Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Aspects of the film have dated badly, especially in the coiffeur department. And, despite having just become a star by playing the female lead in Franco Zeffirelli’s hit version of Romeo And Juliet, Hussey is a terrible, terrible actress. But Clark’s low-budget mise en scène is impeccable, the foul-mouthed script a shock even now, and there are genuinely memorable characters played with enormous gusto by Kidder, Waldman, the ever-reliable Saxon as the square-jawed cop, and Dullea, who brings the same dimpled, long-faced, blank-eyed strangeness to Peter as he did to the lead astronaut in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film has a haunting otherness; a gothic quality that later teen slasher movies rejected in favour of splashy pop culture nastiness, as if Italian art-horror maverick Dario Argento had suddenly decided to make popcorn entertainment for American teens.

  There is a great scream-out-loud moment, too. Black Christmas was one of the first adult horror movies I managed to sneak into as a nipper, and I still have thrilled memories of the ruckus in the stalls when the killer – face still ingeniously kept out of shot – chases Jess down stairs and manages to shoot out a hand and grab her hair.

  And interestingly, the punishing of sexually active women isn’t the point here. In fact, the control-freak nastiness of Peter, and his status as main suspect, establishes a clever pro-choice sub-plot. But on the other hand, the uproarious Barb does seem to get punished for her sexual taunting of various square older men with funny scenes involving the sex lives of turtles and improper use of the word ‘fellatio’.

  Nevertheless, all of the girls appear to have active, permissive-society sex lives, and some live, and some die. Whether the cat got any before meeting its maker remains one of Black Christmas’s many mysteries.

  A BOY AND HIS DOG

  1975

  Starring: Don Johnson, Tiger, Tim McIntire, Susanne Benton, Jason Robards

  Dir.: L.Q. Jones

  Plot: After you’ve had your way with a girl, you should at least make her dinner.

  Key line(s): Boy: ‘I know what you mean! Over the hill where the deer and the antelope play and it’s warm and clean and we can relax and have fun and grow food right out of the ground. How do you like that pipedream?’

  Dog: ‘It’s called farming.’

  Remember how I said, just a few entries ago, that Louis Malle’s Le Souffle Au Coeur (see here) was the most twisted teen film of all time? Well, I was forgetting this movie and the fact that the 1970s weren’t over yet. The incredibly strange A Boy And His Dog combines several of the most popular recurring elements of the American ‘Movie Brat’ era. Post-nuclear apocalypse dystopia. Rampant machismo. Anti-Christian ranting. Relentless pessimism. A cynical loathing for humanity. Male bonding. And extreme misogyny. The only thing it’s missing is Charlton Heston and lines about damn dirty apes.

  A Boy And His Dog is based upon a celebrated novella by sci-fi mini-legend Harlan Ellison. The year is 2024 and the world has been destroyed by World War IV, which lasted all of five days. In this parallel universe, the money poured into space travel in the ’60s was spent on bombs, futuristic technology, building androids and doing crazy experiments on animals. Which is how come an 18-year-old rapist called Vic (played by Don Johnson of Miami Vice fame) is wandering around an arid desert wasteland accompanied only by a telepathic dog called Blood.

  Slipped the ‘R’ word right in there, just to see if you were really concentrating. You see, among Earth’s few human survivors, women are even scarcer than men, because many of the men were off fighting while the women were all at home waiting in the cities for the bombs to drop. So Vic, as well as every other man, it seems, feels that sex has become a right to take by force. Or, as Buffy Summers once memorably put it when Xander Harris was possessed by a mystical hyena in classic Buffy episode ‘The Pack’, ‘His idea of wooing doesn’t involve a Yanni CD and a bottle of Chianti.’

  The price Blood (played by cute mongrel Tiger and voiced brilliantly by Tim McIntire) has paid for being made super-intelligent and telepathic by some mad scientist is that he’s lost his ability to track food. Even though he can track women. Yeah, I don’t really get that either. But anyway, the boy and his dog have become mutually dependent to a post-apocalyptic degree. As the boy is dumb and the dog is smart, Blood acts as both teacher and taunter, giving us much of the pre-bomb back-story as impromptu history lessons for Vic while also mocking him for his sexual urges and lack of education. He delights in calling him Albert, which we assume is Vic’s real name.

  So life for the pair is one long scavenger hunt with added bickering, what with laws, ethics and morals having been rendered redundant by Armageddon. For a start, slavery has also joined random rape and pillage among the survivors’ relapse into uncivilised habits. Vic manages to steal some food from a desert slave-master and barters his way into one of the wilderness’s rare settlements, where there is company, a movie projector showing scratchy vintage soft porn . . . and a woman.

  The woman is evil schemer Quilla June (Benton), whom Vic saves from bandits and mutants, and finally gets his oats from as recompense. Blood doesn’t like her, but that’s always the way in ’70s bromances, even when one of the bros has four legs and bad breath. But he has a point, because Quilla June’s idea of post-coital intimacy is to knock Vic unconscious and disappear. She also leaves him a card that gets him into ‘Downunder’, the underground paradise that she’s told Vic all about. The injured Blood advises Vic that a violent woman and a mysterious subterranean world might be equally dangerous things to enter. The dog pleads with Vic not to go and leave him, especially as Blood believes in ‘the promised land’, a magical place running over with rapeworthy women and hot and cold running popcorn (Blood’s favourite food) that he insists is just yonder, ‘over the hill’. Vic follows the pussy. Bad move.

  It turns out that Quilla was just bait for a trap laid by her Bad Dad Lou Craddock (Robards), who has started a crazy fundamentalist Christian utopia enforced by a mighty grinning android called Michael where everyone is forced to wear dungarees and mime make-up while acting out a grotesque parody of small-town American life, pitched somewhere between Gone With The Wind and The Waltons. But this new start for humanity means breeding, and ‘Topeka’ doesn’t have enough virile young men. This is all starting to sound like an 18-year-old boy’s wildest fantasy, except that Craddock doesn’t believe in nature taking its course. Vic is strapped to a machine that extracts the semen right out of him and then artificially injects it into young women dressed as brides. And once he’s impregnated 35 ‘wives’, Vic buys the farm. Or rather, he gets sent to ‘the farm’, a place no one comes back from because it basically means Michael crushes your puny human head with his bare robot hands. Cue daring escape.

  The meat of the matter comes when Vic and a now contrite Quilla June return to the surface. Poor Blood has been waiting there patiently, as dogs do, and, what with his non-existent food-finding skills, is now one of those tear-jerking dog rescue ads. They can’t go back to the settlement to feed him because bandits have taken it over. Quilla presents Vic with that old, ‘If you love me, you’ll leave the dog to die’ chestnut. The screen fades to black.

  We hear the faint sounds of a fire, and then gradually see smoke. We hear Blood do his think-speak thing. As he and Vic walk away into the distant sunrise, nattering, we begin to understand Vic’s solution to his thorny problem.

  ‘She said she loved me,’ Vic’s voice intones. ‘Well . . . it’s not my fault she picked me to get all wet-brained over.’

  A pause. ‘Well’, answers Blood, ‘I’d say she certainly had marvellous judgement, Albert . . . but not particularly good taste.’ And the damn dog laughs. And we’re asked to laugh right along with the fact that a man has fed his girlfriend to his dog.

  Ellison was reportedly angry about the jaunty misogyny of the ending. But the only thing screenwriters Jones, Alvy Moore and Wayne Cruseturner added was the jokey line. The novella still ends with Vic and Blood eating Quilla June.

  I know. I sho
uld be utterly ashamed of myself for putting this movie in this book. Problem is . . . it’s a really great movie. Despite the low budget, the desert dystopia and the genuinely terrifying Topeka are superbly designed. The movie projector settlement scene was surely where George Miller drew inspiration for the dirty dystopian chaos of his Mad Max movies. The dog voiceover is outstanding, with McIntire making Blood into a strange sort of misanthropic professor with a love-hate fixation on his master that absolutely fits our ideas about what our dogs might be thinking. McIntire also provided the soundtrack’s imaginative mix of folky whimsy and avant-garde electronica, along with Jaime Mendoza-Nava and former Door Ray Manzarek. And the dog’s very good, too, especially in the sad bits.

  And Johnson, who was actually 26 here and nine years away from his Miami Vice Zeitgeist moment, is a revelation. Like John Amblas in Martin (see here), he has to carry a film as a protagonist with virtually no redeeming features while also playing a fair few scenes reacting silently to a dog as voiceovers carry the conversation. He gets it wrong, the film becomes unwatchably confusing and nasty. But Johnson somehow manages to imbue Vic with enough hick charm to make the film seem like a reasonable tilt at how an ignorant boy might become corrupted under such circumstances, rather than an exercise in sheer loathing for womankind.

  Nevertheless, there really isn’t any further that teen cinema – or any other kind of cinema – could take feminist backlash misogyny than making women into dog food. Carrie and Halloween are on their way, and, from that point on, Ms Spacek and Ms Curtis ensure that women start to get a little more respect around here.

  CARRIE

  1976

  Starring: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, William Katt, Betty Buckley, John Travolta

  Dir.: Brian De Palma

  Plot: The last night at The Prom. The very last night at The Prom.

  Key line: ‘After the blood comes the boys, like sniffin’ dogs, grinnin’ and slobberin’ and trying to find out where that smell comes from!’

  Carrie has a great set of casting stories. Brian De Palma was coming off a minor hit with grand guignol rock opera Phantom Of The Paradise (see Popcorn). But the original casting sessions for Carrie were held as a joint effort with another director, to save money and time. The end result was that the whole of young Hollywood turned up to a room to test for De Palma and a new science fiction film by the guy who had had a surprise mega-hit with American Graffiti. If you came to try out for Carrie, you were also auditioning for Star Wars. So I guess everyone who bagged Carrie is kinda pissed off, in retrospect, even though, in the real world, Carrie is a much, much better film.

  Amy Irving, who went on to be the singing voice of Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? after marrying Steven Spielberg and getting a divorce settlement of a reported $100 million, got the part of Sue Snell. Because De Palma had enjoyed working with a mother–daughter team in an earlier movie called Sisters, he immediately cast Irving’s mom Priscilla Pointer as her onscreen mother.

  Piper Laurie had been astonishing alongside Paul Newman in 1961s The Hustler but had completely retired from acting when fan De Palma sent her the Carrie script. She read the part of Margaret White and dismissed it as schlocky cliché until her husband pointed out that all De Palma’s previous, arty movies had had a satirical edge. She read the script again with that in mind, got it, and took what would be her second and final iconic role.

  Before being Chris Hargensen, Nancy Allen was just one of those thousands of wannabes who do a bit of stage-acting and get a few commercials in New York and head to Hollywood with dreams of being a movie star. And, like most of those thousands she’d got absolutely nowhere and, by November 1975, had decided to give up and move back to New York. A few days before leaving she went to the gym and, as she was coming out of the steam room, a woman called her name. She was Harriet Helberg, the casting director for Carrie, and she had hunted Allen down to persuade her to take just one more audition. So, in the very last slot in the very last day of casting, Allen tested. Two years later, she married Brian De Palma.

  And Sissy Spacek, who made Carrie White into one of cinema’s most profoundly believable and sympathetic monsters, was not even on De Palma’s radar as casting began. She was married to production designer Jack Fisk, whom she had met on the set of Badlands (see here). He gave her a copy of Stephen King’s novel and she was desperate to play the title role, but De Palma was not a fan of her previous work, and already had another actress in mind. Spacek, who, bizarrely, had gained little success from her stunning performance in Badlands, had an audition for a commercial on the same day as the last casting call for Carrie White. She called De Palma, asking which audition she should go to. He told her to go for the commercial because she had no chance of getting the lead in Carrie.

  Furious, she went home and re-read the Carrie screenplay, obsessing over De Palma and Hollywood’s lack of interest in her pale, cold strangeness. She felt abused by the system. She got up the next morning, blew off the commercial, vandalised an old sailor suit her mother had given her as a child, rubbed Vaseline in her hair and turned up at De Palma’s casting as dirty, angry and little-girl-lost as she felt. She then proceeded to blow De Palma’s unlucky first choice out of the room. The rest is horror history.

  Based on Stephen King’s first novel – but possibly the only King screen adaptation that is better than the source – Carrie is the story of Carrie White, a teenage girl living a repressed, abused life with her maniacally religious mother. Margaret White roams around the neighbourhood trying to convert the hostile natives, eats dinner in front of a giant print of The Last Supper, calls breasts ‘dirty pillows’, and locks her daughter in a closet every time she expresses the vaguest interest in anything worldly. So damaged is Carrie by repressing her hormonal desires, the physical and mental torture at home, and the bullying and humiliation she suffers at school, that she has developed telekinetic powers that are unleashed at moments of unbearable stress. When a group of mean girls are punished by nice gym teacher Miss Collins for attacking and taunting Carrie when she has her first period in a shower after games (her mother has never bothered to warn Carrie about ‘the curse’), they take revenge on Carrie by setting her up on a date at the senior prom with school heart-throb Tommy Ross (Katt). When I say ‘mean girls’ these are Mean Girls Deluxe, led by Chris Hargenson, who gets orgasmic feelings when successfully enlisting her brutish boyfriend Billy Nolan (Travolta) to do her dirty works. So this prom night revenge involves a bucket of pig’s blood, dropped from a great height, just at the moment when Carrie thinks she’s finally been accepted by her peers. Driven insane by this final cruel humiliation, Carrie kills everyone in school by way of destroying the building with the power of her mind. When she arrives home, her mad mother stabs her so she kills her in a symbolic act of crucifixion which Mad Mom seems to rather enjoy. And then Carrie burns down the house and dies, too. In a famous and much-imitated coda, we see nice-ish girl Sue Snell, prom night’s one survivor, take flowers to Carrie’s grave. As she kneels to place the flowers, a blood-streaked arm shoots out of the ground and grabs her. We cut to Sue screaming in a hospital bed, hysterical and being held by her horrified mother. Sue may have lived through prom night, but it looks very much like Carrie is driving her insane from beyond the grave, living on through a nightmare that will never fade.

  Now this should all be preposterous. Especially when you add the clunky attempts at comedy, the bad rock music, the horribly dated ’70s clothes and hair. There’s a compelling argument that Carrie’s true horror lies not in the supernatural, but in William Katt’s supernaturally bad do, an unforgettable mixture of blonde Afro and explosion in a curly perm factory. Then there’s De Palma’s career-long tendency to smash viewers in the face with his intentions for each scene, using gimmicks like split-screens and something called a split dioptre lens that provides those amazing shots where a character’s face is in extreme close-up with a sort of halo effect at one end of the frame, while c
ompletely in-focus stuff goes on in the background at the other end.

  But this, I think, is Carrie’s secret. It’s an exercise in hysteria, with the utterly over-the-top performances of Laurie and Spacek (both so good they forced the Oscar dummies to break their traditional loathing of horror and nominate the pair for Academy Awards) matched all the way by De Palma’s good taste-rejecting obsession with pastiching Alfred Hitchcock (the school is named after Psycho killer Norman Bates, the shrieking violins are pulled wholesale from Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score), releasing cathartic baggage about his own Catholic upbringing, and exploring his (and our) fear of and repulsion at menstruation. How many of us knew that teenage girls were so universally feared before we saw Carrie? Is a sexually repressed girl the most dangerous creature on Earth? And how many other post-’60s films would have the audacity to have Carrie’s mother say the key words, ‘The prom?’, have a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning provide the punctuation, and play it with a straight face? It was De Palma’s unusual post-Russ Meyer blend of cinematic reverence, virtuoso technique and fearless bad taste that ensured that he and Carrie belonged together. It was the perfect vehicle for De Palma’s bleakly ironic view of manipulating audience emotions, too. You can almost feel his loathing of the viewer in many of his films. The reason you don’t feel it in Carrie is because he has horrible characters that he can loathe right along with us.