So odd to think it’s nearly December. I’m not sure what happened to October and have no idea where November went to. I still have a bunch of scary movie post ideas leftover from October. It doesn’t make much sense to post them at this point so I suppose I’ll hold ‘em for a year. That said, this jewel is a campy, occult, cult classic that boasts a more literate script than one might suppose from its psychedelic poster art, and this film’s self-conscious tweaking of supernatural horror film tropes makes it a real treasure. Here’s the Wiki regarding Simon, King of the Witches…

Simon Sinestrari (Andrew Prine), a cynical Ceremonial magician, is on a quest to become a god. Simon is living in a sewer, selling his charms and potions for money, when he is befriended by a young male prostitute named Turk (George Paulsin). Turk introduces Simon to his world of drugs, wild parties, and bizarre Satanic rituals featuring a goat and Andy Warhol star Ultra Violet. Death, freakouts and mayhem ensue, along with romance for Simon with the district attorney’s vague daughter (Brenda Scott).

What sets Simon, King of the Witches apart from the legion of occult genre films of the late 60′s and early 70′s is the script, which is far more literate and versed in the esoteric than the norm, both offering new twists to and poking fun at the clichés of the genre.

Simon is also much more of a camp satire than a horror film. Several scenes are obviously meant to be taken as black comedy, a fact that tends to escape traditional horror fans.

The movie begins with Simon walking in the rain, reciting a monologue about being a powerful warlock, after which he is immediately busted for vagrancy.

Simon lives in a storm drain, where he performs rituals to the Goddess Aphrodite, and advises us on magical etiquette.
A rainstorm floods the storm drain and washes away his magical paraphernalia.

Turk and Simon crash a “Wiccan” ceremony presided over by Ultra Violet. Every cliché in the book is dragged out, from spooky music, sinister chants, references to “Queen of the Night”, to people undressing and eventually worshiping a real live goat. In a separate room, Turk is getting it on with a nude woman on an altar who refers to herself as a “sacred object” (a reference to the Church of Satan tradition of woman-as-altar). Simon is thoroughly unimpressed with the goings on and eventually ridicules the coven much in the way Frank Langella mocks Lena Olin’s devil worshipers in the Roman Polanski film The Ninth Gate. The amused couple make a hasty exit with the angered “Wiccans” on their tail.

Simon shares with us his elaborate plans to enter the realm of the gods via sex magic, a special mirror, and the importance of proper timing.

Through all of this, Simon’s approach to his magic and the world is nothing short of cynical, and simultaneously practical yet grandiose. He holds absolutely no romanticism at all towards his work and reacts to everything else with laconic amusement.

Here’s Simon, King of the Witches…

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When we talk about travelling to the stars, we often talk in terms of technological development and pushing past the current limits bounding the horizons of space science. However, one thing a space-bound race will always have a hard time hurdling are the strictures on their own understanding of themselves and their culture.

Terrestrial earthlings and space travelers must be categorically different entities even if they’re part of the same species. The courage to traverse the stars must mirror the boundlessness of space itself — how can one cross that void without becoming a void and emptying oneself of earthbound prejudices, expectations, superstitions and beliefs? It’s the only way.

When people ask why we’ve never gone back to the Moon or why we’ve never put a man on Mars, tell them to look at the small mindedness that surrounded the Pioneer plaque and then look no further. It turns out that there is more than gravity keeping humanity’s feet on the ground: self-loathing, prudishness, war paranoia and the fear of sex. Damn Interesting explains:

During it’s long journey through the universe, should any intelligent beings come across Pioneer 10 (or Pioneer 11, which carries a copy of the same plaque), they’ll be greeted with a pictorial engraving from humanity in the form of a 6 by 9-inch gold anodized plaque bolted to the spacecraft’s frame. The plaque design attempts to convey as much data about humans and the Earth as possible using simple line diagrams, in the hope that whatever beings may find it can learn whence and from where the probe originated.

Still other critics warned that showing a map to the probe’s planet of origin may invite a hostile race to find and attack the Earth. This risk does exist, but even in the extremely unlikely event that the first star a Pioneer probe encounters (two million years from now) is home to a hostile race bent on our destruction, they must first A) detect the fast-moving piece of space debris, B) capture it, C) decode the plaque’s message, D) locate our planet, and E) traverse the distance. This means that at the soonest, such aggressors would be arriving in about three million years.

I have little doubt that space is ready and waiting for the human race to become an interplanetary species. The nagging question that still remains is when will human beings be ready for space?

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The Quebec-born actress, Haji, passed away over the weekend on Friday, August 10. The iconic star of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! was 67.

Barberella (seriously!) Catton became an exotic dancer at the age of 14. Cult film genius Russ Meyer discovered her working in a topless bar. The duo made five films together, but their great masterpiece was Pussycat. Basically a remake of Motor Psycho — their first collaboration — Pussycat eschewed Meyer’s famous nude scenes while simultaneously demonstrating an unexpected cinematic sensibility.

Haji appears in the role of Rosie. Her lesbian lover Varla is the anti-hero/protagonist in this story about a female car gang that serves as a kind of Bad Girls: 101, providing one of film’s most surprising and entertaining studies of female sexuality and violence.

While Haji is not a contemporary household name, it’s hard to imagine the success of new cultural phenomena like Orange in the New Black without the pioneering work of this brave and beautiful actress. In her work with Meyer, Haji introduced psychedelic and occult themes into his scripts and was often responsible for writing her own dialogue. She appeared in more of the director’s films than any of his other voluptuous vixens.

If you haven’t seen Pussycat, here’s the trailer.

Check out my pal Nick Pell’s memoriam of Haji, here.

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“As soon as moving cameras were invented people began using them to make pornographic films…”

So starts Taboo: The Beginning of Erotic Cinema – a one hour documentary that examines the earliest days of the dirty movie biz, tracing the industry up to the age of the VHS tape. As the quote suggests, Taboo argues that nude/erotic/pornographic films were some of the first expressions created with moving picture technology. But, that shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with porn’s early adoption of video, cable, digital and the Internet to produce and distribute their goods to wider and wider audiences at lower and lower costs.

While not a porno movie, Taboo is still full of enough moaning nudity to be NSFW.

Read about another sexy/weird film pioneer at Joe Nolan’s Insomnia.

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Joe Nolan