Morgan's Monthly: Heatwave Edition

Hello all and welcome to the inaugural publication of MORGAN’S MONTHLY, a new column where I trawl through the grab-bag of (usually digital) celluloid I've watched in a given month and talk about what I find cool, interesting, or most of all, worth your valuable time and attention. 

This July found me mostly staying indoors thanks to skin-blistering heat and diving into a treasure trove of genre oddities. Here’s five features I'd highly recommend – my attention span is very sick, so please enjoy reading these bite-sized digestible reviews as much as I enjoyed writing them.

What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

Watching any film is an act of equivalent exchange—for example, taking the three hours to view Oppenheimer is sacrificing one-hundred and eighty minutes you could've used to watch a couple Henenlotter movies or Phantom of the Paradise twice or whatever. In my case I've spent too much of my life viewing and re-viewing the Saw movies and the Resident Evil movies and like the ‘80s Dr. Caligari and all that nonsense so I'm really trying to work through some canonical “cinema classics” this year, which I guess means “black and white movies about women who hate each other.” All About Eve, Faster, Pussycat!, and of course, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?

Something really interesting happened while I sat down with Baby Jane: it was the first movie I'd seen in years and years where I checked the Wikipedia synopsis to ensure the ending wouldn't make me unbearably upset. A testament, then, to the acting ability of real-life haters Joan Crawford and Bette Davis—as a dependent, captive movie star and her unstable, abusive sister respectively, the two ebb and intertwine through moments of aggression, anxiety, and vulnerability; performances so captivating they paper over the film’s minor flaws. Too long? Too much bullshit about a sad British man and his mom? Inconsequential when I'm biting my nails over whether a ghoulish ABDL enjoyer is about to starve her sister to death. One of the few films where I do not, in fact, think that the evil woman should've gotten away with it.

The Mighty Peking Man

My biggest picked nit about any movie is whether or not it bores me; a problem I encounter a lot in kaiju and giant monster films. The dissonance is always maddening: films about big creatures stomping around are inherently cool and the easiest sell on Earth, so why must I be made to suffer the doldrums of bad human drama and lame non-monster plotlines? The Mighty Peking Man—a Shaw Brothers rip on 1976’s King Kong—does not suffer this problem because The Mighty Peking Man is a film where something completely unhinged happens every five minutes.

The movie begins—the mighty Peking Man destroys a village and shatters the earth! A group of Hong Kong adventurers go in search of the beast—they're immediately attacked and killed by elephants, tigers, and quicksand! A survivor is saved by the Peking Man—he meets a hot jungle woman and they dance with a leopard to lounge music! She's suddenly bitten by a snake—and he has to suck the poison out of her thigh! The film rolls by at a clip, barely ever taking a break from the deeply ridiculous, until the Peking Man rampages through a super-destructible Hong Kong set for like thirty minutes and gets blown the fuck up by military-grade weaponry. End film. If most giant gorilla movies are too genteel for your tastes, The Mighty Peking Man has you covered. It's got beautiful miniatures, plus giant monkey hands and feet used to incredible effect. What more could you want?

The Laughing Woman

Every now and then I get this sense that's like, okay, you've seen every type of movie; there's nothing left that's going to surprise you. This, of course, is patently untrue; especially when there's nutty shit like The Laughing Woman still lurking in dark corners. Following a secretary kidnapped by her boss and forced into a series of bizarre sexual games, The Laughing Woman quickly nosedives out of standard giallo territory into sheer BDSM feminine wrath weirdness with assault by mannequin, villain monologues about artificial insemination, and at least one extended funk music dance scene. The whole thing predicates itself on poking fun at male anxiety and impotence—but as Garth Marenghi once said, “I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards.”

The politics and ideas of The Laughing Woman are so outright and obvious that it might as well be called The Cucked Dude; here the lack of subtlety only enhances the film's generally odd pop-art atmosphere. Not every movie can support such unsubtle commentary, but this is a dreamy, sleazy smorgasbord which features both a rubber bondage suit mounted to an inverted light-up pyramid and a man walking into a giant vagina sculpture and coming out a skeleton. We aren't exactly digging deep here. For those whom the common girl's revenge film has grown stale, give The Laughing Woman a spin. If nothing else, you'll get some great interior design ideas. 

The Alien Factor

Like sinking your teeth into fresh honeycomb, there's few cinematic treats as decadent as the regional low-budget lo-fi genre film. The Alien Factor is one such blissful morsel; a movie about crash-landed extraterrestrial beasts filmed with $3,500 in basements and woods around rural Maryland. If you're a veteran of such offerings, you'll recognize the hallmarks. Burble-crunched “made in a weekend” synth music, totally amateur yet completely dedicated performances, and utterly unforgettable alien effects. Oh my god, the alien effects.

If you judge a film by title alone then The Alien Factor delivers: there are no less than four batshit aliens providing, a, uh, factor of terror to these small-town denizens. All of them look nasty and smelly and deep-fried like you can imagine the poor bastard sweating under all those pounds of cheap rubber and make-up but good lord do they work. My two favorites are the Sasquatch-tarantula hybrid on giant goat-leg stilts who kicks off a very slow car chase and the already-dead shriveled-like-a-raisin UFO pilot who is inexplicably dressed in an Adidas tracksuit and platinum blonde wig. The whole thing is fun and endearing and cozy and the sort of movie which will both pop your eyes and gently lull you to sleep. MVP goes to the guy playing the town’s mayor, who hams through this movie with the conviction of a Shakespeare player.

Homoti

I don't know how much legwork I can perform on Homoti aside from the simple act of informing you that this is a gay Turkish interpretation of E.T.; sort of. More specifically it's about an alien in a hysterically, dementedly funny costume with sausage fingers and a massive butt who hangs out at a Turkish dude’s house, cries a lot, and attunes his inner homosexuality before leaving for outer space again. The entire film is incredibly janky and somewhat off-putting but also weirdly tender and clearly invested in the growth and development of this caked-up moldy-faced extraterrestrial. The duality of man, I suppose.

There's plenty here to laugh at—a too-cool guy rolling around Turkey on his red motortrike, the bizarre sequence where Homoti summons a Windows 95 screensaver, the alien’s gargantuan ass (it bears repeating)—but beneath it all there's a genuine, well-thought narrative about self-discovery and what it means to find connection with other people and a certain heartbreak always lurking at the periphery of queerness. It does, uh, require a little bit of digging because it's very hard not to cackle at Homoti’s depressive mumbling or when his gnarled fingers fumble wiping away someone’s tears—but the meaning is there, I promise! I speak from experience when I say this is a great one to spring on unsuspecting friends.

Thanks for reading! See y’all next month if the weather hasn't reduced me to ash!