When the glands bubble and the moon is full, a special kind of madness prevails. : Tales of a Dollar Critic

It occurred to me one recent Tuesday night that the movies teen-agers are seeing in this enlightened epoch in human history contain lessons that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. How to eat spaghetti with their bare hands, for instance, and how to strip their chicks within 15 seconds flat.

I refer specifically to the coming-of-age films directed at America’s most impressionable and unreasonable commodity, namely anyone who is either chronologically or emotionally floating somewhere between the ages of 12 and 20.

Until recently, I have spared myself the trauma of witnessing on the big screen those rites of passage that turn fairly sweet young people into slavering animals before they metamorphose into Republicans.

Instead I have opted for brave-country-women movies of the type that find a plucky Sally or a dimly smiling Sissy facing odds that might rout the 1st Marine Division but can’t penetrate Sally’s grit or darken Spacey’s smile. I mean Sissy’s spacey smile.

But there is only so much country spunk a man can take. God deliver me from anymore gingham dresses and kitchen aprons.

As a change of pace, I began pursuing a different genre of film, as the critics say. I went to Woodland Hills’ UA Warner on Dollar Night to see a teen-age movie. No one ever told me it would be like that.

I’m not certain whether it was the movie or the price that attracted those armies of little animals (and some not so little) to the old UA. The prior week I had attended a teen-age movie on dollar night at the Mann Valley West in Tarzana and it was peaceful to an extreme.

Going from there to Woodland Hills was like leaving a sewing bee to invade Iwo Jima.

Nature has a way of protecting the brain by purging it of memories detrimental to human survival. Which is probably why I cannot recall either the name of the movie or the name of the company that presumed upon profit to produce the film. But then I’m only a dollar critic and you get what you pay for.

Imagine if you can, however, the children of “Deep Throat” growing up to star in “Animal House” and you get the general idea of what “Movie X” was all about. It was enough to turn Hal (Kick Smut in the Butt) Bernson celibate by the time we froze frame on the final orgy.

It opened with what was supposed to be humorous sex (can a copulating couple really shake a lamp free from the ceiling?), built to a kind of teeny-bopper whorehouse and ended with . . .

Well, I don’t really know how it ended. I was distracted by the fight.

As I indicated earlier, the theater was crowded with teen-agers running amok. The girls giggled, babbled away in a language best described as Valley Girl Bubble Gum and made frequent visits to the lobby for who knows what nefarious purpose.

The boys alternately exploded in non-sequitur yowls and threatened one another in voices trapped between pubescence and lycanthropy. When the glands bubble and the moon is full, a special kind of madness prevails.

Suddenly, just about the time things were really getting naked on the screen, a male voice yelled into the tedium of yet another bare female behind, “Larry’s going to fight him!” Well, actually, it was more like “Larrygonnafightum,” but I have had some training in adolescent linguistics and was able to understand the dialect.

As of one, every teen-ager in the house rose and scuttled up the aisle like lemmings on their way to a predetermined fate.

What amazed me about the phenomenon was not that Larrywuzgonnafightum but that everyone seemed to know both Larry and the even more ambiguous um , or him.

In a short while, just as the befuddled father on the screen was discovering his son’s teen-age cathouse in the family-owned motel, the crowd of young people straggled back in gruttering , a form of communication that combines grumbling and muttering and is often undecipherable to the naked ear. It seems that him had backed off from the fight.

As luck would have it, however, someone near me mysteriously received new information either by scent or vibration (I swear he never left his seat) and yelled “It’s on!” which once more emptied the house.

They never came back, thank God, and possibly have not been seen since. Larry, perhaps blessed with a special mission, may have them trapped in a damp basement where he keeps them chained to a moss-slimed wall and feeds them live mice.

The movie? Even as I write, the ending comes back. After all the nudity, the violence and the making out (often in the same scene), the film ended somewhat traditionally. Remember how they used to wrap it up with a kiss? Two pairs of lips, mouths closed, touching?

Well, it wasn’t quite that traditional. They didn’t kiss. They sucked face. Considering the possibilities, let it go at that. Pull back, freeze frame and faaaade out.

Al Martinez

When the glands bubble and the moon is full, a special kind of madness prevails.

Tales of

a Dollar

Critic