Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Book Club of Desolation #6: The Fangs of Suet Pudding (1944), by "Adams Farr"



The deeper I've dug, the more I've found that there are a few author that are (in)famous for being particularly odd. Obviously this includes Harry Stephen Keeler and Lionel Fanthorpe. But the name Adams Farr was a moniker I kept coming upon over and over; it seemed to represent a semi-renowned, semi-respected literary anomaly. Though Farr's name is probably false, Farr was the writer of The Fangs of Suet Pudding, a book seen as something of a hidden classic--the title and general premise have bewildered writers ranging from Russell Ash and Brian Lake in Bizarre Books to Chris Mikul in Biblio Curiosa. I had to check it out for myself, and I've found that the legends are true: The Fangs of Suet Pudding is legitimately good while also being intensely idiosyncratic. It's an artifact from a world that couldn't be replicated, for reasons regarding the time in which it was written, and regarding the presumed facts about "Adams Farr."

Fangs centers around Loreley Vance, a young English girl living with her aunt in France during the German invasion. Her life is changed forever when a burglar named Pugg breaks into her house, an act which naturally leads to their friendship. He takes her to a dance and introduces her to another boy, wealthy aristocrat Bobby Treslin, and the three of them, along with an exile from "Troubania" called The Dictator, get caught up in the machinations of the Nazi officer Carl Vipoering, aka Suet Pudding, whose head resembles the beefy dish for which Loreley names him. While France falls apart around them, they stop each of Vipoering's schemes, while he seems to toy with them, insisting on playing snakes and ladders with Loreley and somehow escaping their every attempt to kill him. Did I mention he also smells like "crushed violets"? The good guys win in the end, but not before enduring some...legitimate trauma. For indeed, this is a book about war written during the war it describes. Adams Farr saw some shit. Whoever they were.

The intro and back cover of the Ramble House edition speculate that Loreley Vance is a self-insert character, and that "Adams Farr" was an English teenage girl. This ties in handily with the realism of how the character of Loreley is depicted, and with the weird prose eddies that marble the book. In the case of the latter, there's an odd blend of eternal Britishisms, inside-jokes, and words used incorrectly but with meaning. Consider the following: "Aunt Sophie sniffed. It was the kind of sniff that said: I TOLD YOU SO, DEAR BOY! in Hindustani." Or how about the fact that Loreley says she was introduced to Bobby's "blond size," or her reference to someone possessing "that pre-Boer-War spirit"? These are signs of an overly-cryptic and inexperienced but otherwise talented writer. While I never could and never will be able to write something nearly as charming as Fangs, I see the same mistakes I made when I was a teenager. It's youthful ambition, raw experimentation, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Assuming this theory was true, I wish Adams Farr, whoever she was, wrote more. It's entirely possible she did--we would never know.

My mind flooded with comparisons as I read this book. In terms of literature, I was reminded of Shirley Jackson (extraordinarily charismatic prose) and R.L. Stein's Goosebumps (bizarre/hilarious chapter cliffhangers). Jackson and Stein's vastly different works show worlds where the supernatural exists, and this other world is sometimes a benefit, answer, or sublime experience for the protagonists. Oftentimes they learn that the weird powers they've encountered are evil. It's a simple story of the innocence of youth being taken away by a brush with something beyond comprehension, or explanation: the mirror that makes you invisible also replaces you with an evil mirror double, or the trip to the beautiful old house, escaping your mother at last, ends with suicide at the base of a tree. In this case, the supernatural is replaced by the circumstances of War. Loreley is at first excited to live in France, thrilled by the notion of war, and charmed by the Chateau her friend Bobby lives in. Slowly, the War becomes both terrible and omnipresent, and takes away whatever enthusiasm she has. Over time, we learn that Pugg's family was killed, and we see civilians run in fear as the Nazis overrun Paris, bombs erupting around them. For all the whimsy, there's a chilling seriousness beneath.

I came up with movie comparisons too. The honest innocence of the work and its infringement by maturity made me think of an entertaining version of Valerie's Weekend of Wonders. It shares its "extreme European-ness" attribute as well. Of course, in terms of style and prose, this is like Nathan Schiff's Super 8 movies. Again, youthful experimentation. Kids Goofing Off. In terms of Nathan Schiff, I primarily mean Weasels Rip My Flesh and Long Island Cannibal Massacre--nowhere does this film get as dark as Vermilion Eyes. Once again: dark but whimsical, not graphic and stomach-churning.

Ultimately, this is a legitimately good book, even outside of trash terms. The writing is good, the plot is fun, and the characters are wonderfully memorable. Not just Suet Pudding, he-of getting Aunt Sophie drunk on cognac as part of his master plan to conquer Europe--but everyone. The Dictator, who learns the meaning of freedom in the course of fighting an evil bigger than himself. Bobby and Pugg, who form a charmingly clumsy attraction-triangle with Loreley. Aunt Sophie, who gets a piece of the action with a few chances to clobber some Nazis. And Loreley herself, who is self-aware, witty, and mature but with youthful imagination and inexperience. If you can stand having your brain twisted around now and then, this is a classic. Check it out.

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Sing Sing Nights (1934), by Lewis D. Collins



I hope I haven't Harry Stephen Keeler'd you to death, yet. It is very easy for him and his presence to kill people--so tremendous is his bibliography, and so imposing is his prose, that cardiac arrest is usually an inevitability when trying to plow through even just one of his novels. Sure enough, there is another Keeler book on the line for the Book Club of Desolation: his ostensible magnum opus, a four-book saga called The Skull in the Box. But the next entry (or next two) will concern some non-Keeler books. After all, variety is the spice of life.

I have discovered another of these life-spices. They are incarnate in a simple fact, and in the subject of that fact. There is a Harry Stephen Keeler movie, and that is our subject--and the movie is awesome, which is the fact. Yes, it's incredible to believe, but this movie manages to preserve Keeler's idiosyncrasies onscreen, though these are translated into equally-bizarre turns of strangeness. Sing Sing Nights, based off the novel of the same name (and one of the many Keelers I haven't yet read), serves as a way to initiate people into the ways of Keeler that is not so extreme as to kill their brain immediately. And for fans of his work in any capacity, it is a treat that is offered nowhere else.

Wealthy douchebag Floyd Cooper is shot by three different men but because each of their shots would have struck a vital part of the body, only one of them--the one who fired the first shot--can be considered the murderer. In order to determine which one of them did it, Professor Varney, who cuts out paper dolls like a goddamn serial killer, uses a special kind of lie director to read the character of the men, by having them explain why they wanted to kill him. As the subsequent flashbacks reveal, Cooper was fond of ruining people's lives and stealing their significant others. All of them had equal cause to kill him, and the answer, of course, is reliant entirely on facts that the story has never seen fit to reveal before. Throughout this entire journey, we have scenes that go on for far too long, scenes that are cut far too short, an actual real-life monocle pop, and the jarring sudden appearance of "the warlord, Chung Fu." Thankfully, in the case of the latter, we are spared the brunt of Keeler's racial wrath, though it would reappear in another form as we'll see.

The first thing that clued me into how this movie worked was the scene at the beginning where the cops are talking at each other at the crime scene. While I've seen my share of Golden Age actors who maybe squared their jaws a bit too much, and, similarly, a solid share of some of the most wooden of B&W potboiler shmoes, the line delivery between these "characters" is so robotic you gotta wear a diving helmet and gorilla suit. They belt their lines out like jocks in a high school theatre class. But all throughout, there are moments that define the characters as human, albeit heavily disguised. Line flubs, weird improvisations, and bizarre faces help us buy that this is happening in real life. Even though there's no chance in Hell it could've. It is this opening scene, and the stiffness that populates it, that showed me that this was a true HSK film, even before the absurdly convoluted plot kicked. It is the only one of its kind in this regard.

But I should say that Sing Sing Nights is not the only movie bearing Keeler's name on the credits. Weirdly, Monogram chose to film Sing Sing Nights not once but twice--in the same year, no less. One of the stories told in Sing Sing Nights, featuring Keeler's ever-offensive depiction of Chinese people, was adapted into the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Mysterious Mr. Wong, featuring Lugosi in yellowface (!) in an extremely slow and generic butchering of the Keeler kraziness. Only thing entertaining about that movie is that Lugosi's Mr. Wong is clearly an inhabitant of Beijing's Hungarian neighborhood, as he makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he's Bela fucking Lugosi and doesn't sound or look Asian at all. It is a painful watch, not only in its tedium and reliance on tropes decades old at its time of release, but also because it is one of the oldies that is searingly racist. There is a casualness to the way the stereotypical Irish cop drops slurs everywhere and says that all Chinese people are a bunch of lousy crooks. Sure, he's played off as an idiot, but it's in a "lovable" sort of way, that ends up being insulting to both Irish and Chinese people. Consider it Sing Sing Nights' evil twin, or a bonus feature on the DVD that Sing Sing never got. (Mysterious Mr. Wong got a DVD, though--which doesn't include Sing Sing as a special feature!)

To conclude: despite some flaws, Sing Sing Nights would be excellent even if it didn't contain a scene of one of the heroes calling his girlfriend "thoroughbred." Watch out for some dodgy race issues, and beware the occasional boredom (even if it does run less than an hour), but otherwise, this is a record showing the extent of human potential. People said that Watchmen was impossible to film (and it wasn't, at least with any degree of quality), but I argue that a Keeler book would be even harder. Lewis D. Collins did it. And he may not be alone--a film based on Keeler's short story "The Flyer Hold-Up" has been announced, with the attached cast consisting of Virginia Madsen and Kyle Gallner. The former's appearances range from Highlander II: The Quickening to Candyman to The Haunting in Connecticut. Gallner was also in Haunting but was much less fortunate, having also been in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and American Sniper. Whatever. I wish 'em the best of luck, and I certainly hope this isn't some shitty self-aware comedy nonsense.

Sorry, I digress all too frequently. Sing Sing Nights. Good. Watch it.

ODD TALES OF WONDER #1 IS OUT!!

Hey everyone! In addition to running this site, I also run a fiction magazine called Odd Tales of Wonder! And our very first issue is finally available!


Odd Tales is a pulp magazine for the modern age, featuring an "anything-goes" approach to plot and convention, while still delivering top-notch stories. The pulps of old told tales of horror, heroes, criminals, and broken hearts, and that's what I and five other writers are offering to you. Brian Furman has a story about death called "Stooging"; Jonathan Huisman tells a story of doomed lives in the form of "Clay Lovers"; Rogaard Montieff talks about the monstrosity of frustration in "Fifteen 2 Fifteen 4"; Zack Rouse gives us the first parts of his play Nestled in the Shade of Jackalberry Tree, which is nicely political; James Ruben creeps us the fuck out with "No Explanation"; and I tell the first adventure of New Pulp heroine Bloody Mary in "The Blood Avenger." This awesome first issue can be purchased on Amazon in both print and Kindle formats.

While I'm talking about other projects, I'd like to once again shamelessly advertise my new book, graciously published by Ramble House, whose books have and will populate many adventures of the Book Club of Desolation.


Tail of the Lizard King is one of 'em books what got two books in 'em! In this case, it has Tail of the Lizard King and Kaliwood. The former tells the story of Sinthia, a pot-addicted factory worker who kills her boss, and consequently joins a cult to get what she wants in life. Kaliwood concerns dying filmmaker Karl Denim, whose desire to be remembered as the world's greatest director will take him to India and beyond--to the lair of dinosaurs. If that sounds in anyway enjoyable, you can get the volume HERE from Ramble House and HERE from Amazon. I would like to point out that the publisher does offer a discounted etext version, the only etext available. Whether you love it or hate it, please leave it a review on Amazon! Preferably the same goes for Odd Tales.

Thank you so much for your support--with these publications and with the A-List. I love you all, and I hope you are having an excellent day.

---

Odd Tales of Wonder #1 Cover Copyright © 2016 Adam Bezecny
Tail of the Lizard King Cover Art Copyright © 2016 Gavin L. O'Keefe 

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

The Awful Doctor Orlof (1962), by Jess Franco


I have to admit, preemptively, that I am more apprehensive of reviewing The Awful Doctor Orlof than I was of reviewing Blood Feast. That's not a difference in respect--after all, H.G. Lewis is a veritable idol of mine, due to not merely directing Blood Feast but also writing the novel of Blood Feast. The Awful Doctor Orlof is, if you will, the European counterpart of Lewis' overwhelming genre-busting success, leaving nothing the same in its wake. It marks the commencement of Jesus "Jess" Franco's legendary horror career, wherein he produced fantastic revolutionary classics as well as an intense amount of shit. Franco is a director often described as relentless, in ways both good and bad. Doctor Orlof is, however, one of the true Franco classics. Christopher Lee in yellowface does not lurk herein, I can promise you.

The plot of Doctor Orlof is memorable if anything because it was duplicated dozens of times through Franco's corpus. Ultimately the story is a loose lift from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face from three years prior--a movie that would see a variety of imitators and perhaps create interest in the old "Killing People to Steal Their 'Glands'" plot, which was included The Leech Woman and Atom Age Vampire just a year or two after Eyes, but had its origins in 1945's The Man in Half-Moon Street. Which, in turn, had its origins in good ol' Dorian Gray. What's interesting to me is that Eyes tells the story of a scientist who collects the body parts he does to restore his daughter's beauty after she is injured. Atom Age Vampire also had a scientist who killed to restore a loved one, this time his burned wife, while The Leech Woman killed people to restore her own good looks (influenced by age, not burning). With the Man in Half-Moon Street, the gland-harvester just wants to live forever. And a lot of this, along with Doctor Orlof, was probably mutated and shuffled around when they were doing the plot for The Abominable Dr. Phibes nearly a decade later.

Anyway. Having not seen most of the films I just referenced, I will instead elucidate that The Awful Doctor Orlof is a relatively straightforward story about a man, named, natch, Dr. Orlof, who goes around killing women to take their skin so he can restore his comatose daughter's face. Actually, the person who does the killing is his blind, mute, deformed ex-convict butler Morpho. If that's not fucking pulp I have no idea what it is. Except this is also a Gothic story, principally so. The city whose streets Orlof and Morpho prowl recall German Expressionism and there are spooky mansions, fancy evening clothes, and a dearth of daytime scenes. Pulp influences return when we see that Orlof largely picks up his women at sexy nightclubs, a feature of basically every other movie Franco ever made. Whatever the influence, atmosphere is everywhere. Simply put, every frame of this movie is interesting just because it is genuinely creepy. Franco, when he did his thing well, was a master of trapping us in the world he created. Orlof fulfills every desire for old-style "innocent" movies that still have a scummy sublayer to them.


Adding to this atmosphere is the ever-charismatic presence of Howard Vernon. I don't know why I'm such a big Vernon fan--actually, never mind. Go and watch Revenge in the House of Usher and see his performance in that. Make sure you have the English dubs, wherein I'm positive Vernon voices himself (his English voice and his natural voice from interviews are too similar to be an impersonator). In that one, he's being hilarious, but he still also delivers his lines fantastically, with gravitas. By the time he shows up as a cranky mayor in Zombie Lake, you'll be sold. And then he turns up in Ogroff... Think Lugosi in his movies from before the drugs got too bad, or Vincent Price but sleazier and less silly (though no less gentlemanly). Vernon was born to play villains precisely like Orlof, and Franco made a great choice in casting him.

Next, there is a plethora of great moments all throughout the film. My favorite trash films always have one moment that they boil down to, though not always (and sometimes the moment is the entire movie). This movie's big moment is probably the scene with the Crazy Guy who wants his name in the paper. Six or seven watches and I still don't really know what he's talking about but I get enough of the gist of it to proceed with the movie. But only just so. I want to know if you have the same reaction. There are certainly other big moments, probably involving some of the decisions regarding accents in the dubbing, but this one takes the cake.

Finally, Orlof obtains some meta-coolness by the legacy it leaves behind--the extremely overcomplicated legacy. You see, Orlof has a great many sequels, and the names of its characters are reused frequently. There are at least five movies with name of Orloff (spelled with two f's after this first movie) in the title that I can think of off the top of my head, and one of them, The Orgies of Dr. Orloff, doesn't even have a character named Dr. Orloff in it (though the main character is played by Howard Vernon). However, characters by the name of Orloff show up in Franco's films The Diabolical Dr. Z, Female Vampire, and Jack the Ripper (with the last of which revealing, in a literally unbelievable sense, that Jack the Ripper was Dr. Orloff), though admittedly the movies that did feature Orloff's name in the title probably weren't depicting the same character. Regarding other names of Franco's, then: if there is an imperiled wife/daughter/sister/mother who the main character wants to protect or heal from an injury, they are probably named Melissa, just like Orlof's daughter in this movie. Morpho also shows up, at least in name, in The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein and Revenge in the House of Usher in basically the same role. Actually, in House of Usher, he was playing the exact same role, because I refuse to believe that Howard Vernon's evil scientist character is actually named Usher. He is clearly Dr. Orlof, probably the same as the one from this movie, and I say this because a lot of the substance of House of Usher is stock footage from Dr. Orlof. Morpho is shown to have aided "Usher" as a younger man and, because young!Morpho is stock footage, he has the same scenes as Morpho from Orlof. Morpho is just one less name we have to change to make House of Usher the closest thing this first Orloff movie has to a bona fide sequel.

House of Usher amusingly complicates the situation further for reasons involving the Zombi series ("series"), which I'll explain in a later article, because that is a huge mess unto itself that drags in Planet of the Apes and Friday the 13th. In that time I'll probably talk a bit more extensively about The Awful Dr. Orlof's cinematic roots, for it digs in deep both in a cinematic and literary sense. What's interesting is that as per Antonio Lazaro-Reboll, in his book Spanish Horror Film, Franco insisted that in the '50s, he wrote a series of pulp novels featuring Orlof, as well as basically every other mad scientist he created, under the name "David Khune" or "Khume," whom he credits as the writer and/or director in a lot of his films. I only wish these books were real. They aren't. Unless someone can prove me and everyone else wrong. Or at least, provide a reasonable and entertaining forgery. 

And at last (can you tell I like movie history?), I feel like there has to be some sort of connection between Doctor Orlof and the other adjectival doctor film of 1962, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. Provided, this is based on the fact that as a kid I always got these movies confused with one another (because yes, I'd heard of them by 11), but riddle me this: Hichcock was released just a month after Orlof. Certainly the film had been made by then, but maybe there was a title switch at the last second that wasn't recorded. The production details behind a movie like The Horrible Dr. Hichcock were never going to be the subject of a tell-tale book, after all--anything was possible. Maybe there was the hope for a double-feature with Orlof, if not a full-on cash-in. Dr. Hichcock proved to be popular enough to have a sort-of sequel, 1963's The Ghost, as well as an in-name-only sequel, 1964's Autopsy of a Criminal, also released as The Killer of Dr. Hichcock (L'assassino del Dott. Hichcock). At the very least, it's an interesting coincidence that a movie possibly retitled to cash in on Doctor Orlof also ended up inheriting that film's curse as far as sequels went.

The Awful Dr. Orlof is both fun to watch and a lesser-known piece of cinematic history. That makes it a classic in my book. If you ever need a new page for your own--your book, that is--give it a try.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), by Sidney Pink



Oh man...and I always thought Reptilicus was weird. An Atragon rip-off (at least as far as Manda's concerned), Reptilicus also had some extremely awful acting, dialogue, and dialects that just didn't fit well with what Western monster movies were doing at the time. Reptilicus was also directed by the director of today's movie, Sidney Pink. Journey to the Seventh Planet contains the implicit weirdness of Reptilicus, exceptt, much more explicitly. It is Star Trek: The Original Series by way of The Twilight Zone, almost like an Old Dark House movie that also involves space travel. Take heed indeed: it is a space horror movie, from a more innocent era, long before things like Alien and Dracula 3000 were invented. Alas, we are becoming buried in references. Let's go on this journey and see what happens.

A group of five White Men™ go into space in some indeterminate future, probably the '80s. Thus far in human history, every planet in the solar system has been explored except the seventh, Uranus (pronounced Yer-AWN-oos in this version to avoid the usual giggles). Upon landing, the homogeneous gang are confronted by a cluster superimposed Psyched by the 4D Witch lamp effects, which, in the most jarring of ways, proclaims that it will possess their souls and use them to go to Earth, where it will feed upon all of humanity. It becomes clear that the astronauts must solve the mystery of this voice--and why the entire ostensibly-frozen planet is actually home to a thriving jungle, as well as a village full of lush, beautiful dames. How convenient! From here on out, the crew tries to journey outside of the mysterious barrier surrounding this jungle, with interruptions from the omnipresent-but-intangible alien presence. Up to and including the alien's reveal, there is an atmosphere of genuine creepiness and suspense. This entire planet is the alien's domain, his giant haunted house. The generic heroes generically win at the end, even if they do lose the chance to find love.

What's remarkable to me is that Journey to the Seventh Planet manages to recall such a variety of movies: Equinox, Ghosts of Hanley House, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier all ran through my head as I perused this one. Indeed, there is a full "What does God need with a starship?" vibe here, which is row-row-row-your-boat levels of excellent. Add in some claymation creatures (scratch Equinox, think Winterbeast!) and you've got a recipe for success. It's fortunate that this movie is acted by the exact sort of people you'd think would be in it: chiseled-jawed, empty-souled folk. The men that populate this movie are all chins, fists, and accents. Fake accents. Deliciously fake.

There's humor to be found, too, in the movie's somewhat unusual sexuality. As far as I can gather the women the alien creates for the men are based on ladies from their past. And the men are quite joyous in their desire to relive the good old days of their boning chicks (and certainly not dudes). But this is the early '60s and so every keeps it in their pants, except for tongues. And even then, tongues are not ordinarily kept in pants. What I'm saying is, the making-out that this movie features is amusing to see in action. This movie does try to press early '60s buttons, almost to the point of being an old-guard sexploitation sorta thing. But most of the time you will be reminded that most of these actors are now your grandparents. And this was how they spent their time.

There is sincere gravitas to this movie. The sheer weirdness, often of the psychedelic-colored variety, is staggering, and often throws you out of sync with things long enough to shock you when the alien chimes back in to yell at the astronauts. When it's not being weird, it's a straight-up adventure film, of the same variety that a lot of us grew up with, especially Jason and the Argonauts and Journey to the Center of the Earth. When those movies weren't focusing on the pulse-pounding action, they were setting up atmosphere or impressing us with effects. At least, that's how I remember them--I could be totally wrong. If I am wrong, the failures of those films probably exist in Seventh Planet too. You may still have to disable some flags in your mind if you're fond of "good" variants of this genre, but keep your mind open.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Book Club of Desolation #5: The Scarlet Mummy (1965), by Harry Stephen Keeler and Tertza Rinaldo Keeler



Harry Stephen Keeler is a perfect writer for people who think their life has too little anxiety. He is the one mystery writer I've read who has so significantly made me bite my fingernails. The tension in his books is real, largely because there is absolutely no way to divine where the story will go next. While I'm finding that he recycles in-jokes, quirks, and self-created tropes without any degree of shame, his worlds are constantly populated by people whose traits are so diverse that you cannot believe they exist outside of a book. And yet, because Keeler believed that reality that unified by coincidences--a key tenet of his pseudo-philosophical idea of the webwork novel--there is a crude realism in his work that compels as much as confuses. The Scarlet Mummy appears to have been his last novel, written two years before his death, in a harsh period of his life that began in the 1950s where his sole market consisted of the Spanish and Portuguese pulp market. The book was never published in his lifetime. Given that Keeler's marginalization within the market was a result of his increasing eccentricity with age, one can assume that Mummy is his craziest work. At a hefty 400 pages, it is indeed a labyrinth, though it is remarkable how little the man altered his shtick as time went on. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.

As will always be the case with Keeler's work, I will probably be unable to list every plot and subplot that haunts the book's wordy halls. There is a main thread largely involving the characters of Don Langdon and Dr. Spencer Harrow. Don, in a well-worn Keeler trend, inherits a collection of valuable items from a distant dead uncle, but he may only profit by this treasure (in this case a collection of bonds) if he fulfills an incredibly specific term. In this case, he must marry a girl with blue eyes. How unfortunate! His girlfriend's eyes are brown. However, a loophole allows him to escape this clause, even though dozens of pages are devoted to it. Yet Don's luck runs low, because the bonds are fake! He learns the story of the man who made this series of phony bonds, a genius named Lew Magner. (Any relative of Lew Kefler?) We jump away from Don's story to meet the man who turns out to be Magner himself, post-plastic surgery, the aforementioned Dr. Harrow. Harrow's plastic surgery backstory proves to be confusing as it seems he has given himself an alibi. You see, after getting out of prison, Magner hired two plastic surgeons to give him an initial altered appearance, which he used to act out the role of vagabond Brophy McShane. Then, he received a second dose of surgery to become the good doctor, so that whenever people ask him if he was once someone else and changed his appearance via plastic surgery, he can say "Yes" and tell the truth without outing himself as a crook. Plus, the plastic surgeons who were responsible for these phony identities are the brothers of Don Langdon's fiance! Are you still with me? Because this is still only about the first 70 pages of the book. From there we get five-and-a-half-year time jumps, Keelerian-typical incomprehensible accents, and of course, a flashback short story to the days of ancient Egypt dropped into the narrative by Keeler's wife.

The Scarlet Mummy is, aside from a few glances at some chapters of his books released online (mostly through Ramble House), basically my second Keeler experience. The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, my first Keeler, is usually considered to be a good first course in feasting on his work. The similarities and repetitions between the two books do boggle my mind--from what I've seen and read about, it's a damn good thing Keeler chose such crazy things to write about, otherwise his tendency to write the same book over and over again would be a little draining. Like I said: my experiences are far from complete at this point. But it's all here: I've already mentioned the esoteric surgeries, the racist dialects, the conditional marriage, the soap opera love plot, the mysterious will, the superhumanly clever gangsters, the unlikely "everyman" 9-5er becoming a detective to clear his name and win the woman he loves. And, of course, the perpetually pseudo-Victorian purple prose, wherein characters stutter, stammer, pause dramatically, and interrupt themselves. There are tangentially trivia dumps everywhere that rival the intensity of the old Gardner Fox Justice League comics, and at one point a character's head is of course compared to an eternally-omnipresent skull. The same tropes, the same tricks, the same writing style, over three decades later. Isn't that great? Isn't it wonderful that for all these years this man and his wives hung onto their borderline hateful ignorance/defiance of literary traditions and conventions? Even when it cost him any sort of market he had the U.S. and the UK? I am not intending to mock here. This is pure admiration, in a "fuck the police" sort of way. My experiences in writing my novel, Tail of the Lizard King, have taught me the value of writing straightforward stories. But I still pine for experimental, middle-finger stuff like this, which makes up a lot of my unpublished stuff as well as (to a milder degree) my blog-based story Dieselworld. Keeler is a revolutionary, not a member of a simpler market as Haydock and Harmon were, but someone fighting to punch his own cracks in the face of the big leagues. Unfortunately, this results in his work becoming incomprehensible. In that sense, it's just an occasion to try to understand incomprehensibility.

Keeler also commands his audience to pay attention as they read, in a way that is much harsher than even the harshest of mystery novels. (And indeed, this is purely a mystery or crime thriller--do not expect the Mummy to come alive at any point. Sorry.) Every sentence is packed with information which will probably turn out to be vital later--though the divergences that the characters go into in their long, long conversations namedrop dozens of people, places, or things that are never mentioned again. Except when a sentence is used merely to rehash something we've read before. There are many such sentences. In fact, anywhere from 50 to 75 pages of the book could be cut entirely with nothing being lost. Except, I found myself paying just as much attention to the filler loops, because as always, the man's prose is extremely hard to follow. I kept drawing comparisons to ee cummings. Run-ons sentences, bizarre punctuation, and odd metaphors or idioms are everywhere, and so having something to clarify them is always helpful. Of course, when the question of "dialect" enters the fray, there is no explanation.

In the 1930s, Keeler seemed bound by expectations of the time to depict people of color in a racist manner. Namely, the "Negro" dialects, which sometimes come straight out of a banned Looney Tunes short, and the insistence on upholding every "Chinaman" stereotype ever. So how baffling is it that a book intended for publication in 1965 contains a long stretch where a black man seriously named "Mist' Coal" tells a story in the same dialect Keeler used for black people in the early '30s? I think I'm going to have to ditch my earlier belief that Keeler was just trying to screw around with racists--either he was seriously stuck in the past and assumed this was still acceptable (and it wasn't acceptable in the past either), or he was conscious about this stuff. I seem to recall that Keeler wrote a few books with minority protagonists--maybe this is where I should be turning my attention? Or...maybe not.

Every writer has their flaws. Charles Dickens had his narrators get too worked up about the story, Jonathan Swift ate babies, and T.S. Eliot insisted on having his work published. In Keeler's case, his likely racism is a genuine fault. But his berserk refusal to let go of his assaults on language, form, and the reader's suspension of disbelief do not work against him. This book should wash over you for its sheer audacity. Gawk as the plastic surgeon brothers tell stories of run-ins with African pygmies and drinking with Marlon Brando, which, in the span of mere sentences, expand to include a story of a Chinese herb called Ruk-Khaapa that is the perfect medicine--unless it gets wet, which causes it to erase one's memories. An element which surprisingly turns out to be really important. Like any good trash, this is a work that gets its merits from anticipating that the reader has spent their life reading mainly "good" books. By benefiting no one's taste, The Scarlet Mummy benefits the taste of most.

If anything, get it for the part where Keeler summarizes history from the time of Cleopatra up to World War II in a single (breathless) page.

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Image Source: Ramble House

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Horror Safari (1982), by Alan Birkinshaw



I was introduced to this movie under the title of Invaders of the Lost Gold. I have no idea why the marketers of this movie felt like they had to rip off Harrison Ford to succeed, but this movie being a Raiders bootleg is just icing on the cake. This is movie is a veritable trash hall of fame--nearly everyone in it has been in something magnificent. Edmund Purdom from Pieces! Laura Gemser from Women's Prison Massacre! Woody Strode from The Outing! Plus it's directed by Alan Birkinshaw, the creator of Killer's Moon, one of the most entertainingly sleazy Clockwork Orange ripoffs of all time (never thought I'd say that). And it is the final film of Harold Sakata, who as we all know played the villainous Big Buddha from 1966's Dimension Five--oh, and he was also a villain in some forgettable piece of trivia called Goldfinger. It has good vibes from all corners of cinema, and while it is slow at times it stands up to the legacies it basks in.

At the end of World War II some Japanese soldiers hid some caskets of gold in the Philippines. Naturally, once the '80s roll around, there are some people who want to get that gold, including Edmund Purdom, but also Stuart Whitman, from basically every TV show ever, who Joe Don Bakers his way through the movie in a spectacular way. Joined by the other stars they travel into the snake-infested jungles, which, by the way, also house a tribe of Amazon cannibals. Okay, they're not near the Amazon, but c'mon. Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals had been out for five years before this, and it would be all too easy to channel that once Laura Gemser signed on. That means this movie is a war movie, a jungle survival movie, a crime thriller, a seedy romance, and an Amazon cannibal flick. Therefore it will be occasionally snooty and largely tedious. Fortunately, it is a movie where if you zone out, you will benefit from zoning back in. Typically you will see some stuff that is hilarious even with context, like people pouring beer on their eyes, or prolonged closeups of what may be the filthiest ship captain in existence. (Not even Jell-O wrestlers get that dirty.) The dialogue, too, sometimes reaches Bruno Mattei levels of inanity. You will never forget Edmund Purdom's whopper unleashed during a shady business deal with a Japanese man: "Now let's skip this Oriental tea party, and get down to some hard drinking!" Edmund Purdom then shoots that man in the chest.

You may wonder how far this movie goes into its various genres. Let me tell you, the soap opera stuff, the thriller stuff, and the adventure stuff all goes over well. However, as far as cannibal flicks go, there is a tremendous amount of buildup followed by a baffling letdown. It is actually pretty funny how tiny a role they end up playing past the movie's first half. Rest assured, however, this movie may well contain some real animal violence. Wait, that's a horrible thing. Jesus. Anyway, a snake may get shot in this movie and it is some awful shit, but then again it appears to be the same snake stock footage from Manos: The Hands of Fate, which originated with Disney. Meaning it probably was not shot. Still, in these movies it would be par for the course, and the deeper I dig into the darkest reaches of Internet exploitation records and IMDB's lowest rated pages, the more terrified I am of seeing that sort of cruelty when I find a dearth of content warnings (having walked blind into horse cock and live amputation surgery without warning). This has a 2.4, making it one of the worst movies of 1982, even beating out the disturbingly similar Oasis of the Zombies, which shares an equally schlocky treasure hunt plot and is generally hated even by the most tolerant of Jess Franco fans. Except for me.

Moving to the movie's story, the grittiness of this movie is perhaps best compared to the unforgiving conditions of B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It reaches absurd levels of cruelty, with snake poisonings, crocodile devourings, and cannibal spearings, and there's no shortage of paranoid arguments. I think someone cheats on someone's wife at some point. This is complimented by the devastated film, covered in stripes and flaws that would give Leonard Kirtman or Nathan Schiff a heart attack. That makes it cozy for people like us. Sure, there are tons of shots that are irritatingly dark, but once gets used to those things in this business. Among other production details that the filmmakers lavished upon us, with us getting little say in the matter, is the "Oriental" music that plays throughout most of the thing. Luckily it is very similar to the unbelievable themes of a similar type used horrifically in Psyched by the 4D Witch. This is the most stereotypical music I can think of, which may be forgiven in that it was apparently shot in Hong Kong. But it's initial release was in Turkey...see why I love the trash cosmos? All of this needlessly convoluted shit clearly has a story behind it. That history makes it seem like it was a battle to get this out--that the people behind it stuck with it, to gain whatever profit they could, just so they could do it all over again with something equally cheap. Trash's vicious cycle.

Speaking of the people behind it, one of the writers was Dick Randall, the producer of such films as Pieces (as well as Pod People, also made by Juan Piquer Simon), Emanuelle, Queen of the Desert (starring Laura Gemser, who else), and Death Dimension (another Harold Sakata villain vehicle). That explains the unholy allegiance forged here that really does improve the film if you are familiar with some of the old friends of trash divers. However, each of these actors have fame for a reason, and so they are capable of delivering an entertaining enough piece for people who haven't met them yet. If you have a strong stomach, use this as a launch point into their careers. Don't expect a masterpiece but if you have the right expectations, it will do good things for you.