Sex

Queen of the Blues (1979)

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Before Rinse Dream turned the sex club in an atomic nightmare, director Willy Roe — with skin queen Mary Millington in her last film — turned it into a kitschy daydream, erections not included.

In London’s lily-white Blues Club — apparently the top spot for the hair-filled nudity in Mayfair — the so-called queen of the joint, literally and figuratively, is Millington, who writhes around on stage, moving her pubic mound up and down for all the patrons seemingly live there to see. In between, the rampant backstage cattiness of nude infighting truly makes Queen of the Blues a film to watch.

The main plot, if you can call it that, is about gangsters demanding protection money from the owner, although it’s probably around five minutes of actual film, as so much of this is dedicated to the sexy strippers, with a preamble by a terrible comedian who tempts me to push the fast-forward button.

A just a little over an hour — a mercifully short running time I definitely miss in film — Mary and her stripper friends soon attempt revenge on the gangsters. The sad thing is that Millington, by then the prime porn star of England, looks tired and, soon enough, would be found dead. Her publisher, however, was able to farm her buxom body into two more features, both of which are terrible.

Also, in case you’re wondering, there is no actual blues music to be heard here, but plenty of horrific dance tunes. I guess Queen of the Disco wouldn’t work, though. —Louis Fowler

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Horror

They’re Outside (2020)

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In indie horror’s digital DIY era of today, everyone who wants to make a horror movie can and does. This floods the market with dreck — and because even dreck has a minute’s worth of good parts to craft an appealing-enough trailer and inspire an eyeball-grabbing cover — the market is rewarded with rental dollars from viewers left wanting. They’re Outside offers the opposite experience: File the trailer and poster art under “no great shakes,” but the movie itself is that increasingly elusive, rough-’round-the-edges gem.

Combining folk horror with found footage, the UK film follows pompous YouTube psychologist Max Spencer (Tom Wheatley, Piglet’s Big Movie) and camera-operating girlfriend (Nicole Miners) as they shoot an episode on agoraphobia. This primarily entails traveling to the middle of the woods, where former nursing student Sarah Sanders (Christine Randall, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong) has lived in a little house — and only inside it — for years and years. She’s so terrified to take one step past the threshold, Max assigns himself a 10-day challenge to change that.

Why so scared, Sarah? It all has to do with “Green Eyes” – not the Civil War legend, but folklore nonetheless. As a prologue explains, Green Eyes is rumored to have abducted a child, resulting in a parental mob burning his home, Freddy Krueger-style. As the story goes, he lives in the woods and is identifiable by his wooden mask, cape of leaves and, yes, vacant emerald orbs. Look, glowing eyes in the dark of night is the cheapest kind of scare to make … and when done correctly, as co-directors Sam Casserly and Airell Anthony Hayles have here, ridiculously effective.

Ideally, They’re Outside’s opening card wouldn’t dole out the fate of each main character, but that’s the way of the found-footage film; ultimately, knowing the end does little to hamper enjoyment of the trip there, thanks to Wheatley and Randall’s respective grasps on performing priggish and peevish. For a first feature, Casserly and Hayles do more things right than most, from using subliminal imagery for an extra jolt of creeps to casting Nicholas Vince, Hellraiser’s chattering Cenobite, to deliver the backstory in film-within-a-film exposition. It would be easy to overpraise the movie — and I may have — but these days, “just fine” can be all we ask. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)

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As I watched The Incredible Shrinking Man, I realized how many classic sci-fi movies I haven’t seen, creating a mental wish list that, ironically, doesn’t seem to be shrinking at all. At least I’m off to a good start, as the signifying combo of director Jack Arnold and writer Richard Matheson have crafted the perfect gateway to the outer limits of old-school speculative fiction.

Based on the novel by screenwriter Matheson, everyman Scott (Grant Williams) is subjected to a mysterious cloud while boating with his wife one afternoon; maybe if he hadn’t been too lazy to get his own beer, he wouldn’t have been hit with this glittery dust. But he is, and within a couple of months, his clothes begin shrinking, creating adorable li’l khakis on him.

But his everyday wear is the least of his problems because, as he shrinks more and more, soon he’s living in a dollhouse and fighting a bastardly housecat in one of the most harrowing battles I’ve ever seen. Of course, I say that and, a few minutes later, he’s trapped in the basement fighting off a fucking spider with a sewing needle — yikes!

Complete with a truly metaphysical ending I think no one in their right mind was expecting — especially in 1957 — Arnold has crafted a thinking man’s science-fiction film that truly turns everyday household objects — and household creatures — into apocalyptic struggles of survival, ones that might prove a prick of irritancy to me but a visage of destruction to Scott.

And Pat Kramer, but at least she had that gorilla. —Louis Fowler

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Reading Material

Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It

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I’ve been a fan of Jason Bailey’s work for several years. To tie me over waiting for his next “real” book, I bought both of his self-published books — extended essays, really; physically thin, figuratively meaty — on Richard Pryor and private-eye pictures of the 1970s — sight unseen.

Now, Fun City Cinema: New York City and the Movies That Made It is finally here! Bailey’s such a terrific writer, the book’s magnificence is a foregone conclusion. But upon its arrival, when I opened the book to a random page, only to find my second-favorite film in history, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, staring back from a dedicated spread, I have to acknowledge this may have been destined in the stars.

Hyperbole? Yes and no. This book couldn’t, wouldn’t exist if NYC were “just” a city; it’s an icon. As Frank Sinatra crooned, if you can make it there, you can make it practically anywhere. When it comes to capturing the city that never sleeps on celluloid, however, you must make it there. (Just ask Rumble in the Bronx, the Jackie Chan actioner actually shot in Vancouver, as the Canadian mountain skyline fails to disguise.)

The movies Fun City Cinema examines and celebrates employ New York City as not merely a setting, but a supporting character. Would Taxi Driver feel as threatening in Dallas? Would the grandeur of Gershwin translate if Manhattan were, say, Boston? Would the suspense of Dog Day Afternoon tick with such piercing intensity if the bank stood in Boise?

All three questions are rhetorical; you didn’t need to be told that. But maybe you don’t know how Bailey goes about managing about 100 years worth of material. Starting with the 1920s, he provides an alarmingly cogent essay of how each decade’s movies reflect the Big Apple at that moment in time — and in grime and in crime, economically, politically, sexually — weaving reality and fiction like an expert tailor.

While he’s picked one film as the encapsulation of the city’s era to front each chapter (not always the title you’d expect), dozens upon dozens of others are recruited to complete the full picture: big and small, commercial and indie, beloved and unknown, Criterion and not Criterion — nary a one is shoehorned in to check a box or fulfill some fan obligations. Not even cult items like Maniac Cop, which other authors would dismiss outright; each serves a purpose.

Like the aforementioned placement of After Hours, a select few films earn end-of-chapter honors for dedicated two-page looks. While this is where you’ll find such top-of-minders as Ghostbusters and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, you’ll also be wowed by some real left-turn choices, from Ramin Bahrani’s Man Push Cart and Claudia Weill’s Girlfriends to Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence. (While I’m slinging plaudits, let me point out if you haven’t heard The Projection Booth podcast’s interview with an irritated and irascible Baron on Blast of Silence, you simply must. It’s all kinds of awkward and hysterical.)

If Bailey’s words alone didn’t already make Fun City Cinema the essential book on New York Movies and the Movies That Made It, the exquisite design work of Eli Mock would push it over the edge. Abrams, the publisher, could have let this project be a “coffee table book,” where the text is secondary to imagery, included to be skimmed if read at all. That’s not the case here; they complement one another to form an irresistible whole. (Intentional or not, Mock’s choice to use sans-serif text for body copy reminds me of the signage for the arterial subway system.) This isn’t one you’ll want to leave on any coffee table, lest it encounters a spilled cup — greatest in the world or otherwise. —Rod Lott

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Sex

Crazy Nights (1978)

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As the story surrounding Crazy Nights goes, French sex symbol/disco queen Amanda Lear thought she was shooting a documentary about herself. Instead, she was tricked into hosting a mondo movie of most prurient interests.

Why was she targeted? Her ideal last name notwithstanding, one guesses Lear represented the perfect mix of naïveté, narcissism and affordability. How strange to think a director as upstanding Joe D’Amato (Deep Blood) would engage in such chicanery when just a year before, he advanced the art of cinema by filming a woman masturbating a horse. Ethics? Neigh.

The finished product — Crazy Nights, not a wrist coated with stallion semen — is a look at either “sordid pleasures from around the world” or “the wild, wicked world of night.” Take your pick; either way, its bits are obviously staged and embarrassing enough for Lear to bring legal action — an act that earned the picture scads more attention than it deserves, then and now.

After a cape-clad Lear performs her hit song “Follow Me,” we’re supposed to do just that, and believe me when I say strap in, because the ride will be bumpy. By definition, mondo movies are supposed to be weird, but when Tokyo frickin’ Japan is the site of the most “normal” activity of all — a woman and man bite strips of newspaper from the other’s unclothed body — you know something is seriously off. Mondon’t.

Our globetrotting tour of kink, mink and stink begins at a Vegas stage show, where one lucky audience member is bamboozled into fucking a goat. Next, in an underground cavern located in a country I didn’t catch (like it matters), a couple copulates atop an altar, prompting the men watching to hike their numbered black robes up just enough to form a human millipede. Much later, a ballerina act in Stockholm proves to viewers once and for all that, by gum, blue is the warmest color.

An S&M hotel in Berlin affords an unclothed elderly man his fantasy of getting nailed. Oh, I don’t mean intercourse — I mean a woman in leather hammers a metal spike into his genitals. (To each his own, recht?)

Meanwhile, in Beirut, a witch demonstrates her ability to levitate things: first, a toupee (yes, of course the string is visible); then, penises. Move over, Peter Popoff!

Do you like magic? Wait, don’t answer yet! A magician in Marseille produces live doves, colored hankies and more — all from the vagina of his assistant. Okay, now answer.

I have neither the wherewithal nor fortitude to talk about the panther, the suspenders, the gender-switcheroo box, the necrophile or the excruciatingly explicit blowjob. I will tell you that Lear appears in between segments to show off her property. Finally, in a gold jumpsuit and on a motorcycle, she returns at the end to sing another hit, “Enigma (Give a Bit of Mmh to Me).” Then, as the credits roll, she tries on wigs. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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