Vertige directed by Jean Beaudin in 1969 is a cinematic pop explosion that plays like a fashion shoot from Paris Vogue photographed by David Hemming’s character in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. A mix of LSD imagery, candy-colored sets, go go dancing, Vietnam war and horror movie stills and clips,Vertige rides the rhythm of a dynamic era of contrasting moods and styles, politics and attitudes.

Malron Blando has created a new soundtrack for Vertige in the experimental spirit of the film itself. Blasphemous? Perhaps. But so was the sixties.

Vertige with its original score by Serge Garant can viewed here.

“Final Days” (Peel Sessions) - Young Marble Giants
“River Of Blood” - The Black Angels
“Change Is Now” - The Byrds
“Voodoo Chile” (Live, Winterland 1968) - Jimi Hendrix
“Chinatown” - Destroyer
“The Desert Is A Circle” (El Topo) - Jodorowsky/Fierro
“Where The Rhythm Takes You” - Makin’ Time
“Signed D.C.” - December’s Children
“True Believers” - The Black Angels
“Trust Us” (Take 6) - Captain Beefheart
 

 
What the hell?! How has this sailed under my radar for so long? And more to the point, how come nobody thought of this before? Tarantino and Rodriguez, I’m looking at you…

As the title may suggest, Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives is a very low budget exploitation flick about a group of transgendered, transvestite and cisgendered ladies who suffer a brutal trans-phobic bashing one night, and decide to take matters into their own hands. Knives, revenge and sheer-black catsuits ensue. Because it takes balls to get revenge. Of course, this isn’t some kind of modern masterpiece-in-waiting, but dammit, it looks like A LOT of fun! The premise is neat, the direction looks good, and the cast is very spirited. What more do you need out of an exploitation flick? Planet of Terror blog has this to say:

I know we all need another retrosploitation movie like we need a hole in the head. But writer/director Israel Luna is genuinely gifted and he has a knack for both the comedic as well as the over the top insanity which is needed to make these types of films work. ... It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s howlingly good fun.

 
More on Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives at the official website (including DVD, screening and Netflix info)

Thanks to Dean Birkett for the tip off!

 
I noticed that one of the first DVDs the company put out when I was with Disinformation has now made its way to UbuWeb. From the DVD copy I wrote in 2002:

Rest in Pieces is director Robert-Adrian Pejo’s intimate portrait of painter Joe Coleman, who is known around the world as a shamanic, moral voice diagnosing the ills of 21st century America. Coleman holds nothing back, telling us of a world wracked with tumorous cities, perversion, divorce, violence, atomic bombs, and a human race destroying itself “simply because we were born.”

I also saw that the film was online at Snag Films, sponsored by Goldman Sachs(???) except that they oddly chose to put the DVD extras—including an interview I conducted with Joe and actress Asia Argento and outtakes of Joe performing an autopsy on a real human cadaver—before the film.

Watch (and download) at UbuWeb or scroll forward about 20 minutes in to watch at SnagFilms, below:
 

“Yes! I am Montag. Master of illusion. Defier of the laws of reason. What is real? Are you certain you know what reality is? How do you know, that at this second, you aren’t sleeping in your bed, dreaming that you’re in this theater?”

In Herschell Gordon Lewis’s bloody 1970 schlock-fest, The Wizard of Gore, a TV talkshow host and her newspaper sports-writer boyfriend investigate a “master illusionist” who seemingly kills off female volunteers from the audience of his shady, underground Grand Guignol with horrific dismemberment, and yet, take a bow, they actually weren’t killed. Well, not yet at least. That happens later. Or does it?

The Wizard of Gore, with its reverse Cartesian logic (“I think therefore I’m… not sure I’m dead... yet”), prodigious flesh and blood quotient and the surreal speeches of deadly magician Montag, occupies a space shared only by the Coffin Joe films and Bloodsucking Freaks, one of the most infamous, morally depraved and misogynistic grindhouse flicks of all time (Bloodsucking Freaks is actually based on The Wizard of Gore). The demented funhouse mirror reasoning that permeates the film is quite effective and adds a philosophical underpinning to the proceedings that take it to a higher intellectual level (I’m not kidding!) and making it unique amongst gorehound classics.

What was once only able to be viewed in a urine and vomit-stained Times Square flea-pit or in low rent drive-in movie theaters down south can now be viewed, in its entirety, on YouTube… You used to have to work to see this stuff!
 

 
Dangerous Minds pal Jesse Merlin (currently appearing in Stuart Gordon’s hit musical adaptation of Re-Animator at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood) sent me this wonderfully weird film trailer for Mad Doctor of Blood Island, a cheesy, low budget—and incredibly bloody—Filipino horror movie from the 1960s. What makes this particular trailer of interest is the hilariously over-the-top voice-over courtesy of my late friend, Theodore Gottlieb, better known as philosopher, metaphysician and podiatrist, Brother Theodore.

“A barbaric experience in the most grotesque sense!”

I’m 100% certain that Theodore wrote the copy for this, too.

Watch the entire movie—if you dare!—on YouTube.
 

 
Below, Brother Theodore on my Disinformation TV series in 2001:
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds: Brother Theodore on David Letterman

 
Dirk Bogarde was cool. He had style. I knew that as soon as I saw him in one B&W ‘50’s movie, loafing around a beach, chatting to his bikini-clad co-star, wearing white trousers, white shirt, white socks and plimsolls. Who else could carry that off? Okay, Cary Grant could, but Grant would have added a cravat, and topped it off with a checked linen jacket.

It’s telling that Bogarde wore such clothes in a beach scene - surrounded by naked flesh cooking under a studio sun - he maintained a distance, an image, a decorum, an untouchability. He was actually hiding who he was, hiding behind his clothes; and that distance, rightly or wrongly, made him seem cool.

Bogarde started off in theater before making his impact as the cowardly killer of P.C. Dixon (Jack Warner) in The Blue Lamp.  Warner went on to become a stalwart of TV with Dixon of Dock Green, while Bogarde became the Rank Organization’s prime beefcake, the biggest British star of the 1950s, with a string of audience-pleasing movies. While these films brought fame and fortune, they sold short his very real talents as an actor.

This was to change, when in 1961, Bogarde made Victim, the highly controversial film that moved his career in a different, more intelligent, more worthy direction.

Victim dealt with the then-taboo subject of homosexuality, telling the story of a man who falls prey to a blackmail gang. It was the first film to use the word “homosexual” and caused considerable outrage amongst those angry letter writers of Tunbridge Wells, but it did help change opinions, and was a step in the right direction to Britain decriminalizing homosexuality in 1967.

Worried that Bogarde (who was himself gay) might lose some of his mass of adoring female admirers, Rank roped him into this promotional interview for Victim, where the actor talked about his career, his ambitions and hopes for the future. It’s a fairly candid interview for a man who, in his later years, fictionalized most of his life.

Dirk Bogarde would have been 90 this week, and for me, he’s still cool as fuck.
 

 
Have a look at the trailer for Devolved, the new teen movie satire/homage from John Cregan and Severin Films, the company that unleashed (inflicted?) Birdemic on an unsuspecting world. With a razor-sharp script and a winning cast, Devolved is the intersection between American Pie, Gilligan’s Island and Social Darwinism….
 

 
Richard Leacock is best known for his work with D.A. Pennebaker on the documentary Monterey Pop (1968). But prior to that, Leacock had established himself within the film community as a major figure in the “direct cinema” movement, a style of film making that shot scenes as they actually happened without manipulating the content and without narration - an American version of cinema verite.

Born in London, Leacock got his start making films when he was in his teens. He moved to the United States, went to Harvard where he studied physics in order to better understand the technology of filmmaking, became a war photographer, and eventually got a serious start as a film maker working with legendary director Richard Flaherty on The Louisiana Story (1948).

Leacock later went on to work with Albert Maysles filming John F. Kennedy on the campaign trail and as Norman Mailer’s cinematographer on the ill-fated Maidstone. He collaborated with Godard in the early 70s on the unfinished One American Movie, which under Leacock’s direction was completed as One Parallel Movie. The film is a fascinating look at American 60s cultural icons including Eldridge Cleaver and The Jefferson Airplane.

While Leacock’s reputation was high among film makers, it was his partnership with D.A. Pennebaker on the production of Monterey Pop that took him to another level in terms of popular success. MP contains some of the greatest rock and roll scenes ever put on film with epic performances by Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and The Who. Ironically, Leacock didn’t particularly care for rock music or rock musicians. He later said:

I didn’t appreciate that kind of bullshit.” As for Joplin: “She was always just full of drugs and alcohol. I remember her coming to look at the film afterwards at our place in New York. She was lying there stone drunk, sucking on a bottle of Southern Comfort.”

Mr. Leacock died at the age of 89 on March 23 at his home in France. His memoirs, The Feeling Of Being There, can be pre-ordered here.

One of Leacock’s personal favorites among his many films is also among the simplest: a lovely interview with film goddess Louise Brooks conducted in 1984.
 

 
The Jefferson Airplane shot by Leacock after the jump…

 
Mondo movie fans, take note: Our friends at Cinefamily, here in Los Angeles are programming another of their weird and wonderful weekend festivals. Focusing on the cheesy paranormal docs and TV shows of the 1970s like In Search Of, the two-day (and night) Phenome-Con 2011 features some outrageous “psychic” fare, that was once surprisingly commonplace in American culture:

In the ‘60s, baby boomers looked for God in a sugar cube, The Beatles seeked enlightenment in India and hippies freaked over Jesus. As the post-summer of love, pre-New Age ‘70s rolled in, it seems everyone went searching for the mysteries of life. Is there a higher power? Is there life after death? Where lies the lost empire of Atlantis? Can plants read your thoughts? How do I bend a fork with my mind? Does yogurt have feelings? Psychic surgery, hypnosis, ESP, UFOs, The Bermuda Triangle—it all held a fascination for Mr. and Mrs. America. It was a Phenomena Phenomenon, if you will. Reflecting these various crazes, a host of “speculative documentaries” quickly cropped up in grindhouses and drive-ins. This weekend, not only will we watch a crop of mind-marinating films, but we’ll also explore pyramid power, mind reading and we’ll search for Bigfoot. Cinefamily invites you to investigate with us the mysteries of our universe—join us for Phenome-Con!

The schedule for Day One, Saturday, March 26:

4:00pm Phenome-Con Saturday Afternoon Party (feat. The Best of “In Search Of…”)

7:30pm-ish The Amazing World Of Ghosts

10:00pm-sh A Bigfoot Celebration (feat. The Legend of Boggy Creek)

Midnight-ish Journey Into The Beyond

2:00am-ish The Devil’s Triangle

Day Two, Sunday March 27:

4:00pm Sunday Afternoon Part feat. more selections from The Best of “In Search Of…”, a casual Sunday patio hang-out, and then it’s time for…

6:00pm-ish The Pyramid

8:00pm Concluding the Phenome-Con will be a special screening and Q&A with director Don Como (hosted by Process Media’s Jodi Wille) featuring his 1978 film, Unknown Powers.

Get tickets at Cinefamily.org
 

 
The Driver’s Seat AKA Identikit stars Elizabeth Taylor in one of her single most berserk performances and since no one can bring the crazy like La Liz, that is really saying something. This 1974 Italian film is based on a novella by Muriel Spark about a disturbed woman in a foreign country who seeks a man who will tie her up and stab her to death. There is ridiculous (mostly shouted, even screamed) dialogue like: “I sense a lack of absence” and “I feel homesick for my own loneliness.” How about “You look like Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me?” She holds up her purse in an airport security check and exclaims “This may look like a purse but it is actually a bomb!?” The best line is this, however: “When I diet, I diet and when I orgasm, I orgasm! I don’t believe in mixing the two cultures!”

The director, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, seems to have had no control over Taylor whatsoever and it appearss like she is making up her own Dada dialogue on the spot much of the time. Andy Warhol has a cameo in the film playing a British “your Lordship” who has a cryptic encounter with Liz in an airport and they meet again later in the film. His voice is overdubbed with an English voice, which is disconcerting but kind of interesting, too. Why isn’t this cuckoo-pops crazy film better known?

 

 
Here is what the AllMovie Guide has to say about The Driver’s Seat:

A beautiful but mysterious woman goes on a journey that has dangerous consequences for her and those around her in this offbeat, arty drama from Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. Lise (Elizabeth Taylor) is a woman edging into middle age who is nearing the end of her emotional rope. Needing some time away from her job and responsibilities, Lise flies to Rome, and on the flight she meets Bill (Ian Bannen), an eccentric health food enthusiast who makes it clear he wishes to seduce her, and Pierre (Maxence Mailfort), a curious man who is wary of Lise and goes out of his way to avoid her. Lise informs anyone she speaks with that she’s come to Rome to meet her boyfriend, but it soon becomes clear she has no specific plans nor anyone to see. Lise whiles away the afternoon shopping with Mrs. Fiedke (Mona Washbourne), a chatty older woman from Nova Scotia, and in time crosses paths with Bill again, but it’s not until she meets up with Pierre that her real reason for coming to Italy, as well as the depth of her madness, becomes clear. As Lise wanders through Rome, a team of police detectives is seen investigating a crime that seems to involve her. Also released as Identikit and Psychotic, The Driver’s Seat features a brief appearance from Andy Warhol as a British nobleman.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to stunned silence and it has been suggested that Liz at one point tried to buy up the rights and all prints of the movie. The filming began one day after she filed for divorce from Richard Burton and she reportedly said to director, Griffi, “It takes one day to die, another to be reborn.”
 
The Driver’s Seat is not out on a proper DVD release, but you can often find bootlegs at a “99 Cents Only” store. Or watch the highlights here: