The above caveat presages the opening frames of Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, a dizzying collage of found footage and B-movie clips and soundbytes whose stentorian narration goes on to explain in no uncertain terms how aliens from a mirror planet on the far side of the sun fled their devastated world a thousand years ago to inhabit the hollow center of this earth. Once there, these literal globetrotters found their bird-like corporeality genetically damaged, forcing them to mate with snakes to perpetuate their bloodline. Slithering through the netherworld, the "undergroundlings" constructed vast subterranean cities from the pileup of their own excrement (in so doing, driving soldier ants and killer bees northward from South America) and controlled the minds of mortal men via thought waves... until underground atomic testing whipped them into "an insanely agitated rage" directed at all Americans, resulting in a globe shattering jihad of Biblical proportions that brought about the end of the world as we know it in the year 1999, on the cusp of the new millennium. You heard it here first.
Running just under 48 minutes but as densely packed as a fever dream, Tribulation 99 may remind cult movie fans of a certain age of the late, great USA Network series Night Flight (1981-1988), which began as a showcase for New Wave and punk music videos but eventually mutated into a catch-as-catch-can venue for vintage Poverty Row chapter plays, offbeat short subjects, performance pieces and underground films in the years before The Independent Film Channel was a gleam in anyone's eye. Narrated by the velvet-voiced Pat Prescott, Night Flight was, in its original incarnation, a mesmerizing mélange of sounds and images from which viewers could barely tear their bloodshot eyes for fear they'd miss the next oddment to round the cathode corner. Tribulation 99 gives off the same aura of dangerous promise, conducting itself with an ironic effervescence that is as heady as it is irreverent. World history post-WWII goes into the cultural Cuisinart as a vacationing President Eisenhower boards a U.F.O. on a fact-finding tour but finds his "shocking report" muzzled by army brass, leaving boytoy successor John F. Kennedy to take on the "intraterrestrials" and suffer the consequences, dead from bullets fired by humanoid duplicate Lee Harvey Oswald. As a result, Central America becomes a theater of war, thousands are sacrificed in boiling volcanoes or atop "monumental mummy-harboring pyramids," the faces of martyred Mexican nationals appear on tortillas, cattle is mutilated in the American Southwest, Jim Jones is brought back from the dead, eerie electrical outages affect world cities, freak lightning strikes plague key shipping ports, Catholic clergymen turn to witchcraft, psychic vampires proliferate south of the border and Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro proves uncannily immune to bullets, bazooka blasts, tuberculosis planted in his snorkel and a depilatory chemical loaded into his cigars to make his whiskers fall out. Meanwhile, American intelligence agencies court Colombia's Medellín drug cartel to help them combat the intruders, who have left a hole in the ozone layer admitting harmful UV rays and inflicting skin cancer on the earth's most vulnerable and imperiled demographic: the white race.
Completed in 1991, Tribulation 99 came out in the wake of the American invasion of Grenada, the Iran-Contra Scandal, the indictment of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North (who is implicated in these proceedings as well), and the handing over of the reins of the American presidency from Ronald Regan to George Bush (former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, founded, we're told, to take on the alien insurgents). Released the same year was Oliver Stone's incendiary JFK, which also posited countermythical allegations to address government silence surrounding the century's most infamous contract killing. Despite the passage of nearly 20 years, Tribulation 99 remains as scathing and disconcerting as the day it first unreeled, in part because the insinuation of the Internet into American homes and lives has made the very type of global conspiracy theorizing more likely than less. Considering the current pogrom-in-the-making on the subject of undocumented aliens, Tribulation 99 seems particularly tailored to these fractious times... although the thought of it becoming an instructional film for the border-trolling Minute Men is actually a little on the scary side.
For all its sociopolitical prescience, Tribulation 99 is no sober-sided Stonean polemic. Despite the palpable anger informing this motor-mouthed meta-mockumentary, it is first and foremost an entertainment, a confection designed to tickle the synapses. Intercut with miles of vintage coffee ads, driver training films, Christian propaganda productions, pull quotes from the Book of Revelations, intertitle non-sequiturs ("The dead piled as dung upon the ground"), stock footage of natural disasters and engineering failures, travelogue B-roll, Mondo atrocity loops, U.S. industrial shorts, the captured assassinations of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, Castle Films newsreel cut-downs, and a boatload of UFO and Mexican wrestler clip art, are snippets from dozens of classic B-movies. More than half the fun of Tribulation 99 for cult fans (and copyright lawyers) will be shouting out the titles of films conscripted for use here. Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), House of Frankenstein (1944), The Breaking Point (1950), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Them! (1954),The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Gojira (Godzilla, King of the Monsters 1954), This Island Earth (1955), Tarantula (1955), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Moby Dick (1957), The Mole People (1956), The Deadly Mantis (1957), Chikyu Boeigun (The Mysterians, 1958), El Hombre que Logró ser Invisible (The New Invisible Man, 1958), The Hideous Sun Demon (1959), Reptilicus (1961), Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962), Dr. No (1962), Crack in the World (1965), Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), Planet of the Apes (1968),Westworld (1973), Executive Action (1973), Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973), Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973), Sssssss (1973), and Death Race 2000 (1975) are all pressed into the service of this intoxicatingly lunatic countermyth.
All fun and agit-prop aside, Tribulation 99 is just wickedly well-written. Keep the remote handy and your thumb on the reverse button to savor the lunatic long-windedness of:
"Throughout the region, the invaders inculcate the veneration of severed body parts, like Mexican general Obragon's left forearm, Santa Ana's right leg, Poncho Villa's foot and skull..."
"Helping to protect the lives of Americans patrolling the El Cerrillo Barrio is the use of re-exploding bullets, as zombies of course have to be killed twice over..."
"In red underwear to escape the evil eye, Noriega flees toward the hollow earth through a network of interconnecting caves under the canal, leaving behind a ritual bucket of blood, a maggot-infested cow's tongue and fifty pounds of highly addictive corn flour..."
Because Tribulation 99 is culled from found footage, image clarity has to be a lesser consideration. End-to-end, the film has the cottony aspect of a thrice-mimeographed political fear pamphlet or a sixth generation video mix tape and this copy of a copy aesthetic is entirely intentional. Frustratingly, Tribulation 99 has been encoded with only two chapter stops, which makes hunting for a particular passage a bit of a job. Otherwise, Other Cinema has treated Tribulation 99 to a respectful deluxe edition DVD, packaging the "feature" with two of Baldwin's earlier works. Named for an early electromechanical video game allowing players to slap leather with optically projected gunfighters, 1978's Wild Gunman (19m 23s) skewers the American cowboy mythos while 1985's Rocketkitkongokit (29m 57s) riffs on documented western espionage tactics to usurp Congolese independence during the 1960s. An engaging director's audio commentary allows Baldwin to discuss the political rage that fueled Tribulation 99, which co-opts the fundamentalist fear-mongering and racism that the CIA and the American government has employed to drive a wedge between the Latin American people and their duly elected officials. Baldwin relates how many of the film's more outlandish claims (Eisenhower using the excuse of a dental appointment to ride-along in a UFO) come from existing conspiracy theories. Liner notes consist of a text interview with the writer-director, who bills himself here simply by his last name ("reported by Baldwin"), a Criswellian flourish that carries the assurance that "future events such as these will affect you in the future."
For more information about Tribulation 99, visit Other Cinema. To order Tribulation 99, go to TCM Shopping.
by Richard Harland Smith
