Thank God It's Friday?

FRIDAY THE 13th: THE NEW BLOOD (1988)
Directed by John Carl Buechler

FRIDAY THE 13th: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)
Directed by Rob Hedden

Love ‘em or leave ‘em, the Friday the 13th series kept horror on the big movie screens through the particularly dry Eighties, in appeasement of rowdy, appreciative audiences who cheered on the graphic murders of unsympathetic youths. Hockey-masked killing machine Jason Voorhees would arise from the dead time and again to provide grist for the mill, and one could count on some seasonal fright flick fare around Halloween time. While often cited as an example of fostering a callous disregard for human life among the young and impressionable, it’s hard to take any of the murders, especially towards the end of the series – seriously. Characters walk into brightly lit rooms where the killer is readily visible and pretend not to notice, people are murdered by being pushed across a room, et cetera. It’s alarming to note more evidence of a societal slide today with video games that encourage adolescents to kill virtual characters in a wide assortment of graphic ways, and real-life torture and murder scenes being available for a download off the net.

Paramount Studios honors its machete-wielding cash cow with two deluxe DVD editions on the waning entries in the series, Friday the 13th: The New Blood (1988) and Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989). Both films try to bring something new to the shopworn, minimal plots of the previous entries. At this late stage, it appears that the Jason franchise was taking a lesson or two from the competing Nightmare On Elm Street series by jettisoning rational narratives altogether.

Friday the 13th: The New Blood ups the ante with a not-so defenseless teenager this time in the form of Tina (Lars Park Lincoln), a telekinetic teen with an even greater grasp of her abilities than Stephen King’s Carrie White. Taken to Camp Crystal Lake by her domineering mother and overbearing therapist for a week of intensive analysis, Carrie joins a nearby cadre of party hounds (those damn kids never do learn, do they?), and an unintentional burst of orgone energy from our heroine raises Jason from his watery grave (where we lost saw him in Friday the 13th Part IV) and the killings begin anew.

The New Blood has many impressive special effects set pieces, befitting a film directed by movie monster maker supreme John Carl Buechler. However, the MPAA was really cracking down on graphic violence at the time of this film’s release, and the majority of the murders are relatively sauce less this go round. As Buechler explains in the disc’s accompanying documentary Jason’s Destroyer: The Making of Friday the 13th: The New Blood, censors ripped into the film with far more frenzy than Jason did to his victims! Part of this is rectified with the addition of 21 “slashed scenes,” varying from snipped bits of dialogue to scenes of far greater graphic carnage. Other extras on this disc include a commentary track including Buechler, actors Lars Park Lincoln and Kane Hodder, and the fun short “Makeup by Maddy: Need A Little Touch Up Work My Ass” where two actresses from the film meet cute for a fun afternoon of shopping. An additional documentary, Mind Over Matter: The Truth About Telekinesis, featuring paranormal researchers, points out the distressing truth that those blessed with telekinesis can never harness it when a dangerous situation actually arises.

“A maniac is chasing us!” “Welcome to New York,” snaps a brassy Big Apple waitress in Friday the 13th VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. This entry remains controversial even among fans of the series. It takes Jason out of a remote rural setting and pits him in a bustling urban landscape, where his menace is diluted considerably. As it has been pointed out elsewhere there are already lots of people like Jason in Manhattan already, and the heavily armed populace there would more than likely take him out with a store-bought Magnum should he give them any out-of-towner ‘tude. The title alone is more than a bit of a cheat, as Jason chases around his captive prey on a cruise ship and spends less than half an hour in the city.

Jason Takes Manhattan has stunning location photography but leaves all coherent narrative in the garbage can. Characters lie still in order to get killed, survivors of a boat wreck jump out of a lifeboat with their clothes cleanly pressed, and Jason swims undetected across the Atlantic Ocean to stalk his victims in the city. The filmmakers at this point were keen that crowds didn’t line up for these films for their believability, and include a scene of Jason knocking the head off a victim to have it go flying clean off in the manner of a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Toy Robot!

Special features include on this disc include a commentary track by actors Scott Reeves, Jensen Dagget and Kane Hodder, the documentary New York Has A New Problem, The Making of Friday the 13th: Jason Takes Manhattan, slashed scenes and a blooper reel. Audiences recently clamored for Jason once again in 2009 with a Friday the 13th remake in 2009 that was number one at the box office opening week. As long as the public demands the slaughter of innocents on its movie screens, it seems that a certain hulking hockey-masked slayer will only be too happy to comply.

MONSTERS, MARRIAGE AND MURDER IN MANCHVEGAS (2009)

Directed by Charles Roxburgh

Jenny (Marie Dellicker), All-Star Pete (Thomas Scalzo) and Marshall (Matt Farley) are the sole members of M.O.S. – the Manchvegas Outlaw Society. The three are cheerfully free of all ambition, and support themselves by doing lots of odd jobs in their small town of Manchvegas (in reality, Manchester, New Hampshire). They deliver papers, sell lemonade and record insipid pop music they peddle to the locals. Jenny begins to suspect that there may be more to life, and is frustrated that her relationship with Marshall hasn’t strayed from the platonic. She begins to date a series of older men, and Marshall and All-Star Pete begin a series of childish pranks to put a damper on Jenny’s romantic aspirations. In the meantime, Melinda Corbin (Sharon Scalzo) starts an affair with local grocer Vince (Kyle Kochan) in spite of her ever disapproving father (Kevin McGee). Vince and Melinda then become engaged, when Melinda mysteriously disappears while skinny dipping in the local stream. Shortly afterwards, other young women set to jump the broom turn up murdered. Could the local legend of a tribe of woolly “near men,” the Gospercaps, be somehow responsible? Determined to get to the bottom of all of this, Jenny and Marshall masquerade as a soon-to-be-betrothed couple, leading to a thrill-packed conclusion.

From the makers of Freaky Farley (2008), Monsters, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas is a movie that is nearly impossible to dislike. Perpetually sunny and good natured, one is far too willing to look past its technical roughness to see a good hearted attempt to entertain its audience. The movie revels in its small town innocence. There is only one cuss word, the bloodless murders take place offstage and the Gospercaps, in their kneejerk monster getups would fail to frighten the most excitable infant. All scenes, with few exceptions are set outdoors in bucolic settings.

The project is altogether so harmless that an unintentional sinister aura begins to pervade it. The character of Marshall (producer Farley, who also played the lead in Freaky Farley) appears to be a textbook example of arrested development. His desire to keep his gang of three chaste and pure verges on the unwholesome, and when he reluctantly accepts Jenny as a girlfriend, one wonders if the relationship ever gets up to the plate, let alone first, second or third base.

In spite of this, the film adheres to its Walt Disney coda of clearly defined bad guys and pure-hearted heroes, and a good time is guaranteed for all. Shot on Fuji Film (a rarity in this digital age), the DVD includes several documentaries on the making of the film. Director Charles Roxburgh cites the American horror films of the mid-Seventies to early Eighties as his biggest influence, but Manchvegas is as far away from those downbeat features as you can get. There are trailers for other films from the same production team, the aforementioned Freaky Farley among them. Manchvegas works well as an after dinner mint after an evening of overly serious film fare.

Battle of the Black Devil Dolls

BLACK DEVIL DOLL FROM HELL (1984)
Directed by Chester Novell Turner

BLACK DEVIL DOLL (2007)
Directed by Jonathan Lewis

Circumspect church woman Helen Black (Shirley L. Jones) tends to her spotless home with vinyl-slipcase- encrusted furniture in an unnamed Illinois suburb. Stopping in a curiosity shop one day, she buys a dreadlocked ventriloquist dummy in spite of the shopkeeper’s warning – cue Casiotone key held down with one finger, eeeeeeeeee – that the doll always returns by its own volition after a couple of days. Once home, the dummy comes to life and spies on Shirley in the shower. The doll overpowers her, then bounds and rapes her bellowing Ebonics-laced obscenities. “Taste the wrath of my tongue, BITCH!”In typical faulty movie logic, the frigid young woman later decides she likes rough sex and begins to cruise the local singles bars for men.

Once you’ve had wood, nothing’s good, and Helen sends her flesh and blood suitor away and has a fatal confrontation with the doll. True to form, the doll returns to the curiosity shop to await a new bitch.

The original Black Devil Doll from Hell (1984), from gutter auteur “Chester N. Turner” was a true cult phenomenon. Found in only the most desolate of mom-and-pop video stores in the Eighties and Nineties, few knew what they were getting into when they popped the VHS tape in their home entertainment systems. Apparently filmed with only the most primitive of video cameras and edited with two VCRs, Devil Doll was a joyously repugnant misuse of magnetic tape. Ugly, foul and mean-spirited, the film fulfilled a requirement that even the roughest horror films often fail to deliver – there were some people out there who really didn’t want you to see this, as it spoke of harsh truths and ugly sentiments lurking in the male consciousness. There’s a scene in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) where the white trash killers kill a family and videotape it for later amusement. Devil Doll was the real thing, baby. Better not get hit by a truck tomorrow and let your family find this tape in your linen closet.

Chester N. Turner would go on to make another shot-on-video horror film, Tales from the Quadead Zone (1986), a horror omnibus once again featuring Shirley L. Jones in the wraparound story. Comforted by the ghost of her dead son, represented by an off-screen hair dryer blowing her hair as a ghostly “yes yes yes yes” trills on the soundtrack, Jones reads some stories from the Quadead zone. Turner had matured as a filmmaker by this time and was able to inject some genuine pathos into his storyline to back up his poverty-stricken visuals. Quadead failed to have the same impact as Devil Doll, and Turner faded into obscurity shortly afterwards. The iMDB claims that Turner died in a car wreck in 1996.

When it was time for horror T-shirt impresario Shawn Lewis of Rotten Cotton infamy to helm his own exploitative horror film, he would call upon Black Devil Doll for inspiration. It was time to bring the Black Devil Doll into the 21st Century, and Lewis and company would successfully breathe life to the wooden one in the post Tarrantino age.

Black Devil Doll focuses on the more worldly-wise Heather (Heather Murphy), bored to tears in her own Northern Californian tract house littered with pop culture detritus. Fooling around with an Ouija board one evening, her plastic ventriloquist doll becomes possessed with the spirit of a militant Black extremist, freshly executed on death row for the murder of young Caucasian girls. The two begin a love affair with trips to the park and romantic picnic until the doll declares his need for sexual variety and sends Heather tearfully away (“Go to McDonald’s, BITCH! I don’t care!”). A quartet of surgically enhanced party girls arrives, and the doll returns to his sensual and homicidal ways in an orgy of rape and murder.

Hysterically funny, Black Devil Doll uses excess as its key to success. Laughs pile up with scenes droning on for far too long, such as a lesbian car wash scene that goes on and on and on until it ceases to be erotic and becomes an ironic commentary on the bankruptcy of the male sexual imagination. Yet another female character, Natasha Talonz, spends over 40 minutes in a shower washing her monstrous breasts.

The film also takes fresh swipes at our processed food culture, as in the scenes of the lonely Heather picking away at her freedom fries in a dreadful 1950s diner. While blatantly racist and sexist, one could well imagine something like Black Devil Doll springing from minority or lesbian feminist filmmakers as a satirical attack against the cultural hegemony of white heterosexual men.

Black Devil Doll is definitely not recommended for humor impaired viewers. As a searing document against certain unspoken cultural truths about America, Black Devil Doll comes nowhere near the scorched earth territory of the original Black Devil Doll from Hell – but then again, nothing else does, either! Laugh it up.

JACK SMITH AND THE DESTRUCTION OF ATLANTIS

Directed By Mary Jordan

How does one begin to ponder the unanswered question that was underground artist extraordinaire Jack Smith? Fleeing the dreary Midwest of his childhood for New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950’s, Smith would influence and inspire a generation of filmmakers and artists while steadfastly maintaining an oath of poverty and self-imposed obscurity. Tall and gangly, Smith was an openly gay artist who drew upon the gaudy Technicolor fantasies of Maria Montez for his own personal mythology. Furthermore, Smith embraced these visions of exotic lands replicated on Burbank soundstages at face value, without camp, without irony. To Smith, these films were a portal to another world free of ugliness and injustice. Pulling bits of scenery and costumes from dustbins and recruiting actors off the street, Smith would explore his hothouse vision with fevered abandon.

Flaming Creatures (1963), Smith’s only completed film would create a sensation, with audiences lining up around the block at the fiercely independent theaters who risked police raids by screening it. Using over-exposed black and white film, Creatures follows the rooftop orgy of a group of men, woman and transvestites as they roll in and out of extravagant costumes. The soundtrack consists of classical music from scratchy records, with Smith whispering “Psst! Did you hear? Ali Baba is coming!” at one point. Seen today, Creatures seems tame and antiquated and is best appreciated in a historical context.

Smith would never experience the critical, let alone the financial success of Creatures in his lifetime. Staging plays throughout the Seventies in his loft apartment, hipsters would gather at midnight only to be shooed away by an indignant Smith, incensed that they dare come see his work on their schedule. As one participant in the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis recollects, the only night Smith staged his seven-hour-plus production in its entirety was on the night no one showed up.

Filmmaker Mary Jordan declares that Smith, who died penniless after contracting AIDS in 1989, was ruthlessly pillaged and then discarded by the art intelligentsia. Using her camera in the manner of a high-powered rifle, Jordan goes on a safari hunt to shoot the purported “villains” in Smith’s life, frequently with their tacit permission. Underground film maven Jonas Mekas is front row and center in Jordan’s sights. Mekas allegedly took Flaming Creatures away from Smith, roadshowing it in the manner of exploitation hucksters of yore, later turning it into the cause célèbre that it would become for defenders of free expression. Mekas happily admits to being partially responsible for this claim.

Next on the hit list are Andy Warhol and Federico Fellini, both no longer around to defend themselves. Warhol was probably inspired by Smith to pick up a movie camera to begin making his own films, but their approaches were as different as you could possibly get. Smith would flood his viewfinder with filigree and exotica, using fluid camera movements, whereas Warhol would nail his camera to the ground and focus his camera on ugly and banal subjects. Jordan then argues that Fellini copied some of the visuals he used in Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon from Smith. Fellini, in the company of such extravagant film stylists in his native Italy, may have heard of Smith, but had far better sources of inspiration nearby. Smith may have readily influenced schlockmeister Andy Milligan, who was active in New York City at around the same time. Milligan’s no-budget costume dramas and handheld camera owe a certain debt to Smith, but curiously is left out of this retrospective.

Smith was staunchly anti-capitalist, an example of art for art’s sake taken to an illogical extreme. It’s refreshing that Smith did not toil as a paste-up artist until that one “big break.” At the same time, this writer is familiar with other artists who declare that those around them have “sold out” while hiding closeted bitterness and jealousy over their contemporaries’ success. It appears that Smith had a lot in common with Screem magazine favorite Underdog Lady Suzanne Muldowney (see issue #14) and definitely falls into a category of artists whose work I admire that I wouldn’t want to meet.
Jordan is to be commended on assembling so many snippets of film, artwork, and interviews on an artist who appeared to prefer that his work be temporary if at all. There are extensive sound bites from Smith, who had a distinctive voice calling to mind Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh’s Booji Boy. One other pundit describes Smith’s voice as one “suppressing a burp.” A list of high-profile celebrities is on hand to describe Smith’s life and times, such as John Waters, Holly Woodlawn and George Kuchar. The disc also features interview segments not included in the feature film. In this section, performance artist Collette describes a frightening altercation with Smith that suggests that the artist may have actually benefitted from a trip to the Stony Lonesome.

Lovingly and artfully assembled with care, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis joyously celebrates a man who truly may have been the earthly manifestation of Oscar Wilde’s Sphinx Without a Secret.

The Unholy Four: Films That Freaked Me Out

On the topic of movies that emotionally scarred me or freaked me out – where to begin? Ever since I was traumatized by the trailer for Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965) incongruously slipped into a kiddie matinee of the animated film Gay Purr-ee (1962) that I attended with my mother and sister while a fresh-eyed youngster, I have fruitlessly sought out other such experiences. I can’t narrow it down to a single film, as I have countless favorites; all of them leaving me scarred and freaked out in a positive way. When pressured to come out with a specific film, I must cite four titles, two of which are acknowledged classics, one a routine programmer, with the fourth and final one considered a lavish and expensive misfire.


The first, Them! (1954), screened on TV while I was a very impressionable tyke haunted me for years afterwards. Everyone recognizes this film as being the first and best of the giant bug movies of the Fifties. To an eight-year-old boy just beginning to recognize the mechanisms of the world around him, Them! is an especially horrific experience. Beginning with a traumatized little girl roaming the Nevada desert clad in a bathrobe and clutching a doll, Them! tapped into my very real fears as a child. Dependant on adults that could be snatched up and eaten by giant ants, I was keenly aware that my suburban security was a tenuous one. Unlike other creature features of its era, Them! builds up slowly and gradually before its unconvincing mechanical beasties arrive. Until our first full-on glimpse of the ants during a desert windstorm, we hear a high-pitched whine with the characters being killed off screen. In one memorable early sequence, two policemen discover a trashed general store; ants swirling around some spilled sugar serve as a foreshadowing. As one policeman goes off to headquarters, the other hears a distinctive wail in the high desert winds. Walking outside camera range, the policeman lets out a terrified scream. How effective is mere suggestion …


What made Them! so unsettling for myself was how realistic and in tune the film was to the mundane and everyday world that surrounded me at that time. Unlike other horror films that were usually set in some undefined middle European locale or shadowy castle, Them! was set in a stark universe of military barracks, clinics and sewer systems. More disconcerting still was the anxiety expressed by all the grownups in the film, unable to comprehend the mysterious menace swirling all around them. Older people were supposed to know everything, and keep little kids like me safe from harm. Viewing the film today, my favorite scene is the one in which a lady psychiatrist trots out a long stream of clinical terms intended to diagnose the traumatized girl’s condition. A whiff of insectoid joy juice under her nostrils sends the girl cowering in a corner shrieking “Them! Them! Them!” This scene would have a personal resonance for me later on, when I too would be diagnosed as a troubled child and be subjected to other “hit and miss” analysis by concerned adults.


The Saturday afternoon creature feature wasn’t done with me just yet. The following week, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) was broadcast. Also set in the ordinary and commonplace, Don Siegel’s classic of paranoia left me quaking in my knee pants. In a small California town, very much like the small California town I was growing up in, pod people from beyond the stars arrive to take the identities of the family next door. Other than the few shots set in a greenhouse – where alien pods regurgitate unformed human replicas in geysers of soap bubbles, there were no conventional monsters. The creatures in Body Snatchers are your friends and family, smiling and welcoming, only dropping their guises when other human beings’ backs are turned. The snotty, superior condescension of the pod people are in fact reminiscent of an impatient adult lecturing a child.

Body Snatchers has many themes and ideas that are far too terrifying for the unprepared youngster to grasp. How do we know the teachers at school really have our best interests at heart? The friendly policeman that we’re supposed to go to if we’re lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood, how do we know that he’s not some malevolent monster from outer space? William Cameron Menzies’ Invaders from Mars (1953) had many of the same ideas, but relied on a dime store surrealism to offset its scares. The one-two punch of Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers on my fragile mind was almost too much to bear. Don’t trust the squeaking noise you hear late at night down the hall from your bedroom …. And furthermore, don’t trust the people who say they’re your parents asleep in the next room!


Speaking of family, yet another film that I saw with my mother and sister in 1972, at a regal downtown theater usually reserved for Walt Disney children’s matinees set my brain awhirl with all manner of cinematic possibilities. Tales from the Crypt (1972), directed by Freddie Francis is not even five minutes old when a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins bashes in her loving husband’s brains out with a poker all over the evening newspaper. More grisly shocks were in store. Hearts torn out, hands lopped off, wicked wardens falling into walls of razor blades – it wasn’t fit for a young boy that had heretofore been nursed on Comics Code-approved pap. I spent most of the film hiding my face in my hands and I loved every last minute of it.


I knew that Tales from the Crypt was based on EC comics that were snatched up and banned long before I came on the scene. I also knew that the comics were the work of William Gaines, the avuncular hippie-like publisher of Mad magazine, a humor periodical enjoyed by myself and my parents alike. I was totally unprepared for the succession of grisly shocks at this matinee. I was simultaneously appalled and delighted – this omnibus of horrors appealed to my childlike sense of right and wrong, while shocking me with all manner of sights and sounds.


Tales from the Crypt was Amicus Productions’ most popular film to date. Based on the American EC horror comics such as Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt was one in a long succession of portmanteau films the studio first began with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. William Gaines allegedly had mixed feelings about the result. Producer Milton Subotsky allegedly hated the film’s grimness, yearning to return to the escapist musicals he had started his career with, such as Rock! Rock! Rock! As a director, Freddie Francis was capable of masterpieces (The Skull, 1965) to some of the worst dreck imaginable (Trog! The Vampire Happening, Son of Dracula). He would enjoy later success as a world-class cinematographer and would keep steadily working right up until his death in 1999.


Viewing it today, where it is paired with its far inferior sequel Vault of Horror (1974) on a Midnite Movies Double Feature DVD, Tales from the Crypt remains a superior horror programmer, still vastly superior to the uneven HBO TV series that bears its name. Its importance to me was in that it forced me to look at the people behind the camera, being keenly aware that this blood-drenched flick was originally the work of a man who flooded newsstands with a beatific, grinning Alfred E. Neumann offering up laughter and good cheer. I began to actively seek out other films directed by Francis, and began to appreciate the transition that the written word takes before it is brought to the screen. Where Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers had twisted my head around with fright, it was Tales from the Crypt that had twisted my head around to the notion of art in cinema.


The fourth and final film in this roundup is one that is included in many horror genre surveys, although it is generally not considered to be a “horror film.” The Day of the Locust (1975), director John Schlesinger’s adaptation of Nathaniel West’s novel of Hollywood life in the Thirties, is not well remembered today, but the film had a far greater impact on my budding mind that The Exorcist (1973) did a few years earlier.

Centered on a collection of film factory fringe types a few steps away from the soup lines, Locust features an impressive cast. William Atherton plays Todd Hackett, an up-and-coming art director with eyes on aspiring actress Faye Greener (the incredible Karen Black) who lives across the way in a crumbling Hollywood duplex with her ex-vaudevillian father (Burgess Meredith). The characters try to claw their way up the tinseltown ladder with no success, and Faye must turn to prostitution in order to pay for her father’s funeral. Faye then sets her eyes nebbish accountant Homer Simpson (Donald Sutherland) as a potential meal ticket, but things fall apart at a disastrous drunken orgy. All the characters converge at a Hollywood movie premiere, where Homer brutally stomps a child to death in a fit of anger and despair. The crowd rises up in mob vengeance to kill Simpson, and transform into faceless monstrosities –the “locusts” of the title -- in a hallucinatory riot.


The Day of the Locust, in its wild and expressionistic final half hour was by far the most horrifying thing I had seen on film up to that point. Seeing it in my confused adolescence, I was drawn to the sexual undercurrents running throughout the film and was left breathless by the orgasmic intensity of its climax. Far more importantly, Locust would smack me across the head with its brutal truths. A native of Bakersfield, I grew up in the shadows of the Great Depression, acutely aware of all the people around me who had come to California in search of a dream. Most found disappointment and despair, and carried on a vicarious life through the popular media. The displaced Okies and Arkies from the Dust Bowl worshipped their movie stars and ball players and politicians from afar – but would rise up and smash their idols if inclined to do so.

Actor Karen Black appears to have a similar “love/hate” relationship with the film. When I asked her to autograph a poster The Day of the Locust at a movie convention, she threw up her fingers in a sign of the cross. Later, she would inscribe one of her glossy 8 x 10’s of her as Greener in the shadow of the Hollywood sign with one of her choice bits of dialogue. “Hollywood parties – PUKE! Best to you Greg! Karen Black.”


When it came time for me to make my own horror film about Bakersfield, I made sure to include plenty of clips from The Day of the Locust. With able assist from editor extraordinaire Damon Packard, footage from the riot scene was interwoven with my story about a young male hustler who falls under the influence of an evil group of powerful homosexuals. Entitled Lords Part One, the six-minute short is a meditation on a local legend that is just as true as any other story to come out of Hollywood.


Of the four films mentioned above, I see no real common thread. Them! Beware of giant ants. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Beware of other people. Tales from the Crypt. Be aware of the people behind the camera. The Day of the Locust. Be aware of the power of cinema. Perhaps the best we can all hope for is to simply remain aware ….

Into the Zone: Richard Elfman recalls the shooting of his cult classic Forbidden Zone

Audiences who stumble into the indescribable musical fantasy Forbidden Zone (1980) -- whether from a late night cable TV showing, a bootlegged VHS tape, or repertory theater screening -- are instantly whisked away to a paper-and-glue netherworld called the Sixth Dimension. In the film's overheated 73 minutes, a veritable parade of ethnic stereotypes, topless princesses, dancing frogs and chorus girls fly by, leaving the viewer befuddled, shocked and enchanted.

The film Forbidden Zone grew as an extension of the cabaret act The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, which later would become the new wave rock group Oingo Boingo, fronted by current film composer wunderkind Danny Elfman. It was through the vision and hard work of Danny’s older brother, Richard Elfman that Forbidden Zone came into existence. Though bizarre and delightful, Forbidden Zone is merely like most other musicals, insists Richard Elfman: an excuse for a dozen hot song-and-dance numbers.

And like the majority of musicals, Forbidden Zone’s plot is a vaporous one, best left to the inebriated film fan to decipher. To whit: Slumlord Huckleberry P. Jones (Gene Cunningham, acting in minstrel blackface under the name Ugh-Fudge Bwana) is rutting around in one of his bungalows in Venice, California looking for heroin to unload. He stumbles through a basement portal into the Sixth Dimension, presided over by midget King Fausto (Hervé Villechaize) and insane Queen Doris (Susan Tyrrell). Jones manages to escape -- and according to one of many silent movie intertitles -- finds and sells the heroin and then rents the property to the dysfunctional Hercules family.

Composed of Swedish Pa (Cunningham again), Ma (Virginia Rose), Flash (Phil Gordon II), Jewish wrestler Gramps (Hyman Diamond) and daughter Susan B. “Frenchy” Hercules (Elfman’s then-wife Marie Pascale-Elfman), the basement has already swallowed up neighborhood kid Rene Henderson (Matthew Bright, acting under the name Toshiro Boloney), the transvestite “sister” of abused child Squeezit (Bright again).

While colorful, the Hercules family was based on real-life characters Elfman says he knew at the time. “Among the things that I wished to portray in Forbidden Zone, besides simply a filmed version of an entertaining stage musical, was an Absurdist satire on contemporary amorality and society’s utter lack of ethical responsibility. My next door neighbors at the time were a poor white trash family -- the drunken father would scream at the mother, who yelled and slapped the teenage piggy slut-daughter, who beat her younger brother, who threw shit at the dog,” Elfman says.

Ma and Pa sternly warn Frenchy against venturing into the basement while stoking her curiosity. “How cure-yee-us!” Frenchy exclaims in her exaggerated Gaelic accent. Attending school with Gramps, Frenchy jumps through the window when a disagreement over a gambling debt between black students (played by adults in Blaxploitation pimp attire) erupts into gunfire.
Returning home, Frenchy disobeys her parent’s edict and enters the basement, where -- in just one of a series of remarkable animated scenes courtesy of John Muto -- she is swallowed whole and sent through gigantic intestines and a Rube Goldberg device before being shat out of a cartoon anus to land on fecal pillows.

“Hot damn! The Sixth Dimension! Is that a rumba I hear?” she exclaims.

Lured to a boxing ring surrounded by gigantic heads, Frenchy discovers two Dadaist boxers (performance art group the Kipper Kids), dancing frog manservant BustRod (Jan Stuart Schwartz) and a rather rotund young man in Mickey Mouse ears singing the 40's Latin classic, “Bim Bam Boom.” In a hilarious scene designed to send all viewers on lysergic chemicals screaming from the room, lips mouthing the nonsensical lyrics in Spanish are superimposed over the kid’s face.

A question foremost in the minds of many of the film’s fans was where Elfman discovered this actor. Elfman has long forgotten the young man’s name. “He was a neighborhood kid in Venice, California. Very, very shy. He froze up in front of the camera, so I had to superimpose Squeezit (Matthew Bright) Henderson’s lips over his.” The scene is still used by Elfman as a warning to actors who fail to memorize their lines.

The dance is rudely interrupted by the Kingdom’s topless princess (Gisele Lindley), who brings Frenchy before her parents King Fausto (Villechaize) and Queen Doris (Tyrrell). Fausto is instantly smitten with the gamine, much to the Queen’s dismay. “She is French, and therefore of the Master Race!” Fausto later rationalizes. The queen consigns Frenchy to the dungeon, and between numerous romantic peccadilloes, a power struggle for the Sixth Dimension ensues.
Frenchy’s friends and family all enter the Sixth Dimension in an attempt to rescue her; the former queen (Warhol Superstar Viva) is found rotting in a cell ; there’s a smoking hot Cab Calloway number starring Danny Elfman as Satan; and a coup d’état. It’s all over before the audience has a chance to catch its breath, and no one can resist jumping back on the roller coaster ride for yet another viewing.

Where did all this wonderful nonsense begin? According to Elfman, it all began in Southern California, with a detour courtesy of Paris, France.

Forbidden Zone is a crazy quilt of ideas and visuals. One can cite the Fleischer Bros., underground comics, vaudeville, Yiddish theatre, silent films, “late 19th Century French Absurdist Theater; maybe French theater in general. And the Ascended Masters, of course!” says Elfman. This writer, a native of the Golden State, points out to Elfman that a lot of Southern Californian malaise seems to have been a major inspiration as well. I ask if his upbringing was a traumatic one.

“Mine wasn’t too traumatic,” he replies. “Except for getting beaten and bloodied by anti-Semitic poor-white-trash kids and taunted and ridiculed for being a Jew through much of my early youth. And maybe the time, a few years later, when Dorsey High won a football game at Manuel Arts High here in South Central L.A. when an angry black mob pulled me and few white friends out of the broken car windows and stomped us. Luckily, the police arrived ... but other than that and several dozen other incidents -- nothing too traumatic. Danny, a few years my junior, seemed to get off easier in terms of harassment.”

The creative Richard and Danny fled California for the higher artistic climes to be found in Paris, France in the Seventies. There, the brothers joined the theatre group The Grand Magic Circus under the hand of James Savary, who would later become the director of the French National Theatre. It was also the Elfmans’ good fortune to work with Peter Brooke of the Royal Shakespeare Company during this especially fecund period. After studying a wide array of music, theatre and stagecraft, Danny and Richard returned to the United States to form the avant-garde musical combo The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

Unlike other musical acts of the day, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo eschewed rock and roll to concentrate on such Harlem Renaissance hipster artists as Cab Calloway and Josephine Baker. Retro long before the coining of the term, the band would dress in wild costumes and engage in bizarre bits of cabaret.

It was during the late Seventies that Richard decided to transpose the Mystic Knights’ stage show to film, and the result was the hour-long, 16 mm, lost-to-the ages The Hercules Family, which was never completed. Friends encouraged Richard to make the leap to 35 mm to capitalize on the Midnight Movie crowd audience, which was then lining up at multiplexes for such fare as The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) and Pink Flamingos (1972).

Production money was raised by “buying and refurbishing old houses, credit cards and help from Ugh-Fudge Bwana and producer Carl Borack,” says Elfman. Shooting Forbidden Zone proceeded off and on over a two-year period. Elfman says that the cast was recruited from friends and acquaintances. “Matthew Bright (Toshiro Boloney) was a classmate of my brother Danny. Matthew’s roommate at the time was Hervé. Hervé’s ex-girlfriend was Susan (Tyrrell). Matthew also was friends with Joe Spinell. Pa was in the Mystic Knights with me. The Princess did a bit in our stage show.” Many other faces were literally plucked from the street, as in one scene where a Greek chorus of drunks is seen chuckling at the action. “The 'inebriated gentlemen' you refer to were sitting on the casting sidewalk that day on 4th and Alameda, awaiting some bottles of acting booze,” says Elfman.

Villechaize and Tyrrell, jealous lovers on film, were jealous ex-lovers in real life. “The two loved and admired each other profoundly. Yes, they had some tempestuous chemistry as a couple, but the love was always there.” Elfman also shares that Viva, who portrays the garrulous ex-queen, had a contentious relationship with Tyrrell, and that the catfight they engage in at the climax of the film was real.

Disaster struck when a lighting fixture fell and struck Matthew Bright on the head during filming. Elfman says he will never forget the sight of Bright lying on a hospital emergency room gurney while dressed in full Rene drag and makeup. Ever the trouper, Bright returned the next day for shooting, albeit with a sprained neck.

Everyone pitched in and did double duty on the project. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, Marie Pascale-Elfman would relinquish her place in front of the camera in order to spend long nights painting the expressionistic sets. Hervé Villechaize, himself an accomplished artist, would lend his artistic expertise to the painted flats on the weekend.

Many actors filled secondary roles. Among the most notable is Susan Tyrrell’s turn as Rene and Squeezit’s barfly mom Mrs. Henderson. In a dark wig and long nose makeup, Tyrrell berates and torments Squeezit (“Oh, Chicken Boy!”) and declares that her waterfront date for the evening is his long-lost father (Joe Spinell of Maniac [1981] infamy).

Shot years before advances in digital technology, many of the sped up sequences in Forbidden Zone were accomplished by painstakingly removing individual film frames and then reassembling them one at a time. While many props and costumes were on loan from the Mystic Knight’s stage act, one bit of wardrobe -- Mickey Mouse caps with distinctive round ears that one can buy at Walt Disney theme parks -- is worn without apology by many characters throughout the film. Elfman remembers that one insurance company refused Forbidden Zone coverage due to the caps, but the items, shorn of their distinctive corporate logos, flew under the radar of the usually litigation-happy multimedia conglomeration.

Once completed, Forbidden Zone had a hard time drawing an appreciative theatrical audience. Released when Midnight Movies had faded in popularity, the film “was condemned by the 'politically correct' when it came out, banned from PC campuses. Arson threats drove it from theaters.” Many accused Richard Elfman of anti-Semitism for his inclusion of an elderly Yiddish money changer character, unaware that the actor was played by Elfman’s real-life grandfather.
This writer became familiar with Forbidden Zone through the odd late-night cable TV screening. “The original cable version was a piece of shit low-res dupe of a rough cut that I had my lawyer pull off the air,” says Elfman. The film was released briefly on VHS on the Video Gems label, where it quickly went out of print (but now fetches high prices on Internet auction sites). “Most people saw shitty bootlegs that I wasn’t aware of. It was only a few years ago that Fantoma Films put out a decent version, and now Legend Films has done this new amazing color job on the film.”

Elfman says it was a longtime dream to have Forbidden Zone in color, hand-colored by Chinese craftsmen in the manner of silent films. The Legend Films DVD release has bright, stylized hues recalling hand-painted postcards of yesteryear. This writer asks if this expressionistic color scheme was intentional. “No, we choose a more ‘realistic’ looking route,” replies Elfman. “The film is cartoony enough already in terms of art direction.”

In the years following the original release of Forbidden Zone, many cast and crew members have gone on to many other projects. Danny Elfman would later score countless motion pictures, in particular the films of director Tim Burton. Matthew Bright would later direct Freeway (1996) and Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999), and currently is working on other film projects. Richard Elfman would go on to direct Shrunken Heads (1994) and Modern Vampires (1998), as well as serve as editor-in-chief of the glossy entertainment periodical Buzzine. Kipper Kid Martin von Haselberg would later marry comedienne Bette Midler, leading the Divine Miss M to quip to her tittering fans during her stage show, “I married a German. Every night, I dress up as Poland, and he invades me!”

Several Forbidden Zone cast members have since passed away. Actor Joe Spinell was found dead in his Queens apartment in 1989. Hervé Villechaize, despondent by the dwindling acting jobs offered him after his long run as Tattoo (“Da plane! Da plane!”) on TV’s Fantasy Island, would take his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1993. Susan Tyrrell would have a brush with death in 2000 when she became stricken with the rare blood disease essential thrombocythemia, necessitating the amputation of both legs below the knee in order to save her life. Confined to a wheelchair, Tyrrell still takes the occasional acting role, but now concentrates on her artwork. At a packed-to-the-rafters screening of the new colorized version of Forbidden Zone at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, Tyrrell was greeted with thunderous applause as she took to the stage for a post-screening question and answer panel.

Midnight film, VHS and Beta, DVD, and finally a spanking brand new colorized version on DVD: I ask Elfman what wild permutation Forbidden Zone will take next. “3-D. Then Holograms in your living room. And finally, hallucinations inside your head.” One last question for Elfman: With every cult film favorite, there are always obsessed fans. What was the most remarkable fan adulation that he has seen as a result of Forbidden Zone?

“Maybe the time those three 19-year-old Playboy triplets, all dressed as the topless Princess, tried to sneak into my bed one night when I was particularly drunk and single. They did lewd things and tried to provoke me -- but of course I told them that such behavior was unchaste, and I ran straight away to the Rabbi for guidance. I told the Rebbe what had occurred. He said I was full of shit and didn’t believe I had resisted--only Abraham or Moses were capable of something like that. I offered my fingers for him to sniff, to prove my innocence. The rabbe left the room... and returned dressed like Susan Tyrrell in ‘The Queen’s Revenge.’ He lashed me with whips and forced me to recite 20 Hail Marvens.”

(Fans can observe other projects by the mad genius by logging on to http://www.richardelfman.com/)

Pittsburgh Triumphant

By Greg Goodsell

"The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death." – Oscar Wilde

Jim Towns, co-director of Prometheus Triumphant: a Fugue in the Key of Flesh tells the story of his visit to the notorious Mummer Museum in Philadelphia. Among the vast collection of medical curiosities was a human skull with an iron rod pushed clean through. "It was during the time when train engines were wont to explode at any given time," Towns explains. The said victim was a man, who managed to survive the ordeal and would go on to lead a normal life and die of natural causes, albeit with an iron rod pushed through his skull.

The anecdote dovetails nicely with Towns' film as both address the resiliency of the human spirit to triumph over grotesque odds. Prometheus is a black-and-white silent Gothic horror film for the 21st Century, calling to mind E. Elias Merhige's Begotten (1996), the films of Carl Dreyer and most especially Guy Maddin, who Towns says he was only recently made aware of through The Saddest Music in the World (2006). Prometheus could be a direct descendant of Maddin's earlier features, such as Tales from the Gimli Hospital and Careful, "except without any winking to the audience."

"Prometheus has a very classical love story at its heart. Two mismatched lovers. It's set in a nebulous time period and place, a lot like the Universal films such as The Wolf Man and The Son of Frankenstein. You know it's sometime between the 1880s and the 1930s, but you can't quite discern it. There's an anachronistic quality to it.

I point out that a lot of these classic horrors appear to be set in some Victorian era when a telephone will suddenly pop up. "In The Wolf Man, there are gypsies and then there's Lon Chaney Jr. driving a car. I kind of love that. And there's also that part where Chaney takes a cart with Maia Ouspenskaya from Wales to Switzerland. I love that nebulous world, because it's almost a fantasy world. You just can't quite place it."

Towns and company tried to recapture this non-era specific atmosphere with the resources that their limited budget would allow.

"It takes place during one of the last Great Plagues, that's sweeping this Germanic town in the mountains. The doctors at the local university are confounded and have no way of helping. The hero is Janick (Josh Ebel), who is a kind of upstart young medical student or doctor, who has very radical ideas about life and death. When he promotes these techniques as a way to combat the plague, instead of being rewarded and congratulated as a hero, his theories are rejected as being too radical and he's decried as a heretic. He has a kind of secret love in the doctor's daughter Esmeralda, who then succumbs to the plague, and without Janick around to help her, she dies from it. I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that Janick comes back in a more mysterious disguised form, exhumes her, and begins a very slow and laborious process of not only reanimating her, but also restoring her to the woman he loves.

Does it all come back to bite him in the ass? "No! No! There was a point where we made a conscious decision, since we had a 'Frankenstein' story, and 'Modern Prometheus' was the original title for 'Frankenstein,' the Frankenstein story is always a morality tale about the presumption of man to assume the power of God, and it always ends tragically. We thought there's no reason for this to end tragically …"

Prometheus succeeds in creating an undefined European largely through a careful collection of settings, all for the taking in that most American of cities, Pittsburgh. Abandoned foundries, mental hospitals and decaying structures, each with their own brand of poetry and desolation was there for the filmmakers' taking. "It was incredible, some of the locations we got," Towns says.

Prometheus has tons of atmosphere, a lush musical score by Lucien Desar and more than just a generous helping of sex. There is ample nudity and a (fairly discrete) scene of necrophilia. Making the round of the film festival circus, the DVD can be had at www.madmonkeyproductions.com.