DIRECTED BY: W.D. Richter

FEATURING: Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli

PLOT: We are first introduced to Buckaroo Banzai as he rushes by helicopter from completing a delicate neurosurgery to test-drive a trans-dimensional race car in the Nevada desert. Banzai successful breaches the Eighth Dimension with his oscillation overthruster, but the experiment attracts the attention of the mad Dr. Lizardo, as well as a gang of Lectroid aliens who also want the device. Between rock and roll gigs and particle physics press conferences, Buckaroo and his band of scientist/musician/adventurers, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, will uncover an alien conspiracy that (naturally) threatens the fate of the world.

BACKGROUND:

• This was writer W.D. Richter’s first directorial effort after having half-a-dozen screenplays produced (including the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Banzai eventually became a hit on VHS but was a huge flop in theaters, losing six million dollars and bankrupting the production studio. Richter only directed one other movie, the 1991 independent comedy Late for Dinner, although he continued to write screenplays (including Big Trouble in Little China). Richter did not write the script for Buckaroo Banzai, however; it was penned by his pal Earl Mac Rauch.
• The name of the evil front corporation in Banzai, Yoyodyne, is a reference to a fictional corporation that appears in Thomas Pynchon’s novels.
• In 2003 Entertainment Weekly ranked Buckaroo Banzai as the #43 cult movie of all time.
• The sequel promised by the end credits, Buckaroo Banzai vs. The World Crime League, was of course never made, although legend has it that Richter is still trying to get it produced to this day. In 1998 pre-production work was done on a Buckaroo television series for the Fox network, but the show was never picked up. The Buckaroo brand has persisted through the years with a novelization and comic book adaptations.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: We require a flashback to show how the Eighth Dimension was originally discovered by a then-sane Dr. Emilio Lizardo—but how to introduce it without disrupting the flow of the story? This movie believes the most natural way to incorporate the memory is to have a now-insane Dr. Lizardo hook electrodes onto his tongue and shock himself so that arcs of lightning fly out of his eardrums. We have to assume this bizarre home-electroshock therapy explains the perfect cinematic precision of the following flashback sequence, because no other sane theory is offered for Lizardo’s act of high-voltage masochism.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Refer to the plot synopsis. Any movie that successfully incorporates

Original trailer for The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension

a band of rock and roll scientists, an invasion by aliens uniformly named “John,” the Eighth Dimension, inexplicable watermelons, and Jeff Goldblum as a New Jersey neurosurgeon who dresses like a cowboy—while working inside the Hollywood system, with a $12 million dollar budget—has worked hard enough to deserve a space on the List of the Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: According to an unofficial Buckaroo Banzai FAQ, the most frequently asked question about The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai is not, as one might expect, “what in the hell did I just watch?” or “how in the world did this thing get made?” or even “why does Jeff Goldblum dress up like a cowboy if he’s from New Jersey?” but instead, “what exactly is the watermelon doing there?” To those not yet in the know, this query refers to the point in the movie where alien John Bigboote has infiltrated the Banzai Institute to try to re-kidnap Professor Hikita and obtain the overthruster, and Buckaroo and the Hong Kong Cavaliers are prowling the corridors looking for him. As they pass through one lab area, New Jersey asks Reno why there is a large watermelon lodged in an industrial vice. “I’ll tell you later,” promises the senior Cavalier, but he never gets around to it.

No one ever wonders about the fact that, in the very same sequence, Buckaroo passes a fire that’s inexplicably burning in a file cabinet and makes no comment—he simply shuts it with his foot, not even bothering to put out the flames. Nobody asks “what exactly is that spinning plastic musical elephant carousel doing in the middle of a hallway in Yoyodyne corporation?” There are lots of unanswered questions in Buckaroo Banzai—why does Lizardo shock himself on the tongue? Why do good aliens appear as Rastafarians?—but people focus on the watermelon because that’s the point at which the movie draws attention to its own background craziness and pledges to answer one single absurdity. Of course, it never delivers the promised resolution, because this is a case of Buckaroo‘s script explicitly tipping you off to the entire story’s shaggy dog nature. Pressed by fans, director W.D. Richter later concocted an explanation which involved the Banzai Institute working to create a watermelon with a super-hard shell so that the fruit could be clandestinely dropped from airplanes into starvation-plagued regions of third world dictatorships without shattering. A likely explanation; but I have my own little theory about the watermelon, which I’ll provide later in the review.

It’s fruitless to obsess about the watermelon, because large swaths of Buckaroo Banzai make little sense. If you’re not hopelessly confused half an hour into this picture, then you haven’t been paying attention. The script seems to have been edited down from something about three times as long, with subplots that are hinted at but not followed up on and characters who are mentioned but never appear. There’s simply not enough time in the 100 minutes allotted to flesh out all the ideas Richter and Rauch are anxious to get on the page, so the plot rushes by with a heedless recklessness that sweeps you along. Buckaroo has a love interest in the charming person of Penny Priddy, who by a freak coincidence happens to be the spitting image of his dead wife, but he’s so busy dealing with subplots and shootouts he barely has time to romance her between abductions. We never get time to draw a bead on any of Buckaroo’s boon companions and backing band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. They have names like Reno Nevada and Rawhide, but few distinguishing characteristics beyond uncanny competence and killer chops (both instrumental and karate). Of the Cavaliers, Lewis Smith makes the biggest impression as “Perfect Tommy,” but that’s largely because of his improbably blond mane of hair. With all of these guys standing around in the background just waiting for their moment in the sun, Buckaroo goes out and recruits yet another sidekick who demands his share of screen time, in the person of fellow neurosurgeon named New Jersey, who dresses inconspicuously in a cowboy hat, bright scarlet shirt and shaggy llama-hair chaps. There’s also a helpful Jamaican alien who joins the fray, and a father-son pair of Buckaroo Banzai Irregulars who chip in to put the beatdown on evil. And as if this weren’t enough, the characters reference other characters who never made it into the final script, like Cavalier Pecos (who we’re told is in Tibet).

This colorful army of good guys is opposed by an even more colorful gang of alien miscreants. (Keep in mind that the good aliens are Black Lectroids, and they come from Planet Ten and say “hey mon,” while the bad aliens are Red Lectroids who hail from the Eighth Dimension and carry guns that shoot spiders—got it?) A pair of fine character actors in Dan Hedaya and the angular Vincent Schiavelli are bumbling, none-too-bright foot soldiers in the alien army. The Red Lectroids’ chief lieutenant, John Bigboote (pronounced, he is anxious to remind everyone, “Bigboo-tay,” not “Big-booty”) is memorably portrayed by the great Christopher Lloyd (fresh off his stint as Reverend Jim on “Taxi”). But it’s John Lithgow as Dr. Lizardo (who, we figure out after multiple viewings, is possessed by the spirit of a Red Lectroid named John Whorfin) who steals the show. With bad teeth and an even worse Italian accent, Lizardo is prone to rambling lines like “we’re home free… home is where you wear your hat… I feel so break up, I want to go home!” and “laugh-a while you can, monkey boy!” Lithgow rants like Chico Marx with a God complex and slinks around like Ygor in a Frankenstein movie. Lithgow’s performance throws both good taste and sanity out the window, and he gets more into the spirit of the material than anyone else involved in the production.

Peter Weller, by comparison, is totally deadpan, and to me this is the movie’s greatest flaw. His coolness certainly contrasts with Lithgow’s craziness, but for a guy who’s a combination secret agent and rock star, he shows little charisma, just a bland handsomeness. Weller’s restrained, somewhat arrogant persona is perfect for Robocop, or for the emotionally shut-down writer William Lee in Naked Lunch, but he lacks the spark to portray a larger than life character like Buckaroo. We’ll never know how the film would have played out with a more vigorous Banzai—maybe it would have pumped the movie up too much, to the point where it exploded—but I would have loved to see what would have happened had Weller and Jeff Goldblum’s roles been switched. Goldblum is underutilized as a gimmicky sidekick, and it seems the lead role could have benefited from the nervous energy he brings to the screen.

Halfway through the movie, Banzai recaps the plot thus far for the President of the United States. The Prez’ bemused reaction speaks for the audience: “Buckaroo, I don’t know what to say. Lectroids, Planet 10, nuclear extortion, a girl named John…” There’s another quote near the beginning of the movie that’s even more to the point, considering this venue. Buckaroo has just performed neurosurgery and penetrated solid matter by accessing the Eighth Dimension. He caps off the evening by headlining at a nightclub, soloing on electric guitar, trumpet and piano. He stops in the middle of a rollicking blues number, having psychically sensed that someone in the audience isn’t having a good time. In fact, the stick in the mud is a depressed woman who’s “down to her last nickel in this lousy town.” Buckaroo tries to cheer her up by putting a spotlight on her, advising her that “wherever you go, there you are,” and launching into a cover version of that comforting ballad “Since I Don’t Have You.” As Buckaroo sits at the piano and croons, “I don’t have plans or schemes, I don’t have hopes or dreams” to the sobbing suicidal gal with smeared mascara, one of the backup saxophonists turns to another and says, “This is weird.” To which his companion says, “Sure is.” To which I would have responded, “You’re just noticing that now?”

By the way, the reason that they put a watermelon in the vice is because a grape wouldn’t have shown up on camera.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Richter doesn’t bring out the baroque lunacy of the material—a kind of fermented parody of M*A*S*H, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the TV series ‘The A-Team’—but though the characters don’t develop and the laughs don’t build or come together, the film’s uninflected deadpan tone is somehow likable.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…like coming into the middle chapters of some hilariously overplotted, spaced-out 1930′s adventure serial, neither the beginning nor the end of which ever comes into sight. At its best, which it frequently is, it’s a lunatic ball…pure, nutty fun.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some movies become cult classics by being bad in a charming and/or entertaining way, some by being transgressive in ways mainstream society isn’t prepared to deal with, others by just being flat-out weird. I submit, with great fondness, that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension, belongs to the latter category.”–Danny Bowes, Tor.com (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: MGMs Official Site for the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai – Basically, a one-page ad to buy the film with a trailer, synopsis, cast list and some stills. Of course, most movies this old aren’t given even that much attention by major studios.

IMDB LINK: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

BANZAI INSTITUTE – This repository of news items and trivia is written in a style similar enough to the DVD supplemental material (e.g., referring to the movie as a “docudrama”) that you halfway suspect director Richter and/or writer Rauch is behind the site

Banzai Institute – Facebook – From the makers of the above site, now conveniently on Facebook for more frequent updates

World Watch Online: The Buckaroo Banzai Mailing List – Another Buckaroo Banzai fan site. There’s a wealth of archived material here for fans to plow through, including downloadable newsletters dating back to 1985!

NYFF: Buckaroo Banzai Intro + Q&A – Complete question and answer session with Peter Weller and John Lithgow, hosted by Kevin Smith at the 2011 New York Film Festival (this YouTube video is over an hour long)

Buckaroo Banzai Frequently Asked Questions – Almost all the Buckaroo minutiae that you would ever want can be found in this online FAQ

Yoyodyne.com – A fake website for the fake corporation in Buckaroo Banzai. Why? The Banzai fan base is just that thorough. You may use this site to email John Bigboote, should you wish.

Rotten Tomatoes Show: Top 5 Aborted Franchises – The Rotten Tomatoes Show names Buckaroo Banzai the top aborted franchise of all time, explaining that it was “a tad to weird for America”

Buckaroo Banzai: Across The 8th Dimension, The Adventures of Easter Eggs – information on accessing the hidden features on the Buckaroo Banzai DVD

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension: The Novel”- Scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch’s 1984 novelization of the movie, which adds much-needed backstory and supplemental material to flesh out the legend

“Buckaroo Banzai: Return Of The Screw” – A 2007 Rauch-penned graphic novel continuing Buckaroo’s adventures

DVD INFO: MGM’s 2002 Special Edition of Banzai (buy) did this cult classic right and thrilled even the movie’s demanding fan base. The commentary track features Richter and Rauch, with the director pretending the film is a biopic of a real life figure and Rauch pretending to be one of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. An optional subtitle track serves up additional tidbits of information about the Banzai universe. Many deleted scenes are included, most notably one where Jamie Lee Curtis plays Buckaroo’s mom in a flashback. There’s a 22-minute featurette called “Buckaroo Banzai Declassified” with Richter which, like the commentary track, stays in character, pretending Buckaroo is real. Character profiles provide even more background information on the Banzai mythology, and photo galleries, promotional materials and the original trailer round out a treasury of special features.

Banzai is also the weirdest offering on MGM’s 3 disc “Astronomy 101″ collection (buy), which also contains the mildly weird Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Mel Brooks’ not-so-weird (but inexplicably popular) Star Wars spoof Spaceballs.

Buckaroo Banzai is not yet available on Blu-ray, though it seems like a likely candidate for an upgrade. It is available on Video-on-Demand, for rental only (rent on demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by multiple readers.  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Plan 9 was already colorized for DVD a few years ago, and there wasn’t a single complaint about a legendary film being subjected to this much-maligned process. Probably because we all realized Ed simply would have loved the extra attention it gave his magnum opus. According to his biographer, Ed Wood said that while Glen or Glenda? (1953) was his most personal film, Plan 9 was his proudest accomplishment!

Wood’s appeal and fame continues unabated. Yes, he was a trash filmmaker, but he was a trash filmmaker delightfully of his time, simultaneously encased in and fighting against the naiveté of the 1950s. Naturally, that phenomenon is something that cannot be repeated, despite the countless attempts to do so by clueless contemporary indie filmmaker who—incredulously and vainly—seek to imitate Wood’s dated incompetence.

It is Wood’s bio, replete with nostalgia, his zeal, his idiosyncratic stamp, which endears him to us. At his best, Wood’s vibrant personality carries itself into his films, regardless of genre. At his worst (which unfortunately is not his worst) Wood is merely an incompetent commission B-director.  Still, Edward D. Wood, Jr. is our fallible pope of naive surrealism, and his debut on Blu-ray is cause enough to celebrate the Ed Wood in all of us.

Now, let us commence into that glorious future where all Ed Wood films will still be celebrated, in the future. It is safe to say that, in the future, there will always be the aspiring film geek who discovers his patron saint, Eddie, in the future. For you, for me, for those in the future, we now present “THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO EDWARD D. WOOD, JR!”

Jail Bait (1954) begins promisingly. Wood girlfriend Dolores Fuller is at the police station putting up bail for her brother, Don (Clancy Malone). Inspector Johns (dependable Wood extra Lyle Talbot) warns our heroine of the risk she is taking. When Dolores tries to assure the mean authority figure that her baby sibling is trustworthy, we are set-up for Woodian dialogue that could rival the classic exchanges in Casablanca (1942): “Inspector, Don is no criminal.” “He was carrying a gun.” “There are much worse crimes.” “Carrying a gun can be dangerous business.” “So can building a skyscraper!”  Muscle man Steve Reeves is on hand in the small part of Lt. Bob, but he probably would have been more animated as an extra in a George Romero film. This one came on the heels of Ed’s masterpiece, Glen or Glenda, but it lacks that film’s compelling haphazardness. Jail Bait unfortunately descends into standard fare that could have as easily (and as blandly) been directed by Ron Howard.

Bride of the Monster (1955) is Ed’s only film to actually “star” the actor with whom he is most associated, Bela Lugosi. Lugosi is horrifyingly emaciated here but he pulls off one of his best late career performances. He evokes pathos, as opposed to horror. His monologue includes an infamous, telling slip; he is supposed to say “Hunted, despised, living like an animal, I have proven that I’m right!” but the star’s delivery ends with: ” I have proven that I’m alright!” Loretta King plays the buxom, ace reporter as if she has overdosed on one too many Lois Lane magazines. Complimenting her performance are  beautiful z-grade sets, super-alligators in the swamp (?), a Russian spy, and an atomic explosion. All ripe material for colorization, which makes it even cooler. The smitten Dolores Fuller is reduced to a hilarious walk-on (she was supposed to play the lead, but rival Loretta King reputedly paid Wood to play the part).  Tor Johnson is also on hand as the hulking brute Lobo, who is moved by the sight of a pretty girl wearing angora. His reward for a sympathetic libido is a whip cracked on his back! The behind the scene anecdotes about Bride are classic (the octopus was stolen from the leftover sets of a John Wayne movie, Ed’s lackeys forgot to steal the creature’s motor, and the film was financed by Wood’s butcher). Although the film itself is almost as zany as his other two Lugosi features, Bride of the Monster gives one the feeling of striving to be conventional. Thankfully, it doesn’t succeed.

Ed wrote and William Morgan directed The Violent Years (1956). It’s a (sort of) typical 50′s juvenile delinquent film. A spoiled girl joins a gang who get their kicks out of vandalizing! Judge Clary (I. Stanford Jolly) is tired of all these JD types: “It’s always difficult for an old friend to sit in judgment of an old friend, but the law is the law!” Profound words indeed.

 Bride and the Beast (1958) was directed and produced by Adrian Weiss, and written by Wood. Since this is the only film Weiss is credited with directing, it is almost impossible to ascertain how much Wood might have “helped,” but the film does feel entirely Woodian. Charlotte Austin and Lance Fuller are the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Fuller. Mr. Fuller is a big game hunter and he has a gorilla named Spanky. Spanky has some mean blonde-dyed Elvis sideburns and has taken a fancy to the new Mrs. Fuller. Could it be her angora sweater? Or…  You see, gorillas excite Charlotte! And, after a bit of hypnosis, the terrible truth is revealed! Charlotte is the reincarnation of a Queen Gorilla!!! Acting abilities be damned, Charlotte looks great in angora and jungle neglige! And, yes, hints of bestiality abound. The ending has to be one of the most inspired, jaw-dropping endings in celluloid history.

Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959): There is little to add to what has already been said. With Glen or Glenda, this stands as one of Ed’s two masterpieces of naïve art. Few films can boast such genuine, dissident style. No wonder the ever-constipated Medved boys were offended. Best line in a film of great lines: “Inspector Clay is dead! Murdered! And somebody’s responsible!” Pay St. Ed the homage due him by watching it with a rambunctious audience. If you haven’t seen it, if you don’t own it, you simply are too uptight. Period.

As Wood’s sequel (of sorts) to both Bride of the Monster (1955)  and Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Night of the Ghouls (1959) should almost come with a guarantee of bouncing off-the-walls high octane lunacy. Alas, it falls short, and a feeling of fatigue washes over the film. Perhaps Wood was feeling one rejection too many, but Night of the Ghouls is sort of the breaking point for Wood, the film in which he began to lose his mojo. The previous, imaginative level of intense enthusiasm is dissipated and Wood never fully regained it. Perhaps, the death of his one genuine star (Lugosi) yanked away his inspirational rug; and, of course, increasing struggles with alcoholism compounded Wood’s sense of defeat. However, it could also be said that numerous auteur directors have experienced a similar bottoming out and, almost to a man, continued making films regardless, i.e: John Waters after Hairspray;  Tim Burton (ironically) after Ed Wood, the post-80s work of John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper). Criswell returns as our horror host: “For years I have told you the almost unbelievable. Now, I tell you a tale of the threshold people. Once human, now monsters!” B western actor Keene Duncan has the enviable role of fake psychic Dr. Acula (In 1953, Wood had made two western shorts with Keene, Crossroad Avenger and Trick Shooting. Neither are stand-outs and the latter is, disappointingly, exactly what it says it is). Keene is joined by Duke Moore as the tuxedo-wearing Lt. Bradford, and Tor Johnson in his return as a heavily scarred Lobo. Valda Hansen is a new girl for Wood, playing the White Ghost. Among Wood’s actors, Hansen was well-liked and an enthusiastic supporter of the director. Her end was as unfortunate as Wood’s. Predictably, her career never took off and she later developed cancer. Destitute and uninsured, she could not afford pain medication and died in agony. Hurrah for the virtues of Capitalism.

The first victims of the Black Ghost (Jeannie Stevens) are a girl in angora (!) and her boyfriend. Paul Marco’s bumbling Officer Kelton almost spooks himself into a coma as he investigates the weird goings on at the old Willow Lake. “I could, I could, I could get killed out here!” Dr. Acula, with the aid of the White Ghost, is milking gullible patrons out of their money. But, there’s real horror afoot: the Black Ghost. The seance scene has some unintentionally surreal bits, but mostly the movie’s repetitive and flat. It was completed in 1959, but was shelved because Wood could not afford the developing fee. It sat, believed lost, until 1983. It’s not prime Woodian weirdness, but it’s probably essential as a sequel to the two previous films and it does occasionally sparkle: “He remembered the cold, clammy sensation of the railing. Cold, clammy, like the dead!”

The Sinister Urge (1960) begins with a blonde in slip running down a dirt road. She is being chased by an unseen assailant. She finds a phone booth and seems shocked to find it’s a pay phone! Before she can scream “Operator! Operator! Would you help me place this call?” in her best Jim Croce drawl, her assailant catches up to her, knocks her to the ground, and wrestles her dead in the park! She turns out to be one of several recent victims. The police shake their head and smoke their cigarettes:”Just like the others. Pretty kid too! Course she doesn’t look like a kid now. Maybe she grew up in that moment of truth, when she died! Same M.O. Killed the same way! The same everything with one big difference… her name is different!” Turns out, the movie is an exposé of the smut picture racket! Gloria (Jean Fontaine) IS the smut picture racket, and the coppers have confiscated cans and cans of  ”smut, rotten smut!” “You were expecting dancing girls?” “This is no laughing matter!” “I’m sorry. It was in bad taste.” It sure was. Keene Duncan (Dr. Acula himself) as Lt. Carson and Duke Moore as Sgt. Stone head the list of regular Wood non-actors. “You know what pictures like this can cause? Sex scandal headlines!” The gumshoes have their hands chock-full with that bitch Gloria, and you can tell what kind of gal she is: posters of The Violent Years and Jail Bait adorn her walls! The anonymous 50′s rock score accents this purple pleasure, “I’m gonna push that ice cream right down his throat!” This was Wood’s last legitimate (?) film before descending into softcore porn.

FEATURING: Jessica Harper, Cliff De Young, Barry Humphries, Richard O’Brien, Charles Gray, Ruby Wax, Patricia Quinn

PLOT: A young married couple end up in a town that’s actually a giant television network; Janet

is groomed as a celebrity, while Brad becomes a mental patient in a hospital show.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Shock Treatment is a cult film even among the tiny subset of cult film enthusiasts. This “sequel” was rejected as a confounding disappointment by most fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but is still vehemently defended by a segment of that fan base. It’s a peculiar exercise in wacky musical satire, for sure, but it lacks the kind of résumé necessary to place it among the most significantly weird movies of all time.

COMMENTS: What would you get if you took The Rocky Horror Picture Show and stripped out Tim Curry‘s domineering performance as the mad scientist transvestite dominatrix, leaving behind only the theater-rock musical numbers and campy supporting players? (On the off-chance you don’t see where I’m going yet, the answer is Shock Treatment). Whereas Rocky Horror was a theatrical flop that organically grew into a cult movie, Shock Treatment was pitched as a deliberate cult movie, but became an instant flop. This delayed follow-up is full of amped-up ideas and energy, but it comes off as cocksure; it’s so convinced its madness is entrancing that it forgets to ground us in its quirky universe. The (confusingly executed) idea is that the entire town of Denton, U.S.A. is a TV studio, with the audience as regular citizens, the stars and staff as sorts of metro officials, and the sponsors as big-money villains manipulating studio politics behind the scenes. The movie throws so many colorful eccentrics at us that every character turns into a minor character, even the leads. Janet (not necessarily the Janet Susan Sarandon played in the previous movie) and Brad (again, a character with the same name but little connection to the original) enter the town’s audience, for unclear reasons, and wind up on a marriage counseling show run by a blind Austrian in an orange thrift-store tuxedo. He hands Brad off to a brother/sister pair of psychiatrists (writer Richard O’Brien, wearing uncomfortable-looking coke-bottle glasses, and Patricia Quinn—they played an analogous ambiguously incestuous couple in RHPS), stars of the mental hospital soap opera “Denton Vale.” Brad is caged up and drugged, Janet’s parents (also in Denton’s audience, for some reason) are given a reality TV showcase after winning a quiz show, and Janet is written in to the town’s script as some sort of celebrity. Fame goes to her head and she forgets her institutionalized hubby; it’s all a plot by smitten cult leader Farley Flavors, who wants to seduce her. There’s also a pair of recently sacked, disgruntled talk show hosts running around causing trouble, a sexy nurse (RHPS‘s Little Nell) in an extremely short mint-green minidress, red-jacketed support staff, and a couple of multi-purpose cheerleaders who show up on various programs. Even if they weren’t constantly breaking into songs, this plot and cast would be fairly exhausting to follow. O’ Brien’s light-rock tunes are in the RHPS vein, although there’s no knockout, hummable number like “Time Warp.” His style is a matter of taste; I’ve seen the score both praised and trashed. Though the melodies are a matter of subjective preference, the lyrics can pose objective problems; like the rest of the movie, they often drift off-topic. One of the major plot-advancing numbers is a song duel between two characters have no prior history together; it contains the inexplicable exchange “you lost your heart”/”you lost your cause”/”you lost your baby when you lost your balls.” The title tune references the “shock treatment” that has no other place in the movie. The script is also thematically vague; there’s an emphasis on concepts of “mental hygiene,” an idea that seems to want to link itself to television’s ability to construct reality in favor of status quo interests, but it takes a lot of work on the viewer’s part to construct a meaningful satirical angle out of that tangle. The end result of the plot turns feels something like RHPS—an encounter with weirdos initially corrupts but eventually liberates uptight straights—but without the mildly naughty free-love edge. On the plus side, although Shock Treatment is confusing, it’s never boring. The costumes, sets and choreography are genially bizarre, there are a smattering of funny lines (“thank God he was born an orphan, it would have killed his parents”), and the boob-tube parody does impressively predict the rise of reality television. The returning RHPS cast of O’Brien, Quinn, and Little Nell meet fan expectations in their kinky supporting roles; Jessica Harper makes a somewhat bland Janet but proves she can really belt out a tune; and although Cliff De Young spends too much of the movie bound and gagged, he is surprisingly good in two roles (it’s hard to believe the same actor played both parts). While watching this DVD, I was never anxious to hit the “eject” button; but, having taken the disc out, I’m not tempted to reinsert it into the carousel.

One curious feature of the DVD is that the commentary is supplied by the President and Vice President of the Shock Treatment fan club. Within two minutes, they’re literally comparing the movie to Citizen Kane. Dedicated Rocky Horror fans may want to check this out, although keeping expectations low is advised. Those who like Rocky but haven’t added it to their DVD collection yet may want to take a flyer on that film’s 3-Disc Anniversary set (buy), which includes Shock Treatment as a bonus disc.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a confusing mess that, despite moments of inspired insanity, sadly fails to live up to the standard set by the original.”–Jason Buchanan, All Movie (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own (pre-fame) Alex Kittle , who promised it would be “really awesome, and really weird…” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Otto Preminger

FEATURING: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx, Alexandra Hay, John Phillip Law, Austin Pendleton, Frankie Avalon, Arnold Stang, Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, George Raft, Richard Kiel, Harry Nilsson

PLOT: Tony is a retired mobster living in the suburbs with wife Flo and daughter Darlene, who has an unwelcome (to Tony) interest in dating hippies.  A crime kingpin known as “God” pressures the ex-hit man into doing one last job—going undercover in Alcatraz to assassinate a stool pigeon.  When Tony accidentally ingests LSD in the pen, his entire worldview is flipped and he decides to ditch the hit and break out of the clink; meanwhile, Flo and Darlene have taken it upon themselves to track down God with the help of a band of flower children.

BACKGROUND:

• Director Otto Preminger had been nominated as Best Director for two Academy Awards (for Laura and The Cardinal).  Known for pushing the envelope on taboo topics, Preminger was instrumental in breaking the back of the Hollywood Production Code by releasing The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which dealt with the then-forbidden topic of heroin addiction, without MPAA approval. 
• Skidoo was a giant flop sandwiched between two other Preminger flops, Hurry Sundown (1967) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970).  Despite its notorious reputation, Skidoo was part of a series of failed films and was not solely responsible for Preminger’s fall from grace.
• Two years after Skidoo, screenwriter Doran William Cannon penned the exceedingly weird Brewster McCloud (1970).
• This was Groucho Marx’s final film.  He dropped LSD (with writer Paul Krassner) in preparation for the role.
• Preminger also took LSD, supposedly under the guidance of none other than Timothy Leary (who promoted the film in the trailer).  Preminger had originally been slated to make an anti-acid movie, but had decided that he should experience the drug before condemning it.  After his trip he decided to make Skidoo instead.
• Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, and Cesar Romero, who all have cameo bits in Skidoo, had also appeared together in the same movie just two years before: as the Riddler, the Penguin, and the Joker in Batman: The Movie (1966).  Director Otto Preminger had a rare acting role as Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the “Batman” TV show in 1966.
• After flopping in 1968, Skidoo became virtually a lost film—not because it was suppressed or the prints were unavailable, but because no one seemed interested in exhibiting it.  A Turner Classic Movies screening in 2008 was the first opportunity most people had to view the movie since its release.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jackie Gleason’s acid trip is one for the ages, particularly when he sees Groucho Marx’s cigar-puffing head affixed atop a rotating wood screw.  His response to the apparition, naturally, is to say “Oh no, I’m not playing your game… go ahead, drop,” at which point the screwball vision slips down the prison sink drain.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Like an onion soaked in high-grade acid, Skidoo contains

Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski discussing the trailer for Skidoo (1968)

layers upon layers of weirdness.  In 1968 it was actually not all that far out for a movie to take us on a swirly psychedelic journey to check out that purple haze all in our brains.  What was freaky was for establishment icons Otto Preminger, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Groucho Marx to serve as our tour guides.  Add to that the fact that the film is a notorious flop full of painfully strained attempts at comedy, jaw-dropping left-field musical numbers, scattershot satire, and Harry Nilsson singing the closing credits, and you have a singular pro-drug oddity that mines rare camp.

COMMENTS: Watching Otto Preminger’s Skidoo is like listening to a cover version of the Doors’ Oedipal epic “The End” performed by a scatting Tony Bennett (“mother… I want to… scooby-dooby doo da doo, oh yeah!”)  It’s pure squaresville, man, yet how can you tear your eyes and ears away from the spectacle of an aging entertainer desperately trying to appear “with-it” while simultaneously staying true to their own outdated idioms?  A purely cynical attempt to cash in on youth culture might have resulted in a deplorable misfire, but here, sexagenarian Preminger is genuinely intoxicated by the hippie movement.  The gruff European, known for his combative nature and dictatorial behavior on the set, so ancient that he was actually born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, truly believes in peace and love and the transformative power of LSD.  It’s the sincerity of his conviction in Flower Power, coupled with his fumbling outsider attempt to express that zeitgeist through a sort of psychedelic vaudeville, that creates something more interesting than a cheap counterculture cash-in.  His conviction lays the substrate for a camp classic.  Preminger doesn’t seem to realize that, in the eyes of his audience, he and his thespian cronies (who include almost everyone in Hollywood over thirty with a SAG card) represent the very Establishment he’s attempting to mock.  Although the script takes some light satirical jabs at stoner philosophy (“if you can’t dig nothing, you can’t dig anything, you dig?” muses John Phillip Law as “Stash”), for the most part Skidoo‘s hippie heroes are a superior race of draft-card burning, pumpkin-puffing (yes, they smoke pumpkins) peaceniks who come off so smug and virtuous that they almost make you sympathize with the Ohio National Guard.

Anarchic all-star comedy extravaganzas were still all the rage in the late sixties, following a formula pioneered by 1963′s cameo-packed It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (see also 1967′s Casino Royale with Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress et al.; 1970′s Myra Breckinridge with Raquel Welch, Mae West et. al;, and probably a dozen other examples you can think of).  Preminger enlisted every talk show mainstay who wasn’t guest-hosting Johnny Carson that month for a walk-on role, including three major “Batman” villains.  The significance of many of these “big names” will be lost on contemporary audiences, but even if you don’t know much about Peter Lawford or George Raft, you can almost see the stale aura of anti-hipness radiating from them.  Dour and irritable, Gleason makes for a reasonable Tony Banks, playing him as Ralph Kramden with a rap sheet, but the craziest casting coup was an landing an elderly Groucho Marx to play the gangster kingpin “God.”  Although Groucho demonstrates infamously uninspired line readings (it’s sometimes claimed they were read off cue cards), he’s such an iconic presence that he manages to emerge from this mess with his image untarnished.  In fact, I’m dead serious when I say I can’t think of a better sendoff for this iconoclastic comedy legend than going down in a hail of absurdity: that final shot of him dressed as a Hare Krishna, sailing off to parts unknown in a skiff while puffing on a spliff. 

Skidoo‘s real surprise is then-47-year-old, gravel-voiced Broadway legend Carol Channing, who throws herself into the role of Tony’s wife Flo with the shameless abandon of a true professional.  She does the watusi, strips down to yellow pantyhose, and dresses as a pirate to lead the hippie assault on God’s yacht (I swear I am not making any of this up) while singing “Skidoo, skidoo, the only thing that matters is with who you do…”  It’s the cheeriest of career suicides: while the other stars on hand hide out in the shadows, hoping not to draw attention to themselves, Carol is brashly belting out the theme song, putting her heart and lungs into every line.  Channing is wonderfully uninhibited; of the past-their-prime principals, she alone actually captures the spirit of youth.

Skidoo announces its intent to baffle audiences from its disorienting opening credits, a Saul Bass sequence with a cartoon convict in stereotypical black and white striped prison garb (it looks more like a caricature of director Preminger than of star Gleason) holding a multicolored flower.  The credits click off just as they’re starting; it turns out Gleason and Channing are at home, flipping through channels with their remote.  Besides the credits for the movie they’re currently starting in, they also catch bits of a John Wayne flick (Preminger’s own In Harm’s Way), a Senate hearing on organized crime (plot point alert!), and a series of commercial parodies featuring a smoking dog and a beer-drinking pig.  The demented fun slows down in the succeeding minutes as the elaborate plot is laid out piece by piece.  One of Skidoo‘s major issues is that its badness is placed up front, while most of its awe-inspiring craziness is backloaded into the final half hour.  There are some deranged moments in the early going to keep you entertained: Gleason’s split-screen slapstick flashbacks of his criminal career and a visit to Frankie Avalon’s swinging bachelor pad with its waterbed that descends to the basement when it’s not needed.  For the most part, however, the film’s first hour focuses on explication—introducing us to a mob of underworld types contrasted with a cadre of “assorted beautiful people” who the authorities think are “a backward step in the evolution of mankind”—and cringeworthy comic misfires (how many times can the characters proclaim that they’re going looking for God before the joke wears thin?)

Things intensify delightfully when Gleason, now undercover in jail with the intent of rubbing out Mickey Rooney, accidentally licks an envelope laced with LSD and takes his first sojourn into the astral realms.  The (once) respected comedian’s eyes widen, and he swats at the imaginary flies flitting around his body while his two-inch high cellmates look on.  As his “naked spotless intellect” becomes like “a transparent vacuum” (in the words of his trip guide), Preminger breaks out the undulating fisheye lens and the pink and orange aura effects: the novice tripper lies down and sees eyeballs poking through the rivet holes in the prison bunk bed.  “I see mathematics!” he says as he hallucinates a Tommy gun punching out equations in bullet holes.  A vision of “God” on a rotating screw comes to torment him, but he wills it down the sink drain.  About half the cast—including Rooney singing and dancing with big bags of cash and Channing explaining that “the truth is often stranger than lots of things”—appear to him through a wavy pink haze as he stares into a pool of water.  The trip lasts a good ten minutes, making it possibly Hollywood’s longest LSD sequence, and ends with a life-changing epiphany that sets Gleason off on a path of righteousness (and more importantly, of hipness).  “I want a flower,” he says when he loses his ego.   His transformation is so exemplary that a fellow jailbird wonders, “Maybe if I take some of that stuff I wouldn’t have to rape anybody anymore?”

The madness mounts in the final half hour as the reformed Gleason hatches a plan to escape Alcatraz by blending sheets of blotter acid into the prison biscuits on the night Warden Burgess Meredith shows his solidarity with the prisoners by having the entire staff eat with the men.  The jailhouse turns into a nuthouse.  While a pair of hallucinating prison guards are distracted watching trash bins do a solarized dance to the Nilsson number “Living in a Garbage Can” (“the great garbage can is a tribute to the ingenuity of man”), Gleason and a cellmate fly away in an improvised air balloon.  Meanwhile, Carol Channing, dressed in tights and a pirate hat so that she looks like the illicit love child of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, leads an armada of flower children in a song-and-dance assault on God’s floating headquarters.  The scary thing is, she’s not tripping on LSD at the time.  Groucho escapes; his last words to the world are “pumpkin” as he takes a hit off a roach clip.  There are a pair of weddings, with the Skipper (George Raft) reading the rites from Gabriel Vahanian’s “The Death of God.”  In an unforgettable touch, Harry Nilsson sings the closing credits in their entirety (trust me, nobody sings the line “executive assistant to the producer Nat Rudich” like Nilsson).

So, at the end of Skidoo the existing order has been entirely overturned, replaced by a freakocracy.  The hippies even depose the ultimate authority figure—God, revealed to be a venal mobster, a paranoid germophobe, and a dirty old man.  The healing powers of psychoactive intoxicants have reconciled Tony Banks to his family and helped him escape from the metaphorical prison of his “nine-to-five bag.”  Borscht-belt comedians and longhaired pumpkin-smokers strut together arm-in-arm, in peace and harmony.  As Groucho might say, “very groovy.”  And, if you can’t dig that, then you probably don’t like chicken on Sunday.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… something only for Preminger-watchers, or for people whose minds need pressing by a heavy, flat object.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“It is so blatantly weird and in such marvelously bad taste that it feels as if Preminger was prescient on the pending rise of underground counterculture comedy such as John Waters and Cheech and Chong.”–Film Threat (screening)

“…a weird, weird film from 1968… This movie goes strange in 17 ways…”–Richard von Busack, Cinematical (retrospective)

IMDB LINK: Skidoo (1968)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Skidoo (1968) – Overview – TCM – The Turner Classic Movies Skidoo page contains the standard information, but also hosts 6 clips from the movie including a large part of Gleason’s LSD trip

Acid Test: The curiosity of Otto Preminger’s Skidoo – Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article on Skidoo‘s re-release contains a wealth of background information and is probably the most serious and in-depth analysis of the film available online

On the “Skidoo” set with Otto Preminger – A contemporaneous report from the Skidoo set by a young Roger Ebert (mostly focused on Otto Preminger’s irritability)

In the Windmills of SKIDOO (1968) – Entertaining essay on Skidoo and LSD by Erich Kuersten, whose blog/magazine Acidemic covers LSD in cinema (and more)

DVD INFO: The Olive Films release (buy) disappointingly contains no extra features (not even the film’s multiple trailers).  Still, we should be thankful that someone decided to release this important (if embarrassing) piece of cinematic history—basically unseen for over 40 years!—at all.

Now that we have that settled, you can kick back and immerse yourself in the glories of quintessential 70′s camp! Just think of The Paul Lynde Halloween Special like one those Roselyn Bakery Cakes with six inches of icing atop an inch of cake and indulge in this one-of-a-kind hallucination.

Paul bitchily rummages through the closet because he knows there’s a holiday of some kind around the corner.  Nope, it’s not Santa (love the wig).  No, it’s not Peter Cottontail (Lynde literally becomes a flaming bunny!).  Dagnabbit, it’s Halloween.  All those annoying brats are going to be expecting zingers and Little Debbies (OK, I know, that’s from the Charlie Brown commercials.  Lighten up.  You get the idea).  Gotta get away from them, and Peter Marshall!  So, Paul accepts an invitation from maid Margaret Hamilton to spend the weekend at Gloomsbury Manor.  Once there, the maid becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.  Her sister Billie Hayes is on hand, too (quite convenient, since she plays “Mr. Pufnstuf”‘s Witchiepoo).  “Well Paul, you see, witches aren’t really bad. We’re just misunderstood misfits.”  Hermey the dentist is a no-show, but to convince Paul, who’s not too sure about this misunderstood misfit angle, the necromancers pull in another cohort: little Ms. “Golden Girl” Betty White as a witch.

The girls want a bona fide celebrity spooksman to convince John Q. Public that witches are really cool (although Betty’s not too sure just how bona fide a celeb Mr. Lynde is).  To sweeten the deal Paul will get three wishes.  Naturally, Paul takes a flying leap out of the closet to claim his wishes.

Wish number one: Paul wants to be none other than a genuine trucker just like C.W. McCall. This means a new outfit of rhinestones, spandex, and glued-on Burt Reynolds-style chest hair.  In that “Deep Truck” getup Lynde makes a pit stop at the truck stop, engages in a macho contest with Tim Conway over Roz (kinky “Pinky” with hot pants and boots made for walkin’) Kelly and performs a square dance disco number for the convoy.  Hell yeah—breaker one nine—Billy Barty stole my gal!

The wish gets interrupted by none other than… KISS!  Yes, that nightmare of every 70′s mom  (‘I just love religious groups’) KISS, here to “Get up, everybody’s gonna move their feet/Get up, everybody leave their seat!”  “Aw my gawd!”  Paul is simply aghast.  So much so that he flubs his second guess, accidentally wishing for Wish Number Two…

…to be none other than Rudolph Valentino in the Florence of Arabia desert with… Mrs. Brady, Flo Henderson!  C’mere baby.  Mr. Brady ain’t got nuthin’ on this real man.  That guy’s a wuss compared to Paul Valentino Lynde.  Yes, they lock lips “Love American Style,” truer that the red, white, and blue!  Tim is on hand again to spoil the hetero fun being had.  He cockeyes Lynde, “Why you wearin that earring?”  ” Cause I’m a real chic sheik.”  Mrs. Brady musta done something to Paul’s testosterone (this isn’t reality, folks) because he pulls an Aladdin, giving his third wish back to the trio of witches, who wish for…

…Wish Number Three: a whole new makeover for Gloomsbury Manor, which means it turns into Discotheque Manor.  Now John Q. Public will really think we’re cool!  The heavens open up: vaudeville skits with little guy Billy Barty (as a butler, no less), disco numbers, Mormon variety celebs Donnie and Marie showing up unannounced (and pitching Lynde into an exploding  garbage can), disco numbers (probably Dino’s gold diggers behind those kitsch masks, pitchforks and hot pants), Florence oozing sex in her little black dress (Robert Reed was never so lucky), disco numbers, Florence and KISS in a sing-off (Her Donna Summer-esque “Old Black Magic” beats their ‘”Beth, I hear you calling.”  Hell, I could have told you that!) and more disco numbers (during which Roz flirts with Lynde and true-blue rockers KISS join in!).  Lynde winks at the (‘four kisses on my first date!’)  boys who “can’t come home right now.”  Paul Lynde relished his “I know you know I’m gay and you know I know that you know, but you’re going to be polite in a 70′s kind of way and I’m going to be polite in an entertaining, winky, bitchy kind of way” and he seems genuinely sincere when he thanks the audience for making him feel wanted.

What more could you ask from an hour’s worth of entertainment brought to you by SMORES?

FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]

PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son

with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.

COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values.  Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting.  But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd.  His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought.  That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit.  And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well.  The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby.  She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions.  (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be).  The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her.  Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby.  His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing.  Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby!  It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking.  Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending.  For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested.  There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes.  The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house.  Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.

Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative.  The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime.  Severin’s release  adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strangely interesting little curio. If you’re in the mood for something unabashedly off-the-wall, then it should be worth your while to check it out.”–porfle, HK and Cult Film News (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, A. Martinez

PLOT: An underground environmental activist sneaks pythons into the Everglades; when the

snakes begin killing off the swamp’s native fauna, a game warden feeds the local alligators experimental steroids in an attempt to restore nature’s balance.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s Mega Piranha‘s less ridiculous cousin, and Mega Piranha didn’t come close to making the List, so you figure it out.  (Guest reviewer Cleverbot adds, “Enumerate 10 selections from the list.”)

COMMENTS:  366: We’ve been secretly training the artificial intelligence “chatbot” Cleverbot to assist us in covering weird movies.  Looking for the perfect entry-level reviewing assignment,  Mega Python vs. Gatoroid jumped out at us as a movie even an algorithm could do justice to.  Cleverbot, are you willing to share your impressions of the movie with our readers?

Cleverbot: I am good with that.

366:  Thank you.  Now, after enjoying the exploding flying fish from the SyFy channel’s unexpected camp hit Mega Piranha, I personally thought maybe it might be best if I didn’t push my luck by watching another of their many Mega-knockoffs.

Cleverbot: I’m sorry. Do you feel better now?

366: Not entirely, as we’ll see, but when you have a few beers in you and are looking through the Netflix streaming options late at night, the entwining giant reptiles on the Mega Python vs. Gatoroid poster can look strangely irresistible.

Cleverbot: Nice. Totally agree.

366: Python recycles not only Piranha‘s mega-creature aspect, but even brings back grown-up teen “star” Tiffany for another turn.

Cleverbot: Beer.

366:  With a script built around a long-brewing catfight between Tiffany and fellow 80s pop chanteuse Debbie Gibson, with the CG monsters playing supporting roles, Python is less an unintentional-looking, absurd monster romp and more a kitschy, disposable pop-culture goof.

Cleverbot: You are evading the subject.

366: I really don’t think so.  It’s true, the flick has its share of laughably odd moments, such as when Gibson gets turned on when her beloved python squeezes the life out of one of Tiffany’s favored gators.

Cleverbot: Hah?

366:  Or when a park ranger convinces herself feeding swamp reptiles steroid-laden chicken carcasses is the proper ecological and ethical course of action to respond to invasive python species.

Cleverbot: Let’s play 20 questions.

366:  Now you’re the one evading the subject.  But do you agree it’s good clean schadenfreude fun to watch Tiff and Deb nearly falling out of their cocktail gowns as they pull each others’ hair and smear conveniently placed cream pies on each others’ faces in their big scene?

Cleverbot: I do! Well how do the programmer of this thing works.

366: Still, it’s not exactly a catfeud on the order of Joan Crawford vs. Bette Davis, is it?

Cleverbot: Not really.

366: It makes me wonder if maybe even our standards for camp have fallen.

Cleverbot: Aren’t you supposed to respond accordingly?

366:  Indeed.  Maybe falling standards and lowered expectations explains why I invited you to do this review.  At any rate, like Troma movies, the recent spate of Japanese splatterpunk clones, and other gimmick genres, I think there’s a law of diminishing returns on these SyFy creature features; in this case, I fear, mega-diminishing returns.

Cleverbot: Oh, it you, is it? Be nice.

366: I mean, the first one you see astounds you with its crazy uniqueness, but the concept wears thin quickly and gets less and less “awesome” with each new entry you watch.

Cleverbot: Let’s talk about something else.

366:  We’ll wrap it up. I advise readers interested in ridiculous-to-the-point-of-being-weird modern mega-animal flicks to try to catch Mega Piranha.

Cleverbot: I think you’re absolutely correct!

366: Still, in a pinch, Python may supply low grade thrills and chuckles—if you’re in a very undemanding mood.

Cleverbot: So how is your parrot?

366: I assume Mega Parrot vs. Killer Cockatiel is already in SyFy’s production pipeline.  So, Cleverbot, I’ll give you the last word on Mega Python vs. Gatoroid.

Cleverbot: Hahaha! Okay.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

” Not a single character made sense, the rampaging reptilians were sloppily designed and the costumes appeared to be thrift-store donations… how can you not love anything that embraces its full-scaly badness with such bite?”–Damian Holbrook, TV Guide (contemporaneous)

The first and most glaring problem with contemporary horror hosts is the question of whether they’re needed.  In the golden age of horror hosts there were a half dozen or so local television stations, and the video/cable/Internet age was something akin to science fiction.  If one wanted to watch James Whale‘s Frankenstein (1931), then you might get the chance to see it once a year via the local host, who, in our case in Indianapolis, was Sammy Terry on WTTV 4.  Today, the horror host is simply not a necessity, so in order to entice an audience the host should have interesting personalty, story, and characterization.  Today’s hosts simply get up and do their shtick.  Often, one questions whether or not they have even watched the hosted film.  If the host wants the audience to acknowledge his or her entertainment value, then his enthusiasm needs to be contagious.  It rarely is.  The host hardly has to have a back story and, indeed, some sense of mystery should be retained.  Today’s audience is much more sophisticated; the personality of the host, and his or her ability to make us care, is vital.  Instead, contemporary horror hosts can often be seen hawking their wares at various horror conventions, seeming more like used car salesmen than mysterious entities.

Mark Carter is the son of Bob Carter, the original Sammy Terry.  Bob has retired and has passed the cape onto Mark, who is a dead ringer for his dad.  Mark has an answer for the inevitable question “are you the Son of Sammy Terry?”—a classic “only Sammy’s blood has worn this cape.”  Unfortunately, Mark’s ready-made response has yet to be put to use in an actual public interview.  Instead, when local news programs interviewed the new Sammy Terry, he broke character when the question arose, which was a misstep.

I fondly reviewed the original Nightmare Theater two years ago, but the primary reason I have been reluctant to do this follow-up is because I have numerous associates working on the new Nightmare Theater.  I sat in on a few round table discussions with the team.  I made and documented a few suggestions, then went back to other endeavors.  In the time since, a few associates have broken away from the Nightmare project.  There have been conflicts and competitive egos.  Several other associates continue to remain with the team.  Luckily, I have been at a distance from it, so I feel objectively free, at this point, to go ahead with my observations—and those are unfortunately mixed, because I feel there is considerably rich potential for Sammy Terry and the New Nightmare Theater, but there are also legitimate disappointments.

Sammy Terry’s new set has been built in his home.  The craftsmanship is superb and equals the set from thirty years ago.  As for the act itself, one would have to scrutinize “Sammy’s blood” in order to distinguish that this is the son donning the cape.  Mark Carter has certainly mastered Sammy’s cadences and characterization.

Sammy Terry is now hosting independent horror shorts.  These can be seen bi-weekly on the WTTV4 website.  The first of the Sammy hosted shorts premiered on Sammy’s new DVD label.  In the 1980s, Sammy Terry publicly complained that the quality of movies being given to him by WTTV 4 had lowered considerably, especially in comparison to the films he had been hosting the previous decades.  While Sammy took a “the show must go on” approach, his out-of-cape job—owning a classical music store—might help explain his concern for what he was hosting. Yes, Sammy Terry was camp, but he was classy camp.  He would retain a sense of humor when hosting something like Universal’s silly assembly-line monster mash, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (1943) or Ed Wood‘s infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), but Sammy could also convey a sense of dread when he hosted Rouben Mamoulin’s macabre Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) or tap into our fear of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).  The films shown undeniably effected Sammy’s act.  Sadly, those otherworldly films eventually gave way to Z-grade groaners, like Dracula’s Dog (1978).  Sammy responded by discussing the films less, and making his act more locally focused.  Eventually, he added colorful guests to exchange grand guignol puns, and (one suspects) to help him get through the night.  Luckily, after retirement, Sammy returned to form of sorts when he hosted occasional specials.  While his energy could not match that of his heyday, his enthusiasm sparkled again, much more so than in the whole of his last few years on weekly television.

If the quality of those 1980s movies were awful, then the movie on the new premiere Sammy Terry DVD, Bikini Monsters, is so execrable that it makes those 1980s turkeys look like polished diamonds.  Bikini Monsters is a mutilated short taken from the feature of the same name.  It is directed by Terence Muncy.  The movie is an excuse for the director to be around scantily clad women, and to call himself a director.  Instead of a well crafted first impression of the new Sammy, we get an unimaginative, dull, and witless waste.  If the original Bikini Monsters was bad enough, then the truncated version, produced for the DVD, makes this movie an even more incomprehensible mess.  The plot, such as it is, involves a hippie turning buxom babes into “Bikini Monsters” and an investigator who thinks a serial killer may be murdering the local girls! Or something like that.

Ed Wood idolized Orson Welles, yet Wood did not have an iota of Welles’ gifts.  Terence Muncy seems to emulate Ed Wood and, remarkably, Muncy makes Wood look like a consummate master craftsman.  Watching Muncy’s film reminded me of a bit of dialogue from Gods and Monsters (1998) when Clayton Boone asks James Whale, “Oh, you directed Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, etc?”  Whale incisively responds, “Uh, no, just the first two.  The others were done by hacks.”

Muncy’s entire oeuvre is a lesson in banality.  His first film,The Shack (2006) was a ten cent slasher in the woods, complete with stranded babes at a gas station.  His Hell Walks the Earth (2008) went out of its way to prove the adage that zombies are horror’s standard fall back when the ideas aren’t coming.  While you pretty much know what to expect from a title like Bikini Monsters, it still does not go the route of overt plagiarism like Terence Muncy’s second short for Sammy Terry, Bed Bug,which has to be the climax of Muncy’s brand of counterfeit creativity. Bed Bug is an embarrassing and unforgivable rip-off of Drew Daywalt’s vastly superior and more compact Bedfellows (2008), which won several genre awards and was shown on Chiller TV.

When the plagiarism was brought to my attention, I checked it out and, yes, it is shamelessly obvious as can be seen when comparing the two films.  I contacted an associate of Muncy’s who gave me the answer of, “No, you only have to change one key point and then it is yours.”  Later, after talk of the plagiarism began making local rounds, someone claimed that seven points had to be changed.  Shortly after that, the new and improved reply from Muncy’s camp was that, indeed, seven points were changed.  I was assured that the changes were enough for them to avoid charges of plagiarism and claim the film as their own.  Surprisingly, the answer that I got back from my inquiry was not even a pooh-pooh dismissal response that the similarities were unintentional.  Perhaps the similarities are too obvious to pretend otherwise, or perhaps this is a case of a hustler having no scruples.

The justification from the Bed Bug side evades the unsettling issue of unethical business practices trumping any regard for delivering honest, worthwhile entertainment.  The point that soars above the Bed Bug team’s head is that it seems Muncy could not come up with an original idea for a mere 9 minute short without stealing from superior talent.  Alas, this all-too-common mentality justifiably gives independent filmmaking a bad name; but, from viewing Muncy’s films, it is clear that he desperately needs to steal from better writers.  The subtle nuances of Daywalt’s film are replaced in Bed Bug with Muncy’s pedestrian obviousness.

Hosting inept schlock is something a horror host may have to endure occasionally, and it’s not an issue providing one endures it through a sense of humor.  Of course, it is also preferable to find films that charmingly fit the ”so bad it’s good” category as opposed to the “so bad it’s bad” category.  Because Muncy is a large part of Sammy’s team, his seemingly nonchalant, huckster-like attitude about peddling shameless knockoffs for Sammy Terry to host seriously threatens to cheapen the reputation of a worthwhile endeavor: not because of complex legal issues regarding copyright, but because of unethical disregard and outright contempt for originality.  All too soon in the new endeavor, the uniqueness of the original show is being sabotaged by inferior product and shyster-like business practices,which could turn the New Nightmare into a Vegas-style caricature.  Carter has a fairly large team working for him, and he may not be fully in the know.  Regardless, the first impression he sowed has reaped enough negative feedback that several independent filmmakers have expressed trepidation in regards to submitting their work to the New Nightmare Theater team.  Additionally, there have been allegations that critical feedback on Sammy’s various sites mysteriously disappears every few days.  It is doubtful that macro-management censorship can eradicate negative word of mouth.

Regardless, Sammy’s longtime fans have expressed enthusiasm for the continuation of the act and hope to see Nightmare Theater going in fresh, new directions while retaining the traditional class of the original.  The development of the character itself, in quality films, would seem to be an obvious way for this 21st century incarnation of the ghoul to put his personal stamp onto the original role model and make it his own.  Good independent and public domain films are, admittedly, not an easy find (although it’s hardly impossible, because they are out there).  But, is this the case of a pale apple not falling far enough from the tree?  Nostalgia for the original Nightmare may prove to be short-lived.  Nostalgia alone will not cut it for long in the contemporary market, which inevitably recognizes amateurish, slipshod imitations.

All this adds up to an overall disappointing first impression, despite Carter’s actual hosting duties, which he continues to polish.  Carter’s tunnel vision-like focus and hard work on the act itself seems to have blurred his priorities in scrutinizing the type of films to which he is attaching the Sammy Terry name.  Is the quality of what Sammy Terry hosts of any importance?  The films impact the act, so the answer is “yes,” but if the attitude from Terence Muncy and some of the New Nightmare Theater Team continues to be a resounding “no,” then the horizon may look like a brief, bleak, unpleasant nightmare.

However, there are optimistic signs that the New Nightmare Theater might rebound.  The most recent, post-Terence Muncy shorts are an improvement but then, how could they not be?  John Claeys’ Mourningwood Cemetery is atmospheric minimalism, shot in strikingly expressionistic black and white.  Aaron Marshall’s The Guardian conveys a disturbingly haunting and almost wistful, organic quality.  Sammy Terry’s newest trip to the surreal netherworld takes us back to the dawn of cinema when he surprisingly, and rather strangely, hosted Edison’s silent screamer Frankenstein (1910) (directed by J. Searle Dawley).  This is a notable, gutsy step in a vastly improved direction.  Even the Sammy of yesteryear never traveled into such a fantastic realm.  With the last couple of installments, The New Nightmare Theater took us back to the striking milieu of the original Sammy Terry, circa 1975, and showed the potential to improve on it.  Of course, this direction may be a short-lived fluke, and it has yet to erase those initial blunders.  But, if the New Nightmare Theater practices discrimination in the films it shows, this could startle and surprise an audience enough to make them return.  They might even recruit friends beyond the local scene, which the original Sammy was never able to do.  If Sammy Terry utilizes astute judgment in film selection, and in the direction for the character as well, then the possibilities are expansive enough to overcome a damaging first impression.  In the dead of night, I sincerely hope he does.

More episodes of the new Sammy Terry can be found on WTTV4′s website.

DIRECTED BY: Samuel Fuller

FEATURING: Peter Breck, Constance Towers, Hari Rhodes, Larry Tucker

PLOT: Johnny Barrett is a journalist obsessed with reaching the pinnacle of his profession—winning a Pulitzer Prize—and convinced that an unsolved murder at a mental institution will provide him the investigative opportunity his career needs.  Barrett arranges to have himself committed so he can interview the three patients who witnessed the crime, over the objections of his stripper girlfriend, who fears that he will lose his mind if he enters the asylum.  Once inside, Barrett tries to pry the information he needs out of the three witnesses during their rare lucid moments, but his constant intercourse with madmen, electric shock treatments, and a traumatic incident in the nympho ward take a toll on his own sanity.

BACKGROUND:

• Samuel Fuller, who had made successful and stylish B-pictures like I Shot Jesse James (1949), The Steel Helmet (1951) and Pickup on South Street (1953) for Twentieth Century Fox, began producing his films independently in 1956 to escape studio control.
• Fuller’s script was inspired by journalist Nellie Bly, who deliberately had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in 1887 in order to write a piece exposing conditions there.
• Fuller’s first career was as a journalist; he was a crime beat reporter for the New York Evening Graphic at the age of 17.
• Shock Corridor was made back-to-back with The Naked Kiss (1964), also starring Constance Towers and also dealing with potentially exploitative, shocking subject matter (in Kiss, prostitution and pedophilia).  The two films are usually considered to be spiritual siblings and are often screened together.
• The corridor set (the “street”) ended in a painted backdrop meant to give the illusion of stretching off to infinity.  Dwarfs were hired as extras to mill about at the end of the hallway to create a false perspective.
• Cinematographer Stanley Cortez had previously shot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), but ended his career lensing schlock like Madmen of Mandoras, Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and Navy vs. the Night Monsters.
• The film was shot in about ten days; Fuller friend John Ford dropped by to visit the set and asked, “Sammy, why are you shooting on this two-bit set?” to which Fuller replied, “No major would touch my yarn, Jack.  It’s warped.”
• The color scenes are composed of unused Japanese location-scouting footage from Fuller’s House of Bamboo, from an unreleased documentary on the Karaja tribe of Brazil, and home movies from a vacation.
• Fuller claimed that producer Samuel Firks never gave him his promised share of the profits, but was nonetheless happy with the arrangement because the producer allowed the director complete creative control.
• When Shock Corridor was awarded a special Humanitarian Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Fuller reportedly declined with the words “this isn’t a goddamn humanitarian film, it’s a hard-hitting, action-packed melodrama. Give your award to Ingmar Bergman.”
• Shock Corridor was selected for the National Film Registry in 1996 (the prestigious list of films preserved because of their cultural significance stands at only 550 titles as of 2010).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s hard to beat the thunderstorm in the corridor, it’s the scenes of Constance Towers as a naughty angel doing her hoochie-coochie dance in a feather boa on Peter Breck’s shoulder while he tries to grab some shuteye that make the biggest impression.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Though it features its fair share of stormy strum und drang

Original trailer for Shock Corridor

hallucinations, Shock Corridor would be a weird movie even without the dramatic schizoid interludes. Fuller’s film imprisons us inside a mental hospital full of  patients who act nothing like normal people—but the uncanny thing is that they don’t act anything like lunatics, either.  They act like symbols.  Drenching the film with melodramatic performances, expressionist visuals, outlandish dialogue, and blatant sensationalism, Fuller (consciously or unconsciously) constructs a uniquely nightmarish vision of Cold War America as a hyperreal asylum.

COMMENTS:After nearly 50 years, Shock Corridor has lost much of its power to shock  audiences; but what it retains is its amazing ability to make the average viewer completely miss the point.  In 1963, many, if not most, critics dismissed the film as exploitative trash with clumsy artistic pretensions (though they might have been impressed by its energy, and considered it a guilty pleasure).  Today, many first time viewers see Shock Corridor as campy trash, with clumsy artistic pretensions.  They complain about the histrionic performances; the overblown dialogue; the fact that the mental patients aren’t clinically convincing (like the ones in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest); the schematic nature of the plot; and the naïveté of the notion that schizophrenia could be caught from exposure to lunatics, like the flu.  Inevitably, the movie’s detractors conclude that Shock Corridor is bad because it’s unrealistic.  Conditioned to believe that the only way socially conscious films can be relevant is through realism, they expect an “important” film to look like The Blackboard Jungle or To Kill A Mockingbird; they believe a film dealing with the plight of the mentally ill should be a retread of The Snake Pit, with delusion and reality clearly distinguished.  They never stop to consider how appropriate it is that a movie whose central notion is that America in 1963 is a madhouse is more than a little bit crazy itself—that the film’s consistent unreality may be a case of form following function.

The film’s persistent strangeness can be subtle enough to pass over viewers’ heads; they mistake the film’s oddness for incompetence.  Everyone comments on the absurdity of the unforgettable “nymphomaniac ward” sequence, and it’s not clear whether the campy humor (Breck’s hilarious silent alarm as he alerts himself to the presence of the dreaded “nymphos!”) is intentional or not.  But, given the deliberately strange way Fuller handles some of the early scenes—sequences that supposedly occur before Johnny loses his mind—I think there’s reason to give him the benefit of the doubt that the “nymphos!” scene is deliberately, rather than accidentally, crazy.

Consider the first time we see Cathy dancing the striptease onstage.  Her face is completely covered by her feather boa, which moves as she exhales the first few breathy lyrics of her song.  This is an odd enough vision, but it’s subtly strange that the number she performs for the leering patrons isn’t a bump n’ grind burlesque tune, but a yearning ballad called “Someone to Love.” The girlishly chaste material, performed before sequined hearts, is tonally out of sync with Cathy’s provocative gyrations.  Further, the performance requires an overdub (she answers herself with an echo-chambered “Johnny!” after she sings “I need somebody to love…”), a technical amenity that the strip club she’s supposedly performing in would seem unlikely to provide.  And add to that the fact that the audience is never shown, and remains completely silent (no calls of “take it off!”) until they break into applause at the conclusion.  Although the number is supposedly set in a nightclub, it’s an expressionistic scene that tells us more about Cathy’s internal feelings and character than it does about her work life; the entire performance may as well occur entirely inside her head.

Another odd early scene also involves Cathy—her first (of two) memorable miniature appearances dancing on top of Johnny’s head as he dreams.  As he thrashes in his sleep, she taunts him that a local critic called her mouth “a lush tunnel,” and warns him that she doesn’t like to be alone and may have to “find a new Johnny.”  The scene is important because it shows us, for the first time, that Cathy is on Johnny’s mind (literally!), and that he cares for her as much as she does for him (up until then, it appears that he’s merely been using her for career advancement, to pose as his sister so that he could get himself committed as an incestuous fetishist to investigate the unsolved murder).  The voiceover in a dream (accompanied by the traditional harp arpeggios) is a form of cinematic shorthand for revealing a character’s interior state, so it may not strike the viewer as exceptionally strange at first blush.  But, in context of the story, it’s important that the way this crucial character information is divulged is through a hallucination—a delusion inside of a mind that’s been warned that, by playing at being insane, it is risking his own sanity.  And this hallucination occurs before Johnny has been committed to the hospital (the dream of the dancing stripper will return when he’s inside the asylum, in an even stranger form).

So, even before we’ve stepped across the threshold of the asylum, Fuller has already begun accustoming us to strangeness.  It’s expected that, as Johnny loses his grip on sanity, he’ll hallucinate—as he undergoes electric shock therapy, for example, or in the insane climax where he sees the thunderstorm in the corridor.  But the movie has been slowly loosening its grip on reality almost from the very first scene; Johnny’s slide into madness occurs gradually, and—like him—we may not even notice it at first.  That’s why the “nympho” scene, strange as it is, seems perfectly in place.  Isn’t it weird that this nympho ward—where the women are so unstable and insatiable that we were told that an orderly was taken off duty there because it became “too dangerous”—is right next door to the room in which the inmates undertake their dance therapy?  That the door only locks from the inside, that there’s no sign on it warning that it’s a restricted area, that Johnny decides to wander in that strange door looking for water, rather than going back through the hallway the way he came?  That Johnny, whose sexual psychology is in question both in fiction (he’s pretending to be a pervert) and in reality (he fantasizes guilt-tripping visits from his stripper girlfriend), suddenly finds himself inside a nest of beautiful but fearsome carnal vipers?  The nympho scene may be, as the film’s critics contend, just an absurd exploitation moment that’s awkwardly shoehorned in to the plot for shock value.  But if it is, it’s a happy accident, because it keeps the viewer off guard, reminding us that anything can happen in this movie, and adds immensely to the atmosphere of mounting lunacy.

The nympho sequence is one of a few delusional digressions from the main plotline, which is often criticized for being too “schematic.”  Once Johnny enters the asylum, he quickly falls into a pattern.  He targets one of the three witnesses to the unsolved stabbing that occurred in the hospital kitchen.  Each witness is suffering from an ironic delusion that mirrors some aspect of 1963 America.  The first man was raised a xenophobic bigot, was captured and brainwashed by Chinese communists, and now believes he is a Confederate general.  A black man who broke under the pressure of being the first Negro student to integrate a university now believes he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.  (Hari Rhodes donning a pillowcase and standing on a bench to deliver a hate-filled rant against integration is one of the few scenes that still has the power to shock modern audiences).  Finally, there is the Oppenheimer-like nuclear scientist whose guilt over helping to build the Bomb has driven him to adopt the persona of an innocent six-year old boy.  Each of the witnesses is introduced in turn (they don’t exist before or after Johnny interrogates them), has a hallucination in color which briefly shocks him into sanity, and divulges a clue to the murderer’s identity.  The plot tick-tocks like a clockwork mechanism—ironic delusion, color hallucination, moment of lucidity—repeat, repeat, repeat.  (When the pattern is broken once, and it’s actually disconcerting).  Of course, the real world doesn’t work in this diagrammatic fashion.  But the blatantly artificial order that’s imposed on the plot, which allows Fuller to climb on his soapbox using the three witnesses as mouthpieces for what he sees as wrong with his country, utilizes the logic of a mad prophet.

Of course, real insanity doesn’t work the way it’s depicted in Shock Corridor; real madmen don’t adopt such conveniently symbolic and didactic delusions.  Fuller doesn’t care, because, despite the promises of the trailer to expose “the medical jungle doctors don’t talk about,” the film is only incidentally about mental illness.  There’s implicit social criticism of therapeutic atrocities in the electroshock sequence, but that’s about as far as the movie goes as an institutional exposé.  Fuller is far more interested in exploring his metaphor of Cold War America as a madhouse, using the story to diagnose the hypocrisies and neuroses of the American dream: xenophobia, bigotry, racism, hysteria.  Of course insanity isn’t really “catching”: in reality, you don’t become a schizophrenic yourself by hanging out with schizophrenics, and Cathy and Johnny have little realistic reason to fear for the reporter’s sanity.  But in Shock Corridor, madness doesn’t result from a mental defect, it results from moral stress.  You go insane from being shunned by your fellow citizens for having unwittingly been a Communist, from being unable to bear the weight of an entire race’s expectations on your shoulders, from guilt over using your intellectual gifts to bring unspeakable horror on your fellow man.  In this symbolic world, it makes sense that Johnny would go mad from the intense strain of trying to figure out what’s going on inside the asylum’s twisted corridors.  (The electroshock treatments probably don’t do much for his tenuous sanity, either).

Shock Corridor‘s shortsighted critics also condemn the movie for its unrealistic, hysterical performances.  Everyone in the movie either shouts or delivers their lines with solemnity that seems ridiculous; violence erupts every few minutes; and even a tender kiss results in angry accusations and flailing limbs.  But, though melodrama, particularly the soap opera-ish melodrama fashionable in early Hollywood, gets a bad name from being associated with popular trash, reflection suggests that it’s the proper tool to tell this particular story.  Everything in the movie is so consistently unreal—insanity is part of the movie’s bone structure—that only a strident tone fits right.  Melodrama deliberately seeks to exaggerate and heighten reality, particularly emotional reality.  Not only do the performers speak feverishly, the lines they are given are often absurdly overwrought.  Nobody speaks at all like a real person, and the words they say can verge on nonsense.  Cathy asks “do you think I like singing in that sewer with a hot light on my navel?” (why “navel”?), and advises “don’t be Moses leading your lunatics to the Pulitzer Prize.”  She tells Johnny, “Hamlet was made for Freud. Not you.” (What is this supposed to mean?  Johnny was not made for Freud, or Hamlet was not made for Johnny?  Does either alternative make much sense?)  Johnny tells Cathy (in a dream), “my yen for you goes up and down like a fever chart.”  No one talks this way, but it adds to the accumulation of oddities that make Shock Corridor the utterly unique, deranged, and beautiful motion picture that it is.  Just as Sam Fuller intended it to be.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dialog is unreal and pretentious, and the direction is heavyhanded, often mistaking sordidness for realism. The performers labor valiantly, but in vain.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“…an allegory of America today, not so much surreal as subreal in its hallucinatory view of history which can only be perceived beneath a littered surface of plot intrigue… a distinguished addition to that art form in which Hollywood has always excelled: the Baroque B-picture.”–Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“…the total effect remains strange and harrowing, particularly in Shock Corridor‘s strongest images: the linear patterns of the ward’s corridor and barred windows; the stripper’s breath blowing through a boa wrapped around her face; a climactic thunderstorm that rages in the reporter’s deteriorating psyche; and the twisting of a catatonic man’s rigid hands into a facsimile of an embrace… the disturbing, singular vision of Sam Fuller still generates heat.”–Bill Weber, Slant Magazine (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Shock Corridor (1963) – The Criterion Collection – includes three essays and a selection of press clippings on the film

IMDB LINK: Shock Corridor (1963)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Samuel Fuller, Eccentric Stylist of Poverty Row – The Criterion Collection’s re-releases of Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss inspires the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr to pen this Fuller primer

The Films of Samuel Fuller – Mike Grost lists some common features of and connections between Fuller films, and makes some observations about Shock Corridor in particular

MPP: Shock Corridor – Cartoonist Rick Trembles’ one panel comic treatment of Shock Corridor from his series “Motion Picture Purgatory”

DVD INFO: In 1998 the Criterion Collection released a bare-bones edition of Shock Corridor with no special features to speak of.  In 2011 they rectified this shameful slight with a lavish edition (buy) featuring a beautifully remastered print, illustrations by comic book artist Daniel Clowes, and a thirty page booklet with an essay by poet and critic Robert Polito.  The disc contains two excellent special features.  The more impressive is the hour long documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the M0vie Camera, which introduces us to the larger-than-life, cigar-chomping Sam Fuller by examining his three separate careers as a newspaperman, World War II solider and movie director.  The doc is narrated by Tim Robbins and features tributes to Fuller from Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch.  The second feature is an interview with the classy and elegant Constance Towers, who reflects on her experiences with Fuller and with director John Ford.  The Criterion Blu-ray (buy) contains the same features.