CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

Fun, Fun, Fun ('Til Daddy Takes The Motorized Shark Fin Away!)

by

Rick Johnson

1800 UNUSUAL NOVELTIES Johnson Smith Company Mt. Clemens, MI 48043 (50?)

It crawled into my post office box, honest. Lurking there amidst the usual ransom notes, subscription revocation notices, libel suits, 8x10 glossies of stereo components, back issues of the Cuban Communist Party newspaper and oversize postcards featuring Bugs Bunny imploring me to watch Tin Huey’s upcoming appearance on Celebrity Whew!, it looked like yet another useless catalog of spare parts for technological advances that have yet to occur.

But then a phrase on the cover leaped out at me: Rotary Nose Hair Clipper, it promised, p. 38. Finally, something I can use! And then, on the very same page, Alien Ears, Motorized Shark Fin, Avalanche Shave Cream, Watch TV Lying Down and Grow Your Own Sponges! I stood there with the transcendentally befuddled expression of George.Chapstick as I realized what had fallen into my hands—the 1980 Johnson Smith Company “World Of Fun” Catalog!

World of fun, nothin’, this 97-page why?-packed booklet is a self-contained star system of advanced stupidity, Whetheryou’re.a practical joker, a practicaljoke or even if you’re Bob Welch, this little number has everything that anyone could ever want to own. And best of all, every item is Cheap City!

For example, you can stock your entire kitchenette for less than the cost of a Kuwaiti driver’s permit a nd still have every necessity: Sucker Butter, FoamingSugar, Plastic Rotten Meat, Dribble Glasses, Stinky Silveryyearand, for a touch of down-home reality, the Sonic Control Puppy! Sorry, pitiful, terrified cry not included!

Once you’ve cooked it all up on your Pocket Portable Stove and washed it down with some Awful Tasting Cola Drink (now available in stores—it’s called “Diet S hasta”) it’s time for some of that aforementioned f-u-n! Take a quick run through your handy Pocket Labyrinth! Apply a ca n of Spray-On Stainless Steel to the household cat and then chase it around with a Big Rubber Magnet! Whip out the old Squirrel Call and summon yourself a squirrel! Or if rodents aren’t your cup of tea Jhow about #4139, Drive Fish Crazy! No, it’s not a Bob Welch album. They actually sell something called Spanish Fly Lure for$1.95. Comingsoon: HowToMakeLove To The Single Chinook.

Magic is fun, too—ask any bore! The folks at Johnson Smith (no relation, regardless) stockall the enduring tricks made popular by masters of legerdemain including the breathtaking Zipper Banana, the astounding Color Change Necktie apd the much-dreaded Vanishing Egg Bag, as well as newer yawns like the Folding Half Dollar, the Famous Spirit Nut (a third career for Kapt. Kopter?), the rather suggestive Penetration Cups and the Frankly Tedious Candle-Through-Arm Trick.

Afraid you’re going to be arrested for having too much fun? Then try some of the inteflectual itemsoffered, such asTwenty-SevenWaysTo Improve Your l.Q. (#1. Put down this magazine...) or maybe the ultimate must for the budding rock critic, The World’s Smallest Dictionary. Has onfy five entries: pirn, lek, plea-bargaining, motmot and in-a-gadda-da-vida.

Speaking of music—a rare event in these pages—you might want to try out the Faucet Radio (plays oply Bob Welch songs), the Mini Simulated Hi-Fi System or possibly the World’s Smallest Harmonica, on which you can play the world’s shortest version of “Train time.” Or better yet, HowTo Write SongsThatSell. Sounds promising but I dunno—it has the same number as Drive Fish Crazy.

The one item I’m most curious about though, is Twenty Ugly Lifelike Creatures for only $1.69. , Sounds like a real bargain, but whatl want to know is how they can fitNick Lowe, Tom Petty, the Stones, Dfevo, Bob Welch, theB-52’sandZZ Top into one tiny package? W

THE JOHNSON COLLECTION

Punk keychain I Punk phonograph needle!

Punk tattoo kit!

Genuine New Wave Toothpicks!

New Wave Condom Tester! Step One: blow up condom Punk-Rock Silverwear! (better serve lots of peas I)

Montezuma’s Revenge

GUYANA CULT OFTHE DAMNED Directed by Rene Cardona, Jr.

(Re-Al Productions)

I’ve always been a fan of low budget films, the Roger Corman school of filmmaking in particular. Corman’s theory is relatively simple: A movie that is humorous, has lots of action, a little sex and social relevance is a film that will sell.

Corman sold America the B-film—movies that were made in a few days, with a few dollars, that debuted in drive-ins across the country. Good healthy trash. I need healthy trash, fast trash.

But what do you call it when a filmmaker produces a movie so fast that he forgets to put an important.colon in the title Guyana Cult Of The Damned? An oversight? Poor proofreading? Mexican filmmaker Rene Cardona Jr. may not have much command of the English language, but someone on his crew must have.. .Que pasa?, Rene...

Just one minor bitch amidst much larger ones. The whole Jim Jones/Guyana/suicide-bygrape-kool-aid may be a tad fresh in our minds, too recent to be reconstructed on celluloid. What’s next? AThurman Munson trilogy? How about the Sid Vicious story?

Guyana Cult Of The Damned is not worth seeing, even at a matinee, the kind of flick that Corman would puke over. I went to see it hungover and tired, and it made my headache worse. What can you do? Valium?

The film is based o,n hearsay, (what else could it be? Nine hundred and thirteen people died by drinking poisoned kool-aid, no one was left alive—exceptafew lawyers—howcould Cor,dona possibly know? Was he there?) so it can’t be regarded as documentary, and should be regarded as shit.

One must keep repeating, “It’s only cinema, it’s only cinema.” The mere idea of getting upset over a movie that is as blatantly moronic as Guyana Cult Of The Damned is pointless; as pointless as Jane Fonda yelling at Robert De Niro atthe Academy Awards ceremony, telling him that The Deer Hunter did not portray Vietnam as it really was. Like they say, it’s only a movie...

Yeah, it’s a movie alright, but even this is no excuse. Guyana Cult Of The Damned is an exercise in utterly poor taste: There are, of course, movies that are so terrib le that they’re classics. Unfortunately, this one does not fit in that category. Guyana is not even funny, except when the narrator delivers his big line: “It was a big night for death.” Uh-huh, and I should’ve been in bed.

In the press kit for Guyana Cult Of The Damned, it states: “For film makers Rene Cardona, Jr., and Alfonzo Lopez Negrete, partners in Mexico’s fast rising Re-Al Productions International—whose specialty lies in revealing dramatizations of actual events, the story was a natural.” If this is a natural for you, Mr. Cordona, you’ve got problems.

In one sequence, three young boys are caught stealing food from the communal pantry, as growing kids need about ten meals a day, and the Reverend Jim Johnson (yeah, the names haye been changed to protect the guilty) has cut food rations to a bare minimum (And spiking the meager rations with stimulants.. .religious speedfreaks?). And how does the good Reverend punish the young delinquents? One of the boys is lashed to poles and submerged in a pit filled with water, another is staked to the ground and a large tangle of snakes are allowed to crawl . over his naked body, and the third is tied spread-eagled and some sort of electrical prod is applied on his wienie. Yikes.

Stuart Whitman portrays the Reverend Jim Johnson, and does bear a striking resemblance to Jim Jones. His grinding of teeth, his twitch and his avid drug abuse, all spell strange, as in sick.

' Gene Barry lowers his standards considerably ' (He Was the star in my favorite T. V. western, BatMasterson, wotta cool guy!), and this is truly sad. Other casualties include Yvonne DeCarlo, who I didn’t recognize in this flick at all, and Joseph Cotten (of Citizen Kane, and the Third Man fame) as the sect’s dignified counsel. Too bad they had to waste their talents on such a poor production.

Supposedly Re-Al Productions makes six films a year, with their next efforts being Boat People, and Kill the Shah. Hopefully, with the price of film stock skyrocketing, we won’t have to be subjected to anymore such mind-fuck.

Mark J. Norton

Apocalypse Hooterville

“Keep Manhattan, just give me that countryside,” was first sung by: (a) Lou Reed; (b) Gerald Ford; (c) Margaret Trudeau; or, (d) Oliver Wendell Douglas.

If you said (d), go to the head of your class or to Crabwell Corners, whichever comes first. It was, of course, Oliver Wendell/Eddie Albert who immortalized that verse in the whimsical duetthat signalled another half-hour of dadavision every week during the late 60’s. Believe me, Peaches and Herb never had writers like that.

Green Acres is the place to be. Yes, it was. Ostensibly a spin-off of The Beverly Hillb illies, Green Acres was perhaps the most plotless continuing non sequitur in the history of television. Watching the show required not only the suspension of disbelief, but the suspension of belief asiVell. 1, for one, could never quite believe I was watching the thing.

But I was and, by God, with good reason. Here was a cast with someone for everyone. From (hubba hubba) Lisa Douglas, theCosmopolitan farm wife, to Arnold Ziffle, the porcine man-about-Hooterville, Green Acres was populated with the most enchanting characters this side of Never-never Land. Everyone in this show was a caricature actor par excellence, They were as well-defined as the plots were ill-defined. Of course, you remember them:

•Mr. Haney, the shyster whose only apparent 'occupation was bilking Oliver Wendell Douglas out of another buck.

•Eb, the indolentfarmhand. Eb’s lot in life was to constantly remind Mr. Douglas that Oliver was incompetent. His penchant for referring to Oliver and Lisa as “Mom and Dad” was only one ofthe many outstanding running jokes on Green Acres.

•Mr. Kimble, the county agent with the mentality of achair. Mr. Kimble probably remains television’s premier example of cretinism, and I’m not forgetting aboutSam on The Brady Bunch, either.

Yes, Green Acres was inane, and-yes, it got bad press. Remember, this was the heydey of HeeHaw, Petticoat Junction, The Hillbillies. Critics (read that New York) feared that CBS was turning the country into Hicksville, North America.

Butthe critics, those eunuchs ofthe harem, were wrong again. People were taking LSD. Surrealism was much-discussed. The Beatles were only needing love, forChrist’s sake. Green Acres was the place to be. For it was there, in Hooterville, that story lines were only a confused backdrop for the more confusing issue, fife. Consider the following:

A well-to-do gangster/farmer(!) has taken pity on the Douglas’ woebegone farm. He decides to modernize the place by ripping off equipment from nearby farms. Eb (“Oh boy, hotcakes!”) is showing Oliver the goods stashed in the Douglas bam while a radio describes the crime wave.

“A blue tractor was stolen,” says the radio. Eb points out the same to an incredulous Oliver.

No, Mr. Honoy, I do not want to buy a vibrator I I don’t care what color it is I

“And a milking machine,” says the radio. The camera pans to a huge crate conveniently labelled MILKING MACHINE.

“And a red combine,” the radio continues.

“Hmm, that’s funny, oursisyeDow,”saysa puzzled Eb.

“Arid 40 gallons of yellow paint,” answers the radio, right on cue.

People having conversations with their radios was not a particularly outrageous notion in the world of Green Acres. After all, Lisa could lounge around in her negligee for half the farming day, cooking up petrified hotcakes fpr hard-working, three-piece-suited Oliver The kids atthe local elementary school could go out on strike when Arnold the Pig was expelled for being a disruptive influence. Andeventheboundariesof transvestism and sexual confusion could be crossed in the persons of the Monroe “brothers^, Ralph and Alph. Hayseed comedy, indeed.

It wasn’t comedy. Utter nonsense, maybe, but not comedy. The real charm of Green Acres was not that the writers endlessly barraged the viewer with idiocy. The real charm was that they made absolutely no attempt to make that idiocy credible. Anything could happen in Hooterville; cause and effect were out the window, someplace by Oliver’s telephone, probably.

And there, in the middle of it all, stood Oliver Wendell Douglas, theHarvard man with a dream. Poor, rational Oliver trying to deal with a world he could not even begin to understand.

Sound familiar? It should; enduring themes aren’t simply fabricated and neither was Green Acres. Oliver Wendell Douglas was a man surrounded by morons. But aren’t we all?

J. Kordosh

Teenage Waistline

by

Richard C. Walls

Late last January I received a Written invitation from Cousin Mort to attend the Second Annual Nova Pilbeam MemorialTea and Orgy. I was flattered. During the last few years Mort and his friends had, unintentionally, made me painfully aware of my encroaching dotage—ever since my twenty-fifth birthday I’ve felt, in the company of minors, slightly depressed, hopelessly mortal. Despite this I’ve always enjoyed being accepted into that company, enjoyed feeling like a visiting uncle, fondly watching the disgusting dissipations ofthe youngsters upon whose shoulders the mantle of worthlessness must eventually fall. Seeing Mort and the others, drugged and drooling and incoherent, always brought a warm feeling to my aging heart. That was me 10 years ago, I’d think with a pleasant shiver of nostalgia. Really fucked up.

During the cold lean months of winter Cousin Mort (not really a cousin, just nicknamed so for reasons long forgotten) would turn tofat and television. Sequestered in a corner of his half-finished basement, surrounded by puffy, evil confections—Twinkies, King Dons, Ding Dongs—as well as remedial beer and dope, he would spend his evenings pampering his teenage waistline and fluffing his brain until the spring thaw, at which time he would emerge doughy and confused andanxious to cruise Woodward for death burgers and loose women. During the day he went to school. On weekends the dissipations would go on far into the night, especially on Friday when the local all-nite movie station serviced those unfortunate Detroiters who found themselves energized at th^ee in the morning. It was one such Friday night, I assumed, that the First Annual Nova Pilbeam Tea and Orgy must have occured. During some blurry, nocturnal appreciation of old movies. I recognized the name ofthe forgotten Hitchcock ingenue on the invitation. ..the “Orgy and Tea” part was Mort’s approximation of humor.

Iarrived drunk and on time, around2a.m., a few minutes before the movies started. I was delighted to see that Mort’s friend Lionel was there since he was hip, articulate and not too obviously 17-years-old. Like Mort, Lionel was always full of distracted energy so that when he leaned into a point during a conversation he gave the impression that he was about to leave the room-1 was somewhat less than delighted to see Ferd there. Ferd was the kind of person you always tripped over at parties—a corqplete burnout, a devotee of weed and malt liquor with a perpetually flushed face and an unnerving lugubriousness—when he turned around to look at you his eyes arrived a ful! three seconds later. I’d never seen Ferd straight and couldn’t imagine what he’d be like if he were all there since, like Pilbeam and Tea his only signs of life were a grin and an occasionafly muttered “o shit”, tho atone point during the night, apropos of nothing, he suddenly shouted “Texture!”. If an ashtray had spoke it would not have been more startling.

Also present was Alice, the quietly weird. Alice wore an eyepatch and was fond of saying “So what?” How she hurt her eye, if indeed she had, I neverknew.

Mort and friends were already in their accustomed positions when 1 arrived since alt ho the Tea was ostensibly an “occasion,” an opportunity to see three rarely seen anywhere Hitchcock films of 30’s British vintage, they’d been doing this since early November. The dissipation, as mentioned, included food as much as beer and dope—they would have been total hedonists if it weren’t for the fact that they were sexual slugs—and slimy Hostess wrappers lay among open bags of stale Tostidos and cans of flawless, tasteless Pringles. Ferd satlike a stone in an oversized armchair and, when 1 arrived, grinned and muttered “o shit”. Mort and Lionel sat crosslegged on the floor sipping beer and contemplatin g an old Queen album cover on which lay a few ounces of mud green grass and a few sylph-like slips of amber rolling paper. “I’m here," Iannounced inanely as I took a seat and Alice, squatting asexually in front of theTV, adjusting the knobs, turned around and said “So what?” We were off.

* The first picture was Sabotage, a ’37 film about anarchy in the U.K., famous for a sequence which concludes with a bus exploding and atomizing a little boy «id a cute puppy dog. The print, like most of Channel 62’s prints, was not only rare but horribly battered. This along with the fact that the commercials entered at random, often breaking off a sentence that was never completed since they apparently kept the films running during the commercials (& the commercials! That’sa whole ’nother meditation—such an epiphany-laden primitivism deserves a monograph from a mind more finely honed than my own), made the viewing a perfect, festively pointless counterpoint to serious drug ingestion. A few minutes into the film the actors’ words became buried under what sounded like cellophane being endlessly crumpled. When the sound returned it was out of sync with gestures and exclamations occurring independently, mouths still chewing sentences long after they’d been spit out. A commercial cut Sylvia Sidney off in mid-chew. “They’re sadists,” mumbjed Mort thru a mouthful of munchies. Lionel deferred. “They’re just inept. Orstoned. Or both.” The movie resumed, the bus exploded, we watched contentedly.

The second film was Secret Agent, ’36. The plot was too confused (I think) and the expected set pieces too few and far between to hold our interests so during the slow spots the sound was turned down and Graham Parker and Nick Lowe were played. Hearing “Crest Motel.. .on dtugs” while on the screen a young John Gielgud ran thru his repetoire of blank stares was a particularly memorable moment of connections.

Finally, a little before 5 a.m., came the piece de resistance—Young And Innocent, ’37 starring the ineffable Nova Pilbeam herself. The plot was similar to 39 Steps, Hitchcock whimsy at its best, displaying little reason but a lot of rhyme as our hero and heroine went thru the paces of pursuing their innocence while the police pursued them. It was fuzzy a nd inconsequential even as it happened and thinking back on it now, I might have imagined the whole thing. Ferd was asleep, possibly, and Alice’s eyepatch had switched eyes. Mort and Lionel watched and made desultory comments about Hitchcock-land in the late 30’s.

By 6:00 it was over and I bundled up to stagger home. I asked Mort about the first Pilbeam Tea. “There wasn’t one,” he said. “Just a joke.. .you know.” Well, I said, we’ll have to do if again sometime. Maybe next year. “Next year,” said Lionel, “we’ll probably all be in the fucking army.” I would like to be able to say that this comment saddened me but it didn’t. Just as enjoying the young people’s pointless partying had conjured up a pleasant nostalgia, so too did the realization that their aimlessness might possibly have a tragic edge. Some things never change.