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So a couple of weeks ago, big fat baby that I am, I gassed on about my TCM Underground wish list, pie-in-the-skying my own ideas about what should be on TCM Underground and copping a total “What Have You Done for Me Lately?” attitude when I should have been offering gratitude for what is in 2015 almost a full decade of delightfully weird late night TV programming. In a gesture of atonement, I offer my highly subjective, wholly personal, perhaps indefensible Greatest Hits of TCM Underground, those movies that have put me in the zone and made me willing to stay up for three hours after the rest of my family has gone to bed. And so, in no particular order…
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1. PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959). In truth, I tell a lie. Though I just said “in no particular order,” I have specifically chosen this movie to top my list because it was the first-ever movie shown on TCM Underground. Back in October 2006, on Friday the 13th, TCMU premiered with a two-fer of PLAN 9 and BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1956), both featuring (to some degree) Bela Lugosi and both directed by Edward D. Wood, Jr. I have an un-ironic love for the films of Ed Wood, for the cadences of his scripts, for the combination of big themes and minimal budgets, and for just everything. PLAN 9 may have been the first movie I ever wrote about for TCM; you can tell I wrote the following a long time ago because it’s extremely efficient and to-the-point. How did I ever lose that?!
Beneficiary of more than its fair share of critical brickbats, Ed Wood’s PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959) is not only not the worst film ever made, it’s not even the worst Ed Wood film ever made. Written and shot around existing footage of aging DRACULA star Bela Lugosi in the sad days leading up to his 1956 death and cobbled together with enthusiasm, determination and whatever Hollywood leavings could be scavenged, PLAN 9 has become the whipping boy of midnight movies for its technical gaffes, flat acting, continuity errors and tautological dialogue (“Future events such as these will affect you in the future”). Guilty as charged– but the film deserves honorable mention as an unsung milestone in American independent filmmaking.
Highly personal, brazenly cross-pollinated from a genre standpoint and openly critical of the Western atomic stockpile, the self-financed PLAN 9 also utilizes the non-professional actors and guerilla production tactics that distinguished the Nouvelle Vague in France a few years later. However risible Wood’s script may be, his dialogue is endlessly quotable and images of Tor Johnson and Vampira doing the zombie shuffle are forever burned into the retina of horror fandom’s collective eye. While few would argue its artistic superiority, PLAN 9 is viewed, discussed and quoted more times in any given year than John Cassavetes’ SHADOWS (1959), Hal Hartley’s TRUST (1990) or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), none of which have, for all their indie credibility, inspired so much as a single refrigerator magnet. Could respected A-list filmmakers such as Nora Ephron, Neil LaBute or even Tim Burton, if denied the studio perks on which they rely to facilitate the creative process, produce a work as enduring as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, which is still being discussed and enjoyed fifty years after it was made?
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2. THE BORN LOSERS (1967). Time hasn’t been kind to Tom Laughlin or Billy Jack, the character Laughlin created in the mid-60s and played in four feature films between 1967 and 1977. A self-taught do-it-yourselfer of the first water, Laughlin made the exploitation-minded THE BORN LOSERS to bankroll BILLY JACK (1971), his dream project, but wouldn’t you know that the test cookie was the best of the batch? Here’s what I said about THE BORN LOSERS prior to its TCMU roll-out:
Its box office success cuts THE BORN LOSERS little slack from cult movie aficionados, churlish over the film’s association with the mega-successful BILLY JACK (1971) and its preachy sequels, THE TRIAL OF BILLY JACK (1974) and BILLY JACK GOES TO WASHINGTON (1977). To this day, kung fu fans remain incensed that Tom Laughlin was doubled for all displays of hapkido by karate master Bong Soo Han. On the performance front, Laughlin has also taken his share of lumps for his stoic acting style. However studied in Steve McQueen cool, Laughlin pulls it off and is an engaging and understated leading man particularly in THE BORN LOSERS, which isn’t as weighed down, as were the subsequent Billy Jack films, with the burden of Importance.
THE BORN LOSERS has aged better than a number of the subgenre’s classics. A central concern with the value of family haunts the script, which opens not with the Born Losers riding into a strange town to wreak havoc but returning to the hometown of leader Danny Carmody (Jeremy Slate), with whom Billy has some past history of unnamed grievances. Although he is the villain of the piece, Danny is nicely shaded as a charismatic group leader, surprisingly slow to retaliate against a teen driver whose VW bug bumps his bike until the idiot unwisely lips off. Later, Danny saves his kid brother from a beating by their brutish father and is also shown to keep a wife and son in a conventional (and seemingly happy) suburban home. However sociopathic, the Losers represent the film’s only functional family while Billy Jack and sardonic heroine Vicky Barrington (Elizabeth James, spending half the film in an Ursula Andress white bikini) are depicted as alienated, disenfranchised, going it alone and suffering for it. However heroically etched, Billy has given up on life and it takes the Born Losers to draw him out.
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3. BELOW THE BELT (197– well, no one’s really sure but it may have begun as early as 1974 with footage added over the years). BELOW THE BELT got a theatrical release in December 1980 via the Atlantic Releasing Corporation but it had been vaulted for years. A wrestling/road picture that kicks off on Manhattan’s grimy Times Square, the film features some familiar Psychotronic faces (Dolph Sweet, Shirley Stoler, James Gammon, and Paul Brennan, “The Badger” from the Maysles Brothers’ SALESMAN, playing a character part in a scene shot in the old Orange Julius on 48th and 7th) but makes a star out of Regina Baff. The Bronx-born Baff was a Hollywood bit player with only a few features to her name (THE PAPER CHASE, THE GREAT GATSBY, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ — she gets more to do in the hard-to-see ROAD MOVIE as a truck stop hooker but, you know, she has to play a truck stop hooker) but solid theatrical credits (as an ensemble member of Paul Sills’ Story Theatre, she performed onstage with Valerie Harper, Richard Libertini, Hamilton Camp, Melinda Dillon, and Avery Schreiber) and and some episodic television (KOJAK, STARSKY AND HUTCH, THREE’S COMPANY, TAXI). Those wrestling fans looking for wall-to-wall grappling will likely be disappointed in BELOW THE BELT, which is character-driven and spends more time out of the ring than in… but I really took to this. BELOW THE BELT made for perfect late night TV viewing. I grew up watching late night movies, blind buys all of them, and that experience shaped my senses and sensibilities. I wish I had seen BELOW THE BELT when younger but I’ll be forever grateful to TCM Underground for letting me see it at all.
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4. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER (1984). I hope you got the chance to see this when TCMU ran it around the turn of the New Year. It’s hard to believe NOTHING LASTS FOREVER, the feature film debut/swan song of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE filmmaker Tom Schiller, had the backing of a major studio. I mean that as a compliment. NOTHING LASTS FOREVER is small and quirky and smudgy and dreamlike in the ERASERHEAD mold but for all of the other films it evokes (either by film clip or by inference) it remains its own unique creation. Thirty three years after it was made, the film is most often sold now on the strength of its Bill Murray cameo but there’s so much more to it that this is something of a disservice. (To his credit, Murray has kept the torch burning for this film, insisting that it be included in a retrospective of his films some years ago in New York.) My favorite moment in this fleeting (80-minutes and change) flight of fancy is when Calvert De Forest, playing an interstellar consumer rocketing through space beyond Earth’s orbit, shouts out “The Man in the Moon is smiling at me!” I don’t know why, but that line always makes me cry!
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5. DEATHDREAM (1972). I’m fairly certain I first saw this while visiting my grandparents in the Bronx, so it was another descent for yours truly into the late night television maelstrom. Written by Alan Ormsby and directed by Bob Clark on the heels of their first collaboration CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1972), DEATHDREAM (aka DEAD OF NIGHT) shucks irony to go for jugular in the tale of a Vietnam casualty who is returned to his Florida family as a blood-sucking ghoul. It’s grimy and low budget in the best way and yet it has such heart. And it’s disturbing as all Hell. All of it! DEATHDREAM is a linchpin horror movie, bridging the gap between ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) on one side and THE EXORCIST (1973) and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974) on the other. And for my money, the horrorface of protagonist Richard Backus is right up there for fearmaking with Captain Howdy and Leatherface. Why more kids don’t go out as Andy from DEATHDREAM for Halloween is beyond my ken, frankly.
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6. FREAKS (1932). Freaks never phone it in and for that reason (and others) Tod Browning’s 1932 sideshow shocker continues to disturb over 80 years later. The backing story is as corny and old as the hills of old corn but the fact that Browning filled his supporting ranks with actual “oddities” makes you sit up and take notice. You hate yourself, kinda-sorta, but you can’t tear your eyes away from FREAKS. Part of its cult credibility comes from the fact that it was disowned by home studio MGM and cut down from 90 minutes to just over an hour. The fact that MGM had the freakout (not without cause – one ticket buyer threatened litigation, claiming the movie had made her miscarry!) lets the modern viewer off the hook, sensitivity-wise, making FREAKS not a lesson in the exploitation of the handicapped or differently-abled but rather a teachable moment in the history of cinema censorship. The fact that many of us watch FREAKS with our toes curled even as we join the gooble-gobble chorus of tolerance is what makes this bastard child of the Golden Age of Hollywood so indelibly powerful eight decades down the pike.
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7. BLACULA (1972). BLACULA has been with me so long that I cannot even tell you where or how I came to see it for the first time. It has always been there for me, in the corner of my eye, at the bottom of my heart. I loved it a lot even before I moved to Los Angeles, so you can only imagine the whole new level BLACULA and I were able to take it to once I was able to actually walk the streets where it had been filmed. I love William Marshall as “Dracula’s soul brother” (as the ads proclaimed) — to the point that, a few years back, I imagined a whole TV series based on Marshall’s undead African prince as an LA detective — but when I revisit the movie now I tend to focus on the silky brilliance of second male lead Thalmus Rasulala and his LAPD cohort Gordon Pinsent and the presence of such welcome character actors as Elisha Cook, Jr., Ji-Tu Cumbuka, and singer Ketty Lester as an LA cabbie who mouths off to the wrong brother. But, really, everybody is great in this, and I would be remiss in failing to mention the late, lovely Vonetta McGee and the no less lovely but happily still vibrant Denise Nicholas as the ladies in the lives of the living and the undead. And Charles Macaulay as Dracula hisself and Lance Taylor Sr., as a mortician whose final line never fails to crack me up. Really, it’s just a great, fun movie that I could watch and rewatch forever, if I should be fortunate enough to live so long.
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8. BORDER RADIO (1987). Allison Anders’, Kurt Voss’, and Dean Lent’s BORDER RADIO came out after I moved to New York City and even though I cherish the memory of my almost 20 years in The Bad Apple BORDER RADIO makes me wish I had moved to Los Angeles instead. It’s a time capsule of once-essential, now long-gone LA hang-outs (Hully Gully Studios, Hong Kong Cafe, Disgraceland), whose ghostly manifestations give the contemporary viewer a potent sense of architectural haunting. If I were king, I would put star Chris D. (pictured above) in his own travel show, still playing BORDER RADIO’s outlaw rocker Jeff Bailey (film noir fans should tumble to that tag), knocking around the world with his acoustic guitar and Elvis piggy bank, seeing the world and staving off making any important decisions. I have a strange love for low-to-mid budget movies shot in and around LA between 1980 and 1990 – ON THE NICKEL (1980), VICE SQUAD (1982), ANGEL (1984), HEARTBREAKERS (1984), MIKE’S MURDER (1984), THE TERMINATOR (1984), TRANCERS (1984), ECHO PARK (1986), SLAM DANCE (1987), MIRACLE MILE (1988) — shuffling as they do big dreams and bottomless disappointment. BORDER RADIO wasn’t the first of these, nor did it have the last word, but it strikes me as a sort of anchor, the cornerstone of a decade obsessed with art and annihilation.
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9. DEMENTIA (aka DAUGHTER OF HORROR, 1955). Like me, you probably first clapped eyes on DEMENTIA as the movie-within-a-movie that the kids go to see in THE BLOB (1958). On top of being just bat shit crazy (narrated by Ed McMahon — that’s how nuts it is!), DEMENTIA is also one of the great unsung dyke films – and I realize the virulence of that phrase but the film’s female protagonist — The Gamine, as Adrienne Barrett’s character is called — is clearly drawn as an Eisenhower era pulp fiction Lesbo; she could have stepped off the cover of THE THIRD SEX or STRANGE SISTERS or been part of Mercedes McCambridge’s gang in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), who kidnap Janet Leigh and hop her up on H. Both films were shot against the spooky backdrop of Venice Beach (in TOUCH OF EVIL, it subs for a Mexican border town) and I’ve long felt there was a queer kinship between the two movies. If I’m in a particular state of mind, I think that DEMENTIA is the dream Janet Leigh has while doped up in TOUCH OF EVIL. You certainly don’t have to read DEMENTIA as a gay film to appreciate it, as the Gamine’s encounters with beat cops and sundry grabby males reflect the problems of all women in that time, who paradoxically didn’t exist for society in any appreciable way beyond the kitchen and bedroom but who could not escape wherever they roamed the never-blinking male gaze. It’s a classic story of Otherness right up there with Kafka’s METAMORPHOSIS, H. P. Lovecraft’s THE STRANGER and Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN. To my mind, Adrienne Barrett sits in the company of those tragic horror heroines Janet Leigh in PSYCHO (1960) and Candice Hilligoss in CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) – women who don’t fit in and so are destroyed by the attempt to live on their own terms. So maybe the Gamine is dreaming and maybe she isn’t but the moral of the story seems to be that either way it’s a nightmare out there.
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10. RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975). One of the things that devil movies get wrong nearly every time is in localizing where our deepest fears come from. The majority of us non-snake-handling folk do not literally fear the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Old Scratch, the Prince of Darkness, the Father of Lies, Beelzebub, The Tempter, you name Him; we understand that the Devil is a construct, a metaphor for the weakness in Man. Therefore, movies that build to the third act arrival of Old Nick cannot help but disappoint because the pay-off could never hope to match what we imagine might happen if such an unalloyed force of evil were to turn up in our living rooms or meet us out on the road. Satan movies invariably attempt to show us the awful power of the Devil by having the Fallen One play annoying tricks on the protagonist when he should just show up and render the guy limb from limb as Mephistopheles did that deadbeat Faust. What’s really creepy, then, is thinking about people dumb enough to believe the Devil is real and going the extra mile of worshiping him. And yet even at that, most devil worship movies fail, too, because too many filmmakers think actors doing the antler dance around a bonfire in red sateen robes is scary. Ninety nine percent of the time, devil cults in movies look dumb; one of the reasons ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) still works a charm is that it treats its satanists as people first, making them real and familiar, and even attractive before it drops the mask of civility and gets all Medieval on our ass. The same is true with RACE WITH THE DEVIL, which goes the DELIVERANCE (1972) route of depicting cityfolk in strange, rural territory, who see something they shouldn’t and try to get the hell out of Dodge… but have to dodge Hell to get there. A canny commingling of all the elements that made going to the movies in the 70s so worthwhile (car chases, gunshots, nudity, suspense, acceleration, combustion, obliteration), RACE WITH THE DEVIL limits the Satan content to about 1% of its running time (the rural setting adds an unsettling KKK element to the Satanry, which gives it dimension and scope, upping the fear factor appreciably) and never lets you think too long before it rushes to the next setpiece. It’s the ultimate drive-in experience, made to be seen from inside your vehicle, but watching it after midnight on Turner Classic Movies Underground is pretty damned sweet, too.
It was tough limiting this list to only ten and, if pressed, I probably could have written a paragraph on every movie we’ve shown on TCMU. Let’s hear what your favorites have been!