Alien Beasts (1991), by Carl J. Sukenick

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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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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House on Haunted Hill (1999), by William Malone

That was fun, let's do it again. But this time, let's see what the '90s have to offer us when we open the doors to the HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL.

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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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The Ghastly Ones (1968), by Andy Milligan

LGBT PRIDE IS HERE!!! Get your gay on with Andy Milligan and his island of murder!

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The Age of Insects (1991), by Eric Marciano

Hope you like being rubbed up with bug jelly.

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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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A Night to Dismember (1983), by Doris Wishman

I have called Carlos Tobalina "The Man," but Doris Wishman puts even him to shame. She was a director like no other, a pioneer not merely for being a woman in the mid 20th Century who ended up with the sort of career usually only obtainable and usually only wanted by men, but for being also something of an underground artist. She threw flourish and flair into 42nd Street sleaze with a style suggesting even she herself was unsure of what she was accomplishing with such. This attention to color and romance and drama was always contrasted with a hilarious feeling of slack laziness and rushed cheapness. And of course, Wishman was always as viciously exploitative as her male counterparts, if not moreso. While Wishman usually made sexploitation flicks intended to show off big boobs (or sometimes, to mix things up a bit, absurdly big boobs), A Night to Dismember was her attempt to cash in on the slasher movie craze rising from the hot freshness of Friday the 13th and, from a little earlier, Halloween. The result was doubtlessly bizarre to begin with, but then something very unusual happened. Someone tried to destroy the movie's print, and nearly succeeded--and this did not deter Wishman. She slowly reconstructed the film from what remained, using dubs and "clever" editing to hide the holes. Or, so she claimed: there's really only one bit of solid evidence that I know of to substantiate this. But just remember, even if this didn't happen, every frame of this movie definitely feels like it did. Remember that well!

The Kent family has lived in the small town of Woodmire Lake for 70 years. However, one October night in 1986 (I'll get to that, don't worry), the Kents were all killed in some manner. (The movie says all its death happen in one night, and that's bullshit, but again, I'll get to it.) Phineas Kent and his two beautiful daughters were slaughtered, and Broderick Kent killed himself after slaying his wife for insurance money. That left Adam Kent, his wife, and their three children, Billy, Mary, and Vicky. Vicky for all intents and purposes is our protagonist--five years prior, she was sent to a mental hospital for killing two boys. However, she's since reformed and recover, and she spends the movie with everyone around her, including and especially her family, fully expecting her to crumble back into homicidal insanity. Billy and Mary in particular want to keep all their parents' affections for themselves (despite looking old enough to have at least one grad degree), and as such forge an increasingly ludicrous string of stunts to frame Vicky and/or drive her nuts, including dressing up like a waterbound zombie and later some kind of green-skinned old man. Of course, there are also some killings going on which make it look mighty probable Billy and Mary won't need to frame their sister for murder. Detective Tim O'Malley is on the case, but will he figure things out before it's too late?

Most if not all of the plot of this movie is told via voiceover. This is because all the stuff that would normally forward the plot was destroyed in a fire...again, ostensibly. The possibility remains that all of the madness that dances across A Night to Dismember's 68 minutes was made on purpose, but even Wishman was too embarrassed to move forward without proper apologia in place. Listening to this voiceover shows a shakiness that has rarely been paralleled in other movies I've seen. Even if there wasn't a warbling delivery to it I'd still be agog at editing that leaves us with the line, "The Kents lived in Woodmire Lake for 70 years. Then, all of the Kents were dead." "Manic" is the word I wrote down to describe it, and I can't think of anything better. There are so many cuts in this film there's a special Death named after them. The tone, speed, and diction of a character's line will change at random, and there's beloved celebration of the old Coleman Francis trick of keeping everyone's mouth out of frame. Once we reach the axe murders all hell breaks loose, and the swiftness and repetition of the cuts nears artfulness. The "bong" sound that sometimes announces the appearance of Chesty Morgan's tits in Deadly Weapons makes a shocking reappearance, to the point of insanity. And there are "chase" scenes made of the same two or three shots looped endlessly.

As I said in my review for Frozen Scream, I'm positive that Thomas McGowan, who plays Kevin McGuire in that film, also plays Tim O'Malley, who is mysteriously uncredited both on IMDB and in A Night to Dismember's end credits themselves. O'Malley supplies the bizarre opening voiceover which summarizes the deaths of both Phineas and Broderick Kent's families in four minutes, as though this film was a sequel to movies about those murders. Then, he dates Vicky's killing of the neighborhood boys to "August of 1981," but also "five years ago." Remember this movie was released in 1983. Either the actor flubbed his line, the editing made him flub his line, or Wishman meant for this movie to be set in the future. Similarly, it's worth commenting on the fact that O'Malley insists the events of this all take place in one day, which I assume is meant to explain why Adam Kent never learns about the massacre of his family. But I'm sure we go through at least one day/night cycle. All of this just contributes to the sheer strangeness that this movie is ridden with.

Now, regarding the chance that there was another version of this movie: I believe it, and I think the trailer proves it. The trailer is a trip in itself, and it fortunately features a spooky narrator who tells us the story of the movie he's advertising. Except in this version, Mary Kent has no siblings, and is apparently assaulted in some form by a disfigured stranger--this encounter leaves her with psychic powers (!), which she uses to slaughter her family. Then, years later, Vicky Manuel moves into the former Kent home, where she begins having psychic visions of the murders. If you've been reading this review in any capacity you can tell that that is a totally different movie. Add in the fact that this trailer features a ton of footage completely unseen in the finished cut and I think the tales are true. This would explain one shot I've noticed in the final movie where one of Vicky's relatives is running towards a car saying, through dub, "Hurry up, dear, it's going to rain!" The shot is slowed down to make it seem less frantic but it's clearly a shot of people running in panic; the person speaking is looking over her shoulder and screaming. They just dubbed right over and hoped no one would notice. I would love to see the original version of this film (I do have to wonder why Wishman didn't make use of the "lost" footage present in the absolutely-extant trailer), but I'm also infinitely pleased with what we ended up with.

A Night to Dismember is one of my favorite movies of all time and I will say no more of it, due to my deathless hopes that more people will see and find fondness for it. I don't want to compare films to Troll 2, The Room, or, God forbid, Birdemic, but if you need a new great bad movie, this is it. It is nothing short of a miracle in filmmaking, which we can all learn from. Here's to Doris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Euridice BA 2037 (1975), by Nikos Nikolaidis

Well, this movie gave me nightmares, so that's a reason to review it.

Euridice BA 2037 is a Greek art film retelling the story of Euridice--as you might expect. So we follow Euridice as she sits trapped in her apartment (Apartment BA 2037), dealing with the bureaucracy of a moving company for a transfer that will never come. A bunch of hippies sometimes open her windows to throw garbage at her and poke her with sticks. She complains to her boyfriend that she can't remember if she's been waiting for the moving trucks for five days or five years; shortly thereafter she begins receiving mysterious calls from a man who claims to have once been her lover. She is also haunted by creepy shadowy figures that probe around at her windows and occasionally-transparent walls. These shadow-figures also run their hands over her sheets when she's sleeping. When she's not trying to figure out her move, she's inhaling vomit out of the toilet, or making her toy dolls fuck each other before biting their plastic dicks off. It may all be tied up in the mysterious death of her friend Vera. In the end we find out that the man who has been calling Euridice is actually her boyfriend from the beginning, because this is an art film and we need a mindfuck ending.

Hm...that all sounds pretty strange. I'm sure it has something to do with the original myth of Euridice. Euridice was the wife of Orpheus, son of Morpheus the dream-god; a friend of Orpheus' decided to hit on her, and when she ran away from him she stepped on a snake, which killed her. Orpheus voyaged into the Underworld to rescue her and played a song that charmed Hades and Persephone into agreeing to let her go...but only under the condition that he not turn back as he ascended out of the Underworld. Orpheus was nearly back to the surface when he had a last-minute doubt that Euridice was following him, and when he looked back and saw her, she was sucked back into Hell, this time permanently.

...okay, so basically they took the story of "woman is in Hell" and went with that. That's cool, even ignoring the fact that the Greek Underworld wasn't really Hell the way the Judeo-Christian world knows it. And Hell this is indeed. I can't claim to understand all of the symbolism in this movie--frankly, I'm a little symbolism'd out at this point--but let's just say for now that there's plenty of terrifying and Freudian bullshit to go around. The creepy figures that stalk Euridice steer this movie straight into horror territory, but the focus is so clearly on the nonsense artistic aspects that it's tough to tell if this was the intent. Nevertheless, as a horror fan I loved all the little moments where these faceless creatures would poke in all Silent Hill-like to fuck with our protagonist.

And of course there is the sexual imagery. An important letter concerning Euridice's transfer comes when she's in the shower, and so our first glimpse of her admittedly beautiful body is when she is caught in the throes of panic. This sets the movie's habit of undercutting eroticism with something unsettling--hey, like a lot of these art films! The doll sex scene is what really sold me. They actually had to mold and cast a tiny little hard-on for the baby doll they use. This is the first movie I've seen that contains a doll-castration; I hope many more follow.

I think I like art films the best when I can riff them. It's pretty hilarious when I get to make a Telephone Book joke: the first words out of my mouth when I realized the nature of Euridice's phone call were "I'd like to talk to you very seriously for a moment, about your beautiful tits." For all the chills it sent up my spine, Euridice BA 2037 is prime material for riffing just because, like a lot of art films, it takes itself a bit too seriously at times. It is also, like a lot of art films, tremendously boring at stretches. I loved it all the same.

And it did give me nightmares! I watched this movie twice, taking on a second viewing because I barely remembered my first. After the initial viewing I had a dream about those hippies from the beginning breaking into my house and poking me and my family with sticks, and throwing garbage at us. That's why I ended up bothering with a second viewing in the first place. I guess there's some imagery that just sticks with you. Euridice BA 2037, for all its faults, contains many such images, and while I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, I do think it's something you should cross off if you like your horror movies leaning to the artsy side. Carnival of Souls fans take note!

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Cruel Ghost Legend (1968), by Kasuo Haze

So outside of Shogun Assassin, and the Godzilla series, we haven't done any Japanese movies on here! Let's change that. J-horror is pretty awesome--my friends awoke me to the coolness of the Ju-On series in college, and around the same time news was breaking of the re-discovery of this movie, which was formerly believed lost. Even then I was wary of lost films retaining any degree of entertainment--the loss of a lot of these movies would not be any big blow to film. But Cruel Ghost Legend is a movie that found its way back from oblivion that actually still has a solid kick to it. Shocking beyond what Western audiences could stand at the time, the movie stands as a potent piece of Japanese ghost horror with enough sleaze to satisfy your average trash fan several times over.

A samurai and his wife are deep in debt to a blind acupuncturist named Sojun, who may also be the samurai's father. They enter a deal where Sojun may have his way with the samurai's wife in exchange for crossing off the interest on the debt--never mind that this would be a huge dishonor for her. However, this is a ruse, and as he goes in to rape her, the samurai brutally slashes him to death. As he and his son Shinichiro throw the dying victim into the river, but as he sinks below the cloud of black blood, he spits a curse out at the couple. We slowly learn more of the samurai's lifestyle after his murder of Sojun; he has a mistress, whom he has gotten pregnant, and he has another son named Shinzo from a restaurant girl. Eventually the ghost of Sojun arrives, and tricks the samurai into killing his wife before seemingly killing him.

But this isn't the end. Years later Shinichiro has become a bandit and multiple murderer. We follow him as he continues his spree of deception, seduction, murder, and thievery, until at last his sins catch up with him when he tries to kill and rob his former sensei, an incestuous lech who fakes quadriplegia. After a rooftop showdown with the police, Shinichiro is captured and sentenced to his final fate. We then go even further into the future to follow the life of Shinzo, who is also a criminal. With the aid of his partner-in-crime/lover Ohisa he tries to seduce a wealthy women to rob her in her sleep, but she catches him and forces him to become her lover by insinuating he raped her. Shortly thereafter her face is horribly disfigured, but he is still trapped with her. These plot threads finally weave themselves together in a fucked-up ending that would make Harry Stephen Keeler proud.

With comparatively few sets, actors, and effects, Cruel Ghost Legend attempts to tell a time-spanning story across two generations that is ultimately a fable of bleakness. Not only is the extent of Sojun's curse particularly chilling, but the reasoning behind it makes it all worse: it's a curse cast in revenge, but it's not even revenge we can root for, since the person trying to avenge themselves is an usurer with ambitions of rape! I can't think of a single good thing that happens to anybody in this movie, so if you go in expecting even a hint of optimism you'll be let down. But if you're like me, and you're a fan of Bad Things Getting Worse...

Unlike a lot of movies that go for relentless negativity, Cruel Ghost Legend still makes some choices that good movies make. Visually, it's very impressive, with some of the same excellent lighting decisions as the spooky parts of Face of the Screaming Werewolf, and some comparably creepy makeup. There's a lot of blood, as well, and as we learned with The Flesh Eaters, gore always looks better in black in white. The movie does occasionally step into color, particularly during select scenes where everything becomes psychedelic purple. These are always used to highlight flashbacks to the circumstances that led into the curse. On an auditory level the film also delivers, using a variety of internal monologues to show just how big of scumbags our characters are, and a high screeching soundtrack that is automatic code for pants-shitting terror. The film haunts you as a result of all these different factors piling up on each other.

I haven't seen enough J-horror in my life, but I write this review with the hopes that some of you out there will watch Cruel Ghost Legend for yourselves and recommend similar things to me. Leave a comment below and I'll love you for life.

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The Telephone Book (1971), by Nelson Lyon

Black and white sexploitation is a revelation. Like most statements this isn't universally true, though I always believe in the significance of anything, no matter how small. Hence this site. We haven't had a chance to talk about a lot of black and white sexploitation outside of the odd thing like All Women Are Bad, but for better or worse the genre has left a powerful impact on my life, even if it is a genre that most people have never heard of, much less experienced. Someday soon we'll have to talk about the wonders of Doris Wishman, or Larry Crane's The Love Captive, or, if I can handle it, Charles Morgan's Stick It In Your Ear. Despite the gruesome titles, to say nothing of the name of the genre itself, these movies are all pseudo-comedic explorations of sexuality through methods both crass and artistic. Oftentimes, the art arises accidentally, a consequence of a modern viewer responding to decades of pastiching this style in "highbrow" circles (or at least high-budgeted ones). But sometimes there is an intention to the craft, an actual attempt at low-budget artistry. I don't know how well intentional art films fit in with my broad and idiosyncratic definition of "trash," but let's just say that no matter how well-known or "significant" The Telephone Book is, it's become one of my new favorites ever. It's one of those movies packed with so much raw insanity that it's truly hard to believe it actually exists. Like Gretta, or Bloody Wednesday, or Evil Dead, this is a movie which hits every single button of what I like in a movie, while still containing flaws which keep it grounded in a realistic humanity. While nonetheless bursting out beyond anything anyone could properly prepare for.

Fittingly, this is a film about a woman who receives transcendent fulfillment from an admittedly flawed and perverse source. Alice is a sexually frustrated young stoner who lives in her small, barren apartment which is wallpapered with porn. One day, she receives a disgusting but largely implied dirty call from a man with black gloves calling from a payphone. This brings her more sexual release than she's ever felt before, so she's delighted when the man calls again, now represented by subtitles. He tells her his name is John Smith, and encourages her to track him down. It shouldn't be an impossible task--after all, he's in the telephone book.

Thus begins Alice's adventures in...well, a potential Wonderland metaphor would be superficial at best. First she meets a man who claims to be the caller, a stag film actor named Har Poon, and he's in the middle of making one of his movies when she comes across him. Then, she runs into a horny analyst who is astonishingly none other than Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Mustache and all. In exchange for money to make more phone calls, she tells him the story of how she helps a well-endowed middle-aged deal with his week-long priapism. Eventually Alice and Mr. Smith meet. And he turns out to be a homophobic, dog-kicking, homewrecking pedophile who wears a pig mask. No matter...he and Alice aren't meant to have sex in the conventional way. They agree to make one last call. And this leads to the film's final ten minutes.

The movie suddenly snaps to color.

And I will say no more.

Every single moment of this movie is unfettered surrealism. But it's calculated surrealism; little is done on accident. The movie has a habit of interrupting itself--especially when it comes to romance. It will be playing music that builds up the attraction Alice develops towards her mysterious caller when we are interrupted with vignettes of former dirty callers confessing their increasing strange and disturbing habits, like the man who used to call nuns while running his hand through a bowl of split pea soup. And the sex in this movie is always made unappealing in some way, despite the fact that Alice's actress, Sarah Kennedy, is one of the most attractive actresses I've been gay for in a while. It's like the movie never wants to be sincere with its romance or sexuality, presenting a contrasting cynicism to its apparent optimism. It does not take long for the film to get dark after Mr. Smith reveals himself, but Alice doesn't seem aware of it. I don't know what to take from the fact that his obvious anger issues, selfishness, and fucking pedophilia are not turn-offs for her. Like I said, the movie is flawed, but so is life. This movie is laboriously unlike life, but like religion it is made by humans and there are bound to be cracks. Or perhaps this is just Dada--the opening to the 1934 Mystery Ranch played out as a whole movie.

Despite its ventures into the tasteless, the movie is successfully funny throughout most of its runtime. The scenes with Rogel C. Carmel are especially great, because he is a great actor even off Star Trek. That is to say that I like to see Star Trek actors scream "fuck"--the only thing I love as much is seeing Star Trek actors face down giant killer rabbits. Because so much of the comedy arises from the surrealism, the movie invited some comparisons to other nonsensical comedies of a sexual nature, like A Clockwork Blue or Down and Dirty Duck. All three of these movies were probably made by stoners, but whereas A Clockwork Blue is weekend silliness, and Down and Dirty Duck is obsessed with being as offensive as possible at all costs, The Telephone Book has direction and drive. You feel like it's actually going somewhere, and rarely do its tangents subsume the themes of the film. Nothing is self-indulgent. It's stoned as fuck, but fortunately there's actually a brain in that THC-stormed skull.

The Telephone Book is a movie that reminds me why I got in this business to begin with. I feel like I've said that or some variant on it a lot recently, but that's just because I've had a string of good luck. This is some exceptionally pure and marvelous '70s B&W sleaze that was put together by people who actually cared. This is definitely a movie which more people should know about, and I really don't think anyone's life is complete without it. If you like art, if you like trash, if you like bad movies and good movies alike, there's something in it for you. Just mind the boobiez.

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LGBT Pride Triple-Review Special!

Happy Pride, everybody!

As fans of the site may have noticed, I'm pretty bad at theming my reviews around the holidays. And that's because, well, I don't celebrate most holidays, aside from Halloween. Next year I'll try to be better about it. But I nearly let Pride, my other holiday, slip by without a mention on the site. So in order to celebrate Pride Month, I decided to look at three different LGBT-related movies which are all appropriate to the site in some way. There's no time to waste, so let's get started!

Vampyros Lesbos (1971), by Jess Franco:

 

So we're starting with...a Jess Franco film? That may seem an odd choice, but assuredly Franco is going to do much better at delivering an artsy sexy gay vampire movie than many of his peers of trash. Vampyros Lesbos is definitely a questionable choice anyway due to the apparent conclusions reached by the film, but I have my own thoughts on how this strange, surreal piece of cinema fits together.

Linda Westinghouse is a real estate agent haunted by sexual dreams of some weird artsy floor show starring a statuesque brunette in a red scarf. When she reports these dreams to her psychiatrist, he basically says she's bored with her boyfriend and should have an affair. Of course, given what he's been doodling in his notebook in the place of notes, it seems like he wants her to have an affair with him. But this doesn't go anywhere, as Linda decides to take on a real estate case with work that will take her out to Istanbul. She's officially there on business, but the implication is that if she meets the right person on this trip, she'll go all Yellow Pages and let their fingers do the walking, if you know I mean. And for a brief while it seems like her client will be the one to do the honors. Countess Nadine Carody has just inherited an expansive estate from a Hungarian kinsman of hers...the last survivor of the House Dracula. Linda's trip has been weird so far--by the time she's met Nadine she's already had a bad run-in with a hotel employee named Memmet (played by Franco himself!) who claims to have some secret information on the Countess...before revealing that this claim was a ruse to trap and murder Linda! But it's about to get weirder, as Linda first faints at dinner with the Countess, then has sex with her upon awakening. This sex culminates in Nadine biting Linda unconscious and drinking her blood, but Linda wakes up unharmed. Nadine is not so lucky. Her dead body, lips still smeared with blood, lies afloat in her pool. The shock of all this erases Linda's memory and she finds herself in the clinic of a certain Dr. Seward...and yet, the mystery of the Countess is not over yet.

Before trying to actually analyze this, I just want to comment on how this movie is one of Jess Franco's Jess Francoiest films. The dream-like structure of the film even outside the dream sequences, the obsession with the zoom lens, the use of actress Soledad Miranda, the appearance of a character named "Morpho," the casting of himself as a sicko, the Dracula parallels and name-borrowing, and the thematic focus on the supernatural adventure of a sexually-(re)developing young woman in a foreign land are all Franco hallmarks. It even opens with a nightclub sequence, and if that wasn't enough, it's also one of the movies that Franco ripped off from himself--specifically, he would clone Vampyros Lesbos twelve years later with the similarly-entertaining Macumba Sexual. If you need to see what a "Jess Franco movie" looks like as a thing unto itself, independent of just a meaningless name on the Internet, this is a good starting point. Suffice it to say it doesn't really function in the traditional sense of a movie--it's incomparable even amongst the other dream-like films pumped out during the golden age of Eurohorror, save for perhaps the works of fellow sexual vampirism fan Jean Rollin.

So how does this movie treat homosexuality?

It soon becomes clear that the psychic hold Countess Carody has over Linda, and Linda's struggle with it, represents Linda's experience with homosexuality. As a result, the movie is ultimately about a group of people, Linda herself included, trying to cure her of her gayness, and ultimately succeeding. It's also about the homosexual urge as something predatory. But that isn't to say that Franco is being anti-gay in the movie. Indeed, there's little to suggest that a life with men is a good thing for Linda either. After all, this movie is primarily about deception, particularly deception as it comes from men. Linda's psychiatrist is a pervert who prefers to get his dick hard during their sessions rather than actually treat her. Memmet's offer of insight into the strange situation turns out to be a trick to try to rape, torture, and kill her. And Dr. Seward, the occult/psychiatric expert who is this film's seeming van Helsing (despite having the name of a different Dracula character), is revealed to actually be using Linda's connection to the Countess to try to force the Countess to make him into a vampire himself! Other than that, the other men we see in any sort of detail are the Countess' mute assassin Morpho, and Linda's boyfriend. The latter isn't a bad guy, he just seems a little boring, and she doesn't appear to be overly interested in him (notice how she basically never smiles at him). That deception theme is important in that by complicating the motivations of most of the characters, it forces us to question its lead "villainess"'s motivations as well.

It could be argued that the film is simply sexist, giving us a female protagonist who is victimized ceaselessly by men who face almost no consequences for their actions. But we are supposed to sympathize with Linda, and I think we're supposed to sympathize with Nadine, as well. In one scene she tells Morpho how she became a vampire--a few centuries ago she was in a war-wracked city, where a group of men were running around raping people. Nadine was among the victims but suddenly Dracula appeared and saved her, at first simply feeding off of her but eventually making into a vampire. As a result of her rape and her negative experiences with Dracula, Nadine is disgusted by men. Yes, this is a huge cliche, but in my mind it's valid for someone to identify as gay after such a traumatic event (the film definitely never suggests that all lesbians are rape victims, or that Nadine would be happy with men if it weren't for that darn trauma). Nadine's phrasing is particularly key: "[The rapist] was my first man. It was horrible." How are we not supposed to sympathize with her after she says that? That it's haunted her for so many decades afterward only speaks further to the fact that she's more complicated than she first appears.

Further confounding the character of the Countess is the strange red kite that keeps following Linda. Because it's red, I suspect it's probably meant to stand in for Nadine's red scarf, which is pretty much confirmed by the film's last shot, which shows the kite crashing to the ground. But to me, that has a tragic dimension to it. The kite flies free throughout the film, and in the end, it is grounded. The woman who could have set the Countess free has gone back to her boring drip of a boyfriend, fully convinced that the world she showed her was evil, even though she's not smiling as she sails away with him. It's because Franco used a kite specifically for this imagery that I see this--or it could be I'm grasping at straws.

Maybe the appeal I get from this film is much more mundane. Maybe it's just that as a gay woman, this film lets me believe that there's a Turkish island out there where there are lesbians with the physique and charisma of Soledad Miranda just waiting for other frustrated gay women to show up and go skinny-dipping with them. Maybe.

Thematic studies aside, Vampyros Lesbos is just a really fun movie. I will probably address more of its content when I tackle its aforementioned clone, Macumba Sexual, which I think I enjoyed more than this one. If you're a Woman-Loving Woman and you want a weird, artsy vampire movie to tickle your horror bone and perhaps a few others with it, this is a pretty good way to go.

Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (1982), by William Asher

Our next movie is much more transparent about how it stands on gay people...and never before have I seen LGBT themes incorporated so flawlessly into a slasher. Well, Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (aka Night Warning) is sort of a slasher...it fits in best with that genre even though its psychological ruminations are much more advanced than even the most devious slashers that have come previously. No succinct statement will summarize this movie, so it's best to crack it open and see what comes out.

Billy Lynch is three years old when his parents die in a rather visceral car crash, leaving him in the care of his aunt Cheryl. Mercifully, Billy grows up with a relatively normal life, until he begins to reach the end of his high school career. He has a lot going for him, even if there's also a lot against him as well: he's in a solid relationship with his girlfriend Julie, and he's due to pick up a full ride at the college of his choice on a sports scholarship. But a lot of people pick on him for being so close to the openly gay basketball coach, and Cheryl is rather overprotective of him, to say the least. We'll be slowly finding out that Cheryl falls into the Margaret White/Pamela Voorhees school of parenting rather quickly, beginning with the film's inciting event of her failed seduction of a serviceman who comes by--when she is rebuked she kills him, and claims that he tried to rape her. The cop assigned to the case is Detective Joe Carlson, who begins his life in this film as the stereotypical unnecessarily-skeptical movie-cop before revealing himself as something else. Carlson hates gay people, to the point where he finds it unavoidable that Billy is gay (because he's friends with a gay person) and that his homosexuality caused him to murder the serviceman. What's more is that as Detective, Carlson answers to virtually no one in the local jurisdiction, meaning that not even other cops can stand in the way of his prejudicial crusade. But even his dedication can't surpass that which Cheryl has for ensuring that her nephew stays with her forever...as her lover.

I was skeptical of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker at first, despite the extensiveness of its opening car crash sequence. Up until Cheryl's murder of the handyman, there's nothing to indicate that this movie is particularly special one way or the other. There are suggestions here and there of Cheryl's unhealthy interest in her blood relation, but it really is that first murder that causes all Hell to break loose. From there, the movie hardly lets up for a minute, bringing us new horror with every new scene. It slowly turns out that Billy's whole life has been a lie, and that no one can be trusted.

Indeed, this entire movie could be called Billy's Unending Nightmare Train. Everything in the movie is coordinated to show that the world is against Billy, even insinuating that Detective Carlson's claim that Coach Landers is sexually interested in the notably-younger boy is true. (It isn't.) But what's interesting is that the focus of the film is on Aunt Cheryl instead...Billy's story is portrayed almost incidentally to hers. It's as if director Asher is trying to get the audience to go along with the world's general dismissal of Billy's trauma, which in turn helps us recognize the horror of his experiences when we realize how the film's gaze treats him. Focusing on Cheryl gives us the added benefit of seeing how deep her madness runs.

And it runs down to her mind's Marianas Trench. Better pens than mine have sung the praises of Susan Tyrrell as Aunt Cheryl, so the only thing I'll say is that you have to see her for yourself. Similarly, rather than spoil the movie extensively in my analysis of the LGBT themes, I will simply say that this is a movie that clenches you up and lets you feel that evil will win in the end. As I mentioned above, this film wears its LGBT feelings on its sleeve, and thankfully this is one instance of an '80s horror movie where there was some progressive sense in the heads of the filmmakers. I love happy endings.

If there are any faults in this movie, it has to do with the weird sequence where Cheryl and Billy's neighbor comes over and learns about some of Cheryl's darker secrets. This neighbor lingers in the scene in a way that suggests the writers lost track of her and what she was supposed to be doing here, and she dies way later than seems logical. This scene bogged down the movie for me a bit because I had trouble following what was going on, but I may just be an unintelligent creature. You'll have to find out for yourself! If you're queer like me, the ending will probably make you stand up and cheer. So I guess you'll have to get all the way through the movie or something...

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), by Toshio Matsumoto

Sometimes, you just gotta dive deep into the artsy.

I actually have a pretty strong taste for art films. I'm finding that I really just love MOVIES and so I see as many of them as I can...not everything is the sort of stuff that washes up on this site. Admittedly, I'm pretty skeptical of art films because, as you may have surmised on your own time, a lot of them are pretentious nonsense. Jodorowsky turns me away with real animal corpses and sexist mommy issues; Godard's "style" is actually just coded sloppiness; and I'm not even going to bother with Terrence Malick. But I enjoyed David Holtzman's Diary, every Truffaut movie I've seen so far, and now, Funeral Parade of Roses. Roses is not merely a contender for placement on this site due to my liking of it, as well as its "underground" (i.e. unwatched) status...it also contains sequences of graphic violence! All of its intriguing vectors come together at the end to make an unforgettable experience that is particularly hard to classify.

I say "hard to classify" as a leading statement into this next paragraph, where I normally summarize the plot. While Funeral Parade of Roses does have a plot, there are other elements which crop up throughout the film that have to be discussed separately. Our main narrative concerns Eddie, a young trans woman who is dating their boss, the cis dude manager of the dance club they work at. Eddie is in the process of forcing their paramour to dump his other girlfriend, another trans woman named Leda. Over the course of this story we see Eddie's adventures through drug-filled queer dance clubs and incidents both tragic and comedic as their backstory unfolds, involving childhood humiliation at the hands of their mother. All of this leads to literally Oepidal aspirations and a final gory ending.

But intercut with this are scenes where the camera pulls back from the action to reveal the production in progress. During this time we have interviews with the cast, who give comments on their own experience as gay men, as trans women, and as drag queens. (Many of the queer characters describe themselves as all of these throughout the film, reflecting that '60s stances on sexuality, gender identity and transvestism were considerably more fluid than what we have today. I have described Eddie and Leda as trans women because their assumption of female identity transcends the performative nature of drag [even while not contradicting it either]. They call themselves gay even though, at least in my mind, a trans woman attracted to men would be heterosexual. But identity is the sole property of the one who has it, so my view, even as a trans woman, should not be considered universal.) Many of these sequences are beautiful and sincere glimpses into a world nearly fifty years away, so different and yet so familiar. These meta-sequences are tied in with a film club that screens the movie as it's being made, comparing it to the works of Mekas and Pasolini. It is the definition of self-aware--and the story changes completely.

So we have a gay trans adaptation of Oedipus Rex, inside a dramatization of the making of that adaptation, that comments on itself mid-production. The earliest impression you get from this combination is that it helps to provide a different context to the more problematic elements of that Oedipus narrative. Eddie's gender identity is heavily implied to be the result of their not being able to live up to the masculine example set by their late father. So this early trauma is what has made Eddie-pus the King, or more properly, the Queen--and the hubris of that leads to their awful fate. That's definitely a negative portrayal of trans life, in my mind. But we aren't watching that movie, are we? We're watching the movie about the making of that movie. The interviews with the cast reveal that a lot of them view their roles rather frivolously, and don't view it in political terms. It's a chance for them to take a classic story and adapt it in a way that's relevant to who they are as queer folk. This is the story of how queer folk choose to tell their stories.

Any good art movie should look nice, and this movie is no exception. There's a lot of great stuff to look at. Take the divergences into the bizarre art gallery chamber that Eddie sometimes teleports too, full of creepy paintings of distorted faces. A narrator talks to us about the notions of "masks" and how our true selves interact with the world. This is intercut with scenes of Eddie and other trans women out shopping, completely indistinguishable from their cis counterparts. I only wish I was as pretty as them. Their shopping trip ends with a confrontation with a bunch of catty transphobic ladies, but this is played for comedy in the trans women's favor. These shifts in tone occur as often as the shifts in imagery. For all the negativity the story brings us to, there's one scene which will stand out for a lot of you: a scene where characters move in fast motion to a sped-up version of the William Tell Overture. Yeah, just like that scene in Clockwork Orange. Because Kubrick, by his own admission, stole this scene where he made Clockwork Orange two years later. What does that say about art cinema?

The last thing I'll say before shooing you off to watch this yourself is that I am obligated to explain the title somewhat. This movie contains a literal Funeral Parade of Roses, possibly even a couple of them, but in Japanese "rose" (or "bara") is a slang term with roughly the same meaning as "pansy" in English. That suggests a derogatory meaning, but the reverence the film gives to floral roses and to funerals shows that the message of the title is the same as the rest of the movie. Queer people are beautiful, and we are valid. You can call us flowers, but that's not an insult. We'll make movies that'll bowl you over.

So dive into the artsy! Dive deep; let it soak into your skin. Let your mind be blown!

And if you couldn't get enough gay from these movies--let's face it, there's never enough gay--I also recommend Ben & Arthur, Fleshpot on 42nd Street, and also future review subject Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things, a hysterical high-camp drag murderfest with some literal Killer Queens. I'm glad these movies are out there, to make me laugh, to make me cry, and to make me think. NOW GO FORTH AND BE PROUD, MY QUEERS.

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