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....

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.

Wild at Heart

Perhaps you're wondering how the work of David Lynch qualifies as the Craptacular... 

After all, Blue Velvet is amongst the finest films made by anyone, ever, classic or modern, American or foreign, indie or studio. No argument there. Eraserhead is a work of divine madness, Mulholland Drive is a haunting piece of cinema that turns on itself like a Mobius strip, Twin Peaks was the precursor of today's dark, narrative-heavy television series. Of course, there is some genuine crap in the output (Lost Highway). But Wild at Heart is Lynch's best attempt at drive-in cheese, whether he (or the jury that gave it the Palme d'Or at Cannes) knows it or not. 

And it has Nicholas Cage. The role of Sailor Ripley helped focus Cage's ass-kicking, snakeskin-wearing, pseudo-Elvis persona... for good or for ill. (Gotta love how he tells everyone that his beloved snakeskin jacket is "a symbol of my individuality and my belief in personal freedom.") I believe we can also add Wild at Heart to the (very) long list of films Quentin Tarantino has cribbed from.

So, the film opens with flames, guitars and action-movie punching sounds. We go straight to Nicholas Cage beating some guy to death in the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. (It says it's somewhere in the Carolinas, but i've drank at the Biltmore and stayed at the Biltmore and i know it's the goddamn Biltmore.) Since he could have stopped at the beating part and left off the "to death" and it was in front of about 100 people, he goes to prison. This distresses his girlfriend, Lula, played by Laura Dern. But it delights her mother, Marietta Fortune, played by Dern's mother Diane Ladd -- not as much as it would have delighted her if Sailor had been the loser in that battle (as was her intent), but it brings a fuschia-glossed smile to her pancaked face nonetheless.

Wild at Heart then flashes forward 22 months and 18 days when Sailor is released into the waiting arms -- and bitchin convertible -- of Lula. The two fuck and talk, the first of many rounds of fucking and talking in this film. They go to a bar where they flail around to some speed metal until Sailor stops the band to sing the Elvis ballad, "Love Me" to Lula. Then it's back to the hotel for more fucking and talking, during which the two decide to break Sailor's parole and point that convertible west.

However, Lula's mama is still pissed and figures she'll take another crack at getting Sailor whacked, sending her boyfriend Harry Dean Stanton to take care of the killin'. Like a job you send Harry Dean Stanton to do is gonna get done. The man has played many, many roles but damned few of them were fellows you'd describe as "go-getters"...

Let us also point out here that Diane Ladd has a remarkable series of wigs and pseduo-Dynasty prom dresses to aid in her demented overacting. But, of course, it's probably hard to figure out what is "too much" when you're acting in a David Lynch film.

Yeah. So that's basically your setup. Crazy young lovers on a road trip pursued by a series of weird, inexplicable villains. Like all Lynch films, Wild at Heart has plenty of odd supporting character turns. The most incredible is, of course, Crispin Glover as Cousin Dell. His narrative technically adds nothing to the story and is simply another of Lula's post-coital tales but, oh, is it bizarre. Cockroaches in underpants.'Nuff said.

Really, i kind of feel like it was stuck in when they realized Wild at Heart just wasn't weird enough. So, they cut out the torture-snuff scene and added Crispin Hellion Glover. I can tell you which one disturbs me more...

Then we have a phantasmagorcial scene of a roadside nighttime car crash with Sherilyn Fenn as a crash victim. The barrage of bad news, ugly accidents and evil mojo that our idealistic young lovers run up against is a recurring motif in this film.Another recurring motif is The Wizard of Oz, which feels a little forced, especially when we have Diane Ladd in full Wicked Witch of the West drag flying alongside Sailor and Lula's Eldorado. Be subtle, Mr. Lynch: Use the flying monkeys.

More plot-crucial, there's Willem Dafoe -- and some really ghastly prosthetic teeth -- providing another of his unhinged turns as Bobby Peru, a creep whom Sailor and Lula hang out with when they decide to strand themselves in Big Tuna, Texas.

Yep, that's a face you can trust. A face that you would have no problem with taking advice from, a face you would get drunk with, a face you would allow to fondle the mother of your child. The face of a man whose hare-brained, low-return criminal schemes you would certainly want to involve yourself in.

Is Wild at Heart a crucial entry in the David Lynch canon? Not really (although it is essential to understanding the evolution of Nicholas Cage). It's got plot holes you could run a fleet of semis through and still have room for a freight train. It's got way too much hotel-room soliloquy not not enough of the not-quite-our-planet otherworldly weirdness that characterizes Lynch's best work.

 It's oddly by-the-wayside in his filmogrpahy now, given the tumultuous reception it received at release -- though that perhaps had more to do with  Lynch's Twin Peaks-era cultural high-tide than the quality of Wild at Heart itself. But it's an entirely watchable film and perhaps the less-overtly Lynchian quality has something to do with that.