Adam Baran

Ugh! This past week has been just awful. I caught the bad cold that seems to be going around New York - everyone I meet has this cold. It sucks. I am almost over it though. I went to the Russian/Turkish Baths yesterday to try and kill all the germs with heat and steam, and I think it almost worked. I am much better though. Among the Hasids and the cruisey fat guys - okay, they’re one in the same, I admit it - was one very special person steaming his fat little stomach and plastic surgeried face off. Val Kilmer. Yeah I know, why was Val Kilmer at the Russian Baths in New York for a quick steam? He didn’t stay very long, but walked around with the towel draped over his head and wearing the blue robes that the guys who give the Platzas wear. It was great.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies too. There was Peter Bogdanovich’s four hour Tom Petty documentary, Runnin Down A Dream. Basically at the end of it you know almost less about Tom Petty than when you started the movie, that’s how light on real analysis or biography the flick is. There’s some cool footage - mostly of Petty teaching Stevie Nicks how to sing “Stop Draggin My Heart Around.” And Tom Petty was definitely super ugly/hot for most of his career. Ugly/Hot meaning from one angle, totally busted, but from another, totally hot, because of how ugly he is. But in the end you just kinda go, “Yeah, Tom Petty had a lot of great kick ass songs. I should get the Greatest Hits record.” I have no idea why this film, which has almost no real true documentary qualities, and was comissioned by Petty himself, played at the New York Film Festival.

In contrast, I saw Julien Temple’s Joe Strummer documentary Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, which was pretty fucking great, although just like the Tom Petty movie, there were some questionable interviews. Johnny Depp, Bono, John Cusack (I know right - WTF - just cause he liked the Clash and put them on the soundtrack to Grosse Pointe Blank he is like an authority?) The worst interview by far, though, is Martin Scorcese. I think the dude must just come up with nonsense to say so he can be in all these movies as an authority on music just because he uses lots of musical montages in his movies. In this one, he claims that Raging Bull, his ode to boxing has-been Jake LaMotta, a movie that takes place in the forties, was inspired by the Clash, no more than that, that it was about the Clash, really! Come the fuck on! You know that’s a lie, says New York.

I also watched Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West for the first time ever, which was absolutely incredible. One of the best movies I’ve ever seen, and I can’t believe I never saw it before. Then the next day I watched Jess Franco’s Cannibals, released by my second favorite DVD company Blue Underground. Cannibals was also known as White Cannibal Queen and it’s about a dude whose wife gets eaten by cannibals (actually gypsies in crazy quilt face paint) and daughter gets kidnapped. Years later he goes to the jungle to find his daughter, only to realize that she’s been brainwashed and is now a super hot goddess and ruler of the cannibals. It’s pretty tame, but entertaining to watch, especially if you’re sick. Both physically and mentally.

Speaking of mental stuff, winter depression hit me this week like a bullet. I was at the Pylon show at Mercury Lounge, watching what has to be one of the best shows I’ve seen all year. All of a sudden, thoughts start racing, and I start to think that I’ll never be successful, find a boyfriend, write anything meaningful, make decisions for myself, live anywhere but New York. It’s pretty bad. I’m trying to find my UV light so I can start using it, and I have to force myself to remember that depressive thoughts like these aren’t really real. They’re a disease. It helps to think about it this way. Otherwise I’ll never be able to do anything all winter. I’m trying to figure out what to do next. What to write, and where to live, and what to do for work. I like sitting at home and writing, but if the government wasn’t paying me unemployment then I don’t know if I’d like it so much. As it is I want to go buy new boots, a new winter coat, some new sweaters, the new Twin Peaks Box Set, the new Mario Bava box set, the Danielle Baldelli Cosmic Disco reissue, and Berlin Alexanderplatz Criterion Edition. Do you think I can ask the government for a raise?

Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print. I’m still trying to figure out a decent direction for this blog, so sorry if it’s been sort of all over the place for the past few months. But I’m working towards something great. Trust me.

Later.

Happy Halloween kiddies!! I’m just going to make this a rambling, delirious blog post about everything I like and everything scary and everything I think you should do tonight to have a great time. Last night’s party was a really fun time, I showed Black Sabbath, the Bava anthology, which was a big hit. Then I put on the Mexican film The Brainiac, also known as the Baron of Terror (a nickname I’ve co-opted, since I’m the Baran of Terror, sort of, not really.) Then I put on Lady Terminator but by then everyone was playing with a toy my friend Dan brought called The Grossinator which made stupid sentences like “Here comes a disgusting, gross, oozing BARF.” Or “I’m gonna make a smelly FART.” It was hilarious.

So what about tonight. I’m going to see the B-52’s and then probably off to Nowhere or Slurp. But what should you do? If you’re going to stay at home, and actually want to watch something scary, here’s a few choice selections from my fingertips.

THE ENTITY - This is probably my favorite scary film. It’s one of the many possessed/demonic spirit films that came in the wake of the success of Poltergeist, starring Barbara Hershey in the only other film of hers worth watching (Besides Beaches, obviously..) You know that scene in Poltergeist towards the end when you think everything is fine and JoBeth Williams is blow drying her hair and all of a sudden she’s floating up to the ceiling and the Poltergeist is pushing her jersey-t up and you start to see her 70’s panties (didn’t she see Alien - when you show your thong, you’re a goner) - anyway so that scene in Poltergeist is taken to it’s nth degree in The Entity. Barbara Hershey plays a single mother with three kids who one night is grabbed by an unseen spirit thrown down on her bed, and raped. She can’t see her attacker, but she can feel him, and we can see the indentation on her body to know something’s going on. It’s really fucking creepy, as she’s raped several more times by the spirit, once in front of her kids, until skeptical scientist Ron Silver tries to come to her rescue. The end is whatever, but you will jump outta your seat more than a few times. Guaranteed. Great score too.

Inferno: Most people who know Dario Argento know Suspiria, and it’s a pretty brilliant film with the kind of primal dream logic and intense imagery of Psycho. But fewer know Inferno, his follow up and second in his Three Mothers trilogy, which he’s recently completed with daughter Asia Argento. The film’s about the second location of a coven of Witches, the first was the school in Suspiria, and the second is this high rise apartment in New York City, Central Park West. The film is just so gothic and strange and moves from one bizarre set-piece to the next, colors exploding all over the place.

Here’s one of the strangest and creepiest scenes, where the lead girl decides to go underwater to try and find this painting that will reveal if the house is indeed a Witch’s hideout. Plot doesn’t matter. Check this out.

For more funny horror, I’d recommend the recently released DVD Murder Party, which is a really geniunely charming horror flick about a loner who winds up going to a Halloween Party at a loft in Williamsburg where he’s the only guest. The people throwing the party are a group of semi-deranged art-students who plan to murder the loner as the ultimate art-project, in hopes of winning a grant. There’s a great indie aesthetic, and cute Williamsburg references - nobody can decide whether to order Pizza or Thai, giving the tied-up victim a chance to escape. One of the killers is dressed like the baseball gang from the Warriors. Another is Darryl Hannah in Blade Runner. There’s some gay sex (briefly) for all you gays, and some fangoria-worthy gore. But it’s all not-taken too seriously, and it’s very winning.

For older viewing, if you have seen Tod Browning’s freaks, and are looking for something similiarly weird, check out his equally brilliant The Devil Doll, which is actually about a man who escapes from prison to his scientist friend’s house. The scientist has perfected a way of shrinking humans to doll size, and then controlling them so they can wake up and kill people. The escaped prisoner, brilliantly played by Lionel Barrymore, takes the dolls to Paris to get revenge on the people who wrongly imprisoned him, disguising himself as a woman named Madame Manderley and selling the dolls to all his enemies. The dolls are super cheesy, film with silly special effects tricks, but it’s really fun.

If you want to read, you should go to Barnes and Noble and pick up a copy of Sara Gran’s Come Closer. This is probably the scariest book I have ever read and when I say something’s scary…. I could not stop thinking about it for weeks after I read it. It’s written in sparse, chilly prose, telling the story of a woman with slight marital difficulties who slowly realizes she is possessed by the spirit of a nymphomaniac demon, or is she just crazy? It’s been described as a cross between The Yellow Wallpaper and Rosemary’s Baby. It’s pure genius, one of the best books I’ve read in years.

If you want to watch porn, you should rent The Hole, Wash West’s hilarious spoof of Japanese Horror flick The Ring. If you watch the pirated video in this one, in seven days you don’t die, you turn gay, accompanied by a phone call that when you answer it, says, “You’re gay, now.” The lead watches the tape and tries to discover the source of the tape so he can not end up gay, but when he finally turns gay at the end, he’s really happy.

For TV, Twin Peaks is out on DVD in a full boxed set that I have to get soon. Watch the last episode, the one that takes place entirely in the Black Lodge and ends with that shocking twist ending that completely freaked out all of the fans who knew that the show had already been canceled. Or better yet, why don’t I just post it here - the black lodge scene, not the twist ending: Happy Halloween! (Btw: I Love that this isn’t in english. It makes it creepier.)

PS. More focused writing to come soon, I promise. Eat lots of candy and cake.

The Devil’s Daughter is a campy TV-movie Rosemary’s Baby-knockoff from 1973 which stars Belinda Montgomery as Diane Shaw, a woman whose mother once did it with Satan, but then pulled the old “full-custody” bit, refusing him access to her daughter by sending her to school in Boston, a city not even Satan wanted to visit. Anyway, dude wants his daughter back, and enlists veteran Oscar-winning actress Shelly Winters to get Diane to marry some evil demon dude she’s been betrothed to. Shelly’s gotta “make it work,” to use the lingo of that other Devil in Disguise Tim Gunn, and using some basic Rosemary’s Baby witchery, she eventually does. It’s got some fabulous fun seventies TV movie atmosphere, and a twist ending that you’re likely to see a mile away, but that’s handled in the most pleasant way possible.

Nothing is more enjoyable than watching Shelly Winters’ go from doing her super nice, humble Place in the Sun routine to her full on Ma Barker madwoman bit. She was without a doubt the queen of the Grand Dames Guignol/Horror Hag genre though Bette Davis may have been the one who started it all in the first place. Who Slew Auntie Roo?, What’s the Matter With Helen?, Bloody Mama, The Mad Room, Wild in the Streets, and Poor Pretty Eddy, contain probably the best of her campy late sixties/early seventies performances, but the Devil’s Daughter definitely needs to be on that list. She’s just fantastic in it. There’s also a small, but crucial role played by Joseph Cotten. Can you guess what it is?

Worth picking up, as it’s just been released on DVD last week.

Synapse DVD seems to have it’s eyes on the prize right now. First they release the restored Snake Woman’s Curse and Horrors of Malformed Men, which I reviewed a few days ago (Click Here). Now they’ve put out one of the most hysterically cheesy horror movies I’ve ever seen, the heavy-metal horror shocker Black Roses.

The trailer above is basically all the highlights of the movie in 5 minutes, but it’s really worth seeing in its entirety. It’s about a heavy metal band who for some untold reason decides to kick off their world tour in the sleepy town of Mill Basin, which fortunately for them is rife with teen angst. What the teens don’t know is that the heavy metal band - which is sort of supposed to be like Ozzy but looks more like Twisted Sister or Quiet Riot, only gayer, are demons from hell trying to possess the minds and souls of their fans. A local teacher who prefers to teach about the transcendentalists (snooze!) becomes concerned when his kids start acting like angry zombies and parents start turning up dead by the tour-busloads. Yoinks!

There’s tons of gratuitous body double nudity. In one sequence - the sequence in the trailer where the girl kills her stepdad - right before that there’s a scene where the body double of that girl stands in front of the mirror rubbing her boobs for 10 minutes! It’s great! Plus, all the monsters in the movie are superb 80’s Stan Winston clones, and the final demon that Damian turns into looks more like something from an old fifties creature feature than something that’s supposed to scare us. Synapse also included the hilariously bad audition tapes of all the actors who tried out for the part of Damian, the lead singer of Black Roses. It’s a lineup of some of the most cheesy 80’s hair metal losers ever captured on video.

There’s also an appearance by Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore, from The Sopranos, as an Italian father who doesn’t like his son’s musical tastes, and ends up getting sucked into a sub-woofer by a demonic spider monster that for some reason, he can’t fight off, even though it’s really small. He delivers a classic movie line when speaking to his son. “Only two kinds of people wear earrings: pirates, and faggots. And I don’t see any ship in our driveway.” This is primo stuff here people! You still have time to Netflix it or pick it up at your local video emporium before All Hallow’s Eve, so get on it!

One of my favorite Halloween movies to watch is the 1981 horror spoof Student Bodies, which was a flop on it’s initial release, and has become a sort of cult movie. It’s filled with corny (and I mean corny) gags, but a lot of those corny gags are pretty funny. It takes place at a local high school - a killer who comes to be known as “the Breather” stalks a high school girl and her friends and kills them when he finds them having sex. It’s filled with spoofs of all the big slasher movies, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Psycho and many more. Surprisingly, the thing it spoofs the most - or rather, it’s biggest reference point is Dario Argento’s classic giallo film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage - which also has a “breather” calling up his victims and whispering hateful things to them. But when the breather calls in Student Bodies, something very different happens. Sort of NSFW. This is so stupid but it cracks me up!

Another super stupid one, but I love how the cast really plays it sorta straight. “Did you hang up?” “No, I just said ‘Click’.”

In the next sequence, we get to hear what’s really going on in all those serial killer’s minds as they spy on young teen girls in the lockeroom. “Belly Button!”

Seriously, how can you not find that funny enough to want to watch? It’s awesome! And so much better than that dumb Scary Movie! It’s great!! Honest!!

Synapse DVD recently reissued two strange Japanese horror classics from the sixties, both of which appear to have attained a kind of cult status over the years since their original release. Last week I watched Nobuo Nakagawa’s Snake Woman’s Curse, from 1968, and this week I watched Testuo Ishii’s Horrors of Malformed Men released the following year in 1969 to almost no attention.

Snake Woman’s Curse is probably the weaker of the two. It tells a very standard vengeful ghost story. A wealthy landlord works a poor old tenant farmer to death, and his wife and adult daughter are forced to move in with the landlord’s cruel family, who essentially cause their deaths. The landlord’s gang are then driven mad by ghostly appearances of snakes and visions of spouses turned into snakes. It’s extremely old-fashioned in a good way, more reliant on mood and atmosphere, pleasant and fun to watch. But the film doesn’t really scare in the typical sense. It’s more like an old Hammer Film - lush colors, studio sets, and creaky acting. The story is too tame thematically, and the idea that it’s only psychological horror that destroys the landlord’s family is a bit too reserved for my tastes. The landlord and his family are so cruel that you really want to see them get their just desserts, which never really happens with the kind of relish that would make the ending really satisfying.

Horrors of Malformed Men’s ending is sort of dissapointing, but also so fucking bonkers that you can’t help but be like “WTF?” (in a good way, yet again). The film’s a really spooky Poe-esque tale, in fact it’s based on a script which mashes up several stories of the Japanese horror writer Edogawa Rampo (the Japanese pen name created by phonetically saying the syllables of Edgar Allen Poe - try it - it’s fun). It’s about a man named Hirosuke, who wakes up in an insane asylum, kills a strange bald man who’s giving him the evil eye, and escapes on a journey to a mysterious island to try and understand the reoccuring dream he keeps having, which goes something like this:

The man in the dream (and who eventually appears in the narrative, natch) is Tatsumi Hijikata, founder of the Japanese dance movement known as Butoh. After Hirosuke arrives on the outskirts of the island, he finds that a man who looks exactly like him has just died. He then pretends to be this man resurrected, and starts living with the man’s family, trying to find out clues to who he is. Eventually he’s drawn to the island, run by a mad Dr. Moreau-character who’s been creating malformed men for some creepy reason. It’s great how many popular Poe tropes are thrown together - part of the fun is taking the film apart piece by piece. There’s the doppelganger thing, the reoccuring dream, the mysterious murders, the madman hanging out in the attic. Then the film goes nuts - imagine a Japanese version of a Jodorowsky world with strange women covered in silver body paint stuck in cages, while others ride around on leashes held by even creepier deformed men. It’s crazy, but great. Check out the trailer, the subtitles are hilarious.

They’re billing it as the most controversial Asian horror film ever, I guess because it was pretty much surpressed by the government censors for years - although there’s nothing too too shocking in there. Maybe it’s just that there’s a counter-cultural spirit in the scenes on the island that are so disturbing not because they’re scary but because they’re so strange and performance arty. The ending is equal parts Agatha Christie and Scooby Doo, with an incestuous twist. Park Chan-Wook has to have seen this film - I’m theorizing that it’s a major influence for Oldboy, though I will probably be corrected. It’s hard to really say it’s a great ending, because it’s really too campy and silly, and tries perhaps to explain the crazy nature of the story for a Japanese audience who must have needed the kind of closure the explosive finale provides. But it’s also totally admirable for the bizzare balls that Tetsuo Ishii must have had to put it to film. I’m glad to see in the DVD extras that people acknowledge it’s dual nature as being totally great, and yet totally over the top and laughable.

Either way, it’s definitely recommended, for a pleasant Shocktober evening.