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Saturday, February 09, 2008

Mr. India

Release Year: 1987
Country: India
Starring: Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Amrish Puri, Ashok Kumar, Satish Kaushik, Bob Christo, Sharat Saxena.
Writer: Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Cinematographer: Baba Azmi
Music: Laxmikant-Pyarelal
Producer: Boney Kapoor
Availability: Buy it from India Weekly.

There is a particular style of courtship presented in Bollywood movies that can be a bit of a tough go-around for Western viewers trying to dabble in that cinema. This courtship begins, predictably, with boy meeting girl. But while boy is immediately smitten by girl, girl loathes boy - because she is either A) a stuck-up rich girl who cannot see beyond boy's modest circumstances, or B) a virtuous village girl who cannot see past boy's frivolous and free-spending ways. In either case, boy does not give up, and instead strives to make himself a near constant presence in girl's life, popping up with a new, even more spirited attempt to ingratiate himself whenever she least expects it. Finally, by dint of boy's persistence and omnipresence, girl's resistance is worn down and she has no choice but to look past her prejudices and see the kind, tender and - above all - mother worshipping heart that beats within boy. Love blossoms.

Now, many of us would call this particular type of courtship "stalking". And not only is it widely illegal, but it also proves to have markedly less real-world effectiveness in winning the affections of one's object of desire than these movies might have you think. At the same time, however, the process of winning hearts through attrition that it represents is also, in my experience, the way that Bollywood movies themselves work. For, unlike your typical Hollywood crowd-pleasers--which attempt to "suck you in" immediately by way of brute narrative drive--Bollywood films often seem to throw obstacle in your path, greeting you with a host of elements that are certain Kryptonite to self-considered persons of taste, and then go on, by way of sheer duration and an unflagging eagerness to please, to slowly and subtly chip away at the defenses, until to not fully embrace what's being presented seems like it could only be the result of some dire character flaw. Indeed, many of the Bollywood films that have ended up being my favorites found their initial volleys of goofy artifice and over-obvious appeals to sentiment bouncing right off of the hard, frozen shell of my cynical heart. But at some point--usually right near the end of their second hour--I found that that same resistant heart, without my knowing it, had gradually begun to beat along with the movie's persistent rhythm, and was now being played by it like a well-strung Stradivarius. It is this slow process of seduction, I believe, that makes watching Bollywood films so addictive, the reason that anyone who makes it past the initial hurdles presented by the experience will find themselves irretrievably hooked.

Take, 1987's Mr. India, for instance. The film boasts alternately maudlin and jingoistic appeals to patriotism, a small army of aggressively cute children who are shamelessly exploited for cheap pathos whenever the script requires, broad physical comedy of the slide-whistle and bass drum variety, and a corny super hero plot that doesn't even get going until halfway through the film's three hour running time--all elements that would seem lab-tested to make Mr. India hard to love by anyone with a sensible thought in their head. Nonetheless, as much as I tried to distance myself by taking in Mr. India as an inept freak show loaded with overheated propaganda, there came that fateful moment during the second hour, right after one of those child-fueled moments of cheap pathos, when I felt a familiar lump growing in my throat. And with that lump came a strangled, tear-choked voice, urging the hero on to avenge the terrible wrong that had been done: "You get those bastards, Mr. India!" And that voice, as if I needed to tell you, was my own. Mr. India had totally made me its bitch.

Mr. India begins with a visit to the vast secret island fortress of Mogambo, a super villain played by the fearsomely-browed Amrish Puri, a frequent Bollywood movie super villain who--as any American reviewer of his movies is required by law to state--is known in the West for his turn as the bad guy in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Mogambo, for seemingly no particular reason, really hates India, and he expresses that hatred by loading the country with illegal drugs, adulterating the grain supply with stones, and generally making life crappy for the average Indian. Judging from the somewhat paranoid tone of Mr. India's nationalistic drum-beating, I'm guessing that Mogambo represents pretty much every country that's not India--but especially that country that's not India whose name rhymes with "Snack-i-stan". At Mogambo's command is an army of foot soldiers so devoted that they will throw themselves into a pit of acid at his bidding just because he thinks it would be funny. He also has in his employ the one and only Doctor Fu Manchu, who is just as risible a stereotype when portrayed by Asians. Mogambo is clearly an object of worship to these various minions, and each greets his every move and utterance with a Hitler salute and a cry of "Hail Mogambo!" In reply--and with a frequency intended to insure you never forget that This Is The Catch Phrase--Mogambo invariably purrs, "Mogambo is pleased".

It turns out that Mogambo needs a new base of operations on India's coast to facilitate his import of horror into the country, and it just so happens that the ideal spot is the home of Arun, played by Anil Kapoor (Taal, 1942: A Love Story). Arun is a gentle soul of modest means whose generous spirit makes him apparently unable to resist any orphan, which has lead to his home being filled with an assortment of cloyingly adorable urchins. Arun is also the son of a late scientist who, unknown to Arun, created an invisibility device that Mogambo has unsuccessfully been trying to get his hands on for years. Of course, this fact will not become relevant until much later in Mr. India, since the film's first half is largely taken up by a "save the orphanage" plot arising from Mogambo's repeated attempts--using Arun's unscrupulous landlord as a proxy--to oust Arun and the kids from their home. Amid this business we are introduced to Seema (Sridevi), a reporter whose resonant pluckiness and girly-ness reminds us that the Christopher Reeve/Margot Kidder Superman movies were still being made in 1987. Through a typically convoluted set of circumstances, Seema becomes a boarder in Arun's home--and, as such, comes to be something of an audience surrogate, as Arun and the children's monotonous toothsome-ness and good cheer will come to slowly wear her down from a state of unqualified revulsion to one of exhausted acceptance and ultimately, actual fondness (though the rest of us probably won't go quite that far).

It is not until Mogambo's goons resort to actual strong-arm tactics against Arun and his toddler army that the hyperactive machinations of Mr. India's plot see fit to put in Arun's hands his father's invisibility bracelet. It is with this newfound power that Arun becomes Mr. India, a symbol (though, interestingly, an invisible one) of the Indian common man, bent on wiping out all those who would undermine his beloved mother country. In the course of what follows, some of the more memorable examples of Arun's pro-Indian payback include him forcing one of Mogambo's goons to eat a mouthful of the stones used to adulterate the country's grain, followed by him taking the goon's feast laden table from the posh restaurant in which he'd been seated and placing it down in front of a starving family huddled on the street outside. In another instance, Mr. India terrorizes one of Mogambo's associates, a decadent Englishman seeking to trade arms and drugs for Indian national treasures (Bob Christo, a familiar face in Bollywood thanks to his go-to-guy for evil whitey roles status), into kneeling in trembling worship before the Hindu god Hanuman. All of this makes Mr. India quite popular with the public, and it's not long before Mogambo is raising a gloved fist and uttering his name through tightly clenched teeth. Seema, on the other hand, is in love with Mr. India, and lets the world know by way of song (see the number "Karte Hain Hum Pyar Mr. India Se", aka "I'm In love With Mr. India").

Though its plot may sound predictable, Mr. India as a viewing experience is anything but. In fact, if you were looking for an example of classic masala film style, you couldn't do much better. So many disparate elements are thrown out in its eagerness to appeal that it's impossible to tell which way Mr. India will veer next. The experience might lead the uninitiated to wonder exactly who the film was intended for; and its a valid question. For instance, it seems to a large extent to be a children's film, except for when it really isn't. Mogambo, for one--thanks to his ridiculous name and exaggerated bluster, in combination with the cartoonish caricature of military pomp that surrounds him--at first almost comes across like some kind of Doctor Seuss character--something along the lines of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T's cranky, monomaniacal Dr. Terwilliker. But then, in the film's final third, when Mogambo resorts to some all-too-real-world terrorist tactics--taking countless civilian lives by means of bombs concealed in public spaces--we are starkly reminded that the film has more on its agenda than poking gentle, whimsical fun at authoritarian delusions. Likewise, while Mr. India uses a bunch of cute kids as sentimental window dressing, it's more than eager to put those kids in harm's way when it serves to pump up the outraged sense of injury that energizes it's violent, pyrotechnically-enhanced conclusion.

These radical shifts in tone apply just as much to Mr. India's musical numbers, which were composed by the prolific team of Laxmikant-Pyarelal. These, unfortunately, are mostly pretty dreadful, consisting for the most part of Arun's orphans singing about sunshine, rainbows and a brighter tomorrow. Family friendly stuff, to be sure. Less so, but still skirting the borderline, is a mid-film number in which Sridevi is accompanied by male dancers who, at first, sport multi-colored afros and metallic face paint and then, later--and inexplicably--black face. But the real standout is the later number "Kaate Nahin Katte Ye Din", which is steamy in the way that only Bollywood musical numbers featuring two people with all of their clothes on can be. Or, I should say, featuring one person, because Sridevi's partner in this number is the mostly invisible Arun--a situation that is enthusiastically mined for it's erotic possibilities (at one point, the effect of Mr. India's invisible embrace is achieved by Sridevi pressing her ample boobs up against a sheet of glass). As the pumping, tango-like beat of the song turns up the heat, we watch Sridevi chill and tremble to her lover's unseen caresses, punctuated by brief, spectral glimpses of Arun delivering them. It's a real show-stopper, one that ably delivers us into the "anything goes" tone of the film's final third--and it's so deftly handled that it suddenly awakens you to the possibility that Mr. India's construction might have involved more than a dartboard and scraps of cocktail napkin with plot points written on them.

Despite making Mr. India probably an unsuitable choice for a video babysitter, the movie's dramatic shifts have, for me, one inarguable upside. And that is that they once again accomplish that wonderful Bollywood magic trick by which a film that begins as the story of a humble man trying to save an orphanage can end as a giant, James Bond-style conflagration inside a crazy sci fi lair. For all the many Bollywood films I've seen, I can count on one hand the ones whose outset allowed me to accurately predict what type of film they would be at their conclusion. Broad comedy crumbles into tragedy, family melodrama escalates into high octane action spectacle, and, in the present case, an affably goofy super hero yarn suddenly becomes infused with a blood lusting thirst for national vengeance. It's often a head spinning ride--one that, in the best cases, leaves you with no memory of the longeurs and treacle you had to suffer through at the beginning. Which is exactly what makes you get back on again.

Mr. India was only director Shekhar Kapur's second film and, surprisingly, he did not choose to parlay its considerable success into a career making cartoonish kiddie sci fi movies loaded with violence and suggestive dancing. Rather--in what I see as a clear failure of creative nerve--he would go on to direct the controversial and critically acclaimed film Bandit Queen, and later such high-profile/middle-brow English language films as Elizabeth, The Four Feathers, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. For the blockbuster writing team of Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan, however, Mr. India was much more par for the course. The pair had, after all, taken Amitabh Bachchan into similar territory back in 1980 with Shaan. Still, their gift for churning out mind bogglingly weird masala movies might belie the team's importance to the history of their national cinema--for just a few years previous they had been a revolutionary force in Bollywood, virtually creating Amitabh's "Angry Young Man" persona single (or, uh, double) handedly with their masterful scripts for such unparalleled 1970s classics as Deewar, Sholay and Don.

Despite this pedigree--not to mention its commercial success--Mr. India still comes down on the slightly wilder and trashier side of Bollywood cinema (though far from the wildest or the trashiest). Still, just as one needs to seek balance in their overall cinematic diet, one's experience of Bollywood can't be all Guru Dutt and Mother India. For, while those more esteemed films can elicit an emotional response with their more nuanced depictions of the human condition, for a movie as silly as Mr. India to sweep you up in its enthusiasms--getting you to root for an invisible Indian everyman against a jackbooted cartoon straw man called Mogambo--is pretty impressive in its own right. Hail Mogambo!

Labels: Bollywood, Science Fiction, Stars: Amrish Puri, Year: 1987

posted by Todd at 3:05 PM | 7 Comments

Saturday, April 22, 2006

Wicked City

1987, Japan. Drected by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. Written by Kisei Choo, Hideyuki Kikuchi. Purchase from Amazon.com.

A thrilling part of Animeighties Month!

I keep sitting down to write my review of Wicked City, and I keep petering out after a page of rambling incoherence, as opposed to what I normally do, which is peter out after about six pages of random incoherence then post it and call it an update. I don't know why I'm so stymied on this review. Perhaps I've just not been in the proper mindset for writing a review of anything (my book reviews of The Intelligencer, Count Zero, and Doctor No are similarly derailed), what with the sun being out, an adventure trip to Dominica booked, and my kayaking hand itching to get a start on developing the season's calluses. My thoughts are definitely going north and south, which is why I couldn't cut the bottle in half. Although that last oblique reference has given me an idea for a new movie: Jack Knifed: The Adventures of Jack Bauer and Jack Burton.

Well, I think I've managed to marshal my thoughts into a loose confederation of like-minded individuals assembled in a disjointed but somewhat recognizable formation, so I thought I'd give it another go, especially since April is winding down and I've only posted two reviews for Animeighties Month -- you should have seen the overly ambitious list I originally made. But let me offer a word of warning as relates to the coming review, as a courtesy to the number of new readers who have been ensnared by Teleport city's jungle booby trap of placing some old anime titles in the usual fray. For the past several months, the reviews here have been relatively focused -- and I say relative in terms of how they relate to some of our previous reviews. You may think to yourself, "You call that Golgo 13 review focused?" And my reply would be, first, "I know what you are thinking, for I have the power to peer into the minds of men." Having thusly chilled you with powers I acquired in 1984 as a direct result of lying about my Dungeons & Dragons character's sudden blossoming of psyonics, I would then explain to you, either vocally or through the sheer force of mental will at my disposal, that yes, all things considered, the Golgo 13 review was indeed focused, for although it covered a large swath of ground with it's billowing parachute of truth, the vast majority of it was related, in some surprisingly direct way, to the background information needed for a proper and deep understanding of a movie where the hero is implored by a woman to pull her trigger, lovingly and softly.

I say this now as a warning that the past several months of reviews that busy themselves primarily with reviewing a movie may have lulled you into a false sense of security. Many of you may not have been around for the halcyon days of having to read five pages of my biography before getting to the first comment regarding the actual subject of the review. If you were looking for lean, mean, informative film writing, Teleport City really wasn't the place to be. My philosophy when I started this site, and yea even long before the Web, was to write about film in a way that related the watching of such movies to a life in general, to place them in the context of daily existence, rather than treat them as external components to be commented upon without any reflection as to the role they have played in my life. I thought this for two reasons: first, because fans of bad films are often met with a chorus of predictable, "Get a life!" taunting, and I wanted to show off the fact that not only do I have a life, and not only does being a fan of these films, not preclude you from a life, but the life I have lead may actually be a hell of a lot more fun and interesting than that of the person trotting out that hoary old cliche of an insult. And most of the b-movie fans I've met over the years have boasted similarly satisfying lives. Adventures have been mounted, relationships have been built, sweeping romance and epic action all manage to coexist with watching and writing about goofy films no one else would devote a paragraph to.

Secondly, and more importantly, a lot of the films I write positive reviews of are positive solely because of the circumstances that led up to seeing them, or under which I saw them. Understanding why I would write a glowing review of something like Treasure of the Four Crowns or Sword and the Sorcerer requires understanding how I saw those movies, what it was like at the time, what experiences became intertwined and associated with the movie. My approach has never been to review films as a science, with a clinical approach. My approach has always been to put them in their proper personal and social context, to explain how the movie might have become a part of my life, and how everything else that was happening to me at the time may have influenced my opinion of a particular film.

The resulting reviews may seem wildly unfocused. They may seem to wander off on tangents, lose their way as they meander through the muck of my memory and nostalgia, but I've never felt that the information, the silly asides and biographies and recollections, were at all throw-away diversions. They were, within the confines of my potentially crackpot way of writing about movies, vital threads of a greater tapestry in which the film itself is only one of the images formed.

Having thusly warned new readers and old ones who may have forgotten, let me further explain that I issue this warning because my review of Wicked City is going to be prefaced by a story that has very little to do with actually assessing the artistic or entertainment merit of the film itself, but nevertheless reflects something that plays an important role in influencing my overall reaction to the movie. Like all my stories, it involves adventure and romance. If you just want to skip ahead to a history of tentacle porn and a review of the movie, use this handy link to fast forward through time and space.

And with that...

My chest was heaving, and I was doing the best I could to suck in as much of the balmy, flower-scented spring air as I could. Blades of grass probed lightly at my back, and I felt the soft warmth of a hand on my stomach, which at the time had not yet embarked on the long and shockingly successful quest to bulge and hang down over the top of my pants that it enjoys these days. It was 1993, her name was Elisa, and we'd just finished whiling away a perfect north Florida spring day by shooting basketball. She was a hell of a gal, too beautiful to associate with the weak-chinned likes of me. Dark, curly hair; healthy, tan skin; fun, easy-going, athletic, with the slightest vestigial traces of a Puerto Rican accent. She lived in an apartment that shared a parking lot with the duplex I lived in with my friend Rob, and after a couple months of seeing each other from time to time, we graduated from friendly nods of acknowledgement to an actual exchange of words and a few drinks here and there. I was just at the early stages of toying with the idea of emerging from a straight edge punk rock cocoon, so I was a bit on the timid side when it came to imbibing (I would learn some years later, when I decided to embrace the culture of wine and spirits wholeheartedly, that Scotch-Irish blood apparently bestows upon you near godlike powers of tolerance and recuperation, regardless of how little you'd been drinking the past decade).

Dating in Gainesville is tricky, because there were (and still are, from what I could tell during my last visit) so very few places you can take a girl that rank very far above Denny's or El Toro. Lisa was the first non-punk girlfriend I'd had in a long time, and I was going to have to come up with a different game plan if I wanted the relationship to continue. Punk rockers often suffer from an unhealthy, "I shall show her my world!" mentality, as if we inhabit a vast underworld full of mystical danger and darkness when, in fact, the average punk rocker's world consists of sitting on the couch, hanging out in a parking lot, or going to see really horrible bands that you pretend to like so you can make proclamations about "supporting the scene," because you're not old enough or wise enough (and some never are) to realize that some scenes and artistic endeavors really blow and aren't worth supporting. This is especially true of any scene that is comprised of four or five guys with beards, Dickies jackets, and fake trucker hats playing loud amelodic indie rock.

Lucky for me that Elisa was some crazy kind of dream girl and was incredibly easy-going when it came to going along with idiotic schemes, and when it comes to idiotic schemes, I'm a Viking. So despite the lack of world-class places to which a sophisticated young gentleman could take a beautiful young lady for an evening of cocktails and witty conversation, there were still plenty of places a slobbish, lazy punk rocker still clinging to the "I ain't gonna wear no suit and dance for The Man" that people should outgrow a couple months after leaving high school could take a charming young lady who, for reasons one can't possibly comprehend, had decided to take a shine to the aforementioned asshole. So we'd go out for Coronas and all you can eat crawdads by the bucket, or we'd stay in with a bottle of wine and a movie. Or we'd go shoot hoops or kick the soccer ball around, take walks through nearby nature preserves, or we'd just sit in the floor at my place and listen to records, because punk rock guys always seem to have this sick need to make girls listen to godawful pieces of crap that the guy thinks is utter genius. "Yes, you are a smart and cultured woman possessed of a striking beauty that leaves a man breathless. Come! Come sit on my ratty bedroom carpet while I play Boredoms records for you."

Actually, in this regard, I took the sage advice of my friend Jon, and rather than trotting out Zeni Geva and Sun Ra, stuck primarily to The Cocteau Twins.

I was, at the time, also a member of the University of Florida Film Council, and we were in the midst of the first annual (of two, I believe) Asian Film Festival, a program I'd put together primarily because I wanted to see Once Upon a Time in China, Chinese Ghost Story, and Bullet in the Head on the big screen, and this was the only way it was ever going to happen. We also peppered it with a smattering of Japanese cartoons and a few respectable films like Black Rain and Tokyo Story so people who wanted to sit and feel smart about themselves four a couple hours could do that. That day spent shooting hoops happen to fall on the final day of the event. I'd skipped out on Ozu in favor of sunshine and a sparkling smile, but the day was growing short and we were at a loss for what to do with the evening.

"Well," I said as we lay there together on the grass, staring up at the tops of palm trees and listening to the slow rumble of traffic along 13th Street, "It's the last night of film festival. It'd be nice to end it on a better note than last night."

"Last night" would have been our big showing of John Woo's Hong Kong swansong, Hardboiled. We were among the very first theaters in America to screen the film, though you wouldn't know it based on the amount of stars and prestige it brought our way (none). But people drove from as far away as Miami and Atlanta when they heard we were showing the movie, uncut and subtitled. All of the Hong Kong films played to packed houses, but none possessed the buzz that surrounded Hardboiled. This was right in the middle of people started to go batty for Hong Kong action films thanks to things like The Killer showing up on Cinemax. And the screening was a massive success, with a packed house howling and cheering right up until the projector went to switch to the final reel of the film -- the sprawling hospital shoot-out -- and we were suddenly watching the first reel of Aliens.

Someone had screwed up big time before they sent us the film, but what could we do? We had a theater of angry patrons, and because UF runs their box office separate from the theater itself, the box office people had already packed up and went home, so there could be no cash refunds. All we could offer were vouchers for free screenings, which didn't do much to placate the people who drove six hours.

Elisa stretched languorously next to me. "That sounds good," she said. "What's playing tonight?"

I went over the schedule in my head. Immediately I regretted making the suggestion. We should have just gone for burritos at El Toro.

"Umm," I hesitated, "A Japanese anime film."

Her eye slit up slightly. She was a real sport at watching bad movies -- we'd even gone to see one of those screenings of Mystery Science Theater together at her suggestion (I'd never even seen the show up until that point, as Cox Cable did not offer Comedy Central) -- and it wasn't that long ago that we'd watched Akira, which had delighted her to no end.

"Which one?" she asked enthusiastically.

"Umm, it's called Wicked City. It's uh..."

Honestly, I hadn't seen Wicked City at that point, which was the main reason I'd even booked it. It was originally meant to fill an 8 PM timeslot, with the midnight movie finale being another showing of Hardboiled, but with Hardboiled on the ropes, we replayed Zu Warriors and then slid Wicked City into the midnight movie slot, where it would be right at home. About all I knew of the film was what I'd seen in the previews.

"Well, I know there's some monsters, some guys in tuxedos fly, and, well, a woman turns into a spider."

I also knew that her vagina became a giant slobbering toothy maw, but I didn't know if it would be worse to bring that up now or wait until it actually showed up on screen. Thing is, I was really looking forward to all that madness, because I'd heard nothing but good things about the movie. Sure, it was a tad perverse, but beautifully animated and incredibly well-written. OK, I figured, maybe it'd be a decent movie for the two of us. I mean, it wasn't going to be Overfiend, which I'd seen unsubtitled a couple years earlier when the tape started making the rounds among cult film traders.

I don't have the world's most sterling track record when it comes to date movies. It's not that I don't know how to pick a decent date movie, one that both I and my prospective lady companion can enjoy. It's just that I tend to stumble by accident into remarkably bad choices knowing full well how bad they are. Midway through trying to impress a dame a mere couple months before, I'd invited her over for a romantic evening of dinner and a movie, only to have an assembly of friends show up demanding they be allowed to watch Black Devil Doll from Hell. As I had the town's only copy and the only working VCR (I'd bought it the day before at Wal-Mart, with the intention of using it for my romantic movie night, then packing it back up and returning it a day later -- such is college life) among my friends, my romantic evening became an enthusiastic and drunken screening of Black Devil Doll from Hell. Other date movies have included Alien 4, Cliffhanger (only because it was 50 cent Tuesday, meaning that you paid 50 cents, not that 50 Cent was in attendance, at the second run theater and my power had been shut off), and I Like to Hurt People.

So it was that I took a girl out on a date to see Wicked City. She showed up in a jaw-droppingly nice dress and those embroidered cloth Chinese slippers. I was a fucking moron punk rocker, so I think I wore olive drab cargo pants cut off at the knees and an XL-sized Ramones shirt -- XL even though I was 5'7" and weighed 110 pounds. What the hell was this girl thinking?

She took the film pretty well. Laughed at the spider-vagina, winced a bit when the demon tentacles started slithering into the chick character's mouth, but all in all, she seemed to enjoy the movie, though she freely admitted it wasn't something she was likely to rush out to see again. Wicked City wasn't what caused our relationship to peter out. It was me, as is often the case. I was still addicted to pretending like being punk rock was some kind of insane revolutionary lifestyle that she would never understand, and I was better off dating some gaunt, lazy chick in a Black Flag t-shirt and possessed of no real interest in anything other than studded leather bracelets and sitting on the couch.

Needless to say given that lengthy intro I wrote, the circumstances under which I saw Wicked City go a long way to shaping my opinion about the film. Although the night we saw it was wonderful, and we were in at the apex of our youthful romance, Wicked City still represents badly blown opportunities, missed chances, and a commitment to awful decision making. My God, that gal was something. And I was an ass who started blowing her off basically because she wouldn't listen to Minor Threat. Wicked City is a painful reminder of how big an idiot I can be. When I watch it, I get a little misty-eyed and start thinking about the past. I raise my gin and tonic to the stars and say, well, I don't say anything.

Granted, it's a funny movie to turn one toward bittersweet reflection, because it's full of bad-ass dudes with guns blowing the crap out of demons that are prone to probing the nethers of a woman with their slime-dripping tentacles, usually against said woman's will. But then, I took a date to see it, so what the hell (if you used the link above to skip to this point and are wondering what I'm talking about, don't you wish you'd read the whole thing now)?

Given the sheer number of absurdly pointless and idiotic things people are allowed to study for their doctoral thesis, I'm sure someone somewhere has sold some desperate-to-be-hep professor in a tweed jacket and bow tie on the notion that it is academically valuable to become a doctor in the history of Japanese tentacle porn. I did not have the foresight to try and pass this off as a thesis, since like all punk rockers I was trying to pass off writing about punk rock as a thesis-worthy topic. So I am not the world's foremost authority on the social and artistic history of tentacle porn. I shall endeavor to do my best to cover the basics. WWII: America drops two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bunta Sugawara survives and begins his long journey through the criminal underworld in post-war Hiroshima. A slew of restrictions are put on Japanese cinema to make sure nothing come sup that'll get the Japanese all riled up and becoming a handful for MacArthur.

Korean War: we figure at this point that the Japanese are basically pretty cool. But many of the restrictions put in place remain. Most famous among them: a ban on showing, in film or still photo or illustration, human genitalia, sexual penetration, or pubic hair. During the seventies, Japanese filmmakers are forced to become increasingly clever in the way they go about depicting erotic acts of wanton carnality, giving rise to a country with more strategically placed candles and potted plants than anywhere else in the world. Porno films are still made, but the pubic region is blurred by unsightly optical mosaics or fogging.

This ban on pubic hair remains intact clear through the nineties. But enterprising smut makers and a population generally sick of strategically placed candles and intrusive mosaics succeed in punching through reform that allows for on-camera pubic hair, though the actual penis and vagina are still illegal. This ban seems increasingly pointless and more about stubbornness with the advent of the "thin mosaic" technique, but we're straying off topic here.

Looking for a way they could legally depict the dirty, disgusting act of sex and the vile, evil, naughty portions of the human anatomy, Japanese manga and anime artists came up with a brilliant idea. Exactly who first thought it up I don't know, but the thought was that these guys could freely draw penis-shaped tentacles attached to a variety of horrific creatures and get away with it since, technically, they weren't drawing a penis. It was just a penis-shaped tentacle. Plus, this way, you could violate a woman in multiple orifices, providing fun for the whole family. My assumption was that this first showed up in manga somewhere, but as I'm lacking my Doctorate in Tentacle Porn, I don't know. I'm sure someone does though. The most famous appearance of tentacle porn in anime was in the infamous Urotsuki Doji or Legend of the Overfiend, but Wicked City might very well have been the first tentacle film out of the gate -- though you can't really call it porn, and you certainly can't put it in the same class as slimy, hilarious filth like Overfiend.

In fact, like many "firsts," Wicked City is really only tangentially related, at best, to the world of tentacle porn that exploded in a luminescent white glob after the release of Urotsuki Doji. There is a tentacle rape in Wicked City, but it's not presented hardcore. There is additional nudity and sexuality in the movie as well, but once again nothing on the level of porn, and really no different from what was in Golgo 13, except that it involves demons and thus lends itself to a more twisted and surreal artistic sensibility. Considering what gets produced these days, Wicked City is relatively tame -- relative, remember, to films in which multi-tentacled demons slather naked women with otherworldly goo. These days, of course, artists get away pretty frequently with drawing full-on penetration and genitalia. Even Overfiend got away with it in 1989, and since then plenty of other anime titles have skirted the No-Dingalings Law, as it was officially known in the Japanese parliament. Yet there are still tons of cheap, crude tentacle porn releases every year. This would be primarily because it turns out some people prefer watching slimy demon tentacles rather than human parts poking around in bodily openings. I'm really not in the game of making moral calls on stuff like this, so we'll just leave it at, "some people preferred the penis stand-in over the actual penis."

You could really understand Wicked City pretty well without understanding this roughly sketched history of tentacle porn (I didn't even get into animism and the role of the octopus in ancient Japanese art, because that's for whoever is writing their thesis about this crap), but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway because it would be good for a larf. So now, when you are trying to impress the doe-eyed Gothic Lolitas hanging out at Otakon, you can do it by saying, "Actually, tentacle rape can trace its roots back to the early days of Shintoism and the belief that certain animals were types of gods. Plus, the octopus, you know. Have you ever looked at one of those things?" If they ask you where you got all your sick information (they will ask you this as a delaying tactic so they can get to their mace, and rightfully so), you can puff up your chest like a rutting pigeon and proudly proclaim that it was "from the same guy who told to watch a Filipino midget spy film, then ditched a beautiful and charming woman because she didn't want to listen to Youth of Today."

I compared the horrible, perverting, youth-corrupting filth present in Wicked City with the filth in Golgo 13, and if you're going to compare this movie to anything, it compares well to Golgo 13 even though on the surface the two seem pretty dissimilar. Both look to a combination of 40s film noir, 70s grindhouse sleaze, and 80s Miami Vice color schemes to achieve a look that is unique and new yet instantly familiar. Wicked City doesn't look exactly like Golgo 13, but one can definitely see parallels in their approach to artwork -- basically, they develop a different style from the same source material.

Likewise, Wicked City continues the tendency of 80s anime to look to past American pulp writing as another source of inspiration. If Odin is a throwback to the writing of AE van Vogt, and Golgo 13 is a throwback to the gritty crime writing of Chandler, Hammet, and the 60s espionage potboilers that followed Ian Fleming's James Bond template, Wicked City can trace its roots back to the pulp writing of H.P. Lovecraft (yes, he wrote serial pulps) and the Lovecraft-inspired horror-pulp of R.E. Howard (best known for creating the character Conan the Barbarian). Howard and Lovecraft were regular correspondents with one another -- friends as much as two insane pulp writers can be friends with each other. Lovecraft's ever-expanding Cthulu mythos was a major influence on Howard, who wrote stories that dabbled in Lovecraft's universe, but with more of the gung-ho brawn that identifies Howard's writing. Howard's own endearing contribution to the world of horror pulp is the grim wandering Puritan Solomon Kane, who walks the earth forever in combat with ghosts, pirates, cannibals, ancient civilizations, living corpses, and other ghoulish delights.

However, while Howard's sensibilities may have informed some of the more macho elements present in Wicked City (as well as his cruder but more enthusiastic style of writing), it's obvious that this and most of the subsequent demon-oriented anime titles (both hentai and not) are heavily influenced by a combination of Japanese folklore and grotesque H.P. Lovecraft imagery. The plot of the film is, like most anime plots, pretty simple once you strip away the orbiting insanity, much like the plot to any fantastical pulp story: there exist two worlds, our own and a shadowy world of demons. While all humans look basically the same, however, the demons get to have a billion different appearances, which doesn't seem fair. Anyway, for centuries or so, the two worlds have managed to coexist, but lately, a passel of rabble rousers from the demon world have decided to start wreaking havoc in our world. It's up to the mysterious Black Guard -- a security force comprised of members from both worlds, but mostly, it seems, ours -- to keep a lid on the situation until a horny old negotiator from the demon realm can broker a ceasefire. Assigned to protect negotiator Giuseppe Maiyart (irritatingly enough, I can't find any accurate listings for the Japanese voice acting cast) are Black Guard members Taki, from the human world, and Makie, from the demon world.

Taki is a grim-faced young man with a no-nonsense approach to his supernatural job (not unlike the sort of blue collar, daily grind" approach to fantastic events that you find in Hellboy). Makie is the beautiful (as always) otherworldly woman with razor-sharp retractable fingernails (shades of William Gibson's Neuromancer perhaps?). They wrok well together, but trouble arises when Guiseppe's impish nature combines with Taki falling in love with Makie, affording the rogue demons a chance to take her hostage in exchange for getting Taki to abandon his post guarding the diminutive negotiator (who is sort of like Yoda, but if Yoda wore track suits and jacked off a lot -- which maybe he does. Unfortunately, the Star Wars movies never explore that).

Wicked City was famous for a clever script, engaging artwork, and some truly phantasmagorical and imaginative set pieces. It was infamous for some of these same set pieces. As mentioned, for instance, this is the first instance of which I know of the now ubiquitous tentacle rape, though again, it's not a hardcore scene and is pretty mild (as mild as demon rape can be, I suppose) on the grand scale of the perversions anime offers the daring and/or sadly horny viewer. The film opens with it's most famous/infamous scene: Taki meeting a hot broad in a bar, then taking her home for a little lovin', then having her turn into a giant spider beast thing with the head and torso of a woman, but with long stocking-clad spider legs and a roaring, drooling fanged mouth where the vagina usually goes. Far from being sexually explicit, this scene is more grotesquely imaginative and crazy than it is offensive. It certainly sets the mood for what's to come and serves as an easy warning beacon. If you get freaked out by this, it ain't getting any more kid-friendly later in the movie. The body horror sequence is lightened somewhat when, shortly thereafter, Taki's superior says that maybe this experience will teach him to be "a littlre sexually cautious next time." Other notorious sequences involve Giuseppe running off to get a little action from a hooker, only to fall prey to a demon woman whose whole body becomes a malleable putty and Taki being swallowed whole by a cooing demon woman's fanged vagina while trying to rescue Makie.

So yeah, it's all pretty twisted, and if you want a fine example of the gory excesses Japanese anime was willing to explore during the 1980s, you need look no further than Wicked City. It's full of ghoulish beasts, dripping tentacles, spraying blood, and spilling guts. But like much of the best anime to come from that decade of gleeful abandon, what sets Wicked City above the seething sea of horror anime is the fact that, coexisting with the repulsive Lovecraftian nightmares and grindhouse exploitation is a movie that is thoughtfully crafted and beautifully animated. Wicked City plays out as a parable of Japanese society in the 1980s. Recovery from the war was complete. Rather than being a limping wounded man, Japan suddenly found itself a world power once again, but this time without the need of a imperialist military. But with such rapid success comes confusion. Japan's image of itself as a well-ordered and well-behaved society was challenged at every turn by the simple realities of life. Some humans can act as cogs in a well-oiled, polite, bowing machine. But in a society like Japan, for every cog there is going to be a square peg that throws a kink into the works. The more repressive your culture, in other words, the more outrageous and extreme the counter-culture. Which is why Japan gave birth to loony youth fashion cultures, noise music, and Kinji Fukasaku yakuza films. Beneath that well-ordered veneer, Japan was as much a boiling cauldron of lust and perversion as any other country, with the possible exception of Germany.

Wicked City is rife with images of archetypal Japanese salarymen -- Taki and the rest of the Guard where the requisite black suit, black tie ensemble of the salaryman, despite their incredible mission -- and women being ripped asunder by animal desires and passions they've sought endlessly to master and suppress. The demons are the wretched excess that so many Japanese (and other nationalities, for that matter) citizens are torn between denying and embracing. Giving oneself over entirely to them results in, you know, being devoured by toothy vaginas. Denying them entirely results in a similarly nasty fate. Survival, it would seem, involves a merging of these two polar opposite tendencies -- which we see in the relationship that emerges between Taki and Makie.

This sort of intellectual underpinning of the often horrific action on screen is what keeps Wicked City a source of constant debate among people who still remember anime from the 80s. When we screened it as part of the Asian Film Festival, it was both lauded and condemned. It certainly created a host of varied and often conflicting opinions, even among types of people usually united by a common goal. Had the movie been simple smut of the caliber seen in most tentacle porn since then, it wouldn't spark this sort of debate. Well, given the fact that people will debate pretty much anything, I guess it might have. Point is, Wicked City has a lot more going for it than just the grisly imagery.

The Tokyo of Wicked City is realized in a way that augments the thematic currents of the story. It's a fairly recognizable world, and it just so happens that incredibly bizarre things happen. Once again, as I've mentioned in plenty of other reviews (if only I could remember which ones), Wicked City succeeds in being creepy by taking the mundane and familiar and tweaking it in a way that keeps it comforting and familiar but also unsettling alien and inexplicable. It's hardboiled detective noir filtered through the askew vision of a director like David Cronenberg. You know something just ain't quite right, even before spider-women start scurrying down the facades of otherwise dull and unimpressive high rise apartment complexes. Like many films, animated and otherwise, it seems to use Blade Runner as its art design starting point, but rather than aping Blade Runner, it takes the foundation concept -- a future that is equal parts gee whiz sci-fi and nourish antiquity -- and puts its own spin on it. There's never any real doubt that Wicked City is set in the near future, but there's not much on display to actually say it's the future. It's simply the way the film is colored and the tone it sets that places it in the world of scifi-noir.

The artwork is gritty and expertly executed, boasting the warmth and intricacy of hand-drawn art rather than the polish and perfection of more modern computer-assisted drawing. It relies heavily on the blue and red palette, a nod perhaps to the playful yet sinister way in which Italian directors like Mario Bava and Dario Argento played with lighting and used it not to reflect reality, but rather to convey a certain mood. Similarly, many of the shots in Wicked City seem to be nods to the old EC Comics horror anthologies, which were probably as much an influence on the tone and style of the film as the old pulp stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The red and blue shaded "shocking scene of unspeakable terror" was a trademark of the EC titles, and Wicked City knows when to pull out homages to those equally pulpy old comic books.

If the plot of Wicked City is nothing overly impressive -- cops guard the witness under siege, basically -- the way in which the film executes the typical set-up is nothing short of staggering in its creativity. The pace is languid without being slow, and the many plot twists stem organically and logically from the story rather than being disjointed zingers thrown in with no reason other than to shock and titilate. Even the film's notorious sexual content is at home and justified by the storytelling. Wicked City is awash with set pieces that manage to be repulsive, beautiful, shocking, and melancholy -- often all at the same time. Often, you can't believe the crazy stuff that's going on, but it totally sucks you in, and it's pulled off so spectacularly in the artwork that you find yourself emotionally involved even when the characters are thinly sketched. It's an atrocity show from which you can't extract yourself. It's also action-packed and rarely lets up long enough to become dull. There's scarcely a pause as the film skips from one eye-popping set-up to the next. The end result is more a series of individual action pieces than it is a full film, but the narrative is just enough to pull the whole thing together into a cohesive and comprehensible feature film that continues to be interesting almost two decades after its initial release. Add to that the fact that the story takes itself completely seriously -- even with the addition of a horny lump-handed old dude in a Sopranos track suit. As with all the best pulp, Wicked City creates a completely outrageous situation and then handles it with such earnest, solemn-faced seriousness that you are willing to buy into the illutsion no matter how crazy it becomes.

Of course, it's hard to sit through a film like Wicked City and not think about the attitude it expresses toward women. OK, maybe it's not that hard, but as a reviewer, I try to do my best to cover as many elements of a story as I can, even if I don't find them especially compelling. It's not debatable that many people see the film as rather strongly anti-female. After all, their sexual organs are often seen as slobbering beasts that can swallow a man whole and destroy him. People often make the mistake of thinking that what a film depicts is an accurate reflection of the attitudes of the film maker, which fails to take into account the fact that someone may be making a statement in reaction to something rather then in opposition of it (not to mention that maybe they were just using their imaginations). Whether director Yoshiaki Kawajiri and writers Kisei Choo and Hideyuki Kikuchi have deep-rooted issues to work out with women I can't say. The way I've always read Wicked City isn't that it's an expression of the creator's fears and hang-ups, but rather an indictment of a society (not just Japanese) that both outlaws and fetishizes female sexuality. Society is endless teasing people when it comes to sexuality, hinting at it, selling it, then telling you you're dirty or evil for wanting it. Look at the porn movie industry -- the world's biggest multi-billion dollar industry that no one has ever seen anything from, or so each individual would have you believe. That sort of twisted entice-and-deny mentality is common everywhere, and ultimately, it creates a destructive mindset that reconciles the fear of the unknown with the desire for that same unknown through acts of violence. In the case of Wicked City, Taki and the other Black Guard are typical men raise din a repressive society. It's no wonder that female genitalia so often manifest themselves as menacing and otherworldly.

But I'll be honest. Although I took plenty of film studies classes that dwell on sexuality and sexual politics in films, it really doesn't interest me. So I'll mention what I think, but it’s not the reason I go to the movies, and it's not the over-arching issue that defines my opinion of Wicked City. I like Wicked City because it's an action-packed pulp horror comic come to life, infused with acid trip imagery that rattles the brain. It's sick, daring, and in my opinion, brilliantly written. The artwork is gorgeous even when it's horrific. It certainly doesn't ever deserve to be thrown onto the hentai rubbish heap, or even blamed for the proliferation of cheaper, sleazier versions of itself that came from knock-off artists who were probably more inspired by Overfiend than by Wicked City anyway.

Yoshiaki Kawajiri began his directing career in 1984 with the feature film Lensman, which was one of the very first anime titles to incorporate CGI into the preceding without it being as noticeably and hilariously pathetic as the CGI helicopters from Golgo 13. Wicked City was his second feature, and he would go on to direct another demon invasion themed movie, Demon City Shinjiku, which is similar to Wicked City in some ways, but very different in others. It lacks the sex and extreme gore, but also lacks the expert creation of dark mood and atmosphere, playing out more like a straight action film than piece of horror pulp. Wicked City made huge waves in America, at least amongst cult film and anime fans, when it made the rounds in the usual format (ie, a dubbed version from Streamline, using the usual Streamline crew of English language voice actors and being of about the same quality as their dub of Golgo 13). Demon City less so, but Kawajiri scored another huge cult fave in 1993 with Ninja Scroll, which retains some of Wicked City's affection for grotesqueries and a Grand Guignol style of film making. Similar, but with more Gothic lace and such, is his recent resurrection of another icon of 80s anime, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Kawajiri had nothing to do with the original Vampire Hunter D, but it obviously shares a lot of common ground with Wicked City as it indulges in a mind-blowing parade of freakish monsters, so it's not all that odd that Kawajiri would find himself directing a follow-up. Additional success with X and with pieces of The Animatrix insure that Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of animated filmmaking. Wow, that last sentence sounds like it came from his resume cover letter. Let me rewrite it: Kawajiri continues to be an important and vital contributor to the ever-expanding world of people being ripped in half by demons and having their guts spill out all over the ground.

Writer Kisei Choo had considerably less of a career, as Wicked City is the only credit I could turn up for him. It wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that Kisei Choo is just a pseudonym for some other, more established writer who was afraid of what being involved with a project like Wicked City might do to his career -- as if such things ever seem to have that detrimental an impact. You can write the goriest, nastiest piece of perverted crap Japan has ever seen (and that's saying something), then turn around and write for Hamtaro if you want. That's just the way things seem to happen. Story developer Hideyuki Kikiuchi had better luck. Aside from being a writer for the original Vampire Hunter D as well as Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Demon City Shinjiku, and A Wind Named Amnesia. But he's not a screenwriter. Most of his work is in story outlines or novel writing.

There was a live-action adaption produced in 1992 by Tsui Hark, who likely did more of the directing than credited director Tai Kit Mak. I haven't seen the film since 1995 or so, so I'm not going to pretend like I'm in a position to write a proper review comparing it to the animated source material. It was less saucy, with only a hint of nudity, and focused on the relationship between two male members of the Black Guard: Taki (the always somnabulistic Leon Lai) and his half-demon partner Ken (Jacky Cheung, who gets to turn into a fanged demn and chew scenery the way he so loves to do). Joey Wong Tsu-hsien (Chinese Ghost Story, and that City Hunter movie starring Jackie Chan) was in the mix as well. About all I remember was the film employed a pastel blue and pink color palette similar but softer to the anime's red and blue, the Black Guard combatted demons using psychic powers that can only be invoked by pointing at your own forehead, and the finale was Taki and Ken riding around atop 747 commercial airliners and giving speeches as they tried to destroy and/or save one another. Or maybe it was Roy Cheung who was riding around on top of a 747. Look, at least two guys were riding around atop 747, and that was pretty cool. The movie itself was, as best as I can remember, pleasing to me without being really blow-away impressive. Now I feel like watching it again. Producer/stealth director Tsui Hark, aside from being the father of modern Hong Kong special effects, was also the man behind hooking up with a Japanese production and art crew to make the first really big budget Chinese animated feature, A Chinese Ghost Story: The Animation, which I highly recommend. Before that, Chinese animation was all Bruce Lee and Chinese Gods, which I also highly recommend.

All in all, I really like Wicked City, and feel that it's not all that shameful to admit such a thing. It's a screwed up movie, but not nearly so much as the hype might lead you believe, and certainly nowhere near the sort of trash Overfiend is. Yes, Overfiend looms like a many-tentacled penis demon over all the 80s. That's why it keeps coming up. Plus, it's pretty funny to keep bringing it up, at least to me. I don't really recommend you do what I did and bring a date to see Wicked City, but I still think it's a high water mark (but not the highest) of the seamy 80s anime that invaded America, and well worth checking out once you've steeled yourself against the more tasteless images the film is going to throw at you. Wicked City is really adult-oriented anime done right. Heck, it's not even as gratuitous as Golgo 13. And anyway, like I always say: don't you have something better to do than be offended by twenty-year-old Japanese cartoons? That's like still being offended by The Canterbury Tales.

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Year: 1987

posted by Keith at 6:11 PM | 2 Comments

Thursday, July 17, 2003

Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare

1987, Canada. Starring Jon Mikl-thor, Lian Abel, Jim Cirile, Denise Dicandia, Frank Dietz, Rusty Hamilton, Gene Kroth, David Lane, Jillian Peri, Carrie Schiffler, Teresa Simpson. Directed by John Fasano.

Once not so long ago, the epic rock band Spinal Tap let loose the soaring song, "Rock 'n' Roll Creation," a song with a message and structure that could very well serve as the basic building block for the movie Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, itself a rock 'n' roll creation from the expansive mind of John Mikl-Thor, himself a rock 'n' roll creation dedicated to creating rock 'n' roll creations. That the rock 'n' roll creation known as John Mikl-Thor made rock 'n' roll creations that in turn help define Mikl-Thor as a rock 'n' roll creation who himself creates rock 'n' roll creations is simply an example of how the undying spirit of rock 'n' roll permeates the very fabric of the universe, which if you believe a variety of rock 'n' roll creations, is a sweeping place full of glowing neon pink animation and chrome.

John Mikl-Thor, or Thor as he is known amongst the intelligencia, is probably best known for his role as the good son turned into a green-faced, bat-wielding zombie in the film Zombie Nightmare. That film, in turn, is his best known as a result of its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a show that was undoubtedly funny yet still contemptible because it spawned an entire generation of nerds who would shout out incredibly unfunny and inane nonsense during bad films, thinking they themselves were as witty as the people on the television show. These are more or less the same people who ruined Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the greater portion of mankind by reciting the entire "Knights Who Say Ni" segment at the drop of a hat and with only the most tenuous and questionable degrees of relevance to whatever was being discussed at the time.

Zombie Nightmare's core audience comes from this group as well as the Adam West completists of the world - and if you doubt such things exist, please remember that there are people who bought the special edition DVD of Carrottop's film, Chairman of the Board. In light of that chilling revelation, the existence of Adam West connoisseurs is not so great a stretch of the imagination. Regardless of any of this, the end result was that John Mikl-Thor became a legend. Many people asked, "How does one pronounce 'Mikl?' Is it like 'Michael," or does it rhyme with pickle?" To them I say only this: you want to know how I pronounce "Mikl?" I pronounce it "hero."

Although Zombie Nightmare is not without its merits, chief among them being the screen debut of a young Tia Carerre, it was not until Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare that Thor would realize his full potential for crafting a film that works not just as a piece of entertainment, but as a defining symbol of the time in which it was made. On the surface, Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is little more than a rousing tale of the forces of good fighting valiantly against the forces of evil. However, peel away the surface and the viewer will discover that the movie addresses one of the great voids in the history of cinema, filling at long last the need for a movie in which a heavy metal warlord dons a jewel-encrusted loincloth and does battle with the immobile Prince of Darkness.

Although there are plenty of movies that either inspired or were inspired by the world of heavy metal music, movies actually about heavy metal are few and far between. Sure, there for a while every horror film made had to throw at least one metal track onto the soundtrack, but that was just a cheap ploy to garner the favor of guys in black t-shirts adorned with an airbrushed painting of Eddie (the corpse or Van Halen, whichever you prefer). When it comes down to movies in which heavy metal is integral to the plot rather than being just some throw-away audio candy for the soundtrack, your choices are limited mostly to Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare or that movie where Skippy from Family Ties was a metal head who summoned a head-banging demon from Hell. In light of that, the better choice is actually Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, which is something that should chill you to the bone.

Our action begins during a prologue in which a nice, respectable middle-class family runs afoul of a few demons. The mother is apparently stuffed into an oven, for starters. Seems a rather stupid way for a demon to kill someone, not to mention incredibly time consuming. It's not as if full-grown humans are easy to fit into your standard range, and believe me, I know this from experience. What happened to cool demonic ways to kill people like, oh I don't know, you could levitate someone up and crucify them in the corner where the walls and ceiling meet. Something with a little religious flash to it.

What's done is done, though, and when the husband comes downstairs in search of his sausages, he finds his wife has vanished and that the oven is shaking around. Seeing the oven shaking around causes him to immediately scream out, "Oh my God! Carol!" as if the most obvious and logical leap was to assume his wife was inside the oven instead of just taking the trash out. Or maybe he screams that every time he comes into the kitchen. Try doing it at your own house. It doesn't matter if your loved one isn't named Carol. That just adds to the fun.

The movie makes up for it in short order by delivering one of the most chilling, eerie, and amazing special effects I've seen in a long time. The husband creeps close to the oven only to have it burst open in an explosion of neon light, smoke, and music! Out pops a horrible corpse head dangling awkwardly on the end of a stick! It's sort of like being attacked by one of those coconut head souvenirs you can buy along the road in South Florida. No, it's not even that scary. My grandparents used to have one of those things sitting on a shelf in their basement. My grandfather told me it was the preserved head of a Nazi he had killed during the war, and that it sometimes came to life and would scream for its body, or at least for an update on the status of Adolph Hitler. I was terrified of that thing for years, and still prefer not to deal with it, and I can say that the corpse head on a stick popping out of the oven is not as scary as a coconut head novelty I thought was the skull of a vengeful Nazi soldier.

Some point-of-view camera work informs us of the fact that the demons got the kid upstairs as well, and then we're off to the movie proper.

Jon Mikl-Thor, with bulging biceps and rippling abs, stars as Jon Triton, leader of the hard rock outfit Triton. This is different than real life, where Jon Mikl-Thor was the leader of the hard rock outfit Thor. Triton (the band, not the man - though some would say the man is the band, or is it that the band is the man?) is the sort of band that could only exist in a movie. Rock star stereotypes that should never be mixed are thrown together in a lame attempt to create something that looks cutting edge. First you have Thor, who looks every bit the heavy metal warrior with his luscious, flowing blond locks, huge muscles, and tight jeans. But then you've got this goofy new wave dude, the nerdy manager who looks like he's about nineteen when most managers of bands that could record in a massive 24-track studio would be dudes in their forties with that "ponytail balding" combination championed by men like Phil Collins. And you've got the girlfriends, who run the gamut from snooty rich bitch to sweet and innocent. Not a single heavy metal chick among them.

And then there's the Australian guy, who is really only Australian for about 45% of his lines. The accent comes and goes with a frequency that will make you appreciate Kevin Costner's fine linguistic gymnastics in that Robin Hood film. At first, you may think that this guy is simply a bad actor who thought throwing a little Australian accent in here and there would help give his character a . character, I guess. Everyone was doing it in the 1980s, after all, in an attempt to give a dash of exotic down-under wonder to a movie. I would suggest that the drummer, Stig, is actually a clever parody of all the fake Australians running rampant in films in the wake of Paul Hogan, Men at Work, at that bleach blond Jacko guy who screamed "Oi!" in a Popeye voice while selling you batteries or attempting to convince you that you should watch The Highwayman that Friday.

Anyway, this band is pretty much the model for every time Hollywood (or in this case, Canada) tries to put together a cast of punks or metal heads or anything else. They never could tell punks, metal heads, and new wave folks apart, sort of how they could never tell hippies from bikers. And what's with the girls? You telling not a single dude in this heavy metal band dates a metal chick? And how did that guy who looks like Nicholas Cage from Valley Girl get in the band?

Never mind these questions. I'm sure Triton knew what he was doing, just like he knew what he was doing when he wrote Zombie Nightmare -- he was giving the world Tia Carerre in a hot tub.

And I'm sure he knew what he was doing when he made his band drive their custom van out to a deserted farmhouse. How do we know they're driving to a deserted farmhouse? Because they show us. They show us for quite some time. I know the rule of thumb is "show, don't tell," but that doesn't mean you have to show every single second. The driving scene goes on for the length of an entire Thor song, and by the time it was over, I was pretty sure I could find the farm house if I had to.

When asked why he has brought them to this God-forsaken (literally!) hellhole (literally!), Triton explains that it's so the band can reclaim their edge. The softness of big city success has spoiled them, and like Rocky in Rocky IV, if they want to punch out the Commies with the power of rock 'n' roll, they're going to have to get away from all that high-tech gadgetry and soft living and do squats in the barn. They just have to get away from it all. When asked why they had to drive up to Toronto, Triton explains that Toronto is where it's all happening, baby: the arts, the music, the nightlife. I thought they were leaving to get away from all those things, but who am I to question the wisdom of Jon Triton? One would think if they were leaving town to get away from distractions like parties and girls, they wouldn't have each brought their girls with them to do some partying.

One guy is even on his honeymoon, and this is how he's spending it. His wife is too much of a sport to care, or she just figured in the race between kicking back in St. Kitts or staying in a deserted farmhouse with a bunch of failed heavy metal guys, the farm in Toronto just couldn't be beat. Who wants white sand beaches, crystal clear water, and hiking trails through virgin rain forests when you can have dull gray skies, cow shit, and the song "We Love to Rock?"

When rehearsing, Thor favors his heavy metal uniform of tight black pants, a shiny silver chest-revealing tuxedo jacket, and mirror shades. I know that William Gibson tried to make mirror shades all cool with cyberpunk and all, and some people even bought that crap. To me, mirror shades have been and always shall be the domain of surfer-bodybuilders and fat Southern sheriffs. I'm not sure why Thor felt the need to get all gussied up in his concert duds for a rehearsal. It can't be because he draws power from the ensemble, because all metal dudes draw their power from their hair. That's why Metallica started to suck so bad after they all got haircuts and James Hetfield said, "I'm just tired of people telling me I look like the Cowardly Lion."

The real big problem is that the demons who killed that family ten years ago are still at this very house, lying in wait for new victims because the evil forces are too lazy to walk down the street to a more populated area. The other really big problem is that despite being isolated and out in the middle of nowhere, the house actually seems to sit a few feet from a major highway, and you can see cars going by all the time. Every exterior shot of the deserted, isolated abode features at least one car that looks like it's pulling into the driveway.

The movie then becomes a series of scenes broken up into pattern of "the band plays a tune, then one of the members gets possessed." From time to time, we get very unappealing sex scenes, the most painful of which involves Thor's beefy, oiled-up body in a shower sex scene with his gal. Not only is the thought of a buff, steaming naked metal musician unappealing, the shot where Thor goes in for a French kiss and starts waggling his tongue like an angler a foot from his woman's mouth was one of the most disturbing things I'd ever had the misfortune of seeing. I can take people being disemboweled or having their eyelids peeled off, but wet, naked metal heads waggling their soft, pink, dripping tongue like a toothless old man anxiously smacking his lips and gums in anticipation of a bit of soggy biscuit and gravy is where I draw the line.

Eventually, everyone has been possessed except for Jon, and he's thankful for the solitude since it will allow him to pen a few power ballads before the next jam session. The demons convene on his location, however, and what a scary set of demons they turn out to be? One looks sort of like a small brown version of Beaker from The Muppet Show. Another just looks like a big ol' penis - no doubt some of Mikl-Thor's clever social satire regarding the concept of cock rock. Or not. Whatever the case, the monsters all fail in delightfully humorous ways to kill Triton, who always does that thing where he bends over to pick something up, just missing getting impaled by something whizzing over his head.

Realizing that his minions are woefully inept at their job, the head demon assumes the shape of Jon's girlfriend and tries to make him concerned about the fact that everyone seems to have vanished. This head demon might have had better luck with his minions if he hadn't hired a group of creatures that closely resemble something that would menace Gumby by stealing his beach ball or something. Even the devil in Petey Wheatstraw had better minions, and all they could do was run around with their arms outstretched while wearing capes and leotards.

Angered by Jon's lack of interest in the disappearance of his cohorts, the demon begins to yell in an otherworldly voice that Jon is a fool not to see what is happening. Jon' calmly stands up and announced his big, shocking surprise:

No one has died. No one has died because no one was ever there. It was all a clever ruse conjured up by Jon to drive Ol' Gooseberry out of hiding for a final confrontation. Surrounding himself with smoke and light, Jon then makes the announcement that he is, in fact, the arch-angel Triton sent to Earth to do battle with the Dark One and send him back from whence he came, never again to plague innocent mortals. Satan responds to this revelation by transforming from a mildly attractive woman into a large rubber monster with no apparent points of articulation. Not one to be outdone, and ever the heavy metal showman, Triton transforms into a glistening rock god in eyeliner and a studded black loincloth. Just to add that extra something that makes God so happy, Triton also teases his hair up into a frenzied whirlwind of bleach blond fury. The ultimate battle between good and evil has begun!

Probably my favorite thing about the ultimate battle between good and evil is that it's a fistfight. No one in movies ever seems to consider just hauling off and letting Satan have it in the jaw as a viable means of defeating him. It's always spells and chants and old priests muttering ancient incantations while grasping crosses. Triton, however, appreciates the religious value of a solid right hook delivered by a buff, mostly naked archangel. Satan, on the other hand, tries to add a little supernatural flair to the proceedings by flinging rubber starfish at Triton, who must catch them and hold them against his barrel chest as if they were sticking to him. It's a scene that will make you ache for the technical wizardry of that scene in Bride of the Monster where Bela Lugosi was attacked by the giant octopus that lived in the swamp. Yes, in slow motion, Satan hurls Wacky Wall Walkers at Triton. You may have thought it would be fire and brimstone or lightning or piercing shards of energy fashioned from the souls of the damned, but in the end, it's just floppy rubber novelty toys. Truly, it is a scene that must be seen to be fully appreciated.

After his rubber starfish fail to do anything other than smudge the chest grease of the mighty avenging angel, Satan too resorts to simple fisticuffs in his bid to usurp the warrior of the Lord. Unfortunately for Satan, the Satan creature is mostly a statue with, as I pointed out earlier, no actual points of articulation. The best he can do is to stand there with outstretched arms and sort of twirl around, hoping Triton will be satisfied with walking directly into the blows or just doing one of those "test of strength" type lock-ups. For the most part, Satan's battle plan works okay, but in the end, not even the Devil himself can best a weight-lifting heavy metal angel lathered in oil and accompanied by a guitar solo.

Triton's final act after vanquishing his foe, the lord of evil: to look into the great beyond and, with wry confidence in his own ability, proclaim, "I'll see you again, Old Scratch!" I always thought just old bluesmen down by the crossroads called Satan Ol' Scratch, but I guess when you've worked together like Triton and Lucifer must have at some point, you develop a familiarity. It would have undermined much of The Bible's power, I guess, to have God constantly warning the Israelites about "this guy, Ol' Scratch."

Some movies offer you so many places to begin, it's difficult to chose one. Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is such a film. It goes so far beyond the realm of what is or is not "good" that such terms cease to have any meaning whatsoever. What is good becomes a secondary consideration to what is entertaining, and Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare is nothing if not entertaining. It's probably one of the only movies to challenge what was at the time the very popular public opinion that heavy metal lead to devil worshiping and witchcraft. Jon Mikl-Thor dared challenge these preconceptions by presenting the world a film in which the power of metal is actually used to combat the forces of Satan. The idea that God has at his command any number of muscle-rippling, loincloth-clad, heavy metal angels would certainly upturn the worldviews of guys like Bob Larsen. What would Jerry Falwell do if he was greeted at the Pearly Gates not by a robe-wearing white male from the deep South, but by a wild-eyed David Lee Roth looking guy in assless leather pants? Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare asks the theologically important question, "What if Stryper was right?"

As far as the technical aspects of a film go, this one is okay in that someone managed to get a series of shots recorded onto film. Asking for more than that is only asking for trouble. The acting ranges from awful to below average, and it says something about your film when the best performance is from Jon Mikl-Thor. Someday I hope to make a movie with the pointlessly Australian guy from Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare and the pointlessly British guy from Honey Britches. It's actually sort of cool to see a movie where no one is a good actor. I mean, even crappy, shot-on-video horror films made by pot-smoking Slayer fans usually have one guy who is at least okay, but this movie manages to feature a cast so devoid of any real acting skill that it will make you pine for the subtle thespian styling of a middle school play.

The special effects are as good as rubber finger puppet technology can hope to deliver in a feature film. The minions are all completely and hilariously awful, looking like someone glued some Mr. Potatohead face parts to a couple hot dogs, only not that convincing. Satan himself has no mobility whatsoever, so all his action consists of being leaned slightly in toward Thor, who grimaces and makes "fight face" with over-the-top glee the likes of which I haven't witnessed since Jack Palance in Hawk the Slayer. At least one of them is somewhat animated.

The music is a curious mix of hard rock anthems by Thor and weird keyboard doodlings, possibly by a chimp. Sometimes, both soundtracks are playing at the same time. It almost makes sense when the "spooky" music plays during a scene in which someone could conceivably have a radio tuned to the movie's "All Thor, All the Time" channel (which could possibly exist in Canada and parts of the Eastern Bloc). Other times, however, it simply seems as if Thor couldn't let a scene go by without mixing one of his songs into the soundtrack as well. The best way to simulate the end result is to take two radios, sit one to your left and one to your right, then play Yanni on one and Spinal Tap on the other, at the same time. Then imagine a whole movie of that. Then imagine that movie contains scenes of a glistening naked metal hero waggling his tongue in a soft-lit orange-pink shower scene.

The plot? Well, I have to say that it's original in the sense that there are very few movies in which a heavy metal rock god strips down to a black leather loincloth to punch out Satan amid a flurry of flashing neon lights, gusting wind, and billowing mist. Yes, in that sense, Jon Mikl-Thor has written a script that is truly unique. Sure, one could ask questions like why he had to concoct this whole charade with the fake people in order to lure Satan out, when Satan seems like he was willing to come out for anyone. And you could even ask why Satan is such an idiot that he would fall for it. Doesn't he have some special sort of God-detecting skills, like Spiderman? One could also ask why Satan, lord of all that is vile and evil in the universe, would take time out to personally haunt an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of Toronto. Shouldn't he, I don't know, be corrupting priests or arranging for apocalypse or prank calling Jesus? How does he have time in his schedule for kicking around the farm possessing the drummers of go-nowhere hard rock bands?

You could also ask yourself just what sort of theological picture Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare paints for us. In the theology of Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare, heavy metal is the tool of God, and sweaty heavy metal warriors are his heralds singing in falsetto voices to usher in his glory as they engage in pose-downs with Bealzabub, or Bub as he's known here. You all already know I'm not a religious man, but I'm not totally ignorant about Christian theology. From what I can tell, most Christians have in their head a particular notion of Heaven. It's all rolling green hills or it's all misty white fluff. Whatever the landscaping decisions, the vision of heaven almost never contains mostly-naked heavy metal archangels with black leather codpieces strutting about the place.

Christianity would be a very different religion if, say, Moses had cast his arms toward the heavens and yelled, "Oh Lord, what do you want?" and God had replied in a shrill falsetto voice, "I wanna rock!" Whether there would be more Christians or less as a result is probably a question that takes more mulling over than I'm willing to sacrifice, but I can certainly say that if The Bible, or more specifically Milton, hadn't painted Satan out to be such a headstrong, suave bad-ass, and instead had opted to portray him as a goofy rubber statue who can't even win a simple fistfight, there'd definitely be a lot less Satanists in the world. Instead of making him this fiery, tough sumbitch, The Bible could simple have thrown in the line, "Yea, and Satan rose from the depths, and he was a pussy." There you go. Problem solved. No one wants to follow a wuss.

Yes, you could ask these questions, but to ask these questions is to miss the point: that this is a movie about a heavy metal rock god stripped down to a black leather loincloth so he can punch out Satan amid a flurry of flashing neon lights, gusting wind, and billowing mist. Not only does it give us that, but it does so with all the technical wonder and finely-honed skill of your lower-end music videos from the 1980s. It's not as disturbing as Van Halen's bizarre zero-budget video for their cover of Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman," in which two midgets dressed as an Indian chief and Lon Chaney from London After Midnight torment a captive woman until David Lee Roth as the hunchback calls the members of Van Halen who are, respectively, a Tarzan guy, a samurai, a cowboy, and Napoleon, all of whom arrive just in time for Roth as Napoleon to cast a pouty-lipped look into the camera after stepping from his white stretch limo. No, it's not as disturbing as that, but frankly, what is?

How you react to Rock 'n' Roll Nightmare depends largely on how you might react to a naked angel socking Satan in the nose, or how you might respond to a Manowar album, or possibly just how drunk you are. If you're looking for a rock 'n' roll adventure on the level of Wild Zero or even Streets of Fire, you're pretty much out of luck. Neither the music nor the movie is as good. If, however, you appreciate the fact that John Mikl-Thor was probably having one hell of a fun time making this movie, and if you aren't looking for something to take especially seriously, then you'll no doubt have yourself a riotous time. The fact that Thor does seem to be having fun, even if it's because he's indulging his own ego as both a song and scriptwriter, saves the movie from a horrible fate a more straight-faced movie might have suffered. It's not that this is a comedy, or even a spoof of horror films, as so many bad horror films claim to be these days. It's not funny; it's just fun, and that makes it worth watching.

Of course, Satan throwing rubber toys at an archangel doesn't hurt.

Labels: Horror: Satan, Year: 1987

posted by Keith at 3:53 PM | 0 Comments

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