retarded joy

Brain Damaged Basket Case ( A Movie Memory)

 First off, just so you aren’t totally confused, this here is my official post for what is, as far as I can tell, called: 

HEY, INTERNET, STOP BEING SUCH CYNICAL EFFING DOUCHEBAGS BLOG-A-THON! DAY 

So, here’s what the assignment was:

Write about something in the world of film that fills you with complete and total unbridled fucking retarded JOY. 

From one of my new favorite blogs, Final Girl 

 So – I thought about it – mostly my retarded joy comes from that one album or that one song that hits even after the expectation and build-up, or sometimes even without warning. Few and far between these days – even in my world of choice – music – so finding a film I thought would be a little more tricky. 

The music side – since I brought it up – I do have to mention that there have been very few albums that hit me amazingly brilliantly wonderful in the last couple of years, so I was thrilled and filled with that ecstatic moronic stupidity that just makes you quiver with delight when I heard both the brand new Bauhaus and the new Nick Cave offerings – Dig, Lazarus Dig is superbly back on track, and “Go Away White” by Bauhaus is sublime. I am so so so happy that Bauhaus is not fading out in some tired slide down, but exploding out of here with an energy and urgency that hits as perfectly right now as it did like 28 years ago (28 years!!! Holy Death Cow, Batman!).

Yeah – so far, a good year for music.  

Now then, about the cinematic point of this particular writing project here. There are a couple of movies currently playing or coming soon that might fill me with joy, or I could possibly write about that joy that comes when you share a movie you love with someone you love and they love it just as much as you do and it’s just fantasticness all around – like watching movies with Shelley like The Stuff, or Motel Hell… well, okay, so maybe she didn’t actually love The Stuff as much as I did – but she did watch it, so there’s a sign of true love right there…  or maybe sitting in the darkened theatre holding hands waiting for the beginning of Peter Jackson’s King Kong – and the lights start to dim – and you have no idea if it’s going to be good or not, but still you feel your heart beat all giddy and your palms a little sweaty and goose-bumps hit your arms like you’re ten years old and sitting in the theatre waiting for the Empire Strikes Back to start….  

But then I thought – that might move into a direction that was a little too mushy romantic for the writing I wanted to do. So… where do I go for non-romantic unbridled fucking retarded joy?  Off to somewhere in the past.

There are a couple of movies that I’ve seen that could be good contestants for the topic at hand, the high school sleepovers that included nights being creeped out by The Howling, The Hunger, Flowers In The Attic… The first time I saw Sam Peckinpah’s “Wild Bunch” was definitely a thrill (DC Cab, however, wasn’t). Then the times hanging out with my friends and watching films by David Lynch and Dario Argento.

We would listen to music by the Bad Seeds, The Birthday Party, the Virgin Prunes, and Andi Sex Gang.  We would love the Good, the Bad, and the Cheezy in horror. “Michael Moriarty is a genius!” We would say. Maniac Cop and Child’s Play! Prince of Darkness and Santa Sangre! Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles! The Lost Boys and Nightmare on Elm Street 3! Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator and From Beyond! Night of the Hunter, Evil Dead, Dr. Phibes, Phantom of the Paradise… Rosemary’s Baby, Hellraiser, Suspiria, and, of course, They Live!

“I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

And on and on and on…  

And then there was Brain Damage.

Two words, one movie, and 86 minutes of fucking retarded joy.

There.

We have a winner. 

Directed by the amazing Frank Henenlotter, Brain Damage is a film that my friend and I were so excited about and looking forward to seeing, partly because any movie with the tagline of “It’s A Headache From Hell” would be a movie worth watching, but also because we had just gone on a little horror film kick that included a few Larry Cohen treats, like It’s Alive, It’s Alive Again (It’s Alive II), and Q; The Winged Serpent (Michael Moriarty Rules!) – but we also included Basket Case – and that was it – we were hooked. Frank Henenlotter forever. 

So when we heard about this Brain Damage thing – we were in horror-geek heaven. Of course, we managed to miss it in the movie houses – and there was a little bit of a wait until it came out on VHS , but that only served to heighten the anticipation for the film (and, as a side note, I still have Brain Damage on VHS), but, anyhows, back to the story… 

My friend lived right across the street from a huge cemetery. Many nights were spent wandering the pathways and around the graves. Looking for something just strange and supernatural to happen – hoping for a ghost, a spirit, a psycho killer to fight, or – more likely – run in mortal terror away from. I think the closest we came was when we (literally) stumbled over an open grave at 2 in the morning – that was a little freaky.

We would sit in his basement apartment, the walls and windows draped in red and blue Christmas lights and strange voodoo scrawlings and artifacts of bone and feather. We would read comics like Creepy and Eerie, drink Old Crow or Southern Comfort, perhaps throw on Two Thousand Maniacs, play some Nurse with Wound, and then we would head out into the night in a slightly surreal slightly tipsy daze, and then after sufficiently creeping ourselves out in the shadows of the graveyard, we would make our way back in to the basement den of iniquity, pour ourselves a couple more stiff Bourbon and Cokes, which were weighed a little heavy on the Bourbon side, and settle back into the couch to watch whatever offering had appeared from the earlier trip to the nearby video store. These nights were always good – even if the movies were horrible – we would be just so into it, and so happy to be somewhere that was safe as all the demons and zombies prowled the night outside, captured by the consecrated grounds right across the street.  

This was Brain Damage night – and we were anxious and excited and ready to go. We had our drinks, we had our red licorice, the phone was unplugged, the red lights were on, the trees swayed, and leaves were flying by the window in a bitter cold northwest winter wind, and we’re grinning big. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the film, but it’s definitely one of your cult classic low budget late 80’s horror films. It’s awkward and a bit clunky, and there are definitely those people who just write it off, or just don’t like it at all. We weren’t those people. We were more like the kind of people that movies like this were made for.

 

We were watching a movie about a guy, Brian, in New York, who gets attached to a strange brain / creature / parasite named Aylmer. Not like high fashion or hipster or funky New York – this was like dirty seedy New York, the grime of the subways, the slums and cracks in the sidewalks. The city filled with tired people, the poor people, the struggling people… and the brain parasites.  

So, basically, our parasite pal, Aylmer, gets Brian hooked on his blue juice, which is a pretty intense hallucinogen, and Brian then has to keep Aylmer supplied with fresh brains in order to keep getting his fix. A pretty obvious metaphor for drugs and addiction, but told in this way, in Frank Henenlotter’s particular style of gore and humor – it’s just brilliant – and you can’t help but feel like the little pusher-parasite is the hero of the story –  

We loved every minute of it – the fights, the electric hallucinations, the blood, the sexual innuendos, the Slayer poster in Brian’s room… sometimes it’s those little things you notice that make the whole movie just a little bigger.

Then in one of those scenes that you see and you just get all over the top excited and jump up off the couch pointing at the TV screen going “Yeah!” (I know – I’m a geek…)  We see our old friend Duane! Duane, as you may remember, is the young man with the creature in his basket from Henenlotter’s 1982 smash hit – Basket Case. Played with style and grace by Kevin Van Hentenryck (see also Basket Case 2 and Basket Case 3…). Here, however, he is just “Man with Basket”. We were so, may I say “retardedly”, overjoyed by seeing Mister Basket Case and Mister Brain Damage on the same subway, that we almost spilled our drinks.

That’s a moment I adore. That’s a moment that I will always remember, and regardless if I’m watching some epic motion picture, some hipster indie flick, or some Oscar wanting slice of life, the level of my enthusiasm and appreciation will always be measured up against that one scene where our guy with a hallucinogenic brain eating parasite meets a man with a monster in a basket on the subway. 

The viewing of this film was sort of, if I may stretch out some semblance of a metaphor all plastic man style, kinda like listening to Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret if it had been written by Trent Reznor after he drank some cough syrup and listened to “Nail” by Foetus. (I can’t help it – I kind of compare everything to music, somehow… ) 

That excitement seems to be harder to come by in movies as I get older – and sometimes I can’t tell if it’s because I’m a little more jaded, or if there’s just a lot more crap being filmed – and it’s the same with music – but I still hope, I still want, I still need to have those truly unexplainable moments of joy that hit me in moments of cinematic viewing, and here’s to many more in the films I have yet to see.  

Then, kind of coincidentally in between bouts of writing this little entry, Shelley and I are at a store looking at some cheap discount horror DVD’s – and we both spy a title on the shelf, simultaneously we both shout out “It’s Alive!” and grab the box –  Sold! 

So I’m looking forward to another nice retarded moment of horror movie joy in the very near future. 

-m

(images lifted with sincere apologies from

Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath )

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