Cruel Ghost Legend (1968), by Kasuo Haze

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

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!

If you liked this reviews and would like to see more like it, consider obtaining my eternal devotion by becoming my Patron on Patreon!

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.

If you like the site and want to see more like it, consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

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.

If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

LGBT Pride Triple-Review Special!

Happy Pride, everybody!

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

Vampyros Lesbos (1971), by Jess Franco:

 

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

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

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

So how does this movie treat homosexuality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), by Toshio Matsumoto

Sometimes, you just gotta dive deep into the artsy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could have gotten this post a week ago! Consider becoming my Patron on Patreon to get early access to posts plus other special goodies!

Skullduggery (1983), by Ota Richter

We open in Canterbury--where else?--in the year 1382. Lord Adam is betrayed by his vizier, the leader of a Satanic cult, who murders the Lord for reneging on his deal to give him his soul. In addition to kill Adam he also curses his bloodline. Flash forward six hundred years to "Trottelville, U.S.A.", where Adam's descendant, also named Adam, is a costume shop employee who plays a Dungeons and Dragons clone which is unfortunately never named. After experiencing some strange incidents, like a red light appearing in the game board castle, and a harlequin puppet falling off the wall for no reason, Adam becomes possessed by an urge to carry out murders that mirror his friends' game session. Slowly, with a wide variety of sometimes-relevant tangents along the way, we seem to accomplish these murders until the rather bizarre ending where he may or may not be killed.

I've been an extremely casual D&D player since high school, and so the "D&Dsploitation" films are old friends of mine. I haven't seen all of them, unfortunately, but both Mazes and Monsters and Skullduggery have been films I've returned to over and over again over the years. I know a lot of people think it's weird that people used to demonize D&D so much, but really, I'm sure we could all make lists of the developments within our lifetimes that have had overly elaborate crusades pushed against them. The first rule of humans is that we hate that which is new, no matter its benefit to us, and no matter how harmless it truly is. And clearly the only path to virtue is found by repressing one's natural tendencies and feelings. If you're not familiar with the controversy that appeared around Dungeons & Dragons, it's basically this: in 1979, a student named James Dallas Egbert III killed himself after at least one failed attempt. It came to light during the police investigation that the child prodigy was a D&D player, and when people realized they didn't know too much about the game they figured there was a connection. This controversy, as far as I know, was tied in with the greater moral panic against Satanism in the U.S. during the '80s and '90s, when we got all those strange cases of kids claiming they saw the workers at their daycare sacrifice zoo animals to the Devil. The Egbert case was the story that Rona Jaffe based Mazes and Monsters off of, and when that got its 1982 TV adaptation with Tom Hanks I assume that Skullduggery's director Ota Richter got himself to thinking that this was a new market of sorts. Little did he know he'd end up creating the best that tiny market would offer!

Beyond possibly ripping off Tom Hanks, Richter had some sort of heart in this film, and I can tell because of how meticulous it is. So much happens in this movie that I doubt I can get it all written down succinctly. Several recurring tangents include a series of scenes where guys with tic-tac-toe boards drawn on their backs have squares marked off by competing players. Also, there's a guy in a dark smoky room who puts together an incredibly simple jigsaw puzzle, which is related to the recurring tarot references the movie makes...I think the puzzle is supposed to be the same as the Lovers card but I'm never sure. As you can surmise from all of that, D&D is not the only game being played here. The idea of games even extends into more casual scenes, like a creepy sequence where a nurse tries to "seduce" an unwilling Adam by asking him if he wants her to play the "game" of being his "mommy" (ugggghhh). And every moment of this is made as weird as possible, to make it as game-like as possible, to remind us that this is a world where magic exists. This is a story about a curse. If you don't play attention to that opening scene literally none of this will make sense, but that's good, because then you'll have to watch it again.

The lapses in logic, while abetting the themes and plot, are also hilarious. When Adam is possessed during that scene with the nurse (which, by the way, you should watch pretending the genders are reversed), and begins chasing her around, she tries to get into a mansion by banging on the door. But this mansion apparently belongs to none other than Liberace, who is playing the piano too loud to hear her. May not be played by the real Liberace, but it's got to be him--not only does he have the sequins, but his piano has a candelabra on it! And when the film isn't showing us the final fate of Chandell, it's showing us a Lady Street Fighter-esque crime-party held by a man known as Doctor Evil.

I think that speaks for itself. There aren't any jokes that I could make with that that haven't been made a billion times before.

If you are even just a casual D&D fan like me, Skullduggery will hit you in ways both good and bad. It's a product of a time when embarrassing paranoia ran rampant, but it's also more loyal and fair to the actual game than something fearmongering like Mazes and Monsters. And in a lot of ways, the movie transcends the D&Dsploitation mold to be a movie about the magic of games in general. It was one of the earlier Really Weird movies I saw, and I think it will resonate with you too.

If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!

Alien Lover (1975), by Lela Swift

I grew up on TV movies, to an extent. Specifically, I was nurtured on the foul stunting brew of the Sci-Fi Original Movies. I don't know if they still do these movies, but for those of you who haven't had a chance to see them: they were extremely cheap two-hour sci-fi action movies that typically ended up better than a lot of direct-to-video stuff of a similar type. The CGI was awful (though still not the worst I've seen) and the plots were flimsy as hell, focusing on getting both the computer-generated creatures and the celebrity or "celebrity" guest star (Lou Diamond Phillips, Bruce Boxleitner) out in front of the camera as soon as possible. No emphasis was put on horror aside from generically borrowing cinematic techniques from straight-to-video horror movies from a decade past. There was a sense of good fun about the whole thing, along with a sincerity in their dedication to producing modern day monster movies, which lasted until they decided their next marketing strategy involved assuming their audience were idiots, leading to such decrepit husks as the Sharknado series. I'd forgotten until recently what power TV movies have due to my disillusionment with Sci-Fi, but as with B-Westerns, it turns out that I was turning up my nose at a gold mine. I keep finding reports of TV movies that transcend the borderline-reactionary conservatism that apparently afflicts the TV movie industry, such as it is, and there was no better introduction to these examples of transcendence than Alien Lover.

Susan is a young woman whose parents have just died. She has spent the last several years in a mental hospital trying to recover from the trauma of this, and as the movie begins her uncle Mike and aunt Marian are preparing to take her into their home. Mike is hesitant as he's worried her mental health will once again slip, but Marian assures him he has nothing to worry about. Indeed, Susan seems very friendly, but as soon as she arrives she begins hearing a voice whispering her name. She becomes worried that she's hallucinating, but she finds a dusty old TV in her cousin Jude's workshop. Before long a figure appears on it, a handsome young man by the name of Marc. Marc explains to Susan that he is an alien who lives in the TV, and he wants to be her friend. At first, Susan believes this is Jude playing a prank on her--and admittedly, Jude is a little shit, which I'll get into later. Eventually Susan begins believing in Marc, and falls in love with him. But she tells her aunt and uncle about her meetings with him, and that's enough for Mike to want her recommitted. Not all is as it seems, though, as Jude warns Susan that he does know Marc: he was the source of the engineering brilliance that Jude to be a college freshman at 15, and the young prodigy believes he may be trying to break out of the TV to invade our world.

Alien Lover aired as an episode of The Wide World of Mystery, an anthology show dedicated to murder mysteries with occasional journeys into sci-fi and fantasy. They did another movie I want to see, The House and the Brain, which apparently features wizardry. Of all the episodes of Wide World, Alien Lover is the one people remember, and indeed as far as I know it's one of the few reasons the show is still on anyone's radar. Alien Lover went through sort of a Candle Cove phase where people remembered it as a big patch of traumatizing weirdness, almost too vague to be properly remembered but still full of nightmarish details. Now, I never saw this thing when it originally aired, so I don't have scars on my youth from it, but I can see how this could definitely scare kids. The idea of a monster living in one's TV--in a movie one is watching on a TV!--is pretty creepy to the adolescent mind. But Marc the alien is just the top layer of this movie's horror. This is a psychological thriller, pure and simple, and it focuses on nothing less than the topic of ableism.

Susan is trapped in a situation which a lot of mentally ill people will know. No one trusts her, because even though they don't know the circumstances of her illness, they automatically assume that she'll snap again, and violently, at that. It is the literal definition of prejudice--pre-judgment--that mentally ill folk face every time they "come out" to someone. That is one risk she faces. But there's also the possibility that Marc isn't real, and we only see him because of what she sees. Marc's reality is seemingly confirmed when Jude tells her that he's seen her too, but she raises the possibility that Jude is just gaslighting her--admittedly, the refusal to actually stick with this mystery is one of the film's weaknesses, as a scene taking place after Susan leaves shows that Jude is being honest.

But this movie is a genuine nightmare as far as its character dynamics. As I've said before and as I'll get to in a minute, Jude is a colossal asshole. However, there is a reason for this. In addition to having medieval notions of mental illness, Marian and Mike have their own unique personalities that make them really despicable. Marian is nice, yes, but she's too nice. She's nice in that White Grandma way, where she ends every observation with, "Don't you agree, so-and-so?", and you should agree, for after all, her belief is that it is friendlier to agree. And this sort of philosophy also informs one of the opinions that Mike posits: "Sometimes being kind is more important than being honest." Mike seems to believe this maxim, but he rarely acts on it, as he is basically never kind and basically always dishonest. Jude's bitterness towards Susan is contextualized in a dinner scene where we see that it is not only his precocious intelligence that's made him an arrogant little carp's cock, but also his rage at having passive-aggressive, lying, hypocritical parents. That detail, along with his eventual fate, redeem him somewhat.

I say "somewhat" because in a lot of ways, Jude treats Susan worse than his parents do. As soon as he shows up he starts calling her crazy, eventually reaching the point where he says, "What, do you think you deserve special treatment because you freaked out?" Um...in a way...SHE DOES, ASSHOLE. Generally, accommodating people who have had nervous breakdowns bad enough to require hospitalization is a good idea because it's kind, and it's kind because it prevents them from having a relapse. Now, that sounds like I'm taking the same side as Mike and Marian, but unlike them, I'm not treating Susan's relapse as anything but a bad thing for her. At no point does any other character consider what she must be emotionally going through. Yes, accommodations shouldn't allow people to abuse their loved ones, nor should mental illness ever be considered an excuse for abuse, but Susan only becomes potentially threatening to others after they threaten her. I mean, her parents fucking died. She's probably in a deep depression as a result of her experience--it's not rational to assume that her grief could have led her to want to hurt other people. And really, to return to Jude's statement, it's not even "special treatment" to treat people the way they ask to be treated, given that that's typically a good guideline for socializing with people who aren't mentally ill as well. Seriously, just be compassionate to people! And in sum, Jude...fuck you!!

Sorry. I...guess I got a little into that.



Alien Lover has a lot of flaws, even besides Jude. There are laughable scripting moments, like people being weirdly calm about the prospect of their houses being bugged with cameras by strangers. The opening of the movie features of the clunkiest exposition I've heard in a while, and the acting is definitely TV acting, and '70s TV acting at that. And I went in expecting something much more gruesome than I ended up getting, based on how disturbing people made this sound. But all the same, Alien Lover provoked some sort of reaction in me, evidently enough. That makes it a recommendation in my book. Hopefully sometime soon we'll get to return to the kingdom of television cinema to see what other awesome shit was made in the confining framework of the TV industry.

If you like the site and want to see more reviews like this, please consider becoming my Patron on Patreon!