ARCHIVES May/June 2008

June 30, 2008
MIDNIGHT MARQUEE and MAD ABOUT MOVIES go digital!

Hello Friends and Subscribers to MIDNIGHT MARQUEE and MAD ABOUT MOVIES:

We have some good news and some bad news for subscribers of MIDNIGHT MARQUEE and MAD ABOUT MOVIES .

Technology changes constantly, and magazines must keep up with such technology or risk becoming irrelevant dinosaurs.   Susan and I, after months of thinking and years of losing money, have decided to abandon the print versions of our magazines.   That's the bad news!   The good news is that we will publish both magazines, for free, online.

By eliminating the ever-increasing postage and the hefty cost of mailers, as well as the constantly escalating costs of printing and advertising, we will be able to publish the magazines in a more timely fashion.   Also, we will be able to use color and higher tech graphics.

Don't fret!   The contents, the heart and soul of both magazines, will remain exactly the same.   Only the external graphic design of the magazines will be updated.   But our emphasis will continue to be classic film oriented.

We could not have survived this long without our loyal readers, and we intend to refund the subscription money paid.   However, we would appreciate if subscribers would use their credit for our merchandise. Please let us know what option you choose.

If you do not own a computer and want the actual magazine printed out, we would be happy to send a printout to fulfill your subscription.   Afterward, this will be a $10 charge (including media mail postage). If that seems expensive, remember, we are printing only one issue at a time, and the cost of color toner and computer paper is very expensive.

We are so sorry we can no longer manufacture and sell an expensive hard copy magazine.   The declining subscription base, along with the escalating costs of production and mailing, unfortunately, has gotten so out of control that we need to make this difficult decision.

Online publishing has become a way to keep our artistic visions alive.   Many magazine and book publishers have ceased production these past few years and, with the state of our economy, it's only going to get worse. The Internet will keep many of these publications alive. We find the creative challenge of remolding the magazines quite exhilarating.   I believe readers will find a new spark of creative vitality present, and when you realize the imaginative opportunities that web publishing (with color) offers, I think you will be apprehensive initially but ultimately delighted.

Anyway, please email us ( mmarquee@aol.com )

Phone us (8 am-6pm, Monday-Saturday, EST) (410.665.1198)

Or write us at

Midnight Marquee Press

Gary and Susan Svehla

9721 Britinay Lane

Parkville, MD   21234

Let us know if you want (1) a cash refund; (2) credit with the company to purchase books, magazines or DVDs; or (3) Bare Bones Hard Copy Print Outs of one or both magazines.

Expect to see the first digital issue of Midnight Marquee to appear on our web site someitme in August.

Most sincerely,

Gary and Susan Svehla

 

June 16, 2008
AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY And the 1950s HORROR FILM

In 1957's I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF teen predator Tony Rivers (Michael Landon) gets an instant migraine when standing too near the school bell that signals the change of class.   He has been eying up a sexy young gymnast who is working out on the parallel bars, and Tony soon morphs into a foaming-at-the-mouth werewolf, becoming a visual metaphor for every adolescent male's sexual yearnings.   He does not rape her; his passions, instead, tear her apart.   While Eisenhower's bland, straight-laced 1950s is generally pictured as American apple pie, horror cinema casts this innocent era in an entirely different light.   As seen in the drive-in movies crafted by American International, the J.D. emerges, the rebel without a clue, the leather-garbed punk who is motivated by breaking rules, rock'n'roll and the fairer sex.

While on the other hand, Don Siegel's INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS takes an idyllic American town, Santa Mira, and recasts it as ground zero for alien invasion, as mysterious seed pods replicate human beings and eliminate the original.   The newly born pod person is like the original human being in every way... except his or her humanity has been replaced by a hive mentality, where emotions are eliminated and one consciousness emerges replacing individual thought.   Even ordinary people walking down the town main street stare stiffly ahead, never showing emotion, not even when a car strikes a pet dog.   Director David Lynch would redefine this idea decades later with BLUE VELVET, showing a dark underbelly exists beneath the veneer of warmth and quaintness in small town America.

In movies such as Paul Landre's THE VAMPIRE we have a single parent struggling to raise a perhaps too precious daughter and maintain his small town medical practice, even going so far as to allow the child practice her ballet right outside the doctor's office.   The pressures of modern life have caused the doctor to experience migraines, but when he substitutes his headache medicine for pills that make human beings revert to their primordial state, all hell breaks loose as even little old ladies no longer are safe walking down suburban streets after twilight.   The post-WWII American dream has quickly transformed into a nightmare.

In Paul Landre's equally important RETURN OF DRACULA, the European Count Dracula journeys to America in search of fresh blood, assuming the identity of an artist who escapes repressive Communist Eastern Europe for the freedoms of small town America.   Once again we encounter a fragmented family, a mother raising a family alone, who welcomes the fatherly Bellac to live in their American cottage and become the new father figure.   But unfortunately, Bellac spends his days either sleeping or hidden away, while at night he always gives his regrets and explains his plans prevent him from assuming his intended family responsibilities.   However sexy daughter Rachel Mayberry (Norma Eberhardt) takes a more than fatherly attraction to Bellac and wishes him to share all his worldly experiences with her, to help her embark upon an artistic career designing clothes.   However, not even the pathetic and blind young woman who lives in the church home is safe from the curse of the undead as Cousin Bellac/Dracula makes her his initial victim, inviting her to step from the darkness into the light.

In Universal International's TARANTULA medical experiments intended to feed an ever increasing starving world are subverted and mutate ordinary lab animals, even the fuzzy tarantula, into gigantic size. Soon the tarantula threatens the desert community in which it was created.   It takes all the efforts of local doctor Matt Hastings   (John Agar) and fighter pilot Clint Eastwood to subdue the monstrous threat.   Leo G. Carroll as Professor Deemer, whose benevolent plans are perverted into human disfigurement as both he and his assistant, through scientific technology, are reduced to ugly, distorted and soon enough dead humans, proving that science, if not properly harnessed, can unloose an army of terror on small town America.

Even the iconic Gillman from CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, a modern throwback to prehistoric times, demonstrates the majesty of nature unbound by civilized humanity.   Of course when David Reed (Richard Carlson) and Mark Willaims' (Richard Denning) intruding scientific investigation arrives to uncover nature's hidden secrets, all they manage to do is destroy this proud creature because of a romantic triangle involving the Gillman's passions for the luscious Julia Adams, whose beauty while swimming, wearing a shimmering white bathing suit, excites the Creature's passions.   Even in an ideal world, the sinister urges of a prehistoric world remind us that beneath our human exterior we are savage creatures very similar to the Gillman.

Even Jimmy Hunt as the archetype 1950s male child David MacLean becomes exposed to the horrors of Martian invasion of his homeland American town. A tentacled head in a bottle controls the invading army, whose zombified mutants carry out the tunneling and dirty work, submitting to the dismembered head.   Humans are captured when they step out into the sand dune that surrounds the back of their neighborhood houses.   Once lured there, they disappear beneath the sand where they are surgically implanted with mind-controlling devises attached to the back of their heads.   Once programmed, these humans do the bidding of the invading aliens, and once their job is finished, they too are finished when the devises explode causing cerebral hemorrhages and instant death.   Even young David finds that not even one's parents or the local police can be trusted, for they too have been subverted by the alien invasion plan.   A way of life that seemed so perfect and safe is infested by evil.   Who can we trust?

Eisenhower's America with its housing boom (thanks to the ending of World War II) and exodus to suburbia seems so peaceful and safe.   Yet the horror and science fiction movies made during this era always go out of their way to illustrate the illusion that such a worldview creates.   Even during the 1950s science was growing too powerful and was destroying the natural environment.   Scientific mutations created for good causes (such as world hunger) suddenly run amok and work against the very reasons for which they were created.   Invasions from space occur, but usually not with the invading war machines introduced in George Pal's THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, but more insidiously, with invasion coming from beneath the quaint societal surfaces (metaphorically, we all have sand dunes and worm holes in back of our seemingly safe homes).   In such a world view even our most beloved relatives (mother and father in INVADERS FROM MARS; friends and lovers in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS) can no longer be trusted, for the monstrous threat to our quiet community lies in the perversion of everything that makes us feel safe.   Even our visiting cousin from far away Europe might be a blood-sucking serial killer. Even the town's loved doctor, self-sacrificing and caring beyond a fault, might himself be twisted and perverted to commit harm against the very people he protects and serves.   And even sophisticated and intelligent human beings might be the beasts in teen's clothing, ready to revert to an animalistic state in the mere split second it takes to sound the bell for the change of classes at the local high school.

When it comes to 1950s horror cinema, the world of the 1950s, seemingly so safe, secure and insulated, is turned on its ear and revealed to be the hidden hotbed of twisted science gone wild and the breeding ground for serial killers and monsters created either through superstition or science.   When held up to close inspection, the sanitized America of the 1950s is revealed to be a world where even our own relative can be working to do us in.   And those bastions of society security, the police and the military, can be subverted and quickly become the enemy.

Recast in horror cinema, America of the 1950s does not appear to be such a Utopia.   It instead becomes a world where everyone puts his or her guard down and becomes too trusting of the inherent good of the government, the military and the world of science.   Instead of keeping one's guard up, in these and other movies, 1950s America becomes the Disneyland (that amusement park first appeared during that decade) that desensitizes its citizens and forces us to feel safe in a feel-good community that apparently represents quiet and calm.   Just when we sigh collectively and think all the horrors of World War II are behind us, well, just at this time the new enemy (from outer space, from the military or from science) sneaks in the back door and gets us when we are not even looking, while we sit with a smile on our faces, our feet propped up on the sofa, eating an easy-to-heat TV dinner, oblivious to any of these dangers, hypnotized by the magic round screen of television.   The children, in the other room, are preoccupied listening to their 45s or transistor radio.

What a wonderful life????!!!!!!

The cinema of the 1950s teaches us a totally different mythology.

 

May 21, 2008
Dario Argento's MOTHER OF TEARS

Dario Argento is the finest horror film director working in movies today, and even at 70, the Italian director still has plenty of blood to spill, plenty of nerves to fray.   Most recently, Argento directed two successful gialli , THE CARD PLAYER and DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?   And anticipation was running feverish when it was announced that Argento was ready to tackle the third installment of his Three Mothers trilogy (begun with SUSPIRIA and continuing with INFERNO), his loosely connected world view of three witches, sisters, inflicting ruin on an unwary world.   Of course SUSPIRIA was Argento's most successful movie (coming early in his career), and artistically, along with DEEP RED, remains his best.   INFERNO, wildly visual and violent, falls one rung lower artistically.   But audiences had to wait 30 years for the trilogy to conclude, and as Argento's career enters its twilight, MOTHER OF TEARS:   THE THIRD SISTER might well be his swan song. So he needed to make this film worthy to serve as a fitting bookend to an astounding cinematic career.

To help insure the film's success he re-teamed with his family, casting both his life partner Daria Nicolodi and daughter Asia Argento (Nicolodi is Asia's mother) in key roles.   Scoring the movie is former Goblin member Claudio Simonetti, who composed most of Argento's recent movies. Frederic Fasano is the cinematographer, while Walter Fasano the editor.   Both Fasanos worked with Argento on the wildly imaginative DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?   So Dario Argento's comfort zone, working with actors and technicians with whom he worked before, had to be conducive to making MOTHER OF TEARS:   THE THIRD MOTHER successful.

Unfortunately MOTHER OF TEARS is ultimately a failure, but it is a film that has a great deal going for it anyway.   It is not the classic the horror film community craved, and making fans wait 30 years only makes this disappointment more profound.   At this point in his career perhaps Argento is better at creating the giallo film and not supernatural horror movies.   As he proved so distinctly in DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK?, Argento used music, cinematography, acting and editing to weave a suspense thriller filled with tension and surprises, his pacing evolving into a crescendo of terror by the final minutes.   In other words, Dario Argento was still operating near the peak of his artistic talents.

However, with MOTHER OF TEARS, using most of the same crew, the film feels half-baked and flat.   The film's scope depicts the "second falling of Rome" with armies of citizens infected by Argento's version of "The Rage," culminating in bloodshed and anarchy.   The film cries out for a larger budget that can better visualize this sudden moral decay after the Third Mother returns.   Such similar sequences were captured beautifully in lower-budgeted films such as Hammer's QUARTERMASS AND THE PIT, but here Argento's visual apocalypse seems woefully lacking.   And when his chic coven of witches appears at the airport, the sequence, while brash, appears more like a walk on the wild side of the fashion runway than the occult loosed upon humanity.   And when an Asian witch upstages the reigning Third Mother, we know the film is in trouble.   In several delicious sequences the witchy Asian, a gold tooth front and center, becomes the most terrifying vision of witchcraft in the entire film.   Her death on a train at the hands of Asia Argento comes too fast and too soon.   Moran Atias, who plays the Third Mother mostly in the nude, becomes the Matilda May of her generation (remember the naked alien from LIFEFORCE?).   Atias, a scrawny young woman with bouncy breasts, seems oddly devoid of power. To make her seem more demonic, witchy cronies, male slaves and kinky human followers always appear in her presence.   The Third Mother hardly has a word of dialogue, meaning the role lacks characterization that could make her appear to be the deliverer of world's end.   Her major actions require draping herself in a talisman, a burlap sack dress, or stripping it off.   Sometimes stripping, sometimes redressing in the same sequence.   Atias wears demonic makeup and uses intense glares, but ultimately she becomes another naked model actress poseur.   She pouts when she needs to command.

Argento's use of gore is both overdone yet never gonzo enough.   In Argento's classics the gore always pushes the envelop of taste, but it is executed in the most visually arresting manner.   Take the beginning sequence from SUSPIRIA where the female victim is cut by shards of glass and left hanging by the neck only inches from the ground.   Argento manifests an opera of visual horror that is both excessive and artistic, the imagery lingering long in the viewer's imagination. Here, the gore seems gratuitous and uninspired.   We have similar sequences with throats being sliced and axes bashing in a human's skull.   We have one woman who has a metal spear rammed up the entire length of her torso finally penetrating from her bloodied mouth.   We have servants of the Third Mother use an ancient tool to disfigure the face and mouth of a female victim as a blade is used to slice open her guts, her intestines flopping to the floor.   The woman, still conscious, is strangled when her own intestines are wrapped around her throat.   Totally ridiculous. Argento was the modern master for orchestrating gore for horrifyingly effective results, but the splatter in MOTHER OF TEARS always looks like a visual effect and fails to involve us emotionally.   It may be blasphemy to admit, but maestro Argento has lost the ability, at least in this one movie, to terrify us.  

Argento must be given props for his inspired use of CGI, the bane of most filmmakers.   He creates a ghostly world when magic dust is thrown into the wind. Images of ghostly, former occupants of the Italian household create a true sense of the supernatural and remain one of the film's most effective sequences.   In several scenes the ghostly presence of Asia's dead mother tries to help her child from the great beyond.   In another sequence, Asia Argento's apartment door comes to demonic life as those denizens of the other world bend the wooden door into the shape of demons that bring the door to terrifying life.   A similar sequence was attempted in Robert Wise's THE HAUNTING with similar effect, but with the magic of CGI, the effect is terrifying and mesmerizing.

The movie's worst flaw is the lack of a fully fleshed out script, based upon Argento's original story idea (both he and four other credited writers are given screenplay credit).   The movie becomes little more than a sketchy premise.   By the movie's end, all it takes for Asia to defeat the Third Mother is to use a metal rod to rip the burlap dress off her quivering body and burn the talisman in an urn.   At this point the entire house collapses and a huge phallic wooden stake crashes through the wall pinning the naked witch beneath it. Classic Argento this is not!

But what does work in MOTHER OF TEARS?   The now mature Asia Argento (still featuring the prettiest bags under her eyes), now oddly beautiful, becomes the perfect heroine to both flee the horrors and finally confront them... and finally to defeat them.   Also, Argento's effective imagery of having a demonic monkey announce the appearance of the world of the occult is wonderfully executed.   Sequences where the monkey sniffs out the hidden Asia are tense and frightening, becoming the scariest sequences in the entire movie.   Even the catacomb tunnel sequence at the end featuring Asia searching for the Third Mother and her nasty entourage even lacks the mood of HORROR HOTEL.

But enough already!

Dario Argento can still deliver the goods, but MOTHER OF TEARS is a failure because the movie appears to have been executed without a fully realized script or the budget to deliver the visuals as Argento would wish them to appear.   Think of SUPSIRIA or DEEP RED and their success is based upon imaginatively conceived visuals edited and scored to perfection.   These productions become visual dreams that lure the viewer into their off-putting vision.   Here, with THREE MOTHERS:   THE THIRD MOTHER, Argento's visuals are literal, seldom poetic, and the result sputters when it needs to soar.   Perhaps Argento was working too fast with too little money, but the entire production has that unfinished feel.   Even cult star Udo Kier appears far too briefly and dies in much too silly a manner.

After waiting 30 years to finish this trilogy, the disappointment is that much more heartbreaking.   I expect much better with Argento's next movie GIALLO. I truly believe the best lies ahead for Dario Argento.  

 

May 11, 2008
WEBZINES vs. PRINT MEDIA

To my dismay, many of my favorite magazines are going belly-up or undergoing drastic transformations.   Most of them are rock/pop music magazines, but music is a primary interest and passion of mine.   It all started about one year or so ago when ICE, a color, slick newsletter, ceased publication.   ICE was primarily a week-by-week popular music release calendar and was the most accurate and up-to-date one in the industry.   But as the newsletter grew into a slick magazine, ICE increased its coverage to include articles and columns, including ones on digital and gray-area (the polite term for bootlegs) releases and was for me an essential magazine to look forward to receiving every month.   However, on-line sites such as PAUSE & PLAY provided the same information (that is, the week-by-week release calendar) for free.   But ICE featured wonderful articles and information, and its loss was heavily felt here.   No other source has yet been able to replicate what ICE did so well.

More recently, two of my favorite music magazines folded and/or transformed themselves.   First of all, the slick alternative music HARP folded just four months after I finally decided to subscribe.   As the staff revealed, with the imminent death of the CD and the reshuffling of music labels (one buying out the others), advertising revenue was way down so the magazine was simply discontinued.   While their informative website is still up, it is no longer updated and seems a click away from oblivion.   Subscribers have been notified that the magazine is trying to get another music magazine to honor remaining subscriptions.   But I am not worried, I am simply sad.

Perhaps the magazine whose demise matters most to me is NO DEPRESSION, a magazine remaining to the alternative music genre what MIDNIGHT MARQUEE remains to the classic horror movie genre.   The two minds behind the magazine, the leading Alternative Country magazine that most recently transformed into what is now called Americana, just could not raise the advertising revenue dollars, since the music industry has been in a state of depression for the last few years.   But instead of folding the magazine that editors Peter Blackstock and Grant Alden called a hobby that grew into something more, they plan to refurbish their web site (a dandy one worth book marking www.nodepression.net ) and add new text content on a regular basis.   Plus, joining with the University of Texas Press, they play to publish two "bookazines" a year that will allow them to include many of the longer articles to see the light of day.

NO DEPRESSION has the right idea.   Instead of bemoaning high printing costs (mainly based upon the increasing cost of paper) and the loss of ad revenue, one of the most individualistic and stylish niche magazines simply has decided to accept the technological fate it faces and move on with the times.   A bookazine, which the editors say will appear in book stores and not on magazine stands, is a novel idea and one closest in spirit to the original magazine.   But the expansion of the website to include current reviews, news, and short articles is also exciting.

Those of us who read MIDNIGHT MARQUEE or MAD ABOUT MOVIES like the smell of the paper, especially that fresh-from-the-printer smell.   We like the feel of the laminated cover stock.   We like the tactile feel of flipping through the pages and holding something tangible in our hands.   As fans of a niche market, we love to possess and hold and store and reread such magazines that have formed an important part of our lives.   However, the writing is on the walls.   Print magazines of all types seem to be a dying breed.   Unless we are a mainstream publication where over half of the pages are advertisements, the cost of publishing hard copy print magazines is becoming prohibitive. Magazines, especially the niche ones, are a dying breed.

Far too many fanboys publish webzines and they are all over the internet.   For film fans, most webzines are published so the writer/editor can receive review copies of new DVDs and books, and the quality varies considerably.   But as more and more print magazines transition to the Internet, the quality of the best web oriented zines will blow the fanboy enterprises out of the water.   And while it costs relatively little to publish a webzine, just like with the fanzines out of the 1960s and 1970s, only the best will survive.

The most difficult thing for such a transition from print to cyberspace is the attitude of the subscriber, the reader, whose bias towards collecting such magazines may be stronger than his/her love of the content contained within.   Right now I know many magazine collectors who do not even READ the magazine, but simply buy the periodical to bag and tag, to collect.   That mentality will not extend to webzines.

Perhaps cyberspace publishing might be a good thing for those people who crave the content, the news and information, over the pleasure of holding and sniffing a magazine they can physically manipulate and store.

One thing is certain, the times, they are a changin', and like the people at NO DEPRESSION, I view such change with excitement and high hopes as Blackstock and Alden venture as pioneers into the new journalistic terrain.   I for one wish them all the luck in the world, and I plan to remain a faithful supporter of all their efforts.   But more importantly, the world of magazine publishing is changing radically and more and more print magazines will be following the lead of others into the world of webzine publishing.   And this might not be a bad thing.  

America, especially when considering Prohibition, has not changed radically since the early