King Lear (1987)

 

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Screenplay: Peter Sellars and Tom Luddy

Based on the play by William Shakespeare (I)

Cast: Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth, Burgess Meredith as Don Learo; Molly Ringwald as Cordelia; Leos Carax as Edgar; Julie Delpy as Virginia; Jean-Luc Godard as Professor Pluggy; Freddy Buache as Grigori Kozintsev ("Professor Quentin"); Woody Allen as Mr. Alien; Norman Mailer as himself; Kate Mailer as herself

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Do I need a name to see thy beauty?

It feels befitting King Lear's conception, as a film ultimately on the subjective nature of the word and image which is deceptive in how it can be read, was a contract signed on a napkin between the Cannon Group's Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan with Jean-Luc Godard. The napkin itself, not literally but subjectively, would form a divisive and curious production in Godard's career in its existence, especially apt as viewers can see that napkin themselves - whilst King Lear is dismissed, you see the contract in Mark Hartley's documentary on Cannon called Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014), one film interlinking and weaving into this one as King Lear itself interlinks in a variety of ways to history (even if own notorious one) in profound ways.

It was not really necessary for a viewer to read King Lear, as whilst contrary to its infamy of a Shakespeare adaptation by someone who never read the play, the truth is more that it does have quotations from the play but Godard specifically stretches one moment, the rejection on the daughter Cordelia from her father King Lear, and transforming it into his ongoing issues with the notion of language and communication.

The work's origins would have been fascinating to witness - author Norman Mailer as King Lear, Woody Allen as the Fool - as a Cannon produced film which, for the company's love and notoriety as the creators of the likes of the American Ninja franchise, comes from the period where they signed contracts with major filmmakers like John Cassavetes to Raul Ruiz for prestige and gave them some leeway as a result¹. The sense that Menahem Golan in particular was out of step to who Godard was becoming, dealt with in Electric Boogaloo as being dismissed by Godard, is when a real phone call from him to the Swiss filmmaker during its protracted gestation, where he wishes for it to be get premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is played in the opening over the words:

A

Picture

Shot in the Back

 

Whilst a playful film at times, King Lear is also a melancholic work. Beyond the constant seagull sounds in the soundtrack, there is a droning nature that appears here and there in the soundtrack, a vast tapestry, where the orchestral music on the score malfunctions constantly, and many voices interlacing and overlapping each other. It feels apt as, in this world set post Chernobyl where everything returned except art and culture, this follows Godard's ongoing issues with the state of the world in terms of cinema and culture in general. The film is from the second "mainstream" era of his career in the eighties, which is inherently deceptive as Godard, whilst a legendary filmmaker, was never conventional from the beginning, already slipping away from his original popular films in the sixties until his complete rejection of it in Week End (1967). The misbegotten Dziga-Vertov Group era, whilst with its virtues, took place and then there is the ultra obscure mid-to-late seventies era including extensive television work. This second mainstream era, from Every Man For Himself (1980) until into the nineties, is deceptive in that he works with name stars and fictional narratives, from a Isabelle Huppert in that film to Johnny Hallyday in the underrated Détective (1985), but his narratives are giving way to didactic essay structures which would eventually turn into essay films in his late years.

It could come off as an older man shouting at clouds, to paraphrase the Simpsons, as Godard complains of the state of culture, but this has clearly been something which enters his work very early in his career and took hold of him. But let us not forget that this is also one of the more perplexing things to exist, in context, which I also wish was more readily available. That, with its initial set up we follow William Shakespeare V, the ancestor of the Bard played by Peter Sellars, not that Sellers before anyone is surprises, the legendary British comedian, but the American theatre director who co-wrote this adaptation and plays a descendent, hired by the Queen of England and the Cannon Cultural Division, absorbing the producers of this film into its world, to recreate the lost texts of his legendary ancestor.

Its key plot points are that one of the people who can help him is Professor Pluggy, played by Godard himself as a barely coherent and yet wise sage whose assistants are a fire obsessed young man played by Leos Carax, soon to be the legendary director of the likes of Holy Motors (2012) and his girlfriend played by Julie Delpy. Godard in manner and acting, especially when he has the red woollen hat on, even with his trademark cigars and glasses, looks like a drunken character you find in a bar scene in a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film. His voice is close to it too and early in narration, you effectively get what would happen if he wanted to try a Michael Caine voice. That narration is there as Norman Mailer was briefly in the production, at the same time directing the notorious Cannon produced Tough Guys Don't Dance (1987). We see Mailer, proud as only a legendary Pulitzer Prize winning author can be with the tenor of his voice to match, completing the script to a King Lear adaptation set in the world of mafia, which is not absurd and blasphemous to consider when Akira Kurosawa just two years earlier adapted this play to Ran (1985) in the world of samurai and created a late masterpiece. Mailer left the production as, with his real life daughter Kate Mailer playing Lear's daughter to him, an incest aspect was being placed into the material. So instead, in stand ins to Norman and Kate Mailer, as much as playing King Lear and one of his daughters Cordelia, we get Burgess Meredith of the 60s Batman series as well as a prolific acting career, and Molly Ringwald of The Breakfast Club (1985).

King Lear from that could be held as a perplexing surprise as a result. It is actually a film of three sides - a serious film, a humerous film, and a later narrative Godard film, such as Hélas pour moi (1993), where the drama is fragmented in heavy analytical theories and references to other culture. One is that, yes, this cast and the context make the film one of the oddest to exist, especially as (whilst a figure cancelled in modern culture in the 2010s onwards) Woody Allen is in the film in a small cameo at the end still. Godard himself was a big figure so his own role, part Holmes film side character but with electric cables dangling out of his hair like dreadlocks, like a Swiss Techno-Hippy, is a cherry on the cake when he mumbles in English and, in one rebuttal to Sellar's Shakespeare, farts as his answer. This film not surprising befuddled many, a review from Vincent Canby of the New York Times saying that this is "as sad and embarrassing as the spectacle of a great, dignified man wearing a fishbowl over his head to get a laugh"², which I think Godard could have easily done here in character for a point. Poignantly however is that, alongside not being dissimilar to the rest of his films from the era, how this farcical light is contrasted by an ominous mood is palpable, where pig noises eventually hit the soundtrack, screaming, and one scene has a bed soaked in blood when the sheets are lifted up. For all the chaos and farce, the one aspect from King Lear kept, alongside quotations from the text, is itself a huge part of his film's heart. Cordelia, in the play, rejects her father King Lear's offer, which here has Molly Ringwald's word of wanting "Nothing" turned to "No Thing" in the Godard trademark of onscreen text. This is a prominent aspect of the film, its true narrative, because of how Shakespeare V learns how the image itself is subjective, its emotional effect more important but the image is not tangential, prominent as Shakespeare himself has to travel around and effectively recreate his ancestor's work from inspiration of those around him he meets.

The struggle of artistic work, and the fact that language and images themselves are fickle, could sound like Godard is a fuddy duddy, but it has been a huge part of his work including the moral conundrums it also raises. He had probably been inspired to create the project years before, as Histoire(s) du cinéma's first "episode" appeared in 1988, but here in a scene in Professor Pluggy's editing room you have two tiny screens which splice and juxtapose different images, from a Tex Avery cartoon to the famous razor to the eyeball sequence from Un Chien Andalou (1929), a prototype of that project's M.O. Here I will admit that, having once in my early twenties hated most of Godard's work trying to watch it, and only becoming an admirer after a lot of adaptation and patience, I personally have never attempted to analyse Godard, and think even blasphemously that his cinema is as much improvised as it is razor focused. What you can grasp, and helped if you can get the references, does favours, as for a film with its absurd origins and content has a darkness felt in the juxtapositions of art by Francisco Goya, a bleakness of the state of the world. For all the dicey politics Godard has nearly shot his feet off with, one of the most noble found in Histoire(s) du cinéma, and evoked again and again in his later essay films of the Millennium, is that cinema failed civilisation when the World War II and the Holocaust happens, and to not turn this lighter hearted film review in a bleak one, his later years beyond his sixties feels like a man, after his ill advised Dziga-Vertov Group years, who has felt the weight of responsibility in his own films and grappled with the morality of filmmaking as a result of ideas like this of his.

King Lear is still bonkers, frankly batshit insane, and I do not think curse words in a Godard review is inappropriate. Godard as the wise Prospero of The Tempest, in his Swiss island away from the world making films like The Image Book (2018), would probably not find it an insult when the entire project comes from strange circumstances. (Sweetly, when interviewed by Katherine Dieckmann for an interview called "Godard in His Fifth Period", in the run up to his King Lear production, it does have the sentence from him saying "I haven't seen any of the movies they [Golan and Globus] financed, but I really want to see the Chuck Norris movie...", whichever that one was he was referring too³.) Yet there are snippets which reflect he was taking this film seriously. It does look gorgeous, even if you were stuck with a VHS rip for a film not easily available, as cinematographer Sophie Maintigneux imbues the film, shot in Switzerland, with both moments of serenity in the woodlands but also moodiness whenever indoors. The sound design is startling once you get past the seagull sounds.

And there is meaning here. Ringwald, on the Electric Boogaloo document, expressed confusion about the whole project, but her Cordelia is one of the more consistent figures. A figure of innocence, she rejects her father's love and is willing to endure the most of it. Her confusion is that as ours, looking at herself in the mirror in a green tiled room at herself, but when the film is explicitly referencing Joan of Arc (including Robert Bresson's 1962 adaptation) that is a loaded metaphor to place on the character. ([Spoilers] Especially as she is found dead on a rock sacrificed by the end, by a executioner with a spear, which is taken from the original play itself. [Spoilers End].) Even accidental connections have greater weight, such as Meredith starring in a Jean Renoir film The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), apt as Sellars' Shakespeare V is introduced at a restaurant with a book on film "auteurs", with no text, legends like Orson Welles without the context of their filmographies as he ponders on Renoir's father, the acclaimed painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, becoming more fixated on young women in his art as he aged.

That the film, for all its notoriety and dense difficulty, obtuse to say the least, has one legitimately beautiful and profound moment does spar it from any accusations of Godard pissing against Cannon's wishes. Breaking his own rules by presenting an actual moment of magic only possible in film, he shows the reconstruction of a flower, with its petals reattached, in reversed footage in a scene Jean Cocteau would have been proud of. That this act, in narrative, is from Godard's Professor Pluggy, sacrificing himself to do this act, and with his body dissipating into a reel of film afterwards is itself a profound image to leave on. That the film itself was never going to be a box office success was obvious, as Cannon should have realised even his eighties films, with narratives, were not like Breathless (1960) at all. But they should have been proud, for all their annoyances with him, for not being lazy either.

Abstract Spectrum: Avant-Garde/Moody/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

 

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1) Even if, as talked of by him in the Electric Boogaloo documentary, French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder had to take a chainsaw into the Golan-Globus office and threaten to cut his own fingers off to finish Barfly (1987) the way he wanted to, impressing Golan as a result.

2) Sadly requires a subscription to read, but the link to the original review is HERE.

3) From Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers) (Conversations with Filmmakers S.) from the University Press of Mississippi.

The Psychedelic Films of William Grefé

Canon Fodder

No one turns on a fish!

 

The Hooked Generation (1968)

Director: William Grefé

Screenplay: William Grefé

Cast: Jeremy Slate as Daisey; Steve Alaimo as Mark; John Davis Chandler as Acid; Willie Pastrano as Dum Dum; Socrates Ballis as Cuban Leader; Cece Stone as Kelly; Walter R. Philbin as Lieutenant Dern; Lee Warren as Charlie

 

Progressing from two monster films (Sting of Death and Death Curse of Tartu from 1966), among other productions, Florida based filmmaker Grefé would progress as the world around him did. As motorbike films like The Wild Angels (1966) came to be, he made The Wild Rebels (1967). And with the bludgeoning era of hippies, drugs and psychedelic coming about, we get this crime film in the process. Three men are involved in drug smuggling with the Cubans, which is more poignant in knowledge that Cuba and Florida has had real life connections in their closeness, including Cuban exiles fleeing to Miami as Castro took over their homeland, an initial set which will escalate as things do not go to plan with the trade between both sides.

The three leads are Daisey (Jeremy Slate), Dum Dum (played by former boxer Willie Pastrano) and Acid, as played by character actor John Davis Chandler, whose character can be perfectly described with him doing heroin over the main opening credits and whose drug addiction is a real reliability for the trio. None of said trio is likable, and it is fascinating to watch a pulp film entirely about figures that are utterly irredemable in their attitudes, anti-heroes who are truly unlikable and where the narrative is not redemption but a downward spiral, blameable on Acid in particular. Killing the Cubans when they demand more money starts the ball rolling, as is killing the coast guards that find them, and generally burning bridges around them. Even in tangents not connected to the plot you have a moment like one of them killing a young Native American woman, at a hut village in the Everglades (shot at a real one with real Native Americans), in an event which does not have any real effect on making things worse as I thought it might have led to. Instead, having two hostages already does not help their stakes.

Like an old film noir narrative brought to the then modern day with more grit, if the review is dry and explaining the plot more, The Hooked Generation is a difficult film for me to really elaborate on without ruining it. This is not a dismissal, as I was engaged with it through, instead belonging to what I have already referred, genre cinema which is less about any hidden meaning but a dynamic storytelling which engaged on the surface. This is a film with a lot more nastiness to it, even if tame by the modern day in actual content, but that seen of streamlined storytelling is still here and to be appreciated.

This argues why Grefé took a while to be appreciated, decades later, as his films are more closer to traditional genre filmmaking, from a man whose professionalism and strive to improve is seen in his work history, whilst the likes of Herschell Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman made odd films which defied filmmaking conventions and won fans over even if a few might have been "ironic". The moment where this film gets any eccentricity is the stint among the hippies, shot with real ones in a home decorated in multi-colour and ending with a shootout that, to Grefé's credit, does embrace the surreal with a drug haze death flashback for a character, involving psych effects and monkeys looking close up at the camera, a weird touch from a hippie preacher beforehand showing them in a cage part of a karmic scale lecture involving evolution. For the most part, The Hooked Generation is a solidly made, exploitation crime film, not one of the best but interesting. It is meaningful in a filmography of a director who, thankfully, made films which are better and thus increases the virtues of this one tenfold. Particularly as well, if you look at a creator's career, The Hooked Generation as a film planned ahead with a small budget and Grefé's resourcefulness makes a perfect contrast for its complete opposite, where Grefé could not plan ahead in a scenario entirely out of his hands....

 

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Electric Shades of Grey (1971)

Director: William Grefé (and Terry Merrill)

Cast: John Darrell as Father John

 

Also known as The Psychedelic Priest, which is not a great title even if one to sell the film easier, this was a film made without any script. The producer Terry Merrill wished to make a film with Grefé but had no script, causing complete improvisation to be necessary and having to make do with who came onboard, including more real hippies, forcing William Grefé out of his comfort zone of being efficient and telling a simple story into something more unconventional. The film's back-story gets weirder as, due to unfortunate circumstances, it never got a proper release until 2001 originally from Something Weird Video, before being made available again through Arrow Video in 2020.

An initial set-up does exist - that it follows a young priest (John Darrell) who, in the midst of the hippie era, is offered a cup of drink by students, caught cutting class and smoking pot, spiked with acid. With pinhole camera lenses for distortion and swirling lights, he has a bad trip with a religious crisis the result, with an extended sombre scene of him being told his is doing God's work by a voice (God's or the acid's effect?) with a distorted voice echo as the scene is under the flickers of coloured light in a darkened catholic church.

Anyone expecting an exploitation film will be disappointed, as Electric Shades of Grey is going to be one of the more difficult films from Grefé to appreciate. It is an odd film - languid and relaxed, a drama shot by Grefé himself as cinematographer with a tiny group on 16mm film, a large part of the film a drama where the priest picks up a female hitchhiker, traumatised by being raped by the last person she got in a car with, who start to bond and connect together in a sedate and even serious tone. Grefé accidentally made an independently made road movie, about existential questions in the hippy era, as a result of the scenario he found himself within, an outlier in a career of genre films.

Events do happen. The couple find a woman on the edge of the road about to give birth, the production having to stage a birthing scene with non-actors and with no baby, which actually works. It has anti-hippy cops who are also racists, leading to a scene with a black doctor, trying to find himself and wishing to go research cancer treatment when he returns to civilisation, which sadly are still relevent decades later. The relationship with the priest and the hitchhiker eventually becomes tense too, as she has fallen for him but he has taken vow of chastity, leading to a tragedy that turns the film into Drugsploitation, as he descends into alcoholism and then becoming a penniless drug addict.

It is an awkward, curious film but I confess I admired it. Grefé took the chance to be experimental, including non-chronological scenes and unconventional editing, whilst the score with its psych rock feels like him catching up to the time with some relevance.  Considering how much of a disaster this film could have been, it is a testament to Grefé instead he managed to put together a film from nothing of interest. The result is a very acquired taste, definitely, but a surprise for me.

The El Duce Tapes (2019)

 

Directors: Rodney Ascher, David Lawrence and Ryan Sexton

Ephemeral Waves

 

Starting with intent, this documentary on the controversial musician El Duce, lead singer of the shock rock group the Mentors, begins with an intertitle from D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), appealing for the right of art. This is provocative to begin with, but in itself is a perfect way of starting this subject, the film (if you know of that film and its history) subconsciously drawing one to think carefully about the figure we are going to encounter in various contexts, as a film whose offensiveness was tragically more wider reaching asks for freedom of speech, ironically used to refer to a figure Griffith would have been appalled by. The film by Rodney Ascher and David Lawrence compiles footage from a young actor named Ryan Sexton that, stored over twenty five years and recorded in 1990-1, follows a figure who in the modern day requires a trigger warning for the type of subject he was deliberately provoking. That the Mentors or at least El Duce said their type of music was called "rape rock" is something from a different era, a deliberately crass and misogynistic tone to the lyrics meant from a provocation.

El Duce would have been cancelled today immediately, although the likelihood is that he would have still been able to make music, which is something in itself that, when looking back on a late figure like this, causes one to ask whether the modern world of "cancelling" figures really does work at all. It asks whether it is very slight and ineffectual as a concept in dealing with these sorts of questions of transgressive speech and the freedom to speak one's thoughts, even the offensive ones. This has obviously become more an issue as, whilst Duce is a complicate figure but also a marginal underground musician, more politically loaded use of the notion of "freedom of speech" has rightly made us be wary of anyone who argues for it. To let the writer of this piece put his own politics into the text, with you the reader to think of your own ideas in contrast, the side which speaks of homophobic/misogynistic/racist/etc, rhetoric is obviously morally wrong, with myself only throwing in too that those types of ideas, not the people but the ideas themselves, which support hate are inherently illogical and examples of complete lack of common sense. The problem for me also includes that the guards who wish to speak for progressive ideals have tragically taken on the same unsubtle, crass and sledgehammer graced tones as their enemies. Cancelling something does not really work for me, when the only way to kill the beasts of illogical thinking (hating another person) is to realise they stem from fears, bias and lack of connecting to others in dialogue.

El Duce, to completely deflate my little piece of soapbox standing, also is an example outside of the issues of modern political incorrectness which is more difficult to tackle in a simplistic black and white moralising. Simply because the subject, alongside making music which was only likely to be heard by a few, is also shown here to be a complicated, psychologically damaged figure also as much influenced by alcoholism as he was deliberately being offensive. It is weird, when the documentary says Duce was a predecessors to the modern day issues of political incorrectness, that they include footage of Milo Yiannopoulos, a figure some people may have completely forgotten about by 2019, and for me is an entirely different sort of figure to El Duce even if the filmmakers do link the pair (and South Park) for a reason.

If anyone remembers Yiannopoulos, the irony was that it was only when he shot his own foot off, saying something which even offended people on his wavelength, which blipped him out of pop culture into obscurity. Duce, in comparison, deliberately prodded the bear of controversy to anger people but at a time where he would still have been considered obscure, and never with the added insidious nature, with Yiannopoulos connected to the alt-right movement in the 2010s, of Duce ever being at a time where he could influence people beyond listening to really crass and offensive songs at concerts. Certainly, the concerns we have in the modern day are not new, as the documentary in its various clips posits the Mentors' rise at a time of highly provocative work from various sides of politics. Roseanne Bar was butchering the Star Spangled Banner to a chorus of boos at a baseball game, as George Bush. Sr. wanted the American family to be closer to The Waltons than The Simpsons, and plenty of other shock rock figures were around such as G.G. Allen and GWAR. And there were too Wally George and Jerry Springer, who both had El Duce on their shows and in themselves were deliberately provoking people by having him on their shows, for a larger audience, even if from different political sides and still condemning him.

GWAR in comparison to El Duce are humble, admitting they thought he was insane. Even GWAR were disturbed by the rape comments. Even Duce's own band members were. There is a lot with this figure which is distasteful. The homophobia is offensive, and then white supremists wanted to book the band. However, you also have the image of someone who declined extremists, awkwardly talking of having non-white friends and with knowledge a member of the Mentors on the side who is black, and whose homophobia (including explicitly at glam metal's poodle hair singers) was unfortunately common in a lot of culture too. Ironically referencing Fascism and anti-immigration dangerously veering into real opinion is the one truly scary moment of El Duce (real name Eldon Hoke) as a figure here, rather than anything that comes off as merely distasteful or crass, in one of his many rants where the line between provocation and intent do blur. A lot of what he says in jest or deliberate is going to make many viewers uncomfortable, but one of the most prominent things learnt throughout is that, for someone who I had only known as a cartoonish figure of offensiveness in his black executioner's hood, he was tragically complicated, something else which could easily be lost in merely damning him.

As the first time actually hearing the music, the Mentors are crude, making the suggestion by his fellow band mate Steve Broy almost absurd when El Duce is compared to Van Gogh. It also however says a lot that most of those around him do not really bat an eyelid at many of his provocations. His girlfriend Missy was only offended by the lyrics of 'On the Rag" and downplays him being evil; their erotic dancer on the stage shows downplays him, also referring to the fact that he and the rap group NWA, who were notorious for lyrics about shooting cops, were probably smarter by not actually doing either in real life but merely writing lyrics about them to shock; and there is the fact that, for anyone like myself with a little knowledge of Duce, he was also tragically a figure crippled by alcoholism who eventually died due to being crushed on train lines, whose sister here paints the image of a psychologically damanged man and also downplaying his comments.

Compiled as a documentary based on Sexton's footage, and pop culture material (films, even wrestling) to match the grubby VHS shot material, The El Duce Tapes is a very conventional documentary in terms of showing a snapshot of a troubled figure as much as their downfall. Said downfall was captured by a person named Steve Bray, the later "the Grunge era" of El Duce which gets uncomfortable as he is seen drunk to the state of pure disarray and barely existent onscreen. Even the one bizarre pop cultural thing Duce got involved with, when inexplicably documentarian Nick Broomfield captured him on film saying Courtney Love paid him to kill Kurt Cobain, was stated to have been not long before his untimely death, which really adds to the reality of what could either be a broad parody of a man or the deeply offensive figure few would defend. Even in the internet age, Duce would have likely not become a figure being clambered at to be cancel as, whether his real beliefs, he was also a man who couch surfed homes rather than own his own apartment, and whose alcohol consumption, as his own sister states, eventually even affected his ability to play music. The documentary has to streamline a bit, even if its structure, but the irony is knowing the little notoriety the Mentors got can a) be blamed on the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) and Tipper Gore for getting them more sales, and b) blamed on glam metal, which led to so many bands in the underground, both innovative genres like death metal and other metal subgenres, and shock rock bands like the Mentors, being created by people who wished to be less commercial. (Something you could forget when, seeing a little of the Mentors touring, they had slots next to Saint Vitus, innovators of doom metal, and inexplicably Killing Joke, which causes me to wonder what that band would have thought of El Duce).

The one moment the mask seems to slip does also show the horrible influence his father had, one whose strict punishments for his children lead to him considering his dad being a sadist. This is coupled with said father designing the bouncing napalm bomb for the Vietnam War which deliberately could cause more death and agony, Duce seeing his Dad as the insane one of the family. That his father's porn collection, an actual collection carefully acquired, is said to have influenced Duce's lyrics really adds to the complicated psychological framework too.

As a snapshot of the time period too, this is definitely a compelling document too, just for the sight of GWAR unmasked which is startling to see. Seeing Dave "Oderus Urungus" Brockie out of costume, in particular, is a rare yeti sighting for a music fan like me. Knowing too the Duce was a talented child drummer, obsessed with the drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Keith Moon and jazz fusion drumming really does open up the provocative and now-problematic image of this hooded figure in itself too, especially once you learn of an alternative world of the Mentors as a jazz fusion band. If anyone above those already mentioned is to be blamed for the Mentors and songs like "Golden Shower", it is that no one would literally book jazz fusion so these musicians went "fuck it" and came up with the Mentors, "jazz fusion into perversion"'. It also says so much, even if you are on the side that this is just tasteless music that he produced that is not acceptable nowadays, that there is the Womentors - the all female Mentors tribute band who even have a gender reversed dancer on stage too - which emphasises that any art, problematic or otherwise, is subjective to the interpretation and should not be simplified. It is also hilarious knowing that the band KISS inspired The Mentors too, if only because as if anyone has watched Martin Scorsese's Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), another documentary based on pre-existing footage from Dylan's 1975 titular concert titular tour, Dylan took inspiration from the band's makeup for his own white face paint during that tour. The strange connection between musicians of all types in it at least offers a light touch to end the review on.

The Creep Behind the Camera (2014)

 

Director: Pete Schuermann

Screenplay: Pete Schuermann

Cast: Josh Phillips as Art Nelson; Jodi Lynn Thomas as Lois Wiseman; Bill LeVasseur as William Thourlby; Laurel Harris as Helen Whittlesey; Mark Lee as Jon Lackey; Chris Winters as Norman Boone / Barney; Jason Coviello as Scott; Katie Bevard as Shannon O'Neil / Brett; Glenn Thayer as Larry Burell / Narrator

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

 I know this is low budget, but you couldn't afford a door?

With documentaries on cult directors and cinema popular, this document on the life of A.J. Nelson, a.k.a. Vic Savage, is probably one fo the most idiosyncratic in terms of trying to document his life. With talking head interviews dispensed throughout in tiny chunks, the production took a different direction for the director notorious for one film, The Creeping Terror (1964), by recreating his life as a biopic at the same time. Thus, The Creeping Terror is repurposed as the ultimate burial of Nelson as much as a document over how this film got made. 

What is a Creeping Terror? The notorious monster film where, when you lose the costume, you acquire what is a carpet from outer space, and is permanently in public domain and on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The problem, which director/writer Pete Schuermann's film has to wrangle around, is that Nelson's life is split between this farce of a film and a deeply abhorrent man who, depicted here, did horrible things away from the film, and both sides clash. This review, despite this initial tone, requires a trigger warning as a result. The problem immediately rears its head, in the director's cut, in how we have the talking heads (members of the production, and figures like Harry Knowles) lambast the film in a light humoured tone, contrasted by the depiction of Nelson (Josh Phillips), burning his first wife Lois' hand on a gas stove.

If we stay with the light hearted side, we get a fascinating attempt at fleshing out this production. Some figures like Knowles or the Medved brothers, creators of the Golden Turkey Awards, are included but the participants of the real production are more rewarding even if they are slim in their time onscreen. Allan Silliphant, the screenwriter who (in an animated sequence in 3D cel shade) envisioned his sci-fi space monster chewing Las Vegas showgirls in a line on-stage, is fixated on Nelson not setting the crash landing site at Lake Tahoe but a ditch of a river, a fixation which is funny for him returning to it over and over again. William Thourlby, one of the actors and the main investor, laments getting involved, the main figure for money that eventually salvaged what footage Nelson made (acquired from his garage in the recreation), and even had to hire an actor to add voice narration over to make sense of. A high school orchestra teacher got his shot at being a composer in this recreation, which would be awesome but with "Monster Gets Blown Up By A Grenade" as one composition with his student musicians itself a bizarre tangent to the film. The content in the recreation, if all true, is ridiculous.

An entire paragraph does deserve to be had for the titular terror and its creator Jon Lackey, whose creature is lovingly recreated here even if only a female associate and friend, sadly only talked to briefly, is our only real figure to discuss the late man. The original creature, as recreated here, is still a rubbery monster costume, requiring multiple students in the hot weather too boil inside it to move, but it is an imaginary figure, especially when you realise this version is creepily gynaecological in look, including the mouth entrance to gobble up victims and its tall, long "head". When Lackey informed Nelson the monster is absent until it was paid, is when the rug appeared....a bastardisation made on the sly. This film's entire structure is entirely because of a perceived lack of on-set and production archive materials, so there is logic to this absurdity being acted out. Whether with creative recounting or entirely accurate, such as Nelson trying to film a car moving when still clearly no with himself onscreen, it nonetheless works.

In terms of the accuracy, director Pete Schuermann deserves credit for trying. Originally behind projects like Hick Trek: The Moovie (1999), a Star Trek parody, the narrative's setting is pulled off with success. Trying to recreate the sixties on a low budget is insanely difficult and I have to admire Schuermann and those involved here, getting the costumes and vehicles as accurate as possible, helped especially as this is not sixties chic either, but lived-in post fifties as a setting. Being shot on digital does catch a viewer off-guard, but the illusion of the past shown through celluloid does muddy our view of the past and what history is. Besides, even Michael Mann showed this discrepancy with Public Enemy (2009), set in thirties but shot on digital too, and that was high budget. The Creep... to its credit can also be credited with having good performances too, helping considerably, Josh Phillips as Art Nelson compellingly evil as a figure whilst Jodi Lynn Thomas as Lois Wiseman does play the most sympathetic figure with a level of discomfort for her plight to feel for the figure.

The only issue with the farce of The Creeping Terror is both the lack of emphasis on talking heads, and that there are some fragments disconnected to everything which do stand out as bizarre but not stitched in enough. Nelson stalking Mamie Van Doren; that he apparently shot a hole in the hand of - Carl Switzer, who played Alfalfa in the Little Rascals, or that they shot on Spahn Ranch, meaning Charles Manson gets a cameo in the film with the hint his stolen vehicles were used.

The problems with the film though, the really difficult ones, are entirely its violently contrasting sides, entirely to do with trying to create a humorous biography about a man who was also horrifying, and finding the right balance. Both sides separately work, exceptionally well, but the problems are there in putting them together. There is a huge tonal problem between an Ed Wood farce and the domestic abuse content with Lois, which is intense. It is made more uncomfortable, though with care, as the real Lois Wiseman is also interviewed, an elderly woman who is explicit about the hell she went through with Nelson. It is uncomfortably a film stuck with two diametrically opposed side - that Nelson was making a car crash, but he also abused his first wife, who suffered in from a tyrannical religious mother beforehand already, a problem to have to tell the narrative of in its entirely, from a makeshift monster to Lois trying to slice her wrists on a fence, intercutting with the real Lois having to talk of this on camera, with both sides very emotionally different in content.

Confounded by the film skipping back and forth in time, the film even without this major subplot does (for the director's cut) toppled under a challenging tonal shift it cannot meld. In the same film, not long between each other, you have Nelson have a Creeping Terror religious freak-out, in a church with the Terror leering superimposed over a giant church organ and humour of him stealing the collection plate money...contrasted by the scene, whilst carefully done, that Nelson is explicitly making child pornography on the side for money, ultimately why he has to disappear and leaving Thourlby to collect back the film for release¹. When this production works, The Creep Behind the Camera succeeds, but never was there also a violently haphazard production which ultimately scuppers itself.

 

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1) Also a CGI locust storm taking place at this period in the film, which never made sense.

Killer Tongue (1996)

 

Director: Alberto Sciamma

Screenplay: Alberto Sciamma

Cast: Melinda Clarke as Candy; Jason Durr as Johnny; Mapi Galán as Rita; Mabel Karr as Old Nun; Robert Englund as the Prison Director; Doug Bradley as Wig; Michael Cule as Frank; David Dale as Portia; Daniel Edwards as Loca

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #219 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

Speak! Speak! Move your fuckin' lips and move them fast!

Odd films always exist, even if you have to dig for them if they have been left from public availability. Streaming, for all my issues with the format for not being reliable for preservation, has thankfully compensated as a great place to stumble over these oddities I am interested in. This one, for example, was a movie I entirely had an interest in because of lead actress Melinda Clarke -, who most will know from Brian Yuzna's Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993), had been on my radar for years. I first knew of --- however, growing up, through her reoccuring guest character in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2001-11), the original Las Vegas set version of the franchise where, staying almost entirely in television work later in her career, she has the character of Lady Heather, a professional dominatrix whose relationship with William Petersen's Dr. Gil Grissom became a potential romance that lasted over a long period of time in the show's running plots.  Her film career is not as substantial as her television work though. Spawn (1997), as a female henchman, is probably the most high profile role, but was clearly cast in mind to her physical beauty only, and is not a good film in the damndest. Return of the Living Dead 3 is in context an exceptional piece, the iconic film in her career (just for the final version of her appearance as a character), if once a divisive sequel to the original 1985 Dan O'Bannon production and one of the few films in said career at all.

Killer Tongue is obscure, a Spanish-British co-production from a Spanish director who would continue to the modern day as a filmmaker. This is also a mid-nineties film; odd films thankfully always exist, but they change as the culture does, so this is a Frank Henenlotter premise if it cross with the post-Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez era of cinema, of a heightened style and crime genre tropes matched with a sensual nineties ambient soundtrack by the director's own band Fangoria. One with a greater awareness than other films then since as I suspect it was influenced a little by Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984) and Natural Born Killers (1994), and with a bit of the history of Spanish cinema there, as I am sure Pedro Almodóvar inspired the fact that, when a meteorite with an alien lifeform provide's Melinda Clarke's Cindy with a sentiment tongue, her four poodles turn into drag queens from the same source.

Candy is the girlfriend of Johnny (Jason Durr), who with two other men pulled off a heist. The couple ditched their friends, but Johnny was arrested whilst she was hiding as a nun for a time among a group running a gas station. The film proper begins when, with his release imminent, she locates herself in an abandoned home with her dogs. The meteorite lands one night, projecting the alien form through the house window into her soup, strong enough upon consumption to propel her into the air from the shock and gives her a parasitic tongue that can extend and make roast chickens explode, requiring human beings for sustenance. The poodles, now human beings due to eating what was split on the floor of the soup, attempt to assist her find said food but she is trying to continually get rid of the tongue until it, with its own mind, tries to convince her otherwise. Contrasting this is that Johnny, on a chain gang in the middle of the desert, is the fixed target of a prison director (Robert Englund), who wants to keep him in jail with his ground, and the two men who were cheated out of the money trying to look for the couple. Englund, chewing scenery like a king, loves tormenting his prisoners, playing golf using Johnny's own head as a tee, and eventually requiring a white bird with a broken wing he calls "Johnny", developing a weird attachment to it as he thankfully becomes a major character in himself.

You could have left this merely as a crime film. Instead, we see a man fellating a petrol pump hose in a nun's hands as a threat. When this leads to split petrol ruining his white suit, he deliberately crashes into a random person's van in the middle of a countryside road whilst driving butt naked and, when that man smashes through his own windshield, proceeds to steal their clothes. It is similar to Raúl Ruiz's Régime sans pain (1985), where in a sci-fi future to win a competition to become the king, the protagonist steals a jacket off a man in a burning car from a random accident. That connection is not out of place, as we get an inside the mouth camera shot out to the world beyond the teeth to match Ruiz's City of Pirates (1983), all in a film where you also get the camera taking a POV from the tongue's perspective as it enters down a victim's throat and right out through the anus.

Killer Tongue's Henenlotter-lite tone does help considerably, especially when the tongue starts to talk, after many attempts to Candy to remove and even burn it off with an iron, developing three pronged fingers and helping the film in its content immensely. Sadly, this is later on in Killer Tongue but it is a pleasure, the film embracing strange tangents as a result, causing one to ask whether it is self pleasure if one's lover is your own (alien) tongue, and when this leads to the pair expecting a baby. Surrounding this is a lot of eccentric content, where even the meteorite is a curiosity, not only a mute nun from the gas station going to it after having visions, but for the fact that direct contact with the rock with water causes things to explode,  something one poor bugger learns urinating up it.  One of the highlights is Englund too by himself. Always a figure who invoked class and elegance, when he does decide to be weird and/or chew scenery, it is a blast, Killer Tongue providing at least one virtue of giving him a part which exploits both.

This is not a profound film, like many motivated by event in terms of the characters antagonising each other, desiring basic things like love and material wealth. It is adequate in terms of how it was made technically, the more prominent aspects its aesthetic style which is deliberately heightened. If you were to remove the build up to out of scenes in this film, it is the kind due to its tone which gets weirder and leads to questions, such as how Johnny ends up threatening to leave a car in the middle of the desert, one he is handcuffed to, for not providing water from the radiator for him to drink. Killer Tongue is stylish, and of the era, a film I wanted to see and was entertaining. Since the key reason I wanted to watch the film was because of her, I will admit that you could have lost Melinda Clarke in among that manic weirdness around her, the tongue itself which is pulled off well in special and practical effects, and someone like Englund stealing the film from the rest of the cast. Even the film itself does dangerously lose her into the role of the downed, villainous woman especially when Johnny shows affection for the mute nun. Thankfully Clarke, who tragically stuck to television for most of her career, had an incredible "it" factor which is not lost, even when decked out in a (symbiotic) black suit from the alien and is trying to cut an alien tongue off that has grown in size. It would have been fascinating as a career if she stayed with genre and cult cinema, but if television was a better direction, one should not complain at a working actor finding something better for their livelihoods.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Laila (1929)

 

Director: George Schnéevoigt

Screenplay: George Schnéevoigt

Cast: Mona Mårtenson as Laila; Tryggve Larssen as Jåmpa; Harald Schwenzen as Anders Lind; Peter Malberg as Aslag Laagje; Cally Monrad as Mor Laagje; Henry Gleditsch as Mellet; Finn Bernhoft as C.O. Lind

Ephemeral Waves

Tonight all should be happy.

Continuing on in terms of learning more about cinema, one night I learnt of the existence of Laila, a Norwegian silent film. One night was left to view said film, entirely heard of before that night and from a country, Norway, whose cinema is neglected. The restored version I saw even includes the births and deaths of everyone who created the film, a time capsule set among the Lapps culture of the region, a reminder that films like this, when preserved, come from an entirely different era and that in itself is a virtue to them being seen..

Among the Lapps, in a tiny village of Finnmark in the frozen wilderness, a strong willed woman, fleeing wolves with her infant daughter, speeds across the snow on her reindeer driven sleigh only to lose the baby in the pursuit. The film itself is lost in time, a novel adaptation set in a timeless region of ageless snow covered wilderness, where the baby is found by Jåmpa, a Sámi man of an indigenous Finno-Ugric people in real life, who is the servant of Laagje, a rich man who adopts the infant girl and christens her Laila. Made by George Schnéevoigt, a Danish filmmaker who also edited and wrote the film, Laila in its two and a half hours proves itself to be a melodrama, one of tangents as its entire first forty minutes is a story in itself, Laagje proving his virtue when he learns Laila is the daughter of a merchant, showing honour upon learning this at Christmas.

Laila will return to being his daughter again when the plague arrives next summer, with a boat full of dead bodies to emphasis this. The melodrama proves a perfect catalyst for the film, able to bring to life a culture rich in detail. The adult Laila is given by her father, as a talented rider, a great white reindeer named Stormwind; it proves heroic but, thinking of a Finnish film The White Reindeer (1952), the mind could not help but be amused wondering if anyone was going to turn into a were-reindeer lie that film. Making this joke is not out-of-place either, as the two films together are rewarding documents of this region of people in these environments, with their lives based around reindeer, by individuals taking an anthropological attitude.  

The film looks gorgeous, due to not only its creator's skill but also the location and time. Silent cinema is unfortunately difficult to sell to some, and I myself have always had to readjust to it a style at times, just by telling itself entirely though its visual vocabulary, due to how entirely alien to modern day filmmaking it can be. This type of cinema is however become more dreamlike as history passes, turning what is a very conventionally told drama with anthropological aspect into something magical, able to get away with its length due to the ethereal nature of the production. The verisimilitude contrasting this helps considerably as this film, when required, also feels like a snapshot of an older time, in its costumes and what the characters do. Said film also had to stage stunts which could not be faked. Alongside the sledding sequences, one major one has a person ride on rapids for real in a boat, and grip a real tree by a waterfall. It could be so easy to forget that, when not one of the dramatic scenes, still and based on acting, but in these action sequences how much coordination they required especially as this film, based around snow and sleds, is unique in terms of such scenes.

It is timeless in another way as a film which tackles the conflict between groups, unfortunately still with us, Laila falling for a "darro" merchant and a taboo for her step father. Whilst the arranged husband he has for her, Mellet, is also dashing, it is not true love and considering he was once the young boy who roped Laila like a reindeer as a baby, this is not going to succeed as a relationship. It is going to end in an obvious way, but for all the jaded and cynical modernity you could bring to the film, you can look back to this silent film and see a greater sincerity. Even the Bible Laila gets, a bound with the merchant, is something that is not discarded as in modern culture as a symbol, and is neither badly latched upon to the point of sycophantism from modern organised religion. Instead, with its wholesomeness, it carries more weight as a gift of love. The sense of reality in creating this world also feels so palpable, shot in snow bound environments that look like they staged the same for centuries before the film schedule, but when Laila does embrace the extravagance of cinema, bordering on the ludicrous, it is Jåmpa fighting wolves in the snow, played by real trained dogs than CGI ones, for true love to succeed. If that is not true movie magic, in content and emotion, in one scene I do not know what is.

Surviving into the modern day, part of itself is made in realism, the other in a haze as even Mona Mårtenson, a Swedish actor, playing Laila herself looks like a figure from dreams, made more poignant as she tragically passed only in her mid fifties. Director Schnéevoigt himself would remake this film twice, going for a third attempt in colour in 1958 which was taken over by someone else¹. What he made regardless in the first Laila needs to be more readily available as a good soulful tonic.   

 

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1) Referred to HERE.

She Devils on Wheels (1968)

 

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Louise Downe

Cast: Betty Connell as Queen; Nancy Lee Noble as Honey Pot; Christie Wagner as Karen; Rodney Bedell as Ted; Pat Poston as Whitey; Jody Pennock as Terry; John Weymer as Joe-Boy

Canon Fodder

 

Sex, blood, guts, and all men are muthas.

In response to all his films where usually women were victims, Herschell Gordon Lewis made a female biker film, where the women are tough and can beat up men. He also specifically hired people who could actually ride motorbikes, which for me is the more progressive aspect to one of his non-splatter tangents, as he cared for more verisimilitude than faking shots with the female cast. This was likely as much to avoid time and budget wasting with people who could not ride the motorbikes in the film, but it is something to admire. Also with mind to Louise Downe, a neglected figure of importance in his career, having written the script you have a sense of this further.

Like many of these tangents in his career, Herschell's films are less about the plots, where this is a very low budget genre film where that plot is vague, than his personality. In this case a female biker gang who ride bikes, defy the law, and have competitive races where the winner and the people in order of who got to the finish line first gets to choose from the male Johns to sleep with. Their one taboo is "steady meat", where you cannot have a boyfriend, something which the female stand-in for the audience, a young woman who joins the group, has to learn a lesson from when she has to drag a potential boyfriend behind her bike on concrete to show her loyalty.

This film is a difficult one to elaborate on in terms of a review as, with the pleasure of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film, plot is not the biggest aspect to even his splatter films. This film's main trajectory, baring the female lead's divided schism between the gang and an old male flame, is that a rival male gang becomes hostile the women, known as the Man-Eaters, being on their turf and take a very nasty decision on threatening them. Instead, it is the tone of his work which intrigues many of his fans, as beyond his trademarks of flood light lit static scenes and garish coloured costumes, Lewis' films are populated with likably eccentric figures. Even if they are meant to be a vicious girl gang, the Man-Eaters even act like fifties cartoonish bullies, terrorising the locals and even stealing a soda from a young girl. Even the police are mocked, despite the irony of thanking the real local police force in the end credits, when a larger powerhouse member of the group tells one he has a tiny penis in verse.

Is She Devils on Wheels actually feminist? To debate, but undeniably these are likably rogue, free figures and even how the final drama for the female lead takes a decision which is more progressive than it could have been. ([Spoiler] I.e. that female sisterhood in the gang is more important to her than a boyfriend [Spoilers End]). And even if the ending has seemingly a conservative ending, the film plays a trick by having the end credits finish only to include a coda that says they are not that easy to get rid off, through the police or otherwise. When they do have to fight, with chains and even razor wire strung across a road, they fight hard. They will even piss on their male enemies when they beat them up, which is merely implied but clearly shown when Lewis has the scene.

Plus in one of Lewis' best virtues, he always cast actors you never heard of, from this independent era of non-union actors in genre filmmaking, who make up for any crudeness of their performances with charisma, and alongside casting women who could actually ride motorcycles, he also cast women who were all charismatic. It is to his credit that, even in mind that the habit of casting female victims in his splatter films could have merely been the unfortunate habit over storytelling of usually having women in peril in horror and suspense films, he embraced the idea of a strong female biker film by having women who do not act like damsels in distress at all.

His films from this time, including his attempt at creating the destruction-sploitation genre with Just for the Hell of It (1968), where a group of young adults decided to destroy and smash everything up in a nihilistic frenzy, even put a baby in a bin at one point, do come in mind of deliberately moving away from his splatter films. They are fascinating films even in mind that, if he had never even gotten the title of the creator of the splatter film genre, or his preferred moniker of creating the "gore film", he would have likely still gained a cult reputation for how quirky his regional genre movies were, even if it took longer to be appreciated. They are as much films of their era too, so if he had stayed in filmmaking throughout the seventies he would have had to have adapted or perished.

In fact, in many ways his cinema, whilst we might have loved him to continue into that decade, may have lost something. It is odd to say this, but the charm even to The Gore-Gore Girls (1972) for all its nasty gore may have been compromised if he tried to catch up with the more lurid and nihilistic films of that decade. Even a film like She Devils on Wheels, with its violence and a dark turn when a Man-Eater member is brutalised, never becomes anything else by a playful romp with its female leads. Watching this film again, alongside the pleasures it brought, made me appreciate the virtue of Lewis even bowing out of film industry for a long period of time too.