Get Kraken (7/21/06)
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The Wild Women Of Wongo. [James L. Wolcott, 1959. Written by Cedric Rutherford.]
Have I at last come across a movie so bad that even I can’t sit through it? Don’t be ridiculous:
In an eternally sunkissed Eden somewhere in the boundless paradise of the South Seas, a tribe of buxom babes who wear skins but mysteriously sport Fifties makeup and hairdos have all by some cosmic coincidence simultaneously arrived at the age of consent when a mysterious Stranger clad in black leather who speaks in Latin hexameters rides on his Harley out of the East. Doffing his signature aviator shades, he stares soulfully into the eyes of the beautiful [and absurdly zaftig] Princess Aringarosa and sets her clitoris abuzz and her very ovaries alight by quoting racy passages from Gregory Corso, winning her heart and lubricating the nether passages of her reproductive plumbing upon the spot; though not without inciting the envy of the brutish Prince Offal, a vile pig without breeding or manners to whom against her will she has been betrothed since infancy. In a dramatic trial by dragrace the two rivals rocket down a torchlit straightaway to battle for her hand, both hurtling over a sheer cliff which looms over the ocean when neither will chicken out. A long moment of suspense intervenes before a single figure is seen to clamber back over the edge. Though for the space of a heartbeat he seems to be the other, it is the Stranger. The Princess runs to his side and embraces him, grinding her hips into his, as he stares moodily over the cliff into the crashing surf below. “He was a swine,” he says. “But he died like a Mandingo warrior.” A Viking funeral is staged for the deceased. Huge funeral pyres are lit upon the beaches as the flaming casket is towed out to sea by an escort of war canoes and released into the equatorial currents to wander in world-girdling Ocean until the gods shall will its release into the allencompassing outer void. The stranger recites an elegy in an ancient tongue which is well received if not particularly well understood. The natives sing plaintive surfer ballads, hurl the ritual Frisbees of Farewell, and roast weenies over open driftwood fires. A roar is heard in the distance. A vast armada of Harleys arrives via the Polynesian interstate. “My posse,” says the Stranger to the Princess. “I only hope there are enough of your sorority sisters to go around.” The ensuing orgy proves that there are, but just barely. As the tropical sun rises over the detritus of the funeral wake, a new generation of Wild Women has been engendered, and the genetic heritage of the Wongonians has been perpetuated.
— No, that couldn’t have been it. — No, it must have been this:
In a picturesque ruin reminiscent of Angkor Wat, crawling with strange iridescent beetles and giant serpents, hidden in the depths of the Polynesian jungle and referred to by the natives with superstitious awe as the Temple of the Dragon God, a priestess bearing a startling resemblance to Susan Sontag, albeit with bigger hooters, holds her regular Thursday office hours for the benefit of students and other members of the Temple faculty who wish to consult her on the great philosophical issues of the day. Questions are put to her about the plurality of worlds, the topological structure of spacetime, and the nature of the phase transition to consciousness in the higher vertebrates and the possibility of inducing it in inhabitants of the state of Texas, all of which she answers with preternatural fluency and a supple brilliance which dazzles her auditors. But finally a simple village witchdoctor schooled in postmodern voodoo comes forward and asks for the “answer” to the “great ‘question’” of “‘life, “the universe, ‘and “everything”’”’”.
“That’s it!” she exclaims, as gongs resound, neon lightnings flash and crackle, and a rubber duck descends from the ceiling with a hundred-dollar bill in its mouth while she lights a cigar and adorns her upper lip with a greasepaint mustache. “You’ve asked the Secret Question!”
She presses a lever hidden beneath the mantel of the strange pagan fireplace that takes up the west wall of her office. A bookcase slides away, revealing a dim passageway leading into the heart of the sacred mountain, down which she leads the party by the light of flickering torches held aloft above their wondering faces as they regard with astonishment the strange hieroglyphic inscriptions and marvelous cave paintings which adorn the walls, into a hidden chamber deep within the earth, where a gigantic stone idol fashioned in the image of the head of John Malkovich is suspended in the air by alien antigravity plates [according to tradition, she explains, hubcaps stolen from the chariots of the gods] and speaks lengthy prophesies interrupted frequently by belches of incense. The stories change every fifteen minutes, but include the tale of an Irish student educated by the Jesuits who wanders the streets of Dublin lecturing his companions about the application of Aquinas to the aesthetic question, the adventures of a merry band of Greek mariners caught up in a waterspout and carried off to the Moon, and an existentialistic interpretation of the Oklahoma State game originally authored by Johnny Cocktail after a quart of Southern Comfort and too close a reading of
L’être et le néant.
Energized, no doubt, by too deep a draft of the strangely intoxicating incense, the witch-doctor makes bold to ask the graven image his question. The idol scarce hesitates in its answer: “It is
not,” it declares, “forty-two.” The witch-doctor protests that this is not a legitimate reply. — “Why not?” asks the idol. — “The question requires a positive response,” says the witchdoctor. “For, after all, there are no negative facts.” — “What?” asks the idol, in tones of incredulity. “If I assert, for example, that there is no elephant in this underground chamber, you would maintain that this is
not a statement of fact?” — “No,” says the witchdoctor, “because — ” — “Bah!” exclaims the idol, moving about the cavern and looking behind the graven images which decorate the walls and beneath the stone tables which are spaced about the floor, “is there an elephant
here? No! Is there an elephant
here? No! Is there an elephant
here? No!” Continuing to zoom about the space with increasing speed and ever more erratic navigation, it turns over rock after rock and triumphantly displays the absence of an elephant in every instance. “Let me know when you’re willing to concede the point,” it says to the witchdoctor. — “Never,” says the witchdoctor, “for the discussion is based upon a fundamental misunderstanding.” — “What?!” exclaims the idol. “You maintain, then, that somewhere in the room, beneath this stone pillar, for instance — ” — plucking it out by the roots as it speaks — “an elephant must exist?” — “No, of course not,” protests the witchdoctor. “For — ” —
But here the discussion is at an end. For the pillar in question was the central support of the roof of the cavern. Which collapses, completely and instantaneously. And the rest is silence.
— No, that wasn’t it. — No, I think it was this:
An artist at the height of his fame wearies of his Parisian life of wine, women, and blue-noted song, sublets his garret, disperses his bling, cashes in his municipal bonds, and packs off for the South Seas, where he determines he shall live upon the beach and commence an ambitious project, a gigantic installation titled
Gidget Goes Gaussian, fundamentally, to be sure, a fairly straightforward study of polymorphous perversity, but on so vast a scale that the work will be unquestionably be visible even at interstellar distances, and will thus serve to depict the varieties of human sexuality in graphic detail for the benefit of geek astronomers on other planets who spend their alien nights studying the Earth from afar because they can’t get laid. Shipwrecked as he nears his destination, he is carried by wayward currents for long days and endless nights upon a floating trunk containing his possessions beneath the riddling subequatorial skies, playing demented solos on the ukulele, reading subliminal messages in the patterns of the stars, and stumbles ashore finally on the lost island of Goona, gaunt, unshaven, sunburned, more than a trifle daffy, and looking for some reason just like Frankie Avalon and talking like he’s been badly lipsynched. Here he meets a tribal council of fat ugly stupid dudes who never shave and a lot of women hanging out in grass huts who are all so stacked that he has to wonder how they manage to balance on fewer than three feet. Strolling off into the interior to clear his head, he comes across Princess Whatsername indulging herself in a nude underwater swim in a sheltered grotto, relieves her of the attentions of an alligator which has taken an inappropriate interest in her delectable flesh, and proposes marriage, or at least a commingling of assets, forthwith. Negotiations are proceeding apace between the attorneys of the interested parties when suddenly a giant ape emerges from the sea and seizes the bride-to-be and lumbers off into the jungle! never to be seen again. — No! it swims back out to sea and wrestles the Kraken! — No! it leaps onto the nose of an ascending rocket ship carrying the genetic heritage of the planet into outer space and saves the world from destruction! — No! it morphs into a handsome young officer with a cruel smile and a dueling-scar who ruins her and she hurls herself into the path of an oncoming train! — No! after a carchase over the Golden Gate Bridge, a crash, an explosion, a vertiginous fall arrested by a fortunate last-second grab, and an awful moment in which she hangs by her fingernails above a yawning abyss while listening to a couple of mismatched buddy detectives crack wise about her predicament, she swings away on dangling cables into the Pacific sunset! yodeling arias from Verdi and vowing never to watch the late show again.
And that must have been the end. — I think. — In any case, for now this seems like more than enough.
____________Doing the Vatican rag (6/17/06)
