by Eutychus
There are certain moments which define your movie-going experience for the rest of your life.
When I was just a young cinemaddict my father, a career Navy man, used to take the family to the movies fairly often. There was always a cheap theater at the Navy Exchange of whatever base he was stationed at and while they didn't show first run movies, we usually got a show of a not too badly damaged reel of something that had at least come out in that same year. It was almost always Disney. Dad was also a Southern Baptist back when it was okay to be a Southern Baptist and still appreciate Disney and made sure we never missed a Disney movie when it came out. But every now and then he'd want to see something a little meatier and I can remember being (at that time) completely bored through showings of Lord Jim and The Ugly American.
This was in the late-lamented 1960's. This was before Jack Valenti and his band of merry pranksters decided that every film released in the United States should have a piece of the alphabet attached to it to inform possible viewers if it was nauseatingly bland or cheap thrills and adventure. If you paid attention you really didn't need the ratings system. It was pretty clear to anyone with half a mind that a film entitled The Undertaker and His Pals wasn't going to be for the kiddies. But the one thing they didn't control was the trailers for upcoming attractions That's where they got the unsuspecting.
The one they got me with was Berserk.
Berserk was a cheap exploitation horror film starring Joan Crawford when she was on the downside of the whole Sunset Boulevard trip. She played the owner of a small circus where the performers where being killed off in fairly hideous ways. The trailer pretty much showed everything, including scenes where a magic show goes wrong and a lady is actually cut in half and another man is impaled on a bed of nails. And the image that stuck with me the longest, and probably the one that the movie is known for most among movie cultists where a man has a steel spike hammered through the back of his skull head popping out above and right between his eyes.
I was twelve. I was sitting right in the front row of the theater. And it scarred me for every time I went to the theater from there on in.
Mind you, I was never that squeamish as a kid. I used to get fish hooks stuck in my fingers and fall out of attics at a fairly regular rate. It was more the shock of the moment that alarmed me; I who had never seen full-screen anything worse than Bambi's mom being shot and even that offscreen. It was the graphic intensity. The shock of the new. It affected me much more than I expected it to. From the on every time I went to the movies, especially for a thriller I always expected that visceral assault.
So these columns will examine those cinematic moments, like the carnage in Berserk that crawled under my skin and stayed there. That scarred me, if you will, even worse that having to watch Battlefield Earth. Maybe not in the same way, though. I never actually cried at the end of a movie until Schindler’s List came out. The Ruling Class has a kind of poetic transcendence that worms it’s way into your mind and stays there. And The Loved One ... what can one say about The Loved One besides it’s tagline which promises “something to offend everyone.”
I never saw the entire movie of Berserk. I don't even know if it’s out on video. It would probably ruin my impression of it if I saw the whole thing. By showing all of the “fun” parts in the trailer, maybe that’s what they had in mind.