by Jim Hanas
he Sore Losers is about Elvis numerology. It's about killing hippies.
It's about a Southern Satan. It's about the decline of Western civilization.
It's about the end of the world.
This is what local filmmaker Mike McCarthy tells me as we mill around the aisles of the Megamarket at Poplar and Avalon, near the "bad meat" section where they put the ground beef that has hung around too long and mark it "reduced for immediate sale." This is where he wanted to meet.
"This
is a heavy magnetic spot right here. There are several heavy magnetic spots
in Midtown and this is one of them right here," he says, before wondering
outloud if "bad meat" is a hippy term. When I suggest that the
people at Megamarket probably don't call it that, he just smirks. "They
don't call it `Death Week' either," he says.
McCarthy, of course, is a character, as anyone who's seen his previous two movies, Damselvis and Teenage Tupelo, can attest. And he's probably putting me on to boot. "I'm just fucking with you," he says early on in the interview. "And fucking with Memphis in general. Memphis has fucked with me for 12 years, so I'm going to fuck with Memphis."
Actually, he does more than that. The Sore Losers ends with the annihilation of the Bluff City in an apocalyptic flash of light. I know it's lame to give away the ending, but this isn't that kind of movie. It's less about plot than about style -- a certain campy style inspired by garage rock, underground comic books, and exploitation movies of the '50s and '60s. "Rock and Roll, sex and violence, UFO's, you know," explains McCarthy.
The basic idea is this: Blackie, Jack Oblivian of the local band the Oblivians, is a juvenile delinquent from space who first visited the Earth in 1954 to kill beatniks, the first manifestion of post-war youth rebellion. He returns in 1996 -- because he didn't bag his limit the first time around -- and finds things changed. He falls in with Mike, played by Mike Maker of the garage-rock band the Makers, and Kerine, played by West Coast performance artist/chanteuse Kerine Elkins and possibly the first performer McCarthy has come across with a persona outrageous enough to fit his over-the-top aesthetic. The three kill some hippies and other people in an attempt to satisfy "The Elders," all the while fleeing the "Men In Black," portrayed by Tokyo trash-rockers Guitar Wolf. Along the way there's plenty of gore, cars, bare breasts, and rock-and-roll.
McCarthy says the movie is "10 times technically better" than his previous effort -- Teenage Tupelo -- and he's right. Shot all in 16mm color, it even includes some pretty impressive morphing effects that make it his best-looking movie yet.
Conceptually, he explains, everything that happens in the movie is dictated by the Elvis archetype, or what he now calls the "archetupe" in order to emphasize its connection to Tupelo, Mississippi, where he, like Elvis, grew up. "The movie is about Elvis numerology and the way that everything is built upon 3, 5, and 8 -- and 42, since Elvis lived 42 years," he explains. "Blackie leaves the Earth the night before Elvis is first heard on Dewey Phillips' Red Hot and Blue, and he comes back 42 years later. So all the things that have happened within the sphere of time that Blackie is unaware of has been the decline of Western civilization. The irony is that hippies are responsible for the decline of western civilization."
In the last few months, McCarthy has taken the archetupe on the road, touring the country to hawk the movie through a series of "Vice Parties." So far he's shown it in 15 cities to what he says has been a positive response -- a response that has included interest from distributors, including Orion. All told, the movie cost $75,000 to make, and he hopes to land distribution deals for that amount so he can pay off various investors and get on with making movies. Among his ideas for future projects are Cadavera, a movie about a woman made out of the parts of dead movie stars; and Iggy/Ziggy, a concept based on 2001: A Space Odyssey in which proto-punk Iggy Pop is portrayed as primitive man and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust persona comes back from Mars to see Iggy and find out what rock-and-roll is really all about.
In the meantime, he'll unveil The Sore Losers in Memphis this week with three shows at a downtown studio space called Parallax, and five at the High Point Pinch. "I'm having eight, because eight is Elvis' favorite number," he says. "Three and five because Elvis was born in '35."
Again I figure he's putting me on.
Outside the store, however, as the interview draws to a close, his tone turns earnest for what seems like the first time. "Everything I'm telling you," he says. "I'm very sincere about it."
Having seen the movie, I believe him.
"THE DEVIL IS WHAT THIS MOVIE is all about," says Mike McCarthy, running through one of his many interpretations of his latest movie. "Garage rock, Jeff Evans, Guitar Wolf, '68 Comeback, the Makers, the Oblivians. It's all about the Devil."
Although all of his movies to date have included soundtracks of local and national underground bands, none of them have been as thoroughly wrapped up with rock-and-roll as The Sore Losers. Two of its main characters, Jack Oblivian and Mike Maker, are rockers, and the Japanese band Guitar Wolf put in a cameo as the movie's antagonists. And that's not all. The New Orleans-based Royal Pendletons appear as a lounge band and the Jack Wagner Experience, featuring a former member of '68 Comeback, star as the entertainment at a doomed hippy shindig.
The soundtrack, which is on the California-based Sympathy For The Record Industry label, features 26 songs that are the perfect compliment to McCarthy's "lo-fi sci-fi" movie, and a veritable who's who of trash-rock. From locals like '68 Comeback, the Oblivians, Poli Sci Clone, and Cris Clarity (Shelby Bryant of the Clears) to national acts including the Drags, the Makers, and Gasoline, it's a must have for fans of the genre.
Particularly nice are the two theme songs: the Velvet Underground-inspired "The Sore Losers" by the Jack Taylor Experience, and the Royal Pendletons' organ-driven whirligig "(I'm a) Sore Loser." And on the off chance that you've ever dreamed of having a music-box that plays the Oblivians, check out Greg Oblivian's minimalistic and downright pretty reprise of "Bad Man" off their album Popular Favorites. -- Jim Hanas