Pop Culture Gadabout
Monday, May 30, 2005
      ( 5/30/2005 07:09:00 AM ) Bill S.  


"I JUST HAVE TO TELL YA, IT'S A MUSICAL MUTINY, MAN!" – I confess: back in the sixties, I used to own a vinyl copy of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. So when Aaron Neathery sent me a care package of tapes which included Barry Mahon's Musical Mutiny (1970) among the offerings, it was the first flick I watched. One of a series of low-budget features lensed by the exploitation filmmaker at a Florida amusement park (Aaron has the goods on the series of kiddie films he also shot at Pirates World), Mutiny is an inept bit of youth culture exploitation built around footage of an Iron Butterfly concert. Takes a special kind of shoddiness to make rock 'n' drug culture look as uninvolving as it does in this puppy, but Mahon easily manages.

The movie opens with a shot of a man in a pirate costume walking out of the ocean, the ominous instrumental break to "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" playing on the soundtrack. First person he meets (a frizzy-haired biker type) he tells to spread the word, "There's gonna be a Borstal Breakout Musical Mutiny at Pirate World!" So, naturally, the biker obliges. "Are you a real pirate?" a group of kids asks when our drip-dry buccaneer appears at what seems to be the park's employee's entrance. Yes, he is, he asserts, "Don Williams the Great!" On receiving this pronouncement, one of the little scapers kicks the guy in the shin and dashes off. Kids today: no respect for their pirate elders.

We follow the biker as he leads us to a set of underdeveloped subplots: a blond chick singer with a raspy case of Joplinitis and her organ-playing companion; a struggling garage band in rehearsal; a young rich kid with a naggy girlfriend who can't really love him 'til he gets out from under the shadow of his businessman father; and a hippie investment broker who offers vague advice to the aforementioned businessman father (played by Brad Grinter, another area exploitation moviemaker) by phone. Periodically, to inject a bit of Monkees-style wackiness into the proceedings, Mahon also gives us shots of a blond longhair frenziedly running around town. (It's funny, see, 'cause he's running really fast!) Back at the park, Don Williams the Great meanwhile cons the ticket takers into letting everybody into the World for free. Because the Great looks so convincingly piratical, nobody questions his assertion that it's all being done as a publicity stunt. So before long all the area kids and teens are showing up at the gate.

Mahon pads (and pads and pads) his film out with shots of hippies and longhairs racing to the amusement park, at one point giving us a good five-plus minutes of dune buggies driving around in circles on a Florida beach. He also includes a nonsensical subplot involving a trio of would-be drug dealers who join the crowd with the intention of selling a new hallucinogen called Doc Hagger's Fantastic Freedom Formula. They set up a table in the middle of the amusement park (now there's a good bit of family friendly p.r.!) and attempt to cajole unwilling concertgoers into sampling some. We keep waiting for some hippie patsy to show up and take a swig – for some stoner humor or a psychedelic hallucination scene or something – but it doesn't happen. Barry Mahon, master of the bait 'n' switch. . .

But the highlight of the flick is the concert: filmed with such a consistently wrongheaded sense of where to place the camera it's like watching someone use a videocam on vacation for the very first time. First song in Iron Butterfly's set, Mahon keeps the lens on the drummer through most of the number, never once showing us keyboardist/manly vocalist Doug Ingle (the pride of Pekin, Illinois!) and resolutely holding the shots above any of the instruments (because who wants to see the musicians actually playing the song, right?) The boys get to lip sync three tunes off their hit album before the park's grumpy owner – upset to learn that all these free-loading kids have crashed the gate and are listening to music for free – halts the show by telling the band's manager he won't pay the $15,000 owed the group. Not to worry, though: three local bands (Fantasy, Grit, and the New Society Band) fill in with a song apiece. One of these appears to be comprised of that blond chick singer, her organist and the practicing band of garage-istes we saw earlier in the film, though how they got together is something that Mahon apparently didn't think was worth explaining. All three groups are fairly unmemorable (no hidden Nuggets here!), though one of them gets to play their unplugged electric instruments on a merry-go-round. Through it all, Mahon intercuts the music with shots of happy patrons on Pirate World rides, and, admittedly, some of them do look like fun. But what possessed him to shoot Grit's guitarist from behind, so we only see the start of his balding head but don't get to see him doing any finger work?

Happily, the hippie investment adviser (remember him?) arrives on-scene to save the day, writing a check for $15,000 to the band's manager and inspiring the group to rush back onstage and perform the full sixteen-minute version of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" (arguably, the first great instance of dunderheaded "heaviness" in pop-rock history). Mahon pulls out all stops for this 'un, actually filming all four members of the group in upper torso medium shot, panning over the desultory outdoor crowd and inserting ecstatic head shots of individual fans unconvincingly grooving to the music, filming two hippie chix as they inexpertly wiggle their uncovered torsos for the camera and occasionally interspersing it all with shots of five or six psychedelic posters that he probably picked up in a Florida head shoppe. After eight minutes of this, you're beginning to wish you had a swig of Doc Hagger's Fantastic Freedom Formula – but 1970 is a lifetime away, and our would-be drug kingpins are most likely selling time shares on the coast of Mexico now, anyway.

Musical Mutiny concludes with the Butterfly's big one-hit: as the concert ends, we realize that we've never seen any of the group off stage. (Did they, I wonder, even know that they'd be appearing in this movie when they signed up to a show at Pirate World?) The crowd's filmed trudging off to the Pirate World parking lot; our young rich kid decides to sign the group with the blond singer to his new label and both he and his nagging girlfriend ride off into the sunset on a garbage truck with "You Are What You Eat" emblazoned over the cab. The owner of the amusement park hasn't made any money that I can see, which may explain why the place is no longer in business. Don Williams the Great walks back into the sea, satisfied that his Musical Mutiny has brought joy to hundreds. Now that's left is for the frenetic longhaired runner to appear one last time on camera, to open a large piece of paper with the words "The End" written on it. (Bet ya never saw that coming!)

Barry Mahon went on to produce a couple more cheapie kidflicks, including one with the wonderful title of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny. If any of the movie's full cast of non-actors went onto make another picture, I don't know about it. To the best of my knowledge, the next time Iron Butterfly would be heard in a movie was for a campy dream sequence in one of the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks. That seems right in oh so many ways. . .

NOTE: For those with a batch of their own Freedom Formula, Musical Mutiny is available as a DVD-R from Something Weird.
# |



Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



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