revenge is sweet... crazy gals with knives!

DEMENTED

D: Arthur Jeffreys 1980

I Spit On Your Grave style rip off that I first encountered around 82 when it got Aussie release. I was 18/19 then and that front cover, tits, blood, meat cleaver reeled me in. And for some reason I always come back to this movie even though its mostly fucking atrocious. Sallee Elyse plays Linda who is attacked about a minute into the movie by four men in stocking masks and raped. Why? Cos she’d get her gear off for the scene is my guess. Anyway, after a trip to the nuthouse she comes home to try and be ‘normal’ again. Her husband played by porn king Harry Reems (sorry Bruce Gilchrist – why do they bother changing names?) is meanwhile banging away at some other slapper. Thoughtful soul isn’t he? Linda starts seeing things, imagining that her attackers, long locked away, are still stalking her. Unfortunately Harry’s porn background seems to have carried over into this movie and the acting and dialogue is pretty much bad 70s porn standard. Except, strangely enough for Harry. Anyway, a chance encounter with the teenage boys next door sends Linda over the edge and when the same boys decide to put on rubber masks and stalk their poor deranged neighbour things start to get messy. (You can almost hear John McClane saying “how can the same thing happen to the same guy twice?)

Its only from here on in that things get better. Suddenly Sallee has decided she can act (marginally) and she overacts the nutter just perfectly. The cleaver comes out and the first boy gets it in the neck. Linda then sets about seducing each of the boys, drugging the first, disarming and confusing the next two boys before a garotting castration, and a chop or two finish them off. Drugged boy wakes up tied to a chair and treated to a raw meat dinner complete with surreal and amazingly bad dialogue before she blows him away with a shotgun. And where’s hubby during all this? With some scrubber who he only ever gets to have simulated sex with!! What a waste of talent. He’s in for quite a surprise when he gets home, let me tell you. Sure Sallee ain’t the best actress in the world and the first hour (except for the short sharp rape scene) are pretty bad but once the mirror cracks she puts on a great z-grade psycho performance that almost makes up for her lack of ability as a “normal” person. See it just for the last supper with drugged boy… and of course because cleavage and cleaver go so well together!

DERANGED

D: Chuck Vincent 1987

Pornmeister Vincent wanders over to the ‘mainstream’ and brings Veronica Hart , Jamie Gillis and Jerry Butler with him.

This flick also stars Jennifer Delora of “Bad Girls Dormitory” fame as well. Surprisingly, considering the porn stars involved she’s the worst actor too! Veronica plays the recently married, pregnant rich girl (girl? Ok, woman) Joyce who has a few minor psychological problems. We know she has problems because as her hubby Frank (Butler) is leaving to fly off on business, Joyce hears voices in her head warning her that Frank is banging her sister Mary Anne played bitchily by Delora.

Then when Joyce gets home she’s attacked by a masked bad guy, who proceeds to beat the shit out of her. She sticks him in the head with some scissors but it’s too late and she loses the baby. (Cleverly done scene I must say – we just see the empty cot while she’s screaming in the background.) That’s enough to send Joycee over the edge and the rest of the movie maps out her downward spiral for all to see. She’s still sane enough to stuff a cushion up her jumper when people come to the door but inbetween she starts having flashbacks and talking to her shrink, her baby, her mudda – soon we get the whole fucked up story. Daddy dearest (played by Jamie Gillis!!!) slashed his own throat in the bath and Joyce discovered the body. Or did he? Did she kill him for the millions of bux she inherited? And just how closely did daddy “love” his girl? And then when her mum brings home her lover (now her new husband) the day after the funeral and introduces her new half sister! (Delora)… well. its no wonder Joyce went crackers. The majority of the flick is in the one set apartment with people popping up out of Joyce’s psyche as the story unfolds. The only real person she sees is Nick the delivery boy. Of course Nick cops a razoring after he discovers her humping a pillow (don’t ask) and mistakenly thinks he’s in. Of course once he’s dead he pops up again anyway but not until Joyce (finally) gives her half sister Mary Anne a deserved knife in the guts. Turns out Frank and Mary Anne had arranged for the attack, trying to knock her off and get her cash. After that it’s a rapid collapse into insanity with the corpse parade – stalker, Nick, Mary Anne and Daddy - being a particular highlight. I’ve seen a couple of reviews that really bagged this flick and I can’t see why. Sure, it’s done cheaply (one set for the most) but Hart puts in a fucking great performance as a woman going completely and utterly nuts. Shit, she carries most of the flick really – drifting in and out of sanity, from one flashback to the next without losing track at all… she does a bloody good job of it. Gillis is his usual sleazy self, even Butler manages to hold up his end.

And I gotta mention the soundtrack, some great throbbing synth noise, especially when she first arrives back at the apartment. And once she starts the drift into insanity there’s a continuous low humming synth loop that continues for most of the flick. At first I thought it was just tape noise or summat but I soon realized that it was the same loop over and over just niggling out yr nerves while Hart wanders from slightly crazy to fucking maniac… Fucking clever little sod that Chuck. Sure it can be slow in parts and a bit wordy for you sleaze hounds but fuck it, this is a great movie, hunt the fucker down and reward yourself.

Tapping The Sauce

What was the punk manifesto again?! Anyone can do it? Yeah, that was it. But you know what, they were wrong. Anyone can be a star – as long as yr. blonde, buffed or a celebrity child but not everyone can be in a band, not everyone can record a song, play guitar, make a record. Well, not anymore anyway.

See, us old farts remember what a burst of fresh air punk was back in the 70's – how you really could believe that anyone could do it. Of course I'm talking that brief two or three month period before the marketing gurus and the record companies got their big boof heads and cheque books in the mix. Watching all the little emo kids and the Mohawk retro kids and the plain dweeby kids think that they're punk now cos they've got the uniform and can drop a few names (like Greenday and Rancid are soooo retro dude!) makes me laugh until I cry. There was no uniform you dimwits, there was no "sound" – you can't compare the sex pistols to Richard Hell nor would you say that the slits sounded like the ramones, geza x had nothing to do with the clash, suicide and the damned had nothing in common except to incite a riot – that was the point, they were breaking away from the music industries' manipulation of our senses, they were all creating their own sounds, their own styles and looks. Now every subculture is turned into a style, a look, a sound. You have to sound like someone else or you wont fit in. And that counts as much in the so called 'avantgarde' as it does in pop music, as it does in metal as it does in jazz. You gotta have a pigeon hole to put them in, to compare them to, to market them with.

Talk about taking the fun out of it all. Music is to be enjoyed. It's an escape, a joyous moment of fucking, fun and frivolity. Not all of it I know, it can be deeply moving, music can have memories for people, of moments when they first heard a song or bought the album, memories of family and friends that become linked to a song or a piece of music. I couldn't play Miles Davis Kind Of Blue for a year after my father died because of the memories it brought back. But there are songs I still play that bring back teenage years, of cruising and sunshine and being dumber than a box of nails when I tried to talk to girls. I can still remember the day I saw the sex pistols on tv – pretty vacant and how raw and fucking ugly it sounded on my little b&w tv playing in the kitchen while mum cooked tea in the background. I didn't run out and shave my head or rip my clothes or even form a band but it instantly changed my way of thinking, the way I saw my life in a small country town of 500 people where I was the only one who listened to that "rubbish". It would be fair enough to say that without the pistols, the damned, boys next door, radio birdman – that I wouldn't be writing this, that I would still be there working in the mill, drinking Friday nights at the club, playing pokies and giving the kids money for chips and coke so they would leave me alone.

Do they get that now? Is there an epiphany when you are being drenched in this stuff – when it's marketed and festivalled and shoved down yr throat constantly? Well, at least until next week when the next album, festival, nextbigthing comes along. You don't even have to hunt for the stuff anymore, you just go on yr computer or try myspace or just wait for them to slap it on high rotation on that "aussie youth network" – whatever happened to the discovery of something new, the search for that song you caught a glimpse of late at night on the telly or radio when no one else was listening. Trying in vain to get yr local record shop to track down the song.

At times I do kinda feel sorry for the kids today, the fun has been taken out of their fun and they don't even know it. They think they're still rebelling with their designer brand alternative bands, clothes, lifestyles. Years ago (many years ago) I took my earring out because I realized it was actually older than the girl I was chatting up at the pub. Now every little twerp has holes all over his/her body. Being cleanskin is rebellious now. I never got around to the tattoos and I'm kinda glad I was always broke/slack/sober 'cos now they don't mean shit – it's just a great marketing tool and they look so cool in those "alternative'' fashion shoots in those "alternative" glossy mags. A smart man would be investing in tattoo laser removal technology right now because in ten years there's gonna be a boom market there!

And sure, pop music has always been marketed and money orientated and top ten hits and all the pretty boys and girls but hey, look at the 70s – garry glitter, angels, slade – they weren't pretty were they? Sure there were music machines pumping out songs but they were songs!! They were written, played by real people they weren't computerized samples and celebrities doing computerized film clips, they was real folk what could actually play their instruments and write the odd song. Some of them could almost lipsync too! (I mean when the pussycat dolls who started life as a dancing troupe need their film clips manipulated so they get the dance steps right you have to wonder) Where are the ugly pop bands? Where are the studio musos who manage that one big and usually silly hit? Where's any bloody musos?

So, what's it all about? It's about having some fun, about the idea that anyone can do it, that you don't need technology, or a good looking front chick, or political correctness or the latest sound/style or even a fucking Mohawk… just an idea or two, a sense of humour and some time. Time to actually stop and enjoy it, the music, the socializing, the act of doing something creative, regardless of what it is or how many people get it or see it or hear it – just do it for yourself and see what happens. It can be fun occasionally. Music used to be about the music (regardless of the style) not about the money or the marketing or the units shifted or getting on the festival bill, it used to just be about the creation, the sound, the fun. If fanzines can be like that again (and they seem to be heading back in that direction) then why can't the music? DIY4Y

End of sermon