http://www.meanmag.com <Writer Mark Ebner is listed as a member of the magazine's Spiritual Advisory Council>

MEAN Magazine, August 2000 THE TEN MOST DEMENTED FILMS EVER MADE!

For all the Ed Woods and Andrei Tarkovskys and Mondo Canes out there - willfully eccentric films or filmmakers that largely accomplish what they set out to do - movies are by and large a conservative medium. They're too expensive to really accomodate a private vision. They take years to get made.

They generally require financial oversight, approval by committee, a built-in marketing hook and target audience. And yet....

And yet, the studio system, in all its deranged genius, has managed to produce some of the most mind-boggling complexities imaginable - many of which still defy description decades later. Some are sheer accidents of casting or kismet. Some are the vanity projects of stars or directors, or hot properties which can command their own final say. A disproportionate number come from the rarefied cusp between the '60s and '70s, when the studios mavens threw up their hands at the sea of enveloping change around them. But in every case, the apparent breakdown of institutional safeguards makes the finished project all the more disturbing.

"Is it funny?" asks Tim Robbins in 'The Player', when Buck Henry pitches him 'The Graduate: 20 Years Later'. "Yeah," says Henry, "it's funny, and dark, and weird." And -from the following sample - apparently in good company.

(1) THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1949)
(2) THE CONQUEROR (1956)
(3) SKID00 (OR, LSD I LOVE YOU) (1968)
(4) HEAD: THE MONKEES (1968)
(5) ANGEL, ANGEL, DOWN WE GO (aka CULT OF THE DAMNED) (1970)
(6) THE LAST MOVIE (aka CHINCHERO) (1971)
(7) ZARDOZ (1974)
(8) THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (aka TWINKLE, TWINKLE, KILLER ZANE) ( 1960)
(9) HUMAN HIGHWAY (1982)
(10) THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1996)
($$) BATTLEFIELD EARTH (2000):

It's a beautiful thing to witness history as it's being made.

John Travolta's career-risking ode to his spiritual mentor, author-prophet L. Ron Hubbard, and the temple of Scientology may yet prove sentient in a way that is invisible to us now.

Because the first thing that that particular religion does with fresh converts - especially high-profile, media-exploitable ones in inventory all their past discretions, effectively leveraging them into eternal submission.

Yet 'Battlefield Earth' may well prove capable of accomplishing what all the critics and cult-busters in the world could not - rendering Scientology and its founding pulpmeister ridiculous in the eyes of the world.

Warner Brothers took a flat distribution fee and couldn't be bothered to test market the film or shore up its woefully inadequate script. Director Roger Christian shot second-unit on 'Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace',and was obviously no stranger to the paranoid delusions of institutional billionaires marketing their own quasi-mystical religions.

Even Travolta will probably escape unscathed, since the public is notoriously forgiving of overly attractive movie stars.

Only Scientology may go down in history as that wierd group that put John Travolta in a nose ring and Ani DiFranco wig.

Scary!

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