Fireworks Woman (1975)

 

Angela is ...The Fireworks Woman is a film that could have only been made in the anything goes atmosphere of the mid-1970s and by a person from a strict Baptist background.  This wasn’t made by just any ol’ Baptist though, director ‘Abe Snake’ was better known to the likes of you and me as Wes Craven, and made this foray into hardcore filmmaking during a lean period in-between horror hits The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes.  Religious repression and sexual guilt are the key themes of Fireworks Woman, the tale of Angela, a woman who is madly in love with a man named Peter.  The only problem is that Peter also happens to be her own brother.  After they both act on their sexual desire for each other, the shame of all that hath occurred drives Peter into the priesthood.  Meanwhile, Angela is cast out into the lustful wilderness.  Watching on the sidelines is Nicholas Burns, the Fireworks Man –played by Wes Craven himself- a mysterious figure who visits their small town on an annual basis to stage fireworks displays... and its heavily implied is the devil.  As the film progresses, so does the case that the Fireworks Man is pulling Angela’s strings, and that she is his instrument that corrupts, and brings out the perverted side of everyone she comes into contact with.  Although a few of these people do, in fairness, seem pretty perverted and corrupt to begin with.

Craven’s casting of himself is one of the many unusual factors of The Fireworks Woman, especially as Craven never strikes you as one of those frustrated actor filmmakers, who used his movies as a means of promoting himself as an actor.  Maybe he’d do the occasional cameo, as in Scream and New Nightmare, but he isn’t someone who you’d expect to show up in a significant role in one of his movies, which he does here.  Craven actually has screen presence too, never coming across as the weak link in what is overall a very well acted film.  Sarah Nicolson and Eric Edwards are partially good in challenging roles as the siblings who are tortured by their desire for each other.  I wonder if the casting of himself as The Fireworks Man wasn’t a reflection of where Wes Craven’s head was at during this period.  You hear all these stories about how the controversy over Last House on the Left had caused Craven to be ostracized in the academic, middle class circles that he moved in, and how friends were wary about him being around their children, once they discovered he directed Last House.  Maybe those kind of experiences led Craven to feel like he was the Fireworks Man, this corrupter of goodness and innocent, and that the Fireworks Man character was a manifestation of how Craven felt he was being perceived by others.  He really does look the part with his Satanic beard, top hat and big cigars, it is a shame Craven didn’t use himself as an actor more, and slightly baffling that when he did it was in a porno that he was directing under a fake name.  Then again, you do also find that in the case of David Durston, who never used himself as an actor in the famous horror films he directed, like I Drink Your Blood and Stigma, but did put himself in a relatively important role in his pseudonymously directed hardcore movie ‘Boy-Napped’.

Considering that he is in the film as an actor, Craven’s involvement in The Fireworks Woman went under the radar for many years.  I think the first person to break that story was Bill Landis in his Sleazoid Express book, way back in 2002.  Prior to that, you’d hear rumours about Craven being involved in adult movies in a lowly capacity, but I don’t think anyone suspected he’d directed a porno.  One of the hundreds of questions I wished I’d asked Bill Landis when he was still alive and kicking, was how he’d come by this information that Craven directed The Fireworks Woman.  All I can think of is that for a time Bill was around Jamie Gillis, who provided Bill with a few quotes for Bill’s Kenneth Anger biography as well as the early issues of Metasex and the re-launched Sleazoid Express.  So I suppose that Bill, who was forever on the prowl for Hollywood Babylon type dirt on people, could have managed to get Craven’s name out of Gillis, as one of the more famous people who’d directed Gillis in porn.  Gillis having appeared briefly in the orgy scene at the end of Fireworks Woman.  Given Bill’s propensity for bullshit, there was for a time a backlash against the idea that Craven directed the film, with others suggesting that it was directed by Peter Locke, who went on to produce The Hills Have Eyes, and that Craven was only on the periphery.  Over time however, the case for The Fireworks Woman being a Craven film has grown.  Its dark themes are befitting a horror filmmaker moonlighting in porn, and Craven is in the movie, as is music from Last House on the Left, namely David Hess’ mournful blues number ‘Now You’re All Alone’.  I remember reading a few years ago, a claim that the version of Now You’re All Alone in Fireworks Woman is either a different, or longer take than appears in Last House on the Left.  Meaning that the makers of Fireworks Woman would have had access to original soundtrack recording material for Last House, rather than this being a case of someone lifting the song from a print of Last House.  Which they wouldn’t have been able to do anyway, as the version of Now You’re All Alone that appears on the Last House soundtrack has had sound effects added to it, like Krug shooting the girl in the lake.  Therefore only someone directly involved in Last House would have had access to an un-tampered with ‘Now You’re All Alone’, minus the gunshot sound effect.  The closest we’ve ever come to an official acknowledgement that Fireworks Woman is a Wes Craven film is the latest Scream movie, in which a grocery store is named ‘Abe’s Snake’.  An Easter egg reference to the name Craven directed The Fireworks Woman under.  Recent quotes from actor Eric Edwards have also confirmed that Craven was the director.

It does appear that the version of Fireworks Woman currently in circulation is a cut version, the film having appeared on tape in the early 1980s.  A time when many adult video companies were censoring kinky or violent material from older movies, out of fear of negative legal attention.  Said to be missing from the current version of Fireworks Woman, is a scene where a man has sex with a fish...I kid ye not.  If you remember the mad fisherman character, who rapes Angela...in the uncut version, this character is said to reappear at the orgy scene, where he ends up sticking his dick into a fish’s mouth.  I assume it is the same dead fish he’d used to beat up another guy earlier on in the movie...he sure got his money’s worth out of that fish!!  I like the idea that there may be an elderly actor out there who can claim that the creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street once had him stick his dick into a dead fish’s mouth...now there’s a tale for the grandkids.  The original version of the film is also said to have contained a urination scene, and I suspect there could be some truth there.  In the version we have there is a scene where a sadist couple lead Angela out into the wilderness and become verbally aggressive to her.  Then there is what looks to be a cut, and suddenly the guy is saying “she’s been very messy” and starts cutting off her wet looking clothes with a pair of scissors.  A lengthy plot synopsis of the film, which ran at the time in the December 1975 issue of Flick magazine, makes reference to a scene where the female half of the couple forces Angela ‘to urinate into her eager hands’.  So, could there have been a missing scene where they force her to piss herself? something that would tie the film in with Last House on the Left, which has its own similar ‘piss your pants’ scene.  One of the unnerving aspects of The Fireworks Woman is that Craven presents the same kind of sexual violence and humiliation that he’d depicted in Last House as ugly and horrific, here as titillation material in an adult movie.

Given the taboos that are broken in the version we have, and the inherently blasphemous nature of the film, it is a surprise that The Fireworks Woman wasn’t a bigger scandal than it was.  At the time Screw magazine predicted that the film ‘is headed for more harassment and confiscation than any film since Deep Throat’.  Which- fortunately for Craven’s long-term career- didn’t actually happen.  If anything I see Last House on the Left as being the Deep Throat moment in Craven’s career. Not in the sense that Last House was a pornographic film, but that the notoriety it whipped up changed the lives of everyone involved in it...and not necessarily for the better.  In terms of his acting career, David Hess spent the rest of his life playing variations on Krug.  Craven himself largely ended up being typecast as a horror film director, and Last House became a source of embarrassment for other cast members like Jeramie Rain and Fred Lincoln.  Yet when Craven upped the ante, and strayed even further from his Baptist roots by making a hardcore film about a priest who is in love with his sister, it largely passed without comment and attracted little attention until Bill Landis blew the whistle on Craven being its director in 2002.  I wonder if in later years, Craven had second thoughts about his endorsement of incestuous relationships in Fireworks Woman.  The People Under the Stairs floats the idea that boffing your sister might not be a swell idea after all, and that path may lead you to dressing up in a gimp outfit and blowing holes in the walls.  The Fireworks Woman and The People Under the Stairs stand as Wes Craven’s two, contradictory, takes on close family relations. 

Often when people who’d go on to have careers outside of porn, shoot a hardcore movie early on in their career, the results can be throwaway works, done to gain filmmaking experience or simply work.  I don’t think that is the case with Wes Craven and Fireworks Woman though, it feels like Craven was engaged and involved with the material, and had something to say, especially about religious repression.  This and Deadly Blessing are the two films of his that touch on his own deeply religious background, and stare into that abyss.  Twisted yet highly compassionate, Fireworks Woman finds the influence of European art cinema flowing through Craven’s veins, and rounds it off with a truly audacious ending that’s sure to be a red rag to conservative and religious sensibilities.  So I would say that The Fireworks Woman is an important Wes Craven film, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked by people who are interested in his body of work.  You’ll probably get more out of it than you will The Hills Have Eyes Part 2...and it is better than being slapped in the face with a fish...which does actually happen to somebody in the film.  Should the full version ever surface on Blu-Ray maybe we’ll finally find out whether anything worse involving a fish also happens in the film.