Prime Time

Tonsils Of Rage

by Richard C. Walls

excerpts from a low budget diary

Mon. Made a point of getting up early to watch The Wizard Of Mars, an obscure SF-er from '65 with John Carradine...had a little time before the movie started to I checked out the morning news/talk/entertainment shows, which I haven't seen in years...on Today, Gene Shalit was quizzing an admittedly hung-over Christopher Reeve on whether or not he could find actorish fulfillment in being identified with a comic strip character. Chris assured Gene that he could cope...only stayed a few seconds with Good Morning America. David Hartman -reminds me of a junior high shop teacher I once had whose folksy good humor was punctuated by minute outbursts of rabid sadism ('you call that a hot plate, fatboy?'). Not that Hartman would ever say anything cruel to a guest, but his average guy amiability makes me anxious...the local Detroit Today clone, Morning Magazine, was running a pre-taped interview with Rod Steiger, who was plugging Lion Of The Desert and his Mussolini impersonation therein... Steiger mentioned that among the other people he'd like to portray is Edgar Allen Poe. Since Poe died at age 40 he's a little late for that one but he'd make an interesting Herman Melville...or maybe Susan B. Anthony... On UHF we have Gilligan's Island. I could never get into this tho it's a deficiency in myself that I'm not very proud of (maybe I could get Robert Hull to explain it to me one more time).. .On Over Easy, Gloria Swanson is waxing sentimental to Hugh Downs about earlier days ('ah, to be 80 again')...our friendly local Canadian station Channel 9 doesn't come on the air until 9:45 (with This Week In Ontario) but they have an interesting test pattern...looks like an abstract mukluk on a field of antlers...

And now da movie...I lingered too long with Canada and missed the credits.. .apparently they started out to make an SF version of The Wizard Of Oz but lack of money (and probably imagination) caused them to abandon' the idea somewhere along the line...the Story involves the crash landing on Mars by four astronauts—three men and a woman tho no other parallels are drawn to the Oz characters... following a yellow brick road (!) they come to an ancient city whose inhabitants are so advanced that they've evolved beyond their bodies...and for some reason they've stopped time and can't get it started again. , since they have no bodies they can no longer operate the machine/clock that starts and stops time...a spokesman for the race, a phantom potato head with a John Carradine voice-over, delineates the race's anguish thusly— 'Just as there can be no life without birth, without death life itself is meaningless.' ...hmmmm... I'm almost convinced that if the secret of life had yet to be revealed, it's contained somewhere in the shaggy dog metaphysics that adorn these otherwise benighted Z-movies...the flick ends in an explosion of incoherence and chintzy special effects (earning it a permanent place in the Prime Time Hall Of Fame), leaving me distracted, edging a sleeper out of the corner of my eye and wondering 'huh?'... who needs drugs? Watching this thing at the start of the day gave me a buzz that lasted well into the night...

☆ ☆ ☆

Tues. afternoon. Caught Linda Lovelace on the Bob McLean Show, a Canadian talk entry. McLean looks like a doughy Jack Paar and is affably inane in the Mike/Merv tradition. Lovelace is stumping for the paperback edition of her book Ordeal, which I haven't read yet...but I've seen this act before, when the hardcover version came out last year...the premise, that Lovelace was forced to do everything she did by Chuck Traynor, her husband and, uh, manager, may seem fantastical on the face of it, but Lovelace on the air was utterly convincing as the bland young girl given a personality by the evil Svengali (Traynor, on the other hand, appearing on the Tomoftow show with his current property Marilyn Chambers, was the epitome of The Man With Something To Hide...all non-committal and evasive...tho Snyder's facile style of interviewing wasn't about to lead to any major revelations).

The local culture pit on the corner has about 1000 copies of Lovelace's book on display...should cash my last CREEM check and buy a copy (which would leave me enough for a pack of cigs and a TV Guide...)

☆ ☆ ☆

Thurs. Stayed up till 3 a.m. last night to catch Blackenstein ('73)...this one's a real curio, a mutant child of the blaxploitation genre that flourished in the early 70's and unlike Blacula ('72), which was a slick production, it has the usual signs of a meager budget—amateur acting, abysmal lighting, laughable post-dubbing.. .as the title indicates, it's a modernized version of the Frankenstein story...

It's ironic that the movie was shown on Detroit's most eccentric * independent station, Channel 62, WGPR, since the mainstay of the station's fare are those weird little religious shows that so nourish the moral majority...and the station's call letters have been designated an anagram for 'Where God's Presence Radiates'...and the movie was shown uncut (a typical move by this station arising not out of any enlightened attitudes towards censorship but simply because it never occured to anyone there that it might need editing)...which was neat-o because the monster in the flick had a habit of attacking half-naked floozies and ripping their guts out...graphically...then playing with the slimey little critters before flinging them glop! on the victim's chest...standard cable fare, of course, but still rather novel on commercial TV...

And just wait till God finds out about this...

Fri. eve. Picked up a copy of Ordeal yesterday and finished it this evening. The book's a disgrace. From its cover—a cracked pink porcelain heart lying on plush red velvet and below it the quote: 'It happened to me. It could happen to any woman...'—thru Lovelace's 500th protestation of innocence, the book is a tacky True Confession seemingly aimed at saving Danielle Steel fans from a fate worse than death...(tho it was enlightening to read about Hugh Hefner and Sammy Davis Jr.'s private indiscretions... Da vis Jr. especially always seemed a little unreal and it's heartening to know that underneath that phony show-biz polish he's a real sleaze-bag)...it's not that if the book's cover had featured a clenched fist and the title Tonsils Of Rage it would necessarily have been more convincing, it's just that the Gothic soap opera approach leaves too many questions unanswered— like how does a person become and remain as dangerously naive as Lovelace pretends herself as being in this story? And what vacuum of American experience did Lovelace come from, so empty that a secondrate hustler like Traynor was able to make her act against her conscious self interest not a few times but a few thousand? (and with these comes the nagging one—is she lying? maybe just a little?)...

It's also a pity that the book's tone and presentation are so Mary Hartman In Hell, 'cause the story it tells is harrowing and probably true.. .and tho these corny melodramatics might be sufficient to elicit heavy clucking from the suburban mothers lined up outside the next Donahue taping, a younger crowd who could better benefit from the books lesson will most likely respond to its sub-Harlequin come-on with 'What is this bullshit?'...