This Week’s Top 5 Films From The Cable Afterlife: Incredibly Strange Dog-Blowing Brothers O.D. on Infinite Terror (a Boo Boo)
Posted at 9:00 AM Sep 05, 2008
By Doug Mosurock
I feel bad for cable television, a juggernaut slowly dying a death against streaming video, bit torrents, Netflix and whatever other avenues of content provision are out there, stealing its thunder. Cable is great in that there are still a handful of mavericks working hard to curate monthly programming schedules ranging from challenging to rare to obscurely absurd; the kind you’ll never forget, and sometimes the kind you wish you could.
Films Fom The Cable Afterlife will highlight a handful of these offerings every Friday─the weird, wild, rare, camp, gonzo and just plain stupid─including movies you can’t find on DVD or video. This week, we have overweight guys in superhero costumes, amateur actors in a bombed-out, real-life ghetto and one of the grisliest horror films made by a studio in the ‘90s. Read on, and set your DVR accordingly.
(Note: all times listed are for Eastern time zones, and we list the start of a new day at midnight, not six in the morning; cable channels have the right to change their programming decisions at any time; yadda yadda yadda. Less explain-y, more movie talk-y.)
5. TRIPLE FEATURE ALERT: The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964; d. Ray Dennis Steckler); Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (1966; d. Ray Dennis Steckler); Bride of the Monster”(1955, d. Edward D. Wood, Jr.)
Saturday, September 6, 2:00 – 6:00 a.m., Turner Classic Movies
Kind of boilerplate cult movies here, but as good a way as any to kick this feature off; you probably won’t find anything stranger on TV this week or next. TCM’s cult Underground series, formerly hosted by Rob Zombie, runs along without him, largely repeating a schedule concocted earlier this year. Still, it’s no small feat to showcase a double feature by Steckler, a true Hollywood outsider who starred in many of his films under the name Cash Flagg (and looks uncomfortably like Nicolas Cage). Incredibly Strange Creatures has an overlong title and was sent up on MST3K back in the day, but stripped of comic narration, it’s a wild and somewhat unsettling tableau of amateur eroticism and romance-as-death metaphor, held together by the free and wild camerawork of a just-emigrated Vilmos Zsigmond. Rat Pfink a Boo Boo (they screwed up the title and didn’t bother to fix it) is even looser, pitting goofball rockabilly musicians Ronnie Haydock and Titus Moede against girl snatchers in ridiculous superhero costumes. Top it all off with Boris Karloff, Tor Johnson and a rubber octopus in Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster and you might not be able to form complete sentences by dawn.
4. Together Brothers
Sunday, September 7, 4:00 – 6:00 a.m., Fox Movie Channel
The ‘90s saw blaxploitation cinema’s stock rise, yet it’s still hard to see some of the genre’s many entries. Together Brothersm shot in downtown Houston and released in 1974, remains lost to time, and I’d guess that paying out the rights Barry White’s original soundtrack is a big reason why you can’t see this one on DVD. Rarely screened anywhere, this story of three young kids trying to find the man who killed a neighborhood cop might not blow your mind, but what if it does?
3. Play It As It Lays
Sunday, September 7, 12:00 – 2:00 p.m., Sundance Channel
Slowly gaining favor as a must-see artifact of early ‘70s downer cinema, this adaptation of Joan Didion’s novel (as lensed by Frank Perry, who carried a torch for this sort of outsider film throughout his Hollywood career, right up to the disastrous Mommie Dearest) is easily one of the bleakest films of that era or any other. Tuesday Weld and Anthony Perkins, who’d teamed up for 1968’s creepy curio Pretty Poison, are rematched as the young starlet slowly going mad and the gay producer who understands her. Arty flourishes and an impersonal, fractured and downright troubling editing stance cover up a bone-dry narrative that stares straight into the void. It projects an air of hopelessness vast and unencumbered, much like the one you might feel on a Saturday night at any club in town. And due to its scarcity, this is one of the few places to see it.
2. Sleeping Dogs Lie
Thursday, September 11, 5:30 – 7:00 p.m., Sundance Channel
Amy and John are a young couple who hit a speed bump in their relationship when it’s revealed that Amy fellated her dog during college. Bob Goldthwait gets this out of the way quickly in his directorial debut so that we can dwell on it for 90 minutes or so, allowing it to become just one more goddamn thing on our minds at any given time.
1. Event Horizon
Saturday, September 6, 4:10-5:45 p.m., Cinemax (@MAX)
Tuesday, September 9, 2:30-4:10 a.m., Cinemax (ActionMax)
Thursday, September 11, 6:20-8:00 a.m., and 9:20-11:00 p.m., Cinemax (@MAX)
An early flop by hack director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, AVP: Alien vs. Predator) has gained quite a following in the decade or so since its release, in a tale of cross-dimensional terror that got lost on the way to a screening of Argento’s Suspiria. There’s little sense to any of its proceedings (a salvage crews boards a ship that’s torn a hole through time and come back to show the living what lies beyond hell). Laurence Fishburne squares off against an eyeless Sam Neill and more gore and bad vibes than most ‘90s horror films could muster. There are many better ways to commemorate our nation’s greatest tragedy than viewing the image of a woman slitting her wrists in a bathtub, so budget your time wisely.
