Monthly Archives: April 2023

Frighteningly Prophetic: Shock Treatment

20th Century Studios

 

Shock Treatment, made following the cult success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, started its cinematic existence under two cursed stars, the folly of attempting to craft a film to be a cult hit, something that nearly aways fails, and the terrible timing of hitting production during a writers’ strike. A bomb at the box office and with the cult crowd, Shock Treatment is film discarded and nearly forgotten.

And yet these days it haunts my thoughts.

Budgets and strikes reduced the original vision until the film’s setting transformed symbolically in a single location, a television soundstage where all the action and the character’s lives are played out for the live audience. A bizarre collection of characters populates the story, a seemingly blind game show host, played by the recently late Barry Humphries, a brother/sister pair of actors (Richard O’Brien & Patricia Quin) portraying doctors on a hit medical show from which the viewers take real medical advice, and puppeteering all of it the media creation and fast-food spokesman, Farley Flavors (Cliff de Young in a dual role). Flavors manipulates opinion and emotions with his broadcasts finally presenting Janet (Jessica Harper) while drugged out of her senses as a model of mental health to sell the audience on committing themselves to his mental institution. Even Janet’s rejection fails to derail the plot, with Flavors discarding her as trash, the sudden reversal irrelevant to the masses under his spell.

I cannot but see the striking parallels between this 41-year-old film and today’s political environment. In 2019 I wrote another essay about this foresight and the 4 years that have passed has only strengthened the film prophetic nature. It is far too easy to see that the wildly cartoonish character of Farley Flavors is a dim shadow of the real-life threat that is Donald Trump. Impeachments and insurrections have no more damaged his ability to control his own cult than Janet’s rejects damaged Flavors. The film’s depiction of the nearly irresistible pull social conformity and the facade of community from the fake history of Americana of the 50s is eerily predictive of the entire MAGA movement, that could so easily and without any irony adopt the song ‘Thank God I’m a Man’ as their anthem.

I had never before considered Shock Treatment a horror film but it undoubtedly. lives in that space now.

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My Upcoming Cinematic Excursion

This is the movie my sweetie-wife and I will be seeing this Sunday at our local AMC theater. The star of the flick, Jorma Tommila also starred in another Finnish film that has become one of our favorite holiday treats, Rare Exports a horror/comedy about reindeer herding, International Capitalism, and the true nature of Santa Claus and his ‘helpers.’

Sisu, which is a word that the Finns use to describe their national character that was forged in the brutal Winter War with the Soviet Union, does appear to be batting a little clean up on the nation’s history. While Finland was not an ally of Nazi Germany it was a co-belligerent, happy to inflict some revenge on the Soviets for their 1939 invasion, but willing to ‘tap out’ once it became clear who was going to win the war.

The film appears to be dubbed but if that is the best we can get in the theaters then that will have to do.

 

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A Curious Editing Choice

Alien is one of the most influential science fiction horror films of all time. A credible argument can be made that Alien killed off the professional explorer style of sf movie, while military and semi-military people crewed spacecraft replacing with the ‘truckers in space.’ Scores of blatant rip-off movie followed in the Alien‘s staggering box office success with cheap direct to video production continuing to this day. Alien’s production design, direction, and cinematography are all presented with a ‘grounded’ realism. A more naturalistic ‘lived in look’ that Star Wars a few years earlier had pioneered in SF cinema.

Yet, in contrast to all this hard edged, grease covered realism Alien also boasts a singular edit that flies in the face of the rest of its choices.

For the most part editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherly employ a simple invisible approach to their craft, never drawing attention to their edits from shot to shot or scene to scene. A style that melds with the film’s ‘grounded’ approach drawing the audience into the screen’s reality. Except for one edit.

When Captain Dallas fatefully goes into the air shafts to hunt the alien in hopes of corralling it into the airlock the unintrusive editing style is maintained until the very end of the sequence. Dallas, fleeing from where he believed the alien to be instead heads directly into the creature, delivering a jump scare that would have made Val Lewton proud, as the creature suddenly reached out for him, and towards us. Then the scene cuts with a very brief shot of a badly tuned CRT screen, like a television switched to a dead channel with an accompanying burst of static.

There is nothing from any of the other characters points of view that supports a sudden cut to a CRT monitor. None could see Dallas as he fled, but instead listened to him and watched him as a phosphor dot on their crude trackers. The choice for that quick startling edit was made entirely for the audience’s point of view and it works.

I have never seen anyone watching this film react with anything other than emersion during this tense, horrific scene. Never has anyone suspension of disbelief ben damaged by that choice. It is a curious and genius bit of editing artistry that a lesser team would have never employed.

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Sunday Night Movie: Billion Dollar Brain

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Billion Dollar Brain is the third and final film with the protagonist Harry Palmer following The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, but the first that I have watched.

Harry (Michael Caine) now retired from the British Intelligence service is scrapping by as a private investigator when a mysterious package arrives along with a promised of a substantial payment for delivering it to a location in Finland. Simultaneously Harry is recruited back in the United Artistsservice as they are aware of the job and its vital national concerns. After using a fluoroscope at a shoe store (People really did use to utilize X-ray machines unsupervised to get better fitting shoes.) and determining the package contains eggs, the method by which viruses are transported, Harry travels to Finland, worming his way into the mysterious and sinister private organization. What he discovers has the potential to spark a nuclear exchange between the world’s superpowers, and Harry must work hard to prevent the coming disaster.

I had heard of this film from one of my many movie podcasts though they made the plot sound more fantastic as though it dealt with artificial intelligence. While the massive computer from which the novel and the film took their title is impressive there is no hint of intelligence in the machine. Rather, it is being used and programmed to analyze and execute insurgency operations behind the Iron Curtain. For me, this vastly improved the nature of the film and its plot. Many technical details, such as using eggs to transport viruses or the use of a mount when attempting a long-range sniper shot, are quite accurate. There’s even a sub-plot where a member of the organization is feeding bad data into the billion dollar brain for his own greedy goals and the bad data produces bad analysis well before the term garbage in garbage out became widely known.

Ken Russel, working with a decent budget, assembled a very good cast and production team giving Billion Dollar Brain the quality that many of the 60s spy genre lacked. Filmed on location in Finland the movie captures the unique charm of that nation and its precarious geo-political position as it remained a free nation bordering directly on the USSR.

In addition of Michael Caine the cast included Karl Malden as Harry’s former friend that brought him into the clandestine organization, Francoise Dorleac as another operative, the film was released the same year she tragically died in a single car auto accident, and Ed Begley as the deranged Texan behind the entire plot.

All in all, this was a surprisingly good espionage flick, more akin to LeCarre than to Bond and that was very much my preferred taste.

Billion Dollar Brain is currently streaming on Pluto TV.

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Let’s Get Back to Wolf Men

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Last week horror film Youtuber Ryan Hollinger released a video essay on 2010’s The Wolfman a remake of 1941’s The Wolf Man. The 2010 film was not particularly well received nor was it a hit at the box office and Hollinger put forth his own analysis of why the film performed so poorly. I

Universal Studios

watched the movie in the theaters on its release and found the adaptation tepid, dry, and wholly uninteresting and despite an amazing cast, Benicio del Toro, Emily Blunt, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving, only Weaving managed to captivate and hold my attention. You can see my original review of the remake here.

While I think Hollinger makes a number of good points about why the remakes failed, I do believe that he missed a critical element.

Curt Siodmak’s script for the 1941 film is a lean, spare affair quite suitable for a modest production with a brief running time of a scant 70 minutes but that is not to say it is without subtext and subtlety. In 1941 turmoil engulfed the world. Depending on how you counted the Second World War had been raging for 2 to 4 years and

Universal Studios

fascism seemed to be conquering the globe. A refugee fleeing Nazi antisemitism Siodmak and his brother landed in Hollywood marked by their experiences something Curt injected into The Wolf Man. The script’s subtext is about how even ‘good’ people become monsters under the wrong influence. A clear for what Siodmak witnessed in Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis. Repeated several times in the film is the famous poem Siodmak penned;

 

Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night
May become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms
And the autumn moon is bright.

We all have the beast within us, and it only takes the wrong circumstance to awaken it, to release it, to the ruin of all including ourselves. This elemental truth is missing from the 2010 remake. It is a tragedy that Lawrence Talbot became cursed the potential lies within everyone. Any person can be filled with hate and perform terrible acts upon their fellow humans. This is the central theme that seems very much missing from modern werewolf tales. It isn’t about the bite but the darkness we hold inside. It’s about how easy it is to hate.

Given the cultural and political storms sweeping the globe we are ready for a return to TheWolf Man and a reexamination of the hatred at the center of a poisoned heart.

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Saturday’s Struggles

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This past Saturday, April 15th, was hardly the fun day I had hoped it to be.

All day the previous day and Saturday I had been dealing with arthritic pain in my toes. On the classic pain scale of 1 thru 10 I would report that it had been hovering around a 3 for both days. Painful, enough to be particularly aware of it, but so intense that I needed to take special actions because of it.

This past Saturday was also the next session of my tabletop roleplaying game, Space Opera, and I was looking for to the new adventure I had crafted for the players as I became more comfortable managing the game over zoom.

It started off well enough. True we were down one player, later I learned it was due to a mistake in the calendar, but we were having fun and all my pre-game work seemed to be on point.

But then the arthritic pain in my toes began spiking. What had been a fairly constant 3 suddenly climbed into the territory of 6 or 7 with bursts to 8. Tears welled in my eyes, and I found myself needed to stop and massages my toes in a vain attempt to relieve the agony. It became too constant to allow me to think coherently for more than a few minutes at a time. I was forced to end our game session two hours ahead of what I had hoped with the central murder-attempt mystery just unveiled, and deal exclusively the arthritis in my toes. (It’s in other joints as well but the toes are always the first to flare.)

I found some relief by elevating my feet and keeping the fluid pressure down. Between 4 hours of elevation and some ibuprofen around midnight the pain had subsided back to the usual constant 2. A background level I have learned to live with over the last ten years.

I am bitterly disappointed and ashamed that I could not provide the entertainment for my friends that I had worked and planned for and hope that next session will be much better.

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Sometimes Plots Holes Don’t Matter

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Do not misunderstand me, the majority of the times if there is an element of your plot that given a few seconds of thought unravels the entire affair, it should be fixed well before the work is finished,

By the way by ‘plot hole’ I do not mean an inaccuracy that plays to genre convention even if it is factually in error. When Tony Star emerges from the cave where he had been held captive wearing his Mark I, built from scraps, every rifle and machinegun there would have had more than enough power to penetrate the metal. That’s not why we are at that movie, we’re there for superhero fun and that allows an amount of ignoring physics.

No, when I talk plot holes I am talking about illogic within the bounds of the accepted genre or conventions of the piece. However, if the characters and emotions of the piece grab your readers or audience by the throat then none of that would matter.

A wonderful example is the beloved classic film Casablanca.

Some of its plot holes and error are quite well know. Transit papers signed by Charles de Gaulle, who was in England and fighting the Nazis from there, would not only be worthless in Vichy France, but they’d also get you arrested. For refugees Ilsa and Victor are amazing dapper and well-fed enjoying their champagne cocktails, but this film is a romance and in romances we want beautiful people live beautiful lives.

The plot hole that really undermines the story if you think about it for two second and that no one cares about because the characters have seized our hearts so thoroughly centers on Ugarte the murder and thief that stole the transit papers and handed them to Rick to hide before Ugarte’s arrest. Prompting two problems in the plot.

1) Why in the world would Ugarte hand them to anyone? He expects to sell them very soon for a vast amount of money. How was this to work? Make the deal with victor, get the handshake, and then run back to Rick to get the papers? This non-sensical action only takes place so that Rick ends up with the MacGuffin.

2) More seriously, the police know it was Ugarte who killed the couriers and stole the papers, they arrest him at Rick’s and haul him off to jail. The next morning, we learn that he died while in custody with the corrupt police dithering between shot while trying to escape or suicide as the official report. A night of torture that killed him and we’re expected to accept that the murdering thief never gave up Rick’s name as the man holding the papers? Ugarte did not come off as the ‘die to protect your sources’ type at all. Again, this is only to keep the plot alive. Rick arrested kills the narrative dead.

And yet of all the times I have watched people experience this classic for the first time no one has ever questioned these actions.

With lesser characters and lesser actors, they would have. Our entanglement with this people blinds our critical eye.

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Plot Authority and the Powerless Character

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Recently speculative fiction author Charlie Jane Anders posted an essay on tor.com about character agency in fiction, interrogating the wisdom that characters, principally protagonists, are required to have agency. Anders presented Arthur Dent from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as an example case but confessed difficulty in presenting more examples but remained certain that they existed.

This got me thinking on such examples and what agency means for a fictional character. First off when we speak of a character’s agency, I think primarily we are pondering ‘plot authorship.’ The influence the character can exert to shape, direct, or stop the story’s plot. Certainly, Arthur Dent has very little plot authorship, he bounces, nearly always without his intention or proactive action, from crisis to crisis. Dent is far from the first or even most famous character trapped by their circumstance.

Alice from Alice in Wonderland is another such character. While she initiated the plot by following the rabbit from there on, she is on a ride that is mostly beyond her control. Lemuel Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is also a character swept by circumstance with limited plot authority. For a more recent example you could consider Sarah Conner from the film The Terminator. Sara in that film is simultaneously the protagonist, the point of view character, and the plot’s Macguffin. Until the final sequences of the story, she is pulled along by other characters, her life in their hands with very little input as to what happens to her.

Clearly, a protagonist does not require a great deal of plot authorship for a story to be meaningful, memorable, or lasting. That said it would appear, at least to me, that the absence of plot authorship is an element in certain types of characters or stories.

Arthur Dent is the ‘straight man’ in Hitchhiker’s farcical, fantastic comedy. He has no agency because he is there to heighten the absurdity to deliver the comedy. Give him too much ability to shape the events and the farce would turn into mediocre adventure.

Alice and Gulliver as reader surrogates, for one as a person to give voice to the reader’s questions as the wonder of the setting spills out and the other to be the subject of the satire and to perhaps see their own reality and its insanity from a new perspective.

Sarah Conner lacks plot authorship because the story, not the plot mind you, is about her gaining it. By the film’s finale she has gained the ability to shape and direct not only her life but the future as well, but to gain it she, and we the audience, must first be made aware of it absence.

Charlie Jane Anders is correct you can obsess too much over if this character or that character have agency, but the lack of agency is also a specific trait that, like everything else in the tale, much serve a purpose delivering the author’s desired effect.

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Streaming Review: War-Gods of the Deep

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1965 American International’s release War-Gods of the Deep (UK title City in the Sea)attempted to capitalize on the commercial and critical success of the Roger Corman Poe movies starring Vincent Price by hiring Price to star in this film very loosely inspired by a Poe poem.

Ben (Tab Hunter), an American working on the English coast, after discovering a corpse on the beach, becomes convince something is afoot, something unnatural. When the object of his

AIP

affections, Jill (Susan Hart) vanishes in the night, Ben and an eccentric artist, Harold, (David Tomlinson), along with the artist’s pet chicken (My sweetie-wife’s favorite part of the movie), go searching for the woman. By happenstance and the force of a plot-driven story they end up in an underwater city ruled over by a tyrannical smuggler, (Vincent Price.)

War-Gods of the Deep was the final movie directed by the legendary Jacques Tourneur who gave us lasting classics such as the original Cat People, Night of the Demon, and the wonderful noir, Out of the Past. Sadly, this movie can’t match the quality of any single shot of any of those previous films. The script is a hodgepodge of ideas, scenes, and wildly incongruent elements. This story has, mystical caverns keeping people ageless for more than a century, reincarnated wives, gill-men living in the deep, and pseudo-ancient cults and practices. None of the actors, save Price, seem to have done anything more than memorize their lines and marks, giving lifeless, empty performances.

The editing of the film is terrible with long tedious underwater sequences that are supposed to contain tension and action but are, in reality, utterly confusing leaving the viewer unable to determine one character from another.

It’s 85-minute running time drags slower than nearly any other film I have watched including some Italian zombie flicks. There is little to nothing in this production that is worth recommending unless you are a Price completionist.

War-gods of the Deep is currently streaming on Amazon Prime in the US.

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More Zoo photos

Not much to say this morning that I haven’t already said, so here are 3 pictures from our trip to the San Diego Zoo on April 2nd.

First a Jaguar presenting the most dangerous position know to many a cat lover, on his back with a belly exposed for rubs.

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