Man Eater and Night of the Sadist

I've just republished two vintage gay erotic novels, Man Eater and Night of the Sadist, in a two-in-one paperback and kindle edition. You can buy them on Amazon -- just search by my name. They're both smart, well-written thrillers, reminders of a time when adult books and movies had plots and characters, and they're both great reads. I celebrated the launch with what I thought would be a small book party, but turned into a pretty bustling event!

In Praise of Ernie Kovacs

The Ernie Kovacs Collection
Six Discs (Shout! Factory)

Not my usual beat and no, I don’t think horror and humor are two sides of the same coin, but petty consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so I'm going to sing the praises of Ernie Kovacs, the television pioneer who died shockingly young -- 42 -- in a 1963 car crash but left a rich legacy of innovative television... a legacy handed down for decades within the comedy community but largely unknown to outsiders because the stuff was so damned hard to see. The Ernie Kovacs Collection takes care of that.

So, why would you want to take a chance on some guy who was on TV before you were born? Well, for one thing, the surrealistic, medium-bending humor we take for granted today didn’t start with Scrubs (2001-2010) or David Letterman (1980) or Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) or even Green Acres (1965-1971). Ernie Kovacs was stretching, subverting and mocking at the conventions of television in 1951... take a moment to think on that: 1951. TV was so young it barely had conventions to mock, subvert or undermine, but Kovacs had an unerring eye for fledgling clichés and lampooned them mercilessly.

You can see Kovacs in Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live (Chevy Chase thanked him in his 1976 Emmy acceptance speech), and in the self-referential patter of Steve Allen, George Carlin and Craig Ferguson. Try not to think about SNL's fake commercials ("puppy uppers and doggie downers," anyone?) or Second City TV's Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd while watching Kovacs play the shameless host of a late-night Hungarian movie show (Kovacs' family was Hungarian) shilling for 'Molnar’s Budapest Krisplies.' "They’re 100% junk!" he says gleefully. They "don’t pop snap or crackle… who wants all that noise from spoon?" To serve: Combine cereal, two cups of sugar and a bottle of cheap Hungarian wine in a punch bowl, then discard cereal.

Before you dismiss Kovacs’ effete poet Percy Dovetonsils as a retro gay stereotype, listen closely to “Roughing It,” his guide to hunting bear like a man’s man, which starts with a shopping spree at Abercrombie and Francine. If that isn’t a joke that plays better 50 years down the line than when it was new, I don’t know what is.

And then there’s the Nairobio Trio, which consisted of Kovacs, Edie Adams – his wife, muse and partner in crime, the rare bombshell willing to go goofy for a laugh – and various third wheels performing classical-light composer Robert Maxwell’s novelty number "Solfeggio" dressed as mechanical apes in bowlers. Their legacy includes a New Zealand jazz quartet who appropriated the name, Harry Nilsson's video for his novelty hit Coconut and columnist Jim Knipfel's Quitting the Nairobi Trio: A Memoir, his sardonic account of spending six months in Minneapolis mental institution after a botched suicide attempt.

None of Kovacs' routines sound anywhere near as funny as they are, even the word-based ones: They’re too intricately time, distinctively delivered and just plain loopy to translate. Which is where The Ernie Kovacs Collection comes in and I step out: There may be someone out there who could watch the entire set without cracking a smile, but when it comes to comedy I’m a notoriously tough audience and Kovacs makes me laugh.

Jules Dassin/Night and the City

I interviewed Jules Dassin, still dapper and articulate, in the mid 1990s and brought along a vintage paperback copy of Night and the City, hoping I'd have the nerve to ask him to sign it. Fortunately, we got along like a house afire: Though I was much younger than he was, we both grew up in a New York that bore little resemblance to the new, improved version. So at the end of the interview I bit the bullet and handed him the movie tie-in paperback and asked.

He looked at it intently for a moment and then said, "Would you mind

if I wrote my name across Gene Tierney's creamy bosom?" And he did.

The revolution will not be televised...

Musician, poet and social activist Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27th, and while reading his obit I got hit with one of those "how'd I get that so wrong" broadsides.

I always took the signature line from Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word screed (contrary to what every over-stressed, culturally under-educated online writer seems to have taken at face value because someone once wrote it somewhere, Scott-Heron's legacy isn't rap -- it's the apparently spontaneous but meticulously-crafted verse of poetry slams)"The Revolution Will Not be Televised” as a defiant warning that when the poor, alienated and disenfranchised finally get up off their asses to fight the power, the carnage will be overwhelming, up against the wall motherfucker real, not some happy news kicker or an intensely manipulated, reality-tv style spectacle. Talk about prescient.

Interestingly, my husband's take was the complete opposite: He interpreted it to mean that the ruling class would suppress real reporting and spin the whole thing into insignificance… also prescient.

But I'd never listened to or read the full piece (shame on me) and it was a revelation. Yes, Scott-Heron addresses racism, police brutality, addiction and entrenched social injustice. But this excerpt sums up what really burned his ass:

“The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions…

"The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle as Julia.

"The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

"The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

"The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother."

Damn – that is more prescient than I ever imagined.

http://youtu.be/qGaoXAwl9kw

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds named a 2010 best non-fiction title!

Thank you Google Alerts! Without you I would never had known that PopMatters just named the revised and updated edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (University of Minnesota Press) one of the best non-fiction books of 2010.

Sneaky movie cameos by musicians... did you spot them?

I'm not talking about Keith Richard as Captain Jack Sparrow's dad (duh) in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End or Alanis Morrisette as one attitudinal God Almighty in Kevin Smith's Dogma — everyone knew about those long before the movies opened.

And I'm not talking about bands or soloists appearing as themselves in a performance context, so Bauhaus-era Peter Murphy doing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in The Hunger is a no go.

But Iggy Pop in a ladies' dress and sunbonnet, talking all holy while fingering Johnny Depp's soft, pretty hair in Jim Jarmusch's existential western Dead Man? That one took me by surprise. So did Miles Davis is Scrooged; what the.......?

You can see all ten by clicking here.

...and a big hand for Sharktopus

So, you thought Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus reset the exploitation bar... oh, ye of little imagination! Prepare to feel the earth shift beneath your feet again, because Sharktopus is here. I live for press releases that read like Onion parodies.

Less than a year after receiving an honorary Oscar for inundating 1950s movie theaters with teen-friendly monster movies, biker flicks, rock ‘n’ roll showcases and WIP pictures, along with helping launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, James Cameron, Bruce Dern, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone, Monty Hellman, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Bartel, Curtis Hanson, Gale Anne Hurd, Alan Arkush, William Shatner, Penelope Spheeris, Curtis Harrington and Peter Fonda, and barely a month after Alexandre Aja’s 3D remake of Piranha opened, 84-year-old exploitation legend Roger Corman proved he’s still in the game with the too-shameless-to-be-believed Sharktopus.

Yes, the hybrid-horror effort, which follows in the drag marks of such recent Corman-produced projects as Dinoshark, Supergator and Dinoshark vs. Supergator debuted on the SyFy channel, but that’s the name of the game these days: The age of theatrical openings for, say, a mutant rapist fishmen movie like 1980’s Humanoids from the Deep is long gone.

But the likes of Sharktopus keep up-and-comers and downward dogs (I leave it to you to fill in the names) in mortgage payments and help feed memories of exploitation pictures past.

And dig that crazy theme song by the Cheetah Whores! Thank you, SyFy and Anchor Bay.

Sharktopus is available on DVD and Blu-ray (like I care) on March 15th… start planning your alcohol-fueled viewing party now.

Memories of horror... good ones!

The horror website Terror Trap recently invited me to contribute a piece about a memorable horror movie viewing experience. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that I chose an Argento movie. But I got a pleasant surprise when the luck of the layout placed me next to Jessica Harper. And she nails who the terror of The Wizard of Oz, namely those damned creepy flying monkeys, with their silly hats, bellhop vests and nasty simian smiles.

Anyway, if you're up for a stroll down sleaze-memory lane, my recollection of seeing Deep Red in one of Times Square's many long gone theaters is here.

Pumpkinhead and Pinhead Sitting in a Tree...

What other explanation can there be for this monstrous gourd except that it's the unholy spawn of Pinhead, dark prince of cenobites, and everyone's favorite demon from the wrong side of the pumpkin patch? Naughty, naughty!

And no wonder it's behind a fence... (Photographed at the Mobilization for Change Community Garden, 107th Street and Columbus Avenue, NYC)

Halloween decor!

I confess: I failed to start planning before there was so much as a nip of frost in the air. My bad.

But for a last minute creation — we're talking an hour from start to finish, and that's with the time it took to hollow out and carve the big pumpkin — it came out pretty well.Of course, it helps that our place is awash in skulls (wooden, ceramic, crystal, plaster, wax... everything but bone, at least when we're talking human), glow-in-the-dark spiders and miscellaneous other cheerfully macabre stuff.

It takes a little pre-planning to do the place up for Christmas, but Halloween is a snap.

Why is my cat reading such filth?

I just retrieved this book from Chip's room (also known as the cardboard box he claimed last year after my husband and I made a whirlwind NYC-Morgantown-NYC trip to collect some stuff  from his childhood home) and would like to know why my cat is creeping around reading purportedly anthropological accounts of pervy sex crimes.

I mean, he's a cat, for God's sake. As those of us who've read Saki's Tobermory know, cats are wise to everything everyone is 

doing all the time, what with their skulking around under beds and behind doors and inside closets. So it's not as though Chip needs to study what folks get up to. And much though I love him, there's a reason Chip has a frat-boy name: He isn't exactly what you'd call a feline intellectual. In fact, he's pretty damned dumb... but he knows about the bishop and the actress.

The necklace with a "Dum Dum Dum Dum" soundtrack...

"The jeweler Eddie Borgo," writes the New York Times (Sunday Styles, Septermber 12, 2010, p.3) "based his Horror Collar [left] on the Mayor of Halloween Town in Tim Burton's 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. 'His wild mood swings make his cone head spin around from a happy face to a scary one,' M. Borgo explains. 'It's a figurative representation of a two-faced politician.'"

Yeah, okay, sure. And that has what, exactly, to do with this Jaws necklace?

All rise for Animal House (and that means you, Snooki)

In yet another sign of the times, Animal House's villain-in-residence d Dean Wormer is sounding more reasonable by the minute.

And I can't help but hear an echo of his admonition to Kent "Flounder" Dorfman ("Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.") in New Jersey Judge Damian G. Murray's advice to Jersey Shore's fat, drunk and stupid Snooki Polizzi who was also fined $500 and ordered to perform community service for being blotto (note that I refrained from saying Bluto) and disorderly on a Seaside Heights beach: "Going through life rude, profane, obnoxious and self-indulgent — that's not the way you want to live your life."

Not as pithy, but the point is the same.

Why I Love Werner Herzeg (and his "fights" with Abel Ferrara and Chuck Norris)

I mean, let's face it: Herzog is a nut. Or a mad genius... whatever. However you phrase it he's always been, let's just say, as eccentric as he is talented. And yet these days he sounds like the most reasonable guy in the room.

Astronomy is dirty!

Oh, please: Does this “Weird but True” item from the New York Post sound like a world class prank or what?

"Space geeks have something new to snicker about. Astronomers, including one named John Johnson (above), have discovered planets orbiting a star called Sextanis 24 and have named the planets "Sex B" and "Sex C." 'This new planet pair came in an unexpected package,' said Johnson, of the California Institute of Technology. He apparently said that with a straight face."

But it appears that it’s basically true: It just sounds less smarmy in real science speak, which could the make the plot of a bona fide, hard-core porn movie sound dull.

Stop the presses: Nicolas Cage is bughouse crazy

I have to hand it to Nicolas Cage: His antics have actually made me feel sorry for Joel Schumacher. I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for Schumacher, whose lengthy career defines the word "uneven." Yes, I have a soft spot for The Lost Boys. I like Tigerland and Phone Booth, and I confess to loving 8mm for many, many reasons, none of them good: I could put it on right now and fast forward to Peter Stormare's scenes as demonic pornographer Dino Velvet. (An aside: I always thought his name was pronounced store-mar-ee, until I heard him introduce himself in a behind-the-scenes segment on the DVD of a piece of crap called Insanitarium and he said it Store-mere.)

The story so far is that Cage (the star of 8mm, as it happens) signed on to Schumacher's Louisiana-set thriller Trespass, about a husband and wife kidnapped by lowlife thieves, in the role of the husband (Kidman was cast as the wife).  Then Cage decided he'd rather play the head lowlife. Then, after being recast, he did a vanishing act -- two weeks before the movie's start date -- prompting a flurry of articles about the frantic search for a replacement. And now it appears that he's come back, but wants to return to his original role.

Yeah, I'd really look forward to working with that guy, especially since he officially stopped acting after Leaving Las Vegas. I mean it's one thing to show up, do your schtick and collect a paycheck. It's another to show up, do your schtick and collect a paycheck after putting the rest of the cast and crew through the tortures of the damned. Sean Penn may be a pain in the ass, but no one has ever said he was unreliable or gave less than his best, which has been consistently pretty damned good for going on 30 years. The bast anyone seems to be able to do with Cage is put him in roles as crazy as he is and hope the result has train-wreck appeal.

Argento posters, stripped to the essentials

So, apparently there’s this fad among artists and designers for creating elegantly stripped-down posters for well-known films -- Google “minimalist movie posters” and see for yourself.

An Italian designer/photographer named Federico Mauro took it upon himself to do designs for the entire Argento canon. See them here.

Overall I think they’re very cool, and no Argento fan will have to read the title copy to match these elegantly unadorned images to the appropriate film.

And I have to say that I’m amused by the way Mauro appropriated the knife design used on early Giallo posters (itself appropriated from the Italian cover of Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra) and assigned it to The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.

Clouds and Kitties: Reviews

My reviews of Cats vs. Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Charlie St. Cloud and are online now and, well, what is there to say?

Cats vs. Dogs is a typical Hollywood's kid pic: Noisy, coarse and pretty stupid. But the credits sequence is a stunner: Read more here — Cats vs. Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. The Zac Efron showcase Charlie St. Cloud is the answer to a dreamy teenage girl's dream: For everyone else — especially anyone who's seen both The Sixth Sense and the Swedish film The Invisible — it's a mopey slog.

Predators on the prowl, sparkly vampires in love and zombies -- new reviews!

If I've said it once, I've said it often enough that my nearest and dearest don't want to hear another word: I like my vampires nasty and/or dangerously sexy (which is why I'm totally hooked on True Blood... but more on that another time), so the tween-friendly swooning and moping of the Twilight series leaves me cold. None the less, when I reviewed Twilight I effectively signed myself up for the whole series, hence my review of Twilight: Eclipse.

I loved [REC], and while [REC] 2 suffers the curse of the sequel, I had a damned good time watching it. The same can't be said for Predators — after an hour of watching sundry humans run through some alien jungle, all I could think was, "There's no way that sniper gal wouldn't have pulled her hair into a pony tail rather than let it hang around her face in fetchingly sweaty tendrils." Thoughts like that are a sure sign you haven't surrendered to the fiction.

And finally, I was pleasantly surprised by the documentary Racing Dreams, about three adolescents pursuing their shared dream of becoming professional NASCAR drivers. It could have been feel good, "triumph of the human spirit" pablum, but it's a much tougher and smarter movie than that.

Superman the musical... Broadway bound?

Back in 1966, just as camp TV series Batman was turning the dark knight into a national joke, the musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman opened on Broadway.

The book was by soon-to-be Academy Award-nominees David Newman and Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde) and the songs by Bye Bye Birdie’s Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; it opened to generally favorable reviews, picked up three Tony nominations (all for members of the cast) and closed after less than four months.

The news that it just might be Broadway-bound again boggles the mind… my mind, anyway, but fair is fair: I — like most people, given that abbreviated run — know the show only from the 1975 TV version, which is so staggeringly awful that it really is, well, staggering.

The TV special has never been available on commercial video or DVD, but like so many other ghastly gems (The Star Wars Holiday Special, anyone?), the bootlegs are out there for those who just have to see it. And, dear reader, I did.

The plot, such as it is, involves the collusion of mad scientist Abner Sedgwick (David Wayne, Batman’s Mad Hatter) and reporter Max Mencken (Kenneth Mars, who sometimes sounds remarkably like Gene Hackman playing Lex Luther) to destroy Superman by undermining his self-confidence, Sedgwick because he wants to rule the world (the better to punish Sweden because he’s never won a Nobel Prize) and Mencken because he’s a jealous schmuck. Plucky girl reporter Lois Lane (Lesley Ann Warren, then just plain Lesley Warren) swoons over Superman (David Wilson) but barely knows his alter ego, Clark Kent, is alive. Clark nurses a crush on Lois, while his comely colleague, Sydney (Loretta Swit) pines for Mencken, who only has eyes for Lois. Sedgwick and Mencken’s plan appears to be succeeding until Superman crosses paths with a couple of wise hippies who think he’s just great because he’s a freak — all the cool people are freaks. Very ‘60s.

Granted, Superman: The Movie (1978) — which Newman and Benton co-wrote along with a host of others, credited and uncredited — but big special effects can distract viewers from a multitude of sins. It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… had none, and I found the songs insipid beyond belief. The comic-bookish sets are hideous and cheap-looking, and the episodic construction (complete with a narrator who hypes the next installment) is straight out of the Batman series which, for the record, I always hated. The script, which tinkers with that of the show (there are, for example, no Chinese acrobats; the original play had five) is full of “timely” allusions, from mobster Malachi Thorne’s solemn “My fellow hoods, let me make one thing perfectly clear… there’s someone we gotta take out” to Mencken’s threat that an errant computer is going to get the 2001 treatment if it doesn’t look out. Not clever. Not funny.

The show was revived in 1992 at the Godspeed Opera Housein Haddam Connecticut, and got a very decent review from the New York Times’ Stephen Holden that apparently impressed no-one. But the Dallas Theater Center’s new production seems to be making an impression, which I suspect is proof that timing is everything — there is, after all, a mega-budget Spider-Man musical lumbering its way to Broadway as I write.

This new version of It’s a Bird… It’ a Plane… reportedly dials down the camp, features several new songs (and eliminates others) and got an extensive overhaul by playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, whose credits lean to the macabre, including a 2009 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Variety’s reviewer liked it, but all I can say is that it would have to be pretty damned fabulous to erase the memory of that excruciating TV special.