Flesh and Bullets (1985), by Carlos Tobalina

This is the weirdest drama I've seen since Satan's Touch. It's definitely a drama, because while people get shot and the story (for the most part) is about murder, it's not a thriller. It is merely an extremely unconventional romance, filmed in an extremely unconventional way for the reason that this was the director's first feature in a while that wasn't hardcore porn. Watching Flesh and Bullets, you really won't believe that Carlos Tobalina made any movies prior to this one, as it's as naive and clumsy as today's direct-to-video piss buckets like Birdemic and A Talking Cat. The movie's awkward shallowness clashes with its desire to do a million crazy things at once, creating a weirdly engaging experience that's over before you know it.

When the movie opens, we see a man named Jeff trick two homeless guys into helping him a rob a bank. He does this so he can make alimony payments to his ostensibly bitchy wife, Dolores. While celebrating his success in a Vegas bar, he meets Roy, who also has an ostensibly bitchy wife named Gail to whom he owes an extravagant amount of money. Roy jokes around that he wishes his wife was dead, and this gives the two men an idea: what if they killed each others' wives? It would be the perfect crime, as there would be no apparent motive. Yep, it's Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, except they're both guys at once. At first, they're fine with killing the women, until they have sex with them, and when they meet their opposite's kids. Jeff has always wanted a boy, which Roy has--and Roy always wanted a girl, like Jeff's kid. But both men know that they are liabilities to one another, and both believe they can't get out of the deal without killing the other. This tension is largely forgotten as other matters arise, like snakebites and abusive exes. And awkwardness.

All of the awkwardness.

How awkward is this movie? Well, near the beginning, we see Jeff have sex with a prostitute. This is not the awkward bit, surprisingly, because after they're done, she says to him, "Wow, I really like you! Maybe next time, I will let you make love to me for free!" Jeff's reply: "I'll know it when I see it...or rather...when I feel it." Cut then to what appears to be a barely off-camera hardcore sequence! I can put it into words, people, but only the image itself may speak.

The acting takes this early scene's outlandish discomfort and carries it throughout the whole film. It's not quite to the levels of I Am Here...Now, but it does come close to the Breen Zone at times. However, it is sometimes jarringly broken by the random appearance of professionals, like the thirty second spot with Cesar Romero. No one except these errant professionals can do anything convincingly, which makes scenes like Roy's recounting of his gang-rape at the hands of gay pro wrestlers (!) cross a number of unexpected boundaries. Every chance Tobalina gets to have things obey a sense of continuity, he ignores.

The movie runs in a linear fashion, sure, but for the most part, it doesn't feel that way. There are some weird plot holes that almost don't seem like plot holes, by merit of the dream-like nature of the shitty acting. I feel like the way the two men describe their wives completely contradicts what we see of the women, and how the women describe their husbands contradicts what we've already seen of the men. I remember Jeff saying Dolores was frigid, for example, but when we meet her, she loves sex. There are also fakeout death scenes for Jeff and Roy which confused me enough to rewind a few times. Actually, now that I think about it, I had to rewind a lot of this movie. It runs about 90 minutes but it took up my whole afternoon...

I really don't know what to say about this. Every scene and shot is strange to experience. Maybe I'm just weird, but there's something fundamentally wrong about this movie, in an entirely captivating way. Perhaps this is a telling look into the head of a porn director. More likely it is just a look into the head of Carlos Tobalina. If there are other romance movies like this out there, I wanna know about them. Drop me a line. And while you're at it, drop this movie a line, and be hypnotized. The best "Flesh" movie of them all!

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Fleshpot on 42nd Street (1972), by Andy Milligan

Yet again I'm surprised by my own deplorable sloth. I've only done one Andy Milligan movie? Seriously? And it was Torture Dungeon? Why not The Ghastly Ones or Guru the Mad Monk? Surely I would start at the outset of Milligan's horror career, or with one of his more famous horror pieces. Well, I'm correcting my sin today by featuring...neither of those movies. Instead, I'm making this week into an unofficial "flesh week" by checking out a Milligan film I only recently discovered. It's not one of his horror films, to boot--it's one of his dramas, much in the same style as his early haunting LGBT short Vapors. In Fleshpot on 42nd Street, Milligan cements himself as a brilliant director and screenwriter, turning in a movie that matches the artsiness of his more respected contemporaries and tells a fascinating story of gender, sex, class, and love...while still keeping things firmly in the gutter, as he's always liked it.

Dusty is a young girl who has shacked up with Tony in his grungy, poorly-lit apartment. She plies him with sex but he keeps pressuring her to get a job. She insists that she has to like a job in order to do it, which I get, but it's pretty clear she really intends to never actually work. Eventually she walks out on him, stealing some of his stuff to sell to pawnbroker Sammy, a clearly gay actor who nonetheless requests a chance to give her really unsatisfactory cunnilingus in return for money. After robbing him, too, she meets up with Cherry, a drag queen friend of hers. This is when Andy gets to strut his stuff--the rest of the movie is nothing but queer bitching, poverty musing, and S&M hooking. And then, Dusty goes through an important moment in every woman's life: she meets Harry Reems. In the end, it wouldn't be Milligan if there wasn't a big fuck-you climax.

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't a slice-of-life film, pure and simple. Milligan channels his inner John Waters, as always, by having the life that's sliced be that of a poor person of questionable repute--a sex worker, and friends with a clique of queer folk. By escaping his normal trappings of Victorian England and high-class mansions, Milligan gets to once more mingle amidst the people he loved the most, and consequently he manages to tone down the hatred in his scripting for genuine attempts at humor and romance. The man was clearly having a rare good day when he put this together. His attempts at nastiness seem almost quota-filling--they're distant and insincere, even Dusty's creepy pro-rape bit about how men "have to stick up for their rights more often" to prevent women from becoming sexless. For once, Milligan has let himself get carried away by the pull of his comfort zone, and his rage hasn't kept him rooted as a stone against the tide this time.

And the film still turns out being well-made. The cheapness still shows: if you check out the Vinegar Syndrome release (which you should), you get to see what it's like when shitty film stock is put as close to HD as possible. You can see every hue of green in those sweet, sweet emulsion scars. But the framing and composition of the film exceeds its technical limitations. There are a lot of really nice looking shots in this movie, with emphasis on shadows and color, with lots of artistic nudity and smoking in bed--the sort of pretentious shit that pretentious people like but which is still captivating in some way. Throw in a snappy script that shoots out zingers like, "We should do it in a bed, like two civilized animals," and you've got a recipe for success.

Andy Milligan always deserves more attention than he gets, and so if you dislike horror movies while also being able to stand some sex, nudity, and crassness in your drama, this is a good entrance point. Vapors is a step to something deeper...and perhaps not as appreciable to The Straights. (The Heterosexuals, I mean.) Like a lot of great directors, there's always more to see with Milligan, more dimensions to his pain. He was famous for his anger, but here's something from when he was a little more happy. At least I think this is happy for him.

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The Flesh Eaters (1962), by Jack Curtis

Famous firsts are important in movies. Every great moment had its start somewhere: The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the first of the proper giallos, while Halloween led the way for the American slasher--The Lost World in 1925 was the first giant monster movie, and 1932's Doctor X was the first horror film in color. Now, these are all inaccurate in their own way, as I'm sure a lot of you already know; there were plenty of mysterious maniacs stalking and offing teenagers in American films prior to Michael Myers' debut, for example. Every genre has its roots, and while you can only go back so far, it seems there's always a movie that crops up that beat such-and-such to the punch. And that's largely due to the simple fact that history records events and happenings that most easily float to the surface. Halloween was the first slasher that people who weren't genre fans heard of in a big way, so consequently it is the "first" slasher. Talking about the prospect of a first gore film is a more nebulous matter, simply because there are many films that contained blood prior to what most people would cite as the most obvious contender, Blood Feast. Hell, there are even some which feature dismemberment: people get their heads lopped off in Intolerance from way back in 1916. Yet Intolerance is not a gore film, because while its violence can certainly be interpreted horrifically, it is not a horror film. If you're thinking of movies that feature blood and guts for the sake of horror, you probably do have to go to the early '60s, as anything truly graphic prior to then would have probably been some long-lost underground presentation. Volume, too, is important: there has to be a lot of blood in order for it to count, not just someone nicking their finger on a knife in a shot the censors were cool with. There has to be so much blood that the movie is borderline about the blood. That's what makes it a gore flick.

The Flesh Eaters almost beat H.G. Lewis to the punch with a 1962 production date, though the film would not see release until 1964, several months after Blood Feast emerged. While it is properly described as a mad scientist monster movie, its emphasis on graphic injury is so prominent, and so totally unlike other monster movies of its time, that it has to be described as a gore film. Indeed, massive amounts of blood turn out to be what our heroes need to survive the film, so my prior comment about gore films being about the gore turns out to be true from a story perspective too! What's great is that The Flesh Eaters isn't just entertaining for gore hounds. No, it's an engaging and dramatic little slice of tight cinema that will leave you wondering why so many other monster movies from the time ended up being comparatively tedious.

Jan Letterman is a woman with a mission--she's got to get her boss, alcoholic actress Laura Winters, to her next gig ASAP! To this end she hires undergrad pilot Grant Murdoch to fly them to where they need to go, but Murdoch is forced to land on a small island due to a storm. Here, they meet Germanic scientist Peter Bartell, who eventually makes it clear to the group that the waters around the island are infested with macrobacterial creatures that devour living flesh. In case the Team Fortress 2 Medic accent wasn't enough, we the audience swiftly learn something the characters don't (at least not right away): Bartell has his own agenda, and his own unique relationship with the Flesh Eaters. The group is eventually joined by an incredibly strange character named Omar, who is subjected to one of Bartell's tests involving the Flesh Eaters after Bartell ostensibly succeeds in killing the creatures with electricity. Unfortunately, unbeknownst even to Bartell, electricity is the strength of the Eaters as well as their weakness. If the palm-sized individuals can kill a person in moments, imagine what they'd do if they got any bigger...

Like I said above, The Flesh Eaters is actually a pretty well-made movie. The performances are all wonderful, and help bring what is already an awesome script to life. These characters become realistic by way of their cynicism--the dialogue stings in places, and consistently hints at the variety of troubles the characters have faced in the past. And it's not just that they're "realistic" too--our trio of protagonists are all likable in spite of, or perhaps because of, their faults. The performances that accomplish this depth and likability blend with some really impressive cinematography; take, for example, one of our earliest hints of Bartell's shadiness. The group discusses the strange events they've witnessed since arriving on the island, all framed in the background but still perfectly audible. Bartell is nearer to the camera, in profile, listening to the conversation. The focus is on him, and on the significant glances that flash across his eyes as he studies the castaways' words. It implies so much, and it makes us curious because all throughout the film, Bartell is generally a nice guy. It's been awhile since I've seen framing that has worked that well, and the movie is littered with it--it really has to be seen to be believed.

Speaking of that which must be seen to be credible: yes, we're gonna talk about the gore. I don't know if it's the black and white leaving more to my imagination or what, but the grue in this movie could compete with Lucio Fulci for sheer visceral nature. As much as I hate to overuse the "twin beds" metaphor, this is a movie that revels in showing us chunks of meat being hacked off of someone's leg in pretty good detail, coming from an era where it was still considered not done to show a married couple sharing a bed. It shows a close-up of a face with its eye blown out! Blood Feast caused literal rioting, and I only wish I knew what happened when The Flesh Eaters hit screens in '64. Perhaps the audiences had been inoculated--but I can't imagine that everyone took it well. The scene where Omar meets an unfortunate gastric demise by drinking water with a "dead" Flesh Eater in it will draw comparisons to Alien, but honestly, I gripped my seat tighter here than I did while watching Ridley Scott's film. Add in the fact that there are nude women as well. As in Blood Feast, there are no crotches or nipples allowed, but the context around these nude women will probably make you thankful that this isn't being played to be sexy.

I do want to talk about Omar a little bit. When I say a character is strange, that's by my standards--Omar represents the uncomfortable cinematic transition between beatniks and hippies, at a moment in time when neither really existed. The closest thing was the sort of hipster epitomized by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and even then, those wouldn't become as recognizable as their hippie descendants and beat forebears until 1968, when Tom Wolfe published The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Omar talks like a beatnik, but is clearly on something significantly stronger than marijuana. He's also something of an evangelist, though it isn't made clear if the "weapon of love" he keeps referring to is meant to be Christian. It seems to be some sort of idiosyncratic micro-faith that Omar alone practices, loosely based on Christianity but loaded up with a lot of generic hippiness. Whatever it is, it doesn't keep him from trying to convert people. I wish we found out why, exactly, he's drifting on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic. I also wish we knew why he's weirdly content with this situation, since he seems to lack both food and drinkable water.

There's just one last detail I want to talk about before we wrap this up. The Flesh Eaters was Jack Curtis' only directorial credit--most of his work in film involved doing dub work for Japanese productions, including Mothra vs. Godzilla, the first Gamera film, and Prince of Space. Anime fans probably know him best as the voice of Pops Racer from Speed Racer. The film's screenwriter Arnold Drake, meanwhile, is generally remembered for his comic book work, where he created such wonderful characters as the Doom Patrol and Super-Hip. And also some nobody named Beast Boy, who I'm told never went on to join significant teams or garner any fans. I just think it's interesting that this movie is put together by two people who had such backgrounds.

The Flesh Eaters shatters the mold for '60s monster movies in a way I've never seen before, even if sometimes it resorts to belting out lines like, "You've created a monster...something beyond belief!" It's fun to talk about movies that have some noteworthy place in history, but it's even better when those movies are awesome even outside of being a first. I can only hope that in time we'll uncover something from 1961 that once more forces us to question our knowledge of the movies of the past.

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Disco Godfather (1979), by J. Robert Wagoner

PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!! Rudy Ray Moore rocked the blaxploitation world in 1974 with the admittedly-flawed classic Dolemite. Dolemite, for those unaware, is about the titular criminal Dolemite, played by Moore, going after the bunch of no-business born-insecure rat-soup-eating motherfuckers who sent him to prison, led by Willie Green, the Baddest Motherfucker the World Has Ever Seen. While definitely not the first '70s blaxploitation movie, Dolemite is certainly the most recognizable, containing and creating many of the over-the-top camp tropes that would definitely the subgenre. Comedian Moore would go on to make Dolemite his stage persona and play permutations of the character over the course of several other blaxploitation films, including Dolemite's sequel The Human Tornado. Now I have seen both Dolemite films, and points to those who can guess what the third Moore flick I've watched is. And points to those who can deduce which of them is my favorite. Ding-ding-ding!

Disco Godfather tells the tale of Tucker Williams, aka the Disco Godfather, a former cop who now runs the local disco joint--for indeed, Moore's character is a true good guy in this one, being more a Godfather to the community, and not in any sort of ironic sense. The opening few minutes are an excuse for Rudy Ray Moore to show up in his extremely '70s sequined vest, and make goofy faces at the camera while wiggling his hips like a disco Elvis. It's pretty incredible. Anyway, Williams' nephew Bucky is getting himself caught up with some gangsters in the employ of Stinger Ray, the local PCP salesman. Bucky has a prosperous academic and athletic career ahead of him, but he's also quite fond of the dissociative high of phencyclidine. Inevitably his trip goes sour and he begins hallucinating the patrons of the disco club as zombies, hags, and skeletons, in one of the most amazing cinematic sequences ever. Seeing the effects of PCP in a personal way haunts Williams, and naturally, being a Rudy Ray Moore character and thus a hard-up motherfucker, he's going to take on this so-called "wack" with the skills he's picked up as a cop and a community organizer. Much of the movie features the Godfather putting together his "Attack the Wack" campaign, and before long you'll have heard character say "Attack the Wack" even more than you'll hear Moore's screech "Put your weight on it! Put your weight on it!" at his disco guests. All of this is intermixed with increasingly hallucinatory disco sequences, all leading to the best ending I've seen in a film this year.

Where to begin? Disco Godfather is a movie which enters the outrageous realm of self-parody while also sidestepping some of the vices that made Dolemite not so fun a ride for me. Dolemite is a movie that's famous because of its anarchy. It plays by no rules, including the rules of cinematic narrative. That's why when I first watched it I panicked when I realized the movie was done and I hadn't paid attention in over thirty minutes. Disco Godfather tries to be funny often enough to call it a comedy, and in that sense becomes chaotic, but what contains the movie as a whole is the fact that it never becomes any more outrageous than disco actually was. It is, if the lengthy dance sequences are any indication, some kind of disco porn. You're meant to bring a date to it, snort some coke over the end credits, and then go down to the club. Or something to that effect. I don't know what Rudy Ray Moore would want from us, but he'd want us to have fun.

And have fun we do. In a lot of ways, everything about this movie is pure camp. This is one of Moore's campiest roles, perhaps even campier than Dolemite, if nothing else because he's so absurdly gentlemanly. He's something sort of like how I'd imagine the Third Doctor if Doctor Who was an American show...brusque, curt, hard on the things he hates, but doing what he does out of heart and caring. The Attack the Wack campaign is a hilariously cheesy After School Special affair, sounding more like open warfare on masturbation than any sort of battle against drugs. I made a coke joke earlier, but in all seriousness: it is weird to think about an anti-drug campaign forming in a disco, of all places. Dance clubs attract young people which means there are bound to be many social activists in the club scene, so that's somewhat realistic to my mind at least, but a lot of the disco-goers of the '70s from what I know, at least the white ones, would probably have a lot of sympathy for someone who likes going all Night of the Chainsaw before hitting the floor. That's not to say that everyone who dug disco when it was alive slunk off to the bathrooms to shoot up (after all, drug problems were still yet to worsen in the club scenes as far as the 20th Century was concerned), but there's almost no time spent at all on the clientele's reaction to Williams' campaign outside of their appreciation and support. That gives the movie a decidedly optimistic slant, however, and I can totally dig that. Dolemite left us with harrowing images of heroin abuse; Disco Godfather shows us some hilarious exploitation psychedelia, thus generally confining its affair with drugs to the goofy side of whatever spectra govern the shape of drug films. Even the ending has a way out, as hopeless as it seems at first.

PUT YOUR WEIGHT ON IT!!! Disco Godfather is a liberating experience, an experiment in mood, humor, and sound. If you like your movies funky this will probably hit every spot you've got to hit. See it at once.

Book Club of Desolation #15: Jaws: The Revenge (1987), by Hank Searls

If you know anything about this book, you know the one reason why I'm reviewing it.

Follows the plot of the movie, really. Ellen Brody is the widow of Sheriff Martin Brody, who has ostensibly died of a heart attack after fighting a couple of different sharks off Amity Island. Their son Michael has also previously had shark trouble, and he's retired to the Caribbean to work on some marine research. Now it's Sean Brody's time to face the shark...an encounter he does not survive. A grief-stricken Ellen is starting to believe, perhaps rightfully so, that sharks have a thing for her family specifically, and so she goes south to join Michael and get away from Amity. She ends up meeting Hoagy Carmichael (who is immediately recognizable as Michael Caine's character even to people who haven't seen the movie), a pilot who will prove instrumental in her defeating the shark. And, inevitably, the shark is defeated. This is a simple paperback tale of good versus evil, so there's relatively little nuance to the plot presented.

With one exception.

There is a significant deviation from the film version of Jaws: The Revenge, aside from the addition of a Haitian cocaine-smuggling subplot which I don't remember going anywhere beyond filling pages. We finally learn why the Brody family has been beset by so many sharks: VOODOO, MOTHERFUCKER. Yep! Years ago, before the events of Jaws, Martin Brody threw a voodoo charm belonging to a houngan named Papa Jacques into the ocean, pissing Papa Jacques off enough to put a curse on Martin and his whole family. Every shark that has attacked Amity Island thus far has been a spirit-shark pulled from Papa Jacques' soul. I can't make this up, nor can I envision the writing process. It must have been agony for Searls, having to turn the worst Jaws movie into a 300+ page novel...adding the cocaine subplot ought to have been enough but there was still something missing. In a postmodern moment his mind must have chanced upon deconstructing the whole thing and asking why there were four sharks haunting a specific family on the East Coast over a twelve year period. Really, a curse does seem to be the only way to explain the bad luck of the Brodys. You can almost overlook the fact that this plot explanation is born of the fact that Jaws shouldn't have had sequels in the first place. If there had just been one shark attack, or hell, even just two, it wouldn't have been suspicious. But Jaws 3D and Jaws: The Revenge bumped up the shark vengeance count on the Brodys to four, and then you do sort of need a reason. Not like anyone would care.

Unifying the four Jaws films like this raises a particular problem. Papa Jacques is now the main villain of the Jaws series, and Hank Searls must make that a believable thing. He doesn't. Papa Jacques barely gets dialogue--he just lurks around being sinister-looking. (There's a lot of racist dialogue focusing on his black skin, usually with the apparent intent being that makes him more sinister-looking.) It's hard to get menace out of a character who is responsible for a number of deaths because he had his magic charm thrown in the water; even if he does possess real mystical powers, that's such a petty grudge that it undercuts any menace he could present as a powerful wizard type. If Jacques was a charismatic character, with a large following and presence a la Thulsa Doom from the Schwarzenegger Conan, then I could suspend my disbelief, but that would still change Jaws: The Revenge into a different story entirely--either a Mansonsploitation-style thriller, or some kind of fantasy story. If you take this novel as canon, you now have to believe that magic exists in the Jawsverse. Indeed, it is the entire impetus for the plot of all the movies.

In case you didn't click that TV Tropes link above, this book is the Trope Namer for the Voodoo Shark: when a plot hole is "patched" by an even bigger plothole, like, say, casually revealing that magic exists in the setting of Jaws. This is the one thing that keeps this book memorable at all. Otherwise, it is the sort of book that I really hate reading, which is the airport novel. This is the sort of thing I could get for four bucks off the "bookshelf" at the local grocery store. I'm getting too snobby for my own good here, but this is an overly dry book that is "realistic" because it uses a lot of technical terms. Ooh, you know what the different parts of a boat are called. That makes your story so much more compelling, and it totally makes me forget your characters are planks of wood.

Read this book, if you must, for the same reason I did, which is voodoo sharks. Otherwise, you'll probably just be lost in a sea of endless do-nothing subplots while a shark creeps around semi-ominously.

P.S. Expect Peter Benchley's original Jaws novel on the site at some point, too. I've heard it's--how to phrase this nicely--kind of a turd. Marvelous!

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Image Source: Amazon

Mystery Ranch (1932) and Mystery Ranch (1934), by David Howard and Bernard B. Ray

This review exists out of spite, in a way. One of the films I wanted to look into before this weird B-Western craze I've been having burnt itself out was listed in my records simply as "Mystery Ranch (1932)." I also memorized a brief plot description I'd stumbled across, which was that it was some sort of Gothic Western with an evil piano player, and that it starred George O'Brien. Curious, then, that every version of the film I found online credited the star as Tom Tyler, each featuring a plot which in no way had an evil piano player, much less Gothic elements. Then I spotted my error: this was the Mystery Ranch from 1934, a completely different film. It sure sucked, then, that there were several online editions of the movie that listed the details of the 1932 film in the description, a fault replicated as well on several movie databases. I love and hate dealing with movies made within a few years of each other with the same title--it can be rough spending a long time searching for a movie, especially if you thought that you already found it...and especially if finding that first wrong film was a challenge to begin with. But then again, I also get to do double reviews like this one.

Mystery Ranch ('32) is ultimately the story of Jane Emory, a wealthy heiress being held hostage at her own ranch by Henry Steele, her late father's deranged business partner. He intends not only to hang onto the ranch by any means necessary but to marry Jane whether she wants it or not. He spends a lot of time brooding and playing ominous piano pieces, because he is Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton. In his employ is a deadly mute Apache whose name, of all things, is Muto...because of course it is. Enter Bob Sanborn, an undercover Texas Ranger who learns about Steele's plot and intends to stop it. He is confronted with peril along the way, including the kidnapping of Jane's English comic relief butler Artie, who is sentenced to death by bucking bronco. This all leads to Bob putting a posse together and leading a siege on the ranch in a scene which makes the entire film.

This Mystery Ranch is vastly different from its 1934 counterpart, but it is an exceptional B-Western in its own right because one simple detail: it's actually a really good movie. There isn't deep characterization, but it has a more expansive world than most B-Westerns. That is to say that the world it presents feels alive, and not like a movie set loaded up with matte paintings. For one thing, the movie actually uses locations, as far as I can tell, so it's made in the authentic American Southwest. Y'know, like A-Westerns! There are a lot of clever twists and turns, and the dialogue and camerawork are snappy enough to keep you engaged. Even ignoring the 55 minute runtime, it'll be done before you know it. I don't know how well you could really describe it as a "Gothic" film, though, because while it does have an emphasis on shadow, and the villains have their creepy moments, it's much more focused on traditional Western action. This doesn't spoil it at all, I should say. I will avoid giving away any more on it--definitely check it out if you get a chance, though you'll probably have to track down a bootleg.

Mystery Ranch ('34) opens with one of the most bizarre scenes I've ever seen put to film. It's this weird over the top melodramatic parody of Western tropes, where the cowboy has to rescue a lady from a bad marriage. "Marry muh!" insists the big-mustachioed villain. "Marry muh, or I'll tear yuh limb from pieces!" It turns out this is just a scene or representation thereof from one of the Western pulps of writer Bob Morris, whose father disapproves of his profession. Bob gets a letter from a town out West which claims to be the real Wild West--they're fans of his novels but think he could improve on his accuracy, so they want him to come out and walk the walk as it were, as a real cowboy. It turns out the whole thing is a gag: the town is just as modern as anywhere else, but they intend to fake exciting Western scenes to give their favorite writer some more inspiration. As it turns out, Bob can handle his dukes, by reining in some wild horses and socking the crap out of some toughs sent to haze him. (This town doesn't care about his assaulting their citizens, I should say.) That'll be useful when at last it turns out an old-style hold-up Bob witnesses is for real. Bob tries to trick the tricksters, so everyone gets mixed up when the real theft is revealed. As in all Westerns, there's only way for Bob to clear his name: bring in the bad guys.

It goes without saying that this Mystery Ranch's uniqueness arises from how meta it is for a film this early. I'm sure that the Western parody is nearly as old as the Western genre itself--after all, there have been stories about the American West ever since a bunch of German started writing adventure books about it back in the 1840s. (Yes, the first famous Westerns were written by Germans, many of whom never visited the Americas. It's a pretty remarkable history, actually, if you have the time to read about it.) But that opening scene is pretty brutal in its satire, exposing how hollow and false a lot of the stuff the masses consumed could be. There's an interplay between how comic and soapy these hack writers make the West, contrasted with how the West was in real life--a brutal place, but also sometimes an ordinary place. A boring place. In a sense, these Westerners want to make fun of Morris and other writers exoticizing the West, and reducing it to a series of tropes, while also not taking themselves overly seriously. What makes this stuff good is that it's played lightly. There's a lot to be learned with how this film deals with layers of fiction.

Pretentiousness aside, it's also pretty good at giving us characters who we can like. The acting isn't nearly as good as it was in Mystery Ranch ('32), but this does contain the miraculous reappearance of Jimmy Aubrey, aka Ptomaine Pete. In the prologue set in Bob's story, he plays Pigsty Pete, and in "real life" he's the guy on the end of the noose when Bob stumbles across a lynching the town stages for him. His presence adds to the tongue-in-cheek nature of the whole thing, and in fact, it muddles the odd performance Aubrey gives in The Phantom Cowboy even further. I didn't even think such a thing was possible.

In the end, both Mystery Ranches are treats, and that they are such in vastly different ways is a treat in itself. One of them is a seriously well-done affair with progressive cinematography and clever performances. The other is a baffling, amusing, and deeply charming exploration of the tropes of a genre only then in the middle of its adolescence. This month has been a fun adventure for me in the world of the low-budget Western, and what sad is that there were still some I had to leave out. Maybe someday we'll saddle up again and visit the debauched worlds of Smoking Guns or Rawhide Terror. Now those are tales to tell...

Gretta (1984), by John Carr

It only struck me after the movie was over the significance of that title card: this movie is based off of a book. The snippety plot synopses I'm finding for this novel by Erskine Caldwell, an author I've never heard of before, don't match this movie at all. Maybe someday I'll read the book, but it's not high on my priority list. This is a movie which I feel operates mostly smoothly on its own, even if I hope that this book is every bit as good as the film. I've seen some really fucking strange movies this year, and it seems that each new discovery tops the last. Gretta, aka Death Wish Club, aka The Dark Side to Love, is one of those movies belonging to a genre all its own, where it is a true whirlwind, unpredictable in its motions. But like the characters in this film, the filmmakers play tricks on us--there is direction to the tornado. I'm not entirely sure if it's brilliant, but since I know the only answer is to rewatch the thing, I can't wait to find out.

Our film starts with a man named George introducing himself to us via voiceover. He explains that he's not interested in romance or sex; he just wants to love someone who doesn't love him back. To this end he goes out to the carnival and finds Gretta, a popcorn girl, whom he plies with hundred dollar bills to go back to his place and listen to him play Chopin. Not long after we jump perspectives to Glen, a man who falls in love with Gretta through the porn movies she now makes. Now keep in mind, Gretta isn't really an innocent victim here: her response to Glen stalking her through a variety of shady connections is to offer him sex. She's in the porn game because she likes to fuck. But he manages to build a romance with her all the same. Eventually she brings him to something she does on the side, a club populated by folk all around the world who have had close brushes with death. At some point Gretta was modeling for a sculptor who turned out to be a mad serial killer, and she had to kill him. Glen's had a run-in with the Reaper as well, so he's introduced to the club's latest game of Russian roulette with a killer beetle. As you may notice, this plot is kind of all over the place, but we haven't even gotten to Gretta's amnesia, where she becomes a man. Specifically, a '30s gangster type named Charlie White! I could go on from here, but what's the point? It is event after event after event, at a breakneck pace, never losing an ounce of crazy along the way, until we reach the most "hey don't forget we're still in this movie" ending ever.

There is a strange dissonance between the professionalism and the slackness of the script, and that is the root of this movie's disturbance. None of the plot points I summarized can come together in a rational way in 90 minutes, and as a result, Gretta ends up becoming like one of the Sandy Frank Japanese movies, sewn together from the tatters of a season of a TV show. But as far as I know, Gretta had no such origin. They made a conscious choice to use their time like this, when perhaps even just 30 more minutes of footage could have made it all make sense. Everything is edited out of order, like a dream. Take for example the scene where Glen meets with a psychiatrist to find out how to "cure" Gretta of her Charlie White persona. The psychiatrist all but encourages Glen to rape her! In fact, when he returns to where Charlie is sleeping in his apartment, Glen climbs in bed and starts going to town. It transpires that it's not Glen but some other lady, who seems fine with it! Then, when Glen asks Charlie what to do about the situation, he literally encourages him to rape...well, technically himself! But Glen is disgusted with this possibility now, when previously he had no such qualms.

One thing that does stay consistent is a running gag involving an old Swedish couple who live next to Glen's apartment who keep interrupting the movie to comment on how marvelous his sexual prowess is. Have I mentioned that trying to analyze this movie thematically is impossible? Because it's impossible to judge this movie tonally. Sleaze is cut with humor is cut with heart is cut with callousness. The hydra can't keep track of its heads. Every dramatic strike is counterbalanced with something of almost unearthly silliness. And every comedic moment is offset by something bitter or upsetting. This isn't in an attempt to keep the film a balanced breakfast, breaking up the drama with comedy while still ensuring that the drama marches forward. This is something else, something far less knowable.

I'm at a loss for words. I interrupted myself in the writing of this review to put tags on the movie and I realize that, aside from maybe just "exploitation" or "thriller," I can't place the genre of this thing. Like I said at the beginning, it really does deserve its own genre in the "you can't predict it" territory. Movies that keep piling shit up and never really resolve it in the end. These are movies like Skullduggery and Ogroff and Death Warrior. Once, I believed that these movies changed when I didn't watch them, because there always seemed to be scenes that I swear weren't in them before. I realize now that it's more just that these movies are so crammed with details that you need to come back to them again and again to see all the ways the facets glitter in the sunshine. Gretta is now among those same ranks; and I now have many adventures guaranteed in my future dedicated to the purpose of seeing just how this gem sparkles.

If you want to see something that's different from anything you've ever known, by God, watch this movie. Is that praise? Is that discouragement? I don't know! I don't care! Everything's run together muddy now, and I hope these brief and degenerate words may speed you on your way.