So Long, Ray Manzarek

I was never a massive Doors fan, but I do like a lot of their stuff, and I'd feel remiss not at least mentioning the passing of Ray Manzarek yesterday. So in brief tribute, here's my very favorite Doors song--and one of my favorite songs by anyone. Ray's piano work has a lot to do with why I love this one so much. 

Review: The Rolling Stones in 'Crossfire Hurricane'

When Mick Jagger contacted Brett Morgen about making a fiftieth anniversary documentary on The Rolling Stones, the filmmaker rightfully believed Mick wanted a series not unlike the great Beatles Anthology. Not so. Mick was very emphatic about wanting a lean, under-two hours documentary. Why the hip shaker wanted to place such a ridiculous constriction on such a bountiful history is anyone’s guess. This left Morgen with the task of condensing five decades of dirty work and eighty hours of audio interviews down to 110 minutes. I don’t envy the dude, yet as a hardcore Stones freak I can’t be anything but disappointed with Crossfire Hurricane. 

Review: 'Yes Is the Answer and Other Prog Tales'

It is long-winded. It is humorless. It is unashamedly grand and robotically impersonal. It is prog, and until hair metal farted onto the scene in the mid-eighties, it was Rock & Roll’s biggest running joke. But time ameliorates shame, and 35 years after punk ostensibly cleared the pomp out of pop, the prog acolytes are finally crawling out of the carpet to reclaim their favorite genre. In a year when Rush has finally been inducted into the cluelessly snobbish Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, anything is possible, including a collection of essays that not only pay tribute to this long-chided form of music but do so in ways that completely contradict its stuffy rep. Long-winded? Humorless? Grand? Impersonal? These are not words anyone would use to describe Yes Is the Answer and Other Prog Tales. Editors Marc Weingarten and Tyson Cornell have gathered twenty writers who discuss how those mathematical soundtracks for D&D all-nighters impacted their lives with humbleness and wit.

Farewell, Ray Harryhausen

He was the father of some of cinema's most memorable monsters: Mighty Joe Young, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the Ymir, the Cyclops, the Harpies, the Hydra,  the Kraken, Medusa, and an army of sword-swinging skeletons. The great Ray Harryhausen brought these creatures to life through the painstaking process of stop-motion animation and the more refined variation he invented called "Dynamation." The incredible detail of his models and their slightly jerky yet incredibly expressive movements were Harryhausen hallmarks. He is that ulta-rare special effects wizard who is more famous than the directors behind his films. I'm sure few people went to see Jason and the Argonauts because they're die-hard Don Chaffey fans. Director Desmond Davis certainly didn't create as big a buzz for Clash of the Titans as the man who made its mythical monsters shudder to life. Ray Harryhausen ended his feature film career with that 1981 movie (his only animation work since then was on a 2003 animated short based on "The Tortoise and the Hare"). Sadly, more than thirty years later, he too has passed at the age of 92.

The special effects world has changed a lot since Ray Harryhausen made the giant ape Mighty Joe Young move--move physically, and move audiences emotionally. Computer generated effects have all but replaced the kind of practical, "primitive" effects he pioneered. But as futuristic sophistication has overtaken fantasy films, the soul has gone out of so many of them. Ray Harryhausen put his soul into the films he made, and that made them soulful. He will be missed.

Cult Club: 'Primitive London' (1965)

In this feature, Psychobabble looks at classic cult items beyond Horror and Rock & Roll.

Oh, those kids today with their potty-mouthed comedians, tattoo parlors, licentious pop stars, key parties, and bowling. What of Victorian values? What of the days when women didn’t merely remove their clothes in degenerate strip clubs but did so while sharing the stage with good, clean vaudevillians telling corny jokes and crooning cornier songs? What of the Empire?

Alas, the sixties put an end to the England of old, the one The Kinks lamented, often with tongue-in-cheek, on Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. Primitive London laments similarly, though its long, lascivious tongue is never out of its cheeky cheek for a second.

Arnold Louis Miller released his movie in 1965 when the mores of old were being swung aside by Swinging London’s new libertine ways but films still had to pay tisking lip service to traditional “morality” in order to stay out of the porno theaters. Three years earlier, filmmakers Paolo Cavara, Franco Prosperi, and Gualtiero Jacopetti assembled stock footage of animals mutated by the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, cross-dressing Gurkha soldiers, Reeperbahn drunks, bikini girls, and other verboten delights into Mondo Cane, creating a box office sensation and pioneering the shockumentary form that would be Miller’s cup of tea. He’d already been making nudist camp pictures with titles such as Nudist Memories, Nudes of All Nations, and Take Off Your Clothes and Live since 1961. With 1965’s Primitive London, Arthur L. Miller expanded his interests to include sports, music, business, and youth culture, though sights of skin are never far away.

The first is the decidedly unsexy image of a woman graphically giving birth to a smurf-blue baby, the attending obstetrician’s “most difficult delivery ever” if you are to believe narrator David Gell’s voice over, and it’s probably best to never trust anything you see or hear in Primitive London. Nevertheless, that baby does not look healthy and it is hard to believe that the kid we see at the end of the film contentedly tugging on its milk bottle is the same one. Getting hung up on such issues, or expecting the unfiltered look at life and death our narrator indicates Primitive London will be, is to miss the point and the fun. Arthur L. Miller is hip to this and his libertine leer always undermines the rote conservatism of his screenplay, which waves its finger at the “true delinquents” with their “incapacity to postpone present excitement in the hope of future happiness” attending a wife-swapping key party one moment while fixing its gaze on the pastie-festooned glamour girls of an old-fashioned burlesque club tellingly called Churchill’s the next.

While Primitive London apparently wants us to find all the radical new developments of Swinging London to be shocking, it slyly and regularly reminds us of the city’s sordid past with Churchill’s, a recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders, and the Turkish baths where quite a bit of “misbehaving” once took place, but apparently no longer does. A visit to a chicken processing plant where conservative looking folks look bored while slitting the throats of and de-feathering birds in gruesome detail makes us long to spend more time with those crazy long-haired kids and their immoral ways.

Primitive London’s cluelessly reductive portrayal of youth culture is one of the more delightful aspects of this shock doc, as Miller divides kids into three categories—beatniks, mods, and some very sweet-faced rockers—that, naturally, the kids reject. Their crazy pop music is represented by the always old-fashioned and already-past-his-prime Billy J. Kramer and the groovier beat combo The Zephyrs. Quite unexpectedly, “Can’t Buy Me Love” makes an appearance on the soundtrack; unexpected both because it’s surprising Miller got the rights to use a Beatles song in his movie (assuming he bothered with such legal formalities) and because he implies that this is the kind of music rockers fancy.

Elsewhere we get a breathless freak show of London life, in which weightlifting, bowling, the advertising industry, and millinery are all made to seem as bizarre as a goldfish undergoing surgery for a fungoid growth. Every six minutes or so, the raincoat crowd that was Primitive London’s chief audience were rewarded with strippers, fan-dancers, beauty pageant contestants removing padding from their underwear, mod girls sharing a bathtub to shrink their Levis to fit, and nude dudes in Turkish baths. Miller’s sense of humor could be a real boner-killer though, as he overlays a striptease with the dancer’s own narration about the exhaustiveness of her work and cutting straight from her gripe about the toll stripping plays on her tootsies to a pair of exceptionally ugly feet having corns removed. Not great for titillation but terrific for titters, and 45 years removed from the Swinging London era it parodied and preserved, Primitive London holds up best as a work of surprisingly smart, often self-aware comedy.

Monsterology: Babies

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Last September, my wife, Elise, and I received the terrifying news. We were told that in nine months, a creature would be bursting out of Elise’s body to menace us for the next eighteen years… perhaps more if it decides not to go away to college. How could this be? Elise hadn’t been exposed to any alien eggs. She hadn’t been visited by Satan after taking a dose of drugged chocolate mousse. At least I don’t think she had. We don’t spend every minute of the day together, you know.

As many, many years of devouring horror movies has taught me, Elise’s pregnancy could have happened any number of ways. After all, a lot of monstrous babies have crawled across the screen. Yet the monster baby is a relatively recent phenomenon. While monstrous children peaked in the early sixties amidst “juvenile delinquency” hysteria with items such as Village of the Damned and the “It’s a Good Life” episode of “The Twilight Zone,” it was not until 1968 that Roman Polanski explicitly monsterized the first stage of life. I say “explicitly” because one could argue that the monster baby was delivered during the haunted summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Though we are privy to the Monster’s sketchily described birth in the book, he spends most of it in a state of rebellious and ornery adolescence, pissed off at his inattentive doctor daddy. And we certainly never witness him as a bald little diaper-wearing thing.

Ten Terrifying and Terrific Title Sequences

Setting the mood has a lot to do with what makes a great horror movie great. The viewer may have to be eased into the unsettling atmosphere as if it’s a chilly bath or thrown in to the terror as if it’s an inferno (because when you see a burning building, you should always push someone into it). Sometimes it’s cagiest to sucker punch viewers with a sequence out of tone with the rest of the film or let them know up front that guffaws are in store with a light-hearted approach. Or in at least one of the following cases, you may need to put some extra effort into your opening titles sequence because the rest of your movie sucks.

1. Frankenstein (1931)

Dracula was the first great sound horror film, but though its use of the “Scene 10 Moderato” from Swan Lake is so memorable that the piece has been used as horror shorthand in films such as The Mummy and Black Swan, the music plays out over the Batman insignia, which isn’t too scary. Universal did a better job of getting a title sequence right with its follow up to Tod Browning’s film. After Edward Van Sloan gives his equally corny and creepy opening monologue, Bernhard Kaun’s brassy score shudders forth. On screen we see a clawed monster, most dissimilar to Karloff’s flathead, reaching from the darkness. This cuts to a leering portrait of, presumably, the title doctor, who once again looks nothing like the actor who will play him in the film that follows. Around Dr. Frankenstein’s head, disembodied eyes swirl, both foreshadowing the sundry body parts that will constitute the monster and mirroring the many eyes of the audience watching him from the darkened theater. The monster’s credit is equally memorable, as he is named only with a large question mark, recalling his similar crediting in the first stage production of Frankenstein 108 years earlier.

2. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Seventeen years after Frankenstein, Universal gave in to playing its main monster for laughs. For a picture such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, an opening as eerie as the 1931 one wouldn’t do at all. So Universal reached into its sack of associates and pulled out Walter Lantz, who’d produced the “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit” series for the studio from 1928 to 1938. Lantz is best known for cracking up audiences with his creation, Woody Woodpecker, and the style of those classic cartoons is instantly recognizable in the credits sequence of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which begins with the monster raising skeletal Bud and Lou from their coffins before introducing the menagerie of monsters in iconic silhouettes. I could watch an entire movie of this credits sequence.

3. Psycho (1960)

Saul Bass is the only title designer who has become a household name, and not just because of that “Seinfeld” episode in which Kramer thinks Salman Rushdie has been hiding out at his gym under the pseudonym Sal Bass (“He just replaced one fish with another, Jerry!”). Bass’s poster designs for films such as The Shining, Vertigo, and Anatomy of a Murder are as unforgettable as the credits sequence he masterminded for Psycho. Abetted by Bernard Hermann’s jittery score, Bass indicates all the violence and disjointed psychology to follow by slashing the screen with straight lines from every direction and cracking up the title and credits. It’s incredibly simple and incredibly effective.

Brace Yourself for 'The Return of the Creature'

In 1954, the Universal Monster age briefly gasped back to life through its scaly gills with the successful release of Creature from the Black Lagoon. The following year, director Jack Arnold was back to strike again while the iron continued glowing bright red with Revenge of the Creature. In 1956, the Gill Man would take his final stroll in the melancholic Creature Walks Among Us, but as it turns out, this was not exactly the third creature feature. In the interim between parts 1 and 2, members of Arnold’s crew and some of the folks from Marineland Studios, the aquatic animal park that was the setting of Revenge (now known as Marineland), created a comedic Gill Man short to screen at the Revenge of the Creature wrap party.

The Return of the Creature was a 21 minute, 8mm film starring Patsy Beery (aka Patricia Powers), who played the unforgettable, uncredited role of “Girl in Convertible” in Revenge of the Creature. On his website, Patsy’s brother Jere, who played the uncredited part of a photographer in Revenge, had this to say about his sister's picture: “(Patsy’s husband) Clayton (Powers) worked at Marineland and made many friends with the movie crew who were there to film the Black Lagoon sequel. After the production crew left town, Clayton and Patsy produced a (sic) amateur home movie satire of the Revenge of the Creature… One particular memorable scene in this no-budget production was when the ‘Creature’ is revived and kept alive in a apartment bath tub while being fed martinis to keep him sedated.”

A still of Patsy Beery with a makeshift Gill Man from The Return of the Creature.

Although Jere Beery goes on to say that members of the Revenge crew received copies of The Return of the Creature, it has generally been considered a lost film for the past 58 years. Film historian Tom Weaver performed his own search to find out if this was true. Weaver’s creature quest brought him to an associate of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of Marine Studios, which led him to the filmmaker behind Return, who then sent Weaver a DVD duplicate of the film.

This is not the end of the story, because on Friday, July 19, The Return of the Creature will finally go public at the Monster Bash convention in Pittsburgh. Tom Weaver, who attested that the movie is laugh-out-loud funny, will be on hand to introduce the film.

In other Creature news, Bloody Disgusting.com reported yesterday that Gammi Illustrations has released some spectacular, unpublished, color-corrected photos from the set of Black Lagoon originally shot for Life magazine in 1953. Check them out in all their full-color glory here.

Review: 'A Life in Film: Peter Cushing'

Like the greatest star of the first golden age of sound Horror, Boris Karloff, the greatest star of the genre’s second golden age, Peter Cushing, was so appealing because the rotten characters he played were partly informed by the charming, gentle man he actually was. So as awful as, say, Dr. Frankenstein or Grand Moff Tarkin—a veritable Space Hitler—were, they remained oddly sympathetic, or at least, magnetically watchable.

Catching Up with the "Twin Peaks" Retrospective at USC

As you may recall, the USC School of Cinematic Arts in L.A. has been hosting a series of panel discussions with "Twin Peaks" cast and crew members since February, and I reposted complete video for the first two panels here on Psychobabble (Week 1 and Week 2) way back then. After that I got busy and completely bungled the project. Many apologies and much garmonbozia. Now I'm trying to get caught up with watching and relaying the four discussions that have gone down since my last post on this series. These are long sessions broken down into a lot of clips, so I'm just going to post links to YouTube where you can access all the relevant videos for each session. As always, the videos are a bit rough, but according to the poster, Humberto Dellamorte, there will eventually be "official" videos for these panel discussions. Until then, a million thanks to Humberto for posting these to YouTube.

Week 3 (2/17/2013)

Robert Bauer (Johnny Horne), Carel Struycken (The Giant), Lenny Von Dohlen (Harold Smith), supervising producer Gregg Fienberg, production designer Richard Hoover, publicist/Mark Frost's assistant Paula K. Shimatsu-U, and ABC programming executive Philip D. Segal.

There are some interesting insights about ABC's attitude toward "TP" in this one, as well as a great story about how David Lynch bought time for the Laura Palmer arc by discombobulating ABC execs with a story about eating blowfish.

Week 4 (3/3/2012)

Piper Laurie (Catherine Martell), Al Strobel (Philip Gerard/MIKE), editor Mary Sweeney, editor Paul Trejo, cinematographer Frank Byers, director Tim Hunter, prop master Jeffrey Moore, and property assistant Rich Robinson.

Piper Laurie tells tales of Tojimura.

Week 5 (3/10/2013)

Catherine E. Coulson (The Log Lady), Michael Horse (Deputy Hawk), Peggy Lipton (Norma Jennings), writer Harley Peyton, director Lesli Linka Glatter, music editor Lori Eschler Frystak, and costume designer Sara Markowitz.

Some ear-opening information about the extent (or limits) of Angelo Badalamenti's role in scoring the show.

Week 6 (3/24/2013)

Mary Jo Deschanel (Eileen Hayward), Kimmy Robertson (Lucy Moran), Wendy Robie (Nadine Hurley), Kenneth Welsh (Windom Earle), Robyn Lively (Lana Budding Milford), director Caleb Deschanel, and editor Jonathan Shaw.

I have no idea what to highlight here, because the whole session is pure gold, so maybe I'll just mention that Kimmy Roberston likes oxygen and props open a door. 

On Sunday April 14th at 4PM, USC will be hosting the final panel devoted to the "Twin Peaks" series and once again admission is free to the public. Scheduled for the Q&A is an especially impressive line up: Kyle MacLachlan (Coop), Ian Buchanan (Dick Tremayne), David Patrick Kelly (Jerry Horne), and Julee Cruise (Julee Cruise). Get all the details at USC's official site here.

Finally, there will be a 35MM presentation of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me on May 5 at 6PM with a Q&A featuring James Marshall (James Hurley), Ray Wise (Leland Palmer), Phoebe Augustine (Ronette Polaski), Walter Olkewicz (Jacques Renault), writer Bob Engels, and David Lynch's daughter/writer of The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, Jennifer Lynch. Read more here.