It's Not what it looks Like: HONEYMOON, FORCE MAJEURE

"This was supposed to be romantic under the stars, not sheets."

In the old days, before cable, VHS and Betamax entered the affordable mainstream, there was something called memory. Films were subject to the warping effects of 'telephone game' oration, passed around like recess versions of campfire tales. Once the film had left theaters it was at least a year sometimes two before it would show up on TV, usually premiering at 8 PM on a major network, where it was panned, scanned, edited for content and time, cut up by commercials, subject to possible static from weather formations above our aerial antenna. Those who saw it on the big screen could then argue over what was missing, what was added, what they remembered that no one else did. People just assumed the 'good' parts were gone... which for us kids meant gore, breasts, and curse words. There was no way to know for sure what you saw by then - and anyway things can always be edited from some prints, not others, and memories themselves often recorded what wasn't, even in the moment - seeing what it thought it would see vs. what was shown.

Look into his false-colored eyes! (HONEYMOON)

Then there were some films, like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1972) or Clockwork Orange (1971), that could never, no matter how much they edited them, ever be shown on TV. In the pre-VCR era this meant no one ever saw them again outside of their possible revival at the tail end of a drive-in triple feature, which meant never. Loaded with dread-by-scarcity, those who did see them were considered gods, the bad kids, a badge of cool like smoking or sex. Even if you were lying and we knew it, if you made up something believable and riveting, hey - you were a star. There was no need to even go into the gore or horror involved in those - as if remembering them alone would be too much, that the shock had created a block on your recollective power, putting them into the same category as traumatic childhood primal scene-stumblings or Satanic Ritual Abuse.

Now of course things are better, film-wise, to a point. Nearly all films from Edison onwards are all available all the time, unedited and in original aspect ratios on big widescreen HD TVs. It's such a great era for movies that there has to be negative side effects. For example, gone is the freedom to lie, to hide truth, to imagine a better movie than really exists, to change the narrative along according to our perceptions, instead of the other way around. We might get six different versions of the same film on our DVD set, choosing the R, NC-17, unrated versions. Still, no actual film gore or violence can compare to our lurid imaging. Now, however, our imagination is cut off at the pass and next time it comes around, we can't imagine as lurid as the movie anymore. We've lost the thread.

Two recent films on Netflix streaming, the indie horror movie Honeymoon (2014) and the Nordic import Force Majeure (2014), offer diegetic examples of these negative side effects. Each relies on a certain cinematic familiarity, a common shared iconography that can then collapse as characters within each film are continually forced to confront their own helplessness in the face of real events vs. their instilled and conditioned expectations that they can somehow change what happened through denial or secrecy. In Majeure, an upscale Nordic family's Alpine ski vacation is momentarily interrupted after an avalanche blowback whiteout that rolls over the outdoor brunch patio. Most people don't move or worry but it causes the father to run inside in a panic, leaving wife and kids to fend for themselves (though he might presume they were following him). The whiteout clears, brunch resumes, the father returns like nothing's happened, but the mom's faith in him is destroyed. He only exacerbates her distrust when he tries to remember it differently, to deny and convince her of a different set of facts.

Thanks to ever-present cameras, the white-out can no longer occur in memory instead of recorded image, not in this era, not when the elephant in the room has been identified and deflated, and no one can smoke, be mean to minorities or homosexuals, or otherwise trod carelessly over other people's feelings. He can't change her mind with a loud and forceful "ENOUGH!" and get her to change the subject. In this recorded age he has no power to shape the social construct to his will, and he gets slapped for flinching from each previous slap.

In Honeymoon, the first date of a couple is jointly recalled as taking place at an East Village Indian restaurant that leads to the man, Paul (Harry Treadaway) puking, trapped by food poisoning vertigo on the studio apartment floor of Bea (Rose Leslie). This weakness on his part binds him to her, and their wedding reception has Indian food which they address directly in their video (the movie begins mostly as their wedding / honeymoon video diary): "You tried to keep us apart. Fuck you, Indian food... we win." Yeah, right. Indian food played you like a putter.

Any sane person watching this already senses something is seriously wrong. Paul is just doing a longer range version of what the dad in Majeure does, submitting to a repetition-compulsion complex until the ugly memory is contextualized as triumph. Poisoning is an old trick used by nurses and cooks with a yen for Munchausen by-proxy to weaken and ensnare those they want to keep dependent. As their video progresses, Paul and Bea's intimate talk always seems to weave it's way back to puking, as if it's a trigger that disrupts what should be danger signals in his brain, that something's 'not right.' The puking triggers a skip in the record where normal good judgment normally functions.

Paul should take it as a sign to run - but he's a good guy and good guys don't run (right, Majeure dad?). So Paul rebukes the omen, reconfigures it. The wedding tent for example, seems like a shroud --we never see anyone else in the confessional booth but them - does Bea even have any other family? If she doesn't, Paul never finds out, until it's too late. MILD SPOILERS AHEAD!

For their honeymoon, Bea brings him to her family's cabin up in Canada, where one of the duck decoys has her childhood note in it "Dear ducks - I am not a real duck --stay away." Of course it's too late by then. And whether and what she means, outside of trying to sabotage the very purpose of a decoy (as in to draw ducks to it), he doesn't know, and neither do we, and that's how history --family, marriage, self, individuality, civilization --slips its bonds, like Jack Torrance sliding into a New Years 1928 Gold Room while simultaneously freezing to death (in a white-out) in 1980.

Honeymoon employs a nice 'suggestion' of a POV home movie, via a Steadicam that whips around the woods and fuses with the opening wedding video, but then it subtly switches over to regular film (or professionally-shot HD ), and soon after that switch is mirrored in the film itself, as this two person isolation takes its toll in paranoia and dysfunction. It becomes another collapse of the social sphere in that uber-paranoid honeymoon Antichrist meets Zulawski's Possession symptom-laden symbolist collapse. The paranoia itself ends up giving "birth" like a virus to some weird The Hallow x  Dagon x The New Daughter x Invasion of the Body Snatchers amphibian reality (or do I just feel that way as 60% of my friends in real life mysteriously married Canadians?)

You don't need a government to make you paranoid. Sometimes all it takes is a Force Majeure, i.e. an avalanche, or worse, a woman...

Good as they both are in their way (I saw them back-to-back on a rainy Sunday on Netflix), neither Majeure nor Honeymoon should be seen on a first date, or even a last. But they do make a great double feature, a before and after of the pros and cons of marrying into the royal reptilian bloodline. Majeure could be the sequel ten or so years after Honeymoon where, instead of a nice redhead hipster revealing herself to be a frigid Innsmouth fishwife, there's a father ostracized by the mom for a single moment of weakness, a whole man resented for the slightest of perceived offenses. Filmed for maximum geometric thermal dynamics, the film, floats squarely in the middle of the Alps, a place that seems inordinately hostile to human life, so that skiing and all the other human 'recreation' is made almost absurd-- like sandcastles in front of a tidal wave. The husband's response (i.e. fleeing) is completely 'natural' of course. It's not until the mom herself overreacts to a moment of perceived crisis towards the end, on a steep dangerous bus ride down the mountain (the precipice dropping below the bus's massive windows) that the balance can be redressed.

Is the wife's problem with her man the fleeing, or that he won't cop to his moment of cowardice? In refusing to remember his flight, maybe blocking it out via subconscious mechanisms he can't control, he's like a kid who just won't admit he stole something to the point of pathology. But she's worse, in that this is a vacation and it's a minor thing but she just can't let the matter drop. Within minutes of the whiteout, brunch is back to normal, with only a thin layer of powdered snow on the plates and coffee surfaces to indicate it was ever there... but she can't forget, and he won't remember. If it wasn't so common in the US (a similar rift forms in the family of Escape from Paradise), one would think the film was overreacting on her behalf. But watching the film it seems pretty natural you'd run for the door and presume your family's behind you rather than run to them to --what-- shield them with your body to make sure you're both buried and suffocate? Either way, as in Contempt, the woman uses this small event as a scratcher to some incoherent deeper itch, trying to test and provoke and de-masculinize the man she married. Vacations bring out the worst in people. It's why I don't, personally, like them.

In Honeymoon the de-masculinization comes from the complete ignorance of some kind of strange Lovecraftian de-evolution in his new (to almost stranger) young wife. The nightmare begins on the honeymoon as she keeps postponing sex and then intensifies when he wakes to find her outside the lonely cabin in the dead of night, naked and with underwear covered in frog egg-style slime. The answer to the mystery of why she needs to be constantly reminded of the most basic things--like her name--begs the question: did he find the right 'thing' when he found her, or is this some amphibious clone pod person changeling, one able to hold the pose of a human for only so long? Is it all paranoid blue ball madness (ala dodging honeymoon 'duties' as if she was hiding her own penis or venereal disease) or is it just that she wants to hook up with this guy down the hill she knows from childhood?

With the semi found-footage approach we never learn any of the answers, except maybe hottie young director Leigh Janiak would like some Paranormal Activity profits or delayed Bug acclaim. She deserves both, taking the same male-female approach (her boyfriend Phil Graziadel co-wrote) that works so well in both films. As with all great horror, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish reality from the vividly imagined the longer we're away from consensual reality, i.e. on vacation in the middle of nowhere, without a stable of normal social others. When there are cops, EMTs--even enigmatic gas station attendants, doe-eyed librarians, lunch-eating coroners--to modulate any accruing cabin fever derangement, we see just how easily escaped are the bonds of a consensual social order.

We might even realize the truth in the process, a truth all couples must accept sooner or later: there never was a consensual social order- it's all just phantoms and shell games. There is, indeed and inescapably, no such thing as objective reality. There is just a shared delusion, a Rashomon-style collective cubist stigmatism. Couples delude themselves that swinging will work when all else fails, or kids, or marriage, or all of it, and then blame themselves, then each other, when it doesn't. Then they accept it. Or die. They die either way, actually.

Oh yeah, and there's the
Successive de-evolution of the masculine father 
in the post-industrial age. 

Sometimes kissing a girl is enough to tingle a man down to the toes. Sometimes he has to keep digging deeper, removing more clothes, grinding closer, just to get the same tingle, approximated or facsimile. He becomes like a relentless miner dredging with his lips for that tingle. Sometimes even after sex he still doesn't get the tingle, so then maybe without a condom? You know, to feel something? Anything? If that doesn't work, then tell her we love her. She loves us, too? Does that help with the tingle? Uh-oh. No, still no tingle. Then marriage. Still no tingle - so kids. On and on, when with the right girl a single kiss would have been good enough to know, for sure, electricity existed.

A smart man would run when that tingle's not there.. A smart man would have run way back at the first lack of tingle, wouldn't have let the Indian food puking sway his better sense, the whole biolgical code is all just there in the kiss. But just the thought of running is cowardly, what a frat murph asshole dude does (since if she's willing you may as well dredge as deep as you can while you can, right bro?)

Still, trying so hard to make it work, the old tingle-deprived misery surfaces like a toadish reminder of all the tingle's that never came. Better keep trying with what you got than just go back to that amphibious nil. After all, maybe it's we who are the problem, not her. Anyway we're not 'that' type of guy, the type who cuts and runs. Fuck you, Indian food.

Honeymoon is not perfect, but it is well-acted, especially by Rose Leslie who manages to look less and less like a human being and more like a bug in the way only certain red haired facial types look when you're looking at them while on, say, enough acid that their small almond chin below their fast talking mouth begins to look like two mandibles moving like a mantis dismantling an unseen fly with sewing machine precision. I applaud that Honeymoon sees that mandible effect too and doesn't need to CGI in actual mandibles, and it doesn't take a post-modern approach like, say, Intervention. It has the courage of its Lynchcraftian convictions. As the film leads to a full blackout just as Force leads to pure whiteouts, there are no easy answers or even coherent questions. None of us in couples ever knows who the other is, or who even we are. Why we should have presumed a 'normal' existed to begin with is anyone's guess (unless it's that we believed the TV).

But then, well the nightmare question that no recent remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers dare ask (there wouldn't be a movie if they did): in a land where no one stays the same, moment-to-moment, at a time marked by no set shared cultural touchstone (thanks to a proliferation of screens and mediums), in a culture driven by myopic narcissism and cultivated shallowness, and shaped only a a ground zero infinity of film history, how would we ever know if our loved ones were supplanted by pods? When the white powder fog clears the brunch deck, or the black-out clears the bedroom, worrying if our mate is the same person before the outage occurred isn't even in our top ten anxieties.

Every minute we stick around is a minute we're not running for our lives.

What or who we're running from is irrelevant when there's so many goddamned directions to choose from. Netflix Boulevard crawls with them, so why feign rootedness? Where is the fleeting urgency to slow down? Our monster monsoon has waited long enough in heaven's white-padded room. Let it come down and eclipse the infinity of our perception so we might once more behold the outline of that dirty finite door. Let us be washed away in high floating style. Bitches be full of tricks. We can stay and be buried or be free and frozen in the Torrence's bit-torrent maze.

Beyond the Door II is, after all, just another name for Shock.

Pharmageddon! JOHN DIES AT THE END

As John Carpenter ages into obscurity, a horror genius named Don Coscarelli has quietly stolen the title of the new Hawksian Drive-in fuzzy sci-fi/horror guru. What is the fuzzy? It's a loosey goosey digging and goofing around - simultaneously mind-expanding and brain-addling; too laid back and badass to care about sticking to any genre, it never has to rely on misogyny, torture, yelling, or religion; it understands normal healthy adult sex is the creepiest most uncanny thing ever once stripped of all its alluring-in-the-heat-of-the-moment buzz. It displays a droll shared language--the gallow's wit of RIO BRAVO, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE THING, SCARFACE, THE BIG SLEEP, and HIS GIRL FRIDAY--and because there's so much less pointless plot twisting and random acts of shock designed solely for trailers and in-theater jolts bad (better than no) publicity, it can explore the two bros being cool language of deadpan calm and running jokes. Why fuzzy? Because it can get pretty sloppy, so is best to watch late at night, with a nice buzz and low expectations. As such the films only get better with each new fuzzy view, cuz the earlier fuzzy has made you forget most of it anyway.

Clancy Brown with the Mehalis sisters, Helena and Maria

I won't go too much into JOHN DIES plot - you can just mosey somewhere and watch it, and then come back to this scintillating post. But let's just say this - Clancy Brown (left, flanked by Helena and Maria Mehalis as his identical twin assistants) played the drill sgt. in STARSHIP TROOPERS, another fuzzy horror/sci-fi masterpiece and he's the guy you want for a part like this, whatever that tells you.

I will say also that time looping is involved in this film, but I liked this film way way better than the recent, over-praised LOOPER. And I believe in time travel, if only via one's third eye, and when a movie makes the third eye hallucinations real instead of dreams it works because a hep person knows movies already exist at the hallucinatory level. Unfuzzy directors feel compelled to separate the two - what is just a dream and what is real - like we'll upend the apple cart if not brought safely back to rut, as in AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, wherein the wolf must come out of David through grand physical agony or it won't be 'believable' --and the welcome eruption of Nazi werewolves with machine guns is revealed to be all a dream. If John Landis made the dream the real and focused on those Nazi werewolves for the whole film, than hot damn, that would be fuzzy, and also a bit like the Peter Grant fantasy sequence of THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME.

What mainstream science still can't quite admit, but which leading edge scientists are realizing, to their amazement, is that the universe is totally subjective. If we can move past notions of size, perspective, and spatial relativity then space/time travel is possible regardless of the distances between solar systems. As humans with limited ESP ability (and lack of astral projection experience), we can't imagine space travel any other way except by carting our bodies from point A to point B, in a vessel relative to own size, but that doesn't mean we all won't one day be long past that limited conception of ourselves. If space itself is a vacuum, the idea of needing to travel a certain amount of miles to get there is foolishly short-sighted. Why not just collapse the vacuum? Why not merely shrink the space? Why not merely beam one's consciousness like a cell phone signal on ahead into some deep freeze robot ready to inhabit like an electro-neurologically linked collection of artificial limbs?

The closest we have to ESP as a legitimate science today is the cell phone, relay tower and wireless router, but we take those things for granted the way we took ESP for granted in the 70s, back when we would have considered cell phones an unrealistic fantasy (even Deckard in BLADE RUNNER had to find a phone booth; and of course Heywood Floyd calling his daughter from the Moon - in 2001). Now we take for granted the sound waves that beam all over the globe constantly, billions of voices, TV signals, radio and military and Google Map drone images, soaring up and down like ping pong balls between humans and satellite paddles, remote controlling martian probes millions of miles out in space, and yet we scoff at alien abductions due to light year distances.

We once laughed at the horseless carriage, in the words of Criswell. Radio, vitmins! Yes, even television.

Perhaps this is why what was absurd fiction a mere century ago is taken for granted as science fact today and yet no one dares broach the subject of  pandimensional travel's validity! And it's because the subjective experience of hardcore psychedelic drug trippers would then be valuable and science fears this, understandably since objectivity is the foundation of their known world, whereas subjectivity the foundation of the trippers. But we know the horrifying truth: Fiction is truer than reality! 

All of which serves as a warped introduction to my praise of Don Coscarelli, a man who I've written of in the past as being suspiciously like myself in extrasensory speculation, to the point that one of my pet AA intervention metaphors, self-performed eye surgery, crops up in JOHN DIES AT THE END. Check out this exchange in the film after Dave calls a priest because John seems possessed.

Dave: What do you think it's like, Father?
Father Shellnut: What's what like?
Dave: Being crazy, mentally ill.
Father Shellnut: Well, they never know they're ill, do they? I mean, you can't diagnose yourself with the same organ that has the disease, just like you can't see your own eyeball. I suppose you just feel regular, and the rest of the world seems to go crazy around you.

Now check this from an old post of mine in the C-Influence:

Eyewitness testimony can be considered “fact” in a court of law but means nothing to science, which cripples itself through its dismissal of everything “subjective” as if there was something that wasn’t (...) Our collective disbelief about things beyond our comprehension is itself beyond comprehension, revealing the fundamental impossibility of trying to think about nature objectively from inside an organic brain (sort of like trying to perform eye surgery on yourself without a mirror) (5/27/11)

I have no choice, therefore--considering the film's avalanche of uncanny coincidence-- to believe JOHN DIES AT THE END was written by me... in the future!

I mean this as no disrespect to JOHN DIES' creators, Coscarelli and author James Wong (a pseudonym, so they say), and of course all three of us are clearly inspired by Lovecraft, William S. and Edgar R. Burroughs, Alan Moore, Cronenberg, and Hunter S. Thompson, so who knows who I really am? I always hoped Lovecraft might read my work one day in a time travel loop and be inspired to write the Chthulu mythos based on my own August Derleth-based fan fiction. 

That's probably not in our immediate 'future' as I haven't written any, and HP is long-dead (so they say) but I once meant to, having read a great Derleth-edited paperback of Chthulu mythos stories called Lurker at the Threshold, and if time is elastic and we are all one, then we are all one right now, connected through an elastic time tentacle, boinging back and forth through the tubes of time and space in order for our quantum conscious to play, not just many parts ala Shakespeare, but every part, ala the Brahmavaivarta Purana. In other words, if you weren't me before reading this, you will e soon. This weird word tentacle I've reached you with has boinged into your future cognition! 

This is how we become our own great-grandmothers, and mighty pissed we are to still be stuck in the space time trap of this baleful prison planet.. Luckily,  Ramboona never fails.

Such weird collapse-of-time distortions in JOHN DIES AT THE END are only one of the great side effects of a black ooze-style drug dubbed 'soy sauce' that makes all of history seem to occur in the Now, and illuminates the full of the brain to the parts where this is own. The film's main drug of choice (though it chooses you, its black drops growing fuzzy limbs, morphing into flies and boring right into your cheek unless frozen). A mix of the black ooze from the X-FILES, the black centipede meat of the NAKED LUNCH, and the Black Sheep Dip from my own under-published novel. Still, though its origin turns out to be extradimensional, it resembles organic psychedelic 'alien intelligence' entry points like psilocybe cubensis mushrooms (the block spore stuff inside the caps and stem veins) and Salvia Divinorum (the black of the gorgon's eyes, if you've seen it you know what I mean). 

Aside from time dilation (which any good psychedelic doth provide) 'soy sauce' provides the ability to read minds and to astral travel, to for example distract the guy in charge of quality control at the factory that made the bullet fired at you by a wise cop or visit an interzone-style alternate reality (accessible via "the Mall of the Dead") to invest in biotech that's a literal fusion of bio and tech wherein a computers and a Lovecraftian multi-tentacled horror fuses into one entity that sucks the intellect and experience of the entire world through its crab-claw-tentacles, ala Corman's ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (or David Cross in FUTURAMA: BEAST WITH A MILLION BACKS - see my 08 post, and More Tentacles from the 5th dimensional Rift) or "if" SKYNET was a giant octopus (and recall the name sky-"net" existed long before the creation of the internet; the film came out in 1984, the same year William Gibson's term 'cyberspace' entered pop culture via his eerily prescient novel Neuromancer). That's not even forgetting the tiny microbe spores that take over bodies in THE THING (1982), GHOSTS OF MARS (2001), and the THE FLESH EATERS (1968), all highly wreck-o-mended, bro.

And of course we can't not mention the almighty Don's own previous films, including the definitive fuzzy horroropus PHANTASM , which depicts post-death Archon soul harvesting procedures, and the melancholy of BUBBA HO TEP, wherein the real Elvis and Ossie Davis as a wheelchair bound JFK battle a mummy from the old west. 

The in-joke humor that indicates a classic horor fan (!) at work never comes at the cost of deadpan narrative suspense in Coscarelli's canon; and JOHN DIES is particularly clever in both these areas:]one-handed Fabianne Therese is the only one who can open the phantom door, because phantom limb made visible through 3D glasses.. That her magic 3D glasses would work in a 2-D film is just one of the stunning filmic choices that puts Don Coscarelli's film way out in front of the fuzzy pack, alongside rarefied company as 1982's REPO MAN, the 1975's DEATH RACE 2000, Cronenberg's NAKED LUNCH, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA; 1985's RE-ANIMATOR, and of course Coscarelli's own PHANTASM,

Alllow me to lay down more of the massive flood of similarities to my own work that will bear out the theory I shall become John Wong in the distant future, looping back in time to watch the movie based on my work, and getting mired too deeply in space-time to fully remember where I left the Moebius strip tape splice section of the loop where I can jump back into 'now' (like trying to find the start of a roll of Saran wrap after its fallen off its teeth). If you doubt, note that the phone Dave uses in the scene depicted on the far left banner is a hot dog, similar to the banana and Marlboro phones in my QUEEN OF DISKS! (2007)

What's that you say? Everyone does the old banana phone gag? Well not when addressing psychedelic transdimensional tape splice time slippage! So there! 

Another similarity is that the 'Mall of the Dead' is similar to my 'Mall of Time' from an old unpublished short story about a guy walking back in time in a special mall to find another of the special cigarettes that once enabled him to move briefly into the head of a Chinese baker (a true incident that happened to me during one of my out of body salvia journeys in the early 00s). Here's an excerpt:

 I wanted to buy some of these new cigarettes - "new" being an operative word. I heard they have a special chemical in them that makes you become someone else. A friend of mine got some and wound up a Chinese baker in Secaucus, New Jersey. It didn’t last long but it was totally like that movie Being John Malkovitch, he said, except that there was no visual component, just the feel of the oven heat, Chinese shouting which he could suddenly understand and the smell of cinnamon. (...)

The mall of time had been designed to appeal to the tactile senses to lure the net-dazed shopper back in. The theme was an evolution of history with spacey gadgets on one end and gradually decades receding as you walked down the aisles until you past the dawn of man and into some weird cannibalistic pagan wordlessness. Eighties clothes and jewelry down to seventies retro, flapper prom tuxedo shops, Cowboy Dan's, and then farther back still… through pre-Columbian dining room sets, a series of moving sidewalk exhibitions with tinsel rain and roaring plastic volcanoes and the voice of Christian Bale narrating your trip through time. The roar of a dinosaur as we reach the kid's robot dinosaur displays, and, if you are a tripper, looking for the special cigarettes, back farther still...

... and as we took the escalators down and down and ran giddy but full of dread along the black tiles, the lights growing dimmer, the plastic lanterns becoming faint torches reflecting the shine on the wet cave walls, our shoes echoing amid the cacophony of drips and winds and jungle howls, and the crowd thinning down to only us, and Bale’s voice on the loudspeaker as it discussed the mating habits of the pterodactyl, that flying dinosaur that was the missing link between birds and reptiles. Down where we were heading the sound faded away altogether, the animatronic dinosaurs became lower to the ground, hiding in the shadows and in the coin fountain now bubbling with fake moss and plastic sludge. The tangy acrid smell of blood and mud filled the air, like a rural abbatoir. 

Right? See the similarity? Coscarelli's film is a little different, but the idea of a "mall of the dead" and a special drug being associated with interdimensional time travel is the same, and James Wong writes really bizarre, perceptive stuff for Cracked. Am I totally comfortable in saying that Wong is me in the distant future or distant past or in an alternate reality (was Wong the name of that baker I briefly became?) where we come from the same persona stalk in the blazing black tree of souls? Yes. 

To mas prove it, I'm going to turn it over to the detective in the film:

Detective Lawrence 'Morgan Freeman' Appleton: "I'm an old school Catholic. I believe in hell. I believe it's more than just murderers and rapists down there. I believe in demons and worms, and vile shit in the grease trap of the universe. And the more I think about it, the more I think that it's not just some place down there. Oh no, that it's right here with us. We just can't perceive it. It's kinda like the country music radio station. It's out there in the air, even if you don't tune into it."

As he showed with PHANˇASM before this, Coscarelli is amazingly prescient about the realities of post-death alternate dimensional enslavement. Forging a direct link with theories espoused by everything from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the writings of Nigel Kerner, Terence McKenna, Phillip K. Dick, Nick Redfern, and David Icke, his alternate dimensions in both films indicate correctly the collapse of reality that comes fro stretching one's auric tentacles out into the slimy obsidian blackness that breathes beyond time and soace.

The heavens and hells of the bibles are all around us, man, the dimension of hell, that radio station that's there whether we tune into it or not, ala that wise detective. Karma is so instant that retribution precedes the crime, like MINORITY REPORT (another Phillip K. Dick "prediction"); this explains the 'lucky in love unlucky at cards' adage. And if time travel is possible, people from the future have already manipulated our past to suit their own future ends (to quote Terminator/Genysis (a movie not made at the time of this post) "What do we want?" / "Time travel!" / "When do you want it?" / "It's irrelevant!" 

The Hassidic Jewish community has mastered this which is why they continue to dress the same over the decades, so as not draw attention to themselves when they come time traveling back and forth across the 1929 crash line with investment tips. This 'truth' was revealed to me by the alien intelligence I sometimes meet and ask questions of - the alien intelligence illustrated this to me via an image of a Hassidic scholar reverse screwing himself into existence via the unwinding of a secret scroll deep in the secret room of an old Brooklyn synagogue, after which he walked through the wall, still only semi-corporeal, confident he'd be 100% 'there' by the time he hit the street and caught a cab to Midtown.

Did I wonder then whether my spirit guide was a member of the Thule Society and possibly some Nordic anti-semite, the same one appearing to David Icke and, perhaps, Himmler? 

Mmmm could be. Spirit guides are so often sleazy tricksters you can't believe everything they say...and therefore can believe nothing they say. Even though they 'win your heart with honest trifles' as someone puts it in Macbeth. 

On the other hand, just hearing them say it is more illuminating than a year at fair Harvard
or so my spirit guide tells me.

Of the two alien (plant) intelligences I've encountered in my 'ahem' travels, one is legal and the other should be. One is like a strict Catholic gardening teacher named Salvia, who skins me alive in a slow, circular orbit every time I drop by her communal garden, like a clockwork of dragon's teeth. And if I can sufficiently let go (of self, time, duality) and identify with the nature of the universe, I can move my consciousness to the floor beneath my meditation cushion and watch with perfect emptiness as her teeth stripz away my egoic shell. And then 'pop' --I'm suddenly free. I become pure love, with no sense of time or space or time to limit me. I dissolve into the bright yellow light and any question the I can think to ask is answered. That's how I learned the truth about Bigfoot.

The other plant guide I encountered is a little younger and less austere -- the cool hipster party partner instead of the stern egocidal gardener. Psilocybe C. is a space jockey. He moves into your room like that fun kid from college, sweeps the crap off the floor of your life, sneaks you into all the coolest wildest clubs and teaches you how to see the spirits between the cracks of reality. Then, after awhile, he starts to get on your nerves. Unlike Salvia, who never overstays her welcome, Psilocybin hangs around forhours and hours after the last party closes. You yawn and steer him to the doorway but he's still lingering, coming back five minutes later to say he forgot his... uh... pen. Each minute passes like hours and you're like, dude it was great having you around but now you're getting on my nerves. By Tuesday he's finally totally gone (by Tuesday usually) and you miss him, terribly. Should you call him again this Friday? Or be a smart tripper, and hang out with him no more than once every other week? (You never have that issue with Salvia - there's nothing 'fun' or recreational there)

Your mileage and enlightenment may vary, and only holy fools, madmen, and artists would be insane enough to ever even want to meet them. But some of us are called, as in on a heroe's journey.

If this rambling 'review' has been more about me than JOHN DIES AT THE END, I apologize. All you really need to know is where it exists in the family tree of midnight cult goofball fuzzy. It's not perfect (if I had been or will be Wong, I wouldn't make the lead such a buzzkill, trying to drive John to the ER instead of playing along with his trippy madness, nor would I have him call ancient alien theorists "those Roswell losers" - both mark him as very uncool.) But aside from all that, it's a must. It's ANTS IN YOUR PLANTS OF 1939 meets 80s John Carpenter at Cronenberg's Interzone. That should be enough for you, me, or an ant waiting to an Indra be.

CinemArchetype 17: The Devil

As the water levels rise and the wind blows the cranes, Pirate Sandy is coming for us like the floods called in by disillusioned church lady Ethel Waters in Cabin in the Sky. I wanted to quick post this which I've been working on for so very long, just in case it's the last one I get to post, before the power goes out or I'm blown clear to Oz. The atmospheric pressure --"and power is just going out everywhere across the area"-- is melting me in my chair. I got Jesus in my bones and heart and I'm all right, but I need to tell you first about the Devil.

In any discussion of cinematic archetypes, Old Scratch sticks out like a proverbial sore thumb, and that's his whole raison d'etre, an anthropomorphized swelling of sin jammed Jack Horner-deep into the plum pie-heart of man. One can argue theology: is Satan just working for God, challenging mortals like a mean but fair swim coach, or an insecure rich girl worrying the faithful only like her for miracles (PS)? Did God release him into the world like British aristocrats releasing a fox before the hunt? Or--as some CIA agents and conspiracy theorists have claimed--is our world owned by the devil? Is God just a huckster's ruse? Is the light at the end of the tunnel just a lure, so the angler devil can haul us up (down) into suffocating realm above (below)? Any astro- or psycho-naut knows that beyond gravity there is no sense of up or down, or oxygen - so Hell being below and Heaven being above makes no logical sense. But the poor damned souls who have broken the golden rule may wind up/down there anyway --stuck in a lake stocked with sinners for the devil's weekend fishing pleasure.

Bedazzled

In the movies and in the literature it all kind of begins and ends with old Faust and his bargain: there's a million variations and we know them all. Robert Johnson met Satan at the crossroads, and his guitar was tuned to the devil's key, but, after his premature death ("I said hello, Satan / I believe it's time to go"), that guitar mojo was loaned out via Aleistar Crowley's trans-dimensional brokerage to Jimi Page. He had to sacrifice his drummer and Robert Plant's son, but Page survived and ended up doing the soundtrack to Death Wish 2. 

I once had a visit from God, I thought, during a profound enhanced meditation, but after awhile He changed. It turned out he was trickster spirit if not a devil outright, just wearing a holy radiance. 

"There ain't no devil / there's just God when he's drunk." - Tom Waits 

He's never far away from a drink either. Every time you curse-- which is constantly-- he collects a bit of your soul. Try saying bless you and may the lord watch over you and praise Jesus a lot instead of goddamn it and  taking the lord's name in vain and you'll see the devil flair up all around in indignant outrage all around in the faces of your friends. "Dude, we thought you were cool?!"Dude, you just cut off the devil's tap!

Little Nicky

Then again,  the horns and hooves are proof Old Scratch is really a representation of old world supernatural pantheism. He's Pan, the god of nature and fornication, the satyr, the initiator into carnal abandon. And now more than ever, we need him.  Not the version hailed in meth-y suburban metalhead attics but the version of natural succumbing to the forces of chthonic nature, Let us sing hymns to Pluto, the Lord of the Underworld. He is not the devil, nor is Pan. But Christians can't tell the difference. That's OK. We still love them despite their inquisitive ways. And if we don't, how are we better than them?

1. Jack Nicholson

Witches of Eastwick (1987) 

"One of those magical practices, divination using the Tarot deck, still contains a paradoxical reminder of an older, more polytheistic vision of Satan, in the form of the eighteenth card of the major arcana of the Tarot, the card called “The Devil.” Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene, for example, link the tarot card of the Devil with the Greek god Pan. “Because the god was worshipped in caves and grottoes, attended by fear,” they write, “his image within us suggests something that we both fear and are fascinated by – the raw, goatish, uncivilized sexual impulses which we experience as evil because of their compulsive nature” (64).

 This image of Pan as god of dark impulses is one which James Hillman as also written on at length. “Pan is the goat-God and this configuration of animal-nature distinguishes nature by personifying it as something hairy, phallic, roaming and goatish” (“Pan” xx). Ever since the beginning of the Christian era, note Sharman-Burke and Greene, Pan has been subsumed into the image of the Devil, “complete with horns and leering grin.” The notion that Pan died, in keeping with Plutarch’s famous story, is psychologically untrue both they and Hillman contend. “Rather,” Sharman-Burke and Greene observe, “he has been relegated to the nethermost recesses of the unconscious, representing that which we fear, loathe, and despise in ourselves, yet which holds us in bondage through our very fear and disgust.” These two writers further observe that “although he is ugly, he is the Great All—the raw life of the body itself, amoral an crude, but nevertheless a god.” Moreover, they conclude, “the energy which is expended in keeping the Devil in his cave, shameful and hidden, is energy which is lost to the personality, but which can be released with immensely powerful effect if one is willing to look Pan in the face” (64-65).  - Richard Strommer - On Satan, Demons, and Daimons:An Archetypal Exploration

2. Sylvia Pinal - Satana

Simon of the Desert (1965)

"For Simon, this apocalypse of course comes in a very worldly form, specifically in the form of the luscious, womanly Silvia Pinal, a recurring Buñuel player most famous for her lead role in Viridiana. She is a seductive, strangely appealing Devil, appearing beneath Simon's pillar or even on it with him to offer him various temptations — not least of which is her own disrobed body. She appears first as a hip-swaying local woman who catches the eye of one of the priests but not of Simon, who uses her only as an example of the evil lure of women. She appears next as a faux-schoolgirl with sexy garters and stockings beneath her innocent uniform, singing a shrill and sing-songy mockery of Simon's religious devotion while trying to seduce him with her long, serpentine tongue or bare breasts. Most cleverly (and hilariously), she briefly tricks Simon by appearing to him as an embodiment of God himself, a young shepherd in a tunic with an unconvincing blonde beard and curls obscuring her femininity. Pinal is, in fact, not Buñuel's vision of the Devil but the vision of the Devil that Simon himself might concoct: the man who turns his back on the world is of course tempted by a Devil who offers nothing but worldly, fleshy pleasures. Simon, though, is stoic, and Pinal's Satan seduces the audience long before she is able to hold any sway over her faithful target." -- Ed Howard (Only the Cinema)

Ed Howard is always spot-on with his observations, and I'll confess I'm fairly agog over Pinal's "innocent" legs. And I especially like the end, which finds Simon and the devil sitting at a modern swinging dance cafe, both feeling outgunned and irrelevant in the age of Cocoa-Cola and Marx but fitting in perfectly in their new beatnik attire. It's amazing to think of Pinal's level of sacrilegious and profane relish here, when in Viridiana only a few years earlier, she was so pious and naive you couldn't imagine her any other way. Here she's a gleeeful serpent, but in the corrupt future she whisks them to, full of planes and rock-and-roll, prophets and devils may are just two more revelers at a mass masquerade.

3. Jack Woods as Asmodeus

Equinox (1967/70)

This movie used to show up once in awhile on UHF TV when I was a kid and it scared the crap out of us all, like a waking dream/nightmare. In a plot that would be loosely borrowed by Sam Raimi for Evil Dead, (he must have been just as freaked by it) some dopey/square college kids visiting a national park stumble onto a crazy hermit in a dark cave with a secret book full of devilish symbols which could trigger end the world. A friendly park ranger comes along, and would really... really like that book, kids. They don't want to give it to him, so he's less friendly. When he gets one of the girls alone he advances on her, his eye make-up darkens, and he begins sticking his face in the camera and twisting his mouth around in an obscene pucker. He's the stuff of kid nightmares and his name was burned into my memory, Asmodeus. Later, he transforms into a crudely startling claymation devil with wings (below), and summons a big Lovecraftian tentacled beastie, a purple Giant, and other things. Funny I remember the devil as much more elaborate (like the demon in Jeepers Creepers) showing just how much extra detail a child's imagination can add.

Now I'm more intrigued by the memory of being scared by it kid than I am about the movie itself, but Asmodeus is still the guy we imagined trying to lure us into cars with candy, looking all official--those bushy eyebrows, deep voice, that Sterling Hayden x Robert Ryan-style terse, manly delivery. As a representative of paternal security, the figure you run to find when someone needs help in the woods, you want to trust him, and Woods--one of the director/producers--radiates adult knowingness. But then next time you look his eyes are darkening, those brows casting way too much shade over his eyes, and he's leering, his tongue out, and hypnotizing with that flashy ring--leading to all sorts of overlays and flash cuts.

That's the kind of shit that's scary shit for a kid. Even in the broad daylight at home alone on a Saturday afternoon while your dad is golfing and your mom's right outside mowing the grass, catching it on TV could put the chill in a room full of kids. And even watching it now I marvel at the quality of the acting (terrible in all the right ways) and the knowing deftness of the editing. There's not a single dull moment, even if it all occurs in broad daylight, on a clear day outdoors, in a beautiful park picnic atmosphere, and the claymation may be crude, but it's still really good.

4. Green ooze

Prince of Darkness (1987)

This movie got some confused reviews over the years and has a dull ugly aesthetic (a church basement is not the most inspiring place to set a metaphysical movie, though it is the place most of us in AA have our spiritual awakenings), but it grows on you, like moss. Sure it's a bit odd that the devil turns out to be an trans-dimensional glowing green slime that climbs walls and shoots into people's mouths like jets of Scope mouthwash to possess them. Sure it's odd that a very pale Alice Cooper lingers outside with an army of schizophrenic homeless, being lured there by their mental illness(i.e. schizophrenia is really just Satan's alpha wave transmissions which most 'sane' inner radios aren't turned to). Sure, a mysterious figure broadcasts a warning from the future into the dreams of anyone crazy enough to fall asleep, but that's just John Carpenter. So see it again in a year and maybe it will be better, regardless.

Carpenter wrote the script under the pseudonym Richard Quatermass, which is apt since the metaphysical triangulation of demonic myth, physics, and human evolution in the story recalls QUATERMASS AND THE PIT and very few others... so

4.5 - Grasshopper -Five Million Years to Earth 

(AKA Quatermass and the Pit) (1967)

I dig that truth and belief have nothing to do with each other and yet create each other. I dig that the human ego is extraordinarily narrow-minded when it comes to consensual reality and maybe for good reason. Few of us want to connect the dots that lead us to the unpleasant possible truths such as the possibility that our difference from other life on earth is the result of some long-dead biotechnically advanced alien's dabbling, especially since it's hard to prove it in any 'scientific' manner and it's scary to think about. We scoff (maybe you're scoffing now) but it's partly that we're as afraid of being considered flaky as we are of being proved correct. It's a no-win situation, unless it's told to us as fiction. (more)

5. John Brown as the Black guy with glowing eyes

and Eddie Powell as the Goat of Mendes - Ride with the Devil (1968)

AKA Bride of the Devil

Here in Hammer's tight little adaptation of Dennis Wheatley's novel we have everything that makes British devil films great: Christopher Lee, some intelligent older women, Charles Gray as a sophisticated, witty villain, and a cult of upper crust young jet setters, peppered with a few older eccentrics who look like any minute they're flying to Manhattan for Rosemary's baby shower. There's two devils here, including a smiling black guy with yellow eyes who appears in the center of a big room with a pentagram. With his cocky, frozen grin he's pretty terrifying --his yellow eyes contrasting with his ebony blackness and huge smile paint some image of Voodoo to the jet setter Satan set, as if two branches of the same happy family, like at this moment he's also standing in the center of a Haitian fire circle.

6. Angela Featherstone as Veronica Iscariot in

Dark Angel: The Ascent (1994)

Directed by a woman (Linda Hassani) who is seemingly from another planet, DARK ANGEL (no relation to the TV series starring Jessica Alba) has a bit of a space cadet glow, kind of like MY SO-CALLED LIFE if Angela Chase was a demon looking to find herself in the world above her so-called-hellish home, etc. What's cool is the relative lack of CGI or misogyny as Veronica finds her way through the city, romancing a dumb doctor, wandering around the park ripping spinal columns out of rapists, and feeding the meat of her slain sinners to her dog Hellraiser. Whenever she's about to do a number on someone Veronica's eyes glow green or red. And we learn from the opening act that Hell is owned and operated by God and that the Devil is just a grunt who still bows and scrapes when angels come along to drop off memos. Most of all we learn that if acting is really really bad it becomes almost like innocence.

Sure she's not the devil devil, but Veronica Iscariot is damned close and I love Featherstone's low-key performance and the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare quality is endearing in a Guy Maddin-meets-Silk Stalkings kind of way. It's thus the perfect film to pass out to after ten whisky sours. And if you're one of those horror fans who has to really search his collection to find a suitable date movie, here it is. Once you see Veronica offer the rapist's spinal column to his intended victim (for a trophy!) then you know there is a God, after all.

7. Richard Devon as Satan

The Undead (1957)

 I saw this when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment. Alison Hayes is the va-va-Voom-level hot 'real bad' witch with eyes on Pamela Duncan's dimwitted man, and no one is too amazed by a time-traveling hypnotist, especially not the devil, played with the perfect mix of beatnik sardonicism and mellifluent calm by Richard Devon, who transcends time itself. He shows up only in the last third, when midnight, the hour of the Witches' Sabbath begins, bringing along his autograph book to give out gifts (and pitchfork tattoos like hand stamps at a rock club) and take signatures. Before he shows up the film is just a great weird and well-written mix of basement Shakespeare and black fog graveyard impishness but after he begins his meeting with the dancing graveyard witches it enters a sublime mania all its own. Recognizing the hypnotist with bemused calm, Satan greets him with "so you've managed to slip the bonds of time at last" as if he's been expecting him sooner.

8. Earnest Borgnine

The Devil's Rain (1975)

There was a deluge of devils in the 1970s but I picked Earnest because this is the movie all us kids from the 70s wanted to see: faces melting, horns, and robes, and William Shatner. The other Satan film I most wanted to see as a kid in the 70s was WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY? I even had a wild dream about it, where I was the baby, and then later the mother, and then a girl... weird man, but it left me feeling a bizarre Satanic kinship with this film. I see it now and it's just okay... but whatever. It's iconic. That feeling of these films having some supernatural power is gone, but as a kid growing up in the Satanic 70s just seeing the TV commercial for THE DEVIL'S RAIN was enough to give you sexy nightmares and make the world seem full of strange polymorphously perverse magic.

9. The Nuclear Reactor in the Middle East (and Simon Ward)

Rain of Fire (1977) 

aka  Holocaust 2000, aka The Chosen, aka Hex Massacre 

With an Italian director and Ennio Morricone score, this film would have to pretty bad to go wrong, and it's not bad, so why isn't it better? It's still watchable thanks to Kirk's hammy but committed performance. Notes Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70: 

"I don't think Kirk Douglas would know how to merely go slumming in exploitation cinema. He earned stardom in a series of apoplectic performances (Champion, Detective Story, Ace in the Hole) in which his characters drove themselves into early graves by force of pure will, it seemed, and at moments here he taps into that early fury. He throws himself into the show with Bela-like commitment, putting himself through more than Lugosi ever had to endure in a picture. Two scenes stand out: a feverish dream sequence that requires him to run naked through a desert and martyr himself (sort of) in a crowd of demonstrators; and a furious insane asylum visit that comes off less like Douglas's dream project of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and more like Shock Corridor, albeit with more color and violence."

The highlights are the various hallucinations where Kirk sees an ancient drawing of a devil-ish hydra rising from the Red Sea on a cave wall near where he plans to build a giant nuclear reactor, and it looks way much too much like the proposed nuclear plant for comfort - clearly the prophet from millennia ago foresaw his reactor triggering armageddon. Good luck stopping the project though, when your son's the devil and he's going for the long con.

The idea that a power plant being built has been misread as a hydra by the psychedelic prophet envisioning it in the ancient epochs is pretty brilliant (and ties in with the transmissions in Carpenter's Prince of Darkness). Annoying hippie protestors tie in the anti-nuke environmentalist factor to the other popular subjects of the day, like Satanic offspring (The first Omen had been a hit the year before) and let's face it, no one does devil movies like the Italians! With their centuries of deep Catholic guilt you know what guts and gonzo guts it took to include a scene where a Catholic priest facilitates an involuntary abortion!

10. Joe Turkel as Lloyd the Bartender

The Shining (1981)

Note that the ghost bartender Lloyd appears at Jack's big moment of crisis - when Shelly Duvall accuses him of hurting his son. Here he's wasted five months not having a single drink and it's all for nothing as he's accused of hurting Danny anyway, and he didn't do it, to his knowledge. His language finally breaks up a bit from the mantras and he mutters he'd sell his soul for a drink. Suddenly he lightens up, "Hi Lloyd!" If there's no booze in this dimension, just step into the next one, where momentary salvation and permanent destruction are all tied up in Jack... on the rocks. (more)

11.   Walter Huston as Old Scratch

The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)

(looking over the contract)

Daniel Webster: This appears - mind you, I say appears - to be properly drawn. But you shan't have this man. A man isn't a piece of property. Mr. Stone is an American citizen... and an American citizen cannot be forced into the service of a foreign prince.
Mr. Scratch: Foreign? Who calls me a foreigner?
Daniel Webster: Well, I never heard of the de... I never heard of you claiming American citizenship.
Mr. Scratch: And who has a better right? When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck. Am I not still spoken of in every church in New England? It's true the North claims me for a Southerner and the South for a Northerner, but I'm neither. Tell the truth, Mr. Webster - though I don't like to boast of it - my name is older in this country than yours.

12. Charles Laughton

Don Juan in Hell (1951)

This isn't a film (that I know of) but I'm a huge George Bernard Shaw fan, and love this most of all - it was done as a record, I think, with Charles Boyer as Don Juan, Agnes Moorhead as the Old Woman. Here's a sample of the scintillating irreverent dialogue:

THE STATUE: ... In future, excellent Son of the Morning, I am yours. I have left heaven for ever.
THE DEVIL: [again touching the marble hand] Ah, what an honor! what a triumph for our cause! Thank you, thank you. And now, my friend - I may call you so at last - could you not persuade him to take the place you have left vacant above?
THE STATUE: [shaking his head] I cannot conscientiously recommend anybody with whom I am on friendly terms to deliberately make himself dull and uncomfortable. (full show above)

13. Pazuzu

The Exorcist, The Exorcist II: The Heretic

 The hardcore Christian or Catholic idea of the devil is rooted in a purely Freudian subconscious wherein he acts as a catch-all basket of repressed desires and speech, possessing Regan for no other reason apparently than to curse like a rabid sailor, even using 'cunt' as a verb! Regan is also subjected to several cruel medical procedures (including two brutal spinal taps) as science becomes a nouveau inquisition, torturing the 'truth' out of her as if science's own unconscious is itself possessed, until the devil falls in line with the parameters of mental illness as they know it. Just as the toes of schizophrenia were mutilated to fit the shoe of Satanic possession in the Middle Ages, so Satanic possession is mutilated to fit the shoe of schizophrenia today. Like the angels, Pazuzu knows your sins before you do, and calls them and you by name and for that must be destroyed, or assimilated. We never learn where he goes once his new host Father Karras is killed. Perhaps he goes back into the ether, awaiting his sequels. Perhaps he was never there at all. You can't kill a sitcom by smashing the TV.

I would personally like to apologize to all the dark lord incarnations brevity prevents including - Peter Cook in Bedazzled, Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, Robert De Niro in Angel Heart, Peter Stormare in Constantine, Gabriel Byrne in End of Days... they are legion, and God bless them.

Lost Highway