El Topo (1970) & The Holy Mountain (1973)

          Although the word “visionary” is often used by lazy critics to describe filmmakers with distinctive visual styles, to my way of thinking, a true cinematic visionary is someone who creates worlds that have never existed before. Based on the evidence of his two most famous films, Chilean provocateur Alejandro Jodorowsky meets the criteria, because El Topo and The Holy Mountain explode with images and situations and themes that can’t be found anywhere else. The question, of course, is whether there’s any compelling reason besides curiosity to visit Jodorowsky’s universe.
          With regard to El Topo, it’s easier to answer in the affirmative, because the movie offers a strange theological meditation on familiar gunslinger iconography, blending counterculture-era philosophy with old-fashioned signifiers to create something new. Although El Topo is overwrought and silly and violent and ugly, it’s also inquisitive and passionate—which might explain why the picture was one of the earliest hits on the so-called “midnight movie” circuit. Yet Jodorowsky’s foll0w-up, The Holy Mountain, is too much of a not-so-good thing. Despite containing several mesmerizingly strange scenes, The Holy Mountain is so grotesque and pretentious that its power to shock wanes. After listening to someone scream for a long time, the noise isn’t startling anymore; it’s just irritating. Nonetheless, it’s likely that some fans consider these two movies among the highest accomplishments in cinematic history, because for all of their faults, El Topo and The Holy Mountain are the products of a unique mind.

          The opening scene of El Topo sets the bizarre mood. Black-glad gunfighter El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) rides a horse through a desert, holding an umbrella as his naked preteen son clutches his abdomen. El Topo dismounts, then tells the boy to bury his first toy and a photo of his mother in the sand, symbolically ending his childhood. Next, El Topo encounters a village whose inhabitants have been slaughtered. The streets are red with rivers of blood, and humans and livestock lie everywhere, some with innards sprawling out of massive wounds. Still dragging his naked son everywhere, El Topo vows revenge, then finds and castrates the man responsible for the slaughter; the villain subsequently kills himself rather than face life emasculated.
          Soon El Topo abandons his son (“Destroy me! Depend on no one!”), venturing off with one of the villain’s concubines to battle several of the world’s best fighters, each of whom teaches El Topo a philosophical or religious idea. Jodorowsky stages all of these odd scenes with artistry, composing striking frames and utilizing elaborate design to give each vignette its own outlandish flavor. Concepts flow freely throughout El Topo, at the cost of telling a compelling story. By the time El Topo transitions to a second passage, leaving the gunslinger storyline beside for obtuse material involving deformed people and religious frenzy, the movie has drifted into the ether.

          Still, El Topo is downright grounded compared to The Holy Mountain. The threadbare narrative of The Holy Mountain involves a religious allegory about a thief who resembles Jesus going through phases of spiritual enlightenment, eventually gaining such offbeat followers as a chimpanzee and a prostitute. Those watching The Holy Mountain closely will find ample fodder for interpretation, because Jodorowsky fills the movie with overt allusions to spiritual tenets; accordingly, The Holy Mountain is full to bursting with symbolism. Still, it’s hard to take Jodorowsky entirely seriously as a guru wearing the mask of a storyteller. The scene of the thief raging through a factory that makes Christ statues hammers the false-idols note a bit too obviously. The scene in which frogs race around a miniature castle wearing tiny knight costumes—until unseen incendiary devices cause the frogs to explode in slow-motion gore—feels needlessly cruel.

          And then there’s the sex machine.
          In one sequence, Jodorowsky outdoes himself from a design perspective by revealing an elaborate mechanical device meant to represent human sexual function in an art-installation context. A woman approaches the machine, strips half-naked, picks up a giant phallic object, and jabs the machine’s g-spot until the machine ejaculates a geyser of nasty-looking fluid. And we haven’t even gotten to the scene of the thief/messiah sitting on a glass bowl and filling it with excrement that an alchemist (again played by Jodorowsky) transforms into gold. Or the knife fight between the thief/messiah and a robed holy man in a giant chamber painted to resemble the inside of a rainbow.

          Jodoroskwy reportedly experimented with everything from LSD to mushrooms to sleep deprivation to yoga in order to access the transcendental plane while preparing The Holy Mountain, and it shows. For those who venture headlong into the cerebral wilderness with Jodorowsky, the movie is undoubtedly a bracing experience. For those of us rooted on terra firma, the movie—even more than El Topo—is alternately dull, grotesque, offensive, and ridiculous. Like El Topo, however, The Holy Mountain is never the least bit ordinary.

El Topo: FREAKY

The Holy Mountain: FREAKY

An American Hippie in Israel (1972)

          Incredibly, the canon of ’70s cult movies continues to grow, because every so often some enterprising soul rediscovers a “lost” cinematic oddity and unleashes the thing upon an unsuspecting public. Such is the case with the deeply strange An American Hippie in Israel, which was produced by an Israeli film company in the early ’70s, discarded, and then revived in the 2010s for DVD release and the midnight-movie circuit. An American Hippie in Israel ticks nearly all the boxes required for cult-flick status: dialogue so ridiculous that it’s immediately quotable; a nonsensical story told with great intensity, as if the filmmakers thought they were making something profound; actors who seem to exist outside the normal spectrum of human experience; rebellious themes about the challenges faced by boundary-pushing individuals; and a steady stream of verbal and visual non sequiturs. In sum, An American Hippie in Israel unfolds like a drug experience, with self-contained pockets of weirdness passing through the frame, to the accompaniment of painfully earnest lyrics repeated ad nauseam on the soundtrack by twee folksingers.

          The movie opens with Mike (Asher Tzarfati) sitting on a plane as it heads for Israel. Barefoot and wearing a squat hat, scruffy facial hair, a fur vest, and dirty jeans, he’s a foreigner’s slightly skewed vision of a hippie. Immediately upon arrival in Israel, Mike hooks up with redhead Elizabeth (Lily Avidan), who offers him a ride in her car. Then another vehicle blocks their path, and two men emerge, both dressed like old-time gangsters and wearing weird Kabuki makeup on their faces. Mike berates the men into withdrawing, and then says to Elizabeth, “I think they want my life.” “But why,” she asks. “That’s exactly what I don’t understand,” he replies. And so the die is cast, because An American Hippie in Israel is all about peculiar shit happening without explanation. Despite having just seen that Mike is a target for dangerous-looking men, Elizabeth sleeps with him—instantly becoming a hippie herself—and then abandons her home and job in order to wander the countryside with her new lover.

          During a wordless montage set to overbearing music, Mike and Elizabeth meet Israeli hippies Françoise (Tzila Karney) and Komo (Shmuel Wolf), who take Mike back to their beachfront commune as if he’s some counterculture messiah. After a concert thrown in his honor, Mike delivers a whopper of a speech: “You’re just beautiful people. Man, I assume that our outlook in life is the same, and that’s why we lead the same kind of life. Because that’s how we want to live. All this is good for us. We’re still living in an environment that strangles us. That’s why we’re not really living the way we want to live, and the way we really could live. And I mean an absolute free life in an absolutely isolated place far away from this civilization and culture of violence. Therefore, men, let’s get organized, and find a place in which we can live as we see fit—without clothes, without governments, and without borders. Got it?”

          Naturally, the hippies respond by shouting “Yeah!” and then commencing an orgy—until the weird gangster guys show up with machine guns and kill everyone in the commune except Elizabeth, Françoise, Komo, and Mike. Their reaction? Casually leaving a roomful of corpses and hitting the road in their quest for a place to be “free.” Free from what, you ask? That’s anybody’s guess. Unbelievably, the movie gets even weirder after that point, devolving into a Lord of the Flies-type story about characters turning on each other in the wilderness—because the hippies encamp themselves on a tiny island surrounded by killer sharks. All the while, the scolding Greek-chorus folksingers warn us that “someday they’ll have to pay for taking time to play.”

          An American Hippie in Israel arguably reaches its apex/nadir with a long scene of Mike and Komo “discussing” possible solutions to the shark problem—Komo, who doesn’t speak English, keeps rambling in Hebrew while Mike, who doesn’t speak Hebrew, repeatedly says “I can’t get you” as he spirals into pointless anger against his friend. Indeed, every scene in American Hippie in Israel is stunningly confusing or repetitive or stupid, if not all three, so that’s why, when viewed from a certain ironic perspective, the movie is magical in its awfulness.

An American Hippie in Israel: FREAKY

Desperate Living (1977)

          With his fifth feature, trash auteur John Waters came close to a perfect synthesis of irreverent comedy, rebellious attitude, and vulgar excess. Like most of his early efforts, however, the movie has too much shock-value material for its own good. Everything is pitched so loudly, in terms of disgusting visuals and histrionic acting and vile behavior, that Desperate Living becomes monotonous despite its upbeat tone. And while nothing in Desperate Living surpasses the apex of Waters’ onscreen grotesquerie (that would be the indelible image of enormous drag queen Divine eating real dog feces in Waters’ 1972 opus Pink Flamingos), it’s not as if Desperate Living wants for transgressive signifiers.

          In no particular order, the movie features a babysitter who stuffs her young charge in a refrigerator; a close-up of an insect crawling out of someone’s rear end; a cop who makes women hand over their underwear so he can put the garments on himself; a disgusting matriarch who uses leather-clad dancing boys for sex slaves; an intercut scene that juxtaposes two energetic cunnilingus sessions (one gay, one straight); countless semi-explicit sex scenes featuring grossly overweight performers; and an incident of self-castration performed with scissors. Compared to everything else with which Waters bombards viewers, the big cannibalism scene at the end is tame. The thing about Waters, of course, is that he conveys such a strong sense of delirious joy while presenting outré images that he rarely seems mean-spirited, especially since the story of Desperate Living—as with most of Waters’ depraved narratives—celebrates freaks and skewers conformists. In fact, when it’s viewed as an over-top metaphor representing the beauty of inclusion and the evil of othering, Desperate Living is oddly inspirational.

          To that end, the movie is constructed like a fairy tale. When the adventure begins, neurotic housewife Peggy Gravel (Mike Stole) enlists her maid/nurse, Grizelda Brown (Jean Hill), for help in killing Peggy’s overbearing husband. Then Peggy and Grizelda escape to Mortville, a remote shantytown inhabited by deviants and weirdos. Ruling over Mortville is the domineering Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey). As Peggy jockeys for position in Carlotta’s court, using insidious means to push likely successor Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce) out of the way, Grizelda joins with the “good” people of Mortville for a rebellion. Meanwhile, lots of screen time is devoted to the exploits of Mole McHenry (Susan Lowe), a bullish lesbian with a face full of sores who pursues a sex-change operation in order to wow her buxom girlfriend, Muffy St. Jacques (Liz Renay). Carnality, crime, and cruelty ensue. Waters, per his norm, exceeds the limits of good taste whenever possible, but he never loses sight of his underdogs-vs.-the-system theme. (It just happens that most of his underdogs are criminally insane.)

          More importantly, Desperate Living has moments of laugh-out-loud absurdity, making it perhaps the most entertaining of Waters’ early films. Consider the moment when Peggy goes ballistic upon receiving a wrong-number call: “How can you ever repay the 30 seconds you have stolen from my life?!! I hate you, your husband, and your relatives!!!” Desperate Living is foul, tacky, and wrong, but that’s why it’s a fitting denouement to the first phase of Waters’ outrageous career—starting with his next picture, the comparatively restrained Polyester (1981), Waters began a steady drift into the mainstream, eventually making a pair of PG-rated studio comedies before inching back into extreme material.

Desperate Living: FREAKY

Pink Flamingos (1972)

          Indie provocateur John Waters’ breakthrough movie, Pink Flamingos, is currently rated NC-17, and the text provided by the MPAA to justify the rating sums up the nature of the film: “For a wide range of perversions in explicit detail.” After directing two no-budget black-and-white features, Waters was ready to make a big noise with his first color feature, so he applied his signature cheerful insouciance to the task of creating the most disgusting characters ever filmed. Accordingly, Pink Flamingos depicts a war between two depraved criminals for the title of “Filthiest Person Alive.”

          The star of the show is, of course, Waters’ singular muse, the 300-pound drag queen Divine, who plays a character named Divine—although the character often travels under the alias “Babs Johnson.” Living in a trailer with her odd family, which includes an adult son and daughter as well as Edie (Edith Massey), an overweight senior who sleeps in a crib and spends every waking hour eating eggs, Divine/Babs finds fulfillment by committing crimes and grotesque acts. For instance, she nearly runs over pedestrians while driving, and she urinates in public like an animal. Meanwhile, Connie Marble (Mink Stole) and her husband, Raymond Marble (David Lochary), lead a similarly revolting lifestyle. They kidnap young women, hold the women hostage in their basement so the women can be impregnated by their servant, Crackers (Danny Mills), and then sell the resulting babies to lesbian couples—using the profits to bankroll their drug operation.

          Even a partial list of taboo acts performed in Pink Flamingos is startling—especially when one considers that only some of the following behavior is simulated. Divine/Babs performs fellatio on her son. A flasher ties sausages to his penis before displaying himself to innocent bystanders. A party guest does a strange puppetry routine involving his sphincter muscle. Revelers kill police officers and eat the bodies. Two people have sex while mutilating chickens. And, in the most notorious scene of Waters’ filmography, Divine/Babs eats dog feces. (As Waters himself proclaims in the exuberant voiceover that precedes the dog scene, “This is a real thing!”)

          Crudely made and deliberately tasteless, Pink Flamingos ventures so far past revulsion that it enters the realm of the surreal—and yet in a (very) strange way, it’s a rather sweet film. Waters’ affection for the weirdo characters (and the brazen performance-artist types portraying them) is contagious, and Waters has an unmistakable flair for comic irony. Scoring a montage of Divine/Babs doing foul things with ambiguously gendered rock star Little Richard’s classic tune “The Girl Can’t Help It” is droll, and it’s hard not to laugh at such stupidly funny lines as, “I guess there’s just two kinds of people, Miss Sandstone—my kind of people and assholes.”

          Which, incidentally, encapsulates the whole perverse joie-de-vivre that drives Waters’ cinematic exploits. In the world of Waters’ movies, freaks are the cool people and straights are the ones who don’t get the joke. That’s a beautiful thought, even if Waters delivers it in Pink Flamingos via some of the ugliest imagery ever captured on film. In other words, if your tolerance for the repugnant is low, give Pink Flamingos a wide berth and content yourself with Waters’ later work, which explores similar thematic material in a less confrontational way. But if you’re eager to prove your mettle by enduring something truly nasty, rest assured Pink Flamingos goes about as far as any movie you’ll ever encounter. Word to the wise, though—don’t eat while you’re watching.

Pink Flamingos: FREAKY

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978)

          If you’ve heard of this cult-favorite comedy, chances are you’ve also heard that it’s considered one of the worst movies ever made. And while Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is indeed quite bad, featuring everything from lifeless acting to ridiculously cheap production values, it’s hard to criticize a picture that was designed to accentuate its own awfulness. After all, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is a spoof of grade-B creature features, and in lieu of a plot, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! features wall-to-wall infantile jokes. As the title explains, this goofy picture imagines a nationwide rampage by vengeful tomatoes (some of which are gigantic), and the special effects used to illustrate this phenomenon are crude in the extreme. During several scenes, actors stand still while tomatoes are lobbed at them by offscreen crew members, and during one bit, a giant mock-up tomato is rolled toward a victim on a wheeled palette that’s visible in the frame. Most of the film depicts the efforts of government officials to prevent the public from panicking, so the picture follows White House Press Secretary Jim Richardson (George Wilson) as he hires an ad man to make PSAs; civilian authority Mason Dixon (David Miller) as he supervises the response of private and public organizations; and idiotic soldier Lt. Wilbur Finletter (J. Stephen Pace) as he plans a military assault.

          The film’s combination of fourth-wall-breaking jokes and musical numbers owes a lot to Mel Brooks, though Brooks on his worst day could easily top this film’s best gags. (How lame are the jokes? When Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! cuts to a shot of the San Francisco skyline, text reading “New York?” appears onscreen.) Plus, suffice to say that none of the musical sequences in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!—even the robustly sung title number—approach the sublime silliness of, say, the “I’m Tired” number in Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974). That said, a fast pace and an upbeat vibe ensure that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! provides a glimmer of amusement every few minutes. So, even though this tomato is closer to rotten than ripe, it’s still basically edible. (To belabor the analogy, however, expect indigestion afterwards.) Unlikely as it may seem, this humble little movie planted the seed for a mini-franchise, because director/co-writer John De Bello returned to the material for three sequels, beginning with Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988), which features a young George Clooney in the cast; additionally, a cartoon series, comic books, a novel, and videogames bearing the Killer Tomatoes brand have been released.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!: FUNKY

Flesh Gordon (1974)

          Although it’s not the out-and-out porn film its reputation might suggest, Flesh Gordon is a cheerfully filthy spoof of the old Flash Gordon movie serials—the picture tries to blend satire with titillation by bombarding viewers with crude jokes, nudity, and sex scenes. The movie is quite awful, of course, but it moves along at a breakneck speed and, in its best moments, approaches an anything-goes party vibe that suggests a low-rent version of the comedy style perfected a few years later by the makers of Airplane! (1980). Obviously, the big difference is that the makers of Airplane! had real actors and a real budget, to say nothing of the fact that the Airplane! team didn’t have to interrupt their movie periodically for lingering close-ups of genitalia.

          The plot of Flesh Gordon is adapted from the first Flash Gordon serial, released in 1938 and starring Buster Crabbe. (Another version of the very same plot was employed for the big-budget Flash Gordon movie released in 1980.) When Earth is bombarded by a sex ray from outer space, which drives victims to uncontrolled lust, dashing adventurer Flesh Gordon (Jason Williams), his new girlfriend Dale Ardor (Suzanne Fields), and kooky scientist Dr. Flexi Jerkoff (Joseph Hudgins) fly into space to find the source of the sex ray and save the Earth. Arriving on the planet Porno, the heroes battle minions of evil Emperor Wang the Perverted (William Dennis Hunt), along the way encountering monsters and other fantastic creatures. This being a sex comedy, those fantastic creatures include the flamboyantly gay prince (Lance Larsen) of a men-in-tights troupe and the Amazonian leader (Candy Samples) of a lesbian cult.

          Ninety-nine percent of the jokes in Flesh Gordon are painfully stupid, the performances are terrible, and the editing is so choppy that some scenes appear as if from nowhere. However, writer/co-director Michael Benveniste and his collaborators cleverly shield themselves from legitimate criticism by framing the movie as a campy goof—the worse the acting gets, the better. Yet some aspects of the picture run perilously close to real filmmaking. For instance, the flick includes several elaborate scenes of stop-motion animation fused with live-action, leading to Harryhausen-style scenes of real actors fighting stop-motion monsters. This stuff is executed fairly well, given the budget constraints.

          That said, the way Flesh Gordon devotes long stretches of screen time to pure adventure would seem sure to infuriate the heavy-breathing crowd more interested in Flesh than Gordon. But then again, that’s why Flesh Gordon is so peculiar—it’s a kiddie movie for pervs. Consider this amusingly infantile chant, delivered by bottomless cheerleaders (!) in Wang’s palace: “Emperor Wang is the one for me—without him, the planet Porno would be ever so forlorn-o.” Or consider the very strange finale, which involves a giant, cloven-hooved monster who chases after the heroes while speaking in smooth, lounge-lizard patter. (Craig T. Nelson, the only familiar actor involved with the project, voices the monster in one of his earliest film performances, though he’s not credited.)

          FYI, there are two versions of Flesh Gordon in circulation. The original 78-minute version carried an X-rating, even though it’s not hardcore, and the 90-minute version available on home video is unrated. In the 90-minute version, the only full-on porn action involves a few extras making out on the periphery of crowd shots. Oh, and one more thing: Howard Ziehm, who co-directed and co-produced Flesh Gordon, resuscitated the character by directing a 1989 sequel, Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders, with an almost entirely new cast. Suffice to say the picture was not well received.

Flesh Gordon: FREAKY

Eraserhead (1977)

          Back in my film-school days, a fellow student who favored experimental cinema encouraged me to watch David Lynch’s directorial debut, Eraserhead, which at that point I knew only by reputation. (This was around the time Lynch was enjoying a vogue thanks to his TV series Twin Peaks.) I took the plunge and watched Lynch’s 90-minute ode to oddness, which explores the world of crazy-haired weirdo Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), who lives in an industrial wasteland with a shrewish female companion and a caterwauling mutant baby. More of an audiovisual experiment than a traditional narrative, the movie is an endurance test for viewers—not only is the film virtually incomprehensible on the level of storytelling, Lynch utilizes so much sickening imagery and thundering noise that it sometimes seems his only goal is inducing nausea.

          Immediately after watching the movie, I was quizzed about my reaction by the Eraserhead fan, and I estimated that about 80% of the movie made sense to me. My friend said that meant I “got” the film, and, indeed, I vaguely recall articulating a fully formed interpretation. Collectively, however, the fact that I can’t remember a single word of what I said, the fact that I’ve never wanted to see the movie again, and the fact that failing to understand the entire movie was considered par for the course indicate how Eraserhead works: It’s like a drug. The movie is such a straight shot of Lynch—replete with his usual tropes of alienation, degradation, mutation, and stylization—that it’s either a sensation you need a fix of every so often, or a sensation you’re content to experience just once.

          There’s no denying the film’s power, because once you’ve seen Lynch’s grainy, black-and-white images of the putrid baby squirming in its crib, ooze glistening all over its misshapen body, you’ll never be able to erase the sight from your memory. Accordingly, Lynch deserves credit for putting his subconscious directly onto the screen; for better or worse, this is auteur filmmaking at its most idiosyncratic and indelible. And, as years of subsequent disturbing movies from this iconoclastic director have demonstrated, it’s not as if Eraserhead represented a juvenile stunt or a weird developmental phase—the man’s first feature is pure Lynch, unencumbered by the dead weight of a plot.

          As Lynch himself remarks in the so-so documentary Great Directors, “Eraserhead is my most spiritual film, but nobody has ever picked up on that.” (Whether that remark was coy or sincere is debatable, since I’ve never been sure how much of Lynch’s persona is a put-on.) Still, whatever the movie’s virtues and/or shortcomings, Eraserhead represents a cinematic artist finding success without compromise.

          Lynch started making the movie while a student at the American Film Institute, acquiring end money from a school grant and from actress Sissy Spacek, the wife of Lynch’s classmate/collaborator Jack Fisk. An adventurous distributor put the movie onto the midnight-movie circuit, where it became a sizable cult hit, earning $7 million despite costing only a reported $20,000. The film’s whacked-out artistry made a deep impression on Hollywood—Mel Brooks, of all people, hired Lynch to make The Elephant Man (1980), and Lynch’s career was off and running.

          So, although it’s deeply unpleasant to watch and although many viewers find it to be a pointless exercise in outré excess, Eraserhead is one of a kind—and that’s why it remains an inspirational touchstone for maverick filmmakers everywhere. Mutant babies of the world, unite!

Eraserhead: FREAKY

Equinox (1970)

          An awful movie that’s probably only of interest to special-effects junkies, Equinox took a peculiar path to the screen. In 1967, college student Dennis Muren spent a reported $6,500 to make a short film titled The Equinox . . . A Journey Into the Supernatural, featuring imaginative stop-motion monsters in the style of Ray Harryhausen. Impressive for an amateur production, the picture caught the eye of distributors, who acquired the film and hired editor-turned-director Jack Woods to shoot additional scenes. The resulting hodgepodge was released in 1970 under the shortened title Equinox, and the movie might have disappeared into obscurity had Muren not achieved fame for his subsequent, Oscar-winning work on Star Wars (1977) and other pictures.

          The narrative of Equinox is a trite contrivance about a quartet of college students heading into the mountains to visit their professor. The kids stumble onto a weird book containing satanic incantations, and an evil policeman named Asmodeus (played by additional-footage director Woods) pursues them because he wants the book. Creature attacks and demonic possessions ensue. Although the effects in Equinox are quite crude—key visuals include a giant blue ape and a flying demon, plus an invisibility-shrouded gateway to another dimension—achieving so much with so little was a noteworthy accomplishment.

          Unfortunately, the acting is atrocious, the continuity is terrible, the camerawork is shaky, and the writing is ghastly, particularly the numbingly obvious dialogue. Equinox isn’t unwatchable, partly because it’s so short (80 minutes) and partly because monsters pop up every so often to keep things lively, but its origins as a student film are painfully evident in every frame. That said, the picture’s in-your-face flaws probably explain why Equinox's 197o release included a trip through the midnight-movie circuit, where viewers often watch bad films ironically. FYI, costar Frank Bonner, billed here as Frank Boers Jr., later found notoriety as oily salesman Herb Tarlek on the cult-favorite 1978-1982 sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati. Inexplicably, Equinox is available on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection, which includes many classics of high-art world cinema.

Equinox: LAME

The Harder They Come (1972)

          One of the few Jamaican-made features to enjoy wide exhibition in the U.S., The Harder They Come fizzled during its initial release and then found a more welcoming audience on the midnight-movie circuit, where the picture’s vibrant soundtrack helped familiarize Americans with reggae music. In fact, iconic reggae star Jimmy Cliff won international notoriety by playing the film’s leading role. Based on the real-life exploits of a poor Jamaican who became an anti-establishment folk hero, The Harder They Come takes place in the 1950s, when Ivan Martin (Cliff) travels from rural Jamaica to the big city in search of work. Eventually, he starts earning room and board as a handyman for a moralistic preacher (Basil Keane). Ivan falls in love with a young woman (Janet Bartley) who sings in the preacher’s choir, and then gets into trouble with the law while pursuing his real dream of becoming a reggae singer.

          After many false starts, Jamaican music-industry kingpin Jose (Carl Bradshaw) agrees to a recording session with Ivan, and the session is the most thrilling scene in the movie: Cliff gives a heroic performance of his song “The Harder They Come,” an upbeat anthem for the disenfranchised. After the session, Jose pressures Ivan into signing away the rights to the song, forcing Ivan to look elsewhere for income. He ends up becoming a small-time pot dealer, so at the same time his song is dominating the island’s airwaves, Ivan must avoid capture by authorities. Reflecting the movie’s real-life inspiration, Ivan transforms into a rebel hero for the impoverished people of Jamaica.

          Directed and co-written by Jamaican native Perry Henzell (whose only other film project was the feature No Place Like Home, which he started in the ’70s but didn’t complete until 2006), The Harder They Come is quite poorly made, suffering from murky cinematography and sloppy editing. The cast’s thick Jamaican accents also make deciphering dialogue tricky. However, there’s a reason the picture kept midnight-movie viewers coming back for more: The picture has infectious energy, riffing on the romantic theme of a man pushed to criminality by an unfair society, and Cliff is appealing despite lacking any real skill as an actor. More importantly, the music kills, from the title tune to Cliff’s soaring ballad “Many Rivers to Cross” to the handful of songs by other artists used as background music.

The Harder They Come: FUNKY

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Its status as the ultimate midnight movie unassailable, Rocky Horror has become critic-proof by this point, because people who love this campy musical and its accompanying audience-participation circus couldn’t care less whether the film meets anyone’s standard of “quality cinema.” Seen with the right crowd, Rocky Horror is a blast, because exuberant fans in fishnets cavort onstage while toast flies through the theater and everyone interacts with the movie’s dialogue. Seen without a crowd at all, the movie loses much of its appeal, if not its debauched singularity. The insipid story, which writer-costar Richard O’Brien and director-cowriter Jim Sharman transposed from O’Brien’s stage musical, is a pervy mash-up of horror-flick clichés, replacing the usual mad scientist with Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a “sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania.” (That’s the planet Transylvania, of course.) The songs are fun, especially the irresistible “Time Warp,” but the jokes are groaners and the wink-wink “we know we’re in a bad movie” vibe gets tiresome. Still, enthusiastic performances abound. Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon play Brad and Janet, white-bread paramours who fall into Frank-N-Furter’s lascivious clutches, and both actors vigorously sell the movie’s gimmicks. Sarandon also looks amazing, spending much of the picture in various states of undress. Meat Loaf sings the hell out of his small role as Eddie, an unlucky biker, and Charles Gray is droll as the movie’s caustic narrator. But it’s really Tim Curry’s movie, because he’s outrageous as Frank-N-Furter. A drag queen with bulging eyes and an overripe libido, Frank-N-Furter might be cinema’s most cheerfully obscene character. So while Rocky Horror may not be “quality cinema,” it delivers enough demented pleasure that it’s worth seeing at least once—especially with diehard fans who know the movie’s raunchy routines by heart.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: FREAKY