Three Films of the Punk and New Wave Era: Forbidden Zone; Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains; Breaking Glass

Hello! In this entry, I'm going to talk about three rock and roll movies about one of my favorite musical periods: The punk/post-punk/new wave movement of the late 70's and early 80's! And yet I STILL haven't seen Sid and Nancy...

Forbidden Zone, by Richard Elfman, 1982

Most of us know Danny Elfman nowadays as the guy who scores the Tim Burton movies, but some may fondly remember him as the lead singer of the nutty, theatrical new wave act, Oingo Bongo, or as they were originally called, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. Forbidden Zone is the Oingo Boingo movie, directed by Elfman's brother Richard, and intended to give theater audiences a cinematic idea of what an Oingo Boingo show was like.

What's it like? It's like a campy, trashy, John Waters burlesque show on acid. The story is centered on the Hercules family, a family of weirdos who live on top of a portal to the hellish 6th dimension. Herve Villechaize is the king there and he wants to toss aside his current queen and take the Hercules daughter, Frenchie, for his own. The rest of the family one by one go down, either on accident or to rescue her.

Forbidden Zone uses strange costumes, bad makeup, weird sets, and different styles of animation throughout. There are lots of musical numbers, the best of them featuring the songs of Oingo Boingo, though some are using old timey numbers. I'm not sure if I could call it a "good" movie, but it's an extremely culty movie and sometimes that's good. The music is really great. The acting is pretty awful, but also pretty appropriate, since Richard Elfman is obviously aiming for camp value. The cast is mostly just friends and family and Oingo Boingo members. The humor is pretty low brow and often knowingly lame, with the intention to offend everyone (and thus no one).

If you like Oingo Boingo and weird shit, you should probably watch Forbidden Zone. It contains lots of those things. It made me wonder what their early stage shows were like. I bet that would have made for an amazing night.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains, by Lou Adler, 1981

It's funny that punk music had become such a thing by 1981 that they were making Hollywood movies about it. The movement had been declared dead a couple years earlier, and everyone was kind of cashing in their chips at this point. Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is one such movie, though it has an air of authenticity lent to it by some real deal punk legends.

A young Diane Lane stars as Corinne Burns, a cynical teenager whose mother's recent death has spun her into one of those "nothing really matters" phases. After causing a mild stir by being fired from her fast food job while on a televised news report, Corinne announces to the world that she's the singer of The Stains, a band she has with her sister (Marin Kanter) and cousin (Laura Dern).

This is spun into a gig as an opening act for an over-the-hill metal band and an up and coming punk band called The Looters. The only problem is, nobody checked to see if The Stains can play. They're terrible. The sister and cousin can't play their instruments and Corinne can't sing. When booed off the stage, Corinne makes up for her lack of musical ability with her true talent: telling people why they suck and why she's awesome. She is perceived as a new feminist icon and spins The Stains into stardom with a plagiarized song, until, of course, it all comes crashing down.

I liked Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains a lot. It's directed by Lou Adler, best known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Cheech and Chong's Up In Smoke, both cult movies in their own right. But I think this is a better film than those two. It's not a "punk" movie, but it's cynical, darkly funny, and self aware enough to even mock itself a little. I thought Diane Lane gave a great performance as a teenage girl with a lot of rage and no real outlet for it. And a young Ray Winstone plays the singer of The Looters, who are rounded out by members of The Clash and The Sex Pistols. The Stains' main (plagiarized) song, Join the Professionals, was written by the former Pistols guys and it's a real-deal, legitimate sounding punk song.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains is good stuff. Unlike Forbidden Zone, you don't have to be a weirdo like me to like it. It's a well made satire with some cool music that never really found the audience it deserved.

Breaking Glass, by Brian Gibson, 1980

It's funny: Breaking Glass is sort of the sincere version of the story that Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains was being sarcastic about. Well, I'm not sure if "sincere" is the right word. This movie has the stink of the English Pop Star Making Machine all over it.

It stars an up-and-coming New Waver named Hazel O'Connor, as Kate, an up-and-coming New Waver. The movie follows the course of her career from idealistic young punk who refuses to sign a record contract, through the formation of her band and first hit, the temptation of success and alienation of said band, and ultimately, the unhappy ending of her being a superstar with no integrity. Apparently there's another scene at the end but it was cut out of the US version for no good reason.

The thing is, Hazel O'Connor hadn't even released an album at the time of this movie's release. Her first was the soundtrack. There was probably a conversation at some executive office like:

"If we make a pop star and give her a movie telling everybody she's a pop star, she'll be HUGE!"

"Yeah, but won't people see right through that?"

"No, see, we'll make it a cautionary tale, and show her unhappy with her success, as if to say, the REAL Hazel O'Connor would never do that."

"I don't get it but you sign checks!"

Anyway, I don't mean to dis Hazel O'Connor, just whoever was pulling the strings. She wasn't just a one-hit wonder, and she still releases music to this day. The songs in the movie are actually pretty good, and they're produced by Tony Visconti. The production sounds a lot like David Bowie's Low/"Heroes"/Lodger period that Visconti was working on at the time of this movie. It's even safe to assume that the band in the movie (and the movie's title), Breaking Glass is named after the Bowie song on Low.

Breaking Glass isn't great, but it has some cool songs, and it also has Jonathan Pryce playing a deaf saxophonist with a heroin addiction, so it can't be all bad, right?

Switchblade Sisters, You're Gonna Miss Me

All I've wanted to do lately is watch movies. I don't really know why, but I've just been experiencing a hunger lately to take in as many films as I possibly can. I'm sure that's what those of you who know me think I'm like all the time, but truthfully, until fairly recently, I was happy to watch three or four movies a week, mixed in with countless TV shows, comic books, novels, video games, and websites, not to mention what passes for my piddling social life.

Suddenly, in July, I started watching a movie every single day, sometimes more than one. I watched close to 40 in that month alone, and that was even with me prepping a cross-country move! It looks like I'll come close to that again in August. In the last month and a half, I've watched 1/3 of the total movies I've watched all year!

Why am I telling you this? I have no idea. I just have so many movies to talk about right now, and the list of films I want to see keeps getting longer. The last couple months have felt quite fulfilling in that respect. I don't know how long I can keep up this momentum. Probably not long, since I'll be back to working full time by September. But I'll try to drag it out as long as I can.

The Switchblade Sisters, by Jack Hill, 1975

Watching old exploitation movies can often be a squirmy, unsettling affair. The violence doesn't usually take me aback very much, but the sex often can. Not that I'm prudish, I just don't really like it when things get rapey, as they often did in the 70's. In those cases, you usually just have to try to look past those scenes and try to appreciate the movie within the context it was made in.

Jack Hill's The Switchblade Sisters is actually a pretty well made film, despite the scenes that make you feel like a creep for watching them. It's about a gang of tough, kick-ass high school girls known as The Dagger Debs, who are like a sister sorority to a man gang called The Daggers. Maggie, a new girl in town, manages to work her way into the Debs, befriending the leader, Lace. Over the course of things, Maggie takes over the gang, throws out the guys, and changes the name to the much cooler sounding The Jezebels, and eventually, it all comes down to a big gang fight, with Maggie going up against her old friend Lace. Lots of violence and titillation along the way.

The Switchblade Sisters walks kind of a weird balance. The girls in the gang are strong, independent, three-dimensional characters, which is pretty impressive for its time. But the movie must also give in to the demands of its financiers and its target audience, so there's a lot of pretty tasteless stuff mixed in. You could almost say this movie is kind of feminist. You could also say it's not in the least bit feminist, and you would not be wrong. Overall, I did like The Switchblade Sisters. It has an entertaining story, and the lead girls were actually really badass. It's worth watching if you know that you're getting into some pretty gloriously trashy stuff. I know Quentin Tarantino is a big fan, if that's any indication.

You're Gonna Miss Me, by Keven McAlester, 2005

Rock and roll history and lore is riddled with stories of success and highly publicized accounts of tragedy. But along the paths of those famous stories are tangential stories of bands that almost made it, or artists who burned out before they even began. Bands who disintegrated after recording one ahead-of-its-time album. Artists who couldn't stand the attention. These stories are often just as, or more, interesting than hearing about The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Kurt Cobain again.

You're Gonna Miss Me is a documentary about Roky Erickson, lead singer of a 60's rock band called The 13th Floor Elevators, and apparently, the man who coined the word "psychedelic". They have some songs you might recognize, look them up. Erickson took too much LSD, was diagnosed schizophrenic, and committed. But when he gets out his guitar and sings, he still can make phenomenal music. A very interesting and pretty sad documentary, and an important side story in the Annals of Rock.

American Graffiti

I try to keep the reviews on my site mostly limited to movies I've never seen before, but every once in a while, I make an exception, usually because the last time I watched a movie was long before I could form an educated opinion on it. I saw American Graffiti once as a kid of maybe 10-12. All I knew at the time was it was by George Lucas, and the guy from Jaws and Harrison Ford were in it. All I remembered about it from that initial viewing was the scene where the kid was trying to buy some booze for his girl, which is still one of the most memorable scenes in the movie.

So how does American Graffiti hold up? You know, not bad. At the time it was made, George Lucas was only known for a little seen science fiction art film called THX-1138. I'm sure that based on that movie, he was having a lot of difficulty getting funding for any of his other projects. So it was probably just as much a calculated career move for him to make such a mainstream movie, even though the result is an obviously very personal, nostalgic and sentimental take on the early 60's hot rod scene that Lucas grew up around.

Set in 1962, American Graffiti follows four teens just out of high school, having one last bang in the old town before they must choose what to do with their adult lives. Steve (Ron Howard) is trying the old "let's see other people" thing on his girlfriend (Cindy Williams). Curt (Richard Dreyfuss) is on a search for a beautiful girl he saw addressing him from another car, inadvertently joining a street gang on the way. John (Paul le Mat) is the coolest kid in town with the coolest car in town, who gets saddled with a girl way too young for him, while being taunted into a race by his rival (Harrison Ford). And Toad (Charles Martin Smith) is a geeky kid who, after borrowing Steve's car, somehow picks up a girl who is way out of his league.

The four stories kind of intertwine and bounce off of each other. An alternate title could have been "Guess Who is in Which Car Now?". No, American Graffiti is better.

American Graffiti is also well known as one of the first and most important soundtrack movies. The film is wall to wall stuffed with great late 50's and early 60's period rock and roll. Chuck Berry, The Beach Boys, EVERYONE else. If you wanted to, you could probably not pay attention to the dialogue at all and still enjoy the movie for the sounds alone.

The acting, though not exactly setting the world on fire, is probably the best out of any George Lucas film. The characters are all funny and likeable. Young Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford doing a bad cowboy accent are fun to watch.

The only thing I didn't really care for was the very end, where they do one of those "Where Are They Now?" freeze frames. It was really heavy handed and preachy, with one getting killed in Vietnam, and the cool kid dying in a hot rod crash. Come on, man. I felt like it was a last ditch attempt on Lucas' part to make the movie more "meaningful" or something. Totally unnecessary after 2 hours of nonstop rose-tinted nostalgia.

That aside, American Graffiti is a pretty great film. As one out of only two George Lucas directed films I even like (the other is Star Wars, duh), I'd say this is my second favorite.