Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more
glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns
for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them
here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.
Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only basic
re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years
ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the
comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore
anyhow.
Superficially, Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) leads a charmed life. He is the
owner of a small, yet successful private zoo in Los Angeles, where he can live
out his love for animals by holding a lot of big cats in way too small cages and
feeding a guy in a gorilla suit. By night, the lions, tigers, panther and
cheetahs are chilling in Michael's living room while he plays the organ for
them. Curiously, seeing as he's obviously quite mad, Michael isn't living alone
with his animals. He is married to chimp trainer Edna (Jeanne Cooper). She copes
with Michael's erratic and abuse behaviour (he's one of those "I hit you but it
won't happen again until it of course happens again and again" types) with the
help of lots of booze.
Then there's Michael's mute assistant Carl (Rod Lauren). The zoo owner has
had the young man under his thumb for years, systematically destroying his self
respect to have a better class of helper than the mere hired help like his
animal-hating zoo keeper Joe (Elisha Cook Jr.) can offer.
Of course, this very particular idyll can't last forever. Various people are
real and imagined threats to Michael's lifestyle, and the zoo owner deals with
these threats by letting his very cooperative animal pals loose on them,
exceedingly puzzling the hilariously incompetent police with his murders.
Things come to a climax when Edna realizes how mad her husband truly is, and
packs up her chimps and Carl and tries to leave.
Robert Gordon's
Black Zoo is the classic case of a film that has all
the elements that could make a thriller digging deep into the messed-up
relationships and power imbalances in a deeply dysfunctional family by way of
not exactly healthy psychology but instead applies all its energy to being as
silly as possible.
Although it's easy enough to be disappointed by Gordon's - or producer and
writer Herman Cohen's - decision not to make a film that's as much in the vein
of
Peeping Tom or
Psycho as the better written parts of the
script pretend it to be, the film's utter silliness does make it practically
impossible not to be entertained by it. It all starts out innocent enough, if
Michael Gough throwing pointed gazes around as if he were a basilisk is one's
idea of innocence, at least. But before long, the film juxtaposes psycho
thriller typical scenes about Michael Gough being a jerk to everyone close to
him with scenes of a lot of big cats our villainous protagonist calls his
children looking very relaxed on couches and settees in his living room (there's
a big painting of lions on the wall, of course) while their buddy Mike creates
an unholy racket on his organ.
And that's before the film presents us with a dignified big cat burial with
the whole cat gang in attendance, again chilling very relaxed on a blue-lit,
foggy graveyard set right out of a gothic horror movie, listening to a heartfelt
speech by Gough about the deceased's particular kitty virtues.
Another moment of great hilarity follows when our hero visits the
multi-cultural animal-lover cult he is a member of (which I didn't mention in
the little synopsis because it has no import at all on the film's plot). There,
the soul of his dead kitten is transferred to an adorable tiger cub by a high
priest wearing the upper half of a dead tiger on his head (that is how true
animal idolators dress) while a shirtless black guy plays the bongo and the
audience mumbles rhythmically. In one of the greatest moments of acting I have
ever had the joy to witness, Gough manages to keep not just a straight face
throughout the scene, but one that is so full of fake intense emotion I found
myself riveted and laughing tears at the very same time.
There's also an awesome swirly flashback late in the movie that explains
Carl's origin story, a final battle to the death in the rain that would be
dramatic and poignant if not for all the awesome nonsense that happens before, a
gorilla costume that looks really good if you can overlook the fact that it
doesn't look like a gorilla at all, and oh so much intense, overly dramatic
ACTING by Cooper and Gough, who both manage to treat their roles with total,
unwinking earnestness like the true professionals they are.
Surprisingly, given the usual budgetary standards of Cohen productions, the
tenor of the script, and director Gordon's nature as typical hired gun director,
all this intense, ridiculous beauty is presented with a degree of style that
came unexpected to me until I realized that
Black Zoo's director of
photography is Floyd Crosby. Crosby was of course also the cinematographer of
most of Roger Corman's best gothic horror films (and of some other fine budget
productions too). His use of contrasting colours - just look at the interplay of
deep blues and reds in some of the film's silliest yet most effective scenes -
work exceedingly well with William Glasgow's (himself a man with an interesting
filmography) more carefully realized art direction, creating a style for the
film which may not be as gloriously dream-like and artificial as that of the
best Corman productions of the time, but that still lifts the ridiculous up
towards the sublime more than once. In fact, the sillier the given scene, the
more creative energy the crew seems to have invested in its look, with the
burial and the organ playing scenes ending up as particular aesthetic high
points.
It's this obvious effort everyone involved put towards a script that really
doesn't deserve it that explains
Black Zoo's particular charm for me. I
see in this not just a demonstration of dogged professionalism, but the result
of a group of filmmakers putting everything they have into their cheap drive-in
movie fodder instead of just phoning it in. It is this on-screen enthusiasm that
helped turn every moment where I should have been laughing at the film into one
where I was laughing with it, congratulating it on a job well done.