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CAPSULE: FREE LSD (2023)
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Free LSD is available for VOD purchase or rental.
DIRECTED BY: Dmitri Coates
FEATURING: Keith Morris, Dmitri Coates, Autry Fulbright II, DH Peligro, David Yow, Chelsea Debo, Chloe Dykstra
PLOT: An aging sex-shop owner takes an experimental erectile dysfunction medication that sends him to an alternate reality where he’s lead singer of the punk band Off!.
COMMENTS: Free LSD joins a small group of narrative movies made by bands. Not movies that are basically filmed concerts, or movies made by others to exploit the popularity of a band like A Hard Days Night or Head, or big-budget adaptations of prog-rock concept albums like Tommy or The Wall, or even movies written by musicians but directed by professionals (the Foo Fighter’s Studio 666, Jennifer Lopez‘ This Is Me… Now)—but movies written and directed and performed by the rockers themselves. Successful examples of this subgenre include Frank Zappa‘s 200 Motels, the Talking Heads’ True Stories, and (at least arguably) the Flaming Lips’ Christmas on Mars.
Of course, for every musician-led effort that’s a qualified success, there are many more that are mixed bags at best: the improvised psychedelia of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, Paul Simon’s box office bomb One Trick Pony, Melanie Martinez‘ heartfelt but adolescent K-12. And so it is with punk supergroup Off!’s offering to the genre. Musicians bring a unique perspective to filmmaking, but they aren’t filmmakers. So when they try their hands at this new medium, we hope for something that departs from the usual, but expect something that isn’t overly polished: something raw and ragged and maybe not wholly coherent that nonetheless sustains a level of exotic interest for adventurous viewers. That is exactly what we get with Free LSD.
One of the first problems bands face when making their own movies is that the band members will act in it. Lead guitarist Coates, writing himself an alternate reality role as a coke-sniffing, secretary groping music exec, does the best in front of the camera—but since he also serves as director, it might have been stretching himself too thin to also play the lead. Bassist Fulbright is serviceable as a cult member/ladies’ man. Drummer Peligro has few lines and is in a coma for much of the film, but he had a good excuse—he was undergoing chemotherapy as the movie was being shot. It only seems natural to cast your lead vocalist in the lead role, but that becomes a big problem here, because whatever his talents as a frontman and singer, Keith Morris lacks any emotive qualities as an actor. (At one point the script requires him to do a spit-take; I wasn’t entirely convinced he actually spit, despite seeing the liquid spewing from his mouth). Hidden in a heavy wig and fake beard, Morris plays an aging hippie who runs a sex shop during the day and hosts an Art Bell-style UFO radio show at night, who is also the improbable erotic target of a hot twenty-something barista with pink hair who favors miniskirts and disfavors brassieres, and has a thing for sleazy graying bohemians who can’t act. Unfortunately, Morris’ monotonously-enacted story takes up the entire first act.
On one level, Free LSD serves as a sampler for Off!’s album of the same name: there are a handful of partial performances of album cuts, just enough to tease fans, but not so much that the concert scenes overwhelm the story. As for the plot—it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s not really an issue. It’s not even clear where the bad guys come from—they seem like they should be aliens, but the promotional material claims they’re an “advanced AI species.” Unless I missed a throwaway line, nothing in the actual movie attempts to explain their origins or motives. But Free LSD isn’t a serious hard sci-fi movie, it’s a movie about a group of eccentrics who take an experimental boner medication and find themselves in the region of the multiverse where they’re famous punk musicians. It is loosely structured in three acts—introducing the premise through Morris’ character, getting the band together, triumphing over the baddies at the end—but it wanders all over the place. In this case, the digressiveness is a feature, not a bug; it allows us to take in scenes like James Duval popping in for no real reason as a street hustler with pierced nipples and a red cowboy hat, an erectile dysfunction parody ad, stopovers at a never-explained inter-reality beekeeping waystation, and an ending where Off! goes metaphysically platinum by giving away free samples of their Viagra-based psychedelic (delivered via blotter tabs that look indistinguishable from LSD) with their latest album to inaugurate an era of peace and love. Given the level of acting here and the generally low production values, a conventional narrative would have doomed the film to failure for everyone but hardcore Off! fans. Instead, there’s just enough insanity in the mix to hold your interest.
Musician/comedian Jack Black produced, and has a small role in the film (appearing remotely via cellphone). On a sad note, DH Peligro, who stepped in at the last moment to replace Off!’s regular drummer (who had another commitment), died in late 2022, soon after the film was completed.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: DAMSELVIS, DAUGHTER OF HELVIS (1994)
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DIRECTED BY: John Michael McCarthy
FEATURING: Sherry Lynn Garris, Adimu Ajanaku
PLOT: Country girl Ilsa discovers she is actually the daughter of the dead god Helvis, and travels to the pyramid in Memphis to resurrect him, while Black Jesus races to stop her.
COMMENTS: In the first few minutes, standing in a muddy Mississippi field, Black Jesus shoots one of his followers in the head and immediately resurrects him. And so begins Damselvis: a schizophrenic mix of Southern Gothic, grindhouse shocks, and rockabilly culture shot through a distinctively kitsch-surreal lens. It also begins the wild extended universe of John Michael McCarthy (or JMM, as he sometimes styles himself).
Damselvis is a simple hero’s journey (complete with a closing epigram from “Joseph Cambelvis”). Young Ilsa discovers her divine heritage as Damselvis and goes on a quest to fulfill her destiny. There is an unexpectedly serious theme about paganesque iconography (represented by Elvis, the chief deity of the pop culture pantheon) replacing the role of Christianity in American culture (a trend McCarthy celebrates); in other words, how rock n’ roll became bigger than Jesus. But it’s all done in a wacky, surreally comic sexploitation style: the journey is far more important than the destination. You keep watching for the abundant nudity (including a lesbian encounter in the woods), the campy biker violence, and the goofy supernaturalism, which climaxes with resurrected giant-eyeball Helvis emerging from his guitarcophagus to battle Black Jesus, who has transformed into a Rastafarian werewolf. You’re guaranteed never to have seen anything quite like this before (unless you’ve seen another JMM movie).
As a first outing, Damselvis‘ two-thousand dollar budget is painfully obvious. The camcorder photography gives it a Polaroid quality look. (Some cheap, lurid-yet-muted lighting and filters appear during the film’s more psychedelic moments to liven things up, but it still looks cheesy as hell.) The sound goes in and out (closed captions are recommended, though sometimes even they read “inaudible”). Locations are remote fields, back roads, junkyards, attics, cheap diners, and abandoned houses in Mississippi and/or Tennessee (there’s also one surreptitious shoot at a cool waterfall, and a brief stint inside the Egyptology display at the University of Memphis). Makeup is ridiculous. The actors are clearly amateurs winging it. The soundtrack is raucous lo-fi psychobilly from local Memphis bands (including JMM’s own Rockroaches). The highest production value goes into Damselvis’ costume: all angel-white, consisting of a vest with long fringes (reminiscence of a Vegas-era Elvis jumpsuit), thigh-high lace-up boots, and hot pants. This aesthetic is charming to some, and certainly fits the film’s redneck surrealist atmosphere, but I would argue JMM’s future shot-on-film efforts benefit enormously from the infusion of a few extra thousand bucks.
Damselvis, Daughter of Helvis was a surprise Blu-ray release from Vinegar Syndrome (via shot-on-video specialist partner-label Saturn’s Core). Given its shot-on-video provenance, the movie’s audiovisual quality is awful, including occasional VHS tracking errors. That’s as it should be; it’s key to the movie’s DIY authenticity. Since it’s under the Vinegar imprint, the disc includes a ton of special features, including a commentary from and interview with the director, a reel of behind-the-scenes footage that’s almost twice as long as the movie itself, JMM reading from his own “adult” comix (including the original “Damselvis”), footage of a Helvis-themed punk concert in Memphis, and trailers for other sleazily weird Saturn’s Core releases. JMM recently self-released his third film, The Sore Losers (1997), on Blu-ray, but we’re praying to Helvis to see his second, the long-unavailable Teenage Tupelo (1996), resurrected soon.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: RADIO ON (1979)
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DIRECTED BY: Christopher Petit
FEATURING: David Beames, Lisa Kreuzer
PLOT: A disc jockey drives across the UK when he learns about his brother’s death.
COMMENTS: Radio On is well aware that its soundtrack is its strongest (or, at least, its most marketable) component. The movie begins with the sound of a radio dial quickly migrating through static and brief news snippets to fasten onto David Bowie singing “Heroes” (the rare extended version where the crooner sings the lyrics in both English and German). The main cast are quickly credited, and then we launch into the soundtrack credits: Bowie. Kraftwerk. King Crimson’s Robert Fripp. Ian Dury. A bunch of late punk/early new wave acts now forgotten. Devo. (Though not credited, a young Sting will also cameo, as a guitar-playing gas station pump jockey who sings Eddie Cochran’s “Three Steps to Heaven.”) Cinematic staple “Heroes” continues to drone as the black and white camera pans through a cluttered apartment to eventually light upon a body in a bathtub.
Unfortunately, the zeitgeist tunes and superior camerawork (by Wim Wenders associate Martin Schäfer, one of several connections to the German director found in Radio On) are the movie’s only real draws. Made just as Thatcherism was taking hold in the U.K., Radio On is as dour and torpid as the mindset of liberal intellectuals of the period. That body in the bathtub belongs to our DJ protagonist Robert’s dead brother, who, after 25 or so minutes of dilly-dallying, staring off into space, and getting a haircut in what seems like real time, sets him off on a journey to find out what happened. The camera focuses on the ugliest examples of modern British architecture it can find—factories, tenement skyscrapers, freeway on-ramps—so that when we finally see the flat and bleak English landscape outside his car window, it looks pastoral by comparison. Newscasts blather on about crime and obscenity raids, until our expressionless antihero turns on some Kraftwerk in boredom. It’s all very Antonioniesque, stylishly alienated and dispassionate. Once the journey gets afoot, Petit livens up the scenario (not a difficult task) with a few chance encounters: a Scottish army deserter, Sting, and a plot detour with a German woman (Wenders’ ex-wife Kreuzer) fruitlessly searching for the daughter her ex-husband has taken to England. Robert’s car deteriorates throughout the journey, until it ends up stalled out at a quarry by a beach. We never learn exactly what happened to the brother.
I’m sure Radio On accurately captures the mood of anomie among leftists in 1979 England. As a time capsule, it has some value beyond the soundtrack and cinematography. But the aggressively disenchanted pallor makes it a hard sell for people who weren’t there. Despite the Bowie tunes, most of the movie informed by long, ambiguous-but-sad silences.
Radio On was a surprise late 2021 release from Vinegar Syndrome (via partner label Fun City). The movie has a small but loyal British following, and among the surprising number of extras on the disc (including a Kier-La Janisse commentary track and multiple interviews with director Petit) is “Radio On (Remix),” a 24-minute experimental film composed of altered Radio On footage with a schizophrenic audio mix and lines of poetry appearing in subtitles. I’m personally much fonder of this abstract, dreamlike approach to the material, but it’s difficult to say how it would work as a standalone piece for someone with no knowledge of the feature.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…an enigmatic and offbeat walk on the wild side.”–Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia (Blu-ray)
CAPSULE: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)
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DIRECTED BY: Allan Arkush
FEATURING: P. J. Soles, Dey Young, Vincent Van Patten, Clint Howard, Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, The Ramones
PLOT: Riff Randell battles the punk-hating administration at her high school by invoking the musical powers of her favorite band, The Ramones.
COMMENTS: The Ramones were icons of minimalism. Progenitors of punk, they pioneered a sound that was somehow both retro and revolutionary, delivering two-chord, two-minute landmarks that had none of the feel of craft and all of the sensation of having been spewed out of the most primal reaches of the band members’ autonomic nervous systems. Everything about them was reduced to its bare essentials: a basic guitar-bass-drum setup, fronted by a flat, nasal vocal that was tuneful while making no pretensions to being musical, presented by a group that spoke to punk’s fierce independence with a façade of careful uniformity, from the matching leather jackets and torn jeans to the identical messy face-obscuring Kate Jackson hairstyles, and even extending to their manufactured noms de théâtre. Everything about them was carefully engineered to celebrate everybody by being nobody.
So the notion that the Ramones would be the centerpiece of a bubbly teenager’s every waking moment is a little dissonant. And that they would somehow come to have an entire feature film devoted to them—one with a substantial cult following—is nothing short of bizarre. It’s the domain of old people to complain that the kids are making idols out of empty shells, but the emptiness of the Ramones is part of their very essence. They’re almost antithetical to the idea of teenybop worship. To watch P J. Soles’ Riff Randell—a veritable firehose of giddy hyperactivity—go gaga for this quartet of empty t-shirts is to plunge headlong through the looking glass. Try to imagine a Disney Channel original movie where a precocious 12-year old learns self-confidence through the power of her favorite band, and that band turns out to be GWAR. (Note to Disney: Please greenlight this. I will absolutely write the script for you.)
But for the purposes of the Roger Corman film factory, the Ramones hardly matter. They’re answer to a Mad Lib wherein [INSERT NAME OF BAND] inspires kids to overthrow those dullard grownups. (It’s telling that Corman’s original suggestion was center the film around disco music, an idea that would have been truly transgressive if it had been filmed two years earlier and dared to address the politics of race and sexual orientation endemic to the genre.) Rock ‘n’ Roll High School has one goal, and it’s to tell the kids how much cooler they are than those stick-in-the-mud adults. And if we have to put our thumb on the scale to make the old people especially dorky and uncool, well hey, that’s just Roger Corman being a smart businessman.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the kind of movie that Rock ‘n’ Continue reading CAPSULE: ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HIGH SCHOOL (1979)