Search the Bava Book

During the past year, we've fielded some inquiries about when my mammoth tome MARIO BAVA ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK might be available through Amazon.com. Well, it's available there now -- just in time for the holidays -- and here's the link to the sales page.

It may interest you to know that the Amazon listing offers a nifty "Look Inside!" feature that allows you to search for specific words or names inside and also to peruse a limited amount of interior pages. I'm sure there are some interested people out there who haven't bought the book because they've never seen a copy in person and haven't had the opportunity to page through it to prove to themselves that it's worth the investment. This "Search the Book" feature will help those people to spend a little time with this 12-pound monster and find out why it became the most celebrated film book of 2007-2008, winning the International Horror Guild Award, the Independent Publishers Award, the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Film Award and the Saturn Award for Special Achievement.


In case you're wondering if it will do us, the publisher, more good if you buy the book directly from us, or through the Amazon seller... the answer is Yes, we'll see more profit from the sale if you buy the book from us directly, and we pride ourselves on the efficiency of our mail order department -- but we're fine with whichever way makes you feel most comfortable. By all means, though, make use of the "Look Inside" feature and take a gander at Mario Bava's life... and a big chunk of mine and Donna's, too.

Revisiting CRASH

In the past couple of weeks, I have watched David Cronenberg's 1996 film of J.G. Ballard's CRASH no less than three times. This is a period when I should be reviewing new product, or perusing old product that was neglected the first time around, but CRASH started reaching out to me in ways that could not be denied.

It began innocently enough with me realizing that I had never acquired the film on DVD during those years of the industry's LD to DVD conversion, for two very good reasons: 1) the New Line DVD had not ported over the Cronenberg commentary and extras from the Criterion laserdisc, and 2) what it had put in their place was an optional R-rated viewing option, which I found offensive. I wrote about CRASH in a feature length essay that appeared in VIDEO WATCHDOG #42 (Nov/Dec 1997, sold out); since then, I hadn't seen the film again, but during that interval, I've sometimes asked myself if I might not have been too hard on it, because I'm such an admirer of J.G. Ballard's 1970 novel. (On one of my VIDEODROME interview tapes from 1982, I can be heard recommending to Cronenberg that he should read CRASH -- "I will," he promises).

I suddenly wanted to see the film again and my only ready option was my old Criterion laserdisc, which I decided to dub onto DVD-R in the process. The disc looked great on my old 32" Sony Trinitron, but viewed on my 60" Kuro Elite, the picture looks seriously dated: dim, pale in color with very uneven blacks, and, of course, non-anamorphic. I recorded the LD with its supplementary items (two cheesy trailers and a short featurette that finds the cast members talking about the project in mostly incoherent terms) and then recorded it again with Cronenberg's excellent, useful commentary activated.

Watching the film twice in close succession proved to be a useful exercise. In retrospect, CRASH appears to be the best film from Cronenberg's weakest period -- post-DEAD RINGERS to pre-SPIDER -- but, as brilliant as it sometimes is, it cannot meet the book's greatness even halfway. Yet there is something about it that tempts one to imagine that it will play even better on the next viewing -- and, in some ways, this hope holds true. After my second run-through, I knew that I couldn't live with my Criterion disc as my only reference copy anymore.

Thanks to the phenomenon of the Amazon Store, I was able to find a shrinkwrapped DVD for only $12. I watched it a few days after it arrived and it was indeed revelatory, not only as a sensual experience but because the enhanced anamorphic clarity of the image made sense of things the Criterion transfer had inadvertently glossed over, at least for me. For instance, the penultimate scene of Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter, a committed but miscast performance) and Gabriella (Rosanna Arquette)'s lesbian assignation in the back seat of a car never quite worked for me, seeming ungrounded in the rest of the story somehow; but the New Line DVD was so crisp and clear that I finally understood that they were coupling in the backseat of Vaughan (Elias Koteas)'s burned-out wreck of a car. The scene charts the inevitable next stage of Vaughan's advent into iconography.

I have not gone back to my original essay to refresh my memory of my raw first impressions of CRASH, but I remember writing that it's a failing of the film that James (James Spader) and Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) are such inexplicably icy characters; they seem to be such compulsive sex-obsessives because they require the warmth of other people. I think I made the point that they seem like the tenants we see driving out of the Starliner highrise at the end of SHIVERS, parasite-driven erotophiles rather than real human beings. This is curious because Cronenberg's commentary admits to him not appreciating CRASH on his first reading, finding Ballard's language too clinical and without the "passion words" he needed to feel closer to the story. In Ballard, that clinical quality of the wording is its passion, but Cronenberg's translation of the text to the screen is not just cerebral but unfeeling. Seeing the film again did persuade me that Unger really is quite remarkable -- ravishing in an Ava Gardner, film noir kind of way, as Iain Sinclair notes in his fine BFI Modern Classics book on CRASH -- but misdirected, so that she's far too poised and abstracted. Spader's lead performance strikes a cold note, too, but at least he's permitted scenes that show him an aggressor in passion and not without a sense of humor. Unger, far better in David Fincher's wonderful THE GAME, doesn't quite thaw even when she momentarily fears that Vaughan might strangle her.

Elias Koteas as Vaughan, whose interpretation of the role I don't think I liked initially, turns out to be the film's ace in the hole. He's brilliant in the way he summons the charisma from this creep, who is somehow able to pass for a doctor in a hospital corridor, able to drive into roped-off accident sites on the highway with a flashbulb camera, able to slip his unwashed hand between Dr. Remington's legs in one brazen move and send James a primly conservative "what are you looking at?" reprimand look a second later. I also like how the film, moreso than the book, shows how the standards of people like James and Helen slip as they become lured into Vaughan's underground fetish world, ending up passing their evenings in the seedy living room of the stunt driver family, the Seagraves, watching videos of car crashes narrated in languages no one in the room understands.

There is an elliptic scene of male homosexual foreplay (involving bizarre medical tattoos of what Vaughan calls "ragged prophecies") and intercourse, but where the movie presses its most provocative buttons is in the car sex scene between James and Gabriella, who wears a bizarre kind of leather and metal body brace. James is shown removing the cumbersome accoutrement from her leg, ripping away her fishnet stockings to expose a frankly labial gash that runs up the back of her thigh, encompassing an even more frankly clitoral nub of flesh, and having sex with the wound. It's the film's most persuasively erotic scene, but the one leading into it -- Gabriella teasing a Mercedes dealer who tries to install her in a showroom car and ends up inflicting costly damage in the display model -- is anecdotal and silly, though extremely well played by Arquette. In his commentary, Cronenberg describes the car salesman as the most realistic character in the film, but he seems to me the least realistic -- a sitcom's idea of a car salesman.

The side break on the Criterion disc actually assists the film by punctuating a problem spot where the movie appears to have run out of money. One minute, James is in Vaughan's car and then we're suddenly looking at the back of James' head as he's looking out an office window -- it's still night, but he's somewhere else entirely. Someone, presumably a co-worker, asks if he needs a lift home. Without turning his head, James answers that Catherine is coming to pick him up. In the next shot, Catherine is there, outside James' office, watching, but so is Vaughan, clearly shaken up as he's questioned by police about some offscreen incident involving the hit-and-run of a pedestrian. "Vaughan's not interested in pedestrians," James says -- a nice line. The New Line DVD, which plays through without side break interruption, makes the viewer more aware of something missing, of something assembled from available pieces, in order to explain what would otherwise be the sudden introduction of Catherine into the backseat of Vaughan's car for the celebrated car wash sequence.

My retrospective interest in the film led me to belatedly acquire the aforementioned Iain Sinclair book, which I can enthusiastically recommend, especially to Ballard fans. He has problems with the film also, and the book spends most of its slim page count in a valuable exploration of J.G. Ballard's work and its adaptation to film, including some very rare early films either based on or somehow connected to Ballard's CRASH.

As for Cronenberg's CRASH, while I have a better feeling about it now than I did prior to this revisitation, it still leaves me very much in the same place where it leaves its two protagonists -- knocked sideways rather than for a loop, disappointed if not quite disengaged, and muttering to myself, "Maybe the next one... maybe the next one..."

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN reviewed

Young Lina Leandersson gives a hard-to-shake performance in the exciting new Swedish horror film LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN [Låt den rätte komma in, 2008] is a new Swedish horror film of many distinctions, one of them being that it was based on a Swedish horror novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist. The writer, whose book has been translated into English, reportedly moonlights or daylights as a stand-up comic and his writing would seem to confirm the theory that every comedian is a closet tragedian.

Directed and edited by Tomas Alfredson, the movie works best if you approach it (as I did) knowing absolutely nothing about it, which makes it seem an effort of conscious destruction just to write about it, so I'm going to do my readers the favor of being elliptical. Suffice to say that it's a film about a childhood relationship between two twelve-year-olds, Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and his neighbor Eli (Lina Leandersson), in which the two young actors succeed in giving psychologically rich performances that are so unusual, so refreshing within genre boundaries, that they feel almost immediately iconic. The strangeness immediately evident in their relationship turns out to have a supernatural cause and the film, rather than becoming a pure exercise in horror and shock and revulsion, becomes a tragic essay on the theme of amour fou and how love can make even monsters sympathetic and their most horrible traits forgivable. The curious title shared by the book and film refers to the discretion we should exercise in inviting new people into our lives and is derived from a song by Morrissey:

Let the right one in

Let the old dreams die

Let the wrong ones go

They cannot they cannot they cannot do

What you want them to do

Let the right one in

Let the old dreams die

Let the wrong ones go

They do not they do not they do not see

What you want them to

Let the right one in

Let the old things fade

Put the tricks and schemes (for good) away

I will advise until my mouth dries

I will advise you to

Let the right one slip in slip in slip in

And when at last it does

I'd say you were within your rights to bite

The right one and say, "What kept you so long?"

What kept you so long?

The movie isn't perfect (there's a scene involving CGI cats that goes a bit over the top), but despite one or two missteps, time may well prove it great. It's certainly rare for a horror film to be this emotionally moving and perversely enchanting; it's very likely to at least cross the minds of many audience members that Eli would have been a cool girlfriend to have at this age, despite her problems and the way one's proximity to her would complicate one's adolescence. The scene of Oskar and Eli's second embrace, when she enters his apartment uninvited, is actually heartbreaking in the way it underscores the mutual self-sacrifice each of them is making by reaching out to one another.

Eli (Leandersson) seeks temporary shelter in the bed of her misfit friend Oskar (Käre Hedebrant).

Those who, like me, are feeling alienated by the current direction of horror cinema will find this film reason to hope that the pendulum is finally swinging back to work that's more subtle, captivating and thought-provoking. There are scenes of remarkably subtle, Lewtonian horror (one of which specifically alludes to THE LEOPARD MAN) as well as some graphic moments graced with elements of poetry and, for those with the acuity of vision to grasp them, subliminal glimpses of Eli's real face. Also worthy of praise is the scenic yet cerebral 2.35:1 cinematography of Hoyte Van Hoytema, which captures nearly every set-up with a bisecting line, an off-kilter visual rhyme of the side-by-side arrangement of the neighbors' two rooms, or some geometric pattern that harkens back to the Rubik's Cube that initiates their contact.

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN is now in US theatrical release from Magnet Releasing. Don't wait for the US remake -- and yes, I understand those rights have been unimaginatively acquired, so the American branch of the genre is by no means out of the woods yet. I'm hopeful that Lindqvist, Alfredson and Co. will be able to resist the temptation to prepare a sequel, as it's a great pleasure simply to daydream about the stories these characters will likely share in the days, weeks and years following the invigoratingly open-ended closing shot.

Fearwell to 4SJ

The Watchdog meets the Ackermonster, 1993.

The news was expected, but I was very sorry to learn that Forrest J Ackerman passed away last night, mere days after his 92nd birthday, and mere minutes before December 4th became December 5th -- the sort of detail I believe would have intrigued him, if he were writing this.

He and I had a modest personal history: I wrote to him for the first time (affectionately) in the pages of Dennis Daniel's book THE FAMOUS MONSTERS CHRONICLES, met him a couple of times at Fanex, was a personal guest at his Ackermansion on a day it was officially closed to the public, and even held hands with him for what seemed like a couple of minutes as Eric Hoffman struggled with my camera to nail this wonderful shot of he and I and his METROPOLIS robotrix all shaking hands together. There were times in my childhood that he seemed like one of the most important people in the world, and he certainly played a major role in the shaping of mine.

It's a natural feeling for those of us whose lives were changed by our introduction to Forry's Warren publications FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, MONSTER WORLD and SPACEMEN to feel as though part of our childhood has died, but you can't close a door that was blasted off its hinges. He made that kind of a difference. Admittedly, he was a controversial figure, beloved by hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) and disliked by others, some of whom had comparably outsized egos or perhaps felt they better deserved to inhabit his place in the epicenter of horror and sf fandom. I'd like to think that a biography will come forth someday that, in the right hands (they will NOT be mine), will show how much in the dark both sides of the argument really dwell. There seems to be very little middleground of opinion where 4SJ was concerned, but I suppose I inhabit it; I spent enough time with, or around, him to see and understand him from both perspectives. I know people who were personally upset and/or offended by things he did, but I don't think there's any question that he did more good, for more people, in his near-century among us than ill. He changed countless lives -- his activities surely helped to increase the production of horror and science fiction film genres in the 1960s, one of their most fertile and rewarding decades -- and, as I've said here and elsewhere before, his example defined the way I've been able to earn my living for almost twenty years.

There is a lot more to say about Forry, but I prefer to pay him the balance of my respects in VIDEO WATCHDOG #146 (our special "JAWS vs. APE" issue -- NOT!) , which I'll be writing tomorrow. Until then, you may find interesting this article, written by Forry in 2003, in contemplation of his own imminent mortality, which someone called "soundstage28" has thoughtfully posted on the Classic Horror Film Boards. It's the eighth posting from the top.

No Blossom on the Trees

Winter's not supposed to start until sometime in January, but the temperature here in Cincinnati tonight is in the teens, so I say it's here ahead of schedule. And I can't think of a more timely reason to recommend you check out this YouTube video of Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man performing "Funny Time of Year" in Nyon, Switzerland on July 26, 2003.

Though nearly ten minutes in length, it's one of the most gripping live performances I've had the pleasure of discovering at YouTube. Unfortunately OUT OF SEASON (Beth's superb album with Rustin Man) didn't attract the same level of attention as her Portishead albums, and consequently I don't think this particular show (in a tent!) has gone down in rock history, but -- my God! -- it deserves to. I'd stack this number up against most of the performances in MONTEREY POP or WOODSTOCK. That's Beth's Portishead mate Adrian Utley shredding it up on lead guitar.

"You Can't Buy A Ticket To See This Movie!"

... So teased the posters for THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! at the time of its 1968 release, and the ballyhoo has somehow adhered as prophecy. This well-crafted horror sleeper has become one of the most difficult to see of its era, though a number of its lesser fellow releases from The Fanfare Corporation -- like SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES and WEREWOLVES ON WHEELS -- have surfaced on DVD in recent years. Last week, I had the good fortune to see it again on DVD-R, for the first time since the early 1970s, when a cut version of this film "Suggested for Mature Audiences" ran on local television.

It stars Jack Lord, Susan Strasberg, Collin Wilcox (so memorable as Thedy in THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR's "The Jar"), Tisha Sterling and T.C. Jones (HITCHCOCK HOUR's "An Unlocked Window") -- and it probably works best if you have no idea who T.C. Jones is (or was; the actor died in 1971). The director was Gunnar Hellstrom, a Swedish expatriate who worked primarily in television (his 1967 WILD WILD WEST episode "The Night of the Running Death" also featured T.C. Jones), and the twisted screenplay was the best effort of Gary Crutcher, author of the subsequent snake melodrama STANLEY and the Joyce Jillson jigglethon SUPERCHICK.

Reviewing THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! for CASTLE OF FRANKENSTEIN, Joe Dante reported that the film contained "moments of Bava-like brilliance," and indeed it does. The film is obviously the work of a craftsman with a feeling for the genre, and it's regrettable that Hellstrom never made another horror picture. The only circulating copy of the film originated from a dim and faded 16mm print, so it's impossible to determine what cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond was able to achieve with its color, but Hellstrom and art director Ray Markham adorn the story with subtle and decorative scares and a deliberately unsettling mise en scène cluttered with psychologically resonant geegaws like broken dolls. The story involves Lord, playing a Hungarian emigré hitchhiker in the American West, who has the good fortune to be rescued by a beautiful savior (Strasberg), who takes him to the secluded home that she shares with her mother and an older and younger sister, all very strange and unpredicatable women. Their home also maintains a roadside display of rattlesnakes and tarantulas -- Sterling's beloved pets -- which marks the picture as the missing link between Jack Hill's SPIDER BABY and Tobe Hooper's THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE. The family name here is Terry, a soundalike to the Merrye family of SPIDER BABY.

What unfolds once Lord gets to the house, where the various daughters proceed to fight over the right to mate with him by circulating disinformation about one another, is what came to be known for awhile as a "horror of personality" film (a term coined by Charles Derry's 1977 book DARK DREAMS: A PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN HORROR FILM [A.S. Barnes & Co., 1977]), but which is now termed "psychological horror." Strasberg as Tracey, to whom Lord is most drawn, is said to be a nymphomaniac with a history of violent break-ups; the plainish Willcox as Diz ("Diz N. Terry," perhaps?) is initially hostile to Lord but soon reveals herself to be very attracted and perhaps the most sexually experienced of the group; Sterling as Nan is the youngest and comports herself like Jill Banner's Virginia in SPIDER BABY, doting on a tarantula and acting like a child, unconscious of her own sexuality yet expert at deploying it to achieve her own ends. (In one of the film's most peculiar moments, a miniskirted Sterling dances provocatively to the psychedelic caterwaul of "Shadows," a forgotten song by The Electric Prunes ["I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night"]). The mother (Jones) is seemingly the most normal of the bunch... until we learn that she may have murdered her own husband, an act of extreme violence that drove her and her daughters to this secluded outpost. Everyone gets their own soliloquy, occasionally stopping the story's progress cold but at the same time deepening it and further disorienting the viewer, who receives so many alternate backstories that it's impossible to get one's bearings. The possibilities simply turn stranger and stranger until the film reaches a point where the volatile mixture cannot help but explode.

The film ends with a tantalizing freeze-frame of Susan Strasberg, chilling in its beauty, and in the days since I've seen the movie again, what I've most carried away from it is a greater appreciation of what this neglected actress brought to the cult cinema of the 1960s. The daughter of legendary Actor's Theater coach Lee Strasberg, Susan made this film when she was 30 -- thirteen years down the road from her Tony-nominated stage debut in the title role of the original 1955 production of THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK. (She had done some even earlier small roles in live television drama like GOODYEAR TELEVISION PLAYHOUSE and GENERAL ELECTRIC THEATER.) She worked on the stage, in television, starred in Hammer's psychological horror gem TASTE OF FEAR (aka SCREAM OF FEAR), and spent time making films in Italy before she returned to the States.

In 1965, she married the hot young actor Christopher Jones and, with him, signed a short-term contract with American International Pictures. It was under AIP's auspices that Strasberg made Roger Corman's THE TRIP (in which she is a compelling but almost incidental ingredient as Fonda's ex-wife) and Richard Rush's PSYCH-OUT, in which she played a deaf-mute searching the Haight-Ashbury scene for her lost brother. No one ever has control over what they'll be best remembered for, and one doubts that Strasberg knew while making PSYCH-OUT that she was giving what would arguably become her signature screen performance. After making CHURUBUSCO with Jones, they divorced. Neither she nor Jones went on to fulfill the promise expressed by the performances they gave at AIP, but Strasberg continued to make her presence known in horror and exploitation films. She was featured in episodes of NIGHT GALLERY and THE EVIL TOUCH, and features like SO EVIL MY SISTER, THE LEGEND OF HILLBILLY JOHN and BLOODY BIRTHDAY. And let us not forget (though she'd probably wish us to) she also gave birth to THE MANITOU.

By the time she had reached 30, Strasberg had transformed from the vaguely elfin ingenue of her earliest work, and the prematurely matured star of SCREAM OF FEAR, into a beauty whose sexiness was rooted in an unusual combination of silken good looks, sobriety and confidence. She was the opposite of what passed for sexy at the time, closer to the epicenter of what passes for sexy when one considers The Big Picture. There was something about her that made her better casting as the ex-wife than the wife, and perhaps better still as disillusioned, defensive loners. She made us want to reach out to her, despite the likelihood that our hand would be slapped away, at least initially. Her later career, heavy in guest spots on interchangeable TV shows about doctors and lawyers, emphasizes the trouble she encountered in finding a niche onscreen -- and, as much as I like her and have strived to make sense of her persona, I'm finding it difficult to write about her. Nevertheless, it's a tribute to her work in THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! that I finally got serious about wanting to know her better, and promptly ordered used copies of her two works of biography -- BITTERSWEET and MARILYN AND ME -- to spend some time inside her head. All that I know now, in my heart of hearts, is that Susan Strasberg mattered -- if only for the vaguely absurd reason that I now find it impossible to hear anything by the Strawberry Alarm Clock without being reminded of her and moved by the memory. She died of breast cancer in early 1999 at the much-too-young age of 60, only a few titles shy of 100 different movie and TV credits.

Bootleg copies of THE NAME OF THE GAME IS KILL! do circulate online. Google the title and you're certain to find one or two sources.

Here's To A Happy Thanksgiving!

That's the newly slenderized me, toasting you in a photo taken last weekend at the WonderFest Reunion, an informal gathering of friends who enjoy each other's company, choice liquid refreshment, and the best sushi in the world. (Sapporo in Bardstown, Kentucky -- and it's not just me who says this; I also have it on the authority of sushi lovers from New York and Los Angeles and places in between, and I can personally attest to its superiority to what you can find in Toronto and San Francisco.)

Not that I would report it here, but I have no idea what I weigh at the moment. I stopped weighing myself because my weight loss seemed to hit a wall after I'd lost about 30 pounds, as my swimming regime started adding more muscle to my frame. It was discouraging to see the number on the scale staying the same, or sometimes going up a bit, so now I focus on those happy results that can be seen or measured -- for instance, I've gone down six notches on the belt I wore last summer. It was startling, in a nice way, to see myself in the reunion hotel's full-length mirrors, where I saw my former pear shape replaced by a midsection that goes pretty much straight up and down. Whatever I may weigh, it's my best weight in, I'm guessing, the past 20 years, and I'm in better physical condition now than I've been for most of my adult life. We haven't been back to the pool since we've been home (we're going back tomorrow), so I've been substituting a daily uphill mile walk on the treadmill and 100 abdominal crunches with a 40-pound weight, along with a few other exercises on the home gym.

I should apologize for not being here very often lately. Life is in the fast, interesting and sometimes stressful lane. We're far behind schedule on the next issue and will be jumping into another immediately after finishing. I'm taking a break from my work on the ME AND THE ORGONE screenplay to work on two outside writing projects, originally due in December but now due in January: a short story (that's turning into a novella) for an anthology of fiction based on the music of Nick Cave and a contribution to Filippo Brunamonti's forthcoming book about my dear friend Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni. My personal correspondence has also lately taken big chunks out of my days. There's so much to juggle that there's next to no time to do anything else, and to be honest, writing about movies has become something I only do when I absolutely have to do it. But I expect Video WatchBlog will be hosting another survey of VW's Favorite DVDs of the Year, which will probably start posting on December 15th, and you'll certainly see some other activity here before then.

In many ways, this has been the most amazing and transformative year of my life, and I have much to be thankful for, today: another blessed year with my adored and loving partner, and the unforgettable week in Los Angeles we shared; my core group of friends, mentors, muses and confessors; a new approach to living which has led to a renewed sense of inspiration, the production of good work, and an awareness of exciting things still ahead. I'm also thankful for the popular and critical success of the Bava book, for the awards it has won, for having finally made human contact with the Bava family by meeting Lamberto last month, for VW's ever-dependable roster of contributors, and for the millionth hit and visit to this blog!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Two Announcements

Donna has asked me to announce that we are currently offering a Holiday Discount on all of our products and services at http://www.videowatchdog.com/. Just click on the link on our home page, and you'll be led to a special code that will help you save 10% on your next order of $20 or more. That's almost $30 off the cost of the Bava book alone!

Secondly, by popular demand (truly), we have finally launched a VW CafePress store at www.cafepress.com/videowatchdog. Some of you have been pleading with us for years to reissue our classic design black VW T-shirt, and it's finally available again, along with some other designs and a plethora of other VW logo products (including coffee mugs!), as well as some items bearing Charlie Largent's "Mask of Satan" design from the binding cover of the Bava book. Even more "Mask" items will be added to the page sometime next week! A nice place to do some one-stop-shopping for that hard-to-please VIDEO WATCHDOG reader in your life.

How The West Was Reviewed, plus Quantum Notes

My "NoZone" review of HOW THE WEST WAS WON, featured in the December 2008 issue of SIGHT & SOUND (pictured), is now up on their website here. Furthermore, Kim Newman has a superb review of QUANTUM OF SOLACE in this issue, but you'll have to buy the magazine -- or at least rifle its pages on the newsstand -- to read it.

I saw QUANTUM OF SOLACE myself this week and agree with the general condemnation of the opening action sequence, which is so chaotically shot and edited that it's impossible to really tell much of what's going on or feel any of the consequences. I did notice that it was shot around a road tunnel location that features prominently in Mario Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK. Of course, feeling (or rather not feeling) is one of the movie's big themes, so it's possible that emotional disconnection is what director Marc Forster was going for here, but that doesn't excuse bad filmmaking. Basically, if an action sequence already has ten or more different things happening, often half of that number in frame at any given time, its success is reliant on the audacity of its staging, on mise en scène, and not on hopped-up, Avid-happy editing. The sequence looks well-planned, just poorly executed -- the stunt people must have been particularly pissed to see how the risks they took were glossed over by fashionably overdriven editing technology. Follow that with a dullish main titles sequence (not by Daniel Kleinman) and a Jack White theme song ("Another Way To Die") that's... um, not bad on its own terms, just inappropriate and unmemorable, and QUANTUM OF SOLACE is basically a lame horse before it has a chance to get out the gate.

Daniel Craig protects Olga Kurylenko in one of the better scenes from QUANTUM OF SOLACE.

But it gets better. The sequence in the opera house I found impressive, both in its staging and in its absolutely coked-out, numbed-up state of abstraction, but also because it gives this rather stripped-down adventure an opportunity to showcase some of the worldly opulence that defines what a Bond film is, or at least should be. Daniel Craig is a compelling Bond once again, though Bond himself doesn't continue to evolve in this continuation of the CASINO ROYALE storyline; in a sense, QOS betrays the final shot of the previous film by putting Bond back on the faster-and-furiouser "how 007 became such a hardass" track. I was impressed by leading lady Olga Kurylenko (who incidentally was the vampire lady from PARIS, JE T'AIME featured on the cover of VIDEO WATCHDOG #144), all the moreso because she's the first Bond girl who isn't treated as a Madonna or a whore (or at least a disposable luxury item); he can see that she's damaged goods like he is, and doesn't take undue advantage. The films have come a long way from women with names like Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead, and as Daniel Craig's Bond develops, it will be interesting to see what genus this series replaces them with. (Actually, there is a character here who's named on the cast list as Strawberry Fields, but she insists on being called "just Fields." Even so, Strawberry Fields isn't quite the same as calling her, say, Tempest Geespot; it actually harkens back to the Sergeant Pepper who worked at Scotland Yard in the Edgar Wallace krimis of the late 1960s, a proper if unintended tip of the hat to a film series that helped inspire this one.) Mathieu Amalric gives an interesting performance as the villain, but I've grown tired of his kind: the scrawny, decadent, greedy entrepreneurs who engineer outrageously contrived plots to garner them more worldly power than their apparent billions can provide. This kind of greed may be true to post-Gordon Gecko capitalism, but Bond villains should be larger than life and their plans should build to grandiose coups de theâtre, not bigger and more corrupt business deals. The movie strikes a genuine frisson with a passing visual reference to GOLDFINGER, but as good as it looks, as tragic a note as it strikes, it doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny; it's one of those ideas that is almost good enough to work but, almost immediately, shows a bankrupt brain trust raiding the franchise's jukebox for greatest hits. (I'll take advantage of that music analogy to add that I admired David Arnold's score, among his best and most original work for the series.)

I guess what I'm saying is that they should have saved this image for a proper remake of GOLDFINGER -- and I hate to say this, folks, but Fleming only wrote so many books and, if Barbara Broccoli and company are desperate enough to call their latest blockbuster QUANTUM OF SOLACE, remakes are inevitable. But look on the bright side: they might consider being faithful to the books the second time around. It worked for CASINO ROYALE.

PS: On a different topic, I want to send positive thoughts to my favorite living novelist, J.G. Ballard, on the occasion of his 78th birthday. His most recent volume of autobiography, MIRACLES OF LIFE, confessed that he is now living with advanced prostate cancer and I hope the day is at least passing comfortably.

Starting Our Second Million

This is the 795th posting here at Video WatchBlog, and I'm making it to proudly announce that VWb has just logged its one millionth visit -- and it only took us (us? YOU!) three years, one month and twelve days! Our millionth visitor, hailing from Denver, Colorado, logged in at exactly 7:44:01 pm. Maybe it was you!

Earlier this year, on February 22, I noted our one millionth hit, or page visit, but this is a different sort of milestone. Hits are a page count, driven up when the people who come to Video WatchBlog are curious enough to browse through its back pages (as I encourage everyone to do); the visits, on the other hand, are a head count of the folks who have come here to see what's new. I'm thankful to and appreciative of both varieties. I'm just happy that so many of you continue to come here on a regular basis -- something I'm still only aspiring to do.

VW 145 On Newsstands Now

I've been tardy about mentioning this, but there is a new issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG on newsstands now. A couple of correspondents have given us some good-natured ribbing about Rob Zombie's placement on the cover, but I make no apologies: if we can grab someone's attention with Shane Dallmann's attentive coverage of the Zombie oeuvre, or with Eric Somer's reviews of Greg McLean's WOLF CREEK and ROGUE, and thereby introduce them to the work of Georges Méliès and the wider world of fantastic cinema beyond, then we're doing our job. And even though Zombie's work is considered "alternative" and "extreme" by the real world, I daresay this is probably the most subversive and revelatory issue of anything that's catered to Zombie's following. For instance, this issue also boasts what the Swedish distributor of SWEDEN, HEAVEN AND HELL cheerfully calls "an insane amount of coverage" of that film -- and it was apparently enough to freak out at least one former MIDNIGHT MARQUEE reader whose subscription we stepped in to fulfill. So it may not be everyone's cup of Aquavit, but it's sure as hell mine; VW 145 is actually one of my favorites in our 19-year history, so please be daring and seek it out.

For a full rundown of the issue's contents, and a free sample, click here.

It's Ennio's Eightieth

"Now that you've called me by name..."

Enzo Santaniello as Timmy McBain in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

If I had to trace the exact moment when the full weight of cinema's importance came crashing down on me, I could draw a straight line to that moment in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST when little Timmy McBain comes running down the corridor of his family's farmhouse and stops cold and incomprehending at the sight of his family's slaughter. The bodies remain offscreen as Tonino delli Colli's camera holds tight on his face, but the power of his trauma is conveyed by the long-delayed introduction of music into the film -- Ennio Morricone's music, Alessandro Alessandroni's distorted electric guitar foregrounded against a full orchestra whose rising and falling, mathematical cadence seems to count the last grains of time left to this young orphan's life.

Today, Ennio Morricone -- far and away our greatest living film composer -- marks the 80th anniversary of his birth. He is well aware of the impact and significance and, I believe, unmatchable quality of his Italian Western music, to the extent that it deeply annoys him, so I do not propose to write not much more about it. Instead, I would like to use this occasion to discuss my own lengthy prowl through the Maestro's back catalogue in search of music that, for me, would be capable of rivaling the unforgettable shock of my initial introduction to his work.

There is obviously no shortage of music of the highest quality in Morricone's filmography, found in pictures as well-known as THE MISSION or CINEMA PARADISO, or as beloved as DANGER: DIABOLIK, or as obscure as Veruschka and Meti una sera a cena. He has also written music that has imbued some otherwise tepid films with the very deepest and richest of emotions -- Adrian Lyne's version of LOLITA comes to mind, a film I like primarily because of what Morricone's music does for it. As surely as Morricone coined the musical landscape of the Italian Western, he did the same for the Italian thrillers of the 1970s, beginning with Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, but continuing with his THE CAT O'NINE TAILS (plausibly one of Morricone's Top 10) and FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, and carrying on with other examples such as WHO SAW HER DIE? (a particularly brilliant session), SPASMO, and the underrated Jean-Paul Belmondo vehicle Peur sur la Ville. I don't think it is possible to say of any other composer short of Bernard Herrmann, but the effect of Ennio Morricone on our understanding of the language available to cinema has truly been incalculable. But the full breadth and depth of that contribution is oh, so tempting to calculate.

Morricone's immensely moving, lyrical and magisterial score for OUATITW is an almost impossible act to follow, and yet he has "followed it" to say the very least. He has, in fact, continued by writing nearly 400 additional scores, with his current IMDb total reaching a staggering and unchallenged 486 film scores to date! His artistic achievement to date is already of such monumental proportion that one almost feels the need of two lifetimes in order to do it justice as a listener and commentator.

I recently posted here about Morricone's soul-stirring pop song "Se telefonando," which comes as close to his own standards of perfection as anything else I've heard -- but it's not film music. It was only within the past year or so that I finally heard something else from Morricone's catalogue that I believe -- in its romanticism, melancholy, majesty and drama -- stands as a true equal to the likes of such outstanding OUATITW tracks as "Jill's America" or "Man with a Harmonica." That cue is "Amore come dolore" ("A Love Like Sorrow"), a haunting 6:10 piece from Luciano Ercoli's 1970 giallo thriller Le foto proibite di una signora per bene. You can find a full rundown on the different issues of this soundtrack album and the various compilations on which its cues have been included here.

Le foto proibite di una signora per bene, which is available on DVD from Blue Underground as THE FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION, is only a passable giallo but it is one of the genre's greatest soundtrack albums. The music runs the full spectrum, from breathy bossa nova pop to organ-driven discotheque tunes (I can't help feeling that Radley Metzger would have killed to have "Allegreto del Signora" in his CAMILLE 2000) to some of the Maestro's best thriller music: suspenseful tracks that seem to accrue more and more silken spiderwebs and eerie lighting as they slither from beginning to end.

But when the album reaches "Amore come dolore," time stands still. I wish I could play it for you, but the best I can do is direct you to this not-always-work-friendly YouTube trailer for the film, which is mostly scored with the piece in question. Since I can't play the music for you in its entirety, the best I can do is to describe it as best I can:

It opens with a vulnerable, naked-sounding piano signature being tapped out on two notes by a single hand, which gains in complexity when it is joined by another hand playing doublets of three complementary notes, which lend the initial signature greater poignancy. A muted trumpet enters, so softly as to be easily mistaken for one of the deeper woodwinds, carried on a river of strings almost hesitant to veer away from the one or two sustained notes that most concern them -- and with the dawning sound of the muted trumpet, the piece acquires a sense of hopeful momentum as the sound of the strings seems to double, triple, with all the disparate components still searching for proper unity. As the lovely ostinati continues, it finally reaches a point (at 1:20) when electric bass enters to ground everything into a strong and coherent, almost jaunty emotion. At this point, pizzicato strings enter, echoing the initial piano notes, and these are soon doubled on electric piano, brightening the same notes that sounded so sorrowful in their initial solitude. As the piece reaches its halfway point, something happens to undermine the coherence and security of the melody: the piano notes tremble and a snare drum rattles as the orchestral strings stretch and bend, in the manner of wary sighing, over a further repetition of the initial piano signature, abruptly darkening the atmosphere of the piece. Slightly after the four minute point, the composition returns to square one with the piano signature repeated solo, and once again, the introduction of the strings and the muted trumpet bring a measure of hope that sounds more bittersweet in recovery after the middle part's unsettled detour.

Considering the title that Morricone chose to give this composition -- and "Amore come dolore" really has nothing to do with anything in the story of Ercoli's film, suggesting that the piece was either written independently of the film or had some other meaning for its composer -- it may be a musical representation of love found, love threatened or possibly abandoned, but love also recovered as the opening theme is once again recovered from its loneliness by a measure of optimism.

Upon discovering this music, I immediately added the Le foto proibite soundtrack to my iPod (which contains very little other soundtrack music, not even OUATITW), but it was "Amore come dolore" that I continue returning to, even today. I consider it one of Morricone's indisputible masterpieces; at six minutes and change, I find it always takes me on a musical journey as complete and fulfilling as, say, Pink Floyd's "Echoes." It's no surprise that, in the last decade particularly, "Amore come dolore" has become one of Morricone's most anthologized pieces.

I was into my obsession with this track for close to a year before it dawned on me that I didn't really know anything about the movie it was from. When I finally looked up THE FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION on the IMDb, I was flabbergasted to discover that it was scripted by my friend Ernesto Gastaldi, with whom I've maintained a warm personal correspondence for the past fifteen years. (In fact, Ernesto is interviewed in a featurette included on the Blue Underground disc -- as I happily discovered once I got around to watching it.) I was so pleased for Ernesto -- imagine having Ennio Morricone respond to something you have written with one of his finest pieces of work! -- that I couldn't resist writing to him and telling him how I had fallen under the spell of "Amore come dolore." He didn't remember the piece, so I sent him an mp3 file so that he could experience it for himself. He replied to me: "Wonderful music! I don't remember it as the soundtrack of my movie, [but] that music is perfect by itself."

Indeed it is. The full Le foto proibite soundtrack album, and individual cues from it, are available for download at MSN Music here. Whatever music you choose to ring in this milestone in the Maestro's life, I'm sure you'll join me in wishing Ennio Morricone many more years of health and joyous productivity.

New Books from Weaver and Schow

I am pleased to note that I'm not the only VIDEO WATCHDOG contributor with a new book out. In yesterday's mail came the latest hardcover from ace interviewer Tom Weaver, bearing the clever title I TALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (McFarland and Company, $45).

Included in this new compendium are "Interviews with 23 Veterans of Horror and Sci-Fi Films and Television, including COLOSSUS THE FORBIN PROJECT's Eric Braeden, Robert Conrad of THE WILD WILD WEST, James Darren, Robert Colbert and Lee Meriwether of THE TIME TUNNER, '50s kid star Charles Herbert, THE QUEEN OF OUTER SPACE herself Laurie Mitchell, HORROR HOTEL's Betta St. John, THE RAVEN's Olive Sturgess and more than a dozen others, including the hardcover debut of Tom's interview with THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE child star Ann Carter, which originally ran in VW. This is reportedly Tom 's 19th book, and I believe it's his twelfth collection of interviews, not counting McFarland's retitled paperback collections. It's amazing that he continues to find such top-drawer people to talk with, but it reflects the skill he applies to the job. As always, Tom dedicates this latest Q&A collection to past interviewees who have passed on since the last one; this book is dedicated to 32 people, which in itself is a testament to the value of the history Tom has been compiling.


Also now in bookstores is David J. Schow's GUN WORK (Hard Case, $6.99), his opening salvo as a contributor to the Hard Case Crime paperback series. I haven't read it yet, but it's my understanding that DJS undertook this book as a sort of lark, as a fan infatuated with the series, which revives the sleazy crime potboiler paperback genre of yesteryear, with reprints of classic long-out-of-print fiction by the likes of Mickey Spillane, Lawrence Block, Robert Bloch and George Axelrod, and new works in the milieu by such steel-eyed idolators as Max Alan Collins, Richard Aleas (a beard for the Hard Case line's founder Charles Ardai) and Christa Faust.

David supposedly wrote this book faster than a speeding bullet, but it turns out that's a key ingredient in the winning recipe for this type of thing. He knows his firearms anyway, and a thing or two about the ladies, I'm sure, and it's all paid off in what is being appreciated as a real knack for this sort of down-and-dirty storytelling. GUN WORK just scored an enthusiastic review at Bookgasm, and if you ask me, a label like "gun porn" just might have more staying power than "splatterpunk."

Dear People

I've only just learned that production assistant Betty Moos died last month, on October 4, at the age of 79. I knew Betty for close to 30 years by phone as the warm and friendly voice of Joe Dante's production office. Long before the one and only time we met in person, Betty would take my calls and ask me nicely to hold for Joe, always adding a "dear" or a "sweetie." I was probably just another caller to her, certainly was in the early years, but she always made me feel welcome and comfortable -- like we had years of friendship behind us. This is a rare commodity in humanity, much less the film business, and I always hoped that Betty would somehow be part of the team behind the movie Joe and I are still trying to make together. I'm deeply sorry to learn of Betty's passing, and I've privately extended to Joe -- as I do to everyone who loved her -- my condolences on the loss of such an irreplaceable and longterm associate, confidant and good friend.


I met Betty only once, in Joe's office in 1993, around the time MATINEE was arriving in theaters. Joe and I had known each other by phone for 13 years at that point, but it was our first-ever meeting. Betty volunteered to commemorate the occasion by snapping a couple of pictures, and this is one of them. Thank you, dear.

As it happens, I went directly from Joe's office that afternoon to the Ackermansion, where I had a two-hour private visit with Forry Ackerman -- our second and last meeting. It was reported this weekend that Forry has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and isn't expected to live much longer. Upon receiving the news, he asked to be released from the hospital so that he might spend his remaining time at home, visiting with friends and fans. This thread on the Classic Horror Film Boards contains some participatory reports from this final "Open House" from monster kids Rick Baker and Bill Warren, and many others who hold Uncle 4E dear. You'll find a message there from me, too.

Bava Book Wins International Horror Guild Award!

The INTERNATIONAL HORROR GUILD AWARDS for WORKS from 2007

NOVEL
The Terror. Dan Simmons (Little, Brown & Company)

FICTION COLLECTION
Dagger Key and Other Stories. Lucius Shepard (PS Publishing)

LONG FICTION
Softspoken. Lucius Shepard (Night Shade Books)

MID-LENGTH FICTION
"Closet Dreams". Lisa Tuttle (Postscripts 10: PS Publishing)

SHORT FICTION
"Honey in the Wound". Nancy Etchemendy (The Restless Dead: Candlewick Press)

ANTHOLOGY
Inferno. Ellen Datlow, editor (Tor)

NON-FICTION
Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark. Tim Lucas (Video Watchdog)

PERIODICAL
Postscripts. Peter Crowther & Nick Gevers, editors (PS Publishing)

ILLUSTRATED NARRATIVE
The Nightmare Factory. Thomas Ligotti (creator/writer), Joe Harris & Stuart Moore (writers), Ben Templesmith, Michael Gaydos, Colleen Doran & Ted McKeever

ART
Elizabeth McGrath for "The Incurable Disorder", Billy Shire Fine Arts, December 2007

PETER STRAUB, named earlier as the year's LIVING LEGEND, was honored in an essay by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz (http://horroraward.org/peter_straub.html or download as a document: http://horroraward.org/peter_straub.doc.)

About The IHG Awards

The International Horror Guild Awards recognized outstanding achievements in the field of Horror and Dark Fantasy. Nominations are derived from recommendations made by the public and the judges knowledge of the field.

The IHG Living Legend Award is determined solely by the judges. Living Legends are individuals who have made meritorious and notable contributions and/or have substantially influenced the field of horror/ dark fantasy. Previous recipients are Ramsey Campbell, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Gahan Wilson, Stephen King, Richard Bleiler, Charles L. Grant, William F. Nolan, Alice Cooper, Ray Bradbury, Clive Barker, Hugh B. Cave, Edward W. Bryant, Richard Matheson, and Harlan Ellison.

Edward Bryant, Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Ann Kennedy Vandermeer, and Hank Wagner adjudicated for the final award year of 2007. William Sheehan and Fiona Webster have also served as judges. Paula Guran administered the award beginning in 1996. The awards were overseen by a non-profit corporation, The Mirabundus Project, Inc.

For additional information on the International Horror Guild, please contact info@horroraward.org.
_______________

Donna and I are honored and delighted by this wonderful news! We extend our heartfelt thanks to the IHG judges and membership, and our congratulations to all the other recipients and nominees!

In Heaven and Hell With You

I've been listening almost exclusively to Siouxsie and the Banshees for the last couple of weeks. Halloween seems an appropriate time to write something about them, and about Siouxsie Sioux in particular, given that a song entitled "Halloween" figures so prominently in their discography.

In my opinion, no other British group of the post-punk era underwent such dramatic metamorphoses or so thoroughly explored their potential as a recording unit as Siouxsie and the Banshees. Their albums were strong and intelligently sequenced, their singles (collected as ONCE UPON A TIME and TWICE UPON A TIME) were glorious, and their B-sides (collected in the box set DOWNSIDE UP) were a laboratory for fascinating experimentation. Siouxsie herself was such a compelling figure, so obviously a creature of theater and so sleekly photogenic in their videos, I find it incredible, even outrageous to this day that no one ever approached her to act in features. And when harrowing flipsides like "Umbrella" started turning up, I couldn't understand why at least one enterprising horror director out there didn't have the brain to put them in harness right away as the Anglo answer to Goblin. They were not ones for standing still; they went through guitarists like Kleenex (The Cure's Robert Smith moonlighted with them briefly), but their core guitar sound was essentially defined from the get-go by original six-stringer John McKay and later refined when the extraordinary John McGeoch joined the Banshees for three of their most beloved albums (KALEIDOSCOPE, JUJU and A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE). Even with later guitarists on board, they were a powerhouse live band, driven by Budgie's thundrous drum sound and one of the most original and authoritative female figureheads a rock band has ever had.

I had the good fortune to see them live once; it was good fortune because Siouxsie and the Banshees never came to Cincinnati, but they happened to be playing in Washington DC in May 1986, on the day after a wedding we attended there. It was a funny situation: we were staying with the friends who got married, who had already been living together for awhile. Donna didn't want to go, but the bride did, but the bride was supposed to be honeymooning, so Donna ended up using my spare ticket under duress. We were strangers to Washington, didn't know where the Warner Theater was, but as we wandered around, people with pink mohawks and chained leatherware began to appear, so I suggested we just follow them. I had seen a number of punk and post-punk acts in Cincinnati, but here people never dressed the act -- you couldn't particularly tell a Ramones audience from a Jackson Browne audience by sight in Cincinnati. This concert was my only direct exposure to anything like an authentic punk audience, and I found their style and energy stimulating, but once the show was over, Donna wanted to get out of there pretty fast, so we did.

Apart from a little accident at the outset when the theater's heavy velvet curtains opened too swiftly, causing a backdraft that sent one right into Budgie's thundering drum kit, the performance was impeccably played with all three musicians giving their all. (I saw them with John Valentine Carruthers on guitar, whose gleaming work on "Cities in Dust" and "92 Degrees" is as definitive as anything they did with McGeoch.) I had seen only very early performance footage of the group at that time and was particularly impressed by how Siouxsie had matured as a live performer. She, who had started out shaking her fists and thumbing her nose and goosestepping across the stage, danced sinuously like an art nouveau Salomé, till the show climaxed with her somersaulting through stage fog while singing "Eve Black/Eve White," one of her many songs of fractured personality, this one inspired by THE THREE FACES OF EVE.

The classic group's only official live video release, NOCTURNE, captures them at an earlier point in time (with Robert Smith still aboard) but playing a similar set list; I recommend it, especially for the show-stopping "Night Shift," a grippingly dolorous dirge that opened Side 2 of JUJU and somehow became the cathartic centerpiece of every concert they played thereafter. (There's a circulating 1981 Cologne show that finds Siouxsie urging her catatonic audience to stand up, dance, do something, explaining "We're just a pop group" -- and then launching into this song.) Siouxsie and the Banshees were also, among other things, a highly film-literate band, even opening TINDERBOX's "92 Degrees" with a sound byte from IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE ("Did you know that more murders are committed at 92 degrees fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once... At lower temperatures, people are easygoing; over 92, it's too hot to move, but just 92, people get irritable!!!")

I'm glad I had the chance to see them play when I did, because they began losing their appeal for me with their next album, the covers collection THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. Their best remaining song, "Peek-A-Boo," was reportedly based on the master tape of one of their earlier songs... played backwards. That they could turn something so rooted in the outré into their only US chart hit testifies to their gifts of invention, even at this late stage. They disbanded after their 1995 album THE RAPTURE, with Siouxsie and Budgie (who married in 1991) focusing their attentions thereafter on the side project, The Creatures. The way groups end often colors the way we feel about them in retrospect, and the way Siouxsie and the Banshees slowly succumbed to overproduction, revolving door personnel and divided attentions meant that I spent a good deal of the past decade not listening very much to the many wonderful songs and albums they gave us.

This latest Banshees binge of mine got underway strangely. I hit a wall in a writing project and felt a depression coming on, so I decided to meet it head-on by listening to "Swimming Horses" from the HYAENA album. Of all the group's recorded work, this is the one song that never fails to get under my skin, and it's been known to induce blue moods in me that last for days -- blue but somehow delicious. In this case, however, I administered it to myself as a kind of antigen -- before the depression could take hold, I hoped the song would. Surprisingly, it worked. I then loaded all of my Siouxsie CDs onto my iPod and found that, despite the music's sometimes dark imagery, its propulsive drumming and spider-woven guitar lines and the sheer gusto of Siouxsie's bellowing combined into something quite energizing and uplifting. It's been a good companion.

In the course of this latest immersion in the Banshees, I read some things and discovered that Siouxsie and Budgie divorced awhile ago and disbanded The Creatures, and that Siouxsie released her first solo album, MANTARAY, last year. She's still a handsome woman, and the album finds her still in strong voice, and noticeably less guarded about showing her tender side. (What's next, a sense of humor?) It's a good album, opening with "Into A Swan," a pounding ode to impending personal transformation -- a theme also reflected in song titles like "About to Happen", "Here Comes That Day" and "If It Doesn't Kill Me." The instrumental sound of the album is percussive techno-cabaret, appropriately fantasmagorical but with a array of instrumentation whose broad musical palette recalls A KISS IN THE DREAMHOUSE. But hearing Siouxsie's voice severed from the tantric, flangey, tidal swell of The Banshees sometimes brings about in actuality the sense of dislocation that she often sang about on the albums she made with The Banshees in the late '70s and '80s. The ever-fluctuating flavors of the record's instrumental backing gradually ring hollow (or at least fickle) over the course of ten songs, failing to provide in visceral anchoring what it delivers in varietal color. Of all the tracks, "Into A Swan" and "They Follow You" come closest to capturing a classic yet distinctively fresh Siouxsie sound. Vocally and instrumentally, MANTARAY is an inventive album, though it falls short of being a wholly convincing or coalescent one. Siouxsie's voice needs to backed by stronger personalities, and I hope her next solo album finds her sounding just as bold but less alone.

To help set the mood for your holiday festivities, I leave you with Siouxsie performing the aforementioned "Halloween" with the classic Banshees lineup of Steve Severin (bass), the late John McGeoch (guitar) and Budgie (drums).

Grace Slick @ 69

Grace Slick, self portrait.

Somewhere in California, I suppose, Grace Slick is celebrating her 69th birthday today -- and if she's not, because she has it in that fool head of hers that old people don't look good when they're making music or having fun, well... I'll celebrate for her.

I first saw and heard Grace singing "Somebody To Love" and "White Rabbit" on radio and television a bit earlier in life, when Jefferson Airplane's SURREALISTIC PILLOW album was climbing the charts, but they didn't become my favorite band until I saw them play live on National Public Television in two hour specials that aired in 1970. Those two shows, "San Francisco Rock: A Night at the Family Dog" and "Go Ride the Music", were released on DVD this year to little notice but, after decades of having to contend with bleary, jittery dupes, these clean and steady presentations (with remixed 5.1 mono sound) are godsends. These shows don't just represent the ground zero of my nearly lifelong love affair with Jefferson Airplane; they embody the moment I became obsessed with live music recordings -- savoring the ways in which live performance differs from studio recordings. As good as their studio albums were and are, live performance was everything to Jefferson Airplane. Witness this sample from "A Night at the Family Dog" -- where I also fell in love with Jack Casady's electric bass.

The way Grace Slick presided over Jefferson Airplane's initial media blitzkrieg, with her soaring contralto painting powerful Cassandra-like visions of the drug-amplified mind, I had assumed that she was the band's lead singer. In fact, she had replaced the group's initial female vocalist, Signe Anderson, who had been granted only one solo number and generally sang backup. Grace left her initial band, The Great Society, to join the Airplane and brought with her the two numbers she proceeded to make world-famous with them. Marty Balin, the group's mellow-voiced founder and actual lead singer, can be seen in footage of these early TV appearances huddled over an electric piano he's not playing, looking like the odd man out. Marty's persona as a singer was romantic and persuasive, almost feminine, and Grace complemented him with rock's first non-melodic female voice, whose value lay in its conveyance of a power that went beyond masculine into something nearer the prophetic or the godly. Finding herself the unwitting focal point in a band she'd just joined, Grace was sensitive to Marty's feelings and refused to allow either of her original contributions to the follow-up album, AFTER BATHING AT BAXTER'S, to go out as the A-sides of their next singles. As a result, Jefferson Airplane stopped being a singles band overnight and became one of the first true avatars of AOR (album oriented rock).

In addition to being beautiful, smart, sassy, sexy and a distinctive vocalist, Grace was one of the most original songwriters of her time: "Rejoyce" reduced Joyce's ULYSSES to a four minute song, "Eskimo Blue Day" and her remarkable live vocal improv on "Bear Melt" were impressionistic ecology, and "Hey Fredrick" and "Across the Board" are two of the most unflinching songs about sex ever recorded. She's underrated as a keyboardist and still generally an unknown quantity as a guitarist, though I've heard a tape of her playing acoustic guitar that proved her at least as adept at the instrument as the Airplane's rhythm guitarist Paul Kantner -- the father of her only child, former MTV veejay China Kantner. But, in a band also featuring Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, the last thing the Airplane needed was another guitarist.

My favorite photo of Grace, circa 1969, from the inner sleeve of Paul Kantner's BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE album.

Over the years, I've done my best to celebrate my love for Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane in some tangible form -- I've finished the work but haven't been able to share it with the public as yet. Last year, I wrote an entire book about Jefferson Airplane's 1968 album CROWN OF CREATION that I hoped Continuum Press would publish in their "33 & 1/3" series; to date, they haven't. (They will start considering new submissions within the coming weeks and I will try, try again.) Before that, I wrote a four-hour script entitled JEFFERSON AIRPLANE: LOVE & HAIGHT, which told the band's entire story with founder Marty Balin as its protagonist and Grace Slick as its accidental antagonist. When more than a year passed without interest from anyone, I took my agent's advice and rewrote the script as a regular feature focusing on Grace. I had lots of ideas for people who could play Grace, ranging from Leelee Sobieski to Pink to Sarah Silverman, but the word that came back after all my troubles is that Grace and the Airplane weren't sufficiently well-known to have a movie made about them.

Excuse me? We're talking about the band that headlined at Woodstock and supported the Rolling Stones at Altamont, the band that Ed Sullivan and LIFE Magazine called "the top rock group in America." Grace herself was ranked #20 on VH1's 100 GREATEST WOMEN OF ROCK 'N' ROLL special. We're also talking about an industry that has made TV-movies about bands like Sweetwater and The Monkees. But be that as it may.

In honor of Grace's birthday, I've decided to post -- for the first time anywhere -- the first five pages of my unproduced Grace Slick biopic screenplay. Maybe someday we'll all be able to see the rest. In the meantime, enjoy.

INT. SUBURBAN LIVING ROOM - DAY

Caption: San Francisco, 1946.

Two little, dimpled hands carefully place a 78 rpm record on an RCA Victrola turntable and lower the heavy needle onto its spinning grooves.

Cue: “Three Little Maids from School Are We” from THE MIKADO, by Gilbert & Sullivan (any version dating from the period).

CLOSE SHOT of an ornate, black, Spanish-style fan fluttering. As the words of the song emerge from the crackles of the worn recording, the fan lowers to reveal the face of a plump little GIRL, six or seven years old, covered in heavy Geisha-style makeup which she has obviously applied herself. This is the YOUNG GRACE SLICK.

YOUNG GRACE (pantomiming)

Three little maids from school are we,

Pert as a school-girl well can be,

Filled to the brim with girlish glee,

Three little maids from school!

Her middle-class MOTHER and FATHER sit on the living room couch, looking more dumb-struck than entertained.

The little girl is wearing a fox stole and one of her mother’s dresses, which drags along the ground as she moves in a child’s version of grown-up choreography.

YOUNG GRACE (cont’d, pantomiming)

Everything is a source of fun!

Nobody’s safe, we care for none!

Life is a joke that’s just begun!

Three little maids from school!

INT. HIGH SCHOOL CORRIDOR - DAY
Caption: Palo Alto High School, 1954.

Three 13 YEAR OLD GIRLS are carrying their books to class. Two of the girls are cute, blonde and shapely, but the third is dark-haired, moody, flat-chested and pudgy.

SCHOOL MAID #1

He’s in my chemistry class! Talk about chemistry! Isn’t he the dreamiest?

SCHOOL MAID #2

I wish he’d asked me to the dance before Darryl did.

SCHOOL MAID #1

Greedy!

SCHOOL MAID #2

How about you, Gracie?

TEENAGE GRACE

Don't call me that. I hate that.

SCHOOLMAID #2

Okay, but who’s taking you to the prom?

TEENAGE GRACE

Jack Shit.
SCHOOL MAID #2

You mean nobody asked you?

TEENAGE GRACE

Nobody sees blonde hair and big boobs when they look at me. What’s left? Funny knees and a smart mouth?

SCHOOL MAID #1

You don’t have to be blonde or have... a womanly figure to get a boy, Gracie.

TEENAGE GRACE(irritated)

Oh, yeah?

SCHOOL MAID #1

No. You just need to make... an impression.

SCHOOL MAID #1 bats her eyes at a passing BOY, who crashes into an open locker door.

Cue: “Greasy Heart” by Jefferson Airplane.

A distorted sting of electric guitar grows in volume, sounding larger and larger until...

TITLE SEQUENCE - VARIOUS CONCERT STAGES

The adult GRACE SLICK is seen performing “Greasy Heart” onstage with JEFFERSON AIRPLANE.

She is dressed in an elegant, pearly white, silk pantsuit with loose sleeves and neckline, low white pumps. Her classically simple apparel offers minimal distraction from her long dark hair, icy blue eyes and porcelain Nordic features. She’s like a haute couture model, but scary as well; she’s like the 1960s prototype of a Goth punk.

Periodically throughout the song, Grace’s wardrobe changes.

GRACE(singing)

Lady, you keep asking why he likes you

How come?

Now she’s wearing a Girl Scout’s uniform...

Wonder why he wants more

If he’s just had some

Now a nun’s habit, wielding a crucifix...

Boys, she’s got more to play with

In the way of... toys

Now a loose-woven, see-through black net blouse with pockets over her nipples, complemented by a black leather miniskirt and thigh-high leather boots...

Lady’s eyes go off and on

With a finger full of glue

Her lips are torn apart

Her face in come-to-me-tattoo

Now she’s performing with black makeup covering every exposed inch of her skin. She thrusts a fist into the air in a Black Power salute...

Creamy suntan color that

Fades

When she

Bathes

Now she’s in Adolph Hitler drag, a little square mustache cut out of black paper stuck on under her nose...

Paper dresses catch on fire!

And you lose her in the haze

With wicked alacrity, she makes a warning “Sieg heil!” gesture to her audience, cautioning them...

Don't ever change people

Even if you can!

The stage is now covered in orange smoke. Grace emerges from the fog dressed in “Bride of Frankenstein” mode. Her hair is jagged, spiky, like an aurora of electricity. Her hands, moving mechanically, scratch at the air like robo-claws.

You’re your own best toy

To play with

Remote control hands

Made for each other

As before, a CLOSE SHOT of an elaborate Japanese fan, which drops to reveal the adult Grace in full Geisha makeup and apparel.

Made in Japan!

Woman with a greasy heart

Auto-matic man

Don't ever change people!

Your face will hit the fan

She whacks the side of her powdered face with the fan, and we return to the white pantsuit:

Don't... ever change people

Even if you can!

Don't change before the empire falls

EXT. LOMBARD STREET - DAWN

As the song continues, Grace (circa 1972) is laughing and drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels while speeding down Lombard Street in San Francisco, where it turns into Doyle Drive in the vicinity of the Golden Gate Bridge. She must be going over 100 miles per hour.

You'll laugh so hard

You'll crack the walls

Grace loses control of the vehicle, which spins and crashes into a wall as the last word hangs in the air, resonating.

FADE TO BLACK.

Grace today. Anybody want to buy a painting?

Jefferson Airplane's manager Bill Thompson read my script (which was informed by my own research, as well as Jeff Tamarkin's fine book GOT A REVOLUTION! THE TURBULENT FLIGHT OF JEFFERSON AIRPLANE) and told me it was pretty accurate. For now, though, it's in a drawer.

Grace, whose tongue-in-cheek song "Silver Spoon" once extolled the joys of carnivorous living (including cannibalism), is today a practicing vegan. A previously unreleased recording called "Surprise Surprise," featuring her, appears on the new Jefferson Starship release JEFFERSON'S TREE OF LIBERTY, but she has been retired from music for many years and now devotes her time to painting. I like the pretty storybook quality of her art, but it doesn't begin to compare to the cutting edge brilliance of her voice or the songs she wrote. Grace says that she continues to write and record songs at home on the piano for her own amusement, and I hope to hear some of them someday. There have been reports of health problems in recent years, but she continues to appear at gallery shows to promote her art. For now, I'm simply glad that she's still with us and that the possibility of new work from her still exists.

Happy Birthday, Grace. You made an impression.

Tomorrow: Some Halloween thoughts on one of Grace's greatest stylistic descendants... Siouxsie Sioux.