sign in sign up
<<
Home , Baby Geniuses, Bride of the Monster, Dolores Fuller, Ed Wood, George Weiss (producer), Glen or Glenda

54

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO

HOLY WOOD! Growing up, we were always a family of movie-watchers. When my mum passed away in 2006, I devoted my only Empire editorial to how her guiding me through early screenings of The Wizard Of Oz and Psycho greatly informed my appreciation of how cinema could be artistic, scary and funny all at once. Her simple advice — ‘If a movie doesn’t grab you within 10 minutes, it’s probably not going to’ — similarly has stuck with me, both as a reviewer and a would-be scriptwriter. Dad’s appreciation of movies was less theoretical but also resonant. Two decades of watching war movies with the retired army reservist — ‘Look at that, walking on a ridge in silhouette!’ was a favourite, followed by a machine-gun noise to indicate he’d just killed all of our heroes — bred an intolerance for flagrant inauthenticity. It was also Dad, who as a salesman for publishers Harper & Row, one night brought home J. Hoberman and Jonathan MARCH Rosenbaum’s fantastic 1983 book Midnight Movies, which expanded my film reading beyond Famous Monsters, Starlog and Fangoria and opened my eyes to — and created an appetite for — the alternative cinema of George Romero, , David Lynch and . A year later, through his connections, Dad put me forward for a ‘Kids rate the movies’ feature in the Sydney Morning Herald. My 300-word review, of an Aussie flick called Street Hero, wasn’t exactly Pauline Kael calibre (‘The only fault I could pick, in my opinion, is that some scenes are a little unrealistic …’) but it was a start and definitely helped chart my course. ‘I look at this slush and Dad’s staying with us for his 76th birthday. We have a lovely backyard dinner and he surprises us by telling us he once — long before Mum — romanced a minor model who went on to bit parts in try to remember — at one a few Hollywood movies. The things you keep learning about your parents. Usually, at this point in the evening, I’d put on whatever time I made good movies.’ recent Hollywood film it was that Dad hasn’t seen. But tonight the first of Ed Wood’s feature films beckons. Father thinks he might want to watch . ‘What’s this one about?’ he asks. Carl Anthony as film director Johnny While he likes costume dramas, I’m not sure he’ll enjoy a cross- Ryde in Ed Wood’s The Sinister Urge dressing psychodrama.

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 54-55 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 56 57

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

‘Ed Wood’s called the worst director who ever lived,’ I explain. via hormones, sex-change surgery and learning to walk, talk and ‘He was also a transvestite. When he got to make his first movie, smoke like a girl. Thrown in randomly is Lugosi raving and solemnly he made it about his love for women’s clothes.’ narrated stock footage of cities, steelworks and stampeding ‘It’s a bit like a documentary, then,’ says Dad, unfazed as he buffalo. Producer also took it upon himself to splice plumps the cushions on the other couch. in a mild B&D lesbian scene. Um, well, sort of. Laughs come from Wood’s bizarre visuals, such as Glen tortured Edward D. Wood Jr is synonymous with bad movies now but he by devils in his lounge room, and from the tin-eared script, which remained almost forgotten by critics and authors until the public has Lugosi raving about green dragons, puppydog tails and rescued him from obscurity by voting warning us to ‘Bevare!’ Over American street scenes, the narrator the worst film ever made in Harry and ’s 1980 book muses solemnly: ‘The world is a strange place to live in. All those . He’d been left out of the predecessor, cars. All going someplace. All carrying humans, which are carrying Harry and Randy Dreyfus’ seminal 1978 tome, The Fifty Worst out their lives.’ Lines like that, and ‘I am a man who thrives on Movies of All Time, but now a cult was well and truly born. learning — we only have one life to live’, make me think Wood’s After reading about Wood for years, I first sampled his work in spirit mischievously possessed George W. Bush and Donald 1987 when, for my birthday, some friends and I went to a ‘world’s Rumsfeld. worst’ triple bill of Plan 9, Glen Or Glenda and Phil Tucker’s Robot For its time, Glen Or Glenda has a brave if mixed message. Monster. Sufficiently stoned, we got the giggles we’d come for, ‘Glen is a transvestite, but he is not a homosexual,’ we’re told. It’s but I was surprised by the surrealism of these movies. Glen Or a fantasy of a tolerant 1950s, in that Barbara accepts Glen’s ways Glenda, in particular, seemed cut from the same cloth as David and offers him her angora sweater and off-screen Average Joes Lynch’s Eraserhead, which we’d caught at the same cinema a few discuss how we should see sex-changes simply as human beings. weeks earlier. Superficially laughable elements also contain grains of truth. Over Twenty years later and Glen Or Glenda is still a weird, wild one- stock footage of 1950s American men, we’re told that hundreds off work of art. Wood’s 1953 debut opens with — once of thousands of Average Joes wear lingerie beneath their suits, an A-list Universal star on the strength of 1931’s Dracula, now a which, given rates of cross-dressing and the US population at the half-forgotten morphine addict — rattling around a lab and sitting time, is about right. in an armchair surrounded by Halloween props. He’s some sort of We take Dad up to Clare’s parents’ house in the mountains. God-like creator. We have lunch at a swanky hotel and I’m minorly mortified that, ‘Life has begun! Ha! Ha! Ha!’ Bela rants — only to be cut off by amid these plush, olde-worlde surrounds, our Ava careens around, my dad’s full-bodied snore. I gently rouse him and pack him off unstoppable, like some noisy, funny little wind-up demon-clown. to bed. Also a tad embarrassing, given that this is a few days for family, Dad misses out on 65 minutes of lunacy, ineptitude and is that I more than once have to excuse myself with the now sincerity. Under the name Daniel Davis, Wood plays Glen, a secret familiar refrain, ‘Oh, well, I suppose I’d better watch a bad movie’ cross-dresser who needs to come clean to his fiancée Barbara or the slightly more jaunty, ‘Well, the next bad movie isn’t going (real-life girlfriend ), not least because his obsession to watch itself’. with her angora sweater is getting out of control. The second, Thing is, the family doesn’t mind, especially if I try as much as I less-remembered story is of Alan, who wants to become Anne can not to discuss the films or the arcane trivia I’m learning about

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 56-57 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 58 59

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

them. I mean, who, other than me, really cares that the producer as a giant, with the strength of 20 men. Or … like all the others … of Bigfoot claimed to have been married to Marilyn Monroe and dead!’ And there’s a genuine pathos in Lugosi’s, ‘Home? I have no promulgated the conspiracy theory that she was murdered? home!’ speech — which recreated so beautifully in One thing I can’t stop myself from doing, though, is venturing ’s Ed Wood that he won an Oscar. into every op shop, garage sale and video library I come across, Not all of the film’s failures are Wood’s fault. His investor hoping to find bad movies in the bargain box. And on this visit, coughed up on the condition that his talentless son take the lead I strike gold, scoring a VHS of a movie called Blame It On The role and that the movie end with a , which makes Lambada for $2. This thing is the only film I’ve ever encountered no sense. Critics also take a bit of blame. The Medveds and others with no IMDb listing. And it ‘stars’ Andy Warhol. The temptation claim that Lugosi says of Swedish wrestler ’s hulking to watch it immediately is almost overpowering. But I resist, and Tibetan man-beast Lobo, ‘He’s as harmless as a kitchen’. Funny, adhere to the order of the Bad Movie Bingo. but he line is quite clear and is ‘He’s as harmless as a kitten’. Wood’s 1954 nincompoop noir Jail Bait is less inept than Glen Bride was the last film Wood made with Dolores Fuller. As Or Glenda and much less interesting. The story has Don, a plastic shown in Tim Burton’s biopic, the director relegated his girlfriend surgeon’s son, falling in with mobster Vic and his crowd. Because to a cameo, replacing her with Loretta King, who he mistakenly these dunderheads stop to count their loot during a robbery, thought wanted to invest in the flick. Now in her eighties, Fuller they’re forced to kill a night watchman and a secretary. Don wants was happy to talk to me about her experiences. What I didn’t to confess to the cops so Vic murders him and tricks Don’s dad know, the first time I called her at the Las Vegas home she shares into giving him a new face. with her husband Phil Chamberlin, is that in the past seven years The plastic surgery twist is recycled from 1935’s Let ’Em Have It she has survived two strokes and a devastating car crash. It took a as surely as the maddeningly repetitive score is lifted from 1953’s few calls before she was up to the interview. Mesa Of Lost Women. One-time-only actor Clancy Malone is a A half-century hasn’t dimmed the pain of Wood’s betrayal, a plank as Don, while Dolores Fuller lumbers through her role as she treachery intensified by the fact that Fuller was the first to support did in Glen Or Glenda. But even Edward G. Robinson and Barbara him. ‘I was the only one giving him money,’ she said. ‘I had a home Stanwyck would’ve been hard-pressed to breathe life into the soft- and I gave Eddie a bedroom and an office. I had two TV show jobs boiled dialogue, which, in the words of the film’s doc, ‘couldn’t — Queen For A Day and The Dinah Shore Show — so I had lots of be deader’. money coming in and I was able to help him because I believed Jail Bait features no under-age temptresses — and was originally in him.’ called Hidden Face — but here ‘jail bait’ is what gangsters call When she lost Bride to King, Fuller wasn’t just miffed, she was guns. Likewise, Wood’s 1955 doesn’t feature suicidal. ‘I was mad as hell,’ she said. ‘I got in the car and just drove a marriage between babe and beast. The original title, Bride Of like a maniac through the hills! I didn’t care if I got killed or not. The Atom, made at least a neutrino’s worth of sense. To work a whole year, and to supply the money, and then have the Lugosi is Dr Eric Vornoff, a batshit brainiac trying to create a part that I had studied given to another girl? My God!’ race of supermen with radioactive mumbo jumbo. Yes, it’s sad that Fuller left Wood soon after, finding greener pastures as a the once-great actor has to wrestle himself into the arms of a limp songwriter for , Nelson Riddle and Peggy Lee. But mock-topus, but this also has some intentional humour, as when she has fond memories of Eddie, as she calls him still. She says Lugosi straps down a victim and smirks, ‘You will soon be as big he was funny, busy, a great dancer and she remains amazed at

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 58-59 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 60 61

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

what he could get on screen with the smallest of budgets. As for The scenario is like via The Day the thing, she says she didn’t mind once she found out, and The Earth Stood Still and the awesomeness is in the massive that Eddie and Danny Kaye would sometimes indulge their shared gap between Wood’s ambition and his talent and resources. fetish together. Her one regret is rebuffing Wood’s attempts to The amateurishness is staggering and celebrated. Characters stay friends after they split. ‘I wish I’d stayed closer to him, and not talk across day and night, the cardboard crosses in the tiny set- let him be influenced by liquor,’ she said. ‘He started drinking after bound cemetery wobble and fall over. It’s charitable to describe things went bad.’ hobby kit model saucers as ‘flying’ when ‘bobbing’ will do nicely. Wood wrote 1956’s , directed by veteran Stock footage unspools by the mile, characters are menaced by Hollywood editor William Morgan, and this girl-gang juvenile spotlights, a plane cockpit is famously little more than two chairs, delinquency flick is hysterical, in both senses of the word. a curtain and a boom-mic shadow. From thickly accented Tor The story is a flashback framed around a judge admonishing Johnson on down, no one can act. bad babe Paula’s parents for their neglectful, materialistic ways. Wood’s dialogue has an inane circularity that’s mesmerising. Lack of love, see, bred a girl who led her gang in libidinous pyjama ‘We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are parties, petrol-station robberies, beatings, of unsuspecting going to spend the rest of our lives,’ warns fake psychic Criswell in boys, Commie-inspired vandalism, murder and, finally, jailhouse his introduction. ‘And remember my friends, future events such as pregnancy. these will affect you — in the future.’ ‘These fool kids, when will they learn?’ asks a cop. Character banter maintains the pace. ‘These aren’t kids — they’re morons,’ answers the doctor. Colonel: This is the most fantastic story I’ve ever heard. The Violent Years’ lurid spiral of sensation dressed up as Jeff: And every word of it’s true, too. sanctimony amuses, but it lacks Wood’s personal touch. That’s Colonel: That’s the most fantastic part of it. because he was saving himself for Plan 9 From Outer Space. The The pinnacle of Wood’s folly was that he built Plan 9 around most famous bad movie of all time was shot in 1956, but went snippets he’d shot of Bela Lugosi for another project. After Lugosi without a distributor until 1959. died, Wood used the footage and shot new ‘bridging’ scenes Even having seen Plan 9 twice, I’m still struck anew by the replacing the star with his friend and chiropractor, who looked experience — the true sign of a classic of some sort. The film’s very different and who was considerably taller. Wood thought he’d enduring appeal — and fame — has much to do with its scope: get away with the switcheroo if the stand-in held a cape up to Wood didn’t just make a , he made an alien invasion his face. epic. But Plan 9 does have striking images in proto-Goth Vampira Flying saucers have been buzzing America for months, blasted twitching through the cemetery and a spookily lit Tor Johnson at by the military. The space visitors come in peace and it’s the US rising from his grave. Wood’s subversive ideas also endure. One of government that refuses to communicate — or even acknowledge the most famous lines has Dudley Manlove as alien Eros denouncing their existence. The spacemen are so fed up they’ve instigated Earthlings with, ‘Your stupid minds! Stupid! STUPID!’ because our Plan 9, which revives recently deceased Earthlings and controls all-American, Eisenhower-era lunkhead Jeff has idiotically claimed them via radio. Whatever it takes to get the message across that that a universe-destroying weapon would make the humanity’s on the verge of discovering the Solaranite bomb — which stronger. In Plan 9, it’s America that picks a fight with friendly detonates sunlight itself and will explode the entire universe! visitors and keeps news about alien life from its own citizens. No

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 60-61 13/10/09 12:18:47 PM 62 63

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

wonder that in The X-Files David Duchovny’s Fox Mulder says he’s seen it 42 times, which, as Douglas Adams fans know, makes it the meaning of life. Agent Mulder claims Plan 9 lets his mind shut off so he can make otherwise impossible leaps of logic. One such leap is found in Wood’s next script, 1958’s The Bride And The Beast, written for producer-director Adrian Weiss, cousin of Glen Or Glenda’s producer. This has all-American Dan Fuller’s new bride Laura almost molested by his basement-dwelling pet gorilla Spanky. She’s so traumatised by the event, they go to stock- footage Africa where hypnotism reveals she used to be a gorilla in a past life! The beast-in-the-basement is Freud 101 but it’s daring for 1958 that the hypnosis scene is a thinly disguised depiction of female orgasm, with Wood laughing up his angora sleeve as the Doctor says to Laura that post-trance, ‘You will feel rested, but you will want a cigarette’. Most bizarre is that the film ends with Laura spirited off to live ‘Over stock footage of 1950s American men, in apparent sexual bliss with the ape. From King Kong down, the genre inevitably intimates interspecies sexy times, but it took we’re told that hundreds of thousands of Wood to write one that actually follows through on the love that dare not howl its name. Average Joes wear lingerie beneath their Wood’s slide started with . He wrote suits, which, given rates of cross-dressing and and directed this in 1959 but it didn’t see the light of day in his lifetime because he could never afford to pay the fees owed to the US population at the time, is about right.’ the processing lab. Criswell narrating from a coffin ties this to Glen or Glenda Plan 9 but it’s a sort-of sequel to Bride Of The Monster. There’s an attempt at intentional humour. Wood’s photo adorns the wall of a police station — presumably he’s wanted for something — and, borrowing from Famous Monsters’ founder Forest Ackerman, the fakir’s name is Dr. Acula. But this is still a yawn-worthy mish- mash. The Sinister Urge (1961), the last non-porn movie Wood wrote and directed, has a gang peddling smut to kids, which inspires a maniac to murder models, which inspires the cops to do a drag stake-out. This one sees Wood aware of his own prospects. ‘I look at this slush and try to remember — at one time I made good

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 62-63 13/10/09 12:18:49 PM 64 65

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

movies,’ sighs a director who has succumbed to porn. An office is less cavegirls get tangled up in a virgin sacrifice that involves a decorated with posters for Bride Of The Monster, Jail Bait, Plan 9 sacred spear put where it doesn’t belong. Inside the cave, it’s all and The Violent Years. ‘Those were made by friends of mine,’ says grimy soft-core sex, while outside what is literally a cheap toy a sleazy producer to a naïve ingénue. ‘I think you’ll find my type of dinosaur occasionally munches a Barbie doll cavegirl. picture entirely different.’ This is the tar pit of cinema, worse than anything I’ve seen so I’ve watched these Woods late at night and, despite their far. I give it 10/100. But the hideous occult-sex effort deficiencies, there’s a comforting, nostalgic feeling in these creaky (1971), Wood’s last film as director, is even worse, rating 8/100. B&W cheapies. But the next few nights will feel very different — I only watch the soft-core edit, which is filled with and not in a good way. assiduously licking each other’s bellies, and I can live without the That’s because porn was to be Wood’s future, with few X-rated version. exceptions. The Love Feast, from 1969, is sad for graphically showing how ‘But if you’re not going to consider them as contenders, then far Wood fell. Ten years earlier, he’d been a handsome Errol Flynn why include them?’ asks Clare. lookalike. Here, aged just 45, he has a boozer’s bloated body as It’s not an unreasonable question for my woman to ask as she’s he plays a lank-haired old photographer who hosts an impromptu getting ready for bed — alone again — while I’m preparing to spend orgy. Had Tim Burton recreated this, Ed Wood would’ve taken on a the first of four nights wallowing in sleaze. far more bruised pallor, with a leashed crawling like I tell Clare I want to see them as a bulwark against the easy a dog for women who’ve made him wear lingerie and heels and glamorisation of Wood’s ‘outsider’ life, and as a reminder of lick their boots. his pitiful decline into this sort of dreck, outright alcoholism, To read about Wood — which I have been obsessively these homelessness and early death at 54. past few weeks — is to realise that, despite his terrible decline, I get a hurrumph, a peck on the cheek, a door closed with a he never gave up or stopped working. And not everything he did little more force than needed. I sympathise. For the past nearly was porn. five years, we’ve usually gone to bed at the same time and now the In 1970 one of his monster scripts was produced as The Revenge comfortable routine has been shattered. By decades-old filth. Of Dr X. This has rocket scientist Dr Bragan going on vacation to But the shows must go on and I settle in with a DVD of the Japan, accompanied by his pet carnivorous plant which, via the tastily titled , made in 1965 by director A.C. magic of lightning, he turns into a man-sized monster with a turnip Stephen from Ed Wood’s script. To say Wood ‘wrote’ this is kinda head and limbs that end in oversized flytraps. It’s Frankenstem, misleading because it’s mostly a series of supernatural striptease then, and pretty weak, if not without amusement from Bragan, acts filmed on a graveyard set. Some of are knockouts, who wants to prove ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt that man is but the long dances are so dull the mid 1960s raincoat brigade descended from plant life’. And the line ‘You will become the most must’ve dozed off mid jerk-off. No boners about it: Orgy Of The powerful thing on this universe!’ surely deserves its place in Wood’s Dead is bore-lesque. roster of howlers. But it’s positively charming compared to the next night’s Most of Wood’s writing in the 1970s was for A.C. Stephen’s offering, 1969’s One Million AC/DC, which Wood wrote under the ‘swinging’ flicks but 1974’s Fugitive Girls is an update of the girl- pseudonym Akdov Telmig — ‘vodka gimlet’, his favourite drink, gang theme of The Violent Years. Five prison-farm escapees roam spelt backwards. The new grimness announces itself when top­ the countryside, steal cars, beat up bikers and bicker a lot. There’s

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 64-65 13/10/09 12:18:49 PM 66 67

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

a lot of gratuitous nudity as the girls strip to don rags — and down $1000 a day for such appearances. While I’ve often second- then take them off again because they’re lice-ridden — and rape guessed abandoning my budding computing career, this is the first any men or women they come across. time I’ve thought I might’ve been better off as another species. Fugitive Girls also marks Wood’s last screen appearance. He These strands — the Bill Gates life that could’ve been, the grand at least avoids Love Feast-level degradation as Pop, the doddery a day made by that damned dirty ape, and the elusiveness of a old caretaker of an airfield. Fittingly, though, Wood scripts his greenlit script — become even more depressing when I have to character as a pure nincompoop who calls the sheriff (also Wood) bump up my Visa card limit to make ends meet. That I immediately to report the girls while a) three feet from them and b) muttering spend some of these borrowed funds on more bad movies just his intention loudly. It doesn’t work out well for him. makes me worry about my mental health. But, after this week’s late-night grindhouse marathon, I’ve now got a day off work, leaving the night free for quality time with Clare. With Ava down for her nap, I say, ‘I gotta watch a movie. DEL’S DEADLY DOUBLE I can do it in the bedroom if you like.’ Out in the real world, US film magazine Premiere ‘migrates’ to an ‘No, it’s okay,’ says Clare. ‘Just not too loud.’ She’s on the couch, internet-only version and I wonder how long Empire has left. I hear reading a mystery novel. the phrase ‘dead tree format’ bandied about and it’s rumoured our Yesterday morning, after Fugitive Girls ran me past midnight, and company is to be sold. before work started, I watched Bloodbath, the debut from It’s in uncertain times like these that I reflect on my parallel Connecticut-based filmmaker Del Tenney. The movie was made existence. Cue swirly flashback to my summer holidays in 1984 in 1964 but remained unreleased until 1970 when appropriately when, hunched over my new VIC-20 computer, I taught myself named distributor Jerry Gross acquired it and retitled it I Eat Your BASIC and invented a bunch of games that’d fit on the machine’s Skin so it could play more comfortably on a double bill with his measly 3.5KB of memory. My creations were little rip-offs of own production I Drink Your Blood. arcade titles like Tron and Q*Bert but they were pretty good for Under either lurid title, it’s a clunker. Our hero is novelist Tom a kid. For a while, I sold them (stored on audiotapes; we’re really Harris (sadly, not Hannibal Lecter’s creator) who visits Voodoo talking the Dark Ages here) via newspaper classifieds and made a Island, home of venomous snakes and voodoo zombies, because couple of hundred bucks. My interest soon waned, replaced by a the babe-to-dude ratio is five-to-one. ‘Virgin natives just waiting gnawing desire to be more integrated with my pot-smoking, girl- for some sophisticated swinger like you to come along and pluck chasing peers. But … but … if only I’d kept going, I might now be a them off their tropical vines,’ is how his publisher sells it. Once there, billionaire IT geek with my own private island staffed by an army Tom falls for scientist Dr Biladeau’s comely white daughter Jeannie. of robot monkeys. Shame her virginal status means she’s marked for sacrifice by the My place in the salaried universe — not to mention advances natives. Even more of a shame that supposed stud Tom can’t think in profitable gaming technology and the value of our primate of how he might make her less appealing to the tribe. Meanwhile, a cousins — became clearer today when Empire’s stablemate men’s six-strong army of porridge-faced zombies lumber around, created magazine Zoo performs a stunt in which a rhesus macaque takes by the Doc’s attempts to cure cancer using snake venom. on an editor in a PlayStation 3 competition. The little monkey is Now it’s time for Del’s second and more famous work, The Horror as cute as a button but I want to weep when I’m told he pulls Of Party Beach, also from 1964. This has distant cousins of Jar Jar

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 66-67 13/10/09 12:18:49 PM 68 69

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

Binks invading the natural habitat of himbos and bimbos whose film ever made — so I’ll have to include it on the still-growing list. mating ritual involves gyrating to surf-guitar band The Del-Aires. But she doesn’t mind, and is similarly happy to lament with me The comedy is deliberate if woeful, as when a jock ogles a jiggling the rash of remakes — Piranha and Escape From New York being butt and is inspired to ask: ‘Hey, that reminds me — did I bring my this week’s victims. The conversation rambles beautifully away hot dog buns?’ The special effects and make-up are dodgy but no from movies, though, from Ava’s newfound ability to point to her matter because the monsters are still very good at killing female uni ears-nose-mouth to the Sydney Harbour Bridge’s 75th anniversary students. Or, as a TV anchor reports it: ‘Rumours of an invasion from celebrations. Later, we taxi home and tumble into bed. This is how it the sea took on a new dimension last night when over 20 teenage used to be, before Ava, before Bad Movie Bingo. Not that I’d change girls were brutally attacked and murdered during a slumber party.’ things, of course, but it’s a nice night of just the two of us. You don’t hear that every day on The Today Show. The discordant music and minor gore gets under Clare’s skin. ‘This isn’t very relaxing,’ she says. ‘And there’s no plot.’ ‘Yes there is,’ I reply, more engrossed than I care to admit. ‘Sea THE CURIOUS CASE OF monsters are eating people — that’s more plot than Babel.’ I’m at Empire, helping to write a story on ‘The 100 Greatest Movies Clare takes Ruth Rendell into the backyard. Of All Time’, when the phone rings. On the other end is Jimmy If she’d stuck around, she’d have seen I was right; the sea Foggo from Fremantle Media and he’s asking me to audition for a monsters aren’t just bloodthirsty, they’re horny. So much so that new version of The Movie Show, Australia’s most respected film TV one severs an arm smashing a shop window trying to get at a program, made famous by ‘David and Margaret’, as they’re known mannequin. I s’pose we’ve all been there. Anyway, the discarded far and wide. Jimmy asks if I’m doing anything other than Empire. I limb is subjected to science that reveals the creatures are sea mention my sideline as weekly film reviewer on Virginia Trioli’s ABC anemones that need our blood to survive. And they’re human radio program. I don’t say anything about my self-imposed regime bodies kept alive by radioactive decay. Thus: of sea monsters, cross-dressers and African-American Nazis. Elaine: They are the living dead? They’re zombies! I am going to audition. But I am not going to get all excited Gavin: Nothing so dramatic as that, Elaine. They’re more like because last year I tried out for such a gig and it went nowhere. a jellyfish. That call came from a cable movie channel looking for a presenter. Radioactive zombie jellyfish? The question is then, why do they I was assigned Dressed To Kill and I honed a pretty decent review. look so amphibian? But my preparation was no match for being slathered with make- To make up for the week of relationship neglect, We drop Ava up, propped in front of blazing lights and asked to deliver my off at her aunty Sarah’s place so she can have a sleep over with spiel from autocue as I tried to follow the red light from camera her three rambunctious cousins. I then take Clare on an afternoon to camera. I wasn’t an unmitigated disaster but my performance date … to the movies. That’s the bizarre thing about being a critic; belonged in an Ed Wood ensemble. when it’s time to relax from work, you tend to still go see a film. My other TV misadventure was a two-show stint as fill-in In this case, it’s David Fincher’s Zodiac, and it’s brilliant, providing reviewer on Sunrise. The first week my mouth turned into the Gobi plenty for us to chew on when we have a Mexican restaurant feast Desert and I turned to the wrong camera, so that the back of my that night. Of course, I can’t help but tell Clare about my bad-movie head rasped most of a critique before I saw the floor manager news — reckon Ballistic: Ecks Vs Sever is the worst frantically waving me to the right lens. Happily, this went out live.

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 68-69 13/10/09 12:18:49 PM 70 71

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

In his massive, essential two-volume history of sci-fi movies from 1950–1962, Keep Watching The Skies!: Amazingly, they had me back and this time I at least looked in the American Movies Of The Fifties right direction and spoke intelligibly. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t asked (McFarland Classics), Bill Warren lists hundreds to join the ‘family’ of regular presenters. I figured my status was of genre flicks that were announced by Forrest J. more that of a mildly brain-damaged exchange student. Ackerman in the pages of Imaginative Tales but that Oddly, I’m finding that the Bad Movie Bingo is a great aid never eventuated. for focusing the mind away from day-to-day worries and when I get home and spin it and it comes up with the bad flicks of I wish the world had seen: Canadian director Bob Clark, all thoughts of what I’ll say or wear to the audition in a few weeks vanish as the schlock-obsession Blood Of The Beast Men reasserts its grip. Crustaceans From Space As of today, Bob Clark has three movies in the IMDb’s bottom The Day The Earth Went Out Of Its Mind 100. I suspect it’d be four if more people had voted on . What sets him apart from other hacks is that he’s also made Frankenstein From Space some bona-fide hits. Clark scored a $100m+ success with 1982’s The Great Green Og Porky’s, originated the modern slasher film in 1974’sBlack Christmas The Nomoglod and, at the other end of the seasonal-holiday spectrum, created Atomic Cannibal 1983’s classic, . When I spoke to the amiable Chookna — the Beast From World’s End director last year, about the DVD release of Black Christmas, he was brimming with good cheer, and not at all offended when I Cowboy From Outer Space probed about some of his less-regarded movies. The Crazy Quilt Terror I asked him if he regretted giving the world the utterly reviled The Giant Sloth and its sequel SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2. ‘Not The Hideous Rock ’n’ Roll Creature at all,’ he laughed. ‘Baby Geniuses is not a great movie, but it had Martian Frankenstein some charm and heart that most people don’t give it credit for. The second one, well, it wasn’t as good but it doesn’t deserve everything that’s heaped on it. I have no apologies to make.’ I hadn’t seen either at the time so I wasn’t able to decide if Clark was defending babies that only a parent could love. But I now wish I’d quizzed the man about his The Karate Dog. And about his first bad movie, 1984’s Rhinestone, the cowboy musical comedy that paired Dolly Parton and Sylvester Stallone. I make a note to drop him an email. When I sit down to watch Rhinestone, I am joined by Clare and Ava. It’s our first Bad Movie family event and I’m quietly thrilled we’re sharing the silliness for once. Clare loves Dolly, and is glad this isn’t another crappy horror.

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 70-71 13/10/09 12:18:50 PM 72 73

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

Ava, meanwhile, misinterprets the TV being switched on as her atypical. Almost overnight, she has acquired a vocabulary. There’s getting to watch Dora The Explorer. No such luck, kiddo. But even Daddy and Mummy, car and bus, cat and backpack and map, pig, Dora might be preferable to Rhinestone. Parton is Jake, an affable bear and Tigger. ‘Uppie!’ means ‘Pick me up, goddamnit!’ while gal with a good set of lungs, who’s stuck singing in a Manhattan ‘Go-go!’ is ‘Give me some yoghurt, goddamnit!’ cowboy dive called Rhinestone. To get out from under her sleazy Being so advanced, and given she’s demonstrated a fondness boss, she makes a bet that she can turn the next Average Joe into for snippets of Clark’s work, I figure she might likeBaby Geniuses. a C&W warbler good enough to win over the bar’s tough crowd. This 1999 turkey begins with Clark taking a dig at his Rhinestone Stallone’s loudmouthed Noo York cabbie Nick screeches in from star by naming the nappy-wearing hero Sly and having him bash stage right. Thus begins cinema’s biggest match-up of big hair on a piano as he wails like a cat passing a gallstone. This obscure and bigger chests. In his unauthorized biography, Smart Blonde: in-joke — likely apparent to only someone who watches the movies The Life Of Dolly Parton, author Stephen Miller reports: ‘It was back to back, i.e. me — is as funny as it gets. rumored that originally the film was to have a sequence featuring The plot has Sly and his brother Whit overthrowing sinister Dolly dancing cheek to cheek with Sly, but this was ruled out on the BabyCo. Sly and Whit may be their names, but sly wit is what grounds that it was “a physical impossibility”.’ That’s not to say we Baby Geniuses most lacks. There are lots of CG-enhanced babies go without seductive moments, as when she purrs to him: ‘Perfect wisecracking about ‘diaper gravy’ and doing dress-up-and-dance timing, perfect body.’ It’s a wonderful line, no doubt penned by Sly montages. Even queasier are moments of sexual innuendo. When who co-wrote the screenplay. Sly tells a baby girl to take her clothes off, she flirts with, ‘Okay, Dolly is no actress but she has a breezy charm. Any light slick, but at least you could take me to dinner first’. comic potential is however stomped to death by Stallone’s brutal Ava doesn’t watch it much, devoting her energies to pulling the mumbling and mugging. If you’ve ever seen a four-year-old loaded nose off a teddy bear. But I do notice Clare has put her book down up on sugar showing off obnoxiously with a toy piano then you still and is amused by babies recycling one-liners from Jerry Maguire can’t imagine Sly attacking a keyboard, arms flailing as he screams and Austin Powers. ‘Tutti Frutti’. It’s one of the most infernal scenes I’ve subjected ‘Did you like that?’ I ask her as the movie ends on a package of myself to. His ‘Drinkenstein’s up there, too. ‘highlights’. Rhinestone may be ear-splitting but it’s also eye-melting. ‘I thought the babies were cute,’ she says. ‘Oh my God!’ Clare screams. ‘Look at that outfit!’ ‘I liked the bit where punched Kathleen Turner in ‘Which one?’ I ask. the face,’ I say. I tally up my score for this one — 28/100, three less In this one frame, Dolly wears a skin-tight musk and cerulean than Rhinestone. jumpsuit while Sly’s in a sportscoat with rolled-up sleeves and ‘Ah, doo, ree, or, ai, ik,’ chimes in Ava. a nineteenth-century bow tie. The worst-best comes last, when We turn. Our child sits on the couch, putting crayons into a tin he rides an electrically lit horse through Times Square dressed one by one. as Freddie Mercury might have — had NASA asked him lead an ‘I think she’s counting,’ says Clare, a mad gleam in her eye. expedition to Alpha Centauri. Ava doles the crayons back out of the box carefully. ‘Ah, doo, ‘Orse! Orse!’ screams Ava, jumping up and down on the couch. ree, or, ai, ik.’ Ah, my baby’s first bad movie. ‘She is!’ beams Clare. Ava’s commentary on the equine ending to Rhinestone isn’t It does seem like Ava has suddenly become numerate.

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 72-73 13/10/09 12:18:50 PM 74 75

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

‘Either Baby Geniuses has super-advanced her,’ I say, ‘or it’s played by go-to Oriental Pat Morita. Cho-Cho teams up with a geek made us so dumb we’re hearing things.’ cop named Fowler and together they bring down ’s Time to test this startling milestone. I crouch down and assemble industrial maniac who’s bent on creating an eternal life superfood. the crayons. I hand an orange one to Ava. Jokes include Cho-Cho using a radio-mic hookup to help Fowler ‘One?’ I say. romance a beat-cop babe in an excruciating riff on Cyrano de She takes it, considers it, and sticks it in her mouth. Bergerac and a bunch of dud pop culture jokes recycled from Hmmmm. Baby Geniuses. It’s the cast that makes me wonder about this biz called show. Chevy Chase must’ve wondered how he went from co-starring In an ideal world, Ava would watch SuperBabies and move straight with Benji in 1980’s Oh Heavenly Dog to voicing a dog in this to algebra. But the fruit of my loins has the attention span of a fruit dog. Voight produced on Baby Geniuses and Karate Dog but still fly, so I watch this at night, when I’m stricken with insomnia, and I gave himself scenes in which he’s covered in pustules or fights can recommend it as a cure for sleeplessness. computer-generated Cho-Cho that surely made him long for the The movie is about a superbaby named Kahuna who drinks simple dignity of being regurgitated by a snake in Anaconda. green fluoro formula that gives him anti-gravity powers, CGI As the love interest, Jaime Pressly is asked to play it straight — muscles and the ability to beat up adults while making Three not her strength — and in one supposedly reverent scene she’s Stooges noises. His nemesis is Jon Voight’s megalomaniac Kane, chewing gum as a measure of her disdain. Simon Rex, who plays who’s set on world domination through children’s TV. Fowler, tries harder but he and Pressly have no chemistry — even Voight’s performance is not recommended for observant Jews though they co-starred in the sitcom Jack & Jill and dated in real or Muslims, as he rambles in a thick East German accent that ‘ze life. What’s astounding to me is that Rex’s career began with solo mind control impulse vill come su ze character of Modest ze Frog!’ jerk-off scenes in gay hardcore movies like Young, Hard And Solo As a movie about the mind-rotting effects of cynically contrived #3 and Hot Sessions 12 and he still managed to work his way children’s media, SuperBabies is a terrific example of the mind- down from there. Even so, I prefer this gang — 29/100 — to the rotting effects of cynically contrived children’s media. wisecracking babies. It’s a 22/100. I hope Ava will watch 2004’s The Karate Dog. It’s about a dog. Who does karate. I put it on. ‘Dora!’ she demands. ‘No, Karate Dog,’ I reply. SILENTS, NOT GOLDEN ‘Dora! Dora! Dora!’ she screams. It’s audition day for The Movie Show. I awake at eight, have a ‘Karate Dog!’ shower, and, wrapped in a towel, rehearse reviews of Rocky Balboa ‘Dora! Dora! Dora!’ and Dreamgirls into the blurry video function of our digital camera. It’s like a stand-off with a small, nappy-wearing Japanese And try not to think about this footage ever leaking out, Simon general ordering the attack on Pearl Harbor. I win only because I Rex-style. know how to work the remote control. She toddles off. When I arrive at Fremantle Media, I’m ushered into a tiny office. Cho-Cho is a high-kicking, talking mutt made out of computer There are no scorching lights, make-up or teleprompter, just three pixels who’s trying to solve the murder of his beloved Zen Master, relaxed chatty gents sitting opposite me. They ask about me and

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 74-75 13/10/09 12:18:50 PM 76 77

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

I tell them about Empire, the radio gig, general film fandom and The other papa of the flickers was Louis Le Prince. His 1888 — God help me — my bad-movie odyssey. I offer way too much Roundhay Garden Scene, a few seconds of Victorian folks walking information about SuperBabies. Happily, they think this is funny, on a lawn, is the earliest surviving motion recorded on film. That Le rather than indicative of deep personality dysfunction. Prince disappeared on his way from Dijon to Paris in 1890, shortly The guys ask me to do my sample reviews into a simple before he was due to unveil his new invention, a movie camera, camcorder. For the next four minutes, it’s like I’m channelling a surely gives Dan Brown the plot for his next novel. higher power. A higher power who doesn’t stumble over words, And so Thomas Alva Edison was left to be credited as the um and ah, and go off on tangents. They say they’ll be in touch. father of the flickers, even though his three-second 1891 Dickson Greeting, the first publicly exhibited film, was directed by, produced by and starred William Dickson, who greets us as he flourishes a After all that talk, the Bad Movie Bingo decides I need a vow of straw hat. In 1894, things took a turn for the druggy with the first silents. So begins three late-night marathons of short films made copyrighted film, the five-second Fred Ott’s Sneeze showing the before the sound era. Given most are lost, there’s no way to Edison employee having a nostril eruption after taking a pinch of present any comprehensive study of what sucked hardest in the snuff. Edison’s minions then made shorts about men boxing, cats early days of cinema, and their style defies comparison with the boxing, a flexing strongman, Annie Oakley firing her rifle, a beauty talkies anyway. My aim is merely to sample pioneering efforts to doing a butterfly dance and a tasty recreation of the beheading of see which of the elements we associate with bad movies were Mary, Queen Of Scots. Thus were set the priorities of cinema: high present when it all began. The answer is: all of them. But I can give times, fistfights, novelty animals, musclebound dudes, chicks with these guys a break: they were just trying to turn a buck as they guns, exotic dance routines and gory girl deaths. inadvertently created the ultimate art form. Edison added porn to the repertoire with 1896’s 47-second The The first person to capture photographic motion was Kiss, directed by William Heise. Actors May Irwin and John C. Rice Eadweard Muybridge and he was eccentric enough to make recreating their already controversial stage pucker for the camera subsequent movie moguls look smaller than life. His debut was a scandal and Chicago editor Herbert Stone thundered: project, commenced in 1872, was to make a series of rapid-fire ‘Neither participant is physically attractive and the spectacle of photos of a galloping horse. The production took six years and their prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was hard to bear went hugely over budget, making him the James Cameron of his when only life size but magnified to gargantuan proportions and day. It was also interrupted in 1874–5 when Muybridge murdered repeated three times over is absolutely disgusting! Such things call his wife’s lover — a theatre reviewer — and had to go through for police intervention.’ Mimeograph Ye Rotten Tomatoes recorded the inconvenience of getting a jury to acquit. But when finished, its first ‘100% Rotten’. Muybridge’s The Horse In Motion was a sensation and settled Over the next decade, Edison blazed an exploitation trail. He forever the question of whether all four hooves leave the turf pitted teenage sorority girls against each other in a nighttime at the same time. (Spoiler: They do.) Muybridge then turned his pillow fight. He made blaxploitation with two African-Americans forerunner of the movie camera on naked ladies hopping across having a watermelon-eating contest. Recreations of Spanish rocks or descending staircases. Before long, people started to soldiers executing Cuban prisoners offered ‘real life’ death thrills. suspect that he’d exhausted the scientific value of his ‘movement The disaster film came into its own with Galveston flattened studies’ and was just a horny old hound. by a storm surge of 1900. Then, like today, Edison did remakes,

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 76-77 13/10/09 12:18:50 PM 78 79

SHOWGIRLS, TEEN WOLVES AND ASTRO ZOMBIES MARCH

‘reimaging’ The Kiss in 1900, with younger, more attractive lovers STATUS REPORT who sucked face longer. Worst but disqualified as porn: One Million AC/DC, Love Feast, But Edison’s literally most shocking exploitation of the medium Necromania was 1903’s Electrocuting An Elephant. Topsy was a star attraction at Worst this month: Super Babies: Baby Geniuses 2 Coney Island but since the turn of the century had killed three men. This month’s runners-up: Jail Bait, Her last victim was an abusive trainer who fed her a lit cigarette. Guiltiest pleasures: Glen Or Glenda, Plant Nevertheless it was decided Topsy had to die. Edison volunteered Movies watched: 91 to fry her — and filmed the execution as a negative ad exposing the danger of competitor George Washington’s alternating current. The sequence, showing the three-ton pachyderm billowing steam before she topples over, remains harrowing a century later. In France, the Lumière brothers filmed workers leaving their factory, a baby getting fed and a wall being demolished. It’s the fascinated-with-the-medium stuff of YouTube. The Lumières hit gold, and accidentally anticipated the 3-D craze, with footage of a train arriving at a station, which had 1895 audiences ducking and screaming in terror. Georges Méliès took moviegoers on the seminal sci-fi A Trip To The Moon in 1902 but he also loved dismemberment gimmicks with 1902’s Sure Cure For Indigestion showing a doctor slicing a patient up and stitching the limbs back in the wrong places, while 1904’s Decapitation In Turkey saw four heads sliced off with one swoosh of a scimitar. Brits were in on the act, too. Cecil Hepworth’s 1900 Explosion Of A Motor Car has an auto inferno causing bits of burned body to rain down on a street, while G.A. Smith’s 1903 lark Mary Jane’s Mishap has a maid’s blown-apart body fragments collected for a tombstone that reads ‘Rest In Pieces’. And when, half a world away from New Jersey, Paris and London, the first-ever feature film, Australia’s 1906 bushranger tale The Story Of The Kelly Gang, was released, well, critics were almost as dismissive as Stone had been about The Kiss. The Bulletin, for instance, derided it as merely ‘twopenny-coloured melodrama’. To some grumps, the first movies were ‘bad movies’.

SGTWAZ_March 3pp.indd 78-79 13/10/09 12:18:50 PM