The Circus of Dread Is Coming

My next project, Circus of Dread, has had a lengthy gestation period, and is finally approaching production.

Bill Oberst Jr. and Domiziano Arcangeli topline this dark, brutal, sensual, and action-packed story of two brothers sucked into the grotesque maelstrom of an underground circus.

Without a doubt, this is just the sort of Pulp that this blog is dedicated to --  and , I trust, something special for lovers of dark, weird, and 'fantastique' cinema. 

As a lifelong lover, devotee, and fan of this material, my mission is to make a movie that I would love to see myself, that I would embrace for its originality, passion, and raw truth.

That's my challenge, and its my responsibility to engage my audience, give them a cracking good time, and disturb the shit out of them with compelling characters in unpredictable situations.

This first piece of art is by the brilliant Santiago Caruso, whose work I've showcased several times on this blog. For me, it perfectly captures the spirit of this considerable creative undertaking, a true collaboration of like-minded individuals. They know who they are, and I'm grateful to them all.

The circus IS coming! Nothing can stop it.

There's No Island Like An Island of Lost Souls

 

It's easier to write about something you hate than something you love. Love creates a euphoria that is difficult to articulate. That's why it's sought after, that's why the passionate murder in its name. One can't define love with a few choice words. Words fail in most cases. Music, on the other hand, can convey feelings of association with love. I used to make a habit of sending CD's to women I had secret crushes on. Some fresh girlfriends got them, too.

My love for Island of  Lost Souls ('32), the first movie based on H.G. Wells' 'Island of Dr. Moreau', heightened my excitement and made me impatient for the Criterion Blu-ray. I received it last week, banished all engagements, and watched it immediately.

 An unflattering portrait of the beautiful Kathleen Burke (The Panther Woman)

Like a reliable compass, the film took me straight to the fog-bound island with its crew of grotesque, tragic beast men, and it deposited me there for an adventure that I live anew every time. That's the film's magic. Each journey feels like virgin territory.  Until recently, I made do with a British VHS tape, its images denigrated by too much wear, its sound muted by inferior technology. As it represented my only hold on the movie, I never abandoned the tape, but I held little hope that a superior version would become available one day.

The Criterion Collection  has made Island of Lost Souls available on Blu-ray. So beautiful, so ravishing, so emotionally musical is this version, I'm tempted to send it out like love letters to those deserving of its joys. Written by Wells as a protest against vivisection, it focuses on one man's attempt to create his own men, using innocent beasts as genetic clay.

 

If you read this blog, you'll know why Island of Lost Souls is a favorite. A favorite? Is that all I can manage?  Describing my love for the film with words like "favorite" does it a horrible disservice. It IS a favorite, but I have many favorites, just as I've known more than a handful of favorite loves over the years, the first being an ethereal creature who opened forbidden gates to me when we were merely of an age deemed appropriate for riding a pushbike. Surely, like the film, she deserves more muscular distinction.

Of similar youth and curiosity, I encountered this Island of Lost Souls on a black and white TV jammed into a corner of my parents' living room at a time when TV wasn't yet a focal feature of the family home. The images of living creatures teetering in a limbo between human and animal engaged my senses and sympathies. Like the malformed stars of Todd Browning's Freaks, I felt sorry for these unnatural wonders, and became fascinated with them. Was my fascination compatible with sympathy? Could I ogle them, marvel at them, desire oneness with them, while fantasizing that I would save them and whisk them off to a safer harbor? Would it, in fact, be safe? Would they be safe with me? Or would I, lacking medical skills, become a purely voyeuristic Moreau, a savior turned betrayer?

Or worse?

The film's 'Panther Woman' (Kathleen Burke) is one of Moreau's finest creations, and she's deliciousness made flesh. As I contemplated her via the Blu-ray image, I was forced to admit that, under such circumstances, I could not merely rescue such a fascinating animal from a grisly fate. No, I'd surely want communion with her, to know her, to explore her, to contemplate the genetic and domestic possibilities she presented.

Director Erle C. Kenton is to be applauded for creating such anxiety in me, for transforming a novel into a horror film that sings a song with the intensity of love, and for leaving us with a trinket that has endured for more than seven decades, its black and white glow an eternal cinematic ember.

Criterion's stunning Blu-ray is a glorious hymn to the movie. Extras include a wonderful, informal chat between director John Landis, make-up maestro Rick Baker, and genre scholar Bob Burns; there is also a terrific piece by director Richard Stanley -- who was fired off the most recent version of the film -- in which he discusses his love for the original novel and film, and explains why he was ousted from his own take on the story. Film historians Gregory Mank and David J. Skal compliment these extras with mountains loads of rich production info.

The Ugly Truth About The Enchanted Cottage

Open Letter to the Makers of The Enchanted Cottage:

Although your movie has been hailed as a romantic classic by some, it has some very serious flaws which gravely undermine its effectiveness.

Yours is the "tragic" tale of an Ugly Spinster who falls in love with an Ugly Soldier who's been disfigured by war.

Fine. I like that. I like Ugly. I like the idea that two Ugly people will find each other, make Ugly Love, have Ugly Children, make Ugly goo-goo eyes, and come to believe that their Ugliness is, in fact, Beauty.

Great idea. Old idea. So bring on the Ugliness.

Problem is, you didn't. You fucked up. You screwed the pooch.

Why?

Lots of reasons, but Vanity is the big one. You got scared. You opted to protect your actors and spare audiences True Ugliness because you were a bunch of fucking pussies.

Well, damn you all to an Ugly hell!

Dorothy McGuire, who plays the Ugly Spinster, is not ugly. You give her a crappy hair-do, light her in an unflattering way, and smudge black around her eyes. Big deal! Do you think we're blind? She's not Ugly. Far from it.

Then there's Robert Young. Je-sus Christ. He's a handsome chap, that's for sure. And it's fine that he's introduced as a handsome chap with a fine dame on his arm and ambition in his eyes. He's lit like a leading man and he behaves in that confident, Leading Man way. Fine. No problems there.

It's in the next development where you fuck up like a pedophile at a child care center.

Young returns from the war. He checks into the Enchanted Cottage of the title and sulks about. He hides his face, which we know is scarred, and he talks about wanting to die and wanting to be left alone because he's so horrible and he's lost the use of his tennis hand. His dame has left him, too, because he's so damn Ugly now, and he refuses to let his own mother see him because, shit!, he's probably scarier than John Merrick, the Elephant Man, with his Ugly mug.

Great. Love it! What a tragic fellow Young has become. Our sympathies are with him.

Right?

They are... until we see him.

Crikey, what a fucking whining pussy-boy. That so-called Ugly scar he's complaining about is more like a thin line drawn with an eyebrow pencil. The bloke's eye is slightly off, sure, but it's no big deal if you squint a bit or don't focus on it exclusively while listening to him lament his sorry state.

Because the producers decided to de-Uglify the Ugliness, they destroy any sympathy we have for Young. Now he's a handsome bloke with a small scar complaining about how Ugly he is.

Well, pal, there are a lot of men out there in the audience not even 10% as good looking as the Ugly version of you. So pull your fuckin head in and stop complaining like a little girl. You're like Howard Hughes screaming about the price of milk.

Why the producers of this fraud didn't go the whole hog and give Young the full Quasimodo treatment is beyond me. THAT would have been my kind of movie, and it would have been a much better movie than the half-ass thing it is now.

In this nonsense, we're supposed to feel that McGuire is some kind of saint for accepting Young and his Revolting Ugliness. Yeah, she's a saint for agreeing to shack up with a handsome leading man with a pencil line down his face. Please, canonize this charitable bitch right now.

Guys, if you want to make a movie about Beauty and Ugliness and its relative relationship, at least have some faith. It's like you didn't have enough faith in the conceit that an Ugly Woman would really fall for an Ugly Man, so you cut the hands off your make-up man and emplyed an eye pencil to do your job.

Of course, it's the cottage that's really responsible for the "magic" that occurs here, so there was no reason to not depict your actors as Godawfully Hideous freaks that only Todd Browning would love. Having that contrast was so important, but you went for the stinking middle ground instead.

Shame on you.

Enchanted Cottage? More like Cottage of Pussies.

Humping Trash

Trash Humpers, the new film from Harmony Korine, the director of Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy, and Mr. Lonely, looks like a must-see proposition (to me, at least).

It just played the Toronto International Film Festival and received some positive reviews; of course, reviews of such a film are all relative to one's individual tastes.

The film piqued my curiosity because of the slightly deformed, "challenged" characters.

The top still looks like an echo of John Waters' Desperate Living with a new Jean Hill (the black fatty) for the 21st century.

The old blokes look like brothers of the old bloke parodies from Jackass (Johnny Knoxville got it very right when he played one of these to perfection).

I can't say I love Korine's films, but I do love his passion for the bizarre and marginalized. I just get bored with his work at times.

Without a doubt, I will be fixating on this film for a while.

And while I (and possibly you) am doing that, let's spare a thought for one of the first and best on-screen freaks, the great Johnny Eck (from Todd's Browning's film of the same name).

This photograph of Johnny, who went into seclusion after his home was burglarized and he was beaten in '88, was collected by Mark Feldman and published in Jack Stevenson's Pandemonium magazine (Issue 3).

By all accounts, Johnny was a golden human being.

Aussie Monster Mags

Famous Monsters of Filmland was never widely distributed in Australia. The country had very little history of filmed or written horror until quite recently. Horror films were actually banned outright for decades.

For the young horror lover (lover of WHAT? wouldn't be an inappropriate question), there were magazines like these, which were filled with licensed or stolen horror articles from other countries where horror was embraced with less contempt.

The generically titled Monster Terror was published on the crappiest paper possible by PAGE PUBLICATIONS, a Sydney-based mass market magazine publisher that specialized in "hobby" mags.

The printing process used for these was so cheap and nasty, the ink still isn't dry today; the images are easily scratched and scuffed.

Despite the company's appalling quality control, there was plenty of gold to be found amongst the wheat.

For example, this article on Murneau's Nosferatu (above) was written by Gary Gerani, who would soldier on to write Fantastic Television, a landmark book on fantasy-based TV that pioneered the concept of "Episode Guides".

For years, it was one of my beloved, non-Christian "Bibles".



Although a couple of stills from Todd Browning's Freaks ('32) had appeared in Dennis Giford's Horror movies, this one-off edition of the company's Monster Horrors featured the first lengthy dissection of the film.

A terrible itch to see the film, an itch that wouldn't be scratched for another seven years, began after several readings and many nights spent staring at amazing photos like these.

Ironically, Page's lousy printing often resulted in grainy reproductions of stills that lent the films a more disturbing quality.

This illustration of a staked Christopher Lee as Dracula always struck me as powerful and gloriously lurid.

For some inexplicable reason, I found this image of Carol Speed as Abby ('74) exceptionally grotesque. Was it her parched and pinched appearance? Or was it the cadaverous facial structure? The twelve year old me found it difficult to reconcile with this publicity pic from AIP. Even now, it makes me feel ill.

The career of the young Jack Nicholson is given a thorough comb-over in this fascinating article.

Note that PAGE PUBLICATIONS P/L, though a publisher of hobby mags...

never offered subscriptions to its horror-themed publications. Instead, they issued a new title when they deemed it financially desirable... or to exploit a sudden trend.

Back when I first purchased this mag in '75, I could not understand how the publisher could possibly think that these shoddy black and white stills could be considered "mini posters". I still can't understand it. Did they actually expect readers to cut them out and post them on a wall somewhere?


A less than impressive contents page.

A true treasure: A wonderful still from Peter Walker's grim House Of Whipcord ('74) with the great Sheila Keith graced one of the last of the Page Publications' horror mags.

And a truly terrible idea -- a horror movie-themed puzzle.

Thank God Famous Monsters was soon to enter my life.