Thank Heaven For Little Girls

CREEMEDIA

Thank Heaven For Little Girls

THE ROMAN POLANSKI STORY

By Thomas Kiernan

(Grove Press)

by Jeffrey Morgan

�...and gentlemen, I use the word kill with all due respect for the fear and loathing I�m sure it provokes in every one of you when you reflect that these degenerate rapists used this galaxy of narcotics to completely destroy the mind and morals of this once-innocent teenager, this ruined and degraded young girl who now sits before you in shame... yes, they fed this girl enough drugs to scramble her brains so horribly that she can no longer even recall the filthy details

orgy was to they used her, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, for their ends!�

Did someone say something about life imitating art?

☆ ☆ ☆ Did someone say something about life imitating art? Anyway, the good people at Grove can feel free to quote me on the back, cover of the paperback version of The Roman Polanski Story when I say that it�s nothing short of unbelievable—and, make no mistake, I�m talking

Positively Butane! It gets an easy 98.6 on the causticity meter for sheer, unadulterated (no pun intended), dredged-up dirt. ■ If you�re looking for a sordid cross beween Bob Guccione�s Caligula and The Tool Box

Murders.. .the real rise and fall of the Roman Empire, as told in the classic Greek tradition (if you catch my drift), then look no further. I mean, forget about Elvis: WhatHappened, Up/Down VJ/the Stones and Hollywood

Up/Down VJ/the Stones and Hollywood

Babylon: this is the one trip to take straight to Hell

with you on a handcart in terms of Grade A

perversion. ■' '

A brief list on the topics contained herein looks

like an agenda for an evening of fun at Rick

Johnson�s house:

—Drug Abuse

—Child molesting

—Unlawful sexual intercourse

—Rape by the use of drugs

—Oral copulation

—Sodomy —Attempted murder —Murder

, And that doesn�t even begin to take into account Polanski�s VTR collection of old Kids Say The Darndest Things shows. Yes, these criminal charges, leveled separately, could cost you years of imprisonment and countless thousands of dollars in legal fees—but for only $12.50, you can vicariously live out all of

you the above in the relative safety of your own home plus more in this fully-illustrated, 262 page spew-stew.

You�ll thrill as Polanski escapes the Nazis by pouring hot candle wax over his cock to simulate a foreskin!

KSTlall

to almost end up slabbed on the meat wagon in the self-same manner!

You�ll squirm as Polanski shows a nubile 13-year-old new vistas of meaning to the phrase �back door man�!

You�ll retch as.. .as... (no, it�s too horrifying —even for CREEM readers. Suffice to say that it happens on page 224.) And, if you act now, you�ll receive—at no extra

And, you act now, you�ll no cost—a special 12-page photo insert including the infamous �death house� shot which Polanski charged Life five grand to shoot. And, best of all, the book is divided into Chapters (containing the straight bio) and Interlogs (containing the really good stuff), so the

discriminating reader can get to Polanski�s �illegal entry� episode (Interlogs 1-10) with a minimum of fuss. All in all, it goes without saying that this would

a motion picture—all

needed is a famous director with an eye and ear for this kind of stuff. ☆ ☆ ☆

�The Blue Lagoon? I love the poster with her

wearing all that makeup: Brooke Shields in Fuck

A Child," —John (AnimalHouse, The Blues Brothers) Landis, 1980. Your New Day

Last

YOUR NEW DAY hosted by Vidal Sassoon (Syndicated) at the screen. After seven minutes, I felt impelled to resign from the hu man race, effective 1962. By the halfway mark, I found myself searching the ward for sharp objects that I could slit my wrists with. But after 25 minutes, Ididn�tcare

wrists with. But after 25 minutes, Ididn�tcare anymore. Vidal�s (rhymes with �crawls�) new 30-minute Winkiefest is a weekdaily journey to the outer boundaries of Total Puke, Biblically speaking. mere insult, this show is a vehicle for the kind of beslimement you would expect to feel after your

first prison rape, getting caught digging up Mom�s grave or having really dirty fingernails. Vidal, truly a dink�s dink, has a face that appear to be on a scavenger hunt for an expression, topped by a jaybird head of graying hair with the texture of a decoy raccoon. The voice is dubbed in by Davy Jones so that the host can hop around the set like some practical joker stuck a pair of frozen binoculars down the back of his shorts at showtime. Plus, this guy is the ultimate stereotype of a... uh, you know!. .. lef s just that, if he were a baseball player, he

just say that, if he were a baseball player, he would always hit to the opposite field. Limp Noodle City, fellow tuff guys. Out here in tundratown, YND falls into the pivotal 1:30 P.M. timeslot, up against such gamebreakers as Mike Douglas, Tennessee ' Tuxedo and commercial classics like �My husband—some hotshotP and Fat Debbie�s

husband—some hotshotP and Fat Debbie�s many-leveled �Creative Mirrors are beautiful, even if all they reflect is you!� sales pitch. This calls for some blockbuster programming and Vidal (rhymes w/�shopping mall�) is ready. �Alcoholism is becoming one of the top three killers in America,� he announced last week. I think the other two are minor mouth pain and embarrassment. Or how about the epic turkey stuffing session? You should�ve seen his eyes light up when he took a gander at that big, bare bird with the hole in it. Obviously aroused, he rams his fist in elbow-deep on the first try. Mmm,

rams in elbow-deep on the first try. Mmm, ecstasy! All over San Francisco, viewers are down on their knees in front of the set, wildly turning up the Tint control. Sometimes our flitty host-creature mixes some comedy in with the Ick, like the day he tackled Sex with the unbearably sincere Dr. Debora

Phillips. �Intercourse,� she quipped, �is just a small wedge in a big pie. � I�ll have mine ala mode, please. Further laughs occurred when the Doc claimed that more people should laugh in bed. No problem, thinks Vidal smugly, all my partners do! Then it�s on to the now-safe kicking around of the

�Good Girls Don�t� myth. According to statistics personally compiled by this author, lots of bad girls don�t either. It�s not all heavy scientific stuff, though. In one typical week, the pastry parade produced four all-different kinds of fun. 1.) A slimy beardling described how to make Art out of TV Dinner trays (don�t eat the peas!); 2.) How To Dress Up Vegetables (basic black is best except for colorful moo-moos, inseason); 3.) An intensely Nancylike designer shows how to decorate your entire home in black, white and red. Black, white and red.. .a bad dead baby joke, right?; 4.) Valerie Harper proves that Linda Ronstadt�s got Rho leg-lifts, the next.. .oh, Cod! I can�t remember a thing!

If you haven�t already devolved into ballet slippers or switched over to Mike and guest co-host-Dom Deluise touring George Hamilton�s plantation, you�ll catch one of the nervier closing shots ever taped. Vidal (rhymes w/�bathroom stall�) leans forward, squints soulfully into the camera and drools, �It�s a good show—call a friend!�

Ring ring. Hello, friends? Don�t listen to this character unless your idea of a good time is spending a day in Charlotte Rae�s shoes, or maybe being left for dead. And then having pink vultures with hairy chests and biker gear nibble at the carcass of your taste.

Anita, you can come home now. All is forgiven. *

Rick Johnson

Humanoids That Aren�t Deep

THEY CAME FROM OUTER SPACE "

Edited by Jim Wynorski

(Doubleday)__

This book is the result of one of the all-time great premises and whatever one thinks of the outcome, editor Wynorski should be congratulated for getting it together. Subtitled �12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures,� the book is almost just that—tho only a few of the tales could be considered classic and only a couple of the resulting flicks were, by any criteria, major. But the touch of hype puts the reader in the proper mood and considering that quality isn�tthe basis of selection here, it�s a surprisingly good anthology. All of these ripping yarns, even the most abysmally written, are succinct entertainments, which was no doubt a large part of their appeal to movie producers in the first place.

There�s only one out and out bomb in the collection, �Dr. Cyclops� (�40—same year and title as film) by Henry Kutter, who was a usually fine fantasy and SF writer and who apparently adapted this high adventure for slow adolescents from the film rather than vice versa (and if The Science Fiction Encyclopedia is to be believed, it was Manly Wade Wellman who wrote the novelization of the film, not Kutter as Wynorski contends) ..There�s also only one indisputable classic, John W. Campbell, Jr.�s, �Who Goes There?� an innovative and suspenseful novella about a shape-shifting alien loose in an isolated Antarctic camp (from �38—it stood, along with a handful of other Campbell stories from the same period, as a model for almost all ambitious SF stories written during the next two decades) which in �51 was turned into an equally suspenseful trendsetting film The Thing From Another World. Ostensibly directed by the permanently obscure Christian Nyby, the film had, as critic Andrew Sarrisput it, �understandable traces of producer Howard Hawks and unearthly traces of uncredited Orson Welles�—and, as with most of these adaptations, �traces� were also all the movie had of the original story.

Three of the stories here could be considered near classics—Ray Bradbury�s �The Fog Horn� (�53), which became a small part of the filmThe Beast From 20,000Fathoms (�53) and is docked a notch for brevity and because Bradbury�s Saturday Evening Post-type poetic sketches aren�t as impressive as they once were; �The Fly�

(�57) by George Langelaan which became, oddly enough, The Fly (�58), an adaptation of unusual fidelity scripted by Shogun author James Clavell; and Harlan Ellison�s �A Boy And His Dog�

(�69)—movie, same title (�76) —a hardboiied period piece which projects late 60�s anarchism into a post-Holocaust setting and depicts such a virulently misogynist society that poor Harlan, who during the last decade has evolved into a committed, if somewhat snippish, feminist, has recently felt compelled to expand the story into a novel, lest his larger intentions be misunderstood.

That�s the best of the lot, but the book is rounded out with interesting odds and ends—�Farewell To The Master� (�40) by Harry Bates, a super alien piece with a wry O�Henry-ish ending, became the ponderous cold war fable The Day The Earth Stood Still (�51), a film which everyone except myself seems to remember fondly; two unpretentious and eminently entertaining examples of �50�s power pulp, �Deadly City� (�53) by Ivor Jorgenson, filmed as Target Earth (�54) and �The Cosmic Frame�

(�55—another neat O�Henry ending) by Paul W. Fairman, which was mutated into the teen scream Invasion Of The Saucerman (�57) Jorgenson was a free-floating pseudonym used by certain SF magazines in the 50�s and for some reason Wynorski doesn�t bother to point out that—in this case—Jorgenson and Fairman were the same person); �The Alien Machine� (�47) by Raymond F. Jones, a boringly earnest piece of techno SF which became the first part of the engagingly silly This Island Earth (�55); �The •Seventh Victim� (�53), a typical Robert Sheckley satire about a future where humanity�s murderous aggressions are channeled into legal and voluntary one-on-one �Hunts,� which was imaginatively inflated into The Tenth Victim (�63); �The Sentinel� (�50) by Arthur C. Clarke, cosmos which started Stanley Kubrick toward 2001 (�68); and a bit of gritty hackwork by lb Melchior called �The Racer� (�56) which became a spoof ish piece of Cormanalia called Death Race 2000 (�75).

Not a bad group, and Wynorski has embellished it nicely—each story is given a brief introduction and is followed by a cast and credits listing for the movie it eventually became. There�s also �50 rare stills� to jog the memory and an autographical forward by Ray Bradbury entitled �The Turkey That Attacked New York,� the title being Bradbury�s accurate description of the DiLaurentiis version of King Kong.

Reading these stories one is struck by how little relation, with a few exceptions, the final films have with what they were supposedly based on. It�s as tho, again and again, the producers were attracted to the stories and then decided, given the limitation of budget and imagination that they had to work with, that the stories were unfilmable. And so, instead, they made the most mediocre movies that for many of us lightly nourished our thrill-starved childhoods—movies mostly made by people who cared not a whit about SF but were devoutly interested in giving us a little entertainment and making a lot of money. Bless their cheesy little hearts.

Richard C. Walls