FILM ME IN

Can we leave a love of schlock to rest or do we take it to our grave?

I can’t help but wonder how my taste in films will evolve or what general stance I’ll take in say, thirty to forty years considering how much of a crucial pastime the flicks have been throughout my existence. How will I regard some of the films that I hold dear today or even the films that I’ve held dear for decades now when the cracks start to appear? Should I be afraid of a fading enjoyment for beloved, old-faithfuls that may wane in their impact or could I even grow to despise certain gems and genres that have previously made my heart flutter at the sound of a title. I have no doubt that despite any embarrassment or altered perceptions of personal classics, my brain will still be reciting bits of corny dialogue a split second before it leaves the actor’s mouths providing of course the treasured favourite warrants a viewing from this old man. Try as I might, I simply can’t envision a day in my twilight, or to be more accurate, geriatric years where I’m still eager to throw on a heart pounder like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or deeply identify with the plight of a fed up Taxi Driver or yield to the power of insomnia with Fight Club, claim them as an all-time favourite and champion them with the same gusto to anyone who will listen as I have so often done in the past. Perhaps I’m just yet to meet someone of the mature age my mind has pictured who churns voraciously through films and comes complete with wicked tastes that I can attain aspiration from.

What saddens me is that a few weeks ago a scenario similar to the one I’m secretly pondering took place before my eyes and my reaction was not as I intended it would be. Whilst waiting to watch a singer perform in a record / DVD store, a day that simultaneously held a DVD sale, my friend and I secured a position amidst the crowd with a vantage point of both the cash register and the makeshift stage. In killing the pre-performance waiting time we amused ourselves by noting what DVDs people still found it necessary to keep in their collections. Game of Thrones proved expectedly popular as did Dirty Dancing priced at under five dollars, but when an older gentleman approached the counter armed with a long stack of violent horror films my friend and I shivered, making the juvenile assumption that his choices were a reflection of some sinister and hidden lifestyle. It certainly wasn’t the light stuff, I pointed out the previously banned Cannibal Holocaust and the return-to-form-torture-porn Hostel to give you a general impression of what he held rested under his chin, and my judgmental and colourful mind travelled straight to this poor guy’s basement uncovering what sickening crimes he had thus committed purely based on his tastes. I immediately felt like a total arsehole, for if this was a teenager I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. In fact I probably would have saluted them with a nod of encouragement ‘yeah you just wait ‘til they rip open that tortoise shell in Holocaust – it’s fucked up – enjoy!’ The truth is that the guy could certainly have been me when I reach senior citizenship, simply restocking the collection in the latest or most common format, and it’s unfair to think I won’t still love a film sale nor the odd slasher.

Despite age or even taste there’s no escaping the irreversible, trivial thoughts that inevitably continue to bother me like how the third Halloween film didn’t feature killer Michael Myers or that the fifth Friday The 13^th has a copycat killer rather than errr… the real Jason Voorhees. Surely these useless facts will continue to plague me while I lounge about in my snuggy sipping decaffeinated coffee and nibbling shortbread through false teeth. I also wonder if my love of the golden age of Hollywood is somehow a pre-emptive assurance that my taste in cinema can grow old gracefully for you rarely see anything edgy or post-studio-era as the matinee movie on daytime television, and I figure give me your oldest cheesiest and most wholesome number from a time when men were men etc. and I’ll be happy as a pig in shit.

Legendary film reviewer, Sydney Film Festival originator and Australia’s sophisticated TV stalwart David Stratton, once said he was looking forward to retirement for he could carry out his time left on earth reliving movies from the golden age and I assume indie finds from his own glory days rather than sit through the countless Hollywood disaster-pieces that his career had always insisted upon. I can only hope that right now he’s doing just that for this is a guy that found immense enjoyment from the silent era and in an exhibition showcasing he and his reviewing partner Margaret Pomerance’s life’s work, Mr. Stratton was quoted as saying that he doesn’t just dislike sequels – he ‘loathes’ them. You start to paint a picture of a movie schedule that won’t feature an inch of CGI. To be honest I can’t say I blame they guy for I could think of no better way than to officially sign off work to the likes of Bogie, Bergman and Barrymore. If the recent documentary Alive Inside which centres on how music can awaken the mind and spirit of dementia patients taught me anything, it’s that regardless of my mental state, providing the carers are well aware that I’m content to kick back and watch movies, then hit play and watch me return to the living and rattle off pointless anecdotes about the film’s director and sordid gossip of its stars.

I guess I’m a little bit more subjective when it comes to music but I’ve found I’ve become painfully nostalgic for my own golden age from when I was a pre-teen. It’s often been said that your heroes during that magical, not-yet-jaded period will be your hero’s for life. Which technically means I will be following whatever musical ventures Nikki Sixx is involved with post Motley Crue and on the strength of Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, I’ll most likely sit through Jonathan Demme’s latest Ricki and the Flash. It occurred to me during a recent catch up with a friend that I’ll be listening to 80s metal and watching 80s horror all the way to my grave and my tombstone may as well read ‘I wanna rock’ or ‘Woah. Yeah. Kickstart my heart.’

By the time I discovered what was then modern rock at the tender age of nine, the writing was already on the wall that the accessories, spandex and teased hair of glam metal had already run its course, as flannels, a lack of guitar heroics and sorrow replaced the party-dude lifestyle. Guns N’ Roses forced everyone else on the Sunset Strip to “strip” off the make-up and the Seattle shake-up was just around the corner. Within six months of listening to the music of my classmate’s older brothers and sisters I was already looking elsewhere. Liam, a guy at school who like me had no older brothers and sisters but had a talent for skateboarding was taken under the wing of the older skaters, guys with mullets who challenged authority, anyone at the local pool to a fight and each other when it came to theft. It was on Liam’s heshen bag that I saw a hand drawn logo for a band named Metallica. I saw the same logo staring back at me in the record store that same weekend and an intriguing cassette cover on an album called Master Of Puppets. I figured I’d gamble my pocket money based on the artwork alone but was instantly accosted by an old Italian man or what I am now lead to believe was actually a doomsayer like in all my favourite horror movies, you know the guy that warns the young teenagers at the start of the film that if they continue on their camping trip they will be killed. He caught me with the cassette and with a voice part Don Corleone, part Chico Marx, instructed me to put it down and tried leading me towards the classical music section telling me I was wasting my time and potentially my life with the cassette I held before me. He technically wasn’t incorrect. If I could have glimpsed thirty years into the future I would have countered the old Italian man’s comments by informing him that that this album would be historically preserved by the Library of Congress!

In my naivety I assumed that perhaps it was technically illegal for a child to own a composition of obvious blasphemy but I hurried it to the counter while the Italian man’s back was turned. Needless to say the ground shook upon inserting that tape into the deck. Even the tiny photographs made me well aware that I was not in safe hands for rather than my accustomed teased hair and pouting these guys had ripped clothes and were giving me the finger, and the music, well let’s just say if the whole album was a tenth as proficient, evil and fast as the opening number Battery then this was the single greatest purchase of my life. That summer at the local pool there was a battle of the bands on a makeshift stage and one band played Metallica songs note for note. Up until that moment I didn’t think emulating your gods was at all possible unless you were in the band and by my next birthday, after begging and pleading I owned an electric guitar.

A few years later I met Bell, a bestie with whom I would bond endlessly over a love of metal and movies. It was Bell that introduced me to the wonderful world of horror and its iconic killers and we quickly realised an obvious but unwritten correlation between it and heavy music. Sadly loving metal in the mid- 90s was a dirty secret best kept, and in a fascinating era of survival, glam bands became tough, the thrash bands soft and the lines of who represented what got completely blurred. Motley Crue sang of drugs and paedophiles while Metallica were crooning about fast cars, chics and errr… feelings, what the fuck was going on? 80s rock stars were all but despised and our clinging interest found a more extreme home with the likes of Cannibal Corpse and Carcass. But when it came to our own music, Bell and I were more fond of the incredible and accessible indie scene in Melbourne’s pubs, from the ashes of shoegaze, we were becoming our own original extensions of the Swervedrivers, the Slint’s and the Sebedohs of the world but always with an undeniable pop sensibility. Somewhere amidst this melting pot of progressive song-writing our high-school band eventually found its place. Rather than openly admitting our love for 80s metal, we treated the genre as a joke always with a sense of irony, imitating high pitched vocals and guitar solos which were all but obsolete post-Nirvana. So, in high school whilst scanning my local video store for a horror film to watch, Bell came across the ultimate in combining our “ironic” love of metal and horror in a film called The Edge Of Hell which we discovered years later was known in the USA as Rock N’ Roll Nightmare.

Rock N Roll Nightmare was a vehicle for real life band Thor (Tritons in the film) and featured an original heavy metal soundtrack by said band. Thor is also the guise of body-builder come lead vocalist Jon Mikl Thor who takes Wrestle-Rock-Mucho-Viking style theatrics to the stage: think an actual embodiment of what KISS were merely parodying. The plot of Rock N’ Roll Nightmare is hysterically awesome – a band leave the confines of the city to rehearse as loud as they please at an isolated haven in the countryside complete with recording equipment. Little do they know this rockin’ getaway was built on the edge of hell. Surviving band members carry on with shrugged shoulders as this five piece dwindles to three. The devil kills off members one by one until the ultimate battle of good and evil ensues between the devil (close resemblance to Skeletor) and the vocalist who reveals that he too is a God (close resemblance to He-man) which brings the film to its earth shattering conclusion. What I found most bewildering however, was how Bell was able to sniff out something that combined our two interests; was an excellent source for countless laughs and snide remarks and all in my own video store no less. Bell even knew who this band Thor were because he had picked up their album Unchained in a bargain bin after being charmed by its barbarically fantastic front cover.

Years later we would manage to secure copies of Rock N Roll Nightmare on DVD – mine is currently missing because the adored disc is still making the loan rounds somewhere. Bell and I would estimate not a year goes by where Thor or Rock N Roll Nightmare doesn’t come up in some way or in some context – I even terrified a poor gentleman at a music festival a few years back who was wearing a Thor t-shirt. I bounced around him like an ankle-high dog beaming that someone else knew of Thor, so much so that he brought the t-shirt. To my confusion the guy seemed threatened expecting I may want trouble and insisted that he simply owned the shirt and had no prior knowledge of the band. He did still allow me to take a photo, which I immediately sent to Bell who was elsewhere on the festival grounds. Just recently Bell and I made yet another wonderful discovery. Someone has made a documentary about Jon Mikl Thor, detailing his career and his persistence to tour in the face of medical adversity. I snapped it up at once! Although it’s not as easy to drop everything for a movie these days with endless schedules and children to consider, it didn’t take more than a week before Bell and I were securely fastened before a screen watching the modest renaissance and genuinely mesmerising history of this figure that we had quietly favoured since the days when the world had turned its back on musical heroics. In fact, I dare say we’ve come full circle openly, loudly and proudly screaming Thor’s praises.

I admit that once our own band folded and progressive thinking in music was no longer required, the nostalgic floodgates burst wide open, we were reliving our childhood with serious intent, heavy metal and horror films were back on the menu and we devoured the banquet like two cannibals in a holocaust. But even that resurgence was a decade ago, so I guess the bigger picture is that if a nod to the good ol’ days in the form of a muscle-bound guy defying evil both on screen and stage can instantly reunite two old mates, then I think it’s fair to suggest that regardless of age and evolving tastes I will forever be a hopeless disciple of everything that made my parents wary as a child. B-grade horror, on-screen violence and masked psychopaths to head banging and saucy riffs, I’m most likely gonna take this schlock enthusiasm to the grave.

It still may come to pass that I’ll be that snob who will only visit an indie cinema for their house wine, Chinotto or fruity flavoured chips seeking features that reach a higher level of truth through the cinematic art form and demand I be left spellbound for days. I also recognise that it’s likely my love of the other cinema will see this retired old man arriving to the cinema of my local shopping complex on half priced Tuesdays flashing my pensioner’s card for an even further discount to the disinterested teenager behind the box office. I’ll then sail away with my smuggled, store-brought, salt-free popcorn and bask in the sounds of roaring chainsaws and swishing machetes as they end the life of a promiscuous teen not unlike the cocky young filly that handed me my movie ticket. I’ll raise my cup of watered down diet-coke to the other teenagers in the film and try to catch their whispers of judgement as they avoid eye-contact with the creepy old man who no doubt performs the most heinous crimes behind closed doors.