Top Ten A-List Films of 2018

2018 was a wild ride without these movies. How can I even describe what it was like with them?

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The Mad Doctor of Market Street (1942), by Joseph H. Lewis

Lionel Atwill is resurrecting the dead, like a goddamn asshole. Won't you step into his lab on old Market Street?

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Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971), by Thomas Casey

Pride continues by asking the vital question: Stanley, why won't you just get that hair cut? Featuring drag galore!

Geisha Girl (1952), by George Breakston and C. Ray Stahl

What, a comedy that I find actually somewhat funny?! Also the home of ZORO, the greatest wizard who ever lived.

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Fanny Hill (1964), by Russ Meyer

John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has a history to it which I must confess I am somewhat ill-equipped to encapsulate. Suffice it to say that it is one of the earliest erotic novels in English, at least one of the earliest to achieve and sustain notice both during and after its own time. Telling the tale of young Fanny Hill, and her indoctrination into the world of prostitution, Memoirs set the stage for a tradition of Western pornography that saw various revivals after the commencement of the trend in the mid 18th Century, with perhaps the biggest revival in recent memory being the book's influence on the Sexual Revolution of the '60s and '70s. As a reflection of that reminiscence, none other than Russ Meyer himself set his usual crew of busty ladies to the task of adapting Cleland's two-century-old novel to film--it was likely not the first such adaptation of its kind, and it was certainly not the last. It is perhaps most appropriate that Meyer handled the production of Fanny Hill, as he would become one of the exploitation filmmakers with recognized mainstream cred. He ended making Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with Roger Ebert, after all. To make a comedy of manners based around a fetishized classed-up version of the 18th Century, adapting one of the most famous pieces of erotic literature ever written, could hardly have been in better hands than Meyer's.

Fanny Hill is a young, innocent orphan, and it is clear from the start that "innocent" may be the understatement of her native 18th Century. After basically being robbed by her only friend, she starts looking for a job in London, ending up in the hands of "kindly" Mrs. Brown, whose dead daughter Fanny ostensibly resembles. Brown takes her back to her, well, brothel, where the shenanigans begin. Fanny never assumes that sex is the object of her various interactions, whether it be with her leather-clad, cigarette-smoking lesbian "cousin" (which oh my god it is so hard watching these movies while being gay and single) or with several men who are brought over to enjoy her company. Eventually, she meets a young man nearly as innocent as herself, an ensign named Charles--when Charles endeavors to marry Fanny, Mrs. Brown arranges for him to be kidnapped by pirates. But love, or what passes for it in this tale, sometimes comes back in strange ways. And maybe love is what it'll take to get Fanny of the life she's found for herself.

Most of the charm and humor of the film--as well as a lot of the unintentional horror--comes from the veritable sea of double entendres that populate the runtime. This sort of comedy thrives on the idea of the 18th Century and the Victorian period which followed it being a time of great euphemism, often contrasting an archetypical bawdiness found in the scandal sheets and "low publications" of the time--which included Fanny Hill itself. Consequently, the world of this movie has a dynamic where it's somehow inappropriate to talk about sex directly even though literally everyone except for the title character is a pervert. Now, obviously, the premise that exploits this--that Fanny is unaware of everything because of her inability to navigate the social customs of her time--does definitely have a creepy edge to it. There are more than a few instances where the "joke" is basically that someone is about to take advantage of Fanny's lack of sexual knowledge to rape her. And I have to bring that up because, well--I have to. As the 21st Century continues to define itself, its style and trends will inevitably shift to progress beyond the ethical confines of the 20th Century. Consequently, I always dive into older sex comedies under the presumption that I as a woman will probably feel uncomfortable. After all, these movies were made for men. Comedies directed primarily at women--sexist in themselves for entirely different reasons--became their own thing at a certain point, but their own problems are beyond the limits of this review. What I mean to say is: rape, or at least threatened rape in some form or another, has been seen as funny in a lot of these older movies, especially when it's dolled up under surrounding contexts of eroticism. But I did not feel uncomfortable with Fanny Hill--though I know I can't speak for everyone. I think it's just because no one, not even the most provincial peasant girl of the most remote part of King George's England, could be as naive as Fanny. At some point you're going to figure out that someone wants to have sex with you for money, or at least that your roommates have sex for money.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in the 1700s, which capture that unique fantastic spirit of that century. After all, I was definitely pulled into the euphemism comedy, even if it is basically the film's only joke. We have rhyming market sellers, slops thrown on people in the streets, and seeming gallons of busty prostitutes dangling giggling out of windows. Not based on reality--not one as pleasant as presented, of course--but an aesthetic which I think is perfect for the sort of "bawdiness" that this movie sets out to achieve. It's the loyalty not only to the appearance of the London of Cleland's time and description, but it's also the loyalty to the tone of Cleland's work, so particularly rooted in the 18th Century, that helps this movie work so well for me.

Some of the humor is in taking the piss out of the formality of the 18th Century. Lines like "Don't tell the others you don't even belong to the Guild" are pretty great, and they help add onto the primary joke of Fanny's copious innocence. Other jokes occasionally prod in, some truly bizarre, like when Charles tells Mrs. Brown, "Topping kidneys, ma'am!" and she says, "My own...the recipe, that is." There's nothing else like that in the rest of the movie, so it made me laugh. A good comedy is like a good soup. You need to have onions to make the chicken taste good, but if you just cram a bunch of fucking onions in everywhere then...yeah. As for charm--part of wit, and thus essential to an 18th Century comedy of manners--that comes from the heart. Russ Meyer had heart, I feel. But then, this is only the second of his movies that I've seen, and I know nothing of the man in real life.

I present this movie in a somewhat bitter context, as I wrestle with issues of my own sexuality--specifically if/where I fall on the asexual spectrum--and my feelings on how the normative prioritization of sexual relationships in modern society marginalizes asexual and aromatic people. I've never felt comfortable with the '60s notion of "Free Love" since I was educated on how this was actually used frequently as an excuse for rape, but I now feel obligated to warn my fellow progressives that many of the old beliefs on sexuality are no longer keyed to liberal progress, at least as long as they do not shift to fully accommodate people who don't have that sort of attraction. In the '60s this movie probably felt pretty miraculous. The early '60s saw film cast off a great many of its shackles, at least in the underground market. Now, I have to wonder. Not because I'm a prude, because true prudes if they exist want people to feel shame for their sexuality, and what I want instead is for ace people to feel included. Just remember, I guess, that 100 minutes of waggling bosoms and double/triple/quadruple entendres can be fun, but to some of us it also just gets a little tacky. Because that's just not what we're into. And then when you can't get away from it, that's the problem.

But I really enjoyed Fanny Hill, even if it sits precariously now. It's well-written and the sets and costumes are marvelous. It was one of my favorite views of 2017, and I've already rewatched it three times this year. Whether it's harmless to you, or whether its non-harmlessness is a deterrent, is a ball in your court. Proceed with caution, unless you know that sexploitation can offer nothing new to you.

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House of Mystery (1934), by William Nigh

That the Old Dark House film and the gorilla picture were wedded early on stands to reason. All the time today do we see popular trends welded anxiously onto each other in an attempt to double-dip on certain media markets. I doubt this was the first ODH gorilla movie, but it was far from the last. Indeed, depending on where you look, it seemed almost mandatory for a gorilla to at least be teased as playing a part in the events to come once all the characters were settled in the house. House of Mystery is not a great A-Lister...it's one of the dumb ones. I don't like it for any good reason, and it's perhaps arguable whether I like it at all. This is a rare film where most of my amusement comes from pure gawking, and that probably means it's no good at all.

In one of the weirdest openings I've seen in these films, we start in "Asia, 1913." Archaeologist John Prendergast likes two things here in "Asia": drinking, and dancing girls. When he's cut off from one he turns to the other, in this case seeking out the dancers at the Temple of Kali--pronounced "Kay-LIE" here because white people in the '30s were not great at paying attention to these things. (So we're in India, then, and not just "Asia.") Conspicuously the Temple of Kali features a pair of guys in gorilla suits--they aren't there for nothing, coming to life when Prendergast is brought there after drunkenly killing one of the Temple's sacred monkeys, invoking the curse of Kali when he calls the priests "dogs" and starts whipping them (!!!). Prendergast escapes, taking not only one of the dancing girls with him but also a fortune in jewels. He and the girl seemingly get married, in an amazingly casual subversion of 1910s race relations, and we fast forward to twenty years later. A man named Professor Potter and his wife are looking for Prendergast and believe that he is now living under the name Mr. Pren in a large mansion, having been confined to a wheelchair or pretending such. Alongside an insurance salesman and several other annoying individuals, the Potters go to Pren's house to talk over the terms of finally doling out payments to those who invested in the Prendergast Expedition all those years ago. Unfortunately, it is Pren/Prendergast's belief that the Curse of Kali extends to those who inherit the wealth of the treasure. Thus, all the heirs must stay in his Old Dark House to see the horror of Kali before they can be allowed in on their share. Before long they're all sat down at the seance table, and a gorilla lunges out of the darkness at Mrs. Carfax...

So, I can imagine the first thing you're thinking: are gorillas an actual part of Hinduism? I tried to look into this to see if any sort of research was done on behalf of the screenwriters, and the closest I could come is this: there is a character in a Ramayana named Hanuman who is a monkey-like being in the service of Rama. However, this movie is about the cult of Kali, who, as far as I know, isn't even another avatar of Vishnu, as Rama is. Hindu belief has a less strict sense of orthodoxy than Christianity but as far as I know there has never been an ape cult of Kali in Indian history. This is just the beginning of the movie's many problems.

There's the weird bit where the medium lady's spirit guide is named "Pocahontas," and I'm not sure if she's supposed to be the historical Pocahontas or just a ghost who goes by that name. This is used for a couple of cheap shots equating Indians with American Indians, which is made worse by the fact that the drums that accompany the gorilla attacks are called tom-toms. I found out actually that "tom-tom" comes from Indian and Sri Lankan immigrants to England, where it was adopted by white people as the name for a toy drum and later for part of modern drum kits--so actually this is more accurate than the word's use in the Westerns it's likely to remind audiences of. In the '30s, however, one has to wonder if this is a furtherance of the "Pocahontas" Indian/Indian cross-up.

Regarding the film's racism, then: poor Chanda, Pren's wife, gets treated like shit in this. There's this lovely exchange about her between the girl and the insurance salesman douchebag guy, who--argh--end up together.

Girl: "I don't like the looks of that person."
Asshole: "Person? She looks more like Gandhi's ghost!" (??????)

As far as I know, yes, he is questioning that she's a person. (Also, I'm sure a reference to Gandhi's death won't have a harsh edge to it in fourteen years or so. Asshole.) Now, Chanda came back with Prendergast to become his wife, right? Like...they're married, right? 'Cause we saw them kissing back in India, right? Nooope. It turns out that Lead Gal is the one Prendergast wants, and Chanda is, in the ex-archaeologist's own words, "just [his] housekeeper." JESUS. You can presume from those kissing scenes that he fucked her as soon as he got her back to the homeland, and then proceeded to fuck her in another way by ditching her for other (white) girls. When it turns out that Chanda is the killer, having worked with Prendergast to use trained gorillas to scare off those who are after "his" investment money, you really don't feel bad at all that her last victim is Prendergast himself. When the two of them left India, she was probably about twenty, and so she's in her early forties now, but there's a certain age to her face that would make the film loads better if they decided to do anything with it. Maybe that's why in the end Chanda gets away, with the only assertion that she's caught being a "don't worry about her" from the local cop. Since everyone in this movie is an idiot I'm assuming said cop has no way of catching her and is just trying to cover his ass. Dick.

One has to ask what the makers of this movie thought its appeal was. In order to answer that question, we have to ask what the movie sets out to do. Well, because it's an Old Dark House film, it's basically out to make money off of cheap scares and cheaper laughs. (Seriously, the "comedy" in this is so bad that it nearly becomes good through sheer surrealism.) The slackness of its research suggests that any sort of subtext, including the movie's imperialism (or possible subversion thereof), are probably accidental. Ever since the miracle stories of the days of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or the bizarre descriptions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the West has had an obsession with weird tales, and has primordially linked those tales with the foreign. Whether they be from the forest beyond or the next continent over, people from other lands have been associated with the mystical and monstrous. The trend has only been challenged comparatively recently and it will be a long time yet before the racist aspects of tropes such as it die out completely. Even last year's The Mummy showed that studios at least are still interested in marketing the "exotic" as a source of horror, mystery, and unknown evil. However, to go back and try to answer my own question, I can't imagine a group of filmmakers setting out to make a movie which attempts to make funny the misadventures of abusive, idiotic assholes who--at least in the case of Lead Girl--are punished if they have any trace of redeemability. Oh, wait, never mind, I can imagine such people, because that sort of formula has always been used by movie comedies and is still being used today. Arrrrrggghhhh.

Just gawk, folks. Just gawk at how fucking stupid this movie is, and give it no quarter. You will only find entertainment if you expect nothing and give no fucks about your own well-being.

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The Intruder (1933), by Albert Ray

Why are movies so weird? Well, I suppose because people made them that way. With movies like The Intruder I can get back into the psychosis of trash cinema--the strange neural lapses, the personality tics, that made people make these...things. The Intruder is a screwed-up little movie, a possible relic of that bizarre, magical era where filmmakers didn't really know the new medium they were working with, leading to clunky mismatches of genre that leave the whole affair just downright odd. Trying all at once to be a zany comedy, a mystery movie, and a horror thriller, The Intruder ends up being both implicitly and explicitly disturbing, hard to put into words and yet all the while, shockingly mundane.

We open in the middle of a Godzilla movie, by which I mean we open with a hilariously fake-looking toy ship that looks like it belongs, at best, in the third Blind Dead film, The Ghost Galleon. This ship is the titular Intruder, and not only is there a man aboard with half a million dollars in stolen diamonds, but a murder has been committed as well. It seems like an ordinary stagey '30s mystery, with the detective lining up and interrogating the suspects...and then the weirdness happens. A fire breaks out on the ship and the passengers are lost at sea. Here, they end up on a desert island (?) where they are threatened by a gorilla who makes horrible screeching noises (!) and a wild man with a Tarzan yodel (!!!). (The actual shipwreck scene is surprisingly harrowing, with dozens shown drowning, despite the apparent plethora of lifeboats.) Said wildman lives in a ruined cabin with the bones of his (wife? girlfriend? victim?) "Mary" and "Joe," the man who apparently stood between them. This movie features a wild man wrestling with an inanimate skeleton, screaming angrily. This is all treated very casually up until they get off the island and wrap up the murder/theft.

I'm sure the reasons behind this movie are much more ordinary than I'm imagining. I suspect that this began life as an ordinary mystery B-programmer, but a studio mandate told director Ray to throw in a jungle segment, with a wild man and a guy in a gorilla suit, and so that just had to happen. It all worked to Ray's benefit anyway, as the lengthy divergences we delve into on the island help pad out what would otherwise be a duller-than-cardboard mystery film. It still ends up just under 54 minutes. With the release of Ingagi two years prior, gorilla films and jungle films in general started their vogue. My Gods, this movie was probably trying to cash in on an exploitation movie that said that Africans have children with gorillas.

It was also still pretty popular at the time to have comedy be part of your mystery, and to cross over into horror wasn't unexpected either. That's why we get things like the comic relief drunk uncle, because alcoholism is so fucking funny. This is also why there are lines like, "Now I know why Robinson Crusoe called his Man Friday--they ate fish everyday," in the same context as a murderous caveman and a shitton of people fucking drowning. (Gotta love the shots of the people drowning intercut with several of our main characters standing on the most spacious lifeboat ever. Seriously, you could fit at least four more people into that thing!) This is where another old friend comes out to play: the fact that They Just Didn't Care.

Let's talk about our murderous caveman for a bit. There are several possibilities present in his little story, each more disturbing than the last. It seems pretty obvious that he murdered "Joe," but we don't know Joe's role in things. He could have threatened the Wild Man and "Mary," or maybe Mary originally dated Joe and the Wild Man wanted a different arrangement. The review for this movie on Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings puts forth the possibility that if the Wild Man still stabs Joe's skeleton like he's alive, what does he do with Mary's remains...? Ewww! Add in the fact that we don't know if Mary herself died a natural death and you have an entire secret horror movie packed away on this island.

I just really don't know what to say about this one. Aside from the sheer oddity of how far the script diverges from its original premise, there isn't much to write home about--it's clunky and stage-like, as I said, and the actor's voices sometimes barely rise above the set's sound effects due to the cheap, primitive recording equipment. It never perfectly holds my attention and really likes spinning its wheels, when already most of it is padding. But it's so unique and peerless even beyond its native era by sheer concept alone that it's worth at least one watch. At 53 minutes, how can you refuse?

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The Black Raven (1943), by Sam Newfield

...and we're back!

After I was done writing up the reviews for 2017 I actually had a chance to (gasp!) watch movies for pleasure--that is to say I got to watch the movies I usually watch but without the need to write about them. During this time I continued my exploration of the trash of the 1930s and '40s, eventually stumbling onto the horror-mystery filmography of George Zucco. I previously had only known Zucco for his small role in Voodoo Man and those boring Mummy movies, but I found him to be a hauntingly charismatic actor and every late night after coming home from my day job, I would make a habit of throwing on one of his little hour-long thrillers while my sleeping meds kicked in. I'll be dealing with some of my favorites from the bunch slowly over the course of 2018, and I knew when I made the decision to spotlight some of Zucco's flicks, I would start with The Black Raven.

Amos Bradford is the Black Raven, who runs an inn by the same name. Under that criminal alias, Bradford helps smuggle crooks like mobster Mike Baroni across the border into Canada. Late one night he's attacked by Whitey Cole, an old member of his racket, but he subdues him with the aid of his groundskeeper Andy. Around this time, however, the border bridge washes out, resulting a flock of guests suddenly arriving at the Raven: Horace Weatherby, a suspicious banker with an equally-suspicious suitcase; Lee Winfield, daughter of Mike Baroni's political rival Tim Winfield; Lee's fiance Allen; and finally Tim Winfield himself. There's also a prowling Sheriff, played by Charles (excuse me, "Charlie") Middleton, aka Ming the Merciless. Allen and Winfield clash rather harshly, and Winfield discovers that Weatherby has embezzled $50,000 from the bank he worked for--he steals this money off Weatherby for himself. Is it really that much of a surprise when the old politician winds up murdered when he's so unlikable? Of course, Allen is the prime suspect--after all, Winfield was calling the police to report Allen for kidnapping his daughter just before he was murdered! The Raven, however, is sure the kid didn't do it, and despite his own nature as a crook, he wants to make sure young Allen doesn't get punished for a crime he didn't commit.

Like any good mystery, it's the cast that matters. Zucco is infinitely charming as Bradford, nailing simultaneously the role of a hardened criminal and the heart of gold which lurks within said crook. You can believe he's a good man who was nonetheless willing to sell out Whitey Cole when it suited him. Contrariwise there's little to the engaged couple short of the typical stuff we see in young couples from '40s horror films, but they are plot devices in what is ultimately Zucco's movie. Weatherby, until we find out his dark secret, is kind of a minor hero for retail workers, putting in a speech about how cloying and awful his bank-desk job really was ("I couldn't stand that awful subway with its thick stench of sweat and garlic..."). Baroni does a good job as an anxious but cocky gangster, and Tim Winfield is pure, uncut asshole--robbing a desperate man, and threatening his daughter's fiance to the fullest extent possible. "Lee isn't quite 21," he says, "and kidnapping's a crime. I'll make sure you get the limit!" In 1943, kidnapping meant the chair...yep, that's right! This guy isn't just a crooked politician and a thief, he's willing to have his daughter's boyfriends executed when he doesn't get his way!

Not all the cast is that great. Charles Middleton doesn't get nearly enough screentime, even if his Sheriff does have an interesting rivalry with Bradford. Glenn Strange, the former Frankenstein's Monster himself, is our ostensible comic relief, and while I've seen Strange act outside the Franky makeup before...he's much better hidden in it. His "humor" is so bad it actually took me a few viewings to even recognize that he was supposed to be our comic relief. He's that bad.

But most significantly, there is a road patrolman who is played by none other than Jimmy "Ptomaine Pete" Aubrey. He's only there briefly and he's not that funny, but he's loads better than Glenn Strange. Recognizing Aubrey in things is always a treat, even if they decided not to give him a credit for this one.

There's something right at the beginning which marks this as a PRC movie: it uses the same stock music that PRC, Monogram, and every other Poverty Row studio harvested back in the day. Listening to this movie, you can almost get it mixed up with The Devil Bat and Invisible Ghost and all the rest. Despite its Poverty Row status, it doesn't do dare to do much outside the Hayes Code--even though Amos is essentially a good guy, he still has to die because he committed crimes at some point and such folk must not be suffered to live. There is some blood, though! It's always fun seeing blood in a '40s horror movie. It's like thinking you've forgotten to order a topping on a pizza and you open up the box and see that they gave you extra of that topping.

The Black Raven is a tightly-paced thriller with plenty of great scripting and a genuine mystery. It's a great first George Zucco movie, and it's a great movie for me to come back to as well. I'm glad to be back. Let Zucco blaze the trail into what will be a year of awesome films.

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The Primal Essence: The Mudman's Top Ten New Views of 2017

2017 saw a lot of growth for the A-List! I found a comfortable schedule wherein I could squeeze in three reviews a week, and I intend to hang onto that schedule for as long as I can. I opened a Patreon, which has been an exciting experience so far. I posted a bad movie sci-fi novella. I was able to find nine weird books to talk about--not as many as I'd hoped, but that's what next year is for. It was a marvelous time and I can't tell you how glad I was to have this site to go back to whenever the real world came down too hard on me. The fact that so many of you kept showing up week after week made it all the better. I may curate its entries, but it's really you guys who build my A-List...you're all on my A-List of People. You are the finest souls I know.

The movies on this list are the cream of the crop. They tore my heart from my chest and shook up my soul. I hope you track them down if you haven't already because they will reshape your life for the better. Well, actually, it's for the worse. But in a good way. Capiche?

FROM BEST TO BESTEST:

#10 - I AM HERE...NOW, by Neil Breen

It is only out of a stubborn respect for the later entries of this list that Mr. Breen ended up at the number ten spot...otherwise this one would be much higher. I Am Here...Now was the best possible introduction to Breen I could(n't)'ve hoped for. I've seen some pretty bizarre Ancient Alien stories over the years, but this one takes the cake--Breen is a sign that Weird Film is far from dead, even as the Intentional Bad Movies try to take their cut from the legacy spawned by the people whom Breen now succeeds. May self-awareness never touch you, Neil, ol' buddy. I'm so glad I have the rest of your filmography to discover.

#9 - THE PHANTOM COWBOY, by Robert J. Horner / SMOKING GUNS, by Alan James

A dirty stinkin' tie! I knew I had to have one B-Western on here and no matter how much boiling down I did I couldn't pick one of these over the other. Smoking Guns is definitely the "better" movie, but the sheer shittiness of The Phantom Cowboy makes it feel truly alien. I'm starting to doubt I'll find Westerns weirder than these two, but if these are the best there are I'm in good company. I've definitely raised a lot of eyebrows in my time talking about the movies I watch with the people I know in Real Life. They've never been raised higher than when I tried to describe these two.

#8 - DRUMS O' VOODOO, by Arthur Hoerl

'Cause the drums make me happy...drums make me happy...my feelings on the so-called "race pictures" have shifted somewhat since I wrote this review due to some things I've learned about them (i.e. creative control was not in the hands of the actual black performers as much as I thought), but there's no taking away the talent from Drums O' Voodoo's cast. Aunt Hagar is still one of my favorite movie characters of all time, and to my dying day I won't forget the time she fucking sassed off Jesus. At this point, I feel I've seen every voodoo movies there is, but there's something deeply special about this one. I'm (ideally) getting a new copy soon, which may be from a different print...I may have to write something up if it turns out the lost footage is in this version.

#7 - JUNGLE TRAP, by James Bryan

I don't like getting hyped for movies because it's so easy for those sorts of hopes to get dashed. But not when James Bryan and Renee Harmon are at the helm. My heart nearly exploded when I learned this was a thing and it was a tough sweat waiting for it to come out. But it was worth it. Farewell to a pair of great careers...you guys made my life, one last time. Oh, how I wish you still had one left in you.

#6 - SWEET TRASH, by John Hayes

Now we're slipping into the New Weird. For me, that is. I spent so much of my life thinking I'd seen all the greats, but then this year came along and I started to see some trippy fucking shit. Sweet Trash is apparently not overly beloved even among trashsters, which is saddening. This movie dips into territory both grim and hilarious, often without warning, in the best of ways. As far as boggy-surreal nightmares go, this one just barely beat out Disconnected and Euridice BA 2037, which would make a great triple feature with this.

#5 - NIGHTMARE ALLEY, by Edmund Goulding

Gotta have at least one legitimately good movie on here. I guess this Ty Power guy is hot stuff, huh? Well, even if I had known that at the time, I would've been swept off my feet by this movie. A clammy, greasy, disconcerting expose of circus life, this one fits in perfectly with some of my other favorites from this year like The Unknown and The Amazing Mr. X, but this one is the best of all of them. I've been watching a lot of Hollywood dramas from the '40s now in the wake of sitting down for this three times in a row. I hope they won't make me sick.

#4 - BLOODY WEDNESDAY, by Mark G. Gilhuis

When I was writing the list I kept putting this on here for some reason. I'd take it off, asking myself, "Wha...really?" Then I would rewatch it and remember everything. For a while I would just quote that goddamn teddy bear, voice and everything, and sometimes people would hear me and worry about my health. Simultaneously the most depressing and hilarious movie about mental illness I've seen, Bloody Wednesday is so unsure of what the heck it's supposed to be that it becomes a psychedelic trance. I've found for myself a new classic of the slasher (?) genre, which isn't an easy feat these days.

#3 - INFRASEXUM, by Carlos Tobalina

Yes, I like this one more than Flesh and Bullets, because I'm a sucker. It's almost unbelievable to me that this was Tobalina's debut. This is a ballsy film to make under any circumstances, and yet porn is a weird thing, and thus he built a whole career out of this. I wasn't expecting to get a Pseudo-Philosophical Voiceover-Journal Inner-Quest Movie that also had a disembowelment scene, but at this point, I should know better. Art and trash go well together and this is a great example of how they pulled that off in the late '60s.

#2 - GRETTA, by John Carr

No explanation. It's not even based off the book--it just exists. It's like 35 movies got stuck in a blender and the director drank the result, and the camera implanted in his brain recorded everything he saw afterward. Or, alternatively, it was originally an 8-hour mega-epic like von Stroheim's Greed and they cut out too many reels. Why should we care about this occasionally-creepy romance when there are killer beetles...and vice versa? Better yet, it has a "sequel." If you count movies that recut other movies to make them even more confusing as "sequels," that is.

#1 - THE TELEPHONE BOOK, by Nelson Lyon

The best. The Holy Grail. This is why I got into reviewing movies. I laughed, I screamed. I could go on forever but The Telephone Book is really good, okay? Every new scene brought fresh surprises that I could never have expected--which is really what cinematic media is meant to be about. For a movie about sex, it felt like sex...it kept building, and building, and building, and then there was that ending and there was such joy. A vulgar, mind-boggling cartoon brought to life, I'll never see anything like it again; but then, I was lucky enough to see it in the first place. 

AND THE BOOK OF THE YEAR IS... *DRUMROLL PLEASE*
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...
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THE UNHOLY THREE, by Tod Robbins

Man, I sure read a lot of bullshit this year. How could the Book of the Year be anything but this when the competition was Space Jason and voodoo sharks? The Unholy Three is a weirdly kinetic pulp pseudo-masterpiece, whose presence on this list means I can live with myself for not including The Unknown. Lon Chaney is a powerful figure even when he's not directly involved; and besides all that Tod Robbins is an accomplished enough writer to keep me hooked. Next year I'm gonna grab a copy of Robbins' "Spurs" to take a look back at the origin of Freaks, and this book will get a mention, as I've said, when I get to touching on Todd Browning's The Devil-Doll. Robbins also wrote a book called Mysterious Mr. Martin, which looks like a delight. More to follow!

So that's 2017! See you next year! I loved all the time we spend together and I can't wait to start again soon. In the meantime, you can check out the $1 tier on my Patreon to hear some of my Movie Thoughts. Otherwise...keeping dreaming, true believers!

Book Club of Desolation #18: Benighted (1927), by J.B. Priestley

Spookyween has come and gone, but Bookvember rises anew! We've gone fairly light on books this year, but this month we'll be making four stops to the Book Club of Desolation. Starting off our celebration of bizarre literature is Benighted. It was from Benighted that we got the 1932 film The Old Dark House, which everyone likes for reasons I'll never understand. The Old Dark House is, despite being the Trope Namer, a late addition to the Old Dark House subgenre; though the form would persist into and through the 1940s, the ODH film's peak was really in the late '20s. This year has seen me take a liking to these creaky old mysteries, and as such, I wanted to dip into the literary origins of this cinematic cluster; Benighted was one of those which was still available and which was actually readable. Mary Roberts Rinehart, I'm sure I will get to you at some point--but for now, let's just get the crap out of the way.

Indeed, Benighted is very crappy. That may be due to the fact that it bears a very close resemblance to The Old Dark House, only it manages to be less funny, more boring, and most damningly, it lacks Boris Karloff. But it was, however, readable, in a way that the original 1925 stage play of The Gorilla (for example) simply wasn't.* Our principle characters are Philip and Margaret Waverton, two travelers who are joined in their voyage through rural Wales by young Roger Penderel. The trio end up going through a heavy rainstorm, finding the sole shelter for miles in the form of mysterious old Femm Manor, ruled over by the bombastic, unbalanced Horace Femm and his religious fanatic sister Rebecca. The travelers are eventually joined by two other travelers whose names I can't remember. I do know that one of them is named Gladys, and she ends up as Penderel's love interest for all the jack diddly it ends up meaning in the end. For the rest of the book, the travelers endure the strangeness of the Femms and their disfigured alcoholic butler Morgan until events reach their violent pitch.

The primary issue which readers may run into concerning Benighted thankfully manifests itself right at the start. Simply put, the book is dull, with the opening driving scene which takes our three heroes to Femm Manor reaching Manos levels of absurd length.** Trust me, it makes you wonder about the literary audience of the late '20s when the first chunk of the book is just Priestley finding new ways of saying "It's raining." And this sets the pattern for the rest of the book in another way: too much of the material printed is wasted on re-summarizing what a ghastly storm this is. I would argue that most of the book is spent describing the weather or having characters talk about the weather. And when they talk--dear God.

This is yet another book which I have spent my precious reading time on this year which features a Party of Roving Twits. You probably know the kind, even if you haven't read any of the abominable thrillers of the '20s and '30s which feature the archetype (and which I keep reading because I'm an idiot with high hopes). Everyone who isn't a pretentious asshat is foppish and disengaged to the point of inducing aneurysm. I tried to find conversations between the protagonists that were both interesting and relevant, and was completely without luck. I hate books where all the women do is scream and all the men do is make faux-Wilde pithy observations on everything. Especially when both insist on using such unbearably Caucasian similes as "strange as a mandarin."

Which is sad, because there is at least some good stuff here. Our ostensible villains, the Femms plus Morgan the butler, are the ancestors of the Sawyers of Texas, the Merryes from Spider Baby, and all the other degenerate families living in isolation spread out over 90 years of horror fiction. There's a great part where we learn that Rebecca's religious obsessions may stem from the fact that when she was young she would witness her father and brother bring women home to conduct orgies! I guess I can hardly blame her after that. But too little time is spent with these folk, and this creates a sizable schism in the text. Really, it's almost like Priestley wrote two books--one, a spooky Gothic horror-thriller, and the other, a soppy romantic drama about idiots--and fused them together in layers like an Oreo mishap. Characters will engage in pointless dialogue...then be trapped in a flooding room...then, more pointless foppishness...then, Morgan attacks somebody...like I said above, I shouldn't have hoped for much when The Old Dark House was such a fitfully boring film.

If you distrust my opinion and want to read overlong accounts of people drinking gin, Benighted may be for you. But honestly you really should run away from it fast. I haven't entirely given up on the books and plays which inspired the ODH thrillers, but damn if this doesn't make me want to.

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* For those of you who mourn the loss of the first two adaptations of The Gorilla which predated the 1939 Bela Lugosi/Ritz Brothers travesty, don't. The original play's primary form of humor outside of the usual "cowardice is funny" shtick is making fun of black people. It was a repugnant read and I'm sure both the 1927 and 1930 versions preserved this rubbish, if I know anything about the films of the late '20s/early '30s.

** Quick! Someone remake Manos: The Hands of Fate as an old-time Old Dark House movie! You can add the gorilla from House of Mystery! It'll be great!

Image Source: Valancourt Books 

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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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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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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Dragon Fury (1995), by David Heavener

I'm not gonna lie, guys, I have trouble reviewing action movies for some reason. Especially post-apocalyptic ones. I love myself plenty of post-apocalyptic action movies, but they make me feel so passive. I can't find the words to describe them. Yet, all the same, I know people out there wanna read about strange action movies, especially ones which might got mutants in 'em. Unfortunately there are no mutants here, just weird pseudo-albinos. Despite the severe lack of disfigured rubbery creatures, Dragon Fury is still a pretty good time, a minor time-travel epic that only the '90s could produce.

Mason is a dragon warrior in the year 2099, in a world ravaged by "the Plague." He saves a woman and her daughter from the evil ninjas who have murdered her husband. They are pursued by a pasty-faced dude in black robes named Vestor, and Mason has reached the end of his patience as far as this whole post-apocalyptic thing. With the help of his scientist friend he and his wife Regina travel back in time to 1999 to find a scientist who once created a cure for the Plague. The Plague, it seems, was the creation of an evil corporation, which Vestor may work for (?). In any case, Vestor sends some of his minions back in time to stop Mason and Regina. And they're on a time limit, too--the time portal can only stay open for 36 hours!

This is the exactly the sort of movie I would love to see on TV if I had a time machine to take me back to 1999. Resembling an unholy blend of The Terminator, Time Chasers, Games of Survival, Jack Kirby's OMAC and Kamandi comics, a Deathstalker/Ator-style adventure film, and a lot of other stuff ripped off that I couldn't even begin to mention, the movie is a perfect artifact of the era it was created in. Everyone has horrible hair and wears leather in places where leather shouldn't go, and the villain is a grungy middle-aged guy in a doofy costume. Just a few degrees in a certain direction and I would hate this movie as well as I love it in its present form.

What helps make this movie a treat is its weird balance between grungy '90s edginess and low-budget '90s comic relief. You can imagine my surprise when we snapped suddenly to a hotel room on a 30ish couple's wedding night. "C'mon, babycakes, daddy's waitin' for you!" coaxes the husband. Suddenly, Regina falls back through the time portal, only half-clothed for...reasons. The wife, of course, assumes that he is already cheating on her. If only they'd had the tact to include wah-wah music.

But then, we have the scene where Vestor's minions arrive from the future. They are confronted by a gang of punks who assume that they are shirtless and passed out because they have just gotten done having gay sex--never mind that they still have their pants on, and they're in the middle of the dirtiest alley I've seen in a movie. After shouting a bunch of homophobic slurs, they threaten to gang-rape them, leading to them getting their asses kicked. I'm always happy to see homophobic rapists get their asses handed to them. Bonus points if it's by shirtless barbarians from the future.

And then there's just the strange stuff, which may not be meant to be funny. For example, time travel gives you amnesia, but don't worry! Regina went along on the trip because she knows that time travel amnesia is curable by sex. The scene leading into their big sex scene is astonishingly scripted, and it's amusing to note that this movie even went so far as to crib the lighting and shadow from The Terminator's sex scene in their desperation to rip off The Terminator.

I don't know what else I can add to that, aside from the possible fact that one of the fight scenes has graffiti in the background of Marvel's Green Goblin. That's pretty fucking cool. So is the rest of Dragon Fury--I'm always happy to have a post-apocalyptic time travel action movie, especially when it involves a metric shitton of samurai swords. May the spirit of the dragon never die.

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3 in a Towel (1969), by Marty Rackum

And here we have another movie which I only enjoy a small percentage of. Like, the first third or less. And I like that short selection enough to try to do a full review on it, apparently. So, without much further ado, this is 3 in a Towel.

After a psychedelic opening credits sequence that shows off the director's prowess with 15-year-old colored gels, we meet our "protagonist" Romeo Bruno. Romeo, like his namesake, dreams of love, or more properly (both here and in Shakespeare), flesh. Romeo will reference his literary counterpart throughout the movie, though he refers to him as "Romeo Lothario," which I'll abstain from commenting on for now. Anyway, Romeo seeks to make his "dream" of banging multiple women a reality. He picks up a young virgin and brings her down to his yacht, but she's turned off by the fact that there are already three girls aboard. After she leaves Romeo and his three girls set sail and have a lot of sex. Then, they return to the harbor, Romeo uses "thought-waves" to psychically seduce women (no FX utilized), and he brings them back to his apartment, where he bangs them. Indeed, as prophesied, there are three girls who get in a towel together, specifically to give Romeo a (softcore) blowjob.

Doesn't that sound great? Doesn't that sound like a fun and entertaining movie? Well, it's really not, but in the beginning, as we learn the excuse for Mr. Rackum's softcore adventures, it's pure bliss. I'll tread over everything a little bit at a time, starting with what I've already brought up: i.e. "Romeo Lothario." Let's unpack this for a second. Even ignoring the fact that linking Shakespeare's Romeo to sexual promiscuity has its own problems, Romeo's last name wasn't Lothario. It was Montague. I'd say this is fine, but surnames are kind of a huge deal in that particular play. It's sort of about, y'know, a family feud. That would be like if you wanted to compare someone to Devil Anse Hatfield, but changed his name instead to Devil Anse Ethan Edwards. The sad thing is, Lothario as a name doesn't even have a Shakespearian origin--he's a character from a story within the story of Don Quixote. Yes, Shakespeare and Cervantes lived at the same time and share nearly equal fame, but there's no need to get their characters confused.

And then there's that whole thing about how Romeo was romantically and/or sexually successful. Um, what fucking play were you reading? The story opens with him getting rejected by Rosaline, then he shares a few days with Juliet, and then he dies! I can't imagine that his lady-bedding days were great in number prior to that, given that by most accounts of my professors, Romeo is about fourteen. If it wasn't for the fact that this movie absolutely reeks of pot, I would say this was some clever irony on behalf of the cast and crew. No, this movie is Kids Goofing Off at its absolute dumbest.


Yes, this movie is dumber than The Tony Blair Witch Project. This is dumber than A Clockwork Blue. This is dumber than Five Across the Eyes, Psyched by the 4D Witch, and Nosferatu in Brazil combined. But it's pretty easy for even someone like me, Queen of Sticks Up the Ass, to discount the fluff that pads out the majority of this movie. To be honest, whenever I see sex in a movie, I zone out anyway. And usually, if the movie is mostly sex, that means I'm gonna give it a paddlin', critically speaking. But here, I knew I wasn't missing anything in the long gaps wherein I jumped around: just more fake-accented Shakespeare quotes, which appear to come from every one of the Bard's plays except Romeo and Juliet. Some of these quotes I can't even properly source, so they may be made up, for all I know.

On top of all this, all of the dub actors are in their fifties while the actual actors (who appear in sweet silent Super 8) are in their twenties. Post-loops are recorded in bathrooms, because they have to splash water to replicate the sea, you see? This means everyone in the maritime sequences has echoes on their voices as the sound bounces off the shower walls. It's a good time.

3 in a Towel is probably a grievous insult to everyone who watches it, and is usually a tremendous waste of precious celluloid. However, I think it's hilarious, at least for a little while, and when I was trapped in the dark depths of my day job little flashes of this movie kept me going for days afterward. A glimmer of hope for a fallen film? Or a plea from the proletariat? You decide.

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Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977), by George Barry

Hey, I reviewed Troll 2 and Manos. It can't hurt to take a look at Death Bed too.

A couple is hiking through the woods to get to an old abandoned house. There's a bed in there that they want to fuck on. Well, that the dude wants to fuck on--this is an awkward sort of relationship. Judging from douchedude's letterman jacket they might be meant to be high school students. There's a man who's been trapped behind a painting in the bedroom for sixty years, who is unable to speak to the other characters but narrates the film. He watches as the bed first eats their food--extruding a foamy yellow stomach acid to do so--and then the lovers themselves. The rest of the film follows the misadventures of the various people who stumble across and are eaten by the Death Bed. Slowly, the narrator reveals the Bed's story: long ago, a demon fell in love with a human woman and created a bed to seduce her in. However, because he was a demon she died during their encounter, and in his grief for her he cried tears of blood, which animated the bed with a ceaseless hunger. Eventually, the narrator is able to speak to a girl who is the reincarnation of the bed's "mother," and with some good ol' ceremonial magic the bed is put to rest.

If a movie with the title Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was made today, you can bet it would be some sort of zany Troma-esque comedy. And while Death Bed is certainly a comedy, it's not really "zany." Or disgusting. Or stupid. That being said, it's not particularly smart, either. It just has style. I've tagged it as "artsy" but in terms of theme and universal questions and whatnot, it's not particularly strong. But it adopts a strange dignity unto itself. Close-up shots show blood droplets snuffing out candle-flames. Statues cry sanguinary tears. Old-timey sepia stock footage plays. And, there is a lady who sleeps in the bed reading a magazine called Oral Lesbians.

Yeah, this movie is pretty goofy. One of the prolonged flashbacks in the history of the Death Bed--surely the most essential of all of them--tells the tale of "Dr." Graham and his wife, who turned the mansion of the Death Bed's residence into a sexual healing clinic; i.e. an orgy club. The narrator speaks of the Death Bed's "one true feast" of six orgy practitioners, including the good doctor and his wife, one sunlit afternoon. I seem to remember this subplot taking up around ten minutes of the movie. It feels like that in any case. They could've done a whole movie with just that in my mind, but I need to be careful what I wish for.

Probably my favorite detail about this movie's weird sideways humor is the fact that the narrator, based on his appearance, on the style of his art, and on the fact that he died of tuberculosis before being trapped behind his painting, is 19th Century artist Aubrey Beardsley. I can think of no reason as to why they would choose Beardsley of all people to fulfill this role aside from that George Barry was a fan of his (and not without reason). The fact that they don't even say his name in the credits makes this a fun inside joke to catch. They even get to joke around with some of his famous quotes, paraphrasing them somewhat: "You have one aim--the grotesque. You are nothing if not grotesque. Except hungry." It's something for snobs and gorehounds alike.

And indeed, this is a pretty gory movie--a lighter H.G. Lewis, I would say. This gore is accompanied wonderfully by a plethora of bad acting. The two go so well together. I would say this is a Kids Goofing Off sort of deal but the people involved are in their 40s, so it's Director's Friends Goofing Off instead. Performances range from sincere to intoxicated. Try to strain out some of the dialogue and guffaw endlessly at the inanity of some of the deliveries. To say nothing of the material itself.

If there was any sort of theme to the movie, it would be one of awkwardness. The couple at the beginning is awkward. The group who shows up at the house at the beginning are all awkward coworkers. A man has his hands eaten down to the bones by the bed, and his response is one of feeling awkward. The demon who was the bed's "father" fucked the love of his life to death Edward Cullen-style, which is awkward. I don't know what the director was trying to say with this, if anything. Perhaps just that life is awkward, even when you are being digested by demonically-possessed furniture. Truer words, never spoken.

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