Ghosts of Hustlers

In the rubble of the brickbatted city
you will find
ghosts of hustlers
dead queerlust action
killed by cops, rich old men with silver hair, and or laboratory microbes
phantom fandom apparitions on streetcorners
waiting for the man
the man with the money, the man with the screwball eightball
the boys in their denim vines
dripping down their wiry wily bodies
dreaming of tomorrow
tomorrow that never comes
tomorrow that doesn’t belong to them
in my little white room
off the sunet strip
i can feel them drifting
spirits drifting
drfiting across my hopeless homeless apartment room
now i'm turning over in my grave

kenneth anger dreams
of dead sex machines
BJs for a tenner
as soon as my crazy friend began collecting SSI
blew it all on hustlers
blondes built like Frankenstein
The Incredible Hulk
and the ever popular Creature From The Back Hankie Lagoon
the ghosts of hustlers came to say hello last night
slamming doors
knocking over picture frames
throwing my beach towels on the floor
the only way I quieted them down
was by lighting a cigarette
and blowing
the smoke
in their pretty little ghost faces

Andy Seven Ltd. · Ghosts Of Hustlers

Now Playing ABSOLUTELY FREE On You Tube: Erotic Euro Horror!

While I would never claim to be the toast of all social networking sites, far from it, I can claim to have a fairly robust following on old You Tube. I have a following of 5,500 faithful followers who want to be entertained by my posting of rare films unavailable on DVD or even on TV. Unfortunately, the brain police at You Tube have been pulling down many of my posts at an alarming rate, claiming that I have violated the laws of intellectual property.

What this means is that if James Toback can't make a cent off his wobbly 1983 suspense film Exposed then I cannot even post it for people who want to view it. Other films that provoked near-suspension included the noir classics Desert Fury and The Gangster as well as the Brigitte Bardot-Louis Malle potboiler A Very Private Affair.

Meanwhile, sites like Spotify and Pandora are doing more to rip off artists than my movie posts on YT. The priorities are getting dodgy. I've had so many of my posts pulled down that I've gotten leery about posting more movies. But I will persist. Besides, there's always Vimeo.

While all this drama is unfolding other Tubers are posting an exciting stream of classic erotic Eurohorror films. Many of these films have floundered on the VHS gray market for years, and now beautiful prints can be seen on YT. Unfortunately, half of them aren't in English, but hell, it's time to brush up on your high school French and Spanish!

Movies I have seen in their complete form in the past two months on You Tube:

1. The Female Vampire - Jess Franco starring the great Lina Romay
2. Shiver of the Vampires - Jean Rollin with a cool death metal soundtrack dubbed in, and it works
3. Kilink! - great Turkish series about a supervillain dressed like a skeleton
4. Lisa And The Devil - classic Mario Bava with Elke Sommer and a lollipop sucking Telly Savalas, as the devil
5. Evil Eye aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much - more Bava with a classic haunted house theme
6. Four Times That Night - Bava doing a bedroom sex farce with some real sex for a change
7. All The Colors of the Dark - psycho giallo starring Edwige Fenech
8. 99 Women - women in prison classic starring Edwige Fenech, Rosalba Neri, Luciana Paluzzi, and more
9. Virgin Among The Living Dead - more Jess Franco insanity with more nudity (not from him!)
10. The Nude Vampire - Jean Rollin with vampire laboratory rituals with animal masks and hoods! Creepy!

There's also lots of American exploitation in their complete form, like Russ Meyer's Cherry, Harry, and Raquel and Jack Hill's The Big Bird Cage. There's also tons of Laura Gemser sleaze to feast your eyes on. I also caught the Japanese film classic Onibaba. There's no limit to what you can catch on You Tube these days.

And just to compliment all the wild European horror films watched you can also catch an English TV documentary mini-series about the whole genre called Eurotika. Eurotika has segments devoted to the previously mentioned Jess Franco, Mario Bava, and Jean Rollin. It's pretty cool seeing starlets Brigitte Lahaie and the reclusive Pony Castel talking about their mentors.

Eurotika is almost touching in the way it celebrates freedom in sexual and artistic expression, eventually folding up towards the conservative early Eighties (the Moral majority-AIDS-Thatcher-Reagan years). But that's what makes these films so precious: just like the films from the silent era they show us a society that almost resemble aliens form another planet, a much, much freer planet.

Now Playing ABSOLUTELY FREE on You Tube - Pyromaniacs On Parade

Lately in my sojourns on You Tube I've noticed a few horror-based thrillers that all employ the device of the house fire trauma. This is not an easy trick to pull off, as in they all seem to have the house still standing after the fire and in pretty good shape. The films listed below aren't particularly good, but they're swell trash worth at least one view and definitely chuckle worthy, so let's get started:

Picture Mommy Dead (1966): A teen variant on the old William Castle movies, where the halfway sane person gets bullied into believing they're still crazy and going crazier by the minute (see Strait-Jacket or The Night Walker). Is it as good as Castle? No, but it's still pretty camp.

Susan Shelley (Susan Gordon) returns to the home where she witnessed her mother's fiery death three years earlier, an experience that drove her to madness to a convent-based sanitarium. While she was committed in the institution her father (a buttoned-up Don Ameche) ran off with the governess (Martha Hyer) and married her.

Ameche went bankrupt spending all of his wife's money and has to sell out most of the property at home. Unfortunately he cannot sell the home, as Susan is the legal heir to the property. These details are explained laughably by a highly abrasive Wendell Corey, who speaks in a sort of crotchety William S. Burroughs-style voice.

Susan also happens to know where the late Mrs. Shelley's extremely expensive necklace is hidden, as selling would mean paying off Papa Ameche's extremely sizable debt, but Susan's shock from the fire blacked out her memory of the necklace's whereabouts.

Most of the film is spent with Hyer and brother-in-law Anthony (a hammy Maxwell Reed) scheming on ways to drive poor Susan into mental infirmity so they can have her locked away again and take over the family fortune. There are many scenes involving falcons, phoenixes, and other aviary imagery.

Mommy Dead isn't a great horror film but it's a decent time waster and a genuine oddity. The role of Mommy is played by a silent Zsa Zsa Gabor, who hasn't got any dialogue to utter. It's also funny her hair's dyed red to obviously symbolize fire. And when was the last time you saw a movie featuring the Mattel Scoo-Ba-Doo beatnik doll?

How Awful About Allan (1970): Curtis Harrington directed this Henry Farrell adaptation from his novel. If the name Henry Farrell sounds familiar to you, it should. He's the writer of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, and the next two films with Mr. Harrington, What's The Matter With Helen? and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?

How Awful About Allan, starring Anthony Perkins, is not as good as any of the films listed above. It's a TV movie and looks it, plus the story isn't terribly involving. It starts with a house fire which killed Allan's father and disfigured his sister, played by Julie Harris. Allan loses most of his eyesight in the fire, with his sanity gone as well, leaving him institutionalized.

Out of the institution and back at home, Perkins is perpetually angry about his blindness, cussing and yelling at Harris in every other scene. It doesn't help that Harris rented out a room to a boarder which Perkins swears is stalking him, a bizarre claim given that Perkins can barely see.

The standout scene in the film is when Perkins loses his shit and steals his sister's car, tearing down the main road, careening wildly all over the place, uprooting trees and knocking over mailboxes with a completely perplexed look on his face. Pretty funny stuff!

It's nice to know that Harrington eventually made better films with Farrell after this one because this film was a hard one to get through. Joan Hackett is the only saving grace in this one. Not one of Perkins' better crazy guy roles!

Cure For Pain: The Mark Sandman Story (2011): No, not another horror thriller, but a film which can be seen in its entirety on You Tube. Directed by Robert Bralver as a labor of love, the film charts the short life of the man behind the legendary band Morphine. Being a major Morphine fan I couldn't wait to see this film.

To those not familiar with the sound of Morphine, they were a three-piece consisting of baritone & tenor saxophones played in tandem, a slide two-string bass guitar and drums. Somehow it worked on a Tom Waits "Swordfishtrombones" level. In fact, it helps a lot to listen to latter day Waits to figure out what Morphine were up to.

Bralver's documentary goes into Sandman's childhood with his troubled siblings, nomadic post-teen years, and going up to his early days playing in Treat Her Right. Both ex-girlfriends and former band mates are interviewed with somewhat less than saintly accounts of the occasionally arrogant musician.

But let's be honest, you're watching it for the great Morphine music and his great singing and playing, which he delivers in spades. The film spends a little too much time recalling his last days playing at an Italian mountainside festival where the air might have been too thin to allow proper breathing for him. A lot of detail is paid to this sad episode.

Again, this is a film that deserves a quick view but isn't terribly gripping, partially hindered by the film's wobbly time line. During the first half of the film it's difficult to figure out what time period people are discussing, because it goes from Treat Her Right days back to his childhood and back again. It can get pretty confusing. Tighter editing and sequencing would have helped.

Still and all, it's pretty great that a Mark Sandman documentary exists, and there are parts that get pretty exciting, but I wonder if that's just something a CD would have accomplished, and a lot quicker, too.

Tokyo Gore Police (Japan, 2008)

If the Chinese dazzled us with creepy psychic horror films like The Ring and The Eye, then Japan responded with insane, erotic fetish, over-the-top gore with humor to spare movies. The most sensational output comes from a genius make-up and special effects artist, Yoshihiro Nishimura. Nishimura references Salvador Dali as one of his biggest influences in the way he depicts distorted body parts in surreal settings. His sci-fi/horror classic, “Tokyo Gore Police” has enough erotica and surrealism to make Dali beam with pride. It serves up outrage the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the college revival house theater days of Jodorowsky, Makavejev, and crazy Fernando Arrabal.

Tokyo Gore Police is the story of Ruka (Eihi Shiina), a police officer for the Tokyo Police Corporation, a now-privatized police force who excels as an Engineer Hunter. Engineers are serial killers who have the ability to make their severed body parts morph into deadly weapons, whether it’s a chainsaw or a sawed-off shotgun, all courtesy of a mysterious stranger dressed in black named The Keyman (Itsuji Itao). It’s up to Ruka to find The Keyman and stop him from his evil task. Unfortunately, Ruka is a flawed person herself, a cutter who inherited her bad habit from her mother to punish herself from not preventing the murder of her father.

Just like Jodorowsky, though, the plot is almost secondary to the Garden of Surreal & Erotic Outrage breaking up the plot from time to time. In between action scenes you’ll be treated to:
1. Blood showering out of a severed limb like a wedding reception fountain.
2. Chainsaws flying straight into a man’s mouth and ripping open his head.
3. Commercials hawking cool cutters for teenage schoolgirls with cute colors and promising it makes “blood taste better”!
4. Punk kids on the subway chuffing down live earthworms and night crawlers. Yum!
5. Amputee leather slaves walking on prosthetic legs made of samurai swords.
6. The Keyman’s severed upper head grows two gun barrels that shoot out bloody ginsu knives.

Ruka’s colleague, Officer Barabara-Man (Jiji Bu), decides to let off steam by going to a kinky S&M club that specializes in back room sex with mutant girls, like a Snail Girl and a Girl with Crocodile Jaws Snapping Between Her Legs. Whoa! He picks Door Number 2 and gets the girl with the croc jaws who bites off his dick, which naturally provokes another Wedding Fountain of Blood. He gets the Engineer Key and needless to say, his empty crotch morphs into humongous red cock cannon! He takes his Gigantor cock cannon and goes berserk at police headquarters, firing deadly cannonballs at his fellow officers.

Ruka finally corners the Keyman in his crummy apartment, and instead of killing her confesses that he’s the son of the Police-sanctioned hit of her father, executed at an anti-police privatization rally. His father also killed by the now-privatized Police Corporation, he devoted his life as a genetic scientist by injecting himself with the DNA of psychotic killers like Ed Gein and Charles Manson, all bottled up and labeled in his laboratory. That’s right, another Mad Scientist movie! To Ruka’s horror she’s trapped by him with an Engineer key installed in her against her will.

In the meantime the Tokyo Police Corporation has gone completely batshit crazy and begin arbitrarily torturing and murdering citizens en masse, so Ruka hits the streets with her newly acquired Engineer mutation, one crocodile arm which rips the face off a policeman’s head. Now that Ruka knows who the fascist madman behind her father’s murder is she has a final showdown with him using her best samurai sword skills and that badass crocodile arm.

Tokyo Gore Police ends with the Tokyo Police Corporation no longer privatized, with the slogan in big screaming letters: MORE GORE COMING SOON! Love it or hate it, Tokyo Gore Police is punk as fuck and makes no apologies about itself. It’s easily the only movie that can kick any video game’s ass with a cock cannon around the block!

Also recommended: THE MACHINE GIRL, almost as demented as Tokyo Gore Police and well worth your time.

Sheitan (France, 2006)

Trashy, nutty and absolutely demented, “Sheitan” is one of those films that’ll leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell you just watched for the past 90-plus minutes. Sure, it’s a horror film, but one that treats Christmas Eve as a satanic ritual. It’s that twisted!

“Sheitan” begins with a clique of hip-hop club kids led by the annoying Bart (Olivier Barthelemy), a rowdy punk who tears shit up who basically gets his French ass handed to him all through the movie. He meets a comely nymphet, the mysterious Eve (a terrific Roxane Mesquida), and since he doesn’t have any wheels, persuades his pals to take them to her home so he can bang her silly. Here’s where the trouble starts.

The clique is a veritable United Nations of teenage immigrant punks, one from every continent, i.e. an Asian pal named Thai, an African guy (Ladj), and his date for the night, a cool Perisan girl named Yasmine, all out for sex and thrills.

Eve lives on a farm in the middle of Nowheresville, France, where they meet her uncle, Joseph, a creepy farmer played with lip-smacking relish by Vincent Cassel, much better here than in the turgid “Black Swan”. Joseph, looking like some demented Jethro Tull roadie, is all smiles, charm and racist remarks about the visiting ethnic teenagers. Before anyone can call him on his nasty remarks he treats everyone to a squirt of milk from an overly pregnant goat. The only taker is Eve, who happily gets on her knees and takes a fresh goat titty squirt of milk in her mouth.

Joseph takes an exceptional interest in Bart, even going so far as introducing him to his slutty niece Jeanne (Julie-Marie Parmentier), who looks like she’d go down on anything that moves. Actually she does a plum scene where she jacks off a big black dog. All the farm kids look inbred and deformed, with two boys in particular who resent the attention paid to Bart and his pals. All sorts of weird pranks are played on them, including a bed-ful of crickets and cockroaches.

Raising the blasphemy level ever higher is the fact that this all takes place on Christmas Eve, with the plan being that Joseph’s wife/sister Mary will be giving birth that night to a young Satanic king. Cassel plays a great French Satanist, investing generous amounts of dogma to his passionate speeches about the Devil and his omnipotence.

“Sheitan” is filled with great scenes of debauchery and depravity, one standout scene being a naked battle between Joseph, the urban club kids and the inbred farm kids. What starts out as good clean fun degenerates into raw aggression, with Bart once again getting his face smashed in.

The film reaches its grand climax when the clock strikes midnight turning the night before Christmas into Christmas Day, when Joseph’s wife Mary breaks her water and drops her baby. The baby, as it happens, is a doll with newly installed human eyes, eyes belonging to…guess who?

“Sheitan” will never be accused of being great art, but it’s trashy good fun and far more interesting and twisted than any teenage horror film produced in the past twenty years. Kim Chapiron directed and Vincent Cassel co-produced this dirty little gem, a pretty wild piece of French filmmaking that’s an antidote to junk like “Amelie”. It's also the only horror film about Christmas worth a damn, for whatever that's worth.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I recently saw Gregg Araki’s 1995 film “The Doom Generation”, a combination of Jean-Luc Godard nouvelle vague and Richard Kern erotic psychomania. The Godard influence can be seen in the first half with his patented hipster frolicking of “Band Of Outsiders” and “Pierrot Le Fou”, even down to naming his three main characters Red, White and Blue. The Richard Kern influence begins with Rose McGowan pinch-hitting for Lydia Lunch by playing the cunty vamp, culminating into a full-on, explosive Cinema Of Transgression finale, where a gang of jocks brutally assault Red, White and Blue while reciting “The Pledge of Allegiance”. Pretentious as hell but still worth a view. Outside of “Mysterious Skin” I don’t think Araki’s made anything else of substance -Smiley Face, Nowhere, Kaboom are just plain awful- but at least he knows how to grab your attention.