State of Horror Address: Teagan Clive

    Some things just inspire poetry. The acts of great men have inspired Homer in The Iliad, and Walt Davis in Sex Psycho; the beauty of nature inspired Wordsworth's "Rain Cloud" and Max Hardcore's "Peeing in a College Girl." Teagan Clive is one such entity. I have had the opportunity to see her twice and feel she's strong in the Force once. Both times I've seen her has been in b-movies, and each time she had even less clothing than they had plot. One is Interzone (1987) by Deran Sarafian, the other is Alienator (1990) by Fred Olen Ray.

    Teagan, if you've yet to encounter her in her brief cinematic oeuvre, is a modern, powerful woman. I don't mean powerful like Hilary Clinton, but more like the sasquatches of the WNBA. She has an immaculately-sculpted, muscular body that nears the boundary between "sexy aerobics instructor" and "where's the penis?" but keeps on the good side. Unlike many female body builders, her face does not resemble Jackie Chan's left foot or a frozen mop, but rather retains its voluptuous femininity. Her beauty is a strange but striking combination of the Grecian and the Californian ideals, except heterosexual.

    Armenian director Deran Sarafian knew that for his epic second feature, Interzone, a post-apocalyptic action adventure, he required the inspiration of a Homer and the visual splendor of the Sistene Chapel--but for only $2000. Thus was Teagan cast as Mantis, the sociopathic warlord who is constantly posing for an unseen Sports Illustrated shoot. Opposite Teagan is Bruce Abbot, a smug cross-breed of Bill Pullman and Elias Kotias. He plays Swan, a wheelin' dealin' douchebag who gets by on wisecracks and streetsmarts, like a white Morgan Freeman. But this descendant of Indiana Jones and Pinocchio is drawn, as all heroes must be, by love and prophecy into saving the treasures of the Interzone from Mantis.

    Interzone is an immensely fun movie that will do for your brain what a bubblebath does for your anus. But the highlight of the movie, and not coincidentally, the most Teagan-filled sequence, is--like the cleansing effervescence of my Ninja Turtles bubblebath--when Swan decides he must seduce Mantis to defeat her. As in real life, this triggers a five-minute montage of Teagan posing in silhouette while a band of harpists play an endlessly looping tune of about five notes. Once the posing is done, Teagan graduates, as any warm-blooded woman with Bruce Abbot would do, to blindfolding him then hand-feeding him bananas and sardines.

    What I'm saying is not just that Teagan happened to partake in this playful, creative, charming scene like a fat kid in gym class. I'm saying that that scene could no more be conceived without Teagan than the Gospels could without the Jesus, or the Mona Lisa without the prostitutes. The scene is composed from Teagan's unique features: her exquisitely-honed female form with its intimations of power even greater than William Shatner's testicles; her seductive femininity with its subtle vulnerability, not unlike a kitten with a shotgun; and her playful expression of sexual desire. What makes Teagan so extraordinary is that, like a cheesecake, she makes contradicting features complementary.

    In Alienator, Fred Olen Ray, like an Asian parent, takes these features of Teagan's and pushes them farther. Much like Crime and Punishment, Alienator is about a space criminal who escapes to earth. The Alienator is not, as Marx argued, the capitalist wage system, but rather a cyborg entity sent to retrieve the space criminal. Combining nearly-invincible super-strength and cosmic destructive powers with a highly-toned female physique, the Alienator can only be played by Teagan--with due apologies to Ernest Borgnine's supporters.

    Just as in Interzone, there is one sequence of Alienator in particular that both encapsulates and is directly inspired by Teagan--a Teaguence, if you will. In Alienator, it's a single shot of Teagan, in her full space armor as any self-respecting Alienator must be, reclining against a tree. She holds out her hand to a deer, perhaps grieving a dead mother--we just don't know--and it comes to her without fear or even lust. The shot combines the physical power of Teagan's physique with the opposing tenderness in her femininity; the Alienator's destructive potential with her gentleness toward the innocent and harmony with nature. In doing so, it almost spiritualizes these features, not unlike Patrick Swayze in Ghost; and it achieves a photogenic sublimity--photogeneity being, according to Delluc and Epstein, the very essence of cinema.

    Perhaps you will think I'm going too far. But there is no denying the real importance of the photogenic in cinema. And Teagan's body and elegant movements are powerfully photogenic, leading to unforgettable moments of fun and charm in what could have been forgettable movies. I don't know where Tegan is now. She, like Sylvester Stallone and Matthew Broderick, has not acted since 1990. But she was a b-movie Muse while she was active, and her few contributions deserve this long overdue recognition.

P.S. Come back, Teagan!