The Lords of Salem (2013)

 

Meet the new scream queen of menstrual cinema.

So rare is it that I get to go to the movie theater that you’d  think I’d make greater use of such a rarefied night than going to see the new Rob Zombie horror flick. Yet, there I was, at the cineplex awash in regret. The choice of film was not exactly mine, but considering the other things playing in town, this was sure shot. There was no way The Lords of Salem was going to disappoint, but don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t expecting it to be good.

Here’s a little side-note. I’m much happier enjoying a film that I know is going to be a disaster than expecting a film to connect with me emotionally or a film that is trying to sell me an image of coolness. If a film has some sort of statement to make about the human condition or it’s trying to wow me with the lifestyle of the characters in the film I don’t want to see it, not when I’m looking to just lose my mind for an hour or two. Give me madness, give me bat-shit-demented-off-the-rails-crazy. This is why I went to The Lords of Salem not Place Beyond the Pines or To The Wonder.

However, no sooner did the previews start before I began to rethink my stance on entertaining cinema.  As expected, the trailers playing before The Lords of Salem were for other horror or thriller films. Most exploited flashy editing, shocking imagery, and high levels of grotesqueness. They got me primed for the feature presentation, but mostly they got me wondering why I waste my time at all with horror movies. Why subject myself to such brutal imagery? Can’t I just turn on the news? I swore that if I lived through this night out I’d change my viewing habits for good. But, tonight, it was too late. I was there, in my seat, ten dollars poorer, and full of regret. Roll the film.

The Lords of Salem is not a great horror film. The first hour drags, so much that I fell asleep. But Thankfully, I woke in time to witness a demonic wookie in a room with a neon cross. That is when The Lords of Salem got entertaining. For the next hour a series of seemingly connected, but never fully developed, scenes flashed on the screen. The film is littered with gothic, witchy, demonic imagery and lots and lots of elderly full frontal nudity. Because, what is scarier than the body of an aging woman, right?

I suggest you let the demonic wookie win.

Rob Zombie’s aesthetic is that of a music video director. The image is king and the story need only hold on by the thinnest of threads. His plan of attack is that of a chimpanzee flinging shit. He throws so many plot lines, ideas, and half-formulated concepts at the screen see what sticks and what slides away. What’s left is a scatter shot of interesting ideas that never fertilized. As the film progresses the weirdness quickens. Zombie appears desperate to shock and awe his audience, but what ends up happening is something different, something ludicrous.  Lucky for him, or perhaps lucky for me, people didn’t mind laughing at his vision hell.

Normally, when I crack-up in a theater I’m expecting sneers, cold-stares, or death-threats. This happens more than you’d want to know and it probably explains why my wife and I rarely go out to the cinema. I make bad cinema interactive and I guess that even in this day and age not everyone wants interactive. That or we all don’t agree to call a bad film out when we see it.  Thankfully, I was not in the minority at The Lords of Salem. Because when Rob Zombie’s version of Satan waddles onto the screen – and don’t worry I won’t spoil the best laugh in the film by describing this abomination – but when it shows up, the dams burst and the whole theater erupted in laughter.

Kudos to you Rob Zombie.  You turned my regret into unabashed joy. I don’t understand what your problem is with your wife’s menstrual cycle and there is enough evidence in this film for a graduate student to write a thesis, but for now I’m not giving up on horror films. I’m just going to continue to seek out the head-scratching horror; the films that are more scared of making sense than making scares.

Five on the Black Hand Side (1973)

“You’ve been coffy-tized, blacula-rized and super-flied – but now you’re gonna be glorified, unified and filled-with-pride,” was Five on the Black Hand Side‘s tagline. The film presents itself as an antidote to blaxploitation. While it does present a non-exploitative, humorous clash between different generations and ideologies, the film cannot shake its roots. Developed from Charlie L. Russell‘s stage play of the same name the movie feels stilted. While the debate between various characters is lively, it never feels natural. Plainly speaking, it feels scripted. The dialogue is well written, directly poignant and funny. Most of all, the film willingly approach serious questions of black identity and politics, even if ever so lightly, which is more than I can say for anything coming from modern black filmmakers like the Tyler Perry or the Wayans Brothers, who once mimicked characters from Five on the Black Hand Side in their show In Living Color. 

Black Shampoo (1976)

Mr. Jonathan is hairdresser / Lothario who does far more than a woman’s hair. When he’s not satisfying his sexually starved clientele he’s a mean fighting machine looking to win back the receptionist who has been stolen away from him.

Made one year after Shampoo starring Warren Beatty, Black Shampoo is one of the oddest twists blaxploitation has ever taken.  With its odd mix of styles the film sexploitation, blaxploitation, even gayploitation (if that is even a genre) this film mixes action, comedy and romance in a way that only director Greydon Clark and writer Alvin L. Fast are capable of doing.

Black Shampoo often screeches to a halter for the sake of showing some serious skin. Clark knows that sex sells and many of his exploitation films try to take this philosophy to the bank, but often in such head scratching ways that his films become either brilliant forays into the unexpected or bungled messes. It really depends on how you look at it and how much you demand a film stick to convention. Personally, I’ll take unexpected, even wonderfully crazy, if I’m looking to be entertained. Show me something I could not think up on my own. A black hairdresser kicking ass with chainsaw and partying at a gay rodeo…where else am I going to see that?

 

Turkey Television

Turkey Television was one of the first shows I ever saw on Nickelodeon, back in the late 80′s when cable television finally reached the corn-field encircled boonies I called home. Because I never taped the show I later assumed I would never get to see it again. Not that the show was anything amazing. In short, it was a mish-mash of pre-produced skits, animations, slapstick, bad jokes, and re-mixed media. The show was a scrambled mess that feels like Night Flight for an underage set. Its format pre-dated shows like Short Attention Span Theater or Roundhouse, and it was meant to serve as a sidekick to that other beloved, Nickelodeon lost relic You Can’t Do That on Television. Today, any affinity I have for the show is more nostalgia for my own youth than a longing for quality television. Still, Turkey Television did introduce me to Jacques Tati, for that alone it deserves some praise.

 

I am happy to have stumbled across this one episode and I’m happy to share it on Turkey Day…now, where’s the Blu-Ray set of this, You Can’t Do That on Television, and Night Flight?

The Blob (1957) + Beware! The Blob (1972)

The Blob is a matinee flick wherein Steve McQueen and Aneta Corsaut play very old teenagers who cannot get adults to heed their warnings about an intergalactic menace. It’s a classic, but it’s overshadowing an equally entertaining blob film.

Beware! The Blob diverges little from its predecessor’s plot. Again, a gelatinous life form is unleashed and few believe the teen witnesses. Filled with far more humor, Beware! The Blob is a surprisingly fun sequel filled with great bit parts by Richard Stahl, Godfrey Cambridge, Gerrit Graham, Burgess Meredith, and many other.

Poking fun at its genre and source material this Larry Hagman directed horror comedy, mixes farcical jokes with traditional scares. There is some low-budget, but inventive camera work and special effects, not to mention some of the wackiest dialog I’ve heard in ages. “Hey let’s go to your place and have an avocado sandwich, on whole wheat bread, with alfalfa sprouts, and Monterey Jack cheese.”

You’d have to watch Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch to find a similar comparison between The Blob and Beware! The Blob, with the first film setting up a premise and the second film having fun with the premise while also poking fun at it.  Joe Dante directed both Gremlins films. His directorial style is a more polished and pointed version of Hagman’s direction, perhaps even influenced by it.

I am quite surprised that it took me so long to stumble upon this gem and to do so uninvited. I cannot recall anyone ever suggesting it to me, nor reading about it in any books or magazines – even those that deal mainly with b-movies. Frankly, I’m shocked as Beware! The Blobis one of the most enjoyable popcorn flicks I’ve seen in some time. I also now get the reference made by WFMU’s Beware of the Blog.

Wet Hot American Summer (2001)

I really should do more homework before picking a film to watch. Even when I’m just looking for something mindless and funny, it is a good lesson to keep in mind. Had I bothered to check up on Wet Hot American Summer‘s pedigree before I decided to view it, I could have spared myself a lot of frustration. Instead, I selected the film simply because I kept hearing the title brought up over-and-over again by people when they were discussing lesser-known (I won’t say “cult”) comedies. Perhaps, I should also take better stock of just who is having these sort of discussions and how their tastes in film match up with my own.

Doesn’t this like one of those whacky films from the 80′s? Let’s try to make one of those, but let’s not really try.

Had I known that Wet Hot American Summer was made by many of the same people behind MTV’s sketch comedy show The State I would have buried this title so deep on my must-see list that I’d be more likely to watch all of the movies based Nicholas Sparks’ books before watching this so-called comedy. Oh, I’m sure that for many people this film, like The State, is hilarious or at least providing of a chuckle or two. I am not one of those people. I have always found the comedy of David Wain, Michael Showalter, Michael Ian Black, et al. to be lazy.

Wet Hot American Summer did not prove to be an exception. I cannot understand if this is an homage or satire of 80′s camp comedies. Ideas are introduced and quickly dropped. While watching the film I felt there was so much untapped potential, so many jokes that could have been, so many tropes left unexplored, and so much that left to be desired. Like ever other work of theirs that I have seen, I felt like I was watching a first draft, something that needed to be revisited and refined. Overall, there is the feel of improv, of jokes made on the fly, then quickly discarded, and never developed.

Live and learn. Next time I’ll check the ingredients before I down any old film. Next time, I’ll just watch Meatballs.

Natural Selection (2011)

Quirky is a dominant trait in the gene pool of indie comedy films. Natural Selection has no lack of quirky. While I rather enjoyed the odd couple pairing of Rachael Harris and Matt O’Leary I found the film dips a tad too far into unnecessarily exaggerated depictions of its Christians characters. The goofy religious targets just feels too easy. I am not defending the eccentricities of the devout, surely they are ripe for comedic fodder. However, the actual care that is expressed for the two leads does not extend to subsequent characters. To be laughed at is the only role of the faithful. I find that rather trite.

Exorcise the overblown, cartoonish depictions of the religious side-characters and you’d have a funny, sometimes touching portrait of two miss matched characters discovering each other and themselves. It’s nothing new in the world of indie comedies, but it is well told, minus a few wrong turns. Still, Harris and O’Leary with their one-on-one comedic scenes make up for any minor quibbles I had with the film.

Spoilers after the image.

A Descendent of Raising Arizona?

Spoilers, perhaps?:

Sometimes a quirky comedy can be too well written, like when all the quirks neatly connect. The real oddity of our world lies in the fact that we can’t figure out how all the dots connect. So, when a woman who can’t get pregnant hooks up with a guy who warns us that he’s all too fertile, the twist at the ending should come as no surprise.

One more note: all films after The 400 Blows should avoid having characters escaping to large bodies of water.

How to Beat the High Co$t of Living (1980)

1980 must have been the year for movies starring a trio of women and Dabney Coleman. I don’t know enough about feminism to know if  How to Beat the High Co$t of Living and Nine to Five are feminist films. I’m sure some would like to say these are pro-women or even women empowering films. I’m pretty sure they are not, but honestly, I never can quite tell what passes for a feminist work and what does not.  It seems to shift, a lot.

What I do know both of these movies make me feel down-right sad for the women in each film. In How to Beat the High Co$t of Living Susan Saint James,  Jane Curtin and Jessica Lange must resort to stealing prize money from a shopping center raffle if they hope to, you guessed it, beat the high cost of living.

Each of their financial woes is the direct result of the men in their life. Susan Saint James is a divorced mom who needs money to not only raise her kids, but more importantly to buy herself some time away from them so she can shag he new beau, Fred Willard. Jane Curtain needs money because her husband just left her and took all their assets with him. Jessical Lange has a man in her life. He’s a successful veterinarian, but he’s just cut off the funds to the unprofitable antique shop she runs. With all this trouble the only logical thing to do is tunnel under the mall and siphon thousands of dollars out of a huge glass orb filled with cash.

I don’t have any trouble with the fact that in both How to Beat the High Co$t of Living and Nine to Five the women resort to illegal measures to solve their problems. These sort of foolish solutions are nothing new to cinema and something we haven’t seen men in numerous movies. It’s just that in How to Beat the High Co$t of Living the women’s motives are less about gaining financial independence and more about co-dependence. The goal of the heist is not just to gain get the money, but to use that money to afford the greatest prize – a man. It’s not the money that completes them it is the man.

The women in How to Beat the High Co$t of Living are all beautiful and full moxie, but they are also sheltered, naive, and just plain lucky. It’s hard for me to tell if these characteristics are simply part of the comedy or a larger view of women. I would not expect that in a comedy of any sort that the heist would go off with out a hitch, but I also found it completely out of character for Jane Curtain’s character to perform an impromptu strip-tease (Curtain uses a body double) to distract the patrons of the mall.

There is ultimately something fun and laughable about this comedy, but its also something personally irksome. Perhaps if I knew that females were creating these projects I’d feel less awkward, but too often I think male creators are projecting an image of women as cute, clumsy, and charmed.

On a totally separate note, I loved the scenes inside the old mall. I once wrote about Scanners and its dark, 70′s era mall scenes. In that write up I said comedies were somewhat exempt from the dark mall look, but How to Beat the High Co$t of Living has those dark mall corridors of my youth. How foreign they must look to today’s youth raised amongst brightly lit malls or open air town centers with their high recognizable franchised establishments.

The Gong Show Movie (1980)

When George Clooney made Confessions of a Dangerous Mind , someone should have had the smarts to re-release The Gong Show Movie. For years I thought of tracking this film down. It has always been one of those can-you-believe-they-made-this titles, but having heard few rare film fans rave about it I simply assumed it was one of those bad movies that is so bad it’s not even fun to watch. Stupid me. This movie is extremely fun. It comes across as a combination of Penn & Teller Get Killed (another title desperately in need of a legitimate DVD release), Jackass: The Movie, and a rare film worth checking out called 1988: The Remake.

The Gong Show Movie shares the same meta-qualities of Penn & Teller Get Killed only here you have Chuck Barris going about his week, constantly being barraged by would-be contestants. You don’t have Arthur Penn directing the film, like you do with Penn & Teller Get Killed . However, you do have Robert Downey Sr. as one of the writers. Had I known this years ago I would have put this at the top of my most sought after list. How did this fact escape me?

Most people wouldn’t watch a movie like this for the writer. I get that. The attraction is the contestants and their outlandish…skills? Is that the right word. I wouldn’t dare call what the contestant have as talent. The one common factor is that none of them are afraid to make fools of themselves. In this way the antics of those performing for Chuck Barris are like those auditioning in Rick Schmidt’s 1988: The Remake. This underground American Independent film is about a potential remake of Showboat. For legal reasons, parts of the performances had to be censored, which only adds to film’s eccentricity. Those try-out for the re-make are some of San Francisco’s weirdest. Imagine the regional talent searches of American Idol, when people tune in to see just how awful people can be. It’s that bad.

However, this is all part of that brand of bad that captivates. The movie itself is not awful. Forget that critics bashed it. There are certainly far worse films, one’s that bore. Sure, this is not a master piece of mta-filmaking or even narrative story telling, but it’s serviceable as a vehicle for Chuck Barris to take The Gong Show to extremes he was never allowed to do on television, much like on Jackass: The Movie. Both Jackass and The Gong Show started as television programs. Neither was well-liked or seen as being high-art, let alone redeemable. If anything, they were shows that opened new roads, ones that many never wanted culture to travel down. On the big screen they are both able to push the limits of what they could do on TV. The one limit that gets pushed the most is the limit of good taste. The only exception is that Jackass’ spectacles mostly revolve around a motley crew of masochistic daredevils. The participants on The Gong Show were less about physical punishment and more about performance; really really punishingly bad performances. Many are do bad (on purpose) that they become brilliantly entertaining and well worth tracking down this video just to see. Plus, how can anyone turn down a chance to see more of The Unknown Comic?

When Nature Calls (1985)

We call them guilty pleasures because we are partially ashamed for lowering our guard and taking enjoyment from something we feel is beneath us. It’s a stupid term and I wish not to use it, but it best describes my reaction to When Nature Calls . Produced by Troma Entertainment, the company responsible for pictures such as The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ‘Em High, and Surf Nazis Must Die. I tend to over generalize Troma’s work as being deliberately bad. Peppered throughout there extensive catalog of films are a few gems; Combat Shock, Mother’s Day, Story of a Junkie to name a few. I can now add When Nature Calls to my list of guilty Troma pleasures.

Like earlier sketch anthology works such as The Groove Tube or Kentucky Friend Movie, this film is a series of gags strung along a loose narrative.  When a New York City construction worker decides to pack up his family and move to the country the family encounters a series of frontier challenges. The story is presented like a movie with commercial interruptions; the family has their own theme song. Most of the jokes are crude, sometimes tasteless, but each segment is never dragged out. Flawed segments are too short to even complain about. Still, one has to be in the right mood or mindset to enjoy the irreverent ideas being thrown at the screen. Screenwriter and director Charles Kaufman has some real wonderful comedic ideas. The trailer for “Raging Bullshit”, a parody of the Scorsese boxing masterpiece is quite funny, as is the segment where G. Gordon Liddy hosts a Jerry Lewis telethon, raising money to find a cure for people who imitate Jerry Lewis. With in the actual story,  David Strathairn plays an Indian who befriends the family and this might be the first and only person in a Troma film to go on to be nominated for an Oscar. Best of all is a cameo by “Classy” Fred Blassie as a psychiatrist, of all things.

Like so many of these sketch anthology films, When Nature Calls feels like an unnecessary movie. Due to the short nature of each sketch and the often randomness of the subject matter behind each gag, it seems wholly illogical that one would need a feature film to deliver these types of jokes. Just read this comment from the Internet Movie Database. Obviously, this poor soul is utterly confused by the When Nature Calls, so much so that they don’t even realize that the previews are part of the actual movie. Still, they do a far better job of describing the film’s intermission animation than I ever could.

“First of all, on the video, you have to muddle through 25 minutes of absolutely, positively HORRENDOUS previews of parody movies…If that isn’t enough to bury someone, the movie starts and is even worse. And, if that wasn’t enough, read on…..I gave up the ghost during “intermission” where a hot dog was “masturbating on popcorn”, noses with glasses were “snorting cocaine”, hog dogs were “drinking alcohol”, and a marijuana leaf “rolled itself into a joint, stood up, and bowed”, among other things that were totally rude, crude, and insulting. It couldn’t get worse than this “movie”! – rainbeau56

Okay, I disagree. I also must note, all the punctuation and phrasing is as is, I changed nothing! Read on…When trying to recontextualize a film like When Nature Calls it probably should be noted that films of this ilk were made prior to the dominance of cable television or the internet. There simply was not a venue for such scatter-shot, gutter-humor back then. Today, we are seeing a slight return in these films, but mostly in the form of so-called-parody movies like Scary Movie or Epic Movie. Still, those films feel to specific or too dependent upon an exact point-in-time, with all of their humor revolving around movies and news events from just prior to their release dates. These older sketch anthologies are looser and further reaching in their comedic targets. If they have a modern day comparison it is perhaps Robot Chicken. Maybe if When Nature Calls’ skits were on Adult Swim, SCTV or even Saturday Night Live, people like the one above would get it. That said, these sketch anthology films do feel like museum pieces, but hey, I like history museums, they are amongst my favorite guilty pleasures.