What’s So Special About Troy Donahue?

Insomnia. Personally I don't belive in it— there are too many home remedies like drinking a fifth of whiskey very quickly or taking 30 valiums in a gulp. It's true that after the whiskey cure you'll probably wake up a screaming paranoid mass of cracked jellied synapses and after the valium cure you probably won't wake up at all, but consider the heinous alternative. If, in the wee small hours (as people who never stay up late call them), you find sleep eluding you and there are no benign deadly chemicals at hand, and all your friends are either asleep or beyond speech, and you've given up making crank calls to the Suicide Prevention Center because they keep hanging up on you, and radio simply isn't enough anymore, and your mind continues to race (or at least lope) along demanding input like a deranged diabetic screaming foraTwinkie . . . well then, there's nothing left but the late, late show. A dubious tonic at best; it won't cure your insomnia but after awhile you'll probablyxbegin to think you're asleep.

The late, late snow is not to be confused with the late show. The late show is reasonably sanb. The late, late show is the haven of B-movies (B for low budget). Here lies lunacy. These are movies made tp be be forgotten, films whose original purpose was to clear the theater between showings of the main feature or to swell the presentation out to a double bill so patrons would feel they were gettin' their money's worth. Now they're the staple fare during those hours which are neither wee nor small but big and empty and intensely long (everything is intensified if you're still rolling on your own mpmentum at , 3:00 AM).

Aside from the influence of television and darkest night there are factors inherent in the films themselves which can make dried crackers oirt of sequential thought. With so little interest and so little bread invested in these films by the studios that m^de them, their production allowed enough freedom for the talent or idiocy of the participants to run rampant. (There are exceptions in the area of interest inasmuch as some studios existed solely for the production of B's — but the low bread factor still allowed for this peculiar kind of freedom.)

The B's fall into three, categories — the films of outrageous ingenuity and artful dodging of budget deficiencies, films of insanely insistent ineptitude and, of course, the mediocrities,, Thoth's law dictates that the majority of the B-movies fall into' the last category. This is mild medicine for the insomniacal tube sucker, similar to watching something like Mayberry RFD right after you've received a phone hill for $50 and you haven't any money. You don't want art when you're feeftng bad (not TV's art, anyway), you want something dumb and bleak like yourself, something you can resonate with (which might explain a lot about the content of current TV programming but probably doesn't).

The B-films of ingenuity are fairly rare — these would be the Lewton films (Curse of The Cat People, The Body Snatcher, that bunch), the Chan films, the later Holmes films (the first two were budgeted out of the B category) and the odd sleeper. Good hack work intensified into high art for all the darkeyed maniacs oh the oblivion trail.

The.films of insanely insistent ineptitude are the Twinkies. Some of these reality out-takes have received cult status among the demented. For example Robot Monster ('53) with the title character wearing a gdrilla suit and a diving helmet, living in a cave with a bubble machine . . . Plan 9 From Outer Space ('56), a film you could run backwards without, affecting its coherency

. . The Incredibly Strange Creatures, Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies ('62), self-explanatory (L. Bangs documented his encounter with this film rather extensively in the March '73 issue of CREEM) . . . The Creation of The Humanoids ('62) which was filmed in somebody's garage with lots of empty backdrops and lots of talking (in movies talk is literally cheap — unfortunately in B's it's also unbearable) and a line that's worth retelling. The story takes place in the future when a group of malcontents are very down on the robot caste that serves them (why? I don't remember) and the payoff comes when the protaganist, who is a militant leader of the malcontents, finds out that he's really a robot too — phony memory bank and all. Unable to accept that he's a humanoid he gets to deliver one of B-dom's classic howlers as he stares at his hands incredulously and says "But these hands were little hands once!" Very heavy to hear if you're naturally bent.

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Not all the Twinkies are of the horror/sci-fi genre! Just recently, finding myself in the state of sleep stillborn and quite helpless to do anything about it I started vbatching a late, date B with the alluring title of House Of Women ('62). The first few minutes were reasonable, the plot unfolding in semi-coherent fashion. The inmates of this women's prison were allowed to have their kids stay in the joint with them up to the age of 5 (strange, but not terribly). The tough woman in the film was called Butch (that was cool). One of the women who didn't like Butch threw a pie in her face in the prison mess so now Butch is out for blood. Naturally I figure sh.e's going to snuff the pie thrower's kid so I settle-in for some low-keyed morbidity, but instead she draws a mustache and beard on the picture of Troy Donahue that the woman keeps in her cell (I begin to gag — could be a TU/inkie). The next scehe has the two women in front of the warden (played by An; drew Duggan no less), and he says, "As I understand it this woman drew a moustache on your picture of Troy Donahoo [sic]. So what's so special about Troy Donahoo?" And the woman says "Like I told her," indicating Butch, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." I missed the rest, deciding that aspirin and after-shaving lotion might not be so bad after all.