Plate O' Shrimp

2011-01-28T22:54:00.000-08:00

Double Dynamite

(1951, 80 min.)

Starring Frank Sinatra, Groucho Marx, Jane Russell, Don McGuire, Howard Freeman, Nestor Paiva, Frank Orth, Harry Hayden, William Edmunds, Russell Thorson.

Screenplay by Melville Shavelson from a story by Leo Rosten from characters created by Mannie Manheim with additional dialogue by Harry Crane (and I think I left out a Hungadunga).

Directed by Irving Cummings.

Johnny Dalton (Sinatra) leads a boring life and that’s the way he likes it (or at least claims to). He’s got a nice woman, Mildred (Russell), but he refuses to marry her until their finances are solid enough to avoid any worry. He’s not even adventurous enough to take a chance on the pickled pig’s feet Emil (Marx), the waiter at his regular lunch place, attempts to foist on him. He figures if he just keeps slogging away at the bank, where both he and Mildred work, as well as the clueless manager (Hayden) and the lothario son (McGuire) of the bank’s owner (Freeman), eventually everything’s going to fall into place. But Mildred is getting tired of waiting, as is Johnny, though he won’t admit it.

One day while out walking, Johnny comes across two toughs roughing a guy up in an alley. They’re both bigger than him, but he manages to make enough noise to get them to run away. The victim, a pretty big guy himself with dark glasses he never removes (cult and mainstream veteran Paiva), tells him there’s no need to call the police, but that Johnny should come along so he can reward him. Next thing Johnny knows, he’s in a betting parlor; seems the man he saved is one of the most powerful crime figures in town, a super-bookie named ‘Hot Horse’ Harris, who has the unique ability to call the winner in any given horserace. He gives Johnny a cool $1000 reward, but then proceeds to bet that grand in race after race until Johnny finds himself with thousands of dollars he didn’t have a few hours before without ever having left the room. Reluctant to be involved at first, Johnny eventually realizes that he can now marry Mildred immediately, as well as buy her everything she’s ever wanted.

His newfound freewheelin’ ways hit a snag when he goes back to the bank and finds that a $75,000 deficit has been discovered and everyone is to be on the lookout for any employee who may be engaging in any unusual spending. Oops. Worse, he can’t give the real explanation for his newfound wealth because the betting parlor has disappeared. With Emil’s help, Johnny now has to figure out a way to hide the money until he can figure out what to do with it.

Given my moniker, it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out the primary reason I chose to watch this. As such I feel I need to tell fellow Groucho-philes that while this is a pleasant enough flick, worth seeing should the opportunity fall into your lap, don’t feel the need to run out and comb through your local video stores (which in many areas would also require traveling back in time at this point, sigh). Frank plays the befuddled juvenile role in a way far removed from the tough guy image for which he would later become famous and Jane makes a cute ingénue, especially when playing drunk. But I use the two descriptives “juvenile” and “ingénue” quite deliberately, because, while old Julius gets off some really good lines here and there, this film mostly serves to illustrate what a Marx Brothers movie might have looked like had it not been a Marx Brothers movie; that is to say if their films had not been such a successful reversal of the Hollywood formula, taking the comics out of the relief position and using the romantic plot and its players as window dressing, the excuse to sing a few songs, and more or less act as a McGuffin around which the Brothers could turn the house upside down. What you get here is a pleasant diversion that actually gives you its “true love rises above” attitude without a single gookie for balance.

So, my Marx Brothers brothers, watch it, but watch it, if you follow. Groucho’s performance will give you a small treat, but only if you can ignore the film’s most egregious offense: Emil pretends to be a wealthy businessman to gain a meeting with the bank’s owner…and then doesn’t even insult him once!

This is the sort of behavior that finally brought down Freedonia, you know.

2010-11-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

A Woman Is a Woman

(France, 1961, 83 min.)

Starring Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy, Jean-Paul Belmondo.

Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

I've been trying to catch up lately on foreign films I either missed during my stint as a videostore clerk or saw but feel I should see again, and I knew that, inevitably, I would feel the possibly masochistic urge to revisit the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard, a man with whom, my friends could tell you, I have had a very contentious critical relationship. But time being what it is, and a decade having passed since the store closed, who knew what changes in myself might affect changes in my attitude towards this vastly overrat- sorry, old habits. I mean, this widely respected but perhaps over-praised filmmaker. That sounds benign enough.

When I decided that the time had come, I figured a dip of the toe would be preferable to a plunge, so I chose this, remembering it as one of the films I liked better than others. (And to clarify, I do enjoy some of his work; I just feel that many celebrate his creative strengths while completely ignoring his weaknesses.) This is Godard’s attempt to make a musical without any songs. (Not many anyway; one scene is set to a Charles Aznavour recording and Karina does perform a number onstage early on.) Using creative music cues to effect this, the filmmaker shows us a young exotic dancer (Godard stable member, director’s paramour, and genuine dollface Karina) pressuring her boyfriend (Brialy) to impregnate her and, when he refuses, considering their close friend (Belmondo) as an alternative, or at least as a way of making the boyfriend jealous enough to relent. The “story” is then played out with various playful sequences, word games, and passing jokes, such as the brief cameo by Jeanne Moreau, wherein Belmondo asks her how filming on Truffaut’s Jules et Jim is going.

If you have ever spent any time with an active theater company, you’ll know the sort of exuberance of which they’re capable, and this movie feels like nothing less than such a company let loose with a camera. As someone who wholeheartedly encourages both creativity and experimentation, I have to give Godard credit for that.

But.

If you have ever spent any time with an active theater company, you’ll also know how overbearing that exuberance can get if you’re exposed to it for too long without being a participant. This reminds me of the repeated comment, if I may genre-jump for a moment, that Bob Clark’s Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things’ rather accurate portrayal of a bunch of theater types is both one of its greatest accomplishments and one of its deadliest liabilities. Coincidentally enough, I recently ran across tapes of a video project in which I was involved in junior high. It was a kick watching it after so many years, but I couldn’t kid myself that anyone without a personal attachment to the project would feel a corresponding enjoyment.

Moving right past the thinness of the narrative of A Woman Is a Woman, it occurs to me that Godard, in this period at any rate, was very much like the child who does something genuinely clever to the tremendous delight and ringing adulation of the surrounding adults…and who then proceeds to do the same thing over and over and over again, the blissful ignorance of calfhood inuring him to the decreasing charm of the bit. Now that’s not an entirely fair comparison; the child, after all, doesn’t understand what made it a good bit in the first place, and Godard obviously does know what he’s doing, and yet the film tries so hard to mesmerize you with its dimples, one can almost feel the stickiness of the syrup coating the proceedings. I would speculate that this might have worked better as a short, and yet the original trailer included on the Criterion DVD itself almost collapses under the weight of its own precocity, so who knows?

Heh. I did say this was one of my preferred films in the Godard canon, didn’t I? I suppose it still is. And I’m perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that my reservations about it stem from my being a curmudgeonly fucker, but to embrace fully that interpretation would be to deny my honest reaction to the film. I don’t actually demand solid storytelling (although this is a consistent failing on Godard’s part in his early work) as long as the progression of the film is interesting enough; hence my love of David Lynch. And obviously some people can watch this, see how much fun the people making it are having, and be swept up in that spirit. For whatever reason, I can’t seem to do that. Despite the obvious enthusiasm behind it, the innovation used to make it, and the moments of genuine inspiration scattered throughout it, it still feels to me a bit too much like watching someone else’s home movies. Creative home movies, to be sure, but home movies nonetheless.

2010-10-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Rififi

(France, 1955, 115 min.)

Starring Jean Servais, Carl Möhner, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin (as Perlo Vita), Marie Sabouret, Marcel Lupovici, Pierre Grasset, Claude Sylvain, Magali Noel, Janine Darcey, Robert Hossein, Dominique Maurin.

Written by Jules Dassin and Rene Wheeler, from the novel by Auguste LeBreton.

Directed by Jules Dassin.

In a small café in Paris, a card game is going on, but it’s not going well for Tony (Servais). Once a celebrated criminal known as Le Stephanois, Tony, since getting out of prison, can’t even muster the respect to be fronted money in the game he’s losing. Past his prime and not very healthy, Tony thankfully still has friends, including Jo (Möhner), who remains indebted to Tony for taking the fall for the job that landed him in stir. The gratitude is deeper than just criminal code loyalty, however, as witnessed by the fact that Jo’s young son is named Tonio.

Jo and Tony go to visit Mario (Manuel), another friend, and find him getting a sponge bath from his voluptuous wife Ida (Sylvain). Mario has an idea to snatch some precious stones from the window of a local jewelry store, but Tony begs off, being tired of the whole scene. Jo subsequently informs him that he’s seen Tony’s ex, a woman named Mado (Sabouret), at a club called L’age d’or. She’s taken up with the proprietor, a surly man named Grutter (Lupovici), and apparently did so right after Tony went away. Grutter is no stranger to the Paris criminal world himself, nor are his brothers Remi (Hossein) and the opiate-lovin’ Louis (Grasset). Tony goes to the club and confronts Mado. She agrees to go back to his flat, but Tony can’t hide his disgust for long and he soon humiliates her and throws her out. Confronted with his own powerlessness, he meets with Jo and Mario again and agrees to do the job, only a petty smash and grab isn’t going to do the trick. If they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it big and go for the safe. A master plan is concocted and carried out, but the inevitable slip brings everything crashing down.

A lot of this probably sounds familiar, but that would be a case of inverse recognition, since every film that uses these tropes got them from this one. That writer-director-actor Dassin managed to work at all at this point in his career was feat enough as it was (there’s plenty of fascinating backstory there: he was a victim of the HUAC blacklist, the poisonous tentacles of which stretched as far as Europe, making it difficult even there to find people who would hire him). That this lucky break would result in his making the quintessential modern heist picture was a happy byproduct that Dassin could probably never have guessed.

No matter how repugnant the reason for Dassin’s having lost out on so many other projects, we can be thankful that he finally landed this one, loosely based on a LeBreton novel that the director had serious reservations about. (He found the depiction of the nightclub gang repugnantly racist.) The talent he displayed for depicting the darker side of Gotham in 1948’s The Naked City gets nicely translated into French, but that’s just one layer in the gateau. At turns playful, somber, sexy, funny and touching (with even a sly, ironic reference to Dassin’s political problems thrown in), the entire mix swirls around a centerpiece break-in sequence in which not a word is spoken by anyone for somewhere in the vicinity of thirty minutes. The producer and soundtrack composer both wanted musical accompaniment but after Dassin showed them his preferred cut, the composer himself did a complete 180 and insisted it be left unadorned. The result is a breathless visual narrative of a crime made all the more suspenseful and sinister by the silence.

But every cake needs a binding agent (we hereby abandon the culinary references) and, appropriate to the incidental way the film came together, this too was driven by circumstance. The budget was too low to hire big name actors, so they got Servais for the lead. Once a prominent actor himself, his career took a downturn owing to his fondness for the ferment. They were subsequently able to get him cheap, but his rough and tumble appearance (‘rough and tumble,’ by the way, being the approximate meaning of the title, as displayed in a night club song sung by Noel that Dassin later felt clashed with the rest of the movie) adds to a performance that is simply spot on. His character’s demons have driven him to a now familiar decision – to go for that one last big score – only it’s never explicitly stated as such, which automatically makes it more understated than its many imitators. Correspondingly, Tony’s acumen, ruthlessness and sadness are all powerfully conveyed by Servais often with little more than his eyes and the lines in his face.

It’s nice to think of the cowards, sycophants and fanatics who wouldn’t give Dassin a break seeing this picture and realizing the opportunities they blew, but it’s probably better – and more in keeping with the filmmaker’s wishes – just to enjoy the picture for what it is. The blueprint for the perfect crime (movie).

2010-03-20T00:42:00.000-07:00

Die! Die! My Darling!

(UK, 1965, 97 minutes)

Starring Tallulah Bankhead, Stefanie Powers, Peter Vaughan, Donald Sutherland, Yootha Joyce, Maurice Kaufmann.

Screenplay by Richard Matheson, based on the novel ‘Nightmare’ by Anne Blaisdell.

Directed by Silvio Narizzano.

During the latter portion of my senior year in prep school, I began to hang out regularly with one of the coolest punk rock chicks I have ever known, a true force of nature with a name to match. She had actually graduated the year before, but both of her parents worked at the school and their house was just over a wooded hill past the football field. Taking advantage of my senior-privileged freedom in the post-dinner hours when everyone else was required to be studying, I’d mosey on over to her place and we’d watch movies, listen to music, have a little beer or grass, and even fool around a bit. (Incidentally, I have no idea where her parents, including her football coach father, were during all of this, because I could have been in several different kinds of hurt if I’d been caught.)

Sometimes we’d wander towards town and on several occasions, one in particular that I recall taking place as we hung out on the loading dock of the local post office, we talked about an idea she had for a movie to be called Alice and Basil. It was to be a horror flick in which we would play the titular couple, a vampire queen and her Renfield-like assistant hiding in the modern world of punk rock. Two of my favorite aspects were a minor plot point involving Basil’s ability to remove his own hand, thereby escaping from police cuffs whenever necessary, and a scene in which I would get up on stage and sing a tribute to her in the form of the Misfits song ‘Die! Die! My Darling!’

Now that it’s become apparent why I padded the review with that story, I have to admit that it has nothing to do with the film at hand; neither, beyond the title, does the Misfits song. In fact, Die! Die! isn’t even a horror movie so much as Hammer Studios’ entry in the mini-genre begun by Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in which older actresses get their psycho on. The grande dame in this case is the notorious Tallulah Bankhead, and she’s the main reason why this is worth a look.

Stefanie Powers, probably most famous for the jetset detective series Hart to Hart with Robert Wagner, plays Patricia Carroll, an American who has just arrived in England with her new fiancé, Allan (Kaufmann). Against his wishes, she has agreed to pay a visit to the mother of her previous, now dead fiancé Stephen. Mrs. Trefoile (Bankhead) lives on a large isolated estate in a small town. She disapproves of just about everyone in that town right down to the minister, and so her only companions are her staff, Harry the groundskeeper (Vaughan) who was related somehow to the late Mr. Trefoile, Harry’s wife Anna (Joyce) who keeps the house, and assistant groundskeeper Joseph (Sutherland, who doesn’t have much to do but manages to portray his developmentally disabled character in a fairly compassionate fashion).

Patricia has agreed to meet Mrs. Trefoile out of a sense of decorum (and to gain a personal feeling of what is all-too lazily referred to as closure these days), but it becomes immediately apparent that Mrs. Trefoile is a full-blown religious fanatic (Fanatic was the film’s original British title), who has only called the young woman to her abode in order to make sure that her son was “pure” when he died and that his former betrothed both is so and intends to remain so for when she meets up with her “husband” in heaven. When Patricia decides she is only willing to play along up to a certain point, Mrs. Trefoile has Anna lock her in an upstairs room and proceeds to starve and terrorize her into submission/repentance.

This is pretty tame for a “private prison” movie (I’m not sure who originated that term, but I first came across it at Rob Firsching’s now seemingly defunct Amazing World of Cult Movies site): no chambers of medieval horror, no excruciating sexual sadism. True, the lecherous Harry does try to take advantage at one point and those with a low tolerance for scripture might disagree about the torture thing, but this is less about voyeuristic thrills than it is about a wall of repression that begins to disintegrate when the real world comes knocking one day. Mrs. Trefoile is a former performer who was “saved” from a life of “decadence” by her late husband who then died as soon as their son was born, leaving her with a fucked up sense of propriety and the poor boy with a mother who instantly transferred her dependence on her husband to him. And it turns out most of the house is infected: Harry doesn’t hesitate to cater to Mrs. Trefoile even as he secretly dreams of murdering her; Anna covets Patricia’s finery but takes special pleasure in destroying it at Mrs. Trefoile’s command. Comparatively, Joseph is doing well; he may have trouble telling which end of a book is up, but he’s a hell of a lot happier than anyone else in the accursed place.

So, those looking for something more along the lines of The Sinful Dwarf or Nightmare Circus are going to be disappointed, and others may find it a bit frustrating as well, not because it isn’t any good – at the very least it qualifies as an acceptable timewaster – but because of the film’s own crisis of identity. There’s a halting element of camp that appears and disappears as jarringly as the harpsichord that sometimes blares on the soundtrack, characteristic of the way that the film just never quite hits its mark…with one considerable exception. An exception named Tallulah.

Bankhead was as famous for her antics in life as she was for her acting. Sexual dalliances, hard partying and a general take-no-shit attitude won her both friends and enemies, and while her salad days were long behind her when she made this, her final film appearance in a career spent primarily on the stage, you can still see the dynamo at work. The irony of Mrs. Trefoile’s dead certainty is the uncertainty that lurks beneath it, and Bankhead lets the audience glimpse that private side, but she skillfully prevents it from ever overshadowing the monstrosity. With her famed rasp and clipped, regal movements (even the way she takes off her glasses is menacing), one wonders how Patricia could have thought for a moment that the woman wasn’t a danger to her or even more how it could have taken Harry so long to conclude that she was, indeed, quite “barmy.” Bankhead proved with this role that she was still an actress to be reckoned with, and it is to my chagrin that I will never have to chance to get her together with that wonderful punk rock chick of my younger years, kindred forces of nature, and sing ‘Die! Die! My Darling’ to the both of them.

2009-09-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

Hellish Flesh

(Brazil, 1977, 85 min.)

Starring José Mojica Marins, Luely Figueiró, Oswaldo De Souza, Lirio Bertelli, Helena Ramos.

Screenplay by Rubens Francisco Luchetti from a story by José Mojica Marins,

Directed by José Mojica Marins.

This is a movie about a scream. And I wish I meant that in the poetic, critically analytical way that it sounds, but, no, I’m being literal. The scream of one of the characters is featured in so many scenes, it practically deserves a cast credit of its own. That scream belongs to Dr. Jorge Medeiros (writer/director/producer Marins, best known for his Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) movies, about a weird sort of anti-hero who revels in the philosophy as well as the practice of evil). Dr. Medeiros is a scientist who dabbles in acid, the kind that makes things dissolve as opposed to the kind that just makes things look like they’re dissolving. One night he sees his wife Raquel (Figueiró) off to a concert she’s attending with their friend Oliver (De Souza), expressing his regret that he can’t take her himself, or for that matter that he can’t seem to take her anywhere, owing to his “experiences.” Raquel herself mentions that she’s gotten used to not seeing him much owing to the importance of his “experiences.” I have to admit I was beginning to wonder why they couldn’t ever share these “experiences,” but then I’m no expert on marriage.

It is revealed soon after that Raquel and Oliver are more than friends – much, much more. It was also revealed around this time that, as I had begun to suspect, the English subtitles were not translated by a native speaker. The “experiences” that kept being mentioned were in fact Jorge’s experiments, most of which seem to involve him putting his face as close as possible to his test tubes. This production error turned out to be somewhat par for the course as numerous typos appeared throughout, and, as with the “experiences,” the occasional flagrant mistranslation. This had the distracting effect of causing my brain to spontaneously make up its own Malapropian subtitles for the ones they got right, my favorite example being Raquel telling the police on the phone that, “There’s been an applesauce at my husband’s leg!”

Which brings us to what happens next. Raquel and Oliver have decided that they can’t stand the situation anymore, the situation being the two of them sneaking around behind the back of what appears to be a perfectly nice man, albeit one with Marins’ trademark creepy-ass affectations, including the long, curly fingernails he always sports. The two philanderers want to eliminate Jorge and live off his fortune, so they come up with a cunning plan. Well, a plan anyway. The whole thing seems to be that Raquel will go into Jorge’s leg- I mean, lab, and throw acid in his face while Oliver fixes them drinks. This doesn’t kill him immediately and he ends up thrashing around screaming at the top of his lungs. Raquel is quite put off by the noise, so Oliver puts down his caipirinha and goes to set the lab on fire, which is when Raquel calls the cops to report the applesauce. I mean- you know what I mean.

Problem for them is, Jorge is one tough bastard and despite the acid and the fire, he still doesn’t die. Raquel and Oliver decide to run off with what money is on hand, while Jorge undergoes facial reconstruction, which brings us a sequence that alternates shots of the two of them dining with footage of what appears to be genuine eye surgery, decidedly upping the ick factor. Jorge is now confined to wearing a mask to hide his injuries and yet he employs a policeman friend of his (Bertelli) not only to keep tabs on Raquel to make sure she’s safe but also to bring her whatever money she needs. And she needs a lot since Jorge’s survival means she isn’t inheriting anything and slacker Oliver is burning through what they stole like, well, like acid through the flesh of an unsuspecting scientist.

Yeah, that had to hurt. But just in case you weren’t able to figure that out for yourself, Marins drives the point home by having the memory of Jorge’s screams piped in to scene after scene after scene. He does use it to interesting effect in one moment late in the film, that is if I’m reading his intentions correctly, but much of the time it mostly serves as a reminder that Marins is rarely hesitant to lay it on as thick as frosting. But at least here it’s somewhat clearer as to what ends. Unlike the Coffin Joe films I’ve seen, which play like twisted carnival shows either repudiating or affirming Catholic belief depending on where you come in, Hellish Flesh, made with only touches of the hallucinatory vibe Marins loves to employ, is kind of like a telenovela version of an EC Comics horror story, narratives gruesome and lurid enough to blind more censorious types to the fact that what they were witnessing were morality plays. Not a perfect description of the brain-scrambling films that Marins makes, but damn close when to comes to Hellish Flesh.

2009-09-06T23:59:00.000-07:00

Snack Bar

This would be the section of Plate O' Shrimp dedicated to short form critiques. In other words, all the thoughts I couldn't pad out into a full review. (Yet.)

Blast of Silence (1961, D: Allen Baron) Stark post-noir crime drama from 1961 about a moody expatriate New York hitman who returns home to carry out One Last Job™ and finds that being in his old stomping ground at Christmastime does a number on his head. Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s obvious labor of love may not be for all tastes – I can imagine the more lyrical aspects, particularly as delivered via a prevalent voiceover (written by Waldo Salt! (and delivered by Lionel Stander!)), rubbing some people the wrong way – but the sense of time and place is dead on and the tone is nicely raw. A must-see for devotees of curios, although it deserves a wider audience than that.

Caged Women (Italy, 1982, D: Bruno Mattei) Mattei does WiP (one of at least two that he did, along with ‘83’s Women’s Prison Massacre). Laura Gemser (whose appeal I get but do not personally feel) is a reporter who goes undercover as an inmate to investigate abuse, butts heads with the domineering prisoner, ends up clashing with the sadistic matron, i.e. everything we’ve seen before. There is the expected nudity and nastiness, and yet the movie also props up my belief that Mattei made genuine attempts to inject social relevance into his films. Crassly exploitative as the whole thing is, Mattei strays into some surprisingly progressive territory, largely by virtue of the character of the prison doctor, who is also an inmate himself in the adjoining men’s facility for Kevorkian-ing his wife. I don’t know if Mattei, like Deodato, ever tried to justify his work in such a way, but he might have had a case to make if he had. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that he was a terrible director and that segments of this film are over-the-top bad, a.k.a., terrific.

Closely Watched Trains (Czechoslovakia, 1966, D: Jiri Menzel) One could be forgiven for wondering why a movie that takes place in a territory technically occupied by Nazis has so few Nazis in it, but that’s kind of the point. A young man in a small Czech town takes a job at the train station because it affords him the prestige of a uniform without him actually having to do anything. This being a mere checkpoint along the arms route, the denizens are free to worry about other matters, which always seem to involve their libidos. The war does interfere here and there, but this is mostly a study of that uniquely Eastern European ennui, and a surprisingly funny one at that.

Doulos, Le (France, 1962, D: Jean-Pierre Melville) Crime drama about assorted criminals and their assorted loyalties, with one played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in the center of it all who may or may not be a police informant. I found the whole thing kind of meandering, until a scene about two thirds of the way through when all of a sudden everything that’s come before begins to make sense. I also have to wonder if the Coens were somewhat inspired by this film when they were writing Miller’s Crossing. Not only do both films have a lot to do with the allegiances of criminals, but Le Doulous has a hat theme as well. We’re told at the beginning that the title is slang for both an informant and a kind of hat, plus one important scene has a shot of a hat rolling across a room. Possibly a coincidence, but it did strike me.

NEW! Fair Game (2010, D: Doug Liman) I rarely get a chance to watch recent films, but a preview copy of this fell into my hands and it was one film that I had significant reason to want to see, both for the political nature of the story and the fact that I haven't stopped loving Naomi Watts since the cold December night when I first laid eyes on her at a showing of Mulholland Dr. at a theater on East 59th Street. I was a little leery of the fact that Doug Liman was the director, not because I have any problem with him - I just didn't know that the filmmaker behind such hyperkinetic fare as GO and The Bourne Identity was the person to helm a story of such grave, real-world importance as the outing of intelligence operative Valerie Plame as a way of punishing her husband Joe Wilson for daring to point out that the Bush administration's justification for invading Iraq was crap. And, to be frank, the movie does come off as a bit slick at times. But it's not a huge liability, and it occurred to me that if a little bit of industry flash meant more people saw this, then so be it. In fact, I would gladly lobby for the story to be remade in as many different genres as possible - action, romance, horror (there are certainly enough monsters in evidence) - just to make sure as many people as possible become aware of what was probably the most repugnantly petty action of one of the most corrupt administrations this country has ever seen. Make a Muppet version while you're at it so the kids will know.

The Ghost of Mae Nak (Thailand, 2005, D: Mark Duffield) Serviceable, if unexceptional, Thai ghost story, written, directed and produced by people with decidedly non-Thai names, about a newlywed couple who buy a house only to be harassed by a (wait for it) freaky female ghost with long black hair. I think this was the first time I got any kind of good look at Bangkok, so that was cool. The lead actress was exceptionally cute, so that was cool too. One of the odder aspects of the whole thing is that a fairly somber tone is maintained throughout much of the story, which makes it strange that they seem to have chosen to play the somewhat graphic gore scenes for laughs. Worth a look if it’s within reach.

A Girl Cut in Two (France-Germany, 2007, D: Claude Chabrol) Having worked in a video store with a tremendous library, I managed to study pieces of a lot of different film movements and the entirety of, well, probably none. When it comes to the famed French New Wave, I wish to Christ I could get back some of the time I spent watching Godard’s more odious pieces so I could switch it with time spent watching the work of the director of this film, Claude Chabrol. And having said all of that, I’m not exactly basing that wish on this particular film. Ludivine Sagnier, the frequently naked co-star of Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, plays an up-and-coming TV personality who becomes torn between two men, one a middle-aged novelist and the other a young heir to a pharmaceutical empire. Both men hate each other for reasons we are never explicitly told. There’s obviously something being said here about arrested development – both men are basically kids at heart, only minus the innocence, the exact quality in her that makes each want to debase her in some way – but even with that potentially volatile subject, not to mention good performances and direction, it all feels rather weightless. Sagnier, keeping her clothes on this time, is a vibrant presence throughout. Speaking of famous nude people, Mathilda May, almost unrecognizable as the same woman who played Lifeforce’s space vampire, appears here as the novelist’s publicist, a vamp of a different sort.

Gore Whore (1994, D: Hugh Gallagher) Super cheap, super sleazy, badly acted, shot-on-video adaptation of Edith Wharton (one of those things isn’t true) about a dead prostitute (Audrey Street) who gets re-animated, steals the re-animating formula and then goes about murdering and re-animating a bunch of men by shooting the formula up their asses with a combination syringe/big black dildo. It took me two tries to get all the way through this, not because it’s boring – although it doesn’t really have anything going for it beyond the abundant filth and grue – and not because of the less-than-flattering descriptives listed above. Definitely not the latter, a fact made all too clear to me by the fact that around the same time I saw this I also re-watched Female Trouble, possibly my favorite John Waters, also super cheap, super sleazy and badly acted. But while Gore Whore has a certain energy to be admired, giving its all in light of where it falls on the cinema-of-limitations scale, and the cast are certainly game for the task, they simply don’t have the inherently gonzo personalities of the Waters stable. Having players like Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Edith Massey, et al, it was as if Waters achieved a kind of cosmic confluence of camp the likes of which is unlikely to ever happen again. Try as hard as they might, there’s simply no way the makers of Gore Whore could have recreated magic like that, and it may be unfair of me to even make the comparison, but it was something that popped into my mind more than once while I watched it. At any rate, sleaze connoisseurs should definitely seek this out.

NEW! Juliet of the Spirits (1965, D: Federico Fellini) Fellini directs his wife, Giulietta Masina, in a surrealistic fantasy the plot of which is essentially a woman wondering if her husband is having an affair. As she interacts with her oddball friends and the mysterious woman next door (and her oddball friends), her suspicion intermingles with neuroses left over from childhood and her own lust, unleashing a series of bizarre hallucinations, but where does the line between reality and fantasy really lie? This is easily the most fascinating film I've seen in a while. This was, arguably, the first film in which Fellini really allowed his imagination to dive into the deep end of the psyche (taking up where 8½ left off, with his previous work, despite elements of his love for spectacle and caricature, tending to be more grounded in reality) and he assembles a circusload of characters and images that he utilizes with a remarkably deft hand. Masina is, as always, a riveting figure, no small feat in a movie with this much going on, and Fellini ups the ante by bucking expectations on a regular basis, such as having recurring disturbing images (one of which, a young girl with crazed eyes tied to a burning fence, would have been right at home in a giallo) pop up in the background of sunny outdoor scenarios set to Nino Rota's playful score, almost as if Italian horror had mated with one of the party scenes from a Blake Edwards movie. I have to believe both David Lynch and John Waters have seen this, the former because Fellini's use of sound, silence, and dualistic images would be right at home in one of Lynch's more gonzo works, and the latter because the next door neighbor's make-up and fashion sense are extremely similar to the look Divine sported in Pink Flamingos. An absolute must-see for anyone interested in surrealism, Euro-weirdness, or witnessing one of our world-class filmmakers directing with no brakes and yet no casualties.

NEW! Last Train from Gun Hill (1959, D: John Sturges) A marshall (Kirk Douglas) and a rancher (Anthony Quinn), former friends, find themselves in a deadly situation when Douglas comes looking for the man who raped and murdered his Native American wife and it turns out to be Quinn's son (Earl Holliman). Douglas then has to find a way to get Holliman out of the town of which Quinn is essentially the king, possibly with the help of Carolyn Jones as the resident damaged damsel. This is a perfectly servicable western story and yet it somehow falls just short of its mark. Maybe it's me, though; other westerns kept popping into my head as I watched it. The general hunting-the-man-who-raped-and-murdered-my-wife theme made me think of Lang's Rancho Notorious, and the extended sequence with Douglas and Holliman holed up in a hotel waiting for train time conjured memories of Delmer Daves' 3:10 to Yuma. Not that I'm implying copycat-ism - both aspects are different enough to stand on their own - but something just seems lacking, despite a good cast, scattered stand-out moments and a strong finale.

The Love-Ins (1967, D: Arthur Dreifuss) Hair-brained story about a college professor who quits his job and becomes a Timothy Leary-style hippie guru, preaching free love and LSD use. It seems to want to represent the viewpoints, and assorted pros and cons, of both the squares and the heads, but when you’re pretty much portraying everyone as a hypocritical, reactionary asshole, minus any kind of genuine context, what’s the point? (i.e. The main character is portrayed as a man of principle until its suddenly convenient for him to be an opportunistic creep.) However, the Alice in Wonderland dance number cum drug trip is a must see.

Mad Max (Australia, 1979, D: George Miller) The society-in-decline movie about out-of-control joy-riding criminals and barely-in-control cops that helped launch both a post-apocalyptic genre and Mel Gibson. I’m not an action movie fan in general, and I hate cars, but I can’t deny that this is some knuckle-biting stuff. In regard to the other genre it represents, the film certainly stands as an interesting contrast to so many revenge films of the ‘80s, both in what they have in common and what they don’t. It hits many of the familiar spots but takes the time to develop a real sense of the world of the film with them, as opposed to viewing them as mere stepping stones to the payback. And when you consider that...[SPOILER]...the incident that sends Max into full revenge mode doesn’t happen until way near the end, whereupon he rapidly and efficiently takes out the bad guys (including a comparatively unceremonious demise for the ringleader), it really does reveal the numerous Death Wish imitators for the exercises in masturbatory violence that they are.

NEW! Man of Marble (Poland, 1977, D: Andrzej Wajda) A young Polish filmmaker struggles to complete a project about a famous bricklayer. That almost sounds like the sort of satirical description of an arthouse movie that they used to use on Frasier, but this is quite real. And, of course, there's a lot more to it than that. The majority of the film takes place in the past, as said bricklayer gains national acclaim for helming a building project that breaks a record for labor (and which is filmed for propagandistic reasons) only to fall from grace when he refuses to play the Party game. If this doesn't seem like the sort of thing for you, consider that director Andrzej Wajda (pronouned 'An-jay Vai-da' in case anyone was wondering) managed to get a roughly two-hour and forty-minute film out of it and it will probably seem even less so. And that's not even counting the sequel, Man of Iron, which runs a mere two hours and thirty-two minutes. I got this off of a City University of New York television program called City Cinematheque and it was accompanied by a half-hour interview by producer/professor Jerry Carlson with Wajda. One of the most interesting things Wajda talks about is that there was an extended period in Poland during the Soviet era when, contrary to the practice in many Soviet countries where artists had to get direct permission from the government to do whatever they wanted to do (often to very limited results), Poland utilized a system by which an intermediary organization would take the script to the government and, upon approval, take responsibility for the finished product. Subsequently there was no government "editor" on the set during production and scripts were often freely changed, resulting in finished products not quite what the powers that be were expecting. So, yay for artistic freedom. Distribution, on the other hand, was another matter. When Man of Marble was completed, the government tarred it as an anti-socialist film (despite being considerably pro-labor) and relegated its exhibition to a single theater. When the crowds that showed up to see it turned out to be too much for the venue to handle, they relented and allowed for two more theaters, but sternly declared that it would not be exhibited outside of Poland. Only, the regular French distributor of Wajda's films managed somehow (he doesn't explicitly say how) to secure a copy and it was subsequently shown as the unannounced "surprise" film at the Cannes festival, thereby unleashing it upon the world, whether the Polish government liked it or not. Wajda uses this as an example of how the smallest crack in an authoritarian power can allow things to slip from their control. One likes to think of the lesson that genuine advocates of freedom - of both expression and in general - can take from this, while inwardly cringing at what those who see no contradiction in "enforcing" freedom through authoritarian means might take away from it as well.

My Winnipeg (Canada, 2007, D: Guy Maddin) Documentary (of sorts) about avant-garde filmmaker Maddin’s hometown is a typically bold mix of the real and the surreal, B&W and color, fact and fiction, stock footage and new footage (much of it made to look like stock footage), etc. Recreated moments from his family’s life are mixed with stories of places within the city from the same period that have long since fallen victim to bad decisions, resulting in a brew of nostalgia, anger and regret that manages, as does so much of the director’s work, to be wildly hallucinatory and eerily sedate at the same time. I know some people find Maddin’s films off-putting, but outside the setting of a (completely) fictional drama, they might find his aggressively poetic stylistics easier to take. Personally, I found it utterly beautiful and mesmerizing.

The Oracle (1985, D: Roberta Findlay) Young couple moves into a new apartment and the wife begins fooling with a planchette (ouija type of device) left behind by the woman who previously occupied the place. She begins to realize that a murdered man is using the device to tell her who killed him. Additionally, whoever tries to get rid of the planchette is offed by a demonic presence, which may or may not be connected to the dead man (not a mystery the movie bothers to deal with). Cheap production, amateurish acting, and at least one scene of unrepentant tawdriness, as is to be expected from any production helmed by a Findlay (Roberta alone in this case; Michael had already died by this point), but I quite enjoyed this. The story is surprisingly solid – indeed, some of the more eccentric plot points could have been used to good effect in an offbeat noir the likes of which Sam Fuller used to make – there’s some decent gore, good use (typical of the Findlays) of NYC locations, and the lead, Caroline Capers Powers, is very cute, with a kind of a young Jennifer Connelly thing going on. A good choice for cheapo night.

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947, D: Stuart Heisler) Susan Hayward plays a nightclub singer who gives up her job to marry her songwriter sweetheart (Lee Bowman) and have a child, only to have his career as a radio crooner take off while she devolves into alcoholism. This movie was the breakout vehicle for Hayward and even garnered her an Oscar nomination, for which she should have thanked her lucky stars, because the whole thing is really a lot of melodramatic piffle. Bowman was apparently not happy that so much attention was lavished on his co-star, and frankly, while he’s kind of wooden at times, he does come off a bit better even if only because his character is a lot more sympathetic. Best of all is Eddie Albert as Bowman’s songwriting partner who maintains his aw-shucks decency – and therefore his dignity as well – despite repeatedly being treated like a second banana in almost every situation. Marsha Hunt also has one really good scene as the talent scout who harbors feelings for Bowman. Not a bad movie, exactly, but be prepared to snigger when the movie wants you to sob.

NEW! Teenage Cruisers (1877, D: Tom Denucci & Johnny Legend (as Martin Margulies)) When a fellow devotee of cult-y salaciousness told me he was sending this to me, I somehow got the impresson that it was another teen T&A comedy. I was not prepared for the fact that it was hardcore. I was even less prepared for the fact that it's a quite bizarre, almost Dada-esque image pastiche, at least at times. There are recurring characters but no actual story. The legendary Johnny Legend plays a DJ and his segments in the radio station act as glue for a series of random scenes, some of which involve sex acts, some of which do not. There's a slapsticky feel to a lot of it (a scene involving two naked girls in a pie-making contest that devolves into a pie-throwing contest is the primary reason my friend sent it to me in the first place), some of the deliberately button-pushing humor deserves the laughs it seeks, some...doesn't, and an underlying current of morbidity slops up to the surface from time to time as well. I haven't run across many XXX movies that seem to demand a repeat viewing purely for artistic reasons, even in the period this came from before the whole enterprise devolved into rote bullshit, but if there are more like this out there, I guess I need to take another look through the Something Weird catalog.

Umberto D. (Italy, 1952, D: Vittorio De Sica) Aging pensioner finds himself in dangerous debt to his landlady – a woman he once helped when she was down and out – and does everything he can to make sure that he and his dog do not become homeless. Another one of Italian neo-realist De Sica’s studies of the sort of abominable treatment the downtrodden sometimes received in post-WWII Italy, this heart-wrencher - which sort of utilizes the dog in the way many of these films use children - does offer an ending that, while not happy, is at least hopeful. The humanist empathy of the neo-realists was undeniable, but that doesn’t make their movies any easier to watch.

Venus in Furs (UK-Italy-Germany, D: Jess Franco) Jazz musician is (slightly) surprised when a woman whose murder he (sort of) witnessed and whose body he subsequently found washed up on shore in Istanbul turns up in Rio where he has relocated, very much alive and just as hostile to the idea of clothing as she was before. Plus there’s Klaus Kinski and strange deaths. The tape I was watching of this got all hinky two thirds of the way through so I had to stop and fix it, which is detrimental to the viewing of any Jess Franco movie. It’s really best to let them wash over you without a lot of critical thought. In fact, having his main character be a jazz musician is one of Franco’s most appropriate meta-ideas since his own modus operandi seems to be setting a theme and then just riffing on it for as long as he can sustain it, plus sex. If you like Franco, you’ll probably enjoy this. If not...

NEW! White Nights (Italy, 1957, D: Luchino Visconti) No, not the Gregory-Hines-helps-Mikhail-Baryshnikov-defect movie. This is Italian auteur Visconti’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky short story of the same name. A young citydweller (Marcello Mastroianni) dealing with loneliness chances upon a young woman (Maria Schell) on a bridge at night. She tells him that she’s waiting for a man who went away after a brief courtship but who promised to return and marry her in a year’s time, which is right about then. He agrees to help her, all the while hoping she’ll abandon her folly and fall for him. Visconti manages to strike a good balance between faithfulness to the original story and his own invention, the latter most evident in a funny scene in which the pair try to join in at a cafe where people are dancing to Bill Haley and the Comets despite neither having any experience with rock music. There are additional changes, some practical (setting it in Italy instead of Russia), some dramaturgical (Mastroianni plays the character with a greater degree of selfishess than is evident in the story, which fleshes things out a bit), but it all works pretty well. But the thing that works best of all, whether the rest of it works for you or not (and frankly, the story is pretty much of a trifle), is that it is, like much of the director's work, a beautiful thing to look at. In this case, the credit goes to the fact that the entire thing was filmed on a set, the essence of an entire town constructed on the Cinecitta lot. Aside from being an impressive achievement, it manages to bring out the fairy tale quality of the girl’s story as well as suggesting the insular alienation that the man feels. This doesn’t seem to get mentioned as much as Visconti’s more grandiose works, such as The Leopard or The Damned, but it’s well worth seeing.

2009-08-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

Phantom Lady

(1944, 87 min.)

Starring Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Alan Curtis, Thomas Gomez, Elisha Cook, Jr., Fay Helm, Aurora Miranda (as Aurora), Andrew Tombes, Regis Toomey, Joseph Crehan.

Screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld, from the novel by Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish.

Directed by Robert Siodmak.

As our story begins, New York architect Scott Henderson (Curtis) is out on the town and in a lousy mood, for reasons to which we are not yet privy. Dulling the pain in a bar with his ferment of choice, he impulsively invites the woman on the next stool (Helm) to come see a show with him. She seems an unlikely candidate to offer him much comfort, being rather perturbed herself, but he assures her he wants nothing more than company and wouldn’t it be a shame for the tickets to go to waste. She agrees, reluctantly, insisting on total anonymity as part of the deal.

They hit the theater where they see a Latin-themed review. Scott’s “date” is wearing a rather garish hat, which stands out all the more when the lead performer onstage, Monteiro (Miranda), turns out to be wearing the same one. The acid looks the singer shoots at Scott’s companion are rivaled only by the cheesy grin of the drummer in the band (Cook). After the show, Scott walks her back to the bar and they part company.

Scott heads home only to find a couple of police detectives in his apartment (Toomey and Crehan) along with their boss, Detective Burgess (the reliably watchable Gomez). Turns out that Scott’s wife was murdered while he was out, viciously strangled with one of his own ties. Scott admits that they had just had a terrible fight – and that the marriage was, for all intents and purposes, over – but that she was alive when he left. Despondent over the state of things, he had left the apartment resulting in his encounter with the mystery woman, who could verify his story if they would just ask her. Problem is he doesn’t know her name and, even worse, every single person who saw them together now claims he was alone. Looks like it’s time to send in housekeeping to make up a bunk on death row, unless, of course, Scott’s trusty assistant Carol Richman (Raines) can find the mystery woman and put him in the clear.

The above set-up is presented in fairly concise fashion, all the better for the focus of the film to shift to Carol, the actual lead character. She’s served up with equal succinctness – we know that she’s a small town girl transplanted to the big city because Henderson calls her “Kansas”; we know that she still has some of the small town girl in her by the way she fiddles with her stockings when she’s nervous – and that shorthand too turns out to be a mere springboard for what comes next, as the small town girl rather abruptly plunges into the darker sides of the big bad city in the interest of clearing her boss’s name.

Director Siodmak was one of that famed group of filmmakers that made the journey from Germany to Hollywood rather than stick around to see how the whole Nazi thing worked out. Here, working from a novel by suspense master Woolrich, penned under one of his pseudonyms, Siodmak creates an odd little noir that I can’t completely make up my mind about. Enjoyable as it is, long before Carol reaches any sort of definitive point in her quest to clear Scott, with the help of Scott’s best friend Jack Marlow (Tone) and Detective Burgess, who has come to rethink the case, the film drops a significant piece of the mystery in the audience’s lap. It allows Siodmak to dabble in similar psychological territory to other crime films of his native land, and yet also changes the nature of the intrigue in a such a way that…well, like I said, I can’t quite make up my mind about, although I suspect it probably worked a bit better on paper.

But either way it’s hardly a deal-breaker. The film does have a few logical bumps and indulges in some of the sort of hyper-stylistics to which fans of the genre are largely inured, but overall it succeeds, with clever details scattered here and there and some really effective sequences, including one in an elevated train station and one at a jazz jam session that is remarkably bald-faced in its sexual overtones. Anchoring it all is Raines, who gives a sweet and sexy performance as a woman with a singular focus (and who is actually more attractive when she’s just being herself than when she’s deliberately playing the vixen). Despite the obvious markers as to Carol’s origins, the film isn’t condescending about it, or about anything in regard to her really. Detective Burgess does acknowledge the danger of what she’s doing but doesn’t make a big production of it, more or less trusting her judgment. That she’s doing it for love may be one of the ultimate clichés, but in a genre that routinely paints women as either dangerously naïve or just plain dangerous, the film’s willingness to allow for the possibility that, as a grown woman, she may know exactly what she’s doing makes Phantom Lady seem almost liberated.

2009-07-16T22:31:00.000-07:00

The World of Henry Orient

(1964, 106 min.)

Starring Peter Sellers, Tippy Walker, Merrie Spaeth, Angela Lansbury, Tom Bosley, Phyllis Thaxter, Bibi Osterwald, John Fiedler, Al Lewis, Peter Duchin.

Screenplay by Nora Johnson and Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by Nora.

Directed by George Roy Hill.

Spaeth and Walker play Marion and Val, two private school girls in ‘60s New York who meet and form an instant bond over a shared vibrancy of imagination. Through three instances of coincidence, their adventures cause them to cross paths with Henry Orient (Sellers), a concert pianist and consummate bullshit artist. They tend to happen upon him when he’s with his married girlfriend Stella (Prentiss) as he engages in his ongoing attempts to get her to cast wide the doors, an unsuccessful venture owing to her irrational fear of being caught by her husband, who’s all the way in Connecticut.

Henry doesn’t know what to make of the two odd girls who keep popping up – how, after all, could they possibly have anything to do with his affair – but the two of them are quite taken with him. In fact, Val decides she’s in love with him, so they start a scrapbook about him. Oh, and they stalk him too. I should probably have put that one first.

All is fun and borderline felony, including an episode involving the girls telling a whopper of a story to a shopkeeper (Lewis) across the street from Henry’s building, until Val’s parents, who have been in Europe, return home. Father Frank (Bosley) is a decent sort, if rarely around, but mother Isabel (Lansbury, not in New England crimesolver mode so much as let’s-brainwash-my-son-into-assassinating-someone mode) is a real piece of work: stuck-up, nasty and not nearly as clever as she thinks she is, the latter illustrated best in a telling little exchange between Frank and Isabel about Val’s parentage. As soon as Isabel sticks her upturned nose into the proceedings, things…well, it’s not as if they were headed towards a fairytale ending anyway, even on the strength of the girls’ considerable will, but they do take a turn for the unfortunate.

Despite the title, the movie isn’t really about Henry at all. We’ve pretty much got his number early on – the smarm, the fake accent that slips away in moments of stress. He may even be a fake as an artist as well, but the movie’s viewpoint in that regard isn’t as easy to guess. At a concert that the girls attend, Henry plays a decidedly modernist piece – composed by Ken Lauber who also conducted the rest of the music written for the film by Elmer Bernstein – and we see a number of the audience members demonstrating visible displeasure (likely the same ilk we later see demanding their money back), but I found the piece to be quite intriguing and well-played, and given the looks on their faces, I’d say the girls agree with me. So there.

But as I said, it’s not about him; it’s about the girls and their families. Marian’s upper middle class existence isn’t idyllic but it’s pretty nice. Her father is out of the picture, having left and remarried, but she doesn’t seem terribly broken up about it, enjoying the life she leads with her mother (Thaxter) in the townhouse they share with one of the mother’s oldest friends, Boothy (Osterwald). Her greatest detriment seems to be the lack of companionship that Val fills. Val, on the other hand, is your classic girl of privilege and classic victim of same. She’s in therapy when such a thing still wasn’t talked about openly, not surprising given the expectations placed upon her, such as excelling in her music studies and raising herself, and the entire Henry Orient fixation can be viewed as a genuinely unique way of acting out, although in this case her mania ends up having a very interesting effect. Marian and Val’s Henry adventure, much of it shot beautifully on location, including a couple of passes by Alice and the gang, ends up affecting their elders’ lives – especially Isabel’s – in ways that couldn’t have been foreseen at the beginning, an insightful mirror image of the way that frivolous behavior of parents like Isabel can sometimes have unforeseen consequences on the lives of their children.

But the subtext, no matter how insightful, pales in comparison to the fun. It's curious to ponder that there was a time when a movie could so competently deal with adult topics while simultaneously capturing the essence of the best entertainment for kids. The girls’ eccentric precocity may be a bit much depending on your reaction to such a thing (i.e., Val’s habit of wearing a fur coat almost everywhere she goes) but Spaeth and Walker are quite enjoyable in what was the only major film appearance for both, guided by director Hill who would later film other duos who seem to be in it for the fun as much as anything else (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting). And while the assorted parents are all quite good for the dramatic stuff, the best comedic bits come from Prentiss and, of course, Sellers, whose ricochet back and forth between faux suavity and fearful bewilderment injects every scene he’s in with a giddiness to rival the schoolgirls. It’s unfortunate that this isn’t better known among the films in his canon.

2009-01-20T22:33:00.000-08:00

Étoile

(Italy, 1988, 101 min.)

Starring Jennifer Connelly, Gary McCleery, Charles Durning, Laurent Terzieff, Olimpia Carlisi, Mario Marozzi, Donald Hodson.

Screenplay by Peter Del Monte, Franco Ferrini and Sandro Petraglia, from a story by Del Monte and Petraglia.

Directed by Peter Del Monte.

McCleery is Jason, a young American acting as an aide for his rich, clock-collecting uncle (Durning) as they attend a series of auctions in Europe. (While the film’s title is French, the setting is clearly supposed to be Germanic, although it was actually filmed in Italy. The architects of the European Union would be so…well, probably confused, like the rest of us.) Clocks aren’t really Jason’s idea of fun, but the trip picks up when he meets Claire (Connelly, lovely, as always, though she still hadn’t quite grown into her looks by this point), a ballet student who has come to enroll in a prestigious school, with hopes of someday fulfilling her dream of dancing Swan Lake.

The school appears to be run by a mysterious man, Balakin (Terzieff). When he’s not commiserating with his small crew of oddballs, he spends his time lurking in a theater adjacent to the school, staring forlornly at the stage. At one point, Claire, thrown by a case of butterflies when her name is called for audition, sneaks away and finds the abandoned theater. She steps out on the stage and proceeds to dance her culottes off, much to the astonishment of Balakin, whose spark seems to come back upon seeing her. (And I defy you not to think of Suspiria during these scenes. Especially now that I’ve brought it up.)

Jason and Claire explore the town together and everything seems to be going quite well, until a mysterious bunch of flowers sent to her room but addressed to someone else spooks her enough that she decides to go back home to the US. Jason is bummed and a little perplexed, all the more so when he spies Claire sitting by a pond watching the swans. His delight soon turns to mystification, as she claims not only not to know him but also to be a completely different person than he thinks she is.

The above mention of Suspiria is wholly appropriate, as this often comes off as if director/co-writer Del Monte were seeing what it might be like to make an Argento film minus the violence. (There is a little bit near the end, including a somewhat amusing instance of Durning dismembering a public pay phone.) But the movie also conjures up the same sort of aloofness that Argento often does, which adds to the air of mystery but also makes you wonder what the point of the whole thing is, a feeling reinforced by the movie’s waffling tone as to the exact nature of the forces driving events. It also retains Argento’s penchant for building up to the finale only to pull out something goofy, although in this case the filmmakers did seem to rein things in owing to a realization of their own limitations, and you have to respect that.

An odd, enigmatic story that will likely frustrate most, and since it’s never gotten a video release in this country, only curio and/or Connelly fans (and Durning completists) are likely to go the extra mile to find it on the gray market.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2008-12-19T00:44:00.000-08:00

Don’t Torture a Duckling

(Italy, 1972, 104 min.)

Starring Tomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, Marc Porel, Georges Wilson, Irene Papas, Antonello Campodifiori, Ugo D’Alessio, Virgilio Gazzolo, Vito Passeri, Rosalia Maggio, Andrea Aureli, Linda Sini, Franco Balducci.

Screenplay by Lucio Fulci, Robert Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, from a story by Fulci and Gianviti.

Directed by Lucio Fulci.

Firstly, no ducklings were tortured to make this movie. This being Italian horror, it can’t hurt to clarify.

The film opens with some of the leisure activities of the small Italian mountain town of Accendura that probably don’t make it onto the Community Bulletin Board. A young woman, Maciara (Bolkan, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), is doing a little digging. She’s thought by many of the superstitious townsfolk to be a witch and it couldn’t possibly help her case that what she’s digging up are the bones of a child. Meanwhile, a bunch of young boys watch the arrival by car of some prostitutes, who are taken to an out-of-the-way house by a couple of the village men. Giuseppe (Passeri), another local pariah, is also on the scene, but is not only denied any peeping opportunities, he’s also razzed by the boys. A little later in another part of town, one of those same boys, Michele (uncredited, as are all the kid actors), is at work with his mother (Maggio). She plays housekeeper for a young woman named Patrizia (doe-eyed Bouchet, Sex With a Smile) whose father was a native before striking it rich and moving away. Patrizia is holed up in Dad’s house, an uncharacteristically modern design for the area, after fleeing a drug scandal in Milan. Michele is sent to her room to bring her a pitcher of juice and finds her laid out completely starkers. (The first glimpse we get of her is her breasts through one of those perpetually-tilting-water doohickeys.) Her willingness to display her nude body to a barely pubescent boy, along with at least one other similarly inappropriate scene in the course of the movie, makes her claim to having retired her hashpipe somewhat dubious.

Through all of this we also get scenes of someone with filthy hands crafting and stabbing small wax figures, from which the plot’s engine gets going. One of the boys disappears, and when his parents (Aureli and Balducci) get a ransom call, an assortment of policemen both local and from the city (Campodifiori, D’Alessio and Gazzolo) intervene. The money is planted and staked out. When someone comes to grab it, they grab him instead. It turns out to be Giuseppe. He leads them to where the body is buried, but swears that the boy was already dead when he found him and that he was only trying to take advantage of the situation with the ransom call. When another boy is found strangled and drowned while he’s in custody, they believe him.

Assisting the police in their investigation is a man named Andrea Martelli (Milian, Sonny and Jed, Bandits in Milan). Typically for Italian genre cinema, he’s a reporter, and even more typically, he manages to insert himself into the case with only the flimsiest of resistance from the authorities, allowing him to follow his own leads (and agenda). He goes to interview the local priest, young, fresh-faced Don Alberto (Porel, The Sicilian Clan), who lives with his mother (Papas) and deaf-mute sister. He runs a soccer program for the local youth and therefore knew both victims, but spends most of his time with Martelli decrying modern permissiveness, boasting of his accomplishment in barring the local newsstand from carrying any smut. (Although we have already seen small hints of the effect such repression might have on the town’s youth.) He does, however, suggest that things have been odd ever since Patrizia showed up. Additional mysterious happenings cast further suspicion on the party girl, but also on Maciara, and the townsfolk are getting tired of waiting for the police to deliver justice.

This is one of at least three gialli (a certain type of Italian murder mystery) that director Fulci made, the others being the earlier Lizard with a Woman’s Skin, which also featured Bolkan and which I’ve never seen, and the later New York Ripper, which ranks up there as one of the nastier, sleazier entries in the genre. Duckling is tame compared to Ripper, but they do have at least two things in common. One is creative location work. Ripper made good use of 1980s New York, including the Times Square area, which, fittingly enough, was one of the only places in this country you could see a Fulci film at the time, while Duckling is lent an old world air by having been filmed in the actual town of Monte Sant’Angelo. The discovery of the second body is nicely effective owing to the lead up of a traditionally dressed woman making her way through the winding paths of the town. (The other thing the two films have in common is that each has a completely weird plot point involving a Donald Duck doll, but it would be too involved and spoiler-rich to explain them and they don’t make a whole lot of sense even if you’ve seen the movies.)

But one of the more interesting things about Duckling is what it doesn’t have in common with most Fulci movies. They’re all pretty much a bunch of FX set pieces – tours de force of latex and Karo syrup – strung together by threadbare narratives, but one of the set pieces here effectively illustrates the subtext of the entire piece, the clash of modern sensibilities with stubborn traditionalism. The scene, the most brutal in the film, is one of vigilante retribution fueled by entrenched superstition, but modern pop music emanates from a nearby radio throughout, achieving something similar to, if far less whimsical than, the famous ear scene in Reservoir Dogs. It is far easier to imagine Signor Lucio asking, “How deep a wound could a chain to the flesh make?” than “How can we best illustrate the conflict of cultures?” but regardless he manages to accomplish both.

Of additional interest is the way this sequence ends. Despite having gruesomely killed off I-don’t-know-how-many characters over the course of his career, Fulci rarely imbued these deaths with any real tragedy. Al Cliver may cradle Auretta Gay’s body in Zombi 2, but his demeanor being less heartfelt grief than “Well, this sucks” kind of undercuts any deeper pathos. Fulci avoids this trap at the end of the sequence from Duckling by having it take place at the side of a road. With no actual characters there to react and only the oblivious passing motorists to remind us of the outside world at all, Fulci achieves a sense of the forlorn not only unusual in his own work, but not especially common in the bulk of the horror genre.

These two points taken together could mark this sequence as an artistic highpoint for the director. Which is appropriate since the film that houses it is an interesting bit of suspense that, while it may not appeal as much to fans of Fulci’s hardcore gore work, shows that he could tell a decent story when he tried, although the resolution will probably be obvious to those familiar with films of this ilk, even those who don’t catch the occasional telegraphed hint.

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2008-06-15T22:26:00.000-07:00

Eaten Alive

(1976, 96 min.)

Starring Neville Brand, Marilyn Burns, Robert Englund, William Finley, Kyle Richards, Crystin Sinclaire, Roberta Collins, Betty Cole, Janus Blythe, with Stuart Whitman, Carolyn Jones, and Mel Ferrer.

Written by Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam; adapted for the screen by Kim Henkel.

Directed by Tobe Hooper.

In a backwoods Texas town, working girl Clara (Collins) is having a crisis of conscience over her new position at Miss Hattie’s House, specifically the position that client Buck (future horror staple Englund) wants her to get into. Buck raises hell and Miss Hattie herself (Jones, who, with all due respect to the ravages of time, look all kinds of different from the woman who played the lithe Morticia Addams) rushes in to placate the assfreak and kicks Clara out. On the advice of housekeeper Ruby (Cole) – and with a stern warning not to reveal where she’s coming from – she goes down the road a bit to the Starlight Hotel. There, mumbly caretaker Judd (Brand) checks her in, but no sooner has she signed the register than he somehow divines where she’s come from and attacks her, ultimately running her through several times with a pitchfork. This whole opening bit is somewhat slapdash (a sign of the proceedings to come) and mainly serves to introduce Buck, who will show up again later, and Judd, along with the fact that the latter has some kind of misfire in his head and, more to the film’s selling point, a big fucking croc that he keeps fenced off in the hotel’s side yard.

While no Sea World, the Starlight does manage to attract its share of families, two on this particular day. Family number one consists of Roy (Finley), Faye (Burns, also the heroine of director Hooper’s previous Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they must have had a pretty good working relationship for her to agree to be brutalized by freaks in two consecutive movies), daughter Angie (Richards), and dog Snoopy. From the second you see him you know what Snoopy’s fate is going to be, and sure enough he’s in the croc’s belly before the rest of the family has even entered the hotel. The entire family is understandably upset, with Roy and Angie competing for most hysterical. (She’s eight; his excuse is unclear.) After a near nervous breakdown, Roy runs downstairs to avenge Snoopy’s death only to follow him down the croc’s gullet with no small assistance from Judd.

Family number two is on a quest. Father Harvey (Ferrer) and daughter Libby (Sinclaire) are looking for a runaway second daughter, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Clara. Upon being questioned, Judd mutters something about Miss Hattie’s, conveniently omitting that Clara had been there and was last seen traveling the croc’s gums one way to Digestionville, so Harvey and Libby go off to talk to Sheriff Martin (Whitman). Meanwhile, Judd attacks Faye, tying her to one of the beds while Angie retreats to the crawlspace under the house, which, while disgusting, does manage to make her safer than anyone else in this odd exercise in mania.

Hooper’s surprise success with the original TCM landed him this slightly larger budgeted gig, which wasn't nearly as well received. It’s not hard to see why. For one thing, the full-blown lunacy is pretty much right on display from the gitgo, as opposed to TCM in which it crept up on the audience like an odd figure approaching across a flatland. Secondly, the easily discernible subtext of TCM, former slaughterhouse workers driven out of work and into the depth of madness as symbols of dehumanization through hyper-industrialization, is replaced here by a hodgepodge of odd quirks. Judd rails against what goes on at Hattie’s but we then learn that he used to go there to watch. He scarfs down pain medicine after being shot only to reveal a moment later that the "wounded" leg is made of wood. What appears to be a Nazi flag can be glimpsed among his belongings. At one point, he stands staring wistfully into space as the radio plays a song about a man on the run. None of this coheres. And if there are any unifying clues to be found in his dialogue, I can’t tell you what they are. Amongst assorted mumblings about following rules and the dirty activity at Hattie’s, there’s a bunch of stuff that, even after seeing this at least three times, I still can’t quite figure out. Lastly, not to take away anything from Brand’s frenzied performance, he’s just no match singlehandedly for TCM’s mad parody of a family.

But leaving aside comparisons to its immediate predecessor, Eaten Alive deserves to be seen by more people (and may, in fact, have been given how many times it's been released under different titles), because, for all it shortcomings, it does have a persistently bizarre aura. It helps if you think of it as a comparatively well-filmed version of a stage production (which it sometimes resembles, backhanded compliment that that is), with the hotel as one gigantic set, and modern theatrical trappings to boot: Roy’s strange meltdown; the seemingly unnecessary wig that Faye wears and pulls off halfway through; Judd drifting slowly around the main room turning the lights on and off and rearranging papers while the music from his radio floats about him. Much of this could easily be imagined occurring in, say, a piece by Pinter or some other modernist. There’s even one sequence set in a bar in which a nervous cowboy ogles Buck’s girlfriend until he’s harassed by one of Buck’s fellow pool players. This bit doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, and could reasonably be assumed to be filler, if it weren’t for the fact that the cowboy oddly resembles a young Judd. It doesn’t really make any sense, and yet I can’t fully discount it either.

If we are to take anything from Judd’s madness it seems most likely to be the danger of a certain type of insularity, all too sickeningly familiar these days, an existence led within an echo chamber of bad ideas, with little or no counterbalance making its way inside whether by design or indifference (the sheriff and the mutedly contemptuous Miss Hattie both have one thing in common with a number of the other characters: no one seems particularly concerned that this man keeps a giant man-eating reptile on his property). What happens in the film has virtually no rhyme or reason, but then neither does its main character, and the result suggests a world in which chaos is the status quo. The finale, set to the avant noise score co-written by Hooper with Wayne Bell that runs throughout the film, is a culmination of histrionics and subsequently only feels slightly madder than the rest of it. It does, however, lead up to one of the film’s most clear-cut moments…and it’s in service of a joke. Turns out, despite Judd’s assertions, that ol’ croc won’t eat just anything.

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2008-05-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

The Hidden

(1987, 96 min.)

Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Nouri, William Boyett, Claudia Christian, Clarence Felder, Ed O’Ross, Catherine Cannon, Richard Brooks, Larry Cedar, Chris Mulkey, Clu Gulager, John McCann, Lin Shaye, Kristen Clayton, James Luisi, Duane Davis, Frank Renzulli.

Written by Jim Kouf (as Bob Hunt)

Directed by Jack Sholder.

(Note: This review does contain certain spoilers, most of which are about things revealed to the audience fairly early on, but if you want to watch it completely cold (and, frankly, it’ll be that much sweeter if you do), you should probably hit the Back button.)

LAPD Detective Tom Beck (Nouri) is having an interesting few days. His squad has just chased down a man named Devries (Mulkey) who went from upstanding citizen to spree killer at the drop of a hat. After a wild car chase and shootout, during which Devries is badly injured, he is taken to the hospital where, not too long afterward, he’s found dead on the floor of his room, while his roommate, a man named Jonathan Miller (Boyett) who is in bad coronary distress and shouldn’t even be able to walk, is suddenly AWOL. The police chase Miller down only to find him dead at a strip club after he was seen harassing one of the dancers, Brenda Lee Van Buren (Christian). They subsequently discover that Brenda Lee has apparently screwed a guy to death (details as to how are neither proffered, nor, frankly, desired) in a car that she then stole.

Beck is understandably vexed, and in need of a little assistance. And assistance he gets in the form of FBI Agent Lloyd Gallagher (MacLachlan), who claims to have been chasing Devries for quite some time, although he’s equally adamant about the need to chase Miller and Van Buren. What Beck doesn’t know but Gallagher does (as does the audience) is that there’s a reason all of them suddenly began to exhibit an aggressive anti-socialism, a love for fast cars and heavy metal, and a surprising tolerance for being perforated repeatedly with ammo. There is a nasty-looking slug-like creature from another world making its way from one body to another, with no apparent plan to stop. And, as if the situation wasn’t difficult enough for Beck to grasp, his new Fed partner isn’t exactly the picture of normalcy either. It doesn’t take too big a leap of logic to figure out why.

This is one of those movies that I saw countless times in my young adulthood, having discovered it with my hometown friends and then turned my college friends on to it as well. (We actually had a rental copy of it in my college dorm room one year for many, many months. My friend and roommate Andrew got stuck with the late fees, but that’s small potatoes compared with the numerous times he ducked out on me at the end of the year leaving me to clean the entire room myself. But I digress.) And it was a pleasure to revisit it after a long hiatus and find that it hasn’t lost any of its spark. The script makes you endure a few ’80s-cop movie clichés along the way, but more than makes up for it by managing to be alternately exciting, tense, funny and even touching.

Now, I could talk about the film’s possible subtext: the creature’s misadventures as a reflection of the unthinking consumerism and excess of the ‘80s, particularly in his somewhat convenient encounter with a cocaine-snorting arms dealer, or the potentially sticky idea of hedonist behavior linked to the spread of a deadly organism. But New York Press critic Armond White recently wrote a typically snotty essay lamenting the state of modern film criticism, blaming, in part, the glut of amateur critics on the net and whining about those who refuse to write about films within their social context. So to spite him, I’m just going to talk about what I like about this film and not mention any of the things mentioned above. (Yeah, I know. Shut up.)

The cast acquits itself quite well, and includes a lot of familiar and interesting faces in roles large and small, including Law & Order’s Brooks, Rescue Me ’s Jack McGee as a bartender, MacLachlan’s fellow Twin Peakser Mulkey, fulfilling the rule that if one Peakser is in a movie, another will be as well, and Danny Trejo in a very small role (and, yes, he gets iced, as always). Letting us know the secret of the villain early on might be a mistake under other circumstances, but it completely works here, and both Boyett and Christian (in one of a couple of sexpot roles she played before becoming a fan-con staple by joining the cast of Babylon 5), as well as the other “inhabited” actors, who I’ll refrain from naming in order to preserve suspense, really make the sociopathic nature of the creature come alive. Once we find out that it is a thinking creature and not just a relentless id-satisfier, it loses a little bit of its chilling allure, but the movie continues to work nonetheless.

The two leads also work well together. Nouri is basically doing the standard put-upon cop routine, but that’s a byproduct of the story and he does it well, while it’s fun watching MacLachlan doing a dry run for his role as Peaks’ Special Agent Dale Cooper a few years later. (Although, ironically, Cooper’s eccentricity was informed by his humanity.) And despite slight inconsistencies, the plot charges forward, sometimes with a level of brutality that approaches if never quite equals the Verhoeven-ian, towards a satisfying conclusion that might bring a tear to your eye, should you be susceptible to pathos (or at least drunk enough at the time to be susceptible, he said, fearing the revocation of his curmudgeon license). In fact, this is one horror/sci-fi movie that really makes you wonder what may have happened after the credits rolled, although I’m told that it’s better to use your imagination than turn to the sequel, which was made six years later and is supposedly not a worthy successor.

As is often the case with films such as this, the build-up to the action movie climax isn’t as interesting as watching the madness unfold, but in this case things are kept moving along briskly enough that it doesn’t matter so much, and, as I said, the coda is suitably dramatic. Plus the aforementioned build-up contains a moment at a press conference that makes sly commentary about the nature of modern sound bite politics as effectively as the rest of the film trades on the fear of camouflaged predators lurking in the labyrinthine maze of the city. (Damn, a little social relevance got by me there. Oh well, just see this one.)

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2008-02-11T23:19:00.000-08:00

Hot Rods to Hell

(1967, 92 min.)

Starring Dana Andrews, Jeanne Crain, Mimsy Farmer, Laurie Mock, Paul Bertoya, Gene Kirkwood, Tim Stafford, George Ives, Hortense Petra, William Mims, Paul Genge, Peter Oliphant, Harry Hickox, Charles P. Thompson, Mickey Rooney, Jr.

Screenplay by Robert E. Kent, from a story by Alex Gaby.

Directed by John Brahm.

“These kids have nowhere to go…and they want to get there at 150 miles per hour!”

Andrews plays Tom Phillips, a New England salesman with a family he could have bought along with his television set, domesticated wife Peg (Crain), moody, teenage daughter Tina (Mock), and rambunctious young son Jaime (Stafford). On the way home from business in Boston, he crosses paths with a crazy, all-over-the-road driver (lending the film at least one facet of authenticity, am I right, Beantown motorists?) and has an accident that sends him into rehab and damages his joie de vivre even more than it does his back. Realizing Tom can’t make a living driving around any more, Tina and Tom's brother Bill (Hickox) figure out a plan for the family: they’ll migrate to California and buy a hotel that’s for sale so he can make money without having to move around too much, not to mention that the desert will be good for his back with its heat and good for his mind with its serenity. Bill has practically brokered the entire deal before even talking to his brother, including full inspections, which either says a lot about his belief in his own powers of persuasion or the writers’ belief in the art of expediency.

Humorously, no sooner have they set wheel in Cali than they’re almost driven off the road by a couple of drag racers. (Fastest lifeplan shot to shit ever.) One of the cars has two guys, Duke (Bertoya) and Ernie (Kirkwood), and Duke’s girl Gloria (Farmer). The high-speed action has Gloria acting like she’s ready to mount the stick shift, and she screams at Duke to run his rival off the road. Circling back around they once again pass the family resting on the side of the road, whereupon Gloria demonstrates another behavior she learned in finishing school by lobbing a beer can at Jaime’s head. They drive on and park, but while Duke turns off his car’s motor, Gloria’s is still running, so they send a grumbling Ernie off on his own while they get it on. (As Gloria, Farmer is campily electric, careening between her need for kicks and her desperate desire to be anywhere but in that town. The overbite that makes her seem so vulnerable in later Italian productions such as Lucio Fulci’s The Black Cat and Armando Crispino’s Autopsy is used to full sexpot effect here.)

Meanwhile, back on the road with one man’s family, the Phillipses blow a tire. Tom, relegated to the passenger seat owing to his heebie-jeebies, freaks out and grabs the wheel, sending them into a bad spin. (It’s possible the universe simply doesn’t want these people driving.) Fortunately, they’re not far from a service station run by old Charley (Thompson). It happens that this is where Ernie has ended up as well, and when he starts to give Tina the once-over, Tom doesn’t like at all. (They kind of have to have him ogling the girl, because before Tom recognizes him as one of the kids from the car, there’s virtually no reason for him to be suspicious of the boy. If anything, his shirt is more conservative than Tom’s and the only difference between their pants is the inches above which they perch on the waist.) Tom threatens to call the cops about their reckless behavior, but Ernie isn’t concerned. He becomes concerned, however, when he hears Tom tell Charley that he’s just bought the hotel, which is also apparently a local hangout. The family leaves, and Duke and Gloria show up. Ernie tells them what he’s learned and Duke decides to set up the family for another scaring. As they pull out, Charley yells, “Why don’t you leave them alone?” to which Gloria replies, “You’re old, Charley! How would you know?” Guess she was on the debate team, too.

The teens, with the help of a number of friends, terrorize the family on the road a little more, until the Phillipses find a rest area full of people to take refuge in. While there, they speak to a local cop (Genge) about what happened, and he delivers the line that begins this review, possibly in hopes that a studio tagline writer is listening in. Tina sneaks off for some alone time by the lake, where Duke finds her and susses out that she’s enough of a typical whiny teenager that he might be able to take advantage of her.

Later, the family makes it to the hotel, the property of which also houses the Arena, the nightclub that our dragsters call home. They meet the man they’re buying the place from, Dailey (Ives), a Hawaiian-shirted glad-hander who’s more than happy to pass the place off to someone else before the delinquents who hang out there cause some real trouble, although he’s not about to tell the Phillipses that. While the family sleeps that night, to the tune of blues rock coming out of the Arena (played by a band apparently led by Mickey Rooney’s son!), Tina sneaks out to get a closer look. She faces off with Gloria, only Duke is ready to kick his old squeeze to the curb, so Gloria runs off to have sex with Ernie, leaving Tina to have Duke all to herself, lucky girl. And sure enough, faster than you can say, “I can’t wait until they invent the roofie,” Duke is all over her. Jaime, woken by the noise, discovers his sister is missing and alerts Tom. Tom runs outside, finds Duke pawing Tina and attempts to throttle him, prevented only by his bum spine. Of course, you know, this means war.

Actually, that last sentence makes the film sound a lot more exciting than it is. Things do come to a head, but in a greater degree of movie-of-the-week than fun-at-the-drive-in. But that’s in keeping with the whole spirit of the picture. The title may scream JD smash-up, but most of those films were about the JDs in question, while this is really more about the family, Tom in particular. Andrews plays him as a walking bundle of nerves (the back one pinched) whose anger at the position of weakness that the accident has placed him in is almost as crippling as his physical injury. Eventually he discovers that he is still capable of acting in a reckless, bloodthirsty manner, which removes the necessity for him to do so and makes everything better in the process…somehow. Hey, I’m not going to pretend to understand the mindset of a middle-aged family man of the late-‘60s.

Which actually brings up another interesting point. This film is about a decade later than most of the JD films it apes, and yet seems to have stepped out of a hole directly linked to that time. This just reinforces the idea that the relevant thing here is the perspective: that of a man with his slightly-more-PG-than-The-Donna-Reed-Show clan being forced into monumental change he can no more control than he can understand. The fact that the antagonists aren’t really all that different from the people they’re tormenting could be looked upon as a psychological dimension, and a defensive one at that. Given the proliferation of outlaw biker gangs by this time, the percolating hippie movement that was about to boil over, and that this very film improbably came out the same year as The Trip and Hell’s Angels on Wheels, if a couple of speed demons who otherwise wouldn’t look out of place on the student council could be so troublesome, imagine what happens when this poor man wakes up the day after his arrival in California and really takes a look out of his window.

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2007-08-30T22:43:00.000-07:00

Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain

(2003, 91 min.)

Starring Bobbie Phillips, Brandi-Ann Milbradt, Phil Price, Gillian Leigh, Neil Napier, Heidi Hawkins, Ginger Lynn Allen, Simon Peacock, Howard Rosenstein, Jenna Jameson, Richard Grieco. Chasey Lain, Lael Stellick, Taylor Hayes.

Written by William A. Mariani and Christian Viel.

Directed by Christian Viel.

A group of American (hey, Canada is technically part of America) anthropology students travel to Ireland, unaware that some schlock screenwriters have written them into a yarn about the old Sawney Bean clan, inbred cannibalistic murderers who, in this version anyway, have descendants who emigrated from Scotland and celebrate Samhain (apparently irrespective of when the celebration actually falls) by hacking up, eating and otherwise terrorizing the hikers that come there for vacation.

As per usual, the characters are stock and, largely, unlikable. There are Jim and Tara (Napier and Hawkins), the couple who can’t keep their hands off of each other; Shae (Milbradt), the withdrawn, bookish one; Steve (Price), the loudmouth jackass who won’t stop tormenting Shae (and it would be more tempting to feel sorry for her if she weren’t such a brooding little pain in the ass); and Barbara (Leigh), the blonde treat who repeatedly puts Steve in his place (until a later scene when she suddenly has a change of heart in the shower and puts him in her place). All of this rancor does nothing to improve the mood of the teacher who arranged the trip, Karen (Phillips), who is also along with her boyfriend, Paul (Rosenstein). Also in the mix are two locals, Gary (Peacock) and Pandora (porn legend Allen), their hosts and, in Gary’s case, the traditional crazy guy who warns them of imminent doom; and some hikers, Jenny (porn legend Jameson), and Amy and Mark (porn legend Lain and ‘90s TV casualty Grieco).

I must confess, and I am nothing if not honest about such things, that my initial impetus for watching this thing was the fact that, despite its cast boasting, as listed above, no less than three porn legends, along with ostensibly mainstream actress Phillips, who showed us her bulbous chest in Showgirls, the TV guide did not list nudity among its reasons for being rated R. I found this hard to believe. The fallacy was quickly dispensed with, as one of the very first shots is of Lain’s big fake boobs as she and Grieco get it on in a tent in the woods. (Jameson also briefly shows her chest, in a lovely little scene that apes Scary Movie, but Allen stays clothed, preferring to offend sensibilities with her undercooked brogue.) Their subsequent murders set the bar for what turns out to be a surprisingly graphic movie at times. I have to admit that, given the crowd at which it seems to have been aimed, I was a bit surprised at some of the places the filmmakers chose to go. Let’s just say that either the gore film’s traditional young male audience is now mature enough to handle images that in days of old might have induced homosexual panic, as thoroughly retarded as that may be, or this film’s creators at least believe them to be.

Unfortunately, shock value represents the lion’s share of what it has to recommend it. As I mentioned above, many of the characters are unpleasant, the narrative is muddled, the pacing is way off in places (the latter two of which can in part be blamed on post-production mischief by the distribution company), and the ending is just plain dumb. But I will give them this: in spite of a bit of capitulation to the current flashier editing style and a couple of completely unnecessary scenes in which characters in a slasher film once again detail the rules of a slasher film, this aggressively repulsive movie actually has segments that capture the feel of the old slashers from the ‘80s way better than the wave of post-Scream movies did. There may be several layers of irony to the idea that a contemporary film could work best when it most successfully recreates the tropes of a generally very bad genre, but, then, cult film love is a strange, complicated, and maddening thing.

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2007-05-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

The Tomb

(1986, 84 min.)

Starring Michelle Bauer, David O’Hara, Richard Alan Hench, Susan Stokey, George Hoth, Stu Welton, Frank MacDonald, Victor von Wright, Jack Frankel, Emmanuael Shipov, Craig Hamann, with Cameron Mitchell, Sybil Danning, and John Carradine.

Written by Kenneth J. Hall, with additional material and dialogue by T. L. Lankford.

Directed by Fred Olen Ray.

In the opening scene, we are introduced to John Banning (O’Hara), international smuggler. He’s in an airfield in the process of passing an artifact to a client (Danning, in a gratuitous cameo). She decides, for whatever reason, that she’s going to screw him over, so her henchmen start a firefight with him and his partner Tyler (Hamann). This offers us the first unintentionally hilarious moment when Banning shoots Sybil’s biplane and with that one shot it instantly explodes into ten thousand tiny little pieces like balsawood.

They escape and make their way to a bar in Cairo, where an Egyptian-themed band (complete with twisting mummies and no actual Egyptians) jam on ‘Tutti Frutti’ while the opening credits bounce around the screen. A local named Youssef (Shipov) tells them that he has found an unmarked tomb that was opened by a recent earthquake and that he can lead them to it for a price. They go there but find little of interest, until a valuable sarcophagus appears out of nowhere. Banning goes out to find something to help them haul it out, but when he returns, Youssef and Tyler are both dead, killed by Nefratis, the former occupant of the sarcophagus, who doesn’t look so good when she first comes out, but looks like Michelle Bauer when Banning sees her, having drunk her victims’ blood, her beauty treatment of choice. He beats his feet out of there, but she promises him they will meet again.

Back in Los Angeles, Banning hangs out at what appears to be your standard neighborhood bar, although it does have a stripper dressed as a cop (legendary busen-madchen Kitten Natividad, in her 6,245th nude scene). He runs away after getting into a fight with some non-descript government agents who are trying to take him in for illegal transport of Egyptian artifacts. Eluding them, he meets with a client, Dr. Phillips (Mitchell), and gives him one of the artifacts retrieved from the tomb. They argue over the agreed-upon price, which doesn’t make any sense given that we were previously led to believe that Banning’s trip to the tomb was spontaneous. There are, I suppose, ways to explain this away, but for once I’m not going to put more thought into the narrative than the filmmakers did.

Banning goes home to his hovel, but is soon visited by Nefratis. She implants a scarab beetle in his chest that nestles up to his heart and gives her the ability to inflict great pain on him if he doesn’t do exactly as she wishes. The first thing she wants is to know where the artifacts ended up. She apparently needs them for a soul-transference ritual that will prolong her youth, a companion method to the blood-imbibing, presumably the way a liver-cleansing and a colon-cleansing go hand in hand.

One of the other artifacts, the Golden Scarab, has made its way into the hands of another archeologist, Dr. Manners (Frankel). Dr. Phillips calls him up and begs him to sell the bug to him, as it’s essential to his work. They arrange to meet the following day, but no sooner has Dr. Manners updated his datebook (to all the young’uns out there, it’s like a Palm Pilot, but you can’t play Texas Hold’Em on it, unless you have, you know, an actual deck of cards) than Nefratis shows up and tears out his heart. Manners’ son, David (Hench), and family friend, Dr. Stewart (Hoth), along with eventual love interest, Helen (Stokey), Phillips’ niece, then attempt to find out what the hell is going on (helped in part by a quick drop-in by the vaunted Mr. Carradine) and who that odd chick that’s always hovering in the background is.

From time to time, a movie comes along that just makes you ask why. Not big ‘W’ why, as in, “Why, God, Why?!” *rends garments*, but more along the lines of “Eh? Why?” You watch enough exploitation flicks, you begin to get a sense for spotting the impetus behind them, be it something as simple as an excuse to parade a lot of naked women in front of the camera or latching onto a current fad or what have you, but nothing in this movie really jumps out. Probably the most memorable thing is the characterization of Banning. He’s clearly meant to be in the mold of the mercenary who comes off as kind of a scumbag but who’s really a good guy at heart (a la Han Solo), only Banning pretty much really is a scumbag. There’s always a wisecrack (some of which are kind of amusing) on his lips, when they’re not wrapped around one of the many bottles of beer he seems to be able to pull out of any available crevice, but he’s also a racist, and doesn’t object at all when Tyler suggests that they murder Youssef so they don’t have to pay him. When this is the most memorable character your story is built around, it’s hard to know who to root for.

But of course, low budgets and lack of a coherent narrative are par for the course in this kind of movie, which is why they generally make up for it with gratuitous nudity and gore. But The Tomb has only a little bit of the former (the closest Bauer, who’s gotten naked plenty of times, gets to unclothed is wearing a lightly see-through tunic) and practically none of the latter. So, what’s the point? I’ll leave that to others to answer for themselves. The point for me was one more entry in my Michelle Bauer collection. I just dig her, nude scene or no.

But, of course, there’s always room for a pleasant surprise. Coincidentally, just at one of the moments I was thinking about how bad the script was, one of the characters came out with a direct quote from Plan Nine from Outer Space. It didn’t make the writing any better, but it is always nice to get a little reminder that the filmmakers know by whom their bread is buttered.

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2007-03-30T17:46:00.000-07:00

LazyTown

Starring Magnús Scheving, Stefán Karl Stefánsson, Julianna Rose Mauriello, with the voices of Gudmundur Thor, Jodi Eichelberger, Sarah Burgess, Kobie Powell, David Matthew Feldman, Julie Westwood.

Created by Magnus Scheving.

Before I write anything else, I’m going to wager a guess: this is not a US production. Instinctually, I’d have to say Canada, and not just because the hero resembles what I imagine a Canadian lifeguard of the 1930s would have looked like. But this will all be addressed before the end of the review.

So let us take a look at this quaint little burg, this LazyTown. LazyTown is a place of vaguely Seussian design, seemingly populated by nine people, all but three of whom are puppets. (Puppets of the rubber variety at that, a fact that my colleague Kodos has fervently protested, maintaining that puppets should only be made of wood or felt.) I’m not even sure two of these people can be considered residents, since one lives in a cave below the surface and the other in a dirigible that floats way up in the sky. Suffice to say I’d hate to be in charge of regulating this place’s tax codes.

First we have Stephanie (Mauriello), a young human adolescent. She dresses predominantly in fluorescent pink, including her hair. She has come to LazyTown to live with her uncle, the doddering Mayor Milford Meanswell (Feldman). The Mayor, by the way, is a puppet. Clearly the genetic science of this world would have much to teach us.

Stephanie has a gaggle of friends, all puppets and all with their individual hooks. There’s Pixel (Powell), the cyber-nerd with cherry-colored dreadlocks (I think that’s what they’re supposed to be); Stingy (Eichelberger), the bowtie and vest-wearing rich kid who covets everything he sees, including, occasionally, the intangible; Trixie (Burgess), who, true to her name, likes playing practical jokes, although the only evidence of this in the episodes I’ve seen has been her moment drawing a mustache on a poster of the Mayor in the opening credits; and Ziggy (Thor), a sugar junkie who comes off as the most childlike of the characters (simple would be another way of putting it, but I’m trying to be nice). There’s also an adult woman puppet, Bessie Busybody (Westwood). She serves as the Mayor’s love interest and the town’s ersatz Margaret Dumont. (There are scattered references to there being other residents, but as far as I can tell they are never, ever seen.)

Then there are the other two humans, the ones of dubious residence. The designated bad guy, Robbie Rotten (Stefánsson), lives in an underground lair and has all kinds of devices and disguises that help him screw with the surface people. His visage is frequently contorted, and looks all the more odd because of the prosthetics with which his face is outfitted. He wears a body-hugging suit that seems to be designed to look like a pinstripe onesie. His demeanor careens between sour, fey and melancholy with remarkable speed, and while there’s nothing specific to indicate that he’s German, he’s still vaguely Germanic in manner, which, coupled with his unusual appearance, makes him a bit like an Otto Dix portrait come to life. Shellshock would be as good an explanation as any for his behavior.

Or not, and this goes a little bit towards one of the questions I originally had about the show: whether the title is intended to be ironic. Certainly the hyperactivity displayed by the characters would indicate so, but it turns out there is some degree of backstory involved. Apparently, there once was a time when the populace was indeed quite lazy, but all of that changed one day, much to Robbie’s chagrin. He has since devoted a lot of time to foiling the architect of that change, his archrival, Sportacus (Scheving).

If there’s one thing Sportacus ain’t, it’s lazy. He might even be classified as a special kind of black hole into which all lazy in the immediate vicinity is sucked and banished. Sportacus is the afore-mentioned guy who looks like what I imagine a Canadian lifeguard of the 1930s might have (in fact, he bears a slight resemblance to Saved by the Bell’s Dustin Diamond, meaning he may be what Screech would have looked like if he had been a Canadian lifeguard of the 1930s, but now we’re treading dangerously close to a whole other level of madness). Each episode begins with a brief prelude in his steam-punky aircraft, where, true to form as the hyper-athlete he is, he can’t even walk a few feet from one spot to another without bouncing off of a wall or three. Presumably such behavior would quickly become tiresome to be around, and yet the character himself, with his friendly demeanor and his gravity-defying pencil mustache, is so utterly guileless – in fact, for the “superhero” his young admirers continually peg him as, he almost seems oblivious to the concept of people behaving badly – that it feels like the pinnacle of grumpishness to dislike the guy.

Sportacus wears a number 10 on his outfit. At one point it is explained that there was a number 9 before him. One can only assume that means there were eight before that. Exactly what the hell happened to all these other guys? You can’t tell me that Robbie, who’s like Wile E. Coyote without the subtlety, has conquered that many opponents. He’s about as threatening as the cream cakes upon which he regularly gorges. And after all, the conflict basically arises from Sportacus trying to make sure the kids stay active, eat vegetables and fruit (he likes to call the latter “sports candy”), brush their teeth, etc., while Robbie tries to make sure that they, well, don’t. As menaces go, he doesn’t strike you as somebody who would need ten separate heroes to defeat him. On the other hand, he does manage to repeatedly convince the others that he’s someone else using disguises that make Clark Kent’s glasses look like the ultimate in fakery, so perhaps these people truly are in special need of protection.

That about sums up the gist of the show, so I might as well go back to that ‘not a US production’ thing. As it turns out, I’m only partially right. It is a US production, but it didn’t start out that way. Magnús Scheving, the show’s creator, director, story-writer and Sportacus himself, is a celebrated gymnast from Iceland and this all began as a stageshow there, eventually being developed into a series. This explains both Sportacus and Robbie’s accents, and possibly even the hint of Germanicism I detected in Robbie. (My initial guess of Canada was probably just a knee-jerk American reaction to anything that has the appearance of being American and yet somewhat not at the same time.)

I’m trying to remember now if the fictional television worlds of my early childhood – Sesame Street, The Magic Garden, The Land of Make Believe, wherever the hell the New Zoo Revue took place (the New Zoo, perhaps?) – were as odd as LazyTown. As memory serves, they were not, even keeping in mind that I’m viewing this through older, jaded, and not infrequently bloodshot eyes. They certainly weren’t as hyperactive. There’s just so much activity in the roughly twenty-four minutes of a single episode, including at least two musical numbers led by Mauriello, who has a lot of on-camera presence for her age. She reminds me of someone, but I can’t think of who it is. If I had to guess, it would probably be a movie personality from the ‘80s, entirely appropriate since the songs have a very ‘80s music video/fitness tape sensibility to them, with Stephanie doing a kind of cheerleader routine-inspired dance with Sportacus. All of that gets a bit exhausting after a while, although I have yet to determine if it was the exhaustion that led me to conclude that in certain instances the show can actually be quite funny.

I have begun to suspect that I could spend a considerable amount of time going over the assorted odd details of the LazyTown world, but thay would be for another day. Ultimately, I have to say that any show that encourages kids to stay active and eat well and like that, hey, that’s not such a bad thing. The very fact that it’s not encouraging five-year-olds to behave as if they were twenty-five-year-olds is a big plus these days. Given all that, it is a supreme irony how many college students are likely enjoying this show’s baroque oddness from the comfort of their couches after taking some “party medicine.” Hey, if Sportacus can call apples, “sports candy”…

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2007-03-07T17:46:00.000-08:00

The 27th Day

(1957, 75 min.)

Starring Gene Barry, Valerie French, George Voskovec, Stefan Schnabel, Azemat Janti, Friedrich von Ledebur, Ralph Clanton, Paul Birch, Arnold Moss, Marie Tsien,

Written by John Mantley and Robert M. Fresco (uncredited) from the novel by Mantley.

Directed by William Asher.

Five people suddenly find themselves aboard a spaceship, having been abducted from their various corners of the world by a looming shadow. These are Jonathan Clark (Barry), an LA newspaperman; Eve Wingate (French), a young Englishwoman; Su Han (Tsien), a young Chinese woman, who, when we first see her, is bending over the body of either her father or husband who has just been shot by soldiers; Professor Bechner (Voskovec), a German professor who is about to travel to the US to oversee an experiment in satellite technology that represents humankind’s best opportunity to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms (ironic, no?); and Ivan Godofsky (Janti), a private in the Red Army.

On the ship they meet The Alien (Moss). He tells them that his universe is dying and that his race needs a new planet. However, their moral code forbids them from the invasion or destruction of intelligent life. Instead, they have decided to gamble on the human race’s penchant for self-destruction. Each of the five individuals is to be given a devastating weapon, devices that look kind of like a compact, but instead of vibrantly colored powders essential for making your look extra kicky, these contain three capsules with the power to destroy all human life – and nothing else – within a three thousand mile radius. Between the five of them, they have enough combined power to wipe all human life from the face of the Earth. Each compact can only be opened by the mental powers of the individual to which it has been given, although once opened, anyone can use the capsules, which are activated merely by speaking the coordinates of the desired ground zero. Additionally, if one of the five were to die, those particular capsules would be rendered useless. The alien race has only thirty-five days before their world expires. They are giving humanity twenty-seven days to live with the weapon, at the end of which, if it has not been used, it will automatically be deactivated. Humanity will survive, and the aliens will accept their own demise.

The five are then transported right back to the exact place and time from which they were abducted. Eve immediately chucks her device into the sea. Su Han decides on something more dramatic- she places hers in front of a Buddha and then runs herself through with a sword. The Alien broadcasts a worldwide message indicating what has occurred and Jonathan, not knowing what else to do, goes into hiding, along with Eve who has joined him from across the pond for no better reason than romantic convenience. Ivan is reluctant to tell his superiors what has happened, although after the broadcast they’re quite eager to tortu- I mean, talk to him, and Professor Bechner can only think of studying the device to learn more about it…along with an abiding feeling that there was a hidden message in what the Alien told them that they haven’t yet grasped, and that may be the key to the whole dilemma.

As far as entertainment value goes, this is a decent little story, good even; interesting in its moral trappings, provided you don’t examine things too closely. I have no problem recommending it, but, having gotten that out of the way, I’d like to talk about an aspect of the film that cannot be discussed without serious spoilers, so anyone who wants to go in cold better hit that Back button now.

I don’t believe it was necessarily intentional, but one could, if one wanted to, detect a certain streak of conservatism at work here. There’s the fact that the two women given the device immediately relinquish the responsibility of being a holder (menfolk being more suited to such non-domestic matters and all). There’s a scene with Jonathan and Eve in a taxi where he turns on a portable radio so the driver can’t hear what they’re saying. When she screws up her nose and asks him what the music is he tells her with equal distaste that it’s rock‘n’roll…despite the fact that what’s actually playing is about as inoffensive a swing tune as you’re ever likely to hear. (I don’t know if this was a screw-up on the part of the sound department, or if they were actually dissing big band or what.) And then, of course, there’s the stereotypically evil portrayal of most of the Russians, although given the time period and Hollywood’s history this isn’t necessarily a right wing thing.

But then there’s the climax. Hoo-boy, the climax. It turns out that the Professor was, of course, correct. There was something to the aliens’ message and the devices themselves that wasn’t immediately apparent. There’s a message engraved on the cylinders that lets him know what it is, and he subsequently launches an entire compact of cylinders effectively blanketing the entire populated world (which seems to contradict the earlier assertion that all five compacts would be needed to do this, but never mind). Except that the only people eliminated are, and I quote, “every person throughout the world known to have been a confirmed enemy of human freedom.” Yes, that’s right. The device somehow had the ability to detect who was good and who was evil, and took out the latter. Thank god, um, I mean God there are no such things as gray areas, huh? It is the utterly simplistic, intellectually-challenged neo-con world philosophical dream come true. Minus the international corporate plunder, of course.

But hold on there buckaroos- we still have a coda to get through, and those conservatives whose little heads were exploding over the climax may find their big heads exploding over what comes next. Having realized that the aliens intended to bring peace to the world all along, the humans decide there’s only one decent thing to do- save them from their own imminent doom by inviting them to come and live on our planet! That’s right. MASSIVE INTERPLANETARY IMMIGRATION!

Given that the neo-cons didn’t even exist when this film was made, there is, of course, zero chance that this was a deliberately-designed bait and switch, which makes it all the more deliciously coincidental when the killing blow is delivered in the form of the final shot: the UN building standing tall and proud over the East River.

Zing!

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2007-02-18T23:45:00.000-08:00

Grave of the Vampire

(1974, 95 min.)

Starring William Smith, Michael Pataki, Lyn Peters, Diane Holden, Kitty Vallacher, Eric Mason, Lieux Dressler, Jay Scott, Abbi Henderson, Carmen Argenziano, Margaret Fairchild.

Written by David Chase and John Hayes, based on a novel by Chase.

Directed by John Hayes.

Paul and Leslie (Scott and Vallacher), two college students (who look old enough to qualify for tenure), sneak away from a frat party to pledge their love for each other (and get it on) in a graveyard. This plan, historically a bad one for those living in a fictionalized world, goes awry when Caleb Croft (Pataki), moldering but still active, decides tonight’s the night to come crawling out of both retirement and his coffin for some unsavory fun. He breaks Paul’s back over a headstone and then drags Leslie into an open grave.

Later, Leslie is in the hospital, having survived. Tests indicate she was raped. When the detective investigating the case, Lieutenant Panzer (Mason), shows her a series of pictures to identify her attacker, he covertly slips in a picture of Croft, a slightly odd thing for a law enforcement officer to do seeing as how, to the rationally-minded, the only connection Croft seems to have had to the incident was getting his long-dead corpse stolen. But Leslie reacts exactly as Panzer expected, becoming very upset, and confirming in his mind that something supernatural is afoot.

Leslie’s doctor informs her that she’s pregnant, and that he believes it best that the pregnancy be aborted. He says that what is growing inside of her is merely a parasite, and that it will be born dead, although not before sucking all of the life out of her. Leslie, believing the baby to be Paul’s, utterly refuses, and is backed up by the woman with whom she has been sharing a hospital room, Olga (Dressler). Olga has a real problem with doctors, one she’s been trying to indoctrinate Leslie with, and the abortion talk finally does the trick.

Olga takes Leslie away from the hospital and becomes her midwife. The baby is born alive, but, apparently, with an oddly gray complexion. When he refuses to take milk, Olga suddenly decides maybe doctors do have a useful role to play in society after all, and suggests that they call one. But Leslie is steadfast, and, after accidentally pricking her finger one day while trying to feed the baby and noticing that he seems to dig the droplets of blood, there’s no longer a problem, at least not one that can be solved with any degree of sanity. She continues to feed him with blood extracted from her breast.

Skip ahead many years and the baby is a baby no more. James, as he has been named, has grown into a quite large young man bearing a remarkable resemblance to William Smith. James has been brought up with the knowledge of where he truly comes from, and indeed has had to spend his formative years watching his mother labor under the stress of raising a child who isn’t quite human. She dies, prematurely aged, and he swears to seek out his father and put an end to him and his taste for coeds. This quest leads him to travel from university to university, finally landing at one institution and enrolling in a graduate course in folklore and superstition, taught by a Dr. Lockwood, who happens to look a lot like dear old Dad.

If this movie were made today, much would likely be made of young James’ curse of being of half-vampire blood, and he would stand around looking pained a lot to the sound of some lame-ass nu metal. And, of course, he’d be played by some young pretty boy from the WB…sorry, I mean the CW, whatever that means. But this movie was made in an era BR (Before Rice), so we get a story by turns creepy, icky, and absurd told with an air of general somnolence, which might make for a unique viewing experience, though not necessarily one to be recommended. I found this kind of interesting, but I imagine many, especially those who don’t share my fascination with relics of the ‘70s, would be bored aside from the occasional bursts of energy. There are also small bits of odd humor to be found – courtesy, quite likely, of co-writer Chase, future scribe for such touchstones as The Rockford Files and The Night Stalker, not to mention the creator of The Sopranos – such as Lockwood’s talk of “goober dust,” his indignation at the teasing librarian, the fact that one of the effects people is listed as “Jack Cheap,” and the inexplicability of the end title being in French.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2007-01-13T17:24:00.000-08:00

Vampyros Lesbos

(Spain-West Germany, 1971, 91 min.)

Starring Ewa Strömberg, Soledad Miranda (as Susann Korda), Andrés Monales, Dennis Price, Paul Muller, Heidrun Kussin, Jesus Franco, José Martínez Blanco, Michael Berling, Beni Cardoso.

Screenplay by Jesus Franco and Jaime Chávarri, from a story by Chávarri cherry-picked from Bram Stoker.

Directed by Jesus Franco.

Did you know that, if this film’s subtitles are to be believed, the English translation of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ is…‘Vampiros Lesbos’? Yeah, I was stunned too.

Linda Westinghouse (Strömberg) is a German woman living in Istanbul with her boyfriend, Omar (Monales). She’s having recurring dreams about a seaside town, a mysterious woman who calls out to her, and a window with a trail of blood running down it. One night she and Omar go to see a live show: one scantily clad woman dances and strips while dressing up a previously naked woman who moves in such a way as to suggest she’s supposed to be a mannequin. Assorted petting and kissing takes place and the audience looks on raptly as if this was all very deep and artistic when it’s really nothing more than a stroke show – sexy but also quite silly (not an uncommon combination). Linda at the very least does have a good reason to show interest: turns out, as we learn in a session with her shrink (Muller), the dancing woman looks exactly like the woman from her dreams. Linda admits that the dreams both terrify and arouse her. The shrink, who has been pretending to take notes while he actually doodles stick figures, suggests that she’s sexually frustrated and that she should get a better lover. I’m not 100% certain if this was supposed to be just advice or an attempted come-on, but either way, Omar should be pissed.

We then see Linda at her job, where a co-worker tells her that the boss wishes the company had a higher profile. I’m not sure what kind of company it is, but Linda's reply that she’s going to Anatolia to see someone about an inheritance suggests some sort of law firm.

That someone turns out to be Nadine Carody (Miranda, who sadly died in a car accident before this film was even released), a countess from Hungary (Franco’s Turkey, interestingly enough, seems to be largely devoid of Turks). On the way to the island where the countess lives, Linda is forced to stay in a hotel on the mainland, whose staff seems to consist of one man, Memmet (the director himself). Memmet clearly gives Linda the creeps, all the more so when he scares her by warning her away from going to the island where “madness and death rule.” He asks her to meet him in the wine cellar later so they can talk, but when she gets there she finds him with a dead woman, bound to a chair and smeared with (very fake) blood.

Presumably the previous discovery has soured Linda on Memmet’s advice because we then cut to her on a boat on the way to the island. She arrives at the Countess’s very quiet mansion and eventually finds the woman sunning herself, and wearing sunglasses with lenses big enough to dip your feet in. Linda tells the Countess that she feels like she both knows her and that she has been there before, all wide-eyed, innocent, and seemingly oblivious to the fact that this is the exact same woman from the dream and the live performance. Coupled with the fact that right before she finds the countess she sees a window with a trail of blood running down it, Linda is either in deep denial or she’s really not all that bright.

The two go for a dip and some naked sunbathing. The Countess assures Linda that no one can see them, an assertion immediately contradicted by the fact that someone is watching them, the Countess’s henchman (Blanco), whose name is Morpho. (Stop laughing.) The Countess gets Linda to drink some wine, which causes her to get woozy. Morpho takes her to her room to sleep it off, but soon the Countess enters. The inevitable allover kissing begins followed by the equally inevitable bite on the neck. When Linda wakes up, she finds the house deserted, until her wanderings bring her to a pool in which the Countess is floating naked, arms outstretched crucifixion-style and blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth. Linda passes out.

Cut to an asylum on the mainland. One of the inmates, Agra (Kussin), is freaking out. She continually talks about an unseen woman who she swears visits her on a regular basis, and whom she seems to regard as her master. The Doctor (Price) attending her is clearly the right (or wrong, depending on your viewpoint) man for the job, because the first time we see him, he’s poring over texts related to the dark forces of the night. Linda is also in this same asylum, having been found unconscious on the beach. She can remember nothing specific about what happened to her on the island except for flashes.

Then, in a convenient bit of exposition, we learn that the Countess is at least a century old. “Dracula” once saved her from marauders, only to turn her into his own private sippy cup. He eventually transformed her into a vampire herself, but her time with him had left her with an insurmountable hatred for men. She says that she has possessed many women over the years, and yet she now feels that she is the one possessed – by Linda. She vows that Linda will be hers.

And the movie goes on from there. Note I said goes on, not progresses. I’ve read haikus with more narrative thrust. Franco and co-screenwriter Chávarri (if he truly participated; IMDb trivia suggests otherwise) select a few points from the original Dracula story and then hang a series of scenes on them that sort of tell a story, much in the same way that scrubbing your teeth with your finger sort of promotes dental health.

The director throws a lot of symbolism around, most of it obvious: insects crawling on web-like nets, stalking scorpions, etc, although I did like the way he co-opted the normally innocent image of a floating kite to suggest a malevolent force hovering nearby and watching. He also makes good use of the psychedelic music on the soundtrack, enhancing the film’s admittedly funky sense of period, but, rampant nudity aside, it’s all kind of boring. Plus it’s a bit too ‘sploity for the art crowd yet a bit too artsy for the trash fans. (In circles where such distinctions are still made, that is; in my world, genres breed freely.)

But enough with the lesbian vampires, I say. When is someone going to take a page out of Gustav Klimt and make a movie about lesbian mermaids? (Mermaydos Lesbos, anyone?)

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-12-28T23:49:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Spring Break

(1988, 92 min.)

Starring Nicolas de Toth, Sarah Buxton, Rawley Valverde, Lance Le Gault, Michael Parks, John Saxon, Ben Stotes, Kristy Lachance, Gregg Todd Davis, Yamilet Hidalgo, John Baldwin, Luis Valderrama, Fred Buck, Debra Gallagher, Turk Harley, Christina Kier, Tony Bolano.

Screenplay by Umberto Lenzi (as Harry Kirkpatrick), from a story by Vittorio Rambaldi and Lenzi.

Directed by Umberto Lenzi (as Harry Kirkpatrick).

Our tale begins in an execution chamber in the fictional town of Manatee Beach, Florida (small town death penalty cases are always the homiest), where hardcore biker Diablo (Bolano) is being strapped into the hotseat, having been convicted for the murder of a local girl. Also in attendance are Sheriff Strycher (Saxon), the local coroner, Dr. Willet (Parks, in an uncharacteristically fluttery performance), the Reverend Bates (Le Gault), and the murdered girl’s sister, Gail (Buxton). Diablo swears that he didn’t commit the murder, and indeed that he was framed by Strycher, but it seems unlikely to sway anyone by this point. They throw the switch and he’s subjected to the single quietest electrocution in film history, his promise to return from the grave to exact his revenge still hanging in the air.

But who can think about the ghosts of dead bikers when there are kegs to stand on? Yes, the local businesses and constabulary are preparing for the annual Running of the Morons (or Migration of the Idiots, as Willet puts it), a.k.a. Spring Break, a holiday seemingly created for the sole purpose of proving that students aren’t actually bettering themselves when they’re in school. Two of our vacationers are football players named Skip (De Toth) and Ronnie (Valverde). Skip is carrying around a bit of notoriety, having infamously thrown an eleventh hour interception in the Orange Bowl. While not really that important a plot point, it is actually quite important as a character point. Without knowing this about him, Skip would come off as way, way too fucking earnest to be a jock. They end up hanging out at the bar where Gail works, and Skip’s comparative reticence amidst all the noisy bluster draws her to him.

We’re subsequently introduced to a number of subplots with varying degrees of relevance. The petty thief who’s ripping off every wallet he can get his hands on; the practical joker whose antics just end up annoying everyone; the Reverend’s daughter (Gallagher) who, to his chagrin, just wants to hang with the Breakers, drinking and throwing herself at anyone who’ll have her; the Breaker (Kier) who’s actually only there to find rich men who will pay to fuck her after she plies them with assorted sob stories; and the sleazy hotel clerk who spies on her through a peephole. (He’s immediately recognized as sleazy by his thinning hair, thin mustache and loud shirts, the standard accoutrements of the closet sleazoid.) I haven’t linked some of the characters to the actors who play them for the simple reason that the characters’ names are not all made explicit in the film.

Further trouble is to be found with the Demons, Diablo’s old gang, who know that Diablo didn’t commit the murder and are also pretty certain that Strycher was responsible for getting him executed. Not that they would otherwise be any more eager to play welcome wagon to the vacationers, as evidenced by their run-in with Skip and Ronnie, during which Ronnie gets into it with the new leader, Dawg (Valderrama). Strycher’s sudden appearance is the only thing that prevents Ronnie from getting his ass handed to him.

But the Demons aren’t the only dangerous ones on two wheels. There’s also a lone biker riding around town who can be distinguished from the others by a) his ever-present helmet, b) his far more tricked out bike, and c) the portable electrocution device built into his ride that he uses to flambé assorted unsuspectings.

Ronnie gets a double dose of bad biker karma when he’s lured into a trap by Diablo’s old girlfriend, Trina (Hidalgo), through which the rest of the gang jump him, beat on him, and steal his football medallion. No sooner have the Demons left than our helmeted friend shows up. Ronnie, figuring he’s with the gang, steps to him and (convolutedly) gets a quick, very deep allover tan for his troubles.

When Skip can’t find Ronnie, he goes to see Gail at the bar to ask if she’s seen him. She hasn’t but she ends up helping him look in all the logical places, including the special clinic set up to deal with injured Breakers. Willet is there – although why someone who has previously been seen enacting the duties of a coroner would be working as an ER doctor is uncertain – but Skip senses his assertion that he hasn’t seen Ronnie is a crock. And when Skip sees Trina wearing Ronnie’s medal, he and Gail confront her, but Trina tells them that Ronnie was alive when she last saw him, and also takes the opportunity to once again deny that Diablo had anything to do with Gail’s sister’s murder. What we already know, and what Skip eventually finds out, is that the Mayor (Buck), Strycher and Willet have buried Ronnie’s body in an out-of-the-way place to avoid any talk of a serial killer stalking the town. But the cover-up is in vain, as the bodies are beginning to amass, and that’s not the only secret that may be about to surface.

Spring break has never been and will never be my scene (not that a geezer such as myself would be welcome there anyway at this point). Despite the fact that beer and breasts (these are but two of my favorite things) are a large part of the focus of this annual bacchanalian tradition, I do not rejoice in wanton drunkenness and, what with the sheer, abundant stupidity in evidence, my enthusiasm for all the hooters would probably be as dampened as the shirts under which they were displayed. Label me content to witness such events from the comfort of my couch, in such dubious entertainments as Fraternity Vacation, Spring Break (duh), or, hell, even Where the freakin’ Boys Are, along with this shadow effort by notorious Italian schlockmeister Umberto Lenzi. The base premise seems so abundantly marketable it’s amazing it took until the tail end of the ‘80s for someone to pitch it. “The kids love the spring break movies. The kids love the slashers. Why not make a slasher set at spring break?” Why not indeed? Well, one answer to that is, “Because you might end up not doing either genre justice.” (And if you’re the kind of person who wonders whether either genre deserves any justice at all, you’re in the wrong house, bwah.)

As per usual, I can’t help but think of opportunities squandered. Not that it would necessarily have made for high drama or anything, but think about the possibilities that could have emerged had they truly explored the whole vacationers vs. locals idea, a classic conflict and one born of reality. Such depth of narrative may be too much to expect from a production that doesn’t seem particularly concerned with the small stuff, or for that matter certain big things, like giving the killer (whose identity won’t be difficult to guess, particularly if you keep in mind that this is an Italian production) some focus in terms of his motive or even something as obvious as his method of execution (most victims are electrocuted (natch), one is burnt alive (okay), and one is strangled (huh?)).

Both Lenzi and co-story author Vittorio Rambaldi do deserve some credit. The director gives small indications of an awareness of the contrasting themes of the story, such as a brief scene very early on where Skip and Ronnie witness someone being carted away from an accident on the road into town, a foreshadowing of the danger lurking in “paradise,” or another quick early shot of a Jesus truck cruising down the beach strip, sporting a cross and a guy with a megaphone trying to convince the partygoers of the error of their ways. And there was a clear attempt through the assorted characters to keep things interesting. Unfortunately, they also seem to think that the appearance of effort is enough. Some of the subplot material is pure filler, while other pseudo-characters are pure meat, introduced just so they can be killed immediately afterwards. And that shot of the Jesus truck is telling in and of itself given the degree to which Lenzi relies on footage of actual spring break activities to give the film atmosphere and bare boobs.

To indulge in an appropriate if uncharacteristic football metaphor, it’s not that Welcome to Spring Break drops the ball so much as kind of shuffles up to the end zone and lays it down. And then yawns. Kind of hard to believe that a man such as our Umberto, proprietor of some of the nastiest flicks from the Italian cult canon (and goriest, an aspect I’ll give a just-barely-passing grade here), would need a lesson like this, but exploitation done in half measures is often a self-defeating proposition, and one need look no further than this movie to understand why that’s so. Originally titled Nightmare Beach, not to be confused with Nightmare City, the alternate title to City of the Walking Dead, a movie that shows Lenzi doing silly exploitation the right way.

This review brought to you by the Astro-Critics and Zombie's Auxiliary Quilting Bee's Holiday Madness Roundtable (and, yes, Spring Break is a holiday of sorts, yes it is, it'll hold up in any court, you don't have a leg to stand on, please stop pointing at me).

Yes, the ACZAQB is proud to present you with these beloved classics. The memories will come flooding back as you sip hearth with your eggnog around a burning family.

Burl 'Choconado' Ives- "Bloody New Year"

Perry 'Grendel72' Como- "Tokyo Godfathers"

Dinah 'Portrait in Flesh' Shore- "Mardi Gras Massacre"

Patti 'Super Mecha Dani' Page- "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians"

Bing 'Mayzshon' Crosby- "Santa Claus' Punch and Judy"

Nat King 'Dr. Kobb' Cole- "Silent Night, Deadly Night 4: Initiation"

Fred Waring 'Deeky' & the Pennsylvanians- "Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker"

Act now and we'll also send you Billy 'Billy Anderson' Anderson's A Very Pagan Christmas!

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-11-10T16:47:00.000-08:00

Amazons

(Argentina, 1986, 75 min.)

Starring Mindi Miller (as Windsor Taylor Randolph), Penelope Reed, Joseph Whipp, Danitza Kingsley, Wolfram Hoechst, Jacques Arndt, Charles Finch, Frank Costa (as Frank Cocza), Santiago Mallo, Anita Larronde (as Annie Larronde), Esther Velàzquez, Fabiana Smith.

Written by Charles Saunders.

Directed by Alex Sessa.

As the film opens, an evil tribe called the Betans (I think) are laying siege to the town of Imbisi (I think), the namesake town of the Imbisians (the Amazons of the title, although theirs is not an exclusively female clan), inhabitants of what they keep calling The Emerald Land. (I admit that so much of my viewing of this movie was in bits and pieces that certain dynamics of the story were a bit unclear to me. Either that or I’m being far too kind to the screenwriter.) The Betans, it turns out, have been trying to enslave the Imbisians for many years, only this time their king, Kalungo (Whipp, who kind of looks like Pernell Roberts), has an ace up his sleeve, having struck a deal with a demon named Balgur, gaining magic powers in exchange for human lives. During the attack, he unleashes these powers on the town. (Although, hilariously, when he chants the demon’s name, it often sounds like he’s saying “Al Gore!” Fourteen years before they stole the election and the Republicans were already muddying the waters.) The Imbisians have a magician too (Arndt, who kind of looks like Jack Klugman), only his power isn’t as great, and he asserts that the only way they can hope to defeat their aggressors is to reclaim the magic sword of Azundati that is secreted away in a cave.

Imbisi is the location of another of the tribe’s sacred objects, the Spirit Stone. When it becomes clear that Kalungo’s magic is too much for them, they sneak the spirit stone out to take it to their capital city of Shanar. There the Queen (Larronde, who kind of looks like Judi Dench dressed up like a playing card) sends two of her Amazon warriors, Dyala (Miller, who kind of looks like Michelle Bauer) and Tashi (Reed, who kind of looks like Cynthia Watros) to fetch it. Dyala is to go because she was chosen during a special ceremony during which she saw a vision of the sword in her own sacred tree. Tashi is chosen to go because, well, it adds conflict to the story. See, Tashi’s mother, Tshingi (Kingsley, who kind of looks like Nicolette Sheridan) and Dyala’s mother were bitter rivals for the attention of the same man, Dyala’s father, which led to a showdown during which the former lost a hand. Tshingi is really bitter over her prosthesis, and while it is intimated that she subsequently killed Dyala’s mother, apparently that isn’t enough. She tells her daughter that once Dyala has the sword, she is to off her and bring the sword to Tshingi. What she fails to mention is that she’s in bed with Kalungo (literally at one point) and plans to hand it over to him.

Dyala and Tashi make their way towards the cave, encountering assorted perils along the way, including two religious cults, one of which is composed of women dressed as vestal virgins and the other of men in ugly masks. The latter is in the habit of kidnapping members of the former and then sacrificing them against some sort of oozy tree monster, while they treat us to more chanting fun with their repeated cries of something that sounds like “En garde, Sullio!” Tashi gets caught up in one of their raids and is about to be skewered when Dyala comes to her rescue with a blowgun and some homemade booby traps, in what is probably the movie’s best scene.

Eventually the two women are led by a white horse to the shack of a seer (Velàzquez, who kind of looks like Kathy Najimy), who foretells that when they get to the cave, three will enter and only one will leave. The second part is understandably upsetting, but the first part is simply vexing, there only being two of them and all. What they don’t know is that Kalungo has had them followed by his own personal lioness (Smith, who kind of looks like Jane Leeves, except when she’s in animal form, when she kind of looks like Elsa). And so they trek on to fulfill their mission, while Tashi struggles to come to terms with her mother’s order to murder a woman who she has come increasingly to view as a friend.

Sigh. As you all know I am a big fucking softie when it comes to criticizing peoples’ efforts, but while I’ve seen worse, there is simply not a hell of a lot to recommend this. The story is clichéd, the fights are sloppily choreographed, and the special effects are laughable. (It’s a toss-up for cheesiest moment- the scratches on the film that represent magic, the “transformation” from lion to woman involving masks and stuffed animals, or the guys in grease paint and muslin dangling on ropes that pass for demons in the forest.) A decent amount of gratuitous gore might have livened things up, but even in this department the film skimps.

However, I’m guessing Beggar So’s Hat, the colleague that foisted this entertainment on me, giggled a little when I said ‘booby trap’ above, because if there’s one thing the movie doesn’t skimp on, it’s boobies. We don’t get anything for the first twenty minutes, but once the naked lion woman shows up, the floodgates have been opened and it’s boobs a’poppin’! Dyala and Tashi go skinny-dipping, there are a bunch of loving close-ups of Tshingi’s nude body while she’s rocking Kalungo’s world, plus there’s some unpleasant rough stuff both with the warriors and the vestal virgins that involves the ripping off of tops. (Nothing like watching a woman kicking ass with a bare chest…unless it’s watching a woman do a kung fu routine completely nude like in Blood Diner, but, then, that was just goofy.)

So nudie completists and those with a high tolerance for the detritus that surfaced in Conan the Barbarian’s wake might want to give this a look. To be fair, I did find myself liking it a little more the second time around, but then, as has been proven in the past, I am very easy to entertain (and immensely difficult to impress, but there was little danger of that happening here).

This review was yet another generated by the Pass the Turkey game at the B-Movie Message Board, where the karmic wheel of cinematic sadomasochism just keeps on a'spinnin'. This round generously provided and sadistically suggested by the curiously chapeau-like Beggar So's Hat.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-09-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

(1965, 90 min.)

Starring Vincent Price, Frankie Avalon, Dwayne Hickman, Susan Hart, Jack Mullaney, Fred Clark.

Screenplay by Robert Kaufman and Elwood Ullman, from a story by James H. Nicholson (under the name James Hartford).

Directed by Norman Taurog.

Evil, um, genius, I guess, Dr. Goldfoot (Price), along with his perpetually put upon assistant Igor (Mullaney), has created a small army of fembots whom he sends out into the world to seduce wealthy men and dupe them into signing over their assets to him. Among the victims is gadabout Todd Armstrong (Hickman), who is scheduled to be targeted by Number Eleven, a.k.a. “Diane” (Hart, hammy, but of the honey-glazed variety). For uncertain reasons, Igor, who looks quite good for the reanimated corpse we’re told he is, accidentally sends Diane after Craig Gamble (Avalon), an Agent for Secret Intelligence Command. (As his uncle/boss (Clark) tells him, “You’re a SIC man.” And that’s one of the better lines.) When the mistake is realized, she is redirected to Armstrong, whom she tricks into marrying her by getting him rip-roaring drunk. (Why precisely a robot is necessary to pull off this ruse is better left unexamined, but then the film’s occasional willingness to slough off logic casually actually provides the better part of its small entertainment value.)

Armstrong isn’t very happy that his comely new wife insists on sleeping in a different bed, and seems intent on spending their waking hours making him sign papers instead of making sweet, sweet love. A little later, Gamble encounters Diane on the street and, in a struggle, her hand comes off, confirming his suspicions that there may be something unusual about her. He contacts Armstrong and the two of them try to dig up proof of Goldfoot’s nefarious plot. Sadly, they barely have two brain cells to bash together between them.

This must have seemed boffo on paper at the time. An AIP version of the Eurospy (Goofball Subdivision) genre, complete with the outrageous concepts, nifty gadgets and sexy girls in bathing suits that entails. Avalon, of the popular Beach Party movies as the hero, and Hickman, of Dobie Gillis fame and star of a Beach Party movie himself that same year, as his partner in crimefighting. Helmed by veteran director (and a frequent wrangler of both Elvis and Jerry Lewis) Taurog. And to top it off, longtime AIP collaborator Price as the title villain. Of course, with hindsight, we’re able to say, “Beach Party movies? What are you, fucking kidding me? Get the hell out of here! No, no, go around the side. I just watered the lawn.” But, after all, the Beach Party movies were bizarrely popular at the time, and AIP co-producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson were nothing if not willing to cash in on popularity. Now the standard expected defense from fans of phenomena such as the Beach Party movies is, “What’s the matter with good clean fun?” And the answer is, nothing. I have many degenerate friends who have no use for such things, but I can appreciate them from time to time, which explains why I occasionally settle on a repeat of Diagnosis Murder. But Diagnosis Murder, aside from the benefit of the presence pf Dick Van Dyke, has the added bonus of actually being clever. The hazy memories of Baby Boomers notwithstanding, the Beach Party movies were not clever. In fact, they were quite stupid. As is Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.

And therein lies the movie’s fatal flaw. The cast has plenty of energy (Avalon and Hickman are quite well matched, inasmuch as they could pass for the US Olympic Synchronized Moron Team) and we’ve seen what Price can do with campy when the material is there, as in a classic like Theater of Blood, but here the dumb jokes and randomly inserted time-padding slapstick just sink it. There are occasional genuine laughs, and buffs will appreciate the cameos and references (although it’s tempting to suspect they were a big part of the initial pitch as detailed above – “think of the references we can throw in!” – much like San Francisco seems to have been chosen as the setting purely so they could have a chase down the famous Lombard Street), but this never comes off as anything more than what might have resulted had the stars wandered off their own sets and onto that of Get Smart, subsequently repelling any of that show’s subversion in the process. (The most subversive thing here is the way the goddamn theme song by Les Baxter keeps popping back into my head.) Harmless to be sure, but hopelessly dumb. This was successful enough to spawn a sequel, Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, directed by, of all people, Italo-horror luminary Mario Bava.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-08-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

Café Flesh

(1982, 75 min.)

Starring Andrew Nichols, Paul McGibboney, Michelle Bauer (as Pia Snow), Marie Sharp, Tantala Ray (as Darcy Nychols), Joey Lennon, Neil Podorecki, Dondi Bastone, Dennis Edwards (as Robert Dennis), Paul Berthell (as Pez D. Spencer), Hilly Waters.

Written by Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream) and Jerry Stahl (as Herbert W. Day).

Directed by Stephen Sayadian (as Rinse Dream) and Mark S. Esposito (uncredited).

In a post-apocalyptic world, the radiation has had an unexpected effect: it has made all but the smallest percentage of the remaining population unable to have sex without getting viciously nauseous. People are now divided into the majority Sex Negatives, and the very minority Sex Positives. The Negatives may not be able to boink but it hasn’t diminished their desire to do so. They subsequently gather in clubs like that of the title to watch the Positives, who are required by law to perform sex acts in public for the supposed benefit of all the rest.

The two most regular of regulars at the club are Nick and Lana (McGibboney and Bauer), the “Blondie and Dagwood of Café Flesh,” as they are described by oleaginous emcee Max Melodramatic (Nichols), a former standup comic who revels in his audience’s misery as he wallows in his own bitterness. (And he’s got good reason to be bitter.) He’s especially miffed by Nick’s elite status in the eyes of Moms (Ray), the club’s owner, and loses no opportunity to belittle Nick publicly, in spite of Moms’ admonitions not to. Nichols’ baroque performance is characteristic of the overall vibe, as is that of Berthell (working under the kicky pseudonym of Pez D. Spencer) as creepy doorman Mr. Joy.

Sleazy “promoter” Silky (Lennon…I think; possibly Podorecki) shows up with a new girl, Angel (Sharp), but no sooner have Nick and Lana made friends with her than she’s spirited off by an Enforcer (Edwards), who reveals that she’s really a Positive. Angel subsequently performs for her new friends, and can’t help telling them afterwards how great it was, and how happy she is that she doesn’t have to hold back any more.

As big of a pain in the ass as Max is, Angel’s sexual awakening goes even more towards inflaming Nick’s increasing frustration, as he deals every day with the unpleasant dichotomy of his need to be intimate with Lana, as they were before the apocalypse, and the fact that any attempt to do so will make him, to use a phrase from bygone childhood years, heave all around.

Thankfully the only sickmaking we get onscreen are a few nauseous gulps before turning off camera. Realistic puking simulations would have done nothing to lighten a film the tone of which howls to us from the grungiest back end of the alley. This may not be the most nihilistic porn movie out there (in spite of what my brethren may think, my experience with this sort of thing isn’t all that extensive), but it’s the darkest one to dance across my eyeballs.

Having been presented with a smut flick bearing characters and a story, is it greedy to wish that they had both been a bit more developed? Case in point: the character of Spike (Bastone), a friend of Nick’s who suffers from a far more familiar brand of post-nuke affliction. His skin marked by radiated rot, he lurks in the background, hidden from the rest by a curtain. He is used sparingly in the narrative and yet both injects a further degree of humanity into the film and plays a fairly significant role in the finale. How much more effective his contribution would have been if his character had been sketched more finely we can only speculate on now. With a running time of only an hour and a quarter, it’s not as if they needed to worry about bloat.

I questioned at first what possible benefit there could be for these sex-starved people to sit around watching others get it on. Then I looked at my TV, VCR and the remote in my hand, and shut the fuck up. A case could even be made that the whole thing is a stab at the porn audience, and their need to experience things vicariously, but I think this idea cheapens what the movie really does set out to accomplish.

The sex scenes are all staged as performance art pieces – a giant rat milkman ravages a housewife while three mutant babies pound bones against their highchairs; an oil executive with a pencil for a head nails a tart on his desk while his naked, pasty-wearing secretary robotically asks if she should take a memo; two women tear off their bikinis respectively representing the American and Soviet flags and 69 each other while warfare rages in the background. This ends up having an odd effect. It’s reasonable to assume that these scenes are meant to be arousing, and they are to a degree, but they’re even more disturbing, what with the nightmarish imagery and allusions to the horror that transformed the world. It seems the director felt that the story was ultimately more important than the audience’s nuts and the busting thereof. It also forces us to feel something of what the screen audience must be feeling. (There are repeated close-up shots of their rapt faces, and many looked oddly familiar to me, though I’m not sure from where. Several sources list Richard Belzer as being among them, but if they’re talking about the guy I think they’re talking about, I’m not so sure. It looks like him but it doesn’t sound like him at all.) They can’t look away from the sex and yet all it really brings them is sickness, horror, and, in Nick and Lana’s case, heartbreak. This is the clearest indication yet that the filmmakers, including co-screenwriter Jerry Stahl of Permanent Midnight fame, truly were trying to make a movie, not just a stroke flick. Apparently an edited version was even given a limited run in non-porn theaters.

But I must admit from a personal angle the real draw for me in watching this was to see the only hardcore performance by legendary, frequently topless scream queen Bauer. Watching Michelle in her assorted horror films, I always suspected there was a ‘fresh-faced girl’ look under all that mugging and garish ‘80s make-up. Who knew it would take a porno for it to finally be revealed to me? Through all the smut and sleaze, Lana comes off as comparatively sweet and pretty. Ultimately she does a not-very-nice thing, but it’s kind of hard to blame her entirely, and her nice girl looks make the ending that much hotter. And, truthfully, that much sadder.

This review brought to you by the giddily-named Alpaca Lips Now!, an Astro-Critics and Zombie's Auxiliary Quilting Bee Round Table.

Co-conspirators (indictments pending):

The roarific Choconado tackles Ultra Warrior.

The enigmatic Deacon Wentworth wrestles with Omega Doom.

The hootin', zootin' Dr. Kobb vivisects Omega Cop.

The klowntastic Kodos points the pie cannon at Target Earth.

And the thoroughly wanton Portrait in Flesh leads on, scores a couple of drinks, lifts wallet and skips out the back door on Warriors of the Apocalypse.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-08-18T17:03:00.000-07:00

Coffy

(1973, 91 min.)

Starring Pam Grier, Booker Bradshaw, Robert DoQui, William Elliott, Allan Arbus, Sid Haig, Barry Cahill, Lee de Broux, Ruben Moreno, Lisa Farringer, Carol Locatell (as Carol Lawson), Linda Haynes, John Perak, Mwako Cumbuka, Morris Buchanan.

Written and directed by Jack Hill.

Our story starts with a bang – literally (ha!). Coffy (the inimitable Grier) tricks drug dealer Sugarman (Buchanan) into taking her back to his crib. She shows us her boobs, blows his head off with a shotgun and then ODs his junkie assistant, Grover (Cumbuka). The next shock comes in the very next scene as we cut to a hospital and discover that this angel of death is, in fact, an angel of mercy, only she’s having trouble concentrating on her nursing, what with her plan to murder every member of the LA drug world and all. See, our heroine has a problem with heroin, not personal usage, but the fact that her sister got hooked and subsequently used by her pushers, although she’s now in rehab, an empty shell. Coffy shares her frustration with childhood friend Carter (Elliott), who’s a cop. He’d like to be more than a friend, but she’s involved with local pol, Howard Brunswick (Bradshaw), who she’s first seen meeting in a restaurant that features a topless girl dancing on a table. Brunswick is clearly a creep from the getgo, although Coffy can be forgiven for not noticing at first, seeing as this was the ‘70s, a time when Smarm, as a dialect, was far more commonplace in public life.

Carter has deeper things than unrequited romance to worry about anyway, since his partner and other fellow officers are hip deep in the culture of corruption, and his refusal to wade in as well earns him a beatdown by a couple of mafia goons (one played by genre favorite Haig). Coffy, being present, gets smacked around as well, though not before getting a shot in with a vase to the head. Haig also takes a few moments to rip open her shirt so we get another look at her chest.

Carter’s prospects for survival don’t look so hot, and Coffy determines to get the Mafioso who sent the thugs, and who is also an integral part of the dope smuggling. (Not that she needed more impetus to get psychotic on peoples’ asses, but this lends the story more pathos, as Carter is the only completely sympathetic character in the piece.) The dude’s name is Vitroni (Arbus, who for some reason employs a Hispanic accent), and word has it he’s into some sick shit. He especially enjoys getting rough with the working girls of a pimp/drug dealer named King George (DoQui). Coffy proceeds to set herself up as one of George’s girls and orchestrates a wild party scene that guarantees that Vitroni will request a one-on-one with her. (She also pulls a switcheroo with George’s dope supply that turns out to have unbelievably coincidental benefits later in the story.) She meets with him intending to kill him, but unfortunately one of the thugs recognized her vase-over-head technique at the party from their encounter at Carter’s, and she is subdued and imprisoned. Things don’t get any more pleasant from there.

This is a thoroughly nasty piece of work from the opening shotgun blast to the closing one. There are only victims and victimizers (a number of characters get to be both). One does get a sense of actual outrage on the part of writer/director Hill at the rampant vice and corruption, and he doesn’t excuse Coffy’s murderous behavior 100% either (he throws her a small loophole when she states that going into that mode is like being in a dream she can’t control). There’s some of the expected racial cynicism, but it’s largely either played for laughs (the only mention of racial harmony comes from the unctuous Vitroni) or merely implied, as in a shocking scene of violence near the end. But, of course, none of that is really the point. The cheap thrills, violent action and copious nudity are the draws, and the movie certainly delivers in that respect. There’s a streak of viciousness on display that may surprise those unfamiliar with the genre, but which enthusiasts will eat up. The party scene, probably the most memorable set piece in the whole thing, is a particular kick, with Coffy hurling girls left and right (and ripping open their shirts in the process), all leading up to the wince-inducing climax when George’s favorite girl Meg (Haynes) grabs our heroine’s hair only to have her hands cut up by the razors Coffy’s hidden in her ‘fro. Plus we get the added bonus of hindsight, allowing us to enjoy such excesses of the era as the garish clothing, the ‘baby, baby’ patois, and Sid Haig’s gigantic grin.

But even if the movie had nothing else, it would have our Pam. She’s not a natural actress, but she is a natural screen presence. She somehow manages to navigate her character through a gamut of scenes ranging from psychotic bitch to soft-spoken lady and you buy it, largely because it’s her. (Not to mention how goddamn sexy she is. There’s one scene where she’s photographed nude through a fish tank that, while I can’t say exactly why, struck me as one of the hottest things I’ve seen in a while.) The movie may be too rough for some folks, but for anyone who’s ever worshipped at the altar of Pam, this is canon. Hill and Grier would essentially remake this movie the following year (and indeed it was originally intended to be a sequel) as Foxy Brown.

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2006-07-16T20:00:00.000-07:00

Isn’t She Great

(2000, 95 min.)

Starring Bette Midler, Nathan Lane, David Hyde Pierce, Stockard Channing, Amanda Peet, John Cleese, John Larroquette.

Screenplay by Paul Rudnick, inspired by an article by Michael Korda.

Directed by Andrew Bergman.

Gender issues are of great interest to me, and I couldn’t help but think while watching this film of that old political favorite, the double standard, only instead of ‘what gets classified as strength in men, gets classified as bitchiness in women’, I was thinking in the other direction. It occurred to me that were a film made about a man with the qualities of the main character here – brash, foulmouthed, pushy – the title ‘Isn’t He Great’ would have been put forward with an eyebrow raised and the tongue pressed firmly into the cheek. In other words, the sort of arch sarcasm most certainly not on display in the title of this film.

Was the life of Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls and other heady tomes that helped birth the literary trash genre, the stuff that movies are made of? Well, there was tragedy: an autistic son; the battle with breast cancer that she ultimately lost. There was comedy: her public feuds with the likes of Truman Capote; the fact that she had a publishing contract in the first place, according to some. (Not having read her work, I am unqualified to judge whether or not she had a talent for anything beyond dishing dirt.) There is her extremely archetypical story of an individual struggling to break into showbiz and only doing so after finding their own particular niche. And then there’s Susann herself, a character if ever there was one: loud, flamboyant, brassy, ballsy. So, yes, Susann’s life was not just movie material, it had enough material for several movies, spanning several genres. And herein lies the main flaw of Isn’t She Great. Director Bergman clearly saw the assorted potential and tried to cram it all into one film. The result is a mish-mash of story elements none of which feel fulfilled and the overall whole of which will most likely not satisfy anyone but the most diehard Susann fans. And even they will be distracted by some pointed omissions.

What’s not omitted is a genuine affection and appreciation for Jacqueline Susann. Truth be told the film isn’t ultimately about Susann as much as it is about the love that her husband and publicist, Irving Mansfield (Lane), felt for her. Lane’s vigorous performance makes it that much easier to believe how much he loved her, which is no small feat given that hers’ was not a personality that everyone might find particularly lovable. (This point of view would also explain why the various affairs she carried on behind Mansfield’s back are nowhere to be seen here.)

Not helping matters is the fact that, as stated before, the film serves up bites of various different elements without ever truly offering a full plate of any one. One of the better extended segments happens a little after the halfway mark, when we’re served up the timeworn device of uptightness slamming up against free-spiritedness, or more specifically in this case, the WASP-y intelligentsia of Hyde Pierce’s editor character coming face to face for the first time with the noisy, bawdy, and predominantly Jewish world of entertainers. Despite the familiarity of the schtick, these scenes actually work quite well. Hyde Pierce, Midler, and Lane play their respective roles in this bit to the hilt. Honorable mention should also go to Channing as Midler’s racy actress friend, who tells a funny story of being fired from Ozzie and Harriet, followed by an equally wonderful moment featuring Hyde Pierce’s reaction to Midler barking out that the Nelsons are “all cocksuckers”. (It’s also worthwhile mentioning that the film alternates the prerequisite shock and befuddlement with moments showing Hyde Pierce’s character finding genuine amusement in their behavior, a smart move that both alleviates the cliché a bit and makes the whole scenario slightly more realistic.)

It’s tempting to ponder whether Bergman might have ever-so-slightly had in mind the film version of Valley (which Susann supposedly hated), with it’s own unique blend of comedy and tragedy, when he made this. Of course, the comedy in that film was largely unintentional, much of it springing directly from the “tragedy” unfolding on screen, so it’s not the same thing at all. Still- tempting to ponder. Especially in moments when it’s not entirely clear what the film wants us to feel. Jackie constantly equates watershed moments in her life with her never-ending desire for fame, which sometimes seems like humor and other times, well, not so much. Such uncertainty on the part of the film does not tend to lend the viewer a whole lot of confidence and simply adds to the overall fragmented nature of the piece.

Ultimately the comedy bits in Isn’t She Great work the best, as schticky as they can be. (While on a book tour, Mansfield greets the nuns in a convent with the line, “If you liked the Old Testament, you’ll love Valley of the Dolls.”) But regardless of the element at work in any given moment, you never get past the sense of incompleteness. The performers were game and the material was there in spades, but the result is as substantial, to use another old New York chestnut, as Chinese food is filling.

I can’t help but feel that this all might have worked out better as a miniseries, for Lifetime perhaps. But then they wouldn’t have been able to include the scene where Jackie looks at up at the sky and yells at God to go fuck himself.

Author’s note: This review was the product of another round of the sado-masochistic games we tend to play over at the B-Movie Message Board, all the various incarnations of which involve one person assigning a bad movie to another. Sometimes it’s done in swaps, as was the case when Bergerjacques tried to fell me with Gothic, and sometimes it’s done in a kind of chain letter of cinematic pain, which is how the evil Grendel72 came to assign this film to me. Both men thought they could break me, apparently unaware that my ability to withstand mutilation makes Jim Rose look like Prince Alex. Nice try though. Bitches.

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2006-07-16T16:55:00.000-07:00

Rancho Notorious

(1952, 89 min.)

Starring Arthur Kennedy, Marlene Dietrich, Mel Ferrer, Jack Elam, George Reeves, Frank Ferguson, Francis McDonald, Gloria Henry, William Frawley, Lisa Ferraday, Dan Seymour, John Kellogg, Rodd Redwing, Roger Anderson, Russell Johnson.

Screenplay by Daniel Taradash from the story ‘Gunsight Whitman’ by Silvia Richards.

Directed by Fritz Lang.

Kennedy plays Wyoming cattlehand Vern Haskell whose fiancée (Henry) is raped and murdered by a thug (McDonald) passing through town. Fueled by rage and grief, he follows the man’s trail to a remote horse ranch called Chuck-a-Luck (named after a roulette-style game). The place is run by legendary ex-saloon girl Altar Keane (Dietrich), and doubles as a hideaway for bad guys on the lam, including her squeeze, Frenchy Fairmont (Ferrer), legendary himself for his shooting abilities. Already tense circumstances get ratcheted up when Vern finds himself engaged in an outlaw lifestyle anathema to him and at odds with Frenchy over his attention to Altar, all the while obsessed with figuring out which one of his bunkmates is responsible for his love’s death.

Once again, director Lang displays his penchant for stories about men whose reason is overpowered by their emotions. The only tie we’re shown that Vern has to his community is his fiancée, and indeed, once she’s gone, he’s pretty much in the wind, following whatever leads he can snatch out of the air as he divines the mystery of Chuck-a-Luck, told through a small series of entertaining flashbacks. It’s not that Vern doesn’t have his wits about him – he knows when to lie and what lies to tell – but the thread holding him together is a tenuous one. There’s a great moment where Vern – convinced by nothing more than circumstantial evidence that fellow ranch hand Wilson (Reeves) is his man and riled by Altar’s song about the unwanted attention of impetuous boys – charges through the reveling crowd with violence on his mind, only to be stopped when the lookout pokes his head in with a warning of approaching lawmen before anyone can see the burn in Vern’s eyes.

But the central conflict here is different than in Lang’s other films. Spurred, perhaps, by the indisputable righteousness of Vern’s cause (I’m no fan of vigilantism, but there’s no denying that the man he’s after is a bad, bad guy), Lang doesn’t feel the need to portray him as a man losing himself as so many of his other protagonists have been. Vern is all too in touch with himself – he even insists on being called by his real name at the very pseudonym-friendly ranch – and the disgust he feels for those he’s forced to take up with in his quest is largely kept in check until a scene that startles both for its suddenness and for its interesting subversion of the dynamic that usually rules characters who find themselves in the presence of Marlene Dietrich.

The story is multi-faceted and entertaining (although the narrative clunks a bit at the very end), but this is no standard western. Akin to Nicholas Ray’s similarly baroque Johnny Guitar, Rancho has a more emotionally charged story to tell and yet comes off as subtler in comparison. No exploding mountainsides here. Or exploding women for that matter. Dietrich’s sloe-eyed Weimar persona (which was a far more important factor in all but her late-career roles than her acting abilities) is firmly intact and there’s little to rival the snarling hellcat antics of Crawford and McCambridge in Ray’s film. The nods to such adult subjects as rape (the doctor tells Vern that his fiancée was “spared nothing”) and kinkiness (the human horse race) also set this apart from your standard handguns and horseshoes fare of the period, the latter possibly pushing it into the realm of deliberate camp, although that’s a point made far more, well, pointed by the presence of…the song.

Ballads are a western tradition, as well as a tradition in westerns. A whole subset of the genre was devoted to singing cowboys, after all. And in some cases a good ballad can serve to make a great film even more poignant, as in ‘Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’’ from High Noon or, in an unjustly less famous example, the George Duning-penned title song for Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma, as sung by Frankie Laine. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with Ken Darby’s ‘The Ballad of Chuck-a-Luck,’ sung by William Lee, but it isn’t hard to understand why some might find it a bit amusing, breaking in as it does in the fairly serious narrative so that Lee’s deep earnest voice can repeat ‘chuck-a-luck, chuck-a-luck,’ building up to dramatic call of ‘Hate! Murder! And Revenge!” If this were a Coen Brothers film, we’d know they were using it tongue in cheek, but with Lang it’s not so clear. Despite the dramatic nature of the film, it’s obvious that in certain aspects he’s having fun with the material, so who knows? Trying to divine his motives at this late a date may be irrelevant anyway. Giggling at ‘The Ballad of Chuck-a-Luck’ may simply be part and parcel of the same post-modern impulse that compels me to mention that this is likely the only film in history to feature appearances by Superman, The Professor and Fred Mertz.

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2006-07-01T20:47:00.000-07:00

Mr. Bungle, California

Bungle has never been the most out there, musically speaking, of vocalist Mike Patton’s myriad projects. That honor would likely go either to his solo efforts or a one-shot project he did with Japanese “noise manipulator” Masami Akita called Maldoror, which even some dedicated Pattonites have been known to warn novices off of. (This is also as good a place as any to mention that if I speak primarily about Patton in the course of this to the exclusion of his bandmates, it’s not for lack of appreciation of their formidable talents, but simply the result of a greater familiarity with his career.)

Bungle’s self-titled debut LP sounded like something cooked up by a group of grad students living in a frat house located on carnival grounds. The barrage of obscenities, laundry list of perversion, and gamut of grotesque sounds, most of which emerged from Patton’s throat, served to please the lowbrows and distract casual listeners from the fact that it was a meticulously crafted piece of work (produced by meticulous craftsman John Zorn). The combination of funk, ska, and punishing metal guitar courtesy of Trey Spruance, was not a new venture. The attempt to morph it all into circus music was. The clownhouse kegger atmosphere was also something of a ruse. These clowns had no problem with you laughing at them because they knew that the last laugh was on you.

The follow-up, Disco Volante, found them both shedding their more adolescent instincts and favoring their artsy side. (And ironically, while Zorn did not come along for the second ride, it actually sounded even more like something he would have done than the first album had.) Patton kind of took a step back from the front of the stage for DV. By his own admission he didn’t do much songwriting for the album and many of the tracks, a good number of which didn’t even have lyrics in the traditional sense, required him to retool the role of the vocalist, becoming less the figurehead singing on top of the other instruments and more one of those instruments himself, a practice he has repeated on other projects. I’ve often wondered if this wasn’t in part a reaction against the repeated references to Bungle as Patton’s “side project” from Faith No More, ignoring the fact that he had been in the other band first and had only joined FNM with the stipulation that he would continue his work with Bungle. Whatever the reason he did it, it resulted in a fascinating piece of work, a series of soundscapes where avant jazz leads to speed metal leads to surf music leads to techno leads to a Morricone soundtrack leads to, etc., occasionally in the service of some rather lofty concepts. It’s fun to imagine what the party animals who rallied around the first album’s gutter-minded humor must have thought when they gave this one a spin. “What the fuck?” seems a safe guess.

And then came California.

Their taste for genre gumbo is in evidence from the opening cowboy clop accompanied by Hawaiian slide guitar, as is the fact that they can still turn on a dime when they fall effortlessly into a samba lounge shuffle in the middle of the second verse. This song is ‘Sweet Charity,’ written by Patton and featuring the first of a number of standout vocal performances. This is a very good thing. As much as I appreciated their approach in making Disco Volante, in general I like my albums Patton-intensive. And I’m happy to say he’s back in full force on this one, contributing a lot to the writing and singing his twisted guts out, though while he’s still all over the place in terms of register, timbre, crazy-ass noises, etc., what little of his trademark roars and demon-spawn shrieks are in evidence are buried in the mix.

The irony of the beautiful, Trevor Dunn-penned ‘Retrovertigo’ is that it may be one of the few songs on the album that doesn’t have an overabiding retro element to it, from the doo-woppity of ‘Vanity Fair’ to the Swingle Singers Space Trip of ‘The Holy Filament’ to the assorted moments when they seem to be channeling that most Californian of musical institutions, the Beach Boys. (Or would that be Charles Manson?) And in fact, ‘Retrovertigo’s electric piano could itself be considered part and parcel of the largely late-‘60s, early-‘70s vibe that runs through much of the album, all the way down to the garishly vibrant floral photos in the insert. But it’s always been their willingness to go to the most unexpected of places that’s set them above so many others. If I hadn’t already known that these were my kind of musicians, it would have become apparent the moment I heard them wed a heavy metal stomp to a Balinese kecak chant.

But the most astonishing thing about California is that while we’re still unquestionably at the carnival, they’ve added a whole bunch of new attractions that are bound to shock. To whit…

THRILL! at the…mature, conventionally structured rock’n’roll songs? Done without sacrificing their inventiveness and all the more revelatory in light of what had come before. The more conventional songs are so good, in fact, that I found myself at first becoming irritated with the standard gonzo compositions, like ‘None of Them Knew They Were Robots’ or ‘Ars Moriendi.’ I got over it, of course – they’re great songs. It’s just sort of like having a personal chef who has for years dazzled you with his Chicken Kiev and his Beef Wellington only to serve up one day the best plate of scrambled eggs you’ve ever had. You’d have to wonder why he’d never made them for you before.

MARVEL! at the…restraint? They seem to have realized somewhere along the way that just because you can incorporate six different styles into one song doesn’t mean that you have to. Witness Spruance’s ‘Golem II: The Bionic Vapour Boy’ in which he takes a calliope melody and transforms it into a P-Funk-style groove, thereby paying simple, extremely weird tribute to two of the band’s favorite genres.

BE ASTOUNDED! by the…SINCERITY?!?! Shit, that one really is astounding. Bungle has always been first and foremost about the freak show. Their lyrics can be surprisingly cerebral (surprising if you’re only familiar with the likes of ‘Squeeze Me Macaroni’ or ‘The Girls of Porn’ that is), but the acid circus delivery, along with Patton’s frequently tongue-in-cheek tone, is less conducive to metaphysical musings than groovy freakouts.

But then there’s the aforementioned ‘Retrovertigo,’ which, if I’m reading it right, is a sober reflection on the overwhelming power of ingrained apathy. And, even more confounding, ‘Pink Cigarette,’ a tribute-cum…I would instinctively say ‘parody,’ of a 1950s death ballad, but surprisingly it’s a gray area. They do such a good job of capturing the mood, and the subject matter – that of a stylish couple with an ugly secret, the male half of whom has chosen to kill himself rather than further put up with his girlfriend's abuse (possibly physical, possibly emotional) – is certainly strong enough, that the song achieves a dimension of actual poignancy. But fear not; they haven’t gone completely over to the other side. I’m pretty sure I can still hear that tongue in that cheek, and I don’t believe for a moment that we’re not supposed to get at least a morbid little chuckle out of the finale, increasingly melodramatic backing vocals swelling, as the protagonist, speaking from beyond the grave, counts down the hours until his lover finds his swinging corpse, her screams, provided by Patton himself, ringing out in the distance. It’s chilling and funny, and subsequently one of my favorite rides in one hell of a park.

That this album is such a roaring success makes it all the more unfortunate that Mr. Bungle is apparently kaput. There’s never been any official announcement, but things assorted members have said make it fairly clear that they’re not interested in working together any more as a unit. Things change, of course, and we can always hold out hope, but it’s possible that Bungle may be one of those cases, like the poetry of Baudelaire and the paintings of Vermeer, where we have to settle for an output the unfortunate paucity of which is gloriously eclipsed by its splendor.

Put that in your seltzer bottle enema and squirt it.

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2006-07-01T17:21:00.000-07:00

National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze

(2003, 96 min.)

Starring Tatyana Ali, Boti Bliss, Gable Carr, Patrick Cavanaugh, James DeBello, Marieh Delfino, Tony Denman, Danielle Fishel, Courtney Gains, Gregory Hinton, Edwin Hodge, Paul H. Kim, Jennifer Lyons, Marie Noelle Marquis, Chris Owen, Patrick Renna, Cameron Richardson, Randy Spelling.

Written by Patrick Casey and Worm Miller.

Directed by David and Scott Hillenbrand.

During a visit inside the titular housing unit on one day during finals week before winter break at Billingsley University, we are introduced to the following characters and situations: Adrienne (Richardson) is avoiding the improbably-named Newmar (Denman) because, though she’s not interested in him, she made out with him the previous evening while drunk and despondent over her unrequited crush on the even more improbably-named Foosball (Spelling), who, unbeknownst to Adrienne, does not return her affections because he’s gay. Adrienne is also avoiding Claire (Ali) because she borrowed a handbag, which she has since misplaced. Marla (Fishel) and Lynne (Lyons), the two resident bubbleheads, have become convinced that Claire’s boyfriend, Tony (Hodge), is physically abusing her (he isn’t), while Claire starts to suspect that he’s cheating on her with Adrienne (he isn’t) after overhearing them doing a scene for drama class. Loud-mouthed jerk Styles (Renna) is determined that his brother Booker (Owen) is going to lose his virginity, and to that end has hired a hooker for him, even though Booker is pining away for Rachel (Carr), the girl down the hall. Wang (Kim) is awaiting the arrival of a French exchange student, but has to go to work, so he asks Foosball to wait for her instead. Pete (Cavanaugh) is visited by his delinquent friend, Cliff (DeBello), with whom he’s supposed to drive back home after exams. Cliff is depressed from having just lost a crapload of money in Vegas, so they decide to tell everyone that he only speaks French so no one will bother him while Pete is at his job. The foreign exchange student, Dominique (Marquis), who naturally speaks no English, shows up and is immediately mistaken for the hooker. Conversely, the hooker (Bliss), who’s also conveniently named Dominique, shows up with her protection, Ted (Hinton), and is immediately mistaken for the foreign exchange student. Meanwhile, Gerri (Delfino) has come across a mysterious bag full of money in a package mailed to her, which she could definitely use as her scholarship is about to be revoked. When the sender of that bag, Lorenzo the Black Hand (Gains), whatever that means, contacts her and they arrange to meet, it turns out he believes she is actually Britney, a famous criminal/master of disguise whom he wishes to hire for some big job.

As should be all too evident, this has got to be one of the most densely plotted dumb comedies in existence, and the above only represents the set-ups, all of which become variously intertwined as things proceed, with messages, phones and notes being inadvertently exchanged. Some of the plot devices are contrived as hell (no, I mean really contrived; it’s saying something when some of your more credible moments involve the old Three’s Company ‘misunderstand a conversation in the next room’ bit), but then this probably isn’t the right kind of movie from which to demand realism, and it actually works far better (and funnier) than ever could have been expected, despite bouncing back and forth between moments of godawfulness and touches of actual inspiration. The dialogue is howlingly bad in spots, but, again, not as much as you might think. The cast is game, and the whole thing has a generally genial nature, a certain level of anticipated crudity aside.

In truth, this is a far more successful modern update of the ‘80s teen T&A comedies than other such attempts as Kevin Smith’s Mallrats and National Lampoon’s own Senior Trip. Actually they all could have used more gratuitous nudity (I was really hoping to be able to put this in Tee-Hee, I’m Naked!), but then I say that about everything, including my own life. I live in hope and am prepared to die in despair that one of these revivals will truly catch the spirit of those bygone paeans to dumb horniness, but until the filmmakers learn to use bodily function humor far more sparingly and bare breasts far less so, I’ll have to settle for the classics and moderate rehashes such as this one.

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2006-06-24T17:12:00.000-07:00

Avenging Angel

(1985, 93 min.)

Starring Betsy Russell, Rory Calhoun, Susan Tyrell, Ossie Davis, Robert F. Lyons, Stephen M. Porter, Paul Lambert, Barry Pearl.

Written by Joseph Michael Cala and Robert Vincent O’Neill.

Directed by Robert Vincent O’Neill

Even those who don’t have extensive knowledge of the trash cinema of the ‘80s may remember the original Angel, the tale of a sweet-natured high school girl who turns tricks on Sunset Strip at night. There are also probably a lot of folks who just think they’ve heard of it, given that the premise is a longtime favorite theme in both cautionary tales and porn. Fewer people, however, are probably aware that the film actually inspired not one sequel, but three. I’ve never seen the third or fourth, but the second was one of those films that I somehow managed to catch numerous times in those heady, early days of cable.

Four years after the events of the first film, Angel (Russell, taking over the role that was played by Donna Wilkes in the original) is now in college studying pre-law and going by her real name, Molly, having put everything, including her street handle, behind her. Lt. Andrews (Lyons, taking over for Cliff Gorman), the cop who helped rescue her is still a big part of her life, and has been paying her tuition. The two of them get together near the beginning of the film, and he asks about a boy she’s seeing and whether or not she’s told him about her past. She says she hasn’t, seemingly setting up some future plot point that never actually arrives.

Soon after we get the film’s only real bit of gratuitous T&A, a young woman showering and getting dolled up in slutty clothes, one shot revealing that she is actually a policewoman, and the outfit is a cover. At the same time Andrews gets a call that the cover has been blown. What we know and he doesn’t is that a car full of armed dickheads are already on their way to her house. They bust in and kill her and her parents. At least, I think they were supposed to be her parents. It’s not explicitly indicated, but the ‘mother’ is white, the ‘father’ Asian, and the policewoman kind of looks mixed, so why the hell not, although that would seem to be a remarkable amount of consideration given for what is essentially a minor point. Andrews pursues the thugs and gets himself plugged for his efforts. One of the local street performers, Johnny Glitter (Pearl), witnesses the murder, but manages to get away.

Molly is crushed by the news of Andrews’ death and decides she needs to be personally involved in bringing the killers to justice. She also decides that the only way she can do that is to revert to her Angel personality and hit the street. (Purely for investigative purposes; she doesn’t plan on dabbling in the flesh trade.)

Back in the old neighborhood, she hooks up with Yoyo Charlie (Porter, the first of three actors reviving their roles from the original), another street performer who does tricks with the toys from which he gets his name. The two of them go to see Solly (Tyrell), a local landlord and eccentric (the latter is pretty much redundant; all of her old crew were oddballs of one variety or another). The reassembly of her gang continues with Kit (Calhoun), a former cowboy movie actor who makes a living playing off that persona, and who they have to retrieve from the mental hospital to which he’s been committed. Together they try to track down Johnny Glitter before the bad guys off him, find out who said bad guys are, and find out why they’re messing around in their territory in the first place.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the original, but I’m pretty sure it was a lot more intense than this. Apart from some comic relief in the form of Dick Shawn playing a drag queen, I seem to remember the psychotic killer storyline of Angel casting a certain amount of gravitas, successful or not, over the proceedings. Not so the sequel. Some fairly serious subject matter and nastiness rubs uncomfortably up against broad slapstick airlifted in from another movie. Indeed the entire sequence in which they rescue Kit from the mental hospital could have been taken from any one of the idiot comedies so prevalent at the time. And Avenging Angel doesn’t even have the sufficient level of gratuitous nudity that makes those films tolerable (for me anyway). Oddly, Russell, who peeled in plenty of other films, most notably the moronic Private School, stays clothed, giving us nothing more than a little mild cheesecake when she dresses up as Angel. This also leads to a scene where she’s stared at by everyone in the room when she goes to do some research in a law library. Given the prevalence of slutty clothing these days, I have to wonder if a scene like that would fly now. (I love it when I get to be pervy and prudish in the same paragraph.)

There’s worse ‘80s crap out there, but there’s better as well. A good movie could be made about the intermingling of assorted street cultures, but the filmmakers never exploit the possibilities. But there are small entertainments to be had, such as the scene where the two drag queens in Solly’s building get into a stereotype-smashing fistfight with the baddies. Plus Calhoun gives the same vigorous sort of performance that helped make Motel Hell as fun as it was, and Tyrell is a positive hoot as the hard-as-concrete, guttermouthed Solly, proving once again that she is one of the all-time greats in the pantheon of cinematic oddballs.

I had an amusing little digestif in the form of a trailer that played after the film for the teensploitation flick Tuff Turf, starring then whippersnappers James Spader and Robert Downey, Jr. Ah, the memories. The awful hairstyles; the gaudy fashions; the chirping synthesizers over synthetic drumbeats; the deluded attempts to make the kids look “punk.” The ‘80s were unquestionably a one-of-a-kind decade, a fact that makes me wistful and grateful at the same time. You can read a review of Tuff Turf at my man Deacon Wentworth’s site, Surfin’ Dead (although in the review he indirectly refers to James Spader as a mediocre actor, and for this he must be spanked).

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2006-06-23T20:21:00.000-07:00

Return of the Living Dead III

(1993, 96 min.)

Starring J. Trevor Edmond, Melinda Clarke, Kent McCord, Basil Wallace, James Callahan, Sarah Douglas, Mike Moroff, Pia Reyes, Sal Lopez, Julian Scott Urena, Dana Lee.

Written by John Penney.

Directed by Brian Yuzna.

Edmond plays Curt, a disaffected teen (yeah, and I just took the training wheels off my Schwinn), unhappy because a) since his mother died, it’s just been him and his affection averse father (McCord), and b) said father is an army Colonel, meaning they’ve bounced from town to town quite a bit during his young life.

Things do seem to be picking up a bit. The current town has provided him with a hot girlfriend, Julie (Clarke). She’s quite juicy, but also rather spooky. In a non-walking cartoon echo of Linnea Quigley’s Trash character from the first film, Julie likes to think about death, and she likes to do so in such a way fit to get her fiddling with her own equipment. Or Curt’s as the case may be, though while he enjoys the action, he’s not too crazy about the context. He is, however, willing to indulge her weird fascinations enough to steal his father’s key card and sneak her into the so-not-high-security-it’s-ridiculous facility, where they find that dad is working on a project involving making weapons out of reanimated dead bodies. Yes, our old friend 2-4-5 Trioxin is back, and being only slightly less badly mishandled than usual. His plan involves bringing them back, sending them in to nosh on the enemy, and then freeze-drying them until they’re needed again. Curt and Julie get a first hand look at this as they spy on the proceedings, though they leave before getting a chance to see how fucked up things can get in zombie movies, as the initial freezing part of the experiment doesn’t go so well and two scientists end up corpses themselves. This means that Colonel Dad’s plan is no-go and a rival colonel (Douglas, though she’ll always be Ursa to me) is free to enact her own plan for brazenly utilizing corpses in a degrading manner and acting awfully snooty about it in the process.

Curt and Julie beat their feet back to Curt’s house for a little fun. Colonel Dad comes back from the base to inform Curt that he’s being reassigned again. When Curt protests, Dad states that getting him away from Julie is all for the best anyway. Curt tells him to go blow and he and Julie jump on his motorcycle and hit the road. Julie is so excited that Curt defied his father she can’t keep her hands off of him, which would be great if she didn’t choose to do it while they’re still speeding down the highway. One encounter with an oncoming semi later, Julie has been thrown from the bike and broken her neck against a telephone pole. Curt, wracked with grief, does the only sensible thing a person with access to a reanimating agent would do for love.

There are certainly things to dislike about this film. For starters the set-up is less than satisfying. The scenes with Frank and Freddy early in Part One aren’t masterstrokes of character development and exposition, but they do successfully establish the combination of ghoulish and goofy – the ‘tongue through cheek’ approach, if you will – that rules the rest of the movie. Part Three, however, suffers, as do so many contemporary films, from what I like to call Main Course Syndrome. A truly fine meal, in a formal epicurean sense, is more than a slab of meat surrounded by this vegetable and that starch product. It’s a series of dishes – soups, salads, appetizers, breads – selected to compliment each other and lead up to the main course. A good film can similarly present assorted complimentary factors that allow the audience to get a sense of the universe that the film represents, so that when the main narrative thrust arrives, they’re invested enough to want to see what happens next. Unfortunately many directors seem to think that a microwaved bowl of canned tomato puree and soggy greens in oil and vinegar are enough, while others ignore the formalities altogether and dive straight for the meat and potatoes.

RotLD 3 does at least have the decency to serve the courses, in this case a fairly strong aperitif and some watery gazpacho. (I’m really beating the shit out of this metaphor, aren’t I?) It’s interesting to note that this is simultaneously the most vicious film in the trilogy (I’m aware more sequels have been made since, but for the time being I’m going to pretend they don’t exist) and the one with the most pathos, more than the original, which did have some, and certainly more than Part Two, which, if it had any, drowned it in a sea of schtick. The viciousness is pretty well established with the first zombie scene, but the passionate relationship and turbulent situation surrounding it are presented far too cursorily, and they’re damn important if we’re going to buy that Curt could do something so incredibly stupid just to keep Julie around.

What’s more, implausibility abounds, not the least example of which is the ridiculous ease with which Curt gets Julie’s body into the reanimation chamber. Granted, they make a point of mentioning how security is lax owing to budget cuts, but they couldn’t put one guard outside the room with all the pickled monsters?

So, yeah, there are reasons to dislike this film; and yet I don’t. In fact, I dig it a lot. For one thing, I dig that, flawed as the setup may be, the film’s crux is a passionate relationship. One might argue that Curt and Julie’s behavior is erratic and unbelievable, what with Julie demanding to be left alone one minute and then begging Curt never to leave her the next, and Curt’s intense naiveté in insisting that things can work out for them, but then, love can turn one’s brain to soup at any given age. Substitute limited life experience and jitterbugging hormones with the slavering jaws of the undead and you’ve got a fair approximation of the travails of young love.

Also interesting is the plot device in which Julie mutilates herself to stave off her cannibalistic cravings. It’s hard to believe that this isn’t a deliberate reference to Self Injury Syndrome, or as many who suffer from it, mostly women ages 13 to 30, call themselves, “cutters.” Impressive that an early-‘90s gore film would utilize subtext related to the emotional trauma of young women. And then slightly less so when you realize that it’s largely used as a means of exploitation. And then slightly more so again when you see how damn effective the exploitation is. I’m sorry if this sounds crass after bringing up cutters, but when Melinda Clarke finally appears decked out in her full “body art” glory, it is truly a sight to behold. (Which brings us to one of the other reasons I like this movie. With her fiery hair, feline eyes and shark’s grin, Clarke is exactly the kind of unconventionally attractive woman that spins my beanie.)

But before I devolve into fanboy droolydom, let me reemphasize that one of the main things this film gets points for (aside from some cool monsters and a topless Clarke) is its overtures towards real sentiment, such as the couple’s encounter with Riverman (Wallace), a homeless man who lives in the sewers (the coin bit is a nice touch and makes Riverman’s ultimate fate both more poignant and harder to watch). And the ending is another reference to Part One, and one of its most effective scenes at that, proving that someone was paying attention. For me it’s heartening to see, especially when so many modern horror films seem to consider even whiffs of real tragedy to be too much of a “downer,” or whatever expression is in vogue at the moment.

My colleague Marlowe once opined the use of the phrase ‘love you forever,’ saying that it’s a cliché, and even worse one that ignores reality while adding nothing new to the collective unconscious. Maybe he’d be more inclined to accept “I’ll love you forever…provided you can refrain from eating my head.” Less cutesy to be sure, but also considerably more difficult to fit on a candy heart.

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2006-06-04T16:30:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Arrow Beach

(1974, 91 min.)

Starring Laurence Harvey, Meg Foster, Joanna Pettet, Stuart Whitman, John Ireland, Gloria LeRoy, David Macklin, Jesse Vint.

Screenplay by Wallace C. Bennett, after an adaptation by Jack Gross, Jr. of a story by Bennett.

Directed by Laurence Harvey.

“There is a witch’s tale that once a man has eaten human flesh, he will do it again.

And again.

And again.”

Young hippie runaway Robbin Stanley (Foster) finds herself in the title town with nowhere to stay. After sleeping on a private beach she is befriended by the property owner Jason Henry (Harvey), a Korean War veteran who lives in a house up the hill with his sister Grace (Pettet).

Jason invites Robbin up to the house to eat and then to stay the night if she likes. Grace openly disapproves of the idea. She eventually relents, but secretly tells Robbin that it’s a house custom to lock all bedroom doors at night. Robbin soon finds out why as she is awakened by a thudding sound, which she follows to the basement where she finds Jason using a meat cleaver to prepare food for his rather unique palate. I think it’s fairly obvious where this is going, but if anyone is confused, I would refer you to the quote at the beginning of the review.

Robbin beats her feet out of there and runs into town, understandably freaked. As she’s cut her arm during her escape, the Head Deputy Sheriff (Whitman) takes her to the hospital, though his attitude of TLC does not extend to believing her story that a respected, if reclusive, local resident is cutting people up in his house. It doesn’t help that Jason shrewdly phoned the police himself right after she ran away, claiming that she busted up his front door, and has already given Sheriff Ireland the bag she left behind after having planted a syringe and a vial of some weird drug in it.

They kick Robbin out of town, but she sneaks back in and, with the help of a friendly hospital orderly (Macklin) whom she met during her convalescence, goes back to Jason’s house to prove once and for all that his concept of Epicurean delight extends to what is charmingly referred to as “long pig.”

If the title of this film doesn’t exactly sound like that of a horror film, that’s appropriate as this really isn’t a horror film. It’s supposed to be and has all the trappings of one, but it just doesn’t come off. In fact given the various elements that pop up throughout (cannibalism, drugs, prostitution, even intimations of incest between Jason and Grace for cripes sake), the whole thing is surprisingly dry.

This was Harvey’s final film before he died. He looks okay for a man in steep decline, a bit gaunt, but not too bad. His performance as Jason is in the fine tradition of charming psychopaths, but unfortunately his performance behind the camera comes up lacking. He purportedly continued working on it right up to the end, even phoning in instructions from his deathbed. While this is admirable, it would also go a lot towards explaining the strangely static nature of the film. Seemingly superfluous plot threads are scattered here and there, resulting in odd scenes like Whitman arguing with his girlfriend about spending too much time at the station and conservative Ireland being interviewed by a leftist newspaper at the rally for his re-election as Sheriff. This latter scene smacks of an attempt to inject some politics into the proceedings, which is odd given that a major and very timely opportunity for politicizing – a war veteran inviting a free-spirited hippie chick into his house – was not utilized. It’s possible they didn’t want to tread into such territory, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were an oversight, especially given the tremendous other oversight they commit: they never really explain why Jason became a cannibal in the first place. Oh, it’s intimated that he was forced to in some sort of Donner-esque situation in Korea, but considering the relative importance of this particular plot point, you’d think they would have spent a bit more time on it.

The film does have its moments. The opening scene in which a hitchhiking Robbin gets picked up by a cokehead hotrodder (Vint), who proceeds to hit on her while simultaneously scaring the crap out of her with his need for speed is giddily amusing. And the film achieves actual poignancy when Jason gets an aging hooker played by Gloria LeRoy to come up to his place to have her picture taken. She’s a former burlesque performer who counts herself in the ranks of Blaze Starr and Lily St. Cyr and his playing on her sad broken dreams in order to murder her injects a note of real tragedy.

But the better parts don’t make up for the fact that the rest of it is regrettably underbaked. A good film could be made about a psychopathic recluse who has a chamber of horrors in his house where he cuts up and eats people. And of course it was made. By Tobe Hooper. That same year.

On the other hand, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn’t have a theme song sung by Lou Rawls, so maybe it evens out.

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2006-05-17T22:42:00.000-07:00

Pickup on South Street

(1953, 80 min.)

Starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley, Willis B. Bouchey.

Directed by Samuel Fuller.

Widmark plays Skip McCoy, a pickpocket who, just hours out on parole for the third time, is back to his old tricks. He lifts the wallet of a woman named Candy (Peters) on the subway, but unbeknownst to him (and her as it turns out) there’s some microfilm in there that her weasely ex-boyfriend Joey (Kiley) has enlisted her to deliver to Communist- excuse me, I mean, Commie spies, though she has no idea exactly what she’s mixed up in.

What’s more, a couple of feds were following her with the intention of picking up whoever she passed the goods to and they witnessed the theft. They go to the police and meet Captain Tiger (Vye), who calls in Moe (Ritter), a professional info-peddler who sells ties as a front and whose only ambition is to buy a burial plot so she won’t spend eternity in Potter’s Field. She leads them, and eventually Candy, to Skip, who realizes that with all the interest people are showing in what he’s got, he may have finally stumbled onto his big score – and he intends to make it pay off.

This is a violent, suspenseful thriller that offers plenty of hard-boiled delights; if only it held up a bit better under scrutiny.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first. Much of it, unfortunately, revolves around Ms. Peters. She’s fine in the role, and she looks great, but, while I realize characters in these films fall in love awfully quickly all the time, Candy’s affection for Skip is doubly hard to buy given that the first time she lays eyes on him, he robs her, and the second time, he slugs her in the jaw. Granted you can say that she’s playing him at first, trying to get him to give her the microfilm, but that dewy look creeps into her eye in pretty much the very next scene. Additionally when things turn tragic there are several instances, including one right in front of Skip, of Candy weeping and blaming herself, the worst part being that the smarmy creep lets her do it and even affirms her blame a little bit, regardless of the fact that in truth, the whole damn thing is his fault. (He does eventually acknowledge some responsibility, and does a damn good deed in the process, but still…)

But there’s so much about this movie that works I’m willing to forgive that which doesn’t. Fuller infuses the film with a thorough sense of urbanity. One of the small entertainments of metropolitan life is the out-of-the-way places that exist on the fringes of which most people don’t take notice, so it’s a great conceit that Skip lives in a shack on a dock down by the seaport, keeping his beer cold by lowering it in a box down into the East River. His secluded, solitary accommodations make a nice contrast to the packed claustrophobia of the subway cars where he makes his living.

The film is in part about the subculture of small-time hustlers, and it could have stood to use a bit more of this. Its eighty-minute running time keeps things taut and precise, but doesn’t leave much room for embellishment, so aside from Skip and his schtick, all we get in this respect is the great scene with Lightning Louie and his chopsticks, and Moe, the latter of whom represents one of the film’s greatest achievements. Many films about grifters feature a stock character who has been doing whatever it is they do for far too long and wants out, but as played by Ritter, Moe is the utter embodiment of this concept. Moe is tired: tired of being alone, tired of being bitter, tired of having creeps for friends, tired of having to fink on said creeps for a living. The fact that she is literally looking forward to death is a marked difference to Skip’s devil-may-care attitude towards his own way of life, and is the one thing that ends up lending him a conscience in the end, and in a rather courageous way for Fuller to have depicted it. Or rather I should say possibly courageous. (Note: A pretty important spoiler follows.)

Being the treasonous leftist that I am, I have always chosen to attribute Skip’s eleventh hour conversion from opportunistic asshole to buster of iniquitous jaws to his regret and guilt over Moe’s murder, rather than some sort of patriotic awakening. Now it could be argued that since Moe dies because of her refusal to play ball with a “commie” her resolve is just as much a part of his turnaround as his remorse, suggesting that patriotism does have something to do with it. Watch the scene where she faces down Kiley and it makes for a compelling case, but I still prefer my interpretation. For one thing Skip is consistently resistant to people “waving the flag” at him, and it’s nice to think Fuller had the balls, given the tenor of the times, not to give into what pressure probably existed then to go as up-with-America as possible. For starters the movie’s anti-communist enough without needing to drive it home by making Skip “see the light”, and to me it’s far more dramatically satisfying to have the ending, which incidentally climaxes with a bang-up brawl in a subway station (the film coming full circle perchance?), come from something deeper than a standard morale straight out of your run of the mill propaganda film.

But frankly, jingoistic or not, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a compact thriller and one of my personal favorite noir pictures.

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2006-05-17T22:35:00.000-07:00

One Hour Photo

(2002, 96 min.)

Starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Dylan Smith, Gary Cole, Eriq La Salle.

Written and directed by Mark Romanek.

Williams plays Sy Parrish, a discount supermarket photo clerk who has developed, both mentally and photographically, a severe fixation on what he believes to be the perfect life of the Yorkins, a family who have been bringing their business to him for years. I was back and forth on whether I wanted to see this or not. On first hearing about it I was intrigued, especially as descriptions of it were couched in the reports of Williams attempt to flex his acting chops after his much-talked-about descent into twee-ness. I’ve always liked Williams and always felt there was a dark side to his humor, and as such would welcome a return to more mature fare for him. But after time I began to wonder what exactly the film could bring to the obsessive psycho genre, not exactly a fresh idea at this point in history. I’m happy to say that my interest won out over my skepticism, and I was rewarded in the process. Though flawed in ways, the film offers a portrait of a deeply sad and lonely individual who reinvents his reality through photographs

Writer/director Mark Romanek got his start in music video, and as such he pays a lot of attention to the visuals, all the more appropriate here being that pictures are a central theme of the story. Scenes and scenery are stylized to fit into this motif, such as the cool sterility of the supermarket where Sy works, which is used to particular effect in a startling dream sequence. But Romanek also brings depth to his story, especially in as much as it is about perception, from both scientific and psychological standpoints. He actually hits this mark a few too many times, shoehorning it in at points, but he still manages to twist the theme around, playing not only with Sy’s perception of the Yorkin family, but with the audience’s perceptions of Sy. On the one hand Sy’s life revolves around photography and yet he is also tormented by it. Sy idolizes the Yorkins for what he believes to be their charmed life, and yet in voiceover he himself points out that photo albums tend to whitewash one’s existence. And, in what I think is one of the film’s most inspired little variations, Sy, as any classic stalker does, has convinced himself that he knows the family, except in this case, in a manner of speaking, he actually does. All of this serves to give the film an enduring air of uneasiness, as does the fact that the director uses a few neat tricks to keep us guessing as to the actual depth of Sy’s psychosis.

But as nice as it is to see an unconventional approach to what is at this point in history a fairly conventional story, the ultimate drawing point here is Williams’ performance, a career redefining turn that was unfortunately overlooked award-wise. It’s hardly surprising given that many committees shy away from celebrating characters who dwell mainly in the gray areas, and there’s no denying that the sympathy Williams makes us feel for Sy stays fast even as his actions become more and more frightening.

While it’s left ambiguous at the end whether Sy has ruined or in a strange way saved the life of the Yorkins, he has in either case become an indelible part of their lives. If the film’s final shot needs any explanation, perhaps it’s that. Or perhaps it’s an indication that in this day when visual trickery is as commonplace as the stark, cold cereal laden shelves of discount markets, reality, particularly for someone as desperate as Sy, is more subjective than ever.

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2006-05-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

Monkey Hustle

(1977, 90 minutes)

Starring Yaphet Kotto, Rosalind Cash, Rudy Ray Moore, Kirk Calloway, Randy Brooks, Debbi Morgan, Carl Crudup, Fuddle Bagley, Thomas Carter, Donn Harper, Frank Rice, Lynn Caridine, Patricia McCaskill, Lynn Harris, Duchyll Smith, Steven Williams.

Written by Charles Johnson, from a story by Odie Hawkins.

Directed by Arthur Marks.

Two years earlier than this, director Marks had helmed two other blaxpo pictures, Bucktown with Pam Grier and Fred Williamson and Friday Foster with Grier and Kotto. Despite belonging to the same genre, these were two rather different films. Bucktown was a rough and mean story of corruption and almost Shakespearean betrayal, while Friday Foster, based on a comic strip (imagine a black Brenda Starr and you’ll pretty much have the idea), had a much lighter tone. Foster also differed from Bucktown in as much as, while still fairly violent, it tempered the brutality by scattering bits of humor throughout. As if this weren’t variety enough, the following year saw the director making J. D.’s Revenge, a blaxpo horror film about a man possessed by a murdered gangster. Marks may have weighed in on these efforts and decided he liked the light touch of Foster, so much so that he would consider going even further in that direction. At least that seems to be what was on his mind when he made this likeable enough, but strangely empty comedy about a Chicago neighborhood populated almost exclusively by smalltime hustlers.

There’s a bit of a plot about a block party the locals throw to protest the building of a freeway through the neighborhood, but most of the film is taken up by the little scams perpetrated by the characters, mostly on each other. (I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of statement or if it’s just a comic device). Kotto plays Big Daddy Foxx, a kind of father figure to the up-and-comers, and he describes what they do for a living as the ‘monkey hustle’ of the title. As fun as all of the scheming is, it leaves precious little time for anything else, and as a result, the characters are so thinly drawn, it’s hard to care about them on anything more than the most perfunctory level. (Interestingly enough, though not well-developed either, the most diverse character is The Black Knight (Rice), the local cop, who is portrayed alternately as a law enforcer, a co-conspirator in the scams, a bumbling fool easily tricked by the young hustlers and, ultimately, a part of the stolid community facing down ‘the man’. One almost wonders if screenwriter Charles Johnson was merely trying to cover all bases with one character, given the sharply divided opinion of the time regarding police officers.)

The cast is not to blame for the rather hollow tone as they all do their best. The wonderful Kotto is as engaging as ever and genre fave Moore (Dolemite), while not given that much to do, still manages to add some flamboyance to the proceedings.

It has been one of my own little pet musings to imagine what might have resulted if the people behind this genre had tried to make a film using the ideologies of the Italian post-war neo-realist movement. Given the over-the-top nature of much blaxploitation and the definitively anti-style stance of neo-realism, it might have resulted in disaster, yet on the other hand, it also might have provided a more contemplative portrait of urban black life than these films tend to. This is actually one place where this film succeeds a bit more than its counterparts. You do get a real feeling of the community at large, which incidentally makes the slightly hackneyed rally scene at the end easier to take. But this is a case of seeing the forest despite the trees and I can’t help but wonder how much more poignant it would have been had we had really solid characters to attach ourselves to.

This will not satisfy those looking for blaxploitation’s trademark sex and violence quotient, but it does stand as an unusual variation. Pity it couldn’t have been a more thoughtful one.

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2006-05-10T18:29:00.000-07:00

Miracle in Milan

(1951, 95 min.)

Starring Francesco Golisano, Paolo Stoppa, Emma Gramatica, Guglielmo Barnabo, Brunella Bovo, Anna Carena, Arturo Bragalia, Erminio Spalla, Jerome Johnson

Written by Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini, from a novel by Zavattini, with additional material by Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Mario Chiari and Adolfo Franci

Directed by Vittorio De Sica

An older woman, Lolotta (Gramatica), finds a baby in her garden and raises him as her own. When she dies he’s placed in an orphanage, from which he emerges a stunningly idealistic young man, Toto the Good (Golisano). Having no prospects and nowhere to go, he takes up with a ragtag band of homeless, whom he encourages to build a shanty-town, the residents of which include a man who thinks himself better than all the rest and gets along with no one, a family with similar airs, who are ultimately just hucksters and who have a housekeeper who takes a shine to Toto, and a black man and a white woman who must pretend not to be a couple owing to their mixed races.

A rich man buys the property the town rests upon, and while he is open and understanding about the plight of the residents at first (partially out of fear of them), when it is discovered that there is fuel to be had under the land, it isn’t long before he’s called out the cavalry to move them out and start drilling. Fortunately for the residents, Toto’s dead adopted mother pays him a visit to give him a heavenly dove that allows him to grant wishes. It’s very effective in driving away the capitalistic forces that darken their doorway, but it also, to no surprise, begins to corrupt the very people it was sent to save.

De Sica was one of the founders of the Italian Neo-Realist movement, which was a post-war school that strived, much like the Dogme 95 movement spearheaded many years later by Danish filmmaker Lars Von Trier, to slough off film conventions established by Hollywood through the use of a handful of particular facets meant to alter the very face of cinema. The Italians weren’t quite as assertive as the Scandinavians (whose fervor was built right into their name after all), at least in as much as they didn’t bother to write up a manifesto, but their aim was clear: to construct a cinema that looked like real life, more in step with what the viewer’s eyes actually see when they’re not confined within the theater’s walls, and, in the process, give a voice to the trodden underclasses.

It’s further interesting to note that it didn’t take long for both schools to begin bending or even casting aside their own rules, this film being a perfect example of De Sica’s break from form, at least in terms of tone. Working from a script written by, among others, Cesare Zavattini, who adapted from his own novel, De Sica uses the story as a way of expressing his own contempt for that often astonishingly shown towards those whose lives had been decimated by the war. But instead of the heartbreaking pathos of such films as his classic Bicycle Thief, he infuses the story with fantastical whimsy, from as early on as the few short opening scenes when he establishes the relationship between the old woman and her charge with remarkable adeptness and economy. The shanty town and the magical defense thereof provide him the opportunity for numerous sight gags and truly funny bits (I got a particular laugh out of the opera-singing soldiers). Of course, in true post-war Italian fashion, and as befits the story, it’s not all fun and games. The resolution of the mixed race couple’s situation is like something co-penned by O. Henry and Rod Serling. Still, overall, this wouldn’t be a bad film to start with if you wanted to try to get a kid interested in foreign cinema.

I will add one caveat, and expose my inherent cynicism in the process. I deliberately neglected to mention that when Lolotta finds the boy in her garden, he is, in fact, in a cabbage patch. Yes, Toto is a literal cabbage patch kid. And while the abiding cutesiness that bygone fad may conjure up doesn’t stain this film, there is a streak of ‘spirit will prevail’ up-ness similar to the one that runs through films like Lasse Halstrom’s Chocolat, for example. Your tolerance for such untrammeled optimism may color your enjoyment of the film. And while it’s been correctly pointed out that the film’s final image (and perhaps Toto’s starry eyes in general) can be seen as an expression of deep cynicism, it’s presented so joyfully it almost seems churlish to cast it in such a light. Perhaps after the utter bleakness of films like the aforementioned Thief, and such other neo-realist touchstones as Rossellini’s Open City and Visconti’s La Terra Trema, some good will was what De Sica, and the Italian moviegoers, simply needed.

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2006-04-22T18:43:00.000-07:00

Gothic

(UK, 1986, 87 min.)

Starring Natasha Richardson, Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, Miriam Cyr, Timothy Spall.

Written by Stephen Volk.

Directed by Ken Russell.

Author's note: This was originally written as part of the B-Movie Message Board’s Reader Roundtable: Self-Mutilation (in which the participants pick films they hate and assign them to other reviewers). That explains the note at the end, apologizing for not having suffered more pain at the hands of this particular flick. I realize I could have just taken the note out and saved myself the explanation, but that would have been the easy way out.

My college girlfriend was very much into poetry and the romantics in particular. I am not nor have I ever been particularly impressed with the art form, and though I can appreciate it from time to time, the romantic stuff has always struck me as overly florid and self-indulgent, though admittedly this may be a by-product of what I know, or at least think I know, about the people who wrote it, absinthe-swilling twits that they supposedly were. My girlfriend always used to say to me whenever I mocked them, particularly her not-so-secret crush Mr. Bysshe Shelley, that if we were living in the same period, Shelley and I would almost certainly be best friends as our natures, as she saw it anyway, were practically identical. I would usually respond by telling her that if I ever came across Shelley in a dark alley, I’d kick his stanza-writing ass all the way back to Queen Mab. I was half-kidding, of course, in that sadistic, tormenting way we reserve for our nearest and dearest friends and loved ones. On the other hand I was also half-serious, because what I’ve read about the behavior of the romantics, Byron and Shelley in particular, suggests to me the very worst aspects of the creative type: the kind that assumes that being a free spirit is the same thing as running about like an idiot. Were these people really like this? History would seem to suggest that it’s so. And let me tell you, he said getting to the matter at hand and not a moment too soon, if they were anything like they’re portrayed in Ken Russell’s Gothic, then a can of whup-ass would not have been sufficient. I’m guessing we would’ve had to open up a gallon barrel. (Well, a sound spanking would have been in order at the very least. I’m such an old softy.)

We begin with poet extraordinaire Percy Shelley (Sands) and Mary “Not Yet Mrs. Shelley” Godwin (Richardson) visiting Lord Byron (Byrne) at his estate in Switzerland. Also in attendance is Mary’s precocious (read: slutty and twerpy) step-sister Claire (Cyr) and Byron’s extremely gay personal physician Dr. John Polidori (Spall), and it’s a wonder given the treatment Byron inflicts on the doctor that Polidori doesn’t go Kevorkian on him. But then love is a strange thing, isn’t it? And Polidori indeed loves Byron, as much as Byron loves Shelley and as much as Shelley loves quaffing wine, chasing tail and generally running around like a spastic freak.

As those of you literarily-inclined may have guessed, this is a dramatization of the famous weekend where these loony luminaries challenged each other to write their own horror stories, resulting in Polidori’s The Vampyre and, more famously, Mary’s Frankenstein. In the course of the film the group performs a séance whereupon bizarre things begin to occur, scaring the bejeezus out of them and convincing them that they have somehow brought something that was dead back to life. Something that isn’t terribly pleased with having been disturbed and that would like to express its displeasure personally. It proceeds to do this by forcing them to face up to the things that disturb them most, including Mary’s heartbreak over the death of her prematurely-born baby that has been speculated is what caused her to write a story about a man who brings life back into dead flesh.

This is a Ken Russell film. If you don’t know what that means, it generally involves freaky, flamboyant imagery, often religious in nature, explicit sexuality, and lots of pseudo-philosophizing on such topics as, not surprisingly, religion and sex. As such the members of this group, with their conflicting views on the former (Shelley is an avowed atheist, Polidori a devout Catholic, etc.) and fair consensus on the latter (free love is all the rage, dontcha know), are perfect Russell fodder.

The visuals are, as per usual, something to behold. Russell peoples Byron’s mansion with a number of artificial humans: a mechanical harpsichord player; a walking suit of armor with a tremendous phallus; and a robotic woman with eyes where her nipples should be that repeatedly haunts Shelley. The significance of this last one frankly eludes me, though it could easily be a well-known image from his poetry, possibly even from something I may have read, as romantic poetry tends to evaporate off the surface of my brain at a remarkably rapid rate. But the overall reference here is obvious: manufactured life. This theme pops up in other slightly more subtle places as well, such as a shadow on the wall of a tree struck by lightning, presented in such a way as to make it look like a living being in great pain. The overall effect is for us to get a glimpse inside of Mary’s mind, the images serving to help us imagine how she came up with the idea of an obsessed man sewing limbs to torso and getting ready to grab a life force and tear it out of the sky.

The director also makes good use of the unrelenting tragedy that seemed to befall these people, most especially in the climactic sequence in which Mary has a vision of the future, including the deaths of Polidori, Byron and Shelley and the birth and death of her and Shelley’s second daughter. This sequence lends the piece a sincere poignancy, much needed by this point, as it curtails, if only for a minute, the factor that makes this film a tough sell.

Not unlike the common problem in slasher films, in which the characters are so obnoxious that you have absolutely no problem watching them get picked off one by one, the artistes in Gothic are presented as such decadent twerps, overgrown children whose minds, despite their grandiose musings about God and such, rarely rise above their waistlines, that watching them get the shit scared out of them seems somehow more appropriate than it does anything else; a much-needed lesson. Was this intentional on Russell’s part? I tend to doubt it. I think for the most part he admires these people (‘these characters’ would be more apt as I still can’t say for sure how close they are to the true figures). At the very least I would say that he feels sympathy for them, and this comes out most clearly in the ending. The new day dawns and everything has seemingly returned to normal, the events of the previous evening no more than a particularly vivid and freaky acid trip, and yet we’ve gotten a glimpse of the terrible things that await them in the future and as the scene morphs from the past to the present, with tourists walking across the lawn of Byron’s mansion (one of them played by the director), we realize that those awful things have already happened. That Shelley and Polidori have already discovered whether or not God exists, even if they can’t tell us about it.

As for me, sympathy? Sure, as I would feel sympathy for anyone who suffered some of the fates that befell these people. Admiration? Well, no. Not really. I confess that in preparation for writing this review, I pulled out some books with Byron and Shelley’s work in them and I found that I got a bit more out of them than I had previously. Would Percy and I be best friends? I doubt it. Would I beat him up? Of course not.

A few good noogies would probably suffice.

Post Script: I’m getting a picture in my head: a picture of one Monsieur Bergerjacques glaring intently at his computer screen and thinking of what would be the cheapest, quickest way of having me whacked. Sitting there on his inflatable donut, which he has to use owing to the copy of Obsession: A Taste for Fear still lodged in his ass (I swear to God, guys, I only asked him to watch the thing!), he thinks, “All this time I was waiting for some pain payback, and he gives me THIS!!!!” Yep. Sorry, BJ. While I can’t claim to have enjoyed this film, I actually did like it a bit more than the first time I saw it, and it gave me some interesting things to think about. Almost a rewarding experience when you come right down to it. And I now realize that this PS, intended as a way of smoothing things over, has probably in fact made them much, much worse. So I’ll just say good day, sign off and spend the next week remembering to stay away from windows.

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2006-04-22T18:39:00.000-07:00

Freddy Got Fingered

(2001, 87 min.)

Starring Tom Green, Rip Torn, Marisa Coughlin, Julie Hagerty, Harland Williams, Anthony Michael Hall, Eddie Kaye Thomas.

Written by Tom Green and Derek Harvie.

Directed by Tom Green.

Okay. I tried. I swear to Christ I tried. I tried to watch this movie as I would any other, putting aside my extreme loathing for the allegedly comedic stylings of its director/co-writer/star Green. Didn’t make a difference. Freddy Got Fingered is awful.

I tried keeping in mind one thing I had been told about the film: that Green had stated that most of it was concocted from private jokes he and his friends shared and he had in effect gotten a major studio to fund a movie that only a handful of people would actually get. That’s a good gag, if it’s true. The film could have used some good gags like that. Freddy Got Fingered is awful.

I tried to look at it from the idea stated by Green’s fans that he’s fearless when it comes to his comedy. To be fair there’s very little in this film in which Green could be accused of playing it safe. That might be admirable if only he were doing so in the name of something worth taking a risk for. Freddy Got Fingered is awful.

And that whole idea about never playing it safe isn’t completely true anyway. I read one comment praising him for having the guts to play a character that was so thoroughly unlikeable. Bullshit. There are pointedly deliberate attempts throughout the film to make the audience sympathize with Green’s character, an aspiring animator who can’t help turning every situation in which he finds himself into a freakshow, not the least of which is the way they make the character of his father into such a vicious monster.

Which incidentally leads me to the film’s one and only true “virtue,”[1] such as it is: Rip Torn’s performance as the father. Nobody barks the ‘f’ word quite like ol’ Rip and he attacks the role with such Doberman ferocity it’s almost enough to make me forgive him for the scene where he pulls down his pants and wiggles his flabby ass at Green. (And just as a brief aside, while I would never condone, let alone encourage domestic violence, it’s tempting at times to sympathize in a way with the father, even given his abusive behavior. The man has reason to be abnormally bitter; look at what he spawned!)

I like Torn so let’s leave him out of it for the rest of the review and refocus our sights on the real culprit. In fact let’s go back to that whole ‘courage’ thing. I don’t see it. Unless you happen to be an individual who has always dreamed of jerking off a horse, but never had the stones to actually do it, then maybe Green could be seen as courageous, but aside from that…

What’s more, for all of his freaky-deaky geekishness, Green is really a bully at heart, which when you come right down to it is the thing that prevents me from getting enjoyment from the few moments in the film that are actually kind of funny. It’s not enough for him to get laughs; what he really needs, what gets him off, is seeing the horror and revulsion that his “comedy” inspires in his victims. As he doesn’t get to enjoy that in the film form, he probably would have been disappointed had he not gotten a spate of terrible reviews. By getting angry at a film like this, you’re basically giving him what he wants. Despite some initial feelings of disgust, I’m glad to say that I’m not angry, but it does still annoy me that there are talented filmmakers out there who can’t get funding no matter how hard they try, but some executive thought it was a good idea to greenlight money for this film. Note to said executive: Freddy Got Fingered is awful.

Much has been made of the shock value scenes, such as Green eviscerating a dead deer and putting on its skin or pulling a newborn baby out of its mother, biting through its umbilical cord and whirling it about the room. Frankly neither of these two scenes particularly bothered me. The deer scene is a metaphorical joke (he’s been told in order to draw animals, he must get “inside” them) so at least there’s a smidgen of wit in there. The baby scene is not much more gruesome than things we’ve seen in other films. Take the ‘Live Organ Donor’ scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. I’ve always felt that they went too far in that bit, but the real humor that lies in the scene comes from John Cleese standing in the background casually talking up the woman whose husband is being disemboweled a few feet away. It is this kind of humor by contrast that Green either cannot or will not understand. As long as things are breaking, blood is flying, his eyes are bugging out and his mouth is wide open screaming, Green thinks that’s enough. He’s wrong.

Far worse is a completely unfunny, repellently sadistic running gag involving a child who lives next door to Green’s character and who is repeatedly being injured throughout the film, albeit accidentally. Admittedly Green’s character at one point is run down by a truck, but it’s done in cartoon fashion. He seems to have gone out of his way to make the young boy’s pain as realistic as possible. That’s the really nauseating part, dead deer and bloody baby be damned. I don’t know whether to hope that this is one of those private jokes that Green shares with his friends or to be distubed by the possibility that it actually might be.

Look, I like playing the iconoclast. Had the situation warranted it, it probably would have been fun to join the ranks of people who say that the mainstream critics just don’t get it and that this movie is an inspired work of comic subversion. But I can’t do that. Because Freddy Got Fingered is amateurish, childish, cruel, repugnant, and painfully unfunny.

In short, not to put too fine a point on it or anything, Freddy Got Fingered is fucking awful.

[1] Marisa Coughlin, who plays Green’s love interest, is also good, and extremely cute, so I’ll give her a brief mention as one of the film’s better qualities as well.

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2006-04-16T18:22:00.000-07:00

Forbidden World

(1982, 77 min.)

Starring Jesse Vint, Dawn Dunlap, June Chadwick, Linden Chiles, Fox Harris, Raymond Oliver, Scott Paulin, Michael Bowen, Don Olivera.

Written by Tim Curnen, from a story by R. J. Robertson and Jim Wynorski.

Directed by Allan Holzman.

A government mercenary (Vint) is summoned to assist a scientific colony on a distant planet. When he arrives, they explain that one of their genetic experiments has gone zip-a-dee-doo-dah on them and may now pose a deadly threat. Seems the thing can absorb itself into a human being and break down the DNA into its own, effectively reproducing itself. Or some such shit.

A decently mounted, though rather poorly executed riff on the Alien motif, produced by Roger Corman, in one of his countless attempts to cash in on the success of another film. (Though as this came out three years after the film it was aping, it doesn't put it in the impressive rank of, say, Carnasaur, a Jurassic Park rip-off that Corman got released to theaters before Jurassic Park! Take that, Señor Spielbergo!)

This is also apparently a pseudo-sequel to Galaxy of Terror, a film that I haven't seen, though I do remember a grade school friend of mine raving about it for two reasons: one, that Erin Moran was in it (Joanie from Happy Days), and two, that there was some scene where one of the alien beasties pulled a girl's face right off of her skull. One of these days I'll get around to confirming that last bit. I'd be especially interested to see, if that scene exists, how well they pulled it off (no pun intended). The gore effects in this film, which of course came after, are pretty good. They're actually one of the better things about it and will, along with the ample amounts of nudity, help horror fans get through some of the sillier bits. And they’ll need it, as some of the bits are quite silly indeed.

I am utterly in favor of horror films being artistic, but this can unfortunately lead to directors getting themselves in a bit over their heads. In this case, director Holzman has framed the film with two sequences that have Vint in suspended animation, while images from the movie run through his mind. At no point in the rest of the film is this given any explanation, leaving us to assume that the last scene is him remembering the events and the first one is some sort of precognition, which we're not told that he has and which is not mentioned or used in any other context.

Worse still is a scene where Vint and Chadwick get it on in her room. As they do, Earl (Paulin), who is in charge of the security cameras, spies on them, all the while playing with this fluorescent yo-yo type thing that spins when you pull on two strings that come out of its sides (I believe this toy has a name, but I can't remember what it is). The thing makes a buzzing noise when it spins and shots of the camera closing in on his face while the toy spins are intercut with shots of the two hump-buddies. Set to a typically synthetic '80's sci-fi soundtrack the cuts get quicker and quicker until they're bouncing back and forth faster than a speeding bullshit. Needless to say this has a comic effect that I don't think they were shooting for.

So, aside from the lesbo-disco-shower scene, which was admittedly kind of a kick, they probably should've booted the artsy stuff to the curb and stuck to the straight horror bits, which work fairly well. Well enough at least to deem this an “acceptable timewaster,” a term invaluable to any serious connoisseur of the B movie. This Is Spinal Tap devotees will recognize Chadwick as the Yoko Ono of that film, and Harris, who turns in one of the better performances here, was the delirious, lobotomized J. Frank Parnell from Repo Man (“You ever heard of the neutron bomb?”)

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2006-04-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

Demonia

(Italy, 1988, 88 min.)

Starring Brett Halsey, Meg Register, Lino Salemme, Al Cliver, Lucio Fulci, Christina Englehardt, Pascal Druant, Grady Thomas Clarkson, Ettori Comi, Carla Cassola, Michael Aronin.

Written by Lucio Fulci and Piero Regnoli, from an uncredited story by Antonio Tentori.

Directed by Lucio Fulci.

We know we’re in trouble when Fulci rips himself off – twice – within the first seven minutes of the film, and does it poorly at that.

We begin with a scene set in 15th Century Sicily where a bunch of revolting peasants (ba duh dum) are crucifying a handful of nuns. Shades of The Beyond, anyone? Except that scene had atmosphere and a nice helping of suspense, whereas this one is so rote, it could have been lifted from Horror Moviemaking for Dummies.

Flash forward to the present where we meet Liza (Register), indulging her yen for the paranormal by attending a séance, during which she has a vision of the crucified nuns, freaks out and faints. Funny, this scene seems to remind me of something [cough]City of the Living Dead[cough], though the sheer cliché of it is only surpassed by the careless, rush-job laziness with which it’s presented.

As it turns out Liza is part of an archeological dig in Sicily looking at Greek ruins, only she’s more interested in a dilapidated convent nearby. Her patronizing superior Malcolm (Halsey) doesn’t want her poking around there. Neither, to no great surprise, do the locals because the place has a history and some time a while back Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing, to whit, the aforementioned plank-and-nails party. Liza decides she has to find out what the secret is and why she feels such a personal connection to a place she’s never been before. Meanwhile Marxo decides he has to seriously consider what made him want to watch this film to begin with, and why he feels that he’d even rather be watching Fulci’s repulsive New York Ripper at the moment.

My esteemed colleague smokeyxdigger was kind enough to send me this with a note attached saying that he thought the film should be re-titled Demoni-argh, as that was the sound that came out of him repeatedly while watching it. I am hard pressed to disagree. There’s barely a plot in sight and while admittedly there is a smidge more than in, say, City of the Living Dead, this has little of the overly theatrical style that redeems that film. Nor is there even all that much gore to keep one interested, except for two scenes near the end: one that continues Fulci’s fixations on eyeball violence and cats (or cat puppets, depending on the shot), and another that’s memorably gruesome, but which still fails because it’s so illogical and nonsensical, and because it just feels so gratuitous, even for a Fulci film.

As I implied earlier, when Fulci’s at his most stylish, it’s easier to forgive the lack of coherence, the ludicrous dialogue, the disregard for basic storytelling conventions, but here there’s little to distract us from those things and the maddening gaffes leap out at you. There are killings of course, but the story seems unwilling to come to a concrete decision as to who or what is responsible. Genre fave Cliver (billed in the closing credits as Al ‘Clever’, though on the other hand ‘Cliver’ isn’t his real name either, so maybe it doesn’t matter after all) is menaced by a ghost –which then shoots him with a harpoon. Explain that one. We get a scene with the town’s mayor, who coughs incessantly, and when Liza goes to see the local records keeper, he too begins to cough. Seems like maybe we have a story angle being developed here, but no dice. And yet Fulci has plenty of time to give us not one, but two interminable campfire scenes where a guy with a guitar strums two chords over and over again while a bunch of people dance drunkenly around.

Now, and here I go again, it’s not all bad. The director, who, by the way, shows up in a role slightly larger than his usual dubbed cameo, gives us an effectively creepy dream sequence in which Liza sees herself standing in the middle of the arena structure they’re studying, while Malcolm cries out to her from on top of a hill. The script meanders by a potentially intriguing idea at one point when Malcolm snobbishly dismisses Liza’s interest in the monastery by saying that they’re there to study the enlightened Greeks, not the dark ages, only to abandon the concept the second the sentence leaves his lips. And there’s a (presumably intentional) joke involving one of the townspeople accosting Liza and loudly proclaiming himself “The Butcher of Santa Rosalia!” – only for it to be revealed later that he is the actual butcher of Santa Rosalia, as in pork chops, sausages and top round cut thin for braciole. Most people use raisins in the stuffing, but I tried substituting dried cranberries and let me tell you…sorry, drifted there for a moment.

But any good parts can’t make up for the whole, which includes a pace that’s positively sleep-inducing (Demoni-yawn?), clumsy plotting, and, as I mentioned, a good deal of rehashing of other films, both Fulci’s and others’ (and while I’ll let him slide on a wall-smashing scene that is faintly reminiscent of Deep Red, he cancels that good will out with the above-mentioned cat attack, which seems a riff on the Emily’s dog scene from The Beyond – itself a rip-off of a scene from Suspiria. Madon'!).

To sum up, let me leave you with this little fact: the same day I watched this for the first time I also took a walk down by the East River, and I got more genuine chills sitting and looking across the water at the spooky abandoned mental asylum on Roosevelt Island than I did from this entire movie. ‘Nuff said.

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2006-04-14T18:39:00.000-07:00

Branded to Kill

(Japan, 1967, 98 min.)

Starring Jo Shishido, Mariko Ogawa, Annu Mari, Koji Nambara, Isao Kamagawa, Hiroshi Minami.

Written by Hachiro Guryu, Takeo Kimura, Chusei Sone and Atsushi Yamatoya.

Directed by Seijun Suzuki.

Shishido plays Hanada, a.k.a. No. 3 Killer, an aloof, puffy-cheeked assassin employed in a bizarre murderous hierarchy, which seems to be based as much on self-destruction as murder for hire (its members spend far more of the film’s running time shooting at one another than they do other people). After a string of jobs, he meets a mysterious young woman, Misako (Mari), who engages him for another killing. When this goes wrong, owing to a twist of fate straight out of the butterfly effect (literally; what is it with these butterflies and their incessant need to affect world events far beyond their narrow lepidopteric scope?), Misako is kidnapped, and Hanada is marked for death by his own organization, eventually finding himself in a strange psychological contest with elusive No. 1 Killer, The Phantom (Nambara).

The first time I watched this film, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around it. The second time, well, to say that I understood it better would be a bit of an overstatement; let’s leave it at I didn’t find it as difficult to follow. And that’s probably good enough, as I’ve become increasingly sure that Branded to Kill functions under the Eraserhead factor: the sooner you realize you’re not necessarily supposed to “get” it, the sooner you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the film’s oddball nature unfettered.

The story doesn’t exactly develop so much as, as the enigmatic No. 1 says at one point, “Things happen.” The bebop that pops up on the soundtrack seems appropriate as, along with the loopy camera angles and static rhythms, Suzuki often appears to be improvising the narrative as he goes along. (And perhaps he was. He was fired from Nikkatsu Studios after completion of this film for straying too far from what they had expected.) Or maybe this is the Japanese cinematic equivalent of beat poetry, if we really want to strain those comparative muscles.

At times it comes off as a parody of gangster films, particularly when Hanada and The Phantom begin their dance of endurance, leading up to a truly odd and somewhat disturbing scene in a restaurant. The scenes with Ogawa as Hanada’s coquettishly slutty, frequently naked wife Mami also have a delirious humor cum creepiness to them, while other bits veer surprisingly close to out and out slapstick.

Hanada is a man with an increasing lack of control over the circumstances of his life. Assaults fly at him from all directions in both the actions of his fellow murderers and from nature itself. If compelled at the point of a gun to assign some meaning to all of this, I’d say that it’s a portrait of a man coming to the realization that no matter how big the blaster, nor an individual’s willingness to use it, there is no guarantee of power or control, there will always be forces that can overwhelm. But I’m personally more interested in a room full of dried butterflies, Hanada attempting to have a conversation with a film screen, a hairpiece swirling around in a toilet bowl, and the eroticism of the scent of boiling rice.

Sometimes it’s more fun just to sit back and watch things happen.

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2006-04-14T02:10:00.000-07:00

Cecil B. DeMented

(2000, 87 min.)

Starring Melanie Griffith, Stephen Dorff, Alicia Witt, Adrian Grenier, Larry Gilliard, Jr., Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon, Eric Barry, Zenzele Uzoma, Erika Lynn Rupli, Harriet Dodge, Ricki Lake, Patricia Hearst, Mink Stole, Kevin Nealon.

Written and directed by John Waters.

Our title character is a self-proclaimed guerilla filmmaker, who, with his merry band of assorted freaks (the porn star, the Satanist, the drug addict, etc.), kidnaps bitchy movie star Honey Whitlock (Griffith) while she’s doing a publicity appearance in Waters’ beloved Baltimore, and forces her to be a participant in his experiment in “outlaw cinema.”

Waters takes his fascination with the SLA/Patty Hearst (who naturally appears here in a small role) incident to its logical conclusion, imagining a scenario where a Hollywood actress is at first forced to participate in an endeavor that goes against everything she knows and believes and then eventually changes sides and takes up with her captors. The main problem here, ironic given that Patty’s true identity was central to the intrigue of the incident, is that he hasn’t drawn a concrete portrait of who this actress really is. Griffith, who does fairly well given how little she has to work with, sometimes doesn’t even seem like the same person from one scene to the next. Instead of really giving her a character, Waters instead just makes her one, relying quite a bit on tried and true stereotypes. This is doubly ironic considering the target the director has in his sights: a bland moviemaking industry that would rather churn out the familiar than take risks. In not developing Honey’s transition from pawn of the system to enemy of same, he falls victim to the same hackwork attitude he longs to lampoon.

Similarly, and while I realize Waters is trying to represent his hometown as always, doing a spoof of Hollywood that never actually sets foot in the place...it’s not that such a thing can’t work, but somehow it feels a little odd, though it’s amusing in a self-referential way for Waters to have the actual head of the Baltimore Film Commission be present at a rally that the outlaws attack for kowtowing to the industry. That’s certainly a step up clout-wise from a guy shooting super 8 movies of an obese transvestite (may he/she rest in peace).

Nevertheless there is still stuff to enjoy here (depending on your taste, but then it’s Waters; it’s always a matter of taste or lack thereof) in the spoofing of both the mainstream and the underground, the latter of which is at least in part Waters skewering himself, which make the scenes in which members of the collective spew out revolutionary rhetoric easier to take. (It’s kind of like Godard, but with a sense of humor, or rather a sense of humor that’s actually funny. Yeah, yeah, I know. Don’t get me started.)

There are also plenty of film references (each of the outlaws has a tattoo of the name of a filmmaker most suited to their particular function, a device some found cutesy, but which I thought was moderately clever), a couple of suitably Waters-esque outrageous ideas and some truly funny moments. But in the end, while I applaud the filmmaker’s spirit, the fact is that in the hands of a more skilled writer, this could have been a lot more than the enjoyable trifle it is.

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2006-04-13T18:31:00.000-07:00

Caligula

(Italy-US, 1979, 148? min.)

Starring Malcolm McDowell, Teresa Ann Savoy, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, Helen Mirren, Guido Mannari, John Steiner.

Written by (deep breath) Gore Vidal, whose screenplay was apparently worked over by Masolino D’Amico, with additional uncredited scenes written by Giancarlo Lui and Bob Guccione, and additional dialogue written for 1984 recut by Franco Rossellini, the whole mishmash purportedly based on a treatment written by Franco’s uncle, the legendary Roberto. (all info courtesy of the IMDb)

Directed by Tinto Brass and, to a degree anyway, Bob Guccione.

I’m never completely sure what to say about this notorious, would-be-arthouse, more-like-grindhouse mess about the most insane Emperor of the supremely insane Roman Empire (some would argue that that title belongs to Nero, but we’re not talking about him right now). It’s not the sort of thing you recommend to someone out of hand. And to understand why I would recommend it to anyone at all requires more than just an appreciation of bad cinema; it necessitates a grasp of that mutant urge that compels some of us to witness with no small amount of schadenfreude the failure of other’s overblown pretensions, blithely ignoring all the while the mental decay it may cause in ourselves.

Just to get a sense of things, take the scene where Caligula (McDowell) molests the body of his beloved, just-departed sister Drusilla (Savoy). (If it helps any, it wasn’t their first time; just the first time that she was dead during. That really doesn’t help at all, does it?) Now go back and read the description of that scene again, take a moment for it to sink in, and then consider that it’s far from the most repulsive thing on display here.

It’s really amazing that the thing got released at all. Different versions boast varying running times – often a sign of post-production problems – and various reports indicate that virtually no one involved wanted it ever to see the light of day. As I understand it, erotic filmmaker Brass took a script by Gore Vidal, who subsequently disassociated himself from the project, and shot it for co-producer Guccione, most famed for being the publisher of Penthouse magazine and for never buttoning his shirt. Guccione decided it was too family-friendly and added some more hardcore scenes, many of which are quite obvious in their insertion, if you’ll pardon the expression. Brass wasn’t too crazy with this tampering and also wanted to disassociate himself, but apparently didn’t completely, as his name is still in the credits. And, as if that weren’t enough, Guccione still wasn’t that nuts about the final project and considered shelving it. Which would have been a pity. Not because it’s a good film: it’s not, in fact it’s terrible. Some handsome design work is fucked up by terrible cinematography. The whole thing looks like it was shot on old stock that had been lying around in someone’s wine cellar. And I’m not an expert on Roman history – most of what I know probably comes from watching I, Claudius – but unless he was born that way, there must have been some point where Caligula began to become mad and we are never shown any real indication of this. At first he seems not really that much more crazy than the rest of them and then suddenly he’s a wack job. Seeing him lose it over time would have made for a much more interesting film. It was what was wrong with Kubrick’s version of The Shining and it’s what’s wrong with this, along with, as stated above, many, many other things.

But I did say I was glad it got released, didn’t I? Yes, because one man’s trash is another man’s, well, trash, but, as I implied earlier, to some of us that’s a good thing. It’s not the same kind of trash you’d get from John Waters or Paul Morrissey during his Warhol period, but…let me put it this way: Waters, the so-called Prince of Puke, is now a bona-fidey filmmaker. He is now working with much larger budgets than he used to and the result is films like Pecker and Cecil B. Demented. This can be viewed as a good thing or a bad thing (having seen Cecil I can say it’s a mixed blessing at best), but that’s not the point. The point is that had the John Waters of yore, the John Waters of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, been given the kind of budget he’s being given now, I’d like to think he might have decided to make something like this. A balls-to-the-wall tasteless non-historical historical, non-epic epic kind of film. A “screw that film school shit, let’s see if we can make this high school auditorium look like the Coliseum” kind of film. An Andy Hardy and Betsy Booth in Hell, but still putting on a show kind of film. The kind of film that Caligula is, only intentionally so. And of course the Waters version would have been funnier.

Oh well. Nice soundtrack anyway.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-04-11T02:26:00.000-07:00

Attack of the Giant Leeches

(1959, 77 min.)

Starring Ken Clark, Yvette Vickers, Jan Shepard, Michael Emmet, Tyler McVey, Bruno VeSota, Gene Roth, Dan White, George Cisar.

Written by Leo Gordon.

Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski.

Despite being a diehard urbanite, I’m a sucker for swamp movies. (Heh. ‘Leeches.’ ‘Sucker.’ Sometimes I want to smack myself with a wet mop.) It’s probably partially because swamps are one of the few remaining links to our primeval past in which man has less power than he does (or thinks he does) in this hyper-developed world, and subsequently interesting from both a literal and symbolic viewpoint. It’s also probably because the first swamp movie I ever saw was this one. Yep, time to haul another bucket out of the old nostalgia well.

I first saw this torrid ‘monsters in the backwoods’ affair many years ago on Creature Double Feature while visiting my grandparents in Massachusetts, along with The Leech Woman. Both films had an impact, not because I found them particularly boo-scary, but because they were the first films I’d seen that involved characters who represented human beings at some of their lowest points. In Woman, aside from the general air of cruelty that prevails, I was quite affected by moments like the quicksand murder and especially the scene in which the title character condemns her (admittedly scumbag) husband to death so she can use his essence to make herself young for the first time. The venomous viciousness with which she orders his murder – right in front of him no less – made me queasy.

With Attack I think the bit that most disturbed me was the sequence in which Big Dave (Ve Sota) finds his wife Liz (the luscious Vickers) fooling around with his supposed friend Cal (Emmet). He chases them through the swamp with his gun, forces them to wade into the water, and then, having gotten them good and scared, tells them to get out, only to watch them get pulled down into the water by the title creatures. There were several aspects of this sequence that got to me. One, the overall sleaziness of it. Two, the way Cal, who up until this point has been “playing it cool” suddenly dissolves under stress into a sniveling mess, even stooping so low as to start getting all nasty with Liz, as if he’s trying to ally himself with the man he’s just cuckolded. Three, their pathetic pleas for mercy when he first orders them into the water, which then turn into more desperate supplications as the creatures pull them down, a look of horror on Dave’s face as he watches the impossible unfold before his eyes. And finally, as if the whole scenario weren’t cheery enough as it were, Dave ending up hanging himself in his jail cell for what he did.

But the disturbing piece de resistance remains the way the leeches keep their victims alive in their cave the better to suck their blood whenever they get peckish. While nowadays this makes me want to make a joke about the leeches gathering around an Yvette-shaped water cooler discussing the previous Sunday’s episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, back then I found that mighty creepy. (Truth be told, it does still creep me out a bit.)

So, yeah, Attack of the Giant Leeches is a nasty little piece of work at its heart, and actually all the more effective for it, though that, of course, is a matter of taste. And while the monster costumes are pretty goofy, and our hero, Clark, maintains such a consistent tone no matter what the tenor of the scene he should receive some special award for Performance Most Seemingly Influenced by Mood Stabilizers, the damp, bayou atmosphere is consistent and effective, and the script, by actor Leo Gordon (The Haunted Palace, The Intruder), is better than ever could have been expected.

So all in all, not a bad way to kill an hour and change, provided you can handle the unpleasantness, and fans of scream starlets will want to visit it at least once (and likely hit the rewind button) for the scene where Yvette lotions up her legs alone.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-04-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

The Abominable Snowman

(UK, 1957, 91 min.)

Starring Peter Cushing, Forrest Tucker, Richard Wattis, Maureen Connell, Robert Brown, Michael Brill, Wolfe Morris, Arnold Marlé, Anthony Chin.

Written by Nigel Kneale from his own teleplay.

Directed by Val Guest.

I’ve been fascinated by the paranormal since childhood. My personal favorite has always been ghosts. I used to be really into UFOs, but my interest has waned somewhat, possibly due to brainstrain left over from trying to figure out the labyrinthine conspiracy of The X-Files. Bigfoot was never a particular favorite; he was basically just a big ape-man and I tend to prefer my monsters a bit more exotic, like the Mothman or the Dover Demon. (Speaking of the former, one of these days I’m going to have to get around to reading The Mothman Prophecies. I saw the movie a while back, though it didn’t make much of an impression on me, and I know that fans of the book didn’t like it at all. Though even they would have to admit that it was nice to see that Mothman had finally gotten himself a good agent.) But over time further study of cryptozoology has brought me a finer appreciation of our possible cousin the Sasquatch and his Eastern relative the Yeti. I also recall seeing a film about Bigfoot many years ago that featured supposed recordings of the creature crying out in the darkness of the wilderness it inhabits. Pretty creepy stuff, and the thought of the Yeti skulking around up there in the moonlit heights is certainly an evocative image of the goosebump variety.

When you think about it, Bigfoot and the Yeti both hang out in places that are superlative backdrops for horror: Bigfoot in the deep, dark woods of the Pacific Northwest and Yeti on the stark, snow-covered expanses of the Himalayas where the eerie echo of a man’s shout could almost be enough to make one wonder if that’s not really your echo, but maybe the voice of your doppelganger, lurking just over the next plateau.

A little dramatic, perhaps, but you get the point. These are great settings for horror films and yet not that many films have been made about Bigfoot or our subject for today, the Yeti, and those that have- well, let’s say that Val Guest’s The Abominable Snowman is most likely the best, though given that the competition includes W. Lee Wilder’s The Snow Creature, which I haven’t seen but have heard less than flattering things about, and Michael Findlay’s Shriek of the Mutilated, one of my favorite bad movies and beyond that let’s just leave it at ‘it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead’*, that’s not exactly the glowing compliment it might be construed as. As such I should qualify that Abominable Snowman is in fact quite a good little adventure/horror film that not only does well by its subject but also puts a nice little twist on it quite appropriate to the region from which the legend sprang.

Cushing plays Dr. John Rollason, a botanist visiting a monastery in Tibet to study the local flora, along with his wife Helen (Connell) and assistant Foxy (Wattis). He’s also something of an authority on the legendary Yeti and as such would very much like to see one. To this end he agrees to accompany an expedition composed of Tibetan guide Kusang (Morris), crass American trapper Ed Shelley (Brown), reserved French photographer Andrew “Jacques” McNee (Brill), and the team leader Tom Friend (Tucker), also crass though with clearly more brains than Ed. Helen is dead set against John going on the climb, owing to an accident he had on an earlier one. Aside from her anxiety, which eventually leads her to follow behind with a small party of her own, this story angle is pretty much left alone. The film doesn’t feel compelled to indulge in cheap dramatics by having Cushing overcome some great odds and emerge in fabricated personal triumph as so many films might have done.

Despite his wife’s fears and hints from the Lhama (Marlé, who, for a Tibetan, sounds awfully Teutonic) that the mission may be a foolish one, Rollason is determined to get a look at the creature and so the expedition sets off. It’s not too long until Rollason discovers that Friend is less Ernest Shackleton than he is P. T. Barnum. So much so that when Shelley shoots one of the creatures, Friend decides that a dead one ain’t good enough and uses the corpse and his own compatriot to try to lure a live one into a net, theorizing that they know Shelley killed their kin and will come after his ass. Not surprisingly this plan doesn’t work out so well, especially for not-so-bright Ed. Things start to get weird after that, leading to a denouement that has Rollason seriously rethinking the creature that he thought he knew well.

I can’t exactly call The Abominable Snowman a great film, but it is a good one. I could complain about the fact that, as is typical in many British films, the two Americans are portrayed as brash, ill-mannered and insensitive, but then again Foxy’s character, with his fussiness and the casual racism in his veiled contempt for the Tibetan culture around him, is just as much of a stereotype, so at least the film is an equal opportunity offender in this respect. What’s more Tom Friend is given some unexpected depth as a character. He has ideas beyond mere hucksterism, as misguided as they may be, and Tucker puts forth a good performance that swiftly banished any thoughts of him yelling “Agarn!” from my mind.

But the thing that really made the film for me was Kneale’s script, adapted from his own televised play. By giving the creatures a mystical quality, entirely fitting given the intensely spiritual nature of Tibet, he elevates the story to a level beyond the big-unseen-monster-systematically-picks-off-the-humans format that it would have been so easy to fall back on.

To close, let me say, Yeti baby, if you’re listening, fire the agent who shoehorned you into The Snow Creature and Shriek of the Mutilated and get back in touch with the one who got you this gig. And if he’s not available, well, give Mothman a call. Maybe he’ll set you up with his guy.

* Nah, I gotta get it off my chest. Why the hell did they feel compelled to use the Abominable Snowman in a film set in upstate New York? Were they unable to secure Bigfoot’s written consent to use his name? I mean that wouldn’t have been 100% accurate either, but it would have at least been more so. All right, that’s enough. RIP, Michael.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

2006-03-04T23:19:00.000-08:00

Plate O’ Shrimp
Film, Music and the Cosmic Unconsciousness

Welcome, ye lads and lasses. Let’s not dawdle, shall we? Let’s get down to brass tacks (whatever that means*).

It might seem odd, to those familiar with my eating habits, that I would name my website ‘Plate O’ Shrimp.’ Why? Because I don’t eat seafood. In fact, I avoid it with the same fervor that Hollywood avoids originality, The New York Putz and Fox Noise avoid objectivity, and Dick Cheney avoids prosecution. (Seem to have something on my sleeve here.) There is the occasional odd exception. For example, I have been known to use Worcestershire sauce, which contains some essence of anchovy. And if those rumors about Budweiser putting fish oil in its beer are true, well, let’s just say I’ve drunk enough fish to fill a decently sized koi pond.

So, indeed: Why ‘Plate O’ Shrimp’? That answer may be supplied by those familiar with my viewing habits, in particular, my devotion to one of the all-time cult classics, Alex Cox’s Repo Man. If you have to ask, you either haven’t seen the film or you haven’t seen it enough times, which is, of course, impossible, since you can’t see Repo Man enough times. (One of those rare examples that not only holds up to repeated viewings, but actually benefits from them.)

As to a more specific reason, that’s explained further in the Cosmic Unconsciousness section of the site. You can read about it there, or you can ignore it and enjoy the mystery.

A few things you should know about me when it comes to film.

1. I believe firmly in the policy that critics should not tell people not to watch any given film. There are exceptions, of course. I would have no problem, for example, telling my mother not to watch Re-Animator, as its combination of rotting corpses, homicidal intestines and a decapitated tongue bath just ain’t her bowl of chick peas. But that’s a case-specific kind of thing. When it comes to criticism, I have no problem telling people that a film is a complete piece of crap (well, for the most part, see #3 for more on that), but I’m never going to tell you that you shouldn’t watch it anyway.

2. This isn’t a big issue as I will rarely be doing long form plot synopses, but when it comes to spoilers, I try to be just as respectful of them if the movie is garbage as I would if it’s an acknowledged classic. So, just as I wouldn’t dream of giving away the ending to the original Planet of the Apes (not that I have to, seeing as how at least one video re-release did so on the freakin’ cover) so would I similarly keep mum about the ending to Tim Burton’s remake, though that may be partially in fear of someone asking me to explain the goddamn thing.

3. I am what I suppose we would call in this age of psychobabble a ‘bad movie enabler.’ Basically what that means is that while some of my colleagues seem, not to be hyperbolic, to take fanatical glee in ripping into certain movies until bloody shreds hang from their glistening jaws, I tend to go out of my way to find the good parts, any tiny little good part I can find. I prefer to see these low budget stinkers from the Ed Wood, “at least they tried” perspective as opposed to MST3K’s famous surmise of Larry Buchanan, that he “just didn’t care.” Am I a softie? A sap? Quite possibly both. My sympathies do tend to extend more to the shoestring budget crowd (the underdog thing), although I can be just as forgiving towards a big budget stinker if a) I get a true sense of good intentions, b) it happens to involve someone whose work I otherwise admire, or c) its cast includes an actress I’d like to bathe in pudding. And with that excessively honest image hanging in the air, keeping in mind that this is ‘Plate O’ Shrimp,’ not 'Case Study 1407: Analyzing Marxo Grouch,’ let’s move on.

Addendum, circa April 2006: For those of you who are familiar with the old Plate O' Shrimp, I should explain the new digs. The site that the entire Crab Chips collective used to be on (a small group of fellow miscreants, whose sites can now be found here, here and here (and which started out with even more members, although I must admit that I've forgotten exactly who was involved, mea culpa)), 50 MGs or something like that, basically took a torch to the whole damn thing, erasing hours and hours of work, most of it Skeeter's. (I had once held out faint hope that the collective might one day reunite, but at this point it seems highly unlikely. Still, the world waits with baited breath, while Cliffie waits with breath that smells like bait.) This new form places all of the responsibility for the site on me, which has proven to be fun and somewhat liberating. (And occasionally confusing. Try to ignore the fact that some of the Special Features down there are technically also part of the Cosmic Unconsciousness.) Maybe one of these days, I'll even learn some of that hatemail...I mean, HTML, so the place doesn't so much resemble a storage closet.

And so, once again, onward and upward!

The Reviews

The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas- Frostbite and mysticism.

Amazons- Toplessness and celebrity lookalikes, like sword & sorcery goes Vegas.

The Attack of the Giant Leeches- Take me to your backwoods now, Yvette.

Avenging Angel- Somewhere between Nancy Drew and The Happy Hooker.

Branded to Kill- Chaos theory, Nippon-style.

Café Flesh- Come one! Come...well, comparatively few actually.

Caligula- A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Vomitorium.

Cecil B. Demented- And Marxo B. Ambivalent.

Coffy- Plenty of cream, but no sugar.

Demonia- Dead nuns awakened; audience not so fortunate.

Die! Die! My Darling!- "Quick! There's no time Tallulah!" (i hadda do it) NEW!

Don't Torture a Duckling- Or fear the reaper. Or sleep in the subway. Or stop believin', etc.

Double Dynamite- Paging Hacken-a-puss... NEW!

Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine- Strives for ginchy, but...

Eaten Alive- Off off off Broadway? Or just off off off?

Étoile- Are all ballet schools in Europe dangerous?

Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain- You can lead a porn star to the set, but you can't make her act.

Forbidden World- When I say knock-off, you say Corman!

Freddy Got Fingered- Puerile sadism masquerading as anti-authoritarianism.

Gothic- Literary twerplings get spooked.

Grave of the Vampire- Oh, Dad, poor Dad, you're a bloodsucking rapist and I'm feeling so sad.

Hellish Flesh- An exercycle in humus! I mean, exercise in horror! NEW!

The Hidden- This is not the sort the LA tourism board hoped to attract.
Hot Rods to Hell- Or as close as you're going. I don't want to be a burden.

Isn't She Great- I don't know about wings, but there's a fair amount of wind.

LazyTown- Kiddie TV fare that forgot to take its ritalin.

Miracle in Milan- And a cabbage shall lead them...

Monkey Hustle- Fun like bites of cotton candy and about as substantial.

Mr. Bungle, California- The Grouch tries rock journalism with one of his favorite albums.

National Lampoon's Dorm Daze- And they say our students can't keep up with Japan's.

One-Hour Photo- Taking an airbrush to life.

Phantom Lady- There are eight million hats in the naked city... NEW!

Pickup on South Street- Skip ain't red, but he loves his green.

Rancho Notorious- Hate! Murder! Revenge! Roulette!

Return of the Living Dead III- Love conquers eww.

Rififi- Don't say a word... NEW!

The Tomb- Beauty secrets of Ancient Egypt.

The 27th Day- Come for the sci-fi; stay for the schadenfreude.

Vampyros Lesbos- Witness three different kinds of sucking.

Welcome to Arrow Beach- Can we offer you a nosh?

Welcome to Spring Break- Two bad tastes that taste bad together.

A Woman Is a Woman- Is it me? It's everyone else, right? NEW!

The World of Henry Orient- Yes, private school makes you nuts, but that's why we love it.

Special Features

NEW FEATURE! Snack Bar- Reviews for the only slightly peckish. Bus your own table. (New capsules added 1/9/11)

Tee-Hee, I'm Naked!- T&A Films of the '70s, '80s and beyond!!! (Warning: juvenile content) NEW!: Sigi Rothemund's Love Bavarian Style

Buñuel in Brief** (amateur musings on the master surrealist) NEW! Capsule review of El Bruto (1953) added

Punk, Not Punk** (the music of SST Records)

Hopping Through Klimt** (a layman's thoughts on one of the 20th Century's greatest painters) NEW!

SNIVLEM- A short overview of sludgerock gods The Melvins

The Cosmic Unconsciousness** (a place for my stuff; updated regularly...or else!)

Tales from the Aberrant- clippings from the coolest newspaper never published: Battle of the Rent-Stabilized; Style, a Manicure and a Dimensional Shift; At Least His Inseam Was Intact; 'Goddess Sweat'; NEW! Two Left Fate

An Almost 100% Fact-Free Author's Bio**

* “Some believe it refers to the brass tacks used under fine upholstery, others that it is Cockney rhyming slang for ‘hard facts,’ and still others that it alludes to tacks hammered into a sales counter to indicate precise measuring points.” Special thanks to the highly useful xrefer.com for that utterly irrelevant piece of information.

** Part of The Museum of My Mind