You're going to thank me.

I am herewith posting for your benefit, the only 19 or 20 minutes of Skidoo (1968) that are worth seeing.  That said, they are extremely worth seeing.  They are simply buried inside a cinematic tomb that rivals anything old Cheops cranked out.

The backstory. Old-fashioned but still-skillful producer-director Otto Preminger decides to make a film about the scourge of the nation, LSD.  But, being an honest man, he tries it.  And he decides it is NOT the scourge of the nation.  But he's committed to make this movie with a large bunch of mismatched middle-aged and even elderly movie stars which is both for and against LSD.

I have to back-pedal even farther.  When I was growing up, Preminger was a star-director name nearly on a par with Alfred Hitchcock.  He made big pictures about big issues and he plastered his name and face all over them.  And he was not unjustified.  His films got big audiences and made big money.  And his technique, which he had been developing since the mid-1940s was extremely well-suited to the wide-screen epics of the 1960s.  Specifically, he preferred long, complex master shots, sometimes reframing the action with camera movement rather than recutting.  Paradoxically for such a control freak, this procedure gives power to the actors, who control the tempo and feel of the scene.  He counteracted that tendency by calling for extensively repeated takes, wearing the actors down.  (Also paradoxically, Preminger was an actor, and in films such as Wilder's Stalag 17, a good actor.)

His career breaks into distinct phases, beginning with the romantic noirs of the 40s, most famously Laura, and my personal favorite, Where The Sidewalk Ends.  The next phase began with The Moon Is Blue a standard-issue sexless sex comedy from a Broadway boulevard play.  But the heroine referred to herself as a "virgin" and the words "pregnant" and "mistress" were bandied about, causing pearls to be clutched across the country.  The film went out without an MPAA seal, made a pot of money from disappointed filmgoers who expected something sexy and turned Otto onto the controversy racket.

The last phase begins roughly around the time of Exodus in 1960, when controversy transmogrifies into international all-star epic.  Thus follows Advice and Consent, Hurry Sundown and The Cardinal.

Back to LSD.  Otto changes his mind and decides to make a pro-hippie movie.  Or at least a movie that suggests that these crazy kids might be worth listening to.  The first clue is in this unconventional opening in which husband Jackie Gleason and wife Carol Channing (bizarre couple, yes, I know) fight over the remote control, a fight seen from the TV viewer's POV.  (Note the inclusion of Preminger's own In Harm's Way in the onscreen melange.)  [Apologies in advance for any ads inserted by Daily Motion.]



Fairly early on, for reasons not worth delving into, Jackie gets his consciousness raised via an acid trip.  So far, so good, except that the sequence bears no resemblance to any acid trip taken by any known person.  It is fun, but fun like those goofy early 1930s movies packed with random non-sequiturs in the place of actual jokes.




Far better than seeing Groucho's head in place of a lightbulb is the acid trip experienced by veteran character actor Fred Clark, which is not only accompanied by a charming Harry Nillson song, but features some of the wackiest dancing and carrying-on by Clark as a prison guard who has unknowingly dropped LSD.   Clark was usually seen as grouchy bank officials turning down nice people for loans or mean neighbors who won't give the kids their football back and rarely had the opportunity to clown this way. The song in question begins at the 3:00 minute mark in this clip.



Finally, we have the last nine minutes or so of the film.  This includes the rather catchy title song, accompanying an incomprehensible sequence in which Carol Channing and her daughter's hippy friends occupy gangster Groucho Marx's yacht, while Groucho turns on and becomes a Buddhist.  I include this clip principally for the final few minutes in which Harry Nillson sings the credits.  All of them.  Right down to the wardrobe mistress and the production accountant.  That's freakier than Gleason's acid trip.




Make no mistake.  By no means is Skidoo a good film.  But it is an instructive bad film, and one with some moments of inspiration of enchantment.  Personally, I would never have thought Otto had it in him.

What's the deal with 80s cult films?

I lived through the 1980s. I was trying to start a career and successfully starting a family. I should remember the era as a golden time. It sucked. Disco refused to die, although people with their hearts in the right places tried to stomp it with hobnail boots. Movies for grownups disappeared. The clothes were mostly hideous. The government under Ronnie Ray-Gun found it could act like a bad boyfriend, taking our money and giving us nothing for it, letting us lose our jobs and refusing to help or support us and making up stories so we'd feel better, and co-dependent America ate it up.

It was an era of "bad is good", "tacky is stylish", "lame is cool" and, of course, the era of Gordon Gekko telling us "greed is good." (Any biologist will tell you that self-preservation and self-interest is good. Organisms that take more than they need will die from it.) And if anything demonstrates that "bad is good," it's 80's cult movies.

Maybe I was just too old. But if Point Blank is a cult film representing the 60s, and Red Dawn is a cult film representing the 80s, one must acknowledge a overall degeneration in the amount and quality of gray matter among the populace.

The cult film thing got so big after the success of midnight audience participation showings of Rocky Horror, that film executives apparently began making films in order to become objects of cult, rather than appealing to the general movie-going public. Thus, we have The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984). Incidentally, the filmmakers objected to the distributor adding the last half of that title. Why? Because it destroyed the dignity of their fine work?????

According to John Lithgow's comments made at the L.A. Film Festival in May, the character and mythology of Buckaroo Banzai began as a sort-of running joke between college classmates writer Earl MacRauch and director W.D. Richter. Once Richter had gained a foothold in the business, they decided to unleash their joke adventure into a world primed by Star Wars and Indiana Jones to accept riffs on 30s serial adventures as a respectable film genre. They had worked out a back story and a milieu for Banzai and his Hong Kong Cavaliers, which actually sounds as if it would have been fun if they series of films they planned had actually been made. But the first film crashed in general release (as it deserved to), and this one film represents the entire saga.

The problem is a textbook example of the Springtime for Hitler syndrome. When you're making a silly piece of work, you can't make everything silly or it becomes tedious; most of all, you cannot have ALL your characters be silly, especially the ones who are supposed to be scary, like Hitler. And Buckaroo Banzai, supposed to be a light romp of an adventure turned into a grand Olympian conclave of overactors, led by the Grand Pooh-Bah of OTP, John Lithgow.



Also seen is this clip, is Lithgow's greatest living rival for the title of King of OTP, Christopher Lloyd. Lloyd is under a severe handicap in this film, having his head encased in a lizard thing, but he does what he can (and more than makes up for it in the Back To The Future trilogy and Star Trek III). But I would maintain that Lithgow still deserves the top spot. Whereas Lloyd's characters are loud and overstated because that's what the voices inside their heads tell them to do, Lithgow seems always to be playing for the least affluent theatergoers in the 3rd balcony who seem to live in Lithgow's head. He is, by his own admission, most comfortable in theater and in television with a studio audience, and always looks disappointed in films that his unhinged antics are not met with wild applause and cheering.

Completing this particular Pantheon is Jeff Goldsmith, who is so consummate an overactor, that he can overact while appearing to underact. His character are is quiet almost to the point of appearing sleepy, but prone to reel off a long run of supergeek gobbledegook so potent as to suck the air out of any scene he appears in. (I just regret that nobody thought to bring Christopher Walken into the cast - or that he was perhaps unavailable.) Is it a wonder that nobody can take this film seriously, or even figure out how it wants to be taken? The cardboard cut-out production design, bombastic music and cheesy photography don't help. (The photography isn't the director's fault - the studio fired his choice and hired the guy who shot The Man From Uncle, a cheese-fest if there ever was one.) Worst of all, the film lacks the sincerity and authenticity of, say, a movie like Evil Dead. Even if it's not good, you know that Sam Raimi BELIEVES in it.

Nobody could like this film and nobody did. There were a few people who LOVE it, and they still do, and it is entirely possible you are or may be one of them. If so, I pray to heaven you do not have a job that involves dangerous equipment or small children, lest you cause serious damage.

Pink Floyd The Wall (1982), on the other hand, bears all the marks of a sincerely-intended piece of work, but fated for cult status nonetheless.

First of all, the producers were banking on the popularity of a rock group as the basis of their audience, heedless of the fact that the fan base of the most popular rock or pop stars at any time; let's say, for example Lady Gaga as I write this, constitute less than 5% of the number of people you need to see a moderately-budgeted motion picture just to get your money back, let alone make a profit. Music - even pop - is a poor basis for commercial success. Add to this that the story is not the usual trope of teenage rebellion against stifling adult society that fuels such works as Tommy, Footloose and Rock, Rock, Rock. (The latter is the one about Tuesday Weld raising enough money to buy a prom dress.) Instead, Our Hero in The Wall has ALREADY achieved Rock God status and finds that it Means Nothing. We can all identify with that, can't we, especially when we're 15 years old? Oh dear, I have fame and wealth and power over people and I can have anything and anything I want, but I am numb inside because I don't know who I am or what my life is for. That's a pretty common problem, don't you think?

Add to that, the film's narrative is not only broken up into barely-related fragments without dialogue rather than a linear story with plots, subplots and characters. The style is more like the cinema equivalent of tableaux vivants, as in this perhaps most famous example attacking the ineffectual and sterile nature of education as we know it.



On top of this, the narrative is frequently interrupted by nightmare animation sequences by Gerald Scarfe, which at least has the possible advantage from a parent's point of view of convincing teens to delay sex for years, perhaps even decades:



All snark aside, this is serious work seriously intended and a signal achievement in the relationship of music to imagery. But I sure hope the people who permitted this film to be made were under no illusion that this would be a blockbuster.

The authors of the meta-musical [title of show] write, "I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing/Than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing." That's the definition of cult, a type of product that thrived in a peculiar way 25 years, before the Coming of the Conglomerates.

If I've piqued your interest in The Wall (and it is worth seeing if you're not easily disturbed by movies or music), here's the whole darn thing for you to watch, provided you have a spare 95 minutes: