Fallen Hearts (MarVista Entertainment, Really Real, Temple Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. last night Lifetime broadcast the third installment of their complete adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ (and Andrew Neiderman’s) Casteel family saga, Fallen Hearts. V. C. Andrews’ posthumous career has been a particularly mean and exploitative instance of a publisher and a literary estate not being willing to let a popular author’s name die simply because the author herself did — so much so that the Internal Revenue Service sued the Andrews estate and successfully won a judgment that her name had such established commercial value it should be valued as an asset for income tax purposes. Apparently Andrews herself completed the first two books in the Casteel cycle, Heaven and Dark Angel, before her death from breast cancer at age 63 on December 19, 1996, and she left behind a partially finished manuscript for the third book in the cycle, Fallen Hearts. The book was finished and put in publishable form by a ghost-writer, Andrew Neiderman, hired by the estate to write “new” V. C. Andrews novels — though as the various cycles of Andrews’ work (she usually wrote in five-novel cycles, a continuous tetralogy followed by a prequel giving the backstory of what happened before book one — a structure copied by Maze Runner author James Dashner) have wound down it’s become less clear how much of Neiderman’s work is finishing Andrews’ incomplete manuscripts, how much is writing from her outlines, and how much is solely Neiderman’s invention. If Fallen Hearts — at least the film version thereof (I’ve never read any of the works of “V. C. Andrews,” whether by her or Neiderman, and I have a lot of other things I want to read before I get to them) — is any indication, Neiderman not only got Andrews’ formula down pat but ramped up the intensity as well as the sheer unbelievability that gives these stories camp appeal. 

Let’s see if I can remember everything that happens in Fallen Hearts: at the start V. C. Andrews’ heroine, Heaven Casteel Van Vereen (Annalise Basso, whom I suspect is potentially a better actress than this role has allowed her to be), has just graduated from college, courtesy of Tony Tatterton (Jason Priestley, 49-year-old former teen idol who’s also the director of this film — and imdb.com lists at least five previous TV-movie credits for him as director as well as quite a few episodes of TV series he was on and also directed), a fabulously wealthy toy manufacturer who lives in Farthinghale, an estate in New England, and whom Heaven ended up with after her previous foster mother died and her foster father walked out on her after seducing her. He’s introduced to her as her “step-grandfather” since he’s married to Heather’s aunt Jillian (Kelly Rutherford), but it turns out midway through Dark Angel that Tony is actually Heaven’s biological father — Jillian had hired her niece Leigh Casteel as a maid and Tony had seduced her (or vice versa — in V. C. Andrewsland it’s never quite clear whether the sub-teen girls the older guys have sex with are victims or deliberate seducers), forcing her to break off her affair with Tony’s brother Troy (Jason Cermak) and sending her back to the Casteel family’s home town of Winnerow, West Virginia (Andrews’ taste in place names is as tacky as her taste in people’s names), where she married Luke Casteel (Chris William Martin) and died giving birth to Heaven. Luke always blamed Heaven for murdering his wife, though that didn’t stop him from marrying again and having four kids of his own, including Fanny (Jessica Clement) and Tom (Matthew Nelson-Mahood). 

Luke essentially sold his two older daughters to other families — Heaven to the Van Vereens and Fanny to the local reverend (Todd Thomson), who raped her the first night he had her under his roof and got her pregnant, then claimed the child as his and his barren wife’s own (and bribed Fanny $10,000 to give up parental rights, which Fanny soon blew on bad men and, we assume, drugs) — so he could fulfill his life-long dream by buying a circus (a seedy, rundown one), and he got Tom to abandon his dreams of going to college and instead hired Tom for his circus as a clown. Heaven reunites with Fanny, who’s become a money-grubbing bitch, who assigns her to go to the reverend and buy back Fanny’s kid — but Heaven cops out because she doesn’t want to pull the poor child away from the only family she’s ever known and because she doesn’t think living with Fanny and her biker boyfriend de jour would be better for her. Got all that? That’s just the backstory! Fallen Hearts starts with Heaven returning to Winnerow in the company of her fiancé, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger), determined to become a schoolteacher there and raise the town’s overall education level as well as trying to bridge the gap between the “hill people” from whom the Casteels derived and the more cosmopolitan “town people” of Winnerow itself. 

Logan, you’ll remember, was Heaven’s high-school sweetheart in episode one until he caught her in an affair with her foster-father Cal, whereupon he immediately broke up with her, but he’s kept an interest in her and midway through Dark Angel decided to forgive her and start up his own affair with her. (The script by Scarlett Lacey, adapted from Andrews’ and Neiderman’s mumbo-jumbo, shows us Heaven being continually upset when people call her a slut, but judging from the sheer number of boyfriends she has in the story, it would seem they have a point.) At the start of Fallen Hearts Heaven is still bitter at Luke for the way he sold off his daughters to richer men to finance his dream of owning a circus, and how Luke sucked Heaven’s (putative) brother Tom into joining the circus with him instead of going off to college and making something of himself. So she decides to get her revenge by dressing up in her late mother’s wedding gown, putting on a black wig to make her more resemble her mom (though Annalise Basso’s red sideburns still poke through under the wig, a “revealing mistake” I posted to imdb.com), and showing up at Luke’s circus to make him think she’s the ghost of his late wife come back to haunt him. Only Heaven gets more carnage than she bargained for: she makes her appearance at the circus just when Luke has opened the cage of the circus’s one lion, presumably to feed him, and when Luke sees Heaven dressed to look like her mom Luke is so transfixed he forgets that the lion’s cage is still open. The lion escapes and Luke grabs a gun and shoots it, but also fatally wounds Luke’s son Tom — and of course everyone, including Heaven herself, blames Heaven for Tom’s death. At Tom’s funeral Fanny confronts Heaven and says that since Heaven wasn’t there for her when Fanny needed her, Fanny is going to exact her own revenge against Heaven — which she proceeds to do by seducing Lucas Stonewall and getting pregnant by him. (Fanny has a rich fiancé of her own, Randall [Kurt Szarka], but we’re told he can’t have kids.) 

Meanwhile Heaven goes back to Tony Tatterton’s estate outside Boston and arrives there just in time to witness the death of Tony’s wife Jillian, who stepped up the pace at which she was drinking herself to death by switching from wine to gin (though still drinking it in wine glasses) until she finally accomplishes it while Heaven is staying there. Heaven talks Tony into bankrolling a new venture: he’ll build a factory in Winnerow to manufacture a new line of dolls based on the “willies,” traditional hand-crafted dolls made by the “hill people” around the town, and appoint Heaven and Logan Stonewall to co-manage it. Only while Heaven is on the Tatterton estate she runs into her old boyfriend, uncle Troy, who apparently committed suicide after Heaven rejected him at the end of Dark Angel. But, withdrawing the deposit V. C. Andrews and Andrew Neiderman made into the cliché bank by showing a fruitless search for his body where he supposedly drowned himself, they and Scarlett Lacey have Troy turn up alive, skulking around the Tatterton estate and hiding out in his old digs — a cabin separated from the main house by a garden maze — where Tony had been having Heaven and Logan stay until he sent Logan back to Winnerow for the ground-breaking and kept Heaven in New England (which is how Heaven’s putative sister Fanny got her hooks into Logan).

The inevitable — at least for a V. C. Andrews woman (one wonders why a woman writer wrote her woman characters with so little agency) — occurs and Troy and Heaven get it on one last time. Did I tell you this “one last time” gets Heaven pregnant with Troy’s child? She’s a V. C. Andrews character, isn’t she? So both Heaven and Fanny are carrying children sired by men other than the ones they’re officially committed to, and if that isn’t enough plot for you, Luke (ya remember Luke?) and his third wife conveniently die and Heaven determines to get custody of their child, Drake (unidentified on imdb.com), after having already offered Fanny $2,500 per month to take care of Logan’s child by her and keep quiet about the kid’s true parentage. Only, at the big party to celebrate the opening of the new Tatterton Toys factory in Winnerow, Fanny kidnaps Drake and, after an even more nasty confrontation between the sisters than we’ve seen before, the case ends up in court despite the warning of Heaven’s attorney that if she sues Fanny to get back Drake, all the family’s dirty secrets will come out, including the true fathers of both Heaven’s and Fanny’s babies, Fanny’s years working as a prostitute to support herself, and ultimately Heaven’s own true parentage. Heaven agrees to settle the case once her attorney tells her that she has no claim to Drake’s custody since she isn’t a blood Casteel, and she offers Fanny $1 million for Drake. (Yes, her actual father is loaded, but where on earth is Heaven getting this kind of money to throw around? Even if she’s his only heir, she’d still have to wait for him to croak before she could acquire and spend his fortune.) Fanny savors the irony of Heaven being in the business of buying and selling children — exactly the crime she condemned her (foster-)father Luke for, but eventually Fanny agrees to take the money and this bizarrely melodramatic film (even by Lifetime standards!) lurches to the end. 

It seems that Lifetime started their “Book to Screen” series on a high point (with Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, Tracy McMillan’s clever adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic to the modern-day 1 percent of Atlanta’s Black community) and has trailed its way down since, landing on a writer who has nothing in common with Jane Austen except a gender and the first letter of her last name. That’s pretty much how this episode ends, though afterwards Lifetime showed a preview clip from episode four, Gates of Paradise (for which Andrew Neiderman claimed no more than “inspiration” from the late V. C. Andrews), in which the plot gets even more hysterical (in both senses: insane and campy): in that one, it seems, Heaven ends up in an auto accident on her way up to Farthinghale, loses her ability to walk, is in a wheelchair and is now being tyrannized by her biological dad, Tony Tatterton (and there are hints from the preview footage that being able to play an out-and-out villain in episode four turned Jason Priestley on more than the merely prissy spoiled rich boy he was in episodes two and three). Fallen Hearts is the sort of movie you watch as if it were a car crash: you’re at once sickened by the situation and revolted at yourself for being gripped by it and unable to turn yourself away. As the writers pile on insanely melodramatic situation on top of insanely melodramatic situation, the actors mostly seem to forget everything they’ve ever learned about acting: one can almost sense them thinking, “Get my line out … hit my mark … turn to the person I’m supposed to be talking to … get my line out and hit my mark again.” Like Dark Angel — in which the actor who stood out was Kelly Rutherford, who’s just as good here but gets too little screen time before she croaks — Fallen Hearts has one genuinely good performance: this time it’s by Jessica Clement as Fanny. Casteel, alone among the people in this movie, has found a way to reconcile the aspects of a V. C. Andrews character: her sexuality, her sleaziness, her greed and the traumas she’s lived with all her life that have made her that way and shaped her evil. Other than that, the acting in this movie is at a strictly professional level, not downright bad but not particularly good either. 

I’ve long had a theory that actor-directors seem to have a unique gift in getting understated performances out of their casts — even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles. Among modern-day (albeit getting on in years) actor-directors I’ve especially liked Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford for not only selecting compelling stories to film for their movies in which they direct but don’t act (and sometimes, like Redford’s The Horse Whisperer, in which they direct and do act) but for getting their actors to play in subtle and understated ways. Alas, either Jason Priestley doesn’t have the chops in terms of working with fellow actors Eastwood and Redford do or — as I suspect — he realized early on in this project that a V. C. Andrews/Andrew Neiderman story requires a certain amount of scenery-chewing and that trying to get understated performances from his cast would have only made the movie seem even sillier. No doubt there’s still an audience for this sort of Southern-fried Gothic melodrama — Lifetime’s first foray into Andrewsiana, Flowers in the Attic (based on Andrews’ 1979 debut novel) and the sequel Petals in the Wind were huge ratings winners for them (apparently they filmed the other three books in that sequence, but I never saw them) — but I’ve found myself alternately infuriated by the movies in the Casteel sequence and drawn to them in a sick fascination, wondering just how low these storytellers can go and how many plot contrivances they can stick on top of each other until Il Trovatore looks like cinema verité by comparison.

By the Time We Got to Woodstock …

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

I first heard of the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival about a month before it happened, when I was hanging out at an alternative radical office in San Francisco and seeing newspapers from the underground press of 1969. Along with the usual political and cultural articles, and ads promoting “head shops” and other businesses of political appeal to the hippie and radical communities, was an engaging listing of quite a few major rock and folk-music acts scheduled to perform at a three-day series of concerts. I briefly was tempted to go, until I realized that as a kid just about to turn 16 in a city on the opposite end of the country from where it was supposed to take place, there was no practical way for me to get there or to survive alone that far from home.

A lot of people did make that journey, though, and I saw quite a few of them on film in a documentary PBS-TV aired August 6, 2019. I found myself responding to the sheer beauty of the people in these pictures, and having a pang of regret that all those young, beautiful men and women showcasing their bodies for the camera are now, if still alive, my age or older and their looks have probably declined as much as mine have. “Woodstock” has become a touchstone of the history of the 1960’s, mythologized in shows like this one as a sort of perfect, albeit temporary, community in which people came together, survived unspeakably awful conditions and, at least for a few days, lived together in the spirit of “peace, love and music” promised by the event’s iconic poster and logo: a dove perched on the neck of a guitar.

I’m eccentric enough — and always have been — that my response to Woodstock and the counter-cultural ferment around it was a bit unusual then and remained so still. I remember the late 1960’s as a time of great political and social ferment, in which I aligned myself with the Left at least partly as what had been called in the 1950’s a “red-diaper baby.” My mother was active in the civil-rights and anti-war movements — she broke up with her second husband, my stepfather, largely over political differences. We had radical publications like Ramparts and El Malcriado (the newsletter of the United Farm Workers and its founders, César Chávez, Larry Itliong and Dolores Huerta) around the house and I read them regularly.

We lived in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, but when my mom and my stepdad broke up she chose to move us into Marin City. Marin City was an almost exclusively African-American enclave built into a sort of natural dish-shaped crater between Sausalito and the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been created in the 1940’s to house Black workers building ships for World War II, and when I grew up there in the late 1960’s it was dominated by four or five giant housing projects that even then already had a reputation as unsafe environments haunted by drugs and crime. Mom’s interesting but ultimately unsuccessful experiment in personal integration just encouraged my introversion; having little in common with the people around me (and not just because almost all of them were Black), I withdrew that much more into myself and the books and magazines I read incessantly.

San Francisco was just down Highway 101 and the Golden Gate Bridge from where I lived, but I rarely got down there unless my mother drove me. As a member of the counterculture herself, she took me to a surprising number of musical events, including the 1966 Berkeley Folk Festival at which I saw the first incarnation of the greatest 1960’s San Francisco rock band, the Jefferson Airplane. I remember one day when the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead alternated sets at a free concert in Golden Gate Park, but because it was a school day I didn’t see any of it except the last set by the Airplane, including their then-new lead singer, Grace Slick, performing “White Rabbit.”

But at the same time I was discovering the new rock ’n’ roll, I was also reaching back into music history and discovering the jazz of the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s. Part of that came from my mother, who still had a lot of the 78 rpm records she’d grown up with. I remember hearing Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording “Strange Fruit” on my mom’s original Commodore 78 and realizing with a start that it was a social-protest song denouncing lynching. (We 1960’s kids thought Bob Dylan had invented social-protest music, though we had a dim awareness that a couple of guys named Guthrie and Seeger might have done some things along that line before him.) I remember my mom telling me she’d played that record in the 1940’s and people had told her, “They’re just kidding. Those things don’t happen. Not in America.”

In 1969 I was developing a schizoid musical taste, enjoying some current acts my mom liked (The Beatles and Bob Dylan) as well as some she didn’t (The Rolling Stones and The Doors) while simultaneously reaching backwards into the musical archives. Part of it was encouraged by a high-school English teacher who was also a semi-professional jazz pianist. Tasked by the official curriculum with teaching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, he took Fitzgerald’s reputation as chronicler of “the Jazz Age” (a phrase Fitzgerald coined) seriously and encouraged his class in general, and me in particular, to explore the music of Fitzgerald’s time. Inevitably I saw ironic parallels between the youth rebellion of the 1920’s and that of the 1960’s, and when we read Fitzgerald’s short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” I loved the fact that in the middle of an era in which young men were showing their rebellion by growing their hair long, we were reading a story about an era in which young women were showing their rebellion by cutting their hair short.

The Story and the Legend

After seeing that one ad in an underground newspaper, the next time I heard about Woodstock was while it was happening. Like most mainstream papers around the country, the San Francisco Chronicle front-paged the news reports of the festival, focusing on the unspeakable conditions: the rain, the mud, the overall disorder that had turned what was supposed to be a money-making capitalist venture into a mess, and above all the sheer number of people who’d shown up. Part of the mythology of Woodstock was that 500,000 people showed up; more sober, fact-based estimates of the crowd put it at 350,000, but that was still about seven times more than the organizers had expected.

Woodstock was the brainchild of four young men in New York City: John Rosenman, John Roberts, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld. Rosenman was a worker in the financial services industry who had suddenly inherited $250,000 from the estate of his mother at a time when that was real money. He and Roberts were sufficiently aware of the growing popularity of rock music that they decided building a recording studio where rock bands could work would be a sound investment. They opened MediaSound Studios in New York City and then decided to build a branch studio in upstate New York, where band members could live and relax in a comfortable rural environment while going through the increasingly complex process of recording state-of-the-art music.

They decided to build their second studio in Woodstock, New York, a small community known for decades as an artists’ hangout. Woodstock was already a legendary name in rock history because it was the home of Albert Grossman, Bob Dylan’s manager. Grossman’s estate included a barn nicknamed “Big Pink” where Dylan had gone to recover after a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 1966. He and his backing group, an ensemble of four Canadians and one Arkansan collectively known as “The Band,” hung out there in 1967 and recorded the so-called “Basement Tapes,” rough-hewn performances that started to dribble out in 1970 on officially unauthorized bootleg LP’s. (A lot of people, including me, later suspected that Dylan himself was putting out these bootlegs because he wanted to make available performances his official record company, Columbia, didn’t think were technically well recorded enough for release.)

Rosenman and Roberts brought along two partners, Michael Lang and Artie Kornfeld, to organize what they originally planned as a small-scale concert featuring Dylan, The Band and other rock talents who occasionally hang out in Woodstock to celebrate the opening of the Woodstock studio when it was finished. The idea soon snowballed into a giant concert in its own right, to be held in a pastoral environment instead of the fairgrounds and racetracks that had hosted previous attempts at rock festivals. (Lang and Kornfeld had previously promoted one in Miami that had been rained out on the second day, though it inspired their headliner, Jimi Hendrix, to write the song “Rainy Day, Dream Away.”)

The original plan for the location was a rather dowdy-looking farm outside Wallkill, a neighboring town to Woodstock, but the Wallkill City Council, horrified by the size of the event and the countercultural hippie audience it was likely to draw, passed an ordinance forbidding gatherings of more than 5,000 people within city limits. The four promoters flew by helicopter over the area and spotted several large patches of land. The owner who was willing to rent to them was Max Yasgur, owner of a dairy farm and milk business in Bethel, New York. Yasgur was a lifelong Republican but enough of a libertarian he thought the Woodstock promoters had been unfairly treated by Wallkill; he cut a deal to rent his farm for the festival.

Unfortunately, the deal had taken so long that the promoters didn’t have time to set up the site adequately. They weren’t able to get an established food-service firm to cater the event and feed its attendees, so they hired a three-person hippie enterprise called Food for Love. Deciding that traditional security people in police-style uniforms would only intimidate the crowd, they made a deal with the Hog Farm Collective, a local commune headed by a charismatic man whose real name was Hugh Romney but who called himself “Wavy Gravy” (and whose missing front teeth themselves became an iconic image of Woodstock), to secure the site and stop people from making trouble by talking themselves out of it. The promoters had been aware that providing restroom facilities would be an issue — one had even prepared by visiting Yankee Stadium, standing outside the restrooms, and not only counting how many people used them but timing them to see how long they took — but they realized they couldn’t provide anywhere near enough port-a-potties to meet the demand, so they did the best they could.

Woodstock so caught the imaginations of members of the counter-culture that as early as a week before the festival, the roads into Bethel were jammed with people heading there. Cars couldn’t get within miles of the site, so the people who had driven there gave up and walked the rest of the way. As one of the promoters told the makers of the PBS documentary, with just four days to go before the festival they realized they didn’t have time to build both a stage for the performers and a perimeter fence to keep out people who hadn’t paid admission. (The tickets were priced at $6 per day, or a three-day pass for $18. Isn’t inflation a bitch?) They figured that if they couldn’t enforce an admission charge, they’d take a financial bath on the festival — but if they didn’t have a stage, they couldn’t present the musical acts and they would risk both a riot on scene and a later lawsuit for false advertising.

So, under the supervision of “Chip” Monck — whose innovative stage, lighting and sound designs did more than any other individual to make outdoor rock concerts possible — the organizers assembled both paid crew and volunteers to work around the clock 24/7 to assemble the festival stage. Then they had another problem: the horrendous traffic jams surrounding the site made it impossible for anyone to get through, including the musicians who were supposed to perform. Though a now-forgotten band named Sweetwater was supposed to open the festival, the promoters put on African-American folksinger Richie Havens first simply because he was the only musician who’d been able to get there — and while the promoters arranged to fly in their other performers by helicopter, Havens ran through his entire repertoire and then made up a new song, “Freedom,” on the spot, basing a good chunk of it on the old Black spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.”

Eventually the other acts did fly in, and they were a who’s-who of the rock world in 1969. While the very biggest names in the rock world — the Beatles, Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan — didn’t perform at Woodstock, the ones who did included Jimi Hendrix; Crosby, Stills and Nash (who’d completed their first album before Woodstock but had never played together live before); Jefferson Airplane; Grateful Dead; Creedence Clearwater Revival; Country Joe and the Fish; The Who; Janis Joplin; Sly and the Family Stone; The Chambers Brothers; Joe Cocker; The Band; Ten Years After; Canned Heat; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band; Sha Na Na; Arlo Guthrie; Tim Hardin; Melanie; Johnny Winter; Ravi Shankar (a performer of the classical music of his native India who’d got admitted into the rock pantheon when the Beatles’ George Harrison sponsored him and learned to play Shankar’s instrument, the sitar); and other, now-forgotten acts like Quill, Sweetwater, Mountain, the Incredible String Band, and The Grease Band.

The Legend Gets Built — and Sold

The 2019 PBS documentary Woodstock — not to be confused with the 1970 film that compiled footage of some of the performances — describes the build-up to the festival as one misfortune after another, one hair’s-breath avoidance of total disaster after another, and an event that lived fondly in counter-culture memories but also left a total mess behind in its wake. The film ends with some of the forlorn attempts to clean up the site after the festival and give poor Max Yasgur back his land as something he might conceivably raise dairy cows in again. It does not mention the mythologization of “Woodstock” that converted it into the profitable capitalist enterprise it was always intended to be.

Before the festival, the promoters had cut a deal with a filmmaker named Michael Wadleigh to shoot a movie of the festival and see if he could place it with a major studio for release. Wadleigh’s main credential was that in 1966 he had shot an hour-long black-and-white documentary about the great jazz bassist Charles Mingus whose emotional climax showed Mingus being evicted from his loft apartment in New York City, with the scores of his composition blowing away in the wind as he waited forlornly to have them picked up. Warner Bros., the legendary studio that had just been acquired by a parking-lot owner named Kinney Corporation. agreed not only to distribute the Woodstock movie but also to release some of the performances on record as a three-LP set.

This required getting the artists who’d performed at the festival to sign releases to allow their work to be included in the film. Some of them refused — notably Janis Joplin, who had thought her performance at Woodstock was terrible. In his book Beyond Normal the late Gale Whittington, who along with my friend the late Leo Laurence helped found the Gay Liberation movement in San Francisco in March 1969 (four months before the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City) and led the first demonstrations against a private employer for anti-Queer discrimination, recalled running into Janis as he was selling copies of the Berkeley Barb underground paper on the streets of San Francisco.

She was arguing with a man, accusing him of having talked her into performing at Woodstock and doing an awful set that would just ruin her career — and Whittington recalled being disillusioned at seeing that a major star he’d admired and revered was just a typical human asshole after all. But his account of Janis’s anger seemed to make sense to me: for all her free-wheeling, no-holds-barred image she was also a conscientious performer who cared about how she came off in public, and she hated her Woodstock set so much that in the original version of Wadleigh’s film she did not appear. Later, after she was dead and therefore no longer able to prevent it, Janis appeared in subsequent edits of the movie.

Warner Bros. charged between $3.50 and $5 to see the movie — almost double what a normal first-run feature cost in 1970, when the film was released. (Again, isn’t inflation a bitch?) A group of my radical friends and I decided to protest the ticket price by sneaking into the movie (the only time in my life I’ve done that). To promote the movie, they generated an intense hype surrounding Woodstock that has become an integral part of the 1960’s counter-culture legend to this day. Rolling Stone magazine cooperated with the hype, giving the soundtrack album a rave review and saying it would be the perfect record to play to later generations who wondered what rock music was about and what made it so special. The result was a huge hit of a movie that is continually being re-released in various permutations — and whose royalties at least partially repaid the original Woodstock promoters for their losses on the festival.

Warner Bros. later followed up with another set of LP’s of the Woodstock performances, Woodstock Two, and in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I heard these records again — and was startled at how mediocre most of the performances were. Not that the conditions at the festival were conducive to greatness: the PBS documentary includes scenes of roadies and tech people frantically wrapping the bands’ electronic equipment in tarps to protect it from the rainstorm that hit big-time on Sunday, August 17 the third day of the festival. Flown in by helicopter, given no opportunity for sound checks, and probably having to share a lot of equipment (most musicians are intensely protective and possessive of their own “gear”), it’s a testament to the professionalism of these musicians that they were able to perform at all.

The hype machine needed only one truly great performance to sell the Woodstock movie, and as it turned out they got two. One was the radiant folk-rock harmonies of Crosby, Stills and Nash, not only giving their first live performance but adding Stephen Stills’ former Buffalo Springfield bandmate Neil Young for two songs. (They’d later add him to the lineup and, as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, achieve a reputation as one of the most internally combative bands in rock — so much so that Frank Zappa, in one of his concerts, joked about having “three unreleased recordings of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young fighting in the dressing room at the Fillmore East.”)

The other was Jimi Hendrix, whose performance closed the festival after a Sunday set that had gone on so long that by the time he went on it was already dawn of Monday, August 18. Though it was actually played in the middle of his set, Hendrix’ unforgettable performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was the part that stuck out then and now. One of the festival organizers told PBS that all of a sudden the sound of Hendrix’ guitar playing the national anthem cut through the haze. I remember playing this record for the 20-something man I was briefly dating in 1994 and he noted that through the first half of the song Hendrix played the melody pretty much “straight” — but when he got to the lines, “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” Hendrix sent his hand sliding down the fretboard and actually made his guitar sound like rockets and bombs.

The PBS documentary Woodstock naturally tried to set the political and social context of the 1960’s, including the seemingly never-ending war in Viet Nam and the assassinations of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the hands of Jimi Hendrix, clad in a white fringed outfit that made him look like an almost angelic apparition in the midst of a crowd of people mostly covered in mud, “The Star-Spangled Banner” became a weird song choice that seemed to sum up the whole contradiction of the counter-culture, loving America and the freedoms it offered while simultaneously questioning it for falling far short of its stated ideals. The contradictions within Hendrix himself — not only was he part African-American and part Native American, thereby belonging to two of the most oppressed groups in U.S. history, but he was one of the few 1960’s rock musicians who’d actually served in the U.S. military —just added to the overlay of the contradictions in his audience, his professional situation (like the other Woodstock performers, he was being well paid for his participation in a “free” festival) and the nation’s history at that particularly fraught moment.

Fifty Years On: Woodstock in the Trump Era

The inexorable push of the calendar has brought the 50^th anniversaries of all sorts of major cultural touchstones for those of us who were alive and aware in the 1960’s: the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles (the so-called “White Album”); the Apollo 11 landing on the moon (which was the subject of its own round of retrospective documentaries, not only from PBS from CNN and other sources as well), and the dark sides of the era — the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Manson murders and the attempt by the Rolling Stones to promote their own instant Woodstock at Altamont. I did attend Altamont and have vivid memories of a green-suited young Black man being murdered on stage by the Hell’s Angels the Stones had hired as their “security.” That just upped my level of cynicism about the “Woodstock” hype and the ability of our generation to do a better job of bringing about peace and love than our forebears.

“Woodstock” has become a brand name. Anniversary festivals have been held in 1979, 1989, 1994, 1999, and 2009, and I recently saw a news report that John Fogerty, who as leader of Creedence Clearwater Revival had been the first person to sign up for the original Woodstock, had just dropped out of Woodstock 2019. It’s also become a touchstone for the continuing conflicts between the mainstream culture and the counter-culture. One can’t understand the ascendancy of Donald Trump — and of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes before him — without acknowledging how much of their political power has come from attacking the Woodstock counter-culture.

It’s certainly ironic to hear Joan Baez and Jeffrey Shurtleff singing “Drug Store Truck Driving Man” — a savage and not especially witty satire on Ronald Reagan — on the latest incarnation of the Woodstock recordings when we know the sequel. Reagan, like Nixon before him and the Bushes and Trump afterwards, rode to the governorship of California three years before Woodstock and the presidency 11 years afterwards, largely by exploiting the racial and cultural prejudices of working-class white voters scared that the advances of African-Americans and other historically marginalized minorities were coming at their expense, and that the hippies were throwing away the advantages their parents had worked so hard to give them — including admission to college — on drugs, free sex and bad music.

The modern-day Republican party is still fueling its ascendancy by “hooking” the racial and cultural prejudices of working-class white voters. It’s true that there are almost no real-life hippies left for them to rail against, but with the rise of the Queer rights movement in the 1970’s the prejudices against the counter-culture simply shifted from anti-hippie to anti-Queer. Donald Trump and his supporters — including virtually the entire Republican Party — are simply the latest and most determined culture warriors aiming to wipe out the entire political and cultural legacy of the 1960’s and get people of color either out of the country altogether or back to the back of the bus where they “belong,” end all this “nonsense” about women having the right to control their careers or even control their bodies, and drive Queers back to the closet and to disgrace or suicide.

Woodstock — both the reality and the hype — seem in a lot of ways to belong to a long-lost cultural era. Because the hothouse atmosphere of the 1960’s had brought about such an incredible expansion in young people’s sense of the possibilities — political, economic, racial, cultural, sexual and, alas, pharmaceutical — a lot of us back then thought the possibilities would just keep on expanding and the world would fundamentally change without the bother, brutality and bloodshed of violent revolution. Alas, we underestimated not only the remarkable ability of the capitalist system to grab hold of our rebellion and sell it back to us as a commodity, but also the depth of the commitment of our adversaries in the “mainstream” culture and their determination to reverse the social and cultural gains of the 1960’s and thus “make America great again.”

As I write this, I’m listening to the three-CD set that’s the latest incarnation of the Woodstock recordings. They sound better to me now than they did in the 1980’s; what seemed on that go-round as the professionalism of musicians doing their best to perform under awful conditions (the truly inspired sets by Hendrix — who for contractual reasons involving his estate doesn’t appear on the new version of the album — and Crosby, Stills and Nash excepted) now comes off as an appealing raggedness that makes the musicians seem more human. At the same time, there’s a tragic cast to the Woodstock recordings from the number of the performers — including Hendrix, Joplin, Alan Wilson (the appealingly whiny-voiced singer featured on Canned Heat’s performances) and two members of The Who, John Entwistle and Keith Moon — who died well before their times.

I’m not sure what the 20-something people of today would make of the Woodstock recordings. Young people’s whole relationship to music has changed; instead of collecting records they “stream,” and they treat musicians as mere entertainers instead of cultural and social avatars. It’s only on the rare occasions when a modern-day singer is directly confronted by the evils of the world — as Ariana Grande was when her concert in Manchester, England was targeted by terrorists who assassinated 22 members of her audience, and she responded by hosting another concert there weeks later, making it a benefit for the victims’ families, and closing with the 1939 song “Over the Rainbow” (co-written by Leftist E. Y. Harburg and originally sung by Judy Garland, who campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy) — that musicians of today put their art in the service of social ideals beyond safe “benefits” for anti-disease campaigns.

Would today’s youth regard Woodstock as the quaint music their grandparents listened to — as my friends regarded the 1920’s jazz and 1930’s swing music I was starting to like when Woodstock happened? Would they hear the anticipations of heavy-metal in the Who and disco and modern dance-pop in Sly and the Family Stone? Would they like some of it but miss the social significance it had for us 1960’s kids? Would they just hear it as one more element in the universal soundtrack of the computer age, in which just about any song ever recorded is instantly available for a small debit-card charge on a computer? Would they understand how we heard it now that the 1960’s conflicts are something they’ve learned about in American history classes — even though the battle lines that were drawn in the 1960’s still largely rule American politics and culture, and are indeed at the heart of the divide between Donald Trump and his political adversaries?

His Perfect Obsession (NB Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 p.m. I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, which actually turned out to be almost a year old — its “premiere” was on September 3, 2018 and I had downloaded its imdb.com page last January in preparation for a rerun showing then but hadn’t actually watched it. The film was called His Perfect Obsession and was produced by the team of Pierre David and Tom Berry — which meant we could expect elements of Gothic horror as part of the mix along with the usual Lifetime elements of cheating husbands, separated wives, hunky hangers-on, teenage daughters (and their boyfriends) and sinister stalkers. The separated wife is Allison Jones (Ariane Zucker, top-billed), who returns to the small town where she grew up following the death of her aunt. She works as a fashion buyer — the sort of person who takes women with more money than brains out to high-end stores and tells them what clothing to purchase for what occasion — and she’s confronted with the task of raising her teenage daughter Abigail (Ali Skovbye) as a single parent. His Perfect Obsession scores one point for originality in writer-director Alexander Carrière’s script: Abigail has recently gone blind, product of the side effect of an asthma medication that went horribly awry — though Ali Skovbye’s unconvincing attempt to convey blindness consists of waving a blind-person’s cane in front of her as if it’s a metal detector and she’s looking for buried treasure, and giving the camera a blank stare in all her close-ups.

The stalker is Bart McGregor (Brendan Murray), and with his thick black-rimmed glasses he looks less like the usual Lifetime drop-dead gorgeous male villain than a cross between former Senator Al Franken and the similarly obsessed nerd the late Robin Williams played in one of his least-known films, One Hour Photo. It seems that Bart lusted after Allison when both were in high school together, and now that she’s returned home he’s renewed his determination to seduce her and get her to live with him whether she wants that or not. We’re briefly introduced to another potential suitor for Allison, real estate agent Lance Lancaster (Seann Gallagher), who shows up to Allison’s aunt’s home thinking Allison still plans to sell it and asking for the listing; they go to the big maple-syrup pouring at the Sugar Shack restaurant (which seems to be the only option the residents of this generic New England small town — “played” by Ottawa, Canada — have for entertainment), much to Bart’s disappointment. Then Bart hacks Lance’s Facebook page and finds that he’s into dating 20-year-olds and taking revealing photos of himself with his latest conquests; he sends these to Allison and that’s the end of that. But Bart, who’s already eliminated Allison’s husband Wyatt (Tomas Chovanek) after she threw him out for continuing an affair he had promised her he’d stop, ends up with another rival: Ed Sullivan (and yes, it’s jarring to hear him referred to by the name of a celebrity whose Sunday night variety show was almost required viewing in the 1950’s and 1960’s; whatever enduring fame he has comes largely from having introduced the Beatles to U.S. audiences, which as I noted in my blog post on the Beatles’ Ed Sullivan Show appearances is like taking the Revolution to the citadel of the ancien regime — as if the French Revolution had begun with the masses storming Versailles instead of the Bastille), an attractive if not particularly hunky actor who alas is not identified on the imdb.com page for this movie.

Ed runs the local bar and he meets Allison when his son Shane (Mikael Conde) starts taking an interest in Abigail — giving us the impression that the film is heading for an ending that isn’t really incestuous but looks an awful lot like it, in which Allison would pair up with Ed and her daughter would wind up with Ed’s son. That doesn’t happen — though Carrière at least hints at it — and the romantic intrigues just take our attention away from the most powerful parts of the movie, the confrontations between Bart and his (presumably widowed) mother Cecelia (Deborah Grover). It seems that Carrière is enough of a worshiper at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock that he’s going to have his psycho stalker motivated by his love-hate relationship with his equally crazy mom, and that midway through the film he’s going to have Bart knock off Cecelia and thereby turn this from a Strangers on a Train knockoff (psycho under the domination of a living mother) to a Psycho knockoff (psycho under the psychological domination of his dead mother — though she’s still a corporeal presence, albeit as an urn full of cremains instead of a stuffed body hidden in a fruit cellar). Alas, Carrière is yet another director who thinks he’s Hitchcock and isn’t, and his film proceeds to the expected climax in the deserted mountain cabin (this time it’s part of a ranch Bart bought with Cecelia’s money years before), where he’s taken Allison and Abigail after he’s kidnapped them. He’s stocked the place with all their favorite products, including tampons (one of the film’s nicer scenes is Shane getting suspicious when he sees Bart, a single male, in the supermarket buying tampons), matching their brand preferences because he’s somehow got a key to their house and has been letting himself in any time he likes, including one scene in which he grabs Allison’s used bath towel and literally takes it to bed (her bed) with him.

There’s a lot of fooforaw about Bart’s gun (a semi-automatic pistol) and his attempt to entrap Allison and Abigail by leaving bullets that are the wrong caliber for it, so even if they steal the gun (which they do since he hides it singularly obviously in his fishing creel) they won’t be able to use it. (This was preceded by a shot of Bart at home counting out his bullets and laying them out on a table — which after a weekend in which there’d been two major mass shooting incidents, in El Paso, Texas on Saturday and Dayton, Ohio on Sunday, no doubt took on a considerably more macabre cast than Alexander Carrière had intended!) Ed and Shane figure out where Bart’s deserted cabin is by searching the real-estate records from when he bought it, and they run down there to find Allison and Abigail confronting Bart, who’s about to shoot Allison when Abigail shoots him — it’s already established that she’s not only developed extra-sensitive hearing after becoming blind but she’s become a virtual Sherlock Holmes in her ability to make deductions on olfactory as well as auditory evidence — and all ends well. Carrière gets some nice atmospherics into this odd tale, but it still remains just a few fresh wrinkles on the usual Lifetime prune, though at least the acting is better than that in the V. C. Andrews Heaven cycle (mainly because at least most of Carrière’s dialogue is conceivable as the way people actually talk) and Bart, like the Hitchcock psychos that were his characters’ prototypes, underplays the craziness and is chillingly effective — though he could have done more in a script by someone like Christine Conradt who would have given us more of his backstory and made him a character of real dimension.

Dark Angel, a.k.a. V. C. Andrews’ Dark Angel (MarVista Entertainment, Really Real, Temple Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie was Dark Angel, the second in their adaptation of V. C. Andrews’ Casteel quintology dealing with the central character of Heaven Casteel Van Vereen (the bifurcated last name came courtesy of the adoptive parents who raised her in the first book in the cycle, Heaven, and of course being a male in a V. C. Andrews novel daddy Cal Van Vereen found Heaven irresistible and seduced her), who for her senior year in high school is put on a bus to Santa Cruz (though she actually ends up, not in the California town of that name, but still on the East Coast in the environs of Boston) to live out the rest of her minority in the home of her grandmother, Jillian Casteel Tatterton (Kelly Rutherford), and her husband Tony Tatterton (Jason Priestley, the young hottie of Beverly Hills, 90210 turned into an imposing and still attractive middle-aged man). Jillian has it in for Heaven as soon as she arrives at the Tatterton estate, figuring she’s just a young, ignorant hillbilly girl who wants to get her hands on the Tatterton fortune. Tony sticks up for her but makes it clear that if Heaven expects to stay with him and Jillian she’s going to have to be obedient and give him whatever he wants. At first we assume that means he has lascivious designs on her himself, but the truth turns out to be both more sinister and crazier. Tony solemnly instructs Heaven never to go into the hedge maze on his estate (one night after watching Maze Runner: The Death Cure it was odd indeed to see another movie involving a maze and a scared fish-out-of-water teenager intimidated by it!) or visit the crazy brother he’s hidden out in a cottage at the other end of the maze. 

Given that the first episode described Heaven reading Jane Eyre in high school, we’re not surprised that the Tattertons are hiding out a crazy relative in a secret part of their estate — only it’s not a former wife who really is crazy, but a brother, Troy (Jason Cermak), who’s attractive, personable and is the source of the Tattertons’ fortune. The Tattertons own a toy company and it’s Troy who handcrafts the originals for their line of collectors’ dolls that has made them their money. Heaven and Troy start an affair — like a typical V. C. Andrews character, she’ll have sex with any guy who stands over her long enough or just hangs out in her proximity — and Troy tells Heaven that falling in love with her has pulled him out of his lifelong depression. Troy proposes marriage to Heaven and gives her an engagement ring (we get the impression that with his skills as a sculptor he made it himself), and meanwhile Heaven gets an entrée into an exclusive all-girls’ private school in Boston for her final year in high school. Her way is paved by Tony, who’s made a major donation to the school as a veiled but unmistakable bribe to get his foster daughter in — and Heaven manages to graduate at the top of her class despite the bitchy antagonism of a stuck-up blonde who keeps insulting her. Meanwhile, Heaven’s old boyfriend from back home, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger, who looks older in this episode even though he’s the same actor who played him in Heaven), turns up in Boston, and while Heaven sees him with another woman in a coffeehouse in Boston, it turns out Logan still has the hots for Heaven despite having broken up with her in episode one when he realized she was sleeping with Cal. Just after she graduates from that exclusive prep school Tony bought her way into — though he doesn’t show up for the ceremony and Heaven is put out about that — she goes back to the mountain town in the South where she grew up, she crashes her car and Logan rescues her and takes her home. He makes the obligatory pass (for a V. C. Andrews male) on her and she seems to be yielding to him, only she calls him “Troy” and she clearly has the two of them mixed up in her brain (as do we, by the way; director Paul Shapiro and his cinematographer, who’s unlisted on imdb.com even though the camera operators are, shoots Jason Cermak and James Rittinger in such a way that they strongly resemble each other). 

When Heaven returns to the Tattinger estate ready to marry Troy and go to college, Tony drops his bombshell on her, triggered by her admission that when she arrived at the Tatterton manse she lied about her age, saying she was 18 when she was really 16. It seems that Tony is Heaven’s biological father: Jillian hired her daughter — Heaven’s long-dead mom (she died giving birth to Heaven) — as a maid on the estate, only Tony seduced her (or she him, which is the lame excuse he gives for their affair), got her pregnant and therefore Heaven can’t marry Troy since Troy is her uncle. (“Why not?” I found myself asking. “After all, Siegfried was the product of brother-sister incest and he got together with his aunt!”) Tony instructs Heaven to break up with Troy but let him down easily, but instead of telling him the truth Heaven just says, “I can’t marry you,” without bothering to tell him why, and the stress of being told off this way leads Troy to commit suicide. (To paraphrase Dorothy Parker’s marvelous line from the 1937 A Star Is Born, “How do you wire congratulations to the Atlantic Ocean?”) Only we never see Troy’s body, and after Dark Angel was over Lifetime showed a promo for the next film in the cycle, Fallen Hearts, which hinted that Troy may still be alive after all. In the middle of all this there’s a sequence in which Heaven decides to spend her summer vacation between the end of high school and the start of college looking up her (half-)siblings — she knows where they are thanks to a private detective Troy hired to find out — and her sister Fanny has gone through the $10,000 hush money the reverend who raped her gave her for the right to adopt the resulting baby (in V. C. Andrewsland rape seems inevitably to result in pregnancy) and is living with a heavy-set biker type in a trailer. Presumably the two spent the $10,000 on drugs, though we’re not told this. Heaven’s brother Tom (Matthew Nelson-Mahoud) is working for a circus owned by his father Luke (Chris William Martin) and seems more or less content (as content as a V. C. Andrews character ever gets to be, anyway) even though Heaven upbraids him for living his father’s dreams instead of his own. The final scene jumps over the four years Heaven spent in college (much the way Booth Tarkington jumped over George Amberson Minafer’s college years in The Magnificent Ambersons) and shows her graduating — this time Tony Tatterton is at the ceremony, and so is Logan Stonewall, who seems to be still in love with her and interested in getting together with her. 

Dark Angel was apparently the last book V. C. Andrews finished personally before her death from breast cancer in December 1986 — though she’d supposedly begun the next book in the cycle, Fallen Hearts, before her death. Andrews’ publisher, not wishing to let her highly lucrative name die along with its original owner, hired Andrew Neiderman to complete Fallen Hearts and write “new” V. C. Andrews novels from scratch, including the remaining two items in the Casteel quintology, Gates of Paradise and Web of Dreams (the last a prequel in which the central character is Leigh, Heaven’s mother). This is the fourth V. C. Andrews-based movie I’ve suffered through on Lifetime, and it’s marked by an excellent performance by Kelly Rutherford as Jillian Casteel Tatterton, the bitchy grande dame who’s also destroying herself on high-class wine. Somehow Rutherford has managed to figure out a way to bring a V. C. Andrews character to multidimensional life on screen — a task that eludes the other actors in this film (except for the one who plays the blonde bitch who torments Heaven in prep school, who’s also quite good — it’s ironic that in a film based on a novel written by a woman, the two most interesting female characters are also the least sympathetic!), who like their counterparts in Heaven seem midway through the filming just to have given up, realizing they’re never going to be able to enact these preposterous situations or speak the ridiculous dialogue (Scarlett Lacey is the credited screenwriter and, having neither read nor wanted to read the books, I don’t know whether to blame her or Andrews for the almost literally unspeakable lines!) with anything approaching credibility. I’m sure Jason Priestley took this role not only for the money but also hoping it would showcase him and prove he’s more than just an aging ex-teen idol, but it didn’t work: he plays his whole role in a state of stentorian monomania, as if he’s a spoiled brat used to getting his own way and having his orders followed without question. (Maybe he should play Donald Trump.) I probably wouldn’t have watched Dark Angel if I’d had anything better to do last night, but there’s a certain haunting quality to the sheer preposterousness of it all and Andrews’ either inability or disinterest in creating multidimensional characters (except for Jillian) that may lead me to turn on Fallen Hearts after all.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure (Gotham Group, Temple Hill Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On August 2 Charles and I had a rare night home together and we watched the third and final episode of the Maze Runner trilogy, Maze Runner: The Death Cure. We’d seen the first two episodes, The Maze Runner and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, back-to-back on successive nights in January 2015 and I was at least mildly curious as to how the cycle would end even though the omens weren’t good. The Maze Runner began as a dystopian science-fiction young-adult novel written by James Dashner in 2009 that begat three sequelae — The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure and The Kill Order. The first two got filmed in 2014 and 2015, respectively, but the third one had to wait until 2018 before its film incarnation was released — mainly because shortly after the third film, Maze Runner: The Death Cure, started shooting in early 2016 the star, Dylan O’Brien, suffered a major injury from doing the opening action scene — a group of rebel commandos tries to liberate a bunch of kids from a train that is taking them to the headquarters of WCKD (pronounced “wicked”) to use their blood for experiments to find a cure for the Flash virus, a plague that has wreaked havoc on a human race already decimated by a series of solar flares that extinguished virtually all life on earth (I guess all the good apocalypses, including nuclear war and climate change, were already taken). 

Though a small army of stunt performers and stunt coordinators are credited in the final roll, O’Brien insisted on doing his stunt work in this scene himself — and as a result the film had to shut down production for eight months while he recovered enough to play his role. During that time the market for films about teenage rebels against dystopian post-apocalyptic regimes pretty much died out — today virtually all the hot movies for the teen audience are superhero films, as if in the Trump era the kids believe that only if you have super-powers can you possibly fight back and defeat the Establishment — so, though The Death Cure actually briefly led the box office for 2018, it was soon swamped by the grosses for Black Panther (a far, far better movie) and one imdb.com reviewer dismissed it as “a weak and predictable ending to a saga that no one cared about anymore.” There’s something to that — it seems that, while the makers of the Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games cycles split the final books in those series so they could get two films out of them, the makers of the Maze Runner films may have mashed the final books in Dashner’s cycle, The Death Cure and The Kill Order, together into one. (Dashner’s Web site, http://www.jamesdashner.com/the-maze-runner-series/, mentions impending publication of a fifth book, The Fever Code, but it’s a V. C. Andrews-style prequel to the cycle.) The Maze Runner cycle has been basically The Hunger Games meets Divergent meets The Matrix meets Ender’s Game meets Mad Max, with elements of Lord of the Flies (especially in the first film, in which the protagonists are teenagers trapped in the Glade from which they have to escape from the titular maze, and of course they form cabals and cliques and fight each other) and even The Wizard of Oz (when I saw the security guard patrolling the outside walls of the WCKD compound I started singing the Winkies’ song: “Yo-hee-ho, YO-ho”) — and I wasn’t hoping for much during the first hour of the film. 

It begins with that long action sequence in which the rebels, driving all-terrain vehicles, are trying to hijack a train because it contains teenagers who have immunity to the Flare virus and therefore hold the key to a successful treatment for the disease — only whatever makes them immune can’t be synthesized because, well, let’s just say that as a plot element the 1-percenters who run WCKD and live in the world’s last extant city (defined as Denver, Colorado in Dashner’s books but carefully kept generic in the film) want to plug the kids into machines and permanently extract their blood, Matrix-style, in order to keep themselves alive. At the end of the second film, The Scorch Trials, Teresa (Kaya Scodelario) switched sides from the anti-WCKD rebellion to work with WCKD and become part of their effort to find a cure for the Flare. In this film she’s actually an assistant to Dr. Ava Paige (Patricia Clarkson), head of WCKD’s scientific lab, and she hopes she’s discovered a cure when she injects the latest serum into a Flare victim and her lesions actually go away — but they come back within minutes and the victim goes into the homicidal mania that is the last stage of the Flare disease before it kills. The first hour of The Death Cure is almost non-stop action, barely motivated unless you remember in depth the plot premises of the first two films (I had re-read my blog posts about them as a refresher course, but I’d sprung the films on Charles without giving him that chance), but at about the hour point of this 147-minute film the action slows down and the film starts delivering a sense of real emotional conflict and pathos. Part of that may be that Dylan O’Brien, who plays Thomas (the Asa, Katniss, Tris of this story), seems to have improved as an actor in the three years since the first two films: his smoldering close-ups have more definition and he seems to have become better at portraying inner pain and angst. 

And the WCKD characters — some of them, at least — become more than cardboard villains this time around: Teresa still carries the torch for Thomas and even Dr. Paige comes across as something of an idealist in her hope that finally discovering the cure for the Flare can make up for all the people she’s ordered killed or exploited for their blood in the quest for it, much the same way the scientists who created the first nuclear weapons anguished for years with the hope that some positive development for nuclear technology would come into being to make up for the potential for death and destruction, including the total obliteration of the human race, they had unleashed. (They thought they had done that with the development of the nuclear power reactor, but they hadn’t.) The only real 100 percent evil person among the principals is Janson (Aidan Gillan), a totally unscrupulous monomaniac who’s determined to exploit Thomas’s super-blood because he’s contracted the Flare virus himself and of course he considers his own life so uniquely important he’s willing to kill just about anyone — including, at the end, Dr. Paige with her crises of conscience — to make sure he can have Thomas’s Flare-curing blood all to himself. (Of course, he also has the hots for Teresa himself, which gives him an emotional as well as survival-driven reason to take Thomas out of circulation and hence eliminate the competition.) Midway through the movie Dr. Paige realizes that the Flare virus, which previously needed direct skin-to-skin contact to transmit, has become airborne — which adds Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (and Roger Corman’s quite good 1963 film of it) to the plethora of literary and cinematic properties Dashner, screenwriter T. S. Nowlin and director Wes Ball have ripped off for this story. (Kudos to the producers of these films for keeping the same writer and director on duty throughout the cycle instead of rotating them the way the makers of the Twilight and Hunger Games movies did.) 

Through much of the middle portion of the film I found myself flashing back to the early, anguished days of the AIDS epidemic, which likewise seemed to have come out of nowhere, behaved in ways previously unknown to medical science, and targeted an already marginalized and discriminated-against population who united in moving and resourceful, if not always well-advised ways, to mobilize to protect themselves against not only the disease itself but the appalling levels of misinformation surrounding it. Of course there’s a good deal more plot to this than that: Thomas and his crew, including his best (male) friend Newt (Thomas Brodie-Sangster); Brenda (Rosa Salazar), who seems to be his alternate love interest (or maybe she’s after him but he’s still carrying the torch for Teresa); Jorge (Giancarlo Esposito); (and Gally (Will Poulter), whom the rest left for dead at the end of Scorch Trials but who turns up somehow having survived an attack from a spear in his back, break into the WCKD headquarters to rescue Minho (Ki Hong Lee), a scared little Asian kid whose blood is thought to have the secret for the cure until Dr. Paige and Teresa realize Thomas’s blood is even more effective. To aid in the break-in they enlist the aid of a batch of plague victims who are hanging outside the walls surrounding the city — when Jorge spies the walls they have to figure out how to breach to get in he says, “Those walls are new. I guess that’s WCKD’s answer for everything,” which in this era of President Trump and the Border Wall plays quite a lot differently than I suspect James Dashner and T. S. Nowlin thought it would (remember that this film was started under Obama and finished under Trump!) — and when they get inside the walls all they want to do is destroy the city. 

The film ends with a climax in which the good guys have taken over a vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft and they have to rescue Thomas and Teresa from the roof of a literally burning building — Thomas makes it but Teresa doesn’t — and in the epilogue they end up on an island which Vince (Barry Pepper), a Mad Max-ish character who had the idea of discovering a “safe haven” in which all the people who are immune to the Flame could hide out while the rest of the world destroys itself and become the nucleus of a renascent human race. They end up on the “safe haven” and there’s a tall rock obelisk sticking out of the sand on the beach at which, like on the Viet Nam War Memorial or the AIDS Quilt, the survivors chisel the names of the people they’ve lost. (As an in-joke, the obelisk also contains the names “Wes” and “Dylan,” referring to the real-life star and director of the film.) Though the ending isn’t quite as much of a downer than the one of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles — in which the civilizations of Earth and Mars are both utterly destroyed (and it’s a testament to Bradbury’s poetic genius as a writer that the book seems oddly uplifting at the end despite the dire ending) — it’s still a pretty depressing prospect, especially since we can all too easily flash back to the often deadly Lord of the Flies-ish cliques that formed around the inmates of the Glade in the first film and it’s hard to believe this alleged Eden will be any happier or longer-lasting than the one back in the Glade (or the one in the Bible, for that matter). Maze Runner: The Death Cure turned out to be a far better movie than I expected, not a great film but a moving one with depths of real profundity rarely sounded in a youth-oriented movie, and well worth the 4 ½-year wait!

Anniversary Nightmare (Feifer Worldwide/Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” movie was actually unusually good, despite some typical plot holes from writer-director Michael Feifer. It was called Anniversary Nightmare and it begins with Liz Thompson (AnnaLynne McCord, top-billed) and her husband Andrew (Philip Boyd) deciding to celebrate their 10^th wedding anniversary by taking a vacation to Hawai’i and leaving their two kids behind with her mom and dad. They rent a lavish villa at a Hawai’ian resort and have a hot first night together — they even have sex, and Feifer shows some delicious soft-core porn of them doing so — only when Liz wakes up the next morning Andrew isn’t next to her. In fact, he isn’t anywhere at all; she can’t find him, and when the police arrive at the villa they find a burning corpse outside the villa and arrest Liz for the murder of her husband. Liz’s mom, an attorney (as was Liz before she gave it up to get married — how retro!), takes her case and raises the bail money so Liz can get out of custody in Hawai’i — but then mom makes the mistake of having jurisdiction of the case transferred to Los Angeles, where they live (can you move a state criminal case from one jurisdiction to another? I don’t think so!), so Liz can be in town and spend the time awaiting trial at home with her kids.

Only, while the Hawai’ian judge granted her bail, the L.A. judge (who’s also a long-time friend of Liz’s mom) announces that under the California court rules, she can’t grant bail and has to hold Liz over until her trial — which could be months or even years away. (The judge cites “extenuating circumstances” she’s learned from the court in Hawai’i that forbid her from granting bail — which didn’t ring true, not only because those would have had to be disclosed to Liz’s defense counsel but also the phrase “extenuating circumstances” usually means factors that suggest the defendant should be treated more leniently, not more harshly; I think the word Feifer meant was “exigent” or “aggravating” circumstances.) In a film that’s already put its heroine through some pretty Kafka-esque nightmare situations — including waking up one morning on vacation and finding her husband missing, while she herself was full of drugs she didn’t normally use (obviously someone went through a great deal of trouble to frame her, including forcing drugs into her so she’d sleep through the crime) — her fish-out-of-water stint in the Los Angeles county jail is the best part of the movie. She befriends her cellmate and two other hard-core cons — one of whom is a hard-bitten white woman who declares a Lesbian interest in Our Heroine, and the other is a Black prisoner with a disarming manner whom I thought was being set up to be the African-American best friend who discovers the villain’s sinister plot against the heroine but gets killed for her pains. As part of the prison routine the inmates are transported in orange jump suits but have to change into mauve shirts and pants for their actual incarceration — “I guess mauve is the new orange,” I couldn’t help but joke — and eventually one of the prisoners smuggles in a copy of the dental records of the burning corpse the Hawai’ian cops found at the villa — and they don’t match Andrew’s, leading Liz to wonder if her husband is still alive.

At this point my husband Charles was beginning to think Andrew had staged his own disappearance and faked his death to rid himself of an inconvenient wife and family, and start over — but Feifer, who’s actually done that plot line in previous Lifetime films like His Secret Family (a movie about bigamy that still haunts me), didn’t go there this time. Instead, Liz starts having flashbacks to That Night in Hawai’i and decides she needs to escape from prison and go back to the villa to jog her memory of what happened. She does this by faking an illness, getting admitted to the jail infirmary — which seems to be considerably less secure than the rest of it — stealing an emergency medical technician’s uniform and sneaking out of the ambulance again once it leaves the jail and getting picked up by an appealingly butch woman truck driver (a character I’d have liked to see more of) and makes it back to her parents’ place. (Remember that mom is an attorney and therefore an officer of the court who is legally required to report a fugitive to the authorities on pain of losing her law license — even if the fugitive is her own daughter. I say remember that because Michael Feifer seems to have forgotten it.) Mom and dad arrange for her to fly to Hawai’i, hurrying before her name shows up on a do-not-fly list, and she meets up with Gabriel (Jabez Armodia), who claims she’s a friend of a fellow inmate back home who used her connections with him to get him to help Liz prove her innocence. Then she runs into Jesse (Mark Medeiros), who tells Liz that he kidnapped her husband and made it look like she murdered him because, as a junior attorney with the Hawai’i prosecutor’s office, she prosecuted him and sent him to prison for 10 years for being the lookout in a robbery where two people were murdered and he was the only one prosecuted because his three confederates successfully got away. So now he’s going to show her what it’s like to serve a long sentence for a crime you didn’t commit.

Jesse says he’ll tell Liz where her husband is in exchange for $250,000 ransom — which is Liz’s and Andrew’s entire life savings — and it turns out Gabriel is Jesse’s younger brother and the two were both in on the scheme. Only when the exchange is about to be made Gabriel just wants to take the money and flee, while Jesse is so angry with Liz that he wants to shoot her and Andrew. Gabriel talks his brother out of it and they escape with the money, while Liz and Andrew return home and Liz decides to return to her legal career and form a firm that will reach out to women in prison and help them win better conditions and appeal their cases. Despite some plot holes, all too typical of Feifer’s writing, Anniversary Nightmare is actually a quite good piece of neo-noir, and the situations and predicaments Feifer puts his heroine through are almost Kafka-esque in their intensity. There’s legitimate suspense here not only over the question of what really happened to Andrew and who’s behnd the elaborate attempt to frame Liz for his murder (though it’s hard to believe two such small-time grifters as Jesse and Gabriel could have concocted such an elaborate plot) but how Liz is caught up in the conventional wisdom among law-enforcement officers that if a married person is murdered the initial suspect is almost always the person they were married to. I wouldn’t say Anniversary Nightmare is Lifetime at its very best, but it’s pretty damned close and a lot better than I usually expect from Michael Feifer!

Heaven, a.k.a. V. C. Andrews’ Heaven (EveryWhere Studios, Front Street Pictures, Fork in the Road, Jane Startz Productions, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime’s “premiere” last night was of a film called Heaven, actually listed as V. C. Andrews’ Heaven, part of their “Book to Screen” series which began with an adaptation of a genuine literary classic (Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, carefully reworked by Tracy McMillan into Pride and Prejudice Atlanta, setting Austen’s tale amongst the modern-day Black 1-percenters of Atlanta) and has spiraled downhill from there to films based on books by writers who have little more in common with Austen than their gender. V. C. Andrews (she got her pseudonym by using her real last name but flipping her first and middle initials; she was originally Cleo Virginia Andrews) was a Gothic horror writer who was born June 6, 1923 in Portsmouth, Virginia but didn’t take up novel writing until she was nearly 50. During the space of a little over a decade — from the publication of her first book, Flowers in the Attic, a smash best-seller in 1975, until her death from breast cancer in 1986 — Andrews cranked out at least one book a year and left ideas and outlines for other novels which were completed (or quite likely written from scratch) by Andrew Neiderman, who was assigned by her publisher to keep the “V. C. Andrews” name and oeuvre alive even after its original owner was dead. Andrews’ (and Neiderman’s) works typically appeared in a cycle of five novels about the same family: the first four telling a multigenerational saga and the fifth reaching back to give the backstory of the original characters and their parents. Flowers in the Attic was the first such sequence and apparently the only one Andrews completed before her death; it told the story of the Dollangangers, and in particular a brother and sister who were locked in the attic of a crumbling Southern mansion and who ended up in an incestuous relationship simply because as they came to sexual maturity there was no one else available. Andrews followed this up with a quintology about the Casteels, a backwoods Southern family of a father and five kids, the first one born of a mother named Angel who died giving birth to a baby girl whom dad named Heaven.

At the start of Heaven Heaven Casteel (Annalise Basso) is in high school and has a more or less serious boyfriend, Logan Stonewall (James Rittinger, a nice piece of masculine eye candy), but everyone else in her school shuns her because the Casteels have a reputation, earned or otherwise, as total sluts. Anyway, daddy Casteel parcels out his two teenage daughters to other families — Heaven’s sister to a reverend who rapes her and gets her “with child” on the first night she lives with him and his wife, and Heaven herself to Kitty Dennison (Julie Benz) — I had the impression she was supposed to be Heaven’s aunt, but Andrews was not that great a writer in terms of sorting out the family relationships between her characters — who’s working as a waitress to support herself and her wastrel husband Cal (Chris McNally), an aspiring novelist who’s endlessly working on a manuscript we know he’ll never finish (and which would probably not be any good if he did, though maybe he could get a literary agent who could sell it to a publisher with the pitch, “It’s just like V. C. Andrews!”). The time frame of the story appears to be the mid-1960’s, judging from the blue Ford Falcon convertible Cal Dennison drives and the large manual typewriter on which he writes his novel. Heaven encounters the ultra-strict parental rules of Kitty and Cal; at one point Kitty instructs Cal to whip Heaven for some infraction of her vague but severe house rules, though Cal saves her by whipping the kitchen counter instead and instructing Heaven to scream out as if she were really being flogged. Also Kitty decides, once she learns Heaven has sneaked out of their house (which she literally never wants Heaven to leave, claiming that the air outside is “dirty”) to see her ex-boyfriend Logan (ya remember her ex-boyfriend Logan?), to clean the dirt and sluttiness out of her literally by pitching her into a bathtub filled with boiling water. Cal rescues Heaven from Kitty’s attempt to scald her, and just then cancer cells appear as a deus ex machina to take Kitty out of the action[1] and leave Heaven alone with Cal, who like a typical V. C. Andrews character has managed to seduce her simply by being the only other person there.

Only Heaven ends up with an even stricter and crazier foster mom, Grace (Ingrid Tesch), and when Logan learns that Heaven has had sex with Cal he decides that everyone was right all along — she’s a slut — so he dumps her. The film was followed by a promo for the immediate sequel, Dark Angel (apparently the only other book in the cycle written by Andrews herself; the third, Fallen Hearts, was apparently started by Andrews and finished by Neiderman, while the last two, Gates of Paradise and Web of Dreams, were written by Neiderman and only, according to their title pages, “inspired” by Andrews), in which she takes a bus from Georgia to Santa Cruz (presumably the one in California), where she’s going to meet with more people out to exploit her, emotionally, sexually or both, including a paterfamilias in a big mansion — the dad is played by Jason Priestley, and judging from the clips he’s probably sexier now than in his teen-idol days, but the lascivious eyes we saw him displaying in the promo indicate that, like a typical V. C. Andrews male, his interest in the put-upon heroine is far more sexual than paternal. He’s supposedly also got a crazy brother locked up in a cottage on his estate that’s reachable only by a maze which he warns Heaven never to enter — which, of course, she does. The fact that in Heaven Heaven receives a copy of Jane Eyre as a present from Cal seems to be prefiguring this plot line — though it’s also an ill-advised move on the part of V. C. Andrews and/or her adapters (screenwriter Scarlet Lacey and director Paul Shapiro) to reference a great Gothic book by a woman writer in their version of a terrible one. Lacey, Shapiro and their cast seem to have set out to do the best they could with the material they had, though not only couldn’t I help but wish that they had done an updated version of Jane Eyre along the lines of Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (indeed, Charlotte Bronté’s story would probably have been easier to transmute into modern times than Austen’s was!),

I got the feeling along the time Grace entered the action that the actors had simply given up. They knew they couldn’t utter Andrews’ wretched dialogue as if it were the speech of real people, so they seemed about midway through the film to have simply stopped trying. Charles had a comment afterwards that the problem with V. C. Andrews is that her villains never let up — they start at 11 and go up from there, and they never have a moment of respite in which they kick off their shoes and just behave like normal people. I keep flashing back to the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, an extended interview with Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, who told us what a wonderful guy Hitler was and an easygoing boss to work for when he wasn’t doing things like starting World War II and ordering the Holocaust — and a great writer, or even a not great but at least sensible one, knows enough to endow a fictional villain with such human qualities and bits of lovability so the evil they do will be that much more frightening. (But then what would a future historical novelist do with Donald Trump, who isn’t as far-reachingly evil as Hitler but doesn’t seem to have any of his warm and lovable qualities either?) Andrews also is an all too typical modern writer (even though her heyday was 40 years ago) in that, aside from her much put-upon heroine, she doesn’t really give us anyone to like: all the people around Heaven seem committed to exploiting her in one way or another — if this film had been made in the silent era it would probably have been called The Horrors of Heaven — and when she moves from one situation to another the only suspense seems to be how her next set of foster parents will exploit her and whether they’ll be content merely to torture her or they’ll want to rape her as well.

---

[1] — By a macabre coincidence, Kitty dies of breast cancer — also the disease that killed V. C. Andrews for real.