It’s safe to say we’re all scarred for life from seeing The Exorcist as kids but these kids worked it out in an exceptional way. The sound design in particular is a marvel of resourcefulness.

In 1974 while THE EXORCIST was still playing in the theaters, my friends and I made a version of our own called THE DEMONIC POSSESSION. Originally the title was going to be MALEDICTION but we figured nobody would know what that is. Filmed in Pittsburgh, Pa and Atlanta, Ga, the film was made on SUPER 8 SOUND and runs 60 minutes. This is an excerpt. Miraculously the film was made without ANY parental censorship or supervision. A film by CLIFF CARSON Cinematography by BILL BURTON

 
Thanks Brian Ruryk !

 
I think this is absolutely great. Definitely mashup-magic of the day!

From Classy Hands:

Inspired by one of our favorite websites, /Film.com, which ran an article called “The Ferris Bueller Fight Club Theory” last year. The piece hypothesized that Cameron could have possibly imagined his whole Day Off, and that Ferris was actually his own Tyler Durden.

 
(via Daily What)

 
Hausu (House), directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi, is the kind of movie that sends a writer scrambling for adjectives in an attempt to christen a new film genre. You pound your frontal lobes in the hope that you’ll dislodge some electrifying catchphrase that will be absorbed into film geekdom’s lexicon. I’ve been trying to come up with something hooky to describe the virtually indescribable mindbender that is Hausu. It’s not a J-horror film, it’s not a head film, it’s not some avant-garde psychological torture test, it’s not a cult film with an ironic smirk, it’s not…Well, I’m telling you what it is not. Let me try to wrap my brain around this and tell you what I think it is: Hausu is to cinema what a dream is to reality. It’s not just a simple record of events, it is the event itself. Hausu refers to nothing outside itself.

Though a mashup of pop memes, Hausu exists in a world of its own, devouring “reality”  and puking it back up in glorious Technicolor. It’s a mixtape compiled by a demented Carl Jung -  immersive, repellent, hysterical and visionary - forging a new consciousness composed of scraps of dead worlds.

Hard as it is to believe, Hausu was made in 1977. It feels as fresh and looks as startling experimental as anything being made by David Lynch or Guy Madden…except wilder.
 

 
Oh, the plot is about a demon possessed house, but that’s not important.
 
As for my new catchphrase, it’s a play on hypnagogic, that state between being awake and falling asleep. Hausu is hipnagogic.
 
Hausu will be released by Criterion in August on DVD.

 

 
If you weren’t familiar with Peter Tscherkassky’s films and just happened to stumble into a theater screening one, you might mistakenly think you’ve discovered an old surrealist film by Bunuel or Cocteau - a lost sequel to An Andalusian Dog or Blood Of A Poet. But, you’d also have to presume that the film was being projected at the wrong speed, 96 frames per second. Tscherkassky’s reconstruction of existent films is the visual equivalent of a Brion Gysin cut-up, fragments of information that operate at the borderline between the conscious mind and dream.
 
Tscherkassky, an Austrian avant-gardist, manipulates found footage, which he edits using a moviola rather than computers. In the short film Outer Space, Tscherkassky deconstructs Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity, a cheesy knock-off of Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, and re-constructs it as a feverish, psychotic, mindfuck.  Filmmaker Guy Madden describes Outer Space thusly:

“shards of frightened eyes, trembling hands, and violent outbursts of self-defense, presented in multiple exposures too layered to count, too arresting to ignore. Each frame is further entangled with details revealed by a jittery effect (a primitive traveling matte?) which spills fluttering ectoplasmic lightpools from one cubist aspect of the woman to another. The filmmaker mimics the action of nightmares by condensing the original imagery of the feature and displacing it into a new narrative—as in dreams, a narrative not explicitly linked to actual events, but emotionally more true than any rational explanation. Tscherkassky’s shorts are actually considerably more terrifying than the original material.”

 
Note to B-movie fans: Barbara Hershey plays the woman under assault.
Outer Space is the second film in Tscherkassky’s Cinemascope trilogy.
 
Turn out the lights and watch.

 
Motown bass deity James Jamerson had more talent and soul in one finger than in any of his peers’ standard ten. Literally. He was known amongst his colleagues as “the hook” for his single digit yet fluid as a river plucking. He also never changed his strings or messed with the controls on his instrument. Everything simply turned up to ten. I mean to feature a few isolated tracks from some of his best known sessions which are new to me and as delightful to listen to as you might imagine but I had to lead off with this already widely seen but marvelous clip of our man backing Marvin Gaye in 1973:

 
And the studio version, Jamerson’s
 

 

 
Imagine José Mojica Marins directing Can’t Stop The Music after snorting the remains of Bob Fosse and Federico Fellini and you may conjure up the demented disco fever that is The Apple. Billed as a “funky fantasy that will rock your world”, this 1980 schlock fest is Xanadu for cokeheads, bouncing a deluge of dance scenes off the viewer’s retinas like a hailstorm of mirrorballs.

In an attempt to replicate the cult success of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Apple takes every rock star as Messiah/Satan cliche and tosses them into a pot of boiling Spandex, gold Lurex, and black Lycra. Add a pinch of amyl nitrate, stir in a rusty cock ring, and some Manic Panic hair dye and you’ve got one of the most insanely inspired spectacles since John Travolta slathered on the KY in Staying Alive.
 

 
A sad day for American literature, writer Harvey Pekar has passed away at age 70. My first thought is that it’s great that he lived long enough to see his work embraced by a large audience due to the success of the American Splendor film but it’s hard to swallow the loss of another singular and utterly unique American voice. Bon Voyage, Harvey.

(Cleveland) - Famed Cleveland underground comic book writer Harvey Pekar has died at the age of 70.

Cuyahoga County Coroner’s spokesman Powell Caesar confirmed the news to WTAM 1100 Monday morning.

Pekar was found just before 1:00 am by his wife, Joyce Brabner, in their home in Cleveland Heights. The cause of death is not yet known.

Coroner: Harvey Pekar dies (WTAM Cleveland)
 
thx Ned Raggett

 
Dutch filmmaker Jan Kounen, primarily known for his ultra-violent gangster flick Doberman and El Topo-esque western Blueberry, spent several months in the Amazon with Shipibo Shamans experimenting with Ayahuasca, a psychoactive infusion prepared from vines and plants containing DMT (Dimethyltryptamine). Ayahuasca is a holy sacrament which the indigenous people and Shamans of the Amazon have known as a powerful holistic purgative medicine capable of great healing and transformation for thousands of years.

While in the Amazon, Kounen made the documentary Other Worlds. The film depicts the Shamanic culture and their underlying belief systems which stem from their knowledge of the Invisible. According to Kounen, the objective of the documentary “is to impress upon viewers that these little-known Indians developed veritable cognitive technology through their own sciences of the spirit, thousands of years ago. To me, these men are warriors in the battle to unlock the mysteries of consciousness. Shamans consider the greatest ally and the worst enemy of every individual to be one and the same… himself or herself.” In the film, Kounen primarily shows the therapeutic power of the Shamans and their plant teachers. This power is a type of ancestral psychoanalysis or human psychotherapy backed by 4,000 years of experience and practice.

Inexplicably, Other Worlds made in 2004 has never been released in the United States. It is only available on import DVD.

In this excerpt from the film, we see night vision shots of Kounen after he has ingested Ayahuasca followed by CGI images the director created to replicate his visual experiences during his “trip.”
 

 
In another excerpt from Other Worlds, Nobel Prize winner Kari Mullis, DMT cosmonaut Rick Strassman (author of The Spirit Molecule) and artist Alex Grey

 
My second post today about something from 1975 is a nice little audio documentary (wedded with just OK visuals, but it works fine) about a song that I’ve always been very intrigued with. I love that it’s both a rigorous formal experiment and a tremendously succesful pop tune, to say nothing of its dark and deeply melancholic atmosphere. It’s easily one of the best radio hits of the 70’s and I can’t imagine ever tiring of it.

 
Toshio Matsumoto’s early 1970’s feature length film Funeral Parade of Roses is widely cited as a big influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange but today we have a truly mad short subject by said director, a simple yet brain-frying (epileptics, beware !) infrared study of a lone, masked subject in a landscape, replete with a chaotic electronic score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Dizzying and possibly bad for you !