Mystery Ranch (1932) and Mystery Ranch (1934), by David Howard and Bernard B. Ray

This review exists out of spite, in a way. One of the films I wanted to look into before this weird B-Western craze I've been having burnt itself out was listed in my records simply as "Mystery Ranch (1932)." I also memorized a brief plot description I'd stumbled across, which was that it was some sort of Gothic Western with an evil piano player, and that it starred George O'Brien. Curious, then, that every version of the film I found online credited the star as Tom Tyler, each featuring a plot which in no way had an evil piano player, much less Gothic elements. Then I spotted my error: this was the Mystery Ranch from 1934, a completely different film. It sure sucked, then, that there were several online editions of the movie that listed the details of the 1932 film in the description, a fault replicated as well on several movie databases. I love and hate dealing with movies made within a few years of each other with the same title--it can be rough spending a long time searching for a movie, especially if you thought that you already found it...and especially if finding that first wrong film was a challenge to begin with. But then again, I also get to do double reviews like this one.

Mystery Ranch ('32) is ultimately the story of Jane Emory, a wealthy heiress being held hostage at her own ranch by Henry Steele, her late father's deranged business partner. He intends not only to hang onto the ranch by any means necessary but to marry Jane whether she wants it or not. He spends a lot of time brooding and playing ominous piano pieces, because he is Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton. In his employ is a deadly mute Apache whose name, of all things, is Muto...because of course it is. Enter Bob Sanborn, an undercover Texas Ranger who learns about Steele's plot and intends to stop it. He is confronted with peril along the way, including the kidnapping of Jane's English comic relief butler Artie, who is sentenced to death by bucking bronco. This all leads to Bob putting a posse together and leading a siege on the ranch in a scene which makes the entire film.

This Mystery Ranch is vastly different from its 1934 counterpart, but it is an exceptional B-Western in its own right because one simple detail: it's actually a really good movie. There isn't deep characterization, but it has a more expansive world than most B-Westerns. That is to say that the world it presents feels alive, and not like a movie set loaded up with matte paintings. For one thing, the movie actually uses locations, as far as I can tell, so it's made in the authentic American Southwest. Y'know, like A-Westerns! There are a lot of clever twists and turns, and the dialogue and camerawork are snappy enough to keep you engaged. Even ignoring the 55 minute runtime, it'll be done before you know it. I don't know how well you could really describe it as a "Gothic" film, though, because while it does have an emphasis on shadow, and the villains have their creepy moments, it's much more focused on traditional Western action. This doesn't spoil it at all, I should say. I will avoid giving away any more on it--definitely check it out if you get a chance, though you'll probably have to track down a bootleg.

Mystery Ranch ('34) opens with one of the most bizarre scenes I've ever seen put to film. It's this weird over the top melodramatic parody of Western tropes, where the cowboy has to rescue a lady from a bad marriage. "Marry muh!" insists the big-mustachioed villain. "Marry muh, or I'll tear yuh limb from pieces!" It turns out this is just a scene or representation thereof from one of the Western pulps of writer Bob Morris, whose father disapproves of his profession. Bob gets a letter from a town out West which claims to be the real Wild West--they're fans of his novels but think he could improve on his accuracy, so they want him to come out and walk the walk as it were, as a real cowboy. It turns out the whole thing is a gag: the town is just as modern as anywhere else, but they intend to fake exciting Western scenes to give their favorite writer some more inspiration. As it turns out, Bob can handle his dukes, by reining in some wild horses and socking the crap out of some toughs sent to haze him. (This town doesn't care about his assaulting their citizens, I should say.) That'll be useful when at last it turns out an old-style hold-up Bob witnesses is for real. Bob tries to trick the tricksters, so everyone gets mixed up when the real theft is revealed. As in all Westerns, there's only way for Bob to clear his name: bring in the bad guys.

It goes without saying that this Mystery Ranch's uniqueness arises from how meta it is for a film this early. I'm sure that the Western parody is nearly as old as the Western genre itself--after all, there have been stories about the American West ever since a bunch of German started writing adventure books about it back in the 1840s. (Yes, the first famous Westerns were written by Germans, many of whom never visited the Americas. It's a pretty remarkable history, actually, if you have the time to read about it.) But that opening scene is pretty brutal in its satire, exposing how hollow and false a lot of the stuff the masses consumed could be. There's an interplay between how comic and soapy these hack writers make the West, contrasted with how the West was in real life--a brutal place, but also sometimes an ordinary place. A boring place. In a sense, these Westerners want to make fun of Morris and other writers exoticizing the West, and reducing it to a series of tropes, while also not taking themselves overly seriously. What makes this stuff good is that it's played lightly. There's a lot to be learned with how this film deals with layers of fiction.

Pretentiousness aside, it's also pretty good at giving us characters who we can like. The acting isn't nearly as good as it was in Mystery Ranch ('32), but this does contain the miraculous reappearance of Jimmy Aubrey, aka Ptomaine Pete. In the prologue set in Bob's story, he plays Pigsty Pete, and in "real life" he's the guy on the end of the noose when Bob stumbles across a lynching the town stages for him. His presence adds to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the whole thing, and in fact, it muddles the odd performance Aubrey gives in The Phantom Cowboy even further. I didn't even think such a thing was possible.

In the end, both Mystery Ranches are treats, and that they are such in vastly different ways is a treat in itself. One of them is a seriously well-done affair with progressive cinematography and clever performances. The other is a baffling, amusing, and deeply charming exploration of the tropes of a genre only then in the middle of its adolescence. This month has been a fun adventure for me in the world of the low-budget Western, and what sad is that there were still some I had to leave out. Maybe someday we'll saddle up again and visit the debauched worlds of Smoking Guns or Rawhide Terror. Now those are tales to tell...

Gretta (1984), by John Carr

It only struck me after the movie was over the significance of that title card: this movie is based off of a book. The snippety plot synopses I'm finding for this novel by Erskine Caldwell, an author I've never heard of before, don't match this movie at all. Maybe someday I'll read the book, but it's not high on my priority list. This is a movie which I feel operates mostly smoothly on its own, even if I hope that this book is every bit as good as the film. I've seen some really fucking strange movies this year, and it seems that each new discovery tops the last. Gretta, aka Death Wish Club, aka The Dark Side to Love, is one of those movies belonging to a genre all its own, where it is a true whirlwind, unpredictable in its motions. But like the characters in this film, the filmmakers play tricks on us--there is direction to the tornado. I'm not entirely sure if it's brilliant, but since I know the only answer is to rewatch the thing, I can't wait to find out.

Our film starts with a man named George introducing himself to us via voiceover. He explains that he's not interested in romance or sex; he just wants to love someone who doesn't love him back. To this end he goes out to the carnival and finds Gretta, a popcorn girl, whom he plies with hundred dollar bills to go back to his place and listen to him play Chopin. Not long after we jump perspectives to Glen, a man who falls in love with Gretta through the porn movies she now makes. Now keep in mind, Gretta isn't really an innocent victim here: her response to Glen stalking her through a variety of shady connections is to offer him sex. She's in the porn game because she likes to fuck. But he manages to build a romance with her all the same. Eventually she brings him to something she does on the side, a club populated by folk all around the world who have had close brushes with death. At some point Gretta was modeling for a sculptor who turned out to be a mad serial killer, and she had to kill him. Glen's had a run-in with the Reaper as well, so he's introduced to the club's latest game of Russian roulette with a killer beetle. As you may notice, this plot is kind of all over the place, but we haven't even gotten to Gretta's amnesia, where she becomes a man. Specifically, a '30s gangster type named Charlie White! I could go on from here, but what's the point? It is event after event after event, at a breakneck pace, never losing an ounce of crazy along the way, until we reach the most "hey don't forget we're still in this movie" ending ever.

There is a strange dissonance between the professionalism and the slackness of the script, and that is the root of this movie's disturbance. None of the plot points I summarized can come together in a rational way in 90 minutes, and as a result, Gretta ends up becoming like one of the Sandy Frank Japanese movies, sewn together from the tatters of a season of a TV show. But as far as I know, Gretta had no such origin. They made a conscious choice to use their time like this, when perhaps even just 30 more minutes of footage could have made it all make sense. Everything is edited out of order, like a dream. Take for example the scene where Glen meets with a psychiatrist to find out how to "cure" Gretta of her Charlie White persona. The psychiatrist all but encourages Glen to rape her! In fact, when he returns to where Charlie is sleeping in his apartment, Glen climbs in bed and starts going to town. It transpires that it's not Glen but some other lady, who seems fine with it! Then, when Glen asks Charlie what to do about the situation, he literally encourages him to rape...well, technically himself! But Glen is disgusted with this possibility now, when previously he had no such qualms.

One thing that does stay consistent is a running gag involving an old Swedish couple who live next to Glen's apartment who keep interrupting the movie to comment on how marvelous his sexual prowess is. Have I mentioned that trying to analyze this movie thematically is impossible? Because it's impossible to judge this movie tonally. Sleaze is cut with humor is cut with heart is cut with callousness. The hydra can't keep track of its heads. Every dramatic strike is counterbalanced with something of almost unearthly silliness. And every comedic moment is offset by something bitter or upsetting. This isn't in an attempt to keep the film a balanced breakfast, breaking up the drama with comedy while still ensuring that the drama marches forward. This is something else, something far less knowable.

I'm at a loss for words. I interrupted myself in the writing of this review to put tags on the movie and I realize that, aside from maybe just "exploitation" or "thriller," I can't place the genre of this thing. Like I said at the beginning, it really does deserve its own genre in the "you can't predict it" territory. Movies that keep piling shit up and never really resolve it in the end. These are movies like Skullduggery and Ogroff and Death Warrior. Once, I believed that these movies changed when I didn't watch them, because there always seemed to be scenes that I swear weren't in them before. I realize now that it's more just that these movies are so crammed with details that you need to come back to them again and again to see all the ways the facets glitter in the sunshine. Gretta is now among those same ranks; and I now have many adventures guaranteed in my future dedicated to the purpose of seeing just how this gem sparkles.

If you want to see something that's different from anything you've ever known, by God, watch this movie. Is that praise? Is that discouragement? I don't know! I don't care! Everything's run together muddy now, and I hope these brief and degenerate words may speed you on your way.

The Irish Gringo (1935), by William C. Thompson and Pat Carlyle

While Sinister Cinema calls The Phantom Cowboy the worst B-Western in their collection, they call this one the best worst B-Western they have. Well, after the travesty that was The Phantom Cowboy,  I wanted more, and I'm glad that The Irish Gringo delivers the goods. I still can't get over how weird these B-Westerns could turn out to be, when not long ago I viewed this entire genre with nothing but disgust and fear. The Irish Gringo is not nearly as weird or entertaining as Phantom Cowboy, but its raw, uncut cheapness will provide enough belly laughs for you and your whole family for minutes on end. It epitomizes the soul of what cheapness meant to the mid-1930s, but there's also a weird heart lent to the project, even if that heart doesn't always manifest onscreen.

A gang run by the slimy Ace Lewis is running around torturing and killing people who know the location of the Lost Dutchman Mine. Eventually, it turns out that the map is written on a shirt belonging to an old man who has a creeeepy relationship with his granddaughter Sally. When Sally goes on the run with the shirt after her granddad is gunned down, she runs into the Irish Gringo and his two sidekicks, Pancho and Buffalo. By coincidence, the Gringo is already involved with Ace Lewis, as Lewis wants to get a piece of the Gringo's crush Anita. Never mind that Anita is already engaged to a man named Jimmy, and that the lovely Carlotta pines for the Gringo, even if he just views her as a sister. Only by his wit and his reflexes can the Gringo lead us to one of the most hilariously anticlimatic resolutions of all time.

The first thing that strikes you about The Irish Gringo is the idiosyncracies of the script. This is pretty pulpy as far as B-Westerns go, and that means it's a good thing for me. An example of some of the gangster banter: "He's dead! Which one of you bumped him off?" "Me, boss--aw, gee, I just couldn't help it!" This sort of proto-camp carries on into Pancho teasing Buffalo for becoming "a mother," since Buffalo's the one who ends up taking care of Sally the most (thus making him the most likeable character). But the best dialogue emerges as a result of the awkward exchanges Anita and the Gringo shares about the Gringo's heritage. A big deal is made out of the fact that he's half-Mexican, half-Irish, though nothing story-wise emerges from it. I think it's meant to make the movie more romantic--the Gringo talks about how romantic both Mexico and Ireland are--but to modern audiences it's more likely to come across as much ado about nothing. The amount of time the film dedicates to this sort of talk starts to become surrealist humor after a point.

Now, the hero of this film is supposed to be the Gringo, but honestly, I think it's Sally. Sally endures a lot of shit, starting with the creepy grandpa I mentioned above. The old man spends a lot of time saying the same things over and over again to his granddaughter, usually while gripping her shoulders a little too hard. He also undresses her a lot, and never seems to give her adequate clothing. After she escapes him his killers, she spends most of the rest of her screentime being carried around like a sack of potatoes by the Gringo and his crew, who ignore her screams of terror. I know that kids have always gotten the short end of the stick as far as having their wishes respected, but both the Gringo and Pancho seem like cold sociopaths after her screaming reaches its fifth minute. Buffalo is different, because he is competent and has a soul. Note that Buffalo has little to do with that cheapout ending that so throws the honor and integrity of our heroes even further into question; Buffalo is an honest man, even if his coworkers aren't.

But like I said, this movie does have heart. Pat Carlyle, who also the plays the Gringo, technically made this movie twice before, as Call of the Coyote and The Tia Juana Kid. He must have seen something in the story, or at least in the character of the Gringo, aka Don Adios and El Capitan. I don't know what exactly, and I may never know, but for Carlyle's sake I hope he was satisfied with this version. I'd definitely like to track down the other two if it's possible, 'cause Hell, maybe they're even worse! Overall, if you want to see what is the goofiest of the bad B-Westerns I've seen so far, this is the way to go. There are plenty of little bad movie notes I didn't touch on all throughout the runtime, like the weird closeups of faces, or the letter that's written in a Southern accent. Saddle up!

Divine Emanuelle (1981), by Christian Anders

Ah, the memories. This is my second Laura Gemser Emanuelle film so far, for the site at least. I've also made the mistakes of watching Emanuelle in Bangkok and Emanuelle in America. The former was far superior to the latter, as it didn't feature a woman jerking off a horse. In case you don't know what the Emanuelle movies are, by the way, that sudden introduction is basically the series in a nutshell. The Emanuelle series is one of those European pornos--the ones you don't really want to watch, but inevitably will if you stay in the bad movie trade long enough. For all its faults, I do like Women's Prison Massacre (aka Emanuelle in Prison), but otherwise I approach Emanuelle films with the same apprehension I have with Amazon cannibal movies. Something unpleasant and probably illegal is going to happen, and I'm not going to want to look at it. But I did have to do research on Divine Emanuelle (aka Love Camp) for another writing project, and I was surprised with what I saw. All the Emanuelle movies are fucking weird, even outside of the unique perversions they set to film in their attempts to titillate, but Divine Emanuelle is notably so, being a weird cross between Women's Prison Massacre and An American Hippie in Israel. Right down to the obnoxious earworm theme song.

"Give up your soul to an everlasting love!" the movie opens. "Peace can be yours if you give yourself to love!" Emanuelle, alias the Divine One, is the head of a South American "love cult" made up of a clan of effeminate free-lovin' nudist hippies! Who may also be a UFO cult, as they warn that soon the the Earth will be blown into a million pieces! We learn quickly that the love they offer (or hook people with) is not entirely free, as the church requires donations before the divine forces allow certain services to be permitted. Similarly, it's clear that not all the servants of the Divine One are there of their own free will. It's an ugly situation all around. Dorian, the bleached-blond sub-leader of the cult, is given a new task, to prevent the dark vision Emanuelle foresees while bathing in milk: he must convince the daughter of a billionaire politician to join the cult, so they can get his money. Of course, this plot will return only incidentally, as we have to first watch people dance, sing, and fuck. Constantly. Because this is an Emanuelle movie there is naturally a tremendous deal of fucking in it. There are also variations on fucking, like playing Blind Man's Tits, which is my name is for the game they played where you grope blindfolded for boobs and have to figure out whose pair you're holding. The cult becomes more and more unsavory--it turns out that while it is a cult of love, you are not allowed to fall in love, because then you become monogamous and therefore worthless. Now, this is a South American cult, so inevitably the whole thing is going to end in mass suicide. So our question becomes...will love prevail?

Like Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS and other similar exploitation films, including most of the other Emanuelle movies, Divine Emanuelle is essentially a string of vignettes tied together around a central theme, which makes it feel random at times. It makes the plot feel jarring and intrusive when it returns, which perhaps serve to prove that plot doesn't even work in softcore porn. All the same, when the plot does appear, it's actually interesting--though it doesn't take much to make her reveal it, we learn a good way through the film that the Divine One doesn't believe her own words for a second, and is in this only for the money and easy sex (to say nothing of the endless praise lavished on her by her followers). The character of Dorian actually has a believable arc, as do a few others. It's not that the plot is bad, it's that it's infrequent, and it clashes violently with the relatively-brainless sleaze we see onscreen.

The production values are also bad, but this is a wonderful thing. Characters frequently speak without moving their mouths. Also, when the Divine One's strongman Tanga (Tanga!) is knocked into a pit, you can tell that said "pit" is only a couple feet deep--a fact confirmed moments later when the actor climbs out of the pit! They left that in; they only needed to trim a few frames. You'd think the editing would have been more careful. This movie runs for 100 minutes, but was originally 140. Christian Anders must've loved this thing, you'd think. But then I remember that some of the other Emanuelle movies are even longer. It's weird to consider that this particular brand of European exploitation usually features such long runtimes. Mondo movies go on for hours and hours, and Jess Franco never understood the concept of modest editing (but I will finish that super-long cut of Female Vampire someday!). Even Joe D'Amato has been known to make some whoppers, despite the fact that whoppers cost more money. This movie has the makings of a D'Amato or a Bruno Mattei all over it, though apparently Christian Anders made only one other movie beside this, a crime picture I may check out called Roots of Evil.

The similarities to D'Amato and Mattei extend to the dialogue as well, and I'm just going to assume that Laura Gemser is one of Claudio Fragasso's horcruxes, because every movie I've seen her in has the same weird clunky Claudioesque dialogue. Maybe it's just how the Italian or German or Spanish or French translates, but there's just that "Eurotrash" feel in so many of these movies, and it's just that Claudio Fragasso and Bruno Mattei let it out most noticeably

One thing that rang out much stronger to me on my second viewing was just how cynical the whole movie is. It presents the Divine One's cult as being time-displaced hippies, hippies who've come too late. It's weird to see such earnest hippie-ism in 1981. And it plays up that anachronism to the fullest, exposing the hippie dream of free love and child-like celebration as an illusory ego trip that led to the rise of figures like Charles Manson. For many of the hippies, free love meant "compulsory love," and many took the return to childhood promised by the hippie creed as an excuse to indulge in petty shallowness, and the world began to feel the consequences of this by the early '80s. Every day I learn how scary the '80s actually were, and how the '60s led into them. That's a gross oversimplification, but what I mean to say is that this movie is more knowing than it lets on. 

If you like the sort of grimy, sleazy Eurotrash that's willing to splice Emanuelle, Jonestown, and hippies, this is essentially the archetypical experience. It even spares you scenes of animal violence, or people shooting ping-pong balls out of their assholes, so it's "clean" for this type of film. Fans of shitty nudist melodrama take note!

The Phantom Cowboy (1935), by Robert J. Horner

I realized quickly that one of the fastest ways to find which of the Golden Age B-Westerns were the most entertaining was to simply look for the ones considered to be the worst. Sinister Cinema says The Phantom Cowboy is the worst B-Western of their collection, and I can totally believe it. It didn't take long for me to realize I'd struck some sort of gold--my sources revealed that director Robert J. Horner is generally considered to be the absolute worst of the B-Western directors, having also produced The Border Menace, often listed as one of the probable nadirs of Westerns of this age. The man was something of a legend, it sounds like: missing his legs and one of his eyes, he was a career debtor who often solicited his actresses to go to bed with him. The Phantom Cowboy was his final directorial project before he died of cirrhosis in 1942. It's hard to imagine a world that would let The Phantom Cowboy into theaters today, but that means the film is all the more unique--indeed, it has been a long time since I've seen a movie so utterly bereft of so many kinds of quality.

A young woman named Ruth Rogers is robbed by the masked Phantom Bandit, whose mask even covers his eyes. "Hand over your family jewels!" the Bandit demands before riding off. Fortunately, she meets cowboy Bill Collins shortly after her ordeal. Bill comes with his own comic relief sidekick, Ptomaine Pete. Pete acts like a pirate and seems to have brain damage; he's played by Jimmy Aubrey, who seems to have played the same character in a bunch of other shitty Westerns, including The Border Menace. I think this is actually the hammiest performance I've ever seen, and possibly the worst performance I've ever seen as well. But God does it have energy. Anyway, after a swimming interlude, Bill and Pete meet the Phantom Bandit, who is Bill's double save for a ridiculous fake mustache. He explains that he's an "honest prospector" who only robs people at gunpoint "as a sideline." You see he has a rich uranium claim which local bandit Buck Houston has wanted to get after. In lieu of not turning him in for the reward money, he will pay the two to help him stop Houston.

Ruth Rogers, meanwhile, has found herself in trouble with Houston's gang--answering an ad calling for "schoolteachers," she has been drafted as a dance hall girl and perhaps also as a prostitute. On top of that, her brother Jack is in with the gang, and when his lighter is found at the site of an empty safe the gang was planning to rob, they beat the tar out of him, thinking that he robbed it early to keep the loot for himself. With a warning of spoilers--here's where things get weird. Eventually the Phantom decides to go after Houston, but is shot by him. As he is dying, Ruth grieves over him, thinking he's Bill (this is basically the only payoff for the whole "mysterious doubles" thing). However, Bill arrives, pursued by Houston, and the dying Phantom shoots and kills Houston. Not only do Bill, Pete, and Ruth get the Phantom's claim, but they also get the reward for technically finding him. But then the Phantom also reveals that he robbed the safe and framed Ruth's brother, which nearly got him killed. He explains that "it was the only way" to stop Houston, but that's fucking bullshit when all he had to do was shoot the man! Ah, well, Ruth and Bill don't seem to mind--and they get their Heterosexual Happy Ending.

Ah, this film. Every shot is cut either too early or too late, and this particular fault manifests almost immediately after the last opening credit rolls. The weird anti-art of the shot of the Phantom with his cloth draped across his face is a chronal echo of the chiropractic not-Bela of Plan 9 from Outer Space--it appears, vanishes, appears again. Combine this with nonexistent framing, blocking, and lighting, and you dive deep into a compositional nightmare. Every line is either badly written or poorly delivered. Our ostensible star, Ted Wells, is particularly egregious, reading this lines in seeming prescient imitation of none other than Torgo. Trust me, you have to hear it to believe it, especially when the Phantom is dying, and his voice changes depending on whether he's onscreen or not. The best explanation I can give for Wells' performance is that the actor got his start in the silent era, and therefore is unused to the idea of actually worrying about the tone and cadence of his voice. All the same, every second in which either Bill or the Phantom talks is a marvelous experience.

Watch this movie at least until a character offers Ruth "a little mountain dew." Then you will get to see the Phantom's aforementioned fake mustache, and how the movie dwells on it way more than it healthily should, including showing the Phantom "shaving" it off. He even calls it a beard at one point! It's great. This movie is great. Life can be good sometimes.

I Am Here...Now (2009), by Neil Breen

I do appreciate, on some level, the modern culture of bad movies. It has its faults, and I'm sure I've ranted about them now and again--I don't like horror comedies that are "so-bad-it's-good" on purpose, and there are way too many of those being made these days. But I'm an optimist, and I think that some of these movies are genuinely worth it. I found Ghost Shark to actually be pretty tolerable, and The Room really is as fun as everyone says it is. But for some reason, the one everyone goes back to is Birdemic. I despise Birdemic, and I despise its director, James Nguyen. He is an egotistical, talentless, vapid excuse for a filmmaker and the laziness present in Birdemic and its sequel, to me, is as atrocious as After Last Season, which is a movie where people walk around in front of CGI shapes. So whenever news breaks of "the new Birdemic," I have the same feelings I'd have if Dr. Lecter told me what my mutton chop was. Neil Breen is said to be sort of like the new Tommy Wiseau, or the new James Nguyen, as demonstrated to the Internet by his film Double Down. After hearing about Double Down and its 2013 sibling Fateful Findings, I decided to start my look at him with one which I could go into blind. Reading the premise of I Am Here...Now was enough to convince me that I would have a winner.

I had no fucking idea.

Let me try this. And it must be a try: for Yoda's Maxim does not apply here. There is no "doing" in adequately describing I Am Here...Now, there is only trying. We open with a shot of twin moons in the sky. They explode, bringing us that excellent Times New Roman title card seen above. After this, we see a man known as The Being (Neil Breen), descend off the Cross. The Being is like Jesus, except his body is sometimes covered in circuit boards, and he sometimes changes into a gray-skinned ghoul-man while horror music plays. He is our hero, for he is the creature that created mankind. He is disappointed that his creation has fallen to a variety of sins, including allowing corruption in government and big business, and not embracing solar and wind power. "I am disappointed in your species--the human species!" he muses to a tarantula crawling next to a rose and a skull. The Being comes across a hillbilly couple in the desert who are drinking, smoking pot, and injecting heroin, all at the same time. The guy of this unfortunate pairing injects so hard that blood starts squirting out of his arm! The Being Schwarzaneggers the dude's clothes, and paralyzes the couple and turn them invisible: "Don't worry, it's only temporary!" he assures them. We then follow our second protagonist, who loses her job at an unspecified corporation doing unspecified environmental/alt-energy work due to unspecified "corruption." She considers becoming a stripper to support her baby, but her sister, who wears a torn-up shirt with no bra for no reason besides Neil Breen being creepy, encourages her to join a gang instead. That gang works as the enforcement for the very same pack of corrupt scumbags who are destroying the environment with their corruption! I could go on, but none of this real comes together. I believe it is what the French call a tranche de vie, or in some dialects, a tranche de merde.

This movie is more fascinating than good. As I get older, I begin to recognize that that which is fascinating is not necessarily good. The story of how the Opium Wars of the 19th Century somehow led to Christopher Lee acting in yellowface for Jess Franco over a hundred years later is fascinating, because it is not good. The story of how a self-professed ultra-fan of Alfred Hitchcock could release a Birds rip-off that was nothing but a colossal insult to Hitchcock is fascinating, but it is not good. There is too strong of a current of discomfort to I Am Here...Now for me to enjoy it unashamedly. Is it the wardrobe decisions Breen makes for his actresses, on top of the fact that he has a sex scene with them, which feature him wearing the ghoul mask? Is it the fact that all the direct points are vague to the point of meaninglessness, making every conversation stiff and uncanny? Is it the oddity of the film's writer and director playing the role of the creator of all humanity? Is it that Neil Breen's lanky physique is constantly draped in a torn brown t-shirt which is too small for him? I don't know, but all throughout this, there is just something fundamentally wrong.

I think it's gotta be that there truly is no meaning here. Breen desperately wants to be relevant to the issues of today, and I understand that they are hard to grapple with presentably and comprehensibly. But merely bringing them up and not making them tied thematically to the story is not going to look good. There is no stake for The Being's interest in humanity obtaining alternative energy, for example, aside from the fact that he is God and he believes alternative energy to be right. Most of us know the benefits solar and wind have over fossil fuels, so you could buy the intent that this as a mission of salvation, but it's where Breen tries to tackle "corruption" that he fails the hardest. This was a problem in Fateful Findings as well, and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if he tries to explore "corruption" in Double Down too. Obviously businesses and government figures are corrupt. That, in 2017, should be readily apparent. But Breen doesn't name his targets, just vaguely evil populist fears. He expresses the anxieties of the times, but he does as someone who isn't affected by them. To be frank, he seems like sort of a dull person, but to see such a bland take on some of the most prevalent fears of the 21st Century is still of a little interest. Even if it makes the whole thing seem pointless.

Fortunately, I at least can take pointless now and again. This movie is fucking hilarious. I've named a lot of the best moments in the synopsis, but I haven't mentioned how often they reuse footage and, bizarrely, audio clips throughout this film. Whenever someone screams in pain, it is the same canned sound over and over again. We will also hear our third main character, an old man in a wheelchair, tell us "I only have...a month to live" at least three or four times, even when his mouth isn't moving. And yes, before you ask, one of the scenes that is looped more times than is necessary is a shot of someone vomiting. I don't have too many moments these days where I have laughed for longer than three minutes, but there were at least two scenes in this movie where I had to pause the movie and lie down, in case I passed out. One of these moments made me laugh for seven minutes. Chrysippus of Soli died of laughter after getting his pet donkey drunk and watching it try to eat figs. Also, the Funniest Joke in the World sketch on Monty Python actually did kill a guy. What I'm saying is, this movie almost killed me.

...sometimes, maybe that's what we need. I Am Here...Now has cleared the pipes. I am generally unrepentant in my appreciation of this movie, despite its many flaws. It will turn your afternoon into a week, I warn you. But if you can stand the pain, there's a lot here that's worth it.

Big Calibre (1935), by Robert N. Bradbury

Good words to live by: "Produced by Sam Katzman." In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Poverty Row studios were factories of raw creativity. Sure, they clipped, borrowed, and ransacked ideas and cliches from much better films, and were not unafraid of dipping their toes into exploitation, but when your goal is to crank out films fast you're willing to put anything in a movie. Sam Katzman, who produced through Monogram, the most famous of the Poverty Row studios, brought us Bela Lugosi's Monogram Nine, and consequently I have faith that there's gold to be found in many of the other movies he put his name to. Big Calibre is one of Katzman's Westerns, and while it was not a Monogram movie, it has the feel of one to an amusing extent. I suddenly now have a strong desire to start digging through the B-Westerns of the '30s and '40s to see if there's anything else like this. God fucking help me.

Mr. Neal of the Triple N Ranch is killed in a gas attack. Admittedly, it is partially his own fault, since he does all he can to stick his head as far into the gas cloud as possible. His son Bob learns that the local chemist, Otto Zenz, is the murderer, but Zenz escapes Bob before the younger man can capture him. Admittedly, Bob isn't much of an angel of justice, being rather scrawny and unobstrusive, so the hunched, lean scientist's escape isn't that impressive. However, Bob doesn't give up, and he and his requisite Elderly Comic Sidekick eventually find themselves in a small town where a woman named June Bowers lives. June and her father are deep in debt to a fellow with huge glasses and Richard Kiel teeth named Gadski, and in order to keep her property June robs a truck and frames Bob for it. Around this time, however, June's father is kidnapped and seemingly murdered, and naturally Bob is blamed for this as well. The twist ending will surprise no one (it's one of the most transparent "twists" I've seen in a long while), but the final fight is worth it.

This movie gradually gains its weirdness, starting with its fusion of the Western with the Lugosi-esque horror mystery. Mr. Gadski's appearance is jarring and astonishingly fake, and so when he enters the screen any seriousness the film had quickly dissipates. Then we get the scene where Rusty is reunited with Arrabella, June's cook, who was apparently his "childhood sweetheart." Arrabella has been pining over him all this time, and given the ages the characters are supposed to be, this has been a period of anywhere from thirty to forty years. The other characters gleefully leave Rusty alone with her, as if she isn't about to kill him with an axe for spurning her.

But then we get to the weirdest scene in the film, the hoedown--a sequence which goes on for a disturbingly long time and only gets more nightmarish the more time goes on. It's chaperoned by a particularly ugly fellow in a top hat, who has an assistant named Elmer, who may be a zombie. As in, he looks and acts like a living corpse. So much is unexplained in this scene and it gets even worse when Bob and Rusty show up in disguise. Both are wearing masks: Bob has some sort of Phantom of the Opera/Michael Myers number, while Rusty wears something that makes him look like Ortega from The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies! There's so much to look for in this scene, and really, so much to look for in the movie as a whole.

It does manage to drag a little bit, even at 58 minutes, but for my first adventure into Golden Age B-westerns, I found this to be a fun ride. Here's to more of the same sometime soon!