FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 @ 45 (Spoilers)

After a prologue that blends a recap of the legend and ending of the first film with a stalking and killing of its final girl, we gather at a new summer camp with new counsellors. It's also on Crystal Lake because why not? Pranks and gossip buzz and the chief Paul and his current flame among the staff, Ginny, smooth out their bickering. Meanwhile, handheld camera at ankle level, Jason is shown active as a full grown man roaming the woods as the young adults cavort in them. The crew get one last night on the town before they get down to prep for the summer camp and then the killing begins and the formula clicks into place.

That might sound cynical but this film, made at the dawn of teen slashers while the rules were still getting their first draft, happily reinforces everything that works and presages some features that the franchise itself would use. The first Friday the 13th was an attempt at distilling what worked about Halloween and dispensing with all that pesky character development. It worked and its first sequel added even more filtration. Get young adults together in a remote location. Kill them.

While I am not about to exaggerate the nuances of the relationships and characterisations here, there is some basic work done on what's between Paul and Ginny, Vickie shows paraplegic Mark that her attraction to him is not drawn from pity, whacky Ted is not just a pranky git. Ginny's bar-side musings on the legend of Jason and that he might have grown to age with no means to distinguish violence from morality. Surrounded by people washing their own ethics away with gushes of beer, it's a poignant moment.

So then you get the kills and they're good. Although gore effects emperor Tom Savini did cross paths with Jason and his victims, this time the setups are handled by Steven Kirshoff. Hammer claws to the skull, machetes to the neck, an encore of a javelin through sexually engaged bodies. All who paid for more of the first one were getting just that. As to the score, Henry Manfredini is back with his Psycho-inspired shrieks in the high stirngs. There is more electronica on the same stage though and the viewing I did for this featured a scene backed by the violin intensity and some strange synthesised chirping which added an uncomfortable weirdness to the scene. 

The most famous setpiece in the film comes at the end when Ginny musters everything she knows about psychology to hypnotically convince Jason that she is his murdered mother. She dons the deceased's jumper and talks to the killer, stopping him as he crashes through the door. It works. With her life at stake, and those of countless future others, she does a turn for the ages as Jason's vision blurs through confusion to acceptance, right up to the moment where he sees his mother's dessicated head still on the altar where he left it. Ginny is making good with her theorising and adding a comprehension to it  that feels like compassion. Where the inspirational figure of Michael Myers in Halloween's sequel (same year) might benefit from a few sprinkles of rounding back detail, he remains a mechanical predator. Jason gets a personality and history of abuse, the childlike killer left is made all the more terrifying.

The Jason of this outing has yet to put his iconic hockey mask on his face. He does wear an Elephant Man hessian sack with a single eyehole over his head, though. In the first we only see him as a mangled child projecting from the water in Alice's memory.  The dialogue states that it was five years between then and this one. Now, Jason is a grown man who has learned to dress himself and survive in the woods without discovery. Ok, but if you're going to hold what will increasingly be a disturbing thread of a figure liminally between worlds who becomes a slashing monster in this one, you won't be getting much out of this franchise. 

So, this one does what it says on the tin without pretending it's doing anything else, while adding some intriguing innovations. As to the tired criticism of slashers being puritanically anti-sex, recall the cry of the hosts of the great Faculty of Horror podcast: the film is rad, the killer is the prude. On the other hand, if I've managed to interest you in this one, move to the underrated Part 3. He gets the hockey mask in that one ;)

Viewing notes: I watched my blu-ray from a set of all the Paramount chapters. The presentation is stellar HD with good muscular audio mix. This set is no longer currently available but the whole franchise is rentable through a few streamers. 

DEAD AND BURIED @ 45

A photographer on a road trip stops at a picturesque beach. After a few decent scenes he focuses on a pair of shapely legs. Tilting up, he sees a beautiful young woman. She's fine with having her picture taken, even loosening her top and exposing her breasts. She invites him to take her and he, finding it difficult to believe, goes along until he's knocked on the head, tied to a post with a fishing net as a group of locals advance on him with cameras, a can of petrol and a lighter. He screams as one of them says, "welcome to Potter's Bluff." If you think that's a spoiler, you haven't seen this movie.

Dead and Buried is a strange horror film in that it refuses to declare its hand until it's got you scratching your head. Further victims appear posthumously, taking their places in the population with new identities. The local sheriff emerges as the protagonist as he tries to piece the bizarre events around him. He's aided by the local coroner who loves his classic big band records and waxes lyrical abou the art of the embalmer. Sheriff Dan's wife Janet is a schoolteacher with a performative style and a barely veiled interest in the occult. The deeper Dan gets into the mystery the worse the possibilities get unto a finale with an unexpectedly heartrending conclusion.

When I've shown this movie to friends, even those of my own vintage, they wonder why they had never heard of it. I saw it because I was getting back into horror movies after a decade or two of snobbery from film student days. Also, the VHS cover art intrigued me. A woman's face is partially buried, surrounded by broken earth with a beach and gentle sea stretchingstretching to the horizon. A full moon shines behind chunky clouds. It could have been a lesser surrealist masterpiece for its impossible geography and  eerie moodiness. The loneliness of the image gives out a weird quiet despair. I had to see it.

James Farentino, rocky faced star of detective and action shows on TV, has an appealing bewilderment at the strange events around him. He manages to blend this with the more assertive heroic figure he needs for the sheriff. Melody Anderson as Janet uses her doll-like face to cover sinister motivations in a kind of reverse gaslighting turn. Her's is the most heavily affecting death scene. Lisa Blount's Lisa, the siren of the opening murder scene, doesn't have to be anything more than amoral malevolance which she provides generously. It is Jack Albertson, veteran character actor of westerns, noir and drama, Grandpa in Willy Wonka, who steals the show here as the coroner Dobbs with a gruff poetry and worldly (perhaps otherworldly) pragmatism. It was his final performance. He died weeks after wrapping.

I'd recommend following up information about the FX master Stan Winston's work on this film, it remains extraordinary. Stephen Poster's cinematography made such heavy use of gauze and lace for the daylight scenes that the patterns can be discernable and feel like we are peeping through curtains at a mystery. My copy includes a CD of Joe Renzetti's score which I can listen to by itself, a piano-led melancholic suite.

Dead and Buried covers its plotholes by pushing the unreality of its events enough to impose on our objections but not so much that it's just formless fantasy. Concentrate on motivations as they slowly emerge and you'll get the movie. If you do, you might just want your own copy, especially if you like an uncanny tale on a rainy afternoon and one that pits humans against their own vanity and resonance. Seek!

Viewing Notes: I watched my Blue Underground special edition with 4K, Blu-Ray and CD soundtrack discs. One thing I'll note about this which is worth bearing in mind. My copy appeared in one fo the 2021 lockdowns. It was misdelivered and lay for days beside my neighbour's letterbox until he found it and left it at my doorstep. It was so thoroughly soaked from heavy rainfall that even the plastic covering had been penetrated. I had to throw away the slipcover (kept the lenticular panel, though) and found that the main 4K disc would not play properly. I complained with the courier company who, after some earnest exhanges, dropped the case. Figuring on water damage I left the disc upright in a place where it would get some breeze. Little by little, over a month, it did dry out and eventually played without seizing up. Handy to know.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK @ 45

In the distant future of 1997 Manhattan Island has become America's prison. It's a massive Alcatraz surrounded by skyhigh walls all around it and lethal chopper patrols around the clock. That is where the hijacked Airforce One crashes as the president is on his way to avert a nuclear holocaust. Oops! Not to worry, war hero turned career criminal Snake Plissken is on hand to glide in, retreive the pres and his McGuffin cassette tape that will put an end to the simmering conflict. Oh, and just in case he thinks about his own escape, he's injected with a couple of lethal pellets that can only be neutralised by the folks in charge. He has less than twenty-four hours to do this before the pellets dissolve and the summit meeting ends in war. No pressure.

The deal is extortinate. The times are tough and urgent but this deal has the ring of privilege. We see nothing of the world beyond the penal system and the sense that legal presumption has morphed from innocence to guilt. If you're caught, it's the island. What kind of society is being suggested, here?

John Carpenter had already suggested a twisted public responsibility in his previous film The Fog. The possibility that the ancestry could rise in pain against injustice is an enjoyable fable. What Carpenter saw in the America of 1981 was a wave of authoritarianism in the guise of economic rationalism. It was the start of two terms of Reagan and another of Bush. Over a decade of sweeping problems under the carpet and calling it justice. The society outside the prison of Manhattan is only different from the gangster-led rule of force within it by the price of the suits of those calling the shots. I've always imagined it as a kind of rigid '50s utopianism masking runaway capitalism.

Carpenter's first attempts at the screenplay were not in response to Reagan but Nixon and the swelling cynicism that rose in self protection in the community. Who would bother trusting politicians? Donald Pleasance's President John Harker is played with all the tight lipped narcissism that a post-Nixon chief might express. He is a weasel who knows how to be nice and for how long.

Kurt Russell is given Snake Plissken which allowed him a launch pad away from his child star status. His matchstick chewing, eye patched leathery hide feels effortlessly donned. His serpentine hissing intimidating. Remember how Heath Ledger went from nice guy with muscle to the most memorable Joker to date? Same thing. Russell turned up toned to the last millimetre with a lion's mane and way with heavy personal artillery. 

Against him, the grinning villain of countless spaghetti westerns, Lee Van Cleef presides over the operation without a beat's difference from those roles. Nor needs he to, Carpenter is happy to continue his exploration of the western through whatever other genre he chooses. The meeting between his Hauk and Plissken is one of those scenes you can replay like a favourite song.

On the island, The Duke of New York oversees. A granite Isaac Hayes, surrounded by Kinskyish punks and leering rags of humans, his chandelier-toting Cadillac proceeds through the streets like the entourage of a Byzantine monarch. Down at the trash fire street level, the information rich Cabbie and the slippery Brain deal with the day to day, offering essential services or knowledge in exchange for preservation. The world building with bizarre vaudeville shows and iron-age lethal sparring as well as gangs of the darkly insane in streets bright with car fires, is still impressive.

Carpenter, as usual, provides an action packed middle act that will lead to a white knuckle finale, this time careful to further expose the president and deliver a joke that works every time you see it again.

While it might get set up as a schlock bam bam movie, Escape From New York with its committed performances, commentary on the desperate unfairness of a brutal capitalism, ends up a wrenching and sincere gut punch at the worst Carpenter feared. It plays as a grim warning with its brooding score (one of Carpenter's very best) and desolate setting. The great city is a prison, the empire somewhere over there where you aren't allowed. We didn't get any of this by 1997 but we never have to. All we need to do is know that this is something we don't want now or ever. But we have to remember that.

FRIDAY THE 13th @ 45 (Spoliers!)

A young woman hitchhikes her way to her job as a cook at a summer camp. After being weirded out by a local preaching doom, warned off going to her destination because of murders that took place there, and then given the ick by the driver of her ride, she gets out and is pursued into the woods to her violent death. Meanwhile, the other young things assemble at Camp Crystal Lake to setup for the advent of the kids. They notice the persistent absence of the new cook (we already met her) and then they, too, start suffering the slings and arrows ... and javelins. Cinema has entered the 1980s.

Sean Cunningham's 1980 teen slasher from a screenplay by Victor Miller was intended as a cash-in after the success of John Carpenter's seminal Halloween from two years before. This is how the film is often dismissed but that really is a disservice. While the parent group is similarly absent, leaving the nascent adults to fend for themselves, the threat of the suburban jungle is replaced with the wilder environment of the forest at night. 

These teens, also, have cleared school, having even less anchor points to the social order. This is illustrated early with the snake. Anyone who has never seen this film needs the warning that it depicts the onscreen killing of a snake by a machete-wielding kid. It happens as part of a panic among the group which is solved by violence. I cannot apologise for it but I can see how it establishes a pragmatism that puts the young adults into preparedness. In the realm of the movie, it's a small crisis brought to a head. It might well haunt more recent views beyond the running time.

For all I prefer in Halloween, I have to admit that the internal politics are given more depth in Friday the 13th. Along with the effective Tom Savini gore of the kills, this cultural aspect is brought to the fore, providing the monster with the kind of grounding absent in Carpenter's shape. In this first outing of the franchise, we don't even catch sight of the killer until the last. At this point we also get the motivation and its twisted ugliness.

A 1950s-set prologue has already given us a kind of standard setter and appears to speak for the film itself by punishing pre-marital sex. This, and a careful misreading of the ensuing movie bears out the common misconception that teen slashers are puritanical thunderbolts, warning the too-young away from the sins of the flesh. This falls apart immediately when you consider the target audiences were the same horny teens on screen who didn't once consider their desires to be preludes to murder. More centrally, it's the deranged monster with the machete that's doing this. As Alex West of The Faculty of Horror podcast once perfectly phrased it: the movie's rad, the killer's conservative.

A glimpse into the future will show how the F13 franchise developed this. The first four display an offroad freedom to the young adults' choices and, while sex is a generic given, they're also adventurous outside of that one. For now, back in 1980, the adults in the form of ludicrous cops and uptight veteran youth counsellors, and crazy Ralph the doomsayer, offer only a kind of dead skin as faces of authority. The result isn't an instant Lord of the Flies but an incursion by the big bad world lashing out from the dark.

It's taken me a while but I've come to appreciate Friday the 13th. When I first saw it during schoolies week in 1980 it was a tearing thrill ride before an eerie walk home though canal-ville on the Gold Coast to the flat I was staying at with other demographically threatened late teens. In a strangely prescient co-incidence, there was a serial criminal known first as the balaclava rapist and then balaclava killer on the loose along the Gold Coast. We were aware of that as we tried to navigate the then forbidding urban landscape of the strip.

This film also carries a surprise for anyone aware of the franchise iconography. It is not Jason who does the killing but his vengeful mother. Her dispatch with a machete to the neck appears to give a second birth to her wronged son whose grisly mutated form polarises out of the lake water and attacks the final girl in what might or might not be a dream. Than he's still out there? she asks the cops from her hospital bed. Yes he was, growing, getting nastier and uglier. But he was also developing and distinguishing himself from a decade of slasher clones who preferred F13's flamboyant gore over Halloween's suspense. And, of course, the Halloween sequels lay down and copied the copy. Jason got his hockey mask on the third go and its assumption was a comment on the society of his victims. Yes, of course, it's fun rather than philosophy but it's fun that got that tiny bit closer.

Viewing notes: I saw this on my birthday of Friday the 13th on Paramount's superb 4K transfer which enhances the always unexpected beauty of the cinematography. It was a birthday celebration and the viewing was ruled by peanut-gallery commentary, but we did take it in in spirit. It has been available as part of a boxset of the Paramount-owned franchise, and Stan used to stream it. Otherwise it's rentable online from a few outlets.

CRUISING @ 45

After a series of murders of gay men in New York, Steve, a uniform cop, gets offered an undercover assignment with the carrot of a promotion to detective dangling. Steve moves into a flat in the West Village and starts meeting the locals and hanging out at the gay bars in the neighbourhood. The job, taking him into an intense world, forces him to confront his own sexuality as he involves himself ever deeper in the scene. His straight relationship starts to come apart and as he gets closer to narrowing in on the killer, he might have to make some big decisions.

Friedkin and his star Al Pacino had both been around the thematic area of crime procedural and undercover work in The French Connection and Serpico respectively. Cruising came at the end of a decade of cinema which New Hollywood had rendered gritty and dangerous. The appeal of the story with an added controversial theme was enough to get this one done as yet another dark big city story.

This film cannot be discussed without mention of the protests around its production and release by New York's gay community whose concern was the effects of damaging stereotyping or worse that might embolden hate crime. With the bullshit of gayness as a lifestyle choice (as opposed to a natural state) embedded in mainstream culture, the concern held water. That the resulting film does not play on this outside of characters' attitudes is a triumph against the times of its conception. Cruising might be many things but it is not a gay bash.

While it might be tempting to view the sweaty, macho and emboldened scenes of the clublife as the last orgy before AIDS, I think it would be missing the point the same way that a film depicting the twin towers might suggest commerce when everything was free. To my mind the flaunting culture of the leather bars is more related to the past, to the obscurity of privileged societies and the supposed decadence of antiquity. The cop cosplay comes across as poignant in the light of scenes of corrupt cops (or just impostors) using their authority for sexual abuse. When Joe Spinell first appears as such a cop in a cruiser car and then, in civvies, in the clubs, Friedkin is extending what he's already started to do with the killers when he shows a number of very similar looking men as likely. This is a microculture as seen by a baffled observer.

Steve is so baffled that his haunted gaze into a mirror toward the end holds questions of his own sexuality and perhaps even culpability. This is why Cruising doesn't play at all like the serial killer movies that dominated crime cinema in the following decade; the deeper the cop goes the less clear the job becomes, the less cultural judgement he is permitted to use. The irresolution is not something that Silence of the Lambs and its copies could tolerate. If anything, Cruising more closely resembles the freaky ambiguity facing Deckard in Blade Runner than anything from exploitation cinema. Friedkin spent marathon hours removing a lot of verite footage from the film (forty minutes). Superficially, this was to evade a lethal X rating but it also improved the film by leanness.

Is the film itself sleazy? It is unavoidably the production of an outsider to the culture who is likely to add more than a dash of exotica but I think the scenes of domestic life around Steve's apartment, the crossdressing sex workers (who come across a lot less freaky than the cops who bail them up). If there is sleaze it gets closest in the depiction of potential psychopathy when the film switches viewpoints and invades the apartment of one of the suspects. Steve invades the apartment and goes through the letters written to the suspect's dead father which include some bizarre and troubling imagery (you want sleaze? I paused the rental VHS for five tape stressing minutes reading the text, back in the '90s!). 

Al Pacino himself might have seemed poor casting but the authenticity of his awkwardness is right there on the screen. It serves him through the rising chill of his relationship with his girlfriend. Karen Allen adds a lot of definition to a role that might have been left superficial. When she plays with his costume it is both an affirmation of Steve's old normality and a creepy absorption of the iconography. If Cruising is a big budget exploitation movie it is a self-aware one.  Of course, I'm writing all this from an Ikea ivory-look tower further away than even William Friedkin was from the culture the film depicts. My judgement for the defence must be read that way. But I can say that, on repeated views, Cruising is a story of self-estrangement delivered cold, a remote surgical procedure, but not a smirk.

Viewing notes: I watched my splendid Arrow Blu-Ray for this review. Cruising has not kept a high profile in Friedkin's output and things outside of The Exorcist or The French Connection are only really served by boutique labels. If you want it on physical media, you'll have to look overseas. Otherwise, it's on at least three streamers for rent or purchase. 

APOCALYPSE NOW @ 45

A beach lined with coconut palms shimmers in the heat. Helicopters drift across, circling, as the mesmeric stirring of the Doors' epic The End lifts. When Jim Morrison comes in with his stern croon, "this is the end, beautiful friend," a flood of napalm swipes across the view which is now made of sticky fire. Lap dissolve to Captain Benjamin Willard naked on his hotel bed in Saigon, floating on cognac as his voice tells his story. Everyone gets what he wants. He wanted a mission and for his sins they gave him one.

In a scene that I find creepier every time I see it, he is briefed by senior officers over lunch. He is to take a patrol boat up river and assassinate a U.S. officer, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz for unsound methods. Shocked, he accepts and gets on the boat. After this mission, he would never want another.

Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam opus was considered a massive folly at the time, its then forty million dollar budget and interminable production time were considered part of the bloated decadence of the New Hollywood decade of star directors. It seemed destined for the jokes of history folder (to perish in the last paper office fire of the '90s). Not only did it defy expectations by handing Coppola his next timeless classic but has travelled down the decades with a quietly persistent reputation for cinematic power and awe-inspiring scope. That its creator keeps fiddling with it does nothing to damage the basic text of the thing which remains robust. 

Oh, that's important: if you see this for the first time, it shouldn't go for more than two and a half hours. Avoid the Redux and Final Cut versions until after you see the 1979. As with The Exorcist, Amadeus and a host of others, the original, while it can be costly to find, remains the definitive one, regardless of what Coppola himself says.

Willard's journey up river knocks him into the American war effort in Vietnam with its gigantically wasteful devastation and self-indulgence. Colonel Kilgore runs his helicopter unit like a posse of surfing cowboys, destroying a beach with napalm so he can watch his men surf. A huge fairy lit entertainment event in the middle of the jungle goes nightmarishly out of control while trying to bring a little Las Vegas to the boys. A bridge, kept open despite constant successful enemy destruction, is maintained in a Boschian hellscape just so the generals can tell their bosses that the road is open. And then there's Kurtz, rogue military muscle with a mind heated by delirium. These really aren't spoilers. They add to Willard's weird and damaging journey to the war and America's heart of darkness.

Oh, you can also read about it. This film is quite closely based on Joseph Conrad's forbidding short novel Heart of Darkness, based on his sobering experiences in the Belgian Congo under the new imperialism of the late  nineteenth century. That tale's hero, Marlow, is sent on a similar mission to control an administrative loose canon and comes into contact with the worst excesses of a darkness visited on native peoples. Change a steamboat for a patrol boat, ivory harvesting for cold war aggression and you're there.

I'll say little more of the plot here, or of the great rumbling monster of the production. You can see the movie yourself and read any of the masses of content about how it was made. My more pressing concern here is the film's resonance. 

But we'll need to say something of the resonance of the Vietnam War. The U.S. withdrew from the conflict in 1975 and it was popularly considered a defeat. Unlike the returning veterans from previous wars, Vietnam vets were yoked with the guilt of American hegemony in Asia and were despised. In film culture, the gung ho attempts from the '60s like John Wayne's own Ballad of the Green Berets gave way to far more cynical efforts like The Boys in Company C or Go Tell the Spartans. By the later years of the decade there was a sense of a need to tell the story rather than keep it repressed. Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter was celebrated for its approach of showing the soldiers as ordinary citizens first, emphasising the trauma they suffered with a more thorough examination.

When Apocalypse Now appeared it changed the game of depicting war from a representation of history to something more like a grotesque or grand guignol. Everything on screen looked as expected, uniforms, hardware the movement of  conflict but things were odd from the off. The helicopters of the prelude scene move more like birds of prey than military hardware. The spinning ceiling fan and gravel voiced narration of the opening suggest an intense film noir. We get glimpses of Willard's life back home but one of them is a photo of his wife which he burns through with a cigarette. The drop needle music that had haunted New Hollywood since Easy Rider was also different. The Rolling Stones sequence is diegetic but the closest the film will come to jukeboxing the soundtrack. The opening swirl and whispers and drones and croons of The End are offered almost as sounds rising from the glare and humidity. Apocalypse Now wasn't interested in humanising the stigmatised vets, that's a given, he wanted to show the trip of it.

At some point in the epic preproduction, Michael Herr's compounded journalistic account of the war, Despatches, was absorbed into the thinking and it was he who wrote Willard's voiceover. This travels from the hard boiled detective cynicism of the hotel room to the musings on his dark and bizarre mission where it takes a flavour more like an Americanised Marlowe from Conrad's novel. This does flow from Herr's own prose style in which his observations of military life in-country read like a Lewis Carroll story with napalm.

And that's a major point of resonance: this film is supremely quotable. Decades on, saying you love the smell of napalm in the morning could refer to burnt toast or even something pleasant, the value is napalm and the joke, if it's a one-off, is always good. See also "terminate with extreme prejudice" when you need to be firm or "Charley dont surf!" when an objection is trivial. When I found myself in the blinding glare and heat of the family home on a holiday, I'd peer through the louvres in the morning and rasp: "Townsville, shit, still only in Townsville." The lot of us who saw it at the time, and especially at Uni, knew the movie line by line and, until, we got sick of it ourselves, that's how we'd watch it.

Ok, so, lefty students in the early '80s, you must have really dug the history of it. Nope, Apocalypse Now doesn't even state its setting year. There are no mentions of Tet or Rolling Thunder. The canvas is crammed with the reality of the war as an inescapable claustrophobia of noise, colour, lethal air, smoke and constant danger. Even if you had no idea that the Americans were involved in a war in Vietnam, even if you thought it was fabricated for the movie, you would still register it as war and war for no good reason. So, no history lessons beyond a chance to hone our young adult cynicism. 

The point is that any major power does this, puts the hooks in lesser geopolitical entities to gain influence, flex or plunder the way they always have. Coppola wanted to show this latest iteration with newer hardware and rock and roll attitudes. It's as much a shopping war, a series of skirmishes and war crimes of opportunity whose chaos could not but engender the kind of transgressive monster of Colonel Kurtz. The casting comes in handy here.

Willard is our tour guide and Martin Sheen gives him an unerring intensity, never smiling once, His narration keeps you in the centre, whether you agree with him or not. His power brought up the joke that he was heading up river to despatch the former king of The Method, Marlon Brando whose Kurtz keeps to the shadows displaying the sole humane trait he has kept is the shame for all he has done. He fought and ranted at the head of his devoted band until even they, extreme as they became, ended up looking like rat race white collars. Brando uses his Buddha-like physicality to dominate his scenes and keeps his mumbling lines special enough that we don't notice that we're bending our own ears toward him.

This was my first encounter with the music of the Doors. There's just that one song of theirs on the soundtrack of the film but it's the one that hooked on to everyone under thirty who saw the movie. There was a rerelease campaign for the band, all the Morrison albums. We got into them because there was no hippydom to them. It was wordsalad mysticism, sure, but there was nothing Summer of Love about the monologue in The End. The playing could get daggily bluesy at times but mostly kept to that '60s compaction. The Doors were perfect for a post punk revival.

Martin Sheen made it into one of the new Cronenberg movies a year or so later, playing a ruthless, self promoting presidential candidate which suited fans of Apocalypse fine, especially as young adults indulging in the wish that their favourite people share all their views.

And the movie hung around the art houses, getting several screenings a year. It was one of the big hits on home video, managing to survive the crop from panavision to 4x3 visual molasses. By the time I took a friend to see it at the newly established Northcote Valhalla, I had seen it twenty times, mostly at cinemas. I'd written something like ten thousand words of undergraduate analysis on it and considered Coppola a bona fide genius of cinema.

And that's the last big point I'll make here: Coppola had an outstanding 1970s after which it all just flattened out or got embarrassing. That's why I'm writing an anniversary blog about it now instead of tomorrow onwards, as it wasn't released in Australia until the following year. I know there many who count the zero year of any decade the end of the last one (boy, they were fun at Y2K New Year's) but I still prefer starting with them. This keeps Francis and his best in the '70s.

I saw two versions in 1980 when it was released in Australia. I was later to learn that the 35 mm cut was identical to the 70 mm one but for the end credits air strike credits. I quite enjoyed these but will admit that the way the film ends without them allows for a punchy silence that they can only over egg.

As I say, I saw it twice. First at a cinema with friends in Brisbane and then at the end of the year with my father, while I was at home for the holidays between finishing high school and getting into Uni. We went to the drive-in as he was more comfortable there than at a cinema. We spoke very little which was normal. I wanted to show him this movie as, even with the dawning home video market at the time, there was little for the adventurous movie goer in Townsville outside of student film club screenings or rickety 16 mm prints. This was a mainstream film I thought he'd take something away from.

After the usual ads for the fast food kiosk and the trailers (can't remember one that was shown) the screen darkened and then the slow threatening choppers faded in against the beach that looked like so many around that part of Queensland. There were the usual flyovers of army helicopters which we'd almost tune out because we were so used to the sound. Halfway through, the monsoonal drizzle fell and kept falling until well after midnight. I had seen it in Hoyts in Brisbane with surround audio which was such a blast but there and then, with the normal military sounds rising in the air around us and the creeping humidity of the tropical night, we had happened on perfect conditions.

Viewing notes: I watched my now out of print Lionsgate anniversary 4K bought from the U.S. It's a crazy beautiful package. If you can find the original cut in 4K with dolby vision and atmos, get that, it's the closest it looks and feels to the original screened at a cinema. If you can't afford that, it is my pleasant duty to relate that there is a Blu-Ray release of the 1979 and redux versions that you can pick up for under twenty dollars in Australia. This movie has always looked great on home video, so if you haven't leaped to 4K the Blu-Ray will bring the goods.