I'm perusing TV Guide and I see this title, number two of the three movies that KTTV in L.A. programs all night, which have provided such unsung therapy over the years and are interspersed with Ralph Williams and that other benign used-car lot yokel with My Dog Storm. I had to watch it. I mean, there's movies and MOVIES! Allowing for the fact that even stations in L.A. and N.Y. can only buy so many films, there's still an awful lotta spiff items that them damn channels've got and only show once in a gnu's lifetime, and lots more that they've never bought or never show! Which is grounds for a People's uprising in any man's book.

In L.A., Albert Zugsmith's classic The Beat Generation is screened about once a year even though any movie with Mamie Van Doren deserves reprogramming at mathematical intervals.

But how often have you seen a real gasser like Teenagers From Outer Space or The Blob with Steve McQueen (he didn't play the Blob like James Arness played The Thing, but the title song was sung by the Five Blobs and released as a single on Columbia: "It creeps/ And crawls/ And slithers up the walls ...)?

These opuses (or opi, as John Simon would say) are true rock'n"roll movies, buried under a conspiracy of bald headed short haired jelly fish biting tricky Dicky pricks rite now! Who didja think programmed all that jive on the tube from Farm Report to National Anthem — the Mod Squad? No! The very same Fascist nebbishes that keep you from buying juice in highschool, diggin" sounds after hours and smokin" your bamalam and walking down the street stark noble savage naked to the world! And I say it's time we rose up outta our remote control chairs and DID something about it! Crazed TV to the TV Crazies!

Left Wing Fanatics Burn Film Libraries, Make Demands. FCC Declares Maoist Plot, Calls In Nat. Guard.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (UPI) - FCC Commissioner Susskind said today that the recent outbreaks of violence and vandalism against TV stations in every state of the

Union were the actions of a vast conspiratorial network "whose extensiveness staggers the imagination of any reasonable man." The Commissioner stated further that the network was populated mainly by heroin addicts, students driven psychopathic by the use of hallucinogenic drugs, politicized shakedown artists, and prostitutes of both sexes — "junkies, sickies, trickles and quickies," as the Commissioner quipped — led by an elusive cabal of disgruntled dropouts from the Weathermen on special orders from Red China.

The Commissioner further stated that as dire as the threat might appear, the Government was already taking steps to "locate these bacteria, with the aid of the great microscopes of the FBI and CIA, and administer appropriate medication. And if I may extend my metaphor, gentlemen, said medication's application will prove much more analogous to that in commercials for Raid or No Bugs M'Lady, and the fate of the viruses inferred from such, than any kind of light-humor spot pushing antihistamines which come on like a crew of house-painters trapping the sympathetically polka-dotted personification of a summer cold as played by Morey Amsterdam in a corner of the nasal passages. Because we are not dealing with Morey Amsterdam, gentlemen, we are dealing with the Plague."

On other fronts in what Senate Majority Leader Mansfield called "the nation's worst crisis since the assassination of JFK," independent stations in Paw Paw, Michigan, Clovis, NJVL, and Nome, Alaska were siezed in yesterdays series of guerilla assaults, leaving only seven stations nationwide still free, the names and locations of which the FCC Commissioner refused to divulge.

At last report, the station in Paw Paw was showing nothing but old "Popeye," "Bugs Bunny," and "Donald Duck" cartoons interspersed with 1952 episodes of Dragnet and Inner Sanctum.

The Clovis station aired absolutely nothing but long-haired young people drifting through the studio, taking off their clothes, engaging in sex acts and shouting strings of obscenities at the camera. After approximately five hours of this, viewers said, they seemed to tire and started running at the, camera making faces. Forty-five minutes later all that could be seen was a group of them slouching against the walls, lounging on couches and the floor, smoking marijuana and drinking wine and occasionally burping or gesturing obscenely toward the camera. At some point in the early hours of the morning, viewers said, a bug-eyed, fidgety young man appearing to be in a state of compulsive drug hysteria began a harangue which was delivered so rapidly and sounded so incoherent that few viewers could make out more than two or three successive words at any given time. The harangue continued for thirteen hours, and was reportedly brought to an abrupt halt when two burly, bearded conspirators walked onto the set, siezed the unfortunate youth and strong-armed him off, after which he was not seen again.

"The station in Nome was showing nothing but old commercials and newscasts run backwards, with a soundtrack of Redd Foxx records...

A sort of coup seemed to take place, as the hippie-types who had predominated were largely replaced by what Commissioner Susskind called "less crypto, more avowedly political groups." There followed a spate of political speeches along New Left themes, by members of the American Communist Party, Progressive Labor Party, Black Panthers, Women's Liberation, Gay (Homosexual) Liberation and others. Few of the speeches lasted more than two minutes and none were concluded. Viewers reported that each one was engulfed in such a rising tide of verbal abuse approximately a minute after it began, that the proceedings dissolved into a round of shouted charges, countercharges and slogans. An independent poll in the area reported that viewer "ratings" were highest at that point. It is also reported that later the delegates of the various political organizations attained some semblance of order, and that the speeches and debates which followed, although entirely Left-oriented, are still continuing. Unfortunately, details of their exact nature were still unavailable at press time, because the "ratings" had dropped so low that the pollsters had not yet found even a single household still tuned in.

In Nome, the commandeered station was reportedly showing nothing but old commercials and newscasts run backwards, with a soundtrack comprised of Redd Foxx records and old rhythm and blues "party" (sex-oriented) songs superimposed on them.

Stations in other parts of the country are showing propaganda films from Communist countries and groups and broadcasting readings from Chairman Mao by hirsute under-thirties. Others screen nothing but Andy Warhol films, or "home movies" or "underground films" made by the guerillas themselves. In San Francisco a rock group called the Greatful Dead has been playing an uninterrupted concert for ten days and, even more amazingly, a song entitled "Turn on Your Lovelamp" for the last four straight days, "round the clock. One channel in Los Angeles is currently featuring a gentleman of indeterminate age named Kim Fowley, engaged in unprintable acts with a girl who doesn't look older than 14 and a boa constrictor, while "singing" in a warbling monotone. Another channel broadcasts nothing but "Jesus Freaks" — longhaired hippie youngsters claiming conversion to Christianity — proselytizing, beating tambourines and singing songs 24 hours a day.

This trend has been noted at many stations across the country. Another L.A. channel features nothing but Buddhist chanting, endless and uninterrupted, with no breaks for breath, commercials or the "no-broadcast" hours

required each week by the FCC Code. This too has been seen in more than one community, although there are a variety of sects and chants involved on different channels.

Largest viewer response, however, was gleaned by yet another L.A. station, which declared its aim, almost immediately after being seized by guerillas, to be the chronological broadcasting of every last motion picture in history. They began at 2:43 AM on May 11th with The Great Train Robbery, and continued without pause for commercials or announcements. Runners have been observed driving up to the back doors regularly in delivery trucks presumably carrying cans of Him. At press time they had reached the year 1927, and viewer response was reportedly unprecedented, as vast numbers of California citizens rearranged schedules and even quit their jobs to build their lives around the station's output. As a shocking . side effect, Los Angeles County Hospital reported a sharp upsurge in the number of admissions for nervous collapses, in most cases brought on by viewers so obsessed with the station's round-the-clock cinematic history that they resorted to artificial stimulants to keep up with it, which as Times critic Charles Champlin observed is ridiculous if not insane, since even if the rebels are not turned out of the studio by authorities (and the station's owner is so pleased by viewer response that they may not be), the series can be expected, according to calculations on police computers, to conclude at some point in the year 1981, if at all.

Around the rest of the country, interestingly enough, viewer habits have changed little or not at all. Ah emergency Nielsen poll revealed that with minor and localized exceptions, the television sets in American homes are on neither more nor less hours each day than before the national coup. And TV Guide magazine, after suspending publication for six weeks to meditate on the matter, examine its conscience and appear before a Congressional subcommittee, has finally announced definite plans to resume publication with regional editions and listings for all channels, no matter what die new formats. "The only thing we're worried about," said editor Merrill Pannitt, "is that some of the smark-alec hippies running these stations now may just write us off as a lot of old fogies and try to discredit us by submitting false programming charts."

—Front-page item in the Los Angeles Times, May 23,1976

That's all still a fantasy now, of course, but where d'ya think all the great revolutions begin if not in fantasies? Like Marx toking down in the third toilet-stall of the London library men's room, like Chairman Mao's De Millean opium pipe dream of millions of militant Chinese peasants looming down the hills to tromp tyranny into fertilizer for vast fields of Five Year Plan grain, like John Sinclair vibrant with notions of a whole nation of rabidly alive pubescents bashing in the windows of record stores and A&P's to get the goods they needed and deserved with the MC5 driving them on like an Internationale out of the book of Revelation — like all these forebears I have a video vision of infinitely exhilarating pluralism.

They used to talk about how when UHF got in really strong we'd have something like 86 channels, so you could watch Green Acres on Channel 2, the Bolshoi Ballet on 34 and reruns of old Miss America pageants on 63 — what a piddling peon's dream! Come the Revolution, we'll have thousands of channels where you can watch anything the human mind can conceive* from I Love Lucy to beatniks jacking off at campaign glossies of Eisenhower to Sun Ra jamming with Iggy and an old Geritol-stewed yodeller from Ted Mack's Amateur Hour! Plus movies, movies, MOVIES! All of "em and often. All power to the People's TV!, and get up off your big fat rusty dusty and man them barricades with me! This is a conspiracy. Taste varies all over the ballpark, but when it comes to the classy flicks of years past, like Treasure of the Sierra Madre ox I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, we can generally achieve some kind of consensus not only with the jerkoffs that pick the flicks to be televised but even with our parents who probably saw the things at the nabes when they first came out and get all alert and sanguine at this chance to slap a bridge across that old generational chasm and buddy up with us over Bogey or W.C. Big deal!

But what about all the truly great movies comprised of unreconstituted trash, which are important not only because nothing else is deranged in quite the way they are, but also because they demonstrate that occasionally intersecting tastes don't in any way prove the sharing of Good Taste cross 20 or 30 years. Nobody likes movies like Teenagers From Outer Space or Wrestling Women Vs, The Aztec Mummy save any loon sane enough to realize that the whole concept of Good Taste is concocted to keep people from having a good time, from reveling in a crassness that passeth all understanding.

I recall reading an item on the entertainment page of the daily paper after Teenagers From Outer Space came out to the effect that responsible people all over were so turned off by this pic that the financial angels and bureaucratic bosses of the studio that sponsored and released it ganged up on the poor guy that made the film, and gave him a good talking-to about devoting his talents to such a piece of trash, and even if it was his first film he should think of the public interest, etc. The item ended by saying that the guy had actually apologized, and promised to do better with the money that was given him for his second film.

The whole thing was probably a bunch of bullshit dreamed up by PR to make people go see the flick, but it still is revelatory, just like the afternoon a few years ago 1 saw

Teenagers From Outer Space on TV, and every commercial break the Dialing for Dollars host would snicker and practically apologize about "this, uh, movie we've got today. Boy, I sure don't know where they got this one."

But fuck those people who'd rather be watching The Best Years of Our Lives or David and Lisa. We got our own good tastes, like when you see the bizarro lushed up Irish scrub-woman Kitty McShane, a manic crone looking for all the world like Samuel Beckett in drag, intimidating Bela Lugosi with epileptic spasms in Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire, or The Blob oozing in a movie house which was itself showing a horror film to an audience of young dudes straining with elbow pangs to grope their sweatered dates just like the kids watching it when it originally came out — and The Blob sluices through the airvents, gets the projectionist, the projector tilts and the film goes haywire and out along with the lights, and then The Blob starts oozing through the projection window down to the theatre while the audience writhes falling all over each other in hysteria ...

That would be a great moment in the history of the cinema even if The Blob hadn't proceeded to engorge not only everybody in the audience but the entire theatre as well! And that's just one of many masterpieces of a long and venerable tradition.

It becomes a bit presumptuous to start talking about standards when we've already admitted that all this stuff is trash, but I think I've seen one movie that must rank at the very top of the heap. I mean, this flick doesn't just rebel against, or even disregard, standards of taste and art. In the universe inhabited by The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, such things as standards and responsibility have never been heard of. It is this lunar purity which largely imparts to the film its classic stature. Like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and a very few others, it will remain as an artifact in years to come to which scholars and searchers for truth can turn and say, "This was trash!"

I sat up half the night waiting, and it finally came on at 2:45 AM. First, though, came a commercial with Bing Crosby spieling in Spanish and then saying: "I was just telling my amigos about United States Saving Bonds." Perfect! And now the credits. Will they be serious about it? Heh heh heh, you bet they will. But what's this credit headed "The Entertainers" and "Dancing Girls," with a roster of names under each? Hmmm. Curiouser and curiouser.

Montage of shots of sleazy fairgrounds, probably shot in the amusement park at Long Beach. Loud soundtrack of erratic, staccato saxophone rock'n"roll, melody a bit like Chuck Berry's "Too Pooped to Pop." Rock'n"roll or music at least related to it will be heard all the way through the movie, all of it thoroughly mediocre. But whaddya want, Woodstock?

Now we're inside the gypsy fortune-teller's tent. A sultry, cat-like wench with eyes like flaming agates, she is unaccountably giving the unmistakeable come-on to a shabby old bald-headed fart who sits snorting up a fifth of rye and sez: "You couldn't buy enough booze to make me want you. Whyncha go out and find one o" them freaks."

What's going on here? Never mind, no time to cogitate; she becomes so incensed at the codger's insults she shrieks: "Now I will put you with the rest of my little pets!," throws acid in his face and drags him screaming behind the curtain!

Cut to nightclub scene: pas de deux with bony cat in tux and chick wearing less than you expect to see on TV. (She bears an uncanny resemblance to the gypsy fortune-teller.) Cut to dressing room: dancer now soaking up rotgut like a sponge. A black cat crosses her path and she explodes into screaming,

"Y)u couldn't buy enough booze to make me want you. Whyncha go out and find one o" them freaks?"

kicking hysterics.

Cut to Jerry and Harold (played by two actors named Cash Flagg and Atlas King), heroes of this thing, lounging around their pad ruminating about the meaning of life. Harold just resembles your typical "50s punk who combs his hair a lot, but Jerry looks like a cross between Pete Townshend and Alice the Goon's brother. Jerry leans back and sez: "Wonder what it's like to hold a job?"

Cut to home of Jerry's cutie, Angie. She goes through a row with her mother, who doesn't approve of Jerry at all. Jerry and Harold arrive to pick her up and take her to the carnival — Jerry beeps the horn, climbs out on the roof of the car and swings the door open with his foot! Cool cat!

Cut to montage of Jerry, Angie and Harold at the carnival, walking in on the beach, riding the rides and especially the roller-coaster in clips reminiscent of This Is Cinerama, interspersed with distorting mirrors and garish dolls moving back and forth in strange Funhouse laughter.

Cut to girl dancer drinking in dressing room again. Her partner lectures her, they go on, she's so lushed she trips over her own feet, falls across the floor, runs offstage. The manager storms back ("I can't run a nightclub with a drunken star!") then splits, leaving her guzzling and reading a paperback about astrology.

Cut to Jerry and Angie and Harold, still on the roller coaster, screaming in the night. Back to dancer visiting the gypsy fortune teller, who lays out the Tarot: First thing up is the Death Card. "I knew it," the dancer screams and runs out.

But she runs the wrong way, behind the curtain where the gypsy dragged the old drunk. A monster hand reaches through the bars.

What a perverted movie! Drool, drool.

Jerry, Angie artd Harold approach the fortune telling tent. They go in and Angie's fortune is told. She takes it seriously, but Jerry says it's a bunch of bullshit. In fact, he scoffs so much he gets the gypsy's dander up, an action he'll regret.

An eerily wobbly organ tape begins as Jerry, Angie and Harold cruise out on the midway and stop to watch the hoochiekoo dancer, whose name is Carmelita and may or may not be the same dancer who drinks all the time and just visited the gypsy. One problem with this movie is that most of the people in it look like some other character; the club manager who bawled the dancer out for boozing, for instance, looked more than a little like the unknown and unnamed coot who got the acid thrown in his face at the beginning. So what's going on? Well, I ain't so sure. I'm not even sure it.makes a difference.

Meanwhile, Angie is burning up about the way Jerry's gawking at that near-nekkid hoofer lady, so she leaves with Harold in a huff. Jerry buys a ticket and goes inside to watch the whole show, and there follows a feather dance like you never seen in prime time, brother. Rendered in its entirety, it consists of a bevy of bountiful babes prancing around, running from one side of the stage to the other and writhing and kneeling all arty and ballet-like, meanwhile shedding more and more feathers til all they got left is a little ducky down o'er bush and nipples! And one even looked like Mary Tyler Moore!

Next up is a girl who looks exactly like Angie, singing an original rock'n"roll ballad: "I was pretending that.our ending was one of those things." Followed by the incomparable Carmelita: "Now we give you our exotic beautiful gypsy dancer!" She sings a song, too: "I'm the Pied Piper of love/Follow me ..."

While Jerry is slavering in the fourth row, Ortega, the gypsy's one-eyed hunchback servant with Fagin nose, taps him on the shoulder and hands him a note from Carmelita, telling him to meet her in the dressing room after the show! And he does, only he bumbles into the wrong dressing-room and gets run out by a bunch of irate half-dressed dancing girls: "Thought he could get some real fast action before the show."

Stumbling down the hall, he sees her suddenly, framed in the shadows of a doorway, distant, mysterious. "Carmelita? You sent for me?"

Here comes that eerie organ music again. "Follow me."

Suddenly, the whole screen is filled by a spinning psychedelic vortex ... down, down into it we whirl... the gypsy is here, hypnotizing Jerry ... his eyes get wild, the light burns into them ... his face snaps forward and back and his eyeballs roll to odd electronic gurgles ... Ortega stands behind the gypsy, laughing monstrously ,.. Carmelita in Garboesque hat and coat enters dressing room alone ... the camera spins crazily around her face as she stares at it hypnotically ... lens careens off every cranny of the dressing room, always homing back into those burning eyes ...

Cut to nightclub floor and a stand-up comic: "I come from a large iron and steel family — Mom irons and Dad steals ..." Followed by the MC: "And now, the Hungry Mouth is proud to present a bright new singer — Don McLean!" and another dull song in full. Back to Carmelita in the dressing room. Up comes her dancing partner: "What's wrong, Marge?" WHAT? Are Carmelita and Marge the same person? Or is it just that they look exactly alike? Or that everybody in this movie looks alike? I'm thoroughly confused but I am taking notes.

Suddenly, though, it all comes clear when Marge and her partner mount the stage, commence the pas de deux and Jerry barges in dressed in monk's cowl with chalky face looking for all the world like the Devil in Bergman's Seventh Seal, if they'd let Max Von Sydow play him. He stabs both dancers, cackling like a hen-bane fiend and runs out. I see! Right! Marge isn't Carmelita, Carmelita's in cahoots with the Gypsy to kill all the other entertainers on the Midway. Eliminating the competition. Okay.

Except that it isn't okay, nothing is. We're sucked just as abruptly back into another one of those nightmare montages ... as in many other films when they wanna go Surreal and Way Out, we see a modern-jazz ballet... a girl who looks like Angie in a blonde wig calls dreamily: "Jerry ... Jerry ... [looks at camera^ Oh there you are!" and breaks into hysterical laughter. .. Jerry writhing in bed ... superimposition of flames, the Gypsy, Ortega, endless images of women, one of whom is doing the Twist... King Kong roaring... the laughing Midway clown marionette seen earlier ... Jerry wakes up moaning and splashes water in his face.

The next morning Harold is out working on his car, and Jerry comes out of the house and says: "Boy, did I have a restless night last night!" Next he hightails to Angie's to apologize for being pigheaded last night. "All right," she says, "but I sure would like to know what happened after I left!"

And with that, coquettishly, she turns her parasol his way and starts twirling it! Oh no! It's turning to the psychedelic vortex! His eyes get wild! She looks out from behind the parasol and she's Carmelita! Lightning cuts back and forth between Jerry choking her and choking Carmelita. Her dad tears him aWay just in time. Jerry runs wildly away, goes for a walk by the railroad tracks and by gum here comes another song! Sounds something like the Sons of the Pioneers ...

Night. The Midway. In the Hungry Mouth another song and dance number commences, with about twelve Goldiggers doing the Twist and singing "Gramma's got shook outta shape from doing the Twist!" Next we see a dancer holding a paper headlined "DANCERS MURDERED" going to the fortune teller, who snaps: "If you're looking for my sister Carmelita, she's not here." AHA! So they're sisters! This little puzzle is falling into place right nifty.

Back at the Hungry Mouth the man is bringing on "the girl with golden voice — Miss Terry Randall!" (Who are all these people?) Terry sings another original that goes: "Choo Choo Cha Boochie, you thrill me with the slightest touch" accompanied by odd rhythmic punctuation of strangled screams. And who wrote all these songs? Were they written especially for this movie?. Or was the movie written for them?

Jerry goes to see the Gypsy: "I've been having a nightmare, and I think you know about it!" Since half the people in this movie are lushes, the Gypsy always has a handy comeback: "You been drinking?" But Jerry is not about to be put off, and asks her what goes on behind the curtain. She leers, "Why don't you go back and see?"

The sap does ... oh no!... it's the vortex again! .J. the Gypsy's staring eyes ... and now she is joined by the dancer

who just left... I start hoping for a Lesbian scene, but no such luck.

Cut to family conference at Angie's house with Angie and Harold begging her parents to let them go back to the carnival. "All right Angela, you can go, as long as Madison goes with you." WHO THE FUCK IS MADISON? Harold Madison? I sure as fuck hope so.

Meanwhile the dancer who left the Gypsy's tent a few minutes back is at home with a bottle of wine and soft radio. Cuddly smiles, obviously waiting for her boyfriend. Instead she finds J. Zombie all cowled and white again, he chases her around the roon, blade flashes in the light and he stabs her with a quick cut to her boyfriend's finger pressing the doorbell. When she don't answer he lets himself in and gets stabbed as well.

Jerry, somewhat recovered, pays another visit to the Gypsy. She leers again: "It's too bad you know so much — now you leave me no choice." Throws acid in his face! "Take him back and put him with the rest of the little pets." But suddenly Ortega fucks up and the Zombies are all loose! Three or four of "em! They strangle Ortega and they Gypsy, whose name has been Estrella all along but wasn't revealed until Ortega speaks her name just before her death. And now here comes Carmelita, slinky gown flapping open and wotta body! But the Zombies are unimpressed and strangle her too. Now the two dead sisters are sprawled across the floor and the camera lingers with loving morbidity over Estrella's tits which brim up out of her shift and Carmelita's whole bod, which is even more naked in death that it's been the rest of the flick. What a perverted movie! Drool, drool. Finally the camera gets tired of necrophilia and rises up to watch the Zombies as they beat it out the door in search of more trouble to make, then pans back for a closeup of Estrella's staring eyes ...

"Howdy friends this is Guy Fletcher and I hope you're enjoying our movie." More used cars. Thanks, podner, sure am. Return after commercial to Midway night cutting to another exotic dance number while the Zombies lurk in hallways between dressing rooms and stage. They run out onto the floor and start chasing the dancers while the audience sits impassively thinking it's part of the show until one. Zombie pushes a dancer to the floor and starts strangling her. Audience screams and people start running out. Closeup of Zombie faces: they look like a cross between Kabuki and Polynesian masks, heavy on the paper mache. A cop runs in and shoots one Zombie dead. Cops chase the other two down the hall, shoot "em both. Angie and Harold come in, and Angie screams. Jerry stumbles in the side door, and he really doesn't look as bad as the other Zombies, face just a little pockmarked. Of course, he just joined the team. Angie screams again. Jerry runs away and jumps out the window! The film must be approaching the climax, because a big chase scene is obviously shaping up. And indeed we cut to Jerry running up the road, Angie chasing him, the cops and other chasing them both. They all run out to the beach and Jerry tears madly out into the rough surf around the shoals, hopping from stone to stone for about five minutes while Angie screams his name from the shore. Finally Jerry climbs atop a huge rock, one of the cops shoots him, he falls into the surf... is washed up on the sand ... struggles to stand up and dies strenuously ... They all rush up and bend over him ... the camera backs away into the sky ... "THE END." Followed by "Made in Hollywood, USA," as if anyone could have any doubts, and a cast list telling who played whom. Harold's last name wasn't Madison, but there was an actor in the film named Madison Clarke. Which could have solved everything: one of the players slipped momentarily and called "Harold" by his real name instead of that of the character he was playing. The only trouble is that Madison Clarke didn't play Harold. Oh, well: I'm sure he was at the carnival somewhere,