Secrets of the French Police (1932), by A. Edward Sutherland

H. Ashton Wolfe was a strange writer. I can find virtually no biographical details of the man online, but he is known to me as an author of 1920s true crime lit which was probably only somewhat true. For example, in Wolfe's book Warped in the Making: Crimes of Love and Hate (1928), he tells two stories about the Parisian police's clashes with a larger than life Chinese criminal named Hanoi Shan. The story features Shan unleashing killer spiders and deadly poisons on the citizens of Paris--in a manner not dissimilar from Sax Rohmer's Yellow Peril racist stereotype Fu Manchu, whose stories were popular at the time. Indeed, comparing Wolfe's work to the pulp fiction of the era yields many more similarities that a comparison to late '20s true crime tales. This movie is ostensibly based on a series of stories by Wolfe which he claimed to be from the archives of the French Surete. I don't know if the French police ever had to deal with a cackling maniac armed with a basement Tesla coil who wanted to subvert the Communist regime of Russia with a royal pretender posing as Princess Anastasia Romanov. It's possible. I guess.

Meanwhile, we last saw director A. Edward Sutherland in command of a film which opens with Lionel Atwill sewing someone's mouth shut. He also committed a dark sin with the creation of The Invisible Woman, but we can let bygones be bygones. Because Secrets of the French Police is a sharp and fascinating film indeed.

We open at the funeral of the mysteriously-killed Brigadier Georges Danton, attended by his colleagues among the gendarmes of Paris. In case we missed the title card, his widow is told that he served the Secret police Secretly, and therefore is being buried in Secret. Using forensics they begin to look for the smokers of a special type of cigarette whose ash was found on Danton's corpse. They track it to a cigarette shop where we get an exceptionally bizarre vignette of a man who appears to be fucked up on meth getting mad over the cigarettes burning his mouth. He's supposed to be drunk, but his repeat exclamations of "FIRECRACKERS!!!!!" gets more and more surreal as time goes on. What makes this scene even stranger is the fact that it has no bearing on what follows.

Our real plot, when we do return to it, concerns a young pickpocket named Leon Renault, who is in love with a flower girl named Eugenie Dorain. Eugenie's father Anton despises that his future son-in-law is a criminal, but as we will learn, Monsieur Dorain has perversely good reasons for wanting his daughter to avoid the world of crime. You see, Anton used to be a criminal himself, as revealed by the mysterious man who comes to his apartment that night. Indeed, Eugenie isn't even his biological daughter, and it is entirely possible that Anton's "adoption" of her was a shady affair--the old man claims she was a war orphan in Russia (which raises some interesting questions as I'll explore below). But Anton does sincerely care about his adopted child and if he can spare her the horrors of his history he will. Unfortunately for him, he was friends with Brigadier Danton, and for that he must die.

The killer, whose belt buckle is actually a sheath for a knife, is a Russian General named Moroff. When we first meet Moroff he's saying something over the phone about Princess Anastasia, and how she will soon return. I started getting really excited for this movie when he mentioned the name, because whenever I hear a phrase from the conspiracy theory buzzword checklist that I totally have, my heart starts racing. "Illuminati," "Die Glocke," "the pyramids," "Kennedy"--now I'm lucky to have found a film which ticks off "surviving Romanovs." In case, Moroff's master plan, if you haven't guessed it, is tracking down a girl with a "Slavic" jaw who could be passed off as the supposedly-living Princess Anastasia, who was in our reality killed along with her family during the Russian Revolution. However, in case the girl is a poor actress or doesn't want to pose as fraudulent royalty, Moroff has trained himself in the arts of hypnotism, and trust me, it's way more hilariously pulpy than it sounds. It's really tempting to speculate that Moroff is meant to be a surviving Grigori Rasputin, just as it's tempting to consider Anton's story of Eugenie's origins meaning that she genuinely is Princess Anastasia (never mind that Anastasia was actually a Grand Duchess). I realize that latter point is more to explain the "Slavic jaw," but come on, do all Russians really look that similar? Do better, 1930s! What the emphasis on facial features also leads to is a face matching board used by the cops to come up with pictures of their suspects--pretty ordinary police work, a bit revolutionary in the 1930s, but for this movie they use a board which is ridiculously gigantic. The poor interns look so stupid looking for puzzle pieces to match to this thing as a guy called out a string of numbers and letters. This is the problem with making a police procedural: eventually, times will change so that your methods eventually look kinda silly. At least this wasn't made thirty years later, when they were showing us "the brand new computing machines" at their disposal. Even Batman knew it was hard to look cool using a '60s computer to solve crimes.

Moroff invites over the brother of the late Czar Nicholas II, the totally-not-fictitious Maxim Romanov. While initially Eugenie's act is decently convincing at first (if you get past the fact that she looks and acts about as lively as a zombie) but the sight of flowers is enough to break the hypnosis and drag her back to her old life. A slip in the act convinces Maxim that he's dealing with "a mental case," and ducks out on Moroff--but not before the General slips a note into his pocket claiming to be written by the Czar's brother, saying he believed Eugenie was Anastasia. Shortly thereafter Maxim and his chauffeur are driven off the road by an ingenious (but also ridiculously pulpy) movie screen projector, which simulates a car rushing towards oncoming traffic, and the plot against the Soviets goes on.

As an aside though, I do have to wonder--does Moroff legitimately think that Joseph fucking Stalin was going to hand over leadership of Russia to his cabal if somehow he did convince Maxim he had the real Grand Duchess on his hands? Really? More like Moronoff, dorogoy.

Eventually Leon, working with the police in exchange for a period where none of this thefts are stopped, breaks into Castle Moroff and nearly frees Eugenia when they are caught and brought down to the General's requisite torture-lab. Here, Moroff starts draining the girl of her blood, while he threatens Leon with a Tesla coil. I don't know what he intends to do with the Tesla coil, but it sure has Leon worried. But the police are right behind Leon, and their entrance is delayed only by the length of time it takes for an acetylene torch to get through a steel door.

Yeah, do you believe that happened in real life? You can say no, it's fine. If you do say no, you won't be alone. This movie is about as much of a true story as the Amityville sequels. I'm sure that it's possible to argue creative liberties, such as the fact that Leon has a well-developed personality that's too movie-perfect to be true--he never steals from Frenchmen, as he is a patriot who lost his entire family in World War I. But the difference between imagination and exaggeration can be a thin one when dealing with the tempestuous nebulousness that is "true crime." There's a strange blend of humor, horror, and stark, dour seriousness as we bounce from plucky Leon to Moroff's Gothic castle to the stiff procedural sequences. Ultimately this adds to a fun Pre-Code sum which is officially in my list of favorite unusual '30s movies. It's legitimately good, and where it isn't, it's at least captivating for other reasons. Give it a shot!

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Geisha Girl (1952), by George Breakston and C. Ray Stahl

What, a comedy that I find actually somewhat funny?! Also the home of ZORO, the greatest wizard who ever lived.

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Sex Madness (1938), by Dwain Esper

We've probably all heard of Reefer Madness at this point. As a matter of fact a lot of you reading this site can probably cite a specific Favorite Moment from Reefer Madness, even if you've only seen it once. Reefer Madness stands relatively untouched as the exploitation movie of the 1930s, if anything because it's one of the few which is still watchable. The Cocaine Fiends, Marihuana, and all the others just don't hold up, because they lack that unique spark that made Reefer Madness fucking crazy. But, while it's still not close to Reefer Madness, Sex Madness is pretty special, if nothing else because it makes for a great riff with friends.

Sex Madness is a relatively plotless depiction of what will happen if you don't listen to your parents (or maybe listen to them too much) and spend your youth going to orgies. Okay, orgies were still off-limits in the '30s, even in exploitation films that posed as education fodder. That doesn't stop our main characters from stopping by a "guest room" party though! We follow the twin narratives of Millicent Hamilton, ambitious young typist and beauty queen, and Tom Lorenz, son of city reformer Paul Lorenz, who is on a quest to eradicate "social diseases" like syphilis. ("Social diseases"? Really? Not only does that have an edge of shaming to it, but "social" is perhaps the most unintentionally hilarious synonym for "sexual" I've heard in a while. It changes so many contexts!) Tom picks up his syphilis at said guest-room party, while Millicent, in her hunger to become a beauty queen champ, is infected via date-rape by her would-be manager. Tom struggles with whether or not to tell his dad and risk ruining his career, while Millicent seeks a cure so she can get married. Because I guess doctors in the 1930s had the authority to stop marriages if someone had syphilis. Or something. Anyway, Tom eventually learns that his dad is on his side, while Millicent is seemingly cured only to infect her husband and baby, killing the latter. I think they still swing for a happy ending, though. Yay?

This movie has all the requisite '30s exploitation tropes: poorly-integrated footage sampled from other films. Evil [minorities] (in this case lesbians). Exaggerated, lip-licking leering. Irrelevant, often nonsensical newspaper headlines ("Sex criminal jailed after baby murder" doesn't really describe any of the events of his film, even when a baby does die). Creaky stage-play cinematography. Horrible, horrible, horrible acting. Moral alarmism. Glorification of what it's ostensibly attacking. Etc., etc. Sex Madness, though, goes beyond in many ways, starting with the fact that it's a sexploitation movie about syphilis. It's the ultimate in combining lurid sexuality with shaming people for the accidental consequences of their actions. It shames people for being sexually assaulted. Every frame of this is subtitled "Ewwwww" in invisible ink. For every moment we're supposed to be aroused by the turn of a shapely gam or stock footage of dancing girls, there are characters pontificating about the horrors of one of the most gruesome diseases a human being can contract. They also feature footage of someone afflicted with the disease which may be fake, but the extra scratches on the film print suggest that perhaps this is real medical footage. I mean, it's far from ending your movie with dog surgery like Life Returns, or with live birth reels like a lot of the roadshow exploitation flicks did, but man, they really made sure you knew the word "exploitation" back then. Sometimes these 1930s films will do stuff that would shock the directors of the fucking 1970s. Someday someone is going to unearth a 1930s-era snuff film, or at least an equivalent of Faces of Death. Not only it is pretty sick to exploit people who already face heavy stigma to begin with (this movie is an entire novel on STD stigma), but to blend it in with content that's meant to turn the audience on is rather a cheap blow. More like a string of cheap blows, if we're being fair.

But there's the mundane stuff, too, which makes this stand out to me. I have to anatomize one scene in particular, because it was such a bizarre thing to witness. Was I warned of this scene in a review? Or have I seen this movie before and simply bleached it from my memory? Because there is a scene in this movie where Millicent fudges her line due to a window accidentally slamming in the background, and it came in like I was expecting it. Reshooting probably didn't even come up in discussion when this scene was filmed. The actors probably just whipped out their cigarettes (or joints) when they yelled cut and wondered if there was booze enough in the world to make them forget this mess. Seriously, this is one of the most dramatic and obvious flubs I've seen in a while. I have to wonder how fucking likely this even was. If I left my windows wide open it could be months before they slam closed by themselves. Either they were filming on a shithole location (probable) or the set was fucking haunted (equally probable).

I've been obsessed with the word synecdoche lately and I've been passing it on to my friends: and this scene, friends, is synecdoche. The statement and sum of the whole movie is held in that slamming window, that flubbed take.

Anyway, I don't want to say you should watch an entire movie just to see a window slam, but man, did I get a kick out of that. Also: all of the leering in this movie. If you make it a double feature with Reefer Madness make this the opening feature, not the follow-up. And if you value your souls, please turn your brains off before viewing.

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Bewitched (1945), by Arch Oboler

Aka: We Don't Understand Mental Illness: The Movie. This is a weird one and a bad one. Let's just dive in.

Joan Ellis is a young woman who should to all rights be happy. She has loving and doting parents, and an equally loving and doting boyfriend, Bob, who wants to marry her someday. Her family seems well-liked and affluent. However, she has the rather serious problem of someone else living in her head. This other voice, which sounds like a crabby 40-year-old waitress with emphysema, is Karen, and she actively tries to ruin Joan's life--in essence, her plot is to weaken Joan enough where she can rule over their shared body, thus enabling her life of evil. Eventually, Joan gets the help she needs, but not before Karen forces her to murder Bob after he tracks her down when she runs away from home. But can the doctors save her before she's due to be executed for Bob's slaying?

I shouldn't be quite as hard on this movie as the opening implies. While its views and explanations on dissociative identity disorder are primitive to the point of ableism, and there is virtually no effort put forth to understand the illness at work, the victim of the illness is definitively portrayed as a victim, and consequently there's an effort to sympathize (but not empathize) with her. Perhaps most significantly, it shows the effects of social stigma against mental illness and people who have it, because Joan never feels safe talking to Bob or her family about her problems for fear of them isolating her. In a time where you could be sent to a mental institution for teen rebellion and get a lobotomy for autism, there's a notable chance that her fears would be valid, especially when you consider the Ellises' wealth and social position. Crazy folk in a rich household are Just Not Done. While there is no attempt made to address or correct this possibility that maybe stigma against mental illness just makes the suffering worse, it still presents enough of a threat where audiences at the time could have left the theater thinking. Unfortunately, so much else is done wrong--and the movie itself is so cookie-cutter--that the whole affair barely registers on the synapses at all.

The plot is very stereotypical: an ordinary girl is suddenly confronted with the horror of an insidious illness, which leads her to make a fatal mistake, though she is redeemed and cured in the end. She is nearly rescued by one man and fully saved by another. I didn't mention Eric in the synopsis--he's the lawyer who falls in love with Joan when she becomes a cigar stop clerk after running away. He's also kind of creepy, because while it does turn out that Joan's reluctance to go out with him is due to her own anxiety rather than a lack of attraction, he doesn't exactly turn away when she turns him down day after day after day. He also proposes to her on their first date, which is strange even by '40s standards. It's not like Bob is much better though. I was a little glad when Bob died, to be honest. He's one of those dudes who think that lines like "I love you and I don't know why" are romantic. He also introduces Joan to a little girl as his grandmother? "She's very weak, but if you help her along she can come with us to the zoo." It's really not charming, and I don't exactly trust his eagerness to take a strange little girl to the zoo without her parents.

What is interesting about Eric is that his marriage proposal triggers the first instance in which Karen is able to fully use Joan's body, implying her problem is rooted in intimacy. She then proceeds to grope and mack on him pretty hard, suggesting that Karen's primary evil...is that she's a sexually interested woman. This is a problem in itself but a bigger issue is that what Karen does to Joan is strange and not well connected. Her primary form of harassment seems to be mocking Joan about her mere existence, insisting that she run away before her loved ones lock her up. Next, she expresses strong lust for Eric, but this is followed by her killing Bob. She seemingly kills Bob for reasons related to the first bombardment of taunts--she wants to keep Joan isolated from people who will think she's crazy. The lust for Eric comes back but it's not strongly tied to the murder plot. We can only assume that Karen sees Eric as a more ideal partner than the admittedly dreary Bob, though she also uses him as an anchor to carve out the independent life she desires. While Karen seeks to achieve her goals through violence, she desires a sort of independence and sexuality which Joan denies herself in her ordinary life, and which she permanently refuses at the end by accepting a chaste upper-class existence with Eric. No reason is ever given for Karen's existence. The movie seems to legitimately believe that multiple personalities are the product of two minds born in one brain by a fluke of hormones, like some failed conjoined twin where only their immaterial consciousness formed. Joan is never shown to have suffered any sort of trauma in the past that facilitated Karen's manifestation--we're to believe she literally popped in existence one day after years of sleeping. But because Karen appears as Joan's sexuality and desire for life outside her family, maybe that's a sign of how Joan's problem came to be. Maybe she legitimately feels trapped by her upper-class existence, and its curtailment on sexual experimentation. If so, the fact that she goes back to that at the end makes the film's conclusion actually really sad--to say nothing of the fact that she's still hanging under threat of execution as the last title card comes onscreen! 'Cause yeah, even if it was proven that Joan wasn't at fault, and that her alternate personality killed Bob, she's still been convicted. This is kind of a strange thing to consider because admittedly, the movie does suck you into the feeling of Karen's otherness. Whatever Karen represents within or without my interpretation of her, she's still a threat to at least one innocent person, and that's enough for the viewer to coherently separate her from Joan.

The thing is, though, I feel this movie is a cash-in on MGM's behalf more than anything. (Yes, despite having the plot of a Monogram movie, this was put out by MGM.) People say that this movie almost works as an early exorcism movie, because of the final scene with Edmund Gwenn as Joan's psychologist, wherein he employs good ol' fashioned Hollywood Hypnotism. Replace the Jesus stuff with psychiatry and it's beat for beat almost the same. The Good Man talks the Demon to death. However, Karen's frequent reference to "freedom" made me think of Fredrich March's Hyde in the 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That movie was remade with Spencer Tracy in 1941, a whole four years before Bewitched...by MGM. Yep, they were ripping off themselves. This isn't anything big, because the big studios did and do that all the fucking time, but the recognition of Bewitched as a de-glorified Jekyll and Hyde clone simultaneously kills and boosts the movie for me. On one hand, it helps explain why it was such a deflated experience, empty of life somehow. On the other, it adds another twist to it that keeps it wedged in my head.

Bewitched is not what I would call a fun film to watch, but it's a fun film to remember. I talk about movies on this site that I love because they're legitimately good, or they're so ridiculous that I can't help but love them. There's also of course the odd movie that I love because they're extremely banal, but their banality makes them exceptional in some way. Bewitched is a movie, though, where it's more a mess to figure out, a puzzle, and while it yields almost nothing in the end, it at least gave me something to say, if I could be said to have said anything. I always relish a chance to talk about mental illness, and how on occasion the great studios of Hollywood's golden years were a bunch of shameless hacks. Watch Bewitched for laughs and a fun Edmund Gwenn performance, but don't expect much else.

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Serpent Island (1954), by Tom Gries

I'm going to level with you: outside of Daughter of Horror and a few others, there aren't many 1950s horror movies appropriate for the site that I enjoy. That's why I'm sort of cheating with this one--finding material for both the '20s and this decade will be a challenge next year, assuming I pursue the same format for our Spookyween celebrations. My one justification for including Serpent Island on the itinerary is that it features a voodoo subplot, plus a killer creature sequence at the end. Other than that, this movie is a sailing drama about adventure on the high seas, featuring a scurvy underdog hero who gets the girl at the end. Call me a sucker for voodoo, no matter how mild it is, but there's something about this one that feels like October to me.

Peter Mason is an old marine engineer working dockrat shifts out in San Pedro, CA. One day a woman named Rikki Andre comes up to him asking use of his sailing services; you see, her ancestor was Michel Andre, a gold fence who hid a million dollars in treasure out near Haiti. Using the ship called the Constellation, belonging another sailor she's hired, a rival of Mason's by the name of Kirk Ellis (Captain Kirk, huh?), they set off, traveling to the Seas of Padding. This includes things like gut-punch brawls, shark attacks, and the lamest stock footage hurricane ever. When they land, Mason and Rikki consummate their romantic tension in a surprisingly explicit scene for 1954, but of course, there's voodoo afoot. Pete is captured by the voodoo cult where he learns that their leader is an old flame of his, a woman named Ann Christoff, and she's bound to protect the gold--after all, it constitutes the mass of their sacred idol. Rikki is allowed to see the idol, but is attacked by a boa constrictor; Pete saves her, Kirk is killed by the snake, and the two lovebirds escape the island safely.

Serpent Island is largely notable because it's the first movie that Bert I. Gordon had a hand in producing. As is easy enough to point out there are no giant monsters in this one, even if that boa is pretty big. In a sense, this is one of the most successful monster movies Gordon made--not in terms of monster content, of course--because I actually found some horror in the scene where Rikki is attacked by the snake. They managed to make the actress being choked to death look strangely real. I found it grotesque, but maybe I'm a big sissy--or maybe a crusty print does things to me.

I was pulled into this movie because it has a strange self-awareness about itself that makes it and its characters charming. Pete is well-acted as an aging former sailor with extreme cynicism about life at sea. Rikki is strikingly convincing as a young woman who is figuring herself out. And Kirk is a true bastard like any evil ship captain in a sailing adventure film worth his salt should be. We get this sense of winking from the oddities the script insists on indulging in. For example, after Pete stops a thief from stealing the letter that will lead Rikki to the treasure, he says, "We never did find out who the uncommon thief was; I still have my own ideas on the subject." Yet we never learn those ideas; moving on. How about his later zinger: "My dad always said to never fight a man in his own territory. I never listened to him and that's how I became a success in life." Pete has a sentimental sort of narration over the whole of the film, with pseudo-poetic reflections on all they come across, which seems to be a fixture of sailing segment in these types of adventure flicks. Some of these bits of narration reminded me of Infrasexum in their own way. He also makes jokes which appear to be at the expense of the Republican Party, which earns him a thumbs up in my book.

One last note on the dialogue before I move on. Kirk comes up behind Rikki one night and looks her up and down like a creep. She knows he's there without looking and he asks how she knows. She says, cheerily, "You're real quiet, and so when it gets real quiet I know you're around. If that sounds confused, that's because I'm confused. About a lot of things." Wow! You know you're a master scribe if you've got that in your screenplay, folks.

There's a lot to riff here, because it's a '50s exploitation movie. For example, we see what might have been some of the film's raison d'etre during a scene where Rikki runs out on deck in her nightie, and gives us a big face full of hot lingerie'd booty. There's something for the androsexual, as well, as there's no shortage of Pete's weirdly-shaped shirtless torso. I never really thought I'd get a chance to see Rob Liefeld's interpretation of Captain America extrapolated into real life, but I was not disappointed. Finally, we have Jacques, Ann Christoff's voodoo enforcer, who I like to headcanon is a zombie, just 'cause then I can claim this is a zombie voodoo movie. Every time he makes his sudden appearance I remark on his stunning resemblance to a shaved Mr. T. Because it's a '50s voodoo movie, there is trace racism, including white people being afraid of burly black dudes just 'cause they're burly black dudes. Fortunately, it's not even in the same galaxy as West of Zanzibar.

Serpent Island may be one of those movies which can only be appreciated so idiosyncratically that it's almost not worth it. It may also be a movie I enjoy exclusively because I had to go to surprising lengths to find a copy. If you like sailing dramas with a touch of killer creatures and the threat of human sacrifice, this one's for you. Give it a try.

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Deadly Weapons (1973), by Doris Wishman

It's time.

Crystal is a woman with enormous boobs. Picture the biggest boobs you've ever seen on a person, and then approximately double them in size, and you're looking at the kind of boobs Crystal has. She looks to be in some degree of pain most times of the day, which is totally understandable if you've ever had big boobs or worn big boob prosthetics before. Yet she has problems even bigger than her boobs. Her boyfriend, Larry, is a mobster, and he's decided to go out on one last big score before settling down with her--he steals a notebook vital to his boss, in order to blackmail him for 100 grand. But he's not quick enough and gets gunned down. Fortunately, Crystal overhears that one of the killers is a one-eyed man named Captain Hook, who is going to stay in a hotel in Vegas. She tracks him there, and her one-woman war against the mob begins.

And she kills her victims suffocating them to death in her boobs.

I've mentioned Doris Wishman here and there on the site before, and at only one other time does she shine brighter than she does here in Deadly Weapons. We'll get to that other movie in this year's Spookyween, but for now let's talk about her. Wishman is one of the most idiosyncratic sexploitation directors of all time. It is somehow entirely her to see an actress like Chesty Morgan (nee Liliana Wilczkowska, who plays Crystal, as you may expect) and immediately think, "Hm, yes, those puppies could be used for murder. But I also have to arouse my audience to make money. Well, c'est la vie--I'll just combine the two." For good measure she brought in Harry Reems, perhaps to trick people into thinking this was a hardcore feature. And then, she set about directing it.

I'm sure there's a better verb to fit Wishman's style of film creation than "directing." Wishman's true power the ability to hollow out other human beings and make them instruments of her id. Somehow, she managed to translate her batshit ideas into modes that were comprehensible, but no less batshit. It's almost like everything is directed wrong. There's brightness, prettiness, but everything is cheap. It's par for the course, archetypically so, as far as mid-century sexploitation goes: horrible, cheesy voiceovers, abrupt interruptions from familiar stock music cues, bored-looking actors, comic-relief "boing" sounds in the presence of tits, and missed-by-a-mile fake violence. Doris takes these already-unconventional cinematic occurrences, and then does them as aliens would do them.

Consider one of the recurring oddities of the movie: when Chesty/Crystal unveils her mammoth mammaries to go in for the kill, the music will cut to instead play a stock horror lightning strike, as if Chesty's tits are the new Universal monsters. They may as well be. Isn't there a scene in Gulliver's Travels where Gulliver accidentally sneaks a peek at some Brobdingnagian junk, and it's so humbling he becomes impotent? Well, even the toughest among us will break down in horror before the monolithic (or duolithic) sight of Chesty's chesticles. I mean this all with the fondest respect. When Crystal isn't looking contentedly bored, she really does look like her bra strap is cutting into her back.

Then, there is the repetitive dialogue. Crystal's tipoff that a man named Captain Hook killed her beau wouldn't be possible unless Harry Reems was there to say, "You're a pretty good shot for a man with one eye, Captain Hook" three separate times. (This is also contingent on the fact that Captain Hook's real name turns out to be Captain Hook, but whatever.) When Crystal is hunting Captain Hook, she calls the service desk of the hotel to see if he's checked in yet. When they say he isn't, she waits five seconds, tells herself, "Maybe they just didn't check carefully," and calls again...with the same result. It's a completely pointless sequence that doesn't even waste enough time to be considered padding. I don't know what this was supposed to accomplish. It doesn't make Crystal seem like a more insistent investigator, it makes her seem ineffectual and impatient.

And I'll never get over how bad the violence looks in a lot of these movies. When the mob boss goes to "crush" Harry Reems' hand with his shoe, he's not even touching him! Add that to the fact that Reems is a porn actor, so his whimpers of pain sound weirdly sexual. That's actually a pretty common feature of these sexploitation flicks, I should point out: pain and pleasure are usually the same as far as vocals are concerned. Especially if it's got the Doris Wishman stamp of approval on it.

Deadly Weapons is not for everyone, and upon rewatching it for this review, it's slower than I remember. However, if you have patience, and the capacity to absorb lengthy shots of titanic boobs, then you will be well-rewarded in strangeness. And you know what? This movie had a fucking spiritual successor. Double Agent 73 has Chesty Morgan running around with a camera hidden in her boobs, taking pictures in the name of heroic espionage. Yepppp...

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The Amazing Mr. X (1948), by Bernard Vorhaus

For a while, I began to notice a pattern in movies that featured the word "Amazing" in their title. Namely, these movies would be about as far from Amazing as one could get. The Amazing Transparent Man, for instance, is one of the most forgettable cash-ins of The Invisible Man out there. The Amazing Colossal Man is Bert I. Gordon's best movie, but it's still not Amazing. And I'll never forget the time, in the process of tracking down obscure James Bond parodies, that I found an Italian film called The Amazing Dr. G, aka Goldginger (yes, you read that right), which ended with a blackface gag. Decidedly not Amazing. And yet, there are doubtlessly hundreds of films that had chosen that adjective for themselves, and as such I just happen to have really bad luck. Until today. The Amazing Mr. X is legitimately amazing, a compact and punchy little film noir that once more scratches my Nightmare Alley itch for phony psychics and carnival magic.

Christine is a wealthy woman who misses her two-years-dead husband Paul. She sometimes envisions his voice coming out of the sea when she walks the beaches near her house. Her younger sister, Janet, encourages her to marry Martin, the awkward nerd whom she's been dating recently. While headed out on a date with Martin, Christine is caught up in her Paul hallucinations and runs into a mysterious man named Alexis. Alexis reveals himself to be a psychic, and he tells Chris things about herself and Paul which he would have no way of knowing. Captivated, Christine enjoys her date with Paul, but has a nightmare about the pressures of a new marriage. She vows to see Alexis again, and when she does, she's hooked. Janet and Martin, of course, suspect that Alexis is a swindler, but when Janet goes to investigate, he sweeps her off her feet as well. And in a rather more literal sense, too, as Janet falls in love with the medium. Naturally, Alexis is a trickster, as we the audience see in great detail--he's a very good one, though, lacking the weaknesses that stopped that the Great Stanton from making it to the big time. He even manages to make a good show out of making Paul's apparition appear, while seemingly tied up in another room.

There's just one hitch. Paul is still alive. And he wants Chris's fortune.

So how's that? I'm really starting to find I love film noir. So akin to psychological horror--and such a variable style. If you keep shoveling me spooky movies about wicked showpeople that love will only deepen. Of course, like B-Westerns, or '30s plane thrillers, or '50s sailing movies, one must pan through much shit to get the gold. In turn, there is salvation, as hipsters looove them some noir, and as such, there's a lot of light shined into where some of the gems may lie. I can't watch too many of these things, because they look to all end mighty unhappily, but I think I finally understand that which I was looking for when I first saw Daughter of Horror.

Film noir is all about the writing--well, the actors need to carry it, too, but there are types I'm starting to see which could be played well by someone who's just seen enough of the right movies. But the writing in these films is tremendous. Set the right combination of believable circumstances, and make them exploitative. Lock the characters in something that'll make 'em sweat. I know those things can be said about any sort of narrative, but noir is written in a way that makes you feel the keys of the keyboard. It's sort of meta, in a way--because it uses quick-cut conventions and language, with its believable circumstances, it can tell a lot of story in a hurry with using speech. That's why you need a "tight" script, and "tight" directing. It uses horror logic--visceral sign language--to help pile on the exploitation elements to its greasy, gritty characters. Flawed protagonists are scattered out here lie autumn leaves, never fully good, rarely fully bad. Am I getting it yet? Am I cool?

But seriously, there are a lot of tips here and there that make this a really good script, and it's so relieving to see Turhan Bey come up after being kicked around in the Mummy movies. He's amazingly suave here and I want to see him in other things. He portrays Alexis beautifully as a convincing criminal genius, but also as a romantic who is willing to recognize true evil in the world, who probably also regrets his past time in prison. He leaks a little bit of cynicism here and there, as in one of the film's best moments, where Janet is cuddled up to him. Once Janet gets on the psychic train she goes full Fluffy Bunny Pagan. "Do you think I would make a good Celestial Companion, Alexis? Would you travel with me and love me for all eternity?" Alexis blinks and replies, "Oh...even longer, my dear." And the efficiency of that script carries into the revelation of how Alexis pulls his stunts--all of it seems plausible for a man of means given the technological limitations of the era. It doesn't have to delve into sci-fi (which would require some explanation) to show us what all this gadgetry is, and therefore the film's momentum is maintained. Comedy props to the moment when Alexis shows how he Batmans up behind people, all mysterious-like...he just walks very quickly, and very quietly.

From the opening fakeout scare to the twisty ending, The Amazing Mr. X is a vast smorgasbord of rich, full characters, knockout performances, genuine creeps, and marvelous dialogue. It's nice when the adjectives of a title aren't used meaninglessly, eh?

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Infrasexum (1969), by Carlos Tobalina

Carlos Tobalina was a sage. He was The Man. He was the big kahuna, the primus unus, the Alpha and the Omega. I didn't think that I could ever get enough of Flesh and Bullets, and then, when all hope was lost, I found that for once I lived in a kind world. Fifteen years or so before Flesh and Bullets, the Neil Breen of the 20th Century turned out Infrasexum, his first movie, an ostensible look into the horrors of male impotence. And yet the resultant film was more, much more. You are not ready.

Peter Allison is a man with a unique problem despite his unique situation in life. He's a very successful businessman, and he has a stunningly attractive wife, and yet for some reason, he can't, uh, prime the old motor as it were. He can't loose his juice--can't sharpen his pencil. He has trouble making his dick hard is what I'm saying. So he decides to cut himself off from his business and family and go on a road trip in search of self-discovery. He ends making a small fortune in Vegas, then returns to Los Angeles, where he meets Carlos (played by Carlos Tobalina), who "turns [him] on to marijuana, LSD, and the hippie world." But still Peter can't find relief from his limpness, even as Carlos introduces him to the world of lesbian threeways. He becomes a painter, but his world is briefly shredded when two crooks learn of his wealth and kidnap one of his hippie girlfriends to try to rob him. When he refuses to comply, one of them tries to rape the girl, and when she resists, he stabs her and starts removing her intestines. Peter is able to escape the two and kills them in self-defense. Then, he goes to a park where he watches ducks have sex. After yet another failed attempt to bang a girl, Peter attempts to bang Carlos Tobalina. This doesn't work either--he's not into men, though not for a want of trying. At the end of it all, as in Psyched by the 4D Witch and other sexploitation movies, a psychiatrist shows up and magics it all better, suggesting that Peter have sex with someone who resembles the best sex partner he ever had. He also suggests he rejects the negative standards placed on him by his father, which we didn't know he had until this point. When this happens, Peter is finally free. The end.

It took a suitably demented eye to frame and photograph Infrasexum. This relatively straightforward tale zigs and zags in ways I wasn't prepared for. When it suddenly turns into a hostage/murder movie, for example, completely H.G. Lewis-esque gore, I am never ready. And, like Ogroff, this movie is always full of stuff which I never noticed on previous viewings. For example, it wasn't until the viewing which spawned this review that I figured out that Carlos was played by the director. That makes the stunningly tender scene where male-on-male sex almost happens even better than it was before. I also didn't notice that Peter visits the bisexual couple at Apartment 420; that the hippie fest he and Carlos go to features a stoned girl with a third eye painted on her forehead; or that said hippie festival also features a guy carrying around an adorable baby fox. These are all miraculous sights to see, glimpses back into another time.

This whole movie, in a sense, is a meditation on the hippie movement. In all likelihood, Carlos was just trying to make money off the hippies, just as many exploitation films at the time were, but that doesn't mean this film lacks time-capsule value. I'm pretty cynical about the hippies these days but little 18-year-old Mudman would have loved this. I can still feel a bit of the groove--while I no longer consider that white guys with embarrassing hair-clips bobbing their heads drunkenly with absolutely no understanding of where they are to be a symbol of freedom, it is still fascinating to watch people who have a seeming dearth of judgment for their peers acting like children and doing nothing productive in particular. In a sense I wish we still had that lack of judgment; but I also don't think that doing cartwheels through parks for hours is a particularly great use of time and energy when you're 25 years old, either. What I appreciate is that, for the most part, people are very nice in this film, and the movie tries to make a point that we--as in humanity--are not as bad as we seem. Peter is free with his money, Carlos is free with his drugs, the girls are free with their sex. And most of the judgment Peter faces for his impotence comes from himself, not from his partners. It would have been too easy to make yet another impotence-themed sexploitation movie where the person spends most of the movie being screamed at, but generally, Peter gets off pretty easy, his pain being more realistically internal than would be shown in a lot of similar films.

And I do really appreciate how the hippie free-spiritisms appear in the style of the film. Bloated with voiceovers, the movie really does play out like Peter's traveling journal, which makes it one of them road trip flicks I love so much. The light classical music sampled throughout the film gives it an artsy sentimental feel that makes me get all fuzzy inside. This really does help build the story of a man who is struggling to find freedom from a prison he's built for himself. It makes it seem tenderly psychological. I love it.

Of course, there is also the lovely trash.

Bad edits, cuts in the soundtrack, and incomprehensible dialogue all wrack the movie, pushing it straight into the Technicolor world of one of Doris Wishman's '70s movies (which I'll get to soon enough!). Peter dresses like a gay bullfighter for a startling percentage of the runtime. And, as Jess Franco will tell you, nothing says classy like a slow zoom towards the vagina of a corpse. Rest assured, we are absolutely still dealing with the director of Flesh and Bullets here. But this is him at his rawest. Gone is the drama of murdering another man's wife; instead, we are gazing into the id of a director/actor on his own personal trip into hedonism. It's almost like a documentary. Yet, still confined to the magically unrealistic world of fiction.

In case you can't tell, I really, really like this movie. Boobs and butts galore, plus a little blood, and a strange journey into a strange mind. Don't miss it.

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Nightmare Alley (1947), by Edmund Goulding

This is yet another movie which is probably too good and too well-received for me to be talking about here, but which I knew immediately I had to review after watching. Nightmare Alley has such a wonderful tone to it, by which I mean it has an utterly ghastly tone to it, making it yet another movie adding to the trend of this site being largely a journal of my night-terrors. I've gotten PTSD from movies before, but some films will leave stains on my psyche in a way that keeps me warm from the cold, fed in the face of hunger. Stop by the box office to get your ticket of admission into Nightmare Alley's carnival of souls.

Stanton "Stan" Carlisle is a barker at a low-rent carnival, which offers many of the usual acts, including a geek and a medium. Stan is fascinated by the geek, at first buying the mythos that they are the Missing Link, but he slowly learns that they are actually alcoholics who are forced to do what they do--i.e. bite the heads off of chickens--by the managers controlling their booze access. Stan strikes up a friendship--and more--with Mademoiselle Zeena, the medium. Years ago, Zeena and her ex-lover Pete were a top-tier magic act in vaudeville, drawing in crowds of thousands. However, due to circumstances Zeena blames herself for, Pete became an alcoholic, and now is reduced to her assistant in her psychic act. Stan at once desires to obtain the secret code Zeena and Pete used in their act, but it's not until he accidentally poisons Pete with wood alcohol that he gets a chance. Stan proves to be a fine mentalist, even waylaying a sheriff who wants to shut down the show for exploiting the geek. This act in particular proves to be so impressive he finally breaks the sexual tension with his long-time crush Molly the Electric Girl--an act witnessed by her boyfriend, Bruno the strongman. When Bruno reveals this to Zeena, the carnival immediately turns on the pair, forcing them into a shotgun marriage just at the dawn of their romance.

Thus begins the next stage of Stan's life. He and Molly have the code, so they swiftly become wealthy top-billers as Zeena and Pete once were. But the ambition of "the Great Stanton," as Stan now calls himself, doesn't stop there. At one of his shows he runs into a psychiatrist named Lilith Ritter, who has a particularly aristocratic patient by the totally-not-miserly name of Mr. Grindle. Stan is interested by the fact that she records all of her therapy sessions on vinyl, and believes he could use those records to learn everything about his clients. Then, he could break into the spiritualism business, where he can start breaking bread with the top 1%. But there's another dimension to this as well--Stan legitimately starts believing he's doing God's work. He's able to convince Molly to help Mr. Grindle make the final crossing into religion by appearing as the ghost of his dead lady-love, but she has a pang of conscience and blows the gig. Stan still has some of his money, though, and tries to skip town with Molly. Except, Lilith has cheated him--she gives him a paltry $150, takes the rest for herself, and makes it clear to Stan that if he tries to stop her or implicate her in the crime, she has a vinyl record explaining he once had something to do with the death of a certain alcoholic former mentalist. Stan is left wandering around, reduced to drinking, until at last he finds a chance to fit back in with carny life. "Of course, it's only temporary," says the man hiring him. "Till we can get a real geek..."

This has been a good year for carnival movies, I feel. This is the same year I revisited The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?, and when I first witnessed the relentless brutality of The Unknown. I'm starting to sense a thing here--it's like creators enjoy telling stories about the dark secrets of sources of mirth and wonder or something. This continues today, with the tradition of celebrity gossip mags and Disneyworld creepypastas--if something makes us happy, there must be something wrong with it. And this is not oversaturated at all, no sir, nor is it simply done occasionally just for the sake of pure cynicism. But sarcasm aside, there is something thrilling about looking into a point of entertainment and seeing it goes colossally wrong. And when that sort of logic is applied to something as seedy as a carnival, it produces results like Nightmare Alley. The movie and the book it was based on don't shy away from the problems of carny life, like addiction and forced labor. It doesn't quite step into the plight of the freaks, but the plight of the geek is highlighted as I've never seen it before. As far as I know, this is historically accurate; shows would take in bums and ply them with booze to do crap shows, in some sense relying on the embarrassment of geekdom to ensure that they never escaped their addiction. It's hard to avoid a cynical, nihilistic message when faced with the reality of that.

So, the primary theme of Nightmare Alley is, "Don't tamper in God's domain." This is hammered in a little roughly but it certainly takes. The movie allows its two-hour runtime to really dig into Stan's journey from barker to showman to wannabe messiah, to chicken-biting lunatic, so we walk through his journey to touch the hand of God with him in great detail. This is film noir, in case I didn't say so, and as such it's really, really good at telling its story through implication and conversation. We learn briefly that Stan grew up an orphan, where he took in "the scripture they fed us Sunday, after beating us black and blue all week." He tried to escape the orphanage but they sent him to reform school, where he faked spirituality to get parole. This is a great way of explaining Stan's wanderings into Christianity as well as his sociopathic tendencies. Interesting that this film, while attempting to be sincere about religion, also portrays it cynically, just as it does the carnival. Perhaps it's that the movie believes that God is good, but religion can be abused by "ministers" like Stan. It's tough to tell, what with the conformist '50s on the way. If this movie was made six years later, it may not have been so quick to condemn Stan's corporal punishment at the hands of the nuns at the orphanage.

Returning, then, to the telling of character by implication: this movie's structure roughly follows Stan's life as a traditional tragedy, detailing how he obtains glory and loses it. But the simple fact of it is that Stan had prosperity before his journey began. He specifies to Zeena at the film's beginning that he quite enjoys being a barker, finding it the first job he ever truly enjoyed. It wasn't great, but it was a steady paycheck and a roof, and maybe he could have worked his way up to a management position at some point (hey, it was the '40s--I'm told the American Dream actually sorta worked then, least as long as you were white, straight, cis, abled, and a man). And yet, whether it was by his upbringing or something else, he couldn't get enough. See, I can say this with honesty! This is a tampered-in-God's-domain story that actually works!

Of course, there's a lot going for it stylistically--I can't describe it all fully but there are tons of neat noir tricks, and if you are a diehard noir junkie, yes, there are plenty of shadows and cig-smoke clouds to go around. One thing I really liked is how, as Stan runs into his obstacles one by one, we begin to hear a faint sound behind the music. When this sound appears near the end of the movie, we can tell it's the screams of the geek that Stan heard at the beginning--the screams which will soon become his own. And yet, there is an ending added to the movie which is not present in the novel, which makes things happier...while also making the parallel structures between Pete and Stan, and Zeena and Molly, all the more terrifyingly adamant. This movie has one of the best uses of this cruel irony that I love seeing in films so much. And while this isn't a stylistic comment, I do have to say something how much this film benefits from casting Coleen Gray as Molly. Gray is one of the most attractive actresses I've seen in a while, and I don't know why. She hasn't been in too much else that I recognize, but my crush on her is rather an irony in itself, due to the fact that the other big I do recognize her for is the titular character of The Leech Woman! So I have found myself attracted to a woman whose other big role for me is "vampiric hag." C'est la vie...

There are some things I could criticize, such as the fact that Stan and Zeena's code is perhaps a bit too complicated for me to believe, and that Lilith's turn from horror at Stan's idea of using her records to swindle her patients to being totally onboard with the idea is never explained. But almost every other frame of the movie is pure gold, and I challenge you to lose yourself in the tangled knots of this one. It's a real treat.

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The Fast Set (1957), by Pierre Foucaud

The war between progress and tradition is the conflict of our age--if we survive our current period of history, people will look back at today as the center of an era defined by a profound and violent difference between left- and right-wing politics. I suspect that by the time this is all over--if it ever ends--we will be left with a world less fundamentally grounded on the old 18th Century idea of liberalism vs. conservatism than what we're used to. At the very least, the definitions of those institutions will be dramatically shifted, or at least, shifted to different sets of issues. And, while this could be construed as wishful thinking, I suspect that conservatism, at least in the United States, is ultimately on its last legs; the recent indications of intensifying conservatism in the form of the increasing activity of white supremacist movements and the like are symbols of conservative inability to reconcile the general right-wing identity with the way the country is going, even in this post-Obama world of ours, which will lead to a burnout followed by a generally progressive (i.e. not necessarily leftist) attitude amongst the populace-at-large. That's my interpretation, at least.

But let's not talk about the present state of ideological conflict (seriously; keep it out of the comments). Today we're talking about the 1950s. Pierre Foucaud's The Fast Set is a lot of things, including a romance and a striptease documentary; but it's also about the difference between the old ways and the new, the libertine and the reserved. Only the French could produce a sexploitation movie that so convincingly touches on real issues.

Sophie is the daughter of a wealthy Lyons family, who disapprove of her boyfriend Jack and her desire to follow him and her dreams of being an artist to Paris. Thanks to her cool mom, Sophie is able to join Jack in Paris, but the fast life she discovers is nothing she's prepared for. Sure, Sophie is used to rebellion back in Lyons, but she wasn't prepared for the world of stripteases, nude modeling, and prototypical free love. She has to dodge the attentions of her jealous rival Rita, and in her quest to win Jack over entirely, she becomes a bohemian. Eventually, the stage calls to her. Out in the parlor, the audience awaits their striptease...

First of all, it needs to be said that this movie is, for nearly all modern audiences, going to seem extremely mild. I don't know how much of that is deliberate, but let's just say those of us who have seen Human Centipede 2 are going to find Sophie's dad's offense at her leaving dinner without being properly excused a little silly. In the beginning, I do believe that Sophie's actions are meant to be seen as rebellious (they also include the abominable crime of eating sweets instead of dinner), but they are not quite on par with taking off your clothes all sexy-like for a crowd of strangers. She is meant to start out naive so she can make her lovely quest towards true libertinism. I do always enjoy stories like this, of young people finding their inner freedoms, even as I get older and more cynical. Movies like this, as milquetoasty as they can be, help me feel less crusty around the edges.

The conservatism, on the other hand, does feel real. Even today we have to contend with old ladies who think that wearing shorts is slutty; and I think all of us have heard at least one middle-aged dude who is refuted on a point for just this once, whose immediate response is to bluster, "I GUESS I'M JUST ALWAYS WRONG THEN." The times, they are a-not changing. I would have laughed if Sophie's dad had a t-shirt that said, "J'ai accheté cet fusil à pompe parce qu'un jour un garçon va sortir avec ma fille"--and not because those shirts are ever anything but fucking sexist and dumb. At least this movie is...generally not racist? Some of the striptease acts are likely to offend people (there's one involving a hashish-smoking sheikh called "Impressions of the Orient"), but it's still usually pretty mild.

The stripteases themselves are presented, as I alluded before, in a pseudo-documentary fashion. This movie illustrates superbly the transition between old-world burlesque and the exotic dancing of today. Initially, we see that these acts are tamer than what we're accustomed, with one of them never even showing the nipples of the woman in question. Then, several of the acts we see actually follow vague storylines. By the time that we see our strippers are a pair of male Laurel & Hardy impressionists, whose deliberately unerotic striptease is received humorously by the audience, we know that we're looking at an animal which is today extinct in the wild. If you put two ugly guys out on stage at a strip club and had them start taking their clothes off, they'd be lynched. Now, I don't say that to disparage the modern exotic dancing industry--just perhaps their audience. It's just interesting to see such an "artsy" take on what we unjustly view today as a lowdown sort of thing, and more interesting to think about how our society may have gotten that way. Have we become more liberal with our sexuality, in our treatment of women, or less? Has the art gone away on its own, or did we push it out? And what can we do for the stripping and exotic dancing which does still hold the artistic spirit?

The movie does get some details of realism wrong. For example, no one is ever turned on during a nude modeling. Not the models, not the artists. I haven't even participated in a nude modeling art session (you can tell because I don't know what they're properly called), and I know that they're uncomfortable as fuck. Not because of the nudity, but because art is pain, and also, studios are cold. When one of the artists remarked on the attractiveness of his nude model I was completely taken out of the movie. ZERO STARS.

To return to the themes in a serious sense for a moment: this movie is about the Big City turning a privileged girl into a rebel, but it's also about a country girl taming a city man. Tradition gets a little victory at the end, which may have been a scene tacked on for the sake of censors and pearl-clutchers. It's interesting to see the movie try to be fair, in a way which is pretty harmless at that. The whole movie is pretty harmless, again due to the oft-stated mildness.

On the trash side, we get such wonders as the tiniest car ever (seriously, EVER) and an extremely casual delivery of the line, "She could kill herself!" There's also an awesome jazz soundtrack which will probably get stuck in your head. If you like seeing interesting '50s politics, and you also like seeing people take their clothes off comedically, you need to speed up--so you can catch up with The Fast Set.

...also this movie probably features the last-ever use of the word "Set" in that context, at least until The Rebel Set came along in 1959. And speaking of The Rebel Set, we'll get into mid-century MST3K fodder again in just a little bit.

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Catwoman (2004), by Pitof

Still better than Suicide Squad.

Or, if I can get a do-over: my new favorite episode of the Adam West Batman.

This movie and I have something of a history--I remember when it first came out and when I first began hearing bad reviews about it. In my first-ever issue of Nintendo Power, there was a preview for the GameCube shovelware tie-in that was about four or five pages, all predicated on the idea of the reading audience being heterosexual teen boys. Naturally they played up the sex angle of the movie as much as they could in a magazine officially aimed at kids. And when the game actually game out, they gave it 9/10. It was a mainstream gaming magazine, of course it got 9/10. In the months that passed I saw the folly of their hubris as the movie the video game was based on was torn to shreds by audiences and critics alike--I saw that Nintendo Power writers were as shameless as I am presently, liking everything they consumed without rhyme or reason. I understood a new dimension in the world of media and criticism. That brings us to today.

Catwoman is a colossal mess, but if you, like me, have had thirteen years of preparation for the moment of watching it, you will probably have a good time. It is a bad movie--a very horrible movie, as it happens. It would have been pretty devastating to have realized you paid full ticket price for a theatrical showing of this back in 2004. But in the course of writing the review for this movie I wrote down more bullet points than I ever have before for a single movie, and that's got to stand for something. The trashy moments just kept happening, and then they would cement themselves into trashy themes and trashy running gags, and soon the whole bloody architecture of the movie was nothing but rotting garbage. I haven't had so much fun with a trainwreck of this magnitude since The Room, which this movie weirdly resembles, with its odd fixations on extremely nondescript urban settings and impossibly unlikely conversations.

Patience Phillips is an extremely anxious and reserved artist who believes that she has sold out by taking a job as a graphic designer at Hedare Beauty, a major beauty company which is about to release its age-reversal product Beauline. Despite the fact that her boss, George Hedare, is obviously evil, it takes stumbling onto a covert meeting after hours for Patience to learn of Beauline's dark secret. Prolonged use of the cream creates horrible facial disfigurements which only continued use of the cream will erase--essentially, Hedare intends to make addicts out of his customers. When Patience is discovered she is flushed out of the building's sewage tunnels, which drowns her. However, she is surrounded by a horde of cats, including an Egyptian Mau which she spotted earlier and tried to rescue from climbing up on a precipice. The cats seemingly restore her to life, and when she returns she has the abilities of a cat, including tremendous agility, enhanced senses, and the power to always land on her feet. She doesn't remember what she found when she was killed nor the circumstances of her resurrection, but she soon meets Ophelia Powers, a woman who helps her understand that she is now the Catwoman, inheritor of the powers of the goddess Bastet, and she must avenge all evil. Patience intends to start by avenging her own death.

Now, I mentioned earlier that Patience tried to rescue that Egyptian Mau ("Midnight") from climbing up onto a ledge on the outside of her apartment building. Well, when she was out there risking her neck she attracted a crowd who thought she was trying to kill herself, including a cop with the rather unlikely name of Tom Lone--Lone and Patience have since become an item, though Lone is also after Catwoman, since Catwoman's first start in her quest to avenging her death involved robbing a jewelry store. This is because this has to seemingly relate back to the DC Comics stories that this whole affair is ostensibly adapted from. Once Patience is fully in touch with her role as Catwoman, and remembers the deadly secret of Beauline, she goes on the hunt to find those responsible and shut down their operation. But it may not be George Hedare that Catwoman has to worry about--after all, his wife Laurel has been stalking in the shadows of the film, slipping deeper into the darkness as she rages against her bastard of a husband and fears her own encroaching age.

So as I work my way down my list of bullet points, I see that a lot of the heat of this hot garbage comes from Patience's friend Sally, who has a lot of screentime for some reason. Sally is in this movie, seemingly, to make the movie fail the Bechdel Test so hard it made me remember the Bechdel Test was a thing. EVERY conservation she has with Patience is about men, and what women can do with male bodies. Sally is--to be somewhat impolite--a nymphomaniac. Our introduction to her is her explaining that she used her tits to get an early-release sample of Beauline from the testing plant. Every scene she's in pushes her more and more over the top, and she says some truly offensive shit, including, "You're never allowed to beat the guy at sports," and, I kid you not, "Give him some brown sugar." Yeah, if you didn't know, Patience is played by Halle Berry. The writers simply could not allow a black actress to have the line "Give him some sugar" afforded to her without making it an issue of race. I'll get into a lot of this later, because I have to briefly mention Patience's gay coworker, her only other friend, who is actually pretty lovely, even though he apparently gave her a leather catsuit for her birthday (?).

Aside from sexism and trace amounts of racism, or admittedly-dated (but not atrocious) CGI fight scenes, the movie's main focus is on the comic relief of Halle Berry as a cat. To specify, her first meeting with Ophelia Powers ends with her sniffing catnip and getting high off of it. That's it. She freaks out about the 'nip, and--Scene. Observe ye also the digressions of Halle Berry hissing at dogs, running away from rain, and eating eight cans of tuna in one sitting. It all culminates in a scene where Catwoman goes into a club (whose staff have no qualms about her face-concealing mask, as if the filmmakers think that modern dance clubs are some sort of old-timey aristocratic Grand Ball) and orders "a White Russian, but hold the ice, vodka, and kahlua." So she gets a big glass of cream, geddit? It's like the Bat Credit Card all over again, but on an endless, film-long conga line.

This movie is canon to the Burtonverse, by the way. One of the previous Catwomen shown is Michelle Pfeiffer from Batman Returns. If only Eartha Kitt or Julie Newmar had been in that pile of photographs as well, just to fuck with people's heads.

Other bullet-points, too brief to be worth their own paragraphs:

• There's a board meeting at the start of the movie that is scripted really awkwardly. As George Hedare is giving a big speech about Beauline, Laurel interrupts to start talking about herself. I know that sounds like it's meant to be awkward, but it doesn't really come across that way.
• Also, if you can't guess that George is evil the second he opens his mouth, you may not be as good at movies as you think you are.
• Tom has to save Patience when she starts falling off the building, but because of how the continuity is handled, it looks like he runs all the way up from the ground floor to the inside of her apartment in the span of about two seconds. Maybe his real name is Barry Allen.
• You know you're a good screenwriter when you end up with moments like, "Thanks for saving me from falling off a building...OH SHIT, I'M LATE TO WORK. I'll talk to you later, byeee!"
• Don't be alarmed by the awful CGI cats. Be alarmed by the awful CGI seagulls.
• One of Patience's cat-related freakouts is that she is more confident, or open about her feelings, or...moody, or something. So she ends up calling George an idiot and gets herself fired for no reason. I don't know why everyone else didn't end up getting fired, though, because they laugh and cheer at her standing up to him in a manner which he surely has to notice. I guess it's okay to fire just one person for an outburst when your entire staff openly hates you just as bad as that one person does, just as long as she makes her outburst before everyone else gets their chance.
• The basketball scene. You've probably seen it or heard of it. Basically two adults get way, way too sexual in front of a bunch of children, in a little game of "one-on-one." This movie's sexuality is really weird.
• Case in point Patience gets glazed-over fuck-me eyes when she first takes the Catwoman costume out of the box.
• At one point, Patience protests a party being thrown in the building across from hers, which apparently is a regular occurrence as it bothers her a few times throughout the movie. The best insult the partyers can throw at her turns out to be, "Get a life, loser!" Gotta keep that PG-13!
• There is a scene in this film where a handwriting analyst determines "from the spaces between the R's" that the writer (Catwoman) is "lonely, insecure...a people-pleaser." What.

I don't want to spoil too much else. Just know that the movie, being written exclusively by men, is pretty sexist. Bechdel failings aside, the movie makes it obvious that this is meant to be a superhero film fer girlz. The central plot is about beauty cream, for God's sake! Relationships, cats, jewelry, gossip, and Sisterhood™--that's what the ladies like, don't they? Isn't this just like Sex and the City, but with fight scenes and awesome whips?

For its unintentional humor, the movie is not unwatchable, as people have labeled it over the years. It's so weird to look at this and think it was supposed to have something to do with Batman. Despite its failings, the cast does give it their all--I always love seeing Halle Berry in things--and if the movie was made by, y'know, women, it might have something interesting to it. Plus the soundtrack is pretty good in its own way. Catwoman is exceedingly problematic, but it is the 21st Century's best answer yet to The Pumaman. It deserves a fairer turn than it's gotten, but not necessarily for good reasons.

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Death Brings Roses (1975?), by Jack Weis

Because of Crypt of Dark Secrets and Mardi Gras Massacre, there's been a tendency to characterize Jack Weis as a trash-horror director, but he also made some poignant dramas as well. Quadroon, which appears to be his earliest film, is an involving and gut-wrenching examination of racial castes in 19th Century Louisiana, with little focus on exploitative or horrific elements at all. It's strange to watch Mardi Gras Massacre, Weis' attempt to clone Blood Feast, and then pop in something like Quadroon or Death Brings Roses, which seem at the very worst to be TV movies on a B-tier channel. They have an artistic flair to them which make Weis a director with many dimensions and capabilities. That he made comparatively few films will always be one of the minor injustices of movie history.

A Harrison Ford lookalike named Chuck Watts (suspend your Stones jokes here!) is an enforcer working for Max, a theatre agent/mobster. We follow Chuck in his adventures around New Orleans, palling around with bartenders and slapping around hookers. Chuck is cold to his girlfriend Laura, which she thinks is a product of his associations with Max, but Chuck has secret reasons for his behavior: years ago, Chuck and his friend Hal accidentally killed a man in a card game gone wrong in Kentucky. Chuck has cold feet about getting with Laura because there is an active warrant for his arrest. But Max soon solves this problem: he makes Chuck a partner in his organization, and wipes out both his and Hal's record. But shortly thereafter, Max himself is wiped out, and it's up to Chuck to find the murderer...as several organizations are now sniffing at the cracks in Max's outfit.

Like all of Weis' films, Death Brings Roses (apparently also screened or released under the title You Never Gave Me Roses) is a love letter to New Orleans. Like Satan's Touch, it allows its plot to snake in and out of its primary raison d'etre, a study/romantic framing of a particular city. This is a slice-of-life film, pure and simple, and while it is a slice of the lives of Chuck, Max, Laura, and Hal, it is also a slice of the life of New Orleans. This may not be the most interesting thing for some people, even when Chuck and Hal celebrate their age-old entertainment of blowing up cars at a junkyard. It seems to be a directionless film at times, but it's about the journey, not the destination. There's always something about it which keeps your eyeballs on the screen.

It's not a perfect film by any means. The acting definitely slips in places, though the main characters are always portrayed convincingly. There's a brief but awesome appearance by Maureen "Damballa" Ridley from Crypt of Dark Secrets, and yes, she does get naked again. The guy who played Ted Watkins in Crypt is an FBI agent here and he's as stoned as ever. But thematically, this movie slips too. It's a little hard to decipher what sort of story is exactly being told here. It's probably meant to be Chuck's tragedy, with his bad actions and bad fates being the product of his life of crime. Yet he does some things early on--beating up a bunch of people, for example--that make it hard for us to root for him entirely, even if generally he seems to keep his heart in the right place.

There's a token Weird Scene in the film, and that's when Henny Youngman shows up and starts doing his bit. I've seen wilder and more disturbing celebrity cameos but it's kind of remarkable to watch people laugh and cheer over some bits which really aren't that funny. No offense to the Youngman fans in the audience, but "Take my wife, please," was never as amusing as people thought it was. I suppose I've killed my fanbase now. Forgive me, servitors of Youngman. The sheer delirium of his cameo has left me confused and bamboozled, I know not what I do.

Death Brings Roses is a sprawling, fascinating drama which should get a release outside of the whole two copies that I know to exist. If you have a chance to see it, you're lucky indeed. Enjoy the moment while it lasts!

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Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976), by Jack Weis

This is another one which sometimes seems to have a life of its own. Whenever I watch Crypt of Dark Secrets, I always feel like it's the right time; whenever I try to watch this movie when the day doesn't make time for it, it feels flat and empty. But when it's my time to watch it--when the movie lets me watch it--then suddenly every frame seems to gain its own weird inner light. I feel like this sensation goes well in hand with this movie's occult themes, which somehow always scratch my Magic Itch. There's a certain way that I like seeing magic done in movies, and this movie has got it. however that happens to be. Keep in mind that this movie does not contain a crypt.

There are legends of old Haunted Island out in the bayous near New Orleans--with a name like Haunted Island, that's basically a guarantee, ain't it? It's the supposed home of a woman named Damballa, an "Aztec" girl whose alternate form is a rainbow snake that is the bridge between life and death. Vietnam veteran Ted Watkins lives out in a small house on Haunted Island with an extensive fortune, and when he is visited by two cops who are curious about the legends of Damballa, they accidentally spread word of his money to a trio of crooks named Earl, Max, and Louise. The three are surprisingly eager to murder Ted and take his money, so they drown him and take all they can carry. But Ted isn't dead, at least not the way we know it--a beautiful naked woman appears and restores his spirit, explaining that she is Damballa, and that their souls must fuse together to fulfill their respective destinies. Ted is pretty cool with this idea (Ted's cool with basically everything), but he needs to avenge his death before he can move on. But temptation alone will bring fate to its conclusion: for there's a voodoo witch in the swamp who is willing to give the murderous trio the treasure of Jean LaFitte. They should have figured that there are no promises when voodoo dolls are involved.

Returning to the beginning of this review for a bit--almost more than any other movie, save for perhaps The Witches' Mountain, is this film like a dream. Everyone in it acts as if they aren't real, or like they're stoned. Every time I show this movie to someone (because sometimes this film wants me to bring it an audience), they say of Ted, "Is he high?" When I watch this alone, my question is, "Is everyone high?" People are in a strange headspace in this one. It goes beyond Ted's dull, blank stare, and his denim short-shorts. It's not just bad acting. But it's not anything deliberate, either. It's almost like they just aren't aware of what they're doing, like it doesn't matter. I wish I could put my finger on it but I can't.

Because this film takes it easy, generally speaking, it's a relaxing watch. And it manages to have a plot without the conflict being overly stressful. I'm someone who can get stressed out by movies. Even movies that I like can raise my cortisol levels if they contain too much conflict. On my thin-skinned days, this movie can pass over me with no trouble. Like, Ted dies, but he's revived immediately after--he needs to take revenge, but the voodoo cult does it for him, because they want him to succeed--and in the end he and Damballa are united to love each forever in the spirit world. Sure, there's the small detail that they hardly know each other, but there's a dreamy romance to Damballa, and not merely because she's hot. I watched this movie on the same day I did my Divine Emanuelle review and Maureen Ridley, who plays Damballa, is an eerie doppelganger for Laura Gemser. She reappears in Jack Weis' Death Brings Roses, one of the few known films that Weis directed. He also made Quadroon, which I watched for the first time before rewatching this. I don't know if I'll ever review it, but let me say for now that it's as essential as this one...

And Crypt of Dark Secrets is essential. It has a scene where a stack of dollar bills start bleeding ketchup. I was worried that the shortness of this review would detract from my implicit recommendation, but then I remembered that that was one of the details I wanted to mention. There are more, but Dark Secrets are best learned firsthand. Find the time for this film to find you.

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The Telephone Book (1971), by Nelson Lyon

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

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

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

The movie suddenly snaps to color.

And I will say no more.

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

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

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

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