Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Psyched by the 4D Witch (1972), by "Victor Luminera"



Okay, I'm starting to think I just like stupid shit.

What would happen if the people who made A Clockwork Blue had even more weed but even less money? If such a thing did exist, and it was a horror film as well as a softcore porn, it would be one of the best horror porn films ever. How fortunate! Our universe also contains such a movie. No, none of the same people from A Clockwork Blue were actually involved with the creation of Psyched by the 4D Witch, but that doesn't matter. "Victor Luminera" and his band of merry persons were simultaneously dumber and more brilliant than the crew of that film. After all, one of the few of their number to get a credit is named "Esoterica," and she along with many others brings us this Tale of Demonology by way of Transetheric Vision. Transetheric Vision is extremely grainy and looks like a lot of shots of masks being waved around behind a red filter. Indeed, there are many shots of floating masks being waved around behind red filters in this film. And to think that that's just the start of it.

A girl named Cindy studies sexual witchcraft in her spooky old house, which summons her Salemite ancestress, a witch named Abigail. Abigail makes a deal Cindy can't refuse--she'll teach her the secrets of magical sex and give her orgasms, while keeping her "a virgin for [her] daddy." An increasingly disturb string of sexual escapades ensues, triggered by Abigail's magic words: "Let's fantasy fuck now." What starts out as simple things like masturbation and fucking gay guys straight leads to more terrifying reaches, like lesbianism, sexual vampirism, and the ol' snake-up-the-rectum. Toothpaste-rabies ghouls dominate the second half, after Cindy is sealed away for disobeying Abigail after the "Salem witch-bitch" tries to get her to screw not just a corpse...but a female corpse! Have I mentioned that this movie is absolutely traumatized by the existence of gay people? Anyway, in the end, straight sex in the material world is what Cindy needs to break Abigail's spell, so she's off to the races fucking her best friend's German psychiatrist dad. But can anyone truly stop a witch who lives in a dimension beyond our understanding...?

I can't entirely do this movie justice, and I already expended my use of the word "psychedelic" in the review for The Witches' Mountain. Which is sad, and a grievous error on my behalf, because this movie stops at nothing to bring us a full rainbow of colors. Beyond the trippy visuals (and audio, and plot, and...), there is much on display here. Particularly, I want to point out that this movie probably has the most stereotypical and awful piece of "Chinatown" stock music ever. It comes out of nowhere and is, like many things in the movie, hilarious, but also offensive. Many things as weird and unnecessary as this occur, and these "things" are surrounded by a story that sound like a pulp written jointly by Anton LaVey and Kenneth Anger. It is miraculous.

I should also talk about the soundtrack of this movie (outside of the racist Chinese music). It's one of many '60s/'70s exploitation movies that have made to the A-List that heavily samples "A Night on Bald Mountain." Bald Mountain is played almost as much as the lyrical theme music that recurs throughout, which repeatedly warns us that the 4D witch is "born from the belly of the devil's bitch." You will hear this song so much that you will begin to love it, even though it is Stockholm Syndrome. It's great to have an ineptly written and performed song play so many times in such an ineptly written and performed movie.

Psyched by the 4D Witch is unlike The Witches' Mountain in that it condemns rather than condones intellectual analysis. It is pure fluff, it is comfort, and it is thus probably bad for you. Mountain may be psychedelia's intuitive processes laid bare, but Psyched is its mindless bubbly idiot joy. In its stupidity it really is something to gawk at rather than truly entertain. But I'm entertained by gawking, and perhaps I make true the old principle that you are what you eat. For I "eat" stupid shit like this, down to the bone. I have now seen this movie probably as many times as I've seen Manos: The Hands of Fate or Don't Go in the Woods, and I have seen those movies probably about thirty times each. I feel like that makes me a bad person.

I suspect you are a good person, and so I want to do you some good. It's with that in mind that I will say that if you tend to adore exclusively "normal" movies, this one may make you puke. But I'm sure someone somewhere has said that the goal of cinema is to evoke a reaction. Puking is a reaction.

If you have to puke, puke to this movie.

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Book Club of Desolation #2: Frozen Planet (1967), by Lionel Fanthorpe

Welcome back to the Book Club of Desolation! Here, we examine the books that comprise a non-canon of "trash literature"--books crazy enough to serve as a parallel to madcap all-nonsense movies like Ogroff and Winterbeast. I always knew they existed and I've been so glad to find out the extent to which they do exist. It's not a barren universe as long as trash is around. Today we're going to be talking about Lionel Fanthorpe, a literary Renaissance man, whose thousand faces including the nom de guerre "Pel Torro." It is one of Pel Torro's books, 1967's Frozen Planet, that will be leading us on a journey into its creator's life.


Lionel Fanthorpe has an extensive biography and resume, and I suspect a lot of my research sources were written by the man himself. He is and was a priest, dental technician, and teacher. He belongs to a wide variety of prestigious organizations, including Mensa and the Ghost Club. He has a successful press that prints his current efforts, a series of books on UFOs and the secrets of the Freemasons and such. But that's not why I've brought him into the spotlight today. From the late 1950s through the 1960s, Fanthorpe wrote 150-odd sci-fi novels, producing nearly 90 of them in a three year period--that comes out to about one novel every two weeks. In a desperate and impoverished market his books were endlessly published under increasingly preposterous pseudonyms, including John E. Muller, Leo Brett, and Karl Ziegfried. As if this wasn't incredible enough, Fanthorpe's method of composition also defies belief. He would curl up underneath an old rug with a dictaphone and ramble for several hours before transcribing the ensuing mess to the written page. The result is stream-of-consciousness gold, a string of contrivances and padding built to an art form. For indeed, the cherry at the top of the cake is the fact that Fanthorpe's books are just as amazing as his life and methods.

Frozen Planet opens in the 23rd Century, at the base of a mysterious group called the Teep, led by the sadistic Lew Kefler. Kefler is torturing Mel Decca, apparently for information concerning "the Sleepers." Slowly, we learn that Decca wants to protect the Sleepers while Kefler strives to kill them--the secret of who the Sleepers are remains a mystery for most of the book. Decca is freed by the ghostly image of his lady-love Delia, apparently astrally projecting from...elsewhere. He escapes, boarding a passenger starship in the process. Here, he meets psychiatrist and general ass-kicker Randall Rogers (presumably a relative of Buck?), to whom he reveals he is not a human being, but rather an immortal alien. In fact, he is one of the Sleepers, and Kefler's people are the Sleepers' ancient foes. They will spread evil across the universe if the Sleepers are destroyed before they can awake. If this plot sounds relatively straightforward, don't worry. Every time you get a handle on things, there's another absurd addition to the story, and whether that takes the form of pirates with eye infections or the sudden appearance of Atlantis, it's all great.

That having been said--Fanthorpe is not nearly as crazy as Harry Stephen Keeler. While I would love for another Keeler to exist, the man created enough in his own life that imitators may oversaturate the world in wonder. Fanthorpe doesn't go terribly far outside of the familiar tropes of the era he wrote in. Frozen Planet's concepts were what Ray Bradbury or Poul Anderson came up with on lazy days. It will entertain casual fans of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi even if it stands a chance of infuriating more hardcore followers of that era. Generally, however, Fanthorpe's concepts don't matter. It's how they're employed. Much like Keeler, the unlikely twist is one of Fanthorpe's motifs--a side-effect of his writing style. And ultimately, what makes Fanthorpe as fun as Keeler is his particular set of idiosyncracies that just happen to include unlikely twists.

Throughout Frozen Planet we see that Fanthorpe does not trust the audience to understand his similes and metaphors. So, he not only repeats them in two or three different ways, but he mutates them so that they go back to not making sense. Oftentimes, these metaphors are bound up his other tools, such as melodrama. Take this, for instance:

"'Brogan is evil,' [said Decca,] 'But Kefler is the essence of it! Brogan is very dark grey--Kefler is so black, he is almost our laboratory friend, the hypothetical black body, the character who radiates pure heat and reflects no light. I mean that he's black metaphorically speaking. He's rather a handsome-looking devil in his way, but that white skin of his is like a mask. He's like a whitewashed tomb that's full of corruption inside. Kefler!' He spat the name over his short wave space-suit radio. 'Kefler!'"

I rest my case!

Saying nothing of the racism in that paragraph, I would like to point out that they have to specify that Kefler is a Handsome CaucasianTM  because Fanthrope doesn't really bother with physically describing his characters. That's fine, I like literary mysteries. However despite establishing Mel Decca to be an immortal, he is an immortal without a real backstory. No one else in the book has a past, why should he? There are a few limp attempts at pulling one of those, "Ah, yes, I knew da Vinci!" moments a la Mr. Flint from Star Trek, but by and large we are lead to believe that Decca walked the Earth for thousands of years with almost nothing happening to him. The present is what matters in this book--the present, and the action happening in it. It's pure self-indulgence, a nonstop rush of images and battles, with no darlings having been killed. It smells like freedom.

It's not just that the book ignores the past, either--it also ignores the future. The world Decca and Rogers live in is almost completely sans description. Humanity has settled on Mars and Venus, and has a large space program of some kind, but that's basically it. What's worse is that it's heavily implied that culture never progress past 1967, as all famous artists, scientists, and philosophers who are name-dropped are from the 19th and 20th Centuries. H.P. Lovecraft and H. Rider Haggard are still household names, and in fact are the household names. 2243 never saw the publication of the great ode of George Klontarf, Space Poet Laureate, I guess. It would not be absurd for something to be compared to a "20th Century Dodge Caravan" or "20th Century electric microwave" in Frozen Planet, which never ceases to be amusing. In the world of sci-fi writing, tricks like that are one of the unforgivable sins, and seeing it repeated so many times made me laugh--a sad laugh, maybe, but a laugh all the same. Truly, you must turn off your sensibilities of great literature when reading this. Have fun or you will drown.

I have been so lucky. The first two authors I've featured in this column were exceptionally prolific, and thus I have as much material as I could ever hope for twice over. And I haven't even started yet.

Frozen Planet could maybe serve as primer material for The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. It will sing you a lullaby, numbing your senses and preparing you for true madness. Frozen Planet is just as fun as Riddle but the author takes himself significantly less seriously. And that makes degrees of difference. I wish more writers would throw parties for their readers in the way Lionel Fanthorpe does.

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Image Source: Amazon

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

The Witches' Mountain (1972), by Raul Artigot



As you may have noticed, I use the word "trippy" to refer to a lot of the movies I talk about on here. Today's movie is essentially perfect for getting deep into the head of that adjective. This movie is nothing less than a waking nightmare, a dream in the dark. It has haunted me since I was a kid, and even to this day, I don't know if I've explored all of its mysteries, and I don't know if these mysteries exist beyond my head. But let's find out, when we travel together to The Witches' Mountain.

A lot of reviews I've seen for this movie highlight this movie's intro, and for good reason. A woman, whom we later learn is named Carla, comes home to her apparent mansion somewhere deep in the Spanish countryside. She discovers weird things scattered around her house, including a wig stabbed in the lawn with a knife, and eventually a dead cat. The apparent culprit is a precocious child named Gerta. Gerta is a creepy child done right, because she is never properly explained, and because Carla seems to be in her power, spending most of this opening scene desperately trying to bargain with her. Gerta basically says that she must take Carla to an unspecified location, which makes Carla extremely uncomfortable. The scene ends with Carla seemingly killing Gerta and herself by setting a gas fire.

Except after the credits (flushed with a creepy choir singing in an incomprehensible language), Carla is alive! She wants to get back together with her photographer boyfriend Mario, but Mario (who resembles his video game name-sharer if he was a '70s era college hipster) calls up his editor to cancel his vacation so he can get away from her. His boss sends him to take pictures of a lake on top of a mysterious, virtually-uninhabited mountain, and he accepts this job. His abandonment of Carla is never explained, but maybe he knows she's wrapped up in something supernatural. On his drive to the mountain, Mario picks up a girl whom he photographs nude, the laid-back and flirtatious Delia, played by the ever-charismatic horror queen Patty Shepard. She agrees to travel with him, even when he hallucinates weird music. The ensuing journey with lead them to a Marty Feldman lookalike innkeeper, inexplicable photos, and, of course, the coven of witches that is hidden at the mountain's peak.

And the whole time, the attentive audience is creeped the fuck out. If you focus--and can survive long periods of literally nothing happening--you can get easily sucked into the setting of the mountain. The dense jungles, the winding roads. People who like road trips through the middle of nowhere like I do (having been a ghost-hunter in the American Midwest) will find themselves lost in the scenery of rustic Spain, and the quietness of the evil present in the story makes it believable. That is to say, I totally believe that there are mountains in the far reaches of continental Europe where one can find strange things just like those depicted in this film. At least, I like to believe in them.

I wholeheartedly believe that The Witches' Mountain should be viewed as an artistic classic. It's a movie that relies on clues--it never says anything outright. The ending is hard to make out because of the poor video quality, but it's tied earlier to the scenes of the barbarian-man the witches have chained up in a cave. On my third viewing I realized the witches are holding up these chains to Mario, basically saying he'll be the next to wear them. Well, in some myths involving witches, the coven is composed entirely of women, who keep a single man as a prisoner basically to breed more witches and keep the coven alive. So that's what these witches do. And it's never expressly stated, never allowed to leave the shadows. It's a movie that's incredibly relaxing, and so maybe your brain turns off and lets you miss things. But if you can get into its rhythm, it'll sing to you.

Nostalgia brought me back to this one. I first watched it back in middle school after my aunt and uncle introduced me to Mill Creek Entertainment's 50 Chilling Classics pack, which contained the 1964 zombie classic, I Eat Your Skin, which I consider to be my first trash movie. My brother and I thought it was boring and we were right. But I remembered how the boredom and slowness really did take on that bizarre dreamy feeling, with a certain '70s trippiness to it. Years later in college I wanted to get creeped out by a "bad" movie. And so when I came back to this one, I was pleasantly surprised that while it was still a rough watch due to the pacing, there was enough to pay attention to it that it gave you the impression the people behind it cared. Perhaps they didn't care enough to make it in-your-face-exciting, but they left behind something gentler. Something worthy of checking out.

I've driven myself nuts trying to find out anything else about this film, including which mountain exactly it was shot on. I would love to visit the locales from this movie, especially the barebones inn run by the deaf not-Feldman (actually European creep-star Victor Israel, of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hell of the Living Dead) or Delia's spooky old house. After all, it is a film about the dark secrets of the countryside, and so location is everything. I did manage to find an interview with director Artigot, wherein he talks about his movies facing censorship in Spain. Horror films that were deemed contrary to the religious goals of the Franco regime--and since we're talking trash, I should specify Francisco Franco, rather Jess--were heavily cut, especially if they involved themes like witchcraft. Artigot apparently also faced sabotage against his picture alongside these cuts, which removed some presumably-now-lost scenes involving nudity intended for more progressive foreign audiences. Discovering this stuff gave me a new look into the European horror scene in a way that didn't involve the Argento/Franco/Fulci/Mattei/Fragasso/D'Amato/Lenzi web of unification that you tend to find everywhere if you can bother to do enough research. As crazy as some of these movies got, they were also bound to rules that washed away those of lesser stamina. Raul Artigot, and The Witches' Mountain, held on, if anything because of a bootleg that formed the U.S. release.

Because a lot of my love of the movie comes from this external stuff, it is indeed a hard movie to enjoy. These meta-details don't help the film stand any stronger, and I would totally understand anyone falling asleep during it. If you show patience, though, the weird will leak out, and it will be good.

One last thing, in regards to the quality of the video, which is universal in every release I've seen: it is pretty bad. Consequently, I am super curious about the apparent HD print shown off in this YouTube video. If anyone out there has any information on this print, please let me know! Especially if it's linked to an updated release! In the meantime, watch what version you can find. The darkness works to good effect with the eeriness--even if you have to squint now and then.

P.S. Cihangir Gaffari, who plays Mario, also appeared in what appears to be a sexploitation Western called Seytan kan kusturacak, which translators tell me comes out to mean Satan Will Vomit Blood! This movie was made in 1972, just a year before its director, T. Fikret Ucak, made the world-famous 3 dev adam, aka Turkish Spider-Man vs. Santo and Captain America. I can only assume that Satan Will Vomit Blood is amazing and that I must find it immediately. (Ucak made another Western called Azrailin bes atlisi, which translates to, hell yes, The Five Horsemen of the Grim Reaper. And bless the lords of awesome names, this one's on YouTube!)

Tuesday, March 15, 2016

Bad Magic (1998), by Mark and Jon Polonia



I cannot say that it's right for me to go into a description of why this movie makes me Super Happy, and not just regular Happy. It is made by the Polonia Brothers, who are Trash Kings of the Universe Forever. Describing their legacy is something better saved for their most infamous effort, 1987's Splatter Farm, which is also one of my favorites. This one isn't as good as Splatter Farm in my mind, because it's not as grotesque and shocking as that film. All the same, it is grotesque and shocking as far as production quality, special effects, acting, editing, and relevance/semblance to real life go. Plus, I remembered it because I needed a double feature with my rewatch of Witchdoctor of the Living Dead. Bad Magic is Witchdoctor of the Living Dead made by Americans. It has the same frenetic jerkiness. The same emphasis on black magic as told through an anarchic dismissal of the idea of magic having rules. The same impossibly shitty acting. It's a blast of a nuclear variety--so let's begin our descent into a black pit called Hell.

Renny seeks to avenge his brother Amos, who was killed during a gang war. Rather than doing, say, anything but learning the secrets of black magic for revenge, his first course of action involves learning the secrets of black magic for revenge. He reads an account which creates flashbacks to the 1993 Polonia film Hellspawn. He eventually goes to "the West Indies" in search of a magician named Tobanga. Bizarrely, and perhaps upsettingly, Tobanga is a white guy. Tobanga enjoys laughter and hitting people in the face with snakes. He teaches Renny of Bluh-key-bluh-kay, the Spirit of Revenge, and gives him four magic tools with which he may destroy the Red Claws, the gang of fat nerdy guys who killed his brother. But of course, there is a price that Renny must pay when his quest for revenge ends...a quest that involves prostitutes in fake wigs, demons with Texas drawls, and toilet-paper mummies. In the end, we cannot forget what is probably the most important lesson of the film: that advertising for Les Miserables looked exactly the same in 1998 as it does in 2016.

This is a bullet-point movie--the fine details of it are best summarized and described as a string of bullet points. There are things that "happen," most or all of them hilarious. Here are some of them:
  •  First of all I want to say that the guy who plays Renny is the worst actor of all time. The absolute worst. He is constantly bored and/or stoned, moreso even than Ted from Crypt of Dark Secrets. He is bored by drinking a god's blood and by being attacked by snakes, and he completely destroys a very workable script. He does a killer evil laugh, though, which gives us the impression that even if revenge didn't play a part, Renny would kill people anyway, for fun. Which is, of course, inconsistent with the ending. I am deeply saddened that this actor, Vincent Simmons, has no other credits to his name--a name that should be praised.  
  • Renny tries to bribe Tobanga to train him when the latter initially refuses to do so. The two bills he throws at him are clearly ones. I like to think that in the universe of this movie Renny did really try to bribe Tobanga for two dollars, and this isn't supposed to be some representational theatre thing.
  • This movie probably has the same soundtrack as High Kicks. Prepare for a '90s-gasm, which is like an orgasm but with mullets. Except unlike High Kicks, it also has shitty '90s video graphixxx, which doubles the awesome.  
  • There is some unfortunately real animal violence (a snake eating a mouse). Luckily, there is enough hilarity involving snakes that you will still love snakes after the movie.  
  • Learning the black arts involves passing boxes back and forth between your hands and picking up bottles off of desks, says this film. This is sacrosanct fact in the school of evil wizards.  
  • In Hell the demons will grab your mullet, and they will tug on it as they whip you! It's all you deserve for growing the fucking thing. That's probably why you went to Hell to begin with.
  • For some reason Renny uses a lot of paired nouns in his expositions voiceovers, specifically ones refer to Bad Shit. "Violence and bloodshed," "bloodshed and death," "corruption and wickedness." It forms its own weird meter that quickly becomes funny, in both senses of that word.
That's it, really. It is a short film, which perhaps pushes me into the Hyper Happy regions--if you take out the credits it's about a minute over an hour. That shortness probably points to one of the things that makes Bad Magic great: its poverty. I sincerely suspect Renny's two-dollar bribe was the sum of what they used to make this, and because there was no money involved there was also no reason not to take risks and go bananas. And take those banana-gone risks the filmmakers did, unleashing a demon unto the world like the characters they chronicled. The only pitfall here is some slight boredom and padding--that is what drags it below Splatter Farm for me, though Splatter Farm certainly slows down sometimes.

The Polonias will undoubtedly return. Sometime soon we'll see Splatter Farm and perhaps another old gem, Night Crawlers. But don't make me choose between them! The Polonia films are all precious. If these movies were taken from me by someone, I, too, would commit Renny's sins, and spectral revenge would be upon the thieves for the awful thing they did.

Friday, March 11, 2016

High Kicks (1993), by Ruta K. Aras



I have encountered a generation of movies--usually action movies, but it varies--that have managed to contain the very living essence of the '90s, which was a bizarre era for those of us who set out to make movies with no money. A lot of these low-budget productions washed up on the shores of our elementary schools. Some of them distantly haunt my memory, all nameless and indistinguishable from one another; nothing else but old ghosts now. They always featured the immortal VHS hiss, wooden acting, curious accents, and questionable slang. It turns out there were some movies that had all of that, down to the letter, in movies made for adults as well, and High Kicks is one of them. It is a martial arts film. It is also a rape revenge film. But because it's filtered down through classic shot-on-shitteo blandness, it comes across as jarring and flat at the same time. That contrast has always intrigued me for some reason. Maybe I just like being embarrassed by how stupid the decade I grew up in was.

High Kicks starts off on what is probably the weirdest possible note for a rape revenge film: with super-sexualized shots of ladies working out. I feel like maybe this was supposed to set up some sort of guilt in the audience, possibly offense and confusion as well. This workout takes place as a gym called High Kicks!, run by Sandy, mistress of aerobics. When her handyman ditches out on her she takes on a new one, a sailor named Sam, who is secretly a karate master. A group of street thugs, led by a chubby white dude named TC, break into the gym and assault Sandy. Sam helps her recover from the trauma, and he offers her to teach her karate, with the aid of his buddies/practice combatants Jonas (from Germany!) and Maurice (from "OUTAH SPAAAAACE!!!"). Every line of dialogue throughout is unnatural but charmingly Hamill-esque ("I'm kinduva free spirit, actually!" Sam says), and the hair on most of the characters is pretty awful. It's simultaneously dark and whimsical, uplifted by Casio cues and community theater earnestness even after people have been gang-raped. It jumps from unflinching and realistic images of trauma to a weird love triangle between Sandy, Sam, and one of Sandy's students, Tracy, which plays out in the most soap opera-y of fashions. And all throughout, those training montages and synth demos never let us forget what decade it is. High Kicks is vengeance and justice...for the '90s!

The scope of the film never gets too sizable for its trousers, as the saying goes. That is to say, it is a movie that you can believe would happen in real life. There is a five-man criminal organization who is the subject of sweet revenge by Sandy and her three karate buddies, broken down into several ass-kicking sessions. Then, there is the Tracy-Sandy-Sam love triangle, which is endearingly the fault of Sam's bad social skills. Actually, Sam is a pretty great character for this sort of movie--not only is he as awkward as he is good at martial arts, but he, too, is a rape victim. He and Sandy are on equal terms, because one is never above the other in terms of martial arts skills, or at least so. Can I go so far as to call it a feminist movie? It does fail the Bechdel test pretty hard, at least as far as I noticed, but unlike a lot of low-budget action movies, it doesn't glory in or exploit its rape scenes...er, even though those rape scenes become the primary motivation for its lead character. I may be thinking too hard about this--you know the rule of never devoting more time than the director did. 

This movie isn't going to change how your brain works. It is simply entertaining. But entertainment, at least in my opinion, can truly be an end in itself--humans thrive on it. And High Kicks will entertain every time you come back. That means it's a reliable resting place for one to go to when the "real world" gets too intense. You just need something of a strong stomach, a little tastelessness, and a forewarning of the potentially triggering material. (The whole thing's nudity-free--there is nothing explicit in Sandy's assault, though it may still be troubling.) But it is rewarding, and not merely because the acting really does remind you of Birdemic.

This movie is better than Birdemic. For one thing it's only 80 minutes, and also, things constantly happen in it, instead of there being blank seas of hopeless nothing. The special effects are better, too, because there are none. A better comparison movie would be 1987's Killer Workout. That film plus this one would be a great double-feature, providing a slasher take on the world of aerobicizing. (A world lost to time, full of dark and mysterious secrets.) I'm sure Killer Workout will end up on this site at some point or another.

Seriously, though: do not watch High Kicks if you have a dislike of the '90s in any way. It will literally kill you.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Book Club of Desolation #1: The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (1934), by Harry Stephen Keeler

I'm very excited to introduce a new column here on Adam Mudman's A-List. I've long wondered if there was ever a literary parallel to the trash cinema that I've dedicated so much of my life to, and only recently have I started to construct a picture of such a thing. This picture was always there, waiting to be dug up, and it's here where I have to say that the new column, of which today's post is the first, is based in large part on the shoulders of previous giants. I would like to start my thanks with one aimed at Ramble House for collecting various and sundry bits of crazy lit back into light--reprinting the works of Ron Haydock and Jim Harmon, Richard E. Goddard and Harry Stephen Keeler, who all disturbed and distorted the function of the novel and the English language. In regards to Keeler, I would like to thank the Harry Stephen Keeler Society for their work on documenting the life of today's writer (who of course I'll get to in a bit), and thus bettering the world in any number of ways. And finally, I would like to give a shoutout to OR Books for their release of Blood Spatters Quickly, a collection of the short stories of Ed Wood. (That Ed Wood. Of course.) I'm sure I have met and will yet meet many other people who will lead me to the sort of wonderful convention-defying literature akin to that which we explore today. Now, the Book Club of Desolation is in session, and in its moldy room in the old haunted library, the weirdest of the weird will be perused. And brought into the sunlight.

The gorgeous McSweeney's hardcover edition.

It would be easy for me to dedicate this entire column to Harry Stephen Keeler. He is truly one of the most baffling and inspirational authors of the early/mid 20th Century, and whether you like him or not, reading his work will forever transform one's knowledge of the limitations of the mystery genre, much in the same way that works like House of Leaves transforms the way one views a book. His motifs, in their own way, have become legendary--absurd plot twists (like revealing the killer's identity to be a character we've never heard of before on the last page), bizarre dialects (which usually have to be read aloud to be comprehensible in any way), and obsessive recurring MacGuffins (circus freaks, skulls) are just a few of the things that motivate the bizarre legacy he thankfully left for us in his prolific lifespan. I have only just begun what I hope to be a long relationship with Keeler, and I have started such a bond with the most recommended first book of his, 1934's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull. If even half of his material is like this, I will suddenly have an entire library worth of material for both this column and my life.

So with that briefest of intros, we reach our first conundrum--explaining the plot of Riddle is next to impossible, because it depends on impossibility to function. All the same, I'll do my best to talk about it, while also preserving the tradition of not revealing its frustrating and hilarious conclusion.

I should say beforehand, however: Keeler was a pulp writer in the '30s, and that means his racial sensibilities are not up to modern par by any stretch of the word--it is one of the most significant issues of his work. There is some debate over whether or not Keeler was genuinely racist or parodying racism. It's hard to figure out, especially in Riddle, and so let me just say that most readers will tense up any time a person of color shows up (Keeler always had a fascination with the Chinese in particular). I like the idea that Keeler was a progressive, and the shocking racism of his work is, in fact, attempt to be a parody. A parody that is no less heavy-handed than anything else in his corpus.

Clay Calthorpe is a businessman returning to his native Chicago from a trip in England, where he is pursued by a, ahem, mysterious Chinaman. Calthorpe realizes that the Asian has been following him from the train--this unsettling realization is swiftly topped when he finds out that his work bag has been switched with someone else's. And the holder of the swapped bag was using it to transport a trepanned skull, containing a green bullet and shredded fragments of a poem! Calthorpe, though shaken by the discovery, goes to visit his friend John Barr, the inventor of Barr-Bag, a model of work bag that seriously gets, like, two chapters dedicated to it in descriptions. Barr has to get throat surgery, and Keeler then spends a lot of time lingering on the use of cocaine in surgery, perhaps trying to tell us something. Calthorpe then visits his fiancee, and the revelation of the skull causes his future father-in-law, the head of a wealthy candy company, to faint, and then call off the marriage. The businessman thus has a personal stake in solving the mystery--his marriage depends on it! The subplots that spin out of this concept are endless. It involves a trail leading to "O. Ming Lee, the Spider-Woman," a circus freak with six arms and four legs (!), as well as lectures about trepanation, and the sinister machinations of Sophie Kratzenschneiderwumpel (!!!), called Suing Sophie due to her compulsion for suing men over breach of promise by faking that they failed to marry her after proposal. As I said, the ending does not merely suck at making sense, but it is literally physically impossible.

I could not believe the amount of plot that Keeler squeezed into the novel. I have mentioned my own complicated plots before (peers' adjective, I swear), but I could never dream of getting in as many sub-stories, coincidences, and unlikely twists as HSK did. On top of this, his prose is dreadful. By which I mean, of course, beautiful. He insists--and here I create a self-demonstrating example!--on using an over-plethora of em-dashes--creating a sequence of increasingly Wagnerian tangents and sub-tangents--using the most egregious and overripe of the prose of purplish hue. He actually really is like Lovecraft, minus the supernatural stuff, and with more fun than ol' H.P. ever had. (He even has a Mysterious Occult Book like the Necronomicon--a tome of Chinese wisdom called The Way Out.) Naturally, he is indigestible, but fortunately, plot points are repeated over and over again, to the point where you can tell what's going on, without straining yourself.

The thing is, Keeler didn't have all of this craziness appear at random. There was an almost philosophical dimension to why he did his plots the way he did. He had a famous theory about plot working called webwork theory, wherein a plot could be sketched into a complex web of connections--each intersection point between the plotlines was a coincidence in the story that bound these seemingly scattered stories into a single (ostensibly) cohesive whole. (The link goes to the theory as posited by the man himself, which admittedly is extremely hard to read, because prose--Wikipedia is a better alternative but please read that link all the same.) When I read about Keeler's webwork theory, I found a weird kinship, as a lot of my own fiction has had a tendency (hear my confession!) to cobble together multiple storylines that are bound by a central idea of significance, and with the ending being the primary pre-planned point of the story. Reading one of his novels helped me understand the process on a deeper level, and already, I have incorporated a KEELERIAN PLOT PENTAGRAM into a story of mine, as an experiment in FUN. (That is to say I drew a pentagram and came up with a subplot for each intersection, and expanded from there.)

The thing is, Riddle seems to put a meta-statement on webwork theory into the character's reflections on life. Several times, Clay talks about how life is just a big web of coincidences that come together in shocking ways. There is a sort of divinity to this, and to me, Keeler is revealing little bit of his soul to us here. He is one of those "God moves in mysterious ways" people. Except in his universe, God is a fucking disorganized mess with no subtlety whatsoever. Keeler thus gets himself a chance to mock life by making it senseless while also being a series of orderly conspiracies by nature itself. Social, historical, or economic forces are not the ways of the secret world here--instead, everyone is the subject of a masterminded universal joke.

Of course, it's also possible that he was just over the top because the pulp standards of his era commanded him to. Those were weird times! I plan on featuring a relatively mainstream pulp on this column at some point, a 1937 piece called The Octopus, which is genuinely fitting for the site. But you can't help but sense that Keeler was different. He was more aware of his surroundings than his peers. And he mocked the hell of out of everything, all the while having the time of his life. He experimented in a time where survival was based on writing quickly, which meant formulas--these experiments are evident in webwork theory, an attempt to render writing scientific. When Keeler did resort to formulas, they were bizarre enough to satisfy every time, as they mostly involved his own internal mythos of recurring symbols.

As I said, most Keeler fans will recommend this as a first. That's because it will hook you for life--I can and will testify to that. I can't wait to look deeper. Sometime soon, I plan to check out one of the last books Keeler did before his 1967 death. He never chilled, and these last works seem to be exponential leagues ahead of the madness of Riddle.

There is one last thing that I think summarizes my experience with this book...

Near the end of this book, there is a tag that the publisher customarily put in all their mysteries, where the reader is told: "Stop! At this point--all the characters and clues have been presented to make it possible for you to determine the true identity of the blackmailer." When I read this I literally shouted "Bullshit!" and slammed the book down on the table.

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Image Source: Amazon

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Hack-o-Lantern (1988), by Jag Mundhra


The worst part of reviewing these movies is describing them.

As I've said many times before, the goal of the A-List is to spread awareness of trash movies with the hopes that people will check 'em out and, ideally, reconstruct their notions of "good" and "bad" movies. Because these movies subvert and play with all of the cinematic conventions we've grown comfortable on (being sheltered since childhood in a Plato's Cave of exclusively good movies...usually), putting them in precisely-defined terms is the most important part of "selling" their value. (More a spiritual and emotional value than a capitalist one, to be sure.) While it is easy for me to simply proclaim the greatness of these films, that method is not effective. And there's always an unsteady balance between revealing the fun and spoiling it. But what complicates the issue further is that there is always an indescribable aura of good in them. An intrinsic sweet substance that flows richly from them, that touch the heart and destabilize the mind. Maybe it's masochistic guilt, or sadistic schadenfreude against the poor souls who tore their chests open to the world and fell so hard. Or soared so high.

Today's movie, fortunately, is one that presents that magic, invisible "trash feeling," while also being easily comparable to "bad movies" that people have a high chance of having already seen. I've heard people compare it to Troll 2. Both are distinctly products of the late '80s/early '90s. Both had foreign directors directing American casts (Indian and Italian, respectively). Both are fucking incredible. Good news, at this point in history statistically you probably either have seen Troll 2 or know someone who can show it to you! That will lead easily in Hack-o-Lantern. Following Hack-o-Lantern may have to be James Bryan's Don't Go in the Woods, or maybe Furious. The goal is to get you to like Manos: The Hands of Fate, and then send you down into Ax 'Em, and finally Hip Hop Locos. It's nearly impossible to get any sort of enjoyment out of what waits on deeper levels, like After Last Season, Where the Dead Go to Die, and Alien Beasts. Love is not applicable to them. They are not even movies. They are Creatures.

This movie gets off to a great start--we have a relatively innocent setup where a young boy named Tommy meets with his grandfather, who is very sweet, if overdramatic and possessed of a voice that sounds like Beetlejuice after six packs of Red Apple cigarettes. Of course, he is a Satanist, who teaches Tommy that blood tastes good and drinking it makes you healthy. Also, he kills Tommy's father by burning him alive. But this is just the beginning. If you think that this movie holds back its weird twists and somehow becomes normal after this intro, you are dead wrong. It's revealed that Tommy's grandpa is incredibly open about being a Satanist, and apparently happily revealed to his daughter that he killed her husband. He even keeps one of his bones on a necklace, which he shows off to her while groping her. It is a scene that is gross by default, true, but the whiplash pacing, poorly-chosen soundtrack, absurd line delivery, and unsettling stylistic changes (rustic thriller to Hammer Horror to POV '80s slasher depending on the scene) make nothing in the film come across as truly fucked-up. It's laughs all the way through, even with some occasional slow bits. Where will Tommy's dark destiny lead him? To heavy metal? To a cool-looking demon mask and burying people alive? Or even to the horrid depths of branding someone's buttcheek with a pentagram...?!

This is one of those films where you can let it play in the background, and 90% of the time when you turn back to it, something crazy is going on. Ass-branding aside, this movie is full of nonsense. The grandpa's mouth is always of both scenery and an ever-worsening Southern accent. People have sex in a graveyard on top of one of the graves. And even dedicated fans of soap operas will be shocked and intrigued by how many times people have the same repetitive conversations about relationships. In all of this, there is perpetually a sense that everyone involved had great fun and they wanted you to have great fun as well.

The issue is, they had to get it to feature length, and thus there are a lot of shots that are just plain uninteresting. Some of them are too dark to see, and others are visually dull next to vibrant shots lit by mood lighting (such as at the Halloween party, which, like everything else in the movie, is full of EIGHTIES). So again, feel free to zone out--just expect to be dragged back in rather hurriedly when the dull shit is over!

I'm always impressed by how this movie, via having the garnishes of poor acting and all the other stuff I mentioned, manages to thrive despite being incredibly generic for an occult thriller. The scenes of Satanic rituals--and indeed, Satan himself is the evil here, because it's not like he's overdone or anything--consist of people in black robes dancing around candlelit pentagrams and drinking from chalices. That's it. It is the original, generic, archetypical "Black Mass" scene. Even the movie's tenuous link to heavy metal had been beaten to death by the '80s by the time this movie came out. Do not come here looking for an original story. The presentation of the story is what matters, because they did indeed manage to fumble literally everything. Everything except showing off lots of boobs.

That combination--failure and simplicity--make Hack-o-Lantern simultaneously charming and spooky. It's great on Halloween, as if you couldn't tell. While it will not frighten you, it may potentially give you goosebumps, which if you're like me will give your life more meaning. I live for spooky shit. I die for spooky shit. And I like laughing at this nonsense.

And sharing it with you, of course.

Hack-o-Lantern is a syzygy, a fusion of two opposites. It is both entirely relatable and entirely alien. It's something that you can jump on no matter what of stage of life you're in, as well as a gateway to something greater. Hack-o-Lantern doles out perspective, and through perspective, we have understanding. And understanding leads to a better world.