Rats: Night of Terror (1984), by Bruno Mattei

Synthesizers and badly-dubbed dialogue are the waters which take us to the world of 225 AB; AB being "After the Bomb." This is a world of Bruno Mattei's making--it's remarkable what he and Claudio Fragasso thought the future would be like. A dark and shabby place, inhabited largely by danger and idiocy. It's no wonder that after-the-end movies were so big in the '80s, but Mattei's unique (or "unique") vision of what humanity and rat-anity would become stands out to me among a vast tan-gray sea of repetitive Mad Max cash-ins. Mark my words, I'm sure there are some "nods" to Mad Max in Rats: Night of Terror that I'm missing, but this is Mattei through-and-through, for better or worse.

Rats doesn't really follow a specific "plot," per se--we mostly just follow a group of dozen-odd "New Primitives" as they attempt to fit in with the surface world after mankind has spent two centuries living underground. (In a reference that doesn't bode well, Mattei mentions that the nuclear holocaust happens in 2015. I'm abstaining from any "two years overdue" jokes.) They all wear outfits that Doctor Who would wear if he regenerated twelve times in the '80s--hell, there's even a girl who dresses like a fucking vampire! They slowly uncover many gruesome secrets about their world, such as the fact that the previous settlers of the surface were all killed by the legions of rats that now rule the ruined former metropolises. And slowly, one by one, the same fate befalls them. Either they damn themselves with their own idiocy by mocking the rats or the rats do weirdly intelligent things like eat through their motorcycle tires. In the end, only a small group of survivors makes it out to witness the ending, which...oh, I'll talk about that.

But to start with, let's just dig into something that nagged at my mind upon rewatching this: what genre is this? I've deliberately tried to avoid horror films in these last few weeks leading up to Spookyween, but it seems I've written myself into a bit of a pickle, as Rats: Night of Terror definitely looks to be a horror film. Post-apocalyptic horror is a natural genre; I mean, swap out the rats for zombies and you've got yerself something mainstream. (And guess what, this movie steals settings and scenarios from Night of the Living Dead.) There are plenty of horror music cues and rotten, half-eaten corpses to go around, plus that delicious ending, but in the end there's a lot of emphasis on the action of fighting off the rats, and also, on the comedy. As we've seen, Claudio Fragasso had a distinct obsession with writing absurd dialogue, up to and through the time that he made Troll 2. And Bruno just kept giving him more leash. I mean, they must have been making some money together, even if it never showed up onscreen. And as such, Rats is a conversational nightmare, fraught with bad lines delivered so poorly it's hard to imagine there wasn't some desire to raise laughs.

Really, how do you explain the scene where the black girl--sigh; her name is Chocolate--gets flour dumped all over her. She starts jumping around, excitedly exclaiming, "I'm white! I'm whiter than all of you!" Then, one of the New Primitives comes across a bunch of rats falling into their water purifier. "Mangy beasts," he says. "That's how our waters get...pahlluted!" Have I talked about this before? Even if I have, it bears repeating. I'm sure I've never mentioned the line, "Computers and corpses are a bad mixture." There are also Ax 'Em-esque sequences of large crowds screaming that go on for such a long time that I can't believe they aren't played for laughs. Then, finally, there's the scene where the leader, Kurt, puts one of the rat victims out of his misery with a flamethrower. I'm pretty sure that there are much more humane ways of killing someone whose flesh has been bitten off than roasting them alive. Incompletely roasting them alive, I should add, as this poor soul lives for several more minutes after being set on fire! I know there's such a thing as the Idiot Ball, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Did Bruno and Claudio read Jack Kirby's Forever People comics or something? There's something about a gang of motorcycle-mounted youngsters having over-ecstatic adventures laden with hilariously unrealistic dialogue that really strikes a familiar chord with me. Of course, these kids don't have superpowers, unless you count Video, who has the power to restore power to computers by pressing random switches.

Yes, I did say "Video." It's astonishing, but I can almost remember all the main characters' names. There's Kurt, the leader, with his scarf and leather jacket; his girlfriend, Diana; Duke, who wants to overthrow Kurt as head of the Primitives; Video, who is a tech wiz; Chocolate, the black girl and heroine of the film; Lilith, the vampire lady; Lucifer, her boyfriend; and there's the bald guy with the third-eye tattoo (a descendant of the girl from Infrasexum, no doubt), and there's also the kind of nerdy guy who gets killed by the water-purifier rats. I should know Bald Guy's name because he almost makes it to the end. But alas, I guess this just means I'll have to watch it again.

So I guess this is also a Power of Friendship movie on top of everything else. Except Friendship doesn't really prevail in the end, does it? Because Chocolate and Video are finally found by masked survivors who are seemingly a group of saviors coming to help them; they poison the rats and save them from the poison in turn. But then it turns out they are Rat People. Huh. Throughout most of the movie, the characters give a strangely human quality to the rats, which may be a remnant of this perhaps having once been a zombie script--maybe Bruno realized that humanization, and decided to make the full jump? In any case, this ending is weird and painfully open. Are the rat-human hybrids friendly? Did they record some of the messages that the Primitives heard earlier in the abandoned buildings? If they can speak English, why do they refuse to communicate with the survivors? Are they mutated rats who have taken on a human-like shape, or are they humans who have adapted by becoming rat-like? Fucking Christ! Why did this movie get no sequel?

Sequel or no sequel though, I don't think I've yet seen a post-apocalyptic movie better than this one. This is quintessential Eurotrash, quintessential Bruno, and quintessential after-the-endsploitation. What have you got to lose?

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Deadly Weapons (1973), by Doris Wishman

It's time.

Crystal is a woman with enormous boobs. Picture the biggest boobs you've ever seen on a person, and then approximately double them in size, and you're looking at the kind of boobs Crystal has. She looks to be in some degree of pain most times of the day, which is totally understandable if you've ever had big boobs or worn big boob prosthetics before. Yet she has problems even bigger than her boobs. Her boyfriend, Larry, is a mobster, and he's decided to go out on one last big score before settling down with her--he steals a notebook vital to his boss, in order to blackmail him for 100 grand. But he's not quick enough and gets gunned down. Fortunately, Crystal overhears that one of the killers is a one-eyed man named Captain Hook, who is going to stay in a hotel in Vegas. She tracks him there, and her one-woman war against the mob begins.

And she kills her victims suffocating them to death in her boobs.

I've mentioned Doris Wishman here and there on the site before, and at only one other time does she shine brighter than she does here in Deadly Weapons. We'll get to that other movie in this year's Spookyween, but for now let's talk about her. Wishman is one of the most idiosyncratic sexploitation directors of all time. It is somehow entirely her to see an actress like Chesty Morgan (nee Liliana Wilczkowska, who plays Crystal, as you may expect) and immediately think, "Hm, yes, those puppies could be used for murder. But I also have to arouse my audience to make money. Well, c'est la vie--I'll just combine the two." For good measure she brought in Harry Reems, perhaps to trick people into thinking this was a hardcore feature. And then, she set about directing it.

I'm sure there's a better verb to fit Wishman's style of film creation than "directing." Wishman's true power the ability to hollow out other human beings and make them instruments of her id. Somehow, she managed to translate her batshit ideas into modes that were comprehensible, but no less batshit. It's almost like everything is directed wrong. There's brightness, prettiness, but everything is cheap. It's par for the course, archetypically so, as far as mid-century sexploitation goes: horrible, cheesy voiceovers, abrupt interruptions from familiar stock music cues, bored-looking actors, comic-relief "boing" sounds in the presence of tits, and missed-by-a-mile fake violence. Doris takes these already-unconventional cinematic occurrences, and then does them as aliens would do them.

Consider one of the recurring oddities of the movie: when Chesty/Crystal unveils her mammoth mammaries to go in for the kill, the music will cut to instead play a stock horror lightning strike, as if Chesty's tits are the new Universal monsters. They may as well be. Isn't there a scene in Gulliver's Travels where Gulliver accidentally sneaks a peek at some Brobdingnagian junk, and it's so humbling he becomes impotent? Well, even the toughest among us will break down in horror before the monolithic (or duolithic) sight of Chesty's chesticles. I mean this all with the fondest respect. When Crystal isn't looking contentedly bored, she really does look like her bra strap is cutting into her back.

Then, there is the repetitive dialogue. Crystal's tipoff that a man named Captain Hook killed her beau wouldn't be possible unless Harry Reems was there to say, "You're a pretty good shot for a man with one eye, Captain Hook" three separate times. (This is also contingent on the fact that Captain Hook's real name turns out to be Captain Hook, but whatever.) When Crystal is hunting Captain Hook, she calls the service desk of the hotel to see if he's checked in yet. When they say he isn't, she waits five seconds, tells herself, "Maybe they just didn't check carefully," and calls again...with the same result. It's a completely pointless sequence that doesn't even waste enough time to be considered padding. I don't know what this was supposed to accomplish. It doesn't make Crystal seem like a more insistent investigator, it makes her seem ineffectual and impatient.

And I'll never get over how bad the violence looks in a lot of these movies. When the mob boss goes to "crush" Harry Reems' hand with his shoe, he's not even touching him! Add that to the fact that Reems is a porn actor, so his whimpers of pain sound weirdly sexual. That's actually a pretty common feature of these sexploitation flicks, I should point out: pain and pleasure are usually the same as far as vocals are concerned. Especially if it's got the Doris Wishman stamp of approval on it.

Deadly Weapons is not for everyone, and upon rewatching it for this review, it's slower than I remember. However, if you have patience, and the capacity to absorb lengthy shots of titanic boobs, then you will be well-rewarded in strangeness. And you know what? This movie had a fucking spiritual successor. Double Agent 73 has Chesty Morgan running around with a camera hidden in her boobs, taking pictures in the name of heroic espionage. Yepppp...

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The Amazing Mr. X (1948), by Bernard Vorhaus

For a while, I began to notice a pattern in movies that featured the word "Amazing" in their title. Namely, these movies would be about as far from Amazing as one could get. The Amazing Transparent Man, for instance, is one of the most forgettable cash-ins of The Invisible Man out there. The Amazing Colossal Man is Bert I. Gordon's best movie, but it's still not Amazing. And I'll never forget the time, in the process of tracking down obscure James Bond parodies, that I found an Italian film called The Amazing Dr. G, aka Goldginger (yes, you read that right), which ended with a blackface gag. Decidedly not Amazing. And yet, there are doubtlessly hundreds of films that had chosen that adjective for themselves, and as such I just happen to have really bad luck. Until today. The Amazing Mr. X is legitimately amazing, a compact and punchy little film noir that once more scratches my Nightmare Alley itch for phony psychics and carnival magic.

Christine is a wealthy woman who misses her two-years-dead husband Paul. She sometimes envisions his voice coming out of the sea when she walks the beaches near her house. Her younger sister, Janet, encourages her to marry Martin, the awkward nerd whom she's been dating recently. While headed out on a date with Martin, Christine is caught up in her Paul hallucinations and runs into a mysterious man named Alexis. Alexis reveals himself to be a psychic, and he tells Chris things about herself and Paul which he would have no way of knowing. Captivated, Christine enjoys her date with Paul, but has a nightmare about the pressures of a new marriage. She vows to see Alexis again, and when she does, she's hooked. Janet and Martin, of course, suspect that Alexis is a swindler, but when Janet goes to investigate, he sweeps her off her feet as well. And in a rather more literal sense, too, as Janet falls in love with the medium. Naturally, Alexis is a trickster, as we the audience see in great detail--he's a very good one, though, lacking the weaknesses that stopped that the Great Stanton from making it to the big time. He even manages to make a good show out of making Paul's apparition appear, while seemingly tied up in another room.

There's just one hitch. Paul is still alive. And he wants Chris's fortune.

So how's that? I'm really starting to find I love film noir. So akin to psychological horror--and such a variable style. If you keep shoveling me spooky movies about wicked showpeople that love will only deepen. Of course, like B-Westerns, or '30s plane thrillers, or '50s sailing movies, one must pan through much shit to get the gold. In turn, there is salvation, as hipsters looove them some noir, and as such, there's a lot of light shined into where some of the gems may lie. I can't watch too many of these things, because they look to all end mighty unhappily, but I think I finally understand that which I was looking for when I first saw Daughter of Horror.

Film noir is all about the writing--well, the actors need to carry it, too, but there are types I'm starting to see which could be played well by someone who's just seen enough of the right movies. But the writing in these films is tremendous. Set the right combination of believable circumstances, and make them exploitative. Lock the characters in something that'll make 'em sweat. I know those things can be said about any sort of narrative, but noir is written in a way that makes you feel the keys of the keyboard. It's sort of meta, in a way--because it uses quick-cut conventions and language, with its believable circumstances, it can tell a lot of story in a hurry with using speech. That's why you need a "tight" script, and "tight" directing. It uses horror logic--visceral sign language--to help pile on the exploitation elements to its greasy, gritty characters. Flawed protagonists are scattered out here lie autumn leaves, never fully good, rarely fully bad. Am I getting it yet? Am I cool?

But seriously, there are a lot of tips here and there that make this a really good script, and it's so relieving to see Turhan Bey come up after being kicked around in the Mummy movies. He's amazingly suave here and I want to see him in other things. He portrays Alexis beautifully as a convincing criminal genius, but also as a romantic who is willing to recognize true evil in the world, who probably also regrets his past time in prison. He leaks a little bit of cynicism here and there, as in one of the film's best moments, where Janet is cuddled up to him. Once Janet gets on the psychic train she goes full Fluffy Bunny Pagan. "Do you think I would make a good Celestial Companion, Alexis? Would you travel with me and love me for all eternity?" Alexis blinks and replies, "Oh...even longer, my dear." And the efficiency of that script carries into the revelation of how Alexis pulls his stunts--all of it seems plausible for a man of means given the technological limitations of the era. It doesn't have to delve into sci-fi (which would require some explanation) to show us what all this gadgetry is, and therefore the film's momentum is maintained. Comedy props to the moment when Alexis shows how he Batmans up behind people, all mysterious-like...he just walks very quickly, and very quietly.

From the opening fakeout scare to the twisty ending, The Amazing Mr. X is a vast smorgasbord of rich, full characters, knockout performances, genuine creeps, and marvelous dialogue. It's nice when the adjectives of a title aren't used meaninglessly, eh?

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The Black Alley Cats (1973), by Henning Schellerup

A group of schoolgirls are going through the city at night. A group of doughy, presumably drunk douchebags are sitting outside a bar. When the girls pass, they chase them down, corner them in a warehouse, and gangrape them. As the girls dress themselves in the wake of this horrific act, displaying about as much concern in doing so as they did when they were being assaulted (i.e. surprisingly little), they swear an oath to fight back against rapists everywhere. After some training in the arts of kung fu and guns, they go out on the streets to kick people in the dick and/or tear their genitals off. Thus our series of random events begins. They get revenge on their rapists, and break up a group of white guys conspiring to keep minorities out of their neighborhoods. Then, they recruit a sixth member in the form of a new student at their school by seeing how well she fights when someone is trying to pull her panties off in the shower. We find out that the dean of the school, plus the couple one of the Alley Cats babysits for, are all rapists, and they'll get the babysitting girl thrown out of school if she exposes them. But all's well that ends well, as the Cats eventually go after the rapist couple and administer to them a fatal dose of aphrodisiacs. How does one die from aphrodisiacs, exactly? Well...how do you think?

The Black Alley Cats is simultaneously alarming, hilarious, tasteless, and progressive. It is a movie which has beguiled me for years now due to the fact I keep watching it, even though it deals with something I actually have a hard time processing. I have to be real careful not to set off my PTSD when it comes to movie with sexual assault in them, but this was one of the movies I stumbled across before I picked up my trigger, so I know what to expect well enough to keep myself safe. The opening rape scene is distressing, but at the same time, the dudes keep their pants on, and the actresses, while generally good throughout the movie, are pretty wooden when it comes to delivering the concept of traumatizing horror. The stuff later in the movie, involving the couple Pam works for, is decidedly grosser, but the ending to everything helps redeem it. Nothing helps a movie like watching two people uncontrollably fuck while two cops try to make them stop.

It's sort of like a weird R-rated cartoon, really, in terms of both situation and consequence. This is another rape-revenge movie I've seen where no one ends up pregnant or with an STD--which, thank God, because there wouldn't be a chance in hell of that movie being entertaining afterward (least to me). What's more, however, there is relatively little notation of trauma, per se, at least as far as the girls who aren't Pam go. She ends up a little more beaten up because she is attacked several times, but at the end of it all, the girls really tend to laugh a lot of stuff off. At least the movie never frames it in a way that shows they're overly upset--it glorifies things like making a bunch of ladies molest a dude for being at a sleazy business meeting. Another take, I suppose, could show the girls' turn towards vigilantism as a symptom of their troubled minds, but I'm glad we got--as much as we could, at least--an optimistic rape-revenge film. It's a film where if you're assaulted, as too many people are, you can channel that rage and fear and pain and sorrow into improving the world, and yes, taking revenge on your attackers, without getting in trouble. Of course, it's also rather suspect that the police were apparently missing from existence both during and after the rapes at the film's inception, but no screenplay is perfect.

I haven't done a really good job of describing the strangeness of this film, but it involves things like: 1) the fact that the thing with the rapist lesbian headmistress is never resolved; 2) the girls call one of their victims "pink toes"; 3) I wasn't kidding about genital-ripping. At one point in their training montage, their instructor teaches them how to "rip the groin away." It's marvelous.

And yet, accurate. I never took self-defense courses in college but I knew other ladies who did. From them I learned that yes, a lot of self-defense programs for women do involve how to properly and safely injure the tender balls of the male rapist. It makes sense. A lot of people say that if you attack someone's crotch when they're trying to kill/molest you, they'll just get madder and treat you worse, but I can't imagine a man alive who would want to rape or even chase someone after even just one blow to the crotch, especially if that blow is meant to cause some hospital-level damage. I've known people, too, who condemn this level of violence, but again, I apparently have to remind people of when they are defending one of the most atrocious crimes a person can commit. If a rapist gets their balls torn off, or, hell, gets a stiff punch to the ovaries, in the course of trying to rape someone, I don't have pity for them. That's how serious this is.

The Black Alley Cats, however, raises important questions without being overly serious. That sense of frivolity in the face of its subject matter, plus its strangeness and weird cheapo charms, make it worth your while, if this is something you feel you could watch. It's a rough sit, and yet it always seem to hit its final reel before I'm ready for the madness to end. Odd.

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Infrasexum (1969), by Carlos Tobalina

Carlos Tobalina was a sage. He was The Man. He was the big kahuna, the primus unus, the Alpha and the Omega. I didn't think that I could ever get enough of Flesh and Bullets, and then, when all hope was lost, I found that for once I lived in a kind world. Fifteen years or so before Flesh and Bullets, the Neil Breen of the 20th Century turned out Infrasexum, his first movie, an ostensible look into the horrors of male impotence. And yet the resultant film was more, much more. You are not ready.

Peter Allison is a man with a unique problem despite his unique situation in life. He's a very successful businessman, and he has a stunningly attractive wife, and yet for some reason, he can't, uh, prime the old motor as it were. He can't loose his juice--can't sharpen his pencil. He has trouble making his dick hard is what I'm saying. So he decides to cut himself off from his business and family and go on a road trip in search of self-discovery. He ends making a small fortune in Vegas, then returns to Los Angeles, where he meets Carlos (played by Carlos Tobalina), who "turns [him] on to marijuana, LSD, and the hippie world." But still Peter can't find relief from his limpness, even as Carlos introduces him to the world of lesbian threeways. He becomes a painter, but his world is briefly shredded when two crooks learn of his wealth and kidnap one of his hippie girlfriends to try to rob him. When he refuses to comply, one of them tries to rape the girl, and when she resists, he stabs her and starts removing her intestines. Peter is able to escape the two and kills them in self-defense. Then, he goes to a park where he watches ducks have sex. After yet another failed attempt to bang a girl, Peter attempts to bang Carlos Tobalina. This doesn't work either--he's not into men, though not for a want of trying. At the end of it all, as in Psyched by the 4D Witch and other sexploitation movies, a psychiatrist shows up and magics it all better, suggesting that Peter have sex with someone who resembles the best sex partner he ever had. He also suggests he rejects the negative standards placed on him by his father, which we didn't know he had until this point. When this happens, Peter is finally free. The end.

It took a suitably demented eye to frame and photograph Infrasexum. This relatively straightforward tale zigs and zags in ways I wasn't prepared for. When it suddenly turns into a hostage/murder movie, for example, completely H.G. Lewis-esque gore, I am never ready. And, like Ogroff, this movie is always full of stuff which I never noticed on previous viewings. For example, it wasn't until the viewing which spawned this review that I figured out that Carlos was played by the director. That makes the stunningly tender scene where male-on-male sex almost happens even better than it was before. I also didn't notice that Peter visits the bisexual couple at Apartment 420; that the hippie fest he and Carlos go to features a stoned girl with a third eye painted on her forehead; or that said hippie festival also features a guy carrying around an adorable baby fox. These are all miraculous sights to see, glimpses back into another time.

This whole movie, in a sense, is a meditation on the hippie movement. In all likelihood, Carlos was just trying to make money off the hippies, just as many exploitation films at the time were, but that doesn't mean this film lacks time-capsule value. I'm pretty cynical about the hippies these days but little 18-year-old Mudman would have loved this. I can still feel a bit of the groove--while I no longer consider that white guys with embarrassing hair-clips bobbing their heads drunkenly with absolutely no understanding of where they are to be a symbol of freedom, it is still fascinating to watch people who have a seeming dearth of judgment for their peers acting like children and doing nothing productive in particular. In a sense I wish we still had that lack of judgment; but I also don't think that doing cartwheels through parks for hours is a particularly great use of time and energy when you're 25 years old, either. What I appreciate is that, for the most part, people are very nice in this film, and the movie tries to make a point that we--as in humanity--are not as bad as we seem. Peter is free with his money, Carlos is free with his drugs, the girls are free with their sex. And most of the judgment Peter faces for his impotence comes from himself, not from his partners. It would have been too easy to make yet another impotence-themed sexploitation movie where the person spends most of the movie being screamed at, but generally, Peter gets off pretty easy, his pain being more realistically internal than would be shown in a lot of similar films.

And I do really appreciate how the hippie free-spiritisms appear in the style of the film. Bloated with voiceovers, the movie really does play out like Peter's traveling journal, which makes it one of them road trip flicks I love so much. The light classical music sampled throughout the film gives it an artsy sentimental feel that makes me get all fuzzy inside. This really does help build the story of a man who is struggling to find freedom from a prison he's built for himself. It makes it seem tenderly psychological. I love it.

Of course, there is also the lovely trash.

Bad edits, cuts in the soundtrack, and incomprehensible dialogue all wrack the movie, pushing it straight into the Technicolor world of one of Doris Wishman's '70s movies (which I'll get to soon enough!). Peter dresses like a gay bullfighter for a startling percentage of the runtime. And, as Jess Franco will tell you, nothing says classy like a slow zoom towards the vagina of a corpse. Rest assured, we are absolutely still dealing with the director of Flesh and Bullets here. But this is him at his rawest. Gone is the drama of murdering another man's wife; instead, we are gazing into the id of a director/actor on his own personal trip into hedonism. It's almost like a documentary. Yet, still confined to the magically unrealistic world of fiction.

In case you can't tell, I really, really like this movie. Boobs and butts galore, plus a little blood, and a strange journey into a strange mind. Don't miss it.

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Nightmare Alley (1947), by Edmund Goulding

This is yet another movie which is probably too good and too well-received for me to be talking about here, but which I knew immediately I had to review after watching. Nightmare Alley has such a wonderful tone to it, by which I mean it has an utterly ghastly tone to it, making it yet another movie adding to the trend of this site being largely a journal of my night-terrors. I've gotten PTSD from movies before, but some films will leave stains on my psyche in a way that keeps me warm from the cold, fed in the face of hunger. Stop by the box office to get your ticket of admission into Nightmare Alley's carnival of souls.

Stanton "Stan" Carlisle is a barker at a low-rent carnival, which offers many of the usual acts, including a geek and a medium. Stan is fascinated by the geek, at first buying the mythos that they are the Missing Link, but he slowly learns that they are actually alcoholics who are forced to do what they do--i.e. bite the heads off of chickens--by the managers controlling their booze access. Stan strikes up a friendship--and more--with Mademoiselle Zeena, the medium. Years ago, Zeena and her ex-lover Pete were a top-tier magic act in vaudeville, drawing in crowds of thousands. However, due to circumstances Zeena blames herself for, Pete became an alcoholic, and now is reduced to her assistant in her psychic act. Stan at once desires to obtain the secret code Zeena and Pete used in their act, but it's not until he accidentally poisons Pete with wood alcohol that he gets a chance. Stan proves to be a fine mentalist, even waylaying a sheriff who wants to shut down the show for exploiting the geek. This act in particular proves to be so impressive he finally breaks the sexual tension with his long-time crush Molly the Electric Girl--an act witnessed by her boyfriend, Bruno the strongman. When Bruno reveals this to Zeena, the carnival immediately turns on the pair, forcing them into a shotgun marriage just at the dawn of their romance.

Thus begins the next stage of Stan's life. He and Molly have the code, so they swiftly become wealthy top-billers as Zeena and Pete once were. But the ambition of "the Great Stanton," as Stan now calls himself, doesn't stop there. At one of his shows he runs into a psychiatrist named Lilith Ritter, who has a particularly aristocratic patient by the totally-not-miserly name of Mr. Grindle. Stan is interested by the fact that she records all of her therapy sessions on vinyl, and believes he could use those records to learn everything about his clients. Then, he could break into the spiritualism business, where he can start breaking bread with the top 1%. But there's another dimension to this as well--Stan legitimately starts believing he's doing God's work. He's able to convince Molly to help Mr. Grindle make the final crossing into religion by appearing as the ghost of his dead lady-love, but she has a pang of conscience and blows the gig. Stan still has some of his money, though, and tries to skip town with Molly. Except, Lilith has cheated him--she gives him a paltry $150, takes the rest for herself, and makes it clear to Stan that if he tries to stop her or implicate her in the crime, she has a vinyl record explaining he once had something to do with the death of a certain alcoholic former mentalist. Stan is left wandering around, reduced to drinking, until at last he finds a chance to fit back in with carny life. "Of course, it's only temporary," says the man hiring him. "Till we can get a real geek..."

This has been a good year for carnival movies, I feel. This is the same year I revisited The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, and when I first witnessed the relentless brutality of The Unknown. I'm starting to sense a thing here--it's like creators enjoy telling stories about the dark secrets of sources of mirth and wonder or something. This continues today, with the tradition of celebrity gossip mags and Disneyworld creepypastas--if something makes us happy, there must be something wrong with it. And this is not oversaturated at all, no sir, nor is it simply done occasionally just for the sake of pure cynicism. But sarcasm aside, there is something thrilling about looking into a point of entertainment and seeing it goes colossally wrong. And when that sort of logic is applied to something as seedy as a carnival, it produces results like Nightmare Alley. The movie and the book it was based on don't shy away from the problems of carny life, like addiction and forced labor. It doesn't quite step into the plight of the freaks, but the plight of the geek is highlighted as I've never seen it before. As far as I know, this is historically accurate; shows would take in bums and ply them with booze to do crap shows, in some sense relying on the embarrassment of geekdom to ensure that they never escaped their addiction. It's hard to avoid a cynical, nihilistic message when faced with the reality of that.

So, the primary theme of Nightmare Alley is, "Don't tamper in God's domain." This is hammered in a little roughly but it certainly takes. The movie allows its two-hour runtime to really dig into Stan's journey from barker to showman to wannabe messiah, to chicken-biting lunatic, so we walk through his journey to touch the hand of God with him in great detail. This is film noir, in case I didn't say so, and as such it's really, really good at telling its story through implication and conversation. We learn briefly that Stan grew up an orphan, where he took in "the scripture they fed us Sunday, after beating us black and blue all week." He tried to escape the orphanage but they sent him to reform school, where he faked spirituality to get parole. This is a great way of explaining Stan's wanderings into Christianity as well as his sociopathic tendencies. Interesting that this film, while attempting to be sincere about religion, also portrays it cynically, just as it does the carnival. Perhaps it's that the movie believes that God is good, but religion can be abused by "ministers" like Stan. It's tough to tell, what with the conformist '50s on the way. If this movie was made six years later, it may not have been so quick to condemn Stan's corporal punishment at the hands of the nuns at the orphanage.

Returning, then, to the telling of character by implication: this movie's structure roughly follows Stan's life as a traditional tragedy, detailing how he obtains glory and loses it. But the simple fact of it is that Stan had prosperity before his journey began. He specifies to Zeena at the film's beginning that he quite enjoys being a barker, finding it the first job he ever truly enjoyed. It wasn't great, but it was a steady paycheck and a roof, and maybe he could have worked his way up to a management position at some point (hey, it was the '40s--I'm told the American Dream actually sorta worked then, least as long as you were white, straight, cis, abled, and a man). And yet, whether it was by his upbringing or something else, he couldn't get enough. See, I can say this with honesty! This is a tampered-in-God's-domain story that actually works!

Of course, there's a lot going for it stylistically--I can't describe it all fully but there are tons of neat noir tricks, and if you are a diehard noir junkie, yes, there are plenty of shadows and cig-smoke clouds to go around. One thing I really liked is how, as Stan runs into his obstacles one by one, we begin to hear a faint sound behind the music. When this sound appears near the end of the movie, we can tell it's the screams of the geek that Stan heard at the beginning--the screams which will soon become his own. And yet, there is an ending added to the movie which is not present in the novel, which makes things happier...while also making the parallel structures between Pete and Stan, and Zeena and Molly, all the more terrifyingly adamant. This movie has one of the best uses of this cruel irony that I love seeing in films so much. And while this isn't a stylistic comment, I do have to say something how much this film benefits from casting Coleen Gray as Molly. Gray is one of the most attractive actresses I've seen in a while, and I don't know why. She hasn't been in too much else that I recognize, but my crush on her is rather an irony in itself, due to the fact that the other big I do recognize her for is the titular character of The Leech Woman! So I have found myself attracted to a woman whose other big role for me is "vampiric hag." C'est la vie...

There are some things I could criticize, such as the fact that Stan and Zeena's code is perhaps a bit too complicated for me to believe, and that Lilith's turn from horror at Stan's idea of using her records to swindle her patients to being totally onboard with the idea is never explained. But almost every other frame of the movie is pure gold, and I challenge you to lose yourself in the tangled knots of this one. It's a real treat.

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Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984), by David Markey

So a lot of my fellow trash-movie fans, I've noticed, are usually big punk fans as well, with a sort of dedication that I feel a certain distance from. Punk is probably one of my favorite music genres, but its presence in my life, as with most music genres I like, will likely be eclipsed forever by my love of metal. Now I realize I'm burning the fires of war here. Punk and metal have a tendency, at least as far as I've observed, to be a bit like Capulets and Montagues. Metal views punk as unstructured and overly political, while punk fans seem to believe that metal is reactionary, patriarchal, and irrelevant. If you think there's a winner in this debate then you are the true loser. In any case, both punk and metal have contributed much to the world of trash cinema over the years, and strangely, despite my tastes outside of the world of film, I've almost always ended up enjoying the punk movies more than the metal ones. Maybe it's just that punk has aged better than metal, generally speaking--I find a lot of early metal almost impossible to listen to, while classic punk is still pretty awesome. And a lot of that is perhaps due to the fact that a lot of punk is about seeking relevance, while metal is a lot about seeking thrills. While there is absolutely political metal, punk has tied itself to significant social movements and become a social movement in itself. Punk is one of the big musical faces of liberalism. And it stands to reason that a bunch of people who grew up in the same era where the VHS tape made home media infinitely more possible than it previously had been would be punk fans as well, as the '80s needed the genre's particular brand of cynicism. I'm just a wee bab, a product of the Internet, and as such my music interests are whatever they happen to be on a given week. But nonetheless, I found a lot of punkish joy to be found in David Markey's miniature opus, Desperate Teenage Lovedolls.

The titular Lovedolls are an up-and-coming teen punk band that, at the film's outset, has faced the minor setback of one of their members being sent to a mental institution after a drug-induced breakdown. While in this place poor Alexandria is chained to a bed and forced to watch a video loop of a man standing in front of an American flag chanting, "Have my kid," in a scene that plays like a weird '50s domestic version of Clockwork Orange. Alexandria escapes the hospital with the aid of her trademark guitar and the Lovedolls are back in business. After getting back on amphetamines, Alexandria helps her fellow Lovedoll Kitty kill her abusive mom, who is, natch, played by a man in drag. They are approached by a sleazy agent who promises to help them make it big. He does, but the price is rape. So they dose him with a shitton of LSD in what is probably one of the most amusing tripout sequences I've seen in a while. Then, there is but one last menace to face: their immortal enemies, the She-Devils. Things get heavy when Kitty accidentally kills one of the She-Devils in a brawl. All things come to a head. And then...sequel?

Desperate Teenage Lovedolls best sets its punk atmosphere by refusing to lean in too heavy with its jokes. The movie's bulk is comprised of what are best described as "punk montages"; scenes of music, drugs, and youthful liberty standing in contrast to an opposing and opposite society. It indulges itself, certainly, especially with its naive earnestness in depicting drugs (life sucks so let's all do speed!), but overall it stays level-headed. The satire in the film ranges from authentic to cursory, and it all works. It's hard not to love a movie that features both the aforementioned TV loop, and the line, "I think I see Led Zep in you--I can do for you girls what God did for mankind!" (So, uh, subject them plagues and floods?) Stylistically and tonally, it bears some resemblance to I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, but I feel this movie is better made. It's subtler in its spoofs, and there's less "oh, this is just a movie"-type editing. Lovedolls is much more immersive, even if it meanders somewhat in viciousness and meaning.

There's a lot to laugh at in this movie, as I may have implied above, and for once it's something of a relief for the laughs to be intentional. The music exec who molests the girls mentions "making the Beatles do a reunion," and his shocking lack of familiarity with psychedelic drugs contrasts his position as a manager/agent, which I doubt is unintentional even if it's not lampshaded. And indeed, I really can't understate how amazing this trip sequence is, as it hasn't been since The Weird World of LSD that I've seen a cinematic freakout incorporate marionettes. Finally there's also a scene where a DJ places a record, sleeve and all, on the wrong part of a turntable. The music starts playing before the record starts spinning. Again, almost surely intentional.

As for the soundtrack, it's handled in a very unique way: it features plenty of punk, yes (admittedly not the best I've heard but still pretty good), but also a broad selection of public domain classical cues. I don't know what it is about Super 8 movies that attract these libraries cues, besides the obvious cheapness, but there's a certain rustic class added to the film by its employment of the same sort of music you'd hear in Weasels Rip My Flesh. Your ears will assuredly have a good time.

If I had one complaint, it's that the movie has one moment where it tries to make it seem cool to call someone a fag. Way to drop the Third Wave there, ladies. This is the unfortunate peril that queers like me must face looking back into the films of the 20th Century. Our suffering was considered "edgy"; our mockery, "radical." And it's still considered to be such. So fuck this movie for its casual homophobia. Thankfully it's just one line, and the movie is relatively inoffensive otherwise--as far as punk movies go, that is. If you want a look at punk rebellion circa the Reaganian tyrannies, then this is a perfect movie to go with. It's only 50 minutes long, but you're in luck, 'cause Lovedolls Superstar is a motherfuckin' 70, ya fuckin' bitch.

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Sweet Trash (1970), by John Hayes

What a fitting title. (I've been getting a lot of those lately.) In the end, I'm not sure it's about anything--that title or the movie attached to it. The title is referenced in the film's tagline: "Some women are born to be sweet trash." And guess what, that tagline has absolutely nothing to do with the movie. Women are the opposite of sweet trash in Sweet Trash. They are usually the only good people in the entire movie. I assume then that the filmmakers were being self-aware. But really, in the end, it's the style, not the substance.

A mobster named Dan shows a beautiful redhead a good time in the sack. She extols his virtues as a lover, and then he shoots her, explaining that "the new computer" determined she knew too much, and talked too much. Then, one of the other members of his mob, Mr. Rizo, has sex with a woman who comes to his mansion. This somehow reveals to him she has information on a certain man "the computer" has them looking for. They need the services of a longshoreman of a particular personality, and the one they've found is Michael Joseph Donovan, who may as well mark down on his resume that he works a second full-time position as an alcoholic. Mike is a pretty jovial guy, but he's also got a skeezy side to him--he spends too much time staring at women, and his pits are perpetually sweaty. Presently he owes $4,000 to the mob, the same mob Dan and Rizo belong to, and he has a chance to win it at a card game. He just needs another two Gs to break out, but at the critical moment he blows it and sets himself back that extra 2,000 as well. The only thing left for him to do is to make a run for it...and his quest for freedom will take him to places and feelings he never could have expected. Meanwhile, the computer is hunting him.

Another (?) movie which is similar to Gretta. I never thought I'd say that, but I never thought I'd see a movie that tries so hard to seem like it's not deliberate. There are so many weird things going on in this movie that it becomes inscrutable at times. It is simultaneously a sexploitation movie, a surrealist art film, a mobster thriller, and a sci-fi speculation exercise. It asks too many questions at once and slathers everything over with increasingly-bizarre sex scenes, as if the real interest is meant to be all the boobers that are on screen. And yet...and yet...oh, hell, I'll just tell you some of the shit that goes down here.

So there are just some little nods here and there--that's the first layer. These are incidents that don't really lead to anything. When there's talk of breaking Mike's fingers, for instance, there happens to be a topless stripper nearby, and the mobster sets the hand he's set to break on her boob: "One last feel," he muses quietly. Then, later on, Mike is speaking to a possibly-illusory Puerto Rican woman when he suddenly imagines that his hands are full of bloody strips of flesh. These things will then form their little strings of pearls that make the movie's private architecture twisted and uncanny. Mr. Rizo keeps having sex with ladies and it keeps getting darker and darker, until we're actually freaking out when two girls are closing in on him with fake vampire teeth, chanting over and over again, "Here we come to suck the blood from your neck." The human mind doesn't function well in the surrealosphere. And it keeps getting bigger and badder.

The movie makes its transition from sleazy exploitation to pure drunken horror both slowly and starkly. There's a moment where Mike is wandering around wasted in an abandoned part of town, and the happy but overly-nostalgic music that keeps haunting him throughout the film suddenly turns into something right out of Jay Chattaway's soundtrack for Maniac. And this leads into the scene where the Puerto Rican lady and Mike walk back through Mike's timeline, visiting his earliest memories, including when he was molested by a neighborhood woman when he was ten. This quick insight back into the source of Mike's alcoholism (presumably, at least) is portrayed entirely for black comedy, like a lot of the film, actually. Mike laughs hysterically as he recounts what happened, and when the woman tries to say it wasn't his fault, he says, "Oh, I'd sinned, mama. But I had such an innocent face that they never knew it."

This is pretty some tough shit to watch, but there's enough counter-negative tone to keep things going. And all those contrasting tones never overlap each other in a way that makes it a painful sit. I don't really know what the themes of this movie are. The angle where the mobsters are helpless to obey their mostly-offscreen computer may be a comment on authority, but it may also be to help explain the corners the plot cuts on its road to surrealism (i.e. there's no reason for the characters to act this way besides the writers making them, and the computer plotline is a cover for that). The whole movie may also be a remark on alcoholism, and indeed this is probably the most realistic depiction of alcoholism I've seen based on what I've heard from former alcoholics--it can be the angry or sorrowful ruts but there's also the boisterous and embarrassing joyousness of drunkenness. Alcoholism can be quite the happy thing even if it's also agony, and that happiness is usually why the drinker stays an alcoholic. And then there is delirium tremens.

This movie is basically Delirium Tremens: The Movie. For all the depression inherent in that, that's a movie I've always wanted to see. I like being taken on a rough ride in my trash, without having to dip into the roughie flicks that the '70s would go on to produce. Sweet Trash may not have art, or even direction, but it has heart, and I can dig that. There's a lot of imagery that will haunt you long after, which coming from me is, once again, nothing short of a recommendation.

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Smoking Guns (1934), by Alan James

How much of this "joke" is predicated on prejudice? How much of my amusement is derived from the simple fact that, even after dedicating a quite a lot of words to talking about them, I'm still not used to B-Westerns completely and utterly blowing me out of the water? 2017 is a year for walking against the wind in many things--so it's healthy for me to go on insisting that these movies have some sort of value. I've encountered few fellow trashsters who have found the same sort of passion I have for digging through the tedious and repetitious tides of old '30s cowboy flicks in search of gold. But I'm gonna do my part to make it a thing, damnit! Why should '80s slashers, '70s roughies, and '60s sexploiters have all the fun? At this point I've cast aside my old superstitions. Smoking Guns cements, now and forever, that Westerns can contain the same levels of perverse oddity that afflict the weirdest movies I've featured on this site.

Ken Masters is a young man who has been accused of the murder of Hank Stone's father Silas--however, Ken knows that Hank himself is the killer. When he confronts Stone with that knowledge, he is driven out of town, and he hides himself out in the Amazon rainforest (as you do). A ranger by the name of Dick Evans tracks Ken out to the jungle and arrests him--Ken is only too happy to return to civilization, as he wanted to stay back in town and face Stone far and square. As Evans takes Ken back through the jungle, however, he contracts malaria, and is forced to let Ken shoot their handcuffs off to go find help after it transpires that he's lost the key. Fortunately, Ken is an honorable man, and not only gives the ranger his gun back, but returns with a canoe as promised. Not so fortunately, their voyage down the Amazon becomes sheer horror when Evans decides to open fire into a horde of crocodiles, which sends them after the two. Evans is bitten on the leg, leading to gangrene; Ken knows how to operate but rather than face the knife, Evans kills himself.

Then the movie gets really weird...yeah, it actually gets weirder. Somehow, Ken gets it in his head that he and the dead ranger are dead ringers for each other, despite the fact that their actors have zero resemblance. He returns to civilization disguised as Evans, and runs into the awkward fact that Evans had a girlfriend, the somewhat improbably-named Alice Adams. It doesn't take long before "Dick" reveals that he's rather ill-suited for impersonating a dead man in front of his loved ones, as he's forgotten Alice's nickname of "Kitten," and praises music the real Dick hated while disliking that which he liked. Still, she takes the truth, when he comes forth with it, surprisingly well. From there on out, Ken uses every advantage he gets to close in on his man.

Much to my dismay, the majority of Smoking Guns' goodness is packed into its first half. The second half of the film is a typical B-Western, and not one of the very good ones...long shots of people creeping around in the dark, broken up by protracted, foot-dragging gunfights--and that's saying nothing of the obligatory square dancing scene. Oh, and the racism. I really don't want to dwell on this, so I'll just say that there is a black butler named "Cinders" who Mantan Morelands the hell out of every scene he's in. And because he's in so many scenes, you'll probably want to skip most of this second half with the assurance that it's a '30s Western, and good triumphs in the end. In-universe. In out-universe terms, good did not triumph, because they forced an actor to completely demean himself for the mild amusement of the white audience. So don't be afraid to ditch the second half if you want.

But man, that first half. Was there really so much demand for movies set in the Amazon in 1934 that they needed to spend a good chunk of the story there? Was it impossible, in the days of the Old West, to contract malaria and gangrene within the confines of the United States? Maybe it's not the Amazon...maybe it's just Florida. But I'm pretty positive it is meant to be somewhere in South America. I am absolutely not complaining about any of this. The South America sequence is entirely contingent on a hilarious amount of improbably bad luck for our characters stacked on top of some of the weirdest passes of the Idiot Ball I've ever seen. Keep in mind, we go straight from Dick Evans confidently arresting Ken to his decline into malaria, with the swiftness of the dissolve implying very little time has passed. Evans spends part of this scene laughing insanely as the disease drives him out of his mind. It's an arresting composition, giving us the impression that he was able to make it all the way out here by himself just fine, but the second he joins up with Ken, he starts going insane. This is built up by the fact that he trusts Ken, a fucking outlaw, enough to hand him his gun! It's not like he really needs much persuading to go all buddy-buddy with Ken, as they speak amiably to each other upon first meeting, and he eats Ken's food, even though Ken could've easily rubbed an Amazonian frog on that meat with the intent of prying the handcuff keys off the ranger's cold corpse. Evans' fate is ultimately his own fault as he shows not a single shred of spine in the face of animals who were gonna leave him alone if he didn't fucking shoot them. It's almost impossible to believe this man was a cop. He must have traveled to the Amazon in a goddamn air-conditioned rickshaw.

Then, Ken seriously overestimates his ability to impersonate a man he barely knew. What's more, the deception generally works! People believe that he is Evans, despite having no beard, a different hairstyle, and, let's just face it, a completely different face. And poor Dick Evans, for all the suffering he went through in the course of just doing his job (well, and being an idiot), is completely forgotten, as Ken steals his identity, his horse, and, ultimately, his girlfriend. If there's a theme to Smoking Guns, it's that if you are noble, you will have a good ending, unless your name is Dick Evans. There's such a strange passion and intensity to the direction and action of all these improbabilities that it feels deliberate--almost wholly detached from the absurd cheapness that affected many of the big studios during the Great Depression. This movie was made by Universal, meaning it was one of the better Westerns out there.

And that shows. Contrast that with The Phantom Cowboy or The Irish Gringo and you'll see that there was at least a little money behind Smoking Guns. And yet, the movie had to be on the market fast, damnit. I don't what they were thinking. I just feel, somehow, that they were thinking. Consequentially, Smoking Guns is an essential B-Western, second only to The Phantom Cowboy by the depressing anti-merit of replacing Ptomaine Pete with racism. Fast-forward when you feel like it and keep your eyes peeled for the good bits.

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D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (1988), by Chuck Schodowski

Let me see if I can even begin to name all the cash-ins and ripoffs of Spielberg's E.T. that have emerged over the years.

There are the two Turkish ones, Badi and Homoti. There are at least five or six porno spoofs. We can't forget about Pod People...or Mac and Me...and now, there is D.T. Hallelujah! D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' (because Single Quotes Are Cool) was a short video made by the Cleveland Browns alongside the barbarian fantasy epic Masters of the Gridiron, probably in a gesture of fanservice to Browns fans. Both films became something entirely else--something which man was perhaps not meant to witness. But we'll see. We'll see if our minds are ready to take the long step into the depths of Dawg Territory.

D.T. of the Planet K9 is on his way to the Intergalactic Fetchball Championship when he is knocked off course by his rival team, the evil Zomalians! (They keep saying it as "Somalians" which makes it awkward.) If D.T.'s team has to play without him they will lose, and if they lose, the Zomalians will take control of the galaxy; "Tyranny and bloodshed shall surely follow," D.T. helpfully explains. Fortunately, the humans who found D.T., and supplied him with his trademark Hershey's Kisses, are the kindly gentlemen of the Cleveland Browns, including Bob Golic, Dan Fike, and Tim Manoa. (I love writing sentences that are meaningless to me.) It isn't long before D.T. is captured by the Zomalians, led by their Thundercats-reject Queen and her right-hand demon, Revoltar. Revoltar looks like if Jack Kirby's Etrigan decided to rob the wardrobe of Scorpion from Mortal Kombat. This leads to a training sequence of a bunch of NFL dudes grabbing camo and guns to storm the enemy ship and rescue their buddy, highlighted in great detail with a soundtrack that wouldn't seem out of place in Lady Street Fighter.

D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is what happens if pure juvenile id vomits on the camera lens. It's a strangely sobering experience to witness these colossal beefy chaps, so typically associated with masculine seriousness, display an innocent and earnest eagerness for shooting lizard-aliens with beam-rifles. Or having lightsaber fights with cat-people. All while channeling what the '80s considered the kid's movie to end all kid's movies. Perhaps the majority of their delight comes from the prospect of this being a blast for their kid fans, but in a way, this was probably a relief from the image football players are ordinarily required to maintain. Again, all of my speculation comes from faulty understanding--I know nothing about football, outside of what I've seen in this movie and Masters of the Gridiron. There may be worlds of information encoded deep in this movie that I'll never understand unless I watch tons of '80s football reruns. All I see, from my perspective, is a bunch of guys enjoying themselves with a man dressed in a dog costume. That's all I need.

And the movie isn't badly shot, either. Director Chuck Schodowski knows what he's doing, as far as duplicating shots from other movies. I don't know where I've seen the shot of a group of camo-clad troops striding out of an orange-lit fog before, but it's generic enough where it's probably a 4th-generation ripoff of something big. Schodowski's like a junior Bruno Mattei, and it's wonderful. I think it's also appropriate that the director of this nerdy football movie is named "Schodowki." That's like the secret last name of every white person's football-loving dad. Who probably gets over-nostalgic about all the trash from the '80s, including E.T.

Running not even a full half-hour, D.T. in 'Dawg Territory' is an almost-literally one-of-a-kind movie that shows a strange side to football, even if you do happen to be familiar with The Sports. It makes a great double-feature with the similarly-short Masters of the Gridiron, a love-letter to '80s fantasy in the same way this is a tribute to '80s sci-fi. Both of them are on YouTube, too, so shoestring fans rejoice.

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Disconnected (1983), by Gorman Bechard

The most accurate title for a movie I've seen since Violent Shit!

Alicia is a young woman in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend, Mike, on charges that Mike has boinked her twin sister Barbara Ann. As this happens, we see Alicia at her day job at the local video store. A nervous but sweet guy named Franklin comes in and asks her out. They begin a relationship, and around the same time, Alicia begins getting mysterious phone calls featuring horrifying moans and a strange dial-tone sound, and all attempts to investigate this lead nowhere. Then, we find out something that Alicia doesn't know: Franklin is a serial killer. It isn't long before he kills Barbara Ann, and the rest of the film follows Alicia as she faces her demons...which, judging from the ending, may be somewhat more literal than at first glance.

Man, this year is shaping up to be the Mental Illness Nightmare Fuel Year, isn't it? No, no, not in real life--well, that too--I mean in the movies I watch. Between Alien Lover, Euridice BA, and this, I've seen an uncommon amount of movies this year which have managed to hit home as far as the ol' mental illness journey goes. Lots of scenes of women crying...but then, I know for myself that that's what going insane is like. Lots and lots and lots of crying. I felt for the women in this movie because I only recently pulled myself out of a similar rut. Thankfully, I've never had to face anything quite like what Alicia goes through in Disconnected.

This movie is both creepy and amusing alike. On one hand, this movie legitimately contains a scene (a dream sequence) where Mike kills Alicia and he and Barbara Ann have sex on her corpse. Trust me, that is the amusing thing, if only because that's something I thought only existed in legends as far as movie scenes go--rather like the scene in Evil Dead where one of the Deadites grabs Ash's ankles while hissing, "Join us! Join us!" But then there's the Phone Gibbering. If Euridice BA gave me nightmares, then I can rest assured that I'll have them tonight as well on account of that awful sound. I kept thinking something was going to burst out from behind a corner but, thank Christ, it didn't. The horror was preserved. As was, one might say, the disconnection.

So the editing of this movie, like everything else, is done to make that title bite you as hard as it can. It frequently feels like scenes are out of order, or dubbed improperly, but it appears to all be on purpose. Strange closeups will pop in, like the shot of the worried-looking Betty Boop clock (?), and they will appear so often that they'll haunt you as much as Alicia's calls haunt her. And finally, we're left out of things in the movie. We don't always hear the other side of phone calls--sometimes things are filmed too distantly for us to see or hear them. Occasionally, the shot will be too bright, and we can only see vague shadowy shapes as characters wander around. All of this means it's hard for us to keep track of what's happening, even if what's happening is very simple, and with a tip-off title like Disconnected it really does feel like this is intentional genius rather than blundering gone right.

It doesn't help that I was going through another, more personal layer of disconnection while watching this movie. You see, the premise for Disconnected listed at the top of its IMDB page is fucking bullshit. They have an accurate synopsis farther down the page, but at no point does anyone suspect either Alicia or Barbara Ann for the murders--not even the narrative of the film itself! Unless, of course, I'm dumber than I think, and I missed all of this. That's always possible. But man, when I was expecting what IMDB promised, you can well imagine I was at the edge of my seat waiting for Alicia to kill Mike or something. And when that didn't happen, I felt even weirder about the whole thing.

Disconnected is occasionally boring, but the sheer artistry of the whole thing will keep you focused enough to follow what can be followed. If you're not sold yet, this movie features a scene where Franklin begins to engage in tender necrophilia with one of his victims. The camera pans up to reveal a crucifix hanging on his wall. We slowly zoom in on said crucifix.

Yeah, I have no idea what the fuck that's supposed to mean, either.

Oh, and because I resisted for so long, and the situation is so very clearly asking for it...here you go.

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I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993), by Sarah Jacobson

At long last, the I Was a Teenage [X] series is complete. We've come a long way from I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and we've suffered long through the nuances of I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, but at long last the wait is over. Now we can finally--

I can't do it. This movie deserves better than a lame joke like that. It's just that this movie puts me in such a good mood. Which is odd, given that it's about murder. But it explores murder in a way that a lot of people can relate to, which is something I never thought I'd say. I Was a Teenage Serial Killer is Third Wave feminism pioneer Sarah Jacobson's 25-minute video essay on the history of violence against women, both "passive" and aggressive. It's a fantasy exercise in homicide and thus we can't take it overly seriously--but if you're a woman, at least one of its brief scenes will remind you of some peril in your life. It is a movie which very much panders to its audience, but the question raised then is: why is it still so compelling?

Mary comes home to spend time with her brother. She's just been with their mom, stopping by their dad's funeral. "Too bad about that accident," Mary's brother says, but she replies, "Yeah, but at least Mom got a big insurance settlement out of it." Hmm...that's odd. Are you really that surprised when moments later, Bro starts garbling poison, courtesy of sister Mary? Dude probably would've been fine if he hadn't started giving her a racism-laden talk about how she needs to settle down with a man, or she'll end up homeless and pregnant. Then, a guy on the street comments on her ass, and she shoves him into traffic; and she is forced to strangle her boyfriend to death when it is revealed he faked putting on the condom. As in Ogroff, our narrative is suddenly broken by romance, when Mary meets a man who also enjoys killing men--specifically straight white men. They enjoy brief domestic bliss, but then he decides to threaten a woman, too, and then the deal's off. We eventually learn that Mary is the way she is because she was molested by her father, tying back to the film's beginning. She is seemingly thwarted, but in the end, she vows to tell her stories, and that act will make her valid even in a society that strips her of her validation.

Y'know, this story is sort of like Robin Hood, but with murder instead of robbery. This is about someone who slaughters the "rich" in the name of the "poor"--Mary refuses to kill people who aren't privileged, apparently refusing to kill men of color or queer men, despite the fact that both can be misogynistic. This is a joke I make only hesitantly--because it's ground already fatally overtrodden--but this is the sort of thing that modern day Tumblr users could identify with. It really is interesting to see a reflection of "Internet feminism" in a movie that's almost twenty-five years old...this really does feel like the sort of movie my friends and I would make if we were feeling particularly bitchy about men on a summer afternoon. I don't know how I feel about the impression I'm left with, however, that Third Wave feminism has gone on relatively unchanged in all those years. Has it been sufficient for us, I wonder, or will our future be tasked with making a fourth wave? I'm just glad that we were concerned with queer issues in the early '90s. This movie doesn't namedrop trans people, so that's one change at least between and now. Trans rights as a thing seem so comparatively new--especially when you're trans.

Speaking, then, as someone with the double whammy of being trans and female, I can tell you now why there's this anger in the air, that's been lurking for at least twenty-five years...once, I would have thought it unnecessary to share my beliefs on the world, but my experiences with the privileged have taught me otherwise. I believe, in essence, that we have never fully left the Dark Ages--and that's a statement I make often, however pompous and windbaggy it makes me sound. It's true. Having spent the first chunk of my life identifying as a white straight cis man, followed by a second chunk as I am today, I've felt the difference firsthand. I know that nostalgia tints all, but even in my worst moments, the world seemed a sunnier place than how I see it today. For women, for queer people, for people of color, there is a second world, and it is prioritized second. And it is subject to frequent violent incursion from the world that exiled its inhabitants to its surface. Sometimes, that violence gets to be too much. Some people do kill. Others--like Sarah Jacobson--make movies. They change the shape of that beautiful crystalline world, the third continuum: fiction. And in doing so, they change both worlds, both privileged and oppressed. Encoding your scream in fiction is always a way to get it heard.

Reflecting on that anger: the last scene of this movie, I think, is one of the best, because it shows one of the most insidious ways that men commit social violence against women. An irritatingly-voiced douchebag plops himself down next to Mary as she tries to console herself after murdering her boyfriend. He refuses to leave her alone, and then he decides to make it all about himself, telling a rambling, incredibly tedious story about he and his loser friends hitchhiking down to this city. Nothing that this man indicates that he's halfway as interesting as he thinks he is. When she does open up to him and tells him about her father, he says that she was probably molested because she's so beautiful..."he just couldn't resist." I have heard people tell molestation victims this in real life. It would have been cathartic to see her kill him, but her proclamation that she'll conquer her trauma by telling her stories to people is more satisfying than murder would have been.

Now, like I said, this is a movie which definitely panders. It seemingly cements one of those age-old arguments that liberalism's ideology is only effective if you're already a liberal. Here, children think murder is cool, there are no police authorities, and people don't try to stand up or move when they're thrown in front of a moving truck. Plus, if you're a sexist pig, you probably will hate a movie which shows a woman killing you for your sexism. Yet this movie, I'm sure, is the very story which Mary vows to tell at the end of it, save perhaps for all the death (maybe Sarah Jacobson killed a buncha dudes, I dunno). It is catharsis; self-serving, as catharsis usually is, but no less necessary. And, possibly, no less genuine.

Most of us feminists wouldn't actually kill men. Feminism's about dismantling patriarchy's effects on men, too. But movies like this--an affirmation of the validity of outrage--are satisfying despite their faults, and they will keep on being so, until the problem is finally over. I love low-budget feminist exploitation movies, and I will keep seeking them out till the day I die. And I'll keep fighting for my sisters until the day I die, too. Movies like this help remind me of the complexity of our struggle and the long roads we all have ahead of us.

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The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? (1964), by Ray Dennis Steckler

Before we begin this review of The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, I want to say that this review will refer to the movie in question, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, by its full title on a consistent basis. Why should I dishonor the movie's writer, director, and star, Ray Dennis Steckler, by abbreviating the title when he put so much hard work into it? And indeed, he put as much work as he could muster into producing The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, another movie which I spent years hating until I was traumatized into liking it.

We open with a scene in the tent of the fortune teller Madame Estrella. She decides to come on to her--customer? boyfriend?--who rejects her in favor of alcohol. She calls him a "dahrty, feelthy peeg" and summons her enforcer, Ortega. Estrella and Ortega then disfigure him with acid and lock him in a closet. We then cut to our main plot, involving Jerry, his girlfriend, his friend(s?), and a few other nondescript individuals as their visit to Estrella's carnival results in Jerry being snared by Estrella's sexy sister Carmelita and her hypnotic dance routine. The process begins for Jerry to become a Mixed-Up Zombie--I don't know why Estrella is converting Jerry into such a thing, but maybe he turned down fucking her as well. Jerry begins a career as a murderer under Estrella's control, until he is put to a sorry end.

I have seen other Ray Dennis Steckler movies, particular The Thrill Killers, and I'd say I'm a fan of his--he's considered one of the quintessential trash directors, and while I never found as compelling as James Bryan or Nick Millard, I like popping in a Steckler when the mood strikes me. I think my issue was that I, like many, watched The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? exclusively in its MST3K format. The beaten-up toilet-paper print that appears in the MST3K version has been replaced by a cleaner edition on new releases, which still leaves the film looking like the gasoline-soaked asshole of every after-the-end movie ever, but which at points makes the film a pop-art masterpiece. That's a good thing, given how psychedelically surreal this movie is.

The process of turning an Incredibly Strange Creature into a Mixed-Up Zombie involving a lot of colored lights and turning wheels. It gets a little nauseating after a while, making it perhaps one of the most authentic psychedelic movies out there. Nausea is the name of the game as far as aesthetics go, and this movie takes that idea farther than any movie I've seen before. The carnival is seemingly located in a barren desert. The roller coasters, tents, advertisements, and employees all look fifty years too old, except for the "old hag" Estrella, who looks about thirty. We never get enough significant shots to establish that anyone is having any fun here. The opening scenes, where Ortega bursts out and manhandles Estrella's victim, are so disgusting to look at that they become genuinely terrifying. No one has any sort of fun in this movie, except for, on occasion, the audience. It is like Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty in action, but there is no point or cause for the Cruelty to lead to us to. And this bounces off the bright colors we can see in newer prints to leave the whole thing feeling like the most feverish of fever dreams.

Jerry relays to us some philosophical gibberish, which I can never remember the content of. I just remember it's depressing and nihilistic. Look at that excuse for a title card--did you really expect anything that wasn't bleak and dull? Yet, as befits Steckler, the movie is also weirdly comical, beginning with that lovably goofy title. There's a slant to this that suggests its entertaining qualities are intentional. I don't know how Steckler wanted us to react to Ortega, for example. His oft-remarked-on resemblance to Torgo is very striking, and it's amusing to imagine Ortega as Torgo's awkward cousin--someone who always somehow ends up on the far side of the table from Torgo at Thanksgiving. I always cheer when Ortega bursts through his curtain, ready to fuck shit up (even as I cringe). I wish I knew why, aside from the fact that I have become so drastically mutated by these films that a crusty chain-smoking freak with a propensity towards acid attacks named Ortega of all things is just a perfect fit for my sensibilities. Ortega, you and your cigar are why I wrote this review. He is a strange paradox, this man, a thing of mirth and nightmares alike.

The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? is legendarily dull as fuck, and I can confirm this. You will probably end up ditching long chunks of it, and that will make the experience more upsetting because you will understand less of the plot. To be honest, I think I understand this movie less the more I watch it. Which means I recommend it. It is another unforgettable experience in the radical deconstruction of a movie, and in extreme experimental sleaze beyond the limits of general sanity. To witness it at least once is a must. Three cheers for Madame Estrella! Five cheers for Ortega!

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