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FunHouse the cyberzine of degenerate pop culture vol. 1 no. 3
FUNHOUSE!
The cyberzine of degenerate pop culture
vol. 1 - no. 3; December 29, 1993
Released on Barbara Steele's 56th birthday
editor: Jeff Dove (jeffdove@well.sf.ca.us)
This issue is dedicated to Frank Zappa. He fought for your freedom whether
you know it or not.
<Note: written on a Macintosh text editor, line feeds are on. Display in
nine point monaco font.>
FUNHOUSE! is dedicated to whatever happens to be on my mind at the time
that I'm writing. The focus will tend to be on those aspects of our
fun filled world which aren't given the attention of the bland traditional
media, or which have been woefully misinterpreted or misdiagnosed by the
same. FUNHOUSE! is basically a happy place, and thus the only real
criteria I will try to meet is to refrain from rants, personal attacks,
and flames - and thus FUNHOUSE! is an apolitical place. Offbeat films,
music, literature, and experiences are largely covered, with the one
stipulation being that articles are attempted to be detailed and well
documented, although this is no guarantee of completeness or correctness,
so that the interested reader may further pursue something which may spark
her interest. Correspondence and contributions are thus encouraged, and
any letters will by printed in future issues. Please send a short message
to the above address, and arrangements will be made for the submission of
larger items. The only other item is that FUNHOUSE! is Free-Free-
Freeware! PLEASE copy and distribute as you wish, however please do not
alter any text. I will be happy to try to clarify anything contained
herein, and to provide additional information if I can, so don't hesitate
to contact me.
Table of Contents:
* Letters, Commentary, and Other Stuff You'll Probably Skip Over
* Three Italian Masters: Mario Bava, Sergio Leone, and Dario Argento
Defy Hollywood Conventions. The Critics Balk! Part 1 - Bava
* A Parliafunkadelicment Thang - FUNHOUSE! Evaluates the Albums of
Funkadelic
* The Original KISS Rate Their Own Records - Read What the World's
Richest Cartoon Characters Think of Themselves
* REVIEWS - Zines, Books, Records, and Live Shows
Letters, Commentary, and Other Stuff...
---------------------------------------
Whew, it's been a long time since number two! Numbers three and four will
thus come out rather close together and will serve as a double issue. Our
Italian Masters article begins here with King Mario Bava, and part two next
time will pick it up with Dario Argento. The review section is likewise
split, with printed matter being covered now and recorded materials being
the dominant items the next time around.
First off a big thanks to Jon Labovitz and his e-zine list, and Jason Snell
at InterText for the publicity they've given this cyberzine. Has anyone
caught the show "Drive-In Reviews" on Comedy Central? (It airs Sundays at
midnight here on the west coast.) Two knuckle heads watch slasher and gore
flicks while commenting sarcastically over them MST3K style. One show I saw
had a "family" theme in which a crazed member tortured and hacked up the
others. While knives and hatchets were being buried into bodies and guts
and blood were spilling, what appeared to be the word "shit" was bleeped
out. Censorship works in weird ways. As this show is a product of the need
to fill air time at the present number of channels, I can't wait for what
will occupy space in the expanded future. Last issue we picked on Mr. Paul
McCartney in this forum for his fascist tactics, and in this issue the
target is a far more obvious villain of the corporate rock world - MTV. I
know those wannabe hipsters are an easy target, but something I came across
concerning them, Nirvana, and the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards deserves
comment. (In "The Dark Side of Innocence: Nirvana and the Rise of the
Seattle Sound" by Gillian G. Gaar in Goldmine, Vol. 19, No. 25, Issue 349,
Dec. 10, 1993 - a pretty good overview of the band's career and recording
history. Fans are recommended to check it out.) It is reported that the MTV
suits wanted Nirvana to perform the song "Lithium" live on the broadcast,
while the band wanted to do "Rape Me". When told it had to be "Lithium" they
were set to walk out, until being informed that if they didn't stay and do
the desired performance that not only would Nirvana never again be played
on MTV, but any bands on their record label (DGC) and with their management
company (Gold Mountain) might also have trouble finding a place on the channel.
Nirvana gave in and coercion is seen to still work. Mojo Nixon had it right
about Music Television until he $old out to them. Guns and Roses should
also note that the inclusion of a Charly Manson composition unlisted on the
end of their Spaghetti Incident album, generating controversy (and record
sales) for themselves, is not without precedent. Red Cross (now Redd Kross
- more in a future FUNHOUSE!) included Manson's "Cease to Exist" unlisted at
the end of their 1982 Born Innocent record. You can hear The Beach Boys
perform this one, if you care to, under the title "Never Learn Not To Love"
where the words were altered to "cease to resist". Look for the hard copy
Clash / Davie Allen and the Arrows complete and illustrated double
discography in 1994 from FUNHOUSE! publications. Clash fans with knowledge
of oddities, promotional items, and uncommon picture sleeves are encouraged
to contact me with your information about them at the email address above.
I could also use a copy of the soundtrack album to the film KILLERS THREE.
Credit will be given for any contributions in the finished work. Look for
periodic postings of the Clash discography that I have as it grows in the
newsgroups alt.music.punk, alt.music.alternative, alt.music.rock-and-roll,
and alt.music.marketplace.
How much credibility does the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have when they
overlook The Velvet Underground and The Mothers of Invention and induct The
Grateful Dead?
Don't ever go to see a band where the cost of admission exceeds the cost of
their latest record (unless it's The Ramones).
***********************************
I really enjoyed reading Funhouse... Here's a spelling tip (which I send
'cuz it drove me nuts to see it repeated): "allot" means to 'assign a share
or portion', while "a lot" (two words!) means 'a large amount'.
Eli Messinger
tekbspa!ebm@uunet.uu.net
***********************************
I've enjoyed your FUNHOUSE! muchly and have distributed it to a couple of
pop-culture fans. I found great writing and amazing research.
May I offer a suggestion? Your apostrophes need cleaning up.
The most common problem I spotted was the confusion between the "it's"
contraction and the "its" posessive. It's useful to remember that "it's"
means "it is".
Some other occasional problems I spotted:
1> to the source. Russ' style is one of the most uniquely
Singular nouns, even proper names, always almost take "'s" as their
posessive. See Chicago Manual of Style for exceptions.
2> as I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE or PINK FLAMINGO'S, when they tell you
These are wrong unless the movie is about something that belongs
to a pink flamingo.
[I realize this is wrong - I just missed it. -JD]
3> run posing as a cop. Alaina's got nothing but insults
As a contraction this is OK, but you should be aware that it resolves to
"Alaina has got nothing ... ", which is gramatically "casual" or else
"Alaina is got nothing ..."
4> come-on's, she refuses to provide his alibi. Clint is picked
5> sound allot like some of the contemporary Ziggy LP's. A good intro
6> Released on the day of George Clinton's 53'rd birthday.
7> Also look for Russ' cameo as the video store clerk in the late-80's
Abbreviations may use apostrophe in a plural if it avoids the confusion of
simply ending with "s". Numbers shouldn't need to do so.
So "come-on's" is probably OK because the idiom is "come-on", and "come-ons"
would look unfamiliar and thus not work. But, for example, you'd get into
trouble with "hard-on's", right? What does it mean?
And "Ziggy LP's" is still OK because there was a time when people might have
wondered what was an "LPs" (as with TVs, VCRs, MUXs, etc.) and so the "LP's"
form has become sort of traditional.
The "late-80's" is probably not OK. To justify it, you'd have to claim that
it prevents reader from thinking, for example, that you're talking about a
soviet missle no longer in production (e.g., "The late 80s was planned for
submarine use...").
And "53'rd" is just plain bad befuddlement. There is no "s" in sight to get
confused over! The structures, "1st", "2nd", ... "87th" ... are quite
traditional and accepted.
8> out on tape was the edited version, however Something Weird's is
Running uncontrolled here, I think. This resolves to "Something Weird is is
the ..."
============================================================================
The apostrophe has become a "thing" with me. I've been seeing more and more
of them in places they shouldn't be. Thanks for your patience if you've read
this far.
============================================================================
Thanks again for your 'zine.
George Klima
klima@vnet.ibm.com
***********************************
Although I didn't have time to read the whole of both of them, I did
get my interest piqued in Russ Meyer. Your Lou Reed reviews were excellent
although I beg to differ with your dismissal of "Magic and Loss". I felt
that it was one of Lou's most compelling works overall. There isn't much
music out there with that much soul and feel.
Thanks for the review of Neil Young because I'll be seeing him on the 25th
w/ Blind Melon and Dinosaur Jr. (and of course the most excellent MGs).
FUNHOUSE! is the zine I'd like Trigger Cut to become if I had more time.
Mike Jordan
goo@pwrtools.wariat.org
[call up Mike at The Last Stand BBS at 216-228-0462]
***********************************
I've very much enjoyed reading both issues of Funhouse!, especially the
articles on Meyer and the biker movies. Both are topics of particular
interest for me (a note: though I find most of Meyer enormously interesting
from a historical and technical viewpoint, the only one of his movies that I
can say I'm a genuine fan of is "Faster, Pussycat!", which is a _wonderful_
work. [A couple of weekends ago, I rented Mikel's "The Astro-Zombies" and
"The Doll Squad", just to see Tura Satana again...)
I ran across a fairly serious (though quite funny) goof in your listing of
"Additional biker genre titles":
"Where Angels Go... Trouble Follows!" (1968) is, ahem, not really a biker
movie, though it would be entertaining to remake it within that genre. It's
a sequel to the 1966 "The Trouble With Angels" (starring Ida Lupino,
Rosalind Russell, Hayley Mills, etc.). Both are about (very) mildly comic
goings-on at a convent school: the girls driving mother superior Russell to
distraction with their wacky adolescent excesses. The sequel stars Russell,
Stella Stevens, don't think Hayley is in it, with guest shots by Milton
Berle, Van Johnson. I saw it once on a late-night movie show: I recall that
the girls go on some kind of road trip (in a bus, not on bikes). There's a
lot of singing (including a zippy title song, the chorus of which is oft
repeated as a bridge between the episodic turns in the plot), and Stevens
plays a young, hip nun who's confused about her commitment to the Church.
Terry
tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu
[whoops! -JD]
***********************************
I like the FUNHOUSE! but try to be sensitive to your women readers, most of
whom are rather disgusted by pornography, and the exploitation of women,
strong characters or not. We like to be thought of a more than a pair of
mammary glands. _Very_ itchy subject. If he picked his actresses on the
basis of their breasts, then he was interested in his hormones and in money,
not art, and definitely not in a positive portrayal of women. I'm not
suggesting censorship on your part, but perhaps a little consideration.
Thanks,
Sarah Aist
sa930211mcis@messiah.edu
***********************************
Well thank you for causing me to miss class. OK that's mis-directed blame,
it is my fault, but the Meyer piece had me glued in place... Funhouse is my
favorite pinball game. "Go get yourself a hot dog"
just another bloodthirsty spectator,
julie atomic
shapiroj@ucsu.colorado.edu
[julie publishes the wonderfully distasteful Seduction of the Innocent (which
is much more interesting than the 1950's censorship tirade of the same name)
and adds...]
I've been enjoying the J. Kevorkian soap opera and am considering putting
together a sticker pack dedicated to the man. (I've been combating
insomnia at Kinkos creating "Atomic Stickers" with themes like Women In
Prison, Woody Allen, Violent Crime Statistics, The College Scene (1967),
Classic Sitcoms, etc...)
[for SOTI or these other fine products, "send a buck or two to cover
shipping costs" to Julie Atomic/2010 19th st./Boulder, CO/80302. When in SF
you can play Funhouse pinball at The 500 Club on Guerrero and 17th st. -JD]
***********************************
I noticed in your Boxoffice Int'l (BI) roundup that the Novak-sponsored
films of the 70s were not discussed in much detail. I assumed you simply
hadn't gotten to them yet and would review them soon. As an aside, I've seen
a few of them in their pre-Something Weird versions and so here come some
unsolicited ramblings about them. . . First, I seem to recall that the BI
films were always kind of "knocking around" theaters, and even the titles
from the 60s would pop up unexpectedly years later to round out the lower
half of a "fleahouse" double-bill. For example, I say "The Toy Box" on the
bottom of a triple-bill at the now-defunct Airport Drive-in in Oakland (CA)
in 1977. "Axe" (which is now out on video under a number of monikers) was at
the Concord Drive-In (Concord, NH, where I moved to in 1981) as late as
1982.
The Toy Box (1971) <SW> -- Reminded me of those Doris Wishman films, where
the words didn't quite match the movements made by the mouths, and there's
no story. My memory is hazy, but it's mostly a softcore porn flick with a
subplot involving aliens that eat people's brains. A lot of people sitting
around on couches; the only jolt in the film is a cutaway to a decapitated
corpse -- sitting on a couch, of course -- my notes say that it looked like
the actress pulled her sweater up and leaned her head back over the side of
the couch to get the shot.
I Drink Your Blood (1971) <SW> -- Is this the David E. Durston film? If so,
Jerry Gross' Cinemation was the distributor and it played nationally on a
double-bill with "I Eat Your Skin" (aka "Zombies," another transplant from
the 60s).
The Mad Butcher (1972) -- This one, if it's the one I'm thinking of -- a
German-made version of "Sweeney Todd," with Victor Buono -- is in one of
those Continental Video packages that sit gathering dust on many video store
shelves. I recall that Buono is good, but that it's an Edgar Wallace-type
murder mystery with slasher overtones.
Frankenstein's Castle of Freaks (1973) -- An embarrassment for Rossano
Brazzi, Michael Dunn. The video version I saw was stickered PG but there's a
lot of skin in this opus.
Caged Virgins aka Dungeon of Terror (1971) -- Jean Rollin? If not, I think
this was a French import. (Again, I'm not close to my handy ref books)
[aka Requiem pour un Vampire aka Vierges et Vampires aka Sex Vampires aka
Requiem for a Vampire aka Virgins and Vampires aka The Virgins and the
Vampires aka The Crazed Vampire. Yes it is from Jean Rollin - JD]
Behind Locked Doors aka Two Girls for a Madman aka Anybody, Anyway (1975) --
This one's part of a Continental Video double-bill. Two young women go to a
party, meet up with crazy hillbilly types, are kidnapped and humiliated
before they get away.
The Rattlers (1976) -- I remember seeing this one at a hardtop in the 70s,
PG-rated horror thingie patterned after Willard and Stanley, et. al.
The Child aka Hide and Go Kill (1976) -- Fred Freidel's sleazy little gem
from, I believe, the Carolinas. I don't have my reference books handy, but I
believe this film kind of tosses its underdeveloped story to the wind in the
last ten minutes and becomes a rather good Night of the Living Dead rip-off.
[Jeff later informed me that he had confused The Child with Friedel's
The Axe aka Lisa aka California Axe Massacre (1977) -JD]
Hitch Hike to Hell (1978) -- With the Professor, from Gilligan's Island!
Just some quick notes. I would like to find a video store like to one you
mentioned in a news message -- the one in San Francisco. I've been all over
the Boston area and there aren't too many that would carry these
obscurities.
*note: update list of BO titles available from SW!
Jeff Frentzen
jfrentzen@pcweek.ziff.com
Updated list of titles available from Something Weird:
Indian Raid, Indian Made (1969) *
The Pigkeepers Daughter (1970)
Country Hooker (1970) *
Teenage Bride (1970) *
Tobacco Roody (1970)
Country Cuzzins (1971)
Midnight Plowboy (1971) *
Below the Belt (1971)
Southern Comfort (1971) *
Sassy Sue (1972) *
* Not listed in previous filmography
Additions to the filmography, not now on video from Something Weird:
Massage Parlor Wife
Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman
Notorious Concubines
***********************************
I retrieved both of the FUNHOUSE! issues from the FTP site. Lot's of
interesting reading, I especially liked the article on Russ Meyer. Since
you seem to be somewhat of an expert on the topic of Mr. Meyer, I'll have to
ask you a question. I borrowed CHERRY, HARRY, AND RAQUEL from a friend some
years ago, and I seem to remember that somewhere on the video box it said
something about "THE MEGAVIXENS". Like some kind of subtitle. You don't
mention any alias for CH&R in your filmography but I'm positive I didn't
dream this up with THE MEGAVIXENS thing.
Marten Sahlen
etxsahm@eua.ericsson.se
[CH&R was released in the UK theatrically under the title THREE WAYS TO
LOVE. MEGAVIXENS was a title that UP! was released under in France.
Marten later confirmed that UP! was indeed the film that he was thinking
of. - JD]
***********************************
Three Italian Masters: Mario Bava, Sergio Leone, and Dario Argento Defy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hollywood Conventions. The Critics Balk! Part 1 - Bava
--------------------------------------------------------
Mario Bava, Sergio Leone and Dario Argento are auteurs in areas of film
which many "cinemaphiles" of the type who probably write for your local
paper look down their noses at. These directors primarily focused their
efforts in the areas of horror, thriller, western, science fiction, and
crime dramas, however each employed a style which broke the paradigm that
had been established by the traditional Hollywood approach in the execution
of these genres. Not only did the Italians challenge the accepted formats
for the films which they made, but they also used expectations of such
formats to their advantage in bringing to their audiences feelings of
tension, terror, anxiety, insight, or even humor. The Hollywood style of
continuity editing was not only ignored, but the editing and camerawork
employed by these directors was designed to in some ways have opposite
effects. The Hollywood theory says that the editing shouldn't be noticed,
that there should be a seamless flow from shot to shot and from one scene to
the next. These filmmakers use the camera intrusively. It may linger on
objects, points of view may vary without warning, or it may travel to places
that the eye of a human observer couldn't, or wouldn't, see. The
messages in the films are often driven by some underlying psychology, and
the methodologies employed in the filmmaking process serve to emphasize
these. Not only are traditional ideas pertaining to plot, characters, and
notions of good and bad toyed with, but styles of presenting a story which
had been refined through decades of output from American studios were also
altered. The most noticeable example of this is in the reliance on elements
other than pure narrative to carry the films. Stories aren't necessarily
presented in the traditional manner, that being: 1) characters are
introduced and defined, 2) a dilemma is presented, and 3) that dilemma is
resolved at the film's end. Linearity of time is sometimes not adhered to.
In addition to the actions of the camera, the sound and art direction are
also relied upon to further a story, or even just an emotion, to a much
greater extent than in more standard movies. The use of a musical score can
be particularly striking, and serve as an important element in the
presentation. This movement away from the norms of commercial studio
filmmaking had of course been utilized by many prior directors. Europeans
such as Goddard and Bergman, and even American Orson Welles, are examples of
those who broke convention, but these and other "art film" directors
applied their efforts to dramas. What makes Bava, Leone, and Argento
enticing is not only the quality of their work, but that they were pioneers
in applying the above mentioned techniques to genre films. The success which
they achieved also led them to be quite influential, as each spurred on many
imitators who produced works of varying degrees of quality. Another element
which they have in common is that each of the three was met with a large
amount, at least initially, of hostile critical reaction from American
reviewers. Some of this undoubtedly arose from the sheer fact that the
genres in which they worked were automatically looked at as inferior, but
some of it must also arise from these reviewers trying to "read" the films
as if they were the product of the Hollywood style. Many seemed confused in
their analysis. There is no doubt that these films can be enjoyed on a
purely visceral level, and while that approach would shortchange the
observer, it undoubtedly contributed to some of the success that they did
enjoy, especially in the case of Leone in America.
The influence of the three directors on others was mentioned above, but the
influence of the two older men, Bava and Leone, on Argento should not be
overlooked. Indeed much of Argento's work can be observed to be a synthesis
of techniques pioneered by the other two, with a good deal of Poe and German
Edgar Wallace films thrown in as well. Leone directed only eight films
himself, and produced a ninth while being heavily involved in it's creation.
Six of these films, those for which he was most well known, represent the
most classic examples of the "spaghetti western". It was the films of
Leone, and the character of "The Man with No Name" in some of these films,
which helped catapult Clint Eastwood into stardom. A couple of epics early
in his career and a gangster saga at the end frame his more famous efforts.
Bava is most well known by those who are aware of him as a creator of horror
films. He did in fact have a great influence in ushering in "The Golden Age
of Italian Horror Cinema", which loosely ran from the late fifties through
the early seventies. His body of work is actually quite varied, with
efforts in the areas of science fiction, giallo (Italian styled murder
mysteries), a Hercules adventure, and even comic tinged fantasy and spy
films. Argento, the only living and currently active member of the troika,
has been more consistent in theme with his films. He is often times seen as
a horror director, but in fact almost all of his projects have been giallos.
Argento is the master of this area of filmmaking, but he has also ventured
into the realm of horror (twice as director but frequently as producer) and
his giallos sometimes incorporate supernatural elements. He once strayed
from fright films entirely with a satirical political period piece early
in his career.
part I - Bava:
Mario Bava made the jump from prolific cinematographer to prolific director
midway through his career. Between the years 1938 and 1962 he lensed at
least 27 Italian made films. There were early directorial efforts, but
these consisted entirely of shorts shot on film no larger 16mm. However by
the mid-fifties Bava was getting work as an uncredited assistant on several
projects, including Pietro Francisci's LA FATICHE DE ERCOLE (aka HERCULES,
1957) and ERCOLE E LA REGINA LIDIA (aka HERCULES UNCHAINED, 1960), and was
credited on Henry Levin's THE WONDERS OF ALADDIN (1961). The event which
would serve as his introduction into the world of fantastic film was his
work on what is considered to be the first in a new wave of Italian horror
productions, Riccardo Freda's I VAMPIRI (1957, released as THE DEVIL'S
COMMANDMENT in edited form in the US). This film was the start of a cascade
of works which generally featured eerie tales of torture and evil, often
dealt with dark forces, and were mostly set in baroque or gothic
surroundings. Many of the techniques familiar from the classic Universal
films were incorporated, but they were also updated with a flair for the
excess that often times occurs in Italian cinema. Dark lighting, musty
castles, fog, and graveyards abound. I VAMPRIRI was scheduled for a 12 day
shoot with Freda directing and Bava behind the camera. After 10 days Freda
walked off the project and Bava stepped in to finish, supposedly filming
greater than half of it in the remaining two days. The film has a 1930's
feel to it, with short and sharply edited scenes backed by an old style organ
score. The Bava look, which would become very recognizable in the future,
shows through in many places however, especially in the areas of set design
and the use of the camera to convey a message through the visuals
surrounding the action. The story is good, telling of a 100+ year old
Duchess who rejuvenates herself into the young Gieselle through blood
transfusions from selected victims. She is aided by a mad scientist
relative. Gianna-Maria Canale plays the dual role of young woman/old woman
which foreshadows the role Barbara Steele will play in BLACK SUNDAY. The
film's strong points are its visuals, and with both Freda (sculpting) and
Bava (painting) having artistic training, their approach is just as much to
create something stunning to look at as to tell a story. The Duchess' manor
has a hidden laboratory annex and a secret passageway to a crypt (also
foreshadowing BLACK SUNDAY), all of which allow for intricate set design.
Bava's fluid camera is prominent, and is especially so in scenes in which a
victim awakes in the lab and escapes to the tomb, and in the finale where
the police comb the castle premises. The American version, which is much
more likely to be seen these days, has several extra scenes shot in the
States which are easy to spot by anyone familiar with Bava's work, including
the opening abduction. These were inserted to make the film more "adult"
and they feature scantily clad victims being apprehended. A nudie version
was even put out under the title LUST OF THE VAMPIRE, which features an
insert of "Grandpa" Al Lewis standing in for a European actor and pulling a
woman's top off. I VAMPIRI is a watershed film much the way that Russ
Meyer's THE IMMORAL MR. TEAS (1959) and Roger Corman's THE WILD ANGELS
(1966) were, in that it served as an inspiration for a slew of imitators,
and thus instigated a complete subgenre.
Several more projects as cinematographer followed, including additional
uncredited second unit direction with Jacques Tourneur on LA BATTAGLIA DI
MARATONA (THE GIANT OF MARATHON, 1959). This was another project which was
saved by Bava, who used his frugal abilities to finish it. He also again
teamed up with director Freda on a horror project. In this film, CALTIKI,
THE IMMORTAL MONSTER (1959) a situation similar to that with I VAMPIRI
occurred in which Freda quit the project midway through and Bava took over
the director's role. Caltiki is an angry Mexican god who directs his wrath
toward some snoopy scientists who are desecrating his temple. The monster
is a rolling mass of tissue that resembles The Blob. The producers felt
that Italian names in the credits of previous films had diminished their box
office draw, even domestically, and thus the names were anglicized. Freda
became "Robert Hampton" and Bava was "John Foam". CALTIKI was sold in Italy
as a US production. Bava would take on pseudonyms on several projects in
the future, but this was usually the result of his hiding his real name when
working in different genres, or was due to his displeasure with the final
editing of the film.
Producers took notice of Bava's skill in saving troubled projects on budget,
and thus Nello Santi of Galatea Films offered to back any project that he
wished to direct. Bava settled on the horror genre and produced one of the
finest examples of that form ever made, LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO (BLACK
SUNDAY, 1960). He also served as co-writer and co-cinematographer, and
designed the special effects. Barbara Steele, who would develop a career in
Euro-horror in the sixties in the wake of this movie, was selected for the
lead based solely on her appearance . She had only had a few minor roles in
non thriller's in her native England up to that time. (See Appendix:
Barbara Steele filmography). Here she plays both the part of the evil witch
Asa, and of Katia the innocent daughter of the local lord. Steele would
also play double roles in the Italian gothic horror pictures AMANTI
D'OLTRETOMBA (aka NIGHTMARE CASTLE, 1965, dir: Mario Caiano) and UN ANGELO
PER SATANA (aka AN ANGEL FOR SATAN, 1966, dir: Camillo Mastrocinque). Asa
is "killed" during the film's intro, along with her demon lover Dominici, by
having the masks of the film's title driven onto their faces. These masks
contain large, sharp spikes on their inner sides, and the hammering of them
onto the faces is a shocking beginning. Before death Asa places a curse on
her family as it is her brother who is disposing of her. The remainder of
the story takes place in 1830, 200 years later to the day. It is a day in
which historically the dead rise to seek retribution on the living, and it
is then which the witch attempts to fulfill her curse. Katia bares a
striking resemblance to her ancestor, whose portrait hangs on the wall of
her home. When the Katia character is first encountered she emerges through
the misty graveyard robed in black and holding large black dogs on a leash.
The visual suggestion of evil when being introduced to the story's heroine
is but one bit of trickery encountered. 100 years ago exactly another
family member, who also resembled Asa, met an early demise. Katia's father
and brother are aware of the curse, and that it is one in which a descendant
of Asa is given the gift of her striking beauty but is to be punished for
this gift with an untimely death. The circumstances around Asa's revival
this time are a pair of skeptical doctors who happen across her grave after
breaking down on their way to a professional conference. When the
analytical non believers stumble through the graveyard and onto the tomb of
the witch, they remove a cross fixed over her head which is designed to keep
her contained. When the spiked mask is pulled off of the witch's face a
hole filled skull swarming with spiders is revealed, and when the senior
doctor is bitten on the finger by a bat, he drips blood onto the body and
the resurrection is set in place. Asa calls to her lover to rise from his
grave, and he pulls his mask from his head in one of the best sequences. He
then aids her revival by capturing locals and bringing his victims to Asa so
that she can consume their blood as a means to her revival (shades of I
VAMPIRI). She is shown to gradually reconstitute, and at one point is
depicted with skin that has returned, but with the spike holes remaining, in
her face. As the victims mount, young doctor Andrej takes an interest in
Katia, and with the aid of the village priest attempts to squelch the demon
before Katia is destroyed by Asa as the ultimate victim in her revival.
Steele is assigned the dual role not only to make use of her striking
features, and as an element of the narrative, but also to emphasize the
dialectical image of the female in society. There is a struggle between the
whore like role of Asa, who has an insatiable appetite for men demonstrated
on screen by her need for their blood, and the virginal Katia who is
virtuous and in danger of violation. Andrej desires Katia, who diverts him,
and Katia is herself desired by Asa for the witch's own evil purpose. He is
forced to confront both women at the end, as when Asa has regained her human
form she places an unconscious Katia in her coffin and encourages the young
man to kill "the witch". The crucifix hanging from the real Katia's neck
identifies her, and Andrej and the priest destroy and burn the witch to
hopefully kill her spirit forever. Themes of inter familial violence occur,
and will reoccur in Bava's work. An uneasy incestuous suggestion happens in
this story when the zombified father attempts to suck out the blood of his
daughter, only to be thwarted by Dominici, as Katia is to be saved for Asa.
Psychological subtexts like this, intended to induce an extra disturbance in
the audience, would become a Bava hallmark. This is also one of Bava's most
dense films in terms of the images on screen. A fog filled graveyard with
an eerie crypt and a vast medieval castle complete with secret passages and
trap doors provide a fine framework for the artist in Bava to present the
ocular imagery, that he saw as a vital part of cinema, with a free hand. As
director he also is given free reign with the motion of the camera, and his
liberal use of tracks and zooms draw out images which in many ways help to
make this a sort of moving painting. AIP picked it up for US distribution
and gave it the BLACK SUNDAY title. They also made a few edits of the more
graphic images and replaced the score with one by ubiquitous American film
composer Les Baxter, actions which detract from the viewing experience.
Bava said prior to working on this film that he didn't wish to direct as he
didn't feel that he had the total vision necessary for creating a story on
that level. Watching BLACK SUNDAY shows this belief to be false.
While Bava is best known as the creator of horror and giallo style crime
thrillers, he actually was active in a wide range of film genres. Based on
his previous experience with the Francisci HERCULES films, he was hired to
direct an installment in the then popular Hercules series. His ERCOLE AL
CENTRO DELLA TERRA (aka HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, 1961) also gave him
his first opportunity at directing a color feature on his own. It has been
stated already that Bava's use of art direction and camera movements are
central elements to his style, but arguably the most important element would
come to be color composition, particularly with regards to lighting. In
HAUNTED the techniques which would appear over and over again are presented
for the first time. The complexity and subtleness that would be present in
the art direction of later films isn't as developed in HAUNTED with it's
minimal budget, but the concept is very apparent. Bava essentially made a
horror movie within the pretense of a sword and sandal epic. Christopher
Lee stars as the evil Lychos, a servant of the dark God Pluto. He captures
Hercules' lover Dianara and plans to rule over the city that she should be
queen of by consuming her blood and keeping that city in eternal darkness.
Hercules learns from the animated oracle Medea that he and pal Thesius must
travel to Hades itself in order to retrieve the Rock of Light to save
Dianara and her people. The darkness of Hell, Lychos' evil lair, and the
Kingdom of Darkness where the Hesperides live, are all created convincingly.
Deep reds and misty layers of fog on the sea to Hell, the carefully placed
green, red, and blue lights in the Hesperides' land, and the bubbling lava
pits of the underworld all create a spooky atmosphere of the sort that would
be perfected in the depiction of an alien planet's terrain in PLANET OF THE
VAMPIRES. A rampaging stone creature, bleeding vines carrying the souls of
damned men, and ghouls crawling from their coffins and out of the ground to
battle Hercules provide some of the horrific elements. Extended fights are
kept to a minimum, and the eerie plot contributes to this film being
commonly referred to as one of two Hercules films, along with the original
Steve Reeves entry, that is worth watching today. It was released in the
US by the Woolner Brothers, who shortened it a bit by cropping some scenes
at the beginning and the end. GLI INVASORI (aka ERIK THE CONQUEROR, 1961)
was made at the behest of Galatea head Nello Santi in an attempt to jump
onto a trend of Viking pictures that were popular in Italy at the time. It
stars Cameron Mitchell as a Viking child abandoned after his people's defeat
at the hands of the English in the 10th century. Queen Alice of Britain
adopts the boy and raises him as Erik, Duke of Helfort. His brother Iron
becomes leader of the Vikings, and after the English Queen is betrayed by
her top aide Gunnar, the Vikings have control over her land. When Erik
returns home to reclaim England, his must do battle with the Viking guards
who protect the traitor Gunnar. A duel between Erik and Iron follows in
which Iron identifies his brother by a tattoo on his chest. Iron is however
killed by Gunnar, who hopes to blame Erik for the deed and bring the full
wrath of the Viking people down on him, but Erik's men and the Vikings see
their common interest and unite to dispose of Gunnar. I haven't been able
to see this yet, but it seems to be most notable for the director's ability
to shoot elaborate scenes and effects on a shoestring budget, utilizing his
photographic legerdemain. This is a talent that will be quite valuable on
future projects such as PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and DANGER: DIABOLIK, where
convincing futuristic visuals were made for next to nothing. One impressive
example of this skill on ERIK is in the way Bava filmed the battle scenes
with only twenty extras. He covered the lens with twelve strips of paper
and filmed his actors with multiple exposures of the same stock, each time
having the warriors in a different space, and each time removing a different
one of the twelve strips. The final shot thus looked to contain 240 people.
He masked the bareness of his sets by engulfing them in clouds of colored
smoke. ERIK was the second Bava film distributed in the US by AIP. They
sold it with the ad line, "Perhaps the only Viking movie to use pasta
battleships", which in fact it did.
Like many other European directors Mario Bava would have his share of
problems having his films shown in their intended form in the United States
and other English speaking countries. Not only did the Americans have a
more prudish attitude at the time towards certain subject matter and
graphical images on screen, but they also took genre films less seriously,
feeling that they needed to direct them toward children rather than adults
to achieve profitability. This problem continues to the present day where
American fans of such directors such as Dario Argento are lucky to see
stories the way in which they were intended. The greatest injustice done to
Bava's artistry probably occurs with BLACK SABBATH and LISA AND THE DEVIL
(both discussed below) and to two titles produced in 1963. The subject
matter in both LA FRUSTA E IL CORPO (THE WHIP AND THE BODY aka WHAT!, 1963)
and LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO (THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH aka THE EVIL
EYE, 1963) were definitely strong for the time, but the complete alterations
in theme given them by the American distributors is so extensive as to
seriously hamper two of Bava's better films, and to mask their importance as
influences on the progression of the genre. THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is
generally considered the starting point for the Italian film murder mystery
dubbed the giallo. These stylistic thrillers tend to rely on bizarre plot
twists and focus on the how and why of crimes equally as much as on the who
and what. In THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, Bava applies his style to an
homage to Hitchcock. Leticia Roman is Nora Dralston, an American visiting
an aunt in Rome. After a chaotic chain of events that occurs when she
seeks a doctor to treat her heart attack suffering relative, she witnesses a
man stabbing a woman to death. Nora is a suspicious and jittery sort who is
fearful and distrustful of all men, and her confused state over what she
thinks she has seen, on top of her natural neurosis, casts a question on
these events. When the body can't be found the police and the doctor,
played by John Saxon, don't believe her claims. She moves in with another
doctor, Dr. Terrani, and his wife Laura, who were friends of her aunt and
are now living in the aunt's house. When Nora learns of a series of murders
that have gone unsolved in the area, dubbed "the alphabet murders" as the
victims are selected in sequence that way, her panic increases over the
killing she believes she saw as she thinks that she will be the next victim.
Dr. Terrani becomes her prime suspect, and a reporter named Landini helps
her to investigate. All evidence is shown to point toward Terrani, while
Nora herself begins to be directly threatened through phone calls and
strange deliveries. Our suspicions are shattered when Terrani is found
stabbed and dying. As he reveals to Nora that it is his wife Laura who is
the guilty party, Laura attempts to finally eliminate Nora, who is saved at
the last minute by the near death Terrani. Bava has said that even though
his previous project ERIK THE CONQUEROR was profitable, with the then
current success of horror films, in his next movie "l had to continue to
kill." Little did he know that this method of depicting killings would take
root as a common style over the next fifteen or so years in his homeland.
This story is Bava's first set in contemporary times, and in fact the stark
surroundings of the modern big city would become a staple of the giallo. The
settings are in contrast to most of those in Bava's future projects as well.
Those which aren't set in the past frequently have their characters move
through older buildings with elaborate antique surrounding which serve to at
least elicit an atmosphere of past times. Bava played on Nora's perceptions
of the events that occur around her, how they effect her psyche, and how
that altered psyche effects the activities of the killer. Portraying the
film's protagonist as a person who stumbles into the world of the criminal
and alters it would also be utilized in future imitations. Some specific
plot devices later picked up on by Dario Argento in his films, which would
elevate giallos from exciting thrillers to works of art, are worth noting.
The influences of some other Bava films on Argento in the areas of style and
technique will be discussed later, but THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is
important for some elements of the narrative that will be built upon. The
concept of Nora being a person who is not only an interloper to the world of
the criminal, but is a complete foreigner in her surroundings (she is an
American), allows for an extra sense of both her vulnerability and naivete.
Argento's protagonists would often fit this mold, most notably the American
writer Peter Neal in TENEBRAE. The method of using the disposition of the
true culprit as a form of subterfuge until the story's end is also notable.
Argento would be greatly influenced by this plot device when he began his
giallos in 1969 with L'UCCELLO DALLE PIUME DI CRISTALLO (THE BIRD WITH THE
CRYSTAL PLUMAGE). That story would also involve a witness to an act of
violence who is confused to it's actual circumstance upon investigation due
to his preconceived notion that a woman could not be responsible. Argento's
heavily crafted thrillers are made with multi layered stylistic devices. By
the time he produced his first masterpiece, 1975's PROFONDO ROSSO (DEEP
RED), he had begun utilizing not only plays on his viewer's senses through
manipulating their expectations of story lines, but would also begin to
incorporate the artistic devices of color composition, soundtrack, and camera
placement and movement, to convey his uneasy and nightmarish visions to his
audience. THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH is a definite influence upon the
narrative style of these films, but it was another Bava creation, BLOOD AND
BLACK LACE from 1964, which provided the visual springboards. Thus while
THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH doesn't ultimately come across as completely
successful as a mystery, it is important in being the genesis for the notion
that elements other than strict "whodunit" could drive a crime drama. One
important factor which is missing from THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, and which
distances it from future giallos, is that it's in black and white. Color
photography would serve as an important part of the films to come. When AIP
picked this up for showings in the US they were uneasy with the subtleties
of the plot, and with those subtleties being so dominant throughout the
story AIP decided to attempt to play them off as humor through re-editing
and dubbing. The result came out as THE EVIL EYE, and the features which
make this movie influential as well as interesting are buried. They also
again dubbed on a new Les Baxter score.
LA FRUSTA E IL CORPO (THE WHIP AND THE BODY aka WHAT!, 1963) is Bava's first
gothic horror film since BLACK SUNDAY, and it is his first in color. It is
also one of his masterpieces. WHIP uses sado-masochistic and psycho-sexual
themes to present a series of intense contrasts within the framework of a
ghost story. Bava makes his only attempt at a substitute for Barbara
Steele, something many other directors would do with varying degrees of
success, with Daliah Lavi in the lead role as Nevenka. She is up to the
challenge both as an actress and in appearance. The plot has Christopher
Lee as the evil Kurt, returning to the castle of his father Count Menliff
for the occasion of his brother Christian's marriage to Nevenko. Kurt is
unwelcome by the residents and there is considerable unease as to his
presence. Years earlier he had been run out after his lover Tania had
killed herself over his rejection. Tania's mother is the housekeeper and
has sworn retribution upon Kurt. She keeps the blood stained dagger encased
in glass to remind her of his crime. Kurt had been the lover of Nevenka
also, and was at one time engaged to marry her. The attraction/repulsion
she felt for him continues at the time of his return, straining her new
marriage to Kurt's brother which was arranged by the Count. Soon after his
return Kurt encounters Nevenka on the beach and whips her violently. He
lectures "You always loved violence" before lashing out. What seems to be a
horrible encounter takes on a perverse sexuality as she is seen to clearly
enjoy the beating, and the encounter ends in an embrace after the whip has
torn away her clothing. This tension between love and hate, and between
pleasure and pain, amongst the two main characters is the driving dialectic
of the film. Later that night while all the other occupants of the castle
are searching for the missing Nevenka, Kurt is killed with the bloody dagger
after hearing a ghostly voice call to him. This event and his subsequent
entombment by red hooded pallbearers is the true starting point for the
movie. Up until Kurt's death it had been shot in a fairly conventional
style, but with this scene the direction takes on a very stylistically eerie
quality. The scene leading up to Kurt's stabbing is the first of many
intricate and drawn out episodes, containing very little dialog and
involving the camera precisely moving through and exploring the carefully
constructed settings. Before the knifing it follows him as he travels
stealthily through the building, tracking behind him and sweeping ahead, as
he goes through a secret passage and spies in on his father on the way to
his quarters. The scenery is dark and backlit with deep blues and with
occasional red and green accents. A moody classical score carried by subtle
piano helps to develop of sense of unnaturalness, suggesting occult
possibilities at this early juncture. While Kurt is clearly alive at this
point, we are introduced to the possibility of him as specter, and when he
is stabbed it is after an otherworldly female voice calls out to him,
solidifying this image. From this point forward the film is a series of
increasingly lurid intervals of this nature, rarely moving out of the dark
and moody confines of the castle. Soon the father is killed with the same
dagger in a similar fashion, and behind the murder mystery which develops
within the mise en scene of the film, there develops a mystery to the
viewers concerning whether Kurt's ghost is present or if he is actually alive.
Nevenka is startled by a series of incidents in which she is drawn to the
lurking presence of Kurt, and her psyche becomes disturbed to a greater
extent after each one. At first she only hears the sounds of his whip, but
eventually he emerges with it in hand to administer his sexual torture.
When she first actually encounters his visage it is peering into the house,
framed within a window. Bava liked using this technique to throw back upon
the audience a sense of their spying in on something which will lead to
frightening results. Similar scenes would be used effectively in both BLACK
SABBATH and KILL, BABY KILL during this period. There is always set up a
contrast between the victim's fear as her attacker approaches, and her
eventual ecstasy over the results. One effective scene has Kurt's
menacingly green lit hand reaching toward the camera and at a screaming
Nevenka, only to eventually caress her head upon reaching it. Bava had set
up this scene by using false scares earlier in the film in which a hand
comes from out of the frame to grab a startled victim, only to be quickly
revealed to belong to a harmless friend. After another beating Kurt's face
is shown to move in toward Nevenka's, changing from being lit in blue to
green and to red as it gets closer, finally being only a set of lips that
approach her. When the whipping is performed on the bare back of Nevenka it
is always shown from the perpetrator's point of view, giving the audience
the chance to perceive themselves as administering the act as the reaction
changes from one of torture to one of pleasure. This is another technique
that Argento would come to incorporate into his projects frequently and with
great effect. The film resolves into a tense final 20 minutes in which
Christian and the groundskeeper find muddy boot prints leading into Kurt's
tomb while frantically searching for the missing Nevenka. When they open it
they find her half unconscious inside, and get a notion that Kurt may not be
dead. A great scene has them open the casket to reveal a decomposed and
unidentifiable body, which is burnt in hopes of insuring Kurt's destruction.
Nevenka slips away, and during her final encounter with the lurking evil
brother reveals the deepness of her love to him, but also the intensity of
her dislike. While embracing she moves a knife around his back to stab him,
and when she thrusts it in, Christian and the groundskeeper have arrived and
are staring through a window as they watch her alone piercing her own
stomach. There thus seems to be a further dilemma with the conclusion. The
lust and guilt filled mind of Nevenka drove her to the killings, but we must
decide if her encounters with the evil brother are the products of her
mind's desire for perverted pleasure, or if the spirit of the dead man was
continuously returning, visible only to her, and allowing for each to
fulfill their own particular sadistic or masochistic urges. The final shot
zooms in on the lash in flames amongst the burning corpse; the whip and the
body destroyed. Naturally, this juxtaposition of eroticism and violence, with
suggestions of pleasure both by the giver and receiver of such treatment,
was too much for the American distributors. They edited out the more lurid
elements and titled what was left WHAT!, which was then sold using Chris
Lee's name. While this version, without the depiction of the posthumous
Kurt's acts, makes little narrative sense having been stripped of it's
subtext, it is still fascinating to watch the frightening atmosphere that
Bava was able to develop with his technique. It's no wonder that most
American critics expressed confusion over it, and it's incidents like these
which lead to not only Bava, but many of his peers, not getting the respect
they deserve as directors in The States. In another attempt to anglicize
the credits Bava took the alias "John M. Old" on WHIP.
I TRE VOLTE DELLA PAURA (aka BLACK SABBATH, 1963) was another AIP
collaboration, and their input allowed them to again do a hatchet job on a
Bava film. BLACK SABBATH is a trilogy of tales highlighted by the
appearance of Boris Karloff, who was secured for the project by AIP. The
English language version has Karloff delivering introductory talks to each
segment, culminating in his own appearance in "The Wurdalak" which ends that
variation of the film. Bava plays on many subtexts to provide the chills
throughout, and Karloff's vampire story is the only true horror tale.
Contrary to most US viewers my favorite section has always been "The
Telephone", number two in AIP's cut. This story was stuck into the middle
as the US producers felt that the other segments, which have a higher
supernatural element to them, were needed to scare the audience both coming
and going. "The Telephone" is appealing to me in that it is a visual
precursor to Bava's soon to be made masterpiece BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, which
I consider to be his best film. In "The Telephone" the camera
voyeuristically explores the sexuality of its female leads, especially the
very beautiful Michele Mercier. In this story Rosy, played by Mercier, is
tormented by phone calls from a dead former lover, who threatens retribution
against her. She summons Mary, an acquaintance played by Lydia Alfonsi, to
stay with her for comfort. When the evil intruder arrives he strangles Mary
with a stocking, but Rosy is able to catch him by surprise with a concealed
knife before he can kill her too. This version presented the former lover
as a ghost returned from the grave hungry for revenge. What is interesting
is the manner in which the victims are depicted, especially in the final
confrontations. Bava lingers seductively over their attractive features and
plays sexual mind games with the viewers before the temptresses are
"punished" by some independent act of violence. This segment has distinct
similarities to the classic BLOOD, and some of the ideas that went into that
film are worked out here. In one shot Mary's black gloved hands are focused
on while she teasingly handles a large kitchen knife. Thanks to the
research of The Video Watchdog (issue no. 5) who translates and compares the
two versions of the movie, it is shown that this segment was intended to be
a prototypical giallo proper. The original dialog and editing reveal that
Mary is in fact using the prison escape of prostitute Rosy's ex-lover pimp
to seduce Rosy into bed with her. Mary is shown to be making the
threatening calls posing as the pimp, who is never portrayed as being dead.
There is no supernatural presence whatsoever, and the killer's arrival at
the end is a surprise. While suggestions of lesbianism remain for the
observant viewer, and thus still allow for some suggestions of "guilt" on
the women's part, Arkoff and Nicholson were uncomfortable with its
overtness and altered the plot accordingly. Feeling that their younger
target audiences needed more horror, they used this opportunity to introduce
the ghost. They even included a new final shot of the telephone again
ringing ominously after Rosy has killed her pursuer. The other segments are
more horrific. "The Wurdalak" also has a subtext to elicit uneasiness. In
it Karloff if the patriarch of a family, who in killing a local vampire (he
keeps its severed head as a trophy) attracts the condition himself. When
he returns home he sets about converting his family to vampiric ways through
both violence and seduction; this is the way of a Wurdalak. Eventually
Vlad, a family visitor, is converted by his lover, the Karloff character's
daughter. The visuals are classic Bava with darkly lit blue backgrounds,
swirling fog, and foreboding surroundings - visuals similar to those
concocted for HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD and the later PLANET OF THE
VAMPIRES. Karloff is excellent, and a plot containing violence against
one's own family, incestuous underpinnings, and the final conversion of all
to evil without pain or punishment, are all unique and unsettling. The third
section of BLACK SUNDAY is "The Drop of Water" and it makes use of
psychological torment to portray a woman sinking into psychosis from her own
fear and guilt. A nurse steals a ring from the finger of a just deceased
mystic and the ghastly figure haunts her for the crime - or is it just in
the nurse's mind? The story is short and well constructed, and the director
uses many devices, both visual and aural, to suggest the haunting presence
of the dead woman to the nurse. Roaming cats, discarded baby dolls, and the
innocent dripping of water from various sources are a constant reminder of
the croaked medium. The protagonist's contorted face, with her hands
clinging around her own neck when the police find her dead, is macabre. They
conclude she died of fright, but was she murdered by the specter as we the
viewers saw? The Video Watchdog piece also reports that AIP altered the
intended order of the segments so as to provide the monsters of "The Drop of
Water" and "The Wurdalak" first and last. Bava created stories with an
intentionally defined running order, that is obvious to the careful viewer,
by utilizing match on action shots which end and begin the various segments.
"The Telephone" was intended to start the film, as its stabbing death
matches the depicted death by stabbing of the original Wurdalak by Karloff
in that section which originally ran second. "The Wurdalak" ends with
three family members staring through a window as the final person is
converted into the evil clan (the "Three Faces of Fear") and "The Drop of
Water" then begins with the Nurse's face staring through a window. Without
this linkage, AIP had Bava direct Karloff's narrative intros to each segment,
which don't appear in the European version. These short pieces are amusing
and worth looking at. The US producers also snipped out a few of the more
graphic shots from "The Wurdalak" and again pulled one of their favorite
tricks by having Les Baxter rescore the soundtrack. The original cut has
been put out on LD in Japan, in Italian with Japanese subtitles. Hopefully it
will one day be subtitled into English.
While THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH laid the groundwork for the giallo, the
film which most expertly introduces the elements which would come to define
that style is SEI DONNE PER L'ASSASSINO (aka BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, 1964).
Bava had previously explored the place of women in a patriarchal society in
BLACK SUNDAY, THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH, and THE WHIP AND THE BODY, but the
idea of women being the objects of both a voyeuristic fetishism and the
victims of punishment for this role by men is most completely developed in
this effort. He creates a series of highly developed and visually complex
"set pieces" where the principal function is not what will happen, but how
it will be carried out. Bava saw the story as written as a mundane crime
drama, and thus decided to use that story to convey something different
altogether. If the script as filmed were read it would still seem a bit
trite, but in the actual completed work the crimes are elevated to a level
as to be the elements around which it revolves. This is a film in which the
images on the screen far more convey the experience to the viewer than does
the narrative. The Italian title literally translates to "Six Women for the
Murderer", and accordingly the viewer is left with no question as to what
will happen through the first 80% of the movie. The story takes place in a
fashion salon where one of the models, who is involved in some scandalous
activities involving drugs and sex, is murdered. In the wake of the killing
it is discovered that she has kept a diary which may implicate some other
employees in various illicit activities. Their scrambling for control of
the diary allows for a background upon which one woman after another is
eliminated. Models are chosen as victims as they are beautiful and their
role in society is to be objects of adoration. While none of the victims is
herself involved in any killing, each is depicted as being tainted in some
way prior to meeting up with the villain. The story around the murderous
set pieces is intentionally bland, filmed in a straightforward fashion and
being carried by a rather uneventful police investigation. When the set
pieces begin however things shift into stylistic overload. An opening
sequence in which the credits role against a background of a skull and
flashing colored lights sets the style. When a murder scene takes place the
soundtrack heats up, the sets become complexly and colorfully lit, and the
settings used are intricately designed. The camera becomes fluid as it
lingers and then tracks and pans through the decor. Color schemes are
complex and the extended scenes are constructed to not only highlight the
beauty of the women, who are fully made up and in their best model garb, but
also to develop a sense of cinematic beauty. This is of course directly in
contrast with the fact that a violent and horrible murder is being
approached. There is no question in the audience's mind as to what will be
the end result of the scene being viewed, yet they are still asked to be
aesthetically pleased as it unfolds. After introducing this style Bava even
indulges in a bit of subterfuge with his viewers. One model enters into her
home, which has not yet been shown. As a dark coated figure is seen hunched
over the fireplace with its back to us the music becomes animated and
amplified, the room has a darkly lit look, and the camera zooms in. We are
set for violence, when the figure is revealed to be the elderly woman
housekeeper. After the false alarm the more conventional, brighter lit,
style returns. While void of any nudity or of much blood, the killings are
still carried out in gruesome and torturous fashion, and the victims are often
posed provocatively, and reveal skin and undergarments while the act is being
executed. As a substitute for actual grue the filmmaker utilizes bright red
objects intruding into the camera's space at key moments for graphic
suggestiveness. Tension is developed between the attractiveness of the
initial images, and the repulsion of the acts which follow. This is
magnified by the garb of the killer. He wears a cloak and hat, with black
gloves, and a cloth wrapped around his head, producing the image of a man
with a completely blank face. The killer is thus not "him", an ugly or evil
beast who can be despised, but a blank faced "anyone" who could be the
viewer himself. At one point a cop states that the crimes are "obviously
the work of a sex maniac". This turns out to be incorrect in the w
orld of
the film, but it could be true when reflected upon the audience. When the
story resolves it is not the police who uncover what has happened, but
events are allowed to unfold for the camera only to see. There is actually
a good deal of complexity in the conclusion, where we find there to be two
killers (a man and a woman) rather than one, and where we are led down a
twisting path toward motivations and the eventual outcome. The influence of
this work not only on the giallo films in general, but on their leading
practitioner Dario Argento in particular, is noteworthy. Argento's giallos
will not only make extensive use of the sexual attraction/violent repulsion
dichotomy, but will frequently portray his killer with a black gloved hand
as Bava does here. Argento will make use of gender confusion with women
killers in key works of his such as BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, FOUR
FLIES ON GREY VELVET, and DEEP RED, and will also use dual murderers in his
masterpiece TENEBRAE. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE stands with BLACK SUNDAY as
Bava's finest work. It was released unedited in the US by The Woolner
Brothers.
Never one to stagnate, Bava next accepted a directing role in the newest
wave of exploitation to hit Italy - the spaghetti western. These European
westerns are divorced of the folklore which often hampers their American
predecessors, and this allowed for some unique twists on the genre, with the
unsettled, libertarian, American west providing a framework for some
nontraditional movie making ideas. These films were coming out more
frequently at this time, and Bava's first of three efforts in the field, LA
STRADA PER FORT ALAMO (aka THE ROAD TO FORT ALAMO, 1964) emerged the same
year as the film which would launch European made westerns into a major
creative and economic force, Sergio Leone's PER UN PUGNO DI DOLLARI (aka A
FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, 1964). THE ROAD TO FORT ALAMO was directed under the
"John M. Old" alias used in THE WHIP AND THE BODY. While a gang of outlaws
are holding up a bank dressed as federals, their sadistic leader kills an old
woman unnecessarily. When one member complains of this viciousness he is
abandoned in the middle of the dessert with another outcast. An army wagon
train escorting a female prisoner picks them up, even though some of the
soldiers are suspicious as to the pair truly being feds. The wagon is on
its way to Fort Alamo when it is attacked by Indians. The two impostors
turn into heroes when they first risk their lives in fighting off the
Indians, and then track down the old gang members and turn in the stolen
bank loot. I've yet to see this film, however it does seem to incorporate
some of the drawn out violence that characterizes this segment of filmdom,
and Bava's directing style should fit this mold well. The good vs. bad
elements and happy ending go against the ambiguity of character that would
later be staples in the oat operas however. Shifting gears once again,
Bava's next project was in science fiction. This field is one in which the
more drawn out and introspective style of European cinema hasn't been as
effective as in others, and Bava's TERRORE NELLO SPAZZIO (aka PLANET OF THE
VAMPIRES, 1965) suffers from some of the similar problems as do its
companions. Shocks which are drawn from emotional manipulation rather than
bombastic effects don't play as well in the realms of aliens, space travel,
and advanced gadgetry, and thus most Continental offerings in this area are
a bit slow paced and dull. However Bava's strength as a master of visuals
does play well here, and a film that could use a some faster pacing and a
little more action in its script is made enjoyable by the space ship
interiors and alien landscape exteriors that the director creates. The
screenplay was co-written by SFX film veteran writer Ib Melchior, and is
based on the story "One Night of 21 Hours" by Renato Pestriniero, originally
published in "Interplanet #3". Barry Sullivan is the pilot of one of two
ships called by an SOS signal to a foreboding planet while traveling through
space. The crew of the other ship is apparently wiped out in the descent,
but they are revived through a strange foreign possession which drives them
into bloodthirsty pursuits of the survivors. When exploring the planet's
surface, a previously destroyed craft is found with the huge skeleton of
its deceased monstrous occupant pilot inside. It is a previous victim of
the planet's evil creatures. The story develops that the ships were drawn
to the world by its bloodthirsty occupants, and unfolds around the attempts
of the remaining living crew to escape alive. In doing so they must deal
with the dead and possessed posing as human. Victims are encased in upright
body bags from which the space vampires emerge. (Yes it does sound a bit
like THE THING and ALIEN). There is an EC-like ending were the survivors
make their escape to an empty Earth and become its colonizers. Bava's knack
for cleverness in the color composition in his shots contributes greatly to
the creation of an effective looking hostile planet surface. Blue lighting
dominates, with spots of carefully placed red and green, amidst swirling fog
and eerie and unnatural geography. This foreshadows a similar lighting
scheme that Bava would employ on his last project, as a set designer on Dario
Argento's INFERNO (1980). Bava uses his lighting and camera skills to
adequately transcribe a feeling of agitation in the characters, resulting
from their surroundings, with a only low budget and a sound stage at his
disposal. The sleek and metallic interiors of the ships and the tight black
suits which the crew wear, complete with emblems resembling Nazi SS
insignia, add to a movie which is a pleasure to look at. AIP again handled
US distribution.
1966 was a busy year, with the maestro being involved in three very different
projects. AIP were anxious to work further with Bava, and through their
Italian contact Fulvio Luciano they hired him to make the sequel to their
minor hit DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE BIKINI MACHINE. Vincent Price was signed to
play the lead role in LE SPIE VENGONA DEL SEMIFREDDO (aka DR. GOLDFOOT AND
THE GIRL BOMBS, 1966), Bava's only outright comedy. The project was
troubled from the start, and AIP chief Sam Arkoff attributes much of this to
problems with the Italian cast, which included model Laura Antonelli and the
comic duo of Franco and Ciccio. Fabian was also on hand. The poor script
and disorganized production probably had as much to do the failure of the
project as did its not being a style which best suited the director's
talents. The story has Price as a mad scientist working on the side of the
Chinese government. He attempts to coerce the Americans and Soviets into a
nuclear war. He creates bikini clad female robots with bombs in their
navels who are sent to seduce UN members and blow them up. Not only is this
Bava's worst film, but it is also probably the worst soundtrack to feature
Davie Allan and the Arrows. Price is quoted as expressing dismay with the
outcome after hearing buddy Karloff's praise of Bava's work on BLACK SABBATH.
Bava made his only on screen appearance as an angel near the movie's end.
RINGO DEL NEBRASKA (aka SAVAGE GRINGO, 1966) is another entry into the
growing spaghetti western field, and is officially credited to Antonio Roman
under the alias Anthony Roman. The Video Watchdog has reported, from an
interview with Fulvio Luciano, that screenwriter Roman (who had previously
worked with Bava on PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and THE ROAD TO FORT ALAMO) was
listed as director of the AIP production to secure a subsidy from the
government of Spain. It's difficult to track down today, and thus I can't
comment on it artistically or offer information as to its story line.
By 1966 Bava had created wholly on his own only two real horror films,
BLACK SUNDAY and BLACK SABBATH, and by this time the Italian renaissance
which he had defined was in full swing. OPERAZIONE PAURA (aka KILL, BABY
KILL, 1966) is his best looking horror title (beating out BLACK SUNDAY by
the virtue of its color photography) and would be Bava's last true entry in
this area until 1972. KILL, BABY KILL returns to the gothic atmosphere of a
19th century village haunted by an evil spirit who resides in a local
castle, a setting common in this contemporary horror revival. A coroner
comes to the village to aid the local police in determining whether a recent
death was due to suicide or if it involved foul play. This killing, which
opens the film, expertly captures a terrified woman fleeing from an evil the
audience doesn't yet know. Her death by back to front impalement after
falling atop a spiked fence is a startling way to begin, and when it is
followed by a shot of what appears to be the feet of a watching little girl,
some suggestion of things to come is made. The outsider doctor finds a
fearful and suspicious town who are resentful of his presence. Bava lets
the source of their fear develop gradually, and thus the viewer doesn't fully
become aware of the form the evil takes until the film's end. As the story
proceeds we see that death has come quickly to residents who cross the
demon. A local sorceress is shown to apply barbaric magical treatments to a
young girl who has been given the sign of impending demise, and she is also
found to be responsible for a coin discovered buried in the heart of the
doctor's autopsy subject. She inserts the coin with a knife to protect the
souls of the departed. The death sign is to see the image of a female child,
recalling what was shown following the opening death. We see small
hand prints, a bouncing ball, and then a face peering through a distant
window. The way that these object are filmed tells us that they are linked
to the killings, but we aren't yet told how. The doctor and a young woman,
who has just returned to the village after leaving at the age of two,
uncover the source of the curse, and locate it to a crumbling castle shunned
by the villagers. The young girl is revealed to be the ghost of a small
child who had been trampled by horses and then bled to death while chasing
after her ball, as the drunken villagers watched without aid. She now
forever exacts her revenge on them by causing her victims to themselves
bleed to death. The story is not complex and was in fact written in a very
short time, as the entire production was carried out on an accelerated
schedule. The sets are again quite intricately designed, a deep golden
color dominates most scenes, and there are an abundance of dark corridors
and hidden corners suggesting a lurking unknown. Bava's best work as
cinematographer is probably in KILL, BABY KILL. He first captures the
claustrophobic paranoia of the citizens of the burg, and then slowly allows
the viewers in on the source of their troubles through selective shots.
There aren't the outright graphically shocking scenes which occur in most of
the director's horror and thriller works, but he still elicits a creepy feel
with his ability to create on screen images quite artistically. The castle
itself is given an otherworldly essence by its occupying non logical filmic
space. Movements from room to room do not always put characters in places
that reality would dictate them to be, a technique mimicked to a great
extent by Argento in his witch's lairs in SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. At one
point the young doctor chases a fleeing figure through a series of closed
doors. As he passes through the next one we see him entering the room he had
just left. He gains ground on the figure he pursues, and upon catching up to
it finds it to be himself. The interplay of family is prominent again as
the heroine, who returned from college to pay homage to her dead parents, is
revealed to actually be the daughter of the castle's matron and the sister
of the now ghostly killer. She had been sent away as a child for her own
protection. Women of differing strengths and character are given dominant
roles in the story while the men are mostly observers. The violent ghost
girl, her grown and more sophisticated sister, the befuddled and disheveled
old mother, and the darkly pretty sorceress who offers both the living and
the dead some protection from the curse, play off of each other. KILL, BABY
KILL had very limited US distribution, showing most widely as one third of
an "Orgy of the Living Dead" trilogy in the early seventies under the title
THE CURSE OF THE LIVING DEAD. It was co-billed with REVENGE OF THE LIVING
DEAD (aka THE MURDER CLINIC, 1966, dir: Elio Scardamaglia aka Michael
Hamilton) and FANGS OF THE LIVING DEAD (aka MALENKA, THE VAMPIRE, 1968, dir:
Armando De Ossorio).
After all of that activity things slowed a bit over the next two years. The
director's only 1967 release was another Cameron Mitchell Viking epic titled
RAFFICA DI COLTELLI (aka KNIVES OF THE AVENGER, 1967). Bava received his
credit under the pseudonym "John Hold". KNIVES is more violent than the
first Mitchell Nordic saga. Harald, the king of the Vikings, has been away
at sea for three years, worrying his wife Karen. She consults a mystic
about his condition who informs her that Harald is alive, but that there are
bad times of some other sort ahead. Aghen, a banished Viking, fulfills
this prophecy when he and his marauders overrun the kingdom, and he attempts
to solidify his position as king by forcing Karen to marry him. While her
abduction is being attempted she is rescued by Rurik, played by Mitchell, an
outsider who had raped Karen on the night of her wedding years earlier
because of his hatred for her people. He now wishes to make amends, and he
manages to keep his identity hidden from her. Rurik also wishes revenge upon
Aghen for the villain's brutal murder of his wife and son. Rurik defeats
Aghen in combat but the latter is able to escape, and he then engages in a
second battle when Harald returns and recognizes him. Before either emerges
victorious the news comes that Aghen has kidnapped Harald's son, and the two
set out together against their common enemy. Rurik slays Aghen, achieving
his revenge, and leaves the proper ruling family of the tribe intact on
their throne. KNIVES is a competent, and rather straightforward for Bava,
action flick which comes rather late in the Viking cycle. The use of an
alias suggests that Bava looked at this project as a job, and he didn't
devote as much effort in developing it into an artistic statement as with
some other films from around this time. Producer Dino De Laurentiis wished
to cash in on the success of Roger Vadim's comic like fantasy BARBARELLA,
and thus obtained the film rights to the comic book super criminal Diabolik,
which was created and written by Angela and Luciana Giussani. De Laurentiis
is always one to go way out (witness his 1976 KING KONG remake) and he
procured a budget of several million dollars for his goal of making an over
the top tour de force of special effects and elaborate sets. Bava was
signed on to direct DIABOLIK (aka DANGER: DIABOLIK,1968) with John Phillip
Law as the black leather jumpsuit clad thief and Marisa Mell falling out of
her skimpy clothes as his partner and lover. The story follows Diabolik as
he cleverly outwits a determined police inspector and a Mafioso, while
pulling off a series of audacious robberies and amazing escapes. It is well
written and Diabolik's trickery is quite entertaining. Bava reveals himself
to be a capable action director, and the elements of humor work despite the
failure of GOLD BOMBS. The highlight of the film is Diabolik's mod styled,
high-tech, batcave like lair. Bava is at his best when creating a fantastic
surrounding for his characters to move through, and the cave fits this bill.
The avant-garde living quarters are reminiscent of the Playboy mansion of
the sixties mixed with computer banks and complex machinery. As in the
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE set pieces, his use of swirling and zooming camera
work, and soundtrack accompaniment, are most active within the cave setting,
adding to the sense that this is a unique place. We are introduced to
this dwelling by Bava's camera tracking Mell's character as she moves
through it. The camera travels through windows and around walls in a method
which reveals perspectives from places that a human intruder couldn't
occupy. Ennio Morricone provided the score, and it is one of his best
outside of Sergio Leone's westerns. His humorous use of aural signals on
the soundtrack is in full force. As is the filmmaker's style, he delivered
the project considerably under budget, using technique to achieve the
results that De Laurentiis planned to get with elaborate sets. The producer
was quite happy with the result and tried to convince Bava to film a sequel,
but Bava was reported to be unhappy with De Laurentiis' meddling in the
creative process, especially his demand for no blood to be shed, and thus
declined. There is in fact no blood or graphic violence, and no nudity, so
this one is strictly a PG. With a much smaller budget it's still as good or
better than a large number of the Bond films.
A return to the giallo would characterize the next few years, with three of
the next five projects falling somewhere within that definition. The first
of these, IL ROSSO SEGNO DELLA FOLLIA (aka A HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON,
1969) is the logical successor to BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. While that earlier
film essentially took the premise that the "who" of the story was not the
important element, it still allowed for some plot twists at the end and thus
maintained some suspense elements. Bava decided to dispense with any
pretense of mystery in HATCHET, as very early on there is a monologue by the
killer telling of his crimes. Stephen Forsyth is the henpecked husband of a
shrewish wife who owns a wedding salon. The irony of a man driven into a
murderous rage by his unhappy marriage, and being his wife's underling at a
bridal gown shop, is fully played upon. He vents his rage by murdering women
who are newlyweds or who are approaching their nuptials. The murders serve
as devices for his recalling a deeply repressed memory, which finally
emerges as his remembrance of his killing of his own mother. His troubled
relationship with her is now projected onto his wife. Again a series of
violent set pieces are the film's main ingredients, and they always take
place with some form of wedding related backdrop. As is the Bava style,
each murderous scene is a drawn out episode that can stand on its own, and
is stylistically executed to deliver its thrills. One notable example has
the killer engaging in a ballroom dance with his next victim, through a
darkened studio of mannequins dressed in wedding gowns. As the couple glide
through and around the dummies, leading up to the slaughter, so does the
camera. In another the killer dons a bridal veil for the final attack on
his wife. HATCHET attempts to play upon gender confusion by making the
culprit's motivation derive from a his threatened manhood, due to his
emasculation by his wife/mother. The wearing of the veil is a final and more
obvious display of this confusion. HATCHET is similar in structure to BLOOD
AND BLACK LACE, but the driving force behind the violence isn't as powerful
as the former's depiction of the women being guilty of, and punished for,
their beauty. Bava's final western was up next, ROY COLT AND WINCHESTER
JACK (1970). It's been described as a "comedy western", and the basic plot
concerns two outlaws battling for the leadership of their pack. After the
loser is ejected, he becomes a lawman and is responsible for rounding up the
old gang when they illegally go after some treasure. Tim Lucas reports that
Bava made a sexually explicit film next, FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT (1970), but
I've only come across his one reference to it. He states that it is a
variation on Kurosawa's ROSHOMON.
The next giallo entry is CINQUE BAMBOLE PER LA LUNA D'AGOSTA (aka FIVE DOLLS
FOR AN AUGUST MOON, 1970). Bava has called this his worst film, and he has
described his work on it as essentially a walk through. The script is a
variation on the "Ten Little Indians" theme, and Bava claimed that he was
completely disinterested in it. His quote is, "They gave me a check on
Saturday and shooting commenced on Monday". It tells of ten people staying
in a large beach house, who begin to drop one by one. Bava's lack of
interest and the very straightforward story make the goings somewhat slow,
but it still has the maestro behind the camera and thus some creative
flourishes emerge from place to place. The murders are committed with some
flair, and there are touches of the expected weirdness through color
compositions and image juxtapositions. He also introduces a twist in the
script in which the assumed hero turns out to be the killer. FIVE DOLLS is
not really a bad film, but it is a bad Mario Bava film, with only occasional
high points which Bava gets through despite himself. It is interesting to
compare the differing results which came from this lackluster screenplay
with those from BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. There the director had a vision for
producing thrills from elements beyond the basic story, and his best film
emerged. With FIVE DOLLS he must have lacked the drive to create yet
another twist in the presentation of the murder mystery plot after the
mediocre artistic success of HATCHET, and all that remained was the
straightforward story. A highlight is the presence of the Edwige Fenech, the
Queen of the Giallos, who would come to be prominently featured throughout
the seventies in the genre, notably in the works of Sergio Martino. This
was never released in the US, but English language prints were made for
distribution in the UK. Bava was quoted as saying, "I had to avenge myself
somehow", and this he did with the outrageous statement of his next film.
Rather than rely on psychological, or even visual, elements to drive a crime
thriller, he went in the opposite direction toward excess. In this project
he also returned to being involved with the writing. If I had to pick the
entry which stands apart as the most unique for the director amongst this
filmography, it would have to be ECOLOGIA DEL DELITTO (aka TWITCH OF THE
DEATH NERVE, 1971). It has been released under at least nine different
titles, including the ludicrous LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT II. TWITCH has
nothing in common with the Wes Craven torture fest. While Bava could be
violent when necessary in his other projects, none depicted the outright
gore that is found in this one. The story revolves around a power struggle
for the control of an undeveloped lake between the property's heirs, some
developers, and the lower class locals living around it. In a guessing game
as to who is guilty of murder, suspects are knocked off one after the other.
One perpetrator becomes the next victim like a row of falling dominos. The
bloody excesses are actually part of a very black comedic theme, and the
gore effects are displayed quite graphically. Ads boasted about the 13
murders that could be seen, and that number is significant as this film has
many striking similarities (at least in story if not in construction) to the
first couple of FRIDAY THE 13TH installments. Amongst the murders are the
hanging of a wheelchair bound victim, a decapitation, and scenes directly
lifted for the first FRIDAY where a couple in bed are simultaneously speared
through the mattress and a woman has her face split with an axe. One of the
most effective parts has a skinny dipping girl encountering a floating,
rotted corpse, which again precedes an Argento scene, this time in the Bava
constructed underwater section of INFERNO. As there is a killer roaming
free it loosely can be called "giallo", much as Argento's PHENOMENA can, but
it doesn't strictly match the conventions of that genre. TWITCH also
doesn't resemble much else of the director's work. It is worth seeing by
anyone with a strong stomach and a strong sense of humor. Be ready for an
outrageous ending when the final two victims are racked up.
A return to horror and the supernatural would be his style for the remainder
of Bava's released film projects, and he worked only sporadically throughout
the decade of the seventies. The year 1972 saw a collaboration with
producer Alfred Leone that was successful to a certain extent, but sad as
Leone interfered with and muddled LISA AND THE DEVIL, which could have stood
as one of Bava's finest efforts. Both projects feature stories which return
to a gothic horror format, and concern an evil spiritual presence in an old
baroque mansion. The first was LISA E IL DIAVOLO (LISA AND THE DEVIL,
1972) as created by Bava, but unfortunately the producer forced a horrible
alteration on it when it was finally released in 1975. Its transmutation at
that time into THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM was designed to cash in on the then
popular Linda Blair vomit epic. What can be seen of the original film shows
the complex story of Lisa, played by Elke Sommer, who may or may not be the
reincarnation of a person who was at the center of events causing death and
tragedy at a previous time. The story is deeply surreal. In it Telly
Savalas (sucking a lollipop for the first time) plays the Devil, who exists
in the flesh as the butler to a perverse family whom a confused Lisa is
forced to take refuge with on a stormy night when she is lost in Rome as a
tourist. There has been evil in this family's past, and the confused son of
the blind matriarch sees Lisa as the reincarnation of his long dead wife
Elena. His also dead stepfather Carlo, who sometimes comes to life through
a dummy resembling him, had been having an affair with Elena which led to
both of their deaths. The crazed son and the sometimes in the flesh Carlo
battle for the attentions of the confused and frightened Lisa/Elena, while
the Savalas Devil character constantly lurks in the background. The story
hinges on the concept of The Devil directing the possession of Lisa by
Elena, for the sake of bringing torment to the family. Bava's gothic
touches create an intriguing look in the old house, and several shocking
deaths along the way also contribute to the horror. One sequence has the
son chloroforming Lisa/Elena, and lying her in bed next to the rotting
corpse of the original Elena, which he talks to while molesting the
unconscious body. In the conclusion the son prepares for his marriage to
Lisa, with all of the accumulated bodies of those killed throughout the
course of the film seated at a table Last Supper style. The rotted corpse
is at the center as the Savalas Devil is set to perform the service. The
film as originally intended was carefully designed to strike a balance
between questions of whether the butler was The Devil and Lisa was a
possessed reincarnation of this woman from the past, or if she is just a
tool being used by the Savalas character to perpetrate an earthly act of
terror on the unstable mother and child. The Devil/butler is always shown
to be moving around the fringes of every terrifying occurrence. What began
as a thoughtful and carefully planned horror tale was reduced to absurd at
the hands of producer Leone. Wishing to cash in on the popularity of THE
EXORCIST he had Bava direct additional scenes involving Sommer and Robert
Alda, who didn't even appear in the original story, which were inserted
nonsensically at various points in the film. They show Lisa collapsing in
the streets of Rome, and Alda as a priest accompanying her to the hospital
and then performing an exorcism on her as she becomes effected by possession
to a greater extent. She turns into a monster, pukes, spits toads, utters
vulgarities, and contorts her body just like Linda, as Alda attempts to
drive the demon out of her. These inserts were shot without inspiration and
don't match the rest of the film in plot, pacing, or visual style. Every so
often the original story is interrupted by this intruding saga taking place
at some other location. Bava did film most of the new material, but he
balked at some of the more extreme images over discomforts due to his
own religious leaning, and thus Leone filmed these himself. These obnoxious
intrusions ruined the pace and feel of a carefully constructed, atmospheric
thriller. Lorne Marshall in Videooze #4 has documented the scenes removed
from LISA AND THE DEVIL in it's transformation to HOUSE OF EXORCISM from a
recently unearthed Venezuelan video of the original. Segments excised from
LISA to make room for the new inserts total about 30 minutes. An important
change was the substitution of endings between the two versions. LISA
concludes with a segment resolving that the protagonist was in fact a
ghostly creature who was reliving past guilt, and the story ends with her
traveling back to the unknown. She emerges from the house in the morning,
and some playing children toss a ball her way. As it bounces at her feet
(an homage to KILL, BABY KILL) one child screams that she is a ghost as no
one has lived in the house for 100 years. The final scene has her boarding
a plane and discovering it to be empty. As she moves through it she
encounters all of the occupants of the house. Eventually the pilot of the
plane is shown to be the butler, who is euphemistically carting them all
away. HOUSE opted for a "happy" ending, skipping all of the above for a
conclusion with Alda exorcising the demon from Lisa's body. Bava was so
disturbed by the hatchet job that he took his director's credit under the
name "Mickey Lion". The ending's alteration also destroyed Bava's minor
visual link to his next project, GLI ORRORI DEL CASTELLO DI NORIMBERGA (aka
BARON BLOOD, 1972), also made for Alfred Leone and starring Elke Sommer; the
second film opens on a shot of a plane flying through the air and landing.
This story tells of a young student coming to Austria to look over an
ancient castle once owned by his ancestor, the evil Baron Von Kleist, who is
still remembered and despised by the townspeople as the vicious Baron
Blood. Peter, the descendent, brings with him a parchment telling how to
revive the Baron, and for kicks he and a local woman named Eva, played by
Elke Sommer, try it out. Naturally the Baron comes back and the murders
resume. Joseph Cotton plays the evil Baron who in human form is a wealthy,
wheelchair bound developer who arrives to purchase the castle with the
stated intention of recreating its old torture chambers as a haunting
tourist attraction. Real tortures and murders resume when the wheelchair
bound man transforms into his true form of a mutilated monster. Peter and
Eva rely on an occultist to provide them with a magical amulet to dispose of
the fiend. LISA AND THE DEVIL was a film into which Bava put a much greater
emphasis on the plot than in most of his previous ones. He carefully
developed a script which would allow for his introspective and artistic
vision as a filmmaker to be utilized to its fullest extent. Perhaps the
disappointment of that effort being diminished by the actions of Leone led
to a lessened enthusiasm for developing more complexity in his next project
for the producer. Or maybe it was just a natural result for the second of
two films made in the same year. Despite its rather straightforward story,
BARON BLOOD is not without positives. As is expected from Bava, the
segments showing the interior of the castle, especially inside the dungeon,
are where the greatest levels of excitement are produced. When Peter and
Eva explore the torture chamber, one item that they run across is an upright
coffin lined with sharp spikes on its inside. A reflection on the Mask of
the Demon in BLACK SUNDAY. A shot of the Baron's victims hanging skewered
on spikes atop the castle is also quite effective. AIP returned as the US
distributor, and they again cut a few of the more violent moments out and
changed the score to one composed by Les Baxter.
Nothing emerged from the once prolific Bava over the subsequent four years.
The project that he worked on next was CANI ARRABBIATI (aka WILD DOGS,
1974). It is said to be a contemporary crime story dealing with kidnapping
and organized syndicates. With the film very near completion however, it
was seized by the producer's creditors as part of a debt settlement, and
what was completed remains unfinished and unseen. Mario's son, director
Lamberto Bava, has tried to purchase the film from its current owners but
claims that the price is unrealistically high. Bava's final work for the
big screen uniquely stands out from the majority of his output to an extent
matched only by TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE. ALL 33 DI VIA OROLOGIO FA SEMPRE
FREDDO (aka SHOCK, 1977) is another demonic horror tale, this time centering
on the misdeeds of an evil young boy. The film is unique in its approach in
that it was created in a much more traditional style than was seen in Bava's
20 years of previous work. Possibly hampered with inadequate funds to
create the elaborate scenarios that his artistic eye usually brought to
films, SHOCK attempts to make up for this by concentrating on the development
of a strong narrative. It was successful in that regard, and SHOCK is a
well constructed and enjoyable horror movie. It stars Dario Argento's
partner Daria Nicolodi as the mother of the strange child. The story is
developed through its characters and their actions, rather than through
cinematography and editing. Nicoldi at first appears as a happy and stable
single mother who is moving into a new home with her son and boyfriend.
Things begin to change however when the young boy begins to display some
vicious behavior towards his mother, which causes her stability to weaken.
Bava develops the story by alternating these actions with flashbacks which
show that the mother had been the victim of torment from the boy's drug
addicted father, and has spent the previous years in an asylum. As she
sinks into psychosis to a greater extent, he plays on the conflicting causes
of her slipping towards another breakdown. Is it due to her mental state or
is she being pushed there by the demon child? Bava is at his best with
these flashback scenes, which in a linear fashion expose the background to
the audience. He also excels in depicting her bouts with shock,
characterized by her strange and violent hallucinations. The last segment
of the movie is the most powerful, where we finally learn that Nicolodi's
character had in fact killed her former husband to protect herself from him,
and then buried the body in the walls of their house. This is the house to
which she has now returned. The conflict as to the cause of her breakdown
is revealed to be supernatural, as the dead husband, through possession of
both the boy and the house, drives her to kill her new lover and herself.
The best scenes are the phantasmagoric flashbacks and the animation of the
house when it helps the evil force to exact its revenge. In a switch, Bava
may have been influenced by Argento in this production in terms of the
soundtrack. It is a loud, gothic/prog rock one, which mimics those created
by Goblin for some of Argento's films. The director's son Lamberto Bava had
served as assistant dating back to PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, and he has said
that in aiding his aging father that he himself directed a greater portion
of this film than any other credited to Mario. Lamberto has been active as
the creator a number of horror titles himself since then, including MACABRE
(1980), THE HOUSE WITH THE DARK STAIRCASE (1982), and THE PHOTOS OF JOY
(1987), as well as DEMONS (1985) and DEMONS II (1986) for producer Argento.
In a situation similar to TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE and LISA AND THE DEVIL,
SHOCK was presented in America under the title BEYOND THE DOOR II, in an
attempt to play it off as a sequel to an unrelated film.
Daria Nicolodi would also be connected to the final two projects that Mario
Bava was associated with. In 1978 he and Lamberto directed an hour long
segment for the Italian television series "Il Giorno dei Diavolo" (which
translates to "The Devil's Notebook") titled VENUS OF ILLE (or "Venus of
Evil"). Nicolodi stars as a woman who is about to be married. The father
of her husband-to-be discovers a buried bronze statue of Venus on his
property, which they display for marital good luck. When the groom stashes
the wedding ring on the statue's finger and then forgets it there, he is
forced to use another in the ceremony. Venus comes to life and in trying to
claim her new husband crushes him to death on his bed. The story is set in
1837, and Bava is said to have effectively created an atmospheric depiction
of that time. Nicolodi once told an interviewer that it may be shown on
cable TV in the US, but I am not aware of its ever being available for
viewing in this country. Dario Argento's INFERNO (1980), co-written by
Nicolodi, would be the last item that Mario Bava was associated with. He
served as an uncredited art director and special effects designer on this
tale of a witch's occupation of a bizarre building in New York City. Anyone
who has enjoyed such Bava creations as HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, BLACK
SABBATH, or PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES will immediately see his influence. The
haunted mise en scene of the house is captured through a careful painting of
its secret rooms, and hallways to nowhere, in combinations of deep red,
blue, and green lights. Bava's eye for the visual and Argento's genius with
pacing, camera movement, and editing, combine for on the best sequences in
any of Argento's films. In exploring the nuances of the house early in the
story, the heroine discovers a hidden basement which is completely filled
with water. As she swims through it in an attempt to recover her dropped
keys, the room is revealed to be an elaborate and old ballroom. As she
moves through the water and stumbles across its hidden secrets, Argento and
Bava fashion a beautifully choreographed trip through a strange environment.
The scene's most shocking moment recalls Bava's TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE,
when a rotted corpse is inadvertently dislodged and floats after the fleeing
and frightened girl.
Selected references -
articles:
"Terror Pioneer" by Tim Lucas, Fangoria no. 42, Feb 1985
"Bava's Terrors Part 2" by Tim Lucas, Fangoria no. 43, Mar 1985
"Black Sabbath: The UnMaking of The Three Faces of Fear", by Tim Lucas
and Alan Upchurch, Video Watchdog no. 5, May/Jun 1991
"The Barbara Steele Interview" by Christopher S. Dietrich and Peter
Beckman, Video Watchdog no. 7, Sep/Oct 1991
"Bedeviled Bava" by Lorne Marshall, Videooze no. 4, 1992
Special Giallo Issue by Craig Ledbetter, European Trash Cinema vol. 2,
no. 6, 1992
"Blood and Black Lace" by Andy Black, Necronimicon no. 2, Jun 1993 (UK)
"Mask of Satan" by Andy Black, Necronimicon no. 3, Sep 1993 (UK)
books:
The Video Watchdog Book by Tim Lucas, Video Watchdog, 1992, ISBN:
0-9633756-0-1
The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies ed. by Phil Hardy, Harper & Row,
1986, ISBN: 0-06-096146-5
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon, Ballantine,
1983, ISBN: 345-34345-5
Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento by
Maitland McDonagh, Sun Tavern Fields (UK), 1991. ISBN: 0-9517012-4-X
Mario Bava by Pascal Martinet, Edilig (France), 1984, ISSN: 0294-0957.
A 126pp monograph in Filmo no. 6, with bibliography.
As is evident from the above, Tim Lucas of The Video Watchdog has done some
of the most extensive research into the films of Mario Bava. He has long
spoken of writing an extensive work on the subject to be titled "The Haunted
Worlds of Mario Bava", and the latest reports have it with a tentative
publication date in 1994.
Mario Bava filmography -
The format for films which have Bava as director is to first list the most
common title as released in the United States, followed by the original
Italian title in parenthesis. The exceptions are with LISA AND THE DEVIL
and SHOCK, as attempts to associate them with unrelated earlier films
through retitlings is ridiculous. Additional titles used for release in the
US, Italy, or the UK follow. Non English or Italian variations are
omitted. Films not released in the US are listed by their most common
title of release in England, or by the literal translation of the original
Italian title.
As director:
BLACK SUNDAY (La Maschera del Demonio) aka The Mask of Satan aka The Demon's
Mask aka Revenge of the Vampire aka House of Fright - 1960. A Galatea
Films/Jolly Films (Italy), and AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C/Se/Co-Art-Dr:
Mario Bava, Pr: Massimo de Rita, Co-Wr: Ennio de Concini, Marcello Coscia,
Mario Serandrei, Co-C: Ubaldo Terzano, M: Roberto Nicolosi (Europe), Les
Baxter (US), Co-Art-Dr: Giorgio Giovannini, Asst-Dr: Vana Caruso, E: Mario
Serandrei (Europe), Salvatore Billitteri (US), Cast: Barbara Steele, John
Richardson, Ivo Garrani, Andrea Checchi, Arturo Dominici, Enrico Olivieri,
Clara Bindi, Antonio Pierfederici, Clara Bindi, Tino Bianchi, Germana
Dominici, Mario Passante, Tino Bianchi, Renato Terra, b/w, 86(83) min
HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (Ercole al Centro della Terra) aka Hercules at
the Center of the Earth aka Hercules in the Center of the Earth aka Hercules
vs. the Vampires aka The Vampire vs. Hercules aka With Hercules to the
Center of the Earth - 1961. A Spa Cinematografica (Italy), Woolner Brothers
(US) release; Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C/Se: Mario Bava, Pr: Achille Piazzi, Co-Wr:
Allesandro Continenza, Duccio Tessari, Franco Prosperi, Co-C: Ubaldo
Terzano, M: Armando Trovajoli, Art-Dr: Franco Lolli, Asst-Dr: Franco
Prosperi, E: Mario Serandrei, Cast: Christopher Lee, Leonora Ruffo, Reg
Park, Giorgio Ardisson, Marisa Belli, Ida Galli, Ely Draco, Grazia Collodi,
Franco Giacobini, Mino Doro, Monica Neri, color, 91(73) min
ERIK THE CONQUEROR (Gli Invasori) aka The Invaders aka Fury of the Vikings -
1961. A Galatea/Criterion Films (Italy), Societe Cinematographique Lyre
(France), and AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C: Mario Bava, Pr: Massimo de
Rita, Co-Wr: Oreste Biancoli, Piero Pierotti, Co-C: Ubaldo Terzano, M:
Roberto Nicolosi, Art-Dr: Giorgio Giovannini, Asst-Dr: Franco Prosperi, E:
Mario Serandrei, Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Andrea Checci, Francoise Christophe,
Folco Lulli, Giorgio Ardisson, Ellen Kessler, Alice Kessler, Franco
Giacobini, Joe Robinson, Raffaele Baldassarre, Enzo Doria, Franco Ressel,
Livia Contardi, Jean-Jacques Delbo, color, 98(88) min
WHAT! (La Frusta e il Corpo) aka The Whip and the Body aka The Body and the
Whip aka Night is the Phantom aka The Way and the Body aka Son of Satan -
1963. A Leone Film (Italy), Francinor (France), PIP/Vox Film (UK), and
Futurama (US) release; Dr: Mario Bava (as John M. Old), Pr: Elio
Scardamaglia (as John Oscar), Co-Wr: Ernesto Gastaldi (as Julian Berry), Ugo
Guerra (as Robert Hugo), Luciano Martino (as Martin Hardy), C: Ubaldo
Terzano (as David Hamilton), M: Carlo Rustichelli (as Jim Murphy), Art-Dr:
Ottavio Scotti (as Dick Grey), Asst-Dr: Ernesto Gastaldi (as Julian Berry),
E: Roberto Cinquini (as Bob King) Cast: Christopher Lee, Daliah Lavi,
Luciano Stella (as Tony Kendall), Harriet White, Isli Oberon, Luciano
Pigozzi (as Alan Collins), Jacques Herlin, Gustavo de Nardo (as Dean Ardow),
color, 92(77) min
THE EVIL EYE (La Ragazza che Sapeva Troppo) - aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much
1963. A Galatea/Coronet (Italy) and AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C: Mario
Bava, Pr: Massimo de Rita, Ferruccio de Martino, Lionello Santi, Salvatore
Billitteri, Co-Wr: Ennio de Concini, Eliana de Sabata, Franco Prosperi, Mino
Guerrini, Enzo Corbucci, Co-C: Ubaldo Terzano, M: Roberto Nicolosi (Europe),
Les Baxter (US), Art-Dr: Giorgio Giovannini, Asst-Dr: Franco Prosperi, E:
Mario Serandrei, Cast: Leticia Roman, John Saxon, Valentina Cortese, Dante
di Paolo, Robert Buchanan, Gianni di Benedetto, Jim Dolen, Virginia Doro,
Chana Coubert, Peggy Nathan, Marta Melecco, Lucia Modugno, Franco Morigi,
John Stacy, Milo Quesada, Tiberio Murgia, Titti Tomaino, Pini Lido, Dafydd
Havard, b/w, 92 min
BLACK SABBATH (I Tre Volte della Paura) aka The Three Faces Of Fear aka
Black Christmas aka The Three Faces of Terror - 1964. A Galatea Films/
Emmepi Cinematografica (Italy), Societe Cinematographique Lyre (France) and
AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr: Paolo Mercuri, Salvatore
Billitteri, Co-Wr: Marcello Fondata, Alberto Bevilacqua, Ugo Guerra, C:
Ubaldo Terzano, M: Roberto Nicolosi (Europe), Les Baxter (US), Art-Dr:
Giorgio Giovannini, E: Mario Serandrei, Cast: Boris Karloff, Michele
Mercier, Lydia Alfonsi, Gustavo de Nardo, Susy Andersen, Mark Damon, Glauco
Onorato, Rika Dialina, Jacqueline Soussard (as Jacqueline Pierreux), Milly
Monti, Harriet White, Massimo Righi, color, 100(95) min
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (Sei Donne per l'Assassino) aka Fashion House of Death
aka Six Women for the Murderer - 1964. An Emmepi Cinematografica (Italy),
Productions Georges de Beauregard (France), Top Film/Monarchia Films (W.
Germany) and Woolner/Allied Artists (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr:
Massimo Patrizi, Alfredo Mirabile (as Alfred Mirabel), Lou Moss (English
version), Co-Wr: Marcello Fondato (as Marcel Fondat), Joe (Giuseppe)
Barilla, C: Ubaldo Terzano (as Herman Tarzana), M: Carlo Rustichelli (as
Carl Rustic), Art-Dr: Arrigo Breschi (as Harry Brest), Ed: Mario Serandrei
(as Mark Suran), Cast: Eva Bartok, Cameron Mitchell, Thomas Reiner, Arianna
Gorini, Mary Arden, Franco Ressel, Massimo Righi, Giuliano Raffaelli,
Luciano Pigozzi, Dante di Paolo, Enzo Cerusico, Mara Carmosino, Lea Kruger,
Claudia Dantes, Harriet White, Nadia Anty, Heidi Stroh, color, 90(85) min
THE ROAD TO FORT ALAMO (La Strada per Fort Alamo) aka Arizona Bill - 1964.
A Protor Film/Piazzi Produzione Cinematografica (Italy), Comptoir Francais
du Film (France), and World Entertainment Corporation (US) release; Dr:
Mario Bava (as John M. Old), Co-Wr: Vincent Thomas, Charles Price, Jane
Brisbane, C: Bud Third, Cast: Ken Clark, Jany Clair, Michel Lemoine,
Andreina Paul, Kirk Bert, Antonio Gratoldi, Dean Ardow, color, 100(82) min
PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (Terrore nello Spazio) aka Demon Planet aka Planet of
Blood aka The Haunted Planet aka The Planet of Terror aka Terror in Space
aka The Outlawed Planet aka The Planet of the Damned - 1965. An Italian
International Film (Italy), Castilla Cinematografica Cooperativa (Spain),
and AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr: Fulvio Lucianso, Salvatore
Billitteri, Ib Melchior (English version), Co-Wr: Callisto Cosulich, Antonio
Roman, Alberto Bevilacqua, Rafael J. Salvia, Ib Melchior and Louis M.
Heyward (English version), C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Gino Marinuzzi Jr, Antonio
Piere Olca, Art-Dr: Giorgio Giovannini, Cast: Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengel,
Angel Aranda, Evi Morandi, Fernando Villena, Ivan Rassimov, Rico Boido,
Massimo Righi, Stelio Candelli, Mario Morales, Franco Andrei, Alberto
Cevenini, color, 88(86) min
KILL, BABY, KILL (Operazione Paura) aka Curse of the Living Dead aka Curse
of the Dead aka Operation Fear - 1966. A FUL Films (Italy) and Europix
Consolidated Corp. (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr: Nando Pisani,
Luciano Catenacci, Co-Wr: Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale, John Hart
(English version), C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Carlo Rustichelli, Art-Dr: Sandro
Dell'Orco, Asst-Dr: Lamberto Bava, E: Romana Fortini, Cast: Enrica Bianchi
Colombatto (as Erika Blanc), Giacomo Rossi-Stuart, Fabienne Dali, Gianna
Vivaldi, Piero Lulli, Max Lawrence, Giuseppe Addobbati, Franca Domonici,
Micaela Esdra, Mirella Pamphilli, Valeria Valeri, color, 85(75) min
DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS (Le Spie Vengona del Semifreddo) aka Dr.
Goldfoot and the "S" Bombs - 1966. An Italian International Film (Italy)
and AIP (US) release; Dr: Mario Bava, Pr: Fulvio Luciano, Louis M. Heyward,
Co-Wr: Louis M. Heyward, Robert Kaufman, Franco Castellano, Pipolo, James
Hartford, C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Les Baxter, Cast: Vincent Price, Fabian,
Franco Franchi, Ciccio Ingrassia, Laura Antonelli, Moana Tahi, Francesco
Mule, color, 85 min
SAVAGE GRINGO (Nebraska il Pistolero) aka A Gunman called Nebraska - 1966.
An Italian International (Italy), Castilla Cinematografica release (Spain),
and AIP (US); Dr: Mario Bava (credited to Antonio Roman as Anthony Roman),
Wr: Antonio Roman, Cast: Ken Clark, Yvonne Bastein, Piero Lulli, Renato
Rossini, Alfonso Rojas, Antonio Gradoli, Angel Ortiz, Livio Lorenzon, Aldo
Sambrell, Renato Terra, Paco Saenz, color, 82 min
KNIVES OF THE AVENGER (Raffica di Coltelli) aka Viking Massacre - 1967. A
World Entertainment Release of a Sider Films production; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario
Bava (as John Hold), Pr: P. Tagliaferri; Co-Wr: Alberto Liberati, George
Simonelli, C: Antonio Renaldi, M: Marcello Giambini, Asst-Dr: Robert Glands,
E: Otello Colangeli (as Othello), Cast: Cameron Mitchell, Fausto Tozzi,
Luciana Polletin, Elissa Picelli (as Elisa Mitchell), Giacomo Rossi Stuart
(as Jack Stewart), British, Mike Moore, Renato Terra, Sergio Cortona, color,
86 min
DANGER: DIABOLIK (Diabolik) - 1968. An S.P.A. (Italy), Marianne Productions
(France) and Paramount (US) release of a Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica
production; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr: Dino De Laurentiis, Co-Wr: Dino
Maiuri, Brian Degas, Tudor Gates, Angela Giussani, Luciana Giussani, Adriano
Baracco, C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Ennio Morricone, Art-Dr: Flavio Mogherini,
Asst-Dr: Lamberto Bava, Ed: Romana Fortini, Cast: John Phillip Law, Marissa
Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Terry Thomas, Claudio Gora, Edward Febo
Kelleng, Caterina Boratto, Giulio Donnini, Annie Gorassini, Renzo Palmer,
Mario Donen, Andrea Bosic, Lucia Modugno, Giorgio Gennari, Giorgio
Sciolette, Carlo Croccolo, Giuseppe Fazio, Lidia Biondi, Isarco Ravaioli,
Federico Boito, Tiberio Mitri, Wolfgang Hillinger, color, 98 min
THE ODYSSEY - 1968. One of eight 55 minute segments made for Italian TV by
producer Franco Rossi. Bava did special effects work as well on other
segments. This was edited down to movie length and distributed worldwide as
THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES. The compressed version contained 18 minutes of
Bava directed footage.
A HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (Il Rosso Segno della Follia) aka Blood Brides
aka An Axe for the Honeymoon aka The Red Sign of Madness - 1969. A Pan
Latina Films/Mercury Films (Spain, Italy), G.G.P. Pictures (US) release,
Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C: Mario Bava, Pr: Manuel Cano Sanciriaco, Co-Wr: Santiago
Moncada, Mario Musy, Co-C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Sante Romitelli, Art-Dr: J.M.
Herrero, Cast: Stephen Forsyth, Dagmar Lassander, Laura Betti, Jesus Puente,
Femi (Eufemia) Benussi, Antonia Mas, Luciano Pigozzi (as Alan Collins),
Gerard Tichy, Fortunato Pasquale, Veronica Llimera, color, 93(83) min
FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON (Cinque Bambole per la Luna d'Agosta) - 1970.
A Produzioni Atlas Cinematografica (Italy) release; Dr/E: Mario Bava, Pr:
Luigi Alessi, Wr: Mario di Nardo, C: Antonio Rinaldi, M: Piero Umiliani,
Art-Dr: Giuseppe Aldebaran, Cast: Ira Fuerstenberg, Edwige Fenech, William
Berger, Renato Rossini (as Howard Ross), Helena Ronee, Edy Galleani (as
Justine Gall), Edith Meloni, Teodoro Corra, Mauro Bosco, color, 88(81) min
ROY COLT AND WINCHESTER JACK - 1970 (1975 in US). A Libert production of a
P.A.C./Tigielle release; Dr: Mario Bava, Co-Wr: Di Nardo and Agrin, Cast:
Brett Halsey, Marilu Tolo, Charles Southwood, Teodoro Corra, color, 90 min
FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT - 1970. (Does anyone have any info on this?)
TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (Ecologia del Delitto) aka Bay of Blood aka
Bloodbath Bay of Blood aka Antefatto aka Reazione a Catena aka The Ecology
of a Crime aka Carnage aka Last House on the Left II aka New House on the
Left aka Before the Fact-Ecology of a Crime - 1971. A Nuova Linea
Cinematografica (Italy), Hallmark (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr/Co-C: Mario Bava,
Pr: Giuseppe Zaccariello, Co-Wr: Carlo Reali, Giuseppe Zaccariello (as
Joseph McLee), Filippo Ottoni, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Barberi, Co-C:
Antonio Rinaldi, M: Stelvio Cipriani, Art-Dr: S. Canevari, Cast: Claudine
Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Volonte, Anna Maria Rosati, Laura Betti,
Chris Avram, Brigitte Skay, Isa Miranda, Leopoldo Trieste, Paola Rubens,
color, 90(76) min
LISA AND THE DEVIL (Lisa e il Diavolo) aka The House of Exorcism aka The
Devil and the Dead aka The Devil in the House of Exorcism - 1972. A
EuroAmerica (Italy), Tecisa (Spain), Roxy (W. Germany) and Peppercorn
Wormser (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava (as Micky Lion), Pr: Alfred
Leone, Co-Wr: Roberto Natale, Giorgio Manlini, Alberto Tintini, Alfred
Leone, C: Cecilio Paniagua, M: Carlo Savina, Art-Dr: Nedo Azzini, Se: Franco
Tocci, Cast: Elke Sommer, Telly Savalas, Sylva Koscina, Alida Valli, Alessio
Orano, Gabriele Tinti, Eduardo Fajardo, Carmen Silva, Franz von Treuberg,
Espartaco Santoni, color, 98(93,91) min
BARON BLOOD (Gli Orrori del Castello di Norimberga) aka Chamber of Tortures
aka The Blood Baron aka The Thirst of Baron Blood aka The Torture Chamber of
Baron Blood - 1972. A Euro International Film (Italy), Dieter Geissler (W.
Germany), and AIP (US) release; Dr/Co-Wr: Mario Bava, Pr: Alfred Leone,
Co-Wr: Vincent Forte, Willibald Eser (as William A. Bairn), C: Antonio
Rinaldi, M: Stelvio Cipriani (Italy), Les Baxter (US), Art-Dr: Enzo
Bulgarelli, Se: Franco Tocci, Cast: Joseph Cotten, Elke Sommer, Antonio
Cantafora, Massimo Girotti, Luciano Pigozzi (as Alan Collins), Dieter
Tressler, Humi (Umberto) Raho, Rada Rassimov, Nicoletta Emmi, color, 92(90)
min
WILD DOGS (Cani Arrabbiati) - 1974. Incomplete and unreleased.
SHOCK (All 33 di Via Orologio Fa Sempre Freddo) aka Shock [Transfer Suspense
Hypnos] aka Beyond the Door II aka Suspense - 1977. A Laser Film (Italy)
and Film Ventures (US) release; Dr: Mario Bava, Pr: Turi Vasile, Co-Wr:
Lamberto Bava, Francesco Barbieri, Paolo Briganti, Dardano Sacchetti, C:
Alberto Spagnoli, M: I. Libra, Art-Dr: Francesco Vanorio, Cast: Daria
Nicolodi, John Steiner, David Collin Jnr, Ivan Rassimov, Nicola Salerno,
color, 95(87) min
LA VENERE D'ILLE - 1978. Made as a one hour segment for the Italian TV
show "Il Giorno dei Diavolo" ("The Devil's Notebook")
The director's son Lamberto Bava was a frequent (and sometimes credited)
assistant on most films from PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES on.
Short films made before features (as director and cinematographer, except
where indicated):
L'ORRECHIO - 1946
SANTA NOTTE - 1947
LEGENDA SINFONICA - 1947 (co-dir with M. Melani)
ANFITEATRO FLAVIO - 1947
VARIAZIONI SINFONICHE - 1949
L'AMORE NELL'ARTE - 1950 (dir only)
As assistant director:
THE WONDERS OF ALADDIN - 1961 (dir: Henry Levin)
As cinematographer:
LA AVVENTURA DI ANNABELLA - 1938
IL TACCHINO PREPOTENTE - 1939
UOMINI E CIELI - 1943
CHRISTMAS AT CAMP 119 - 1948
THIS WINE OF LOVE - 1948
QUEL BANDITO SONO IO - 1949
ANTONIO DI PADUA - 1949
E'ARRIVATO IL CAVALIERE (HER FAVORITE HUSBAND?) - 1950
VITA DA CANI - 1950
MAD ABOUT OPERA - 1950
MISS ITALIA - 1950
GUARDIE E LADRI (COPS AND ROBBERS?) - 1951
GLI EROI DELLA DOMENICA - 1953
VIALE DELLA SPERANZA - 1953
TERZA LICEO - 1954
COSE DA PAZZI - 1954
VILLA BORGHESE - 1954
LA DONNA PIU BELLA MONDO - 1955
ADVENTURES OF GIACOMO CASANOVA - 1955
MIO FIGLIO NERONE - 1956
THE DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT (I Vampiri) aka Lust of the Vampire aka The Vampires
- 1956 (dir: Riccardo Freda, Bava uncredited assistant)
THE WHITE WARRIOR (Agi Murad il Diavolo Bianco) - 1959 (dir: Riccardo Freda,
Bava uncredited assistant)
HERCULES (La Fatiche de Ercole) - 1957 (dir: Pietro Francisci)
CITY AT NIGHT - 1957
LA MORTE VIENE DALLA SPAZIO - 1958
THE DAY THE SKY EXPLODED - 1958 (dir: Paolo Heusch)
LABORS OF HERCULES - 1958
CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER - 1959 (as John Foam; dir: Riccardo Freda as
Robert Hampton, Bava uncredited assistant)
GIANT OF MARATHON (La Battaglia di Maratona) - 1959 (dir: Jacques Tourneur,
Bava uncredited assistant director with Bruno Vailati)
HERCULES AND THE QUEEN OF LYDIA - 1959
HERCULES UNCHAINED (Ercole e la Regina di Lidia) - 1960 (dir: Pietro
Francisci, Bava uncredited assistant)
ESTHER AND THE KING (Ester e il Re) - 1960 (dir: Raoul Walsh)
NERO'S MISTRESS - 1962
The above is by no means complete, and as it came from several sources some
titles are in Italian and some in English. As I don't speak Italian it is
possible that some of the above names are duplicates. Bava is reported to
have actually directed the majority of both THE DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT and
CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER, and finished GIANT OF MARATHON. He wrote THE
YOUNG, THE EVIL, AND THE SAVAGE (1970) and was set to direct it before the
producers replaced him with Antonio Margheriti. Bava also contributed some
effects and photography to ROMA CONTRA ROMA (aka WAR OF THE ZOMBIES, 1965,
dir: Giuseppe Verdi), BABY KONG (1977?), and INFERNO (1980, dir: Dario
Argento). A couple of sources have attributed him with some camera work on
Freda's L'ORRIBLE SEGRETO DEL DOTTORE HICHCOCK (aka THE HORRIBLE DR.
HICHCOCK, 1962) but this is questionable.
Mario Bava on video -
These are titles which are available, or have been available in America. THE
DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT, BLACK SUNDAY, KILL, BABY KILL, and the very recently
acquired BLOOD AND BLACK LACE are all sold by Sinister Cinema (see Appendix)
in their original forms. HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD has been put out by
Rhino in the Woolner cut at a sell through price. HBO Video released the
following titles in 1987: BLACK SABBATH (AIP cut), PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES,
and BARON BLOOD (AIP cut, as TORTURE CHAMBER OF BARON BLOOD). ERIK THE
CONQUEROR was released by Twin Tower Enterprises under the title THE
INVADERS. Media Home Entertainment put out BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (with
scenes removed that are reportedly in Sinister's tape), A HATCHET FOR THE
HONEYMOON, and SHOCK (as BEYOND THE DOOR 2). SHOCK can also be found in
discount video racks now for under $10 from Video Treasures. A HATCHET FOR
THE HONEYMOON has also come out under the Nelson Entertainment and
Powersports-American Video (!) labels. KNIVES OF THE AVENGER was issued
under the title VIKING MASSACRE by Westernworld Video, and DANGER: DIABOLIK
was put out by Paramount. MPI Home Video has released LISA AND THE DEVIL
(as DEVIL IN THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM) and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE (as BAY OF
BLOOD). LISA AND THE DEVIL was also released under the HOUSE OF EXORCISM
title by Trans-Atlantic and TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE came out from Gorgan
Video under that title. THE EVIL EYE (as THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH), WHAT!
(as THE WHIP AND THE BODY), and FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON are all
available in their European forms as dupes from Video Search of Miami for
$25 each, PO Box 16-1917, Miami FL, 33116, 305-279-9773, but the picture
quality is probably below average. Midnight Video sells dupes, said to be
of good quality, of the uncut European versions of BLACK SUNDAY, THE WHIP
AND THE BODY, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (as SIX WOMEN FOR THE MURDERER), TWITCH
OF THE DEATH NERVE (as BAY OF BLOOD), LISA AND THE DEVIL, and BARON BLOOD
(all in English), and BLACK SABBATH (in Italian without subtitles). $19.00
each, at 5010 Church Drive, Coplay, PA, 18037, 610-261-1756. BLACK SUNDAY
and BLACK SABBATH have recently been put out on one laser disk by HBO Image
Entertainment. Redemption Video in England has recently acquired the rights
to a number of Bava films and will be releasing complete English language
versions, but they will be in the PAL mode. BLACK SABBATH, BLOOD AND BLACK
LACE, PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, and HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD have all
been widely distributed and can be found in most large video stores,
including Blockbuster (the last resort!). A HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON and
SHOCK are also fairly common.
Appendix: Barbara Steele filmography -
BACHELOR OF HEARTS - 1958; Dr: Wolf Rilla
SAPPHIRE - 1959; Dr:
THE 39 STEPS - 1959; Dr: Ralph Thomas
BLACK SUNDAY aka (La Maschera del Demonio) aka The Mask of Satan aka The
Demon's Mask aka The Revenge of the Vampire aka House of Fright - 1960;
Dr: Mario Bava
ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS TV show - "Beta Delta Gamma" episode - 1961
THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM - 1961; Dr: Roger Corman
THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK (L'Orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock) aka The
Terror of Dr. Hichcock aka Raptus aka The Terrible Secret Of Dr. Hichcock
- 1962; Dr: Riccardo Freda (as Robert Hampton)
8 1/2 aka (Otto e Mezzo) - 1962; Dr: Federico Fellini
THE GHOST (Lo Spettro) aka The Spectre - 1962; Dr: Riccardo Freda (as
Robert Hampton)
IL CAPITANO DI FERRO - 1963; Dr:
THE HOURS OF LOVE - 1963; Dr: Luciano Salce
CASTLE OF BLOOD (La Danza Macabre) aka La Lunga Notte del Terrore aka
Castle of Terror aka The Long Night of Terror aka Tombs of Horror aka
Coffin of Terror aka Dimensions in Death aka Terrore - 1963; Dr:
Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony Dawson)
WHITE VOICES (Le Voci Bianche) - 1963; Dr: Pasquale Festa Campanile
THE MONOCLE - 1964; Dr:
THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH (I Lunghi Capelli Della Morte) - 1964; Dr:
Antonio Margheriti (as Anthony Dawson)
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR WIFE - 1965; Dr: Anthony Simmons
TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE (Cinque Tombre Per Un Medium) aka The Tombs
of Horror aka Five Graves for a Medium aka Coffin of Terror; - 1965;
Dr: Ralph Zucker
NIGHTMARE CASTLE (Amanti d'Oltretomba) aka The Faceless Monster aka Lovers
Beyond the Tomb aka Orgasmo aka Night of the Doomed - 1965; Dr: Mario
Caino (as Allan Grunewald)
AN ANGEL FOR SATAN (Un Angelo Per Satana) - 1966; Dr: Camillo Mastrocinque
THE SHE BEAST (La Sorella di Satana) aka The Revenge of the Blood Beast
aka Satan's Sister - 1966; Dr: Michael Reeves
SECRET AGENT TV show - "The Man On The Beach" episode - 1966
I SPY TV show - title unknown - 1967
YOUNG TORLESS - 1967; Dr: Volker Schlondorff
THE CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTER aka The Crimson Cult aka The Crimson Altar
aka The Reincarnation aka Spirit of the Dead; - 1968; Dr: Vernon Sewell
HONEYMOON WITH A STRANGER - 1969 (made for TV); Dr: John Peyser
NIGHT GALLERY TV show - "The Sins Of The Father" episode - 1972
CAGED HEAT aka Renegade Girls - 1974; Dr: Jonathan Demme
THEY CAME FROM WITHIN aka Shivers aka The Parasite Murders - 1975;
Dr: David Cronenberg
I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN - 1977; Dr: Anthony Page
PIRANHA - 1978; Dr: Joe Dante
PRETTY BABY -1978; Dr: Louis Malle
SILENT SCREAM - 1980; Dr: Denny Harris
THE WINDS OF WAR TV miniseries - 1983
WAR AND REMEMBERANCE TV miniseries - 1988
DARK SHADOWS TV series - 1991
Mario Bava, Federico Fellini, Roger Corman, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante,
Riccardo Freda, Antonio Margheriti, Michael Reeves, Louis Malle, Volker
Schlondorff and David Cronenberg. That's quite a talented list.
Aid in compiling the above came from "Barbara Steele Videography" by Tim
Lucas and Alan Upchurch in Video Watchdog no. 7 (Sep/Oct 1991), "The Diva of
Dark Drama: Barbara Steele" by Mark A. Miller in Filmfax no. 19 (March
1990), and The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Of the horror titles
above BLACK SUNDAY (European cut!), THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK, THE GHOST,
CASTLE OF BLOOD, THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH, TERROR CREATURES FROM THE GRAVE,
NIGHTMARE CASTLE and AN ANGEL FOR SATAN (subtitled in English) are available
from Sinister Cinema (PO Box 4369, Medford, OR, 97501-0168, 503-773-6860,
$16.95 each). THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM is priced for sell through by Warner
Home Video, and they also put out PIRANHA. THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK has
also come out in edited form from Republic Home Video, and THE GHOST is
discounted from Liberty Video. Gorgon Video released THE SHE BEAST. THE
CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR was distributed and has since been deleted by HB
O
Video. THEY CAME FROM WITHIN was issued by Vestron Video and Media Home
Entertainment released SILENT SCREAM. I recommend BLACK SUNDAY (no
surprise!), THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH, NIGHTMARE CASTLE, AN ANGEL FOR SATAN,
and THE GHOST. These releases are in the US. (Would someone PLEASE release
Jonathan "Silence of the Lambs" Demme's first movie, CAGED HEAT, on video?
This film which also stars Erica "Vixen" Gavin was produced by New World).
Thanks to Paul White (paul.white@canrem.com) for supplying me with the
Fangoria articles. I'll get that ZOMBIE tape to you when I'm able Paul!
A Parliafunkadelicment Thang - FUNHOUSE! Evaluates the Albums of Funkadelic
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Funkadelic is one of the earliest incarnations of the George Clinton led
P-Funk universe, and they were the predominant format under which his
twisted funk/rock/soul fusions would appear throughout the first half of the
seventies. When Brother George decided that his doo-wop group The
Parliaments would benefit by a rock band backing, ala fellow Detroit
acid heads MC5 and The Stooges, he rounded up a gang of young bros for
guitar/bass/drum/organ chores. At this time George considered these guys
(Ed Hazel - lead guitar, Bill Nelson - bass, Lucas 'Tawl' Ross - guitar,
Ramon 'Tiki' Fulwood - drums, Mickey Atkins - organ) to be "Funkadelic", and
it is their mugs which form the kaleidoscope image on the cover of the first
album. The Parliaments had issued a few sixties singles, some on Motown and
the minor hit "I Wanna Testify" on Revilot, but interestingly the actual
first album recorded by the full band was 1970's OSMIUM, credited to
"Parliament" (on the Invictus label). The singers of The Parliaments
(George Clinton, Raymond Davis, Clarence "Fuzzy" Haskins, Calvin Simon, and
Grady Thomas) joined the above musicians with the additions of Gary Shider
on guitar, Tyrone Lampkin on drums, and Bernie Worrell performing all of the
keyboard chores, for the project. Worrell can be seen these days in the
background as a member of the band on the new "Late Show With David
Letterman". He also did a stint with the large version of Talking Heads and
is in their film Stop Making Sense. After the first couple of LP's
"Funkadelic" would come to signify all members of the entourage, which
included just about everyone mentioned above plus others, in various
combinations and formations which varied from track to track on the records.
Due to legal arguments the Parliament title would be retired until the 1974
album Up From The Down Stroke, and all of Clinton's visions would be
broadcast through Funkadelic until then. When Parliament was resurrected
that band would take on a much more dance floor oriented sound (not that you
can't boogie to Funkadelic), and would be used for Clinton's more concept
oriented projects. Funkadelic tended a little more toward the nasty side of
things thematically, and almost never utilized the horn section common in
Parliament recordings. Feedback and acid drenched guitar solos were
featured instead. The first eight Funkadelic LP's were put out on the
Detroit based Westbound label (1971-1975), but in the latter part of the
seventies when the P-Funk empire reached it's zenith, Clinton would move the
band over to Warner Brothers for the last four (1976-1980) in an attempt to
achieve greater distribution. This move created some dissension in the
group and started movement toward the schism which would result in the
splitting off of some of the founders (and the to be avoided Connections And
Disconnections phony Funkadelkic recording). During this peak period of
activity, when P-Funk would also issue music under such labels as Bootsy's
Rubber Band, The Brides of Funkenstein, and The Horny Horns, the musical
divisions between bands became a little more blurred, and the last three
Funkadelic albums (especially Uncle Jam Wants You) contain cuts designed for
booty shaking under the mirrored ball side by side with those for mind
melting trip outs - but still horns were mostly left off. George himself
summed up the distinction by saying, "Parliament was the glitter, the
commercial, and Funkadelic was the loose, the harsh. We'd take a couple of
tabs of acid and play whatever we wanted. Parliament was more vocal, more
disco with horns, and a bit more conservative. Funkadelic was more guitars
- no horns, more free-form feelings, and more harsh and wild. Sometimes
there was an overlap, but generally Funkadelic got more pussy than
Parliament." (From an interview in Motorbooty #3). In the same discussion
George suggests that Parliament was kept around to keep the group in the
spotlight and earn some cash.
Over the last few years the entire Funkadelic catalog has become available
on both vinyl and CD. They have regained a larger level of popularity with
new fans coming on board by way of both white boy funk rock bands (such as
the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who have covered Clinton's songs, had him produce
one of their albums, and even featured a P-Funk alumnus on guitar for a
short time), and rap acts who have sampled P-Funk riffs with regularity
(some of the best usage being by De La Soul and Digital Underground).
Westbound themselves have re-issued the eight records that appeared on their
label. These were put out sequentially over a period of time, and titles
were able to be had as imports from England or Germany prior to US
availability. I acquired some of the titles as imports, and I only bring
this up to point out that I've found some of them to be of better sound
quality than the domestic versions. The fidelity on the domestic releases
of the first two albums is somewhat lower than average, however I haven't
listened to the original releases so I can't say if this is an artifact of
the original recording or if it's due to the re-mastering. There was a long
delay before the Warner Brothers material was available anew due to that
company's refusal to let it go. Recently these four albums have been put
out by independent labels in both England and America, on vinyl and on CD.
With the entire Funkadelic catalog now available again, we at FUNHOUSE! are
presenting our evaluation of all the albums containing original studio
recordings. Eddie Hazel died this year at the age of 44.
ratings: one to four electric sugar cubes ([])
FUNKADELIC
1970 - Westbound 2000
[], [], []
Mommy, What's a Funkadelic? / I Bet You / Music for My Mother / I Got a
Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody's Got a Thing / Good Old Music / Qualify
and Satisfy / What is Soul
The first LP out of the box for the freak boys under the Funkadelic moniker
is a rather subdued effort based on what was to come. There is a greater
consistency of sound throughout the album than one would come to expect, but
the aural treats were still like nothing else being done at the time. The
music sounds as if it's emerging out of the depths of the swamps after
midnight, and is dominated by steady and heavy bass lines, with oozing
guitar lead interplay, organ chords, steady drumming, and various
vocalizing coming in and out in the background. This style is epitomized by
the nine minute plus lead off track. After George intones, "If you will
suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions" it takes off with the same
riff being overlaid with various voices and instruments playing off of it.
"I Bet You" and "Music for My Mother" follow the same pattern, but with a
faster line and a stepped up chorus in the first and a country-blues feel to
the autobiographically themed second. The gears shift with "I Got a
Thing..." which open with a great "waka-waka" intro, and features a wild
guitar and organ jam rave-up in the middle. "Good Old Music" gives us an
even better taste of Eddie Hazel's worshipping at the alter of Hendrix.
"Qualify and Satisfy" is based on an "I'm A Man" styled blues riff, while
the closer "What is Soul" is an example of the extended experimental tracks
which would turn up on most subsequent releases. Over weird spaceship
noises George explains what it is that we've just experienced. After asking
us to loan him our minds so that he can play with it, he tells us that all
that is good is nasty, and we're off. There's not another album in the
P-Funk universe quite like this in - listen to this voodoo rock after bong
hits.
FREE YOUR MIND AND YOUR ASS WILL FOLLOW
1970 - Westbound 2001
[], [] (three if you're really looped, or institutionalized)
Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow / Friday Night, August 14th / Funky
Dollar Bill / I Wanna Know if it's Good to You? / Some More / Eulogy and
Light
This is easily the most whacked collection that George oversaw, and the
spaced out meandering stands in the way of the production of a cohesive
work. The title song repeats the mantra, "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will
Follow - The Kingdom of Heaven is Within" in various voices and intonations
while metalish rock jams try to emerge, only to be sucked back down into the
noisy ether. The strength of the album lies in its next three central
songs. "Friday Night..." is an up tempo rocker featuring Spacey Eddie doing
his thing, while "Funky Dollar Bill" brings a trio of guitars way up in the
mix to support a tale of street capitalism that features an off the wall
piano line coming and going. "I Wanna Know..." also utilizes the trippy
guitar jamming that rocks you out, this time to a more soulful beat. With
"Some More" the band takes a style reminiscent of Booker T And The MGs,
with a subtle guitar line taking a back seat to a lead organ. "Eulogy and
Light" is the album closing free form message carrying cut here. If you
were listening from the beginning you might have thought that the title track
served that purpose, but this one eclipses it in its esoterica. The music
sounds like something backwards masked, and the vocal gives us the
Funkadelic spin on the state of corporate America. These guys seemed to be
tripping pretty hard while they wrote and performed this album, and if
you're in the mood (or the proper state of mind) for a little weirdness it
can be quite enjoyable. However the songs aren't structured quite as
strongly as some of their other work, and subsequently it isn't amongst the
group's disks that are in high rotation on my turntable.
MAGGOT BRAIN
1971 - Westbound 2007
[], [], [], []
Maggot Brain / Can You Get to That / Hit It and Quit It / You and Your
Folks, Me and My Folks / Super Stupid / Back in Our Minds / Wars of
Armageddon
Now we're onto something! This third record is the last to carry the first
generation, more pared down Funkadelic style. And damn they got it exactly
right! Maybe after this sound was done to perfection they moved on to
bigger and sometimes equal if not better things. George lets us know that
the weirdness factor is still intact by delivering "Mother Earth is pregnant
for the third time, for y'all have knocked her up. I have tasted the
maggots in the mind of the universe, I was not offended. For I knew I had
to rise above it all, or drown in my own shit" in the opening seconds. This
then gives way to one of the most unlikely hit singles ever. Over ten
minutes Eddie Hazel delivers the most emotional and intense recorded track
in history that features no human voice. Over a simple rhythm guitar
backing, Eddie cuts loose with some of the wildest six string screeching
ever put down. Through tempo changes, volume fluctuations, feedback coming
in and out, and movements between subtle picking to wild raves, we
experience possibly the best recorded electric guitar performance of all
time (did someone say "six hits of purple microdot"?). After you're drained
from that trip, they deliver one of the more upbeat Funkadelic songs to
date. "Can You Get to That" is a good time R&B number with vocal
harmonizing over a heavy chording acoustic guitar. "Hit It and Quit It"
maintains the upbeat pace with a sound that harkens back to the Funkadelic
of the first two records. A more traditional Hazel lead carries the song
which gives way to some of the best organ soloing and jamming we've yet
heard. Eddie returns to his "Maggot Brain" inspirations for a feedback
drenched solo which closes it. "You and Your Folks..." is track with a
gospel feel and some great soul style singing, and its a perfect set up for
the mind melting "Super Stupid". Slip this one on between Black Sabbath and
Led Zeppelin the next time you're spinning disks with your heavy metal
friends and see if they're shaking their asses without realizing what
happened. Along with "Alice in My Fantasies" on the Standing on the Verge
of Getting It On album, "Super Stupid" is the dude's heaviest cut. "Back In
Our Minds" is in the "Can You Get to That" vein, albeit a little bit more
off kilter. It does feature a rare horn part. This record's freakout
effort is the album closing "Wars of Armageddon", and it features a little
bit of everything. Crazy guitar and organ come in and out, while various
chanted words of wisdom are delivered throughout, over the backing of such
sound effects as cows and trains. A highlight is the wisdom of "More power
to the people - more power to the pussy - more pussy to the people." Its
finale is an atomic explosion, but rather than that ending it all somehow
the music seems to fight back for a few more bars. "Wars" is a kick to
listen to despite its idiosyncrasy, and this sets it apart from some of
its partner pieces on other albums which can get tedious if your not in
just the right mood. Maggot Brain is an album without a bad track, and it
presents the perfect synergy of great rock guitar, bass and drums, heavy
rhythms, mind melting feedback solos, power organ, and tripped out
sensibilities, to an R&B based heavy dance beat. This was the last attempt
to label Funkadelic as five guys playing instruments. Soon after, a whole
gang of musicians would appear over various tracks on the records as
everyone was brought under the Funkadelic umbrella. Maggot Brain's cover
art is equally trippy, with a madly screaming large 'froed woman's head
sitting on the ground on the front cover, and its counterpart on the back
being a skull posed in the same manner. Liner notes feature literature from
the Process Church of the Final Judgment's "Fear" pamphlet. They were a
Satanic church which Charles Manson has been said to have had some ties to.
AMERICA EATS ITS YOUNG
1972 - Westbound 2020
[], [], []
You Hit the Nail on the Head / If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce
the Cause / Everybody is Going to Make it This Time / Joyful Process / We
Hurt Too / Loose Booty / Philmore / I Call My Baby Pussycat / America Eats
Its Young / Biological Speculation / That Was My Girl / Balance / Miss
Lucifer's Love / Wake Up
Definitely a transition album, this double LP represents a step away from
the garage funk of the first three freak outs, but isn't quite to where the
next series of perfected versions of metal soul will be. Most Funkadelic
records focus their themes at some cosmic intersection between weirdo
philosophies, sexual innuendoes, and stories of groovy good times. Good
chunks of America however comment on the ugly politics of the post-sixties
era. Bernie Worrell steps up with his largest contribution, and thus
keyboards and synths emerge in front of the guitars in many places. This is
evident on the opening track, in which a couple of minutes of jamming starts
things out with the keyboards leading the way. Narratively the attention is
on the deteriorating conditions in capitalist America. This takes its cue
from the Process Church, whose writings again provide the liner notes as
well as the record's title. Other than the consistent presence of much more
than usual keyboards, strings, backing vocals, and horns, musically it's a
hodgepodge of styles not unlike The Beatles or Sandinista! LPs. It
sometimes slips into a sound more akin to The Meters ("You Hit the Nail on
the Head, "If You Don't Like the Effects..."), there are 60's styled R&B
ravers ("Philmore", "Wake Up") some gospel like sounds ("Everybody is Going
to Make it This Time"), and even some over-syrupy balladeering ("We Hurt
Too"). The rock sounds come through in the upbeat instrumental "A Joyful
Process", the heavy "Balance" which gets close to where "Super Stupid" was,
and "Miss Lucifer's Love" which goes for a more stripped down sound with a
molten guitar solo in a song with a late period Beatles feel. "Loose Booty"
achieves what they would later try on Uncle Jam Wants You, a dance track
with punch and intensity. "Biological Speculations" may be the album's best
effort. It gets back to rock basics in a style which recalls "Can You Get to
That" from Maggot Brain. The two most unique songs are those which have the
greatest presence of the nasties. These are "I Call My Baby Pussycat" which
is a slowed down remake from Parliament's Osmium album (with a chorus of, "I
call my baby pussy..."), and "America Eats It's Young" which has 5:52
minutes of maggoty guitar amongst the organ and horns, accompanying the
sounds of a woman experiencing orgasm interrupted only by Clinton reciting
one of his philosophical spiels. This review was the last written by me for
this article, and that reflects the difficulty in evaluating the album. It
was recorded a few years before the resurrection of Parliament, which is
where the horns, backing vocals, and keyboard dominance would find a home.
The best tracks succeed in rocking out despite all of this. If America Eats
Its Young were trimmed from a double down to a single album it might have
been more consistently enjoyable, but like other "concept" albums it takes
both vinyl slabs to get the whole message across, and I wouldn't want it to
not all be there.
COSMIC SLOP
1973 - Westbound 2022
[], [], [], []
Nappy Dugout / You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure / March to the Witch's
Castle / Let's Make It Last / Cosmic Slop / No Compute / This Broken Heart /
Trash A-Go-Go / Can't Stand the Strain
Here's a very straightforward recording, with a number of well crafted songs
laid down without a lot of the weirdness and perverse philosophizing
usually found. After the broad concept of America Eats Its Young, George
probably decided to settle down and deliver the goods on a purely musical
level. The spoken passages and longer offbeat pieces that are often present
are left off here. A sacrifice in strangeness doesn't make for a bland
album however, because all of the efforts are right on track. With this
record a new Funkadelic sound is developed which would be largely the style
they worked in over the next four albums. The keyboard and orchestration
dominated music of the last record served as a bridge from the style
displayed on the first trilogy of LP's to a more intricate and refined
guitar based feel for this middle period. Don't worry though - it still
rocks! The recording quality is really elevated from here on out, and one
gets the feel that the gang took a much more fastidious approach in the
studio. Loosely (very!) Funkadelic songs from this period fall into one of
three stylistic categories. First are the more upbeat dance oriented
approaches that represent the harder edge of what will be produced under
the Parliament name. Second are slower tempoed soul numbers, many times
accompanied by cleanly played guitar solos. The final are the straight
ahead rockers that are closest to the sound of old . These styles would
many times merge of course. Overall, vocal tracks as an element of the music
in the songs are given much more attention. "Nappy Dugout" is a boogie
number that features a great driving beat with guitars playing off each
other while the euphemistic title is sang. The group was always good at
spinning off clever ways of referring to private parts and sexual functions.
"You Can't Miss..." keeps things pumping along at the same rate with another
dance tune, this time driven by vocal interplay rather than guitars.
"March to the Witch's Castle" may be the weakest track, with a slowed down
tale about 'Nam vets told over a lead guitar based backing. The soulful
style continues on in "Let's Make It Last" with a great vocal and some
vicious guitar leads. "Cosmic Slop" is a great rocker and is easily the
central track on the album. Everything's perfectly in synch on this raver
tale with another suggestive title. It tells the woeful story of a woman
whoring with the devil to make ends meet. "No Compute" continues to rock,
although this time with a more upbeat story regarding the mating ritual
(central philosophy: "spit don't make babies"). "This Broken Heart" is a
soul dripper and comes as close to a ballad as the group gets. "Trash
A-Go-Go" is the hardest rocker and features a heavy, heavy hook with great
background guitar freak outs. "Can't Stand the Strain" gets us back to the
feel of "This Broken Heart", in a little more upbeat soul number featuring
multiple vocalists. "Cosmic Slop" may be the best song that they ever did,
and this LP follows closely behind Maggot Brain as their top work. The acid
drenched/Hendrix/psychedelia guitar noise that had been lurking is cleaned
up here, but that instrument is still predominant and featured loudly
throughout the mix. This is most likely due to the temporary absence of Mr.
Hazel in the recording, although he would return. (He is represented by
songwriting credits on "Let's Make it Last" and "Can't Stand the Strain".)
The band is pretty constant over the whole record, which contributes to the
consistency of the sound. Gary Shider and Ron Bykowski (the "polyester
soul-powered token white devil") handle axe duties, while Cordell "Boogie"
Masson is the bass player throughout. Likewise Bernie Worrell plays all the
keyboards, and Tyrone Lampkin handles drums on all songs except "Nappy
Dugout" where "Guest Funkadelic Maggot" Tiki Fullwood sits in. With Cosmic
Slop the densely illustrated covers drawn by Pedro Bell depicting the crazed
world of Funkadelica begin. His art is featured on all subsequent record
jackets with the exception of Uncle Jam Wants You.
STANDING ON THE VERGE OF GETTING IT ON
1974 - Westbound 1001
[], [], [], []
Red Hot Mama / Alice in My Fantasies / I'll Stay / Sexy Ways / Standing on
the Verge of Getting It On / Jimmy's Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him / Good
Thought, Bad Thoughts
Fast Eddie's back! Standing has a similar feel to Cosmic Slop, but it can
also be said to be the most pure rock and roll of all the sonic emanations
from planet P-Funk. The musicians are identical to those on the last
effort, except that Tiki does all the drumming and Hazel joins Shider and
the Token White Devil on guitar. The production is cleaner than on the
earlier records, and chord driven rockers don't leave much room for any rump
shakers like last time. Hazel shares a writing credit with George on each
track, using his composing pseudonym "G. Cook" on all of them except "Red
Hot Mama". That song is in fact a reworking of a Parliament B-side which
was conceived prior to the Cook alias. After the commercial success of
Cosmic Slop, Sir Ileb (as George signs the liner notes) felt that a return
of some elements of goofiness could accompany the return of the reverbed
crunch. And thus we open with 1:22 minutes of musing d'Clinton, heard first
at 78 speed like a hopped up Alvin Chipmunk, and then repeated in the real
time deep tenor of the master. The one-two punch that kicks of the music of
"Red Hot Mama" and "Alice in My Fantasies", are relentless, driving, head
bangers. "Alice" delivers the immortal line, "Say baby can you be my dog, I
can be your tree, and you can pee on me" over a sonic blast. Pearl Jam
should have this cranker shoved up their asses to learn what real hard rock
is all about. Things cool down just a little for "I'll Stay", which falls
into the category of romantically themed, silky voiced, balladesque songs,
and is accompanied by a subdued guitar. It's amazing that even with the
subdued guitar there's still room for echo, feedback, and soloing behind the
music up front. "Sexy Ways" is da funky numba in this lot, with a chooglin'
bass and choppy chording, but alas Eddie can't resist getting off sonically
to the beat. "Standing on the Verge..." again provides a title track which
is a classic, and it's the song around which all the others are built. It's
pretty complex in style. After a start which revisits the album intro with
Alvin rehashing his pee line, the music opens itself up to you for gyrating
your booty, banging your head, or spacing out - depending on your mood or
your disposition. "Jimmy" is this record's carryover from Cosmic Slop's
"No Compute", a silly and dirty upbeat ditty which informs us that "It's all
in the angle of the dangle, increased by the heat of the meat". This line
was recently lifted by that TV pontificator Beavis. As stated above Clinton
felt comfortable bringing back the bizarro quotient left off of Cosmic Slop,
and this record's avant-garde piece is the closer "Good Thoughts, Bad
Thoughts". If "Maggot Brain" is like tracers at a brilliant sunrise,
"Thoughts" is its counterpart for the wee hours. A haunting guitar improv
carries on for 6:35 minutes over a light strumming rhythm, before George
delivers some thoughts on consciousness raising and the value of the self
over the final 6:00 minutes. You Caucasian rockers out there might look to
this LP as a good starting point.
LET'S TAKE IT TO THE STAGE
1975 - Westbound 215
[], [], [], []
Good to Your Earhole / Better By the Pound / Be My Beach / No Head No
Backstage Pass / Let's Take It to the Stage / Get off Your Ass and Jam /
Baby I Owe You Something Good / Stuffs and Things / The Song is Familiar /
Atmosphere
A greater diversity of sounds come from these grooves than from any of those
which preceded them. The songs are shorter and tightened up, and the first
suggestions of some new directions appear in a few tracks. The credits
aren't as extensive as on other records, but with E. Hazel and Ron Bykowski
cited as "Alumni Funkadelic", I suspect that their performances are limited.
As Michael Hampton, the guitar hero of the next wave, won't make the scene
until Tales Of Kidd Funkadelic, it's possible that Gary Shider handled most
of the six stringing. "Good to Your Earhole", "Better By the Pound", and
"Stuffs and Things" contain polyrhythmic dance floor sounds with layered
vocals and a multi instrumental sonic boogie. The electricity drenched lead
guitar soul style is heard on "Be My Beach" which features another play on
words in its title, and on "Baby I Owe You Something Good" which somewhat
recalls Cosmic Slop's "March to the Witch's Castle" in its heavy plodding.
After the loud rock 'n' rave up of "No Head No Backstage Pass", the two
standout songs of Let's Take It to the Stage are delivered. "Let's Take It
to the Stage" is a laying down of the gauntlet to the competitors and
pretenders (in Funkadelic's eyes, and with tongues in cheek) who are now
placing themselves under the label of funk. After informing us that "funk
was a bad word" they stake their claim to the throne over heavy rhythm and
silly nursery rhymes ("Little Miss Muffet, sat on her tuffet, smoking some
THC"). Challenges come from the background directed at the "Godfather? -
Godmother! Grandfather", "Slick and the Family Prick", "Earth, Hot Air, and
No Fire", and "Fool and the Gang". "Get off Your Ass and Jam" is one of the
purest rock 'n' groove wails ever attempted. Over the repeated phrasing of
"Shit, goddamn, get off your ass and jam!" some of the jamminest guitar on
any of Funkadelic's records is heard. It's one of their top rockers. "The
Song is Familiar" is a soul ballad not unlike those regularly rolled out by
the competitors, but the competitors don't have Gary Shider providing sonic
craziness in the background. Another "different" track closes the album
with "Atmosphere". If you take the tune "Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts" from
Standing on the Verge and substitute organ for guitar, you get "Atmosphere"
TALES OF KIDD FUNKADELIC
1976 - Westbound 227
[], []
Butt-To-Butt Resuscitation / Let's Take It to the People / Undisco Kidd /
Take Your Dead Ass Home (Say Som'n Nasty) / I'm Never Gonna Tell It / Tales
of Kidd Funkadelic (Opusdelite Years) / How Do Yeaw View You?
A collection of mostly outtakes, unpolished compositions, and songs usually
utilized in live jam sessions make up this odds and sodds collection which
closes out the Westbound contract. Most of the tracks have a solid base to
them, but seem to need a bit of refinement. "Butt-To-Butt Resuscitation"
sounds as if it could have been Devo or The Tubes playing, with all of the
quirky syntho noises popping up throughout. "Let's Take It to the People"
is a good mid tempo tune which ends with a patented Funkadelic wild guitar
solo. "Undisco Kidd" is a tale of dance floor politics which again relies
on keyboard gurgling and guitar doodling to give it uniqueness, rather than
on mind melting rock. They get back on track with "Take Your Dead Ass
Home", a song with some drive that is reminiscent of "Let's Take It to the
Stage" from the previous album. This track is dragged down a bit by a
somewhat silly X-rated nursery rhyme chorus, and it does go on for a bit too
long. It sounds like product from an above average improv. The line "turn
that sucker out" would be recycled into one a Parliament's biggest top 40
hits. "I'm Never Gonna Tell It" is a slow one that is a bit tame for
Funkadelic. It's the best for last this time out with the final two cuts.
The title track represents this album's long trip out piece. "Tales of Kidd
Funkadelic" recalls "Atmosphere" with it's weird goth rock organ, and is
accompanied by bongos and voices deep in the mix. It could be a horror film
soundtrack, and if you're up for it, it might be the best cut on the record.
If you're not into that much strangeness then "How Do Yeaw View You?" is
probably the pick here. It's another mid tempo number but is better than
the others on Tales as it's got a better groove and some fuzz guitar creeps
in. It's good but it isn't a rouser. Perhaps they were saving the "A"
material for the step up to a major label which followed.
HARDCORE JOLLIES
1976 - Warner Brothers BS-2973
[], [], [], []
Comin' Round the Mountain / Smokey / If You Got Funk, You Got Style /
Hardcore Jollies / Soul Mate / Cosmic Slop / You Scared the Lovin' Out of Me
/ Adolescent Funk
The first of the Warner Brothers records is the last with the feel of the
old Funkadelic. Michael Hampton steps in with full responsibility for lead
guitar duties, and the result is the last P-Funk album of any kind with some
real crunch to it. While more refined than the early acid groove disks,
this album rocks pretty hard in many places. It's also one of their overall
best and most consistent efforts. "Comin' Round the Mountain" begins with a
simple groove but quickly melts into passages of heavy rock guitar and a
pyro-solo ending. Things settle down a bit with a couple of bottom heavy
soul numbers that keep you grooving, complete with tricky picking in the
background. Neither "Smokey" nor "If You Got Funk..." rave up like some of
the other cuts, but both are excellent, and are tight and groovy without
getting monotonous. "Hardcore Jollies" is Hampton's declaration of
independence - his "Maggot Brain". This is one intense sonic bombast in
which the kid demonstrates that he's up to the task of handling Funkadelic's
roar. A simple organ intro fools the listener as to the electric attack
that quickly comes . This instrumental is amongst the top few heaviest cuts
on any of the records, however it follows a more structured approach than
some of the "Maggot Brain" era stuff. There's a definite sectioning between
verse/bridge/chorus, with Hampton's lead filling in where the vocals might
have been. "Soul Mate" returns to the more traditional soul sound of tracks
two and three, before the young guitarist steps back up to prove his chops.
The re-recording of "Cosmic Slop" is however the one minor misfire on this
record. While a great performance, it's still a half a step behind the
original interpretation, but that leaves this track infinitely more
listenable than the majority of the dreck out there. "You Sacred the Lovin'
Out of Me" is my favorite song of the eight, and that may have something to
do with it being the weirdest. Not a balls out rocker, but a trippy
almost-ballad carried buy the intermittent reoccurrence of a distorto
keyboard playing an Indian belly dancer riff. "Adolescent Funk" closes the
album with a voiceless track featuring keyboard doodlings, geetahr pickun,
and machine gun sounds, and with more riddum than most experimental album
enders in the Funkadelic universe. There's not a bad song on the record,
and with the exception of a few select compositions to come, Hardcore
Jollies is a swan song for the old hardcore rock elements of the band.
After a short hiatus they would come back with three more albums that more
resemble a rawer Parliament in style.
ONE NATION UNDER A GROOVE
1978 - Warner Brothers BS-3209
[], [], [], []
One Nation Under a Groove / Groovallegiance / Who Says a Funk Band Can't
Play Rock?! / Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doo Doo
Chasers) / Into You / Cholly (Funk Getting Ready to Roll!) / SPECIAL 7"
BONUS EP: Lunchmeataphobia (Think! It Ain't Illegal Yet!) / P.E.
Squad-Doodoo Chasers ("Going All-The-Way Off" Instrumental Version) / Maggot
Brain (live)
Some call this the pinnacle of the empire of the Parliafunkadelicment thang.
It's definitely the album with the most uplifting message and one with a
statement of purpose. That purpose is pledging groovallegiance to the
united funk of Funkadelica, and promising the funk, the whole funk, and
nothing but the funk. Pedro Bell's cover depicts Clinton's Space Maggoteers
planting the R&B (that's rhythm and business!) flag atop the earth. The
Funkadleic moniker was almost buried while George and the gang focused in on
Parliament, but was revitalized for this concept album in music if not in
lyrics. The opening two tracks are 14:33 minutes of danceable fun that
never wear down and always stay exciting. The extended groove thing works
better with "One Nation Under a Groove" and "Groovalleginace" than an any of
their other attempts, over all of the records discussed here. After
settling in with those two tracks, you're jolted back out with a blast
recalling the old days in "Who Says a Funk Band Can't Play Rock?!". Not me,
especially this funk band, and neither will anyone else who hears this. The
song is similar to "Get Off Your Ass and Jam", with a rock steady beat
backing some simple harmonious vocalizing and full blown, cranked up, guitar
worshipping frenzy throughout. It's one of their most sonically powerful
tunes. "P.E. Squad" slips back into a soulful beat while George leads the
gang in a scatological discussion which equates loud mouthed pseudo
intellectualism with a bowel movement. After all, many of those with
"mental diarrhea" do seem to be "talking shit a mile a minute". A subtle
but exciting lead comes in and out, which is expanded upon in the
instrumental version contained as a bonus track. "Into You" has a slower,
soul ballad approach while "Cholly" goes somewhere altogether different
than the rest of the record. That place is one which is inhabited not only
by some of the then current Parliament boogie hits, but also by the bass
driven, story telling tracks found on the first Funkadelic release. It's a
great dance song which was designed to be the club hit from this collection.
The primary tracks on One Nation are all excellent, and present a balance of
well produced styles throughout. When this LP was being prepared Clinton
wanted it to be a double, with the second record being made up entirely of
the more raw, exploratory compositions which usually sneak onto Funkadelic
records one or two at a time. Warner Brothers wouldn't go for it, and thus
Clinton self financed a three song 7" EP to be included with each copy. The
music on the insert definitely stands out from the rest of the record, in
that it's all much less clean and crafted than the material on the 12" disk.
"Lunchmeataphobia" contains a monster riff which gives way to psycho noise
caterwauling over chants of "Think! It Ain't Illegal Yet!". The above
mentioned "P.E. Squad" instrumental version allows for the guitar lead to be
appreciated to it's fullest extent. And finally Hampton proves his
Hazelness once again with a live version of the wordless freak anthem
"Maggot Brain". Being live, this version isn't quite as introspective as
the original, but the more pronounced bass and drum backing give it a thump
that makes it the preferred interpretation on occasion. Overall this is an
excellent demonstration of an ability to make a commercial record which
moves away from free for all freakouts, yet still maintains a solid rock and
roll perspective. George felt that it had to be done, and who better to
pull it off than Funkadelic. Reissues tack the bonus EP onto the album
itself.
UNCLE JAM WANTS YOU
1979 - Warner Brothers BSK-3371
[], []
Freak of the Week / (not just) Knee Deep / Uncle Jam / Field Maneuvers
/ Holly Wants to Go to California / Foot Soldiers (Star-Spangled
Funky)
"Eh Butt-Head...Does this suck?"
"Uhhhhhh, well it's got George Clinton, that's cool"
With the success achieved in utilizing Funkadelic to create a record with a
specialized style on "One Nation Under a Groove", the idea was to carry on
with that process to show that a disco album with integrity was possible.
They wished to "rescue dance music from the blahs" as the cover slogan says.
It almost worked, but the extended funky dance tunes this time out don't
have the style of those on One Nation. "Freak of the Week" and "(not just)
Knee Deep" merge together over the whole first side much like "One Nation
Under a Groove" and "Groovallegiance" did, but there isn't enough zip in
them, like in the previous two, to justify their length. "Knee Deep" was
written by George Clinton Jr. It isn't too bad and its got a catchy chorus,
but it is a bit overextended. "Uncle Jam" comes closer though. It carries
not only a good tune, but also a call for unity under the funk that is in
line with the theme of the preceding album. It's the only really good thing
here, and it was co-written by Bootsy, Gary Shider and Bernie Worrell along
with Clinton Sr. All of the other tracks share composition credit with
outside writers. With Bootsy's and Shider's names on "Uncle Jam", it's no
wonder that the most interesting bass and guitar lines on the album are
found on it. "Field Maneuvers" is an instrumental which provides the only
hint of old style wild guitar, but even here the soul-o's are confined to
a sound bordering on seventies AOR. "Holly Wants to Go to California" has
piano accompanied crooning which doesn't work, and "Foot Soldiers" doesn't
really end the record on a high note. It's a mostly instrumental military
style marching song which tries to maintain the theme of recruitment into
Uncle Jam's army. Pedro Bell's cover art even gets relegated to the inside
of the gatefold, thus the cover isn't his for the only time since America
Eats It's Young.
THE ELECTRIC SPANKING OF WAR BABIES
1980 - Warner Brothers 3BSK-482
[], []
The Electric Spanking of War Babies / Electro-Cuties / Funk Get's Stronger
(Part I) / Brettino's Bounce / Funk Gets Stronger (Killer Millimeter Longer
Version) / She Loves You / Shockwaves / Oh, I / Icka Prick
The last LP under the Funkadelic label (although a 12" came out in 1991
carrying it) attempts to move away from disco, and to produce a sound that
merges both the rhythmic and the rockin' paths followed previously. In
entering into the eighties they came up with a good overall sound, but the
songs are kind of nondescript in areas and can tend to linger too long. The
lead off is a decent enough, quirky, new-wavish dance floor track complete
with that techno drum sound. "Electro-Cuties" is a straight funker with a
polyrhythmic approach, while "Funk Get's Stronger" starts with a good heavy
groove, but gets stuck in it as the track seems to carry on without much
variation; guest vocals: Sly Stone. "Brettino's Bounce" is a short segment
of sound effects, bongos, and jungle drums occupying time before they get
back to "Funk Get's Stronger" in a rawer reprise which now includes horns.
"She Loves You" is a few seconds of joke where a chorus of "We Love You,
Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" ala The Beatles is heard. The best stuff here is tucked
near the end in "Shockwaves", a good Funkadelic take on reggae complete with
imitation Jamaican singing, and "Oh, I" which is the one song on
Electric Spanking which captures that great Funkadelic energy. It moves
along at a good tempo while a guitar lead burns away incessantly in the
background throughout. This one flashback to the rock and roll past is the
only place here where anything really breaks loose. "Icka Prick" begins by
stating "We're gonna be nasty this time", and that they are in traditional
LP closing style. It's a rude discussion concerning genitalia, over weirdo
noises punctuated by occasional metal riffs. Overall this record is OK, but
with six outstanding, foolproof choices, wait on adding it to your
collection until your truly committed. Things were then beginning to
crumble in the P-Funk universe, and after this alteration of musical course
from Funkadelic, and a similar one from Parliament on the Trombibulation
album, it fell apart. The eighties were spotty, with several uneven George
Clinton albums, before rap sampling encouraged the crew to get back together
regularly as the P-Funk All-stars in the late eighties and on into the
nineties.
additional Funkadelic releases:
Funkadelic's Greatest Hits - Westbound 1004 (1975)
The Best of the Early Years - Westbound 303 (1977)
Connections And Disconnections - LAX (1981); A phony Funkadelic album made
by three of the original Parliaments, Fuzzy Haskins, Grady Thomas, and
Calvin Simon, without Clinton or the band.
Music For Your Mother - Westbound 1111 (1993); A double LP made of recordings
from singles, there are thus many alternative takes and B sides.
Live In The Rockies - a boot from a 1976 show
The Original KISS Rate Their Own Records - Read What the World's Richest
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cartoon Characters Think of Themselves
--------------------------------------
The original members of KISS rate their own records! The scale was from one
to five, and each member only rated albums on which he performed. In an few
instances a member would say something like "three or four", so in this case
the response is 3/4. A response of "NA" means "not applicable", indicating
that that person wasn't in the group for that recording. In the few cases
where a rating wasn't given, the space is left blank. GS = Gene Simmons, PS
= Paul Stanley, AF = Ace Frehly, and PC = Politically Correct, uh I mean
Peter Criss (but you're no knuckle head - you knew this!) This info was
lifted from the October 15, 1993 issue of Goldmine. RSAG = Rolling Stone
Album Guide (1992 edition), and is given for comparison with what some
critic thinks.
GS PS AF PC RSAG
-- -- -- -- ----
Kiss 3 5 5 5 3
Hotter Than Hell 3 3 3.5 3 2
Dressed To Kill 2.5 3.5 4 2/3 3
Alive! 4 5 5 5 3.5
Destroyer 4.5 5 5 3
Rock and Roll Over 3 5 4 4 2
Love Gun 3 4.5/5 4 4 2
Double Platinum 2 3 3 2
Alive II 3 4.5 4 5 2
SOLO ALBUMS:
Gene Simmons 1 2 3 5 1
Paul Stanley 2 5 5 5 1
Ace Frehley 3 3 5 5 2
Peter Criss 0 0 3 5 1
Dynasty 2 2/3 3.5 3 2
Unmasked 1 1 3.5 NA 1
The Elder 0 ? 2 NA 2.5
Killers 1 1/2 NA NA NA
Creatures Of the Night 4.5 5 NA NA 1
Lick It Up 2 4 NA NA 1
Animalize 2 4 NA NA 1
Asylum 2 3 NA NA 2
Crazy Nights 2 3 NA NA 1
Smashes Thrashes and Hits 1 5 NA NA 3.5
Hot In the Shade 2 NA NA 1
Revenge 4.5 5 NA NA
Alive III 5 NA NA
The December 1993 issue of the Tower Records freebie magazine Pulse reports
that there's a new Kiss tribute album (not Hard To Believe) for which Gene
Simmons is soliciting bands. It is to be called Kiss My Ass. Already
confirmed are: Lenny Kravitz and Stevie Wonder - "Deuce" (but can they
surpass the Redd Kross or 69 Eyes covers?), Garth Brooks - "Hard Luck
Woman", Choad (I mean Toad) The Wet Sprocket - "Rock and Roll All Night" (I
saw this band play their first ever show at a place called Pat's Grass Shack
in Goleta, CA, in September or October 1986. I didn't like them then and I
don't like them now), Nine Inch Nails - "Love Gun", Extreme - "Strutter",
Megadeth - "Strange Ways", Anthrax - "She", Lemonheads - "Plaster Caster",
and Galactic Cowboy - "Black Cowboy". Yet to be confirmed possibilities
include Dinosaur Jr. (who would have to be the highlight), Naughty By
Nature, Axl Rose, Bell Biv Devoe (who would have to produce the strangest
cut), Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, Soul Asylum, House Of Pain, and Ice
Cube. The idea of Wonder and Kravitz teaming up is intriguing to me. Lenny
Kravitz is a guy who has some good ideas about what constitutes real rock
and roll but has troubles writing good songs. Stevie Wonder on the other
hand is a master songwriter whose work can sometimes come out too wimpy.
There are possibilities here for something good.
REVIEWS - Zines, Books, Records, and Live Shows
------------------------------------------------
As this FUNHOUSE! is essentially a split issue with number four, the
following review section will focus on literature, while recorded material
will be covered next time.
Beginning with some new fanzines -
The long awaited third issue of ANSWER ME! has come out. This most
ballsiest of zines continues its focus on the dark underbelly of society
with a "Doctor Death" Jack Kevorkian interview, articles on Al Sharpton,
Nambla, Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, Mexican deformity comic
books, 100 spectacular suicides, a rant section, and tons of other fun. 130
pages for $5 (1st) or $4 (3rd) from Goad to Hell, 1608 N. Cahuenga Blvd.
#666, Hollywood, CA, 90028, 213-462-8252. The incredibly dense BLACK TO
COMM has put out its 20th issue. Like usual it's loaded with reviews,
articles, and commentary which favor the rock and roll of The Velvet
Underground, The Stooges, and everything which springs from them. The
latest has 106 highly illustrated, small type filled pages. Highlights are
interviews with Roky Erickson (13th Floor Elevators), Mick Farren (Pink
Fairies) and Adny Shernoff (Dictators) plus pieces on the New York Dolls,
Shadows of Knight, Lenny Kaye, Seeds, and Kim Fowley. Highly entertaining
except for the reoccurring snotty political shots which appear throughout (we
know that you don't like Clinton Chris, but leave the silly cheap shots to
Rush Fathead). $7.50 (ppd) from 714 Shady Ave., Sharon, PA, 16146. Back
issues are available. CULT MOVIES #8 maintains the regular appearance of
this mag which usually covers horror/exploitation films from the 50's and
60's. Among the many features here are a Ray Dennis Steckler interview, a
Harry Novak interview (who's selling original posters from B.O.
International films), and stories on Vampira, the Coffin Joe films of Jose
Mojica Marins, Kenneth Anger, Stan Laurel, David Freidman on Hellavision
from his "Roadshow Rarities" series, and a new feature, Porn Queen
interviews - in this issue it's Jade East. By the time this FUNHOUSE! was
completed, issue #9 of CULT MOVIES had been released. This mag continues to
improve, and is moving past European Trash Cinema into the number two spot
(behind Psychotronic) among sleaze film zines. This time they have a Bob
Cresse interview, Frank Henelotter speaking about discovering his "Sexy
Shockers from the Vaults" released by Something Weird, more Coffin Joe,
Hollywood Martian movies, Theda Bara, and alt.cult-movies regular
contributor David Milner with three pieces on Japanese monsters; an Ishiro
Honda interview, an Akira Ifukube interview, and a look at Japanese
monster fanzines. $4.95 cover price from 6201 Sunset Blvd., Suite 152,
Hollywood, CA, 90028. Some back issues available. That great teller of
truth Zontar the Thing From Venus has issued his latest words of wisdom in
ZONTAR'S EJECTO-POD #4. This collage of pictures and articles intended to
keep track of those would be purveyors of The New World Order is 30 pages of
the truth about Pat Robertson, George Bush, Bob Tilton, Larry Buchanan,
Rutger Hauer, Ivan Stang, and other fundamentalists. $6.00 (ppd) from Jan
Johnson, 29 Darling St. #29, Boston, MA, 02120. Also look into other Zontar
products such as Zontar The Mag From Venus, Zontower, and a subtitled tape
of the original cut of Godzilla (aka Gojira, 1954). EUROPEAN TRASH CINEMA
v.2, n.8 keeps up Craig Ledbetter's exploration of the sleaziest cinematic
output from The Continent. Here there is a lengthy analysis of Argento's
latest, Trauma, a Jean Rollin interview and filmography, a Brigitte Lahaie
interview and filmography, an analysis of Claude Chabrol films, and plenty
of reviews. $6.00 (ppd) from PO Box 5367, Kingwood, TX, 77325. FACTSHEET
FIVE #49 has Punk Rock Beth on the cover. THE GIALLO PAGES is new from
England. Its motto is "Exploitation All Italiana" and the debut has
interviews with Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Michele Soavi, and David
Warbeck, a profile of Edwige Fenech, and a remembrance of Marisa Mell.
Reviews fill out the 42 pages for 2.50 pounds (cover) from On-Line
Publishing, c/o 33 Maltby Road, Mansfield, Notts, NG18 3BN, England.
MONSTER! INTERNATIONAL #3 is highlighted by Horacio Higuchi's huge, highly
detailed, article on Brazilian fright film auteur Jose Mojica Marins. This
is a timely piece in light of Something Weird Video's subtitling and release
of some of Marins' titles, beginning with four featuring his infamous Ze Do
Caixao ("Coffin Joe") character. Also in this extremely well produced zine
are features on possession films, Franco's Attack of The Robots, and plenty
of reviews of works from The Philippines, Italy, Britain, and elsewhere.
$7.95 (ppd) for 68 dense pages with a slick specialized cover from Kronos
Publications, MPO Box 67, Oberlin, OH, 44074-0067. Its sister publication,
the also excellent Highball, will have its second issue published as a
double with MONSTER! INTERNATIONAL #4. NECRONOMICON is another British zine
to hit the scene recently that deals with horror and exploitation. It's 58
slick pages with a multi colored cover, and largely consists of detailed
(3-5 pages with photos) reviews of all sort of Eurosploitation. Amongst the
contents of #2 are Blood and Black Lace, Once Upon a Time in the West,
Cannibal Holocaust, Nekromantik 2, a Richard Stanley interview, and a
special feature on Vampire flicks. #3 checks in with Deep Red and Inferno,
Mask of Satan (aka Black Sunday), Requiem for a Vampire, Vampyre Lesbos,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Django and Django Strikes Again, The Torture
Chamber of Doctor Sadism, The Church, a Jorg Buttgereit interview and more.
Each is three pounds from Andy Black at 15 Jubilee Road, Newton Abbot,
Devon, TQ12 1LB, England. With PSYCHOTRONIC VIDEO #16 the mag is now up to
80 pages and a $4.00 cover price (plus $1.50 postage by mail). All the
usual great features such as the extensive letters pages, >>many<< reviews
of videos, music, zines, and books, and the obits, are joined this time by
an interview with Michael "Pluto" Berryman, a Curtis Harrington interview, a
Bob Clark interview, and a Jeff Morrow interview. PSYCHOTRONIC is still the
king! Write them at 3309 Rt. 97, Narrowsburg, NY, 12764-6126,
fax:914-252-3905. Most all back issues are still available. TRASH
COMPACTOR v.2, #6 is their blaxploitation issue. It's also got a John
Ashley interview and some reviews. $3.75 plus $1.00 postage for 42 pages
from 253 College St. Suite #108, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1R5, but beware as I
tried to order a back issue and couldn't get them to cough it up. Any
Misfits fans out there? Well if you are you >>need<< UGLY THINGS #12 as it
has the best article ever written about the monster punks. A long interview
with Jerry Only along with many photos and other items from his personal
collection help to tell their story from beginning to end. The zine covers
"60's/ 70's/80's punks", and so this issue also has The Downliners Sect,
Pretty Things, Los Cheyenes, The Barrier, Dave Wendels, and some reviews.
Lots of good reading over the 64 pages for $6.00 (ppd) from 405 W.
Washington St. #237, San Diego, CA, 92103.
books -
Apocalypse Culture: Expanded and Revised ed. by Adam Parfrey; Fereal House,
1987,1990, $12.95 (softcover), 362pp, ISBN: 0-922915-05-9
This is a perverse collection of essays from the nattering nabobs of
negativism, and I don't mean the popular press. It is a much larger version
of editor Parfrey's 1987 compendium, with expanded versions of items from
the original book, as well as some deletions. It also contains a good deal
of new material. The articles range from crackpot theories to intense
journalism documenting the ugly underbelly of society - but who is to say
which are which. The various pieces which make up Apocalypse Culture look
at the fringe elements which are theoretically serving to undermine, and
contribute to the eventual fall of, the popular order. They explore people
and ideas which creep through the crevices of our world and go undocumented
or unnoticed by the wider populace. The book is divided into two sections,
"Apocalypse" Theologies" and "The Invisible War". The former surveys the
philosophies and theologies of some death leaning movements, while the
latter documents some actual fallout from these movements. There is a sort
of cause and effect structure between the first and second parts of the
compilation. Some of the pieces are interesting, some are disgusting, and
all are way out of the mainstream. Among the philosophies investigated are
those of The Abraxas Foundation, G.G. Allin (RIP), The Red Brigades, Mel
Lyman, a necrophile, and The Process Church of the Final Judgment (which I
found particularly interesting). Exposes cover The Christian Right's
adopting Zionism as a means to Armageddon and The Second Coming, a history
of the theory of eugenics and those who espoused it, and beliefs concerning
secret conspiracies to commit genocide against Black Americans. The various
authors approach their work from differing angles; some are advocates, some
are critics, and some just deliver the facts objectively. A few articles
are simply reprints of original musings by their subjects, such as those of
Anton La Vey and Elijah Muhummad. Not recommended for the easily obsessed
or depressed.
Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento by Maitland
MacDonagh; Sun Tavern Fields (UK), 1991, 9.95 pounds (softcover), 293pp,
ISBN: 0-9517012-4-X
The most analytical and detailed look at the cinema of Dario Argento yet.
There has been much praise for Argento's heavily crafted thrillers in the
pages of horror mags and fanzines from purely the perspective of them as
fright films, but this book and Douglas E. Winter's "Opera of Violence: The
Films of Dario Argento" chapter in Cut!: Horror Writers on Horror Film
(1992, Berkley) are the only works in English that I've come across which
discuss the depth of, and careful detail applied to, Argento's productions.
(At least until FUNHOUSE! #4 that is!) To look at Argento's films as just
well made slasher or horror films is a mistake, as he carefully constructs
each scene to an extent that few thriller directors do. The author explores
subtexts utilized in the movies which play on the viewer's inherent
discomforts, and preconceived notions, in realms of the human psyche, such
as the nightmare experience and sex and gender confusion. Author Maitland
MacDonagh developed this book out of her masters thesis written at Columbia
University. Her writing analyzes Argento's creation of multi layered films
which utilize camera movements, color, sound, and especially editing through
the juxtaposition of scenes and images, to frighten on levels beyond
ephemeral shock. Broken Mirrors is more dense in its prose than is common
in books discussing genre filmmakers. It explores the underlying meanings
of on screen images in some detail, and thus it often slips into filmic
language. The depth of her study is justified by the depth of Argento's
work however. This book is recommend more for hardcore Argentophiles;
novices are encouraged to view the films (maybe for a second time) prior to
digging in, so that they're not lost in trying to recall the often times
twisted story lines while exploring the subtexts. Broken Mirrors is also
valuable for its extensive filmography and bibliography, for the author's
discussion of influences on the director's style by such predecessors as
Alfred Hitchcock and Mario Bava, and for the inclusion of information on
Argento as producer to such disciples as Luigi Cozzi, Michele Soavi, and
Lamberto Bava. An interview by the author with her subject is appended as
well.
>From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World
by Clinton Heylin; Penguin, 1993, $14.00 (softcover), 384pp, ISBN:
0-14-017970-4
England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond by Jon
Savage; St. Martin's Press, 1992, $16.95 (softcover), 602pp, ISBN:
0-312-08774-8
It's great that these two histories were published so close together, as
there is much to be said for reading them back to back. From The Velvets To
The Voidoids chronicles the formation of the US punk scene, making (the
correct in my mind) argument that the roots of punk rock are distinctly
American, and that they follow a rather linear progression which runs along
the lines of Velvet Underground - MC5 - Stooges - Modern Lovers - New York
Dolls - Dictators, and then branches into the subsequent New York and
Cleveland scenes encompassing such groups as The Ramones, Pere Ubu, The Dead
Boys, The Heartbreakers, Rocket from the Tombs, The Electric Eels, and The
Voidoids. Such non-punk but related bands as Blondie, Talking Heads, and
Television are also given plenty of attention. The book is well written, as
it lays out its theory as to the American origins of punk rock and the linear
progression of the style in this country in the beginning, and then attempts
to support the theory by tracing the histories, and describing the music, of
the bands mentioned above. It's interesting throughout, and some very
worthwhile information is provided for anyone into in any of these bands, as
well as for anyone who wishes to get a sense of the nature of the
development of the subunderground and what linkages occurred between the
groups. The best elements are the detailed accounts of the rise and fall of
both The New York Dolls and Television, and the attention paid to the
Cleveland seventies scene which gave rise to Pere Ubu and The Dead Boys.
The latter has only been very sparsely covered in the past. The book's draw
backs lie in the author's allowing too many of his personal biases to slip
into the story. He has a definite preference for the more "arty" creators
of the music over the balls out rockers, and thus heaps extra praise on
Television, Pere Ubu, and Talking Heads, while sometimes taking a derisive
tone with the hard rock party music of The Dictators and The Dead Boys.
It's well worth reading for both fans and the unfamiliar alike.
The main difference between the English and American punk scenes of the
seventies was that in the UK punk rock was much more of a social phenomena,
while in America the driving force was almost entirely musical. Due to the
nature of the British music scene, their music press, and the social
conditions of the time, punk quickly developed into a widely known and
popular segment of the culture, which brought about radio air play and
large record sales. America's reactionary entertainment moguls however
wrote punk off as worthless from the start. With almost all of the
mainstream music and news press being negative, and with a complete
commercial radio blackout excluding a few select exceptions, punk was always
something which was considered disgusting and useless. England's Dreaming
is primarily a Sex Pistols biography, but in the context of their story, the
culture which surrounded them at the time and the careers of contemporaries
such as The Clash, The Buzzcocks, and The Damned are given attention. Author
Jon Savage writes from the perspective of someone who was there, and in a
slightly excessive move attempts to prove his first hand credentials by
reprinting entries he made into his own journal. Despite this, the birth of
English punk is very well described and the Sex Pistol's story in particular
is covered in great detail, from the youth of Malcom McLaren to their
disintegration at Winterland. If I have a complaint with this book it's
with the rather generous credit the author gives to The Sex Pistols as THE
creators and greatest practitioners of punk. It is certainly true that the
notoriety of English punk and its explosion in popularity there can be
traced with the rise of The Pistols. Other groups, especially The Clash
and The Buzzcocks who created amazingly great music, definitely rode on
their coattails to fame. But Savage's rejection of punk rock music as an
American creation is specious. He seems to put forth the notion that it was
English in general, and Sex Pistolian in particular, in origin. This goes
against accounts in the book as to the major influence on McLaren of The New
York Dolls, who he managed for a short stint when their demise was nearly
complete. In fact Steve Jones' Les Paul guitar was the one which Sylvain
Sylvain played in The Dolls, procured for him by McLaren. The fact that The
Sex Pistols chose songs by The Stooges ("No Fun") and The Modern Lovers
("Roadrunner") to cover isn't even given a mention. A slightly lesser
complaint is the author's dismissal of the
music of The Damned, but that's
my own personal bias. Reading both of these books consecutively (I
recommend Velvets first) will provide a better history of pre Black Flag/
Dead Kennedies punk rock than can be had anywhere else. Each is excellently
researched and explores the evolution and roots of the style, as well as
telling the stories of the bands. Both also have the added value of
carrying useful discographies, with critical evaluations and coverage of
some of the better bootleg material.
The New Poverty Row: Independent Filmmakers as Distributors by Fred Olen
Ray; McFarland, 1991, $27.95 (hardcover, library bound), 240pp, ISBN:
0-89950-628-3
Fred Olen Ray is himself working today as one the exceedingly rare people
whom his book addresses, a completely independent filmmaker. Ray is an
historian of exploitation cinema, in addition to being a producer/director in
that sordid area, and he applies his knowledge to chronicling the careers of
some of his predecessors, as well as himself. Like most McFarland books,
this was written as a reference work as much as a story, and it is packed
with filmographies for a select group of entrepreneurs and their companies
from the past 35 or so years. The personalities discussed are those who
served as individual creative forces, and had a strong influence themselves
in guiding the direction of their companies. Chapters of the book look at
Jerry Warren and Associated Distribution Productions, Roger Corman and
Filmgroup, Kane W. Lynn and Hemisphere Pictures, David L. Hewitt and
American General Pictures, Sam Sherman and Independent-International
Pictures, Lawrence H. Woolner and Dimension Pictures, and Fred Olen Ray and
American Independent Productions. The real value for me in the book is in
having a source for the complete output, and descriptions of that output,
from these producers of some of the more interesting psychotronic material
from the great era when American drive in cinema was at its peak.
Interviews and anecdotes do provide for fun reading as well, particularly
with regards to how some of the films were managed to be made. Highlights
as far as my tastes are concerned are the details behind Hemisphere's gore
and softcore productions of the sixties and seventies, which were mostly
made in The Philippines, and which include the classic Blood Series (THE
BLOOD DRINKERS [1966], BRIDES OF BLOOD [1968], BLOOD FIEND [1968], MAD
DOCTOR OF BLOOD ISLAND [1969], BLOOD CREATURE [1969], BLOOD DEMON [1970],
BEAST OF BLOOD [1970] and BRAIN OF BLOOD [1971]), and Independent-
Internationals work, especially with legendary badfilm director Al Adamson
(SATAN'S SADISTS [1969], HORROR OF THE BLOOD MONSTERS [1970], HELL'S BLOODY
DEVILS [1970], BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR [1971], FIVE BLOODY GRAVES [1971],
DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN [1972], and ANGELS WILD WOMEN [1972]).
Private Parts by Howard Stern; Simon and Schuster, 1993, $23.00 (hardcover),
447pp, ISBN:0-671-88016-0
If you've listened to Stern then you fall into one of two categories,
someone who likes him or someone who likes him and won't admit it. Stern is
a funny guy, but his greatest appeal is his shameless honesty; he's not
afraid to say exactly what he thinks about someone or something. That may
seem to be a recipe for obnoxiousness, and to some extent it is, but it
works with Stern as he applies his honesty equally to himself. People who
accuse him of the various -isms need to stop and realize that he's no
different than anybody else, especially themselves, he just admits his
opinions, his prejudices, and his shortcomings freely for all to hear. In
Private Parts what you get is an unexpurgated version of the radio and TV
shows. With a semi-biographical format, each individual chapter is devoted
to a different aspect of Howard's career, past or present. Fellow
employees, former bosses, competing radio personalities, and especially
select celebrities who have crossed paths with Howard are freely skewered.
Chevy Chase, whose talk show bomb was predicted in the text to fail quickly
and miserably before it even went an the air, Roseanne and Tom (Yoko)
Arnold, Arsenio (aka Asskissio) Hall, and Kathy Lee Gifford are amongst the
biggest recipients. Who could defend that deserving group of pompous
characters?. While Howard is always a complete cynic, the book is far from
all negative. He's got plenty of praise for those entertainers whom he
likes. There are also a number of not only funny but interesting stories,
such as events in Howard's awkward youth in a black neighborhood on Long
Island, the college years, early radio at Boston University, in Hartford,
Detroit, and Washington DC, and at NBC New York from which he was fired, and
particularly regarding the FCC vendetta against him. The book is heavily
illustrated, and the photos are almost as entertaining as the text. See just
how much of cheeseball Howard was with a shorter permed hairdo and huge
mustache in the mid-eighties. Long time fans will know a lot of the stories
already but will enjoy the more detailed versions, while those outside of
any of the radio markets will see what it is that their local governments
and the FCC feel that they need to be protected from. There are three
chapters on lesbians.
Ramones: An American Band by Jim Bessman (in association with the Ramones);
St. Martin's Press, 1993, $14.95 (softcover), 202pp, ISBN: 0-312-09369-1
The Ramones stand as one of the greatest all time rock and roll bands, and
their longevity is a tribute to their staying power with their fans. With a
dedicated following which some might try to label "cult", it is surprising
that it took this long for someone to publish a book on them. We seem to
get three to four new Sex Pistols volumes annually, and they were a lesser
band whose story covers about two years time. It seems that all those
Rolling Stone styled rock critics who rejected the Pistols for the first ten
years following the release of "Anarchy in the UK" are now trying to show
their versatility of tastes by praising the group, glossing over the fact
that they were rejected as snotty, atonal noisemakers not on a par with true
"artists" such as Bob Segar, The Eagles, or Jackson Browne when they were
happening. This Sex Pistol revisionism by the old boy network seems to have
begun with Rolling Stoned's hypocritical "best of" list, published upon
their twentieth anniversary in 1987. Some of these same critics are also
now trying to give The Ramones their due, but most seem to feel that jumping
onto the Sex Pistols bandwagon is enough to prove that they can relate to
punk rock. John Savage in England's Dreaming finally told the Pistol's
story in a coherent manner, with a critical evaluation and description of
them in the context of the social scene from which they emerged, rendering
unnecessary all of the knock off fan mag styled publication which preceded
it. Unfortunately, Ramones: An American Band falls more into the latter
category than the former. Author Jim Bessman is too enamored with the
group, and too friendly with them, to create something which doesn't come
across as cheerleading. As a fan rather than a writer, his prose comes off
as simplistic and amateurish to boot. A great deal of the text is spent
going over how innovative and important The Ramones are in the greater
context of rock music, and how they were unfairly rejected by an
establishment who couldn't see the raw pop energy of such radio ready tunes
as "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" or "Rockaway Beach" (sentiments that I agree
with). However the editorializing does get repetitive. The book is far
from without value however, as the author's closeness to the group allowed
for the acquisition of many interesting interviews and photos, and the
Ramones history as chronicled here provides for some entertaining reading.
There are not many post CBGB's era accounts of the band's activities
available. Segments which I particularly enjoyed tell of the recording
sessions with Phil Spector for End of the Century, and the comings and
goings of Dee Dee, Marky, Richie, and CJ Ramone. There is also an appendix
listing every show that the headbangers ever played, which was a fun device
for recalling some of the blasts I've had at their gigs. My most memorable
experience was with Black Flag and the Minutemen at the Hollywood Palladium
in November 1984, in which a full scale police riot followed. The whole
world should be familiar with LAPD tactics these days so no more needs to
be said. The unobjective nature of the writing and the lack of digging any
deeper into The Ramones or American punk scenes render this one valuable for
fans only.
Television Horror Movie Hosts: 68 Vampires, Mad Scientists and Other
Denizens of the Late-Night Airwaves Examined and Interviewed by Elena M.
Watson; McFarland, 1991, $29.95 (hardcover, library bound), 256pp, ISBN:
0-89950-570-8
This is another McFarland publication, and again it's designed to be
primarily useful as a reference. Thus it's a book that you probably won't
read from front to back at one time, but it is invaluable if you need the
scoop on something specific contained within. The goofy characters who
popped up on local television stations around the country from the fifties
on into the eighties are an artifact of the days before infomercials and
made for TV movies replaced the great and not so great films of the past on
the airwaves. Just about every metropolitan area had at least one crazy who
would dress up as a vampire, ghoul, or mad scientist and hang out in a
haunted house, cave, or laboratory, while engaging in wacky stunts during
the breaks in showings of monster movies shown on TV. The author has
gathered up information on the careers of most every movie host who appeared
in a city of at least moderate size throughout the US. After an
introduction which sums up the origins of the phenomena in Los Angeles'
Vampira and the Universal packaging for TV of their classic horror films
under the Shock! label, the book dives into chapters covering each host.
How the character was developed, his or her gimmicks, stunts, and
personality, the station that he or she appeared on, and their years on the
air are given in each case. Many chapters contain interviews with their
subjects as well, and most have photos. A ghoulography lists film and
record appearances when applicable. The creatures included range from older
heavyweights like Zacherley in Philadelphia and New York, Ghoulardi in
Cleveland, and Morgus the Magnificent in New Orleans, to the more obscure
likes of Sir Cecil Creape in Nashville and Dr. Paul Bearer in St.
Petersburg, to today's nationally known figures Elvira and Grandpa Al Lewis.
68 fiends are covered in total, and if you're is interested in any or all of
them there aren't many other information sources to turn to. If anyone
expresses an interest I could list them all by city in a future issue of
FUNHOUSE!
EOF
