Brecht and the Single Girl: PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT (1973)

If you're confused about why Italy continually undoes the soundness of the Euro, Elio Petri's PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, a nihilistic anti-capitalist Brechtian satire from 1973, can surely clarify for you toute suite. (Short answer: too many Commies --and they got a funny idea 'bout money.)

The "plot" follows neurotic bank teller Total (Flavio Bucci - the blind pianist in Suspiria) as he tries to escape his meager 9-5 barely-make-ends-meet job, which mainly consists of doling out cash to greedy titans of industry who proudly brag about their non-paying of taxes, oblivious to the seething rage welling up in the little guy who counts their capital. Snapping his pea brain after a robbery, Total becomes obsessed with a rich, corrupt butcher (Ugo Tognazzi), stealing all his signifiers: little butcher hat, favorite carving knife, his car, even his mistress (Daria Nicolodi!). Launching himself on an absurdist Harpo-cum-Karl Marx-Quixote odyssey, Total wind up lost in the out-of-bound weeds of Anarchy. Burning a lire note in his boss's office ("that's sacrilege!") to signify his resignation, he justifies his identity stealing operation by staying 'pure' i.e. not stealing any actual cash: "I'm a Mandrakian Marxist," he announces. "I only steal what I need." By Mandrake, naturally, he means 'the Magician'. When it comes to films equally indebted to crime, communism and comic strips, no one outdpes Elio Petri (The 10th Victim, Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, A Quiet Place in the Country).

While I'm no fan of what I can't help but read as Petri's ingenuità utopica (given allowances for its time and place), I love his deeply cynical reading of a social structure so deeply ingrained most filmmakers don't even notice it's there. The title is confusing mistake, though, a riff on an old anarchist slogan revived for the 60s, when commie ideology was snuck into movie dialogue by leftist filmmakers like Petri, Fernando di Leo and Giuliu Questi. Italians really love the idea that stealing in time of necessity is justified. Obviously they have a violent reaction one way or another to their Catholic guilt, so keep belaboring it, ever evoking the 'bread riots' of the 1940s - as seen in Rossellini's Rome: Open City. (The kind of thing America was briefly allowed to explore (i.e. between the Crash and the Code) in films like Hero for Sale and The World Changes).  Also, they had an establishment much more corrupted and deadlocked government to actually work, so chaos descended. That's why 60s Italian master thief characters like Diabolik (who would be the villains in American comics like Batman) became the heroes of Italy, encouraging the average Italian to smash and grab what they want, leading to rampant crime in the streets and all the other things anti-capitalist Commie subversives would have loved to see become the norm in the US as well. So thank you, Joseph McCarthy, after all!

Property is No Longer a Theft is a child of that mindset in more ways than one. It's on Blu-ray from Arrow, and looks and sounds great, but--if you don't believe in money but do have a Prime subscription, you can pretend you're stealing it by watching it 'free'. Just don't wonder if Arrow suddenly doesn't have any money for new restorations. It's your fault.

What drew me to the title initially (aside from being enthralled by Petri's earlier masterpiece A Quiet Place in the Country) was a recommendation from horror film historian Tim Lucas on Facebook, who pointed out its proto-giallo greatness. Total may not be a crazed killer in high giallo style, but he does threaten people with a knife. Ennio Morricone delivers one of his most surreal breathy scores; Deep Red cinematographer Luigi Kuveller twists the frame with portentous shadows and expressionist angles (lots of doors within doors), star Bucci played the pianist in Suspiria, and longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi (1) looms tall and ungainly-albeit-sexy as Anita, the butcher's mistress. When she lets loose a deep throaty laugh during one of her Brechtian fourth wall-breaking monologues, you might get an instant chill as you recognize her voice's deep masculine depths from so many Argento classics (it's the same laugh from Phenomena, when daring Jennifer Connelly to call her insects, or the mocking, snarling demoness at the Suspiria climax). Since Bucci looks more than a little like Dario Argento himself (with a Dog-eared dash of a young Pacino around the eyes) it would be easy to see Property as a kind of deranged reflection of the Argento-Nicolodi collaborative canon (1), with the Butcher representing typical 'red telephone' Italian filmmaking at the time, and Total the Argento who steers Daria free. But to what end? 

Keeping the giallo framework in mind might help today's 60s-70s-era Italian genre cinema fan keep its odd mix of police corruption and insurance scam satire (we follow the flow of $$ from robbery to insurance claim, to inventory-exaggerating, cop bribing, policy collecting, to thief selling stolen goods back to insurance company, like some giant financial food chain) from getting too mired in either didactic dissertation (In standard Brechtian practice, characters break the narrative flow perhaps too regularly) or Polanski-style young hungry male vs. olde rich male for sexually ravenous younger woman - power triangulating.

Meanwhile, weird characters pop up to keep you guessing: there's the droop-eyed chief of detective (Orazio Orlando) who seems like he's either fishing for a bribe or trying to trap the butcher into a confession with a sense of conspiratorial camaraderie ("If you're not afraid of having it stolen," he notes, during the insurance tally, "you can't enjoy your wealth"); a cross-dressing master thief named Albertone (Mario Scaccia) who teaches Total the trade (and Total in exchange, does nothing but taxes his mentor's weak, albeit big-as-all-outdoors queer heart with his irrational Ledger Joker-x-Harpo Marxist nonsense), and  Cecillia Pollizi as a dyke fence who evokes Lotte Lenya's madame in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone albiet in a  resonant post-glam fashion. There's even Diabolik in a blink-and-miss cameo (below):

Diabolik dies in a posion gas-filled car at a security expo in Property is No Longer a Theft

It's not all surreal Brechtian digressions though. A real unhappy, even if trenchant, thread in the film is the Butcher's and Total's treatment of Anita, and her realization that neither being a sexual object or 'powerful' will generate even a flicker of human compassion from them. It's a rather sad in a reflection of the same objectifying dread animosity towards the opposite sex we see in a lot of neorealist and nouvelle vague works of the time wherein a dash of meta-awareness tries to offset the leering (i.e. make sure her legs are crossed and breasts are heaving while she tallies the day's profits in the window a butcher shop display, sigh. The Symbolism!! Is it not deep?). Naming her various succulent sweet meat body parts while addressing the camera, Petri might be referencing the first part of Godard's Contempt (the part Joe Levine wanted added to include some seat-filling Bardot nudity), or --the theme that clouded the mind of Franco Nero's artist in Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country --one of the classic devil's bargains of European film in the 50s-70s-- the relationship of the sex-hungry producer to the idealistic auteur.

By 1973, though, this was all just a bit didactic. On the the other hand, it's nice she can enjoy sex enough to get her rocks off without losing face in her struggle for gender equality. Petri does leave space for Nicolodi to--as he did for Redgrave did for Quiet Place in the Country--to quietly fill up her character's margins with traits that divulge themselves--Farber termite-style--subtly, on repeat viewing. Watching her face, for example, after the butcher instructs her to cry over the 'stolen' items from Total's first robbery. (claiming h stole way more than he really did, hiding non-stolen jewels in a suitcase in the basement to get more insurance $$). Facing close to the camera in close-up we see her crying increase and decrease based on Pirelli's proximity. When it starts to grate on the butcher's nerves, she stops abruptly and cuts into a vague smile, barely able to reign in her delight at the thought of 'earning' more expensive and useless stuff.

Neither happy nor totally miserable in the life of basically a contracted--albeit relatively well-treated--sex-worker, at least Nicolodi doesn't have to play second fiddle to some harridan wife. She and the butcher live together without any tinge of Catholic guilt. She has a nice job as the cashier at the butcher shop; he trusts her, and he buys her expensive things like nice, presumably real, pearls. She can put up with his macho abuse, aware that--in her own words to the audience--if she wasn't here, she'd still be somewhere else. She doesn't consider any of us--there in some imagined air-conditioned little Italian cinema of her mind--to be any less trapped. At least she's free to enjoy her cage as best she can, rather than just banging her head against the bars in an inevitably-doomed attempt to impress some far-away future feminist studies professor.

The chameleonic sexual personae of Daria: with long black hair as armed mistress (PROPERTY 1973); as can-do, sexually assertive reporter (DEEP RED 1975)

Bearing the meta-textuality still further, we find the butcher and Anita going to the adult movie show where he threatens to "send her back to work at the bar" if she doesn't obediently go down on him. He also hits her when frustrated, which doesn't seem to foster any resentment on her part, beyond a fleeting feeling of shock. On the other hand, he also goes down on her --which we know from pop culture is a sad rarity with Italian men, who consider it demeaning to them. In a way, his slapping her around, and her whining to the camera almost seem like they were thrown in last minute efforts to taint what is essentially the film's only full-formed human relationship. Everyone else treats each other the way they might treat vending machines or food products, Total--for all his commie bellyaching--is the worst of all. In the world of backwards men like Total, his rationalizing father (who enjoys the fruits of his son's thievery but doesn't want to hear where it came from), the crazy cop, the drag queen gang of fur thieves, etc., the butcher is, at the very least, reliable and loyal (he doesn't have a wandering eye). Together he and Anita work to keep a legit business in the black, and after hours they share a certain post-coital simpatico that captures the benefits of long-term casual sexual relationships that are very rarely shown in movies which usually deal only in extremes of rapture or loathing. I love the scene when she abruptly stops him from going down on her in the office while she's counting the days tallies,  by announcing she's hungry and wants a steak. He agrees and gets up and there's a moment they share of simpatico alignment, a relationship without the need for little bambinos and sacred mother-in-law's nagging everyone to go to mass. We can, if we care to, admire the way the trappings of love and family are avoided in favor of a long term simpatico entrainment, the languid way two lovers disengage and prepare to go get something to eat, not really looking at each other but totally aligned; since pleasure, wealth and convenience are the focus, and not God or family or some other phony idolatry, they are fulfilled.

When you see these names in the credits, pounce! 

That may not add up to much in the end, but what really puts it all over into classic status, is the presence of an Ennio Morricone score. Why more composers don't endeavor to follow his lead--the use of antithetical counterpoint and surreal minimalism--is one of cinema's great tragic mysteries. Most composers try to show off all the stuff they learned in music school with a lot of mickey mousing orchestral pomp, dictating our every emotion. Ennio shows how the twang of a jaw harp and a lady whispering urgently but incoherently over discordant guitar stings would work so much better than a 100 piece orchestra. Has Ennio ever done a bad score? (and in the 60s-70s he did like ten or more a year). Certainly this is one of his weirdest and most memorable (and it's on Spotify!) especially during the strange opening credits, which play over overlapped densely colored pencils sketches of all the principle players on paper that resembles marble (but with lire notes for veins) while heavy breathing repetitions of "I.... have" ("avere! av-ere!") pulse over whooshing timpani undercurrents.  Elsewhere little ominous electric bass lines, stabby little mountain king strings, and little cycling piano riffs foreshadow similar pulsing passages in his recent Oscar-winning Hateful Eight score (Hey, we all steal from ourselves - and it suits the subject matter)

Ultimately, the main problem with Theft is a not uncommon one for anti-establishment movies of the period: it gest so busy critiquing the current system, and rebelling against it, it runs out of room to find an alternative. Do communist intellectuals seriously think they'll ever weed the Stalin reality out of their Trotskyist idealism by attacking capitalism's status quo? NEVER!

Sellers takes aim at bourgeois values - The Magic Christian (1969)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL PRINTED-GREEN PAPER

An example of this same problem can be found in 1969's The Magic Christian (above)--a satire of consumer culture not unlike Property-- which finds bored millionaire Peter Sellers and his nephew Ringo learning about the world through staging of some very elaborate (and presumably overpriced) 'freak outs' to blow the minds of standard bowler-and-brolly London-suburb train commuters. You can all but trace the thought lines of these little gags back to a time when access to a flood of freely available, semi-legal high-quality LSD woke artists up to the handrails and structure of modern society. The sudden awareness of the absurdity of money and other social mores --as aesthetic things in and of themselves--are made--while tripping--instantly absurd. The cash in hand is no longer 'invisible' as a symbol for goods and services but a pocketful of green portraits of old men in weird wigs; their strange knotty faces seem to be smiling and winking to your dilating pupils. They seem to be struggling to move; en verso, the eye in the pyramid follows you around the room, blinks, and blazes light, pulling you in towards it like a tractor beam. The fact that 'normal' people don't notice these things is even funnier. "Living is easy with eyes closed." With newly opened eyes, one naturally wants to open the eyes of the sleeping straights around him, even if only for a few flash moments, like one of Jerry Garcia's onstage backflips tripping deadheads often see in concert. Pranksters like Ken Kesey and his magic bus pull over on some random small town main street to run amok for five minutes, then disappear - leaving the sleepy town to wonder if it was all just something they ate. This is art. Important. Maybe pointless. And can get you jailed.

Noble in original intent, it spun out of control too fast - too many idiots taking too much of stuff that was too strong, too often, then clogging up the ER en masse the minute they think they're dying (i.e. the 'only fools rush in' preliminary bad trip bardos); the logistics of the endless stream of runaway kids turning Golden Gate Park into a giant toilet. It was a revolution with nowhere to go.

Take that!

But in Europe, there was a movement of intellectuals ready to absorb the psychedelic culture shocks with deadpan bemusement: Antonioni, whose earlier work like Red Desert explored, in a much more abstract, intellectual way, the collapse of structuralism (even sober, he and Monica were hip to the aesthetic absurdity of bank notes) connected with the turned-on generation in such a way as to help form it (via Blow-up), leading to the idea that by keeping your behavior totally random, and embracing a kind of abstract chaos magic approach to life, you can shimmy down from the symbolic ledge and run 'free' without having to run naked, screaming, down 5th Ave with question marks written all over your body in Day-Glo paint.

Even so, some symbols - like 'Stop' signs are better left heeded for their symbolic message rather than regarded purely as red octagons. Failure to comply could lead to your death by car. Similarly, give your money away like it's a disease and you can drift so far off the grid you can't get back on, which might be important if you want to eat regularly. Screw with your own life at your own risk, and you better take that risk seriously. Vanessa Redgrave isn't playing around.

(see also: Through a Dark Symbol).

Pull the string!

That's the core of what's missing in Petri's Theft - which shows the all-importance of having a good star at the center of a work like this: the closest thing we have to a person to root for is Albertone, the beloved cross-dressing leader of a queer gang of jewel robbers who-- their identity as maligned subculture perhaps leading them towards a group loyalty--are truly grieved by his passing. (though he only shows up in the last third). This being a time when queerness was portrayed in giallos as one more signifier of freaky transgression, drag was a common enough drag sight, a symbol of the split self (and Norman Bates), in Petri's reserving of the bulk of our sympathy for Albertone show that beneath its cynical Brechtian satire, Petri's film has a genuine heart and respect for humanity and artistic perception.

If you can admit your confusion, you earn a pass.

But the price of true post-structuralist realization--of stepping free of the bullshit-- is complete paralysis. Hemmings with the ghost tennis ball in his hand, frozen in contemplation. Without real money, and real balls, the void stretches past even new life and new civilizations - it boldly goes where no man has gone before... but leaves you standing there, just a focal point for the endless nada.

One happy little family, pre-Total

You know where I'm going with this: America got around this anti-money issue with a show called Star Trek where private property no longer existed. Maybe one day we'd grow into it, but only if we didn't rush things. America couldn't afford to be nihilistic about money, not at right then, having used up all our nihilism cards on our all-consuming hobby, Vietnam. But, at least the Cold War helped externalize the Red Menace well enough that we didn't have to fight it in the mirror, unlike some people - ahemItalycoguh. 

But hey - in 1973, crime in New York City was as bad as it was Rome, albeit with less motor-scooter purse snatching (ciao, Scippatori!) and more subway knife-point mugging.

Funny, but hardly surprising, that we took the opposite approach of Italy, whose pop culture tended to idolize the crooks, encouraging readers to fantasize they were like Diabolik, robbing the country blind while bemoaning its collective impoverishment, never getting how the two were linked. Here in the USA it was the reverse, we decided to invoke our second amendment rights and make a stand. Here, we wouldn't cheer these masked crooks at all... we'd... well...let's just say, we gotta guy comin' in, and he knows just how to deal with punks like you. See you soon, pally!

(Charles Bronson Death Wish - 1974)

FURTHER READING:

1. See 'Woman is the Father of Horror' - which I argue that a lot of the success of the great horror auteurs comes from their female writing/producing partners - i.e. Debra Hill, Daria Nicolodi, Gale Ann Hurd.

Burnt Persona Jessica Drives Again (to Death, Sister): SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (2016)

Rolling through the ghostly corridors of small town 70s America, via director A.D. Calvo, rides SWEET, SWEET LONELY GIRL (2016), a retrosomely intertextual homage to those young girl-sunk-to-madness horror films from the 1970s, the ones float between the drive-in and the after-school special, never resting, never settling.... Calvo's feature debut, it exudes such a curious retro-pastorale lyricism over its nicely brief running time (78 minutes) one can forgive it for not really having anything new (or even coherent) to say for itself. What it has in place of meaning or resonances however is something far rarer in the retro-homage horror genre: a nice slow but inexorable build of unease, genuine corner-of-the-eye scares and moments of quiet beauty, photographed in a style eerily reminiscent of early Vilmos Zsigmond. I kid you not. Make sure you see it on a good HD screen, with deep blacks, to get the 3-D cavernous shadows within shadowiness. It's there.

Sent by her weary bitch of a mother to work as a helper for a secretive (and wealthy) shut-in aunt, vacant but sweet Adele (Erin Wilhelmi) is left alone most of the time (the aunt never speaks or comes out her room, just leaves notes outside the door). Though it's a big eerie Victorian house with very few lights on (left) and quiet enough to make the suffocating tick-tocking of the clock in Bergman's Cries and Whispers seem like a swingin' sock hop, Adele is already a taciturn bookworm who's never without her anachronistic 'walkman' so she adjusts easily to the job's long stretches of lonely tedium.

But we're uncomfortable for her! The Gothic gloom gets to us almost immediately. Is the woman in that room even her aunt? Maybe she's some creepy monster lady who killed the aunt and took her place! If you've seen any 'paranoid chick' movie made in the 70s, you'll naturally be suspicious. There's not much else to be. Adele just bops along listening to lit FM pop songs, shopping for auntie's sardines alone at the lonely small town supermark- wait, who's that chick? Adele stops in her tracks as cold as we would.



Beth (Quinn Shepherd) is her name. Can you dig her rocking a welcomely 70s midriff, holding a tell-tale apple and the gaze of a long-haired shop clerk? Naturally they're drawn to each other and soon Beth is dropping by the aunt's Victorian mansion and bad-influencing Adele into all sorts of things (stealing from the aunt's petty cash, etc.), until it's too late for Adele to extract her old persona from the vortex. Not that we want her to, but what's the deal?

Wilhelmi and Shepherd are subtly captivating as the leads in what's essentially a two-hander character study and lord there's been a lot of them, these "which is one is crazy or a figment of the other's imagination or going to kill the other, etc" two-handers. Sun Choke, etc. But this one, this one follows its own little whispering shadow up the attic stairs.

I also shouldn't neglect referencing  how the combination of new formatting (it's 'exclusive' to Shudder, a curated horror streaming service) and old style (digital recreations of retro-analog celluloid familiarity) so eloquently sums up the easy death of 'currency.' Today, any new movie can choose to look older, like a tween at Forever 21, or worse. No one from 20 years ago would want to deliberately evoke bygone eras of filmmaking (except for confirmed horror fan Mel Brooks) but now there's just too much 'present' to go around. I, for one, am glad the the 'everything available all the time' post-modern paralysis has reaped at least one benefit, the ability to make things made before our time. If that makes no sense, you understand it perfectly: the past is perhaps the one place we can still look forward to. Anything lucky enough to have been shot on 35mm film stock now seems bumped up a star in our esteem. Loving restoration Blu-rays by Scorpion, Shout, Code Red, Blue Underground, make the lamest 80s slasher film glow like a priceless artifact in comparison to the washed-out flatness of most HD video.

In short, everything is topsy. If it will ever turvy again, well.... there's always the movies. We can make turvies today that make the topsies wince in shame.

GIRL is one such turvy.








Don't think about it, I won't tell if you just enjoy the eerie vibe Calvo generates using little more than the odd deep shadow--such as the dark, empty nearly Edward Hopper-esque chasm space of the local watering hole.




WHOM DOES IT ALL MEAN:

Calvo is taking a lot of variants on "the opposite female personas melting into one another" artsy subgenre of the 60s-70s (3 WOMEN, PERSONA) and seeing how many can fit. There's: the 'wild free spirit helps alienated young wallflower open than tries to kill her and take her place' lesbian thriller (POISON IVY, THE BLACK SWAN); the cautionary mental breakdown after-school 70s special episode ( GO ASK ALICE); the 'is this all a dream of Jane Eyre's crazy attic dweller post-Lewton Victorian Gothic' descent to the underworld; and the cracker factory "distortedly loud ambient sound" am I alive or dead genre (REPULSION, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, ), all deftly blended with Satanic supernatural subdivisions. Fans of 60s-70s feminine psyche horror mind-fuckery like BURNT OFFERINGS, the "A Drop of Water" segment from Bava's BLACK SABBATH, and of course the 1970-72 lesbian vampire 'Carmilla-wave.' and THE SENTINEL will love, as I did, mostly, scenes like the girls' dallying through the graveyard with their brass rubbing materials (LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH), peeking in at dead child coffins (HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY!), their long sapphic gazes as they try on Victorian attic clothes, they're sneaking a peak into the invalid aunt's room, etc. Calvo touches the touchstones of 70s paranoid feminist horror like he's rounding bases after a grand slam.

I hope you didn't consider all that a massive web of spoilers. Am I just showing off my vast 70s feminist horror acumen again, Hannah?

That said, being able to predict future scares doesn't make them less enjoyable when they come. Rather, there's an almost Godard-esque cross-referencing between disparate sources that made me, for one, yell out the names of referenced films like I was recording a footnote commentary (in ways I hadn't done since SUBMARINE) and annoying my fellow viewer/s. The erotic story of a beach tryst Beth tells Adele during their getaway is lifted wholesale from PERSONA (1966), which is then seen, briefly, very very briefly, on TV, and further checked via some 'was their lesbian tryst / psychic merge a dream or real?' facial merging (the way it is referenced too in Lynch's MULHOLLAND DRIVE). Things start to get really real when... well, I've said too much.

Beth in bed at the cabin (Note Pazuzu on night table at left)

While these references are really all the film has under its sleeve, SWEET fits nicely next to recent work discussed elsewhere in this site, like AMER, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY, HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and IT FOLLOWS, KISS OF THE DAMNED, THE STRANGE COLOR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS, and Ann Biller's THE LOVE WITCH. These retro-modernists operate on the principle you've already seen the movies they love, and rather than remaking them or working around them, they incorporate their direct thematic tropes like colors on a palette or a song in the hands of a jazz improviser. Their retro-analog stylistics intensify the melancholy of half-remembered small town suburban isolation, the giddy feeling of renting movies for Halloween parties as kids coupled to the dreamy mixture of after-school special and women's lib with sexual awakening pastorales in all the best female-centered horror. In other words, not just the tropes but the love, what drew them to these films, is very much in evidence. These are labors of love and the sincerest form of flattery, even if in the end, little else besides (in some cases).

The trying on old clothes in the Victorian attic with a possibly ageless vampire lesbian bit was, I thought, basically over in indie film since all that great Victorian stuff finally fell apart (it lasted much longer than our modern pre-fab shit, which is why there was so much of it still around in the 70s when it would surface in films like Let's Scare Jessica to Death)

If there's not a lot else to add except to once again cite the excellent cinematography by Ryan Parker, who cares? I'll confess, for awhile this seemed more like a cinematographer's demo reel or film school thesis, a kind of Terence Malick of horror, rather than vice versa due to the continued emphasis on gorgeous composition and fading light indoors lit by a single multi-colored lamp, or a rotting pomegranate on a table at night in a thunderstorm, all twisty and alive like a rotting old Dutch master's still-life. Seriously, perhaps it's thanks to a new generation of DPs and ever-evolving tech in the HD world that underlit shots only the ballsiest of cinematographers (like Zsigmond) would dare make in the days of 35mm film (to risk wasting a day's shooting on the hopes the dailies wouldn't be too dark to see).

Those who know all the films I've mentioned here should have no problem respecting Calvo's homage as a real film as, for the most part, Calvo quotes his sources like a man, a man who's not afraid of dipping his unmoored eye down into the split-feminine psyche (even the tale of the beach tryst lifted wholesale from PERSONA has an echo--in Godard's lifting Batailles' Story of the Eye for a similar part of WEEKEND). People can argue about men doing split-subject female movies but I think it's natural --they're effectively imagining themselves trying to endure the harassment and unreasonable and contradictory social expectations forced on women and realizing they'd never be able to handle it without snapping their pea brains.) It's too bad more women don't do the same with men. As of late there's only Kathryn Bigelow, whose HURT LOCKER is still probably the most profound movie about the split-masculine psyche since RED RIVER.

As per Jung, the unconscious ego/anima of every sane man is an insane woman; all demons are haunted by their inner angel or vice versa. The nature of the universe consists of a weird balancing act of gravitational, everything spinning everything madly around itself on both sub-atomic and macro-galaxial reality level, everything interlocked and reflected so that every Rochester has a madwoman in the attic. Thus, as the enigmatic Beth, Shepherd is both alive/seductive and zombie-like/terrifying -- her motives stay shadowy, she's a composite - is she even there? She not only lifts that sexy beach narrative in Persona but notes the Jane Eyre reference herself. Don't ask questions or you become guilty of listening, but to whom?

If, as a man, you get your anima to even talk to you at all, you must be either crazy or lucky. Lock her away behind thick Victorian wood and she still passes you empty notes and whispers unintelligible secrets. You'd wish she'd either speak clearer or not at all. These constant meaningless notes and phrases only distract and derail a man.

The gay or lesbian pair-bond if taken at face value in this way--(i.e. without the presence of any feminine image on which to screen the anima)-- confounds traditional Jungian dialectics, however, like electric guitar feedback, the creative inner voice looping on itself and drowning out the male ego altogether. This may be a simplistic reason but it illuminates one of my pet theses, that the reason men are so drawn to the subject of lesbians in films hinges on this aspect (even more than --as pop culture presumes--some kinky three-way fantasy) in reverse. The lack of a male to project the animus onto leads to a kind of death-drive freedom in the male viewer--we are left to imagine the complete lack of our own presence in the fantasy - the result is like snuffing out an oil fire that's been scorching our brains since we were first cockblocked (after a fashion) by our own father in infancy. Since we can't get jealous with, or compare ourselves to, a woman - we can withdraw our ideal ego from the scenario without feeling any sense of personal rejection. Put a man in there and we wince- now we have competition right when our Anima was finally beginning to talk above a whisper. Now it goes slinking back into the shadows.



Exiting the film, the Shudder, the TV, it's the truly unnerving work by Wilhelmi that lingers in the mind. With a face that seems at times very old and others like a child, she has a homeschool Heather Graham-ish vulnerable good cheer that contrasts starkly with the shocking ambivalence she receives from both mom and aunt. We come to admire her pluck, even if it's a little strange, smacking almost of psychotic disconnect. We wonder how quickly we'd lapse into morose depression in similar circumstances (or maybe already have) so her ability to keep trying, her can-do spirit, however wan, wins us over and then--when she gets slightly bonkers--we realize we're already in too deep to escape. We thought we were escaping via this movie, escaping maybe from other, less-captivating, retro-genre pastiches, like THE VOID. But now, well, we're stuck deep.

Alas, a few things stop me loving this film: there's yet another of our decade's apparently inexhaustible supply of cliche'd 'dehumanizing sex' scenes, one of those joyless HBO-brand rutting smash-cut that signifies a kind of depressed ambivalence (you know the type: a girl and guy make eye contact and we suddenly smash cut to the girl's expressionless face as the dude mechanically ruts at her from behind like some spastic dog); the Lite FM 70s hits by the likes of Classic IV, Bread (cover), Lobo, and the unfortunately-named Starbuck ("Moonlight Feels Right") are so ROTM it feels kind of like a missed opportunity. Music is so integral to doing these retro films right, and one dreads to imagine similar pop music burdening the amazing analog synth scores of Disasterpiece (IT FOLLOWS), Tom Raybould (THE MACHINE), Dixon and Stein (STRANGER THINGS), Sinoa Caves (BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW), The Gifted (SOUTHBOUND) and so forth. And while composer Joe Carrano often conjures a retro TVM mood from the use of familiar eerie string sustains and scales, bongos and rattles, we can't help but wonder if they weren't secretly culled from some 70s PD cue library. The Sound mixing is sometimes totally psychedelic (indulging in that
aural tapesty' hallucinatory quality), but there's enough missed opportunities (the tinkling bell the aunt uses to ring for Adele could have had a big well-earned scare moment, and instead it's buried under such a cascade of piano mashes, stuttering drums, and Beth whispering her name close into the mike, "Adele..." that I wanted to circle it with a red pen.

But I'll forgive this final product a lack of point or logic or analog synthesizer with the same generosity as I appreciate the lack of torture porn, imprisonment, MISERY-style sadism, progressive isolation (i.e abuse) or moping, and I do love that it's short (78 minutes or so) and that the photography and the splitting feminine psyche thematics fit the film's pastiche nature. Because Calvo understands that narrative linear 'sense' is a prison, a phallic male construct.

One of the key '?' in Hithcock's VERTIGO is that we never know for sure, how Scotty got off that ledge, or if he's still there, or if this whole story has existed in the span of time between his grip giving way and his skull smashing open on the pavement (like the breaking chimney in Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET). There is no right answer, instead we're left with the difference between a 'twist' like in THE SIXTH SENSE and 'art' like in POINT-BLANK --if you need an answer as to whether Walker is alive or dead at the end of BLANK then man you're a square! He who complains is not artsy - and he who is artsy 'gets' the lack of anything like a concrete twist one can 'get' in the Rod Serling sense.

I don't mind, man, that even unto the last frame we're never quite sure--anymore--what is real, and at the very end, one more final reference, CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944, below) brings the Val Lewton savvy full fore.

Shudder being worth getting at $4.99 a month is thus affirmed. One wonders just where GIRL might have wound up without it. So often these films get either ignored at the festivals (by distributors who aren't quite sure how to market them), or bought up and then relegated to the shelves for years or changed by studios who demand it make sense or have a point before sinking advertising into it. Shudder is there to do a rare and important job in unearthing the near-gems from the vast fields of shiite, not to say there ain't a shair fare of that at Shudder too. But I take odd comfort in their existence. In our sweet sweet loneliness and despair, the devil sent classic horror fans a friend. Whether or not this friend is real or just a homicidal amalgam of past images, reflections and hazy memories, riffs on photos both still and in motion, we'll never know... but that's just how it's gonna have to be. Times change either way. We've never gotten anything without losing something else. That's just progress, and whatever other names you'd care to call the ceaseless diligence of gravity, weather, and worms.

See also: Naomi Watt's Post-Modern Mother of Mirrors

Genealogy of Flies: HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, LORDS OF SALEM

The Carpenter Hush: IT FOLLOWS, SOLE SURVIVOR

Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic (Netflix Curated List)

Baby in the oven and the chicken in the Crib: GO ASK ALICE

Last Year at Marien... something something

Bell, Book and Hallucinogenic Tampon: THE LOVE WITCH

Let the Darioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance: AMER

See also: Bad Acid's Greatest: Paranoid Feminsim Edition

1. for my curated list of cool retro-analog synth scores from 2015-16, have Spotify and go here.

Angels of Groovy Death #IV: Lynn Lowry Special Edition

With her big cat eyes, button nose, wide toothy smile (innocent yet terrifying), long straight hair, and knack for being cast in future iconic cult gems, Lynn Lowry was a kind of unofficial poster girl for the post-Manson hippy- horror micro-genre of the late-60s/early 70s. She was the quintessential gone-homicidal-flower-child, the girl who Middle American viewers dreaded drawing as a babysitter. She was too sweet to say no to, but.... something about her made you uneasy - like she could charm an elderly neighbor at the front door while letting a coven of knife-wielding satanic bikers in through the back. She glowed with a kind of worldly ephemeral inner luminescence that somehow kept her innocent and free even as she was being gunned down by soldiers or cutting off a housewife's hand with an electric carving knife.

We, the small kids of the early 70s, all knew and loved a girl like her. When she babysat us, anything could happen: fun board games, seduction, arson, smoking-- all kinds of mischief, all with a spontaneous air that let us know any second-guessing or hesitation at one of her dares and she'd leave us behind, forever. You either ran with her giddy madness or got left behind to die in the dull roar of the TV flames. We learned to just say yes, no matter what.

Girls like her carried a bad rep. This was the era of a very popular urban legend of the hippy babysitter who was so high on LSD she microwaved the baby and tucked in the chicken. That may sound farfetched, and one presumes it was, but the legend was so embedded in popular consciousness of the time that it shows up in TV movies like Go Ask Alice (1973), in the scene wherein Alice finds out she's been dosed while on a babysitting job by vindictive ex-drug buddies, so rather than risk the baby's safety by succumbing to the lure of the Radarange, she locks herself in the closet. That the film doesn't even need to explain why she does this testifies to that legend's prevalence.

We kids weren't afraid, though. We wanted to have her over every chance we got. So when mom was making the calls, we prayed for all her first choices to fall through.


This innocent serpent flower child was a new kind of femme fatale. Not the sort to go framing you for murder or shaking you down with blackmail like in the 40s-50s; she wasn't even a new version of the old spoiled nympho drug addict waif like Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep. This new homicidal cultist was never spiteful or mischievous --her heart was too full of love; acid had burned out those small minded reptilian fear-desire tail-biting instincts that befell lesser mortals with base fears and wants. And it's this freedom from the usual fears and desires, above all else, that made her so dangerous and unpredictable. Along with everything else, acid dissolved away the morality and impulse control the rest of us took for granted. These tripping waifs belonged more in a comfy psych ward where they couldn't have long fingernails or access to sharp things like pointed scissors... at least until the drugs wore off. But instead of chasing butterflies through leafy fields they were trying to make popcorn --heating lots of oil in a big pot on the roaring stove while we hovered immediately below.

But we were innocent too, and in our love for her, all sense melted away.

Consider this, especially if you're a straight male: Look at that picture below left, for a few seconds, long enough to get a read on all three of their faces. Now... consider if these three girls were to come onto you in, say, the park while you were alone reading the paper on a bench on a sunny 'frisco day. You know that you'd have no problem resisting the ones on the left and right, they're more like sisters or aunts, but the girl in the middle, man, she's cute. If she wanted to go home with you, you'd take her. And you'd be dead by dawn, and she'd wake up snug in your entrails with no knowledge where she was or who you were. Then she'd shower off the blood, eat enough acid to send a rhino to the psych ward, then fingerpaint on the walls with your coagulating blood while softly singing "tralalalala." Does that make her evil? Or are you dumb for letting beauty blind you to danger signs? Were danger signs even there? If evil isn't present, merely a lysergic 'lack' of moral partitioning, then it's just 'temporary insanity' and that's nowhere near the same thing.

"We have no jelly donuts for you today... only death."

The 'Manson Girls,." singing and chanting as one, had become national figures around this time trials (1971) and though I was too young to remember the courtroom hooplah I do remember the fear associated with the words 'Helter Skelter', the baby/microwave thing, and the fear some crazy swinger devil worshippers down the block would put razors in your apples on Halloween. (So we all had to 'check' any fruit, not that we ever got any - if you gave out apples, you were automatically suspect).

This fear of hippies, and the serpent under the hippie flower, so to speak, goosed the 70s along and gave seemingly helpless little barefoot waifs selling peace buttons on the corner a kind mobster street gang clout. No one dared mess with them. And as a kid nosing through mom's record albums, the ones with similarly clad babes (like Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas) all had a queasy bone-chilling dread about them that wasn't there before, and didn't last very long (by the time I became a hippie myself in the late 1980s, I'd forgotten all about it).

Then again, my aunt on my dad's side in Chicago ran off and joined a commune, and we went to visit when I was five, and man that was a hairy place - I tried cat food for the first time, and ran through lots of beaded doorways, and still remember the groovy art, and so forth. My aunt was dating her fourth guy named Randy... four Randys.... in a row... the mind boggled. My grandmother had disowned her.

My parents were just a few years too old for that scene, Ours was like in Mad Men, that bridge club wife swap 70s middle-class golf game / kids walk to school of our own accord / freedom to roam just stay within "Dinner!" earshot type.

We ran amok. We molested the babysitters, not the other way around.

And if you grew up kind of crushing on Susan Dey even if you rarely watched The Partridge Family (Danny was gross; the music horrific), then she might be who comes to mind the first time you see Lynn Lowry; with that downturned lip and sultry eyes and wavy straight hair, Lowry strikes me first as if she's Dey crossed with a cute alien hybrid drawn by a Disney animator unwittingly dosed by a CIA operative. Someone sure should have dosed the Partridge Family. God I hated that redheaded kid Danny, that plagiarizing ginger with his unheimlich neediness.... and wasn't too crazy about Shirley Jones and her sister-wife collars and androgynous hair. She was like that mom who eavesdrops as you try to pick up her daughter than snidely puts you in your place, loud enough for everyone to hear, so that you blush and stammer and run home to sulk with your comic books, and then you never come over again. People, c'mon get happy, yeah right --quit tellin' us what to do. You could tell Mrs. P was one of those hovering mothers that never questions why she's always grabbing things out of her daughters' hands and lavishing them on Keith, whether Keith wants them or not. Feeling badly, Keith waits til mom goes off to pray or something, then gives sis back her shit.

Nice, sweet doomed Keith. He'd make a good sacrifice for the solstice.

On the other hand, Marcia Marcia Marcia was also pretty hot, and had similar straight blonde hair. And that whole family was way cooler, way less locked in their Mormon incestuous death grip. Much healthier sexually. If Mrs. Brady saw you clumsily putting some moves on fair Marcia, she wouldn't shame you, she'd probably just call you into the den, give you some hands-on sexual advice and then kick you back downstairs with a strip of condoms in your hand and lipstick on your forehead like a governmental seal of approval.

Why? Because unlike Mrs. Partridge, Mrs. Brady got laid, really laid. Even us kids could tell that, and her sexually satisfied glow kept the decade alight with a special baseline magic. Mrs. Partridge, if she ever saw how happy they were, would probably call Child Protective Services and make up some lurid lie.

David Lynch would make great use of this terrifying yet sweetly innocuous smile.  Lowry alone knows how to make her untrampled flower child joy indistinguishable from a flesh-rending maenad frenzy

I mention all this only to illustrate how the Partridge Family vs. Brady Bunch dichotomy provided parameters for our collective 70s pre-sexual psyche, and maybe that's partially the idea a Susan Dey archetype untethered from her prim bitch overprotective mom and ginger brother, running away with a Satan-worshipping boyfriend and winding up rabid (ala 1970's I Drink Your Blood --her first movie role) or foaming at the mouth thanks to some new STD (Shivers), chem warfare agent (The Crazies)--or just really speedy acid--rang so many popular unconscious gongs. The times demanded a girl who could slice off a woman's hand with an electric carving knife and still be an innocent, a free spirit cranked to eleven, a girl so pure the needle spins all the way around to the other extreme- batshit homicidal. If you've ever known and partied with the type then you know how rare and intoxicating they are, the sweet sudden shock of dread when what was once a feeling of smitten love and devotion to her sweet beauty becomes sickening blood-chilled dread, the realization you were so far on cloud 9 you made the mistake of letting her get between you and the exit.

give the lady a hand

A sweet, sweet Scorpio (born Oct. 15), she's the kind of friendly animal a Pisces like me would let ride on our back as we swim the channel, but I'm too savvy to ask why she'd sting me to death halfway across - it's not even cuz a man or a sexually transmitted parasite or water-spread virus told her too, or because of acid, it's just her nature. Her long straight hair like wind-stirred gossamer over a denim jacket picturesquely dabbed in a cop's blood, when she starts slowly laughing at the carnage going on down the hill in The Crazies there's a weird schism that marks a great unexplored middle ground between the sane heroes and the 'changed.'  Rather than turn zombie or something, where the line is clearly drawn between normal and 'possessed' or us vs. them, Lowry extends the 'in between' with her contracting and expanding organic circular breathing. She's already scans a "little" crazy, so going all the way crazy is no great stretch, nor is it quite clear the extent to which her incestuous dad's behavior is a result of Trixie (the virus) or just habit. Eventually she's too crazy to know to hide when the military comes. They end up surrounding her, guns drawn, like she's a dangerous maniac, even though all she's doing is offering them flowers and singing, just another flower child protester with no concern for her own life as she marches towards the bayonets with a flower in her hand.

Like some Innsmouth elder royal Neptune princess

With that air elemental aura (she'd make a great Ariel in Shakespeare's Tempest), Lowry is both uncanny and inviting, innocent and corrupting, the babysitter from the 70s my little brother and I prayed for as my mom made her round of early evening phone calls. We only got her around 1/3 of the time but when we did our stomachs sank with queasy dread. Whether she'd be in the mood to play her dangerous Go Ask Alice-style games with us rather than staying on the phone all night or hanging out on the porch with some sketchy boyfriend was another story. But if Jupiter aligned with Mars and she was ready to focus her loving laser beam attention upon us, then it was like some magic new dimension was opened in the Kuersten house, like she alone had a key to a secret door in the hallway wall that led to where all the cool stuff was.

Lowry has that same vibe, an open book of forbidden but benign ambivalence that puts her past our reach even while making her as accessible as all outdoors; she can dive merrily into the depths of depravity and horror and escape unscathed, like Daniel in the lion's den. As long as we don't try to pull her out of it, no harm will come to either of us. If we step in, we'll get hurt.

Shivers - during the transformation from sexually available but professional nurse to uninhibited maenad orgiast.

Toots, my darling, I was only eight years-old and didn't understand but I still hated the implied ascension to older man leering implied in the your acceptance of a quasi-derogatory nickname (I was always trying to come up with a different one) clearly given by a much older man, like a pissed off patron of a table she's waiting on at a roadside diner. Toots, I hated having to say that name to address you, my froggy voice stringy anchored by sublime pre-sexual adoration.

Mom stopped volunteering at that runaway shelter when we moved to NJ in 1980, a fitting analogy. I was 13, so bye-bye cool wild flower power kiss you-on-the-mouth babysitters and hello slasher craze sober virgin final girls making sure we did all our homework and went to bed on time and then we lay  awake, terrified anyway. The early 80s: devil worship wasn't 'fun' with denim babysitters anymore, but the province of icky child molesters at day care centers. The slasher craze had even formerly-louche grade school swingers afraid to go upstairs at night unless mom was already up there, her sewing machine humming the "all clear". Only WW2 saved me from that fear. I stopped thinking about slashers with knives and started thinking about Sgt. Rock, Sherman tanks vs. Panzers, Messerschmidts, Spitfires, B-17s. I was invulnerable when being shot at over Berlin. Figures.

Was it some kind of EC/DC House of Secrets/Tales from the Crypt, post-code/pre-code comic book comeuppance, all this terror and tub-thumping? It didn't matter which side of the censorship barrier, what was once shag carpet and wood panelling vivid--once Thulsa Doom snake cult decadent--was now just postage stamp size color pictures in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide and John Buscemi Conan the Barbarian reprints. And that was how I wanted it. Whether the one led to the other, in grand macabre twist payback paperback style I don't know. But if both sides want a thing, at least on some level, and if no one else is involved or hurt, can it still be evil, even if it kills them?

It might depend who you ask, but frankly I'd trust Baudelaire as a babysitter over Cardinal Richelieu any day, for he who writes of evil needn't express it, physically. Either way, whether we felt it was evil or not, the fall-out was the same. We may wonder what happened in that Tenderloin peep both in THE HOWLING that caused Dee Wallace to repress her memories. Did that Fiona Apple "Criminal" MTV video cause me to revert back to savagery in the early 90s? Maybe, but by then I was an adult, strung out on a melancholy from never being able to get that delirious first MDMA peak high moment back again. Apple had that certain Lynn Lowry mix of childlike glee and physical corruption. Calvin Klein ran ads that looked intentionally like they were taken in some pervert's basement to send into Flesh World.  The important thing to understand is that dirty old man perversion of today was the gold chain hedonist swinger of yesterday, and if the girl is over eighteen and broke and hot and really into doing your drugs, is it a crime to get involved? Some people sure think so, irregardless. Lynn Lowry--or at least her archetypal hippie Mansonite--doesn't. She forgives you in advance.

We, who were just in elementary school at the time, can't remember if those days were really that deranged, but there's magic and power in the wicked but sweet, terrifying but absolving cat sister mile of Lowry on film which will never fade. Whether succumbing to the mad slavering ecstasy-overdose insane group orgy hysteria of Shivers or giggling in progressive waves of insanity in The Crazies or playing with an electric carving knife in I Drink Your Blood, this strange wondrous actress evokes that 70s post-Manson 'girl next door' anxiety with a flair unrivaled. Some girls are just never far enough away from the fire to know they're burning. Bless them for that, and even if following them drowns you in cop bullets, hitting you like scorpion knife flicker stinging flames of razor wire cat o'nine tails water, how can you keep from singing? Tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....tra-la-la-la....

FURTHER LOWRY READINGS:
"That's how you play 'Get the Guests'" SCORE!
SHIVERS! (capsule review)

What's Eating You: FOOD OF THE GODS, EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, JAWS OF SATAN, FROGS

Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws for Ants), they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color, after nigh under forty years of washed out who cared VHS grays. That's a good thing, for when all else fails (and it sure does), we can admire how now pink natural light beams through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa: those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are now so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children. I like big bugs and I cannot lie, you know this.

Shout knows it too, for they preserve the subtle grain of real film stock so HD or no these still look like 70s movies. And that's what matters, for there's no reason for these two double features to exist--they are abominations in the eyes of God. But some of us, of a certain age and misanthropic disposition, need them. They deliver a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger that gets us deep where other monster movies cannot reach.

All nonbelievers beware, however: for there are two problems with these films' coming to Blu-ray. First: the contrast between rear projection and overlays is even more very glaring than ever before: the splices and outlines between the humans and the amok nature backgrounds glow like filaments. Second: seeing any animal--even lower life forms like snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or even annoyed... is abhorrent to modern sensitized sensibilities. Partially because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), part of the 70s naturalist horror kick, we've learned to care about nature. Now Humane Society stooges monitor every animal shot--even the rats and insects get body doubles for crushing scenes--but I sincerely doubt the mysterious BIG had one. And the look of stunned betrayal in the eyes of some of these vermin is crushing in ways it wasn't back in the time of these films' release. To redress the wrong, and spare the sensitive unseemly sights, I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating. First up...

FOOD OF THE GODS

(1976) - Dir. Bert I. Gordon

**1/2 / PETA: D

Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain his decision to cast the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde, cap-toothed, and suspiciously diminutive ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a fourth down prayer! Yet there he is, practicing his throws on a frosty field (or is it pollution? Freeze frame!) before trundling off to a remote woodsy island with two of his teammate buddies. They go hunting on horseback - as NFL stars are wont to do, and the ever-dependable Jon Cypher is soon-offed by giant wasps. First they look like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps (you can see through them), and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps with their pipe cleaner legs carefully entwined around his backpack.

Marjoe will not let Cypher's death stand! He must have vengeance against the hive! And so the film is off and running. Old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations and is soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as a farmer's wife, and--playing the rote capitalist who wants to monetize the situation-- a bloated, hungover Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat.

Meeker's on the island to get a look at the weird white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food, which might have profit potential as a growth hormone. One thing's for sure, it works! But without a rooster the size of a UPS truck (like the one Marjoe kills while investigating Ida Lupino's barm) there's nothing to keep the rats away, or the giant caterpillars from biting her hand! Argggh!

Gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand, to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own and that she's trying to shake them off (while she's clearly holding onto them), Ida taps into the same 'go for broke' madness of Bela Lugosi wrestling the rubber octopus in ED WOOD. Her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low-key horror. So howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its full expression; it is only for this expression that the pain was ever for...

...teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's nonplussed secretary, Pamela Franklin disguises her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. That's gotta be it, for she was such a thin little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to hold back in order to not act circles around ole Marjoe even with clunky dialogue like "I'd like... for you to make love to me." Meanwhile, the much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, as a stranded mobile home camper, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the giant rats start closing in around their camper faster than a drunken Cornish lynch mob.

But then... endless shots of rats getting shot (for real) with pink paint in the face and body (is it supposed to be blood?) begins to weary the soul. even if it's not fatal and can be washed off, the look of shock and betrayal in their eyes is dispiriting. For mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better. As I wrote about Day of the Animals, part of the appeal of these movies (for me at least) tends to be in how the abstraction of the animal attacks (arms about to be bit suddenly appearing to have a pillow crammed under the sleeve; animal trainers doubling for actors; dogs wagging their tales even while growling and baring their fangs) gives the feeling the animals are just good-naturedly roughhousing - the violence implied solely through the rapidfire edits - and if the animals know it's all in fun, so do we, and it makes enjoying the film easier (and no more or less scary). Watching that all-in-fun look vanish in an instant in the startled rat eyes when they get pelted by the pink pellets drains the joy de vivre tout suite from Food of the Gods, that is unless you really hate rats.

That said, many of the better overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, they feel real and inescapable, maybe because they're big but not so big they can't fit through a window or attack you from ontop of the kitchen counter. Add the (real size) giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam', and this bad film shines like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. God bless the Gordons, and forgive them for all their sins...especially against the rats... future Indras, all.

FROGS

(1972) - Dir George McGowan

*** / PETA - B

I always thought Frogs rather overrated--most of my horror critic friends love it--but that was on the small screen, wherein its colors felt drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and the tediously flat red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party decorations. Now that it's on the Blu-ray, however, the voracious amphibian and reptile and insect footage is beautiful, creepy, and poisonous with ambiguity. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' champagne pop cheeriness.

The lead hunk (you know he's going to be a conservationist) is laconic Sam Elliott (sans mustache) as Pickett, just an easygoin' nature photographer paddling around along the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by the prodigal son (Adam Roarke) who--with his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark)--is trying out their new outboard motor during a lull in their duties fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations at their nearby island mansion. Soaking wet from his splash, Pickett is invited home to change, meet the patriarch, and participate in the 'fun.'

Since he gets a come hither look from foy Karen, naturally Pickett says yes. Soon he's meeting the gang and finding a real kindred soul in Milland. One of the more unique relationships in horror, their connection forms a kind of off-center parallel maybe to Ben Quick and Will Varner in The Long Hot Summer or Col. Rutledge and Marlowe from The Big Sleep, each recognizing in the other a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken hombre. There's also a bisexual vibe in Elliott where we can't tell if Pickett's going to shack up with Karen or Roarke. As seductions and simmering resentments accrue over cocktails, deaths accrue via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids outside in the greenhouse or around the grounds as one person goes looking for the one who never came back from looking for someone else. Meanwhile, no one can get any sleep or hook up, for the mansion is also besieged by frogs, croaking away at night, in a deafening cockblock serenade.

Blu-ray image much better

Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring out proud, we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual on-the-nose loungey Mickey Mousing. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster. In fact, he's almost heroic in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders. G'head Ray, you golden patriarch, and get that cake!

Meanwhile, they even go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler share a coffee at night with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland when all the shit goes down, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.

The servants' leaving also signifies when the film really comes into its own: sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws, now it's just the white man and the all-devouring natural world, like it was always meant to be. No witnesses, sides, or seconds, just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, for this is the raccoons' revenge for his coonskin cap. The escape for the rest of the clan doesn't go well either: a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line... And then... well, don't worry - it's too late to change our ways now. Just savor the mix of nice things: the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and mist; the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions" dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker; the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be literally found dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko); the sense of wonder how in hell they effects crew are going to pull off a believable death by a handful of normal-size frogs; and most of all, where that dog came from just in time for the end.  Poor dog. Where did he come from? Dogs never do get a break in horror. The frogs get the best of everything. Also, Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame Sousa record to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but wily old Les Baxter would have his pomp. 

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS

(1977) Dir Bert I. Gordon

***1/2 / PETA - N/A

Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, as you might guess. But this you won't: the ant queen's pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do with a slumming Joan Collins trying not to break a nail while rooking time share commitments out of a charter boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders? Well, Collins' sales pitch is pretty shrill. So maybe she can pick up some pointers from that bigger queen. As it is, rather than seduce and coerce obedience through her pheromones, she bitches at and berates potential customers in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' of the once-gorgeous / still-vain cougar/puerella aeterna archetype, trying to recapture the undivided male attention by trying too hard to spurn it. Spitting out harsh 'quips' like "You are terrific in the sack, and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you." Or, to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!"

Hey, I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the sexiest decade's powerful female icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her time share rooking sound convincing. Her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that she yells at herself in the mirror at night because she has no kid to bully and can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! And Empire of the Ants is one of my guilty trash favorites. Shhh! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this tough old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray. Even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film grains, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. In sum, it is beyond perfect. Even scrubbed clean, those pheromones command obedience!


Now that I've had time to think it over, I'm glad old Bert I. Gordon didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them through top bitch manipulation. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior, missing even the most glaring subtextual veins in his blindfolded jackhammering. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections.

Like all 70s disaster movies, there's a cross section of Americans (Poesidon Adventure template) thrown together on a high-pressure life or death trek. This lets older stars and younger B-listers intermingle and each get a chance at owning a scene while their careers pass each other up and down the hill. There's never enough time to rehearse such a large cast, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, while at the same time having second thoughts about the whole venture. But there are no cell phones in the 70s on which to call an Uber or their agent, and there's no roads, so no escape. So... without a better suggestion coming from their unresponsive director, the marooned cross section of people who signed on for a 'free boat ride lunch' time share pitch play it like a Love Boat episode: a frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, with nothing to show for her years but a blah blah, hits on the grouchy captain; a rich girl (Brooke Palance) wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine!) wasn't such as a rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to rape her.  Talk about bouncing back! And through it all Joan bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than there are hours in the day.

That said, the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which explodes, stranding them all in this remote section of beach, and, well a fire keeps the ants away,  but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is truly served.

As for EXTRAS... Well, considering how under-directed the actors are in his films, it's probably no surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy. It's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like his declaration that Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane. Or the nonsense (hopefully) story of personally going down to Panama to shoot footage of a special kind of fire ants (but the footage looks like normal nature show stock footage; most ants seem to have been shot inside an ant farm and then matted into the main image, which is fine. I like the effect of seeing them look like they're crawling up into the sky around the terrified humans (above), standing on hind legs (the glass their leaning on invisible). And I also like the big 'actual size' fake ant heads used for the mandible biting scenes here better even than the ones in Them! They're actually scarier for being relatively smaller, the size of a sports car rather than a van. With their jet black eyes and hairy heads down low to the ground, their jagged mandibles seem infectious and sharp. They have a real grim dirty angry menace about them. But I don't think Bert intended any of that, which is probably why it's one of the few things that's effective. Here's a man so dependent on termites he never buys dry wood.

JAWS OF SATAN 

(1981) Dir Bob Claver

*** / PETA = **

Who'd of thought the second best film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness, a too-late entry in the Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrid race (The Car, Killdozer)? It's also known as King Cobra but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources (even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen). For as you can guess, the devil this time is a snake, hibernating since being venerated in the Age of the Druids but allowed to return every 666 years to pick a fight with one lucky holy roller. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver is conveniently descended from a bunch of druid burning Christians, so is probably the right priest for the honor. "Considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup," says the local tasseographer during a dinner party, perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration has rendered that form of divination fruitless. But soft! The devil cobra is coming and it has telekinetic powers. It can even bite people just by banging its head on an 'invisible' terrarium wall (the director can't be bothered cleaning the plexiglass that separates cameraman and snake so we see all the tiny cracks and smudges). The serpent then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis' current incarnation (poor old Fritz) waits, and you can start counting the beats toward the inevitable showdown.

If Jaws of Satan was any good it would be terrible, but since it's terrible, its terrific, because, you see, unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in the above praised Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. Every line feels like he's trying to do such a bad job he gets fired so he can go home and soak in a hot tub. "You know, God, he can be quite a 'trip,' too" he counsels a 'tempted' nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced of his own bullshit than we are. What good is it being a materialist priest? Glug glug glug. Guess it's Nack do the toddle... You know, drinking can be quite a trip, too!


Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to rise up from its rocky crevasses and attack the humans. Deaths by rattlesnake bites mount; small cobras show up out of nowhere.

The best sequence occurs in a late afternoon leaf-blown graveyard, where an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film, though no one's even guarding it) and soon Weaver's being chased around the local graveyard by King Cobra, all while all while normal small town life goes on around him, oblivious to his predicament, and he's eventually he's trapped down in an open grave while the snake tries to get at him through a closed gate. Only then doth Weaver seem awake-- and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. People watching from far away wouldn't see the snake down there in the leaves, just you running like an idiot. It's a rare thing to see in a horror film, that sense of horror being all a matter of proximity to indifference.

The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in the highly recommended Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross, corrupt coroner has already burned the body, on the mayor's orders! A cobra loose in town could start a panic! And worse, could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state," assures the mayor.

Damn, what kind of lame state are we in? Dog track? Really?

Applegate, Christina

And there you have it. You know by now that dog track opening is going to be a disaster, that is if the budget allows for enough fleeing extras in the stands (or dogs, for that matter). I don't think we see either. But we do see a very young Christina Applegate as the corrupt financier's daughter. She gets the film's only other spooky moment: wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night in search of her kitty, the wind rustling the grasses and trees around her. With just the wind in the leaves and her little voice calling for the kitty, it's genuinely chilling.

But the rest of the time, the details are so ludicrous as to defy all explanation. The supposedly independent doctor lady Corbett needs herpetologist Korkes to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into her bed (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and when he finally arrives this professional snake handler needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun to finally dispatch it, only after pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they have an excuse to sleep together. Bro, if--even after you have a loop around its neck--you--an expert snake handler--still have to really fight against a rattlesnake's power--and then, wait... wait... finally blow its head off (getting snake blood on the sheets), rather than throwing into a pillow case and releasing it into the garden, and it's the kind of innocuous serpent that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then, well, you're going to be very good in bed either.

wait for it....

So now the couple is together, the evidence of something unusual going on confirmed, but the mayor still ignores them: the dog race track grand opening must not be delayed. The "biggest thing to happen to this state" turns out to be the kind of cheaply rendered event that Aaron Spelling might stage for a Charlie's Angels episode: a dixieland jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in a stadium, people fleeing and trampling children as they fight for the exit, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, etc. Instead, all that happens is Christina Applegate gets bit by a snake while looking around in the janitor's closet. And that's the end. I don't even think we see a single dog. Nice!

Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shouting "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over in a perfect imitation of Oron Welles' shouting for his footman in his 1948 Macbeth .

Great stuff. Aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker hired to terrorize Corbett, there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its chosen namesake/s. And then at the very end, after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, you can still see the wire that held the snake erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far. Jaws of Sayyyy-TAN goes farther.