It's Only a Movie

by Mark Kermode

  ‘Two bucks,’ said the guy behind the till who was wearing a fetching Corpse Grinders T-shirt.’Or you can buy it for five.’

  Immediately, I was in turmoil. For less than the equivalent of three pounds in ‘real money’ I could legally purchase this banned movie, with a proper original sleeve and everything. But then I’d have to take it home, through customs, where I was bound to be spotted and cavity-searched to within an inch of my life, thus forfeiting both the video and my dignity. The element of danger was too great.

  ‘Er, I’ll just rent it,’ I said, pathetically.

  ‘Okey-dokey. Need to see a membership card or ID.’

  Damn. I knew it was too good to be true. Of course you couldn’t just walk into a video store and rent Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. What on earth was I thinking? Damn, damn, damn.

  ‘There you go,’ said Tim, handing over his driver’s licence, and less than thirty seconds later the deed was done, and I was out on the street clutching TCM 2 and well on my way to being depraved and corrupted. And it wasn’t even teatime.

  When we got back to the apartment, I slammed the video into the VCR in a manner creepily reminiscent of James Woods having sex with his fleshy television set in Videodrome.

  The movie started. I watched it all.

  It was terrible.

  There was a lively highlight in the opening act in which Leatherface ploughed his chainsaw through the roof of a moving car and cut someone’s head and face in half to enjoyably squishy effect. But other than that it was total toilet. Not even Dennis Hopper could dispel the air of dreariness. It just went on, and on, and on … By the end of the film, I was feeling more depressed than depraved. Still, that’s another banned movie ticked off the list, so it hadn’t been a complete waste.

  The next day, we set off at the crack of dawn and headed for the desert where the dumbo heavy-metal band (whose name I honestly cannot remember) were shooting their hairy video. I should have been excited because, no matter how lousy the music sounded, this was my first experience of an ‘authentic LA desert shoot’. We were in the middle of nowhere, but everywhere you looked there were lights, trucks, camera tracks, and swooping cranes, all guarded by burly Hell’s Angels types who probably handled security for the Stones back in the days of Altamont. (‘Meredith Hunter? Stabbed? Get away!’) It was only a video shoot but, in the manner of all things within the nuclear-fallout radius of Hollywood, it had taken on the appearance of a full-blown feature-film set. So why was I so unimpressed?

  The answer was the band, who were catastrophic. Full head-trees adorned each preening nincompoop, with poodle perms and cat flaps to a man. Their trousers were horrible, their silly spiky boots even more so, and they sounded every bit as awful as they looked – after three ear-splitting playbacks of the band’s ghastly single I was sorely hoping for a surprise visit from the Manson family, the inbred stragglers of which presumably still lurked hereabouts. But this was my first Hollywood film assignment, and I really needed to earn that money, so in an attempt to look busy I went and stood by one of the gigantic wind machines positioned ostentatiously to the side of the stage.

  ‘Be careful with that,’ warned Tim, tapping the contraption which resembled a giant aeroplane propeller trapped in a cage and mounted on wheels.’If you crank it too hard, it’ll try to take off. It’s basically a plane without wings.’ Bearing this in mind, I spent the next six hours gingerly blowing the smallest of sensitive breezes toward the stage, artfully catching the noxious smog spewed out by industriously pumped Mole Foggers, and whisping it around the band’s golden locks which flapped and billowed in the breeze. With every take of the song, I detested the band more, and started to fantasise about trapping their hair in the propeller and deftly removing their collective tresses and scalps with one bloody rotation. Perhaps last night’s encounter with Leatherface had corrupted me after all. What a relief.

  Finally, after yet more air-blown preening and primping, the band decided to take a break and retire to their trailer for what I presumed was a relaxing session of communal masturbation. As the drummer manoeuvred his heavily spandexed bum from behind the kit, I found that I could resist temptation no longer, and cranked the handle on the wind machine up to maximum thrust. I presumed that this would cause the machine to race away from the stage at wobbly velocity and I braced myself for the inevitable G-force. Strangely, nothing happened. The propeller sped up, the engine roared a little but the wind machine remained solidly in the same spot. No attempt to take off. No oversized go-carting fun. Nothing. Just more wind and noise. I looked down, and realised to my disappointment that some safety-minded technician had (very properly) anchored the wind machine firmly into the ground, a chain descending deep into the desert sand, holding it in place like a boat in the harbour. We weren’t going anywhere.

  I looked up into the afternoon sun, and through the swirling sands I noticed a minor commotion on stage. People waving their arms around. Shouting. Lots of hair blowing. And the drum kit (with spandexed drummer still attached) moving slowly, inexorably, backward toward the edge of the stage. It was a surreal spectacle, graceful and beautiful, if a little bit creepy, and I was transfixed. Maybe the heat had got to me, but I can see it now as if witnessing some eerie poltergeist phenomenon – the drum kit being moved by unseen spirit hands. People were shouting but you couldn’t hear what they were saying over the calming drone of the wind machine. And anyway, the sight of the perambulating drums was too enrapturing to pay much attention to anything else. There they went, inch by inch, oozing like a giant snail toward an approaching precipice. And then, a moment later, they were gone, gently dropping off the stage, a percussive boat sailing over the edge of the world, its hairy captain at the helm. I shut the wind machine down and wandered off toward a picturesque dune, momentarily serene and at one with the world …

  OK, cut!

  Right, that’s what would have happened in the TV movie – the drummer being blown off the stage. After all it’s a funny image, cinematic and somewhat odd, an ideal clip for the trailer, blah blah blah. But the more I think about it the more I begin to suspect that this episode (which I remember vividly) is actually made up – or rather it is ‘inspired by real events’. Think about it: how likely is it that any scene happening in ‘real life’ would have such a neat set-up, arc, and comic denouement? It’s like that urban legend about a ‘celebrity’ forgetting to unclip a radio microphone and being overheard moaning earthy obscenities whilst on the toilet; or the story about the even more famous movie star being admitted to hospital with a rodent stuck up his tradesman’s entrance; or the one about the equally celebrated pop star whose stomach was pumped and … well, come on now, you know the rest, don’t you? I don’t need to tell you the names involved because you’ve all heard those stories before. And even though you want them to be true, deep down you know they’re not because, dramatically speaking, they are simply too good to be true.

  Rule Number One: if it reads like a movie script, it’s almost certainly a myth.

  And in the case of that drummer, I’m pretty sure that if anyone blew him off stage it wasn’t me, but Jason Isaacs in the wildly fictionalised Movie of My Life.

  You see, I really did point the big wind machine at the drummer with the horrible hair and spandexed buttocks and his drums really did shake a little bit. I think a cymbal may even have fallen over. I know this to be true not only because I can remember doing it (which, as we have seen, proves nothing) but because I can remember having a conversation about it with Tim who was actually there at the time and thus offered independent third-party verification. But when we get to the bit about the drums sailing off the stage it all starts to sound rather too visually orchestrated to be true. Moreover, in my ‘head movie’ this final movement has changing camera angles and alternating POV shots. I can see the cymbal falling over from the viewpoint of someone standing by a wind machine about twenty yards away to the left of the stage, but then my memory cuts to a medium close-up of the bass drum starti
ng to shift on its axis, and thence to a low-angle rear view of the drummer’s hair blowing majestically behind him as his backside creeps slowly toward the camera. In short, I’m seeing this sequence as if from the vantage point of an editing suite, or indeed from the bank of ‘video-assist’ monitors behind which movie directors now hide in order to keep an eye on a whole range of cameras rather than striding around the set with a megaphone like in the good old days …

  And that means that it’s almost certainly pure baloney. It doesn’t help that the scene smacks of an out-take from This is Spinal Tap (in which drummers regularly spontaneously combust on stage and get killed off in bizarre gardening accidents) or more damningly a passing moment from Slade in Flame in which a drunken Jack Daniels falls off stage taking most of Don Powell’s drum kit with him. In fact, if I put my mind to it I think I can even match up the exact shot from Flame which inspired that ‘low-angle rear view’ I was mentioning a moment ago. No, the more I consider the evidence the more I’m certain that the writer of this screenplay is indulging in what is referred to in the trade as ‘dramatic licence’.

  Still, it’s a good scene – one of my favourites in fact. And since I’ve apparently already shot and edited it (and Jason is really good in it) I’m leaving it in. And if asked whether or not it is ‘true’ I will reply serenely that it is a ‘composite’ dramatic construction drawing on several ‘actual events’ (I really did once see a real drummer really fall off stage at a real concert) in an essentially ‘truthful’ – if not entirely ‘factual’– manner. Like that bit in the ‘true story’ of Frost/Nixon where the ex-president rings the presenter up in the middle of the night, pissed as a fart, and starts babbling about them being essentially the same kind of guys – the bit that is everyone’s favourite scene in the whole movie but which is also pure bunkum from start to finish. That drunken phone call didn’t happen, but as screenwriter Peter Morgan has so often argued, it could have happened. And that movie got nominated for loads of Oscars, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

  ‘Mr Isaacs to the wind machine please!’

  It came as little surprise to discover that, despite my English accent (and despite the fact that I hadn’t actually blown the bloody drummer off stage) I wouldn’t be required for any more casual crewing work in the near future. Still, with $100 in my pocket I felt like Little Richard preparing to rip it up and ball tonight, and duly emboldened I decided to strike out on my new career as an international film journalist. I had always said that if ever I got to LA it would be easy to bag some choice interviews which I could sell back home in the UK. After all, why wait for film-makers to do the press junkets in Blighty when they were all right here in Hollywood just waiting to speak their mind to a spunky British scribe? It sounded straightforward. And oddly enough, it was.

  I began with a call to Wes Craven’s office, for which I had acquired an address and phone number from the Directors Guild of America. During my brief stay in New York, I had endeavoured to stay out of Saul’s hair by visiting the local cinemas to see movies which wouldn’t be released in the UK for months (or maybe years) to come. Top of my list was Shocker , a film about a serial killer whose execution by electric chair turns him into a high-voltage phantom, able to rip heads through phone lines and power cables. Daft, but fun. Craven’s best-known work was the chiller A Nightmare on Elm Street, which gave the world the spectre of Freddy Krueger, and redefined the ‘plastic reality’ of modern horror cinema. But there was something more controversial lurking in Craven’s back catalogue which still remained beyond the pale of British law.

  A return trip to Mondo Video had secured a copy of Last House on the Left, an uncomfortable mix of earnest art-house invention (the plot is lifted from Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring) and leery grindhouse gore (rape, torture, disembowelling) with bizarrely ill-judged interludes of chicken-flapping comedy. Like Texas Chain Saw, Last House had long been banned in Britain, and it was easy to see why; our censors were never going to take kindly to a film which looked so disreputably shabby, and featured scenes of chainsaw-wielding carnage and death by blowjob. Even hardened stateside sensibilities were offended, with audiences in New York reportedly storming the projection booth, hell-bent on ripping the print from the projector and slicing it to smithereens. All this was, of course, great publicity for the film-makers, who marketed Last House with the immortal tag line: ‘To Avoid Fainting, Keep Repeating It’s ONLY A MOVIE …’

  Watching Last House on the Left at Tim and Jenny’s flat was a somewhat grubby experience which they politely left me to enjoy on my own. The next morning, I rolled up to Craven’s sunny office on Wilshire Boulevard where (to my surprise) he had agreed to meet me and talk about ‘whatever you like, kiddo’. He greeted me warmly, I pulled out my tape recorder, and for an hour we shot the breeze about cinema and censorship. He was warm, witty and intelligent, and I was utterly seduced. He talked about Last House as if it were made yesterday, describing it as an angry response to TV images of the Vietnam War, discussing the visceral elements in terms of confrontation and catharsis, and remembering the intestine-ripping scene that ‘you only see very briefly’ because it’s actually a bicycle inner tube. Of the film’s vociferous detractors, he championed the protestors’ right to tear up his movie if they felt moved to do so, whilst railing against the official ratings boards for being biased against low-budget movies. His position, in short, was that while he abhorred state censorship, he applauded spontaneous community action.

  He was my new best friend.

  Unbeknownst to Craven, this ‘friendship’ would backfire spectacularly in future years when my enthusiasm for his work ironically caused British censors to lay into his film with renewed enthusiasm. Having been banned for nearly thirty years, Last House found its way back to the newly liberalised British censors in 2001, when they finally agreed to pass it on video with only sixteen seconds of cuts. Spurred on by my encouraging words, the distributors decided to go to the Video Appeals Committee, where a group of media-literate concerned bods (including Blue Peter stalwart Biddy Baxter!) heard arguments for releasing the film uncut on the grounds of its great historical importance. Central to their case was an erudite essay written by an acclaimed ‘specialist witness’ (i.e. me) which contextualised the film within the evolution of the modern horror genre, and verified its status as a key work of American independent cinema. It was a bravura polemic – weighty, profound, and forthright.

  And they were having none of it.

  After considering the evidence, the good folk of the Video Appeals Committee reported that in their opinion the sixteen seconds of cuts which we were contesting were in fact far too lenient for such a revolting and frankly indefensible film. As a result, the BBFC not only upheld those cuts – they doubled them! Thanks to my earnest outpourings, I had effectively prevented Last House from being released in an all but uncut form.

  With friends like me, who needs enemies?

  (Since then, the BBFC have looked at the movie again – this time without the aid of my learned input – and decided that it is now fit to be released uncut after all. Some would say that it was the passing of time which caused them to reverse their earlier decision. Others would argue that I was the problem all along.)

  Back in LA, I turned my attention to Sam Raimi. Today, Raimi is one of the most financially successful film-makers of all time, thanks to his blockbusting Spider-Man movies, all three of which enjoyed record-breaking openings worldwide. In the eighties, however, Raimi was still best known as the creator of The Evil Dead, a low-budget splatter comedy which had been deemed legally obscene by several British courts, and had become the bête noire of anti-’video nasty’ campaigners like Mary Whitehouse. The British censor’s report on The Evil Dead is one of the funniest pieces of ‘serious’ literature ever written, as sober adults struggled to defuse the delightfully disgusting power of a deliberately stupid movie with a series of increasingly impotent alterations.

  ‘Reduce
sight of Shelley chewing off her own hand’ the report reads po-facedly, before going on to insist that the distributors ‘remove close shots of Scotty chopping Shelley’s hands and legs off’ and ‘reduce to minimum fluid spewing from Linda’s mouth after falling on dagger [and] trunk gushing blood after head cut off’. Call me childish, but doesn’t reading that make you want to run off and watch The Evil Dead uncut right now ?

  When Radio Four asked me to appear on a programme called With Great Pleasure (imagine Desert Island Discs but with books) in 2008, I agreed on the understanding that I could include the BBFC’s report on The Evil Dead as one of my favourite works of literature of all time. To their great credit, the BBFC granted me permission to make them look ridiculous in public by getting actress Amelia Bullmore to read out the cuts list to a packed theatre audience in the style of Joyce Grenfell.’Remove entirely the second shot of headless torso spurting blood on man’s face as he lies on top of it,’ Amelia recited in schoolmarm-ish tones, to the delight of the audience, all of whom seemed to find this as funny as I did. Sadly, the radio audience never got to share the joke; when the powers that be at Radio Four heard the tape of the recording, they decided that even the description of what had been cut from The Evil Dead was too revolting for daytime broadcast and it all got cut – again! Meanwhile the BBFC had gone ahead and given The Evil Dead a clean bill of health uncut, and I have the censor’s certificate at home, framed and hanging on the wall, to prove it.