Yellow

Yellow Submarine

Beast of the Yellow Night

Yelloooooooow my sweet readers, I hope you’re doing swell! After sweating through the Semiquincentennial and trying to celebrate in spite of what this holiday stands for, I’m getting back to what I love doing most: watching movies and yapping about them. Last week’s vivid video game double feature inspired me to add another pop of color to this blog, and with the blistering, burning sunshine surrounding me, I thought I’d give yellow a try. I’ve already covered red, blue, green, pink, purple, and orange, so let’s complete the rainbow and give yellow its moment in the sun. Yellow is a far more complicated color than it ever gets credit for. It’s always just a subtle shade away from gorgeous gold, but also, putrid pus. It is delicate yet abrasive, light yet bright. Yellow was a significant, treasured hue in the days of Ancient Egypt, but by the 14th century it became associated with jealousy and deceit—in medieval art, Judas Iscariot is often shown wearing yellow. It is obviously warm, vivacious, and eye-catching—it is one of the most common colors used for traffic and road signs, and it is almost always associated with sunshine. There is a powerful but quiet energy emanating from yellow, it adds the perfect pop of attention to little details that might otherwise go unseen. Yellow is the skin tone of The Simpsons, it is the trademark shade of Lego humans, it is the color of butter, flowers, lions, some tigers and bears (probably), it is the previously-discontinued Dandelion shade of Crayola Crayon that one TikTokker singlehandedly brought back. Yellow is not gold, but gold would be nowhere without yellow. But on the other hand, yellow is sickly, sour, a color often indicating disease and infection and decomposition. It can be hard to read, and hard to separate it from its association with number two pencils and highlighters and buses and school and signs that alert us to some kind of hazard. Too much yellow can be sickening, but none at all would be depressing. Vincent Van Gogh gave yellow new life with his “Sunflowers” series, but I can personally only take so much yellow before I get a headache, so this is perhaps why it’s taken me so long to get to this color. Neither of tonight’s yellow films were off-putting with their yellow representation, but they weren’t particularly mellow, either.

Let’s begin with perhaps the most famous yellow film of all time, one that spans many colors, shades, tunes, emotions, and generations of appreciators—this is Charles Dunning’s 1968 film Yellow Submarine. Much like the color yellow, the history and reception of this film is way more complex than it should be, but I suppose that’s true to much of rock n’ roll film history, as a whole. Yellow Submarine is the fourth of five movies that that featured a collaboration with the Beatles, though this project probably featured them the least—much to the regret of some of the members, years later. While the animated film features many Beatles songs and follows four protagonists who look, sound, and are named after the Beatles, the actual band is not in this film until the last two minutes. They were allegedly unenthusiastic about this project after being dissatisfied with their previous live-action film, Help! as well as the Beatles cartoon, and their very brief cameo at the end of Yellow Submarine was technically enough to fulfill their contractual obligation to United Artists. John Clive voiced John Lennon, Geoffrey Hughes voiced Paul McCartney, Paul Angelis voiced Ringo Starr, and Peter Batten voiced George Harrison—until, halfway through production, he was discovered to be a deserter from the British Army of the Rhine in West Germany and was arrested, leaving Angelis to complete his remaining dialogue. Yellow Submarine opens on an idyllic, lush, ridiculously, radically colorful realm called Pepperland, where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band provides enchanting, energetic songs that delight and inspire all of the citizens. It’s all one, big, vibrant, melodic party, until the negative neighboring realm of the music-hating Blue Meanies descend upon this blissful place, on a mission to silence the tunes and turn everything blue and gray. (The animation, and the premise, at this point, was very similar to Belladonna of Sadness, minus all the rape, but I digress.) Moments before utter destruction, Pepperland’s elderly Lord High Mayor sends a man named Young Fred to get help, so he climbs into the titular yellow submarine and goes in search of the right heroes for this job. This, naturally, leads him to Ringo Starr, who walks the dreary, gloomy streets of an exaggeratedly-depressing London as “Eleanor Rigby” plays. When Ringo finally realizes he’s being followed by a giant, yellow sub, he tracks down his bandmates and they all climb into the semi-aquatic apparatus and agree to help Young Fred save Pepperland. Thus begins a fantastic, fabulous, frenetic, phantasmagorical, hypnotic, hallucinogenic odyssey that, as my buddy Roger Ebert put it, was “beautifully simple and childlike on one level, and erudite and deep on another.” To call this film colorful, or trippy, or hippie-dippie-heavenly would be an understatement, and to say its script was silly and incredibly loose in its narrative goes without saying. There are so many Beatles Easter Eggs and puns and innuendos and euphemisms and self-references, it was hard to keep up—though if I’d been afforded the luxury of subtitles (I had to pirate this, of course), I might’ve caught even more references through those thick Liverpudlian accents. Yellow Submarine is a fascinating, puzzling, sometimes dizzying visual feast, one that you can never look away from—hence why my notes on it are nearly impossible to make out. So many different animation styles and techniques were implemented for this film, and nearly every musical interlude had it’s own unique, tailor-made vibe—from the gif-like 2D photo-magic of the “Eleanor Rigby” sequence to the Rotoscope glass-sheet animation of the “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” sequence. It was all mesmerizing, groovy, occasionally profound, and intermittently hilarious—particularly for a viewer like myself, who is a later-in-life Ringo stan and died laughing nearly every time he spoke. All of the Beatles, or the depictions of them, had their turn to be poetic and funny, but I find it interesting that even in fantastical, fictionalized form, John is easily the most pretentious and annoying of the bunch. The impact of Yellow Submarine upon popular culture is too massive to summarize—with its many animation styles inspiring the likes of Monty Python, Schoolhouse Rock, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and several cartoons on Adult Swim—but its very existence and unprecedented popularity has been credited with generating wider interest in animation as a serious art form, rather than just entertainment for children. And though this film is often compared to Disney’s music-centric classic Fantasia, art director Heinz Edelmann hated Disney so much that he intentionally designed most of the Blue Meanies with Mouseketeer hats. (And FYI, in another turn of my niche psychic abilities, July 7th was Ringo Starr’s birthday, so now feels like the perfect time to watch or rewatch this one!) I had so much fun watching this film, shockingly for the very first time, and I can see why people of all ages and drug preferences enjoy it.

Up next I watched a film that was not made for family-friendly audiences, though I struggle to understand who the audience for this film was, exactly, this is Eddie Romero’s 1971 disastrous drive-in B-movie Beast of the Yellow Night. I was torn between watching this or Vilgot Sjöman’s controversial I Am Curious (Yellow), but this week I decided to go with the horror film over the porno flick (a common coin toss on this blog.) Beast of the Yellow Night opens in, “a small town in Southeast Asia, 1946” where Filipino soldiers and members of the American embassy are clearing out the bodies of a recent, unknown massacre. The soldiers are looking for survivors, but somehow miss the hairy, dizzy gentleman covered in blood who looks as though he’s been wandering in the woods for days. The man’s name is Joseph Langdon (John Ashley), and he’s a traitor, a murderer, and a rapist, whom is on the brink of death after eating some poisonous berries. Suddenly, the disembodied voice of Satan bellows nearby, along with a cloud of yellow smoke, and he is charmed by Langdon’s devilish persistence. Satan decides to save Langdon from death, on the condition that he become his disciple—inhabiting the bodies of several people over several years in an effort to awaken the latent evil that exists within whomever he meets. Langdon agrees, and suddenly is in the possession of the body of a freshly-dead American businessman named Phillip Rogers. He is greeted by Phillip’s wife, Julia (Mary Wilcox), and brother, Earl (Ken Metcalfe), who are happy to see their family member again, but can sense a change within him. Immortality, as it turns out, is not what it’s cracked up to be, and Langdon tires of Phillip’s body and of his unrelenting existence, in general. And as if the unending monotony of an immortal life weren’t unbearable enough, Satan will, from time to time, inflict a werewolf-esque curse upon Langdon, wherein he transforms into a murderous, bloodthirsty beast who appears to be a cross between the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Leatherface. These fits of beastdom seem entirely random and only mildly inconvenient at first, as Langdon can seemingly find and kill victims quite easily without anyone noticing. His high-pitched, gorgeously-dressed, under-written pseudo-wife, though, is suspicious of something, but she is unable to articulate why, exactly, either due to her character’s trauma or this half-assed script. Eventually, this life becomes untenable for Langdon, and the local police finally catch wind of his murders, as well as the impossibly-long history of his attacks. He prays for death but Satan enjoys his little minion too much to let him go, and his wife, while neglected and confused, doesn’t want to let go of him either. Apart from the chic clothing, fun hair and makeup, and accidentally-hilarious line deliveries, the entirety of Beast of the Yellow Night was confounding and incoherent. I’ve watched my fair share of shitty, shabby, cheaply-made, nudity-filled, plot-secondary B-movies, but this one was another level of half-baked. There was plenty of potential for an interesting script and a semi-sympathetic monster with explainable lore, but the filmmakers opted to be meandering and muddied instead. In a decade chock-full of exploitation and gore and violence, everything felt a bit tampered down in this film, which was an intentional and later-regretted decision by the director, who said, “We really tried for quality… I don't think it did very well. They [the audience] prefer out and out gore.” And I couldn’t agree more. The script was incredibly talky for saying so little and clearly it had the desire to be deep, existential, and psychologically scary, but none of these things were achieved. This film was just one in a long line of horror films produced by Roger Corman and filmed for cheap in the Philippines, but it lacks the true chutzpah and spectacular splatter of a true B-horror movie. Even paying full attention and taking notes, I struggled to piece together the premise of this movie, and dare I say, all of its best parts were merely implied or explained as having happened in the past. I would’ve loved a film that actually catalogued the journey of tortured evil man, cursed to be an immortal werewolf for the rest of time, but that wasn’t what was actually presented here. It was somehow too dense and too simple to really function as a story. And apart from this film’s poster appearing on Garth’s bedroom wall in Wayne’s World, I’m not sure if it made any impact at all. There wasn’t even that much yellow representation here for a film that specifically specifies a “yellow night” in its title, but why am I trying to make sense of a movie like this anyway? If you wanna turn your brain off for a little while and indulge in some colorfully chaotic cinema, I highly recommend watching Yellow Submarine, but if you really wanna confuse the senses, watch Beast of the Yellow Night. Or don’t! Until next time, stay mellow!