Black Sabbath—“All Good Bands Should Be Named After Movies Where People Died” (and some other reviews, mainly documentaries about the Iraq War)

The fab Final Girl herself is having another Movie Club blog-a-thon, and this time it’s about the Mario Bava-directed horror anthology Black Sabbath (1963).

Starring Boris Karloff (always a plus!), Black Sabbath is a pretty good flick—not as good as Bava’s Black Sunday, but (and this may be a caveat) as a member of the mid-1960s-to-early-1970s horror movie anthology sub-genre (which includes
Asylum,
Dr. Terror's House of Horrors and
The House That Dripped Blood (I love that title!)),
Black Sabbath is one of the best.

But I think
The major reason the movie is remembered is because of the band.

And if all you outraged horror movie nerds who are getting ready to lynch me in effigy stop and think about what the general population considers, you know I’m right.
If you did a Heavy-Metal Parking Lot-style Q&A, most would assume Black Sabbath to be a completely satanic name, in no way related to the movies.
I think a lot of heavy metal fans might be amused to find out that there was even a movie called Black Sabbath!


And how did the band adopt the name Black Sabbath?
The band got its name from the Boris Karloff flick—

This is from the lips of The Mighty Ozzy:

In August 1969:
“Right across the road from our rehearsal room was a cinema that showed mainly horror movies.
One day I thought that it seemed strange that a lot of people spend so much money to see scary movies.
Nobody really wanted to listen to us, so we decided to play slightly scary music.
We liked it and, yeah, that's how it all got started.
That's the story of Black Sabbath.”

If you’re wondering, Ivanlandia’s fave Black Sabbath album is Sabotage.




Big
Black
Sabbath—

Time for an aside:
When I went to see Big Black at the Cat Club on August 6, 1987, during the band’s final tour—
And yes, Big Black was awesome that night—whatever band I’ve seen Big Black frontman Steve Albini perform with, including Rapeman or Shellac, it has always delivered the goods (sure, some shows are always better than others, but there’s a level of quality and professionalism—and let’s not forget fun!—to his gigs that others can’t come close to).

So when Albini introduced opening act The Honeymoon Killers, he said something I’ve never forgotten:
“All good bands should be named after movies where people die.”



Hmmm…I wonder who would be on that list of bands named after movies where people died?
Well, we’ve already discussed Black Sabbath….
Then there’s:

Unsane
(which was the grindhouse retitling of Argento’s Tenebrae)

White Zombie

My Bloody Valentine
Unfortunately, I’ve been dragging my heels about seeing the new My Bloody Valentine 3-D, but more out of lack of funds and scheduling mishaps than anything else. But I thoroughly intend to rent the re-release/unedited DVD of the 1981 My Bloody Valentine when I get the chance. I really need to see what caused Kevin Shields to name his band after that movie—or was it just because of the title?
I know that Mudhoney (see below) named themselves after the movie without ever seeing it.

BTW, jeez, My Bloody Valentine used to be my favorite band for a while—I even saw them live twice—so many guitar pedals!

The Honeymoon Killers

Rodan
(Just because it’s a phony rubber monster doesn’t mean that millions of human beings aren’t being crushed beneath its feet)

Mudhoney

Killdozer (TV movies are okay)

The Candy Snatchers

Destroy All Monsters



Some more bands named after movies where people died—
These are from Toestubber:

The Highlander Twos
The Brood
The Thing (NY)
The Spider Babies
Faster Pussycat

Toestubs sez:
“I think the name Pussy Galore was taken from the Bond character. The porn paperback Teen Pussy Power became one of their songs.”

From Ivanlandia Loyalist & Follower Dean R.:
“Pussy Galore was the name of a character in a James Bond film.
I think you can use that.
If so, Duran Duran can be used, too.
As well
as Boss Hog.”

Blood Sucking Freaks
The Gore Gore Girls
The Corpse Grinders

Some more:
The 400 Blows
Stray Dogs
Spider Baby
Freaks
Soilent Green (spelled incorrectly on purpose)
Susperia (ditto)
Begotten
Six Feet Under

Trick Babys (I know there was a movie of this, but I think the band is taking this straight from the title of Iceberg Slim’s novel)

Leviathan

Dean says, “I know there's hundreds more - probably all death/black metal bands.”

If you, dear reader, know of any more bands named after movies where people died, please let us know—leave a comment!

Since we’re on the subject of
Heavy Metal, let’s review the documentary

Heavy Metal in Baghdad (2007)
Directed and produced by Eddy Moretti & Suroosh Alvi

Watch “Heavy Metal Parking Lot” and then Heavy Metal in Baghdad, and you will feel guilty about everything.

While the actual film of Heavy Metal in Baghdad would only get three out of five stars (the flick seems to either need greater depth or some trimming), the entire disc (film and supplemental materials) is absolutely 4/5 stars.

Altogether, it is a richly detailed story about the four kids of the band Acrassicauda who just want to rock out—
in possibly one of the deadliest places in the world.
This so-called “non-professional” documentary has shown me a facet of life in Iraq I had never seen anywhere else.

Since we’re talking about Iraq, here’s another documentary about the conflict there:

Baghdad ER (2006)
Directed and produced by Jon Alpert & Matthew O’Neill

If you don’t think U.S. veterans don’t deserve their medical benefits, after watching Baghdad ER, you will change your mind.

What this documentary sacrifices in depth (we learn little of the lives of the doctors in the ER; the one person we see the most is the chaplain, and often he’s delivering the last rites), it makes up for in intensity:
I don’t know what programming decisions made this doc only an hour long, but it’s grueling enough as it is.

We’re visiting a hard-core trauma unit in a combat zone, and it’s not for the squeamish. If this film were any longer, audiences would have been crushed and in tears most likely.

(And more people need to see stuff like this—I seek it out because I have friends and family over in the war zone, and I want to know what’s happening! Do people not care? Has America forgotten that there’s a war going on? WTF?!?)

And here’s a docu about the war in general:

Full Battle Rattle (2008)
Directed and produced by Tony Gerber & Jesse Moss

Boot camp meets method acting meets the biggest game of laser-tag in the Army’s desert training center where a portion of Iraq has been recreated, complete with Iraqi refugees playing the civilians.

Full Battle Rattle doesn’t simplify the issues of the Iraq conflict, and maintains a surprising neutrality—
but the scenario of the flick is so weird, that weighing the flick down with a political agenda would really work against it.

This very good serio-comic documentary follows a brigade as it goes through training at the desert base, and as a viewer, I felt an strange feeling of disassociation:
the fake town, the preplanned wound cards, the gamers “programming” the training from back at HQ, the “method” acting that soldiers and civilians are encouraged to pursue, it all made me feel like I was watching a sci-fi movie, maybe based on a story by J.G. Ballard or Philip K. Dick.
Definitely worth a look.

Meanwhile,
Full Battle Rattle would be an interesting double feature with either Punishment Park or The Hurt Locker.

(And if you haven’t seen Punishment Park, you must, you simply must! It’s probably one of the most intense and brutal agitprop flicks made in the early-1970s: real angry stuff!)

Okay, let’s get back to un-real-world horror anthologies:

The first two seasons of Rod Serling’s
Night Gallery (1970-1973)
were made available on DVD in 2008 and 2009—
Although hardly perfect overall, there are enough superlative segments, where good writing and acting come together perfectly with the macabre, to make Night Gallery (or at least a disc or two) worth a rental—especially if you’re a fan of Rod Serling and his works.

Sure, the show suffers from all the drawbacks that impacted early-1970s TV shows (especially anthology series like this one):
low budgets, lackluster camerawork, miscasting and so on.

But as director Guillermo Del Toro says on one of his commentary tracks (his only connection to Night Gallery is that he’s a famous fan), while the show is flawed, when it’s “firing on all cylinders, it’s great.”

Some of the segments, like “The Messiah on Mott Street” (with a heartfelt performance by the great Edward G. Robinson as a man arguing with Death on Christmas Eve,
and a cameo by Yaphet Kotto, who’s so very natural and at ease that it doesn’t seem like he’s acting),
or “The Caterpillar” (when a murder plot backfires horribly—it’s the “bug in the ear” plot done awesome, helped by Laurence Harvey’s sweaty performance),
or “Pickman’s Model” (one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most well known stories—“That’s not a drawing, it’s a PHOTOGRAPH!”)
deserve to be discovered by new audiences.



Personally, I think Night Gallery’s second season is much better (and definitely weirder) than the first season, perhaps due to the wider range of supernatural stories adapted, including several from authors like H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth and Robert Bloch.

Meanwhile, nostalgia buffs will get a kick out of the parade of familiar faces here, like a
Love Boat of the Damned, or
Death American Style:
It’s an incredible cast, from acting giants like Laurence Harvey and Geraldine Page, to camp figures like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Marty Allen and Bobby Darin, and cult figures like Barbara Steele, James Gregory and Severn Darden.

BTW I love Night Gallery’s opening credits and music.

Francis Bacon’s Starship Troopers (The 47th Minute Project Number Six!)

Touchdown! Yay team! Go 47!
Rock ’em to the east
Rock ’em to the west
Everybody knows
The 47th Minute Project is the best!
Gooooooooooooooooo Ivanlandia! Yay!
(and the crowd roars)


The Latest Installment of the 47th Minute Project

Enough editorializing!
Let’s start the next contest of
The 47th Minute Project—

(The rules are simple—I post the 47 minute—and since video cycles at 30 frames-per-second, I try and catch the cycle at the beginning of when the DVD counter reads “47:00”—and you try and guess, posting in the comments section—and I apologize to everyone who tries to post and the weirdness of feuding software systems makes us just that more disconnected with each other, but what can I say? Bill Gates laughs at my pain while eating caviar on his private train):

If you can't identity the 47th Minute of this movie below…
I’m giving up.



Please leave your answers in the comments section below—

As for the last entry’s three different 47th minutes—



This was the 47th Minute of the movie
H.O.T.S.,
which I should have screened by
The National Film Board of Ivanlandia
just to have an opinion
because I did originally post this image in, what? June 2009? Jeez, that’s plenty of time.

But I haven’t screened H.O.T.S.
I’ve been busy, okay?
But I was willing to put up a pic,
for good Darius,
and besides,
I had to watch Don Siegel’s recently-released to DVD The Lineup instead.
There it is. I’m a loser.

Several people recognized this as the 47th minute of Sunset Blvd., absolutely one of the greatest films ever made; we will hear no criticism of the film (okay, maybe some, but you have to admit, the great stuff outshines any potential weaknesses the flick may have).

Our friend Toestubber once wrote of Sunset Blvd.:

Great music, one-of-a-kind cameos, shockingly great performances in the service of a brilliant, biting script.

The hardcore humanism in its complicated characters, to me, contradicts the misguided "camp" label that people often slap on this classic picture.

Modern fans of the mystery genre looking for an offbeat, dark, psychologically rich drama should definitely check it out.

If Old Hollywood had to die, it couldn't have asked for a more enduring tombstone.
Sunset Blvd. is as perfect as a movie can be.

One thing I noticed the last time I watched Sunset Boulevard I noticed something in Norma’s sunglasses…

Yes, Miss Desmond, it is time for your close-up…

Why, what have we here?
Look, there’s the crew! Hi, Mr. Wilder!
I think Kiss Me Stupid is great!
(Yes, I know: Kiss Me Stupid was made way after Sunset Blvd. So sue me.)

And this? Ahhhh, my ace in the hole:
I doubted anyone could guess it.

It is the 47th minute of Starship Troopers (1997)
—from “the meteor almost crashes into Carmen’s ship scene.”

About a nano-second earlier, her stunt double’s hand smashed the glass around the SHINY RED BUTTON to, you know, power up and save the ship.

My opinions of Starship Troopers is that it is a brilliant subtle joke, and that most people don’t get jokes unless they’re hit over the head or broadly winked at.

If the flick had ended with a reveal that the movie we’ve just watched was actually a movie being watched by another audience,
like a bunch of troopers at a PX,that this is a propaganda flick—
that this is the movie Star Wars would have been if
INSERT NAME OF FAVORITE DICTATOR HERE
had won the war (hot or cold)—
then I think mainstream critics might have gotten it.

But then the flick would be obvious.

Yes, I think that the gorehound’s delight/splatterpunk’s fever dream that is Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is a subtle movie.

The movie is then the “degenerate” art that a society like the one in the film would probably disapprove of.

Speaking of which….

And when you watch Starship Troopers frame-by-frame, you often wind up with some of Francis Bacon’s paintings (see above).




Francis Bacon (1909-1992) is a brilliant artist, and a master of the macabre.

I first learned about the late born-in-Ireland/worked-in-England painter through my obsession with Ridley Scott’s Alien.

Like a lot of other nerds, after seeing the 1979 sci-fi/horror masterpiece (screened at the Avalon Theatre on Kings Highway in Brooklyn),
I picked up
The Book of Alien: an incredible find for a young geek in 1980—
it was a beautifully organized “making of”/behind the scenes collection—
dealing mainly with production design
(lots of illos by Giger and Ron Cobb;
not so much about post-production or scoring),
and I really hope I still have it somewhere,
either in storage or at my mom’s place….

And speaking of Alien:
In early December, Dan O’Bannon died. Crap.

For those who don’t know, O’Bannon is credited as sole screenwriter of Alien, from a story he wrote with Ronald Shusett.

Reportedly, producers (and screenwriters themselves) Walter Hill (an Ivanlandia fave and a vastly underrated filmmaker) and David Giler extensively rewrote O’Bannon’s script (the “Ash is an android” subplot is one of Hill/Giler’s contributions, I’ve been told), but that WGA arbitration gave O’Bannon sole screenwriter credit.

This may be because Hill & Giler were trying to take sole writers credit, and stiff O’Bannon with a “story by” credit—
and while they really did revamp the first script, if you compare versions, much of O’Bannon’s original stuff is there.
I guess nobody wanted a three-way credit, like “Written by Dan O’Bannon, Walter Hill and David Giler.”

Since then, the late writer receives credits on all the subsequent films in the Alien franchise, usually a “based on characters created by.”

Whatever the writers’ credits hoo-hah Alien went through,
O’Bannon deserves heaps of credit for contributing to the American horror/sci-fi landscape, for not only Alien, but Dark Star and Return of the Living Dead
(and Lifeforce has its supporters, that’s for sure, it definitely has a cult following),
as well as Blue Thunder and several other flicks, which, while they may not be of the highest quality, are all entertaining.

And speaking of death:
If the flags weren’t at half-mast at Pomona College for alum, 1998 honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree recipient and brother of the Alpha Gamma Sigma fraternity Roy E. Disney, then they should have been.

While Ivanlandia may time and again mock the products of the Haus of Mouse, The National Film Board of Ivanlandia LOVES animation, and so did Roy.
He was a big supporter of the CalArts animation program, and he fought hard against the corporate bean counters in the 1980s to keep the studio’s animation wing alive.

So, getting back to Francis Bacon:

Some initial production designs for the monster from Alien were inspired/copied from some of Bacon’s paintings.
Or at least that’s what The Book of Alien said.

So then I searched out Bacon’s art.

I’m really kicking myself hard for missing the last summer’s Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But as I said, when you freeze-frame Starship Troopers, you get yourself a variety of potential Francis Bacon paintings.

I’ve picked a smattering of his paintings, and variety of framegrabs—personally, I like the way the shots off the TV screen are extra-grungy, like 16mm film footage blown up to 35mm—and mixed them up.

Compare and contrast.
Essays should be between 50 and 200 words.
Submit to comments section.


Three Studies for a Crucifixion, (1962)



Head VI (1949)




Painting (1946)





Head I (1947-48)




Portrait of George Dyer Talking (1962)



I still haven’t seen Starship Troopers 2—most people seem to hate it, but Friend Of Ivanlandia and Ambassador from Irish Bronx, Ed S., says there are some good qualities in it.
But we still haven’t seen it. And unless it’s on TV, we might not. We’re willing to watch it—if it’s put on a silver platter before us—
but not at the expense of other, probably better DVDs.

However, If you like the sick, cynical tone of the first Starship Troopers, you should like
Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (2008).

The tonal similarities are probably due to Starship Troopers (and RoboCop) co-screenwriter Ed Neumeier’s promotion to writer-director in Starship Troopers 3: Marauder (ST3:M).

It’s a terrific and satirical B-movie/genre flick that really captures the crazy, resourceful and sometimes transgressive low-budget spirit of Roger Corman’s New World productions and Charles Band’s films from the 1980s.

Some of ST3:M’s effects aren’t up to snuff compared to the first film, and there isn’t enough gore (IMO), but the flick overflows with ideas – often controversial ones –
and that’s a rarity in today’s sci-fi action films.

The Federation is first shown using pop music to keep the populace fired up, and then finding that religion is even better for mind control.

Meanwhile, the flick goes the distance and finally presents Heinlein’s trooper suits as they were described in his novel (yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a nerd): armed-to-the-teeth armored robotic exoskeletons—that, while the CGI may not be as up to snuff with something over-budgeted and pretentious like Avatar’s, still deliver the excitement and thrills.

There’s a new H.P. Lovecraft-inspired super-brain-bug that I found wonderful as a concept, and its effects were executed with as much aplomb as possible—I got it, and any movie-viewer who can still suspend disbelief (remember when everything on screen wasn’t more real than real?) will get it, too.
(That’s why I think ST3:M is similar to Corman and Band’s flicks: heavy on ideas and action, and brought together with dime-store ingenuity.)

And I’ll admit to a weird fascination with fembot/cyborg-love-doll Jolene Blalock and her pneumatic lips—yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m a nerd and I still live in my mom’s basement.
Fuck you.

Back to the movie:
If ST3:M was not some direct-to-DVD B-movie exploitation flick, it’s doubtful it would have been allowed to even broach the subject of religion in the movie’s fascistic future.

And I’m sure some folks are annoyed by the flick’s thinly veiled references to the Iraq War and the resulting protests at home, but ST3:M never states that the bugs are interested in peace and cohabitation:
they want us dead and won’t stop until it’s done.

In its (weird and sick) examination of what the Federation is doing about the bugs, ST3:M is more inventive and less shrill or preachy than most “serious dramas” about the Iraq conflict (with the exception of The Hurt Locker, which succeeds by not taking the controversial war head on).

ST3: M messes with your head!
And is therefore highly recommended.

And to the folks who would never bother renting ST3:M because it was a direct-to-DVD release, you’re idiots.

Direct-to-DVD is the contemporary equivalent of the drive-in, grindhouse or second-run movie theater. If you praise the flicks that used to appear at those venues, yet still pooh-pooh direct-to-DVD, you are a hypocrite.
Direct-to-DVD is often the only chance some flicks have to be seen.