Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death Of Al Adamson

For a brief moment as I watched David Gregory’s superb 2019 documentary, I dreamily contemplated ordering Severin’s 14-disc Al Adamson set, despite swearing a few years ago I would never see another Adamson film after the death march that was a late-night TV screening of Psycho-A-Go-Go. But the moment passed, and I'll put that little slippage down to the sheer pleasure of hearing veteran movie folk (most of them well into their 70’s and 80’s) recount war stories from the halcyon days of American exploitation cinema. Al Adamson wasn’t the worst of the schlockmakers, in fact some of his better made films are actually quite... watchable - his 1969 outlaw motorcycle film Satan’s Sadists in particular is a minor classic of the late-60's biker pic craze. Adamson is best remembered nowadays for his horror films but as a journeyman film maker he dabbled in westerns, crime films, science fiction, blaxploitation, even a family film (the very skewed family film Carnival Magic). If Adamson had a genuine talent it was his ability to make films dirt cheap, often financed with loose change and it remained a source of pride for Adamson that he made entertaining and profitable films at a fraction of the spend of the major studios. With the decline of the drive-in market in the early 80's (the natural home for Adamson's films), the director for the most part retired from movie making and branched into real estate, virtually disappearing from view until he made headlines in 1995 with the shocking discovery of his body, bludgeoned to death by a handyman he employed, and concealed for weeks under a freshly laid tiled floor at his remote home in Southern California.

Dramatic stuff indeed, and director David Gregory to his credit has made a film that finds the right balance of light and shadow. Told in a chronological order, the first hour or so is dedicated to Adamson’s film-making career and assembles all the major surviving members of Adamson’s repertory of cast and crew (and sometimes there was little to differentiate both), as well as the affable director himself culled from an archive interview he gave before his untimely death. The tales from the trenches of low-budget film-making are often hilarious. We hear about Adamson's penchant for casting washed-up actors who came cheap but not without their eccentricities. Lon Chaney Jr, performed in a fog of alcoholism, while actor J. Carrol Naish was in poor health was by the time he appeared in Dracula vs. Frankenstein in 1971. The twice Oscar nominated actor was incapable of remembering his dialogue and when huge cue cards were provided for the semi-blind actor, his line readings were accompanied by distracting loud clicks from his unruly dentures !

Producer and close friend Sam Sherman, himself a great chronicler of Adamson’s films on several laserdisc and DVD commentaries, explains how Adamson’s films were often re-shot, re-edited, (re-colored!) and fashioned into completely different films from what they originally started out as. For what was one of Adamson and Sherman's most infamous cut n' paste jobs, the 1965 film crime thriller Echo of Terror was overhauled and re-released as Psycho-A-Go-Go, then in 1969 it mutated into the science fiction film The Fiend with the Electronic Brain, before being reworked again and re-packaged as a horror film called Blood of Ghastly Horror. Elsewhere, colleagues recall with some affection, Adamson's notorious thriftiness which often meant his cast and crews went unpaid. Vilmos Zsigmond who shot 3 films for Adamson before graduating to McCabe & Mrs. Miller for Robert Altman, recalls how the director paid him for a day's directing work with the proceeds of a newspaper delivery job which Zsigmond found endearing enough to continue working for him. Actor and stuntman John "Bud" Cardos fondly explains how he often appeared as two different characters in Adamson’s films, as in the scrappy 1970 western Five Bloody Graves, where he is actually killed by himself ! The documentary also draws on dark connections with the Spahn ranch (Satan’s Sadists and some pick-up shots for 1969's The Female Bunch were filmed at the ranch when it was home to the Manson family) and in the early 90's Adamson appeared to make a return to film-making only to get tangled up in quite a bizarre UFO conspiracy which those close to the director, Sam Sherman included, seem very reluctant to discuss on camera (!)

With the final years of Adamson’s life, the documentary shifts gears and turns a darker shade. Adamson spent the early 90's caring for his terminally ill wife and muse, Regina Carrol and was heartbroken by her premature death. Tragedy would continue to dog Adamson as the decade wore on when Fred Fulford entered Adamson's life. Friends and family recall the increasingly sinister behavior of Fulford whom Adamson hired as a live-in handyman and there are disturbing accounts of trust being abused and financial exploitation. It's a terribly sad coda to Adamson's life, with old friends seemingly gone, and it was only through the interventions of Adamson's brother and his housemaid that police took an interest in Adamson's sudden disappearance. When the police finally recovered Adamson's remains (seen in a quite astonishing and grisly VHS recording of the actual excavation), the moment is genuinely upsetting. When news of his death first emerged, some of the more unsavory elements of the press relished the irony of a horror movie director dying in most horrific circumstances ("This story reads like a plot of a bad horror film" one news report led with). Thankfully though what lingers in the mind after watching David Gregory's moving film is not Al Adamson's gruesome demise but his joie de vivre for making films, a director who delighted in entertaining audiences with cost-effective, unpretentious movies, and a man who was loved and adored by friends, colleagues and fans alike.

Kraftwerk Catalogue Plus

Since the news broke last week of Florien Schneider's passing, I've been revisiting my Kraftwerk collection, that is, the Catalogue albums, plus the three pre-Autobahn albums that Hütter and Schneider have long declined to re-issue. My CD album editions pre-date the 2009 remasters (which I've heard mixed reports about), but the discs sound absolutely fine and far better than my old LPs which were prone to skips and increasingly distracting surface noise. Kraftwerk made their albums sound so beautifully refined and luxurious, that any extraneous noise becomes a distraction. I long held the image of Kraftwerk recording their music in pristine white lab coats in an ultra clean laboratory. Needless to say it was quite a jolt when I finally saw pictures of the group at Kling Klang, dressed smart casual and the studio brimming with electronic and traditional instruments fed by a writhing mass of cables snaking across the floor.

In addition to the Catalogue albums, there is of course Kraftwerk 1, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf and Florian. I think it was Hütter who brutally dismissed these early albums as "rubbish", which is ludicrous of course - all three are essential documents of German electronica and are strongly recommended to adventurous ears. A cursory listen to these albums (which in the absence of official releases are easily available to stream and download at least), might suggest this noisier, more experimental side of Kraftwerk doesn't sit well with the electronic purity and the precision beats and rhythms of the Catalogue albums. Certainly, there are parts of the first two albums in particular, that seem anathema to Hütter and Schneider's later methodology, with sections of music that sound like they strayed from one of Kluster's proto-Industrial improvisations. One might even hear a guitar plucked Derek Bailey-style here and there. Atem off Kraftwerk 2, is an electronically treated recording of someone breathing, and I presume it was this kind of sonic weirdness that prompted Steve Stapleton to place Kraftwerk on the Nurse With Would List. But with a closer listen to these albums, you can get a sense of the near future - the train-like rhythms of Ruckzuck, and the robot chit-chat heard on Vom Himmel Hoch, both from Kraftwerk 1, the gorgeous melody on the trance-like Tanzmusik on Ralf and Florian, anticipate the music Kraftwerk became famous for. What's most pleasing about listening to these three early albums again after wading through the Catalogue is the sense of the group evolving towards the more familiar Kraftwerk. It was as if Hütter and Schneider had to pass through that experimental phase of the first two albums, before arriving at the warmth of Ralf and Florian and onward to Autobahn...

Nine Types of Industrial Alienation

Monica Vitti and Richard Harris in the poisoned Red Desert...

My Criterion DVD of L'Eclisse was still sitting alongside my DVD player today (some weeks after an impromptu screening) and before returning it to the shelf, I stole some time to watch the hour-long 2001 RAI produced documentary Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema, which offers a decent overview of his career. What made the documentary worth watching was the remarkable footage from the Red Desert shoot showing assistants spraying grasses and bushes with an industrial paint. I long thought that oft repeated line, attributed to Jonathan Rosenbaum, that Antonioni had "entire fields painted" for the film was apocryphal, but at last here’s the proof. The revelation was enough to prompt a screening of Red Desert and it's always a pleasure to revisit my favourite Antonioni film. Even now, after numerous screenings over the years, I still find it a strange and contradictory picture. Antonioni emphasizes the poisoned grasses and lakes with their unnatural colors and textures (which must have stirred the environmental consciousness of some of his Italian audiences), but Antonioni himself favored innovation and development, and found more vibrancy in the industrial architecture of Ravenna (where the film was shot) than in the region's natural beauty. Indeed I still remain uncertain whether Antonioni is actually sympathetic to Monica Vitti's anxiety-racked Giuliana, and I get the sense that Antonioni is shrugging his shoulders at Giuliana's plight, as if to say change, progress and adapt or be damned. A key line in the film, and perhaps a clue to Antonioni's philosophy comes right at the end, when Giuliana tells her son, that the birds have learned to avoid the plumes of sulfuric smoke in order to survive.

If Red Desert is my favourite Antonioni film, it's certainly Monica Vitti's best Antonioni film. The lost and alienated Giuliana feels a more more substantial character than the aloof, ephemeral women she played in L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and even with the hindrance of post-sync line-readings, her performance achieves a genuine pathos. On this screening of the film, I couldn't help but judge Richard Harris' character Corrado harshly. He's one of the very few people in the film who empathizes with Giuliana's sense of alienation but ultimately he's only briefly passing through Giuliana's life and he knows it. His solution to his own sense of alienation is to keep on the moving, and in the end all he can only offer her before he departs for the southern hemisphere is some meaningless sex which only deepens Giuliana's predicament. The film ends as it begins, with Giuliana left to wander that haunted space between her inner and outer landscapes, the film offering no solution to her problems, only a dream or perhaps a memory to cling to, of a young girl in a beautiful rocky cove, far away from the toxic red desert...

Florian Schneider (1947-2020)

Florian Schneider has passed away. The founder member of Kraftwerk died on April 30th but in suitably enigmatic style, the news of his passing is just filtering out, almost a week later. I can't help but feel a little sad that I didn't get to see Schneider in the flesh while he was with Kraftwerk - he had left the group a decade (or more perhaps) before I saw them in concert in 2018 (where I stood only a few feet away from where Ralf Hütter was stationed). Reflecting on Schneider's death this morning, I'm still not sure what he did in the group. There was of course Florian's distinctive flute playing which gave those early pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk albums a tremendous color and mood, but for a breakdown in the division of labor at Kling Klang, I shall have to consult David Buckley's excellent 2012 book Kraftwerk: Publikation. As the 70's wore on, Kraftwerk became less a four-man group and more a single collective. The last time the members displayed any kind of visual identity on their albums was in the elegant group photo from Trans-Europe Express. The following year the Man-Machine artwork presented the four members styled and dressed as clones, while subsequent albums would display the group as robots. It was an image that no doubt suited Schneider. While Ralf Hütter lent a human voice to the group with his dispassionate vocal style, Florian preferred to cloak his voice with vocoders and other devices. On the rare occasions when he offered an interview he was tight-lipped and gave little away (and not without some humor it must be said). And yet it must have pleased him when David Bowie, returning the name check on Trans-Europe Express' title track, named the "Heroes" semi-instrumental V-2 Schneider in his honour.

Before he departed the group, Florian could claim he was Kraftwerk's longest serving member, and he steered the group through at least two organisational crises - early on in the group's history, when his partner Ralf Hütter took leave for university, and later in 1982 when Hütter was seriously injured in a cycling accident that left his continuing participation in the group in doubt. When Florian left the group in 2008 or so, it seemed like Kraftwerk has powered down for good, but the group continued on with retrospective tours and the 3D Catalogue concerts. When I saw Kraftwerk in 2018, it seemed more like a multi-media event than a traditional live show. Ralf Hütter duly sang his vocals but the music I suspect was pre-recorded. In a sense, this kind of automation has future-proofed Kraftwerk from the rigors of psychical deterioration and death. Perhaps, there will a time, after Ralf Hütter has ceased activity that a highly sophisticated Kraftwerk machine will tour and perform across the world thus fulfilling Ralf and Florian's dream of Kraftwerk robots performing on stage in their place while they worked on music in Düsseldorf.