The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, April 13, 2007

Strange Queue: Because Life Is Too Short To Waste On Pasteurized Hollywood Product

On the fence about some oddball choices in your Netflix queue? Here's a couple of low rent gems worth bumping to the top.

THIS FILTHY WORLD

Take a close look at many counter culture icons from the last fifty years and what you'll see are miscreants raised on a steady diet of popular entertainment. Creative geniuses from R. Crumb to Quentin Tarantino have a way of capturing mainstream entertainment and refracting it in their own offbeat interpretations. They are like sculptors working from the trash heap of Americana. As This Filthy World reveals, John Waters also loves wallowing in gimmicky trash. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with his work. Pink Flamingos remains his Citizen Kane, a gloriously realized exercise in shit flinging (and eating) that can still stir revulsion and induce vomiting more effectively than any Johnny Knoxville stunt. But over the years Waters' persona has become much more interesting than his films. Let's face it, his last worthwhile flick was Serial Mom, made some 15 years ago. Since then he's seen popular entertainment gradually catch up with his sensibilities. Hairspray, which Waters describes here as his most subversive work, has taken on a life of it's own as a Broadway play eagerly embraced by the stodgy blue haireds. And now that Travolta is donning a dress for the cinematic adaptation of the stage adaptation (How much of its own tail can a snake consume?), John Waters' ouvere is reaching strange new levels of irony.

Having completely shot his load in the celluloid medium, Waters now expresses himself through his one man shows. To see Waters on stage, so at ease as he recounts his sordid tales to a hipster audience half his age, is much more entertaining than any one of his last three movies. He's no longer eager to push the boundaries of good taste for it's own sake. He's content now to share his sincere love of gimmicky William Castle films, ugly strippers and Edie The Egg Lady. There's an especially precious moment when Waters, taking questions from the audience, elaborates on what kind of person appeals to him. It's someone, he says, who is completely unaware of his own strange eccentricities, completely without pretense. The unforced irony here is that he's addressing a theater that looks to be packed with navel gazing poseurs, all eager to be the next John Waters. What they (hopefully) learn by the end of his show is that Waters' kitschy appeal comes from an earnest and sincere place.

As the fringe performance artists of modern entertainment mug it up on YouTube, Waters' brand of intelligent irreverency is like a refreshing breath of foul air. The sight of an endlessly charming middle aged man, who looks more like a maitre'd than a trash auteur, waxing philosophic about what it takes for a tranny to eat dogshit on film has become the new subversive.

DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN

If you're looking for an authentic grindhouse flick to prime your pump before the release of the Tarantino/Rodriguez opus, look no further than the catalog of Mr. Al Adamson. His drive-in delicacies, chock full of bikers, monsters, hippies, chicks, drugs, and tons of recycled footage, are quintessential examples of the genre. But one Adamson classic, the crown jewel of his collection, contained all of those elements and threw in a couple of old school horror veterans to boot. And a midget! It seems Adamson was originally making a biker/slasher movie (a follow-up to his last hit, Satan's Sadists), but decided halfway through that it would be more marketable with Frankenstein and Dracula thrown into the mix. The story goes something like this- Dracula visits Dr. Frankenstein at a boardwalk carnival besieged by a biker gang and a mute axe murderer. And a midget. The doctor runs a house of horrors as a front for his lab experiments using decapitated girls for... something or other. What's important here is that Dracula (actor Zandor Vorkov, looking like Jerry Seinfeld by way of Frank Zappa) has a devil ring that shoots a laser. I said a laser. Dracula's ring shoots a laser.

Adamson must have broken the piggy bank for this one as he landed three horror movie vets, a big get for a grindhouse director. J. Carroll Naish plays the evil Dr. Frankenstein, Angelo Rossitto of Freaks fame (and later to become the brains of Thunderdome's Master Blaster duo) plays the sinister carnival barker, and Lon Chaney Jr. turns in his most disturbing performance as the fat retarded mute axe murderer who sweats gin. Sadly enough, the part requires very little acting for the perpetually bitter, perpetually drunk horror legend. These would be Naish and Chaney's last roles. The old Universal Monsters thespians rarely went out with dignity. Other Adamson regulars are Regina Carrol, his busty blonde of choice and Russ Tamblyn, known to many as Riff from West Side Story. Also known to some as Dr. Jacoby from Twin Peaks. Or known to actress Amber Tamblyn as Dad.

Now if you look up Adamson's DVD's on Netflix, you may be tempted by some better sounding titles. It's hard to resist the allure of names like Blood of Ghastly Horror, Hell's Bloody Devils, and Psycho A-Go-Go. It's even harder to resist the vintage Neal Adams box art for Horror of The Blood Monsters. But trust me when I say DVF has the most bang for your buck. From there you can move on to Satan's Sadists, a straight up biker flick that Adams called his personal favorite. Tamblyn stars in this one as another tough as nails gang member who isn't at all gay.

Like many of his cohorts, Adamson suffered a tragic, but fittingly sensationalistic, ending. He was murdered in 1995, his body found three months after the fact, buried in cement under his own newly tiled bathroom floor. The killing was the result of an argument with his contractor who bludgeoned him and then incorporated him in the renovations to hide his body. But if Tim Burton (or more appropriately, Tarantino) ever directs a bio-pic about the guy, they should make his murderer a lusty space alien with a ring that shoots lasers. It's what he would have wanted.