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The
year is 1984, and we open somewhere around
the foggy fields near Cumberland,
Maryland, as a group of hunters make their
way along a trail. When their dogs roust a
couple of wired down pheasants, the lead
hunter shoots them down. He smiles and
hands the shotgun over to his companion,
then climbs over a barbwire fence to
retrieve the game. We slash cut to a shot
of the dogs sniffing for more birds, and
then hear another gunshot -- and a man
screams. We pan back, just in time, to see
the man climbing the fence take another
blast to the chest. Smiling sinisterly,
the shooter proclaims, "Rock and roll
is dead. Long live rock and roll."
With
that cryptic opening, the credits roll
over a montage of Jimmie Hendrix, Janis
Joplin and Jim Morrison performing live.
The credits also reveal that the film
we're about to encounter is written and
directed by no-budget exploitationeer
Larry Buchanan -- but let's stick with it,
anyway, shall we...
After
the funeral, we move to the dead man’s
house and find out that he was a former
G-Man, named Alex Stanley (Sandy
Kenyon). We know dirty work is
afoot when his wife can’t believe he
died in a "hunting accident."
She also begs her son, Frank (Steven
Tice), to
stick around in case those strange men
come back. He asks her to elaborate. She
does: It seems two Men in Black
types showed up, demanding all of
Stanley’s papers. They cleaned
everything out of his home office, but
then came back later, looking for
something they missed, but still
couldn’t find what they were searching
for. Mom knows it must be her husband’s
briefcase; she hid it because he left
strict instructions that if anything
should ever happen to him, to make sure
Frank got it.
Later,
Frank tells his wife, Ellen (Jennifer
Wilde), how his father worked for
the government, doing mysterious,
top-secret work, and how he had
disappeared for long periods of time.
Frank, too, smells something fishy, so
they open the briefcase. Inside, he finds
a manuscript that starts with the ominous
"If you’re reading this, I’m
already dead…"
Frank
continues reading and reveals his dad
belonged to secret government organization
called The 39 Steps:
a super-secret spy agency formed to
neutralize the three "Pied Pipers of
Rock and Roll" -- Hendrix,
Joplin and Morrison -- by any means
necessary.
We
then jump back to 1968 and a concert in
New York. After Hendrix (Gregory
Allen Chapman) finishes his set,
Joplin (Riba Meryl) and
her band finally show up. Terminally late,
the management won’t let her on until
the audience threatens to riot, calling
for Pearl. After her set, the two singers
meet as Joplin goes to Hendrix’s room,
and we get our first gratuitous topless
shot. (The
first of many gratuitous topless shots.) During
the impromptu jam session, Joplin wants to
know if all the rumors about the size of
Hendrix’s *ahem* Texarkana
Dingus are true.
We
jump again to hotel room in Amsterdam,
where a nude woman watches a TV-report
about the escalating war in Vietnam. In
the same room, a prostate Jim Morrison (Bryan
Wolf) is rousted out of bed, I
assume by the rest of The Doors,
for a gig. He mumbles something about
dying for rice paddies and napalm and then
leaves.
Switching
locales and time frame, again!, we find
Hendrix in a studio laying down a new
track. A group of Black Panthers enter and
accuse him of selling out to the MAN
while his people are dying over in
Vietnam. As
the female leader points out that his
music says nothing, and only helps whitey
get laid, the singer
promises to do more -- and is working on a
song that will wake America up. After the
Panthers leave, Hendrix breaks his guitar
in anger.
Next,
we’re in Oakland, at a sleazy hotel,
where a FBI agent is getting some nookie.
His pager goes off, and when he calls in,
the man warns his bosses that the Black
Panthers have moved south, into LA, and
are spreading their doctrines on the
campuses and rock concerts. In
LA, Morrison is still feeling melancholy
and spouts some more bad poetry that
impresses his female companion. (I
assume it's Pamela Courson.) He
then talks about the leaders of the world
becoming butchers using 18lbs.
sledgehammers to get their jollies. (Heavy.)
Pam
digs it and it turns her on.
And
then we continue to jump all over the map,
this time to Washington DC where Alex
Stanley reports in to his superiors. They
all share a funny, off-color joke about
Nixon being crooked, and comment on the
Commander-n-Chief’s growing paranoia. It
seems Tricky Dick is setting up an
independent security force outside of the
FBI. Stanley's surprised that J. Edgar
Hoover would allow this to happen, but
Hoover approves of it because he thinks
they’re still fighting the communists.
Stanley then says all Nixon really cares
about is his re-election, and that's why
he's so worried about the influence of the
counter-culture movement. He wants it
neutralized, and that's where The 39
Steps comes in.
Would
Nixon really go that far? As paranoid as
this guy was, I’ve no doubt he or his
cronies could have. Did he actually do
it though? I doubt it. The man was
crooked but he just wasn’t that
clever.
In
one of the films better scenes, Joplin
watches a BBC newscast after a performance
at Albert Hall. She told a reporter that
there is no connection between drugs,
music and Vietnam. But as the BBC shifts
to news footage of the war, Janis shoots
up with heroin. Then the images on the TV
dissolve into Hendrix’s scalding version
of the national anthem at Woodstock. (I
think this was the song he promised.) After
finishing the blistering set, he passes
out backstage.
Later,
at the Stanley home, Alex tells his agents
that the voices of the counter-culture
must be silenced -- and quickly. Distracted
by music coming from young Frank’s room,
Alex barges in and destroys the record,
and warns his son not to play that type of
N-bomb music in his house. (So
we find that Alex not only hates music,
but is a bona fide bigot as well.)
The
rogue agents target Hendrix first.
Tracking down and killing Rainbow Brown,
the guitarist's source of drugs, they
substitute a bad batch of acid. (Don’t
take the brown acid, man.) When
Hendrix reports for a photo shoot,
he gets sick on the tainted drugs. But he
recovers and we find him at The
Le George discotheque in New York. As
fate (or
a bad movie script) would
have it, Joplin and Morrison are
there, too. They’re all impressed with
the show until a bizarre conga-line of
transvestites start imitating them, and
bash them pretty good for their
self-indulgent lifestyles.
And
I almost went blind when one of the
"ladies" flashed his own
"Texarkana Dingus" to the
audience, in tribute to Morrison who
exposed himself at a concert in Florida.
At least it wasn't old J. Edgar
himself...
Hendrix
recognizes one of the performers as one of
the Black Panthers who visited him
earlier, drunk to the gills, and gets her
alone to talk. She tried to reach him
before but he was too insulated. He
promises her that things will be different;
no more playing with his teeth, his music
will mean something. He
then tells her about the bad acid doses
and bad trips that he’s been having
lately. He’s also wary of the same
"gray faces" that have been
lingering at every concert, hanging around
backstage. She warns that somebody has put
a mark on him. He promises to be careful.
Meanwhile, in the club's ladies room,
Janis finds Morrison banging some gal in
the john. When Pam catches them, Morrison
blames it all on Joplin. This, with good
reason, pisses Janis off, and a shouting
match rages as they make there way outside
where she eventually breaks a bottle over
his head. After Morrison leaves, Joplin
confesses to Pam about how lonely the life
of a rock star is. She’s jealous of the
"action" Morrison and Hendrix
gets, and (in
a scene that is way too good for a Larry
Buchanan flick) she
confesses there are two Janis Joplins: one
that makes love to 25,000 people on stage,
and the other who always goes home alone.
The
39 Steps tighten the noose on Hendrix
back in England as he finishes his concert
at the Isle of White. Backstage, he meets
the infamous Cynthia Plaster Caster: a gal
who wants to make a mold and capture every
famous rocker’s "Texarkana
Dingus" in dental plaster -- starting
with Hendrix.
This
is a true story folks, and she’s still
doing it today. Immortalized later in
the KISS song, Plaster
Caster,
the only thing they got wrong was they
had her being English, when Cynthia is
really from Chicago. And yes, Hendrix
did get the cast made.
The
next morning, Stanley’s agents tamper
with the phones in Hendrix’s flat.
Stanley then checks in with another agent
who assures him Hendrix drank a drink they
slipped some drugs into the night before.
Inside the flat, Hendrix’s companion
wakes up and leaves for cigarettes. After
she’s gone, an agent make his way inside
and plants some pills inside the
apartment. Begging Stanley to just let him
kill Hendrix, but Stanley orders him to
stand down and clear out because this has
to look like an accident. When the
girl returns, she goes into a panic when
she can’t wake Hendrix up. She tries to
call a doctor but the call is routed to
Stanley, who sends in some bogus
paramedics to haul Hendrix out. After they
get him loaded up in the ambulance,
Hendrix starts to come around and begins
to vomit. One of the paramedics quickly
gets him in a headlock, and forces Hendrix
to choke on his own vomit.
One
down, two to go.
We
have a brief pit stop in Washington, DC,
where an agent reports to J. Edgar that
they’ve intercepted a coded message
about the termination of a certain target
-- a target that doesn’t jive with
anything the FBI or CIA is involved in.
When the agent asks if the rumors are true
about a certain elite and illegal task
force, Hoover ignores the question and
comments on the weather. (I
love the smell of vomit in the morning.)
Things
start to speed up as Joplin finishes a
recording session and heads home. Inside
her apartment, Stanley is injecting her
oranges with lethal doses of heroin. He
hides in the closet when she comes in.
Running the tainted oranges through a
juicer, Janis mixes it with her vodka. She
drinks, becomes woozy and passes out. (Death
by screwdriver.) Stanley
comes out and begins doctoring the scene:
He places several empty syringes around,
and sticks another into her arm just as
the phone rings. Ever the cool character,
he picks up the receiver and drops it by
the singer’s head. He gathers up all the
evidence and leaves.
Two
down.
As
he lays out his plans for Morrison,
Stanley hears over the TV that the Lizard
King is already dead. Wanting to make sure,
he goes to Paris and finds Pam. Posing as
a reporter, he questions her about the
singer’s death. Her story doesn’t ring
true, and since no one ever saw the body,
he believes Morrison is still alive. We,
as the audience, know for a fact he is.
His health failing, Morrison faked his own
death and retreated to a Monastery Hospice
in Spain to try and recuperate. Why did he
fake his own death? In his own words,
"Death has one helluva plus --
privacy."
Stanley
eventually tracks Morrison down, but he
has grown disenfranchised with the
government he works for, and lets him go.
Years later, the agent planned to blow the
whistle on the whole operation by going to
Europe to see if Morrison was still alive.
He would then finish and publish his book,
exposing The 39-Steps and what
they've done. Well, he was going to
do all this right after a pheasant hunt
with some old friends. (Oops.
Never go pheasant hunting with the MAN.)
Flabbergasted,
Frank isn’t sure what to make of it all.
Ellen suggests he take his father’s
airplane ticket (it
was in the briefcase) and
go to the Spanish Monastery and find out
for himself. This he does, and upon
arrival, asks to see the head monk.
Showing him some pictures of The Doors'
front man, the older man does remember him
and promises to take Frank to see him. They
walk around and come upon a cemetery. The
monk comments on how happy Morrison became
upon arrival; he felt he finally found
peace there. Unfortunately, his health was
too far gone and he died in 1974 and they
buried him, here, in the simple cemetery.
Frank
asks which one is Morrison’s grave, as
they are all staked with an unmarked
cross. The monk isn’t sure, and says,
they don’t mark the graves for "How
else would they truly be free?"
Whoa.
That is, like, deep man.
The
End
Wow!
What a great idea for a film...The Nixon
administration, in another fit of
paranoia, authorizes a rogue branch of the
FBI to silence "the pied pipers of
rock and roll" through dubious
subterfuge and assassination.
Wow!
Who's
the mastermind behind it?
Larry
Buchanan. You know, Zontar, The
The Eye Creatures, and Mars Needs
Women.
Hey!
Wait! Don't click off! Come back here.
Okay,
okay, stink bomb that it is, this film has
been a Holy Grail for me for a long time.
A
good friend of mine once said, "There
are only two kinds of music in this world:
good music and bad music." And I
couldn’t agree with him more. My taste
in music is about as eclectic as my taste
in film. From AC/DC to Zevon,
Dean Martin to Southern Culture
on the Skids and Link Wray to Glen
Miller and, well, you get the picture.
Frequent
readers of this site know that I do not
put the Beatles up on a pedestal. (Elvis
on the other hand...) I’m more
into the eras that came before they hit
big and after they went transcendental. I
favor the early rock-n-roll of Elvis
Presley, Buddy Holly and Link
Wray, but I also dig the psychedelic
music of the '60s along the lines of The
Mamas and Papas, Cream and Hendrix.
Now, I’ll
admit I haven’t really heard a lot of
Joplin, and I like my Doors in
small doses -- as another good friend of
mine put it, "You can only listen to
circus music for so long." (In
reference to Ray Manzarek’s repeating
organ licks.)
Okay,
where was I?
Oh,
yeah, Holy Grail.
Back
in college, I teamed up with my good buddy
Naked
Bill to create a cartoon for the
school paper. Comic book and Elvis geeks
that we were, we kicked around the idea of
having the Big-E as a super-hero. We
kicked the idea around some more over a
few pitchers of beer at Murphy’s, and
came upon the inspired idea of having a
band of super-heroes based on deceased
rock and roll legends. For villains, we
decided to have them fight what we
considered to be the evil music groups
that were dominating the charts at the
time. Thus
Atomic Jukebox was born. It
was the Presleyterians (the good
guys) versus the Evil Dr. Bolton
and his dastardly Top 40 Gang. (It
was well received by the student body and
even won a couple of awards.)
Now,
I’d heard about and seen brief clips of
a film that alleged the government had
killed Hendrix, Joplin and Morrison -- and
I know that influenced the forming of the
strip. Hendrix made the team as The
Purple Haze, a flaming-guitar surfing
mad-man. (I
point out this character came out about 8
years before Val Hallan rode his Axe on
the Justice
Friends.)
Morrison obviously made it as the
Lizard King, a man transformed into a
lizard after ingesting some bad peyote. Alas,
Joplin didn’t make the cut because aside
of making her a witch called Pearl, and
having an invisible plane that only
Morrison could see, there wasn’t much to
do with her (so Buddy Holly and
Mama Cass rounded out the cast.)
We’ve
kicked around the idea of Atomic
Jukebox II: Disco Armageddon,
and actually have a rough-draft pounded
out, somewhere, so it may see the light of
day -- someday. In the interim, I had
framed some of the original drawings for Atomic
Jukebox and hung them up around the
house, and whenever I’d look at them,
I’d think about the mystery film that I
never could find a clue to its identity,
anywhere, in my B-movie compendiums. But with
the advent of the web I finally took one
day and worked the IMDB
over and finally found it listed under the
alternate title, Down
on Us.
It was a happy day, and even though I
discovered it was a Larry Buchanan
special, I still tried to track it down. (Like
the Doors, I like my Larry Buchanan
movies in very small doses.) After
two years of fruitless searching, I
finally found the damn thing at the local
video store, right under my nose, the
whole time. Some genius stuck it in the
small classics section. Right between Ben-Hur
and Casablanca
sat Beyond
the Doors.
Well,
I expected the worst and wasn’t
disappointed.
All
the Buchanan trademarks are there: one
familiar set, static shots, and tons of
bad dialogue. Allen does an okay Hendrix,
and, despite the script she’s forced to
recite, Meryl is actually quite good as
Joplin (especially when she talks
about how lonely she is). Wolf,
however, is completely laughable as the
morose Morrison with his constant
comparing of everything to napalm. And I
can’t quite decide if they’re singing
on their own or if it’s canned. (All
the songs are pretty low on the groups’
hit lists.)
You’d
think that such a great idea would
translate into a better film, but leave it
to Buchanan to take such an inspired
premise and make it so utterly and
completely dull.
Buchanan
got his start by directing films for American
International Pictures, including Free
White and 21
where the audience got to choose the fate
of a man of color accused of raping a
white girl. He made his reputation by
filming no-budget 16mm color remakes of
old AIP science fiction films for
television. The
Day the World Ended
became In
the Year 2889,
while The
She-Creature
and It
Conquered the World
became Creature
of Destruction
and
Zontar, the Thing from Venus.
But the most well known rehash, thanks to
the Brains at MST3k, is the remake
of Invasion
of the Saucermen
as Attack
of the the Eye Creatures.
This
wasn’t Buchanan’s first foray into
skewed celebrity bio-pics. Who can forget
Misty Rowe’s (of
Hee-Haw
fame) tour de force as Marilyn
Monroe in Goodbye,
Norma Jean
that he cannibalized later for Good
Night Sweet Marilyn.
In that one, Marilyn, too, was bumped off
by the government with a lethal
suppository.
(Jeez, you just can’t make this stuff
up.) Buchanan’s
other passion seems to be the conspiracy
surrounding the JFK assassination with
films like The
Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald
and Naughty
Dallas
-- which featured a lot of the strippers
from Jack Ruby’s night club
I
believe Larry did a little homework for Beyond
the Doors.
Some of the incidents hold true to
history, while others are based on
folklore and urban legends of the musical
giants -- and quite a few dramatic
liberties. Unfortunately, Larry seems to
be more concerned with shots of topless
groupies (and
one disturbing bottomless groupie),
than unraveling any great
conspiracy in Beyond
the Doors.
The only real conspiracy, here, is that SAME
mystery television set that just HAPPENS
to be everywhere the singers are. (I’m
also amazed that the concert stage looks
exactly the same in New York, Florida,
England and Woodstock.)
Actually,
as far as Buchanan films go, this one is
pretty good. But again, that isn’t
saying very much. It is better than
anything Oliver Stone has put out on the
subject. Sorry kids, aside from his
Vietnam films, I personally can’t stand
his self-indulgent crap. You see kids,
Buchanan makes exploitative bull-crap, and
to me, Stone makes the same exploitative
bull-crap but he and critics claim it's
high art. Whatever, dude.
I
am glad that I finally managed to track a
copy down, and I’m happy to cross
another film off the gotta see list. So
why am I not real happy about Beyond
the Doors?
Well, it's simple, really. What is
unfortunate about the whole thing is that
the film really is such a great idea,
and I just wish it could have been
executed a little better.
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