I Will Devour Your Content

You Never Go Ass To Mouth To Ass To Mouth: A Note Regarding The Human Centipede (2009)

2011-10-24T08:16:00.006-04:00

I am not an old man, but I am no longer a young man. And while I have never, and will never, completely grow up (I just rolled out of a bed covered with Spider-Man sheets), I find that I have less and less interest in watching movies that are all shock value and nothing more.

While I love all sorts of movies, horror is a genre I watch more than most. Yet when there was all kinds of buzz about The Human Centipede (2009) a year-and-a-half ago, I found myself tuning out. I was not interested. I was sure I was never going to watch the flick. I assumed that Centipede was going to be nasty, sadistic, and vile, and nothing else. Well, it is those things, but in a much more understated and interesting way than I would ever have imagined.

I ended up watching the thing because friends and co-workers, knowing that I am, among other things, a horror-movie fan, kept expressing profound disbelief that I hadn't seen The Human Centipede. The one resounding theme in all of their recommendations was, "That shit is sick!" And that, I would tell the recommenders, is why I didn't have an interest in the flick. There's a lot of sick shit out there, and I've seen a ton of it, but I need more than that these days.

But yesterday, after many weary days of hard work and labor, fresh from the shower and wearing brand new clothes (including a spiffy Captain America t-shirt), I was feeling relaxed and content and comfortable for the first time in two weeks. My mind was open and curiously receptive. As I sank pleasurably into my Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment and powered-up my big ol' TV, I idly scrolled through the offerings on Netflix streaming. And there it was. The Human Centipede. "Ah, what the fuck, why not," I muttered, and pressed play. (I didn't grab any screen captures; I didn't think I was going to write about this one.)

There may be spoilers from this point forward

First of all, I was surprised to see some foreshadowing. Knowing that the centipede was coming, it was interesting to see that the mad surgeon lives in a house with three sections. He has a neat row of three candlesticks on his coffee table. Through these and other visual cues, we learn that for whatever reason, the demented doctor has an affinity for a nice, symmetrical triad of objects. At one point, when his two pre-centipede female victims try to escape, one has passed out and the other is dragging her. The way she does this, the way her comatose friend is positioned, puts us in mind of the horrors to come.

The centipede itself is much less horrifiying than I anticipated. And that's a good thing. We see some close-ups of the demented doc carving flaps of ass meat, but when the centipede is revealed, everybody is swaddled and bandaged and the true horrors are left to the imagination. We can't really clearly see the mouths attached to the asses, which is fine by me. And that horrible and oft-talked about part of the movie wherein the front section of the centipede has to take a shit, that is done in a much less explicit manner than I anticipated.

There are scenes of violence and gore, but not so much as to take the movie into the ultra-sicko gonzo realms I was expecting. The Human Centipede actually turned out to be a decent little horror flick, and I surprisingly do not regret having watched it. It realistically presents a horrifying situation, it does so with some sense of style and story. Wow. I probably won't ever watch it again, but I am glad that I watched it one time.

There is actually only one problem I have with the movie: girls, when your car breaks down and you have to walk to find a phone, don't plunge into the middle of a forest; walk along the road for crying out loud.

To those who recommended the film to me: you've won this round. But I still have no interest in seeing A Serbian Film (2010) or Dumplings (2004); based on what you all have described to me, there's some sick shit indeed in those movies. And really, stop bugging me about Rubber (2010). That one seems super-dumb. But you were right about Human Centipede. It is decent. I'll give you that one.

Local Independent Short Movie: Chompy! Attack of the Fishman

2011-10-23T20:45:00.004-04:00

I work with a young man who, with a group of his friends, makes short movies in his spare time. Collectively they are known as Punch Farm. Their latest effort is about a creature that emerges "from the depths of the Susquehanna River."

Watch Chompy! Attack of the Fishman at this link (it's only about six minutes long). I dig it. If you dig it too, follow this Punch Farm link to see more of their movies. (I'm particularly fond of Ghost Punchers.) Share and Enjoy!

(My co-worker is the dude with the knife and the chicken.)

John Bem's Hero of Horror: Dr. Shock

2011-10-21T21:16:00.001-04:00

The Mike, proprietor of horror blog From Midnight With Love, is compiling a most excellent list of his True Heroes of Horror. He's doing a very nice job with it. I'm particularly fond of his post on Joe Bob Briggs, but each of his entries so far, and indeed The Mike's entire blog, is very well done and a pleasure to read.

Taking a cue from The Mike, allow me to take a moment to mention the man who immediately sprang to mind when I thought of Heroes of Horror: Dr. Shock.

You see, I've lived all of my life in southeastern Pennsylvania, close enough to Philadelphia to receive television signals from that brotherly city. When I was around eight or nine years old, when television sets had knobs on them and UHF channels were beamed across the airways, there were monster movies and horror movies on the tube on Saturday afternoons. Channel 48 had Creature Features. Channel 29 had Chiller Theatre. But the best were Channel 17's back-to-back Mad Theater and Horror Theater. They were the best because, unlike the shows on the other channels, these two shows had a host: Dr. Shock (Joe Zawislak). Dr. Shock's patter and jokes and magic tricks enthralled and entertained me, as did the movies he screened. I tuned-in religiously, even on those sunny Saturday afternoons when I should've been playing outside. I remember that it was Dr. Shock who introduced me to The Blob (1958), The Thing With Two Heads (1972), The Creeping Terror (1964), The Monolith Monsters (1957), X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes (1963), and many, many more. Dr. Shock is a very personal Hero of Horror because he is the gateway through which I entered the endlessly entertaining and weird world of horror movies.

As Interesting As Watching Ice Melt: Bikini Girls On Ice (2009)

2011-10-16T07:52:00.006-04:00

Bikini Girls On Ice ain't no Ice Capades. It's a completely predictable horror-slasher which has (perhaps) one redeeming feature: pretty girls in bikinis. I say perhaps, because even this titillating flesh factor did not keep me from being utterly underwhelmed.

It's my fault, really. If I had followed one of my guiding principles for choosing which horror and cult-trash movies to watch, I never would've allowed this mediocrity to flow across the wires and onto my TV. That guiding principle: The more clever the title, the more awful the movie. I've encountered this phenomenon many times across the years. For example, Surf Nazis Must Die (1987): fabulous title, craptacular movie. I might also point to Hot Wax Zombies On Wheels (1999): another great title attached to a lousy movie, which was not made more palatable in any way by the presence of topless biker babes. Weasels Rip My Flesh (1979) and Teenage Catgirls In Heat (1994) are two more examples of awesome titles attached to awful movies. There are exceptions to the rule, such as Die You Zombie Bastards! (2005), but that was only a three-star flick, and that third star mostly was earned by the presence of cult rockabilly rocker Hasil Adkins.

So, despite all of this historical evidence that one should usually steer clear of horror flicks with overly clever titles, I violated my own principle, viewed Bikini Girls On Ice (2009), and was subjected to a most tedious and predictable affair. Why did I do it?

Sometimes, many times actually, the deep-seated teenage-lizard part of my brain overrides the higher-level functions and demands bikinis and titties and general sexy-pants sexy-times. And when I allow that primitive part of me to drive the supposedly sophisticated meat-computer riding around in my skull, the price usually is regret and remorse. And I regret that I spent 90 minutes of my time watching this movie.

(There will be spoilers from this point onward.)

My lizard-brain wanted bikini girls, and bikini girls are pretty much the only redeeming element of Bikini Girls On Ice. The story: a bunch of college girls, a soccer team, are on their way to a bikini-carwash fundraiser. On the way, their bus breaks down at an abandoned gas station. It's going to take hours for the driver to fix the bus, so the girls decide to hold the bikini carwash right there. Yes, at an abandoned gas station. They get like three customers, including an old hillbilly with a massive white beard who warns them to get away from there before horrible things happen.

But at least that allows the movie an excuse to present a bikini-clad car-washing montage, far and away the best part of the film. But then the sun goes down, the bus still isn't fixed, the bikini girls are cold and worried, and horrible things do indeed start to happen. A motivationless overall-clad grease-monkey named Moe starts slaughtering the girls (and their two male companions) one by one and dumping their bodies into various bathtubs and Coca-Cola coolers filled with ice. Until one plucky survivor gets away. The End.

The bikini car wash was to take place at Muscle Beach. The most famous Muscle Beach is in Venice, California. I suppose even California has its share of run-down backwoods locations, but when the bus breaks down, it sure looks to me like the girls are stranded somewhere in the hinterlands of Appalachia. But perhaps that's just my foolish East-Coast mentality indulging in the mythology that California is filled with nothing but endless glistening beaches and palm trees and eternal sunshine.

Bikini Girls On Ice indulged in pretty much every horror-movie cliché out there. Let's run down the checklist, shall we?

* No cell phone reception and all land-lines not working or disabled. Check.

* Engaging in behavior, such as sex and car washing, inappropriate for the circumstance of being trapped in an out-of-the way location that emits a palpable sense of wrongness and menace. Check.

* Fighting amongst yourselves when you should be banding together to escape a decidedly unpleasant situation. Check.

* Investigating a noise that sounds like a dog, finding no dog, then later finding the slaughtered corpse of a dog in the back of your bus yet still not being sufficiently freaked-out to get the hell out of there. Check.

* Allowing members of the group to wander off when everyone should stick together and wait for rescue. Check. I mean, despite the out-of-the way location, an occasional car does drive by.

* Dozens of jump scares which are just your friends walking up behind you. Check.

* Eluding a plodding, slow-moving killer not by fleeing at top speed across the open fields (I mean, these girls are athletes after all), but by entering a confined space and basically waiting to be slaughtered. Check.

* A getaway car that starts up fine first time, but then when the killer is approaching five minutes later, suddenly doesn't turn over until just in the nick of time. Check.

* Broadcasting the obvious Final Girl during the first five minutes of the movie and having that play out 90 minutes later exactly as anticipated. Check.

* Doing that old trick where we think, at the end of the movie, that the killer is dead but no, he is still alive and is now back to his old slaughtering habits. Check.

And so on.

Now I don't mind a horror movie engaging in standard practices. But for Bikini Girls On Ice to do so in such a flat, uninspired fashion, why that just left me cold. If the characters had been more likable or engaging, perhaps some of these cinematic sins could've been forgiven. Or if the motivations were more clear. Or if the killer was more interesting. Or if the location was more believable. But alas, Bikini Girls On Ice was flat, boring, largely uninteresting.

And I haven't yet mentioned the thing that bothered me most about the movie. What is that thing? Tetanus. That's right. You see, after the sun goes down, some of the bikini girls are wandering around behind the gas station in a junkyard filled with rusted machine parts. One of the girls is carrying her flip-flops in her hand, which means she's walking around in bare feet in a field of scrap metal. She's bound to step on a rusty nail or spring and cut her foot and get lockjaw. That detail bothered the hell out of me for some reason; it's just such a dumb thing to do. Wear your shoes! Well, later in the movie she gets her throat cut and dies gurgling on her own blood, so it turns out that tetanus was the least of her worries.

My advice: stay away from Bikini Girls On Ice (unless you're really hard-up to see a couple of minutes of sudsy women sponging each others asses or you're turned-on by deep hubcap probing).

This post is part of my ongoing Shocktober/Rocktober efforts to write, during the month of October, more-frequent posts about horror movies and rock-and-roll movies. Previous entries in the series can be found at the highlighted links. Cheers!

More Pulpish Delights

2011-10-15T13:27:00.001-04:00

I will have for you another movie post (or two) later this weekend. Until then, here are some more scans of recently acquired pulp novels (I got these just a few hours ago; hurrah for flea markets!). Click to embiggen for more detail. Share and Enjoy!

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Pocket Books, 1960. I can tell, just from flipping through it, that this book is going to be fun. Those Rate Your Date charts mentioned on the cover contain checklist items such as, "Was he neat and tidy when he rang your bell?" and "Is he now the man of the hour?" And then there's this passage about how to boost your morale after a break-up: "If you know how to sew, this is the moment to refurbish your wardrobe. There's not a woman alive who doesn't get a real lift from a new dress or skirt or even a frilly blouse."

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Ace Books, 1953. "Here is a vivid, thrilling account of existence in primitive surroundings, when human life often depends upon the true thrust of a spear at a jaguar."

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Popular Library, 1957. This one also is going to be fun. Among the chapter listings I find "Where Babies Come From," "Going Steady," and "That Question of Petting." And there's this: "The evidence is that no one can tell by looking into another's face whether or not he is an habitual masturbator. Circles under the eyes or a shifty look in the eye can mean a lot of things."

Pulpish Delights

2011-10-14T22:10:00.001-04:00

Until I have another movie post prepared, I thought y'all might enjoy seeing some recent paperback acquisitions. Share and Enjoy! (And click to embiggen for more detail.)

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A Crest Book, 1961. What sold me on this one is the back-cover quote by Dr. Frederick Wertham, the psychiatrist whose efforts led to the institution of the Comics Code and the dissolution of EC's entire line of horror comics.

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Popular Library, 1956. I dig this one because of the artwork on the front and back covers. A woman in dungarees! And look at all those cigarettes!

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Dell, 1955. In addition to the gorgeous cover art, I like the back-cover blurb, especially "a blond, six-foot cathedral of a girl...."

Dee Snider's Strangeland (1998)

2011-10-11T23:56:00.000-04:00

October is the coolest month, October is most awesome. October rocks: Rocktober! October is eerie and haunted as Halloween draws ever nearer: Shocktober! And thus my self-assigned project: to write during this month frequent posts about rock-and-roll movies and horror movies. A perfect time then to finally get around to watching a movie that I've seen sitting on movie-store shelves for years and years but never rented. A shocker written by, and starring, a rocker: Dee Snider's Strangeland (1998).

Oh, Look: The Picture Says What I Said

I love Dee Snider as the lead singer of Twisted Sister. I love Dee Snider as the host of the "House of Hair" radio show. Do I love Dee Snider's Strangeland? Not so much.

Spoilers below, beware, take care.

Snider plays Captain Howdy (I suppose he got the name from The Exorcist (1973); Captain Howdy is the name of the entity that speaks to Linda Blair through the Ouija board), a "modern primitive" who is pierced with much metal jewelry and covered with many tattoos.

What Howdy does, see, is he lurks in online teen chat rooms and lures unsuspecting kids into meeting him, because he pretends to be a cool teen who's into snowboarding and stuff. He then takes his victims to his dungeon, stitches their mouths shut, and performs unwanted body modifications on them.

At one point, Captain Howdy bizarrely equates hair transplants with performing forced genital piercings on kidnapped and dungeon-bound teens. Yes he does. He means to say, if the one is socially acceptable, why not the other? I'm surprised he didn't try to graft a small hairpiece onto the head of someone's dick. Ah well, missed opportunities.

Howdy makes the mistake of capturing the daughter of a detective. The guy who plays this detective expresses the bulk of his emotions with deep sighs. He looks and acts the same in almost every scene, whether at the beginning of the movie when all is well, or later on when his daughter is missing and one of her friends turns up dead. Whether this acting strategy is intended to express a profound level of world-weariness in this jaded detective, or if it is supposed to convey a suppressed layer of deeper feeling, I surely don't know. But it is very annoying, all this deep sighing and lassitude, and just doesn't work that well. You get the feeling that the detective, Gage, would carry the same facial expression whether he was unearthing his daughter's mangled, violated corpse, or merely buttering his toast. There are a few points during the movie where he emotes properly and believably, but they are rare.

By the middle of the movie, Captain Howdy is captured, placed into a psychiatric facility, and in only four short years is completely rehabilitated and will be released. According to the local newscast: "Doctors report he has made a complete and total transformation."

Well, we've got about half the movie to go, so we as viewers ain't buying it. Neither are the good citizens of Helverton, where Howdy, now going by his real name of Carleton Hendricks, makes his home. One clever vandal even changes the name of the town to reflect the general state of discontentment and moral outrage.

A lynch mob, formed by a guy named Jackson, played by Robert Englund, soon gathers outside of Carleton's house. Carleton comes out onto the porch to explain to the people that he's sorry, it wasn't him, it was Captain Howdy; now that I'm taking medication, everything is just fine.

The townspeople don't believe it (and neither do we viewers, sitting in our recliners and watching the story unfold); indeed, one enlightened Christian woman steps forward and proclaims, "My Lord Jesus Christ will see you burn in Hell, you sorry son of a bitch!" The lynch mob carries Carleton off while the detective watches but does nothing. This section of the movie plays like a heavy-handed "the townspeople are the real monsters" or "society creates its own demons" morality tale.

Carleton's bottle of pills is smashed and destroyed; the mob hangs him from a tree. As the noose is being slipped around his neck, Carleton says, "Death is like an old friend." The mob disperses, assuming Carleton is dead, to avoid an impending thunderstorm. The tree limb breaks. Carleton is alive, but he's off his meds and he's pissed. Goodbye Carleton, welcome back Captain Howdy.

Howdy then captures more teens, tortures them, and the first part of the movie in effect plays itself out again in the last part. Except this time when Howdy is tracked down, he is truly destroyed. The End.

The idea behind Strangeland is an interesting one, but ultimately the movie doesn't work for me. Howdy is a fearsome person, and he does some very horrible and gruesome things, but ultimately he is a pretty tedious villain. He talks too damned much, always spouting some pseudo-philosophical bullshit or other about transcendence through pain, about helping the teens to enlightenment through torture and mutilation, and on and on.

A lot of the movie focuses on Detective Gage, and he is a pretty tedious hero, as I mentioned above. I suppose I prefer my heroes more energetic and active, not so world-weary and plodding.

And there's that problem with the last part of the movie being deja vu of the first part.

So, Strangeland was just OK. I didn't mind watching it, although I won't be watching it again. Although I didn't like it all that much, it did have some good stuff in it:

* Captain Howdy is a pretty scary-looking dude (except in close-up, where it becomes obvious that his "piercings" are just bits of metal glued to Dee Snider's face)

* Some disturbing and gruesome imagery (including Robert Englund in his underwear)

* It's pretty cool to see Dee Snider in a cardigan.

* The detective's supervisor is the same guy who played God in a couple of episodes of The Sarah Silverman Program (sorry, I neglected to grab a screenshot of the man and I'm not going back in to look for one)

* Titties

So, from the Naugahyde recliner of judgment, here in the Upper Chamber, I give Dee Snider's Strangeland a resounding shoulder-shrug. It wasn't great, it wasn't awful. It was a decent movie, but ultimately I'm pretty indifferent toward it.

Tonight's post is part of the ongoing month-long Shocktober/Rocktober project I mentioned above. Other entries in the series can be located by clicking on the highlighted words. Thanks for reading. Stay sick.

Advertiser's Note

This post was lubricated with Malibu Rum.

Vampyr (1932)

2011-10-09T07:10:00.006-04:00

I recently acquired a book called The Seal of Dracula by Barrie Pattison (1975, Bounty Books). According to the dust jacket, it "traces the history of cinematic vampires from Nosferatu to the present-day ghouls of Terence Fisher and Mario Bava."

Although I haven't actually started reading it properly, I am skimming through the book, which contains many excellent vampire-movie stills and posters. Browsing the text of the early chapters has put me in the mood to see some of the older, seminal horror movies. Thankfully, Netflix streaming is there to help me fulfill that desire. Such as with Vampyr (1932).

Beware: spoilers emerge from the fog

In Vampyr, shadows and angles tell much of the tale, creating a mood of menace and weirdness. There's a great sequence wherein a peg-legged man sits upon a bench, and then, a few minutes later, his shadow sits down on the bench beside him. We are to believe, I think, that the shadows are phantoms: at one point there are shadows on the wall of people dancing and musicians playing, but there are no people in the room.

The print which Netflix streamed to me (which is labeled as being part of the esteemed Criterion Collection) is washed-out in some sections and is filled with artifacts. It is a shame that the film is in such rough shape, but the powerful imagery shines through and the movie is, despite this limitation, very effective. (I will need to investigate to see if there is a restored version out there somewhere.)

In Vampyr we do not get a vampire tale such as modern moviegoers might be more accustomed to. There is no sensuous, sexy Count, in a red-lined cape and a tuxedo, mesmerizing victims with his eyes and curious hand gestures. There are no Robert Quarry, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, or Gary Oldman vampires here, and there is not even a hint of Bela Lugosi. What we do get is a tale that closes in around you, makes you feel uncomfortable and unnerved.

A man in an unfamiliar town encounters strange sounds, sights, and shadows in various rooms and buildings. He feels compelled to investigate these odd occurrences, toward what sinister end we can only wait and wonder and imagine (although the film's title certainly gives us an enormous clue). I felt almost compelled to cry out to Allan, "Don't go up those stairs. Leave that trap door alone. Surely you are moving toward something monstrous. Leave it be and go home." But Allan is pursuing his investigations almost 80 years ago, and is not familiar with the arcs, patterns, and tropes that were to be established in horror movies during subsequent decades.

Vampyr, as I learn from The Seal of Dracula, is an early sound film, the first non-silent film from director Carl Theodor Dreyer. There is not much dialogue in the movie, which still relies on some title cards to advance the story. But there are many other sounds, and they are effectively used to create an eerie atmosphere: wind blowing, dogs yipping and children crying out in the distance (even though, as Allan is told, "there are no children or dogs here"), disembodied voices muttering, an ominous musical score.

At the inn, Allan hears voices. He ascends the stairs to witness a disfigured man emerge from a room. Frightened, Allan retreats to his own room and locks the door. But, while Allan is sleeping, we see the key in the lock being turned from the outside. A strange man enters, exuding an aura of dread, and silently stalks to the side of Allan's bed. "Quiet," says the man, hearing something that Allan does not hear. He leaves a packet, upon which he writes "To be opened after my Death," on Allan's writing desk, then exits the room.

We learn that the man is the father of two daughters, one of whom is ill with a strange fever. His family is being plagued by a vampire, as Allan slowly learns, aided by a book he discovers, a book about vampires.

This book, showing us that some of the conventions of silent movies hadn't yet begun to fade away, imparts its information to us via title cards (whereas today it might be read in voiceover). We learn some fascinating details about vampires that we don't get in modern vampire movies: the dead rise only at full moon and are interested only in the blood of "children and young people"; vampires are aided in their evil deeds by the shadows of executed criminals; vampires try to drive their victims to suicide to ensure the eternal damnation of their prey; vampires are to be dispatched with metal bars (unlike the now-familiar wooden stake).

At the end of Vampyr, Allan's shadow detaches from his body and moves about independently. Has Allan been dead all this time? Is he a shadow striving to help others from becoming shadowy? We see a corporeal Allan in a coffin; his eyes wide and staring. The lid is put on and the coffin is transported away. We see a perspective, a camera angle, as though we are looking out of the coffin as it is taken away. Is Allan the undead, the revenant? But he has been acting as a seemingly benevolent figure, aiding the vampire-plagued household. Has he been killed by the vampire for his troubles?

Vampyr is a unique experience for a modern viewer who may be more accustomed to the now-conventional ways most cinematic vampire stories are told. Despite its age and despite the rough condition of the print I viewed, and despite the film's relatively brief runtime of 72 minutes, Vampyr is very entertaining and deeply engaging. It draws you in to an eerie otherworldly atmosphere and doesn't let you go. It contains haunting imagery and bizarre occurrences, such as a man dying by being trapped in a grist mill and being smothered to death by flour.

When I watch "old" movies, I often do so with the intent of increasing my understanding of the history of cinema, but I don't always find the movies to be all that enjoyable to my modern sensibilities and expectations. Vampyr however, in addition to adding to my knowledge of the history of vampire cinema, is a highly entertaining film with its strange and curious story and its unique execution of the tale told. It will bear repeated re-watching. Even though Browning's seminal Dracula was made a year earlier than Vampyre, the Dreyer film seems older somehow, more like a silent film, more like an early excursion into the genre. I suppose this is because Dracula ended up being the movie that set the conventions for most future vampire movies and it therefore seems comfortable and familiar despite its age. Whatever the case may be, Vampyre is a worthy counterpart to Dracula, a more inventive and artistic way of telling a tale of a bloodthirsty creature of the night.

This entry is part of my ongoing Shocktober/Rocktober efforts to post, during this most haunted and rocking of months, relatively frequent entries about horror movies and rock-and-roll movies. The other entries in the series are located at the underlined words. Thank you for visiting I Will Devour Your Content; I hope you'll come again (and again and again and again; oh, baby).

Something Visual That's Not Too Abysmal: Eye Candy Guest Post

2011-10-02T00:26:00.005-04:00

Greetings groovy ghoulies, this post is a guest-entry from my friend cdck. It's gotta lotta pretty pictures for you to look at. To see cdck's previous efforts on behalf of I Will Devour Your Content, you can click here and here. I now relinquish the podium.

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Dawdling around in my Netflix queue the other day, I gave The Turn of the Screw (1992) a try. After all, I liked reading the original, and The Innocents (1961) was a completely gorgeously creepy adaptation, so I was looking forward to the more recent version, to see what direction they took with it. Seventeen minutes in, I was inspired to write an essay for you all regarding Eye Candy.

No, not that kind of Eye Candy.

In my collection, I have several movies which I keep around mainly to throw on the TV with the sound off. The visuals in the films are just so strikingly beautiful that they're worth having on just to look at; many are not worth listening to.

By around the 17-minute mark, I'd determined that The Turn of the Screw made no real changes or improvements over the basic story told in The Innocents, keeping painfully faithful to the previous versions of the story- - -but filling the screen with delicious eye candy.

Not delicious, delicious eye candy- - -no nudity, sorry.

and so I abandoned my viewing of the Screw, dug though my shelves, and found some nice pieces to fill up a little bowl in preparation for Halloween. I hope they taste as lovely to you as they do to me:

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What Dreams May Come (1998; Robin Williams, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Annabella Sciorra) was the first delectable morsel that sprang to mind.

Robin is his normal, sad-as-a-kicked-puppy self from his serious films. He sees his kids die, then follows them (both in traffic accidents) and then watches from the afterlife as his wife falls apart and kills herself, struggling the while to offer her some comfort. He then sets out on a journey through the afterlife to save her soul from the pits of despair- - -with all the realms he travels through actually being pieces of art- - -many painted by her.

At least, I think that's the story. . .give me a break. I watch it with the sound off; it isn't that good. But here's why I have a copy crammed onto my library shelf:

As with most films in the eye-candy realm, the stills can't even begin to capture it- - -one of the most impressive-looking scenes shows a sunlit sky full of shifting and bright brushstrokes that just doesn't translate to a screenshot.

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Somewhat sweetish, but with an a shy texture, Silent Hill (2006; Radha Mitchell, Laurie Holden, Jodie Ferland) was the movie where it occurred to me that sometimes the sound actually detracts from the film. I believe I demonstrated this to Mr. Bem one evening when he was over. . . .

I know it's based on a video game (which I've never played) so I won't pretend that the graphics were invented by the movie. I had the feeling the whole way through that the director was making the storyline fit and move like the game it came from, which is one reason I don't think much of the story - - -well, that and all the huge plot holes. Or the characters who act a certain way because the movie needs them to, not because that's who they are, or the convenient juxtaposition of the main character's home right next to both a busy highway and the Grand Canyon's little sister- - -since they needed the little girl to be able to sleepwalk there. . . . OK, yes, I followed the story once.

Basic idea: worried mother takes adopted daughter to the town she keeps talking about during her walking night-terrors, and it turns out to be a bad idea.
On to the real reason to watch:

My apologies if any of those were too dark- - -it's a dark movie.

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I love The Haunting (1999); I love that story in all its forms, going back to the original story by Shirley Jackson (“The Haunting of Hill House,” 1959) and including the1963 version. This is one story where each version brought a new angle to the view.

I'm a huge fan of creepy-old-mansion ghost stories, and Jackson wrote a very interesting one, indeed. The 1999 movie is quite enjoyable on that score, but it's just as enjoyable to watch for the scenery.

The basic story: A researcher arranges for a group of people to stay with him in an infamous mansion for a study. The nature of that study was different in all three versions of the story, but in the 1999 version, the good Doctor (PhD-type- - -Liam Neeson) coaxes his subjects (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, and Lili Taylor) to Hill House under the pretext of a study on sleep disorders, when actually he's studying the effect of FEAR on them all.

And it turns out to be a bad idea.

This one's the toffee stuck to the side of the bowl, folks:

I want to visit this house. Seriously. I'd love to get lost in there. If it weren't for that whole murderous ghost thing, I mean.

* * *

Ooo, wait, I think I have a full-size Twix mixed in here. . . .

Ultraviolet (2006) is a beautiful piece of nummy-nummy sugar-craze chocolate. For those of you who enjoy comics, it's a great comic-book become film, fun, fast-paced,heroic, and, well, hot.

I enjoy the story and I enjoy the view. . . .

sorry, kiddees, this one's for me...

"We all have dark corners in our souls": The Phantom of the Opera (1998)

2011-10-01T14:21:00.052-04:00

I am not very familiar with the story of The Phantom of the Opera. I have never read Gaston Leroux's novel (which I hope to remedy in the near future). I have never seen any film versions of the Phantom story. At most, in movie books, I have read descriptions and seen stills from the 1925 Lon Chaney version of Phantom. I must say, I am not at all displeased that my cinematic introduction to the Phantom mythos is by way of maestro Dario Argento.

Avvertimento: spoilers ahead

At the beginning of Argento's The Phantom of the Opera (1998), a baby is abandoned, set loose in a basket upon an underground river. Just before plunging over a waterfall, the basket becomes lodged upon an outcropping of rocks. The child is rescued by rats who also, it must be presumed, procure food for the infant and otherwise raise him up, because the timeline races forward to reveal that the child has grown to a man. A hauntingly beautiful man with long hair and telepathic powers who lurks and lives in the catacombs and galleries beneath the Opera House.

This man becomes a legend, a whispered rumor, a fearful byword. He is the Phantom, and while he does not molest anyone in the opera house (at least not at first), he will brutally destroy any who venture into his catacombic domain.

Look Ma, No Torso

He becomes infatuated with Christine, an operatic understudy of great beauty who possesses a powerful and passionate singing voice (dubbed; the song and the lips don't always quite match up), with whom he communicates telepathically. (I can't help but wonder if the Phantom was born with telepathic powers, a 19th-Century Parisian X-Man, or if the rats are telepathic and he somehow learned his ability from them; the Netflix blurb describing the movie assumes the rats are telepathic, although that is not made clear in the film; in fact, the phrase "telepathic rats" is what made me decide to watch this flick.) Christine is played by the breathtaking Asia Argento, with whom I myself am infatuated.

In the movie, part of the Phantom legend is that he is the keeper of a vast store of treasure. This is why, despite the peril, some people continue to venture into the catacombs. They hope to be able to defeat the phantom, take his gold, and live like royalty. The folks who venture down into the earth invariably wind up dead.

But not even the fear of death can stop some hopeful souls from getting very excited about the possibility of untold riches. Some treasure-seekers get so excited that they take their shirts off. (This is a minor plot point, but I composed the preceding two paragraphs simply as an excuse to include additional screenshots of gore and nudity.)

Sometimes Phantom is cartoonish (as in the rat-catcher's vermin-killing car, complete with whirling blade and suction tube),

sometimes it is beautiful and moving (as in some romantic scenes between the Phantom and Christine).

There are portions of Phantom that border on sheer ludicrousness. For example, at one point, as the Phantom broods on the roof of the opera house, he sees an image of a giant mouse trap, a number of nude men writhing upon it, screaming, trapped by its sprung mechanism, surrounded by flame. Yet somehow this works within the campy tone of the film. Another rooftop apparition shows him a scantily-clad Christine descending from a rift in the heavens like some erotic Madonna visiting her carnal blessings on the sinful sublunary world.

Asia in the Sky Wears Cobwebs

There are moments of tension and dread in the movie, as when a candy-proffering pedophile, with a sugary morsel in his outstretched hand, pursues a young ballerina into the catacombs. We know what is coming, but we don't know exactly when, or how, as the Phantom has been shown to be rather inventive in some of his kills. After the man is murdered, there is a moment of continued fear and tension: will the Phantom also kill the child, or will he let her run back home? Just what sort of Phantom is he?

The Phantom is, in microcosm, reflective of the flawed yet amazing human condition. As humans, we are crowned with divine fire, able to create music and poetry, yet we also are composed of ape DNA and our hands are steeped in the blood of our fellow creatures, including other humans. This Phantom is not externally ugly (unlike the 1925 Chaney Phantom, who is outwardly unsightly) (doesn't that sound like it could be a vintage automobile? "The fabulous 1925 Chaney Phantom was the first model to introduce a rumble seat"), but he carries, as do we all, his scars on his soul. He is able, with his long and tapered artist's fingers, to coax brilliant music from the pipe organ in the catacombs beneath the earth. Yet with those same fingers, he will not hesitate to rip out a man's throat. As the Phantom himself puts it: "I was abandoned at birth in the river of Time and Space. But I was nurtured and cared for by creatures who have become my friends, my brothers. This is the reason for my double nature, the reason I call this Underworld home."

Argento's Phantom contains passages that caused me to reflect on these sorts of things. But it also contains gory sections and sections of Gothic beauty that engaged the horror fan in me without necessarily stirring the philosopher. And there are even sections of laugh-out-loud-fun, such as when the rat-catcher and his dwarf assistant race madcap through the tunnels in their death-dealing rat-car. Or this exchange between two compassionate colleagues, the directors of the opera house: when a gentleman starts foaming at the mouth and collapses into a chair, the opera director says, "He's dying." His partner, calmly pouring a glass of champagne, asserts, "No, it's just a bout of malaria. He'll be all right in a moment."

Sometimes these various moods of the movie follow fast upon one another, providing a delightful shock as the viewer's mind suddenly is required to switch gears. For example, a tender scene between Christine and the Phantom, where we see them bathed in soft candlelight, is immediately followed by a close-up of the grotesquely brutalized and wounded rat-catcher.

For Christine, love for the Phantom turns to hate when she learns he intends to control her, to make her wait confined in his subterranean grotto while he goes out on his murderous missions, to kill for her to get her the lead role in the opera. She turns against him, resists him, will not be subservient to him.

Later, peering through a curtain, Christine discovers the Phantom in a rat-filled room: rats on the shelves, clambering over globes and books, clambering over the Phantom himself, scores of rats. Christine flees the scene and to her hatred is added revulsion. (The Phantom removes his shirt and begins to unbuckle his trousers as the rats crawl upon him; thankfully, the scene cuts away at that point.)

After Christine flees and makes her way back to the surface world, the Phantom fondles her shoes, holding them against his face: either he's able to use them to get some sort of psychic vibratory impression from them so that he can track her down (like some sort of telepathic bloodhound), or he's a full-blown shoe-fetish freak. I'm fine with either interpretation.

Christine is abducted by the Phantom during a performance (the understudy is singing because the Phantom has put the diva out of commission, and a number of audience members as well, by dropping an enormous chandelier on a prior performance). Raoul (a hunky baron who also is infatuated with Christine), the ratcatcher, and a number of gendarmes descend into the catacombs to rescue her.

But, back in her rat-baby's arms, in closer proximity to his telepathic powers, I suppose, she is under the Phantom's thrall again and does not want to be taken from him. "His will is my will and his thoughts are my actions; I need help," says Christine to her rescuer Raoul. When the Phantom is destroyed ("My world is finished, and so am I" says the Phantom right before he dies),

as Raoul takes Christine away across an underground lake in a rowboat, the Phantom's signet ring slips from Christine's finger, falling into the water (as the Phantom also falls into the water when a gendarme stabs him one final, fatal time), indicating that the Phantom's control over Christine finally has been broken. This however does not stop Christine from wailing and weeping over the Phantom's loss. Even the rats mourn his passing.

I did wonder how rats could've raised a human child, and how that child could've learned to speak when his only peers were rodents. I will allow the fact that the subterranean passages are so close to the opera house that the rats could've brought food from there for the infant, and that the child could've snuck into the balcony to watch the performances and learned to speak from them. It's not much of an explanation, and the movie itself is not at all concerned with giving you one, but at least it's something and it satisfies my fussy brain sufficiently to allow the point to pass.

But look, you've got to take a film like this with a grain of salt. A handful, actually. The movie contains touching and emotional passages, as well as moody and evocative passages, and gory and horrific passages. It also contains ridiculous sections, as well as sections of comedic buffoonery and cartoonish lunacy. Argento's The Phantom of the Opera ultimately is a campy film. But it is a very enjoyable and entertaining film because, in my estimation at least (I know the flick has its detractors), all of these disparate elements nestle fittingly next to one another and combine to create a movie that works very well and suits my tastes almost perfectly.

Christine On the Phantom's Organ

At the end of the credits I learned that the movie was filmed at the Budapest Opera House and in the Pertosa Caves in Salerno. This sort of detail is one of the many reasons why the cinema remains magical to me. I know it's old hat, perhaps, and I know it's been done countless other times in countless other movies, but I love how two disparate and distant locations were fused together into a single believable space wherein unfolds a fantastic fantasy, a gripping horror and love story.

Of all of the monsters out there, the Phantom is the one with which I am probably the least familiar. Based on what I've seen here, I definitely will be seeking out more Phantom movies in the near future. I know Hammer did one, I'll definitely need to see that. And the Chaney classic. So thank you, Dario Argento, for initiating me into the ranks of Phantom film fans.

October has arrived and it is a gloriously chilly, overcast, haunted day here in southeastern Pennsylvania. I couldn't help but inaugurate the month with a horror-movie essay. This Phantom post is another entry in my launched-early Shocktober/Rocktober cavalcade of posts about horror movies and rock-and-roll flicks. Previous entries in the series can be found by clicking the highlighted words at the beginning of the sentence you've just finished reading. Thank you for visiting I Will Devour Your Content. Check back frequently because I'm stepping up my efforts this month. There is much more awesomeness to come.

The Time Is Right To Do It Now: The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle

2011-09-29T23:16:00.002-04:00

I love the Sex Pistols. They are not the first punk band I discovered. That would be the Dead Kennedys: the first punk record I owned was a 12" single of "Too Drunk To Fuck." It has been lost to the mists of time. Should I ever seek to reclaim this portion of a mis-spent youth, it will be expensive, I am sure. But that's neither here nor there. I came to punk obliquely via Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and I discovered the Dead Kennedys, the Cramps, and the Circle Jerks before I encountered the Sex Pistols. But the Pistols quickly rose to the top and became one of my all-time favorite punk bands; they remain among my favorites to this day.

And so, because I love the Sex Pistols so much, I really want to love Julien Temple's 1980 anti-documentary about the Pistols, viz., The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle. There is much I do admire about the film, but I cannot end up loving it, or even liking it all that much, because it is one of the most cynical and disheartening movies I've ever seen.

The focal point of the Swindle is Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols' notorious manager. From all accounts I've read, McLaren was a shyster and a scoundrel. (But he did have a hand in giving a start to many musical artists whom I enjoy: Boy George, Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow; also he's recently deceased, so requiescat in pace, Malcolm.) The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle is a loosely constructed biography of the band: their rise, their success, their break-up, and of the post-Pistols careers of the band members. But mostly the movie is a showcase for Malcolm McLaren who, throughout the film, teaches us how he cleverly created chaos and anarchy and got rich from it.

In various settings, Malcolm details how he orchestrated the whole Sex Pistols phenomenon. He utters, in the guise of "lessons," such cynical profundities as, "Forget about music and concentrate on creating generation gaps," "Terrorize, threaten, and insult your own useless generation," and "A group that can't play is better than a group that can." About that latter statement: as I write this I'm listening to Never Mind The Bollocks for the 17,000th time. The stripped-down, raw sound is what appeals to me about punk. They may play rough, but the Pistols can play (well maybe Sid couldn't, but I think he was getting there) and their songs are able to pump me full of energy and to renew my worn-down and flagging sense of do-it-yourself determination.

Anyway, by the end of Swindle, Malcolm is informing us that through his program of creating chaos, of putting together a talentless (in his estimation) band that was banned from playing, of creating an aura of outrageousness and notoriety around the band, of signing the band to record companies and getting dropped from them again while doing practically no shows and no work at all, he has been able to line his pockets with filthy lucre on the order of 700,000 pounds. Well, Hell's bells.

My problem with the program that Malcolm presents in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle is that it doesn't take into account the band members. From what I've read, Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) actually was interested in the music and cared about the lyrics he wrote. (Lydon's 1995 autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs is an excellent read.) Poor Sid Vicious (to think of him to this day breaks my heart) bought into the hype and the myth to such a degree that he died. (In Julien Temple's later, much better, non-Malcolm-centric Pistols documentary, The Filth and the Fury (2000), Lydon makes the tear-filled statement, regarding Sid, "They killed him, Julien.")

What I'm getting at, or trying to, is that I like the Sex Pistols for their music, and I like the individual band members. So to watch a movie that lionizes the band's sleazy manager for manipulating these individuals as nothing more than money-making pawns in a cynical game, well that doesn't go down very smoothly.

In Swindle, we get to see Sid perform a number of songs, including his now (in)famous rendition of "My Way." Paul Cook isn't in the movie much; most notably he sings a song while wearing flannel pajamas and lying in a child's crib. Steve Jones does a bunch of songs, and he is in a lot of the movie, portraying some sort of sleuth who is trying to track down Malcolm McLaren (who is listed in the credits as The Embezzler). There's a muddled section where Jones and Cook travel to South America to hang out with and record songs with notorious criminal Ronnie Biggs, and where Nazi Martin Bormann wants to be the new "punkenführer"; this part of the movie really drags.

Johnny Rotten (Lydon) isn't in Swindle. He only appears in archival concert footage. There is much of this footage in the movie and it is excellent, showcasing some of the band's best performances. Standing-in as a sort of replacement for Rotten is a strange creature called Ten-Pole Tudor. He sings a song or two, obviously aping Rotten's vocal style and stage movements as he does so. During some viewings of Swindle I've found Tudor to be amusing, but most viewings have him grating on my nerves.

A cool scene in Swindle is the Jekyll-to-Hyde-style transformation of a young woman into a Soo Catwoman lookalike. Also, if you're into that sort of thing, Steve Jones gets his willy out on at least one occasion. And there are some animated sequences that are amusing

Along the way in The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, there's much cynicism, buffoonery, and pure art-school nonsense. The final image in the movie, tacked on as though it were little more than an afterthought, is a still shot of an array of newspaper headlines trumpeting the death of Sid Vicious (Nancy Spungen is barely a footnote in the flick). And it is this that makes the movie a bit hard to take. Even if all of Malcolm's claims in the movie are true, even if the Sex Pistols were nothing more (to him anyway) than a money-making gimmick, at least one young man bought into the myth and believed it to be real. Rather than providing guidance to Sid, Malcolm encouraged him, so that his antics would generate headlines, would generate outrage, would generate cash. And then Sid died. And that takes all of the fun out of the proceedings.

So to me The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle, although I get it out and watch it from time to time, will remain nothing more than a mildly entertaining curiosity. For me, at least, Sid's demise overshadows the whole thing, and rather than seeing it as a farce or comedy or art-school film, or what have you, I cannot help but view it as a deeply cynical piece of filmwork. To get to the meat of the matter of the Sex Pistols, to get to know, at least to a degree, the human beings behind the cartoons and caricatures presented in Swindle, the above-mentioned movie The Filth and the Fury is the place to turn.

But another thought occurs to me. Perhaps The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle is the ultimate punk movie (because let us not forget that the music is rock and roll; it is the attitude that is punk) in that it takes beloved icons and skewers them and tears them down. Perhaps Swindle is pure punk because ultimately it says "fuck you" to the legions of fans who would worship and form a Sex Pistols cult, because it says "fuck you" to the record companies who shelled out whopping sums of cash to have the Pistols not record or not perform, because it says "fuck you" to the Pistols themselves, even to the one who lies moldering in the grave. Perhaps on all of my viewings of Swindle, I've been reading the movie all wrong. Perhaps it is the punkest thing there is. Perhaps. Or perhaps it is just pure exploitation.

This post is another entry in my launched-early Shocktober/Rocktober cavalcade of horror and rock and roll movies. Previous entries in this series can be located here, here, and here.

"Find the Well, It's the Passage to Hell": The Amityville Horror (1979)

2011-09-21T22:49:00.001-04:00

Warning: this post contains supernatural spoilers.
There is no way that I can discuss objectively The Amityville Horror (1979). Not that I've ever made any pretensions toward objectivity here at I Will Devour Your Content. I write about movies through the filter of my own particular and perhaps deranged perspective. That's why I call these posts 'essays' and would in no way dare to call them 'reviews'. If you read these posts (thank you) and you see the sorts of film elements on which I most focus and which I most particularly enjoy, and if you happen to like those same elements, chances are you'll dig the movie too.

But back to Amityville. The movie came out in 1979. I was 11 years old that year. Yet I have vivid memories of watching The Amityville Horror (and reading the book on which it was based). That means I must have seen it on TV (perhaps more than one time); there's no way my parents would've taken me to see a horror movie (flicks such as Star Wars and The Cat From Outer Space (which, if memory serves, were screened as a double-feature at a now-defunct drive-in) were the most I could talk them into, and they weren't very thrilled about those either). Even now, decades later, my folks don't approve of much that I do. Not that it matters any more. So, that leaves only a TV viewing as a possibility.

So, when I sat down last night to re-watch Amityville, after all of these years, I soon discovered that the 43-year-old man was overwhelmed by the memories of the 11-year-old boy. From the iconic opening shot of that haunted Long Island house, I felt myself trembling with anticipation and dread. Memories came flooding back.

I anticipated and dreaded the clustering houseflies,

the invisible entity in the rocking chair, the sludge-spewing toilet,

the demonic disembodied voice commanding "get out!", the bleeding stairs and walls,

Harry the dog clawing at an unseen presence behind the basement wall, and the Lutz family's final panicked flight into the rain-lashed night.

So, I was way more creeped-out by Amityville than I should've been. It is an effective horror movie, yes, but if I hadn't been so disturbed by it more than 30 years ago, I certainly don't think I would've been as disturbed by it last night as I was.

There are certain elements of the movie that I don't recall. I don't remember half-nude Margot Kidder. This is evidence of an edited-for-TV viewing; I don't think there's been a time since I turned 10 years old that I haven't been aware of and appreciative of the female form.

And I don't remember the glowing-eyed demon pig in the upstairs window. I'm not sure why I don't remember that. Last night, my rational brain immediately thought, "man, that demon-pig sure is cheesy." This thought was immediately overwhelmed by the more primitive part of my brain, the part that was tapping into my young-boy experiences: "It's not cheesy, it fits! It's satanic! Remember that part in the Bible where the demon Legion entered the herd of swine? Pigs are satanic!" I was in thrall to the flick. There was no helping it.

I do remember that, as a youth, the most harrowing part of the movie for me was the ending. The family had escaped the house, but Harry the dog was still inside. For a moment, it looked like the Lutzes were going to abandon the poor sweet puppy dog, but then George goes back in to get him. During the course of George rescuing Harry, Harry also rescues George from a goo-filled hell-pit. Harry and George get out OK and I was able to stop chewing my nails just before they started bleeding. That was a pretty harrowing section for me last night as well; I can't abide to see animals in peril.

My (so-called) adult mind was able to override my feverish boy-brain in at least one place. Rod Steiger's performance as a priest was utterly histrionic and over-the-top. So much so that he would've put William Shatner to shame. His scenes lifted me out of the movie just a smidgen, but they were fun in their overwroughtness.

So do I like The Amityville Horror now as much as I did 30 years ago? No. I still like it very much, but we grow up and when the lights go back on, our adult minds reassert themselves (dammit). Amityville is effective, but considered the next day in the cold light of the morning, it must be admitted that it is solidly a B-movie. Some sections still work very well. Some aren't nearly as effective as they seemed to be way-back-then. For example, the scene where the headgear-bedecked babysitter is trapped in the closet, while troubling, does not seem nearly as harrowing as it did in 1979 (or -80, or -81, or whenever the flick was on the tube).

And I'll never understand why the Lutzes didn't flee long before they did. When you move into a house that, within a few short weeks, transforms a lovely young couple from this

to this,

as well as causing a nun to flee in terror and vomit with horror, you move out within days, if not hours. At least I would.

There is an element of the flick that I find to be very effective now, something that I could not have detected or fully understood when I was a lad. I like how no sort of authority, whether religious, as portrayed by Rod Steiger's priest, or secular, as indicated by a detective who investigates the Lutzes' complaints, can withstand the evil entity that is tearing apart the family. Not even the father, bearded, strong, stalwart, he who should provide rescue and solace and relief during this terrible trial, can withstand the evil. In fact, he is the most susceptible to the demonic influence and instead of comfort and respite, all he can supply is an axe or sheer terror-filled flight.

It is this thought most of all that causes The Amityville Horror to remain effective for me as an adult viewer: the thought that there are evil entities out there in the cosmos, that they harbor nothing but ill-will toward humankind, and that they can slide over into our realm and create hell and havoc, is utterly terrifying, bone-chillingly horrifying. It is the reason that I find, for example, the writings of H.P. Lovecraft to be so effective: that sense of alienness and otherness from an entity that wants to do nothing more than torment and torture and then dispose of you.

So, The Amityville Horror. Hell yeah. What a blast from the past. I've added this movie to the permanent collection because I fully intend to rewatch it from time to time to see how my reaction to it might change across the years. Ultimately, despite my personal back-history with this flick, I think it is a wonderful B-grade horror flick that has a lot going for it.

Tonight's post is another entry in my launched-early Shocktober/Rocktober month of horror-movie and rock-and-roll-movie essays. The other Shocktober/Rocktober entries I've posted so far can be found here and here.

Thanks for reading. Pleasant dreams.

What Is Blood For?: Candyman (1992)

2011-09-17T23:28:00.002-04:00

Who can take the rainbow,
Wrap it in a sigh,
Soak it in the sun and make a groovy lemon pie?

The Candy Man,
The Candy Man can,
The Candy Man can cause
He mixes it with love
And makes the world taste good.

Nope. Wrong Candyman. In this 1992 flick, based on a Clive Barker story, the Candyman is a murderous monster from outside our world who can enter in and kill. The story goes that Candyman was, in the late 19th Century, a freed slave who was murdered for loving a white woman. But the question is, was the Candyman a historical fact, or has he been made real by the thousands of people who believe in him? A very intriguing question that the movie doesn't answer. Nor should it. However he came to be, Candyman is real enough to leave terror and death in his wake wherever he walks the Earth.

Adviso: spoilers ahead.

How is it that I've never seen Candyman before? This is an excellent movie; I'm glad I grabbed the DVD for $2 at a yard sale a couple of weeks ago. This flick definitely deserves a place in the permanent collection; it certainly will bear numerous re-watchings.

Helen and Bernadette are two students from the University of Illinois who are working on a doctoral thesis in folklore or some such. Toward this end, they are researching the Candyman legend. They bravely travel to the North Chicago housing project that is supposedly Candyman's stomping grounds. I say bravely because the minute they show up, they are menaced by gang members; when inside, they discover that the bleak structure is full of rot and decay. The only people braver, I would say, are the stalwart folks who live there. While inside the building, Helen steps through a sort of hellmouth, discovers razor blades wrapped in candy wrappers, and soon learns that Candyman is all too real.

By killing the dog and abducting the infant son of Anne-Marie, one of the project's residents, Candyman makes it look like Helen is the psychopath who perpetrated these despicable deeds. Her attempts to prove her innocence are of no avail. She eventually is locked away in a mental institution, where she summons Candyman to prove to her psychiatrist that the murderous entity is real. (One summons Candyman in a sort of Beetlejuice-like fashion: you look in a mirror and say his name five times.) Of course, when Candyman appears he murders the shrink with his hook-hand; Helen is now even more on-the-hook than before.

Eventually, to save the infant child, Helen willingly succumbs to Candyman's power. He embraces her and kisses her with a bee-filled mouth (Candyman's original murderers tortured him with bees before he died) in a sort of transference of power. But Candyman is a liar, and Helen dies rescuing the child from a fire. As tormented as she was during the last days of her life, Helen is beautiful in her eternal repose.

Or is her repose truly eternal? Helen's husband Trevor is a college professor who's been banging one of his students. Despite this, he is deeply grief stricken at his wife's death. Weeping in the bathroom, he says her name over and over again. "Helen, oh Helen," until he's uttered the word five times. Helen appears and slaughters him. When the co-ed, who was with Trevor making dinner, finds her lover's mutilated corpse in the bathtub, she stands, kitchen knife in hand, screaming. We know that when the police show up, they will assume she is the killer, and that the Candyman cycle will continue. Fucking brilliant.

Virginia Madsen plays Helen and she is brilliant. She is believable and convincing in portraying all aspects of her character: strong and intelligent research student, bewildered hospital patient, menacing wronged wife, and vulnerable frightened woman (of course, when she's feeling vulnerable, she's alone in the house and naked in the bathtub; everybody, I think, feels at least a little bit vulnerable in that situation, even on the most normal day).

Tony Todd is absolutely creeptacular and menacing as the titular entity. He fits the role perfectly.

Much of Candyman takes place in a blighted urban setting. Initially we as viewers wonder if Candyman is real at all. For a while, the film allows Helen (and us) to believe that Candyman is just a gang leader who kills his enemies with a meat hook. But later, when we learn that the supernatural Candyman is real, we wonder why he is real. Have all of the grim feelings of hopelessness and futility engendered by the bleak urban wasteland brought him to life? Is he real because the people of the projects believe in him? This would seem to be the case, as evidenced by Candyman's statement to Helen: "I am rumor. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street corners, to live in other peoples' dreams, but not to have to be."

It is a tantalizing possibility. But there are others. The movie hints at answers, but doesn't nail down the coffin lid on any one 'right' way of viewing things. It is deliciously open-ended in this regard.

As is usual for a modern horror movie, Candyman contains gore and a bit of nudity. But it uses these elements with more restraint than most fright flicks. The two times that Helen is nude, it is to point out her vulnerability and helplessness in the face of the unrelenting advances of Candyman. I do think though that the co-ed's see-through shirt at the movie's end is there just to titillate. Which I'm fine with.

Candyman uses atmosphere more than gore or scares to evoke a strong feeling of decay and decrepitude and eerie otherworldliness and supernatural fear. This means that when a gore scene does appear, it is that much more effective for its relative scarcity. Trevor's corpse in the bathtub was a particularly unnerving shot.

Candyman is exquisitely photographed, eliciting a sort decayed beauty and realism from its scenes of urban decay.

The Philip Glass score, heavy on organ music, is very effective at evoking a sort of otherworldly mood at certain key sections.

And the writing is brilliant. It's been a long while since I've read Clive Barker, so I don't know if some of my favorite lines were lifted from his story or not. But either way, the dialogue is definitely as rich in places as a novel. I particularly liked two of Candyman's utterances: "They will say that I have shed innocent blood. What's blood for if not for shedding?" and "Believe in me. Be my victim." (Which ties in with the notion that Candyman might not have power and corporeality if he lost his believers; but Helen started out not believing in him, and she discovered him to be very real indeed; ah, delectable ambiguity.)

There are images and passages in Candyman that will stay with me for a long time. Thought-provoking passages, which is a bit rare for a horror flick. I'll just have to remember that, when I talk about Candyman with my friends, I better not say the name of the film more than four times during the course of the conversation.

This Candyman entry is post number two in my probably overly ambitious Shocktober/Rocktober project. (From now until Halloween, I intend to post frequently about rock-and-roll and horror movies.) The first entry, about the 2010 documentary Lemmy can be found here.

Thank you for reading. Stay tuned. There are many more rockin' chills to come.

Shocktober/Rocktober Launches Early with Lemmy (2010)

2011-09-17T10:23:00.000-04:00

Alright, it's time to step things up around here. A cold front has moved through, dragging Autumn behind it. October, that most hallowed of months, is right around the corner. I Will Devour Your Content has been languishing a bit during the long, hot stretch of summer; it is time to rectify that fact.

And so I declare that October here in the Upper Chamber at IWDYC will this year be known as Shocktober/Rocktober. By that I mean, from now (yes, I know October isn't here yet; I'm getting a head start on things) until that holy of all holy-days, Halloween, I will be posting with much greater frequency. And I will be writing during this period solely about two kinds of movies: horror movies and rock-and-roll movies. Or the occasional flick that is a glorious conjunction of the two. I'll be writing about old favorites and I'll be visiting films I've never seen before.

In advance, then, I dedicate to you, my faithful dozens of followers, and also to you, welcome occasional reader, my upcoming weeks of bloodshot eyes, headaches, cramped typing fingers, and ringing ears. Although we here at IWDYC endeavor to be all-embracing, enjoying all sorts of filmic genres and subjects, horror and rock are two of our favorite things (also, brown paper packages tied up with strings). And so for these next few weeks, I will revel in horror, rollick in rock, and I will share my adventures with you. Alright? Alright then: hey, ho, let's go!

Lemmy (2010) is a documentary about the legendary Motörhead frontman. From what I understand, a film crew followed Lemmy around for three years, documenting all aspects of his life. The movie starts with some shots of fans queueing up outside of a Motörhead concert. "The man's the modern Jesus. To be honest, he's fuckin' Jesus Christ," enthuses one fan. "Rock and roll is Lemmy. Lemmy is rock and roll," claims another. And finally: "Lemmy is God. They drop a nuclear bomb on this planet, Lemmy and cockroaches is all that's gonna survive." I certainly don't disagree with these sentiments, and they set the tone for the bulk of this excellent movie.

Lemmy is a praise piece. During the movie's approximately 90-minute runtime, we get to see very little of the dark side of the man. We learn from members of his early band Hawkwind that Lemmy was very difficult to work with. They attribute this to the fact he was a speed freak, always late, frequently grouchy and tired. They were more mellow because they took "organic" drugs such as peyote and 'shrooms. Lemmy attributes his ouster from Hawkwind to " '70s drug snobbery."

Other than that, the movie mainly is here to praise Lemmy, not bury him. Toward that end, the film-makers interview dozens of rock luminaries, including members of Metallica, members of The Damned, Henry Rollins, Mick Jones, Dave Grohl, Steve Vai, Alice Cooper, and many, many more, including two of my all-time favorite rockers, Joan Jett and Jim Heath (Rev. Horton Heat).

Saint Joan

Heath tells a great story of how Lemmy basically gave him alcohol poisoning during a night where they ended up drinking Maker's Mark all night long instead of getting any work done.

Another favorite celebrity story comes from Scott Ian of Anthrax, who talks about the time he witnessed Lemmy wearing very brief denim shorts and confronted him about it.

And the great Ozzy seems to be utterly perplexed when he wonders how Lemmy could've survived all of these hard-living, hard-drinking, drug-fueled years.

Throughout the flick, the general consensus from peers and fans alike is that Lemmy is a genuine person. He is loved and revered because he is who he is with no pretense, no show. He does what he wants and he wears what he wants, unapologetically. Not all of us are brave enough to do that, and so we want to be like him. Lemmy also apparently is a very kind man, caring deeply for his friends, fans, and family. Plus, he rocks like a motherfucker (one close-up of Lemmy's Rickenbacker bass shows that the strings are about as heavy and fat as a baby's arm).

I first encountered Motörhead and Lemmy back when MTV was airing episodes of the cult-favorite British sitcom The Young Ones. Most episodes of the show contained a musical act (that way they could get a bigger per-show budget because variety shows, which Young Ones could be called if it contained music, received more money than comedy shows). Motörhead appears in the episode called "Bambi" (from 1984). Ever since that airing, while I haven't followed the band with great diligence, I have found great joy and rocktackularity in Motörhead's music. (Indeed, as I write this post, I'm listening to my five-disc, Lemmy-compiled Motörhead box set Stone Deaf Forever! (Castle Music, 2003) and it is, per usual, melting my face and making me very happy.)

Therefore, because I wasn't deeply familiar with anything about Lemmy other than his music, I learned some cool stuff from Lemmy. Such as the fact that Lemmy is a great collector of stuff, specializing in memorabilia and weaponry from World Wars I and II. I too like stuff, and while I don't have as much stuff as Lemmy, I admire his collector's mentality.

One of the bits of the movie that I liked the most was when Lemmy was talking about his musical influences. He remembers a time before rock and roll, when there was nothing but Rosemary Clooney records, and so when he first heard rock, that was it. That was what he loved, that was what he wanted (this is according to a story related by Henry Rollins, who was recalling a conversation he had with Lemmy). In the movie, Lemmy cites his early favorites as Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis, and the Beatles. During another section of the flick, Lemmy states to Billy-Bob Thornton that he really digs country music, especially the female vocalists, who according to him create some of the best harmonies ever.

Oh, how I loved this. I wish all genre snobs would see this, would be aware of and understand the origins of their favorite music. I don't mind if people dislike something because they've tried it and don't find it to their tastes. But in my experience, too many people dismiss certain genres (country music and rap in particular) and when you question them further about their dismissal, they will admit to never having listened to any examples of the thing they hate. (For what it's worth, I view Richard Wagner as one of the deep-roots forebears of heavy metal.)

There is much too in Lemmy that is inspiring. Like Lemmy's statement to Billy-Bob that, "when you stop being hungry, you're fucked."

Or at the end of the movie, when the filmmakers ask Lemmy if he has any regrets. He unhesitatingly answers, "None. Life's too short."

The movie delves a bit into Lemmy's childhood, and he talks about his relationships with women. These were very interesting sections. There's some compelling stuff too with Lemmy and his son.

I wouldn't call Lemmy a balanced documentary. As I mentioned above, it's not really a warts-and-all piece; you see mostly the positive side of Lemmy. And that's fine by me. It was fun seeing all of those awesome musicians praising Lemmy. He deserves it. He's in his middle 60s (holy hell, he's my father's age) and he's still getting out there and slaying with his songs. Motörhead's been around for something like 35 years and has made two dozen or more kickass records. If that doesn't deserve a praise movie, then nothing does.

Of course, the music is fucking awesome. The DVD contains six or seven bonus scenes of live Motörhead performances. And during the runtime of the movie proper, in addition to Motörhead shows, we get to see Lemmy performing with Metallica, The Damned, and others. Rock. The fuck. On.

Oh, and I've recently been playing a PlayStation 3 game called Brütal Legend (from 2009, I think). The game has 107 metal songs on the soundtrack and Lemmy is in it as an in-game character. (As is Ozzy. And Lita Ford provides voice work.) So that's way cool.

Lemmy. And Lemmy. Hell. Yeah.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned. Shocktober/Rocktober has just begun.

Semi-Metrical: A Gill Man Poem

2011-09-10T15:11:00.000-04:00

Greetings, friends. Welcome once again to I Will Devour Your Content. I am your weary but undaunted host, John Bem, and I welcome you. For this episode, I've got something a little bit different for you. I've got...monster-movie-related poetry.

You see, Stacie Ponder, hostess of the perpetually fabulous Final Girl horror blog, is preparing some sort of SHOCKtober shenanigans. (Much like Brad Majors, I tremble with anticipation.) Toward that end, she asked her readers to submit to her their favorite fictional horror character. I chose the Gill Man from Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954). I chose Gill Man because I identify with him to a large degree: content in his natural habitat, intruders from the world beyond present him with an object of beauty and desire (Kay Lawrence as played by Julia Adams) and when he reaches out to take it, they destroy him for his troubles. Feh. I've always viewed Gill Man as the much-wronged hero of Creature. It's one of my many all-time favorite movies.

And then a memory, dim, nebulous, began to swim to the surface of my cluttered brain. "Didn't I," I asked myself, "at one time write something about Gill Man?" And so some three-ring binders were unearthed. Lo and behold, I located a poem I'd written back in 1998. A poem about Gill Man. I hadn't seen it for a very long time, so I re-read it. I still like it, so I thought I'd share it with you guys. I hope you like it too. (I scanned my original printout page, so click to enlarge for enhanced readability.)

Guest Essay: Messiah of Evil (1973)

2011-08-21T23:13:00.007-04:00

Greetings groovy ghoulies. My dear friend cdck, who last month regaled us with her cinematic adventures during the Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973), is back this month with another guest essay. This time around, she's unshelved her "The Living Dead" DVD box set (St. Clair Vision, 2005) and witnessed the advent of Messiah of Evil (1973). Take it away, cdck.

* * *

Imagine you find yourself in a large town/smallish city which you've never visited before. You know a person who is supposed to live here, but can't find them. The locals all respond to you as an outsider. And everything seems just a little wrong. Not that you could say how it's wrong, it's just... a little... wrong...

And then the wrongness grows, but subtly. One piece at a time, you begin to doubt your interpretation of everything going on around you.

It's the atmosphere of Messiah of Evil that keeps me coming back, over and over. The first time I watched it, I was convinced that it was the best re-interpretation of a Lovecraft New England fish-people story I'd ever seen. But it's not. It's the best Lovecraft atmosphere in a movie which seems to have nothing to do with Lovecraft that I've ever seen.

Spoiled Flesh ahead. And no, not the good kind.

Messiah of Evil starts with a short scene that seems to be unconnected to the rest of the movie. That impression could stick with you for quite some time. It appears to be setting up a slasher flick, with a man running from something unseen and having his throat slit by a girl who appears at first to be offering him refuge.

This movie is at no point a slasher flick. I'm of the opinion that this first scene was to keep the slasher pic fans from leaving the theater without giving the movie a chance. Much later in the movie you may come to understand that this scene sets up an idea: what's going wrong in Pointe Dune has been going on for some time before Arlety arrives, and her awareness of the depth of it doesn't mean it had only reached that point when she became aware.

The real movie begins during the opening credits, as we see Arlety (Marianna Hill) traveling to the town of Pointe Dune while her voice explains that she's coming to try to find her father, who's fallen out of communication with her.

Her narration includes the fact that the town was originally called New Bethlehem, but an incident in the past including a red moon caused the town to be renamed. (This and a number of other references in the movie support the title Messiah of Evil much better than the one most viewers/reviewers online reference it under - The Dead People.)

Arlety stops for gas, and we get a glimpse of a day in the life of someone who's been working the night shift too long (Charles Dierkop).

Arlety looks disturbed by his behavior

until he notices her, holsters his gun, and comes to fill her tank, acting just like any other normal gas station attendant and explaining the odd howl she hears as wild dogs. OK, yeah, that makes sense. No biggie. Who wouldn't want to scare off wild dogs from their gas station in the middle of nowhere?

Then another customer (Bennie Robinson) pulls in, and the attendant is all tension again.

He wanders away from Arlety before she can pay and cautiously moves to get this new customer his gas. In the process, and unknown to Arlety, he also sees the corpses of two young men in the bed of the truck (one wearing what could be beatnik glasses), covered by a tarp. It's clear that the attendant is not actually surprised to see this, and this is the reason he's all business about getting this customer gone as soon as he can. When Arlety approaches him to give him her card to pay for her gas, he brushes her off, telling her the machine's broken, and to go. To Arlety, he seems quite unexpectedly rude, but to the viewer he's something of a hero, knowing that he's full-on in danger and keeping his calm while he gets her out.

It's too bad that even though he apparently succeeds in getting her gone and the customer happy, he succumbs to another slasher fanservice scene shortly thereafter.

Arlety continues on to Pointe Dune, apparently unsettled by the oddness at the gas station, but she never saw anything really wrong. She arrives at her father's house to find it empty, although his scattered notes and materials seem to indicate that he was recently here and working on something important to him.

It's his house that sets the mood for the rest of the movie. Everywhere Arlety turns in that house, she finds images her father painted of people, always standing, always watching, with shadows and positioning that makes them just not quite right. They're just standing there, and yet they are full of a menace that's not easy to explain. Scattered throughout are some items of taxidermy, as well. All I can say is that there is no way I could live in a house where so many people watched me constantly.

The search for her Father quickly leads Arlety into the company of Thom (Michael Greer), Laura (Anitra Ford),

and Toni (Joy Bang).

From the start there is a raw sexuality surrounding Thom, and it's clear that his relationship with the two women he travels with falls far outside society's norm. But it's never stated.

Toni is constantly referred to as a kid, and she behaves like one, whatever her figure tells your eyes. Although it's obvious their relationship is not a sibling one, Thom talks to her like he would an annoying kid sister, with “shut up” a common statement. In fact, he treats both women with him as if they are on some level lower than him, overriding their feelings or concerns with his own determination to do what he feels like doing now – which includes one of the most unfortunately awkward seduction attempts I've ever seen, directed at Arlety.

Awkward as it was, it would have succeeded, based on Arlety's immediate move into the hug, if Thom hadn't shown some sort of sensitive side, leaving her to get some sleep. But the attempt is witnessed by Laura, for whom it is the last straw, and after a 'touching' goodbye scene with Toni (in the creepy creepy bathroom)

Laura attempts to find a way to anywhere else, and ends up in town in the middle of the night after hitching a ride with the unnerving truck driver from the gas station. She wanders the empty streets for awhile, after finding no-one to check her in at the motel, and finally follows someone to the grocery store, which is still all lit up and open.

And here's where this movie makes a good effort to ruin one of my favorite things for me. I've always enjoyed being in public spaces during times when the public is absent. I know a lot of people are unnerved by the emptiness, but I find some sort of comfort there.

I like shopping a 24-hour store when no-one else is there.

I mean, really, I do...

OK, maybe it is a little creepy...

Holy shit, I'll never shop that late again.

*Cough.*

This is where the movie excels. What happens to Laura in town late that night is something I've seen in numerous horror films, to the point of cliché. But here, it is presented so matter-of-factly, so believably, and with just the right amount of suggestion as opposed to over-the-top detail, that it felt fresh, new, and spine-chilling.

Likewise is the way that Toni's night at the movies is handled later. Thom and Arlety have been to the beach, where the police claim to have found her father, and when they return to the house, Thom sends Toni to the movies so that he can concentrate on comforting Arlety. It's only after Toni has been gone for some time that Arlety reveals that she knows that wasn't her father. That's when Thom realizes that things are really and truly wrong in this town, and he just sent Toni alone into it at night.

Meanwhile,Toni buys a ticket to Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, enters the lobby to find no employees, and helps herself to some popcorn with a puzzled expression. In the theater, the progression from this:

to this:

occurs as Toni munches and watches what appears to be one long film filled with nothing but fight scenes and scored by wild, rollicking music. When Toni's attention is caught by a woman sitting down in a seat in her row, she looks around to realize she's surrounded. Again, I've seen it so many times in other places, but I buy it as fresh here.

It's only when Thom attempts to go find Toni that we get to see the full scale of what has happened to this town, and it appears as if it's a problem that has been growing as the moon has been getting redder. He makes it back to the house without Toni, only to be injured by Arlety, who has been worrying about her own decaying condition in his absence. And then the fight for their lives begins.
Obviously, it's not a perfect movie. I'd have been happier without the out-of-place slasher pieces at the start, and the theme song was written with one of those rhyming schemes that annoys the HECK out of me and a message about love that has nothing to do with anything that happened in the film.

But I've read other reviewers who made reference to “plot holes” -and I couldn't find any. I think it requires a different sort of read than the normal horror film, partly because of the pre-Lynch Lynch-like visual touches that show up

associated with story elements which I think many people find disconnecting, when they actually do firm up the plot. Unlike the standard horror film, however, the characters never react to the important details with “OMG! That's totally what's happening!” As real-life people would, they react to these things as puzzling or interesting, but of course not really related to real life. At least, not until real life begins matching the stories, and by then it's too late. A discussion of how silly the stories were between the characters would of course set them up as obviously important to the viewer, but would be completely out of place.

One thing that struck me as I watched the film this last time was the appearance of all the affected townspeople. Both in the artist's paintings and in the actual crowd scenes, they're all such upright, normal citizens of the day. They're the housewives, the businessmen, the staid members of society who are often threatened by things that they consider to be 'other' – not like them, and not conforming to their way of life.

In every case where we can tell anything about the victims, those who are not turned, but become actual prey, they are people who have resisted taking roles in that way of life, people who are 'other'. The kid with the beatnik glasses, Toni, Laura – even the gas station attendant who is aware of the situation and walking a delicate balance between being accepted by the mass and keeping a stranger from becoming a victim of it.

And although I recognize that this may just be my own bias, I can't help but think that scenes like the banquet in the meat department and the gathering mass in the movie theater are also subtle comments on consumerism and its effects.

This is a Lovecraft movie that has nothing to do with Lovecraft, and a zombie movie that has nothing to do with zombie mythology.

So yes, I highly recommend this movie, for all its flaws. The meat is delicious, even if there's some gristle to cut out and set on the edge of the plate. Or is that metaphor inappropriate?

* * *

Thank you cdck for another super-fine guest appearance.

I've never seen Messiah of Evil, but after this write-up I'll have to give it a try. I gotta say, Joy Bang is one of the most awesome names ever and it seemed familiar somehow. The Internet Movie Database reminds me that I've seen her in a 1971 episode of Hawaii 5-0 called "To Kill Or Be Killed." Oh, and that man in the last picture up above, he looks mighty familiar to me. A quick check of IMDB confirms that it is indeed Elisha Cook, Jr., a fine actor with an incredibly long and varied career. I've seen him in Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) with Sterling Hayden, House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price, and Rosemary's Baby (1968) among others. He's also been a guest on what are probably hundreds of television shows. I've recently watched him in the 1967 "Court Martial" episode of Star Trek. So that's even more incentive to give Messiah of Evil a go.

Dear reader, look forward next month to another guest appearance from cdck. I do believe she intends to be a regular here. If you're so inclined, give her some love in the comments. I know she checks this space regularly.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Simian Overlords: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)

2011-08-16T23:11:00.001-04:00

This just in: I just got back from watching the new Apes movie. Briefly, it is spectacular. It is a well-balanced blend of action and drama. There are moments of great truth and beauty, passages of heart-wrenching pathos, and scenes of fierce primal action. The scenes with John Lithgow, one of my favorite actors, are particularly moving. Andy Serkis deserves at least an Oscar nomination for his motion-capture performance as Caesar: he displays an astonishing range of emotion, from cowed and heartsick to prideful and defiant, the performance is nothing short of amazing. Oh yeah, and Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) is in it as a dickheaded zookeeper. Keep a sharp eye open throughout the film for some little touches that are nods to the original Planet of the Apes (1968). Initially, I wasn't going to see Rise; after being burned by Tim Burton's awful Marky Mark and the Planet of Funky Apes (2001), I vowed to stick to the original Apes movies and to nevermore bother with any other reboots/remakes/reimaginings. But every review I read of Rise, from mainstream media to skeptical nerd bloggers, indicated that the movie was actually quite good, very effective, and the surprise hit of the Summer. Then I saw the Rise trailer before Captain America (2011) (another awesome movie). I was sold and I'm glad I went out to see it. I unreservedly encourage you, dear reader, to venture out to view Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

The Fiercest Heroine of the Hyborian Kingdoms: Red Sonja (1985)

2011-08-14T23:15:00.002-04:00

"Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars: Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west." - - - Robert E. Howard, "The Phoenix on the Sword," 1932

"Know also, O Prince, that in those selfsame days that Conan the Cimmerian did stalk the Hyborian kingdoms, one of the few swords worthy to cross his was that of Red Sonja, warrior-woman out of majestic Hyrkania. Forced to flee her homeland because she spurned the advances of a king and slew him instead, she rode west across the Turanian Steppes and into the shadowed mists of legendry." - - - The Nemedian Chronicles, cited in Smith and Tierny's six-volume Red Sonja series, 1981-1983

Know further, O Blog Reader, that in 1985 Brigitte Nielsen starred as Red Sonja in a movie that I've been avoiding for years, assuming that it would be awful. But, having recently read all six novels in David C. Smith and Richard Tierney's Red Sonja series, I decided finally to watch the cinematic adventures of the flame-tressed Hyrkanian warrioress.

It turns out that Red Sonja did not suck but was quite enjoyable as a bit of high-camp fantasy fare. The movie begins by giving us Red Sonja's origin story. Unlike current superhero movies that take an hour or more to tell the tale of a hero's beginnings, Red Sonja's origin is swiftly dispatched in something like five or ten minutes. An evil queen invades Sonja's village.

When the queen sees Sonja, she is smitten by her beauty and wants to take her for her own. The movie strongly implies that queenie wants to introduce Sonja to the pleasures of Lesbos (or whatever the Hyborian equivalent of Lesbos might be). When Sonja refuses to roll out the red carpet, queenie kills Sonja's family and allows her soldiers to rape her. Later, after Sonja escapes into a forest, a wispy supernatural entity grants her superhuman swordfighting skills and sets her on the road of her destiny. Boom. Origin story done.

From there the story is a basic straightforward fantasy tale: a talisman of great power is in the possession of an order of priestesses. (Women must be the guardians of the artifact because if a man touches it, this happens:)

The priestesses intend to hide the artifact, which draws its power from light, deep in a dark pit before it absorbs enough energy to destroy the world. Along comes an evil queen who steals the talisman for her own evil purposes. It turns out that this is the same queen that slaughtered Sonja's family. Sonja learns of the theft from her sister, who was one of the priestesses. (Wait, didn't we just learn that Sonja's entire family was slaughtered? Yes, yes we did. Let's just chalk it up to an oversight on the scriptwriter's part and move on.) From there, Sonja's quest is to stop the queen, destroy the talisman, and save the world, at the same time exacting her own personal revenge.

As for the performances in Red Sonja, Brigitte Nielsen works most of the time as Sonja: decently fierce, certainly athletic and brave and beautiful. Nielsen plays Sonja better during the action sequences than during speaking passages, but I'll give her a bit of a pass and say, yeah she's a good Red Sonja.

Sonja encounters some traveling companions along the way: a boy prince whose kingdom was destroyed by queenie and the talisman. This little dude is hilarious: despite his diminutive stature, he is fierce and proud and boasts some brilliant fighting skills. He's also more than a little bit smitten with Sonja.

The little prince is traveling with his hefty servant. I like this guy quite a bit too. Normally in a movie like this, the fat guy would be all bumbling and useless, falling down stairs or into pits, always needing to be rescued, always adding an extra layer of problems to the hero's already trouble-filled existence. That's not the case here. In Red Sonja, the portly retainer is sufficiently athletic and weapon-adept to be useful and brave and effective. He's a deft hand with a thrown dagger and he unhesitatingly battles a mechanical fish monster when the little prince is in peril.

The only character I don't like is Kalidor, a warrior played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's not with Sonja for her entire journey of vengeance, and that's a good thing. Because when he's around, Sonja tends to be overshadowed by him. Hell, look how much bigger than her he is on the poster/DVD cover.

One of the things I like about Sonja as a heroine is that she is stronger and smarter than most men. In fact, she has vowed that the only man she will give herself to is one that can best her in fair combat. We discover during the course of the movie that Arnold-as-Kalidor can't beat her. Their skill levels are equal. However, at the end of the movie, after the evil queen has been defeated and the world has been saved, Sonja allows herself to be defeated by Kalidor so that she can succumb to her desires. Even in Smith and Tierny's books, Sonja from time to time wishes she could give herself to a man, but at least in the novels she never succumbs to the temptation. Red Sonja is a great fantasy warrior. If she does need to give in to her humpy desires, as we all do from time to time, she should be the one with the upper hand. She should be the one taking the man, powerful like a queen, having her way with him and then tossing him aside. The man should be the one that gives himself to her, not the other way around. But that's not what we get here. Ugh.

That being said, if you can ignore the sappy, kissy ending, Red Sonja is a fun movie. It boasts exciting swordfights, fabulous and elaborate costumes, and awesome scenery and set pieces. And at the end, many explosions.

The film is rated PG-13, so you won't get any sex or nudity except for two Red Sonja nip slips, one at the beginning of the movie and one when she leaps out of the water while battling the mechanical fish monster. You also won't get much in the way of gore except for two obviously fake heads flying through the air.

Red Sonja is a bit cheesy, yes, and very campy. It's high-camp sword-and-sorcery stuff, and that's exactly why I like it.

Oh, and as far as the novels go: they're decent enough fun. The language is workmanlike, a bit clunky at places, only occasionally soaring to eloquent heights. But the books are full of imagination and fun ideas. The writers, David C. Smith and Richard L. Tierney, do well at describing gory battle scenes, and they occasionally titillate by giving Sonja reason to be nude. They also make an attempt to explore Sonja's psychology, and this works decently enough. There's magic and monsters and all that good fantasy stuff, too. The books are like pulp potato chips: you eat them quickly and enjoyably, and they taste just good enough that you'll be back for more, although eventually you'll want to seek out more substantial fare. The novels were published from 1981 to 1983 and they are The Ring of Ikribu, Demon Night, When Hell Laughs, Endithor's Daughter, Against the Prince of Hell, and Star of Doom.

Adventures in Flea Markets: Vinyl & Pulp

2011-08-12T23:45:00.000-04:00

My life is primarily quiet and sedentary, but I do go on quests from time to time. If my life were a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, the dungeons would be used book and record stores, flea markets, swap meets, and junk shops. The monsters would be standholders and dealers with good but overpriced merchandise. A successful to-hit roll would be the equivalent of me haggling with said dealers and getting them to trim a couple of bucks off of the asking price. And the most valued treasures would be items such as these recently acquired artifacts of wonder and delight:

(To see details, click to embiggen any image.)

Vinyl

Johnny Cash tunes covered by the Nashville Fiddlers.

Centron Corporation, 1970.

Gotta love a pretty blonde wearing a sexy outfit made of money.

* * *

Brylcreem wants you to sing along with Connie Francis.

How awesome is that?

Mati-Mor Superecords. Year unlisted.

* * *

That's Jack Davis artwork on the cover of this Homer & Jethro record.

An RCA Dynagroove recording, 1966.

* * *

"A celebrated cellar in San Francisco's North Beach area reached the imagination of all American show business by spawning such greats

as the Kingston Trio, Phyllis Diller and now, The Smothers Brothers."

Mercury Records, year unlisted.

Pulp

"Al Wheeler showed his badge, stated his business, and before he could whisper, 'Kiss me, my dream girl', he was seated poolside and the flaming-tressed vision was doing...just that." Signet, 1962.

* * *

"The girl aimed carefully and, as Al-Jawari's eyes widened,

she put a bullet in his groin."

Lancer, 1973.

* * *

Dell, 1957

* * *

"She was beautiful, clever, and ruthless, but she left no clue

as to who she was or why she killed."

"Send this book to a boy in the armed forces anywhere in the U.S...

Only 4¢ postage."

* * *

"Never had Pappy seen so many friendly women. Things were sure different in the city. Why, take Gertie May. He'd met her only a few minutes ago and here he was already in her room."

1953, 1958, Fawcett Crest.

* * *

That's all for now. See you again soon.

Spelunking in the Montana Mancave: John Bem's Top Ten Horror Movies of the Past Ten Years

2011-08-06T18:12:00.004-04:00

I like it when other bloggers give me ideas for a post. It saves my often-weary brain from being overtaxed. This post's idea comes from Marvin the Macabre of the delightfully named The Montana Mancave Massacre blog. Marvin has set out to prove that, despite frequent mediasphere reports to the contrary, the state of modern horror films is not one of unmitigated craptacular suckage. Marvin contends that there have been many good, if not excellent, horror movies during the course of the past decade. To prove this, he has asked his readers to submit lists of their ten favorite horror movies of the past ten years.

I like this idea very much, but when I first encountered Marvin's post, I felt daunted by it. Would I be able to meet the challenge? Would I be able to compile a list of favorite 21st-Century horror movies? I was worried that I might not be able to do so, because frequently (although, as it turns out, not irretrievably) I am stuck in the past. My favorite horrors come from the decades of the 1970s, 1960s, 1980s, and 1950s (in that order). Had I even watched many recent horror movies? I wondered. Ten years, huh? That takes us back to...what...let me get out my abacus...ah yes, the year 2002.

After doing the math, and thinking about it a bit more, I realized, hell yeah! I've seen plenty of super-awesome horror films in that time period. Let the listmaking commence! (Confetti rains down from the sky, doves and balloons (and a few doves encased in balloons) are released into the air, torches flair, triumphal music swells, as a lone man sits typing in the crepuscular confines of his study.)

Without further ado, I bring you John Bem's Top Ten Horror Movies of the Past Ten Years.

* * *

1. Drag Me To Hell (2009)

Although it was made just a few short years ago, Drag Me To Hell evoked for me the feel and charm of old-school horror. A dancing goat-demon, a terrifying and mucusy gypsy, a fetching leading lady, some dabs of black humor, and a surprise ending that I should've seen coming but didn't: all of these elements and more blended together to make for me an almost-perfect moviewatching experience.

* * *

2. Let Me In (2010)

A chillingly effective vampire story that also exquisitely captures the existential perplexity and loneliness of an outsider youth. I wrote about it elsewhere on IWDYC. (It is an unfortunate oversight that I have not yet seen Let the Right One In (2008).)

* * *

3. Slither (2006)

I enthuse about this movie whenever I get the chance. This flick not only makes the list of top-ten recent horror movies, it easily makes my list of top-ten all-time-favorite movies. Goopy space slugs take over a town. People are infested, some mutate. Elizabeth Banks is the star. Jenna Fischer is in it. An unused Lloyd Kaufman cameo (which you can see on the DVD extras). Much black humor. And a detail I never neglect to mention when I talk about Slither: this movie features the best-ever cinematic use of an Air Supply song.

* * *

4. Zombie Strippers (2008)

This flick was introduced to me by some friends. I had low hopes for it because, too many times, I've been burned by B-movies with awesome titles but mediocre, sub-mediocre, or atrocious content. I ended up falling in love with Zombie Strippers. As my friend cdck put it, "This movie was quite possibly the best and most accessible philosophical discussion of the conflict between self and culture/society that I've ever seen." She's spot on, she is. The movie also is awesome because it contains zombies, super-foxy strippers, Jenna Jameson, Robert Englund, and many naked titties. I wrote about it elsewhere on IWDYC.

* * *

5. Zombieland (2009)

This is my second-favorite zombie horror-comedy (my favorite is coming up later in the list). This movie would be super-awesome even without the Bill Murray section. But there he is, "Bill motherfuckin' Murray," which takes the movie beyond super- and into the realm of ultra-awesome (cf. Coffee and Cigarettes (2004)).

* * *

6. Snakes on a Plane (2006)

I imagine some viewers might contend that this movie isn't really horror but more along the lines of camp comedy. Well, to me, as funny as it is, Snakes on a Plane also contains elements of horror. I have a fear of flying. I have never flown in my entire middle-aged life. Also, of all of the creatures that creep upon this blue-green planet, snakes are to me the most terrible and horrible. Most animals don't scare me, don't bother me a bit, even if they are snarling or hissing. But snakes scare the ever-living fuck out of me. I hate the venomous, slithery, fork-tongued bastards. I don't know if my fear and loathing stem from the ancient Satanic enmity posited in the Bible or what, but yuck. So, take my fear of flying and my fear of snakes and and mash them together in a bloated-with-poison-and-plummeting-from-the-sky melange, you can color me horrified.

* * *

7. Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I normally don't go for remakes, but 2004's Dawn of the Dead works for me. Particularly effective is the opening sequence, which in its rapid but reasoned transition from tranquil suburban bliss to full-on zombie apocalypse is harrowing and horrifying. I also love the fact that Richard Cheese is on the soundtrack. (For any Richard Cheese neophytes, I recommend starting with his year 2000 album Lounge Against the Machine.)

* * *

8. House of 1000 Corpses (2003)

I love The Devil's Rejects (2005) almost as much, but of Zombie's filmic output his first effort is still my favorite. That's probably because of the sequence with the Slim Whitman song, the short but hilarious scene at Red Hot Pussy Liquors, the kid who gets the Dr. Zaius action figure lodged in his asshole (mentioned but not seen), and Karen Black, who is a much more effective Mother Firefly than Leslie Easterbrook.

* * *

9. Planet Terror (2007)

Robert Rodriguez is another favorite director. I love every single balls-melting, brain-eating, pustule-popping thing about this movie. My favorite element? Cherry Darling. 'Nuff said.

* * *

10. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Shaun is my all-time favorite horror-comedy. I love the way it equates actual zombiedom with the tedious routine of day-to-day life. I also love the fact it is so very British, like in the scene where Shaun's zombie-bitten stepdad doesn't want to be a bother to anyone, so he says he doesn't need to go to the hospital, he'll probably be all right if he can just run some tap water over the bite for a few minutes.

* * *

There you have it. If the list was longer than ten choices, I'd also include The Descent (2005), May (2002), and Bug (2006). I initially wanted to include Ginger Snaps, but when I checked I saw that it was released in the year 2000 and falls outside of the list criteria timeline.

Be sure to read The Montana Mancave Massacre for other awesome lists. Also, make sure to visit Kweeny Todd, who has a top-notch list as well.

L Is For Lonely, L Is For Lesbian: Just The Two of Us (1975)

2011-08-01T19:19:00.002-04:00

Occasionally, when I mention to someone my frequent bouts of insomnia, a co-worker or a doctor perhaps, that person will recommend some sort of sleep aid: pills, booze, something to allow me to sink into a deep and untroubled slumber. I nod politely and go my weary way, never intending to take their advice. Why? Because in some possibly perverse way, I sort of enjoy my insomnia. It allows me to read a few more books and watch a few more movies than I might otherwise. For instance, were I not troubled by insomnia, I never would've been awake in the wee hours last night, idly browsing the selections available on Netflix Instant Streaming. Had I been sleeping instead of creeping, I would not have discovered the fabulous 1975 sexploitation flick Just The Two Of Us.

Warning: Sapphic spoilers ahead.

Just The Two Of Us was produced by Harry H. Novak. I'm familiar with some of the other movies produced by Mr. Novak, such as The Black Alley Cats (1973), Tobacco Roody (1972), and Sassy Sue (1972), but this one is my favorite so far.

Just The Two of Us tells the tale of two lonely housewives who live at Rockpointe Patio Homes.

These two ladies are friends whose husbands are always away from home, working a Government job in Arizona. While having a fruit-salad lunch at a "kooky" restaurant called The Source, the women (one blonde, one brunette; their names escape me) see two other women holding hands.

Intrigued, and after a discussion with The Source's groovy mustachioed waiter, the two friends decide to dabble in the Sapphic arts. For blondie, it was just a fun dalliance, but for the brunette, it was real. As real as it gets. So she gets super-jealous when blondie finds a man and ends up ignoring her.

The problem for blondie is that she's deeply in love, to the point where she's planning to divorce her husband. She takes her boyfriend shopping for a suit at a men's store that has the corniest name ever.

They go on dates to The Swing, a nightclub with a house band that sings a song about not wanting money or any of that hassle, but just wanting to be free, just wanting "the Western sky."

Meanwhile, the brunette, feeling jilted, sits at home, reading and drinking. Or she wanders the beach despondent, stopping to listen to a band called Love.

At one point brunette attends a reefer party where she tries to have a ganja-fueled billiard-room relationship with a woman other than blondie, but it doesn't work. It doesn't feel as real as what she had with blondie.

The movie ends with blondie's husband coming home unexpectedly and catching her in bed with her boyfriend. Hubby beats the hell out of both of them, the boyfriend flees, the husband storms off, blondie lies on the bed weeping, and the movie cuts to and ends with a poignant still shot of an empty carousel.

At one point in Just The Two Of Us, the women host a card party with two of their friends. One of these women has fabulous high hair. Unfortunately, she espouses the belief that lesbianism is a mental illness.

I learned a lot while watching Just The Two Of Us. For example, I learned that

--Gawking at two women holding hands can lead to lesbianism.

--Horseback riding can lead to lesbianism.

--Holding hands on a carousel can lead to lesbianism.

--Falling asleep during the movie can lead to lesbianism.

--Naked make-out sessions can lead to lesbianism. No, wait; they are the lesbianism.

I also learned that thwarted lesbianism either leads to nude women sitting on pool tables and weeping,

or to chain-smoking, drinking, and weeping on the patio at night.

Actually, despite my levity, Just The Two Of Us tells a good solid story, and it imparts some strong messages of love and freedom and acceptance (but it does have its cornball and exploitative moments too). As much as I enjoyed the story of Just The Two Of Us, I enjoyed another element of the movie even more. If you've ever visited me here before at I Will Devour Your Content, you may be aware that I wish the 1970s had never ended. In my estimation, the 1970s were the greatest pop-culture decade ever. I love the 1970s. And that was my favorite part of the movie: the groovin' and swingin' 1970s styles, fashions, and decor.

I Would Kill To Own This Sofa

Do I even need to say it? Sure, why not. From the sweat-sticky Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment, I give Just The Two Of Us an ultra-hearty "hell, yeah!" rating. Thank you Harry H. Novak for giving to the world this superlative sexploiter.

The Glass Bottom Boat (1966)

2011-07-31T21:27:00.001-04:00

Director Frank Tashlin has helmed two of my favorite movies: Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957, with Tony Randall and Jayne Mansfield) and The Girl Can't Help It (1956, with Tom Ewell and Jayne Mansfield). These are two films that I turn to time and time again when I need a bit of lighthearted, frothy fun to chase away the blues, the doldrums, or the gloomies. I can now add another Tashlin film to that list: The Glass Bottom Boat (1966). The movie is joyful and effervescent, it hosts a number of great performances and cameos, and it even contains a song or two.

The Glass Bottom Boat also happens to be the first ever Doris Day film I've watched. What a lovely actress she is: beautiful with her freckles, a golden-throated songstress, heartachingly moving in the few dramatic passages in the film, and hilariously slapstick wacky. I've got to make sure I watch more Doris Day movies.

Spoilers ahoy!
The plot in a nutshell: Day plays Jennifer, who works at an aerospace engineering company run by engineer Bruce Templeton (Rod Taylor). During the course of the movie Jennifer falls in love with her boss. But things get complicated when she is mistakenly suspected of being a Russian spy attempting to steal Templeton's formula for artificial gravity. After numerous wacky events, things get sorted out and Jennifer and Bruce get married. Very lovely.

There are numerous noteworthy supporting actors in The Glass Bottom Boat, and many delightfully zany events. Here are my favorites:

Doris Day performs a wonderful slapstick bit, involving a ladder, a trash can, and a banana-cream cake, with Dom DeLuise and Rod Taylor.

Jennifer's neighbors are played by Alice Pearce and George Tobias, who also played the neighbors in the TV show Bewitched (1964-1972).

We get to see Paul Lynde in a number of disguises, including drag.

We get to see Dick Martin, of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In (1967-1973) fame, end up in bed with Edward Andrews, a great character actor who had a very long career and who performed in dozens of movies and TV shows. The two characters end up in bed mistakenly, but it is still somewhat disturbing when Martin pops his champagne cork and gets white foam all over Andrews.

Master of the Two-Brush Hair-Grooming Technique

Arthur Godfrey plays the guitar and sings "Que Sera Sera."

Sections of the movie were filmed at Santa Catalina, the same setting for Policewomen (1974), another favorite movie here at I Will Devour Your Content.

Look for a brief but hilarious cameo by Robert Vaughn of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) fame. Listen closely to the music when he appears.

Ellen "Grandma Walton" Corby has a small, funny role .

And for the foot fanciers in the crowd, we get to see Doris Day receive a foot rub and we get to see a robotic vacuum cleaner suck her big toe.

The Glass Bottom Boat is just under two hours long and you get a lot of bang for your buck: songs, slapstick, space-age technology, fabulous fashions that never should've gone out of style, and a dream sequence with Doris Day dressed as Mata Hari. Give it a watch: it'll make you feel good.

Oh, and let me not forget our sponsor.

Thank you for visiting I Will Devour Your Content. Good night.

100th Post Devourama: Big Movie List

2011-07-26T05:33:00.000-04:00

Television shows celebrate their 100th episodes. Comic books celebrate their 100th issues. More and more frequently these days, people get to celebrate their 100th birthdays. When I reached the brink of the 100th post here at I Will Devour Your Content, I knew I wanted to do something special, just like those other centenarians. I wasn't sure what that special thing should be, until I paid a visit to The United Provinces of Ivanlandia. I love Ivan's recently posted list of "exploitation/monster/B-movies" and I thought to myself, "I can do that too." As I commented over at Ivanlandia, "I am nothing if not derivative." Like Ivan, I admit to wide gaps in my cinematic knowledge. And of course the term "exploitation movie" has never been, and never can be, definitively defined. For the most part, exploitation is one of those "know it when you see it" genres. Or, to put it another way, "exploitation is in the eye of the beholder." Nonetheless, I took pad and pen in hand and wandered around the Upper Rooms of the I Will Devour Your Content Compound, wherein my collection of tapes and DVDs is housed, and compiled the I Will Devour Your Content List of Essential Exploitation/Monster/B-Movies.

Please note that these choices are purely personal. These are some of the films and movies that have played key roles in the development of my cinematic tastes, or they're just flicks that I like because I like them. These are some of the films that I would recommend to a neophyte desiring to begin the journey down the strange highway of Exploitation/Monster/B-Movies. Onward then. Share and Enjoy!

John Bem's I Will Devour Your Content 100th Post List of Essential Exploitation/Monster/B-Movies

* The Creeping Terror (1964). This one is a hold-over from my UHF-wasted youth. Enormous carpet-monster munches people.

* Satan's Cheerleaders (1977). Starring Yvonne "Lily Munster" DeCarlo as a devil-worshipper and some of the peppiest Satanists ever seen.

* The Curious Dr. Humpp (1969). Psychopathia sexualis indeed. Depravity, thy name is Humpp. Rob Zombie sampled bits of Humpp dialogue in his songs "Never Gonna Stop" and "Feel So Numb."

* The Mole People (1956). Subterranean adventures await genre stalwart John Agar and Hugh "Ward Cleaver" Beaumont.

* Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama (1988). Michelle Bauer, Linnea Quigley, and Brinke Stevens star in this tale of an evil imp accidentally released from its imprisonment inside a bowling trophy.

* The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2003). A bullet in the head gives a call girl psychic powers. Among other adventures, a woman gets finger-fucked by George W. Bush.

* The Monolith Monsters (1957). See humans flee from crystalline creatures that grow, topple, shatter, re-grow, topple, shatter, re-grow....

* Mothra (1961). A giant month. Tiny women. Monster-movie gold.

* The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1980). I consider this movie to be exploitation. At the very least, John Lydon felt exploited. Behold Malcom McLaren's pecker.

* Double Agent 73 (1975) and Deadly Weapons (1974). Two movies starring Chesty Morgan that have got to be seen to be believed. In the John Waters movie Serial Mom (1994), one the characters whacks off to a Chesty video; this was my gateway to these two awesome movies.

* The Astounding She-Monster (1957). A geologist and his dog battle gangsters and a sexy alien from beyond the stars.

* Slither (2006). Elizabeth Banks and Jenna Fischer battle disgusting slug-creatures.

* Psychomania (1973). A blend of biker gangs, the occult, and Nicky Henson's leather pants make for an excellent movie that I recently wrote about here.

* The Kekko Kamen quadrilogy: Kekko Kamen (2004), Kekko Kamen Returns (2004), Kekkon Kamen Surprise! (2004), Kekko Kamen: The MGF Strikes Back (2004). Exploited Japanese schoolgirls, who are frequently stripped to their underwear and at one point are subjected to forcible teeth-brushing, are rescued and defended by a mostly-naked female superhero.

* Bloodsucking Freaks (1976). Gratuitious nudity, gratuitous torture, gratuitous gore, and a demented dwarf named Ralphus.

* Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958). You gotta love a movie where the "monster" is an enormous woman in a bedsheet bikini. The 1993 remake with Daryl Hannah is pretty good too.

* Evil Toons (1992). David Carradine, Dick Miller, Arte Johnson, and a bevy of frequently undressed lovely ladies combat a demonic cartoon brought to life by reading from an ancient grimoire.

* Screwballs (1983). The raison d'être for this movie is tits, pure and simple. I wrote about it here.

* Heavy Metal Parking Lot (1986). A very short but awesome documentary. I consider the movie to be exploitation because, to some degree, it takes advantage of drunken teens waiting for a Judas Priest concert to begin. Check out the "Hell, yeah" girl in the sidebar over there to your right. She's from the movie.

* Sting of Death (1965). Jellyfish monster. 'Nuff said. Well, almost 'nuff said. I should mention that Neil Sedaka sings a poolside song.

* Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984) and Lovedolls Superstar (1986). Follow the low-budget exploits of the Lovedolls, the worlds most awesome all-girl rock band. The 1984 flick has one of the best-ever soundtracks, featuring songs from Red Kross, Nip Drivers, and more.

* Bone (1972). Yaphet Kotto and Brett Somers (of TV's Match Game fame) star in this odd blaxploiter from Larry Cohen.

* The Monster of Camp Sunshine or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nature (1964). A blend of two of my favorite things: monsters and nudists.

* Blaze Starr Goes Nudist (1962). A blend of two of my favorite things: Blaze Starr and nudists.

* The Beast That Killed Women (1965). A blend of two of my favorite things: killer apes and nudists.

* Michael and Roberta Findlay's Flesh trilogy: The Touch of Her Flesh (1967), The Curse of Her Flesh (1968), and The Kiss of Her Flesh (1968). Demented, sleazy, violent, naked movies from a husband and wife team. These flicks are a sort of bridge or gateway from softcore smut to hardcore porn. Roberta Findlay later made one of my all-time favorite porn movies, Anyone But My Husband (1975), notable for an excellent scene of gypsy-fisting and a great scene involving El Goncho (The Hook). Although porn is the ultimate exploitation, if I included too many porn movies on the list we could be here all night. I will mention one other porno, though, another one of my favorites: The Devil Inside Her (1977), starring Zebedy Colt and featuring a Satanic orgy at which Annie Sprinkle is the recipient of a copious golden shower.

* Frankenhooker (1990). Features one of the worst lawnmower accidents ever.

* The Killer Shrews (1959). The giant mutant killer shrews actually are dogs with carpet samples strapped to them. Starring James "Rosco P. Coltrane" Best.

* Orgy of the Dead (1965). Criswell. Strippers. Werewolf. Mummy. Ed Wood screenplay. Hell yeah.

* The films of Edward D. Wood Jr.: Wood is my favorite filmmaker. What he lacks in technical prowess he makes up for with passion and audacity. All of his flicks are worth a watch. My favorites are Glen or Glenda? (1953) and Bride of the Monster (1955).

* Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity (1987). This is basically The Most Dangerous Game (1932) set on on a distant planet and featuring naked babes.

* The Olga trilogy: Olga's House of Shame (1964), Olga's Dance Hall Girls (1969), White Slaves of Chinatown (1964). Olga is the nastiest, most sadistic madame ever to appear on the sleazy silver screen.

* Horrors of Spider Island (1960). Mutant spider-men attack planecrashed showgirls.

* Pagan Island (1961). A shipwrecked man finds a statue-worshipping cult of gorgeous native girls.

* Pretty much any film starring Pam Grier: Pam is a favorite actress here at I Will Devour Your Content and we will watch anything she's in. Our favorite films of hers include Black Mama, White Mama (1973), Coffy (1973), and Friday Foster (1975).

* Across 110th Street (1972). My all-time favorite blaxploiter (although Shaft (1971) comes close) starring Yaphet Kotto and Anthony Quinn and featuring Antonio Fargas.

* The films of Herschell Gordon Lewis: We love pretty much all of the Godfather of Gore's movies here at I Will Devour Your Content. Our favorites include The Gruesome Twosome (1967); The Wizard of Gore (1970); The Girl, The Body, and The Pill (1967); and Suburban Roulette (1968).

* Chainsaw Sally (2004). Delightfully gory. Featuring cameos from Gunnar Hansen and Herschell Gordon Lewis. April Monique Burril as Sally is fine, fine, fine.

* The films of David F. Friedman: Friedman was a partner of H.G. Lewis for a time, then he went off to produce his own films. Among our Friedman favorites here at IWDYC are She Freak (1967); Trader Hornee (1970); A Smell of Honey, a Swallow of Brine (1966); Scum of the Earth (1963); and The Defilers (1965).

* The films of Doris Wishman: Among our Wishman favorites here at IWDYC: Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965); Each Time I Kill (2007); and Another Day, Another Man (1966). Wishman also directed the Blaze Starr and Chesty Morgan movies mentioned above.

* Films from Seduction Cinema: Across the years, I've met a number of Seduction Cinema starlets at conventions. They've all been lovely, but my favorite Seduction ladies are Darian Caine, Misty Mundae, and Ruby LaRocca (that's Misty and Ruby on the Ubangis CD cover in the sidebar over to your right). Seduction Cinema makes all kinds of movies: naked horror, naked thrillers, naked comedy spoofs, and naked dramas (OK, not all of their movies are naked, but many of them are). I am not affiliated with Seduction Cinema in any way, so this is not a shameless plug. I just really like most of the stuff they release. I've not yet seen all of Seduction Cinema's output (or that of their affiliated companies and production lines), but of the dozens of their movies that I've watched, these are among my favorites: Gladiator Eroticus (2001), Erotic Survivor (2001), Playmate of the Apes (2002), Flesh for the Beast (2003), Screaming Dead (2003), and Mistress Frankenstein (2000).

* Pretty much any film starring Linnea Quigley. Linnea is one of my all-time favorite scream queens. Among our favorite Linnea movies here at IWDYC are Return of the Living Dead (1986), Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers (1988), Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula in 8 Legs to Love You (1998), Jack-O (1995), Burial of the Rats (1995), and Night of the Demons (1988). Linnea also is in the above-mentioned Wishman movie Each Time I Kill (2007).

* Pretty much any film starring Brinke Stevens. Brinke is another all-time favorite scream queen. Among our favorite Brinke movies here at IWDYC are The Slumber Party Massacre (1982) and Bad Girls From Mars (1990). Brinke also is in the Slave Girls From Beyond Infinity and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama movies mentioned above.

* * *

There you have it. You have just devoured (and hopefully enjoyed) John Bem's I Will Devour Your Content 100th Post List of Essential Exploitation/Monster/B-Movies. This just scratches the surface of all of the wonderful cinematic adventures that are out there to devour. Thanks again to The United Provinces of Ivanlandia for providing the inspiration for this post. Please feel free to mention your exploitation/monster/b-movie essentials in the comments. I'm always looking for more content to devour.

Guest Writer: Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

2011-07-20T23:44:00.002-04:00

Greetings groovy readers. I am your host John Bem, and I welcome you once again to I Will Devour Your Content. I've got a special treat for you this time 'round. In this post, you will not be subjected to my typographical blathering. Instead, you will be treated to the blathering of one of my friends. That's right, this post has been submitted by a Guest Writer.

No, no. I'm afraid you mis-heard me. Guest Writer.

My longtime friend, an enigmatic woman known as cdck, has graced this virtual space with an essay about one of ther all-time favorite movies. Her initials remain mysterious and stubbornly lowercase. She has provided her own introduction below, but I could not resist the urge to mention that cdck is descended, so I understand, from mighty Martian warlords. She is also a great admirer of schlocky cinema and bad movies, probably more so than myself. You'll see, as you begin to read cdck's essay, that she references a conversation we had a few weeks ago. This is evidence of her great powers of recall and preternatural stamina, as she was deep into her second tumblerful of Polish vodka at that point in the evening. Without further ado, I yield the floor to cdck.

* * *

Ok, first and foremost, I suppose an introduction is in order. Especially since the kind Mr. Bem, in coaxing me into this guest spot, assured me that he would post this unedited, "most likely even before reading," as he said. Of course, I could not turn my back on the opportunity to set the record straight on a couple things.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, the Monkey God's Black Claw, nor would I have any idea what that would be. Also, I never heard the term before.

My face is at the top of my body, not at the ground level, you foot-loving, fuzzy man.

By publishing these words, Mr. Bem has acknowledged both of the above items as fact... .
[Facts are malleable and I acknowledge no such thing---Bem]

I am cdck, and I am not a writer.

Like Mr. Bem, I have a fake leather chair in which I recline as I devour whatever content I stumble upon, but I prefer to think of mine as pleather, just because it sounds so dirty. Say it with me... “pllllleathhherr.” There, now take a moment to enjoy the afterglow.

My drink of choice currently is Brandy, but vodka or rum will do in a pinch, and it is rather difficult for me not to share my pllleatthherrrrrrr chair with at least one cat as I consume, because I have many in the house, which I share with Reve.

And so it is with a warm, fuzzy feeling in my stomach and with a warm, fuzzy feline on my lap that I set out to introduce you to one of my all-time favorite awful movies, Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973).

Pleather.

Invasion of the Bee Girls is one of my happy stumble-on items, found in a 50-pack of movies picked up for $15 (the questionably-named “Drive-In Movie Classics,” Mill Creek Entertainment, 2006). The quality of my copy is probably not the best, but boy was that $15 worth it, for this flick alone. This is a movie that I heartily recommend to anyone and everyone I meet who admits to enjoying truly terrible cinema.

I have watched this movie over and over, and never failed to get numerous good laughs out of every viewing. One online friend who I directed to this experience told me that he only needed to see about 15 minutes of this movie to be satisfied. Thinking that he disliked it (shocked, I say), I made a sort of apologetic on its behalf, to which he replied that he thought that we watched for different reasons. His reason? “BOOBIES!” He was anything but disappointed, I assure you.

The basic concept in Invasion of the Bee Girls is that a scientist (Dr. Susan Harris - Anita Ford) working at the Brandt Research Laboratory in Peckham, CA, has somehow melded Bee-ness into her own nature, resulting in a half-sexy-mad-scientist/half-queen-bee who seeks male mates in town and converts women into creatures like herself.

Before you get all het-up wanting to volunteer to be the former, you should know that no man can survive her supreme bee-ness. Surprisingly, given the number of men I know who say they'd love to die during orgasm, the victims in this movie seem rather distressed by their fate.

The hero of the movie is Agent Neil Agar (William Smith),

sent by the government to investigate after the death of one of the scientists from the lab, which is, of course, a government-tied facility. Neil is supported in his effortsby the first hot chick he meets at the lab, Julie Zorn (VictoriaVetri),

who he interviews because she worked with the dead scientist that drew him to this town in the firstplace.

Spoiled Honey Ahead!

Briefly, here are some important lessons to take away from Invasion of the Bee Girls:

If she's wearing incredibly huge sunglasses which give her face a buggish appearance, and she never takes them off in public, your date may be a Bee Girl. She does not want you to see her amazingly normal-looking eyes, because she fears you can tell that she is actually seeing in bug-vision. Or maybe she can't tell when her eyes really do go all buggy, so she just plays it safe all the time...

If she suddenly becomes out-of-breath and needs to expose her nipples to increase her intake of oxygen or else pass out, your date may be a Bee Girl. Even having exposed her nipples, the Bee Girl may need to rub her breasts enthusiastically to facilitate proper air intake. While this may prove titillating, it is perhaps wisest to forgo watching the display and take the time to remove yourself from her vicinity, before she starts buzzing.

If, in a moment of tender intimacy, you begin to wonder who let all the mosquitos into the room – and then cease caring as your libido kicks into overdrive, your date may be a Bee Girl. In which case, it is probably already too late. At least you get to fulfill a common male fantasy.

And three non-Bee-Girl lessons I learned from this movie:

In some towns in America during the 70s, especially towns in which there was a high percentage of the population closely tied to high-level scientific research, the term “balling” was the only appropriate way to refer to sex. Its use was preferred in all situations and by every local, including town meetings at top volume. Especially when insisting that a man wasn't gonna give up no pleasure from “ballin' my old lady, or anybody ELSE for that matter!”

A woman who has just very nearly been violently gang-raped on the hood of a car will forget entirely about it within ten minutes of the hero coming to her rescue just in the NICK of time. I suppose I should be comforted by this thought, and yet somehow I still have to look askance at this idea.

As in real life, in the movie world all the truly exciting stuff happens while the hero is doing boring things like watching educational bee films or talking on the phone. At length. I won't bother with a picture.

Be warned, there ARE explosions.

Can the hero save his heroine from becoming a Bee Girl? Will he finally get to ball?

Ok, those questions you gotta answer onyour own, but there ARE explosions.

And, because what am I, if not a panderer, for the foot-lovers in the crowd, here:

And ok, it's corny, but some end shots are just too good to pass up.

pleather

* * *

There you have it. I hope you enjoyed cdck's post as much as I have, which is quite a lot. I too have witnessed the cinematic spectacle that is Invasion of the Bee Girls. It is quite the B-movie, filled with apiary awesomeness. For the record, cdck and I discussed the penultimate screenshot above. I claim it is an ass shot, but she claims that the boots make it a foot shot. However you look at it, it's a naked woman on a motorbike, so thumbs up to that.

Look to see cdck grace these pages again and I'll see you here next time, after I figure out something special to do for I Will Devour Your Content's 100th post.

Solid As Ice: Cold Prey (2006)

2011-07-17T09:59:00.003-04:00

Greetings readers, it is time once again for Stacie Ponder's Final Girl Film Club, a collective movie-watching experience wherein her devotees from across Blogland share their impressions of a film chosen by Ms. Ponder herself. This time around she's picked an icy Norwegian horror flick called Cold Prey (2006).

For a previous Film Club outing, Ms. Ponder had her readers and minions watch Frozen (2010), and this was during February. Brrr. I hate the cold, and watching then an icy movie indoors just reminded me of how freaking frigid it was outdoors. But now, when Stacie's sending us to the land of the ice and snow, she's doing so in the summertime, which makes said ice and snow more palatable, as they are naught but distant memories during this delightfully sweltering mid-July.

Thank you, kittens; we have now over-established the whole

ice-and-snow thing.

Beware: spoilers below.

From the opening flashback sequence, Cold Prey lays out all of its cards on the table, face-up and easily readable. The movie is gorgeously photographed, the young actors are beautiful and entertaining, and the story is a solid step-by-step recounting of a standard "locked-in-a-remote-cabin-with-an-injured-friend" story.

A snowboarding accident, on a mountainous backslope away from more populated ski resorts, results in a busted leg for one young man, a member of a group of adventurous youths out for a snowy good time. Fortunately, there's a hotel nearby. Even though the place has been closed for 30 years, there's enough petrol to run the generator, there's some intact cassettes to play in the stereo (which is pretty astonishing; none of my cassettes survived past the early 1990s), there's enough wood for the fireplace, there's enough booze left behind on the sideboard, and there's enough non-moldy tinned food in the pantry to make for a pleasant enough night. (At one point, however, a character is served a meal of fresh oranges; I'll be kind and assume one of the adventurous youths had a backpack stuffed full of fruit.) Then, in the morning, it's off to get help, down off the mountain we go, tra-la, easy-peasy, and all that.

Nope. There's a killer. And like I mentioned up above, we know pretty much from minute one who that killer is. There's no twist endings here. The final survivor is pretty easy to figure out as well.

Oh fuck, he sees us

Cold Prey is a good, not great, movie. It is a solid, serviceable slice of cinematic entertainment. I liked it. I enjoyed the performances of all of the actors, even though it was difficult to get engaged in their character-building, background-revealing, heart-to-heart conversation scenes because, after all, most of them are gonna die. Cold Prey is that kind of movie: I didn't get immersed in it; I was all too aware all along that I was watching a horror movie that was going to follow the playbook point by point. And so it did; I was entertained but not surprised.

For example: no signal on the cell phones? Check.

The girl in her underwear is the first to die? Check. (Although this was a harrowing and well done scene.)

There are are number of harrowing scenes throughout the movie, wherein one or more of the adventurous youths are trapped in a small room with the killer banging on the door or the wall. Cold Prey does a very good job of building suspense and dread in certain sections.

I will say that the characters in Cold Prey are a cut above your usual dimwitted horror-movie youths. The Cold Prey kids act reasonably and intelligently. They have survival skills and medical skills and you have no problem believing that they'd get down off the mountain all right, if not for that damned killer. When the characters realize there's a murderous madman on the loose, they don't go blundering around; they hide and they stay hid as long as they can. I liked these kids (except for the fatalistic one who channels Bill Paxton's "game over, man" character from Aliens (1986)).

From the Naugahyde Recliner of Judgment, I give Cold Prey a "Hell, yeah" rating. It won't surprise you, you'll see the end coming from the beginning, but it is well-acted, well-filmed, and it will entertain you. For this posting, I rented the DVD, but if I ever saw a cheap copy in a bargain bin, I'd bring it home with me to add to the permanent collection.

Be sure to stick around for the end credits, over which plays an excellent Turbonegro song.

And what the hell is up with the fruitcake credit?

Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading. On July 19, be sure to visit Final Girl to discover what other film-clubbers have to say about Cold Prey.

Bikini Girls With Harpoon Guns: Deadlier Than The Male (1967)

2011-07-12T20:37:00.001-04:00

Spoilers follow.

Within the first ten minutes or so of 1967's Deadlier Than the Male, a beautiful stewardess (Elke Sommer) kills an airborne business executive with a bullet-loaded cigar. She then sets a time bomb, strips down to a swimsuit and leaps from the plane. As she drifts serenely through the air, borne by a parachute, the recently vacated airplane explodes. The stewardess safely lands in the ocean, where she is picked up by a bikini beauty (Sylvia Koscina) in a speedboat.

These two lovelies, both now bikini-clad, boat to a beach. They shoot a man with a harpoon gun and steal the tape from his reel-to-reel. "Hot damn!" I thought, leaning forward in my Naugahyde Recliner of Judgement, rubbing my hands together in anticipatory eagerness, "This movie's gonna be good." And so it was, and is.

The two breathtaking women who open the movie are members of an elite squad of female assassins. These deadly femmes are dedicated to removing obstacles. Let's say a Middle Eastern king refuses to sell his oilfields. Rather than endure the arduous legal channels of negotiation, the leader of the killer girl squad dispatches his ladies to terminate the king. They'll seduce him with their oh-so-feminine wiles and then kill him, always making it look like an accident.

Indeed, the gang leader, a Mr. Petersen (Nigel Green), sums up his practice quite succinctly: "My method is simplicity itself. If a man stands in your way, dispose of that man."

Someone needs to stop this nefarious mastermind, and who better than Bulldog Drummond (Richard Johnson), an insurance investigator with the skills to shame any secret agent.

Drummond uncovers the plot and defeats the bad guy in an awesome set-piece showdown: gunplay amid a field of enormous, metallic, voice-controlled robot chessmen. Hell. Yeah.

Deadlier Than the Male is virtually overflowing with film elements that I love: beautiful deadly women (some with high hair),

fast cars,

tough men, deadly capers, evil henchmen,

and nefarious plots. The movie is enjoyable and engaging from beginning to end. I was disappointed by only one small aspect of the film: the fact that such a ruthless and capable gang of female killers needed to have a man as their leader. I was hoping that the leader would be a powerful woman such as

Olga

Ilsa

Mom

But that's a minor flaw in an otherwise brilliant gem.

The movie ends with a mighty explosion and a groan-inducing pun. In other words: it ends perfectly.

Deadlier Than the Male. Hell. Yeah.
Oh, yeah: The Producer has the best name ever:

"I'm Still Healthy, While Every Other Girl Is Either Dead Or Horribly Mutilated": Miss June 1963

2011-07-07T22:56:00.005-04:00

It is my understanding that every issue of Playboy magazine published during the last half-century has been digitized, pixellated for easy pleasure and convenient perusal. Nonetheless, I prefer physical artifacts. I enjoy gripping actual magazines: I love the unique, musty smell of old paper, an aroma that triggers deep nostalgia; I thrill to (minor) creases, folds, dents, and rusting staples, all of which are tiny testimonials to the historical nature of the item; I treasure the unique feeling that gets left behind on the fingertips after handling old paper, like the whorls have been filled with moth-dust and magic. This is why I was very pleased when, a few days ago, I was able to purchase the June 1963 issue of Playboy.

I'd been seeking this particular magazine for some time. Why? Because Miss June 1963 is none other than Connie Mason, the blonde bombshell who starred in two Herschell Gordon Lewis movies: the seminal gore classic Blood Feast (1963) and the Southern-fried, blood-spurting mayhem of Two Thousand Maniacs (1964). Lewis is one of my all-time favorite movie-makers, and it is a great treat to finally see Connie's pictorial. (The Jayne Mansfield pictorial is a saucy bonus!)

The text accompanying the pictorial has this to say about Lewis' upcoming movie:

"[Connie] was spotted by movie talent scouts for an outfit modestly dubbed Box Office Spectaculars, Inc., who promptly signed her to play the heroine of a Florida-filmed, gore-splattered quickie entitled The Blood Feast, which will be released this month. 'It's all about sacrificing beautiful young virgins to Egyptian deities', says Connie. 'You know, a typical, everyday kind of story. I'm rather proud of the fact that at the end of the show I'm still healthy, while every other girl is either dead or horribly mutilated. I don't imagine we'll win any Academy Awards, but it was fun taking time off to do it and I'd love to act in more films if I get the chance'."

And here's a few tidbits about Connie from Randy Palmer's book Herschell Gordon Lewis, Godfather of Gore: The Films (McFarland, 2000):

"Except for the minor irritations that accompany the production of any low-budget movie, the Blood Feast shoot progressed smoothly. The single major hurdle HG encountered was the hiring of an actress---and that term is used very loosely here---known as Connie Mason. She was a David Friedman discovery who was paid a total of $175 to star in Blood Feast."

"David Friedman was enraptured with Connie Mason and insisted she play the female lead in Blood Feast opposite Bill Kerwin. As good as Kerwin was...he made Connie Mason look that much worse. She couldn't act, she couldn't emote, she was stiff, and she read her lines off cue cards because she had so much difficulty memorizing the script. Lewis acknowledged, '...[Connie] had such great difficulty learning her lines. In fact, she had a terrible time learning how to say anything! We wrote her lines on pieces of cardboard which were affixed to the shirt front of the person standing across from her. The camera couldn't see it, but she could. We were consistently taking lines away from her and giving them to other actors, even offscreen voices, just to get the picture finished'."

That's all right, Connie. Legions of film fans still love you.

The Palmer book is excellent. It contains two forewords, one by Herschell Gordon Lewis and one by David F. Friedman.

Without further ado, then, here are scans of Connie Mason's June 1963 Playboy pictorial. (I only scanned the first panel of the foldout; I didn't want to risk mangling it.) Click the images to embiggen them, to read the text or scrutinize other details. Share and Enjoy!

"Look At Me, I'm Sandra Dee / Raped By Cosmic Entities" : The Dunwich Horror (1970)

2011-07-03T11:03:00.000-04:00

If you'd've ever told me that one day I would witness sweet Francie "Gidget" Lawrence lying in a black dress on a stone altar with the Necronomicon propped between her open legs as Admiral Al Calavicci intoned the mighty and fearsome name of Yog-Sothoth, I'd've said, "Hey you, get out of my dreams."

But, ah, true believers, it has come to pass, as all things someday will in the cinematic wonderland that envelops and surrounds all B-Grade Cinephiles.

Thanks to James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff of blessed memory, the sainted gentlemen who created American International Pictures, the film production company that has generated many of my favorite movies, I have finally seen a Lovecraft-based film that stays true to its source material, features a stellar cast, and is great fun to watch. I'm talking about The Dunwich Horror (1970). I love this movie.

Achtung: spoilers below.

Wilbur Whateley, played very effectively and creepily by Dean Stockwell (a brand of creepy that reminded me of his Ben character in Blue Velvet (1986); "Darling? Darling, could you bring some glasses... .") travels to Arkham University to pilfer the dreaded and forbidden Necronomicon, that fabled tome of black magicks and unspeakable evil. Wilbur needs the book so that he can continue his grandfather's work of calling down star-spawn to impregnate Earth women, who will give birth to monstrous creatures. These beasts will eradicate the human race, paving the way for the re-emergence of the Elder Gods, the Great Old Ones who intend to take back the Earth, the planet that once was theirs before this upstart race of ape-descended bipeds usurped their position.

You see, Wilbur himself is the product of such an unholy union, a blasphemous congress that produced twins. Wilbur himself, while weird, looks to be perfectly human. His brother, however, is another story. The brother takes after the cosmic father and is kept locked in a room in the Whateley mansion, a spiffy abode filled with occult artifacts.

The woman whom Wilbur chooses to be the next victim of interstellar rape is Nancy, a lovely blonde-haired secretary who works for Doctor Armitage, the current keeper of the foul Necronomicon.

Armitage becomes suspicious of Wilbur and discovers him, at movie's end, standing above altar-bound Nancy, chanting unearthly words, making weird signs, and gesturing with a chalice. It turns out that Armitage is a bit of a wizard himself. He chants some counterspells, slowly advancing on Wilbur, and eventually defeats the sorcerer. But he does so just as an old god was about to break through to our side. Armitage may have defeated Wilbur, but is Nancy pregnant with star seed nonetheless? You'll have to watch the movie to find out.

During all of these goings on, Wilbur's mansion-imprisoned brother breaks free and wreaks havoc on the countryside, destroying all of the houses and people he encounters. He even kills Mrs. Rocky Balboa (Talia Coppola in a small part as Nurse Cora).

The Dunwich Horror is a rare Lovecraft-based movie that stays true to its source story and captures very well the tone of the printed work. Some details are changed: instead of being de-evolved semi-morons who live in backwoods decrepitude, the Whateleys here are intelligent, if evil, and live in a very nice mansion.

Wilbur is not as alien here in the movie as he is in the book, but Stockwell's strange yet restrained performance is sufficiently odd to evoke a sensation of disturbing otherworldliness.

In Lovecraft's story, Wilbur's utterly unhuman brother is never seen outright but, in typical masterful Lovecraft fashion, is only hinted at: massive footprints, black ichor in the ruins of destroyed farmhouses, a lightning-glimpsed sighting of something massive and monstrous that had tentacles, perhaps (the poor farmer who in the book caught a peek of the beastie joins the legions of Lovecraftian supporting characters whose sanity will never be the same). The way The Dunwich Horror movie presents the extreme alienness of Wilbur's twin is with strobe-quick editing, brief glimpses of feathers and tentacles, all accompanied by shifting overlays of different colors and a strange fluttering sound. I imagine that some viewers might find this method somewhat cheesy, but I found it to be very effective.

The Dunwich Horror does contain one curious and problematic detail that I kept noticing, and which bothered me pretty significantly. During the course of the movie, Doctor Armitage and some of Nancy's friends travel, at different times, to the Whateley mansion to try to see Nancy and to find out if she's all right. During these visits, there is always a live owl sitting on the porch railing. But no one seems to notice it, or if they do, they take it stride, as a matter of course, turning their backs and knocking on the door. Me, I'd be all "whoa, cool, there's an owl here!" and I'd try to pet it and probably end up with a talon in my eye. But c'mon, an owl on the porch is way cooler than a dog or cat; you'd think somebody would take note.

Overall, The Dunwich Horror is a super-awesome movie. It is a faithful Lovecraft adaptation, exquisite in its tone pacing. From the Naugahyde Recliner of Judgement, I give The Dunwich Horror a hearty and resounding "Hell, yeah!" rating. I've been waiting many long years to discover a Lovecraft movie that satisfied me; with Dunwich, I've finally found it. It is in many ways a product of its time; without even knowing the date of release it's easy to say "yeah, this was made in the 1970s, the greatest pop-culture decade ever" but despite that it doesn't feel dated at all. It is perhaps more witchy, more Wicker Man-ish (1973 Wicker Man, natch), than cosmic, but the cosmic elements are present and effectively depicted, and I think that the late, great Howard Phillips is well-served by this version of his work.

There you have it. Thank you for visiting I Will Devour Your Content. I have been your host John Bem. I hope you're having a groovy summer and I'll see you back here again soon.

Cinema Roundup: Good Flicks I've Watched Recently

2011-06-30T21:47:00.001-04:00

Greetings friends and followers, my apologies for not checking-in for a little while now. You see, I am by nature a sedentary and indolent creature. However, I made a vow that this summer I would get out more, be more active, do more non-inert things, find a way to start breaking free of the rat race, and so on. And so I have. I've already accomplished more this summer than I probably have during the past three summers combined. I'm attending concerts and festivals. I'm working on sorting out my vast-ish collection of pulpish ephemera with the aim of starting an online store. I'm doing some decorating and fixing-up around the house. I'm (gasp) getting out for walks. In the evenings, I'm sitting on the side porch and reading by moth-fluttering lamplight rather than staying cooped-up in my room. All of which is wonderful, but I find that amid it all too many days have passed since last I sat down to share a movie or two with you. I've watched a few good ones during the past two or three weeks, and so, for your deliberation and delectation, I bring to you, in lieu of a proper posting, a flickering grab-bag of the good movies I've watched recently.

Adviso: There may be spoilers below.

* * *

Hot Cars (1956)

Nick has a wife and a sick son to support. He's trying to make a living as a used-car salesman, but he's lousy at it. He's too damned honest. Faced with paying for his son's surgery, Nick discovers that he can make a lot more money at a lot dealing in hot cars. Along with the money comes a sultry blonde played by Joi Lansing. There are a lot of gorgeous automobiles to ogle as well. Alas, this is 1956 and crime ultimately doesn't pay.

Check out Lansing in this fantastic "Web of Love" Scopitone:

* * *

Hot Rod Gang (1958)

Cars, teen-culture, rock-and-roll. Rich-teen John Abernathy III leads a secret life as a rod-racing rock-and-roller. He ends up meeting Gene Vincent and becoming a star. Hot Rod Gang is a fun flick that features many of the same cast members as The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959).

* * *

Man-Thing (2005)

Marvel Comics' muck-monster Man-Thing is one of my all-time favorite comics. But I'd never watched the movie because it didn't look it did justice to the swamp-dweller. Well, when I saw a copy of the DVD at a yard sale for only $1.00, I figured, "What the hell." Delightfully, Man-Thing didn't suck as much as I thought it would. It is actually a solid little horror move and I'm not sorry I watched it. The whole "whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch" idea is gone; the movie Man-Thing pierces his victims with roots and coats them with fungus and swamp growth. Also, this Man-Thing doesn't sport the classic root-face look that I love so much, he looks more like an Ent.

Nonetheless, the flick does toss a bit of homage toward the comics: the evil oil-drilling capitalist invading Manny's Everglades is named Schist and there are characters named Ploog and Gerber. So yeah, it's pretty cool. Give it a peek. Oh, and it's the only Marvel Comics movie I've seen where you get to see a topless girl. Whoo!

* * *

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw (1958)

This is a comedy-Western starring Jayne Mansfield. It's the tale of an English gun salesmen in the American wild West and the comic misadventures and misunderstandings that lead to him becoming the sheriff of a little town called Fractured Jaw. The movie isn't gut-bustingly funny, but it is charming and amusing and loads of fun. Jayne Mansfield performs a few song-and-dance numbers and I always love it when Mansfield sings.

* * *

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

Director Jack Hill, the grindhouse genius who brought us great B-movies such as Spider Baby (1968), The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974), and Foxy Brown (1974) here tells the tale of a street-tough girl gang. The Dagger Debs are an auxiliary of sorts of the all-male Silver Daggers gang. But they overthrow the men and start a gang of their own, fighting off all rivals. The culmination of the tale is a massive guns-blazing streetfight. I love all of the Jack Hill movies I've seen so far, Switchblade Sisters included. Keep an eye out for a young Don Stark, the actor who went on to play Donna's dad on That '70s Show.

* * *

There you have it. As I said, I'm sorry I haven't been around much lately. I'll try to be back soon with a post with a bit more substance. In the meantime, enjoy your summer and be excellent to each other. I have been your host, John Bem, and I thank you for stopping by.

Once More Unto the Beach, or, God Help Me But I Love These Things: Pajama Party (1964)

2011-06-11T14:17:00.024-04:00

"Look how nicely he fits in on Earth, chasing Indians and blondes."

I am delving once again into the frothy, feel-good cinematic universe of the American International Pictures beach party movies. Previously in these content-devouring pages, I've reported on The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966) and Ski Party (1965). Now it's time for a Pajama Party (1964).

There are some swingin' spoilers ahead.

In Pajama Party, Don Rickles and Frankie Avalon portray Martian leaders who have been monitoring Earth teenagers. They are concerned that should these teenagers become adults, they will spread their hijinx throughout the galaxy, and that Mars will be overrun by their tomfoolery. So, Rickles and Avalon send Go Go to Earth as an advanced scout for a planned Martian Invasion. Go Go is played by Tommy Kirk, who here makes a much more interesting Martian than he did in Mars Needs Women (1967). Much like The Angry Red Planet (1959), the Pajama Party scenes that take place on Mars are filmed in red.

In a subplot, Jesse White is back as the crooked and conniving J. Sinister Hulk. This time he's planning to steal millions of dollars from rich widow Aunt Wendy, played by the eternally wonderful and beautiful Elsa Lanchester. Toward this end, Hulk enlists the aid of Chief Rotten Eagle (a very funny Buster Keaton) and Helga (Bobbi Shaw, who played gorilla-keeper Princess Yolanda in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini).

In yet another subplot, Harvey Lembeck is back as Eric Von Zipper. He, together with his gang of Rats and Mice, are plotting revenge against Aunt Wendy's nephew Big Lunk (Jody McCrea) for throwing him into the ocean.

Big Lunk is Connie's boyfriend. Connie is the main female character in the story, so she of course is played by Annette Funicello. Connie gets jealous when she finds Big Lunk arm-wrestling with Helga during a poolside pajama party.

Despite all of the plots, subplots, and story threads, Pajama Party finds plenty of time for singing, dancing, pool parties, pajama parties, and general bikini-clad, negligee-wearing, feel-good romping, sporting, and cavorting.

I'm Thinking of Legally Changing My Name To "Nooney Rickett"

Annette Funicello sings.

Donna Loren sings.

Dorothy Lamour even gets into the act as the singing and dancing hostess of a fashion show.

One of my favorite bits in the movie involves Susan Hart as a bikini girl called Jilda, who does very little throughout the movie except to gyrate seductively while wearing provocative outfits. (Hart played the titular swimsuit-clad spirit in The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini.) In a nod to the opening sequence of The Girl Can't Help It (1956), every time Jilda shimmies and sways, her surroundings feel the heat: flowers wilt, bottles of Dr. Pepper explode (there's a lot of Dr. Pepper product placement during the movie), candles melt, a papier mache volcano erupts, and marshmallows spontaneously combust.

At the end of it all, Go Go falls in love with Connie (leaving Big Lunk free to be with Helga) and calls off the invasion.

A pajama-clad Von Zipper and his similarly garbed gang end up all wet in the pool.

And Aunt Wendy retains her millions as J. Sinister Hulk is foiled once again.

Be sure to stick around all the way through the end credits, as the sexy zaniness continues to the very end.

In the preceding picture, notice how one of the pajama girls is Toni Basil. Yes, that Toni Basil.

Pajama Party is a big ol' cauldron of "sunshine, lollipops, rainbows, and everything that's wonderful" as Lesley Gore might put it (indeed, as she did put it in Ski Party). Pajama Party is a great spirit lifter, possessing the ability to replace a gloomy mood with one brimming with happiness and delight. Colorful, tuneful, funny, foxy, and fun, with Pajama Party you can't go wrong.

Illuminatus! On-Stage: Retro-Awesomeness from 1977

2011-06-08T20:03:00.000-04:00

One of (or, more correctly, three of) my all-time favorite books is Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Because of that hefty, well-worn, frequently read tome, I have been spotting fnords and calculating 23s for many years now. Last night as I perused the June, 1977 issue of Playboy magazine, I learned that Illuminatus! had been turned into a stage show in Britain. That's pretty audacious and pretty awesome. It takes some mad thinking to attempt to adapt that sprawling opus into a play. Man do I wish I could've seen it. Here's the article. Click to enlarge for textual clarity.