Deathdream - Bob Clark - 1974

It’s a well established notion that the horror film is a primary visual means by which to incorporate a subtextual representation of, and commentary on, the times in which it was made. Reaction to real world traumas channelled through the cinematic medium can be seen from the post World War I doppelgangers and distortions of German Expressionism to the Cold War “the reds walk among us” paranoia that found itself a staple of the 50’s drive-in B-Movie. If the relative sanity and prosperity of the early Sixties therefore saw somewhat of a lull in horror cinema, then the unbridled chaos and loathing of the fallout from the countercultural implosion saw horror return to the forefront of cult cinema at the tail end of the decade.

From George Romero’s watershed Night of the Living Dead (1968) onwards, we can easily play ‘spot the allegory’ as references to the counterculture, civil rights movements, Nixon’s politics and the Vietnam War abound. A good overview of how this era would go on to influence the 1970s careers of Carpenter, Craven, Cronenberg et al, can be seen in Adam Simon’s documentary An American Nightmare (2000). One film from this fruitful period that isn’t provided with an overview in the documentary though is Bob Clark’s Deathdream (also known by the even more generically 42nd street grindhouse title of Dead of Night).

Clark (who mined a rich vein in cult horror during the mid Seventies with this, Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things (1972) and Black Christmas (1974) before finding infamy in 1982 with the teen sex ‘n’ slapstick romp Porky’s) boldly takes on the issue of veterans returning from the Vietnam War, tapping directly into the uneasiness of the period.

The film at an intrinsic level is essentially a contemporary retelling of W.W. Jacob’s famous short horror fable The Monkey’s Paw. Here a fresh faced infantryman Andy Brooks (Richard Backus) is seemingly killed in a striking low budget fever dream recreation of Vietnam in the film’s opening scene. We then cut to his family who are informed that he is M.I.A. and presumed dead. His mother’s refusal to accept this leads her to pray for his safe return, which duly takes place the following night. Except now rather than the vivacious all American apple pie eatin’ young gun that left them, he instead returns as an anaemic and disturbingly somnambulistic young chap with a sideline in casual canine slaughter and family friend butchery.

It is finally and unsurprisingly revealed that Andy is now a slowly decaying member of the undead (make-up for which is provided by a debuting young war Veteran named Tom Savini) who needs human blood to keep himself relatively ‘fresh’. The film never attempts to play this for laughs, thankfully averting any images of Weekend at Bernie’s esq. scenarios. Nor though does the film particularly attempt to force cheap scares upon us. Clark instead envelops the viewer with a creeping dread, a fatalist approach that makes it clear we are not in for a happy ending. Everything in the film hints towards misery, from the mise-en-scene of the middle American mundane, in which our protagonist’s hometown is everywhere and nowhere, a world of identikit prefabs and greasy spoon cafes, through the wonderful lighting of the family home’s hallway, the staircase lit like a shadowy representation of their collective mental disintegration, to a minimalistic soundtrack so intensely coarse it sounds like it’s being scratched across the celluloid.

So to return to the subject of horror as allegory, Clark here paints a picture of the difficulties faced by veterans returning from war, attempting to return to normalcy after witnessing months of shocking atrocities. Throughout the first half of the picture Andy is like a pent up ball of post-traumatic stress, finding himself unable to communicate the horror of his putrefying form with those he loves. The scenes of his self-preserving attaining of blood from people by using syringes (in a clear precursor of Romero’s Martin (1977)), and watching his eyes roll back in a hit of junkie lust clearly reminds us that for some the only way to escape the war still raging on in their minds was to turn towards narcotics. While Deathdream is hardly Born on the Fourth of July, it is still a film that resonates far beyond its current undervalued position as a cheapo early seventies fright flick.

Los Angeles Plays Itself - Thom Anderson - 2003

The image of the cityscape in cinema has long been a personal obsession of mine, from classics such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s preeminent montage document Man with a Movie Camera (1929), through to recent exponents of the cinematic city, such as Michael Mann, who never lets a films plot get in the way of presenting his ultra-modernist visions of sleek and cold-hearted corporate glass dome cityscapes, or to reference a very recent and particularly wondrous example, we can consider Terence Davis’ feisty homage to his home town of Liverpool with Of Time and the City (2008). Davis uses historical council documentarian footage to aid in building a picture of his youth as a sepia-toned poem. With Los Angeles Plays Itself, Thom Anderson has no need to visit local councils for such footage in order to present the city he once knew, instead the city he knew can still be found documented in hundreds of thousands of homes around the world.

As “the world’s most photographed city” Los Angeles is a place whose history seems to have been created through the lens of the filmmakers who chose to decamp there. As a resident Angelino, Anderson looks to dispel many of the myths that seem to have become part of the regular vernacular when considering the city, and searches for an image of the city lived in by the “39 out of every 40 residents of Los Angeles who aren’t part of the movie industry”.

Therefore rather than a personalised poetic elegy like that presented by Davis, Anderson (usually a tutor at CalArts) presents a heavily politicised audio/visual dissertation that considers the ramifications of living in a city whose double identity has helped in the deformation and reconstruction of large swathes of it, helping create the misshapen segregated beast that the “City of Angels” can be seen as today.

Like a cinematic equivalent of Grandmaster Flash and 2ManyDJ’s, Anderson builds his documentary through the (un-commissioned) employment of hundreds of film clips remixed together to paint a picture of a city whose cinematic representation has distorted it’s geography, history and even its name (though Anderson’s complaints about the abbreviation of the city’s title to L.A. does come across as overly fastidious). Voiceover commentary is provided by Encke King, whose relaxed and muted tone always threatens to veer towards dull though somehow contains just enough bite to keep you attentive for the near three hours duration.

The range of clips employed by Anderson is expansive and to be honest quite superlative. From the obvious and much revered documents of the city seen in the likes of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) via unexpected delights such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s chimerical Zabriskie Point (1970), Peter Bogdanovich’s debut Targets (1968) and Hal Halicki’s car destruction orgy Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), through to even referencing trash that would be otherwise consigned to an unloved eternity at the bottom of supermarket sale bins such as Virtuosity (1995), Death Wish 4 (1987) and Sly Stallone’s self penned ego massage Cobra (1986).

Anderson gradually layers depth into his essay, beginning with the shallow surface examination the use of Los Angeles’ famous art-deco architecture within films. Before really hitting its stride with a fascinating dissection of the history of downtown’s Bunker Hill district. Anderson finally bares his teeth in the second half with an angry deconstruction of the false histories created for the city.

Even with a running time that makes the documentary seem as sprawling and over-bearing as the city itself, Los Angeles Plays Itself inevitably contains omissions. The most obvious cinematic omission would seem to be Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) a film that like Tarantino’s other early work, happily charts a Los Angeles that lives lights years away from the Hollywood Hills crowd. Though it’s representation of the city as one of small time crooks, bric-a-brac store dwelling rapists and pop-culture hitmen will probably still make Anderson’s blood boil.

As the film draws to a close one also begins to feel there is a large hole in the documentary with its lack of in-depth reference to the multi-ethnic make-up of the city outside of brief reference’s to the Watts riots and the Rodney King beating. This is made up for though with a fantastic closing segment that rather than taking the obvious route of examining what Anderson feels to be the exploitative and unfair representations of south-central Los Angeles as urban guerrilla warfare zones as seen in Boyz in the Hood (1991), and the post ’92 riot crowd such as Menace II Society (1993). He instead pays loving tribute to the black independent cinema movements of the 1970’s, covering such films as Charles Burnett’s much admired Killer of Sheep (1977).

Far from attempting to appeal to the masses Anderson has created a document by a film fanatic and very much for film fanatics. If the subject matter may occasionally appear daunting, a dry as Death Valley humour helps the film along, from comparing the punctilious production of hardcore right-wing cop show Dragnet to the methods employed by Art-House deities Bresson and Ozu, to even admitting the documentary’s title is lifted from an early seventies gay porn flick. Anderson has created a work that any self-respecting film student really should hunt out*.

*and hunt out you will have to do, as due to the abundance of unlicensed film clips this is unlikely to ever see a DVD release. Of course searching the darker more legally dubious corners of the internet may help in yielding positive results, not that I could ever promote such ideas.....