Movie Outlaw: The Prequel: Movie Outlaw, #0

By Mike Watt

MOVIE OUTLAW: THE PREQUEL is a revamped, beefed-up, recharged republishing of what was previously-known as "Fervid Filmmaking". Featuring 70 "underseen" films including "Keep Off My Grass", "Dr. Caligari", "Forbidden Zone", "Coonskin", "Head", "The World's Greatest Sinner", "Psychos in Love" and many more. Also features a rare interview with "Dr. Caligari" director Stephen Sayadian. A new addition to the acclaimed MOVIE OUTLAW series. Bigger, better - CHEAPER!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Happy Cloud Media, LLC
• Release date: Apr 11, 2018
• ISBN: 9781951036003

Mike Watt

Mike Watt is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He has written for such publications as Fangoria, Film Threat, The Dark Side, the late Frederick Clarke's Cinefantastique, Femme Fatales and served as editor for the RAK Media Group's resurrection of Sirens of Cinema. Through the production company, Happy Cloud Pictures, he has written and produced or directed the award-winning feature film The Resurrection Game, as well as Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut, A Feast of Flesh, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation and the upcoming feature Razor Days.

Book preview

ANGUISH (1987)

"During the film you are about to see, you will be subject to subliminal messages and mild hypnosis. This will cause you no physical harm or lasting effect, but if for any reason you lose control or feel that your mind is leaving your body—leave the auditorium immediately." — Anguish opening disclaimer.

For anyone who thinks Charlie Kaufman invented meta-movies like Adaptation (2002)—or worse, that Wes Craven created this broken fourth wall technique for Scream (1996)—let me tell you about Anguish.

Written and directed by filmmaker and painter Bigas Luna[25], Angustia, as it is known in Spain, starts out telling a twisted story of a man and his mother. John (Michael Lerner[26]), with bad eyesight and thick glasses, is a timid, backward orderly working at an ophthalmology clinic. His mother, Alice (the wonderfully creepy Zelda Rubinstein[27]), surrounded by caged pigeons and loose snails, lives in a world of delusion. She believes that John is a world-famous surgeon and believes that if he goes out and cuts out other people’s eyes, adding them to her squishy collection, this will somehow restore his own poor vision. She holds sway over him via a combination of hypnotism and telepathy; John is her willing slave and devoted son. And he’s pretty good at cutting out eyes. (Note to the squeamish: the genuine eye-surgery footage on display here might drive you to the permanent fashion choice of swimmer’s goggles.)

Just as you settle into the rhythm of the gruesome plot, the camera pulls back and we find that John and Alice are characters in a movie called "The Mommy showing in The Rex

Alice (Zelda Rubinstein) and John (Michael Lerner): a portrait of psychopathic mother and son.

(Courtesy Bigas Luna)

Theater"[Θ]. Two teenage girls, Patty and Linda (Talia Paul, Clara Pastor), watch with the

audience and poor Patty isn’t reacting well to the film. It’s freaking her out, she wants to

leave. A man sitting in an aisle seat diagonal to her keeps checking his watch and looking back at her. The dread created by The Mommy seems to spill directly out of the screen to splash over Patty, making her increasingly panicked and agitated.

Before long, in The Mommy, John has entered a similar movie theater (playing Willis O’Brien’s silent The Lost World[28]) and resumes his eye-surgery on unsuspecting audience members. He keeps a set of surgical tools strapped to his wrist, enabling him to select one sharp ow-y thing after another to do his work in flickery dark. Meanwhile, in the Rex, the jittery man in the aisle seat calmly leaves the theater (walking up the aisle just as on-screen John does the same in a fantastic multi-level shot), shoots the counter girls, blocks the doors and returns to begin his own reign of terror. Before long, both The Man (Ángel Jovè) and John are committing their horrific acts simultaneously, the audience of reality and fantasy are panicking in equal proportions. The bodies begin to pile up at an alarming rate. For Patty, real life meets film life in a horrific instant.

If ever a movie was meant to be seen in a theater, it’s Anguish. Watching it alone on television can’t possibly have the same impact as seeing it live, adding that third element of audience participation and meta-reality. The movie begs for that extra layer (how wonderfully-horrific would it be to have an actor leave his seat at the very instant John and The Man walk up the aisle?). As Richard Scheib pointed out in his review on Moria, It is a shot where you cannot help but look over your shoulder and wonder if you cannot get a glimpse of an audience watching you.[7][29]

But even when viewed at home, Anguish is a unique, satisfying little thriller that seems to directly address society’s love for horror movies. The auditorium for The Mommy is packed pretty tightly, everyone seeking escapism through other people’s horrific deaths—

how would they react when confronted with similar tragedy in real life? How would we, as

a member of a theater audience, feel after watching two other audiences decimated by mad-

men?

While Anguish wasn’t my initial introduction to multi-layered fiction, the images and ideas stuck with me and would not leave. Shot on a low budget in Barcelona (Lunas is said to have imported an enormous backdrop of Culver City, California, to recreate the city’s famous hills and make the movie more American[30]), Anguish piles on tension, mixing it with misdirection. Both movies are shot on the same film stock and he doesn’t often make a clear delineation between The Mommy footage and the footage of the viewers, and this is clearly intentional, to keep the real viewers off balance up until the very end. Lerner’s and Rubenstein’s Mommy world is lit with garish colors and deep shadows; the real life footage is shot naturally, with only the light of the screen illuminating the bulk of the action. Scenes set outside the theater in bright daylight add to the surrealism of the movie. The overall approach is extremely effective.

Director Bigas Luna puts himself on the big screen in The Mommy (courtesy Bigas Luna).

ONE ASPECT OF THE FILM that is especially chilling is in the presentation of The Killer or The Aisle Seat Man played by Ángel Jovè. Twitchiness aside, there is nothing about Jovè that screams murderer. Every movie theater has at least one patron whose fussbudgeting borders on tweaking. How farfetched would it be for this everyday movie-goer to turn out a vicious killer? Jovè is so normal, particularly when compared to the larger-than-life cinematic psycho portrayed by Lerner, that his resulting rampage seems all the more real. He could be the person sitting right next to you in the theater, waiting for that final synapse to snap and give him permission to slice out your jugular.

Not that this movie worked for everyone, of course, and the film’s central conceit—love your horror films, but be aware of those living inside one—was either lost or dismissed by many critics. To argue that the film's mediocrity is its very point would be taking Mr. Luna's premise more seriously than his accomplishment, maybe more seriously than he intends, wrote Caryn James for The New York Times. "He does not play off ideas about fantasy and reality or about movies and the power of suggestion; he hands them to us, to make of them what we can. And we can make a better movie in our minds than the half-baked Anguish."[8]

Shot in English with the primary actors either English-speaking or effectively dubbed, there are no subtitles to pull you out of the experience. It’s only at the very end that the movie falters, just a little, as Lunas struggles to unify his central theme. But it’s such a small price to pay for what you’ve just seen.

If you ever hear of a theatrical screening of Anguish—though in light of recent tragedies, this opportunity seems more doubtful by the day—make sure you’re the first in line. Grab an aisle seat. Stay through the closing credits. As the names scroll, the camera pulls back just slightly to reveal yet another audience, members gradually getting up to leave. So what layer of reality is the real one? And is there an audience behind us, as Scheib suggested, watching us get up to leave? What will happen as we make for home?

Anguish is both available on DVD and Streaming.

The Killer (Angel Jove) and Patty (Clara Pastor). (Photo courtesy Bigas Luna)

NOTES

ANIMAL ROOM (1995)

H ope is a waking man’s dream. – Aristotle.

Inscribed on a plaque hanging on his Principal’s wall, this is the summation of Arnold Mosk’s life. It summons the question, If I have no hope, am I therefore asleep?

It’s an existentialist dilemma that plagued most of William Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Shakespeare is a clear influence on the themes of Animal Room, and emptiness comprises the infinite space of the characters’ nutshell.

Written and directed by Craig Singer[31], the film’s title refers to an isolation chamber located in the basement of an otherwise healthy high school. It’s there that the toxic students are placed—the bullies are psychopaths, disruptive and dangerous. The extremely bi-polar Doug Van Housen (Matthew Lillard[32]) leads one particular group of outcasts who worship him homoerotically as both messiah and father figure. He feeds off of their dependence and he, in turn, feeds their aggressive and misanthropic natures. Apart from the group, the weak in the Animal Room herd, is Arnold Mosk (Neil Patrick Harris[33]). Like the others, he comes from affluence, is highly intelligent, but suffers beneath the shadow of a drunkard mother. LSD provides his escape and for that dependence he has been banished to the realm of carnivores. Doug and his droogs brand him a favorite victim, and abusing him is their escape from whatever afflicts them.

While the thugs have only the pathological Doug, Arnold actually has a couple of good people in his corner, including Dr. Rankin (Joseph Siravo[34]), who vehemently opposes the boy’s inclusion in this experimental ward. Others on the teaching staff, however, terrified of Doug and his followers, have little sympathy and more than enough apathy towards Arnold Mosk. They cite his drug abuse as the unconscionable crime that must keep him down in the guarded basement.

Also in Arnold’s corner is former childhood friend, Gary (Gabriel Olds[35]), who adapted to the world of young adulthood with more ease, finding his niche among the beautiful, athletic people. Out of a semblance of survivor’s guilt, he starts reaching out to Arnold again, standing up for him against Doug, getting knocked down as well, attempting to prove that he is still a friend, despite social standing. But Arnie has already succumbed to a nihilism that mirrors Doug’s fatalism and cannot see beyond daily humiliation and abuse. His endless cycle is that he cannot cope with the world without the drugs, but cannot fully escape the room with them. So how can Arnold the weak withstand the obsessive Doug, whose only wish is for Arnold’s blood in my mouth? Even more, how can Arnold fight against an antagonist who has his own death wish, desiring only complete domination or complete destruction? Every day I hate him worse, Arnold tells Gary. Today I hate him like it was tomorrow.

Equal parts insightful and pretentious Animal Room is definitely an odd duck of a movie. Wearing its Shakespearean conflict on its sleeve, Singer structures much of the dialogue in pentameter, stuffing lines like What, pray tell, is this regarding? into Doug’s mouth; Is it true? Will the world finally shine on Arnold Mosk? into Arnie’s. Also, Singer’s script rains its messages down on the viewer like a downpour of hammers. At the surface is the obvious: Darwinism in high school, represented by the bullies and the bullied, only ratcheted up to Stephen King levels of psychopathology; neglect of authority to stop or even hinder the ills it sees out of apathy disguised as the good of the many outweighing the good of the few; the dispossessed seeking connection with anything, even something poisonous; the tragedy of the outsider. Not to mention the totalitarian indoctrination the denizens of the room have to endure, via an endless televised screed by a cadaverous man in sunglasses, resembling a cross between Josef Mengele and Willy Wonka’s nemesis, Arth-

ur Slugworth.

Less obvious is the sense that affluence produces discontent and paranoia. Both Arnold and Doug come from rich families, live in large houses and seem to have everything they want save a parent’s touch. Arnold’s mother is a simpering alcoholic; Doug’s parents are absent, and thus he interacts only with his butler, stripping naked before him after school for the sole purpose of making the servant serve and clean up after him. Gary, on the other hand, lives in a middle class family, modest housing but surrounded by siblings and a realistically supportive mother.

While our sympathies are meant to be with Arnold from the start, he isn’t introduced until after the gang, who appear one at a time cohabitating in a closed-down New Jersey amusement park. Moments after we are told about Arnold’s plight, we take an acid journey with him through the same park, lit now like a hellish carnival, where vampire lesbians gyrate (independent starlet Tina Krause[36] in a fast cameo) and a devilish Spring Heeled Jack (E.I./Alternative Cinema superstar John Fedele[37], who acted as an associate producer) sells him even more acid, rose-colored soaking into sugar cubes.

Doug is more the cipher than Arnold. While he appears in Arnold’s dreams as a rotting corpse, the character is walking subtext brought to life by Lillard’s very subtle performance.[38] If anyone is Hamlet in this film, it’s Doug Van Housen, draped languidly over his girlfriend, Shelly, brooding and disconnected from the group, animated only in violence. Quiet moments with Lillard alone give us clues into the character’s ennui and desire for someone in this world to rise above his oppression and destroy him. We, as a society, are bred to respond to the Arnold Mosk’s (especially if they’re played by the always, if you’ll pardon the expression, awesome NPH), Singer works to divert our sympathies onto the character less traveled, who is trapped in his own cycle of self-destruction.

Doug’s thuggish followers are interesting in and of themselves. At times cackling yes-men and at others perceptive if inarticulate philosophers, there is something being said about intellectualism here as well. After a particularly vicious bathroom beating, Doug grins down at Arnold, face down on the floor, and proclaims, See how quickly we turn the intellectual into the animal? But who, exactly, is he referring to, as Doug spends as much time reading (studying Henry VI as it turns out[39]) as Arnie, as do his gang. Is this a comment on corruption of intellect, or are they merely serving further the Shakespearean conceits of the script?

Much of this movie’s richness is buried in the visual. Little is spelled out until after the inevitable violent conclusions, when blame is hurled around by teachers and parents. Arnie pointedly refers to the ‘Animal Room’ as ostrich education, with the authorities sticking their heads up their asses so they can pretend nothing is wrong. Outside of murder, the state says these kids have to be in school. It doesn’t mean they have to be part of the general population, spouts the Principal, ignoring the violence bred downstairs and instead pointing to graffiti on a wall. Do you see the nonsense that I have to deal with?

The parallels to A Clockwork Orange[9] are also obvious—Singer’s promoting the film as a "modernization of A Clockwork Orange," didn’t win him fans among film addicts— though little of Animal Room bespeaks science fiction, despite the claims of the box art. The film’s stark look, even when awash with color, is attributable to cinematographer Amy Vincent[10]. I’m not sure if it was a result of improper processing or a filter trick by Vincent, but the bright sky is always streaking with black lines, giving it the appearance of constant rain, or even an endless meteor shower.

Animal Room is both victim of and benefited by its status as little seen, as described in the dozens of online reviews. The A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin despised it, calling it "[a] slapdash mixture of Z-grade exploitation and laughable pretension, Animal Room takes place in a nightmarish dystopia where teenagers drink and use drugs, no one pays attention in school, and violence can strike anywhere, even during low-budget recording sessions for the post-Danzig Misfits[11]. When not stealing blatantly (and badly) from A Clockwork Orange—in one scene, Lillard and his gang terrorize a wheelchair-bound man and his pretty wife—writer-director Craig Singer alternates shakily between brutish nastiness and pathetic attempts at social commentary. But then, maybe the objection has to do with something deeper: The only distinctive feature about Animal Room, beyond the puzzling Misfits cameo, is its pervasive homoerotic overtones. The barely implicit subtext manifests itself not only in Lillard's frequent ‘violent’ manhandling of Harris, but also in the fey Harris’ tender bond with his effeminate therapist and close relationship with a hunky football player who wants to take him on a (no doubt platonic) Caribbean cruise. Camp aficionados should appreciate the handful of scenes in which Harris wigs out on acid inside an empty theater, in part because his trips look and feel like orange-tinted White Zombie videos, but Animal Room fails even as camp."[12] So something hit a nerve, it would seem.

After a very limited theatrical release, the movie went on to be a staple of those cluttered, eclectic video rental stores. Many people I’ve spoken to, if they’d heard of it at all, knew it only by its title and having seen it buried on a VHS shelf somewhere. The 2001 DVD release came and went without fanfare, despite the presence of the now-established stars including Olds and Amanda Peet[13] (in her film debut as Gary’s girlfriend, Debbie). Not to mention an extended sequence involving one minor character mixing a recording session with The Misfits. (In all honesty, I may have passed this movie up as yet another angsty high school message movie like School Ties or Lost Angels[14] were it not for a back-cover still of Tina Krause and Fedele’s name in the producer credits, having worked with them in the past.)

Still a valid and off-kilter offering, rife with both pop psychology and genuine existential dilemma, it’s worth hunting down. No other bully movie in recent memory has the ostensible villain comparing the ostensible hero to Job. No matter what Satan did to him, [Job] never turned on God. Even though God allowed all of this to happen, he just said, ‘Shit happens’, says Doug. When ‘shit happens’, Arnold Mosk, who do you curse?

NOTES

THE BABY OF MÂCON (1993)

One of the principal laws of comedy is that if you have to explain a joke, it isn’t funny. There is a school of thought that maintains the same is true about a movie; if one has to do any post-watching research then the movie is not effective as art. If this were true, audio commentaries would have never been invented and film criticism would have never evolved beyond pissing on cave paintings [40] (although a quick look around the web would seem to indicate that it really hasn’t, but that’s a snarky digression). But truthfully, just as some films benefit from multiple viewings, there are others that almost require deeper research into the filmmaker’s intentions, the history he’s presenting, the themes he’s exploring and even the motivations behind the actors’ acceptance of the central roles. That is certainly the case with Peter Greenaway’s 1993 film The Baby of Mâcon.

Set in 1659, an Italian audience watches a post-Reformation morality play. Appearing on stage with the actors, as was customary for the period, are royalty and nobles who interject and interact with the performers and comment on the proceedings, as much to be seen by the common audience as to get a closer look at the production. The Baby of Mâcon, as performed by the actors, opens with a twisted, crippled man hanging from a makeshift scarecrow’s cross. He represents famine and through his choked words we decipher that the titular medieval French town has been stricken with disease and poverty and that all the women are barren. But a miracle happens: an ugly, elderly woman gives birth to a beautiful infant. All who are present rejoice, tick off the child’s perfections one by one, and relate their own versions of the miraculous tale to others outside. The child’s sister, The Daughter of the elderly woman, quickly seizes upon an opportunity, passes herself off as the Child’s virgin mother, the child immaculately conceived, and thus devises a way to gain her fortune. Selling the child’s blessings in exchange for a lifetime of goods and riches, The Daughter becomes the guardian of an ersatz deity. This threatens the Bishop, fearing that the child will replace the church in the hearts and minds of the townspeople. The Bishop’s Son, a man of the burgeoning reason of the time, doubts the child’s lineage entirely. Unable to fathom the concept of a virgin birth, yet disgusted at the idea that a deformed and hideous old woman could conceive successfully, he is convinced that The Daughter kidnapped the child from another parent.

Desperate to hold onto her power, The Daughter attempts to prove her virginity to the Bishop’s Son by offering it to him. Before they can consummate in The Child’s stables, The Child, prescient of his own coming death and disdainful of being ill-used as a tool for others ambitions, commands a bull to gore the Bishop’s Son. Arriving just after the horrible death, The Bishop demands retribution and vengeance. Removing the Child, The Bishop now uses him as a symbol of The Church, demanding even more from the people in exchange for the Child’s blessing. Jealous, The Daughter smothers the Child. As the law of the land forbids harm to come to a virgin, The Bishop is at an impotent standstill to punish her, until Prince Cosimo de Medici, who has been excitedly entering the play throughout, provides a whispered solution. The Daughter will be subject to rape from 208 participants—the number determined exponentially according to her crimes—after which she will no longer be a virgin and can be hung. During this sentence, the Bishop dismembers the Child’s body (echoing the inventory of his perfect features) and sells the pieces off as holy relics to the highest bidder. Famine returns to Mâcon. The play thus endeth.

This horrifying play, invented by Greenaway but in perfect keeping with the morality tales at the time, particularly those of post-Protestant Reformation in which all aspects of Catholicism were mocked and portrayed as sinful and hypocritical, is the meat of the story and would be more than enough to exhaust any audience. But the director adds a few meta-layers to the mix. Between acts, the camera moves through the lavish scenery to follow the actors behind the scenes, eavesdropping on them discussing their dissatisfaction with minor roles and gossiping about how the Lead Actress won her prime role of The Daughter. You were so desperate for the part you’d have paid for it. As I’m sure you did, says a Halberd Bearer. Her fellow actors so despise her, threatened by her, and angry at her intrusion into their troupe, they devise a suitable revenge for her to occur during the play’s horrible climax: And an audience of three hundred will have no idea that you’re not acting, she’s told. The Actress’s screams give those of The Daughter’s an added layer of veracity indeed. It is only a play with music! she cries. The response given, Be grateful for the music. Most of us die in silence.

In the end, the players bow to their audience, which in turn, stands and bows to the viewer.

Violence in a Peter Greenaway film is presented under the pretense of fabrication, because his films are so notably visually embellished. But what makes this sequence particularly frightening is that this pretense does not diminish the severity of what is occurring in principle: a woman’s greatest torture and its approving audience. This scene is certainly one of the visual hallmarks of the film, however, composed in a majestic tracking shot that moves throughout the entire space of the stage and auditorium. In sustaining this action in this manner, the horror is pronounced more sharply.[15]

Hardly the most accessible of directors, Greenaway’s movies are studies of the grotesque within the confines of the beautiful. Trained as a painter, particularly of the Renaissance and Flemish styles, Greenaway’s films often achieve the opposite of the master painters—where Rembrandt, for instance, brought the still to life, Greenaway often distills action into stillness, creating live tableaus within his widescreen frames. Some critics have accused him of elitism for his taking clear-cut themes and burying them in abstract terms and relishing in Artauld’s Theater of Cruelty[41]—a study of grief analyzed through the gross fascination of decay (as in A Zed and Two Noughts, 1985) or desperate infidelity and flight from vulgarity within the confines of an impossibly beautiful restaurant (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, 1989). A master of contrasts, his movies present lavish costumes alongside shocking nudity, sex and violence conflicting in a single scene, hypocrisy and altruism butting heads in detached argument. He doesn’t make slam-bang actioners, to state the obvious. You need patience to enjoy a Greenaway movie, and an aesthetic artistic eye wouldn’t hurt your enjoyment either. However, if a viewer automatically categorizes male frontal nudity as pornography, he or she would be advised to look elsewhere. In whatever preferred meaning of the phrase.

"I would say there has been no cinema yet. Nobody has yet made a film. I think the best we can manage is a version of illustrated literature or recorded theatre. Alain Resnais [the French filmmaker, creator of Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and L’annee derniere a Marienbad (1969)], for me, has probably come the closest of any filmmaker to make a film which canot be manifested in any other art form. I also think that the dominant commercial cinema is extremely conventional, very orthodox, very non-investigative; Scorsese, basically, is still making the same movies as Griffith. But I’m not down-hearted about this, because just around the corner, after a hundred years of this prologue to cinema which we’ve had, is the possibility of at last being able to make pure cinema, with all the new technologies. Virtual reality, the IMAX screen, the whole digital revolution is going to allow us to make actual cinema. You might recall that occasion when Eisenstein, of all people, said to Walt Disney that Disney was the only man that really made films, because the entire filmic universe was created completely within his imagination, and not with reference to the real world."[16]

Like his other films, The Baby of Mâcon is sumptuously photographed, light streaming in from above and the red backgrounds blazing like fire—and love, and lust. The camera moves in and out of the stage world and the real world of the play’s story in single long takes, gliding along with a procession as they vanish behind the proscenium arch and into Mâcon itself, gliding out again when the act finishes. This puts an American oddly in mind of 42nd Street[42] and Busby Berkeley’s penchant for swooping his camera into a stage performance and transporting the audience into an impossible fantasy world, though not as literally. This is the magical way of cinema’s breaking the hymen, as Greenaway has called the metaphorical fourth wall separating the audience from the performance.

My camera has, of course, moved much more in the recent films. I’ve become interested in notions of a choreographed, almost balletic sense of space, although the camera still retains a diffidence. It doesn’t swoop across the floor and go up Robert Redford’s nose, it doesn’t follow the actor into the lavatory in that peculiar, St. Vitus’ dance of contemporary cinema. If the camera moves, it must do so for a very good reason indeed. [...] And when my camera does move, it moves with a static frame. So it literally is a tracking shot, as seen through a very apparent, self-reflective frame.[43]

The lengthy climactic rape, the actors and Actress shielded behind a drapery, plays out in a nearly unbroken ten minute take, while the camera pans back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, while other dramas unfold amidst the Actress’s screams. The child’s dismemberment is presented graphically and brutally, belying what can be achieved on a 17th Century stage (in what would no doubt delight gleefully ghoulish John Webster[44]). If you don’t feel wrung out by the time the movie finishes, I’d advise you to immediately fog a mirror to make sure you’re actually alive.

Now, is it necessary for a viewer to know that Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642 – 1723), penultimate Grand Duke of Tuscany, was historically a well-intentioned but ineffectual leader whose reformations often led to his own legal impotence, thus strengthening his portrayal as a sensitive but muddle-headed teenaged Prince in the film? (Including him on

the stage as both spectator and participant makes one wonder if The Daughter’s fate would

have played out differently minus his presence—raising the additional question of the width of the division between spectator and participant.) Or for any of us to dive into researching socio-religious politics of 17th Century Europe? Or know how morality plays were presented to audiences with both pro- and anti-Catholic agendas? Is it necessary to know that The Baby of Mâcon, if performed fifty years earlier would have been perceived as a testament to the rule of the Catholic Church, but in 1659 it would be an utter condemnation of the concept of the Virgin Mary and the hypocrisy of priests and bishops selling indulgences[45]? Probably not. Not that it wouldn’t help of course, but The Baby of Mâcon is pretty horrifying on the surface. Peeling back the layers of this onion that even Greenaway didn’t strip away only adds to the predominant sense of discomfort.

Premiering in Cannes, The Baby of Mâcon disturbed audiences and critics alike, who felt that it was unnecessarily graphic, that the full-frontal nudity of so many of the players—including leads and soon-to-be-superstars Julia Ormond[46] and Ralph Fiennes[47] (as The Daughter and The Bishop’s Son)—was exploitative and gratuitous. Of course, many found the ten-minute rape scene almost too shocking to bear. Instead, that year’s accolades were heaped upon David Lynch’s surreal and violent fairy tale, Wild at Heart[17], which allowed the audience to satisfy their bloodlust at a cartoonish arm’s length, and without working quite so hard.

Unlike Greenaway’s other and more-acclaimed films, The Baby of Mâcon, extreme even by Greenaway’s standards[18], never received an official U.S. release and currently can only be found in a relatively ugly presentation on Region 2 DVD. Not surprisingly, as one rather tiresome review put it simplistically, "Not even Ken Russell could have dreamed up the stew of grotesque religiosity, slavering voyeurism and sexual violence that is Peter Greenaway’s 1993 movie, The Baby of Mâcon, the English director’s only feature film not to have been distributed in the United States."[19]

In fact, the outcry surrounding Mâcon caused Greenaway to rethink his next film, which eventually became The Pillow Book (1996). "I had spent a considerable amount of time in the past three pictures, starting with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover[20], in an ever more claustrophobic European situation. I was making all sorts of references to 17th century baroque and its use of sex, violence and sensationalism, and making lots of comparisons with now, although whether those comparisons were fully understood by my audiences is highly debatable. After that, we’d been engaged in a trilogy that starts with Prospero’s Books (1991) and then goes to The Baby of Mâcon—and there was meant to be a third movie, a story about necrophilia. All the actors were going to be over 65, because I wanted to utilize some amazing actors in the U.K. Because our budgets were very small, and because it’s about necrophilia, it meant the prosthetics bill would have been huge, so I needed to shoot most of the film in the dark, so people couldn’t see what I was doing. So—all over 65, necrophilia and in the dark doesn’t sound like a very good idea for financiers."[21]

Maybe that’s for the best. It certainly isn’t a film to haul out for a dinner party or a beer bash. In this viewer’s opinion, The Baby of Mâcon might be best observed alone, allowing one to admire the visuals when the story gets too unpleasant. A quick scan of IMDb user reviews shows that it’s easier to dismiss this movie as sick or boring than it is to confront it head on.

NOTES

BANNED (1989)

Teddy Homicide (Neville Welles), one of the worst guitarists in history, front man for the punk band Rotting Filth [48], is on his 57th take of completely missing his guitar solo cue during a recording session. To the horror of all, just as he’s about to miss it again, he is interrupted by a pizza delivery guy. Teddy has no option but to express his frustration by machine-gunning everyone in the room—he even fires directly at the camera and, by proxy, the viewer—and then drowning himself in a toilet.

Flush—uh, flash-forward to the present, where light jazz-rock band Banned (get it?) busks on street corners to the applause of no one. Their own lead guitarist, the very whitebread Kent (Dan Erickson), is quite talented but has delusions of making great art. His refusal to write anything even remotely commercial has kept the band down on the streets for too long. Bassist Willie (Roger Coleman) brings up the fact that his brother has renovated the old Impulse Studios, where poor Teddy forced the demise of so many, and recommends that they attempt to cut a new demo there with the professional equipment. Kent isn’t convinced. "Success is selling out," he insists.

But Kent can afford to take this stance. His parents, who hate him, are rich. But his scruples are what makes his artist girlfriend, Rachel (Amy Brentano), love him as she does. As far as the rest of the band goes, Chelsea Fontaine (Brent Trish Whitney) spends her off-hours doing confrontational performance art specifically designed for poseurs. Yes, I am the cow. The source of all that is good and pure.

They eat that shit up! she tells Kent later.

Their drummer, Serge (Fred Cabrel), has so many problems poverty may be the least of them. He’s an over-sexed, perpetually-late, born-again Christian son of an Evangelist, and happens to have been a roadie for Rotting Filth, just weeks before Teddy opted to burn out rather than fade away. Like Teddy, Serge is an asshole. But he’s their asshole, as the saying goes.

So, naturally, the first time someone visits the old studio men’s room, they are confronted with the haunting, gurgling voice of an agitated Teddy Homicide bubbling up through the bowl. Anyone who has ever seen a movie before knows where this is heading,

but the surprise is that he doesn’t pick Serge. Instead, the toilet explodes and showers Teddy’s spirit all over Kent.

Before too long—actually, it’s almost another twenty minutes before Kent shows any sign of his Teddy within. At first, it’s subtle: he’s sitting quietly and then emits a short and very loud scream, then asks, Who’s that screaming?

During a gig at a bar, Kent goes all Teddy on the audience, the cockney accent kicking in, cursing at the audience, You killer bimbos from Cleveland! You flatulent, well-dressed twit!, before collapsing on stage in a very violent and very punk epileptic seizure. Or possible electrocution. But it gets the room’s attention and they clamor for more, filling their dressing room after the show until only assholes and elbows remain. In the words of Groucho Marx, Hello, room service? Send up a bigger room.

Kent’s behavior starts to change even more dramatically. Deciding what he really wants is to sleep with Chelsea, he continually ditches Rachael for some alone time (which is probably just as well, since every time he has a fight with her, he ends up falling into an open manhole cover). But his philanderings are always interrupted by one thing or another. Like Chelsea’s unexpected negative reaction to his proposal that she sleep with him and he just won’t tell Rachael. Later, their outdoor café is attacked by wacky Libyan terrorists in yellow hazmat suits. Kent leaves Chelsea, who continues to talk about her life to the empty chair, to give the terrorists larceny and dressing tips. You’re preventing me from scoring with that beautiful girl over there. Don’t you guys think about anyone but yourselves? Look at that bank over there. They’ve got way more money than this place! This—is a fashion nightmare! You might as well wear a t-shirt that says, ‘I’m a really stupid terrorist, please arrest me’. It’s called ‘camouflage’, guys. The terrorists are so grateful that one promises Kent a place to stay any time he’s in Libya.

Soon, there’s no telling where Kent ends and Teddy begins. He shaves his head into Teddy’s three-pronged hair style, trashes his clothes and picks up loose women in a bar (I have all your albums on CD! says one. You have albums on Civil Defense? asks Kent/Teddy). One of these women, played by Debbie Rochon in one of her earliest roles, exclaims: Kent, you’re such a punk when you vomit![49]

By this time, the band has finally doped out that Kent has become possessed by Teddy. He writes a new song titled Chaucer Stinks—I’d rather be impaled on a rusty nail / than listen to another Canterbury Tale! (To which Chelsea responds in umbrage, Did you do this to insult me? You know I majored in English Lit!) In order to be sure, they set things up so that he has to re-record his guitar solo. If he’s now Teddy, he won’t be able to do it. And, of course, he can’t. So, of course, he goes off on another rage spree. Serge and Willy chase after him through Manhattan and Central Park (albeit small corners of said places) with machine guns and a bazooka, neither of which work because now bullets bounce off of Kent’s body. Meanwhile, Rachael, who finally understands how much she loves Kent, turns to the only one who can help: her brother, Percival (Adam Fried), the world’s only priest-slash-plumber. If anyone can get Teddy back into that bowl, it’s Percy!

Written by Jim Cirile, who conceived Banned as a punk-rock All of Me, Banned is lunatic on every level. Lowbrow comedy with rapid-fire jokes and general rudeness. It’s a punk movie at heart and on the surface, with little surreal moments that throw the big surreal moments even more wonderfully off-kilter. For example, lest I forget to mention, the Jewish record producer, Sid Blessenthal (Allan Lieb), whose drug of choice is powdered Romanian horse adrenal gland, which turns him, temporarily, into a large black man (Cecil Wowzen, billed as Sid Blessenthal II). As one online reviewer noted, Banned is a refreshing low-budget punk version of a Rudy Ray Moore film.[22] Which is as good a description as any.

Now here’s why you will never, ever see this movie...

Banned was the last movie produced and directed by Roberta Findlay, who had a truly strange career arc. In the 1960s, she and her husband, Michael, made roughies for the 42nd Street grindhouse theaters, back in the day when sleaze meant something. Roughies, by the way, are ill-tempered nudies, with an equal amount of violence and sex throughout the running time. S&M, bondage and general slapping around were par for the course with the nudity in these films, and the Findlays scored surprise hits with their Flesh trilogy. They were also responsible for the notorious yet nearly-unwatchable movie Slaughter which, in turn, was taken from their hands by Allan Shackleton and given a new laughable fifteen-minute gore coda and released as Snuff. While that movie was getting banned for its title alone, the couple worked on other gore films like the nonsensical Yeti movie, Shriek of the Mutilated.

Some insight into Roberta Findlay, courtesy of the New York Press: "If any of this makes you nostalgic, then Roberta Findlay thinks you’re crazy. ‘People who like those old movies seem to have deep psychological problems,’ she explains. ‘Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn’t call any of them art. My first budget was $5,000. That was the deal. You’d be given a budget and then they’d own the film. I’d get a fee, whatever the fee was. Until the last picture I did [Angel of Fire, 1974], when my producer [Allan Shackleton] wasn’t going to pay me for no reason. He punched me in the eye, and then, forbearance to sue, he paid me what he owed me.’"[23]

By this time, Michael and Roberta had separated. On May 16, 1977, Michael Findlay was one of six people, including two pedestrians on the street below, killed on the roof of New York City’s Pan Am Building when the parked helicopter’s tail rotors suddenly tore off and spun into the queue of waiting passengers. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that the probable cause of the accident was the fatigue failure of the upper right forward fitting of the right main landing gear tube assembly. Fatigue originated from a small surface pit of undetermined source. All fatalities were caused by the operating rotor blades as a result of the collapse of the landing gear.[24]

Roberta Findlay regrouped and with new partner and producer Walter Sear formed Reeltime Productions to produce a series of low budget horror movies for the mass market. The ‘80s were a boom time for direct-to-video fare and since Roberta and Walter owned their own camera and sound equipment, they were able to keep the overhead low. Out of this new partnership came a half-dozen offerings ranging from fun to baffling with the wondrous insanity of The Oracle on one end of the spectrum and the leaden-paced Blood Sisters on the other. ‘We made these films for two reasons,’ says Findlay, ‘One, to make money, which we did. Not a lot by Hollywood standards, but for our own personal use, we did very well. And I liked to shoot as a cameraman. That’s what I liked best, being behind the camera, doing shooting and lighting.’[25]

According to Rochon, who’d go on to star in hundreds of films following Banned, "My first real acting job in film was for genre director Roberta Findlay. I had just finished doing glorified extra work in a horror film titled Lurkers, and she rehired me for a role in her next film, Banned. It was my first nude scene in a movie but I wanted to do the part so much because it was fun, it was punk-comedy and I thought the story was terrific. I had a blast doing it although I was still getting my film acting legs at the time. I remember telling Jim I would love to do it which shocked him at first because he had an idea about me which included the assumption that I wouldn’t want to do the nudity. I wasn’t threatened by it and with film roles hard to come by when you’re starting out combined with such fun subject matter there was no second guessing it, I told him hell yes! And watching the movie all these years later I am really glad I took it. I love this movie."[26]

One of their assets of personnel was a young and eager go-getter named James M. Cirile. Perceptive to the changing foreign sales markets and realizing that the home video bubble wouldn’t last forever, Cirile saw an opportunity to, in his words, rebrand Reeltime. "Roberta and Walter were used to making movies a certain way, for a certain amount of money. I was thinking—they had all their own equipment, including 35mm cameras and Panavision lenses, really high-end equipment. They were going to do another low budget horror movie for the market and I had this idea for [something different]. Roberta was a big Honeymooners fan and so was I. We used to quote lines from the shows all the time at the office and she had a really great sense of humor. I had this idea to do, basically, a punk rocker version All of Me—what if a jazz singer was possessed by Sid Vicious? So I pitched it to her and she really liked the idea."

According to Cirile, Findlay and Sear went into an office and discussed Cirile’s script. Or, as he says, argued about it for a while. Finally, Walter comes out and says, [adopts a gruff voice] ‘Well, I’m not sold on it, but I guess we’ll do your script’. And there wasn’t much more discussion beyond that. What we shot was pretty much the first draft of my script, with very few changes. And they sank their own money into the production.[27]

While Banned is uneven in pace and acting, it still has the most solid story through-line of any of Findlay’s movies of that time. And I had written it intentionally to be ‘Roberta-proof’. So that any weaknesses in would be to the movie’s benefit. Things like, you know, acting, sound, photography, says Cirile. And for the most part, Reeltime rose to the occasion. It was the first time they had stunt doubles for actors, for the fight in the studio, crashing into the drums. They shot off machine guns in Central Park. We staged a terrorist attack at the Tavern on the Green!

Unfortunately, the gamble didn’t pay off for Findlay and Sear. They couldn’t get a distributor to touch it. And I’m not entirely sure why. Cirile theorizes that Sear’s marketing skills weren’t up for promoting a screwball black comedy like Banned. Whatever the reason, Reeltime took the financial hit and Banned went unreleased.

I definitely blamed myself, says Cirile. You know, they gambled on me, on my script, and it wound up being the last thing that Roberta would ever direct. I didn’t know that at the time, of course, and it wasn’t like they were outright blaming me, but things did get chilly around the office. So I thought it would be a good idea if I got out of there before things got worse and I moved out to L.A. I went back and visited the offices a couple of times after that and Roberta was always really nice, very gracious, but I still felt horrible.[28]

In 2007 the home media distributor Media Blasters acquired the rights to release Reeltime’s horror films and the DVDs came complete with new interviews and commentary by Findlay. (On Blood Sisters she mentions that she liked making horror movies for the quick buck. On The Oracle, she insists that she never liked horror movies personally. They’re gratuitous, she says. And that goes for all of them. Even the George Romero stuff.[29]) Despite an announcement in the trades, Banned, however, was not included in the ultimate release package. Nor will Findlay even discuss the movie. We contacted the filmmaker regarding her thoughts on the movie and why she never returned to directing after its completion, wrote Zack Carlson in his book Destroy All Movies!!! (co-edited with Bryan Connolly). At first she was very open and conversational, but when I said the title of the film I hoped to discuss, she blurted, ‘Not interested’ and hung up.[30] In their review, Carlson and Connolly refer to the film as ruthlessly berserk, which is the greatest description of anything ever.

So this is one instance where you really have to turn to the underground black-and-grey markets[31]. Never released in any format there are, nevertheless, copies floating around from nth generation VHS tapes converted to nigh-unwatchable video files, likely leaked to friends by members of the cast or crew. Like Tod Browning’s London After Midnight and the uncut version of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, Banned has become one of those legendary lost films. Another Holy Grail for the film addict.

NOTES

THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969)

If you’re like me—and really, who isn’t? And if you’re not, you should be—then sometime in your life you’ve kept a little list of movies you want to see. You jot down titles that have struck you interesting as you obsessively page through the Leonard Maltin guide, checking off what you’ve already seen, with a certain self-satisfaction that you are cinematically better than your fellows. I have made not just one of these lists, but several over the year. Of course, I’m alone a lot. For many, many years, at the top of these lists has been a little thing I and many others like to call The Bed Sitting Room . A reportedly zany, happy-go-lucky British comedy about the end of the world and what comes next, The Bed Sitting Room stars a Who’s-Who of Hey, That’s...! of Anglo comedians. Among them: Spike Milligan [50], Peter Cook [51], Dudley Moore [52], Marty Feldman [53], Roy Kinnear [54]and, less known for being funny than for being British, Ralph Richardson [55]. The description most-commonly associated with it goes, and I quote, ...one critic memorably described it as being ‘like Samuel Beckett, but with better jokes’. The identity of that one critic seems to be lost in the mists of time and laziness. Against all obstacles, I finally managed to see this movie. And here is what I saw:

Against a red sky and green landscape littered with villages of burned-out cars, mountains of shoes (none of which match), hills of broken crockery, structures made only of doors beside upright doors lacking surrounding structures,