“Sound of My Voice” (2012)

Sound of My Voice is riveting and well-acted but has such a thin, vague plot that by the end you walk out feeling ripped off. I can honestly say I watched every single scene with rapt attention; the three main characters are consistently watchable and believable; the dialogue is weird and feels true. But if the director got the trees right — almost every scene feels properly creepy and emotionally fraught — the forest turns out to be a disaster.

Unlike last fall’s brilliant Martha Marcy May Marlene, which told a twisting tale about how a young woman became absorbed into a cult (and ultimately left it, and remained terrified by it), Sound of My Voice isn’t primarily interested in the scary psychological appeal of cults, the insidious means by which leaders draw their adherents in, or the fantastical raisons d’être offered by their charismatic leaders for the group’s existence and future. Rather, this film devolves to an “is she or isn’t she?” question. Whereas many small films opt for so much plot that you want to teach them that less is more, this film made me realize that sometimes, less is less.

Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius) are would-be documentary filmmakers who have made their way into a secretive cult oriented around a mysterious woman, Maggie (Brit Marling). Indeed, the film opens with an eminently creepy sequence of shots, wherein they are bound and blindfolded, stuffed into a van, and driven out to the cult’s secret location — where they are stripped of their street clothes, asked to shower and scrub themselves thoroughly, and dressed in hospital gowns before meeting Maggie. All of this is filmed so economically, and with such a fascinating combination of moodiness and dreariness to the sets, that you find yourself holding your breath, anticipating … what? A terrifying leader? That Peter and Lorna will be uncovered as frauds?

Peter has hooked up a spy-cam to his glasses to film the proceedings — like when Maggie tells the new recruits her story about being a time traveler from the future. But as the film moves along, it focuses ever more intently on the question of whether Maggie really believes her own story or has ulterior motives. Those questions just aren’t good enough, nor are the plot twists unusual enough to keep us guessing.

Directed by Zal Batmanglij, who also co-wrote the script with actor Marling, this film sustains your attention even through scenes that seem either odd (like when the germaphobic shut-in Maggie, who eats only foods grown in her own hydroponic growhouse, nevertheless opens a window and lights up a cigarette) or stereotyped (when one of the cult’s henchwomen whisks Lorna off to a woodsy area to teach her how to fire a gun — a scene we’ve seen in what, three or four recent films?).

Not to mention my biggest disappointment: the filmmakers only used the “sound of my voice” theme sloppily, dropped in absent-mindedly, rather than plumbed for more. What is it about the voices of these cult leaders, their ability to put concepts together for their adherents, to insinuate themselves like earworms into the brains of eager followers? That’s interesting. This film doesn’t touch the topic, nor does it convince me that Maggie’s voice or sentences will haunt me later. If they could create a movie poster as vivid and enticing as this one, I argue, surely they could have spent more time on the script.

As you can see, I walked out feeling frustrated — partly because the overall vision for this quasi-sci-fi film was ultimately so muddled by its emphasis on style and creepy anticipation; and partly because the final big plot twist makes the entire film look more like a 45-minute long X-Files episode rather than a smart, well-plotted full-length feature. So as much as I’d like to see writer/actor Marling as part of a new wave of women filmmakers, I’m going to table my enthusiasm for now … and at the risk of sounding bossy, suggest that she throw herself more completely into articulating a vision for a film before racing into production.

Female monsters: My mother made me this way

Scariest female monster ever? Patty McCormack as The Bad Seed

When I started this Mini-Marathon of Cult Horror Movies featuring Female Monsters, I was pretty sure I’d be seeing a lot of cheesy films as I explored the dirty underworld of how filmmakers associated women with monstrousness. But the subject matter has taken over — the more I explore, the more seriously I view these films’ underlying themes. Oh sure, it’s all fun and games to talk about the Bitchez From Outer Space subgroup, or those Crazy Science Experiment Ladies (The Wasp Woman, Mesa of Lost Women, etc.), or about how these films invariably show women doing the Evil Sexy Dance of Death to lure men to their doom. But then I uncovered this rich vein of My Mother Made Me a Monster films.

Curiously, these are undeniably better films than the aforementioned cheese. (Why? Please send answers!) Rather than imagine Sex In Space or answer questions about what would happen if you injected women with wasp venom, Mother/Monster films raise questions about whether nature is destiny — whether an evil mother inevitably produces demonic qualities in her child, and whether even a good mother is to blame for producing a monster. From Cat People (1942) to The Bad Seed (1956) and eventually Carrie (1976), a whole genre of cult horror films swirl around mother-hating or mother’s guilt to produce an exceptionally riveting set of questions.

*****

The most claustrophobic of all cult films is surely The Bad Seed, 95% of which takes place in that awful middle-class 1950s apartment inhabited by the Penmarks and their super-perfect 8-yr-old daughter Rhoda (Patty McCormack). Rhoda’s pigtails are always neat, her shoes never scuffed, and her dresses always as girly as possible.

Let this be a lesson to all of you who complain that your daughters are slobs: thank your lucky stars, for it doubtless means your daughters are normal.

Is Rhoda just a nasty little piece of work? Oh no, friends. She is a bad seed (or, in the parlance of our day, a psychopath). She acts all sweet and treacly, but then get her on the topic of why she didn’t win the school medal for penmanship, and you see a little monster come through. So much of a monster, in fact, that she murders the prizewinner, takes his medal for herself, and expresses no remorse.

Told through the eyes of Rhoda’s mother Christine (Nancy Kelly), we find ourselves trapped in that insidious, nightmare-inducing space of that apartment (yes, this was originally a stage play) — sympathizing with and yet infuriated by Christine’s passivity and mother love for a monster of epic proportions.

Christine’s suspicions about her daughter lead her to delve into her own past. She has always suspected she was adopted — and after pressing hard on her father, she learns the truth: her own mother was a psychotic murderer, and only by fluke did the 2-yr-old Christine end up with loving adoptive parents. But this means, of course, that unwittingly she has given birth to a Bad Seed (and that it’s genetic). Now that she knows she’s responsible for passing this gene along to her daughter, what will Christine do about it? If someone is to be punished, is it the mother or the psychotic, manipulative child?

Needless to say, The Bad Seed could be paired with We Need to Talk About Kevin for one of the most disturbing double features ever. (Who would come to such a double feature?) These films also seem to confirm the notion that even very young children can be psychopaths (that recent NY Times article even discusses the fact that the public inevitably blames mothers for having psychotic children).

*****

A similar set of questions undergirds Jacques Tourneur’s excellent Cat People, which might be the best horror qua noir film ever. It all starts out so innocently, with guileless Oliver flirting with that fetching girl at the zoo. She turns out to be Irena (Simone Simon), a Serbian immigrant and fashion designer who harbors an eccentric fascination for the big cats in their cages — even more eccentric than most, considering that we find out that her drawings show the panthers speared through the heart with a sword.

Fast forward to love and marriage (and I mean fast), and suddenly we have a problem: Irena fears she has inherited the evil taint of her Serbian village’s devil-worshiping past, and that she is a Cat Person. Is it possible? or is it all in her pretty little head? Naturally, Oliver is inclined to believe the latter, and signs her up for visits to psychiatrist Dr. Judd.

But Irena doubts the answer is so simple. She’s haunted by fears and dreams. What about the fact that her father died so young, so mysteriously — and that they accused her mother of being a Cat Person, responsible for his death?

She’s always kept people at a distance, but breaks down her defenses because she loves Oliver so much. Still, on their wedding night, as she sits in the restaurant with a wedding party, a strange, ominous-looking woman (with the best 1940s up-do) stares at her from across the room. “Look at that woman,” says one of her guests. “She looks like a cat,” another guest responds. The woman approaches and speaks to Irena, repeatedly, in Serbian. Irena crosses herself and looks terrified.

“What did that woman say to you, darling?” Oliver asks after the woman leaves. “She greeted me,” Irena replies. “She called me sister.”

One of the many things Irena learned growing up was that she must avoid growing angry or jealous, for those heightened emotions will bring out the evil inside her. Let’s pause for a moment to let that sink in: if she gets jealous or angry, she becomes a murderous, vengeful panther who stalks and kills those responsible. This makes Bitchez From Space look mild in comparison.

So Irena determines the best response is to keep Oliver at a distance: they sleep separately. Which places such pressure on the marriage that Irena begins to suspect — correctly — that Oliver and his work pal Alice have fallen in love with each other. When Irena sees the two of them together in a restaurant late one night, she knows the truth — and thus begins some terrific horror/noir sequences in which Alice is hunted by a big cat through lonely city streets, and Irena is haunted by (animated) dreams of cats staring at her, surrounding her. It’s all so distressing that we see her, crying by herself at her alienation in the bath.

There’s so much to say about this film — about the confusion over the protagonist (Oliver is decidedly not sympathetic; both Irena and Alice are, yet they wind up in a cat-and-mouse game against one another), the beautiful filming, that terrific animated sequence of cats:

But let’s stay focused on the My Mother Made Me a Monster theme, which obtains throughout this film and becomes even more prominent in the (weak) sequel, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which is all about fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. No wonder Irena fears sex and love with Oliver: it makes a woman unpredictable, dangerous, even one as sweet as Irena. No wonder that in the sequel, mothers and daughters are far more at war.

*****

And finally there’s Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel, a film that encapsulates so much of the horror of pubescence and high school that I’m tempted to term King a genius. The opening sequence alone is a brilliant piece of horror/ porn all packaged up in a wrapper of female trouble. A pointedly anodyne musak tune plays while the opening credits move us through a high school girls’ locker room as the girls dress and horse around. As we gradually move toward more full-frontal nudity and the steam of the showers, we find Carrie (Sissy Spacek) luxuriating alone in the hot water, all soft-focus and slow motion — eyes closed, hand running a bar of soap all over herself slowly, pleasurably.

Then she starts to bleed — she’s started her period — but not knowing anything about menstruation, she starts to scream and beg the other girls for help. Being typically unsympathetic high school girls, they taunt her, smack at her, and throw tampons at her until she cowers, naked, bloody, and dripping, in a corner of the shower.

When she gets home, she tries explain to her domineering, religious fanatic of a mother (Piper Laurie), “Why didn’t you tell me, Mamma?” Her mother hits her over the head with a biblical tract and has only one thing to say:

Mamma, reading aloud: And God made Eve from the rib of Adam. And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world. And the raven was called sin. Say it: the raven was called sin! 
Carrie: Why didn’t you tell me, Mamma? 
Mamma: Say it. [hits Carrie in the face with her tract] The raven was called sin. [hit her again]
Carrie: No, Mamma. [gets hit yet again, finally relents] And the raven was called sin! 
Mamma: And the first sin was intercourse. The first sin was intercourse. 
Carrie: I didn’t sin, Mamma. 
Mamma: Say it. [hits her again] 
Carrie: I didn’t sin, Mamma! 
Mamma: The first sin was intercourse. The first sin was intercourse. The first sin was intercourse. 
Carrie: And the first sin was intercourse! Mamma, I was so scared. I thought I was dying. And the girls, they all laughed at me and threw things at me, Mamma. 
Mamma hits her again: And Eve was weak! say it! 
Carrie: No! 
Mamma: Eve was weak! 
Carrie: No! 
Mamma: Eve was weak! Say it, woman! 
Carrie: No! 
Mamma: Say it! 
Carrie: Eve was weak, Eve was weak. 
Mamma: And the Lord visited Eve with the curse, and the curse was the curse of blood! 
Carrie: You should have told me, Mamma! You should have told me! 
Mamma kneels down and takes Carrie’s hand: Oh, Lord! Help this sinning woman see the sin of her days and ways. Show her that if she had remained sinless, this curse of blood would never have come on her! 

Then, of course, her mother locks her in a closet with the most terrifying Jesus-on-the-cross figure ever. I mean, come on — is this not the creepiest horror scene you can imagine? And this is long before the pig’s blood starts flying!

The film never tells us whether having to deal with such an insane mother was the trigger that initiated Carrie’s gift of telekinesis. But it’s clear that Carrie’s extreme social withdrawal is the result of such mothering. She’s so withdrawn that the other kids at school find her an easy joke, a target. Her mother keeps her so naive that she doesn’t know about menstruation, after all.

And her mother displays a fear of men and an antipathy to sex that colors everything her daughter does. When Carrie decides to go to the prom with hunky Tommy (William Katt), her mother prays desperately, ecstatically, in that awful attic room while Carrie makes her own dress.

“I should have killed myself when he put it in me,” Carrie’s mother says late in the film, as she explains that Carrie is the product of her own sin. Does it matter that this comes from the fevered imagination of a crazy woman? What we do know is that Carrie and her mother ultimately go down together, locked in a strange reverse-maternal embrace, as the creepy eyes of the Jesus figurine look on.

*****

My mother made me a monster. It’s a theme that has been the source of much cheesier filmic material than in these three films (see for example She-Wolf of London [1946] and Cobra Woman [1944]) but isn’t this theme more interesting when done well?

I think it’s appropriate that I end this Mini-Marathon of Cult Horror Movies about Female Monsters on this note — after watching three films that problematize femininity via that scary mother-daughter bond, via questions about nature, nurture, Jesus and the Devil. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when Hollywood created female monsters, its writers and directors tried to work out their own crazy, stereotyped and contradictory ideas about women along the way.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling awfully grateful for the mother I have — a woman I’m going to see tomorrow, and who’s promised yet another couple of days of relaxation in her beautiful garden. And I’m going to remind her how lucky she is to have a daughter who had a messy room for all those years.

Hitchcock’s earliest blonde: Anny Ondra

Welcome to the Hitchcock Blog-a-Thon, designed to raise the funds to stream online three reels of the recently rediscovered 1923 silent movie, The White Shadow, for which a young Alfred Hitchcock served as assistant director, wrote the title cards, edited, designed the sets, decorated the sets, and learned everything he could about how to make a film. You’ve heard me rant about access to film before; now’s your chance to put some money toward universal access. Click here to make a gift of any size toward this effort.

In addition, check out the vast outpouring of Hitchcock blogging at three sites: The Self-Styled Siren, Ferdy On Film, and This Island Rod, each of which has taken a turn as blog-meister during this May 13-18 Hitchfest.

*****

Alfred Hitchcock cast a lot of different women as leads, but oh, his blondes. He left no doubt that each was a spectacularly beautiful specimen. Perfect to a fault yet surprisingly willing to initiate sexual encounters — even aggressive. Deliciously unpredictable (and occasionally malicious) for long stretches until, suddenly, she falls in love with the hero and becomes absolutely trustworthy.

Critics have complained bitterly about these women being portrayed as ice queens, absurd male fantasies — which they most surely are. But come on. Remember Grace Kelly’s first appearance in Rear Window? (See here for a clip.)

She enters the dark apartment as Jeff (James Stewart) naps, and bends down to kiss him. Hitchcock filmed it as if we were the object of her desire: that extreme close-up of her perfect face, coming in straight for us. When Hitch transitions to a side view so we can watch her plant a perfect, luscious kiss on Jeff’s lips, all the neighborhood noise drops away, and the shot is almost perfectly silent. Watch it and tell me if you don’t hold your breath while she kisses him/us.

Tippi Hedren, Madeleine Carroll, Eva Marie Saint, Kim Novak, Grace Kelly — via Hitchcock’s lens, these women are transfixing, spectacular, maddening. One might go so far as to suggest that Hitch helped to cement an abiding ambivalence about blondes into our collective psyches.

Which made me wonder how early he manifested this fascination with blondes — so this blog-a-thon offered the perfect opportunity to scour the Hitchcock back catalogue for some of his earliest films. And thus I found Anny Ondra, a Polish/ Czech/ Hungarian actor who grew up in Prague and whose total English-language career consists of these two 1929 films for Hitch: The Manxman and Blackmail, two films bookended by a long career of European films that stretches almost forty years, concentrated most heavily between 1922 and 1938, when she was between the ages of 19 and 35.

She wasn’t Hitch’s first blonde, but she seems to be his first repeat-offender actress. And with her, the die was cast. At the risk of looking backward from his classic blondes of the 1950s to ask whether Ondra possesses some of the qualities that would become quintessential to the Kellys, Saints, and Hedrens, I nevertheless offer that from the very earliest scenes in these two pictures, we know how untrustworthy her character is, how duplicitous. In fact, we’re reluctant to like her at first.

Except that she’s so flighty and girlish we grow more lenient; we come to see that she knows not what she does.

The more we watch her, the more we need to watch her. These films both utilize what now appears to be a ham-fisted cinematographical technique: frequent shots in which the characters break the fourth wall and face the camera directly — at first as a means of introduction, but later on as a way to pause for emotional effect. Ondra flirts at the camera as she torments her two suitors in The Manxman, an operatic tragedy of a love triangle. Clumsy though this technique might be, we learn a lot about Ondra’s true charms in the process, and we suspect that our own growing softness for her character mirrors Hitchcock’s affection for the actress.

Look at those sweet little butterfly lips, that delicate little chin, that over-permed hair. Those large eyes, that could narrow to slits or widen in horror: in sum, she’s adorable. With all those close-ups of her lovely little face, we’re able to watch her flirt, weigh a decision, worry, or fool a man (transparently). She acts the pants off of all her male co-stars, who are negligible, forgettable figures (except perhaps Carl Brisson as the happy-go-lucky Pete in The Manxman, distinguishable primarily for being a Tom Hiddleston look-alike, albeit without perhaps such a massive forehead).

But therein lies the first major difference between Hitch’s later blondes and Ondra’s appearances for him in 1929: Ondra is truly a girl, utterly lacking the cool, elegant self-possession of his 1950s ice queens. No matter that, at 26, she was a year older than Grace Kelly had been when they filmed Rear Window — Hitchcock wanted women for his later films, whereas in these very early efforts he allows Ondra to charm in a different way. Put her in a room crowded with Manx fishermen, and she glows.

And charm she does. I mentioned above that she’s portrayed early on in each film as a deceiver — the thing is, she ultimately becomes the central protagonist in each film. In The Manxman (the earlier of the two films), she steals the film out from under her male co-stars. As she lives through a marriage to the wrong man, she quickly appears as a foolish yet sympathetic girl whose haste in marrying dooms her to unhappiness. Likewise, in Blackmail she simply wanted to have a nice time with a man who gives her more attention than her boring, busy detective boyfriend — only to find herself in a tight spot indeed.

Blackmail has a simplistic storyline, but the added attraction of being a very early talkie — in fact, it sometimes appears almost as if Hitchcock arranged to dub all the sound onto the film later on. Neither is this purely a guess on my part. Ondra’s voice is entirely dubbed by actress Joan Barry, after the filmmaker determined that her accent would distract from tale.

No matter. Even without hearing her true voice in that film, we have preserved via the ever-magical YouTube this delicious little moment: a sound test for Blackmail, in which Hitchcock and Ondra engage in a delightful little bit of dirty verbal sparring. You can see immediately that Ondra is a charismatic little number — and that Hitch didn’t miss an opportunity to tell a dirty joke, and run his eyes up and down his lead actress:

Now, isn’t that enough reason to donate to the Hitchcock Blog-A-Thon — the possibility of being able to see, at your leisure, a gem like this one online? Please consider making a donation to the NPFF, and visit my colleagues’ sites to enjoy the wide-ranging conversation about the many sides of Alfred Hitchcock!

“Veronica Mars” (2004-07) for a dose of noir

She used to be friends with them, a long time ago, but they hardly think of her lately except to hurl a couple of those old accusations at her. It all fell apart when Veronica Mars’ best friend was murdered. Not long after, Veronica lost her place among the anointed super-rich of Neptune and she went back to being just another lower-middle-class kid – one of many who live in the shadow of (or who provide services to) those extravagantly arrogant one-percenters.

The fact that she’s had a foot on either side of that fence makes her the perfect observer of both worlds. Veronica is cynical, sure, but she’s still capable of being shocked by the depths of sordid ugliness she witnesses in her crepuscular investigations. Moving back and forth between those different worlds of social rank – and between the brilliant SoCal daylight and its nighttime neon crappiness — makes her a liminal figure, prickly and slightly nostalgic about the naïf she used to be, about the love she used to feel for her lock-jawed, troubled ex-boyfriend, Duncan Kane, and her murdered best friend (Duncan’s sister) Lilly.

What’s not to love about Veronica Mars, at least seasons 1 and 2? Its skewering of the 1%, the diminutive Kristen Bell in the lead role (and the excellent Enrico Colantoni as her gumshoe father, an actor who raises the quality of every scene), the wisecracking dialogue. But what I love best is the cross-cutting of genres between film noir with the high school teen dramedy. Veronica is a modern-day Sam Spade/ Philip Marlowe, whose hard nose is pretty hard, yet still allows for a few sensitive spots where she can still be offended, hurt, disgusted, or maybe swept off her feet. (I maintain that Rian Johnson’s Brick, which won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, must’ve been indebted to Veronica Mars as an influence.)

It’s those California noir night scenes I love best – the ones in which she sits in her crappy car on a stakeout, or in her father’s private detective office with the glow of a computer screen. The cinematographer never missed an opportunity to give us more of that vivid noir texture: the nighttime ripples of an apartment-building swimming pool, the shadows and grime of the Camelot Motel under the harsh glow of streetlights. Those places where she’s alone and lets the melancholy move in, like coastal fog. Where she’s not performing those publicly-acceptable versions of herself. Where she’s allowed to think.

It’s such a good emotional escape — to hunt down one or two of those episodes at TheWB.com (despite all the ads; sorry ’bout that) and let yourself dive in. It’s a kind of noir you don’t get to see enough of, and which hits a wide range of pleasure centers. Why don’t any other teen shows opt for noir rather than melodrama?

Pitch: “A Touch of Zen” (1971) could use a remake

About a week before Ocean’s Eleven (2001) came out, I saw the original with Frank Sinatra et als (1960). It was terrible. All the more reason to love the Steven Soderbergh version. He took the bare bones of the original but did some pretty serious rewriting and major character development to give us style, humor, better actors, and a better ending.

Just think what you could do with a film like King Hu’s A Touch of Zen, which is already pretty good. It’s just too long and has some other issues as I’ll detail below. As I occasionally like to offer up my own brilliant plot ideas for an eager reading audience, here’s my advice to Hollywood: tweak this story and you’ve got box office gold!

The original story centers on Ku (Shih Jun), a mild-mannered, unambitious scholar in a small village who refuses to follow his mother’s advice and apply for a better-paid job in the magistrate’s office. One day he encounters two strangers: first, he’s commissioned to paint a portrait of a sinister-looking man named Ouyang (Tien Peng); and second, that night he hears strange noises coming from the abandoned and reputedly haunted house across the way. When he investigates, he’s spooked by a strange and ghostly figure who later proves to be Miss Yang (Hsu Feng, above), a laconic, unsmiling, beautiful woman on the run from a corrupt official who wants to execute her and has hired Ouyang to do it. Ku teams up with her to help (as much as a clumsy scholar can), and the remainder of the film traces their attempts to escape. It culminates with a terrific battle scene in a bamboo forest with some kickass Buddhist monks, which shows this film’s influences on later wuxia greats like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

The dvd copy I got, a simple VHS-to-DVD transfer, shows the film’s abundant wear & tear — all those night scenes are almost too muddy to see, and you often see scratches or grit on the film itself. At just over 3 hours it’s long and seems to end 3 different times. Still, this tale has great characters, terrific fight scenes (including one in a bamboo forest that has huge potential for re-imagining, and not just in a Crouching Tiger imitation way), and — best of all — a ghost-story subtheme.

Nor does it need to be set during the typical wuxia never-never land of an unspecified past of swordsmen and secretive martial arts sects. In fact, I can imagine a great modern version taking place amongst Chinese Americans of a 1940s San Francisco or perhaps one of its agricultural regions nearby, like Watsonville or Gilroy, during the same era that saw the internment of Japanese Americans. Can’t you just imagine the final fight scene taking place in a redwood forest or a eucalyptus grove, or perhaps on the oceanside cliffs south of Monterey? (Hollywood: call me and we’ll talk. My screenwriting and/or consulting rates are shockingly affordable.)

No matter the setting, the first order of business is to switch up the protagonist. In the original, our hero(?) is Ku, the bumbling scholar — but although we need to start with him, once we meet Miss Yang she needs to supplant him as protagonist. (I mean, even us bumbling scholars don’t really like to see ourselves as protagonists.) Ku pales in comparison. He reminds me of that creepy dude in my college dorm, the one who always seemed to leer at you from his doorway. Miss Yang could also use more of a back story, as well as clearer motivations to explain, for one, why in the world she has sex with Ku, with his creepy toothiness and weird makeup. (The Feminéma rewrite might have to find a more Chow Yun Fat-style sexual partner for Yang. Mmmmm.)

Second: don’t drop the creepy haunted-house subtheme midway through the film. The film’s first half takes place on the best set ever: a lonely, run-down village, at the center of which is a hauntingly memorable abandoned home and compound that used to belong to a military general. What a set it makes. The white plumes of the tall, ghostlike pampas grass constantly block your view of what’s going on. Spiderwebs everywhere — fabulous! It provides the setting for one of the film’s best big fight scenes, during which our heroes scare the bad guys by making them think real ghosts are attacking them on all sides. Afterward, however, we leave the haunted house and don’t return.

I say you can bring it back in with the Super-Dooper mystical Buddhist monks, who make a couple of handy appearances in the film’s second half. No matter how this story gets rewritten, the monks stay in.

Best of all, just imagine the possibilities if our sword-carrying heroine and her monk friends are not just battling corruption (Californians trying to grab Chinese-American land and business as well as those belonging to Japanese Americans, possibly?) but also World War II, nativism, and 1940s sexism. It could be a cross between blaxploitation and wuxia — with just enough historical and place-specific context to make it interesting.

Hollywood, remember how much money Crouching Tiger made? It ranked as the 19th most profitable film worldwide of 2000 and raked 44 film prizes from 14 different awards-granting institutions.

Now, finally: a title. A Touch of Zen might sound a bit too tame for the action I foresee.

• Zen and the Art of Surviving a War?
• Zenifornia? 
• Mod Zen Explosion?

“Turn Me On, Dammit!” (2011), a surprisingly quiet, rural teen sex comedy

If you had grown up in a rural town in the 1980s like I did, you’d have found teen sex comedies to be a rich fantasy world. Molly Ringwald, John Cusack, Winona Ryder … their characters were all cuter, funnier, and more apt to experience wacky hijinks in those  suburban locales than anything us rural kids could imagine. It helped us fantasize that high school life could be a lot more exciting than it was. The only thing we had in common was that those movie characters all seemed to find their high schools boring, too. It was reassuring

This background gave me a special appreciation for Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s characters in her début narrative feature Turn Me On, Dammit! (Få meg på, for faen; she has previously made documentaries). At least in my town one or two of us had cars, so we could drive around. 15-yr-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm, looking a bit wicked in the photo above) and her friends, in contrast, are limited to the bus. Her mother works at the turnip factory. Otherwise, the boredom, limited boyfriend material, and stultified circles of girls … yup.

Crucial detail: Alma is horny. Really horny.

Most teen sex comedies mess around with the sex/love spectrum. Alma alone covers all those octaves, with special skill for sheer hormones. She dials the phone sex service Wild Wet Dreams on such a regular basis, racking up such a phone bill, that her favorite telephone operator there calls her with a monthly free bonus call. She’s willing to fantasize about virtually anyone, including one of her friend’s fathers. But mostly she fantasizes about her neighbor Artur (Matias Myren), daydreams more tender and romantic than her usual fare.

So imagine Alma’s delight when they attend one of those dismal dances at the youth center and, in a private moment, Artur takes his woody out of his pants and pokes her leg with it. “Artur poked me with his dick,” she announces excitedly to her friends Saralou and Ingrid when they’re back inside. Artur denies it, and soon the entire school shuns her as Pikke-Alma (Dick-Alma).

What all of this amounts to is a very different kind of teen sex comedy. Rather than wacky and exaggerated like the 1980s genre I know so well, it’s quiet and subdued. The subject that motivates the film is the simple fact of Alma’s horniness, but that fact never amounts to a real problem (except that it places a wall between her and her mother). If you get right down to it, I think the film’s real problem is the sense that rural kids feel confined and restricted by their isolated locale.

The film quietly contrasts Alma’s horniness with her poker-faced friend Saralou, who fears getting trapped in their awful tiny town by a baby or a husband. Instead (somewhat delightfully) Saralou wants to go to Texas to fight the death penalty . There’s also the usual glimpse of a world beyond: a friend’s older sister, Maria, who’s so happy at college in Oslo that she cuts short all her visits home.

Perhaps you can intuit from this that the stakes are low in Turn Me On, Dammit! but that doesn’t mean you won’t find it disarming and sweet. Even after all those years I still find teenagers mooning over one another to be a worthy object of my gaze for 90 minutes — and Systad Jacobsen’s characters are more sweet and believable than most. Especially when, on the bus home, they pass the road sign announcing that they’re entering their little nowhere town — at which point each of the teenagers flips it off. No wonder Alma goes home and dials up Wild Wet Dreams; isn’t masturbating, after all, the very best possible solution to rural boredom?

¡Órale! “Santo contra las mujeres vampiro” (1962)

Alert reader and fellow Space Bitch JE is keeping me on track with my Mini-Marathon of Cult Horror Films about Female Monsters — at least insofar as she sends me the best YouTube snippets ever. Witness this classic Mexican film from the prolific El Santo franchise. In this one, a professor recruits the heroic wrestler El Santo (“The Saint”) to protect the professor’s daughter from being kidnapped by evil female vampires who intend to marry the innocent girl to the Devil.

But why am I telling you the plot? If we’ve learned anything from these Cult Films About Female Monsters, it’s that the storylines are the flimsy bits that get us ricocheting between sexy wackiness and scary titillation. To wit, this scene in which las mujeres vampiro demonstrate how to take a nasty, crackle-skinned vampiro and transform her into a 1960s sexpot:

And if that’s not enough to get you leapfrogging through the full-length film (available in chapters on YouTube), here’s a handmade trailer for it made by a diehard fan:

Some might say, “I watch this and feel brain cells dying in my head.” But I say, this film is extra-appealing because of the sequel, Santo en la venganza de las mujeres vampiro (1970; no translation necessary, right?). And did I mention Santo en la casa de las brujas (1964, or El Santo in the Witches’ House)? That’s what I’m talking about.

Space Bitchez talk back

“I keep wondering what she’s thinking,” says Paul (Dennis Hopper), one of the astronauts who has discovered the strange green-skinned being from another planet in Queen of Blood (1966). Paul gazes into her green face, which is transfixed with an otherworldly, sphinxlike smile. Needless to say, Paul will not last much longer.

Paul (Dennis Hopper) is riveted by the silent, smiling Queen of Blood ... for a while

Oh, you foolish human mortals. In offering you this letter, we break our most sacred vow, which is to prevent you from learning of our existence. Whenever we watch one of your Hollywood films and someone says, “The universe is so vast that there must be more intelligent life out there,” everyone on our planet laughs hilariously. In fact, this line is a part of many movie-oriented drinking games on our planet. We find it delightful that you people are always congratulating yourselves on your “intelligence” yet can’t figure out that so many of us are hiding from you.

Despite our eagerness to remain hidden from you, we have recently caught up on one of your more bizarre film sub-genres and find ourselves unusually eager to set the record straight. Although these cheesy horror films about female monsters have spawned new and riotous drinking games, we would like to hope that our news might spur new advances in thinking among your kind.

The Queen of Blood gazes hungrily on the human males who may or may not become her next victims

Here’s the thing: films like Queen of Blood (1966), Devil Girl from Mars (1954), Queen of Outer Space (1958), and Cat-Women of the Moon (1953) each seem to believe that all us fine interstellar women are solely interested in rounding up some human men to eat and/or use as breeding stock. Let us offer a few comments.

First there are the plot elements that transform us into Space Bitchez to titillate human men. Honestly. As you read these, tell me whether you can actually begin to hear yourselves when you write this horseshit.

• Space Bitchez come from a planet where gender relations have gone terribly wrong when the women took over.
• Space Bitchez always have strange hypnotic powers over human males.
• Sometimes Space Bitchez also have hypnotic powers over human females, whom they manipulate to get at the human males.
• Space Bitchez always wear tight cat suits/ leather/ sexy flowing gowns. In Queen of Outer Space, Zsa Zsa Gabor insists on wearing slits up the side of every single one of her dresses, which makes us want to hurt someone.

There is no relationship whatsoever between Zsa Zsa's dresses and her half-witted decision to fall in love with one of these idiotic human males in Queen of Outer Space.

• Space Bitchez utilize a sexy, compelling dance number to seduce the males.
• Space Bitchez have all manner of advanced technology – space ships, Death Rays, lasers to shoot other people’s ships out of the sky – but can apparently come up with no substitute for human males.
• At least a few of the Space Bitchez are susceptible to falling in love with one or two of the human males. (The rules of our planet’s drinking game demand that you drink twice upon witnessing this plot element.)
• Despite the superiority of the Space Bitchez, the majority of human males always manage to escape unharmed in the end in their tar-paper rocket ships.

Ugh. It’s exhausting. Where does one even begin? It makes me want to fondle my Death Ray Laser Gun, which has a hair-trigger mechanism….

Human males overcome these badass Space Bitchez who serve the Queen of Outer Space in yet another highly unrealistic human male fantasy of superiority and desirability.

Let’s start with the fantasy that awesome women from space need or even want human males. Aside from the question of whether you could be any more obvious in your fantasy life, let’s just note that human men are almost as pathetic as lovers as they are as scientists. Possessing our superior intelligences means never having to say the words, “If only I had a human male to impregnate me/ find me attractive.” I can’t tell you the number of jokes we have about how many men it takes to stimulate a Space Bitch’s erogenous zone – needless to say, these jokes are hilarious.

Zsa Zsa leads the human males and then, inexplicably, pretends to let THEM save HER

Just remember this scene from Queen of Blood, in which astronauts Alan and Laura discuss the mysterious deaths of two of their colleagues:

Allan:  He didn’t fall asleep — I’m convinced of that now! And I don’t think Paul did either. She does something — hypnosis — some strange mental power that we don’t have. I’ve sensed it from the beginning — it’s deadly.

Laura:  I’m really afraid now, for the first time.

Space Bitchez do a facepalm. Are you people serious?

The Cat Women of the Moon wear unitards, which in our opinion is a strange choice among Space Bitchez

You may wonder how we know so much about human males’ sex skills. Surprising numbers of them find ways of offering themselves up to us as willing slaves; they occasionally show up on our planets, stow away on our ships, or fake emergency distress calls to find us. No matter how badly we treat them, they won’t go away.

The Cat Women engage in their regularly-scheduled Sexy Dance for the benefit of their human male invaders

Can I be any more clear? We don’t need hypnosis, sexy outfits, a sexy Dance Of Death to win you over. Not only do we have terrific sex lives on our own, but we procreate effortlessly without you. Our political economies don’t require men to function smoothly. Dialogue like this from Devil Girl From Mars is so wrong on so many levels that all we can do is drink. Here, the evil, leather-clad Nyah has come to Earth to round up some men as breeding stock:

Oh Nyah, how do you sleep at night after appearing in Devil Girl From Mars? Was it the leather outfit?

Nyah: Many years ago, our women were similar to your today. Our emancipation took several hundred years and ended in a bitter, devastating war between the sexes. The last war we ever had. …After the war of the sexes women became the rulers of Mars, and now the male has fallen into a decline. The birthrate is falling tremendously. For despite our advanced science, we have still found no way of creating life.

Ellen: So you’ve come here for new blood.

Nyah: In a way.

Okay, okay – we get it. We know these films help make you human males feel better about your pathetic space skills and low levels of desirability by imagining that there are Space Sexpots out there who want your loins. We know these films helped to undergird the gender inequalities in your culture by demonizing powerful women as Space Bitchez.

Would a real Cat Woman of the Moon really allow herself to fall in love with some human dork named Kip or Laird? I think not.

But we can also see there are chinks in your argument – that a few of your human males and females are starting to take off your blinders. And so we conclude with one of your own poets, Billy Collins, who frames it all quite nicely – perhaps even better than we could have done ourselves. (Collins, you are always welcome to visit space.)

All you have to do is listen to the way a man

sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people

and notice how intent he is on making his point

even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

 

and you will know why the women in science

fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own

are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine

when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

–Billy Collins, “Man in Space,” 1995

This piece was jointly written with fellow Space Bitch JE, who watched a lot of movies with me and knew about Billy Collins (by heart).

Female monsters: “Mesa of Lost Women” (1953), featuring Tarantella

Her name is Tarantella (Tandra Quinn). Are not her charms sufficient to persuade you to watch this film?

No need to translate -- I think it's fairly straightforward.

How about the fact that it’s set in a remote, lonely part of Mexico, where Dr. Araña has a crazy science lab hidden deep in a cave where he experiments with spiders? “Hey, Araña means spider in Spanish!” proclaims one of the unlucky souls sucked into the scientist’s orbit. (So there’s also the crackling dialogue.)

The Wasp Woman was the first feature in my Mini-Marathon of Cult Horror Movies about Female Monsters — and it shares something in common with Mesa of Lost Women: the theme that science is dangerous. But whereas poor Janice Starlin believed the wasp venom would make her look younger with no side effects (oh, woman’s vanity and foolishness!) Dr. Araña has less scientifically justifiable aims.

He just likes to see what happens when you mess around in a crazy lab with humans and spiders.

Sure, Mesa of Lost Women suffers from some writing, editing, acting, and directing foibles — remember, I’m not conducting this marathon because I expect these films to surprise me with their high quality. But if you look past the interminable, nonsensical voiceovers and your own guffaws at the hairpin plot twists, we get back to Tarantella. Because out here in the Muerto Desert (yes, it’s that subtle: muerto) some very strange gender dynamics are at work, just like we’d hoped when we started this marathon.

Tarantella’s body looks like it’s been cross-pollinated with hydraulics, but in fact it’s the implantation of a spider pituitary gland that makes her so … arachnoid.  She doesn’t speak; her eyes are always bugging out; her hands are often clenched in fingernail-y claws. One can only admire how her strapless dress stays up (can we chalk that up to the spider blood in her veins?). Cue the Bitch Semiotic!

Oh, she’s a bitch all right. These 1950s sci-fi horror films are full of references to all those female bugs that eat their mates. Tarantella will gaze hungrily at whatever man comes into view — all of whom turn into jelly with a single glance at her.

Let’s remember that movies like Mesa of Lost Women had the fundamental role in American culture of the 1950s of providing just enough titillation and spookiness to allow teenagers to keep up the heat while they make out in cars parked in drive-in theaters. This film succeeds.

Scariest of all, Tarantella knows how to dance. In a bizarre sequence of events so convoluted it’s not worth explaining, Tarantella arrives at a little bar where the mariachi music begins and she shakes her badunkadunk. It’s utterly bizarre and hypnotic. “She’s fascinating!” says the riveted Jan as he watches her. “As a dancer, of course,” he adds as a quick cover-up to his blonde fiancée.

Oh, this video is so deliciously whack.

There’s a terrific blogger over at the brilliantly titled blog And You Call Yourself a Scientist! who’s written the most extensive, knowledgeable assessment of this film that I almost feel overwhelmed. (Almost.) This blogger makes a particularly astute point about how boring these movies often are. Having deferred most knowledge to that blogger, let’s talk about the Bitch Semiotic and the role of the sexpot monster in films like this.

Point 1:  Tarantella is guilty of any number of vague crimes of the sort that women commit against men, but she’s really only a serf who follows Dr. Araña’s evil directives. She dances, but she never speaks. She hypnotizes in order to lure men into her web and uses that killer body of hers to ensure men’s doom. Can you say “bitch on wheels”? All of this makes the motivations of Janice Starlin from The Wasp Woman seem unbelievably sensitive and complex in contrast.

What could be more revealing of men’s ideas about women in the 1950s than a vivid, bitchy death dancer who’s a slave to her male master?

Point 2: I’m wondering how often these Cult Female Monsters engage in what we might call the Sexy Dance of Death — and whether any of the others could possibly touch the weirdness of Tarantella’s. Is the Bitch Semiotic of this genre of cult horror films especially reliant on elaborating the monster’s bitchiness via dance? Stay tuned for more on this subject! This film provides not just the Sexy Dance, but also the patented Cat Fight® so essential to portrayals of women.

And finally, Point 3: to fully explore the subject of the Bitch Semiotic in Cult Horror Films with Female Monsters, I’m starting to see that we need to break them down into categories. In the vein of the abovementioned blog And You Call Yourself a Scientist!, I’m thinking about categories something like this:

• Science gone wrong (The Wasp Woman, Mesa of Lost Women, etc.)
• Religion gone wrong (the appalling Cobra Woman, for example)
• Bitten! (monster bites woman and transforms her into a monster, revealing all manner of fascinating infection fears)
• Bitchez from outer space (I can hardly wait!)
• Family curse (à la Cat People)

These categories will, I think, clarify even more the universe of the mid-century male psyche about women and gender. And I’m fairly convinced that Bitchez from Outer Space needs to come next, aren’t you?

from 1966's Queen of Blood

Female monsters: “The Wasp Woman” (1959)

According to Roger Corman’s classic cult film The Wasp Woman, the first in my mini-marathon of Cult Horror Movies about Female Monsters, we should be worried about two things: women’s fear of aging (who doesn’t know that?) and science (again, duh). Early on, the experimental scientist Dr. Zinthrop tries to explain to his boss that he thinks he has found a miracle anti-aging drug in the royal jelly of queen wasps. The man replies:

“Listen, Zinthrop, I understand about science, and progress, and all that, but you were obtained to extract queen bee royal jelly. Now, it’s a health food! A cosmetic! It’s not a miracle drug or an elixir of youth! That sort of thing is impossible!”

Oh, Zinthrop, why didn’t you listen?

Like any good would-be mad scientist, he heads for New York City — where cosmetics magnate Janice Starlin is meeting with her team to talk about why the company’s profits have taken such a nosedive. Why? one brave marketing douchebag asks mockingly — because you, Janice, have gotten old. Her haggard face makes the whole company look bad. Who wouldn’t agree with those lines and the bags under her eyes? horrors! and I haven’t even shown you an image of her terrible glasses!

Don’t get the wrong impression: as unflattering as that screen shot is, Janice Starlin is no bitch. Now, I’m relatively new to the genre of female monsters, but it seems to me that ultimately these films address what we might call the Bitch Semiotic, in honor of the classic Sigourney Weaver line in Aliens: “Get away from her, you bitch!” delivered to the gigantic alien monster mother. Film monster women might have many reasons to be bitchy, and many manifestations of their bitchiness. Janice, in contrast, is merely tragic — tragically desirous of a more youthful appearance.

She tries to explain Zinthrop’s wasp jelly plan to a member of her company’s marketing team named Cooper, but he won’t have any of it. In fact, he’s a font of condescending and questionable entomological wisdom:

“I’d stay away from wasps if I were you, Miss Starlin. Socially, the queen wasp is on a level with the black widow spider. They’re both carnivorous, they paralyze their victims and take their time devouring them alive. They kill their mates in the same way, too. Strictly a one-sided romance!” [har, har.]

With bad jokes like that, I could hardly wait till Cooper’s own foreshadowing did him in.

Naturally, Janice arranges with Zinthrop for secret injections of the wasp serum — in deliciously perverse needle scenes set in classic Hollywood laboratories. Naturally, when the reverse aging process doesn’t proceed as rapidly as she’d hoped, she sneaks into the lab and injects herself with more. Naturally, someone says (prophetically), “Cosmetics are one thing. Medication is another.” And naturally, Zinthrop’s experiments weren’t thorough enough to show the dangerous side effects:

But my favorite is the great line, muttered amongst some company employees baffled by the mysterious changes to company policies: “It’s not funny any more, Mary. There’s something going on in that building — [dramatic pause] — and I’m gonna find out what it is.” Screenwriters of yore, where have you gone? Why can’t we enjoy scintillating, literary subtlety as in days gone by?

Don’t get me wrong — there are many things to recommend The Wasp Woman: 1) it’s only 73 minutes long; 2) it’s streaming on YouTube and Archive.org as well as Netflix; and 3) in refusing to engage with the Bitch Semiotic, this film allows its star, Janice Starlin (Susan Cabot) to appear so genuinely appealing that she actually subverts the plot a little bit.

You’d think this would devolve into a simple tale of a woman driven mad (and carnivorous, and murderous of her mates) by her need to appear younger-looking — heaven knows that’s what all of Cooper’s foreshadowing indicated. But in matter of fact she’s surprisingly touching. It’s hard to hate her when she prances into the office one morning looking to-die-for gorgeous. She asks her secretary how old she looks. 23? the secretary guesses. Maybe 22? at which Janice looks wistful, for that’s the age at which she started her cosmetics company — 18 years ago. (Yes: that means she’s 40 years old!) The film doesn’t demand that her delight in looking young would itself make her a monster of vanity, or a killer of more beautiful women, like the evil Queen in Snow White who stands in front of her mirror all the time. (Are there really two Snow White films coming out this year? Groan.)

I started this marathon of cult horror films not just because I love cult films and need more excuses to see them, but because I think the subject of female monsters seems rich with interpretive possibility. It seems to me there are at least two primary questions that help us assess the genre: what causes their monstrosity? and, what does their monstrosity make them do to the other characters, aka men?

I’m willing to guess that most female movie monsters are driven to their monstrosity by singularly female traits. Whether it’s their desperate desire to be beautiful, their overpowering sexual drive, their crazed dementia after being dumped by a man, or (as in Aliens) a maternal instinct on steroids, Hollywood’s female monsters are — I suspect — just the flip side of Hollywood’s typical gender code. These are Girls Gone Wild, except usually in a bitchy way.

In playing out these narratives of women who’ve let their natural lady-ness take them way too far, I’m guessing The Wasp Woman is a bit of an outlier. Not only does it refuse to turn Janice into a bitch, but there’s no sex, no dangerous lady-temptress luring a man into her web of lies.

What’s next? Depends on availability and information. I’ve been constructing a list that includes the following:

• Astounding She Monster (1957)
• Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1960)
• The Bad Seed (1956)
• Black Sunday (1960)
• Cat People (1942) and Curse of the Cat People (1944)
  
• Cat Women of the Moon (1953)
• Cobra Woman (1944)
• Devil Dolls (1936)
• Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
• Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
• Gill-Women of Venus, or Voyage to the Planet of the Prehistoric Women (1968)
• The Gorgon (1964)
• Mesa of Lost Women (1953)
• Queen of Outer Space (1958)
• The Reptile (1966)
• She-Wolf of London (1946)
• Wild Women of Wongo (1958)

I have yet to work out the kinks in my system — after all, I want women who actually turn into monsters, not just sexy vampires or sexy prehistoric women, so some of these titles may have to go. I’m also taking suggestions.

Some advice to all us ladies: go out there and kick your own Bitch Semiotic today. Why, the next thing you know, we’ll have our own Hallmark holiday.