I will talk to you of art
for there is nothing else to talk about
for there is nothing else…
Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art!
Burn gas buggies and whip your sour cream of circumstance
and hope…
I was planning to post a copy of this, but someone beat me to it. Either way, we’re all the winners here. I seriously think this is one of my top 10 best movies of all time. I don’t know if it’s the awesome script by Charles B. Griffith, the over-the-top performances by Julian Barton (poet Maxwell Brock) and the one-and-only Dick Miller (Walter Paisley), or the so-bad-it’s-like-folk-art special effects. Heck, Maxwell Brock’s opening poem (some quoted above) is worth the price of admission alone.
You just have to love a beatnik horror comedy made at the height of the beat generation. Obviously I’m not the only one out there — there’s even a wiki page for the movie, though it mostly just recounts the plot of the film. It does note that the film is now in the public domain, which I had hear but hadn’t been able to confirm until now.
Back in the nineties a big group of friends and I put on a version of this movie as a play at Winnipeg’s famous Fringe Festival and it was a huge hit. It wasn’t because we were great actors or had high production values; it was the opposite. One of the reasons this film works is because it’s so loose.
At any rate, this movie holds a warm place in my heart. Heck, this web site’s name was inspired by the movie - it was the nickname given to the apartment I lived at the time that we put on the fringe festival play. Enjoy!
(P.S. Don’t miss Bert Convy in one of his earliest roles.)
