Redmond, Maitland and Cave

I've been remiss in announcing that VIDEO WATCHDOG #146 was mailed to our subscribers just before the holidays and is now on newsstands everywhere. The cover feature is the first-ever interview with 99-year-old Harry Redmond, Jr., whose long special effects career extended from RKO's classic features of the 1930s (THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, KING KONG, SHE, THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII) to TV's THE OUTER LIMITS in the 1960s. Remarkably, Mr. Redmond appears to be the only worker on the original KING KONG still among us, thereby earning the interview's striking title: "Last Survivor of Skull Island." THE DINOSAUR FILMOGRAPHY author Mark F. Berry, who interviewed Judi Bowker for us in VW #135, adds another feather to his cap with this important career overview, which has already been suggested for a Rondo Best Article Award over on the Classic Horror Film Boards. You can find out more about the issue and its contents, and even order your copy, on the VIDEO WATCHDOG website.

Donna and I are only now starting to work on VIDEO WATCHDOG #147. The feature article in this issue will be another of our popular Round Table Discussions, this one devoted to Dario Argento's THE MOTHER OF TEARS, one of the more controversial horror releases of recent years. In this case, our round table is composed of , including input from Kim Newman, Richard Harland Smith, Brad Stevens, yours truly and -- happily making her first VW appearance since our 8th issue, back in 1991 -- BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS author Maitland McDonagh!

On a more personal note... I've been preoccupied over the past four months with writing a short story for an anthology of fiction based on the music of Nick Cave. I've never had much luck with writing short stories, and I guess this still holds true, since this one ultimately swelled into a novelette of five chapters, running close to 17,000 words -- just a couple of pages shy of novella status. I loved working on it and feel very pleased with the result, and am now contending with the usual post-partum depression though my nest is anything but empty. I've sent the story to the anthology's editor and will tell you more about it if and when it's accepted.

SCHOOLGIRL REPORT 10 Reviewed

SCHOOLGIRL REPORT 10
"Every Girl Starts Sometime..."
aka Schulmädchen-report 10. Teil - Irgendwann fängt jede an
1976, Impulse Pictures, 80m 40s, DVD

REVIEWED BY TIM LUCAS

Like all the preceding numbers in Impulse Pictures' releases of the Schoolgirl Report series, this tenth outing is presented in the original German (itself almost always dubbed) with English subtitles. In this case, however, the main titles sequence unreels in English and carries the title SEXY SCHOOLWORK - contrary to the film's earlier dubbed release here on VHS under the title SMARTIE PANTS. Under the direction of Walter Boos, the film attempts to uphold its docudrama pretenses by crediting none of the actors by name.

This time, five different stories are presented as offshoots of a sex education class in an all-girls college. In contrast to the more juvenile or melodramatic nature of the segments themselves, the questions raised in the classroom are surprisingly intelligent and philosophical, proving there was intelligence behind this project if not always within it.

In the first story, related anecdotally by the class professor (Astrid Boner), Dr. Hansel (Reiner Brönneke) is charged with the rape and deflowering of a 17-year old student, Susanne (Bärbel Markus), whom he was tutoring in Latin and English. In a RASHOMON twist, perhaps inspired by Mario Bava's FOUR TIMES THAT NIGHT (1972), we see the incident staged according to the accusation, and then Susanne's real lover, her classmate Bert (Claus Obalski), comes forward with the true story, which we also see enacted.

The second story concerns a student in the class itself, Inga (Marianne Dupont), who reminisces internally about how her own sexual awakening compelled her to pursue young men who might deflower her. The first refuses after a heavy petting session because it's a bother; the second actually does it but in a wham-bam dismissive way that leaves her depressed; the third is a young man working in a greenhouse, who is scared off by her aggression; and the fourth, Freddy, turns out to be a wonderful lover... except that afterwards he turns her over to two biker friends for a gangbang. Fleeing the scene of her violation in tears, she meets a gentle and sensitive young man who may be the answer to her quest for genuine love.

The next story has no apparent connection to the framing story and concerns 17 year-old Kathy Dietz (Yvonne Kerstin), who engineers the break-up of her father's second marriage by promising sexual favors to her boyfriend if he succeeds in making love to her stepmother (Karin Lorsin). He succeeds and discovers that the stepmother is really the woman he prefers to be with.

Episode Four zeroes in on an absent student, Seffi (Alexandra Bogojevic), who is very much in love with her boyfriend Karli (Peter Hamm) but they are both miserable because they have no place to sleep together. In a completely outré contrivance, Karli is introduced by a co-worker to William Peter Blatty's novel DER EXORZIST and conceives a wild idea. He proposes to Seffi that she pretend to be possessed by the Devil, so that he can gain entrance to her bedroom in the guise of a Rasputin-like monk named Horace, and make love to her under the guise of an exorcism! Seffi agrees and commences to make faces and expose herself to all the baffled folk in her small village until "Horace" shows up at the local tavern and makes his expertise known. It's the only episode in which the series' zany sense of humor is apparent.

The final segment is about Iris (Gina Janssen), whose happy affair with a wealthy older man, Walter (Paul Glawion), is suddenly cut off. She finds herself pursued by a younger, yet still older man, Franz (Claus Tinney, previously seen in SGR 8), who turns out to be Walter's nephew and hopeful of becoming the new partner in Iris' love life. To his surprise, Iris turns out to be a more substantial young woman than he expected - she has read Dante in the original, no less - and he is still more surprised when she immediately accepts him. Afterwards, he invites her to dinner but she turns the tables by inviting him to eat with her parents - a careworn mother and a drunken father forever complaining about his war wounds ("an inheritance from Adolph"). His reaction to the dinner decides their future and confirms her wisdom.

In the context of its series, SCHOOLGIRL REPORT 10 is something of an oddity. Despite the subtitle (a sexist tweak on the German original's "Everybody Starts Sometime"), only two of the five vignettes are about the loss of virginity. Furthermore, it's not really a film about the "issue" of teenage sex, as the once-political exploitative series set out to be in 1970. The majority of its stories involve relationships between adult partners and unusually mature, theoretical teenagers. It's common in the series for the teenage girls to be smirkingly knowledgeable beyond their years, but all of the young women in this film are indistinguishable from sexually active adults, even when they are pretending to lose their virginity. The EXORCIST-themed episode is a riotous hoot, like nothing else in the series, and its two principals are plainly adult, impossible to confuse for school-aged lovers. The film gains most of its value from its typically attractive and capable cast, but its most successful erotic scenes involve the older characters; it's otherwise flatly directed and shot, with only intermittent moments where the camerawork shows imagination. Gert Wilden's particolored dance score is somewhat more vivid than usual.

Like the original German release of this title, Impulse's 1.66:1 DVD contains more than a half-dozen brief cuts during scenes of sexual activity -- jumps in the music track help us to pinpoint them at 8:40, 18:09, 18:26, 18:30, 25:05, 25:46 (which apparently omits a lengthy gang-rape), 37:46 and 38:15. There may be others. The omissions are not the fault of Impulse and survive as traces of an attempt on the part of the film's producers to jazz the film up with some added explicitness that was reconsidered before the film hit German theaters. An earlier Region 2 release from the Japanese label Mondo Romantic ran only 78m 02s and omitted the gang rape finale of the Inga segment (and its hopeful conclusion) in its entirety, ending her story on the happy note of finding satisfactory sex with Freddy! While Impulse's transfer of this wintertime movie appears mildly noisy and somewhat drably colored, Mondo Romantic's somewhat more colorful transfer was clearly pumped up too much, creating still more surface distortion. Impulse's release, though flawed, therefore embodies the best possible presentation of SCHOOLGIRL REPORT 10 we are likely to see.

Purchase directly from Impulse Pictures here.

(c) 2013 Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Make Your Name Like a Ghost

It's both moving and a bit alienating to read the news today that Syd Barrett has died at age 60, from diabetes-related complications. Barrett's public self died, in a sense, more than thirty years ago when he recorded his last music; or perhaps more than twenty years ago, when his last album of unreleased material was issued; or perhaps more than ten years ago, when it was all collected on a box set.

The founding member of Pink Floyd, the author of their early singles "Arnold Layne" and "See Emily Play", the visionary responsible for taking their psychedelic noodlings into space ("Jupiter and Saturn / Oberon, Miranda and Titania / Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten..."), Barrett dropped out of the band as it finally stood on the brink of ascension above and beyond mere cult status. His closing (almost solo) song on the PIPER AT THE GATES OF DAWN album, the awkwardly pedal-toggling "Bike", showed the direction in which his songwriting craft was being lured by his acid-knurled imagination, which we're told initiated psychological problems. He withdrew from public life, abandoning music and sharing a Cambridge flat with his mother.

I have no idea who he was, or what he was like personally, but his songwriting and performing was an inspiration to later musicians like David Bowie and Robyn Hitchcock, and even to writers like me. As far as music goes, Syd Barrett was THE object lesson in the value of scrapping the traditional rules and making combinations of words and notes and tempi that suit you, because the more directly you are in touch with your own spirit, flaws and all, the more likely yours will touch others -- and, if the kiss is a bit raw, all the better. It's a lesson applicable to all the arts. I won't make the time-honored observation of the thin line dividing genius from madness, which would be lazy and presumptuous of me, but I think it's unquestionable that Barrett's three solo albums stand as some of the most original, completely unmoored, and sublimely playful and poetical music to be found in any category. His catalogue isn't dark and self-absorbed and deadly, or any of the things commonly associated with mental illness, but fractured and fanciful -- a fun place, prone to occasional wonderment and melancholy and longing, but essentially true to the emotional roller-coaster of life.

I first heard Pink Floyd after Barrett had left, with UMMAGUMMA, and I heard Syd Barrett for the first time when it was all over, basically -- when a local FM station played "Baby Lemonade" from his second solo album, BARRETT. The song's sleek but coltish feel and absurd lyrics encouraged me to seek it out, and I discovered there were far greater pleasures awaiting me on the album (which may have been the first import vinyl I ever bought): "Gigolo Aunt", the sweetly inebriated "Wined and Dined", "Maisie" (a heavy blues song sung to a cow). I'm listening to the album now, as I write this, and I find myself impressed anew by the song "Rats", which contains a wealth of inspired incantatory, impressionistic couplets, each one chanted twice ("I like the ball that brings me to / I like the cord around sinew.../ Love an empty son and guest / Dimples dangerous and blessed"). In fact, I got so deeply into BARRETT that I've never been able to take his debut solo album THE MADCAP LAUGHS into my heart on the same level, and most Barrett observers claim that it's the masterpiece and BARRETT that falls short. Perhaps the day will come when I can fully embrace THE MADCAP LAUGHS, but whenever I want to hear a nice stretch of Syd Barrett, I can't help it: I instinctively reach for BARRETT.

But when I crave the hardcore essence of this artist, it's the third album -- the odds-and-ends compilation OPEL -- that I reach for. And the opening title track is often all I really need because, somehow, this previously unreleased epic stands, for me, as Barrett's definitive musical statement. His two solo albums are sometimes described as "ragged," but they are actually very well produced and the musical ideas advanced and avant garde rather than sloppy. "Opel," however, is genuinely ragged -- no more than a demo, really -- but the album compilers had the wisdom to issue the rough-hewn song as it was, without production embellishment.

Guitar string searchings, almost tunings, arrive at the right chord, then give way to a chiming, striving rhythm as Barrett describes his own stance in a desolate yet also fantastic landscape:

On a distant shore, miles from land
Stands the ebony totem in ebony sand
A dream in a mist of gray
On a far distant shore

The pebble that stood alone
In driftwood lies half buried
Warm shallow waters sweep shells
So the cockles shine

A bare winding carcass, stark,
Shimmers as flies scoop up meat,
An empty way
Dry tears

Crisp flax squeaks tall reeds
Make a circle of gray
In a summer way (around man)
Stood on ground

At this point, the guitar makes an inspired turn toward an absolutely heartbreaking chord progression, its tonalities tragic and somehow innocently nostalgic while its cadence is almost that of a child happily skipping along. It's played only on a starkly recorded acoustic guitar, but somehow I can hear this passage (indeed the whole song) as though it were fully orchestrated and being played by orchestra, full steam ahead. As the voice returns, soaring with longing sung off-key and all the more vital for it, the chords turn bitter and brittle with an encroaching admission of yearning and struggle:

I'm trying
I'm trying to find you
To find you
I'm living
I'm giving
To find you
To find you

The entire arc of Syd Barrett's musical career is somehow encapsulated in this inspired demo. The presence of some obviously unfinished lyrics (i.e., "An empty way / Dry tears") does nothing to mar its perfection, but rather invites us more intimately into his creative process. It's this one piece of music that makes me most sad to hear that he's dead.

Whatever Syd Barrett was seeking in music, he clearly found it -- seemingly at great cost to himself. As I say, the personal Syd is a cipher to me and to most people, and I can only hope that he found more happiness in his strange, enchanted life than is commonly known. Knowing his music certainly made my life richer, and I know this is true for thousands of people. No, we can't mourn him because his death means there will be no more music, because none was forthcoming; true, his death changes nothing where most of us are concerned. But we received the messages he sent into the void in intimate places most recording artists never touch, and that's why he mattered and always will.

Damage Report

Cincinnati was hit yesterday by high winds, fallout from Hurricane Ike, the likes of which I have never seen except in newsreels. Donna and I went to the local Healthplex yesterday morning for our regular Sunday swim/exercise regime, and everything was fine as we went in; when we stepped out, around 1:00pm, the trees were bending and the decorative bird feeder outside the door was on its side.

Driving home, we found a runaway shopping cart endangering cars at a busy intersection, and I leaped out of the car, chased it, grabbed it and rolled it back onto a sidewalk, where I wrestled it onto its side. Pulling into our driveway, we saw a chunk of one of our two Dish Network satellite dishes resting on our front lawn. I immediately checked our reception and found out that we were still receiving our Dish service; evidently the other dish is the old one they never bothered to take down when we upgraded.

Then, around 3:00, our power went out -- no electricity, no computer (= no work), no TV. So we opened the shades and used our windows for television as the high winds carried parts of trees, garbage cans and lids and recycling bins down the street. (Of course, it was garbage night in our neighborhood, as it always seems to be when high winds strike.) We watched in amazement as a section of vinyl siding from a blue house across the street came loose, began flapping in the wind, and finally sailed off somewhere into its rear yard, leaving large sections of insulation exposed. Then I went into the kitchen for some reason and saw, through one of the windows there, that our next door neighbor's deck was covered in bricks and other detritus -- one of their chimneys had collapsed! A good thing they hadn't let their dogs out. How our rickety chimneys withstood the same winds is a question for the ages.

I went outside for a better look. In addition to our neighbor's indeed fallen chimney, the house next to theirs had lost some stripping from its aluminum siding, and a house on the block behind us had lost its entire back surface of siding! Fortunately, the worst we got was that piece that fell off the dead satellite dish. That is, until our power continued to be lost... for a total of 16 hours. Sixteen hours with no lights, no TV (hence we missed the second night of IN TREATMENT's Alex episodes, adding to my generally pissy mood), no phones, no computers... in short, no distraction from the fact that we live in Cincinnati, Ohio! As the hours wore on, we got so bored, sitting here in the dark with our candles, we decided to get in the car and go out to dinner. That's when we realized how widespread the blackout was -- it reached well into northern Kentucky, yet there were also houses less than a mile from us that did have their electricity. I'm hearing that 750,000 people here lost their power last night, and some are still without it.

As we drove, we had to turn back on some familiar streets because of fallen trees. Amazingly, we saw trees whose entire trunks had been snapped in half. We saw one overturned tree and, as we drove past, saw that it had fallen on top of a parked car. I felt like we had driven into some sort of George Romero "martial law" picture with Mother Nature standing in for the usual zombies.

We ended up at Appleby's around 9:30 -- a half hour wait, crowded as a Bengals locker room after a victory, and the entire staff seemed stressed out. Our waitress confessed to breaking down in tears in the kitchen earlier, once the crush of business started easing off, because it was the busiest night they had ever had, with cars actually circling the place earlier. Dinner was fairly miserable; I'm afraid Appleby's isn't very vegetarian friendly, if tilapia isn't your favorite.

We then went home, got into our iPods and spent fairly separate evenings in the dark, Donna sewing by candlelight. Unlike me, she's really cut out for this sort of pioneer days adversity. I sat outside for awhile, smoking a Frisco and listening to Scott Walker -- surveying a yard covered in green leaves, tree branches and snapped twigs, thankful that our chimneys survived the onslaught -- and saw, behind the dense cloud cover of the southeastern sky, what looked like the aurora borealis. It flickered and turned the dull slate blue sky different shades of deep blue, red and violet. It lasted less than a minute but it was a welcome coda for such a distressing day. I was in bed before 2:00am, most unusual for me.

The return of our electricity this morning prompted me to rise early, and I went around resetting clocks and checking the e-mails I should have received yesterday. It feels good to be reconnected to the world!

Birthday Love to Coralina

Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni is Italian horror's reigning Diva of Delicious Death Scenes, but she is also a dear friend, an inspiring fellow artist, and our beloved sister, so Donna joins me today in sending her our warmest regards on the anniversary of her birth. She's seen here with us at last October's Cinema Wasteland convention, embracing her own personal copy of the Bava book, while we embrace her -- as I wish we could be doing right now.

Coralina first won the hearts of horror fans as another birthday girl: the ill-fated, talon-sprouting, pus-erupting Sally of Lamberto Bava's DEMONS 2: THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS -- a legitimately great monster performance. She can currently be seen in what is surely the most outrageous of her many death scenes in Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS (featured in the new issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG), and is presently engaged in many different projects we eagerly await, including an ambitious authorized biography written with Filippo Brunamonti, new paintings and music, and some original screenplay projects written in collaboration with the talented writer-director Mariano Baino (DARK WATERS).

You can see the delightfully experimental and allusive 6m trailer for Coralina's and Filippo Brunamonti's forthcoming book on her MySpace page here (which includes a Hitchcock-like cameo by... er, another book), and also sample tracks from her CD, LIMBO BALLOON -- which capture the real Coralina I know and love.

"Happy Birthday!" the dark incubus spake.
"Now tie the birthday girl down
And... cut the cake!"

SUSPIRIA in HD

Stefania Casini welcomes you to SUSPIRIA.

I want to caution WatchBlog readers that the version of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA which is being shown this month on Action Max, the Cinemax subsidiary, is not only the cut US theatrical version (which renders nearly all the violence incoherent) but, for some reason, the stereo surround track is lacking much of its original, room-shaking bottom end. However, on the plus side, it IS being shown in True HD -- as far as I know, the film's high definition debut. For this reason alone, I found it hard to peel myself away... the wallpaper alone (blue velvet, silver foil...) is enough to poke your eyes out. Next showing is at 2:30am eastern, tonight -- and sister station Thriller Max HD is showing MOTHER OF TEARS just before at Midnight.

For Your Oscar Consideration

Best Supporting Actress: The Monkey from Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS.