Alabama’s Ghost (1973)

 

Director: Fredric Hobbs

Screenplay: Fredric Hobbs

Cast: Christopher Brooks as Alabama - King Of The Cosmos; Peggy Browne as Zoerae; E. Kerrigan Prescott as Carter's Ghost; Steven Kent Browne as Otto Max; Grantham as Granny / Moxie / Gault; Karen Ingenthron as Dr. Caligula; Ann Weldon as Mama-bama; Ann Wagner Ward as Marilyn Midnight; Joel Nobel as Doc

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

I'm not afraid of no white racist ghost!

The narrative exposition out of the gate of Alabama's Ghost befits its charm, like a parody of a genre film or a fever dream - Nazis attempted to get a substance, made using a form of hashish, from the magician Carter the Great (E. Kerrigan Prescott), one that can turn people into drones when introduced into the body. Carter seemingly died in the past taking this secret with him. It is however befitting this wonderfully eccentric film made entirely by Fredric Hobbs. Serving in the military as an Air Force officer from 1953 to 1955¹, Hobbs became also an artist, pioneering the "Parade Sculpture", where he transformed automobiles into travelling ritualistic artworks he could drive around the United States², one of which makes a prominent appearance in Alabama's Ghost, among the four films he had a hand in directing and writing. Contrasting his legacy with his art sculptures and other media, even having his work in permanent collections such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco¹, emphasising a legacy of great legitimacy by his 2018 passing, there is delightfully however as well his psychotronic genre cult films which make up his career.

The most famous of his tetralogy, least the most well known, will likely be Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), which got a Something Weird Video release. It befits as a sibling of Alabama's Ghost; alongside the titular Godmonster being a lovably sad creature I legitimately wish you could get a plastic action figure of like horror icons of bigger franchises. These two films, Roseland (1971) and Troika (1969) sadly much more obscure, part of a huge trend of American independent genre films made by people with their own resources, where the idea of a sculptural artist getting involved in the filmmaking medium makes sense among the many who came to the medium and only managed to make one genre film in their time next to Hobbs' four. His decision to make genre films though, unlike more overtly experimental cinema, is something distinct, and the results of deliciously idiosyncratic, Alabama's Ghost the oddest of the most easily available pair.

Letting his imagination run wild, he takes tropes and genre ideas into his own idiosyncrasies, cutting from the exposition of this film's start to the Turk Murphy Jazz Band to introduce the film proper with an out-of-time jazz swing song. Alabama (Christopher Brooks) himself is a bar staff member at this opening location, who wishing to become a musician, will become an acclaimed magician instead when he drives a forklift by accident through a wall whilst cleaning up, finding Carter's real tomb or at least his possessions and secrets. Contacting his elderly sister - who is actually a male leader of evil vampires that wants to use Alabama - our hero will inherit and be trained in the skills to be a huge draw, if in the danger he is to be the tool in the vampires' plans. Alabama found the hashish Carter had found too, which the leader of the vampires wishes to use for mass brainwashing of the world through a television broadcast of Alabama making an elephant disappear and reveal the secret to the trick. Written, produced and directed by Fredric Hobbs, this is a hangover of the sixties, where the manager who takes him, with an English accent, is a throwback to the late Sixties hippy movement, part of the aesthetic tropes now knee deep in the seventies and surreal due to the juxtaposition. Sixties psych rock now is now performed at one of Alabama's performances, which evoke seventies variety shows, and if there is artistic concepts behind this from the artist directing and writing it, I cannot help but see a cynicism explicitly there with a figure of a business being a legitimately evil vampire who wants to control people. It is obvious, but like Godmonster of Indian Flats having a corrupt mayor as its antagonist, framing visitors and conning the townspeople for his own gains, natural suspicion of authority in some form is here even as a pair of wacky genre flicks.

It is both an insanely languid film, drifting through its plot like many independent genre films from the US at the time, and also delirious like many from then too. The dinosaur bone car alone is a personal touch never explained, one of the creator's Parade Sculptures, but becomes also one of the more conventional aspects than a plot which lunges sincerely into its strange turns. It is technically a horror film, but also its own strange thing, barely factoring this in barring moments of supernatural images, such as the scene where the horrors of these Nazis vampires, whose evil female scientist is even called Dr. Caligula for emphasis, is fully shown when they have a blood gathering conveyor belt. Nothing is more sinister when vampires bite hippies moved along as they pass like the conveyor belts at a sushi restaurant.

Strengthen by Christopher Brooks as Alabama, a figure so full of charisma it is annoying he is not someone I know of beyond the Fredric Hobbs' films he was in - sadly an actor with a small filmography baring with Hobbs, the Sun Ra project Space is the Place (1974), and playing Jesus Christ in The Mack (1973) - Alabama's Ghost is a film of its time for the better for me. The plotting and tone is entirely filtered through its own desires and whims, and this does produce some results that are unexpected, such as the fact, whilst still exaggerated, this is a rare case of a positive depiction of voodoo. The priest here is to help Alabama when he is spooked by the people he is with and finds himself literally cowering in his mother's arms, needing an exorcism and still there in the finale to save the day with Alabama's mother. Even if with mechanical doppelgangers of Alabama inspired by Disney World's Abraham Lincoln automaton is involved in the plot, which might distract from this one character and passage of the plot. Just having this figure is a positive in showing a depiction of the religion that unfortunately has not been done in many films at all, let alone in horror, very well or in a progressive way.

The ending is undeniably bombastic, Fredric Hobbs choreographing together a mass concert involving a sea of hippies at an open end festival, a real elephant, whose species clearly hate vampires, and like Godmonster of the Indian Flats, a taste for endings where everyone goes mad, run about and chaos transpires. The film will not be everyone, and it would be hilarious to know what fans of Hobbs the artist would have thought of this, but this shows just how rich and peculiar that independent era of genre cinema was in its own distinct way from examples in the later decades.

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1) In Memory of Fredric Hobbs, an obituary from Ever Loved.com.

2) From the Vaults of Streaming Hell: Alabama’s Ghost, written by Pat Padua for Spectrum Culture, published January 12th 2022.