[rant]
The cover and title are somewhat misleading, insofar as there is no detailed discussion of Satan's Cheerleaders and the tone of the pieces is academic rather tha sleazy. No doubt Sconce would contend that this is an ironic reflection of the kind of films featured within the volume, insofar as in his own essay he notes how our mental picture of a Nude for Satan was one that the films themselves could never hope to live up to.
Yet it also, to me, speaks of a certain lack of reflexivity about the academic game itself, that one wants to know about its conventions here in terms, fundamentally, of what sells best in its marketplaces and of a continuing gulf between the fan and academic discourses when, for instance, Kevin Heffernan's article on the changing status of Mario Bava's Lisa and the Devil and House of Exorcism arguably does little more than recast the work of a Tim Lucas in more theoretical guise or where Something Weird's Blue Book catalog has as much to tell us about the history of 60s and 70s sexploitation and porn as Eric Schaeffer's admittedly impressively researched essay.
Ranting aside, the essays are the usual mixed bag, with much of interest for fans and scholars of European horror cinema.
Schaeffer's essay 'Framing the Sexploitation Audience' indicates how the marketing of sexploitation films contributed to the discourse of the raincoat audience as deviant, thus ironically creating a situation in which the films could no longer be advertised in the mainstream media thereby further contributing to their ghettoisation – unanticipated consequences strike again.
Tania Modleski's 'Women's Cinema as Counterphobic cinema' takes Doris Wishman as her test case and performs the usual feminist detournements and deconstructions to end with the slogan “bad girls unite”; as such one eagerly awaits a follow-up piece defending Lizzie Borden's Cocktails. Unless, of course, not every sister is in fact a sister...
Harry Benshoff's 'Representing (Repressed) Homosexuality in the Pre-Stonewall Hollywood Homo-military' film is self-explanatory and does what it says on the tin.
A similar predictability limits Chuck Kleinhans 'Pornography and Documentary,' insofar as exposing the base material realities of mondo and white coater films is hardly the most challenging of tasks. Late capitalism, the cash nexus, blah blah blah. Tell us the same thing as it relates to academic publishing in late capitalism...
Colin Gunckel's 'Origins and Anatomy of the Aztec Horror Film' brings out what he terms “additional, even provocative explanations for the existence of this curious subgenre,” in the form of the way it engaged with the historical and cultural specificities of Mexican identity in a way that Hollywood product could not. It makes sense but there's the rub: wouldn't it in many respects be more surprising to find a national popular cinema cycle that did not connect with a national population? But while I didn't get too much out of this essay, perhaps this is because of having read Doyle Green and David Wilt's work on much the same subject...
Kay Dickinson's Troubling Synthesis looks at the place of music in five Italian video nasties – Cannibals Holocaust and Ferox, Inferno, Tenebrae and The Beyond, arguing that the detached nature of the music, in its lack of obvious engagement with the on-screen action and use of the synthesiser, could have contributed to the negative readings afforded these films in the early 1980s. It's a piece that I think has the right ideas, in countering the dominant vision-centred approach to the film experience that stems from psychoanalytic theory in particular, but whose reading of the semiotics of the synthesiser as “cold” and “inhuman” seems somewhat essentialising. As I understand it, analog synthesisers of the sort used in these films are now commonly referred to as having “warm” sounds in comparison with the later digital synthesisers, while she also fails to discuss Frizzi's use of the Mellotron, which I've seen described as an instrument with a very distinctive personality to it (Robert Fripp: “Tuning a mellotron doesn't”) in The Beyond's score. Maybe I'm being pedantic, but pedantry is what being a cult fan is all about...
Joan Hawkins's 'The Sleazy Pedigree of Todd Haynes' does a Cutting-Edge type reading on the director's work, seeking to bring out its low culture aspects (i.e. Meyer rather than Sirk and Fassbinder) and made me wonder when / if someone will ever do straight readings of queer films that bring out their repressed heterosexuality...
Matt Hills's 'Para-Paracinema' is, for me, the most useful and challenging essay in the collection. Looking at the characterisation of the Friday the 13th films amongst both the academic and cult film audiences, he identifies them as an object which both groups can unite in their hostility towards as lacking in subversive potential for the former and too mainstream for the latter, with this failure to engage being seen in frequent factual errors in the discussion of them. While I can't say that I particularly want to look at the films again – perhaps because there's no cultural or subcultural capital to really be gained thereby now that Hills has made the point – it does suggest that a more honest way for the enterprise to proceed could, in effect, be for films to be assigned to us whose value and interest we then have to make a case for, rather than choosing the films that we like in part on the basis of our pre-existing theories about them. (Yes, I'm currently in a what if Argento has been all played out and I'm just a johnny come lately; should I have made my investment in, say, Italian cop films instead and pushed them as the next big thing. Or more broadly, when territorialisation and careerism come in, where does the fun go?)
Chris Fujiwara's 'Bordedom, Spasmo and the Italian System' is one of those challenging intellectual exercises that brings Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Lenzi together. Those who have read Michael Grant's essay on T. S Eliot's The Wasteland and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond will find it right up their street, while others might consider it intellectual masturbation of the worst sort. (On the subject of Spasmo, am I alone in thinking that it would make for an interesting comparison piece to David Fincher's The Game?)
Greg Taylor's 'Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic?' examines US television show Beat the Geeks and the discoures around geekdom it explores. I haven't seen the show, but imagine it would make for an interesting comparison to the likes of Mastermind or a Radio 4 quiz programme here in the UK, insofar as they're each dealing with trivia, albeit of different sorts – i.e. my trivia is pointless shit, whereas yours is culturally validated as valuable knowledge. Of course, once civilisation breaks down we'll both be equally fucked compared to the aborigine who couldn't care less about Deodato or Derrida...
Jeffrey Sconce's Movies: A Century of Failure diagnoses the current crisis but has a predictably more difficult time finding any solutions. For my part, I was more interested to discover that the Rape of Frankenstein story Andrea narrates in Four Flies on Grey Velvet would seem to have been a borrowing from a 1971 novel by Jacques Sternberg, Toi, Ma Nuit / Sexualis '95...
Sometimes it is that chance encounter that makes it all worthwhile...
[/rant]
