Bad Moon Rising

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES (1984)

Swamp Thing #40 (1985)

With her pale skin, black hair, and air of innocence, 13-year-old Sarah Patterson was perfect for Rosaleen in THE COMPANY OF WOLVES.

UNLIKE Disney's sugar coated simulacrums of folktales, Neil Jordan’s THE COMPANY OF WOLVES resembles the original oral folklore of medieval times. These stories - the television and pornography of their day - were consistent with times full of violence, as well as beauty. Based on Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, the film is essentially a coming-of-age tale, a dark retelling of Little Red Riding Hood making explicit its sexual and Freudian subtext. For the writer, the original version(s) of Little Red Riding Hood operated as a structured agenda to warn young girls of the dangers of sexual maturity, and implicates for them a passive family and societal role. By viewing this and other traditional tales from a feminist perspective, both subtle and blatant inversions took place within Carter’s stories. Jordan wrote the script in collaboration with the author, and as such, the film creates a symbolic world where the transition from child to adult - from girl to woman - is a change to be both celebrated and feared.

As in Freud, Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson)'s visage deals with her psyche as characters in her dream. Grandmother (Angela Lansbury) symbolizes the path of rules, caution, and fear. Rosaleen is warned by her Grandmother to never "stray from the path… once you stray from the path you're lost entirely! The wild beasts know no mercy. They wait for us in the wood, in the shadow, and once you put a foot wrong they pounce!" What the elder is really saying is to stay on the path of celibate adolescence leading to marriage, and to beware of the bestial sexuality of men.

Swamp Thing #40 contained The Curse, a segment of Alan Moore’s American Gothic story arc.

Like John Fawcett’s GINGER SNAPS, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES uses the changing body of the werewolf as a metaphor for puberty, menstruation and sexual maturity. The recurring motif of the full moon draws obvious parallels between the menstrual (often thought lunar) cycle and the 'call of the wild' of the full moon for werewolves, which was also the subject of Alan Moore’s story for DC Comics Swamp Thing #40 titled The Curse. This tale - illustrated by Steve Bissette and John Totleben - provoked more heated mail (pro and con) than any other entry in Moore’s celebrated run on the title, ranging from letters about feminism to suicide. But The Curse works as a female werewolf yarn on three levels: as a horror story standard, an allegory for menstruation, but also men’s attitude to the female sexual cycle and by extension their attitude to woman. This hints at Moore’s true intent for the work - that physical and psychological mistreatment of the gender goes back a long way.

Anarchy in the UK

O LUCKY MAN! (1973) 
BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (1982)

A leading theatre director, Lindsay Anderson was also an eloquent and perceptive critic, editing Sequence - still widely regarded as the most influential film magazine ever published in Britain.

O LUCKY MAN! and BRITANNIA HOSPITAL complete a trilogy of boldly conceived and literate films from director Lindsay Anderson, scriptwriter David Sherwin, and actor Malcolm McDowell as everyman Mick Travis, which began with the schoolboy rebellion allegory if…. Despite the shared name, Travis isn’t the same character in the three, nor do the stories follow-on; they do, however, jointly illustrate through fantasy and satire the sobering reality of how our institutions succeed in dehumanisation. A study of Britain during the first half of the 1970s, O LUCKY MAN! is an energetic piece of work which shows our country retreating from its imperial past but managing to retain some influence in the world by means of corrupt dealings with foreign dictators. Within its lumbering three-hour timeframe, Travis starts off as an ambitious coffee salesman who finds unexpected riches in the North East, narrowly avoids being blown up by the army and killed in the name of science, makes a fortune associating with a dishonest businessman, and finally becomes a movie star. At the end, Mick is lucky not because he is successful, but because he has survived a world where cruelty is random and kindness rare.

Anderson has described O LUCKY MAN! as an "epic in the classical, poetic sense." Travis changes careers frequently and philosophies as many times, enjoying good fortune and enduring injustice and suffering. Because of this, the character bears marked similarities to Perceval, the archetypal quester of medieval romance. The film has aged well because many of the issues - the class divide, corruption of authority, the immorality of international affairs and the ruthlessness of science - are all still relevant. Science comes off especially badly at the Millar (Graham Crowden) research laboratory, where Mick narrowly avoids having his genes spliced with those of an animal – he’s luckier than another who has had his head grafted onto the body of a sheep. Sherwin’s script hits out in all directions, giving the work a disjointed feel of a series of prolonged sketches; apart from McDowell, the only real constant is the score of Alan Price, who provides a commentary for the serendipitous events. His lyrics could act as a warning, but atypically remain unheard.

BRITANNIA HOSPITAL - lost when initially released during the Falklands conflict - is an English political cartoon similar to MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE.

With the imminent visit of the Queen Mother, Britannia Hospital couldn’t be any less prepared. In the opening sequence to BRITANNIA HOSPITAL, an elderly patient in an ambulance is blocked for entering by striking workers. The old man is only let through because he is about to die, and even inside the staff decline to attend to him because their shift is over. Also, kitchen workers refuse to prepare food until a union leader (Robin Askwith!) is bought off with promises of O.B.E.’s. Later, in a scene which plays like an anticipation of RE-ANIMATOR, Dr Millar (Crowden, in his recurring role) - a surgeon conducting deranged experiments with public funds - inadvertently rips the head off his Frankenstein creation.

Much more than a scathing satire on British healthcare - and unfairly dismissed as the lesser entry of the trilogy - BRITANNIA HOSPITAL acts as a grotesque sledgehammer to where the world was heading. Anderson presents a society incapable of accepting any responsibility, or communicating in anything other than demand. There are no heroes - here, Travis is reduced to an investigative reporter whose head is used for Millar’s monster, and even the hospital administrator (Leonard Rossiter) fells a striking worker with a shovel. However mad, Millar is the only authority figure who inspires loyalty from his staff, and the only character who cares about the world around him. In his climactic monologue, Millar prophetically announces that a "motion picture entertainer of North America will receive enough money in a month as would feed a starving South American tribe for a hundred years."