The Lunatic Is In My Head

It's been a truly tiring 48 hours or so, feeding this demon inside me that's crawling from the pit of my gut in the form of menstrual cramps, cresting in my chest in the shape of agonizing muscle pain that prevents me from breathing deeply, and now threatening to burst fully-formed from the crown of my skull as something akin to a migraine, which I have never had in my life but this must be the closest thing there ever was to it. I've had zero appetite, and when I do eat my chest feels as if my heart were to rupture from its bony cage. I was so afraid that I might have a heart attack last night that I eased myself into bed and stayed as still as possible, as if just moving an inch would trigger some kind of internal eruption. Today the chest feels slightly better, but the head pain has taken over, and I only spent about 2 1/2 hours at work today before I bailed and came home, unable to expand my lungs or bear the loud noise in that muggy, obstreperous store.

So I'm home now, and drinking a soda, which I never do, but I longed for something fizzy and sweet and now that I can take off my clothes and lie under the ceiling fan things feel a touch less intense than they did an hour ago. Joe and Mike at attended the VCW wrestling event at the Norva tonight so I have a few hours to perhaps watch a movie and try to stay awake. The glare from the computer hurts my head so I might just cut it short here...

WRONG! I can't leave yet without mentioning that I finally got to see THE WORLD'S GREATEST SINNER, which I have been pestering people online to burn for me for what feels like ages, only to discover that Joe had burned it off TCM a few months ago, and he had even mentioned it to me but I didn't realize that it was the same thing that I was searching out all this time.

And how do I describe The World's Greatest Sinner? Well, I probably couldn't do any better than this blogger does in capturing the nuttiness within. But first one must get a sense of the man behind the camera, who also happens to be the man in front of the camera and everywhere else -- legendary eccentric character actor Timothy Carey, a man who made his career in film by following his own daffy trajectory exactly how he wanted. He famously turned down roles in The Godfather and Godfather II to do his own projects, yet also appeared as a variety of villains and weirdos on television as well as in such pictures as The Wild Ones, Beach Blanket Bingo, East of Eden, and D.C. Cab, to name a minor few. You know, as soon as you see his face, that you've seen him in something before. And chances are, you did.



The World's Greatest Sinner (1961) was Carey's low-budget labour of love, and although never having had a commercial release it has become a cult classic, and it has been said that it was also a favorite of the late Michael Jackson (still strange to put the word "late" in front of his name) as well as Quentin Tarantino (who dedicated Reservoir Dogs to Carey). Filled with all the grindhouse trappings of incongruous edits, bad dubbing, and whole frames disappearing -- there's a sex scene where Carey kisses up a woman's leg, then about 5 seconds of blackness before the film returns after he's worked his way up to her face -- it's hard to look away for a minute for fear of missing something so completely loopy it just may stay ingrained in your brain forever. Carey plays a bored life insurance salesman who decides to quit his job and become a rock 'n roll evangelist, changing his name to "God" and running for president under his Eternal Man Party, growing more and more deliriously drunk with power, as evidenced by the increasingly wacky expressions crossing his face. The film is narrated by the famous voice actor Paul Frees (of Rankin-Bass/Hanna-Barbera fame) and if that weren't insane enough, the music is composed by a 22-year-old Frank Zappa, at least five years before his own Mothers Of Invention album debut. I think Zappa even mentioned composing this picture when he was a guest on the Tonight Show back around the same time, although it was said that Zappa later called this film "rancid", which I suppose is par for the course for Zappa.



Joe was watching this scene (above) and snarked "Where's the guy on the stage with the cape?", joking on the obvious James Brown-ness of Carey's desperate "Please! Please! Please! TAKE MY HAND!" But holy moley, what a scene it is! Not a single band member playing in tune. Or is that just how Zappa wrote it to be? Seeing as how it's Zappa, one never can tell.

I am so very, very happy now. Headache be damned.