Word: guignol
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...master of Now Grand Guignol, Alice finally came to the climax of the evening: an execution. After slaughtering a dozen or so mannequins and being overcome in a fake fistfight Alice stepped forward to pay for his crimes. Out rolled a guillotine, and Alice's ugly little head was ceremoniously placed to the block. The snare drum rolled, the audience hushed, down came the blade and Alice's head seemed to drop away...
...bunker as once they had echoed down the parade grounds of the Third Reich. Hitler's pallid hand, shaking from Dr. Morell's amphetamine capsules, spoons dollops of Schlag onto a slab of chocolate cake. The movie is the world's most overdocumented Grand Guignol, the phantom of history's opera at bay in the foundations of the Fuhrer's falling theater...
WICKED, WICKED is a shopsoiled piece of Guignol tricked up with a split-screen technique the distributor has christened Duo-Vision. The film is as unimaginative as that label. Since there are two separate images on the same screen, the ads promise, "Twice the tension! Twice the terror!" A little elementary multiplication furnishes the melancholy reminder that twice zero is still nothing. Two images only reinforce the suspicion that Writer-Director Richard L. Bare had difficulty filling even one screen, and had to resort to all sorts of scraps off the cutting-room floor. While a maladjusted youth (Randolph Roberts...
...Alice Cooper is the name of both the leader and the group that have climbed to infamy as the chief practitioners of what can only be called Grand Guignol rock. The discovery of Frank (Mothers of Invention) Zappa, Alice the group is a gaggle of allegedly straight males who started out by pretending to be transvestites. Now they are into horror and, as they describe it, the purging of the evil within the souls of their young fans. Alice the leader sometimes throws live chickens to the audience, axes dolls to death, carries a snake that sometimes works...
...staging of the crucifixion provides another prime example of Mr. Mayer's stagecraft of restoration. The use of a grand, reflective aluminum cruxifix--totally unrustic and aggressively mechanical--renews one's sense of horror in an etiolated atrocity. No measure of guignol, no matter how richly sanguinary, no matter how grande could accomplish this alone...