Jack Be Nimble

Once upon a time and before becoming one of the most hideous pseudo-Aryan platinum blonde chicks-with-dicks working in Hollywood, Alexis Arquette (born Robert Arquette), the lesser known sibling of the famous Arquette acting family (including Rosanna, David, Patricia, and Richmond), played the role of the male adolescent anti-hero Jack in the gravely underrated New Zealand neo-fairy-tale horror flick Jack Be Nimble (1993) directed by Garth Maxwell. More demented and cunning than a schizophrenic tranny on uncut crack, Jack nimbly hypnotizes personal enemies with his artfully crafted motor-powered candlestick and has them unintentionally commit suicide through a variety of intricate, highly intimate, and ruthlessly befitting ways. Jack has very privy reasons for becoming a sly metaphysical mass murderer, but the true root of his irrevocable psychosis is the direct consequence of being separated from his little sister Dora when he was a wee lad.  After his obese father became an unrepentant philanderer, and, thereafter, his mother turned into an emotionally unstable drunk with nil mothering skills, Jack and his sis were put up for adoption and given to two very different families. While Dora was raised somewhat ideally with a good, bourgeois upbringing, poor Jack was cursed to live in the less than luxurious rural land of wild cow-turds with a hostile pack of sadistic Kiwis hellbillies who don’t take kindly to the lonely boy’s proclivity towards impulsive hypersensitivity and playing with furry kitty cats. Although Jack grows up to be a talented murderer and dilettante inventor with an unorthodox intellect, his sister Dora becomes a creature of feminine empathy and intuition as she develops crucial extra-sensory abilities that allow her to know when her bothersome brother is in immediate danger. Despite their deracinated coming-of-age, Jack and Dora remain two peculiar peas in a pod during their vexatious separation. Upon reuniting after many years of emotionally severe severance, siblings Jack and Nora face fierce vulnerability from various outsiders, ranging from jealous boyfriends to split-personalities, but most specifically from a dyke-like brigade of ex-stepsisters. Due to a childhood’s worth of cataclysmic abuse, Jack becomes his own worst enemy; burning every bridge and annihilating all beings that have the misfortune of carelessly crossing his capricious path. 

Director Garth Maxwell has cited various influences, both personal and aesthetic, that went into the creation of Jack Be Nimble. On a more diacritic and arcane level, Maxwell and Jack Be Nimble co-writer Rex Pilgrim have stated their personal familial and social isolation as gay men played an imperative role in assembling the psychologically damaged and confounded character Jack and his affinity for ritualistic revenge.  In fact, the screenwriting duo would once again collaborate on the gay dramarama When Love Comes Along (1998); a mostly mediocre and artistically sterile work that bares no resemblance to its older sibling Jack Be Nimble. Despite the innate (albeit cryptic) gayness of some of the more personal themes that plague anti-hero Jack in Jack Be Nimble, the film itself lacks any sort of overt mention of homosexuality. While Dora enjoys engaging in verbal and physical intercourse with an older gentlemen, Jack's only source of sexual ecstasy seems to be through brute violence, which one could argue is a symbolic metaphor for sodomy.  As far as cinematic inspirations go, Maxwell has (somewhat unsurprisingly) named David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and David Lynch as filmmakers who had influenced the look and atmosphere of Jack Be Nimble. For the scenes of Jack growing up in rural Hades, Maxwell attempted to channel the ethereal aesthetic potency of the late nineteenth-century Symbolist art movement, most specifically, the work of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin. Despite its many influences, Jack Be Nimble hardly seems like a hack-kitsch derivative work as the film, much like Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954), has a timeless quality that transcends both age and passing trend, thus guaranteeing its staying power as a truly ominous and caustic, yet bewitching piece of cinema . Upon first viewing Jack Be Nimble, my always discerning eyes failed to notice any blatant influences as I was immediately taken aback by the film’s savage yet startlingly sentimental story and unmerciful yet aesthetically-titillating acid-washed imagery. Like any great modern fairy tale, Jack Be Nimble tells an archaic story in a wholly neoteric and sophisticated way. Being a work of apt cinema, Jack Be Nimble is most successful in depicting the story through its use of exceedingly expressive imagery, keen shot composition, seamless editing (in one clever match-cut, a bucket of pig's blood dissolves into a birthday cake), and overall dynamic mise-en-scène, as opposed to the often platitudinous realm of sheer words.  In fact, the greatest weakness of Jack Be Nimble is its sometimes unconvincing and poorly synched dialogue, which sometimes resembles the poor overdubbing of a Lucio Fulci film.  Of course, like most great films, the actions and images featured in Jack Be Nimble are more vehement than patently restrictive words.  

Jack is quite quick when it comes to stomping on the throats of bloated waitresses who happen to be two times his size, but such erratic and unbecoming behavior ultimately leads to his demise, hence the tragedy of the story and his character. Ultimately, Jack’s greatest talents are merely a clever and intricate survivalist response to his undying and overwhelming pain. After all, had it not been for the barbaric backwoods childrearing techniques of his abominable adopted parents, Jack would have never went to the trouble of fashioning a marvelous machine of hypnotic destruction. While the ending of Jack Be Nimble may be less than ideal to the typical Hollywoodized automaton, the film does provide an optimistic view of family matters and the primordial power of genetics.  Although being a work that is indubitably too dark and risqué for toddlers, and too mystical for the seasoned cynic, Jack Be Nimble is a truly strangle tale that tends to leave most viewers divided, but never blasé.  Undoubtedly, the presence of pre-tranny Alexis Arquette also adds a curious ingredient to Jack Be Nimble that few other films can boast.  Surprisingly, what I found most odd about Arquette's appearance in the film was not the atypical 'leading male' role s/he plays, but the quality and plausibility of his/her performance.  In fact, Arquette's exceptional performance in Jack Be Nimble may be one of the best abstract arguments against sexual reassignment surgery.  After all, who can say anything positive (and with a straight face) about any of "her" subsequent performances?  The creators of Jack Be Nimble described the film, somewhat sneeringly, as the, "queerest little grenade."  Indeed, the film is most certainly preternatural and esoterically homosexual, as well as overly emotionally explosive, but it is also devilishly delightful and crudely charming work of de facto cult/horror cinema.

-Ty E

Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh

When I first heard about the film Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh (1984), I instantly asked myself whether or not such a film could live up to its brilliant and brassy title. Clearly, a film entitled Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh must be a work of pretentious trash, and, of course, to my pleasurable discovery, it is; minus overly conceited and painfully pedantic mental masturbation. As someone who enjoys both trash cinema and artistically refined arthouse flicks, I always feel a bit blessed when I discover a rare cinematic breed like Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh; a work of aristocratic artistic degeneracy that follows in the grand out-of-step footsteps of alpha-art-fag Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Paul Morrissey, and John Waters, but stands alone perfectly fine on its own two delightfully dotty celluloid feet. Written, directed, and starring Greek-Canadian junkie Demetri Estdelacropolis at age of 22 years old as a mere student film, Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh gained minor infamy when it was the only Canadian film screened at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival, henceforth presenting the most northern North American nation in an atypically perverse light. More psychosexually disturbing, hilarious, and downright strange than any of fellow Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s films and more personally incriminating than anything ever directed by Winnipeg-Nord Guy Maddin (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Brand Upon the Brain!) and Arabian-Canadian Karim Hussain (Subconscious Cruelty, The Beautiful Beast), Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh is a work ridiculously riddled with opaque elements of Estdelacropolis’s perturbed opium-seduced psyche and peculiar personal fixations. Estdelacropolis plays the cursedly fucked up ‘anti-hero’ Dimira aka Lucie, a gay porn star who, with every act of male sodomy he engages in, becomes further preoccupied with his equally warped mother Esther; a stocky wretched wench that is like a cross between Edith Massey (Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living) and Shelly Winters à la Curtis Harrington's What's the Matter with Helen? (1971) and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971).  It is apparent in the film that Esther is largely responsible for creating Dimira's self-destructive Jungian "shadow"; the unconscious part of the mind responsible for repressed and destructive instincts.  Dimitra's Anima, the unconscious feminine psychological qualities of his mind, are also partly uncovered in the film. Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh is essentially an unconventional experiment in psychoanalytic individuation as it is a work that attempts to bring light to (in the noble spirit of Lucifer) the more painful elements of the unconscious and decipher the filmmaker's 'true self'. In fact, director Demetri Estdelacropolis ends the film with the quaint, but fitting tribute "Dedicated to all of our mothers."

Demetri Estdelacropolis’ Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh could also be called Oedipus Wrecked and Retarded. As a charming chap tells the ever reluctant protagonist Dimira, "shut up, just accept the fact you’re a fag and hate women.” As one finds out while watching Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh, this chap is Dimira’s psychiatrist and he is soon trading roles and paying his porn star patient for anal physical therapy.  Like Dr. Freud, the psychiatrist's theories seems to have more to do with the perversity of his own psyche than that of his patient's. Of course, Dimira has no time for women (aside from the occasional petrifying sexual encounter with a dildo-wielding porn starlet friend), as his obscenely pesky and putrid domineering mother does a spectacular job nagging him into oblivion. Any prospective viewer of Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh needs to be prepared for the fact that mother Esther brings a certain repellent (yet distinctly humorous) quality to the film that might inspire certain spectators to erupt violently during one of the many times when the horrid hag incessantly whines, “Dimira, Dimira, Dimira...." as she unabashedly dreams of bedding her homosexual son. Also, those individuals suffering from an acute case of castration anxiety might want steer totally clear of Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh as the film takes genital mutilation to generous extremes. Naturally, Dimira’s man-loving sexual aberrance is explained in quasi-Freudian terms, but in a manner that is more campy than clinical. Dimira, being the son of an exceedingly egging and mind-numbingly neurotic lady lunatic who lusts after her own male progeny, is repelled by all women as he associates them all with mommy dearest. Mother Esther may not be mentally perceptive enough to believe her own son is a flaming queen who buggers boys and plays with phallic sex toys, but she does claim to know how to spot an authentic transsexual by the size of their Adam’s apple. Structurally, Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh is a magnificent nonlinear mess that is comprised of eccentric slapdash scenes that mostly revolve around sexual deviancy, humorous 'soul-searching' existential isolationism, and pathetic personal crises. Despite its lack of plot, the film moves along quite fluidly and never wavers in the realm of vulgar artistic pretense, nor pseudo-intellectual banality, but it does feature a wealth of scatological imagery and themes, as well as a sordid buffet of bittersweet food-for-thought. Mother’s Meat & Freud’s is further accentuated by an exquisite soundtrack by the German New Wave group Trio. In both sight and sound, the film is ultimately a foremost work of avant-garde cinematic debauchery that features a number of quotable lines and ever-present replay value. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it is nearly impossible to find a copy of Mother’s Meat & Freud’s on the internet, let alone in dvd form. 

 

After completing Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh, it would take Demetri Estdelacropolis over fifteen more years to complete his second and only other feature Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom (2000). As somewhat crudely explained in the Canadian documentary In the Belly of the Beast (2001), a work covering the Montreal-based Fantasia Film Festival over two years in 1997, Estdelacropolis never could 'kick the Chinaman all the way out', hence his lack of regenerative artistic productivity over the years. At the conclusion of In the Belly of the Beast, Estdelacropolis appears randomly on the deserted nighttime streets of Montreal looking like a white Rastafarian vagrant in a clear state of opium-induced stupefaction and rambles on somewhat pathetically about his films and fans. Needless to say, in the documentary, Estdelacropolis, both mind and body, barely resembles the fag chic porn star he played in his precariously honest autobiographical flick Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh. Maybe if Estdelacropolis had a lifelong trust fund like fellow homo heroin addict artiste William S. Burroughs, he would have had a much more fruitful career, but alas, Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh and Shirley Pimple in the John Wayne Temple of Doom are the audacious auteur filmmaker’s only cinematic offerings, yet they suffice. After all, a discordantly intimate and unceremonious film like Mother’s Meat & Freud’s Flesh is infinitely more important to me than the entire filmography of an artistically-compromising 'for hire' Hollywood hack like Christopher Nolan. Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh is probably what Norman Bate's life would have resembled had he been a young adult in the early 1980s, given into to his sexual perversity, and been deterred by a grueling drug addiction.  What amazes me the most about the film is that it was made nearly thirty years ago, yet it is now artistically vivid and kooky as ever.  As a child, I greatly enjoyed quirky 1980s Brat Pack/John Hughes comedies like Weird Science (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986), but such outdated films do nothing for me nowadays as an older and much more discerning viewer.  Mother's Meat & Freud's Flesh most certainly fills the void of my youth as it is a stand alone achievement of truly demented, ribald, and idiosyncratic 1980s cinema.  One can only hope that Estdelacropolis will get help and go on a methadone maintenance program as the now middle-aged junkie auteur probably has so many new (and much starker and discombobulated) stories to tell.

-Ty E

On Hitler's Highway

 

I typically derive an ample amount of ardor and pleasurable self-indulgence from road trip flicks, especially those featuring anxiety-driven murders like Pasquale Festa Campanile’s Hitch-Hike (1977), Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986), and Victor Salva’s The Nature of the Beast (1985), but that was before I saw punk documentarian Lech Kowalski’s video diary On Hitler’s Highway (2002), an entry in the Polish-American filmmaker's 'The Fabulous Art of Surviving' documentary trilogy. As an auteur best known for capturing the erratically spiraling lives of sub-rock-stars and their compulsive soul-destroying addictions in films like D.O.A. (1980) and Born To Lose: The Last Rock and Roll Movie (1999), I expected a certain gritty realism to Kowalski’s On Hitler’s Highway, but little did I know the documentary would be a dauntless modern day testimony to apocalyptic philosopher Oswald Spengler’s foreboding prophecies. Being a son of Poland himself, On Hitler’s Highway is ultimately a highly personal documentary for Kowalski as expressed by his oversensitive, if strangely laid back, approach to the documentary and its unspectacular yet tragic subjects. In the film, Kowalski somewhat aimlessly (but quite auspiciously in terms of material) cruises Poland’s oldest highway; a road constructed under the orders of Adolf Hitler himself, where, apparently, under the asphalt (according to local folklore) lie the bodies of many Polish slave workers who had fallen building it. The highway was built in a historically relevant area of Poland where Napoleon invaded Russia, Muslims invaded Europe and attempted to convert Europeans to Islam via bloodthirsty Jihad, and what was once an eastward extension of the Third Reich, yet one would not expect such a grand history while viewing Kowalski’s personal journey through this most Western Slavic nation. On his humble and mostly humorless journey, Kowalski encounters aesthetically-displeasing Muslim prostitutes, jubilant ghetto-dwelling gypsies, and poor indigenous Poles who dream of Uncle Adolf’s revengeful return and Poland’s complete destruction so as to forever relieve their daily pain. As far as video ethnographies go, On Hitler’s Highway is a tolerably amateurish pseudo-anthropological work, but it is also an authentically humanistic piece that surely drives home the collective hopelessness of the post-communist Polish plight like never before.

Apparently, in Poland, teens and young adults care a whole lot more about trendy discos, partying in abandoned underground bunkers, and playing jokes at the expense of elders than the ill-famed domestic history of Auschwitz concentration camp, as expressed by various youth in On Hitler’s Highway. Naturally, the Turkish, Bulgarian, and Polish prostitutes featured in the documentary care more about how many customers will give them the old ‘in-and-out’ than Hitler’s infamous legacy. The only truly holocaust-obsessed individual featured in On Hitler’s Highway is a disgruntled and scornful elderly survivor with a refined distaste for sauerkraut who righteously claims that concentration camp victims were, “suffocated, NOT GASSED.”  Considering that most of the individuals featured in the documentary have a hard time providing food for their children, let alone themselves, the Holocaust is of little, if any, relevance to their lives. In fact, it becomes quite apparent in On Hitler’s Highway that, ironically, Uncle Dolph’s vintage superhighway is one of the very few things these Poles have to look forward to and be proud of as many of these individuals, who live in an indefinite state of stark squalor, call rapidly dilapidating ghettos their damned homes. Without big H’s freeway, many of these individuals would have no place to peddle their middle-finger flaunting lawn gnomes, nor their long expired and thoroughly abused flesh as these unofficial and unstable trades provide them with their only means for an income and a 'livelihood.' Needless to say, it seems the Polish populous of On Hitler’s Highway has yet to recover from about a half a century of communist repression and emotional debasement, thus Hitler’s partial dismantling of Poland is nothing short of irrelevant to these thoroughly disenfranchised folk. As someone who personally lives in an area flooded with young, ex-communist Slavic ‘students’ and ‘quest workers’, I can personally vouch for the complete and utter desperation of these less than blessed individuals. Many of these Slavs uncomplainingly accept being illegally underpaid (as they are also illegally employed) and taken advantage of just so they can continuously stay and marginally prosper in the United States. The saddest part is that aside from paying for the necessities of food and board, many of these Slavic immigrants blow their slavishly earned cash on trendy American consumer products like iPhones and Michael Jackson cds, and have no qualms about abandoning their ancient identities.  I remember one particularly comical incident when a young Russian man (who fit the ideal National Socialist physique of being tall, muscular, blond, and having blue yes) matter-of-factually proclaimed to me that Michael Jackson was the King of Pop as if I was totally ignorant of such a popular American sentiment.  Compared to the men and women featured in On Hitler’s Highway, the young Slavs I know – who are apparently comprised of the ‘cream of crop’ (e.g. sons and daughters of businessmen and military leaders) from their prospective nations – live like virtual prince and princesses in the United States.

Forget about irresponsible junky AIDS victim Gringo from Kowalski’s infamous Troma-distributed work Story of a Junkie (1987), the real-life cast of On Hitler’s Highway is infinitely more forsaken and forlorn as their circumstances are mainly the result of an unfortunate birthright and not of their own making. In fact, many of the nearly starving and somewhat emaciated individuals featured in the documentary are eastern immigrants who moved to Poland in the hope of making a better life for their families and themselves, but such crucial ambitions seem to have acquired nil results for these cursed lost souls. On Hitler’s Highway is the sort of film that should be screened at various American universities as it destroys the totally mythical illusions of collective ‘white privilege’ and other wretched liberal abstractions assembled by sneering ethnomasochistic members of the truly privileged white bourgeois, as the poorest of American Negroes live in less dire and much plusher, warmer, and most importantly, more stylin’ living conditions than most of the individuals featured in the documentary. On Hitler’s Highway is anything but a pleasurable cinematic affair, but to say it is a work without cultural nor socio-political merit would be gross neglect. Both aesthetically and thematically repellant, On Hitler’s Highway is an undeniably potent work with a humbling power that does not rely on petty and contrived sentimentalism like a typical Hollywood production, but upon the mere words and images of uncharismatic and impoverished individuals whose most imperative concerns are finding clean enough water to drank and enough food to eat just so they can survive another day.  Indeed, On Hitler's Highway is a fine testament to the fabulous art of surviving, but you will probably want to take a shower in bleach and watch a totally fantasy driven work like Tim Burton's Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) in an attempt to clean away the 'metaphysical grime' that this eerie and aweless testimony of human tribulation permeates.  Still, whether intentional or not (and it is not), On Hitler's Highway does have its moments of genuine humorous human absurdity as few screenwriters could dream up a real-life scene of illegally squatting Ukrainian homeless men serving tea to seemingly unscrupulous Polish cops at a deserted Nuclear airbase.  On Hitler's Highway is the sort of film fellow eccentric realist filmmaker Werner Herzog would have made during his more zealous youth as it is a totally selfless work that could have only been made by an individual without an inkling of monetary gain nor critical acclaim in mind.  On Hitler's Highway may feature one of the most dismal virtual road trips that one will have the grand displeasure of taking, but you will posolutely never forgotten it.

-Ty E

Night Warning

Teenager Billy Lynch has some serious problems: a ‘homophobic’ cop thinks he is a homo-cidal killer and both his hopelessly neurotic/psychotic aunt Cheryl and gay middle-aged gym coach want to fuck him. After his aunt Cheryl impulsively kills a closeted gay man (the longtime lover of coach Tom Landers) who ignores her emotional and sexual needs, Billy boi is suspected of being the prime suspect in a bizarre homo love triangle by an aggressive fag-bashing police detective named Joe Carlson. In the curiously exploitative slasher flick Night Warning (1982) directed by William Asher (who is probably best known for directing silly 'beach party' films like Beach Party and Beach Blanket Bingo), lustful murder, subconscious oedipal complexes, playful pederasty, awkward teenage sex, and virtually every other popular example of Freudian neurosis is assembled in a way that makes this underrated slasher film shine boldly in a subgenre that is well known for its mindless murder-driven mediocrity, and feeble and contrived formless formulas.  Although amateurishly directed and devoid of any sort of genuine artistic merit, Night Warning is a film that calculatedly slaughters its mostly forgettable early 1980s contemporaries.  Owing more to Alfred Hitchcock’s proto-slasher flick Psycho (1960) than an intemperate undead retard in a hockey mask, Night Warning is a schlocky psychosexual romp through the domesticated sidewalk lands of unchecked suburban perversions. Many people have an eccentric, childless and single aunt in their family, thus Night Warning hits close to home as it exaggerates this relatively common phenomenon to a most pestiferous and ambiguously politically incorrect degree. For those that fancy sexually confused and erotically deviant quasi-slasher flicks like Paul Bartel’s Private Parts (1972) and A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (a film that seems to borrow liberally from Night Warning), Night Warning makes for a pleasantly perverted family affair. 

 Apparently, Night Warning is a bastardized adaptation of the 1981 novel Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (a title that is one of many alternative names in which the film was released under) written by Joseph Burgo and Richard Natale; a somewhat obscure literary item that, unsurprisingly, features more secondary characters, subplots, and crucial character back-stories than the simply structured, but audaciously themed film. Night Warning also has the distinction and horror fiend honor of being one of the original UK Video Nasty films on the DPP 72 list. Unlike a lot of the Video Nasty flicks (e.g. Blood Feast, The Burning) , which are usually nothing more than plot-less platitudes with the occasional unwarranted murder of a scantily clad whore, Night Warning is one of the few works on this dubious, outmoded list that deserves its reputation as a veraciously coldhearted expression of vulgarity and debauchery as the film is an intransigent assault on society itself, especially the sheltered middle-class; the segment of society that is most often ideally portrayed in lighthearted, sentimentalist sitcoms. Billy, being a literal bastard and the unconscious desire of two divergently perverted minds, is an unwanted abstraction in suburbia, even if he is a nice chap. Additionally, in a traditional middle-class societies of the past, few individuals were considered more pathetic and repellant than a childless old maid past her aesthetic prime, aside from maybe a childless middle-aged homosexual. In Night Warning, all of these socially undesirable (but increasingly more common) ingredients are mingled in a slasher work that was surely prophetic of things to come in postmodern Levittown. 

Following in the grand cult cinema tradition of neurotic female murderers, criminals, and sadists prevalent throughout the wonderful works of Poe-possessed auteur Curtis Harrington (What's the Matter with Helen?, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?), Night Warning is a film were sexual repression leads to insensible and wholly cockamamie malevolence of the killing kind. Behind the translucent façade of Aunt Cheryl’s pseudo-motherly persona lies an aberrant mind fit for a lobotomy. Unlike most slasher films, Night Warning features pop-psychoanalytic reasoning as to why a seemingly normal woman of the suburbs is more fitted for being an unflinching murderer than a warm mother. One could argue that Night Warning is ultimately an early work of homo-philia with misogynistic undertones. While the killer is a man-hating suburban wench who literally prays to an altar of failed male conquests, the detective also acts as a sub-antagonist who sees all societal problems as the direct result of sadistic sodomy. Undoubtedly, the most sympathetic character in Night Warning is coach Tom; a man who acts as both Billy’s surrogate mother and father. While little Bill’s abusive aunt wants to keep him imprisoned for life in her provincial madhouse, coach Tom becomes a crucial mentor for the boy and, to the dismay of aunt Cheryl, even attempts to get the lonely lad a college scholarship. Whether Tom is an active member of NAMBLA or not remains to be seen, but what Night Warning adds up to is one gutsily outlandish and fortuitously worthwhile slasher flick that has unequivocally left a number of desensitized gorehounds in a startled stupor of perplexed emotions, and delayed and equally muddled responses.  Although nominated for the Saturn Award for the Best Horror Movie of 1982 by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, Night Warning failed to earn the prize.  Naturally, this does not surprise me as subversive works like Night Warning are bound to rub a number of people the wrong way, especially the sort of slasher fan pedigree (I have personally met a number of these people) who fantasizes about being the masked (and often mentally deficient) killer.  Of course, I doubt many people can relate to an incestuous middle-aged bird with a childlike fondness for 'playing house' in a real house, but she sure does know how to treat a guest.

 -Ty E

Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural

 The idea of a mid-1970s PG-rated vampire flick about a young girl usually seems like a less than tempting prospect, but after hearing much underground praise for the film Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973) aka Lemora: The Lady Dracula aka The Legendary Curse of Lemora directed by Richard Blackburn, I finally decided to suck it up and give the film a fair and serious viewing after having a copy of the work in my possession for over a year. Lemora is probably one of the best reasons as to why one should not judge a film by its rating and marginality, as it proved to be one of the most truly virtuoso vampire flicks I have had the luxury to see and one of the most uniquely American ‘horror’ films ever made. Taking critical inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft (The Shadow Over Innsmouth), Arthur Machen (The White People), Mervyn Laurence Peake (Boy in Darkness), film noir, and the more unadorned aspects of 20th century American history, Lemora is a splendidly unrivaled Southern Gothic set in the depression era American south. After seeing the relative success of Count Yorga, Vampire (1970) directed by Bob Kelljan, Lemora director Richard Blackburn (rightfully) felt confident that he could direct a superior horror film due to his somewhat uncommon literate understanding of the horror story, especially those written by the likes of Lovecraft. Sticking to the southern tradition of honoring family history, Blackburn’s paternal confederate ancestry would also be a crucial inspiration on the pleasantly peculiar atmosphere and themes of country fried grit, bastardized backwoods Baptist Christianity, and downright unholy repression-based perversions that are featured throughout the film. On top of providing his ½ Yankee son with inspirational stories about real-life country yokels who don’t take kindly to strangers in their towns, Richard’s father C.V. Blackburn also acted as executive producer for Lemora and even played a small role in the film as a seemingly drunken man urinating in public. Richard Blackburn, himself, would also play the imperative role of the Reverend; a somewhat dubious religious leader who acts as a surrogate father to the child lead Lila Lee (played by the already adult age Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith). 

Despite her maturity in real-life, no better person was born to play the role of 13-year-old Lila Lee in Lemora than Cheryl Smith. Nowadays, Smiths is best known for her roles in a variety of cult films (Caged Heat, Phantom of the Paradise, Cheech and Chong’s Up In Smoke) and playing drums with alpha-dyke musician Joan Jett. Horror films are well known for their glaring lack of sufficient and believable acting, yet Cheryl Smith, with her truly sad and ‘damaged’ facial expressions, lent a certain authenticity to Lemora that is central to the driving emotional and visceral potency of the film. Lesley Gilb, who plays the nazi chic lesbian vampiress Lemora with unconventional witch attributes, also adds a exigent ingredient to the film as she acts as the perfect antithesis to the innocence of little lady Lila Lee, both in personality and physique. While Lila is a humble and thoroughly chaste girl with angelic blonde hair and a pleasantly petite body, Lemora is a domineering vamp with a tall stature and dark features (aside from her corpse-like skin) who does not take no for an answer, whether it be from a man, monster, or child.  Lemora has a collection of loyal undead children and hopes to coherence Lila into joining her ferocious foster family by using a variety of somewhat subtle erotically driven compliments such as, "what an exciting figure you have." The male characters featured in Lemora range from degenerate criminals to active scumbags to potential molesters, yet most of the women are puritanically dressed Baptist lemmings who swoon for the handsome charlatan Reverend. Lila’s father is a well dressed, pudgy gangster who did the unspeakable act of killing his wife/daughter's mother, hence why the lonely girl was adopted by the good Reverend. The Reverend himself even seems to have a hard time keeping his hands off of Lila’s little lily, but through the imagined power of the lord and misinterpreting religious texts, he seems to mostly persevere, at least for most of the film. During the beginning of Lemora, Lila is summoned by her apparently dying father (under false pretenses) to meet him in the decaying feral town of Astaroth where everyone has some degree of the degenerative Lovecraftian “Astaroth look.” On route, Lila’s bus is attacked by barbaric lycanthropic-like vampires and is intern saved and imprisoned by the beautiful yet endlessly cunning Lemora who therein throws the young girl into a phantasmagorical tribulation where the line between reality and dreams has been illustriously ripped apart at the seams. 

Lemora, not unlike Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) directed by Jaromil Jireš and The Reflecting Skin (1990) directed by Philip Ridley, is an ominous coming-of-age flick that – while too scary, sexualized, and incoherent for the typical child (and a number of prudish adults) to view – does manages to recapture the wonder and hopeless bewilderment of childhood. As a longtime cynic, skeptic, and misanthrope (even as a prepubescent child), I was even able to tap into my “inner-child” via Lemora. In fact, I was so surprised by the impact the film had on me that I re-watched Lemora two more times the day after my initial viewing just to make sure I was not in a state of random hypnotic derangement during the night before. Seeing Lemora was the closest I have come to recapturing the singularly penetrating and totally unpredictable experience I had while randomly watching Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) late one night on cable television for the first time when I was about ten years old. Lemora is one of few American horror films that has managed to combine stark surrealism, taboo religious themes, traditional horror elements, vintage Americana, and unpretentious artsy in a work that stands alone in terms of originality and sheer quality of pure entertainment. The fact that Lemora is not as well known nor as highly revered (by fans and critics alike) as films like George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1981) is nothing short of a testament to the peasant-like philistinic tastes of artistically-disinterested American audiences.  Although some believe the obscurity of Lemora is the result of the film being banned by the Catholic League of Decency, director Richard Blackburn has voiced (on the audio commentary of the Synapse Films release of the film) that such claims are nothing short of hearsay as he has never received any form of formal notification from the organization. Thankfully, at least the French – the people who essentially invented film theory and have consistently esteemed film as a legitimate art form – have long respected Lemora as piece of exceptionally crafted cinematic design.  After all, Erich von Stroheim did not spend his remaining days in France for nothing.

Lemora seems to be an all around cursed production of sorts as not only did the film fall into the unfortunate realm of uncertainty after a limited run of theatrical distribution, but the two lead actresses of the film would also meet grim fates. Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith, who was apparently high on painkillers throughout the production of Lemora, died in late 2002 at the age of 47 after suffering complications from liver disease and hepatitis due to a calamitous two decade addiction to heroin, which also resulted in two prison sentences and the total disintegration of her acting career. Of course, Smith was not as innocent on the real-life set of Lemora as her character seems in the movie as she apparently bragged to the film crew that she gave Dick Blackburn a bulging boner during their kissing scene; a claim the bashful director wholly denies. Lesley Gilb (aka Lesley Taplin), whose acting career unfortunately all but ended after her excellent performance as the title character in Lemora, died tragically in a car accident on highway 101 in Los Angeles, California in 2009 at the age of 62. Aside from a brief period of critical acclaim for co-writing the script for Paul Bartel’s black comedy Eating Raoul (1982) and penning a couple episodes for the George A. Romero produced anthology horror TV series Tales From the Darkside (1983-1988), Lemora director Richard Blackburn’s filmmaking career was also cut prematurely short. Still, few filmmakers can boast that they have assembled a work as gorgeously quaint, exemplar, and full of artistic integrity as Lemora, and for that alone, Mr. Blackburn deserves much praise. The film is a virtual confederate haunted house amusement ride in film form that never falls into banality and calculated clichés, nor preposterous pretensions, but provides the viewer with an incomparable time of very real predatory pedophilic monsters, as well as those of the imaginary bloodsucking sort.  By the conclusion of Lemora, the viewer will probably question whether or not Lila's experiences were the product of reality or her dreams, which is indubitably one of the greatest strengths of a fundamentally anarchic primordial film of ceaseless ambiguity where nothing is as it seems.

-Ty E

Hitch-Hike

As far as I am concerned, David Hess (no relation to Rudolf) is my favorite Jewish-American actor. This is for many reasons, but most specifically due to his totally genuine expertise at playing perverted homicidal psychopaths of the most sleazy and degrading sort. If any actor was born to play an Irgun terrorist, it is Hess, but alas, Hollywood would never produce such a film, thus his career was secluded mostly to the marginal realm of marvelous exploitation cinema.  Although Hess is best known for his infamous performance as the exceedingly deranged felon-gang leader Krug in Wes Craven's Last House on the Left (1972), his greatest and most eclectically maniacal performance is as a bank-robbing hitchhiker who escapes from a mental institution for the criminally insane in the Italian production Hitch-Hike (1977) aka Autostop rosso sangue directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile; a work that makes Robert Harmon’s subsequent film The Hitcher (1986) seem like a softcore flirting match between a mature androphile and young, shy hustler. In Hitch-Hike, an American fellow who calls himself Adam Konitz (David Hess) hitches a ride with a vacationing Italian husband and wife that are on their way to Los Angeles, California. The husband, Walter Mancini (played by the great Franco Nero), is a thoroughly debased alcoholic Italian journalist whose wife Eve (played by Corinne Clery) wears the pants firmly and indisputably in the relationship. After picking up hyperactive Herr Hess, the married couple soon realizes that their passenger enjoys more than playful mind-games (albeit of the perverted philistine sort) and that he is brandishing a weapon more deadly than his equally pesky penis. Being a jolly immoral psychopath, the hitchhiker utterly enjoys taunting his less than hysterical bourgeois hostages and, in no time, has them fighting each other. Walter, being nothing more than a glorified gossip columnist, is not match for his vivacious wife who is a wealthy heiress and all-around independent women. It is quite obvious for the beginning of Hitch-Hike that Walter has a dark underbelly in his masked soul that is rapidly reaching a boiling point. It is only his unexpected fateful meeting with a hairbrained and pussy-obsessed nut-job that finally empowers Walter with the tenacity he needs to meet his truly sinister destiny. 

Upon first glance, Hitch-Hike seems like your typical psycho hitchhiker flick, but it breaks all the conventions of theme and morality in this small, but mostly spectacular, subgenre. What makes the film especially interesting is that virtually all the characters in the film go beyond the prissy Hollywood realm of carbon-copy good and evil. In Hitch-Hike, the knight does not comes to save his princess from the dragon, nor does he fancy bedding her down and getting his dick wet. When it comes to virile male potency, the swarthy cop-killing hitchhiker is the only man who has what it takes to unload bullets and unsanctioned semen. While the frivolous hitchhiker spouts narcissistic and delusional fantasies about having his unremarkable life stories documented for the totally apathetic world to see, passive Walter dreams of a ‘progressive’ male-only world of communal buggery. It is most apparent that lady Eve is sexually repressed and almost welcoming of the hitchhiker’s assertive forced entry. Seeing as her own man is not man enough to properly provide for her, let alone protect her, Eve ultimately takes it upon herself to slay the evil dragon and the venomous lizard in his pants. For her noble and uber-miss strength, Eve is ‘rewarded’ in a way that has no rivals in the history of cinema in terms of gross betrayal and defiance of morality. In short, Hitch-Hike is not the sort of film one would want to show a prospective female mate, let alone a dictatorial girlfriend, but it is the sort of work that would be big with militant homo-supremacists, misogynistic serial killers, and maybe a couple oddball feminists. Needless to say, although I thought Hitch-Hike would be your typical Italian pseudo-Hollywood clone, it turned out to be one of the most shocking and strangely rewarding films I have seen in sometime. 

Throughout Hitch-Hike, Franco Nero proves his versatility as an actor by auspiciously playing a proto-metrosexual character who has his testicles carried around in his wife’s thousand dollar purse. Like a lot of great films, Hitch-Hike is even more relevant today than when it was first released, which is virtually unheard of for films of this sort. After all, in our increasingly office-based abstract paper-shuffling western world, women are asserting themselves in ever sector of society and homogenized political homos are demanding that society put male-on-male sodomy on a sparkling lavender pedestal. Naturally, nowadays masculine maniacs and audacious alphas are rarely needed to lead raping and pillaging conquering armies and are but a mere pestilence that has no place in society aside from prison and the imaginary and insignificant world of professional wrestling. When it comes to a modern look at the sexes, Hitch-Hike takes a vicious yet honest nihilistic approach; offering no answers but foretelling a more conflicting and unhealthy future.  Near the conclusion of the film, Walter and Eve are threatened and affronted by an unruly group of irrational and criminally-inclined youths who give evidence as to what to expect from future generations: hyper-materialism and mindless perniciousness.

Undoubtedly, the most glaring flaw of Hitch-Hike is that the film was dubbed, but I guess that is what one comes to expect from any and all Italian films. Still, it is nothing short of a tragedy that one does not get to hear the authentic dueling voices of heinous Hess and beta Nero.  For those that enjoyed Hitch-Hike, the short 17-minute documentary The Devil Thumbs a Ride (2002) directed by David Gregory (Texas Chain Saw Massacre: The Shocking Truth, The Theatre Bizarre) for Blue Underground, is also a nice, if hopelessly superficial and overly sentimental, treat.  While lacking in any real intellectual depth as far as socio-political issues are concerned, the brief documentary does feature some worthwhile personal commentary from Franco Nero and his accomplice David Hess.  Unsurprisingly, Hess declares his performance in Hitch-Hike to be his finest.  Nero also discusses the little problem of breaking his arm after punching a naughty horse during the shooting of the spaghetti western Keoma (1976) right before the production of Hitch-Hike.  Seeing as his character is an emotional cripple, breaking his arm was indubitably a blessing in disguise as the visibly broke arm is symbolic of the character's emasculated impotence.  While shooting a fight scene in Hitch-Hike, Nero also accidentally broke Hess's Hebrew honker.  I think most people will agree after seeing Hitch-Hike that it was a noble sacrifice.

 David Alexander Hess (September 19, 1936 – October 8, 2011)

-Ty E

Michael (2011)

 

There are few members of the human race as worthy of contempt as the pedophile, and no I'm not going to go on a rant about the well-documented effect childhood sexual abuse has on the individual or society as a whole. Rather, I disagree with pedophilia on grounds of (a) it is arrested development taken to its most pathetic extreme and (b) why would ANYONE want to fuck a kid? Pedophilia to me is the most extreme form of social retardation, in which a delusional man-child who has not spent enough time with actual children to realize that however intermittently amusing they may be from time to time, kids are iron-willed little shits with terrible hygiene, awful taste, and precious little life experience (duh), or who has spent plenty of time with kids and finds the above qualities boner-inducing. Sure, there are plenty of why's, often pointing to abuse in the pedo's own childhood, but do we weep in sympathy when we see a thirty year old man decked out in Spiderman PJ's playing Xbox in his parent's basement? A pedophile is essentially that guy, only instead of trying to grasp onto childhood via video games or buying seasons of beloved Saturday morning Hanna-Barbera shitfests on Blu-Ray, he tries to re-live the sexual excitement of playing "house" for the first time.

You see, most of us at some point or another, have better, wetter, and altogether more satisfying sexual experiences when we "put away the childish things" and make our way through high school and into the early years of adulthood. This is when the human being of either sex is both at peak physical form AND often blissfully unaware of the power the wield over interested parties, thus enabling schlubs like us to experience the divinity of silky smooth skin, taut firm breasts, rock-hard boners and abs, and the incomparable beauty of age-appropriate braces. This is why "teen" is probably the most popular category of pornography, at least in terms of search results. Pedophiles, I'd say, tend to be those who missed out on some of those pivotal experiences and continued to fixate on the only sexual experiences they've had, be it playing house with their sister or showering with pops. Of course, I'm sure some pedophiles are such without rhyme and reason, and that wanting to fuck someone who in a year or two will be of no interest to them sexually (sounds like most relationships, though, but I digress) is an "orientation", though only in as far as a rapist could claim that donning a ski mask is a part of his "orientation", and something to take pride in. However fringe, there are groups like Nambla (Ginsberg dug 'em) and "activists" like Lindsay Ashford who attempt to put a "human face" on the affliction- a pasty, doesn't-get-out-much, relies on checks from mom, collects Star Wars memorabilia face, but a face nonetheless. Guys who take great care in stressing that somehow being a "girl lover" or someday-diddler of boys doesn't translate into being a "molester", and that often feel isolated from society at large, ostracized for their "beliefs", and as a result, are often suicidal. On the flip side are parents groups, the media, and politicians, who use the fear of these failures to rally the public into all kinds of hysterics. Just look at all of the "ritual abuse" at daycares in the eighties, in which prosecutors, law enforcement, and bewildered kids worked themselves into a frenzy and used the mere spectre of childhood sexual abuse to send countless innocent people to prison, people who no doubt could not understand what the fuck was going on. Who would want to "schtup" one of those little snotnoses anyways?

Which brings us to Michael, an Austrian film that neither weeps for the titular pedo nor works itself into hysterics over its subject matter- five months in the life of man who keeps a young boy locked in his basement as a sex slave. Michael is in many ways the textbook pedophile- a fairly immature man-child, isolated from society because of his compulsions, but still managing to shuck and jive his way through an office job, some strained "surface level" friendships, and keeping the family at bay with tales of a long-distance girlfriend. Michael Fuith, with his shy, nerdy countenance, male pattern hair loss, and pale "doesn't get out much" complexion, is dead-on in the title role. Where Michael differs from many pedophiles is that, rather than simply beating off to Tiger Beats in view of playgrounds or offering to babysit his sister's kids, Michael has himself his very own Wolfgang (a heartbreaking performance by David Rauchenberger), a ten-year old boy kept locked in the basement of his state-of-the-art flat. The film is an extreme exercise, not in terms of the specifics of what is shown onscreen (in fact, there is not a single scene of molestation in the entire film, and the only questionable moment- of Michael exposing a non-plussed Wolfgang to his flaccid penis- was achieved via split screen), but in restraint, giving us only enough details to figure out what Michael is foisting on the young boy (seeing Michael, in an earlier scene, wash said cock in the sink after leaving Wolfgang's lodgings is the first overt reference to what precisely is going on). Director Markus Schleinzer, a long-time casting director for Michael Haneke, takes the cold, clinical ambiance of his mentor's best films to new heights, refusing to cut the audience any slack through lazy moralizing. Nor does he attempt to instill outrage by assaulting our senses with any over-the-top imagery whatsoever, instead cultivating a thick blanket of unease via static camera non-movement and letting subtly unsettling moments linger uncomfortably throughout and letting our own imaginations add the necessary pathos and horror to Wolfgang's situation.

As the film wears on, a surprising amount of jet-black humor enters the fray. Rather than view Michael as an 'stache-twiddling super villain, we are treated to the site of a pathetic sociopath whose life outside of his fuck slave is one sad encounter after another, whether it be painful attempts to connect with other men on a ski trip, a particularly humiliating go at having sex with an adult woman, or having to dodge the advances of a smitten co-worker. As his exterior life continues to be awkward and ungratifying, Wolfgang begins to fight back, first by attacking Michael's idealized view of their relationship (such as giving Michael a crayon drawing of a mommy and daddy for Christmas), and then by physically attempting to put up a resistance to Michael's advances and planning his escape. Michael, with no idea of how to treat a child aside from as a sexual object, meets these road-bumps with physical aggression, condescension, and eventually, in a scene that rides the creepy/comedy divide expertly, by attempting to kidnap Wolfgang a companion to assuage the boy's loneliness (and no doubt replace Wolfgang, as in one chilling scene of misdirection we see Michael clearing a spot in the woods when Wolfgang exhibits a high fever that Michael, understandably, can't seek medical attention for). The film also skirts the thin line between tragedy and hilarity in a scene resulting from Wolfgang's fever, when Michael, walking to a pharmacy, is struck by a vehicle. The absurdity of the situation is drawn to almost painful suspense as we witness Michael's extended hospital stay, all the while wondering what is becoming of the ill Wolfgang, hanging on to life in the basement.

Michael is as bold an achievement as I've seen in the cinemas all year. The effect it has on the viewer is not unlike that of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in the way it respects us, the audience, enough to show the realities of a resolutely unsympathetic, destructive main character without having to beat us over the head with how evil and disgusting he is. And unlike a comparatively "Hollywood" flick like The Woodsman, there isn't some underlying message about "kidfuckers are people, too." What we're given is a reality that is experienced by unlucky nephews, altar boys, and Thai pre-teen "sex workers" on a daily basis, from a purely objective standpoint. Sure, we see the terrible effect this has on the defeated Wolfgang, whose tears mean next-to-nothing to his bulge-stroking captor, but Schleinzer trusts us to draw our own revulsion from his plight without having to rely on any showy speeches or risque imagery, and when the boy does strike out and become insolent, I for the only time in my adult life found myself rooting for a kid to be as annoying and "difficult" as possible. As the film nears its end, unexpected occurrences foreshadowed earlier on ratchet up the tension considerably, creating a true-to-life horror film with none of the familiar trappings of the genre. Watching it with an audience was definitely an experience, as groans and often showy "need to convince others around me of how horrible I find this" gasps gave way to nervous chuckles, then outright laughter, then further groans, and in the ending scenes, a tension-enhancing hush that made it all the harder to bear. All in all, a masterpiece that I won't be revisiting any time soon, and one of the only films to examine this particular subject manner with honesty and candor.

-Jon-Christian

Queen of Blood

 

    

Queen of Blood is a result of Roger Corman, at his resourceful best, purchasing special effects footage from some big-budget Ruskie space opera and then hiring Night Tide director and Kenneth Anger chum Curtis Harrington to shoot a film around it (in about a week, no less). What could very well have been as slipshod and haphazard as something like The Terror, however, is instead a transcendent piece of pulp entertainment; the cinematic analogue of an EC comic like Weird Science with the dreamlike atmosphere of Night Tide and the color scheme of Bava's Planet of the Vampires.

The year is 1990. At the International Institute of Space Technology, while keeping an eye out for space signals, Laura James receives a transmission that the project's head, Dr. Farraday, recognizes as an attempt by an extraterrestrial race's attempt at communication. After Farraday announces the exciting news, Laura receives a video from the aliens, showing that they've crash landed on Mars. With this, Farraday sends Laura and two other astronauts aboard the spaceship Oceano to Mars to investigate, where they discover one humanoid corpse and evidence that it's companion took an escape ship to one of the moons of Mars. Laura's love interest, Allan, and his pal Tony convince Farraday to allow them to make the trips to one of Mars moons, where they can launch a satellite in order to locate the stranded alien ship, which they soon find. On board? An unconscious, green-skinned woman. The astronauts board the Oceano (save Tony, who stays behind to wait for the arrival of the Oceano II) with their inhuman cargo, who regains consciousness and wields an off-putting, strange countenance and refuses to touch the food they offer. Before you can say "space vampire", crew members begin dropping off like flies, seemingly by their own hands, and all but Laura seem susceptible to the space woman's otherworldly "charms." 

Why this flick works where myriad of its ilk fail is Harrington's sure-handed direction, the expert utilization of the Russian footage, and a winning cast. Harrington, responsible for both the direction and the script, manages to infuse the film with both the "gee whiz!" matinee attitude of sci-fi of the time and the haunting lyricism of his debut feature, beginning with a credits sequence of three minutes or so of unsettling, Lovecraftian avant-garde paintings by John Cline (if anyone has any info on the guy, feel free to share- some really stellar work I've been able to dig up next to nothing on) set to dependably foreboding music. When "The Queen" shows her true colors, stalking and killing members of the expedition, the cinematography shows ITS colors, which are vivid and assuredly dream-like, at times suggesting what Ken Anger himself might have done if he'd taken a very different route of independent film. The drawn-out special effects sequences from Mechte Navstrechu and Nebo Zovyot, respectively, actually add to the trippy vibe by being singularly odd (it's difficult to tell what precisely the aliens are doing in these sequences, but adds to their alien nature considerably) and dubbed over with the eerie music that makes sci-fi-horror of this time period such a joy to listen to (some I recognized as the Barron's score from Forbidden Planet). The costumes and set-direction take Bava's Planet of the Vampires to an even kitschier level of retro-futurist fashions and garish color filters, making this eye-candy of the first order.

And speaking of Planet of the Vampires, a double-feature of Queen and that masterpiece would account for a big chunk of the plot of Dan O' Bannon's Alien script (what with the space eggs and distress beacons, but save the whole stalk-and-slash by phallic Giger-grotesque element), and I for one definitely see just as much Queen of Blood in Tobe Hooper's genius Lifeforce, also scripted by O'Bannon, as I do Colin Wilson's Space Vampires, on which Lifeforce is ostensibly based (especially in the scenes within THAT film in which a hot alien chick systematically makes her way through all the men aboard a spaceship). What pushes this one out of the ranks of "fun time waster" into near-classic is the solid cast. John Saxon takes the lead as Allan, delivering dialogue in that slightly-off, wooden fashion that Saxon somehow manages to make inherently affable. Dennis Hopper, a Harrington pal and holdover from Night Tide, isn't yet the raving loon we'd come to love from a distance, but does manage some eye-bugging as The Queen grabs him by the nuts every bit that that mermaid chick did in his other Harrington outing, while Basil Rathbone collects his check as the head-up-his-ass Dr. Farraday (he reportedly filmed his scenes for this one concurrently- and on the same sets- with his scenes in Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet). Of particular note are the two female stars: Judi Meredith's protagonist Laura is all kinds of a mid-sixties Sci-fi babe, managing to keep her bouncy blonde bob whether rocking a stylish space helmet or cowering in terror from the Queen. As for the Queen herself, Florence Marly, with the aide of make-up artist William Condos, creates a uniquely inhuman humanoid, communicating through confused and confusing facial expressions, a ceaseless malevolent smile, strangely lit eyes (that glow once the stalk-and-killing gets underway), and rocking a beehive wig and eventual green skin that effectively invokes the praying mantis she ultimately is. While I'm not familiar with much of Curtis Harrington's work beyond Night Tide and this fun flick, on the strength of Queen, I definitely look forward to delving into his oeuvre.

-Jon-Christian