HALLUCINATION GENERATION (1966) - (d) EDWARD A. MANN

Be warned, there is no easy entry into this film, as you will be hurled immediately and seamlessly into the debauched dreams and frenzied fantasies of some of the most boring people you'd ever hope to meet. Yes, you will experience every jar, every jolt experienced by the brain dead. Otherwise known here as: Beatniks, Sickniks and Acid Heads. Idjits and semi-literates whose ideas of 50s and 60s counter culture begins and ends with Maynard G. Krebs! So turn on, tune in, drop out, and get ready to witness the ecstasies, the agonies and the bizarre sensualities of those seeking to nullify their lives while putting yours on a one way trip to Nowheresville. Yes, man, yes: a movie with no answers to a question that begs the question as to why there should be a question when answers merely lead to more questions. Or is that answers? Anyway, thrill, or don't thrill to actor and furniture maker George Montgomery as psychedlic guru of a coven of American expatriates in Ibizia waiting for their mahatma to, well, to just do something. Anything. While we wait, fighting sleep, a young poet and wife-beater turns up. Montgomery, suddenly galvanized into consciousness, decides it's time to unleash a crime spree on Barcelona. Before he does, he convinces our aspiring Byron to ingest every drug known to man, at which point the film itself starts to hallucinate, transmogrifying from black and white to blacklight color. Groovy, baby! (Available from Trash Palace)

BEAT GIRL AKA WILD FOR KICKS (1959) - (d) EDMOND T. GREVILLE

Yeah, baby! An all wrong, distaff Rebel Without A Cause. Which makes it, of course, all right with us. Starlet Gillian Hills headlines as a mixed-up, muddled-up, thoroughly shook-up, not-so-sweet sixteener bored to tears with her life as a wealthy, upper-class art student. Daddy doesn't appear to love her, you see, and when Daddy brings home a gorgeous, grown-up, French version of Gillian as his new wife, well, for Gillian, that's the living end. So Gillian starts hanging out with beatniks Oliver Reed and Adam Faith in a local coffee bar where she hopes to get the low-down, dirty no-goods on her stepmother. Just so happens the answer can be found in Les Girls, a strip club run by pederast Christoper Lee. And what a strip club it is. Herein the girls not only doff their clothes and push their charms in the face of the Johns, but hump the stage, the curtains and anything not nailed down as well. Male members of the 50s audience must have delighted in such shenanigans and pinched themselves to see if they were dreaming, what with all the bare breasts and buttocks parading across the drive-in screen.

Not content with making life miserable for dear old mom and dad, Gillian takes to sneaking out in the dead of night to party with her psychopathic pals, instigate dangerous car races on isolated backroads, and engage in games of chicken with oncoming trains. Our little minx finally goes too far when she invites the gang back to her parent's posh pad and proceeds to wake stepmom up with a riotous, improvisational striptease in the foyer. Enter enraged Dad stage left to throw the bums out, at which point Gillian, in a bratty rage, decides to reveal stepmom's deep, dark secret: 'tis a pity, but she's a ho (apologies to John Webster), Daddy-O! With that, Gillian runs off to Chris Lee and the strip club to begin her career as a prossie-in-training, that is, as an ecdysiast.

As if the story wasn't risible enough, the dialogue, obviously written by studio hacks, tries way to hard to be "with it." This results in lines veering dangerously close to sheer gibberish. The acting, too, never rises above pathetic. Adam Faith, in particular (with Oliver Reed a close second as a sex-mad retard), disgraces himself with his desperate attempts to emulate Elvis in the two songs he is allowed to perform. At least Adam doesn't try to dance with his sidekicks; if one can call the spastic and clumsy movements of the cast, "dancing." Nijinski these kids ain't. The incidental music by The John Barry 7, on the other hand, surprises with its inventiveness. It's deliciously sleazy - "The Stripper" has since become a cult classic- in the club sequences, and wildly reelin' and rockin' in the cavern club dance bits. (Available in the racier version from Trash Palace)

Is your music unusual, unconventional, uncompromising,
uncommercial or what some folks may call unlistenable?

Then WE WANT YOU! We're looking for music that has the courage to
break rules or works within the confines of the rules to subvert them
for the BRUTARIAN Magazine and Records compilation - Vol 2!

We're not interested in the Next Big Thing, but music that people will
talk about that will probably never be on MTV...

Think Daniel Johnston, Wesley Willis, Capain Beefheart, The Cramps...
or anything different that just KICKS ASS!

Check out Brutarian's myspace page below:
http://www.myspace.com/brutarianmagazine

Send your masterpiece to:
Dominick J. Salemi
9405 Ulysses Court
Burke, VA 22015

Please send by January 31st, 2009. Thanks!
we're looking forward to hearing what's out there!

DOG SOLDIERS (2002) - (d) NEIL MARSHALL

When Oz stops and thinks about it, he really can't say that there are a plethora of lycanthrope flicks worthy of a six-pack rating. Let's see, there's the original Wolfman, The Howling, The Company of Wolves, and perhaps, Wolfen. That's about it for the classics. No, Ken Russell's Alternate States doesn't count: William Hurt turned into an ape, not a wolf, in that one. Yes, Ozzy has seen all the latest hairy beast movies, including the fitfully entertaining but dreadfully overhyped Ginger Snaps. He's down with all the horror happenings. Still, there ain't much good happening in the genre, wolfie or otherwise. So you can imagine Mr. Fide's surprise when he popped this one into the DVD player and, after little more than a half hour, found himself down to his last brew in the sixer. These were sixteen ouncers, too. Dog Soldiers is that good, which should come as little surprise to anyone lucky enough to catch The Descent at the multiplex, as said flick was easily the best outing of 2005. Curioser and curioser, Neil Marshall wrote and directed that film as well.

Dog Solders wastes little time getting started. Open with a hippy couple in the Scottish Highlands getting torn to shreds in their pup tent. Now cut to the following morning and a small platoon of British soldiers on wargame manuevers a few miles off. There's a bit of clever, manly chat to establish character, and then we stumble into the camp of their opponents. Only what's left of the other side is not choice, aside from one survivor - a bit of heart here, an entrail there - and no sooner does the platoon start to recover from their shock,when the howling begins and furtive movements are espied in the bushes. This, again, during broad daylight! And you thought werewolves only came out at night . . .

The attack isn't long in coming and before the platoon hightails it to the road, one member is impaled on a tree limb and another has his stomach shredded. Miraculously, an SUV appears out of nowhere driven by Megan, a beautiful blonde. She manages to get our crew inside and drive off, despite a werewolf ripping through the top of the roof. Turns out, she's an anthrpologist researching the mysterious disappearances in the area, and she hustles one and all into the only cottage within fifty miles.

Right, you're asking now, how Megan managed to survive, not to mention the family of four who've been living in the charming fairy-tale like house with lycnathropes roaming all about them. Of course the clan just happens to be out when Megan and the platoon hit the house running, so the answer is painfully obvious to the audience. The Army crew still doesn't get it, even when Megan explains things, but they really aren't given time to debate the point as the monsters, once the sun goes down, begin a full scale assault on the Yeatsian-styled hut.

Here, the film begins to shamelessly ape Night of the Living Dead but it really doesn't matter because director/writer Marshall is effortlessly mixing effective comedy with gruesome shocks and some wonderful plot twists to keep you on the edge of your seat. Remarkable too, is the dialogue; there isn't a single wasted line, and every bit of it is used to flesh out character and to advance the story. And those special effects, oh my, those are some genuninely frightening, realistic looking werewolves. Let's hear it too, for the gruesome and sometimes mortal wounds we are forced to witness, when a face is slashed, an arm lopped off or head slowly bitten into, you feel it, deep in the pit of your stomach. Which can really hurt, if you, like Ozzy, are working on your second sixteen ounce six-pack.

JOHNNY BURNETTE AND THE ROCK 'N' ROLL TRIO
SHATTERED DREAMS - THE RISE AND FALL OF THE JOHNNY BURNETTE TRIO

Johnny Burnette, Dorsey Burnette, and guitarist Paul Burlison recorded some of the wildest, most primitive rockabilly sides of the 1950's. Cut from the same cloth as fellow Memphians Elivs Presley, Scotty Moore, and Bill Black. They blended raw-edged folk, blues, and country to forge rockabilly music of the most passionate variety. On guitar, Burlison - a white guy who once worked behind the curtain for bluesman Howling wolf - played with simple, liberating fury. His fuzz-tone lead breaks - sometimes credited to studio ace Grady Martin - screamed off the records as Johnny yelped like a sex-starved prisoner through "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," "Tear It Up," "Rock Billy Boogie," "Honey Hush," and "Please Don't Leave Me."

Their best work for Coral happily resides on this well-annotated two-disc set that collects rarely heard alternate takes, a live Alan Freed show appearance, and an ultra-rare early single. Better still, the bonus DVD houses the only know surviving footage of the group on national television.

Musically, the Rock 'N' Roll Trio were wilder than Presley and The Blue Moon boys, but never displayed one iota of their musical depth. They could rock the blues, but not much else at this juncture. ndeed, such pop contrivances of "Shattered Dreams" and "I Love You So" pale when compared to their delightfully thuggish remakes of Big Joe Turner's "Honey Hush," Sticks McGee's "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee," and Fats Domino's "Please Don't Leave Me."

Further, the inclusion of their 1955 Von waxings of "You're Undecided" and "Go Mule," tends to disprove the claim that they knew how to rock before the King led the way. This in no way diminishes their musical achievements. For while Elivs, Scotty & Bill defined rockabilly, the Burnettes and Burlison were virtually creating punk rock.

Eventually, the group disabanded and both Burnettes enjoyed national solo chart success singing straighter versions of pop and country. Most rockabilly fans wince when they hear Johnny's recordings of "You're Sixteen" and "Dreamin'." Doubtless, these hardcore enthusiasts will enjoy viewing the DVD that contains the Rock 'N' Roll Trio's appearance on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour.

Sponsored by Geritol - which is no longer available in its alcohol-laced liquid form - the Amateur Hour was a hold-over from radio. A talent contest that genuinely relied on mailed votes from the audience, it featured singers, dancer, comedians, impressionists, novelty acts and occasional rock 'n' rollers. The episode seen here was a contest finale and the Trio's third and final appearance.

The acts presented are remarkably entertaining from a nostalgic point of view. A barefoot young woman does an eccentric dance as she pantomimes "Two to Tango." A harpist plucks his instrument with a seemingly inappropriate swing beat. Best of all, a one-legged tap-dancer on crutches steals the show. Seen in this eclectic company, the Rock 'N' Roll Trio lacked polish.

Greasy and cute, Johnny was surprisingly short and, as was common in early TV, Dorsey's bass playing is inaudible. Speaking for the group, Burlison quips that he and Elivs worked at Crown Electric together and, "His hair was a little too long." Then the Trio launches into a raving - albeit grooveless - rendition of Presley's "Hound Dog." The girls scream and the applause is strong, but the Trio does not emerge triumphant.

Ironically, the names of the Amateur Hour winners have been lost to history By contrast, reissues of the Rock 'N' roll Trio's recordings continually inspires new generations of roots rockers. Stuffed with hard-charging cathartic rockabilly, this excellent compilation, provides historical context while managing to sound better in these time than when the music was first created. - Ken Burke

CAPTAIN BEEFHEART UNDER REVIEW


Everyone remembers their first Beefheart experience. For Oz, it happened whilst watching an early weekend viewing of a local UHF rock show. The station couldn't afford to host the more popular acts, a good thing for the stoned and more adventurous viewer, as this meant the suits were forced to fill up the time with the acts with little, if any, commercial potential. So at twelve, Mr Fide found his fragile little mind being twisted by the likes of Sir Lord Baltimore, The Illusion, Doctor John and the good Captain aka Don Van Vliet. I'd never heard, or seen anything like it, a Dada mixture of Delta blues, harmelodic jazz, post-modern classical stylings fronted by a guy dressed like the Mad Hatter doing a Howlin' Wolf imitation. The band dressed like they just landed from Venus and they moved like they just learned to walk upright. Not surprising as Beefheart kept stopping things and forcing the band to lurch into one absurd time signature after another. Just as confusion worse confounded appeared to set in, everything went quiet, the house lights dimmed, and Beef slowly and theatrically reached into his coat pocket and brought out a toy raygun. You remember those, the kind that made a rusty schreech and emitted sparks from the side when you pulled the trigger? Of course you do, and that's what the audience saw and heard for about thirty seconds until the band kicked back in. Unforgettable, and here's Oz remembering as if it was yesterday, some forty years later. Yeah, you guessed it, this was stuff from the epochal Trout Mask Replica and just like that, abba zabba, Ozzy was hooked.
The English folks working this documentary are "hooked" as well. Hell, you'd expect that from guys who've listened to Trout Mask some sixty times. And what you get, is a very entertaining history and exegesis, from the first single, "Diddy Wah Diddy," to the last album, Ice Cream For Crow. There's lots of wonderful lost and archival footage, extended intercut comments with Drumbo (speaking to us by way of a disconnected phone hanging from a tree limb), Zoot Horn Rollo, Rockette Morton, Winged Eel Fingerling and Gary Lucas, to name just a few, and lucid and incisive critical examinations of the entire oeuvre. While you may not always find yourself in agreement with the conclusions of the British journalists - you can express disappointment with a Beefheart work like Bluejeans and Moonbeams but "too commercial" you cannot call it - their encylopedic knowledge of their subject makes it difficult to find fault with their analyses. Especially those of the eminence gris of the group, who has chosen to deliver his pronouncements from a church pulpit, a sly bit of surreal humor, nicely undercutting the tight-lipped and straight-laced remarks. A bit of "theatre," which the good Captain, no doubt, would have heartily approved.

BIRTH OF THE COOL (2001) - LEWIS MacADAMS (THE FREE PRESS)

M'lords and ladies of the royal court, our dear hearts and gentle people at The Free Press would have us believe this tome to be the wiggiest, the mostest, the gassiest, the k-razzzziest bit of historicism what should eve he laid down since that carpenter kitty told all and sundry that he was . . . The Nazz. Which mayest be right and true; nevertheless, in the days and long nights of ripperty bip and bop and rada-deet-deet deet, one might have ascribed the greater genius influence to cynical Jack's, drunken Jack's, On the Road. Or mayhap, the cock-loving cat seeing the greatest minds of his generation reduced to the .. . Howl. Nay, my lords and ladies, that was a poem. It was a long one though, almost an epic, so let us allow the true hipsters to put it up for nomination. As well as let the truly disaffected, nominate Naked Lunch. Noble causes all; again we sayest, nevertheless, Birth Of The Cool, subtitled Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-garde remains, totally . . . with it. "Cause the man what wrote it, despite being a world-class poet, ain't into pontificating or didactyling. No sir, my Man, he's tapped in, way gone completely, into the power of story.

Story is the way to go. Always the way to go, if you think about it without thinking too much. Especially when you're trying to limn the entire history of the American Bohemian thing from 1940 to the 1965 of The Newport Folk Festival. 'Tis a burden; yet this cat, MacAdams, tells it brilliantly, and manages, somehow, someway, to weave this magnificent tapestry along the way. Without letting any of the seams show, you dig? In the gentle sewing session, cats and kitties, we learn the manner in which Zen Buddhism got on line and why everyone was so down with it, why Pete Seeger rates with fold bodhisattva Woody Guthrie, how Thelonious Monk, as much as Miles or Bird led bop to cool and the Jim's to jazz, what "beat" is and, most importantly, why it is not, necessarily synonymous with "cool." Still, here's the lick, the true gas - it's those nutty stories: Lucien Carr's murdering, dismembering and dumping a mentor's body parts in the East River; that wiggy Black Mountain School and their birthing of the "happening," the unbelievable-but-rue tale of drugs, madness, mayhem, and the incorporation of Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies into bop by the now legendary Chano Pozo. At the heart of it all, like a Zen koan - What is the sound of one hand clapping? - is the notion of cool. As MacAdams notes, "Anyone striving to define 'cool' quickly comes up against cool's quicksilver nature. As soon as anything is cool, its cool starts to vaporize." At is heart though, cool is about defiance, which in turn, is kind of what the avant garde is about: an attack on accepted notions of taste and beauty. so here's what flips us out, studs and birds: there weren't three more crazy, double-euphonic, nutty hipsters than Elvis Presley, Nina Simone, and Johnny Cash. They certainly ain't jive. Yet there's no flippin' over their scene? Well, we will make no comments, complaints, criticism, avowals, appraisals. We will just watch the river flow, flow,flow, and let what is be what is and always is. This mad bad writer here grooves to his own wild irreverent vibe and forsooth, payeth for the gas. Thus, we grant him our kindest indulgences for missing a few stops along the way.

THE ATOMIC BRAIN (1964) - (d) JOSEPH V. MASCELLI

The tag line, something unforgettable - "Can death be outwitted?" We're not sure we can give you an answer; however, we can say for certain that this flick, brought to us, courtesy of Ray Dennis Steckler's cinematographers, possesses not a groat's worth of wit. What we got is one mad scientist, a Dr. Otto Frank, working out of the basement of a creepy mansion owned by an elderly, crippled dingbat searching for the fountain of youth. Dr. Frank has convinced his harridan landlord that if she lets him build an atomic lab downstairs he will eventually perfect brain transplant experiments that will allow him to place her gray matter into the skull of any hot young thing he or she chooses. The Landlady remains enthused abut the project despite the fact that previous transplants involving animal brains and humans have resulted in weremen and catgirls. So the good Doc brings in three European hotties as potential and unwilling body donors. No, none of three are told about the experiments. They are hired as maids. But once they espy a wereman peeking in a window they all ask out. too late as a badly aging manservant suddenly appears and hustles all three into rooms in various parts of the house and locks them in. Despite this, when let out, they work like slaves,shining the silverware, vacuuming the threadbare rugs and pouring drinks for the guests with smiles as broad as the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, the experiments in the basement continue and things don't so much as go from bad to worse as become progressively more ridiculous. Atomic Brian, nevertheless, manages to entertain mightily, thanks to a script so implausible it would have embarrassed the aforementioned Steckler, the "brain" behind the first zombie musical, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies. Also because the proceedings possess a kind of dime-store seediness not seen since the heyday of Todd slaughter. "She doesn't have a brain. Imagine the possibilities," one is told early on. Thanks to the ineptitude of Mascelli and Company, this becomes, as the film unspools, a relatively simple task for the viewer.

SOCK - PENN JILLETTE (2004) ST. MARTIN'S-GRIFFIN

Anyone who's ever had the good fortune to lend an ear to the talky half of comic-magic act Penn & Teller should not be surprised that Penn Jillette has penned a lively and highly idiosyncratic novel. Listening to the big lug, whether on sage or whilst watching Bullshit, the Emmy Award winning Showtime series, you quickly conclude that the man was born to write. Which he does, constantly, but this is his first attempt at fiction. And boy, is it a doozy. On the surface, the story of a New York City police diver and his gay hairdressing friend's efforts to find the killer of the cop's former lover. In reality, a wiggy meditation on life, love and the whole damned thing. The story itself is fairly interesting, Penn's a born storyteller; you know that already; what keeps you reading, though, are all these philosophically comic discursions on sexuality, religion, the nature of reality, etc. This comes seasoned with scores and scores of 70s and 80s pop culture references. It works as kind of a Brechtian distancing device, but it also cleverly and ingeniously puts the capper on the disquisition at hand. In fact, most every literary trick Penn assays, works, not the least of which is Jillette's heartfelt notion, and underlying subtext to much of this: that humans, pushed in the right direction, have an enormous capacity for love and compassion. Sure there's bad craziness and much evil out there, but what the hell does that have to do with the price of apples in New Hampshire in the winter? One bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch girl! Oh yes, did we forget to mention that the whole shebang is narrated by the policeman's sock monkey?

VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN (1968) - (d) PETER BOGDANOVICH

Hey, forget about 2001: A Space Odyssey as the ultimate trip. Drop some acid and tune into this wild and crazy feature. It is, not to put too fine a point on it: the most! Producer Roger Corman takes an arty Russian sci-fi flick Planet of Storms (1962), gives it to Peter and lays this on him: "Make it even craaaaazier than what Curtis Harrington and I did to it in 1962 with Voyage to he Prehistoric Planet." Bog says, "well, what did you do Roger, baby?" Roger hips Bog to the fact that they hacked the Russian flick to pieces and added new footage to it. "Cool," responds the young Bog and he proceeds to go them one better by not only dicing and splicing the Russian film vegamatic style and inserting new sequences, but he adds scenes from neophyte Frankie Coppola's science-fiction opus Battle Beyond The Sun, also made for Corman in 1963.

The original Ruskie epic had cosmonauts hitting the terra-not-so-firma of Venus on a rescue mission. Once outside the ship, the intrepid crew encountered dinosaurs, man-eating plants, and all manner of nasty things. Bogdanovich added his own voice-over narration as a framing device, in the process, extemporizing a story concerning said narrator falling for the siren call of a Venusian gal. This gave Bog the opportunity to hire Mamie Van Doren and some hot models to walk about the desert in seashell bras and shimmery hip huggers. The gals communicate by telepathy and worship a pterodactyl. Don't ask "why." "Why" is not an operative term in this movie.

Absurd, astounding, unreal: a fantastic voyage to the bottom of your mind! Empty it of all preconceptions and just let the sound and Bogdanovich's vision have its way with you. The drone of our love stricken narrator makes increasingly less sense as we proceed; yet what matter that? Dig the monochromaticism and the way in which it contrasts with the empty sounds of space. The attenuated sirenesque cries of the clam-shell-clad cuties. The beeps and squonks comprising eh soundtrack. Thrill to the impossible attempt to interweave the look and texture of three highly disparate films. Shake your head in wonder at time passing so slowly and your barely noticing.