Still More Subversive Cinema So I�m a total girly swot because I actually went to Curves before I came to work today. Ick. You�d think I was turning into one of those health nuts or something, eating lots of yogurt and fresh veggies and stuff. Well, I am, so I suppose -- I prefer watching the scale go down than to being a fried-food-eating-beer-swilling stump. When is that chocolate-flavored celery going to get here? C�mon people! I picked up a 25lb bag of cat food and then realized that�s how much weight I�ve lost. It�s bizarre and somehow ecstatic to put weight loss into that kind of very physical term. Eventually it will be that 52lb bag of dog food that I will have lost. Future Perfect, darling, and all that. I�ve watched a triad of bad movies this week and there�s still two days left. Amazing. At Midnight I�ll Take Your Soul: This is the first Coffin Joe movie. Who�s Coffin Joe? Well, in Brazil, he�s a favorite anti-hero of movies, comic books, and stories you tell your children at night if you want them to grow up to be economists. Coffin Joe is an undertaker who is a complete misogynist of society in general. He holds the entire town in fear of his maniacal madness and his search to find a woman to bear his son, which includes rape and murder and cutting off people�s fingers with a broken bottle. The movie is a morality tale, however, fraught with both heavy Catholicism and gypsy-ish voodoo. Which of course go together like PB & J! Devils of Darkness: Another very Hammer-ish kind of film (but not made by the Hammer studios), a young gypsy woman suddenly drops dead at her wedding because she�s been chosen by the devil (named Moliere) to be his own bride. Flash forward about 400 years and the entire town is held in sway by this devil and his woman, but his ministrations might be thwarted by a bloke who decides to figure out why all his friends end up dead with two little holes in their necks. Features a forty-something very respectable woman of a Thatcher-ite kind of ideal (complete with Vivienne Westwood wardrobe and reading glasses hanging around her neck) sputtering, �Satan! Satan!� The Freakmaker: Made in 1974 with the original title The Mutations, Donald Pleasance is a rather odd microbiology professor who has decided that carnivorous plants (like the venus fly-trap) can make the evolutionary jump to humans cross-bred with plant life in oh, one step. What he gets is a lumbering Triffid-looking thing. Anyhoo, the movie also features Tom Baker (Doctor Who!) and Michael Dunn (Loveless in the original Wild Wild West series) as the owners of a carnival who get mixed up with Donald Pleasance to create new freaks for their sideshow. Also features some real-live sideshow members, including a woman with Icthyosis, and a dude who can pop his eyes right out of his head! I�ve also watched Sex Madness, one of those Reefer Madness-type movies from 1938 which is about the heartbreak of syphilis. One night of desperation for a wanna-be chorus girl in New York city ends up as a near-suicide experience. Of course, this is right about the time that antibiotics first hit the market, so a cure was still a slow and painful process indeed. But the movie was still a message to stay and home and keep yer pants on. And don�t kiss anyone, much less voh-do-ee-do-do. Have a good day kids. Back to the celluloid madness. Whee!
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