MOVIE REVIEW: FOES (1977)

Written, Directed, and Special Effects Designed by John Coats

. . .

“I’m going to the other side of the island.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

UFOs. Flying saucers. People see ‘em. People wonder what they are, and why they’re so mysterious, always flitting about, teasing us, never quite letting us see the goods. All the photographs and video footage are indistinct, blurry anticlimaxes-if not total damn hoaxes. Some people write books about ‘em trying to explain what they are, how they came to be-and they end up making some wildass claims about the saucers and their presumed occupants. Abductions. Anal probes. Harvesting human sperm and eggs to mix ‘em with extraterrestrial sperm and eggs to cook up some alien-human hybrid omelets. Perverse conspiracies involving government/x-tro collaboration. This is stuff people claim is true! Not a shred of actual evidence, and yet people concoct entire cosmologies around a whole array of interstellar creatures. You have people writing extravagantly paranoid science fiction sagas but they’re published as non-fiction. Some marketing genius must’ve realized right quick that these alien abduction stories moved more units if you sold them as “shocking true stories.” What a fuckin’ racket, right?

As a kid, I used to believe all this stuff was true. Like, y’know, when I was K thru Fifth Grade, elementary school. I spent hours and hours watching TV shows that presented themselves as nonfiction narrative recreations of horrifying alien invasion scenarios of the most gruesomely intimate kind: people kidnapped out of their beds by strange entities that could walk through walls; alien mind control powers that could corrupt your perceptions by implanting screen memories; women forcibly impregnated with alien fetuses and nonconsensual medical exams that could be described as a system of organized high-tech rape-and when I asked my parents about this stuff they just kind of shrugged it off, didn’t seem to have much to say about it one way or another. I started to think that my parents were in denial because they couldn’t acknowledge their powerlessness before these alien masterminds. Of course, I grew out of all this by the time I hit middle school. Around that time I got into serial killers, gangsters, and world-ending diseases, so all that UFO stuff seemed less urgent. The X-Files came along and kinda gave the game away with its overstuffed mega-conspiracy style of plots which made all the paranormal/crackpot stuff seem like plug’n’play narrative gimmicks similar to assembling a tabletop role playing adventure from a Monster Manual. Mulder and Scully would encounter one reality shattering horror after another-and Scully still wouldn’t get it. The true conspiracy seemed to be a plot by Chris Carter to make Mulder look right all the time at Scully’s expense. By the time I got to the end of high school I was pretty much an atheist. 

Which brings me to the 1977 movie Foes, a film that benefits greatly from not trying to over-explain itself. Foes is about a flying saucer that harasses a quartet of people on a small island that’s home to a lighthouse. We get some exposition laden scenes of clueless military officials whose equipment is all being malfunctioned by an energy field projected by the flying saucer. The occupants of the saucer zap the humans with strange energy beams that pick them up off the ground and/or cause them to catch fire. You ever burn ants with the sunlight concentrated through a magnifying glass? Well, now we’re the ants. Eventually, we see creepy lights come out of the saucer that may or may not be living beings. Much of the running time is taken up by nondescript humans overcome with a nameless sense of dread to be in the presence of the opaque and ominous saucer. Nothing is explained. We’re never told who or what the saucer and its accompanying lights are supposed to be, nor are we reassured that the government has any secret answers. You watch what happens, and then you have to make up your own mind.

Foes didn’t scare me here in this year of 2026, but I found it utterly fascinating to watch. It doesn’t back down from being creepy and mysterious. Sure, the special effects are obviously special effects, but they’re also precise and evocative. Foes is absolutely committed to preserving the mysterious and the inexplicable without any trace of romance or sentiment. Something from beyond takes an interest in us, and we may have to accept the fact that it will always be incomprehensible to us. 

Of course . . . we may also be beyond the understanding of the saucer beings . . .

You ever got the ants' side of the story before you burned ‘em on a whim?

Probably not . . .

BOOK REVIEW: SECRET RENDEZVOUS (1977, 1979)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by Juliet W. Carpenter, and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1979.

Originally published in Japanese in 1977 by Shinchosha.

. . .

“This is one peculiar job I have taken on. No matter how I follow myself around, I will never see anything but my own backside, when what I want to know lies beyond: the empty space, for example, that I never knew or dreamed existed until it was invaded by that doctor’s footsteps . . . the space that ever since has grown endlessly wider, separating my wife and me . . . the ground that anyone can walk around on freely, that belongs to nobody . . . the jealousy like a bed of hard, frozen lava, leaving only the imprint of anger . . .”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

A nameless man tries to write his story according to the extensive surveillance logs collected by a secret police agency that he himself may or may not be the boss of, but he seemingly depends upon these logs more than his own memories. Hey, nowadays we all know how unreliable eyewitness testimony can be, and who is the primary eyewitness to your life? Yourself, an unreliable narrator of your own existence. So it would seem that the secret police are just trying to help us out, just some friends indeed to a friend in need of memory enhancement.

The nameless man is looking for his wife, who disappeared after taking a sinister ambulance ride. The nameless man is assisted by a man who is also a horse, or is working hard towards becoming a horse. The nameless man is not as weirded out by the horse as you might think, but it is something he gets caught on now and again. 

The nameless man investigates a suspicious hospital. He finds a labyrinth of secret passages, hidden rooms, and quirky characters ready to make his acquaintance. It’s not a million miles from a Hideo Kojima video game. There’s even a power-up item in the form of “jump shoes” which the nameless man also retails. The nameless man also has to evade goon squads, and even has a martial arts dustup to protect a woman with liquid bones. This investigation uncovers a festival of sexual perversion, human trafficking, and human experimentation. The secret police turn out to be a private enterprise outfit who get quite a lot of their business from the suspect hospital. The people running this hospital stalk and capture people to be used for parts-a chop shop of a most gruesome kind.

The nameless man’s narrative is suffused with jealousy, paranoia, misogynist entitlement, and bewilderment. He is not the most sympathetic character, and yet he himself also seems to be caught up in the chaos gears of a machine he cannot control or understand despite his desires for power via surveillance networks and unethical biotechnologies. By the end, he is abandoned by the system which he once prized. Perhaps his manufactured narrative that pitted him as a rebel against a corrupt system was his fantasy of escaping a world he knew would turn on him in the fullness of time since its hunger for human vivisection fodder could not be effectively regulated. Secret Rendezvous may have been intended to remind audiences of Imperial Japan’s germ warfare atrocities which included testing of weapons upon live human beings. The empire is gone, but big business endures, so why wouldn’t corporate capitalism, ever restless for new frontiers to consume, section and suture and dissect human beings to derive new products and services?

Secret Rendezvous may also be the chronicle of an elaborate delusion and/or masturbatory fantasia reflecting cranky, reactionary attitudes towards advances in medical science. Maybe it’s just a middle aged author’s remix of nurse porn and sensationalist headlines about artificial tissues and organ transplants and sperm donations and egg banks and the like. This is Kobo Abe, so it’s hard to tell what’s a put-on and what’s in earnest. I imagine many contemporary readers raised on formulaic lawyer thrillers, Stephen King-a-likes, Harry Potter-esques, Tolkien clones, and various YA soap operas will be displeased by such a twisty, ambiguous, button pushing narrative such as this, but that’s how it goes. Abe carved out a place for himself as a literary weirdo who wrote whatever the fuck he wanted, and I think that has value, even if Secret Rendezvous witholds narrative closure. Hell, even I sometimes find myself frustrated by Abe’s novels. I assume the frustration is part of the point.

ONE LINE MOVIE REVIEWS #50: AIRPORT '77 (1977)

Despite the presence of Christopher Lee this is not Dracula on a Plane, more’s the pity.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE HILLS HAVE EYES (1977)

 

Written, edited, and directed by Wes Craven 

Cinematography by Eric Saarinen 

Music by Don Peake

Produced by Peter Locke

Starring

Russ Grieve as Bob

VIrginia Vincent as Ethel

Dee Wallace as Lynne

Martin Speer as Doug

Susan Lanier as Brenda

Robert Houston as Bobby 

John Steadman as Fred

Michael Berryman as Pluto

James Whitworth as Jupiter

Janus Blythe as Ruby

Corey Clark as Mama 

. . .

"What’s the matter? You don't like dog anymore?"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker. 

The Hills Have Eyes for the suffering of hapless outsiders who think they are on vacation to Los Angeles but are actually on a nonstop death trip to hell. It's not enough for the hill dwellers to just kill and eat their victims. They must first taunt and torment them until their bodies are full of fear. And then, of course, proper torture and meal prep can begin in earnest. 

A family is traveling to Los Angeles. They end up driving on the periphery of an Air Force testing ground out in the Nevada desert. Stock documentary footage of zooming fighter jets invades the frame and seems to terrorize the family into driving off the road, shattering an axle into the bargain. So much for taking the scenic route.

The family is led by a white racist patriarch named Bob Carter, recently retired from the police. He's one of these guys who still likes to flash his badge and pack a .357 Magnum revolver. I think writer/director/editor Wes Craven is setting this guy up as a pisstake commentary on the Charles Bronson type of self-righteous avenger. Too bad about his heart condition. Not a good health problem to have if you need to run from cannibal killers in the scorching desert heat. 

The retired cop's wife is a fussy Christian fundamentalist named Ethel. In a pinch, I suppose she can pray the cannibals away, or even convert them. I fantasized a deleted scene where she tries to save the souls of the cannibals by hitting them with a handful of those odious Chick Tract comics. 

Bob and Ethel are hauling a travel camper containing the rest of the fam: teenage spawn Bobby and Brenda; adult daughter Lynne and her hubby Doug Wood plus baby daughter Katy; and a pair of dogs named Beauty and Beast. The characterization of most is pared to the minimum. Patriarch Bob gives a cynical, racist speech casually dropping the n-word like a character out of a Joseph Wambaugh novel, and wifey-poo Ethel gets to yammer about Jesus, and that's it. The rest of the Carter-Wood clan is young and functional. 

Now, there is another family in this movie. The family of cannibals. They maneuver among the rocks and crevasses of the desert hills, communicating by walkie-talkies, and coordinating their attacks on the stranded family with zeal and precision. Bob the Elder discovers via his police investigatory skills the grotesque origin of the cannibal family, and this precipitates a campaign of terror. The truth gets you tortured and killed and eaten in The Hills Have Eyes.

But the younger Carter-Woods people are resourceful, and they do fight back-even the dog becomes a vengeful character once its mate is butchered and killed. The stripped down approach to the characterizations also keeps you guessing as to who will live, and who will die. There are no heroes in this film, just desperate survivors. 

I guess that doggo is pretty damn heroic.

The cannibal family is almost cartoonishly depraved, and I suppose that's the point. I wasn't entirely convinced by some of their costuming and make-up. But the modest budget doesn't sabotage the storytelling, the brutal themes, the tension inducing hardscrabble locations, the frantic violence, or the atmosphere of terror and desperation. The Hills Have Eyes is a hardcore horror film that makes no effort to reassure the audience. 

It's also funny in the sicko style that I tend to appreciate. It's got a vengeful canine as a proper character which is funny but also pretty formidable. 

The music is disquieting, hard to pin down, and incorporates creepy voices in just the right proportion to set you on edge.

The cinematography is willfully disgusting and antirealistic-night in the desert is lit like a big box store parking lot, but this only increases the abject despair of the characters. It's grimy and unwholesome, and makes you want to scald yourself with boiling water and scour your body with sand paper when you're done.

As far as I can tell, it is all filmed on actual desolate outdoor locations. You gotta wonder how many broken ankles and other injuries occurred. You see real humans contending with some very tough natural settings. The effect is as unnerving as the crazed cannibals' whispers and snarls. 

The Hills Have Eyes is definitely a post The Texas Chainsaw Massacre flick. You even have a scene where a cannibal waves his machete wildly like when Leatherface waltzed with his chainsaw, but it goes by pretty quick. I think Wes Craven wants to let you know where he's coming from by giving a nod to Tobe Hooper's work, but then keep it on its feet, stampeding towards an abrupt and fatal conclusion. Craven's vision also differs from Hooper's in that the potential for mayhem exists within the Carter-Woods clan as well as the cannibals. 

It all borders on being a strange hybrid of violent action and horror movie. But the fact that the victims of the cannibal attackers are so average, so anonymous, so not-up-to-the-fight keeps it grounded, and thereby short-circuits any sort of action movie escapism functions. 

I have great admiration for The Hills Have Eyes as an expression of grimy, disgusting, despairing horror cinema. 

I really do.

The Lynch Meditations 5: Eraserhead (1977)

WARNING: If you've never seen Eraserhead, go watch it. It's excellent. It's a high point in the career of David Lynch. It's best to go into it totally blind, with no pre-conceived notions. Don't read what I think about it, don't read any other reviews before you see it-do that after, if at all. Eraserhead's worth the time spent with it.
...

An evil man in the moon manipulates a set of levers setting in motion a nightmarish existence for a printer named Henry.

Henry is full of monster sperm he doesn't want.

A woman with a face full of tumors-or maybe Jo Shishido-style silicone injections gone bad-sings of heaven inside a radiator, and stomps out the unwanted sperm monsters.

Henry is so ashamed of his desires,
he literally loses his head sometimes.
When he really gets down, the grotesque head of a monster baby replaces his own.

Henry's apartment transforms into a muggy jacuzzi when he finally has sex with the woman across the hall whom he has desired for so long . . . assuming this isn't a dream.

Henry lies in bed with his fiancee (not the woman across the hall, btw), post-coitus. Suddenly, he starts trying to remove the monster sperms he has filled her with by reaching inside of her and extracting them manually which causes extreme pain to the fiancee.

And then there's the dream of becoming an eraserhead . . .

Eraserhead is full of nightmarish imagery in glorious black and white meticulously planned, lit, designed, shot, scored, sound re-recorded, edited, and mixed over five laborious years in the 1970s. I had to remind myself that this was 1970s American cinema. It has that timeless look that Citizen Kane has, where I have to remind myself of the true age of what I just watched. Eraserhead feels even more contemporary than Citizen Kane, whose snappily paced dialogue and German Expressionist style clearly dates it to the 1940s. Eraserhead is still very much of this present moment with its long stretches of ambient sound scoring, and characters who alternate between anguished silences and awkward exchanges. The characters inhabit a world of deep loneliness and isolation, and so they turn inwards to keep their own counsel, nurture bizarre fantasies, or have outright hallucinations. Or are they transcendent visions? (Maybe these people need social media. I mean, if they could just situate themselves within solipsistic always online echo chambers I'm sure their angst and alienation would be geometrically amplified to lethal proportions-oh, wait . . .)

The question of whether this movie takes place in reality or a dream is seemingly settled by its well-know tagline: "A dream of dark and troubling things." Of course, you could say that every movie is a dream of one kind or another, especially if we define a dream as a discrete set of images, sounds, and moods that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself.

Gojira is a nightmare of a giant radioactive monster laying waste to Tokyo; Double Indemnity is a fever dream of forbidden desire run riot overturning the placid surface of prosperous lives; Zero Dark Thirty is a slow-burn nightmare of vengeance hollowing out an intelligence analyst's soul; La La Land is a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood; Mulholland Dr. is a nightmare of attractive young people making it in Hollywood hidden inside a bittersweet dream of attractive young people making it in Hollywood.

Eraserhead is, perhaps, a nightmare of a man who fears having to take care of another living being.

Henry has a child with his fiancee which is a monstrosity seemingly created before the camera from an actual cow fetus, expertly puppeteered like something out of a Clive Barker story. The newborn is piteous, magnificent, repulsive, and irritating in equal measure. He keeps it on top of his dresser in his tiny apartment. It mewls in pain at all hours of the night, and in this world it's almost always night. Henry tries to ignore the monster freak baby, but then he tries to tend to its fragile, bandaged body and everything only gets worse. Which is exactly what drives people from trying to love one another, right? A peculiar fear not just of failure, but of rejection, that no matter what you do you'll only become more vile, more alone, more unworthy of being loved. And because Eraserhead is a discrete set of images, sounds, moods, performances that constitutes a hermetically sealed experience complete in and of itself the only possible escape or transcendence flows from the logic of a dream or a nightmare . . . you just need to see it for yourself.

I really don't want to spoil the ending on this one, but I'll say this: a number of Lynch's movies play like nightmares with a transcendent climax in which some mercy or salvation is achieved even if that transcendence can't help but also encompass a high degree of perversity, of madness, annihilation of self and others.

Eraserhead. It's some weird shit.

1/22/18: The Elephant Man (1980)
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