Spice World

Oh, this one takes me back. Way back.

 

Specifically, to a period in the late 90s. I was a music critic/editor and general NYC rock chick. It was the internet boom, the rise of downtown, the zenith of the major labels, it was a giddy motherfucking time indeed. And it was also the time of the Spice Girls, the cartoonish girl group that i and a number of my Lower East Side proto-hipster chick friends (un)ironically loved.

They were like the Monkees but with cool outfits and a line of dolls and stickers and books and lollipops and viewmasters and creepy inflatable toys and all manner of crap.

See that Ginger doll, second from left? Sitting in my library, still in the box,
right next to my NRFB Debbie Harry Barbie.

And, like any band that's more persona than chops and that has a ton of money and a young fanbase behind it, someone decided they needed to make a movie. Spice World tries hard to be A Hard Day's Night, but it actually doesn't even make it into Head territory.

The plot, such as it is, is the same plot these movies always have: Will They Make It To The

Big Gig, although this also has a dash of We Must Stay True To Where We're From  No Matter How Famous We Get. As you can imagine, a lot of time-killing shenanigans and amusing set pieces are needed to fill up this cream puff, but the Spice Girls and Spice World just don't have enough in them to pull it off.

 

There's a bit where the Spices swap personas--Posh as Baby, Scary as Ginger, etc.--and do mildly nasty impersonations of each other. The best part is when the girls flash forward to what they would be like as mothers--overly fecund and correspondingly cranky Baby, drop-'em-off-at-boarding-school Posh, bedazzled jogging suit Sporty, kente caftan earth-mother Scary and, my favorite, cocktail-swilling, rollers-and-rhinestones Ginger...

 

What Spice World has in spades is a truly insane amount of cameos: Elton John, Elvis Costello, Bob Hoskins, Bob Geldof, Jennifer Saunders (in Edina Monsoon mode), etc. Roger Moore plays their boss and Meatloaf plays their bus driver. Said bus has a little thematic nest for each Spice Girl--Posh has a runway and fashion magazines, Baby has a swing and stuffed animals, Sporty has exercise equipment and Scary has... zebra print. It is not explained why they need to careen around London in a bus, rather than just go home each night. I mean, they're not on tour. There is also a curious fixation on the bus' plumbing. Although maybe that's supposed to be humor, I dunno...

 

 

 All manner of shit is flung around in hopes that something sticks: Male strippers, drill sergeants, costume changes, childbirth, haunted houses, alien encounters, bomb scares... none of it is exactly dreadful, but none of it is particularly droll either.

 Spice World was truly the last of its kind: Today's teenybop stars already feed their fans a steady stream of Twitter and Youtube, so there's no need (or much desire) to bother with a full-length film. Which is just as well: Do you want to see Justin Bieber as a boxer or a carny? Selena Gomez beach party? One Direction meets the Phantom of the Park?

Now this is the movie i wanted to see...

The best one can say for Spice World is that it moves along. One wishes they'd gone a bit further--of course it wasn't going to be Beyond the Valley of the Dolls or Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, but it could have pushed a wee bit harder. Posh's peevish reaction to everything (summoned to meet a fan in the hospital, she begins screaming "It's Victoria!" in the comatose kid's ear) and Ginger's cleavage-flashing and boy-chasing hint at something that could have gone a bit more Ab Fab. Still, it's got "girl power" and, lord knows, it is a relic of its time.

... which leads me to one of my favorite conversation starters: "Did I ever tell you about the time I managed a Spice Girls tribute act?"

Back during the second Clinton administration, i had a cable access show and a shitty punk band. Even more than bar-and-party-gigs, my bandmates/improv troupe/girl gang were known for getting into full glamour drag and crashing high-profile parties. Once as we strutted into a Grammy after-party, people began shouting about us being the Spice Girls and thus a brief turn as a lip-synching Spice Girls tribute act was born. Before you ask, i was Managerial Spice, which meant that i did not have to dress up as a Spice Girl (i was actually in a heavy Mamie Van Doren phase then), but got to run them through their routines like an autocratic Russian ballet mistress, get everyone to the nightclub, give the manager our CD and have top-shelf Scotch with said manager, and finally collect our pay. (In drink tickets: After all, we were lip-synching in a nightclub, back before this was something Britney Spears could make five figures a night for.)

Fake Spice: Ginger, Scary, Baby, Posh, Stalker.

(Managerial Spice is behind the camera, natch.)

Xanadu

It was supposed to be the next Tommy or Grease. Instead, it was more like... fuck, it's not like anything. It's 80s roller disco 40s retro mythology clusterbang. It's Xanadu.

So, we open with a mural of the Nine Muses somewhere on Venice Beach springing to life. They all dance, then fly off into various directions in a a streak of neon and legwarmers.

Which begs the question: Where the hell did the other eight Muses go? Did Thalia fly away with a kilo under each arm to help with Stir Crazy and The Blues Brothers? Did Urania flit off to get high with Carl Sagan and inspire Cosmos? Was it Euterpe or Calliope who headed for the Sunset Strip to rock out on the lyre with Eddie Van  Halen? And, my word, which of these poor lasses wound up with Roman Polanski? One of them was played by Sibyl Danning, which means she apparently flitted off to inspire Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, both for good and ill...

Olivia Newton-John is Terpsichore, the muse of dance, given to saying things like "Shakespeare's written sonnets about us. Beethoven's composed music for us. We're  not supposed to feel emotions... Wait! Doesn't anybody care about my feelings?" She rollerglides down the Venice boardwalk in search of a hot dog, a nickel bag or someone she can inspire into opening a nightclub with a nice big dance floor.

... which she finds in one Sonny Malone, a frustrated painter. (Don't ask why a singer is playing a deity of the dance who is inspiring a painter. Mythological sloppiness is to be expected in the movies.) Sonny himself is an artisan of a time long past. A time when, if you wanted an 8x8 foot version of your album cover to hang outside of Tower Records, you had to hire some guy to paint it by hand. And there was still a Tower on Sunset to hang it in front of. And record labels to pay for it all.

Sonny Malone is played by Michael Beck. And this was another reason Xanadu should have gone well: Beck was fresh off of his role as Swann, the war chief of The Warriors. "Whatever happened to that guy?" you've wondered.  And, well, what happened was Xanadu. Now, Xanadu has a sort of epic badness that can be truly entertaining but somehow I doubt that the idea was “I’m gonna make two movies that are total bewildering, facepalming flops that will one day be admired for, well, their facepalming badness.” The sad thing is that Xanadu is not the worst of the pair. That would be Megaforce, which involved Beck and Barry Bostwick cruising around the desert (actually Henderson) on quads wearing silver spandex jumpsuits.

When he’s being the surly artist, he’s pretty good. When he’s debating the nature of dreams with Gene Kelly, he’s okay. But any time he’s interacting with Olivia Newton-John or wearing dolfin shorts and conversing with Zeus in a neon minefield, he’s fucking awful--although who wouldn't be awful doing those things? They should've gotten Gregory Hines, which would at least has left us with some astonishing dance scenes. Or Richard Gere, who would have at least been fun to look at.

As for Miss Olivia Newton-John, well, she’s game, she tries, but she’s not much good. Especially when you consider that Xanadu bascially jacks its plot from the far superior Down to Earth, starring the truly godesslike Rita Hayworth as a Terpsichore who actually could dance supremely well. It also cribs a little from One Touch of Venus, which starred Ava Gardner, 'nuff said. Newton-John is pleasant and pretty but she's not much of a dancer--not next to Kelly, not that anyone ever could be. (Okay, okay, Fred Astaire, the Nichols Brothers, Ann Miller, Eleanor Powell, Hayworth. Or if you wanna go new school, Michael Jackson or Savion Glover. Anyway…) But she is at least essential to the soundtrack. In the movie... she mostly she just has to look pretty and rollerskate through dry ice.

Oh lordy. I had those barrettes. A few sets. I made them with plain ol' goldtone Goodys, two colors of satin baby ribbon and a few beads on the end if you're fancy.

After he's been kissed by a Newton-John and bitches about his lack of inspiration and how no one appreciates his talent and the man hassles him, Sonny meets Gene Kelly. Kelly is wearing a porkpie hat and playing clarinet while sitting on the beach. Kelly still carries himself like a prince. He's a bored, rich ex-jazz musician--wait, rich ex-jazz musician? the film at least has the decency to explain that he invested in real estate with his jazz musician money... or something.

So he agrees to partner up with  Sonny to open a nightclub. Because people just really dig Sonny. Chicks loan Sonny their mopeds, some dude lets him hitch a rollerskate ride on the back of his amazing bus (now that i think of it, so did Steve Gutenberg in Can't Stop the Music) and generally has everyone sitting around talking about how fucking awesome he is. I will not comment how Sonny's proclivity for dolfin shorts and financial reliance on a much older man with bespoke suits and real-estate holdings seems, well...

The scene where they both describe--and, in the world of Xanadu, thus enact--their respective visions of the club is one of the moments in the movie that actually works, in a weird way. Kelly's swinging' Bette Midler/Manhattan Transfer/Kid Creole vision of the 40s melds with Beck's shoulder pads/jumpsuits & synths version of the 80s, as enacted by the Tubes. It's basically a mash-up long before such things had a name.

The, back in the realm of horror, they also have a makeover scene with Gene Kelly, where he tries on a bunch of outfits. At Fiorucci. And then it become a big dance scene. And roller boogie scene. And it's ELO. Excuse me: I need to sit down.

During "Suspended in Time," Olivia sings a powerless ballad in some kind of Tron space mid-shot. No one can endure that treatment: Frank Sinatra barely survived in in The Tender Trap--the protracted mid-shot, not the Tron part. And then there's "Suddenly," which is basically just the audience having to sit through three minutes of "Couples skate only!" I assume that it was part of the contract that every. Single. Song. on the soundtrack be played in. Its. Entirety. Because five minutes out of every ten, Xanadu stops stone dead while an ELO song plays. They even resort to a bizarre animated sequence to find yet another way for Olivia and Sonny to stare soulfully at each other while Jeff Lynne warbles in the background.

Some bullshit about how Olivia is a muse and has to return to Olympus but she loves Sonny but Zeus says no but Hera says okay and Zeus says maybe, who gives a shit, isn't it time for happy hour yet...?

So the club opens. There's a montage of Hopper cocktail waitresses and Nagel go-go girls roller skating in circles to marching-band drums and disco war chants. The Olivia returns for an absolutely bombastic and completely mediocre musical number whose sole raison d' etre seems to be costume changes and genre changes, none of which amount to anything. Not the tiger-striped vinyl, not the fringed white cowgirl, not the beaded headdress and Flash Gordon knockoff, none of it...

Apparently it was a double bill of Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music that inspired the creation of the Razzie Awards.

I recall when this movie came out, the anticipation was huge. I remember sitting around the elementary school cafeteria table while a friend who had finally Seen. It. As soon as we set down our trays and popped open our lunchboxes, we eagerly asked her how it was. "Well [long pause] I liked all of the colors." She did not lack for opinions on other matters, so it became clear that Xanadu was not that all that we had been promised....

The Seventh Victim

Screw your torture porn: Give me the slowly building menace of a Val Lewton horror every time.

 The Seventh Victim is part of the series of darkly brilliant films Lewton produced for RKO. One would ask why a film now seen as a classic by a revered writer/producer would qualify as craptacular, but bear in mind that RKO was considered a bit of a second-class studio and this was horror back in an era where the genre was second-class by definition.

The Seventh Victim initially may seem like a conventional whodunnit--well, more accurately, a whereisshe--but it's got a deep streak of nihilism and a sense of doom hangs over it from the start, and not just because it opens with a trip to the principal's office. Our heroine, Mary, is summoned by the Head Dyke in Charge at her boarding school to be told that her tuition hasn't been paid and her older sister is missing. HDIC offers to let her stay on and work for her room and board but, as she leaves, HDIC's timid femme companion warns her: "Don't come back. No matter if you never find your sister. No matter what happens to you."

Mary makes her way to New York City and begins searching for her sister. She goes to the missing persons office of existential despair, where she runs across a rather weasely private eye type. 

She goes to the cosmetics company/spa that her sister owned to find that it's apparently been sold. The new Head  Dyke in Charge claims to have no idea where her sister is--but, as we saw back at school, behind every HDIC is a timid little femme who's willing to provide some information...

In a small Italian restaurant on Perry Street (the likes of which have been completely gentrified out of New York) she meets the couple who own the restaurant and who knew her sister , as well as writer's block-ed poet Jason. The latter joins in her search, the former spend a lot of time pouring wine and espresso and saying vague and wise things. (Definitely more useful in times of crisis.)

Mary also runs across Gregory, her sister's lawyer... and husband. She also makes the acquaintance of Jacqueline's psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd, who is played by Tom Conway. If Tom Conway seems like an ersatz George Sanders, it's because he's Sanders' younger brother. Dr. Judd has the same name and a similar demeanor as the psychiatrist in Lewton's Cat People--although Judd dies in Cat People, so we must assume that The Seventh Victim happens earlier in the Lewtonverse.

 

Another thing that happens often in the Lewtonverse is the "night walk," in which a character walks alone through darkened streets as suspense mounts and several false surprises are launched before the final, actual shock. We get several of them in The Seventh Victim, as Mary and Jacqueline each take their tense nocturnal stroll through the city.

 

Another constant from the Lewtonverse is the presence of Elizabeth Russell, who also appeared in Lewton's Cat People, Curse of the Cat People and Bedlam. Here she plays Mimi, a neighbor who is doing the slow fade from consumption.

Mary's search for her sister is mostly your classic hero's journey, recast as a noir film about a teenage girl's coming of age with a side dish of supernatural horror. Mary ventures into the big city, meets various allies and opponents, thinks of turning back but instead adapts to her new surroundings and plunges forward. She's played by Kim Hunter, who would earn an Academy Award as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and later play Zira in Planet of the Apes.

 

After some night walks and much fussing amongst the gentlemen, we discover that the "exciting and unforgettable" Jacqueline had fallen in with a group called the Palladists. Has she disappeared, or is she just hiding? And if she's hiding, where? And from who?

Jacqueline, with her black bangs, black fur coat and eternal pessimism--"I've always wanted to die"--is goth as all get out and clearly the coolest chick in the film. She's a bit like a cynical, death-bent Blanche DuBois wearing Bettie Page's hair and Louise Brooks' perfume. She is played by Jean Brooks aka Jeanne Kelly aka Ruby Kelly aka Robina Duarte--she changed stage names a lot after being discovered by Erich Von Stroheim while she was singing in the lounge at the Waldorf-Astoria. She made another Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man, but mostly worked in westerns and horror flicks, eventually dying of complications from alcoholism at 47.

But back to the film! It seems that "Palladist" is just a schmancy word for devil-worshipper. However, this group of Satanists isn't sacrificing babies or tormenting peasants or unleashing hordes of maggots--they're a pretty ordinary-seeming bunch, but their normalcy makes them even more chilling. Because it never is the fire-breathing horned monster that gets you: It's being ground down by the incessant nagging, the peer pressure, the adherence to nonsensical rules...

So much more enigmatic and chic than that silly pentagram-goat's head thing....

Like any fine art film, nightclub or romance, The Seventh Victim is all atmosphere and philosophy. It is said that when a RKO exec chided Val Lewton about films with messages, Lewton responded, "Our film does have a message and the message is: Death is good!"

Like all of Lewton's films, The Seventh Victim was under-appreciated in its time, but has since grown in influence and prestige: There are echoes this film in Psycho, Rosemary's Baby and numerous lesser flicks. It's not horror in the maniacs with machetes sense, but its eerie atmosphere and gloomy outlook will haunt you long after the credits have rolled.