Saturday 9 March 2024

Reflections on ... Honky Tonk Nights (1978)

 


Recently watched: no-budget shitkicker exploitation flick Honky Tonk Nights (1978). Tagline: “Drinkin' ... Lovin' ... Fightin' ... and Cussin'. Those were the nights. Those Honky Tonk Nights.” Synopsis via The Grindhouse Cinema Database:Dreaming of Nashville while singing at a rowdy tavern, a stripper-turned-songstress fends off male patrons while the owner battles shady businessmen.” 

Truthfully, Honky Tonk Nights is virtually unwatchable by any objective standards, but as an accurate time capsule of 1970s drive-in or grindhouse fare, it’s exemplary. Set in the low-end of country music dive bars, it offers 71-minutes of barroom brawls and fistfights (if you like seeing chairs smashed over peoples’ heads, THIS is the movie for you), car chases and car crashes (and motorcycle chases and motorcycle crashes), a wall-to-wall soundtrack of Country & Western music of wildly varying quality that quickly grows numbing, softcore sex scenes and copious female nudity (women routinely start undressing mid-conversation with  no apparent reason). Honky Tonk Nights' pungent ambiance of sleaze and murky 1970s porn vibe is perhaps inevitable - director Charles Webb mainly specialized in X-rated films (and the cast includes noted golden age of porn performers like Georgina Spelvin and Serena. For verisimilitude, esteemed American folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott also crops up). 

San Francisco’s iconic topless go-go dancer Carol Doda (1937 - 2015) stars as heroine Belle Barnette. “Winner of the 1979 Dolly Parton lookalike contest!” the poster promises. Doda certainly shares Parton’s physical attributes and penchant for cotton candy wigs, but regrettably not her on-screen charisma (at least as evidenced here) or musical ability. And anyway, Doda vanishes from the action for long stretches. (For such a short movie, Honky Tonk Nights is overburdened with subplots and supporting characters). In conclusion: if you want an exposé into the realm of country music, stick with Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975). Honky Tonks Nights is free to watch on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

Saturday 2 March 2024

The Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Butterfield 8 (1960) on 21 March 2024

“The John O'Hara novel that seemed perfect for the movies, plus the role that seemed perfect for Elizabeth Taylor - and this is the garish mess it became,” is how the reliably terse Pauline Kael dismissed Butterfield 8. “Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse than the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script. With Laurence Harvey; Dina Merrill, doing a noble wife to end all noble wives; and a vacuum on the screen that is said to be Eddie Fisher.” 

Almost no one has a good word to say about this lurid, wildly entertaining 1960 melodrama (including leading lady Taylor herself) – so of course Butterfield 8 is absolute catnip for me and it’s the March 2024 selection for the Lobotomy Room cinema club devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People! 


To its advantage: Taylor is sublime as wanton high-priced, high-class New York call girl Gloria Wandrous (tagline: “Gloria is the glamour girl who always wakes up ashamed!”). And the script co-authored by John Michael Hayes (the genius behind camp classicks (sic) Torch Song, Peyton Place, The Carpetbaggers, Where Love Has Gone and Harlow) features dialogue like “Face it, mama! I was the slut of all time!” and “I’ve had more fun in the back of a ’39 Ford than I could ever have in the vault of the Chase National Bank!” 


The opening moments alone are spellbinding: as Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello recount in their 1993 book Bad Movies We Love, “Taylor awakens alone in her married lover’s bed, wraps herself in only a sheet, lights a cigar, drains a glass of whiskey, discovers her torn dress on the floor, brushes her teeth with booze, finds an envelope with $250 cash, scrawls “No Sale” in red lipstick across a mirror, leaves the money and instead steals the absent wife’s mink coat, calls her answering service and hails a cab to the apartment of … Eddie Fisher (by then, he was the real life Mr. Taylor).”  


So, join us on 21 March 2024 to watch Butterfield 8 over cocktails at Fontaine’s in Dalston! In my intro, I’ll provide context on Eddie Fisher leaving his then-wife Debbie Reynolds for Taylor in 1958 (the red-hot showbiz scandal of its time) and how Taylor almost dying of pneumonia helped win her a “sympathy Oscar” for her performance in Butterfield 8 in 1961! 

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserve your seat via Fontaine’s websiteAlternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.


“By the odds, it should be a bomb. But a bomb it is not, let us tell you. At least, it is not the sort of thing to set you to yawning and squirming, unless Elizabeth Taylor leaves you cold. In the first place, it has Miss Taylor, playing the florid role of the lady of easy virtue, and that's about a million dollars right there. "I was the slut of all times," she tells her mother in one of those searing scenes wherein the subdued, repentant playgirl, thinking she has found happiness, bares her soul. But you can take it from us, at no point does she look like one of those things. She looks like a million dollars, in mink or in negligée. When she sits at a bar with Laurence Harvey, who is not just any Joe but a millionaire with a ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment and "caves all over town," and she lets her eyes travel up and down him, measuring not the bulge of his pocketbook but the bulge of his heart - well, all we can say is that Miss Taylor lends a certain fascination to the film. Then, too, it offers admission to such an assortment of apartments, high-class bars, Fifth Avenue shops and speedy sports cars, all in colour and CinemaScope, that it should make the most moral status seeker feel a little disposed toward a life of sin. Brandy, martinis and brittle dialogue flow like water all over the place.”  

/ Bosley Crowther reviewing Butterfield 8 in The New York Times, 17 November 1960 /


“In both Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Butterfield 8, Taylor appears in a tight white slip that looks as if it were sewn onto her body. What a gorgeous object she is! Feminists are currently adither over woman’s status as sex object but let them rave on in their little mental cells. For me, sexual objectification is a supreme human talent that is indistinguishable from the art impulse. Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuous in her sleek slip, stands like an ivory goddess, triumphantly alone. Her smooth shoulders and round curves, echoing those of mother earth, are gifts of nature, beyond the reach of female impersonators. Butterfield 8, with its call-girl heroine working her way down the alphabet of men from Amherst to Yale, appeared at a very formative moment in my adolescence and impressed me forever with the persona of the prostitute, whom I continue to revere.” 

/ From "Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Pagan Queen" by Camille Paglia, Penthouse magazine, March 1992 /



 


 


Saturday 10 February 2024

Reflections on ... The Children (1980)

 

Recently watched: gleefully cheap, nasty and enjoyable exploitation flick The Children (1980). Tagline: “Something terrifying has happened to … The Children.” 

It was free to stream on Amazon Prime (as well it should be) and their synopsis is more succinct than anything I could come up with: “A nuclear-plant leak turns a busload of children into murderous atomic zombies with black fingernails.” 

Yes, the contemporary reviews were scathing (The Orlando Sentinel termed the cast “the ugliest bunch of folks we've seen assembled on any screen at any one time” and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette accurately but cruelly noted that the children’s charred victims resemble “leftover pepperoni pizza, complete with black olives and anchovies”). 

But seen today, The Children looks like a prime example of irresistible low-brow drive-in fare complete with gore, violence, bad special effects and the occasional glimpse of bare breasts. And there is artistry here: as the It Came from Beyond Pulp blog perceptively argues, “once night falls, [director Max Kalmanowicz’s] true gifts come into play. Under cover of near-darkness, he exhibits an almost supernatural mastery of simple, evocative, and scary-as-hell shot framing, shock reveals, and pacing. He doesn’t make the mistake, common in the slasher genre, of overlighting his shots: the lighting here is the familiar blindness-inducing pitch black of a moonless night, in which headlights, flashlights, and candles illuminate just enough to remind you of how cavern-dark everything else is. It’s here, in the dark, where he uses his scary kids brilliantly. Smiling, arms outstretched, calling “mommy, mommy” in their piping voices, they loom out of the blackness like pretty little angels of death: this is the single scariest image I can remember from any horror film.” 

Unsurprisingly, The Children’s cast is mainly unknowns, but one woman felt vaguely familiar: Gale Garnett (who delivers a very broad, soap opera-style performance). She was the singer of 1964 hit "We'll Sing in the Sunshine", which I remember being ubiquitous on the radio when I was a kid.

Wednesday 7 February 2024

Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Desire (1936) on 15 February 2024

“Marlene Dietrich, with her pencil-line arched eyebrows, as the most elegantly amusing international jewel thief ever. She steals a pearl necklace in Paris and speeds toward Spain; on her way she has a series of encounters with Gary Cooper, a motor engineer from Detroit who is on holiday. Produced by Ernst Lubitsch, for Paramount, and directed by Frank Borzage, this is a polished light comedy in the "continental" style - a sophisticated romantic trifle, with Dietrich more chic and modern than in her von Sternberg pictures. When she eyes Cooper, she's so captivating, you almost feel sorry for him; there's an image of her standing against French doors that is simply peerlessly sexy. But you can also see why this European sophisticate longs for the American innocent. Cooper is a bit coy and rambunctious in his Americanness but wearing narrow-tailored suits and with his hair sleek he's the ideal Art Deco hero. And he's great when he leans close to Dietrich and says, dreamily, "All I know about you is you stole my car and I'm insane about you." When he's being threatened by her crooked associate (John Halliday), who remarks, tauntingly, "One mustn't underestimate America - it's a big country," he bends forward and says, "Six foot three."”

/ Pauline Kael’s review of Desire (1936) /

Considering the February film club almost coincides with Valentine’s Day and to prove that even Lobotomy Room can occasionally raise the tone, on 15 February we whisk you away to The Spanish Riviera for sumptuous 1936 romantic screwball comedy Desire! Gary Cooper stars as Tom Bradley, a naïve American automotive engineer who becomes entangled with Marlene Dietrich’s enigmatic Madeleine Beaupré – described by Pauline Kael as “the most elegantly amusing jewel thief ever.” Directed by Frank Borzage, with lavish costumes by Travis Banton and songs by Frederick Hollander (who wrote all of Dietrich’s best musical numbers – including “Falling in Love Again”) and featuring the two leads at the height of their considerable beauty, Desire is an Art Deco gem of a movie! Join us to wallow in sheer glamour over cocktails in the splendour of Fontaine’s in Dalston.

Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to cinematic perversity! Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest. Facebook event page.




Some fun facts about Desire: it was originally meant to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch – and entitled The Pearl Necklace! Marlene Dietrich stars as a glamorous and amoral jewel thief who - due to wacky screwball hijinks - becomes entangled with unworldly vacationing American-in-Paris automobile engineer Gary Cooper. Desire reunites Dietrich and Cooper for the first time since their triumphant pairing in Morocco in 1930 (which was Dietrich's Hollywood debut). As Dietrich’s definitive biographer Steven Bach asserts, “Cooper was not just her first American leading man, but her best.” Decide for yourself on 15 February! 



/ Below: find someone who looks at you with the same delight as Marlene Dietrich contemplating these pearls! /



Trailer:

Monday 15 January 2024

Reflections on ... Thundercrack! (1975) and The Scala Cinema


/ George Kuchar and Marion Eaton in Thundercrack! (1975) /

To commemorate the release of the excellent new documentary Scala!!! Or the Incredibly Strange Rise and Fall of the World's Wildest Cinema and How It Influenced a Mixed-up Generation of Weirdos and Misfits (2024), the British Film Institute is currently holding Scala: Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll Cinema, a season of films associated with London’s notorious, much-missed repertory cinema. 

Reader, I was one of the mixed-up generation of misfits warped by the Scala at an impressionable age. (I moved to London just in time to experience its final year or so; I remember feeling bereft when it closed). The first double bill I ever saw there was within a month or two of arriving: Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) / The Wild Angels (1966) (in other words, Marianne Faithfull and Nancy Sinatra as black leather-clad biker mamas). This was when Kings Cross was still a genuinely dangerous grungy red-light district / junkie central (just walking from the tube station to the cinema felt like risking your life).

From there, I plunged into essential underground classicks by the likes of John Waters, Russ Meyer, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Richard Kern and Bruce LaBruce. But for me, the film synonymous with the Scala will always be Thundercrack! (1975). It was a blast to revisit it on Sunday afternoon with friends. In this triple X sensual and depraved oddity written by George Kuchar and directed by Curt McDowell, a motley crew of freaky outsiders seek shelter at an isolated old dark house one rain-lashed night. The house in question is called Prairie Blossom and its chatelaine is the eccentric, drunk, reclusive and deeply horny Mrs. Gert Hammond, a Blanche DuBois-type wearing Anna Magnani’s black slip. 

/ Marion Eaton as Gert Hammond /

If you’ve never experienced Thundercrack!, anticipate hardcore sex scenes interspersed with verbose faux Tennessee Williams dialogue (“Take me away from all this! I’ve got money, a car and a body – and they’re all yours!”). You get a measure of Thundercrack! immediately when Gert vomits into a toilet, her wig falls into the bowl, and she simply slaps it back onto her head to answer the front door. (“Who’s there that speaks to me in the voice of a woman? It’s been years since those doors felt the touch of a human knuckle!”). As Gert, the remarkable Marion Eaton’s gutsy and committed performance deserves to be proclaimed alongside Divine’s in Pink Flamingos or Female Trouble in the gutter movie pantheon.


/ Ken Scudder's deeply memorable jockstrapped crotch in Thundercrack! Read his story here /

Scala!!! is in cinemas now and will be available for streaming soon. Thundercrack! is apparently available on Blu-ray, but really, you wanted to watch it in a cinema full of rowdy drunk people - ideally at midnight! 


Friday 5 January 2024

The Next Lobotomy Room Film Club ... Strait-Jacket (1964) on 18 January 2024

 


Considering campy horror masterpiece Strait-Jacket turns sixty this month (it was released on 19 January 1964), it’s only fitting that it’s the first Lobotomy Room presentation of the New Year!

Call it “hagsploitation” or “psycho-biddy”, Strait-Jacket (directed by low-budget trash maestro William Castle – one of John Waters’ primary influences) is a stark, vicious little b-movie featuring a truly berserk and mesmerizing performance from bitch goddess extraordinaire (and perennial Lobotomy Room favourite) Joan Crawford as a deranged axe murderess! If you liked What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), you’ll LOVE Strait-Jacket! In fact – and I appreciate this is a controversial opinion – I’d argue Strait-Jacket is the superior film. Join us at Fontaine’s on Thursday 18 January and I’ll explain why over cocktails! But take note – as the original poster exclaimed, “Warning! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts axe murders!”


Lobotomy Room is the FREE monthly film club devoted to Bad Movies for Bad People. Third Thursday night of every month downstairs at Fontaine’s cocktail lounge in Dalston. Numbers are limited, so reserving in advance via Fontaine’s website is essential. Alternatively, phone 07718000546 or email bookings@fontaines.bar. The film starts at 8:30 pm. Doors to the basement Bamboo Lounge open at 8:00 pm. To ensure everyone is seated and cocktails are ordered on time, please arrive by 8:15 pm at the latest.

“As a movie, Strait-Jacket is no better than adequate. As myth however, it’s something else again. For homosexuals this is a remarkably resonant film. Few images could be more iconic than Joan Crawford as the ultimate castrating mom: an axe murderess who carries a weapon which has a handle that seems to grow longer with each successive reel. Add to this the fact that she’s all dolled up in forties finery, including a shoulder-length hairstyle and a flashy flowered dress. Her mouth is a livid, lipsticked slash. To complete the ensemble, she sports a set of charm bracelets which clank and tinkle ominously whenever she’s hefting her hatchet.”

/ From High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films, Vol 2 by Paul Roen (1997) / 



“Strait-Jacket continued Joan Crawford’s descent into grand guignol. She played an axe murderess in the film by William Castle, who had achieved fame by dangling skeletons over audiences and wiring seats with electrical charges. Joan was paid $50,000 and a percentage of the profits, which were considerable, but the film seemed to lower her reputation.”

/ From Joan Crawford: A Biography by Bob Thomas (1978) /


“After seeing What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? fifteen times, [William] Castle dreamed of hitting the big time, of working with stars like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. One evening at a party in Beverly Hills, he had the good fortune to be introduced to Crawford. “He almost fell at her feet,” said writer Hector Arce. “He told her he had a script that he had written specifically for her. It was called Strait-Jacket. It was written by the man who wrote the Hitchcock classic Psycho. “I’m listening, Mr. Castle,” said Joan … After Crawford read Strait-Jacket, she called the director. The woman was supposed to age from thirty to fifty. Joan wanted to make the character younger, to lop off five years at each end. Castle agreed. He also said yes to her salary, percentage and contract demands.”

/ From Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud (1989) by Shaun Considine /

[Crawford was approximately 59 at the time (her precise birth year is disputed –somewhere between 1904 and 1908) so in the opening epilogue, she’s playing a woman of 25].




Sure, Strait-Jacket is a gruesome serial killer exploitation flick – but deep down, is the real subject motherhood? Let’s have a heated debate on Thursday 18 January!




 

Yes! Come see Joan Crawford wearing the harshest jet-black wiggiest wig ever committed to celluloid at Fontaine’s bar in Dalston on 18 January! 


Full putrid details here. 


Sunday 31 December 2023

Reflections on ... New Year's Evil (1980)

 

Staying in tonight? Want some thematically appropriate festive viewing? I recommend grisly low-budget slasher flick New Year’s Evil (1980). Tagline: “Don’t dare make new year’s resolutions … unless you plan to live!” In Los Angeles, glamorous hard-boiled celebrity DJ and television’s first lady of rock’n’roll Blaze Sullivan (Roz Kelly) is hosting “Hollywood Hotline”, a live televised coast-to-coast New Year’s Eve countdown. Viewers are encouraged to phone in to vote for their favourite New Wave song of the year - but one of the callers is a misogynistic serial killer calling himself “Evil”, who threatens to murder a “naughty girl” as each time zone hits midnight – culminating with Blaze herself!



What distinguishes New Year’s Evil is its focus on the punk subculture. Considering it was filmed in LA in 1980, the mind boggles at the actual bands the filmmakers could have feasibly utilized for the musical sequences: X, The Screamers, the Germs, the Zeros, The Weirdos! The presence of any of these would make New Year’s Evil a valuable time capsule. But no – we see only two appalling ersatz punk bands (nonentities Shadow and Made in Japan), and at tedious length. The film’s received wisdom about how punk rockers behave (they are troublemakers with piercings and Mohawks who mosh and stick their tongues out a lot) is unintentionally hilarious. New Year’s Evil also fails to clarify why hardened young hardcore punk fans are so rabidly enthusiastic about sequin-clad middle-aged Blaze. Is it because she exhorts things like “It’s time to spin out and boil your hair!” while wielding a feather boa?


Which brings us to Roz Kelly. In her brief heyday, she was best known for portraying Pinky Tuscadero, Fonzie’s tough cookie girlfriend in seventies sitcom Happy Days. Her screen presence was certainly … um … distinctive. Whether playing Pinky, Anthony Franciosa’s brassy secretary Flaps (yes – Flaps!) in Curse of the Black Widow (1977), cavorting in Paul Lynde’s infamous 1976 Halloween special or indeed here as Blaze, Kelly is consistently abrasive, brittle and borderline hostile. Her bizarre acting choices are perhaps the scariest aspect of New Year’s Evil! 


Watch it for free on YouTube.