The best in blood and breast movies
_ ————
When Ritz O’Brien’s “The Rocky
Horror Picture Show’’ debuted
in 1975, it was a critical and
commercial failure. And in 1981, “Mom
mie Dearest,” based on Christina Craw
ford’s sour-grapes memoir of her mother
Joan, sustained equal failure.
Today, thanks to underground adu
lation, these have become trendy fare
that induce laughs the mainstream
never knew existed. Such is the essence
of cult films, drive-in exploitation
slasher/soft-core pom sagas that usu
Scott
Harrah
ally aren’t appreciated for years. The
sentiment seems to be that if it’s old,
bad and predicated on sensationalism,
it’s bound to find a cult audience
eventually.
The reasons we are drawn to cult
films are still arbitrary. But one rntyor
figure who can be credited with their
current rise is drive-in movie critic Joe
Bob Briggs, who writes about redneck
films with the literary voice of a good
ole boy who wants to see some blood
and breasts in his movies. Briggs’ influ
ence has brought lowbrow to the atten
tion of highbrows, which is why literate
publications like American Film are
running his reviews of titles like
“Lucifer’s Pussycat Love Bimbo” along
with essays about Godard.
Camp is the basic underpinning of
any cult item. In the retroactive 1980s,
our thirst for nostalgia from the 1950s
and 1960s is littered with camp. But we
seem to have drained much from those
days, so now we’re turning to that
decade we once thought we’d rather
forget: the 1970s, the golden age of
drive-in dreck.
Camp is terribly misunderstood in
our culture, mainly because we view
exaggeration and absurdity as threats
to intellectual morality and reality.
What many don’t realize is that camp
itself a form of social criticism, a
blasting of staid mores that satirizes
gender, sexuality, crime and our past.
As Susan Sontag noted in her famous
essay, “Notes On Camp:
“To talk about camp is therefore to
betray it. If the betrayal can be defended,
it will be for the edification it provides,
or for the conflict it resolves.”
Pornography can be viewed as camp
if it’s not viewed with lust or political
disdain, which is why most cult films
use sex as a comic tool. Whether they
exploit women, create new ways to bru
tally murder or affront what’s viewed as
acceptable is not important. What we
must realize is that cult films fill avoid
in society, the vicarious line between
mere voyeurism and veritable crime,
and the ability to see depravity as a
reaction to current values.
The following is a listing of cult films
available at Lincoln video stores. These
are the ones you won’t see on Show
time’s “After Hours”:
“Jubilee” (1978, Britain):
Undeniably the first “ptink” film,
directed by Derek Jarman, who has
been called “The British Fassbinder.”
This slow-paced, surreal foray into the
world of London low-life has been
hailed as “the cult film that never
was,” a poor man’s “Rocky Horror”
minus the theatrical dance numbers.
Starring Siouxsie and the Banshees,
Adam Ant before he was famous, and
transvestite punker Wayne/Jayne
County, Jarman uses shockers like bal
lerinas dancing around flaming baby
carriages and London’s bleakest venues
to create an apolcalyptic antiutopia.
Motorcycle gang girls dominate the
arena, while all the men in the film are
portrayed as passive sex toys.
Nell Campbell is the ultimate lay,
the men think, but they feel otherwise
when she lures them to her flat, wraps
them up in Saran Wrap, suffocates
them and then casually dumps their
corpses in the nearest alley. Wayne
County as Lounge Lizard, the “last
punk rocker,” cuts a song called
“Paranoid Paradise” in Moscow. It
sells 50 million copies, and then he
is murdered by the femme-commandos.
Sound a bit incoherent? It is.
The m«uor problem with “Jubilee” is
that it’s too whimsically talky and
thematically uneven to be effective,
but some moments make it worthwhile,
like one punk girl’s infamous line:
“America is dead; it’s never been alive.”
(Available at Audio Visual).
“Double Agent 73” (1974,
Denmark):
Chesty Morgan, a drugged-out woman
with a 73-inch bustline, is hired by a
detective agency. Doctors implant a
secret spy camera in her left breast.
She rushes all over Copenhagen taking
Courtesy of Harper and Row Publishers
The famous bathtub scene from George Romero’s "Martin.”
photos oi the thugs she murders witn a
simple lift of her disgustingly huge,
deformed breast. And how does she kill
them? One bad guy gets whomped in
the face with her endowments, another
licks poison off her nipples, and yet
another is stabbed in the jugular vein
with her hoop earring.
riven more obnoxious about Chesty
is her wardrobe — a nauseating dis
play of mismatched plaid polyester
pantsuits, gold lame go-go lounge wear,
polka-dot clown blouses with ruffles,
and seven-inch platform heels. Ches
ty’s grotesquely made-up face retains
——-————Sfl
a constant expression oi pain, ana it s
obvious that she was on too many
’ludes when she made this bomb.
But the Pink Pantheresque sound
track and lines like "Gee, flowers are
pretty" make up for Morgan’s mori
bund acting. By the end of the film,
you’ll be so annoyed by monstrous
mammaries that you’ll fear every ‘‘full
figured gal" for the next two weeks.
(Available at Audio Visual).
“Female Trouble” (1974, U.S.):
This is trash genius John Waters’
best film, featuring one of the most
hilarious soap-opera plots.
Three-hundred-pound transvestite
actor Divine plays Dawn Davenport,
from her days as a juvenile delinquent
to her death in the electric chair. Teen
age Dawn begs her parents for a pair of
"cha-cha heels" for Christmas, and
when she receives a less fasionable
pair of shoes, she runs away and hit
chikes her way to a life of trauma. She is
picked up by a blue-collar sleazeball
(played by Divine out of drag), who
rapes her. While the camera focuses on
her rapists’s stained undies, Dawn
steals his wallet. She gets pregnant,
delivers her baby, Taffy, by biting off
the umbilical cord with her teeth, then
supports herself and the little rug rat
by working as a waitress, a go-go dancer
and a hooker. She steals TV sets on the
side with bouffant-wigged pals Chiclet
and Conchetta, who later persuade her
to "audition" to be a customer at the
exclusive Lipstick Beauty Salon. There
she meets her fiance, Gator, a long
haired greaseball hairdresser. She mar
ries him in a see-through wedding
gown, much to the disgust of Gator’s
Aunt Ida (Edith Massey). Ida is a gap
toothed, retarded blimp who sports
dominatrix get-ups and begs her son
to become gay because “the world of
the heterosexual is a sick and boring
life."
Her daughter Taffy grows up to
be a brat and spends her days
staging mock car accidents in which
she douses herself with ketchup as
blood. Meanwhile, Dawn gets fed up
with the domestic life and divorces
Gator, and the owners of the salon per
suade her to become a model. Gator,
sad about the divorce, moves to Detroit,
and Ida blames Dawn. In a fit of rage,
Ida splashes battery acid on Dawn’s
face, and the salon owners tell Dawn
that her newly disfigured face has
turned her into a "ravishing beauty.’’
They kidnap Ida and place her in a
birdcage, and Dawn chops off the old
bat's arm with an ax. Next, the owners
start iryecting Dawn with fixes of liq
uid eyeliner, tell her she’s even more
beautiful and trick her into staging a
mass murder in public to make her
"even more ravishing." She shoots up
most of an audience at her first night
club act, is convicted and finally fries
in the electric chair. End of movie.
(Available at Applause Video and
Audio Visual.)
‘‘Faces of Death” (1978, U.S.):
This is a boring, overrated, much
maligned exploitation documentary
purporting to show real people and real
animals being murdered. A water moc
casin is eaten alive by piranhas in a zoo
pool; diners at a Moroccan restaurant
bash open a live monkey’s head with
hammers and eat his fresh brains as an
hors d’oeuvre; a bear mauls a tourist;
See CULT on 13
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