The Movie Orgy (1968-197?)

Before Joe Dante established a Hollywood career as the director of Piranha (1978), The Howling (1981), Gremlins (1984), Explorers (1985), and Innerspace (1987), among many others, he was a cinephile collecting 16mm footage along with his friend Jon Davison. They collaborated upon a massive montage of clips from B-movies, television shows, commercials, trailers, instructional health films, cartoons, and U.S. savings bonds propaganda; calling it The Movie Orgy (onscreen title: “Movie Orgy,” with a semi-nude woman reclining beneath the words and a cut-out head of Woody Allen popping up lewdly behind her), they took it on a Schlitz Beer-sponsored tour of colleges throughout the United States. From 1968 until sometime in the mid-70’s, Dante and Davison continued to add to the compilation’s bulk, splicing in new segments by hand, until, reportedly, The Movie Orgy expanded to about seven-and-a-half hours, a length which may actually qualify the film as a cinematic WMD. After the 70’s, the film disappeared and became the stuff of cult-film legend: just “that weird thing Joe Dante did before Hollywood Boulevard.” But in 2008 Dante revisited the project, cut it down to a slightly-more-digestible running time of close to five hours, and screened it at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles (Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright were spotted in the crowd). More recently the Cinefamily in Los Angeles approached Dante to show the film at the found-footage “Everything Is Festival” in July of this year, and this has prompted a mini-tour, which brought the film to New York and, just this past weekend, Madison, Wisconsin. (Dante also brought the original workprint of Gremlins, and is curating the “Joe Dante Selects” series, screening some of his favorite films through November 20.) I have survived the Madison orgy and am here to tell the tale.

Joe Dante introduces "The Movie Orgy" at the Nov. 5 screening at the University of Wisconsin Cinematheque.

Dante introduced the film apologetically. “This is crude in every sense of the word,” he insisted, also encouraging everyone to leave and come back as they saw fit: “I won’t be offended.” When you get bored, go have a few beers and come back with a buzz, he instructed; it helps. Certainly the film was never meant to be seen in the atmosphere the UW Cinematheque provides every weekend: a colony of film buffs and students, attentive, taking notes, applauding appreciatively at the end credits of everything. One year I joined them for a 450-minute screening of Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó (1994) on one long, mesmerizing Saturday; we’re a tough bunch. But The Movie Orgy – rated “Z” (inappropriate for everyone) – was intended for a more chemically-altered, anarchic, late-60’s crowd. It’s happy to add fuel to your trips, or just play in the background while you chat with your friends. And it is crudely made – some of the gags are spoiled by the hasty splices, as the sound drops out between edits. It’s a kick anyway. Dante and Davison have crafted an expression of pure movie love, equal parts nostalgia – digging through the television shows and movies they grew up on, which weren’t as easy to revisit in the days before home video – and subversion. As a “mash-up,” no single program is shown in its entirety. They append new conclusions, or splice in characters from other films. A sudden juxtaposition – sometimes interrupting one character in mid-sentence to join another character, in another program, completing the thought – might create either an instant lowbrow gag or an anti-Vietnam statement. (A few times, clips of Richard Nixon acting asinine are interrupted by other characters saying so.) Commercials crash into the action with deliberate obnoxiousness: here’s Mighty Mouse selling you Colgate toothpaste; here’s a French commercial for a nasal spray; here are “Defenders of America” collectors cards featuring Cold War-era missiles, free with every box of Nabisco Shredded Wheat; here’s Wild Root Cream Oil hair tonic, “with lanolin and cholesterol.”

"Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" is one of the many B-movies cut-up and reconfigured for "The Movie Orgy."

There’s a stream-of-consciousness flow to the edits which reminded me of Terry Gilliam animation. When Peter Graves discusses dropping an atom bomb on Chicago to destroy a swarm of mutated locusts, we cut to an instructional film on how to handle a nearby nuclear blast; get away from the window and behind the furniture, and once the blast is over, wash your hair thoroughly to get all that radiation out. “If only the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki knew what we know today, there would have been fewer deaths.” Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) is introduced by Alfred Hitchcock, who promises scantily-clad dancing ladies at the end. (Dante and Davison then cut the film – one of the worst ever made – down to about four minutes. Hitchcock reappears and apologizes for the lack of dancing ladies.) Running gags emerge, like commercials for Bufferin, which claims to be “strong medicine for sensitive people,” those sensitive people including one man who’s demolishing a building which will leave desperate residents homeless; certainly if you find yourself in a situation where you’re putting people out of house and home, you’ll want to take some Bufferin. Kids in a classroom watch an instructional film with some nudist camp footage. A female reporter tries to take a picture of the skinny-dippers, but is told by a cop that no pictures are allowed. A program about the bravery of the modern police officer turns out to consist solely of footage of the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms picking up a cop in its jaws and swallowing him. Andy Devine presents “Andy’s Gang,” a children’s TV show in which a French waiter is berated by a talking frog puppet into confessing how he abused the Queen. Andy sings – terribly out-of-key – “Jesus Loves Me This I Know,” while a cat plays an organ and a hamster beats a marching drum, I SWEAR I SAW THIS HAPPEN.

The 50 Foot Woman in defeat.

Even at such a vast running time, there is a shape and structure which gradually emerges in The Movie Orgy. A few films are begun – opening credits included – and consistently revisited throughout, until we reach their various conclusions: these include Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Speed Crazy (1959), Beginning of the End (1957), The Giant Gila Monster (1959), College Confidential (1960), and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Tarantula (1955), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), The Giant Claw (1957), and Duck Soup (1933) are never too far away, either. This gives the viewer something to grasp onto during this very wild ride – narratives to follow, many of which echo one another. It’s not that they run parallel; eventually, they begin to occupy the same universe. Commander Cody flies through the same sky as Superman, Sky King, and the Absent-Minded Professor’s Flubber-fueled car; he dodges the same lava flow that the caveman family is escaping in One Million B.C. (1940). The racing psychopath from Speed Crazy – whose nonstop catchphrase is “Stop crowdin’ me! Everybody’s always crowdin’ me!” – shares the same streets as Abbott and Costello, caught in a slapstick chase. You might begin to wonder why Glenn from The Amazing Colossal Man doesn’t ask the 50 Foot Woman out on a date – he’s only ten feet taller than her. No, I’m serious: after four hours you begin to ask yourself these questions. And there’s music: Dion and the Belmonts in an amazing performance of “Runaround Sue”; Elvis Presley singing “Hound Dog” to a sad-looking hound dog; the Animals (squeezed into the wrong aspect ratio, so they look like singing pencils) delivering a solemn “House of the Rising Sun”; a plumber investigating a pipe leak blames beetles, which leads to the Beatles singing “She Loves You” before a crowd of screaming girls. To say that rights issues will prevent a DVD release of this underground film is an understatement: Mickey Mouse and the Mouseketeers cameo here too. It all builds toward a very orgiastic climax, as our various films come to their destructive ends, and Roy Rogers sings “Happy Trails” to send us home. Then it’s midnight, there are still people in the theater, and the blood in our veins has congealed into wrinkled celluloid. It’s an experience, is what I’m saying.

Here’s a selection which Joe Dante’s Trailers from Hell put together to promote The Movie Orgy‘s revival, to give you a small taste:

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Viy (1967)

Often cited as Russia’s first horror film, Viy (1967) faithfully adapts a 19th-century tale by Nikolai Gogol which, like the tales of Poe and Hawthorne, became a classic of modern folklore. The opening titles state that it’s directed by “graduates of Advanced Film Directors courses”: Georgi Kropachyov and Konstantin Yershov, though the better-known name attached to the film is credited as “Artistic Director and Special Effects Designer.” That would be Aleksandr Ptushko. Ptushko, who began his career as a pioneer of stop-motion animation, was the director of the first Russian film to be shot entirely in color (The Stone Flower, 1946), and became famous for his eye-popping fantasy films which employed a variety of creative visual effects, including The New Gulliver (1935), Sadko (1952), Ilya Muromets (1956), Sampo (1959), The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1966), and Ruslan and Ludmila (1972). Though some of these films were hacked to pieces by Roger Corman and others in the 1960’s, badly dubbed and rendered incoherent (and thus making their way to Mystery Science Theater 3000), even in these bastardized versions Ptushko’s fertile imagination shines through. His touch is invaluable to Viy. The fantasy sequences have wit and a kind of comic-strip elegance. It’s a Russian ghost story filtered through the mind of a child, and as vivid.

The witch (Nikolai Kutuzov) rides the terrified Khoma (Leonid Kuravlyov) through the sky.

The simple narrative follows a student from the Kiev Seminary, Khoma Brutus (Leonid Kuravlyov), ending his studies for the summer and traveling with his friends through the countryside. An unfortunate decision to spend the night at one particular barn, which happens to be owned by a witch (so ugly she’s actually a man: Nikolai Kutuzov), leads to Khoma being trapped under a spell and guided through the night sky, the witch riding him like a horse. When they collapse back to Earth, the terrified Khoma beats the witch savagely…at which point she transforms into a beautiful young woman (Natalya Varley), who dies with tears on her cheeks. The matter isn’t over: he’s soon summoned to a village where a young girl has died; her dying wish was for none other than Khoma Brutus to spend three nights by her body praying for the salvation of her soul. He tells the grieving father that he never met the girl, but it’s a half-truth, for the body lying upon the bed is clearly that same girl whose likeness the witch took. The father tells Khoma that he will reward him handsomely if he obeys the girl’s instructions, and so the seminary student follows her corpse as it’s delivered in an open casket into an old church. It’s a spooky place, with creepy religious portraits and a door that resembles a standing coffin. After he lights candles, an invisible being blows them out. Less than sober, he stands at a podium and begins reciting prayers, and the girl’s body rises like a vampire from the casket. She gropes blindly toward Khoma, and in terror he draws a protective circle on the floorboards in white chalk. She presses her hands and leans against the invisible barrier. Thwarted, she returns to her coffin, and the lid lifts and slams shut on its own accord. Khoma’s efforts to escape the next day are thwarted, so he decides to get more drunk instead.

The witch (Natalya Varley) assaults Khoma's magic circle, riding a flying coffin.

On the second night, Khoma drunkenly slams down his prayer book and opens it, and a bird flies out, settling up in the rafters. He begins reading, and the witch rises once more. This time she flies through the air, riding her coffin like a surfboard, but even as she slams it again and again upon the barrier of Khoma’s magic circle, she can’t reach him. The cock’s crow interrupts her efforts. Now Khoma is desperate to escape, but neither the wealthy father nor the men of the village will allow him to leave, so he takes to more drink. The third night is a phantasmagoria of Ptushko’s creative effects work: the witch summons devils which at first are giant gray hands that come reaching out from the walls and the floor. Then winged gargoyles and deformed bat-men begin flooding the room, climbing down the walls and clawing through the cobwebs. Finally the witch summons a creature called “Viy,” a troll-like behemoth whose heavy eyelids need to be lifted by the devils. Once its gaze settles upon Khoma, they are able to penetrate his circle and swarm him. The cock crows and the witch and her demons are destroyed by the dawn, but by now Khoma is dead.

The witch summons her grotesque devils to attack Khoma.

Viy‘s reputation has grown in the ensuing decades as horror buffs have gradually discovered it (often comparing it to The Evil Dead); but it’s just as appealing for its clever visual effects as it is the folkloric style of storytelling – it would pair well with the “Fearnot” episode of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller (1988) or the Faerie Tale Theatre episode “The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers” (with the one-time-only cast of Peter MacNicol, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, David Warner, and Frank Zappa). I watched the film this past Halloween while receiving trick-or-treaters, and it felt seasonally appropriate. Viy has an appealingly timeless veneer; unlike any film from America or Western Europe in 1967, you couldn’t guess the year Viy was made. And though it’s probably overlong at 78 minutes, the padding to the story is assisted by dollops of humor and persistently fantastique imagery: such as a drunken night at an inn, with Khoma hallucinating the same man emerging from three different doors simultaneously and in the same shot. The film is as restlessly creative and visually entertaining as any modern film by a Terry Gilliam or a Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but then again, I can hardly resist a film which features both a walking skeleton and a skeleton hydra.

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Double Feature: Onibaba (1964)/Kuroneko (1968)

Kaneto Shindo, who turns 99 this year, established one of Japan’s first independent production companies, Kindai Eiga Kyokai, and – working outside the system – was able to present edgier fare. It’s difficult to imagine, for example, a darker and more daring work for the Japan of 1964 than Onibaba (Demon Woman), and it helped open the gates to a new kind of cinema in the decade to come. Based upon a Buddhist fable, Shindo’s film takes its time getting to the key element which will turn the story from a bleak, quasi-documentary on peasant life in the 15th century – when samurai warred for domination and burned cities, leaving the poor to scrabble for food or die – into a true horror tale worthy of Poe. But look closer, and the horror is there from the start. We see a dark, round pit in the center of a field of swaying suzuki grass. An almost-haiku tells us: “The hole, deep and dark. Its darkness has lasted since ancient times.” Then the score pounds upon the soundtrack while the opening titles roll: improvisational jazz wedded to something more frighteningly primitive. As the film progresses, the music by Hikaru Hiyashi (who scored Shindo’s The Naked Island) will settle for raw percussion and human screams. It’s that kind of movie. We see two samurai battle within the tall grasses, and just when a victor emerges, panting in exhaustion, a spear strikes out from behind and kills him. Out of the grasses come two women, who leap upon the men and strip their bodies of the armor. Then, without saying a word, they drag the bodies to that “deep and dark” hole, and shove the naked men over the edge. They’ll take their prizes off to a sleazy fence named Ushi, all for the sake of some millet, so they won’t starve. It’s a routine; you get the impression they do this every week, and long for another wounded samurai to wander into their deadly field. If this were a more straightforward horror film, they would clearly identified as the monsters. But no one in this film is untainted by corruption.

Nobuko Otawa and Jitsuko Yoshimura as the two peasant women, dragging another kill to the bottomless pit.

We learn that the younger woman (Jitsuko Yoshimura, Pigs and Battleships) is a wife abandoned by her husband, gone off to war to fight as a samurai; the older woman (Nobuko Otawa, Children of Hiroshima) is her mother-in-law. Fittingly, the mother-in-law wears a kimono patterned with the image of a crab: these two women, living by a the river and in a muddy swamp, scuttle and scavenge. The tale properly begins when a wandering samurai, Hachi (Kei Satô, Harakiri), arrives at their hut, announcing that the man for whom they’ve been waiting – named Kichi – is dead. Hachi is a crass slob, and leers over the woman whom he claims is now a widow. Gradually, she begins to succumb to his advances, possibly out of loneliness, but certainly out of a need for survival. He can provide for her, so she has no choice; almost greedily, she gives in to lust. The mother-in-law disbelieves Hachi, and is as appalled to see her daughter-in-law cave to possible adultery as she is anxious to keep someone so vital to her own survival in this muddy field. One night, while her daughter-in-law is off sleeping with Hachi, the old woman encounters a samurai with a demon-faced mask. He needs guidance through the field, which she reluctantly offers; when she inquires about the mask, he tells her that it’s meant to strike fear in the heart of his enemies – and also that he cannot show her his true face, for it is too beautiful for her to withstand. But the old woman sees this stranger as an opportunity…a chance to put things back to the way they were before Hachi’s arrival; with a cold-hearted calculation she begins to enact her scheme.

Nobuko Otowa as the mother-in-law in "Onibaba."

Onibaba is a most feral film. Its characters act more like animals than recognizable human beings; we feel a voyeuristic queasiness at seeing humanity at its lowest, with not a single likeable character in sight. (The character of Kichi’s wife becomes the most sympathetic, but only by default.) Director Shindo delivers this effect not just through the brutal score, but through the movements of the two women, close-ups of their delirious, hungry eyes, and manic shots of the two lovers running ecstatically through the tall grasses. The story, like so many fables, relies upon a repetition that builds toward a calamitous interruption: each night Kichi’s wife rises from the bed, carefully studying her sleeping mother-in-law, then creeping out the door before sprinting through those grasses toward Hachi’s hut – orgasmically. (When she finally encounters something waiting for her, rising suddenly out of the grasses, it’s genuinely hair-raising.) The film is dripping with sex. Hachi openly leers at the girl’s bare legs while she works by the side of the muddy river. In a movie that couldn’t possibly be more Freudian, he collapses, fraught with his unconsummated desires, at the edge of the dark pit and moans, “I want a woman!” Even the mother-in-law is not free of lust. In one moment she embraces a tall, barren tree while the camera pans up, up, up its long trunk and pointed branches. With greater frequency as Onibaba wears on, the actresses are partially nude. One of the key images in the film is Kichi’s wife lying on her back in the hut at night, her breasts exposed, damp with sweat, as she anxiously awaits the moment when she can run free through those grasses to her lover. Otowa, who was the wife of the director and his frequent star, plays the mother-in-law with a daring commitment to the film’s ungarnished texture; in one moment, topless, she towels off her armpit and then her face before alternating once more between that sinister smile and (default) scowl. This approaches the gritty peasant cinema of Pasolini, but with none of his romanticism. Ostensibly the film is a morality tale, but one custom-fit for a decade of sexual liberation. After such a long build-up, the ending is abrupt, but almost absurdly satisfying.

"Kuroneko": the ghost of Shige (Kiwako Taichi) seduces another samurai victim.

Four years later Kaneto Shindo brought audiences a follow-up, Kuroneko (Black Cat, 1968), but this horror tale trades much of the previous film’s grime and grit for a more abstracted visual poetry. It suits the story. Kuroneko begins with a shocking scene – a gang rape of two peasant women by an army of samurai – but you’ll notice it’s less explicit than it might have been handled in Onibaba. The unconscious women are left to perish in the burning hut, but Shindo lingers, until we see the smoldering remains, and the two victims, covered in burns and bruises, lie dead as their pet, a black cat, crawls over their bodies and licks their faces, and then the blood of their wounds. Once more we’re treated to an evocative, experimental score by Hikaru Hiyashi – at times it resembles the growls of a restless cat – but the environment of this film quickly becomes more overtly dream-like, and we’re not precisely sure of the rules of this reality. Late at night, a samurai comes to Rajomon Gate. There he sees a woman (Kiwako Taichi) materializing suddenly in the darkness, dressed in a white kimono, holding a hood over her face. She asks to be escorted back to her home, which lies deep in a bamboo forest. He obliges, seduced by her beauty, and travels through a fog to a house occupied by an older woman (once more, Nobuko Otowa). They give him some strong sake; the older woman asks after her son, who has gone off to fight in the wars – shades of Onibaba. Then she departs, and the drunken samurai takes the younger woman to bed…where she suddenly strikes at him like a cat, and rips his throat to bloody shreds. The mother waits in the darkness, watching the murder enacted by silhouettes. At dawn, the ghost-house dissipates back into ruins, upon which the samurai’s corpse rests.

Kichiemon Nakamura, as war hero Gintoki, sports his kill to the leader of the samurai.

The murders repeat, which Shindo protrays as a cyclical series of images: the samurai arriving by horseback at the gate; the young woman appearing – sometimes back-flipping through the air like wire-fu; the ride back through the bamboo forest; the sake; the seduction; the spilled blood. When a young samurai named Gintoki (Kichiemon Nakamura), calling himself “Gintoki of the Grove,” rides into the city with the prize head of a fearsome enemy warrior, his leader, Raiko (Kei Sato), cares more about the publicity he can drum up with such a war hero than the fact that Gintoki’s entire army has been lost to battle. And it’s really just a publicity stunt that he asks Gintoki to go to Rajomon Gate and slay the monster that’s been ripping out the throat of so many samurai. The young man obliges, but when he rides out to the gate he encounters a ghost who bears an uncanny resemblance to his wife, Shige, whom he’d presumed was killed while he was away at war. When he follows her back to her home, he finds that the older woman looks exactly like his mother. He demands that they reveal their true identities, but they vanish into the air. Only after subsequent visits can he persuade the ghosts to linger; they claim they can speak nothing of their true selves. He says he won’t harm them; he becomes content with their rules, and the woman-who-might-be-Shige takes him to bed. He spends the evening unharmed at her side, but is told to leave before dawn. Raiko impatiently awaits news of the monster’s destruction, but Gintoki returns empty-handed day after day, even as his face grows paler, his body more frail. Then one night he learns the truth of a pact that his lover ghost has made, and he finds himself compelled to follow Raiko’s orders to their desolate ends.

The ghost of Gintoki's mother (Nobuko Otowa) pays a final visit to her son.

Kuroneko is a distorted mirror-image of Onibaba, once more following a triangle of tormented souls in an age of samurai which Shindo is determined to strip of all traces of glory and honor. But while the supernatural happenings are more direct than in the former film, the dread is more existential, and almost suffocating. Gintoki’s wife and mother have become fused with the identity of a demonic cat, and have sworn an oath to the “god of evil,” taking vengeance on every wandering samurai. That oath can’t hold Gintoki as an exception, though as the story wears on, we see the two women struggle vainly against that oath, just as the samurai tries to neglect his oath to his boss, Raiko. Ultimately they’re all doomed by their promises, and one of the many Buddhist hells awaits them; for Gintoki, it’s a hell on earth. With these two unconventional horror films, Kaneto Shindo portrays a very human kind of horror, where the characters are trapped by their own decisions – and driven to do so by an impoverished and merciless world. And the beauty is that the grimmer they become, the more graceful is Shindo’s touch: true black magic.

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