October is SLEAZE MONTH!!

Even for someone as exciting as I, last night’s wild, mad-cap shenanigans set a new standard for thrills. Here’s how I spend my Saturday nights: relaxing on the couch and reading. Oh yes, we know how to cut loose here at AlcO-bEAT headquarters. The TV was on for background noise purposes, as usual; IFC happened to be on, and the original 1984 A Nightmare on Elm Street happened to be on IFC. Its hard, after twenty years (whoa, A Nightmare on Elm Street came out TWENTY YEARS AGO) of lame sequels, endless merchandizing tie-ins and general oversaturation, to remember how effective this movie was when it first came out (well, sort of - I first saw it on cable in the middle of the night in 1985 or 1986). A lot of Nightmare has aged horribly, even worse than the original Halloween. I imagine that the scene in the sleep clinic is wringing tears of laughter from the eyes of midnight-movie-attendies somewhere. “What’s this in the bed with me...? Its...its...oh my god, its a HAT!!!!!!!!!! Aiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!! DON’T LET THE HAT GET ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Even so, the surrealism of this one still hasn’t been beat, and I mean by ANYTHING - Un Chien Andalou and L’Age D’Or (both of which I also like) can get in line with everyone else as far as I’m concerned. I’ll see your “woman’s eye being cut with a razor”, Luis, and RAISE YOU a tongue snaking out of the telephone, flaming footsteps leading up the stairs, and a fountain of blood shooting from the bed to the ceiling. Plus, the nasty simplicity of the various subtexts here are just too cool to believe. One of the things that I always hated about movies like American Beauty is that they absolutely tie themselves in knots trying to put together this rickety critique of suburbia, the family, school, whatever, whereas a good horror movie would basically just come out and say what was on its mind without getting all twinkle-toed about it. American Beauty says “Beneath the seemingly happy facades of suburbia there is a boiling cauldron of hypocrisy, paranoia and frustration;” Nightmare cuts to the chase: “Your parents are alcoholic, superficial dickwads, and a bunch of murderous vigilantes besides.” Its a subtle distinction, but (especially for anyone who was a kid in the 1980s and was into scary movies) its an important one.

So ANYWAY, I’m partly reading and partly watching Nightmare when Stacey, who’d been burning the midnight oil designing the cover of the new issue, wanders in to see what her layabout husband is up to.

“What is this...?”

“Nightmare on Elm Street. The original. You’ve seen it, right?”

“Nope, never have.”

The causes me to put my book down, sit up and practically fly into a fit about how its inexcusable that any wife of mine hasn’t even seen A Nightmare on Elm Street, let alone The Re-Animator, The Thing (1982 version) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is something of a refrain of mine; I let out a big tirade about it every other month or so. Some people are “children of the Depression” or “children of the Vietnam era”. I’m a child of the cable and video revolution. My family got cable in 1981 (when I was five) and a VCR in 1983 (when I was seven) and ever since I’ve been a sleaze addict, always on the prowl for bizarre and/or shocking sci-fi, horror, porn (hardcore when I can, softcore when I must), action or fantasy films. Those of you who got HBO or Cinemax back in the old days will no doubt remember the content warnings that came with every movie in the monthly guide. At the end of the description, right after the time listings, there’d be a series of letters clueing in the conscientious parent (or the tenacious pre-teen sleaze monger) as to what sort of moral depravities they could expect in any particular movie. AL meant “adult language”, which was in almost every movie. AS meant “adult situations”, which I always found maddeningly vague. AS was maybe the one pair of initials which wasn’t worth getting excited about - someone in the movie might consider getting an abortion, for example, which would get it slapped quick with an AS. All well and good, but it doesn’t really move the needle on the Sleaze-O-Meter too far to the right, not even as much as the most perfunctory AL (I could talk about abortion to my parents, but heaven help me if I gave ‘em any AL!). (September, starring Margot Kidder is the only movie that I know of to make the listing with ONLY AS, nothing else. It sounds like the most boring movie ever made.) AH, however, would never fail to make my young heart skip a beat - AH meant “adult humor”! This era was also good for gross teen sex comedies, by the way (once again, American Pie and other modern-day members of tis ilk can go sit in the back of the bus. In the Reagan era the jokes were funnier, the grossness was grosser and the women were hotter and took their tops off more often. Get used to it.), which could always be counted on to produce some swell AH.

Next, there were the violence warnings: You gotcher ML (“mild violence”), you gotcher V (regular ol’ “violence” - not too much, not too little) and then you got GV (“graphic violence.”). GV, of course, was the one to look out for, because it usually meant some manner of scuzzy slasher movie. Best of all, though, especially for an adolescent boy, were the sex warnings: BN was “brief nudity” (bah!) and N was just “nudity.” Sadly, there was no designation for “abundant nudity” or “extreme nudity” or anything like that; regular old “nudity” was the ceiling, but I was certainly happy enough with that. If I was really lucky, though, there’d be something on that garnered an SC, which stood for “strong sexual content”. This could usually only be found in the softcore porn that Cinemax would play late on Friday and Saturday nights (ah, the Emmanuelle movies...but that is for another post...), so it usually meant “lots of people fuckin’”. Anything with an SC would almost always have an N with it (and in conjunction with the SC, that N could fairly reliably be taken to mean “full frontal”, so, like, bonus), although I do remember a few isolated cases of an SC paired with a BN or, even weirder still, an SC without ANY advertised nudity. I’m still not exactly sure how that worked. The last letter in the HBO/Cinemax rogue’s gallery of sleaze was R, which stood for “rape”. I felt a little weird about that even then, but I must confess that I would make a point to not miss anything with an R in it, as movies with rape scenes in ‘em tended to not hold back on other sleazy elements, upping the sex and (non-sexual) violence ante even more. I thought then - and I haven’t changed my opinion too much since - that the greatest movie ever made would have ALL the letters in its listing: AL, AS, AH, GV, N, SC, R. I even remember the one that had the most - Hard Ticket to Hawaii, which had (at least) AL, GV, N and SC in it. There may or may not have been AH or R; I’m pretty sure that no Andy Sidaris movie has any “adult situations” in it.

Anyway, the point of all this is: sleazy movies are part of my cultural DNA, horror movies in particular. Horror movies did for me what punk rock did for thousands of other kids (punk rock eventually did this for me as well). While I’m not as much of an obsessed nut as I was, its not something I think I’ll ever completely get over. So I think you see why I want to share all of this with Stacey. She likes sleaziness and horror movies and such - I doubt we’d be together if that wasn’t the case. But there’s so much of the canon of sleaze that I have yet to introduce her to. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that she hasn’t yet seen Blood Sucking Freaks means that I’ve somehow failed as a husband and as a man.

With that in mind, I’m designating October as Sleazy Education Month. I’m gonna see to it that Stacey has a bit better grasp of this sort of stuff by Election Day. I’m not saying that she’s gonna be an expert, but I will promise that she’ll appreciate the odd Jeffrey Combs joke.

This is where you, the reader, step in. What should I show her? I wanna focus mainly on the 1980s, since that’s what I grew up on. Plus, I consider that to have been something of a golden age. I wanna throw a few 1970s gems in there as well, but mostly just for seasoning and context - we’re gonna focus on the Reagan administration here. I’ve already got a sort of rough draft of what I want, but I wanna hear your suggestions (which you can leave in the comments box) before I show my cards. I’ll be sure to post a log of what we watch.

That’s it. Ready...GO!