Doesn't sound like much to ask, does it? Well, I've been working on the solution on and off since 1975 - and I still don't know the answer, and I've only ever met one person who even suspected they had seen such a thing before ... there's a better than even chance that MYSTERIOUS FORCES were at work on my television set that night (Jesuit variety), and an entirely plausible explanation can be built on mental overstimulation/illness. BUT ... I saw the goddamn thing, and there's nothing that's ever been on TV that's never been on it twice, and I HAVE NEVER SEEN THIS MOVIE, READ A REVIEW OF IT, OR FOUND IT IN ANY FAWNING AUTEUR APPRECIATION. So there.
I might add that even as we compose this missive, Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" are coming through just as loud and clean as CD technology and the AKG 141s can deliver them, and that's just about right for this tale. So, if you're maybe about 40, and you ever took psychedelics to excess, and there are some things you can't ever get explained to your satisfaction, go grab Bringing It All Back Home and continue reading after you cue it ... and if you aren't, and didn't, and don't have a copy, that's suboptimal but I believe you may be able to cope ... depends a lot on where you are, who you're with and what's happening around you.
So here's the deal. In 1975 or so (little vague but it must have been the late winter, which would actually have made it 1976) I was serving time in a little Catholic-oriented university plopped like a fresh concrete shit in the middle of Da Bronx, New Yawk. Just how I came to be there at that time is another question I think I would like to know the answer to, but that particular answer wouldn't matter much anyway, so we'll let it pass. I had been having a rather unpleasant time of life in general, largely as the consequence of insisting on turning my head around 187 degrees every couple of weeks through the influence of various and sundry non-prescription reality remedies (Stops Linear Thinking Fast, Fast, Fast! Try LSD-25, mescaline, peyote (don't eat the fibers!), christallknowswhatelse). Dope. Lots of dope. Cheap beer. Hard liquor. Powerful gasoline, and a shoe- no, that's someone else's routine. BelAirs. BelAirs. Why the fuck did I ever smoke BelAirs?
This unpleasantness built into a rather rabid paranoia (we're getting to the fucking movie, can't you sit still for a minute?) on the backside of a trip allegedly engineered and manufactured by Augustus Stanley Owsley hisself, via a healthy dose of drug maintained for some years in a hermetically sealed container. Genuine Orange Sunshine. A pal of mine who will still deny everything to this day (just remade his acquaintance the other month, he's still a moron and I was able to check his ability to own up after 21 years - nonexistent) pushed a few too many buttons marked "Emergency" on my psyche, leaving me quite convinced that god, the psychiatrists, and the police were all onto me, but that ... it was okay. The whole thing was just ... okay. Except me. I was not okay, because all of this machination had been kept from me for my own good, because I was badly occluded ... the millennium, you see, had arrived (okay, the movie is in the next paragraph, you impatient fuck) but people could only be brought into it slowly or it would blow their very minds. Or something.
Well. I still had enough sense not to tell anybody about this. (Ha. No movie yet. More exposition. Think of this as a montage cut). And off I went back to college to attempt education while my mind and my ego struggled daily to decide which of us would be in charge. The mind wanted to run amok. The ego figured something was seriously wrong, o.k., but it was pretty sure the mind was what needed fixing. The ego mostly wanted everything to stop for a while, let the smoke clear. So, like the sheep equidistant from two equally delectable morsels of hay, I, my mind and my ego, were stuck - not getting any crazier, but not actually developing any insight, as they say, into my condition.
(As if you care. My condition quite simply was the outcome of astonishingly wild chemical imbalances brought on by the impossible level of psychotropic and toxic materials that were do-si-do'ing with the rest of my mental molecules. Better fucking living through chemistry, yassur.)
BUT ... (Here comes the movie!) ... one of the characteristics of such a state is that ordinary things begin to signify. Some years later I DID figure this one out -- the fucking signs on the street ARE talking to me, it's just not all that PERSONAL or anything -- they talk to everyone, all the time (Antelope Freeway, one half ... oh, cut it out).
So a couple of months now following the BIG WOW (as the initial depth charging of my psyche came to be known) I am still a verry crispy critter. Many things happen in between, but they aren't - look, do you want to hear about the movie or not? Quit interrupting ...
One night I'm sitting, alone, in an apartment on the 22nd floor of an apartment building in the Bronx (Something Towers, at the northwest edge of the Bronx Zoo, corner of Southern Blvd. and Fordham Rd.). I don't really remember why I was alone, it wasn't my apartment, but that of some college pals. Where they were, I cannot say. Actually, I now realize it may have been my sophomore year, which would put this night in winter 1977, since I didn't know anyone in the Towers in my freshman year. Whatever. I have a rather healthy hit of mescaline. I have a black and white 12" television. I have absolutely nothing to do but to watch the fucking TV. So I'm flipping through the channels. Manually. No remote. These were still exotic devices. No Web. No email. NO COMPUTERS. Fuck, I had an electric typewriter and that was HOOT POP!
I used to love to trip overnight. The sleep deprivation and the darkness would smooth things out and keep you from focusing too much on visual weirdness and more attentive to the mental atmosphere. It's the Bronx - who actually wants to SEE it, especially in enhanced 3D multipalleted colors that have no memory?
Now, one of the worst movies ever to see on any psychedelic is Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" simply because it is just creepy. Creepy situation, creepy characters. The true definition of creepiness is contained in "Strangers on a Train." The following movie I am about to describe was creepier by a factor of 10. About 200 times cheesier, too. The creepy factor I probably brought to the experience, but the cheesy aspects were strictly the fault of the director and his/her budget.
If you can definitively ID this film from my description, PLEASE send me the details. I'd like to see this turkey again. I'll recount as much as I can, but I did keep flipping around ( ... to the Land of Snails and Adventures ... )
Scene I
(Opening shot is from the interior of a Volkswagen Squareback. A person is running from the car in a seriously disturbed manner. Slowly, the hand brake of the VDub eases into the down/off position, the VDub moves forward, gathers speed, chases the struggling runner, RUNS THE FUCK OVER CLEAN. Cut to next scene).
Now, you've got to understand - there are NO OPENING CREDITS TO THIS FILM. Nothing. Nada. This is the Hour of the Wolf Movie on Channel Nine, it's like 2 a.m. in the morning, the previous show has ended, there have been a couple of commercials (I'll paint any car for $39.95 ... S.M. Rose Chevrolet... Chris Burden ... the usual Channel 9 drivel). And on comes this opening scene. No comment.
This thing starts to run on into what appears to be a pretty ordinary Roger Corman potboiler, which is what I would assume it was had I ever found any mention of anything even remotely like it in any movie book or Corman compendium. Never have seen mention of it. By the car, it had to be made after 1966.
You see, there is this group of California-type middle-class white kids who are kind of doing this Mountain Dew ad thing in what is probably the back lot of some studio - all the background looks like every cheap Republic western you've ever seen. Somewhere in here I flip the channel and I don't come back to it for a while, but the mescaline is taking solid hold by the time I do.
Right. The movie. So by the time I flip back to this thing, it seems the Kids have come into possession of a BOOK, which is not theirs by a long shot, and appears to belong to a particularly bad rancher. Well, he looks like a rancher, he's dressed like Lamar Alexander with a cowboy hat. But his FACE is positively the weirdest thing ever seen. Those few of you that have read Philip K. Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" would recognize this face. This guy has been in the sun too long - over a century too long. It's like a leather mask, very stiff, very lined, very unhuman.
This gets my attention. Along with the miracle of M(escaline)TV, which is now dribbling onto the floor in a glittering, oozy stream of photons released from the mundane business of bouncing off reflective objects and now available for direct apprehension by the skewed perception of your by-now fascinated correspondent.
So this thing goes on. For maybe two hours or so. The Devil (for dat's who he be) wants his friggin' book back. Of course. I never said it was a GOOD movie. It's a cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, fourth-grade D-picture. But it is so weird! The Devil on horseback chases the Kids all around the back lot of the studio, unleashing ... DINOSAURS! FUCKING DINOSAURS! BARNEY IS CHASING THE CALIFORNIA KIDS ACROSS THE BACK LOT OF PARAMOUNT TO RETRIEVE THE DEVIL'S DAY-MINDER!
My. As all this is going on, this eternal battle of good and evil played small on a shoestring budget transmitted over the lowest rated TV station in the entire Tri-State (New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut) as received on a TV that even in 1977 couldn't have cost $49 DELIVERED! that old familiar suspicion begins to creep up onto my paranoia screens.
Pay attention, Dennis. This MEANS SOMETHING!
Well, no. Just another sign. I know that now. But at the time, this battle of the CK vrs. the D was just filling my brain with dread. I mean, shit, I'm the product of a Catholic education, recently separated from most of my common sense through the aegis of the chemical crowbar that even at that minute I was prying my perceptions apart with again, and here is this cartoonish heaven-and-hell morality play spinning out ... who WOULDN'T think such a stupid thing would have a subtext, a meta-physical purpose over and above entertainment, which I highly suspect it was NOT (entertaining) unless watched in the Psychedelic Cinema ... well, okay, so I'm an idiot. What else is new? But this gets EVEN BETTER ...
So this MEANS SOMETHING, it does, it does ... as usual, the question is, WHAT?
Meanwhile the Devil picks off the rest of the California Kids save one, who ends up a gibbering wreck in the corner of some Tudor-like house doubtlessly located a half-mile across the movie lot from the arroyo-in-a-can where most of this film takes place. The sole surviving kid cowers in a corner, clutching a Rosary (there's that CATHOLIC thing again - usually, defensive weaponry against the Devil is restricted to a Cross, but here we have a whole ROSARY!). Someone comes to the door. The Kid PANICS. Runs out the door. We see him through the window of a VDub Squareback. The brake slowly closes, the car gains speed ... SPLAT! The freaking movie has gone full circle! We are exactly back where we started. (Now, there's a message in THAT!)
THE END in typical cheap horror movie lettering. Then, a final Final Frame:
?
QUESTION MARK?! THE END - QUESTION MARK!? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT!! No credits. No cast. No crew. Nothing. THE END. ? That's it. No opening credits. No closing credits. THE END. ?.
But that IS NOT THE BEST PART!
The BEST PART was what came next. No commercial interruptions. No reason to run commercials at 3:45 am on a weekend winter morning on the least-watched TV station in the tri-state area. We segue directly into ... SERMONETTE!
Is anyone anywhere still running Sermonette? Sermonette was a little two-to-three minute - well, sermon - televised in the wee hours to meet some obscure public service objective. After Sermonette comes the National Anthem, and Channel Nine had a dandy one, jets and fireworks and all kinds patriotic shit just designed to make you proud you're an American and can afford a $49 TV and a hit of purple mescaline. Flags rippling, children laughing, bombs bursting, etc., etc., etc.
Following the National, there was about 10 minutes of dead air, then Channel Nine would start up again, with The Modern Farmer, Library Lions, and Davy and Goliath by 7. But I don't think I have even seen Sermonette before or since that night, either.
On this particular early morning Sermonette, an ecumenical program, featured a young rabbi who pretty much cut to the chase. In short, he pointed out that HE'd never seen a Sermonette, he was NEVER up at this hour, and he had no idea why ANYONE would be up at this hour. (Obviously bad movies and mescaline were not part of the curriculum at the yeshiva).
And so, he asked - WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING UP AT THIS HOUR, ANYWAY? AND IF YOU CAN'T GIVE A GOOD ACCOUNTING OF YOURSELF, WELL - you should reconsider the direction of your life ... loser ...
Well, okay, he didn't say fuck. But he might just have well have for the effect it had on me.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooo................................. !!!!
Fortunately, someone finally showed up around then, and my ego kicked the self-preservation switch. Say nothing. Act like nothing's happening until we can figure this shit out. Sit on that friggin' mind with its nasty appetites and twisted logics and KEEP FUCKIN' COOL! I DO NOT want to discover the therapeutic benefits of Haldol with a Cogentin chaser (although Cogentin by itself is a hoot - but that's another story).
Never did figure it out. Just let it go. But I kept trying to prove or disprove over the years that what I had seen was just normal programming on a trashy TV station, and not another assault on my tattered reality filters by who knows what nefarious cabal of shrinks, cops and priests who were either a) secretly engineering the pyschedelic revolution and eliminating those who could not evolve, or b) systematically scaring the shit out of otherwise promising youth who had by their standards lost their way ...
So now, for the box Carol is standing beside on the floor - NAME THAT MOVIE! If someone out there can, then I'm just a gibbering idiot who is much less a threat to himself and others since abandoning all chemical enhancements some years ago (save tobacco, coffee and antihistamines). And I'd appreciate some useful detail so I can go find a copy of it. If no one can ...
The End ?
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