It's Called Scissoring: IN FABRIC

I heard about Flux Gourmet being totally weird. Well, a new Peter Strickland film is a time for nervous celebration! 'Celebration' because anything by old Strick-9 (his cool nickname, I just decided) guaranteed a totally original, multi-genre-exploding work of art; 'nervous' because original multi-genre-exploding works of art don't always 'land' --especially when stretched to feature length. You may gaze in awe at his always-beautiful imagery, thrill at being able to recognize all the embedded references, savor the alienation of Antonioni-esque post-structuralism, and yet when you pick a time to go to the bathroom, you don't feel the need to 'pause' or hurry back to your seat You can be pretty sure you're not going to miss any detail of plot or lose the narrative unction - as there is nothing to lose. 

The cost of experimental eccentricity, alas, is stasis, the pre-Raphaelite fairie bower. We gaze in rapt awe like Hylas at the beauty of our own reflection, wondering when the nymphs will drag us under into rapt cinematic hypnosis. In Strickland's pond, they never come!

But Strickland may yet find a way around this edging. With each film he gets closer to making a real normal movie. He came closest with his last film In Fabric (2018) and so to celebrate the serving of Flux Gourmet, let me dust off this unfinished gem of a review I started after watching it a few months or years ago. 

PS- Dig my prolonged urine metaphor opener. Shout out to the Yellow River Boys! 

IN FABRIC 

(2018) Dir. Peter Strickland

Wise cine-urologists say: When a director aims the golden arc of his film in three directions at once, he better be on his toes, lest he be left with piss-sprayed shoes. 

Peter Strickland is just such a reckless streamer. His films are homages to the golden shower of 70s 'Eurosleaze,' splashing beautifully into a shiny, serpentine urinal of experimentalist meta-satire, dusky cinematography, and vivid collapsing, ever-shifting signifiers.. The signposts by which we recognize all the tics and tricks of the era's erotic 'dream/nightmare'-makers (Franco, Rollin, especially) are--in le universe Strickland--twisted around to leave us with that strange, alienated feeling where we kind of step out of the narrative, and it's as if we're waking from the dream of our own lives, the dream where time stops, the clocks melt, and the illusion that dreams and waking life are mutually exclusive evaporates in the cold heat of a blazing moon.

That's why it comes as no surprise that Strickland's In Fabric (2018), wiggles that stream of consciousness into three different streams, hoping one at least will hit the mark. We get: (a) a dark 70s-set period piece surrealist dystopian satire of England's Tony Richardson-style 'kitchen sink' (i.e. working class yabbo) character dramas; (b) a high-fashion updated or Tales of Manhattan-cum-decadent-capitalist horror satire equating fashion retail with kinky sex and black magic, and c) a work of détourned experimentalist fashion decollage, exploring the way the concept of "objectification" refuses to hold still and have its picture taken. In short, rather than leaning on Franco, Kümel, and Rollin, you can feel influences from Antonioni (modernist alienation), Bunuel (surreal deadpan satire), Argento (wild vivid colors and sudden violence you can feel in your nervous system like a cold shock), Fulci (gore as high art), Gilliam (dystopia!) and Kubrick (glacial gliding) all coalescing around a kind of Stan Brakhage / Tony Richardson collaboration for a Situationist detourned Sears catalogue from the mid-70s. Sure, technically it's about a red dress that kills its owners, sold by a Satanic department store, in an outskirt of 70s London. But that's like saying Psycho is about the difficulties of juggling a failing business with caregiving for an invalid parent.

What does it say about this film that the idea of the dress itself as a sentient, relentlessly destructive garment is perhaps the least interesting thing about it? The 'enigmatic uncanny object destroying everyday people' motif is soooo last season. We've already had Rubber (a tire), Christine (a car) or The Car (a different car), Maximum Overdrive (many cars) or Killdozer (take a guess)--or--probably the films Fabric most closely resembles as far as adhering to the 'possessed object killing a series of folk' narrative structure--Death Bed - the Bed that Eats and The Mangler (a laundry press).  As is often the case, there's no origin story to Fabric's monster dress - no flashback to a satanic dress designer whose soul moves into the dress as he's killed by an angry mob; no meteor crashing through a boutique window and infusing the dress with an unholy glow; no shamanic child laborer in Malaysia weaving curses into the fabric as an act of anti-capitalism vengeance, or anything like that, but that's ok. What matters is that Strickland never misses a chance to run the camera's scissor gaze up and down on the crushed velvet curtain of a scene.  The end spends lots of time showing us the blazing hypnosis of the devilish TV commercial, implying that if we ever die while watching TV, it's conceivable we would never even notice the program had changed. The image would just catch on fire and melt into our dispersing attention locus. 

Whether or not it's attempting to be some caustic lower berth satiric response to the gushy texture-and-privilege fabric worship of PTA's Phantom Thread (1), no one man may know. I don't think so, but Thread did come out the year before this. And it's all connected by a... But this ain't no portrait of an oh-so sensitive famous guy tortured by his own rich fame and a doting fan/wife/personal assistant with a streak of Munchausen by-proxy, this is about Dentley and Soper, a fashion oasis that really put the 'tore' in 'store.' The mannequins loom like aliens moving to a century-long circadian rhythm (we never see them move, but they do, like plants). The vampiric alien department store sales staff are all statuesque mannequin-like black-haired pale skinned women who speak in a kind of philosophical sales-pitchin' English, never addressing questions or people directly, speaking only in (masterfully-written) commerce-bent aphorisms. The store has an old time chute for the payments, where the money goes up and the change comes back along a ceiling tube (bringing another chill of 'bored child of the 70s' recognition from the check-cashing drive-through at the pre-ATM bank). And an old timey elevator runs through the middle of the place like a steampunk serpent. And if you think you know what floor it's getting off on, you're mistaken, it goes down, down, down, to where souls and skin and cloth stitch together in a 'Cronenberg meets Barker at the 70s fashion outlet'-style shock tableaux. 

There can be no doubt, In Fabric succeeds at whatever it's trying to do. It's always lovely to look at, sumptuous in a way that makes one wonder "where's all this money coming from?" because "who is the audience for something this esoteric?" The wonder is that the level of cinematography and craftsmanship is so high, as films this weird are usually low-budget shoot-from-the-hip affairs. Not so In Fabric!  The dream sequences are special highlights. Witness the lovely color and surreal composition of the below, the demon newborn beckoning! I could watch this film forever... but would I have really ever seen it?

It doesn't pay to tell you too much about what's going on, so I'll just elaborate on random moments and the general framework which is a kind of Damien Thorn parable, with an evil red dress in place of a Satanic changeling, and a vampiric sales staff instead of shady nursemaids and big dogs. 

First, a divorced black middle-aged bank teller named Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) buys a dress for her blind date (i.e. to wow the eyes of her unseen suitors), and second, a geeky ectomorph trapped in a working class yobbo hell with a fiancee wife who spends most of her time on the phone with her family. To go into all the hows and whys would do much to ruin the WTF progression of the film. For watching a guy dance at a pub in a red dress with some guys twice his size all rapey or not as they get hammered is to wonder what the hell is going on and that wonderment is the best part of Strickland.

Since this is all set in the 70s-80s (Strickland's and my childhood era, tellingly), she's going on and pre-internet date, this being when you answered personal ads in the newspaper and they leave messages on your gigantic answering machine. And you don't even get to see a picture before meeting them. As I can assure you from my internet dating during the early wild west dial-up modem days, that's not a good idea. But she gets lucky, and maybe it's the magic of the becoming red dress she's bought from aver Satanic department store. The guy turns out to be a salt-and-pepper middle aged knight in shining sweater armor. A guy any middle=aged black bank teller would be glad to grab, and he's into her! Thanks, red dress.

And man she needs a break. Her artist/slacker son treats her like a servant, passive-aggressively lobbing his ever-present girlfriend's vagina in her face via his bizarre but very cool art.  At the bank, her grinning identical twin bosses give her a carefully HR-approved talking-to after she takes five extra minutes in the bathroom, and surreal Bunuelian/Brazilian digressions ensue. They also ask to hear and then analyze her dreams--which are then depicted and presented as key portents towards maximum work efficiency (these dream elements will recur and are are like a welcome tide that keeps drifting the film outside its kitchen sink harbor). 

But the dress may be just setting her up for a fall, for demons like to prop you up higher before knocking you down, like an angry kid building a tower out of blocks. During a walk through the park a pit bull attacks her sleeve and she gets blood all over the dress! The washing machine in the basement goes rogue when she throws it in, and tears itself out of the wall leaving a deep gash in her hand. Even in remote cornfields, mannequins seem to watch her every move. What does it mean and why her? Is it because she tries to take the dress back? 

Not only will the store not give a refund, they refuse to even take it back. The staff do not look kindly on this attempt at abandonment of decisive and initially admirable lifestyle upgrades. The saleswoman Ms. Luckmoore (Fatima Mohammed) did warn Sheila that the girl who modeled in the catalogue died in a "zebra crossing," on a catalogue shoot in Africa, but then she assures Sheila that the dress was washed "throughly" before putting it back on the rack. There's only one like it, one size fits all, and it has the habit of trying to strangle you or floating above your son's lover while she's having an orgasm and freaking everybody out.

So it finally finds it's way to a thrift store where it's grabbed almost sight unseen by a passing lorry driver who make washing machine repairman Reg Speaks (Tony Bill) wear it for his bachelor party, which consists mainly of getting roiling drunk and dancing and drinking to the point of puking with his fiancee's macho-charged brother and their yobbo co-workers. Their crazed boozy mania, howling in the streets and circling Red in the dress like a Ned Beatty in dem woods. At home his fiancee/wife, Babs (Haley Squires).  His boss is so tough that he expresses his hurt at not getting invited by a long angry stare. Meanwhile a bored housewife tries to seduce him when he comes over to fix her 'ahem' machine, and he diffuses the situation by giving a monotone recitation of all that might go wrong with a washing machine and how each issue would be repaired. Apparently this is like a hypnotic turn-on, even thrilling those banker twins, to whom Reg applies for a loan to open his own repair shop after he's fired for not writing up an invoice when repairing his own washing machine. The boss doesn't say a word, just eats Reg's time card while the crazy synths of Cavern of Anti-Matter's strange clangy score drones to a head. 

It's only when Babs drops by Dentley & Soper's for an exchange of the red dress (which she just throws on a rack after they refuse to accept it, oh Sheila why didn't you think of that?) that someone is able to fire back enough retail savvy to make an impression on the vampiric staff, out-aphorism-ing them at their own game and rattling their implacability. Too bad the dress has evil plans for her whether she effectively got 'rid' of it or not, which includes burning the store down during a riot over a place in line while she ends up hiding out in a changing room. Is the whole message of the film that one small altercation over who was before who in line can lead to looting and rioting to the point film itself may spring its thread in the sewing machine projector and wind up unspooling down around your projectionist/seamstresses' feet like an amok and endless serpent? 

P'raps. 

So what 'ave we then? Gorgeously photographed and stylized imagery that plays on childhood memories boys have of first arousals poring over Sears (or in this case, Harrod's?) catalogues; deep tissue social satire that sometimes tips over into the obvious (oopsy!); genuinely dark and unrelenting comedic horror about the imperfections and oily parts of the human body vs. the bald wild-eyed perfection of the department store mannequin? All this and body horror galore can be found IN the endlessly perverse and fascinating-- if a trifle obvious around the gills--FABRIC, a movie so weird the producers or whomever had to rename it, adding "Dressed to Kill" at the end in re-release (just so folks know it counts as a horror film as well as a Bunuel-ish surrealist satire). 

There can be no doubt, it succeeds at one or two of its chosen artsy arcs, but when there's no 'normal' to rush back to, no 'home base' from which to get our bearings (as we could, for example, in the knotty-legged sanity of Sellers' Group Captain Mandrake in Dr. Strangelove, or Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup), we can't find a 'whole cloth' from which to start all the ripping. We can only judge it as a collection of surrealist remnants, half-off at Harrod's, one-day-only; they don't add up to a cumulative effect, but taken as weird vignettes they look like a million bucks.

At this level, In Fabric is a sporadic triumph, a genuine 'going out of existence sale' wherein if one row of cast-off ideas and satiric notions doesn't grab you, keep shopping as every corner's bound to hold an object you just have to try on to lift your dull little life into some kind of dystopian delight. 

So what if the clothes don't fit? They're literally unlike anything you've seen before, with so many startlingly dark moments of satire that any random 20 minute chunk is the wildest feature I've seen all year. As a whole though - one wonders what Strickland wants out of us, other than to maybe 'wake up' to our programming? Are the Duntley & Soper commercials that are always on TV-- all strange color bleeds and cryptic 'come here' gestures from the frozen smile sales staff - meant to evoke hypnotic triggers for consumer society mind control? Are we being dared to find all this trenchant, or is Strickland taking the piss? 

It's one thing to insult us, but when you insult our first world consumer entitlement you better be armed with a sense of forgiving catharsis or warmth by the end. Otherwise, your movie smacks of sophomore film student self-righteous preachiness, like a trust-fund Marxist lecturing his dad on socialism over winter break. Don't expect applause if you depict your audience as clapping seals, especially if you don't throw them any fish. The fish may be plentiful, but they're too far away, and the lashing talons of social satiric harpies wait for any outstretched hand. Oh how you mock blind King Phineas with the sound of your dazzling stitchwork feasts! 

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ORIGIN STORIES - or "Why Erich breaks out in an uncontrollable rage if a girl drags him into a fabric store"

I think I can explain the origins for In Fabric, as well as the whole homosexual or metrosexual or bisexual male's yen for fabric texture and fashion on film vs. the straight male's terror and loathing of it. Strickland cleary. has the same formative year memories as I do of being a child dragged around to fabric stores and fashion outlets in the 70s by mom (according to Wiki, it was mainly the now-closed Jackson's in Wiltshire) bored for what seemed like torturous hours in women's fashion stores, getting reprimanded by the sales staff for crawling up the mannequin's skirts or hiding under the racks. As a (straight) boy, my sole source of pleasure at these stores came from ogling under the mannequin skirts and staring qua-lustfully at the provocative pictures on the nylon labels. That only lasted a few minutes though, then you're back to being bored beyond endurance. If you're a boy dragged to such places, it's impossible to be neutral about them as adults. 

Kids today got cell phones so are never bored on that excruciating level. But we of Gen-X. We knew boredom. Stuck for hours in these stores we either snapped from the strain, resulting in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome / personality split leading to a career in fashion--or developed a vivid imagination to lose themselves in fantasy; and when they grow up they have a rich escapist streak plastering over a lifelong fear of being bored. That's me. I still get insanely claustrophobic if I'm in a fabric store or ladies' fashion outlet for more than fifteen seconds. Just be a girl I'm shopping with and tell me what you want to try something on, I'll either leave instantly or start a huge in-store fight. It's automatic. I can't control it. Mother!! Mother, why!?

I ended up saving my sanity by getting mom to buy me those three-in-a-bag $1.29 Gold Key horror comic book packs--I can still see the covers in my mind's eye now, especially Boris Karloff -Tales of Mystery--which the now-closed Wannamaker's had hanging on a child's eye rack by the cashier, as if sensing the need for my escape. Thank you whoever thought of that!  Today, I can't walk past a display for ladies pantyhose without imagining Karloff's dapper mustache (above left). Gold Key you are aptly named. To paraphrase TS Eliot, thinking of you confirms a prison!

Strickland meanwhile must have developed far differently than either from those experiences, with the result is that In Fabric blurs the line between the store and the comic's contents. His film is even structured like an issue of Karloff Tales of Mystery replete with multiple stories connected by a thread (literally in this case), harnessed to consumerist critique and clear reverence for the sexual allure of glossy red fabric when beautifully filmed against dark backgrounds in 35mm. With In Fabric, Strickland escapes to the 70s fabric store for his horror fix. I want to shout at him as the Gold Key lights the path through the darkness, Strickland, you're going the wrong way!"

I'll never quite feel it, but I understand it. 

Stuck in the zone of the gigantic maternal Other, looming over your small stature--and being neither the focus of her loving attention (she's looking at clothes, so just stay close by and don't break anything or annoy her) nor freed from her presence (i.e. allowed to escape to your den of toys, wherein YOU are the giant), you are stuck in a Spenserian fairy bower built for someone else, destined only to watch the process of slow materialist seduction from the outside. Your young imagination is so desperately bored and alienated you either have that split personality break--i.e. fall into the enchantment of another gender's fashion scene and become determined to make mom's clothes for her (thus restoring yourself to the center of her attention, i.e. her Lacanian phallus)--OR you become withdrawn into your own interiority, shutting out the maternal altogether, losing yourself in the all-male world of dragons, dinosaurs, and advancing German tanks (i.e. the realm of the absent father, taking the hero's journey of differentiation from the mother). 

In short, dragging your son to the fashion store too many times will either make him a dress designer, filmmaker or master escapist, using his Gold Key to open the door out of the dusty sales-tag maternal sphere. Follow Boris Karloff, he does not steer amiss. 

And one final question: when you die alone in front of the TV, does it really keep playing? Or does the commercial beckoning you forward melt away, like a mannequin in the flames of a black-out riot, the dripping plastic of the sales force entwined with malfunctioning cathode rays adhering to your wiggly soul and dragging it down into the abyss of paying the full price in a world of knock-offs?

Gettin' Ripped: Luigi Cozzi's PAGANINI HORROR (1989)

If ever there was a time to order Blu-rays of things you want to see on your desert island after civilization's you-know-what, it's now, for the canon of Luigi "The Italian Ed Wood" Cozzi is nearly all fully available from one label or site or another. I've already blathered praise for his two masterworks Starcrash and Hercules.  Now the lunatic eye slash-cum-time warp-devil-dipped and Pleasance-lipped, slippery dippy house bash Paganini Horror (1989) is available on a stunning Blu-ray (via Severin), so the circle is complete (almost). I hope, by the way, you don't think my praise of his crude genius is snide or mean-spirited - quite the opposite. If we can't laugh at Italian versions of our basest music class fears, see them bounced hurly burly into cosmic prisms, fall into slime pits in a universe where time loops are illustrated by giant floating hourglasses and spray-painted physics equations on the drywalls, we may as well hang shop and close up ourselves. 

It's as threadbare a production as they come. It's clear the money ran out somewhere along the line for Paganini Horror in ways it didn't for his other 1989 masterpiece, The Black Cat. Still, budget be damned, no way is Cozzi going to just give us girls in a rock band disemboweled with a bladed violin. L'Italiano Wood has bigger things on his mind. Tell him to make a cheap slasher movie that ties in Paganini to get some free associative publicity from a big budget Paganini biopic in the works at the time and he'll give you the universe. No budgetary constraints can stop him from grabbing at the cosmic ring, even if he knows his horse is out miles too far for his budget's arms. 

Maybe you saw the DVD cover, with the skeleton playing violin (left) and drew some cheap late-80s punk-meets-slasher impression from it. Maybe you figured it would be the usual tactless ladle of topless broads and denim-jacketed idiots offed gorily in some house where money for the electric bill grows on trees. Your conclusions couldn't be more wrong. Instead, Busto Arsizio's favorite son delivers all his usual tropes and tics: plenty of strong women with wild hair, planetary shifts, portentous gazes into nowhere; lasers, wild light effects, godawful dubbing, spiritual homage-paying (the spirits of Jack Kirby, Ray Harryhausen, Alex Raymond, and Bernie Krigstein all watch over Cozzi's shoulder in numb surprise), only in a 'house' that's really more like a half-finished set, drywall only half-painted, buckets laying around, sheets everywhere....  Man, I am talking myself into watching this all over again.... again? 

Bad though it is, in many ways, Paganini Horror is never dull or lacking for color. As in the same year's Black Cat, it reaches a climax at around ten minutes in and just keep building from there until we're too far out in space, riding a cosmic hourglass around the moon, through the moldy mud, through to the same room we left, only now covered in candles. And then someone stabs us with a violin. 

Dario Nicolodi gets star billing as Sylvia, the owner of the fabled "House in the Key of G" (where Paganini lived) which she rents out for cash. This week she's hosting a music video shoot for "Paganini Horror" the new song based on the mysterious last piece of written music by our titular virtuoso. Goosing up the atmos, Nicolodi announces Paganini conducted black mass rituals here in the 19th century. He disemboweled his bride and used her intestines as strings for his Stradivarius! That's how he hit those weird notes only he could hit! It's the screams of his bride forever trapped in the strings! Lead singer Kate  (Jasmin Maimone) exclaims that their 'House in the Key of G video' will be "like Michael Jackson's Thriller!" Bitchy manager Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli) hires horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi, who plays the same character in Black Cat) who decorates the shoot by spray painting the song title onto white sheets on the wall. Their most bodacious of bassists, Rita (Luana Ravegnini) wears a devil mask; there's also all-seeing eye lamp, a cosmic hourglass Cozzi must have brought from home, and candles. There's a mention of substituting mannequins as the band members start to disappear, but there's no time to follow up on that, as the disappearances keep happening as more and more people are sent off to look for the missing.... until everyone is being lured into the evil Paganini's clutches.

There are two real crimes to this movie. One, is that most beautiful bassist in all the world, Rita, is the first to die. Why her?  Why not literally anyone else in the cast? It seems very spiteful of our Paganini! Every second with her is precious. The doe-eyed assistant manager boy is next (lured to his death by a wet-haired version of Rita's ghost); but soon there's way more going on than just violin stabbings and standing around, with lots of weird mask cutaways. Holes open up under people's feet; electric energy pulses through those who fall into it or who try to escape the force field surrounding the house. Meanwhile Albert Einstein looks on, balefully, from a tacked-up poster, tongue hanging out in mock disapproval. Just to let you know, weird physics be happenin'.

As for that final piece of music, the one Paganini supposedly wrote that the doe-eyes assistant pays a fortune for from Donald Pleasance, well, no one ever called the film's composer Vince Tempura a modern Paganini. He does okay with the non-diegetic part of the score, not so much the Paganini-attributed song, though it is serviceable certainly. If Paganini is the Jimi Page of his era, this would be the theme from Death Wish II. 

Paganini himself is really the weakest part of the film: naturally the knife he uses has a treble clef-shaped handle, and also his metal Stradivarius switchblade likes to stick into expose bellies, i.e. sweet, sweet Rita's. He also has a huge cello case (no cello) to lock up our final girl and it's then set on fire. In addition, guitarist Elena (Michel Klipstein) gets infected by "a special fungus... like they discovered in the 1800s, on logs... floating along...  certain European rivers," notes Lavania. 'This infected wood.. was used to make a special kind of violin, the Stradivarius." Elena becomes a hideous fungus-covered monster; Lavinia says "this is the fungus, for sure... I saw it... magnified... in a TV documentary." 

Music is magic. We get an update on the harmony of the spheres. As with everything in the Cozzi canon, we get way more than you might expect. It may not all fit, but everything's here - even Cozzi's beloved cosmic hourglass! The name Lavania is also similar to Lavana (from The Black Cat). It's all here. 

If an analyst tells you why all traumatic childhood flashbacks occur in

 red bathrooms, kill them instantly.

We open on the ominous synth notes dotting along as a strange young girl rides up a foggy Venice canal; we dig the look of satanic royalty in the way she sits, with the violin case in her lap, the gondola like some kind of fast moving sea serpent, snaking through the lonely mist as Vince Tempera's soundtrack pulses like Tangerine Dream guiding Roy Scheider's nitro truck through the Sorcerer mud. At home, amidst her collection of weird dolls, the music echoes with vocals, the girl picks up a Barbie-sized doll with a brown skull face and long white hair (a ringer for the Paganini spirit to come) and stirs mom's bath with it. A stark red wall is behind them...

After the untimely death of Rita, the second most unconscionable choice is that Donald Pleasance is dubbed by someone else!! His replacement does an okay enough job - especially in his rant about demons as he climbs up to the top of an under-reconstruction clock tower in Venice and throws all the money he got for the Paganini score to the wind, trying to keep a straight face while talking to money ("fly away, demons, so the real ones can take your place... so what happens with Paganini will repeat itself.... extracted by the one to whom it belongs, his majesty, Satan!") makes for a pretty well modulated rant, but what's the point of even having the Donald in a film if not for that deliciously silken, fearful but scarily seismographic voice?

All of the dubbing is pretty bad in both the Italian and English versions. English dubs especially have been Cozzi's Achilles' heel - be it the lame Texas accented robot and shrill Stella Starr of Starcrash, or the grating storytelling narrator in Sinbad and the Seven Seas, the result is that kind of lazy mixing where everyone sounds like they're right up on the mic in a quiet sound booth rather than out in the actual environment depicted. One side effect of it all is the hilarious near-constant screaming of Cozzi's nearly all-female cast. There is so much screaming that the actresses seem to be running out of breath; their screams trail off into hysteria, like they're barely trying to keep a straight face, the way a child who's been crying for hours starts to almost laugh with their crying voice. 

What makes it a true gem is Cozzi's infectious, palpable love and respect for fantasy, for strong women, and moviemaking.  When Ravegnini and the other girl band members gaze into the camera for their music video, you can tell they're feeling happy and part of the Cozzi family pack; they're not taking it very seriously but they love it.  There's no vibe of having to fight off pervy producers or rote macho objectification. These girls glow. Franco Lecca's deep yellow and red-accented cinematography makes everyone seem lovely with natural skin color (rather than the ghastly pale or gaudy tan we sometimes get in Italian horror films) and the Venetian architecture hums in burnished oranges and browns. 

Too bad when they go outside it's all bad day-for-night that makes everyone look purple and green. Why?

Ugh, why, Paganini, why kill Rita first? Why not get Pleasance to do his own dub? Why the bad day-for-night? Why the bad vibe ending? If it didn't have these things I would have seen it a dozen times already, instead of only twice.

Regardless, there are still enough gateways to other dimensions, electrical charges, melting hands, green glowing lights, and strange doorways to hell and all the other Cozzi trimmings to make six ordinary movies, even if full half the film is just one girl or the other walking up and down stairs and down halls, or screaming. We can't blame the master if some turkey distributor who didn't get what he wanted, so took out all the cosmic cutaways. We sure can wish for a full restored director's cut. Wishing is free.

BLU-RAY EXTRAS:

There's a nice interview with Cozzi at his sci-fi store; and the footage excised by the producer fills in a lot of the blanks  (would there was a copy with all the original shots -love the hourglasses floating in space - recycled from Hercules) and an explanation of why that too-trusting kid assistant would shell out a bag of money to some sinister Hobbes Lane type for an alleged authentic Paganini score.

Anyway, Severin has done wonders with what they got (Did the color grading just give out for the exterior shots, or was it supposed to look like that?) All we need now from Severin (here's hoping it's coming soon) is Cozzi's unofficial meta-Suspiria-sequel (recently re-available on Prime), The Black Cat (aka Demons 6: Anus Profundis) from 1990. (PS they released it this year, 2021!). 

And while we're on the subject, what about that crazy shot-on-video quasi-autobiographical Blood on Melies' Moon? (PS it came out this year, 2022! I'm quoted on the back label!)  I saw a clip wherein the great one himself ruminates in his bedroom about coming to terms with being labeled "The Italian Ed Wood." I guess I'm not the first to call him that. But hey Luigi, if you're reading this, know that a lot of us fans love Ed Wood way more than a more highly regarded artist like, say, Fritz Lang. I have a billion theories why that is but the main one might be the Brechtian distancing opening us up to the interplay of our own imagination, like having the curtains around your favorite play suddenly flung open. We get a bit of that in, say, Bergman's Magic Flute or Olivier's Henry V but it's intentional and hence a little pompous compared to the accidental Brechts like Wood and Cozzi (Godard--erasing his auteur footsteps around the sudden exposure of Brechtian mechanics as if Danny Torrance slinking backwards in his own tracks--is the Mr. In-Between.)

Maybe it's all too short with a hyper-ironic, unsatisfying ending that makes all the parts click into perfect place, the way some insane carnival ride turns out to be "Take the A Train" all along in a Charles Mingus composition. Maybe it was trimmed of its cosmic portent, maybe Rita died too soon, maybe Donald doesn't dub himself, but the Cozzi magic is still there and this film must to be treasured for a lifetime of Cozzi binges to come. Who knows how long that lifetime will be? Einstein on the poster knows! He says, honey, you better pounce while you still have all your own strings. 

For the Complete Cozzi Cannon, click here!

10 Surreal Cult Gems of the 80s: A Prime-Stream Special

What was the 80s and why was it such a golden age for weird sci-fi and head trips? Was it thanks to the dawn of MTV and Night Flight and their power to amuse stoned kids back late from the punk shows on weekends? Repo Man, Return of the Living Dead, and Night of the Creeps in theaters; Liquid Sky and Street Trash were at (shhh) inner-city theaters; drive-in and the video rental places co-existed comfortably.., for the moment.  Conan, the Terminator, and Robocop made such big money that art house wonders like Brazil and Blue Velvet could be seen and occupy hallowed places in the press.

Also, it was the height of Nancy-fueled anti-drug hysteria, and so--just as, during Prohibition, imbibing booze had become a symbol of American freedom and defiance of knee-jerk puritanism, so now there togetherness and patriotism to be found in smoking weed during the 80s (when you could go to jail for years just for having a joint in your pocket). Today weed is mostly legal and so innocuous its users are unnoticed. But back then, getting high and going to the midnight movie was a rite of dangerous passage. And going home to watch Night Flight and weird rented movies was simply the norm. And as a result, thrived a momentary nation of the strange. We were a decade away from the ecstasy-and-blue recovery roller coaster of the Prozac 90s. We had to invent micro-tripping just to get by - so we liked it weird. As ye shall see, brave wanderer:

1. SOCIETY

(1989) Briam Yuzna

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

For sheer over-the-top surreal class-commentary, nothing really beats Brian Yuzna's SOCIETY which has one of the best WTF denouements in cinema history. I'm going through great pains to not spoil any of it, let's just say that in best surrealist form it taps into the Freudian Id impulse and the anxiety that one is shut out of a massive 80s upper crust orgy--that even your parents are in on some licentious surreal group sex cult secret. It's this very real feeling that underwrote the Satanic panic of the 80s (and continues today in things like Pizza-gate, Q-Anon, and the conspiracies of David Icke -[here]), so it makes sense this came out in the "me" decade, a time when Reagan was in office and 'yuppies' were gobbling up everything, their little IZOD collars turned up and Ray-bans on in slavish imitation of their god, Tom Cruise. Not for nothing, then, does Society star the euphonious Cruise-clone Billy Warlock as a privileged lad who enjoys the finer things thanks to his adopted family, yet is ever reminded of just how much better a slightly richer contingent at his elite school has it.  He begins to realize something is going on when his older sister's paranoid ex-boyfriend-cum-stalker plays him tapes he secretly made of the sister's private conversations with their father re: her debutante 'coming out' party. It sounds, in this weird conversation, like she's going be offered up to some evil reptilian throng as a sexual offering, forced to sleep with everyone in the cult, including her parents and local officials--and that she's looking forward to it. But that can't be--can it? 

To amp the paranoia we're never quite sure, til it's too late, if we're just reading into it. Billy is paranoid, but the truth is far crazier. Along his journey, he picks up a hot mess girlfriend (Devin DeVasquez) and--in the weirdest element--her "mother" (Pamela Matheson), a bizarre hair-eating nutcase that seems to have wandered in from a John Waters casting lagoon, and seems younger than her daughter, starts hanging around with them, regularly trying to eat Billy's hair. 

 Yuzna produced those early Stuart Gordon gems From Beyond and Re-Animator so clearly knew how to hire and use the best effects teams. The gooey weirdness would be CGI today but here it's all latex analogy--the weirdest coolest mess since Carpenter's The Thing. Too bad that, like The Thing itself, so few people saw it in theaters --did it even get a release? Either way, what a blast! It goes everywhere Eyes Wide Shut does in about 1/3 of the time, and then a whole, whole WHOLE lot farther. Along the way it lays down full bushels of insight on the nature of desire, social-climbing, consumer culture, the parasitical nature of the rich, and what's known today as FOMO - or the feeling a massive beautiful people orgy is going on whenever you're not around. Kurbick really should have gone out more, or at least watched some horror movies --Society would have maybe saved his film from its fatal inertia.

And even today, some still believe there's a secret basement where gorgeous women abandon themselves to hairy ugly men at the clang of Get Out teacup rattle or an Eyes Wide Shut Rammstein-style synth/chant dirge. How that 'missing the orgy' feeling ties in with priapism and paranoia could be a full semester course (see here for full syllabus), but Society says it all in 99 minutes and without bitter aftertaste. 

3. LIQUID SKY

(1982) Dir. Slava Sukerman

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

We're deep in the height of the artsy early-80s downtown NYC New-Wave scene, back when it was cool, underground, emaciated and addicted to an array of pills and powders. A small alien saucer lands on the roof above the balcony apartment of trendy new wave icon Margaret (Anne Carlisle) and her drug-dealing lesbian roommate Adrian, played by Paula E. (Alice in Alice Sweet Alice) Shepherd. Across the way in a parallel story is Susan Doukas as Sylvia, mother of Jimmy (also Carlisle) a strung-out sneering male model struggling to pay for a high-end cocaine addiction. A German scientist is lured up to lonely Sylvia's apartment for dinner but really he wants to spy on the saucer across the street. What is it up to? It's zapping anyone nearby at the moment of sexual climax, using the orgone (?) energy for, presumably, rocket fuel or their own form of drug. 

There's oodles of great stuff, style, and disaffect, but the ultimate in weird 'scenes' has got to be Anna Carlisle going down on the male version of herself while a bunch of fashionistas hanging out (while using her gorgeous roof balcony apartment for a photo shoot) jeer in a very punk aggro manner that would be scary if it were done by a bunch of straight dudes, but done by coked-up gay aesthetes it's just kind of punk. As Walter Sobchak might put it, there's nothing to worry about --they're nihilists. 

In the end it's Margaret's zonked renouncement of sexual pleasure in favor of drugs and mind expansion is what saves her while all her lovers are zapped. She doesn't say no to sex, even with her old teacher/mentor who drops up (a different time to be alive in NYC, oh me brothers). Then the aliens zap the life essence out of these lovers in the moment of orgasm and--until Anna complains--leaves their corpses piling up in the apartment. If you're not totally down with this film by the time Adrian starts an impromptu smack-shivery poetry slam while playing one of the corpses's bald head like a conga, then well, you may as well leave the city and move in with your brother out in Phoenix, know what I'm talking about? Me, I belong to this film, I love all its little moments, like Sylvia's a hilarious brunch with her sneezy, coke-withdrawal-wracked son. Now that the image is so lustrous, the sun streaming in through the window makes his suffering so beautiful and uniquely NYC I got a 90s strung-out flashback chill just watching him/her -- been there, bro! Not for coke or heroin, but for alcohol. They are actually similar in that (as I learned in. CASAC school) two withdrawals they have to medicate you for in detoxes, i..e. quitting cold turkey can be fatal! So if you've ever tried to hide how hungover and strung out you are while eating brunch with your mom, you'll really relate.

Clearly, this is the female east coast parallel to Repo Man. Was it an influence on Alex Cox? And like that one-off masterpiece, it's a film to be revisited, again and again - especially now that it's been so lovingly remastered. It probably never looked this good even in its initial NYC run. The shrill pre-programmed Casio synth music mat make the raucous punk on Repo Man's soundtrack seem like Mozart by comparison, but it works.  (see full review)

7. BRAZIL

(1985) Dir. Terry Gilliam

**** / Amazon Image - A-

Time was this was the bee's-knees, a universally praised cult hit, and it's kinda forgotten today due to being kinda dated. Though one of the most gamely dark and savage satires of modern bureaucracy in the history of cinema, here in the paperless 21st century its big anti-bureaucracy messages can seem rather labored. The whole Orwellian hodge podge and endless ducts and malfunctions feel so yesterday since  the entirety of the film's vast "Dept. of Information Retrieval" would be replaced by a handful of geeks on laptops. Still, as the missing link between Kafka (a rather heavy debt is owed) and--alas--one of those whimsical too-obvious Danny Kaye 'daydreaming office drone thinks he's a swashbuckler' odysseys, the level of detail and imagination is stunning. Since it's all before CGI and so beautifully remastered in HD, we can really savor the level of obsessive termite craftsmanship (the clouds in the fantasy flying sequences alone are worth the price of admission). 

Terry Gilliam's trouble as a director has always been that--like Ridley Scott--he can never trust the story to work on its own so his films gush over with detail and interesting things while the mythic root is lost like a child in a Black Friday opening door crush of overworked imagery. Here, since that crush is what it's all about, the overkill actually works perfectly, turning it all into a ballet of post-futuristic 30s decor crumbling under the weight of add-on tech (temporary things installed to fix problems with the fixes to other problems, etc). Still, Jonathan Pryce's flustered Walter Mitty-everyman schtick starts to get wearisome during his prolonged panicky run-for-it with the girl of his dreams. With her short hair and trucker's job she'd be instantly pegged as a lesbian today, making her initial resistance all the more glaring. It never even occurs to Pryce to ask if she likes him. 

That's the cool thing about Gilliam's vision - though a knee-jerk leftist reading is the most obvious--i.e. that Pryce is a hapless hero in a coiled universe strangled by evil bureaucrats-- a closer reading shows that the dystopia is the fantasy as much as the clouds. Reality chokes itself on its own exhaust so millions can relax in air conditioned privacy and dream of angels, or watch The Cocoanuts in their own bathtub while smoking a joint. Hey, I relate, I don't have a bathroom TV but I've smoked weed to Paramount Marx Brothers movies on air-conditioned couches far and wide. Realizing the extent to which my first world consumption habits butterfly tsunamis out to mass poverty in the third world doesn't help me change my habits. Trying to change them now would be like throwing a pale of water on a forest fire. It might make me feel less guilty, but it won't even slow the blaze--and I don't like being hot. 

Regardless of whether you think Pryce's character is a hero or just a trust fund Marxist floundering in the deep end, it all gorgeously done, with an extended wordless chase set piece finale that finally fishtails into pure fantasy that references everything from American in Paris to The Red Shoes and (of course) Potemkin under a dazzlingly expansive Michael Kamen score. And what a cast of first-class Brits! Ian Holm has never been funnier as Pryce's nervous wreck boss; Michael Palin is a chilling blast as Pryce's nonchalant torturer college friend and--marvelous as ever--Bob Hoskins is a miracle as a sinister blue collar duct worker. And cuz ya gotta have an American, there's Robert De Niro as a combination Groucho Marx and Che Guevara, zip-lining in and out of windows and balconies along the tall apartment complexes to make bootleg duct repairs without the proper forms. If Gilliam never made another movie after this, he'd be remembered as one of the masters of surrealism and dark comedy. But dystopia has a habit of dragging on... 

6. THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI

(1984) Dir. W.D. Richter 

*** / Amazon Image - A+

The problem with this film was that it kind of positioned itself a shoe-in for cult status, and that's not how cults are made. Cult films are born of legitimately weird outsider types trying to make a normal film, not a normal person trying trying to make a weird outsider film. BUT just because the motives are baffling and the weird hybrid Captain Midnight-brain surgeon-mad scientist-Formula 5 racer-rock band frontman thing is just a little Too Much Johnson, it doesn't mean the cast, effects crew, and too many moments to count in the script, aren't worthy of Sub-Genius-style lionization. Let the lamp affix its beam! Even if one can't simply whip up a franchise out of thin air (Lucas, never forget, used carefully imported mythic ingredients, plumbing Joseph Campbell as well as Alex Raymond), "No matter where you go / there you are" became an instant classic line.

And what a cast: Peter Weller and Ellen Barkin have never been more beautiful (the way Ellen Barkin opens her mouth for a kiss is so carnal and raw it collapses time and space as we know it), and it's clear they vibe on each other's energy. Jeff Goldblum is saddled with a ridiculous cowboy get-up that's just not working for him, but he's great as usual, and so is John Lithgow as Big Booty or Dr. Lizardo (top), and on and on it goes with way too much fan club stuff ("I'm Buckaroo club, Genus chapter!" like anyone watching was old enough to remember Captain Midnight decoder rings)- did they really expect such fan clubs would start? 

One thing too - this is one dense film - packed with mythos and character running which way and that. You can see it over and over agin and are still noticing little details. Around the tenth viewing, it starts to really work except for, it never quite does. Great end theme though. Too bad there weren't ten sequels! Weller - you are or were a gawd!

7. MEET THE HOLLOWHEADS

(1988) Dir. Thomas R. Burdman

*** / Amazon Image - C

A chamber piece that plays like some off-off family sitcom from an alternate reality (we never see a window or an outside - are they all in some gigantic multi-generational cross-galaxy spaceship? Did I miss that part?). No moment of the typical domestic bliss-ticked early-60s-late-80s sitcom is missed in director Thomas Burdman's (and co-writer Lia Morton)'s keen eye for absurdist surreal digression. The doofus grandpa needs force feeding with a giant syringe; the half-dog half-human 'pet' needs de-lousing (the boys shoot the bugs off him with a slingshot); the boss (Richard Portnow) comes over for dinner and dad (John Glover) is planing to ask for an overdue promotion; wife (Nancy Mette) hopes dinner goes just right!  The cute daughter (Juliette Lewis!) is getting ready to go out on a date with some new wave glorkenspruling doofus; the tentacled one-eyed watcher in the foyer (security system?) makes sure no lurkers walk past unnoticed. It's all played letter straight, such as it is, and the weirdness never stops. 

It's very tube-oriented; everything is round and comes out of tubes that connects to a vast system,  one that is cleaned out chimney sweep-style by men covered in pipe cleaner tubules who speak so abstractly they need subtitles (the same font Spheeris uses in The Decline of Western Civilization!). Lewis does her Lolita thing in due earnest here, clearing the way for her iconic stretch of films as a jailbait thumbsucker from the early 90s (Husbands and Wives, Cape Fear, Kalifornia). Just look at her in the top center picture! She's almost a different girl and who's that on her left? It's Bobcat Goldthwait --pre-screechy voice -- as one of the weird cops who carry her home. 

Come over for an evening with the Hollowheads, and stare agog at a universe that might have been. If the 80s was really that kind to weirdness, this would be on muhfuggin' Criterion!

I confess, I was only able to finish Meet the Hollowheads over several 20 minute viewings, as I found it too weird to endure for longer, especially in such bad quality (it's about akin to what you'd find on youtube, duped from some old first run VHS scored at a close-out) though as soon as I finished it, I started it right up again, so what's that tell you? And it's no dis - I watch Godard movies the same way and I love him. If you love crazy Godard too (for the comedy) and if you like the friendly day-glo genuine insanity of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, the industrial Kafka savagery of Brazil, and post-industrial ennui and alienation of Eraserhead, then this is your film. Just watch it from far enough away you don't get any on you. And though the image is bad it's all worth it for the wacky climax which finds the lecherous Portnow running amok, killed more times than Rasputin, the kids coming home wasted after hacking into a forbidden drug tube (the title I'd give it were I in charge: Forbidden Drug Tube-Tap) and the wasted son almost giving the whole show away by thinking the bruised near-dead boss is a monster. What a family. What a film! What set decoration. Would it was clearer, image-wise as that deep red in the round living room alone is to dye for. Stick with it and it you may never get it off. Maybe you won't even want to. 

8. NIGHT OF THE COMET

(1984) Writer/dir. Thom Eberhardt

*** / Amazon Image - A

With a weird cult-ready veneer that's quintessential 80s, this sci-fi/cult/horror/comedy tics a lot of boxes but does 'em all right. The heroine survives the comet night apocalypse because she was shacked up in the El Rey theater's projection room in a sleeping bag with cult douche Michael Bowen, for god's sake - and rather than work her usher job she eats Twizzlers and rules the Galaga high score in the lobby, saved from being fired by her beauty. Writer/director Robert Thom was one of those almost-iconic auteurs who made too few films to have a following, aside from weirdos like me who love both this and his Sole Survivor (also 1984, though much less widely known - seek it out immediately!) - I remember I saw Night on the big screen in the suburbs during its initial release--by myself, while skipping a high school--so you you know I'm the right guy to defend it. And if you love Mary Woronov and any movie where the teenage heroine warns a guy trying to kill her that she's "been trained" and doesn't want to hurt him (and means it, and does) then you'll love this film which now looks better than ever thanks to a great Shout Factory dusting and color-depth-asizing.

The dazzlingly-haired Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney star as the cool sisters Regina and Samantha--capably rescuing children and mowing down punk mall cops thanks to their CIA op father teaching them home defense before departing for Nicaragua. Woronov's fellow Eating Raoul star, Robert Beltran is a truck driver who answers the girls' survivor call (they set up base at the local LA radio station). Woronov heads an underground lab looking for a cure to the slow decay that hits those who survived the initial mystery dusting of the comet. God, zombies were so much cooler back then. What happened?

One thing may turn some folks off if they watch in the wrong context: this is the film with the quintessential first shopping montage set to Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." Echoing Dawn of the Dead as much as foreshadowing Day with its underground scientist think tank bunker, it's not the film's fault that trying-on-clothes montage set to that song have become inescapably and inseparably cliche. We might wish for a world in which it was cliche instead to have super cool, capable girls like Regina and Samantha as our stars of horror and science fiction films, but they're still rare in any genre. (see also Anita Skinner in Thom's Sole Survivor for another cool Hawksian, this one even quoting To Have and Have Not -here)

9. PHENOMENA

(1985) Dir. Dario Argento

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - B

When the plot of this was first described to my roommate and I by his girlfriend back around 1994, we knew the movie we needed to see after a drug-addled weekend. The description was so weird we doubted it even existed. This being long before the advent if Wiki and imdb, we could only trudge video store-ward and scope out the Argento titles, and nothing even remotely insect-concerned appeared. Years later, when I finally did get to see Phenomena it was the uncut version presented by Anchor Bay (as opposed to the American butcher job, Creepers) and in widescreen on DVD (as opposed to murky VHS) so it was even better than she made out. I was never so happy. Why am I telling you this? Because to relay the actual plot of it is like giving away the trick ending of Psycho if it was all trick endings. While Argento certainly references everything from (the previous year's hit) Firestarter as well as Carrie, (Jennifer Connolly loves insects and they swarm at her telepathic command) it also goes in all sorts of zig-zaggy directions. I'm not a big fan of Argento's insistence (continued in Opera and other late 80s films) of using heavy metal to underscore the murders, ghoubh. Time has been as kind of Morricone and Goblin as it's been unkind to Iron Maiden, in my opinion. At any rate, the rest of the score is the perfectly accentuated flanger-drenched guitar music of Claudio Simonetti, evoking the film's windy foot-of-the-Alps setting with a palpable unearthly chill. 

What I most love about it though is the weird midnight bond that forms between young Connelly, a wheelchair-bound entymologist played by Donald Pleasance, and his helper chimp, Inga. The dubbing is excellent and a real weird unique mood holds between them, as the ever present chilling wind keeps rolling down and up the Alps creating a totally unique mood in the Argento canon. There's also Daria Nicolodi as a nerdy teacher and Daria Di Lazzaro as the sexy-bitchy headmistress. The last 1/3 is a never-ending cascade of shocks and twists guaranteed to keep any jaw glued to the floor, and in the midst of it all, sweet innocent Jennifer Connelly finds herself swimming in lakes covered by burning fuel and calling insects and drowning in pits of maggot-filled decomposing bodies, and almost decapitated, all in great style. You may be warned, but there's no way you can be prepared...

1. BLUE VELVET

(1986) Dir. David Lynch 

**** / Amazon Image - A

I'll confess it took me a long way to come around to this movie: I found its violent thuggery disturbing and without a cathartic resolution. After a few decades of repeat viewings, and absorbing deep tissue analyses of the film by Todd McGowan and Zizek, I was able to unravel my private relationship to its Freudian subconscious Oedipal separation trauma, so I could let go of my ambivalence. Turns out the purple and blue velvet apartment where Kyle McLachlan spies through the closet blinds isn't merely his anger/anxiety over a woman being hurt, but a primal scene as understood through the mind of a child who mistrusts the animal grunts of sex and seethes with resentment over the dad's power to shut him out of the bedroom at a whim. So, turns out, the problem was mine, not Lynch's! I myself was Frank (Dennis Hopper) as much as Kyle - and I didn't want to be either one. I had to make peace with my inner monster. I tried, and am trying, and sometimes I love this film and sometimes not. I prefer actually Lost Highway, perhaps because it isn't as good. I'm not really connected to it, and that's just fine.

Laura Dern co-stars, at her dreamy-but-chipper best; the beautiful Dean Stockwell as a kind of dream world pimp lip syncing Roy Orbison (see CinemArchetype 18: The Aesthete) while Kyle tries not come off like a frightened kid who visits his drug dealer on the wrong night and ends up a veritable hostage in an all-night road trip binge. An initiation into a darker realm of life beneath the grass line of sunny Lumberton, these scary people eventually guide him into becoming a mature man through their loving abuse (like in Sonny Boy, with which it would make a fine double feature!).



Lynch's subsequent works would all point back to this key moment, some improving on it (Mulholland Dr.) some not so much (Wild at Heart). But Blue Velvet is Lynch's first great 'cracking it wide open' while still staying in a recognizable (small town noir) genre format. It's his "Demoiselles d'avignon," his Pollock's 1947 drip stick moment. No matter how many times you see it, it's never the same movie, but it's always, always disturbing. It's the dark nightmare of childhood brought into the light like a screaming, still-alive, tar pit mastodon.

TOO WEIRD EVEN FOR ME: 

These are definitely cult/surreal and look great on Prime but --me--personally - I couldn't stand them. I hate them And I'll give you my reasons why, in case your mileage varies. One critic's bias should never lose a film's chance at the right viewer.

SPIRITS OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS
(1989) Dir. Alex Proyas
*1/2 / Amazon Image - A

In and around a cloistered shack in the middle of a nowhere post-apocalyptic outback, two wildly overacting eccentrics--one a wheelchair-bound aviation enthusiast, one a Gothic virgin introvert--help a monosyllabic punk rocker type escape the empty desert plain via a homemade airplane. Though the scenery is lovely, the actors are grotesque and do little to allay the monotony. The film seems to last forever as nothing happens, but not in a cool Jarmusch way but in an overwrought hammy Aussie way - the worst of both worlds. It needs either a genuinely macabre element (ala Burton's Beetlejuice), savage gallows satire (ala Gilliam's Tideland) or deadpan zest for living (ala Kusturica's Arizona Dream). This has none of the three! NONE! I hate it the way I hate those stale nightmares I used to have when suffering from a bad flu. The deep aqua-blue tint of the wide open sky and the burnished gold sand indicate gorgeous cinematography and color-grading; the Tangerine Dream soundscapes keep it all at a dreamy windswept beguilement; Melissa Davis hams it up like a kind of Helena Bonham Carter gone butoh missionary, but it's not enough to make it worth enduring the spittle-flecked hamming of Michael Lake, usually filmed for maximum grotesque close-ups (his teeth need work).  Director Proyas went on to make The Crow and Dark City, so he has his fans. The rest of us might survive if we view it as a prequel origin story for Bruce Spence's pilot character in The Road Warrior. Nonetheless watching it is too much like that feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere I used to have as a child in the suburbs. God, being forced to hang out with these three people the rest of my life seems far worse than any death by dehydration. 

THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

(1980) Dir. Richard Elfman

* / Amazon Image - B

Though zany and strangely familiar to any one who's watched old Betty Boop cartoons while macro-tripping, the ceaseless toilet humor of Elfman's little miracle gets very old fast, in fact before it starts. There's so much shit imagery and septic tanks I wonder how mired in infantile poop obsession can any alleged adult be? Further, Oingo Boingo is one irritatingly uncool band. Clearly a lot of effort went into this film and Herve is amazing (those dewey eyes....sigh), but everyone else -- good lord. I felt sick to my sacrum for weeks after only ten minutes of viewing. God blind me to the sights herein.