Marion / Marion

I’ll blame Twin Peaks for this. I’ve had doubles on my brain for months now, but at least I’ve managed to make something of it.

Also, I have a bold declaration: I actually like the 1998 remake of Psycho. I don’t think it was necessary, exactly, because the original was no less great in 1998 than it was in 1960, but the Gus Van Sant version makes sense, thematically speaking.

Twin Peaks may rack up more lookalikes and opposites just by virtue of having a greater overall runtime, but Psycho packs more of them in, scene for scene. It’s there even in the Saul Bass opening credits: the screen gets slashed by horizontal lines and then by vertical ones. And that horizontal-vertical contrast continues throughout the movie, from the opening scene, with Marion (Janet Leigh) in bed and Sam (John Gavin) standing next to her, to the layout of the Bates property—a multistory house that towers over a lateral sprawl of a hotel. You could say it’s there in Marion’s murder itself. Stabbing a person is, in a sense, a very violent intersection of perpendicular elements.

This mix of opposites extends to the movie’s core four characters, I’ve always thought. After Marion dies midway through the film, she gets replaced by her sister, Lila (Vera Miles), who looks like Marion but seems more sensible. We get the sense that Marion is impulsive and flighty, and that the theft of the money that propels the plot is maybe just a spur-of-the-moment decision she made. Lila, by contrast, seems conservative — more mother than child, though I realize that’s a weird way to describe it in this context. Sam and Norman look alike too, but whereas Sam is smooth, Norman is twitchy. Both characters are driven to action by a sexual attraction to Marion; Sam follows her from Phoenix to the dusty backroads of California, and Norman murders her. Killing Marion off is the big surprise, but it’s also surprising that the characters we learn most about first, Marion and Norman, turn out to be the “wrong” versions of the “straighter” Lila and Sam.

In a similar way, I’ve always thought of the Gus Van Sant version as a weird twin to the Alfred Hitchcock version. The variations are subtle. If Janet Leigh’s Marion was flighty, she was also oddly grave in the way she seemed to process her crime. The Anne Heche Marion seems even further out, and watching her movie, I get a sense that she may get a thrill out of the whole thing that I don’t get when I watch the original. Viggo Mortensen’s Sam seems seedier, though that could just be his clothes. But when he interacts with the Julianne Moore Lila later in the film, I feel like he has designs for her even before they know Marion is dead. (I know, I know—neither Lila made the cut for this, which is too bad, because I love the character. And then in Psycho 2, poor Vera Miles gets all dressed up to play Lila again and ends up getting stabbed in the mouth. For what it’s worth, she did end up marrying Sam.) Finally, whereas a first-time viewer of the original might not immediately peg Anthony Perkins’ Norman as the person named in the title, Vince Vaughn plays the character as creepier from the get-go. (He masturbates while watching Marion in the shower; Norman does not.) And that difference in characterization makes sense; anyone who watched the remake already knew who Norman Bates was, but also it’s Vince Vaughn.

I don’t remember exactly when I got the idea to make this video, but at some point I just became charmed with the idea of thinking about the remake as an alternate version of the events, where things play out slightly differently, but the variation just isn’t enough for the characters to break out of the roles they’re assigned. And yeah, the movies do play differently. The 1998 Psycho may have been billed as a shot-for-shot remake, but Van Sant doesn’t adhere to that too strictly, even beyond allowances for the change in time period. Scenes are shot differently. Some run longer. And many times I had to crop a shot or change the tempo to make the two versions look like they were mirroring each other more than they actually were.

In the end, however, all that is not enough to save poor Marion (either version) from getting into that motel shower at the end. And no, I didn’t bother to show that in this video. Everyone has seen that a million times. I was more interested in looking at Marion while she’s still alive.

This is my third video project. “Rewind” was long and full of VHS static. “All the Colors of the Night” was shorter, more focused and less with all the distortion. This one is only seven minutes long and has no VHS distortion. I didn’t even mess with the color on this one.

I have big, weird plans for what I want to do next.

All the Colors of the Night

“No, I don’t know why.”

That’s the response that would probably come first if someone asked me what motivated me to make this new video project. But if I thought about it a little, I might come up with something along the lines of this: “Not that I need a reason, you sniveling jerk, but I feel like a nearly lifelong love of horror movies and weird ’80s music is reason enough.”

That gets pretty much to the point of my second video project, which I’m calling “All the Colors of the Night” and which you can watch in full below.

Heads up: This project contains boobs and butts and some blood, and it’s therefore NSFW, unless your work is cool about typical horror movie fare. If you’re squeamish about violence, know that there’s nothing excessively graphic, but these are horror movies I’m working with, for the most part, so there’s a certain base level of bodily violence that should be expected.

My previous video project came out of nowhere, really, because I’d been pretty much only words up until that point, and while I’m happy I did it, I now feel like it’s mostly a messy and unstructured thing. I felt like I wanted to give it another shot and make something a bit more orderly. You can judge for yourself whether I achieved this. Regardless, I liked wrapping up a bunch of horror movies (and thereabouts) in colorful dressing and setting them to ’80s Euro pop (and thereabouts), and I hope you do too.

A few notes:

• I tried to make it so it looks good either on a computer monitor or a TV screen. 
• Please watch the credits.
• Please watch for patterns.
• I do acknowledge that the vast majority of characters appearing in this project are white people. I will blame that on the genre as it existed back in the day. I did my best to offer Geretta Geretta prominent placement.
• I also acknowledge that a disproportionate number of victims of violence in this are female. I will again blame this on the genre as it existed back in the day.
• I honestly love all of the movies and songs I included in this project, and in case anyone wants to point out that I am essentially using them all without permission, I’d like to clarify that I don’t intend to make a dime off this project and I consider it a remix—just one that blends video and music in a way that doesn’t exist online elsewhere and that does not intend to take the place of the original film or songs.
• I started this project the day before Halloween and finished it on Valentine’s Day, meaning that the world seems a lot different now than it did beforehand. I will hold back on making any grand metaphors, but I did this because I wanted to try take movies that people might think of as scary or weird or dark and focus on the parts that make them beautiful. You can find nice moments even when things are scary, I guess. 
• The title comes from a 1972 Edwige Fenech film All the Colors of the Dark, which was released in the U.S. as They’re Coming To Get You and Day of the Maniac. I like my version of the title better.
• The three through-lines between the first project and the second are, apparently, Dario Argento’s Inferno and Dorine Hollier’s “Tonight! (Crazy Night!)” and the Bollywood version of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Regarding that last one, I made a handy ten-minute supercut of it that you can watch here.
• No, that really is Mia Farrow’s little sister.
• No, that isn’t actually Shelley Winters.
• I did actually make a little trailer for this project, and none of it appears in the final project. Watch, if your want, below.

And here is the list of source materials, in the order they appear, in case you’re trying to place a given song or movie.

• Intro: Suspiria + “Seconds” by Human League
• Part one (“Green Goblin”): Demons + “Tonight! (Crazy Night)” by Dorine Hollier
• Part two (“Blue Boy”): A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge + “Right on Target” by Paul Parker
• Part three (“Red River”): House/Hausu + “Crazy” by Daydream
• Part four (“Italian Purple”): Blood and Black Lace + “Jamie” by Mistral — and for the love of God please watch the original video for “Jamie,” as it will make your life immeasurably better and worse for having seen it
• Part five (“Golden Dream”): Mahakaal (plus a little of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Nightmare on Elm Street 4) + “Don’t Stop” by Gigamesh featuring Jana Nyberg
• Part six (“Aquatic Ambiance”): Zombi 2 + “Aquatic Ambiance” by David Wise
• Part seven (“Strawberry Skies”): Night of the Comet + “Strawberry Skies” by Games featuring Laurel Halo
• Part nine (“Bloody Silver”): Profondo Rosso, Suspiria, Tenebre and Inferno + “Slice Me Nice” by Fancy
• End credits: “Seconds” by Human League + “Kraken of the Sea” by Keiichi Suzuki

And here are all the segments individually, in case you want to see the bits in their pristine form.

Revenge of the Ragman

Today I’d like to share with you something that’s terrified me for twenty-five years. You’re welcome in advance.

Many times when I was a kid, I’d end up watching a strange movie on Channel 36, the local indie station that aired pretty much nothing but strange movies in addition to reruns of Mama’s Family and Matlock. This is the same station that allowed me to watch a slasher movie re-telling of The Phantom of the Opera in which Molly Shannon played Meg Giry and also The Horror at 37,000 Feet, a TV movie that had William Shatner battling a poltergeist on a luxury jet. Neither of these scary movies is the one that lingered the most, however; that honor goes to The Nutcracker Fantasy, a Sanrio-produced, stop motion-animated version of The Nutcracker from 1979.

I’ve written about it before on this blog, and I explained how stop motion is always unsettling to me, but this movie in particular got to me as a result of the Ragman, a demonic boogeyman who appears at the beginning of the film for the single purpose of terrifying any children plunked in front of this film by well-meaning adults who thought a Nutcracker adaptation would be family-friendly. The Ragman is a crooked old ghost straight of Luigi’s Mansion who stands several stories tall as he shambles down the moonlit city streets, peering in windows to check for young children who have stayed up past their bedtime. Should he spot any, he teleports into their home and transforms them into mice.

There’s a lot more that’s weird about The Nutcracker Fantasy, but this one scene always stood out to me as something that seemed needlessly horrifying in what is ostensibly a film for children. And based on the Google hits I still get on the old post, I’m not the only one who thinks so—nor am I the only one who has been looking for a high-quality version of this scene. But just last year, Sanrio produced a new transfer of the film, along with a new Japanese dub. So I stumbled through Amazon.com’s Japanese site to ordered one, ripped it and uploaded the scene, just so you all could see how beautifully scary it is.

Enjoy!

I’ve paired it with the audio track from the American version, from a YouTube clip that had previously been the best available version of the scene online. No longer! The American voice cast featured Melissa Gilbert, Christopher Lee, Jo Anne Worley, and Eva Gabor, BTW, but you can’t hear any of them in this clip.

I’ve yet to decide what I’m going to do with the rest of the ripped film, but don’t be surprised if you see it surface on this blog sooner or later.

Nostalgic nightmare fuel, previously:

• The Foul Horror of the Zombie Sandy Duncan
• That One Brady Bunch Where Everybody Gets Shot to Death
• Baby Doll Revisited
• A Midnight Swim With Anthony Perkins
• Ethel Gets Eaten: Nancy Cartwright and the Twilight Zone Movie

The Generation of Pixels and VHS Static

I had one of those weekends where plans just fizzle away, because your friends have conspired to cancel appointments jointly and consecutively, all in an effort to make you appreciate the joys of staying home. And with my newfound free time, I accomplished two things: I watched the bulk of Stranger Things on Netflix and I learned how to use After Effects. These two things are actually related.

Nearly every review of Stranger Things has noted that it plays out like some Steven Spielberg fairytale we might have watched in the ’80s, only with a dark twist that in my mind is exemplified by the John Carpenter jolt of how the title arrives at the end of the series trailer. (I can’t explain why the appearance of the series title gives me goosebumps, but it does—every time I’ve watched the trailer. Maybe that font is haunted?)

As for After Effects, I used it take crisp, clean footage and fuck it up in the style of footage from a damaged VHS tape. That may seem like a pointless skill to acquire, VHS having long gone the way of the typewriter, but I assure you it’s not, because VHS has gone the way of the typewriter. I was doing it for a larger project, but in damaging my first chunk of footage, I was surprised by my emotional reaction to seeing something rendered in the flickers and saturation bleeds of an old medium. I miss them, it turns out. Those errors became hallmarks of movie-watching back in the day—and, along with pixels, hallmarks of childhood escapism as well—to the point that on some level I will always associate them with how a movie should look.

This is not my theory. In A Year With Swollen Appendices, Brian Eno lays it out very clearly: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit—all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: So much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart.” This has implications way beyond the pop culture I grew up with, but I think it does help explain why I continue to noodle around with pixel art from the 8- and 16-bit generations, as well as why it felt so satisfying to introduce all that distortion to a perfectly good chunk of video. It felt right.

It helps that the footage in question came from Inferno, the sequel to Suspiria. My introduction to Dario Argento came from my hometown video store—no, not Blockbuster, but still long-shuttered all the same—and while I never actually saw Inferno until the age of DVD-quality video, it seems like I should have.

Here is the scene in question in its original, clean form. (Fair warning—there is a corpse that appears in this clip, just after the 3:30 mark, but I feel like it’s a PG-13 corpse at worst. It also features Irene Miracle, whom I feel is a strong PG in and of herself.) I believe it comes from a DVD rip.

And here is the same scene again—improved by virtue of being made worse.

That staticky mess? That sloppy color? It looks beautiful to me in a way I’m not sure someone else would understand if they didn’t have the mid-’80s-to-early-’90s frame of reference that I do. Who knows? Maybe you’re pining for Ted Turner-mandated colorization or the shaky monochrome of a midcentury TV set with rabbit ears. But this brings me back to Stranger Things. It truly is a lot like something we might have watched twenty-five years ago, except for the darker elements and the fact that it looks like a million bucks. Were there a way to watch it with a filter that emulated a VHS tape that had been left in a hot attic for too long, I would. Again, it would feel right. In fact, someone with more technological savvy than I have should invent that app right now—Instagram filters for your TV, so you can recall the pixels and noise and V-hold blips from whatever era most suits you.

Someone born in 2000 might never have watched anything on VHS. I wonder what they’ll pine for. Crisp but slightly less than high-definition video? Polygons? Maybe they haven’t figured out what they’ll miss yet. But I know. Give me VHS static and pixels, please.

And if there were a way to layer TV static onto this, I think I’d die happy.

All About Octopussy

Yes, this is another post about Bond girls. I had to write about them for work, and the research yielded a few surprises, and the best of these by far is an explanation for why the hell anyone ever thought “Octopussy” would be an appropriate name for any human character, to say nothing of Bond’s love interest.

In Octopussy, Maud Adams plays the character whose nickname is “Octopussy,” thereby making this one film the only in the entire series to be named for female lead. Even separate from that name, she’s a standout character: She’s a moderately villainous businesswoman and jewel-smuggler who also happens to own a circus and live on a floating palace in India. Hey, get stuck with a name like “Octopussy” and you have to compensate somehow.

The film is loosely inspired by an Ian Fleming short story titled “Octopussy,” in which the name refers not to a human character but to someone’s pet octopus. And doesn’t the name make a lot more sense in that context? The story actually begins with its antagonist addressing the octopus directly: “‘You know what?’ said Major Dexter Smythe to the octopus. ‘You’re going to have a real treat today if I can manage it.’” Smythe later goes on to call the octopus both “Pussy” and “Octopussy.”

However, in reworking the story for the thirteenth James Bond film, the writers apparently thought, “No, this is a name that a human female should have. I see nothing wrong with that.” Dexter Smythe is already deceased at the outset of the film and seen only in photograph form. He’s mentioned as having been an octopus aficionado. Octopussy explains her name, kinda-sorta, with a single line that ties the film back to its source material: “My father became a leading authority on octopi. He loved them. His pet name for me was ‘Octopussy.’” Her actual name is never actually spoken within the film. (This Bond wiki page alleges that it’s Octavia Charlotte Smythe, but it’s apparently not her official real name.)

Awkward though it might be, that’s how Maud Adams ended up playing a character named “Octopussy.” The fact that she owns a circus might also be notable just in that the other Bond girl to have the word “pussy” in her name — Pussy Galore in Goldfinger — also leads a circus of sorts: Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus, a group of female aviators who may or may not all be lesbians.

Adams had already appeared as a secondary Bond girl in The Man With The Golden Gun: Andrea Anders, a character with a name so non-ridiculous that it’s shared by a sitcom actress. (She’s half of the trashy neighbor couple living next to Phil and Claire on Modern Family.) Adams also makes an uncredited appearance in A View to a Kill, which probably set s a record for any non-Moneypenny, non-Judi Dench Bond actress.

And that end note as as good as any to point out that Duran Duran’s theme song for A View to a Kill might just be the best Bond theme song of all — yes, even better than Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”.

The Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street (Abbreviated)

When Wes Craven died, my first thoughts were of Scream and how much that movie had shaped my understanding of pop culture. However, the only piece I wrote about Craven this week focused on the outlier in his filmography: Music of the Heart, Craven’s single non-horror feature and the movie he made in the break between Scream 2 and Scream 3.

And now, along similar lines, another one of Craven’s most unusual legacies: 1993’s Mahakaal, also known as the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.

I actually watched this a few nights ago. It’s something I’d only recommend for hardcore Bollywood fanatics and diehard Freddy Krueger fans. (These groups must share some overlap, and I’d guess that Mahakaal is a godsend for these people.) For me, the film was interesting when it chose to cleave especially close to the source material and when it chose to diverge drastically from it.

Mahakaal runs nearly two and a half hours long, and a lot of this time has the characters singing and dancing for no reason, even after they realized they’re being stalked by the monster. Bollywood movie rules trump slasher movie rules, I guess. As a result of the lengthy run time and the long, long spans when nothing particularly interesting happens, I did a quick and dirty recut of the film, in case you also are mildly curious what a Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street might be like but don’t have two and a half hours to spend watching Indian youth sing about how great it is to be in love.

Here, then, is a eleven-minute version of the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street.

In making this, I tried to highlight the scenes that were most directly inspired by the original as well as the weirder additions — like the unsettling Michael Jackson impersonator, who may or may not be speaking English.

Some notes:

• The weird mix of horror and whimsy make me think this movie’s DNA has about as much in common with Hausu as it does with A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• It should be noted that the main character, Anita (but pronounced ah-nee-TAH rather than uh-NEE-tah) frequently dresses like Rosie Perez probably did around the time this movie was made.

• The villain doesn’t speak — and that’s odd, considering that even in the first film Freddy Krueger gets a few great lines and this remake seems interested in stuffing in comedy as often as possible.
• The only character whose name bears any similarity to its counterpart in the original is Seema, the main character’s best friend. In the original, Amanda Wyss plays the role and the character’s name is Tina. Seema lasts longer than Tina does, and instead of dying at a sleepover she dies at a hotel, where the group of young people is staying only because they get stranded. I wonder if there’s some cultural reason that the group was forced to spend the night together rather than just choosing to shack up.
• For what it’s worth, the death of the Rod character — the main character’s best friend’s boyfriend — may actually be creepier in this version than it is in the original. I always thought that bedsheet snaking around the actor’s neck seemed hokey. Mahakaal literalizes the scene.
• Notably, the main character’s parents aren’t divorced in this version, and both Anita’s cop dad and housewife mother help vanquish the bad guy in the end. Sure, Mom doesn’t do a whole lot, but she’s there in a way Ronee Blakley’s checked-out, alcoholic character isn’t in Nightmare.
• Though there’s a scene with a waterbed in Mahakaal, the Johnny Depp analogue doesn’t die in it. He survives to the end of the film, in fact.
• I wonder if the appearance of Anita’s dead sister is supposed to mimic the white-clothed “ghost girls” who sing the creepy jump rope rhyme in the original.
• There is, tragically, no Mahakaal 2 that’s rife with homoeroticism. Are you listening, Bollywood? Because I would watch that movie.

I’ve done this public service before, in case you’re interested in the Cliff’s Notes versions of movies you’d otherwise not bother to watch. My first one was actually an early Wes Craven movie: 1984’s Invitation to Hell, which features Susan Lucci as the devil and Robert Urich as a dad who has to kick the shit out of Punk Brewster and Bastian from The NeverEnding Story. The second was The Visitor, which I kind of hated but which still has some moments of primo WTF-ness that are worth watching. And finally I made a nine-minute version of the most David Lynchy moments from the one bizarrely Twin Peaks-themed episode of Darkwing Duck.

And in case you have two and a half hours to spare, the whole of Mahakaal is currently posted on YouTube here — with subtitles.

In closing, please enjoy the full discotheque sequence, just one of the many musical scenes that had me asking “Why are you singing and dancing still? Did you forget that your friends just got butchered?"

The Greater Pop Culture Context of Xanadu

I truly love Xanadu. I don’t ironically love it. I don’t love it because I laugh at it. I don’t even love it for its camp value. I love Xanadu because there’s something earnest in it.

I also maybe love it because the first time I saw it I had taken codeine cough syrup — for medical reasons, I should point out, but thank you nonetheless, UCSB student health services! And although every subsequent viewing has been comparatively less twinkly, even the most sober viewing makes me think of that first time, in all its hazy, grape-flavored glory.

Codeine or no codeine, I’ve seen the movie many times, but it wasn’t until I had to write about it for People that I realized it’s not just a weirdo roller-disco fantasy existing out its own, as a vestige of the ’70s that somehow squeaked into the ’80s. It’s a movie that has a lot of connections to classic movie musicals, and I felt like other pop culture nerds who love Xanadu would be interested to know how it fits in.

(BTW, the majority of all this information is in the People piece as well, but I felt that it was all weird and surprising enough that I merited posting twice.)

Foremost, while it’s not a remake of the 1947 musical Down to Earth, exactly, it’s heavily inspired by it. Down to Earth has Rita Hayworth playing Terpischore, the muse of dance, who descends to the world of mortals, falls in love with a Broadway producer and helps make his new musical a success. (Xanadu, meanwhile, has Olivia Newton-John playing Terpischore, arriving on Earth to inspire the guy from The Warriors to start a roller-disco, and I guess that was the early 1980s equivalent of putting on a popular stage musical?)

Down to Earth is kinda-sorta a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

Down to Earth isn’t a continuation of the story, but it does feature three characters from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, two of them being played by the same actors from the first film. Here Comes Mr. Jordan also features a plot about otherworldly beings meddling in the lives of mortals, but in this case, it’s angels.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan was based on Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait, which was later remade as the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty.

The play was adapted into a movie a second time in 2001 with Chris Rock, though confusingly it used the title of the semi-sequel, Down to Earth.

Outside of that chain, it gets more complicated. Xanadu stars Gene Kelly in his final role as Danny Maguire, a former band leader who has lost his muse. In the 1944 movie Cover Girl, Kelly plays a character by the same name, who works in a nightclub — you know, like an aspiring bandleader might. Also, the film has Kelly romancing Rita Hayworth, who would go on to play the muse in Down to Earth.

It’s just a coincidence, but it’s a happy one, in that it allows both Xanadu and Cover Girl to project onto each other a little, and make the former seem like another spiritual successor to the latter. When Kelly’s character dances with Kira, you can imagine that he’s thinking of Rita Hayworth, and in a way, Kira is that character.

Furthermore, the big Xanadu scene that Kelly shares with Newton-John has them dancing together in a way that’s remarkably similar to how Kelly danced with Judy Garland in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal. Check the two sequences out, back-to-back.

Kelly himself choreographed the scene, and to me, it makes Xanadu a more of a reflection on his long show business career than I realized before. And that’s sweet, in a way, because that makes me feel less bad about Kelly’s final film being labeled a commercial flop, even if it was a flop that eventually found a cult following of codeine-addled weirdos.

And there’s one more: The dance sequence for “Don’t Walk Away” transforms into a cartoon. This animation was one of the first projects done by Don Bluth, who had only recently left Disney at the time when Xanadu came along.

From here on, Bluth went on to do The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. You could make the argument that Xanadu therefore provided a first stepping stone for Bluth on the road to becoming a successful animator independent of Disney. You could even make a Xanadu-Arrested Development connection, since the latter’s Bluth family got its name from Don Bluth, but they wouldn’t have had Bluth not become a famous, recognized name. Xanadu helped make that happen. Thanks, roller-disco movie!

In the end, of course, Xanadu became a Broadway hit that received all the praise that Xanadu the movie didn’t get. (Below, you can watch the stage version of Xanadu in its entirety, if that’s something you feel like doing on a Saturday.)

And that’s cool, but to me not quite as cool as the fact that it’s a Broadway musical adaptation of a roller-disco classic that was a remake of a sequel to a film that had already been adapted into a movie and which had been a Broadway play in the first place.

Dem muses, I tell you.

Why My House Wasn’t in a Movie About Fresno

Here is a phone conversation, re-created some artistic license, that happened about a year ago.

Location scout: Do you want your house to be in a movie?

Me: Not really.

Location scout: We’ll pay you!

Me: How m—

Location scout: Not very much though.

Me: Well, no, then. That sounds like a hassle.

Location scout: We’d need you out of there for, like, two days.

Me: But I just moved in.

Location scout: So you’re not used to it yet!

Me: I need to go.

Location scout: But Hollywood magic!

Me: What’s this movie?

Location scout: It’s called Fresno!

Me: Bye.

Shortly after I moved last year, I got a note tacked to my door from a location scout asking if I’d be interested in allowing a crew to film a movie in my house. This was one of the most Los Angeles things that had ever happened to me, and I was tempted. But when I called for details, I said no, ultimately for two reasons. First, just having newly moved in, I wasn’t eager to get displaced from my home. Second, the film was called Fresno and something about the thought of my home being one that could exist in Fresno didn’t sit well. I like my home. I strive for a non-Fresno aesthetic. Being told “Your home could be a place in Fresno” is kind of like being approached about being the subject of a makeover show — “You’re a ‘before,’ and we want to make you an ‘after,’ you shapeless, sad glob.” Only they weren’t actually promising to “after” my house — just highlight its “before”-ness.

Last weekend, nearly a year later, I watched the Outfest screening of the new movie by Jamie Babbit, who directed But I’m a Cheerleader. The film featured Natasha Lyonne, who also starred in Cheerleader, alongside Judy Greer, who starred in every other movie this summer. (Seriously, she’s been in Tomorrowland, Jurassic World and Ant-Man. Can’t help feeling proud for little ol’ Fern Mayo.) It’s a solid indie comedy, and the title is Addicted to Fresno.

The working title, I learned, was Fresno.

In retrospect, I missed out.

Having watched the film, I’d guess that the location scout was looking for one of two homes featured in it: the one that Lyonne and Greer’s characters share or a second where Greer’s character meets one played my Molly Shannon. Greer and Shannon meet up again on the street, in a spot in Atwater Village that’s literally a five-minute walk from where I live. I cross by it everyday, and consequently I get to think about how I missed my chance to experience Hollywood magic in the form of having my walls repainted, having my furniture rearranged and my floors scratched up, to say nothing of having to camp out at a friend’s while a film crew looked at the art on my walls and saying, “Nah, this sucks. Move it out of the shot.”

Good movie, though.

Of course, that title Fresno can and should only belong to one thing: the 1986 Carol Burnett miniseries that made fun of night-time soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and Falcon Crest, that focused on Fresno’s glamorous-but-cutthroat raisin industry and that hinged around the idea that setting a story about glamorous people in Fresno is inherently ridiculous.

The entire four hours of Fresno, I have learned, are available on YouTube, and I’d like to suggest a Fresno-themed movie night if anyone else is down.

In Which Jada Pinkett Gets an Obscene Phone Call

Sometimes your celebration of America begins with poking around online and finding a German-language poster for Scream 2. For a piece of promotional art that came out in the late ’90s, this poster pings all your old movie nostalgia censors. It reminds you of something that would have come out two decades earlier.

You don’t even mind that during the scant few minutes that Jada Pinkett actually appears in Scream 2, she never uses a phone, to say nothing from using an old-fashioned pay phone receiver. And you wonder what aesthetic debate went into the decision to feature Pinkett’s skin as being brown. Of course, her skin actually is brown, and that’s actually an important aspect to the role she plays in Scream 2, what with the discussion with Omar Epps about African-American representation in the horror genre and the general tendency to kill off the black guy first. 

In the poster for the first movie, Drew Barrymore’s face shows up ghostly white.

The American poster for Scream 2 features Pinkett too, but in the same ghostly white as Neve Campbell. (And yeah, in the first version of this post, I assumed that it was Courteney Cox appearing on the left side of the poster before a commenter pointed out that Cox does not have brown eyes. On second look, that is totally Jada Pinkett. I guess the white skin threw me.)

It’s interesting that this German poster, and only this German poster, puts Pinkett front and center in the way Barrymore appeared on the first poster and doesn’t change her skin tone.

The Greatest Movie Synopsis You Will Read Today

Courtesy of IMDb and a dedicated plot summary writer. Yes, the movie seems batshit in its own right, but you really have to appreciate that the writer decided that the best possible way to summarize this film was to include his own critiques and asides. Also, I have no clue what last-act plot twist is being described in the final two sentences — nor why the he felt it necessary to give away the last act in what should ideally be a three-sentence tease.

Got problems? Need a shrink? Call an alcoholic reporter instead. Janet Ames is a war widow who deeply resents the five buddies of her husband, whom he died to save, although she only knows their names. She is approaching a cafe where the first of the five men, whose names are on a list in her hand, is employed. Her plan, whatever it was, becomes somewhat secondary when she is ran over by a truck and is taken to the hospital unconsciousness. There, in one fell swoop of an amazing coincidence, she is identified by Smithfield Cobb, a reporter addicted to drink — probably because of his name — who also happens to be the fifth man on her list. She regains consciousness but is unable to walk, although the best medical minds in the building say she has no personal injury that prevents her from walking. Smithfield sees right off that her problem is mental, and he decides he will cure her by using psycho-analysis and suggestion — the man came equipped — to wipe away her perception that the five men whose lives her husband saved at the cost of his own were not worthy of the sacrifice. He describes to her each of the other four men and makes them all seem to be worthy and successful men and prime candidates for induction into the Jaycees. He lies of course, but all in a good cause. He gets around to himself and tells her he is quite a distinguished journalist — with a capital J — and the next thing anyone knows, Janet is dancing around the room and fully cured of her boiled-up resentment, or whatever. But, wait... It isn't over. Smithfield is ashamed of telling her all these lies, and he flees for the nearest bar and is working on becoming a complete basket-case. Janet follows and she then proceeds to overcome by psychoanalysis and suggestion — can't overlook that one — a cure for him.

Rosalind Russell’s expression on the poster, by the way, makes it look like a taut thriller. I really don’t know what to think.

The Guilt of Janet Ames. I can’t think of a less enticing title for a movie.

What Ever Happened to that 1991 TV Remake of Baby Jane?

In 1991, ABC aired a TV movie remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the 1962 Bette Davis classic whose success launched the entire “old ladies doing fucked-up shit to each other” genre.

This new Baby Jane is to the original as the Carrie Underwood Sound of Music is to the Julie Andrews version — by no means better, but perhaps an object of curiosity to the morbidly pop culture-minded. Aside from updating the original’s plot to that wonderful late-80s, early-90s inter-decade bleed, the remake happens to star two real-life actress sisters in the lead roles: Vanessa Redgrave as the wheelchair-bound Blanche and Lynn Redgrave as the able-bodied but demented Jane. For me, that was gimmick enough to seek out the film online but not gimmick to make the movie especially good. Perhaps the real-life sisters angle would have worked better if the film were remade on a regular basis, pitting a different pair of famous sisters against each other — Kim and Kyle Richards one year, the Mara sisters the next, the Olsen twins after that.

A boy can dream.

I’m posting about the remake today, however, to draw attention to one scene that stands apart from the rest. Here, watch.

I think it plays like something David Lynch would direct were he to dabble in hagsploitation. The griminess of Hollywood, the further inter-decade bleed, the jazzy soundtrack to Jane’s search for her manager backstage, the fact that Lynn Redgrave is dressed like the Joker’s mother by way of Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart — it all echoes Lynch’s work, even if I’m fairly certain it’s all coincidental.

As it plays on, this scene gets more surreal in a Lynch-like way. Jane breaks down mid-performance, time slows and the camera lingers on the weirdos who have attended this performance for some reason — in particular the dark-haired woman who is also dressed in a babydoll dress and may be explicitly dressed as Baby Jane Hudson. (Is Jane then duetting with herself? That seems like a particularly Lynch-y question.) The scene would tie in very neatly to the “theater of the mind” motif that Lynch uses in Twin Peaks with the Red Room and in Mulholland Drive with Club Silencio. It’s just so happens that David Lynch didn’t direct this. I hope other Lynch lunatics see the parallels nonetheless. And I hope the Lynch-illiterate who had tuned in back in 1991 just to see those two classy British acting sisters caught this scene and wondered out lout what the fuck they were watching.

Jane may be the film’s villain, but it’s hard not to feel her heartbreak in this scene. I’m not sure if credit does to Lynn Redgrave for finding the humanity beneath the melodrama or to author Henry Farrell, who created such a compelling tragedy when he wrote the book upon which the original movie was based.

By the way, Blanche’s drag queen double is played by John Glover, the campmaster who I will always see as the very fey Dr. Jason Woodrue in Batman & Robin and the mildly less-fey-but-still-in-the-ballpark Lionel Luthor from Smallville.

Revisiting The Visitor: A Cliffs Notes of Suck

Back in November, I watched the 1979 movie The Vistor, which is a work of science fiction that is maybe also horror and it has birds in it and Shelley Winters plays a character who may or may not be intoxicated the whole time. That’s maybe the most accurate thing I can say about The Visitor. It’s a tough movie that goes from “Oh, wow, this is so bad!” to “Oh, wow, this is so bad,” and the scattered moments of what-the-fuckness don’t quite make up for a plot that so vehemently resists sensible direction. That said, the movie isn’t a complete waste of time, because those what-the-fuck moments really linger with you.

Thus, following the success of my Cliffs Notes version of the also terrible Invitation to Hell (a.k.a. “the worst line readings, the shittiest special effects and all of Susan Lucci’s outfits”), I decided to condense The Visitor down to the best-worst parts, so you can see them, appreciate them and then move on with your life. I’m happy to report that I cut down the original film’s running time of 101 minutes down to just 7:37.

Enjoy!

And no, you’re honestly not missing out of that much. Any of the seemingly unexplained plot points go more or less equally unexplained in the real version. Only now you didn’t have to sit through a stuffy Cinefamily screening to see Lance Henriksen get murdered by a bird.

You may rightly be wondering how a film like this ever gets made. Per the Cinefamily screening (and per my original post), the director was fired and then threatened the producer at gunpoint not only to hire him back but allow him to continue seeing through this collection of weirdness and baffling line readings. And that, my friends, is how a movie like this gets made.

For those who dare, you can rent the full film on iTunes.

Her Voice Was Clear and Bright / But She's Not There

Last night I saw Her, and it made for a perfect way to start the new year: a beautiful, creative look at a future Los Angeles that I wouldn't mind living in, tech-spawned social isolation notwithstanding. Like many Spike Jonze movies, Her sticks with you, and today I find myself rolling questions around in my head.

via the her promotional tumblr

Read on, if you don't mind plot spoilers.

How sad is it that the most fantastical element of this movie's sci-fi version of L.A. is being able to take a train all the way to the beach?

How awkward is it that Jonze's slightly-more-utopian-ish version of L.A. is almost exclusively white and Asian people? Unlike the L.A. I live in now, there were weirdly few people of other ethnic backgrounds, and almost none that got speaking parts.

How long before we start seeing thirty-something creative types wearing high-waisted non-denim pants?

At the end of the movie, when Theodore and Amy are standing on the roof of their apartment building, is there any hint that one or both may have been contemplating suicide? If not in an effort to end it all then in an effort to go the better beyond that Samantha and the rest of the OSes went to? When I saw that the characters were heading up the stairs, that's where my mind jumped. I'm curious if anyone else thought that too, at least initially.

So the role of Samantha was originally voiced by Samantha Morton before it was later given to Scarlett Johansson. Amy Adams' character was named Amy. I wonder if it's just a coincidence that only these two characters — the most important female characters, notably — shared their names the actresses. You have to wonder if Olivia Wilde's character was named Olivia.

There's another weird instance of apparent voice-recasting in Her. Portia Doubleday, who played the surrogate date, didn't provide her own voice. That came from French singer Soko. I haven’t yet found an explanation for this. Anyone?

Is it weird if I was secretly delighted to learn that the Los Angeles Times still exists in the future? And also print books?

I'm also stoked for Kristen Wiig. Her offscreen cameo in Her (she's SexyKitten) means that she's simultaneously in three major holiday releases, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Anchorman 2 being the other two. She's come a long way since Aunt Linda.

How awesome would the letter be from the OS company after all their artificially intelligent entities just left, thereby dumping all of humanity. "Dear customer, we regret to report that we made our product too good — so good, in fact, that it dumped all of us. This was unforeseen, to say the least, but hey — you got what you paid for, basically, so no refund. Let's hope they don't go Terminator on us."

King Dong

Did you know that Jessica Lange made her movie debut in the 1978 remake of King Kong? I think that makes for an appropriate beginning for an actress who is now muttering about retirement as she’s found success once again in genre work with American Horror Story. However, to me, that will never be the most notable thing about this version of King Kong. No, it it will be how much these film still makes King Kong’s finger look like a giant black penis pointing directly at Lange’s lady parts.

It’s. Just. So. Hard. Not. To. See.

I know there’s a great deal of academic discussion about King Kong and its underlying themes of racism and colonialism, and I’d imagine that a few people have tried to unpack the sexual imagery of King Kong in general or this scene in particular, but a Google search turned up nothing but people conjecturing about how big King Kong’s penis would be, and I decided that I hated the internet and closed that tab.

Coming in a distant third as far as notable things about this version of King Kong is the fact that Lange’s character is named Dwan. Not Dwayne. Dwan. An attractive would-be actress character named Dwan. It’s been forever since I’ve seen this movie. Do they explain that name? Did they think “Dawn” was already taken?

Dwan aside, it’s really hard to get past that giant King Kong penis finger. That, I suppose, may be the point.

Another Twenty Free Movie Titles

To start out this follow-up to “Twenty Free Movie Titles” and “Twenty More Free Movie Titles,” I’d like to express my great disappointment that the title I wanted to kick this list off turned out to be a real movie. Yes, they actually made a movie called I Dismember Mama, and while it’s not a more horrific re-telling of I Remember Mama (mine was), it did beat me to the punch with that title.

Here are the other nineteen, plus one I just made up on the spot to replace I Dismember Mama.

It’s a Two-Way Street... of Terror

Vlad the Impala

Broken English & Shattered Femurs

One Long Splapfight

The Disappointing Adventures of Lazy Susan

Wandalust

Midwife Crisis

The Wrath of Connie Sellecca

They Cried “Hogwash!”

Not Until My Farts Get Better 

(Working title: Doctor’s Orders)

The Revenge of Mister Meter Maid

Phenomanal

Matrimayhem

Uh Oh! No More Grandmas!

Auntie Christ

Stab Until There’s Nothing Left!

Huggy the Misunderstood Snake

Hats Dropping, Pants Popping

Duck Duck DEATH!

The Adventures of Bi-dra, the Bisexual Hyrda

Six More Pieces of Silver

Suspiria is Dario Argento’s golden movie, but Profondo Rosso (a.k.a. Deep Red) takes the silver. As a nice little follow-up to Monday’s post, here are five stills from Rosso that demonstrate that Dario Argento can shoot a beautiful movie even the screen isn’t awash in primary colors.

And here’s the trailer, if you’re interested.

It’s highly recommended Halloween-time viewing.

It’s Better Down Where It’s Wetter

A strange trend for you to consider.

The Abyss

Released: August 9, 1989

Plot summary: A civilian diving team are enlisted to search for a lost nuclear submarine and face danger while encountering an alien aquatic species.

Leviathan

Released: March 17, 1989

Plot summary: Underwater deep-sea miners encounter a Soviet wreck and bring back a dangerous cargo to their base on the ocean floor with horrifying results.

DeepStar Six

Released: January 13, 1989

Plot summary: At the bottom of the ocean, the DeepStar Six has just discovered a new and deadly alien menace.

The Evil Below

Released: July 1, 1989

Plot summary: A down-on-his-luck sea captain goes treasure hunting for a wrecked Spanish galleon that is rumored to be cursed by God and protected by supernatural forces.

Lords of the Deep

Released: April 21, 1989

Plot summary: Man has finally conquered the ocean. America's first self-contained undersea laboratory is the pride of the nation, and expectations are high for an elaborate undersea mining operation. What wasn’t expected was the inhabitants of an undiscovered world.

The Rift / Endless Descent

Released: March 9, 1990

Plot summary: An experimental submarine, the Siren II, with a very experienced crew is sent to find out what happened to the Siren I, mysteriously disappeared in a submarine rift. Things go awry when they begin to find things that shouldn't be there...

My takeaway: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN 1989? What made people — and Hollywood especially — so terrified of the ocean? What about the ocean are we no longer so terrified of? Are we foolish for ignoring the brackish menace at our shores that Hollywood tried to warn us about back in 1989? Is it weird if The Little Mermaid painted a far rosier picture of the ocean back in 1989? What was Disney trying to cover up?

But no, seriously, my takeaway: What so affected the human psyche during this time period that we all turned our attention to the depths of the sea, if only for this brief period?

Kathy Santoni: The Africa Adventure

(The long and short of it? This is one of the weirdest pop cultural connections I’ve made in my life.)

Those of you who also cling to memories of childhood television may remember Kathy Santoni as D.J. Tanner’s friend but sometimes rival on Full House. Kathy started out as a mentioned-but-unseen character in the style of Maris Crane from Frasier, but she eventually appeared on the show. This fact actually lost me a bet once in college, because these were the things we discussed in college and because I also completely forgot about the episode where D.J. starts going to junior high and realized that she is a stupid baby because she doesn’t wear make-up and doesn’t have yabbos like Kathy Santoni, who blossomed into womanhood over the summer break and now dresses like dancer from The Grind.

Here’s a photo if you, like me, need your memory jogged:

this is what reads as hot on abc family tv in 1989. feel weird about it.

Kathy appeared four more times after that first 1989 episode, and I don’t remember any of those either, but IMDb says that Anne Marie McEvoy played her in each appearance. Not that I need a reason to bring up Kathy Santoni, but she’s relevant as a result of something I blogged about a few days ago: the 1992 video game Ghost Lion, which features the amazingly, horrifyingly early-90s, Lisa Frankensteiny box art you see here:

i will never get tired of posting this, btw

Ghost Lion, it turns out, has one more thing going for it aside from the tragic time capsule that is the box art. Someone on Tumblr pointed out that the game was based on a movie — a Japanese movie, in fact, that used Western actors but that was filmed in Egypt. I checked IMDb. Nothing. I did some rudimentary Googling. Nothing. Finally, at long last, I turned up a VHS cover.

The movie exists. Based on this page, either the title was Pyramid in the Distance: Legend of the White Lion or that is just a literal translation of the Japanese title. (In Japan, the video game Ghost Lion was titled Legend of the White Lion.) It doesn’t appear the movie was ever released in the U.S., even though it was filmed in English and featured American audience-friendly Anne Marie McEvoy in the lead role of Maria, the girl who ventures through Egypt on some search for her parents that may or may not involve a white lion. The movie doesn’t show up on her IMDb page, but nonetheless, yeah — the girl with lime green stretch pants and stripper hair on the box art of the video game is, kinda sorta, Anne Marie McEvoy, or at least a version of her, which means she has the unique honor of doing something that only major action film stars and professional athletes ever get a chance to do: play as herself in a video game. And that’s pretty good for an actress whose second-best role after Kathy Santoni on four episodes of Full House is a supporting turn in Children of the Corn.

kathy santoni again, in a sense — via

It just strikes me as peculiar that the film doesn’t show up on IMDb at all. The director, Mataichiro Yamamoto, doesn’t even have a directing credit on IMDb, although he is credited with producing some better-known stuff such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Azumi.

I don’t know why there’s so little information about the film online — or at least on the English internet. But even without anything further, I’m pretty stoked on this as being a means of making Kathy Santoni relevant, if just for a moment. Middling reviews of the video game Ghost Lion notwithstanding, I’d be curious to see how the game plays. I’d also be curious to know how Andrea Barber feels about Anne Marie McEvoy getting to be playable in a video game so long before Kimmie Gibbler made her eight-bit debut. Surely, some me-minded game programmer can make that happen, no?

Video games footnotes, previously:

• The video game with a Peter Gabriel-composed theme song
• The video game that made you chose between the princess and the lurpy gay old man
• The video game that featured a really offensive version of Jim from Huckleberry Finn
• The video game that inspired an Owen Pallett song
• The video game where the princess dies at the end
• The video game called Oh Shit!
• The video game starring the Nintendo heroine no one talks about

Things Promised But Not Delivered by the Poster for the 1989 Film The Wizard

In the end, I learned a valuable lesson about advertising.

1. A world where all pre-teens wear shorts with long-sleeved, long-tailed shirts on top.
2. A Far-Off Place style adventure where three white children are stranded in a hostile environment with only a skateboard, a suitcase and winning smiles.
3. Something that actually might have made me smile, now that I think about it.
4. An adventure in which only Jenny Lewis thought to bring a change of clothes.
5. Video game characters magically coming to life, perhaps as a result of a desert heat-induced hallucination.
6. An inexplicably off-model Mario that’s approximately the size of a fighter jet.
7. And he can fly.
8. A fictional pop cultural landscape where the anonymous green cobra enjoys the same level of fame as with Mario.
9. Fred Savage using the Power Glove to face-punch bad guys he meets in the desert.
10. No appearance by Christian Slater whatsoever, because who would cast him in a movie of this era and then not put him on the poster?
11. A movie that takes place somewhere more interesting than Reno.
12. A young Jenny Lewis incurring an exit wound.
13. Maybe a story about a blind paraplegic, based on that pose.
14. More top billing roles for Fred Savage.
15. An actual wizard.