West of Zanzibar (1928), by Tod Browning

...huh. It's not every week I get to start out with sepia.

But this isn't a usual week, is it? Oh no. This is the start of SPOOKYWEEN '17. This month, we'll be examining no less than twelve horror films taking us from the 1920s to the 2010s to celebrate the Halloween spirit. Kicking things off is a return to Tod Browning and Lon Chaney with the unbelievably brutal 1928 feature, West of Zanzibar--a silent horror film matched only by the uncanny strangeness of The Unknown. West of Zanzibar does its best to break every single taboo in the book, and given its early release date that makes it remarkable, though one finds that the film's age has also given it some truly reprehensible qualities.

Phroso (Lon Chaney) is a magician at a carnival, because this is a Tod Browning movie; he has a beautiful young wife named Anna, whom he loves more than anything. However, Anna's attentions stray and she takes a lover--said lover, a man named Crane, wants to take her out to his ivory plantation in Tanzania, but she realizes who she really loves and doesn't really want to go along. While arguing with Crane, Phroso gets knocked over a railing and breaks his back, and is unable to stop the two from leaving.

Time passes, Phroso discovers that Anna has returned to the city, but she's come here to die. She abandons her daughter, doubtlessly sired by Crane in Phroso's mind, inside a church. Phroso takes her and over the course of several years he commences his lengthy revenge scheme against the ivory-trader. First of all, he uses his stage magic to take over a Tanzanian tribe, and begins directing that tribe, with both authority and performer's tricks (including a fake voodoo monster), to break up Crane's ivory trade. (At this point the ex-performer has taken on the name of rather appropriate named of "Dead-Legs.") As this happens, one of Phroso's minions is busy raising Maizie, Anna's daughter, in her shabby seaside bar/drug house/brothel. Maizie has long desired to escape this place, with its boggy marshes of cheap income and illicit substances, but fortunately, a man has arrived who claims to know who Maizie's father is. We already know that this man is another of Dead-Legs' minions. He takes her out to Phroso's village of horrors, where it is revealed that her happy fate was all a lie, a cover for the world of drugs, drinking, starvation, and rape that Phroso has been setting up all this time. Sure, the former magician's doctor henchman takes pity on her...but this is only the beginning. At last it comes time to capture Crane, and reveal to him the truth; he then intends to kill Crane, which will in turn force the natives to enact their traditional ritual of burning a dead man's family members to join him in the afterlife. Except...well. Crane isn't Maizie's father. Anna never went away with him. She hated him for crippling her husband, so why would she? So who's Maizie's real father, I wonder...?

Yes, West of Zanzibar is very effective. It takes an oddly progressive approach towards using intensified sleaze as a source of horror, predating movies like Bloodsucking Freaks and the H.G. Lewis canon by decades. Sometimes you can get scary out of slimy. We humans don't like our rules broken--we don't like seeing young women left to dry out after being forced on a months-long drinking binge, for instance. We don't like seeing something that was once love turn to hate, and we are terrified of so much of our relationships with our children. All over and throughout, the movie breaks taboos, showing us nary a clean house or tidy city street. Its characters, from their faces down to the clothes they wear, are bitter and gruesome. Tod Browning drives home the fact that grotesquery is the name of the game by showing montages of enormous spiders rising from the waters or tangled in their webs, alongside worms, grubs, and lizards writhing in river mud. It's unpleasant.

But unpleasant is just the first layer. There's one more taboo that Browning decides to break, and that's the race taboo. The exploitation of black people for horror value in movies starts at the beginning of the history of movies and carries on into the present. This is some of the worst racism I've ever seen in a movie. The Africans depicted in the movie embody the most despicable "jungle native" stereotypes white people have ever come up with; they dance wildly, speak broken English, run screaming from "evil spirits," rape white women, and engage in meaninglessly violent religious rituals. For all the likable qualities of this movie, the movie should absolutely be condemned for its attempts to exploit racial fears of its era in an attempt to ramp up its horror elements. Period.

There are still reasons, of course, as to why I reviewed this movie--even besides the fact that there are almost no other '20s horror films appropriate for the site that I like enough. We get to see some glimpses of 1920s carny life, including a strange comedy fire-eating act where a man started smoking both ends of his cigarette, then eats it, decides he likes the taste, and starts gobbling down lit matches. I dunno, the other carnies seem to think it's hilarious. Phroso's act, what little we see of it, is pretty neat as well. But of course, that's because the man playing Phroso is a genius.

Lon Chaney Sr. gives one of his best performances here. He manages to perfectly capture a magician's theatricality in the same rhythm as his petty, mirthful cruelty, and he's more than capable of convincingly turning that cruelty into flat-out barbarism. The Phroso we meet at the beginning is a handsome, well-groomed man dressed in a tux; by the film's end he's wearing greasy rags, shaved himself bald, and worn his face down to an angry snarl. His former soft-spokenness is replaced with the tongue of a cynical dock pickpocket. My favorite part of watching silent films is lip-reading the performances. If you do it with Chaney, I swear you can hear him talk. Chaney's costar, Lionel Barrymore, has seen his performance heavily criticized in the wake of the Internet, but I thought he did fine here as an asshole with basically no redeeming qualities. Browning would get a chance to direct Barrymore in a more complex role in The Devil-Doll, which I'm sure I'll talk about on here at some point.

I also do have to give credit to Edward Rolf Boensnes, who made the soundtrack to the version I saw on Web Archive, available here. The music is catchy and fits the movie's tone of mind-warping horror. If you're going to watch this movie, I definitely recommend the version with Boensnes' music on it.

West of Zanzibar is a tough movie to praise because of how thorough its bigotry is. It's not something we can dismiss easily, either--I can't just tell you to skip past the racist bits and watch the good Lon Chaney parts instead. What should be done is that we should talk about this movie, and learn from it what our society once did wrong and what it's still doing wrong. That this still happens is the scariest Halloween horror of them all! Well, rest assured. Things for the rest of this month are going to be notably less controversial.

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Rats: Night of Terror (1984), by Bruno Mattei

Synthesizers and badly-dubbed dialogue are the waters which take us to the world of 225 AB; AB being "After the Bomb." This is a world of Bruno Mattei's making--it's remarkable what he and Claudio Fragasso thought the future would be like. A dark and shabby place, inhabited largely by danger and idiocy. It's no wonder that after-the-end movies were so big in the '80s, but Mattei's unique (or "unique") vision of what humanity and rat-anity would become stands out to me among a vast tan-gray sea of repetitive Mad Max cash-ins. Mark my words, I'm sure there are some "nods" to Mad Max in Rats: Night of Terror that I'm missing, but this is Mattei through-and-through, for better or worse.

Rats doesn't really follow a specific "plot," per se--we mostly just follow a group of dozen-odd "New Primitives" as they attempt to fit in with the surface world after mankind has spent two centuries living underground. (In a reference that doesn't bode well, Mattei mentions that the nuclear holocaust happens in 2015. I'm abstaining from any "two years overdue" jokes.) They all wear outfits that Doctor Who would wear if he regenerated twelve times in the '80s--hell, there's even a girl who dresses like a fucking vampire! They slowly uncover many gruesome secrets about their world, such as the fact that the previous settlers of the surface were all killed by the legions of rats that now rule the ruined former metropolises. And slowly, one by one, the same fate befalls them. Either they damn themselves with their own idiocy by mocking the rats or the rats do weirdly intelligent things like eat through their motorcycle tires. In the end, only a small group of survivors makes it out to witness the ending, which...oh, I'll talk about that.

But to start with, let's just dig into something that nagged at my mind upon rewatching this: what genre is this? I've deliberately tried to avoid horror films in these last few weeks leading up to Spookyween, but it seems I've written myself into a bit of a pickle, as Rats: Night of Terror definitely looks to be a horror film. Post-apocalyptic horror is a natural genre; I mean, swap out the rats for zombies and you've got yerself something mainstream. (And guess what, this movie steals settings and scenarios from Night of the Living Dead.) There are plenty of horror music cues and rotten, half-eaten corpses to go around, plus that delicious ending, but in the end there's a lot of emphasis on the action of fighting off the rats, and also, on the comedy. As we've seen, Claudio Fragasso had a distinct obsession with writing absurd dialogue, up to and through the time that he made Troll 2. And Bruno just kept giving him more leash. I mean, they must have been making some money together, even if it never showed up onscreen. And as such, Rats is a conversational nightmare, fraught with bad lines delivered so poorly it's hard to imagine there wasn't some desire to raise laughs.

Really, how do you explain the scene where the black girl--sigh; her name is Chocolate--gets flour dumped all over her. She starts jumping around, excitedly exclaiming, "I'm white! I'm whiter than all of you!" Then, one of the New Primitives comes across a bunch of rats falling into their water purifier. "Mangy beasts," he says. "That's how our waters get...pahlluted!" Have I talked about this before? Even if I have, it bears repeating. I'm sure I've never mentioned the line, "Computers and corpses are a bad mixture." There are also Ax 'Em-esque sequences of large crowds screaming that go on for such a long time that I can't believe they aren't played for laughs. Then, finally, there's the scene where the leader, Kurt, puts one of the rat victims out of his misery with a flamethrower. I'm pretty sure that there are much more humane ways of killing someone whose flesh has been bitten off than roasting them alive. Incompletely roasting them alive, I should add, as this poor soul lives for several more minutes after being set on fire! I know there's such a thing as the Idiot Ball, but this is fucking ridiculous.

Did Bruno and Claudio read Jack Kirby's Forever People comics or something? There's something about a gang of motorcycle-mounted youngsters having over-ecstatic adventures laden with hilariously unrealistic dialogue that really strikes a familiar chord with me. Of course, these kids don't have superpowers, unless you count Video, who has the power to restore power to computers by pressing random switches.

Yes, I did say "Video." It's astonishing, but I can almost remember all the main characters' names. There's Kurt, the leader, with his scarf and leather jacket; his girlfriend, Diana; Duke, who wants to overthrow Kurt as head of the Primitives; Video, who is a tech wiz; Chocolate, the black girl and heroine of the film; Lilith, the vampire lady; Lucifer, her boyfriend; and there's the bald guy with the third-eye tattoo (a descendant of the girl from Infrasexum, no doubt), and there's also the kind of nerdy guy who gets killed by the water-purifier rats. I should know Bald Guy's name because he almost makes it to the end. But alas, I guess this just means I'll have to watch it again.

So I guess this is also a Power of Friendship movie on top of everything else. Except Friendship doesn't really prevail in the end, does it? Because Chocolate and Video are finally found by masked survivors who are seemingly a group of saviors coming to help them; they poison the rats and save them from the poison in turn. But then it turns out they are Rat People. Huh. Throughout most of the movie, the characters give a strangely human quality to the rats, which may be a remnant of this perhaps having once been a zombie script--maybe Bruno realized that humanization, and decided to make the full jump? In any case, this ending is weird and painfully open. Are the rat-human hybrids friendly? Did they record some of the messages that the Primitives heard earlier in the abandoned buildings? If they can speak English, why do they refuse to communicate with the survivors? Are they mutated rats who have taken on a human-like shape, or are they humans who have adapted by becoming rat-like? Fucking Christ! Why did this movie get no sequel?

Sequel or no sequel though, I don't think I've yet seen a post-apocalyptic movie better than this one. This is quintessential Eurotrash, quintessential Bruno, and quintessential after-the-endsploitation. What have you got to lose?

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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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The Black Alley Cats (1973), by Henning Schellerup

A group of schoolgirls are going through the city at night. A group of doughy, presumably drunk douchebags are sitting outside a bar. When the girls pass, they chase them down, corner them in a warehouse, and gangrape them. As the girls dress themselves in the wake of this horrific act, displaying about as much concern in doing so as they did when they were being assaulted (i.e. surprisingly little), they swear an oath to fight back against rapists everywhere. After some training in the arts of kung fu and guns, they go out on the streets to kick people in the dick and/or tear their genitals off. Thus our series of random events begins. They get revenge on their rapists, and break up a group of white guys conspiring to keep minorities out of their neighborhoods. Then, they recruit a sixth member in the form of a new student at their school by seeing how well she fights when someone is trying to pull her panties off in the shower. We find out that the dean of the school, plus the couple one of the Alley Cats babysits for, are all rapists, and they'll get the babysitting girl thrown out of school if she exposes them. But all's well that ends well, as the Cats eventually go after the rapist couple and administer to them a fatal dose of aphrodisiacs. How does one die from aphrodisiacs, exactly? Well...how do you think?

The Black Alley Cats is simultaneously alarming, hilarious, tasteless, and progressive. It is a movie which has beguiled me for years now due to the fact I keep watching it, even though it deals with something I actually have a hard time processing. I have to be real careful not to set off my PTSD when it comes to movie with sexual assault in them, but this was one of the movies I stumbled across before I picked up my trigger, so I know what to expect well enough to keep myself safe. The opening rape scene is distressing, but at the same time, the dudes keep their pants on, and the actresses, while generally good throughout the movie, are pretty wooden when it comes to delivering the concept of traumatizing horror. The stuff later in the movie, involving the couple Pam works for, is decidedly grosser, but the ending to everything helps redeem it. Nothing helps a movie like watching two people uncontrollably fuck while two cops try to make them stop.

It's sort of like a weird R-rated cartoon, really, in terms of both situation and consequence. This is another rape-revenge movie I've seen where no one ends up pregnant or with an STD--which, thank God, because there wouldn't be a chance in hell of that movie being entertaining afterward (least to me). What's more, however, there is relatively little notation of trauma, per se, at least as far as the girls who aren't Pam go. She ends up a little more beaten up because she is attacked several times, but at the end of it all, the girls really tend to laugh a lot of stuff off. At least the movie never frames it in a way that shows they're overly upset--it glorifies things like making a bunch of ladies molest a dude for being at a sleazy business meeting. Another take, I suppose, could show the girls' turn towards vigilantism as a symptom of their troubled minds, but I'm glad we got--as much as we could, at least--an optimistic rape-revenge film. It's a film where if you're assaulted, as too many people are, you can channel that rage and fear and pain and sorrow into improving the world, and yes, taking revenge on your attackers, without getting in trouble. Of course, it's also rather suspect that the police were apparently missing from existence both during and after the rapes at the film's inception, but no screenplay is perfect.

I haven't done a really good job of describing the strangeness of this film, but it involves things like: 1) the fact that the thing with the rapist lesbian headmistress is never resolved; 2) the girls call one of their victims "pink toes"; 3) I wasn't kidding about genital-ripping. At one point in their training montage, their instructor teaches them how to "rip the groin away." It's marvelous.

And yet, accurate. I never took self-defense courses in college but I knew other ladies who did. From them I learned that yes, a lot of self-defense programs for women do involve how to properly and safely injure the tender balls of the male rapist. It makes sense. A lot of people say that if you attack someone's crotch when they're trying to kill/molest you, they'll just get madder and treat you worse, but I can't imagine a man alive who would want to rape or even chase someone after even just one blow to the crotch, especially if that blow is meant to cause some hospital-level damage. I've known people, too, who condemn this level of violence, but again, I apparently have to remind people of when they are defending one of the most atrocious crimes a person can commit. If a rapist gets their balls torn off, or, hell, gets a stiff punch to the ovaries, in the course of trying to rape someone, I don't have pity for them. That's how serious this is.

The Black Alley Cats, however, raises important questions without being overly serious. That sense of frivolity in the face of its subject matter, plus its strangeness and weird cheapo charms, make it worth your while, if this is something you feel you could watch. It's a rough sit, and yet it always seem to hit its final reel before I'm ready for the madness to end. Odd.

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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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