King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

King Kong is a deeply weird and transcendent work of imagination that exists outside of age and time, a permanent thumbprint-on-the-subsconcious film-dream, and a vulgar spectacle/frozen time capsule piece that shows off the full derangement of the white male American brain (I have one of those, and I've been nuts since birth). It's also a lot of damn fun and must have been mindblowing to audiences walking in cold in 1933.

I can't remember a part of my life where I wasn't aware of King Kong. Both the 1933 and 1976 film versions were on television constantly when I was growing up (though the '33 version was mostly relegated to early Sunday mornings, where the '30s and '40s films were often dumped in the early '80s), and one of the first comic books I repeatedly devoured after learning to read was an oversized, full-color adaptation of Kong that my mother or grandmother bought for me at a garage sale when I was in preschool. Like Sesame Street, King Kong was just something that always existed, a foundational piece of my childhood mind.

By now, after multiple film, television, and comic book adaptations, sequels, and rip-offs, the story is familiar to most of you, so I'll forego the plot synopsis. What I'll attempt to describe instead is the odd sensation of childhood memory and adult experience crashing into each other while watching Kong in the present.

As a child, the film's opening scenes were just something one had to endure until the ship makes it to Skull Island, the conversation of adults sounding to my young ears the way the grownups sound in the Peanuts cartoons. Quit making with the yakety-yak and get to Skull Island, you jabronis. As an adult, these scenes are hilarious, skillfully paced, and great at building atmosphere, mood, and character. Cooper and Schoedsack poke fun at themselves, masculinity, show business, and the stereotype of the rugged action/adventure director who would do anything to get his pictures made, especially put the lives of his cast and crew in danger.

The sexism is so ridiculously over-the-top that it's obviously, at least in part, meant as self-parody. Director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) laments having to include a woman in one of his films for the first time because of the beauty and the beast angle he envisions for his latest story. A crew member on the ship replies, "You've never had a dame in any of your other pictures. Why put a dame in this one?"

Sailor John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) initially resents the presence of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray, who worked with co-director Schoedsack and actor Armstrong on another weird island movie, The Most Dangerous Game, the previous year) on his usually all-male sea voyages and gives her the business every time he sees her. Until, of course, he falls in love with her. When he gets the nerve to profess his love, Ann says, "But you hate women!" to which Driscoll shyly replies, "Aw, you ain't women." Wray is famous for her full-throated screaming in Kong, but she's a likable, funny, and natural actor in the early scenes with a luminous beauty and charisma that the camera loves.     

The early scenes on Skull Island filled me with awe when I was a kid, but the racism bums me out as an adult. So much entertainment I consumed as a kid depicted black people from Africa and island nations as superstitious, easily frightened, barbaric primitives who could not be trusted around white women. They were simultaneously novelties, threats, and expendable pieces of a story. I internalized so much of this without noticing, and King Kong is unfortunately a part of that, even as the powerful images and the scale of the sets and extras in these scenes still visually leave a great impression. These scenes don't read as malicious, just ignorant, and a few of these characters get human moments, but it's the part of Kong that has aged the worst.

The remainder of the film is a whirlwind of action and incredible images from Skull Island's giant monsters, lush wildlife, and rugged terrain and Kong's tragic adventures in the streets and on the skyscrapers of New York City. The New York scenes, especially, continue to astonish. The scenes of Kong in chains on a Broadway stage, his giant face peeping in the windows of apartments, the attack on the high line train car, and his ascent up the Empire State Building and the plane's-eye-view zooms toward him as he stands atop it are almost frightening in their visual power and presence and have lost none of their strange beauty. I felt a fusion of my childhood and adult selves while watching the film's second half, and I'm still amazed at how much emotion the special effects team managed to create in the face of a stop-motion animated ape-gorilla hybrid. 

The 1933 King Kong is still the greatest of the Kong film adaptations, a complex, weird stew of sexuality, comedy, horror, adventure, fantasy, male and racial anxiety taken to artistically absurd lengths, show business spectacle, and the vicarious thrill of a giant creature smashing things to bits, with some of the most expressive dream images of Manhattan ever committed to celluloid (yes, I know it's mostly studio sets). So familiar, so eternally strange.

Beyond the Darkness aka Buried Alive (Joe D'Amato, 1979)

Another weird, wild Italian horror film from the seemingly endless supply of weird, wild Italian horror films released between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, Beyond the Darkness is a sick, twisted, unpredictable, and deeply strange Psycho-inspired shocker with a few truly disgusting scenes, lots of dark humor, some genuinely creepy scares, and plenty of atmosphere and detail. When I wasn't looking away in disgust, I really enjoyed this one.

I knew I was in for something quite a bit different than a routine slasher film when the first two post-credits scenes involved cult movie actress Franca Stoppi showing pictures of a happy couple to another woman, who then begins to violently stab a voodoo doll with pins while Stoppi grins malevolently, and a young man unloading the carcass of a baboon onto a medical table inside a sprawling Italian villa. "Hell yeah," I thought to myself. "Weird times are about to be had."

Those weird times soon begin to make some narrative sense (though I don't require narrative sense to enjoy a movie). Iris (Stoppi) is the housekeeper/caretaker of the villa, and the guardian/twisted mother figure of the young man who owns it (you guessed it, the guy with the baboon). That young man, Frank (Kieran Canter), inherited the villa from his parents, who died in a car accident when Frank was a tween. Now Frank is a young adult who enjoys taxidermy (the baboon finally makes sense), blank stares from his piercing blue eyes, and his fiancee Anna (Cinzia Monreale), the victim of the voodoo doll mischief. The voodoo soon works its magic, and Anna falls deathly ill. Frank pays a visit to her in the hospital, they make out, she dies. He watches her final moments with more arousal than grief, digs up her body after the funeral, removes her guts, replaces her real eyes with fakes, dresses her, and puts her in his double bed. Real normal shit.

Meanwhile, the jealous Iris manipulates and controls Frank, playing both the authoritarian mother figure and a weird sort of wife role, making him suck her breast and giving him hand jobs while he stares at his dead fiancee. You know, real normal shit. They strike up a deal where Frank will marry her on the condition that he keep his dead fiancee in the house. Frank also has a habit of luring attractive young women to the villa, and he and Iris murder them and dispose of their corpses in a variety of gruesome ways. Iris becomes more and more jealous of Anna's corpse, detectives come around looking for a missing jogger, and a suspicious funeral home employee secretly snoops around the premises on multiple occasions. Things come to a boiling point when Anna's twin sister Elena stops by the villa to say goodbye before leaving the country, leading to a pretty sweet shock ending.

Beyond the Darkness is a wild ride, with more humor than you would expect from the above plot synopsis (shout-out to the disco dancing scene and the hilarious boogie moves of actress Simonetta Allodi, credited as Disco Girl) and, as my wife pointed out after we watched it, lots of real-time detail, like a scene where Frank changes a flat tire and another scene where Iris tries on different dresses until she finds one she likes for the evening. The characters are interesting and unusual, and Stoppi is so weird and so great as Iris.

Beyond the Darkness also contains some supremo gross-out moments, which has led to much censorship of the film. I had to look away when Frank rips the fingernails off of one victim (finally found something that makes me as squeamish as hypodermic needles going into arm veins), but the film also includes gut and eyeball removal, sawing off of limbs, and the dissolving of bodies in acid. Maybe the grossest scene of all, though, contains no violence at all, and is merely a closeup of Iris enthusiastically and vigorously chowing down on a gruel-like stew after one of the murders. Get some table manners, Iris. This scene also grosses Frank out, and the guy loves gross shit. If you have the stomach for it, Beyond the Darkness is an unusual, character-filled, detail-packed horror movie.

Director Joe D'Amato had a long, prolific career in Italian cinema until his death from a heart attack in 1999 at the age of 62. He made a steady living as a cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccesi, and his credits in this role add up to a whopping 169 films. He worked as a camera operator on 71 films, a screenwriter on 47, a producer on 27, an actor on 15, an editor on six, an assistant director on six, a crew member on another handful, and a director on a mind-boggling 197 films. No wonder the guy died of a heart attack.

In order to keep his various projects separate and keep working at the prolific pace he loved, D'Amato used a staggering number of pseudonyms for the staggering variety of genres he directed. He made horror films, spaghetti westerns, action movies, fantasy movies, softcore sex movies, and hardcore pornos under dozens of names, including Hugo Clevers, Raf de Palma, Dario Donati, Dirk Frey, Arizona Massachusett (lol), Igor Horwess, Zak Roberts, Chana Lee Sun, Robert Yip, and my favorite, only used once, Dick Spitfire. D'Amato was his horror name, and the one most often connected to his films today. His directing credits include such titles as More Sexy Canterbury Tales, Stay Away from Trinity ... When He Comes to Eldorado, God Is My Colt .45, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Papaya: Love Goddess of the Cannibals, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, Porno Holocaust, Ator the Fighting Eagle, 2020 Texas Gladiators, Paprika: The Last Italian Whore, Sex Penitentiary, Lunch Party, Flamenco Ecstasy, Cop Sucker, House of Anal Perversions, and multiple entries in the Emanuelle series. It's Joe D'Amato's aka Arizona Massachusett's world, we only live in it. 

Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979)

Before we Caligu-live, Caligu-laugh, and Caligu-love, please forgive this brief detour into remembrances of VHS days past. During my sophomore year of college in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the mid-'90s, a local man was struck with an epiphany while watching Babe and decided to open a video store specializing in cult, weirdo, and indie movies called Pig of Destiny Video. Around this same time, I was recovering from one of the worst bouts of depression I've ever experienced, one that put me within a hair's breadth of quitting school. I came out the other side, stayed in school (though I only took three classes that semester, two of them very easy), and slowly recovered by watching dozens of movies a week. I was a regular customer at Pig of Destiny during its brief existence (I got a VCR for Christmas that year and went berserk tearing my way through every cult movie, '70s movie, and '80s/'90s indie movie I could get my hands on). After the store had been open for six or seven months, the owner got in some tax trouble. I'm not sure if he didn't pay his taxes or filed incorrectly or what, but he was no longer legally allowed to sell or rent anything from the property. Being the cool and unusual guy he was and with a few months' rent already paid allowing him to remain on the premises through the end of his lease, he decided to give unlimited free rentals the last two months to anyone who already had a store membership. I took great advantage of this sad yet briefly awesome turn of events, and I watched, for free, nearly every day, as many movies as I could carry while riding my bicycle during this magical couple months. I was 19, I was thin, a fascist wasn't president, and for eight glorious weeks, I had unlimited free movie rentals. I watched so many good and great movies in that 60-day window of time. I also watched Caligula. Last night, after a 22-year Caligula-free stretch, I watched Caligula again.

Caligula, the only theatrical feature produced by Penthouse magazine, is basically an expensive splatter-porn version of Fellini's Satyricon with great sets and actors but pure chaos behind the camera. It's a terrible movie, and a long one at nearly three hours, but it's somehow entertainingly watchable throughout, mostly thanks to Malcolm McDowell's lead performance, which finds the perfect happy medium between seriousness and camp. It's one of those movies where the sex, nudity, and violence are piled on so thickly and continuously that the impact is lost. Ho-hum, another bucket of blood, yawn, another shapely naked ass in my face. If the film had weaker actors, Caligula would have been a trial to sit through once its oddball novelty wore off and the barrage of orgies and killings began its viewer desensitization, but McDowell, Helen Mirren, Teresa Ann Savoy, and John Steiner keep the crazy train solidly on the tracks. (On the other hand, Peter O'Toole looks tired and preoccupied, though he does give some good line readings, and John Gielgud can barely hide his shame and embarrassment.)

Caligula is the kind of project that could only have existed in the second half of the '70s. The country was in the waning days of post-Deep Throat porno chic, glossy sex mag publishers were rich, home video wasn't yet an option for the average person, no one but a few computer scientists had any idea what the Internet would be, major actors could take on ill-conceived projects without seriously damaging their careers, blockbuster madness was only just beginning and hadn't yet colonized every theater chain in the country, and cocaine hubris was still in full snort in the world of film production (I apologize for that terrible pun but will not delete it, in the spirit of Caligula). I'm not even sure if Caligula was fueled by cocaine dreams, but it sure feels like it.

Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse and wearer of deeply unbuttoned shirts and gold medallions, had a dream. He wanted to make the Citizen Kane of adult movies, an explicit sex movie that would play in regular movie theaters with a scripted narrative, expensive production values, and professional, non-porn talent behind and in front of the camera, and he thought the life story of insane, priapic Roman emperor Caligula would be just the ticket. Guccione, who was wildly wealthy at the time, convinced Gore Vidal to write the screenplay for $200,000. After his first two choices for director, Lina Wertmuller and John Huston, both turned him down, Guccione talked Italian filmmaker Tinto Brass into taking the project. Vidal and Brass hated each other, and Brass and Guccione also fought throughout the production.

The shoot and post-production process were both chaotic. Brass banished Vidal from the set, and the two men insulted each other in the press. (Brass called Vidal an "aging arteriosclerotic" while Vidal called Brass a "megalomaniac" and said film directors were "parasites" with screenwriters being every film's true authors.) Guccione thought Vidal's script had too much homosexuality and not enough heterosexual sex, and Brass worked on a rewrite that substantially changed the direction of the script, prompting Vidal to request his name be removed from the film. (The producers decided to go with "Adapted from a screenplay by Gore Vidal.")

Meanwhile, Brass wanted no unsimulated sex in the film and refused to shoot the porn scenes. He also specifically focused his camera in the big orgy scenes on extras he thought Guccione would find unattractive. They fought about this throughout the shoot, and eventually Guccione and Giancarlo Lui snuck back on the sets with Penthouse Pets and a skeleton crew and directed the unsimulated sex scenes themselves (mostly oral sex and masturbation, with a little bit of full-on intercourse sprinkled throughout for flavor), adding these scenes to the final edit. (The hardcore scenes were removed for a shorter, R-rated cut that played theaters a few years after the initial run.) Credit where credit is due, the nudity in Caligula is pretty egalitarian. Tons of naked ladies and dudes, and everyone wears open tunics. I guarantee you will be tired of looking at dicks (both flaccid and hard), vaginas, breasts, butts, buttholes, side boobs, and side butts thirty minutes in, or your pizza is free.

Side tangent: I had to laugh at a few of the people involved in the film's many orgies. Amidst all the intercourse, oral sex, groping, voyeurism, and solo and mutual masturbation, there was a naked guy with a hard-on walking around on giant stilts, a guy in a thong hopping around on one foot, a nude guy juggling, some clothed plate spinners, and various clothing-free men and women casually wandering around aimlessly. Imagine being some horny freak excited to attend a giant orgy and getting assigned juggling duty. 

Director Brass was also hired to edit the film, but after Guccione watched the first hour of his cut, he fired him. Instead of hiring an editor, Guccione assigned multiple people to the task. The film's credits list the editor as "the Production," one of many weird credits in the opening scroll. No director is listed in that sequence, either. Brass gets a "Photographed by" credit, even though the cinematographer was Silvano Ippoliti (some of the production staff thought Ippoliti had no idea what he was doing, in yet more off-screen drama), with Guccione and Lui getting an "Additional scenes directed by" credit.

Brass also clashed with actors Peter O'Toole and Maria Schneider, and actor Anneka Di Lorenzo sued Guccione for sexual harassment, winning her initial case but losing it on appeal. O'Toole hated Brass, finding his large, loud personality insufferable. O'Toole was also having personal problems. He quit drinking shortly before filming (probably a bad idea to stop drinking before Caligula instead of after) and was in a vulnerable place. Guccione claimed that though O'Toole was alcohol-free, he was nevertheless high on drugs during the shoot, though Guccione didn't specify which drugs. Schneider's short time on set was even more dramatic. Initially cast as Caligula's sister/lover Drusilla, Schneider pushed back against the production adding more nude scenes for her, and in act of rebellion, sewed up the open tunics worn by most of the cast. She quit the production just a few days into the shoot, and Brass replaced her with Savoy, who had starred in his previous film Salon Kitty.

Whew. That's a lot of drama, which continued into the initial theatrical release, as multiple countries and U.S. cities took legal action against public screenings of the film, though the film's producers and distributors won the bulk of these cases and got some great publicity as a result. I wish the film itself was as exciting as its production history, but, again, McDowell is hilarious and excellent, Mirren is slyly funny and sexy, Italian horror movie veteran (and current California real estate agent) Steiner is also slyly funny and a great visual presence, and there's a lot of comical business with Caligula's beloved horse Incitatus (though the film weirdly fails to mention that the real Caligula made Incitatus a consul).

Danilo Donati's set design, though underused, also deserves mention here. The bizarro, face-shaped chambers of O'Toole's Tiberius, complete with a precariously tall, uneven, carved-from-rock staircase, is a feast for the eyes, as is the enormous, blood-red, slowly moving wall with rotating scythes that decapitates prisoners buried up to their necks in the soil of an outdoor amphitheater. I have to give it Donati. The sets are pretty cool.

Do you need to see Caligula? No. Is Caligula an essential cult film? Also, no. Will you be sorry you saw Caligula? Maybe. Is it somehow weirdly enjoyable? Yes. And maybe, just maybe, as our own supposedly formerly enlightened nation grapples with its own mad emperor, a Filet-O-Fish Caligula if you will, we can glean some lessons in how to handle and remove him and his twisted, corrupt hell-spawn.
Caligu-later days, my friends.