When we speak of Canada’s two mythic solitudes, as consecrated by more-or-less-forgotten Canadian novelist Hugh MacLennan, we must in kind speak of two distinct and awfully discrete national cinemas operating very often at cross-purposes with one another. While Anglo-Canadian cinema for the longest time mostly kept its hands to itself when in came to trespassing against Hollywood’s dominion over popular narrative cinema and its international dissemination, Québecois people had their hand forced from the beginning: they had to make Québecois movies for Québecois audiences because who the hell else was going to do it? They don’t call it distinct society status to sound snooty. If you didn’t hear it before I’m here to lay it to you: Québec is distinct as fuck. This is incidentally how most of the children in staunchly and repressively Catholic Québec of 1952 found themselves watching the savage ritualistic scalding of La petite Aurore l'enfant martyre. The movies and traumatized and/or demystified kids have always travelled in tandem. The province of Québec had a whole entire star system functional only within its own modest borders before English Canada could even find its own ass. The whole global culture entered a radical phase of tempestuous transition and peptic upset in the 1960s and Québec was not exempt, though the province’s hard lean into Marxist politics and open debauchery put unambiguously to shame anything going on in the Anglo Zone of Solitude, largely because those folks hadn’t previously been living under the thumb of the Catholic Church the way the Québecois had and so hadn’t nearly the steam to blow off. So...as it should happen...along with the FLQ/October Crisis in 1970…we have…Deux femmes en or, a raw and racy sex comedy by the husband and wife team of Claude Fournier and Marie-José Raymond, a huge hit in one province only, and the film many believe to be the lynchpin of the Maple Syrup Porno cycle, which lasted only as long as the counterculture did, from about ’68 to ’71, but definitely made some people a ton of money. More sets like this, pretty please! Feed my eyes, cruel demon!
I’ve been in the company of Allan Moyle and Frank Vitale, who together with their friends made Montreal Main and The Rubber Gun in 1974 and 1977 respectively. Dope, drop-outs… transgressive poetics…gutter punk spunk. Having heard them tell stories, I’m confident that Allan and Frank got up to more mischief and into more trouble than should technically be survivable. Of their onscreen collaborators, present in both aforementioned films, the queer autodidact and painter Stephen Lack looms eternally largest. For example, it would definitely seem to be the case that Lack did prophesy AIDS years before it happened, and it is definitely true that he can rap wild and free like Bob Dylan on speed only with a gaze far, far, far more chilling. He would somehow go on to appear in films by David Cronenberg, Larry Cohen, and Jon Jost. Nobody else can boast that, fella. Allan Moyle would go on to direct cult Hollywood movies Pump Up the Volume (1990) and Empire Records (1995) as well as lovely lowkey Cape Breton classic New Waterford Girl (1999). Honk if you're in the process of invading Canada. There is a scene in Pump Up the Volume where Samantha Mathis and Christian Slater are fooling around and Mathis pulls her sweater off over the top of her head revealing that she has nothing on underneath. It’s a scene I once studied at some length. Amazingly, Allan told me that the studio felt uncomfortable with that scene and tried to compel him to cut it but he just kept saying he wouldn’t and so it stayed. Thank Christ for artistic integrity! I mean…the studio said whaaaaat? They’re over tits now, are they? Pfff. Go figure.
I asked her what she likes to do
for fun
and she said:
oh, I just throw on some fun music
and when I get tired of that
I’m liable to make faces in the mirror
for a spell.
She asked me if I was religious
and I told her that I worship
Denthremenetos, the Risen One
Sewer of Ruination.
Yikes, she said, interested.
I would tell you in all earnestness that I’m sorry I hurt you but you are exceedingly lovely when you cry so I am of at least two minds.
In 1816, when the sun barely shone for a year due to a volcanic winter triggered by the eruption of Mount Tambora on Sumbawa Island in Indonesia, the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was staying with her husband Percy, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where to beat the doldrums Byron challenged each of the others to come up with a gangbusters ghost story for the ages. Drugs and alcohol were definitely involved, but it is worth noting that Percy Shelly liked hash and laudanum but did not drink. In short order, Mary had a vivid dream featuring a "pale student of unhallowed arts" kneeling beside a hideous, reassembled humanoid being as it emerges torpidly back into a cursed condition of sentient awareness. Byron’s prompt and Mary’s dream were to prove the kernel from which the classic novel Frankenstein was to emerge. Bleak times? “It was the year 1816,” Paul West has Dr. Polidori muse in his sublime 1989 historical novel Lord Byron’s Doctor: “My life began then, and all else.”
Long before the theme park et cetera, Universal Studios set up shop in Southern California in 1915 when it built a studio lot in Universal City on land bought with prophetic good sense and no small amount of temerity by company honcho Carl Laemmle the previous year. One thing that Universal quickly learned and that no small number of small or micro ‘indie’ studios know very well to this day is that good horror movies are essentially cash cows because they are relatively cheap to make and can reliably be expected to pull in audiences everywhere. Universal had huge financial successes with a spate of atmospheric Gothic horror classics starring Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney and born of classy intellectual property like The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both Universal properties from 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein are not only among the most remarkable and innovative films of the early sound era, they also more or less singlehandedly saved Universal Studios from bankruptcy. Carl Laemmle Jr. bought the rights to Dracula after he saw a version adapted for the stage on Broadway. Instead of picking an actor with an existing contract at Universal, Carl Laemmle Jr. chose Bella Lugosi, star of the Broadway production. The iconic appearance of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein came at a cost. Karloff endured up to four hours of make-up every morning, and because his costume was so heavy and the lighting rigs so hot…he started to lose a considerable amount of weight. The lighting rigs in Classical Hollywood were so hot they could start fires (and did). Bella Lugosi famously downplayed Karloff's work in Frankenstein, qualifying that he considered Karloff primarily a "make-up artist" rather than a genuine actor steeped in the craft.
What’s my deal? None. I have no deal to offer a living soul. I’m just sitting here with the kid from Ju-On attacking the back half of a day-old box of assorted Hoopla donuts. What makes me believe myself such an expert that I can go ahead and speak on behalf of the monsters? I woke up knowing of the horrors to come but I could do nothing. Cassandra, daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba of Troy, who was sentenced by Apollo to prophesy the truth and be believed by no one. “All our knowledge is derived from infidels,” Percy Shelly is declared to have boasted.
The sea, the sea, the dark blue sea,
The bright, the pure, the ever free.
Edward John Trelawny on fair weather friend Percy Shelley: “barring drugs and accidents, he might have lived as long as his father—to ninety.” Trelawny believed that Shelley’s vessel was probably hijacked on the water and Shelley robbed and killed, or that it was a malicious ramming, an act of hot-headed caprice, the vessel’s occupant(s) in due course casualties of the sinking. What kind of monster was Percy Shelley? He was the best kind of spoiled, little brat. He wanted to have his cake and eat it too, turning the King’s England, all the while, into a foul open-air zoo. The angelic toddler who bangs on the table and proclaims its rancid epithets, servants running about in dismay and confusion. King baby and spoiled, little brat are not equivalent. King baby is all diapers, lung power, and demands, whereas spoiled, little brat will use intelligence and cunning to really and truly fuck shit up. When Percy Shelly wrote The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, not yet twenty, he knew what he was doing and he went ahead and did it, turning himself into a No-Go Zone for his whole family and all other members of polite society who’d formerly known him.
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches, and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanised automaton.
If you were a white rock and roll star in the 1950s the best way to demonstrate credibility and be a hardcore badass was to to die in an airplane or automobile crash. That’s what happened to Eddie Cochran in 1960 when the ascending earth angel entertainer died in a car accident at the age of twenty-one on the way to Heathrow Airport at the end of a successful UK tour. Witnesses to the accident describe Cochran throwing his body over his fiancée, songwriter Sharon Sheeley, to protect her during impact, perhaps in the process sealing his own fate. At the age of eighteen, in 1958, Sheeley wrote the hit “Poor Little Fool” for Ricky Nelson, which had the distinction of becoming the first number one hit on the inaugural Billboard Hot 100 chart. The sublime Eddie Cochran tune “Somethin' Else,” in all its pummelling sturm und drang commodity fetishism, peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959 and was written by Sharon Sheeley and Eddie’s older brother Bob. My goodness, now doesn’t that just look like a Freudian case study if anything ever did? I can see it on the billboards now: Kane and Abel Vs. the Kustom Kar Kommandos.
