The Manitou

The Manitou was one of the wave of occult horror flicks during the 70s--this time with some of that fashionable Native American culture and a few of those newfangled computers thrown in. Other than that, it's just your standard flick about a chick with a tumor on her back that has an undead Native American medicine man living in it.

Wot? I know--weird even by the addled standards of the Quaalude decade...

Our star is Tony Curtis, slumming--if you can call anything Tony Curtis does slumming, he always just seemed happy and bemused to be there, glad you see you, thank for the check--plays a two-bit psychic who hustles old ladies (so many Tony Curtis roles involve the words "two-bit" and "hustle")...

C'mon, sweetheart, let's go. I gotta get this schmatte back to Williams Costume by five
or I pay for another day's rental.

He's got a sweet San Fran bachelor pad with an awesome stereo, drinks beer out of a wineglass and knows lots of babes. Among said babes is his ex, played by Susan Strasberg with a pussycat bow at her neck and a fetus on her back. (Yes, Susan, your father was a guru of the American theatre, you fucked Richard Burton and Warren Beatty, you hung out with Marilyn Monroe, but here you are in The Manitou. And just wait until the topless laser scene...)

Strasberg shows up on his doorstep and they wander around the various tourist locales of San Francisco, as they always do in movies set there--everyone always goes to Fisherman's Wharf and the steep hills. No one ever goes to a Kwik-E-Mart. She tells him about this tumor she's got and Curtis is all, "Oh, that's too bad. But it's on your back, right? Not on your front? Like, not your lower front? Okay then." I mean, I was in New York during 9-11 and i know what fucking in the face of death is like but I'd consider "removal of a large tumor tomorrow" more of a "let's cuddle" occasion.

So, they bang, and as Strasberg and her tumor sleep, she mutters, "Panna witchy salatoo." It is not the last time we will hear this nonsense phrase repeated portentously. Nay, it will be repeated over and over until one longs for the simplicity of a "Klaatu barada nikto!" or "Pazuzu!"

So, they X-ray the tumor and the mop-topped and pastel-coated doctor declares, "They are sure that the tumor on her neck is actually a fetus." I cannot think I of something I would less want to hear from a medical professional. I' think I'd rather hear "malignant" than "monster fetus."

Of course, Tony Curtis rolls with this as he rolls with everything in The Manitou (or anywhere else) and goes to rip off another old lady. (Curtis would go on to remain unphased by the weird and the undead in Sextette.) However, when old lady goes full Linda Blair in the middle of a tarot reading, levitates and chants "Panna witchy salatoo," he finally freaks out. Bitch's monster baby tumor is fucking with my livelihood!

So he goes back and tells the doctor all about "Panna witchy salatoo"  and the doctor is like, "Whatever" and messes with his giant mainframe computer some more before stomping off to operate to remove said tumor. I'm waiting for some right-wing politician to run in and stop him because Unborn Undead Native American Mutant Demon Parasites have a right to be born, even in the case of threatening the life of the mother and jeopardizing all the lives and souls on Earth. But i'm getting ahead of myself in the story...

Holy diver, Batman!

Anyway, the doctors try to X-ray the tumor, Strasberg has seizures and speaks in "possessed voice." They try to cut it off, the surgeon slits his wrist. They try to laser it off, the laser goes nuts like a Spinal Tap stage prop gone wrong. So Tony Curtis flounces off to to find Stella Stevens, who is slathered in self-tanner to the edge of blackface and is apparently some kind of California psychic buddy of his.

They have a seance with a Gabor sister, some weird shit goes down with heads rising up out of the table and people speaking in tongues and freaky wind (But isn't there always freaky wind?) Stella's stoner hubby finds a passage in a book that seems to mention the human-tumor phenomena as well as the "panna witchy salatoo" and the gang is off to find the author...

Burgess Meredith! Yes! You loved his kung fu battle in Foul Play and leading motherfuckers straight to hell in Torture Garden, so here he is! The Scooby Gang asks for his help, he yadda yaddas about some more old books. Then they go up in his attic, which is a mere staircase above his paneling n' shag, ferns n' pre-Columbia art living room, but shrouded in yard-square cobwebs and inches of dust because, y'know, attic.

Burgess Meredith tells them that what they need is a non-parasitical undead Native American shaman to battle the Native American shaman that is attempting to resurrect himself. Tony Curtis hustles and bribes (via a deus ex machina "aunt" who has $100,000 to donate to the little Indian kids or whatever because Tony Curtis knows motherfuckers don't do shit for free). In the meantime, the tumor has finally given birth to itself--although it's a dwarf thank to the goddamn X-rays, which means it looks kind of like Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages drag.

Tonight, the role of the undead medicine man will be played by Glen Danzig...

So Tony Curtis and Live Shaman do battle with Undead Shaman. There's ice storms and computer malfunctions and random gore. Little Undead Shaman seems rather arbitrary in his attacks--he might use mind control to force a doctor to cut himself with a scalpel, or it might somehow create a giant lizard to chew on your hand, he might throw a possessed old lady at your or he might just rip your skin off. But, well, we already understand that logic isn't part of the The Manitou's universe. Panna witchy salatoo. Anahl nathrak, uthvas bethud, do cheol dienve...

Anyway, The Manitou is what happens when no one's really paying attention, just throwing casting options and plot points against the wall like so much chimp scat and seeing what sticks. But that's what makes it fun to watch: If you can't come up with good snark for The Manitou, no one can help you....

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....

Daughter of Horror

I have watched a lot of movies that make no sense. However, i cannot recall one more bewildering than Daughter of Horror.

 

 A bizzarro horror-noir-expressionist-surrealist mishmosh, Daughter of Horror--also known as Dementia--is a late 50s silent film about a schizophrenic beatnik chick. It's basically one long dream sequence with a lot of jazz clubs and sweaty, creepy guys and a weird fixation on knives and cigars. It is the sole film credit of many of the people involved. That is probably a good thing.

While Daughter of Horror is a silent film, it does not lack for sound. The music is by avant-garde composer George Antheil (who also helped Hedy Lamarr invent the cellphone) with wordless melisma by Marni Nixon (who also did the vocals for Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady), doing an excellent impression of a Theremin. There's also a brief digression into a basement jazz club featuring Shorty Rogers and his Giants. And, occasionally, we get some truly bombastic narration courtesy of none other than Ed McMahon.

In fact, that's the first thing we get: An underexposed image of the sweaty visage of a young Ed, looming in a field of "stars" and intoning, "Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad! This is a place where there is no love, no hope... in the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real, nightmares of the Daughter of Horror!" 

If you thought the opening of Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf was a low-rent ripoff of Night of the Hunter, it has nothing on Daughter of Horror. 

Our heroine--she looks kind of like a cross between Leslie Caron and  Rachel Maddow in beat girl drag--awakens in a seedy hotel room and finds her two totem objects in a drawer: A groovy medallion necklace and an ominously large switchblade. She wanders out, past a bruised, sobbing woman, a guy being hauled away by the cops and a handful of rubberneckers. Out on the streets of Venice Beach, Beatnik Chick runs into "MYSTERIOUS STABBING"--oh, for the pre-Buzzfeed days of the totally opaque headline. The newspaper is being waved by a little person because, well, as Peter Dinklage himself once said, "The only place I've seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! "Oh make it weird, put a dwarf in it!"

Some drunks grab, her, some guy beats up the drunks, some other guy summons her over to a car where another guy--a sort of Orson Welles and Jack Black hybrid--flashes his wallet. Beatnik Chick gets into the back of the car with him... wait? She's a hooker? A hooker in a suit and a turtleneck with no lipstick?

Beatnik Chick swings between laughing hysterically and laughing psychotically, a pattern she will continue throughout the movie. It's not that Beatnik Chick is out of fucks to give: She never had any to start with.

They go to the first of a series of nightclubs that we will wander into during the course of Daughter of Horror. It's a pretty good way to kill time: Nightclub montage. It's more interesting than the extended scenes of Beatnik Chick staring into a mirror or looking intensely at various objects or running down the street pursued by the spotlight of paranoia--or maybe it's the cops, who can tell?

Over the sound of horns and leers of the Creepy John, the over-the-top tones of Ed McMahon are heard: "The pulse of the neon lights, like a hammer at your brain! Tormenting you, haunting you! Forcing you to think, forcing you to remember your guilt, your horror!" And now we head into a flashback--well, i mean, kind of a flashback, given that this is the dream of a crazy person, so it's hard to tell. But anyway, some guy with a bodega-robbery stocking over his face leads her to a graveyard and then we see some kind of re-enactment of her childhood amidst the tombstones...

Dad smacks daughter (of horror), mom cheats on dad, dad shoots mom, daughter stabs dad. Boom.

Post-flashback, Beatnik Chick and Creepy John go to his apartment, which is in some kind of huge office building with giant stairs. He has a grand piano and a full bar but what really compels his attention is an enormous plate of greasy chicken wings. He scarfs wings, scarfs wings, scarfs wings, ignoring the increasingly agitated murderess sitting about six feet away.

Yeah, he gets his, as does any cigar-smoking man of girth who gets handsy with the Daughter of Horror. In some ways--delusional, intermittently catatonic heroine who represses shit and stabs people--Daughter of Horror is also like a D-grade proto-Repulsion. I wonder if Polanski ever saw it.

Anyway, after killing him, Beatnik Chick realizes he's grabbed her medallion as she pushed him (and his money) out of the window of his skyscraper (Take that, Ayn Rand! Emma Goldman and Diane Di Prima all the way!) She has to get it back! Thus we have the dismemberment, more faceless men, more Venice at night, more jazz club montage, more Beatnik Chick hysteria, more Ed McMahon: "The face of your first victim! Pursuing you relentlessly through your haunted dreams! Hunting you mercilessly through the twisted corridors of your tortured mind!"

Daughter of Horror is an inexplicable flick. One cannot figure out why it was made or how or by who. It's also reminiscent of the movies my college roommates used to make for their film schools--not the final project, but the projects they had to turn in a few times a year, which were inevitably underplanned and then stuffed with random surrealism and excessive portentiousness as some kind of feeble compensation. And, like here, all of the shots went on too long--when one is planning a student film or cable access TV show, one tends to be surprised at how quickly everything goes on screen. You thought something would take 90 seconds, it takes 30. If you're a pro, you know that already and plan, or you find a way to make something happen for that 90 seconds. If not, you just let that damn shot drag on three times as long as it should.

Still, there is something to be said for Daughter of Horror's unique brand of insanity and bargain-basement surrealism. It would make a fine TV backdrop for any Halloween party--actually, it's the film the teenagers were watching in the original version of The Blob when the blob invaded the movie theater. It's a B-movie's B-movie: That should tell you something about Daughter of Horror.