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 psychedelic sort of 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 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, a journalist 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 it’s 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 odd 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 its 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 its 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—though not in the real world—it makes sense that Johnny would go mad merely 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.

FEATURING: Masashi Endô, Kwancharu Shitichai, Guitar Wolf, Makoto Inamiya

PLOT: Guitar Wolf (frontman of the pistol-packing punk outfit Guitar Wolf) makes Ace a blood

brother when the would-be greaser is injured during a showdown between the band and an evil club owner; the rock star gives him a whistle he can use to summon the band in times of need, which comes in useful when Ace finds himself trapped in a town overrun by zombies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s more “wild” than “weird,” and more “awesome” than “great.”  The surrealism sometimes seems to result from carelessness—as if the director is thinking, “no one’s going to care if this character suddenly shoots lasers from his eyes, as long as something blows up and the soundtrack’s loud”—rather than an ideological dedication to absurdity. It’s a crazy, fluffy pop confection made from zombies, punk rock and flying saucers, fun but totally non-nutritious; the younger, or the drunker, you are, the more likely you are to fall in love with it.

COMMENTS:  When Wild Zero‘s advertising proclaims it a “super rock and roll jet movie!,” it reminds us that Westerners are as fascinated and amused by the way the Japanese absorb and alter American pop culture, chewing up and spitting our entertainment idioms back at us in twisted forms.  Wild Zero is a fairly obvious mashup of Rock and Roll High School and Night of the Living Dead, but when seasoned with casual Oriental surrealism, it turns into something that feels unique and unclassifiable: a “super rock and roll jet movie!”  The band Guitar Wolf, with their leather jackets, shades, shared surname (frontman Guitar Wolf shares the stage with sidekicks Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf), and fast and furious odes to teen rebellion, shamelessly crib from the Ramones.  However, they add their own flavor to the recipe.  The Ramones never had magical powers, arsenals of munitions, or flames shooting from their microphones, and to my knowledge they never went so far as to act as superheroes for their most dedicated fans, explode zombie heads with glowing guitar picks, or use samurai blades hidden in guitar necks to gut alien motherships.  Superhumanly cool and macho, like Clint Eastwood if he knew three guitar chords, Guitar Wolf is a role model to average fan and audience stand-in Ace, a Japanese greaser with a ducktailed pompadour, a motorcycle and self-confidence issues.  Mix in a shy love interest with a mysterious secret, three squabbling losers tooling around looking for a fallen meteorite, a sexy gun-runner with a camouflage-decorated Humvee, and—most memorably—a disgruntled pill-popping club owner in short-shorts and a pageboy haircut, sprinkle with a plague of walking undead and occasional flying saucers peeking in on the proceedings, and you have yourself one mixed up B-movie.  (If that’s not enough, then throw in a hermaphrodite and some gold eggs that keep recurring throughout the story with no explanation).  Stylistically, director Takeuchi stays true to his music video roots.  Scenes of Guitar Wolf in concert feature arcs of electricity improbably leaping from the band’s superheated axes, and the remainder of the movie’s reality is just as malleable.  Takeuchi may comically speed up the film for a chase sequence, or have Guitar Wolf appear from nowhere to advise Ace (putting every life lesson in the context of “rock and roll!”), or frame the screen with a cut out heart.  These techniques anticipate the arch artificiality of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though they’re not used as aggressively or with as much panache.  When it comes to shooting action sequences, Takeuchi’s not nearly as competent; there’s little terror or excitement to the zombie assaults, which are basically of the style where undead claws are centimeters away from grabbing the paralyzed heroine in one scene, then distant enough that the hero can run in from offscreen and weave between them to grab her and run to safety in the very next shot.  The movie is fun, but its basic messages are light: Guitar Wolf will do anything for their fans, and rock and roll (and, to a lesser extent, love) has a magical power to defeat zombies.

The Wild Zero DVD comes with its own drinking game (sample rule: take a drink anytime “fire shoots out of anything.”)  Since you’ll soon be too sloshed to pay attention, a beer glass appears on screen to prompt the player to imbibe.  Unfortunately, it would take an entire fraternity working in shifts to survive a single game without a trip to the emergency room.  There’s also an Easter Egg that gives you a seven minute interview with the real band Guitar Wolf: click here for instructions on accessing it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…never even tries to make sense. From video-generated lightning effects to magical, zombie-killing guitar picks, the film whirls from one madcap idea to another; if you start to worry that all of this might not be holding together, well, don’t worry; all the loud music and flashy lighting will keep you distracted.”–Mondo Digital (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Evan,” who called it “pretty great and pretty weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: John Boorman

FEATURING: Sean Connery, Charlotte Rampling, John Alderton, Sara Kestleman, Niall Buggy

PLOT: Zed is an Enforcer, a warrior and slaver who pillages the countryside and takes commands from Zardoz, a floating stone head, in a distant barbaric future.  One day Zed sneaks into the head and is carried away with it to Vortex 4, a land filled with technologically advanced people who never seem to age.  Zed is a curiosity to them and becomes both a slave and an object of scientific study, but his presence disrupts their society in profound ways.

BACKGROUND:

• Zardoz was John Boorman’s first film after being nominated for an Oscar for Deliverance.  Boorman had been trying to get an adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” off the ground, but the project fell through.
• This was Sean Connery’s second role after completing his run as James Bond with Diamonds Are Forever in 1971 (although he would return to the role for a one off in 1983′s Never Say Never Again).
• Burt Reynolds was originally slated to play Zed but fell ill.
• According to Boorman the film’s budget was one million dollars, $200,000 of which went to Connery’s salary.
• Cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth also lensed 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many other films.
• Boorman later co-wrote a novelization of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Try as he might to fill his film with unforgettable visions of giant floating stone heads vomiting firearms and of humanity’s entire cultural heritage projected onto the half-nude bodies of immortal hippies, the one image that adorns almost every review of Boorman’s Zardoz is a simple one: Sean Connery standing in the desert, pistol in hand, ponytail insouciantly thrown over one shoulder, dressed in thigh high leather boots and a red diaper with matching suspenders.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:   This sci-fi spectacle starts with serious ideas and weighty themes,

Original trailer for Zardoz

but gets weighed down under an avalanche of self-indulgent dialogue, a confused script, low-budget psychedelics, and consistently bizarre directorial choices.  Fill a talented young director’s head full of anticipation of adapting Tolkien, then pull that opportunity out from under him but instead give him Sean Connery and carte blanche to make whatever film he wants, and the result, apparently, is Zardoz.  (Oh, and LSD might have had something to do with it, too).

COMMENTS:  Zardoz is introduced by a floating head weaving through a void, slowly approaching us while enunciating with almost parodical Shakespearean precision.  He announces that the tale he is about to relate is “full of mystery and intrigue, rich in irony, and most satirical.” (When imagining him speaking these lines, consider that he rolls the “r” in “richly” ostentatiously, as if auditioning for the role of harlequin at a Renaissance Faire).  He goes on to explain that, although in this tale he is “the puppet master” who manipulates the characters in the story, he too is “invented for your entertainment and amusement.”  Eyes widening and voice lowering, he ends by addressing us directly: “And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay?”  Smirking and chuckling:  “Is God in show business too?”  By this time, his head has filled enough of the frame to reveal that his goatee and mustachio have been painted on with a magic marker.

Welcome to the world of Zardoz.  Soon, a giant stone head will be explaining that “the gun is good, the penis is evil,” Sean Connery will tramp about utopia in a red jockstrap with a confused expression on his face, and immortals will age half of a reluctant member’s face by humming and waving their fingers at him because he refuses to enter second level meditation with them.  Zardoz is a movie that deliberately evokes high culture, with its soundtrack consisting of variations on Beethoven’s “Allegretto,” citations to Greek mythology, rooms full of classical statuary, and a Nietzsche-quoting protagonist who has to literally kill God, not once, but twice.  And yet the film seems to realize, and at times even relish, its own ridiculousness: its hard to say that a movie that puts James Bond in a wedding dress has no sense of humor.   And of course there’s that floating-head prologue reminding us of the movie’s satirical intent, and Friend’s dying words: “it was all a joke.”   Zardoz wants to have it both ways, to be simultaneously a profound movie about ideas and a campy absurdist goof.  And the funny thing is, to a large extent, it succeeds—at least as entertainment, and by listing strongly to the “absurdist goof” side of the spectrum.

Zardoz begins with an appealing “hard science fiction” feel to it.  In an age of giant mainframes and science fiction’s presumption that supercomputers would grow increasing massive as they became more powerful, Boorman foresees the development of micro-storage, with all the world’s knowledge being stored in light patterns trapped inside a crystal about the size of a clenched fist.  The future society is well-drawn—class based, with ignorant Brutals in the Outlands bred like racehorses and manipulated by effete Eternals living in luxury in the Vortex behind invisible walls—even if some of the details of their daily lives seem silly.  The society seems to be largely matriarchal—at least, females May and Consuela seem to be the prime drivers of the political action.  There’s a strong temptation to read a political allegory, with the young Eternals and their Age of Aquarius meditation rituals representing a flower power generation come to power and corrupted just like their forebears.  The central idea, that immortality would be a curse, is intriguing and romantic; the Eternals resemble Greek gods, which resonates well with the picture’s ambitions to become a religious allegory.  The inhuman sexlessness of the Eternals is creepy, too high a price to pay for immortality.  Penetration, associated with virile Zed, is a continual theme.   “The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men,” warns the stone Zardoz.  “No Brutal has ever penetrated a vortex,” marvels May.  “You have penetrated me… Come into my center,” says the Tabernacle, sounding uncomfortably like HAL 9000 trying to talk dirty.

Any of these seeds of ideas might have made for a thoughtful sci-fi feature if followed through to the end, but the movie’s too stoned to keep its mind on one thing before wandering off to the next cool concept.  Consider the film’s climax, where Zed is trapped inside the hall of mirrors in the crystal Tabernacle (whose determination to destroy him manifests itself as the cast performing interpretative dances while moaning like ghosts in a Halloween haunted house).  How will Zed defeat the omnipotent machine?  A masked image of him in his previous incarnation as an Eliminator appears in a mirror, and he shoots it, symbolically killing his past identity and thereby being reborn as the messiah who brings death to the land.  So the story has been about Zed’s spiritual actualization, overcoming his own Brutality, all along.  Wait, what the…?

The movie contains so many odd digressions—more “WTF?” moments per minute than perhaps any other widely distributed film of the 1970s—that everyone will have their personal favorite.  Perhaps its the moment when, for no ascertainable reason, Friend starts speaking backwards.  Perhaps its the moment when Sean Connery puts on a wedding dress.  Perhaps its when the Eternals try to induce an erection in Zed—purely in the interest of science, you understand—by showing him softcore porn on a big screen TV, including two gals mud wrestling, while the crowd stares in rapt amazement at Connery’s crotch.  Perhaps its the bathetic finale when Zed and Consuela morph into doctor’s office display skeletons holding hands.   It could be any of several lines of geeky purple dialogue, all delivered with deadpan sincerity: “We will touch-teach you, and you will give us your seed.”  (Zardoz’s “the penis is evil” speech is an obvious choice here).

It could be the sight of pistol-packing Sean Connery running about the desert and tumbling down hills in that saggy red diaper.  Without a doubt, Connery is a huge asset to the film’s camp value.  Being a movie star, he doesn’t disappear into the role.  We’re always conscious of the fact that that’s James Bond up there on the screen exposing his pale hairy torso and tossing an Apathetic lass into a bale of hay with rape on his mind.  When Zed looks confused—as he should, being a stranger in a strange land—we can’t help but imagine that Connery’s projecting that befuddlement by thinking to himself, “What the hell am I doing here running around in my Underoos?”  Sean does get off one great, sly moment, when he looks down to matter-of-factly admire his own erection, then calmly glances back up to lock eyes with an uncomfortable Charlotte Rampling.  But generally, his restrained, unemotional performance is the stuff of schadenfreude: we’re happy to see this larger-than-life figure brought down to such a ridiculous level.

Another clear asset is the visuals.  Boorman has never lacked for a great cinematic sense, and he and cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth have produced a great looking film.  The special effects are impressive and interesting, even when they’re more than a bit ridiculous in the context of the story.  The great floating stone head of Zardoz is unforgettable, more so when it unexpectedly opens its mouth and belches forth guns and ammo.   Many of the scenes in the Vortex rely on projecting a second image directly on another surface.  We see flashbacks of Zed’s life as a Brutal cast on a trapezoidal screen in the background while he lies on a massage table in the foreground: naked female mannequins stuck to what appear to be saran wrap walls decorate the sides of the building.  At one crucial point, images are projected directly on topless bodies: mathematical formulas, Da Vinci frescoes, a musical score.  While the hall of mirrors finale in the Tabernacle is quite silly, you won’t be tempted to shut your eyes to the trippy visuals, either.  The vistas, many shot in the misty hills of Wicklow, Ireland, are often stunning, and when hordes of mounted Exterminators ride over the rise, the scene presages the grandiose martial imagery Boorman would conjure seven years later in his excellent Arthurian epic Excalibur.  (The character of Arthur Frayn/Zardoz is also an embryonic sketch for Nicol Williamson’s Merlin, and in fact it seems that everything Boorman had hoped to seriously achieve in Zardoz was actually realized in the later film).

Is Zardoz an unintentional comedy, or was it always intended as a sly counterculture satire?  Or, did Boorman come to realize that his bloated epic was doing pratfalls over its own clumsy feet, and add a few intentional jokes and ironies in an attempt to salvage the film’s reputation and pass it off as a self-aware comedy?  Boorman’s slightly embarrassed DVD commentary suggests the third option, as does the fact that he added the floating-head prologue suggesting that the film shouldn’t be taken entirely in earnest in response to the befuddlement of early test audiences.  At any rate, it hardly matters.  Whether you think you’re laughing with Zardoz or at Zardoz, the point is that you’re laughing, and laughing with amazement.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…lushly photographed piece of twaddle… a glittering cultural trash pile, and probably the most gloriously fatuous movie since The Oscar—although the passages between the laughs droop.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…a genuinely quirky movie, a trip into a future that seems ruled by perpetually stoned set decorators…  Every once in a while, a movie like [this] comes along; a movie you’ve got to see so that you, too, can be in the dark about it.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“Hoity-toity and self-important to the point of supreme silliness, Zardoz is an odd artifact of a time in Hollywood when moviemaking and drug-taking often intertwined, to the benefit of no one but bad movie fans like us.”–John Wilson, The Official Razzie Movie Guide

IMDB LINK: Zardoz (1974)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Zardoz Online – Welcome to the Vortex – Contains many Zardoz stills, quotes from pressbooks, and other digital memorabilia, though the site hasn’t been updated in years

zardozthemovie: ZARDOZ: Out of the Vortex – A (low traffic) Yahoo group devoted to Zardoz

Zardoz B-movie review – Humorous review from badmovies.org, with plenty of stills, a clip, soundbites, and a long discussion thread

Zardoz – Television Tropes and Idioms – A list of pop-culture idioms cited in Zardoz from the popular tvtropes site

History and the death wish: Zardoz as open form – Academic essay by Fredric Jameson in Jump Cut No. 3 (1974) attempts (and fails) to find meaning in Zardoz

“Book of Eli” Reboots “Zardoz” – Annalee Newitz claims (half-seriously?) that 2010′s Denzel Washington feature The Book of Eli is essentially an inferior remake of Zardoz

DVD INFO: The affordable 20th Century Fox release (buy) is presented in anamorphic widescreen. Extras include the trailer, multiple radio spots, and most importantly a commentary from Boorman, which is rather sparse and which fails to address the “deeper meanings” that many fans see in the film.

The film can also be rented on Amazon’s Video-on-Demand service (rent). Zardoz is not on Blu-ray at the time of this writing, but given the continued interest in the film and its impressive visuals it would not be at all shocking to see it released in the near future.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Felix,” who said it “seemed to be an old post-apocalyptic James Bond just because Sean Connery is the main character of the film and he has a gun with him… this movie is great!”  Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Phil Caracas, Maria Moulton, Murielle Varhelyi

PLOT: The Son of God recruits retired Mexican wrestler “Santos” to help him defeat the

vampires who are preying on Ottawa’s lesbian population.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s defiantly odd, but not consistently funny or entertaining enough to rank among the all-time greats.  If you saw any two-minute stretch of JCVH selected at random, you might be convinced that this was a work of camp genius; but string 45 such segments together, and the comedy value runs a little thin.  It’s a hard movie to peg: in its own way, given its low budget, its a sort of masterpiece, and at the same time it’s sort of a disaster.  I think that if it had offered us one less overlong kung fu battle, and one more song and dance number, it might have had a shot at exalted weirdness. Ultimately, though, just as the tone is more irreverent than blasphemous, the style is more zany than weird, and that should keep it off this particular List.

COMMENTS:  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is a stew of pop-cinema leftovers, mixing kung fu with horror, Mexican wrestling and even scraps of blaxploitation, all seasoned with a hint of sacrilege.  Like all peasant cuisine, it will be comfort food for many, but offend some refined palates—it’s definitely an acquired taste.  The technical aspects effectively evoke the feel of late seventies/early eighties exploitation movies, with drab urban cinematography, sound obviously added in post-production, and even a cheesy “waka-waka” funk theme as the heroes cruise down the highway. The action scenes are a problem here: for one thing, there are too many, and they’re too long. They’re just competent enough to remind us that they’re not quite up to snuff; Phil Caracas’ Jesus shows reasonable high-kicking athleticism, but he’s no action hero, and it would have been funnier and more endearing if he’d been clumsier. At any rate, the movie can’t be accused of false advertising. The campy/sacrilegious title scares off the squares and the fundies (though it’s obvious the filmmakers are clearly fans of JC’s philosophy of love and tolerance, if not proponents of his divinity). More to the point, the movie delivers exactly what the title promises: the Prince of Peace staking multiple bloodsuckers through the heart. As if that weren’t strange enough, there are plenty of absurd little low-budget surprises along the way: a crazed, shaggy narrator who jumps out from hedges and spouts Bible verses; punk monks; a martial arts melee between J.C. and a gang of atheists; a talking cherry sundae; a fat masked wrestler with his own theme music. There’s even a musical number, which is decently choreographed and librettoed (“C’mon now gentlemen, c’mon now ladies/We’ll kick these vampires straight back to Hades!)”  Still, with all that deliberate jokey absurdity inserted into the movie, it’s the idiosyncratic oddities that catch the mind’s eye.  For one thing, there’s the movie’s obsession with lesbians—not fetishized lipstick lesbians, but unglamorous, butch tattooed lesbians.  In the movie’s view, they represent the dispossessed—Jesus’ kind of people—the modern day equivalent of the New Testament’s tax collectors and harlots.  At one point, the Virgin Mary, speaking through a night light, tells us that God loves lesbians because “they get so much done in a day!”  Then there’s the minor character named Gloria Oddbottom (possibly the only heterosexual woman in the film). She’s equipped with a huge prosthetic bottom, and every man she passes gives it a squeeze; she has no other function than to serve as a bizarre running joke. But possibly the weirdest thing about Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is the fact that the messiah’s first act in anticipation of his grand apocalyptic battle with hordes of sapphic nosferatu is to tool into Ottawa on his wimpy blue motor scooter and go and get a shave and a haircut. Through the rest of the movie Christ sports close-cropped hair and a pair of earrings, and he even dumps his iconic white robes for a nondescript navy blue t-shirt. No explanation is ever offered for this un-Christlike behavior; it’s one of those unconsciously weird touches that turns the film into something a little odder than your typical revered-religious-icon-battling-the-undead comedy.

Actually, I have an explanation to offer for Jesus’ mysterious haircut. If you watch Caracas’ pre-shearing scuffle with the lesbo vamps, you’ll see that his long wig is constantly blowing across his face, making it difficult to execute his stunts. The scene probably required multiple takes because of follicle-induced visibility issues, and a directorial decision was made to lose the flowing locks for subsequent tussles. Jesus’ new, hip look is therefore more the result of practical considerations rather than aesthetics. I consider the above theory to be my foremost contribution to the massive body of Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter scholarship.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a chopsocky, zero-budget masterpiece that has ‘cult classic’ written all over it in big, bloody letters.”–Adam Nayman, EyeWeekly.com (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Funakdelic,” who added, “fair warning, though it’s weird, J.C. Vampire Hunter really is BAD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)