Drive-In Mob Tonight!: Airport and Airport 1975

It’s Drive-In Mob night and disaster is in the air. Star-studded disaster, that is! The first leg of our journey starts at 8:00pm EST, as we tweet-along to Airport, with a connecting flight of Airport 1975 at around 10pm EST. Both films can be streamed via Netflix Instant and, as always, you can follow or tweet along by using the #DriveInMob hashtag on Twitter. Be sure to check the official Drive-In Mob site for full details!

The Infernal Brains Podcast, Episode 10

 

In this very special episode of the Infernal Brains, Tars Tarkas, myself and our guest, Durian Dave of Soft Film, nerd the fuck out over Hong Kong Jane Bond films while my kitchen collapses in flames around us. It's a shame we didn't film it, but I suppose the slide show accompanying the streaming version below  makes up for it in visual razzle dazzle. For those blind movie fans out there who'd prefer to simply listen to the podcast with your enhanced super hearing, you can download it for your iPode machines here.

Himmelskibet, aka A Trip To Mars (Denmark, 1918)

If Reptilicus had been Denmark’s only contribution to the science fiction genre, that might well have been enough. Few countries, after all, can boast of producing a film in which a prehistoric dragon is represented almost exclusively by a vomiting puppet head. But, of course, I kid. Not only did Denmark make another contribution to the sci-fi genre, but that contribution was also among the earliest cinematic depictions of space travel. The Danish film industry was, in fact, pretty robust during the teen years of the last century, with receptive audiences throughout Europe and a reputation for a high level of craftsmanship, of which Holger-Madsen’s 1918 film Himmelskibet (or Sky Ship) offers a fine example.

Himmelskibet begins with Navy Captain Avanti (Gunnar Tolnæs) returning from the Great War in search of new ventures. His father, the great astronomer Professor Planetarios (yes, it’s that kind of movie), introduces him to the concept of space travel, lighting a fire within the lad that can only be expressed by lots of overwrought gesticulating toward the heavens. (Hopefully, once the talkies came along, actor Tolnæs was able to find a job pointing at things, because he’s really good at it.) Avanti recruits his sister’s suitor, Dr. Krafft (Alf Blutecher), to assist him in building a spaceship capable of reaching Mars, and the call soon goes out for volunteers to make up the ship’s crew. Throughout this process, the only obstacle to our heroes’ progress is that posed by Planetarios’ arch rival, Professor Dubius (again, that kind of movie), who makes a project out of heckling them at every step of the way.

Two years later, Avanti and his team have succeeded in building the Excelsior, a spaceship that, with its vestigial wings and protruding wagon wheels, is at once ungainly and perilously rickety looking. Yet fly it does, and soon Avanti, Krafft and a crew that includes a hulking alcoholic by the name of Dane are winging their way to Mars. Unfortunately, even at this historical remove from actual space travel, the makers of Himmelskibet were aware that getting to Mars would take an awful lot of time, and that, in addition, spending that amount of time in quarters as cramped as those within the Excelsior would take a grave psychological toll upon its astronauts. Thus, six months in, Avanti and Krafft find themselves with a mutiny on their hands under the leadership of the boozy Dane. Fortuitously, it is at this moment that the Martians choose to send out their tractor beams and gently waft them down to the surface of their planet.

The Martians turn out to be a highly enlightened race who spend their days sitting around in white robes while being unnervingly serene. Obviously, we humans have a lot to learn from an encounter with such a race, but even a film as idealistic as Himmelskibet has the common sense to realize that we would fuck it up. After sampling the Martians’ vegetarian diet, Avanti send one of his crew back to the ship for some canned meat and wine. Asked by the Martian elder how the Earthlings are able to obtain “dead meat” for their consumption, Avanti enthusiastically demonstrates by whipping out a revolver and blowing a passing bird out of the sky. In response, the outraged Martians fall upon the group and, in the ensuing melee, one of the crew members throws a grenade that seriously wounds one of the Martians. It’s pretty bad.

Because the Martians’ is one of those vaguely atavistic utopian societies in which there is a “the something” of everything, Avanti and his men are sent to “The House of Judgment”, where, after a presentation on how the Martians overcame their own warlike past, they are encouraged to “judge themselves”. They gain some assistance in this from Marya, the Elder’s beautiful young daughter, who takes pity on the Earthmen and decides to act as their counsel. With her guidance, the humbled Earthmen collectively lay down their arms, swearing off violence forever, and are in turn rewarded with the honor of wearing “The Robes of Innocence”. Marya and her fellow Martian maidens then subject these long isolated males to a performance of something called ”The Dance of Chastity”, which is just as airy fairy as it sounds, contrasted with scenes of bad behavior back on Earth that involve unruly beer halls, rowdy mobs mocking the infirm, gambling, and lovers necking in darkened dance halls.

Perhaps as a result of all this in-your-face chastity, Avanti finds himself taken with Marya. A formal courtship ensues that involves Marya leading Avanti to “The Forest of Love” and then “The Tree of Longing” (and ultimately, one hopes, to the “The Well Hidden Grove of Surreptitious Boning”, though, to be honest, that is neither depicted nor implied). Eventually, Avanti takes Marya and, with his newly reformed crew, heads back to Earth, only to face a violent storm upon reentry into our atmosphere. The odious Professor Dubius, watching from the ground, is felled by a serendipitous lightning bolt, happily leading our way into a hopeful conclusion. Once they are safely on the ground, Professor Planetarios tells Marya and Avanti that he hopes theirs will be a new generation who will, by embodying the Martian example, set the human race on the right path. Then a title reading “SLUT” appears on the screen. Which is apparently Danish for “The End”.

Though I myself would hitch a ride on the next piece of flaming space debris to get away from those Martian hippies, I have to admit to being moved by the sweetness at the core of Himmelskibet. That in the immediate aftermath of humanity’s horrific introduction to modern warfare on a near-genocidal scale, its makers could even conceive of a society as enlightened and peaceful as that pictured here is something of a human achievement in itself. And the naïve special effects and rickety spaceship only serve to make it that much more endearing. Set aside, of course, that the bloodless, endlessly lounging lifestyle of the Martians seems like a specific hell of its own, and that, with all of those white robes and bleached Roman edifices dotting the Martian surface, it all seems a bit queasily Arian. The main point is that Himmelskibet, in showing us its epic depiction of man conquering the heavens, had the humble goal of making us all just a little less shooty with each other. It’s hard to find fault with that, really.

Friday's best pop song ever

Wolves Don't Eat Meat, aka Kuwait Connection (Egypt/Lebanon/Kuwait, 1973)

Given that most of my exposure to Arab popular cinema has been through viewings of the relatively genteel and apolitical films of Egyptian cinema's golden age, Wolves Don't Eat Meat comes as a bit of a shock. Believe me, if there were pearls around my neck, I’d be clutching them. In making the film, Samir Khouri, a Lebanese director filming in Kuwait with an Egyptian and Lebanese cast, reportedly aimed to take advantage of what turned out to be a very brief relaxation in Egypt's censorship standards, but his kid-in-a-candy-store approach to the endeavor only ended up getting the film banned upon release.

Which is not all that surprising, given that Wolves Don’t Eat Meat (which was originally known as Zi’ab La Ta’kol Al Lahm and released under the international title Kuwait Connection) contains about a thousand percent more full frontal nudity than you'd ever expect to see in a film from a predominately Muslim country. And that's not even considering the jaw dropping amount of grand guignol violence on display in the film -- or the fact that this was the early 70s, when filmmakers everywhere, regardless of creed or country, were allowing themselves to go just a little bit crazy in their attempts to see what they could get away with.

According to an interview with Mondo Macabro’s Pete Tombs and Andy Starke over at Cinema Strikes Back, previous to making Wolves, Khouri had worked in Italy under such directors as Sergio Bergonzelli, whose output of rough sexploitation fare included lurid entries like In the Folds of the Flesh. And, indeed, that influence here is clear, though what’s really interesting about Wolves Don’t Eat Meat is just how many different trends in 1970s international cinema it channels, making its exact lineage hard to nail down.

Following a credit sequence set to Patrick Samson’s Italo disco hit “Hey Yaba Hey”, Wolves kicks off its narrative proper with a wild car chase through the streets of Kuwait, at the conclusion of which hired assassin Anwar (Ezzat El Alaili) staggers away from his wrecked car and into the desert. Eventually he somehow comes upon the mansion of a shady underworld type named Saleh, at which some strange cross between a party, an orgy and an occult ritual is taking place. Anwar collapses and is carried by Saleh’s men to a spare bedroom, where he is cared for by Saleh’s wife, Maya (well known Egyptian actress Nahed Sherif, whose frequent nudity here guarantees this title a strong showing in next year’s 4DK Search Term Tweet-a-thon).

In a bizarre coincidence, it turns out that Maya is an old flame of Anwar’s, a former bar dancer whom he met while working as a war correspondent in Southeast Asia. Further signaling our and Anwar’s entrance into some kind of uncanny alternate reality is Saleh’s sister, a wizened crone in a wheelchair portrayed by an actor in an aggressively obvious rubber mask -- and with whom Maya appears to be having a lesbian affair. And then, of course, there is the fact that Saleh is seen receiving a visitation from the ghost of his previous wife.

Upon recovering, Anwar tells Maya that the atrocities he witnessed while working as a journalist resulted in him becoming “blood-thirsty”. Among these was the massacre at Deir Yellin, an attack upon a Palestinian village that left hundreds of men, women and children dead and would go on to become a pivotal event in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Anwar subsequently fell in with the beautiful and psychotic hit woman Linda (Lebanese actress Silvana Badrkhan, also frequently nude), with whom he has come to Kuwait to retrieve ten million dollars worth of jewels stolen from the Mafia. This caper, as such things are won’t to do in stories of this type, has gone completely pear-shaped, with the result that Anwar now is being hunted not only by both Linda and the Police, but American mobster “Barney” and his gang as well.

 

Meanwhile, Saleh, not blind to the obvious attraction between Anwar and his wife, turns threatening, which leads to the two lovers taking flight upon Maya’s luxury yacht -- where, in one of the film’s many uses of symbolism that even the most remedial student of film theory couldn’t miss, they make love on a bed blanketed with live doves. Saleh’s menace is then diminished somewhat when he is mysteriously murdered. This event gives birth to a whodunit subplot that you’d think might ensnare Anwar and Maya in its web, but which actually threatens to eclipse their story altogether as it takes on a life of its own as a parallel narrative. Finally this all leads circuitously to another insane car chase and a blood spattered finale in which all of Anwar’s various nemesis converge upon him at once -- and then, more surprisingly, to a hallucinatory final sequence that echoes Fellini’s 8½.

Throughout all of this, Khori makes sure to place his film’s simulated violence against a jarring backdrop of the real thing. The flashbacks to Deir Yellin are made up of real documentary footage that is both graphic and harrowing. A bloody fight with hatchets is staged in an actual slaughterhouse, the pretend carnage playing out amid shots of live sheep being butchered. Because of this, fans of movie-style blood and guts not inured to the sight of actual dead and dying children and animals may want to look for their thrills elsewhere.

 

Despite its many aforementioned nods to Italian genre films -- be they Polizzioteschi, Giallo, or Gothic Horror -- what Wolves Don't Eat Meat seems to be most in its heart of hearts is a violent political art film. Whether those pop cinema elements are then intended as a seductive candy coating or a further provocation I can't say. But I have noticed that a number of online writers who have approached the film as a genre piece have characterized it as more or less a bad, if interesting, one. I can't say that, either. To me, it's too fiercely unique, too personal, and too genuinely disturbing to be subjected to such easy judgment. For me to achieve a clearer state of mind on the subject will no doubt require repeat viewings, of which I suspect there will be many.

Friday's best pop song ever

Tonight! The Drive-In Mob goes to a place "where nobody dared to go"

Tonight the Drive-In Mob will be camping it up 80s style with a gut-rumbling double bill of jaw-unhinging neon excess. First up, at 8pm EST, it's Olivia Newton John, Gene Kelly and who-the-hell-is-that-guy in Xanadu, one of the most gloriously upward failing musicals of all time. And then, at precisely 9:30-ish EST or thereabouts, it's Dino De Laurentis' delirious day-glo take on Flash Gordon, a film that has been scientifically proven to be better than Star Wars. Seriously, if these movies don't get you rocking, the wall-to-wall Queen and ELO will!

Both Drive-In Mob features can be streamed via Netflix Instant, and those who want to tweet or follow along can do so by using the hashtag #DriveInMob on Twitter. As for myself, I plan to eschew my usual tardiness and be present for the duration -- BECAUSE THIS IS FUCKING IMPORTANT, PEOPLE! Oh, and, as always, please check the official Drive-In Mob site for full details.

Indian Superhero Roll Call

No film industry that lays claim to colorful escapism the way India’s does can do so without putting forward its fair share of ridiculously garbed costumed heroes. I’ve encountered quite a few of these magnificent creatures in my day (though I’m sure far from all of them), so I thought that -- given that I’m feeling a bit lazy in the lingering haze of the just completed Tweet-a-thon -- my doing an informal survey of the topic might be a good investment of the minimal effort I feel like devoting to it. Let’s proceed!

SUPERMAN: It’s no surprise that Superman is beloved in India, certainly not least because he is goddamn Superman. But also because his supernatural abilities so resemble those of the heroes of Hindu religious epics -- such as the awesome Hanuman -- who, through appearances in everything from movies to comic books, have also become fixtures of Indian popular culture. As far as I know, India’s first screen adaptations of the Man of Steel were a pair of low budget productions released in 1960, both of which starred the actor Jairaj in the title role despite being the products of completely different outfits. One of these was Mohammed Hussain’s pragmatically titled Superman, while the other, directed by Manmohan Sabir, bore the more puzzling moniker Return of Mr. Superman, a direct result of pressure put upon Sabir by the producer of Hussain’s competing version. As you can see from the pictures above, Return of Mr. Superman’s interpretation of its titular hero (that’s Mr. Superman to you) stays well shy of honing too closely to the original source material.

Far less liability-averse were a couple of adaptations that came along during the 80s. These included the 1980 Telegu language version that is often referred to as "Telegu Superman" (and which is helpfully reviewed here by my colleague Tars Tarkas), and 1987’s notorious “Hindi Superman”, which went so far as to swipe actual special effects footage from Richard Donner’s mega-budget Superman, The Movie.

GURU (1980): Though basically a remake of Dharmendra’s 1973 thriller Jugnu, this Tamil language film sought to set itself apart via the inclusion of the pictured pink garbed caped crusader, who shows up in one scene to dazzle a slack-mouthed gang of hoods with his acrobatic skills before disappearing from the picture altogether. Mission accomplished, Guru.

SHIVA KA INSAAF (1985): The mid 1980s saw something of a mini-boomlet in Indian superhero films, with Shiva Ka Insaaf standing out as something of an early adopter. Shiva Ka Insaaf was also India’s second 3D film, and its first in the Hindi language. Star Jackie Shroff appeals to the god Shiva for super powers and gets them, along with a somewhat ill fitting leather costume. Other than the religious overtones, this is another pretty straightforward retelling of the Superman story, complete with Jackie taking the guise of a socially challenged reporter and Poonam Dhillon taking on the role of a serially-imperiled Lois Lane figure. Given the 3D process involved, it will surprise no one that Jackie’s super powers mostly involve throwing things directly into the camera.

MR. INDIA (1987): The superhero boom of the 80s was no doubt due in part to the success of this charming crowd-pleaser, in which Hollywood’s current favorite Indian, Anil Kapoor, uses the power of invisibility to defend Mother India from a vaguely provenanced foreign boogeyman (is “Chino-stani” a word?) played by Amrish Puri. Hail Mogambo!

SHAHENSHAH (1988): The road back to superstardom after his ill-advised detour into politics was a hard one for Amitabh Bachchan. Perhaps hoping to piggy-back on the success of the aforementioned Mr. India, his rapid-fire spate of late 80s comeback vehicles included not one, but two costumed hero capers. The first of these was the moderately well received Shahenshah, in which Bacchan played a Batman-style costumed vigilante. Unfortunately, I have yet to see this film -- though I intend to remedy that in 2012 -- and thus have yet to review it… by which I mean make fun of it.

TOOFAN (1989): But I have made fun of this one! Here Amitabh prays to Hanuman to aid him in avenging his father’s murder, and, in return, the monkey god turns him into a caped crusader complete with a nifty crossbow that looks like it came fresh off the rack at Sports Chalet. This is one of those movies that sounds like it would be a hoot when described, but in reality is a dispiriting slog. Avoid yar!

AJOOBA (1991): And rounding out Amitabh’s trilogy of cinematic superheroism is this odd Russo-Indian co-production, in which the Big B plays a righteous masked rider. But what you’ll really want to see this movie for are all of the bizarre creatures and weird special effects, which are plentiful. The happy ending to all of this, of course, is that Bachchan did eventually regain his foothold on superstardom and has not looked back since. Since then, he has refrained from playing any superheroes, but he has played the Progeria-stricken child of his own actual son, so I’ll let you be the judge of whether that’s a change for the better or not. (Both MemsaabStory and Beth Loves Bollywood are big fans of Ajooba, and are happy to tell you all about it in their equally erudite and entertaining reviews if you just follow the links.)

KRRISH (2006): Either I’ve missed out on some Indian superhero movies from the 1990s, or audiences of that era were having a hard enough time dealing with Karisma Kapoor’s outfits without also having to confront the spectacle of grown men in day-glo tights. In any case, in the 00s the superhero returned to India’s theater screens in big budget style with this loose sequel to 2003’s Koi… Mil Gaya. Heartthrob Hrithik Roshan plays Krishna, the inheritor of super powers that were given to his father by an E.T. Graced with enough state-of-the-art CG effects and wire-assisted stunts to make it almost indistinguishable from a crap Hollywood film, Krrish met with enough favorable audience response to merit two sequels -- which makes me wonder why I only barely remember watching it.

RA.ONE (2011): Admittedly I have yet to see this one, in which Shah Rukh Khan apparently plays a hero with some kind of Tron-based powers. Though I never thought about it before, the advent of Ra.One made me wonder why SRK waited so long to take this route.

DARA SINGH: It’s impossible for me to compose a list like this without mentioning beloved wrestler-turned-stunt-film-king Dara Singh. Although I don’t know of Dara ever starring in what could be described as a traditional superhero film, the man is something of a superhero in his own right, and, in keeping with that, many of his films have a fittingly comic book-ish feel. Included in these are pictures in which he played everything from Tarzan, to Flash Gordon-style space jockeys, to Zoro-like masked riders, all of which guarantee that, mask or no, his are films that provide all the breezy, cheesy thrills that any superhero movie fan could ask for.

The Tweet-a-thon and the damage done

I think it's safe to say that the 3rd Annual 4DK Search Term Tweet-a-thon was a spectacular success, given the modest height of the bar for success in this case. Essentially, there were search terms and they were tweeted, and this done in the rapid  and extended sequence that might allow one to advisedly affix an "a-thon" to the end of things. To be honest, this was what I'd like my Twitter feed to look like all the time, but I just couldn't come up with gems like these on my own -- each one forged like a diamond inside a harrowingly unique mind which, in that fevered moment of creation, seemed to be finding its very reason for existing.

This year's selection of search terms was marked more by its variety than it was by any unifying trend. Yet there was at the same time no dearth of familiarity, most notably in the constellation of Bollywood stars on hand, the dragging of whose names through the mud has become something of a Tweet-a-thon ritual: Amrish Puri, Aruna Irani, and Bob Christo -- the latter via the entry "bob christosex", which memorializes his sexiness for the ages by making "sex" a part of his actual name!

And then there was the remarkable outpouring of guest contributions, among them those from the Cultural Gutter and Houseinrlyeh of The Horror!?, whose entries were so rarified and various that they made choosing a favorite difficult -- though I am partial, in CG's case, to "scary chinese people" and, in Houseinrlyeh's, to "muscle horror". Hell On Frisco Bay provided a local angle with "Making Frisco less pejorative", among others. Sadly, none of my searches for my own name or the name of this blog on any of these people's sites made the cut.

Probably those people who are most deserving of thanks, however, are all of my Twitter followers who failed to unfollow me despite the noisome and annoying ordeal I subjected them to for most of 24 hours. Sleep soundly, my friends, and thank you. You have a whole year to recover.

It's the 3rd Annual 4DK Search Term Tweet-a-thon!

Every year at this time I'm forced to come to terms with the fact that all but a very few of you come to this site in the hope of seeing a picture of Aruna Irani's lactating boob. As a consolation, it's also the time at which I get to survey all of the other insane bullshit that some of you freaks have been one handedly pawing into Google in your journey toward the inevitable disappointment that is 4DK. This in turn all gets fed into what is surely America's Next Top Social Media Based Pseudo-event: The 4DK Search Term Tweet-a-thon!

That's right, girlies, it's that time again. Starting this Sunday, January 22nd at 5pm PST and ending at the same time on the following Monday, January 23rd, I will be devoting 24 drunken hours to the tweeting of some of the most disquieting queries culled from last year's selection of keyword searches reported via 4DK's Google Analytics account. As always, I encourage -- no demand! -- that any other interested bloggers and web masters dip into their own deep reservoirs of search-based shame and join in. I will retweet any and all contributions made in like spirit. Though keep in mind that, in order to insure that my Twitter feed during that time is but one impenetrable wall of Dada-esque word vomit, I will not be responding to any tweets, so don't get bent out of shape, all you precious sensitive souls.

4DK's Twitter account can be accessed here. Remember, only you and I will know. The rest will just think that I had some kind of seizure.

Friday's best pop song ever

Drive-In Mob Tonight! Blue Sunshine and Squirm

Tonight the Drive-In Mob really lives up to its name with a salute to drive-in auteur Jeff Leiberman. First, at 8pm EST, we tweet-along to Lieberman’s killer hippie classic Blue Sunshine, followed, at 9:30-ish, by his creepy crawly debut feature Squirm. Both films can be streamed via Netflix Instant, and like-minded souls can both follow and tweet along on Twitter by using the hashtag #DriveInMob. As always, be sure to check the official Drive-In Mob site for full details.