If a documentary about Akron duo the Black Keys seems premature--because it is--a documentary about Detroit trio Death is long overdue.
Though most people wouldn't discover them until three decades after
the fact, the band of real-deal brothers provides the missing link
between the virtuosic rock & roll of Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s and the righteous hardcore of Bad Brains in the '80s. In other words, they were proto-punk, just like their Motor City brethren in the MC5 and the Stooges.
If those white players incorporated jazz and blues into the mix, Death also combined genres in a way that confused '70s listeners, which seems weird in retrospect, since Detroit's Parliament-Funkadelic could also rock up a storm—and even sang about it here—but you could dance to their material.
Death, on the other hand, were capitol-letter ROCK. Not just in the proto-punk sense, but in the Ted Nugent/Alice Cooper sense, to name a couple of one-time Detroit rockers (a gig by the latter, in the wake of Love It to Death, served as a major source of inspiration). It's also worth noting that singer/bassist Bobby Hackney recalls Phil Lynott—a Thin Lizzy/Death tour would've torn shit up good.
Now, almost 40 years after they recorded their first singles, Bobby and Dannis Hackney return in A Band Called Death. In 2009, Drag City issued the singles as ...For the Whole World to See. Buy it! It's essential...especially if Chains and Black Exhaust
ranks among your favorite compilations. Since then, they've started
gigging again, including a stop at 2011's SXSW. Sadly, founder David
Hackney missed all the delayed recognition: he succumbed to cancer in
2000 at the age of 36.
Alas, not everyone shares my affection for the group (the trailer came to my attention via Dirtbombs front man Mick Collins' Twitter feed). In this Line Out thread,
a commenter claims that they were "fashionably co-opted, overrated
bullshit. Nobody really listens to these guys; they just love to make
sure you know that they know." Line Out contributor Derek Erdman agreed; Travis Ritter did
not. I haven't picked up the second Death collection, but the first made my 2009 top 10. It sounds just as good today.
The premiere of Jeff Howlett and Mark Covino's A Band Called Death takes place at LA Film Fest (June 14-24). Photo credit: By Death - Original publication: Publicity photo / Immediate source: www.vancouversun.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50569349.
(James June Schneider and Paul Bishow, US, 2020, 88 minutes)
"We dared to suck. In other words, we weren't afraid to be horrible."
--Randy Austin (Overkill)
The DC punk scene (1976-1984) takes the spotlight in James June Schneider and Paul Bishow's long-gestating, crowd-funded documentary.
To Patricia Ragan (Punk), "DC was just such an empty pit of misery. It was such a small community, I didn't see anything good coming out of it," but a scene coalesced in the 1970s, giving rise to bands like Overkill and the Slickee Boys. And it wasn't the only scene, since Go-Go, which emerged in the 1960s, was also making waves. As Jeff Nelson (Teen Idles, Dischord) puts it, "When you're working in isolation, sometimes you come up with the best stuff." When Bad Brains emerged, they tore the whole thing wide open.
As guitarist Darryl Jennifer explains, the band heard the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and decided they wanted to do something similar--except faster.
To Kim Kane (the Slickee Boys), "They made the Ramones seem like they were asleep." Archival footage doesn't just show them racing through "At the Movies" (among other songs), but singer H.R., sporting a sharp grey suit, concludes by executing a perfect backflip--without his dreads, he looks a lot like Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Ian MacKaye (Teen Idles, Dischord) credits Bad Brains with the promotion of Positive Mental Attitude, aka PMA, a concept alleged conman Napoleon Hill introduced in his 1937 best seller Think and Grow Rich. If one thing set the DC punks of the 1970s apart from most others, like their UK counterparts, it was their embrace of positivity over negativity, though the scene would grow more aggressive as punk gave way to hardcore in the 1980s.
That isn't to say they were all about peace and love. Nelson caught MacKaye's attention by setting homemade explosions off on the school grounds, while MacKaye and Henry Rollins bonded over skateboarding and Hendrix. The three would form Teen Idles before moving on to other outfits, like SOA and Minor Threat. Not mentioned: Calvin Johnson was part of the same crowd, even if he's most closely associated with an Olympia-based band (Beat Happening), label (K Records), and radio station (KAOS).
Like many scenes, the DC iteration coalesced around sympathetic organizations, such as Yesterday and Today Records, a music store that employed several punk musicians, and Madams Organ (R.I.P.), an art collective and group house, where Bad Brains lived for a time and wrote "Banned in DC." The latter also served as a gathering place for Yippies, meaning longhairs, no-hairs, drug users, and straight-edge kids mixing and comingling--and not always happily.
The 1,200-capacity 9:30 Club debuted in 1980, just prior to the departure of Jimmy Carter and the arrival of Ronald Reagan. Naturally, the music grew harder and louder, but that's also the point at which Bad Brains moved to New York and Rollins traded SOA for Black Flag. That could have been that, except there were plenty of other bands, many of whom would find themselves on Dischord Records, home of the compilation Flex Your Head, the Faith/Void split, and Minor Threat's genre-defining Out of Step.
Instead of splintering, the scene blew up, making fans across the world, including Jello Biafro (Dead Kennedys) in the Bay Area, Tim Kerr (Big Boys) in Austin, and musician-turned-politician Joe "Shithead" Keithley (DOA) in Vancouver, all of whom appear in the film.
The MacKaye-associated concept of straight edge--"Don't drink, don't smoke, don't fuck"--also caught on. Whether Minor Threat fans knew it or not, the lyrics to "Out of Step" were contentious even within the band, since Nelson felt that the lack of the word "I," as in "I don't drink," made it sound as if MacKaye was issuing orders rather than explaining a philosophy.
As hardcore grew in popularity, audiences became whiter and less tolerant. Participants who leaned towards the egalitarian end of the spectrum got out while the getting was good. It's outside the purview of the film, but the transition laid the groundwork for riot grrrl, which stood in opposition to most everything hardcore's more extreme proponents represented.
Schneider and Bishow spent 15 years assembling their film's interviews, photos, posters, and Super-8 performance material (much of it shot by Jeff Krulik of Heavy Metal Parking Lot fame). There are several women speakers, like graphic designer Cynthia Connolly (Dischord), though most were behind-the-scenes players rather than performers. It's a subject they could have explored in more depth, though the the overwhelmingly male--downright homoerotic--nature of hardcore merits some rather humorous attention in Don Letts's Punk: Attitude (2005), which features footage Bishow shot in DC. In fact, they wouldn't make for a bad double bill.
The documentary ends in 1984, so don't expect any mention of Unrest, Fugazi, or Pussy Galore (a band that also relocated to NYC), though Ian Svenonius (the Make-Up) makes a brief appearance--and Half Japanese appears in archival footage. It's a matter of personal taste, but for me, that's when things really got interesting, strictly from a musical perspective.
Endnote: For a list of virtual and in-person screenings, please click here. The list includes Seattle's Grand Illusion Cinema, starting on May 21. Much like the DC punk scene, the Grand Illusion is a DIY affair, and they've stuck around through thoughtful, wide-ranging material programmed, promoted, and projected by people who are in it for the love of movies, not money.
Photo credits: H.R. by James June Schneider, Slickee Boys and Out of Step album cover (designed by Cynthia Connolly) from Discogs, Teen Idles from Still Got It, and Connolly (Erik Gibson) from Arlington Magazine.
Once upon a time, comic book movies weren't always such serious affairs.
Granted, there have been exceptions along the way, like Taika Waititi's superhero buddy comedy Thor: Ragnarok, but far too many have been suffused, both visually and thematically, with sturm und drang. It isn't the worst thing in the world. Christopher Nolan's Batman entrieshave their charms as dark-hued quasi-political intrigues, but he aims to make his characters as believable as possible, which is fine as far as it goes, but it can be fun to watch fictional figures who aren't exactly psychologically complex do stupid shit purely for our entertainment. And that's the gist of Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon, out now in a 4K Collector's Edition overflowing with extras from Arrow Video.
In this brightly-colored bauble, Flash isn't a hero because he's smarter or stronger than everyone else. As Hodges notes in his excellent commentary track (one of three, including Brian Blessed's boisterous contribution), "He's a bit thick, actually." Indeed, he's dumb in a likeable, surfer-dude way, and he gets into trouble precisely because he's an idiot, but his upbeat attitude operates as a kind of super-strength. He believes he can extricate himself from every situation, and so he does. The power of positive thinking!
Hodges introduces Flash as a musclebound lunkhead who wears his name emblazoned on his chest, not because he's a superhero, but because he might forget it otherwise. This is the first sign that Hodges (Get Carter, Pulp) knows that he's engaged in a very silly enterprise, so instead of classing it up or attempting to make some kind of larger point, he leans into the ridiculousness of it all.
Flash, like Marine-turned-actor Sam J. Jones, is a professional football player. There's a key difference, though. Hodges' Flash is a quarterback for the New York Jets, while Jones didn't make the cut when he moved to Seattle, post-military career, to try out for the Seahawks, but he did end up playing for their semi-pro practice team, the Flyers, in 1976.
For some reason that I've already forgotten, the bleached-blond bumpkin ends up on a charter plane with the spunky Dale Arden (Melody Anderson in her big-screen debut). When Ming the Merciless (Max von Sydow in expectedly fine form) creates a storm on Earth in order to fuck with our dull, faded planet and its free-thinking inhabitants--fascism alert--the pilots are sucked out of the cockpit. Or that appears to be the case. One minute, they're there; the next minute they're gone. The script from Seattle author Maria Semple's father, Lorenzo Semple Jr. (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor), often feels as if it were written by a hyper-intelligent toddler with a short attention span. That's a compliment, by the way.
When Flash crash-lands the plane into the laboratory of discredited scientist Dr. Zarkov (Fiddler on the Roof's Topol), he tricks them into entering his homemade rocketship by telling Flash it's a phone booth he can use to call for help. I mean, this guy is a total rube! After Zarkov follows them into the vessel in an attempt to kidnap or kill them--I was never quite sure of his intentions, but they did destroy his workplace--Flash accidentally activates the ignition, and off they head into a series of space adventures.
Once the trio arrives on Ming's red planet, Mongo, the plot mechanics click into place. For all the fights and other action set-pieces, including a loopy football game and a death-defying duel atop a spike-filled platform, Hodges has melodrama in mind. If Star Wars, which had appeared three years before, was a western in space, Flash Gordon is a SPACE OPERA filled with elaborate costumes, creative in-camera effects, and a hard-rock score from Queen that opens and closes the thing with a blistering bang.
From the opening sequence, Hodges sets up the expectation that romance will bloom between Flash and Dale, but first they'll have to fend off the advances of the merciless Ming and his slinky daughter, Aura (Russian-Italian actress Ornella Muti), once the former sets his sights on Dale and the latter sets hers on Flash. It's worth noting at this point that Aura's diminutive sidekick (played by the great Deep Roy) is named Fellini, a nod, perhaps, to all of the Italian talent behind the British-based scenes.
The rest of the film revolves around the attempts of two entitled people to make mates out of their two powerless captives. As Ming would have it, "I like to play with things awhile before annihilation." His play includes rape, which Dale foils by switching outfits with a slave girl just before Ming tries to have his way with her, but Hodges makes sure to let us know that Ming needs a little help in the bedroom department. As Aura, who knows more about her father's sex life than a daughter should, enlightens Dale, "My father always drinks a power potion before he makes love."
Beyond Dale's intelligence and Flash's relentlessness, Ming's complicating factors include Zarkov, who undergoes a brainwashing process in a brilliant montage sequence incorporating every major event from his past, and Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton), Aura's dashing suitor, who hails from a green planet where everyone dresses like Robin Hood. Not to give too much away, but Flash's aw-shucks charm wins these antagonists, and most others, over to his side in order to defeat Ming who intends to turn Dale into a baby-making machine, wipe out most of the Earth's population, enslave the survivors, and install his human-alien spawn to run the place. Whew.
And that's the gist of the thing, which might be enough, except Hodges stacks the deck with scene-stealing supporting players Brian Blessed as barrel-chested Hawkman Vultan, Peter Wyngarde as Eyes Wide Shut-like henchman Klytus (Wyngarde expressed displeasure that he never got to reveal his famous face), Richard O'Brien (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)as a young Arborian, and John Osborne (Look Back in Anger) as an Arborian priest. Robbie Coltrane also makes a brief appearance in the prologue. Hodges didn't seem to care that few of these fellows would be recognizable to American viewers. Producer Dino De Laurentiis gave him a surprisingly free hand, and it shows.
In Hodges' commentary track, which dates back to 2010, he admits that Flash Gordon is "crude by contemporary standards," but found it "incredibly fun to do," adding, "Dino De Laurentiis really thought it was a serious film, which I found puzzling." In the end, it was, as he puts it, "a soufflé" and "a tongue-in-cheek film." And that's the best way to look at it, though he was as serious as a heart attack about the evils of fascism. It's exemplified in the plot and the dialogue ("Hail, Ming!") as much as in the red and gold Mongo costumes which draw from Chinese, Russian, and German military fashion during their most repressive regimes--with a shiny, black S&M twist.
If Flash Gordon isn't considered a great film, even by the people who made it, it could have been a very different one. Next to Hodges' commentary track, the most fascinating extra centers on the efforts of original director Nicolas Roeg to get the project off the ground. In light of his famously wiggy adaptation of Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth, Roeg's version probably would've been slower, stranger, and a lot less goofy. It might also have been better, but we'll never know for sure.
De Laurentiis didn't like the way things were going, so he fired everyone involved, except for cowriter Michael Allin (Enter the Dragon, Truck Turner), a close friend and collaborator of Roeg's who felt guilty for staying, but probably found the paycheck fairly irresistible--and who can blame him.
Allin dismisses the film now, not simply because he feels it doesn't represent his best work, but because he believes De Laurentiis treated Roeg disrespectfully. Oddly enough, though, it wasn't either director's idea to bring Queen on board. Hodges credits De Laurentiis for that winning move. Although Flash Gordon didn't represent my introduction to a band that had already been kicking around for a decade by the time of the film's release, it led me to pick up their Greatest Hits, and I've been a fan ever since.
Aside from Queen's chart-topping release, 1980 marked the arrival of box office champ The Empire Strikes Back, the first of innumerable Star Wars sequels and spinoffs. In Hodges' space opera, which would see release almost seven months later, the movie ends after Flash saves the universe. But then. A brief epilogue suggests that Ming might not be as dead as he seems. De Laurentiis was certain he had a George Lucas-like franchise on his hands, but the box office returns weren't robust enough to justify the expense. Plus, he would've had to find another director. Hodges had his fun, but he was ready to move on.
The director went on to make four features between 1983 and 1989 that didn't exactly set the world on fire, before scoring a leftfield hit in 1998 with Croupier starring Clive Owen. Just as 2007's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead briefly reignited Sidney Lumet's career, Croupier did the same for Hodges'. He and Owen would reunite in 2003 for the more downbeat I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, and then he disappeared from theaters again.
Hodges turned 88 this year, and it's unlikely he'll make another feature film. Stranger things have happened, though, like the fact that this maker of gritty British crime pictures was even hired to direct a major comic book movie in the first place. And yet he pulled it off. Here's to him.
Photo credit: Portrait of Mike Hodges taken during the 2004 Sundance Film Festival (Carlo Allegri / Getty Images). All others: Universal Pictures.
Flash Gordon is available on Arrow Video/MVD Entertainment as a Limited or Standard Edition 4K UHD and a Limited or Standard Edition Blu-ray.
Coverage of the Seattle International Film Festival and year-round art house programming in the Pacific Northwest.
Kathy Fennessy is President of the Seattle Film Critics Society, a Northwest Film Forum board member, and a Tomatometer-approved critic. She writes or has written for Amazon, Minneapolis's City Pages, Resonance, Rock and Roll Globe, Seattle Sound, and The Stranger.
