Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Nightmare Returns!

Theme: Second Coming - Alice Cooper

Note: I know this is a Halloween post, but I ran out of buffer articles to post bc lazy, but in any case it's been a whole winter since Halloween, and we deserve another.

You may be /fa/, but are you /fa/ enough to rock this bright red codpiece? I didn't think so.

Can a concert film be greatest movie of all time of the week? Why not, if it's Alice Cooper's 1987 comeback showcase The Nightmare Returns? For, from the psychedelic 60s inception of the OG band to the present, perennial Pat Bastard and the Spurious 5 favourite Cooper has injected off-kilter narrative and imagery into the rock show format, transforming it into a visual spectacle with a classically theatrical throughline, from scene-setting start through rising action to knuckle-biting eucatastrophe to ecstatic catharsis. Groucho hailed it as the last stand of vaudeville, while the Dalí praised it as musical surrealism. Personally, I've been to see the great man twice, back when he was a mere boy of sixty-something, and can report that he still stage-mogged bands a fraction of his vintage.

Unlike Sir Mixalot, Alice actually has an anaconda to back up his boasts*.

Yet the narrative behind the scenes lends even more satisfaction to this triumphant moment: Coop himself describes how the old Alice of the OG band days and the classic Welcome to my Nightmare was society's whipping boy, cringing, stumbling about the stage, as pitiful as he was dastardly. Like so many rock stars, Cooper felt the pull of addiction and collapsed personally even as his career lurched erratically from one creative peak to another. From the Inside turned personal misfortune into top tier songcraft, with each tale inspired by fellow inmates in the nuthouse where he spent his first rehab, but it was cocaine masterpiece DaDa where the master hit rock bottom personally even while the unchained forces of his shadow wrought his finest art.

This is exactly how I look when dreaming up my firest b╙og posts.

But then something happened to shock everyone anew: Coop ditched the coke and booze, retvrned to Christ and stormed back into the public's nightmares as he took his rightful place at the head of a brand new wave of rockers who had cut their teeth on his material, pacing and leading like the genre godfather he was. And he was no longer the whipping boy: this Cooper owned the stage. No longer was it his nightmare; this time he was yours.

The pro wrestling energy in this entrance is off the scale.

Alright, the actual Constrictor album this tour promoted kind of sucked, minus the GOATed opener and closer ("Teenage Frankenstein" and Jason Lives theme "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)" respectively), but this hardly matters because only two of the blah tracks are in this show, while all the justifiably overplayed hits you know from radio benefit measurelessly from the added muscle of the metal treatment ("Go to Hell" sounds like it was written with just this overhaul in mind). Speaking of muscle, the more elaborate axework on display comes courtesy of Kane Roberts, who played up to the Rambo image his physique implied, making this even more of an 80s time capsule experience. He even has a machine gun guitar that shoots flames:

Sorry Marty, this is what peak cinéma actually looks like.

The rampage continues in crowd-pleasing style, with Alice duelling this dominatrix who shows up on stage, as dominatrices are wont to do:

Thot patrolled. I repeat: the thot has been patrolled.

The Coop then aims his righteous malice at a cameraman who's been foreshadowed getting too close in a couple of shots, laying the groundwork for his well-deserved demise:

Vlad III poses with Ottoman invader (1462, colourised).

But all good things must come to an end, and so our hero sadly finds himself restrained in hospital, where he laments his lonely life in classic "The Ballad of Dwight Frye". Of course, no hospital can keep /ourpsycho/ down for long:

REKT.

Further shenanigans include a bit of practical magic, in which the Coop constructs a monstrous automaton...

And "Sick Things", in which Coop is adored by these dudes that kind of look like the Toxic Avenger:

I love how he poses like a rapper with his bitches and/or hoes, except they're drooling mutants. Don't worry; I feel the same way about you guys.

Finally, it looks like he must pay for all his crimes. But even a murderer is entitled to his last words, in this case tender fan favourite "I Love the Dead":

"Before I go, I just want to say one thing: I love fucking corpses. Thanks!" - A. Cooper.

Even in death the spirit that inspired every subsequent shock band from the Sex Pistols to Mötley Crüe shows its defiance of society in general. As the executioner steals a triumphant kiss from the Coop's severed head...

Oh, like you've never had a faceful of fluids before.

But then, as though the clouds suddenly part, the spiral into madness and horror gives way to the jubilant strains of "School's Out", which I'm fairly sure even yak herders in the ruralest hamlets of Nepal have heard, and what's better still, after the journey you've been on, it hits like you're hearing it for the first time.

Now that's entertainment.

It's masterful sequencing of a sort the OG band used to good effect on Love it to Death, with the bleak "Dwight Frye" giving way to the reassuringly Zen "Sun Arise". You could also liken it to the end of Fantasia, when the first rays of light put paid to all the devil's bullshit. Generations of imitators have come and gone and tried to top the spectacle with more lavish productions, ostentatious pyrotechnics or tryhard shock antics, but that showman's grasp of narrative and the immortal songs have yet to be surpassed.

*Yeah, I know it's a boa constrictor. Everyone's a herpetologist.