Tuesday, July 17, 2007

trance formation





Yeah boy. Talk to Alex and get you a copy of this highly collectible and rare piece of indy film history.



From the liner notes by yours truly:


On the Transformers: the Movie(86): the Remix(99)  (2/4/5)

Beyond Good. Sure. Beyond Evil? Mmmmmaybe. Surely not outside the wild imaginative reach of a certain auto technician in training. Perhaps even the younger age Matthew Puckett, at some level, originally intuited: the mightiest of heroic constructs, like all our industrial devices, could breakdown beyond the point of no repair. And later at any rate he had to know that mechanics’ vocabulary actually included the word “shit.” And that the evolutionary destiny of robotics lies in pink-hotrod-hotties. But you gotta understand: at the time of “the Transformers: the Movie” original
US theatrical release, this all came as quite the shock to us sheltered children of Suburbia. We’d been content w/just commercially injected half-hour doses of mindless mayhem, and virtual animation the series’ binary psychodramas provided our all too slowly moving and rapidly disappearing prepubescent lives. This flick definitively carpet-bomb-86’ed plenty of kids’ mental cherries back in 1986. Hardcore; Newborne.

Why then looking back should the film seem now well... so freaking childish? Maybe it was all the freon, axl-grease, or thundering repetitive rattle-rattle John Lee clatter Boom-boom-boom-boom wafting around the chop-shop air there? More likely; an overdose droning on of man-hours, engaged in robotic servitude, slaving to get CFC + noise shitting, design fucked monstrosities back into working order for their insane in the mundane, wind resistant, plastic paneled owners. But however it came to be--- although History is clear on this much
@ least: more than a few metric tons of Schlitz and PBR were involved--- a threshold was achieved one night, over cheap rentals, in the mind of a man who’d heard just about enough Muzak infiltrating his consciousness. Matters had to be taken into the only skilled appendages he had: his own grimy hands.

Enlisting the technical assistance of his would be accomplice and younger cuzin; Alexander Demaris, and holing up in his efficiency bunker, wading up to his neck in a complex web of prime dirge: Matt got down n’ dirty w/it. He composed a defiant, W.S.Burroughs-ian, battle plan of attack D-fence: He’d mix in raucous trax (tunes diametrically opposed to the conformity concert, rocking our sad excuse for an outside world to its very brink); vivisect, bootstrap, utterly transform, and revitalize the audibles of this fine flick; into something more indicative of the power, this watershed story of glory n’ gore, this movie still held, in our collective memory banks at least. Transformers would once again kick ass!


Back in the day, we didn’t have y’r fancypants non-linear-editing, personal- computing,
@home production studios. No sir-ee Jr. Well akchly, we kinda did. But I’ll be a GoBot’s uncle if we had either: access, time, or the inclination to use ‘em. All that this job required to hack it was: some excessive late-fees, a stack a wax tracks, and a garage-sale bought, homemade, stereopathetic, VCRecording studio. Using the penultimate century’s greatest art form, a masterpiece was collaged unto its rightful throne in the cinematic echelon.

The rock demons assuredly beamed up at us all from Hell the night this gruesome Champbanite twosome laid down, in one ‘n a half continuous, contiguous takes down pat, this overdub to end all dubs. Later cuts’ attempts to recapture--- as I guess the 2 initial copies were either thought lost, or cast off to the mercy of videostore sea (the one kulture jammed original rental copy got lost in circulation, or copied back over) the alchemical magic moments, we see in abundance herein--- lacked the originals’ dynamism. The disconnects here- still disturb; the congruent syncronisties- continue to mystify synergetically. Geekdom needn’t get their signed Tom Cruise tighty whitey’s in a bunch: proper props were paid Dr (Galvatron) Spok, that motormouth (Blurr) from those old Fed-Ex commercials, Scatman (Jazz) Crothers, Eric (Wreck-Gar) Idle & Weird Al “Dar[ing] To Be Stupid” Yankovich. While every last syllable of Unicron’s dialogue, Orson Welles’ swansong (and for many of us kids, introductory) performance, remains here wholly intact along w/the plot. They just kicked out the jelly. Sorry, Judd Nelson diehards: don’t narc on us to Metallica, Okay? And in exchange we promise not to tell anyone you like Judd Nelson.


New and improved soundtrack!
Now includes:
Butthole Surfers, Melvins, I think Slayer probly, Reverend Horton Heat, Moistboyz,
Funkadedlic, Man... or Astroman!?!, M.E.T.H.O.D. Man, Primus, Mr. Bungle, Beck, Metallica used with implied aural consent (back when they were really drunk), some Steve Albini band, and an explosive Monster Magnet finale.
As well as plenty other classic cuts that are too punk for my poseur ass to discern with any kind of certainty. Enjoy. `