Nothing the Public Enjoys More Than a Little Iron Fisting...

Yes, Marvel's quickly upcoming Iron Fist series is getting an early critical drubbing from pop culture and nerd sites all over the interwebs (the reviews are based on the first six episodes), but that in no way is going to keep me from hitting Netflix as early as possible this Friday to see the show for myself.

On a personal level, if they were going to concentrate on a pure martial arts series (though it is hard to say that Daredevil isn't really already such a creation), I would have preferred that Marvel do an adaptation of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu (with or without the Sax Rohmer characters from the Fu Manchu books, part of the original Shang Chi series). Who knows? Shang-Chi has been shown to be a friend of Danny Rand's in recent years, so maybe he will pop up in a cameo in the future.

But, I also recognize that as goes Luke Cage, so goes Danny Rand (as well as Misty Knight and Colleen Wing). Since Luke has his own series, it is a natural to have Power Man and Iron Fist together eventually (even if it is in The Defenders, where Iron Fist was only a member for a day in the '70s comic, while both were members of the Secret Defenders in briefly in the mid-'90s.)

If we must go through a new series that is not quite as good as the other Marvel Netflix series that preceded it, then so be it. The bar has already been set so high with the preceding series that it was only going to be a matter of time before something that was still pretty excellent was going to get a thrashing from the public for not being totally excellent. Though I am hoping that it turns out that I end up personally enjoying Iron Fist, and thus will be able to tell the rest of the critical world to screw off...

The Villeneuve List: A Tour of Cosmos

"Move and I shave her!"

Upon posting on Facebook that I was stunned to my senses by the film Incendies the other day, my friend Kenda recommended that I see director Denis Villeneuve's earlier work in a film called Cosmos (1996). After finding it Cosmos is not readily available on DVD or streaming (not even on Amazon.ca), I managed to locate a quality full copy that someone posted on YouTube. Even better, since the film is in Québécois French, the copy turned out to be subtitled in English.

Cosmos is not a full Villeneuve film. It is an anthology film of short films by six directors including Villeneuve, each taking place on and around the streets of Montreal. The short films are tied together by the presence of a partly Greek cab driver named Cosmos (played most appealingly by Igor Ovadis), who stays mostly at the edges as the six vignettes are played out before us, though he is fully involved in one of the stories (Cosmos et agriculture, probably the funniest section of the film).

The short films are edited together so that they weave in and out of each other's stories occasionally in a mostly organic way, aided by the fact that co-director André Turpin also serves as the cinematographer for the whole affair. His stellar camerawork aids immeasurably to keeping a consistent look to Cosmos, even if there are vast changes in tone and style between the six directors.

Villeneuve's extremely odd section (Le Technétium, about a film director who is highly nervous about appearing on an MTV-style channel where the only real concern is how incredible the guests' hair looks once in-house star stylist Tekno has his way with it) was my favorite (and most imaginative) of the individual sections.

Cosmos is somewhat reminiscent of the higher profile Night on Earth (1991), the difference being that the Jim Jarmusch film is in color, and tells the stories of five different cab drivers in five cities around the globe in one night, whereas Cosmos is in black and white, and has one cabdriver involved in six stories in one city in Canada. But it was hard for me not to think of Night on Earth constantly while watching Cosmos. Still, while at least one of the stories didn't really work at all for me (Marie-Julie Dallaire's L'Individu), I enjoyed the film overall.

Recommended for the adventurous of spirit and for those who don't cringe at the thought of either subtitles or French (or both).

For anyone interested, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AtYfdsyV4.

Psychotronic Ketchup: The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea is not an easy watch. In climbing deep into the recesses of a mind wracked by a childhood full of sexual abuse – which culminates in an adulthood full of swinging sex and drug addiction – director Matt Cimber made quite the interesting counterpart to his later film, Butterfly… you know, the one that got Pia Zadora a Golden Globe award (and a couple of Golden Raspberries) but is generally considered to be one of the worst films ever made.

This is not the case for the far more interesting The Witch Who Came from the Sea, which is sparked by a frankly astonishing performance by Millie Perkins (an actress to whom I have paid little attention over the years), along with sharp, evocative cinematography, some of it provided by Dean Cundey, who worked on this film before performing the same duties on several of John Carpenter’s biggest films (Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China), as well as filming the Back to the Future trilogy, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, Romancing the Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Apollo 13, and Jurassic Park.

Honestly, I would not have watched the film today except that my pal Aaron and I were discussing it early this morning, and he mentioned that he found the film streaming on Amazon, along with a couple of other titles which recently had gotten the Blu-ray treatment in something called The American Horror Project Vol. 1. The purpose of The American Horror Project is to recognize lost classics of the horror genre from the 1970s and then give those long-neglected films (some never even had decent VHS releases) restoration and high-end release to the public. The film’s selection for this honor instantly made us both realize we need to see it, but the cost of the Blu-ray set (well over $60, even with a discount on Amazon.com) is more than slightly prohibitive for both of us right now, with a new baby in his household and me without steady employment. Luckily enough, he found all of the three titles (the others being Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood and The Premonition) on Amazon’s site, and lucky me as well, I have a Shudder subscription on there so that I too can now watch and (hopefully) enjoy those films.

In the end, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is more of a psychological drama (its not, even with its murders and resulting police investigation, even really all that much in the thriller genre) than it is an actual horror film. Don’t get me wrong… there is violence within the film and it might indeed be troubling to some (it was one of the 72 films declared to be a “Video Nasty” and banned from England in the 1980s), and when you add in the nudity and sexual scenes, this is not a film for the kiddies or truly weak of stomach (and especially mind). Even though most of the more graphic violence is merely suggested and occurs offscreen (and the razor cutting scenes that are shown aren’t done all that believably), when the lead character gets around to murdering, her fallback move is that of castrating her victims. So if you are a guy and overly sensitive about your manhood, just repeat to yourself… no, never mind. You are just a big baby. It’s a movie and the violence is faked. Get over it.

The film has gained some controversy in the horror nerd realm for its appropriation of some Frank Frazetta artwork from the cover of an old issue of Vampirella. The face of the artwork was changed to that of Millie Perkins and she is holding a man’s severed head in the movie poster. The fact that such an image (or even a severed head) does not occur within the film itself seems to really set a lot of people who encounter this film on edge. And sometimes their reaction is such that they savage the film entirely without taking into account that The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a very sincere look at child abuse and the sexual politics of the 1970s. Since the film is most decidedly not a book, I guess the armchair critics feel justified in judging the film solely by its poster (i.e., cover) and its ability to deliver those goods promised by the image. But then, they aren’t taking into account that the elements within the image all are either discussed or implied within the film (seriously, the poster image makes perfect sense fairly early on in the film), whether an actual supernatural witch bearing a scythe manifests herself or not.

I had thought for a good while that I had seen the film before this morning, but discovered just a scene or three into the film that I had not. The Witch Who Came from the Sea bears slight thematic and title similarities to another 1976 film of greater note, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, which I have seen a couple of times (and which came into my life at the age of 12 when I saw a particular picture of a naked Sarah Miles (and that Kristofferson guy) getting it on in one of those “Sex in Film” annual recaps in the pages of Playboy). So a film with a similar title has been kicking around my head for a good while (though it would be about a decade more before I first saw it). When you take into account just how many horror films (and films in general) that I have seen in my life, I find it quite reasonable that I sometimes get confused when confronted with certain titles.

But now I have actually seen The Witch Who Came from the Sea on its own, and while it wasn’t really the horror film suggested by its garish, gaudy (but intriguing) poster artwork, it turns out that found the film a very worthwhile watch and one that is quite worthy of further discussion and study.

Out of Bounds is Always Out of Bounds...

I have been on pain meds lately to help me deal with a constant hip pain issue (it's the reason that I have not been writing very much the last two months), and as per the instructions given by my doctor, I am supposed to take my pill once a day... AT BEDTIME. Unofficial bedtime – as in "lights out" (though not "TV off" or "phones off") for Jen and I is usually around ten at night, but this does not quite jibe with my ability to withstand the pain in my hip. The meds I have been given help me sleep, though in a pretty light way (which is a nice bonus), but the chief benefit of their use for the past couple of weeks is to reduce my level of pain (and the resulting annoyance with that pain) from anywhere to 50-75%, depending on the night. My mornings are relatively comfortable, but by noon the meds have usually started to wear off incrementally. Each day varies, but most often by around two in the afternoon, the onslaught of discomfort and leg spasms begins.

For the remainder of the afternoon and into the early evening, the pain gradually increases. I started out taking my pain medication each evening – after determining a certain amount of time for the pill to start kicking in to at least allow me to settle into sleep – around nine p.m. But I found quickly that I was getting more and more impatient each day to get that pill inside my system, and thus, the time has moved up every couple of days to 8:45, 8:30, 8:20, and so on to the point where I am throwing it down the ol' gullet around 7:45 p.m. So, as I have shifted my pill-taking time, so to has that "AT BEDTIME" time. Last night, this allowed me to seek the downy softness of my pillow just after nine o'clock, where I crashed pretty deeply for nearly nine hours.

The point of this? Well, each evening, I generally stop checking Facebook and other social media sites somewhat early in prime time. I also cannot get onto any news sites at all. The main reason is so that I don't get riled up about something in the news or by something stupid someone says (more often than not lately, the same goddamned thing). If I decide to pick a fight with someone online around 8:30 in the evening, I will go ballistic for about four hours, Jen will never hear the end of it, and my brain will never shut off at all in order for me to get some sleep. Add in another reason being the one-hour time difference between where I am located (California) and where the vast majority of my longtime friends and family are (Alaska), and then mix in yet another reason that so many of my friends seem to get on social media (owing to various family and/or theatre-related concerns) much, much later in the evening – long after I go to bed (and add in that extra hour) and sometimes early in the morning – that it becomes completely futile for me to check Facebook before I go to bed. There just won't be very much there to see until later, so I tend to wait until the morning.

Every once in a while, however, I miss out on something. Last night, people on both sides of the political divide within my group of friends seem to come to agreement over something someone had tweeted about Barron Trump, the ten-year-old son of... eh, you know. The tweet was by Katie Rich, a writer with Saturday Night Live  (who has apparently been suspended since this blew up) and the joke was along the lines of "Barron will be this country's first homeschool shooter." Ms. Rich was not the only one to go after the youngest Trumpster, as it seems to have become a bit of a pile-on to come up with cruel things to say about the lad. Even my hero Patton Oswalt's younger brother Matt got into the swing of things.

Of course, the Facebook thread merely discussed that it was not alright to do something like pick on a kid, but they did not elaborate on who it was about (not by name anyway) or what was said. The thread began last evening, right around the time where the news becomes a "Forbidden Zone If You Want to Get Sleep" for me. They mentioned "Trump's son," and I never even thought about the youngest one. I immediately thought Eric or Donald, Jr., and my reaction was, "Fuck those douchebags. Hell, Junior posed with a severed elephant's tail on safari. Fuck him in the ass and mouth with it. The ass first." Nor was the content of the tweet revealed so I had no idea what was said. I know "vaguebooking" was not meant (for once) with this thread and that the people involved were discussing the issue fully engaged and aware of the story's details already. But for someone just dropping onto Facebook early in the a.m. and finding that thread was the first thing in their feed, and then finding no information within the thread that actually revealed who the hell the victim actually was and who the hell the perpetrator was, it was maddening to me.

Luckily, I am great at research, and had the answer in seconds. And yes, I agree with all of my friends on that thread, both on the left and the alt-right (sorry, had to get a dig of some sort in there), Barron Trump is out of bounds. He is a ten-year-old boy. He is not an adult, and he has not put himself in the public eye on purpose. Someone did mention in the thread that the president's wife, children, etc. [I am paraphrasing] should be untouchable, and I do not for a second agree with that, however. Trump's adult children – at least the three who have determined (or are allowed) to take this ride along with him – are legal adults who have placed themselves in both the celebrity and the political world of their own free will. The same goes for the First Lady, who was already in the public eye (in rather revealing ways) before she joined the Trump Circus Train.

I am not saying that people should go after them or have a right to go after them just because they are celebrities, but when your face is constantly in the public eye, it is going to happen more often than not. Every actor, actress, comedian, musician, director, etc. out there has fans and haters alike, and the only real way to make any of that go away is to simply not be in one of those professions. And politics? Half the people are going to hate you no matter who you are, and in Trump's case... well, let's leave that stew for a good while. People should not automatically go after celebrities or politicians just "because". But if that celebrity or politician does or says something stupid or terrible... well, by all means. Tweet away. Fire your barbs if you must.

But his ten-year-old son? Leave him alone. Off limits. He is out of bounds. Let him have his childhood, even if his dad seems to be modeling him in his own image, suit, red tie, and everything. What dad doesn't want their kid to be like them? My dad wanted me to love fishing as much as he did, and I wasn't having it at all. I love my dad, but I had a different agenda, even as a kid. Barron might even be a horrid little brat behind the scenes, but that is not for us to muse upon in public forums. Barron Trump is to be left alone, people. 

But there's more to this...

I am saying all of this as a person who has openly and actively despised Mr. Trump for well over thirty years to the point where even seeing his orange-crusted image has me reacting much like Kramer did to Mary Hart's voice on Seinfeld. I do not like the man. I do not want him in the highest office in this country, and I do not want him in charge of anything other than his own worthless businesses. I would rather we built a wall around him more than anything. (And in some ways, he kind of has done that...)

But there is another trend I have been noticing lately – in fact, have been noticing for quite some time – and that has been the calls for extreme violence in response to whoever is sitting in the White House. I don't mean by terrorist groups... I mean by ordinary people on social media or that one encounters in public.

Or by celebrities. The one getting attention right now is Madonna's thoughts about "blowing up the White House," which she says, in the usual half-apologetic, public relations-laden turnaround, was "taken out of context." No, Madge, I think it was pretty clear what you were saying. I don't like Trump any more than you do, but I didn't leave America for years to pretend I had a British accent, and I certainly don't want our political system to become a free-for-all target range for whatever yahoo wants to shoot or blow up the place. We have checks and balances in place for a reason, and Trump has many millions of miles of work to go to actually earn the trust of the American public for real. I'm an atheist, but no one steps on a church in my town. Likewise, no one gets away with saying they would like to blow up the friggin' White House. I don't care if you once had some decent songs...

The same goes for random people commenting on posts on Facebook. I have seen several threads in recent months, some as recently as yesterday, where someone has posted a comment about something political (generally something anti-Trump), and people have most often replied in kind. There is the occasional person from the other side who will provide a counterpoint, and that's fine (as long as it is not obvious trolling). But then, someone will agree with the original poster's point, but then throw in something along the lines of "I think someone needs to shoot him." Wait, what? NO!!! That's not how we do things here in America. OK, yes... that's how most of America operates day to day in the streets, but not in the political arena. Violent upheaval is not how you run a government.

Am I wrong, or isn't it rather illegal (or at least didn't it used to be) to say such things? Or are there just so many people doing it nowadays that our federal agencies have just given up trying to track each instance down? I am pretty certain most of the people who randomly throw such comments out (the most recent instance I noticed was someone who is a housewife day to day, and is probably a pretty nice lady otherwise) are just releasing hot air, and don't really mean such sentiments. Do you really want someone to get physically shot? I mean, shot with a gun, possibly killed by a bullet through their head or decimating their innards. I suppose they could have meant "with a camera," but then why didn't they just say "Hey, I think that person should have some 8x10s taken!" and not sound so violent with their ultimatum?

I think this instance upset me most because it was someone who seemed to have generally the same take as me on the discussion but then they decided to throw in that nasty little tag to their response. No wonder those on the right like to often point out how "violent" liberals are lately when such things are tossed off at random. I am not trying to create an equivalency here in conjunction with this statement, but I am reminded of one of my innumerable doctor appointments about six months ago. 

I was waiting to see my allergist in a room shared by a variety of doctors. There was a couple sitting almost directly across from me in the room, and they were watching the news on a television hanging down from the ceiling that was tuned to CNN. The couple – both caucasian – were in their forties, perhaps early fifties, seemingly in the same general age range as me, though they were two different patches of much rougher road. It was a Jack Sprat situation: the lady was obese enough to require a cane and was eating a sandwich from a Tupperware container in the waiting room; the man was pencil thin, wore a ratty T-shirt and trucker cap, and noticeably had what just had to be "meth mouth". They were eyeing the news with suspicion, as it aired an interview with Barack Obama. The TV sound was low enough, and I was far enough way, so that I could not make out most of what the then-president was saying, but I could hear what the couple was saying in reaction to the fact that he dared to be on the television in front of their faces.

The lady said, "Oh, I hate that man so much" and the man replied, "Yeah, that motherfuckin' n----- should be shot! If I don't do it, somebody should!"

Beside myself, there were about a half-dozen other people in the waiting room when this was said. (My mother-in-law was in the restroom.) It was said loud enough that no one could mistake the words, and in fact, the man's voice raised slightly – puffing himself up in about as macho a pose as he could – as he said it. I was the only other white person in the room, and his speech made me feel filthy just by proxy. Everyone else in the room clearly heard what he said, including the three receptionists at the counter about fifteen feet away, and there was noticeable agitation in the room. But no one said anything in response. I glared straight ahead at the couple, and I caught the man's eye, and when he saw I was staring hard at him (I easily had a hundred pounds and six inches on him), he actually kind of withered and lost his resolve. When my mother-in-law returned, I whispered to her what had been said, and she was shocked.

I thought hard about contacting the FBI or Secret Service about the situation, but then let it go. I knew it was just a couple of bona fide assholes letting off some steam, and knew there was nothing behind their stupid threats besides ignorance. And that's how I feel about most of the people, on either side, who throw out such words. There's nothing to it. So why do you have to say it? Do you really want to see someone shot? Or raped? Or blown up? Wouldn't you rather live in an America where no one gets shot, raped, or blown up?

People on both sides are equally capable of saying terrible things about anyone. I am not going to say one side is more guilty of it than the other, because such numbers are unquantifiable and not really worthy of discussion. And I don't care if you are "on my side" or not, talking seriously about killing someone for any reason is not OK. It doesn't matter who they are, what you perceive they have done, and most certainly what position they hold in government. Even if you hate that person beyond all reason, it is not OK. Not one bit.

And if you are an adult, don't pick on ten-year-olds. No matter whose kid they are.

Out of bounds is always out of bounds...

RTJ

Hidden Underground (in Plain Sight)

I have owned a copy of The Hidden, Jack Sholder's sci-fi action classic (yes, I said it), since it first came out on VHS not long after its theatrical release in 1987. Watched that tape dozens of times, leading to a need to replace it eventually, and then I did an upgrade to the film when it came out on DVD years ago.

As much as I have seen The Hidden though, and even though I still own a copy, I feel that when a channel like Turner Classic Movies decides to show such a film on their TCM Underground slot late on Saturday nights, that I should do my part to support their decision to air it. So, even though I own The Hidden, I recorded it last night (they paired it with director Mike Hodges' 1974 take on Michael Crichton's novel, The Terminal Man) and watched it this afternoon, to give its showing whatever minute smidgen of ratings percentage that I can to tell TCM that I love it when they show films like this.

It's for the same reason that I watch the Universal classics on Svengoolie’s show as frequently as possible, even if he does chop the films up with commercial breaks. It's why I have followed Elvira through her various show incarnations over the last 35 years. Or the same reason I threw in my small support for MST3K's eventual return this year. And every once in a while, I will even scout the public access channels and find locals who have produced their own variations on horror host shows. Most are terrible What can I say? I have a lifelong fondness for sci-fi, horror, and exploitation films, and I especially love when airtime is committed to showcasing them on television (and now online).

Sadly, TCM Underground has not been hosted for quite some time. Rob Zombie was the original host, but that apparently went over like a lead balloon, and so TCM just shows a couple of genre films back to back with a neat lead-in sequence. The natural fit for TCM Underground would be somebody like Joe Bob Briggs, though I doubt they have any plans to bring a host back to the show. But, as long as TCM takes a small break every weekend from its normal fare (believe me, I watch an awful lot of that as well) and shows films like The Hidden, I will be there. Even if I do own the film already...

RTJ

Ignoring the Ignoramus...

I have watched one presidential inauguration in my life, and that was Obama's in 2008. It doesn't matter who I voted for in previous elections nor their outcome, public ceremonies and rituals doused in tradition generally fill me with a combination of ennui and coldness. I don't care whether we agree or not on his record, or how you feel about him as a person, I was onboard with Obama in a way that I hadn't been in years and I genuinely felt that for the first time in my reachable memory that mankind was finally figuring a way out of the dark ages.

So, the fact that I will not be watching one second – nor even a multitude of seconds – of the inauguration today is unremarkable in itself. I don't normally watch or even care about these rituals. I understand they seem to be important to show all Americans "the peaceful transition of power" and the strength of our Constitutional grounds and all that. I know they are happening and I don't need to bear witness to the event in a live aspect.

The only thing that I will do today to mark the inauguration in my mind is to watch Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. You can take that however you would like, but partly it's because watching Idiocracy again at this particular moment is a little bit too on the nose for me. With Dr. Strangelove, what appeared like a worst case scenario once upon a time may now at least look a little bit like blessed relief.

And remember the immortal words of President Merkin Muffley: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

The Monster's on the Loose!!! Non-Chaney, Pt. 3: Were-Rik? There... There Rik!

[This is the third part of a trilogy in my The Monster's on the Loose!!! series concerning my fascination with wolves and werewolves in my youth, none of it due directly to the influence of the Universal Monsters series and its Wolf Man character as portrayed by Lon Chaney, Jr. (He had already entered my life in comedy form through Topps Creature Feature trading cards, but we are discussing scares and not laughs here, not intentional laughs anyway). To read the first two parts of the series, visit either Non-Chaney, Pt. 1: Who's Afraid of the Big Bad... Something? or Non-Chaney, Pt. 2: Werewolves Along the Wall.]

The universe of my youth was rife with werewolves in flicks, books, comics, and television. Even with a mere four channels at my disposal, television continued to prove to be my main source of lycanthropic thrills. I have already recounted some of the early cartoon meetings with those of the furry set, but there were even more characters such as the hippie-styled Weirdo Wolfie on Filmation's The Groovie Ghoulies, Ruby-Spear's titular werewolf Fangface, Buck Kartalian as Bruce W. Wolf on the live-action Saturday morning show Monster Squad (with a pre-Love Boat Fred Grandy), and Howler, the youthful offspring of the Wolfman who fight crime with the Drak Pack.

While young, if there was any show or movie on that had the slightest whiff of monster mayhem, I was there. And I did have a sharp eye for werewolf antics. I was lucky enough (if that is how you wish to see it; I certainly do) to run into such titles on television as The Boy Who Cried Werewolf (1973), Moon of the Wolf (a 1972 ABC Movie of the Week with David Janssen), Deathmoon (a CBS-TV movie in 1978 with a werewolf loose in Hawaii), and The Legend of the Werewolf (1975, with Peter Cushing). And while not really a werewolf title, the ABC television series, Lucan, was about a orphaned boy raised by wolves who grows up and then roams about seeking out the mystery of his birth parents. Over in the funny books, Marvel Comics had a regular series called Werewolf by Night, of which I only got to read a few issues, but Marvel also had a character called the Man-Wolf, who was the monstrous alter-ego of J. Jonah Jameson's astronaut son, John. The Man-Wolf headlined Creatures on the Loose for the last few issues, and was featured in a pretty cool double-issue story in Marvel Premiere as well, but was most prominent in my life for battling Spider-Man on several occasions.

So, far before I truly ever got to see Lon Chaney, Jr. play his most famous character, I was not hurting for source material to fuel my werewolf fears, nightmares, and obsession. This obsession caused me to write one of my stupid songs as a kid – alongside such classics as I'm an Elf and The Anaconda – that I titled The Monster's on the Loose!!! You might notice that the title of the song matches the title of this ongoing series of posts about my monster obsession stemming directly from my youth. And get this, it had a chorus that went – the soft-skulled amongst you may wish to brace for impact – "The monster's on the loooooooo-oooo-ooo-oose! The monster's on the loooooooo-oooo-ooo-oose! The monster's on the loooooooo-oooo-ooo-oose! The monster's on the loooooooo-oooo-ooo-oose!" You get the idea. There were actual lyrics for a pair of verses, of course, but the main point was so that you could practically howl while singing along with the chorus.

But there were three prime titles that influenced my fears the most in those early days: two movies and one episode of a quite famous but short-lived television series.

Kolchak: the Night Stalker: Werewolf (1974)

Dan Curtis' Kolchak: the Night Stalker TV series should never be underestimated as to its influence on me as a growing horror fan of a certain age. From my first time seeing an episode, where the intrepid reporter Carl Kolchak battles a swamp creature in the sewers, I was hooked. When The X-Files came along, my attraction to it from the start was from the residual effect of having seen the few Kolchak episodes over and over and over again, and having long wished I had another such series that could fill the void. To find out that X-Files creator Cris Carter had drawn his own inspiration directly from his love for The Night Stalker (to the point of eventually hiring star Darren McGavin to play a Kolchak-type character in seclusion late in the series) did not surprise me.

For the werewolf episode of the series, Carl ends up taking over at the last minute for his editor Tony's long-anticipated working vacation aboard a luxury liner promoting a singles cruise. Naturally, something weird is happening onboard. After a series of gruesome deaths, Kolchak gets caught up in not just trying to stop the creature (played by a sleazily perfect Eric Braeden) but also doing battle with the captain (good ol' Henry Jones) and crew who are trying to downplay the murders and keep the press from getting the information. And, of course, even though he gets a terrific confederate in this adventure – Nita Talbot as movie-mad Paula Griffin is a riot – Carl is the only one who ultimately believes that Braeden is an actual werewolf. Or at least the only one willing to go on record saying that is what he encountered (which is the basic thrust of the series).

Like most episodes of the show, it is alternately funny (apropos of its subject matter, the show has a consistently dark sense of humor) and silly (many of the filming effects are pretty dated). The attack scenes are mostly of the creature throwing people overboard (it seems to be his M.O.), or tossing multiple crewmen about in group fashion, but as a kid, the POV attacks and the quick flashes of the werewolf's intense strength and fury still gave me the willies. I saw this episode numerous times as a kid (like all of the show's mere lot of twenty, along with two introductory television movies that drew massive ratings). While my estimation of the series might be a good deal higher than most and heavily dosed with nostalgia, my more practiced eye still thinks the Kolchak series as a whole holds up not just as being pretty haunting today, but also as solid entertainment, its chief attribute being Darrin McGavin, arguably one of the more underrated actors of his day.

The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)

Hammer's more historical attempt at the genre, The Curse of the Werewolf, directed by Terence Fisher in 1961, was a revelation to me. I was already a big Oliver Reed fan thanks to seeing Richard Lester's Musketeer films and Carol Reed's Oliver! quite young. My mother had told me that Reed had played a werewolf at one point, and staying up past midnight one Saturday to watch the local World's Most Terrible Movies program on our ABC affiliate, KIMO, I was granted my first opportunity to see him play the role. By then, I had already been introduced to the Hammer Studios style (my first such film was Frankenstein Created Woman), and was fascinated by the fact that the Hammer films were both classier than most of the other horror films I was encountering to that point, but also far more gruesome, sadistic, and bloody. Curse goes for an epic feel from the start, trapping its tale of lycanthropy in a Spanish fairy tale setting. The werewolf plotline almost gets swallowed up for a large portion of the film, but gradually builds to a terrific climax, the thrills becoming larger and larger on the way.

As a kid (and even now), I wished that there was a bit more of the monster in this film – you really have to wait for the payoff – but when it comes, it's a doozy. Reed looks fantastic as the creature, with a torn, billowing flouncy shirt as he climbs up and about the roofs and bell tower of the village. Shots of Reed in his werewolf guise are seen quite often in monster and horror books, and that is with very good reason. The film was the first to show a werewolf character in full color, and the added touch of being able to show bright red blood smeared on his face and dripping from his fangs is fabulously rendered. It is astounding to me that Hammer never did a follow-up to this film, when they seemed to have no problem expanding their Frankenstein and Dracula series well beyond reasonable limits. In a perfect world, there would at least be five or six Hammer werewolf flicks to choose from; sad to say, there really is just this one, but they did a magnificent job with it.

The real Big Bad: My imagination...

While I had seen the Kolchak werewolf episode already, I had not quite run into that first viewing of The Curse of the Werewolf just yet. The Reed version of the werewolf was just around the corner, as were the rest. But I was still wolf-haunted. To be sure, after the image of Maurice Sands' Les Lupins entered my brain as a grade schooler, my every walk home from the bus stop through the mid-to-late afternoon of Alaskan winter dusk became a genuine task in terror for me. While I was fine walking along the far end of the street on which our house was built, with a couple of houses and a trailer along one side while nothing but dark woods lurked along the other, the fear would grow over me as I made my way towards our neighbors' house. The Wachsmuths' house was built close to the road's edge, with a simple driveway area in which to part cars, and while it was surrounded by trees like every home in the area, it's nearness to the street meant that approaching the house was never foreboding and sometimes stopping there even served as a temporary refuge when I couldn't quite work up the gall to get to my own door (which happened on occasion).

Directly across the street was the Woods' house, and while we were friends with Mr. Wood's kids, it had become harder and harder to go over there to play after his wife had committed suicide a few years earlier. It was probably one of the first times in my life where I became expressly attuned to human tragedy, and certainly the moment where the act of suicide, which I barely even understand when used in a movie or TV show, became a reality to me. The Woods and the Wachsmuths were our nearest neighbors; everyone else lived a couple of acres away or more, always with forest, other roads or both between us, and the hilly terrain was not always conducive to plotting out quick getaways to a safe space when monsters were on the rise in one's backyard... or mind.

From the moment that I took that first step off our street and onto our driveway – usually a dirt road covered with rocky gravel, but taking on an occasional more precarious texture when snow and ice came along due to the season – my nerves would seize up at the same time that the goosebumps sprang into full industry along my arms. My eyes would dart back and forth to the trees on both sides of the long, sloping driveway that sunk down into our property. To say the trees lined the driveway would be a misnomer, since that would imply they were planted in some form of designed precision; rather, the driveway was cut naturally into the woods that were already there, and so the word "surrounded" is far more of an appropriate term. For surrounded I was, tree after tree with who knows what lurking behind them, awaiting a taste of my supreme deliciousness.

Each forward step would bring a slight crunch of snow, which would cause me to stop and listen hard, because anyone knows that a werewolf is crafty enough to only move closer to its prey when the intended victim is making too much noise to hear anything else. When I say "anyone knows," I mean, "Because I made that up myself when I was a kid". But that is exactly what would happen. My journey down my driveway each afternoon after school that winter (and the next) would begin with a series of small steps and hesitations, listening for anything that might move in the woods around me. One would think, despite the darkness, that I could easily see most of the ground was just snow because the birches and other deciduous trees and plants had lost their leaves already. But since when does logic rule the life of a sixth grader? The spruce trees, which were still fully covered in needles and therefore vast green curtains of terror, hid unimaginable horrors behind them, and were the chief cause of my distress. After moving perhaps five or six feet down the driveway in this manner, I would finally get up just enough nerve to shoot forward, running as fast as I could the rest of the way down the driveway, through our parking area, up the grass along the edge of our yard, and under the stairs where we kept the key to the house hidden for my use.

In my head, I was running a thousand miles an hour each time, but I always new that if an actual werewolf wanted to get me, there was no way for me to stop him. Because I knew that simply running fast was not one of the werewolf rules. I had no silver bullets, let alone a gun, and knew that I was pretty defenseless. My previous fear of dealing with the Big Bad Wolf, which you might recall was centered around the lower driveway and stairs on our property, was frightening enough but he could be dealt with by cartoon pigs by simple trickery. I was pretty tricky myself, so I knew that if it came down to it, I could handle him; I just wished to avoid the situation altogether. But werewolves were different. They were usually supernaturally based, and had to be dealt with using arcane magicks and herbs and very specific elements.

And when I finally got inside my house, what was it that I would do? Would I hit my homework like a good boy (and like I was supposed to do)? Would I do my few chores, because I was the oldest and given some responsibility, and which was why I was allowed to come home early instead of staying at the babysitter's house a couple of streets away with my brothers? Or would I pray to Jesus to protect me from the werewolves that were surely after me? Most of the time, none of the three. Sometimes some homework would get done, and sometimes some chores would, but most of the time, I would turn on the local CBS-TV affiliate, KTVA, and watch whatever chunk of that afternoon's matinee monster movie was left. In the summers, I got to watch the entire movie, but in the winter, I would just tune in and see what movie it was and catch the second half of the film. This was fine, because that was usually where most of the good monster action was anyway – the second half – or where all the big monster reveals were if the film depending on them.

I don't remember the name of the program or if it even had a title. This is strange because the films it showed were never to be forgotten by me. The program aired classic (or non-classic, depending on your viewpoint) horror and science-fiction movies – mixed with the occasional Sherlock Holmes mystery or film noir adventure – and of the monster flicks, they were chiefly from Universal, AIP, and Toho. As a result, this is where I got my basic education on the films from those studios. It's where I finally got to see those Dracula, Frankenstein, Mummy, Wolf Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon films I was reading about in the then-waning days of the original run of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine. I also was able to catch the bulk of the original Showa period of Godzilla and other kaiju films from Toho. Other favorites which I would first see on this program were The Manster, The Monster that Challenged the World, Fiend Without a Face, It Came from Outer Space, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, The Black Scorpion, The Deadly Mantis, Son of Kong, The Green Slime, This Island Earth, and most importantly, The Thing from Another World. And yeah, this is where The War of the Gargantuas became such a glorious, ridiculous obsession for me.

However, mostly due to timing of when I started watching this afternoon monster matinee show, Universal's acclaimed House of Horrors, filled to the rafters with its famous monsters, would not show up on the program for me until later in my viewings. The Wolf Man, as a film and not just mere pictures in books or on trading cards, would not come fully into my life for another year or so, nor would other films in which the Chaney Wolf Man character appears, like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, or Universal's own preceding film in the subgenre, 1935's The Werewolf of London. But there was one film that aired on this matinee program that, with very furry fingers of its own, touched a quite specific nerve with me. And stuck with me for years...

The Werewolf (1956)

Fred F. Sears' The Werewolf nearly did me in as a kid. Seen today, it's a pretty enjoyable, quick little thriller (only 75 minutes, like many similar films), almost as much science fiction as it is horror, but I didn't care about such distinctions back in those days. I also didn't know that Mr. Sears directed, in the same year as The Werewolf, what would be one of my favorite science fiction films, Earth vs. Flying Saucers (though that was mainly due to Ray Harryhausen's still immensely appealing and famous special effects sequences). He also directed another film that would become of my "so bad, it's good" faves to this day, The Giant Claw, a ridiculous giant bird flick that features effects that serve as the complete opposite to Harryhausen's sublime animation in his other, better sci-fi film.

But The Werewolf doesn't rely on flying saucer or giant monster effects; the monster is human-sized in this film, and it isn't necessarily the title creature. It is a detail I would not realize until the second time I encountered the film, but while there is indeed a werewolf at loose in this film and by almost any definition he could be described as a monster, the true evil in this film is via the hands of a pair of mad scientists attempting to track down their creation, as well as the majority of townspeople who go over the top in their attempts to shoot down and kill what is, for the most part, a very sick and unarmed man in this film. It might seem too easy to you that I would take the position of declaiming a large group of humans in the film as "the real monsters" – especially since it is how I tend to view most of the unthinking proportion of the human race – but the film itself makes this distinction in having a smaller group of good guys trying to find and help the poor man to safety.

My first viewing (and therefore, earliest memory) of the film was near the halfway point of its running time, since I turned on the television mid-afternoon after having just battled my werewolf fears to find myself face to face with one of those same creatures on our now (in hindsight, given the current standards) ridiculously tiny television screen. I was seeing a transformation scene that made my blood run cold for not just the remainder of the winter, but for quite a time afterward.

A nervous and clearly brain-addled man, Duncan Marsh (played by Steven Ritch) stands inside a cave confronted by another man, a mad scientist dressed as a hunter, bearing a rifle. In the woods outside, a posse led by the local sheriff (Don Megowan) is trying to track Marsh down, seemingly for a series of local deaths, both human and animal. Marsh doesn't understand what he has done, and begs the other man to tell him why his pursuers wish to kill him if he hasn't done anything to them. Suddenly, as his anxiousness and fear grows, Marsh starts to hyperventilate, and then his deep breathing noises turn into a series of growls. He transforms before the eyes of the scientist, in what was to me one of the most frightening things I had seen on television at that point in my young life.

The effect is not particularly smooth or well-done (Universal did it a bit better), but his face gradually becomes hairier. Where this werewolf has it all over Chaney, Jr. and others, perhaps harkening back to Mamoulian's version of Dr. Jekyll, is the look of pure bestial terror and then confidence in Marsh's eyes as he changes, and then the sickening way he drools out of his mouth and over his chin as he advances on his would-be attacker. Marsh is far more frightening to me mid-transformation than when he is fully transformed, for when he staggers out of the cave, his attacker fleeing, his once tight, shorter wolf hair is much shaggier and fairly ridiculous looking. Honestly though, just about anyone dressed as even the simplest, even silliest, version of a werewolf could have sent me running for shelter back in those days. I was eleven years old, living in the woods, and frightened to death of werewolves and Bigfoot. A plastic Ben Cooper Halloween mask could have done the trick on me.

Aside from the mostly effective makeup, there were several elements of The Werewolf that clearly forced the film to stick in my cranium as much as it did. The first was the fact that most of the action in The Werewolf takes place in the light of day. There is no full moon affecting Marsh's behavior. He can change into his wolf form by merely being angered or scared. Most importantly, there is no silver bullet to cure his condition; a regular bullet will do. It is an important note to make, though I doubt that I took notice at the age of eleven, but there was nothing supernatural at all about this version of the werewolf. His condition was brought upon him, like the monsters of many a film from the 1950s, from exposure to radiation; in this case, after Marsh showed signs of amnesia after waking up from a car accident, two scientists gave him a dose of irradiated blood from a wolf. Why wolf's blood? Well, they had it on hand, having one of the creature's caged for study. And did I mention that the main scientist is just a bit mad in nature, being not just thoroughly committed to his study, but also absolutely intent on saving his own hide by murdering Marsh before the authorities can catch the poor man.

The setting, too, was instrumental in my fascination with the film. While so many monster flicks took place in far off places like jungles or Transylvanian villages or in big, thriving cities that I could only dream about visiting, The Werewolf was in a world recognizable to me. Shot in Big Bear, California, The Werewolf takes place in the mountains, with homes and buildings surrounded by forest, not necessarily the same types of trees that I had in my mountain area home in Eagle River, Alaska, but the mood was the same. Likewise, the opening shot in the film of a small town street lined with bars, restaurants, and pharmacies could have been a crawl through Anchorage's then grungy downtown area – namely 4th Avenue – of my memory. Additionally, some scenes rely on the werewolf's tracks being seen in the snow, which was also a new touch for me, and instantly reflected upon my own walks home from the bus stop, where the snow became a most willing participant in giving away my whereabouts to the creatures lurking about me in the trees.

While The Werewolf takes place in the 1950s, it it not a 1950s of sock hops and teenagers, fast cars and girl chasing. The men are hard drinking (the very first scene takes place in a bar and eventually ends up in an alleyway mugging), their basic clothes are not much different from the working class people of my Alaskan neighborhood not quite twenty years after the movie was lensed. At the very least, the men in the film looked like the photos of my relatives that I saw in family photo albums, where several deer would be tied across the front of an automobile while men and sometimes women stood stiff-armed and awkwardly for the picture. Most of our own neighbors were at least weekend outdoorsmen, if not consistent in that behavior. My own parents loved fishing, and my dad hunted occasionally, and so the gear that went with such a lifestyle was as apparent in our lives as it was in the people populating this film. And while seeing a car from the 1950s on the street today is an indescribable pleasure (for the most part, depending on condition), 1975 was not so far removed that I didn't see cars from that then slightly older decade pretty regularly both on the road and in surrounding neighborhoods. The world of The Werewolf, with some minor differences in behavior and dialogue, was close enough to my own forest and hill-filled town to add an extra layer of verisimilitude to its "B" movie plotline.

Something that would come to me on my second showing of the film that I rather missed in the first was the sympathy that the picture has for its lead character. The first time around, I pretty much just entered the story with the transformation that I described, and then the rest of the picture is Marsh being captured, the scientists breaking into the jail to do away with him, his escape from the jail, and then the pursuit and stopping of the werewolf. What I missed was the large amount of character work that goes into establishing Marsh, his wife and small boy who feared him dead, the local doctor, the evil scientists, and others. Marsh is completely sympathetic, and even some of his actions as the wolf are him fighting against this uncommon nature that has been thrust upon him. Certainly there is much about the picture that is patently ridiculous, but it is played so straightforward, and the drama is never allowed to be anything but true to its characterizations, that – perhaps apart from some of the werewolf shots (and this depends entirely upon the viewer's tolerance for such things), the film never truly comes off as campy.

Piling a viewing of The Werewolf on top of the book of werewolves with the picture of Les Lupins was nearly a deadly combination for me. If I was scared to walk home because of werewolves having just seen the Maurice Sand's picture, I was practically crapping my pants after seeing Duncan Marsh drool in the cave and then tear apart two evil scientists in a jail cell. (Luckily, I never actually crapped them.) Les Lupins, with its grouping of werewolves lounging about in sinister suggestion in front of that cemetery wall may have overtaken my imagination, but that scene suddenly had a companion: The Werewolf's full, cinematic close-up of a werewolf's face – however silly the makeup might seem today – and it took just that single look at half the film for me to springboard my fears to even greater heights.

If you are among those who think that growing up and getting past such irrational feelings is easy to do, keep in mind that I have been a lifelong pedestrian. I catch rides where I can, and take the bus as often as I am able, but walking about is usually my main means of transportation. Sure, it is by my own design, and I could be locked comfortably behind the wheel of a car in scary situations like the rest of you if I only changed my habits. So in most ways, it is my own fault that I have often found myself in some pretty dark, secluded places in my meanderings, in some fairly awful neighborhoods by accident, and sometimes in situations where I have gotten more of the night world than I really wanted to get. My life has actually been threatened a couple of times but I managed to get out of them. 

But even with that, finding myself all alone on a quiet road, at dusk, with the moon peeking through the trees along the sides of the road, is something that still triggers those childhood fears, albeit for a brief moment or so. It is in those moments where often a stray thought of Duncan Marsh from The Werewolf, snarling and drooling, desperate in action and quick of claw and fang, will enter my mind. However, as time has passed for me, most often those thoughts have receded from the primeval fear of the monster and drifted instead to identifying not just with the monster, but as the monster. Just another lost, lonely creature who must keep fighting, howling in rage, and running constantly to distance himself from an increasingly senseless and uncaring world.

Sure, such thinking is maudlin and counter-productive, and it's not like my life isn't filled with both love and long-standing friendship. Sometimes, though, I can't help it. One cannot always control one's emotions, and one cannot help but let irrational fears sneak in from time to time to subvert one's worldview. Such slips can affect any one of us, or even masses of us, as we have seen recently in how our country seems so split apart right now. For my part, almost without noticing it, I slowly grew past my ridiculous, early fears of such imaginary things as werewolves (though I have still maintain a healthy respect for Bigfoot, just in case he actually does exist). I have new fears now, some brought on by a prolonged and unwanted spell of unemployment (which is only in recent months starting to break down) and money concerns, and others brought on by political upheaval and uncertainty in the bonds of certain close relationships. I'm a grown-ass man, as one variation of a current popular catchphrase goes, and as such, I can't worry about werewolves anymore.

But, goddamnit, I am going to snarl and claw and fight like one when the time calls for it. Who says I never learned anything from all of these silly cartoons and movies?

RTJ