B-Movie Prognosticator

I wrote this for FilmInk, and it was published a couple of months ago. Seems like a good idea to post it here for Halloween. 

Jeron Criswell King started as a newspaper writer, but slipped into the role of a Hollywood prognosticator. In tinsel town he was the personal  psychic for Mae West, who periodically chauffered home cooked meals to him which he would share with his friends. On one occasion the actress sold him her old Cadillac for a dollar. 

With his silver hair, aristocratic manner and slightly sing-song exaggerated thespian voice he was a natural for movies. It was the master of visionary cinema Edward D Wood Jr who recognized Criswell’s cinematic talent and cast him in the legendary Plan 9 From Outer Space (1956). At the film’s opening Criswell appears – as himself - sitting behind what appears to be a card table. The camera pulls in and he starts speaking: “We are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives, and remember my friends future events such as these will affect you in the future.“ As an opening spiel to a b-movie there are few stranger, or more enigmatically compelling. There are many elements in Plan 9 worth celebrating - from the wild plot concepts to the wonky props and the b-movie acting - but Criswell’s cameo is perhaps one of the strangest.

A close friend of Ed Wood, Criswell also appeared in Wood’s movie Night of The Ghouls (1958). Once again offering an opening monologue, this time delivered from a coffin: “I am Criswell, for many years I have told you the almost unbelievable, related the unreal and showed it to be more than fact. Now I tell you a tale of the Threshold People…”  Criswell even appeared in the Wood scripted 1965 sexploitation movie Orgy of the Dead, here he provided an intro to the movie and appeared in the role of The Emperor.

Criswell’s most accurate prophesy occurred in 1963 on The Jack Paar Program  - a popular variety show, when he stated “I predict that President Kennedy will not run for re-election in 1964 because of something that will happen to him in November 1963”.  But he is best known and remembered for his astonishingly inaccurate yet fantastically imagined predictions which including Mae West being elected president and floating icebergs in the atmosphere prohibiting air travel.

In the ‘50s had his own television show on KCOP in Los Angeles: Criswell Predicts. Something of  socialite he would invite friends to the Brown Derby every Friday after shooting his show, where they would drink cocktails.  As his fame grew Criswell appeared on The Tonight Show, often as the source of mirth to Johnny Carson and his studio audience. Legend has it that he slept in a coffin, which may not be true, but makes good copy.

Criswell wrote three books: Criswell Predicts: From Now To The Year 2000!, Criswell Predicts Your Next Ten Years and Criswell’s Forbidden Predictions  and recorded an album The Legendary Criswell Predicts  (available on CD if you search for it) which included such nuggets as “I predict embalming by radar, where the body is turned to indestructible stone!“ and “I predict that flying saucers will land on the lawn of the White House… mark this date on your calendar: May 6^th 1991".

Criswell; a true star of bizarre Hollywood.

State of Things 7

The Fantastic Planet Sydney Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Festival starts in Sydney on  29th October running until November 6th. I have programmed a screening of The Return of the Living Dead as part of the Saturday 30th Zombiethon and will be introducing the screening at 7:00pm at the Dendy, Newtown. Haven't seen The Return of the Living Dead for years, so looking forward to this. 

Currently Reading 3

Revisiting two classics of underground and cult cinema, Amos Vogel's Film As Subversive Art (Random House) and Hoberman & Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies (Da Capo). Great to be immersed in these writers and their examinations of cinema. Also, deep in Lowenstein's Shocking Representation (Columbia), an exploration of - amongst other things - allegory, trauma theory and horror movies. Once again I find myself taking copious notes and exploring numerous lines of flight and potentialities.


The Hiliker Curse - James Ellroy's latest book, sees the author exploring his relationships with women, from lust to love, all haunted by his relationship to his murdered mother. Not as powerful as My Dark Places, but Ellroy's writing style always makes for an enjoyable read. 


Finally, independent publishing house Inkblot have issued a limited edition paperback of a previously unpublished essay by Brion Gysin Living With Islam, an examination of his experiences as a westerner living in Tangiers in the 50s. Expect a 'review' to be posted here soon.

Decadent Literature

Three images by Mclean Stephenson taken at the Decadent Literature event, that capture something of the atmosphere of the evening. 


This month's event will be on Wednesday 27th at Moon Age and I will be talking about Harry Crosby. 

Ubu Lives

UbuWeb is slowly coming back online. 

Vale Ubu?

The best online resource for avant garde film, sonic art and texts relating to these topics, Ubuweb has been hacked and appears to be offline. I'm not going to re-iterate arguments about copyright, my belief is that the site was akin to a library and was an essential resources for disseminating cutting edge work to people who may otherwise have no opportunity to see it. The piece below was first published in FilmInk.

The maniac, anarchist and monarch known as Pa Ubu was the central character in Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play Ubu Roi, a theatrical work that transformed Shakespeare’s Macbeth into a celebration of corruption and mayhem, fallen kings and despotic self-indulgence, all punctuated with outrageous tirades of scatological abuse. The 1896 premiere performance saw the Parisian audience run riot, so scandalized by the production they were driven to violence. Now recognized as a key text in the avant-garde literary cannon, Ubu Roi and its sequels influenced dada, the Surrealists, experimental poets, modern theatre, punk musicians, cutting-edge sonic artists and visionary filmmakers.

Given this cultural lineage, it is no surprise that UbuWeb has named itself in part as an homage to the figure of Pa Ubu. A website which celebrates and disseminates key works of the global avant-garde. UbuWeb started in 1996 as a website dedicated to concrete and sound poetry, over  the ensuing decade it has expanded to include a massive visual archive of around 1,000 underground, experimental and avant-garde films, alongside sound recordings and writings. It has been described as “a never-ending work in progress” and an “unlimited resource”, and it remains an utterly unique online museum / resource / archive.

The film archive includes works by many artist filmmakers including surrealist photographer May Ray, artists Hans Richter and Yoko Ono alongside movies by underground filmmakers including Ron Rice, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke and many others. These names probably won’t mean much to most people, and there in lies the central importance of UbuWeb – it is creating a vast online archive in which these works can be accessed by anybody, making works normally only seen by art students or those living near a cinematheque available to anybody with access to a computer.

UbuWeb’s curatorial policy is simple, if a suitable work is unavailable or out of print they will add it to their archives and make it available online. They are careful to observe that if something subsequently becomes readily available, or if an artist wants a work removed, they will take it down. The truth is, however that often artists like having their work available on UbuWeb.

Crucially UbuWeb is a free open access resource, they are not selling works nor do they charge people to watch them, as the web site proudly states: “It’s all free. We know it’s a hard idea to get used to, but there’s no lush gift shop waiting for you at the end of this museum”. There are no adverts on UbuWeb. Server space and bandwidth have been donated by some institutions but these supporters have no say on the content.

So, if you want to watch some of the rare classics of the underground and avant-garde, UbuWeb is essential, the site represents open access at its best and is surely what the Internet is for.  

Currently Reading 2

I am currently reading Jack Stevenson's latest study Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s (McFarland) an absorbing history and analysis of exploitation and sex movies produced in Scandinavia. The section on I Am Curious (Yellow) is exceptionally interesting as is the study of the 1974 movie The Sinful Dwarf. Recommended reading for any student of the nether regions of the true world cinema. 

Also, revisiting Gary Indiana'a Salo or The One Hundred Days of Sodom (BFI) one of the best books on a single film published and absorbing reading for those interested in Pasolini's movie and / or in de Sade's writings. 

A piece on Jack's book is forthcoming.

Feral Desires

Samantha Sweeting’s work has followed a number of strands, which entwine in themes around a specific body, her own, as a zone that is simultaneously nurturing, consuming, sexual, and animal. Her earliest works as a performer were presented under the name Jezebelle, the Phoenician princess who worshipped Baal the male fertility god associated with holy prostitution.

The Jezebelle works existed as an anonymous website and as a series of projections of her super-8 film One Night Stand. Showing the artist sleeping, the film was screened at a London striptease bar and a female sex shop. She also carried out a performance with her longterm partner, the intensity of which provoked the collapse of their relationship.

"I had asked my partner to follow me (I was dressed in a red wig and tight clothing) as I walked from my apartment to the striptease bar where my sleeping film was showing. He had to photograph me from a distance. I went inside the bar, saw my video and watched the stage show as some men tried to talk to me. I left and walked back home, with him following me all the way. The performance was called Jezebelle and the Underworld and lasted about an hour. It exploited the emotional and physical gulf that had opened in our relationship. He reacted very badly."

Fundamental to Jezebelle were a number of barely seen, private photographic images. These were records of a personal performance of a sexualized self, produced as an engagement with the self-as-seducer and self-as-object. The central images were made as a long distance dance of eroticism following a chance meeting in New York, wherein the veils were temporal and geographical rather than finely woven silk. They were part of a personal journey into a period defined by the physical excesses of dietary restriction and what the artist has referred to as excessive masturbation. The interest was not in the philosophical nature of Baal, but in the celebration of the performer’s desire to seduce and to probe her own sexuality.

These photographs existed as an initiatory moment, where the artist turned her body into a source of artistic meaning, the personal images acting as documents of a journey into an eroticised becoming which both affirmed and annihilated her identity. In many of the images, her face is absent or blurred into abstraction. The focus is simply her body, the curve of her belly, the roundness of her buttocks and implicitly her cunt; in one image the curve of her belly flows down to her pubis, in another, taken from the artist’s perspective in the bath with her legs slightly parted all that is visible is limbs, yet the intention is clear. 

These images are not intellectual but visceral. Any meaning is retrospective projection, the initial response is designed as sexual, but not as erotic, these images are not hidden behind the simple pretence of aesthetics but are raw recognition of desire. These photographs are illicit. A status emphasised by the use of Polaroid film.

Several years later...in a field in rural England Sweeting was photographed on all fours by artist Tom Hunter, as part of a collaborative series of pinhole performance photographs. The picture is framed as a classic image of the British countryside, only the centrepiece is different. In a dark dress with an apple in her mouth she appears like a woman deranged, spun into animalism, her eyes closed in concentration, as if she is willing to be out-of-her-human-skin. As the photographic series progresses her clothes vanish, on hands and knees surrounded by wind-fallen fruit she grasps an apple in her mouth. Rendered like a bestial Eve, consuming an excess of apples, her sin marked by her animalistic posture. Naked, her eyes are closed, but the look on her face is no longer one of concentration, but something more, she is becoming lost within the role. But her hair is still tied back; she has not become fully feral. 

The intensity of this performance haunted the artist as she returned to a more visceral engagement a year later in rural France for a video camera rather than a photographer. In this video entitled Like a Pig in Shit – again a personal exploration devoid of an audience – she eats an apple, but the framing of the image has been reworked and her appearance has transformed. Crouching in mud and grass, the image grabs have specific titles, beginning with Piggy In The Mud. Nude, her untied hair appears heavier, dirtier, the half chewed fruit lying before her on the ground. As the series progresses it becomes clearer, her hands are sinking in the mud, clutching handfuls of dirt. Mud clings to her chin. She is becoming a human-as-pig, wallowing in soil and filth, removing herself temporarily from the confines of the organized and policed body.

Yet the sexuality of the earlier work is still apparent, in a second series produced at the same time, she eats as an animal on a crudely made bed, the white sheets contrasting with the images of her engorgement, her mouth stuffed with apple. In a place commonly reserved for dreams and copulation she has lost herself as animal. The last image of the series, depicting Sweeting looking at the core of the fruit is titled simply Post. Post climatic. She has returned to being human.

These personal experiments are performances that chart an annihilation of the social self. They form a dance with the feral and the states of hunger for food and sex that exist as consuming primal urges. These images of personal performances suggest that she is pushing ever closer to a moment during which she will fully forget herself. A moment in which it is the human itself that becomes consumed.

Over the Wall

My old friend Jim Morton, co-author of the brilliant and influential Re:Search Incredibly Strange Films book, is producing a new blog on East German cinema, but as you would expect these are not the movies most people talk about. Check the blog out here. Jim attended Revelation this year and screened clips from some of these films as part of his lecture on incredibly strange films and both this blog and his ongoing research into this largely uncharted area of cinema promises to open-up an entire new world of movies to the reader. 

For those who don't know, Jim also writes the Pop Void blogspot, once again necessary reading.