Last year, I saw a flyer for Thor, playing a really small bar in Monroeville, not far from my Pittsburgh home. I didn’t go, but after this, I kind of wish that I had.
Jon Mikl Thor was a Mr. USA and Mr. Canada that became a heavy metal vocalist and an actor who appeared in Recruits, Zombie Nightmare and Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, a film that begins with a van driving scene that may still be playing somewhere.
The thing I have learned about this movie is that no one cares about or believes in Thor more than Thor himself.
That said, you have to believe in yourself, even when the rest of the world doesn’t. Thor reminds me of several of the old pro wrestlers I’ve been around, assured that they didn’t make it in the big time because no one understood them or they were just too good and no one wanted the competition.
Ryan Wise and Alan Higbee spent fifteen years making this film, getting some truly astounding footage. It feels like they were embedded with the singer, getting footage that anyone other than him would feel was incredibly negative.
That said, I never felt horrible for Thor. He’s doing what he loves and it doesn’t matter if there are ten or a thousand people in the crowd. He’s always going to go full thundergod.
You can learn more at the official site and watch the movie on Tubi.
As a 16-year-old in 1988, I have to tell you that this was probably the most important movie of my life — all the short time I had spent on Earth — and it made me dream about heading off to the Sunset Strip and taking my singing abilities in the service of bands like Jetboy and the Sea Hags.
And here we are, as I write about this on my couch while working all day on a Sunday afternoon, writing marketing materials for a college somewhere in New York.
If you watched this movie at 16 and didn’t want to be Chris Holmes, what was wrong with you? It’s funny, because as we watched this, my wife asked, “When did he die?” He’s still, improbably, alive.
Before reality TV decimated the Satanic edge of metal, seeing artists like Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Mustaine, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley discuss their careers rarely happened. I love that each of them gets a background that relates to them — Joe Perry and Steven Tyler are just chilling on a couch while Ozzy is in a bathrobe making eggs and Stanley is covered in models as he talks about the life he leads. By the way, him spilling orange juice never happened and that’s not even his kitchen.
That said, W.A.S.P. bassist Holmes steals the show, mumbling throughout and providing the films one sobering — if totally drunk — take on the fakeness of it all. Just witness the band Odin, who is surrounded by models in a hot tub, discussing how they’ll be bigger than Led Zeppelin or The Doors or commit suicide. Or nightclub owner Bill Gazzarri, who just seems like a character straight out of the hell of a Dark Brothers film.
I kind of love that Lemmy was shot from a distance and asked questions in the hopes that he’d give dumb replies. Lemmy being Lemmy, he seems above it all, despite spending just about every night at the Rainbow, right in the heart of all of 1988’s hairspray.
Detroit band Seduce was added to fill the loss of Guns ‘n Roses, whose management kept them out of this movie. Several have pointed to the excesses in this film as killing off the era of glam and hair metal. If that’s so, bands like Steel Panther have seen this as a map to the world they wish still exists.
Spheeris told Louder Sound, “In a way, you can look at Decline II as the research and then Wayne’s World as the final product.”
The funny thing is, despite Ronnie O’s claims that he’d kill himself — like GG Allin without the punk heart or body covered in feces and gore — the band had already broken up before the film came out, with guitarist Jeff Duncan joining Armored Saint, a band that he’s still in.
Anyways, I’m 47 now. And I can tell you that most of what Chris Holmes was drinking was water. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t dream of 1988 a lot and wonder what it was like to play the Whiskey or the Cathouse.
Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedy’s goes Repo Man in this post-apoc sci-fi romp that reminds of Death Race 2000‘s political-parody intrigue — and it’s backed by the music of DOA, Keith LeBlanc, and Nomeansno, along with Biafra himself fronting DOA and Nomeansno for a pair of tunes.
Canadian acting mainstay Peter Breck (appeared in a wide array of U.S cop and western dramas in the ’60s and ’70, as well as starring as Nick Barclay in ABC-TV’s The Big Valley; you’ve also seen Breck in 1958’s Thunder Road, 1960’s The Beatniks, and 1963’s Shock Corridor by Samuel Fuller) stars as Ross Glimore, a media entrepreneur who serves as the corrupt, evil mayor of Terminal City, a decaying dystopia that manipulates the masses through television — and bans things such as rock & roll and meat — that renders the citizens addicted to consumerism that financially benefits the government.
When Alex Stevens, a punk-youth newspaper delivery boy, witnesses Glimore commit a hit-and-run accident, Glimore dispatches Bruce Coddle (Biafra, in a pisser of a role), a maniacal agent of Terminal City’s Social Peace Enforcement Unit, and his lackeys (DOA’s Joe Keithley and pro-wrestling legend Gene Kiniski) to silence Stevens until after Glimore steals yet another election.
Terminal City Ricochet was never officially available on VHS and rarely shown outside of its native Canadian TV broadcasts, along with an occasional U.S film festival or art house showing hosted by Biafra himself. Alas, there’s no freebie uploads or PPV streams online — you can, however, listen to the soundtrack on You Tube. (I rented a bootleg rip in the early ’90s from a local comic book store that carried VHS obscurities, such as the previously reviewed Hangin’ Out starring Nena; I also picked up the 1993 documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies and Toshiharu Ikeda’s Evil Dead Trap around the same time.)
Alternative Tentacles first issued the film to DVD in 2010, but as of April 2020, they now offer the film and soundtrack as a DVD/CD combo at the reasonable price of $12.00 via their website. If you loved Allan Arkush’s Get Crazy, Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Penelope Spheeris’s Suburbia, Michael Nesmith’s Tapeheads, and Allan Moyle’s Times Square, then you’ll dig the low-budget indie shenanigans of Terminal City Ricochet.
Get this . . . the scribe behind this, Phil Savath, also wrote the David Cronenberg drag-racing epic Fast Company and . . . the sci-fi horror musical Big Meat Eater. Yeah, really. All this, and the Dead Kennedys, too.
And be sure to join us for our “Phil Savath Night” as part of our weekly Drive-In Friday featurette.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook. He also writes for B&S About Movies.
Rock, Rock, Rock! was conceived, co-written and co-produced by Milton Subotsky — he also wrote nine of the songs in the movie — who we all know was half of the team that was known as Amicus (along with Max Rosenberg, who also produced this movie). All hail Amicus! And all hail Sword & Sorcery Productions, Subotsky’s 70’s production team that tried — and sadly failed — to bring Lin Carter’s Thongor in the Valley of Demons and adapations of Creepy and Eerie to the screen. He’d also co-produce Maximum Overdrive, Sometimes They Come Back and The Lawnmower Man.
This is the first rock ‘n roll movie to have its own soundtrack, released on Chess, which features four songs each from three of the label’s artists — Chuck Berry, The Moonglows and The Flamingos — as other bands were signed to different labels, which appear on screen in the credits along with each band at the end. Connie Francis’ songs were released by MGM, for example, and The Teenagers’ songs were on Gee Records.
This film is considered a jukebox musical, where the plot is driven by popular songs. I could give you great stage play versions that everyone in the rest of the world loves, but I’m me, and the examples I give are Nilsson’s Son of Dracula and The Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music.
The story itself is very simple: ori Graham (Tuesday Weld, with Connie Francis’ singing voice) get sinto hijinks as she tries to buy a gown for a big dance. Jack Collins — who was Mr. Brady’s boss — is her dad, who is driven nearly mad by her ridiculousness.
Alan Freed shows up as, well, Alan Freed. He grew up in Salem, Ohio, miles away from my small hometown and his first jobs were on WKBN in Youngstown and WKST in New Castle. He was a rebel, playing mixed raced music and throwing dances that weren’t segregated. He’s perhaps best remembered for popularizing the term rock and roll, describing it in this movie as “a river of music which has absorbed many streams: rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, cowboy songs, country songs, folk songs. All have contributed greatly to the big beat.”
His initial big success came in Cleveland, in case you ever wondered what the hell Huey Lewis was singing about and why the Hall of Fame is on East 9th Street. He also started appearing in other movies like this, such as Rock Around the Clock, Mister Rock and Roll, Don’t Knock the Rock and Go, Johnny Go!
Freed’s career was destroyed by the payola scandal, which showed that he had accepted money to play certain songs and even songwriting credits on others, ensuring he would get royalties. That said, The Moonglows did confirm that he did co-write the song “Sincerely.”
But the damage was done. He’d bounce from station to station, unable to promote the rock and roll shows that he loved so much. He died in 1965, at the young age of 43, from the damage that alcohol does to the liver.
He was played by Tim McIntire in the movie American Hot Wax (he also played George Jones in Stand By Your Man), which features tons of artists playing themselves, like Jerry Lee Lewis, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Chuck Berry and Frankie Ford.
Times were weird in 1956. Tuesday Weld turned 13 while this movie was being made. Her boyfriend in the film, Teddy Randazzo (who wrote “It’s Gonna Take a Miracle”), was 21.
If you grew up in middle school or high school during the advent of a new cable TV channel called HBO in the early ’80s, chances are you caught at leastone of the incessant airings (we watched it multiple times, of course!) of this British rock film — alongside the likes of the juvenile delinquency classic Over the Edge (starring Matt Dillon in his film debut) and Ladies and Gentleman: The Fabulous Stains. (Meanwhile, over on the USA Network’s “Night Flight” programming block, we watched Social Distortion in the punkumentary Another State of Mind and the Ramones in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. Ah, those were the days. . . .)
O’Connor got her start as an actress, with support roles in the British films Girls Come First (1975) and Double Exposure (1977). To launch her music career (with financial assistance by Princess Diana’s then lover, Dodi Fayed), O’Connor was teamed with Marc Bolan’s (T.Rex) and David Bowie’s longtime producer Tony Vinconti (he also worked with Iggy Pop and Thin Lizzy) to craft the songs for the film; Brian Gibson (later of several Styx videos, as well as the Tina Turner bioflick What’s Love Got to Do With It and the 1998 Brit rock flick Still Crazy) was hired to craft a film around the songs.
Fans of ’70s British new wave music and of Toyah, know that the unknown O’Connor beat out Toyah Willcox for the role. At the time, Willcox was high on the British charts with her debut album, 1979’s Sheep Farming in Barnet, which featured the hit singles “Neon Womb” and “Victims of the Riddle,” and “Leya” from 1980’s The Blue Meaning. (If you’re a fan of the image and music of Lene Lovich and Nena Hagan — from our previously reviewed Cha Cha — or Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees, then you’ll enjoy the music of Toyah.)
As with the plot of most rock flicks, Gibson devised a story about the ubiquitous, meteoric rise and even quicker fall of Kate, a young and angry rock star lost in a world of drugs that’s compounded by managerial, record company, and media manipulation that leads to her eventual nervous breakdown. It’s a tale not far removed from the career trajectory of the faux bands chronicled in Slades In Flame, the 1982 Australian new wave comedy-drama Starstruck, 1980’s Times Square, and the aforementioned Ladies and Gentleman: The Fabluous Stains.
Astute British music fans will notice Phil Daniels from his starring role in Quadrophenia (brilliant as O’Connor’s talentless, bottom feeding street hustler-cum-manager), along with bassist Gary Tibbs from Adam and the Ants and Roxy Music as a band member (with equally decent acting chops). And keep your eyes open for ex-Animals keyboardist Zoot Money (You Tube) and Gary Holton of the Heavy Metal Kids (You Tube) in support roles. And yes, that is Jonathan Price as Ken, the band’s deaf and heroin-addicted saxophone player — on his way to his breakout roles in Something Wicked This Way Comes and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Image courtesy of Good Reads. You can find used copies of the novelization on Amazon U.S.
Caveat Emptor #1: Sure, you can stream Breaking Glass on You Tube Movies and Amazon Prime U.S. But those are the American edits of the film that run at one hour thirty four minutes (94 minutes) with the film’s ending and other scenes (about 10 minutes) excised — you want to watch the original British version distributed in Europe that runs at 100 minutes. Alas, due to the usual legalese, that British version is not available on Amazon Prime in the U.K. — but the intrepid staff of B&S About Movies found the lone online copy of the British cut of the film on Vimeo (it’s been there for three years, but watch it while you can).
Caveat Emptor #2: The film was out-of-print for years and the recently released, mass marketed Blus and DVDs — which come from the choppy American print — have received poor reviews. The U.S online streams come from those un-restored Blus and DVD impresses. The way the reviews read, it seems we’d be better off with a grainy, taped-off-cable or VHS online rip of the film. The Blus and DVDs offer no menus or extras, booklets or the usual commentary tracks you’d expect from the re-release of such a classic, coveted film.
And just how influencial is this film?
Well, we all know about the debated relationship between Jack Wood’s Equinoxand Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, right? Well, check out this shot of Hazel O’Connor’s “robot” from the “Eighth Day” segment of Breaking Glass against an image of 1982’s TRON.
Then, there’s the striking similarities between the hair and makeup of O’Connor and Daryl Hannah’s Pris from Bladerunner.
You can listen to the full soundtrack — which hit # 5 on the British charts and earned a gold album status — on You Tube. You can also watch two scenes/songs/rock videos cut from the film of the soundtrack’s two Top Ten British singles, “Will You?” and “Eighth Day,” also on You Tube. “Give Me an Inch” became somewhat of new wave “hit” on U.S college radio stations at the time.
You are a programme! Programme! Programme!
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
This beach movie features no beach. Sure, it’s the sixth and last of the AIP beach genre films, but right now it’s the perfect movie for the abject pit of despair that I’ve found myself in tonight.
Mr. Hiram Stokeley (Boris Karloff!) has just died and has to perform just one good deed in the next day so he can go to Heaven. He asks for Cecily (Susan Hart, the wife of AIP co-founder James H. Nicholson) to help him stop his lawyer Reginald Ripper (Basil Rathbone!) from stealing his estate from its rightful owners Chuck (Tommy Kirk) and Lili (Deborah Walley, the Gidget star who was once married to Blood Island star John Ashley).
Ripper has hired his daughter Sinistra (former Miss Scotland and Fabian bau Quinn O’Hara), J. Sinister Hulk (Maytag man Jesse White), Chicken Feather (Benny Rubin) and Princess Yolanda (beach party regular Bobbi Shaw) to kill off our hero and heroine, while Eric Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck) and his Malibu Rat Pack get involved.
This was originally called Pajama Party in a Haunted House, which is a pretty great title too. It’s the only beach party movie without Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, but it does have Nancy Sinatra right at the start of her fame, as well as George Barrows in his ape suit, Italian starlet Piccola Pupa and The Bobby Fuller Four.
Originally announced in the end credits of Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (under the title The Girl in the Glass Bikini, it was retooled after AIP producers hated the initial cut. All of the scenes with Karloff and Hart were added in, with Hart superimposed over existing footage and Karloff appearing mostly by himself on a soundstage.
This film arrives at a time before hippies would change the world. It’s kind of ironic that Eric Von Zipper’s motorcycle crash would find its way into another AIP film that would more accurately reflect the latter half of the decade, the Billy Jack-introducing The Born Losers.
I have great memories of hearing the commercials on my local rock radio station for Down on Us when it played at the—then—behemoth six-plex in the big city as a midnight movie. Our hopes were high. We loved the Doors. We all dog-eared our copies Jerry Hopkins’s No One Here Gets Out Alive. We loved those midnight showings of AC/DC: Let There Be Rock, Led Zeppelin’s The Song Remains the Same, and Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. This was going to be an epic night where the classic rock spewed from the speakers, mixing with the waft of nacho cheese congealing over tortilla chips and the sweet flow of Mr. Pibb. . . .
To say we were disappointed at what unfurled across the silver screen would be an understatement. This wasn’t Rock ‘n’ Roll High School. This was Plan 9 from Outer Space: The Rock Musical. Yes, if Ed Wood made a rock ‘n’ roll flick, it would be this Larry Buchanan hot mess of a movie. Where’s Roger Corman and Allan Arkush when you need them?
While we’re on the subject of the Ramones: The modern-day doppelganger for Down on Us is Randall Miller’s muddled bioflick boondoggle, CBGB (2013). Randall Miller, the first film director in history to be convicted in the U.S. for the death of a cast or crew member (during the production of Midnight Rider, his Gregg Allman bioflick), was unable to secure permissions from the estates of Joey and Johnny Ramone, so faux “Ramones” tune were created—and Ramones tunes were absent from the accompanying soundtrack. (A movie about CBGB’s without the Ramones? Why bother making the movie at all?)
Original 1984 theatrical one-sheet courtesy of IMDb.
As for American exploitation filmmaker Larry Buchanan: He proudly wore his self-professed “schlockmeister” honor on his chest, an award he earned for his beloved (blue-jelled) day-for-night shoots trash-classics of Curse of the Swamp Creature, The Eye Creatures,In the Year 2889, Mars Needs Women, and Zontar: The Thing from Venus (need we say more: he made the Planet of the Apes rip-off Mistress of the Apes). Buchanan’s faux-biographical drama format—mixed with his ubiquitous speculations and conspiracy appendixes—that he utilized in Down on Us dates back to his “exposés” on the Kennedy assassination with The Trail of Lee Harvey Oswald (1964), the gangster chronicles The Other Side of Bonnie and Clyde (1968) and the life Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd in A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970), and the “romance” between billionaire Howard Hughes and actress Jean Harlow in Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell (1977). Buchanan also twice explored the life of Marilyn Monroe with his same theories-vigor in Goodbye, Norma Jean (1976) and Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn (1989). Not even folklore dinosaurs are immune from the depths of Buchanan’s conspiracies: he made the speculative-drama The Loch Ness Horror (1982).
Courtesy of its chintzy-muddy production values, Down on Us looks like a porn movie—only backed by a cover band sloggin’ through some “originals” they wrote that ersatz-as-tunes for Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and The Doors. Yikes! This wasn’t Oliver Stone’s The Doors—not by a longshot. This was Ferd and Beverly Sebastian’s Rocktober Blood—only with Jim Morrison instead of Billy Eye Harper (and Nigel Benjamin) fronting Sorcery. And if not for Oliver Stone going into production with his 1991 biography on the Lizard King, even with the home video market’s voracious appetite for analog delights to line their shelves, this Buchanan conspiracy faux-fest would most likely have never made it to video on the cusp of the grunge decade.
Although many critically attacked Buchanan’s film that explores Jim’s paranoia of the government—not so much a theory, but more a cinematic license playing with a “what-if” story line—as rubbish, it seems those critics are not familiar with the legend of Jim Morrison. For Morrison, it was a real, believed threat: American Government agents were after him; that he was marked as “Number 3”—after Hendrix and Joplin. Therefore, Morrison left America for Paris to find shelter and reject the legal controversies of his life. Except, in Buchanan’s bizarro-Jim world, Morrison didn’t die in a Paris bathtub: Jim fled to Spain and took up residence in a monastery.
And speaking of legal controversies: It’s one thing to craft a bogus dramatical document about the psychedlic rock triumvirate of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison. It’s another to licensing their music. So Buchanan contracted musicians to forge replicates of those artists for the film. Oscar nominated and award-winning director Gus Van Sant exceptionally and effectively executed this same approach with 2005’s Last Days, his faux-Kurt Cobain docudrama concerning actor Michael Pitt’s eerily portrayed pseudo-grunge rocker, Blake, fronting the film’s scripted Nirvana substitute, Pagoda (featuring stunning Nirvana simulations composed by Pitt; it all goes back to poet William Blake, one of Jim Morrison’s lyrical inspirations. The circle completes). The man Buchanan hired to mimic Jim Morrison was a musician also speculated as one of the possible musicians behind the Phantom mystery of March of 1974; an enigmatic Morrison-ersatz that released the album Phantom’s Divine Comedy: Part 1 on Capitol Records: Richard Bowen.
Richard Bowen’s other musical offering, starring Fabian!
Courtesy of Bowen, it was Buchanan’s film—not Oliver Stone’s The Doors—which offered the first on-screen interpretation of Jim Morrison, as done by actor Brad Wolf, who lip-synced to the music written and performed by Bowen. Bowen construct haunting Doors mimics with “Knock So Hard,” “Sorcery,” “Old Pictures,” “Holding On,” and “Phantom in the Rain”—each sounding like doppelganger leftovers from Phantom’s Divine Comedy: Part 1, or as outtakes from the recording career of Jim Morrison’s alleged son, Cliff Morrison. (Cliff Morrison—in a career-analogous path to Jimi Hendrix’s “son,” Billy Yeager (and to a lesser extent, Frank Marino of Mahogany Rush and his Hendrix-medium myths)—evoked his “dad’s” memory with two, late-nineties albums: Know Peaking and Color of People, fronting his Lizard Son Band.) Not only were the vocal similarities between Morrison, the Phantom, and Bowen contributing to the theory that Bowen could be the Phantom: the songs titles composed by Bowen for Down on Us also fueled the theory. Again, Bowen wrote two songs: “Sorcery” (which is what a “wizard” performs—and ties into the lead track on Phantom DC’s “Tales from a Wizard”), and the second song that appears in the film, “Phantom in the Rain.”
Image of 1989 reissue by Unicorn Video courtesy of Paul Zamarelli/VHS Collector.com and user 112-Video.
The first theory about Morrison’s demise was murder: In the backwash of Oliver Stone’s 1991 document, another film sloshed the brackish tributaries first navigated by Buchanan, a film that played it very fast and very loose with the Morrison-was-murdered theory: the 1992 direct-to-video rock flick Sorority House Party (You Tube). In this case, three hotties thwart a managerial plot to kill Attila, and unpredictable, high maintenance, costly ‘80s rock star, to boost album sales. This murder theory regarding Jim was the direct result of Hendrix and Joplin doing great sales numbers after their deaths. Moreover, with Jim flaking out on the band and a split of the Doors proving costly to both the band and the label, knocking off the Lizard King doesn’t seem like an implausible idea. (Also known as Rock and Roll Fantasy,Sorority House Party served as the directing debut of David Michael Latt, who came to incorporate the successful mockbuster purveyor, Asylum Studios.)
Other movies in the 1980s also tailored the mysterious threads of Jim’s death as cinematic narrative inspiration.
The second theory regarding Jim’s “demise” was a death hoax: Jim, tired of the dealing with the band and his Miami indecency trial ending in a possible jail sentence (like counterculture comedian Lenny Bruce), paid a French doctor to create a phony coroner report and death certificate. The cable movie-rock flick favorite Eddie and the Cruisers played with this myth—no doubt inspired, in part, by the last chapter of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the 1980 best-selling, first biography on Jim, which theorized Jim Morrison may have faked his own death. In Eddie and the Cruisers, a Rimbaud-inspired rocker of the Sixties, distraught over band infighting and record company hassles, bailed out with an elaborate death ruse. In the eventual Eddie sequel, the rocking protagonist, Eddie Wilson, ended up as a construction worker in Canada; not exactly ranking with the romanticized rumors of Jim running away to Africa—then returning to music in 1974 as a mysterious rocker, the Phantom; or as the Circuit Rider (that’s a whole other Jim-tangent that we won’t get into here).
And that brings us to best of the Jim-inspired conspiracy rock films: Down on Us (1984), eventually reissued to video as Beyond the Doors (1989). And we say “the best” because it’s all about the schlock n’ trash at B&S About Movies. (Honorable mention going Michael A. Nickle’s portrayal of the Lizard King in Wayne’s World 2, of course, living out his life as a sage beyond the immaculate perimeters in the desert.)
Larry Buchanan’s film speculated Jim was not murdered, nor did he fake his death: he went underground to avoid assassination. The plot line: President Richard M. Nixon, despondent over the antiwar sentiments agitated by the hippie icons of Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison, sanctioned the F.B.I to kill the trio. Morrison apparently caught wind of the plot and “got out alive.” And, to complete the final cover up of the plot: the agent (Sandy Kenyon) who carried out the sanction is murdered. When his son discovers his dad’s files, the plot unfolds via flashback, then the son tracks down Morrison in Spain . . . .
While Buchanan’s film doesn’t get into it: The alleged “F.B.I murdered Jim” scheme has been in circulation since Jim’s death in 1971, cobbled in a basket with theories alleging the American government assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Marilyn Monroe (Hi, Larry!), along with Robert Kennedy and his brother, President John F. Kennedy (Hey, Mr. Buchanan!).
One of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission report regarding President Kennedy’s assassination, Mae Brussell, the late counterculture public radio personality of the Carmel and Monterey, California, radio stations KLRB and KAZU, most likely influenced Buchanan’s screenplay. The former host of the nationally syndicated Dialog: Conspiracy program compiled her government conspiracy theories in an unpublished November 1976 report: From Monterey Pop to Altamont, Operation Chaos: The C.I.A’s War Against the Sixties Counterculture (it was online to read in full; now it’s gone again). This report, along with current Doorsphile conspiracy theorists on social media platforms, contend there was a coordinated effort initiated in 1968 by the F.B.I’s Counter Intelligence Program and the C.I.A’s “Operation Chaos” to undermine the counterculture movement. These theories point out that Jim Morrison knew Charles Manson, through his mutual acquaintanceship of the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson and music producer Terry Melcher, and Morrison composed “Riders on the Storm” about Manson’s “murderous” followers.
Additionally, theorists opine the membership list of the 27 Club (with its own outlandish conspiracies; e.g., Courtney Love hired El Duce of the Mentors to murder Kurt Cobain) ties into the military service of the rockers’ parents. In addition to the high-ranking, classified naval service of Jim Morrison’s Admiral father, Lt. Col. Paul James Tate, the father of Manson Family murder victim, actress Sharon Tate, also served in the military. Theorists also point to Lewis Jones, the father of the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, a PhD mechanical engineer, who served as a military aeronautical engineer for Bristol Aircraft . . . et cetera, one may read the extended theories online, but the point: the deaths of their famous children were “assassinations.” The “theory” concludes: Charles Manson and his family were either hired as “actors” for the “plot,” or Manson himself was a patsy—like Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (Oy! Larry!)—set up to take the fall for the Tate “assassination.”
It all began, according to Brussell, with the 1966 death of anti-establishment comedian Lenny Bruce (1967 memoirs: How to Talk Dirty and Influence People)—the first victim of the “operation.” The critical and financial success of the Monterey Pop celebration in the summer of 1967 simply solidified the government’s resolve to snuff out the counterculture’s icons. Brussell goes onto state that, between 1968 and 1976, many of the most famous names of the counterculture movement, were dead: Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, and Janis Joplin all participated in or attended the Monterey Pop Festival. The report’s assassination roster also “stars” Duane Allman and Berry Oakley of the Allman Brothers (Hey, Randall?), folkie Tim Buckley, Jimi Hendrix’s manager Michael Jeffrey and the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, along with Graham Parsons of the Byrds, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan of the Grateful Dead, blues musician Jimmy Reed, and, of course, Jim Morrison, along with his wife, Pam Courson. All became victims of coordinated mind control tactics via Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD)—a poisoning that altered the icons’ personalities and behaviors, encouraging their accidental “deaths-by-misadventure. . . .”
I know . . . I know . . . tangents and non-sequiturs. Let’s get back to the movie! But wait! There’s one last tangent: what’s this all have to do with Rocktober Blood?
Riba Meryl, who co-wrote the faux-rock epic “Rainbow Eyes” with Sorcery’s Richard Taylor, became an actress and portrayed Janis Joplin in Down on Us. Surprising, Riba, an accomplished singer in her own right, lip-syncs the faux-Joplin tunes “Easy Now” and “No Way” written-performed by Janet Stover (her lone film credit). Riba also repeated her Joplin character in a 1987 episode of the syndicated rock ’n’ roll U.S television series Throb (You Tube). After her lone, non-Janis character acting role in 1987’s Banzai Runner, Meryl concentrated on television and film session work and contributed the song “Brand New Start” to a 1987 cop-murder drama, The Jigsaw Murders (You Tube). Sadly, Riba passed away in 2007 at the age of 52 from breast cancer. (And why didn’t Riba Meryl provide the vocals for the song she wrote for Rocktober Blood? We may never know.)
The studio band who helped create the faux-soundtrack for Down on Us was comprised of the members of the American-New Jersey hardcore punk band Adrenalin O.D (they also as appeared as musicians-background actors). If you’re familiar with the Slickee Boys (their punky-take on Status Quo’s “Pictures of Matchstick Men”) or the Dead Milkmen (remember “Punk Rock Girl”?); AOD are goofy like that. How else can you describe a band who releases an album Crusin’ with Elvis in Bigfoot’s U.F.O that features “Bulimic Food Fight” as a lead single? Formed in 1981, AOD broke up after the failure of their “big rock move” on Restless Records, their fourth album, Ishtar (1990) (they do Queen a hell of a lot better than Metallica; it’s like the Monkees on crack. And they played CBGB’s several times).
And we never heard again from the acting-musician duo behind faux Hendrix: Gregory Allen Chatman mimed to the music written and performed by David Shorey (he also served as the film’s music supervisor): “Today or Tomorrow,” “Looks Like You,” “Crystal Wings,” “Three Day Rain,” “Poet’s Reprise,” “Just My Size,” and “Seriously Shot Down.”
We did, however, hear from two of the film’s lead actors, again: Sandy Kenyon, as government agent Alex Stanley, and Toni Sawyer as his wife; neither let there involvement with Buchanan dissuade their careers. Kenyon continued to work up until his 2010 death, amassing over 130 credits on a wide array of TV series since the 1950s (. . . I’ll never find a copy of the 1974 TV movie Death in Space starring Kenyon and Cameron Mitchell, will I? Nope: The only known surviving English language print is stored at Library of Congress, alongside Kim Milford’s lost TV rock flicks Song of the Succubus and Rock-a-Die Baby). Toni Sawyer’s latest (her 74th project), the family-adventure, When the Moon was Twice as Big (Facebook), is currently in post-production.
Both versions/titles of the movie are exactly the same: so don’t fret over which VHS issues you decide to buy. Although, in all my years, I’ve never seen a post-1984 VHS on the shelves as Down on Us, only the 1989 Beyond the Doors version. And I only found the ’89 VHS, out of six video memberships —once—at a 10,001 Monster Video. The VHS pops up in the online marketplace from time to time, Amazon and eBay in particular. However, beware of those DVDs: they’re all grey market rips-from-the-VHS.
As for online streaming: There’s only two choices to watch this online—via You Tube, natch. There’s a multi-part upload (of 13, 10-minute segments) HERE that was the only choice for many years. However, someone recently uploaded the complete film in one upload HERE.
“Our assignment: neutralize the three pied pipers of rock music.” — F.B.I Agent Alex Stanley
Indeed. And you “neutralized” the after effects of my cheesy nachos and Mr. Pibb, Agent Stanley. (I miss you, John, my brother. Good times.)
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis regarding Jim Morrison’s doppelganger, the Phantom of Detroit, on Facebook and Medium. He also writes film reviews for B&S About Movies.
Post Script: Down on Us is a movie that never ceases to keep on giving. Check out Bill Burke’s new, February 2022 take on the film at Horror News.net.
Hector draws pentagrams and is from Colombia. Sina is from Iran, where even liking black metal, not to mention being in a band, could get him jailed or worse. Kaiadas is a member of the Greek parliament as part of the Golden Dawn party, which has praised Nazis and takes a hard right stance (this is glossed over in the film). What draws them together is a metal festival in Norway and their love of where black metal was twenty years ago.
While the movie begins with a really interesting scene of a guy explaining to kids what blackpackers are — black metal fans who come to see places they’ve only listened to or read about — the rest of the film is pretty basic, sad to say.
The only scene that I really enjoyed was when the mayor of the town introduced the festival in the most friendly and least metal way possible. Decades ago, churches burned and people lived in fear, but today, black metal is commodified tourism, loved by the manchildren in this film. Only Sina comes off as someone who uses metal as an escape from a truly horrifying life.
Penelope Spheeris may be best known for Wayne’s World, but her life and films are more than just one movie.
Until the age of seven, Spheeris grew up in a traveling carnival until her father was stabbed after intervening in a racial dispute. After his death, she grew up in California trailer parks with a succession of stepfathers, yet still graduated high school voted “most likely to succeed.”
Working at Denny’s and IHOP in Los Angeles — one wonders if she even encountered David Lynch — she put herself through UCLA and started her career producing short films with Albert Brooks, several of which aired during the first few seasons of Saturday Night Live.
Between Dudes, Suburbia and two of the Decline films, Spheeris has shown her understanding of punk even as she lays bare some of the sillier moments of the kids caught up in its wake. The decline of Western civilization could mean many things here. It could be a reference to Lester Bangs’ review of The Stooges’ Fun House, where a friend remarked that this album had to be the signal of the end of it all. Or it could be a reference to Germs singer Darby Crash Darby reading Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West).
The bands within this movie — as well as the punk rock fans — gave Spheeris some amazing access to their lives, warts and all. While some bands like Alice Bag Band and Catholic Discipline may not be well known, X, the aforementioned Germs, Fear, the Circle Jerks and Black Flag should be recognized by anyone, not just punk fans.
After the film was screened in Los Angeles, punk music fans got into so many fights and caused so much chaos that L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates wrote the filmmakers a letter asking them not to screen the film again.
This series of movies was only available in bootleg form for years. This was because of licensing issues for all the songs and Spheeris not wanting to go back and relive them. She didn’t need the money, but then she decide dthat she’d rather be remembered for these films than her more commerical work.
You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi. There’s also the official site which has press clippings and more info on the films.
While this German rock flick is best remembered for featuring MTV video favorite Nena in her acting debut, the film takes its title from a hit song by her co-star Markus Mörl, which translates as “Step on the Gas – I Want Fun.”
The film was crafted as a multimedia showcase to launch the music careers of both singers in their native Germany. But after Nena’s “99 Luft Balloons” (which isn’t featured in the film) became a freak international hit (in both of its German and English versions) courtesy of its video, the film was quickly dubbed into English and retitled as Hangin’ Out — a title which also carried over into its Spanish and Japanese dubs.
The film, which featured six tunes from Nena’s eponymous band, became the 13th most successful film in Germany that year. However, to hear Nena — who has long since derided the film — tell it, the film had an opposite effect on her career: instead of the film launching her career, it was the MTV success of her career that made the film successful.
And while Nena, along with fellow Germans Falco (“Der Kommissar“) and Trio (“Da Da Da” and “Boom Boom“) where able to find international success beyond the Euroasia continent, Marcus failed to expand his career beyond Germany’s borders. He did, however, score a Top Five hit with “Kleine Taschenlampe brenn,” (“Small Flashlight Burning”), which is featured in the film and consider a German pop music classic. The film also features another one of his chart hits, “Feuerwehrmann,” which you can listen to in this clip from the film.
So, what’s the film about? It’s a simple love story.
Tina (Nena) is tired of school and life in her Barvarian village and won’t give fellow student Robby (Markus Mörl) the time of day. Instead she falls for Tino (Enny Gerber, in his only film role), a red silk jacket wearing, motor scooter riding ne’er do well who works at the local carnival. When Tino leaves town and breaks Tina’s heart, she convinces Robby to hit the road and track down Tino — which leads Tina and Robby to eventually fall in love.
While there’s several clips from the film available on You Tube (some blocked from U.S. playback), we found this English language vignette on You Tube — as you can see, the film awkwardly transitions from English language dialog to German language vocals (and here’s several trailers and clips to sample). There’s no online rips or VHS copies available online of the English language dub released under the Hangin’ Out title, but we located a copy of the German language version of the film on Russia’s version of You Tube, OK.ru.
Nena’s only acted in front of the camera two more times: the German films Tagediebe (Day Thieves; 1985) and Der Usichtbare (The Invisible; 1987). Curiosity seekers of all things Nena can watch Der Usichtbare and this promotional video of the song “Memorija” from Tagediebe, courtesy of You Tube.
About the Author: You can learn more about the writings of R.D Francis on Facebook.He also writes forB&S About Movies.
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