Fifty years ago—in the perfect pop culture year of 1966—Woody Allen did his first film project for American International Pictures, home to Roger Corman, monsters, bikers, acid heads and futuristic Death Races looking way forward to the year 2000. I say film project as he didn’t make his first film, he sort of stole it! Legally.

Basically Allen took the Japanese action film International Secret Police: Key of Keys and re-dubbed the dialogue, changing the plot to make it revolve around a secret egg salad recipe being fought over by rival James Bond-type spy characters. The film became What’s Up Tiger Lily? and was quite well received. The idea had been done before of course, on a smaller scale by Rocky and Bullwinkle creator Jay Ward for his Fractured Flickers TV series in 1963, and surely others had toyed with the concept, but not in a feature length film. The opportunities for juvenile, MAD Magazine humor were endless and very funny.

What’s Up Tiger Lily? created a model that has been followed by some of the funniest people in history. Here is the trailer in which Allen explains to an unsuspecting public what it is that he has done. (The entire film can also be found on YouTube.)
 

 

 
The next one of these dubbed comedies that comes to mind was in fact done by two of the funniest people to ever grace this planet, Phillip Proctor and the late Peter Bergman of Firesign Theatre fame. In 1979 Proctor and Bergman took clips from 1940s Republic Serials and overdubbed and rewrote an extremely stoned cliffhanger entitled J-Men Forever, starring themselves in newly filmed black and white bits that were inserted into the insane mess of rearranged reality. To top this off they used modern loud rock n roll music for the soundtrack.

To quote the blurb under the YouTube clip:

J-Men Forever became the signature for Night Flight’s stoned comedy audience in the 1980’s. This ultimate late night chronic high comedy was the most demanded rerun for the entire 8 years Night Flight was on the USA Network.

After the jump, experience the inspired insanity of ‘The Rusty James Show’...

The Black Klansman

Forty years before Chappelle’s Show made the joke, a black man spends his nights in a most curious manner…

This is a sampling from a private collection of rare, massive 40” x 60” posters that were printed on cardstock for drive-In movie theaters.  More posters and related merchandise are online at hautecampe.com (“Archeaologists of the Strange”).  All are for sale at auction until February 8, when the bidding closes.

Haute Campe offers a collection of original rare, vintage film posters from the 1940s-1970s originating mostly from drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. Most of the posters went through a single distributor called National Screen Service, hence the “property of N.S.S.” at the bottom of 99% of the movie posters printed in the 20th century!  While many posters were destroyed by the elements and others were pulled off the wall by collectors, a great many returned to the distributor’s archives and piled up for many many years. 

We were fortunate enough to be able to acquire a large part of the archives and the treasures were fantastic, including rarely-seen posters that were for small run promotions and exceedingly impossible to find sizes like the gorgeous and massive 40” x 60” silkscreens created for drive-in movie theaters.

This is just a selection from the first part of the alphabet…
 

Blood and Black Lace

Mario Bava directed this 1964 film that created the template for the “body count” slasher films of the 1980s.
 

Blood Bath

A 1966 stinker that started out in Yugoslavia as a spy film and—being judged unreleasable—had extra sequences filmed in Venice, California and was re-edited as a horror movie.
 
Many, many more movie posters, after the jump…

 
This marvelous bit of playful fetish art comes from the skillful hand of Dirk Vermin, who tossed off this comic book in 1992 in a limited run of 1,000 copies. Vermin is a tattoo artist who works out of Las Vegas and I can think of no better endorsement of his work than this comic. Today he is probably best known for the A&E reality series Bad Ink.

Over the course of 20-odd pages, Bettie (whose name is rendered as “Betty” throughout) flirts with, is spanked by, threatens to whip, and generally cavorts with many of the highly recognizable figures from 20th-century pop culture, including James Bond, Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, Norman Bates, Marvin the Martian, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, King Kong, Adam West’s Batman, and so forth.

All I can say is “Wholly not safe for work, Batman!”
 

 

 
More Bettie and friends after the jump…

A 23-year-old Peter Gabriel of Genesis in costume as “The Watcher in the Skies,” 1973
 
During the tour for their cosmic 1974 double record, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (the subject of an excellent book by the same name by Kevin Holm-Hudson), Peter Gabriel and his many different theatrical personalities took center stage. But that wasn’t the first time Peter Gabriel tripped his bandmates out with his on-stage personas.

In an 2012 interview, Gabriel recounted how the audience reacted the first time he appeared on stage in his wife’s dress, and a custom made fox head back in 1972 during Genesis’ tour for their album Foxtrot.

With the costumes, I started wearing bat wings and stuff, and getting a little more outlandish, and then on Foxtrot I wore the fox head and the red dress. My wife, Jill, had a red Ossie Clark dress which I could just about get into, and we had a fox head made. The first time we tried it was in a former boxing ring in Dublin, and there was just a shocked silence.

 

Peter Gabriel as “The Fox” during the tour for the 1972 album, ‘Foxtrot’  with his wife’s red dress and a custom made fox head

When it comes to how the other members of Genesis felt about Gabriel’s getups, he said that “some of them hated it” (I’m looking at you Phil Collins). According to Gabriel, none of the members of Genesis knew what “clothing” he had packed in his suitcase for the six-month Lamb tour, until he arrived to rehearsals. After the last performance of the tour, Gabriel left the band.
 

Peter Gabriel as “Old Man Henry” during a performance of “The Musical Box” from the album ‘Nursery Cryme’
 
If for some reason you’re not acquainted with this era of Genesis (which is perfectly understandable if you are of a certain age), the following images of a young Peter Gabriel, will probably blow your mind (man). Even if you are long-running fan of the band, it’s nearly impossible to not admire Gabriel’s pioneering weirdness, and chameleon-like ability to look like anyone but himself.
 

Peter Gabriel as the deformed “Slipperman” (Phil Collins’ most hated costume of the ‘Lamb Lies Down’ tour)
 

Peter Gabriel as “Britannia” 1973
 
More after the jump…

 
Even among the very strange artists who pioneered industrial music, Foetus was an outlier. While that project—the nom de noise of J.G. Thirlwell, a/k/a Clint Ruin a/k/a about a zillion other names—indulged deeply in that movement’s difficult, grating sounds and nihilism that approached absurdity, Thirlwell never bound himself to the genre like industrial’s grimly serious noise explorers or its goth-crossover synth mopers. Foetus, while expressing a self-loathing impossible in any organism with an intact survival instinct, also expressed a wicked and wry sense of humor, not only in the one-man-band’s name, which varied from release to release (You’ve Got Foetus on Your Breath, Foetus Interruptus, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel, Foetus All-Nude Revue… this list could go on for awhile), but in the music itself, which cheekily incorporated elements from classical music, showtunes, film noir and spaghetti western incidental music, even doo-wop.

Check out the incredible and representative “Enter the Exterminator,” from the 1985 album Nail (Thirlwell beat the Jesus Lizard to the punch on the all-LP-titles-will-be-four-letters-long schtick), chosen because it blew my mind when I was a kid, and it got me started on exploring the industrial program as much as anything off of Micro-Phonies or Twitch. The at-once growled and whispered lyrics snared me, but it was the music that compelled me to the record store. NSFW for bad words, jobber.
 

 

 
Not one to sit still, in the later half of the ‘80s Thirlwell formed the duo Wiseblood with Swans drummer Roli Mossimann, which was about as bludgeoning a project as you’re imagining, and The Flesh Volcano with Soft Cell’s Mark Almond. In 1988 he released the absolute must-have Stinkfist, a collaborative EP with no-wave heroine Lydia Lunch. That EP features two tracks of tribal-drumming insanity plus the ten minute “Meltdown Oratorio,” an admirable nightmare of Neubauten-esque slow-burn menace spiked with still more manic tribal percussion. Even if Lydia Lunch monologues aren’t your thing, this is really fucking great. (If I even need to tell you that a Lydia Lunch piece is NSFW for profanity, um, hi, welcome to Dangerous Minds, we hope you like what you find here.)
 
More mayhem from Clint Ruin, after the jump…

 
Gee Vaucher was a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective that produced Crass. She was responsible for most of the arresting cover art for their albums, although she wasn’t the one who came up with the band’s ingenious logo; Penny Rimbaud’s friend Dave King came up with that one.

Crass was one of the first bands to use bewildering back-projected films and video collages to enhance their stage performances. Vaucher was the woman responsible for those, and watching them today, it’s startling how little they’ve dated since their creation. The anger and the need to fuck with people, that seems very late 1970s, but the fast-cutting use of grainy archival footage seems perfectly contemporary today and indeed would seem vital and relevant at really any point between then and now.

Vaucher’s Crass-related imagery is collected in the volume Crass Art and Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters.
 

 
Semi Detached collects all of Vaucher’s Crass-related videos for the the first seven years of Crass’ output. The full title is Semi Detached: CRASS performance videos 1977-1984.

The first third or so of the hour-long video features “Reality Whitewash,” “Shaved Women: 1979,” “Mother Earth,” “Mother Love” (the opening credits have it as “Smother Love”), and “Bomb Plus Tape (Well Forked—But Not Dead).” Then the rest is dedicated to videos for the entirety of Crass’ 1983 album Yes Sir, I Will.

As we head into the last days of campaigning before the Iowa caucus, enjoy this very different political message…
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Our Wedding’: Crass’s magnificent romance-mag prank
Pranksters make a Crass logo crop circle, oblivious ‘astronomologer’ attempts to interpret it

 
The first movie ever made in Canada about skateboarding is called “The Devil’s Toy,” and it’s a frothy 15-minute effort from 1966 depicting a couple dozen freewheeling youngsters gliding over the streets and parks of Montreal.

The weirdest thing about the “The Devil’s Toy” is that the people who commissioned the production may have been under the impression that this was to be a terrifying social guidance movie à la Troy McClure’s “Firecrackers: The Silent Menace,” but apparently the people who actually made the movie weren’t seeing it that way.

Three elements—the title; a portentous, nay grandiloquent dedication “to all victims of intolerance”; and a suitably over-the-top voiceover (one imagines someone like Gary Owens at the mic)—point to the movie’s ostensible purpose of alarming teenagers into selling their planks tout de suite—but for anyone with eyes to see, the movie clearly depicts youths having some harmless fun, plus precisely zero malign consequences are depicted as a result of the use of skateboards—not even a single scraped knee.
 

 
The director of “The Devil’s Toy” is Claude Jutra, an important figure in the history of Quebec film, responsible for 1971’s Mon oncle Antoine, among others. Based on “The Devil’s Toy” alone, there is no doubt that Jutra was a filmmaker of some talent. The proceedings are heavily influenced by the nouvelle vague, even as the effervescent score, featuring vocals by none other than Geneviève Bujold, can easily be imagined emanating from a Scopitone in some Gallic bistro.

Marc Campbell, my colleague here at DM, posted this gem back in 2012. He thinks “The Devil’s Toy” was intended to be a straight-up “mockumentary.” He might be right. That’s it’s so on the edge is what makes it even better.

By the way, can anyone clear this up? All sources seem to agree that the movie dates from 1966—it certainly feels like 1966—but “MCMLXIX” (1969) is plainly visible in the end credits, so I don’t know what’s up with that.

As stated, the scarifying elements of the movie seem well-nigh parodic. But as shocking social guidance films go, this one’s a pure delight.
 

 
h/t: Jeff Albers

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Black and white pictures of famous people on skateboards

 
Meat Puppets scholar Matthew Smith-Lahrman, the author of The Meat Puppets and the Lyrics of Curt Kirkwood from Meat Puppets II to No Joke, has posted a number of his in-depth interviews with the band on his blog, Perspective. Toward the end of one such conversation with main Puppet Curt Kirkwood, the singer and guitarist breaks down which drugs the band used while recording each of their first five albums for SST:

The first album was, “Let’s do it all on acid.” We thought that our heroes did. And I always thought, “Wow, the Grateful Dead and Jimi were trippin’,” and so we did it in the studio, Meat Puppets I sounds like that because we really are on drugs. Meat Puppets II we had MDA: lots of it. Really good MDA. We just had a ball with the stuff for about four or five days and recorded the record, but nobody is going to do that again after that. It’s like, “This record depends on this.” Well, it kind of does. Up on the Sun is just a big pot and beer album. “Now this one we’re going to go smoke pot and drink beer.” Then we go do Mirage and Huevos and snort cocaine.

 

 
For the Meat Puppets fan whose response to the above paragraph is “tl;dr,” here’s the Dangerous Minds easy-reference, wallet-sized taxonomy:

Meat Puppets: acid
Meat Puppets II: MDA
Up on the Sun: pot and beer
Mirage: cocaine
Huevos: cocaine

And here’s a story from Gregg Turkington’s liner notes to the Rykodisc reissue of Meat Puppets that should help you remember which drug goes with that album:

Curt once told me a story of a night he spent in the Arizona desert under the influence of hallucinogens. Wandering around in a patch of barren desert far from town, he came upon what appeared to be a beautiful Persian rug, laid out in the sand. Under the influence as he was, he couldn’t help but lie down on the rug and attempt to commune with its cascading patterns and beautiful colors. He eventually wrapped himself up in this gorgeous rug, and drifted off to sleep. Upon awakening to the heat of a desert morning, he was instantly sobered up by the realization that the rug was in fact, an extremely dead coyote, covered in maggots and stinking like the bowels of Hell from days spent rotting in the sun. The influence of incidents like these (and there are others!) definitely gave the Meat Puppets their particular and peculiar edge.

Continues after the jump…

Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen, John Lydon and Poly Styrene
 
Sadly this isn’t a photo essay with the images—you’ll have to watch the video to see the photographs of the Sex Pistols by French photographer Pierre Benain. Benain shot these back in the Spring of 1978 for a French magazine. A few of these you might have seen before, like the one image of Sid Vicious holding a knife to Nancy Spungen’s neck, but most should be new to you.

For some odd reason in the interview, Benain makes no mention of X-Ray Spex’s frontwoman Poly Styrene being there. She was, as you can see from another photo from that day, which you can see above.

 
h/t Declan O’Gallagher

 
Sometimes a small change in perspective can reveal the whole truth of a subject. While most people know Donald Trump is a dangerous idiot, there are some (god help them…) who are deluded by his bluster, bullying and ranting xenophobic hatred. These poor souls are caught like a rabbit in the headlights or you know, a mouse hypnotized by a snake or whatever it is snakes do to fool mice into standing still long enough to become lunch… promise them some tasty cheese or something…

Hopefully this may all change as actor, comedian and writer, Peter Serafinowicz has done a truly marvellous thing. He has added a cockney tough guy accent to Donald Trump making sound like a cross between a Bob Hoskins’ villain in a British gangster flick and one of the Monty Python’s Piranha Brothers (Dinsdale).
 

 
Mr. Serafinowicz has not altered any of Trump’s words, but his small and powerful tweak in presentation is like having subtitles for the hard of thinking. Do spread this far and wide, please.