Even though I think it’s a stupid holiday, it’s pretty easy to just go along with Thanksgiving. The whole family gets together, awkwardly sits in silence while grandparents give some hooray-America prayer of thankfulness and then everybody eats a bunch of delicious yams and stuff. There is pumpkin pie at the end and also probably a Big Game, giving the sports fans an excuse not to have to sit around and make forced conversation with the rest of us. The food is good and everything, but Thanksgiving is really one of those unpleasant and morally bankrupt celebrations of hypocrisy that always makes me kind of uncomfortable. I’m not going to protest and refuse to eat the turkey, but I think that sometimes it’s important to remember that we’re living on occupied Indian territory and that our country was responsible for the long and slow holocaust of the indigenous peoples of America.
But beware, for the graves of the ancients do not rest easy and the vengeful spirits await their chance to return and repay the wrongs done against them! Here are three of my favorite Indian revenge movies.
The Manitou (William Girdler, 1978)
Director William Girdler is an exploitation wizard who conjured up many excellent films during his brief career. They include Abby (The Black Exorcist), Grizzly (Jaws, but it’s a bear), and Day of the Animals (one of the craziest animal attack movies ever, with a master performance from shirtless Leslie Nielsen). The Manitou was his last film before dying in a helicopter crash at age 30 and also possibly his greatest. It tells the tale of a young woman played by Susan Strasberg who is shocked to discover a giant tumor growing on her back, and even more shocked when she finds out from an old Indian shaman who lives in New York and talks with a Yiddish accent that the tumor is actually the fetus of another old Indian shaman who is reincarnating himself inside of her so he can take his revenge on the white man. The thing eventually births itself out of her and the naked little guy covered in goo that runs wild through the hospital is played by Felix Silla, the tiny actor responsible playing Cousin Itt on the Addams Family and climbing inside a million and one little monster suits over the years. This guy can flay the skin off people’s bodies with his mind. The film climaxes with Tony Curtis channelling electrical power from an enormous old computer into topless Susan Strassberg as she floats in the fourth dimension and shoots lighting bolts out of her fingers. I never imagined that the spirits of the elders would be so good at fighting laser battles until I watched this gem.
Scalps (Fred Olen Ray, 1983)
When some anthropology students go digging up Indian artifacts in the California desert despite the warnings of some old man, one of them gets possessed by the spirit of a crazed warrior named Black Claw and starts killing off his classmates. The movie is a fairly straight forward slasher with some good Indian themed kills involving tomahawk decapitation, bow & arrow to the eye and at least one particularly gruesome scalping. I am not a fan of director Fred Olen Ray, his movies tend to be way too intentionally campy for me to enjoy. But he’s going totally straight-faced into horror with this one and he pulls it off pretty well. One unique touch is the weird disembodied head of Black Claw that sometimes flies around looking like a murderous Jambi. You could call the movie a rip-off of Death Curse of Tartu since it has pretty much the exact same plot, but the director of that film, William Grefe, was a sort of mentor to Fred Olen Ray so you’ve got to imagine that he intended this more as a gory tribute. It has a sort of sincere quality to it, like he’s still hungry to prove himself, as opposed to the cynical irony of some of his later movies. Along with The Manitou, it has no understanding or interest in actual Native American culture. But by at least acknowledging that the students are doing something bad, it implies that Native history is something which can only be disrespected at the peril of losing your scalp.
Savage Harvest (Eric Stanze, 1994)
Another camcorder triumph from the world of anti-budget SOV horror. A bunch of profoundly unattractive young people gather in the Missouri woods to go camping and begin telling tales (unendingly long tales) of ancient Indian demons. They say whatever magic incantations are necessary and summon forth the whole collection of animal-themed entities. Each one infects and controls a camper, hideously transforming them into some backyard Island of Dr. Moreau disaster and causing them to hunt and kill their friends. The appeal of homemade horror movies like this is found in the raw and undistanced realness on display (it’s like peaking in on some homely teen’s home movies from that one sad time all the unpopular kids went camping together) and the level weirdness which is discovered in the depths of unrestricted imagination. Just look at the make-up jobs on those possessed campers in the pictures. The monsters are all genuinely creepy in surprisingly unexpected ways. And a lot of the camera techniques are so weirdly abrasive that almost seem intentionally avante-garde. But the film as a whole is so poorly put together and filled with so many agonizingly boring parts that the thing as a whole creates this incredible, uneasy dissonance that’s both unnerving and fascinating. This is good stuff and once again pays no heed to the reality of historical myth, coming up with its own totally insane idea of Indian spirits.
Enjoy your Thanksgiving, but try to remember whose land we live on and the people and cultures that have been lost. And not only because they may one day come back for bloody revenge!
I don’t really know. And apparently neither do most writers or filmmakers. I’ve been given the impression that the activities of these Indian outlaws encompasses everything from highway banditry to assassination by yellow scarf to ritual sacrifice unto the four armed goddess of time, change and destruction–Kali!
They’ve appeared in fictional form torturing British prisoners in Sherlock Holmes stories (Adventure of the Crooked Man), squaring off against Napoleon Solo in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and trying to prevent Kobra from bringing on the apocalyptic Kali Yuga in the pages of John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. Here are three great films about thuggees with debatable historical accuracy.
GUNGA DIN (Dir: George Stevens, 1939)
Three rowdy BFF’s, Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Victor McLaglen, yuk it up as soldiers jauntily brawling around colonialist India looking for adventure. The screenplay is written by the “Shakespeare of Hollywood” Ben Hecht and his sometimes writing partner Charles MacArthur. A lot of it is pretty much just a period reworking of their classic and frequently-filmed play The Front Page. Fairbanks plays the roll of the boozy chauvinist torn between a respectable marriage and debauched fortune and glory with his buddies. But then the group runs into trouble with a cult of Thuggee and their evil guru, only escaping with the help of their lowly companion Gunga Din (and also the entire British army). The movie has almost nothing to do with the Rudyard Kipling poem from which it takes its title, but it does have a ridiculous scene at the end where a fictionalized Kipling sees Gunga Din nobly sacrifice himself and decides to write about it. Despite an overabundance of stupid humor this movie is massive classic Hollywood adventure.
THE STRANGLERS OF BOMBAY (Dir: Terrence Fisher, 1960)
This is one of Hammer Films’ all too rare non-horror movies, though it was still somewhat notorious for its bloody violence. Members of the British East India Trading Company have for years been getting kidnapped and murdered by a mysterious cult. Guy Rolfe shows up to get to the bottom of things and has almost as much trouble getting the British to cooperate with his investigation as he does with the evil Thuggees who stake him to the ground and unleash a vicious cobra on him. In terms of Thuggee menace, this movie really steps it up. The cult is vicious and gruesome, disemboweling, cutting off or gouging out stomachs, hands, tongues and eyes. Of course, they also strangle. But the film seems to be intensely critical of the imperialist British as well. It doesn’t condemn colonialism outright, but it shows most of its enforcers to be stupid, selfish assholes. It’s a weird balance between criticizing the ignorance and injustice of colonialism and presenting this totally fantastical, implicitly racist vision of stereotype villains. This movie isn’t as swashbuckling as the other two on the list, but it is definitely just as entertaining.
INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (Dir: Stevie Spielberg, 1984)
“Drop them Dr. Jones! They will found! You won’t!” This is where the Thuggees cross the line. No longer are they just murderers. They now enslave entire towns of children and their leader Mola Ram somehow has the ability to tear out sacrificial hearts while keeping his victims alive long enough to lower them into a vast pit of fire. He even has the hypnotic power to get Indy to strangle his charismatic little Chinese friend. This movie is pure class. I hesitate to say it, but in some ways I like this one even more than Raiders of the Lost Ark. They wisely changed things up for the sequel. It’s more pulpy, more gruesome, more in the spirit of an actual old-time serial. It’s definitely better than the still respectable third one and in a whole different class from the horseshit new one. The only thing that brings it down is Kate Capshaw’s obnoxious performance. As a little kid, home sick from school one day, I walked down the street to Stadium Video and rented this movie on VHS. It scared me so bad that I had to call my mom at work and ask her if someone reached into your chest and tore out your heart, would it really just heal up like that? And if so, if you then caught on fire would your heart also erupt in flames? And do people really eat chilled monkey brains and living baby snakes recently cut out of the bellies of big dead snakes? I don’t think her answers were very satisfying because I had to watch the movie several more times that day. Thuggees officially became nightmare material.
If there is one holiday truly deserving of indulgence and excess it has to be Halloween, the greatest day out of all the days of the year. You may stuff your gut on Thanksgiving or tear open a lot of toys on Christmas morning, but only on Halloween do your night time pranks and candy-benders culminate in a much deserved restless sleep full of traumatic nightmares and agonizing stomach pains. If you’re like me, your heart breaks again every year when you realize you’re still too old to go out trick-r-treating door to door. Well, to simulate the mighty satisfaction of a pillowcase overflowing with sugary loot, I’m gonna jam pack this weekend’s triple feature post with Halloween spooks until it’s tearing at the seams. That means not one, but THREE Halloween triple features. Enjoy and remember, if anyone tries to give you something healthy like an apple, put it right back through their fun-deficient window.
TRIPLE FEATURE #1: Cartoon Spooks
Not technically a triple “feature” since none of these are longer than ten minutes. You can watch them all right now and still have time to put the finishing touches on your costume.
Wot a Night
This is the first in a series of “Tom & Jerry” cartoons from Van Beuren studios. But we’re not talking about the cat and mouse. This Tom & Jerry team is made up of two unmemorable human characters who later got retitled “Dick & Larry” before drifting away into total obscurity. Despite the characters’ anonymity, this is some classic stuff. But beware… old-timey racism ahead!
Bimbo’s Initiation
Not strictly a Halloween cartoon, but it utterly terrified me as a kid. To this day it remains one of my favorite cartoons of all time. You can be certain the Elfman brothers watched this before making the Forbidden Zone. And it’s a rare chance to see Betty Bimbo’s dog boyfriend, Bimbo, before he got axed by the production code in 1933. This is Fleischer animation at its greatest.
Skeleton Dance
The best there ever was. Pure art.
Come back later for Part 2: Terrifying TV Specials!
-Tommy
Welcome to a new regular feature on the World of Mondo, the Weekend Triple Feature! I’m Tommy and each week I will be suggesting a thematically linked series of films for your viewing consideration. Thanks to Justin for inviting me onto the blog. I hope to recommend some interesting, undiscovered and entertaining stuff. Enjoy!
THIS WEEKS THEME: THE CHINATOWN UNDERGROUND
The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 stands as a political testament to the rampant and pervasive anti-Chinese racism of America’s past. But while a passionate and hallucinatory fear of the “Yellow Peril” gripped the nation and picaresque police reports of mysterious Tong Wars captured people’s imaginations, the overwhelming fear and fascination with Chinese culture found its most lasting expression in the sordid pages of the pulps. From Fu Manchu in his Limehouse lair, diabolically plotting world domination (not to mention his many literary clones like the Mysterious Wu Fang, the Yellow Spider or Wu Chung Fu) to the “slant-eyed immigrants” who practiced “nameless rites in honor of heathen gods” in the notoriously xenophobic stories of the otherwise brilliant H.P. Lovecraft, the Chinese were generally presented as a bunch of sinister fiends. Philip Francis Nowlan’s first Buck Rogers story, Armageddon 2419 A.D., is an example of pure Yellow Terror; and even well respected authors, like Jack London in Unparalleled Invasion, sometimes wondered at the awful fate which could befall America at the hands of the “heathen chinee.” But there was also a certain allure to the far East and its mysterious, possibly occult secrets which can be seen in characters like Milton Caniff’s seductive Dragon Lady or that great practitioner of Buddhist magic, the Green Lama. The detective Charlie Chan was created, with all his fractured-English wisdom, as a rebuke to the negative portrayals of Chinese in popular storytelling and he, of course, inspired his own thinly veiled rip-offs, among them Mr. Moto and Mr. Wong (the Mr. Moto movies with Peter Lorre are especially good, in my opinion). So it is out of this convoluted melange of attitudes and imaginings that a sort of mythic and fantastical notion of what secrets might be hidden beneath the crowded, foreign streets of Chinatown is dreamt up. Each of these three movies takes us further down into those perplexing passageways hidden beneath Chinatown in search of the many ancient and mystic secrets of the Orient.
The Secrets of Chinatown (1935, Dir. Fred C. Newmeyer)
Cultists hidden beneath black hoods, deadly knife-throwing assassins, men hypnotized to kill, coins of death, and a mystic cabal of evil opium smugglers are just some of the excitements to behold in this super entertaining but rickety, Z-grade programmer. A man dining in a Chinese restaurant discovers an ominous coin in his soup moments before being mysteriously murdered. The police investigate, but their top detective also turns up dead. The case is left in the hands of Donegal Dawn, an amateur sleuth with a strong imperialist inclination. He shows up at the Mayor’s office offering to take the case while, for some unimaginable reason, disguised as a Hindu (he’s even wearing blackface!). None of his many crime solving techniques are any less inscrutable than his ostentatious and misguided disguise but he somehow manages to get all the pieces in place. The movie is rich with atmosphere and somewhat surprisingly doesn’t try to explain away any of its supernatural elements. The opium smugglers actually are practitioners of black magic! It wasn’t just a Scooby-Doo style ruse. Another unique thing about this movie is that the Chinatown is question is actually in Vancouver, B.C. The film was shot in Canada with Hollywood money by a bunch of mavericks looking for loopholes on the limited import quotas for American movies in Britain. Since Canada is technically part of the British Commonwealth, Americans were able to covertly shoot movies there and pass them off as authentic “British” product, circumventing the cap on American imports. The somewhat disreputable films briefly made under these circumstances before the authorities caught on are, today, either totally forgotten or unfairly reviled. But this movie is true pulp of the most purely entertaining kind. Also it’s barely an hour long, a running-time more movies should aspire to.
Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962, Dir. Albert Zugsmith)
Vincent Price, in a treasured non-horror performance, is an international adventurer who arrives in San Francisco during a Tong war at the turn of the century and discovers an illegal trade of slave girls inside a maze of chambers and passageways beneath the streets of Chinatown. This eerie, somnolent film has nothing to do with the Thomas de Quincy book from which it gets its name and is actually pretty difficult to explain. It has the claustrophobic intensity of a fever dream. People are caged, beaten, drugged, and disappear through secret passageways, trapdoors and sewers. As Price descends into a miasmic, opium-induced stupor, he’s lead on a chase through a seemingly endless procession of twisting corridors and underground rivers. Spouting a steady stream of pulpy philosophical platitudes, his nightmare culminates in a whole hallucinatory five minute sequence shot entirely in slow motion. Directed by Albert Zugsmith, who’s responsible for producing a number of excellent films in the 50’s including several Douglas Sirk movies and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Opium Eater is one of the most strangely poetic and unnervingly fatalistic pieces of genre exploitation ever made.
Big Trouble in Little China (1986, Dir. John Carpenter)
No need to explain this gem. And no excuses if you haven’t ever watched it and are over 10 years old. Kurt Russell goes deep down underground and gets mixed up in some dangerous Chinese mysticism. One of the many things that’s entertaining about this movie is its knowing use of blatant stereotypes. Once again there’s some evil Oriental shenanigans afoot and a heroic white guy there to save the day. But where the film gets its satiric edge is by making this main character an arrogant, hubristic, smart-mouthed idiot. The crucial strength of this movie is in Kurt Russell’s swaggering, obliviously insensitive performance. The frantic, live-action cartoon pacing and non-stop gags and effects make it into an eternal 80’s classic and a bittersweet reminder of when John Carpenter was a totally infallible filmmaker. A perfect end to the triple feature.
