movies

Country Crap Exposed!

PAYDAY

Directed by Daryl Duke Fantasy

Country music stars get sucked off.

They also eat cunt. And, more often than not, they drink a lot and ingest vast quantities of speed. They even say dirty words.

For some arcane reason, however, country music, unlike rock ’n’ roll which thrives on the flaunting of such sordid goings on, has traditionally affected a facade of goody-goody piety in a tireless effort to obscure its festering underbelly.

The personalities of such twang’morph magnoids as, for instance, Hank Williams (alcoholic, chloral hydrate schmecker, attempted murderer), Spade Cooly (convicted murderer), Merle Haggard (armed robber, car thief, prison escapee, quondam drunk), Johnny Cash (during his barbiturateghoul days, Cash used to get his cookies by painting motel rooms black, buzzsawing the legs off hotel furniture and hurling beer cans from speeding Cadillacs in the early hours of the morning), Johnny Paycheck (another jailbird, Paycheck got his nickname by specializing in forgery) and Faron Young and Jerry Lee Lewis (let’s just, to put things mercifully, say that those two have a tendency to be very, very drunk and very, very loud at any given moment) cause rock’s most selfindulgent pretensions of debauchery to pale in comparison.

Natheless, the moguls of twang still try to foist off the farcical tableau of good ol’ boys making goo-goo eyes at the Lord and Tennessee Ernie singing “Little Green Apples” as a just representation of what it’s all about (not unlike the way that rock was being packaged and pushed until, say, 1969-1970).

Anyway, when I read a negative review of Payday in the February issue of Country Music (they had never before given anything, whether record, film or book, a derogatory review) I knew the movie had to be good, for Country Music was and is a staunch exponent of the shallow goody-twoshoes approach to the twang’cosm, refusing to print words like “suck” or “shit” ‘in articles dealing with people who say things like “I wanna get me some fuckin’ nigger cunt” (one of the more choice utterances to pass the whiskey-pickled lips of a famous country crooner I had the pleasure of travelling with a few months ago). Country Music writer Robert Mitchell (who, in the same issue, described Barbara Fairchild’s recording of Don McLean’s “Vincent” as “daring”) said of the film that “It is the fact that Maury Dann (played by Rip Torn) is supposed to represent country music which causes the stomach to turn ... to patronize the film is to play right into their cheap little scenario.” Not unlike the kind of review Performance would’ve probably received from Sixteen had that film been released in 1964.

Payday is a great fucking movie. It’s the story of the last couple of days in some rising country star’s seedy life. Filmed on location in Alabama, and utilizing a lot of actual characters (the clientele of Mr. Ed’s Bar in Selma and a local disc jockey, for example) the flick follows Maury Dann (a composite of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, who had a penchant for firing his .32 at random from the window of his car as does Payday’s Maury) as he picks up some admiring teenage pussy, visits his aging speedfreak mom, drinks Wild Turkey, accidentally kills someone, and finally suffers a fatal heart attack whilst rolling along in his car. Good shit.

A few more movies like Payday and the world of twang just might be coaxed into joining the present century.

Nick Tosches

THE FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH

Directed by Cheng Chang Ho Warner Bros.

If you can imagine what a film entitled Godzilla and Hercules Go Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and into the Planet of the Apes to a Muscle Beach Party with a Fistful of Superfly’s Dollars might be like, then you may have a frame of reference for dealing with The Five Fingers of Death. This made-in-Hong-Kong film centers on the rivalry of two schools of the martial arts (kung-fu, karate, judo, etc.) and features hostile Oriental fighters clothed in turn of the century robes, who exchange such dubbed bits of dialogue as:

“Whatever happened to Chao Chihhao?”

“I heard he’s having an affair with a singer.” Of its kind it is perhaps the best ever made; the Citizen Kane of sleazoabsurdist-dubbed trash.

The film traces the rise, fall and re-emergence of Chao Chih-hao, a young Chinese who is being instructed in the martial arts. He is trained by a master in the ritual of the iron fist; when he uses this method in fights, his fists (thanks to an ultra-violet light from the property department) glow like two hot copper pennies in a dark room. One of the film’s many villains, Meng Tien-hsiun, rolls large ball-bearings around in his hand, Caine Mutiny style, during moments of stress.

The film’s formula is not so different from hard-core pornography; a few bits of dialogue to link scenes together and then the banging starts again. The banging in this case consists of endless fights, all pierfprmed in a style reminiscent of Broadway choreography, circa West Side Story. When the opponents slash at one another with their fists and palms, the soundtrack is filled with appropriate whooshes, and the camera’s zoom lens goes into orgasm, contracting back and forth in a crazy syncopated rhythm with all that flying flesh. The greatest moments of the fights (leaps into mid-air during which the opponents’ skulls knock, swords sliced in half by an iron fist) are all in slow motion and the more enjoyable for it.

The editing is devoid of the Peckinpahesque poetry that finds spiritual grace and cosmic energy in acts of violence, but it is functional and entirely appropriate. Watching the action scenes, which are laid out in clear, square camera set-ups and edited in action-reaction textbook style, eventually assumes the visual sensation one receives while moving the eye rapidly from square to square in a Marvel comic book. It is uncomplicated, childish fun.

The movie, which rates not stars, but rather, four bags of hot buttered popcorn accompanied by king size Cokes and a 50 cent box of Raisinettes, was produced by a gentleman named Run Run Shaw, who has what is surely the best movie name since Tab Hunter;

Paul Varjack