Population

Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder had completed a few short subjects and one feature-length film (The White Slave was cowritten with architect Rem Koolhaas and Belgian writer-director Harry Kümel and photographed by Jan De Bont) in the Netherlands before crossing the Atlantic to try his luck in the American movie business. Falling under the wing of softcore sultan Russ Meyer, Daalder became the recipient of a cast-off project offered to "King Leer" by a group of Chicago investors –an exploitation film bearing the prefab title Massacre at Central High (1976) and boasting no less than eight onscreen deaths. Although he had no particular taste for the material, Daalder took on the assignment and turned it into a slyly subversive political allegory masked as a body count movie just a few years before John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) turned dead teenagers into a growth market. At the best of Malcolm McLaren, manager of the UK band The Sex Pistols, Meyer and Daalder began drafting a treatment for Anarchy in the UK, a punk answer to A Hard Day's Night (1964). Due to the clash of extreme personalities, the project came to naught even with the participation of film critic Roger Ebert, who had scripted Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in 1970. (McLaren did use the resulting material for his 1980 faux documentary The Great Rock and Roll Swindle.) Undaunted, Daalder continued to pursue his interest in the LA punk rock scene. Impressed by the onstage presence of the "synth-punk" outfit The Screamers and its kinetic frontman Tomata Du Plenty, Daalder began to devise a film vehicle for the group using the then cutting edge medium of video tape and the gimmick of digital compositing (or "chromakey"), which would prove to be a versatile tool for the nascent music video industry. What began as a "disco Caligari" paean to German Expressionism morphed over the course of several years (due in large part to the eviction of Daalder et al from their Melrose Avenue film studio) into Population: 1 (1986), a thematic sci-fi crossdressing of Citizen Kane (1941) and Glen and Randa (1971). To make nominal sense of the accumulated puttanesca of vignettes, music videos and B-roll, Daalder devised a framing device focusing on the last survivor (Du Plenty) of a nuclear holocaust, who recollects and reviews a highly dubious personal and national history from the safety of a submerged fallout shelter. Marching through the narrator's fractured consciousness is a fool's parade of some of the shining lights of the Hollywood music and avant garde scenes of the mid-Eighties, including Los Lobos saxophonist Steve Berlin, Avengers front-woman Penelope Houston, Plan 9 from Outer Space star Vampira, Netherlands-born actor/photographer Carel Struycken (later the cadaverous valet Lurch of Barry Sonnenfeld's The Addams Family movies), Eldon Hoke (aka El Duce, lead singer for The Mentors and a prime suspect among conspiracy theorists in the alleged murder of Kurt Cobain) as well as session musician David Campbell, Campbell's father-in-law Al Hansen (a colleague of Andy Warhol, John Cage and Yoko Ono) and 12-year old son, who grew up to be Grammy Award-winning recording artist Beck. But despite the jaw-dropping procession of talent in front of and behind the camera (Texas Chain Saw Massacre DP Daniel Pearl helped out between higher-paying gigs), it is the puckish Tomato Du Plenty who keeps Population: 1 focused and entertaining even at its most piecemeal. Du Plenty (who was diagnosed as HIV+ around the time of shooting) is an endearing and ingenuine screen presence, combining a Candide-like ingenuineness with the physical elasticity of a silent screen comic. Du Plenty is well-served by leading lady Sheela Edwards, a crack-toothed punk chanteusse who appears siren-like as the narrator's lost love and croons infectious covers of "Jazz Age Vampire" and "Ten Cents a Dance." Daalder's "total chromakey freakout" had its premiere on January of 1986 at the Four Star Theater in Los Angeles, where it was heralded as a "no-holds barred assault, (as if) Frank Zappa and Hieronymus Bosch took angel dust together and created a nightmare." Although the film tourned the festival circuit, it was as good as lost to the public consciousness after only a few years. While the digital jiggery-pokery used throughout Population: 1 was pioneering, especially considering its co-option by MTV through the next decade (Daadler himself would go on to a sideline career as a digital consultant on such films as Robocop II, Blink and What Dreams May Come, among others), the film's politics and local flavor ghettoized it as strictly cult material. Never forgotten by those who saw it way back when, Population: 1 has been resurrected and restored in a two-disc special edition DVD offering Rene Daadler's director's cut of the film. It's great in and of itself to have the (barely) feature – the standard frame image looks on par for an 80s movie shot without much money – but sweetening the deal are an impressive roster of supplements that place Population: 1 within the context of the careers and aesthetics of its many collaborators. Most valuable among these are a contemporary interview with Daadler, in which he relates the project's tortured history. The funniest bit has Daadler recalling that Tomata Du Plenty's apartment was used for the bomb shelter set, which forced the actor to live with that art design for an entire year; the saddest is his testimony to the utter poverty of many of the principals, who lived for art that did not pay them a living. The remainder of the roster of extras includes (but is not limited to) original music videos, concert footage, short films (Daadler's 1973 LA-set spoof Je Maintiendrai), trailers, a documentary short on Al Hansen (who died in 1995), an excerpt from a forthcoming documentary on Vampira (who died in January 2008) and a tribute to Tomata Du Plenty, who left the building in 2000. To order Population: 1, go to TCM Shopping. by Richard Harland Smith