The Night We Caught the Hallowe'en Show: guest post by Jeff Segal

I watched the documentary Halloweenville late Friday night, the 30th, taking notes on how enthusiastically Lambertville, NJ celebrates the holiday and which streets to visit. That exposure, plus what I found on the internet, assured us of a more entertaining adventure. Local Lambertville filmmaker/musicians Paul Kaye & Gary P. Cohen helmed the doc and they recruited actress Deborah Reed to narrate. She is known, with good reason, among cult film fans for her role in the legendary Troll 2 as the bespectacled queen of the goblins, vicious vegan monsters who convert hapless humans into greenery so they can be eaten.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

  

Though Saturday's temps never rose beyond the low sixties, the cheery sun was out all day and there wasn't much wind when sundown brought temperatures down to the upper forties and early fifties. I had on my clunky large ankle-cradling shoes, thick jeans, a multi-pocketed zipper up vest that had belonged to my father UNDER my oversized Hawaiian shirt and a large multipocketed black jacket (the heaviest of my lighter jackets, which in conjunction with the rest of them, probably adds up to a winter coat) so I was quite comfortable lumbering around two quaint towns Hallowe'en night: New Hope, PA, where we eventually ate and shopped, is separated from NJ's Lambertville by a sheet-metal automobile and pedestrian bridge that clanks as we walk over it...and we did lots of footwork. My cousin Joe and my buddy Jeff were dressed in traditional more serious winter outerwear.  While killing time in New Hope, waiting for sundown, we ate at the Logan Inn--good, tasty food but too pricy for my comfort. We didn't encounter any scary phenomena, save for the bill, but ghosts would have certainly given us more bang for our buck if we had! Once it grew dusky, we packed our purchases of New Hope fudge and gourmet popcorn away, clanged back over the bridge, and re-entered the transformed Lambertville. I had switched the Christmas-decoration-festooned, guinea pig-sized rubber spider that I had been carrying (Nastassja Kinski once, gingerly, had patted it, its sole brush with celebrity) with the dog-sized rubber cockroach that I had decked out with a Santa cap, a pet sized Santa coat and Christmas mittens, plus a spiked collar and leash. The Christmas roach (as my cousin dubbed it), often evokes cringing revulsion in many onlookers once they realize what it is and I cradled it in one arm like Paris Hilton does her barking rat-dogs, jiggling it around for maximum jointed-leg-twitching effect. It did its magic Hallowe'en night, provoking much conversation and gasps. 

Evidently, there are side streets of decorated houses and neat businesses, most of which we didn't have time to side-track down. But we did tour the most popular street in Lambertville, which the police close to automobile traffic for several hours Hallowe'en evening. Many residential and businesses owners decorate along that drag, with second and third stories featuring illuminated or moving figures against windows, things dangling out of the window frames, webs stretching from top floors down to their postage-stamp-sized front yards. I recognized some of the props as pop-up Hallowe'en store merchandise from the current season or previous years, but the owners often utilized them in ways that maximized their efficiency or modified them. There were plenty of created-from-scratch figures and scenarios, some I recognized from the Halloweenville documentary. I think I saw the one house where the owner made use of hooded, caped performers in expressionless golden masks--she confessed in the film that she had discovered that they disturbed visitors more than the more obvious monsters that she had once employed; the house front and yard looked familiar but I didn't see any masked figures doing odd rituals...they still might have been lurking about.  Amid the concerts of ghostly noises some owners played, a ghoulish rock band pounded out classic dark rock tunes such as a track from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. To accommodate the hundreds of trick 'r treaters (including parents, older siblings and many costumed pets, some in glow-in-the-dark outfits to prevent them from getting stepped on), many owners stocked BARREL LOADS of goodies. A significant portion of the revelers were costumed. We only saw a portion of them but some folks were pushing a huge enclosed transparent illuminated crib with their multiple monkey-garbed children, another family had their children in a huge carrier dressed like a waste management truck. A child too young to be watching or reading Watchmen was dressed as Rorschach. The most impressive spectacle of the evening had at least two strong adults operating an Imperial Walker the size of of a large bulky camel, complete with classic "Imperial March" theme playing in a loop. The four-legged costume didn't walk swiftly up the street but the crowds did part out of respect for it. 

[Unrelated to the documentary, except from the same year's festivities:]

This is the type of well-populated small-town Halloween celebration nostalgically envisioned by the movie Trick 'R Treat. I'm sure that the revelry could be juxtaposed with adventures down creepier parts of town where there are more shadows than people and among more rural patches in Lambertville; that was the geographical contrast mapped out by the Trick 'R Treat film and could be used as a template for Lambertville as well. 

on-set gallery: sf/fantasy films in production

From an amusing clump of on-set candid photography gathered on Gizmodo; courtesy Ian Covell.

Perhaps oddly, while Gojira can always provide a light, he has been an early and fervent anti-tobacco advocate.

Ten Teen-Focused Suspense and Horror Films Which Are Better Than We Have Any Reason to Expect

Having just seen again, after a decade or so, Night of the Comet, it strikes me as clever and well-worked-out for the most part, and while usually given the credit it deserves by most reviewers, it's an easy film to underestimate, in its utter lack of pretense. And while there are acknowledged classics involving such matters as teens and near-teens dealing with very grave peril indeed (such as, obviously, Lord of the Flies, or, with lesser crime involved, The 400 Blows), Night of the Comet is one of a number that might be slighted in one's memory, particularly if one didn't catch them when maximally willing to give them their best shot, i.e. when a teen one's self.



And it reminds me of others nearly drowned in the sea of slashers and similar drek (such as the "torture porn" children of the slashers), such as The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, featuring the adolescent Jodie Foster as a prodigy who is doing quite well living a fairly isolated life with her father, whom no one ever seems to see. Sentiment akin to nostalgia will probably always allow me to forgive the rougher edges of this film, also clever and well-cast, with Martin Sheen as relentlessly creepish as he was in Badlands (a film which almost makes the cut for this list).



The opposite of prodigies populate the much later River's Edge, loosely based on the actual experiences of some small-town teens who covered for the murder of one of their friends by another. Perhaps the best single example to offer to those who enjoy insisting Keanu Reeves can't act, and the rest of the cast is impressive.



Meanwhile, even more blatantly satirical, a touchstone for many fans from its debut in the 1980s, is Heathers, which takes a few easy choices but also mocks the John Hughes sort of teen-stroking flick among many other targets.



Another mockery of most of the other most popular teen films of the previous decade is Not Another Teen Movie, which is apparently not currently being pirated on the web-clip services (this post being an exercise in part in demonstrating how many are), due to Universal keeping a close eye on this film, which was originally released by Columbia. This could be the choice among these ten that would generate the most disapproval, anyway, particularly from those folks who would insist this film is crude hack while describing the inane Scream films as deft.



Meanwhile, April Fool's Day (1986) is one of several films starring Deborah Foreman, best remembered for Valley Girl, which fall solidly into the Better Than You'd Expect Category. A witty reworking of the And Then There Were None... formula, and marketed incorrectly as a slasher, this still suggests more of a kinship with RKO/Lewton Unit The Seventh Victim than probably should be.













The Chocolate War was a credible adaptation of Robert Cormier's YA novel about the rise of fascism in the microcosm of a private school, but while the novel remains one of the more popular in its class, the film seems to have been ostracized. (It probably doesn't help that, as with many of the other films cited above, its releasing studio is long dead.)






Massacre at Central High is a low-budget 1970s film with some remarkably inappropriate music, and it's been decades since I've seen it (cut for television), but I remember it as an eventually persuasive study of young psychosis (played by actors rather too blatantly superannuated, as too often the case). A legitimate YT posting, apparently, perhaps as it's in the public domain.


And two films of fairly recent release to round out the selections here, both more the focus of somewhat scandalized chatter rather than much close analysis, but both devoted to observations about sexual politics, exploitation, and no little challenging the blithe attempts of too many teen oriented films to highlight women, very much including young women, as still the Other...Deadgirl and Teeth. Neither a perfect film by any means, but both unafraid of controversy and more complex than they were often given credit for on first release...

Tuesday's Overlooked Films (And/Or Other A/V Items), Round 1

Jeannine Kaspar in Paper Covers Rock.

Welcome to a revival of the shortlived Forgotten Films roundelay a few of us were engaged with a few years back...now more or less formally expanded to include television and other audio/visual artifacts...and what a wealth of artifacts and formats and delivery systems we have, and sometimes no longer have.

I hope to have a weekly example or so of my own, and as many citations of examples of the insufficiently appreciated as others wish to share, every Tuesday. I will post links to their blogs (and specifically to their relevant posts) when possible, and will post any contribution that blogless folks wish to make on my blog, if they like...very much in the mold of the ongoing Friday's Forgotten Books, hosted by Patti Abbott, and the monthly (last Wednesday) Forgotten Music, hosted by Scott Parker.

The following folks have a post up today:
Bill Crider: Condemned
Eric Peterson: Boiling Point
Evan Lewis: Metropolis
James Reasoner: SOS Coast Guard
Jerry House: Loose Shoes
Juri Nummelin: The Murder Maze
K.A. Laity: Straight to Hell
Randy Johnson: Cop Hater
Scott Parker: π
Todd Mason: The Limits of Control; Paper Covers Rock; The Exiles

and, honorarily:
Dan Stumpf: The Night of the Eagle and other adaptations of Fritz Leiber's Conjure Wife
Pearce Duncan: on the directorial career of Orson Welles
...but the more the merrier (and these links will be refined at first opportunity.

Now, the range of audio/visual materials for which we don't have easy access any longer is pretty large, and beyond even the lost films and television and radio, whose original prints or recordings were discarded or allowed to deteriorate, when any recording was made at all. While the Internet Archive is just one (and perhaps the most impressive) of the sites on the web that can help ferret out any number of materials hart to get at in any former otherwise (comparable in its excellence and in its necessary incompleteness to the likes of Project Gutenberg), there's so much still only accessible in orphaned formats (up to and including the 33 RPM LP and 16 RPM talking book vinyl discs)...among the supposed facts that used to boggle my young mind was the number of early recordings in the Library of Congress, and presumably collected elsewhere as well, with, as the Guinness Book put it, "no known matrix." I suspect at least a few engineers are working on those...

For another example of Stuff You Probably Don't See Much Of Any Longer: ViewMaster. Now, there's a thriving collectors market, aided like most such by eBay and its competitors over the years, but the new ViewMaster offers for sale the last time I was around a VM display were very sorry, indeed...which I suspect indicated the worsening fortunes of the retail outlet almost as much as the downgraded state of VM in a video and console-game age, with animated 3D still problematic but available. But the beauty of at least some the nature and science packs (VM typically sold its slide discs in three-packs), and the mild (or not so mild) joy of some of the entertainment packs, at least if one was capable of enjoying that kind of photography, was hard to deny (I did throughly enjoy the clay artistry of some of the Peanuts cartoon adaptations). And, of course, that sort of stereo photography wasn't just useful for the entertainment and instruction of children: my only college roommate was a studio art and pre-med major, and as such brought home discs of autopsy photos...a corpse missing a mandible was among the most disturbing images I'd seen to that time. And in dead, nearly palpable color.




The 1970s and the decade before were probably the ViewMaster's heyday, and that of other slide-based toys (I certainly had others, less impressive than VM), and the widespread availability of William Castle's organization's silent 8mm film highlights reels from horror and adventure films, and from his travelog short subjects. And, also, there was no lack of investment, on the part of several small spoken-word record labels, such as Caedmon, Spoken Arts and Argo, in not only readings by authors of poetry and prose, and actors, but also full-cast audio staging of plays; Caedmon particularly would arrange them on three- and four-LP sets so that one could put them on a stacker, and disc one would have side one, then disc two would drop with side two, and on a three disc set one would flip over the stack after side three on disc three and eventually finish with side six on disc one. Tough on the records, but very easy on the listener with the tall spindle on their turntable. Spoken Arts's full-play recording I remember best was their staging of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, but it'd be hard to recall all the plays I heard through Caedmon Records; they included O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra, and an excellent Ah, Wilderness!; Williams's The Glass Menagerie; my favorite of Miller's plays, Incident at Vichy; Sartre's No Exit; Cocteau's The Infernal Machine; the Peter Weiss/Peter Brook Marat/Sade; and many more, including Shakespeare and Sophocles...only the American Film Theater complete soundtracks, such as of Ionesco's Rhinoceros with Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, were likely to disappoint, in part due to the rushed nature of the productions and in part due to the fact that they were soundtracks to filmed plays that might, in many cases, depend even more than the Caedmon-staged productions on their visuals rather than dialog and sound effects. HarperCollins, who now own the Caedmon catalog, have done a remarkably poor job of getting it back out on the market.

And all that (nostalgia) doesn't even take into account all the nationally-broadcast radio drama one could find in the US in the 1970s, I'd guess at least twice as much as in the '60s, when matters had dwindled to the last two CBS series, Suspense and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar ending in 1962, Bob and Ray continuing largely as a part of NBC's weekend Monitor umbrella, and some Pacifica Radio productions. While few series were consistently good among the new series from CBS and the new NPR, Pacifica (which shared the Firesign Theater with "underground"/free-form commercial rock stations at the turn of the '70s) and such projects as the ZBS production and syndication unit, there certainly was a ferment, ranging from such long-running series as the CBS Radio Mystery Theater and Earplay (and Christian radio's Unshackled) to a new series of full-length Bob & Ray shows and The National Lampoon Radio Hour, Rod Serling's Zero Hour through The Sears Radio Theater to The Fourth Tower of Inverness...and such British and Canadian imports as The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, (1980's) Nightfall and such kids' fare as The General Mills Adventure Theater and the NPR Star Wars adaptations.

Tilda Swinton and Isaach De Bankolé in The Limits of Control

But most of the contributions to this weekly list are likely to be cinematic and television (and perhaps increasingly web) presentations, and I've got some of those to briefly discuss, too (believe it or not, given all the above). I haven't been exploring too many of the really obscure corners of these arts, recently, but I'd like to draw your attention to at least The Limits of Control (2009), a typically beautifully-shot, extremely deliberate, funny and not altogether vague Jim Jarmusch film, which involves characters involved in a conspiracy that borders on the edge of crime and espionage, and has a weight and thoughtfulness that can easily be taken, by the likes of Rotten Tomatoes reviewers, for excruciating pointless pretense. I'd disagree, of course...I think the point is pretty clearly spelled out in the title, for all the characters and for the larger forces around them. If you want more traditional thrills amidst an attempt to add some weight and humanistic wit to spy drama, you might want to check out the similarly good A Few Days in September (briefly mentioned in yesterday's reprinted list) with Juliette Binoche as a spy-master thrust into trying to keep the young-adult children of one her ex-colleagues alive long enough for him to reunite with them, or the slightly more clownish, but still impressive Fay Grim, the sequel to Henry Fool I half-liked upon first viewing, and liked much better upon the second viewing...again, Parker Posey's Grim is forced into a ridiculously complicated situation while simply attempting to see her spy husband again, and does her damnedest to try to make sure as few as possible of the people around her get killed while she attempts this.

Paper Covers Rock (2008) is a pretty grim film, even in comparison to Limits, featuring Jeannine Kaspar as a woman attempting to pull her life back together, after falling into a trough of suicidal depression and being hospitalized for it; we join her, and see all the interpersonal and other obstacles she has to face, and good and not so good people close to her, sometimes supportive and too often insufficiently-so, and how her behavior can trigger them as well as vice verse. Very well-acted and absorbing, and worth the time.

More alienated than actually downbeat, the characters in The Exiles (1961) are from various Native American nations, mostly first-generation escapees from the reservations, who are mostly not doing so well in lives spent in and around the now-vanished Los Angeles largely-native-ghetto Bunker Hill. Made with almost no money with a mostly amateur cast, and meant as a document of the players' actual lives or at least those of their peers, it has post-filming-recorded sound, and a lack of throughline-plot that would presumably enervate those who find The Limits of Control pointless, as it follows the adventures, such as they are, of relatively young adults through the course of a night in the city. Nonetheless, the utter lack of slickness helps the film, in part in the same way that many better no-budget films have a certain fascination for the viewer, as you can see how the desired effect was almost achieved, or achieved in spite of the handicap; the amateur cast isn't put through the kind of ridiculous paces that one finds in such films as Kids, but instead seem to be doing their best to represent the Way We Live in that Today. This film might even be the least obscure of the three I'm highlighting here, as a "lost" film, from its completion by newly graduated USC Film School student Kent MacKenzie in '61 till a revival, with much attendant publicity, in 2008. And, personally, it was very striking that the women in the film looked a whole lot like my aunts, who are, oddly enough, like my mother in being Italian/Cherokee/Irish, but my mother the most Milanese-looking by far among her gen, and the rest of the family much more strongly Cherokee in features, when not also complexion.


I saw these films in those utterly obscure venues, respectively cable channels Showtime, IFC, and TCM...cable does have its uses, still (quite aside from upgrading the budget and showcase of the likes of Children's Hospital). I look forward to what others have to suggest for us, today and in the weeks to come...and please feel free to join in (and please let me know, in comments or via email, that you've done so! Thanks).