The Grapes of Death (1978), by Jean Rollin

Our first podcast episode! Pesticide zombies and high art, together at last!

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Book Club of Desolation #22: Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres (1971), by Paul Bera

Last year I took a look at the first of the French Frankenstein pulps. This year, I figured it would be nice to have the Book Club of Desolation return to similar waters--only this time, the book I read was untranslated. That's why I failed in my promise to have a monthly Book Club review up for January (on top of being sick as shit). It took me quite some time to read my way through Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres, the first of Paul Bera's six-volume series chronicling the eternal war between the avatars of cosmic forces known as Leonox and Lisa, but I found it a fulfilling experience, to say nothing of the wonders it did for restoring my knowledge of French. Even with the language barrier in place, Bera's prose reads smoothly and thrillingly, with enough pulp action and supernaturalism to make me seriously consider tracking down the rest of the series, before all the remaining rare copies are snatched up.

Our protagonist is Lacana, a ten-time serial killer constantly on the run from the police. While hiding out in Paris, he feels a compulsion to enter a building, which seemingly contains more on the inside than it does on the outside. This is the headquarters of the mysterious organization known as "Leonox and Co." headed by, as you may expect, a man named Leonox. But Leonox is less a man than he is a demon; he possesses supernatural powers, and is in fact the embittered slave of what may or may not be the cosmic embodiment of evil, known as "the Master" or "He Who Controls Leonox." In exchange for his service, Leonox offers Lacana a new identity, including a new face and set of fingerprints--he'll accomplish this by giving him a whole new body. The first of many catches in this deal is that in order to get this body, he has to share a coffin with it. The process is a success, however, and Lacana becomes instead Francis Dalvant, a famous journalist killed in Vietnam. As part of his operations, "Dalvant" next comes in contact with the mysterious Lisa, a young woman who claims to be able to see Lacana's soul in Dalvant's body. Lisa has frequent clashes with the police for her strange statements and behavior; they think she's a drug addict. Slowly, however, Lacana/Dalvant will learn that she is Leonox's spiritual opposite, a servant of a more benevolent cosmic force known as "He Who Controls Lisa." (It's worth noting that neither of these cosmic forces are truly good or evil, it's just that Lisa is beautiful and Leonox is monstrous, both in a variety of ways.) His encounters with Lisa "reunite" him with Dalvant's old friend, the Principal of Police Princex. In the end, Lisa and Princex reform Lacana, who ultimately takes on the mental traits of Dalvant, who was an intrinsically good man. He and Lisa go after Leonox and successfully kill him after he takes control of the body of Dr. Satelm, who has the power to unleash a world-destroying plague. Lisa takes the rap for the murder, claiming she was Satelm's jealous mistress, and goes to jail--but to Lacana/Dalvant's delight, she escapes, and he begins traveling the world in search of her.

It's amazing how well Leonox, Monstre des Tenebres fits the formula of English pulp stories, and how well it pulls it off too. It's something of a random events plot, yes--now Lacana is poisoned with curare! Now Leonox is trying to unleash a plague!--but it also taps into the vein of worldbuilding which is so vital to pulp storytelling. So many ideas whiz past us at once. Just pages after revealing that our narrator-protagonist is a serial murderer, we are dragged into a world of the magical and inexplicable with the cosmic distortions of Leonox's headquarters. From there we have body-swapping, celestial war, and living burials. Oftentimes, the descriptions of the spiritual aspects of Leonox and Lisa come across as Lovecraft-lite, or Lovecraft processed through fairy-tales--sparkling and glittering, but also vast, unknowable, and perhaps most properly, incomprehensible. All of this is presented in a style which is both simple and compelling.

I really should say how grateful I am for the simplicity of the style. A lot of key points are repeated again and again, which helped me get through the plot in the case of my translations failing the first time around. (I'm still embarrassingly vulnerable to false cognates.) However, this style is also probably the book's greatest weakness--as compelling as it is, the tendency to repeat does get a little silly at times. "It was incredible that I, Lacana, ten-time killer, could be standing here in the presence of the police!" is a phrase that comes up over time and time again. Yeah, I imagine most serial killers would be shocked at rubbing elbows with the cops after making their faces known, but we don't need to be told that so often. Lacana also has a tendency to forget that he is now Francis Dalvant for too much of the book, and he keeps chanting that he has new fingerprints over and over again. These parts can be glazed over once you get the rhythm of things, though.

I keep thinking about how cool it is to have the main character of the book be a serial killer who slowly redeems himself as pieces of another man merge with his persona. I'm pretty sure that Dalvant's spirit is actually coming back and that's what's causing Lacana to take on his traits--eventually their reference to themselves as two people seems to transcend metaphor. Lacana/Dalvant is thus of dual nature, good and evil--though Dalvant wasn't purely good, nor was Lacana purely evil. Setting up this dichotomy furthers the book's themes of good and evil by making our lead(s?) into parallel(s?) of Leonox and Lisa, albeit with human drives that the reader can understand. Bera seems to believe that Good and Evil are important concepts to mankind, but they also have gray areas and spots where they blend--how very '70s of him! It's notable too that Christianity doesn't enter the picture at all; neither of the forces behind Leonox and Lisa are aligned with God or Satan in any way.

I say this is a book that reflects the '70s, but it's also French in a way that reminds me of why I love French media. It makes sense to title the series after Leonox, and to have the protagonist be a reforming serial killer, when this is a story coming from the same country that created not only the Grand Guignol, but Fantomas, the ultimate villain-pulp protagonist and grandpappy to Diabolik, Killing, Kriminal, and all those other groovy, creepy masked thieves and killers who spread through Europe and the Middle East throughout the middle of the 20th Century. France loves its villains, and Leonox was no exception...even if he's largely forgotten today.

The chronicles of Lisa and Leonox are practically begging for English translations, and I would eagerly snap those up if/when they ever came along. Despite some minor flaws, this was an awesome read and I would love to see what happened next to these characters. Longue vie à Leonox!

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The Fast Set (1957), by Pierre Foucaud

The war between progress and tradition is the conflict of our age--if we survive our current period of history, people will look back at today as the center of an era defined by a profound and violent difference between left- and right-wing politics. I suspect that by the time this is all over--if it ever ends--we will be left with a world less fundamentally grounded on the old 18th Century idea of liberalism vs. conservatism than what we're used to. At the very least, the definitions of those institutions will be dramatically shifted, or at least, shifted to different sets of issues. And, while this could be construed as wishful thinking, I suspect that conservatism, at least in the United States, is ultimately on its last legs; the recent indications of intensifying conservatism in the form of the increasing activity of white supremacist movements and the like are symbols of conservative inability to reconcile the general right-wing identity with the way the country is going, even in this post-Obama world of ours, which will lead to a burnout followed by a generally progressive (i.e. not necessarily leftist) attitude amongst the populace-at-large. That's my interpretation, at least.

But let's not talk about the present state of ideological conflict (seriously; keep it out of the comments). Today we're talking about the 1950s. Pierre Foucaud's The Fast Set is a lot of things, including a romance and a striptease documentary; but it's also about the difference between the old ways and the new, the libertine and the reserved. Only the French could produce a sexploitation movie that so convincingly touches on real issues.

Sophie is the daughter of a wealthy Lyons family, who disapprove of her boyfriend Jack and her desire to follow him and her dreams of being an artist to Paris. Thanks to her cool mom, Sophie is able to join Jack in Paris, but the fast life she discovers is nothing she's prepared for. Sure, Sophie is used to rebellion back in Lyons, but she wasn't prepared for the world of stripteases, nude modeling, and prototypical free love. She has to dodge the attentions of her jealous rival Rita, and in her quest to win Jack over entirely, she becomes a bohemian. Eventually, the stage calls to her. Out in the parlor, the audience awaits their striptease...

First of all, it needs to be said that this movie is, for nearly all modern audiences, going to seem extremely mild. I don't know how much of that is deliberate, but let's just say those of us who have seen Human Centipede 2 are going to find Sophie's dad's offense at her leaving dinner without being properly excused a little silly. In the beginning, I do believe that Sophie's actions are meant to be seen as rebellious (they also include the abominable crime of eating sweets instead of dinner), but they are not quite on par with taking off your clothes all sexy-like for a crowd of strangers. She is meant to start out naive so she can make her lovely quest towards true libertinism. I do always enjoy stories like this, of young people finding their inner freedoms, even as I get older and more cynical. Movies like this, as milquetoasty as they can be, help me feel less crusty around the edges.

The conservatism, on the other hand, does feel real. Even today we have to contend with old ladies who think that wearing shorts is slutty; and I think all of us have heard at least one middle-aged dude who is refuted on a point for just this once, whose immediate response is to bluster, "I GUESS I'M JUST ALWAYS WRONG THEN." The times, they are a-not changing. I would have laughed if Sophie's dad had a t-shirt that said, "J'ai accheté cet fusil à pompe parce qu'un jour un garçon va sortir avec ma fille"--and not because those shirts are ever anything but fucking sexist and dumb. At least this movie is...generally not racist? Some of the striptease acts are likely to offend people (there's one involving a hashish-smoking sheikh called "Impressions of the Orient"), but it's still usually pretty mild.

The stripteases themselves are presented, as I alluded before, in a pseudo-documentary fashion. This movie illustrates superbly the transition between old-world burlesque and the exotic dancing of today. Initially, we see that these acts are tamer than what we're accustomed, with one of them never even showing the nipples of the woman in question. Then, several of the acts we see actually follow vague storylines. By the time that we see our strippers are a pair of male Laurel & Hardy impressionists, whose deliberately unerotic striptease is received humorously by the audience, we know that we're looking at an animal which is today extinct in the wild. If you put two ugly guys out on stage at a strip club and had them start taking their clothes off, they'd be lynched. Now, I don't say that to disparage the modern exotic dancing industry--just perhaps their audience. It's just interesting to see such an "artsy" take on what we unjustly view today as a lowdown sort of thing, and more interesting to think about how our society may have gotten that way. Have we become more liberal with our sexuality, in our treatment of women, or less? Has the art gone away on its own, or did we push it out? And what can we do for the stripping and exotic dancing which does still hold the artistic spirit?

The movie does get some details of realism wrong. For example, no one is ever turned on during a nude modeling. Not the models, not the artists. I haven't even participated in a nude modeling art session (you can tell because I don't know what they're properly called), and I know that they're uncomfortable as fuck. Not because of the nudity, but because art is pain, and also, studios are cold. When one of the artists remarked on the attractiveness of his nude model I was completely taken out of the movie. ZERO STARS.

To return to the themes in a serious sense for a moment: this movie is about the Big City turning a privileged girl into a rebel, but it's also about a country girl taming a city man. Tradition gets a little victory at the end, which may have been a scene tacked on for the sake of censors and pearl-clutchers. It's interesting to see the movie try to be fair, in a way which is pretty harmless at that. The whole movie is pretty harmless, again due to the oft-stated mildness.

On the trash side, we get such wonders as the tiniest car ever (seriously, EVER) and an extremely casual delivery of the line, "She could kill herself!" There's also an awesome jazz soundtrack which will probably get stuck in your head. If you like seeing interesting '50s politics, and you also like seeing people take their clothes off comedically, you need to speed up--so you can catch up with The Fast Set.

...also this movie probably features the last-ever use of the word "Set" in that context, at least until The Rebel Set came along in 1959. And speaking of The Rebel Set, we'll get into mid-century MST3K fodder again in just a little bit.

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Ogroff (1983), by Norbert Mautier

 There is nothing I can really say about this fucking movie.

That line could be read as negative. I could be about to lunge into a critique of this film's many structural flaws. But no, that's not really what this fucking blog is at all. Of course I love this movie. I cherish this movie beyond many other movies like it, and it is a movie that is so much a part of my life that I've already exhausted words about it elsewhere. I've written about this movie semi-professionally in college, and I've shared it with literally everyone I've met. Whether they've watched it or not I don't know. It should be watched. It is a movie that is honestly shocking to behold, no matter what walk of life one comes from. To fans of "good" movies, movies like 2001 or Citizen Kane, it will be an offensive shock. To fans of "bad" movies, like Birdemic and Saving Christmas and maybe even some sprinklings of Driller Killer or Manos, it will also be an offensive shock. However, you will come to love it. The pain it brings is so self-evidently proud of the accomplishments it stems from. It is, like so many movies I love, a movie that has taken the limits of poverty and transformed them into riches and boundless constructs that sometimes rival the "good" movies of their environments. I would rather watch Mautier than Truffaut. I do have to wonder who the harder watch is, however.

Ogroff is atmospherically dark, visually ambitious, bizarrely comical, and disturbingly well-plotted. The movie opens with many seemingly unrelated scenes of Ogroff, a masked trepanned killer who lives in the French woods in a shack full of porn and axes, killing several people. He also eats them, feeds bits of the bodies to zombies in his basement (more on that later), and masturbates with an axe substituting his dick. More importantly, he engages in a duel with a chainsaw-wielding lumberjack that is as or more gripping than a middle-school fanfic of some crossover with Leatherface. (If you have a sense of humor this will be very gripping.) Chessboards, chainsaws, and children--none are safe from the axe of Ogroff, who reminiscences over how he served and was presumably disfigured in World War II. There is almost no dialogue, and even with subtitles the dialogue present is meaningless. ("Walking's good for you, you stupid bitch!") This all leads up to where he meets a lady friend...and the rest is history. Let us just say that the movie attempts to pass off the sadistic child-killing cannibal as a knight in shining armor, and partially works.

Every so often in my fiction you'll come across a reference to Ogroff. I could write forever on it, and how precious it is as an example of refined Eurotrash. Talking about be-alls and end-alls, however, is rarely interesting, which would lead me to instead talk about the fine details. But as ever, the fine details are not particularly related to one another. Blood drips out of a crushed car over a stick of Donald Duck. A woman changes oil in her car. Flies buzz while people are tied to stakes. But sometimes, truer scenes will enter--most are disturbing. Ogroff decapitates a child and feeds her mom's tongue to a dog. Other times, they will feature things like Ogroff bursting out of a woman's locked car trunk without any setup. Those times are amusing. The movie is a real slushy cocktails of a bunch of different types of stories, and it's made for so very little...

It's the archetype of a trash movie superstar. Imaginations fill the empty voids of "normal" or "workable" budgets or filming conditions. Everything is wrong, and yet the ambition replaces the wrongness with innocence. Even when Ogroff, who has probably not showered in forty years if this movie is set at the time of release, sleeps with a random woman who stumbles into his shack from the woods. I think she might be a reporter. In any case, she's fine with him being a killer and everything. She ripped a man's head off, after all. However, it's tough living the life with Ogroff. Sometimes, you'll accidentally free all the zombies he keeps trapped under his property, which he's been keeping locked away and placated using the remains of his victims. Whoops. And away Ogroff goes--in pursuit of his lady-love, wielding an axe on a motorcycle. With a helmet over his nailed-on mask, even. That's, like, seven different movies, or maybe it just feels like that. It is legendary. It is...

I can't say anything else or it will genuinely ruin it. You'll see. I haven't mentioned Howard Vernon in it. He's only in there for a little bit, and it's a good glimpse to prepare for the Howard love that will appear on this blog. You better like long shots of zombies wandering, though. Of course that was how the movie was going to end up--that disconnected craziness cannot last forever. However, those early glimpses create a great tower for the ending to sit on. We see at the end that this is a world of crazy: Evil Eyes, werewolves, vampires, zombies, and masked serial killers. It all concludes as humbly as it began. This is an every fact of life for this part of the French wilderness. That's all it is.

I suppose now I've gone and told everything. I couldn't help it--it is constantly a presence in my mind now. Perhaps it is something malevolent...I have noticed that I'll notice things almost every time I rewatch, and I've rewatched it about two dozen times. I think that's a sign that the movie changes. Let me know if this affects you, too. I've been trying to see what it wants with us.

Portents aside, Ogroff is still a thing of divinity. It is beyond our words, and thus, something-something Sapir-Whorf, I believe it is beyond our world as well. For good or for ill. Watch it.