31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 3: THE VAMPIRE (1957)

 The real curse of vampirism: transforming into Lee Marvin.

A kindly doctor (John Beal) becomes addicted to pills made from the blood of vampire bats, pills meant to regress animals to a more primitive state before restoring the subject to their original temperament, and he ends up transforming into a vampire every evening around 11pm. The doctor rampages nightly, wiping out people who know him in his daytime existence, and it's only a matter of time until he murders someone he loves. As the police investigate the murders and start noting the forensic evidence that lends credence to the killer being a scientific vampire, the doctor's loss of control escalates and it seems the only way out is self-execution...

THE VAMPIRE attempts to reinvent one of the classic monsters for the modern age by adding a scientific twist, and while rather tame and cheesy by today's standards, the story is told with considerable heart and intelligence (even if at times it reads like a knockoff of Universal's  THE WOLF MAN). The performances are solid and its 76 minutes are briskly paced, and the filmmakers had the good sense to keep the look of the vampire hidden until the last reel, as the makeup renders him a darker-hued twin of Lee Marvin's drunken gunfighter, Kid Shelleen, from the western comedy CAT BALLOU (1965).  That said, though its effort was noble, nothing beats the appeal of the classical gothic vampire and all of its trappings and tropes. The seductive terror and elegance of the undead suckface is utterly lost when transplanted into 1950's suburban California, so while I respect it for trying something new, I rate THE VAMPIRE as worth a look for genre completists only. It's not terrible or anything and it's completely suitable for the kiddies, but your life will be totally unaffected if you give this one a miss.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 2: SPIDER BABY or, THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD (1968)

Playing the deadly game of "spider."

In an unspecified rural location, high atop a hill off of a remote back road sits the Merrye House, home to the last remaining members of a branch of the Merrye family. Cursed with a degenerative disorder wrought by generations of inbreeding, the brains of the Merryes regress to a childlike state as they age, eventually leaving them in a permanently, homicidally feral. The family's chauffeur, Bruno (Lon Chaney Jr.), promise the dying Merrye patriarch that he would care for the remaining members of the clan, so he keeps them isolated within the confines of their decaying house while serving as their surrogate father figure. Allowed to roam about the place freely are siblings Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn), titular "spider baby" Virginia (Jill Banner), and non-verbal grownup toddler Ralph (Sid Haig), a bizarre trio who would be right at home in an even darker answer to the cartoons of Charles Addams. All are young adults and the girls are both quite appealing and nubile, but they both possess roughly the mental/emotional development of a five-year-old, with Elizabeth being the craftier and more dominant of the two, while Virginia adores spiders and plays disturbing games where she imitates them and arms herself with a pair of wicked butcher knives that serve as her "sting." 

The Merrye sisters: Virginia (Jill Banner) and Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn).

Their brother Ralph, on the other hand, is a borderline-feral, non-verbal, open-mouthed and perpetually smiling idiot who is not unfairly described as "just a big kid." That said, his look and behavior are quite unnerving, as he is a grown male who is apparently sexually functional, and he brings to mind a larger variation of Schlitzie the pinhead from the classic FREAKS (1932).

Exploitation cinema legend Sid Haig as Ralph.

Lastly, residing in the basement are the fully-feral Uncle Ned, Aunt Clara, and Aunt Martha, while the skeleton of Daddy is housed upstairs in a bedroom and regularly bid "goodnight" by Virginia.

The bizarro family has become the stuff of local legend and are actively avoided by nearby townsfolk after Virginia trapped two trespassing kids and nearly did them in while playing her "spider" game, but the children escaped and spread the word that the Merrye house was to be avoided at all costs. Nonetheless, loyal and diligent Bruno shepherds and protects the family and manages to keep them and their secrets out of the spotlight of the general public and the authorities. 

Into this warped, insular environment come cousins Emily (Carol Ohmart) and Peter (Quinn Redeker), who seek to boot the current residents and take possession of the house and land. Emily is a nasty bitch but her blonde good looks arouse unmistakable desire in Ralph, while the affable Peter wins over the girls with his friendliness. Along for the ride are Emily's assholish lawyer, Schlocker (Karl Schanzer), and his secretary, Ann (Mary Mitchel), and the outsiders make it clear that they plan to stay the night, which does not sit well with Bruno. Taking the hint, Ann asks Peter to drive her into town so she can stay in a motel instead, which leaves Emily and Schlocker with the Merryes. As the evening progresses, Bruno's control over the "children" drastically erodes as the creep factor escalates with acts of torture, murder, and rape, leading to an apocalyptic climax.

A bad day for Emily...

A throwback to the "old dark house" sub-genre, SPIDER BABY is an atmosphere-drenched little low-budgeter that may be the first of the "inbred weirdo family" flicks and stands as one of the weirdest films of the 1960's. Shot in 1964 but held in release-limbo thanks to its producers going bankrupt, the movie bears distinct echoes of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) with its setting of a creepy old house on a hill, taxidermy birds as home decorations, outlining of familial insanity, infantilism, voyeurism, and disturbing sexuality. It also shares another aspect with Hitchcock's masterpiece, and that's the fact that it's the blackest of black comedies, though SPIDER BABY's humorous intent is far more blatant than PSYCHO's. Writer/director Jack Hill has frequently crafted exploitation features that managed the difficult balance of visceral content juxtaposed with utter, delirious cartoonish ludicrousness in such grindhouse classics as THE BIG DOLL HOUSE (1971), THE BIG BIRD CAGE (1972), COFFY (1973), FOXY BROWN (1974), SWITCHBLADE SISTERS (1975), and SORCERESS (1982), and that flavor is fully evident even in a work that came this early in his career. If taken at face value, the events of SPIDER BABY are downright unsettling, but the dialogue and performances bring to mind a 1960's sitcom like THE ADDAMS FAMILY or THE MUNSTERS if it had been crafted by Tobe Hooper while on a tequila and Gabapentin-fueled bender somewhere in a Tennessee Williams fever dream.

The comedy of bedlam.

Basically an eerie live-action cartoon, SPIDER BABY is not at all what one would expect from a film of its era, not even from a film within its genre, and it's something of a quirky little gem that deserves better recognition from dyed-in-the-wool horror enthusiasts as well as casuals. It's fun seeing Lon Chaney Jr. in a late-period performance that's actually good — he made far too many embarrassing turds after his 1940's heyday — , young Sid Haig is a hoot, and the dynamic between the sisters is a hell of a lot of mad fun.

Two very bad "little girls."

Though obviously made on the cheap, SPIDER BABY makes the most of what it had to work with and comes up with a humble study of an ultra-dysfunctional family that initially fools us into accepting it as a lark, only to take a hard left into gore-free bleakness. Definitely worth checking out for its atypical flavor and also as a look at the unpolished days of the legendary Jack Hill.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 1: FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

Surprisingly, not a scene from DELIVERANCE 2.

This one's going be a little different, folks, as it's a look back at an event I actually attended back in 1984. This may read like utter bullshit but I assure you that this actually happened, and only about a year ago I found out that another local who later became a good friend upon our meeting during our college years also bore witness to what you are about to read, with her younger brother in tow. With that by way of introduction, allow me to set the Wayback Machine and take you to...

OPENING NIGHT- FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (4/13/1984)

In the bygone days of pre-gentrification, Norwalk, Connecticut was a scuzzy little town with a large quotient of criminals, junkie hookers, drugs, violence and questionable activity; sort of Connecticut's answer to Baltimore. In other words, a great place to for a kid stuck in Westport, the ultra-boring affluent town next door, to hang out in.

The movie theaters in Norwalk ranged from those owned by a theater chain to the independent art/porno/cult movie house, the Sono Cinema. The Sono could get pretty wild, but nothing could compare to a rowdy audience at the infamous Norwalk Theater. Norwalk Theater was the closest thing that Connecticut ever had to the classic Times Square grindhouses insomuch as it specialized in violent, sex-laden exploitation flicks, the kind that drunks and heroin addicts like to sleep it off to. The derelicts in the audience would even make non-sequitor comments at the screen, such as the time when a junkie started yelling "Give her the big one!" enthusiastically during a scene of two cab drivers talking. This sort of evening was my true baptism of fire into the culture of the grindhouse, and I made it a point to attend as many of such screenings as I possibly could.

As anyone who came of age in the United States during the same era when I did no doubt remembers the ubiquity of the "slasher movie" as a transgressive rite of passage for '80's adolescents while simultaneously drawing a deluge of outrage from parents and censors over the genre's gleeful transformation of the silver screen into a celluloid abattoir. The kids ate up the showers of gory dismemberment and murder (with considerable amounts of sex and nudity thrown in for good exploitative measure) and the resulting box office windfall led to filmmakers of wildly varying skill and talent churning out such fodder by the dozens for close to a decade. John Carpenter's landmark shocker HALLOWEEN (1978) served as a solid launching point from which a legion of less-accomplished copycats sprung, but the one that really ignited the craze was the first in the long-running FRIDAY THE 13th series, which debuted in 1980 and in retrospect serves as amusing overture for a considerable amount of the decade's cinematic fare.

Odds are if you're bothering to read this you already know the drill regarding the series formula: Youthful camp counselors turn up at Camp Crystal Lake in order to get the place ready for the summer season, but years before it was the site where malformed and "mongoloid" child Jason Voorhees drowned in its lake while his inattentive counselors were engaging in *GASP* pre-marital sex, after which the pair are murdered by un unknown killer. Since the drowning and murders, Camp Crystal lake has been shut down and is now considered a cursed location by the locals, but some idiot always decides to reopen the place and carnage ensues. In the first film the killer is revealed as Jason's quite-insane mother, as it is made clear that Jason himself has been dead for 22 years, and his mother is quite decisively dispatched via beheading. When the shot-on-the-cheap shocker proved an unexpected box office smash — earning $59.8 million dollars off of a $550,000 budget — a sequel was immediately green-lit and FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2 (1981) made it to theaters less than 12 months later. The problem of continuing the mayhem after the death of the original killer was solved by bringing Jason back from the dead (with no explanation) and unleashing him upon wave after wave of idiot counselor fodder on pretty much a yearly basis, as the films continued to rake in the bucks despite being pretty much creatively bankrupt from the word "go." It was not until the third entry that Jason donned his now-iconic hockey mask — why there would be ice hockey equipment at a summer camp is a question that has haunted me since 1982 — and from there the character joined the pantheon of 1980's horror films' Mount Rushmore, alongside Freddy Kreuger, Pinhead, and Chucky, with the FRIDAY THE 13th/Jason series continuing into the 2000's and bringing the total number of films up to 12. Pretty impressive for what's essentially a case of telling more of less the same "story" — or rather and excuse for gory murders, really — over and over again.

Anyway, opening night came along for the "final" film in the increasingly unimpressive and predictable franchise (which got progressively worse as it lurched on), so I called the aforementioned Norwalk Theater to get myself and a couple of pals in to see it on opening night (I worked for the Cinema National theater circuit at the time, and got in for free to most theaters in the state). The manager said "Come on down," so my friends and I went. Imagine our surprise when we arrived and found the theater looking like it was in the center of a demilitarized zone.

The front doors had been torn off, popcorn and spilled soda had turned the lobby into a quagmire that required a swamp boat to navigate through, and the poor concession girls were shivering and crying. I asked the manager what the fuck had happened and over the Zulu Nation-like din that issued from the audience, I heard her tell a tale of misery and violence. She told me that the patrons had been worked up into such a frenzy over the possibility of finally seeing the previously un-killable Jason Voorhees get his ass kicked that they had actually stormed the entrance, barbarian-style. The place looked like it had been sacked by an army of crazed Visigoths on a PCP bender, was filled beyond capacity (over 550 seats), and roughly ten people in the audience had paid for admission (yet they did pay for their refreshments. Go figure...). There were even four squad cars full of police in attendance, and the poor bastards advised that it would be best to run the movie or else there would have been a full-scale riot.

My friends and I waded into the tumult, and actually managed to score seats when a bunch of stoners got up to sneak a few bowl-hits behind the screen. The lights went down and an unholy roar exploded from the adrenaline-charged throng that would have been totally appropriate at a public beheading. The trailer for 7 DOORS OF DEATH came on, but it was impossible to see due to the impromptu shower of popcorn and malt liquor that obscured the screen. A chant of "Jay-son! Jay-son!" began and only died down when the main feature began.

Wholesome family entertainment!

What followed can only be called the greatest display of audience participation that it has ever been my pleasure to witness. Foul rejoinders hurled at characters who couldn't respond, people in the balcony sticking their hands into the projector beam and creating shadow hands that played with the actresses' tits, an out-of-nowhere sing-along to the old "car rock" hit "GTO" (which would have made a modicum of sense if the song had been included in the film)... Folks, we're talking two hours of humor, insanity and "Will I make it out of this movie alive?" terror. If I could download the memory of this show and sell it on DVD, I would be a millionaire overnight.

Anyway, the crowd dispersed peacefully, no one was arrested and the doors were repaired the very next day. Surprisingly, the subsequent showings went off without incident. Oh, and Jason is killed by a young, machete-wielding Corey Feldman (until he returns two films later; don't ask).

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Introduction

Dedicated to the late, great Bob Wilkins (1923-2009), my first horror paedagōgus.

Hey there, dear and loyal Vaulties!

October, the month that culminates in the most excellent day that is Halloween, is about to kick off, so you regulars know that means it's time once again for my annual month-long journey through the dark annals of horror cinema (and occasionally television).

Scary stories have been around as long as there have been storytellers, and a sizable segment of this planet's sentients eat up spine-chilling tales like a rapacious werewolf devours the tender flesh of an unlucky woodland wanderer, so it comes as no surprise that the horror genre has been a staple of global entertainment and has grown and thrived as the means to enthrall audiences with narratives that evolved along with us. Horror as a motion picture genre goes back to the dawn of the movies and it's been over a century since the first moving images silently flickered across the screen in the darkness as the public absorbed the wondrous diversions that unspooled. While comedies, dramas, romances, and adventure narratives held moviegoers riveted, darker, more sinister material also lurked in the indoor twilight and filmmakers were quick to realize that such chillers were a rich lode to be mined. From there the genre grew like Topsy and filled the silver screen with hordes of shambling revenants, thirsting nosferatu, eldritch demoniacal entities conjured through the wielding of forbidden rites, unrestful spectres, blasphemous man-made creatures, other-worldly wigglies that the mere sight of which drives the most stalwart of men to states of gibbering madness, medical nightmares in which our own bodies become our enemies or the healers who are supposed to grant us their aid turn their skills to dire pursuits, seemingly indestructible wielders of kitchen implements and power tools who stalk remote back-woods to prey upon randy youths, primordial throwbacks that defied extinction to terrorize swimwear-clad nubile young maidens, and even that most seemingly-mundane of threats, the unhinged murderer who walks among us and blends in while committing atrocities that would make veteran homicide detectives blanch and fall to their hands and knees while voiding the contents of their stomachs. All of those and more can be found in a richly-fetid cornucopia that often slyly reflects the needs and climate of the given era of production and examines areas of the human condition that may otherwise be un-broachable if not cloaked in shadow.

But enough of all that flowery film school yakkety-blah-blah-blah. If you've bothered to read this far, it's plain that you care about scary movies and are here to see what baleful chronicles of fright Yer Bunche will dredge up from the celluloid depths for the year of two-thousand and nineteen. As in previous years, there is no real rhyme or reason behind my choices, though there will be the occasional thematic overlap and comparison/contrast of certain sub-groups within the genre. I will also rerun a couple of reviews I did for entries that came out between last year's run of 31 DAYS OF HORROR essays, in case some of you readers may have missed the more recent stuff.

So sharpen your axe, dust off the Necronomicon, apply fresh lipstick to grandma's mummified corpse, and make sure your homemade shroud of supple human skin is properly secured to your febrile pate. 'Tis once again the month of All Hallows' Eve and we are nothing if not prepared...

FIFTY YEARS OF "THOSE MEDDLING KIDS"

You know you're old when you clearly remember watching the debut of SCOOBY-DOO, WHERE ARE YOU! which happened on this day fifty (!!!) years ago.

ELVIS PRESLEY IS STILL DEAD (A Vault of Buncheness Perennial)

Surprisingly, not a scene from a special episode of ACCORDING TO JIM.

It's the anniversary of the passing of the King, and I remember that day in 1977 like it was yesterday.

It was the summer of STAR WARS, a heady time for Americans in the early stages of teendom.  I had just barely turned twelve and was quite immersed in the history and music of rock 'n' roll, and although I had listened to a lot of Elvis Presley I just didn't get what the big deal was. I'd seen the footage of his appearances on THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW, suffered through a few of his (mostly) wretched flicks thanks to THE 4:30 MOVIE, 

Elvis, about to molest a hand puppet in G.I. BLUES (1960).

heard the mothers of some of my friends describe how crazy and "naughty" he made them feel when they were teens, and witnessed the general public mention him with a reverence usually reserved for the Pope or some shit.

The "lost" Elvis movie, NUDE HAWAII (1961)

This across-the-board worship didn't sit well with me at all since I considered Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis to each be far superior in terms of both musical output and sheer showmanship — to say nothing of being balls-out crazy in the case of the latter two — and I scoffed at Elvis' Las Vegas career, a period described so eloquently in the film HEARTBREAK HOTEL (1988) as him "kissing the ass he used to kick," so I simply had no use for an icon that I felt was an overrated, bloated has-been in a Captain Marvel Jr. suit.

Think I'm kidding? Google Elvis Presley and Captain Marvel Jr. and see what you discover!

On the day Elvis died you would have thought the world had come to an end. The news was crammed with endless footage of beer-gutted, toothless trailer bunnies, their beehives practically touching the sky, bawling at the entrance to Graceland like they'd just seen their most beloved child shot through the head by a nude-from-the-waist-down Ronald McDonald with a bloody penis. Again, I just did not get it. This was the summer of 1977, the summer of STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, a golden era twenty years after the heyday of the now-deceased hillbilly whose famous sneer sometimes made him look like a stroke victim. His music was now obsolete, dethroned by disco and the anti-monarchy vitriol of the Sex Pistols and things could only get better, right?

The Sex Pistols, aka Rock 'n' Roll Phase 2?

Well, all of that just goes to show you how little I knew in my twelve-year-old arrogance. The STAR WARS series would eventually turn to utter horseshit, the Sex Pistols fizzled out after one album — two, if you count the soundtrack to THE GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL SWINDLE — and disco, which started out annoyingly enough, would collapse under its own weight and played-out repetition (to say nothing of all that cocaine), and not long after that MTV would start the countdown to the death of not only rock 'n' roll, but pop music in general.

MTV: the future is now, and it sucks ass.

It wasn't until my college years that I reevaluated my opinion of Elvis and finally got why he was culturally important. For better or worse, the guy brought black music to the masses, had a look and a style that were totally unlike anything that white America was ready for at the time — or maybe it was ready and needed the boy from Tupelo to kick down the front door — he could sing his ass off, and he irritated the shit out of parents everywhere while sending their innocent young daughters into fits of panty-drenching ecstasy, all of which is, as we now know, the very definition of what a rock star is supposed to do. Elvis Presley invented that shit. Let us review:

Sure, Chuck Berry was a born guitar-slinger who hauled underage white girls across state lines in order to violate the Mann Act.

Chuck Berry, about to duckwalk your little angel over to the Motel 6.

You're goddamned right Jerry Lee Lewis performed as if someone had hooked a high voltage power cable up his asshole just before he took a break to fuck his thirteen-year-old cousin.

Is that the Mummy? Holy fuck! IT'S JERRY LEE LEWIS!!!

Yeah, Little Richard looked like the first contact ambassador from the Planet of the Flaming Hairdressers and shrieked like a Capuchin monkey on a fistful of Stud City animal stimulants.

"Tutti Fruity" indeed.

And not one of them would have made it onto the popular airwaves if Elvis hadn't blazed a trail of "unwholesome, race music filth" before them, and for that I could haul his mouldering corpse from the cold, cold earth and kiss him full upon his maggot-drooling lips.

The King relaxes between takes on the set of the stag reel masterpiece HOUND DOG HUMP (1958).

And as I got older I also found out about just what a twisted freak Elvis was in real life; all the creepy shit about his mother and her bizarre nickname of "Satnin," how he supposedly wouldn't fuck Priscilla anymore after she'd given birth to Lisa-Marie because her parts were now associated with motherhood (thereby driving her into the arms of Elvis' karate instructor), the escalating madness brought on by unimaginable excesses and prescription drug addiction, the deep-fried peanut butter and bacon and banana sandwiches, and all sorts of bizarro good ol' boy shit that the tabloid media still mines and we still devour, and probably always will. Plus, don't forget the religious-cult-like proliferation of Elvis impersonators and their oddball ilk, some of whom are actually legally empowered to perform marriage ceremonies, perhaps the ultimate white trash/kitsch statement.

But the crowning moment of Elvis lunacy can only be the time when the King, allegedly doped-up out of his mind on one of Dr. Nick's pharmaceutical cocktails, barged into the White House, presented President Richard M. Nixon with a gun in a beautiful wooden collector's case, congratulated him on what a great job he was doing running the country, and asked to be appointed as an honest to Christ agent of the D.E.A., an event which, thank the gods, got photographed for posterity.

I swear on my mother's eyes that I didn't cobble this together with Photoshop. Tricky Dick meets Captain Marvel Jr., for fuck's sake! I mean, you just can't make this kind of shit up. 

So I salute you, Elvis Aron Presley. King of Rock 'n' Roll, karate black belt, master of every field of human endeavour — if you believe his movies, anyway — and total maniac. I will remember you this evening when I spin the bootleg compilation ELVIS' GREATEST SHIT,

an incredible compendium of the King's all-time worst efforts, including "Song of the Shrimp," "There's No Room To Rhumba In A Sports Car," "Dominic the Impotent Bull," and his incredible rendition of "Old MacDonald Had A Farm," in which Elvis outlines how the animals on the farm had better stay in line or else he'll eat them in a variety of ways. I may also break out Turkish Elvis impersonator Emil Nargi's cover of "It's Now Or Never,"

but I'd really like to get my hands on this gem, perhaps the perfect album to play on this day of days:

Sadly, I don't have THE ELVIS PRESLEY SEANCE, so I may pop over to the local bodega and kick down a couple of shots in Elvis' honor.

THE KING IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE KING!!!

WEE WILLIE WINKIE

As just encountered at the 14th Street/Union Square subway station in Manhattan. Not only was this loser's face caught on camera, but he's publicly called out for wielding a tiny, wee tadger and the flier proclaiming this tragic state was plastered all over the place, impossible to miss.

YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN

As seen in the theater district. The perfect placement of an eloquently silent ad for the latest film featuring perhaps the most quintessentially NY superhero.

WAIT FOR THE BLACKOUT: A MISADVENTURE 42 YEARS AFTER THE 1977 NYC OUTAGE

Outside the entrance to the Circle on the Square theater, home to the revival of OKLAHOMA! (photo by Susan Boardman)

Well, last night's plans turned into a true NYC shitshow, and on the 42nd anniversary of the famous 1977 blackout, no less.

Myself and five friends snagged tickets to the revival of OKLAHOMA! on Broadway, so I arrived at the theater about fifteen minutes before we were all due to meet out front. Upon arriving I discovered that not only was the theater where OKLAHOMA! was completely dark save for emergency lights in part of the main lobby, the theater across the way that was home to WICKED was likewise dark. The weekend is one of the most packed times for Broadway shows due to the tourist influx, especially during the summer, so there were hundreds of people milling about in the dark in the underpass where the theater entrances are. Seeing what was going on, I soon found that the west side of Manhattan was suffering an all-over power outage from roughly the 42nd Street area up through and including the Upper West Side, from Broadway apparently over to the West Side Highway. 

I waited around to gather info but it became apparent that the evening's show was likely well and truly fucked, so I texted the gang and suggested we abort. Three of the five were stuck either in traffic or on the subway, and traffics was snarled as hell while the subway lines on the west side were not running at all. I removed myself to the benches in front of the Paramount Plaza and told everyone to meet me there, but only Susan and Daniel actually made it. (They live close enough to walk there. The others, not so much.) Megan, Tim, and Suzi all ended up screwed by transit and the evening's performance was inevitably canceled so they bailed, and Daniel, Susan, and myself all went home. 

Well, so much for that...

My local train was not running this weekend anyway, due to necessary track work, so I had to take a different line to get to the main subway traffic hub near my home, and from there I had to take a local bus. Bottom line: Close to four hours were wasted on transit and just hanging around, only to eventually have to return home. Oh, well, it could have been way worse. It could have been during a heat wave or pissing rain, but I had my book to read so I was happy.

Oh, and since our dinner plans also fell through, I opted to grab a fish sandwich at the schmancy McDonald's near the theater that caters to the legion of tourists. Upon entering the McDonald's before I'd hit the theater, I noted the place's AC was not functioning and that they had wheeled in a huge portable industrial air conditioning unit that was aimed at the main counter. The emergency lights were on and the kitchen was up and running, so orders were being filled, but the fetid air was thick with the unmistakable miasma of summer heat-activated derelict urine. The place reeked like a piss factory, but it deterred not one of the joint's ravenous customers.

MA (2019)

 Getting their underage drunk on in Ma's basement.

16-year-old Maggie Thompson (Diana Silvers) moves with her mom (Juliette Lewis) back to her mother's podunk hometown in Ohio after her mother's dreams of making it big in California amount to squat and her marriage falls apart. Now the new kid at the local high school, Maggie is soon befriended by a quartet of average, nice-enough fellow students whose one goal in their boring, go-nowhere lives is to get as stoned and drunk as possible, as often as they can. 

While trying (and failing) to get adults to buy booze for them at a liquor store, the gang manages to convince veterinary secretary/assistant Sue Ann Ellington (Octavia Spencer) to help them in their quest for underage wastedness. The sympathetic Sue Ann recalls what it was like for her growing up in their boring-ass town and continues to buy the kids liquor, eventually inviting them to party in her remote house's basement. Despite them knowing absolutely nothing about this kindly grownup, the desperate kids accept her invitation and begin regular visits to their illegal speakeasy and find Sue Ann, whom they now refer to as "Ma," to be an affable and fun hostess who is more than happy to join them in their hard-partying shenanigans. But almost immediately her mask of lovable sweetness occasionally allows glimpses into a much darker true nature, and though she gives the gang free rein of the basement, they are warned never to go upstairs, as "that is my world."

Though sensing that something is rather "off" about their overly-benevolent hostess, the allure of a safe place in which to get fucking shitfaced on the regular is too great a temptation, and in no time Ma's place becomes the off-the-chain hangout spot for a legion of teens from the local high school and beyond. But Ma's facade slips more and more with each passing day, as she stalks the kids online, gathering as much information on them as possible and serially bombarding them with requests for them to hang out at her house. She even begins stalking Maggie's mother at her job as a casino waitress, and during that bit of creeping we start to piece together Ma's back story and exactly why she obsessively wishes to hang with Maggie and her pals. When all of the pieces come together, what we are left with is a cautionary tale centering around one deeply (yet understandably) deranged, lonely, and damaged sociopath.

 Sue Ann "Ma" Ellington (Octavia Spencer): behind that sweet smile lies the heart and mind of a deeply pathetic and damaged psycho.

MA is concrete proof that the sensibility and thrills of '70's era psychological horror exploitation has not died out, and it's a hell of a fun thrill ride that is best appreciated when seen with a black audience. My people's "audience participation" with movies in general but horror flick in particular is so well-known that it is now its own punchline, and scary movies, especially those with crazed antagonists of a dusky hue, elicit unbridled reactions that are often hilarious but that also engage the Chalkasiains in attendance to find common ground with us. MA is old school grindhouse horror and social commentary rolled up into a satisfying burrito that starts out very deeply-rooted in an all-too-recognizable suburban purgatory. A death trap for personal growth or progression, wherein the youth seeks to numb its senses as it faces the inevitable departure from the mundanity of high school social politics and cruelty into an adult world where hopes and dreams are crushed by the realities of dead-end jobs, loveless marriages, and unwanted progeny.

MA connected with me in a rather visceral way because a lot of its over-the-top depictions of teenage partying excess rang absolutely true when compared to my own experiences growing up when and where I did. Westport, CT in the late 1970's and early 1980's was a far cry from rural Ohio, what with its affluent ostentation and atmosphere/culture that bore little resemblance to the American reality at large in other locales, but its teen culture of driving around aimlessly in search of any sort of altered state of consciousness, regardless of it being had in someone's home or in the weeds-choked and secluded confines of random, remote parking lots, was exactly like what is seen in MA. Between the ages of 15 and 18, I went to a good number of out-of-control parties that were sanctioned and participated in by adults — sometimes the parents of some of my peers — and during those gathering I and many of my classmates learned how to drink and even do assorted drugs, often with the parental implication that it was safer for us to do so under their roofs than having us drive somewhere while wasted. The police were seldom involved and I and many of my peers developed drinking and drugging tolerances that would have impressed the likes of Hunter S. Thompson. (Consequently, there were also a considerable number of drug and drunk-driving-related deaths to go along with all of the pre-collegiate debauchery.) Anyway, the party insanity seen in MA actually did and does happen, so go into the film knowing that some of us lived it (and, miraculously, lived through it).

The kids in the cast all do serviceable jobs, but the film is unquestionably Octavia Spencer's spotlight in which to draw the viewer in with her initially lovable aspect, but when Sue Ann goes into full-tilt crazy-as-a-soup-sandwich mode, Spencer chews the scenery like a motherfucker. And it is glorious.

 Sue Anne: Proof that monsters are made, not born.

"But," you may ask, "What drove the formerly sweet and shy Sue Ann over the edge into full-on bunny-boiler territory," you might ask? Well, I won't give away the specifics, but throughout the film we are given glimpses into her memory of her adolescent crush on a hunky white classmate and how her vulnerability let her become the victim of an incredibly cruel and humiliating prank engineered by her school's cadre of "mean girls" and her unobtainable love. If you are a horror fan, you are no doubt familiar with what was arranged for and done to poor Carrie White, but what befalls Sue Ann eclipses Carrie's tragic humiliation, something that would seem almost impossible, but I assure you that Sue Ann's victimization is the single worst example of "They're all gonna laugh at you" that I have ever seen. Seriously, if it happened in real life today, it would result in harsh prosecution, with the possible tacking-on of classification as a hate crime, as Sue Ann was one of the school's minute number of students of color. (An aspect noted to pointed effect by Sue Ann in the film's climax.)

With all of that said, it should be pretty obvious that I very much enjoyed MA, though it should be made clear that it perhaps best enjoyed by those of us whose bread and butter is old school exploitation trash cinema. Though there is social commentary to be had, the true meat of the narrative lies in the fact that it is an old school tale of cruelty-spurred vengeance, and though quite believable for its first two thirds, the film goes out-the-window insane with some of the shit that happens during the final reel. It should also be noted that if one wants approach the film with a minimum of knowledge regarding some of its more shocking elements, I advise avoiding Google Images and other sites that features promotional stills released by the studio. Some of them spoil some major nasty moments, so I'll just leave it at that. RECOMMENDED.

Oh, and Juliette Lewis is great as Maggie's struggling mom. I always liked her, and it's good to see her in another of her down-to-earth relateably-trashy roles.

Poster from the theatrical release.