There Must Be Some Mixtape: Track #3 – Goolie Get-Together by Toadies (1995)

It's 1995, folks, and I've got big problems. I love Saturday morning cartoons and I especially love Saturday morning cartoon theme songs. I have some of the songs in various places in my record collection. I have the original album by The Archies from my youth, and I also have a pair of 7" singles by The Banana Splits that I ordered from Kellogg's cereal boxes when I was five years old. In the mid-'80s, the wisely named TVT Records put out a series of albums called Television's Greatest Hits, that were completely comprised of nothing but TV theme song after TV theme song. I had a few volumes of Television's Greatest Hits, and included on there were a great many scattered songs from Saturday morning cartoons, but still it wasn't what I really wanted. There was just something missing...

It turns out that the "something missing" was a compilation album entirely made up of new renditions of some favorite themes and occasional "in-show" songs from cartoons of my youth, all performed by current bands who may or may not have ever heard the songs they were being asked to perform. (More on that notion later in the piece. A-ha!... Yay, foreshadowing!)

And late in 1995, that very album arrived in the form of a CD and long-form video called Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits. Cartoon Network, naturally, was involved in the promotion of it all, which included an airing – on a Saturday morning, nonetheless – of an 90-minute-long show (with commercials; the album itself it 65 minutes in total) featuring videos for the songs on the CD. Producer-composer Ralph Sall supervised the project, and brought in a lot of big names from the alternative and punk music worlds to take part. Somehow, most of the pairings of musicians to cartoon theme work out surprisingly well. At their worst, they are merely passable with nothing truly egregious to my ears (Collective Soul sounding like they are staring straight ahead having to do the theme to The Bugaloos; face to face basically walking through the Popeye theme); at their best, the matches seemed to have been made in some form of pop culture heaven.

The Ramones riffing perfectly through Spider-Man., with Joey closing the song by singing the last syllable of the hero's name as "Ma-yan". (No, not Mayan...) Helmet thrashing forcefully through Gigantor. The Reverend Horton Heat picking his demented way through that complicated and heart-pounding Jonny Quest jazz score before switching gears halfway through to get all yokel goofy by singing Stop That Pigeon! And do you mean to tell me that honey-throated Matthew Sweet didn't sing the original theme song to Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? You could fool me. I'd ask if we could go back and insert Sublime's dub remix of the Hong Kong Phooey theme onto the original cartoons, but it would mean wiping out Scatman Crothers' swell voice, and I couldn't bear a world with any less Scatman Crothers than we already have.

Deep in the Saturday Morning album, I discovered its true revelation. At the time, I and the rock radio world were in love with an eerie, hard-hitting song called Possum Kingdom from a band in Fort Worth, Texas called Toadies. (Not the Toadies...) Truthfully, when I first heard Possum Kingdom, the vocals reminded me so much of Robin Zander's way with a song that for about a month, I thought Cheap Trick was making a comeback. (The dynamic between rhythm section and guitar was very different than Trick's, so it couldn't have been. But still...) When I found out for real who the band was, I rushed out to buy their album Rubberneck, and if I haven't listened to the album around a thousand times, I must be pretty close. It is in regular rotation (if I really have a regular rotation anymore) on my music devices and computer, and I also follow the band's new stuff to this day.

But somehow, even with how much I enjoy Toadies' music – and with singing along to the repeated "Do you wanna die?" part of Possum Kingdom, a song that has served as the template for a hundred rumors – the band's cover of Goolie Get-Together just might be my favorite song by the group.

But first, for the uninitiated. the Groovie Goolies...

The success of transplanting the squeaky-clean students of Riverdale High from the comic pages to television meant that Filmation's The Archie Show (1968-69) would bounce around for another decade in one form or another. The show would stretch into The Archie Comedy Hour for 1969-70, and add Sabrina the Teenage Witch to its cast, giving her a showcase in her own segments within the hour. The following year, Sabrina got a title spin-off while the rest of the Archies carried on in their own series in other forms. But Sabrina shared the 1970-71 season with a gang of gag-spewing monsters called The Groovie Goolies. Once that show was a hit with the kiddies, in the following season, the Goolies split to get their own show for a single season, while Sabrina (like Archie before her) carried her own series for several years.

I said the Goolies had their own show for a single season, with only 16 half-hour episodes produced, but they were all over the Saturday morning schedule throughout most of the '70s in some form. It is always amazing how few episodes there are of some series that have carried on for decades sometimes. The Jetsons was a single-season show in 1962-63 with only 24 episodes produced, but that one season was shown for years on end. It wasn't until the mid-'80s that Hanna-Barbera finally produced another season of new stories, even with its continued success with a succeeding generation. Likewise, Jonny Quest ran its mere 26 episodes starting on September 18, 1964, exactly one week after I was born. If you are thinking, "Hey, Rik was a Saturday morning baby. No wonder he loves cartoons so much!", then you would be wrong. Jonny Quest premiered on a Friday night, facing a prime time audience with a focus on reaching adults, just as The Flintstones and The Jetsons did before it. That the kids lapped it up was pure gravy. By 1967, with the Saturday morning cartoon market finally in full bloom (it started small in the early '60s and built up stronger each year), Jonny Quest finally reached its long run before an audience mostly made up of kiddies, including myself.

Back to the Goolies, I probably watched every incarnation of every Archie series as a kid, and while the show is a little harder to watch today, I really loved the Groovie Goolies back then. Part of the appeal, of course, was my natural inclination towards monsters of all types. The Goolies were less of a family like the Munsters and Addamses, and more like a monster club operating out of a castle (Horrible Hall) on a desolate clifftop. That sounds ominous, and the trappings are meant to invoke a certain amount of spookiness, but the Goolies were just pure silliness. Even the name "Goolie" has been altered from that of "ghoul" – which means "An evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies." [Oxford, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ghoul.] Hardly the fare of Saturday morning TV where there were likely censorship boards who looked out for these sort of things, and I suspect the softening of "ghoul" to "gool" renders the original definition a more babyish appearance and sound.

The main characters were Frankie, an obvious nod to the famous monster of Frankenstein; Drac, the scariest of the bunch (even some of his closeups kind of get to me today), but who serves as the primary and mostly congenial host of both Horrible Hall and the TV show; and Weirdo Wolfie, a slang-spewing hippie-werewolf hybrid who who wears shorts and sandals and rides a skateboard. There a couple dozen other supporting characters who pretty much run the gamut of monster archetypes, outside of a zombie, which would fall into the ghoul category for kiddie television and pretty much off limits. (Also, the zombie renaissance was just in its earliest stage as Night of the Living Dead only came out roughly two years earlier.)

The Groovie Goolies show was also very current in its style, as it mostly operated like a kid version of the immensely popular Laugh-In, then still enjoying its original run on TV. There was little in the way of connective tissue from one scene to the next, with little to no plot at all. Largely, the show was one blackout gag after another, broken up by a couple of musical performances in each episode. There were even specific sequences devoted to Laugh-In-style gags – Weird Window Time – but then the rest of the show would be one joke after the other. Other segments would theme schoolhouse lessons and bedtime stories, but they really were just more scenes for a series of quick gags. Like viewing old episodes of Laugh-In today, the hit-to-miss ratio of the Goolies show is pretty heavy on the miss side, but then again, the Goolies get an excuse for being designed to appeal solely to 7-year-olds. I dearly loved the stupid jokes as a kid, and I can easily soak them in now in the same way that I look back at my old Topps monster trading cards and still have fun reading the lame monster jokes. Or even listening to old Lenny Bruce "Mama, Mama" jokes...

Then there was the Goolies' music...

As I said, each episode of the Groovie Goolies contained two songs. The first song would be "sung" by an all-star monster band that contained Frankie, Drac and Wolfie. Frankie played the drums and xylophones using bones for drumsticks, Drac played a pipe organ a la The Phantom of the Opera, and Wolfie strummed a lyre-designed guitar. However, most of the poses and animation were used from song to song, so is little to no attempt toward having either their lip movements or musical actions match whatever song was being played. In fact, there is so much reused footage that occurs from show to show that you can probably shuffle the episodes, select four or five, and it is likely you will have seen all of the actual animation used for the entire series.

There were several other bands that played within Horrible Hall, which is why I said it feels more like a club where all the monsters hang out than anything. One of the other bands would usually be seen "playing" the second song in each episode, though sometimes the vocals for those second songs would sound exactly the vocals for the main monster band (though not in all cases, such as with the mummies, who had distinct vocals at times). As to those other bands, they were: The Mummies and the Puppies (featuring, quite literally, three mummy musicians and four dogs who also play along; the name is an obvious rock reference and shouldn't need elaboration); The Rolling Headstones, which are three gravestones that somehow play musical instruments; a three-skeleton group called the Bare Boned Band (too bad The Grateful Dead was taken); and finally, the Spirits of '76, a patriotic trio of colonial ghosts.

Now, the theme song to The Groovie Goolies was very well-known to me, as it would be eventually to my two little brothers as well, as they grew up with year after year of some version of the show. Here's how the original tune went in this clip from the show...

But there were several other tunes from The Groovie Goolies that stuck in my head as I came out of childhood and grew to be, well, nothing but a larger child. The chief earworm in the group was the howling call of "... and Weird-o Wolf-ie!!" which sprang from a song about the main monsters on the show called Frightening Frank, Dangerous Drac and Weirdo Wolfie aka The Monster Trio. (Sadly or not, I am still prone to saying that phrase at any given moment should something trigger it in my memories.) Another strong contender for my favorite as a kid was the song Chic-a-Boom. I remember the puppet theatre that my father built which had enough room for all three of us to stand inside it. As a result, we would often turn the construct around and use it as a full stage on which to pretend to play rock band. I recall very clearly we Johnson Boys singing along with "Chic-a-Boom! Chic-a-Boom! Don'tcha just love it?" many times on that stage or just when we played in general. And I always really liked songs like Monsters on Parade and The First Annual Semi-Formal Combination Celebration Meet the Monster Population Party... look, if you are going to have a place full of every type of monster, you had either be ready for either a parade or party... or both. And you can bet there will be songs that come out of it.

The truth of the matter is that I could pick any of the thirty-plus songs that were played on The Groovie Goolies show and place them on one of these mixtapes, and no one would blink about it, nor would I. The show was about monsters that (mostly) sang about monsters or monster-related activities. But the song that stuck with me the most over the course of the past 40 years was that damned catchy theme song. However, which version should I use. The actual show version of the theme song is less than a minute long, which just never felt long enough. The album version released in 1970 – which featured three guys in really bad monster makeup on both the front and back covers, but still had images from the TV characters too – has a much longer version of the TV theme (at 3½ minutes) and it is one of the rockier songs on the record, even if it is really only a country rock rave-up that turns into a sing-along. But it was the only version I had for a long time. And I didn't know I needed another one.

Enter... Toadies

When Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits came out, I went hardcore into pushing it on my friends. It became part of an all-night animation fest that I held at my apartment in 1995, in which the plan was to end up on Saturday morning having to watch the promotional special while we all ate breakfast cereal. This is after we spent about a dozen hours watching all manner of Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, and other cartoons through the night. (Most slept through a chunk of it, of course... we were all working people and many were college students in those days.) The reaction to the show itself in the morning was tepid at best, mostly because it was ruined by host Drew Barrymore and her friends doing the same thing we were doing, by breaking into the middle of the individual videos in the special with their own giggling and dopey commentary. Dammit, we were trying to do that, Drew! Get your own animation festival! Or at least one that doesn't intrude upon mine! I know the intent was to be post-post-post-everything and oh so cool by laughing at popular culture and nostalgia, but all it really did was piss off the people who legitimately wanted to hear the music (and possibly buy it). And for Drew Barrymore-hating me, it just made her look like that much more of a self-absorbed asshole.

Regardless of stupid interruptions, the Saturday Morning special did have some pretty groovy videos within it, Most often, the best videos were the ones where the songs were already the more successful translations from past to present. The Violent Femmes' video for Jet Screamer's classic Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) (from The Jetsons) was favored over most of the other, with the jumpsuit-wearing Femmes pretending to play in front of rear-projected Jetsons footage and looking like they having a great, goofy time while also looking just about as uncomfortable and out of place as they did when they made a cameo on an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch a few years later. Helmet does a fantastic video for Gigantor, and the appearance of the band (in muted color) playing in front of the black and white cartoon explosions from the cartoon make their video arguably the most dynamic of the bunch. Liz Phair looks like she is genuinely having a ball doing The Banana Splits theme, all while wearing a go-go dress. Juliana Hatfield was pretty much born to sing Josie and the Pussycats.  And as always, the Ramones have the superpower of being... well, the Ramones, and thus they are able to team up with a certain web-slinger to make sure that their video for Spider-Man becomes a hell of a good time.

And then we come to Toadies covering the Groovie Goolies. But first the video...

Toadies
Goolie Get-Together
(Written by Linda Martin and Janis Gwin)

[Chorus 1]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

[Guitar solo]

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together

Come on, everybody
Join the Goolies
They're gonna do their thing for you
They're kinda strange
But they're real funny
You'll be glad to know
They love you too!

[Chorus 2 repeat]
Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

You're gonna see
How funny they can be

'Cause it's time for the Goolies get-together!

[Chorus 1 repeat]
"Everybody shout!
Come on now, sing out!
It's time for the Goolies get-together!

They got jokes for everyone
With laughter, songs, and fun
So let's go to the Goolies get-together!

Everybody shout!!!

The words to Goolie Get-Together are devastatingly simple, but after all we are only being invited to join a bunch of monsters at a party. You don't want to make the invitation too complicated or nobody will show up to the gig. The single verse is repeated twice in the song, and there are two variants on the chorus; the first one is only repeated at the tail end of the song, and we get version 2 of that chorus thrice overall. Also note that while the song is titled Goolie Get-Together, the words "Goolies get-together," with the name of the group pluralized, is actually sung in the song (and appear on the official lyric sheet that way too).

It is the performance by the band Toadies that is the remarkable thing here. While, of course, the recording of the song took place in a studio (Planet Dallas), the sound of the song has a true live feel to it. I have heard full, actual live albums that sound less "live" than this track. Adding to this feel is the video, which is one of the few (if not the only one) in the special that incorporates stage footage of the band actually performing the song they are covering in the special. The footage is edited into the video, naturally, so you don't see an unaltered performance; instead, in the MTV style, it is chopped up and lightly tossed with footage of the Goolies mucking about and causing all sorts of chaos. The Toadies stomp about on stage and work the song hard, while the screen seems to ripple and flash as if being threatened by a lightning storm.

And in the song, lead singer Todd Lewis imparts almost as much passion into singing about a cartoon monster party as he does to singing about coming from the water, swearing he won't backslide and become the hypocrite he seems to fear becoming, or convincing a girl to self-immolate to join him in the afterlife. Dare I say he brings the song actual gravitas? He makes it sound like his band really is performing at Horrible Hall and have committed to coaxing a crowd inside to join in all the ghoulish, silly fun. You can almost feel the sweat and hum of the club, and as Lewis grips his guitar and dives into another chorus, you think, "Yeah, I wanna join the Goolies at their get-together..." The song hypnotizes me nearly every time into believing that I am at that clubhouse, ready to become one of the crowd. It's the best rendition on the album, built out of what might be one of the lightest, simplest songs covered on it.

Even Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah (Means I Love You) has more lyrical depth to it than Goolie Get-Together, and half the song is just "Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah" sung relentlessly. Getting back to what I said at the beginning about the bands participating in this album not necessarily being fans of the songs they are covering, I had the pleasure of being allowed to hang with the Violent Femmes in the green room of their show during one of their appearances in Anchorage, Alaska. Singer-guitarist Gordon Gano asked me if there were any particular songs or rarities that I would like to request that evening, and I said, "Maybe it's a longshot, but Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah?" Gordon gave a sly smile, shook his head, and said, "Man, the last time we played that song was when we recorded it for that album." 

He told me later that he really didn't know the song or the show growing up, and that they selected the song from a list of potential songs for the album. I asked him to play T. Rex's Children of the Revolution instead (which the Femmes had released as a single off their third album, The Blind Leading the Naked, in 1986). They did, and I was happy; it was really a killer show. But the crowds would really go nuts if they ever did play Eep Opp Ork Ah-Ah.

If only they understood the power of the animated side...

This Week in Rixflix #15: June 16-22, 2017

As I predicted in last week's column, my revived interest in westerns due to the online film course in which I was taking part found me continuing my deep plunge back into the genre. While I purposefully avoided them for the first three days of the week in question, six of the last eleven films I watched were in the western genre, including my 84th John Wayne feature, Dakota, as well as The Hangman, The Last Frontier, Comanche Territory, and The Kentuckian. I had planned to watch the Duke in The Undefeated (and had announced it last week too), but it fell by the wayside at the tail end of the week when I ran into a 1946 Jacques Tourneur film called Canyon Passage.

With but a single viewing, I already have to count Canyon Passage amongst my favorite films in the western style (though it is more of a "pioneer" film and mostly takes place in a forest area). Tourneur, who directed many of my favorite horror films from the Golden Age such as Cat People, Night of the Demon, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, as well as the noir classic Out of the Past, is always on my must-see list, and being able to track down another one of his westerns had me diving into the film the moment that I found it online. For that matter, being a fan of Dana Andrews' acting too, it was grand to see him outdo himself in one of his finest performances here. Helpful, too, was the inclusion of Susan Hayward in the female lead, in a place where I would not have expected her. The best role was that portrayed by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael as a neighboring business owner who seems to end up in the middle of everything while roaming about playing his ukulele and singing songs (and getting an Oscar nomination to boot). Fully loaded with tough guy fist-fighting, swirling gun action, sordid business dealings, a romantic triangle bound for trouble, and those swell Carmichael tunes, I am most certain that Canyon Passage will get watched again by me rather soon.

I found myself with some unexpected downtime this week, and as a result, my numbers were really up overall. I had hoped by this time of the year that I would be tailing off and perhaps get down to just one or two films per day, but I have been far more focused on watching things lately than writing about them, or even in doing other projects. That will have to change – in fact, I rather demand that I change it by force – but with the TCM Hitchcock online course just starting (as of this writing), in which I will be most likely attempting to watch all 42 features (and two short films) of Hitch's they are spotlighting through the month of July, it will be interesting to see what happens. I also have some time on the road to see family coming up soon, and thus I will have no access to my normal channels for viewing in that span (though I will have an iPad with me). The two events should even each other out, but then again, with my ability to cram in film viewings at any given opportunity, you never know. (Hmm... maybe I will get my dad to watch Canyon Passage with me. That's right up his alley...)

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 26; 19 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: The Big Sleep (1946) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) – 2/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.13
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 191

The Reviews:

Raiders from Beneath the Sea (1964) Dir.: Maury Dexter – I record an awful lot of films simply because I hope that there will be a shark scene or two inside one of them. Quite often it is because I have heard there might be such a scene, but mostly, I look at the premise of the film or the shooting location or, in the case of this film, merely the title, and see promise that I might be graced with the presence of toothy, finny friends. A low budget creaker from "B" movie vet Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, Surf Party, Hell's Belles), Raiders from Beneath the Sea is a true snooze-fest about four Neanderthals planning the dumbest armed robbery in the history of dumb armed robberies, specifically, holding up a small bank on Catalina Island while walking all the way from the pier and back in full scuba gear. Yeah, it doesn't go smooth, and while you only have to wait about an hour to get to the heist, that hour seems to take about fourteen. Sure, these raiders do indeed come from beneath the sea to do their crimes, but they barely hit the water in the buildup to those crimes. The bad guys certainly talk about diving a lot, but most of their time on the water is spent timing out their trips to the island via its famous ferry and working out how to make off with the loot afterward. (As it turns out, a magnetized plate that they slap to the underside of the ferry.) When they finally do get in the water, it is for the briefest, murkiest underwater footage this side of Catalina Caper, another 1960s heist flick that at least made some attempts at intentional humor, however hackneyed. (And if you've watched Caper as it was tortured on MST3K, it then became truly fantastic.) This one, though, has no such such saving grace; poorly made, poorly filmed exploitation, but apart from some peeping tom shenanigans on the part of the lead character's creepy, drunken brother as he gets off to Merry Anders, Raiders' tank barely allows it to make it offshore. And by the end, there is not one damn shark to be seen. At least Catalina Caper had an animated one in its opening credits.   – TC4P Rating: 3/9

S if for Stanley (2015) Dir.: Alex Infascelli – Hardly a week goes by that I am not surprised by the appearance of some new documentary on Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix about the making of a particular film or the work of a filmmaker. Last week, it was Becoming Bond; this week, there are two such films that I will cover, the first being S Is for Stanley, the story of Emilio D’Alessandro, Stanley Kubrick's driver and personal assistant for a thirty-year period beginning in the early '70s when Kubrick was making A Clockwork Orange. It seems that Kubrick was impressed by Emilio's demeanor when he showed up as the delivery man for that certain, massive ceramic phallic piece that is used in one of the attack scenes in that epic of ultra-violence, and instantly hired the man to be his Man Friday. The film takes us through each Kubrick film all the way through Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick's death in 1999, mostly told by Emilio himself, a former race car driver who suddenly found himself immersed in Kubrick's obsessive nature. (His wife also plays a big part in relating events to us.) It is clear, at least from the material given here, that he and Kubrick formed a close bond that could not be shaken, even when Emilio left his employ for a handful of years. Usually, I find that a film documentary that is not rife with clips from the films under discussion is usually to be found lacking in flavor, but that is not the case here. There are enough behind the scenes details and set photographs to keep one interested throughout, and it is almost enough that Emilio has plenty of marvelous vignettes about his life spent catering to Kubrick's every possible whim that the film never gets tiresome. D'Alessandro is an engaging interviewee with a rather introspective way of looking at life, and it is perhaps that very quality that kept him at Kubrick's side for so long. I do wish someone from Kubrick's family had weighed in here and there, but overall, an enjoyable look at a side of filmmaking well off the set most of the time. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

A Canterbury Tale (1944) Dir.: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – With every film by the Archers that I check off my list, I feel my cinematic knowledge and eye becoming purer and sharper. Such is the way that the films of Powell and Pressburger play off of me, always elegant, always studied, always balanced deeply with wit, irony, grace and heart. In A Canterbury Tale, while it starts out with a visual nod to the older work by Chaucer, this tale swiftly transports itself to then-modern times – during World War II in the British countryside – as we are introduced to a trio of "pilgrims" all making their way to the same location, or thereabouts, for differing reasons. We are given army sergeants both British (Dennis Price, the lead from one of my all-time faves, Kind Hearts and Coronets) and American (actual U.S. Army sergeant John Sweet) and a "Land Girl", a term used for women hired during the war to replace men on farms who were off serving in the army, here played charmingly by Sheila Sim. The three bond almost instantly over a mystery that they encounter when they reach the fictitious town of Chillingbourne (though supposedly set near Canterbury), when Sim has glue poured into her hair by a shadowy assailant. The mystery will consume most of their time and direct their actions during the film, during which they encounter the fourth major character of the film, the local magistrate played by Eric Portman, who will prove both daunting and helpful in turn during their investigations. Films by the Archers are almost always more than merely the sum of their parts, and that is the case here. There is so much going on in every scene, that it is easy to lose the plot because the characters and scenarios are each individually engaging enough to make you want to live inside the film for days. Especially effective is the non-actor Sweet, whose off-the-cuff but oddly effective delivery of his lines make you wish he had found greater acting opportunities on the screen elsewhere. (His IMDb resume only lists one other film, both biographical details do say he did some theatre in the ensuing years before he died in 2011 at the age of 95.) A very worthwhile and lovely experience, as is nearly every film by Powell and Pressburger. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) Dir.: John Campopiano and Justin White – This is the other film documentary that I mentioned briefly above in the S Is for Stanley review. Popping up on Amazon Prime at the exact moment that I really needed this type of film to fill some open time, Unearthed and Untold is a pretty detailed look at the production of the late '80s horror classic (yeah, I said it) Pet Sematary. While I was never a huge fan of the film at the time (though I liked it just fine), I have grown fonder of it over the years, during which I have had the opportunity to see it a couple of times more. Unearthed and Untold gathers just about any artist and actor who worked on Pet Sematary that was willing to recount their tales of working on the film, and despite there not being any actual final film footage from the production (probably because they didn't have the budget for it), this film is pretty thorough with its excellent use made of behind-the-scenes photos and video that gives us a neat glimpse into how it all went down on the set. Visits to the location sites in Maine are an added and sometimes rather creepy bonus. Even Marky Ramone, the sole main member of the Ramones left alive today, gets in briefly to talk about how they were brought in to provide songs on the soundtrack and record the title song. The big question is whether tiny Miko Hughes had turned into a murderous psycho after being subjected to some truly horrific scenes as a two-year-old (they even talk about being worried about at points in the film), but no... Miko is just fine and still acting at age 31, and seems a normal guy here in his interview scenes. The doc is sorely missing the inclusion of a fresh interview with King himself about the film, but I don't know that they didn't try to get one, so I will leave that as a stray thought. I am certain that somewhere in the near future, my writing partner Aaron and I will be re-reading Stephen King's original novel and watching Mary Lambert's film freshly to review and compare both for our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. (Yes, this is an unabashed and unashamed plug.) – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) Dir.: Sean Patrick O'Reilly – There are many things that I really hate in films, but two of them are very evident here in Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. First, I hate badly done computer animation. I can live with a single bad CGI shot or two in a larger film if their harm to the film is contained to a few seconds, and I can be accepting of a limited animation budget if the film in question is a mere few minutes and at least has a clever premise or voice performance to counter it. The other thing I hate is "Muppet Babying," where a franchise or character is cleaned up and/or dumbed down from its original form to appeal to a younger audience. This video feature is pretty much just "What if H.P. Lovecraft was a kid?" and has him having all sorts of misadventures on another dimensional plane with a monstrous tentacled pal that he names Spot, not knowing the creature is actually a younger form of the Elder god Cthulhu himself. I am a fan of Lovecraft's writing, but I am fairly certain that I am happy with the proper age for discovering his writing being approximately around the same as when I did, as a middle teenager, and not when young readers are six or seven, which seems to be the target audience for this film. It's not so much the existential dread and horrific implications of his words that causes me to state this, but rather the more than casual racism that also lurks within his stories, perhaps not in all of them but lightly throughout most and pretty hard in some. Such words might fly over the heads of many younger readers, especially since the style of his writing is itself antiquated enough by today's standards that his stories may seem rather dull to a generation that banks upon immediate thrills and not slow-boiling suspense and atmosphere. This is all for the better, and I find it fairly hard to believe that watching this animated crap pile will inspire anyone to seek out anything written on paper except perhaps to carefully edit their own self-penned suicide note.

This video pretty much jettisons anything worthwhile in Lovecraft's writing and mostly co-opts character and place names along with the occasional magical spell and slams them into a stiffly animated, witless, cliched children's film. The look of some of the goblin guards from Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty are also swiped for that of the villainous henchmen throughout the film as well. I have not read the graphic novels that form the basis for this film (nor for the planned sequel and the inevitable third production, since there are three comics in total), but taking a quick look at the first few pages of the Frozen Kingdom volume reveals that hewing closer to the style of the comic would have been a far more intriguing direction. At least in a visual sense, the comic doesn't look half bad (though a little generic). Instead, in the film version we get a design that pretty much made me feel like I was watching the truly atrocious Food Fight again, and goddamnit, I never needed to have that feeling! I've lived through it once. The only compliment I can give is that at least the story made a little more sense scene to scene than Food Fight, and for that I am truly thankful. The other thing that got my notice in Frozen Kingdom is that there are hammerhead sharks in the tank of the villain's fortress. Sure, they swim the same exact way, over and over again, in every single shot in which they appear, but there are at least sharks here. Otherwise, this video is a bloody mess. But without the blood, of course... this is for the kiddies, after all. Poor, poor kiddies... – TC4P Rating: 2/9

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) Dir.: Dominik Hartl – Oh, it is Wednesday? Must be time for yet another goddamn zombie movie... OK, despite my living dead ennui here in 2017, I will say that if I had encountered Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies in 1988, I would have loved it without any reservations. However, it is 2017 and I am where I am at currently, having seen so many zombie films by now that I think I might be one. Sure, Jen and I love iZombie and watch it reverentially (it thrills me to no end that Jen loves a zombie show), but for me, that reverence might be mostly out of obeisance to Ms. Rose McIver. And I still love all the old zombie flicks that I grew up with in the '70s and '80s, and even many of the newer ones, but there are just so many out there now, and they just keep coming... almost like a zombie apocalypse. And everyone thinks they have the greatest, newest twist on the genre, and really, nearly all of them don't. But would I want everyone to stop trying? Of course not. That would block even the occasional innovation, and I don't want that. Lederhosen Zombies is a full-on slapstick gore comedy filmed at a ski resort in the Alps of South Tyrol where someone stupid has the idea to use this untested formula to create instant snow, but of course, what the formula really does is make someone sick enough to turn into an instant zombie instead and the fun begins. Crazy, non-stop action, Rube Goldberg-style gags involving snowboards and skiing equipment, a genuinely insane Austrian barmaid with a fully stocked arsenal for fightin' the undead, and some pretty noxious moments that even had me thinking about blowing chunks early on in the action... that sounds like fun to me. However, many of the jokes are too stilted and don't land with the impact that the filmmakers thought, the editing is pretty haphazard, and the (dubbed) acting is fairly wooden on occasion. Still the insanity is as infectious as a zombie plague, and the film goes by incredibly smoothly at under 80 minutes. A good film for a party night of horror heads. Not that I have been around one of those for, oh, far too many years. (I miss my horror peeps...) I can't rate this one too highly due to its many faults, but I will no doubt watch it again for kicks. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

This Week in Rixflix #5: April 7-13, 2017

I will admit that I was a bit distracted from watching other films last week, what with the new, eleventh season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 lurking in wait for me by week's end on Netflix.

Actually, I didn't have to wait that long to watch most of it because I was one of the 48,270 people who took part in the Kickstarter campaign, which raised over $5 million total to bring MST3K back as a show. As a result, I got my name in the end credits (there are so many names they split them up between shows; mine shows up in Episode 11), got a whole bunch of goodies like a T-shirt, keychain, soundtrack, and coffee mug (some items still pending), and got to download the entire season in DRM-free files 24 hours before the season premiered on Netflix. (Creator Joel Hodgson made us promise to watch the show on Netflix as much as possible, though, and to save watching the files for a rainy day in the future when we are without internet.)

Best of all, though, we backers got to see the pilot on the Sunday before the Friday, April 14 premiere, as it streamed for us for 24 straight hours, during which I watched the pilot three full times, took part in an exclusive live viewing Q&A chat with Joel and Jonah Ray on YouTube, and then did a side-by-side comparison of the episode next to my DVD copy of Reptilicus, the film torn to shreds by the riffing in the pilot. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we got 48 hours to stream the entire season exclusively, followed by the early downloads on Thursday. Having been a hardcore MSTie ever since the show's first Comedy Channel season in 1989-1990 – unfortunately, I have never lived in Minneapolis, so I didn't see any of the original season's episodes until later –  the events of this week have almost been a dream come true (apart from actually being on the show).

But I did cram in a bunch of films in the two days before that Sunday (7 in all), and then in the brief moments between MST3K showings (I did need a few breaks... didn't want to totally burn out, you know), Jen and I finally watched the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds doc that was far to painful to view when we recorded it in late December a week after their deaths (which I will write about at a later date), and a few other palate cleansers (and some Canadian cartoons, but more on that next week) that happened across my path. But the overriding theme was the buildup to MST3K, and I can tell you, writing this a few days into the following week, that theme has not let up for me at all. Each day, there has been a little bit of MST3K for me.

The rest of my life might be shit right now, but at least I have the Satellite of Love again...

This week's feature-length film count: 14; 12 first-time viewings and 2 repeats.
Animated shorts seen: 6
Highest rated feature-length films: The Winding Stream (2014), Night Will Fall (2014), and Bright Lights: Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2016) – 8/9
Lowest rated film: Reptilicus (1961) – 3/9
Average films per day in April thus far: 2.23
Average films per day in 2017 thus far: 3.08
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen: 121

Dead West (2016) Dir.: Jeff Ferrell – The poster of this movie offers up a glaring example of how one (i.e. me) should pay a little more attention to even the most generic artwork when browsing for a movie to watch on Netflix. My eye caught the title, Dead West, the cowboy hat, the gun, and the ominous posing of the figure, and immediately thought the film might be a dark horror western. What I didn't pay enough attention to in the poster was the modern gun in the figure's hand, for Dead West is indeed a dark horror western, but a current one that could even happen in your neighborhood. The low budget, overlong (seriously, two hours) and quite often ponderous story of a serial killer practicing his grim trade in the bars and hotels of the American West, searching for true love but always ending up disappointed in the women he meets, the filmmakers seem to wish they could emulate Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer in style, but have no idea (or the resources) to pull off such a feat off satisfactorily.

I like that the lead actor, Jeffrey Arrington, is basically an everyman schmo in the looks department (the actor may not feel that way, but hey, he's the one who let the camera film him), but I find his character, Tony, more creepy than charming as he sweet-talks his future victims into making the last mistake of their lives. (In much of the promotion and reviews for the film, his character is described as "charming".) And he does it all with dialogue that fails to convince much of the time. The classic "western" tone of the story comes into play in the form of the brother of one of Tony's former girlfriend/victims, who longs for revenge and hits the road to track down the ladykiller and end his reign of terror. I won't say what happens, but rest assured, it will be handled in an unsatisfying fashion, and if you are coming to this film for gore effects, you will not have that great a time either. Though there are a couple of twists that I did find interesting before the end, overall, I felt the film was a disappointment, even if I had no pre-conceived notions going in, apart from the mistaken thinking about it being a dark horror western. With some judicious pruning of about 20 minutes or so, this might have ended up becoming a semi-decent feature, but in its current released form, it is not charming at all, and the only form of danger it conveys it that of being deadly dull. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

Joe Cocker: Mad Dog with Soul (2017) Dir.: John Edginton – Joe Cocker has been in the mix of the music of my life since I was a kid. You Are So Beautiful was known to me before I was a teenager, but it wasn't until I saw John Belushi pull off his amazing impersonation of Cocker's idiosyncratic stage style on Saturday Night Live (on an episode on which Joe Cocker sang) that I really knew who he was. When I saw Woodstock on network television, I got to see Joe in one of his most famous performances, and around that time, he was making a comeback that went through the 1980s. Best of all, though, I had the pleasure to see him live in concert in Anchorage, Alaska, in a fantastic July 24, 1990 show that Joe co-headlined with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble. (The opening act was Nicolette Larsen, who was adorable and delightful, and who sang with both headliners later in their respective parts of the show.) The concert took place a month and two days before Vaughan, one of my main guitar heroes at the time (as he still is now), was killed in a helicopter accident in Michigan. But this is about Joe Cocker, who only died relatively recently (in Dec. 2014), and while I had several Cocker albums in my collection over the years, I never really thought much about who he was a person. I knew he had troubles and battled the bottle for many years, but I just kind of accepted that he was this cool musical presence in my life, and never dug into it very much.

Along comes Mad Dog with Soul, a pretty comprehensive documentary about his life, with a pretty even focus across all the various periods of his career. Especially fun was learning about his pre-Woodstock years as a young man growing up in Sheffield, England. I guess that I always figured Joe was this being from outer space who came down with this amazing voice and style intact, but it was eye-opening to see his early years of struggle with his own teenage band, his off-kilter approach to everything not necessarily making things smooth for him in society, and his daytime job as a gasfitter while he worked the clubs in a variety of bands, which resulted in an unsatisfying recording contract that eventually withered. When he formed the Grease Band in 1966, he seemed to find the musicians he needed to propel him to stardom. His first 1969 album, With a Little Help from My Friends (and its Beatles-covering, massive hit single of the same name) set him up for his appearance at Woodstock and then his famously crazed Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour, which also brought great notice to his bandleader, Leon Russell. He had several big hits along the way, but by the mid-'70s, the cracks began to show. Alcohol and heroin addiction took over his life. While he cleaned himself up and launched his comeback that led to Up Where We Belong winning Grammys and an Oscar, he also wrestled with his demons for many years afterward. Continuing to perform and record to the end, when he died in 2014, Cocker's iconic stature was such that it is almost disgusting he is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I felt that before I saw Mad Dog with Soul, but thanks to how deeply the film digs into his roots and helped me to understand the artist so fully, his eventual inclusion is now a cause with me. Joe must be honored... – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) Dir.: Kelly Asbury and Lorna Cook – Over a decade ago when I still lived up in Alaska, my best friend was dating another friend of mine who had a young daughter named Grace. Little Grace was awfully fond of an animated movie about wild horses called Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and at a series of parties over the period of a year or so, Grace would pretend that I was Spirit the Stallion, and would feed me hay and lead me around with invisible reins. (Grace would actually call me, "Spiwit: Stallion offa Cimmawon" but we adults would further garble the language to insist she was saying "Scallion offa Cinnamon".) It wasn't horsey of the sort that many kids play; I never got my back broken by having to ride some little kid around on it. The play was more respectful and gentle, and I remember being told when I didn't show up for one party that Grace asked if Spirit was going to show up that night. That kind of thing just about broke my heart hearing it.

Here's the catch: while I am a huge animation fan, I had not actually seen Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron at that time. Nor had I seen it until last week, when it popped up in an early morning Saturday showing on HBO. Now's the time, I said. Grace and her parents were down here at Disneyland in late February, and I revealed to the now-teenage Grace that I had never seen the film. She was shocked by this, and last week, I decided to make things right. Now, while I knew it was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, I was still not expecting myself to actually enjoy the film. I was also dreading having to listen to anthropomorphized horses talking to each other through 90 minutes of film; yes, much of the animation I watch does have anthropomorphized animals discussing all manner of things, but I was worried about the tone of the film. To my surprise, Spirit mostly keeps the horses as they normally behave, except for a few facial expressions that I have never seen on a real horse, and with a greater understanding of the human world around them as well.

Otherwise, this is a remarkably natural film in regards to the basic behavior of the wild horses, and the more than slightly preachy tone of the narrative luckily falls into my general worldview (white man mostly horrid, Native Americans murdered and robbed of their lands and cultures, animals and natural resources ravaged and abused). I thought the color palette was lovely, and the combination of hand-drawn and computer animation to be lovingly mixed and thoroughly engaging. A bit overlong considering its target audience, though that was not much of a problem for me, with the only things that really bothered me being the Bryan Adams' song score (which had to have felt dated already in 2002, the year of its release) and the narration by Matt Damon as Spirit telling his tale (without actually speaking directly in front of the camera), which I felt was fairly unnecessary, though again, not enough to stop me enjoying the film. There you go, Grace... I have finally caught up to you. – TC4P Rating: 7/9

Now, back to MST3K...