The Corsican Brothers

The Corsican Brothers

United States - 1984

Director - Thomas Chong

Lightning Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 31 minutes

I picked this one up just because of the Lightning Video box.

Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter

United States - 1976

Director - Tom Gries

Key Video, 1985, VHS

Run Time -1 hour, 59 minutes
(cut by nearly an hour from its original TV length)

The time honored tradition of Hippy hating was born mere moments after its target. Twinned from the plaid-jacketed, buzz-cut mid-century Company Man, the Hippy was an ideal scapegoat for an isolationist generation. Representing social rebellion, the Hippy also promised an escape from that same stifling society. The Hippy was the repressed desire of a frightened culture. Having spilled itself from the television screens of the nation for nigh on a decade, Vietnam had poisoned the cultural pool and a populace addicted to the visceral lunacy of social breakdown was jonesing for their next fix of televisual carnage. Based on the bestselling book of the same title, this 1976 TV epic was perfect. Written as it was by Vincent Bugliosi, the attorney who prosecuted the case against Manson, Helter Skelter is an exemplary case of spectacular polarizing demonology.

First our competing protagonists, each inseparable from the other for each is a negative image of the other. The Tate/LaBianca victims constitute the America we admire and envy; rich, famous and beautiful socialites, as clean and untouchable as they are unattainable. They are essentially the American Dream promised. Contrast this with Manson and his “Family,” a pack of unwashed, filth encrusted, fatherless maniacs inspired by a group of drug-taking foreign musicians to do the unthinkable: literally and figuratively puncture the barrier between the dream and the nightmare. Manson was the leakage of sin (the fringe, poverty and non-conformity) into the blinding promise of salvation (the center, success, comfort.)

The irony is that, though the film is cloaked in the trappings of secularity and rational legal procedure as the machinations of justice move inexorably onward, the puritanical framework of the whole debacle can’t help but reveal itself with handwringing glee. Consisting of roughly two halves Helter Skelter first uses an appeal to visceral emotion to elicit an endorsement of the preeminence of judiciary law.

The crimes and their lead-up are presented in classic TV true-crime expose fashion complete with time signatures at the bottom of the screen and stern narration provided by that icon of objective justice, the prosecuting attorney. One of the great selling points of the movie was that it was filmed on location at the actual crime scene using actual pieces of evidence as props. Friends of the victims are shown weeping and vomiting at the sight of the dead bodies that litter the yard of the lavishly furnished home. The proximity of the holy artifacts, the imaginary irrational inspires in its audience (both TV and actors) a visceral reaction and a rapturous appeal to the logic of legal justice.

Yet in the second half of the film when it transitions to the trial (again recreated but ‘present tense’)  it is the very idea of justice elicited by the sin/crime that now demands the condemnation of emotion. The crushing normalcy of modern culture is what inspired Charlie and his cohort to ecstatic messianic prophesying. Now that the film has elicited our emotional endorsement of the rational, it uses that rationality to condemn ‘irrational’ emotion.

Ending with the threat of further spectacle, Helter Skelter reminds us that in just two years time (1978) Charlie, and by proxy his transgressive ‘vision’ would be up for parole. Listening to Charlie’s courtroom ranting as delivered by a young Steve Railsback one can’t shake the realization that he’s right, the culture that condemns him is the same one that created him. The world loves to hate a Hippy because s/he is a necessary illusion, a foil for our own normalcy.

Innumerable serial-killer and real-crime films and television programs have come since, but Helter Skelter was exceptional because it kicked down the gate. Hippys were the perfect scapegoat because like Commies, they were easily painted as outsiders, not because of what they were but for what they represented; opting out, rejection of the establishment. In that case Charlie Manson, at least insofar as Television was concerned, was the perfect Hippy. He transformed secular right and wrong into religious good and evil merging marketplace and mythology and making the Puritanical sin and atonement binary commercially palatable to a “secular” mass audience.

I found this flick on that sweet, sweet Key Video box above, but it is available on DVD. This cover is from DVD Covers.

 This VHS sleeve insert and the courtroom image above are on loan from Black Hole Reviews
Top image of George DiCenzo as Vincent Bugliosi and bottom image of shaven Charlie are from The Stuff You Gotta Watch

Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas

 Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas

United States – 1989

Director – Tina Young & David Van Hooser

Brentwood Music Inc, 1989, VHS

Run Time – 30 minutes

It should be clear now after a forty-five year Cold War that communism is an ideology that seeks to subject us all to the withering self-doubt of constant deprivation and loneliness. Christmas is exactly what communists hate, for it embodies all the things that make the world a wonderful place. In short, Christmas is the uranium core within the reactor of America.

Any attempt to undermine the spirit of Christmas is clearly a communist plot to destroy the very fabric of America. It can be forgiven if the fear of just such a scenario might drive godfearing Americans to the heights of paranoia, afterall we did spend over two decades in a tiny Southeast Asian country trying to keep some dominoes from falling over.

The social upheavals of that very era sent shockwaves through the country. Never more so than in the South where even in the late 80’s the youth culture of the 60’s could still be conjured as a counterrevolutionary boogeyman, albeit in a tattered and proscribed version. Just such a scenario occurs in Snowbird and the Forgotten Christmas when aging hippy Kredge seeks to realize the crumbling utopian monocultural dreams of his youth and kidnaps Snowbird from his annual celebration of Christmas.


Kredge intends to harvest Snowbird’s own Christmas memories to create an atheist brainwashing gas which, unleashed upon the unsuspecting community like a cloud of radioactivity, will wipe their minds clean of any recollection of the holiday, including the identity of the infant in the manger scene at church.

But Kredge's own mind is teetering on the edge, haunted by the spectre of the failed revolution of ’68. They tried so hard to fill the world with love and equality and now to be surrounded by the revelry of American consumption and decadence. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, enough to plunge even a free wheeling hippy into the depths of bitterness and depression and Kredge almost didn’t make it. His epic plan to subject the free world to godless communist uniformity is foiled only at the last minute by a simple Christmas gift from Snowbird. This unexpected act of compassion brings Kredge’s meticulously constructed factory of pain crashing down around his beard. He slinks off into the night to contemplate his own emptiness, and perhaps plan a new machine to wash away his own tortured memories.

Overwhelmed by the lonliness of a commune of one, Kredge contemplates what he has become.

Another Brentwood version of the VHS box art.

Acid

Acid - Delirio dei sensi

Italy - 1968

Director - Giuseppe Maria Scotese

Kazablan

Kazablan

Israel - 1974

Director- Menahem Golan

Cannon Films, 1990, VHS

Run Time - 2 Hours, 3 min.

Holy shit, this is really quite unbelievable. It’s an Israeli musical! The credit sequence itself is full of alternating shots of an old fisherman telling the sorrowful tale of the Jews and the little town of Jaffa, and shots of a gang of young men in 70’s couture dancing in the streets and raising a ruckus. Casablan is a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca (really?) whose real name is Joseph Shiman-Tov, has a thing for Rachel, the beautiful young daughter of a Polish Jew family. Although they all live in the same slummy part of Jaffa, Rachel’s parents disapprove of the carousing Casa and his friends and their penchant for tight bell-bottoms. Now come the songs.
· Casa sings a song about self-respect.
· All the Jews of Jaffa sing a song about the diversity of Jewish culture.
Casa confronts Rachel’s parents and demands that Rachel come out of the house and bid him good morning. Reluctantly she acquiesces.
· Casa sings about home and unrequited love.

Soon, the government authority shows up in the slums of Jaffa to inform the residents of their intent to raze the condemned and apparently unlivable homes. The neighborhood gets together and has a big vote on what to do about it, deciding to pool their income and fix the ‘hood up.
· Ensemble song about voting and the beauty of the democratic process.
Casa comes across Rachel at the store of the lascivious local shoe salesman and saves her from the salesman’s impertinent advances. Casa tells his friends who have been constantly follow him around like a pack of dancing hippie vultures to beat it, and he walks Rachel home alone.
· Casa’s pals sing about having fun and ogling girls.
After leaving Rachel at her home, Casa is accosted and beaten by the shoe salesman’s hired muscle.
· Song about how Jaffa is really great because even though the hood aint pretty, it is in a Jewish gangsta’s blood.
At the local bar, Rosa’s, Casa and his pals commiserate.
· Song about how much they love Rosa and her bar.
Rachel, who actually really does like Casa, invites him over for lunch with her parents. He reluctantly goes, and has an unfortunate experience with gefilte fish because that’s a funny joke for Ashkenazi Jews to play on all the other Jews. Afterwards, Rachel and Casa take a day trip to Jerusalem where they visit all the hopping tourist destinations. Meanwhile, the shoe salesman pays a visit to Rachel’s pops to try and get him to consent to their marriage, but Rachel’s father denies him. Somewhere during the course of the days visits to Rachel’s household, the community moneybox, which is in her fathers care, disappears. Of course, everyone suspects Casa, not because he’s brown no, but because he sings and dances in the street with a pack of , uh well, singing dancing hoods. For this crime he is arrested.
· Rachel’s love song about Casa in jail.
Casa’s old army buddy, now working as chief of police gets him out of the clink simply on the basis of their previous friendship. Showered with racism from his fellow Jews, Casa seeks the same hypocritical retribution that his tormentors have visited upon him for their own previous sufferings, and hey, that’s considered a happy ending in the Promised Land. Which brings us to the final soaring tune;
· A song about making peace with yourself.

This is a bizarre and dated spinoff of Shakespeare via West Side Story via Zionistic Judaism and opens a brief window into a different cultural era. Entertaining enough and highly amusing for a completely detached young American to watch 32 years after the fact particularly considering the subsequent legacy of director Golan who went on to found Cannon Films with Yoram Globus and produce some of the finest American schlock ever to grace the screen. Here the aspiring Golan reveals some of his future sleazegrinder with various scenes of funky disco beats and gratuitous shots of girls asses and crotches and naked men running about. And of course what Israeli romantic-musical-comedy would be complete without a bris?

The Teaser

The Teaser
United States - 1973
Director- Greg Valtierra
Something Weird Video, 2005, DVD

One of Something Weirds awesome series of "classic" sexploitation double feature DVDs.

Becky an uptight 19 year old girl working in Mr. Condors stamp shop argues briefly with her semi-steady boyfriend Stanley who’s come to sweat her for a date. He leaves flustered and after work she hops in her car to her second job, gyrating on the floor of a divey LA strip club wearing nothing but a smile. Buck, a slimy dude exuding rape through his matted fur lined coat comes into the club tries to buy a private “show”, but is rebuffed, and instead follows her when she leaves and sure enough, takes her by force. Afterwards, a young couple finds Becky tied up, violated and naked in her car, and comforting her, take her home and ply her with wine and full body massages. The next morning, Becky and the wife lounge about and frolic in the nude completely unconcerned, while under cover of getting Beckys car “fixed” the husband clandestinely calls his slimy hippie buddies.
Back in the house, the wife lubes Becky up with some more booze and seduces her into prolonged lesbian friction in front of a warm welcoming hearth. The husband arrives home to find the ladies in a post coital cat-nap and decides to smoke a hookah and again call his buddies who begin to show up like paisley feathered vultures to a groovy fresh roadkill.Creeping into the party on his slime trail is Buck, and while all the other suburban hippies start grinding all over the nasty furniture he tries to dose Becky with rufies.
Just in time to save us from seeing these people dance again is Stanley who’s back to redeem his character (despite the fact he too merely wants to screw Becky) and bring another flesh fueled movie about the supposed depravity of the “free love” lifestyle which it so freely displays to a gloriously noncommital finish. Now that’s sexploitation.