Lost Highway - 1997

 Who knows how I got into David Lynch.  I believe I had heard the name at some point in my early teens, and it is possible my good buddy in high school Ben introduced me to Lost Highway possibly.  We liked it cuz it was insane, had Marilyn Manson and Rammstein in it, and was very transgressive.

I have rewatching both Lynch and Cronenberg throughout the years, revisiting my old teenage favorites, and seeing what does near-middle-age me think of them?  Lost Highway is memorable for many things, one of which being the standard Lynchian weirdness, but also I think in a lot of ways it serves as an interesting bridge from what Lynch was to who he became later, I see a lot of the relaunch of Twin Peaks in this, as well as a lot of Eraserhead, in a mashup perhaps a bit like Balthazar Getty turning into Bill Pullman.

It's somewhat hard to describe the plot (no surprise) but basically Fred (Pullman) and his wife (Patricia Arquette) begin receiving scary VHS tapes on their steps.  They call in cops, who have no answers, and then a tape reveals Pullman killing his wife, which he is then pronounced guilty for.  He randomly disappears from his cell and is replaced by Balthazar Getty, a delinquent non-related guy who soon enough gets involved with a woman that creepy mob dude Nice Guy Eddie is dating, also played by Patricia Arquette, and from there a creepy underworld is exposed.

Filled with Lynch moments, there are individual sequences in this which you've never seen anything like before and really will not again.  I simply do not understand how some things have not been copied, drawn from, influenced the cinema of others.  Sure, he has some thematic copycats, but I don't really understand why people don't copy this.

Thematically, hell, I'll throw in my take about the two real questions to ask:  What happens in the movie, and then, What is the movie about?

What happens:  I think if we look at this as literally as possible, it is about a man discovering his wife is cheating on him.  Pullman sees Arquette at his jazz club, and if we accept there are not two Arquette's, she's also maybe mixed in with Nice Guy Eddie.  Pullman goes a little crazy and grows distant from her before murdering her one night, killing Eddie and a few of his men as well.  He is caught and arrested.  He embarks into a fugue state and imagines himself as someone innocent (Getty), and draws many psychotic conclusions about her life that justify him murdering her. 

Thematically, I think it is about growing distant from people, and the sort of bizarre moments we wish that someone was dead or gone or would just get lost or whatever.  This film explored the reality of how dark those thoughts are, how evil exists even in the mind of innocent people, and how we use justification in different ways to explore the dark recesses of the human mind.

This movie is worth a rewatch, y'all.  It stands up.  I would love to see a high def transfer, the full screen pan and scan DVD I watched is an awful experience.

Scream - 1981

 So Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven....just kidding.  Also known as The Outing 

Scream is a simple name for a bizarrely simple but also way too complicated movie.  Scream stars nobody and was directed by a guy mostly known for stunt work, this movie supposedly started filming without a finished script or an ending in mind, and boooooyyy does it show.  

Scream is a simple enough idea, a bunch of people are at an abandoned town in the middle of nowhere and a dead body shows up and soon enough they're being hunted by a mystery killer.  The town is too far (more on this later) from anything to go get help so they try to band together and use their wits to escape the situation.

Okay, so they say it is 30 miles from the nearest help.  You know guys, I'm a hiker.  I did 13 miles, half of it uphill with an elevation gain of 3000 feet.  I did this in about 5 hours.  The average person walks a 20 minute mile.  Just wake up and head out at 6am, you'll get there by nightfall.  It is not that hard.  I'm tired of movies saying they're too far to walk to get help.

As the strangers wait in this town, random things also start happening to them.  A pair of motorcyclists come out of nowhere and they try to use the bikes to get help.  But then later the weirder one - a black cowboy comes out of nowhere with the body of their friend, drops it off, evades all questions and leaves, and is never explained.  WHAT???

The good things about this though is that the music is great, and the bizarreness does achieve a level of atmosphere that sorta pulls you in.  This is not as amateur as it could be, and the low 2.3 rating on IMDb seems a little wrong.  I'd give it like a 2 I guess.

The Vampire Happening - 1971

 Cruising through Amazon, hey I haven't watched a 70's sex vampire movie in a while.... eh, why not.

Produced by and starring Pia Degermark, this is a pretty damn fine definition of the 70s cult grindhouse movie scene.  We have topless women aplenty as a woman inherits a castle with a creepy painting of her dead relative, who looks exactly like her.  

Pia begins roaming the castle and soon enough finds a tomb in the basement, opens it and wabam, her relative is released because her relative was a vampire in the tomb.  The two women look alike and so the clumsy butler tries to kill the vampire and keeps making mistakes and pursuing the wrong woman.  This is a horror comedy, which I was not expecting, and even more what I would not have guessed was that it is actually somewhat funny!

It's a romp to see these deceptions and silly shenanigans going on and soon enough tons of people are getting turned to vampires.  There is a great Abbott at a local church who gets flashed by a vampire woman and then seduced in the woods and turned into a vampire himself, and so he is also getting into trouble and converting people to vamps.

I liked this movie, but I have also not seen one like this is a while.  So was it good or am I just nostalgic?  I dunno, but I do think this was a pretty good one.  A little overly long, but it does a good job of keeping things light and it knows what it is.  Count Dracula shows up later doing the whole "I vant to suck your blood!" thing and it's great.  I'll give it 3.5 stars.