Tag Archives: Les Baxter

Pere Ubu Meets X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes

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I thought it was some kind of avant-garde prank when I first saw a poster advertising a special showing of Roger Corman’s X, The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) accompanied by the legendary Cleveland, Ohio band Pere Ubu performing a live score. It sounded too good to be true but how would it work?  Would the audio be turned off so that the movie would essentially be treated as a silent film with a new score? Would the band perform a spontaneous live remix of Les Baxter’s score while riding the volume levels? Would the film’s dialogue be heard at all in this presentation? All of my questions were answered on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at Atlanta’s Plaza Theater when I attended the Pere Ubu show.

*This is an archival reprint of an article that originally appeared on Movie Morlocks, the official blog of Turner Classic Movies (the blog was discontinued in the Fall of 2018 and is no longer available).

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Yma Sumac: Inca Goddess

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Yma Sumac, that rarest of exotic songbirds, officially became an extinct species on Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008 in Silver Lake, California. Her passing was barely noticed by the media despite the fact that her impact on pop culture in the early fifties had an international impact. From her first U.S. album release, Voice of the XtaBay (1950), and Hollywood film debut Secret of the Incas (1954) starring Charlton Heston, to everything that followed in her curious career, Sumac has been many things to many people.

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Rock ‘n’ Rock Forever Will Stand

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Can a penniless teenager, raised in an orphanage and self-trained as a musician, overcome the odds and win the star search radio contest hosted by superstar disc jockey Alan Freed? It’s a cinch because Go, Johnny, Go! (1959), directed by Paul Landres, is a clichéd Hollywood fantasy of pop stardom modeled on previous box office hits like Rock Around the Clock (1956) and Jailhouse Rock (1957). Yes, the story is trite, the acting is wooden and its low-budget, set-bound look is uninteresting, but none of that is important when you consider the musical talent on display in the film. With such early rock ‘n roll pioneers as Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and Ritchie Valens blazing across the screen, Go, Johnny, Go! is not only an invaluable pop culture document but an immensely entertaining and occasionally cynical look at the burgeoning music industry of the late fifties.

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Degenerates at Large

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Long before it ever became available for the home video market, The Girl in Black Stockings would occasionally pop up on late night television screenings in unexpected places like Turner Classic Movies. Such a lurid, sensationalistic crime drama was a natural fit for the drive-ins of its era but it actually makes sense that TCM would air this rarely seen obscurity because The Girl in Black Stockings is a classic sleazefest and definitely several notches above the standard exploitation drive-in fare that tantalized audiences in the late fifties before the advent of more explicit films like Blood Feast (1963). Continue reading →