#I think this is ray's film maker brain talking

[earlycuntsets]

ray: I like how they have that like uh- they got nasa thing? like what up with that poster of the dude? of the astronaut? how does it make it like principals office it just works it's so funny.

from the making of i'm not okay

[riotatthemovies]

Runaway Nightmare (1982)

My brain hurts gaaahhhhhhhh.

Tubi just added this gem of a fart in a bottle. 

I remember a few years ago the local boys at Laser Blast played this in Toronto and got that sweet hand draw poster for it. Which was later used on the Videonomicon rerelease.  But I missed that screening but I knew what it was.. but I still wasn’t ready when years later I finally watched it.

Directed and edited in dream logic. Which random over dubs to explain a plot that may or may not have been their in the first place. All skills used to tell a simple story of two dorky guys working as simple worm and snail farmers in the dessert get held hostage by an all girl gang who and setting up in the area  to do a big deal and shakedown with mobsters.  But the girls all talk in nonsensical sentences as if the dorky guys were drugged and hallucinated this. One of them may be a vampire but that’s totally not important.  Shots of other actors seem be be in the shadows cause they were obviously filmed later and edited in. Making the intense and confusion reactions of the other actors all seem surreal. But the surreal nature is not a mistake it happens to often to be just bad film making. Its a stressful train ride into a weird grasp of reality as very little happens except to see fear through the eyes of one of the two main men. Making the gang of women all seem alien or insane. Not surprising the movie is written and directed and edited by that same man Mike Cartel. Seems like that kind of indi passion project film maker that loves 70s exploitation but also deep down wishes he was Woody Allen as he cries a little when he masturbates. 

So bizarre. Many gorgeous girls in this gang / cult, who probably could have had good acting careers but many a casting agent would have been scared away if they found this avante garde masterpiece of confusion and self loathing. One or two of the girls got some more roles, but not many. They are an interest collection of half written characters I would have been interested in seeing them in something else. But this was pretty interesting in its own damn weird way.

 See it just to believe it in a way like Science Craze, yet I feel Science Craze knew more how ridiculous it was then this film. I feel Mike Cartel thought this was high art... and I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying “Wow dude, what is going on and why you all so fucking weird?” Twists and turns and double crossses in the end but wait till after the credits for the post credits scene , maybe have a drink before that scene though just so you can take it in a lubed brain. 

For local friends I have to say Cartel looks and sounds a lot like a guy that used to work as Suspect the old horror themed video store in Toronto, you guys know the guy I mean without me saying it. Funny to me. 

Basically imagine a crime thriller but done by a high school play beatnik that would make a short play by smashing a cell phone on stage while wearing a beret and shout “HISTORY!” then say le fin. 

Available on Blu Ray from Vinegar Syndrome I believe. 

 Not enough worms in this movie as well ha ha ha... fuck i think I lost my brain. 

[luckylq12-blog]

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[thedeaditeslayer]

Josh Becker interview: Thriving, surviving and doing it his way.

Here’s yet another interview from 1428 Elm except with Josh Becker. You can support the Evil Dead/Michigan Mafia alumni by giving his latest film Morning, Noon & Night a look. You can read the interview at the link above or attached below.

Josh Becker is a talented writer and director whose film school was the Super 8 shorts that he made with pals, Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell and Scott Spiegel while growing up in Detroit. Known for quirky films like Lunatics: A Love Story and his ode to Hitchcock and film noir, Running Time, he is a maverick with a unique voice in a cookie cutter Hollywood.

Josh Becker is an independent filmmaker who honed his craft writing and directing majority of the Super 8 shorts featuring Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, Rob Tapert and Scott Spiegel. Known for his candor and his innovative approach to moviemaking, he is a modern-day storyteller.

Currently, in post-production on his western, Warpath, (which coincidentally sparked a murder investigation but more on that later) we were fortunate enough that the director was able to take some time out of his busy schedule to chat with us.

So, without further ado, here is our interview.

The Interview

Birth of a Maverick

1428 Elm: When you were growing up in Detroit, did you always want to be a director? Was that what you originally set out to do?

Josh Becker:  When I was a young kid, I first wanted to be an actor.  Then, when I came to realize there was such a thing as a director, perhaps when I was 9 or 10, I switched goals.

1428 Elm: Everyone knows how Sam and Bruce met initially. How did you become a part of the group?

JB:  My family moved to Franklin in 1968 and the Raimi family moved in around the block from us a few months later.  I immediately became best friends with Ivan Raimi, Sam’s older brother, then soon became friends with the whole family.  At that point I was in 4th grade and Sam was in 3rd grade. Then, when I started junior high (now called middle school), the lockers were alphabetical and about five lockers down from me was Bruce Campbell.  We became buddies and were both in the drama club and in a play together. That’s where we met Scott Spiegel.  Then, the next year, Sam started junior high and became friends with Scott and Bruce and that’s when we all started making Super-8 movies together.

1428 Elm: You cut your teeth as a director on the Super 8 shorts. What was your most memorable shoot?

JB:  The many various slapstick comedies, like: “The Blind Waiter” and “Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter” were all fun to make, but my epic was “Stryker’s War,” which I spent $5,000 making.  That was my biggest, and most memorable Super-8.

The Lunatic Is on the Grass

1428 Elm:  Umbrella Entertainment recently released Lunatics: A Love Story. I feel this is one of your underrated gems. Very trippy. What was the inspiration for this movie? How did Bruce become involved as a producer?

JB:  The inspiration was my desperate need to make another movie and make some money.  I got the idea from listening to Pink Floyd, and when they sang, “The lunatic is on the grass,” I thought, “Hey, no one has yet used “lunatic” as a title. I then dreamed up a story to go with it and pitched it to Sam and Rob. They liked it and optioned it.  After a year of development (meaning 14 rewrites), they hired Bruce to produce the film.

1428 Elm:  Running Time is another terrific film of yours. Everyone knows about the “single take” like Hitchcock’s Rope. Tell us something that isn’t common knowledge about the film.

JB:  It’s nearly ready to come out on Blu-Ray from Synapse Films. I wrote an essay about it that’s in my book “Rushes” that explains everything.  It was shot on film so there’s a hidden cut every five minutes.  I think it turned out pretty well and I know Bruce likes it a lot.

1428 Elm: For those of us that like the 50’s style B-movie sci-fi thrillers, Alien Apocalypse is a great deal of fun. Do you remember your pitch to the SyFy Channel?

JB:  I didn’t pitch it to SyFy.  Bruce and I were working with a now long-defunct company who pitched SyFy on making any movies with Bruce, and they said “send us some scripts.”  I dug out “Alien Apocalypse” (which was 14 years old) and Bruce dug out “The Man with the Screaming Brain” (which was 16 years old) then at some point not too long later we were in Bulgaria making both films.  I never talked to SyFy at all about it.

“Everybody’s Gotta Choose Their Own Poison”

1428 Elm:  Morning, Noon & Night is getting a special showing in Royal Oak, MI on June 6. This is a darkly comedic take on addictions which relies on actually telling a story which isn’t something filmmakers do anymore. Can you see Hollywood ever getting back to doing that and where can our readers view this film?

JB:  “Morning, Noon & Night” is available right now on Amazon — and will soon be on many other platforms, too. I can’t see the future, but I can’t imagine Hollywood correcting itself any time soon.  It’s a thousand times easier to do sequels and remakes then to come up with a good story that everybody agrees on.  I think the entire Hollywood system is broken.

1428 Elm:  Let’s talk about your latest production, Warpath. Something unusual happened when you were doing pick-ups. Gerry Kissell told me about it. Can you tell our readers the story because it sounds like an incident that would be on the ID Channel?

JB:  Well, “Warpath,” which will probably be fully done by July, just had its final pick-up shoot a few days ago where we got the few missing shots we still needed.  As we were shooting in the woods not far from my house, folks in the cast and the crew kept mentioning a funky odor. Finally, someone pushed back a pile of branches and underneath was a decomposed human body. Suddenly, my set became a crime scene.  The police showed up and we all had to fill out witness reports.  Then me and the co-producer quickly found a new location, hustled everybody and everything over there and got all of the remaining shots.

1428 Elm: Wow. That’s crazy!

JB: That pile of branches is in the foreground and background of a couple of shots, so it will be in the film.

**An interesting footnote to add regarding this unfortunate turn of events, one of the cast members, Joaquin Guerrero is an active duty K-9 officer. He stepped in and took charge of the situation before local law enforcement arrived. According to the actor/officer:

“My main concern was preserving the scene and the well-being of the crew, because of the traumatic effect it may have on them afterwards.”

Riding Off into the Sunset

1428 Elm:  You have an impressive cast, horror vets Thom Matthews and Ted Raimi. The film synopsis sounds like a fresh take on The Searchers. Are you a fan of Westerns? This feels like a new subject for you to tackle.

JB:  I’ve always been a fan of westerns.  I was the film critic for True West Magazine just a few years ago. “Warpath” certainly owes something to “The Searchers,” although in this case it’s a wife out looking for her husband, with the aid of a tough bounty hunter played by Thom. I’ve always wanted to make a western and now I have.  I think it turned well, and the lead, Sasha Higgins, is terrific. Thom has aged into the perfect Marlboro man and plays it wonderfully.

1428 Elm: Do you have any upcoming projects in the pipeline? Anything you can talk about?

JB: As for the future, me and my cohorts at Panoramic Pictures — one of whom is Gary Jones, maker of such cult classics as “Mosquito” and “Spiders” — are gearing up to make my JFK script that was previously called “Head Shot” but has been retitled to “I Killed Kennedy.” It’s the account of how the assassination really came down and the professional hit men who were brought in from France by the mafia who actually did the shooting, as well as how Oswald got set up, then murdered. Th-th-that’s all, folks.

Thanks so much to Josh Becker for speaking with us. We look forward to seeing Warpath.

[thisguyatthemovies]

Hungry, hungry sharks

Title: “The Meg”

Release date: Was in theaters Aug. 10, 2018; released on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov. 13, 2018

Starring: Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Winston Chao, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Jessica McNamee, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Robert Taylor, Cliff Curtis, Sophia Shuya Cai, Masi Oka

Directed by: Jon Turteltaub

Run time: 1 hour, 54 minutes

Rated: PG-13

What it’s about: A team of oceanographers sent below the previously presumed deepest point of the Pacific discovers a megalodon – a giant shark thought to be extinct millions of years ago – that soon wreaks havoc when it makes its way to the ocean’s surface.

How I saw it: Let’s as quickly as possible get the fundamental comparisons out of the way. Yes, like “Jaws,” “The Meg” is a summertime movie about a gigantic killer shark. Both films are about man (or in the case of “The Meg,” man and woman) against beast. Both movies naturally spend a lot of time on and in the water.

But you, “The Meg,” are no “Jaws.”

Sure, “The Meg” wants to remind you of “Jaws,” the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie that often is credited with creating the summer blockbuster genre. Certain moments in the newer film appear to be an homage to a movie that spawned many imitators. The makers of “The Meg” undoubtedly relished their film even being mentioned in the same breath as “Jaws.” It certainly didn’t hurt at the box office.

But here’s a partial list of all the ways the new one doesn’t measure up to the classic:

*Once it settles in and heads out to the water, “Jaws” is the story of three men (eventually reduced to two) in search of a largely (to that point) unseen shark. “The Meg” gets everyone involved. And I mean everyone. And I mean everyone that represents a cliché. Or just dramatic device.

Action movie go-to guy Jason Statham is a diver sent to rescue a team sent to below the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He’s a doesn’t-play-by-the-rules guy who is an alcoholic and possibly crazy (we are often reminded of this) and is carrying around a bunch of regrets. And he must be talked into leading the rescue effort, insisting he would never go back into the water. Of course. And – wouldn’t you know it? – his ex-wife is among the stranded oceanographers. Rainn Wilson, for some reason, plays a billionaire financing research of the bottom of the Pacific. He’s no ordinary billionaire, though, and we know this because he wears running shoes and a ballcap, and he gets to say such lines as “Hell yeah.” There’s a little girl who seems to be running free largely unsupervised in an underwater ocean observation facility and is clearly here to remind us this is supposed to be emotional stuff. Model-turned-actress Ruby Rose supposedly is the brains behind the operation, and because she has lots of tattoos and a snarl, we know she’s the edgy one. There are many more one-dimensional characters, so many that, despite director Jon Turteltaub’s best efforts to spread the ball around, most of them just get a line in here and there and easily could have not existed.

*”Jaws,” at least in the early going, has a morality conundrum. The mayor of Amity Island wants to keep the beaches open to make money despite the presence of a killer shark. The police chief, with his own family in danger, wants to err on the side of safety. There is little of that in “The Meg,” save for one line that the head of the ocean observation facility utters about halfway through, something about humans observing nature and then destroying it. If you think that means “The Meg” is more fun than “Jaws,” think again. “The Meg” is kind of fun, but largely unintentionally. “The Meg” should have been really fun. But it takes itself too seriously, and it just isn’t good enough for anyone to take seriously.

*When he made “Jaws,” Spielberg did it the old-fashioned way – without CGI. His shark was mechanical, and yet somehow it seemed more like a real shark than the megalodon (make that megalodons; there’s two of them, as it turns out). In a couple of places, the meg is flat-out scary. And way bigger than the shark in “Jaws.” The great white in “Jaws” would be an appetizer for the meg. But at other moments the CGI in “The Meg” is ridiculous, including the climatic scene. Perhaps part of the issue is this. Like Alfred Hitchcock, Spielberg seemed to understand that we are more afraid of what we can’t see than what we can. The meg makes its first appearance early in “The Meg,” and we see a lot of it. And that familiarity seems to reduce the impact of a beast that should have been scaring the crap out of us.

*”Jaws” includes a few funny moments, but just enough to remind us that, despite people being shredded by a shark, it is intended to be good summer fun. “The Meg,” despite its heavy-handedness (a lot of it thanks to Statham) and a couple of side dramas (including that old standby, the seemingly unloving father), reduces most of its characters to the type of humor typical of action movies. That is, quick lines that the least discerning of moviegoers might find funny before they are quickly forgotten. And Wilson, here as the center of the comic relief, is far more annoying than hilarious. And he’s annoying about 10 seconds after his introduction.

“The Meg” was never going to be “Jaws,” but it could have gone for all-out cheesiness and would have been better for it. Or could have cut out one-third of the cast (instead of them being devoured one at a time by the meg) and would have been better for it. Or it could have sidestepped much of the forced drama and been better for it. Or found a way to work around the clichés (a doctor doesn’t like Statham’s character at first, but – surprise! – he grows to admire him, and they have a moment). It could have been a movie so bad that it was good, but instead it settled for just bad enough that it’s just not very good.

My score: 27 out of 100

Should you see it? It’s your money and time.

[mst3kproject]

1004: Future War

There are movies that over-reach themselves, and then there's Future War.

Some opening titles tell us that time-travelling cyborgs occasionally drop in to our planet to harvest humans as slaves (because the cyborgs have no thumbs) and dinosaurs as trackers (because somebody wanted dinosaurs in their movie).  One slave has escaped to Earth, where he successfully fights off the cyborgs and dinosaurs only to be ignominiously run down by a nun in a station wagon.  She takes him to a halfway house to recover, but the dinosaurs follow them there, and Sister Anne is forced to call on her gang connections to protect her new friend from the extraterrestrial manhunters.

My god, it's like a twelve-year-old rented Jurassic Park and The Terminator in the same evening, watched them while drinking his parents' liquor, and decided to make a movie. Somebody really should have objected that you can't film a sci-fi epic with cyborgs and dinosaurs when all you have is seventeen dollars and a video camera.  When a movie can't possibly realize its ambitions but tries anyway, I often find that entertaining in itself, but Future War aims just a little too high, and falls just a little too short.  It passes 'bad', speeds right through 'so bad it's good', and enters the wasteland beyond.

Future War does at least tell us upfront what it's about: its theme is faith.  Sister Anne's story is basically a tale of redemption.  She has made mistakes that she cannot undo: her murdered friend can never come back, and her criminal record will follow her throughout her life.  She has turned to the church because God is supposed to be infinitely forgiving – but her real problem is that she cannot forgive herself. She therefore finds herself asking all the old questions about the Christian universe.  How can God be good when the world is such a horrible place?  How can rape and murder, war and starvation, be part of a loving deity's plan?  When we meet her, she is on the verge of rejecting the church altogether, as it has not brought her the peace she sought.

Then she meets the escaped slave, whom the credits simply call Runaway. He is seeking not redemption, but freedom, to make his own choices and use his own abilities to do what he wants.  Those abilities are meager, limited to what any human being could learn to do with his or her body, but the point is that he gets to choose how to direct them.  He has latched on to one line from the Bible as his inspiration: John 15:13, greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends; he wants to do things out of love, not because he's following orders.  Through him, Anne comes to understand that her religious devotion should not be about whether she understands why the world is the way it is (Isaiah 55:8) or about whether she can forgive herself for her past – it's about what she can do for others, to try to make this imperfect world a little better.  She is then able to turn the most shameful parts of her past, her connections with the gangs and drug lords, into a weapon to fight the invaders.

This actually sounds like a fairly powerful arc for a piece of fiction.  It's also more feminist than it may at first appear. Sister Anne's past, her current crisis, and her decisions are all her own, and the other characters repeatedly emphasize this.  The men at the halfway house helped her at her lowest, but they tell her they cannot choose her future for her.  Runaway comes into her life not with solutions to her problems, but as part of a series of events that help her understand how her approach to those problems has been flawed.  He is an inspiration to her search for answers, rather than an answer in himself.  The movie even passes the Bechdel Test, as Sister Anne and her mother superior talk about her crisis of faith.

It's really pretty astonishing to realize that Future War, of all things, contains the seeds of a good movie.  A film about an agnostic nun and an escaped slave helping each other find themselves sounds like Oscar bait. It just needs the right writers. Too bad Future War has only David Huey and Dom Magwali.  They're the ones credited for coming up with the story and writing the script, so they're the ones to blame for deciding this story about faith, redemption, and good works needed cyborgs and dinosaurs in it.

That was really not a good decision.  I'm not saying a movie with cyborgs and dinosaurs couldn't have been an entertaining or even meaningful movie in the right hands, but this movie was absolutely ruined by them, because the most obvious feature of Future War is how desperately cheap it is.  They had so little money they filmed the entire thing on a single camera.  How do I know that?  Well, there's that scene in which we see a guy who's supposed to be filming a news report.  If they'd had a second camera on the set, they surely would have used it as a prop in this shot, but they didn't.  They taped a spare lens to a cardboard box and pretended that was a camera.  It's kind of hilarious, except it's also kind of sad.  You laugh as you cry tears of pity for these poor souls.  With no budget for a second camera, how were they ever going to manage halfway-convincing cyborgs and dinosaurs?  The answer, of course, is that they didn't.

Special effects in a movie don't have to be perfect.  Suspension of disbelief is more powerful than I think Hollywood often gives it credit for, and a special effect with seams around the edges needn't ruin a movie.  Think of Teenagers from Outer Space and its focusing disintegrator ray.  The doctor's office skeleton they use to represent the victims doesn't look real for a moment but it's good enough. It tells you what happened and it isn't so terrible that you dwell on it at the expense of the story.  Effects can even get worse than that and still make the movie entertaining – Teenagers from Outer Space also had a lobster for its monster, but that was so stupid it was fun in its own right.

The dinosaurs in Future War fall yet further down the suck scale.  They're too crappy to add anything to the movie. Even as a joke, they quickly wear thin.  Several shots are literally a hand puppet being waved in front of the camera – the, uh, 'film-makers', I guess, put it closer than the actors to make it look bigger, but it never works.  The full-body puppets they use in other scenes are almost kind of okay as long as they aren't moving, but as soon as they're supposed to do anything you realize they're as rubbery and immobile as those animatronic ones you might see at the zoo in the summer.  Their knees don't bend. There's a bit where a dinosaur supposedly falls into a pit, and they literally just pushed the puppet in.  It bounces off the wall on the way down.

The movie can't decide how big the dinosaurs are.  Sometimes they're huge and sometimes they're small enough to fit in your carry-on luggage. Sister Anne's narration does note that they come in various shapes and sizes, but that doesn't work as an explanation when an individual dinosaur appears to change size with the camera angle.  The one that breaks open the halfway house's window seems like it's supposed to be enormous when we're looking from behind it, and about as big as a German shepherd when we're inside the room.

The cyborgs aren't great either.  They look kind of like members of an underfunded 80s metal band, but they're better than the dinosaurs.  A big part of the reason the dinosaurs suck so terribly is that the viewer quickly realizes they aren't even necessary. The cyborgs, okay, sure.  Runaway is supposed to have escaped from time-travelling aliens or maybe humans from the future (the script cannot decide), and the cyborgs could represent either.  The dinosaurs, however, are 'trackers'.  There is absolutely no reason why they needed dinosaurs in this role.  Ordinary dogs, perhaps with a few cardboard contraptions to represent cybernetic enhancements, would have done just fine and been way more believable.

Then again, the dinosaurs also kind of make the movie.  A bad movie about a nun, a runaway slave, and cyborgs from space would just have been a bad movie.  A bad movie about a nun, a runaway slave, cyborgs from space, and dinosaurs crosses some sort of line where people like me (and the Best Brains) sit up and notice.  It goes past “that sounds so bad” into “that sounds so bad I need to see it”.  The result is deeply disappointing but by then it's too late.  Dinosaurs aren't really necessary to this, either, though.  Zombies or ninjas would have the same effect, be way cheaper, and look much better on screen with the budget they had.

What this movie really needed was for somebody to say no. No, you guys.  We can't do this – we don't even have enough money for a second camera, we can't possibly have cyborgs and dinosaurs in this movie.  Can we scale it back a bit?  Apparently nobody involved had the common sense to say that, and as a result, the movie is a dirt-cheap disaster.  Even as an MST3K episode, it's at best sort of amusing... it never really reaches any heights because the movie doesn't offer them any kind of foundation to build on.  It just sucks.

The police captain in Future War is named Captain Polaris, which sounds like a second-string Canadian superhero.  That would have made for a better movie, too.

[movimblog]

After Le Grice: on inciting a new culture and infiltrating institutions A conversation with Malcolm Le Grice, A Coruña, June 6 2019.

Prelude

In May 2016 I was in London, at the BFI, to attend a special evening of performances by Malcolm Le Grice. An event so rare that I asked myself whether that would be my first and last chance to see Le Grice performing his iconic Horror Film 1 (1971). The evening programme also comprised Threshold (1972) and After Leonardo (1973), of which you can watch below eighteen fragments:

Three years later, the curators of (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico proved me wrong by inviting Le Grice (now aged 79) to A Coruña for a retrospective and a master class. The intensity of the retrospective last programme – composed of Castle 1 (1966), Berlin Horse (1970), Threshold and Horror Film 1, all presented in 16mm – moved the audience, some of them broke into tears. After performing Horror Film 1, Le Grice said that it was maybe his last performance of the piece, adding "I'm actually offering it to anyone else who wants to do it. There is a person in New Zealand, a woman, who does it, and I've given her all the materials for it, and she does it occasionally. She also does it with students.". The emotions of that evening are still violently pulsating, and all I can say is: I don't want to believe you, Malcolm. You'll perform again, and we will all be grateful for that.

After his master class at Filmoteca de Galicia, I sat down with him for a short conversation on his first book, academia and more.

* *  *

I would like to start this conversation by engaging with memory. I have with me a copy of your 1977 book Abstract Film and Beyond. Can you tell me something about the time when you were writing this?

Well, it's interesting because I was working on it for at least two years, I think, but mostly the writing was done in six months. But then nearly a year and a half was spent in editing and getting the publication done. Now, goodness, how do I get my brain back to what was going on then? First of all, I wrote the book because there were things which I didn't know. So I had to do real research into the early period of experimental cinema, which was Léger and Man Ray, and even Oskar Fischinger and Hans Richter, all of that. And not just abstract: my understanding of abstract is not the same thing as non-figurative. My understanding of abstract is when you draw out the properties and separate the properties from each other: that's abstraction. If you take the colour from the form, so you got an orange or whatever, and you take the colour away, you've got orange and you've got the form. And those are two abstractions. So, once you've abstracted, instead of putting back orange you could put back green, or blue, or whatever. That, for me, is for example what Matisse does in the Fauves. So, for me abstraction is not just about films with no representation. I took the interpretation that you could take films that had photographic images and they could still be abstract. So, Léger's Ballet mécanique, for example, is abstract.

Then, there was a polemical question as well, although it didn't play so heavily in this. A very important polemic at that time was to establish the British and the European artists in the experimental cinema, when it was completely dominated by the American. Because the Americans had a lot of developed artists, but they also had all the publicity system, they had promotion. You know, I talked about the CIA this morning, but actually, the CIA was promoting artists, as a cultural promotion. It's not true that I was cynical, because actually a lot of people involved in the CIA liked the work, they actually appreciated it. From the politics of American culture it was very important to make an establishment of the European work in a way that could be compared with (and compete with) the American work, so that polemic is in there.

I've always felt that Abstract Film and Beyond was more of an artist book than an academic one – I don't think you like the word academic. I see it as an artist book because the research you were doing, the type of questioning, has the urge of a creator, of someone who wants to understand something, reach a perspective, in order to keep creating. You've also inserted yourself, your artistic practice, in the book: you write, briefly, about your work, one can see reproductions of film strips from Little Dog for Roger and Berlin Horse, and also a picture of you performing Horror Film 1. Because of this aspect of your book, I wonder if you've ever been questioned about research rigour, in an academic context.

Not at all. I mean, there wasn't the same academic establishment then, that there is now. Now, a lot of publication is done in universities to make sure that your research rating is high. And that you could get your money for research. So it's a gain now. When I wrote this I didn't think of it being in the university at all, for me it was in the public domain, it wasn't for the university. In fact, there really wasn't any experimental film in the British universities at all, at that time. Even the art colleges, many of them didn't even offer degrees, they didn't offer a Bachelor of Arts or a Master of Arts, a lot of the art colleges simply offered diplomas, so there was no establishment of a research culture within the universities. That changed, and I was part of the change, because when I became Dean of Faculty [

at Harrow College in 1984, Ed.

] and then Head of Research [

at Central Saint Martins in 1997, Ed.

] it was at a time when first of all we established that art could be a subject for a bachelor's degree, that it could have master's degrees and that it could have doctorates. That didn't exist. By the nineties we were establishing all of that, the BAs earlier, and I was part of this because the money for teaching was going down and down, so the only way of making up the difference of the money in the university context, was to build your research funding. I got very involved, I was on the national committee for how to define research in the arts, and that committee then decided on the equivalences for research. After that, the universities that had art departments were able to apply to the government for research funding. Of course that made a big difference to the teachers mainly, because the research money went to the teachers for their research activity. Some of it went to students for PhDs, but the main amount was going to the teachers. So that didn't exist at the time this book was written. It was very naïve and very undeveloped. The awareness, the culture, was very undeveloped for experimental cinema and there was a sort of still uncertainty. The production money came from the British Film Institute or the Arts Council. The British Film Institute didn't have any understanding of experimental film at all, they brought me on to the committee of the production board of the British Film Institute [

from 1971 to 1975, Ed.

] and then I was the chair of the committee at the Arts Council, for artists' film and video [

from 1986 to 1990, Ed.

]. In that way, it was all about building up a basis for the culture.

You were creating tools for the future generations.

That's right, I don't think I'm making this up in retrospect. What I realised was that we needed a culture for this. We needed something more than individual artists trying to make films. We needed a culture. And obviously the focus for that culture, to start with, was the Arts Laboratory. It was more important than people realise. The Arts Laboratory in Drury Lane was the centre of counter-culture. But there was also the group who started the London Film-Makers' Co-op, they were all really cinéastes, not filmmakers, as far as I can recall, the only filmmaker in that group was Stephen Dwoskin. He was the only one, all the rest were all saying "Wouldn't it be nice if we had a film culture?". The London Film-Makers' Co-op was modelled completely on the New York's Film-Makers' Cooperative, but all the production idea came not from there, but from the Arts Laboratory.

In regard to building an experimental film culture, can you tell me more about the days at the Arts Laboratory?

It was me and David Curtis, we talked a lot about how to encourage and stimulate filmmaking, and David was very important in this. He dug up other artists and put on performances and various things in the Arts Lab. He was a very significant figure really, and he set a cinema up and really promoted experimental film. He and I were a lot together, it was he and I who really had the idea of a filmmakers' workshop. Then, he was always very supportive and he was working at the Arts Council as well. We were infiltrators.

You were injecting something new into the country's institutions - that were still not understanding what you were doing. Were you fully aware of the strategic possibilities given by this chance to infiltrate institutions like the BFI and the Arts Council?

There's something strange about the English: if somebody opposes, then what they try to do is not stop it but try to include it. I was a big, big critic, of the British Film Institute in relationship to contemporary and experimental cinema, so what did they do? They asked me to join the committee. So I'm infiltrating, and of course I don't say "Oh no, I'm not going to go in that committee". It's how the British at that time worked.

I would like to go back to Abstract Film and Beyond. Speaking in terms of research, of conceptual understanding: when you finished the book, do you recall of achieving something that you needed for your artistic practice?

The research and the thinking increased the intellectual content, the understanding, of what was going on. It is more analytical than it is theoretical, analysing what was going on in experimental film. I'm more of an analyst than I am a theorist. Peter Gidal is more of a theorist, I am a theorist, but mostly I'm looking at things and see how does this work, what's going on with it, what's actually happening.

Do you think that this analytical modus operandi is also reflected in your films?

I don't know, I think that's different. Again, Peter Gidal and I we've talked a lot over the years. One of the things I think we both agreed with is that none of us begin our work from theory, we always prefer a more spontaneous practice. Virtually none of the films that I made began from a theoretical position. The theory came as an analysis afterwards, by including what actually is now a very important essay, which is the Real time/space essay1. But Real time/space did not lead the work, the work led the concept. And, certainly for my part, I've always trusted an unconscious instinct as a filmmaker. Writing the book gave a stronger rationale to the work, but it didn't actually change the work. I would go and do things like Little Dog for Roger for example: you could not begin that from theory, there's no way. When I look at it, I now know that there's a common set of aesthetic notions that come from Little Dog for Roger, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein's Rohfilm and George Landow's Film in which there appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles etc. When I made Little Dog for Roger I was not thinking of Rohfilm, I was not thinking about George Landow, I was making Little Dog for Roger, and I was making it in the same way I would make a painting. Only when I looked at it I would think "What's happening here? What's the difference between this and other non-materialist film practices?". It's still pretty much true that a lot of my filmmaking and videomaking comes out from the unconscious. I may have strategies of various sorts but [he pauses to think, Ed.]. There were a few films, the long feature-length films, which are Emily, Finnegans Chin and Black Bird Descending2, which address issues around narrative - they're works with a certain amount of theory-preceding-the-work, which was a bad thing. Fairly quickly after making them I said to myself: you're on the wrong track. You know, it was a big discussion going on at that time around deconstruction, narrative and feminism, with Laura Mulvey, who was a great friend of mine. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen shot one of their films in my kitchen.

The kitchen in Riddles of the Sphinx?

It's my kitchen in Harrow. There was a lot of that kind of cross-discussion and influence. And I was influenced by the debate about feminism, but in particular about the semiotics of cinema. But that was the only time, I think, in my filmmaking, where the theoretical got into the films ahead of the making. Also partly because I got a lot of money for those from Channel 4 and from the Arts Council, and you don't take as many risks, if you're working with a big budget. With a big budget you got a cameraman and a crew. I've looked at them recently, and they're not as bad as I think. But I realised that my earlier work was more in the right direction. So I then went back. That's when I started making short videos. I went back to saying "OK, I'm going to make short films, I'm going to respond to the material, I'm not going to take on that kind of wrong ambition".

1Malcolm Le Grice, Real time/space, Art and Artists, December 1972, pp 39-43.

2Emily - Third Party Speculation (1979), Finnegans Chin - Temporal Economy (1981) and Black Bird Descending: Tense Alignment (1977).

[irishmuseumofmodernart]

I was invited by IMMA to respond to their exhibition, As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics, and to work with Alice Butler and Daniel Fitzpatrick of AEMI to develop a screening for the IFI in conjunction with IMMA’s Talks and Public Programmes. The resulting programme – Out of Body – features films by Maya Deren, Mairéad McClean, Jordan Baseman, Paul Sharits, and John Smith, alongside a selection of my own work. These films consider the psychic and physical spaces of body and landscape; they explore automatic, subliminal and unconscious states of mind. Multiple viewpoints, strobing, and repetition draw attention to our perceptual senses, and to the very act of looking, and of being observed.  Out of Body took place at the IFI on Tuesday 25 July 2017 and you can listen back to the introduction and discussion here.

I was commissioned to write a text to capture this curatorial process, my thinking behind the selection and my relationship with IMMA.

Medium Stanislava P, 13 June 1913 From Phenomena of Materialisation, A Contribution To The Investigation of Mediumistic Telepastics, Baron von von Schrenck Notzing, 1923

The end is the beginning is

  Three years before the turn of the 21st century, and sparked by a television documentary, I became captivated by the activities of the séance room, ideas about the psychic medium as producer of image (ectoplasmic emanations etc.) and the role of the camera within the séance room as observer and document maker. The collision of the birth of modern spiritualism (1848) and the popularisation of photography fascinates me. It’s now twenty years since I first picked up a video camera and began using the fields of psychical research and the narratives of the paranormal, as my subject matter. My films have investigated materialisation mediums, ectoplasm, trance, hysteria, table tilting, clairvoyance and telepathy.

While I frequently present experimental and artist film to my students, this invitation has afforded the opportunity to screen films within a cinema setting and to work with AEMI and IFI to access work in a range of formats. I knew early on that I wanted to include Maya Deren’s Witch’s Cradle and John Smith’s Om, and these works became a starting point for our conversations.

Psychic Edit, 2008, Susan MacWilliam Courtesy of Susan MacWilliam and CONNERSMITH

We discussed which of my films to include and agreed firstly on Psychic Edit. Out of Body commences with this 14 second looping film as the audience enters the auditorium. The subject of Psychic Edit is the Irish medium Eileen J. Garrett. It features family movie footage and an image of Garrett’s smile. Garrett is said to have possessed a charisma that would warm any room she entered. Psychic Edit sets out to lodge images of this magnetic personality in the viewer’s mind. My friendship with Eileen Garrett’s family has opened many doors for me, and she has become the ‘glue’ that connects much of my work.

Webs, strings and interconnectedness

I first encountered Maya Deren’s films in 1999 when living in New York during my residency at PS1 Center for Contemporary Art. At the time, having seen very little artist film I was working within a limited context of knowledge. In New York I saw Nam June Paik’s retrospective at the Guggenheim, Martha Rosler’s solo show at the New Museum, and film and video programmes, curated by Chrissie Iles at the Whitney, that included Maya Deren, Yvonne Rainer, Gary Hill, and Bruce Nauman. Deren’s interest in consciousness and altered states resonated with me.

Left: Witch’s Cradle, 1943, Maya Deren. Courtesy of LUX, London | Right: The Last Person, 1998, Susan MacWilliam. Courtesy of Susan MacWilliam and CONNERSMITH

Shot in Peggy Guggenheim‘s The Art of This Century gallery, Deren’s Witch’s Cradle features as the central protagonist a woman, Ann Matta Clark, and a male figure, Marcel Duchamp. The landscape they occupy is littered with objects, sculptures and string. The female figure moves through the space as if trying to make sense of, or control the strange forms. Objects move as if by their own accord, by magic or via unseen forces; a string moves up Duchamp’s leg and across the nape of his neck. The words ‘the end is the beginning is’ encircle a pentagram marked on the woman’s forehead. I see strong visual parallels between Deren’s film and my film, The Last Person, which depicts the phenomena of the séance room.

Higher Beings Command, 1968, Sigmar Polke Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum (C) Estate of Sigmar Polke / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany. http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/348394

Higher Beings Command

Sigmar Polke’s Higher Beings Command, a series of 14 lithographs exhibited in As Above, So Below, depicts both Polke and various inanimate objects taking on the form of other things. I find them peculiar and intriguing in a similar way I do the spirit photographs I’ve worked with in my own research. Higher Beings Command, Witch’s Cradle and The Last Person share sculptural and performative connections.

Psychic and psychedelic

Eileen Garrett is often referred to as the world’s most famous psychic medium. She was deeply inquisitive and supported many in the fields of parapsychology, literature and the arts. She was supportive of Maya Deren and her interests in the spiritual and the occult. Deren’s essay, Religion and Magic, is published in Garrett’s Tomorrow magazine (Haiti issue, Autumn 1954). Aldous Huxley was amongst Garrett’s eclectic circle of friends, and with him she experimented with LSD to see if it might enhance her psychic abilities.

Following our initial conversation Alice, Daniel and myself corresponded via email. I proposed a number of works and Daniel suggested Paul Sharits’ Ray Gun Virus. Alice and Daniel worked on the running order, and Alice was instrumental in the logistics of accessing screening copies from LUX, London.

Ray Gun Virus, 1966, Paul Sharits. Courtesy of LUX, London

Ray Gun Virus is a structural flicker film. MOMA, said of it, “…with films like RGV, LSD may become obsolete.” In the 1950s at one of Eileen Garrett’s Parapsychology Foundation conferences, the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond drew comparison between mediumistic experiences and those of patients under the influence of LSD. In the early 1960s, Brion Gysin, with Ian Sommerville, built the Dreamachine, a rotating cylinder with cut outs and a light bulb inside. Placed on a turntable and spinning at 78rpm it is viewed with the eyes closed. The light flickers at a similar frequency to Alpha brain waves. Gysin was fascinated in consciousness and perception and Eileen Garrett was said to have been of great influence upon him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_film https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs with the Dreamachine. Photograph by Charles Gatewood

Faint, 1999, Susan MacWilliam Courtesy of Susan MacWilliam and CONNERSMITH

Out of body

My first connection with IMMA was when I was there as artist in residence in 1998. Shot in the grounds and interiors of IMMA, Faint, explores ideas about trance, mesmerism and hysteria. When Faint was exhibited recently at the Swedenborg Film Festival, London, I had the sensation while watching it, that the girl in the film (myself 19 years earlier) could be my niece, and myself her aunt. This feeling of familiarity yet disconnect gave me a peculiar feeling of being ‘out of body’. Faint shares with Mairéad McClean’s State of Mind remix #4 the image of a female figure in the landscape. State of Mind explores whether experiences carried in our memory can come back to haunt us. A sense of anxiety is conjured through its use of imagery and sound.

State of Mind remix #4, 2005, Mairéad McClean Courtesy of Mairead McClean

Water, mist, smoke and ectoplasm

Landscape is concealed and revealed in Mountain Mist. The steam is echoed by the ectoplasm in The Last Person, by the wisps of smoke in Om, and the billowing smoke in State of Mind. Jordan Baseman’s intensely silent and intensely visual The Black Sea is visceral and bodily; it feels like a breathing organ. Baseman processes his 16mm film in buckets; the images of the sea materialising with the ebb and flow of the chemicals. The material physicality of this low-tech process is worn into the surface of the film. Baseman uses a fixed camera position as does Steve McQueen, whose Running Thunder, is presented at IMMA. In Running Thunder the dead horse no longer breathes, while the grass around it moves gently in the air.

  The Black Sea, Jordan Baseman, 2010/2013, UK|USA, 3 minutes. Courtesy of Jordan Baseman and Matt’s Gallery.

John Smith’s Om brings to mind the saturated photographs of Kenneth Anger at IMMA. Om plays with our sense of perception. It forces us to think about how we read an image, how we consider belief systems, and how we make judgments. Like magic, can we really trust our eyes and ears?

Left: Om, 1986, John Smith. Courtesy of John Smith and LUX, London | Right: Lileth (Marianne Faithful), 1970-71, C-Print Kenneth Anger. © Kenneth Anger Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers

The end is the beginning is

The screening ends with The Last Person. For me this is where it all began. Made in 1998, this was my first film. It features me reconstructing the phenomena of the séance room and acting as the medium Helen Duncan, who in 1944 was the last person imprisoned under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735. In 1998 it screened in First Cut, at the IFI (IFC), and the following year was nominated for the IMMA Glen Dimplex Artists Award. The circle has turned a full revolution as The Last Person returns to the IFI through an invitation from IMMA.

Left: The Last Person, 1998, Susan MacWilliam. Courtesy of Susan MacWilliam | Right: Witch’s Cradle, 1943, Maya Deren. Courtesy of LUX, London

Out of Body – List of Films 

Psychic Edit, Susan MacWilliam, 2008, Ireland, DCP, 14 seconds looped

Learn More on susanmacwilliam.com

Witch’s Cradle Outtakes, Maya Deren, 1943, U.S.A., Digibeta, 10 minutes

Learn more on lux.org.uk

State of Mind remix #4, Mairéad McClean, 2005, Ireland, DVD, 10 minutes

Learn more on maireadmcclean.com

Faint, Susan MacWilliam, 1999, Ireland, DCP, 4 minutes

Learn more on susanmacwilliam.com

The Black Sea, Jordan Baseman, 2010, U.K-U.S.A., Blu-ray, 3 minutes

Learn more on jordanbaseman.co.uk

Mountain Mist, Susan MacWilliam, 2002, Ireland, DCP, 8 minutes

Learn more on susanmacwilliam.com

Ray Gun Virus, Paul Sharits, 1966, U.S.A., 16mm, 14 minutes

Learn more on lux.org.uk

Om, John Smith, 1988, U.K., 16mm, 4 minutes

Learn more on johnsmithfilms.com

The Last Person, Susan MacWilliam, 1998, Ireland, DCP, 11 minutes

Learn more on susanmacwilliam.com

With thanks to the artists and LUX for providing copies of the films.

Further Information

Upcoming IMMA & AEMI, IFI Programme

IMMA is delighted to continue its collaboration with Aemi Projections, when invited artist Vivienne Dick curates a screening programme to coincide with her show at IMMA. This takes place at the IFI on Tuesday 10 October 2017 more details are available here.

About the Artist

Susan MacWilliam’s touring solo survey exhibition Modern Experiments, which features her films, video installations and sculptures will run at Uillin: West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen from 9th September – 18th October, and at Butler Gallery, Kilkenny from 28th October – 17th December 2017.

Susan MacWilliam. Born in Belfast and currently based between Belfast and Dublin, where she teaches at the National College of Art and Design, Susan MacWilliam has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo shows in New York, Dublin, London, VictoriaB.C. Northampton and Derby. MacWilliam has worked with prominent parapsychologists and psychical research institutions, including poltergeist investigator William G. Roll, the New York family of Irish born medium Eileen Garrett and the Dermo Optical Perception Laboratory of Madame Yvonne Duplessis, Paris. She has worked extensively with historical archives including those of the Parapsychology Foundation, New York; Hamilton Family fonds (spirit photograph archive), University of Manitoba; Parapsychology Laboratory Records, Duke University; and Rhine Research Center, Durham, NC. Learn more about Susan MacWilliam on her website. 

  OUT OF BODY – SUSAN MACWILLIAM I was invited by IMMA to respond to their exhibition, As Above, So Below: Portals, Visions, Spirits & Mystics…

[mst3kproject]

106: The Crawling Hand

A movie in which a guy is brutally attacked while Surfin' Bird plays on the soundtrack.  We can all strike that off our list of Shit We Never Thought We'd See.

As the film opens, astronaut Mel Lockhart (no relation to Gilderoy, but perhaps an ancestor of Brant) hasn't quite made it back to Earth.  He gets blown up before he can complete the trip, but his severed arm somehow survives re-entry and washes up on a beach where it comes to the attention of a kid named Paul Lawrence.  The arm is carrying some kind of alien organism that infects anything it touches with the desire to kill, and soon Paul Isn't Paul Anymore as the space bugs take over his mind.  The arm, meanwhile, goes on a rather more limited rampage of its own, strangling Paul's landlady and knocking over her preserves.  Cops and scientists argue over who's in charge of the investigation, and horror and comedy argue over who's in charge of the script.

I had forgotten, but Allison Hayes is in this, too.  She plays Captain Lockhart’s girlfriend in a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere and she’s still more into it than she was in The Unearthly.  I’m gonna assume that her boyfriend blowing up in space was what caused the nervous breakdown that landed her at John Carradine’s little home hospital.  I told you guys the movies were coming together!

The bit about infectious alien bacteria in the summary isn't quite accurate.  The two scientists, Dr. Curan and Dr. Weitzberg (whose name the movie has to take the trouble to spell for us), spend significant time expositing poetically to us about what's been happening to living tissue sent into space.  Something about an Earth cell romancing a cosmic ray and giving birth to some vital force that evolves intelligence within minutes or hours, turning men into killers and rats into brooding supervillains.  I don't know why they went with this labored explanation when 'angry space germs' is literally three words. Generally in movie exposition less is more, unless the 'more' is somehow vitally important to the plot – which here, it is not.

The Crawling Hand is a dumb movie, and it's not my favourite film or my favourite episode, but I've kind of been looking forward to writing about it because this is my chance to share my theory about Hand Movies.  There are a surprising number of animate severed hands in movies.  Attack of the The Eye Creatures had one, for instance, as did The Evil Dead 2, and everybody remembers the Addams family's pet hand, Thing.  But hands also have movies of their own: in addition to The Crawling Hand there's The Beast with Five Fingers and The Hand, Severed Ties and that one short in Dr. Terror's House of Horrors.  What can we take from this, besides the fact that I watch way too many movies?  Well, I think that the Hand Movie is actually a sort of necessary partner of the Brain Movie.

We – or at least, those of us with an unhealthy love of awful old horror movies – have all seen a Brain Movie.  Stuff like The Brain from Planet Arous or Donovan's Brain, and several movies simply called The Brain.  Even things like It Conquered the World can be thought of as variations on the Brain Movie, because what the brain represents in movies like these is intellect unfettered by morality.  Either because they have no emotions or simply no interest in the lesser beings still trapped in the flesh, these brains apply their intelligence to doing things normal humans could but know that we shouldn't.

There's a problem with being a disembodied brain, though.  Humans are very proud of our brains, claiming they're the main thing that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom etc etc etc, but our brains wouldn't do us much good if we didn't also have hands. The thing humans do, to a degree no other creature does, is build shit.  Our brains are vitally important in figuring out how to build shit, but it's our hands that do the actual work.  We talk about finding 'intelligent life' in space but intelligence alone is not what we're looking for – dolphins are smart, but an alien SETI program would never find them. That's why dolphins need that alliance with the electricians, so there'll be somebody to build their warships for them.  Our search for life in space is a search for fellow builders.

The lack of hands plagues the villains of brain movies.  Gor from The Brain from Planet Arous needs a body in order to take over the world, so the poor thing is forced to possess John Agar's. Donovan's Brain uses its telepathic link with Dr. Cory to carry on shady business dealings.  In It Conquered the World Beulah uses human slaves, either willing or unwilling, to do its bidding.  A brain without hands is mere purpose without action – which brings us to the Hand Movie.  If an isolated brain is purpose without action, then an isolated hand is action without purpose.

Sometimes evil hands in movies do have a purpose – The Beast with Five Fingers seems to be taking revenge on the people who wronged its owner in life, for instance, and Ash' possessed hand in The Evil Dead is being controlled by the movie's nameless evil force.  Even in these cases, however, the hand itself is just a tool.  It cannot be reasoned with, and killing it does not mean killing the controlling influence, which can find another tool and try again. The Crawling Hand isn't one of these, though.  It is in fact a particularly pure example of the Hand Movie, because the titular crawling hand is animated by the alien bacteria and there is no purpose to its actions at all.  It's not trying to rule the world, or to make money, or anything like that.  It just kills people because it can, and there's no way to stop it from doing so except to either lock it up or destroy it.

If Brain Movies are about intellect without emotion, it's also possible to read Hand Movies as emotion without intellect.  The emotion involved is usually anger, whether the vengeful rage of The Beast with Five Fingers or the undirected murderous instinct of The Crawling Hand.  Whether the dichotomy is thought/action or reason/emotion, Hand Movies represent the partner of the Brain Movie, and the end result is the same whether it's the hand or the brain that has been isolated.  Either is an incomplete, perverse entity that cannot contribute anything to the world.  True creativity, true invention, and true humanity can only come from brain and hands working harmoniously together in one being.

This line of thought, that wholeness is essential to human-ness, is probably why we get things like bad guys with partially or even mostly-robotic bodies, like Darth Vader or that guy in Lois and Clark who wanted to transplant his head onto Superman's body – which I would much rather watch than bullshit like Me Before You, in which a man who has lost the use of his limbs cannot be convinced that life is still worth living even with Emilia Clarke.  For the record, if I ever lose a major body part, I am definitely going the supervillain route. If I get to hang out with the cast of Game of Thrones while I do it, bonus!

But let's get back to The Crawling Hand.  The movie presents this unreasoning incompleteness as something infectious, that can spread to humans and deprive us of our intellects, leaving only the purposeless rage of the hand.  In the opening scene we briefly see the doomed astronaut begging for help.  He is well on his way to hand-zombie-hood, periodically breaking off his sentences to chant, “kill, kill!”, but when he describes his situation he refers specifically to his problem being in his hand. It started there, 'making him do things', before moving on to the rest of his body.  The fact that it started in his hand is in large part responsible for the mess he's now in, since with that appendage out of his control, he can't activate the spacecraft's self-destruct mechanism.

Maybe it's because of the alien influence that the hand survives to land on Earth and be picked up by Paul Lawrence (man there were a lot of Pauls on MST3K), who it infects in turn.  Under the influence of the angry space germs, Paul too becomes little more than what the hand is: an undirected, purposeless killing machine. In this form he attacks people he knows, but there's no hint that this is because Paul himself is in any way resentful of them.  The soda shop owner was a weirdo but Paul had no reason to want him dead, and Marta is explicitly somebody Paul loves.  Zombie-Paul attacks them not because he is letting out anything he has suppressed, but simply because they are available.  When he has a choice, he tries to make Marta leave his house, or decides to run away from home, in order to avoid harming her or anybody else.

Sadly, most of what's interesting about The Crawling Hand is the opportunity to examine the sub-genre it lies in and how it relates to other types of body-part movies.  The movie itself spends way too much of its time on Paul and the scientists, and not nearly enough on what drew the audience in to see it, which is the unavoidably humourous image of a disembodied hand strangling people. Instead the film-makers use Zombie-Paul as the main villain, probably because they knew damn well the hand thing would make people laugh rather than scream.  This was probably a mistake.  The surf movie soundtrack, the crusty soda shop owner, and the scientists' clumsy improvised investigation are all clearly meant to be funny, and the movie as a whole would probably have worked better as an explicit horror-comedy about a murderous hand than it does trying to divide itself into discreet 'horror' and 'comedy' sections.

And yes, you can expect to see both The Brain from Planet Arous and The Beast with Five Fingers in the Episodes that Never Were section.  I wouldn't miss them for the world!