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The Elephant Man (1980)
Referred to as "Steampunk"
David Lynch's Elephant Man has a cinematic style that has been called Steampunk and compared to the early fantastic fiction of Tom Powers and James Blaylock. Steampunk was coined as a retro analogue to Cyberpunk. The movie itself does not fit in that subgenre label.
Peter Nicholls, in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, in his entry on Steampunk, mentioned the film in this context: "Steampunk is a US phenomenon, often set in London, England, which is envisaged as a once deeply alien and intimately familiar, a kind of foreign body encysted in the US subconscious....not so much the actual 19th century as a 19th century seen through the distorting lens of Charles Dickens, whose congested, pullulating 19th-century landscapes were the foul rag-and-bone shop of history from which the technological world, and hence the world of SF, originally sprang. Somewhere behind most Steampunk visions are filthy coal heaps or driving pistons. It was a vision that also entered the cinema, especially through David Lynch, first in Eraserhead (1976) and then in The Elephant Man (1980), and even -- inappropriately enough -- in much of the mise-en-scene of his movie Dune (1984)."
John Clute and Paul J. McAuley, both themselves accomplished SF writers, in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, gave an entry to Steampunk as a subgenre of fantasy as well as SF, but they do not mention any movies or Lynch. They do differentiate Steampunk from Gaslight Romance, though both share the romanticized 19th-century London setting. Gaslight Romances border on supernatural fiction and fantasies of history, whereas Steampunk is more closely Technofantasy that features anachronism or alternate world settings, and urban fantasy. Dickens is mentioned again, his London a Babylon on the Thames. John Grant, another SF writer, gave David Lynch his own entry plus one on "Twin Peaks" (1990). He mentions Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Dune, but does not connect them to Steampunk. He does give Lynch his importance to fantasy with Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet (1986) and describes both as urban fantasy and surrealism.
Admittedly, both encyclopedias are not very helpful to Lynch's early work. The Elephant Man is not even presented as fiction. But neither as a documentary. Lynch has taken obvious creative liberty in his film's look, sound and narrative. It is more conservative and naturalistic than Eraserhead, its artistic flourishes are kept to a minimum, but flourishes they still are. The several short sequences of dreams and thought dot the film, make waves in the flow of the otherwise straight story. These scenes could not have come from any true source as the main story had. They qualify as fiction and as Steampunk, as they include actual steam, driving pistons and heaps of coal, as well as rampaging bull elephants.
The non-fiction bulk of the film is kept historically real and accurate, no anachronisms and no fantastic technologies. Everything seen here was real, from the medical office officials and the uppper-class personages, complete with opera glasses, down to the bloody operating rooms, dusty specimen labs, squalid streets and alleyways, and the carnival. Every freakshow performer was real and documented, and actual dwarfs, giants and unusual people were among the film's cast. The makeups that recreate that infamous visage perfectly match the actual photographs and plaster casts Merrick himself taken in the 1880's. The entire cast bears the meticulous makeups and costumes that portray the period. Lynch and his crew have done an impeccable job all around.
Yet, there frequently is lots of steam and smoke, and occasionally punk kids on the streets (no trendy "punk rock" look here), and more often adults of the lower classes with their ill manners and nasty attitudes. No telling what types one might bump into downtown. There is that distorting lens, that peculiar conveyance that can easily be mistaken for Steampunk. No one may have thought of inventing a new niche of fantasy, no writers may have borrowed from the film. But when a critic noticed a stylistic similarity between certain novels and certain films, Steampunk was named. Lynch and his Elephant Man were labelled.
When Billie Beat Bobby (2001)
When Disney aped John Waters
One of the worst sports films in a long time, When Billy Beat Bobby is a mutant of a movie. Unevenly waffling between drama and comedy, fact and farce, it takes a fairly normal subject--a famous tennis match--and makes a weird mini-spectacle of it.
Completely miscast, Holly Hunter doesn't quite fit into Billy Jean King's tennis shoes, she looks too strange and unnatural--as if she should have been in Hannibal instead (The muscular character Margot Verger was omitted from the horror flick for fear of offending certain women). Ron Silver broadly overacts as Bobby Riggs, has too close a resemblance to Austin Powers, and sounds too much like Sylvester the Cat. Fred Willard as a TV sportscaster helps only to skew the film into Fernwood 2-Night territory, and every other person is reduced to a sexist/racist/handicapped/ethnic caricature.
The story and style is clumsy and unsteady. Is it trying to be Rocky, the Karate Kid, or When Harry Met Sally? When Billie Beat Bobby does not know what it wants to be. The 1970's setting seems to come out of an old Mad magazine, and everyone looks and acts grotesque as if they were directed by David Lynch, or John Waters-lite. The fake-Stanley Kubrick technique breaks into bits of sports-film cliche, bits of nostalgic kitsch, bits of comic exaggeration, and other odd bits that don't move, fit or jive. It has about as much respect tennis-players as a black-face minstrel show has for African-Americans.
What it all ends up in is When Myra Breckinridge Beat the Nutty Professor with an American Graffiti/Animal House epilogue tacked on. It even cheats the viewer out of any beleivable tennis action--most of the shots are of closeups and fans in the bleachers. When Billie is best forgotten, it may be remembered for being what Dan Aykroyd on SNL used to call "Bad Performance Theatre!" At least it was broadcast on ABC TV, so you got your money's worth of curiously awful cinema.
The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972)
A fictional documentary that is true idiocy
Before the Blair Witch Project, before the Last Broadcast, even before Cannibal Holocaust, what may be the first docu-drama made to scare is The Legend of Boggy Creek. It plays like many of the fad nature films of the 1960's and 1970's, amateurish and simple as they were, only with an unlikely subject, a Sasquatch-like legend, a lower budget and even less skill.
Filmed with handheld 16mm cameras, with narration and voiceovers instead of onscreen dialogue, this movie ended up blown up on 35mm film, the picture cropped of its top and bottom to fit a widescreen format. The resulting picture quality looks like a home movie on super-8. The film crew peeks at witnesses, skeptics, and other local folk, as they track down the Beast of Boggy Creek. Intercut into it are some scenes of the Beast himself, filmed in distance, shadow, or with shaky camera, as if one of the filmmakers found him first, snuck after him and filmed him on the sly. We never get a clear look at the Beast, but we do get an occasional glimpse of a button or a zipper. The narrator ponders the monster's existence and tries to wax poetic and make the audience sympathize with him, and even a sappy song plays as the sneaky cameraman keeps stalking and pestering the poor thing. Even an unphotogenic monster-suited guy deserves his privacy.
Halfway through, the nature film tries to turn to formula thriller, with more locals whining "I saw it! I saw it!", and the film crew finding themselves stalked after the Beast turns the tables. The sympathetic narrator gives up as the film's tone paints a nasty picture of the hardly-visible (but understandably fed-up) monster. There is some attempt at confusion and buildup, ending with the crew hiding in a cabin and an unlucky guy gets thrown through a cardboard door, the movie's only moment of action. One more glimpse of a zipper, then the movie ends with a question mark.
The question is hardly what part, if there is one, is the scary one here, which may be just how gullible an audience can be to pay and watch for something that just does not exist, not even in make-believe.
But if there is a question of whether a pseudo-documentary can be convincing and even compelling, the answer may be no, as in Boggy Creek. Or it can be yes, as in Blair Witch. For some audiences, the Blair Witch Project did so and with success, and with an even smaller budget and fewer locations than Boggy Creek, proving that mere skill can compensate for crude tools and pocket change. But a lack of skill cannot be compensated for by anything. For those who found Blair Witch a big disappointment, Boggy Creek may be a bigger bore -- inside a little insult added to a littler ripoff.
The Creeping Terror (1964)
Most people don't think a flick THIS bad even exists!
**SPOILERS** **SPOILERS** Just try watching this relic and telling somebody about it! "REALLY?" "You're kidding!" "I don't believe it!" "How could anyone make a movie that bad?" "Why would any TV station show something like that?" This is one of those films that are so bad you just have to see it to believe it. Like a home movie of a stupid party stunt that collapsed into a pileup under its own lameness.
First there is one minute of opening credits, then one minute of dialogue with three people inside a car driving to the film's setting. Then it segues into something that tells you, whether you paid you see it or saw it for free, "You've been conned, SUCKER!" The movie supposedly had a budget of $10,000.00, but at least $9,995.50 got used up in those first 2 minutes. The rest of the film is choppy, shaky, grainy, and silent, except for one man narrating the plot and speaking the lines of every actor who has a speaking part (which is few), a few sound effects, and -- get this -- a music score that sounds like the crew waited 'til the last minute and drafted a small mariachi band from the nearest Mexican restaurant...and kept goading them to "Play scarier! Play SCARIER!"
The wonder of how anything like a movie could be made for so cheap, turns to wonder of where did all the cheap money go. The director/producer/writer/star wears a bad toupee (he must have pawned the good toupee for the budget) and mingles with golf-shirted scientists who find out about some unknown phenomena (without the use of a laboratory, of course). Then a few seconds of a night shot, shaky telephoto, blurred, panning past parking lot lights and anything else that shines, while the narrator tells us this is an alien planet that is launching a spaceship to explore Earth. Soon we see what's supposed to be the spaceship, obviously something from a junkyard, a canopy from a wrecked trailer or boat, we don't even get to see it land.
Then we get to see the REAL star of the flick: a 7-foot-long giant slug, obviously played by a 7-foot-long rug with a few old vacuum-cleaner hoses in front and several Spalding tennis shoes underneath. (They could have had a better rug, but that got pawned too) Whoever those poor kids were, sweating and stumbling around under a hot rug in the Nevada sun, they actually did the best acting in this film, grunting and straining to make this monster the tiniest bit convincing and menacing. The slug-rug crawls out of the piece of junk and slowly meanders around until naive victims just happen to be standing or lying around.
Then the monotonous routines of scientists in their golf shirts, scientists talking to confused witnesses in their T-shirts and rags, the slug-rug eating helpless people, and more golf-shirts and confused witnesses. There's a small party in a garage -- kids doing the twist to some stock rock stolen from some other bad movie, slug-rug wandering in through an open door, kids reacting by hitting eachother or milling around trying to look helpless and lame(while being goaded to "Act scareder! Act SCAREDER!"), slug-rug swallowing one lame kid at a time.
This film could have a G-rating if it were not for one shot of a punched nose with ketchup, and later on a scene when a guardsman disobeys his chief and the narrator says "He says 'Go to hell!'" This film might be safe enough for children to watch, unless you think they might be disturbed by gratuitous, pathological stupidity. And lots of tinny, annoying Mariachi scare-music.
Finally it ends when a stunt-slug-rug, consisting of the same rug and hoses but with the sneakered kids replaced by bales of hay, gets hit by a car driven by the director/producer/writer/star as the smart hero with his golf shirt and bad rug, driving to the scene -- just in time! The narrator explains that the smart guy explains that the slug-rug ate people in order to analyse people's chemistry so those aliens on the other planet, being not evil but merely curious, could find out what us Earthlings are made of!
And what you had sat through just happens to be made of the director/etc.'s home movies, and embarassing ones and lots of them. Could there have been a mistake at the film lab with all but the first 2 minutes being SOMEONE ELSE'S film? Or could there have been an accident that destroyed all but the first 2 minutes of the film and the rest was redone by a DESPARATE crew? Or was it an accident that the film had opening credits and a minute of actual sound and speaking? Could that minute have been taken from someone else's film, by accident or stolen by some lame guy?
"And who could be lame enought to watch anything like this?"