Texts of Antiquity IV: Waste Management (Antenna #33, Miami Beach, 1990)

Waste Management: A Slum-Hopper's Guide to Tele-Squalor

In 1990, I was hired to write a column on movies appearing on cable television for Antenna, a South Beach alternative tabloid. Six pieces were published before the rag suffocated. A trio of weeklies (Antenna, The Wire, and Miami New Times) were competing for the same turf; today, only the latter remains. (Apologies for the Emergency Hospital blurb... Cabinet made it to DVD in 2005.)

After a rough night of mot-slinging with SoBe's least and dimmest there's nothing quite like worming one's way into a woefully mottled narrative. Waste Management will sub for the gentle, Karaoke-weary reader in slogging through toxic broadcast effluvia. Only those films deemed sufficiently capable of reversing life-affirming patterns will be suggested to the public by Waste Management's editorial board. We will only critique titles not yet legally available on home video.

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October 11 (Friday)

Shockproof

(year of release: 1949/network: TNT/air time: 2:20 pm/allocated time slot: 100m./actual running time: 79m.)

Fassbinder sub-muse Doug Sirk directed the inconsolable Cornel Wilde in this Sam Fuller-scripted noir of a parole officer's destructive affair with hot box parolee Patricia Knight. Tumescent gloss, a perfect morning-after complement to an evening spent baiting Washington Avenue's proto-dork valet pools.

When the Clock Strikes

(1961/TNT/4:15am/105m./70m.)

Hyper-prolific exploitation auteur Edward L. Cahn directed eleven (!) marvelously routine timesnuffers in '61, among them The Boy Who Caught a Crook, You Have to Run Fast, and The Police Dog Story. This obscure n*ir-tinged anomaly features James Brown (neither Mr. Super Dynamite Soul nor the Cleveland Brown-cum-blaxploit icon, but the stolid Texan b-vet) and Cahn regular Merry Anders as seedy feebs squabbling over hidden swag. Guaranteed to stultify, so in its way at least on a diegetic par with the typical Le Loft power confab.

October 12 (Saturday)

Hercules Against the Sons of the Sun

(1963/TNT/3pm/120m./91m.)

Peplum at its superannuated azimuth, with Mark Forest toplining as the mutton-toting Ercole
(transplanted to a pre-Columbian milieu). Many Incas tossed; soulless Hombre theme nights beckon!

Women's Prison

(1955/TNT/2am/105m./80m.)

In 1950 the majestic Caged staked out the iconography, but this roupy girdle cruncher delivered hot stock characters in menses-daubed halfslips. Subtextual corn chopping aside, Lewis Seiler's "jug"-posited long pig verity beggars delectation. Banji extends to Jan Sterling; house lection of her recidivist paperhanger "Brenda"'s self-mutilation should spur peroxide stocks.

October 13 (Sunday)

Emergency Hospital

(1956/TNT/4am/75m./62m.)

Second feature machinist Lee Sholem injects just enough tedium into this hardly inenarrable plasma-fest to render it compulsively smot-worthy. Sholem also directed the bleak Crime Against Joe and the tolerably low-fi, Christian robot-vs.-Commie technothug blare of Tobor the Great. For every offal-smothered shitwaffle like Dances with Wolves there are hundreds of Emergency Hospitals waiting to piss on your wheel rims. With vulpine b-stalwart Margaret Lindsay.

October 14 (Monday)

Portrait of a Mobster

(1961/MAX/12:30pm/120m./108m.)

Dutch Schultz-jinx, with brown-shod moon calf Vic Morrow limning all over the noetic srawlchart. Appropriately half-vile, with the great Ray Danton (see The George Raft Story for verification) reprising an earlier flesh peel of a certain Schultz comtemporary (see also auteurist fave Budd Boetticher's 1960 babe-intensive bio spool The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond). There are no snakes in Ireland.

October 15 (Tuesday)

Rampage

(1963/MAX/10:15am/105m./98m.)

Kraut-tainted safari palaver, notable primarily as '40's icon-by-proxy Sabu Dastagir's next-to-last feature. His Sabu and the Magic Ring alone is worth ten thousand latex-swathed nights of 40-weight-suckled, fist-boit-addled felicity. Directed by noir savant Phil Karlson. Bob Mitchum stars, farts, walks off the set.

October 17 (Thursday)

Cabinet of Caligari

(1962/AMC/6am/120m./104m.)

Heretical remake of Robert Wiene's 1919 piceous, somnambulant masterwork, abandoning the original's monorhinous Teut-bludgeon for Bloch-writ post-Psycho volk-shocks. Continuously aired on AMC; although not without detractors, one should nonetheless pay heed to this irritating gut-pummeller.

October 19 (Saturday)

Teenage Caveman

(1958/MAX/6:45am/75m./66m.)

Robert Vaughn, lumpen monolith, decades away from infomersh stewardship, sulks through post-apoc hormonal shudders in a rumen-girdled peignoir. Many bearskins jimmied in this zero-budget sop-fiesta from vestal atrocity-meister Roger Corman. Fuck Ken Brannagh.

- Tom Smith

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