The Drive-In Cathedral

 
From 1999 to 2002 this documentary chronicles video store clerk Kier-La Janisse’s efforts to hold an international horror film festival in Vancouver.

This had a one-night only showing at the Park Theater to promote its DVD release. As the film’s director Sarah Fester explained, the film focuses on the first three years of the Cinemuerte film festival from 1999 to 2002, it took years for this to be completed due to the lengthy amount of time it took to get the rights to include clips from the various films that have played as part of the festival. Sarah Fester herself was involved with the Festival from the start and Janisse is clearly a close friend, this still does its best to not be simply as puff piece but actually focuses on the actual nitty-gritty details of how producing a film festival actually works. Though it focuses on a festival dedicated to the horror genre, it still does its best to be accessible to someone who might not be interested in horror, though the film clips chosen often feature some of the most disturbing scenes from some of the most extreme movies out there to better give the audience an idea where Janisse’s vision is coming from (there’s a sequence dedicated to the midnight showing of Cannibal Holocaust which shows two of the most notorious scenes of a real-live turtle being killed and the scene where the film’s loathsome protagonists film one of their own who had been killed by the Cannibals: a dead woman impaled nude. We see those scenes juxtaposed with actual footage of a Cinemuerte patron fainting in the lobby, while others leave talking about how boring it is because too much happens between the gore scenes. It prompts a wonderful response from Janisse about how true horror is more than gore and those people who come for the gore aren’t true fans of the genre. One person in our audience applauded, and I suspect a few more were nodding their heads in agreement like I was).

As the years progress for the festival, though still without coverage from Vancouver media and without any government funding it begins to generate a reputation that includes visits from French director Jean Rollin, New York director Buddy Giovinazzo (whose ultra-nihilistic Combat Shock makes Taxi Driver seem a reaffirming portrait of the innate goodness of humanity in comparison), and in the unique role of personally doing his best to generate interest in the festival and actually help the festival get something resembling respectabilty, Eurotrash actor Udo Kier. Who shows himself a witty and erudite gentleman who is able to get onto the Vancouver media channels in a way nobody else can and plug the festival, allowing for the documentary’s upbeat ending where the Cinemuerte festival becomes a big enough hit that it can move to San Francisco (!).

Janisse is of course now involved with the programming of Winnipeg’s own Cinematheque, and there’s already signs of her influence coming in (an independent horror film Pop Skull is playing there 10 days from now, and there’s a much greater emphasis on having the audience interact with the movies such as upcoming Power Ballad Singalongs and Saturday Morning Cartoons coming soon. (My favourite being the fact right after the showign of beloved children’s Canadiana The Dog Who Stopped The War will be a chance for filmgoers to meet an actual St. Bernard named Cleo after the film’s heroic canine.)

All of this suggests good times are ahead for Cinematheque. I plan on being there for at least some of them.

A young University Student named Bud Corliss is dismayed when his girlfriend Dorrie reveals she’s pregnant. Not looking forward to eking out a living supporting a child he does not want, he engineers Dorrie’s death and makes it looks like a suicide. Dorrie’s death arouses the suspicions of her older sister who investigates privately, while getting ready for marriage to her beau, Bud Corliss…

As someone who only knows Robert Wagner from such classic seventies chess like the TV series Hart to Hart, it’s a bit of a shock to see him as a charismatic young sociopath here, because he’s so good at it. In fact the film suffers in the second half when he isn’t the sole focus anymore, as after he finally is able to achieve the death of Dorrie while making it look like a suicide, that the film suffers. Virginia Leith is fine as Dorrie’s older much more capable sister (who looked annoyingly familiar to me until I realized Ms. Leith was also the severed head that is the true star of the misnomered The Brain Who Wouldn’t Die), but since this is the 1950s it means there has to be a nominal male hero, and that comes in the personage of a big lummox of a police detective in Clark Kent glasses and silly pipe-smoking affectation played by Jeffrey Hunter. Hunter’s a fine actor (who nowadays is more known for being Captain Pike on the unsold pilot for Star Trek instead of being John Wayne’s co-star in The Searchers), but here you can’t help but laugh at the guy as the character he plays is also a condescending, dense, arrogant twit…and those are presented as his good points.

Still the film is trying to be a Hitchcockian thriller, and for that first half it damn near succeeds at being as good as old Hitch. Due to all around behind-the-scenes quality like Lionel Newman’s Bernard Herrmann-esque score to the lush Technicolor cinematography that features such eye-popping treats like Cherry-Red convertibles and deep blue swimming pools to the clever direction from Gerd Oswald (responsible for some of the most twisted and nightmarish episodes of the early 60s Outer Limits, as well as a later film noir The Screaming Mimi, which features a plot twist borrowed by Dario Argento and a hundred of his imitators for the 1970s cycle of giallo thrillers from Italy).

As much as I enthuse about this film, I was struck by its focus on beautiful young rising stars (to the point of gratuitous long shots of a swimsuit-clad Virginia Leith sunning herself) and not terribly complex story, that in many ways it’s a predecessor to later teen-focused thrillers like Disturbia, Cruel Intentions or (god help us) swimfan

Don’t let that scare you off, even with the subpar second half, this is still the best and most worth your while.

If all goes well, this will mark the first entry of a blog dedicated to films and TV of a certain bent, with occasional sidetrips into reviews of the written word. The title of this blog should be the tip-off. It takes inspiration from the short story "Pilgrims to the Cathedral" by Mark Arnold, printed in the movie-themed horror anthology Silver Scream edited by David J. Schow. The story details a triple screen drive-in that becames something special due to the three way partnership between a trash-loving punk, a woman who just rejected a lifetime of marital bliss for something resembling Art, and a semi-coherent redneck who makes a good chili. Between the three of them they create a special sort of drive-in (one, the reader suspects, is the one Mark Arnold always wanted to have) where punk rock is played pver the speakers when the movies weren’t showing, and the three screens offer each a triple-feature that allows Mark Arnold to enthuse over the many different subgenres of disrepespectable cinema that had taken form over the 1970s and 1980s. From chopsocky films to spaghetti westerns to Italian cannibal films to Women-in-Prison flicks to straight ahead horror to hardcore porn to Lynchian weirdness and beyond.

Of course since this is a horror story this wonderful dream of a drive-in can not last forever, as due to political skullduggery allows the drive-in to be repossessed and turned over to a fundamentalist Christian preacher who sees the drive-in as an opportunity to build one of the biggest cathedrals America had ever seen up to that point (note: This story was published initially in 1988). The story proceeds to detail the break up of the original triad of owners and it seems like the preacher and his  congregation will be triumphant, but on the day of consecration for the new church, the preacher discovers that the drive-in the place once was had somehow become the equivalent of a cathedral itself, though to a different sort of diety. One who does not like what has happened and strikes back in the only way it knows how, by manifesting revenants of trash movie icons (the psycho killer with a toolbox; the shaolin priest who can punch through a living person’s head; the sex-crazed mutant etc.) and turning them loose on the all too frail congregation.

 It’s a fun story and serves as a good final story for the anthology, and the ideas has stuck with me enough to use a varriation of the title for this blog. I figurte I’d give credit where credit is due as the last thing I want is to piss off the diety that represents obscure cinema and suffer its wrath…