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You gotta conceal the bodies if you wanna make it into the arthouse, Roger Corman can dig it. The hulking poet in sandals and taped-on beard (Julian Burton) faces the camera in a Beat peroration ("What is not creation is graham crackers..."), the spotlight pulls back to reveal a busy night at the Yellow Door, a dive thick with smoke and pretension. Stumbling from table to table is the twitchy busboy with artistic dreams (Dick Miller), at home he flounders as a sculptor until a note from Poe places a skewered feline next to his bag of clay. (Corpses into effigies, cf. House of Wax, the inspiration hits him in the kitchen under a stream of blood.) Undercover narc cleaved by frying pan, bitchy model throttled mid-pose, luckless laborer with buzz-saw—enough items for a gallery. Flush with beret, ascot and Zen stick, the murderous dweeb blows the mind of the comely poseurette (Barboura Morris): "Free-form? With his talent for realism?" A lovingly sardonic thesis on aestheticism, a Polaroid of Greenwich Village to go with Kienholz's John Doe. The wannabes and sycophants and frauds of "creative living," its faddish fortunes and morbid epiphanies, Charles B. Griffith's wry screenplay doesn't miss a thing. The schlub crowned hepcat, the bit player made leading man, the exploitation impresario turned satirist. "A film of fear," says Godard of Becker's Modigliani (Montparnasse 19), the auteur-maniac besieged by voices finally grabs noose and plaster for his masterpiece. "Crazy! What did he say?" "Didn't you hear him?" "Nah, man, I'm too far out." Quite the feast on a shoestring, and there's still dessert (The Little Shop of Horrors). With Antony Carbone, Ed Nelson, Bert Convy, Judy Bamber, Myrtle Vail, and Bruno Vesota. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |