Frank Doubleday (1945-2018)

Frank Doubleday as the sinister emissary Romero in Escape From New York... I chanced upon this scene in John Carpenter's film last night, (broadcast on the Syfy channel and looking horizontally squeezed to the point of being unwatchable), and I had to wonder if Carpenter had based Romero's striking look on Klaus Kinski ? I haven't listened to the film's commentary track in over 10 years but I don't recall it being mentioned. And I see a certain resemblance to Captain Howdy too, not to mention a certain similarity to Brad Dourif's character Piter De Vries (another emissary of sorts) in Dune, made a few years later. Rather than post a traditional still of the scene I found this beautiful piece of fan art, originally posted here

I generally don't do obituaries on this blog, but a few days ago I learned that actor Frank Doubleday had passed away on the 3rd of March, so I'd like to use this post to mark his passing. Doubleday worked primarily in television, with few substantial film credits to his name, but thanks to John Carpenter, he has achieved a certain immortality - if his scene in Escape from New York is one of the more memorable moments in the film, Doubleday landed an equally if not more striking scene in Assault on Precinct 13, playing the Street Thunder gang member who shoots Kim Richards' 12-year old Kathy at point blank range - a wanton killing that still shocks today...

In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up

The news of Barbara Bush passing away at the grand old age of 92 has me listening to Ministry’s 1990 live album In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up this morning – the connection being that the former first lady had the dubious honor of being included in Al Jourgensen’s infamous roll call at the conclusion of a particularly savage rendition of Stigmata. I’m listening to the expanded edition of the album released last year as the 2-disc Live Necronomicon, and it sounds fantastic, a more faithful document of the original performance without edits or added overdubs. If the new edition can claim to be definitive, I still think the original album, even with its post-production adjustments remains a powerhouse of incendiary post-Industrial rock, and it’s worth keeping if only for the artwork – a pity Ministry didn’t retain it, opting instead for what seems like a meaningless tip of the hat to The Evil Dead’s Book of the Dead, but then again the band have always indulged in appalling artwork. Regrettable too that the release of Live Necronomicon didn’t prompt a DVD upgrade for the In Case You Didn’t Feel Like Showing Up VHS tape, an extraordinary film of the Indiana show, augmented with a battery of psychedelic effects, different film stocks and speeds, hyper cutting, and layered with all sorts of found footage and surreal imagery, pre-dating Natural Born Killers by some 14 years. Thankfully it’s available on youtube

Boyz n the Hood

Ice Cube spirals in ever decreasing circles in Boyz n the Hood, John Singleton's brilliant 1991 debut, which I revisited last night... I recently finished Jeff Chang's 2005 book Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, a sweeping chronicle that begins in the dilapidated third world neighborhoods of the South Bronx in the early 70's and concludes some 20 years later in the smoking embers of the Los Angeles riots. Originally I had wanted to follow up Chang's book with a screening of Dennis Hoppers' Colors, but after learning something about life in LA's gang neighborhoods (and the brutal tactics practiced by the LAPD) Boyz n the Hood felt like a more appropriate choice. I seem to revisit Singleton's film at various epochs of my life, and with the advancing years, Boyz n the Hood assumes greater significance - now that I'm a parent, the struggles of Laurence Fishburne's Furious to keep his son beyond the reach of crack and guns resonate more profoundly with me than ever before. All the more remarkable that John Singleton was just 24 when he wrote and directed the picture. I'm reminded of the early 90's when the South Central region of Los Angeles became the quintessential inner city-hell destination for the armchair tourist, with the tide of films and records that emerged in the wake of Boyz n the Hood - films like South Central, Menace II Society, Friday and albums like Straight Outta Compton, AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted, and O.G. Original Gangster all helped shape a mythology, and a stereotype that I myself have bought into - I remember driving along one of the main arteries in Los Angeles a few years ago and seeing a slip-road for Crenshaw District, I felt momentarily anxious, that a wrong turn would end in disaster for myself and my rental car. I don’t think the good people of Crenshaw would appreciate such typecasting…

Face to Face with Derek Jarman

Derek Jarman is never far from my thoughts these days, the forthcoming BFI box will surely be, for me at least, the home cinema event of 2018. The BFI box has been delayed by a week so I’ve been trawling thru youtube for Derek Jarman related videos, and found the excellent BBC Face to Face interview Jarman recorded in 1993 before his death in February the following year. The 40min interview feels very much like a last will and testament, and sees Jarman looking back over his life in his usual erudite, and indeed honest fashion – interviewer Jeremy Issacs is perhaps a tad too preoccupied with Jarman’s sexuality at times, but Jarman discusses it and other related matters (being HIV+) with typical good cheer…

In related matters... I've been revisiting the 1995 Eno/Wobble collaboration Spinner this morning, and while it's one of Eno's better albums from an era which saw him slide increasingly into mediocrity. Despite Jah Wobble's fine contributions to the album I can't help but think of it as the poor cousin of Eno's magnificent soundtrack for Derek Jarman's final film Glitterbug, which Spinner is salvaged from (I use the word salvaged because Eno has expressed a certain indifference for the soundtrack). In fact the best stuff from Spinner is when Jah Wobble leaves the Glitterbug music alone (as in the gorgeous Garden Recalled). I'm hoping Glitterbug will be included in the BFI's second Jarman box (Artificial Eye's 2007 DVD of Blue/Glitterbug has gone OOP  clearing the way for the BFI), and it would be nice to see an optional subtitle where the various Super8 footage is annotated, similar to the original Arena screening back in 1994. I mention this because I shared a few comments recently on Facebook with the team lead on the Jarman-BFI box and requested this. One can hope !

Audiodrome

"Max, I would like you to try this on for size"... Listening this morning to Howard Shore's soundtrack for Videodrome, and quite an extraordinary 30-odd minutes of New Flesh it is too. The soundtrack contains all the music from Videodrome but augmented with additional electronic effects and processing. One might even call it an early example of remixing and reconstruction, which seems very appropriate to Videodrome's theme of mutation and "reprogramming". It's a surprisingly abrasive suite of music too, with torrents of electronic noise sometimes overwhelming Shore's central Videodrome theme music, and anticipates glitch music by a good decade - the opening few minutes of the soundtrack could easily be mistaken for an Autechre track as layers of sound squelch, squiggle and ricochet off one another to dizzying effect. Meshing with the cold, mechanical textures are Shores's beautiful use of strings, which remind me of Goreki's Symphony No. 3, as they soar into the upper register (and put to excellent use in the film's final sequence when Max Renn embraces "total transformation"). Incidentally, the album sleeve credits Alan Howarth for engineering duties, forging a link between Videodrome and the great electronic soundtracks of Escape From New York, Halloween II, Halloween III: Season of the Witch...

Celebrating the Greater Sex

I'm marking International Women's Day today in the company of four extraordinary, inspirational woman from my record collection...

Rattus Italiano

Some Bruno Mattei borrowed with thanks.... I've just polished off James Herbert's 1974 debut novel The Rats, and while there's no explicit association between Mattei's post-apocalyptic thriller and Herbert's novel, I very much approached the book as if it were an early 80's Italian splatter movie. I don't wish to belittle Herbert's skills as a writer, but imagining the film as an over the top Italian import acclimatized me to some of the more ludicrous parts of the novels - an infant torn to shreds in its cot, a nymphomaniac alcoholic stripped to the bone, and in one of the book's biggest set pieces, a London Underground station besieged by hordes of flesh-hungry rats. Mattei would need a considerably bigger conveyor belt for that sequence but the films of Mattei and his contemporaries are the perfect foil for Herbert's novel - neither of them apologetic about being in the Horror business.

Thinking about it now, The Rats could have easily ran as a series in those early issues of 2000AD, perhaps Invasion, with rats replacing Volgans, the hard-as-nails anti-establishment Bill Savage the only thing standing in the way of the UK being reduced to a vermin-infested wasteland... Lair is next...

Criterion of the Living Dead

I watched Criterion edition last night and was very pleased with the presentation - to beat a cliche of the HD era - the film looks so fresh it could well have been shot yesterday. Along with along with Thundercrack!, the Criterion Night of the Living Dead is perhaps my most eagerly awaited title - I first heard speculation that Criterion were putting it out some years ago so this edition seems like a long time coming. The addition of the Criterion Blu brings an inevitable touch of sadness as it spells the retirement of my cherished Elite DVD, which has seen active duty for nearly 16 years, and a disc that still looked very impressive when I saw the film again last year. Now, I can almost hear the Criterion disc bellow: "Now get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down there, but I'm boss up here!". Wonderful too, that the film with its coveted Criterion spine-number will introduce the film to viewers who may have previously shrugged off the film as B-movie trash, and its place in the Criterion collection will do much to banish memories of the shoddy treatment of previous home video versions, namely the horrendous colorized edition and the abomination that was the so-called 30th Anniversary with its added scenes - "anal-raped" as Todd Doogan memorably described this assault on Romero's film when writing about the various editions DVD editions of the film for The Digital Bits. So, all good ? Well not quite. The transfer may be outstanding but I'm less enthused about Criterion's packaging. I remain lukewarm about Sean Phillips' artwork (and in fairness, it's no easy task to come up with an original piece of artwork for this the umpteenth video release), but shame on Criterion for putting out the film in a thoroughly flimsy digipak sleeve, with the two discs stacked on top of one another. It's fortunate at least that it comes in a protective slipcase because, this one goes up pretty easy....

Karloff's Heart of Darkness

"He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct"... Boris Karloff goes native as Kurtz in the 1958 Playhouse 90 adaptation of Heart of Darkness. Another one of those mind-boggling rarities that turns up on youtube, this one is decidedly lo-fi but worthy of investigation. I've only watched a few moments of it here and there and it looks bizarre indeed. I'm coming at this from an Apocalypse Now angle (rather than Conrad), and it's worth noting that this adaptation was written by Stewart Stern who was the screenwriter for Rebel Without a Cause and The Last Movie, both of which involved Dennis Hopper, and a further connection to Coppola's film. Interesting to imagine what Apocalypse Now might have been like had Martin Sheen's long journey up to the Nung River led to an aging, depleted Boris Karloff (who would have been closer to Conrad's vision of Kurtz than Coppola's) and I do enjoy pondering an alternatively cast Apocalypse Now. Recently, I was hotly debating with some friends, the idea of Steve McQueen playing Willard, and while they flatly disagreed, I think McQueen would have been a better choice than Harvey Keitel or Al Pacino. But I digress... The Playhouse 90 Heart of Darkness can be viewed here: here

Fellini Satyricon

Enjoying a late night screening of Satyricon, and watching the film for the first time with the English dub, I was pleased to hear the unmistakable voice of Michael Hordern. I wonder did any other noteworthy players lend their vocal talents to the film ? I could have sworn I heard the voice of Ian McCulloch in a small incidental part earlier in the film, but perhaps I was wrong - I seem to remember McCulloch's interview in the October 1992 issue of Dark Side, where he discussed his three-picture sojourn in Italy (Zombie Flesh Eaters, Zombie Holocaust and Contamination), and there was no mention of working with Fellini (surely not something one would omit from a self-appraisal). Incidentally, whilst browsing Satyricon's credits over at the imdb, I spotted two interesting credits: the The Minotaur was played by the great Anthropophagous Beast himself George Eastman, and a credit for music recording goes to electronic composer David Behrman. I know Tod Dockstader contributed some electronics to the soundtrack, but seeing Behrman name attached to the film was a pleasant surprise. Strangely though, there's no mention of Behrman's work on Satyricon on his official website... I'm starting to think that Fellini is a dirty word these days !