Carnival of Blood (Leonard Kirtman, 1970)

Leonard Kirtman mostly directed porn, but he also made several horror films, including his directing debut, Carnival of Blood, a classic piece of low-budget Coney Island derangement. Recommended for fans of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Andy Milligan, and early John Waters, Carnival of Blood is a weird, weird time at the movies, and I salute it.

Kirtman takes what could be a standard slasher setup and turns it into something personal and strange, with a cast of mostly nonprofessionals (plus Burt Young) doing odd things at a bustling real location with background extras who are everyday people enjoying themselves at an amusement park (or "amusement area" as one of the characters repeatedly calls it).

The film begins with a bickering couple hanging out at Coney Island. The husband, Harry, just wants to get on the subway, go home, and sleep, but his wife, Claire, doesn't want to leave. She drags him to every ride and game, berating him all the while. They get their palms and cards read by a fortune teller with a Jesus fetish who sees something terrible in their immediate future and stops the reading. Meanwhile, a game operator named Tom who is a little too into the stuffed animal prizes and his disfigured, humpbacked assistant Gimpy (oh my god, yes, that is the character's name) (played by soon-to-be-famous character actor Burt Young, under the name John Harris) take a disliking to Claire when she and Harry stop by Tom's stand so Harry can throw darts at balloons and try to win a stuffed bear. Hey, guess what? People start dying at Coney Island. Are Tom and Gimpy to blame? You possibly bet your ass they are ... with a twist.

Tom lives on the top floor of a rental house with his stuffed animals. The tenant downstairs is Laura, an artist (her art is really, really bad and looks like an extremely stupid child created it) and art teacher engaged to district attorney Dan. Laura somehow can't detect the deranged creep vibes coming off Tom like cartoon stink lines, and she and Dan have a friendly repartee with the old so-and-so.

People keep dying and the fortune teller keeps seeing terrible things, but the amusement park keeps on keeping on. The rides stay open, even the one that was host to a decapitation.

The other major characters in Carnival of Blood are a drunken sailor and his sexed-up, opportunistic date and an older woman with intense Divine energy, a pearl necklace, egg-shaped glasses, a serious 'tude, and a hankering for fried shrimp. I have no proof of this, but I believe Kirtman told the actor playing the drunken sailor to play the drunkest man he's ever seen multiplied by a hundredfold.

As you may have guessed, this movie is right up my alley. Kirtman has a great eye for strange people and strange moments, and he ignores all the competent professionalism that makes most normal movies so dull while capturing a fascinating historical slice of Coney Island in 1970. I also enjoyed the oddball soundtrack that alternates between private-press acoustic folk and electronic boops, beeps, and burbles.

Like Andy Milligan, Kirtman is an acquired taste that most people will probably not wish to acquire, but I love this kind of thing. The lack of it in our present moment is a real sickness. 

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

More a variation on similar themes than a straightforward remake of Jacques Tourneur's 1942 classic, Paul Schrader's take on Cat People doesn't quite work as a horror film or a coherent artistic statement, but I like movies for a lot of different reasons and artistic coherence is near the bottom of the list. Schrader's Cat People is a deranged, fascinating, visually exciting, horny, early '80s time capsule that is both fascinated with and terrified by sex. Maybe Schrader was working out some inner conflict between his strict Calvinist upbringing in suburban Michigan (he didn't see his first movie until age 18) and his adult exploits in the '70s and '80s New York and Los Angeles film scenes. Yeah, that's some armchair psychologizing, but he really did have an odd childhood and adolescence compared to most of his movie-brat filmmaker peers.

Keeping the idea of an ancient lineage of people who shapeshift into big cats when sexually aroused and the ensuing doomed romance with a non-cat person (people people??) and repeating a few major scenes, 1982's Cat People otherwise veers into different narrative directions. The original film was shot in a Hollywood studio and set in New York City, but this version takes place on location in New Orleans. Schrader does a good job of retaining the mystery, danger, character, and atmosphere of the actual city and stylizing it just enough to match the film's tone without doing the "we're in New Orleans Mardi Gras voodoo Cajun zydeco Bourbon Street I guar-on-tee" shtick of so many Hollywood takes on the city. (For just one example, everyone in The Big Easy has a Cajun accent even though that particular accent is extremely rare in New Orleans. Cajuns live in a different part of Louisiana, Hollywood dorks.) This version also gives the main character a brother she's never met before, with their belated union the jumping-off point for everything else in the story.

Those siblings are played by the appropriately feline-esque actors Nastassja Kinski and Malcolm McDowell, who both do a great job embodying a hybrid cat/human physicality (in very different ways). Irena (Kinski), raised in foster homes in Canada, is met at the New Orleans airport by her brother Paul (McDowell). The siblings were separated when their parents committed suicide shortly after Irena's birth. She moves in with Paul and his housekeeper Female (pronounced fuh-mahl-ay) (why?) (I mean, they tell you why, but why?) played by Ruby Dee. They're both happy to see her but otherwise very intense and a little creepy, and Paul is disturbingly touchy-feely.

Strangely enough, Paul disappears shortly after Irena moves in, not-so-coincidentally around the same time a panther mauls a sex worker (played by cult movie veteran Lynn Lowry) in a seedy hotel and is captured by a team from the New Orleans Zoo, including curator Oliver (John Heard), Alice (Annette O'Toole), and Joe (Ed Begley Jr.). Irena feels drawn to the zoo and takes her sketch pad with her, drawing the panther. Oliver sees her out there, even though the zoo closed a few hours ago, he tries to find out what the hell she's doing, they get to talking, they fall in love, and oh shit, she's a cat person and he's a person person. This relationship doesn't sit right with Paul, who has (not so) mysteriously reappeared after the panther disappears from the zoo. He tells Irena she'll kill Oliver if she bones him and that she can only get her bone on with Paul incestuously because they're damn panther-people and their parents were also incestuous brother-sister panther-people. Irena thinks this whole thing sucks, though she's starting to feel the panther vibes within.What to do?

Paul Schrader is a bit of an odd fit for the genre material even though he usually deals with dark subject matter and psychologically tormented characters, and it's weird seeing a Schrader film with American Werewolf in London/Howling-style transformation scenes, goo, blood, and gore. (I have not seen his other two detours into supernatural horror, the Exorcist prequel Dominion and the made-for-HBO Witch Hunt.) There's a bit of an awkwardness to the horror, but that awkwardness actually works in the context of the film. Irena as a character is hesitant, confused, unsure of herself, and outside of her comfort zone, and so is Schrader. It gives the film an additional layer of tension.

Though Schrader did some uncredited rewrites on the script, Cat People is one of those oddball Schrader-directed films that didn't originate as a Schrader screenplay. The remake's writer, Alan Ormsby, wrote and co-directed the Ed Gein-inspired cult horror Deranged and has a wild and kooky résumé as screenwriter, including work on Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, Deathdream, The Little Dragons, My Bodyguard, Porky's II: The Next Day, The Substitute, Disney's Mulan, and the TV show Nash Bridges. I'm curious which parts of the shooting script were Ormsby's and which were Schrader's.

Whatever the case, I like Cat People's uneasy mixture of horror, European art film, comedy, myth, romance, erotic thriller, drama, and morality tale modes, and the Giorgio Moroder score (and David Bowie's closing theme), lighting, mythological prologue, and fantasy and dream sequences give the movie a particularly first-half-of-the-'80s electro-psychedelia vibe. (Off the top of my head, I'd include Michael Mann's Thief, The Keep, and Manhunter, Ken Russell's Altered States, William Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Slava Tsukerman's Liquid Sky, and Michael Wadleigh's Wolfen in this microgenre I may have just invented. Need to flesh this out more.)

Schrader fills the movie with cult cameos (the aforementioned Lowry, Berry Berenson, Frankie Faison, Ray Wise, John Larroquette, local DJ The Black Pope), nonprofessional locals, and oddball extras, sometimes looking straight at the camera in the margins of the frame, giving the movie so much added flavor and texture. Schrader also avoids perfunctory visuals, with nearly every shot and image a memorable one. He's not just telling a story, he's creating and maintaining an atmosphere. Cat People is a far from perfect movie and may be a little creepy if you dwell on the ending too much, but it's so damn weird and interesting in ways that current movies really aren't. I enjoyed rewatching it for the first time in more than 20 years.