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HOME / SLIPPY TOWN TIMES
Except where noted, all original text & art ©2008 Eddie Flowers
16473 McKeever Street
Granada Hills CA 91344
USA
It's already been removed (DAMN!), but youtube.com did have an upload of the complete 13 minutes of Funkadelic from the Say Brother TV show in 1969. Does anybody know if this is available anywhere? Shit goddamn--it's too KILLER to not get a proper release. Check Clinton's mohawk!
Blonde Death (1983, directed by James Dillinger) No-budget shot-on-video feature with a twisted comedic look at Southern California's rotting culture in the early Reagan era. Teenage Tammy (Sara Lee Wade) moves from the Mississippi Gulf Coast to Orange County, California, with her father and bible-thumping stepmother. Tammy dreams of being a sexually free beach bunny, dancing around her bedroom to music by the Angry Samoans (also featured as soundtrack music in other parts of the movie). She seems like a cross between Sissy Spacek in Badlands and Jan Brady from The Brady Bunch! When Tammy utters "the F word," Dad spanks her as the family watches TV minister "Pat Goon" on the tube. After her stepmother threatens to give her a "scalding Clorox enema," Tammy runs away and meets a one-eyed, patch-wearing lesbian. The two girls visit the lesbian's football-watching ex-husband. Tammy watches as the angry lesbian pokes out her ex's eye and puts it down the garbage disposal. Back home, Tammy encounters an intruder: Link (Jack Catalano), a good-looking mass murderer who has escaped from prison. The two hook up, and then discover Tammy's stepmother has been plotting against her. They tie up the stepmother and lock her in the garage, while dad is away on business in Saudi Arabia. To add more spice to the story, Link's prison boyfriend also escapes, and the psycho lovers become a "menage a twat." The three decide to pull a heist at Donkeyland (part of it secretly shot inside the real Disneyland!), where needless to say, things do not go right. This obscure movie is billed as "a tape by James Dillinger," who directed, wrote, photographed, and edited the whole thing. Carnival Rock (1958, directed by Roger Corman) This Corman-directed "teen" movie features some mighty excellent rockabilly--the real raw, sweaty thang: two tunes by Bob Luman; Luman's backing band the Shadows (James Burton on lead guitar!) doing a great instrumental called "The Creep"; and future C&W star David Houston (two songs, including "Teen Age Frankie and Johnnie"!). Plus the Platters do "Remember When." And there's pseudo-rock from Susan Cabot and the Blockbusters' theme song. Even the pseudo stuff ain't bad. What is bad, though, is the soapy, tragic story that surrounds the wailin' sounds. Susan Cabot plays a sexy singer who rebuffs older carnival/club owner in favor of a younger stud, etc. It's pretty hard to pay attention to this stuff, but all-time groovy Dick Miller does give a brooding performance as the club owner's sidekick. Viridiana (1961, directed by Luis Buñuel) The title character is a novice nun (Silvia Pinal), a pretty young woman who visits her benefactor (the always suave and strange Fernando Rey). He's got his eye on the young believer. He was married to her aunt, who died on the couple’s wedding night. He wants Viridiana to forego her life as a nun and marry him. Horrified, she says no, and he ends up hanging himself with a skip rope (used earlier in the movie to entice the housekeeper's young daughter, so the old man could watch the child at play). The young would-be nun stays on at the dead man's luxurious home, trying to continue her saintly ways by allowing assorted street people to live on the grounds of the estate she has inherited. But her benefactor had a bastard son Jorge (Francisco Rabal), who has claim to half the property. He's a free-wheeling, non-believing modern man. He thinks his pretty blonde cousin-by-marriage is wasting her time with the beggars, and could do a lot better by becoming his lover. Left alone on the grounds for the night, the beggars break into the "big house" and decide to have a feast. In this sequence, Buñuel revs up the surrealist engine. The party begins with friendly conversation and pious generosity. It quickly progresses into a jolly pagan Last Supper, and finally becomes an orgy of casual sex, jealousy, and violence. The free-for-all is interrupted when Viridiana and Jorge arrive home earlier than expected, but the naive young woman is then confronted with something much uglier than her poor flock's destruction of the house. The very end finds Viridiana's faith broken, but her eyes opened to a new world of freedom and erotic possibilities. She joins a three-handed card game with handsome Jorge and his mistress, while a rockabilly record adds a helpful hint: "Shake your cares away!" (Anybody know who did the song? It reminds me of the rock band at the end of Simon of the Desert.) This is one of Buñuel's best. Although it moves a little slow at the beginning, it's rich with the director's visual symbolic touches: the nun's fetish for a crown of thorns, her uncle's fetish for his dead wife's wedding attire, a cat leaping on a rat as Jorge seduces the housekeeper in a musty attic, Christ's disciples represented by a group of deformed and psychotic beggars, etc. Juggernaut (1996, directed by Mark Bodnar and Kyrill Kazemirovitch Protsenko) The citizens of Kiev are seen waiting--always waiting--for buses, for visitors, for something to happen. Slow-moving shots show people milling about the city like ghosts. Air-raid sirens mysteriously sound. Our baffled hero has heard a rumor than an evacuation is taking place, and feels compelled to help--but how? He wanders the city, occasionally haulted in his tracks by seizures of radio static in his head. Who's in charge? He's snatched off the street by a burly man, who briefly films the wanderer in a desolate apartment, and then frees him. There's a mission to be accomplished--but what is it? Everybody on the screen seems as uncertain as the viewer. More than an experimental art film, this B&W short (about 27 minutes) is a great dreamlike narrative that shows a chaotic, decaying world--a grim shadow of a world. It’s a place where humor is found in turmoil--two men randomly meet on the street and fight until, exhausted, they continue walking. Great soundtrack by Sun City Girls. Invisible Invaders (1959, directed by Edward L. Cahn) TV announcer: "Throughout the entire world, the dead are leaving cemeteries to attack the living--walking dead who kill but cannot be killed!" Invisible aliens, who have been observing Earth for the past 20,000 years (!), show up to destroy all the people on our planet. They take human form by occupying the bodies of dead people, including nuclear scientist John Carradine. The white-faced zombies walk around with out-stretched arms, looking very much like Night of the Living Dead nearly a decade later. When not occupying human bodies, the aliens can be "seen" as they displace dirt and vegetation in their shuffling paths. He-man hero John Agar shows up, about 25 minutes into the 65-minute flick, to help an elderly scientist (Philip Tonge), his pretty daughter (Jean Byron), and a younger, reluctant assistant (Robert Hutton). In their secret underground bunker, the four watch the zombies on closed-circuit TV, while twiddling dials and pulling levers as spooky music plays in the background. They finally come up with an effective weapon--a sort of sonic rifle that causes the aliens to leave their zombie bodies, become briefly visible, and then die. There's lots of stock footage of the Earth being "destroyed," a narrator to fill in the plot gaps, and remarkably bad acting from most everybody except the four main actors. |
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SLIPPY TOWN TIMES:
Intro
Stuff I Been Listenin' To
Stuff I Been Watchin'
Spam Pomes: Junk Email, Unedited (& Uncredited)
Stooges in St. Louis 1974 photos by Bruce Cole
Creme Soda Q&A 1974
1974 Rock Writers Symposium in Buffalo NY by anonymous
Outro
BONUS BURGER:
Teenstar 69 online reprint