Reel Wild Cinema (1995-97)

The Mid-Nineties were a time of relative ease, strangely, on the American landscape. Despite race riots, political scandals, the uprooting of cultural mores, and the gradual emergence of mass casualty violence in the form of domestic terror and school shootings, it was, by and large, still a period where American preeminence was unchallenged, a fixity on the world stage, one that could be relied upon. I lived in a little blue house, under a vast, sprawling Midwestern blue sky, at the edge of farm fields and on a street with well-clipped lawns. And I thought I was PUNK.

Regardless, the serpentine serpent of slithery rebellion crept its fanged and new-fangled creeping creepiness across the crapheap of cultural...conundrum? (Okay, I can't think of a good word to complete the alliteration, but you get the idea.)

Into that boring, suburban wasteland void of medicated lives and broken homes beamed the magic of cable TV, which experimented (but not too much) with format and content, and always looked with the jaundiced and cynical gaze of a capitalist pig in a shitpile, at what could bring in the most bucks for your bang. Something like that. To that end, we had stuff like "Night Flight," the surrealistic video magazine montage all-nighter that aired in the Eighties, with a caleche of music videos, movie clips, student films, cartoons, kitsch commercials, you-name-it. It lasted for two hours, was rerun, as I remember, and must have been great entertainment if you were in the habit of staying up all night smoking tremendous bowls of skunk weed. It was "Night Flight" that introduced me to such films as The Decline of Western Civilization and Terror in the Aisles, two personal favorites.

Alas, "Night Flight," just like "Friday the Thirteenth: The Series," "Werewolf," and all my other favorite cable television shows of the era disappeared, along with the era. Reagan gave way to Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden (did I miss anyone?), and here we are, decades later, and now computers think. And get an attitude, even. It's like our future was written by William Gibson. Paranoid yet?

Anyway, getting back to it, the Mid-Nineties saw the revival of alternative "kitsch" culture. People dyed their very hair, pierced their very noses, punk rocked their very rock, and wore a lot of Converse All-Stars and thick, ugly, clunky glasses. (I still have mine.) Anything outre, avant-garde, underground, "alternative" or that smacked like a hissy fittin' bitch at the larger, dominant culture was taken up and lovingly embraced by the demimonde of cultural anti-taste. They even had alternative music mags (albeit short-lived ones) in the pharmacies in Gas City, Indiana. I know. I was there. As Robert Downey Junior said in Natural Born Killers, "I was there when the shit went down!" Yeah, baby.

Something Weird Reel Wild Cinema (Unaired Pilot Outtakes)

Cinema Veri-Bad

There was a bad movie show on cable TV, USA Network to be specific (those same mad geniuses that had already given the world "Night Flight" ten years earlier), a show called "Reel Wild Cinema," hosted by the delightful and delectable and sometimes snarky queen of camp herself, Sandra Bernhard, who my ex-wife wanted to make passionate love to. (She was less enthusiastic about making passionate love to me, but that's probably the subject of an entirely different article, and this is a family-friendly show.)

So.

The show boasted some of the worst examples of cult, kitsch, camp, and just plain awful cinema, from rubber monster flicks to nudie cuties (censored nipples and other body parts blacked-out, of course), mad maniacs, peplum with biceps and pecs to make an army of Herculean Steve Reeves worshippers howl in ecstatic delight; weird witches, Mexican wrestlers, guys in gorilla suits, you get the picture. (Actually, since they cut away the boring parts, you actually only got about HALF of the picture. But that was cool, too.)

You got trailers for movies so drive-in abominable they would have been relegated to the dust heap of steadily deteriorating film stock were it not for the OCD of the folks at Something Weird Video, who saw great value in preserving the generally thought of as valueless. To that end, they rescued and refurbished (to the best of their ability with current technology) films such as She Creature, The Fat Black Pussycat, The Wild Women of Wongo, and Blaze Starr Goes Nudist. They must have thrown Ed Wood somewhere there in the mix, but, just in case they didn't, they did have a special guest appearance by the late Maila Nurmi, a.k.a "Vampira" of Plan Nine from Outer Space and the famous Misfits song fame; and not only her. You also had guest appearances by Dweezil Zappa, Roger Corman, Lloyd Kaufman, Paul Bartel, Herschell Gordon Lewis, David Friedman, Adrienne Barbeau, and many other notables in the world of lowbrow cult, camp, and shlock movies. I doubt if John Waters ever made it on there, but I'd have to go back and check, and I'm too lazy at this point. (As Patrick Bateman said, and I think he speaks for all of us: "Gimme a break! I'm a child of divorce!")

Mamie Van Doren, the "Tallahassee Tassle Tosser" was also on there, but she was never a special guest (actually I just looked again, she WAS). But she did have a couple of special guests protruding from the front of her lace-up corset and brassiere combo thingie, and the opening shot of her being laced up by someone who looks suspiciously like Bettie Page, had absolutely NOTHING to do with horny dudes stopping their channel surfing as they came (came?) across the program, while flipping channels after a hard night of flipping burgers. (Or delivering pizzas, take your pick.)

Sandra lounged about the perversely thrift-store decorated, John Waters bad taste and art deco set while humorously chiding the cinematic Turkies eviscerated and spat across the video tube, exposing the ugly, skinny, plucked-chicken legs of The Robot Versus the Aztec Mummy, Bloody Pit of Horror with Mickey Hargitay (which, though claimed to have been "inspired by the writings of the Marquis De Sade," bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything ever penned by the notable French polymorphous pervert), as well as Monster from Camp Sunshine. (A curious pic with a Big Bubba of a "monster" running around a nudist camp, that seems to have jacked the title cards from some old, long-forgotten silent epic to throw in at random, even though the pic has sound.)

The "boring parts" of the film (i.e. the parts that would, in more traditional movies, help to establish the "story", which is not much of an issue with these films), being edited out, we are given free entry to a cinematic alternate dimension of rubber monster masks, bad makeup, absurd special effects, moronic costumes, technically inept direction, wretched cinematography, turgid, lifeless, and laughable dialog, and plots so inscrutable, senseless and dreamlike they border on the surreal. It's all either a postmodern joke or HIGH ART, MAN!

In between we have tits. Lots of 'em.

Ah, the Nineties! The terrors and wonders of our present age, the terrible "beasts" waiting to be born, were still a decade away. "Reel Wild Cinema," a show conceived to celebrate cultural ephemera, and cultural relics, is now a relic itself, a marker on the roadmap to the present Wasteland. And it was a whole helluva lot of fun, for a short, wretched, wanna-be punk rocker from a cow town out in Indiana, one who embraced "alternative cultural tendrils." Whatever the hell those were supposed to be.

I guess something, wild. Weird. Real.

Love and napalm.

Note. "Reel Wild Cinema" began with a cartoon Sandra Bernhard driving a cartoon James Bond spy car as a comic book Superheroine. With some jazzy music in the background, no less. We think that's just purrfect. Meow!

Excelsior!

Reel Wild Cinema intro