Godmonsterous
Fredric Hobbs is an authentic outsider artist. Although his work, much of it involving automobile art which he calls “parade sculpture,” taking art out of the museums and onto the streets and freeways, has attracted some wider attention and is exhibited and collected in major galleries, his contribution to cinema is authentically outré and unloved.
I haven’t managed to see Hobbs’ first film, Troika (1969), described by the New York Times as follows: “…a cluttered and disconnected collage of art objects, paintings, live-action fantasy and symbolism, thronged with some capering young people weirdly clad and smeared in blue, purple, green, white and mahogany.” Well, that sounds pretty good to me!
But I’m put off a little by the Hobbs films I have seen, a trio produced between 1971 and 1973. They have an odd effect. While watching, my hand twitched involuntarily towards the remote control, and it was an effort to stay focused. But afterwards, I wanted to see more. There was some crazy hope that things would get better.
Roseland deals with a full-bearded singing star, fired after performing a number entitled “You Cannot Fart Around With Love,” on the Ed Sullivan show – we see this performance, complete with scantily-clad chorines and Busby Berkeley angles. Undergoing experimental psychedelic therapy to cure him for a porn addiction (manifested in Tarzan-swinging through behavioral science lectures to snatch the film cans), he embarks on a long, tedious trip — lots of girls in s&m cavegirl costumes, and sex scenes that go on forever.
“Sex is ugly, boring, hippy shit,” snarls Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy, and it’s hard not to agree after the umpteenth endless romp. The girls are pretty, their charm even surviving the caresses of Hobbs’ trademark fisheye lens, but without anything to maintain narrative focus, the whole film feels sluggish and unmotivated. The appearance of Hieronymous Bosch adds a certain frisson, played as he is by the enthusiastic Christopher Brooks (who is black). Bosch crawls out from under the protagonist’s hospital bed to advise him, or something.
The problem of why we should care what’s going on torments Hobbs’ next epic, Alabama’s Ghost, which stars Brooks, as Alabama, who does not die and does not become a ghost. He’s a would-be musician who says things like “That was smooth—like a hundred yellow cats dancin’ on jade!” It’s impossible not to warm to him. Then I went off him and never wanted to see him again. But he hung around for the whole thing.
Alabama’s Ghost doesn’t lack for plot the way Roseland did, in fact it has plot to spare, involving an amazing new drug, the late real-life magician Carter the Great, an evil Nazi scientist called Houston Caligula, and a horde of vampires who feed off girls on a conveyor belt. The trouble is, much of this plot is backstory, delivered via a sepulchral voice-over as the camera pans listlessly over the foggy San Francisco Bay Area. Once the “story” actually begins unfolding, rather than being read to us, we have to watch Alabama, a rather self-indulgent twit of a character, meandering about, failing to understand the big, surreal, Pynchon-like conspiracy presumably unfolding in some more interesting parallel movie.
But it’s better than Roseland, giving rise to the hope that Hobbs was getting somewhere.
Brooks is back in Godmonster of Indian Flats, released or unleashed the same year as Alabama’s, 1973. (Brooks’ other main credit, intriguingly, is for 1974’s Space is the Place, starring Sun Ra and his Arkestra, suggesting an affinity for outsiders/extraterrestrials with their own private mythologies. After that, he seems to have vanished from the screen.) This is a movie “about” a giant mutant sheep on a rampage in Nevada. The sheep, or “Godmonster” I suppose we must call it, is the product of inter-species miscegenation between farmer and sheep, and it’s another sculptural creation by Hobbs (whose kustom kar carnival float creations also feature in most of his films). With its loose, fleecy hide, strangely apologetic constipated chicken walk, and one distended forearm, this is a monster more to be pitied than fled, but it doesn’t get very much screen time.
Playing more like a really bad observational documentary with amateur dramatics asides, Hobbs’ film lingers on every scene, no matter how tangentially related to the plot. The aesthetic goal seems to be to use up all the footage shot. Despite this, the adoption of a recognized genre might have helped Hobbs, as the market for hippy-inflected head movies declined, except that the movie was yanked from theatres after the stroboscopic red flashes in a scene of mad science provoked epileptic fits in some patrons. At least someone had a memorable viewing experience.
What’s weird is that these movies, motivated by obviously quite personal interests and tastes, clearly attracted some real financing, with their exploding petrol stations and scenes of mass nudity (even allowing for the fact that it was the seventies). At any rate, such funding never appeared again, returning Hobbs to a different kind of trundling assemblage. Despite the films’ aching unwatchability, this still seems like some kind of loss to cinema. Maybe a good loss, but a loss.
by David Cairns