When Jennifer Jones accepted an Oscar for her saintly portrayal in The Song of Bernadette, she couldn’t have guessed that 25 years later, she’d be uttering the line “I made 30 stag films and I never faked an orgasm!” That declaration can be heard in Cult of the Damned, a movie so peculiar and overdone that it leaps directly into the “camp” camp, though that’s never a sufficient reason to appreciate something . Now that this obscurity is finally on video, and a gorgeous Blu-ray transfer at that, we have the chance to savor its aromas of 1969. It’s not a “good” movie, but it’s something.
It begins by juxtaposing art and trash as a handheld camera wobbles down a well-appointed corridor and looks at classic paintings and chic bits of bric-a-brac, scored by Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan call on the soundtrack, until — speaking of the call of the wild — we arrive at a shower with two naked men, in a scene that feels like an extension from Valley of the Dolls. “No, my father was not a homosexual,” says the voice of Tara (folk singer Holly Near), as we comprehend that this is a childhood memory by a daughter who will do her best to whitewash and deny.
Daddy (Charles Aidman) is some wealthy businessman, while the beautiful mother (Jones) was allegedly a cigarette girl and, according to rumor, a star of stag films. That’s what makes this a perverse type of Hollywood story, along with the fact that the daughter is named Tara and her boyfriend will be called Bogart. Also, their mansion is, in real life, the former mansion of star Marion Davies, most famous as the trophy squeeze of William Randolph Hearst.
Tara’s big hang-up, and a major theme in the movie, is that she’s fat because the unwanted child turned to food in lieu of emotional nourishment from her bickering and self-involved parents. By today’s standards, she’s only modestly chubby and certainly not obese, but she’s supposed to represent a “fat America”. Later, intercut with zaftig nymphs in classical art, she’ll observe, “I’m the last old-fashioned girl, mother. Fat girls are a remembrance of things past. Twiggy only dates back to Buchenwald.” Well, there were the flappers, but hers is a great line nonetheless.
At 18-year-old Tara’s uncomfortable coming-out party, thrown by mom to show off her fabulous self at 45, Tara is dumbstruck by Bogart Peter Stuyvesant (Jordan Christopher), a successful rock star hired to perform. She spots him shirtless, writhing on the ground with his microphone while jutting up the knees of his black leather pants. Indeed, the movie will present him as its primary sex object throughout, despite glimpses of Tara’s breasts or Roddy McDowall’s backside.
After Bogart whisks away her virginity in a sylvan glade and falls asleep, three supporting players mysteriously appear in one of the oddest introductions in cinema, as though manifested from his dream. They are his new rock group, the Rabbit Habit (something about breeding?), although they never do anything while he sings various songs by Brill Building powerhouses Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil.
“He owns us,” explains the white flower-power girl (Davey Davison), pregnant with what is presumably his child. The studly black man (Lou Rawls), shirtless under a vest, and the shirtless and vestless white homosexual (McDowall) take turns explaining: “Don’t dream around him / Unless you want your dreams to happen, baby / He’s the analyst gone mad, born inside a movie house inside a television set in the fat generation / Lots of violence in that scene.”
Okay, so are they projections of Bogart or projections of Tara via Bogart? And is Bogart perhaps a projection by Tara? It’s fair to ask, because most or all of the movie deals with Tara’s subjectivity, often represented by art and by photo collages (created by Shirley Kaplan) to indicate her passing thoughts or a burlesque of same; this is echoed by photos of famous men that paper the walls of Bogart’s pad. There’s a sequence where Tara’s evidently high on something that’s not life, as she’s shown rolling on the ceiling. Bogart (as in, “Don’t bogart that joint!”) is a (mood)swinging, active-aggressive, “polymorphous perverse” (to quote him), quasi-psychotic, homily-spouting, hostile creature of the id, but whose?
After poet/playwright Robert Thom scripted Wild in the Streets, the sour youth-revolution dystopia that was a hit for AIP Pictures, they let him make this, his only film as writer-director. Bogart is clearly an unhinged variant on that film’s Christopher Jones character, as this film joins his parade of scripts about generational angst (The Subterraneans, All the Fine Young Cannibals) crossed with his obsession with classic Hollywood (The Legend of Lylah Clare).
This R-rated film (M at the time) shows where the bolder elements of New Hollywood Cinema were going at the time — inward and outward to “shocking” themes with sex, drugs, nudity, and dangerous, ungrateful youth created by thoughtless parents. Old-guard queen Jennifer Jones clearly wanted in. It didn’t help her, but she proves a game old trouper and does get to wear pretty fabulous gowns by Renié, so there’s that.
Originally called Angel, Angel Down We Go, the movie tanked amid critical hostility and mystification, not aided (or rather, aided immeasurably) by an opaquely apocalyptic ending that feels more symbolic and altered-state hazy than literal or neatly explanatory. It most resembles a California answer to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, in which an “angel” (Terence Stamp) sleeps his way through everyone in a household. Angel, Angel Down We Go is the title of one of the Mann-Weil songs, which are mostly pretty good, and it also has a literal reference to the skydiving element. Oh yeah, there’s skydiving, also very well-handled.
In his commentary, Nathaniel Thompson points out the influence of avant-gardist Kenneth Anger in a scene of confession and communion as the characters pass a chalice with a wafer. That’s when McDowall’s character, Santoro, drawls, “Draft board told me to go home. They asked me if I’m a homosexual. I said baby man, I am just sexual. I mean sometimes I can just stare at a carrot, and baby man, that carrot can turn me on.” The whole movie’s pretty much like this.
Thompson’s genial commentary (along with Tim Greer, who seems along for the ride) discusses the film primarily in terms of Thom’s other screenplays. Still ahead were brilliant scripts for two Roger Corman productions, Bloody Mama and Crazy Mama, which deconstruct American culture via family crime as effectively as anything then or since, and his biggest Corman hit, Death Race 2000, with its collision of violence, media and celebrity.
He also observes that the movie came out in the same month as the Charles Manson murders. In an attempt to recoup some of its cash, American International Pictures (AIP) reissued the film under the inappropriate title Cult of the Damned (the print seen here) and tried to advertise it as similarly offering a messianic bloodbath by crazy hippies instead of the woman-centered, semi-experimental, caution-to-the-wind bit of zeitgeistian soul-searching it is.
This HD transfer does wonders for the colors and textures of production designer Gabriel Scognamillo, as shot by John F. Warren. Usually low-budget producers, AIP spent real money on this auteurist effort, and they paid for it in more ways than one. Never mind all that; it’s here now, complete with the cannibal fantasy depicted on the back of the package and looking as bright and bewildering as the day it was hatched.