Demon Wind (Charles Philip Moore, 1990)

Demon Wind is a low-budget horror movie that borrows heavily from The Evil Dead and Night of the Living Dead, but anyone expecting the same-old same-old from that description should raise their expectations. Maybe not in terms of quality (the movie is extremely stupid in a myriad of hilarious ways), but in terms of subverting the dominant paradigms of logical character behavior and narrative coherence, Demon Wind will surprise you at least three times no matter how many cheap horror flicks you've seen (and no matter how many times you've already seen Demon Wind). Writer/director Charles Philip Moore balances every well-worn horror cliché with at least two moments of unexpected lunacy or confusion-inducing nonsense, and I thank him for it.

Beginning with some historical demonic possession and exploding farmhouse biz in 1931, Demon Wind soon jumps to the present with our stubbornly driven young hero Cory (Eric Larson) and his momentarily exasperated but generally supportive girlfriend Elaine (Francine Lapensée) driving to the location of the old exploded farmhouse for reasons known only to Cory. Cory recently discovered his father was orphaned in the 1931 farmhouse disaster and only survived because he was in an incubator in the hospital at the time, though Cory also says his father was born in 1929 in a later scene. One of those dates has to be incorrect or the father was either a two-year-old in an incubator or mysteriously born twice; either explanation is perfect Demon Wind logic. Whatever the year of his birth, Cory's father, after years of normalcy, begins acting strangely, moves to a shack in the California countryside near the farmhouse, and cuts off ties to his family. When Cory drops in on his father to get an explanation, the old man tells him a crazy story about demons killing the biological grandparents he'd never known and then 23 skidoos this mortal coil by slashing his wrists with a razor.

Cory does what any logical person would do after these events. He keeps it all to himself but takes his girlfriend to the cursed exploded farmhouse's location and invites his entire group of friends out there, too, telling them he needs them. Why does he need them? Emotional support? Because each of them possesses a special skill? No, man, it's so most of them can be killed by demons. For our enjoyment.

The friend group covers the key demographics of horror movie friend groups from the home video era. We have the already mentioned Cory, the insanely driven go-getter protagonist with a family secret; Elaine, the supportive girlfriend, sexy blonde version; Dell (Bobby Johnston), a sexist and homophobic jock asshole who's quick to anger and ready to fight and who would never hang out with these people in real life but is somehow an integral member of every teen/twentysomething friend group in every movie made between 1979 and 1993; Terri (Lynn Clark), the supportive girlfriend, brunette version, who is inexplicably partnered up with Dell despite her friendliness and even-keeled demeanor; Jack (Mark David Fritsche), the intellectual guy with glasses (who is a dead ringer for Tears for Fears' Curt Smith and shares his '80s hairdo); Bonnie (Sherry Leigh), Jack's girlfriend and the skeptical member of the supportive girlfriend triptych (she also fulfills the 1984-1990 requirement that at least one member of the group has to be wearing pink); and, last but not least, the most common friend group stereotype of them all, Chuck (Stephen Quadros), a magician who is also really good at karate. I'm so sick of seeing the karate-magician in every damn movie. Who's with me? Chuck is accompanied by his hype man Stacy (Jack Forcinito), who seems to be secretly in love with Chuck, though Chuck is only in love with magic and adventure, which is why his previous relationship with Terri fell apart.

Dell, already hotheaded, is not too happy to see his lady's ex, especially after Chuck karate-kicks a beer can at Dell's head after Dell tries to punch him. Chuck then pulls out a white handkerchief, says "Shazam," turns the handkerchief into a dove, and throws the dove into the air. The dove promptly shits on Dell. Dell's beautiful response, "You son-of-a-bitchin' idiot!" Did I forget anyone? Yes, and the movie almost forgot them, too. Willy (Richard Gabai) and Reena (Mia M. Ruiz), an alternative hipster couple, arrive fashionably late and are almost immediately killed by demons. Is that a spoiler? You can't spoil Demon Wind, son. Miss me with that question and go back to demon wind school.

The friends initially meet up at the only café/gas station (and the only sign of life) for miles, run by a surly old man who warns them away from the old farmhouse site and waves a gun in their faces and an oddball waitress/clerk who keeps asking them about a woman none of them know named Little Linda. Classic Demon Wind. The café menu doesn't look too bad and is pretty varied (and cheap!) for such a remote location. You can get ribs, a half-chicken, giant burgers, and fish and chips for a buck or two, though I'd stay away from the fish burger. The drink options? Coke, beer, water, or goat's milk. You know some joker, probably named Tiny or Red or Big Al, is going there every week for a fish burger and goat's milk. Classic Tiny.

Our legendary group, despite the warnings and Bonnie's bad vibes, carries on with the pilgrimage and arrives at the farmhouse remains. All that's left is a few burnt farmhouse walls and the front door, an abandoned barn, a skeleton on a cross, and a partially buried skull poking out of the grass. You'd think someone would have cleaned that shit up between 1929/1931 and 1990, but they were all too busy knocking back fish burgers. Things get even spookier when they walk into the door. The house reappears intact around them. This freaks them out enough to make them leave, but the batteries in all their cars are dead. They decide to hoof it back to civilization, but an eerie fog accompanied by some wind .. some DEMON wind ... passes through, changing the landscape behind them to different isolated forest scenes before depositing them right back at the farmhouse.

Soon, the group is beset by Evil Dead-style demons, and they respond by boarding up the windows and doors Night of the Living Dead-style. The demons start moving and attacking like Romero zombies. I have to hand it to these demons. They adapt quite well to the style of whichever movie is being ripped off. We also get a spell book, magic daggers, X-Men-style superhero mutations, people getting turned into dolls, adults turning into children turning into doves (if you get access to a dove for one scene, you might as well put it in two scenes), a failed seduction by a sexy topless demon played by porn star and Gorgeous Lady of Wrestling Tiffany Million, karate-kick beheadings, psychedelic cartoon FX, and a huge monster demon played by someone named C.D.J. Koko in his only film role.

Demon Wind is a silly movie, full of nonsense, but it's just the kind of nonsense that warms my heart. I had a good time watching this thing several years ago, and I had a good time watching it last night. A straight-to-video movie that only got a theatrical release in Germany, Demon Wind was mostly forgotten until its appearance on the first season of The Last Drive-In put it in the cult movie canon. I bet it plays great with an appreciative late-night crowd. It also teaches us some important lessons. If you need to go to a possessed farmhouse to fight demons, invite an egghead with glasses who looks like one-half of an iconic '80s synth-pop duo, an asshole meathead, a martial artist/magician, their supportive girlfriends and/or hype men, and a couple hipsters. They won't be any help to you, but the demons will be so distracted killing them that you and your girlfriend will have time to figure out a plan and, when everything is said and done, you can make some new friends that are less annoying.

Writer/director Charles Philip Moore hasn't been active in film since the '90s, but he worked as a screenwriter, actor, and assistant director on several late '80s and '90s b-movies, and his other directing credits include Dance with Death, about a reporter going undercover as a stripper to catch a serial killer, Blackbelt, about a martial arts expert and former cop protecting a rock star from a serial killer while also fighting off other martial arts experts, and Angel of Destruction, which has the exact same plot as Blackbelt, except that the ex-cop is still a cop and is a woman instead of a man.

Notable cast members include Bobby Johnston, who, in addition to his extensive b-movie CV, is a model and former Playgirl centerfold; Lynn Clark, who played the longest-lasting Jerry Seinfeld girlfriend on Season 1 of Seinfeld (she appeared on two episodes and was mentioned as Jerry's girlfriend on two other episodes before finally being dumped and was involved in George's first Art Vandelay namedrop); Sherry Leigh, a stuntwoman who hails from my home state of Nebraska; Richard Gabai, b-movie actor and director whose filmmaking credits include Assault of the Party Nerds, Virgin High, Assault of the Party Nerds 2: The Heavy Petting Detective, Vice Girls, Kickboxing Academy, Motocross Kids, the Lifetime movies Expecting Amish and Mommy, I Didn't Do It, and the Hallmark movie A Gingerbread Romance; and the karate-magician himself, Stephen Quadros, who is a true Renaissance man. He initially moved to Hollywood as a heavy metal drummer, where his band Snow was popular on the club scene. Snow fell apart when guitarist Carlos Cavazo quit to replace Randy Rhoads in Quiet Riot (Rhoads left to join Ozzy's band). Quadros auditioned for KISS but injured his hand shortly thereafter and turned to acting. He's worked steadily as an actor since (mostly in b-movies and episodic TV) while also putting his mixed-martial arts background to use as a sports journalist (where he earned the nickname The Fight Professor), MMA play-by-play commentator, and fight coordinator/choreographer in the television and film industry. He appeared as himself in The Smashing Machine. I'll always think of him as Chuck.

"You son-of-a-bitchin' idiot!"

Desperate Living (John Waters, 1977)

I'm facing some possible desperate living of my own as I write this post, as yet another potentially disruptive winter storm descends upon Texas, a state with its own unreliable power grid (because of liberty, you see?), except for the wise people of certain parts of west Texas, who are hooked to the national grid. Will I finish my post today or at some unspecified future date when power is restored (if the power goes out)? My wife and I lost power for seven days in 2023 and lost running water for three days in 2021, so we're both slightly on edge but reasonably prepared.

You know who wasn't reasonably prepared? The Good Housekeeping film critic, who walked out of the Desperate Living premiere after ten minutes, a badge of honor I'm sure John Waters wears proudly. Desperate Living, the only Waters film of Divine's lifetime without Divine (he reluctantly withdrew from the production due to a clash in schedules with the off-Broadway play Women Behind Bars) (the same goes for David Lochary, whose drug habit kept him from appearing in this one and who would die from drug-related injuries shortly after Desperate Living's release), is a hilariously mean-spirited, vulgar, transgressive, disgusting, and heartwarming tale of the power of women to overcome a fascist queen of a godforsaken burg called Mortville near Baltimore. We could all learn a lot from this one. (My non-storm thoughts today are with the good people of Minneapolis fighting the fascist federal government of our nationwide Mortville.)

Though I'm a fan of Desperate Living as a whole, I think the opening scene is one of the greatest pieces of comedy ever filmed and Mink Stole's tour-de-force. (Her "I hate the Supreme Court" line has become the most inevitable 2020s online meme.) I could watch two straight hours of Mink Stole yelling at people over the phone, and I'd be in heaven. Cranking Sirkian melodrama and those very special TV movies about suburban women having nervous breakdowns up to eleven (after a very Douglas Sirk opening credit sequence, except for the cooked rat on the dinner tray, of course), the opening scene begins with boys playing baseball in the yard of a suburban Baltimore home. A doctor exiting the home tells the family patriarch Bosley Gravel (George Stover) that his wife is the most neurotic woman he's ever met and that she should return to the institution. Bosley calmly tells the doc everything's hunky dory and that she's improving. In her upstairs bedroom, Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole), proceeds to unload on everything and everyone around her at fever pitch, especially when the boys' errant baseball smashes through her window. It's truly one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Stole yells classic line after classic line in her wonderfully inimitable style ("Go home to your mother! Doesn't she ever watch you? Tell her this isn't some Communist day care center! Tell your mother I hate her! Tell your mother I hate you!"). It could go on forever and I would be a pig in mud.

Through an escalating series of events, Peggy and her maid Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill) kill Bosley and go on the run. Once on the open road, Grizelda lets Peggy know the power balance has shifted: "I ain't your maid anymore, bitch. I'm your sister in crime." (John Waters should be on the Mount Rushmore of movie dialogue writers, if one were ever to exist. What a weird fucking project that would be.) The women stop to camp despite Peggy's hatred of nature ("Look at those disgusting trees, stealing my oxygen! Don't we taxpayers have a voice anymore?"). Unfortunately, a Baltimore motorcycle cop (played by the wonderfully named Turkey Joe in his only film role) pulls in and threatens to arrest them. (There's already an APB out for them even though the killing happened minutes ago.) The cop lets them go and gives them directions to Mortville in exchange for their underwear and a couple wet kisses. A fair deal. Who is Turkey Joe and why is this his only film role? I need to know more about Turkey Joe. He also delivers a tour-de-force here, half of it while simultaneously wearing three pairs of women's underwear.

Mortville is a shanty town with no indoor plumbing (except at the bar) on the outskirts of Baltimore populated by society's outcasts. Its fascist monarchy is run with an iron fist and many whims by Queen Carlotta (the one and only Edith Massey) from her castle. She's guarded by a group of men in Gestapo-meets-leather daddy regalia, and her castle is adorned with painted portraits of Idi Amin, Hitler, and Charles Manson. Her rebellious adult daughter Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) is kept under close supervision in her bedroom, and Carlotta disapproves of Coo-Coo's relationship with nudist garbageman Herbert (George Figgs).

Peggy and Grizelda rent a newly available spare shack from the power couple of disgraced former professional wrestler Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), on the run after killing Big Jimmy Dong in the ring, and Marilyn lookalike Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay) (check out Renay's life story to take a wild ride), who suffocated her child's terrible babysitter in a bowl of dog food. Divine was originally going to play Mole, which would have been an interesting departure. Mole is a very butch masculine character, and Divine usually played such fabulously over-the-top women for Waters. I'm a little bummed we'll never see Divine's take, though Lowe is an excellent member of the Waters troupe in her own right and does a fine job here. (My favorite Lowe performance is Vikki, the salon receptionist in Waters' masterpiece Female Trouble: "Boys, she won't pay. Take the hairdo back!")

Tensions between the Mortville residents and Queen Carlotta reach a boiling point, the resolution of which involves collapsing homes, rabies potions, betrayal, gunplay, deaths, nudity, a botched sex change operation, armed revolt, a fantastic-looking Cookie Mueller, and the immortal line, "Get out of my chambers, lesbians!" It's the quality entertainment some of us deserve.

Divine is missed, but Desperate Living is otherwise top-shelf Waters. It's his ugliest, grimiest, and nastiest movie and plenty disgusting (though nothing reaches the gag-reflex high/low of Divine eating the dog shit in Pink Flamingos), and it's also one of his funniest and most life-affirming. Mink Stole and Edith Massey are so goddamn hilarious here, and, though Waters may vomit at what I'm about to type, the movie is an earnest tribute to the power of collective action over I-got-mine-so-fuck-you individuality. There's a utopian aspect to Waters' films that makes a lot more sense to me than the kumbaya hippy shit utopias we usually get in artistic works. His characters just want to live life on their own terms (as the filthiest people alive, or in specific cha-cha heels, or as a serial killer of disrespectful fellow suburbanites) without a boot on their necks, and they succeed when they team up to defeat the squares, winning or losing on their own terms without relinquishing their individual personalities or watering down their unsavory qualities. I love these characters so much.

Watching a John Waters '70s movie in the 2020s gives me melancholic, bittersweet feelings about the robustness of the various countercultures in the 20th century. In our current social media/content creator world, we have the worst of both monoculture and underground culture without the benefits of either. Almost everything shares a similar flattened aesthetic form and delivery system, but we're all consuming it separately in isolation, except for the occasional viral moment. Younger artists are too often worried about offending people or being observed and recorded or making a public mistake or being misunderstood to create the kind of joyfully transgressive work that Waters made.

I'm not trying to make the stupid right-wing argument that "no one can say anything anymore without being canceled/comedy is illegal/Rogan and his boys are fighting the good fight against tyranny because they got mild criticism for saying a few shitty words" (not pictured: me making the jerkoff motion) (the only real, long-lasting censorship in the U.S. this century has come from the right wing erasing history and banning library books, though I'll admit there are plenty of art-misunderstanding left-wing online bullies trying to police language and content from their tiny virtual soapboxes, too, but none of those people have any real power), but I'm not going to pretend there isn't a sort of self-censoring walking-on-eggshells fear-of-online-criticism approach to art in the current era where everyone and everything is on permanent display and observation. People have less freedom to try on identities and experiment and push boundaries and figure out who they are and make mistakes without out-of-proportion criticism, leading to a lot of watered-down, safe, preachy, pandering art and entertainment and a lot of media illiteracy confusing depiction for endorsement. We could all stand to be online less and create more.

I really miss the 20th century, but I'm also a guy who tries to live in the present without wallowing in nostalgia, so I'm in a sort of permanent existential crisis. Now I'm on a damn soapbox, so I'll step off and just say I love John Waters. The man is a national treasure. No one else would have given Edith Massey a film career, which is a testament to his instincts and an indictment on society. (I feel like Mink Stole would have made something happen without Waters, but I'm so glad they were contemporaries and friends.) I honor you, Queen Carlotta, and I hate the Supreme Court, too.