“I just kind of thought it looked like a bearded homeless man, but when I posted pictures on Instagram, one of my friends was like, ‘That’s Jesus.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. You’re right.’”
- Erika Scheldt, 24, on her “Jesus Ray” photo, taken on James Island, SC
I’ve never read any of Larry Niven’s long-running Man Kzin Wars series, mostly because the covers look like wet dream manuals for military fetishist furries. So welcome to a gallery of book covers that will make you deeply uncomfortable inside your pants.
Space kitteh with eye tube is just chillin.
Arrghhh! What is that?!? No…please…must…stop masturbating…
That one was for the dudes, but this one is for the ladies.
Space kitteh is about to drop trou and get down.
(illustration from a a Man-Kzin story)
Space kittehs need war armuh!
Is it the butch kitteh on the left with no shirt? The femme kitteh
on the right in brokeback pose? Or the obviously phallic guns?
Dunno, but this cover takes the win for sexual discomfort.
Aw, no. Sexy lady space kitteh and her disgusting hairless tail.
What is she? Part mouse?
In the world of the Kzin, there is always room for naked humans
and the crotch-covering tails of their war kittehs.
Digital space kitteh in 3-D!
Space Kitteh vs. Puddle Dog!
The secret fantasy of every housecat.
(Welcome to the NSS: Netflix Streaming Safari. A trip into the bowels of Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming movies library. On this journey you will see things that will shock you. Things that will please you. And things that will haunt you forever.)
Nazi love in Pressure Point.
Pressure Point (1962) – Peter Falk is a psychiatrist who just…can’t…crack…this…case! His patient is a black kid who hates white people. That reminds elderly chief shrink, Sidney Poitier (with white shoe polish in his hair), of a case he once had a long, long time ago, back before anyone put shoe polish in his hair. Produced by that manufacturer of message movies, Stanley Kramer (Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), this is a freaky-deaky race flick with Poitier playing prison shrink to a neo-Nazi whose flashbacks to his terrible childhood are played out on an enormous, empty soundstage that looks like a cross between Dogville and Eraserhead (the scene where his dad silently stalks him with a fistful of raw liver is particularly Lynchian). Oh, and the Nazi is played by Bobby “Splish Splash I Was Taking a Bath” Darin. Just under 90 minutes, it’s a Freudian funfest. (watch it!)
White Dog (1982) – the last significant film by two-fisted American director, Samuel Fuller, White Dog was shelved by Paramount after it was completed, it had a TV broadcast scheduled and then yanked at the last minute, it had a small theatrical release in 1991, and then it had to wait until 2008 when the Criterion Collection gave it its first official American home video release. Most of this was due to studio fears of the film and an NAACP campaign to keep it off screens, which is too bad because it’s a great big slice of rage that might be the angriest movie about race since Goodbye, Uncle Tom (which you can read about here). Kristy McNichol plays an actress who finds a stray dog. Turns out the puppy is a “white dog,” trained from birth to attack black people. Everyone wants her to exterminate her pet, except for a black dog trainer named Mr. Keys who is determined to break the animal’s conditioning. Shot like a spaghetti western (and with music by Ennio Morricone) Fuller does away with the novel’s ironic ending (in which the black dog trainer re-trains the dog to attack only white people) and instead substitutes an even more upsetting finale. (watch it!)
From Playboy Press, the publishing house for men with discerning taste, came The Closed Circle, and in the back of that book is one of my favorite things ever: a house ad for other books from Playboy. These house ads were always the best bonus that came with buying paperbacks way back when, because the often-incoherent ad copy was more fascinating than the actual books themselves. Some of these other Playboy books are real winners and I thought I’d share:
The Transformation – by Joy Fielding, “Three star-struck women, disenchanted with Hollywood, are caught in an orgy of satanism and death.” Ho-hum.
Wolf Mountain – by Peter Lars Sandberg, “A mountain-climbing party of teen-age girls is taken captive by two escaped psychopaths.” That’s more like it!
Frogs at the Bottom of the Well – by Ken Edgar, “Molly Reagan is a cop who puts her life on the line when she infiltrates a revolutionary group of feminists.” I’ll say! A Goodreads reviewer says, “Soooo good. Like a romance novel and a sexist conservative AM radio show all in one!” Sounds like my cup of tea!
The Death Connection – by Roger Brandt, “Corruption was everywhere; the Border Patrol had to stop the smugglers and clean up the murderous mess.” This one gets points for its bold use of a semicolon.
“Nancy Drew versus Satan” only with more scary oral sex, The Closed Circle is a crusty, musty paperback cash-in on the 70′s craze for Satanism and the occult. Written by Barney Parrish, the pseudonym of George Wolk (although why he needed a pen name I don’t know), this is the kind of cheap paperback that lives up to all the promise of cheap paperbacks: it’s a fast read that’s full of sex, sleaze, and reactionary attitudes.
Satan was big in the 70′s. The purported true stories of people who escaped from or were enslaved by Satanic cults were flooding the market like the Great Boston Molasses Flood, unleashing an avalanche of books and movies about the Devil that started with Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, and continued with The Exorcist (book in 1971, movie in 1973), The Satan-Seller (1973) written by the fraudulent “high priest” of Satanism, Mike Warnke, The Devil and Mr. Smith (1974) another “Satanic cults abused me” book, The Devil’s Rain (1975), Race with the Devil (1975), Malachi Martin’s Hostage to the Devil (1976) riding piggyback on The Exorcist (Martin claims he was the inspiration for the movie), The Omen (1976) and coming at the tail end of the craze, like a stray dog looking for scraps, The Closed Circle (1976).
Peter Fonda and Warren Oates take on Satanic cultists.
The Closed Circle revolves around Lila Gerard who is described by the berserk back cover copy as, “Lila: Crazed or Possessed? Lila: Shy Bride or Wanton Bitch? By day, quietly religious, by night, lewd and possessed of a strange psychic power that enables her to witness events a continent away – weird events, diabolic orgies, and a cult of evil which calls itself THE CLOSED CIRCLE.” Which makes it sound like she has DirecTV and the Spice Channel.
Satan is real, and apparently he’s ruining marriages
with too much sex.
Lila, who is taking a “university-level” course in weaving, starts sleepwalking, possessed by “nocturnal Lila” who is really into sex, much to the horror of her husband (“Lila, what are you doing? Jesus, the light on and everything?” he cries) turning him from a normal young groom with a romantic inclination, into a man who sobs and weeps while he “protects his penis from her.” Her attempts to have sex with him make him vomit, and scare him, and make him cry, and so after he forces her to read the “disgusting filth” that Nocturnal Lila wrote down about the devil orgies she psychically witnessed, Diurnal Lila realizes she has no choice but to commit herself to an insane asylum. There her psychiatrist, Dr. Cabel (yes, he’s named Dr. Cabel), discovers that she is psychically linked to kidnapped hippie hitchhiker girls who have been abducted by a Hollywood Satan cult who are beating them to death and making them sit on dildos.
“Yes we are!”
Things take a turn for the sapphic when a lesbian nurse sells Lila’s story to the tabloids, which causes the Closed Circle to hire a hitman to try to snuff her out. The celebrities in the Closed Circle are real-world celebs, given fictional names (I count Robert Redford, Elizabeth Taylor, Ann Margaret, Edward G. Robinson, and Jackie Gleason), and they really are a lot of fun. Wearing hooded robes, they kill black cats, keep hippie chicks imprisoned in their mansions, gobble LSD-soaked sugarcubes, and, being a conservative’s idea of decadent, they have awesome call and response sessions such as:
“The hooded figures gathered in a circle and the litany began:
“Why are the rich rich?”
“Because they are chosen.”
“Why are the famous famous?
“Because they are elect.”
“Why are the rich rich and the famous famous?”
“Because we ARE.”
“How do we intensify this?”
“We destroy that.”
“What is that?”
“THEY are that. The poor are that. Their morality is that.”
“Who is that?”
“The weak are that. Their minds are that.”
“How do the weak attack?”
“Manson,” the circle hissed.
“How do their minds attack?”
“Their thoughts weaken us.”
“How do we gain strength?”
“We destroy their thoughts.”
“How do we destroy their thoughts?”
“We destroy THEM.”
Manson had been on trial just six years before, so you can understand why he’s on their minds, but man. Satanists are like the 1% before there was a 1%.
Fast, cheap, and a reflection of what people thought was really going on behind the closed doors of Hollywood bedrooms, The Closed Circle is a little time capsule of crazy. Written mostly to be sold to bored housewives with high school educations and tipsy blue collar workers in bus stations, you can blow through it in about 2 hours and get your fill of kinky sex and evil elites. As harmless as it seems, books like this paved the way and seeded the national imagination for the tidal wave of false memory syndrome books and the Satanic Panic of the 80′s that would shred families and result in Geraldo Rivera’s bold expose’, Devil Worship: Exploring Satan’s Underground.
Thanks, hero!
When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” Despite all the stories about haunted bridges, haunted graveyards, and haunted telephone numbers the most commonly haunted places in the world are still good old haunted houses. Occasionally people will wonder, why are our houses so haunted? Is it because they’re built on Indian burial mounds? Is it because people kill themselves in them? Is it because there’s something about the arrangement of doors and windows that invites spooks inside?
No, it’s because that’s where the people are.
People are inside the spooky haunted houses!
Hauntings are not objective phenomena. If a ghost falls in the woods, no one hears the sound. For a ghost to exist, there has to be an observer (be it on video or even in a photo) and as human beings we spend most of our time in our houses. It’s where we sleep, it’s where we eat, and it’s where we take off all our clothes and take showers. Sometimes it can get pretty specific, like in the scandal-plagued Build Together Housing Programme in Namibia which has become a hotbed of hauntings while the rest of the township reports no supernatural activity whatsoever. The tokoloshes and witches that infest the building walk on the roofs and sit on people’s faces, and the residents even know who the witches are. “We know who is doing this. They don’t even get rich, yet still indulge in such shameful activities,” one says. Lynchings are probably imminent.
Sometimes the secret of the haunted house is modern art.
In other cases, haunted houses are just vague collections of noises and things falling over. Sometimes people try to excavate the history of a house to bolster their argument that it’s haunted since it sounds way better to say that things keep falling over because of a guy who murdered his wife rather than you just don’t know. But the fact is, houses are never haunted. People are haunted. They just happen to spend most of their time in houses. The confusion is understandable.
Whoa, indoor hockey rink. Nice house!
“Bolide meteors are supposed to be rare, yet fireball UFOs have appeared in multiple states across the United States in the past year.”
It’s an all-perversion edition of Netflix Streaming Safari. Feeling too good about humanity these days? Then come take a stroll down this awful alley of moral atrocity.
INSERTS – one year before he appeared in Jaws, Richard Dreyfuss starred in this NC-17 Hollywood Babylon art film set in the 1930′s with Veronica Cartwright as a junkie porn star, Bob Hoskins as a bootlegger producing porn films, and Jessica Harper as a flapper thrill killer. Dreyfuss plays a washed up silent movie director who now makes stag films. The entire movie is set in his house, full of long takes and big emoting, and by the time it’s over it’s machine gunned a lot of staccato dialogue into your ears about rape, autoerotic asphyxiation, necrophilia, McDonald’s, and the Los Angeles freeway. (Watch now!)
THE BABY – television director Ted Post lends a movie-of-the-week sheen to this bizarro tale of a social worker whose new case is an adult man who is treated like a baby by his mother and his sisters. David Manzy gets his diaper changed, sucks his thumb, and breast feeds, which is extremely disconcerting since he’s a man in his late 20′s. Picking the scenery out from between her teeth, Ruth Roman plays mommy, gargling nicotine and sneering like a John Waters diva. (Watch now!)
RAPE SQUAD – okay, so on Netflix it’s called Act of Vengeance but its other title is RAPE SQUAD and that’s the title that spells out pretty much exactly what happens in this movie. A squad of women get raped, so they form a squad to stomp out rape. See what they did there? A masked serial rapist who forces his victims to sing “Jingle Bells” while he violates them, chalks up a list of victims who all meet at the police station. They recognize their mutual interest, team up, learn self-defense and go after the rapist. Unpleasant and uncomfortable one second, Dolemite-level campy the next, it’s the kind of bad taste roller coaster that’ll give you a case of moral whiplash. See what Ebert has to say about it. (Watch now!)
“I believe there’s something when you die because there are ghosts. I’ve seen them, I’ve been around them. Some are just energy left behind, and some are intelligent. I’ve had conversations with them…I rolled into a river in a car. Got hit in the head by a shot put, I was on a commercial airliner landing in DC when the wing hit the runway…I’ve had 18 concussions. I think I had a 19th, but I didn’t go to the doctor, so it’s not official.”
There is a crisis in America, a chastity crisis that only a talking stuffed bear who speaks in the flat monotone of a serial killer can possibly combat. This first Purity Bear video is notable for its use of random insert shots of sweaty palms and actors struggling not to crack up:
But, obviously, a stuffed bear with an affectless voice couldn’t keep American teens from rutting like pigs in heat, so in this second video the Purity Bear has the voice of a sassy black best friend, and she compares a woman’s vagina to a dirty, greasy pizza box that men shove in the trash.
I think that video will definitely make American teens hate their genitals. Mission pretty much accomplished. Hooray!
