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A couple of times a year, SHOCK CINEMA turns up at my front door, like an old undead fishin’ buddy who can’t stay buried, who grows restless and forlorn in his pinebox and claws himself up out of the peat every so often to shuffle on over to where I am and present himself to see me again, to spend a little time in the company of one who gets him, and to split a six of Mickey’s Big Mouth that he picked up at that packy near the graveyard. So has it been lo these many years, so I hope it shall always be until I, too, go to my rest. SHOCK CINEMA and I go way back, twenty years, it seems, or near that. I can’t say I thrill to every interviewee that the magazine offers up in each new issue — the readership is pretty broad-based, the syllabus wildly eclectic (and I quote: “Blaxploitation, Sexploitation, Demented Art Films, Women In Prison, Horror, Sci-Fi, Porno Weirdness, Musical Misfires, Mondo Movies, and everything else in between. It’s all here!”) – but that’s just me. Still, I was jazzed to see in this latest issue — no. 46, if you’re keeping score — a lineup that held my interest 100%. I grew up watching (and listening to) Tim Matheson as a kid, I’ve been deep into Scott Wilson ever since I first saw his work in IN COLD BLOOD (1967) and CASTLE KEEP (1969), David Huddleston is always welcome in my house (anybody else remember his old, short-lived political sitcom HIZZONNER?), Peter Jason is a veteran character actor (trivia: he and Huddleston both played small roles in Howard Hawks’ RIO LOBO) and an occasional John Carpenter rep player, and oddly enough I was thinking about Mike Starr the other day and, bang, here’s an interview with him. Okay. Let’s get lost…
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Even before I knew anything about the craft of acting I understood on a visceral level that Scott Wilson drew his talents from a very real place that had nothing to do with false noses or the reliance on costuming to create character. There was something raw and feral about him, even when his manners were impeccable. It wasn’t just because he played Dick Hickock in IN COLD BLOOD that I feared him — I didn’t fear the threat of violence at his hands — it was that he was displaying something just too real, too truthful — and who wants to stand next to that? Role after role only concretized that aesthetic, as the Volkswagen-obsessed Clearboy in CASTLE KEEP (1969) — his final line “Where’s all my buddies?” haunts me still — as George C. Scott’s LAPD partner in THE NEW CENTURIONS (1972), as a hillbilly horse trainer in LOLLY-MADONNA XXX (1973), and as the unstable George Wilson in THE GREAT GATSBY (1974). Keep in mind, I was catching Wilson’s act more on late night TV than at the movies, so his career didn’t unfold, for me, in chronological order, necessarily. And then he seemed to disappear. What a happy surprise, then, when he turned up in a small role, as test pilot Scott Crossland, in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983); I may have gasped audibly at his entrance, so happy was I to see him again. My friend, Victor Argo, knew Scott somewhat, at least professionally, and shared with me some aspects of his personal troubles early in his career and what’s amazing his how densely packed his brilliant early career was, and how soon it was over. Over the course of the last thirty years, however, Wilson has more than made up for lost time, contributing memorable cameos to such films as LEGION: THE EXORCIST III (1990), FLESH AND BONE (1993), SHILOH (1996) and its sequels, MONSTER (2003), and more recently on THE WALKING DEAD. I was so happy to see Wilson being given a weekly series, and so crushed that the showrunners benched his character, relegated him to the sidelines, hanging on a crutch, waiting out the bullshit. Wilson’s interview with Justin Bozung is warm and comprehensive and just the stuff you want to know if you’re a Scott Wilson fan, and you should be.
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Thanks to JONNY QUEST and, interestingly enough, THE QUEST, I was such a lifelong fan of Tim Matheson that by the time he turned up in ANIMAL HOUSE (1978) I thought he should be playing middle-aged, not college-aged. But that’s just a testament to how long the California native has been in the business. Born to a lower middle-class family in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, Matheson started playing child roles to help support his parents’ meager income, beginning with bits on such episodic TV shows as RIPCORD, LEAVE IT TO BEAVER, and MY THREE SONS. Paradoxically, his earliest attainment of anything like pop culture immortality came not from being seen on TV but from being heard — as the star of JONNY QUEST and with key roles on such animated series as SPACE GHOST, SINBAD JR. and YOUNG SAMSON AND GOLIATH. The maturing actor’s film career was sporadic at best through the late 70s (MAGNUM FORCE was one of his few features) but that all changed with ANIMAL HOUSE, after which Matheson enjoyed a brief tenure as a summer film leading man (ALMOST SUMMER, DREAMER, A LITTLE SEX) before transitioning to solid character actor, a sidebar that began, for my money, with his role as the villain in FLETCH (1985). Matheson has since added directing to his C.V. but he hasn’t stopped acting and I hope he never does. His conversation with Anthonyh Petkovich is wide-ranging but full of delightful specifics (Matheson’s audition for THE QUEST, alongside Kurt Russell, is a good story and so telling of how the Hollywood machine grinds away) but I’ll let you read the issue yourself to find out what movie he describes as “a train wreck, an absolute disaster.” And, no, it isn’t 1941.
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I remember watching Kathryn Bigelow filming a scene from BLUE STEEL (1990) a couple of streets down from where I was living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side back in 1988 or 1989. It was an incidental scene, between rookie cop Jamie Lee Curtis and building super Mike Starr, whose name I did not then know. But that face! It sure stuck with me, and I had occasion to call it out in movies on screens big and small ever since. I suppose I had seen CRUISING (1980) by then, which marked — for all intents and purposes (which means, “not really”) — the Queens, NY native’s film debut but he got lost in the mix for me. Starr really came into his own as a presence, as a signifier of big city life (specifically, but not exclusively, New York), and an heir to the streetwise legacy of such veteran character actors as Alan Jenkins and Frank Jenks in such films as THE NATURAL (1984), MILLER’S CROSSING (1990), GOODFELLAS (1990), BILLY BATHGATE (1991), THE BODYGUARD (1992), and DUMB AND DUMBER (1994)… but during that decade-long spread he played a lot of uncredited bits, like an old studio contract player. In fact, I was on a movie set with him for a couple of days in the summer of 1988, when I did extra work on LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989), in which he had a bit as a factory security guard and I “played” one of the throng of strike-busting workers. Typecast as Big Slab of Beef No. 1, Starr proved in the fullness of time that there was cunning, craft, and true wit behind those hooded eyes, and he has more than proved his mettle over the course of the past thirty-odd years, alternating roles on the big screen with parts on TV (JOAN OF ARCADIA, SCRUBS, CHICAGO FIRE). Mike Sullivan got good mileage out of his recent talk with Starr, who recounts his first big break, as Sylvester Stallone’s stand-in on the set of PARADISE ALLEY (1978), of how he was cast in THE NATURAL on the say-so of former NYPD cop Sonny Grosso (whose brother-in-law coached the cast to play like the pros) and of how he came to be cast in GOODFELLAS by first not being cast in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST; Starr was trying out for the role of the apostle Peter, which went instead to my pal Victor Argo (“God rest his soul.”) This is good reading.
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And so on. The other two interviews are also must-reading but I’ll let their respective charms make themselves manifest to you on your first reading. (Okay, here’s a teaser: Peter Jason asks “Wanna hear a funny story about Warren Oates?” Are you in yet?) If each new issue of SHOCK CINEMA is like a carnival, and the interviews like the midway rides at that carnival, then the wealth of reviews that fill out each issue are like the food stalls, full of robust, oily fare with which you fill your gut as if you haven’t eaten in a year. Rising to the top of my Must-See list like cream and bastards is the new-to-me survival flick A SAVAGE HUNGER (aka THE OASIS, 1984), a harrowing Death-Valley-lensed adventure shocker about a place load of disparate types (among them 70s standby Scott Hylands, ANIMAL HOUSE‘s Mark Metcalf, and MY BODYGUARD‘s Chris Makepeace) who must rely on one another (spoiler: they don’t) to survive after their plane nosedives in the desert. Man, I want to watch this right now! Also noteworthy are editor/publisher Steven Puchalski’s takes on William Castle’s pre-gimmicks crime thriller HOLLYWOOD STORY (1951) with Nick Conte, the post-apocalyptic French TV miniseries LES HORDES (1991), the British 60s crime films STRONGROOM (1962) and BOMB IN THE HIGH STREET (1961), and such oddments as Mohy Quandour’s THE SPECTRE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (1974) and William White’s unreleased 1970 jungle cash grab picture BROTHER, CRY FOR ME (1970), about three brothers out to grab their late coffee plantation owner-father’s fortune in the jungles of Mexico.
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Other contributors (Kim Newman, Brett Taylor, Mike Sullivan, Anna Puchalski) and other reviews (CALCULATED RISK, HAWMPS!, MURDER WITHOUT CRIME, MURDER CAN HURT YOU!, and Lucio Fulci’s DRACULA IN THE PROVINCES) abound, all good reading, but what jumped out for me is Adam Groves’ review of the Czech animated KRVAVA PANI (aka THE BLOODY LADY, 1980), an animated take on the life and crimes of Hungarian noblewoman/serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, or Erzebet Bathory, or Alžběta Báthoryčka, or Báthoryčka Alžběta if you want to say it like a real Hungarian. Writer-director Viktor Kubal downplays the horror movie aspects of the story to favor a fairy tale aesthetic that argues sympathy for its protagonist, whose story has been told elsewhere in such wide-flung films as COUNTESS DRACULA (1970) and THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE (1973), and BATHORY: COUNTESS OF BLOOD (2008) and THE COUNTESS (2009). By reports maddeningly elliptical and with animation that floats somewhere between anime and MULTIPLICATION ROCK, this one isn’t going to draw much attention from the Hammer horror crowd but its rarity and inclusion here is all the proof I need that SHOCK CINEMA is as vital and cutting edge now as it was back when they printed it on card stock. Get ye to a newsstand.
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