Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s

 

Exorcising Demons

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural 
Paranoia In The 1980s
Edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe
Fab Press/Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9781903254868

Just a very brief shout out now to a book edited by one of my favourite movie people, Kier-La Janisse... Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s. This one took me out of my comfort zone a little because it’s not exclusively about movies but, I saw it on the Fab Press stall at Bank Holiday FrightFest a couple of years ago and, it being one of the very few books I didn’t already own on the stall and, to boot, a tome I’d been keeping a look out for since it’s first US edition on Kier-La’s Spectacular Optical publishing arm, I thought I’d finally pick it up and give it a go. 

The book is a collection of various essays by a variety of authors, such as Alison Nastasi and the redoubtable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on various aspects of the absolute alarm caused by parents and other authority figures who believed the ‘youth of today’ were being attacked/corrupted/coerced/recruited by various devil worshipping organisations/unofficial groups during the 1980s. 

Now, I have to say, 90% of the contents of the book was completely unknown to me and this tome covers a variety of manifestations such as child molestation rings/enthusiastic money grabbing preachers and many other ‘authority figures gone wrong’, sometimes by first hand witnesses of the people and organisations in question. Although there certainly is some overlap with UK slants on the phenomenon, such as the worry, even in this country, about the game Dungeons And Dragons... once again proving that whenever anyone is given a creative outlet which any one group of individuals doesn’t understand, there’s going to be a huge push back by some of the more ignorant of them, as they seem to have a habit of empowering those gullible enough to throw in with their lot. 

So, yeah, I think you get the idea... if you were into heavy metal music, gaming, horror movies and various other stuff... you were going to be targeted as a devil extolling, malevolent presence in somebody’s life. 

The book is full of stuff I’d never heard of such as the Procter And Gamble logo being a manifestation of 666, religious comics, White Metal (or Christian Metal) music, teenage murder, paedophilia rings and so on. Those interested in film will also find some good things to contemplate here... such as an article on horror movies utilising ‘devil worship via computers’ such as Evilspeak and a nice chapter on Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. There’s also stuff about the Dungeons And Dragons missing person case that inspired the novel and subsequent movie of Mazes And Monsters (which I reviewed here) so, there were some elements familiar to me in the book. But, of course, it’s precisely because a lot of the things covered is stuff I’m not so well acquainted with, that makes it a valuable addition to my book shelves... err... book piles (like I could ever get enough shelves installed). There’s one very interesting chapter, for example, about devil cult books published by Playboy magazine as an imprint, which were deliberately marketed to susceptible female readers while the books actually seemed to favour wanting to show control over women. It’s fascinating stuff, to be sure.

And I’m going to get out of this review now while the getting’s good, I think. So I’ll just leave you with the thought that Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is, if nothing else (and I’m sure it probably is a lot more to many readers), an entertaining and educational read, throwing light onto subjects which, due to the country I live in more than anything else, were certainly unknown to me in a lot of cases. Definitely worth a read for the inquisitive minded at the very least and, with people like Heller-Nicholas on some of the chapters, you know it’s going to be well researched and written, for sure. 

Orchestrator Of Storms

Rollin Alley

Orchestrator of Storms:
The Fantastique World
of Jean Rollin
USA 2022
Directed by Dima Ballin & Kat Ellinger
Arrow Films
FrightFest Screening 26/8/22

Orchestrator Of Storms: The Fantastique World Of Jean Rollin is a brand new documentary that I saw screening on its European premiere at this year’s FrightFest. And, truth be told, it was a really nice little movie. Although my first reaction to this heady concoction of talking heads, excerpts from Rollin’s cinema and behind the scenes stills was that it felt a little like “Rollin for Beginners” to a certain extent. Some of the presenters and guests for the screening seemed to be getting more out of it in terms of acquiring knowledge than I did and my first gut reaction straight after the screening was... really? You can pick most of this up from the extras on many DVDs and the few books written about the director. But then I realised that this documentary did do something new which I’m really grateful for... it did give me at least one thing I’d not known before and it also reminded me of something I’d long forgotten. And, actually, it also acts as a kind of summary for a lot of those old DVD and Blu Ray extras from times gone past so... yeah, after I got thinking about it for a bit, I figured I did get a lot out of it and, beyond me personally, this cinematic document is going to be a lot of help for people who don’t have the time or opportunity to piece together all this information like some of us were doing as teens in the 1980s, when there was no internet. So, yeah, good job.

The film talks to certain key people in the director’s life and various other experts, among them some very important ones such as the brilliant Virginie Sélavy (who I think I might have met at a seminar on Rollin’s work once and who was one of the guests here at FrightFest), the great Kier-La Janisse, Nigel Wingrove (who founded the Redemption label, instrumental in exposing a lot of people to Rollin’s work... albeit in sometimes cut form... in the UK back in the 80s and, indeed, Redemption’s recent definitive US Blu Ray editions are still the best documents of these films), the wonderful Françoise Pascal and frequent collaborator and legend Brigitte Lahaie... who was the main guest for this screening with much to say and who I was happy to meet, briefly, at a signing session after the film.

The movie takes us from Rollin’s early childhood, where I found out a little about his parents and was reminded that, when he was a very young boy, his mother was engaged in an amorous affair with the writer Georges Bataille, who was an early influence on Rollin. It goes through his early break into the film industry and talks about the riot that ensued at the screening of his first feature film The Rape Of The Vampire (which I reviewed here), putting it into context with what was going on at the time. It goes through, mostly, his personal films but it does touch on his career in the pornographic industry he used to finance his own work, perhaps a little more briefly than I would have liked since this is the stuff I genuinely don’t know much about and could do with learning a little more.

What I did find interesting was Rollin’s desire, in his final year, to try and make a movie version of Georges Bataille’s confrontational, pornographic work Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil). Admittedly, it would be a tough movie to try and get past any censor in most countries but one thing which did spring to mind, when Wingrove describes the scene where a man’s eyeball is torn out and then inserted into a woman’s vagina... is that Bertrand Blier already filmed a version of that scene, pretty much, in his charming movie Merci La Vie so, yeah, maybe not necessarily that scene but it would have certainly made for a challenging movie, that’s for sure.

Kier-La Janisse once again tells the charming story about how she invited Jean Rollin to one of her first film festivals without realising the strings attached and it’s made apparent just how much that meant to Rollin and how much joy it brought him. The most moving and informative stuff in the film, though, I think comes from his technical collaborator Véronique Djaouti. There’s a point in the proceedings charting just how ill Rollin was in his final years and it gets to a point where she’s practically reliving his final night for the camera and just breaks down, unable to go on for a while. Now, I was in tears myself by this point so it’s admittedly a very powerful piece of film but I was thinking to myself... they could at least have turned the cameras off. I’m sure the footage is here by mutual consent though so, yeah, it’s strong and engaging stuff.

After the film finished there was a quite good Q&A with Sélavy, Lahaie and the man behind the new book about LeHai’s films and, I learned a lot from this too. I already had an inkling but it turns out that Lahaie has been successfully hosting a very popular two hour, daily radio show since early in the millennium and so she’s actually a very busy person these days. I’m not going to say too much about the Q&A because Arrow were filming it for inclusion on their Blu Ray of the movie, due to be released sometime next year. There were some interesting questions that came up though, including one about Rollin’s connections to the underground jazz music scene at the time.

And, yeah, I think that’s me done on Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin. I got so much more out of it than I at first realised and fans of this director’s filmography should appreciate this one... especially the future fans who will certainly find this an invaluable insight into the director’s life and work. This is probably my favourite film of FrightFest this year, I think.

Warped & Faded

AGFA
La Vista,
Baby!

Warped & Faded
by Lars Nilsen and Friends
Edited by Kier-La Janisse
Mondo Press
ISBN: 9781733333627

Subtitled on the cover as Weird Wednesday And The Birth Of The American Genre Film Archive, this beautifully designed paperback called Warped & Faded, put out by the Mondo label (who have very close ties with all the people and organisations covered in this book), is as much about the history of the Alamo Drafthouse cinema as anything else.

Well, I say cinema because, living in the UK with the only real reports about the Alamo coming from sources like Ain’t It Cool News back in the day, I’d just assumed it was one magical cinema in Austin Texas but the first section of this book, a tome which is split into four main sections, is more or less an oral history (I hate pretentious terms like that on books but, that’s pretty much what the first and fourth sections here are) of recollections by the people who were either running, working or being customers at the Alamo and it soon became clear that, after moving locations a few times, it became a chain of cinemas.

Following an introduction, the book is, as I said, split into four main sections (with many subsections) comprising Weird Wednesday - An Oral History In Six Parts, The Weird Wednesday Compendium,The Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame and Epilogue: The Birth Of AGFA.

So the first section presents the recollections, by many varied people such as Tim and Carrie League (who originally set up and still, I believe, run part of the chain), Lars Nilsen and the famous Kier-La Janisse... which are thrown into paragraphs and put into some kind of order to tell the story of the Alamo and, also, the main focus of the book, the Weird Wednesday screenings (which still run, in a progressed form, to this day). It starts off telling the problems of buying and moving a huge old, legacy collection of films from a warehouse and how these ‘warped and faded’ prints, showing the wear and tear of their battle against vinegar syndrome, became the backbone of the original Weird Wednesday screenings, shown for free late on Wednesday nights (I think it eventually went to charging a dollar entry at some point in the history of the series) to try and keep what are, in some cases, quite obscure films in the public consciousness to an extent.

The second section, The Weird Wednesday Compendium, is the heavily illustrated main section of the book, presenting the various listing summaries of each of the many screenings up until a certain date, by the likes of Lars Nilsen (who did the lion's share) and Tim League. So, for UK readers, if you think of the old SCALA cinema fold out programmes... well the Alamo Drafthouse had their own equivalent of those and that’s where these highly amusing descriptions were culled from. Presented alongside colour stills and poster artwork for quite a lot of the titles you will find in this section. For film enthusiasts who want to know more about what’s out there, this is a gold mine of stuff, some of which has made its way onto Blu Ray in the intervening years and much of which is still missing in action as regards to any kind of home video release of the titles. Indeed, there were even a fair few films in here that I hadn’t heard of myself and a few made my list although, many of the ones I want to see now don’t seem to be available. But this is where you’ll find out about films like ‘thanksgiving favourite’ screening Blood Freak, where a guys takes a drug and his head turns into the head of a chicken, before he goes on a bloodthirsty killing spree yelling ‘gobble gobble’... yeah, I really need to see this one. Or Super ManChu, Master Of King Fu who, in the words of the poster art, is “Cooler than Bond!” Yeah, I noted a few titles down to be on the lookout for and, I’m pretty sure I can guess which US based boutique Blu Ray labels might have a chance of putting some of these out at some point (I’m looking at you Severin and Vinegar Syndrome... not to mention AGFA, of course). One caveat on this section is, I believe all the films are listed under the titles on these particular release prints so, in the case of a few titles, these aren’t necessarily the title the film is best known by these days.

The third section, The Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame, is comprised of essays by various writers, some very famous in critical circles, writing about key directors, producers or actors who would have been represented in a big way in the Weird Wednesday slot. So you have the following ‘personalities’ - Al Adamson, Andy Milligan, Arthur Marks, Claudia Jennings, Eddie Romero, Gary Kent, George ‘Buck’ Flower, Henry Silva, Jamaa Fanaka, Jess Franco, Joe Sarno, John Carradine, John Saxon, Laura Gemser, Lee Frost & Wes Bishop, Matt Cimber, Mimsy Farmer, Stephanie Rothman, Susan Tyrrell and Vic Diaz - written by such notables as Tim Lucas, Lars Nilsen, Kier-La Janisse, Stephen Thrower, Maitland McDonagh, Kat Ellinger and, in a bizarre occurrence of one of the subjects of a subsection writing about somebody else, Gary Kent.

Finally, the epilogue, The Birth Of AGFA, details how the archivists working at the Alamo started off AGFA to try and preserve these films for future generations. Okay, so if you’re living outside of America like me (and every other person I’ve mentioned AGFA to)... we’re not talking about the very famous printing and IT solutions company, which has been around for decades. We’re talking about the American Genre Film Archive, which specialises in keeping these prints in their best condition and loaning them out for screenings. Not to mention of course, their Blu Ray label which has been releasing some of these movies into the ‘home video wild’, partnering up with the likes of Vinegar Syndrome and, just recently in the UK, 101 Films.

And, yeah, all in all this is a brilliant and informative reference book which would delight, I’m sure, any cineaste who is open minded enough to recognise the obvious merit of rescuing these trashy titles from oblivion and preserving and showing them for the hidden treasures they often are. I did have two very minor problems with the book (because, I have to find something, right?) which are probably not worth mentioning but I will anyway.

One is that two of the films in the Compendium section have had their titles missed out. One of them I could figure out by the accompanying artwork and, luckily for me, I’d seen the other film so I knew exactly the title relating to the description. The book is really well designed, actually, with some superb layouts so, I bet the designer who put this one together is kicking themselves for the oversight. It’s a bit of a shame.

The other slight problem I had was the scorn that some of the programmers and writers in the early sections of the book were pouring on the idea of a film being ‘so bad it’s good’. Now, I have no problem with that particular phraseology and mindset because, unlike the supposed perception of it here, I don’t automatically use this term myself as a particular form of disrespect to the people who worked on these movies. I can imagine how hard it must be to get any of these things made and, even if I do find them funny in their incompetence at some level, it’s never intended as a mean spirited engagement with the film, for sure. However, I can completely respect this attitude and I would have been fine with it... if not for the fact that many of the descriptions in the Compendium section, written by some of these same people, certainly do seem to be trading on that very ‘so bad and ridiculous its laughable’ kind of attitude... so, yeah, I’m not going to lose any sleep over this one, for sure.

And that’s me done with one of the more valuable, illuminating and entertaining film books for anyone’s personal library. Warped & Faded is a real gem of a tome and worth the debilitating shipping fees required to ship this from Mondo in the US, who put this one out and are pretty much the only place you can get it to the UK from. I can’t say I regret my decision to purchase because I’ve had a really great time with this one and I think there’s a very strong audience for this book. You don’t want to miss out on this one, for sure.

The Naughty Stewardesses/Blazing Stewardesses

Bosoms And Boeings

The Naughty Stewardesses
USA 1973 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Blazing Stewardesses
USA 1975 Directed by Al Adamson
IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Well... okay, so softcore sexploitation pictures aren’t exactly my usual stomping ground (not necessarily by choice) so I thought I’d review the next two films in Severin’s gorgeous Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection as a double bill as they comprise The Naughty Stewardesses and its direct sequel, Blazing Stewardesses. Now, as it happens I made the right choice because, although as you’ll see, I grew into the spirit of the first film very quickly... the sequel is a huge mess of a production which I probably wouldn’t have had enough to say about (especially good things) to sustain its own review anyway so... okay, lets start with the first movie.

The Naughty Stewardesses starts off with a nice enough, very 1970s feeling animated title sequence identifying the stars of the film in little photos plus moving handbags and wing insignias. And, then we move into an opening set up of three of the four title stewardesses... including Marilyn Joi as Barbara... on a plane, talking about various sex positions engaged in while flying (and now I’ve got my eye in with Al Adamson’s films, I can tell you one of the passengers in this scene is an uncredited Regina Carrol). I have to mention right here that the interiors of the airplane sets are pretty much as authentic looking as the spaceship interiors on Horror Of The Blood Monsters (reviewed here)... that is to say, not at all. One of the girls incites one of the pilots to demonstrate that ‘it’ can be done standing up. Meanwhile, a woman on her way to her day job in a ‘massage parlour’ picks up a hitchhiker and explains she’ll soon be joining an airline company as a stewardess. Her name is Debbie, as played by Connie Hoffman and... I’ll get back to her in a minute because she’s one of the reasons this film didn’t just fall flat on its face with me.

Okay, so the film goes from bad to worse as we have a birthday party where a guy is wheeled in, covered in icing like a cake, for one of the girls and there's lots of red blooded male sex antics which are pretty much on the level of Porkys (another film I’ve always kinda hated). And at this point I was pretty much telling myself, ‘This is for the blog, I should sit through this’ when... things suddenly take an upward turn and the movie gets really engaging and, also, kind of dark in places. There’s several dollops of nudity and over the top exaggerated sex of course, which are always very welcome but, I believe Adamson couldn’t direct a sex movie if he tried and I know he was very reluctant to do this movie but, yeah, this jettisons the adolescent overtones very quickly and his soft core sequences have all the credibility of a modern Japanese porn film which, if you’ve ever tried to watch a snippet of one, you’ll know is pretty ridiculous.

Debbie, it turns out, even when shedding her clothes for the odd scene, is actually both a tragic and sincere character. She moves in with the other three stewardesses and then meets, on one of her first plane trips, a very rich, old World War Two vet who saves the life of one of the other passengers. His name is Brewster, played by the old Western actor Robert Livingston (who surprisingly, considering his age here, gets the lion's share of the simulated sex scenes too). Anyway Debbie becomes friends with Brewster and, afterwards, accidentally meets an amateur photographer/taxi driver who takes some nice modelling shots of her. However, this is where things all go wrong for Debbie because, photo-boy really isn’t all there. In fact, even as he accompanies Debbie to a party and gets offered a job shooting a porn film, Locked Loins, by a director of such movies, we can see that he might be a bit of a psycho.

And then he also turns out to be a member of a terrorist organisation called the People’s Liberation Army. Along with the porn director, he kidnaps Debbie and two of her fellow stewardesses and takes them to a cabin, to ransom back to Brewster for fifty thousand dollars. Why they would have the rendezvous point so close to where the cabin is would be anybody’s guess but when Debbie escapes and gets involved in a little chase across the snow, I have to say that it looks like the same landscape that Adamson used for the final scenes of Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here). Brewster brings one of his rifles and, accompanied by the fourth of the stewardesses, who he’s also sexing up on the side, he shoots the psycho dead and it all ends in tears.

And it’s a not bad film, in all honesty. Between Adamson’s bleak turn and the performances of Marilyn Joi (billed in this and the sequel as Tracy King) and especially Connie Hoffman as the thoughtful Debbie, I was actually quite taken with this movie once I’d got the first ten minutes out of the way. One of the expectations in this kind of film, I would guess, would be that the girls would all be fairly dumb but the four stewardesses are all quite intelligent, strong female roles who just happen to enjoy sex... which really helps the viewer engage with the various ‘almost but not quite sexy’ elements of the movie. Again, like early Adamson actress Vicki Volante, it’s a shame that Connie Hoffman only made a handful of films because she really has amazing screen presence in this. Possibly her best known role was as a recurring character called Orange in two episodes of Starsky and Hutch.

There are the usual strange choices you seem to find in all of the Adamson films I’ve seen so far, such as the attempted rape of Debbie by the impotent psycho photo boy at the cabin where he’s holding the girls for ransom, being scored with music that sounds like it came straight out of a 1970s funky action movie. And, knowing the director as I do now from this box set, I wouldn’t be surprised if that is exactly where it comes from. I don’t know who came up with the idea of a ‘weird sex device’ handcrafted by Brewster, which is just a basket chair which yo-yos up and down from the ceiling but, as seen in this movie, it’s pretty impractical and not something I can imagine selling very well at a sex shop.  There are also a lot of ‘filler’ montages of the girls wandering around various locations like Las Vegas and so on which are actually quite easy on the eye and... also something I am accustomed to seeing now in this director’s movies. One thing is for sure, though, this is not your atypical ‘sex romp’ and, while the same can also be said for the sequel... um... yeah, lets get to that one now.

Okay, so after the phenomenal success that The Naughty Stewardesses got at the box office, Adamson was asked to helm a sequel... which he did in the form of Blazing Stewardesses, with three main performers coming back in the form of Robert Livingston, Connie Hoffman and Marilyn Joi reprising their characters from the first film. A third stewardess, who doesn’t take her clothes off in this film, is Adamson’s wife Regina Carrol, playing a completely dumb version of a stewardess, complete with comical voice and, frankly, although I’m sure this particular performance has its admirers and certainly had my jaws agape, it’s definitely scoring high on my ‘what were you thinking?’ chart of bizarre acting choices in a movie. It’s like watching a road accident in horror and fascination as it plays out right before your eyes but, to be fair, that’s totally appropriate to this mess of a movie, which does the same thing on all levels.

Although there are two nude scenes near the front end of the film, none of them feature the title characters and that’s pretty much it for any pretence of a) being the sex romp it’s purported to be and b) having anything to do with airplanes either, apart from the first ten minutes. Instead, after Debbie finds her future husband in bed with a another girl, she gets an invite for her and her two stewardess friends to host the opening of a new gambling ranch that her friend Brewster has opened. They accept and arrive at the ranch, along with a load of customers but, complications ensue as a bunch of cloaked and masked marauders have been hijacking Brewster’s employees and also making sure the gambling equipment he buys doesn’t make it to the ranch. If this sounds like an old timey western plot to you, that was definitely Adamson’s intention. The opening titles has cartoon figures of bikini clad stewardesses dancing around in front of shots of cowboys (presumably the title was also trying to cash in on Blazing Saddles). Even the music in the scenes with the ‘bad guys’ plays out like a 1950s Republic western score and, again, knowing Adamson that might be exactly where he purloined the cues.

Behind the plot, unknown to the others, is the madam of the neighbouring whorehouse The Beehive, played by an ageing Yvonne De Carlo, of The Munsters fame. Also on hand are... the two surviving members of The Ritz Brothers, who hadn’t been in a movie since 1943 (The Three Stooges were originally lined up for this and I believe even rehearsed some of their material but were unable to do it due to ill health and ultimately death). Now, I don’t know what The Ritz Brothers’ act was but I get a pretty good idea of it from their antics here and they do a little dance, plays cards badly, get vaguely sex addled by Regina Carrol and share a giant sandwich. I’m not sure now that I would ever watch a Ritz Brothers movie after seeing this but... you never know.

So there’s not too much of the stewardesses in the film at all, just a lot of mostly bad comedy routines and some ‘sped up’ cowboy chase footage. Other things on offer are a dodgy looking arab who we cut back to every now and again, as he tries to find oil on the ranch and, somehow, Adams manages to work in one of those exploding, rolling car shots of footage from one of his earlier movies. If this film actually hit enough right notes it could rightly be called a ‘laugh riot’ but, honestly, there wasn’t any laughing coming from me and, although I found the film interesting (like watching a train wreck happen right next to you), I’d have to say it’s one of the worst films I’ve ever seen from this director. It totally hits the wrong notes throughout its running time which is a shame because, as I said, the first film was actually quite engaging.

So that’s it for me with these two. I’d recommend The Naughty Stewardesses to anyone who knows what they’re getting into and I’ll almost certainly watch it again some day. Blazing Stewardesses is a terrible mess, however... I really would give that one a hard pass. One of the extras in this is a nicely researched mini documentary about the real life phenomenon of the air stewardess and their iconic role in popular culture called Fly Girls - The Stewardess As Lifestyle Icon In The Golden Age Of The Exploitation Film, written and narrated by the living legend film programmer and writer Kier-La Janisse (I reviewed one of her amazing books on film here). It’s an interesting look at the subject matter and, frankly, worth it’s weight in comical gold for the brief shot at the start which shows Ms. Janisse in a stewardess unform herself. Another nice addition from Severin, also included on the disc, is the Adamson directed ‘gluing scenes’ from the unrelated release Bedroom Stewardesses (which I haven’t had time to watch yet but I’ll get to it at some point, I guess). So yeah, one hit, one miss and I’ll get to some more Adamson ‘masterpieces’ soon.

Lost Girls

Wander Women

Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin
Edited by Samm Deighan
Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9780992146320

I’ve been an admirer of Kier-La Janisse since I first read her excellent tome House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (reviewed here). At the time I think I called it the best book on the overall range of those specific film genres I’d read and I still feel that way. I remember she wrote it, in part, as a reaction to a documentary movie made about her and her Cinemeurte Film Festival, called Celluloid Horror (reviewed here) which is a movie I also think a lot of. So when I heard through the Twitter grapevine that her book label Spectacular Optical was involved in putting together a volume on the cinema of Jean Rollin, one of my favourite French directors, it would be true to say this went straight to the top of my obscure objects of desire list.

That being said, when the book was finally released, it seemed the only way you could get a copy was through the Spectacular Optical website and with a price tag of around $36 ($46 Canadian) with an added cost of postage to the United Kingdom (where I am) which far exceeded the price of the actual tome, if memory serves... well I just couldn’t justify paying that much to get a copy... and believe me, I tried every possible way of getting one into the country via UK stores and sellers that I could think of.

Luckily for me, Ms. Janisse is also heavily involved with The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies which has been running in a couple of countries the last year or two and a couple of the writers who contributed essays to this book... Virginie Sélavy and Marcelle Perks... were there to give a seminar called Virgins and Vampires: Gothic Damsels and Final Girls in the Cinema of Jean Rollin. I figured it was a safe bet to assume they would have a few copies of Lost Girls to sell at this thing so I and a friend booked ourselves a ticket and... well, while the number of the books they sold was finished up well before the end of the entrance queue, I made sure I was one of the first in line and snapped up a copy of this truly excellent publication for the more than fair sum of only 20 English pounds. Furthermore, I was able to get the book signed by both ladies on the night and it would be true to say that I and my friend were very happy that we decided to buy this thing before the start of the lecture and not at the end, when all the copies had been sold.

One of the reasons I was particularly interested in having a book on Jean Rollin is because there just is not much written about him in English. I have both the other books I know of specifically about Rollin in my native tongue... Psychedelic Sex Vampires by Jack Hunter (a somewhat slight tone in terms of textual content, from what I remember) and the excellent Fascination: The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin by David Hinds (which I reviewed here). I’d like to be able to say that either Hinds book or this one is the superior volume but, truth be told, they are both very different kinds of books on Rollin and I think they are both worth reading.

One of Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin big marketing points was that it’s a collection of essays on Rollin which is from purely female contributors. Now, being a man, I can’t really see why that was flagged as a selling point... after all, I’m sure there must be some ‘men only’ collected tomes on a whole variety of subjects out there somewhere too and I don’t see what the sex of the writers has to do with anything but, in her afterword to the book, Kier-La Janisse explains exactly why she felt this was a good idea and, yeah, I can... kinda... see where she’s coming from.

The first thing you will notice about the book itself is that it’s absolutely beautifully designed and illustrated. The illustrations are by Jessica Seamans and the layouts are by Ms. Janisse herself. Both aspects are stunning and, with my pernickety designer head on, I only noticed one minor typographical error, where the text flow seems to have gone wrong around a picture, so I was pretty pleased. Each chapter has its own black and white header illustration around the number and the other thing which fans of Rollin will notice is that it has a vast amount of photographic stills accompanying the movies talked about in these pages. I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many photos from Rollin productions all in one place before... or as beautifully reproduced as those in here are and it’s another reason why this book should be on the shelf of any lover of this director’s work.

The book starts off with a chapter entitled Le Viol du Vampire and the Last Surrealist Riot and it’s written, in a very informative manner, by Gianna D'Emilio. This talks about the production and reception of Rollin’s first feature film Le Viol Du Vampire and the way it was put together as two parts of a serial masquerading as a feature. And you get loads of little anecdotes here about this one... some of them the usual suspects but mixed in with a fair few stories which I wasn’t aware of. Stuff like the awful hotel putting up the cast and crew running out of toilet paper so, after eight days, the various copies of the script were either lost in the woods or used as a replacement for the absent bathroom equipment. The writer duly notes the stylistic influences from surrealism via the likes of Cocteau and Bunuel and mentions that one of the reasons for the riots and death threats at the screenings may have been because of the specific artistic sensibility of this piece as opposed to other vampire films popular at the time (such as Hammer’s contemporaneous release, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave). She also mentions that this film has the only existing footage of the old Grand Guignol Theatre before it was refurbished (for more info on the Grand Guignol, click here).

Actually, the difference between Rollin’s work in the vampire genre compared to many film makers over the decades is something that a lot of the contributors here choose to pick up on. For instance, in Heather Drain’s chapter Disgracing The Family Name: Vampirism and Societal Rebellion in Le Frisson Des Vampires (aka Shiver Of The Vampires) she points out the way the director used vampires to explore them as a family unit while in editor Samm Deighan’s chapter The Thing In The Coffin: Jean Rollin’s Female Vampire as Romantic Liberator, she makes the observation that the vampires in these films are much more likely to be companionable rather than predatory creatures. Deighan further looks at the way females in general are handled in another of her essays, Blood Sisters: Female Intimacy in Jean Rollin’s Contes De Fées and points out the way they are often portrayed in duos or groups and the way they are elevated with a fairytale sensibility which, again, sets them apart from the work of a fair few other directors in these kinds of genres.

Now I’m not going to go through every essay chapter in this book but I will pick out a few more of them here. In all but one specific case I found the writing to be a mixture of optimistic appreciation of the director’s work, written extremely enthusiastically from a place of knowledge and, in almost every case, the writer was able to dispense that knowledge in the most understandable and entertaining way possible. That being said, one of the earlier essays struck me as being the exact opposite of this but... I’m not going to name the writer or the title of the piece because that just wouldn’t be nice and, also, just because I thought it was the worst thing here doesn’t mean everyone else can’t see the worth in it. I may just be incredibly stupid when it comes to this kind of thing but one in particular seemed to be bringing in a lot of esoteric references without really making any point, it seemed to me.

But for me that one essay was really the exception to the rule... which is a pretty good ‘hit rate’ if you think about it. Let me just pick out a few more chapters of interest, though, before I finish this.

The Zombie-Gore-Disaster Film... Jean Rollin Style by Michelle Alexander is a really interesting one as she points out how topical, real life disaster stories of the time would have inspired, or at least informed, the plots to films like The Grapes Of Death (and probably also Jorge Grau’s The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue, I would imagine) with their sobering stories of chemical leaks and agriculture gone wrong. She also talks about the possibility of the deaths of some of the Bader-Meinhof Group in prison being an influence on Rollin’s Night Of The Hunted, which I found kinda interesting (I remember next to nothing of Bader-Meinhof being on the news when I was a kid so I need to watch the movie they made about them and get up to speed, I guess).

Alexandra Heller Nicholas’ chapter Les Démoniaques: Politics, Poetry and the Supernatural Rape-Revenge Film makes the curious point that the follow through on the inevitable revenge in such movies is often abandoned by the main protagonists in a Rollin film, as they get distracted or have other priorities coming to the forefront.

Serials in Soulless Cities: Les Trottoirs De Bangkok and Killing Car by Gianna D'Emilio looks more closely at the way Feuillade's serials of the silent era have influenced Rollin, specifically in regard to these two movies. She also looks at the way that Asian stereotypes are somewhat overturned in these, as opposed to one of Rollin's chiefly named influences, The Mask Of Fu Manchu. Meanwhile, one of Samm Deighan’s chapters, Phantasmes: Jean Rollin's Hardcore Reveries and Work For Hire, gives more of an overview, a welcome one, of some of his lesser seen work (in this country) and is good for trying to work out which, if any, of these specific movies from the director’s portfolio are worth tracking down.

My favourite chapter, however, has to be Virginie Sélavy’s wonderful Castles of Subversion Continues: From the Roman Noir and Surrealism, which looks at Rollin’s use of castles in his movies. For instance, out of his 20 main features (as in his personal projects, the one the majority of his fan base will be more familiar with), 12 of them feature castles of some description. She makes the point that they appear as ancient artefacts in the modern world where they shouldn’t necessarily be or fit in, creating an artificial environment and looking at the way Rollin perhaps uses the architectural atmosphere as a kind of mental space for his characters. She picks up that castles, the famous Rollin beach and cemeteries are anchor points signalling man’s futile battle against time and decay as these places often display physical manifestations of being run down or, quite literally, covered in floral history (so to speak).

As I said, I’m not going to go through the contents of every chapter of this for the purposes of this makeshift review but hopefully you’ll see that this is a thorough and very useful, not to mention spectacular, book to have on your movie bookshelf. The afterword chapter, by Kier La Janisse herself, is similarly wondrous in that she uses her own recollections of Rollin from his visit to her Cinemeurte Festival and beyond, along with various other somewhat authoritative voices on the director in terms of their initial experiences of his work (such as Tim Lucas, who wrote one of the greatest movie books ever with his monolithic study of Mario Bava, All The Colours Of The Dark), to pay a loving tribute to the man and his work to round things off.

And that’s about all I can say about this one now unless I want to be writing for a good many more hours than there are left in the day. Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin is truly one of the most interesting collections of essays looking at a particularly neglected (in English language print) body of work from one of the great, somewhat surrealistic French directors of the last 50 or so years. Definitely worth the price of purchase and, I have to say, I am so glad I went to that seminar last year to be able to get myself a copy (yeah, the seminar was pretty cool too, by the way).

The spectacular optical website is here and the Miskatonic website is here. Go explore.

Celluloid Horror

Scare Necessities

Celluloid Horror
2004 Canada
Directed by Ashley Fester
DVD Region 0

Celluloid Horror is a documentary feature film which focuses on troubled but transformed soul Kier-La Janisse’s crusade to get a legitimate horror film festival up and running in Canada. Tirelessly dogging her goal and mining her passion for film, specifically movies which, arguably, fall into the horror and exploitation categories, into a much loved and well attended event which ran for several years.

I first became aware of the existence of this documentary about Janisse from the introduction to her book, House Of Psychotic Women. I read that earlier in the year and was pleasantly surprised by what a knowledgable and entertaining read it was... there’s a reason why I called it, pretty much, the best book on the exploitation and horror genre in film I’d ever read and, if you want to read my review of that book, you can click here. 

Although this film has less of the “case history” of Janisse in it, one of the things which helped make the book so unique and fascinating in its approach, I was pleased to see some of the real life “characters” of her past, such as “Warren Oates Dad” and “George C. Scott Dad” making brief appearances in the documentary, so I could put some faces to names. The film certainly lets you get an alternate flavour of the woman and her tireless energy in making quite daunting things happen for her creation, the Cine Muerte festival. It’s a pretty entertaining piece and it seems to be less angled at painting a specific bias or promoting a hidden agenda in its focus... which is unusual for a documentary, to be honest. The only real pitch it seems to be going for is all out fun and the promotion, vicariously through the lady in question, of the legitimacy of horror and exploitation cinema as a serious artistic pursuit in and of itself. Hey, no argument from me on that one. Preaching to the converted.

The film struck a cord with me because of the naivety of Janisse when she started trying to get films for the very first festival, in regards to the kind of money involved. I myself had been looking into getting into programming screenings a few years ago but a seminar on just how to do it left my face white with the amount of money in different kinds of licences you have to pay out just to get one film screened... and that’s assuming you can even get in contact with the various rights holders. When I looked at the amount of time I would have to put in and the various other factors involved in that particular route to regular screenings, I realised there just wasn’t enough flexibility in my day-to-day existence for me to fit it in around my work life. Fortunately for Janisse, it looks like she was in a position at the time where she could just about drop stuff in her life to pursue these passions... but that’s not to say it was in any way easy, far from it. You have to admire her tenacity in her pursuit and there are several stories highlighted in the film which show her importance within the realm in which she has chosen to plough her love for film into something which can be beneficial for her audience... even if it means taking a loss on it. There’s an interesting anecdote about French vampire surrealist Jean Rollin, for example, and the long journey to getting even a willing participant such as him to turn up as a guest at the festival.

Also, she was one of the people championing The Isle, a great movie I was trying to push to people’s attention back around about the start of the millennium (I believe the UK DVD is still sliced to buggery by the BBFC, so grab a Hong Kong edition if possible). I didn’t realise she was actively involved with getting it screened in Canada but that gives her even more brownie points in my little black book, as far as I’m concerned. More importantly, she got the ban lifted on Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik in Canada, by being quite shrewd and challenging the censors at an appeal level by spotting their deliberate agenda based ommissions from their own case against lifting the ban and using it against them. So.... one smart cookie.

Also, between her excellent book House Of Psychotic Women and this documentary, it’s even made me kind of interested in seeing the Nekromantik films too... something I wasn’t all that bothered with until now... so that’s kind of interesting (luckily for me, Arrow Films are releasing an uncut blu ray in the UK this year... so I shouldn’t have too long to wait).

The documentary is really well put together and uses a lot of clips from genre films to either illustrate, decorate or, occasionally, push a point someone is making, and this is all well and good. Some of the footage is not footage which is certified over here in the UK actually (and I’m thinking of an animal killing from Cannibal Holocaust) so that’s all really interesting. And, of course, you also get to see the audience reactions a little bit when she screens some of these films at Cine Muerte... which is kinda fun.

And talking of fun, I think my favourite bit is the footage when she manages to get Udo Kier over for a week. He’s a cool guy and it’s just brilliant when, because subtitled prints haven’t arrived in some cases, Udo, Kier-La and a bunch of her friends “live dub” some of the films for the audience as they are watching the film. There’s some footage of them all trying to dub the excellent giallo Black Belly Of The Tarantula, for instance, and Kier-La is just trying to keep a straight face while saying her lines and just failing hilariously throughout. This is brilliant stuff. And to top it off, at the end of Udo’s week, they present him with an award in the form of a giant sized bottle of J&B whiskey with the inscription “For Lifetime Achievement In Eurotrash - Udo Kier”. I’m sure lots of my readers are regular J&B spotters, as they always turned up in a lot of gialli, police thrillers and various other Italian exploitation films throughout the 1960s and 1970s... so the form of the award is totally appropriate. They go on to confirm that Udo drank the bottle full of whiskey that night... which is another thing that cements his cool, wild man reputation, for me.

So that’s it for this one. A cool documentary which tends to use the music of Goblin quite a lot, specifically the main themes from Suspiria and Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso), which is kinda puzzling actually because I don’t remember director Dario Argento even getting a mention in this movie... but still, a really entertaining piece and one that gives you a nice look at the bubbly enthusiasm of Kier-La Janisse, which is not how I’d imagined her when I read her truly excellent book House Of Psychotic Women (again, that book reviewed here). Definitely worth a watch and there are some nice extras on the DVD, including a segment of the film which was heavily truncated in the documentary itself, restored as a lengthy segment, and the full interview with Kier-La Janisse and Udo Kier on a talk show... not to mention a whole load of exciting photos and things of that ilk. Definitely worth a look if you can get your hands on a copy. See Celluloid Horror if you are into scary, gory movies and exploitation but, absolutely, definitely, make sure you read Janisse’s excellent autobiographical genre study House Of Psychotic Women too... both these things are well worth your time.

House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

Top Kier

House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films
by Kier-La Janisse 
FAB Press 
ISBN: 978-1903254691

Wow. This book is really great.

You know, when you get to my age and you start reading books about your passions - in this case the art of film  - you start realising that a lot of factual errors are getting into print these days. I can only conclude that a lot of the people writing these things are way younger than me, do not know quite what they’re talking about and, worse, don’t have anyone at their publishing house checking their facts. Either that or they’re all very ancient and suffering from senility or some such unfortunate condition.

I’ve also noticed a lot of spelling mistakes creeping into print these days too... which I find almost inexcusable.

Kier-La Janisse’s mouthful title of a book, House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films, doesn’t suffer from any of this stuff and, I have to say, it’s certainly the most interesting book I’ve read on genre film, and one of the best tomes on any kinds of film history that I’ve read in a long time. I’m not saying it doesn’t have any faults... you know me, I always find something to complain about, but those faults don’t stem from the writing in any way (yeah, don’t worry, I’ll get to them later).

One of the things that make this book seem like a breath of fresh air in a wilderness of genre studies is the approach to roughly the first half of the book... it’s actually like having two heavily illustrated books in one, which is a bargain. The two halves are split by a generous section of colour photographs highlighting posters and film stills from various movies discussed here, with the second half being an absolutely invaluable appendix section of alphabetical reviews of some of the author’s favourite films that have a prominent psychotic woman. Some of the entries in this section are quite small but, in those cases, it’s because the writer has already covered those films in more detail in the first half of the book.

And the first half of the book just blew me away.

The author has been a film programmer for various famous cinematic venues in America but, she is also a self confessed psychotic woman... her term for a quick character reference, not mine. It is this bold revelation which gives the thrust of the title and its contents, of course. The whole first half of the book deals with her own bad behaviour and mental insecurities and expressions but she choses to tell her story in a convoluted and wildly entertaining way... by comparing her true life experiences of various traumatic episodes with those of her favourite, female, celluloid psychos and so, each chapter covers a few films which she briefly summarises, passes critical judgement on and then relates back to her own life in some way. This is fantastic stuff.

Just to give you a quick taste, here’s a quote from the book where she’s talking about a documentary film made about her called Celluloid Horror (it’s on my "to acquire" list):

“... my adolescent propensity for physical violence, my history in group homes, foster homes and detention centres, and the years of involuntary therapy that only encouraged my rebellion further. Most painful of all, it captured the disintegration of my brief marriage.”

And that’s just from the introduction.

What’s marvellous about this work is the author's ability to look at her own life history, good and bad, and treat it with an objective and critical eye, which demonstrates both her intelligence to question and rationalise it... before she feeds it back into certain psychotic women from various horror and exploitation movies made over the years. I don’t know who this woman is but she “had me” from the opening pages and I became an ardent admirer of her writing style, expressive flourishes and insight very quickly. I didn’t always agree with her judgements of certain characters or inclusions, particularly in the case of Four Flies On Grey Velvet and Morvern Callar... but that’s okay. I’m surprised I agreed with so much stuff she was saying.

Another good thing which came out of this book, asides from a really great read on this kind of material, is the fact that I now have a lot more films I need to see... which I find quite amazing. When I read books on horror and exploitation... and Janisse doesn’t fall into the trap of mistaking one for the other, as a lot of writers do... I usually have a short list of about four or five films which have managed to get past me and which I would like to add to my growing backlog of movies to watch. This time I came away with a list of 37 movies I definitely need to see. That’s a lot and, the worst of that is, I reckon at least half of them aren’t commercially available either. Time to start asking around at the Westminster and Camden film fairs again, methinks. But this is all good stuff and it was the final straw that brought me to finally purchase Zulawski’s Possession and watch the damn thing (expect a perplexed and bewildered review of that movie on this blog sometime in the next few weeks).

I said there were a couple of not so good things about this book and they both stem from the design... which is interesting. The thing is, the layout of the book looks great... but it’s not so functional or practical.

The length of line, for example, is way greater than the 12 - 16 words you would get in the majority of books and so the strain from both concentration and eye flick is appalling. Coupled with this, the print in the book is really tiny. It looks like it’s 8pt or something and although there’s a lot of content and this may have forced the decision from a financial issue, I think this was a big mistake. I had some trouble but the psychotherapist/counsellor I showed it to over a stolen lunch hour found it so difficult to focus that I know there’s no way she would ever read it in this form... which is a shame. And, of course, the small print also contributes to that problem with “length of line”. If the publishers were this dead set on going down to this size then I would have preferred to have read it either double or triple columned, if truth be told (which also lessens the page count, as a bizarre typographic symptom... something I always find amazing, even when I know the science behind it). Note to the publishers: there’s so much content in this book that, if you’d have blown the type up a few points and then published it as two separate volumes, I would have happily shelled out double the money for the same content dressed differently. It would have been an even easier read than it already is, too.

That aside, Kier-La Janisse’s House Of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films is easily one of the coolest, riveting and entertaining books I’ve read on film in a good few years. I would recommend this wholeheartedly to anyone who is into horror and/or exploitation films and, also, for anyone who is into the idea of a “case study” owning her own perceived neurosis and converting it into something knowledgable which enriches other peoples lives through what can be learnt from it. An absolutely invaluable resource and a truly interesting work from a truly interesting character. One of my few “must reads” of the year.

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