saturday night fever and a bad hangover

Disco Exorcist

Directed By: Richard Griffin

Year: 2010

 Bad moves, bad wigs, bad acting, deliberately aged film stock, naked sheilas and more polyster suits than any man needs to see, this is the world of the Disco Exorcist!  

More precisely, this is the world of Rex Romanski, a smooth talking, smooth dancing, smooth romancing disco king who beds the wrong babe and now must pay the price. Rex thinks he’s found the right girl when he meets Rita Marie and after a night of dancing, both vertical and horizontal, it seems the romance is blossoming. That is until into the club comes Disco Porn starlet Amoreena Jones, (I kid you not, disco porn! What more could you want?) and Rex makes the fatal error of leaving Rita alone on the dance floor while he romances Amoreena. 

Rule number one on the dance floor, never upset a disco voodoo queen! Cue voodoo ceremonies, lots of humping and strange dream sequences before we head off to the porn studio where Rex finds himself drafted into the movie when head disco dick Jack Toughskins doesn’t arrive on time. (And by arrive I actually mean arrive, no double entendres there.) 

So Rex Romanski, king of the dance floor is now a porn star – tough life hey. Things turn ugly though when the porn babes, possessed by demons, go nuts and start dicing up the crew. Luckily for Rex, Amoreena snaps out of her trance in time to save his nuts.  Soon enough though Rex works out what is going on and when it turns out the Brazilian cleaner Angel is an excommunicated priest (“I like-a the small children”) Rex, his DJ buddy Manuel and Angel decide to perform an exorcism in the disco basement. This doesn’t happen though until after a great orgy sequence with an Anton La Vey lookalike running proceedings, Jack Toughskins getting his rubber wang torn off and a bunch of risen from the dead women crashing the party.  You see, Rita Marie is a bit of a womens libber too, calling up the scorned, raped, beaten and victimized from their graves to get revenge on the male of the species. That’s when Rex realises just how much trouble he is in and grabs the demonic Amoreena, taking her back to the disco to be exorcised. Of course, nothing goes to plan but with a possessed disco ball, an exorcism performed from a pamphlet and even a tubular bells ripoff riff to finish proceedings, you know this baby is a labour of love. 

With deliberately aged film stock, plenty of bad 70s clothing, lots of blood and guts, plenty of naked flesh, snappy lines, a couple of scenes deliberately cut out and replaced with “shot missing” tags, this film is a homage to the great days of b-grade vhs trading, where you never quite knew what you were getting but you were always surprised. Deliberately cheesy, Disco Exorcist takes Saturday Night Fever and destroys the myth of hot chicks and smooth movers with a smirk, a bucket of blood and a shitload of coke. Blood, guts, babes, demons, drugs, tits and polyester – Disco Exorcist has it all. For anyone who had to suffer the indignities of the disco era, this is your revenge!

john travolta was never this good

forget the walking dead - here's Jesus!

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The Lounge is rockin' today

The Hedgehogs – Our Minds Dyed Yesterday

(Levitation Records /thehedgehogs.bandcamp.com)

Straight outta Aalborg, Denmark  The Hedgehogs offer up an LP of classy psych-pop late 60s styled garage that if you didn’t know better you would almost think was the real thing.   

No fancy updating, no jarring “modern” stylings, just a set of pure, brash and sweet pop music whose origins are only really obvious because of the clean quality of the digital recording/download.  On a beat up record player you would be double checking to make sure you hadn’t stumbled upon an unknown Ugly Things moment.   

It’s hard to pick a highlight since there really isn’t a bad song on this disc and from opener Stumblin’ Around with its sweet guitar pickin’ and cool vocals through to the Bo Diddley lite riff that holds down Servant Chant the boys don’t make a false move.  The Witch (all 1.49 of it) is the song you want to hear in any 60s b-grade juvenile delinquent movie as the kids rumble at the club, then there’s the gritty country twang of Dirty And Vile, the cool harp blowin’ on Elevator, the great jangle of guitar on songs like Peace In My Mind… 

hell it’s all good.  I hear Flamin’ Groovies, Sunnyboys, Lime Spiders, Troggs, every great Nugget moment, Byrds… but none of them overtly taking over, no one band you can say is the main influence, just moments of clarity, riffs that sound so familiar and yet aren’t.  A great job, not a revisionist album, not a revival album, just a band having a mighty fine time in their garage.  You will too. 

there's somethin' rockin in denmark 

The Jac - I'm a one man band and i take all the credit

The Jac – Faux Pas

There must be something about Western Australia, maybe it’s the isolation or maybe it’s just in the Swan Lager but over the years some great pop, power pop and punk pop has worked its way over the border –The Dugites, Loaded Dice, Hoodoo Gurus and The Stems just to name a few and Joe Algeri (Jack And The Beanstalks, The Britannicas, Green Beetles) and his one man band The Jac are definitely adding to that pedigree with his latest effort Faux Pas.   

Eleven tracks of impure pop that always drift a little left of centre, Faux Pas kicks off with I Play All The Instruments - “I can be a one man band / I can play everything with a single hand / There are no fights 'cause I always get it /And I can take all the credit” which should tell you straight away that Joe is having fun here and his mix of The Kinks, 70s British pop, new wave, Robyn Hitchcock and Todd Rundgren makes for one hell of a sweet album.  There’s backward masking, the odd tip of the hat to The Beatles, some great punk pop in Julie Got Angry and Persistent Man, the  pseudo silliness of I’m A Glass Of  Orange Juice  and then there’s Romano The Dog – “Romano the dog is humping Ginger the cat / What do I tell the kids / About life and the universe, it seems so perverse / I think I'll have a cup of tea” which, despite its strong English 70s pop feel,  reminded me of US band The Big Enjoyers who also coincidently owe more than a nod to the world of Rundgren and Utopia.  Title track Faux Pas finishes the album off in a swirl of keyboards while adding some crunch to the poptones, really digging in and maybe just hinting at a darker side to Joe.  For this album though The Jac is all snap, crackle and pop and a worthy addition to the Perth pantheon.  Whatever it is in the water there, it’s responsible for some great sounds. 

snap crackle and power pop 

She Freak - movie of the week

She Freak

Directed by: Byron Mabe 

Year: 1967

 “Filmed on actual locations where it COULD have happened!”   

But of course it didn’t.  This 1960s B-grade carny flick from the twisted mind of legendary producer David F Friedman is a poor attempt at remaking Todd Browning’s classic Freaks but it does have its own charm. The story follows the trials and tribulations of smalltown waitress Jade (Claire Brennen) who wants more out of life than working in a diner and fighting off her sleazy boss. When a carnival comes through town she decides to join up, seeing it as the only way out.  Of course she also has her eye on her future too with the moneyed up Steve St. John, owner of the Freakshow tent, right in her line of vision. Trouble is Jade don’t actually like the freaks themselves and she’s also partial to a bit of the rough stuff with carnie tough nut Blackie Fleming.   

Steve might be naïve to what is going on but his offsider Shorty (Felix Silla – Cousin Itt!) is keeping an eye on things and doesn’t like what he sees.  Not that it matters because Jade soon has her hooks in St. John and once those marriage papers are signed her ugly side comes out.  Blackie and St. John have a knife fight, St. John loses and Jade inherits the freakshow.  Of course if you’ve seen Browning’s film you know where it’s going from here.   In a hilarious scene the freaks come out to get Jade – the only problem being, there are very few “freaks” – ugly does not count!!  Anyway it all culminates in a ‘classick’ ending even if the cover slick does give it away.   

So the movie sounds great right?  Well there’s some stuff I forgot to tell you.  Padding for a start, lots and lots and lots of padding.  The whole romance ‘tween Jade and Steve St. John is just footage of them wandering the carnival with music over top, there’s tons of stock footage of carnival stalls setting up and then pulling down, there’s the actors mingling with real folk wandering the carnival, there’s more footage of Jade and Steve… all that’s lacking sometimes is a corny narrator or you would think you were watching a 60s doco on small town America.  Sure it’s great as a slice of history but hell, this is supposed to be a horror movie not a bloody documentary on what fat people were eating at travelling shows in the mid west! 

The film gets slow, reaaaaallll slow at times but finally picks up again in the second half.  Yes it’s a stinker at times, sure it’s slower than your cousin Tommy who was kept back in grade three and yes there are better things to do with your time but I can’t deny it, there is a certain charm about this film and the era it has preserved.  And anyway that’s what your thumb is for – the fast forward button.  Neither Friedman nor Cheezy Flicks ever promised you a classic film – you know what you’re getting here so just remember  - it could have happened! 

http://cheezyflicks.com/shop/ 

Gene Gregorits – Dog Days Volume One

If you only buy one book about a dog killing, self mutilating, drunken, drug fucked failed writer this year make it Dog Days. 

 It would be easy to say that Gene Gregorits is knocking of Charles Bukowski and sure Dog Days does have hints of Bukowski’s novels (wanna be writer, drunk, sexual antics) but whereas Buk was a working class bum, a man who was comfortable in the environment of shitty dives and bars, factories and hookers, you get the feeling Gregorits is never really comfortable, he uses them as an escape, a place to hide but he’s not one of them, he’s a man with aspirations, with a sense of being better, even if his aspirations for the most part seem to be to just get fucked up and to escape from the world around him.  At times brutal and confronting (hell any book that starts with a rape scene isn’t going to be light reading!) the reality is that this is a love story, just not your conventional one.  Sure there’s a girl (or two) involved but really his love was his cat Hank and this is the story of a man struggling to come to terms with the loss of that love. It’s that underlying storyline, that sensitivity, the stuff Gregorits tries and fails to hide that makes the difference, dragging this ‘anti-memoir’ up from the gutter and into the fresh air, that makes you want to read more to see if this drunken, self loathing, self centred prick can redeem himself because if he can, then maybe we have a chance too.  

Drive In Movie

RATTLERS

D: John McCauley 1976

This baby is in a ten dvd set I picked up for $4 called Drive – In Dusk ‘til Dawn that I gather is actually part of a bigger set put out by some one called Millcreek Entertainment (well, their damn watermark/logo kept showing up during the flick anyway) There’s a real early 70s tv film feel to this flick and it aint helped by the direct to dvd transfer of a really crap copy complete with crackles, pops and frames slipping. The movie kicks off with a coupla all American Disney kids out in the desert playing, blonde hair shinin’ in the afternoon sun, jiving each other and looking for bones when they stumble into a snake pit and get their asses killed. Cue Title and then we jump to our dorky hero, Dr Tom Parkinson, (Sam Crews) snake expert and all round cheesy dork but with immaculate hair and a nice safari suit. He gets called in by the local sheriff to help out with their investigation. And when a whole family including the pets gets attacked well, then Dr Tom gets an assistant to help him, a photogapher sidekick who just happens to be a feisty chick with a feminist bent. Another snake attack on a plumber (with the snake sneaking up his leg – lemme tell you I flinched) then gives us the snakes in the bathtub… so that’s where Wes Craven got the idea. He did it better too or at least he had a hotter babe in the bath not a nagging divorcee who only shows her back. Anyway, as the investigation continues, we find out the army is involved. Seems they dumped some chemicals down a mineshaft and Dr Tom needs to find that mine. Of course the colonel wont tell him where cos the colonel is completely nuts. Luckily the drunk army doctor with the bad toupee helps out with some info and soon the doc and the girl are wandering around a mineshaft with a torch looking for snakes, dangerous snakes, dangerous killer snakes… duh! Of course they stumble on em too (well, one at least I think, it was pretty shitty filming/editing at that stage) and they have to run back out in a truly pisspoor segment of bad filming, bad overdubbing, just bad everything. After that of course Dr Tom mentions that he’ll have to go to Vegas to find out where the mine is. Oh yeah of course. And so this girl who gave us a huge rant at the start of the movie about women’s rights and the workforce and all this guff goes all weak at the knees because he mentions Vegas? Cue, two minutes of holding hands, kissing, and dancing together in Vegas (or at least some fountain and a woodgrain lounge somewhere) then its back to the desert to be attacked in their tents by rabid rattlers. But then an army guy shows up out of nowhere, blows them all away and drives away again. Doesn’t even stay to check if Doc and the babe are okay. Turns out the mad colonel dumped some nerve gas down the shaft that is sending the snakes whacko and seemingly giving them the intelligence to group together and climb up pipes and into houses and all the other shit they’re getting up to. Mad colonel kills drunk doctor, goes out to the mine shaft and blows it (and hisself) up after firin’ a few shots at Dr Tom and the sheriff and then the snakes are sealed in the shaft, the doc gets the girl and we can all go home after we hang the speaker back on the rack, rearrange our clothes and drop the empty beer bottles in the bin.

Is it an eco disaster flick or just a disaster?

Well it sure as shit aint no Kingdom Of The Spiders or Frogs or even Piranha (which by the by is in the box too) but it was just so corny that I had to watch it. I’m a sucker for punishment. And hey the snakes were real, I’ll give them that and that certainly added an edge to it cos those fuckers bite!