FEATURING:  Irene Miracle, Leigh McCloskey, Eleonora Giorgi, Alida Valli, Daria Nicolodi

PLOT:  The second in Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, Inferno follows his masterpiece

Suspiria.  The earlier film is not referred to explicitly, and it’s not necessary to have seen Suspiria to enjoy Inferno—though it might get you in the mood.

Rose, a poet living in New York, buys an old book about the Three Mothers from a neighboring antiques dealer and after reading it begins to suspect that the basement in her apartment block is home to Mater Tenebrarum, the Mother of Darkness, one of a trio of sisters who are the age old matrons of witchcraft.

After investigating a strange, flooded ballroom below the building, Rose and a neighbor are murdered by an anonymous, black gloved killer.

Rose’s brother Mark is a music student in Rome.  He receives a letter from his sister mentioning the Mothers and flies to New York to investigate.  The apartments she lives in are home to a small group of strange people, given to uttering premier league non-sequiturs, asking weird questions, and performing bizarre actions.

Mark explores the building, discovering the weird architectural features designed by the Mothers’ architect, Varelli, the one whose book kick-started the whole affair.  After a long ramble through tortuous crawlspace, Mark uncovers the lair of Mater Tenebrarum.  She reveals herself to be Death; the building burns to the ground; a dazed looking Mark wanders out unscathed; the end credits roll; you wonder what you’ve just witnessed.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Its dream logic story line and stylized cinematography mark it out as weird, but Inferno really pales next to Suspiria. It features some wonderful scenes and startling images, but they’re too widely spaced out, and the film is marred by some wooden acting and inadvertently hilarious dialogue.

COMMENTS:   Inferno is a very enjoyable film, not always for the intended reasons.  The dialogue is so disjointed and at times downright bizarre as to be chucklesome. It also features the inconsistent acting and wooden delivery common to any number of giallos (understandable given the speed of some productions and the vagaries of international dubbing); after watching a number of giallos, you may come to view them as a feature rather than a flaw.

Inferno features a number of Argento trademarks: an oneiric story flow, driving soundtrack (this time by Keith Emerson), unexplained plot lines, and theatrical death scenes.  Sometimes these elements are knit together more smoothly than others, and Inferno shows the joins a little too much to be a classic. Like a curate’s egg, though, Inferno is very good in parts.

The movie’s outstanding scene is when Rose makes the rash decision to explore the basement of her building and discovers a small hole in the floor which opens onto a flooded ballroom.  Here the previously constant music stops, and we follow her bold underwater exploration to a background of gurgling bubbles and gentle lapping of water.  The lighting is dim and algae green, silt floats about from Rose’s slightest movement, and she seems weightless as she drifts around examining the furniture and décor, including a portrait of Mater Tenebrarum.  The tension builds gradually and steadily the longer she is underwater.  The space seems paradoxically huge and claustrophobic.  Behind Rose a door swings open very slowly, perhaps moved by the water current she’s creating.  Suddenly there’s a jarring chord and a moldering corpse floats into view, flashing a crumbling grin towards the camera as it bumps against Rose.  Understandably she bolts, swimming fast for the surface, missing the hole, flailing about, dragging the body behind her, kicking out at it in a convincing moment of panic and disgust.

The dictionary defines horror as “painful or intense fear, dread or dismay; something repulsive.”  The underwater ballroom scene is a bravura example of horror.  There is wonder at the unexpected discovery and tension as Rose explores, spending too long swimming about; the viewer urges her to surface.  Argento is like a master musician here, mixing the instruments and controlling the timing and rhythm of the piece to evoke the maximum emotion in his audience.  He takes his time, builds the tension to breaking point, and then just at the right moment bursts forth with the horror of the corpse.  There’s a logical explanation for the body “following” Rose: she’s stirring up the water, creating currents; the corpse is decomposing but has bloated flesh still attached and possibly retains some buoyancy.  That’s analysis for later though; it’s not what the viewer feels as the scene plays out.  Irene Miracle is so good at this point that I find myself wondering if she did get caught up in the moment, underwater, with this ugly thing bobbing around her, trapped against the ceiling, searching for the escape route.  When she kicks out at the corpse, her face squirms with repugnance.  Any arachnophobe who has struggled to shake an unexpected spider from a sleeve will recognize the look of panicky disgust.

Argento pulls another winning trick from his bag later.  Rose returns, wet and scared to her apartment, bringing with her a neighbor to keep her company.  Verdi’s “Va’ pensiero” features throughout the film, and it is used to great effect in this scene.  Rose puts on the music and she and Carlos are about to relax when the power starts to cut in and out.  The lights flicker off and on; the magnificent music blasts and is silent, over and over.  Carlos goes to investigate, only to fall prey to the mysterious black gloved killer.  It’s another disorienting scene: Rose’s room is plunged into darkness and silence, then the music blares and the light bursts out, over and over and over, until the viewer is as tense and shaken as Rose.  It’s almost a mercy when Carlos eventually staggers out with a knife in his throat.  In an echo of the persistent corpse he collapses on Rose, clawing at her for help as she tries to retreat, pushing him away with exclamations of disgust.

Argento clearly understands horror, but his work is inconsistent; not just from film to film, but from scene to scene.  The death of the antiques dealer, attacked by rats whilst drowning a sack of cats, before being finished off by a possessed hot dog vendor is as unintentionally amusing as the previous examples are horrifying.  The whole of Inferno is a downward journey in terms of quality, leading to an anti climactic ending which is a genuine shame compared to the strong beginning.

Is Inferno worth your time? Absolutely! Any lover of weird cinema or stylish horror owes it to themselves to see the glorious flooded ballroom and the inventive apartment murder; they almost earn the film a place on the List on their strength alone.  The rest of the film, though, is just too patchy to make Inferno a winner.

Remember, if you move to somewhere new and the area has an overpowering, bittersweet stench of evil, that’ll be the cake factory.

The release used to compose this review was the Region 0 Blue Underground DVD.  Upscaled on my PS3 it looked very good; the picture was sharp and clear and the blacks were handled well.  An internet search suggest that the Blue Underground Blu-ray release is a crisp transfer, though problems with sound seem to have persisted.  The soundtrack is a bit of a stumbling block anyway, occasionally detracting from the mood rather than enhancing it, and it is sometimes so far up in the mix that it obliterates the dialogue.  This is an irritation, as there is no subtitled version.

The Blu-ray (buy) extras include additional interviews with cast members, in addition to interviews with Argento and assistant director Lamberto Bava that are also featured on the DVD.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…borders on the surreal in its approach… The combination of the beautiful and the bizarre is hypnotically entertaining, but imagery does not resonate quite deeply enough to compensate for the lack of conventional virtue.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefantastique (DVD)

FEATURING: Vladek Sheybal, Catherine Mary Stewart, George Gilmour

PLOT: An innocent pair of Canadian folk singers/lovers split up when the female falls under

the spell of a Mephistophelean pop music promoter in this “futuristic” (set in 1994) musical fantasy.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: How do you solve a problem like The Apple?  This science-fictiony musical satire/religious allegory is an obvious attempt to cash in on the camp credibility of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but with the disco sensibility and glittery production values of Xanadu (also made in 1980).  The results are spectacularly uneven: the bizarre costuming, choreography, and psychedelic production numbers are actually pretty good in their deliberate excess, the songs range from annoying to quite hummable, and the rushed, out-of-nowhere messianic ending is an unforgettable cinematic disaster.  With RHPS already taking up a spot on the List in the “fantastical outré musical” category, I’m not sure that this similar (but less entertaining) movie is worthy of making it on the first ballot.  It’s more of a second tier midnight movie; but I wouldn’t rule The Apple out altogether.

COMMENTS: The Apple pulls you in many different directions: you’re never quite sure whether to tap your toes, roll your eyes, drop your jaw, or bring up your lunch. The plot, which mixes old MGM backstage musical themes with the Faustian corruption of show-biz innocents and a touch of dystopian literature, is familiar and easy to follow; it’s the production numbers that strangify things. The easiest way to simulate the insanity of The Apple is to take a track-by-track guided tour of the film.

“BIM’S on the Way.” (Representative lyric: “there ain’t no shame…”).  A full scale glam rock concert anthem, complete with dozens of backup singers, flashing multicolored lights, a disco ball, and a sheep-like chanting audience armed with green glowsticks, as two pop stars in sequined skullcaps screech out a propaganda ode to their corporate sponsor (B.I.M. stands for “Boogaloo International Music,” the name of the villain’s consortium).  It’s 1994′s “Worldvision Song Competition” to determine the pop anthem that will serve as the theme song for the New World Order. Back in the control room, Mr. Boogaloo and his transvestite entourage are monitoring the audiences pulse rate and other key biorhythms. They are thrilled with the results, until the next song…

“Love, the Universal Melody.” (Representative lyric: “United by our love, we’re all children of the universal family…”) Moose Jaw, Canada troubadours Alfie (think Donnie Osmond) and Bibi (looking eerily like a “Partridge Family” era Susan Dey) get on stage with their scaled-down guitars and blue jeans and sing a sticky-sweet song that’s the musical and nutritional equivalent of Rice Krispie treats marinated in maple syrup. Fortunately, Mr. Boogaloo senses the audience’s distress (that’s our distress, not the movie audience’s: they dig the pabulum) and plays a tape of Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” over the speakers so the brown shirt music fans turn on them.

“You’re Made for Me.” (Representative lyric: “You’re made for me/Created for me/And I am your king…”) At a party at Mr. Boogaloo’s, evil BIMstar Dandi (think Rod Stewart) dazzles Bibi with his perfectly feathered hair, gives her a pill, and serenades her with this 1950s style doo-wop number while a chorus-line who would have been kicked out of the Official Ziggy Stardust Drag Queen Fan Club for dressing too flamboyantly dance in the background. When Alfie catches Bibi making out with Dandi, he breaks up the party, but the duo is still invited to sign a contract with BIM, leading to…

“Life is Show Business in 1994.” (Representative lyric: “Like the bleary eyed baboon/To an organ grinder’s tune/Mankind screamies for whatever kind of dreamies we might treat them to…”) Waiting for an appointment with Mr. Boogaloo, Bibi and Alfie watch “Ballet 2000″ (a clown-heavy troupe that’s a shockingly prophetic prefiguration of Cirque du Soleil) rehearse in the BIM building foyer. Mr. Boogaloo and his femmiest assistant, Shake, take the lead in singing this electronified cabaret number.

“The Apple.” (Representative lyric: “It’s a natural natural natural desire/Meet an actual actual actual vampire…”) This is The Apple‘s knockout centerpiece, and there’s no denying it’s filled with infernal energy. When Bibi signs a contract with Mr. Boogaloo, a recalcitrant Alfie hallucinates that she’s Eve in Hell (?) being tempted with a fatal apple by Dandi (wearing a sequined speedo) while a team of damned dancers prance about (including Napoleon, a two-faced man, and of course, an actual actual actual vampire) to a rather catchy R&B tune. Possibly the weirdest song and dance number ever put onscreen; this one may well have been choreographed by Busby Berkeley’s zombie.

“A Master.” (Representative lyric: “Cultivate a need/Grab them by their greed…”). This is another musical snippet that’s quite well done, and the lyrics aren’t even an embarrassment this time. Mr. Boogaloo suavely slides his way through a self-congratulatory calypso-tinged number, with sweet harmonies. It doesn’t add anything to the story, but it gives Vladek Sheybal, the film’s only acting asset, another moment in the sun and might just be the movie’s best song.

“Speed.” (“America, your red, white, and blues/Are in our blood; we’re strung out on you…”) After two fairly good musical numbers, The Apple shows us its rotten core with this satirical, motorcycle-themed abomination. Bibi becomes an unlikely BIM star singing this ironic and annoying tribute to life in the fast lane that sounds like it might have actually been written during a coke jag. The black leather backup dancers look like they came off the set of Scorpio Rising, only made up with gobs of silver eyeliner so that they look gay.

“Where Has It Gone?” (Representative lyrics: “I walk through a world of deceit and decay full of faces with sad frightened eyes…”)  Out in the real world, a down-and-out Alfie is trying to sell another earnest, Donovan-esque folky love song.  He can’t understand why no music executives are interested: is it because the sinister BIM corporation controls the airwaves, or because he no longer has a hot chick standing next to him to distract us from the actual music?

“BIM’s On the Way (reprise).”  BIM has tricked the government into signing a contract mandating an hour of aerobic exercise per day, to be done the tune of their “big hit.”  Comic relief comes in the form of dancing nuns, firefighters letting a building burn down while they twirl and do high kicks, and an open-heart surgery patient trying to comply with the exercise requirement from the operating table.

“Alfie.” (Representative lyric: “Should I go on living for the memory of your love, or should I end it all?”).  Dressed as a dominatrix (complete with studded dog collar), Bibi looks out over a rainstorm from her opulent balcony and longs for the lost love of her simple lunkhead ex-boyfriend.  Meanwhile, a bloodied Alfie, whose been beaten up for not wearing a BIMmark (long story), leans out if his crummy tenement window and sings a similar lament, while the same rain falls!

“Come for Me.”  (Representative lyric: “I’m coming, coming for you…”) Alfie goes to a BIM party to try to talk Mr. Boogaloo into releasing Bibi from her contract, but Dandi’s female equivalent, Pandi (think Donna Summer), slips a hallucinogenic aphrodisiac into his drink.  Boogalow sprouts a single gold lamé horn on his forehead, and high as a kite Alfie sees BIM’s usual entourage of harlequins, leather freaks and cross-dressing weirdos in quadruplicate as Pandi leads the staggering folksinger to the bedroom. Drug abuse aside, it’s the extreme subtlety with which the seduction is handled (Pandi sings, “Make it harder and harder and faster and faster and when you think you can’t keep it up/I’ll take you deeper and deeper and tighter and tighter and drain every drop of your love” while a dozen couples in their underwear dry-hump on a sea of beds) that makes it work.  It may be the dirtiest PG-rated sequence ever filmed. The funky song is catchy, but it’s not catching; however much you may be tempted, you don’t need to get yourself checked for an STD after watching this scene.

“Something’s Happened to Me.” (Representative lyric: “I thought that I had died and then I looked into the light and I found me.”) Impressed by Alfie’s devotion to Bibi, Pandi decides to help Bibi escape BIM, then sings this redemption song.  The suspicion is that the producers did not want the audience to go home remembering actress Grace Kennedy merely as the slut of “Come for Me.”  They needn’t have worried about people remembering her.

“Child of Love.” (Representative lyric: “Shine on me, child of love.”)  Alfie and Bibi escape to a cave occupied by a band of hippies, led by a baritone dressed like Gandalf the Grey with a wicked looking dagger stashed under his jerkin.  The tune is a mercifully short, mercifully sitar-free hippie chant; it serves as a sort of a common-law wedding song for Alfie and Bibi.

That’s the end of the musical numbers, but not quite the end of The Apple.  The movie suddenly realizes it’s spent one hundred fifteen minutes singing and dancing and has only five minutes left to wrap up the plot.  So, the screenplay does what any good script would do in this situation: it has God come down from the heavens in a glowing muscle car to lead Alfie and Bibi and the hippies to paradise.  Queue up “The Apple,” and roll credits.

The Apple is one of those movies that could only have come out of the swinging, anything-goes psychedelic 1960s; and yet, impossibly, it was made in 1980.  It tries to be deliberately outrageous and ridiculous, yet its absurdities are frequently accidental; it becomes a spectacle of camp devouring itself.  That makes the question of whether The Apple is a good or a bad movie irrelevant.  You can call it one of the worst musicals ever made, or praise it as one of the greatest unintentional comedies; no one’s going to get much traction from either argument, because The Apple is so singular and prophetic, we’re only just now taking the first baby steps towards devising a new critical vocabulary capable of discussing it.

Or, maybe The Apple‘s just rotten.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The peculiar genius of The Apple is that every time it appears that the film cannot get any crazier, it ratchets up the weirdness to almost indescribable levels. It belongs to the curious subset of movies so all-consumingly druggy and surreal that they make audiences feel baked out of their minds even when they’re stone-cold sober.”–Nathan Rabin, The Onion A.V. Club (“My Year of Flops” series)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Tony,” who called it “one of the worst, and possibly the weirdest movies of the 80′s.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING:  Barbara Steele, Rebecca Balding, Cameron Mitchell, Yvonne De Carlo, Brad Reardon, Avery Schreiber

PLOT: College students rent rooms in a mysterious mansion by the beach only to find that

the landlords are a tad invasive.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Silent Scream is not a particularly weird movie.  Instead, it is a  dated relic of the “Unusual ’80′s” horror movie phenomenon.  The 1980′s produced a glut of highly conventional, large-draw slasher flicks such as Friday The 13th and the Halloween sequels.  The decade also produced a couple of dozen unusual and distinctive efforts such as Fade To Black, My Bloody Valentine, Grandma’s House, and Motel Hell.  Odd films like these dwell on a darker, more rarefied level, one that hasn’t been visited much in the intervening years.  Newly released on DVD after 29 years, The Silent Scream is a noteworthy entry in this later category of period horror.  Until last year it had been lost in the mysterious, silvery mists of screen-scream antiquity.

COMMENTS:  Barbara Steele stars as the villain in this dated ’80′s American-made shocker.  Good character development, strong performances, and relatively little gore distinguish this effort from the usual slasher fare.

Here’s the setup: Cute and saucy Scotty Parker (Balding) transferred to her university a couple of weeks late and missed out on the fun of bunking with a bunch of freaks she doesn’t know in the dorms.  Challenged to find accommodations, she gravitates toward the old Engels house, a foreboding, sea-side edifice.

The creepy Engels place is run—on behalf of his very reclusive MOTHER! (De Carlo)—by a wrapped-awfully-tight, real-life Milhouse Van Houten character named Brad (Reardon).  Brad harbors a wide variety of deeply seated personal issues.  (Hey, who’s that looking through my air vent?)  Three more hormonally bloated students sign rental agreements and the school year is off to a beer and bodily fluid saturated start.  For most of them, that is.  The fratboy/ playboy roomie barely gets out of the starting gate before he is found filleted rather than fellated on the beach.  A psycho is roaming the dunes.  Worse yet, there is something sinister going on in the Engels House, something really F ‘ D-UP in the attic.  SOMETHING TERRIBLE!!!!!

Creepy 50′s music is mysteriously wafting down through the air vents, and who’s burning that light bulb up there and thumping around at night?  The cops show up and an erstwhile detective (Mitchell) starts keeping an eye out the desolate beach.  But with more secret passages, hollow walls, trap doors and concealed rooms than H.H. Holmes’ Chicago Murder Castle the real danger, don’t cha know, may be creeping through the crumbling walls of the old mansion itself.

The Silent Scream is variously reminiscent of The Unnameable (1988), The Shuttered Room [AKA Blood Island] (1967), Black Christmas, (1974), American Gothic (1987), Psycho (1960), and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, (1987).  With plot elements of all of these movies, The Silent Scream could be an unremarkable horror yarn, but instead it manages to add a fresh twist to the genre, and establishes itself as one of the more memorable “old scary house at the top of the lonely hill” movies.

While not the bloodiest ’80′s slasher piece, The Silent Scream offers genuine tension with a distinctive and offbeat feel.  There’s plenty of atmosphere for a small budget (but well-produced) ’80′s horror flick and a few stylishly shot, memorable scenes that will stick with you.  (And yes it is a “flick” in very since of the word.  No, not a film, a flick.  Write that down.)

Not so much a horror story as a thriller about a seriously dysfunctional family, The Silent Scream’s plot falls a bit short in that it misses out on some chances to include more twists and turns, but it’s still a good ride for nostalgic ’80′s horror fans.

PRODUCTION NOTES:

Barbara Steele is especially noted for her giallo and Euro-thriller characters.  Despite Yvonne De Carlo’s tremendous body of dramatic work, viewers may remember her best for her role as Lily Munster in The Munsters television series.  Cameron Mitchell appeared in numerous horror and thriller films in the 1980s, and Rebecca Balding may be familiar to audiences from her part as “Trish” in The Boogens (1981) as well as for a gigantic volume of television work.  Jim and Ken Wheat are the writer/producers behind films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Pitch Black, The Fly II, and The Birds II.

The Silent Scream was first filmed in 1977 by Denny Harris.  The original project was scrapped, then rewritten and reproduced by Jim and Ken Wheat who constructed new sets around fifteen minutes of salvageable footage filmed at the original location house.  A more appropriate house in Highland Park was used for the exterior shots in the re-shoot.

As a side note, The Silent Scream is one of the first horror movies to use CGI editing techniques.  According to old timers (those antiquated souls who were coming of age in the 1980s) “everyone wondered how they did that.”  Apparently general audiences weren’t that computer savvy in the nearly pre-silicon, medieval 1980s.

Utilized in establishing shots under the opening credits, the CGI created the illusion that the action in each frame was halted abruptly for a moment and frozen in time.  This same result was achieved with freezes during the opening credits in the 1979 Chuck Pierce film, The Evictors.  In that instance good old fashioned film lab printing techniques were applied to frames in the opening sequence to give a sense of antiquity to the past events they portrayed, and to emphasize the significance of those shots to the plot’s subsequent events.  Today, CGI editing is overused and abused so much that we take it for granted.

Thanks to the newly established company, Scorpion Releasing, The Silent Scream has been re-released on DVD in high definition after 30 years of obscurity (as “Silent Scream, not “THE Silent Scream“).  The soundtrack has been remixed in true 5.1 and 2.0 stereo, with bonus featurettes, audio commentary and interviews.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“When the mystery actually begins unraveling in the film’s final third, The Silent Scream becomes far creepier and more compelling than it has a right to, helped greatly by DeCarlo, Rearden, and the “mystery member” of the Engels family. A few skittish turns into over-the-top land help solidify this one’s status as a cult oddity.”–Tom Becker, DVD Verdict (DVD)

The Silent Scream trailer

“You don’t have to tell me how weird you are.  I know how weird you are…  Even sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant, which can be very nice, but I sometimes wonder if it’s me that’s being made love to.  I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.”–Blair Brown to William Hurt in Altered States

DIRECTED BY: Ken Russell

FEATURING: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Charles Haid, Bob Balaban

PLOT: Dr. Eddie Jessup is a Harvard physiologist who used to experience religious visions as a teenager and is now studying the phenomenon of hallucinations caused by sensory deprivation in isolation tanks.  His inquiries into the nature of consciousness eventually take him to an isolated tribe in Mexico who use a powerful psychedelic mushroom in ancient Toltec religious rituals.  When he combines the magic mushrooms and the isolation tank, he finds that the mixture causes him to regress to an earlier evolutionary state.

BACKGROUND:

• The character of Dr. Jessup was based on the real life Dr. John Lilly, who invented the isolation tank and experimented with using hallucinogens in combination with it before moving on to research on communicating with dolphins.
• Lilly tells the tale of a fellow researcher who took the drug ketamine and believed that he had turned into a “pre-hominid” and was being stalked by a leopard, which was presumably the kernel for the the idea of genetic regression.
• This was William Hurt’s first starring role.
• A young Drew Barrymore, in her film debut, briefly appears as one of Jessup’s children.
• Paddy (Network) Chayefsky, the three-time Oscar winning screenwriter, adapted his own novel for the screen; he was so displeased with the final results that he had his name removed from the credits.  Chayefsky had originally written the story as a satire of the pretensions of the scientific community.  The original director, Arthur Penn, resigned after disputes with the writer.  Russell and Chayefsky reportedly argued on the set over the actors’ line readings and performances.  Chayefsky’s original novel is long out of print.
• The seven-eyed lamb that appears in Jessup’s first vision comes straight from the Book of Revelations: “…in the midst of the elders, stood a Lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes…” (Rev 5:6).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  One of the two major trip sequences (you can take your pick).  The crucified seven-eyed, seven-horned lamb from the first  is a popular favorite. In a sense, however, the quick-cut surrealistic montages play as a whole images that can’t be chopped up into constituent parts.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Ken Russell makes it weird. There’s no director more eager or

Original trailer for Altered States

better suited to make a science fiction movie about hallucinogenic drugs that bring about religious visions.  With its long, intense episodes of druggy delirium, Altered States may well be the greatest trip movie ever made (and it’s certainly the most expensive).  Put it this way: you know the movie’s weird when the sight of a naked, simian William Hurt gnawing on a bloody gazelle is one of the film’s more humdrum visions.

COMMENTS: There are fishes swimming in the sky behind William Hurt’s head.  He offers his dying father a Bible, but the Shroud of Turin falls over the old man’s face; his withered hand casts it onto the hospital floor where it bursts into flame.  A crucified lamb with the body of a man and seven eyes and seven horns appears and recedes in the sky, then reappears by a ruins where a sacrificial knife severs its head, causing its blood to flow onto a gilded Bible.  A one-celled organism explodes in a blast of psychedelic shapes and colors.  Hurt appears to be raping a woman, then the shadow of a goat’s head grows in the distance, filling the screen as John Corigliano’s shrieking, apocalyptic score roars in the background.

It’s all over in about a minute; Dr. Jessup (John Hurt) has been hallucinating in his isolation tank, remembering the terrible agony of his father’s death that caused him to reject the idea of God while simultaneously reconnecting with the ecstatic religious visions he had as a teenager.  As intense as this music video-style version of the Book of Revelations is, Jessup wants to push deeper to the edges of consciousness, so he travels to Mexico to take magic mushrooms in an ancient Toltec ritual setting.  There his real trip begins.  The shamans, with their faces painted skull-white, lit by a bonfire crackling inside a cave are freaky enough, but when the stuff kicks in he sees fireworks going off in the cavern and the Indians dancing to the drone of a tribal mariachi band before a stone mushroom idol decorated with skulls.  Soon enough the fireworks are going off inside his head; a miniature Dr. Jessup is having a tea party with his wife in front of a field of sunflowers.  There’s a mushroom cloud in the distance, a snake, a Mexican beaded lizard.  The snake wraps itself around his neck, the lizard turns into a nude Blair Brown.  Dust blows over Jessup and his wife and they turn to statues, which gradually return to dust.  When he sobers up, he finds he’s gutted a lizard while stoned.

Only 40 minutes in, Altered States peaks at this second (and very great) surreal montage, and the trip mellows out for a bit.  There are still plenty of small flashbacks—a scene set in Hell, the time Jessup hallucinates that he’s grown an opposable toe in the shower.  And there’s the 2001-style climax featuring as many exploding fluorescent amoebas as you would expect to see during the Big Bang, and an epilogue where Hurt turns into lava, then static, then changes colors and forms as bangs on the wall.  But Ken Russell realizes that he has to get the plot—some hokum about how Dr. Jessup’s experiments are taking his psyche back in time via molecular memory so that he can experience the moment of creation (with a stop-off in caveman times to snack on a gazelle)—moving.  Following that plotline turns the movie from a drug trip movie into a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with the mushroom extract starting to physically transform Jessup into an apelike creature—which is in itself a weird turn for the story to take.

I started out discussing the trip sequences because they’re what you’re going to remember about Altered States.  They are not just illustrations of the movie’s story: they’re the story of the movie, and the plot exists for their sake rather than the other way around.  Ken Russell is a very competent storyteller, and he puts just enough care into the plot that it carries us along while we wait for the next bravura special effects sequence to blow our minds.  Silliness of the details aside, the director does build a genuine tension as Jessup continues his investigations into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.  The secondary plot, involving Blair Brown as his pretty and charming but deliberately ignored anthropologist wife, gives the movie just enough of an emotional center to make us care about the principals.  Russell also coaxes a star-making performance from the debuting Hurt, who retains his boyish charm while being inhumanly obsessive, spouting pretentious mystico-scientific b.s., and gnawing on African ruminants.  Charles Haid also impresses as the disbelieving voice of reason who advises Jessup not to shoot up powerful untested psychedelics which seem to be causing morphological changes—his advice is so sound that he has to play the part as a blustering buffoon in order to make Hurt look sane by comparison.

Russell plays the absurd plot, a spiffed-up version of a 1950s mad scientist movie, totally straight.  The obvious satire and black comedy we would expect to see from Chayefsky, the caustic author of The Hospital and Network, is missing.  Instead, we get glossed-over pseudoscience delivered with absolute sincerity: Jessup explains, over a beer, that “our atoms are six billion years old, we’ve got six billion years of memory in our minds.  Memory is energy, it doesn’t disappear.  There’s a physiological pathway to our earlier consciousness, there has to be…”  Therefore, we shouldn’t be surprised when Jessup starts “externalizing his consciousness” to turn into a monkey-man, and then later on into the moment of creation itself.  Well, maybe we should be, but like a brilliant but utterly crackpot mad scientist, the movie believes fervently in its own theory, and for ninety minutes it’s able to convince us to sit there and hear it out, entertained if a bit bemused.  The climax is a humdinger of high-minded schmaltz, proposing that the Power of Love conquers all, genetic regressions and existential terrors alike.  As is so often the case in a Russell film, we can’t tell if the director is taking it all seriously, or putting the audience on; we don’t know whether we’re expected to laugh or suspend disbelief.

Although the stock plot comes from science fiction/mad scientist movies, Altered States is actually a trip movie.  The old LSD-exploitation movies like The Weird World of LSD, The Acid Eaters and The Trip were made solely to give the directors the opportunity to get arty and freak out audiences with kaleidoscope and fisheye lenses, trippy color schemes, and (crucially) hallucinations prominently featuring topless women.  Those flicks existed solely to showcase the drug experience for the curious and/or cheap, but there really was nowhere for them to go, plotwise.   The protagonist resists taking the hip new drug despite the proddings of his/her peers; eventually gives in and samples the forbidden fruit, endures a horrible, psychically scarring, yet highly entertaining delirium; and at the end is contrite for having fried his/her neurons.  Russell goes the exploitation auteurs one better.  Jessup’s hallucinations aren’t random, they’re set up by the script: his apocalyptic biblical trip flows directly from an earlier speech about his loss of faith after witnessing his father’s death.  During the Mexican phantasmagoria, Jessup’s immediate environmental inputs (dancing shamans, the mushroom icons graven on the cavern walls, lizards) meld with visions of the civilized European world of tea parties and umbrellas, and of the wife the doctor has supposedly left behind him (but who is nonetheless very much present in his subconscious).  The fact that the apparitions draw from Jessup’s particular psychology and preoccupations gives them extra power.  Pauline Kael complains that the hallucinations appear “like choppy slide shows,” but it’s the appropriate way for Russell to present them: their blazing speed suggests uncontrollable fury, they come at you too fast for your mind to process, and they help you to forgive the primitive green screen technology rather than focusing on the discrepancies in texture between the foreground and background images (although seen today, the very artificiality of the now low-tech process adds to its aura of oddness).  With Altered States Russell made what may be the greatest trip movie of all time; he has the Hollywood budget, and the vision, to turn psychedelics from a gimmick into an art form.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An aggressively silly head-horror movie… Russell clomps from one scene to the next, the psychedelic visions come at you like choppy slide shows, and the picture has a dismal, tired humanistic ending.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness… It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit…It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer’s mind out through his eyes and ears. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States.”–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

“If it is not wholly visionary at every juncture, it is at least dependably – even exhilaratingly – bizarre. Its strangeness, which borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature… The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer’s reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you’re watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much. By the time it begins straining for an ending both happy and hysterical, it has lost all of its mystery, and most of its magic.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Altered States (1980)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

John C. Lilly Homepage – info on the decidedly (and delightfully) flaky Dr. Lilly, mostly focused on his research into communicating with dolphins

Strange/True: Isolation Tanks and Altered States – background on Lilly’s isolation tank experiments

DVD INFO: The Warner Home Video edition (buy) is light on extras, containing only trailers and text bios of cast and crew.  Dishearteningly, Warner caters to yahoos by offering a full-frame version of the movie on the flip side of the dual disc (using dual-sided discs decreases picture quality).  Who hates those tiny black strips so much that they’d rather watch a version of the film with the sides hacked off?

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Ayla.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Lewis Jackson

FEATURING: Brandon Maggart

PLOT: After young Harry sees his father making love to his mother while

dressed as Santa Claus, he grows up obsessed with jolly old St. Nick; one Christmas Eve, he snaps.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Christmas Evil has a few nice, weird little touches scattered throughout.  Several times the film seems to switch perspective from an objective view to Harry’s skewed subjective view without giving the audience notice.  The darkly witty Santa lineup scene, the out-of-left-field Frankenstein homage, and of course the memorable final shot, where Harry completely breaks with reality and takes the viewer with him, are memorable enough.  There is also an eerie atmosphere throughout, helped greatly by an unsettling electronic score.  Unfortunately, there aren’t enough such high points to justify placing Christmas Evil on the overall list of 366.

COMMENTS:   Christmas Evil is a serious character study—or, at least, an honest attempt at a serious character study—of a middle-aged loser who lives in a dangerous fantasy world of his own making.  There are many little subtle details (catch, for example, the vintage Santa poster depicting St. Nick as a forbidding judge with a gavel) that provide a black comedy feel.  On the other hand, it’s very slow to get started and the cheapness of the production often shows to its disadvantage–there’s one terrible editing glitch at the company Christmas party that’s so obvious and jarring, it suggests a loss of financing during post-production.  Overall, it’s not nearly as bad as detractors would have it, or as as good as its few defenders (like John Waters) would like to believe.  If Christmas Evil were a gift in your stocking, it wouldn’t be a lump of coal, or the keys to a new Mitzubishi Lancer; it would be a pair of cheap but comfy socks in a crazy color scheme that’s not to everyone’s taste.

When it debuted, Christmas Evil (then known as You Better Watch Out) was an oddity: the first film to depict the previously jolly St. Nick  as a potential homicidal killer.  Since then, the holiday vidscreens have been decked with Santa-slasher dreck such as Santa Claws (1996), Santa’s Slay (2005), and the Silent Night, Deadly Night series (1984-1991, with a remake on the way), greatly diminishing the novelty of a psycho Santa.  Christmas Evil has little in common with it’s bloody progeny, and is probably the best entry in the sleazy sub-genre it inspired.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: “…the best seasonal film of all time. I wish I had kids. I’d make them watch it every year and, if they didn’t like it, they’d be punished!” -John Waters, Crackpot

DIRECTED BY: Lee Shi Chieh, Lee Geo Shu

FEATURING: Carter Wong [as Huang Chia-Da], Cheng Shing, Sida the French Monkey Star

PLOT:  A princess marries a chimpanzee, amidst intrigue in the Chinese imperial court.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Any film featuring “Sida the French Monkey Star” is at least a little weird.  The main obstacle to Kung Fu Arts cementing a place in the list of 366 is that it’s coming out of the weirdest movie genre of all—those short lived 1970s “chopsocky” movies made quickly, dubbed badly, and exported to the West to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee.  When the average entry in this genre features fists that cut the air with a loud swoosh, heavily stylized but amazingly choreographed fight scenes between men wearing brilliantly colored robes, and silly dialogue that surrealistically refuses to keep up with the actor’s lips, the threshold to be considered “weird” rises significantly.  Kung Fu Arts adds monkeys to the formula: monkeys who are addressed by the ensemble as if they were mute actors with a perfect understanding of Cantonese, but monkeys nonetheless.  This is creates a fairly high weirdness quotient, but in the end I decided not to make Kung Fu Arts a finalist, because I have faith there were even more deserving entries out there.  But don’t be surprised to see this movie reconsidered and placed on the list some day in the future.

COMMENTS:  If you’re tuned in to the chopsocky wavelength (and you should be), Kung Fu Arts is an entertaining little picture.  Although it’s somewhat light on fighting, it has wonderful costuming, an intriguing fairy-tale plot, and a reasonable amount of chuckles stemming from the straight-faced acting directed at the primate stars.  From the moment the imperial guards fall to their knees and plead with Sida to come down from the rooftop with the king’s pilfered royal proclamation, to the final battle where a small army of primates help the hero to defeat the evil usurper to the throne, Kung Fu Arts supplies plenty of silly smiles, some intended by the filmmakers, and many unintentional.

Kung Fu Arts is available as part of the Mill Creek 50 Martial Arts Movie Pack.  Because the movie is in the public domain, it’s available for download from Public Domain Torrents.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: ” The plot is completely nonsensical (though possibly based on some sort of Chinese myth), and it seems like the film was designed mostly for children with some potty humour thrown in for good measure.”–Doug Tilley, Movie Feast (DVD)