PULSE@20

Computer wiz stares at his screen in his murky green Tokyo apartment. He gets up and exits, stage style, into another room. A group of twenty-something friends are talking about how they've lost contact with the computer wiz who has been doing some work for their startup business. Michi volunteers to pay him a visit and finds the apartment apparently empty until he appears, gives her the disc and goes into another room. She follows after an awkward pause to find him hanging by a noose against the wall. There had been a big oily stain there before. Now she knows it was shaped like his body. 

Across town young Kawashima, an ecomonics student, realises he has to learn to use computers to get through university unpacks and sets up his PC, clicking through the internet connection and huffing like a newbie at all the clicking and admin he has to do just to get started. He connects but the early 2000's OS does not look like Mac or Windows. On a black screen he sees the words emerge: "Would you like to meet a ghost?" What the hell, why not? It's probably the ISP doing some marketing. What he gets is a split screen of several web cams of people in blobby silhouette moving slowly around their apartments or just sitting at their computers staring at the screen.

Through a process of elimination the six degrees separating Michi from Kawashima vanish like all their friends and they find each other in a city turning into stains on walls, haunted rooms, driving through air that is filled with what look like uncrushed cremation ashes. To where? Wherever.

Kyoshi Kurosawa's apocalypse of loneliness (Kairo in the original Japanese which means circuit which is more appropriate) suggests a world to come will sound like the beeping and popping of billions of old modems as the people slowly harden on the walls and then dry to dust. Unlike other films from the '90s which showed the weaponising of the internet just as people were letting it into the lounge and bedrooms, the internet in Pulse has no malignance of its own, acting only as a conduit between worlds. There is no direct explanation for the ghostification of the world that appears to be coming through the screen, no imagined hyper-corporation or Bond villain, it's more of a phenomenon of a new nature.

Helpdesk woman Harue at the University cannot help newbie Kawashima very much but the computer lab she works in has a strange app running that models human connectedness. It was created by a grad student and she warns Kawashima not to look at it for too long. It looks like a screensaver of the night sky where the constellations move around in the dark. The lab, filled with students in an early scene gets progressively empty in later ones. The pair's own connection seems to be off to a great start until they both go to his apartment and she is compelled to climb the nearby stairs, returning to him minus a lot of her vitality. 

One of Michi's friends can't best his curiosity about seeing apartment doors sealed with red gaffer tape so he untapes one and explores the place. In one room there is a vague human shaped stain on the wall which on second look is a woman. As he begins to retreat she walks toward him in a slow but malevolent fashion. And then she stuimbles (but it could be a kind of dance) and keeps advancing. He is backed to the wall and crawls behind a couch but the thing keeps coming. He screams for us. 

This scene, often referred to as the stumbling ghost, makes it to a high spot on every scariest scene list that is made from the margins of the genre. It doesn't sound like much but the look, the operatic music and grimy hopelessness of it combine with the sheer lack of control over it we have as its viewers get into our spines. There are several more like it, each with their own special device of terror and they give this mostly quiet film a reputation for singular achievement. Nothing is like it, barring other films by the same director but even they don't approach it for the intensity of its dread. Michi's rescue of Junko actually feels demoralising.

What's the point? Well, as already argued, Kurosawa does not have a beef with information technology or even how it might be exploited by the usual suspects of government or capitalism. This apocalypse is about connection and its decay, the breaking of circuits. While there were forms of proto social media in 2001 like irc and usenet which were heavily populated and in constant use they had nothing of the cultural penetration found later in the decade and onward. But I doubt if Kurosawa has seen a great deal of social improvement from this thing that is so present with us now. 2021's Pulse would simply find the point of entry different only in appearance and more insidious. Then again, why bother when it was both the connection of it and the knowledge that everyone else was depending on it the same way as whole nations became shut-ins. Pulse in 2001 meant more. Kawashima in 2021 is too young to be anything but a native-born citizen of the internet and would never have gone through the frustrations that brought him to Harue. 

But that's not to say it doesn't work as well as it did. The notion of the teasing invitation to enter ghosts rooms and the energy draining webcam footage (in one a character starts to walk across a room but the image glitches and starts again creating a loop, it feels crushingly futile or even more crushingly might serve as the last evidence of the person who once was there. If anything, these moments look a lot like the kind of folklore that has grown around the notion itself of the dark web. Hell, why stop there? Youtube is bursting with channels passing home made horror as found footage. It's enough to make Pulse look tame. But it doesn't. Because Pulse is not about the computers but the people who use them and all else beyond whose connection to each other is being ironically deteriorated by communication.

The characters in Pulse are almost all young. The boss at the plant nursery, Michi's mother and the newsreader are the only prominent ones who come to mind and their presence is brief (the newsreader even gets glitched so that half his face is cut off by video noise. The youth of the principal characters is poignant as it is drawn from the hikkmori, the Japanese adolescents and young adults reported to whitdraw not just from the outside world but the space outside their rooms. Various causes have been suggested including a relation to autism spectrum disorder and PTSD but at the time the numbers of hikkimori were reportedly in the millions and looked to commentators like a social phenomenon. Kurosawa was imagining what an epidemic of it might look like. Any number of trival causes might add up to such a withdrawal without the person suffering noticing. Kurosawa adds the notion of ghosts escaping from their existential inertia into the living world as a kind of narrative diesel which he can use to avoid a lot of exposition. The inevitable U.S. remake has characters explain about the red tape as:"It just seems to work somehow." In Pulse someone imagines a situation where the tape used just happened to be a red the first time. The imagined scene suggests the colour took on a significance the same way that people wear lucky socks when they go to the pokies.

I said before that Pulse was unique but that's not quite true. It might seem extraordinary to suggest that the age range of its characters, its release date and location do not admit it into the canon of J-Horror but it really just doesn't behave like Ringu or One Missed Call. While there are three clearly discernable acts to the plot the tension is deliberately scrubbed bare to allow these people space and light enough to wonder at their continued life. One reviewer at the time memorably found it so difficult to describe the style of this film that he called it The Omega Man as directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. He was being funny but he meant it. The only films that this one resembles are its imitators. Those fail the same way that copies of Eraserhead or Possession fail as they don't come from the same compelled statement as the original. That's why Pulse still works, it's still there, sitting by itself, apparently the kind of horror movie ready to get up and dance like all the others but keeping quietly to itself until someone like you approaches it and an act of social charity becomes a meeting you will never forget.

Review: THE DARK AND THE WICKED

An elderly woman tends to her bedridden husband as she goes about the daily demands of farm life. Strange sounds at night as the wolf alarm (clinking things on a string) goes off in the barn containg the goat herd. Among the animals is a vaguely human shape with glowing green eyes. The woman isn't quite the same after investigating which brings her two grown up children back from their lives to help out. The woman cuts her own fingers off and wanders off into the night. She is found dead the next day. Then, in a series of horror effects setups the remainder of the household, some of their friends and the nurse tending the old man are beset by dark and violent forces ... for the next hour and a bit and then it ends.

High production values, good acting and some impressive effects and even a commitment to strong atmosphere cannot save this film from its own pointlessness. Why were the old couple targetted by the evil? It's made clear they weren't churchgoers which would point to the devil (whose warm embrace has chilled a little over the years) or god (who seems to have become even more of a bitch since he got away with his pranks on Job) but it doesn't really make much sense as it then attacks everyone who comes within a cooee of the farm. Is it like Hellraiser where you go to hell regardless of why you started playing with the Rubik's cube of the damned? Trying allegory, is it a grim statement on the withering fortunes of people on the land? I have to guess about all of these because all I get from the movie itself is that there's evil in the neighbourhood and ... don't step in it. There is an approach to a lot of the horror scenes that tie them that has to do with perception but nothing is made of that beyond the fact itself; it can't even say  beware of doing this thing because it feels written rather than thought about the thing to beware appears to have been assumed (beat the hell out of me, though).

I have long railed against the cattle prod approach to horror in films like Insidious or The Conjuring where 90% of all the horror scenes are unearned jump scares which work on surprise rather than suspense. There's not even a lot of suspense on show here: a bad thing is about to happen and it happens. Next!

I chose this as an expendable school night extended Halloween movie, thinking from the title and the tile art that it would be, at worst, a campy extension of The Exorcist. That it then goes on in an apparent campaign of letting its audience know that it's a serious horror movie only makes its lack of substance worse like a Shakespearean actor stage whispering with thunderous projection: "This is scary!"

Currently on Shudder.

DRACULA @ 90

Last night I watched the 1931 Dracula. I can't recall how many times I've watched it and wouldn't ever try to number how often I've just seen the first half hour. I keep coming back to it and probably always will.

Why? Actually, yes, why, when I know that after Renfield comes crawling up the steps of the Vesta's hold with an insane grin and a honking laugh the movie changes gear, gets talky and then kind of ends. Would I be proud to serve this chicken to my family? 

Yes, yes I would. But with resevations. If you have no idea that there were films made before The Matrix you will not get why a rubber bat on wires representing a vampire could scare at least the characters on screen then you will never get this movie. If you think black and white movies are inferior to colour movies you will never get this movie. But if you care to bring your imagination to a viewing the same way you imagine the events of a story someone tells you from their life this movie will touch you.

Ok, so the villagers at the start seem to go into anaphylaxis at the mention of Castle Dracula. The bat that sometimes replaces the carriage driver never looks like more than a bat shaped puppet. Bela Lugosi's line delivery, stretching out the vowels as though he's trying to remember his lines is in every hokey old vampire movie. Same with the tux and the urbane manners. All done. Well, yes and no. Dracula was a tale well known to bothe readers and theatre goers for many decades before this film. This film wasn't the first horror film, the first sound horror film or even the first sound horror film made in Hollywood. But what you are watching when you see it is the forming of the code for Horror Cinema 2.0

Horror was a natural for moving pictures as was any imaginative genre. The first were little more than setups or brief spectacles a la Melies. When committed narrative was added they got stronger and then when sound promised the benefits of both cinema and theatre it was both an exciting and terrifying prospect. Dracula wasn't the first to try this but it was the first to start getting it right. If you want to see an extended nightmare parade of images you have to dig down and find something like Begotten. If you just want to go and watch a horror movie you will have something in mind that shares its essentials with Dracula. From medieval ruins to elegant drawing rooms, chemical smelling surgeries to the leafy grounds of mental hospitals, Dracula builds a world that its audiences could instantly recognise and still be surprised by. The two virginal young ladies at the centre of the second act are not corsetted Victorian vestals but jazz age flappers who playfully talk about Dracula's sexiness. The movie had all the mist and gothic decor of the Stoker novel but it felt like 1931.

Does Lugosi come across as a ham? Maybe. He had played the Count on the stage where his battles with English compelled him to use his physical presence more prominently than his lines. And there's another thing I haven't got to yet which really does make all the diference. The director Todd Browning was a carny; he came from the side shows and big tops where the allure could range from shows of great skill to the sight of disfigurement. He was a veteran filmmaker by the time he got to Dracula and had worked with the great Lon Chaney. If anyone knew how to build and sell the performance of an urbane vampire t'was he. And under his guidance Lugosi brought his best from the stage but pared down because the camera always spots bullshit if it's pushed and his Dracula was a man who could effortlessly charm one minute and go into spasms of self-restraint like an addict the next. Even the accent worked. It might sound goofy and cliche now but at that first cinematic outing it sounded other, alien, weary. When Bela says, "there are far worse things awaiting man than death" Dracula means every syllable.

By contrast the always welcome character maestro Dwight Frye brings an ethereal craziness to Renfield. At first he is a personable city slicker among the villagers but his transformation into servitude to Dracula renders him eerie, in pain from his devotion to the Count but possessed of knowledge beyond the ken of all the normal sluggards around him in the boring old world. His luminous grin is not just crazy it's knowing and what it knows is mystical, terrifying and forever. A late scene where he is crawling across the floor of Van Helsing's study has a genuine eerieness that calls across the near century of its first appearance. His performance is a feat and takes him to the level of Lugosi with all the others, however fine they can be, short of the competition.

Other characters get a more or less functional treatment. David Manners' Jonathon Harker is a '30s handsome lead but in a side role. Frances Dade as Lucy gives us a socialite of her time. Helen Chandler as Mina is a standout, showing us the pleasure and danger of being in thrall to the Count. Edward van Sloan is solid as Van Helsing. No one is bad but they have strong forces to beat. 

But I've put something important off here and it's a detail that cannot go unnoted. Dracula has no music score. There is a theme from Swan Lake over the titles but that became a generic mark. Other than that there is the diegetic music of the scenes at the opera. This is the thing more than rubber bats or cape flinging that gives the film what creakiness it has. While it is effective by its absence in the storm at sea, Renfield's crawling on the ship and then in the study and all of the vampiric scenes the silence under the Foley effects (done here, as it happens by the original Jack Foley) and dialogue renders exposition and action and philosophical exchanges uncomfortably equal. It was left out through budgetary squeezes, not artistic choice and the film does ultimately suffer for it. 

A score was prepared in the '90s by composer Phillip Glass. If you know his minimalist, repetitive style you can imagine this. It's all strings, subjects and strettos but for all that it does add atmosphere, if perhaps over applied. Universal (who have retained rights to this film since it was new) have put it into every release of Dracula in physical media from DVD onwards as an optional track. I would recommend against adding for a first viewing. Keep it simple and you'll do fine.

Last night's viewing was of the newly minted 4K presentation at HDR10 with a DTS doubled mono for the front speakers both of which are appropriate for a film of this vintage. The Glass score is presented in surround. As more picky reviewers have found the new UHD image restores the blacks and darker greys allowing for not just clarity of image but depth. This is the least flat this film has ever looked to me. The disc is one of four released in a box set that includes other high profile Universal horrors Frankenstein, The Invisible Man and the Wolf Man. For physical library nerds like me I opted for the UK release as I already have the very rich Blu-Ray box of the Universal horrors which is housed in a coffin shaped outer case. the US version of the 4K box has a book form with discs lodged into pockets that can be difficult to manage and the blu-rays I already have as well as artwork from the period. What I got was a smaller box with four 4K discs. The lack of waste appeals to me.

So, Dracula at 90, eh? Yes, the marriage of horror and Hollywood money that ushered in the genre in its conventional form and bears the traits of what we still consider horror movies. And these are not blown over hands of the walls of ancient caves as first signs of art, they arrive in a disciplined package of form and function, beauty and industruy. That's the version 2.0 of it, before Dracula there were horror movies. After it there was a horror movie industry, an entity that, as old as it has got, as different as the masks its worn, as reactionary or revolutionary, yet boasts the sinew of a young athlete and the wisdom of antiquity. I will always have a good copy of Dracula, a sdeathless film that utters this line of crushing futility that has been to the benefit of all cinephiles, fans or not:

"To die, to be really dead. That must be glorious."

1971@50: THE SEVEN MINUTES

A young clerk at a bookshop gets stung by detectives for selling obscene material. D.A. gets on to a hotshot lawyer and they work out a deal where everybody wins. Then the D.A. is courted by local political heavyweights who want to make an example of the book and raise their electoral profile. And then a savage rape occurs, implicating the son of one of the political shakers and the book is in the crosshairs and the deal is off the table. Hotshot is compelled by the social injustice and gets his slingshot ready for the stage entrance of Goliath.

This courtroom procedural has a few things on its plate that speak to its time. On the surface it's about the place of putting literature on trial like the titles it namechecks like Lady Chatterly's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. Just under that, though, is the suggestion that political pursuits can veil themselves in morality and, given enough clout, can steer a show trial like a speedboat. And through all of this is the intriguing pursuit of the author of the novel (which shares its title with the film) who committed suicide thirty years before.

All of that and it still manages to look and feel like a colour ad from a contemporary magazine, a kind of post-Manson Rennaisance man who dressed well and smoked the best and earned the love of the babe on his arm while leaning on the bonnet of the sleekest car available. Wayne Maunder as lawyer Mike Barrett makes that figure talk and move and care. It might sound sarcastic written out but there is a real gravity to his quest to prevent the damage of the sinister conservatives. While the steamy sexuality of his relationship with his fiance (seen while he is taking the call about the case in the beginning) has the sense of a living men's magazine, his later courtship of Maggie Russell feels accidental and so more genuine. You don't just want his case to be won you want him to win ... at all of life.

This is a Russ Meyer film which might have you imagining a clipshow of buxom nudity and exploitation but you might find yourself pleasantly surprised (or crestfallen) at seeing the film, after that phone call/sex scene, suddenly sober up and get to work. The rape and goading Wolfman Jack montage soon after begins salacious but quickly turns intentionally sickening, outrunning any preconceptions we might have about Russ's old tricks. If there is a fault here it is that the earnestness of the good or the naturally moral is played a little too dryly, as though the early sauciness needed an equal and opposite balance. It can get like the letters page of an old issue of Playboy that might run a goofy one about drugs next to a stark one about Vietnam. The courtroom tactic Barrett tries of extracting the word "fucking" from the coyness of a witness has the feel of the elder lords of liberalism scoring a touchdown.

I was hanging out to do this one for this series as it has a personal appeal for me. When I was a kid and joined the family in trips to the drive-in I saw the trailer for this movie. It mostly consisted of characters speaking the title in a snarl, including a clip from a quite poignant scene of one man assaulting Barrett for defending the book. I was completely intrigued. The title (which is explained in the end credits) posed a real mystery. A short space of time was revving people up so much they came to blows? What could the Seven Minutes be about? It bugged me but the movie was way out of the range of the kid that I was (though I think I would have enjoyed the trial) and I had no way of finding out what it was about. Later, as a media student with more resources at my disposal, I saw the Rus Meyer by line and left it where it was. It was only in the past few months, compiling a list of films released in 1971 that I saw it and said out loud: Bingo!

So, I was ready for trash and happy to sit through it if only for the pleasure of writing something snide and self-delighting. I did not expect the seriousness that I found nor the colour-blind casting nor the complexity of the women's roles. Even the lightly archaic solemnity of the cause was acceptable. And why not? This piece about bad politics and genuine decency, played with such appealing verve, gave me the kind of slap in the face I might have expected from being a touch too cheeky at a university party, a gentle affectionate pat that yet says: watch it.

1971@50: WILLARD

Young Willard Stiles still lives with his mum and gets daily bullied by his oaf of a boss. When his mother throws a birthday party for him she invites her own friends. He walks out and goes to frown at his life in the back of the crumbling mansion where they live. Seeing a rat he flinches but then feeds it some of his birthday cake and then as the rest of its pack arrives they get the rest of the slice. His mother isn't so open minded and wants him to kill them. Well, they're just rats so he organises a trap with food, a plank and water. It works until the water level stresses them and he puts the plank back so they can escape. It's possible they are the closest thing to friends he has ever had and he sets up a home for them in the cellar, training them to follow basic commands. Not so powerless and mild mannered now.

Daniel Mann, directorial all rounder, approached this horror scenario by underplaying its threat. Ernest Borgnine's sadistic boss is more terrifying than the rats and when his party is invaded by a pack of them at Willard's command we feel its just desserts. It's when Willard's personal impotence breaks against the force of his rage and he leads the rats to ever darker territory that we begin to feel uneasy and wonder how much he has come to love the animals and how much he just likes the power. The horror here doesn't have paws and tails.

And it wouldn't work without Bruce Davison's realisation of the title role. His Willard isn't just some sap who lets people walk all over him. He understands that he lets this happen and is most likely the way of a  world he will never be able to change. Even the possibilities fowarded by Sondra Locke's Joan seem unreal to him as he treats her sympathy more casually than he might if he were more of a Travis Bickle. Willard's conversations with Joan have a refreshing pleasantness but it's one that allows us to see the potential that his life has done its best to crush. So, while Travis' clunking misjudgements with Betsy make us cringe and he starts to look more and more like what we'd now call an incel, Willard really has only missed the opportunity. He really is a believable nice guy and knows the gravity of his deeds as much as the joys he might find with Joan.

The mansion sits in the ugliness of a part of the city that could be anywhere in the world. It's all forgotten glory and overgrowth, ruled by Elsa Lanchester's monster of need and bitterness. It is familiar rather than homely, a kind of Baby Jane meets the Addams Family on Sunset Boulevard. Perhaps a two bedroom flat might have provided more narrative stress but the old house does such a good job at being an escape worse than the world escaped from. Just as we groan for a little pushback from Willard we also might shiver from the mutual loathing between him and his mother.

At the end of a decade that destabilied confidence in a system and exposing it for the fantasy it always had been Willard's horror is that of the compliant Vietnam draftee, the whipping boy, the cipher. We might freeze at the torment of a Norman Bates but Willard knowingly won't give us the satisfaction. It's not the suspense of a psychological timebomb we fear in him but the patience of life's undeclared saints who, given the chance, might well lead armies of rats.

1971@50: THE BROTHERHOOD OF SATAN

WARNING: Potential spoiler in second last paragraph. I don't give away the ending but if you haven't seen the film and want to, you should skip over it to the final par.

A toy tank buzzes across the ground. It rolls over a toy car.  A real tank rolls over a real car, crushing it and the young family inside. A little boy walks up to the wreckage, inspects it and strolls off to meet some other kids. Titles.

A young family group at a multi-family picnic packs up when it starts to rain, and heads west in their car. The radio is getting weird. They pass the wreckage of the car at the beginning and drive to the next town to report it. No one at the sheriff's office is interested, not even to talk to them. The sheriff himself appears outside, marvelling at the newcomers. A small crowd of locals does the same, swamping the family car. They are not particularly sinister, just in wonder that anyone got through. Times are strange.

Stranger still, the town's kids are vanishing. We see them stop what they're doing and walk away in scene after scene. When the newcomer family try to leave to get help their borrowed car breaks down and it's back to square one. Meanwhile, the local charismatic retiree is marshalling up the elderly of the district, well thirteen of them, for some peculiar rejuvenative procedure.

This oddity of a supernatural horror film in a western setting is of its time in that it really isn't of anyone's time. Somewhere between the game changing Night of the Living Dead and The Exorcist (with a a sprig of Rosemary's Baby) the genre rules of horror were in tatters and its practitioners again had to work out what might scare or at least disturb the modern viewer. The three films I just mentioned were remarkable for finding the darkness in the light of day, the evil in the every day. Romero's zombies weren't created in voodoo rituals they just appeared. Rosemary faced witches but they were the nice old couple in the next apartment. The gothic would reappear later as it's pretty dependable fun but for now the horror was as real as a flat tyre or a vending machine, it lived where you lived.

And there in the sheriff's office with the injured and the dead the remainder of the people of the town slowly figure out what is happening and what they need to do about it. They are as nonplussed as we would be to find a coven forming in our neighbourhood that had real earthly power. The coven is in the process of changing its skin and is as fascinating and horrifying to behold as a snake doing the same thing, and the more you look the more natural it seems. This is how this film works, despite the shocks in the infreuqent violence, the terror lies in the fact that this act of supernature will happen regardless of their inertia or resistance. I read in a book about the confronting northern Rennaisiance painter Hieronymous Bosch that to the theistic medieval mind the notion that God might be no match for the Devil. If you can put that in your thoughts and assume such a postition it will feel like a waking nightmare. Now imagine it as an earnest thought, day after day, for the rest of your life and beyond it.

The widescreen canvas and plain-as-day pallette serve this end, bringing the horror of the potential defeat to the doorstep. By contrast, the extended Californian gothic palour/lair of the coven is virtually psychedelic, the juxtaposition of the old folk revelling in what looks like an acid rock band's cover art shoot would have rubbed roughly. And then there are the children themselves, normal whiny American kids who would have played with the likes of Sonny from Skippy or anyone from Flipper or Gentle Ben. Their plain faced atrocities remind us of how casually our own peurile tempers could seize us at that age. What better vessels for the leathery old witches of the gulch? In fact, it is the breathtaking expressionlessness of their faces that crawls into our eyes as the credits roll and the sickly music box score kicks in.

While it doesn't have the universal love of a Harold and Maude or even the cultish adoration of a Little Murders, The Brotherhood of Satan is unjustly obscure, an underplaying but solidly performing tale of horror in a genre that was back in gestation at the time and didn't really look like anything predictable. If it refers to gothic imagery here and there, the constrast with the ondinary world is pleasantly jarring. Cinema would return to churning out more gothic and contrived fare in the name of horror and even the Venn diagram overlap in the '90s of crime and horror in the serial killer movies took on an increasingly old school spookfest look and feel. It wasn't until the end of that decade when The Blair Witch Project fulfilled for the genre TS Eliot's thought that any revolution in poetry should start with a return to the banal. That doesn't mean it should be featureless or bland, just that it should feel like home and that home should not be trusted.

1971@50: COLD TURKEY

Big tobacco takes a risk for a better profile by challenging any town in America to give up smoking for thirty days. If they do it they get a very cool twenty-five million in 1971 dollars. If they don't, smoking wins. The pastor at the small town of Eagle Rock, Iowa leads the local campaign and his charismatic ways prevail but will everyone go the distance? The air force is also knocking on their door for a use of the town that will expand the community and bring the government contracts.

This enemble satire comes at the end of a decade packed with social revision and a newly feisty protest culture faced off against a digging-in conservatism. It's 1971 and everyone, right or left, smoked. Remove the gaspers and you have a community going through a kind of Lord of the Flies series of transformations, from cranky, to violent, to horny to anything else that was kept under control with the hit of nicotine. Things thicken up as the media gets its foot in the door and parodic versions of figures like Walter Cronkite appear. There's even a kind of representation of Richard Nixon. In the town itself the local radical right are given the jackbooted role of policing the abstinence as the packets and cartons fill the collection pen to be taken away forever. The young left leaners stage a kind of generalised protest for the sake of it and the new normal emerges as a kind of short-fused control is achieved. The pirze money is counted pre-hatch and everything starts tightening up again. This is the USA of the future as it looked in the past: no jet packs or ray guns, just amped up versions of everything already on the ground.

Norman Lear's only feature film was held up for two years post production and perhaps had more to say about the America or Woodstock and My Lai. The year after its release was Watergate and everything changed after that, even the movies. In this corridor of time you could not only still have the kind of Frank Capra poke set among the common folk but you could make it more grown up. Lear was a career tv writer and director with work on the Alf Garnett clone All in the Family at around this film's production time, and the bizarre Mary Hartman Mary Hartman from the mid '70s. He also worked pretty closely with the Parker and Stone team who gave us South Park. The gags of acceptable addiction are constant, the media circus has an almost psychedelic zing to it, the baring of the extremities of human good and evil are paraded with what starts to feel like pageantry. While it's kept to the better side of cute but just short of alienating earnestness, the control over this massive allegory is impressive and reliable. By the time the final image takes its place in the landscape we're allowed to feel a little crushed under our laughter.

While the writing and performance is consistently ensemble Dick Van Dyke at the centre of operations gives us a fallible good man. Careful to add some grown-up stress to his small town preacher he brings what might have the Jimmy Stewart role in the 1930s version he's also not above shoehorning this concept or sweeping this incorrigible character out of town for a "vacation", and is clearly interested in his church's brass promising a cushier position. Everyone is needy and greedy just like the whole nation clamouring to get out of the '60s. While he's in no danger of assassinating his musical comedy roles here he seems grateful to get the chance to expand on them.

From the Randy Newman theme song to the full page magazine cartoon image at the end this one works. Big cast satires weren't as much on the way out as heading for the change that the likes of Robert Altman would render. The Mad Mad Mad Mad .... World era could no longer squeeze American life after Manson. If you wanted your satire more sharply focused you hunted it down among things like Network, Smile or Shampoo which could get very tough; no one wanted to see Magic Town take another beating and the post Watergate nation was readier for the shadows of The Parallax View and the outright horror of The Exorcist. If Cold Turkey's machinations feel on the gentle side it's worth recalling any time you had to keep your cool when you felt like exploding. That's what's on screen here.

This is currently on available on Stan.