Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Mimsy Farmer

From RIOT ON SUNSET STRIP and MASTER AND MARGUERITE respectively.

New I Luv Video Pick Shelves

MOJU: THE BLIND BEAST

Since the folks over at the great I Luv Video are kind enough to give me my own pick shelves I popped over last night to change them out.

Here are my new selections:

AIRPORT Location:

VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS
This is the one about the giant teenagers who take over a town. It's really pretty subversive and funny. The music by Jack Nitzsche is great. There's a lot of that beehive and bikini sex appeal that I like from these sixties youth movies. Producer/director Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) specialized in movies with outsized protaganists.

THE YESTERDAY MACHINE
Made in Dallas Hitler Time Travel movie. Super cheap and great. Very imaginative in a cornpone kind of way. Like a lot of ultra low budget films it leaves a dreamlike aftertaste in your brain.

THE BLIND BEAST
From the same avant-garde Japanese theater world that brought you movies like FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION, this is a very strange dreamlike fantasy about a blind sculptor and the woman he loves. Some of the most bizarre sets ever built. Director Yasuzo Masumura also made the the equally odd BLACK TEST CAR and the Tashlinesque GIANTS AND MONSTERS.

CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN
A pretty devastating look at police (and human) corruption in '70s Rome. Franco Nero and Martin Balsam take it all very seriously and the film has the nightmare realism of the best Italian polizieschi.

AT THE GUADALUPE STORE:

SHAOLIN INVINCIBLES
Judy Lee (FLYING MASTERS OF KUNG FU) stars in one of those kung fu movies that must make a lot of sense in the exotic east, but seem completely insane over here. She fights gorillas and weird wizards with long tongues that hang down to their knees. Run of the mill in some ways and capital K KRAZY in other ways.

THE ACID EATERS
The comparatively innocent adult film world of 1967 California responds to the LSD menace in the only way they know how: with boobs and tedious shirtless makeout scenes. Fortunately things get a little crazy in the Satan department and everybody has fun.

CASTLE OF FU MANCHU
I can't defend this Jess Franco Yellow Peril movie on any grounds at all. It's not especially good or original. But when you watch it you will feel immersed in a sort of tacky pulp nostalgia, you'll smell the vinegary newsprint as it powders away under your fingers. Franco's free-wheeling new wave style has a lot in common with the fast guys who made the old serials. And Christopher Lee is a great looking Fu Manchu. And Rosalba Neri is a great looking Rosalba Neri, as always.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
This was originally called ONE PLUS ONE. It's Jean Luc Godard's Rolling Stones project. It documents the band in the studio trying out the song Sympathy For The Devil in different ways. It starts as a bluesy ballad, becomes a samba, then once Keith plugs in a little 15 watt amp and wails the paint off the walls, it becomes the song we all know and love. With interpolations of Fanonian anticolonialist discourse delivered point blank at the screen by murderous garbagemen and Anne Wiazemsky (Mrs. Godard) painting punny graffiti.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Fernando Di Leo

Here he is with friends on (I think) the MANHUNT set. DiLeo's sense of story (and humor) are missed more than ever. Watch his movies MR. SCARFACE, CALIBRE 9, MANHUNT and THE BOSS. Then and only then watch LOADED GUNS. Enjoy.

Layers of filth

I wish there was more Bill Landis writing out there.

Here's a fantastic guide to the bygone food of Times Square by the late Landis and Michelle Clifford.

I have the late era Sleazoid Express and Metasex issues but if anybody has the original '80-'83 run of Sleazois I want it!

Pink Eiga DVDs out now!

Those of you who watched the unforgettable Japanese Pink Film series at Fantastic Fest '08 will not want to miss out on the new slate of titles being rolled out by Pink Eiga. They will be officially released on January 14 but if you're smart you can go to www.pinkeiga.com and buy them now.

The first titles released are the delirious FF favorite S&M HUNTER and the highly regarded NEW TOKYO DECADENCE: THE SLAVE. Check out screencaps and trailers and all the goodies that Pink Eiga has in their overflowing vaults and you'll be looking forward to a great new era of insane sleaze.

Weird Wednesday Hall Of Fame: Claudia Jennings

When Maureen McCormick was here a couple of months ago I asked her about making MOONSHINE COUNTY EXPRESS. She said (in front of the audience) that her strongest memory of making that film was waking up in bed with Claudia Jennings and Gary Graver after a cocaine bender! The mind boggles.

Bill Landis is dead?

Bill Landis photo by Michelle Clifford

Our friend Bill Landis, editor/publisher/damn near sole writer (with his wife Michelle Clifford) of Sleazoid Express Magazine and author of the essential book of the same name, has died. Bill was here 5 or 6 years ago when the book was first published and we chewed the fat about exploitation for a couple of memorable days. Not only did he know his stuff, he lived it. He even worked as a projectionist and night manager on the deuce.

While the rest of us pick up the latest Blue Underground and Code Red DVD releases and watch this sleaze in the comfort of our homes, Bill and his early collaborator Jimmy McDonough (whom he later had a huge falling-out with, unfortunately) sought these films out on 42nd St. in the last decaying pits of perversion where they unspooled for armed and hostile raincoaters and popeyes. In the pre-video era that was the only way to see them and Sleazoid Express was the Variety of 42nd St. You can feel the thrill of discovery on every page. Landis would review the film AND the experience, so if a glue-sniffing masturbator fell out of the balcony it was recorded for posterity.

Not surprisingly he was a weird guy, his tastes were so far out of the mainstream he may as well have been living in another country. I remember at Tim and Karrie League's he was blasting some Charles Manson jams and telling a long complicated story about BLOODSUCKING FREAKS maker Joel Reed, which Bill's New Yorkese stretched into a silly-putty dipthong I'll always remember: Jwaal Reeeed. He made his surroundings as hectic and confusing as his inner world, which was like a Times Square of the mind.

Bill's early death (he was 49) is especially sad because as we get farther and farther away from that glorious time the living memory of it is leaking out of the world, either through death or the slow attrition of brain cells. Bill was its greatest chronicler, so bursting with stories that his fingers could never have typed them all.

I'd like to think that our Weird Wednesday and Terror Tuesday series at the Alamo are as close as we can get to the kind of rude, untamed world of 42nd St. That's my hope anyway. So long, Bill.