The Stud (1978), by Quentin Masters

This movie was pitched to me as "British Saturday Night Fever." What?! Not only are the plots completely dissimilar, but before this movie, the idea of a British disco movie struck me as being about as likely as dubstep in Puritan times. Well, I can now finally have a double feature with Disco Godfather. You have no idea how glad that makes me.

The film opens with a surprisingly catchy disco song that I had stuck in my head for--well, actually, it's still in my head, and I think I first saw this movie, like, a year ago. The only lyrics consist of "Ooh--Stud! What's his name, what's his game?" It implies immediately that we're dealing with a man of mystery; one who we've already seen to be the recipient of dozens of signed photographs from beautiful women that allude to his tremendous sexual prowess. The man in question is Tony Blake, the manager of a club called "Hobo" which is owned by the wealthy Fontaine Khaled. Fontaine is married to a diplomat, Benjamin Khaled, who is unaware of Fontaine's many affairs. Her favorite is Tony, who we learn she "made," training him in management, class, and sex. She says of him, "You know, when we first met, he thought a 69 was a bottle of scotch!" Fontaine has sex with Tony in an elevator where she's hidden secret cameras. Not only does she enjoy watching the tapes for her own satisfaction, but she uses the tapes to advertise Tony to her friends. She's planning a big trip to Paris, where Tony is the intended centerpiece of a massive orgy. He isn't to know until the last minute, though, an unnecessarily rape-y twist that shows off that Fontaine is a libertine in the style of de Sade. She loves wealth for wealth's sake, even though that wealth has left her bored enough where she's bound to completely collapse if she doesn't have sex constantly. The Paris plot develops slowly and runs parallel to a thread which has Tony trying to open his own club, so he can be free of Fontaine forever.

Of course, we also get plenty of eyefuls of the action at Hobo. (That actually is the worst nightclub name I've heard, ever.) We have Tony's pedo friend who "waits for 'em to get off the schoolbuses"; we have Molly, a black woman who Fontaine (the white bitch) calls "an interesting creature"; then there's the seemingly endless "disco" song which mostly chants, "Let's go, disco, let's go disco." That last bit is probably the funniest thing in the whole movie--I mean, I laugh at music from all eras, and I especially like laughing at the music I like. But disco can get so goddamn goofy sometimes. I'm on the floor every single time I realize that the fucking song has been playing for like seven solid minutes.

Tony hates his situation. Sure, he gets laid more than any other man in London who's not David Bowie, but even his conquests from outside Fontaine's social circles fully know about his place on the ladder. Molly calls Tony a gigolo, and while he's frankly a sexist pig, Tony knows that it feels wrong to be used. When Ben Khaled comes down to Hobo to visit with his wife, Tony falls in love with--or makes himself fall in love with--Ben's daughter from a prior marriage, Alex. Alex is turned on by Tony, even and perhaps especially after she learns that he's fucking her stepmother. Her own boyfriend is so no-sex-before-marriage that her attempts to make out with her are met with confusion and disgust. So she and Tony sleep together and something of a relationship starts. But then Christmas comes. It's time to go to Paris.

And oh my God, I'm glad movies exist, because you'd never see this in real life. Fontaine's Parisian friend has a gigantic sex-mansion, complete with what is probably the world's hardest-to-maintain swimming pool. Have you seen Caligula, or at least, Brad Jones' review of it? I immediately thought of Tiberius' grotto during this scene, albeit less ridiculous. I mean, the place has a fucking sex-swing on it! Anyone who is into sex-swings or fucking in pools is in the right because there's nothing wrong with what you're into (as long as it's not animals or children). However, I'm going to speak from my own personal perspective and set of kinks, when I say: 1) sex-swings sound extremely painful and dangerous; 2) fucking in a pool sounds even more extremely painful and dangerous because YOU DON'T WANT TO GET CHLORINE INSIDE YOUR FUCKING GENITALS. Also, orgies in a pool? Get ready for some floaters. Brrrrr.

Inevitably, Mr. Khaled learns about his wife's dealings, because that's usually what happens when you create dozens of sex tapes featuring yourself and your extramarital lover and store them in your husband's house. Tony is on his way out, because surprise, being drugged with amphetamines and raped is incredibly disturbing to him. At least Fontaine burns with him--or does she? I guess we'll have to find out in The Bitch! Because yes, this did get a sequel.

Thank Disco God!

Not only does The Stud offer us a fascinating glimpse into the British side of disco, but it's a pretty progressive movie for a film full of homophobic slurs and ruthless misogyny. It depicts the rape of a man with the same sort of gruesome focus as many movies of the period where women are raped. In fact, that's one of the central themes: that men, too, are harmed by patriarchy, because they're expected in all senses to be fuck machines. And naturally, not every man wants to be a fuck machine--in the sense of having sex frequently and/or intensely, or in the sense of being a genuine machine, so slavishly dedicated to his base desires that he'll accept anything that comes his way. And it does so in a way that doesn't show all women as monsters; only the characters in-universe are sexist. Everyone in this movie is pretty much awful, or at best severely obnoxious. Nearly everybody is a pedophile, a rapist, a racist, or just cruel for no reason. The richer you get, the bitcher you get. And this is a movie about the super-rich.

The dialogue is very pointy and sometimes it gets ridiculous. People talk about how snappy and dire Valley of the Dolls is, but Valley of the Dolls just made me a bit sleepy if I can be frank. This movie has about as many barbs as a drag show, but the costumes aren't nearly beautiful enough--it is a good-looking film, even if it never does anything too bold with the visuals. As far as the barbs, though, you do need to have a high threshold of tolerance, for both acid and camp. It's like if the Adam West Batman villains could say fuck.

Overall, The Stud has much to offer and its 3.6 on IMDB perplexes me. The movie made a good deal of money when it came out, and contemporary reviews were positive, it seems. I mean, it does deal with some dark topics, particularly that of male rape. Why would a film about male rape get such low reviews? Surely that's not a reflection of any aspect of our society? Hmmmmmmmm...

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Performance (1970), by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell

200 MOVIE REVIEWS!!! We're celebrating by taking a look at my favorite movie of all time, the hyper-trippy mindbender of a crime-occult adventure known as PERFORMANCE!

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Blood Freak (1972), by Brad F. Grinter and Steve Hawks

Don't smoke too much weed, or you'll turn into a blood-drinking turkey man.

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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!

The Age of Insects (1991), by Eric Marciano

Hope you like being rubbed up with bug jelly.

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Oriental Evil (1951), by George Breakston and C. Ray Stahl

Despite the bad title, Oriental Evil is actually something of a lost film noir classic. Strange and touching.

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Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), by Don Edmonds

1975 saw the release of what could easily be called the archetypical Nazisploitation film, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. That film featured Dyanne Thorne as Ilsa, a Nazi commandant who tortures prisoners at a concentration camp, while also seeking a man who can give her an orgasm. Those who fail in this task--i.e. all of the male prisoners at the camp--are castrated. As you may well expect, She-Wolf is a miserably gruesome watch, with much of the torture that's shown looking pretty authentic, thanks to the filmmakers only showing what they could technically accomplish, and implying the rest. When making the follow-up, which brought Ilsa to 1970s Saudi Arabia, the filmmakers toned down much of the disturbing content in an effort to seek an audience that wasn't comprised entirely of weirdos and perverts. But they still had to appeal to, y'know, weirdos and perverts, because it was still a film about a big-breasted, often-nude Teutonic blonde torturing people in ways that were occasionally erotic. While many consider this mixture of interests to be a failure, I'm of the opinion that the producers of Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks managed to create an atmosphere of camp which both the original film and this film's followup, Ilsa, Tigress of Siberia, were sorely lacking. This is, generally speaking, a feel-good exploitation movie, where it's just one bit of nonsense happening after another. It grows on you after a while.

Ilsa is now the lieutenant of a powerful Middle Eastern crime lord, El Sharif. El Sharif deals both in human trafficking and in drugs, and he and Ilsa's activities have caused them to be investigated by an international commission led by Commander Adam Scott and a pudgy, wimpy German dude named Dr. Kaiser. The pair have a spy planted in El Sharif's palace but she is captured and tortured before they arrive. Despite knowing that the two are spies, Ilsa falls for Commander Scott when he turns out to be a regular sex machine. Eventually her relationship with him causes El Sharif to sentence her to molestation at the hands of a leprous beggar whom she had flogged at the start of the movie. This causes her to help out a group of rebels seeking to oust El Sharif and replace him with the legitimate ruler of this region, his nephew Prince Ali. In the end Ilsa is betrayed by Ali and thrown in his dungeons to await a hideous fate.

I had to piece together aspects of this plot over multiple viewings, because as far as director Edmonds is concerned, story is as secondary and incidental as a hillbilly's napkins at an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet. No, we're here to see sleaze, and they are quite insistent on pouring on that sleaze whenever they can. Gore, dismemberment, torture, cannibalism, pedophilia, and rape are all key themes, though unlike She-Wolf none of it is brought "too far." For all that means. For example, they may talk about letting rats feast on someone's vaginal tissues, but they don't show it. We still get a girl whose breasts are crushed in a vice (which is actually a lot funnier than it sounds) and of course there are the women whose vaginas are outfitted with proximity mines. These mines are tested, by the way, by "the love machine"--a piston-driven mechanical arm that ends with an immaculate pewter dildo. (Might not want to use that too much, pewter can be real nasty on the skin I've heard.) Legit gross-out points to the scene where a girl's legs are eaten by ants--and then there's the guy who buys one of the girls, but says over a pair of pliers, "I don't like the scrape of teeth..."

Dr. Kaiser's arc in this movie is, um. Interesting. On the drive to El Sharif's palace he says, "I hope they do not give me...a sheep's eye. I have been all over the Arab world and it is a common gift to give to foreign guests. But they are disgusting, and I do not know if I could eat another one." Then of course El Sharif feeds him "the eye of [his] most beautiful sheep"--Kaiser's spy. Later, El Sharif sends an underage male prostitute to Kaiser's room, and despite initial resistance, there is every indication that he ended up taking him up on his offer! It's equal parts horrifying and comical, because despite its implications, it's so blatantly glanced over that it feels like a background gag! I have no idea what to make of this. I think it's best I move on. It is noteworthy that the same actor played a Nazi General in She-Wolf of the SS who commanded Ilsa to give him a golden shower. So he's always been a class act.

I don't really even know if I can call this film racist, because while it seems to assert that Arabs are vicious and have a propensity for human trafficking, it's not really something that's specifically dwelled on besides the provision of the setting. There are local people fighting El Sharif for presumably noble purposes, and it's not like the white Europeans are much better, with Dr. Kaiser being a pedophile, Commander Scott leaving Ilsa to die after sleeping with her, and Ilsa being, well...Ilsa. The sleaze is universal, and frankly, after watching movies like The Sheik and The Barbarian, this movie is pretty fair in its treatment of Arab folk. Though that's not saying much.

If you want uncut sleaze as only the '70s can deliver it, this is the film to watch. It's the one Ilsa movie I've bothered to go back to, and despite the change in tone, it is the most watchable of all of them in terms of content and lack of boredom. There's always something happening--whether you like it or not.

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Samurai Cop (1991), by Amir Shervan

Samurai Cop starts off pretty normal. Two cops, Joe and Frank, are going after some cocaine smugglers, aided by Peggy, their eye in the sky. Everything is straightforward and by the book. And then the car chase begins.

It's a familiar thing, in a way, though I can cite no other movies off the top of my head that do it. There are actions films just like this that have a few scenes right near the start that mimic "real" movies almost perfectly. Perhaps this is the footage they shot first, and showed to investors, to trick them into thinking they were getting anything other than Samurai Cop. And then, once they had their budget secured and squared away, they filmed that car chase scene. And Amir Shervan's apparent desire to be the world's biggest ten year old began.

Joe is a samurai as well as a cop, and with Frank he chases these coke dealers through the requisite City of Boxes, all of which are smashed. Yes, it's one of those car chases. At this point in cinematic history, it's not a true car chase if there aren't some conspicuously-placed boxes (fruits and veggies optional) for everyone to smash into. Anyway, once they arrest/slaughter the coke dealers, Joe and Frank start going after the Katana Gang, controlled by the mulleted Mr. Fujiyama. Aiding Fujiyama in his drug empire are martial arts master Okamura (a creatively named character played by Gerald Okamura) and evil samurai Yamashita. Yamashita must be a codename of some kind, because he's played by Robert Z'Dar, who, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is as white as a sheet of printer paper. He turns in a legitimately great performance here, which easily rises over what most of his colleagues turned in. Fujiyama commands him to kill one of the hospitalized victims of Joe and Frank's coke bust: "I want his head! And I want it right here, on this piano!" "I will take his head, and I will place it on your piano," Yamashita replies.

Joe ends up getting involved with Jennifer, whose family owns a restaurant that Fujiyama helped raise out of debt. This angers Fujiyama, who wanted Jennifer all for himself. The war between the Katanas and the Samurai Cop heats up until Fujiyama is torturing Joe's friends--threatening to castrate Frank, burning Peggy with hot grease, and killing a cop he worked with on raids, along with his wife. But this is an action movie, so you better believe all the bad guys end up dead, one way or another.

There is so much that is just done wrong in this movie. The sex scenes are astonishingly bad, even by the usual "sex through the undies" standards. We get many scenes of men in Speedos with full cock outlines visible, and none of it is welcome, especially if it comes from Joe. Joe is perfect, though. His beyond-shoulders hair and ludicrously intense face make him seem like the opposite of someone who should be a cop. The fact that he runs around shooting wantonly and chopping people's limbs off doesn't help matters. This is yet another movie where laws are more like guidelines, along which those in authority may impose their own moral beliefs rather than following those that might be "popular" or "ethically acceptable." I think there are a few moments though where it questions its own stance on police brutality (which is that it's okay as long as the people you're dismembering are bona fide evil). There's an amazing bit were Joe is making full of Chief for "not wanting no more dead bodies," plus a later bit where he says, "If it's Okamura [at this house] we'll arrest him; if it's the wrong house we'll apologize the owner, standard police procedure." They don't go in guns blazing for this scene but it's easy to imagine them doing so. In this universe, unarmed civilians are shunted to a pocket dimension for safekeeping when fights break out, unless they're romantically involved with the main characters--then they can be used as hostages.

This movie does some other stuff wrong besides saying that police brutality is an okay thing to do. It's kind of hella racist? Joe messes up the Japanese characters' names on purpose (calling them "Omaha" and "Yamaha"), brings up their ethnicity for no reason, and calls Jennifer, the white girl in Fujiyama's company, "all-American." There's also an oddly-inserted gay waiter character from Costa Rica whose "comically" long name is brought up for no other reason than to drag Hispanic people. Finally, there's the bizarre incident where, when Frank (a black man) is threatened with castration, his dick is called "a gift--a black gift." I don't even know what to make of that. This movie is fucking weird.

Finally, there's a wonderful cascade of trash besides all this. When sneaking into the hospital to put that guy's head on Fujiyama's piano, Robert D'Zar disguises himself as a doctor--for no reason. This never comes up in any way. While he and his assistant are escaping the hospital, they're confronted by two security people who have the same dub actor. When someone asks Joe what katana means, he translates it as "Japanese sword," which is, um, not exactly correct. Fujiyama sends guys to break Joe's legs twice, because the screenwriter keeps forgetting scenes that have already happened. Then, when we see Robert D'Zar having sex, we have the opposite problem of the sex scene from The Room--here, the woman in question seems to think that Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his belly button! (You fool, everyone knows Robert Z'Dar's dick is in his chin.) Oh, and I can't consider this review complete without quoting this scene--an exchange between Joe and a random nurse.

Nurse: "Do you like what you see?"

Joe: "I love what I see."

"Do you want to touch what you see?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to go out with me?"

"Yes. Yes I would."

"Would you like to fuck me?"

"Bingo."

"Then let's see what you got." *Gropes his pants* "Doesn't interest me. Nothing there."

"Nothing there? What would interest you? Something the size of a jumbo jet?"

"Have you been circumcized? Because the doctor must have cut a big portion of it off."

Both of them deliver these lines like they're kids doing bad impressions of Robby the Robot.

I think that's a good place to end this review.

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The Zodiac Killer (1971), by Tom Hanson

Most of us at this point are familiar with the story of the Zodiac Killer. In the late '60s through the early '70s, an as-yet-unidentified murderer killed at least five people in the San Francisco area, leaving behind mysterious ciphers which remain as unsolved as the case they belong to. Many theories have emerged citing a number of suspects, and similarly quite a few films have been made on the subject of the murders. Like the theories, some of these movies are sound, while others are not. The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer, made by Tom Hanson as part of a harebrained, probably-bogus scheme to catch the Killer in the theater it showed at, is decidedly not one of the sound Zodiac case adaptations, being instead a fascinating portrait of ugly people thrown into a classic exploitation backdrop.

The film is a relatively disconnected series of vignettes. We first follow the Zodiac Killer without knowing who he is, and two suspects emerge for us to consider: the meek, rabbit-keeping vegan mailman Jerry, and the violently misogynistic, drug-addicted, alimony-dodging Grover. The police begin to close in on Grover, seeing as he's the more readily obvious suspect, but he's shot down after trying to kidnap his daughter with a Ultimate Weapon, a handsaw. Jerry is the actual Zodiac, believing that his victims will become his slaves in the afterlife (which the Zodiac Killer claimed to believe), after Atlantis rises from the ocean (which is horseshit concocted by the director). He keeps on killing and, as in real life, he is never caught.

Tom Hanson here takes the Ed Wood route of exploitation and tries to make a movie that teaches us something. At first, the movie is rather cynical--it flat-out calls the audience stupid for not being more paranoid about serial killers, for not suspecting the un-suspicious. This is a rather uncomfortable view to take, especially in an age where kids are now being told that their shy classmates are potential school shooters in the making just because they're quiet. Jerry being the killer fits in with this mentality; he is the very "guy next door" that he warns us about at the beginning. Grover's arc exists to demonstrate that sometimes the most vulgar and openly-violent and Trump-esque of us are just bad people, and despite their loudness and brashness they shouldn't be the only ones we look at when it comes to looking for murderers. Of course, that sort of seems to normalize people like Grover, but the subversion, I think, goes deeper than that.

Grover is violently misogynistic, true, but grotesque sexism is a running theme of the whole movie--almost as if Hanson wanted to demonstrate, at least subliminally, that the Zodiac Killer could not exist without a confining culture that encourages men to be violent. Jerry is not as sexist as Grover, but only barely. He shares a conversation with his hideous pimple of a neighbor Doc, who opines that "once women are over 20, they're no good...Chinese have a term for it, it's called the Year of the Dog. [That's...not what that is, but 'kay.] Or as I like to call it, the Birth of the Bitch!" Following this Doc adds, "if you get any leftovers, though, send 'em my way...remember, I like 'em plump 'n' juicy...and DUMB!" Jerry is generally on Doc's side during this, and the rest of the movie will show him throw sexist remarks out of his own volition. Jerry and many other characters also sling around the word f*ggot, and Jerry himself takes deep offense at being called such. This latter incident takes place in a bar scene where we get glimpses of various relationship dynamics, nearly all of them portrayed negatively. Bad sexual dynamics, negative gender roles, and institutionalized homophobia are all major parts of the world that makes the Zodiac Killer who he is.

Actually, this movie in some ways is all about subversions. After Jerry is shown to us as the Killer, we see him first share some hotdogs with some beachgoers, where he doesn't kill them--then he goes to a park full of vulnerable children, where he doesn't kill anyone. But then we get the biggest and most infamous murder scene of the whole movie, where he first claims to be a crook escaping from a prison in Montana, and that he just needs to steal his victims' keys and money to get to Mexico. But after he ties them up, he chuckles casually, "I'm gonna have to stab you people." This sort of sadistic joking-around follows as he plays games with the police. He takes genuine pleasure in shutting down the power of those who can stop him. At the end, this is played with, where it's briefly put forth that maybe if the police didn't need to get so many fuckin' permits and warrants and whatnot they'd just be able to arrest/kill all those dirty crooks all the time like we want. It's uncomfortable (because time shows that cops perform worse and commit more crimes without those regulations), but it's presented alongside the suggestion (put forth, admittedly, by the Zodiac himself) that the Killer may in fact be a sane person, which means there are other reasons for his killings aside from simple "mental illness." While it is the Zodiac Killer himself putting forth this view, it also obviously stands in for the sentiments of the filmmakers, so this is a point they're interested in exploring. It's interesting. It's almost like unscientific views of mental health and biased explanations/solutions for crime are excuses for the violence of the patriarchy or something. 

Of course, this movie is also ridiculous. Grover is absolutely disgusting inside and out, which becomes kind of comedic after a while. ("Suspect proceeded to urinate in customers' drinks, proclaiming...'The Fountain of Youth lives'?") The Zodiac Killer wears a Paul McCartney wig and a beaglepuss. The police consult a psychic, Mr. Koslow, who has some Mysterious Foreigners in his apartment for no reason. It's a weird movie, and I may have understated that, despite the fact that this is a fictionalization of a series of murders that was released while those murders were still happening. To say nothing of the fact that for all the hard facts about the case Hanson gets right, there are plenty he just makes the fuck up.

This is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's not an easy watch, for quite a few reasons, but every time I pop it into I'm completely engrossed in its world for 87 minutes. Like, I will actually forget about outside reality when I throw it on. That's another way it's weird. Watch it.

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Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars (1992), by John Carr

It is finished. What began in 1980 with The Nightmare Never Ends and led into Gretta in 1984 and Night Train to Terror the year after comes to a stunning finale twelve years after it commenced with Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Originally set for production in 1982 under the title Scream Your Head Off, Marilyn was only partially made, and it took ten years for the scrapped footage to be turned around into a full movie. I suspect that the movie we would've gotten with Scream Your Head Off would have been more similar to "The Case of Harry Billings" from Night Train to Terror, but sometime in the decade between its start and finish director John Carr and writer Philip Yordan developed an obsession with actress Marilyn Monroe, and decided to work that angle into the affair. The success of the result means that this whole quartet is amazing all the way through: Marilyn doesn't drop the prestigious ball passed to it by its predecessors.

Harry Billings accidentally kills his wife in a drunken accident on the first day of their marriage, and shortly afterwards, tries to commit suicide. For this, the hospital that retrieves him follows what is clearly real-life procedure and sends him to a mental hospital for indefinite, nonconsensual treatment with no notification to his surviving family. The hospital is run by Dr. Brewer and Dr. Fargo, and they use the hospital to harvest women to sell to Middle Eastern oil sheikhs using hypnotically-controlled patients. Considerably odder than just kidnapping the women for body parts, no? While being used for this purpose Harry also encounters a patient who claims to be Marilyn Monroe, who speaks of a powerful conspiracy to imprison her in this place. Due to the meds they give her she frequently reverts to the mental age of 12, desiring a handsome prince to come save her. Curious to bring up her age, given that Marilyn hasn't, y'know, aged in the last thirty years since her ostensible death. Eventually Dr. Fargo lobotomizes Brewer, but this will bring about her downfall when she seeks to have Harry, the hospital, and all the money to herself.

Not too far a deviation from Night Train, I'd say, but the introduction of the Marilyn plot, and the screentime it consumes, cannot be understated. This is significant for one big reason: this movie is edited drunkenly, trying desperately to stitch on the newer Marilyn bits to the older Scream Your Head Off bits. Making the whole mess hopeless is that the older parts of the movie were shot on film, while the newer Marilyn chunks are very obviously shot on video. This makes the whole affair seem less like A Night to Dismember and more like Run Coyote Run, the pseudo-remake/sequel to Lady Street Fighter. It's a patchwork monster but I always love when one of those makes itself at home in my house.

The film bits feature the same sort of artistic scripting and direction that made Gretta seems so self-contradictory. There's a scene where Dr. Brewer gives someone the "Roman thumb" and it actually feels like something from a real movie. Then the video comes along and it's stiff, hurried, and over-focused on making cheesecake out of Marilyn Monroe. There is no sense of quality in the script. This fits John Carr's filmmaking very well, though; even the good bits that are continuous with one another are still largely suspended in seas of Just Not Getting It. Carr knows how good movies look, but he doesn't know how they work. As ever, this quality works entirely to our benefit.

The mental hospital is still unbelievable medieval, though that might be partially to blame on Fargo and Brewer's crooked natures. However, I don't understand why an ordinary hospital chooses to send someone to a psychiatric facility against their will, rather than, y'know, offering them treatment at the actual hospital and discharging them with recommendations for a therapist. Harry hasn't even regained consciousness when they choose, via shitty dub work, to send him off to Brewer's "care." This must be a weird alternate universe in several ways besides that unusual detail, though, since one of Harry's victims is only mildly put off by a "cab driver" who drives an unmarked cab, is oddly insistent on driving her, waives the fare, and also buys her coffee which he does not allow her to refuse. Sometimes movies just do this. I don't why. They just keep doing it.

I'm running out of things to say, but I'm going to spoil something before I wrap it all up. In the end, the twist seems to be that Harry's friend is actually Marilyn Monroe. That's why I made a note how she hasn't aged since 1962; it's not because she's someone who believes she's Marilyn Monroe, it's because she actually is her. That means the conspiracy against her was real and is probably still out there with no one really investigating it. That's a big slug in the jaw from a movie which already has the audacity to not print a colon in its title. But the movie does have a happy ending, a non-ableist one at that, with the various patients all getting what they want without judgment.

I can't possibly hope to conjure words for my feelings about the journey these four movies have taken me through. So I'll simply end here with the knowledge that these were not the only movies John Carr and Philip Yordan worked on. Those that survive are in my scopes. The party lives on. And if you want to join the party, you should check out Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Just don't take the complimentary coffee.

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The Snake Woman (1961), by Sidney J. Furie

I just have to describe how The Snake Woman starts. It can't maintain its hilarity through its whole runtime but that's okay, because what we get at the beginning more than compensates for a little bit of boredom.

We're in good hands right at the gates when a somber narrator informs us that the tale we are about to hear is a legend passed down "from generation to generation," but one "which the residents of the town would rather forget." In 1890, a snake researcher named Dr. Adderson (sic) is conducting strange experiments. By "strange experiments," I mean he's convinced that snake venom is the cure to mental illness, and therefore he's been injecting his insane wife with snake venom. Did I mention that Mrs. Adderson is pregnant? Curiously, much of the poor woman's protest comes from the fact that "we don't know what all that poison will do to me!" Hmm...I dunno, I think we can make some presumptions. She's also worried that the venom will hurt the baby, but Adderson is convinced that being raised by a madwoman is infinitely worse than being deformed or killed by in-utero toxins. Rather unsurprisingly Mrs. Adderson goes into premature labor (very premature, I should say, given that she doesn't look more than a month pregnant), and Dr. Adderson, whose medical credentials are already in question, has to fetch another doctor to deliver the baby. At first they're sure the girl is dead, because she's as cold as ice. Similarly, she has a weirdly shaped mouth and black, lidless eyes. Despite this, she still breathes, and when she's handed to her mother, she releases a hissing sound. The shock of this is too horrible for Mrs. Adderson and she dies. The midwife on hand, Aggie Harker, is rumored to be something of a witch, and she's convinced now that the baby has the power to kill with a glance. Adderson stops her from murdering the child but the old woman gets a mob that's more curious and weak-willed than angry to go wreck Adderson's laboratory. Cue the scene where the mob smash the glass cages of the snakes while setting the place on fire, releasing a large breeding population of deadly animals into their community when the fire chases them away before they can kill them all. Adderson dies when he tries to grab a snake by the head, causing it to bite his hand. Dr. Murton, the real doctor who delivered Adderson's baby, brings the child to a local hermit, who must keep him for the night while Murton goes to Africa to do...something. (Don't worry, it's not plot related, he just doesn't have the right schedule to pencil in idiots orphaning their own babies.) The idea is that Adderson will seek them out in the morning and retrieve the child but they don't know the dumb idiot is dead. The hermit raises the girl, named "Atheris" (an ancient name for a snake), until she's old enough to embrace her full powers as a weresnake. When Murton finally returns it's been years since Atheris scared away the hermit's animals and eventually vanished into the wilderness. Now the town is plagued by mysterious murders, and some white dude whose name I literally can't remember shows up to learn things we can already figure out until Atheris dies.

If you boil our plot down further, then we get this: maniac creates weresnake at expense of his family and the safety of his community, and then an outside agent kills the monster when said monster turns murderous. It's Frankenstein, people--but with a very strange Dr. Frankenstein at that. I hope I'm not alone in thinking that Adderson is fucking cracked. Now, it is true that snake venom-derived drugs have been effective medicinally. ACE inhibitors, for example, used to control high blood pressure, are derived from the venom of the Brazilian pit viper. Adderson cites a variety of ailments that can be treated with snake venom and some of them are accurate (though I have to wonder if such medicine existed at the turn of the century). Note that I used the word "derived," though; as far as I understand you can't just straight up milk a snake and put that right into somebody's veins. Poisons are more complicated than that. Okay, fine, there's a meta-reason--writer exaggeration (it's not like snake venom would turn someone into a weresnake either; mothers who eat honey while pregnant don't give birth to werebees, or wereflowers for that matter). But consider also that Addison hasn't the faintest idea of how to deliver a baby. I get that he's a herpetologist, but he's also performing medical procedures on someone, implying he does have a degree in medicine. Yet I know people who have undergraduate degrees in medicine who know how to deliver a baby. I'm sure in a doctoral program it comes up at least once. So Adderson is both unethical and incompetent as a doctor, but he's both those things as a herpetologist too, as evidenced by his grabbing a poisonous snake incorrectly, leading to his death. I'd say he was emotionally disturbed and didn't know what he was doing, but the double revelation of his wife's death plus the fact that he fathered a snake-human hybrid doesn't even make him blink. He has a heart of stone, that Horace Adderson.

You cannot possibly hope to salvage a movie after that. Even though it loses inertia The Snake Woman is still haunted by the ghost of that bone-rattlingly awful opening. It just keeps coming, and coming, and coming. More and more bullshit. What we are left with in the second half are two interesting details--the first being that Atheris sheds her skin. The effect for the shed human skin is actually somewhat convincing, though they don't show it in great light. The second detail is more a lesson to storytellers and filmmakers everywhere, embodied perfectly in the quick-stop lurch of focus this second half engages in: don't kill off your primary cast halfway through and expect us to care about who replaces them. It's not like Norman Bates also killed off Sam Loomis in the first part of Psycho.

The Snake Woman is yet another breathtaking exercise in copious incompetence. Profit by the laughs it gives you.

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Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), by Albert Zugsmith

Just as Fanny Hill was an adaptation of a classic book that echoed and cashed in on the Sexual Revolution, this movie's timing was similarly perfect--and it's probably no coincidence that today's movie's director produced Fanny Hill. While this "adaptation" of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium-Eater preceded much of the heavy drug use that was to come in the West, it doubtlessly had an influence on such as well. If it was possible to screen reels of this you'd better believe hippies were doing that in their basements when they had a chance--hell, it has Vincent Price in it, and hippies loved them some Vincent Price. (Who doesn't?) Promising trippy visuals clipped onto the action scenes that would define the Bond films yet to come, Confessions of an Opium Eater can be viewed as a prototype for many of the trends of the nascent decade it inhabited, a creepy drug-echo of times yet to come mirroring Price's character's own time-warping experiences in the story.

Price plays Gilbert de Quincey, a thug-for-hire and descendant of Thomas de Quincey. Gilbert finds himself caught up in the San Francisco Tong Wars of 1902, specifically a showdown between anti-human trafficking editor George Wah and the ancient, never-seen slaver of women Ling Tang. Ling Tang, through his officer Ruby Lo, hires Gilbert to bring back a prize slave girl who originally wanted to come to America to marry George Wah. Gilbert decides to rescue the girl from Ling Tang, bringing the full force of the Tong down on him. At some point in the chase, in order to hide out, Gilbert must smoke opium. Much of the film's reality has been dubious so far--but now Gilbert can't trust his senses, and consequently, neither can we.

This film is well-made, but it's not really until the end that everything "clicked" for me. It's lit by plenty of fun moments but only when viewed holistically does it become truly wonderful. Let's focus on the little details first. First of all Angelo Rossito shows up and he and Vincent Price are onscreen together, though they share no lines. Rossito is probably foreshadowing for another little person who shows up, the unnamed Chinese little person who helps Price in his quest, and whose death possibly foreshadows Price's own. Then, there's something I caught at the beginning, where one of the slave-girls aboard the ship tries to appeal to the ship's captain, who silently rolls his eyes and gestures her away. To me that hinted at something bigger. Was there a relationship between this girl and the captain, an attempt by the former to save her life? Is this all that tryst led to? I don't know if that was intentional but in the heat of the moment I read it that way, and it was heartbreaking.

Even as early as these opening sequences on the slave-ships, there are psychedelic hints which help suggest that Gilbert's trip travels back from the future to touch on all of his experiences. When the captured women are transported from ship to ship, their bodies falling to the deck are rendered in claymation, which looks out of place in the rest of the shots. Similarly, when one of the slave-ships is destroyed the explosion is a cartoon. This ends up leading into a scene where Gilbert, ostensibly sober at this point, hallucinates that a dragon-kite is a real dragon. Add in some weird geography/architecture (why does George Wah's office have an elevator into the sewers?) and you've got a world which is weird to start with. One which probably doesn't need opium's touch.

The actual psychedelics of the film are rather disappointing, but this was in an age where filmmakers rarely ever had even secondhand experiences with these substances. We get plenty of distorted shots of faces, skulls, and Chinese masks, however, which make up for things. There's also a spooky sequence where everything is silent and in slow-mo--a more realistic psychedelic terror. Zugsmith understands at least in some capacity that psychedelia and the horror therein thrives on altered sensation and a feeling of dissociation from time and other aspects of reality we take for granted--this slow-mo sequence captures that feeling nicely.

Then there's the dialogue. The runtime is populated with stretches of Price (supposedly) quoting de Quincey, Confucius, or the Bible...I couldn't be bothered to check all the quotes. But in between this pretentious quoting, Price also gets lines like, "I'm not a side'a beef in a butcher shop" which help bring you back to reality. Similarly, the aforementioned Chinese little person is a delight, as she often finds herself married to husbands she doesn't like--but only because they bore her. She often runs away or dissolves the marriage herself just so she can move onto a new experience. She actually probably has the best-defined character in the movie.

Despite the pretension of the dialogue, the ending does feel emotionally resonant--the movie does feel like the end of a journey, like a trip winding down. At the last, Gilbert has embraced the distorted reality opium has given him, and I will say that there is no more appropriate Vincent Price ending than this. As he is carried to his presumed death by the grungy waters of a dank sewer, he asks the audience: "Were these the whitening waters of death...or the gates of Paradise?" You gotta wonder, but the visuals don't let you wonder far...

Confessions of an Opium Eater is probably a love-it or hate-it, or rather a like-it or meh-it. It never dares too much, but it is pretty great for what it sets out to do. I felt like Vincent Price was slumming it a bit with these Zugsmithian conditions, but Price is never wasted--with him, you're in good hands.

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Book Club of Desolation #21: Spiridon (1907), by Andre Laurie

And so it is that Bookvember 2017 comes to a close with another book about unusual ants. The Ant with the Human Soul was one of three ant-related texts which I knew would turn up on the site sooner or later; Spiridon is the second of them, and I'm sure that at some point in 2018 I'll be cracking open The Ants of Timothy Thummel as well. This will be part of my new initiative, which is to feature Book Clubs of Desolation every third week of the month. In the meantime, Spiridon is a fun way to close out the year--a strange ethical fable by a man famed for collaborating with Jules Verne.

Spiridon tells the story of Dr. Aristide Cordat, a young French med student who, with the aid of his Asian friend Baron Tasimoura, has brought new medical miracles to Europe. Surgeries that heal terrible illnesses in minutes, drugs that induce swift recovery--there seems to be no limit to the talent of the Cordat-Tasimoura team. We find out why Tasimoura seems to possess superhuman knowledge: he is superhuman. Specifically, he is actually Spiridon, the Emperor of a race of ants living in the ruins of an old Phoenician treasure-tower on an Italian island. After nearly ending up as one of Spiridon's vivisection victims while exploring the tower, Cordat discovered the various wonders of the ants and realized how valuable the giant ant's scientific knowledge could be. Finding that the curiosity was mutual, he helped Spiridon disguise himself as a human so he could become a student of human ways. Unfortunately, human and ant morality differs substantially, and it isn't long before Cordat and the rest of France realize that ants have no compunctions about murder.

Like the best sci-fi, Spiridon is surprisingly ahead of its time in a lot of ways. There are a lot of interesting ideas here that expose how people in the early part of the century were adapting to the still-fluid genre; for example, Spiridon's human-like size and intelligence are not customary to his species, but are instead chemically induced when the Ant Emperor ascends to the throne. The rest of the ants on his island are normal-sized, though they seem to have above-average intelligence, as they are capable of vivisecting Cordat intelligently (as intelligent as vivisection can get anyhow). There's something about the setup that recalls Plato's philosopher-king--the Ant Emperor is given his enhanced abilities so that he is better equipped to govern. It's a system of elitism but it also ensures that the governing elite is best equipped for leadership; Cordat's response to Spiridon's explanation is a wish that intelligence-enhancing drugs were given to human leaders as well, which is hard not to sympathize with.

The way in which the ants' ethics manifest, too, defies a lot of the expectations I had for a work of this time. This book is gory as hell! In fact, this may be one of the most violent books I've read in a long time. I knew I was hooked the instant Cordat woke up in the ant tower next to a goddamn eviscerated corpse--the eviscerated corpse of the brother of one of the main characters, at that! When Spiridon is kidnapped by Joel le Berquin, one of Cordat's friends who becomes jealous of him and wants his secret to success, his threats to vivisect the ant are turned on him when Spiridon escapes; Spiridon straps le Berquin to his own operating table and cuts out his organs. All of this is because Spiridon, while possessed of emotions, is ruled primarily by cold insect logic--he was threatened, so of course it makes sense to turn that same threat around on the threatener...and learn more about human anatomy, to boot! Spiridon manages to come across as a being ruled by an alien sense of ethics without being a Vulcan, which is better than a lot of Laurie's successor would do when writing characters controlled by logic rather than feeling. And indeed, logic was applied to the creation of the character, as Laurie demonstrates a knowledge of ants that helps him guide the plot. Specifically, he knows about the various chemicals used by ants to control their social order and extrapolates that into Spiridon's wonder drugs and paralyzing venom. It just makes sense for ants to be master chemists, because from a certain perspective they already are.

Now, this book does have some noticeable shortcomings. I am concerned sometimes that I talk about bigotry so often that my words have become meaningless after a time, but I honestly don't care, so let's talk about how this is another book where ant class divisions = race. There is a...sigh...charming passage where Laurie mentions that, just as there are divisions in ethics and logic between man and ant, there are also "real gaps of conscience between men of different races." Now, it's certainly undeniable that people of different races are going to be culturally different, but to call it "gaps of conscience" implies that some have better consciences than others, and that, just as the differences between Spiridon and his human compatriots are largely irreconcilable, so too are the differences between races. It read too much like the arguments white supremacists make all too often about "incompatible" cultures, wherein they automatically dismiss the idea that "gaps" between cultures can be accommodated without destroying, assimilating, or prioritizing one culture over another. And I know that's because this is a book from 1907, but the white supremacists of today are using the same lazy excuses people were back then.

The book struggles tonally, oftentimes unsure of whether this is all supposed to be fun and whimsical or dark and bleak. Characters will sometimes speak like they're in a comedy and act extremely aloof about the situation, but there are several instances of people being butchered alive, with their remains left to be found by their friends, family, and coworkers. There is also the character of Pia, whose brother Cordat finds at the beginning of the book, and who swears a vendetta against Spiridon as such. She loses her life trapping Spiridon in a burning building and her death is treated as a tragedy, but the book--spoiler alert--ends with Cordat using the ants' chemical secrets to bring Spiridon back from the dead. He completely invalidates the lives of an entire family who died horribly thanks to a creature who has killed and could kill again not only with a lack of compunction, but with a biological inability to generate compunction in the first place! Keep in mind--Pia and Cordat have romantic chemistry together! The ending admittedly reveals that Spiridon is effectively lobotomized as a result of his death and resurrection; still cognizant and intelligent for an ant, but with a broken will, and therefore unlikely to go around cutting people up again. But it's really unclear who's supposed to be the victor here. At this point our sympathy for Cordat has vanished, yet he dances away into the sunset clicking his heels over all the scientific secrets he's unlocked.

I mentioned at the beginning that Andre Laurie (born Paschal Grousset) was a collaborator of Jules Verne's. When researching Laurie I was surprised to find out that one of the Jules Verne books from my childhood, The Begum's Millions, was written almost wholesale by Laurie! In fact, it's entirely possible that The Begum's Millions' relationship to Jules Verne was simply that the more famous author's name was stamped on the front cover by the authors' mutual editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, while Laurie was in political exile. Spiridon is often described as the work wherein Laurie broke away from Jules Verne's mold, and I take that to mean that maybe this book was something of a rebellion against Verne's scientific optimism. Neither Cordat nor Spiridon give science a good name, and I feel that almost has to be intentional. Maybe Cordat is supposed to be a colossal asshole, consumed, just as Spiridon is, with his own curiosity, rather than the human consequence that can arise from experimentation. It wouldn't be an unusual statement for a book at the time to make.

Then there's the detail that Spiridon spends most of the book in a wax mask and fake gloves. I know it's fiction, but unless Cordat's colleagues were 90% blind I can't imagine them mistaking wax prosthetics in 1907 for real human flesh. These people are goddamn doctors! They should know what a person looks like!

Problems aside, however, Spiridon is by-and-large an entertaining work, managing to avoid being boring despite some rather substantial deviations from the main plot thread at times. It is snappily written for a book from the dawn of the 20th Century, and Michael Shreve's translation-adaptation with Black Coat Press has a good flow to it. In fact, there's more drive to this than the usual Jules Verne novel. I just hope Timothy Thummel doesn't try to say that the ants represent race again.

Speaking of Black Coat Press, December sees the release of my short story "The Curse of Orlac" in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol. 14: Coup de Grace, which stars and references a number of fictional characters who have been mentioned before on this site. For next year's volume I have a story planned which involves Spiridon in some capacity.

In any case: this is kinda it for 2017, then. Man, what a shitty fucking year. But at least the movies were good, and the books were mostly good, right? I hope I've helped make your life a little more bearable in these trying times. I've been watching movies this whole time to get prepped for 2018, and I'll tell you now: it's gonna to be a fucking party. But I don't want to get too ahead of myself yet. We've still got a Top Ten Movie List to do, plus we have to crown Book of the Year!

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Hip Hop Locos (2001), by Lorenzo Munoz Jr.

Everyone I know of who has seen Hip Hop Locos hates it bitterly and deeply. That is because most people in this world--ostensibly--are sane. Spookyween, however, is not a holiday for sanity! It is a holiday of raw, unfettered chaos. The chaos present in Hip Hop Locos is of such an idiosyncratic brand that I can't help but love this movie through and through. It may have little appeal to those of you possessed of "taste" or "standards," but that's almost the point. I can hardly explain, but here I go.

Unodoz and J10 are two rappers appalled by the lack of Mexican rappers in the hip hop industry. (This movie makes no distinction between rap and hip hop, which I am told is not super accurate--but there is enough Venn diagram overlap where this may not be naivety on the filmmakers' behalf.) Thus they concoct the brilliant scheme of killing musicians and cocaine dealers to steal their music equipment, their cocaine, or both, and using the money they get from selling that, they'll buy recording time at a studio (?). The formula for the entire film: murder scenes cut by lengthy driving sequences or shots of the two rappers in dark rooms, in both cases repeating the plot premise of killing people for drugs/equipment so as to fund their rap career ad nauseum. Near the end, we get a hilarious sequence where they are unable to locate the house of their intended victim, and when they do get to said house, the man isn't home, so they just leave and never mention him again. The ending is inconclusive. Apparently they just keep killing people and all their wishes are granted.

Because there are only three kinds of scenes in this movie--talking in rooms, talking in cars, or killing people--this movie tries to make the mundane interesting by applying "cool" video effects. Shots will bounce around or become inverted at random. It's basically just a Rally of the Sony Filters. The insistence on raising the contrast of the already-muddy shots just emphasizes the largeness of our heroes' pores. It also disguises something that it took two viewings to confirm; these rappers spend most of their time wearing their beanies over their eyes, for reasons I can't divine. Plus, there's an insistence on dropping the pitch of peoples' voices, but not for any particular reason. Sometimes the pitch shift seems to have been added to emphasize a "scary" pre-murder moment, but this is done so infrequently and with such a lack of style that it's impossible to tell.

It's also impossible to tell if this movie believes that the true rapper lifestyle is as presented or if it makes fun of people dumb enough to believe such. Most of the dialogue is the movie is hopelessly inundated with exclamations of "homes," "esse," "eh," and "y'know what I'm sayin'?" And this is where the movie achieves the glory I see in it. The second murder scene involves a coke dealer being garrotted from behind. Whoever isn't doing the strangling keeps chanting, "Choke him, homes! Choke that mothafucker, homes! Choke him! Choke him, eh! Choke him, homes! Choke him, homes!" This scene lasts for almost exactly two and a half minutes. What's depressing about this is that this is actually the most accurate scene of strangulation I've seen in a while? Some last way too long, some are way too short. I can believe that the average adult has about two and half minutes of air in him. But the chanting really makes it go on for eternity and a day.

Regarding SFX/related material. One of the victims gets himself one of those rubber sticker blood spatters you put up on windows on Halloween leaking out of his body. There is no other gore. And despite this being a movie about rap and hip hop, there are about three (hilariously awful) raps, and everything else seems to be MIDIs from a '90s point-and-click horror game. This movie couldn't even get weed. In a lot of the scenes the actors are very clearly not smoking what's in their mouths (they don't exhale smoke), but when we get close-ups of blunt-rolling, well--look, I've been to college, and I know the difference between cannabis sativa and fucking chopped lettuce. Beautiful. Simply beautiful.

If you're a fan of such classics as Five Across the Eyes and The Tony Blair Witch Project, Hip Hop Locos is a treasure trove, a pot of gold at the end of your personal rainbow. It will probably take you slightly closer to eternal damnation, but hey, what's Halloween without that? The horror is, for now, on YouTube. Tread into its den...if'n you dare!

P.S./Fun Fact: When I was younger I thought this movie was a snuff film. I realize now that was a little dumb of me, but who knows...?

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I Drink Your Blood (1970), by David Durston

Doing a more intensive Spookyween this year has allowed me to obtain a particularly gleeful sense of history when it comes to tone in movies. The '20s produced films of shocking brutality, and the '30s continued that tradition, albeit in a milder sense. By the '40s, the horror genre had been thoroughly gelded, and the '50s produced virtually no horror films at all. I can't succinctly explain what was happening in the '60s, but the '70s saw the cultural upheaval of the hippie movement give agonized birth to the fervent pessimism of the punk era. Didn't take long for a horror movie to pick up an X rating for violence, did it?

I Drink Your Blood tells the tale of Horace Bones and his Family of Sados, who are not at all based on the Manson Family, no sir. They hold a Satanic ritual which is spied on by a local girl from the nearby small town of Valley Hills. This girl, Sylvia, is dating Andy, a member of the Sados, but this status does not spare her from the rape she suffers as punishment when she's caught. When Sylvia's grandpa Doc goes to settle affairs with the Family, he's beaten up and dosed with psychedelics, which causes him to have hallucinations of zombies or skeletons or something. Finally it is Sylvia's ten-year-old brother Pete who takes revenge. Their family runs a bakery, with the aid of Mildred Nash, girlfriend of the foreman of a local construction site--the same construction site, incidentally, which has led to most of Valley Hills becoming abandoned. While the hippies are having a rat barbecue at one of the abandoned buildings scattered throughout the area, Pete finds and kills a rabid dog, and injects its blood into the meat pies his bakery ends up serving to the hippies. Uh-oh. Soon all of the Sados are rabid, and once the promiscuous girl in their group gets to the construction crew, the bakery fam are the only folks in the area who aren't infected. Not everyone's going to get out of this one in one piece.

I'm not drawn into this movie simply because it's the natural double feature with I Eat Your Skin. It is a good movie of its own merits, even if I've recently discovered some differences between the "full" version of the movie and the version I've been watching these last ten years. The 75-minute version I was accustomed to is pretty gristly to begin with, featuring hands lopped off, pregnant hari-kiri, and a ton of real animal violence. The full 88-minute cut that I watched for this review contained not only an additional rape scene (and a truly nasty one at that), but also threw on a downer ending for good measure. What this all means is that I Drink Your Blood pushes more limits that a lot of the other movies that would follow through its native decade, managing to still freak me out after all these years.

Even ignoring its central focus on rabies-induced violence, there are tons of little nods here and there to ramp up the controversy. The Sados do a lot of drugs, naturally, which admittedly for a '70s movie isn't played for horror as hysterically as it could have been. But two moments stood out to me: there's a scene where the Sados end up knocking out Shelly, the guy they all pick on (presumably the father of the Friday the 13th Part III character). They cut his feet open and suspend from the ceiling, swinging him back and forth as a gristly pendulum. The blood from his feet splashes on the Sados, and one of them, Su-Lin, seems to get turned on it. Then, there's the fact that the promiscuous chick, the same who brings doom to the town in what I'm sure was at least a Freudian insertion of misogyny into the script, is also implicitly a pedophile--we see she's totally willing to try to seduce a ten-year-old in order to stop him from looking into what they're doing to his grandpa.

And yet despite their awfulness, I still somewhat enjoy the Sados as characters. The movie understands that it is they and not the townsfolk who are our leads, and therefore it fleshes them out with strangeness as best as it can. It starts on a good foot by having someone be named "Horace Bones" (though the name of his actor, Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, is almost as good). It helps that Bones acts like an ersatz hippie version of every villain Ricardo Montalban ever played. There's also the fact that the black man in the group is named "Rommel Yates," which a better critic than I could spend days unpacking. Then there's Su-Lin, the group's Asian representation, who dresses like a stereotypical "Dragon Lady" and commits suicide by burning herself like a Buddhist monk (this movie presents race weirdly, at the very least). Each of these characters, save perhaps for Shelly, who is largely there to be tormented and killed, all get faces of their own, in spite of their numbers, making them resemble the New Primitives of Rats: Night of Terror in that sense. And it really is tough to say how much we're supposed to like them. On one hand, they don't seem to take themselves overly seriously, and are largely just hyper-exaggerated caricatures of "wild youth"--Andy even comes right out and says most of it is for show and ego. Somehow they would seem a lot more menacing, at least initially, if they actually believed in Horace's stories of being the son of Satan. But you realize they're actually a lot worse. Cultists do what they do because they believe they're serving a higher cause, a greater authority; even Manson believed he had the God-given quest to provoke a race war. But Horace Bones and his crew have no such illusions. They're doing this just because they can, and because they want to. One gets the impression now and again that there is some philosophical motivation behind their actions--Su-Lin, for example, seems to honestly believe that blood and pain should be viewed by society as positive because they are signs one is still living--but the Family's primary direction in life is chaos and nothing but. This doesn't differ overly from other hippiesploitation flicks from before and after, but by incorporating decidedly more disturbing aspects into its evil hippie characters, I Drink Your Blood makes this sort of recklessness actually unsettling.

I do wonder, though, why they didn't get rabies from the rats they were cooking. It can't be healthy to take a bite out of a wild rat, especially if you don't bother cleaning it first in any way.

I also have to wonder why (trying to wrap things up now) our ostensible heroine, Mildred, is dating the dude that she is. He constantly talks over her, treats her like an idiot, and presumes he's always right. Ah well--he gets what's his in the end. I feel like maybe his bad-character-ness is a set-up for this final cruel twist, making it not so cruel after all.

I Drink Your Blood managed to shock me thoroughly, and I return to it on an annual basis. Stacking beautiful trashiness with sleazy gravitas, it serves effectively as a source of laughs and chills alike. And despite its gruesome content, it does make a good double feature with the comparatively tamer I Eat Your Skin. So draw up your chair, get yourself a meat pie, and dig in.

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West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

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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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