Movie Outlaw Rides Again!

By Mike Watt

From filmmaker and journalist Mike Watt comes a the long-awaited SEQUEL to the beloved Movie Outlaw collection. Brand new collection of essays focusing on another 70 "undeservedly underseen" films, such as, "Crazy Moon" starring a pre-star Keifer Sutherland; Frank Henenlotter's hilarous "Frankenhooker"; the all-star "Jane White is Sick and Twisted"; Terry Southern's "The Magic Christian", starring Peter Sellars and Ringo Starr; Peter Jackon's non-Hobbit forming "Meet the Feebles"; Michael A. Simpson's purgatory classic "Impure Thoughts"; Paul Morressey's "Spike of Bensonhurst", Richard Rush's "The Stunt Man"; Clive Barker's long-mishandled and newly revived "Night Breed"; Brian DePalma's rock operetta "Phantom of the Paradise", Will Vinton's Claymation Classic "The Adventures of Mark Twain"; the disturbing TOETAG Pictures' "The Redsin Tower"; and the late underground filmmaker Andy Copp's disturbing "The Atrocity Circle". We also slap around Disney's atrocity, "The Lone Ranger" (while simultaneously trying to redeem "The Legend of the Lone Ranger"). Selecting movies from all over the world, with budgets large and small, we salute these underdogs once again!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Watt
• Release date: Nov 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310046988

Mike Watt

Mike Watt is a writer, journalist and screenwriter. He has written for such publications as Fangoria, Film Threat, The Dark Side, the late Frederick Clarke's Cinefantastique, Femme Fatales and served as editor for the RAK Media Group's resurrection of Sirens of Cinema. Through the production company, Happy Cloud Pictures, he has written and produced or directed the award-winning feature film The Resurrection Game, as well as Splatter Movie: The Director's Cut, A Feast of Flesh, Demon Divas and the Lanes of Damnation and the upcoming feature Razor Days.

Book preview

Introduction by Richard Harland Smith

Additional Material by

Pete Chiarella

Carolyn Haushalter

Mike Haushalter

Bill Watt

Cover Designed by Ryan Hose

Movie Outlaw Rides Again!

By Mike Watt

Introduction by Richard Harland Smith

Additional Material by

Pete Chiarella

Carolyn Haushalter

Mike Haushalter

Bill Watt

Cover Designed by Ryan Hose

Movie Outlaw Rides Again!

By Mike Watt

Introduction by Richard Harland Smith

Additional Material by

Pete Chiarella

Carolyn Haushalter

Mike Haushalter

Bill Watt

Cover Designed by Ryan Hose

Some material herein previously appeared in different forms in

Fangoria Magazine, Film Threat.com and/or Movie Outlaw Blogspot

Unless otherwise credited, DVD cover designs and Poster Art are copyright the respective holders and are reproduced here in the spirit of publicity.

PICTURE CREDITS

20th Century Fox, A-Pix Entertainment, Academy Home Entertainment, ACME-TV, Allied Artists Pictures, Alternative Cinema, American International Pictures, Anchor Bay Entertainment, Aquarius Releasing, Ardustry Home Entertainment, Artisan Entertainment, Atlantic Releasing Corporation, AVCO Embassy Pictures, Black Hill, Braveworld, Buena Vista International Spain, CBS/Fox Video, Cinecom Pictures, Cinecrest, Cinefear, Cinépix Film Properties Inc., Colorama Features, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Comworld Pictures, Concorde Pictures, Dark Sky Films, Destination Films, EMI Films, Empire Video, EuropaCorp, EuroVideo, Far West Films, Film House Bas Celik, First Look International, Frontier Amusements, Greycat Films, Hobo Film Enterprises, Hollywoodmade, Howco Productions Inc., Icon Home Entertainment, Karl-Lorimar Home Video (KLV-TV), Key Video, Koch Media, Legacy Releasing Corporation, Lorimar Productions, Majestic Films International, MCA, Media Distribution Partners, Metropolitan Filmexport, MGM-EMI, MGM/UA Home Entertainment, Miramax Films, Missing in Action (MIA), National Broadcasting Company (NBC), New Horizons Home Video, Nordisk Film, Optimum Releasing, Paragon Video Productions, Paramount Home Video, Phase 4 Films, Polo Pictures Entertainment, PolyGram Video, Precision Video, Precinct 13, Random Media, RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, Reel One Entertainment, RKO Radio Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Santelmo Entertainment, Satori, Senator Film Verleih GmbH, Shout! Factory, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Synapse Films, Trust Film Sales, United Artists Corporation, Universal Pictures, Vestron Video, Victorian Film, Warner Brothers Pictures, Warner Home Video

Any omissions will be corrected in future editions.

MOVIE OUTLAW Vol. 2 © 2015.

MOVIE OUTLAW RIDES AGAIN

2015 Happy Cloud Publishing

ISBN-10: 1514623722 and ISBN-13: 978-1514623725

BISAC: Performing Arts / Film & Video / History & Criticism

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Movie Outlaw, Vol. 2 / Mike Watt ; Introduction by Richard Harlan Smith

p. cm. Includes index.

©2015 Mike Watt. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks to Allan Eastman; Andrea Martin, Linda Eddy, Brian Hubner, Elizabeth Dafoe Library at the University of Manitoba; Archivist Ari from The Swan Archives; Art Ettinger, Allana Sleeth, Ally Melling, Michael Varrati; Barebones Productions; Barry Crawford; Charile Deitch, Pgh City Paper; Chris Gore; Chris Kutcha; Chris McCorkindale; David Gregory and Severin Films; David Michael Latt, Rachel Anderson, The Asylum; Dino Ramble; Don England; Don May, Jr., Jerry Chandler, and Synapse Films; Dr. Rhonda Baughman; Frank Henenlotter; Fred and Shelby Vogel; Gabe Bartalos; Geoff Portass, Heather Drain; Joe Krysinski, Autumn Cook, Dave Brown, Ryan Hose; John Amplas; John Skipp; Jonathan Maberry; Lisa Morton; Mario Dominick; Mark Bell; Mars at Deadworld Music; Matthew Brassfield; Megan Kingdom from Weta Workshop; Michael A. Simpson; Michael and Carolyn Haushalter; Michael Gingold and Fangoria Magazine; Michael Plumedes, Occupy Midian; Nicholas Burman-Vince; Paul Krassner; Paul Scrabo; Phil Hall; Ray Bacorn; Rich Dalzotto, Sandy Stulfire, Michelle Linhart, Horror Realm; The Hollywood Theatre; Richard Harlan Smith; Richard Rush; Robert Kurtzman, Allan Tuskes, Matt Jerrams, Precinct 13; Shaune Harrison, Stephen Sayadian; Steve Railsback; Terry Thome; Thomas Edward Seymour; Todd Sheets, Amanda Payton; Will Vinton, Gillian Frances, Vinton Entertainment; William Forsythe; Ken and Pam Kish, Tom Brunner, Pete Chiarella, Douglas Waltz, Henrique Couto, and all of the Cinema Wastelanders.

And, as always, Amy, April, Bill, and Mary Watt.

Dedicated to the memory of Andy M. Copp.

Front cover images: Crazy Moon (courtesy Allan Eastman), Nightbreed by Chris Kutcha; King of the Ants (courtesy The Asylum); Frankenhooker (copyright Frank Henenlotter).

Back cover images: Jane White is Sick and Twisted (courtesy The Asylum), The Stunt Man (photo courtesy Severin films); Frankenhooker (copyright Frank Henenlotter); Mark of the Beast (courtesy Thomas Edward Seymour)

FOREWORD FROM THE ENDTIMES

I don’t see Mike Watt very often but when I do the circumstances are the same. It will be an otherwise unremarkable day—as unremarkable as the days can be said to be in these postapocalyptic times—and the air will grow suddenly still. Becalmed, as the sailors used to say, back when the seas were bottomless, when there were still seas and men to sail them. There will be a flash on the horizon, the tiniest blip of light, fleeting and ghostlike. I’ll look up from my labors and stare out to the vanishing point and there will be nothing. I’ll give up and turn back to my work—and then the flash again, peripheral and faint, like Tinkerbelle’s dying heart. My grandchildren figure it out before I do.

It’s Johnny Appleseed! they’ll chime, in their shrill, high-pitched voices.

And then I’ll see him. A dot in the distance, a blur behind the thermals. He grows as he approaches, like an old movie trick, and gains definition as he puts the wastes behind him. He reminds me every time of that old Tom Petty video, that one where the band roams the husk of a dead world and finds a casino hidden inside a circus tent. I guess it’s Mike’s goggles, like the ones in that video, that forges the association. It’s the sun reflecting off the cracked glass of Mike’s goggles that signals his coming, every time. I let him come to us; I’m past the age of rushing to meet old friends, and besides the air is bad and he’s the one with the respirator. As we wait, my grandkids dance around inside the perimeter and sing about Johnny Appleseed.

I can see why they call him that.

Once we let Mike in through the gate and have made goddamn sure he hasn’t been followed, and after we’ve hung his leathers on the clothes line and let the children beat them with badminton rackets to shake off the ash, Mike and I will get down to cases.

How is it out there? I don’t care much anymore but it seems right to ask. Mike will shake his head—he still has a mane of it, even after everything that’s happened and all he has seen—and grumble about the cruelty of man and the hopelessness of it all and the desperate things they’re doing for food in what’s left of the plains states.

And we’ll have a drink—whatever’s fresh off the hydroponic hopper—and he’ll say something like "They don’t remember Electric Dreams out there."

Or "Nobody’s heard of The Phantom of the Paradise."

Or "I quoted The Stunt Man in the Kansas City crater… and nobody got it."

Well. I grunt and think about what to say next. They don’t remember Vietnam either. Or Desert Storm. Or the one that came after that. Hell, even I’ve forgotten what they called that one. They don’t remember who discovered radium or broke the sound barrier or cured polio. So I guess it’s not so surprising they don’t remember movies.

"You’d think in Canada they’d remember The Pyx."

I smile at the memory of the tax shelter films produced in Canada in the 1970s. I grew up on them. But they were forgotten by the time we discovered them, back in the 80s and 90s, back when the world was still flush and there was no excuse for forgetting. I don’t tell Mike this. I don’t like to set him off.

Well, I’ll just say, as sagely as I can manage: "We remember."

And it will all feel a bit sad and heavy as we stare down into our meads (God, what I wouldn’t do for a lousy old Rolling Rock these days or a Mickey’s Big Mouth—anything cold, anything I don’t have to ferment myself) and I try to lighten the mood.

Surely it’s not all bad, though. Is it?

Mike’s eyes spark here, they come to life for the first time since he walked through the gate. "I was telling some kids in the Alamogordo Bartertown the plot of Raw Meat and they really were interested, they really wanted to see the movie!"

"Do you think their interest is because they’re cannibals? So they want to see a movie about a cannibal?"

I feel like a jerk but the question had to be asked.

Well, maybe, Mike allows. But they seemed interested in the romantic subplot, too, and they were curious about the backstory of the Donald Pleasance character. So that’s something. That’s worth something… isn’t it?

I think of an old Tom Waits song, and the line, If it’s worth the going it’s worth the ride.

Mike Watt doesn’t walk the blasted earth sowing actual apple seeds in his wake and yet I get why my grandkids call him Johnny Appleseed. He has that same mythic silhouette, that solitary surety of purpose. He’s on a similar quest, to coax life out of lifelessness, to cultivate forgotten fruit. But the journey is not about him, it’s about us, about reminding us of our cinematic heritage, our stories, our origin myths. The zealots have their holy books and even in the end of the world as we know it the Jehovah’s Witnesses are still going door to door… but the rest of us, the remnants, the wretched refuse, the threads and crumbs… we have Mike Watt.

As long as he is still out there, kicking the ash off our memories, reminding us of who we are by reminding us of who we were, we will endure. Keep his books in a sacred place and bring them down at night and read them to your children and teach the young to know well the names of Frankenhooker and Dust Devil and Nightwing and Angel and to hold them in their hearts, so that they—and we—will never perish from this earth.

Finding the trick of what’s been and lost ain’t no easy ride. What movie is that from? I forget. I’ll have to remember to ask Mike, next time he comes around.

Richard Harland Smith

Van Nuys-on-the-Sea

Free Republic of California

PREFORWARDUCTION

What, another one?

Why yes, and many more to come. For the simple reason that I no longer know what obscure means in terms of film history.

What seems obscure to me may be either completely unknown or a favorite movie, depending on who the next guy is. On the flip side of that, what I generally judge to be common knowledge is becoming more and more something someone else hasn’t heard of. I know that Citizen Kane is not everyone’s cup of cinema, but I was under the impression that most, if not all people, had at least heard of it. But through my travels I’ve discovered people who have never even heard of the film, and were only vaguely familiar with who Orson Welles was, is, and has been.

Hell, in the past few months alone, I heard the long-since debunked Casablanca rumors—that neither Bergman, nor Bogart, nor even director Michael Curtiz, knew what the ending would be, despite the fact that the script’s final structure had been worked out months in advance (even though there would be multiple rewrites of individual scenes during production). This misinformation stems from out-of-context musings that became folklore. Just as Play it again, Sam, is not the film’s famous line (as it is not uttered by anyone, not even Rick—the lines are:

Rick: You know what I want to hear.

Sam: No, I don't.

Rick: You played it for her, you can play it for me!

Sam: Well, I don't think I can remember...

Rick: If she can stand it, I can! Play it!"

As you can see from a quick perusal of the contents, there are another 70 movies investigated in this book, many of which I initially believed to be too familiar. Every horror fan has seen Nightbreed and Frankenhooker, right? The Cotton Club plays too often on TV to be considered underseen. Every child of the ‘80s grew up with Electric Dreams and Nightwing playing constantly on HBO. Everyone knows about Penn & Teller Get Killed and The Stunt Man. These were my assumptions. And, we all know what happens when you assume, right? That’s right: I made an ass out of you, didn’t I? Or however it goes.

Even in this glorious age of Instant Gratification, there are countless scores of movies I know about that people don’t know. I am no longer the yardstick for obscure. For Movie Outlaw Vol. 3, I could fill every page with Robert Mitchum and John Wayne movies and many of my readers will have been none the wiser of their existence. Out of the Past? Ask some of my younger readers (both of them). What’s that?

Which proves a bit of a problem for me. If I can no longer judge what’s underseen, where do I draw the line? Using the logic that every movie is obscure or unknown to somebody, I have the whole history of film at my disposal. But who has that kind of time?

So I’m just going to keep forging ahead, perhaps erroneously believing that this or that classic film is universally applauded. I can continue scouring the darkest recesses of moviedom for the most off-beat, unusual, or victimized production. And I can sit down and write a thousand words on Return of the Living Dead and introduce new audiences to what may be old hat to other film scholars. That doesn’t mean I’ll ever waste my time analyzing The Sound of Music, just because Robert Wise also directed The Haunting. But that doesn’t rule out The Haunting, either. So I’m gonna keep writing about whatever I want to and if you—yes, you—don’t like it, skip to the next chapter. It’s called freedom.

[Oh, and the line Richard quotes in his introduction, Finding the trick of what’s been and lost ain’t no easy ride. It’s from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985, directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie.) I wasn’t going to identify it and risk being a pretentious smartass, but I was starting to itch from the madness. To quote Cheech Wizard: I am what I is.]

NOTE REGARDING THE EBOOK EDITION

With the nature of ebooks being what it is, this special Smashwords edition of Movie Outlaw Rides Again! is a necessarily stripped-down version of the print edition. With that in mind, many of the wonderful and legally-cleared photographs illustrating the chapters have been removed for necessity, easy-reading, and overall file-size. The same goes for those photos not legally-cleared.

In this manner, we here at Movie Outlaw—mainly me—are able to bring this electronic version to you at a special low price. If you, as all others who have come before you, enjoy this book like no other (save Movie Outlaw Vol. 1), we encourage you to pick up the print edition to add to your collection of books to show off to your friends and enemies. In fact, we implore you to not only purchase the print edition, but multiple copies of such for relations and acquaintances, if only for the opportunity to rub it in their grubby faces that you discovered Movie Outlaw before they are, and are thus intellectually, ethically, morally, and grammatically superior to them in every way.

We here at Movie Outlaw (again, me) would further encourage you to visit your local Amazon.com and peruse the other offerings in the series. Mainly, Movie Outlaw Vol. 1. Thanks to the magic of the electronic booklette, you can do so by placing your finger HERE.

Sincerely, The Management

(again…me.)

CONTENTS

THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN (1985)

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’[1]—Mark Twain, a Biography.

During his seventy-five years on this Earth, writer Samuel Clemens, better-known to everyone as Mark Twain, amassed a breathtaking amount of literary work that has endured for more than 100 years after his death. If you discount his two acclaimed novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, you are still left with what can be arguably pointed to as some of the greatest works of American literature. Certainly one of the most popular and influential writers of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Twain’s work endured into the 21st and will probably still be read and enjoyed by readers by the time Halley’s comet makes its come-back performance in 2060.

In 1985 another pioneer in American entertainment commemorated the comet’s most-recent return by teaming it up again with its most-famous co-conspirators with the awe-inspiring The Adventures of Mark Twain, an 80-or-so minute feature film made entirely in the art of CLAYMATION®.

Clay; once derided as only suitable for the most basic forms of animation has, in the hands of Will Vinton, been used in such diverse projects as Academy Award winning shorts, feature films, special effects, TV specials, pop videos, theme park attractions and commercials. Reveling in clay’s malleability, Vinton and people he has worked with have advanced and promoted the qualities of clay, giving the world of stop-motion a new word and a new avenue—CLAYMATION®, extols Vinton’s official site.[2]

"While clay animation had been around long before Closed Mondays (as early as 1908’s The Sculptor’s Welsh Rarebit Dream [released by Edison Manufacturing]) [1], it had been replaced by cel (hand-drawn) animation by the 1920s, and was castigated as impractical and time-consuming. Though clay continued to be sparsely used in subsequent animations (Gumby, in the 1950s/60s), Vinton revitalized—then proceeded to revolutionize—its applications in film."[3]

In Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, Vinton’s entry reads thusly, "During the 1970s and 1980s, Will Vinton (b. 1948) almost single-handedly revitalized stop-motion animation with his trademarked Claymation shorts and helped establish the viability of regional animation in the US. While studying architecture and film, he came under the influence of the visionary Spanish architecture of Antonio Gaudi’s organic forms. After working in live-action, he experimented with clay animation, which eventually resulted in his collaborating with Bob Gardiner on the Oscar-winning short Closed Mondays (1974)."[4]

At the time of the award, the animation field had little in the way of competition beyond the realms of Disney or, perhaps, the Don Bluth Studios. Though acknowledged as one of the earliest methods employed in film, clay animation was considered strictly a medium for the amateur animator. There really wasn’t anything, Vinton told Film Threat in 2008. Clay was completely discounted, in terms of animation. There were one or two books that had anything about it. It was discounted as impractical. It was fun to do. Back when I started messing with clay on tabletops, I realized that it was magic. Vinton was one of the first to truly explore the medium in the ‘80s. Apart from his painstaking frame-by-frame movement of three-dimensional Plascticine figures, he also pioneered the art of relief animation, what he called clay painting. "Literally, it was painting with bits of clay, smearing it in small increments of motion. In the film Creation, Joan Gratz did all of the painting. As the director, I just put the ideas and boards together, and recorded the voices."[5]

I think people have slightly different definitions. But to me, dimensional animation is simply distinguishing it from flat or cell animation. I’ve always done the 3-D animation, except for the clay painting, ‘cause that’s all I’ve done—real puppets made of clay, or foam, or latex materials. Even when we moved into computer animation…it’s 3-D as well. In some ways, the process that we went through in dimensional animation led to the acceptance of and appreciation for computer animation, especially as a medium for all ages. When I started out, animation was absolutely and totally for kids. It was called ‘family entertainment,’ but it was totally something for kids. You almost never saw animation of any kind for adults.[6]

Will Vinton, the film’s visionary director and the man who trademarked the animation process, was a seemingly inexhaustible figure whose celebrity was cemented by the immense popularity of a series of ads used to reinvigorate fruit snacks. In the mid-’80s, it was impossible to get away from The California Raisins: dried grapes revived as a Motown singing group who’d adopted Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine as its new jingle. Not only did the animated clay characters sell raisins, it sustained Will Vinton Studios and inspired hundreds—if not thousands—of budding animators, filmmakers, and clay enthusiasts. The Raisins the group leapt from 30-second commercials to starring in their own TV specials, including an ‘80s-child staple,

__________________

¹ Plasticine, invented in 1897, started the clay ball rolling. Naturally, the first studio to experiment with the format in animation was Edison, producing Fun in a Bakery Shop in 1902, and A Sculptor’s Welsh Rarebit Nightmare in 1908. Later that year, "The Sculptor’s Nightmare, a trick film shot by Billy Bitzer with animated clay sculpture, released in May." (Frierson, Michael, Clay Animation. Twayne Publishers (Simon & Schuster MacMillan), 1994.) In 1916, artist Helena Smith Dayton joined forces with animator named Willie Hopkins produced more than fifty clay-animated films, nicknamed Miracles in Mud) for the Universal Screen Magazine. By the 1920s, cartoon animation using either cels or the slash system was firmly established as the dominant mode of animation production. Increasingly, three-dimensional forms such as clay were driven into relative obscurity as the cel method became the preferred method for the studio cartoon. Nevertheless, in 1921, clay animation appeared in a film called Modeling, an Out of the Inkwell film from the newly formed Fleischer Brothers studio. Modeling is one of the few known shorts using clay that was released during the 1920s. Modeling included animated clay in eight shots, a novel integration of the technique into an existing cartoon series and one of the rare uses of clay animation in a theatrical short from the 1920s." From Wikipedia’s entry on Clay Animation. (Macy, 1913) (BFI Screen Guides, 21I0)

A Claymation Christmas.

Even now, those working in Stop Motion Clay are few and far between. Even Peter Lord and Aardman Animation have moved into CGI—early Wallace and Gromit shorts, or 2000’s Chicken Run to 2006’s computer generated Flushed Away.

The Raisins’ enormous success helped keep the doors open at Will Vinton Studios and kept Vinton’s dream of a Claymation feature film alive. Having already adapted a few of Twain’s better-known stories as shorts—including Twain’s breakthrough yarn, The Incredible Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which often ran solo on HBO—Vinton assembled The Adventures of Mark Twain one frame at a time to create the virtually unrivaled animated experience.

The movie’s protagonists are three of Twain’s most-familiar characters, Tom Sawyer (Chris Ritchie), Becky Thatcher (Michele Mariana[2]) and Huck Finn (Gary Krug), who stumble across the writer himself (James Whitmore[3]), standing at the helm of his vast and magical hot air balloon ship, preparing to sail off and meet his destiny in space as the famed Halley’s Comet returns. As Becky, Tom and Huck soon discover as stowaways, Twain’s Airship is also a multi-deck living history of his work and ideas, including the Jumping Frog, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, even the Mississippi river-rats’ stories.

Even if you don’t feel like wandering down every path in Vinton’s surreal labyrinth, the film still offers more than enough to enjoy. Twain’s then-groundbreaking Claymation is worth the price of admission alone, and puts some recent stop-motion productions to shame, if only by sheer technical audacity. Everything that appears on screen has been crafted from Plasticine, including water, plant life, backdrops, ships and comets. Shape isn’t sacrosanct either. Faces melt and reform, rivers flow, life rises from the ground, beasts shift and transform, and reality is sometimes subject to the author and his whims.[7]

While they explore the ship and interact with Twain’s themes and ideas, the trio encounters the writer’s dark side—Twain’s doppelganger, wearing a black suit in contrast to the more jovial public figure decked out in Tom Wolfe white. This is the Twain created by the deaths of his daughter and wife, his tiring of a planet populated by contrary and willfully-ignorant creatures that had long-ceased to amuse him in later life. As Twain says in the film, in a fit of pique, I will continue on doing my duty, but when I get to the other side, I will use my considerable influence to have the human race drowned again, this time drowned good. No omissions. No ark.[4] And like Tom and friends, we helpless audience members experience that the dichotomy of Twain lies within all of us—friendly, solitary; ebullient and conflicted; full of life while yearning for an end.

It’s the darkness that The Adventures of Mark Twain that made its most powerful impact on those of us raised by the colorful hope of Disney and Saturday Morning Cartoons. While the majority of Mark Twain is hypnotic, rainbow-fuelled wonder and nostalgia, the movie’s major set piece shattered many a forming psyche when it premiered. Taking a scene from Twain’s most-infamous, most-worked-upon yet unfinished work, The Mysterious Stranger, the folksy kid trio exit the Airship’s magic elevator—represented by a Kubrick-style black monolith from the outside—and find themselves on a small meteorite suspended in space, marooned with the planetoid’s sole survivor: a headless being in Victorian garb, its face represented by a theater mask that morphs and twists as it assumes the holder’s attitudes and emotions. The figure introduces itself as an angel named Lucifer[5] who proceeds to illustrate the indifferent nature of the universe by creating a little clay village for the kids to play with. After building the villagers

__________________

2 Sesame Street’s Gloria Globe, 1990-2008. Ritchie’s and Krug’s careers are almost exclusively limited to this film. The movie’s only other notable voice actor is Dal McKennon (Lady and the Tramp (1955), 101 Dalmatians (1961))

3 Brooks Hatlen from The Shawshank Redemption (written and directed by Frank Darabont,1994).

4 Taken from Twain’s original quote, I am the only man living who understands human nature; God has put me in charge of this branch office; when I retire there will be no-one to take my place. I shall keep on doing my duty, for when I get over on the other side, I shall use my influence to have the human race drowned again, and this time drowned good, no omissions, no Ark. Mark Twain, J. Macy. Doubleday, Page & co., 1913. See http://www.twainquotes.com/Man.html

5 The fallen angel’s nephew according to the story, but apparently the real deal here in the film.

"The Stranger" (voice of Herb Smith) reveals his true self to Huck, Tom, and Becky.

Photo Copyright Magnolia Home Entertainment (2012)

and the monarchy, the kids place the figures into Lucifer’s playset and he uses his divine powers to bring the figures to life. He then inflicts his will upon the new beings, striking them down with lightning, creating earthquakes to swallow the howling and terrified little village. Dying in terror, the dead figures transform into their own coffins, which are then surrounded by the mourning survivors, wordlessly pleading with the heavens—with Tom, Huck and Becky—to explain why they were made to suffer and die. Disgusted and bored with the creatures’ baleful keening, Lucifer squishes the rest beneath his hand. Aghast, the children flee from Lucifer’s mask, now twisted and angry and demonic, and leave the deposed king to rule alone on his lump of cold stone.

This short section alone is worth the price of admission and stands tall as one of the most impressively animated sequences in film history. (It’s easily available to view on YouTube and it’s horrifically wonderful even outside of its context.) It’s also astonishingly mature for a young audience, and remarkably avoids talking down to impressionable viewers. It was for me, at least, the first visual depiction of cosmic and divine ambivalence I’d ever encountered and I know that I wasn’t alone in my awakening. Vinton achieved visually what Twain had done verbally. In fact, the sequence is perhaps even more viscerally unnerving than the original passage in the story. For so many kids raised with religion, but without much in the way of insight, the idea that God might not be our biggest fans—or that The Devil might not be the greatest of all evil—was startling and heady. As powerful an existential exercise then as the ending of Toy Story 3[6] would be decades later. For kids lured to the theater by the hopes of seeing the Raisins writ large on the screen, it was an unexpectedly powerful lesson in grey-area morality.

Despite the friendly-looking cover art and the quaint, charming first half of the film, this is not for kids. There are elements that I’m sure children would enjoy, but this is quite a strange, occasionally very dark and deep film that pays homage to the whole gamut of Twain’s work which, especially in his later years, could be quite bitter and cynical towards issues as touchy as organized religion, wrote David Brook in his review for Blueprint. "Those who would get most out of this film would be people particularly knowledgeable about his life and writing, which I certainly am not. It didn’t stop me appreciating the experience though and it certainly makes me want to track down more of Twain’s less familiar novels and short stories. It’s clear why the film

6 Toy Story 3 (2010) produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Screenplay by Michael Arndt, story by Arndt, John Lasseter, and Andrew Stanton, directed by Lee Unkrich. And, yeah, we’re talking about that almost fed into a furnace scene at the end.

bombed so badly on release though. It is not an easy film to pin down and its audience was always going to be quite niche. What’s quite amusing is that now, a particular scene in the film has become an internet phenomenon and currently stands at over 11 million views, probably a hell of a lot more than the film itself. The scene I’m referring to is the infamous ‘Mysterious Stranger’ segment. This disturbing scene is thought to be the main reason the film got banned from certain television networks, where an ‘angel’ with no face (just a constantly morphing stage mask) introduces themselves as Satan and takes the children through his cold views on the human race."[8]

On the other hand, as Rick Beck points out on Stoopid Smart Reviews, There are kids’ movies and then there are ‘80s kids’ movies. You’ll find few other decades that produced so many films that appear to be made for children from their posters or their content at a quick glance (It’s animated? Must be for kids! Enjoy Watership Down, Billy!"[7]), but often contain no shortage of violence, death, and nightmare-inducing images. In other words, I love 80s kids’ movies. They’re typically flawed when it comes to their stories (The Black Cauldron) or their characters (The Dark Crystal), but when they’re good, they’re good (The Secret of NIMH, The Never Ending Story). The near absence of CGI in this decade only helps to accentuate some of the creepiness factor of 80s kids’ films as special effects were accomplished by puppetry, animatronics, stop-motion, and things that are just really there."[9]

For what it’s worth, the majority of The Adventures of Mark Twain remains in the giddy, candy-colored side of morphing clay. Apart from the occasional stark psychological asides, the film spends most of its narrative with the whimsical retelling of Adam and Eve and their adventures in the Garden of Eden, with Adam confounded by Eve’s naming-of-everything compulsion and his bafflement as to why she won’t just leave him alone to travel over a massive waterfall in peace.[8] In contrast to the Mysterious Stranger section, we’re also granted a brief amusing interlude with a bit of Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, in which the intrepid adventurer discovers that he’s arrived in the wrong Heaven. The double-headed purple aliens have no trouble granting his request for a halo and harp, but doubt he’ll be happy in their extraterrestrial Paul Lynde nightclub of eternity. Throughout it all, both Twains pontificate, analyze, instruct and educate the young stowaways as to the ways of the world, at least as it stood somewhere between 1910 and 1985.

Unsurprisingly, The Adventures of Mark Twain disappeared from theaters very quickly, shoved aside during the busy Spring season by the more successful traditionally-animated The Care Bears Movie. While Beck’s book tries to put a positive spin on things—"The failure of his sole feature effort, The Adventures of Mark Twain (1984), essentially a collection of short films, was eclipsed by the acclaim for his John Fogerty ‘Vanz Kant Danz’ (1985) music video and the ‘Speed Demon’ sequence in Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker feature (1988)."[10]—it was an expensive blow to Will Vinton Studios, one from which it never fully recovered. In the following years, Vinton’s animators continued to toil on TV specials and commercials—giving us, among other things and for better or worse, Domino’s pizza-killing jester, The Noid. Towards the end of the century, Vinton was forced to replace Claymation with Foamation in order to bring the short-lived Eddie Murphy series, The PJs, to life and somewhere in the neighborhood of within budget.

An angel investment from Nike CEO Phil Knight seemed like a blessing at the time, but a

number of economic factors—including the 9/11 disaster—forced many companies to scale back their advertising budgets and Vinton’s brand of 3D stop-motion was seen as an expensive luxury even for Fortune 500 companies. Eventually, Knight’s son Travis, a former white-rapper

______________________

7 Written and directed by Martin Rosen, released in 1978, but that doesn’t nullify Rick’s point.

8 This sequence was actually one of Vinton’s earliest featurettes, The Diary of Adam and Eve (1980), released, like The Incredible Jumping Frog, as a stand-alone short for animation festivals. In 2010, British film scholar Andrew Osmond wrote of the sequence, "Only when the reconciled Adam and Eve grow old do we see they’re really Twain and his late wife. The pathos of these weathered oldsters foreshadows Up[.]" Osmond, Andrew, 100 Animated Feature Films. BFI Screen Guides, Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. P. 52. Osmond also notes that when released in the UK, Vinton‘s movie was titled Comet Quest: The Adventures of Mark Twain.

Will Vinton in his studio. Photo copyright Will Vinton.net

turned, by all accounts, an outstanding animator, wound up at the head of the company and Vinton himself was forced out, losing dominion over the term CLAYMATION®, and even over his own name, until Knight rebranded the company as LAIKA. (LAIKA’s consolidation commenced with the hiring of one Henry Selick and the eventual production of the successful Coraline (2009). Since then, Vinton has refocused his efforts on smaller-scale productions, resettling in Portland, OR.

Today, life isn’t as grand for him as it once was—though it’s simpler, quieter, and more hands-on. He’s stepped away from the ‘cesspool’ of business and gotten back to what matters most to him: the beauty of animation, wrote Crockett in Pricenomics. "After being ousted in 2002, Vinton endured a period of financial and psychological anguish. The modest fortune he built for his family over 30 years had largely been wrapped up in company stock; when the ship went down, he sank with it. He sold his Oak Grove home of eight years, pulled his two sons out of private school, and ‘scaled back’ on the lifestyle he’d grown accustomed to. 

There was definitely a time when I was rolling the dice and growing the company, Vinton told the Portland Tribune in 2005. I didn’t think the downside would be as big as it was. Months after the interview, Vinton was knocked down again: Bob Gardiner, with whom Vinton had sparked his career and won an Academy Award, committed suicide."[11]

Yet, maybe things weren’t so bleak. As reported in Film Threat, Vinton told an audience for his earlier films at the Northwest Film Forum in February, 2008, The LAIKA take-over proved a devastating fall for Vinton, but to hear him talk, it’s also been a liberating means of returning to what he’s best at. ‘Now I’m back to my roots, doing new projects. I’m back to being an artist, as opposed to a businessman’.[12]

While animation today seems solely in the hands of Pixar, who took CGI light years into the future, seemingly overnight with the success of Toy Story, Vinton’s absence from the field was surely felt, even if fans couldn’t quite articulate what was missing.

As Jerry Beck told Joseph Gallivan for The Portland Tribune, Vinton, "developed a style that humanized his characters. Beck said Vinton’s clay figures, ‘brought to life with stop-motion

photography, had a level of personality no one had achieved before. Things that we now take for granted with computer graphics, he was doing it with clay 30 years ago,’ Beck said. Although modern animation may be magnificent technically, Beck said, it lacks the human texture that Vinton brought to his craft. That alone ensures curiosity about Vinton’s new work, he said. ‘If he were just to do little animated films, there’d be a lot of interest in it—at least in the animation community there would be,’ Beck said." [13]

For years, The Adventures of Mark Twain lacked the respect it truly deserved, as a stand-alone feature or even to acknowledge its place in animation history. A movie-only DVD appeared in Wal-Mart discount bins in 2006. Finally, a more-respectable Blu-Ray from Magnolia popped up with a few more extras in 2011. Its fall to obscurity is very sad, not only due to the tremendous amount of work involved bringing it to life, but as a primer to Twain’s works for new generations. As Sadie Stein wrote for The Paris Review, [The film is] a respectful, albeit bizarre, introduction to the works of Twain that gives children a lot of credit. You wouldn’t, maybe, want to use it as the basis for a paper […] but as a testament to the author’s enduring appeal, it’s noteworthy.[14]

For more info, as well as some delightful artwork spanning Vinton’s career, please visit The

Lawrence Gallery (http://www.lawrencegallery.net), and Vinton’s official site featuring his traveling exhibition, Will Vinton’s Animation Art Collection, willvinton.net/artGallery.htm.

NOTES

1 Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete, The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Full ebook available at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2988/2988-h/2988-h.htm

2 Will Vinton.net/history

3 Crockett, Zachary. 2014. How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company. Pricenomics. May 9. http://priceonomics.com/how-the-father-of-claymation-lost-his-company/

4 Beck, Jerry, general editor. Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, This History of Cartoon, Anime & CGI. New York: Harper Design International, 2004. P.250

5 KJ Doughton, KJ. 2008. Will Power: Interview With Claymation Pioneer Will Vinton. FilmThreat.com, February 20. http://www.filmthreat.com/interviews/1176/

6 Ibid.

7 Brown, Kenneth. 2012. The Adventures of Mark Twain Blu-ray Review. Blu-Ray.com, December 9. http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Adventures-of-Mark-Twain-Blu-ray/55941/#Review

8 Brook, David. 2011. The Adventures of Mark Twain. Blueprint: Review, October 19. http://blueprintreview.co.uk/2011/10/the-adventures-of-mark-twain/

9 Beck, Rick. 2014. Stop-Motion Creepiness Month: The Adventures of Mark Twain. Stoopid Smart Reviews, October 2. http://stoopidsmartreviews.blogspot.com/2014/10/stop-motion-creepiness-month-adventures.html.

10 Beck, Jerry, Animation Art: From Pencil to Pixel, 2004. P.250

11 Crockett, Pricenomics, 2006.

12 Doughton. FilmThreat.com, 02/20/08.

13 Gallivan, Joseph. 2005. As Animated As It Gets. The Portland Tribune. February 1. Archived at http://willvinton.net/news.htm#reanimated

14 Stein, Sadie. 2014. Letters from the Earth. The Paris Review, The Daily, December 10. http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/12/10/letters-from-the-earth/

ANGEL (1984)

"High school honor student by day. Hollywood hooker by night."

In 1984, New World Pictures released a movie that became near-synonymous with the word sleaze. Directed by Robert Vincent O’Neill[1], and written by O’Neill and Joseph Michael Cala, the title character was a 15-year-old schoolgirl with the real name of Molly Stewart, who hooked out on Hollywood Blvd. as soon as she was done with her Trig homework. More or less an orphan, out on the streets Angel (Donna Wilkes[2]) has a whole surrogate family of miscreants and degenerates. Like Yo-Yo Charlie (Steven M. Porter[3], and former movie cowboy Kit Carson (Rory Calhoun[4]), and most-especially Miss Mae, a paternal transvestite played

_________________________

1 Responsible for the far-sleazier Wings Hauser vehicle, Vice Squad (1982, dir. Gary Sherman).

2 No stranger to playing younger than her age, Wilkes co-starred with McLean Stevenson on his ill-fated 1979 sit-com, Hello, Larry (created by Dick Bensfield and Perry Grantthe, show for which he left M*A*S*H). Her character, Diane, was meant to be 15. At the time, Wilkes was 20. In the second season (Hello, Larry had a second season?), she was replaced by Krista Errickson (Little Darlings, 1980, directed by Ronald F. Maxwell).

3 One of those, Hey, it’s that guy actors. In addition to roles in Flags of Our Fathers (2006, directed by Clint Eastwood), he starred in the X-Files 1997 episode Elegy as autistic bowling alley attendant Harold Spuller. He reprised his role as Yo-Yo Charlie in Avenging Angel (1980, also directed by O’Neill).

4 Smithers, who is that actor who is always standing up and walking? Rory Calhoun, sir? – The Simpsons Two Dozen and One Greyhounds, written by Mike Scully and directed by Bob Anderson, originally aired on April 9, 1995.

by the immortal Dick Shawn[5]. Her landlady is Solly (Susan Tyrell[6]), a tough-broad lesbian with delusions of artistry. Naturally, Molly works hard to keep her two lives separate.

Which hadn’t been too difficult until a serial killer with a thing for raw eggs (John Diehl[7]) shows up on the Walk of Fame. (We know he’s a necro’, probably bisexual, possibly impotent. My guess is he wants to get busted. Whatever the case, pal, he’s out there somewhere cruising this fucking boulevard.) After he offs Angel’s friend Crystal, Lt. Andrews (Cliff Gorman[8]) gets involved, and he thinks there’s something fishy about Angel’s my mother is bedridden because of a stroke story. You’re young, attractive, and healthy—and swimming in a toilet bowl!

Sure, that story worked on her teacher, Patricia (Elain Giftos[9]), but Lt. Andrews is a competent, well-trained cop. So it only takes him several days to piece her real home life together. Tragedy strikes poor Angel over and over again as her friends turn up dead, both her teacher and her cop are on her tail, and to ice the cake, the school jocks discover her nocturnal occupation and blab to the whole student body. So at least she won’t have to worry about a date for the prom.

When Angel was released, people complained. "This is only Jan. 13, but as movie vehicles go, Angel will almost certainly turn out to be one of the top sleazemobiles of 1984. It comes very close to being so consistently ridiculous that it’s not unentertaining. You simply can’t imagine the heights that inappropriate dialogue can attain until you hear Molly say to a couple of street friends: ‘Gee, I’m glad I found you two. I’m on my way to the morgue.’ Even as she picks up clients and even as her friends are being dismembered by the not-so-mysterious killer, Molly talks like Winnie Winkle.[9] This from Vincent Canby’s NY Times review (who also wrote, and not without validity, that Shawn plays Mae as if he were trying to imitate Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot.)[15]. Remind me never to get murdered!" Mae tells Andrews.

_____________________________

5 The immortal Dick Shawn is perhaps best-known as Lorenzo St. DuBois in Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968). As I recounted in Fervid Filmmaking, Shawn notoriously died on stage in 1987 during the climax of his one-man show. "Witnesses said Shawn, 57, was left lying on the stage for nearly five minutes before the audience realized it was not part of his act, and an ambulance was called. Hospital spokeswoman Diane Yohe said he received cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the Scripps emergency room, but was pronounced dead at 9:55 p.m.

He literally was probably on the stage five minutes until it was realized that it was serious, said Tom Wartelle of San Diego, a member of the audience of about 500. The stagehand came out several times and obviously thought it was part of the act. It all blended in very well, Wartelle added. There were comments from the audience like, ‘Take his wallet!’ Finally a doctor came from back of the wings, felt for his pulse and realized something had happened. He flipped him over. The audience reaction by then was, ‘Boy, this is out of taste.’ Scott, Anny and Ted Thackrey, Jr. 1987. Comedian Dick Shawn, 57, Is Stricken on Stage, Dies." L.A. Times. April 18. http://articles.latimes.com/1987-04-18/local/me-1079_I_dick-shawn.

Reportedly, one of his last lines, playing a politician running for election, was If elected, I will not lay down on the job.

6 Best known as Pvt. Cruiser in Stripes (1981, directed by Ivan Reitman).

7 An Obie-award winner for his role in the 1968 play, The Boys in the Band. In my favorite bit of meta-life, Gorman won a Tony Award for playing Lenny Bruce in Julian Barry’s 1972 play Lenny. In Bob Fosse‘s film version, Gorman was replaced by Dustin Hoffman. Perhaps to make up for this, Fosse cast Gorman to play a Dustin Hoffman-like character playing Lenny Bruce in All That Jazz.

8 A veteran TV actress, Giftos played Bonnie Kleinschmidt, a recurring role on the ABC series The Partridge Family between 1972-73. In Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask, she played the wife to Gene Wilder‘s Woolite-guzzling sheep-lover, Dr. Ross. (1972, directed by Woody Allen, written by Allen, adapting David Reuben’s 1969 very clinical sex book). Perhaps my favorite credit of hers, as listed on her IMDb bio: "She stars with Edward Asner and Majel Barrett in the first original made-for-the-Net Science Fiction cyberseries, Mars and Beyond (2000), on the Cyber Sci-Fi Network." http://www.imdb.com/name/nm03I7560/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_s

9 Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner was an American comic strip running from 1920–1996, one of the first to focus on a working woman. Conceived by Joseph Medill Patterson, Martin Branner wrote and drew the strip for over 40 years.

Seriously, Mae is more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever have.

On the flip side of that, Richard Scheib at Moria felt that the movie was actually too uppity for its own good, Angel is a film that holds out for sociological relevance. It gets all indignant about its titular heroine’s abandonment and the sense of moral corruption presented by her having to work as a streetwalker—but then quickly shows its true colours up by relying on blood and naked breasts for purposes of titillation. The footage that was actually shot on Hollywood Boulevard has colour, but when the film jumps in with actors and tries to get the hooker patois down it’s just godawful—a drag queen dies with the epitaph ‘You can’t die—you still owe me $147, you fucking faggot,’ which really says all there is to about the film. Former Western star Rory Calhoun appears as a clapped-out cowboy actor—roles like this must be an actor’s equivalent of being reduced to a wino.[16] But admittedly, this review was more recent.

Wilkes, who was 24 at the time, prepared for the role by hanging out at halfway houses for homeless teens, as well as with real prostitutes on Hollywood Blvd., interviewing them about their day-to-day-to-night lives. According to press material posted on her site[17], Determined to make it on her own [also at the age of 15], Donna convinced not one, but two employers that she was 18 years old and married. For the next year she worked as a computer operator for an ambulance service, and as a secretary for a large corporation in Culver City adding up to 16 hours a day, five days a week. So pretending to be someone else probably didn’t seem like much of a challenge.

And while Wilkes is very good as Molly/Angel, it’s her supporting cast that leads the Angel parade. Like the best finding your real family stories, Angel’s streetwalking sidekicks all exhibit not only eccentricity but real pathos and genuine affection for their young ward. And they treat each other like family as well, right down to Solly and Mae talking to each other like an old, foul-mouthed married couple. Wilkes scenes with Gorman and Giftos also play as genuine, with the adults first shocked at her alter ego, then legitimately concerned and willing to help her in any way they can, even after they both realize she’ll never willingly leave the streets.[10] Teacher Allen has some stones as well, particularly when she goes to Solly’s flophouse to meet Molly’s mother, but Solly gives her shit at the door.

Listen fuck face! sez Ms. Allen. I used to work for the city health department and you got so many violations in this flea trap that one phone call down town would put your ass in court so fast you wouldn’t have time to wipe it let alone pull your pants up. Do you get my drift?

Solly grumbles, Feh, the fuckin’ mouth on that broad!

So when the killer—as goofy and twitchy as Diehl plays him, like Travis Bickle if he never went out much—rears his ugly head, we the audience has become so invested in this little John Waters family, we really do fear for everyone’s lives. When sacrifices are made, we feel it. I don’t care if you’re the straightest-laced shoe in your private closet, Angel makes you love these characters. It’s as much strength of the screenplay as it is the actors. Okay, maybe a little less—Tyrell, Calhoun, and Shawn are awfully good.

Mae: When I was a kid my father warned me. He said, Rachel don’t ever play cards with a Jewish dyke. They cheat!

Solly Mosler: Eh, eat my puff will ya!

Though O’Neill had previously written the borderline-reprehensible Vice Squad (1982), starring Wings Hauser as a psycho into female genital mutilation, Angel is almost quaint in comparison. It’s certainly the most gentle of the killer slashes hookers to bits subgenre. "Surprisingly well-acted by Wilkes and Gorman—in spite of the dialog—Angel is mildly entertaining trash that can’t decide whether it wants to be grimly serious or sleazy camp, wrote Brian Lindsay for Eccentric Cinema. For every dramatic scene there’s a counterbalancing silly one. (This is the only movie I know of to feature a battle to the death between a

_______________________

10 In the television-approved cut, O’Neill added an epilogue where Andrews basically adopts Molly and helps her leave the life of the carefree hooker.

wisecracking drag queen and a guy dressed as a Hare Krishna.) It’s also surprisingly chaste compared to European exploitation fare. There is some full frontal nudity on display, but ironically the majority of it occurs in the girls’ high school locker room and not when the hookers are plying their trade."[18]

Which brings us to the concept of time. It’s said that comedy equals tragedy plus time (c = tr + t for you math nerds out there). If that’s the case then sleaze plus time equals heart warmth, at least as far as Angel goes. What was yesterday’s outrage is practically today’s latest series on ABC Family.

Woe betide the naysayers, Angel proved popular enough to spawn three sequels, each with a different Angel—Betsy Russell in Avenging Angel (1985), Mitzi Capture in Angel III: The Final Chapter (1988), and Darlene Vogel in Angel 4: Undercover (1993, really undercutting the whole Final Chapter aspect of III). That none of the sequels performed well at the box office—Avenging Angel suffered from a lack of Shawn; Angel III suffered from a lack of everyone else, though a wonderful Mark Blankfield [19] works tirelessly to try and make up for it. Angel 4 suffers from my lack of having seen it. O’Neill wrote the second and third installments and directed Avenging Angel. The three O’Neill Angels were released as a boxed set by Anchor Bay and is still available.

And though you might think us a nation of screwballs, the Angel series even has its own Facebook page [20], as well as its own Then and Now site [21]. And don’t worry; the latter has a section titled Unanswered Questions. Maybe that sounds crazy to you, but Solly has some words on crazy:

"Two blind lesbians lost in a fish market. That is crazy. Get it?"

NOTES

15 Canby, Vincent. 1984. Film: ‘Angel,’ In School And Outside The Law. NY Times, January 13. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/ review?res=9902E1DD1138F930A25752C0A962948260

16 Scheib, Richard. Review, Moria. http://moria.co.nz/horror/angel1984.htm

17 http://www.donnawilkes.com/bio.htm

18 Lindsey, Brian. Review. Eccentric Cinema.com. http://www.eccentric-cinema.com/cult_movies/angel_collection.htm

19 Best-known by those in the know from Fridays, ABC’s version of Saturday Night Live, created by Bill Lee and John Moffitt. 1980-1982.

20 https://www.facebook.com/OfficialAngelFans

21 http://www.lenrek.net/movies/Angel/.

THE ATROCITY CIRCLE (2005) [22]

The Atrocity Circle (directed by Andrew M. Copp): News of a vicious gang-rape of a woman brings forward a repressed memory in medical student Brandon (Chris Workman). As a teenager, he witnessed a group of classmates rape his best friend (Telsa) resulting in her suicide. Haunted by the rush of images, he leaves his pregnant wife, Lisa (Michelle McLaughlin), and sets out to find those responsible, now adults and involved in illegal activities and hardcore pornography. Descending into a hell on Earth, as Brandon’s plan of revenge takes shape, the question of his righteousness quickly becomes an issue. And when he finds the tables turned on him, the matter of his own innocence is brought to bear.

No one gets out alive, was a favorite quote of Andrew M. Copp’s.

In January of 2013, Amy and I received one of the worst phone calls of our lives. Henrique Couto told us that Andy was dead at the age of 40.

The Thursday before, he’d updated his Facebook profile pictures to one of his stylistic self-portraits, himself in profile, holding a handgun, blood spattered across the photo. His banner was nothing but a plain black rectangle. The filmmaker who referred to his movies as exorcisms, who was one of my oldest friends in the business, a member of what we called the Second Wave of Indie Horror Filmmaking[1], lost his life-long battle with depression and bi-polar dis-

order, and took his own life. And overwhelming grief shot through the Indie industry.

__________________

1 The First Wave consisting of guys like Tim Ritter, J.R. Bookwalter, Kevin Lindenmuth, Mike Legge, Ron Bonk, Scooter McCrae, etc. We Second Wavers—Andy, TOETAG, Chris Seaver—came in on the cusp of DVD distribution and its almost immediate downfall.

More than two hundred people attended Andy’s funeral services in Dayton—friends, family, film-makers, Waste-landers[2], his co-workers at DATV—an avalanche of folks whose lives he’d touched over the years. He was universally remembered as a sweet, caring, gentlemanly and astonishingly giving man. While he poured his pain into his art, he never allowed it to come between himself and someone he loved. As Sean McLaughlin (husband of Circle star Michelle) said during his eulogy, Looking around the room, I think I know what Andy is thinking right now: ‘Two hundred and fifty people at my funeral… where were you schmucks when I was trying to sell out Horrorama?’ [3]

For filmmakers and artists who primarily work with the darkest sides of horror, real death is surprisingly hard to comprehend. More than a few people expressed disbelief: I keep waiting for him to yell ‘cut’ and jump out of the coffin. On a deep level, we all understood that, despite the fervent wish that he’d reached out to one or any of us, his movies were howls of pain, and he was never going to get the answer he was looking for.

Andrew Copp didn’t make easy-to-classify movies. His first, The Mutilation Man, is a tormented journey through a blasted Jodorowsky landscape. This time around, The Atrocity Circle seems to be honing themes that he originally explored in Black Sun—guilt, repression, faulty memory—only to a more satisfying and successful end. Copp’s movies are filled with anger, violence and guilt, and they wear his own adult nightmares on their sleeve. He was definitely one of the most brutally honest and personally indie filmmakers working in the realm of what we tried to dub Outsider Cinema. "I have Type 2 bi-polar disorder, though I only found this out in 2005, so my brain and how it worked was a mystery to me at times for a large portion of my life. I think that The Mutilation Man and Black Sun really represent how the inside of my skull often looked. My inner life looked like those films in a lot of ways until I got my brain chemistry on track and was diagnosed properly."[4]

Mark Sieber at Horror Drive In.com wrote, "Andy Copp’s movies deal with, among other things, scars. The devastating remnants of physical and other forms of abuse. The long range affects of child abuse, destructive relationships and rape. But fear not...his movies are not anything like a Lifetime Channel movie. They are as hard-hitting as horror can be and all but the staunchest gore fanatic will flinch from some of the footage from The Atrocity Circle." [24]

The Atrocity Circle was Copp’s third feature film, and his first to originate as a work-for hire, meant to be part of Ron Bonk’s Sub Rosa Extreme line up, headed at the time by Scrapbook writer/director Eric Stanze. Originally titled Her Name Was Samantha[5], as Andy told