DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968)

Mario Bava is one of my favorite filmmakers but he's a difficult subject to cover. What, after all, can one say about Bava that others haven't said a million times? One ticks off the standard raves like items on a grocery bill: He's a masterful visual stylist, a brilliant special effects innovator, a veritable magician of the cinema who could take practically nothing and make it look like he had a Hollywood-sized budget. He made damn good movies. Over the years, he's become one of the most ripped-off filmmakers to ever sit behind a camera; if imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery, Bava has been flattered by some of the best.

When it comes to praise of Bava, it's all become boilerplate. Bava was a great filmmaker.

Having now offered the standard praise, I can proceed with the business at hand, namely composing what I expect will be an adoring screed about one of his works I've recently revisited after too long an absence. One of my absolute favorite Bava flicks is DANGER: DIABOLIK, an adaptation of an Italian comic that certainly ranks among the best comic book films of all time.

Diabolik, its protagonist, is a character after my own heart, an anarchistic anti-hero, a romantic rebel who robs from the rich, a master thief elevated to the level of a comic book super-villain who does what he does for no other apparent reason than for the sheer fun of it. He's sharp, resourceful and never just one step ahead of the government goons who make it their mission to bring him in--he's always 20 steps ahead of them. They swoop down upon him like hawks after blood, but whenever it looks like his goose is cooked, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat and shows them to be nothing but a gaggle of turkeys. They have the entire government behind them, they're granted emergency powers, they bring back the death penalty to use against him, put a huge bounty on his head, ally with organized crime to bring him down and they never even have a chance. He takes great pleasure in making fools of the lot of them.

As I feel it, DANGER: DIABOLIK is about reveling in the sheer joy of living life to its fullest. Diabolik, played with great flair by John Phillip Law, has cast off the soul-deadening drone culture that is most of so-called "civilized" society. He operates outside it and by his own rules and has a blast doing so, getting his kicks from forever testing himself with one impossible crime and escape after another then returning to his massive underground Bond-villain-style lair and the warm embrace of his luscious lady love and constant companion (Marisa Mell). The film reflects their passion--both for one another and for life itself--in a striking visual sensuality, particularly in their scenes in the lair.

The words "Bava" and "visual stylist" deservedly appear in the same sentence with great regularity and in Bava's filmography, DANGER: DIABOLIK may be his most visually impressive. The director uses clever comic-book-inspired compositions to tell the story, and his trademark candy-colored lighting schemes work particularly well here, immediately invoking the brightly-colored pages of a comic.[*] He works in healthy doses of frenetic action, which are marvelously complimented by Ennio Morricone's typically brilliant music.

The film's plot consists of a series of increasingly elaborate heists and other difficulties for our anti-hero to try to overcome. His battle with the government hilariously escalates into a full-scale war, with Diabolik reacting to a large bounty being placed on his head by blowing up tax records in order to choke the government of funds and threatening to bankrupt it. He meets every challenge with a wink and the same mocking laughter. He doesn't have any grand scheme to finance with his purloined loot. He doesn't even need it himself. He does what he does because he enjoys it. At one point, after he's just ripped off several million dollars, police officials are sitting around contemplating what he'll do with it. One darkly assures the others he will use it in "a way no mind but his could imagine." Cut to Diabolik in his lair, the money spread all over his bed while he and his fine lady roll around in it, screwing like rabbits.

I've loved DANGER: DIABOLIK since I first saw it some years ago and I find myself wanting to rave about it at much greater length but in the name of avoiding spoiling it for those who may read these words and haven't yet seen it, I'll resist the temptation and conclude only by saying the film is a funny, endlessly entertaining romp, a masterwork by a master and one of the finest productions of a very special age of Italian cinema. Do yourself a big favor and check it out.

--j.

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[*] Though not the Diabolik comics, which were black-and-white.

INDECENT DESIRES (1967)

Given the state of exploitation filmmaking in the 1960s, Doris Wishman would be historically noteworthy simply by virtue of her chromosomes. Women simply didn't do what she did when she did it. She wrote, produced, directed--the whole schlemiel--and in a field that was an almost exclusively male preserve. She never struck it rich but she did well enough to make a lot of movies over the years and tonight, I got my first look at one of them.

The flick was INDECENT DESIRES, an odd little gem from 1967, and though it's true Wishman would have been one for the books simply for doing what she did while a woman, I learned by watching this film what I suspect is the real reason the cult around her work has only grown over the years: She's very good at what she does.

Pretty Ann has a good job, a good man and her future is looking pretty bright, until, one day, into her life comes a creepy little slug she meets at random on a street corner. The slug never speaks a line of dialogue and is never given a name but he's played by a fellow named Michael Alaimo and "creepy" is an understatement--sleaze practically oozes from this guy's pores. He walks the streets during the day picking up odds and ends, things people have lost, thrown away, left laying around. He swipes them and takes them back to his apartment, for no apparent reason other than that he has a serious screw loose. One of these objects is a doll he finds in a trash can. Another is a ring, which turns out to be possessed of magical properties. When he meets Ann on that street corner, he's immediately smitten and associates her with the doll.

Here's the rub: when he dons the ring and handles the doll, Ann can feel it too. Realizing this, he begins working out his fixation with her on the doll. He caresses it, molests it, fondles it and, when angry, beats it and burns it. Ann can feel it all and having no idea what's happening to her, she slowly begins to lose her mind.

As odd as that sounds so far, it doesn't even begin to do justice to how truly bizarre INDECENT DESIRES really is. It's shot on a small number of sparse sets through a constant barrage of crazy, off-kilter camera set-ups--there's barely a "normal" shot in the film--and the soundtrack never stops moving. This is an exploitation picture, so there's copious nudity, but none of that pubic stuff that would have gotten the censors so full-frontally outraged and Wishman has a delightful sense of the fetishistic which she indulges through the camera with some regularity.

This isn't just a weird film though; it's a good one, a perfect example of effectively realizing an utterly personal vision on screen in an unique way with virtually nothing with which to work. The ending is particularly good and has probably left a lot of slack jaws in its wake over the years.

It's been said of Wishman that if she was some Euro-director and her films were subtitled imports, instead of home-grown underground films, she'd be widely hailed as a bold, innovative filmmaker. I've read about her work for over 20 years. I've always been curious about it. I'd just never gotten around to seeing it. In general, it seems impossible that anything could even live up to that much stored up anticipation, much less surpass it. It has, nevertheless, happened a few times with me. With Wishman, it has just happened again and if the rest of her filmography is of the caliber of the one I just watched, I'd say whoever offered that "what if" scenario about her films as imports was probably right.

--j.

PUNISHER WAR ZONE (2008)

The first two efforts to bring Marvel's Punisher to the screen were creative abortions and I held out little hope for the third, PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, upon learning it would soon be coming to a theater near me. There were early reports that Lions Gate (the studio behind it) was insisting it be a wimpy PG-13 flick. I knew nothing of the director--if I'd heard then that it was being made by a female German kickboxer, it would have probably drawn a lot more of my interest--and as it turned out, the movie was savaged by critics and pulled from theaters by the studio almost immediately after its release. Sounds like another pooch in the Punisher pound and I paid it little mind.

But the film grew a following. The internet buzzed with its words of praise, their persistent insistence that someone had finally gotten the Punisher right. This buzz drew sometimes angry retorts from those unfortunate souls--few but loud--who inexplicably found something of merit in the meritless Thomas Jane Punisher film from 2004. They resented these mouthy upstarts' insistence that their beloved turd of a movie had been upstaged and insisted that WAR ZONE was just a dumb gorefest.

PWZ, as it turns out, was something of a dumb gorefest.[1] It was also an absolute blast from beginning to end. Saying it's easily the best screen adaptation of the Punisher isn't really saying much--neither of the other two films even tried. It isn't sufficient to say it's the best we're ever likely to get either, because that sounds like we're settling for something that isn't as good as it could have (or should have) been. No, it's much closer to the mark to say PWZ is a great adaptation of the Punisher.

Over the years, there have been a few different "versions" of the Punisher and it should go without saying that as conceptually different as they are, no movie can be a great adaptation of all of them. PWZ isn't about the original version, which was, conceptually speaking, a top-to-bottom ripoff of Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan the Executioner character (had Pendleton ever decided to sue, Marvel would have lost a bundle). PWZ primarily adapts the far more interesting and original version of the character portrayed in Garth Ennis' very long run on the title.

Like Ennis, those behind PWZ knew what they had in the Punisher; a relatively simple pulp character who rages through a comic-book world of over-the-top-of-the-top ultraviolence, dishing out justice to superhumanly inhuman scum. That's what PWZ delivers in spades, a solid, violent, entertaining exploitation actioneer (albeit one made on a budget of which most exploitation films could only dream)[2]. And that's exactly what a Punisher film should be.

Noteworthies: Ray Stevenson, a dead ringer for the comic character, is rock-solid in the part, even if it does mostly just require him to look rock-solid, and Dominic West does a first-rate turn as the villainous Jigsaw. Director Lexi Alexander and cinematographer Steve Gainer tried an interesting experiment with the film's color scheme, attempting to replicate the color schemes of the comics. It succeeds, and makes for an interesting effect on screen. And the ending of the film? FANTASTIC!

Unfortunately, PWZ wasn't treated very well by Lions Gate. The production had been troubled from the beginning, and many of its troubles had been very public. Reading between the lines of the contemporaneous reporting, it seems as if the studio suits were determined to wring an anemic PG-13 film out of the material and when this wasn't possible, set out to intentionally make it fail in order to prove their "point." What isn't in any way speculative is that the film was dumped into wide release with virtually no promotion at all then pulled from theaters after only a few days and written off as a flop. Few were even given the chance to hear of its existence and of those who did, memories of the earlier Punisher films, unleavened by any knowledge that this one would be any different, no doubt kept large swathes of potential audience away in droves. It was never even given a chance and that it was deprived of any chance in such a dramatic way strongly suggests someone really had it in for the movie.

Now that Marvel is making their own movies, perhaps they should buy back their rights. I suspect they could get them for pretty cheap. Stevenson has expressed his enthusiastic desire to continue with the character as long as he's able. I suspect Lexi Alexander could be lured back for another go 'round. I'd like to see it happen. PWZ was the third attempt at a Punisher film but it's the only one that earned what the others got--another chance.

--j.

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[1] A "gorefest" relatively speaking, that is. For a contemporary "mainstream" film, that label would probably apply. For an action picture made these days--or, at least, one that isn't the latest RAMBO--it also seems appropriate. As a hardcore horror buff, I wouldn't personally regard it as a "gorefest" in general, but still, PWZ offers bloody deaths via various objects through the throat, one exploding head after another via gunshot, decapitations, cannibalism, a guy ground up in a glass grinder, a fellow hacked up with an axe, a man roasted on a spit over an open flame and so on. For some reason, the filmmakers, in assembling their list of horrors to cover, missed necrophilia. Something to save for the sequel, I suppose.

[2] By upbudget Hollywood standards, though, PWZ is a very small-budgeted film. It cost less than the 2004 feature but managed to be vastly superior.

Mainstream Scribe Makes Mess of Slasher Movie Meditation

Why would an allegedly intelligent professional writer try to pass off, as an informed, learned article, something he'd written about a subject of which he really knows very little? Does the thought that his ignorance is immediately going to be apparent to anyone who does know anything of the subject give him pause? Why would he do it?

The answer, as best I can tell, is that he assumed there aren't a lot of horror fans who read the Atlantic. In that, I'll admit he's probably right. But when it's put on the internet, everyone can see it, including those fans of dark fantasy who, randomly scanning the internet one night, come across it and immediately recognize it for the thin inaccuracy it is. Sometimes, they even feel the urge to come to their own little corner of the internet and rant about it.

The offender, here, is James Parker. His article: "Don't Fear the Reaper," from the April 2009 Atlantic. The subtitle: "Learning to love the slasher-film renaissance." The premise: That we're in the middle of a full-bore revival of the cinematic slasher sub-genre. The problem? The author doesn't know what a slasher movie is.

Slasher films, properly speaking, are a sub-genre that emerged in the 1980s in the wake of the huge success of 1978's HALLOWEEN[1] and, particularly, 1980's FRIDAY THE 13th (which proved HALLOWEEN hadn't been a fluke).[2] It's no accident of history that they proliferated so prodigiously in the Reagan '80s. The slashers were simple, reactionary morality fables wherein bad little boys and girls--particularly the girls--are punished for their "sins," those "sins" being any deviation from the sternest Puritanical morality. Take a hit off a joint, a shot of booze, party while the parents are away, or, worst of all, get laid and you're guaranteed to be laid to rest before the film runs its course.[3] Such sinners are destroyed in slasher films by a killer who, brandishing bladed weapons, is often little more than a cypher, a living embodiment of those Puritanical moral notions--gaze upon the blank "face" of HALLOWEEN's Michael Myers or FRIDAY THE 13th's Jason Vorhees.[4]

As a matter of convention, the killers were usually given some sort of backstory that began years earlier and tied into this theme. There's usually a "final girl," the last to survive the killer's onslaught and who usually defeats him in the end. This, too, ties into the central theme. The "final girl" is always "virtuous," by the curious "morality" embraced by the films. She's not allowed to be sexual, to dissent from this stern "morality," to do much of anything to assert her independence. She's the one left babysitting while everyone else is out partying. And everyone else is merely a target, thinly written non-entities whose job is solely to sin and to die for it in various ways.

What I've just outlined doesn't make for a complete definition of the slasher movie, of course. Other conventions and clichés grew up around the subgenre, and there are other elements floating around on the outer strands of its DNA, but that basic reactionary morality fable was its core, its central defining characteristic, and the slashers were, with very few exceptions, rigorous in their devotion to the formula. By 1996, that formula had become so universally recognizable that it could be effectively parodied--and turned into a huge money-maker--in Wes Craven's SCREAM. The slashers are an identifiable group of literally hundreds of films sharing the same genes in incestuous fashion. Their family tree is, for the most part, a straight line. You can pull out virtually any dozen genuine slasher films at random, watch them back-to-back, and, with the exception of the obvious disparities in talent, different settings, and so on, you'd essentially be watching the same movie over and over again.[5]

I don't think much of slasher films. There were some good ones over the years, to be sure, but out of those hundreds of productions, the good ones can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand with fingers to spare. They are, for the most part, creatively bankrupt ventures that, at their height in the '80s, became a blight on the horror genre, nearly strangling it to death. Or perhaps "cutting its throat" would be a better metaphor. I suppose that's why I get all uppity when someone like James Parker comes along and writes an article about "the modern slasher movie" wherein non-slashers like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, and SAW are aggressively thrown on the same slasher pile as genuine slashers like MY BLOODY VALENTINE and the FRIDAY THE 13th movies. Parker seems to think the only thing a slasher film needs is a killer who slashes. A killer with blades does not a slasher film make, though.[6]

To be fair, Parker isn't alone in this. One encounters this same sort of thing all over the internet; whenever fans on message boards are tasked with compiling a list of great slashers, there are almost inevitably numerous non-slasher inclusions. It's a sign of the complete creative bankruptcy of the slasher subgenre that, with so many films from which to choose, not even their most fervent fans seem capable of compiling a simple list of worthy efforts, even one only ten movies long, without padding it with at least a few non-slashers.

"But why this press of remakes," Parker asks, "this slasher-jam at the box office, right now?" He hasn't made any case for any "slasher jam," though. Hollywood has been aggressively remaking every horror success story of the past for years, now; it was inevitable that it would eventually get to the slashers. It didn't just get to the slashers this year, either--it has been remaking them (along with everything else) for a few years now. Parker's assertion of a current "slasher jam" is partly premised on the current remakes of slasher films, but it also relies heavily on those numerous remakes of films that are not, in fact, slashers, and on more recent films that aren't slashers, either.[7]

Parker says "the modern slasher movie... is a child of the 1970s," but it is, of course, much more closely--and properly--associated with the 1980s. In the '70s (starting, really, in the late '60s), filmmakers were using horror and other exploit genres to present interesting ideas and radical points of view. Films like THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT are much more sophisticated than the simple, Puritanical morality fables of the slashers. They follow no blueprint. No one in them is "safe." They were made in an atmosphere in which "The '60s" had crashed and burned really hard and it seemed as though America itself was winding down, sentiment the films reflected. There's a heavy emphasis on things like American self-image vs. reality. The evil you see in these films isn't some sort of exterior force that can be made to vanish by waving a crucifix at it or mumbling incantations over it. It resides within us.[8] The slashers think there's evil in us too, but their notion of "evil" is infantile, and they're all about cutting it out instead of contemplating the horror of it. They're like the dumbed-down revenge of angry, stupid, grunting conservatism, finally stomping out all those dope-smokin', fornicatin', long-haired troublemakers.

Parker is light-hearted in his comments. It would probably be wrong to be too hard on him. Most "mainstream" writers don't like horror films, and their work reflects it. That this one isn't openly hostile to the genre is, alone, a plus. And it certainly doesn't betray the shocking degree of ignorance and idiocy of a David Edelstein (He Who Created "Torture Porn"). Still, it is an uninformed piece, and, pretending to be informed, ends up dragging some good movies through the mud. I thought that was worth a grunt or two of protest.

--j.

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[1] Though I recognize that it belongs there, I've never been entirely comfortable with including HALLOWEEN in the slasher category. The things that made HALLOWEEN work--the mythical element, the incredible visual stylings, the consistently menacing atmosphere, the suspense, the killer-as-projection-of-the-mind--are all pretty much ignored by the slashers that followed. FRIDAY THE 13th is the one that really popularized the by-the-numbers formula the subgenre would follow, and the long green it raked in was the point at which it really took off.

[2] Various commentators have unsuccessfully tried to make a case for the slashers starting earlier. BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974) is often cited by this contingent. The fact that the film was a failure, disappeared, and had no real influence wouldn't disqualify it as being a slasher film, but, among other things, it doesn't have the slashers' habit of lovingly lingering on the sinners getting their comeuppance, and, in fact, doesn't really offer the slasher movie morality fable at all. It's much more closely related to regular suspense films and thrillers. The full gamut of elements that would come to characterize the slasher film first congealed in HALLOWEEN.

[3] Women who express their sexuality in any way or who just get naked (even if no one but the camera is watching) are slaughtered without mercy, and the films always lovingly dote on the deaths of the women far more than the men, because female misbehavior is always thought far worse by this particular breed of moralizing.

[4] Those are extreme examples--slashers obviously didn't all go this way--but they were the most successful.

[5] The slashers are sometimes referred to as "body count" movies, and the appellation is certainly appropriate. Coming at the end of a great period of horror, they're not just stripped of the intellectual content of their predecessors, they're stripped of nearly everything. As my description suggests, they amounted to an effort to reduce horror down a few basic elements. They're horror in its most degraded, dumbed-down form, an artless, soulless assembly-line product featuring a standardized procession of unidimensional targets committing sins and being destroyed for it.

[6] Some would like to use that as the defining element of a "slasher movie," but doing so results in so many non-slasher horrors, thrillers, and mysteries being dumped under the classification of "slasher movie" that the huge body of work that legitimately falls under it and that does contain the clearly identifiable elements that make a cohesive subgenre is completely overwhelmed by these new additions and the classification is rendered meaningless.

[7] He uses, for example, the SAW films, which aren't slashers. The first is quite good, and is really a throwback to the pre-slasher '70s, in that it has an actual story, a psychological approach to the horror, characters who are more than cardboard cut-out targets, and a killer with an intriguing point of view (it borrows heavily from SE7EN, which is also excellent).

[8] That's not to romanticize the horror cinema of the '70s. Like any other era, it produced scores of films ranging from mediocre to outright worthless. Sturgeon's Law always applies: 90% of everything is crap. It's usually closer to 99% of everything. The top horrors of that era were crude, nasty, pitiless and in-your-face. They were also sublime. The slashers not only marked the end of this era of horrors of substance, they helped kill it off.

How To Get HAMMERed: A Reevaluation of Hammer Horror

When fans talk about movies on the internet, one of the most painfully overused words is "overrated." It's thrown around time and time again, usually when someone somewhere has just watched some widely recognized classic of a movie and didn't get any kicks from it. The fault, he decides, must lie in the movie, not in himself, so he logs on to the internet, punches some buttons and gives birth to the latest overuse of "overrated" to describe his conclusion about that mediocre-to-lousy movie everyone inexplicably seems to love.

I offer this both as prologue and as a bit of a warning; what I've just described is what I'm about to do. It's not exactly the same, of course. Mine isn't a momentary whim. I've thought on the subject I'm about to tackle for some years. I've even written about it for years in various forums. I've had entire squadrons of angry fanboys try to decapitate me for my thoughts on the matter. I've had more learned commentators intemperately dispute with me on the subject. And sometimes--just sometimes--people agree with me too. But not as often.

Let me put my cards on the table.

The films of Britain's Hammer studios are some of the most beloved horror picture shows of their day, the movies that gave birth to the careers of icons Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, smashing successes at the box office, scandalized for their sex and violence and hailed for pushing the boundaries on both, credited with singlehandedly giving birth to "the modern horror film" and with the rebirth of Gothic horror. That's the legend of Hammer.

The analysis I'd offer is a little different. As entertaining as a lot of the Hammer films undeniably are, the studio was a factory. In an era of wild experimentation in cinema, the stiff Tories running Hammer strove to impose--largely successfully--an unchallenging uniformity on their product. Even their staunchest defenders would have to concede most of their horror films were, for the most part, basically formulaic programmers, the filmmakers behind them competent jobbers without much to say. While it's certainly true their success helped bring about that new wave of horror films, the Hammer pictures were a part of that wave, not the leaders of it, and quality-wise, they were often put to shame by the films that emerged from around the world at the same time. Hammer gets a lot of credit for pushing the boundaries of sex and violence in horror cinema and while their content certainly resulted in a storm of controversy at the time (mostly from elderly British critics who, one suspect, were being paid by the harrumph), it really wasn't particularly bold and, for the most part, seemed the stuff of tame children's fare within only a few short years. Others were pushing those same boundaries much harder in those years.

Hammer films are, in a word, overrated.

That isn't to say, as some have seemed determined to have it say, that Hammer is bad. In this Bushite age of starkly drawn, irreconcilable and perpetually combative dualities, I've often been dismissed as a "hater" when I've offered this line. That's not the case at all. The Hammer gang, which doesn't need me to vouch for this, turned out a lot of good and even excellent horror films. The best of it has always had a place in my heart. I recently had another look at their version of THE MUMMY--a great piece of work. Their Nigel Kneale adaptations--THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN and the Quatermass flicks--are excellent. I really like the first two Draculas, most of the Frankensteins, CAPTAIN KRONOS, COUNTESS DRACULA, their adaptation of DR. SYN, THE GORGON (which is very underappreciated), the first and last Carmilla movies--lots of good stuff over those years. I'm a fan of a lot of it, a big fan of some of it, "Hammer horror fan" is a label I'd definitely self-apply and nothing I write here should be interpreted as the words of a "hater" or of someone who fails to appreciate and even adore the studio's very real accomplishments. When I assert Hammer horror is "overrated," I'm mostly aiming at its reputation for innovation, which goes beyond what it deserves, and attempting to redress, to some extent, the habit of some of its enthusiasts of sweeping under the rug its shortcomings.

The state of horror cinema when Hammer first entered the field was the first block on which the Hammer legend was built. Sci-fi horrors were the order of the day in the 1950s--saucer pictures, big bug movies, commies-from-space pictures--and when Hammer came along, what very few straight horror films still appeared were mostly terrible and had been for years, pretty much since Lewton's RKO unit had closed up shop.[1] Gothic horror in particular had died a cruel death with a Lou Costello whimper in the '40s. Hammer films were great indeed compared to most of what had been passing for horror for years but contrary to the legend, Hammer didn't lead the pack when, in the late '50s, the world had ripened for a return to the good stuff. The modern horror film actually began in France with DIABOLIQUE in 1955,[2] while the modern Gothic horror began in Italy, where Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava offered up I VAMPIRI in 1956. When, in the magic year of 1957, Hammer lept into the horror field with THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, horror was already popping up all over the world. In the U.S., Roger Corman made THE UNDEAD, a cheapie and no classic but one that introduced many of the elements he would, within a few years, expand upon in his superior cycle of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.[3] Also produced at the same time as CURSE were Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL (Sweden), Fernando Mendez's EL VAMPIRO (Mexico) and Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON (UK). All three of these films were vastly superior to Hammer's CURSE.[4] They were, in fact, superior to just about everything Hammer would ever produce in the horror field.[5]

What CURSE had that the others in the Class of '57 lacked was color.[6] The flesh-tones were warm, the blood was red, and no one had seen anything like it. The use of color in Gothic horror was, indeed, a Hammer innovation,[7] and no doubt part of the reason those crotchety English critics were so shocked--shocked!--by the level of gore in the film. For those who haven't seen it, there's virtually no gore in CURSE but what little was present was indeed red and that seemed to inspire those critics to portray the film as a nauseating bloodbath (Feeling cheeky, the Hammer boys replied by opening their next horror production, DRACULA, with a shot of some blood splattering on a tomb).

What Hammer's use of color lacked was artistic initiative. CURSE and the Hammer horrors that followed offered sumptuous, beautifully rendered color photography but their use of color remained strictly matter-of-fact. Decorative and nothing more. While Hammer is so often praised for its use of color, it in fact fell to Hammer's contemporary rivals to show the world how it's really done. Roger Corman, in his Poe cycle followed almost immediately (and even more impressively) by Mario Bava left the merely decorative far behind, offering up wild, innovative experiments in the expressive use of color. Hammer never matched it.

Hammer films were also encumbered with a conservatism in the studio's choice of stories. Hammer films were always set in a conservative, rigidly ordered moral universe, which arguably murdered any effort at horror right out of the gate. With a few notable exceptions, they offered simple good-vs.-evil tales. As horror buff "Squonkamatic" put it (in one of the message board exchanges I've had on the subject):

"Their stories tend to be about the status quo being upset and a quest to settle things down again. Even if the particular evil isn't destroyed or the story wrapped up into a neat bundle, there is always an emphasis on order being restored in the face of chaos. The monster himself isn't so much the antagonist as is the disruption of normal life and the moral or ethical disharmony that his/her influence inflicts on the community."[8]

While genre films were taking storytelling in different and interesting directions,[9] Hammer held to this conservatism throughout its time in the horror business.[10]

Hammer was routinely pelted with criticism in its native Great Britain for its violent and sexy movies and that hail of rotten tomatoes has been converted, over the years, into a shower of praise for pushing the boundaries of acceptable content. Lost in the midst of both the decaying vegetation and the congratulatory wreaths is the fact that Hammer's use of sex and violence was actually extraordinarily mild. Mild in and of itself, mild in comparison to their contemporaries and becoming cartoonishly mild in comparison as time went on. British censorship was the most conservative in the Western world; coming into conflict with it required very little. The insanely stodgy critics and censors of the House of Horror's heyday revealed, through their reviling of Hammer's product, everything about themselves and little about the films. Hammer's years of horror coincided with Jesus Franco's earliest work,[11] PEEPING TOM, Herschell Gordon Lewis' gore-packed extravaganzas, THE WHIP & THE BODY, BLOOD & BLACK LACE and the rest of Bava's prime, ONIBABA, REPULSION, MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN, PSYCHO, etc. By the end of the '60s, Hammer had been left entirely in the dust when it came to blood and bumpin'-uglies-related business. We were getting items like THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL, Jean Rollin's early films, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the Blind Dead, MOJU, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, Dario Argento, pinku stuff from Japan, Paul Naschy's movies and so on, movies that genuinely pushed boundaries like mad and like they were mad.

Particularly odd are the hysterical howls of their early detractors regarding all that smutty sex stuff with which Hammer supposedly stuffed their productions. In the real world, Hammer always shied away from full-bodied eroticism. They had to--the British censors would drag out the scissors if they offered more than the vaguest suggestion. Their films didn't even feature nudity until 1970.[12] Before that, the most you'd ever get from them was a little upper-jubbly cleavage from some busty (but fully clothed) barmaid, a suggestive dance or a curvy vampire lass whose actions we're to regard as "sensual" because we're meant to substitute, in our minds, her sucking of her victims' blood for suction of a more wholesome variety.[13] To sample how truly backwards was Hammer when it came to more involved matters relating to the beast with two (or more) backs, look at the snickering, embarrassed, English-schoolboy-being-naughty approach to eroticism in the first two Karnstein films, especially the second one,[14] and compare it to the way the same element is approached by Franco, Harry Kumel, Jean Rollin in their roughly contemporaneous films.

For that matter, look at how just about everything was being handled by Hammer vs. everyone else, particularly from the mid-60s onward. It was a time of remarkable innovation. As genre writer Tim Lucas put it, the '60s was "second only to the '20s in terms of its serious contribution to the history of imaginative moviemaking."[15] We're getting KWAIDAN, TARGETS, Jose Mojica Marins' Coffin Joe and all of the other films about which I've just been rattling on, and Hammer is cranking out DRACULA, PART 48.[16]

Hammer was a film factory and like most factories, those who ran it didn't see much merit in the idea that strength could come from diversity. On the other hand, the Hollywood axiom "nothing succeeds like success" had a lot of very dear friends among the management there. When the studio started making horror movies, it had a big hit, then another then fell into its cycle of formulaic programmers almost immediately. Its films weren't made by artists with a burning desire to tell a story; they were made by clock-punching jobbers,[17] skilled craftsmen working from a house style that was intended to obliterate as many signs of individuality as possible and that mostly succeeded. That's why, when one isolates the films of any particular individual director among the long-time Hammer hands, there are no identifiably consistent themes,[18] bold or unusual points of view or even particularly innovative technical work that marks those films as the product of that individual. The house style evolves with time but Hammer horrors of a given "era" generally look very similar, regardless of the director, whose job was little more than to show up, say "action" and say "cut." If they had a good story and script--and they were always assigned this; rarely came up with the idea or developed it themselves--and the actors and crew were doing well, the picture worked. If there was a shortcoming anywhere in this chain, it didn't. Hammer was blessed with a large number of competent craftsmen who could make pretty things for an audience to look at and could crank out a fine entertainment from time to time.

The blessing comes with a caveat though; they cranked out a lot of mediocre-to-poor entertainments. I've always found a certain blandness factor in Hammer's horror films, even among the better ones. It isn't true that, with Hammer, "if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all," but it often feels a lot like that. That's part of the downside of too unyielding an effort to impose uniformity--it makes your best picture feel a whole lot like your worst one. And while great horror can inspire outright awe, very few of the Hammer horrors do (which isn't an insignificant point, particularly given the volume of horror Hammer produced). My own feelings about Hammer are, as everything I've written here makes plain, mixed but one thing on which I'm not divided is that the common sentiment regarding the high quality of their films, the boldness of them and the place they earn Hammer in cinematic history is overblown.[19] In this sense, they are overrated.

Make of that what you will.

--j.

---

[1] While ailing in the cinema, however, horror had flourished in American comics between 1950 and '54, led by William Gaines' gang of groovy ghouls at EC Comics. At mid-decade, the insanity of the McCarthy era turned its guns on horror books and TALES FROM THE CRYPT and all the rest were put out of business but the Cryptkeeper had the last laugh; the influence of the EC horror comics on modern horror cinema is immeasurable and, to bring things back to the central theme of this article, puts the influence of Hammer to shame.

[2] LES DIABOLIQUES was a huge box-office success. William Castle, upon seeing it, was inspired to leave his regular job at Columbia and start work on what would eventually become MACABRE, the first of his many entries into the horror field. Author Robert Bloch named LES DIABOLIQUES his "favorite horror film of all time," and "the epitome of what the horror film should be." He was inspired by it to write PSYCHO, which was, a few years later, turned into the seminal horror film by Alfred Hitchcock.

[3] '57 was also the year Screen Gems put together, for television airing in the U.S., a package of more than 50 classic Universal horrors from the '30s and '40s under the banner "Shock Theater." The package was wildly successful, and set off a renaissance of interest in the classic horrors. Their popularity led Forrest J. Ackerman--Uncle Forry--to launch his horror fanzine "Famous Monsters of Filmland" in 1958, and it nurtured a few generations of genre filmmakers and writers.

[4] That isn't to say CURSE was a bad movie. Though one of Hammer's lesser films, it still had, among other things, a cracking good villain. The character of Frankenstein is said to have appeared in more than 200 movies over the years but for my money, Peter Cushing's is easily the definitive portrayal.

[5] Some would disagree, of course. Fortunately for them, they face no legal sanction for being completely wrong.

[6] And what it made was money--lots of it. The big bucks Hammer had rolling in from their initial productions added rocket-fuel to the production of this new breed of horror film.

[7] There is a perpetual argument among horror aficionados about whether Gothic horrors even should be shot in color. I confess my sympathies lean more toward those who argue black-and-white is the proper medium for the sub-genre but I'm no ideologue on the point. There have been far too many great Gothics well lensed in color to dismiss it as a palette. Still, Gothic horror is about generating a certain atmosphere and a lot of the visual language that most effectively spoke to this seemed to get lost in the translation to color.

[8] That may be the first time in history someone known only as "Squonkamatic" was quoted in a text of this sort, and this may be the first footnote to cite such a source, too. I don't care. I'm feeling lazy. He said it as well as I could have--why rewrite it?

[9] Roger Corman, for example, constructed his Poe films around the idea that the "reality" they present is a projection of the disturbed minds at the center of the stories. Polanski's REPULSION (1965) visualized the delusional fantasies of its central character, a mentally disturbed woman.

[10] Hammer also remained committed to straightforward linear narratives right to the end, though the genre began generating interesting challenges to those narratives by the end of the '60s, like Jesus Franco's SUCCUBUS and Jean Rollin's early work. If this is judged a sin at all, it's a very minor one, but it does help make the case for Hammer's lack of innovative spirit.

[11] Franco's first horror, GRITOS EN LA NOCHE (1962), is a vicious little film, with onscreen surgery on bleeding human beings (a carryover from 1959's seminal EYES WITHOUT A FACE) and sporting, as a lead, a doctor who seems to have had much of his conscience surgically removed. The torture sequence in THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS (Franco's second horror outing) puts to shame anything ever shot by Hammer. A lot of the sex and violence in films of this vintage look quaint now--that KLAUS sequence is still jaw-dropping in its rawness and viciousness today. And both of those flicks feature all kinds of wild music, crazy camerawork, improvisation. They are innovative features, reaching for something new and different, not the dull, practically invisible house style adopted by Hammer for most of its time in the chiller business. O.K., so this was really just an excuse to throw in a footnote about Jesus Franco movies. Sue me. I like the guy.

[12] In THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, a most excellent (if flawed) flick, that appeared nearly a decade after Hammer's contemporaries began using nudity.

[13] Then, later, we're meant to cheer with some sexless Puritan drives a stake through her, ridding the world of suction forever in the name of the Lord. Hallelujah!

[14] These were Hammer's first attempts at a plunge into lush eroticism. THE VAMPIRE LOVERS gets the striking Ingrid Pitt naked on camera--a good start, to be sure--but when, in the scene in question, a pair of fully grown women suddenly act like silly girls playing a game of tag, one suspects the jobbers behind the camera didn't quite understand the phrase "lush eroticism" (as one commentator has said, one expects them to break out into a pillow-fight at any moment). As for the follow-up, LUST FOR A VAMPIRE, well, let me hear you sing it... "Straaange love..."

[15] "The 1960s" from Fangoria #100

[16] Again, that shouldn't be read as any across-the-board dismissal of Hammer's late product. Among Hammer connoisseurs, there's a running debate regarding early vs. late Hammer, with the latter inevitably regarded as significantly inferior. I think this is ridiculous; some of the best and, particularly relevant here, most inventive Hammer horrors came out of that late period. BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, to cite an example, was a considerable step up from any of the Hammer Mummy sequels. CAPTAIN KRONOS was the beginning of what should have been an entire series of cool swashbuckler horror movies but instead of recognizing its worth, Hammer's chiefs were put off by it and shelved it for years. Hammer's chiefs just couldn't bring themselves to embrace that sort of innovation.

[17] I've gotten some static over that and similar phrases when I've discussed Hammer in various venues. It's said to be demeaning, which isn't the intention at all. As a matter of personal bias, if that's the right word, I do place artists at a higher level than employees when it comes to making art. Being a jobber can imply a lack of passion for the work. Obviously, an indie filmmaker who puts his all and usually every penny he owns, and a lot of pennies he has to beg, borrow, and steal from friends and relatives is going to put all of his heart and soul into a project. It's going to consume all of his time and money, maybe for years. It requires dedication, commitment, a sort of obsession. I know--I've been there for a few years myself. A jobber is someone who punches a clock every day, who is usually going to look upon his work the same way most of us look upon our work. It's just a job. This isn't always the case, of course, but my bias in that regard is, as I see it, reasonable. It's the same reason football fans prefer college ball to the pros. And none of this is to suggest the jobbers can't sometimes trump the artists. Warner Brothers, as a factory operation, produced CASABLANCA, for example, a film without which no list of the greatest movies can be complete. It's telling, however, that literally no one who worked on that movie had any idea how good it really was. They just cranked it out, moved on to the next one, and expressed disbelief in later years that it turned out so well. The difference between the artist and the jobber: for the latter, filmmaking a job; for the former, it's a life.

[18] Hammer's films had thematic consistencies, not the films of the individual directors.

[19] And no, Hammer fanatics, that's definitely not the product of a "divided mind."

A Minor Meditation on the Matter of Lobbing Metaphorical Manure at Lousy Movies

My recent Jesús Franco article, posted over at Bob Monell's excellent Cinemadrome board, drew some words from Bob about a pet peeve of his--scatalogical references used as a substitute for competent film criticism. I'd quoted some references of that sort from Franco-bashing reviewers, and he recounted recently seeing the same sort of comments being directed at Dario Argento.[1] In the grip of a manic fit, I thought it a topic worth addressing. Briefly, anyway. Bob:

This kind of "language" tells us little, if anything, about the films or filmmaker, but tells a lot about the writer's impoverished critical vocabulary. "I don't like it... so it's shit!" What banal, totally unegaging language. I don't care what this person thinks, if there's any thought at all involved, which I doubt. This is reactive writing. Self centered writing. Bad writing.

Most of the time, that's probably true (and I'd add "lazy writing" to the roster).I do think, however, that scatological references are sometimes useful shorthand, and even appropriate. Someone who calls a Brett Ratner movie "shit," for example, is expending only slightly less thought than went into making the movie itself. One could write a detailed article about all the ways in which the Ratner film sucked, but if such an article was competent (that it would be very long is a given), one would, by definition, be expending far more thought on bashing the movie than went into making it.

Sometimes, this can be an amusing exercise--I picture Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog at a picnic table combing through old books in an effort to find arcane profanities for Kinski to hurl at Herzog and his films. Most of the time, it's pointless, because most upbudget Hollywood rubbish--the movies that most merit that treatment--isn't, shall we say, up to Herzog's standards.

The "summer blockbuster" season is well underway, Hollywood besieging us with their annual roster of "tent-pole" movies, a parade of brainless CGI-laden inanity that seems to find no denominator either common enough or low enough. How does one write a thoughtful, intelligent critique of a movie like ARMAGEDDON or THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW or INDEPENDENCE DAY or this year's X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE? Such films wear their cretinous idiocy and complete lack of value on their sleeves. Their mere existence is an insult to the universe itself, particularly given their budgets (which run into the hundreds of millions of dollars). They're the soulless, putrefying leavings of a system of once-mighty studios who, decades ago, stopped living and became mixed-up zombies. And not in any good way.[2]

And if one doesn't want to waste the energy necessary to detail, about them, deficiencies already patently obvious to anyone with more than a few functioning brain cells, I think it's all right to just call them shit.[3]

--j.

---

[1] As this suggests, at least some little part of the objection to the use of defecation metaphors is that they're so often so poorly aimed!

[2] Think about this: 70 years ago, the studio system gave us THE WIZARD OF OZ, Laughton's HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, GONE WITH THE WIND, GUNGA DIN, STAGECOACH, ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS, THE YOUNG MR. LINCOLN--more great movies than can be counted. This year, we're getting a FRIDAY THE 13th remake, X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE, PAUL BLART: MALL COP, a LAND OF THE LOST rehash, a remake of THE TAKING OF PELHAM 123, YEAR ONE, and TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

[3] After all, is the bashing I've just given them here that much different? Some windier prose, some whimsical alliteration, some big words, but, when all is said and done, all I've done is call them shit in a fancier way.

My Movie Madness (version 2.0)

As I was out to-ing and fro-ing a week or so ago, I ran into one of my old customers. That isn't so unusual for me. I've worked with the public in one way or another in every job I've had and when you live in such a small town in such a small county as I, you sort of get to know everyone after a while. This was a customer from a video store I owned a few years ago. It was called Movie Madness. It operated for three years before bowing to the inevitable. Before opening it, I'd worked for four years at another video store in town, so I'd put in quite a few years in movie rentals before I had to pack up my ruck and call it a day. When I closed, a lot of my younger customers had been renting from me since they were kids.

The fellow I saw on the day in question was among them. I hadn't seen him since I'd closed up my shop three years ago. I remembered him well. I just couldn't remember his name! He remembered me and my name very well, and you'd have thought, from his reaction upon seeing me, that he was some crazed fan who'd just randomly encountered whatever rock star to whom he secretly built shrines in between stays at the local mental health facility. He was very pleased to see me.

I was pleased to see him. I run into my old customers all the time--practically any time I'm out in public. I'm always particularly glad to see the old customers from my Movie Madness though. The store was an impossibility. I opened it in a rundown old building with $2,600, and ran it on a shoestring from opening to closing. Ultimately, it failed but I did give it a sweet try for a few years there and my customers were the ones who made it possible. There are a lot of good people among them. I'm grateful to all of them.

Well, all but the ones who stole my movies. Not so big on those.

Thankfully, this old customer wasn't among that mercifully small group. He was a diehard loyalists and he wanted me to know how much he missed me and my Movie Madness. Expression of this heartache was practically the first things out of his mouth. The next was about how there's no cool place like Movie Madness to go to anymore.

I'd tried to make my Movie Madness a place that would provoke that sort of reaction. Not just a sterile, impersonal rental house but a sort of shrine to cinema, the way video stores had been when I was younger and they first began popping up. When I was a child, access to movies was very limited--you saw them when they were making the theaters, caught whatever ran on television and that was about it. And then came VHS. In the Dark Age days before cable had penetrated my neck of the rural outback and satellite dishes were exotic structures the size of small autos (and just as expensive), a trip to the video store was a special thing indeed for a young cinephile. The stores were all independently owned and featured a remarkable diversity of films, much more so than in the years that would follow. You got to know whoever ran the place and they were usually movie lovers, too--it's why they were in the business. As they learned your tastes, they could point you to a dazzling array of fine films you'd never seen and often, of which you'd never even heard. Vigorous movie-watching became part of the culture (a change that is little appreciated today) and browsing the aisles, you ran into other people from around town and you'd kick recommendations back and forth between you. Sometimes, you'd just pull odd items off the shelf that looked interesting and even if you were burned by them two times out of three, the one that clicked made it seem worth the dig. When I built my Movie Madness, I think I wanted to make a place that was sort of like that, a place that would build a loyal base, and that would advertise itself.[1]

Because of money--more particularly, because of my lack of it--my Movie Madness was necessarily limited, to a significant degree, by the bounds of popular taste. A big part of its budget was consumed, every week, by whatever the new, popular material was at the time. That's what pays the bills at any video store. Still, I tried to make of it something different and special, even working within those limitations.

One of the ways I made the place my own was through my selection of older films. I'd been assembling Movie Madness in my basement for years before there was ever any store or even the name.[2] When I first hung out my shingle, video libraries had all but disappeared. When everything went from VHS to DVD (a process still underway at the time I opened), those older movies--all on VHS--were bundled up and sold for whatever they'd bring, with no effort to convert popular older titles to disc. It wasn't uncommon to go into a video store and discover it didn't carry a single title that was over three or four years old, with most being of much more recent vintage. Older movies are lower return items but they're also cheaper. I wanted my library to be part of my hook, a thing that marked my store as different and that drew people in. With no real libraries around, my thinking went, I could fill a vacuum. Much of my library of older films was carefully chosen. I went for cult films [3], classics, movies that were good but little known, those kind of movies about which people have always heard but haven't gotten around to watching and, encompassing all of these concerns, I wanted quality movies to which I, personally, could mate viewers. For the longest time (before I'd opened), I wanted to call my store "Video Eclectica," but there was no way that would fly in a small town in Georgia. Even if people could pronounce "eclectica"--which they couldn't--they'd have no idea what it meant (Yeah, I made up the word but I insist its meaning is plain).

Throughout my Madness years, I always sought out new old stuff whenever I was making a little money. Film cultists swoon over the things I'd dig up but odd items caught the attention of Joe Average renter too. I had the old original NOSFERATU, magnificent silent German Expressionist fare from 1922. Conventional wisdom says you can't pay people to take silent films, especially in the culturally desolate environs in which Movie Madness stood, but this particular version was the Arrow release scored by the music of Type-O Negative. I rented it like gangbusters! One guy even gave me a $20 tip after seeing it, just, he said, for having such a cool store.[4] I had REEFER MADNESS and THE COCAINE FIENDS, infamous, unintentionally hilarious anti-drug films from the 1930s--I stocked them in the comedy section. People loved them. I had PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Ed Wood's wonderfully incompetent anti-epic. It was in comedy too and it was so popular it was stolen. Not once, but twice. As much as it made for me, I didn't mind buying it three times.

Many of the sections in which I divided my library reflected its eccentricity.

I had a section devoted entirely to ancient world "Epics"--nothing but sword-and-sandal flicks and Roman empire-related titles. I had a great (and extensive) section devoted to films based on comic books. My section marker was a great collage of comic characters (I designed all of the section markers, and my pal John printed them up). I had a "Film Noir" section, one of my personal favorite genres, and quite a nice selection of films, many of them from my personal collection. My marker for it was the cover of a Raymond Chandler anthology. I had sections devoted to the old cliffhanger serials (which I've always loved) and to Japanese anime. Never had much of either but they weren't that popular. I had an extraordinary "War Movies" section. No exaggeration, it would be easier to name the great war movies I didn't have than the ones I did. And where do you ever see a war movie section in a video store anyway? I had mine by way of my friend Darren, who made a deal with me to use his collection in return for half of whatever they made in rentals (he provided me with several other good flicks too).

Even the "normal" sections of the store were marked by eclectic selections. My Western section was made up of things like spaghetti westerns, the complete KUNG FU series (GREAT show from my youth, released to DVD in the years I was in business), Sam Peckinpah's blood-drenched sagebrush sagas and so on. My tips of the hat to "normal" were things like the YOUNG GUNS flicks (very popular), and even a copy of HIGH NOON (a great movie no one ever rented). My section-marker was a black-and-white Clint Eastwood from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES with "Western" written over him in red Marlboro font. Over the rack on which they stood, I had a reproduction of a great poster from Enzo Castellari's KEOMA (also available to rent). My children's movies were marked "Kids' Stuff," and, again, odd choices. The animated LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, the Betty Boop collection and so on.The section-marker for "Sci-Fi" had a then-new image of the surface of Mars taken by a Russian craft--I downloaded it, made the marker out of it and had it on foam-board over my sci-fi films within three days of it being taken. I had a "Fantasy" section too, where roamed Ray Harryhausen, THE ODYSSEY, CONAN THE BARBARIAN. My collection of softcore "Skinemax" type movies and most of the films that ended up being "unrated" or NC-17ed for sex were posted under a section labeled "Lovin'." I had a great section marker featuring a cut-away of Shannon Whirry obviously enjoying the attentions of some beefy fellow and the words "Lovin'", in a very ornate font to the side. I put up my section devoted to wrestling and Ultimate Fighting events on a large rack beneath the "Lovin'" films, in a section marked "Fightin'," which had, as a marker, Popeye, fresh from eating a bait of spinach and charging into action. Lovin' and fightin' in the same place. The stuff of life![5] My "Horror" section was to die for. There was quite a bit of good horror being released when I was open. DOG SOLDIERS, WRONG TURN, the GINGER SNAPS trilogy, 28 DAYS LATER, CABIN FEVER. I had Jesus Franco flicks, Jean Rollin, when a lot of it was out of print[6], and lots of Italians, alongside Roger Cormans and Herschell Gordon Lewises and George Romeros and John Carpenters, among a plethora of great, obscurities I'd found.

DVD brought forth the proliferation of "special editions" and "director's cuts" and "unrated" or "expanded" versions of movies. When there was one available, I always tried to get the nice edition. Most people didn't care but my core clientele of cinephiles certainly appreciated it. I wanted them to have the longer editions of the LORD OF THE RINGS movies, not just the radically shortened theatrical releases all the other stores had. A new, much revised release gave people who has already seen the films a reason to rent the new version. I made a fortune on UNDERWORLD in its original version; when the unrated, extended edition was released, I got it too and made another fortune.[7]

When people rented my movies, I stuck the boxes back on the shelf with a rubber band on them and a big tag with some silly, irreverent message indicating their absence, most of them reflecting periods of boredom when no one is coming in and one has a little time to concoct silly, irreverent messages. If a Schwarzenegger movie was rented, the tag indicating it read--what else--"Ah'll be back!" If it's a sad movie, it will be something like...

A Western or other guy picture might get this...

A more generalized one...

Most were general, and could be stuck on anything. "Roses are red/Violets are blue/I've been rented/ But not by you"; "Already gone"; "I ain't here"; "Gadzooks! I've been drafted!"; and so on. Better, more clever ones too, but I don't, off the top of my head, remember them. I'd suggested doing something like this at a previous store at which I'd worked and the idea had been vetoed on the grounds that people might be offended. No one ever expressed offense at my tags. A lot of people laughed at them though. A few customers even provided new ones. I kept a pile of blank tags on the counter where they checked out so they could add to the pile if they came up with a good one.

I had lots of great posters and other images all over the store. I had a reproduction of a German poster for James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN, a reproduction of an old 1933 KING KONG poster and the long one-sheets of CASABLANCA, OUT OF THE PAST, and ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT. Contemporary posters for new movies as they came out as well but not so many of those. In my horror section, I had a Gil Elvgren print of a witch--actually, one of Elvgren's typical smiling beauties in witch duds riding a broom that is visibly tied up with a string. Once, a customer who turned out to be a fellow fan of the old pin-up artists decided he simply had to have it. I sold it to him and had another copy of it in its place within a few days.

I had lots of other things hanging around the store, as well. A poster recounting the Golden Age origin of the Batman. Another doing the same for the Golden Age Superman. Plenty of things like this, too...

And many iterations on my logo. The logo was designed by a very old friend of mine (thanks, Allen). It was going to be a character I'd just called "the Doc" and I told him to make it a mad scientist in a Peter Lorre/Dexter's Laboratory vein. It was great:

I had a more-than-life-size Doc on the front of the store and those coming in the back--most people, because that's where the parking-lot was--were greeted by a 4-foot stand-up Doc, mounted on coreplast, again by my friend John, who, after a while, did all of my printing, including banners, flyers, business cards, and my little newsletters I'd write and put in various locales around town. He only ever got, for his troubles, whatever movies he wanted. And he didn't even want a lot of those.

My first location (and the one where I spent all but the last year of the store's run) was an old house. There was  a small porch off the back door, which, as I said, is where most people entered. It had a huge cherry tree growing beside it. When they were in season, this meant all the cherries one wanted. It also meant a mess, though, when they ripened and dropped off on to the porch--I had to keep them swept off so they weren't crushed and tracked in. I had my punk-rock night-drop box on that same door--a milk crate with a pillow on it, nailed to the door under a mail-drop slot. For some reason, people found this endlessly amusing. The place had a bricked-up former fireplace with a mantle off to the side of where I'd put my long counter. I turned it into a shrine to Dr. Shock, a local late-night horror host in Chattanooga who had delighted me as a child:

Early in putting together the store, I tried to track down Dr. Shock (whose real name was Tommy Reynolds), in the hopes of arranging a personal appearance at the store. Never could find him though. He was apparently in Alabama at the time and he died a few years later. I never got to meet him.

I also sold comics out of a back room; they're another passion of mine. I had an old-fashioned spinner-rack up front, stocked, perhaps appropriately, with older books. The comics didn't sell very well in the store but I sold a ton of them on ebay. They were, in fact, what helped get the store through its first summer. Movie rentals wither in the heat of the summer and while the comics didn't bring in a lot, they added enough that it was like getting an extra week out of  each month.

The blood that kept afloat my cash-anemic project flowed from my customers and I loved them.[8] I ran the store myself, and made it a point to interact with everyone who came in. They became like friends and family. I always kept a cooler of drinks in the front for anyone who wanted one. I had a small dinner-table in the front room; sometimes I'd feed folks who were a little down on their luck and maybe couldn't feed themselves and sometimes food was for people who had done me a favor, ran an errand for me when I couldn't get away and so on.[9] I got to know a fellow named Dmitri who had opened a pizza shop a short walk from me. The location was new to him but he'd been in business for a while and was sympathetic to the new kid on the entrepreneur's block. One day, I told him the tale of who gets fed and he told his people to give me a 2-liter Coke any time I bought pizza, free of charge! I never got to do anything to repay him (except, of course, buy his pizzas and say "thank you" in a blog post years later).

The real cheese-and-pepperoni of my Movie Madness though, was always movies. I love movies. At Movie Madness, I got to talk about them all day and get paid for it. Paid a little, anyway. Some of my customers would stick around for hours yakking about them. A large part of my solid customer base was younger people and because I was knowledgeable and passionate about movies, many of them came to regard me as some sort of film guru, which, for whatever reason, always seemed to amuse me. People would pick a movie from my store, ask me if it was any good, then find it hilarious if I told them it sucked. I never misled anyone for the sake of a rental. They often rented the ones I dissed anyway. Sometimes they didn't come back with sour "you told me so" looks. A lot of times, they did.

People would sometimes come by and talk about problems they were having with a DVD player or VCR or movie and I'd tell them to bring it over. I installed some DVD players and explained their workings to those who found them mysterious and I got to be pretty good at fixing things. The town mayor was my neighbor, and his wife once brought over a pair of movies on VHS, one of which had broken free of one of its reels and one of which had been left in the car in the sun and had melted into something that barely resembled its previous form. I gave the latter a full body transplant from an identical tape I had laying around and patched up the former. She was so pleased she gave me $20, which I did my best to refuse. In the end, she insisted, and I needed the money at the time too much to fight it to the last man.[10] That was the only time I ever accepted any payment for such business though. A friend once told me I was crazy to do those things free of charge. My view was that it made for better advertising than you could possibly buy and if I could install or fix someone's machine, they'd rent my movies. Whenever I would order things for people (which was pretty regularly), I always took a pretty small cut.

There are a lot of funny Movie Madness stories. My original location featured an ever-collapsing toilet. The floor was progressively falling in on one side of it but it was situated in such a way that fixing it would have been a major hassle. It still worked and didn't get much use, so I just let it be. Eventually, the best you could do, if you had to go, is one-cheek it and hope. The building was rigged for gas heat but I couldn't afford to have the town gas-line connected, which meant a constant struggle to keep the drafty old place warm in the winter. My best solution was kerosene but there was never a good solution. It was always a lot warmer inside than out but in the colder parts of winter--the prime movie rental season--the warmer-blooded of my customers became fond of my big heater. There was also the underhanded hijinks of the competition, who, at one point, launched a whisper-campaign aimed at suggesting I was running a porn shop! I thought this quite amusing at first. When skeptical parents kept their teens away while a lot of the new customers were shady guys in metaphorical raincoats looking for porn that wasn't there, not so much. Well, the guys in raincoats were funny. Not what the rumors did to my bank account though. In a sense, I got the last laugh--I outlasted those who started that bit of trouble.

Some years ago, a Movie Gallery had moved into town and helped kill off the local independents. I was the only one to open my doors after they arrived on the scene, and the last holdout to fall after they'd finished off everyone else. Mine is a small town but it used to support five video stores. Now, there's only Movie Gallery.

And, as my old customer I saw a few days ago put it, "Movie Gallery sucks."

In a very real sense (and to borrow the old cliche'), an era ended with my Movie Madness. I put up the best fight I could with what I had.

I sometimes doubted myself on that point though. Was I really putting up the best fight? I would often walk the length of my store and wonder if I'd made it too eclectic. Too much like me. Was I hurting business by making a trip through my library too much like a trip through a corner of my own mind? I could never entirely convince myself it didn't hurt me but I did lean that way. Being so different probably helped me hold out as long as I did. It was an unique place. My customers seemed to find my enthusiasm infectious. I developed a strong cadre of clients to prove it, many of whom even followed me when I had to move the store out to the styx for its last year of business,[11] and when I run into them today, they're still going on about the place. There just weren't enough of them. And, really, who cares if I did do any harm by making the store my own? I ran into another of my old customers online last week and, talking with her, I came to realize something about my Movie Madness that should have been obvious to me all along:[12] It was more than just a store. It was art. I've always been an artist, not a businessman. Movie Madness was, in a very real sense, one of my works. A personal one.

Well, this has been a bit of a rant and on what must seem a bit of a strange subject. I started my Movie Madness because I thought it would make the money I needed to fund things I really wanted to do. This is hilarious in retrospect--I barely made anything at it. I do think I created something unique and worthwhile. And if my own film projects ever get off the ground, it will be through the efforts of people I met through my Movie Madness, so in a sense, it helped "pay" for those projects after all. I don't think I'd ever want to go back and do it again. Well, that isn't exactly true. I'd love to do it again. One of these days, maybe someone will come up with a way to run a business like that without the incredible amount of stress my Movie Madness involved.[13] If that ever happened, I'd jump back into it in a second. Seems pretty unlikely though. The age of the independent video store is, unfortunately, over, now. It really was a lot of fun while it lasted.

And I did finally remember your name, George. Don't hold it against me that I forgot.

Forgive me if this has been boring. It's just something I did with my life for a while.

--j.

---

[1] Word-of-mouth really is the most valuable advertising. When I opened, I had a massive box of flyers printed. I don't remember how many--probably a thousand or two. They acted as a coupon on a rental. I, my friends, my family, and whatever other poor souls I could rope in handed out flyers. We put flyers in the local businesses. We hung flyers. We taped flyers to mailboxes. We coated the world in flyers. In all the years I was in business, I got exactly one customer from all of those flyers and all that effort. There was, on the other hand, one guy who lived not far from my store. He was a real movie buff--came in with his girlfriend, fell in love with the place, told all his friends. I probably got a dozen regular customers from him. Thanks, Jerry.

[2] I'd put in four years working at a place called Dynamite Video, right next door to where I'd ultimately open my own. At one point toward the end of that job, one of my customers approached me about teaming with him to open a new video store in town; I'd run it and he'd be the bank. I did some initial work toward this end, putting together some numbers and so on, but he ultimately had to pull out over money--his wife, pregnant with twins, had just been put to bed by her doctors a few months before her due date. But I kept working on the project from time to time anyway, thinking maybe I'd take it up myself at some point. When Dynamite closed its doors, I went for it, with a little borrowed money and my income-tax refund for that year.

[3] Film cultists are choice customers. They want to see BLAZING SADDLES or MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL for the 10,000th time. They're predictable and profitable, so I tried to find and stock as many Blazing Saddles and Holy Grails as I could (and to spend as little on them as possible). These renters also multiply well; they talk up these movies so much that they make people who have never seen them want to see them, and I got their business too.

[4] Thanks, Jason.

[5] Those softcore flicks were the most popular item with thieves--during my years in business, I lost more from that section than all other sections of the store combined.

[6] My preference for obscurities meant I had a lot of movies on the shelf that, over time, went out of print. Incredibly stupid--setting myself up for theft--but I was fortunate enough to never lose one of them, and cinephiles certainly appreciated me for having them. The closest I ever came to losing one was the 1980 version of FLASH GORDON. It had run out of print for a time, and one day, a fellow called rather desperately searching for it. He turned up at my door, near orgasmic over the fact that I had it. He kept it a lot longer then he was supposed to have. I had to call him a few times. He did finally--maybe reluctantly but at least graciously--bring it back.

[7] I also had it in the back of my mind that having all these nicer editions would make the library worth more, if I ever wanted to sell it. I never got to sell it.

[8] And I still do, Adrian, Melanie, Bryan, the Jerrys, Jason, Deforest, Christy, Gerard, Mike who helped me through an inventory crisis, among a great many other things, Darren who delivered my movies every week, sometimes fed me and was always there when I needed help, my cousin Julie who made some "Movie Madness" t-shirts, my aunt Sherry who helped me out of a money jam with my early taxes and more others than I can fairly list, so don't even think about taking it as a sleight if I fail to mention you. You all made it happen. You're the greatest.

[9] And sometimes, they'd bring me food and other goodies. Once, one of my regulars brought me some exceptionally good barbecued pork, right off the grill--thanks Bryan.

[10] Later, whenever the mayor and his wife would leave town, they'd get me to come over and feed their cat in their absence.

[11] That's what killed me off. I had to move because I could no longer afford my place in town. I moved into the back of a convenience store, an isolated commercial property in a remote area. Should have been a good move, but the new owners of the convenience store systematically ran it into the ground, thus running me into the ground.

[12] Thanks, Melanie.

[13] The part I definitely don't miss is the stress. There was never money for anything, and, for most of my time in business, I lived on stress sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, to the point that my health was adversely affected (I'm still living with the legacy of THAT). It became so ridiculous that the mere appearance of the mailman was enough to make my acid reflux kick in--the mailman meant bills I couldn't pay.