August, 2023 - Flinching with Delight

Perfectly “Lovecraftian” – From Beyond

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

I make a lot of plans. For example, I’ve got a long spreadsheet for this blog, listing things I know I want to cover – I don’t have it all scheduled, but I know what I want to devote my time to, and there are topics I’m really looking forward to eventually dealing with. But “the best laid plans of mice and men” and all that…sometimes you just see something and have such a strong response that it jumps to the front of the line, and that’s what happened with today’s movie, Stuart Gordon’s 1986 adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “From Beyond.” But hey, at least when my plans go askew, no one gets an eye sucked out…which only happens once in this movie, but it is memorable.

Now, I’d watched this before about nine years ago, but I think conditions weren’t right for me to really appreciate what was on offer. I was watching it in the background while I was in the kitchen, baking cookies, and though I remember basically enjoying the movie, it hadn’t done a whole lot for me – fair as I hadn’t given much to it, myself. But a few weeks ago, I got home on a hot Saturday afternoon, exhausted and desperately needing a bit of easy fun as a reprieve from the summer heat and my other responsibilities, and as this had just popped up on Shudder, I gave it another try and just LOVED it.

So let’s get into it. I expect this will be short (though that expectation is often wrong) as I mostly just want to shower praise upon the film, and I’m certain there will be spoilers…

From Beyond (1986)

An immediate follow up to his cult breakout hit, Re-Animator (also based on a bit of Lovecraft) from just one year earlier, this was Stuart Gordon’s second feature, bringing back Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs from the first film, as well as much of the creative team (he’d come up in the theatre and was accustomed to working with a company). The script was co-written by Brian Yuzna and Dennis Paoli, who had also co-written Re-Animator, as well as having worked before with Gordon at the Organic Theatre in Chicago. Gordon would go on to do three more Lovecraft films with Paoli: Castle Freak (1995) (arguably at least, inspired by “The Outsider” and again working with Crampton and Combs), Dagon (2001), and Dreams in the Witch House (2005) (for the TV series, Masters of Horror). While I haven’t seen ‘Witch House,’ the others are really enjoyable. But, I’ve gotta say, for my money, From Beyond is my favorite of his Lovecraft adaptations, hands down. In a few ways, it is just more “Lovecraftian.” Some of that is obvious – it’s a story of otherworldly creatures beyond our comprehension that breach reality and drive people mad. They’re squiggly and goopy. There are tentacles involved. It all fits a common perception of what Lovecraft’s work consisted of. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So first, a bit of a digression re: Lovecraft.

On Lovecraft

The work of H.P. Lovecraft is a peculiar case. I can only speak for my own experience, but I imagine it may not be all that dissimilar from others’. I really like his oeuvre, but I can’t praise all aspects of it. Even overlooking the disturbingly blatant xenophobia and racism (a negative trait which he was not alone in having – if you ever pick up Bram Stoker’s “Lair of the White Worm,” for instance, be prepared), I sometimes feel like he didn’t actually write stories. I mean, he did write. A lot. Probably more than 100 tales were published. But they don’t always feel like stories in the classic sense. He didn’t seem particularly interested in character, and protagonists seemed to rarely have much, if any, agency over the events that would play out (thematically appropriate for him, but not always dramatically satisfying). Rather, the recurring narrative would be that of a witness. Some “normal guy,” who sometimes knew enough about the odd things that went bump in the night to sensibly try to steer clear of them, would be thrust into a situation wherein he would discover/observe/experience some shuddering horror beyond that which could be understood by his meager human intelligence. It would shake him to the core, but by the end, he would generally get away, such that he could tell the terrible tale, and through this unlucky narrator, H.P. could lay out some horrifying concept he’d dreamed up.

So with character and plot so decentered, I think the primary appeal of his work exists in two complementary qualities: theme and style. When I first encountered his texts, it was as if he had managed to exactly pin down just what this idea of ‘horror’ was that I’d become so enamored with: an encounter with that which is beyond what we can accept, what we can endure. He generally wrote in a sci-fi/weird fiction mode, creating (in many, though certainly not all) of his works, an extended mythos of all manner of wild, trans-dimensional, ancient beings, godlike to us petty humans, who do not really seek to harm us, so much as they just don’t care about us at all, and in going about their endless, unfathomable, arcane pursuits, just so happen to mortally, psychically, and spiritually threaten and/or destroy us in the process. We inhabit a world far larger, darker, and more terrifying than we can imagine, suffused with alien threat (paralleling his own xenophobia) and if we could see reality as it actually is, our feeble minds and souls couldn’t hope to endure. The thing is, for me, I don’t think this “cosmic horror” of his needs “cosmic” elements, per se. Rather, he paints pictures of encounters with things that shatter our previous conceptions of reality, of morality, of scale, and in so doing, can break us – and not all of them need include massive beings lying in slumber, waiting to awaken and devour the stars. I think this encounter, this revelation of unbearable reality is what “horror” is in life and having an author focus so specifically on setting it down on the page was exciting for me when I first discovered his writing many years ago. Also, the mythos itself is fun and odd and specific – it’s so refreshing to have something that plays the role of the demonic without having to buy into a Judeo-Christian mythology and ethical-moral hegemony.

Referenced below, ‘Under the Pyramids’ was also published as ‘Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,’ and credited to Harry Houdini in its first publication (it’s written first person from his perspective)

But the other thing he focuses on, and what really gives me pleasure in the reading, is his style. He is trying to do so much, to suggest things that test the limits of the imagination, and he will use every damn synonym in the thesaurus to do it. The phrase “over-the-top” cannot hope to capture his lexical abandon. An adherent of the school of thought that says what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, he wrote extensively of the narrator’s reactions, while painting around the edges of the thing itself, maintaining the implication that words couldn’t contain the truth of this horror. But, regardless, along the way, he did use all the words. Hemmingway he is not. A favorite, thrillingly overwritten passage comes from his 1924 story, “Under the Pyramids,” in which Harry Houdini finds himself in Egypt, captured by sinister Bedouins (ah, the much mentioned xenophobia) and lowered by a rope into a hole in the ground, wherein he will discover ancient nefarious mummified beasties with crocodile and hippopotamus heads, carrying out their dark rites in worship of some eldritch, indescribable, god-like thing, rising into the chthonic darkness. But well before he gets to the horrific payoff, the process of being lowered under the earth just sings:

“Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible—hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac—one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua. . . . Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead.”

I mean, yeah. That there is a good time! Is it good writing? I don’t know. Maybe? But also, maybe I don’t really care. When I can put myself in the mood for it, his prose is just such a blast. This is writing that is unashamed to go big, and while it is as over-the-top as can be, I don’t feel it ever ventures into a realm of campiness. It is a blast exactly because it is “too much,” but the whole point is to take that “too much” totally seriously – and be broken by it. It’s refreshing in our modern, jaded times to encounter anything so dialed up to eleven, while still being entirely earnest.

Written in 1920, ‘From Beyond’ wasn’t published until 1934, first in “The Fantasy Fan,” and then reprinted a few years later in “Weird Tales.”

So, with that, let’s actually come back to the film in question, which I think is an excellent adaptation of Lovecraft’s horror themes and exaggerated, but lovable style, while filling in some of the gaps his writing leaves open to make for a most satisfying viewing experience.

The Film

First off, the adaptation is, on one level, quite faithful. Most of what happens in the story makes it to the screen: in the text, the narrator goes to visit his friend and colleague, the scientist, Crawford Tillinghast who, in his attic laboratory, has created a sonic resonator that can tune the pineal gland to function as a kind of sense organ, perceiving layers of reality typically unnoticed. However when in the presence of the resonator, whatever lives in those other realms with which we are usually out of sync can perceive us as well – and attack. The mad doctor turns against our narrator, but when the police arrive in the end, Tillinghast is dead, our narrator has destroyed the machine, and he can go on, forever shaken by this encounter with that which came from beyond!

The film takes all of these details as a premise, as a starting point, but then it builds from there extensively. Now, Tillinghast (Combs) is actually the assistant to the mad (and we come to learn, also quite kinky) Doctor Pretorius (in a nod to Ernest Thesiger’s fabulously mad scientist in The Bride of Frankenstein). In a standout cold open, they get the resonator to work, discover the squiggly things beyond, and Tillinghast manages to escape with his life (though not his sanity), having destroyed the resonator, while his boss loses his head to something bigger, something worse.

Tillinghast is rescued from the psyche ward by Dr. McMichaels (Barbara Crampton), a psychiatrist who believes Pretorius’s machine could help schizophrenia patients, and has Tillinghast freed so that he can repair the resonator, enabling her to carry out her own experiments. Once operational, Pretorius returns, now one with the thing that had consumed him, mad with power and lust (the machine’s effect on the pineal gland results in a heightened state of arousal, even as goopy monsters abound), and mind shattering horror ensues.

Past that, I don’t really want to go too much into the plot (and there is a surprising amount of plot – twists and turns and reversals of alliance all over the place). Suffice it to say that Yuzna and Paoli run with the initial premise of Lovecraft’s text, do justice to it, and then add in an actual “story” on top, resulting in a really engaging, colorful, gory, inventive horror flick. Most of all, without ever undermining its own seriousness, it is fun and oh so “Lovecraftian.”

Firstly, beyond just faithfully following the concept of the text, it features wild special effects that live up to most expectations viewers would have of a “Lovecraft piece.” There are all manner of slimy, fleshy creatures that defy logic. The Pretorius-thing is in a state of constant flux, flesh distending and becoming other as it seeks to consume and absorb. Monstrous, cephalopodic tendrils undulate through the ether, wetly grasping at victims. There is an unearthly, pink-purple glow (truly high 80s) permeating the “science” of it all. And there are some jaw dropping moments of gore and weirdness: Tillinghast returning from the gullet of a transdimensional beast, bald and scarred, his pineal fully awakened and rising out of a newly formed orifice in his skull to lead him on a murderous brain-devouring, eye-sucking rampage; the Police sergeant accompanying the experiment to keep an eye on the mental patient (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead (1978) as well as countless others) being devoured by a swarm of insects from another dimension until he’s a quivering, meaty skeleton on the ground; and Pretorius eating Tillinghast whole, only for him to climb back up out of his mouth, beginning a goopy game of ‘whose body is this and whose hand is reaching out of whose chest?’ Fun stuff.

But in line with what I wrote above about Lovecraft’s prose, what really makes this feel so in the spirit of his writing is not the tentacles or the goopiness or the existence of horrors well beyond our ken. It is the style, and that best surfaces in the performances. Our three central characters are all obsessed and/or mad in one way or another, and their performances are so perfectly tuned – all achieving a heightened style without tipping over into self-parody. Ted Sorel’s Pretorius is sadistically menacing while also being quite playful and sardonic. He brings great intensity and focus to his madness – not ranting and raving, but deadly in his single-minded desire to consume physically, psychically, and sexually, anything or anyone he can lure into his orbit. Barbara Crampton’s Dr. McMichaels walks a fine line between personally motivated clinical interest and being wholly seduced by the power and allure of the machine, and her fluctuations between self-erasing compulsion and rational self-interest, between victimizing and being victimized are carried with a great deal of nuance. Both performers are excellent.

But the movie really belongs to Jeffrey Combs. While of course, I enjoyed him in Re-Animator (and also Bride of Re-Animator – but I never saw Beyond Re-Animator) as Herbert West, his performance here is just perfectly calibrated, threading the needle with exactly the right amounts of mania, terror, earnest feeling, and fragile humanity in the face of the unbearable, as well as periodically bringing a hint of humor which sells the horror without undercutting it, without diminishing its seriousness. When, after their first encounter with the newly, fleshily otherworldly Pretorius, in which Tillinghast just barely saves the sergeant from being devoured by turning off the machine at the last second, and he says simply, “that – will be quite enough of that,” Combs’s delivery elicits a genuine laugh from me every time – but this small comic moment works with the drama of it all, rather than detracting from it. Without jumping around a lot, he gives a rather physical performance, the play of different mental-emotional-spiritual tensions acting out in his body, his voice, his eyes, and breath. All three actors are on the same page with that Lovecraftian excess, but Combs absolutely shines, delivering moments that in their personal horror, are such a freaking delight. It is pitch perfect horror-melodrama (which really is harder than it sounds) and deeply satisfying.

And there are some elements which don’t feel much like Lovecraft, but still bring something to the table. As mentioned, there can be occasional notes of comedy here and there. When it arises, though, it is just for a moment and doesn’t dominate the scene (a bit of a departure from the more blackly comic tone of Re-Animator) – still, old H.P. never really came across as a funny guy, so this is a change, but I think a welcome one.

But the most significant introduction is that of sex, something that Lovecraft didn’t generally touch on (if at all – I haven’t read his full catalogue, but I’d be genuinely surprised). The film adds the conceit that the pineal gland is responsible for regulating the sex drive (which, from a quick skim of the Wikipedia page, I don’t believe is true), and thus, when the resonator stimulates the pineal, allowing the veil to be lifted between worlds, the air is filled with a sexual charge. Furthermore, those who succumb to the call of the machine do so out of a kind of sexual obsession, an utterly non-cerebral, even physical drive – a hunger they can’t fully understand or resist – to see, to know, to experience – to possess. This can lead them to monstrous actions in pursuit of their new sensory addiction, and also result in their own violation (a warning, if sexual assault is something that will just ruin a movie for you, as in Re-Animator, in one scene, Barbara Crampton’s character is subjected to unwelcome, sexualized contact – before a giant, slimy, mandibled thing tries to eat her head).

In a way, to connect to a different author, it made me think much more of Clive Barker than Lovecraft – the mutable body, blurred lines between minds and flesh and sexual need – desire and pain and compulsion all tied up in knots with some unknown quality of the spirit. The addition of sex takes the experience beyond the realm of the merely cerebral – the horrors now existing in an interpersonal space, between bodies and minds, just as it also invites creatures that tread between worlds. Unfortunately, this sexual element didn’t always land for me on first viewing (and I found myself thinking how amazing it would have been if Barker had somehow been brought onto the project to help develop it – but I’m pretty sure he was developing Hellraiser (1987) at the time) – sometimes it felt tacked on and underdeveloped – an excuse to include some ticket-selling titillation and put Crampton in leather gear, though having watched the film a few times in the last couple of weeks, I can now better see its integration through the whole film. Still, even if I think it could have been explored more deeply, it certainly augments the piece.

So that is From Beyond. If you are in the mood for something that goes big, that takes itself seriously while still having just a bit of room for humor, that has crazy physical effect work, that captures a truly “Lovecraftian” style of madness, of excess, of Horror (all on a tidy little budget at Charles Band’s Empire Entertainment in Rome), this is your movie. It sure made my day, and might currently be my favorite Lovecraft adaptation.

—

A quick non-Lovecraftian aside – if you are a regular reader, I am sorry it’s been a couple of weeks longer than usual. Life got in the way. It’s even kinda funny. After watching this the first time, I thought, “Wow! Fantastic! Loved it! Let’s get a quick post up about that and not overthink things!” And then more time went by than ever before actually publishing. I’ve been preparing a performance for the cabaret I work with (among other things, finally making that “Youth Runs Wild!” 50s teensploitation act I wrote about months ago) and there has been a great deal of arts and crafts to do in order to build everything. Along the way, I have put this movie on in the background so many times while sewing or hot gluing or painting, keeping it fresh in my mind and always thinking, “Today will be the day I write!” though it’s been weeks since that initial hot Saturday on which I first watched it. Argh. I try to get a post up bi-monthly, but that’s not always feasible. Anyway, I have high hopes for what’s coming next – thanks for sticking around…

Nostalgic Cult Classics: Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger

Posted on August 5, 2023 by Glen — No Comments ↓

A while back, I wrote about my long journey to becoming a horror fan. I certainly wasn’t one from the beginning – I just got scared too easily. I have a distinct memory of being seriously disturbed out on the playground of Ocean City Elementary while some kid detailed (to other kids, not even directly to me) the kill scenes in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies (from what little I remember, I think it was probably part 5, The Dream Child). And yet, around this time (I would have been 10 or 11), I did discover something that was more my speed: cult classics, B-movies, flicks that were “so bad, they’re good,” films that didn’t take themselves seriously enough to frighten me, but were still chock full of outrageous, fun, gratuitous, over-the-top, schlocky, campy material: Attack (and later, Return) of the Killer Tomatoes, Elvira – Mistress of the Dark, Big Trouble in Little China, Frankenhooker, Ghoulies, My Mom’s a Werewolf, so many titles I can’t even remember, and of course, today’s two cinematic gems, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) and The Toxic Avenger (1984).

At the time, I remember how that not-seriousness really let me enjoy them. I wasn’t yet up for what I understood horror to be, but I could really get a kick out of gory dismemberment as long as it didn’t feel too real (even if realistically shown, it was ok if it didn’t feel too serious, hence scary). Returning to at least these two films as an ‘adult’ is interesting. They both still have elements that I can enjoy on their own merits, but neither is something that I’m often in the mood for now, even if I could watch them on repeat 35 years ago. But the nostalgia is strong in them. They both take me back to a time and a place, and a memory of dipping my toes into material that I might not have been fully ready for, but that was part of the appeal.

But more than the stroll down memory lane, I also find them both fascinating to consider, especially as I have fully become a horror fan, and what’s more, someone who is interested in thinking and writing about horror, about categories (are they Camp? Trash? Satire? Exploitation? Do these terms even matter – are they useful?), about aesthetics, and about the pleasures I (and presumably others) derive from content that others would find distasteful, unpleasant, or even abhorrent. I no longer describe a movie as ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ – that feels unnecessarily belittling now, but in addition to the truly great masterpieces of horror which are so rightly praised (and, to be fair, tend to be my favorites) as ‘good’, I still have a really warm place in my heart for fun, cheap, trashy, unpretentious excess (unburdened by ‘quality’) – and I think it can be enjoyed for what it is and not only as a work of nostalgia or sociological-theoretical interest.

So, let’s get into these. There will probably be spoilers, as well as descriptions of some pretty absurd stuff, so you’ve been warned. Also, on the other side of the ‘reviews,’ I have a bunch of thoughts on cult movies/camp/sleaze, so I cordially invite you to stick around for that (this is a long post – make sure you’re hydrated).

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Primarily special effects and Claymation artists who have worked on a wide range of projects from Robocop to Critters, from Elf to Team America: World Police, the Chiodo brothers (Stephen, Charles, and Edward) have written and directed only one feature film, giving them free reign to create outlandish, ridiculous, gloriously silly things, and it was, of course, Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Following the model of a 50s sci-fi monster movie (The Blob (1958) is all over this thing), what it lacks in narrative drive or acting that might traditionally be deemed “adequate,” it makes up for in genuinely inspired set dressing and matte panting, very effective, if low budget, effects work, and endless creative, absurd, clown-horror gags. Also, it has one of the all-time great eponymous closing credits songs, written for the film by The Dickies (in my book, it’s right up there with The Ramones’s Pet Sematary).

In short, a young couple up at Lover’s Lane sees what looks like a meteor strike in the nearby woods and they go to investigate, finding a circus big-top set up in the middle of nowhere – which is also a spaceship – filled with bloodthirsty clowns who have seemingly come to earth to eat everybody, cocooning most of their victims in something like pink cotton candy so they can insert laughably long twisty straws into the rose colored concoction and suck out their blood. The young couple tries to get the police involved, but encounters difficulty from both the older officer (because he’s just a mean, abusive, awful cop) and the young deputy (because he’s the girl’s ex). But eventually the deputy witnesses a clown eating some citizens, he comes on board, and having learned that the clowns can be killed by puncturing their big, red, confetti filled noses, they all team up with some goofballs in an ice cream truck to send the alien jesters packing.

But really, this is not about the story, or the characters. Most of the performances are perfunctory at best (and some don’t quite make it that far), and the narrative goes about where you would expect it to. And that is all fine. As prefaced, this is a pretty ‘campy’ movie (a term I mean to be at least somewhat distinguished from ‘camp’ as one might discuss in terms of Oscar Wilde, John Waters, Susan Sontag, or Ed Wood, Jr.). It knows how silly it is and it just doesn’t sweat elements of ‘quality’ that are not its focus (i.e., clown based menace and mayhem).

So what does it have, you may ask? How about a sequence where one of the titular clowns quickly crafts a balloon animal dog to track the young couple, it’s inflated head sniffing about, hot on their trail? A big creepy clown disappearing in plain sight by copying the stiff, regular movements of an animatronic gorilla outside a drug store? A puppet theatre for an audience of one, a kind of Punch and Judy show that culminates in the single viewer being fatally wrapped in candy floss? The terrifying sight of too many clowns getting out of one tiny car? An amusement park security guard who is pied-in-the-face to death, one of the clowns leaving a giant cherry on the pile of cream that is dissolving his flesh, leaving only his bones and a badge? A motorcycle gang making fun of the littlest clown for riding a funny tiny bicycle with training wheels, leading one of them to destroy his bike, so he jumps out of frame and jumps back in with boxing gloves. The jerk who broke his bike mockingly says, “What are ya gonna do? Knock my block off?” and so he does, the thug’s bloody head flying off of his shoulders.

And it’s not like the clowns only target ‘bad people.’ We get a scene outside a clown-themed burger place (that is not McDonald’s) with a big, freaky clown luring a little girl outside, a giant mallet gleefully held behind his back – her mom yanks her back inside before the clown gets to mutilate her, but even if that isn’t shown, the suggestion that it might be is already planted in the imagination.

Similarly, this is a PG-13 movie and therefore can’t offer the kind of gratuitous nudity it might otherwise, but it does tease it. There’s a shower scene where we see the girl of the young couple undress, implying that evil clown stuff is coming her way (some particularly animated popcorn on her discarded clothes threatens to do something though we don’t yet know what). The camera stays at her feet as she undresses, and on her face in the shower. Then it cuts away to another scene, and when we finally see her attacked in the bathroom, she has finished the shower and is fully dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater, even wearing her sneakers already. I can’t help but think that this is all intentionally playing with audience expectations, teasing what isn’t shown.

But when the attack comes, it is weird, gross, playful, funny, and kinda great. The popcorn has somehow sprouted into fanged clown heads on wormy, phallic bodies that shoot out of the hamper, the medicine cabinet, and the toilet, chomping at her as she fights them off with the shower head and curtain (I guess they’re not that tough). She then runs out of the bathroom to hear her boyfriend’s voice at the door, but when she opens it, it’s a big, scary clown! The door slams and she runs to her bedroom window, seeking escape, only to see a clown fire patrol below, eager to catch her. Finally she turns and sees that another has found his way inside, who shoots her with a clown gun that captures her in a giant yellow, polka dotted balloon, now needing to be rescued by our heroes.

But the pièce de résistance of the whole film has got to be the shadow puppet scene. It is certainly the bit that I’d best remembered through the years, and on re-watch, it absolutely holds up. A bus passes a stop to reveal a big, old clown that wasn’t there a moment before. He gets the attention of those waiting at the stop and starts to make shadow puppets of increasing complexity and delight: an adorable bunny, a trumpeting elephant, George Washington Crossing the Delaware, and a sexy belly dancer. Everyone watches and laughs and claps, loving the show. It’s sweet how much they like it, and also funny how the clown’s big sausage fingers couldn’t possibly be forming these amazing images. Finally, as the clown directs a sinister chortle at the camera, the shadows take the shape of a red eyed tyrannosaurus which, with a mighty roar, bends down and gobbles up all of the once enchanted, now terrified and screaming viewers in its umbral maw, devouring them whole. It really is a joy. Check it out here.

So, yeah – this is not a film about the story, but is rather an excuse to have a series of almost completely unrelated monstrous clown gags. And they are fantastic unrelated monstrous clown gags, easily making up for any of the film’s (many) shortcomings. But I want to return to one of those. Earlier, I commented on how this movie doesn’t expect much of its actors, but I must say there is one exception: John Vernon, who plays the mean, awful police chief, is just great in this part. I know him best from Animal House, where he plays the mean, awful dean, and as I understand, he really made his career playing wholly unlikeable, comically nasty characters. That’s just what he does here, and every time the camera is on him, he really brings the scene to life, along the way, adding a surprising note of something like social commentary to this deeply silly movie.

He is a bad cop, and what’s more, he is a symbol of everything that’s wrong with policing. He directs his energies at those he preemptively suspects of wrongdoing (in his case, “young people”), while completely ignoring the calls of help of people being murdered by clowns, convinced that everyone is just trying to make a fool of him, both under and over policing his community at the same time. He is abusive to those he arrests, joking about their lack of rights now that they’re in ‘his’ territory. He only attacks, threatens, and belittles, refusing to see where the real threat lies. He makes fun of his deputy for how his ‘police academy training’ causes him to care about idiotic things like “civil liberties.” But when he gets his comeuppance, it’s a treat.

Earlier in the film, convinced that everyone was just pulling his leg with this clown nonsense, he’d declared that they weren’t ‘going to make a dummy’ out of him. So, of course, that’s eventually what happens. The deputy returns to the station, finding clown prints everywhere (big and red, and climbing the walls), and eventually his crooked boss propped up on the knee of a clown that has gorily shoved its hand into his torso to pull his internal strings as one would a ventriloquist’s dummy. His cheeks are rouged (with blood), and trickles of the red stuff at the side of his mouth suggest the articulated mouthpiece of such a doll, as the clown uses him to tell the deputy not to worry because “all we wanna do is kill you.” It’s the only time a clown gets anything like words, the rest of the time just uttering funny little squeaking sounds, and it is cool, creepy, and intimidating. Plus, Vernon does it so well.

My grandparents had cable and I remember one summer when this was just on HBO constantly. As the film had come out in ’88, I can only assume this would be the summer of ’89, making me ten at the time. And it was just perfect: funny, silly, gross, and creative, with some pretty outrageous stuff in it, but still tame enough to be shown on TV at noon on a Tuesday. It was filled with moments of horror (the clowns do kill a lot of people, the image of the clown sucking blood out of the candy cocoon was disturbing, and the aforementioned dummy scene was pretty creepy), but the campiness made it all fun for me. I remember some friend having the Friday the 13^th game for Nintendo and that I didn’t like playing it cause it felt scary (even though it was an 8-bit system and you could barely see anything – Jason was effectively a purple and white blob chasing you around the screen), but this movie was a blast and I couldn’t count the number of times I watched it. It’s a pleasure to have returned to.

The Toxic Avenger (1984)

If today’s first film was TV-friendly, this next one was decidedly not (though it somehow got a cartoon version for kids, so go figure). From Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz of Troma Entertainment, The Toxic Avenger is crude, cheap, and ugly, with nudity that precludes it from being shown in the middle of the day as well as gory, sometimes shocking violence that is so over-the-top (though also frequently quite silly) that some viewers will just not be able stomach it. Positioned somewhere between a superhero satire and a monster movie, between mean-spirited schlock and loving camp, this is a wholly independent movie that you had to go to the video store for.

Now, though I didn’t take quite as much pleasure in returning to it as I did with the first feature today, there was still a charge of nostalgia, and beyond that, it has really prompted a lot of thoughts about camp and exploitation, about the concepts of taste and aesthetics, about how we watch a film and about how a filmmaker can push and/or play with our boundaries. Troma successfully builds and maintains an absolutely loyal fan base for their weird, little pictures that are as far from mainstream Hollywood as can be imagined – and that wouldn’t happen if these movies weren’t quite special in their intentionally ugly, utterly idiosyncratic way – if they didn’t invite the viewer to a uniquely loveable viewing experience (even while viewing horrible things).

As with many a superhero origin story, we start with a put-upon weakling, in this case, Melvin, the scrawny, gawky mop boy at Tromaville Health Club, where he’s ill-treated by everyone, but especially a quartet of bullies who, when they’re not chain smoking in the gym while pumping iron, are chugging whisky as they speed around town, actively trying to run down pedestrians for points. As with many a slasher film, things really get kicked off thanks to a prank gone wrong. One of the bullies convinces Melvin that she wants to leave her boyfriend for him, so he should meet her by the pool in a pink leotard and tutu. This he does, only to have the lights turned on, realize he was making out with a lice infested sheep, and be chased by all the laughing customers of the club until, in terror and shame, Melvin leaps out of a second story window, landing in an open vat of bubbling green toxic waste on the back of a flatbed truck, stopped by its drivers so they can do an insane amount of cocaine.

Melvin goes through a pretty gross transformation sequence, becoming a giant, greenish brown monster, covered with boils, forever stuck in his now filthy leotard and carrying weaponized mops. He is also instilled with an overwhelming urge to destroy evil wherever he finds it. And it so happens that his small New Jersey town of Tromaville is full of depraved scumbags. From the 80s stereotypes of punk-street gangs to the nefarious Mayor that they all directly report to, who is furthermore making deals to line his pockets by poisoning the town with toxic waste, this is not a nice place to live. And yet, it’s also implied that the town is filled with ‘good people’ who would be able to live their lives in peace if only some kindly monster would brutally tear apart all of the ‘bad guys.’

Along the way, Toxie (as he will later come to be affectionately called in the sequels), rescues and falls in love with a nice blind girl Sara, who moves in with him in his lean-to shack at the toxic dump site, adding that feminine touch that makes a toxic dump shack feel like a home. By the end, the corrupt mayor calls in the National Guard to take out this vigilante monster, but the good people of Tromaville show up to protect their toxic defender.

I feel that the seed of the story is satirization of the classic superhero narrative, a genre of fun kids’ entertainment which often carries quite reactionary messaging about how the world is full of dangerous elements and that the only way for them to be dealt with is by masked vigilantes who carry out a form of extra-judicial justice.

I think that vibe is right on the surface in something like Batman, but even in the more kid-friendly Spider-man comics, there is an impression that the city streets are full of gangs and muggers that normal people are being victimized by. It’s one thing to fight colorful supervillains, but the presentation of our modern cities as such threatening hellscapes in order to justify a ‘hero’ having someone to fight, someone who deserves to have violence used against them, definitely carries a message.

This is a theme that some comic books and later some comic book movies would eventually pick up and interrogate, but that generally followed Alan Moore’s seminal Watchmen books which were published 2 years after this was released.

Thus, The Toxic Avenger offers criminals that are so reprehensible, such unforgivably monstrous people (vicious, racist, drug addled rapists, murderers, and gleeful sadists), that the hero of the piece can be even more of a monster – absolutely physically brutal in how he dispatches them. For example, among other things, the “good guy” of the movie crushes a drug dealer’s head in a weight machine, stabs out another guy’s eyes with his fingers, blends an assailant’s brains with a milkshake mixer (along with milk, whipped cream, and a cherry of course), deep fries a robber’s hands until he dies of shock, bashes heads together until brains ooze out, rips another guys arm off and beats him with it ala Beowulf and Grendel, burns one bully girl’s butt off on hot sauna stones, takes scissors to the other bully girl (weirdly, it happens off screen, but as we don’t see it, we assume the worst – in one longer cut, he just cuts her hair), disembowels the mayor with his bare hands (in front of a crowd which cheers with joy as the mayor tries and fails to push his guts back in before dying), and murders a seemingly nice old lady (who we learn after the fact was a slave trader) by locking her in a hot dryer and then crushing her in a steam press, all of this earning him the love and loyalty of the good people of the town.

I think that in its exaggeration, the movie shows how this superhero “kids’ stuff” was not that dissimilar to conservative fantasies like the Death Wish or Dirty Harry movies. But in its ludicrous excess, I feel Troma’s movie communicates a different message, rather showing the absurdity, the silliness of both the fear mongering and the violent response of “the good.”

Now, while I wasn’t into horror yet when I first watched this, I was absolutely a Marvel Comics kid and I don’t think the satire of reactionary messaging made it through to me. I just got the joke of ‘it’s a comic book super hero origin story and there are bad guys and isn’t it funny that it’s all so extreme?’ And obviously, this is not a “message movie.” It’s a movie having grotesque fun with taking awful things beyond where you thought they could go. But still, the reactionary-as-absurd reading feels very present.

But like I said, this really is not a movie about a message. It’s also not a movie about making do with a limited budget and making ‘artful’ decisions to create something ‘beautiful,’ perhaps by showing less and implying more, ala a low budget, gorgeously shot Val Lewton joint. Nope, Troma rather follows an exploitation film ethos of showing you what you couldn’t see in a ‘Hollywood’ picture because they don’t have to follow any dictates of commercial ‘good taste.’

It wears its low budget proudly and rather than ‘overcoming financial limitations’ with clever cinematography or nuanced performances, it instead embraces a home grown, rough hewn look and feel, featuring outlandish acting that exists somewhere between Pink Flamingos, The Three Stooges, and a skit on Saturday Night Live as played by middle schoolers. This description may come across as negative, but I don’t mean it to be so. I think the anti-style of the performances is key to the film’s success, underlining the campy not-to-be-taken-too-seriously-ness of the whole proceedings.

Some of this comes from the performers themselves, dialing everything up to eleven and mugging for the camera, and some is a filmmaking choice, such as Toxie, after his transformation, always sounding as if he’s been poorly dubbed by the most polite, square jawed, good guy imaginable, when he isn’t grunting and growling. He also periodically takes a break from gutting baddies to help little old ladies cross the street or rescue a baby caught in a tree.

But it’s not always so simple as the violence and cruelty being artificial, just a silly act, and therefore more of something to laugh at than be shocked by. Sometimes, the envelope is pushed far enough that even if an effect is clearly unrealistic, the fact of what is being played can still elicit a strong response. While I remember really liking this movie when I was maybe 12 (give or take – I’m not sure), and in many ways it is the perfect movie for a 12 year old, there was one scene that always got to me and that really delivered the horror.

Early on, we see the four bullies from the health club out for a night drive, swilling booze and playing their favorite game. One of the girls reminds the driver of the rules – how many points he gets for running down different kinds of minorities (all of whom are described with racist epithets). Then, to all of their joy, they come across a kid on a bike and slam into him, the kid flying over the car and lying bloody in the street. You don’t get any points if he lives, so the driver backs up, steering the tires directly over the kids head, crushing it with a wet pop. The two girls run out of the car and gleefully take Polaroids of the dead kid for their collection (we later see one of them getting off to these photos in the sauna). The fact that the effect is clearly fake (a melon in a wig, filled with corn syrup and food coloring) doesn’t detract at all from the overwhelming wrongness of the scene. I remember around when I first saw this, some yahoos in a pickup running me off the road when I was on my bike and this scene always connected with that genuinely scary memory for me. And the idea of such terrible people having so much fun targeting someone like me just for kicks was real horror – the kind that stays with you – the kind that teaches you something unbearably sad and scary about the heartlessness and cruelty of the world.

And at the same time, as the whole film constantly goofs around with extremity, having a punk rock, offensive blast with poor taste, I feel even this scene is kinda played for laughs. It’s all too much – villains so beyond believable humanity that it is a joke. But it also shook me to my core. This movie is silly, and it’s horrible, and it feels fake, and it feels real, and it’s fun, and it’s deeply, disturbingly wrong, and sometimes it’s even hilariously sweet (especially in the absurd romantic scenes played out between Sara and Toxie – walking among toxic waste at sunset, hula hooping, decorating their shack, making tender love – all to delightfully cheesy music). A line is walked between sincere feeling and a kind of camp detachment. In many ways (aesthetically, in terms of special effects and acting, even “morally”), it is all intentionally ‘bad.’ But that is where a camp appreciation comes in. Even if it is bad, that doesn’t mean it can’t be loved (and not in a superior, so-bad-it’s-good) sense, but as its own, weird self.

Somehow, in probably just trying to make a fun, crazy, cheap movie and turn a profit, Kaufman and Herz created something special. It is both ‘the thing’ and ‘not the thing,’ both sincere and ironic, mean and sweet, naïve and jaded. In terms of horror, it mostly follows the tropes of another genre (superheroes), but it features one of my most memorable instances of kindertrauma, and therefore one of my strongest ever experiences of ‘art-horror’ (as opposed to ‘real life-horror,’ like learning about Nazi death camps or something). And yet, it was also just a really funny, stupid good time that I watched again and again, along with its sequels, when I was exactly the right age to enjoy it. It’s an irony that when one is old enough to handle its violence, one is probably too old to fully appreciate its humor.

Re-watching it for this post, I felt perhaps that time had passed – that it was harder to laugh at it as much as I had more than thirty years ago, but I still found it fascinating, and maybe more than anything else, I respected the chutzpah that went into making it. It can be hard to commit yourself so wholly to making something that most people won’t like. That takes courage and will and not just anyone can do it. These days, I feel a bit inundated by the trolls of the world just out to get a rise out of people and therefore don’t have too much hunger for such button pushing, but it’s weird how a movie like this can feel almost innocent in its juvenile, perverse love of serving up shock and disgust and slapstick and inane jokes and all manner of gratuitousness. The grotesquerie is real. But so is the love.

—

The last few months, I’ve been hung up on a question of aesthetics. When writing about Fulci’s Murder Rock, I noted how its sleazy vibe excused any failings and offered its own peculiar pleasures. I went on a run of 50s ‘teensploitation’ movies, enjoying them both as cultural artifacts of their time, and specifically digging those elements which, from a certain perspective, might not be deemed ‘good,’ but are there to be reveled in. I found real enjoyment in a couple of Lesbian Vampire movies that really fit into an erotic-Euro 70s ‘sexploitation’ mode. And in this post, it has been interesting to take this trip down memory lane to two movies of my adolescence that both edge into realms of campy exploitation and which were both key steps on my path to eventually falling in love with the horror genre. In all cases, I have been wondering: what exactly is the appeal of what might be deemed “sleaze” or “trash” or “exploitation”? There is a distinct aesthetic quality that I catch a whiff of but I can’t put my finger on.

Also in the last couple of months, I’ve read Calum Waddell’s book analyzing American exploitation films from 1955-1977, “The Style of Sleaze” and a book of essays edited by Jeffrey Sconce, “Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins on Taste, Style, and Politics.” I’ve read Susan Sontag’s “On Camp” and a thesis written by James W. Macdonald, “The Art of Trash: Evaluating Troma Entertainment as Paracinema.” And through all of these, I still haven’t pinned down what that artistic quality is that I find reflected in these works, which feels so aesthetically satisfying. Now, it’s not exactly “camp,” but camp is part of how I enjoy them, and it’s worth touching on.

However, I don’t even want to attempt a definition of “camp.” For all that her essay was iconic, I don’t think Sontag was all that successful, herself, some qualities just defying definition (quick – define art!). But some elements I find helpful are Sontag’s description of life as an aesthetic posture, a section from Charles Ludlam’s manifesto for his “Ridiculous Theatre” company about how “Bathos is that which is intended to be sorrowful but because of the extremity of its expression becomes comic. Pathos is that which is meant to be comic but because of the extremity of its expression becomes sorrowful. Some things which seem to be opposites are actually different degrees of the same thing,” and the moment on the 1997 episode of the Simpsons, Homer’s Phobia, when the John Waters voiced character describes ‘camp’ as “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic,” and Homer responds, “Oh yeah, like when a clown dies.” In addition, I think it’s key that a camp appreciation is ironic, but isn’t mean or judgmental. It celebrates failure with a genuine joy in the failed thing as opposed to mocking it with a disaffected smirk. Camp distinct from snark.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space doesn’t care about its ‘failings.’ It just wants to make crazy clown horror gags and can shrug off the rest. The Toxic Avenger takes it a couple of steps farther and actually celebrates what one might term its own ‘crappiness.’ Thus, I think much of how I might enjoy some of the described material is through a camp lens – but that describes my way of watching and appreciating, and not the qualities which I find worthy of appreciation in the given work. So, there must be another element to identify: in low budget material that might be deemed ‘sleazy,’ there is often a direct, honest attempt to deliver something to the audience. You can see the strings, and it might all be pretty slapdash, but they promised to ‘turn you on’ or ‘gross you out’ or ‘shock your sensibilities’ and without any shame, they are damn well gonna try (and may or may not succeed, and as discussed, failure can be lovely).

I came up in the theatre and have a deep love of overt theatricality – theatre that leaves room for the viewer’s imagination to do its work: shows made out of cardboard and duct tape and bodies and passion in a poor medium that depends on the audience to show up, forever doomed to make art in a world of commerce and die if no tickets are sold. How could I not love to see that spark of struggling-to-create so visible in the final product? In Sconce’s book, he includes an essay of his own, “Movies: a Century of Failure,” wherein he writes, “Much of the romance of exploitation cinema stems from this valorization of film production itself as an elemental struggle against the conspiratorial forces of the universe. For many trash cinephiles, this is the essence of the art form, a medium of exploitation that has always been less about realizing some idealized, artistic vision than the act of creation itself, transforming the cinema as a whole into an existential metaphor of affirmation in the face of chaotic absurdity.” He describes so well something I’ve always loved about making theatre – that sense that you are in a noble battle against reality to pull something into being – for a moment and then it’s gone. It is a romantic, Quixotic notion. Maybe the element I’m finding in this sleaze-trash-cult-exploitation work is just ‘theatricality’?

I feel this element can be found in both of today’s films. What they may lack in ‘traditionally understood quality,’ they make up in an unmistakable joy in the act of their own creation, of committing to the ridiculous idea, of abjuring half measures and always using one’s whole ass. Returning to the notion of camp, I found it striking that Troma Entertainment was referenced in the two abovementioned books and in neither case positively. I feel there was a judgement that it doesn’t satisfy as a kind of camp pleasure because it is done too intentionally, and thus fails (and though neither volume mentioned Killer Klowns, I have the sense it would have been viewed similarly harshly). For me (and I admit I am no expert), I feel that misses a key point. If, as Sontag wrote, camp views life as an aesthetic posture, then a ‘put on’ is no less real.

From a theatrical perspective, from a camp perspective, in terms of many (though certainly not all) tenets of gender theory, queer theory, and notions of “performativity,” we are what we play (as well as the ones who play – forever both and neither), and identity is all performed. The mask we choose to wear is as revealing, if not more so, as the face concealed beneath. Now, it is fair to say that an artist’s intention to adopt an artificial, “campy” mode does change how we understand their work – we appreciate it differently than work accidentally resulting in those ineffable qualities appealing to a camp sensibility, but I think it is needlessly limiting for that sensibility to close itself off to the pleasures found in material thus intentionally crafted. Honestly, it’s just weirdly snooty to look down on films (or anything else) for ‘trying too hard.’ If artifice weren’t a legitimate route to the ‘authentic,’ Wes Anderson wouldn’t have a career. These movies can be dumb on purpose, and thus can be dumb and, at the same time, be very clever and fun for how they choose to be dumb. Ambivalence can be delicious.

This seemingly paradoxical aesthetic tension describes a whole segment of horror works, often fan favorites, which will never win an Oscar, and which never need to – they’ve already served their audience, and their creators have gotten a nominal payday and can go on to try to make more. But though they will always exist outside of the purview of a mainstream “Academy,” and even also outside of the appreciation of many of the lettered scholars of exploitative trash, for whom I guess they’re not trashy enough or in ‘the right way,’ odd little treasures like Killer Klowns from Outer Space and The Toxic Avenger surely deserve to be celebrated – and I think, by at least certain people, they always will be.