Philippe Mora double post: THE BEAST WITHIN (1982) and MAD DOG MORGAN (1976)
Posted by Daniel Metz
This past week, we were lucky enough to have been visited by directer Philippe Mora, who’s Howling 2 pleased both a Terror Thursday and Terror Tuesday audience. Mora is a hilarious storyteller, and the comments he made on the Ritz stage had both Tuesday and Wednesday night crowds in stitches. Zack and Lars did a fine job conducting the discussions, too.
I usually enjoy writing about the Alamo’s weekly late night series, Terror Tuesday and Weird Wednesday. Sometimes I defer to Stephen when he has got particularly good insight onto some element of the film, as in his excellent post about Klaus Kinski in Crawlspace. In general, though, I think these shows represent a uniquely Austin tradition that sets our website apart from other, lesser sites, and I think it is essential to go to and post about these shows.
A scene from Mora's Howing 2
Unfortunately, this week, Stephen and I were both thoroughly unimpressed with the film choices. We loved hearing Mora, and would probably go to another one of his films just to hear him speak. But we were left cold both nights, feeling that Mora’s directorial style leaves much to be desired. He leaves great sections of exposition out, weaving almost-impressionist pictures out of gritty genre pieces. This could be interesting in the right circumstances (I would love to watch Mad Dog Morgan on some kind of psycho-hallucinogen, for instance), but in general it demonstrates that the films were made by someone who doesn’t care about the conventions of coherent storytelling.
The Beast Within – Dir. Philippe Mora
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 3/2/10, 10:00pm
A cult classic that left me surprising cold, The Beast Within is the only cicada horror film I have ever seen or that has ever been made. The picture is a low budget transformation horror film, a la early David Cronenberg. Here, though, there is also the mad, possessed, restrained protagonist I remember from Bob Clark’s Dead of Night.
The film is violent and somewhat gory, and it involves the love child of a raped woman and a mutant-bug-killer. The story gets itself wrapped in a strange town-revenge story that I didn’t care to follow although I doubt it would have allowed me to.
The beast! Looks scary, don't he?
The only thing I absolutely loved from the film was a character named Dexter. Dexter was a mortician in the film before he gets killed by the beast. He is played by a young Luke Askew, who you may/should know as the craziest character on television, Hollis Greene of “Big Love.” I am not joking about that. Hollis Greene is nuts. Askew’s Dexter is not incredibly memorable, but his voice, like on the TV show, is haunting original.
Oh, also, one line in the film, when the unknowing beast is trying to seduce a fairly beautiful ingenue. She says, “nobody goes down there, not even to pick blackberries, it’s all full of briars.” How much of that sentence do you understand?
Mad Dog Morgan – Dir. Philippe Mora
Alamo Drafthouse Ritz, 3/3/10, 11:59pm
This Australian film was heavily hyped as a wild and crazy film starring Dennis Hopper. Hopper plays the titular Mad Dog, a crossroads robber in 1860s New South Wales. His turn as Morgan is admittedly inspired. Hopper is convincingly doglike and also mad.
The film has its relationships with other movies: El Topo, Bonnie and Clyde, Blue Velvet, Che, Robin Hood, The Good The Bad and the Ugly, Une aventure de Billy le Kid, etc. You figure out who influenced, was influenced, or hasn’t heard of who.
Dennis Hopper as a morose bandit.
There is one scene where Morgan reads a story about Abraham Lincoln. He says, “I like this fellow, I can look like this fellow.” He then proceeds to shave off his mustache to have just a beard, as Lincoln did. I really like this scene a lot. The idea of looking like people you admire is very cute in the 19th century, although it is obviously super lame now. Poser.
Oh, there is one thing really worth mentioning about this film. The final line: “And don’t forgot the scrotum.” Apparently Mad Dog Morgan’s man purse was turned into a tobacco pouch by his insane captors. I suspect that this myth is the reason Mora wanted to make the film in the first place.
