ANALOG SCUM

Exhuming lost gems of the VHS age. By L.J. Carroll

[analogscum]

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980, d. Lewis Jackson)

MERRY SCUMSMAS! Welcome to the very first installment of our 4-part Christmas series, in which we’ll be covering some truly twisted holiday flicks! Now, if you’re anything like me, you may find the Christmas season to be a difficult time of year. Sure, there are decorations and hot cocoa and all of your favorite animated TV specials return for their yearly viewings, but something about Christmas just feels…sad. Hollow. Disappointing. The opposite of Halloween, if I really had to put a finger on it. Maybe all the cheer only reinforces what a crappy year you’ve had. Or you find splurging on gifts to be a financial strain. But what I really think it all boils down to is a human problem. It’s hard to wish for peace on Earth and goodwill towards your fellow man when your fellow man seems dead set on making sure that Earth is anything but peaceful. Hell, it seems like most people don’t even care enough to put in the effort to simply just be nice. They’d rather just settle for naughty. Well, wouldn’t you know it, that very problem is addressed, albeit by a maniac in a dirty red costume, in our very first film, 1980’s Christmas Evil!

We open on Christmas Eve, 1947. Two little boys, Harry and Phil, and their mother sit on the staircase and watch as Santa Claus shoots down the chimney. Now, this is the first instance in which I was genuinely surprised and confused. Does this film exist in a universe where Santa Claus is real? I saw that motherfucker shoot down the chimney, don’t try to gaslight me on this one! Or, is this supposed to be viewed as just a childhood memory, laced with some magic realism? Don’t worry, we never quite get a straight answer. Anyway, Santa leaves a bunch of presents, hears one of the boys giggling, gives them a wink, and shoots back up the chimney (again, do NOT try and gaslight me here!) Then all of a sudden the boys and mom disappear, like that one shot in Blue Velvet after Frank Booth yells “I’ll fuck anything that moves!” Now Phil, the younger of the brothers, does not believe that that was the real Santa that they just saw. Harry, however, still believes that the big man exists, so he heads back downstairs for some unspecified reason, and what doe he see? It seems that Santa Claus has snuck back into the house, and Mommy is, um, doing a little bit more than kissing him underneath the mistletoe. In fact, Mommy is writhing in pleasure while Santa Claus says hi to the little man in the boat. Yikes! Harry, totally traumatized, runs upstairs to the attic, where he smashes a snow globe and slices his hand open with one of the shards of glass, spilling blood everywhere. And thus, the horror movie trope of Santa Claus as a lecherous old creep was born!

Now it is present day. Harry, despite the fact that he saw Chris Cringle feasting on his mom’s lady sandwich all those years ago, seems to be totally well-adjusted and normal. Well, there is the fact that he listens to Christmas music all year round. Oh, and his apartment is furnished with Christmas decorations even when it’s not Christmas. Right, and when he shaves in the morning he gives himself a shaving cream beard and goes Ho Ho Ho! into the bathroom mirror. Yup, totally well-adjusted and normal. Another hobby Harry has that is very healthy and not deeply disturbing at all is spying on the neighborhood kids from the roof of his apartment building via binoculars. Don’t worry, he’s only doing it so that he can record which of them have been naughty and which of them have been nice! And c’mon, it’s not like he’s whispering incredibly creepy things to himself while he watches them, like oh what a sweetheart and oh my dear little angel and…wait, no, never mind, he’s definitely whispering those things to himself. One boy takes out the trash, so he’s good. A girl is brushing her doll’s hair, which strikes me more as neutral but Harry seems very taken with it. However, this one little bastard named Moss Garcia is looking at the centerfold of a Penthouse magazine! Ooooh, does that ever burn Harry’s grits! How he hates Moss Garcia! In his book of naughty children, he notes that Moss “throws rocks at dogs, uses profane language, picks his nose, impure thoughts, negative body hygiene.” Ummm, hey, at least the guy is observant?

Would it surprise you to learn that Harry works at a toy factory? I didn’t think it would. Over at the Jolly Dreams toy factory, Harry is bummed out. On one hand, he’s been promoted to an office job, but he misses working on the factory line, because he cares about the quality of the toys. You know who doesn’t? The fat cats in corporate, that’s who! However, his former coworkers on the factory line aren’t much better, they’re portrayed as lazy and cynical. In fact, one such working stiff, a guy named Frank, basically bullies Harry into working his shift so that he can leave for vacation with his family early. Harry begrudgingly agrees, but when he’s walking home later that night, he passes by the local redneck bar, and who does he see? Why, it’s Frank! And he’s knocking back some brewskis and yukking it up with his roughneck buddies, laughing his head off about how he lied about leaving for vacation and shoved his shift off on that schmuck Harry! Harry handles this incredibly well, i.e. he runs home like an embarrassed child, then angrily hums “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” while crushing a doll in his bare hands. Could this be, I dunno, some sort of fancy pants foreshadowing? Well read on, college boy!

It’s Thanksgiving, and now we get to meet Harry’s younger brother Phil, who is played by one of my favorite character actors, Jeffrey DeMunn! This seems to be one of the first in a series of uptight assholes that DeMunn made a career out of bringing to irritated, deeply caucasian life, and for my money, few out there play an uptight asshole better than Jeffrey DeMunn. In the case of Phil, he’s always yelling at his kids to turn down the volume on the TV, and he seems to be offended by the very existence of his brother Harry. He thinks that Harry is a loser and an emotional cripple, which is kinda harsh. But at the same time, his wife makes up for this by going TOO easy on Harry, and is basically like, hey, Jeffrey DeMunn, when Harry comes over for Thanksgiving dinner, could you maybe not bring up the fact that he works in a factory and lives in a shitty poor part of town and is clearly mentally ill and possibly a pedophile? To which Jeffrey DeMunn is like, grumble grumble grumble I’m Jeffrey DeMunn! As it turns out, he needn’t have worried, because literally a minute after having this conversation, Harry phones up the house and is like, hey, it’s me Harry, I can’t make it to Thanksgiving this year, because I’ve got to take some nascent steps into full on Santa psychosis, ok byeeeee.

Harry goes about setting his plans into motion. The guy’s a bonafide craftsman; he’s sewing himself a Santa Claus suit, he’s in his basement like, smelting his own toys, he’s painting a sled on the side of his creeper-ass Econoline van, he even manages to smear some mud on his face and hands and terrorize that little shit Moss Garcia, ooooh he’s just the worst with his potty mouth and nudie mags! Anyway, now it’s time for the Jolly Dreams factory Christmas party! Everyone is getting super schwasted and dancing to a terrible disco version of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (does this now qualify as a motif?) when Harry is introduced to a new exec named Gordon. Gordon, it turns out, spearheaded a project wherein Jolly Dreams is going to donate a bunch of their surplus toys to a local children’s hospital. Harry is like, this plan seems really nebulous and non-specific, like, how many toys should we be setting aside, how many children are at this hospital, etc. And Gordon is just like, hey, I dunno, it’s just a publicity thing, who cares about those sick kids, it’s the me decade, babe! As you can probably imagine, this does not sit well with Harry. He storms out of the party, stealing a bunch of Jolly Dreams products on his way out the door, goes home, and immediately attaches a fake beard to his chin. He laughs and winces in the mirror, mumbling to himself, “it’s me!”

Now, I’m going to jump ahead a bit, usually I reserve final judgments for, well, the end of these pieces, but I’ve gotta say, I really enjoyed this movie, and part of what makes it hold together so well is the lead performance by Brandon Maggart as Harry. Maggart usually played supporting or cameo roles throughout his career, but here he truly gets to shine, totally revealing the wide range of Harry’s psychosis, and making you ultimately sympathize with him, even when he goes totally off the deep end and starts straight up murderizing people. Speaking of which…

Hey everyone, it’s Christmas Eve! But instead of St. Nick, it’s fuckin’ Harry Claus roaming the streets in his creeper-ass Econoline van. He breaks into Phil’s house and swaps out all of the presents for the kids with his homemade presents. He goes to the children’s hospital and almost gets shot by a hundred year old security guard, but then everyone is like look he brought presents what an awesome Santa Claus! He even gets in one final swipe at that rotten shitheel Moss Garcia by leaving him a giant sack full of dirt! Haha, take that you little pervert! Things kinda go off the rails a bit when Harry finds himself in front of this ridiculously gigantic church that looks straight outta Tim Burton’s Gotham City, and these three upper crust preppy assholes decide to poke fun of him for absolutely no reason. Sho what does Harry do? He pulls out a hatchet and butchers these people to death right there on the church steps in front of at least a hundred witnesses. Do any of them try to stop him? Nope!

So Harry is on the lam, and he finds himself at a very cheery Christmas party. All of the adults are super nice to him, and the kids are happy to see him, so he just plays along for awhile, and he’s in his element. He’s dancing the polka and giving the kids presents and knocking down shots that people are handing to him, they’re lovin’ this Papa Nöel, and apparently don’t notice the giant blood stains on his robes. When he decides it’s time to leave and go pay Frank and his family a visit, Harry Claus leaves the children with the following speech:

“Be good little girls and boys. Listen to your parents and do what they say. Obey your teachers and learn a whole lot. If you do this, I’ll make sure you get wonderful presents every year...But if you’re bad little girls and boys then your name goes into the bad little girls and boys book. And I’ll make sure you get something...horrible."

Shit, if that ain’t genuinely chilling, then your chill-o-meter may be broken.

Harry is really feeling his Santa Claus oats at this point, so he hilariously tries to actually go down the chimney, and nearly breaks his back. So he just breaks in through the back, the kids see him leaving some presents, and then Harry makes his way back to the master bedroom. Frank wakes up and is like, uhhh, Harry? What are you doing here, ya schmuck? And Harry starts to smother him with his bag full of toys! Whoa! Somehow this doesn’t wake up Frank’s wife, and Harry starts to get bored, so he grabs the star from a miniature Christmas tree next to the bed and fuckin’ SLASHES FRANK’S THROAT WITH IT! The wife wakes up and starts screaming, the kids watch as Harry Claus flees the premises. Ummm, Merry Christmas?

Christmas morning arrives, and Phil has an uneasy feeling. He just knows that Harry was somehow involved with these murders and break-ins last night. His wife, of course, is like, you’re being too hard on Harry, you’re totally blinded by your disappointment in him as a brother, you need to be nicer to him, to which of course he replies, grumble grumble grumble I’m Jeffrey DeMunn! Meanwhile, the cops are on the hunt for a murderous Santa, pulling in all sorts of drunken reprobates and mall goons for lineups. Harry, apparently realizing that the jig may be up soon, goes over to Jolly Dreams and destroys the rest of their toys. When he’s driving his creeper-ass Econoline van home, it gets stuck in a snowbank, and he finds himself on a gorgeous, picturesque suburban street lined with beautiful Christmas lights, and a bunch of kids are like, Yaaaay it’s Santa! He’s like oh, hey kids, here are the last of my presents from my murder satchel! The parents of these kids, meanwhile, realize that this guy must be the murderer, so one of them, this fuckin’ guy who’s dressed like a 1920s street tough for some reason, pulls out a switchblade and is like, the show’s over, Cringle! You make one move towards those tots and I’ll box your ears, seeeeee?! And Harry is like, you dumb asshole, you’ve forgotten the meaning of Christmas, children need an adult figure to look up to, who can teach them the difference between right and wrong, and the whole goddamn world seems to be in dereliction of that duty. Our 1920s street tough, of course, understands none of this, and despite protests from both the children and the fellow parents, who just wanna let the cops handle it, this guy lunges at Harry, and a minor brawl ensues, but Harry gets away.

Now, here’s where things start to get a bit…loopy. All of a sudden, these adults have formed a LYNCH MOB, and they’re chasing Harry down the streets while brandishing TORCHES AND PITCHFORKS! Where the hell did all of these Frankenstein-esque accessories come from?! So Harry hightails it to Phil’s house, where they finally duke it out once and for all. Phil is like, I always wanted a normal, strong older brother to look up to, and you let me down, and now you’re murdering people you sicko, to which Harry is like, you broke my heart by not believing in Santa Claus and I saw some crazy shit that you wouldn’t understand, to which Phil, quite understandably, is like, all of this shit is because of something I said when I was six years old?!?! THAT’S BULLSHIT, HARRY! GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUMBLE, I’M JEFFREY DEMUNN!!! And he fuckin’ chokes Harry out until he’s unconscious. He brings Harry’s lifeless body out to the van, at which point Harry wakes up and hilariously sucker punches Phil in the face, and goes speeding off. But oh balls, he’s surrounded! He’s got the angry mob coming from this direction, his angry brother coming from that direction, so what does he do? He drives his creeper-ass Econoline van off of a bridge. So that should be the end…but hark! What is that I spy? A dirty white van, and it’s starting to fly! In the light of the moon, all the townsfolk are stunned! They’re totally speechless, even Jeffrey DeMunn! “And I heard him exclaim as he rode out of sight, Merry Christmas to all! And to all a good night!” GODDAMN WHAT AN ENDING!

So yeah, I highly recommend Christmas Evil. Based on the title, I was expecting your typical high body count, gory slasher faire in the vein of the Silent Night, Deadly Night series, but instead I got something way more special: a dark character study about a vigilante loner who just so happens to be obsessed with Santa Claus. Like Travis Bickle but with a red stocking cap instead of a mohawk. And it helps that this is a genuinely well-made film too. The pacing is on point, the camerawork is full of really good tracking shots, and the soundtrack is buzzing with industrial Lynchian madness. It’s too bad that the director, Lewis Jackson, never made another film aside from this one. Still not convinced that Christmas Evil deserves to be a weirdo holiday classic? Well, here’s what no less an authority than John Goddamn Waters had to say about it, in his 1985 essay “Why I Love Christmas:”

“Forget White Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life and all the other hackneyed trash,” Waters tells us. “Go for the classics: Silent Night, Bloody Night, Black Christmas or the best seasonal film of all time, Christmas Evil (“He’ll sleigh you”).

This true cinematic masterpiece only played theatrically for a few seconds, but it’s now available on videocassette and no holiday family get-together is complete without it…I wish I had kids. I’d make them watch it every year and if they didn’t like it, they’d be punished.”

Well that settles it, Scumbags! If this movie is good enough for the Prince of Puke, then it’s sure as heck good enough for me!

[analogscum]

DON’S PLUM (2001, d. R.D. Robb)

Why is it, my dear Scumbags, that forbidden fruit is the sweetest fruit of all? Why is it that, when we know that we can’t have something, it only makes us want it that much more? This applies to any number of life’s pleasures, but especially to movies. Just think of the number of films that are out there, just waiting to be viewed, but because they’ve either been lost to time, or the powers that be have locked them away somewhere, we may never get to experience. London After Midnight. The Day the Clown Cried. Until recently, anyway, The Other Side of the Wind. Well, tonight, thanks to the magic of illegal YouTube uploads, I’m here to tell you about some of that forbidden fruit. We’re going to talk about a film that its stars do not want you to see (if you live in America or Canada, that is), a film that to this day they continue to try and bury via any legal shenanigans they can. So get ready, because it’s time to take a big juicy bite out of Don’s Plum.

To start, we must talk about the nineties. In the nineties, two big things happened that allowed Don’s Plum to come into existence: the advent of low-budget Indies with cool kids talking in verbose, provocative lingo (see: Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Reality Bites, Kids, etc.), and the teen heartthrob coronation of Leonardo DiCaprio. As an infamous New York magazine profile from 1998 established, young Leo ran with a gang of fellow young thespians who would be immortalized as “the Pussy Posse.” The modus operandi of the Pussy Posse was…well, you can probably guess what it was. These guys were all about scoring chicks and getting loaded and not tipping waitresses, and they lived like goddamn boy kings. Leo was the leader, with his two best friends Tobey Maguire and Kevin Connolly on either side of the pussy throne. Other members of the Pussy Posse included David Blaine, Lucas Haas, and R.D. Robb, who you undoubtedly remember as the kid who played Schwartz in A Christmas Story. Anyway, around 1995, Robb had a boffo idea: if I could get my hands on a camera and some black and white film, I could shoot my friends doing what we do every night, just hanging out acting like douchebags, and somehow this will magically congeal into a smash indie hit. So Leo and Tobey, who were allegedly under the impression that this was just going to be a short film, gave Robb a bunch of money to make this thing, which he did, casting Leo, Tobey, Kevin Connolly, and a bunch of their other friends, shooting on and off for a two year period, with the young actors improvising almost all of their dialogue. And with that, let’s get into the finished film itself, shall we?

Los Angeles. The mid to late nineties. Everything is in black and white and super fuckin’ suave, because, again, it’s Los Angeles in the mid to late nineties. Jeremy Sisto is driving a pickup truck with leopard print seats. He kicks a hippie chick out of the passenger seat, mumbling something about “I need…pleasure. And…I need…to know that with…BRUTE FORCE, I got you out of my life, mmkay?” So, uh, right off the bat, um, that dialogue. Yikes, right? The hippie chick, for her part, gets very angry and yells, “You were supposed to take me to Vegas!” Don’t worry, we never find out why she was going to Vegas in the first place, or who Jeremy Sisto’s character is, because he then promptly drives out of the movie. Bye, Jeremy Sisto! Beep beep!

Cut to Tobey Maguire, who looks like he just finished going through puberty roughly five minutes before Robb called “action!” He’s got a dopey look on his face, and an unfortunate bowl cut/chin scruff combo that makes him look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He’s sitting in a moody mid to late nineties café, drinking a comically large cappuccino, and half paying attention to the absolute worst goddamn music I have ever heard in my life. The end credits describe this band as “acid jazz,” but I think a more accurate description would be “music to try and swallow your own tongue to.” It’s like a fiendishly unlistenable combination of free jazz, ska, Tom Waits hobo wailing, and beat poetry, and it should’ve been left back in the nineties where it belongs, alongside Olestra and the Kosovo war. Tobey is trying to pick up some ladies to bring to hang out with his friends later, but oddly enough none of these women want to hang out with an arrogant sad sack who has all the charisma and sex appeal of Uncle Joey from Full House. Meanwhile, there’s like a full-on burlesque dance number happening to accompany this zoot suit cacophony, and the director only occasionally cuts to it for a few seconds at a time. I guess, who needs to see a big splashy musical number when you can watch a comic relief wet blanket who just got his first pubes strike out with every woman he talks to, right? Luckily, the café waitress takes pity on him and agrees to accompany him to meet up with his friends, and then does basically nothing else for the rest of the movie. Occasionally the scene will cut to her to remind us that she’s there, but, like, is she really there, though?

Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley is sitting facing a dude who is showing his bare ass to the camera, because that’s how real fuckin’ life just is, maaaaan, not everyone always wears pants, dude! They apparently just had sex, even though she’s fully clothed, and they get into a philosophical argument about nothing and everything, as if they’re in the worst deleted scene from Slacker. Even though they clearly hate each other, the dude, Brad, invites Jenny Lewis to come meet up with his friends, and she makes some overly hostile joke about how he didn’t make her cum earlier, because low-budget indie movie. Next we see Kevin Connolly driving down the street in his Jeep, when he encounters the hippie girl from the beginning of the movie, like a couple of star-crossed blabbedy blahs. Finally, FINALLY, we’re introduced to Leo, when he borrows a comically large mid to late nineties cell phone from this little hood rat kid who insists on telling him some boring story about a brawl at the Viper Room even though Leo is CLEARLY trying to use said comically large mid to late nineties cell phone to call up every fine young female he knows to meet up with him and his friends. This makes the little hood rat kid very very angry, and its supposed to be funny, I guess? Anyway, like they were all fated since time immemorial to do, all of our leads finally converge down at the titular greasy spoon eatery, Don’s Plum.

Now, have you ever been at a restaurant, and you find yourself sitting near a table of people who are so obnoxious, so vapid, so relentlessly annoying and unpleasant, that you can no longer enjoy your food, and just find yourself eavesdropping on every improbably stupid thing that these goddamn condom leaks are rattling on about, slowly being pulled further and further into their vortex of suck? You have? Well, then, congratulations, because that experience is the rest of this fuckin’ movie. Jenny Lewis and Brad are the first to arrive, and what do they do? They start playing a goddamn harmonica. Um, no. Hell no. I’m trying to enjoy my meal in relative peace and quiet, you know what I don’t need? Your shitty ass John Popper impressions, ok? Get that shit all the way outta here. Then, just to really up the insufferability factor, Jenny Lewis starts opining about Bob Dylan, but she only calls him Bob, which, you can take that one away from here right away, and then launches into the following diatribe...

“You know what I’m so sick of though? All that fucking commercial grunge crap. It all sounds alike. It’s like the record companies that are promoting sterile music. I mean, I love Nirvana, don’t get me wrong, but they weren’t the Beatles.”

WOOF. Mercifully, Brad interrupts her to tell her that he loves her, even though it’s their like, first or second date. She’s reasonably creeped out by this, and just by how earnest and dark and brooding Brad is in general, until thankfully Tobey and the waitress show up, soon followed by Kevin and the hippie hitchhiker. Leo gets his own grand entrance, checking himself out in the reflection of an aquarium while some mid to late nineties boom bap hip hop blares on the soundtrack, natch. For the next hour or so, the group basically just chain smoke countless cigarettes (remember when restaurants had smoking sections?), harasses their waitress, Flo (hey, it’s a mid to late nineties indie movie, were they supposed to NOT name the waitress Flo?) and talk shit endlessly. They also say the word “bro” a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Like, way too much. The world’s most date rapey frat dude would tell them to relax with how much they say the word “bro.”

Suddenly, in between all of the cigarettes and “bros,” a morbidly obese lady walks past the table, and Leo mocks her for daring to be morbidly obese. The hippie hitchhiker takes umbrage with this, and Leo, charming guy that he is, calls her a “squatty piece of hippie shit cunt.” This escalates to the point where the hippie hitchhiker storms off, throwing her Birkenstocks at Leo, and then smashes Kevin’s windshield with a bat that she found…somewhere? Anyway, she’s out of the movie now, and replacing her is Jenny Lewis’s friend Constance, who they just happen to run into. So more bullshitting and chain smoking unfolds. Female masturbation is discussed, because mid to late nineties indie movie. They play Never Have I Ever, and Kevin doesn’t understand the rules, which is kinda endearing. They almost get into a fight with some creep in a mechanics outfit and Buddy Holly glasses. A horrible ska cover of the “Menomena” song from The Muppet Show pops up for a minute of your life that you’ll never get back. Leo sends the group into more turmoil when he outs Brad as bisexual and gives Tobey shit for being vegan. He also gropes Jenny Lewis’s breasts countless times, but no one seems to mind. They all fight about this for awhile, but eventually apologies are offered and they’re bros once again. However, upon learning that Brad is into both girls and guys, Jenny Lewis begins freaking out about AIDS, because ugggh. Then she and Constance start making out for absolutely no reason other than mid to late nineties indie movie. At one point, the film fades out for no reason, and then fades up again on the exact same scene just in time to hear one of the ladies ask the table, “do you guys bathe every day and, like, wash yourself with soap?” Meanwhile, the film will occasionally cut to short vignettes of the characters each saying non-sequiturs into the restroom mirror. Why? Again, because mid to late nineties indie movie. DUH.

The absolute weirdest scene occurs when Kevin Connolly notices a lady producer whom he auditioned for the previous week. He calls her “Spielberg with a pussy,” because of course he does, what else would he call her? The rest of the table convinces him to go talk to her. To both our surprise and his, when he tentatively approaches her at the bar, she’s like, Oh my god, Kevin Connolly! It’s so good to see you! I’m sorry you didn’t get that part you auditioned for, but get this, I was just watching your tape again the other day, and I want to cast you in the lead in this other movie that I’m doing! Not only that, I have to admit, I find you and your Cub Scout haircut and thrift store bowling shirt to be super fucking sexy, and later on tonight I wanna fuck your brains out so hard, so take my number and call me, hot stuff.

WHAT?!?! Like, is this supposed to be a fantasy sequence? Is it? If it is, you have to tell me, movie! Shellshocked and erect, Kevin returns to the table and recounts the whole thing, including the line “bro, it was crazy, bro! She was on my dick so hard!” Leo, meanwhile, is wearing some fake redneck dentures, talking in an exaggerated Southern accent, and eating his own boogers. This is all real, you guys, I promise.

Anyway, some more shit happens, and everyone is yapping about some stupid, possibly offensive nonsense when suddenly a lady at the next table over slaps the guy that she’s with. Hard. Slaps him really hard. Our heroes get quiet for less than a second, before remarking on the slap that just took place. Holy shit bro, that bitch slapped that guy so hard bro, bro bro bro bro, etc. When things get back to normal, Leo is suddenly quiet and sullen. Kevin notices, and tries to coax it out of him the best way he knows how, which is by asking, “you fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro?” Leo starts giving all of these cagey, mysterious non-answers, and before long everyone at the table wants to know if he’s fuckin’ thinkin’ about something, bro. Leo takes a deep drag off of his cigarette, and tells everyone, “my dad committed suicide bro.”

WHAAAT?!?! I’ve gotta say, I honestly did not see this coming. In a mood, Leo storms off for the back bar. Jenny Lewis follows him, and tries to make him feel better by relating her OWN familial sob story: “My dad is gone. And my mom is a junkie. She sells her ass on the corner.”

WHAAAAAAT?!?! All of these sudden dollops of soap opera drama, man! Good gravy. For whatever reason, this turns Leo on, and he tries to bang her. She rebuffs his advances, and they get into an overwrought screaming match that plays out like a Level One improv exercise at the world’s shittiest acting school. Meanwhile, back at the table, Tobey gets mad at Kevin for pushing Leo to reveal the truth about his dead dad, and this escalates into a full on fist fight! BRO!

Now, holy shit, you guys, the last five minutes of this movie. Jenny Lewis runs into the bathroom, and begins lamenting into the mirror about how she let a “perfectly good fuck” get away. As she’s saying all this, she pulls some tinfoil, a straw and a lighter out of her purse and just straight up starts FREEBASING CRACK COCAINE.

WHAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Kinda makes all that AIDS talk seem kinda hollow, huh? Then, oh my god, she starts crying and launches into this fucking after school special monologue, screaming into the mirror about how “I was the one that came on to Uncle Jerry! I was the one that was curious!”

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?! Excuse me, waitress, but it seems you got drug abuse and child molestation in my mid to late nineties indie movie! What is ANY OF THAT doing in here?! And in the last five goddamn minutes of the movie, no less! So now Tobey and Kevin’s bro fight has spilled out onto the street, so Leo goes and breaks it up, he and Kevin do a very intricate secret bro handshake, everyone has a good laugh, Brad lights Kevin’s bowling shirt on fire, everyone goes prancing down the street, and the movie ends.

Now, imagine that you’re Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. It’s late 1997, or possibly early 1998. One of you is now the biggest movie star on the planet, thanks to a movie about a big-ass boat. You’ve just seen this Don’s Plum movie that your little buddy R.D. Robb made. First of all, it’s a full-length fucking movie, not a short like you both thought it would be. Second of all, both of you are in there saying terrible things about women, doing terrible things to women, and oh shit, the majority of your fans…wait for it…are women! Bro! But worst of all, our little buddy R.D. Robb, who we thought was our friend, our fellow Pussy Posse member, our BRO, is shopping this fucking movie around to distributors? This fucking movie that could possibly end our careers if anyone ever sees it? Tell me, if you were Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire in late 1997 or early 1998, would you do everything in your power to make sure that Don’s Plum never saw the light of day?

Well, according to a lawsuit filed in 1998 by one of the film’s producers, David Stutman, that’s exactly what Leo and Tobey did. Interestingly enough, according to court documents, apparently it was Tobey who was more concerned with how his performance in the film would negatively affect his nascent stardom, and therefore enlisted his much more famous best friend to help him carry out “a fraudulent and coercive campaign to prevent the release of the film.” I mean, Leo comes off as WAY more of an asshole than Tobey, who mainly just mopes around and eventually bro fights with Kevin Connolly, but in any case, both parties eventually reached a settlement in which Stutman agreed that Don’s Plum would not be released in the U.S. or Canada. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 10, 2001, and quickly faded into Hollywood lore.

Every few years, talk of this wild, black and white, mostly improvised movie with some big celebrities before they got famous will pop up again. Most recently, back in early 2016, another of the film’s producers, Dale Wheatley, uploaded the film to Vimeo and posted it to his website, freedonsplum.com, where anyone could watch it for free. Within days, Leo and Tobey’s respective legal teams had the video removed. You would think that after more than twenty years, with Leo now a respected Oscar winner, and Tobey having brought Spider-Man to life on the big screen, they’d be willing to let bygones be bygones. But it seems that they’re still legitimately concerned that they would stand to lose their vaunted place amongst the Hollywood elite if North American audiences ever got to see Don’s Plum. They still fear it. They still think it’s dangerous. In reality, it’s just embarrassing, which isn’t the same thing.

Truth is, there are a million movies out there just like Don’s Plum. There are a million other overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing indie movies made by overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people about the lives of overly earnest, needlessly vulgar, navel-gazing young people out there. I mean, I went to film school, fer chrissakes, I can say with some level of authority that Don’s Plum is the sort of project that my classmates and I poured our hearts and souls Into, only to be embarrassed by its messy, guileless sincerity later. The only thing that distinguishes Don’s Plum from the horde of other cringeworthy embryonic efforts like it is, as I said before, its status as cinematic forbidden fruit. Will its two stars ever allow the audience that it was made for to have a taste? Somehow I doubt it, bro.

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SCUM IN THE AISLES #4 (The House That Jack Built: Unrated Director’s Cut)

Sometimes, in order to seek out the weirdest discarded slices of celluloid trash that cinema has to offer, one must leave the confines of their crappy apartment, and go to an actual movie theater. This is a column recounting my excursions into the b-movie wilds. This is Scum in the Aisles!

PART 1: ANTICIPATION

“You’ve all bought tickets for a Lars von Trier film, so you know what you’re getting yourselves into.”

With this, Justin Timms, the founder of the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, and our host for this evening in a dark and chilly corner of Greenpoint known as the Film Noir Cinema, ceded the floor to the film we had all gathered to experience, The House That Jack Built. A two and a half hour art house serial killer epic by perhaps the most controversial filmmaker alive. A film that prompted both mass walkouts (anywhere between a dozen and a hundred people, depending on who you ask) and a ten minute standing ovation when it premiered out of competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A film which has since been decried as a gruesome, sadistic, mean-spirited slog by some, and praised as a beautiful, self-reflexive act of provocation by others.

Timms, for his part, had just seen the film for the first time along with the crowd from the first screening of the evening, and he looked positively shell-shocked. All around me, the crowd buzzed with nervousness and excitement. What sort of celluloid horrors awaited us? Would we be able to stomach what was splayed up on the screen? Would cinema’s angry Danish trickster god once again succeed in getting under our skin and raising our cockles? Or had his flagellations, both towards himself and the audience that improbably keeps coming back (myself included), grown tired and stale?

Our host had claimed that we knew what we were getting ourselves into simply by showing up to watch a Lars von Trier film…but did we?

PART 2: SYNOPSIS

The House That Jack Built follows Jack (Matt Dillon, turning in a career best performance) over roughly twelve years of a very eventful life. Jack lives somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, he’s an engineer who dabbles in architecture on the side. He comes from a wealthy family; his inheritance allows him to buy a large plot of land by a picturesque lake and build his titular house. However, what Jack really loves, his true passion in life, is annihilating other human beings. Jack is not just A serial killer, he is THE serial killer. Dude makes Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, both of whose real life exploits are alluded to via Jack’s activities in the film, look like slouches.

As von Trier likes to do, the film is divided into five chapters and an epilogue. The five chapters are each devoted to a specific murder out of the nearly hundred he commits that is supposed to make us understand why Jack does what he does. I’ll get to the epilogue later, because I have FEELINGS about it. Similarly, as von Trier also likes to do, Jack narrates these chapters in the form of a confession, in this case to a man named Verge (Bruno Ganz). With the first two chapters, von Trier catches us off guard by deploying humor. Aside from the violence, which is indeed quite brutal, von Trier manages to wring genuine laughs out of the absurdity of these situations. In the first chapter, Uma Thurman plays a rich woman with a flat tire who is so unpleasant and annoying that you can’t help but root for Jack to kill her. In the second chapter, Siobhan Fallon Hogan makes the mistake of believing Jack when he knocks on her door, first pretending to be a policeman, then incredulously switching gears and pretending to be an insurance salesman, before a comedy of errors involving Jack’s cleanliness-based OCD, a very annoyed local cop, and a telltale trail of blood ensues. The audience I saw it with tonight ate these moments up, partially laughing at the jokes themselves, then perhaps doubling down when we realized how inappropriate it was to be laughing in the first place.

However, the laughs quickly dried up once chapter three began. This chapter involved the shooting of children, and was the focus of much of the ire directed at the film after Cannes. Indeed, especially in a post-Sandy Hook world, the violence in this section was almost unbearable. Aside from seeing children gunned down in graphic detail, Jack then conducts some, shall we say, amateur taxidermy with one of the corpses, making for the second time in two films that von Trier has given us the nightmare image of a child with a horrifying rictus smile (shoutouts to the baby from Nymphomaniac Vol. II). Chapter four details the gruesome fate of Jack’s one and only girlfriend, played by Riley Keough. Von Trier ratchets up the tension here to near intolerable levels, foreshadowing a horrific act of mutilation a good ten minutes before it happens, and then showing it up close, in nauseatingly graphic detail. Most of the audience, myself included, watched this scene through our fingers.

Now, very quickly, I’ll say that, yes, for most normal moviegoers, the violence in this film will definitely be a lot. But speaking as a connoisseur of horror movies and weirdo genre experiments, it wasn’t anything outside of the ordinary. In fact, I found the violence in Antichrist to be way more upsetting and visceral than most of what you see in this film.

Chapter five sees Jack conducting a gristly experiment in his industrial freezer involving full metal jacket bullets. He also picks up a spiffy red hooded robe. This is where we catch up with the beginning of the film, and see Verge for the first time. As it turns out, Verge is here to chaperone Jack to the fires of Hell. This is where the Epilogue kicked off, and where the audience, myself DEFINITELY included, started to get a bit antsy. I seem to recall an old maxim that goes something like, you can do anything to an audience aside from bore them. Well, unfortunately, I found this Epilogue to be almost unbearably boring. Aside from some stunning imagery, it was mostly tedious and pretentious, straining for some sort of higher message that was just unnecessary. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it would be: Tarkovsky by way of Tim and Eric. Normally that would be a compliment coming from me. All the pretty pictures in the world means nothing if the audience is reaching for their coats.

PART 3: INTENTIONS

So what is von Trier trying to tell us with all of this madness? What does he want us to take with us once we leave the theater? If you follow his filmography, it’s not a big scoop to say that von Trier’s most recent work, starting with Antichrist and continuing through Melancholia and the Nymphomaniac films, have been somewhat autobiographical, sort of his version of State of the Union addresses. The House That Jack Built feels like the culmination of this stage of his career. In this film, von Trier puts himself on trial, with Dillon’s Jack as his surrogate. Just like with the Nymphomaniac films, there are many, many, MANY flowery, pseudo-philosophical digressions on a number of topics, accompanied by slides and bits of archival video (I’ll bet someone out there is kicking themselves for ever having introduced von Trier to Shudderstock), including the poetry of William Blake, photography, love, deer hunting, gothic architecture, and Glenn Gould. One especially epic digression finds Jack opining on dessert wines, the Third Reich architect Albert Speer, and finally the artistic integrity of von Trier’s own cinematic oeuvre, complete with clips from his previous films. Ballsy, no?

I would be lying to you if I said I understood everything that von Trier was trying to convey with these digressions. However, it is definitely clear to me that this film is meant to function as sort of a statement to the jury in the court of public opinion. Von Trier has always put himself at the forefront of his films more so than most directors, displaying his name alongside, or sometimes above his actors (hell, for this film, he even devoted an entire poster to himself). This, of course, means we the audience tend to read his films as glimpses into its maker’s psyche more than we would for most other directors, which is not entirely fair in my opinion, but it’s a blessing and a curse that von Trier has brought on himself. So what does he want us to understand about himself after we’ve seen The House That Jack Built? It seems to be something along the lines of, yes, every awful thing you’ve said about me is true, and you could never hate me as much as I hate myself, but I only answer to a higher power. Which, yeah, ok...but is that enough? Or, to put it more succinctly, is that even that interesting of a conclusion? We’ve now sat through nearly ten hours of von Trier’s cinematic therapy sessions over the last decade, and he basically ends it all by pulling a Tupac on us: only God can judge me.

PART 4: MISANTHROPY

The best and most succinct description of von Trier’s modus operandi as an artist that I’ve yet to hear comes from the excellent YouTube movie review show Welcome to the Basement. During their most recent episode, while giving a (largely negative) critique of Dogville, co-host Matt Sloan describes von Trier as “a provocateur that has the talent to back it up.” Indeed, if von Trier was entirely the sum of his detractors claims, then he would’ve been forgotten a long time ago. He does indeed have the cinematic bonafides, and they don’t let him down here: the camerawork in this film is gorgeous and intimate, the editing is kinetic and fast-paced, and as usual von Trier knows just how and when to perfectly deploy a pop song for maximum disarmament.

The most resounding jibe against von Trier is that he is a raving misogynist, due to the almost ludicrously awful levels of suffering that he puts his female protagonists through. For his part, von Trier has defended himself in the past by saying he is actually fighting against the patriarchy by showing the awful trials that women must endure in a society run by men. It’s a fair, if slightly dubious claim. Personally I’ve always been kind of dumbfounded that we seem to hold von Trier to these moral standards based on the fates of his fictional characters that we just don’t with other directors. What makes him an exception in this case? Wes Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos depict gruesome animal deaths left and right in their films, but does anyone legitimately think that they hate pets? However, when it comes to The House That Jack Built, I cannot and will not defend von Trier against these accusations of misogyny. Almost none of the female characters in the film are even given a name, and the one exception, Keough’s “Jaqueline Simple,” is derided constantly by Jack and called stupid because of her last name. It becomes especially stark and uncomfortable when, at one point, Verge observes that the women Jack has discussed strike him as “unbelievably stupid,” as if they somehow deserved to die because of that. Jack just shrugs and says that he also killed men, but he just so happened to choose these stories of killing women “at random.” Mhmmm. Not buying it this time, bucko.

Then again, you could argue that, since this story is told from the perspective of a man who unapologetically murders women in the most gruesome and debasing of ways, it would be dishonest or nonsensical to show them otherwise. But that brings up a whole other can of worms: what does it say about von Trier himself that he seems to seriously identify with a mass murderer? At one point, the film alludes to, and seemingly tries to make excuses for, the infamous press conference following Melancholia’s Cannes premiere during which von Trier compared himself to and jokingly sympathized with Hitler, an act of provocation which earned him an unofficial “ban for life” from the festival (obviously this did not last). And perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but the scene where Jack experiments with killing multiple people at once with a single full metal jacket bullet reminded me of a director at work, setting up his shot, changing the angle, making sure everything is just right, except in this instance, the camera is replaced with a high powered military grade rifle. Jack does remark at multiple times throughout the film that he sees his killings as a sort of art. Does von Trier relate to this sentiment? Does he see the creation of art as an act of love, as Verge does, or more like Jack, as an act of decay and degradation? I’m guessing more the latter than the former.

PART 5: DAMNATION

As good as Sloan’s summation of his modus operandi on Welcome to the Basement was, I have my own go-to log line: von Trier’s story is the story of a man who got everything he wished for, but was still miserable. For the first part of his career, von Trier was determined to an almost psychotic degree to be seen as one of the great auteurs of cinema. Anyone who didn’t agree was the fucking enemy. When his 1991 film Europa, which was up for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, won the Jury Prize instead, von Trier lashed out, calling that year’s jury president, Roman Polanski, “the midget” during his acceptance speech, and later hurled his trophy into the French Riviera in anger. But then his luck began to change. His next film to play in competition, 1996’s Breaking the Waves, won the Grand Prix and was nominated for an Oscar, and 2000’s Dancer in the Dark finally won him his long sought after Palme d’Or. After years of angrily bashing the world cinema establishment over the head with his own inflated opinion of himself, von Trier was finally one of the most respected and discussed filmmakers of the day.

The thing is, once you’re on top, there’s only one way you can go. He never finished his proposed “Land of Opportunities” trilogy, completing only the first two installments, Dogville and Manderlay, both of which were met with mixed to negative reviews. Von Trier soon found himself spiraling into depression and alcoholism, twin demons that he has wrestled with cinematically over the course of the last decade. It would not surprise me if The House That Jack Built was von Trier’s final film. On one hand, it feels like the thesis statement, the grand summary, of what he’s been trying to say with all of his films. On the other hand, in recent interviews, the guy just looks terrible. He’s frail, he’s got the tremors, his hair is unwashed and ratty and his clothes look ill-fitting and dirty. Despite getting sober not long after the Melancholia press conference debacle, it’s clear that alcohol abuse has taken quite a toll on him. Perhaps its gauche and inappropriate to speculate from afar on von Trier’s mortality, but he’s already done it himself, by making The House That Jack Built.

EPILOGUE: FUTILITY

Now that I’ve reached the end of this jeremiad of a review, I have to wonder, what was it all for? You’ve probably already made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to see this film. You’ve probably already got a very strong opinion on Lars von Trier, both the man and his work. Some of you are probably judging me for even having paid money to see this film, which is your right. Odds are, whatever you think about this filmmaker and his films are not going to be swayed either way by anything I have to say. And even if you did want to experience The House That Jack Built like I did, you can’t: last night was the only night that von Trier’s “Unrated Director’s Cut,” the one that screened at Cannes, is going to be shown in theaters (a stunt that has apparently landed IFC Films in hot water with the MPAA), before an R-rated version is released next month. Was this a shameless promotional ploy? Yes. Did it still give us weirdo cinephiles the feeling that we were part of a super naughty super secret club? Absolutely. I didn’t know anyone in that dark and chilly corner of Greenpoint, but I feel connected to them for life, since we all went through this cinematic journey to Hell together. So, then, now that we’ve descended into the flames, how to describe The House That Jack Built? It is vibrant and stuffy and brilliant and maddening and hilarious and terrifying and pretentious and vulnerable and prescient and infuriating and awful and a masterpiece. In other words, it is a Lars von Trier film. You know what you’re getting yourself into.

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THE BLACK GESTAPO (1975, d. Lee Frost)

Finally, my dear Scumbags (or, should I say, my dear Jive Turkeys?), it’s time to discuss blaxploitation. Technically it’s not the first time the funkiest of genres has graced this fair internet site: we’ve previously covered Ebony, Ivory & Jade, which has traces of blaxploitation in it, but consists more heavily of a women’s prison film, a shot of a dummy getting kung-fu’d, and a bunch of boring nonsense. But no more half measures! Today, we’re getting knees deep in the dy-no-mite waters of blaxploitation, I’m talking perfectly manicured afros, I’m talking overwrought Shakespearian dialogue delivery, I’m talking a soundtrack full of nothing but stone cold grooves until the break of dawn, woman! And what better way to cruise down blaxploitation lane than to discuss a title that is, shall we say, rather eye-catching. A title that is seemingly designed to give old white conservatives a heart attack. A title that, politically speaking, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but shut yo mouth, cause we’re talkin’ bout 1975’s The Black Gestapo!

Watts. Los Angeles. The ghett-ooooooooo. White mobsters who have names like Vito despite the fact that they all kinda look like Kris Kristofferson are running amok all over town. They’re shaking down businesses! They’re funding pushers and pimps! They’re beating up prostitutes! It’s a whole thing, but luckily some local brothers have started a group called the People’s Army, which we learn was started with a government grant. This is the first sign that this film takes place in a fantasy world, even in a progressive blue state like California, it’s beyond insane to imagine that the government would ever willingly fund a group of black men in military garb in a post-Panthers society. But here’s the thing: the group’s leader, General Ahmed, is a pacifist in his activism. He only cares about providing food and shelter for the homeless, and getting drugs off the street; if he’s gotta work with The Man in order to get that done, so be it! When we meet Ahmed, he’s giving a speech to a very small group of very disinterested Watts residents, who receive his message of picking oneself up by the bootstraps with decidedly muted applause. Meanwhile, Ahmed’s second in command, Colonel Kojah, seems to have other ideas. This is conveyed by a sudden cut to actual news footage of Hitler greeting his troops, which turns deep black before the blaring funk of the soundtrack greets the title card. Holy shit! That’s certainly one way to start your movie!

Ahmed goes to check in on the local medical center, where his on again off again woman, Marsha, works as a nurse. Mere moments later, Marsha is just trying to walk home, when Vito and his lil buddy start harassing her, implying that she’s a prosititute and all sorts of jive turkey behavior. Marsha, because she don’t take no shit, slaps Vito, and a classic blaxploitation kung-fu fight ensues. Yaaaay! Kojah sees this as his opportunity to make moves: he goes to Ahmed and is like, hey man, your woman almost got raped and beaten in broad daylight today, I wanna start a “security force.” Ahmed, who ain’t no dummy, is like, Kojah, dude, I know you, and I know that you’re probably gonna use this so-called “security force” as a convenient excuse to start a race war. Kojah is like, um, no I’m not. To which Ahmed is like, ok fine, I’ll give you six men, don’t make me regret this. Meanwhile, the white mobsters are having a business meeting. I love these types of scenes in genre movies, these scenes that imply that criminal organizations are run like corporate boardrooms. The lead gangster, Vincent, has a little dog and looks so much like Higgins from Magnum Pol.I. that I had to look and make sure that he wasn’t played by John Hillerman (turns out he’s being played by the film’s director, Lee Frost). Vincent is like, hey Vito, this one pimp hasn’t payed up, take your lil buddy and figure it out.

Vito and his lil buddy go and visit this prostitute, who for some reason has a Disneyland pendant on her wall, which is a weird decision on the part of the art director. Anyway, this begins a trend of white women being used as scantily clad sex objects in this film. Every white woman who appears onscreen is only there to show her breasts. In fact, the film doesn’t do much better by Marsha, either: when she’s not being raped or assaulted, she’s pretty much nothing more than an angry black woman stereotype. Given that this is the genre that gave us Pam Fucking Grier, the misogyny herein is disappointing, to say the least. Anyway, Vito and his lil buddy continue searching for the pimp, while Kojah meets with an old military buddy who looks like Bill Withers. Bill Withers is like, man, I think your boss is a jive-ass brother, to which Kojah is like, I agree, he sucks, so we’re gonna start some new shit, and I need you as my right hand man. Meanwhile, Vito and lil buddy are at this bar, when Vito spots Marsha and is like, you know what, we can shake that pimp down later, I’ve got unfinished business with this lady. Cut to a horrific beating and rape scene, which, no thanks, I didn’t ask for that.

Kojah and his six troops show up at Marsha’s house the next day and is like, hey sister, tell me who did this to you. Marsha is like, since it won’t make any difference because they’re mobbed up AF, it was Vito. Kojah is like, ok cool, byeeeeee. Cut to Kojah and his six troops breaking into Vito’s house in the middle of the night. Vito is enjoying a nice relaxing bath, a choice he will soon come to regret. The troops burst in, and all I could think was how impressive it was that they pulled off this scene in such a small bathroom. Anyway, Kojah pulls out a straight razor, CASTRATES VITO, AND FLUSHES HIS JUNK DOWN THE GODDAMN TOILET AND VITO BLEEDS TO DEATH!!! WHOA MOMMA!!! This of course kicks off the race war that Ahmed was afraid of, whoops. Vincent, who is just trying to sleep with his very annoyed, very topless lady friend, is more than happy to retaliate. A bunch of gangsters are killed, but a bunch of Kojah’s men are also killed. This culminates in lil buddy’s death scene, which is wonderful. He’s driving down the freeway when a car full of buh-buh-buh-baaaaabes pull up next to him. He’s like, heeeeey! And then one of them pulls out a single boob, and he literally giggles like a child. Oh whoops, then they side swipe him, and this car goes careening off of a goddamn cliff. It is ruined something fierce! Somehow lil buddy survives, but whoops, there’s Kojah and his men, and they’re packing heat. They shoot at lil buddy a bunch, then they throw a Molotov cocktail at his car. Damn, that’s some cold dinner. Vincent decides to get the hell outta town, lamenting the fact that he should’ve stayed in Harlem in the first place. I’ve gotta agree with him, Harlem is great! My sister lives there! Maison du Harlem is a great restaurant!

So now that they’ve tasted victory, Kojah is like, alright, time to go full on black gestapo up in this piece! Suddenly he’s got this palatial mansion compound where his troops are trained and there’s a swimming pool and all the white women they’d ever want to sock it to. Oh and look, they’ve eschewed the khaki and red fatigues favored by Ahmed in exchange for some black uniforms, complete with…oh, yup, shit, that’s an actual Third Reich officer’s hat that Kojah is now wearing. He works his troops up into a frenzy with his fiery speechifying, which culminates in them all chanting “Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!” Just in case we somehow missed the point in this, the chant then transitions into a recording of a bunch of Nazis chanting “Sieg heil!” Thanks, movie.

Somehow all of these new developments totally elude Ahmed, who decides to go to Marsha and be like, hey woman, this movie’s runtime needs some padding out, wanna make sweet sweet love to me? Marsha is like, sure why not. While these boots are being knocked, the black gestapo is running roughshod all over Watts. They’ve basically replaced the mobsters; now it’s Kojah and his troops that the local businesses are paying for “protection,” it’s Kojah and his troops who are funding the pushers and the pimps, and it’s Kojah and his troops who are beating up that poor prostitute who just wants to go back to Disneyland from the beginning of the movie. This upsets the citizens of Watts, who think that the People’s Army are responsible for Kojah’s bullshit, so they respond by bombing the local medical center. Marsha is, shall we say, less than thrilled about this, so she goes to Ahmed and is like, get your ass out of my bed and go get ya boy! Rightfully so, Marsha.

Ahmed goes to visit Kojah at his compound and is like, what the hell bro, didn’t I warn you about starting a race war, I gave you an inch and you took a mile, the streets are worse than they ever were when the mob was in town, and worst of all Marsha is pissed off at me! Kojah just fucking shrugs his shoulders and is like, whatever man, go feed some homeless people like a weak ass pussy, we ain’t homies no more. Ahmed is like, fine with me, much like Michael Showalter in that one sketch from The State, I’m outta here! At which point Kojah is like, hey Bill Withers, go pick up some drugs from a very cliche looking blaxploitation drug dealer so that I can sell them to the community, I’m sure this won’t backfire on me at all.

So Bill Withers goes and picks up these drugs from Not-Superfly, but oh cripes, a bunch of dudes in People’s Army uniforms steal the drugs! Bill Withers interrupts Kojah mid fuck sesh with a white lady to be like, the drugs got stolen, and you know that Ahmed had something to do with it, let’s kill him. Kojah is like, yeah, fine, kill him. So Bill Withers and co. track Ahmed down, shoot him, and he falls down a hill. However, they make the mistake of being too lazy to actually go down this hill and make sure that he’s dead. Way to half-ass your one job, Bill Withers!

Unfortunately for the black gestapo, this assassination attempt inexplicably turns Ahmed into a Rambo super soldier. The last half hour of the film is essentially him infiltrating the compound and fucking up everyone in sight; it makes no goddamn sense from a character perspective, but oh man is it awesome. Just shootouts and explosions and kung-fu fights galore! So Ahmed basically blows everyone up with booby traps, until only Kojah and Bill Withers are left alive. Ahmed makes Kojah drop his gun into the pool, but then Bill Withers sneaks up behind Ahmed and gets him in a headlock. Kojah pulls out his straight razor, and we know what THAT’S for, but then Ahmed karate kicks Kojah, and Bill Withers gets his throat slit by the straight razor! Whoa! Then Ahmed and Kojah have their final fight…in the pool! Underwater showdown, holy heck! Ahmed gets the rifle from the bottom of the pool and shoots Kojah dead! Again, underwater! So miss me with this nonsense that black people can’t swim! Ahmed stumbles out of the compound. Freeze frame on Kojah’s dead body floating in the pool. Cue the funk!

Aside from all of the unfortunate misogynistic bullshit, The Black Gestapo has everything that you could want from a blaxploitation film. The dialogue and acting is enjoyably over the top, the violence is pulpy and low rent and awesome, and of course the soundtrack kicks fucking ass. And on top of all that, the film manages to capture a pivotal moment in the history of the civil rights movement, when there was a schism in the Black Panthers between those who wanted to provide community service and those who wanted violent revolution. What doesn’t quite track however, is the whole gestapo connection. Aside from it being a big, splashy, attention-grabbing title, it’s hard to imagine a black revolutionary finding any sort of inspiration from the Third Reich, who were, surprise surprise, pretty fucking racist against black people. Then again, this is true of basically all blaxploitation films: the social context is there if you want it, but if you wanna just watch a bunch of honkies get kung-fu kicked to a blaring funk soundtrack, then you do you, my brother. You do you.

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SOMETIMES AUNT MARTHA DOES DREADFUL THINGS (1971, d. Thomas Casey)

It’s turkey time, Scumbags! Gobble gobble!

Since Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, we’re going to be discussing movies about weird families this week. Now, I know what you’re thinking: you wanna talk about weird families, just look at the gaggle of miscreants I’m gonna have to sit around the table with in a few days! They all belong in the gosh darn loony bin! Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence, buster! Well, sure, maybe your grandpa constantly misgenders you despite the fact that you are not transgender, and that one uncle thinks that gay people are a Jewish conspiracy, and your little cousin is always knocking over the gravy boat with his incessant dabbing, but hey, look on the bright side: at least your family doesn’t consist of a burned out hippie man-child and a cross-dressing murderous lunatic on the run from the law, right? On second thought, that sounds slightly better than all that “gay people are a Jewish conspiracy” business, but let’s move on, because holy frijoles, we need to discuss 1971’s Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things.

We open in Miami. Scary already, right?! Two small time crooks, Stanley and Paul, are on the run. Turns out, they’re wanted in Baltimore for robbery and murder, so they’re laying low down south. Problem is, things aren’t going so well. Stanley, as we learn, is driving around town in this absurd van that looks like a cross between Ken Kesey’s bus and the Mystery Machine, he’s always getting loaded, and he’s always bringing “far out chicks” back to the house. He also likes eating mini donuts out of a cigar box. Paul, meanwhile, is disguising himself as the titular Aunt Martha, because apparently two men living together in suburban Florida is much stranger than one man and what is obviously a man in a Halloween fright wig and elderly maid clothes living together. Oh, and Paul is extremely bitchy, prone to angry outbursts, and has a nasty habit of butchering the “far out chicks” that Stanley is always bringing home.

If nothing else, this movie is a harrowing portrayal of a toxic, codependent relationship. It is heavily implied, though never quite said out loud, that Stanley and Paul are lovers, but they act like a contentious couple throughout the entire film. Have you ever been around a couple where one is always flying off the handle at the smallest slights and just mercilessly berating their partner, who is immune to the endless haranguing by now, so they just act up out of spite? I have, and it is super fucking awkward, and this movie captures that dynamic perfectly. Paul is a massive control freak, while Stanley just wants to live the groovy life and let his freak flag fly, maaaaaan. Except when it comes to the aforementioned “far out chicks,” that is: whenever one tries to initiate the nasty with him, Stanley flips out and screams for Paul to come get them away from him. Did we mention that Stanley and Paul even sleep in the same bed?

Most of Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things follows this general pattern: Stanley does something that annoys Paul, Paul makes a big angry scene, which only eggs Stanley on more. Thrown into the mix are their nosy neighbor from across the street, who is pregnant and has a daughter who is training to become a nurse. This nosy neighbor somehow never realizes that Aunt Martha is a man in drag, and Stanley develops a crush on the nurse daughter, probably because she’s the only girl in the movie who isn’t trying to ride the baloney pony. We also occasionally check in with a local pizza parlor, because why not. And then there’s the lowlife junky who has followed them all the way from Baltimore, who wants to steal the diamonds and jewels that they’ve got, or something, this plot point never really quite pans out.

Things escalate to the point where the last half hour or so of the film just descends into insane violence. The nosy neighbor insists on making Stanley a cake for his birthday. While Stanley and Paul are gone, the junky goes rifling through the house, and eventually finds the diamonds and jewels. He gets into a scuffle with Stanley and Paul, and as he’s running out of their house, he knocks over the nosy neighbor, who is on her way to deliver the cake, and somehow this mortally wounds her? Paul goes after the junky, eventually gunning him down on a golf course, because Florida. Meanwhile, Stanley takes the nosy neighbor back to the shack behind their house. She’s somehow dying from being knocked over, and before she dies, she whispers, “save my baby.” That’s when Stanley pulls out Paul’s favorite stabbing knife, and we are treated to the most twisted c-section this side of Prometheus. Got DAMN!!!

Paul decides that it’s time for them to flee, but Stanley is getting tired of running. Nevertheless, Paul bullies Stanley into leaving the stillborn baby on nursing student’s doorstep, ditching the Ken Kesey Mystery Machine, and they hide out at an abandoned movie studio. It is at this point that Stanley is like, seriously, I’ve had enough, I don’t care if I go to jail, I can’t run anymore. Paul is decidedly not enthused by Stanley’s decision, and is like, you fool, you’re going to rat me out if you get caught, and you’re not taking me down with you! To which Stanley is like, c’mon man, I was the one who murdered and robbed that lady, they only want me. Which prompts Paul to go into full on super villain mode and be like, you shithead, I murdered that woman and gaslighted you into thinking that you did, because you’re high as fuck all of the time, it was a perfect crime, so what if I stole it from the ending of Multiple Maniacs! They have a very long, very slow game of cat and mouse (all of the “action” scenes in this movie are very long and very slow, just FYI), and then the police show up. Stanley is like, hey, my pseudo boyfriend is holding me hostage in here, OMG haaaaaaalp! So Paul has no choice but to stab Stanley a whole bunch of times until he’s been thoroughly murderized, but immediately regrets it. How do we know this? Because this pair’s relationship has progressed to the point where Paul cannot even live without Stanley, so as the cops are busting into the abandoned movie studio, Paul shoots himself in the head and dies. Now they can lay next to each other like latent homosexuals all the time, because they’re corpses.

Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things is a wonderful time capsule that gives you a peak back into a very important time in exploitation filmmaking. It will be no surprise to you, given the state’s down and dirty reputation today, that Florida was a hotbed for weirdos with shitty cameras and sick imaginations back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Florida’s underground film industry gave us the likes of Doris Wishman, Dave Friedman, and Herschell Gordon Lewis, for chryssakes!  This is a prime example of one of that era’s oddball, crackpot roughies, where the sun looks like it has jaundice, the tacky interiors were clearly shot on a soundstage somewhere, and the music seems like it was lifted straight out of I Dream of Jeannie, making for a hilariously incongruous counterpart to the always dirty, sometimes psychedelic imagery it is meant to accompany.

And then there are the performances. Abe Zwick is an absolute hoot as Paul. He vigorously chews the scenery, giving every bit of spewed invective a Shakespearian verve. I started to write down his most memorable line deliveries (“that…BASTARD!”), but soon realized I would be quoting all of his lines from the film. The best way to sum up his performance here is to say, imagine Dudley Manlove starring in a John Waters movie, but even more demented. Wayne Crawford (who is billed here as “Scott Lawrence” and would go on to produce Valley Girl and Night of the Comet) does an admirable job as Stanley, really nailing the balance between his debauched hippie ways and his childlike insouciance. Simply put, these guys bring real pathos to these cartoonish campy roles, and if they weren’t starring in this thing, it would be pretty much unwatchable. As it is, the film is sluggishly paced, with scenes that run on for far too long, not to mention various scenes that play out in near total darkness. At 95 minutes, it feels twice and long and really would not suffer from being shorter by half. But if you’re a genre fan, you’ve gotta watch this thing at least once. It’s the cinematic equivalent of when your parents catch you smoking cigarettes, so they make you smoke a whole carton in one sitting. Rarely does making yourself sick feel this fun.

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BLACKOUT (1985, d. Douglas Hickox)

I’m gonna let you in on the process, my dear Scumbags. The method behind all of this madness, if you will. This is how I tend to go about picking a movie to write about for this site: I look at the VHS box art. I would like to say that this is because I want to make the experience of reading ANALOG SCUM like scrounging through the grimy back section of a video store of yore, but the reality is that I’m lazy and easily swayed by aesthetics. So you can imagine my elation when I came across the box art for 1985’s Blackout. I mean, look at this puppy! There’s a bondage gimp man brandishing a knife, with a very rock n’ roll title font, what’s not to love?! This is one of those titles that haunted (tee hee) the horror section of my local National Video as a young’n, and I’m sure horror fans around my age or older remember those piercing blue eyes staring at us through that leather mask. Based on this box art, I thought I would be watching a sleazy giallo-inspired slasher, with nudity and gore to spare, maybe even of the SOV variety, which is a-ok in my book. But then…I learned that Blackout was a made-for-TV movie. Oh fudge.

So there’s this lady in a red trench coat, right? She walks up to a house and knocks on the back door. Then she rings the doorbell, and it sounds like a buzzer, which, who has a doorbell on their back door, and that’s not how a doorbell sounds. Fucking CARE MORE, filmmakers. The lady finds a spare key and enters the house. It’s pretty eerie. There’s classical music blaring, and the remnants of a child’s birthday party are still on the dining table. The lady goes into a side office, where the classical music is blaring from, and turns off the record player. But what’s that? The TV is on in another room. So the lady heads downstairs. It’s dark. It’s creepy. And in the TV room, there’s another lady and three kids, and they’re super duper dead! Whoa! Afternoon ruined!

And so enters Detective Grandpa. He’s a grizzled old gumshoe who you just know is going to take this case way too personally and the guy who did it is going to become his white whale, etc. etc. etc. Detective Grandpa learns that the patriarch of this murdered family, one Ed Vincent, has gone missing. So of course that must be the perp who done it! Cut to: a guy hitchhiking by the side of the road. Huh? So he gets picked up by someone driving what looks like a Yugo or a Gremlin or some other terrible late 20th century car. Anyway, this fucking guy immediately starts tailgating a lumber truck for no goddamn reason. Ease off the gas, dicknose! Then he tries to pass the lumber truck on the right hand side, which, c’mon, asshole, and then ANOTHER LUMBER TRUCK comes in the other direction, the car swerves, goes up a hill, comes crashing down, and fucking EXPLODES. Was it worth it, ya tailgating son of a bitch?!

Now the movie turns into The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for a few minutes, and we see things from the perspective of the hitchhiker. Turns out he’s suffered serious facial injuries and will require a series of total reconstructive surgeries, plus he’s got amnesia, so he has no idea who he is, whoops. We meet a bunch of his doctors, who don’t matter, plus his nurse, who is played by Kathleen Quinlan, aka the lady from Apollo 13, plus her cop boyfriend, played by Michael Beck, aka the guy from The Warriors and zero other good movies. She’s a recent divorcee, and he’s extremely pushy about wanting to get married, and gets super annoyed when she tries to assert her personhood, but don’t worry about it. Anyway, our homie gets all of his surgeries, and decides that he wants to look like Keith Carradine, which is fine. It’s a choice. It’s like saying, hey, make me look like a more wholesome Klaus Kinski. But yeah, eventually he and Kathleen Quinlan fall in love, and decide to get married. Michael Beck takes this extremely well, by which I mean he yells at her and then pretends he was only worried about their financial situation. Oh hey, is that a wall on Michael Beck’s bedroom that’s covered in photos of Kathleen Quinlan? I thought I said don’t worry about it!

Cut to: six years later. Keith Carradine is going by the name Allen Devlin. He’s a super successful real estate agent, he and Kathleen Quinlan are happily married, and they have three kids. Detective Grandpa, meanwhile, has been forced into retirement by the powers that be, definitely because of political reasons and not because he’s a degenerate drunk. But then someone anonymously sends him a newspaper clipping with a picture of Allen Devlin, and he’s like, oh fuuuuuuuuck, I’m off to Washington state to harass some innocent people! He accosts Allen on a crowded elevator and is like, Oh hey, Ed Vincent! And of course Allen is like, um, no, you’ve got the wrong guy. And Detective Grandpa is like, oh no, you’re definitely Ed Vincent, remember, you had a wife and three kids and then they were fucking murdered?! Anyhoo, see ya later! And then he just gets off the elevator and Allen is like, what the hell was that about, some old rummy just called me a killer?!

Detective Grandpa then does what he should’ve done in the first place were he not a whisky-soaked dickhead and shows up at Allen Devlin’s office. He shows Allen a bunch of crime scene photos and Allen is horrified and agrees to prove his innocence however he can. THE VERY NEXT SCENE, they go to the doctors and the doctors are like, hey, look, Allen’s dental records don’t match Ed Vincent’s, so this movie should basically be over now. But Detective Grandpa is like, nah, who needs scientific evidence when you’ve got a sleuth’s intuition and blah blah burp. At this point Michael Beck gets pulled back into the movie, and once again rightfully points out that the movie should be over at this point because scientifically speaking Allen can’t be Ed Vincent, and Detective Grandpa responds by calling Michael Beck a “young hot shot computer type.” Ugh. So Allen hires a private investigator to look into his past before the accident, which goes pretty much nowhere. Kathleen Quinlan starts getting threatening phone calls from someone calling themselves Ed, and addressing her by the dead wife’s first name. Oh, and out of the fucking blue, Mr. Bondage Guy from the box art shows up and starts attacking women around town, and Detective Grandpa is like, oh yeah, forgot to mention this, we had similar attacks out in Ohio, creep in a gimp mask going around rapin’ everybody up in here, but they stopped…AFTER THE VINCENT FAMILY MURDER!!! SPOOOOOOOOKY!!! It’s like, c’mon, you’ve GOT to set this up way before the mid-point of the movie! It’s like getting a sandwich with one too many meats: do you want a serial killer hoagie or a bondage rapist grinder? PICK ONE, BLACKOUT!

So the private eye that Allen hired winds up dead, and the police of course suspect Allen. Allen, meanwhile, is starting to think that Detective Grandpa and Michael Beck are conspiring to set him up, because of course he would think that! This sentient bottle of Captain Morgan and the creepy cop who clearly still loves his wife suddenly start lobbing accusations of murder at him? C’mon, what’s he supposed to think? But then one of the kids finds a gimp mask in the garden shed! Oh noooooo! Kathleen Quinlan is like, gaaaaah maybe you are a murderizer! And brandishes a knife at him, and Allen is like, c’mon, baby, you know me better than that, I have no idea how that super sexy mask got in our garden shed! Look, to prove that I’m not a murderer, I’ll have myself committed, so that the cops can’t arrest me (which is not how that works), and then when the crimes continue, I’ll be exonerated for good! So off to the loony bin he goes, and into the garbage bin this movie goes.

Detective Grandpa gets the DNA results back from the lab on the super sexy gimp mask: no traces of Allen anywhere on the thing. And then a guy gets arrested for attempted rape, and they find a different sexy gimp mask on him! All of a sudden, Michael Beck, who has been calling Detective Grandpa crazy this whole time, is like, this could be a copycat crime, I think Allen is the real bad guy here now because the plot needs me to! Detective Grandpa is like, nah, your man confessed, there’s no real evidence to tie Allen to any of this, I was wrong, I’m going back to my elderly bachelor’s apartment in Ohio, but before I do that, can I use your bathroom? Michael Beck is like, sure, no problem, just ignore my wall festooned with pictures of Allen’s wife, if you could. But whoops, he doesn’t, and Detective Grandpa is like, holy shit, you set this whole thing up because you wanna go back to boning Kathleen Quinlan, you sent me that newspaper clipping, didn’t you? And Michael Beck, toilet clown that he is, tries to have it both ways, and is like, ok fine, I sent you the newspaper clipping, but I did it because I really thought he may be the guy you’re after, not because of this obvious romantic vendetta of mine! Psssssssh. So then Detective Grandpa is like, did you make those phone calls and plant the gimp mask too? To which Michael Beck is like, how dare you, I may have sent you a newspaper clipping in the hope of getting my unrequited love’s new husband accused of murder, but I’d NEVER plant evidence! Get off your fucking high horse, Beck, and just admit that you’re a creep, yeeeeaaaaaah.

To his credit, Detective Grandpa stops by to see Kathleen Quinlan, and is like, hey, I fucked up, your husband is definitely innocent, and Michael Beck definitely set this whole thing in motion because he’s still in love with you. Which comes as a huge shock to Kathleen Quinlan, and I hate when movies do this, because women are fucking smarter than this. Men in general, but especially creepy men, are terrible at hiding their unrequited feelings, and women definitely know, they just choose to ignore it. Whatever. So Kathleen Quinlan goes to see Allen and is like, I know you’re innocent now, I just want you back, and he’s like, ok, you’re right, it’s time for me to come back to my family, but oooooh boy am I mad at Detective Grandpa and Michael Beck! Anyway, I should be home just in time for…OUR SON’S BIRTHDAY PARTY!!! SPOOOOOOOOOOKY!!!

Michael Beck, because he’s awesome at ideas, decides to show Kathleen Quinlan that he’s not a creep by accosting her in the Safeway parking lot. Smooth move, Xanadu. He’s like, look, I know that I made a few oopsies, but I still think that your husband is a murderer, and you and your family are in danger. So finally Kathleen Quinlan just unloads on him. She’s like, you’re a manipulative jerk, that’s why I didn’t want to marry you, and that’s why we’re in this situation now, and you need to fucking nut up and get over this childish crush you have on me, and while you’re at it stay away from me and my family, I never want to see you ever again. So Michael Beck totally respects these wishes and…nope, nope, sorry, he parks his car across from the house and goes and stalks them. To make sure they’re “safe.” Fuck offfffffffff, dude.

So the kids are celebrating the youngest’s birthday, they’re decorating the house and blaring the rock n’ roll radio (let’s go!). Kathleen Quinlan asks one of the kids to go close the garage door, but he’s like, nah, I’m on the phone with the radio station so that they’ll give little fuckin’ Mikey or whatever his name is a shoutout on the air! So Kathleen Quinlan goes herself to take care of the garage door, but the lights aren’t working, so she grabs a flashlight, and then, OH CRIPES IT’S MR. BONDAGE GUY!!! She fights him off and manages to knock him out. Meanwhile, Detective Grandpa has stopped for gas, when he hears the birthday dedication to little fuckin’ Mikey or whatever his name is on the radio and he’s like DEAR GOD!!! So then Kathleen Quinlan is like, I must know! So she pulls off the super sexy gimp mask, and whoopdie fuck, it’s Allen. Great. So he wakes up and starts smacking her around and he’s like blargh bloogh I’m crazy now, I’m Ed Vincent and I think you’re my wife, so everybody’s going to hell tonight! The kids don’t hear any of this, of course, because of that blasted rock n’ roll music! She barricades herself in the car, and oh shit, there’s Michael Beck’s dead body! He starts busting out the windows, she crawls out of the driveway, and he’s about to gank her with an axe, when all of a sudden, Detective Grandpa shows up and puts two between the eyes. RIP Allen Devlin. RIP Ed Vincent. And RIP Blackout.

Mostly this movie is just a deeply frustrating viewing experience. The central premise, an amnesiac accused of murder, is a really smart and fascinating one, because there are so many ways you can run with it: is this guy really a secret cold blooded killer? Is this detective just letting his obsession (and all that liquor) cloud his judgement? Or are they both being manipulated by someone else for their own nefarious means? Unfortunately, the filmmakers decided to go with the most predictable and boring answer, while also taking the most needlessly convoluted route to get there. However, the performances are all good, more or less, and there’s some excellent cinematography, courtesy of Tak Fujimoto, who would go on to do incredible work with Jonathan Demme and others, so at least the movie looks good. Still, you can’t help but lament what a lost opportunity this is from a storytelling perspective. This is exactly the types of movies that should be getting remade: films with interesting plots that failed in execution. Just imagine what someone like Nicolas Winding Refn or David Fincher could do with this story, right?!

I’ll wrap things up with a strange and macabre addendum. Thanks to Nate Phillips, who runs the fantastic online storefront Media Crypt (I own a few of their shirts, and you should too!), for pointing out to me the fact that Blackout inspired a real-life murder! The film premiered on HBO on July 28, 1985. Less than a week later, on August 3, Ed Sherman of Hartford, CT, murdered his pregnant wife, Ellen. Just like in the film, Ed cranked up the air conditioning to slow down decomposition, and throw off the time of death, in an attempt to establish an alibi. During the trial, witnesses claimed to have discussed watching Blackout with Ed the day after it aired, and the film was even shown to the jury by the prosecutor. In the end, Sherman was sentenced to fifty years in prison, but died of a heart attack only four years into his sentence. The case would eventually be covered on an episode of “Forensic Files.” So that just goes to show ya, Scumbags: crime doesn’t pay! Or maybe it would if you pick a better movie than Blackout to base your crime on. I dunno. I don’t really do crimes.

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TRICK OR TREAT (1986, d. Charles Martin Smith)

Happy Halloween, Scumbags!

Today is the spookiest day of the year, and unfortunately, the final installment of ROCKTOBER. If you’re reading this site, then Halloween probably means something special to you. For us freaks and weirdos, Halloween is the one day of the year where the whole world bends itself to our macabre whims. It’s no longer us vs. them, for one terrifying and awesome day, everyone turns into us. We never quite outgrow that us vs. them mentality, do we? Those of us who grow up loving horror movies and rock n’ roll and everything else that society shuns and dismisses as evil garbage, for us, the straight world will always be anathema to everything we stand for. Horror movies wouldn’t exist without that struggle, nor would rock n’ roll, and by that measure, neither would our final ROCKTOBER offering, 1986’s Trick or Treat.

Trick or Treat opens on the most bitchin’ attic room ever. I always wanted an attic room as a kid, probably because of Home Alone. Why didn’t Kevin McCallister want to sleep on the third floor? The third floor looked awesome! But I digress, this is not the room of Kevin McCallister, this is the room of Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer, teenage metalhead. You may remember him as Skippy from Family Ties. Anyway, Eddie’s room is dope as hell, he’s got a killer stereo system, a badass Ozzy blacklight poster, a pet rat, all sorts of Hesher accoutrements. When we meet Eddie, he’s writing what feels like his eight hundredth fan letter to his personal heavy metal hero, shock rocker Sammi Curr. As Eddie explains it, everyone at his high school fucking blows, because they’re all a bunch of posers and preppies and they treat poor Eddie like total shit. Indeed, at one point, we see a gang of jock dickheads, lead by this one particular jock dickhead named Tim, throwing Eddie’s stuff all over the locker room after gym class, then they yank off his towel and push him into the girls volleyball practice! And Tim’s girlfriend, who I think is named Heather, grabs a polaroid camera and takes a picture of Eddie’s bare buttocks, and everyone laughs! Bummer! But Eddie’s not about to let it get him down, because as it turns out, Sammi Curr went to the same high school, and he got out of there, and now he’s a rock n’ roll god, doing lines of coke shaped like pentagrams and sticking his dick in burritos so his girlfriend won’t smell all the road gash he’s been slipping it into (we don’t get to see any of this, of course, but it’s definitely implied).

Eddie heads downstairs to do some laundry, and the TV is showing a expository dialogue dump, um, I mean news report, on Sammi Curr. It starts out with the news lady being like, Sammy Curr was supposed to play the Halloween dance of his alma mater, Lakeridge High School, but thanks to complaints from the PTA, the show was canceled. Then the news lady talks to a very stern looking old woman from the PTA for like five seconds about the evils of heavy metal. Then we cut to Sammy Curr testifying before the UNITED STATES SENATE in something hilariously called “the Senate Committee Inquiry Into Rock Pornography,” and some stuffy Senator is like, Mr. Curr, rock music is totally evil, right? And Sammi Curr is like, ya can’t legislate morality, old maaaaaan! And Eddie is like, fuck yeah, there goes my hero, watch him as he goes, etc. But then…then….this news lady is just like, oh, by the way, none of this matters anyway, because last night, Sammi Curr died in a mysterious hotel fire at the age of 38. Then it cuts to this amazing graphic, which is some master level trolling on the part of this news station:

Way to bury the lede, news lady! Anyway, Eddie is totally devastated, of course. He flips out and starts ripping posters off his wall, like he’s Dirk Diggler’s mom. Then he goes to visit Nuke, the local rock DJ that he’s inexplicably friends with, who is played by Gene Simmons. Nuke is like, yeah, it sucks that Sammi is dead, but the guy was starting to believe his own hype anyway, it’s not like he was a god or something. To which Eddie is like, bullshit, man! He spoke for people like us! He spoke for me! To me he was a god! Then Nuke, rather inexplicably, is like, hey, let me stoke this hero worship that I was just trying to pat down by giving you the only copy of Sammi’s final, unreleased album. Eddie is like, holy shit, this is the only copy?! Nuke is like, yeah, I’m gonna play it at midnight on Halloween. And Eddie is like, but you’re giving it to me? And Nuke is like, yeah, I have a copy on tape, so it’s cool. And the audience is like, so, wait, that means it’s NOT the only copy? And then Nuke is like, well, it’s been fun, movie, but now it’s time for this scene to end, so that I, Gene Simmons, can collect my paycheck and go sexually satisfy Shannon Tweed, because it’s the 80s, and I’m all about that rock n’ roll fontasy. And the audience is like, um, ok, bye, Gene Simmons.

The next day at school, one of the popular girls, Leslie, feels bad for the whole naked volleyball prank, and is like, oh hey, Eddie, sorry about what Tim did to you, wanna come to this party tonight? And Eddie is like, uhh, whaaa, me, you, huh? Which, to be fair, is pretty much how I would always react when a pretty, popular girl inexplicably acknowledged my existence in high school. But on the other hand, dude, Eddie, what are you doing? Why are you trying to socialize with these popped collar fuckos? You should be leaving dead animals on their doorsteps and shit, not trying to be all buddy buddy! But Eddie does not heed my advice, and he ends up going to this party, which looks to be taking place at the pool from the end of It Follows, and everyone there is gorgeous and almost naked and clearly too old to be in high school, but anyway, Tim sees him there, and of course he’s like, get the fuck outta here, dildo! Metal is stupid and you’re gay and I’m Tim! And Heather is like, why are you such a weirdo freak, you’d be a better person if you’d conform and run for student council. Student fuckin’ council? Seriously? So then Tim and his fascist football flunkies put like a dumbbell or something in Eddie’s backpack and throw him in the pool, because murdering outcasts was totally legal in Reagan’s America. Leslie dives in and saves him, and tries to apologize, but Eddie, quite rightly, is like, fuck this party, fuck these assholes, I’m gonna make them regret the day they ever fucked with me! And then he drives off in his shitty Oldsmobile, which has a personalized license plate that says RAGMAN, by the way. Relax, Eddie. You’d have an easier time making “fetch” happen.

Back home, Eddie puts the Sammi Curr record on (which, by the way, is entitled “Songs in the Key of Death,” because fuck yeah) and falls asleep. While asleep, he sees visions of Sammi Curr dying in the hotel fire while trying to summon the devil, because duh, what’s more metal than that? When he wakes up, the record is playing backwards, and Eddie is like, oh cool, maybe it’ll tell me to kill myself like that one Judas Priest record! But instead, the voice of Sammi Curr begins speaking to him, directly! And it’s like, hey, Eddie, you should totally get revenge on those bullies, I’ll help you out, and also, Ragman is a really cool nickname, don’t listen to that insult in the previous paragraph, I’m Sammi Curr, your new undead buddy!

At lunch the next day, against the advice of both Leslie and his best friend Roger, who is one of those high school geeks who acts like they’re a senior citizen stuck in a teenager’s body, you know the type, anyway, Eddie smashes a lunch tray full of food into Tim’s face, and soon all the jocks are chasing him. This chase scene is nuts, people are falling over tables, bodies are flying down stairs, it’s total chaos. Around this time, I noticed that the cinematography in this film is way better than most of your average b-horror movies, the shot composition and camera movements and color palette are all really great. Well, as it turns out, the DP of this film was Robert Elswit, who would go on to shoot most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films! Whoa! Anyway, Eddie somehow tricks Tim and his friends into shooting a fire extinguisher into the teachers’ lounge, so they all get in trouble and Eddie is like, tee hee hee, revenge is fun!

Eddie tries to show Roger the subliminal messages, but Roger, being a man of science, is like, dude, c’mon, you’re falling for one of the music industry’s biggest schemes, they put those so-called subliminal messages in there so that you play it backwards, scratch up your vinyl, and have to buy more copies. Damn. Roger may be a wet blanket, but he’s clearly on to something there. Eddie is like, whatever, man, I know that Sammi Curr is trying to talk to me! Oh, and around this time there’s a hilarious scene where Eddie’s mom enters his room for what appears to be the first time ever, because she seems completely taken aback and terrified by all of the heavy metal ephemera lying around, then she accidentally turns his stereo on and has a full blown fear induced meltdown when it begins playing heavy metal music. Again, hilarious.

Now the backwards record tells Eddie to go to the wood shop room and wait. So he does, and he finds Tim and one of the other jocks there waiting for him. They’re dressed like they’re in A Flock of Seagulls for no goddamn reason, and Tim roughs Eddie up a bit. But then the equipment starts to go haywire, and Tim almost has an eye taken out by a drill. Eddie turns off the power at the last moment and gives Tim a look like, what now motherfucker? Tim is like, this isn’t over! I’m not running because I almost had a drill induced poop! Eddie speeds away from school, once again like, tee hee hee, revenge is fun. Then he ups the ante by making a tape of “Songs in the Key of Death” and taping it to Tim’s locker with a note labeled “A peace offering.” Is it, though? Nah, son!

It’s a gorgeous autumn sunset, and Tim and Heather are making out in the backseat of Tim’s ride down by the river. Talk about some gorgeous scenery! As it turns out, the movie was shot in Wilmington, North Carolina, a town which would be featured in another film also released by DEG that same year, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Fun fact there for ya. Anyway, Tim has to take a leak, so he takes a walk either five feet away or five miles away, it’s hard to tell. Heather is like, well, I’m barely a character in this movie, what should I do to entertain myself? What’s this, a Walkman and some headphones? And what’s this, a mysterious unlabeled tape? Ho hum, may as well listen to it! So as she’s listening to it, she closes her eyes and starts like, writhing around erotically? And this green mist comes out of the headphones, and removes all of her clothing? And now she’s totally naked? Then she opens her eyes, and HOLY STUFF IT’S A BIG RUBBER SEX DEMON PUPPET! We see this big rubber sex demon puppet for like two seconds, and then Heather screams, and Tim comes running. He tries to remove the headphones, but they’ve burned her ears off, and they’re all goopy! Gross! Oh, by the way, hope you didn’t get too attached to that big rubber sex demon puppet, because it never shows up again! How is that possible, movie?! I imagine this thing had to have been a bigger deal in the script, but then they made it and it looked like a giant version of the Cheddar Goblin from Mandy except shittier, so they only showed it for those two seconds. If I were the FX guy on this movie, I’d be pissed.

So Tim shows up at Eddie’s house and is like, I dunno what you did, but Heather’s ears are all goopy now, and she’s in the hospital, so just stay the fuck away from me. Which, surprisingly, is a wise move on Tim’s part. Most jock bully dickheads would just keep escalating, but this guy is like, nah, you win, weirdo. Meanwhile, Eddie’s mom is doing some aerobics while watching a news show in which a preacher in condemning rock music, because it’s the 1980s, duh. You may recognize that preacher, Rev. Aaron Gilstrom, as none other than Ozzy Osbourne. In case you were wondering, yeah, he’s apparently always been that incoherent. Luv ya, Oz! Anyway, Eddie puts on the record again and is like, hey man, this is going too far, I just wanted to like, prank those assholes, I didn’t wanna hurt anyone! And the record is like, nah son, we’ve gotta get revenge like super hardcore! By the way, Leslie is up next! And Eddie is like, oh c’mon, no way, it’s not her fault! And the record is like, stop thinking with your little head and start thinking with your big head! She set you up! And Eddie is like, I love her and shit, this ends now! And he tries to unplug the stereo, but he gets electrocuted! Oh no! Everything goes dark and quiet for awhile, but then there’s a bunch of Emperor Palpatine force lightning, and out of the speaker comes Sammi Curr himself! Geez Louise! He looks like Tommy Lee Jones as Two Face in Batman Forever, and all of the electricity in Eddie’s room starts to go haywire, and the TV turns on, and Ozzy as the preacher is like, these rock people are sick perverted sick perverts who are evil and perverted and they must be stopped! And then Sammi like, moves his hand across the TV and Ozzy goes AAAAAAUUUUUUGH!!! And later they say he had a massive hemorrhage live on air and died! What the heck?!?! So Eddie goes berserk and starts smashing his stereo with a hammer, then his mom comes in and is like, you’re insane, and I’m going to ground you until you’re not insane anymore!

Eddie frantically calls Roger the next morning and is like, look man, I need you to go break into Tim’s car, steal the demon tape I made, and then destroy it, ok? Of course Roger is super skeptical about the whole thing, but he’s a good friend, so he agrees. Cut to, Roger dressed in all black, breaking into Tim’s car, which is parked in Tim’s driveway, in broad fucking daylight. Smooth, Roger. Very smooth. Anyway, Roger gets the tape, and when he gets home, Eddie frantically calls him again and is like, hey Roger, did you destroy the tape? And Roger lies and is like, umm, yeah, whatever, it’s like, totally destroyed. And Eddie is relieved and goes back to being grounded. Roger, meanwhile, is like, oh what the hell, I’ll play this tape while I make myself a peanut butter and chocolate milkshake! Which, first of all, sounds delicious, but also, you’re just dropping balls left and right here, Roger! So of course Sammi Curr comes out of the speakers and is like, yo, Roger, play this song at the Halloween dance tonight, or else I’ll totally murder you and your family. Oh, and that PTA lady from before is on TV talking about how sad it was that Ozzy Osbourne died, and Sammi Curr fucking reaches into the TV, grabs her by the throat, and pulls her into reality, where she turns into like a shrunken burnt corpse and disintegrates! Best of all, that incompetent lying dork Roger then has to vacuum her ashes up! Yaaaaay!

Sadly, this is the high point of the film. The Halloween dance happens, and Roger of course plays the demonic tape. Leslie calls Eddie from the dance because she inexplicably wants his bod, and during their conversation Eddie is like, hey, what’s that music playing in the background there? And Leslie is like, oh I dunno, some tape that Roger brought? So Eddie is like, oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck! And hangs up the phone and hightails it over to the dance, but then oh cripes, his car is possessed by Sammi Curr, and it drives through like a junkyard or something and tries to go full Griswald but the top is chopped off, then it catches on fire and nearly falls off a bridge, but Eddie is safe. Somehow. Meanwhile, Sammi Curr comes crawling out of an amplifier and plays the titular song “Trick or Treat” for the enthusiastic crowd. Somehow the band that was supposed to play knows the song. Don’t ask me how, I just work here. Sammi Curr dances around like Tina Turner doing an Iggy Pop impression, which is certainly a choice, and then he’s like, hey teenagers, taste my thunder bolts! And he starts shooting thunder out of his guitar, and people start exploding in plumes of smoke, including one total fucking dork in a Humpty Dumpty costume, which is hilarious.

Basically Eddie and Leslie spend the rest of the movie running around trying to stop Sammi Curr, which proves to be kinda boring, except for when Sammi Curr is briefly foiled when he trips over and gets his hand stuck in a toilet, which is awesome. Like, the problem is, we don’t really know what Sammi Curr is trying to accomplish. We know that he’s an electricity demon, and can travel anywhere he wants to via electricity, which is cool, but what is his end game here? Does he want to blow up everyone in this town with force lightning? I dunno. It kinda feels like the movie is just spinning its wheels for the last twenty minutes. Catharsis finally comes when Eddie realizes that he can’t define himself through his heroes, and that Sammi needs him more than he needs Sammi, so he…drives off of a bridge with electricity demon Sammi in the backseat? And then Leslie destroys Nuke’s copy of the tape? But somehow Eddie survives, and the movie ends with him and Leslie kissing? Okay, whatever you say, Trick or Treat.

Despite my issues with the third act, I’m still gonna recommend Trick or Treat. It’s a fun, well-made movie with plenty of spooky Halloween atmosphere, and just the right level of over the top cheesiness. Not to mention, in today’s climate of fandom, I think a lot of people should take to heart the lesson that you need to be your own person, and not let the things you like represent your entire personality. It’s ok to be a horror fan, or a rock fan, just as long as you remember to be a real human being underneath it all. So with that, I hope that all of you Scumbags out there had a hell of a time reading along with ROCKTOBER, that you stay safe and have plenty of spooky good fun this Halloween, and if you happen to come across a mysterious record, maybe think twice before playing it backwards. Wouldn’t want to unleash a big rubber sex demon puppet…or would you?!

[analogscum]

ROCK N’ ROLL NIGHTMARE (1987, d. John Fasano)

Rock n’ roll is dead. I’m sorry to have to break the news to you, my dear Scumbags, but it’s true. If I’m being honest, for awhile, I was feeling the same way about ROCKTOBER.

Just look at today’s musical landscape. The youth of now don’t want to listen to killer riffs and epic drum solos. They want to listen to shiny, overproduced country ballads about driving your truck down to the river at night. They want to listen to shiny, overproduced pop songs about how being a woman is awesome and there’s no night like tonight because tonight is the night that we’re all gonna be women. They want to listen to shitty, underproduced hip-hop made by rapists with facial tattoos about how they want to kill themselves because they either have no drugs, or they have too many drugs, I’m honestly not too sure. On a commercial scale, what does that leave us rockers? The Black Keys? Uggggh. Mumford and Sons? Blecccch. Imagine Dragons? Imagine my itchy taint.

Point is, I was feeling about ROCKTOBER the same way we’re all feeling about the state of rock n’ roll today. I wanted to do something fun and weird for my favorite month of the year, but the first two movies I selected, well, they were lacking. They simply didn’t rock enough. But then I realized, you can’t lose the faith. If you wanna find the good stuff, you’ve just gotta keep digging. And just like that, a stiff, demonic wind blew in from the great white north, and saved ROCKTOBER, just when we needed it the most. Thank you, Canada. And thank you, Rock n’ Roll Nightmare.

We open on a quaint little farmhouse. It’s morning. Mom is downstairs making breakfast, Dad is shaving off that stubble, and Junior is getting ready for school. How picturesque this familial scene is! Mom opens the fridge, and there’s a glowing red light and a growl! Oh no, is it Zuul?! Dad hears this growling and his wife screaming, so he saunters downstairs at a leisurely pace. But when he gets to the kitchen, Mom is gone! Hey, what is that in the oven? Dad opens it up, and it’s Mom’s goopy skeleton! Wow! It reaches out and tries to grab Dad! Junior sees this and screams! Then an Evil Dead first person camera demon zooms around the house as the credits roll, because THAT is how you start a goddamn movie!

Now we cut to a van driving down a rural highway. But this is not any ordinary van, this van is a total shaggin’ wagon. It’s white with shiny red stripes, the interior is all red velour, and to top it all off, there’s a pair of handcuffs dangling from the rearview mirror. You can practically smell the vapors of bong water and old genitalia coming off of this thing. The van screams down the highway for about the combined length of the driving scene in “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and the driving scene in “Solaris,” which is to say, for way too long. Would it surprise you to know that they shot this sequence when they realized the film’s runtime was too short?

Anyway, the van pulls up to the quaint little farmhouse from the beginning, and for the first time we meet The Tritonz, the most bitchin’ heavy metal quintet from the United States and definitely not Canada! There’s our banshee vocalist and fearless leader, Jon, played by Jon-Mikl Thor, whose Wikipedia page describes him as a “bodybuilding champion, actor, songwriter, screenwriter, historian, vocalist, and musician.” Now that I’ve seen this movie, I take issue with a few of those descriptors, but anyway. We’ve also got Stiggy, the Australian drummer, Max, the guitarist, Roger, the bassist, and Dee Dee, the keyboardist. Along for the ride are Jon’s girlfriend Randy, Roger’s new wife Mary, Stiggy’s girlfriend Gwen, and Phil, the band’s manager. As Jon explains, they’re going to be staying in this farmhouse for the next month while they work on material for their new album. The barn has even been converted into a 24-track recording studio for them. When someone asks why this farmhouse on the outskirts of Toronto, Jon replies thusly: “Toronto is where it’s happening, man! The music, the entertainment, the arts…” So, in other words, Rock n’ Roll Nightmare is the world’s weirdest tourism commercial. Neat! Gwen immediately starts complaining that they’re in the middle of nowhere, and that they don’t have roadies to carry their luggage for them, because Gwen is the character in the movie who gets angry and annoyed about everything. We then meet the groundskeeper, who looks just like Ken Burns. Phil tries to get the keys from him, but Ken Burns just keeps rattling on about Alice Cooper, and I think this scene was supposed to be funny, but whoops, and then Ken Burns gives Phil the keys and walks out of the movie. Bye, Ken Burns! We get an overhead shot of the house, and an ominous musical stinger…but then everyone just walks into the house and nothing happens. Get used to this, because I really think that they let shots go on about three to five seconds longer than necessary in a desperate attempt to pad the runtime out, and I won’t be convinced otherwise. I’m a Rock n’ Roll Nightmare truther!

So they divvy up the rooms, and Gwen complains that they’re gonna have to eat Phil’s cooking for dinner, and witheringly refers to Mary as a “housewife.” Cool. Jon announces that he’s going to go lock up the van, and then we watch him do just that, in real time. At one point, he sees a shadow behind the curtains in his bedroom, and looks concerned, but then it’s just Randy. She cups her breasts in his direction, as if to say, hey, look, I’ve got tits! And he just kinda smiles in a way you do when you wanna be nice to spare someone’s feelings. Cut to, dinner has just ended. Phil is wearing an old timey paper hat like he’s behind the counter of a soda fountain for no reason, and I’m HERE FOR IT. Jon makes a toast to making their best album yet. Then Gwen pressures Stiggy into giving a toast, thinking he’ll be like, here’s to my girlfriend Gwen who is super awesome and not an asshole at all, but because Stiggy is kind of a dummy, he’s like, ummmm, here’s to Phil for cooking us an awesome meal. Gwen of course gets mad, and then refuses to clean dishes, because, as she puts it, “I’m not a HOUSEWIFE.” I really don’t understand where Gwen is coming from here. Is she jealous of Mary? Does she think Mary is a goody two shoes? Or is she against the institution of marriage in general? Sadly, only lil’ Baby Jesus knows for sure, and he ain’t talkin’. Anyway, Phil and the other two ladies wash dishes while doing a funky little dance and giggling like they’re in a Nancy Meyers movie, before deciding to head over to the barn and watch their menfolk (plus Dee Dee, who is a lady) rock out.

And rock out they do! We’re treated to the first of many Jon-Mikl Thor originals here. This one is entitled “We Live to Rock,” because of course it is. While the Tritonz are melting faces with their wattage (kinda), that gosh darn Evil Dead first person camera demon starts zooming around again. To my surprise, we then get to see said demon, and well, there’s no polite way of saying this, so here goes…it looks like a penis. It just does. It looks like a penis with one googly eye and a big dumb mouth right underneath the tip. I could not even believe it. So then it drools (calm down, everyone) right into Phil’s beverage, and we see him take a sip, and ewwwwwww. As they finish the song, Stiggy breaks one of his drumsticks. His bandmates get on him as if he just ruined the entire song, which, like, drumsticks break all the time, guys, relax. Phil is like, hey, I’ve got a bunch of drumsticks in the basement, I’ll be right back. But when he gets down to the basement, Gwen is waiting for him. She’s like, hey Phil, you look like the host of an early 90s Nickelodeon game show that only lasted one season, let’s fuuuuuuuuuuck. Phil is deeply confused by this, because, let’s face it, he’s Phil, but he goes along with it, at least until Gwen’s face becomes a zombie demon face and bites a chunk of his shoulder off! Oh nooooooo! Everyone upstairs hears Phil yelling, so they run down to the basement, but Phil is nowhere to be seen. Jon decides that, hey, we definitely heard the yelling coming from down here, but maybe Phil is in the attic? Uhh, what? Anyway, then they discover that their shaggin’ wagon is gone, so they’re like, hey, Phil probably went into town to buy some drumsticks, typical old Phil, That’s So Phil, etc. etc. etc.

Night has fallen. Randy desperately wants Jon to slip her his Mikl Thor, but he’s too focused on his songwriting, his art, his craft, maaaaaan. Max and Dee Dee also wanna freak each other nasty, but they’re too shy to admit it. You know how 80s rock stars were notoriously sexually timid, right? Roger and Mary make sweet love and talk about how much they love being married and isn’t it great to be married and we’re so glad that we’re going to be married for a long time and definitely not turned into zombie demons off screen anytime soon, because yay marriage. We catch up with Stiggy just as he’s blasting a load into Gwen, and he seems very satisfied with himself. After he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Gwen refers to him as “the one minute wonder,” because Gwen gonna Gwen. Stiggy is flexing in the bathroom mirror and doing a terrible Schwarzenegger impression, when all of a sudden a bodacious buh-buh-buh baaaaaaabe that we have never seen before is standing in the doorway. Instead of being like, umm, who the hell are you and how did you get into our house, Stiggy is like, oh, awesome, tits! But then the buh-buh-buh baaaaaaabe turns into a zombie demon creature. It kinda looks like Goosebumps’ The Haunted Mask crossed with Night of the Creeps. It puts it’s hand on Stiggy’s mouth, so now Stiggy is possessed, I guess? He goes back into the bedroom and Gwen is like ugh, what do YOU want? And Stiggy is like, dat ass. And he gets on top of her, and then from outside the room we hear Gwen screaming with orgasmic delight, so I guess demonic possession DOES have its upsides?

Now there’s a dumb and unnecessary scene where a bunch of teenage girls who are in the “Mississauga Chapter of the Tritonz fan club” or some such nonsense show up at the house and are like, Ohmygawd, it’s 2am, let’s go wake them up and…I guess ask for autographs or something? But who should answer the door? It’s Phil! Ummmm what? And Phil is speaking like an upper crust weirdo because I guess that’s what the movie thinks a possessed person would sound like, and he’s like, ok girls, the band will be down “in twenty minutes” (???), how about you take them titties out! And these girls, one of whom we just heard drop the word “retarded” in a derogatory way, are shocked that a rock band would wanna see some nude breasts. Phil gets angry at the lack of exposed lady nips, the girls leave, the camera pan down…Phil has a zombie demon hand! Cue the Vincent Price laugh, I guess!

Morning comes, and Roger and Mary are like hey its our first time washing dishes as a married couple and we’re totally married and being married is awesome, oh whoops, some zombie demon hands pulled us offscreen and now we seem to have zombie demon hands too! Drat! Over at the barn, Jon is like, hey, where’s Roger, off being married or something? Oh well, guess I’ll strap on this totally tubular headless bass which will never go out of style, so that we can play our next song, “Energy!” Gwen is happily rocking out, because Stiggy’s demon dick turned her frown upside down. When the song is over, everyone is like, wow Stiggy, your drumming sounds great, we’re not even concerned that your Australian accent has inexplicably vanished! Then everyone gets a case of the hornies out of nowhere. Stiggy is like, hey Gwen, let’s go down to the lake so I can give you more of that possession nookie. Max and Dee Dee decide that now’s the time to finally seal the deal vis a vis knockin’ them damn boots. Randy is like, hey Jon, we should probably fuck the color out of each other’s hair, right? And Jon is like…nah, I’d rather work on some lyrics. Sorry, Randy!

Down at the lake, Gwen takes her top off and is like, hey, here are my boobs, let’s do this. Stiggy, in his new, non-Australian accent, is like, OK, and then his stomach rips open and a devil hand pops out! Neat! Gwen screams as the demon hand cops a feel, and Max and Dee Dee hear it, but assume that it’s a scream of ecstasy. Now the movie turns into a softcore porno for like ten or fifteen minutes. Max and Dee Dee have a slow, passionate bonk sesh. Randy stops beating around the bush and is like, hey look, Jon-Mikl Thor, I’m naked, let’s go have a super awkward sex scene in the shower. Jon-Mikl Thor is like, sounds good to me, and they go have a super awkward sex scene in the shower. It’s so unfortunate, you guys. There’s gross tongue kissing and weird acrobatic poses. Like, movies love make it seem like shower sex is totally easy, but no no, I beg to differ! Anyway, Max and Dee Dee finish up their romantic porking and get dressed, when they spy Junior! From the beginning of the movie! What’s that lil’ rugrat doing there?! They chase after him, ending up in the barn, where, to their horror, he turns into what looks like the love child of Bud Cort and a Shar-Pei, and zombie demon murderizes both of them. Which I hear is way worse than being murderized by a human. My uncle told me.

Anyway, Jon-Mikl Thor is super annoyed that everyone has mysteriously vanished, so he goes over to the barn to work on some lyrics, just in time for Randy to encounter Junior herself. Our hero is working on those darn lyrics of his and enjoying a nice crisp refreshing Coca-Cola, when all of a sudden, the penis devil returns! But not only that, there are now a bunch of penis devils! One looks kinda old, one is greenish blue, one is even smoking a cigarette, can you even imagine?! What’s strange is, Jon-Mikl Thor doesn’t seem to notice any of them, even the one that’s sitting literally right next to him. Then Randy enters the barn, and it’s like, ok, she’s obviously possessed. She gets up in Jon-Mikl Thor’s face and is like, face it, all your friends are dead, everyone’s dead! To which Jon-Mikl Thor is like, nope, don’t think so. At which point, Randy is engulfed in a flash of red light…and turns into a giant rubber Satan puppet! Holy shit! Eat your heart out, tiny-ass Satan puppet from Prime Evil! Weirdly enough, Jon-Mikl Thor seems completely nonplussed by ANY of this. Cool as a cucumber with a feathery viking haircut.

Now, my dear Scumbags, we come to perhaps the most batshit guano crazy town banana pants plot twist I have ever seen in a movie. I’m not exaggerating. SPOILER ALERT, FOR CHRISSAKES. SPOILER GODDAMN ALERT.

Satan puppet is like, haha, I turned all of your friends into my zombie demon minions or whatever. Jon-Mikl Thor, still completely unshaken, is like, nah bro, you didn’t. To which a perplexed Satan puppet is like, umm, no dude, I’m pretty sure I did that shit, homes. Then, Jon-Mikl Thor drops a goddamn bombshell: 

“You killed no one, Bub. Or is it less familiar to call you Beelzebub? Or do you prefer Abaddon? Or, as the Hindus called you, Shaitan? Or, as you are known to answer to, Ahriman? Belial? Apollyon? Asmodeus? Because, you see… I do know you.”

IN OTHER WORDS, NONE OF THE OTHER CHARACTERS IN THE MOVIE WERE REAL!!!

Wh…wh…wh…

THEY WERE ASTRAL PROJECTIONS, CREATED BY ME, JON-MIKL THOR, TO DRAW YOU, SATAN PUPPET, OUT INTO THE OPEN SO THAT WE CAN DO BATTLE!!!

Wh…wh…wh…

AND I DID THIS BECAUSE I’M NOT REALLY JON-MIKL THOR, LEAD SINGER OF THE TRITONZ, I’M ACTUALLY TRITON, THE ARCHANGEL, THE INTERCESSOR!!!

AND JON-MIKL THOR RIPS OFF HIS CLOTHES TO REVEAL A SHINY CAPE AND A METAL CODPIECE!!!

And so the fight between Jon-Mikl Thor and Satan puppet begins, and oh my word, it is so goddamn charming. It’s like an Ed Wood fever dream. While the epic strains of our last Tritonz number, “We Accept the Challenge” blare triumphantly over the soundtrack, Satan puppet throws some rubber squid monsters at Jon-Mikl Thor, which he holds to his oiled chest while screaming in pain, as if they’re real, but then he rips them off and tears them to shreds! Yaaaay! Then he kinda gets Satan puppet in a chokehold for awhile, but then Satan puppet bitch slaps him and he falls to the ground! Oh noooooo! But then Jon-Mikl Thor gets Satan puppet by the ankles, and somehow gets him in a chokehold again? Ummmmm? Then the song ends, which means it’s time for the scene to end, so Satan puppet is like, you win this time, guess I’m going back to Hell until I find another Canadian family to harass with penis devils! To which Jon-Mikl Thor cooly replies, “I’ll see you again, old scratch.” Old what? Excuse me? What is any of this?

We then cut to a dark graveyard. Dark as in they seem to have forgotten to light this scene. Jon-Mikl Thor wanders up to some tombstones, we don’t know whose because he doesn’t say and again it’s dark, and he’s like, hey, good news, I choked out the Satan puppet, so you guys didn’t die in vain, anyway, byeeeee. Then we cut to a seemingly random shot of what looks like a suburban home, and then the movie ends. WOWZERS MCZOWZERS.

Simply put, Rock n’ Roll Nightmare is fucking awesome. I had an absolute blast watching this ridiculous cheese log of a movie. Having read the review, you may not be shocked to learn that, in addition to starring in the film and providing all of the music, Jon-Mikl Thor also wrote the screenplay and produced the movie himself. One may be tempted to call a film in which you cast yourself as a literal rock god who vanquishes the devil a vanity project, but I’m not sure that I would. I think a big part of a vanity project is a lack of self-awareness. Tommy Wiseau and Neil Green make vanity projects. To me, anyway, it seems like Jon-Mikl Thor is at least somewhat in on the joke here. The guy comes from the metal world, which is all about embracing over the top silliness, so of course he would make a movie that is chock full of over the top silliness. While I was watching it, I couldn’t stop thinking of Panos Cosmatos’s “Mandy,” another film that I recently saw and loved. Despite the fact that Cosmatos is somewhat of a visionary, and Thor and his director, John Fasano, well, aren’t, both films feel like the acid-soaked daydream of a teenage metalhead dude circa the mid 1980s. And I mean that in the best way possible. Sure, the dialogue is borderline alien, the acting is mostly awful, and the editing is beyond subpar, but when you’re dealing with a movie this fun, this weird, and this full of imagination, none of that stuff really matters. Hell, that ineptitude can sometimes even elevate what you’re watching, when there’s heart and soul. Which is all a long winded way of saying, hey hey, my my, rock n’ roll can never die. Thankfully, neither can Rock n’ Roll Nightmare.

[analogscum]

TERROR ON TOUR (1980, d. Don Edmonds)

You know where you are? You’re in ROCKTOBER, Scumbags! You’re gonna die! And I mean that strictly in a philosophical, Sylvia Plath sort of way! Hopefully most of you live a long, long time! At least long enough to finish reading this review and sharing it amongst your likeminded peers! Rock n’ roll!

Now, it doesn’t take a brain genius to figure out why hard rock and horror schlock make such good bedfellows, at least in theory. In the 1970s, acts like Alice Cooper and KISS were able to disguise the fact that they played totally unremarkable power pop by incorporating ghoulish, Grand Guignol antics into their live shows. It was pure vaudeville from a stagecraft standpoint, the type of stuff you could’ve seen in a theater at the turn of the 20th century, but when combined with rock music, suddenly suburban parents were all concerned that their children would become pot addicted Satan worshipping serial killers, when in reality they were much more likely to just sit in the back of a van and stare at their hands for too long. This is all to say, these acts may look dangerous, but behind the veneer of volume and debauchery, it’s all pretty milquetoast and boring. Speaking of milquetoast and boring, let’s discuss 1980’s Terror on Tour!

We open on what looks like a very dark VFW hall, where tens of people are going nuts for The Clowns. This four piece is rocking out in a very moderate manner, but their stage show is…supposed to be pretty nuts, like in theory, I guess? It mostly consists of ripping limbs off of mannequins and obviously fake stabbings. And then there’s the matching outfits that The Clowns are festooned in: skintight black jumpsuits with red silk bat wings that show off plenty of chest hair (no duh), sort of mime makeup accompanied by these Phantom of the Opera masks, and then as the silly cherry on the dopey sundae, afro wigs. These guys look like Freddie Mercury on Halloween. They look like Doctor Rockso from Metalocalypse going to a funeral. They look like a third funny example that I’m sure I’ll think of later.

Meanwhile, backstage, one of their roadies, Herb, is putting on some clown makeup of his own. You see, Herb is no good at talking to chicks, so he pretends to be a member of the band so that he can dispense with the chit-chat and just make with the bork-bork. Tim, the band’s manager, played by none other than Larry “The Soup Nazi” Thomas (welcome back to the site, Mr. Thomas!) stops by backstage long enough to decline a beer. This really upsets the other roadie, Jeff. Like, I mean, it REALLY upsets him. He sprays the beer all over the dressing room, then yells about Tim being an asshole. Whoa, take a chill, Jeff! Then he demands that Herb give him $50, which Herb does, because he’s a total pushover. By the backstage door, a lady is waiting. Jeff goes and buys drugs from the lady, but she gets mad because they had agreed on $100, but Jeff only has $50. Jeff is like, uhh, gimme the drugs, and I’ll be back in twenty minutes with the rest of your money? And she totally falls for it! Worst! Drug dealer! EVER! Oh well, it doesn’t matter though, because two seconds later a guy dressed as one of The Clowns walks up to her and stabs her. She dead!

Because the cops are stodgy old white guys, and The Clowns’ onstage antics seem really sick and twisted to them, the band immediately become the center of the police investigation. Which we the audience know is ridiculous, because The Clowns are about as hedonistic as The Monkees. One of them leaves immediately after the show because he’s TIRED and wants to GO TO BED. Two others order pizza and play bumper pool. The only one who is even remotely rock n’ roll is the drummer, who is in his bedroom and about to take like, two quaaludes, and then Tim walks in on him, chastises him for his behavior, and he immediately apologizes and promises to clean up his act. Not exactly Hammer of the Gods material here, eh?

Well, the next day, the band have a big party, because everyone knows rockers love to party at 11am, right? There’s drinking and drugs and wacky table dancing. One of the band members yells, “I need a joint!” And someone just hands him one out of nowhere. A blonde bombshell goes up to another band member and says that she thinks The Clowns are better than The Beatles and The Kinks. He’s like, yeah no shit, we rule, and then they start making out. Now, this is more like it! The band has a room set up in the basement strictly for fuckin’, and for no apparent reason it is decorated with bloody handprints and a noose. Oooooh, how spooky! So basically the killer Clown goes through the party stabbing and slashing a bunch of groupies, and you can always tell when one of these babes is about to bite the big one, because the killer Clown talks like Christian Bale Batman, as opposed to the real Clowns, who all have super embarrassing Illinois accents. Speaking of embarrassing, the quote-unquote sexy talk that these groupies are making? You’d think that these women were improvising and had never talked dirty before in their lives, or that their dialogue was guest written by a virgin, or an alien, or a virgin alien. One woman, right before she dies, actually says the line, “that cocaine made me really horny!” Nope. Nope nope nope nope. Sorry, but nope.

Back at their house, or wherever they’re staying, the main cop is talking to The Clowns and their crew, asking about their alibis during the party. Before he leaves, the main cop is like, hey, better make sure the movie gets super boring for the next half hour or so, because that worked so well in Rocktober Blood, right? And everyone is like, right! And then the movie becomes super boring for the next half hour or so. We learn that the band is becoming tired of all this rock n’ roll horror business, and want to go back to the old days, when they were Tim Buckley style balladeers, because money and fame and access to all the free drugs and muff that they want pales in comparison, to being twue awtists, also FAAAAAAAAAAAART NOISE. The film briefly becomes a softcore porno as quaaludes guy goes to the bone zone with his girlfriend, while Herb creepily watches from outside the bedroom window. So maybe Herb is the killer? Well, next scene, Herb is just wandering around the house by himself, and he starts doing through some of Tim’s paperwork, as you would, and finds a letter to Tim from his mother. Since he’s totally alone, Herb reads the letter out loud, again, as you would, and Tim’s mother is talking about his devout religious belief and how she’s proud of him and his love of God, and Herb just cocks his eyebrow, like, geez, look at this weirdo whose mother loves him and stuff! Gross! Then he goes and steals some pills from the bathroom. Oh, Herb!

Now it’s almost time for The Clowns to um, rock isn’t quite the right word, but I digress. The main cop does that thing that cops only do in the movies, where they find a girl who is in trouble for drugs or prostitution or shoplifting, and are like, hey, if you act as bait in this sting operation, I won’t send you to jail. Which, for some reason, these girls always agree to, this girl included. Tim goes up to Jeff and is like, hey, you’re barely a character in this movie, so you’re fired! Jeff of course is furious, and is like, I am TOTALLY a character in this movie, remember, I got way too angry at you for not drinking a beer! And Tim is like, that scene was like three minutes long and at the very beginning of the movie, so vamoose, buster! And Jeff is like, you’ll pay for this! I may look like a pathetic creep who doesn’t back up any of my threats, but you’ll definitely pay for this! So maybe Jeff is the killer?

The blonde bombshell who quaaludes guy was banging earlier is down in the murder fuck room with who we immediately realize is the killer Clown. She does more deeply embarrassing, unconvincing dirty talk, all while trying to sensually fondle the noose above the bed, which, if that does anything for you, then yous a freak. Thankfully, awkward come ons stop when killer Clown slashes her throat open. Bait girl finds the body, and we’re treated to a slow, poorly lit chase scene that pretty much goes nowhere. Meanwhile, The Clowns are onstage, playing their curiously long songs and defiling more mannequins, much to the delight of the crowd. The main cop walks down some stairs and is almost immediately stabbed to death by the killer Clown. Bait girl comes upon the main cop’s body and is like, super sad that he’s dead for some reason? Like, I would step over his corpse and get the fuck outta there as soon as I could if I were her! But for no goddamn reason, she’s like, I will avenge you! And then she turns around and killer Clown is there and stabs her to death too. Welp. As she falls to the ground, she pulls off the afro wig and mask, and we see that the killer Clown…is Larry Thomas? Umm, what?

Herb is in full Clown makeup and regalia, so he goes down to the murder fuck room in the hopes that a groupie is there, and doesn’t question who he is, since the real Clowns are currently onstage, but of course all he finds is the blonde bombshell’s dead body. He runs out into the poorly lit hallway, only to find Larry Thomas, and he puts two and two together. Slowly, yes, but he gets there. Now all that’s left to know is why? Por que, Larry Thomas, por que?! And Larry Thomas is like, all of those women were whores and they were impure and they weren’t fit to bring children into this world? Umm, what? So, you’re so religious that you decided to take on this long con of becoming a successful rock n’ roll manager, so that you could surround yourself with groupies and drug dealers and other assorted women of “loose morals,” and then murder them on the off chance that they might get pregnant from all the fuckin’ they do? Dude, c’mon, you could’ve just picketed outside an abortion clinic. Would’ve saved yourself a lot of time and effort.

So there’s another poorly lit scuffle, and at some point I guess Herb is cut? Because he ends up collapsing onstage just as The Clowns are finishing up their second song of the night, because all of their songs are like ten minutes long for some reason? And he’s got a huge wound across his back, which we didn’t see him get, because god forbid anything exciting happen in this movie. So The Clowns all look at Herb like, oh shit. Then they look at each other like, oh shit. Then Larry Thomas runs onstage and stabs Herb a bunch more times, and yells “Stop! Stop! Stop!” Which, yeah, I couldn’t agree more, Larry. Luckily, the movie listens to him and ends on, yet again, a freeze frame of the killer’s twisted visage.

In the end, Terror on Tour is slightly better than Rocktober Blood. The characters are for the most part likable (or at worst totally forgettable), and even though I made fun of it a lot, the music in this one is definitely more my speed, a weird mix of like, Big Star and Simply Saucer, if you can imagine that. In fact, The Clowns were played by a real life power pop group called The Names, who came from the same Champaign-Urbana, IL rock scene that blessed us with Cheap Trick and Shoes, and the music you hear in the film is all their own original songs. However, this one suffers from the same issue that Rocktober Blood does, namely it is so goddamn boring. Like, you’re making a slasher movie here, so why are you spending so much time showing these mopey band members talking about staying true to their artistic roots, when you could be killing people in gory and interesting ways?! It’s so frustrating, especially when you consider the pedigree behind the camera: Terror on Tour was directed by Don Edmonds, aka the guy who gave the world Ilsa: She-wolf of the SS, which, I cannot believe I’m gonna say this, is a MUCH BETTER movie than this one!

As it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who found Terror on Tour to be a frustrating experience. On that note, I’ll cede the final word to Larry Thomas himself, who posted the following broadside on the movie’s IMDb page. I swear I’m not making any of this up, this is straight from the Soup Nazi himself…

“For anyone who makes the mistake of sitting though this movie: I had just decided to become an actor and I knew very little about it. I was majoring in journalism in Junior college and took a theatre class to get a date with a girl I liked and got interested in acting. I drove a friend to the audition of Terror on Tour (originally called “Clowns”) and the director (Don Edmunds) asked me to read. I told him I wasn’t ready as an actor to do a film and didn’t know anything about acting much less film acting. He cast me and talked me into doing it. I was patently awful. I over acted every word and indicated like crazy. Above that a year after initial filming when I knew a little more about acting they called me back to shoot two pick up scenes (easy to spot as my hair was much shorter–it went from ’79 to ’80 nuff said). I was told to yell my dialog as there would be loud rock music playing in the background. The other guy in the scene was producer Sandy Cobe who wasn’t an actor and couldn’t really handle yelling while imagining loud music. In the end they forgot to add the music so it seemed like I was over acting even more than in the rest of the film. When I saw the film I came very close to quitting trying to be an actor altogether. The only reason I didn’t quit is that I figured if I could spot how awful I was maybe I had a chance to learn to do it right. The band members were a real band and had never acting before so you could forgive them their acting. Of the rest of the cast there was (in my opinion) one good actor. Jeff Morgan. In filming he actually seemed to be in the moment and connecting on an honest level when you were talking to him. When I saw the film I felt I could see it in his performance. I never heard from him again and don’t know what he’s doing now but I do think he escaped the horror of the acting in this horror film. Again I hope whoever has to see me in this film will understand my horror that it still exists.”

Bravo, Larry. Still, that doesn’t explain your involvement in Night Ripper! Also, you probably have nothing to worry about: if you wanna legally watch this thing, you’ve gotta head over to Amazon and fork over almost $200 for the Media Home Entertainment tape. Doesn’t matter if it burns out or fades away, in any case, I don’t see Terror on Tour getting the DVD or blu-ray treatment anytime soon.

[analogscum]

ROCKTOBER BLOOD (1984, d. Beverly Sebastian)

Ok, Scumbags, time to rock n’ roll!

Welcome to ROCKTOBER! In order to properly celebrate the spookiest time of the year, we’ll be laying down 4 reviews of heavy metal-themed horror movies, all leading up to the big day, Halloween! We’re bringing you this hard rockin’ special series in the hopes that it will make up for my prolonged absence here, which I will leave unexplained for the time being. Point is, the chill of the autumn air and the reappearance of the ghosts and goblins of our souls has made me more determined to exhume lost gems of the VHS age than ever before. Even as the world swirls further and further down the terlet, ANALOG SCUM will be here to celebrate all things wondrous and strange in no-budget filmmaking, and that’s a gosh dern promise. So raise your devil horns and bang your heads, because it’s time to experience ROCKTOBER! And what better way to kick things off than discussing 1984’s Rocktober Blood, a film whose title actually features the word Rocktober in it? Yes, Rocktober is a real word, trust me, I should know, I’m a guy who writes things online!

Rocktober Blood opens with Billy Eye, frontman for L.A. sleaze rockers Headmistress, laying down some heavy vocals for the group’s latest tune, “I’m Back.” He’s doing this in front of a big painting of a palm tree, because what is more heavy metal than tropical weather, especially if you’re Black Sabbath in 1976 recording Technical Ecstasy, but I digress. Hey, let’s peep some of these lyrics that Billy is belting at us…

“When you least expect it, I will attack! / There will be hell to pay / I’m back!”

Could it be that this song is setting up the plot of the film that we’re about to watch? Naaaaah, forget it. In the control room, there are a bunch of music industry goons straight out of VH1’s Behind the Music, complete with feathery perms and British accents and shit. They’re drinking beers and celebrating the fact that this new song is so bitchin’. One even says that it could go platinum! Tubular! Billy finishes up with some powerful Iron Maiden banshee wails, and then announces that he’s gotta bail, because he’s got a date with some prime Sunset Strip muff. This does not sit well with his backup singer, Lynn. See, Billy promised that he’d write a song for Lynn to sing if she’d let him dip his wick. Billy, in his defense, points out that he did write her a song, called “Rainbow Eyes.” To which Lynn scoffs that she only gets to sing harmony on it. Billy just throws up his hands and is like, hey, what can I say, that’s showbiz, babe. Lynn snarls back, “You jerk. I hope you catch every disease known to man.” Well guess what, then he DOES! No, sorry, just kidding. That would be a weird plot twist, right?

Next we see why Lynn hasn’t taken some initiative and wrote her own goddamn song: she spends like 45 seconds trying to get a take of her vocals on “Rainbow Eyes” before she gives up and tells the engineer that she gonna “go take a jacuzzi.” Way to go for the gusto, Lynn. However, this scene is important in that it establishes one of the main motifs of the film: Lynn walks upstairs, strips naked, gets into a bath for a few seconds, stands up, towels off, gets dressed, and walks back downstairs. Scenes like this will comprise the majority of the film. Fair warning. Meanwhile, some unknown assailant has brutally murderized the engineer and his assistant. These are the best two kills in the film, and they happen roughly fifteen minutes in. Again, fair warning. Anyway, Lynn heads down to the control room to find Billy sitting there, rocking a pair of Lou Reed Street Hassle sunglasses, and smoking grass. She disgustedly points this out too, saying with disdain that he’s “smoking that stuff.” Nice to know that, in addition to being lazy and mediocre as a performer, Lynn is also a total narc. Way to endear our main character to us, movie! Lynn discovers the bodies of the engineer and her assistant, and Billy basically has to spell out for her that he killed them, even though it’s painfully obvious. He then offers some very harsh criticism of her vocal talents (that’s fair), and slices up her boob with his knife (that’s not fair). Billy is about to kill her when the wimpiest security guard in cinema history stumbles in. Seriously, this guy makes the fat guy with the hearing aid from the beginning of Batman Forever look like SEAL Team 6 material. He mumbles something like, “You’re um, you’re, under arrest,” before Billy chases him away. But don’t worry about it, because we’re about to get a…

…TIME JUMP! There’s a guy in a devilish mask doing a dance that looks like a combination of mime and breakdancing to a crowd of uninterested metalheads, because when I think metal I think mime and breakdancing. A title card informs us that it is now TWO YEARS LATER, and that we’re at the ROCKTOBER BLOOD TOUR PRESS PARTY or something. Then, thanks to a big ol’ exposition dump, courtesy of a coked out VJ for “MVTV” (oh, c’mon now) named Rick Righteous, we learn that Billy murdered “25 rock n’ rollers” that fateful night (would’ve liked to see some more of that, movie), that Lynn fingered him for the crime, and that Billy strongly professed his innocence, even up until he was executed. Now, Lynn has taken over as the lead singer of Headmistress, and the group is about to embark on the Rocktober Blood and Gore Tour ’84 (dope name). When Rick Righteous asks Lynn the understandable question of how she can sing songs written by her dead ex-lover who almost murderized her, Lynn just kinda shrugs and says, “Billy was a real talented musician, he just went berserk.” Well, that settles THAT, I guess.

Lynn is wandering around backstage looking for Chris, her boyfriend and manager, who cannot hide his total lack of charisma and acting talent behind his charming British accent, unfortunately. Suddenly, someone in the same devilish mask as the breakdancing mime jumps out at her! She thinks that it’s a dude named Frankie playing a prank on her, even after he stabs the wall just inches away from her head. Good to know that Lynn is still incredibly slow on the uptake when it comes to dangerous situations. But then, the figure takes off the devilish mask…and it’s Billy! WAIT, WHAAAAAT?!?! Chris finds Lynn crumpled up on the floor, crying. Thus begins the other main motif of the film: Billy terrorizes Lynn, Lynn tells someone that Billy terrorized her, the other person says it must’ve been someone else, Lynn forcefully reiterates that it was Billy, and the other person condescendingly reminds her that Billy is dead, and dead people can’t come back to life. For good measure, Chris punches out the real Frankie, and sends Lynn off to “the lake house” so that she can relax until her next show. Interestingly enough, Frankie does not complain or ask his boss why he just sucker punched him, which makes me think that Frankie gets up to some awful shit when he’s blotto. I’d much rather watch a film about a heavy metal breakdancing mime with a crippling addiction problem, but alas, we got Rocktober Blood instead.

Now comes the excruciatingly boring middle part of the movie. I can’t stress enough how little excitement there is over the next 45 minutes. The whole shebang just grinds to a halt. Lynn walks around the woods taking pictures of squirrels, but some spooky noises scare her, so she drops her camera and runs, depriving the world of some primo squirrel photography. She does aerobics with her two girlfriends. There’s a boat ride. The movie tries to convince us that prank calls are scary and menacing, and fails spectacularly. One of Lynn’s aerobics friends gets murdered, and even that is boring. Lynn takes another one of her spectacularly brief jacuzzis; leave it to Rocktober Blood to make even the sight of a naked woman a total yawn. Billy shows up and terrorizes her, and of course no one believes her. Usually it’s very frustrating when everyone but the main character is totally oblivious to the obvious carnage happening around them, but it’s hard to sympathize with Lynn in this situation, because, quite frankly, she’s a total asshole. She’s a petty, ill-tempered, entitled diva who expects everyone around her to take care of all her problems. At one point she snaps at a friend, “you’d better shut up or I’m gonna fire you right here, now, on the spot,” which is not how friendship works. To her genial, mustachioed security guard, she hisses, “Some security you are. You suck,” which is great initiative to protect someone. However, the biggest bit of drama queen horseshit comes when she decides that she’s not gonna be satisfied that Billy is actually dead unless someone digs up his grave, or as she puts it, “I WANT. IT. DUG. UP.” She says this like she’s a white woman calling the cops on a black family who are just trying to enjoy their cookout. If this movie took place in 2018, people would drag her online and Twitter would give her a pithy nickname. Gravedigger Greta? Let’s go with Gravedigger Greta for now.

So Lynn, Chris, and her non-dead aerobics friend head to the cemetery, armed with shovels, to commit a felony. Here is where the movie takes a small step towards redemption: they dig up the coffin after about fifteen minutes, as you would, and when they open it up, Billy’s corpse comes to life and attacks Lynn! Aaaaaaah! But wait, someone alert Biggie Smalls, cause it was all a dream! Lynn is hysterically crying, but Chris is like, look, look, he’s dead, look into the coffin! And it cuts to a perfectly bleached white skeleton with intact eyeballs, a headband, and some worms on the skull! Wow! It’s stupid in a highly endearing way, like watching a dog dream about running. Finally Lynn admits that Billy is indeed dead, and that she’s been acting like a douche canoe, and that she’s ready to head over to the big arena and put on a big rock n’ roll show later tonight. Which begs the question, it was pitch dark when they went into that cemetery, were they grave robbing at like, 6pm in January?

Backstage, non-dead aerobics friend is getting Lynn’s dressing room ready, when who should walk in but, um, what looks like Lou Ferrigno in a shitty Elton John costume? Anyway, he kills her by holding a hot iron against her neck, thereby turning her into yet another dead aerobics friend. Then he removes his ridiculous disguise…and it’s Billy! WAIT, WHAAAAAT?!?! Lynn goes to Chris’s office, but Billy is there waiting for her. She is understandably freaked out. Then we are treated to the big plot twist…holy moly…get a load of this…

So, as it turns out, who Lynn thought was Billy was actually John, Billy’s SECRET IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER. Yup. John was the musical genius who actually wrote all of Headmistress’s songs, and he was sick of Billy stealing the spotlight, so he framed him for murder. Which raises a lot of questions, namely, why did this never come up during Billy’s trial? Not only did he have an alibi in the groupie he was bonking, one would think that the existence of a SECRET IDENTICAL TWIN BROTHER would’ve casted, shall we say, some level of REASONABLE DOUBT on the prosecution’s case. Billy must’ve had the world’s shittiest defense attorney.

But why is John trying to kill Lynn? Oh, that’s simple: he thinks that she sucks at performing his songs. Honestly, I think we would all do the same if we were in John’s glam rock combat boots. So John is like, hey, here’s an idea for a new stage show: I’m gonna drug you and stuff you in a coffin, then I’m going to perform my songs the way they should be performed, and then during the final number, I’m gonna murder you onstage, cool? Lynn is like, no, obviously that’s not cool, but by that time, John is already drugging her, using a bottle helpfully labeled “ETHER” in giant block letters.

Now there are fifteen minutes left in the film, and luckily, the film spends those fifteen minutes working as hard as it can to totally redeem itself. And how does it redeem itself? By putting on a goddamn heavy metal rock n’ roll spectacular, that’s how! There’s fog and lights and lasers and bondage lady backup dancers, one of whom has a single breast hanging out, which, like, if you’re gonna take one out, might as well take ‘em both out, you know? Anyway, neither the band nor the crowd seems all that confused when a figure in a devilish mask and a sword for a mic stand that is definitely not Lynn comes out onstage to sing lead, nor do they so much as bat an eye when he uses that mic stand to disembowel the bondage lady backup dancers and then tosses their entrails into the crowd. I mean, in their defense, that IS pretty fuckin’ metal. He then lets Lynn out of her coffin so that she can sing “Rainbow Eyes,” which is a magnanimous gesture, I guess. Then he handcuffs her to himself for some reason, and takes off his mask. This reveal does briefly rattle the band, before the drummer impatiently implores his bandmates to kick into “I’m Back.” Guess the drummer has dinner reservations he can’t get out of?

Meanwhile, backstage, Chris and the mustachioed security guard are hatching a plan to take John out. Their plan is to, um, electrocute him, by, erm, whacking him over the head with an unplugged electric guitar. Which is not how any of that works. But they decide that they have to wait until Lynn breaks free of the handcuffs, or else she’ll be electrocuted too, which, again, nope. Finally, just as John breaks into those bitchin’ banshee howls, Lynn wriggles free, and John is smacked upside the head and electrocuted by this, again, unplugged electric guitar. The film ends on a freeze frame of him giving a demented smile straight into the camera. That’s a wrap! The End! Fin! That’s All, Folks!

Rocktober Blood is like an album by a killer band that has kinda lost the plot in their old age. It starts out strong and ends strong, but in the middle, you’ve got a shitload of boring filler to wade through. And those glimpses of brilliance only make that boring filler all the more frustrating, like they clearly know how to rock n’ roll, but waste much of our time by neither rocking nor rolling. Like, why is this movie mostly jacuzzis and whining, when it could be so much more? Believe me, I take no pleasure in panning a movie like this, which squanders so much of its promise, from the title on down. I’m sorry that we had to begin ROCKTOBER with a dud, but all that means is that next time, we’re gonna have to crank the volume, and the terror, up to eleven.

[analogscum]

SUMMER CAMP NIGHTMARE (1987, d. Bert L. Dragin)

OK, campers. Since it’s our last day together here at Camp Analog Scum, I thought we might have a little discussion about the power dynamics inherent in the summer camp flick. For a lot of kids, summer camp is a chance to blow off some steam. You’ve spent all year getting bossed around by your teachers, your principal, your parents, whomever, and now you get a few weeks of relative freedom out in the wilderness to run wild. Sure, you’ve got counselors to answer to, but what are they gonna do? In a lot of ways, summer camp is like one big dare to see how much shit you can get away with and not get in trouble. It’s the ultimate quest for extreme fun. But what would happen if that fun got a little too extreme? Could it lead to, say, armed revolution and lawlessness? Well, that’s what we’re working with in today’s film, 1987’s Summer Camp Nightmare, either the darkest comedy or the funniest drama ever, depending on who you ask.

Things start out innocuously enough, with busloads of eager kids arriving at Camp North Pines for Boys. Our hero, a nerdy kid named Donald Poultry (amazing name) is narrating everything into his trusty tape recorder, because he’s a tech wiz, because he’s a nerd in the 80s, c’mon, try and keep up. These little devils are pumped for a summer of gorging on junk food, reading nudie mags, catching up on reruns of Dynasty, and most of all, trying their luck with the girls over at Camp South Pines for Girls. We meet a few of our junior counselors, including Mason, the obnoxious Guido; Chris, the attentive older brother type; Stanley Runk, aka “Runk the Punk” who is, well, you can figure it out; and last but certainly not least, Franklin, who is super smug and really into philosophy and believes that society is governed based off of fear. Yeah, Franklin is “that guy.”

Unfortunately, everyone’s plans for a summer of debauchery and decadence are ruined by the arrival of Mr. Warren, the new camp director. Mr. Warren is kind of an old fuddy-duddy who speaks in a hushed voice and with great moral authority, so in other words, he’s supposed to remind you of Ronald Reagan. Anyway, Mr. Warren is like, no one is allowed to curse, smoke cigarettes, or drink booze, all of which seem like pretty boilerplate rules for a kid’s camp, but everyone acts like he’s a total fascist. What’s not as cool is when he rigs the TV in the rec room to only play the televangelist channel. OK, that sucks. They literally do that to punish Hannibal Lecter. Mr. Warren also decrees that the old rope bridge that leads to the girls’ camp is off limits, because it’s in disrepair and too dangerous. Damn, guess the panty raids are cancelled, huh?

Oh, and Mr. Warren is super into catching butterflies, which is a perfect hobby for this character in that it’s so innocent that it’s kinda weird at the same time. So he takes a bunch of little kids in Franklin’s bunk on a butterfly hunt, and one of them, I think his name is Eddie, comes back in tears, because he peed his pants. But Franklin somehow twists this around and concocts this story about Mr. Warren molesting Eddie. He even tells Runk the Punk about it. This is our first hint that there may be more wrong with Franklin than just being “that guy.”

Before long, our boys are engaging in shenanigans. Chris and Donald rig the TV in the rec room to play some good ol’ scramble vision porn, but Mr. Warren catches them, unplugs the TV, closes the rec room for good, and locks Chris up. Then it’s time for the cross-camp talent show! We get a rapping emcee, because he’s the only black kid in camp! Cool! Then three of the girls do an original song about how the girls will take care of the boys “down south” while dressed up like Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, and…um, I think also Madonna? For some reason Mr. Warren doesn’t seem to mind, perhaps the innuendo just goes over his head? But then, in easily the best scene in the movie, Runk the Punk and Mason do a totally bitchin’ lip sync to Fear’s classic “Beef Bologna.” This time, Mr. Warren understands that the song isn’t actually about lunch meat, and freaks out. He sends the girls home, and cancels the dance scheduled for next week. This proves to be the final straw. Franklin holds a campfire pow wow with some of the other counselors in training, plus Donald, who by the way owes Franklin a favor because he saved him from drowning one day. They decide to stage a coup and take Mr. Warren and the other counselors into custody. Viva la revolucion!

The next day, everyone springs into action. Franklin creates some unrest by starting a “Free Chris Wade!” chant, then head over to the administration building to bust Chris out. Mr. Warren and the other counselors are like, what the hell this is insane you’re acting like total jerks, at which point Franklin is like, oh no, we’re super serious about this whole revolution thing, and by the way, I have a gun. Oh shit, Franklin DOES have a gun. Mr. Warren and the counselors are lead into the administration building at gunpoint, and locked up. Chris is like, hey man, I appreciate you busting me out and all, but we’re not really gonna take the law into our own hands, right? To which Franklin is like, don’t worry, we’ll let them go soon, we just wanna have some fun, I’m definitely not a power-hungry sociopath. Yeah, this is the point in the movie where it becomes more and more clear that, despite his guarantees, Franklin miiiiiiiiight just be a power-hungry sociopath.

Feeling the rush of having staged a successful, bloodless revolution, Franklin decides to also liberate the girls camp. Before long, all of the boys and the girls are living together, and it’s just a nonstop hormonal jamboree. During one of the now nightly dances, Runk the Punk decides to bring in the tied up and gagged Mr. Warren, to torture him by making him witness all of the grinding and making out that’s going on. None of these kids are leaving room for the Holy Spirit! Chris and this girl Heather, whom he’s fond of, are like yo, what the hell, this is going too far! And Franklin is like, oh hey, I’m wearing military fatigues now, so don’t fuck with me, you’re excommunicated. He orders Runk the Punk to take Mr. Warren back to his like, prison cell or whatever, but along the way, Mr. Warren tries to fight back, kicking Runk the Punk a bunch of times.There’s a scuffle, and oh shit, Mr. Warren accidentally gets stabbed and dies! Whoa! When Franklin finds out, he orders Runk the Punk and some other dude to ditch Mr. Warren’s body down by the caves. They’re in too deep now, there’s no turning back.

Things start to take a turn into Lord of the Flies territory. Franklin decrees that anyone who talks to Chris or Heather will be punished, and names Donald minister of propaganda. The whole free love thing turns dark too, when Mason rapes Joanie, whom you may remember as Cyndi Lauper from the talent show. Donald and another girl catch him, and he’s put on trial. Mason acts like a super gross, misogynist piece of shit, and Franklin decides that, as punishment, Mason will be forced to cross the rope bridge, hand over hand. If he lives, then he’s innocent. If he dies, then, well, he’s dead? He makes it, but then decides to mouth off to all of the girls, which is a bad idea, because they literally form a mob and Lynch him. Holy hell! I mean, it’s hard to feel bad for this piece of shit, but I didn’t think the movie was gonna go THERE.

At this point, some of the campers start to think that maybe this whole revolution thing wasn’t the best idea, while others just go more and more insane. Donald uses his computer nerd skillz to try and contact the outside world, but gets caught, and is sentenced to also walk the rope bridge. But Donald is a total dork, he’s gonna die for sure! Chris decides this is the time for the counter-revolution to begin. As Donald flails along on the rope bridge, losing his precious glasses in the process (which of course made me think of the classic Milhouse gag, “I need those to live!!!”), some of the kids start just straight up wailing on Franklin and his gang. Runk the Punk gets thrown off the hill, wow! Chris punches the shit out of Franklin’s face until he’s hamburger meat, whoa! Then the cops show up, somehow? Anyway, since Donald had been keeping his tape recorder diary thing, the cops are like, ok, we’re arresting the perps, everyone else get on the buses, you’re going home. Franklin is in the back of a cop car. The cop is like, we’re gonna contact your parents in Europe, implying that Franklin was never this salt of the Earth revolutionary, just a fucked up rich kid looking for some kicks at any cost. Whatever, man.

It probably wouldn’t surprise you to learn that Summer Camp Nightmare was co-written by none other than Penelope Spheeris. Early in her career, before she got famous thanks to directing the Wayne’s World movie, Spheeris excelled in this kind of movie: the kind of story that starts out looking like a typical popcorn flick, before descending into pure darkness. She did the same thing with Suburbia, her excellent film about a group of punk squatters living in Los Angeles, which features one of the heaviest, most gut-punching endings to any movie I’ve ever seen. If she and director/co-writer Bert L. Dragin were trying to combine Meatballs with Lord of the Flies, then they definitely succeeded. It’s far from pleasant, especially when things get rapey and murdery, but that’s the point. Subversion is the name of the game. Best of all, both sides are judged in equally harsh terms. Mr. Warren may be a sanctimonious dick, but Franklin’s way is even worse, and it doesn’t let either of them off the hook. It’s a somber note to close up Camp Analog Scum on, but hopefully next year won’t be quite as macabre. Though I doubt it…

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THE BURNING (1981, d. Tony Maylam)

Welcome to Camp Analog Scum! Now that summer is in full effect, we’ll be devoting this week to discussing two entries into one of the most hallowed subgenres in all of horror: the summer camp slasher flick! Following the massive success of Friday the 13th in 1980, small studios realized they had an easy formula to print some quick dough: find an idyllic summer camp somewhere in the Northeastern U.S., fill it up with hard-partying horny teenagers, and unleash a bloodthirsty psychopath with some kind of score to settle on them. It’s not hard to understand the universal appeal of the summer camp slasher flick: who doesn’t remember long July days running around in the woods, swimming in the lake, or the white-knuckled terror of a ghost story told ‘round the campfire? After all, a story can’t hurt you…unless it’s real.

Our first entry into this double feature, 1981’s The Burning, was somewhat lost to time for awhile. It was perhaps the first film to try and capitalize on Friday the 13th’s boffo box office, and while it got a more positive critical response than the film it was aping, audiences greeted the film lukewarmly, and it quickly faded from public consciousness thereafter. These days, thanks to re-releases from the likes of Scream Factory and Arrow, The Burning has finally found an adoring audience. I won’t lie, part of the reason I even did this summer camp-themed week in the first place was so that I could finally stop making excuses and watch this movie. And now, time for a controversial opinion: in terms of pure slasher bonafides, I think that this may be a better movie than the original Friday the 13th. Yeah, I said it!

If you grew up around New York and New Jersey, like yours truly, then you probably heard some variation on the legend of Cropsy, the madman who stalked the woods, looking for children to kill. The Burning takes this campfire classic and runs with it: we begin at Camp Blackfoot, sometime in the late 1970s. It’s after lights out, but a few of the older campers are plotting a prank on Cropsy, the groundskeeper of the camp. Quickly it becomes apparent that these kids fuckin’ hate Cropsy’s guts, but we never really get a clear answer as to why. Hey, sometimes kids just decide that a person sucks. The gang slowly make their way into Cropsy’s creepy-ass bunk, set something next to his bed, light that something on fire, then go knock on his window, stifling their laughter. Cropsy wakes up, and to his horror, sees what is burning next to his bed: a worm-ridden human skull! Wait, how did these pimple-faced little shits get their hands on a human skull?! Doesn’t matter, because Cropsy knocks over the skull and sets himself on fire! Oh fuck! Then he knocks over a canister of gasoline that is by his bed for some reason, and now he’s even more on fire! Oh fuuuuuuuuck! He runs out of the cabin, and he’s totally for real super duper on fire, and throws himself into the lake. The kids run off, their prank having turned into a crime scene.

Cut to five years later. Cropsy is getting wheeled out of the hospital or whatever. As he’s being rolled down this hallway, we hear all sorts of ADR voiceover recapping his stint in the burn ward: the skin grafts won’t take, there’s nothing we can do for you, try and forgive those kids, it was just an accident, etc. Suddenly, Cropsy is in Time’s Square, picking up a prostitute. Wait, I thought that this was a summer camp slasher flick? Anyway, she leads our giallo-ed out crispy critter up into her bedroom, understandably freaks out when she sees what he looks like, and then gets stabbed to death with a pair of scissors. If you look up “gratuitous” in the dictionary, its just a picture of this scene.

Now we’re back at camp, but this time it’s a different camp: Camp Stonewater. We meet our cast of characters: there’s Todd and Michelle, the head counselors; there’s Dave, the prankster; Eddie, the lothario; Karen, the virginal shy girl; Sally, the blonde bombshell; Glazer, the asshole bully; Alfred, the misanthropic nerd, and a few more. We get to spend quite awhile with these characters before the bloodshed happens, and we grow to like quite a few of them, so when the bloodshed actually begins, we’re more invested in the story, and more likely to get scared. I don’t know why this concept is so often lost on other filmmakers, but this is the main thing that this movie gets totally right. It’s also fun because these kids are played by some future notable faces: if you’ve seen a mob movie made after 1980, then you’ve seen Ned Eisenberg, who plays Eddie. A shockingly young Fisher Stevens plays a scrawny kid named Woodstock. We get to see future Oscar winner Holly Hunter in a small role as Sophie. And most notable of all is Dave, who is played by none other than Jason Alexander, when he still had a full head of hair! Talk about the Summer of George!

Some shenanigans happen. Alfred spies on Sally in the shower, and he’s a whiny dork about it. Glazer roughs him up a bit and throws him in the lake, because he’s decided that Sally is his girl, which is news to Sally. Dave and Woodstock help Alfred get revenge on Glazer by shooting him in the butt with a BB gun and mooning him. Constanza ass alert! These kids smoke cigarettes and read Playboys and talk openly about sex and jerking off, just like real teenagers do, and it’s very refreshing. At one point Alfred catches a glimpse of a weird, burnt up face in the window, but no one believes him, because he’s a total wet blanket about everything. There’s a really good fake-out scare involving Woodstock in a dark empty cabin which totally got me because even in my thirties I’m still freaked out by the dark. You don’t judge me, I judge you!

The next day, our gang jumps into some canoes and sets off on an overnight camping trip, somewhere near the former sight of Camp Blackfoot. What could go wrong?! That night, around a roaring campfire, Todd recounts the legend of Cropsy, who jumps out and tries to kill everyone! Aaaaaaaah! No, wait, it’s just Eddie in a rubber mask! Oh, Eddie! Speaking of Eddie, he convinces Karen, whom he has the hots for, to go skinny dipping with him in the lake. Karen is apprehensive, but she does have feelings for him, so she strips down and hops in. However, she gets uncomfortable when Eddie starts putting some moves on her, and keeps telling him to stop. Finally, Eddie gets super mad and tells her to leave him alone. In exchange for standing up for herself and refusing to be just another one of Eddie’s sexual conquests, Cropsy shows up and violently slits Karen’s throat with his trusty garden shears. Umm?

Now it’s morning, and Todd and Michelle are freaking out. Not only is Karen missing, but the canoes have disappeared. Eddie tells them what happened the night before with the skinny dipping and the blue balls and the anger, but Michelle is suspicious of him, despite telling Karen in an earlier scene that she should just let Eddie fuck her and get it over with. Whatever, Michelle. Todd gets the bright idea to build a raft out of twigs and branches and shit, which sounds hella stupid, but somehow actually works. They send a bunch of the kids, including Eddie and Woodstock, to row back to the camp and see if Karen or the missing canoes have turned up. Meanwhile, Glazer will not stop getting handsy with Sally, who keeps telling him no, which of course gets him super mad, and so finally to get him off her case, Sally is like, fine whatever meet me in the woods later and we’ll totally clown on each other in the nude, which is good enough to make Glazer stop pawing at her for awhile.

Back on the raft, everyone is tired and miserable. But look! There’s one of the missing canoes! Just floating there ominously in the middle of the river! Let’s row towards it! And so they row towards it, for what feels like 8 hours. Even though you can probably figure out what’s coming, they draw it out for such a ridiculously long time that you can’t help but hyperventilate a little bit. Just when they finally get right next to the canoe, who jumps out but our old pal Cropsy and them garden shears of his! In roughly twenty seconds he disposes of all of these kids in a very gory, graphic manner, and it’s awesome. So, so, so, so awesome. The amount of carnage that they manage to squeeze into these twenty seconds is awe inspiring. Well done, The Burning. Well done.

Meanwhile, Glazer and Sally are finally doing the horizontal polka, but of course Glazer blasts his sauce after like five pumps. Sad. But for some reason, Sally is kinda impressed? And she’s like, how long until you can drum up a new supply, because I’ve got a totally inexplicable case of the hornies. So Glazer is like, holy shit, ok, this truly never happens, sit tight, I’m going to head back to the campground and grab some matches so that we can make a fire. Good thing that Glazer wasn’t sleeping with Missy Elliot, because we all know how she feels about one minute men.

So of course as soon as Glazer leaves, Cropsy leaps out from behind the camera and turns Sally into his own personal shrubbery. Back at camp, Glazer grabs the matches, and for some reason, Alfred wakes up and decides to follow him. Dude, Alfred, what are you doing?! Being a voyeur has already gotten you in trouble once, and you know that Glazer is praying for any excuse he can find to shred you into pulled pork. Ill-advised, this plan is. As Alfred looks on, Glazer very, very, veeeeery slowly pulls back his and Sally’s sleeping back, which Cropsy was somehow hiding in? It’s confusing, but oh shit, Cropsy stabs the shit out of Glazer, and there’s so much blood. Peace out, Glazer.

Alfred runs back to the campground and wakes up Todd, who is understandably not super thrilled to be awoken by this neurotic dork at 4am or whatever, but Alfred runs one of his classic guilt trips on him, so they head into the woods, where Todd is shocked to find that yes, Glazer and Sally are both super duper dead. Oh no, Cropsy jumps up and smacks Todd on the side of the head, knocking him unconscious! Alfred runs around the woods for what feels like the entire first season of Cheers. The makeshift raft drifts back over to the campground, and to Michelle and the others’ chagrin, it’s full of the mutilated corpses of their friends.

Todd follows Alfred’s screams to a shack in the middle of the woods. We’re treated a suitably tense game of Cropsy and mouse as the creep stalks Todd through his lair. All of a sudden, there’s a flashback to the first scene: turns out, Todd was one of the kids who pulled the prank that turned Cropsy into fried chicken! Cropsy is brandishing a flame thrower, because this time, it’s…well, you know. We finally get a good look at the guy, and, well, he looks like if someone took an action figure of Sloth from the Goonies and put it in the microwave. Todd is about to get totally murderized by fire, but at the last moment, Alfred breaks free and stabs Cropsy with his own garden shears! Oh, the irony! Our two heroes are walking away, but oh crap, Cropsy is still alive! He grabs Alfred, but he breaks free and Todd smashes his head in with an axe before Alfred finishes the job with the flame thrower. Oh, the double irony!

As the police chopper in, we fade in on another campfire, and another set of campers. A counselor once again tells his rapt charges about the legend of Cropsy. The man himself may be dead, but he lives on in nightmares, just like Roger Ailes.

There are many reasons to recommend The Burning, and many of them are up on the screen. The acting is good, the cinematography is surprisingly artful, the story is well-paced, and the kills are fantastic. But The Burning is also an intriguing film due to some of the faces behind the camera. Weirdly enough, the film’s soundtrack was composed and performed by Rick Wakeman, the Arthurian legend-obsessed synth wizard from Yes. Though he occasionally dips into his typical ornate, switched on Bach territory, Wakeman also does deep, guttural digital terror surprisingly well. The film’s excellent, gory kills got their bite courtesy of the legendary Tom Savini. As the story goes, the makeup master was less than thrilled with the reveal of the undead Jason Voorhees at the end of his previous project, so he passed on the sequel in order to work on The Burning instead. Savini set out to outdo his work on Friday the 13th, and I personally think he succeeded. These kills are nasty and visceral and stock full of Grand Guignol madness. The only demerit is Cropsy’s burnt face, but in his defense, Savini only had three days to make it.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, in more ways than none: Harvey Weinstein. The film has the distinction of being one of Miramax’s first productions; Harvey and his brother Bob helped write the screenplay, alongside future Sopranos producer Brad Grey, and Harvey gave himself a “Created and Produced by” credit, whatever that means. Sadly, for as much as I enjoyed the movie as an 80s slasher, I found it to be nearly impossible to watch The Burning today without it being colored by what we now know about Weinstein. There’s been plenty of ink, digital or otherwise, spilled on how the Friday the 13th franchise punishes its characters with death for their sexual transgressions, but that trope is somewhat murkily applied to The Burning. Karen is punished with death for REFUSING to have sex with Eddie, whereas Sally is punished with death for giving in to Glazer’s sexual advances despite not wanting to. No matter if you’re the Madonna or the Whore, you’re still just gristle for the slaughter in the end. Given that this film’s “creator” may end this year as a convicted sex offender, could this film be a glimpse into his poisonous views on women? Turns out there were multiple monsters on the set of The Burning, but only one of them showed up onscreen.

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HAPPY 4th of JULY, SCUMBAGS!

We’re taking the week off to recharge our batteries, drink beer, and eat BBQ. But fear not, ANALOG SCUM will be back next week, and we’ve got something fun planned to celebrate summer vacation! So have a happy and safe Independence Day, and we’ll see you on the flip side!

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FUNERAL HOME (1980, d. William Fruet)

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to attempt to answer an age-old question: what does it mean to call a movie a ripoff? On one hand, it could mean that the movie was a waste of time, that it didn’t deliver on it’s promise, that you would’ve rather counted sweat beads on Sean Hannity’s upper lip than have sat through it. On the other hand, it could mean that the movie is so craven, so shameless, so devoid of it’s own ideas that it steals concepts wholesale from far better films, and does nothing to try and hide it, or to elevate those ideas into something that we, the audience have never seen before. Now that we’ve established our terms, I may as well tell you that today’s film, 1980’s Funeral Home, is a ripoff in both regards. It is completely devoid of any of the qualities that make a slasher flick exciting, and lifts its ending, almost beat for beat, from one of the most famous horror movies of all time. So without further ado, here is my eulogy.

We open on our young heroine, Heather, being dropped off by a bus in the middle of nowhere, somewhere in America and definitely not Canada. As she walks over a bridge, she notices a black cat following her. For some reason, this black cat freaks her out so much that she jumps into the next van that comes driving by, because everyone knows that hitchhiking isn’t nearly as dangerous as being in the presence of what appears to be a totally benign cat. Luckily, the driver of the van is Rick, a local good ol’ boy who is more than happy to give Heather a lift. You see, Heather has come out to the country for the summer to help her grandma, Maude Chalmers, run a bed and breakfast. As it turns out, the Chalmers family house used to be a funeral home, and Maude’s husband, James, has been missing for a number of years. I wouldn’t worry about it.

Once we get to the house, we meet Maude, who is your typical holier than thou old broad who disapproves of kids these days with their sex and rock n’ roll and electricity, plus the mentally handicapped handyman who lives in the shed out back and looks just like Donnie Wahlberg. Nearly 45% of this movie is shots of him reacting blankly to things. Cool. We also meet Rick’s brother, Joe, who is a local cop. Joe is investigating a number of mysterious disappearances in town, and of course the stodgy old sheriff refuses to even consider the possibility that these people were murdered, because as he puts it, “You know how many people go missing in the United States every day? Thousands!” Which makes sense, as this movie absolutely takes place in America, and not Canada. Every time Joe is on screen, the movie suddenly tries to become a comedy for no reason. Joe steps in cow shit. Hardy har har. Joe has a hard time backing his squad car out of a driveway. Hardy har har. Joe gets yelled at by the guy at the diner for putting his hat on the counter. Hardy har…nope.

Back at the bed and breakfast, we meet some of the guests. There’s Mr. Davis, a nice old guy who likes to go fishing, and the Brownings, Harry and Florie. Harry is kind of a Leisure Suit Larry-looking schmuck with a mustache, and Florie is an asshole. She’s the absolute worst. She complains about everything, tries to pick fights with everyone, and generally carries herself like she’s the most sexually irresistible creature in all of Canad…I mean America, despite the fact that she looks like a community college earth sciences teacher. She even mocks Donnie Wahlberg by pretending to flirt with him, which makes him angrily chop wood. Could he go from chopping wood to chopping…people?! Oh there’s also a family but we never learn their names and they have no lines.

Maude does some eavesdropping and finds out that Florie isn’t even Harry’s wife, she’s his mistress! Scandalous! That night, the camera does some creepy zooming around the house, going down into the basement, which is filled with old caskets and other spooky stuff, and we hear Maude speaking with someone with a disturbingly raspy voice who says that the adulterers have to go. One thing I will give this movie: it has atmosphere when it wants to. It really captures the dark stillness of rural America, and certainly not Canada, pay no attention to those accents. Oh, and the black cat shows up in a tree outside Heather’s window, and she once again totally flips out. This movie works so hard to convince you that this cat is terrifying, despite all evidence to the contrary. Donnie Wahlberg stares at some stuff.

So the next day, Maude confronts Harry and Florie and is like, you two are godless heathens, and you need to take your naughty fornications to some other, less reputable bed and breakfast! Harry is like, nuts to you, lady, I paid for a weekend, and that’s how long me and my awful side piece are gonna stay! They go off to the town dance to act like douchebags, and end up causing an honest to goodness brawl. Afterwards, they go park at the local quarry for some drunken sexy shenanigans. Suddenly, we see the Chalmers family truck cruising up slowly and quietly, with the headlights off. They love tap the back of Harry and Florie’s car. They do nothing but scream. The truck love taps them again. They make no attempt whatsoever to get out of the car and instead keep screaming. The truck love taps them for a third time, and their car falls maybe less than ten feet into the lake below. Again, apparently they just let this happen, there’s no visible effort to fight against their fate.

This is the first kill in the movie, it happens over a half an hour in, and there’s no blood. Oh, joy.

Heather goes in to clean the Brownings’ room the next day, and finds it totally empty. When she brings it up to Maude, Maude is like who what when never mind, I don’t want you hanging around that boy too late at night leave me alone nothing’s wrong. Oh yeah, I forgot, Heather and Rick are kinda dating at this point. That night, Heather hears the strange voices coming from down in the basement, and creeps down to check it out. But whoops, she knocks over a jar of pickled apples or some shit, oh nooooooo! The next morning, Heather is all like, hey grandma, who were you talking to down in the basement last night, and Maude literally grabs her by the arms and is like never go down in the basement it’s a terrible place and you can’t go down there and I’m not crazy and stop staying out so late with that boy and once again I’m not crazy. Riiiiiiight. So at this point it’s like, ok, grandpa is secretly living in the basement and going out at night to kill people. Speaking of which, can we get some more kills, please? Oh of course, that would leave less time for shots of Donnie Wahlberg staring at stuff.

Maude drives Mr. Davis into town, and tells him all about James. We get the first of three totally pointless flashbacks, in which a family photographs their dead child. When they get into town, we see Mr. Davis walk into the police station. Huh? What’s he doing there? And is that a Canadian flag in the background? But this movie is as American as apple pie and baseball and Pierre Trudeau! I mean Gerald Ford!

Heather and Rick do some snooping around the house, where they find the old hearse, along with a necklace that has the initials H.D. Heather talks about how she wishes she knew her grandpa, how her grandma always talked about what a kind, upstanding man he was. At which point Rick is like, well actually your grandpa was a mean drunk piece of shit who locked me the crematorium with a fresh corpse one time, queue pointless flashback number two, and Heather is like, psssh whatever, and leaves in a huff. The next day Heather and Rick drive into town, and Heather is like, my grandma is so weird, she’s so old fashioned, and it’s like she has no opinions of her own, they’re all my grandpa’s (uh huh), it’s like he’s still there with her (UH HUH) and she’s hiding him from everyone (UH HUUUUUUH). To which Rick replies, well, everyone in town knows that your grandpa was screwing around with another woman, and your grandma had a nervous breakdown because of it. Once again, Heather totally loses it, and is like, nuh-uh, you’re full of bullcrap, my grandparents are saints, what do you know. Ummm, Heather? A minute ago you were having your doubts, and all Rick did was confirm your suspicions. Don’t shoot the messenger, girlfriend. Save that energy for the spooky black cat. Also, Donnie Wahlberg stares at some stuff.

But that night, Heather overhears a strange conversation: Mr. Davis is like, oh hey Maude, I’m gonna go do some night fishing now, by the way, I’ve been snooping around town, and I think my wife was having an affair with your husband. At this point, I was hoping the movie was going to turn into In the Mood For Love, and just be about Mr. Davis and Maude falling in love, but refusing to act on it. No such luck. Also, his wife’s name was Helena! Helena Davis! H.D.! Cue the third totally pointless flashback, in which James watches some woman in a nightie dance around the kitchen. That’s how affairs work, right? Maude once again pulls her totally convincing I’m not crazy everyone else is crazy act, so Mr. Davis is like oh well I tried, just goes about his night fishing business. Then the movie has almost the exact same kill from the first Friday the 13th involving a flashlight and a first person camera. Mr. Davis is beaten with a pickaxe and buried in a shallow grave.

Kill number two, with less than half an hour left in the movie, and once again no blood. Super duper.

Down by the quarry, a swimming girl that the movie tries to pretend is a real character finds the bodies of the Brownings. Joe the cop is like, see?! The sheriff tentatively admits that ok, maybe all of those missing people didn’t just up and leave for the big city, and ok, maybe the fact that all of them were last seen at the Chalmers’ place wasn’t a coincidence. So Joe goes to see Maude and is like, hey, I need to look at the Brownings’ room. Maude is like how dare you I’ve known you since you were in short pants and I’m seriously not a crazy person, to which Joe is like, uh huh, well I’m the police. He of course finds nothing, then leaves. Donnie Wahlberg, meanwhile, stops staring at things long enough to follow our notorious black cat down into the basement, where he is stabbed a bunch of times by someone wearing a flannel shirt.

And that is the grand total of kills in Funeral Home. Three. No blood. Whoopee.

Now, at this point, I started to get worried. Are they really going to make it so Maude was the killer all along and James is like a split personality sort of thing? Are they really going to make it a Norman Bates situation? They wouldn’t, I thought to myself. They couldn’t, I thought to myself. Well, guess the fuck what? Heather and Rick go down in the basement, find Donnie Wahlberg’s dead body, Rick gets knocked unconscious, and none other than goddamn Grandma Maude chases Heather around with an axe, while screaming in that disturbing raspy voice. Great. But the bullshit doesn’t stop there! Heather runs into a dark room, Maude finds her, knocks into a hanging lightbulb, and reveals the corpse of Grandpa James Chalmers, sitting upright in a chair. Holy balls. It is almost literally shot for shot the reveal of Mrs. Bates at the end of Psycho. I couldn’t fucking believe the nerve of these filmmakers. Then, we cut to a shot that shows us that Joe and another cop happen to be outside the house for no reason, and Joe is like, well, time for this movie to end, so lets run in there. Oh, OH! And why doesn’t Maude chop Heather up into tiny little pieces? Because the black fucking cat runs by and distracts her. UGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.

As the credits roll, Joe explains the plot twist that was stolen from Psycho to some journalist, as if we were all too stupid to understand. Then he finds everyone’s favorite black cat on the hood of his cruiser, and picks it up. The camera zooms in and freeze frames on this dumb cat that it desperately wants to be meaningful and important to the plot, despite assigning no real meaning or importance to it whatsoever. You know, like how movies work.

Look, I’m going to be blunt: when you sit down to watch a film like Funeral Home, having read that it’s an 80s slasher film, you expect two things: creative, gory kills; and naked breasts. This film delivers on neither of these things. The three measly kills that we get are basically bloodless and shot so poorly that they’re almost Avantgarde, and there’s nary a nipple to be seen for the entire running time. Oh, and guess what, movie? You don’t just get to borrow from Alfred Hitchcock, okay? You really truly don’t. You have to earn it, which you do by making a film that can stand on it’s own artistic merit outside of it’s Hitchcockian overtones. Brian De Palma did this. Curtis Hanson did this. Funeral Home, you did not do this. By the way, I know a lot of people like this movie, ok? People seem to think it skates by on atmosphere alone. Furthermore, the lady who played Heather was actually nominated for Canada’s equivalent of a Best Actress Oscar. Good lord, I can only imagine the sorry state of Canadian cinema in the early 80s if this performance was deemed award-worthy. Which is weird, because obviously this is an American movie and…oh fuck it, this thing was shot in Canada, by Canadians, starring Canadians, and it is mind-boggling that the filmmakers thought that they could try and convince us otherwise. What a bunch of hosers.

So pay your last respects, because it’s time to lay Funeral Home to rest, where it belongs.

[analogscum]

ZOMBIE LAKE (1981, d. Jean Rollin)

Many filmmakers spend their entire careers trying to perfect a single idea. Jean Rollin, for example, never met a creepy castle that he didn’t wanna fill with lesbian vampires. These erotic gothic films, beginning with 1968’s Rape of the Vampire and concluding with 1979’s Fascination, represent the high water mark of an auteur who, as writer Scott Ashin put it, specialized in “movies that seem to have gotten lost on the way to the arthouse, and wandered into the grindhouse instead.” Yes, Rollin’s films featured all the hallmarks of textbook Eurosleaze: ample nudity, questionable dubbing, a soundtrack that ranges from lounge exotica to harsh synthesizers, etc. But with Rollin behind the camera, especially during this era, there was no doubt that you were in the hands of a true artist. His shot compositions, his use of color, and the languid, dreamlike pace of his movies still remain breathtaking to this day. In fact, many of Rollin’s films were based directly on his dreams: he considered 1973’s Requiem For a Vampire to be his best film, because he finished the script in two days, pulled from deep within his subconscious. For Rollin, the first thought was often the best thought, and for whatever reason, his thoughts always seemed to drift back to bloodsuckers.

Oh, but we’re not talking about vampires today. On the contrary, we’re dealing with a different kind of undead. You see, as the seventies turned into the eighties, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead kicked off a demand in the international film market for zombie movies. On the one hand, this craze lead to such flesh-eating foreign classics as Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2 and Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City. However, it also lead to today’s film, 1981’s Zombie Lake, written by the previously discussed Spanish skin flick madman Jess Franco, and directed by Rollin. You would think that such a simpatico pairing of writer and director would go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Unfortunately, it’s more like two great tastes that should never be mixed, like chicken and orange juice. We’ll get into the behind the scenes chicanery that befell this film later, but for now, let’s strip down to our skivvies, and brave the undead Nazi-infested waters of Zombie Lake.

We open with a naked young woman. Obviously. She is lounging by a idyllic lake in the French countryside. Could it be the titular Zombie Lake? Only time will tell. Speaking of titular, the camera lingers all over this lady’s exposed flesh for a crazy amount of time. It’s a real get a good look Costanza sort of situation. You could count individual pubic hairs if you were so inclined. After what feels like three hours, the lady goes swimming in the lake. We get some underwater shots that feel positively gynecological. But wait, what is that creature emerging from the murky depths? Oh wait, never mind, here are some more shots of this woman’s crotch. Ok, now the creature is back. Are they even in the same lake? Is the young naked woman actually in a swimming pool? It’s difficult to say. Oh yeah, it’s a zombie. It’s wearing some sort of military uniform. Ok, yup, he’s drowning this nameless naked young woman. Au revoir, naked young woman!

So the town responds to this naked young woman going missing with a resounding shrug. Every time someone brings it up, they’re all like, ehh, we’ll deal with it tomorrow. The mayor, who looks like a frog who lost weight and speaks in a dubbed voice that sounds like someone doing a bad Peter Lorre impression, wants to get the cops involved, but doesn’t seem to think this is an urgent matter either. Things escalate when one of the zombies strolls into town and attacks another lady. This time, we get to see that the zombie has a special power that allows it to press his lips gently against a person’s neck, causing them to bleed to death. The town picks her up and lays her down on the mayor’s doorstep, then stands there completely stone faced, while the mayor once again is just like, oh well, nothing we can do, guess we’ll have to wait for a plucky reporter to show up in town.

Enter the plucky reporter! She goes to the local bar and literally announces to everyone there that she’s in town to do a story on that creepy ol’ lake of theirs. Some dude with an impressive mustache is like, hey, I’ll take you to see the mayor, he can tell you all about that lake, he reads books and stuff. So she goes to see the mayor, who for some reason is furious that she’s interrupted his busy schedule of sitting around looking pensive, until she’s like, hey, let’s talk about the legends and folklore surrounding that lake that your whole town doesn’t like to talk about, at which point he’s like oh cool hell yeah, come sit down, here’s the deal with the lake, it all started back in World War II…

Cut to the most adorable battle recreation you ever did see. It has all the charm and realism of a highly precocious grade school play. So a Nazi soldier saves a lady from a very small explosive, and gets a minor head wound in the process. After the medic fixes up his noggin, the lady repays him for his valor with some good ol’ fashioned fuck service. Would it surprise you to hear that this scene goes on for a long time? So all of a sudden the Nazis are being pushed out of the village. Our soldier goes to see his boo long enough for her to be like, hey, this is our daughter, I named her Helena, anyway, deuces, and then she dies. The Nazis are like, nuts to this, let’s retreat, but then whoops, they all get gunned down by some French resistance fighters, including the mayor, who apparently has been the same age since the 1940s. He’s like, yo, we have to throw these dead assholes in the lake, or else the next Nazis that roll through will see their dead homies and start some shit with us. So they throw the bodies in the lake, taking comfort in the knowledge that they’ll never rise from the dead and kiss people on the neck to death.

At this point, the movie realizes, hey, it’s been almost ten minutes since we last saw some nude boobs! So wouldn’t you know it, a female basketball team rolls up in a VW bus! How about that! There are like almost ten of them, and they all decide to go skinny dipping in this lake! Great idea, ladies! Would it surprise you to learn that this is the longest scene in the movie? Anyway, they all wait patiently to get drowned by the nazi zombies, which is hilarious, and one of them runs into the local bar, totally topless, and screaming her head off. Luckily these crusty old Frenchmen keep their hands to themselves.

Honestly, this is the part of the movie where my memory gets a little rusty. I know that the zombies start getting out of the lake and roaming around town. I know that our undead soldier lover man finds his daughter, Helena, who looks to be about ten years old, even though the war was almost 40 years ago at this point? Or maybe the movie takes place right after the war, but then why does everyone wear clothing and drive cars straight out of 1981? Uggggh, whatever, anyway, Helena somehow knows that this rotting corpse man is her dad, and she loves him. Oh yeah, and two detectives show up and are almost immediately eaten to death. Apparently there’s a scene involving a lady in an outdoor bathtub? I’ve seen pictures. And apparently our undead soldier lover man gets into an extremely slow-moving knife fight with another nazi zombie? Guys, I for real don’t remember any of this happening. This could be for two reasons: one, I watched a cut of the film that didn’t include these scenes, or two, it was after midnight, and the movie was boring, and I kept nodding off. I’ll let you be the judge.

Finally, plucky reporter lady is like, hey, have you ever considered just lighting these fuckin’ things on fire? And the mayor is like, holy shit, fire! You’re a brain genius, plucky reporter lady! So he goes to Helena, and is like, look, we’ve gotta kill your undead papa with fire. And she’s like nooooooo, but then agrees to it, telling the mayor, I’ll need a bucket of blood, then you can do whatever you want. Helena is the creepiest character in this movie.

It’s a beautiful afternoon in the French countryside, so the nazi zombies decide to go for one of their leisurely walkabouts. Plucky reporter lady is eaten for absolutely no reason. Helena lures her daddy and the rest of his crew to the old chapel with the bucket of blood. Here is where you notice that the main zombies merely have their faces painted green, while the background zombies seem to have more extensive makeup effects, scars and lesions and stuff. Why would you put the more realistic looking zombies in the background?! Ugggggh, whatever, anyway, Helena is like, I’m sorry daddy, deuces, and runs out of the chapel, just in time for one of the villagers to use a flame thrower (!!!) to turn these SS goons into crispy critters. Helena looks on, tears in her eyes, because her deadbeat daddy is dead for the second time. It’s like the end of that one episode of Fresh Prince, except dumb and shitty, and there are no meaningful statues.

So, it probably won’t shock you to learn that nearly everyone who worked on Zombie Lake was totally embarrassed to have done so and disowned the film completely. Jess Franco was originally hired by Eurocine producers Marius and Daniel Lesoeur to write and direct the film. However, when Franco learned how small of a budget and how tight of a schedule the Lesoeurs were giving him, he was like, fuuuuuuuuuck that, and bounced. So they hired Rollin, who signed on as a favor to the Lesoeurs, without really reading the screenplay. Later on, Rollin would admit that, had he actually read it, he never would’ve done the film. As it turned out, Franco was right to have budgetary concerns: apparently money was so tight that at one point, the actors were forced to move and say their lines in slow motion, because the camera was running at the wrong speed, and there wasn’t enough cash or time to have it fixed.

The sad irony is, Zombie Lake got a much wider distribution than any of Rollin’s passion projects. I can’t imagine having to live with the fact that your most widely seen film is the film that you’re most ashamed of. The one that you wished you had never made. The one that you demanded to have your name removed from, which is why “J.A. Lazer” is listed as director in the opening credits. But you know what? The fact that Rollin got this film made at all, under the circumstances that he was up against, is admirable. It may have had no budget, and a half-baked script, and a distinct lack of lesbian vampires, but that didn’t stop Jean Rollin from finishing the job that he was hired to do. So, in the end, A for effort, Monsieur Rollin. And B for breasts. Unfortunately, the movie is still C for crap.

[analogscum]

GIRL FROM STARSHIP VENUS (1975, d. Derek Ford)

Last year, I went to a screening of the ultra gory bizarro slasher classic Nightmare at the Drafthouse. The film was introduced by Mike Hunchback, a name that should be familiar to genre fans, especially in the tri-state area. During his opening remarks, Mike made a point that I thought was especially trenchant: when it comes to low-budget cinema, we must judge the film based on its merits. After all, not every film is trying to be Citizen Kane or Vertigo, so why should those be the water marks that every film has to meet? It’s something that I really try and hold true here at the site, giving each film I watch a fair shake based simply on what it set out to accomplish, and whether or not it succeeded in doing so. All that being said, I seriously think that today’s film, 1975’s Girl From Starship Venus, is the worst film I’ve watched for this site. I hated every second of it, I frowned throughout its entire 81 minute runtime (which felt more like 881 minutes), and seriously considered doing something I’ve never ever done in the history of ANALOG SCUM: giving up on a movie. Turning it off and never looking back. But I plowed through for you, my dear Scumbags. I’m not going to say it was worth it, because it wasn’t. So, if nothing else, take this review as a dire warning. Stay away.

We open in space. The music and the narration blatantly rips off Star Trek. I suppose this was supposed to be “charming.” A spaceship lands in the Picadilly Circus section of London. It looks like a silver pinball. It lands in a puddle, to the consternation of the commander. Then it lands in another puddle, because comedy. They refer to Earth as “Dom” and call all earthlings “Doms,” please don’t ask me why. They send out one of their own, named the Surveyor, who takes the form of a nekkid blonde buh-buh-buh-baaaaaabe. The Surveyor wanders around in the nude for awhile, and ends up at some seedy massage parlor where everyone else is nude as well. Two of the ladies who work there assume that her clothes have been stolen, I’m not sure how, because the Surveyor just stands there, totally mute and dead-eyed. The entire film, she and the commander on the ship are communicating telepathically, because it’s cheaper to make a movie where you record most of the dialogue in post. The Surveyor has the most comical German accent you’ve ever heard, she almost sounds like Elmer Fudd. Anyway, the ladies give her some clothes and a five pound note and tell her to beat feet, so she does.

She wanders around the Soho district, which was basically London’s equivalent to 42nd Street at the time, nothing but porno theaters and dirty magazine shops. For some reason, she’s able to talk now, because whatever. From here the movie establishes its tedious formula: she just walks around, reporting back to the ship in voiceover about what she’s seeing, and of course she doesn’t understand anything, so it’s sooooooooo hilarious. Every time she encounters a man, that man inevitably reacts with wild gesticulations and facial contortions straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon, as if they’ve never seen a woman before. It is exhausting. These old pervs make Don Knotts look like Daniel Day-Lewis. Eventually she meets a charming dressmaker (speaking of Daniel Day-Lewis…) who takes her in, solely because he’s a Good Samaritan, either that or he’s totally oblivious to the obvious signs that the Surveyor wants to engage in “refueling,” which is what she calls sex, and please kill me now.

The bulk of the movie is dedicated to a long sequence involving a lecherous old creep who picks her up at a wedding she’s crashed (don’t ask). They go to a strip club, where she drinks alcohol for the first time, and it turns her skin green, and her hair into an afro. He understandably freaks out, but then HE gets kicked out of the strip club, not the lifeless automaton who has suddenly turned a different color. No one seems to notice THAT. Apparently that wasn’t a deal breaker though, because they end up back at his place anyway. His flat is full of balloons, because he’s freak nasty. Were the makers of HBO’s Real Sex out there somewhere taking notes? Anyway, he’s like, you’re so dumb and weird that you must be a virgin, so let’s do this damn thing. But before they can, the commander puts up some kind of force field around her, so when he tries to slip it in, he gets shocked so bad he’s thrown across the room. He blames this on a “Japanese sex toy,” even though a minute ago he thought that she was a virgin. So he tries again, and of course it happens again, only this time he blames it on “women’s lib.” Again, please kill me now.

Some more stupid shit happens, and eventually she’s arrested for trying to steal a baby, because she was trying to figure out it it was “a deformed dwarf” or “a deformed midget.” Please make it stop. In the jail, a wacky German doctor tries to take her pulse, but of course she has none because she’s an alien or whatever, so the doctor goes apeshit and is screeching about how she’s about to die and tries to give her CPR, but the guards walk in and think that he’s sexually assaulting her, aren’t mistakes like this just the height of comedy? Anyway, the handsome dressmaker bails her out for some reason. Oh hell, I’ll tell you why: so they can fuck.

This is what the whole movie has been leading up to: because of the incident with the German doctor, the commander gives the Surveyor human feelings, which in this movie just means that she becomes uncontrollably horny. She keeps dropping, not even hints, just straight up propositions to this handsome dressmaker, but he’s totally oblivious, even when she invites him to take a bath with her. He thinks she wants him to cook her some eggs, because misunderstandings are hilaaaaaaaarious. So basically the last fifteen minutes of the movie are her totally naked and writhing around in pleasure before she and this dumb dumb finally do the deed, and the entire time the commander is like, hey stop that, this isn’t part of the mission, I’m a big dorky nerd who hates sex, and it goes on and on and on and on until finally the movie ends. Hallelujah.

So, in the spirit of judging a movie based solely on its merits, fuck Girl From Starship Venus. Fuck it straight into the sun. I despise this movie. The comedy is horrendous; I got more laughs out of Breaking the Waves. The acting is appalling; nothing but obnoxious over the top mugging mixed with dead eyed stares. Yes, there is a lot of nudity, but it’s almost impossible to enjoy with that grating, nerd-ass voiceover droning on endlessly on top of it. The music…actually isn’t bad. It’s on the fun side of cheesy. OK, so that’s one thing. Anyway, this movie has never come out on DVD or Blu-Ray. Girl From Starship Venus only exists today as a very rare VHS, and if you ask me, that’s how it should stay. Mankind doesn’t deserve much good these days, but we certainly don’t deserve the misery that is this movie. Given the choice, I’d happily take an anal probe.

[analogscum]

PRIME EVIL (1988, d. Roberta Findlay)

Recently, my dear Scumbags, I watched a horror movie that I simply must tell you about. It deals with a woman who is haunted by dark secrets in her family history. It keeps her from enjoying everyday life, and she only begins to unravel more and more when a tragic death rocks her world. In her time of need, she brusquely pushes away those around her who would provide the help she really needs, and instead turns to spiritualism, only to realize once it’s far too late, and she’s burned all her bridges, that she has been an unwitting pawn in the machinations of a bloodthirsty demonic cult for her entire life, a sacrificial lamb destined for the abbatoir since birth. That movie, of course, is 1988’s Prime Evil. Wait, what movie did YOU think I was talking about?

Prime Evil was the final film to be directed by exploitation auteur Roberta Findlay. Her story is a fascinating one: alongside her husband Michael, she wrote and directed a number of sadomasochistic sexploitation films in the 1960s. Under the tutelage of George Weiss, who produced Ed Wood’s cross-dressing classic Glen or Glenda, the Findlays began spicing up their skin flicks with touches of seedy violence, essentially creating the “roughies” genre, alongside fellow New York City filmmakers Joe Sarno, Joseph P. Mawra, and Lou Campa. By the 1970s, the couple transitioned into making straight up slashers, including the super controversial 1976 feature Snuff, arguably an early example of found footage horror. The next year, Michael Findlay was tragically killed in a horrific helicopter crash on the roof of the Pan Am building. Roberta soldiered on, directing a number of genre classics on her own, including two in 1985 alone: Tenement and The Oracle. Prime Evil, unfortunately, is not a classic. In some regards, it is barely even a movie. Miss Findlay clearly had some lofty ambitions with this film, but attempted to execute them on a grindhouse, run and gun, down and dirty production. Because of this, Prime Evil is a fascinating failure, the type of film that works best when watched with like-minded friends, and preferably at some level of inebriation.

We open in a church in the 1300s, where some good ol’ terrible narration explains that the plague is in full effect, and the priests believe that it is God punishing those who aren’t holy enough, so a few priests were like, fuck this noise, we’re taking our talents to Hades. There’s a meeting with a bunch of priests, and the head priest is like, yo, Father Thomas, what’s with you, man? And Father Thomas is like, didn’t you hear the narration? I’m on Satan’s team now, God is wack. They converse about this, but Roberta Findlay must’ve not liked the dialogue, so the narrator comes back in to drown them out. Then the head priest is like, I’m gonna excommunicate you, Father Thomas, but Father Thomas is like, lol nope, and decapitates this head priest with a giant sword, and it’s awesome. Father Thomas is like, news flash bitches, I’m running this show, and I’m Satan Squad all day, so don’t get in my way. Some dork-ass priest is like oh noooooo! So Father Thomas awkwardly slashes him across the stomach with his sword, and the guy awkwardly falls down some stairs, and even the movie can’t stand to look at this, because it fades to black, mid-fall, like it’s embarrassed.

Cut to: present day Boston, though the film was obviously shot in New York City, to the point where nearly every synopsis I’ve read incorrectly says that the film takes place there. Anyway, an old priest dies while holding a weird amulet. A nun, Sister Angela, goes to the bishop and is like, hey bishop, I think Satanists killed that old priest, and I have a story about my mom being murdered by Satanists in Egypt or something, it’s kinda boring, Liam probably zoned out during this part. And shockingly enough, the bishop is like, yup, we know, it was totally a satanic cult, we just don’t know how to handle this pesky problem. So Sister Angela is like, hey, let me go undercover and infiltrate the cult and do nothing else until the final scene of the movie. The bishop is apprehensive for like five seconds, but then agrees, under the stipulation that Sister Angela must renounce her vows so she can do all sorts of evil cult stuff, which in this movie means smash a plaster crucifix with a hammer and burn her nun uniform. Umm, hail Satan?

Honestly, nothing about this cult makes much sense. They’re still lead by Father Thomas (whose last name, we find out, is Seton. GET IT?!?!) Members of the cult have to sacrifice a family member who is a virgin, and in exchange they get “13 years of immortality,” which is an oxymoron. That is not how immortality works! Why would you agree to some cockamamie plan where you have to renew your immortality clause or whatever every 13 years or start to age again? Is worshiping Satan like going to the DMV? Actually, that kinda makes sense.

So all of a sudden, this blonde lady is making out in a hallway with some dude who looks like Kevin Nealon. But wait, what? I thought Sister Angela was our main character? Is it now this lady? Anyway, she goes in and sees Alex, who is her job recruiter of some kind? Apparently blondie used to be a prostitute before she joined this like, temp agency? So Alex is like, hey, I got you a job interview at 2:30 tomorrow, it’s for a paralegal job…on Wall Street! To which blondie animatedly replies, “Wall Street?!?!” And I died a thousand tiny deaths.

Now we get to see blondie and Kevin Nealon hitchin’ a ride into the bone zone, Findlay style. But oh gosh, they’re interrupted by a homicidal maniac in a handyman’s uniform! Wait, what?! But fortunately, Kevin Nealon knows karate! WAIT, WHAT?!?! So he awkwardly does karate at this schlubby murderer for a minute, but then whoops, he still gets stabbed in the back, contorting his body like a Merce Cunningham dancer. Which is weird. So blondie runs down the stairs, before our killer catches up via a convenient jump cut, and knocks blondie out with some sort of tranquilizer. As he’s carrying her out of the building, some guy passes them and goes, “She have too much to drink?” To which our schlubby murderer replies, in a lifeless monotone, “Yes.” And the guy responds, “Have fun, man!” EWW EWW EWW EWW EWW EWW EWW EWW EWW.

Since every cut to a new scene in this movie feels like violent whiplash, all of a sudden we’re at a gym, and Alex is working out with her friend. This friend is the most obnoxious character I’ve seen in a movie in awhile. She yells all of her lines in an exaggerated Valley Girl accent like a Siobhan Fallon SNL character for no reason, grunts loudly while using the machines, is constantly shoving chips and other junk food down her throat, and only wants to talk about sexytimes. She asks Alex if her boyfriend, Bill, is any good in bed, which really upsets Alex for some reason, and they get into a fight, which ends with the friend yelling the amazing line, “WHY DON’T YA WANNA GET POKED?!?!”

Suddenly, Alex and Bill are in the back of a horse-drawn carriage, riding through the part of Boston that looks just like Central Park. Without being prompted, Alex begins to go into excruciating detail as to why she don’t wanna get poked. Turns out, when she was 6 years old, her father sold her to a ring of child pornographers before mysteriously disappearing, yup, the movie really goes THERE. Clearly and understandably, she’s still deeply traumatized by all of this, which is why she and Bill still haven’t had sex despite the fact that they’re ENGAGED. But then, in basically the next scene, she’s hanging out with her rich lush of a mother, and she’s like, hey, come with me to Grandpa’s Christmas party, and the mom is rightfully like, you mean the father of the man who sold my daughter into sexual slavery as a child? Yeah, no thanks, I never wanna see anyone in that family ever again. GOOD IDEA, LUSH MOM! But Alex is like, oh c’mon, Grandpa is nice.

Plot twist: Grandpa ISN’T nice! In fact, Grandpa is a Satanist, and he’s going to sacrifice Alex at their next ceremony in order to renew that bullshit immortality contract. Apparently last time he offered up his son, Alex’s father, and that’s why he ain’t around no more. But, didn’t it have to be a virgin who was sacrificed? Umm, don’t worry about it. Father Thomas has the amazing line, “You’re being very flippant for a man about to sacrifice his granddaughter.” But Grandpa doesn’t just want to do that, he wants to overthrow Father Thomas and rule the world, or something, basically it’s all talk and nothing ever comes of it.

OK, this is taking forever, because something batshit insane happens every two minutes in this movie, so I’m gonna ramp it up a bit: Alex meets Father Thomas and begins to fall under his Satanic influence, thanks to his handsome eyes and Shatneresque line delivery. This rightfully upsets Bill, but Alex screams in his face every time he brings up how inappropriate this PRIEST acts around her. Dude, Bill, my guy, between the crazy family and the lustful priest and the no sex, why would you marry this woman?! The Satanists basically waterboard Alex’s lush mom with alcohol, which somehow Alex doesn’t hear despite being right next door to it happening. She moves in with Grandpa. Father Thomas makes out with her after the funeral, which, holy shit! Schlubby murderer abducts more ladies, including a hooker whom he basically reverse psychologies into roofying herself (in a scene set to Seinfeld style slap bass, no less!), a wise-cracking teen prostitute character they introduce solely to be abducted, and Alex’s slutty gym rat snack friend. Turns out schlubby murderer is doing all this because he wants to be a part of the Satanic cult, but Father Thomas is like, lol bro you may hang with us, but you’ll never be ONE of us, because you’re a creep and no one likes you. Somehow Bill starts to figure out that Father Thomas is behind all this murdering and Satanic chicanery, and goes to confront him, but whoops, schlubby murderer throws him off a roof. At least we get a pretty good bad dummy shot out of it!

At this point, you may be asking yourself, is there a bumbling police detective in this movie? Well of course there is! I think his name is Dan and he’s got a mustache! He’s investigating the disappearance of blondie from the beginning, and gets wrapped up in all this drama with Alex’s family because of it. Based on one phone conversation with Bill shortly before he’s murderized, he somehow puts together the entire satanic plot, including knowing that it’s going to happen during the winter solstice on December 21st, which, whatever, the movie has to end somehow, right? So Mustache Dan and his partner go to arrest Father Thomas, and during their confrontation, Mustache Dan utters what is actually the best line in the entire movie, a line that puts even “WHY DON’T YA WANNA GET POKED?!” to shame. Get ready for it...

“Cut the crap, fart breath!”

Slow clap for that. Slow clap. Brilliant.

Finally, the sacrificial ceremony can begin! Alex is all loopy under Father Thomas’s sexy spell, everyone has gathered in their finest Sunn O))) robes. Even Satan himself is there, and you guys, Satan in this movie is played by a tiny adorable puppet. It looks like if the baby from Eraserhead had bat wings and was made of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. It is terrible and charming. Father Thomas begins the proceedings by introducing everyone to blondie, slutty gym rat snack friend, and wise-cracking teen prostitute. He’s like, these ladies are the brides of Satan now, so go ahead and show the audience dem titties! Naturally, they oblige. Suddenly, we see Sister Angela standing in the corner, and remember that she’s in the movie. Grandpa is ready to sacrifice Alex, and all the satanists begin to awkwardly grind on each other. Schlubby murderer wants in on some of them libations of the flesh, and grabs Sister Angela. Sister Angela is like nope, I didn’t sign up for THIS shit, and slashes his throat. Then she stabs Grandpa to death, before he can sacrifice Alex. Then, oh my gosh, she stabs the tiny adorable Satan puppet to death! RIP Satan puppet! All of the occultists begin to age rapidly and turn into corpses, like a less impressive version of the climax of The Devil’s Rain. Father Thomas runs up some stairs, yelling “You’ve won this time!” as if he’s a goddamn Scooby-Doo villain. All of the women are safe, and Sister Angela has some dumb line that includes the phrase “prime evil” but who cares.

The movie ends with a real estate agent lady showing a church to some guy, which is not how churches work I don’t think, and we’re supposed to not know who this guy is even though it’s glaringly obvious, and of course it’s Father Thomas, and he’s like, why don’t we check out the basement, mwahahahaha! And then the camera zooms in on him twice, just to really make sure we all get it. But wait, how can you restart the cult if Satan has been stabbed to death? How are you not a rotting pile of bones now that Satan has been stabbed to death? Get outta here with this ending!

Now, I wanna give this movie a fair shake. Yes, it is bonkers. Yes, the dialogue and the acting are both laughable. Yes, the camerawork and the editing are shoddy. Yes, the kills are mostly dull. But as I was making my way through the movie, trying desperately to make heads or tails of the madness unfolding onscreen, I suddenly began to think to myself…did Roberta Findlay secretly make a film about abuse?

Alex, the main character, is defined by the trauma of her childhood. It rules her everyday life, it keeps her from enjoying meaningful friendships and an intimate relationship with her boyfriend. However, despite all of this, she still lets herself be groomed for further abuse by Father Thomas, and remains oblivious to the fact that she is being groomed until it is nearly too late. That really struck me. Was this intentional on Roberta Findlay’s part? Was she trying to make a statement about how women can become complicit in the machinations of their abusers? Would I have thought of this if the film wasn’t directed by a woman? Am I giving Prime Evil too much credit, seeing a feminist message in a blood n’ boobs cheapie? Either way, there’s no denying that, whether it’s amassing an impressive oeuvre of sleazy underground classics, or infiltrating a weirdly bureaucratic Satanic cult, sisters are doing it for themselves.