MOSTEST BESTEST

(originally featured inbarebones Volume 2 Number 1)

Unfortunately for all of us, the popularity of the Top Ten list has no symptoms of losing steam any time soon. Under normal circumstances, the end of the year freights in a number of requests for lists of every-damned-thing, year-end wrap-ups, picks and pans, thumbs up and down and four stars to no stars--all of it, thickheaded, populist horseshit designed to render down, oversimplify, make palatable for mass consumption and otherwise navigate the clueless toward a statistically satisfying consumer experience.

But in 1999, STAR WARS mania can be outclassed by only one thing--millennial fever, which has the benefit of centuries of advance PR. Most of its ominous portents are based on our entirely arbitrary Julian calendar and contain as much raw truth as a newspaper horoscope.

It's the Millennium! It's Y2K! And you can be sure that most of the panic attendant to New Year's 1999 will be caused not by a nationwide digital crash, but by jumpy dimwits cleaning out your local foodmart, stockpiling way too much ammo, yanking their cash out of banks, and causing freeway gridlock in their bovine-brained rush to escape the cataclysms they've fantasized and are damned sure going to help implement. The only funny Y2K joke I saw on the internet was the one pointing out that the Dark Ages were a result of "that Y1K bug." We also have to conveniently forget that the first year of the new century doesn't roll around until 2001, a year which, let's face it, should be re-dubbed Year Kubrick. But it won't, because idiots, fanatics, Armageddonists, Apocalypsoids and religious loons all over the globe will waste most of 2000 in a fight-or-flight panic about the very next year.

So with all this torment in mind, we get not only end of the year lists, but end of the decade, end of the century, end of the world lists.

All pop lists attempt to hierarchize art; in this context we may interpret everything from movies to soft drinks to athletes as products, executed better or worse than other products. "Most popular" quickly translates as "most units sold," and sales are no basis upon which to judge art, but literally nobody gives a damn. This is, after all, a mercantile society.

List-making attempts to throw artforms like movies, books or music into an elimination derby, with, ideally, one survivor in each category. It is not a meritocracy. Imagine your favorite recording artists all pitched into some Thunderdome and forced to kill tooth and nail until one remains standing, and you have a pretty good model of the bottom line in corporate showbiz. America loves a winner, we are told, this being the land of bigger-is-better-and-biggest-is-best (how else to explain the popularity of SUVs among feckless Boomer losers?). But America also loves a good dinner spread, which is why it manufactures fast-track stars almost as fast as it can eat them alive. The biggest and best turkeys always get eaten during our way-too-many national holidays.

On the next rung down from the "#1 Syndrome," we find our culture awash in Top Ten lists. But once asked for your ten favorites in any category, you'll then be asked to cull it down to a Top Five, then a Top Three, as the very fundament of our list-making capacities as homo sapiens are tidally magnetized back toward the only True North that matters--Numero Uno, #1.

Many entertainment outlets like to poll what they call "experts" in selected fields for their own Top Tens. Very often, all the Top Ten lists are published or presented together...at which point conclusions are drawn as to which stars or books or films or songs were mentioned the most often, leading inevitably toward...well, you're getting the pattern by now.

Top Tens desperately need to be made fun again.

I've noticed a number of requests made for Top Tens--usually movies, in my own case--fail to account for criteria or timeframe. Experts asked to list their ten "best" science fiction movies in 1960 had fewer movies to sort out than their modern counterparts, who naturally are required to specify the ten best "of all time" without any decent definition of just what qualifies. As the decades just keep on piling up, the cap stays at ten. Therefore, any film replaced on a given list by the march of time and new movies automatically, I guess, becomes "less good" than it was the previous year, when it qualified. And is ALIEN a science fiction film or a horror film? Is SILENCE OF THE LAMBS a horror film, or does supernatural stuff have to occur? Should we care one damn about such nerdland nitpickery?

The natural solution would be to compile a Top Ten for each decade in each category. But that means you'd have to choose only one film per year to represent your tastes. And even if you started from 1950, and even if you could pinpoint ten good genre films from the last couple of dismal decades, the floor would be fifty films, minimum, per genre--too tedious for a Lite audience to wade through. Can't you just name--wait for it--your all-time favorite? And we're back to #1, again.

"Best" is a word with far too many operative definitions in this arena. Your own Top Ten might comprise the movies you thought were the best as movies, or the best in terms of their genre, or the most groundbreaking and influential, or the basic coursework everyone needs before they could be considered qualified enough to judge more sophisticated stuff. Or you might just pick ten of your favorites. To me, "favorite" indicates a movie which, while not necessary good or bad, you can watch over and over and never tire of.

Shit! That's five different categories--another fifty films again. Already. Another fifty you'll probably have to winnow down to ten, and that's not counting all the Guilty Pleasures you'll have to justify in yet another list at the end.

The most recent time I was boxed into this corner was by The Astounding B-Monster, probably the best and most useful website devoted to sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and cult flicks. While other genre 'zines kill millions of trees with crap content that most film fans already know or would rather skip, the B Monster always has another unique interview or profile up its digital sleeve, especially if the subject is someone you thought had already been thoroughly profiled. Its editor/creator, Marty Baumann, asked for my lists, and it's tough to say no to someone who credits you as an expert. Simple, right? Easy, right? I started by firing off what I thought were my Top Ten science fictioners, in no order, as:

1. MIRACLE MILE (1989)

The best movie ever made where the world blows up at the end (STRANGELOVE included), and the only one that made me shed a tear for the characters, who are absolutely nothing like me. That's important.

2. LIFEFORCE (1985)

A much-reviled film with a surprising overage of cool stuff, including a breakneck pace, dead serious, fanatical performances, Mathilda May's two biggest talents, and a scene where Steve Railsback has to kiss Patrick Stewart and like it. It's also an invasion film in which the whole goddamned Earth loses--the vampiric aliens top off their tanks and leave.

3. IT CONQUERED THE WORLD (1956)

Corman, Beverly Garland, the teepee monster, "umbrella bats," Bronson Cave, and Jonathan Haze as a Mexican. Every character in this film has at least one lush, fruity, declamatory speech. Plus, this movie made for one of the best Mystery Science Theatre 3000s ever.

4. PLANET OF THE APES (1968)

I watched it twice in a row (at a drive-in) when it came out, then went back and saw it again, and could probably watch it twice right now. A movie whose groundbreaking qualities were much-overshadowed by 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY...a film not on this list only because it's on so many others.

5. THE THING (FROM ANOTHER WORLD) (1951)

I like the Bill Lancaster/John Carpenter remake, too, but ultimately this is the film that has spawned so many ripoffs and retellings that you couldn't count them all. It's also one of the few monster movies that is (unlike its remake) as exciting to listen to as to see. You don't realize it, but that's important too.

6. WORLD WITHOUT END (1956)

Hunky Americans with lots of firepower meet horny subterranean babes in tight clothing actually designed for the film by Alberto Vargas in an plot inversion of THE TIME MACHINE that combines space travel, time travel, post-Apocalypse, giant spiders, and homicidal mutant cave guys with faces like goulash. A favorite of my misspent youth.

7. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1970)

I read the book as soon as it came out in paperback and hungered to see the movie. I was not disappointed. How often do you get to honestly say that?

8. ACCION MUTANTE (1993)

The only fresh twist I've seen in years on the usual pile of sci-fi clichés. And when it's all done, like a Monty Python sketch, it wraps up with a song!

9. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952)

Mostly because it's about people learning to cope with a brand-new technology; an unexpected form of sci-fi, if you will. Watch it again if you don't believe me, and pay attention this time.

10. VIDEODROME (1982)

I like virtually Cronenberg's entire canon (the jury's still out on M. BUTTERFLY), but this is the one that sticks with me. When I saw all the missing footage broadcast by A&E, I thought someone was scanning an alternate universe version of VIDEODROME into my soon-to-explode head.

Special vote for most overlooked prophetic sci fi movie: LOOKER (1981).

Of all the movies that try to predict the future, LOOKER (directed by--surprise--Michael Crichton) comes closer than anybody with its scenario of digitally-created actors. The same technology, today, enables advertisers to indulge in post-facto product placement in any movie that doesn't ballyhoo enough commercial goods (it also permits wrong-headed correctness fanatics to omit cigarettes and their smoke from old movies, too). Is this movie important? Yes, considering that every know-nothing ever interviewed about science fiction brays on about how he read H.G. Wells as a child, and how prophetic it's all supposed to be. Is it a good movie? It depends on your tolerance ceiling for the fashion catastrophes of two decades past, or your gag reflex for watching Albert Finney trying to woo Susan Dey. It'll be a joyride if, like me, you relish bearing witness to the savage destruction of a gang of cameo-ing Playboy Playmates (by extension, a negation of the whole Playboy conception of mass-consumer beauty). See it with the cut scenes if you can (a network broadcast ofLOOKER about ten years ago reinstated two sequences vital to the plot. One is an escape, and in the other, James Coburn explains why the bad guys are doing what they're doing. Neither scene will confer greatness upon LOOKER, anymore than all the laserdisc supplements in the world can make THE ABYSS into a good movieÉbut it deserves a historical note.)

With the ten films cited in the main list above, problems are already obvious, namely that for every film on the list there's another that should be there, too. SOLARIS. DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. FORBIDDEN PLANET. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. THEM! Or the films that were undeniably influential, like BLADE RUNNER (which I dislike, but which changed the whole visual aesthetic of sci-fi) or THE ROAD WARRIOR (which I did like, and ditto). Don't get me started; just know they're out there, like the film which is probably the apex of 20th Century science fiction, 2001.

Moving on to the "horror" list presented even more difficulties.

1. THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954)

Like ALIEN, like THE THING, a horror film masquerading as a sci-fi film. But this one (and the two sequels) features the greatest monster ever to emerge from the 1950s, period, Godzilla included.

2. ALIEN (only the 1979 original)

A movie that drew from a bunch of movies before it, stirred in a wild club of diverse talents, and subsequently effected every genre film made after it. Probably the first techno-Gothic horror film.

3. REPULSION (1965)

This near-flawless portrait in close-up of a mental crash-and-burn remains a skin-crawler; the perfect definition of a "disturbing" horror film, as opposed to one that just throws scares into your face or viscera into your lap.

4. PSYCHO (the 1960 original, dammit!)

But only if you see it in a theatre.

5. LA CASA DALLE FINESTRE CHE RIDONO (1976)

Eerie atmosphere reigns in a nightmare tone of isolation in Pupi Avati's best horror film ever.

6. TRAS EL CRISTAL (akaIN A GLASS CAGE, 1982)

Think SCHINDLER'S LIST was wrenching, upsetting, traumatic? Then this film is definitely not for you. Think it was pap, like I did? Then treat yourself to something genuinely upsetting. Writer/director Augustin Villaronga crafted an unrelentingly bleak scenario based on the vengeance structure of a horror film, yet which doesn't pander to the easy emotional push-buttons&emdash;it only gets more horrifying until you feel like you're on some sort of hallucinogen. Sort of a cross-clone of I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE withHENRY, PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER, with a Nazi child molester tossed in. You will not forget this movie.

7. LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO (akaBLACK SUNDAY, 1960)

Despite the (now-) hokey Satanistics, still a wonderfully upsetting and remote movie to watch late at night with all the lights out. The crypt in this film still looks to me as though it is at the literal ends of the earth.

8. ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)

Not a scary movie, but, I've found, the movie upon which more people base their memories of the Universal monsters of the 1930s and 40s than any film you'd expect.

9. THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942)

The first horror movie I can remember watching front-to-finish, on a local version of TV's Shock Theatre. It's actually two movies in one since it incorporates so much flashback footage from the previous film, THE MUMMY'S HAND (1940), which introduces us to Kharis, the slightly, eh, weight-challenged Egyptian priest who reanimates for love. The two sequels,THE MUMMY'S GHOST andTHE MUMMY'S CURSE (both 1944), tip the whole saga into the surreal via an interesting separation gambit: Each sequel is stated to take place some 20-30 years following the events of the previous film, which means thatCURSE wraps up, minimum, in a theoretical post-1995 during which World War Two is still going on!

10. DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979)

A reverse on the theme mentioned in (1): Here's a flick that is technically sci-fi (if you pay attention to the plot) masquerading as horror. I lived with this goddamned film--literally, I lived in the theatre in which it was playing, for a time--and watched people stagger out of it as though bashed in the head by a rubber mallet. You all think you're way too cool, now. Too bad you couldn't have tasted it when it was fresh.

As you might be able to tell, "genres" are already breaking down like crazy and the lists would be next to meaningless without the added copy to describe why certain films are on the list. Do we separate out "supernatural" from "non-supernatural" horror films, and if so, on which list does LES YEUX SANS VISAGE go?

As far as "influential" horror films go, it's pretty easy to trace the generational links back to the likes of NOSFERATU (which begat DRACULA and that whole family), CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, the 1932 DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (the first horror movie to win an Academy Award),THE UNINVITED (which, in an odd way, begat the classic line incorporatingTHE INNOCENTS andTHE HAUNTING),NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD,ROSEMARY'S BABY, orTHE EXORCIST...

...unless we create a separate listing for what are quaintly called "psychological horror" films, in which case the bloodline must be declared for everything from Fritz Lang's M to DIABOLIQUES, FREAKS, THE BODY SNATCHER, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, and TARGETS.

And that's not counting A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, which fits into every category I can think of, including comedy.

The only solution was to foment a third list, of titles unexpected by the jaded, or cocksure, or hair-splitty. Hence:

HORROR FILMS NOT THOUGHT OF AS HORROR FILMS...(But They Are!)

1. HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994)

The story of one of New Zealand's most infamous matricides. When Peter Jackson did MEET THE FEEBLES (1989--or, SESAME STREET reimagined by way of BARFLY, PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, SID & NANCY, DAWN OF THE DEAD and ALL THAT JAZZ), his rep was cemented as "low-budget gross-out king." HEAVENLY CREATURES altered that assessment to "Academy Award nominee."

2. SPIRITS (OF THE AIR, GREMLINS OF THE CLOUDS) (1987)

Alex Proyas' first feature, a post-apocalyptic fable shot in Broken Hill (ROAD WARRIOR territory) using minimal sets and three actors...and almost none of it takes place at night, or in the rain.

3. RED DAWN (1984)

A fantasy film in almost every particular. The moment when the schoolteacher glances out the window and sees the impossible--Russian parachutes--has seldom been matched for sheer, off-down-the-rabbit-hole giddiness in other so-called "fantastic" films.

4. THE WARRIORS (1979)

1979's hippest gang movie looks dated today, but never mind. It's an ancient tale--Xenophon's Anabasis--retold from the urban gutter point of view, and wearing the kind of colors you only see in the movies.

5. THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE (1994)

If you don't believe this is a horror film, consider the scene in which Matthew Broderick is compelled to shit in a pan before an audience, then have his "formless, mushy and foul-smelling" excreta critiqued by the guy who invented Corn Flakes.

6. KINGPIN (1996)

A film that gleefully subverts almost every movie cliché about down and out champions rallying one final time, and if that doesn't getcha, then Randy Quaid's nipples will. And if those don't freak you out, wait for the sex-starved landlady. You, too, will sink to your knees murmuring, "Terror, thy name is KINGPIN."

7. NEVER TAKE SWEETS FROM A STRANGER (1960)

An overlooked classic about a genuinely shuddersome child molester, from Hammer Films, a studio that really should have made more movies like this and fewer piss-poor Frankenstein and Dracula sequels.

8. SALON KITTY (1975)

Fuck CABARET, bring on the Fatherland's most superior women! Some of the stuff they have to do will freeze your blood, though.

9. CRASH (1997)

Cronenberg, again, inevitably. A film so thoughtful in its architecture that it demands to be seen in a theatre, for its framing, compositions, and color palette alone. If not a bonafide art film, damned close.

10. WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE (1996)

Sold as satire but forged in the crucible of humiliation that is grade school. This film made several of my friends weep, and not with laughter, as it snapped the sheer torture of childhood into a most-unwelcome flashback focus. Being a kid flat-out sucks, and this movie is a document of that, even if it is wincingly funny. Letting this movie in also opens the floodgate for a new tide of horrors the likes of GUMMO (1997), which has to be seen to be believed.

ALL THAT JAZZ reminds us that there are movies that apply to no category or genre unless you want to make up new ones, like "death musicals." Then there's stuff made strictly for TV--enough to justify a bonus list that would include the NIGHT STALKER telefilms, the BBC's two-and-a-half hour version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS (superior in every way to the 1964 film), along with an unnerving little exercise called A COLD NIGHT'S DEATH (aka THE CHILL FACTOR, 1973). You'll also notice the cunning trick of listing other films in the copy for the one-of-ten numerical choice, a good way to sneak in extra titles the next time someone asks you to generate one of these goofy lists. All tolled, we've cited about sixty to seventy movies here; not bad for a Top Ten.

As John M. Ford once said, "I reserve the right to change this list every five minutes, if necessary." The B-Monster listings are presented here at such length (and with two minor changes) on the theory that if you haven't heard of or seen at least one of these movies, perhaps you'll be in for a pleasant surprise, or at least consider a reappraisalÉand if you do that, then all this frivolous list-making will have had a point, as we kiss the 1900s goodbye.