Odd Noggins (2015)

 

Director: Joe Sherlock

Screenplay: Joe Sherlock

Cast: Melody Berg as Amanda; Juniper Bloodraven as Miss Garland; John Bowker as the Drunk Grandpa; Emily Howard as Shannon; Richard Johnson as Tom; Bryn Kristi as Liberty; Morgan Mayhem as Tammi; Rob Merickel as Uni; Roxxy Mountains as Tami; Bob Olin as John; Kirk Sardonis as Jeff; Connor Sherlock as Jeff

An Abstract Candidate

 

Half Gator

Half Man

Caught on security cam!!!

Aliens. Always the menace, abducting women and pulling out their intestines in nightmares, but in this context, Joe Sherlock's Odd Noggins comes with the knowledge that, whilst they are integral to the film, everything you would normally expect even from a micro budget film, and what to presume with one about said aliens, flies out the window. The woman we are introduced to have these nightmares, clearly believing she was abducted by aliens, is sympathetic and takes a stance. Where things abruptly turn is the moment she dissolves into yellow custard and all that remains is a skeleton...in a film watched by another woman.

I was aware, through a podcast named No-Budget Nightmares, Odd Noggins was going to be a perplexing experience even for a micro-budget film, and there is the additional context that the original version they covered was from 2000, whilst this is the 2015 remake I am covering, still a weird amalgamation of non-sequiturs, a UFO plot and going against expectations of conventional genre films. This was where I first learnt of pimento loaf, a food item I never heard of until learning of this film's existence, and this clearly shows that director-writer Joe Sherlock either has a thing for women drinking beer in the bath, or does but also enjoys doing so himself, with drinking beer in the hot tub the more decadent option to really enjoy life. For the version I saw, it is a film that, even if shot in many people's homes, has its own gleefully playful sense of logic you have to accept or you will hate this film. Expect to be befuddled on purpose, as this repeats and refers to small details in a noodle map of logic not following its plot in great elaboration. That film within a film for starters is referenced throughout, mostly following various women who end up watching the film and/or referencing it without greater context, but there is never context given for it, even if linked to the central plot, nor considered related to the aliens in that film proper.  In one scene a male bar keeper jokes about an art house film which just leads from one person than to another's path they cross with, than onwards. It is breaking the forth wall in talking of how that is the structure here, and inexplicably, I can reference a film like Max Ophüls' La Ronge (1950), a film literally about a circling narrative of interlinked romances, as a comparable example with Odd Noggins of all things. That is respect for Sherlock himself as, playing in its own logic, this toys with leading the viewer around the garden path deliberately, so any unexpected similarities to acclaimed art house cinema from French is entirely because this film itself is structured this unconventionally on purpose too.

This follows a string of characters in strange scenarios, including a "Bellygram" dance, a belly dancing strip-o-gram figure without the nudity, a sad female clown, and various women that are part of a UFO conspiracy with many drinking beer in the bathtub, even still wearing the clown makeup. I bring that up again, and I will probably get a weird look from the reader from across the internet for this, but this is a behaviour which happens a lot here to the point you have to address it, with many of these female characters doing this. And yes, the nudity as a result by the female cast is far more frequent than even some erotic films, surprisingly so. In mind to concerns about this, if one is going to have exploitative factors like this, Odd Noggins can also legitimately claim to be a standard bearer for body positivity even when it is doing this for titillation. It is amazingly positive as, something clearly through his career, Sherlock casts a diverse cast of actresses, of various ages and figures, larger women to smaller, and Odd Noggins at least bothers to have a wider view of women of all shapes and sizes being attractive. Even as a goofy free flowing piece, it is also about its female cast, frustrated workers in a variety of jobs, whilst the men are almost all weirdoes and doofuses on purpose. The exception is the man who needs special modification and dresses like a man in black. Clearly, in his case, he is connected to the aliens and really does not count, alongside the fact he also eats large jars of mayonnaise with a spoon.

All of this is part of this film's logic, to repeat little touches ad nauseum to befuddle the viewer. This feels unlike some films from this area of having improvised their plots with little, but a micro budget film with a fixation on deliberately repetition, Twin Peaks references, and finding concepts like a Renaissance fair and pimento loaf in the abstract inherently funny as concepts. Occasionally, as want of its alien premise, people melt into luminous lemon meringue filling barring the bones, the kind you get from even English cafes underneath Perspex covers. Most, if you cannot vibe with this, will hate Odd Noggins, a film which does the "it was all a dream" twist as a standard moment. [Huge Spoiler] The actual twist is that most of the female cast are working with the aliens, to take men's heads and take them up to the mother ship in cardboard boxes. [Spoilers End] How Odd Noggins plays, since we follow the female cast, means that its finale never comes off as misogynistic symbolism of female tempters that sadly comes into storytelling a lot, but more like the men are, as mentioned, patsies. Figures like "Sir Porkalot", as he is dubbed by his girlfriend, and the rest of the male cast, obsessed with these women, are always side characters that are clueless and/or horny until the film reveals its actual plot. [Another Spoiler] Always too late when their heads are ripped off by pure strength. [Spoilers End]

The end is a pimento loaf sandwich being made with an insane amount of sauce and slices, in close up as the plot is actually explained, used aptly to conclude how this strange film closes out. This is an acquired taste, probably like that sandwich itself, but I have to credit Joe Sherlock for making something idiosyncratic. He was also also editing and scoring this, with the score itself too a compellingly odd synth score meant to evoke Theremin, drones and an end credit piece where "Shake your booty" is repeated, playing with the mood of proto vaporwave or recorded on musty tape on purpose. Throughout the film, characters also read a magazine like Weekly World News, famous for its UFO sighting claims and the cult hero Bat Boy, and that really suggests a lot of the tone. It is a film about the eccentric and the strange on purpose, and it actually lives up to the attitude that made me want to cover such films like this as a fan, of the film seemingly of "no purpose" defying expectations over and over again.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Non-Narrative

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

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

 

Director: Dominique Othenin-Girard

Screenplay: Michael Jacobs, Dominique Othenin-Girard and Shem Bitterman

Cast: Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis, Danielle Harris as Jamie Lloyd, Ellie Cornell as Rachel Carruthers, Don Shanks as Michael Myers, Wendy Kaplan as Tina Williams

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Around Part 5, and you begin to see the cracks start to appear in the Halloween franchise even if I found entertainment within this film over Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988). By this point in a franchise, sequels are inherently a nightmare as a concept as producers would like to continue their franchises but logic is stretched as to why to continue with the same characters and tropes as before. With Halloween, whilst it should have done this after the first film immediately, there was the idea to make an anthology series in feature length form with Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) which could have made more sense.  Instead, as it stayed with Michael Myers, yes there is an iconic villain and so much iconic aspects of the original film that were already lingering in consciousness by this point, as they are returned to as audio and visual motifs, but you are also finding yourself in the shadow of the first film, a herculean task especially as this attempt to change the series, as this "Thorn" trilogy, would lead to the next film only appearing five years later and through Miramax. Before it even reaches this point, this franchise also fully embraced the slasher genre's cheesier side, not inherently an issue for me at now, but at the time when the original version of the slasher genre was petering out fully.

With fully spoilers, Michael Myers survived the last film, again terrorizing Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) again, but with the end of that film leading to a "curse" being transferred to his niece, leaving her traumatised and having to be kept in a special children's hospital with Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) watching on. By this point we have fully entered the supernatural, with Jamie having a psychic link to her uncle, but we have at least a credible new turn of a traumatised child having to live under the shadow of her uncle's acts, more so as, for all the cheese in this, Harris as a child actor here is good and the thing you can legitimately credit as a real virtue to the piece. Beyond her performance however, this is the kind of slasher that, fun, does lose the veneer of its original John Carpenter version fully, where to recuperate from the last film it seemingly suggests Myers slept in a cabin on the same bed for an entire year until the next Halloween.

For those who enjoy these types of films, even if the wheels are falling off the wagon, this definitely has more spark than The Return of Michael Myers, having a more absurd edge to enjoy. The idea of what was originally a realistic film about a killer with a knife becoming more and more supernatural - Season of the Witch (1982) notwithstanding - is exceptionally strange as this series of viewings have gone on, to think that to literalize the bogeyman the productions had to eventually reach this point, especially with the amount of injuries he took and managed to survive at this entry. Eventually you would need to pull back as in a harsh reverse to this progression when, as this Thorn trilogy, a metaphorical take of Myers as a psychological threat that Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) would go back to where the franchise started. It does not end up where Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (1993) went though, where you need a relative of Jason Voorhees with a magical fantasy sword now to kill him, the psychic link a simple McGuffin to a vicious movie, one which manages to get away with a young girl being terrorised by an adult, even trying to run her over in a car at one point, and depicting it with teeth even there is now a more unintentionally ridiculous edge to everything. You do also have cartoon sound effects over two bumbling comedy police characters, and this is where we are entirely dealing in pure gouda cheese. All the eighties suddenly ploughs in with the music alone throughout the film, and notwithstanding the opening, with heavy editing cuts and all those wasted pumpkins in the credits, this is fully removed from the style of the first three films baring the recreations of iconic sound and visual motifs.

Even if you have a prolonged and moody set piece in an barn at a Halloween party, one upping the cat jump scare from horror with a kitten, you see the tears with this franchise in that Michael Myers is such a simplistic fear, a single minded killer with a knife, that you are struggling to try to add more to him. Unlike A Nightmare on Elm Street where all possibilities are opened by the premise, having to retain a franchise this simple in premise means you strain at the restrictions and repeat the beats from the films before, leaving me with utter sympathy for someone like the director/co-writer Dominique Othenin-Girard, a Swiss-French filmmaker who before this made After Darkness (1985), a Swiss horror film starring John Hurt which was his sole feature beforehand and likely caught enough interest from Halloween's producer to hire him. The psychic subplot does feel unexpected, fully immerging as some form of symbol of Jamie's relation to her uncle, taking an extreme with the idea of inheriting his bloodline, the horrible reputation of his crimes like a real life family of a murderer, whilst giving an excuse for creepy POV shots. It does however feel underutilised and, even for an opening minded person with mysticism, they would suspend disbelief at how easily the police follow leads from a young girl's psychic visions when Myers does come to town again. Everything involving a faceless man in iron toed heels, so evil he punts a small dog to the side, is a bizarre decision to try to sustain the series when you have hindsight; that after it finishes with shocking the viewer with mayhem and a jailhouse on fire, this sequel did so bad at the box office it took six years for the next film in the series, with another company, to be made, dampening this intentional rug pull.

Then there is the most controversial aspect, Donald Pleasance's performance as Dr. Loomis as a man who fully loses his mind and spends most of his time screaming at a young girl to help him like a madman. It is either an apt depiction of him breaking down, desperate to end Myers, or the biggest slice of bowl of ham acting you will ever see. This time around watching the film, it is hammy but makes perfect sense, another of the virtues as by this point, half burnt, and physically and mentally scarred, I would imagine Dr. Loomis just on a frayed strand of sanity which would easily snap if more death transpired, the Ahab comparison from Herman Melville's Moby Dick apt as by this point, he looks like he would sacrifice people to finally sort of his foe.

The unintentional humour and decisions really start to make their way into this series by this point, which is a sign of the scars and struggle of keeping this series aloft really showing, and I admit right from the get-go, we have had sequences involving a piece of Stonehenge being stolen and a hot tub with a scalding temperature mode on the dials in the previous films, so I accept absurdity was here from earlier. Here though you see the series changing its aesthetic entirely and being entirely able to amplify these absurdist edges; the comedic cops are this, and the soundtrack betrays, whilst charmingly of its era like the Romeo Romeo song, that this has become like its brethren in the slasher genre than the one slasher film from 1976 which seemingly sat on a podium higher than most. You also cannot deny too that, with Myers suddenly having a Samhain tattoo on his wrist, the moment your franchise is crow barring a cultist back-story set-up into the franchise, you are in trajectory for it to fail, especially as even if we finally got the final of this trilogy in the franchise, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) notoriously came in a drastically butchered form.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers opened to $5.1 million, with a gross of $11.6 million off a $5 million budget which would prove to be the lowest for the series so far in the franchise¹. It would lead to Miramax and their Dimension Films label. Long before we realised Harvey Weinstein was a terrible human being, we only presumed our grievances with Miramax was how films were treated. The horrible truths learnt of his behaviour are too uncomfortably real to have as a tangent in a review of a goofy slasher sequel, so we will stick to the fact that Miramax, for all the acclaimed films in their back catalogue, were terrible for tampering with films, especially those they licensed in genres like martial arts cinema. Whilst from the Dimension Films label, we can also add The Revenge of Michael Myers, which infamously has a theatrical cut which is a legitimate mess to witness, and a Producer's Cut which finally surfaced which managed to salvage some good will from fans of the franchise. The later sadly only came long after the Thorn trilogy in the Halloween series ended, thus closing off this timeline broken and all it's set up in this film obliterated from whatever promise it had.

This leaves Part 5 too in a really peculiar place; it is absolutely a more interesting film to watch than Part 4, entirely just from a fun slasher side, but we are dealing with a series of films, truthfully, finding themselves drifting into a period after the Golden Age of Slasher films, no longer a trend setter for the genre but also not even in the era where they were huge. The nineties is an idiosyncratic time for horror films in general, but Scream in 1996, when it help usher the slasher film back, did so with a change in tone for the new decade, changing the tone and/or simply the aesthetic choices as per what was trendy at the time. It is funny for me that 1989, the year of my birth, signalled the time in horror, just as the nineties were to change the template for this cinema, where the slashers were to fade back, with the three big titles in this genre all showing up in that year. I came to be in the year the three heavy hitters of this genre came with some of their weakest efforts, even if they all have their fun virtues is you ignore the need for them to be "great". A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is not the worse for me in the franchise, but certainly a law of diminishing returns, and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was the last of the Paramount era of the franchise, infamous for promising to be set in New York City but mostly set on a boat and in Canada. They are a trilogy of entertaining films, but the strain of the need of a sequel is felt through them all, and The Revenge of Michael Myers is no different whatsoever.

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1) The 40-Year History of Halloween at the Box Office, written by Chris Eggertsen for Box Office Pro, published October 14th 2022.

Touch of Death (1988)

 

Director: Lucio Fulci

Screenplay: Lucio Fulci

Cast: Brett Halsey as Lester Parson; Ria De Simone as Alice Shogun; Al Cliver as Randy; Sacha Darwin as Margie MacDonald; Zora Kerova as Virginia Field; Marco Di Stefano as the Tramp

A Night of a Thousand Horror Movies / An Abstract Candidate

[Warning: Spoilers Throughout]

The set-up to Touch of Death would win anyone over as long as they had a strong stomach, or cause him or her to turn the film off if they did not. An older man is shown, when not killing women, cooking pieces of her flesh for TV dinner, then disposing the corpse gorily with a chainsaw. This sounds like the worst nightmare for a moral campaigner, but my first introduction to Touch of Death was weirder, that it is one of the films of Lucio Fulci's own, with those of others, re-contextualised in A Cat in the Brain (1990), his deeply weird meta-commentary on his own work where he was the central character. The chainsaw and subsequent meat grinder dismemberment definitely raises the bar in feeling ill with Fulci gore, even if you know its fake. In itself it already sets off that we are if getting into the absurdity, reminding me in particular of when British band Carcass got to their album Necroticism - Descanting the Insalubrious (1991), which stills plays to the grotesque morbidness of the type of music they helped contribute to, but by that point even in imagining someone turning a victim into glue to huff, you are seeing them parodying the idea of gruesome horror imagery to offend and traumatise audiences. Touch of Death itself, starting from that initial scene, sets itself quickly as a sick hearted comedy with a deeply unconventional trajectory, in which older bachelor and gambler Lester Parson (Brett Halsey) constantly has to pay off debts for an illegal horse racing group, having found a novel way of acquiring the funds needed by skimming the lonely hearts pages for wealthy women. Where things get weird is that, seemingly, Lester has a copycat killer reported on TV claiming his victims and implicating him with each news report. Considering his radio is talking back to him in his own voice, it is not really a spoiler to know he is not a conventional state of mind, but the film takes it in an odder direction.

In general, there are strange entries at this point in Fulci's filmography by the mid eighties even for a director who invested into the nightmarish and dreamlike with his horror films – Conquest (1983) is a border line, the least conventional fantasy film you could ever watch, and Aenigma (1987) springs to mind too – whilst Touch of Death was one of the many films either directed by Fulci or had his brand naming upon it recycled as clips for his truly bizarre, quasi-autobiographical oddity A Cat in the Brain. Made the same year as the infamous Zombi 3 (1988) production where he only finished a large portion of it due to illness, and the team of Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei finished the final film, Touch of Death itself is a strange movie to my surprise in its own way. A perplexing mix of comedy, nasty splatter and his reoccurring obsession with reality slowly ebbing out of grasp as the film continues on, this does stick out among the films before and after. The premise has a dark reality, in that you have the likes of the Honeymoon Killers, couple Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who targeted real women for money and killed them, but here as played by Brett Halsey, Lester is a foil who, despite getting away with a few murders, also gets a speeding ticket at one point when disposing of a corpse. Halsey is among many actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood and of fifties television productions who, as he got older, started appearing in Italian productions such as their spaghetti westerns, finding himself in his later career in a string of late eighties Fulci films at this time. Even in mind that Italian productions are post-dubbed, his character just in presence here. Whilst looking creepily like a real serial killer would in his conventional dress sense, he also has an absurd aura of a man constantly under strain, far from control. His cat Reginald, even if using human corpses, has better luck just from least having good meals.

The character being a putz really adds something here, the tonal shifts themselves effecting. Most of the narrative, until it builds to Lester's increasing paranoia and his fate being sealed, is the character interacting with a string of various female victims, and in spite of the stereotypical Fulci gore that became synonymous to his work at this point, it is played as a black humoured farce. John Waters springs to mind, for playing up bad taste deliberately. A strange quasi American environment, meant to be Florida but entirely in a nether realm of Italian cinema's interpretation of it, is where we find ourselves, one where Lester is an unapologetic sociopath but in a world which makes him look ridiculous. The illegal horse gambling organisation, ran by an older Caucasian man and a still older Asian man assisting him, who exist in their own world wary of the police, seem like a budget restriction expected from a micro budget horror film, in that they have no fixed office; in context however it adds a weird edge that, having to keep an ear for police helicopters, their lack of fixed location is ridiculous on purpose. Lester's female victims are exaggerations, and even a glamorous actress like Zora Kerova is given pronounced prosthetic disfigurements like a mere birth defect on the top lip or a vague moustache to undercut their appearance. It is not flattering in the slightest, and can be seen as sexist, but in general the film's tone is a peculiar ode to the tasteless in a weird way. The exaggeration of the women for broad comedic effect, the most extreme an opera singer with masochistic streak, is balanced out by Halsey playing a strange, pathetic man himself. Charming enough to woo these women, and played by Halsey with charisma even with the ghostliness of him having to dub himself, but slowly finding that he is even having to run over homeless men trying to blackmail him. Considering he is a man unable to keep hold of money, because he is actually terrible at gambling, it is clear he is about to slip off the deep end.

The realistic advice from the voice, similar to his, on the radio is a clear sign early on not all is what is expected, very early in the film and already showing its hand. That moment was enough to push Touch of Death into the abstract before it went further, becoming more unconventional with how this plays out with a streak of melancholia from this. It is clear the film is entirely from inside the mind of a man losing what sanity he had, the copycat himself in some form, but the dreamlike lack of clarity famous from Fulci taking this to an extreme. One where it can be as argued Lester is already dead or a literal doppelganger situation is actually involved. Everything is unexplained, the grotesque broadness of the female caricatures or the depopulated world of a low budget Italian genre flick, alongside the stranger details. Horse racing commentary constantly in the soundtrack is one of those many unique touches to this film I have not seen many "weird films" do, but it works, at first presumed to be on the radio constantly for Lester, but becomes apparent in being part of his psychosis at it continues.

That it is played for comedy is a surprise too. Fulci had made comedies early in his career, (fans proclaim that one, The Eroticist (1972), is actually a hidden gem from his filmography), but he was known at this point and still as a serious, nasty director of gore. Unintentional camp which appeared in the late eighties films was one thing, but deliberate humour catches you off guard. Obvious jokes stretched out at length such as Lester struggling to get a body in the boot of his car, due to rigor mortis, stand out when one has seen him direct some of the most gothic and notorious films from the eighties Italian cycle of cinema. One is legitimately a great moment, his attempt to add a Mickey Finn to a potential victim's drink only for it to continually switch which glass belongs to who, but even that scene is violently contrasted against the violent gore that happens afterwards, which adds a punch to this. The gore’s over-the-top actually fits in a sick way for this type of film too, more glaringly fake compared to his early work and with such exaggeration, as even when Fulci has someone hit in the head with a stick, an eye has to pop out. It becomes a heightened wreck of conflicting reactions as a viewer. That Fulci is credited as the sole screenwriter adds a fascinating touch to this film, that this is his interests unedited and leading to this concoction. 

Fulci, bless him, even when background material states the film was undercut by its low budget still managed to make a memorable film in Touch of Death. Its obscurity is not surprising as, compared to the stereotype of his career of lurid horror films, even the gore found here does not off-set that most of it is a melodrama black comedy of a sociopath. The film eventually gains more meat, whilst fascinating before, when you suspect the rug is going to be pulled from under Lester's feet at any moment, helped because Fulci's history of the unexpected always happening in his work adds to this, able to wrong foot the viewer even if it breaks the logic of before. Even the music, which is chintzy, works for the strange humour because it sounds like cartoon music. The tone eventually leads to an ending that can be interpreted in different ways, which is applaudable, Zora Kerova's femme fatale (who yet has that distinct lip disfigurement) a warning of Lester meeting his matched, followed by an emotional conversation with his own shadow for a very unique ending scene. It is kind of twist you would want from Italian genre cinema, and absolutely distinct from Lucio Fulci's filmography as its own quirky surprise.

Abstract Spectrum: Weird/Grotesque/Quirky

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

Human Highway (1982)

 

Director: Neil Young and Dean Stockwell

Screenplay: Neil Young, Jeanne Field, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and James Beshears

Cast: Neil Young as Lionel Switch / Frankie Fontaine; Russ Tamblyn as Fred Kelly; Dean Stockwell as Otto Quartz; Dennis Hopper as Cracker, Charlotte Stewart as Charlotte Goodnight, Sally Kirkland as Kathryn Geraldine Baron as Irene; Gerald Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Mark Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson / Booji Boy; Bob Casale as Nuclear Garbageperson; Robert Mothersbaugh as Nuclear Garbageperson (as Bob Mothersbaugh); Alan Myers as Nuclear Garbageperson

An Abstract Candidate

 

Among idiosyncratic trends, one was a small amount of times musicians directed films. A few happened in the seventies – Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara (1978) in its original four plus hour form, outside of fragments, was withdrawn, and Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels (1971) is a divisive and weird experiment I need to get to again before given a proper comment on. Even Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit gets into this line up with The Fanatic (2019), a genre film with John Travolta, and he did manage to get into a murder’s row of figures, as in the eighties especially, you get a set of really distinct ones from big figures of music. Prince directed Under the Cherry Moon (1986), and David Byrne of the Talking Heads made True Stories (1986), a film which got lost beyond being a known cult film, only to get a huge critical reevaluation and a Criterion approved re-release for physical media. There is also the subject for today, which has to be one of the weirdest, in that I can now talk today about a film Canadian born musician Neil Young, legendary for the likes of the After the Gold Rush (1970) album, in which he managed to get together with the likes of Dean Stockwell, a bugged out Dennis Hooper, older actor Russ Tamblyn, and the band DEVO just before their mainstream success with the song Whip It, and make a film were Stockwell taking salt in his coffee is the least peculiar thing on the table.

Young, to be blunt, is an incredibly talented figure but, like Lou Reed, his impulses over the decades are entirely his decisions whether his fans agree with them or not. His eighties period, before 1989’s Freedom album and Rockin’ in the Free World, is bizarre in general. Trans (1983) I will look to with sympathy as, with the tragedy that his son was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak, the sudden shift as a rock musician to synthpop was as much dealing with trying to communicate to him as an experiment. It is however after this when David Geffen, the owner of his then-label of choice, demanded a "rock and roll album" from him, only for Young to make a rockabilly album as a response and Geffen to sue him for not making albums uncharacteristic of him. The eighties albums after are not well regarded, and even his return to Cosby, Stills and Nash for American Dream (1988), their last album from 1970 as a quartet, was not held in good regard. Human Highway, which has songs from Trans, predates that album, and was shot over four years with Dean Stockwell as a co-director¹, and likewise this is one of those films that, with Young's name as a selling point, which would divide people as much.

Young himself plays Lionel Switch, an idiot savant of a car mechanic who also dreams of being a rock star, someone who thinks that working on a car radiator is the same as the dangers of radiation poisoning, and openly admits to having drunk water from these radiators in the same dialogue. Stockwell is Otto Jr., who also plays his late father in an old man fake beard who died of said radiation poisoning, Otto the second having inherited the family gas station and diner, which is in close proximity to a nuclear power station, and was running into the red in bills when the son inherited it in the will. Hopper is among the diner staff, the chef with a loose hygiene plan and friend of neighboring raccoons, and Russ Tamblyn is the new employee Fred, a friend of Lionel‘s, taken in to work in the garage. DEVO, glowing bright red due to the radiation, work with the nuclear waste from the plant they casually dispose of, and both provide the most musical numbers and has member Mark Mothersbaugh, in the early era version of the band where he wore a baby mask, taking on the Dadaist Greek chorus by himself. Experiencing Human Highway, it is a vibrant plastic Americana in design to the production team’s credit, with throwbacks to fifties culture set against the new eighties era. Stockwell comes prepared with a pea green shirt and red tie, but for a film which has been difficult to see at times in a proper version, even a muddier version shows Neil Young already had a distinct eye even with help, creating a vibrant place even with minimal production design in idiosyncratic touches, like occasional back projection or the issue of nearby radiation from the plant causing flies to also grow bright red by a onscreen visual effect. Whilst cinematographer David Myers was more known for his history in musical concert films and working with musicians - he was the cinematographer on Renaldo and Clara, and was there to film the legendary Woodstock (1970) concert film - he also was cinematographer on a lesser known George Lucas project, THX 1138 (1971), a very aesthetically distinct film which, whilst different animals in aesthetic and tone, makes the stylization found here in Human Highway not a hard abrupt turn in his career. The look of this film stands out for what does admittedly wander to and fro from what presumably could be a plot, such as Otto considering torching the buildings for an insurance scam.

Sadly this does have one badly aged and problematic joke, of a stereotypical Middle Eastern (Saudi Arabian) figure of wealth that comes to the diner, clearly an actor in brown face and Young’s character using a racial term that is not acceptable. It is a sole sour note to a film where its biggest sin would be that, for Neil Young fans or film viewers, it is so scattershot and a weird flight of fancy it would lose people for not really caring for an actual story. You have to tolerate its peculiar lurches and that Neil Young, whilst capable of composing the likes of Cortex the Killer, or pissing Lynyrd Skynyrd off enough they added additional digs at him in live performances of Sweet Home Alabama, has a very dad humour sense of comedy too. His character Lionel with Russ Tamblyn play to old style slapstick, and the diner staff are over the top, so if you at all find this "lame" or still think this with a dismissive viewpoint, neither is that going to help with Human Highway. David Lynch is an apt comparison, more so as members of this cast would appear in his work – Stockwell and Hopper in Blue Velvet (1986), Russ Tamblyn in the Twin Peaks series - but even his most explicably comedic work, like the one season TV series On the Air (1992), whilst also having cheese ball humour, still possessed his own distinct sense of surrealism.

By the end of the film, Human Highway even rejects pretense of plot, as alongside abrupt nuclear catastrophe, a music number to celebrate it, and end credits evoking the Heaven sequence from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983), a portion of the film is Lionel being knocked out and having an extended fantasy about his rock success. This transpires after he meets his idol, also played by Neil Young, and knocks his head working under the star’s limo, starting a multi-scene dream sequence where, splicing in real concert performances, even the most impatient viewer will be rewarded, as Human Highway would have been worth preserving for the duet between Young and DEVO on My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue). This becomes of note as, whilst this timeline has been questioned¹, it is Mark Mothersbaugh, as he sings in the lyrics, credited to the phrase "rust never sleeps", which became the album this song would appear on with its acoustic counterpart. The heavier version of the song I first learnt of becomes a ten minute version here with added electronic noise instrumentation, and Mothersbaugh in a baby crib on the lead vocals, a sequence which is spectacular if you can appreciate a full blown rock jam session. It is, for a legendary song, an impressive moment for rock film history even if you sit through the whims of Human Highway and do not appreciate its goofball cheesiness.

That entire dream scenario may put off some who can even appreciate the first half, as it has its own aesthetic choices. It oddly evokes another director, Chilean figure Raúl Ruiz, and his eighties work with the obsession with idiosyncratic production design, saturated colour and viewers having to watch his work in VHS rips only, as Young choose to depict this passage of his own film with what feels like Vaseline smeared on the screen throughout.  Shifting between real concert footage, and moments of more slapstick, you have the character of Lionel is touring with the type of woodcarvings of Native Americans you would see in front of cigar stores in American films, seemingly wandering off at some point by themselves, and Young and real Native Americans at a celebration in front of a pyre, all of which becomes a stream of consciousness. The entire experience is unpredictable in a way, legitimately comparable to some experimental films, which can be appreciated but also liable to cause some viewers to pull their hair out for cohesion. Human Highway does show a lot of indulgences in its form, undoubtedly, but at the same time, baring the one joke I references earlier, the obvious issues with the film structurally have thankfully given way to so much that stood out and stayed with me in a positive. The final film altogether is absolutely of a period in Neil Young’s career which was ready to divide people, and even outside of it, this is an eccentric film I could appreciate but could have frustrated me if I was in the wrong mood. Thankfully I was in the right mood and could even at its silliness something to admire.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Stream-of-Consciousness/Wacky

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

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1) The Weird Story of Neil Young’s Human Highway by Jim Knipfel, written for Den of Geek and published June 4th 2018.

Psycho II (1983)

 

Director: Richard Franklin

Screenplay: Tom Holland

Cast: Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Vera Miles as Lila Loomis, Meg Tilly as Mary, Robert Loggia as Dr. Bill Raymond, Dennis Franz as Warren Toomey, Hugh Gillin as Sheriff John Hunt, Robert Alan Browne as Ralph Statler, and Claudia Bryar as Emma Spool

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

How do you follow up a legacy defining film? After Alfred Hitchcock passed in 1980, thus screenwriter Tom Holland, future director of Fright Night (1985), and Richard Franklin, director of Roadgames (1981) in Australia and openly an admirer of Hitchcock, had this challenge ahead of them when they collaborated on a Universal Studio’s follow up of Psycho (1960), with Anthony Perkins two decades on returning as Norman Bates. The opening reuses the legendary shower scene from the first film in the opening, but the Jerry Goldsmith score sums up the tone perfectly for a different film.

This does a good job in avoiding a poor rehash, with a plot to its credit playing to an idea, gas lighting someone, Hitchcock did use. Norman Bates is still a sympathetic figure, despite being a murderer, now with the context he has been rehabilitated, back at Bates Motel with all the repressed memories, those which caused his psychosis, and the potential vilification by the outside world as likely to prevent him ever atoning for his sins. Neither is it helping someone is trying to torment him, even with notes said to be left by his mother. With Dean Cundey as the director of photography, this feels like a grand film, when sequels existed but were not inherently expected for every title which were huge successes, and could be disasters regardless of genre and especially if the expectations of the original’s acclaim were at stake, something which can be attest to with the response to Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). As an attempt to credibly follow up the original Psycho, presenting its own drama even if with awareness and influence of the slasher film boom Psycho itself helped inspired, the sequel does well. It is strange seeing Norman Bates near a Pac Man arcade cabinet, but that is as much the point, a man out of time from a film that hit like a lightning bolt, even among the heavy hitters of Hitckcock’s filmography, and returning in the midst of horror movies inspired by it.

What Psycho II is a horror film with the emphasis on a strong cast, provided with a weight for its thriller plot and having some gruesome scenes in the wake of Friday the 13^th films. No one is giving a bad performance, Perkins about to return for a surge of recognition in this role that would lead to films like Crimes of Passion (1984), matched by the likes of Robert Loggia as his therapist, to Meg Tilly as a diner waitress who ends up at the old Bates home as a friend, subverting the original film in a willing guest of the hotel alongside both a shadow of doubt there for her and additional context that will pull the rug out of their relationship. The slasher influence is there – one scene befits the era, of a young guy and girl making the unfortunate decision to get high and heavy pet in the Bates home cellar – but what this becomes is closer to something you would find in an Italian giallo, the kind of storytelling influenced by Hitchcock too, especially as you have to factor in Vera Miles, in an inspired choice, returning as Lila Crane/Loomis, the sister of Janet Leigh’s character switching roles with the irony of hindsight, now the concerned person who wants Bates to stay in jail even if it leads her to doing something legitimately evil morally to punish him.

The film does recreate images from the first film, even the psychoanalyst explaining the plot at the end of the prequel, so there is the real sense of this being a film made by fans of the source returning to it. They have a Herculean challenge in a way – Hitchcock is a sacred figure, and barring one or two exceptions, a TV movie The Birds II: Land's End (1994), or Christopher Reeve post his tragic accident starring in a 1998 TV remake of Rear Window, readapting his work has not happen a great deal unless entirely out of coincidence. Psycho was an exception, and the sequels and re-adaptations are their own universe, where Anthony Perkins would direct one of the films, and there was a cancelled attempt to turn the series into an anthology series, by way of an unsuccessful 1987 TV movie, with a young Lori Petty. Barring one aspect which may be very controversial, a final twist about Bates’ family which I will not spoil, Psycho II does not take huge risks but does an admirable job in being a retrospective on Norman Bates himself, whether it would be possible to ever live a normal life, and succeeds when making a sequel to the Alfred Hitchcock film could have been an ill-advised mishap.

Bad Dreams (1988)

 

Director: Andrew Fleming

Screenplay: Andrew Fleming and Steven E. de Souza

Cast: Jennifer Rubin as Cynthia Weston; Bruce Abbott as Dr. Alex Karmen; Richard Lynch as Franklin Harris; Dean Cameron as Ralph Pesco; Harris Yulin as Dr. Berrisford; Susan Barnes as Connie; John Scott Clough as Victor; E. G. Daily as Lana; Damita Jo Freeman as Gilda; Louis Giambalvo as Ed; Susan Ruttan as Miriam

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

In the shadow of Nightmare on Elm Street becoming a huge horror franchise in the late eighties, 20th Century Fox joined among others on the supernatural horror bandwagon with Bad Dreams, in which the prologue, as you always want, introduces a cult actor like Richard Lynch in a prominent cast member, in this case as the head of a hippy cult, Franklin Harris, anointing members with what seemingly is ladles of water.

It is later revealed it was gasoline, the house exploding from the resulting fire, beginning the film with one survivor Cynthia, a young teen, having to bare the memories of what happened after the thirteen year coma she wakes from after the incident. This is a big film in context of this genre, in terms of the studio distributing it, just from the soundtrack -  I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night) by The Electric Prunes, a punk cover of My Way, and more strikingly Guns 'n' Roses before they went big with Sweet Child of Mine, long before it become a radio staple even here in Britain - and there is a deliberately sense of this trying to match the success Nightmare on Elm Street had. Specifically, this was made after the third film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), which managed to figure out the tone of the series and become a favourite for fans, this explicitly riffing on its premise and re-casting Jennifer Rubin, a prominent side character in that film, as the lead Cynthia here. Prominently as well, with director Andrew Fleming starting here and continuing through the next decades in Hollywood, you have as his co-writer on the script Steven E. de Souza, a big figure in Hollywood who, also in 1988 when Bad Dreams was released, co-penned the script for Die Hard, which mid-way through a career with credits alongside other big actor films is arguably the hugest title for his entire career. Souza is someone I like, even when his directed and written attempt to adapt Street Fighter (1994) as a video game franchise to the big screen was seen as a failure, and you can spot his sense of humour and witticisms throughout this.

The Dream Warriors set up, of a group of patients being targeted one-by-one by an unnatural force, is obvious here, as with Harris the cult leader who, like Freddy Krueger with his burnt face make-up, occasionally appears burnt up to in the border beyond life and death. Like Dream Warriors, it is a series of set pieces where people are picked off with the only difference that, with the doctor running the group here, said male figure here is openly a sceptic to the scenario who is yet trying to rationalise the alarming number of freak deaths taking place one soon after another. Honestly, Bad Dreams is pure horror spectacle even in terms of being pure cheese as well as what works, with some flair but until its ending twist is going in an expected route for the set-up even in terms of the exaggerated takes on mental health by a game cast, such as the nervous wreck of a former newspaper reporter, for the equivalent of a Weekly World News where Bat Boy came from, who chain smokes like a furnace. They are picked off one-by-one in inventive deaths like Dream Warriors, the equivalent of a haunted house ride of a film, and your taste will entirely depend on whether you can appreciate this.

There are some memorable incidents, including someone seemingly deciding to play hit-and-run on their senior in the hospital car park and gleefully killing them, to the surprising level of gore such as the gruesome moment someone ends up going through the turbine in the boiler room and literally recreating the song Raining Blood from Slayer onscreen. Probably the most idiosyncratic aspect of this whole film does need major spoilers, but suffice to say, this set up with a supernatural slant becomes a more “rational” ending, which comes off more contrived than if ghosts were involved yet provides an appropriate heightened nature of a ludicrous murder twist. [Major Spoiler] I highly doubt even with the variety of side effects and causes medicines can induce in real life, any that can cause people to kill themselves as happens in this, or hallucinate about Richard Lynch would be allowed anywhere near a medical storage facility on a hospital unless you wanted a scandal. [Spoilers End] It comes off like a giallo twist, where attempting a rational route than taking a supernatural slant becomes stranger than accepting the idea of the unnatural over materialistic logic in a plot. It feels appropriate for the film, far from a criticism, and does provide a distinct touch for Bad Dreams. Even in among this too, remembering the film it was inspired by, this does thankfully play to some unnatural imagery as it subjectively pulls the rugs out from under a viewer a few times. In reference to something that is already talked of, without spoiling which scene mentioned it is, this manages to get away with the “it is all a dream” segment twist by having a moment so abrupt and jarring for a character to be involved with that it actually comes off as gleefully inspired in a sick humoured way.

Of course as well, it provides a fascinating tangent into the careers for those involved as Steven E. de Souza is a big name from this era of action and Hollywood blockbusters, making a rare jump into horror cinema, and Andrew Fleming, despite mostly staying out of the genre, if more well known for The Craft (1996), a film I will admit I always found disappointment in for how its ending seemingly conforms against the promise it has about all female tale about witchcraft, but had a legacy for people who caught it at the right age. This is a cool piece in their careers, not the best of these Elm Street inspired films but certainly a memorable one.

Smut Without Smut: Satanic Horror Nite (2021)

 

Including reviews of Sacrilege (1971), Satan’s Lust (1971) and The Devil Inside Her (1977)

Directors: Ray Dennis Steckler (Sacrilege); Zebedy Colt (The Devil Inside Her)

Cast:

Sacrilege:

Jane Tsentas as Cassandra; Gerard Broulard as Jay; Ruthann Lott as Maria; Charles Smith as Lucifer

 

Satan's Lust:

Judy Angel as Pamela Goodright; Ron Darby as Boris; George 'Buck' Flower as Manheim Jarkoff; James Mathers as Wayne

 

The Devil Inside Her:

Jody Maxwell as Hope Hammond; Terri Hall as Faith Hammond; Dean Tait as Joseph; Zebedy Colt as Ezekiel Hammond; Renee Sanz as Devil's Crony; Chad Lambert as Nicodemus; Nancy Dare as Rebecca 'Becky' Hammond; Annie Sprinkle as Orgy Girl; Rod DuMont as The Devil

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I’ll buy you a dildo for Christmas.

Smut Without Smut, a concept created by American Genre Film Archive, works around the issue that erotic cinema would be off-putting for some, but have their compelling aspects even if unintentional. This is significant even in a serious way as, with the uncensored versions of three of the films covered as they were included in the AGFA Blu Ray release, these films represent a side of filmmaking for all their amateur and absurd tones which will be deeply problematic for some. It is worth putting ahead of time as, especially as actual hardcore films, some people will not feel comfortable (or want to) sit through work which have openly non-consensual scenes even if all these films are truly ridiculous times to witness, openly too silly (or frankly shambolic) to take seriously baring. They are from a different time, even if sadly pornography has its sleazy edges still to this day, so all these films have to be taken with a pinch of salt even in their cut-down Smut Without Smut versions, which will not be possible for all to stomach. Those who can, like myself, will witness truly strange works.

To be blunt as well, some people will not feel comfortable (or want to) sit through extended scenes of real sex if with the artificiality that it is acted out sequences which are prolonged and in gynecological detail. In mind the tone will end up having to be lowered to review these, but wanting to take into seriousness the content, even thought pornography has still a lot of distasteful content to it in tone, these films have moments for all their goofiness you would prefer not to have in them, as much as some people just do not want to watch a man’s hairy testicles up close for a prolonged five to ten minutes. Satanic Horror Nite is closer to what the point on this concept was as Smut Without Smut’s prequel. That one was before AGFA started releasing their mix-tape works to physical media, instead having a double bill of Things to Come (1976) and The Dirty Dolls (1973), two softcore sex films where the removal of said sex scenes made little sense. That title was only logical for outright porn, tackling the sordid world of hardcore that Something Weird Video accumulated alongside their other exploitation film libraries, in this case centering on the obsession in the seventies with Satan and the Devil throughout a lot of these productions.

The compilation version follows The AGFA Horror Trailer Show (2020), another early mixtape from AGFA in which it is initially set up as an actual cinema showing, starting with trailers including in the intermission, not surprisingly going for the obvious sex innuendo with the food trailers but with legitimately idiosyncratic trailers which come some of the best parts of the production altogether. Americana from a different country to mind, such as one for a Wizard of Oz Head Shop, or the obsession between these mixtapes with finding as many trailers for cinemas made for Toddy, a chocolate drink that could be served cold or hot, are an obsession I am developing through works like this. More popular in the likes of Brazil to Argentina, Toddy chocolate drinks were pushed in the USA in these types of trailers, such as one here which is an animated trailer like  an old sixties cartoon about firemen. There is even a Pac Man parody for another concessions stand food advertisement which is also memorable.

This is not about gluttony however, but the sin of lust, and trailers for other hardcore films even if one or two does at least produce a Count-Erotica film which immediately warns you of some of eye-popping content. Even if everything in the Smut Without Smut cut is softcore, the sight of a man humping into a rabbit hand puppet for what is a Count Dracula parody immediately is memorable whether you want it to be or not. These films, uncut versions as well, are weird for how they can straddle the line between legitimately sleazy, progressive, deeply dated and problematic, but also very quaint or weird, where “Englebert Humpsalot” for a pseudonym on the credits time stamps the films to their era or even earlier into the sixties, like a Carry On joke.

Sadly the first film in the compilation, Hotter Than Hell (1971), is not among those included in their full cut which is a shame as it presents itself as a sitcom about demons, presided upon by a Satan who is closer to a gregarious Saint Nick/Green Man figure, whose desire to corrupt the folks up above is less eternal damnation but orgies and sex even in the underworld. This feels like a sex romp comedy which just happened to end up with real sex, boing sounds and all, between demons magically appearing for women or being helpful to frustrated female psychologists. There is already though an inherent issue with Smut Without Smut in context too that, yes, splicing out all the hardcore scenes, alongside making some of these barely over fifteen minutes each between five films used, means that so much tonal context let alone story plotting is lost, which becomes a significant issue with appreciating it as a work by itself.

Sacrilege probably is not a film you would gain a lot of from having all the sex back in, but it is the most notorious of the trio as it is directed by Ray Dennis Steckler. Steckler, infamous for the likes of Rat Pfink and Boo Boo (1966), did make some porn films in his career, and starting with a nude woman (barring gloves and a cape) gyrating to drones and string instruments to the camera, we are absolutely in a strange territory even next to the other films involved in this collection. This woman, in the form of a more humble witchcraft enthusiast in more clothing, will temp a man reading a book in the countryside for what is a played satanic sex ritual. There is not a lot else to talk of, baring that he reads books on witchcraft, and that she has a Siamese cat named Lucifer who is the aforementioned Devil and starts a nice trend of cats in these films. There is also the weird decision to have our witch make erotic cat wails, which is probably one of the strangest aspects of any of the films as this happens even in the sex scenes.

The reason Smut Without Smut exists is that Sacrilege, bluntly, will force you to look at the lead’s testicles in close up for a long period of shots, which is not for everyone. The paradox with hardcore, which this mixtape has to work around, is that porn drags because of its hardcore scenes of actual sex but without them, not in terms of wanting to arose the viewer but for their tone, you cannot really cut around them depending on the film used without potentially losing so much of their tone, or feeling as here they abruptly change scene. Again, and with the desire to not repeat this repeatedly, these films do present a taboo nature when our male lead calls a female friend to join over when possessed by sex, the playing to a non-consensual nature to these scenes in all the films mentioned in this review something which is going to offend people, more so because of the uncut versions having real sexual acts transpire even if they are highly choreographed. Sacrilege out of the three full films I saw is the most lacksidasical, but this would still be seen as a taboo for some still even if that  the film in context, the repetitiveness of the sex scenes themselves, undercut the potential grimness with monotony. The film by the ending also possesses a very squeaky table the scene of the Satanic orgy plays out on top of, and jazz drumming on the soundtrack mixed with soundtrack pieces for a silent adventure serial, which is a realm of strangeness in itself, which cannot defend these to someone who feels sexual fantasies like this are indefensible, but do undercut such a film by reveal how absurd it is as a fictional piece, real sex or otherwise. For Ray Dennis Steckler, it definitely becomes an idiosyncratic production to watch if an acquired taste even next to the others in this. Its compilation version would probably suffice for most, but uncut, the repetition and tone becomes its weird aura.

As mentioned, there are films here which were not included as extras in their full feature form, Sexual Awareness (1974) one of these, about a religious sex cult.  A lot of clearly missing from its cut form, a fragment of curiosity that really does not stand out, and again, about a cult that use hypnosis, this does emphasis that with a childlike naivety in a lot of these films’ cases that they touch upon fantasies which many may find completely unacceptable. It emphases sexual fantasies as a complicated and at times difficult thing, notwithstanding the fact that pornography even into the modern day has problematic aspects, especially when it comes to fetishing race, where we do not willingly face these with the complexity they need as much as rightly challenge them. None of the films in this, though a few have some eyebrow raising and sleazy moments, can be seen as anything but utterly ridiculous, entirely artificial and able to dismiss as from another time in look, especially as  Sexual Awareness in the Satanic Horror Nite cut is played for all its awkward pauses in acting and non-sequiturs, alongside in the intermission afterwards subtly playing to the only innuendo in the trailer choices, with a hotdog advert terms which are far more explicit then one would presume.

Satan’s Lust, which thankfully comes with another cameo by a cat also minding its own business, tries to be a murder mystery with obvious culprits shown in their criminal act from the get-go, a Satanic cult whose murder of a female victim has people sniffing in on them. Those people are Pamela Goodnight and Wayne, who are investigating the strange death of a woman named Carla who was working for Satanic Films, a movie studio in Los Angeles who were not hiding their purpose in being an evil satanic cult. This film, even in mind to The Devil Inside Her really going for eyebrow raising moments, is arguably the skuzziest of the lot as, baring a few romantic sex scenes, which involves their leads shaking their heads in slow mo, this definitely is the one where any concern for trigger warnings is appropriate, Pamela Goodnight probably as put upon as anyone can get in terms of a secret sexual satanic cult. Even in mind that, with legitimate suspicion on my behalf from all the cutaways, that faked fluids were used to be polite about it for scenes, this does become even sleazier the further along it goes, barely over an hour for a film reduced to fifteen minutes or so without the scene. It manages to have a scene that is problematic and twisted in capitals when someone is unconscious for the sex scene, and the perpetrator is thinking of an eleven year old girl, which is gross as that sounds in mind to how slapdash it also is, especially as said scene is also pointless for plot reasons to ever have. The version in Smut Without Smut form is more ridiculous for what it is, emphasis the non-sex scenes as being an ultra low budget genre film with the lack of these off putting edges to deal with, like one’s sex partner to one’s horror turning into a skeleton mid way through. If you could not get the tone, that these films are incompetent for the most part with actors just earnestly going through them, it is completely understandable why those here would still be uncomfortable to experience. This is also in mind that Satan’s Lust does have its own ridiculous moments which could only be laughed at, the most inappropriate use of Yellow Submarine by the Beatles, as an instrumental piece, finding itself here of all places the most obvious example of this.

Out of all the films, whilst with some of the most shocking content, The Devil Inside Her is the most ambitious of the trio as well, trying to be an actual film with a knowing transgressive streak at its heart. Set in 1826, a normal puritan farming family is undercut by the fact that, among the two daughters, one is romantically attracted to a young man, whilst the other is jealous of this. The father neither helps, as even kissing in broad daylight is enough for him to call one of these daughters a “harlot” and punish her with naked whipping, but the pleas of both sisters invokes Satan to appear, as depicted with KISS makeup, spike leather neck and wrist pieces, and the horn. Obviously this is again a film where its attitude to sex has dated extremely, but it is one that feels deliberately transgressive rather than being sordid; even if Satan is depicted nude barring boots, using a backwards talking masturbation ritual to turn into the love interest for both women, there is a clear knowing sense of provocation here not just from the film’s clear low views of this form of Christianity it depicts, even having Satan having the last words with God in the finale that, as long as people are sexually frustrated and he is the first on call, he will always get to the mortals first. Tellingly, its director Zebedy Colt has a compelling history which likely explains this, in that this was someone who clearly was bringing a lot of provocation to the production knowingly; birth name Edward Earle Marsh, he had two parallel careers, a musical and acting career including in several small Broadway roles, with his homosexuality something which he explicitly showed in music about romance and love between men, contrast with his directing and acting roles in hardcore porn, including having of all people a young Spalding Gray, famous for his acting and monologue work among other things, in a role in Farmer's Daughters (1976)¹.

With Satan able to shape shift, this is where the film gets more over the top and memorable. The film certainly has an imagination – where as the jealous sister goes to a witch for a love potion, we bear witness to some vivid dialogue such as the concoction using “the menstrual fluid of a Persian harlot” and Nicodemus the parrot who transforms into a human being, needing to be "milked" to finish the love potion. There is still a lot here which would be considered shocking for people, playing to how Satan disguises himself as members of this family, brining in some shocking concepts such as incest but two really out-there moments, one more acceptable in certain areas of erotica, a golden shower, which takes place at the Satanic orgy in the finale between consenting Satanists, but the other involving consensual use of vegetables which is quite a surprise. This in the Satanic Nite Orgy loses all of this, but also a lot of the tone, where this film which may be still indefensible for its content and tone still possesses a lot more in its tiny budget in terms of tone. It is telling that, even if it goes for the happy ending where the religious win, clearly horny Satanists were the ones we were supposed to be cheering.

The actual Smut Without Smut cut is a fascinating and fun ride to witness, but honestly, it can be argued to be a failure. There will be films people would prefer to have cut down into non-hardcore films to be able to enjoy their cheesy natures, and these versions will be easier to screen at cinema presentations, and more power to those both, but it really gets into the difficulty with what one does with hardcore adult cinema as a concept. There is still taboo some have with the concept of these films, let alone if they have any artistic merit, contrasted by the dichotomy of how one of their trademarks, emphasis on lengthy explicit depiction of the sexual act, is not something that is meant to be experienced for many as an actual film, rather than for titillation, but also is how their stories are structured around them if they have actual stories, making it insanely difficult to not undercut the tone and mood by splicing out the sex. Softcore cuts of these films are still made, which is telling in terms of the market for them, but Satanic Horror Nite also emphasizes the practical issues here that, wishing to re-edit these films for consumption, what this is just is censored cuts in a compilation, with not anything which could have emphasized the disjointed results on purpose and had for fun, such as more Satanic porn film trailers or jokes based on old advertising for drive-ins. I admire AGFA still releasing this, but it is telling that, not films to just jump into as they could be deeply off-putting for their content, the uncut versions are far more fascinating for what strange and sordid productions they are, one in The Devil Inside Her managing to be compelling for its clearly artistic goals among also being porn.

 

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1) The Many Sides of Zebedy Colt from Queer Music Heritage. This is NSFW for some of the archive materials included in the page about Zebedy Colt's life.