Cult movies on DVD have become a big business these days, what with Shout! Factory raking in the cash with their 80's horror re-releases and MST3K box sets. There's so many old crazies coming out that you'd think they could run out, though there are tons of great, cult-worthy movies that still haven't seen the light of a laser. The trick is to create smaller subsets of cult film in order to get collectors obsessing over how many nunsploitation movies they can cram onto their shelves, and one of the most elusive and awesome subsets is the cult musical. Borne from the phenomenal cultural attachment to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, cult musicals are few and far between, largely because most cult movies are low budget and musicals are quite difficult to make in cinema form. A notable exception is Francis Ford Coppola's box-office disaster One from the Heart, such a tanker that it killed the New Hollywood movement for good, though through the power of video rentals and the continuing success of its composer Tom Waits the film has gained a small following. Perhaps there simply aren't many that are good enough to watch; for example, I've known about the Canadian sci-fi spoof musical Big Meat Eater for a while now but everything I've heard about it makes me hesitant to make the plunge into its Balonium depths. However, after hearing about Population: 1 (1986) at Arbogast on Film I had no choice but to give it a spin, and I quickly realized that my play-by-play of what transpired may be the last record of my mortal existence, as my head was about to explode from post-punk counterculture ecstasy. Or because I was trapped in a Philip K. Dick-brand-Gnosticism Demiurge trap of post-punk counterculture ecstasy. Actually, thinking I'm trapped in the 1st cenury AD seems a picture of sanity in comparison to Population: 1. If I'm not back in 72 minutes tell The Ordinaires that I love them.
Scratchy-ass B&W and the results of Björk time traveling to 1986 to start a third stream/progressive punk group set the stage for a woman running around empty urban wastes and lip-syncing to the audience. She wails, she has thick makeup, she sleeps next to backwater docks, and we get a voice-over from a man who was disturbed to find himself the sole survivor of a suicide pact. It appears we're watching the memoirs of Tomata duPlenty, lead singer of the L.A. techno-punk group The Screamers, and he's a fan of using his impressive reel-to-reel tape setup to play Star Wars up a couple of octaves. Then the door to his studio blows up and he hallucinates, and we know that we're in for a great party movie, the kind where he sees his mother holding the Olympic torch for no reason and falling over in a series of still shots. Memories of flooding are accentuated by flexatone Boing!'s, and he recites a messed up variation on My Country 'Tis of Thee, because satire.
Movie or goof-assed pseudo-beat-poetry one-man-show? Tomata poses these questions as he monologues in a top hat and wife beater to nobody. The player piano has no idea what he's talking about, either, though as he appears to be the only person left on Earth I guess he's got the right to do whatever he wants in his Pee-wee Playhouse bunker. His bathroom appliances fly around, and that's not nearly as odd as his talk-singing. Actually, I think this bunker was intended for Pee-wee and this guy murdered the Right Honorable Mr. Herman while disguised as Floory. Before he has a wavy Wayne's World memory transition a computer flashes between his picture and his picture plus an elongated Pinocchio nose, and then his presumably dead girlfriend informs us that she's a "Jazz Vampire" through song. She pukes hand-animated blood, and Tomata takes a bath, and Renaissance paintings flash past, and-
As I tried to flatten my ash-covered, stuck up hair and mend the rips in my blackened clothes I made the realization that no review can sum up Population: 1. At no point is the movie normal or even comprehensible, and would you have settled for anything else that has both the giant from Twin Peaks and a 12-year-old Beck playing the accordion? I didn't think so. For some Population: 1 will be unrecommendable; for other essential. Its writer-director, Rene Daalder, made this after the minor cult high school movie Massacre at Central High and a failed (?) attempt at a Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. He was also an underling of Russ Meyer, which might explain the boobs and breakneck pacing a bit but not so much the male nudity and half-assed video effects. Population: 1 exists outside explanation and any need of approval or even an audience - and in a way YouTube has provided the ideal platform for these kinds of movies, whatever that kind of movie is. An earlier cousin could be 200 Motels, the Frank Zappa-conceived disaster where every kind of crude satire and member of the Turtles was thrown at the wall in the hopes something would stick, but while it's entirely apparent that nobody had any control over 200 Motels (most certainly not Zappa) Daalder and duPlenty at least had a consistent vision of Population: 1 and must have known what they were doing. In fact, the experience is so whimsically unhinged it's almost kind of cute, like a clown mounting a balloon-animal tribute to GG Allin. That doesn't mean that any non-Daalder/duPlenty viewers will emerged unscathed or even sober, and I might as well have become the bastardly head growth from Bruce Robinson's insufferable How to Get Ahead in Advertising for how Earthbound my brain was after the last drum machine had beat its last circuit.
How's about this: I'll post the first 10 minutes below, and you take a look to see if you can handle it. That way I can spend that time crawling back to reality and you can start planning your next Pot-'n'-Punk Hootenanny with or without the woozy anti-normalcy of Sirs Daalder and duPlenty*. Either way, get Beck to play the accordion, preferably as a 12-year-old, but don't invite too many Twin Peaks actors or else you'll wind up with a fish in your coffee pot.
Scratchy-ass B&W and the results of Björk time traveling to 1986 to start a third stream/progressive punk group set the stage for a woman running around empty urban wastes and lip-syncing to the audience. She wails, she has thick makeup, she sleeps next to backwater docks, and we get a voice-over from a man who was disturbed to find himself the sole survivor of a suicide pact. It appears we're watching the memoirs of Tomata duPlenty, lead singer of the L.A. techno-punk group The Screamers, and he's a fan of using his impressive reel-to-reel tape setup to play Star Wars up a couple of octaves. Then the door to his studio blows up and he hallucinates, and we know that we're in for a great party movie, the kind where he sees his mother holding the Olympic torch for no reason and falling over in a series of still shots. Memories of flooding are accentuated by flexatone Boing!'s, and he recites a messed up variation on My Country 'Tis of Thee, because satire.
Movie or goof-assed pseudo-beat-poetry one-man-show? Tomata poses these questions as he monologues in a top hat and wife beater to nobody. The player piano has no idea what he's talking about, either, though as he appears to be the only person left on Earth I guess he's got the right to do whatever he wants in his Pee-wee Playhouse bunker. His bathroom appliances fly around, and that's not nearly as odd as his talk-singing. Actually, I think this bunker was intended for Pee-wee and this guy murdered the Right Honorable Mr. Herman while disguised as Floory. Before he has a wavy Wayne's World memory transition a computer flashes between his picture and his picture plus an elongated Pinocchio nose, and then his presumably dead girlfriend informs us that she's a "Jazz Vampire" through song. She pukes hand-animated blood, and Tomata takes a bath, and Renaissance paintings flash past, and-
As I tried to flatten my ash-covered, stuck up hair and mend the rips in my blackened clothes I made the realization that no review can sum up Population: 1. At no point is the movie normal or even comprehensible, and would you have settled for anything else that has both the giant from Twin Peaks and a 12-year-old Beck playing the accordion? I didn't think so. For some Population: 1 will be unrecommendable; for other essential. Its writer-director, Rene Daalder, made this after the minor cult high school movie Massacre at Central High and a failed (?) attempt at a Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. He was also an underling of Russ Meyer, which might explain the boobs and breakneck pacing a bit but not so much the male nudity and half-assed video effects. Population: 1 exists outside explanation and any need of approval or even an audience - and in a way YouTube has provided the ideal platform for these kinds of movies, whatever that kind of movie is. An earlier cousin could be 200 Motels, the Frank Zappa-conceived disaster where every kind of crude satire and member of the Turtles was thrown at the wall in the hopes something would stick, but while it's entirely apparent that nobody had any control over 200 Motels (most certainly not Zappa) Daalder and duPlenty at least had a consistent vision of Population: 1 and must have known what they were doing. In fact, the experience is so whimsically unhinged it's almost kind of cute, like a clown mounting a balloon-animal tribute to GG Allin. That doesn't mean that any non-Daalder/duPlenty viewers will emerged unscathed or even sober, and I might as well have become the bastardly head growth from Bruce Robinson's insufferable How to Get Ahead in Advertising for how Earthbound my brain was after the last drum machine had beat its last circuit.
How's about this: I'll post the first 10 minutes below, and you take a look to see if you can handle it. That way I can spend that time crawling back to reality and you can start planning your next Pot-'n'-Punk Hootenanny with or without the woozy anti-normalcy of Sirs Daalder and duPlenty*. Either way, get Beck to play the accordion, preferably as a 12-year-old, but don't invite too many Twin Peaks actors or else you'll wind up with a fish in your coffee pot.
~PNK
*Kind of sounds like a carpet installation company, don't it? Daalder & Duplenty, Remnant Wizards!
No comments:
Post a Comment