Go see Clutch. Best live band ever. Possibly the best band ever, period. Top five, anyway. I saw them on the 27th, for the third time. Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, and Murder by Death opened. Both bands are on shitty emo/hardcore record labels (MSoD even has the original singer from Underoath – ugh), so I automatically assumed they were going to suck, and I just wanted them to get the hell off the stage so Clutch could come out and rock my face off. Isn’t it great when you go to a show with really low expectations for the warm-ups, and then it turns out they’re really good? I wound up buying the new albums from both bands because they impressed me so much. Some people don’t like being introduced to a band live without being familiar with any of the songs. Personally, I think it’s the best way to be introduced to a band. So you may not catch all the lyrics or remember every single chord change in the morning, but the impression when a band you’ve never heard before stands on the stage in front of you and hammers out that first riff is much more powerful than just hearing it on a stereo.
If your first introduction to Edgar Allan Poe was tonight’s movie, you may not be so inclined to purchase one of his tour shirts, even if this is a cheap Mexican knockoff with a bad iron-on transfer and the seams in the wrong places. Of course, being no great fan of Poe to begin with, I’m probably the wrong guy to ask.
Gaston is a reporter, on the trail of an interesting story. He wants to interview Dr. Maillard, director of a famous sanitarium which allows its inmates free reign to live out their crazy bastard fantasies. After being given an excessively meandering tour of the place by Maillard where inmates harass them, and Gaston inexplicably falling in love with Eugenie even though his only previous contact with her was watching her go into a trance during a faux Egyptian ceremony and try to kill Maillard with a rock, we come to find out that Maillard is in fact a notorious outlaw named Raoul Fragonard. He took over the asylum, imprisoned the real Maillard and his guards, and turned the inmates into his subjects and the asylum into his own personal Latveria. Eugenie came there looking for her missing father, and was captured and eventually forced to believe she was an Egyptian goddess, or some such nonsense.
Eventually Gaston’s friend, who some of the inmates captured in the woods and threw in the brig, leads a counter-revolution and the guards regain control. Raoul freaks out and attacks Gaston with a sea turtle (no, seriously) before being shot down, and order is restored.
This thing was made in Mexico by some of the people who made El Topo. The real title is Mansion of Madness, and while it’s obviously an attempt at a pseudo-philosophical art film (there bloody well is a difference between a flick and a film, and give me a flick any day, brother), it was marketed as an exploitation flick in the States. Be forewarned that there is no doctor named Tarr (where the hell did they get that from?), and while we do briefly see a dungeon, there is absolutely no torture, just a malnourished guy clapped in irons. No one has to push the pram a lot.
The first two acts are incredibly boring. It’s good joke fodder at first, but it wears out its welcome quickly, as it’s just Raoul and Gaston wandering from crazy skit to crazy skit of inmates dressing like Napoleon and sheep running around so Gaston can conveniently mention that he “can’t be led around as easily as that lamb” that just ran by them for no reason. See? Art film. Lambs don’t run by for no reason in a flick. And you can be sure that it means something. Only at the end, when it turns into Caligula with no sex, chicken women with scythes, and sea-turtle-fu does it get interesting. I’m fairly certain, by the way, that Edgar Allen Poe wrote neither about chicken women with scythes, nor sea-turtle-fu, though he certainly would have been much cooler if he had.
If you absolutely love foreign movies made in the 70’s (which is why I wound up watching it, thinking there was going to be torture in a dungeon, dammit), check it out. The cinematography is typical of the style inherent to the genre and the decade that so catches my eye – grainy film, dingy, washed out colors and light, and a sense that it might just be something from another universe. There are a few amusing moments, most notably the random act of violence involving a sea turtle, but not really enough to recommend it unless, like me, you can sit through a boring piece of crap movie as long as it has the proper aesthetic sense. To make my point a little clearer, if I had rented this movie – the exact same movie, acting, sets, everything – only it had been shot on digital video (worst filmmaking medium ever; looks like ass, and is responsible for Brain Damage films existing on the budget they do) and released DTV, I would have been PISSED at having to sit through it.
Who knew that between stealing silverware, jumping the border, and cutting open old car seats in junkyards to get high off the fermented fart residue stored up in the cushions, Mexicans could find the time to be so pretentious. Then again, the fermented fart highs may have directly related to our hero being threatened with a sea turtle. I just want to point out one more time that the bad guy, once cornered by a group of armed guards, accosts our hero with a SEA TURTLE.
The Moral of the Story: Film (FIL-m) n. 1. An audio-visual work of art, sometimes colloquially called a “movie”. 2. The way pretentious jerk-offs refer to their movies because they have tiny penises and are afraid no one will take them seriously if they try to have any fun.
Flick (fl-ICK) n. 1. A movie that makes no pretensions about its purpose in existence, which is first and foremost as entertainment. 2. The kind of movie pretentious jerkoffs hate, because it isn’t a “film”. 3. Much more fun than a “film”. 4. More honest than a “film”, because even if a “film” is artistic, art itself is primarily entertainment. 5. Do I really have to keep going, or do you get it already? 6. Seriously, if I have to explain this any more, you better just go watch a Fellini film (a phrase which actually makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I hear it).
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