Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies -- May 2010

Craig J. Clark Watches a Lot of Movies
May 2010

Saturday, May 1, 2010
A soul cannot be forced to join the Legions of Hell. Each one is given a choice.

Last week it was biker movies. This week TCM Underground showed a pair of films with satanic overtones. First up was 1965's Incubus, a film shot entirely in Esperanto, with a cast headed by William Shatner (who I imagine learned his lines phonetically). Verkita kay direktita de (that is to say, written and directed by) Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, the film is about beautiful young women who lure sinners to their deaths and offer them up to Satan, their dark master. One such lovely, Kia (Allyson Ames), decides to test her powers on a righteous soul for once and who does she try to corrupt but our man Shatner, playing a quiet, modest man named Marc who lives in a humble cottage with his sister Arndis (Ann Atmar). Ames's plan works so far as getting him to fall in love with her is concerned, but when he insists on doing things "the right way," which includes dragging her to church, that doesn't exactly go over like gangbusters.

Meanwhile, Atmar temporarily loses her eyesight after looking too long at a solar eclipse and desperately seeks Shatner out, calling out "Marco! Marco!" (which practically begs the response, "Polo! Polo!"). Having been spurned by Shatner, Ames seeks out her high priestess, Amael (Eloise Hardt), and together they summon the incubus we've been hearing so much about and who turns out, rather disappointingly, to be a pretty nondescript-looking guy dressed all in black (Milos Milos). His first victim is Atmar (whose only crime is being related to Shatner) and his second is Shatner's purity when he strikes Milos down in anger. Even so, Shatner insists on going to church to pray for repentance, and when Ames follows, having fallen in love with him (hey, that wasn't part of the plan), Milos turns into a goat and attacks her on the church's doorstep. This is less horrific than you might imagine, especially since most of the attacking is done by a stuffed goat head. You'd think the all-powerful Prince of Darkness could do better than that.

The Dark One has a little more on the ball in the second feature, 1971's The Brotherhood of Satan, which was co-written and produced by L.Q. Jones, who also stars as the sheriff of a small town that has been cut off from the rest of the world by a coven of Satanists. Somehow a family of three (Charles Bateman, Ahna Capri, Geri Reischl) manages to get in but then can't get out again, which is troubling because the children of the town are going missing and their families are methodically being slaughtered. No wonder the townspeople gang up on them when they first arrive, causing them to try to flee (unsuccessfully, of course).

The script, which Jones co-wrote with William Welch based on a story by Sean MacGregor, is all over the place, and in between seemingly random scenes of bloodshed, it introduces a benevolent doctor (Strother Martin) who "picked a hell of a place to retire," a priest (Charles Robinson) who desperately tries to convince the others that something supernatural is afoot, and the town's dim-witted deputy (Alvy Moore, who also produced with Jones) who doesn't help Robinson's case when he chimes in about little green men. Then, of course, there are the aging Satanists (who reminded me of the group of old people waiting to enter the vessel in Being John Malkovich) who are attended by a cadre of hooded men in black robes. Director Bernard McEveety brings some style to these scenes, but the action surrounding them is disappointingly slack. Even the ending, which is meant to be foreboding, just kind of lies there. I don't know what else I can say about it.

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.

Like many film cultists, I know exactly how many times I've seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The first time was just after it came out on video when a group of high school friends rented it to see what the fuss was about. Unsurprisingly, it was somewhat underwhelming under those circumstances, but I gave the film another shot when it was shown at an outdoor screening on campus during my sophomore year of college. That was enhanced by the presence of a number of Rocky Horror veterans who knew what to shout and throw and when to do it and were kind enough to educate us. And soon after that the Kevins hosted a screening in their dorm room, during which participation was encouraged. By that point I felt I was ready for a full-blown theater experience and one or two Halloweens later I got it along with my good friend Tony and some of his friends. (My favorite riff that I heard for the first time that night: "The flowers are still standing!") That was many years ago, though, and until tonight it was the last time I gave myself over to absolute pleasure.

This is, of course, not to say that I've forsaken Rocky entirely. In fact, I've read a great deal about it in various cult and midnight movie books, and learned all about its history from Rocky Horror: From Concept to Cult, which was published in 2002. And every Halloween I can count on hearing "The Time Warp" on the radio at least once. I just haven't felt the need to pick up the DVD no matter how many times I've seen it on sale at Borders or elsewhere. Tonight, though, I gave one of my library's copies spin number five in preparation for the next installment of "Craig and Joe Watch Movies You've Actually Heard Of," which will be on Rocky Horror's much-maligned sequel Shock Treatment. That's a film I'm looking forward to revisiting since my first exposure (during a visit with Anthony and family) was far from ideal. But what of Rocky Horror itself? Does it hold up as a film without all the attendant rice- and toast- and toilet paper-tossing? And in a post-MST3K world, is it really novel to shout rude things at a bad movie?

I'll answer the last question first. No, it is not novel, but it is still fun to do, as is evidenced by the fact that I continue to give Atomic Age Cinema five dollars of my hard-earned money each week. (Tonight's crap du jour is 1981's The Burning, a derivative slasher flick which was co-written by Bob Weinstein and produced by Harvey Weinstein for their fledgling distribution company Miramax Films.) As for whether the film holds up, I'd say it does so mostly thanks to the performances, with Tim Curry a clear stand-out as the gender-bending Dr. Frank-N-Furter. (This is not to knock the rest of the cast, but this is Curry's show from start to finish.) And I would be remiss if I didn't mention Richard O'Brien's songs, which have been a major part of the show's appeal from day one. Thirty-five years later, there are still people lining up every weekend to do the Time Warp again and again.

Sunday, May 2, 2010
Another rocky marriage is headed for intensive care.

When the time came to make a sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1981, the flesh was willing (well, most of it, anyway), but the spirit was decidedly more noncommittal. The left-field cult success of Rocky Horror was always going to be a touch act to follow, but Shock Treatment's biggest stumbling block was its failure to secure a star and main character as electrifying as Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Also, despite the best efforts of songwriter Richard O'Brien, who again co-wrote the screenplay with director Jim Sharman, and music arranger Richard Hartley, with a couple notable exceptions the songs in Shock Treatment simply don't measure up to what they had written for Rocky Horror. The main thing holding it back, though, is the fact that it was specifically engineered to be a midnight movie and audiences can generally tell when something has the whiff of artificiality to it.

Then again, artificiality is the name of the game in Shock Treatment, which turns the entire population of Denton -- "The Home of Happiness!" -- into the captive studio audience of a series of interlocking television programs on DTV, with the whole shebang sponsored by fast food king Farley Flavors (Cliff De Young), who covets newlywed Janet Majors (Jessica Harper, taking over for Susan Sarandon), whose marriage to Brad (De Young again, taking over for Barry Bostwick) is apparently already on the rocks. Rocky Horror alumni litter the supporting cast, with Jeremy Newson reprising the role of Ralph Hapschatt, now a smarmy TV personality, O'Brien re-teaming with Patricia Quinn as another incestuous brother/sister act (and the proprietors of Dentonvale, the local mental hospital), Nell Campbell (a.k.a. Little Nell) as their nurse, and Charles Gray as Judge Wright, whose early appearance on a show called Denton Dossier is a clear reference to The Denton Affair, the book his Criminologist reads from in Rocky Horror. Newcomers to the fold include Barry Humphries as Bert Schnick, host of the rigged game show Marriage Maze, Ruby Wax as Ralph's bitter half Betty Hapschatt, host of Denton Dossier, and Rik Mayall as O'Brien and Quinn's internist, Rest Home Ricky.

In a way, it's difficult to judge Shock Treatment on its own terms since it's constantly making sly allusions to its forebear. Whether it's the crack about Brad and Janet's "rocky marriage" or the presence of Grant Wood's American Gothic in a dressing room or Frank-N-Furter's throne, which has been repainted red, there are reminders of Rocky Horror around nearly every corner. Then there is the ribald dialogue, which is delivered in such a way as to intentionally leave gaps for the audience to fill. In his first scene, Gray is asked, "Are you perhaps one of those amongst us who feel this emotive form of presentation is overly manipulative?" That question could have just as easily been asked of the audience, which evidently didn't like being manipulated and declined to submit to a weekly dose of Shock Treatment.

The nights I've dreamt of lying here with you.

The first Pedro Almodóvar film that I ever heard of was 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which is known more for its controversial subject matter than it is for its excellent performances and perceptive writing and direction. The first of six films he made in the '90s, Tie Me Up! stars Victoria Abril as a former porn actress and ex-heroin junkie making her first legit film -- a b-horror movie called Midnight Phantom -- who is stalked by recently released mental patient Antonio Banderas, who resorts to taking her prisoner in her own apartment so she can get to know him and fall for him the way he loves her. As one would expect the situation is fraught with peril and there are many close calls -- composer Ennio Morricone aptly scores much of the action like a horror film -- but eventually kidnapper and kidnappee reach an understanding that's not so easy to quantify.

"It's more a love story than a horror story," says Midnight Phantom's editor, inadvertently voicing how its director (Francisco Rabal), who is confined to a wheelchair after a debilitating stroke, feels about his leading lady. In fact, in his own way he's as obsessed with Abril as Banderas is, but Rabal has to make do with capturing her on film, even if it's an incredibly schlocky one. (To drive the point home, and give a clue as to the fate of her missing star, he has a poster for Invasion of the Body Snatchers in his editing room.) The other major character is Abril's sister (Loles Léon), who is the one to finally come to her rescue, although by that time she's not sure whether she wants to be rescued. "How can you love someone who ties you up?" Abril asks quite sensibly. "Do you think that's normal?" Maybe it isn't, but whoever said love makes people act normal?

Monday, May 3, 2010
I don't know what to make of this. Minotaur masks, carnival costumes... Is it always like this?

It hasn't been an easy road for film director Alex Cox in the years since he made his debut with 1984's Repo Man. Its cult success led to higher-profile projects like Sid & Nancy in 1986, and Straight to Hell and Walker in 1987, but when the latter underperformed at the box office he found himself unable to secure financing from any major studios. Eventually he found alternate sources of funding and shot a pair of films in Mexico in the early '90s, the second of which -- an adaptation of the Jorge Luis Borges story Death and the Compass -- was made for the BBC in 1992. Cox later expanded the 50-minute film to feature length in 1996, and that is the version Anchor Bay released to DVD.

Told in flashback by the former commissioner of city detectives (Miguel Sandoval), who has definitely seen better days, Death and the Compass unravels the story of mercurial detective Erik Lönnrot (Peter Boyle), who always takes things too personally, and a baffling series of murders that seems to point to a impenetrable conspiracy. Sandoval believes the clues point to criminal mastermind Red Scharlach, who hides behind a strange costume and mask (as do most of the city's criminals, it seems), but Boyle turns to a freelance journalist (Christopher Eccleston) who points his investigation in a more mystical direction. And, in a nod to the story's progenitor, Cox himself appears (in one of the scenes added during the re-shoot) as Commander Borges, a blind sharpshooter who never gets to show off his skills.

If nothing else, Death and the Compass is a colorful film, with bold costumes (a bright blue suit for Boyle, bright yellow for Sandoval, and, of course, red for Red Scharlach) and labyrinthine sets that mirror the case Boyle is embroiled in. It's also unafraid to juxtapose anachronistic vehicles and props (making one wonder whether it's supposed to take place in the '40s or the '90s) and was obviously shot from the hip. (Some viewers may be put off by Cox's run-and-gun style, but it definitely keeps things moving.) No matter what one thinks of the final product, at the very least one has to respect Cox for finishing it.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010
You think it's dark when you turn out the lights? Well, down there it's pitch black.

For his follow-up to Dog Soldiers, Neil Marshall went from the werewolf-infested woods of Scotland to the caves of Appalachia, where he set his 2005 sophomore effort The Descent. It's a grim, unrelenting film that pits its six protagonists (all women -- a rarity in the horror field) against an almost preternaturally stealthy foe and watches as they either rise to the occasion or fall victim to the subhuman creatures that infest the cave they've decided to do a little spelunking in. Of course, even before the beasts rear their ugly heads, we know the women are in trouble after a rockfall makes it impossible for them to go back the way they came in. And since the organizer of the trip wasn't truthful about which cave they were going to be exploring (turns out the one they're in is completely uncharted), that puts them in a difficult spot even without having to contend with hungry monsters.

Apart from Marshall's solid writing and direction, The Descent's greatest asset is its game cast headed up by Shauna Macdonald as a woman struggling to overcome a personal tragedy and Natalie Mendoza as the danger-seeker who unknowingly puts herself and her friends in harm's way. The other characters aren't quite as well-drawn, but the actresses playing them (Alex Reid, Saskia Mulder, MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone) definitely rise to the occasion, whether they're looking for a way out of their predicament or trying to figure out just what they're up against and how they can fight back. For his part, Marshall keeps things from getting too monotonous by alternating between different types of illumination: flashlights and head-lamps, red flares, fluorescent lights, a mini-cam's night vision and, of course, fire. He also doesn't let us get a good look at his creepy crawlies until well into the picture, which is standard operating procedure, but this is one creature feature where they retain their menace even after we've seen them in all their grotesque glory. How often can you say that?

Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Time was when a corpse didn't do much, just laid there. Not so anymore.

Here's a bit of unfinished business left over from HorrorHound Weekend. As the group I was with was heading out for dinner on Saturday night, the DVD of John Pata's 2007 short Better Off Undead was pressed into my hands (probably by John himself) and I said I would review it when I got home. Well, that was a month and a half ago, so it's about time I lived up to my promise. Produced, written and directed by Pata, who also did the special effects and edited the film with director of photography Colin Crowley (when you're making a low-budget film, you're bound to wear a lot of hats), Better Off Undead follows a trio of slackers -- pop culture junkies all -- who are forced to confront the zombie menace in their small Wisconsin town. It's hardly the most original idea out there, but Pata and his cast give it their all and at 29 minutes it doesn't have time to wear out its welcome.

Heading up the cast is Drew Schuldt as horror fan Marcus, whose main objective appears to be drinking himself into a stupor and waiting for someone else to come along and take care of the problem. He's also prone to getting into nerd arguments with his one friend Chris (Dave DeVries, who also did the make-up on the film), who lives above a comic book shop, and picking on his other friend Evan (Jordan Brown), who takes a lot of ribbing for his love of Xena: Warrior Princess. As it turns out, none of them are particularly well-suited to battling the living dead, but they're good at cracking jokes between zombie attacks. (If you ever wondered what it would be like if Kevin Smith ever made a zombie movie, this is a pretty good approximation.) I'd say the film as a whole is summed up pretty well by Schuldt's moment of self-realization after he makes his first kill. "Listen, man," he tells the others. "I'm not saying that what just happened wasn't pretty cool, but I just bashed someone's head in. It's kinda fucked up, even if it was a zombie."

For my feature presentation I chose the 2008 horror comedy I Sell the Dead, which was written, directed and edited by Glenn McQuaid. (See what I mean about hats?) The film stars erstwhile Hobbit Dominic Monaghan as a Victorian-era grave robber due to be executed for his crimes against nature who is given a brief reprieve so he can tell his story to inquisitive Irish priest Ron Perlman. Monaghan is eager to have his say since he's quite proud of his far-from-noble profession, as well as his long association with his mentor (Larry Fessenden), but Perlman isn't really interested until he gets to how they graduated from digging up corpses for a blackmailing anatomist (genre favorite Angus Scrimm) to trafficking in the undead and their run-ins with a rival gang led by the notorious Cornelius Murphy (John Speredakos).

The film walks the thin line between horror and comedy, never tipping too far in one direction or the other, and should delight anyone with a taste for the macabre. It also manages the feat of making its zombies both comical and frightening at the same time. I guess the best scene that illustrates this is the one where one of the zombies is shown something so horrifying that it scares even him. (Naturally, McQuaid declines to show us what it is. All things considered, that's probably for the best.)

Thursday, May 6, 2010
Those first interactions between you and your baby are so powerful.

With Mother's Day just around the corner, the time seemed ripe to watch another film that Baron Mardi of Atomic Age Cinema has entrusted me with. (I didn't mention it at the time, but he was also responsible for bringing Death and the Compass to my attention.) So, hard on the heels on Better Off Undead and I Sell the Dead comes Grace, a film about a newborn with very special -- and disturbing -- dietary needs. Written and directed by Paul Solet, the 2009 film stars Jordan Ladd as a mother-to-be whose vegetarianism and desire to be seen by a midwife doesn't sit well with her busybody of a mother-in-law (Gabrielle Rose). As it turns out, the midwife she has in mind (Samantha Ferris) is her former women's studies teacher and a firm believer in holistic obstetrics (whatever that means). It's also strongly intimated that they were once more than just teacher and student.

At any rate, after a close call where Ladd's labor is nearly induced at a hospital (largely at Rose's insistence), she and her husband (Stephen Park) get into a car accident that claims both his life and that of their unborn child, but she insists on carrying the baby to term anyway. This leads to a grotesque travesty of a birthing scene at Ferris's facility where Ladd gives birth to a stillborn child, but then something astonishing happens: she asks to hold the baby and somehow wills it back to life. Initially overjoyed by this development, Ladd soon finds out that her pride and joy has a way of attracting flies as well as an overpowering stench that even soap can't wash off. Oh, yes. And it also craves blood. I'm pretty sure that's something Dr. Spock never covered.

Meanwhile, Rose alternates between brooding over the loss of her son and treating her hapless husband (Serge Houde) like a child. She also decides that it's her duty to rescue her granddaughter from her daughter-in-law, and enlists the help of a well-respected doctor (Malcolm Stewart) to declare Ladd an unfit mother. Frankly, I don't know which is more disturbing: the lengths to which Ladd goes to try to feed her baby or the ways Rose expresses her own maternal instincts. (I knew Rose was a fearless actress from her work with Atom Egoyan, but the scene where she dusts off her old breast pump confirms this.) Can you say custody battle? I knew you could.

Saturday, May 8, 2010
There are lessons in here. I'm not qualified to explain them.

Saw a couple documentaries while I was in L.A. over the weekend. The first was at the Egyptian on Hollywood Boulevard, which was showing Funny Girl in its main auditorium at the same time It Came from Kuchar, a 2009 doc about underground twin filmmakers George and Mike Kuchar, was being screened in the much more humble Spielberg Theatre. The disparity between the two films couldn't be more pronounced, especially since the Kuchars frequently used their super low-budget extravaganzas (which often starred friends and family members, none of whom could act worth a damn) to parody Hollywood conventions. That's probably why they were such a hit in the underground film scene, screening their homemade epics alongside the likes of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol. The Kuchars never had any illusions that they were creating high art, they just had stories they wanted to tell and film was the medium they chose to tell them in.

It Came from Kuchar tells their story of the Kuchars from the time they were given their first 8mm camera in the mid-'50s to the present day, when they continue to crank out shorts on the cheap thanks to the medium of video. At first the brothers collaborated on all their films, which featured risque titles like The Naked And The Nude (1957) and Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof (1961), but from the mid-'60s on they chose to work independently, although George did appear in Mike's seminal Sins Of The Fleshapoids, which he directed in 1965. Other key films from this period (many of which are excerpted in the documentary) include Mike's The Secret Of Wendel Samson (1966), George's Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), Mike's The Craven Sluck (1967) and George's The Devil's Cleavage (1973). As you might expect, sometimes the titles alone were enough to elicit laughter from the audience. So, too, were the interviews with the Kuchars and famous admirers like John Waters, Wayne Wang, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin and Buck Henry, who was present at the screening along with director Jennifer M. Kroot, a former student of George's at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has taught since the early '70s. In fact, some of the most illuminating scenes were the ones where we get to watch George in action during the making of his annual film with his students. His "anything goes" approach to filmmaking is an inspiration to behold.

As a bonus, in addition to a Q & A with Henry and Kroot, Saturday's screening was augmented by a program of recent works by both brothers, including Mike's Animal, Dumped! and Obsession (all 2009), and George's Centennial (2007), which is one of his weather diaries, and Hairy Horror (2009), which is about a Bigfoot sighting. As it's unlikely I'll get to see these shorts anywhere else, I was happy for the opportunity, even if I thought some of them (Animal, in particular) went on quite a bit longer than they needed to.

Sunday, May 9, 2010
This is a story about human failure.

Documentary number two was Casino Jack and the United States of Money, which is the latest film from Alex Gibney, who previously made Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the Academy Award-winning Taxi to the Dark Side and the Academy Award-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, so he's clearly no stranger to controversial subject matter. In this case, Gibney took at his subject the rise and fall of Washington lobbyist extraordinaire Jack Abramoff, whose life also inspired a docudrama (also called Casino Jack, confusingly enough) due out this fall and starring Kevin Spacey. I'll be interested to see that when it comes out, but I can't imagine how it could hope to improve on Gibney's freewheeling take on the material.

Starting with his tenure as chairman of the College Republican National Committee (which became much more radical under his leadership), the film traces his involvement in various conservative organizations, as well as his writing and production work on the Dolph Lundgren vehicle Red Scorpion, before finding his calling -- so to speak -- as a lobbyist with ties to Newt Gingrich, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. From there, you can take your pick of the scandals he's been at the center of, from the sweatshops of the Northern Mariana Islands that he worked to keep open to the millions he and his cronies bilked out of Native American tribes, from bribing congressmen and other government officials to his fraudulent attempt to buy a fleet of casino boats. And that's just scratching the surface. To anyone who's followed Abramoff's career some of what Gibney uncovers may be old news, but there's nothing quite like having it all laid out in one place.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Feast your eyes, glut your soul, on my accursed ugliness!

Well, my plan back in April had been to follow The Hunchback of Notre Dame with the silent version of The Phantom of the Opera a week or so later, but whoever had my library's copy of the latter apparently decided they wanted to hold onto it, so I was forced to improvise to fulfill my Kryptic Army mission. Now, almost exactly a month later, The Phantom has finally made it into my hands and I have finally gotten it under my belt. Huzzah.

Made in 1925, the film was directed by Rupert Julian and stars Lon Chaney as the Phantom, who doesn't actually appear until 30 minutes into the story, yielding plenty of screen time to his co-stars (Mary Philbin as Christine, the soprano the Phantom watches from the shadows, and Norman Kerry as her fiancé Raoul) as well as some comic business about the Paris Opera House's new owners and the frightened stage hands and ballet dancers who think the Phantom is lurking about backstage. And when Chaney finally does show up, another 15 minutes goes by before he's unmasked, which means fully half of his performance is either done in silhouette or from behind a mask, so the fact that he does make such a strong impression is a testament to his skills as an actor and a makeup artist.

Then again, how could he not make an impression with that iconic unmasking scene? For my money, though, it's topped by the masked ball, which was shot in two-color Technicolor, an absolute necessity for the Phantom's striking appearance as the Red Death. No wonder Andrew Lloyd Webber seized upon that image when he brought his version of Gaston Leroux's novel to the stage 60 years later. No matter hard he tried, though, his Phantom would never be as unnerving as Chaney's.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Why must I always fail her when she needs me most?

I have decided to do some housecleaning over the next couple of weeks, starting with 1935's Magnificent Obsession, which TCM premiered last month. Remade in the '50s by Douglas Sirk, this version was directed by John M. Stahl, who also made the original version of Imitation of Life and the great Technicolor noir Leave Her to Heaven. It stars Irene Dunne as an altruistic doctor's widow who comes to have an unusual relationship with the spoiled rich kid (Robert Taylor) who, in a roundabout fashion, took her husband away from her. Upon learning this, the irresponsible Taylor reaches his lowest ebb when he declares that he knows he's "not worth anything, let alone a great man's life," but soon he turns over a new leaf, determined to provide for Dunne in her hour of need. That hour comes sooner than he might have expected when she is struck down by a car and loses her sight -- another accident for which he feels partially to blame. From that point on, he devotes himself to the study of brain surgery so he can learn how to perform the delicate operation that will restore her sight.

It all sounds pretty corny, I know. In fact, the plot description alone is what has kept me from seeing the Sirk version all these years, but Stahl and his cast put the material across with such conviction that you can't help but get swept up in the melodrama. Even Charles Butterworth's comic performance as the bumbling suitor of Dunne's sister (Betty Furness) never crosses the line into outright foolery. I will be curious to see how Sirk handles that aspect of the story.

Thursday, May 13, 2010
You've suffered enough. You can be king or you can be free. It's for you to decide.

More housecleaning: 1939's The Man in the Iron Mask, which TCM aired back in February. One of the last major films directed by James Whale, it was the first sound version of the Alexandre Dumas story, a sequel of sorts to The Three Musketeers, and stars Louis Hayward in the dual roles of the odious King Louis XIV and his twin brother Philippe, who is imprisoned in the Bastille -- and in the titular contraption -- when Louis feels threatened by him. It takes some time for that to come to pass, though. First there are affairs of state to attend to, including the wooing of Spanish princess Joan Bennett, who has been promised in marriage to King Louis and can't figure out why he runs hot and cold with her. That's because, foreshadowing the behavior of the Mantle twins in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, Louis is in the habit of brushing her off and Philippe, to put it bluntly, is not. No wonder she quickly falls for the ersatz king.

The heroic d'Artagnan (Warren William, later to play Dr. Lloyd in The Wolf Man) and his Musketeer pals (whose ranks include Alan Hale as Porthos) also figure into the plot, but for the most part they're window-dressing, giving over much of the political maneuvering to rival court advisers Joseph Schildkraut (as the villainous Fouquet) and Walter Kingsford (as the upright Colbert). The four of them are definitely on hand, though, when Philippe turns the tables on his insufferable sibling. This is also the last James Whale film in which Dwight Frye has a cameo (as Fouquet's valet) and it gave Peter Cushing his first minor screen role and it gave Peter Cushing his first minor screen role as well as the job of doubling for Hayward in the shots with both twins that didn't use trick photography. Speaking of which, this film features some of shoddiest rear-screen projection work I've ever seen in a major Hollywood film. One can only imagine that Whale's heart wasn't really in it.

Friday, May 14, 2010
Everything is achievable through technology.

I realize I'm a week late to the party, but I have now seen Iron Man 2 and am prepared to pass judgment on it. And in my humble opinion, it was a good movie, not a great one. (Then again, I wasn't expecting greatness.) I'll leave it to the fanboys to debate whether it measured up to the first Iron Man (which was an exceedingly pleasant surprise when it appeared out of the blue two summers ago) or how it compares to The Dark Knight or Kick-Ass or whatever it is they want to compare it to. All I know is I paid my $9.75 and I had a good time. Oh, and Robert Downey Jr. is one of the most compulsively entertaining people on the planet. I defy anyone to convince me otherwise.

Downey aside, the film chugs along like a well-oiled machine under the direction of Jon Favreau, working from a screenplay by Justin Theroux which injects just the right amount (and the right kind) of humor in between the action sequences. He's also aided by returning director of photography Matthew Libatique, who's best known to me for his work with Darren Aronofsky and gives all the glossy surfaces a terrific look. On the acting front, most of the major (as well as some of the minor) players from the first film return (the only substitution being Don Cheadle for Terrence Howard as Lt. Col. James Rhodes, who eventually puts on Tony Stark's War Machine suit), with Mickey Rourke taking on the role of the lead villain with a lot of gusto (and an occasionally impenetrable Russian accent) and Sam Rockwell as Stark's ideological nemesis, a slimy defense contractor always looking for a way to one-up him. And while he's not strictly a villain, Garry Shandling's showboating senator doesn't exactly endear himself to Stark by demanding the turnover of what he calls "the Iron Man weapon." That just leaves Scarlett Johansson as Stark's new personal assistant, who quickly turns the boss's head (and stokes love interest Gwyneth Paltrow's jealousy) and a beefed-up role for Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, who had the briefest of cameos at the end of the first film.

Speaking of which, it bemused me to see most of the audience getting up and leaving when the closing credits started to roll. I guess they didn't know about the post-credits scene, which seems odd considering they're de rigueur for these Marvel adaptations. This one, incidentally, is a teaser for next year's Thor, which has Kenneth Branagh at the helm. I have to admit, I'll be curious to see how that turns out.

Saturday, May 15, 2010
A lot of people down there would like to know why you did this.

Ever since HorrorHound Weekend, when I bought a book entitled Mind Warp! The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman's New World Pictures, I've been meaning to see more films that the company produced and distributed under his watch. One that I've actually had my eye on for some time was 1976's God Told Me To, which was written, produced and directed by Larry Cohen. The film stars Tony Lo Bianco (of The Honeymoon Killers fame) as a New York police detective baffled by a series of random, seemingly unmotivated killings. The only thing connecting them is that when the perpetrator of each is asked why they did it, they reply, "God told me to." This bothers Lo Bianco, a practicing Catholic who's far from a plaster saint since he's estranged from his wife (Sandy Dennis) and living with a substitute teacher (Deborah Raffin), leading him to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to get to the bottom of things. He has no way of knowing just how far above and beyond he'll have to go, though.

Like a lot of his work from this period, Cohen shot on location in New York City, giving the film a lived-in feel that you would have to spend a fortune to replicate in a studio. He also made good use of real streets teeming with people who, in some cases, may or may not have known they were extras in a movie. One such sequence is the opening where a sniper has climbed up onto a roof and started shooting random passersby (echoing a similar scene in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, made two years earlier). Then there's the incident at the St. Patrick's Day parade, with Andy Kaufman making his film debut as a uniformed cop. The film also features the always-welcome Sylvia Sidney as an old woman in a rest home who unknowingly holds the key to Lo Bianco's investigation. Suffice it to say, before it's all over he finds cause to doubt some of his long-held beliefs.

If you want my opinion, we're in for a nightmare.

Last weekend TCM Underground ran Zaat again and for a backup feature it showed 1977's Tentacles, a blatant Jaws ripoff that saw the light of day thanks to AIP, beating New World's Piranha to the punch by a whole year. Of course, getting there first (or second if you really want to be pedantic about it) is no great achievement when the results are this dull and lifeless. Directed by "Oliver Hellman," a transparent pseudonym for producer Ovidio G. Assonitis, Tentacles was an Italian-American co-production headed up by an all-star cast including John Huston (as a big shot reporter), Shelley Winters (as his sister), Bo Hopkins (as a marine biologist, because every Jaws ripoff has to have a marine biologist), Claude Akins (as the sheriff, because every Jaws ripoff has to have a sheriff) and Henry Fonda (who is credited with making a "special appearance," which mostly involves looking pained while taking a phone call from Huston and then dressing down his subordinate).

The plot of the film involves an underwater tunnel construction project that has disturbed a giant octopus and caused it to start attacking people (including a baby that's not even in the water) and stripping the flesh off their bodies (which is never shown because it's rated PG). This may seem a little far-fetched, but at one point the screenwriters have Huston say, "I've read that the suckers on the tentacle are like the claws of a tiger," which he manages to do without once breaking up. That's far from the only howler, of course. Later on, when Hopkins has decided to go toe-to-tentacle with the vile creature because it has killed his vapid wife, his assistant counsels against waiting outside its lair because, he says, "All octopi, large or small, have a sense of foresight. He won't come back." Oh, really? They teach you that at marine biology school? Next time I meet an octopus, large or small, I'll try to get some winning lottery numbers out of it.

Anyway, like the good Jaws ripoff it is, Tentacles features an extended sequence where young children are put in harm's way, in this case during a yacht race that claims the life of Winters's son's friend. He's not the only person we barely get to know before they become octopus food, though. There are several scenes where we're introduced to characters who have a tangential relationship at best to the stars just so they can get suckered to death. Of course, I find it kind of disturbing that, thanks to my knowledge of a certain type of anime, when I think "tentacles," the next thing that comes to mind is "rape." Luckily, nothing of the sort happens in this film -- this isn't Humanoids from the Deep, after all -- but it was at the back of my mind whenever the giant octopus wrapped its appendages around some scantily clad lovely.

In the end, it's up to Hopkins and his killer whales to eradicate the giant eight-armed menace, and the scene where the whales -- which are obviously rod puppets -- rip the beastie to pieces is quite a hoot. Or rather it would be if not for my sneaking suspicion that the filmmakers didn't actually go to the trouble of making a fake octopus for the puppets to mangle and what we're in fact watching is the death throes of a live animal. That's the kind of thing that takes all the fun out of seeing something rent asunder.

It's no use, there's nothing we can do. Even our greatest experts are baffled.

And so, I go from an Italian Jaws ripoff to an Italian Star Wars ripoff. And once again it's been about a month since my last "Chilling Classic," which makes me worry that I'll be watching these movies for the rest of my life. (I swear, that is not my intention.) Today I chose 1978's War of the Robots, the middle film in director Alfonso Brescia's quintet of cheap space epics. Coming after 1977's Battle of the Stars and Cosmos: War of the Planets and before 1979's Star Odyssey (which I've seen courtesy of the Cherry Hill Experiment) and 1980's Beast in Space (the inevitable soft-core porno of the bunch), War of the Robots is notable for actually having a recognizable star in Antonio Sabato, which is a lot more than the others can say. Not that Sabato's presence in the lead prevents this from being a total piece of shit. It just makes it, as George Weiss would put it, "shit with a star."

As such, I don't intend to spend a whole lot of time running it down. The basic plot, as laid out by Brescia (hiding behind the pseudonym Al Bradly) and Aldo Crudo (credited as Alan Rawton), is about a professor (Jacques Herlin) working on the secret of life and his lab assistant Lois (Malisa Longo, credited as Melissa Long), who are kidnapped by a platoon of golden Edgar Winters. To get them back, Sabato (who has a thing for Lois) and his crew (which includes Yanti Somer as Julie, who has a hopeless crush on Sabato and is constantly ribbed about it by one of her co-workers) are dispatched and almost immediately run into trouble and have to touch down on an asteroid (where they have to put on radiation spacesuits but don't bother with helmets). There they have a run-in with some the humanoid aliens led by a bald guy in a cape with no shirt named Kuba (Aldo Canti, credited as Nick Jordan). There's a kerfuffle, a lot of the golden Edgar Winters are shot dead and Kuba agrees to help Sabato and company free the professor and Lois.

Ah, but what if the professor and Lois don't actually want to be saved? Well, that would pose something of a problem since the professor is needed back on Earth to shut down a nuclear reactor he left running and which is due to blow in a matter of days. (Oops.) There's a passing reference to how the fallout from such a catastrophe could be worse than "the Planet Wars," but for the most part we're stuck with Team Sabato as they shoot more Edgar Winters, fight with low-rent lightsabers, recite cheesy dialogue (my favorite example: "I don't think they like us. Let's get away from here.") and perform some of the shittiest fight choreography in the known universe. And the whole shebang ends with one of the sorriest space battles ever committed to film, along with the resolution of the love triangle between Lois, Julie and Sabato. It's just like the end of Star Wars, if Han Solo blew Darth Vader to smithereens so he and Luke could go off and live happily ever after, and Darth Vader was also the equivalent of Princess Leia. That makes total sense, right?

P.S. - I have absolutely no idea what makes this a "Chilling Classic." Maybe it's chilling that I spent 99 minutes of my life watching it?

Sunday, May 16, 2010
Whoever built her sure forgot something.

I hate it when curiosity gets the better of me. Last week IFC aired the little-loved 1980 sci-fi spoof Galaxina, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to tape it and then play it back at my leisure. I also figured it could be no worse than The War of the Robots, but unfortunately it's no better, either, despite the fact that it had more of a budget and more than one recognizable face in the cast. Of course, if Galaxina is known at all today it's as the screen debut of 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten as the title character, a role that didn't require much from her in the way of acting since she's an android who doesn't speak at all in the first half of the film. And when she does learn how to speak in the second half, so she can express her love for space jockey Stephen Macht (as the improbably named Sgt. Thor), she's still basically there so she can be ogled by the camera (and the crew).

Written and directed by William Sachs, who also made the MST3K favorite The Incredible Melting Man, the film announces its intentions right off the bat with a Star Wars-style rolling caption and a credits sequence that fetishizes its hardware. It then immediately sets the tone with a rambling log entry by Avery Schreiber (as Captain Cornelius Butt -- you're laughing already, aren't you?) and footage of an alien opera singer followed by the announcement, "That was the United Galactic Network's special program, Live from Uranus." From there it has nowhere to go but down, especially since Schreiber's character is the king of the lame-ass one-liners and his ship, the Space Police Cruiser Infinity, is essentially on traffic duty. That changes when they're sent on a top secret mission to retrieve a rare mineral called the Blue Star, which gets an annoying musical sting every time it's mentioned. (And if you think it's mildly funny the first time the actors look around trying to discover the source of the music, you'll be on the floor begging for mercy by the time the bit gets up into the double digits.)

Before that happens, though, we're introduced to the rest of the crew, including naïve private James David Hinton and the ship's two mechanics: a winged gargoyle-type creature played by Lionel Mark Smith (later to be a regular in the films of David Mamet and Stuart Gordon) and inscrutable Chinese workman Tad Horino, who's given to aphorisms like "He who promises too much too soon accomplishes too little too late" (and whose other credits include The Kentucky Fried Movie, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey -- in which he actually played Confucius -- and Mulholland Drive). There's also a rock-eating alien that they keep prisoner and an actual Alien-type alien that makes its first appearance when the crew sits down for a meal (by candlelight, of course, because there's no reason to conserve oxygen when you're in space). Star Wars gets further ribbing when the crew visits an intergalactic whorehouse, which qualifies as Galaxina's cantina scene along with a later sequence set in a saloon that caters to human-eating aliens. And the sound effects are liberally borrowed from sci-fi movies and TV series like War of the Worlds and Star Trek.

Galaxina is not content merely to poke fun at science fiction epics, though, since it also takes on westerns when the Infinity reaches its destination, a former penal colony where the aliens make their home in a wild west set (complete with horses and a street made just for showdowns at high noon) and the humans are descendants of motorcycle gangs who worship a Harley Davidson. The daylight scenes feature a severely washed-out look courtesy of director of photography Dean Cundey (best known for his work with John Carpenter and Robert Zemeckis) which is at odds with the rest of the film, but at least it's something different. And the climax of the film features the villain, a robotic creature named Ordric from Mordric, being distracted by First Spaceship on Venus (another piece of MST3K fodder) on TV while the ship's resident alien (who grows up a lot during the course of the film, but not to the size of the one in Alien) sneaks up on him. Anything to put us out of our misery.

It wouldn't be the first time in history a monster was mistaken for a god.

While watching God Told Me To yesterday I was reminded that writer/director Larry Cohen had reused some of the shots of people panicking in the streets when he made his monster movie Q in 1982. And since that's the only film of his that I own (having gotten a promo of the Blue Underground release when I worked at Tower Records), I decided to give it another look this afternoon. Q, whose title is frequently expanded to Q: The Winged Serpent, is about the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl flying around New York City snatching people off of rooftops and chowing down on them. Its first victim, though, is a window washer who merely has his head bitten off, which puzzles police detectives David Carradine and Richard Roundtree. (Later on, when Carradine is having a drink at a bar, the bartender asks, "Hey, did you ever find that guy's head yet?" His response: "Oh, it'll turn up.") Meanwhile, the city is also being plagued by a series of ritual sacrifices (one man flayed, another whose heart is removed), which Carradine tries to link up with the winged serpent sightings to little avail.

Concurrently, we are privy to the comings and goings of small-time hood Michael Moriarty, a wheel man who gets involved in a diamond heist that goes south and, while hiding out from the cops and the mob, finds Quetzalcoatl's nest in the dome atop the Chrysler Building. Seeking a big payday, Moriarty offers to show the authorities where the nest is, but only if he can get a Nixon-like pardon for all his offenses, past and present, plus a cool million. His long-suffering girlfriend (Candy Clark) tries to get him to do the right thing, reward or no reward, but Moriarty simply can't pass up the opportunity to feel like a big man for once in his life. In all, a good old-fashioned monster movie with some great stop-motion effects work on the flying beast. I know it's a cliché, but they don't make 'em like this anymore.

Remember, no matter where you go, there you are.

I've loved The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension ever since the first time I saw it, way back in the mid-'80s. The kind of film for which the adjective "overstuffed" was invented, it's a wild science fiction adventure that hits the ground running and never lets up, dragging the viewer headlong through a series of bewildering events with characters who are never properly introduced, figuring that those who want to will try to keep up and anyone else will fall by the wayside. No wonder it didn't catch on with a mass audience and seemed predestined for cult status from the moment it was greenlit. Accordingly, it was the only film I considered for "Cult on Arrival" month for the bimonthly column I write over at Unloosen with Joe Blevins. (And if you haven't read our article on Shock Treatment yet, please do so now.)

Directed by W.D. Richter (who previously wrote the screenplay for Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and subsequently adapted the screenplay for John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China, so his genre credentials are solid) and written by Earl Mac Rauch (who previously co-wrote Martin Scorsese's sprawling musical New York, New York), Buckaroo Banzai tells the story of a brilliant neurosurgeon, rocket scientist, rock star and comic book hero, played by Peter Weller, who breaks the dimensional barrier in his jet car, an event that attracts the unwanted attention of the Red Lectroids, a race of slimy aliens who want to use his oscillation overthruster to return to Planet 10. Along the way he recruits fellow neurosurgeon Jeff Goldblum (playing a character nicknamed New Jersey) to join his team, plays a gig with his band the Hong Kong Cavaliers, encounters his dead wife's long-lost twin sister (Ellen Barkin), and thwarts the evil Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), who has been possessed by a Red Lectroid named John Whorphin since 1938 -- all within the space of two days. A busy guy, that Buckaroo Banzai.

With a film like this detail is key, and Buckaroo Banzai is chock full of details. Not all of them will make sense on first or second or even eighth viewing (take the watermelon, for example), but what Richter and Rauch are doing is presenting a set of characters with a long and complicated set of histories which are barely touched on in the film yet inform all of their actions. (Dr. Lizardo is the only character who actually gets a bona fide flashback, but that's because he really needs it.) There's also a great deal of comedy, particularly in Lithgow's over-the-top performance ("Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy!") and the antics of his subordinates, played by Christopher Lloyd (as John Bigboote, an easy name to mispronounce), Dan Hedaya (as John Gomez) and the late Vincent Schiavelli (as John O'Connor). It's just too bad not enough people cared to watch them, thus denying the world the promised sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.

Monday, May 17, 2010
There's something cockeyed about that joint and I'm gonna find out what it is.

The same year that she made history as the beauty that killed the beast (i.e. 1933's King Kong), Fay Wray starred in Mystery of the Wax Museum, one of the last of the two-color Technicolor films and one that was remade in 1953 as House of Wax, giving Vincent Price his first major horror role. This version was directed by Michael Curtiz and stars Lionel Atwill as the sculptor who suffers a setback when his London-based wax museum goes up in flames thanks to an unscrupulous business partner looking to cash in on the fire insurance policy. Atwill resurfaces a dozen years later in New York City, where he directs others to recreate his masterworks (which mainly involves browbeating eager apprentice Allen Vincent) since his own gnarled hands are useless. Then he catches sight of Vincent's fiancée (Wray), who is the spitting image of his long-lost Marie Antoinette figure, and realizes that his collection will soon be complete once again.

Meanwhile, in what seems like a completely different movie, fast-talking newspaper reporter Glenda Farrell (who just so happens to be Wray's roommate) tries to scare up a big story to impress her editor (Frank McHugh) and finds herself on the trail of a gang smuggling corpses out of the morgue under cover of darkness. During the suspense sequences Curtiz uses expressionistic sets and twisty staircases to heighten Farrell's disorientation, a trick repeated later on when Wray descends into the bowels of Atwill's wax museum and discovers its mysteries. As in House of Wax, Atwill also has a deaf-mute assistant (named Hugo instead of Igor), but his presence doesn't really add much. He isn't even all that threatening in the few scenes he's in. Then again, instead of fading out after Atwill's vanquishment, Curtiz goes one step further and wraps everything with a scene prefiguring the ending of His Girl Friday by a good seven years. Clearly the horror wasn't at the forefront of his mind.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010
It's not every day your hair turns green.

Housecleaning again. This time it's the 1948 anti-war fable The Boy With Green Hair, which TCM showed back in March. Directed by Joseph Losey before he fell victim to the blacklist, this is a vibrant Technicolor film about a war orphan (a 12-year-old Dean Stockwell) living with a retired entertainer named Gramp (Pat O'Brien) -- who's not actually his grandfather, but the movie kind of glosses over that -- when his hair spontaneously turns green overnight. After the novelty wears off, he is ostracized by the other kids (even after kindly schoolteacher Barbara Hale points out that there's only one student in the class who has red hair) and pressured by the adults to shave his green hair off, which Stockwell resists once he finds out why he has it.

All this is relayed in flashback to child psychologist Robert Ryan, a self-professed "expert on boys," when Stockwell appears in a neighboring town with his head shaved, refusing to say who he is or how he came to get there. Everything works out in the end, though, even if the message is rather on-the-nose at times, and along the way O'Brien gets to sing a few jaunty tunes and do some magic tricks, which puts a happy face on the occasionally heavy story. The most memorable scene, at least for me, though, comes when Stockwell is finally talked into having his hair cut and the whole town gathers to watch the barber do the deed. I don't know whether the filmmakers actually dyed Stockwell's hair green or not, but as it's lopped off I could swear those are real tears he's shedding.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010
To you, they're wax. But to me, their creator, they live and breathe.

Vincent Price had a steady film career before he made House of Wax in 1953 -- he even appeared as the Invisible Man in a couple of films for Universal -- but it's fairly safe to say his career was never the same after he top-lined the horror classic. A remake of 1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum, the film borrows some bits and snatches of dialogue almost verbatim from the earlier film, but it has more of an impact overall because it drops the fast-talking newspaper reporter and concentrates more on the horror. Plus, it was in the vanguard of the era's 3-D boom, despite the fact that director Andre de Toth was blind in one eye. I guess that was one way to make sure the gimmick wasn't overused.

Just as Lionel Atwill had done two decades earlier, Price plays a brilliant sculptor whose wax museum is put to the torch by his unscrupulous business partner, only this time he doesn't have to relocate from London to New York. He just waits a few years (the film doesn't specify how long) and opens a new museum, complete with a Chamber of Horrors to attract the gawkers. We also get to watch him dispose of his ex-partner in a particularly gruesome fashion and pursue female lead Phyllis Kirk through the fog-enshrouded streets. Oddly enough, this is before he realizes how much she resembles his beloved Marie Antoinette figure, but once he makes the connection we know it won't be long before he straps her down to a table (completely naked!) and prepares to give her the wax treatment of her life.

The film also features Frank Lovejoy as the police lieutenant trying to find out who keeps stealing bodies from the morgue, Paul Picerni as Kirk's completely ineffectual boyfriend, and Charles Bronson (credited as Charles Buchinsky) as Price's deaf-mute assistant Igor, who's actually much more of a figure of menace this time out. Then, of course, there are the 3-D effects, which range from the blatant (paddle ball, anyone?) to the nonsensical (can-can dancers, really?), but audiences ate them up to the tune of just under $24 million, so I guess they must have done something right.

Friday, May 21, 2010
I'd go to the far end of the world for you, baby. You know I would.

With the Cannes Film Festival going strong (this year's winners are to be announced Sunday), the time seemed ripe to revisit the film that received the Palme d'Or 20 years ago: David Lynch's Wild at Heart. It's a film I've only seen once, more than a decade ago, and to be perfectly frank I found it more than a little off-putting. Based on the novel Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula by Barry Gifford, who would later collaborate with Lynch more directly on Lost Highway, the film stars Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern as the subtitular characters, a pair of lovers who defy Dern's mother (Diane Ladd, who is really Dern's mother) by running off together. This is a big deal for Cage because he has to break parole to do it, but they're so young and in love that he's prepared to throw caution to the wind. (One might even call him -- dare I say it? -- wild at heart.)

Desperate to get Dern back, Ladd dispatches her boyfriend, private detective Harry Dean Stanton, to track them down, but when he doesn't get results quickly enough she turns to her other boyfriend, gangster J.E. Freeman, who sees a golden opportunity to get Stanton out of the picture and get into Ladd's good graces. Meanwhile, Cage and Dern make a pit stop in New Orleans (where she tells him, apropos of nothing, about her mentally ill cousin Dell, played by Crispin Glover) before pushing on through Texas. Their charmed existence comes to an end, though, when they stumble upon a fatal car accident and the sole survivor (played by Sherilyn Fenn of Twin Peaks fame) dies right in front of them. From there they wind up in the town of Big Tuna, where Cage seeks out an old associate (Isabella Rossellini) to find out whether there's a hit out on him. Running low on funds they find themselves stranded in Big Tuna, where Dern confesses that she's pregnant, and end up in the orbit of transparently psychopathic Vietnam veteran Willem Dafoe, who dangles a two-man bank job in front of Cage with the promise that it will solve their money problems. Sure it will.

"This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top." So say Dern during their extended sojourn in Big Tuna. Whether or not that's a direct quote from the novel, Lynch sure does pile the weird on top with his adaptation. In addition to a slew of references to The Wizard of Oz (I counted 16, with multiple depictions of Ladd as the Wicked Witch of the West), he also throws in Freddie Jones as a squawking bar patron, Grace Zabriskie as a crippled hit woman, Jack Nance as a deranged rocket scientist, and Sheryl Lee (Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks) as Glinda the Good Witch, who appears in a vision to Cage and assures that the film has a happy ending. Knowing Lynch, the fact that the film has a happy ending is probably the strangest thing about it.

Saturday, May 22, 2010
You gotta know the rules before you can break the rules.

Last weekend TCM Underground showed a pair of films of a highly unusual nature written and directed by Robert Downey Sr. The first was 1969's Putney Swope, his justly famous satire of Madison Avenue in which the token black man on the board of an advertising agency, gruff-voiced music director Arnold Johnson, is elected chairman when the company's founder dies unexpectedly. His first official act (after firing the rest of the board, including the founder's idiot son, Allen Garfield) is to rename the company Truth and Soul, Inc. and announce his steadfast refusal to make commercials for cigarettes, war toys or alcohol. It's an idealistic stand that puts him in direct opposition to the President of the United States (who's played by a midget and advised by the Henry Kissinger-like Lawrence Wolf), who puts pressure on him to sell out his values.

Of course, as conceived by Downey, Swope isn't the most ethical man around since he steals most of his ideas from his underlings (who include Antonio Fargas as an Arab) and fires people left and right, oftentimes on a whim. Furthermore, the ad campaigns he does create -- for products like Ethereal cereal, Face Off pimple cream, Fan-A-Way (with the nonsensical slogan "You can't eat an air conditioner"), Lucky Airlines and the Borman Six -- are crass, crude and titillating, and frequently all three at once. Good thing they're also incredibly funny, as are most of Downey's digs at the advertising game. Case in point: the opening sequence where a supposed expert is flown in to speak to the board about one of their products and essentially blows a bunch of smoke up their asses and walks off with their money. Once the dust has cleared, one of the board members concedes, "The man made some very perceptive statements." I guess he's been in the thick of it for so long that he can't tell when he's been conned himself.

The second feature of the night was 1972's Greaser's Palace, a surreal western that saw Downey working with a large budget for the first time and, for the most part, making a hash of things. This is not to say that Greaser's Palace is a total write-off. It's just terribly undisciplined. For starters, Mr. Greaser (Albert Henderson) is in the habit of killing people indiscriminately, including his own offspring when they displease him. I suppose that makes him the town's equivalent of the O.T. God, who sends his only son to Earth (by parachute, no less) in the form of a stranger in a zoot suit (Allan Arbus, who played the minor role of Mr. Bad News in Putney Swope) who says he's on his way to Jerusalem to be an actor/singer/dancer. Along the way he brings people back to life (well, one person, but he does it repeatedly), does a little faith healing ("If you feel, you're healed.") and ticks off Greaser's daughter Cholera (Luana Anders), who's used to being the star attraction. The film also features Toni Basil as a frequently topless Indian girl, Hervé Villechaize as a lonely homesteader, and Lawrence Wolf as a French priest who's eager to proclaim Arbus the second coming, but quickly disappointed when he turns out to be underwhelming as a spiritual leader.

As for the film itself, I suppose Downey thought he was onto something with his juxtapositions of random acts of violence (there's one character -- played by Downey's wife Elsie -- whose sole purpose, it seems, is to wander around the desert aimlessly and periodically get shot by an unseen assailant) and bursts of madcap comedy. I suppose I should put comedy in quotes, though, because I don't see what's so funny about the repetitious scenes of the entire population of the town accompanying Greaser to his outhouse (which is on top of his palace, naturally) so he can try to have a bowel movement. (No points for guessing what happens when he finally succeeds.) Then there are the total non sequiturs, like Arbus's agent Morris, who wears a plastic space helmet and platform shoes for no discernible reason. I will say, though, that having the Holy Ghost be played by a guy in a white sheet who whines that his father never gives him anything to do is pretty amusing.

You know, times have changed. People aren't into really heavy trips anymore.

For my "Chilling Classic" today I chose 1975's Slashed Dreams, which was originally called Sunburst before the new title was blatantly overlaid on top of it in the opening credits. Directed by James Polakof (who also receives a puzzling "created by" credit), the film stars Peter Hooten (who was later to play the title role in the Dr. Strange TV-movie) and Kathrine Baumann (who previously appeared in The Thing With Two Heads and 99 and 44/100% Dead) as two friends who decide on a whim to look up another friend of theirs who dropped out of college and moved to the woods to get back to nature. Hooten is carrying a torch for Baumann but is trapped in the dreaded "friend zone," so he's thrilled when she breaks it off with her controlling jerk of a boyfriend (Ric Carrott, who doesn't need much screen time to establish that he's a total asshole) and goes off with him. That's what makes the subsequent mountain man rape so unfortunate, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Then again, Hooten and Baumann should have known something was amiss when they stopped at the general store and found special guest star Rudy Vallee in the back singing to no one in particular. He even warns them that "a lot of strange things have happened here in this wilderness" and tries to sell them a $15 hunting knife, but they laugh off his portents and go on their merry way, weighed down by ever-shrinking backpacks (I swear, they change size and shape from scene to scene) that look like they've never been used before. Their antics are also accompanied by insipid music which alternates between the super-groovy sounds of the '70s (including one number called "Animals Are Clumsy, Too" that plays over an interminable climbing scene) and sappy ballads (like the tender "Theme from Sunburst," with the unforgettable lyric "You're a fool to be a puppet, even on your own string"). There's also a hilarious morning scene where they wake up to the sight of a bear eating their provisions, as well as one where they rub berries on each other's faces and crack Al Jolson jokes. That sort of thing couldn't possibly happen in a film where the female lead is brutally raped by two mountain men, could it?

The answer, of course, is yes, it could. After locating their friend's cabin (a ramshackle dwelling if I ever saw one) but not their friend, our two young city slickers decide to go skinny dipping (which is always a good idea), whereupon they attract the attention of disfigured miscreant James Keach (brother of Stacy), who wrote the screenplay based on the original screenplay by his fellow backwoods rapist David Pritchard. (I tell you, the writing credits on this film are all kinds of messed up.) At first, Keach and Pritchard only present a vague threat at best, but when they return later that night and catch Hooten and Baumann unawares, well, let's just say there's a reason why I've used variations on the words "rape" and "mountain man" throughout this review. The thing that gets me, though, is that the soundtrack has the gall to feature a sappy post-rape ballad, which is the kind of phrase I never thought I'd use in my life.

Anyway, with the new day comes the extremely belated appearance of their back-to-nature friend Michael (Robert Englund, in only his second film appearance), who gets to play rape trauma counselor while Hooten stands outside holding a hatchet impotently. But why should he settle for that when Keach and Pritchard can come along for no good reason and give him somebody to swing it at? I've got news for you, pal. It's a little late for you to defend your woman's honor. Man, did I hate this movie.

It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.

For a long time now I have read about the work of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, but have never actually seen any of his films. That is about to change since I have his seven-hour epic Sátántangó on tap for tomorrow, but as a warm-up I chose his 62-minute adaptation of Macbeth, which he made for Hungarian television in 1982 (and is included as an extra on the DVD from Facets). What makes it so extraordinary is the fact that Tarr did it in just two shots. Furthermore, the first shot is a mere five and a half minutes long, leaving the bulk of the action to a single, uninterrupted, mindbogglingly complicated take running 56 and a half minutes. I can only imagine how much time and effort went into devising it because while it starts out relatively simply, with Macbeth (György Cserhalmi, who is astonishing) and his ambitious Lady (Erzsébet Kútvölgyi, ditto) plotting King Duncan's demise in close-up against generic-looking stone backgrounds, the staging eventually grows expansive enough to includes horses, fog and a pitched battle happening right before our eyes. Who knew Hungarian television could be so exciting?

Sunday, May 23, 2010
It's not just to others we can do unforgivable things, but also to ourselves.

Béla Tarr's 1994 film Sátántangó, based on the novel by László Krasznahorkai, is a potentially punishing seven hours long, so I made sure I was fully rested and properly breakfasted before embarking on it today. The film opens on a muddy patch of land upon which a herd of cows is going about cow business. (There's one bull that repeatedly tries to mount some of them, but they're quick to shrug him off.) This shot lasts seven and a half minutes and features no human beings or dialogue (apart from the occasional moo). It's also one of the shorter shots in the film. Sure, there's nothing like the unbroken 56-minute take in his Macbeth, but that's because Tarr shot this on film, which has its inherent limitations. What he accomplishes within those limitations, though, is quite literally breathtaking.

To attempt a synopsis of Sátántangó would probably be a foolhardy venture -- not because so much happens, but rather because the story unfolds at such a deliberate pace that it would be best for anybody not put off by the extended running time to encounter its twists and turns for themselves. I will say that Tarr frequently doubles back and covers certain events from different vantage points (an obvious inspiration for how Gus Van Sant structured Elephant), which not only tells us more about the story, but also how much (or how little) each individual character knows of it. The clearest example of this is the doctor (Peter Berling) whose only occupations appear to be drinking heavily and keeping tabs on the comings and going of his neighbors. He even keeps a file on each of them for reasons known only to himself. After all, he lives in the kind of rural village where everybody already knows everybody else's business. It's also the kind of place where rumors spread fast and have a way of supplanting the truth.

With its stark black and white photography and unsympathetic characters (as well as the unspecified time period), the film that came to mind most often while I was watching was Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, especially during the section that follows Erika Bók, who appears to be the only small child in the village. As such, she has no one to play with and, lacking proper adult supervision, does some extraordinarily cruel things to a cat (which I hope was not harmed in any way during the making of the film). If that's the sort of thing that would keep you from watching something, well, consider yourself warned. Personally, I'm glad I didn't turn it off (partly because I had already invested three hours of my time by that point), but everybody has their own level of tolerance for that sort of thing.

Monday, May 24, 2010
The best films are like dreams you're never sure you've really had.

Over the past three decades Jim Jarmusch has made a total of ten features, plus one documentary (1997's The Year of the Horse, which I haven't seen). That's not a huge output (certainly not compared to what Woody Allen has produced, that's for sure), but he's managed to carve out a niche for himself in the world of independent film, steadily producing an idiosyncratic body of work that no one could mistake for anybody else's. That principle definitely applies to last year's The Limits of Control, which got extremely mixed reviews and received an extremely limited release. (I'm sure I'm not the only Jarmusch fan who was denied the chance to see it in a theater.) Having seen it I can understand why some would find it off-putting (or, even worse, boring), but it's a Jarmusch film from the first frame to the last and that's what I was expecting.

The story, such as it is, concerns a laconic man with no name (Isaach De Bankolé, who has been a mainstay of Jarmusch's films since Night on Earth, in which he played the cab driver in Paris) who is sent to Spain (despite the fact that he doesn't speak Spanish) to complete a mysterious mission. He meets his contacts in various cafés where they exchange matchboxes -- his contain instructions for where he should go next -- and have mostly one-sided conversations. (De Bankolé isn't much for small talk -- or talk of any size, really.) Finally, he reaches his objective, does what he was sent to do, and returns to where he came from. It's about as basic a set-up as you can get -- or rather it would be if Jarmusch didn't have such strange and diverse characters to throw De Bankolé's way.

Take for example the oft-nude Paz de la Huerta, who is disappointed that De Bankolé refuses to sleep with her. Or Tilda Swinton's blonde cowgirl, who talks to him about old films and explicitly references Hitchcock's Suspicion and Welles's The Lady from Shanghai. Or Youki Kudoh (who previously appeared as one of the Japanese tourists in 1989's Mystery Train) as a woman he meets on a train who has a bizarre theory about molecules. Or John Hurt (previously seen in 1995's Dead Man) as a man who delivers a guitar and bends his ear about bohemians. Or Gael García Bernal as a Mexican who provides him with a car and driver. Or Bill Murray (who entered Jarmusch's orbit in 2003's Coffee and Cigarettes and starred in 2005's Broken Flowers) as his final objective. I could tell you what De Bankolé does to him, but I'm sure you can guess.

I'm not sure what else there is to say about the film. If you're a Jarmusch fan then The Limits of Control is probably already on your radar. If you were put off by some of the negative reviews, you should at least know that it's a staggeringly beautiful film to look at, thanks to the work of cinematographer Christopher Doyle. And where else are you going to find a film that contains an exchange like this:

MOLECULES: Among us there are those who are not among us.
LONE MAN: I'm among no one.

In short, it's prime Jarmusch. Get it while it's fresh.

Tuesday, May 25, 2010
It's a tough galaxy. If you want to survive out here, you've gotta know where your towel is.

Pop quiz: Do you know where your towel is? Actually, a better question might be, did you know today was Towel Day? First observed on May 25, 2001, exactly two weeks after Douglas Adams died, Towel Day commemorates the life and work of one of the 20th century's most beloved writers of science fiction and humor -- and humorous science fiction. His magnum opus, of course, was The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in all of its various permutations (radio series, novels, records, a TV show, script books and other ephemera), but the one medium he never managed to crack during his lifetime was film. That didn't happen until 2005, nearly four years after his passing. As of one of the H2G2 faithful, I dutifully decamped to the multiplex on opening weekend to see how it turned out, but unfortunately I found the efforts of director Garth Jennings and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick (who reshaped Adams's original screenplay) severely lacking. Still, there was just enough of the author's voice left in it that I didn't want to write it off completely. I just haven't felt compelled to revisit it since.

Cut to today, and my realization that Towel Day 2010 would be the ideal time to give the Hitchhiker's movie a second look. If I had hoped my views on it would have softened in the intervening years, though, those hopes were dashed to pieces by the prologue with the dolphins singing "So Long and Thanks for All the Fish." A miscalculation of galactic proportions, it starts the film off on absolutely the wrong foot and from that point on it hardly seems to set one right. For the most part, it's in such a hurry to get from plot point to plot point that it jettisons whole swaths of Adams's meticulously crafted dialogue in favor of throwaway jokes that hardly seem worth the effort. Then there are the bizarre performance choices (especially by Mos Def and Sam Rockwell) that can't simply be explained away by saying "but they're supposed to be strange, they're aliens." Rockwell, for one, has an impossible role to play because the filmmakers copped out when it came to his second head. Frankly, I'll take the cumbersome mechanical head from the BBC series over the film version any day.

This is, of course, not to say that the film is entirely hopeless. I thought Stephen Fry was the perfect choice to play the Guide and Martin Freeman actually did a decent job of filling Simon Jones's slippers as the hapless Arthur Dent. And the sequence on Magrathea where Slartibartfast (Bill Nighy) shows him around the "factory floor" is probably the best use of visual effects in the whole film. But all the visual effects in the world can't help when it deviates too wildly from the path laid down by Adams in his previous adaptations. From the decision to upgrade the Vogons to major villain status to the stunt casting of John Malkovich (as a character invented for the film who looks so much like Trevor Horn that it's distracting) to the unmotivated capture of Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) by the Vogons which results in a pointless side trip to their home planet of Vogsphere, it veers so far away from the source that whenever a Guide entry flashes on the screen it seems to have been shoehorned in totally at random. Either they should have been integrated better or dropped from the picture entirely. As it is, they exist in a narrative hinterland that doesn't do the film very much good.

I have other issues with the film, but I feel like I've run it down quite enough. (Don't even get me started on Marvin.) Obviously it didn't catch on with audiences because if it had then we would have taken a trip to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by now. For my part, I probably would have skipped that, though.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Why should God, in his wisdom, permit these things?

Some months back I acquired The Hammer Horror Series, a collection of eight of their films from the early '60s that Universal distributed in the States. I did this mostly to get the film I'm watching for tomorrow's full moon (and since Hammer only ever made one werewolf movie you can probably guess what that is), but I don't plan on neglecting the other seven. And since the earliest one in the set is the sequel to 1958's Horror of Dracula, I decided to give that another look first.

It's been several years since I last saw Horror of Dracula, but it's the kind of film that continues to have an impact more than five decades after its first release. Written for the screen by Jimmy Sangster and directed by Terence Fisher, who had teamed up for The Curse of Frankenstein -- Hammer's first foray into monster movie-making -- the year before, Horror of Dracula also brought back that film's star, Peter Cushing, as Dr. Van Helsing and cast Christopher Lee (who had played Frankenstein's Monster) as his nemesis, Count Dracula. It was a good match-up for all concerned, especially since Lee not only fit the role of the handsome, debonair aristocrat, but also brought a ferocity to his portrayal of the infamous bloodsucker that previous actors hadn't. And he was unafraid to be seen with bright red blood dripping from his fangs, an all-important touch for this garish Technicolor production.

Since the film was made on such a small budget, Sangster had to compress the action greatly and alter and/or eliminate characters as he saw fit. For example, instead of being a real estate agent, Jonathan Harker (John Van Eyssen) is now the new librarian at Castle Dracula, and it is a picture of his fiancée Lucy (Carol Marsh) who inspires the Count to relocate -- not to England but to a neighboring city, which is apparently in Germany. (The film never specifies which country it's set in.) Furthermore, the character of Mina (Melissa Stribling) is now Lucy's sister-in-law and her brother Arthur (Michael Gough) is the only person who helps Van Helsing in his efforts to destroy Dracula and his progeny. In short, it's far from the most faithful adaptation around, but what does that matter when the end result is so chilling?

And Horror of Dracula was such an enormous success that Hammer returned to the well two years later and came up with 1960's The Brides of Dracula, with Peter Cushing reprising the role of Van Helsing. The studio had yet to hit upon the notion of resurrecting the Count, though, so another dashing aristocrat had to step in to take a bite out of the local population.

Again directed by Terence Fisher and co-written by Jimmy Sangster (who shared screen credit with two other writers), the film takes place about a decade after the events of the first film and concerns a French student teacher (Yvonne Monlaur) on her way to her first placement who takes refuge in the castle of a lonely old Baroness (Martita Hunt) who it turns out is keeping her son, the Baron (David Peel), locked up. Taking pity on him, Monlaur releases Peel, which is an extraordinarily bad idea since he's actually a vampire, and flees from the castle and the maniacal laughter of its lone servant (Freda Jackson), who switches masters on a dime.

It is at this point that Cushing literally stumbles into the plot, encountering Monlaur entirely by chance and, being the gentleman that he is, escorting her to her new school, which provides Peel with a virtual smorgasbord of potential brides to choose from. He really only has eyes for Monlaur, though, which would be flattering if he were interested in more than just her carotid artery. Peel also has the ability to turn into a very large, very fake bat, which is something Christopher Lee couldn't do. (In the first film, Cushing states definitively that vampires cannot transform into other creatures, but I guess he must have changed his mind about that somewhere along the way.) Also unlike Lee's Count, Peel even manages to put the bite on Cushing, who has to resort to drastic measures to prevent himself from being turned. Good thing he had that holy water handy.

Thursday, May 27, 2010
No ordinary wolf would tear out the throat and drain blood.

Unlike Universal, which had its writers concoct original stories for its werewolf films of the '30s and '40s, Hammer Studios used a literary source -- namely Guy Endore's sensationalistic 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris -- as the basis of its lone such effort, 1961's The Curse of the Werewolf. Directed by Terence Fisher and scripted by producer Anthony Hinds (using the nom de plume John Elder), the film is a very loose adaptation of Endore's book, as evidenced by the fact that the setting was moved from France to Spain in order to utilize a set that the studio had built for a film about the Spanish Inquisition that never got made due to censorship problems. Even so, within those limitations Fisher and Hinds managed to produce an engaging film that adhered to the spirit, if not always the letter, of Endore's story.

They also gave Oliver Reed's budding film career a boost by casting him as the title creature, the son of a mute servant girl (Yvonne Romain) who was raped by a mad beggar (Richard Wordsworth) who was imprisoned by an excessively cruel Marques (Anthony Dawson) and left to rot in his dungeon for several years. The whole set-up is a major change from the novel, but the boy's dubious parentage -- as well as the fact that he was born on Christmas Day, which is considered an ill omen -- is not. That doesn't come to pass, however, until after Romain has escaped from the Marques and been taken in by a nobleman (Clifford Evans) and nursed back to health by his servant (Hira Talfrey), who is the first to voice concern about her impending due date. She's also the one who has to take care of the child after his mother dies in childbirth, which is only fair since his father died right after conceiving him.

The next part of the film pretty much comes straight out of Endore's novel as the child, who has grown into a young boy (Justin Walters), begins changing into a wolf (which he believes is just bad dreams) after he gets his first taste of blood. Evans puts bars on his windows to prevent him from getting out at night and consults a priest whose knowledge of lycanthropy is pretty shaky, but the holy man's diagnosis that what the boy needs is extra love to counteract his wolfish nature seems to do the trick until he grows up to be Reed and is ready to go out into the world. As befits a young man who needs to stay on the straight and narrow, he goes to work at a winery where he falls in love with the boss's daughter (Catherine Feller), despite the fact that she's already engaged to a priggish fop. Their relationship is further doomed when he abruptly resumes his beastly ways after being dragged by a co-worker to a house of ill repute for a night of debauchery. Sure enough, it isn't long before he's begging to be put out his misery, but first he has to have one last night on the town -- literally.

Unsurprisingly, a great deal of the film goes by before we see Reed in his wolf form. (Then again, Reed himself doesn't even show up until the film is half over, but he takes command of it once he does.) When we finally do get a look at it, though, it's quite a stunner -- unlike any other werewolf design I've ever seen. It's a pity this film wasn't a financial success for Hammer, but in a way I'm glad they didn't drain the life out of the concept. That would have to wait until the end of the decade, when a Spanish actor/screenwriter named Paul Naschy kicked off his long-running "Hombre Lobo" series. I don't know about you, but I can't wait to dig my claws into it.

Friday, May 28, 2010
I think you might be surprised at what follows after trying this way of life.

I have an unprecedented four-day weekend ahead of me, so I've decided to get cracking on the movies. First out of the gate was Douglas Sirk's 1954 remake of Magnificent Obsession, which stars Jane Wyman as the young widow and Rock Hudson as the reckless playboy who changes her life several times over. First there's the speedboat accident he gets into, which ties up a resuscitation device that could have been used to save the life of Wyman's husband, an eminent doctor. Then Hudson tries to turn over a new leaf (after blithely picking up the philosophy of altruism as explained to him by artist Otto Kruger) in order to impress her and inadvertently causes another accident that results in Wyman losing her sight. Naturally, Wyman's stepdaughter (Barbara Rush) comes to resent him for that, and the hospital's head nurse (Agnes Moorehead) likewise gives him the cold shoulder, but Hudson is persistent and tries to do everything he can to make things up to her.

If there's anything that distinguishes Sirk's Magnificent Obsession from the 1935 version -- apart from the fact that it's in color and CinemaScope, obviously -- it's the elimination of the comic relief characters. Instead of being a well-meaning buffoon, Rush's fiancé (Gregg Palmer) is now a capable lawyer and even handles some of Hudson's affairs for him. Likewise, the part of Hudson's chauffeur has been reduced to a walk-on which suits the story just fine. Sure, Sirk ramps up the melodrama to a certain degree, but he's only heightening what was present in the original film (and presumably the novel). And he manages to get deep, soulful performances out of Hudson (then still something of a neophyte) and Wyman, who received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her role. It wouldn't be the last time a Sirk-directed performance was recognized by the Academy.

Sometimes we see it produce some pretty queer mental effects.

Whenever the Criterion Collection raids Hollywood's back catalog, it's usually in the service of calling attention to some neglected masterpiece. This is clearly the case with Nicholas Ray's 1956 film Bigger Than Life, which he made just one year after Rebel Without a Cause. The film was produced by James Mason, who also stars as a conscientious schoolteacher who undergoes an abrupt personality change when he's put on cortisone -- then an experimental "miracle drug" -- to combat a life-threatening illness. It's a tough film to watch, especially when the drug turns him into a megalomaniac and causes him to turn on his family (loving wife Barbara Rush, uncomprehending son Christopher Olsen) and friends (gym teacher Walter Matthau, in one of his earliest screen appearances) alike. It's also a film where the requisite happy ending, in which the status quo appears to be restored, rings somewhat false. No wonder audiences in the '50s didn't quite buy it.

What does she see in you anyway, your mom?

A decent-sized crowd joined me for the Ryder's screening of Mother tonight, which I found gratifying since it's a South Korean film and anything that's subtitled is a hard sell around these parts (a situation I don't see improving since Kerasotes was bought by AMC this week). Co-written and directed by Bong Joon-ho (whose previous feature was 2006's The Host, which I still need to catch up with), Mother is about a textbook overprotective mom (Kim Hye-ja) who is beside herself when her borderline-retarded son (Won Bin) is arrested for a murder and coerced into signing a confession by the police. Initiating her own investigation, especially when the high-priced lawyer she hired starts giving her the runaround, Kim looks for her evidence that her son's ne'er-do-well friend (Jin Goo) is responsible, and when that doesn't pan out she digs deeper in the vain hope of clearing him (which I suppose is one way of proving to the world you're a good mother).

Bong gets a lot of mileage out of following Kim around while she plays amateur detective, but even before her son is taken into custody he shows how unnaturally attached she is to Won. For example, he's fully grown, yet they still sleep in the same bed, and there's a disturbing scene where she watches over him while he's urinating against a wall. One could go so far as to call them uncomfortably close, but there's no sense that their bond is sexual in any way. It's just incredibly creepy. Then again, a boy's best friend is his mother -- at least according to Norman Bates, who was something of an authority on the subject.

Saturday, May 29, 2010
They call on the name of the Devil. They seem to take strength from their own blasphemy.

Spent the afternoon watching a couple of British horror films, both of which starred Christopher Lee. The first was 1968's The Curse of the Crimson Altar, which was released in the States under the title The Crimson Cult (and which was shot in color, but the DVD I got from Plan 9 was rather disappointingly in black and white). Directed by Vernon Sewell and based on an (uncredited) story by H.P. Lovecraft, the film follows an antiques dealer (Mark Eden) searching for his brother who winds up at the estate of Lee's aloof aristocrat. There he becomes enamored of Lee's niece (Virginia Wetherell), who just so happens to be descended from an infamous witch (Barbara Steele) who was burned around those parts many years before, and is unnerved by his enigmatic servant (Michael Gough). He also starts having disturbing dreams where Steele speaks with an echo effect on her voice and attempts to force him to sign his name in a book while a gaggle of witnesses in animal masks look on. Talk about a hard sell.

Despite its old country house trappings, this is definitely a film that takes place in the present day. In fact, when Eden first arrives Wetherell is throwing quite a swinging party (in case anyone had any doubts about when it was made). When she's showing him around he even makes a crack about Boris Karloff jumping out at them, which is something of an in-joke since Karloff himself appears a few scenes later as the local expert on witchcraft. His days of jumping out at people are long past, though, since he spends most of the picture in a wheelchair and only gets up out of it twice. That leaves most of the villainous heavy lifting to Lee, who appears to be doing a dry run for the role he would play in The Wicker Man five years later.

The same year he made The Wicker Man, Christopher Lee also starred in his final Dracula film for Hammer, 1973's The Satanic Rites of Dracula, which was released in the States under the title Count Dracula and His Vampire Bride (which is how it appears in Mill Creek's "Drive-In Movie Classics" set). (While we're on the subject of retitling, I'm not sure why distributors of horror films had such a mania for that sort of thing, but it was so prevalent it hardly seems worth questioning.) A direct sequel to Dracula A.D. 1972 (which I have not seen, but by most accounts I'm not missing much), The Satanic Rites was directed by Alan Gibson and has Dracula seeking to bring about Armageddon by unleashing a terrible plague upon the world. Good thing Peter Cushing's on hand as Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing (the descendant of the character he played in Horror of Dracula and The Brides of Dracula) or else we'd all be screwed.

In an effort to keep the series up to date, screenwriter Don Houghton (who also wrote Dracula A.D. 1972 and The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, which was Cushing's final Dracula film) throws in an espionage angle and even makes the Count the head of a major corporation. He also gives Van Helsing a granddaughter, a carryover from the previous film, but this time she's played by Joanna Lumley. Cushing says she's extremely knowledgeable, but she's still treated like a girl by Scotland Yard inspector Michael Coles (reprising his role from the previous film). I should also mention Hammer regular Freddie Jones as the Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist (and expert on germ warfare and blood diseases) who's tasked with creating a virulent strain of the Bubonic plague by Dracula. I guess that must have seemed like a good idea at the time.

I was what you call ragged. I mean, way beyond torn up.

When I was at Plan 9 to rent Curse of the Crimson Altar last night I noticed that Kathryn Bigelow's directorial debut, The Loveless, was on the employee picks rack, so I took that home as well. Written and directed by Bigelow and Monty Montgomery (who went on to become a producer for David Lynch in the early '90s), the 1982 film also gave Willem Dafoe his screen debut (after he was cut out of Heaven's Gate, on which he was an extra) as the leader of a '50s motorcycle gang that gets temporarily stranded in a small Georgia town when one of their bikes breaks down on the way to Daytona. It's a languidly paced film, mostly content to hang out with Dafoe and his leather jacketed buddies (including rockabilly musician Robert Gordon, who provided the music for the film) as they find creative ways to kill time, only occasionally cutting away to the mistrustful locals. Among their ranks are a tomboy (Marin Kanter) who feels drawn to Dafoe and is unafraid to talk to him straight, and her father (J. Don Ferguson), the local big shot who has quite the big mouth on him. Just about everybody has their part to play, though, and they know how to play it.

On the whole, the film is most successful when it just sits back and observes how people behave. One key sequence is when Dafoe commandeers Kanter's car to go on a beer run and she tells him point blank, "You know, without that motorcycle of yours, you'd really be a nobody." The fact that he doesn't contradict her or even get upset says a lot more about him than a entire monologue could. It's only when the film enters the home stretch and starts cross-cutting between different sets of characters, building up a head of dramatic steam in the process, that it loses its way. I guess Bigelow and Montgomery felt there were some narrative conventions that they simply could not buck. Until then, though, it's a pretty sweet ride.

Sunday, May 30, 2010
If you're squeamish, best look the other way. Some frightful things happen here.

The title of Pedro Almodóvar's 1984 film What Have I Done to Deserve This? is quite an apt one since its main character, an overworked cleaning woman played by Carmen Maura, is beset by all manner of trials and tribulations throughout the film. For starters, she's married to a lout (Ángel de Andrés López) who drives a taxi and doesn't make enough to support his family. Not only that, they share their cramped apartment with his mother (Chus Lampreave) and of her two sons, the older one (Juan Martínez) is a drug dealer (and occasional user) and the younger one (Miguel Ángel Herranz) is a sexually active homosexual. And to top it off, she's become addicted to pills and the local pharmacies have stopped serving her. To reference the title of another Almodóvar film, she's clearly on the verge of something or other (whether it's a nervous breakdown or not remains to be seen).

As Almodóvar is wont to do, he fills out the supporting cast with lots of colorful personalities. Maura's neighbors include a prostitute (Verónica Forqué) who's always popping in for things she needs for her clients and a single mother (Kiti Manver) whose daughter (Sonia Anabela Holimann) has telekinetic powers. One of López's fares is a struggling writer (Gonzalo Suárez) who hatches a plan to forge Hitler's memoirs and whose wife (Amparo Soler Leal) is an unrepentant kleptomaniac. Herranz's dentist (Javier Gurruchaga) is so taken with the boy that he adopts him on the spot. Then there's the policeman (Luis Hostalot) who's so concerned about his impotence that he hires Forqué to pretend to be his girlfriend when he goes to see his psychiatrist (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba), who just so happens to be Suárez's brother. Finally, there's the lizard that Lampreave and Martínez find one day in the park and, because it's green, decide to name Money. If only there were more of the real stuff around, maybe Maura wouldn't be so frazzled all the time.

What the hell's the sense of being a decent person when nobody else is?

Had a double feature of Touchstone Pictures from 1986, both of which starred Bette Midler. First up was Down and Out in Beverly Hills, which was co-written and directed by Paul Mazursky, based on Jean Renoir's 1932 film Boudu Saved from Drowning. Instead of a bookseller fishing a tramp out of the Seine, though, it's about a hanger tycoon (Richard Dreyfuss) pulling a suicidal bum (Nick Nolte) out of his swimming pool. This act of charity makes Dreyfuss feel good about himself, but it leads to some unexpected consequences as Nolte gives Dreyfuss's materialistic wife (Midler) her first orgasm in nine and a half years, beds their Hispanic maid (Elizabeth Peña), who was previously carrying on an affair with Dreyfuss, encourages their gay son (Evan Richards) -- who is hardly ever without his video camera -- to be open with them about his sexuality, and wins the heart of their college-bound daughter (Tracy Nelson). He's even able to win over the family dog, Matisse, who is so neurotic that he's seeing a dog psychiatrist.

As one might expect, the film gets a lot of mileage out of detailing the excesses of the very rich. (For this reason, it would likely play well on a double bill with Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, which is long overdue for a DVD release.) Some of the most trenchant observations are reserved for their neighbor, a record producer played by Little Richard, who complains about the disparity of service when a tripped alarm brings an immediate response to the Dreyfuss clan's residence. He doesn't get half as many reaction shots as the damned dog, though. I swear, Mazursky must have put it in every scene just so he could cut to it at will. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with cutting to a dog to get a laugh, but it does get old after a while.

A dog also features into the action of my second Bette Midler film, Ruthless People, but in that case directors Jim Abrahams, David Zucker and Jerry Zucker had much more faith in their material,an original screenplay by Dale Launer that they apparently decided not to toy with too much. This time out, Midler stars as the kidnapped wife of the Spandex Mini-Skirt King (Danny DeVito), who was planning on bumping her off anyway, so he's none too eager to pay her ransom. This doesn't exactly sit well with her kidnappers, nice couple Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater, who soon find out that the easy $500,000 they were hoping to get isn't going to be so easy. Also thrown into the mix are DeVito's venal mistress (Anita Morris, who coincidentally enough starred in the short-lived TV version of Down and Out) and her dim-bulb lover (Bill Pullman in his first major role), who have their own designs on his money.

The film's comedy is a lot more character-based than the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team's previous efforts Airplane!, Police Squad! and Top Secret!, but they still manage to slip in some background gags like the policeman playing a match on DeVito's personal tennis court during one scene and all of the impractical furniture in his house (which most likely was picked out by Midler since the only normal-looking room is his home office). They also generate some genuine menace in the scene with the Bedroom Killer, who has been as much in the local news as Midler's kidnapping. Even so, this was the last film they directed as a unit, choosing to turn the reins of their next project, the first Naked Gun movie, over to David Zucker. For his part, Jim Abrahams would team up again with Midler for 1988's Big Business (also for Touchstone) and Jerry Zucker would surprise many with his first solo effort, 1990's Ghost. That's a long way from gags about Barbara Billingsley speaking jive and beer-swilling Hare Krishnas.

Monday, May 31, 2010
Surviving is the only glory in war, if you know what I mean.

After a weekend spent practically gorging myself on movies, I decided to spend my Memorial Day with just one. It's a long one, though -- in fact, some might call it a big, red one on account of all the blood shed over the course of its running time. Or perhaps they would call it that because that's its title. Okay, enough of the cutesy stuff. Samuel Fuller would probably smack me around if he knew I was introducing his magnum opus in this fashion, so let's get down to brass tacks, shall we?.

The Big Red One was the first Samuel Fuller film I ever saw, thanks to its frequent appearances on cable and the four star write-up it got in the TV book. It's an exciting account of Fuller's time with the United States Army's 1st Infantry Division during World War II, which he expanded upon in his posthumous autobiography, A Third Face : My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking, but the film as released in 1980 didn't tell the whole story because it was heavily cut by the studio. Thankfully, in 2004 film historian Richard Schickel was able to reconstruct Fuller's original vision based on the shooting script, and that is the version that I sat down to watch today. Boy, am I glad I did.

What was once a gritty, if episodic, depiction of war from the grunt's point of view is now a full-blown masterpiece that brings home how terrifying -- and necessary -- it can sometimes be. It also deepens what was already Lee Marvin's greatest performance as the sergeant who leads his "four horsemen" -- Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco and Kelly Ward -- from North Africa to Sicily to Omaha Beach and beyond. Along the way their ranks are swelled by replacement troops, but they quickly learn not to find out too much about these "wet noses" since it's doubtful that they'll still be around for the next campaign. Fuller also tells the parallel story of a German officer (Siegfried Rauch) who matches them step by step and likewise has a way of surviving skirmish after skirmish.

Apart from Marvin, the characters who get the most development are Hamill's sharpshooter, who lacks the nerve to murder until he comes face to face with the ultimate in Nazi atrocities, and Carradine's cigar-chomping writer (and Fuller stand-in). Fuller himself even shows up as a war correspondent shooting some newsreel footage in one of the sequences restored for this edition, and his wife Christa Lang plays an opportunistic German countess. He saves the most powerful sequences for the end of the film, though, when the squad helps liberate a Czechoslovakian concentration camp and Marvin has a heartbreaking encounter with an emaciated little boy. I'm getting teary-eyed again just thinking about it. That's a testament to the strength of Fuller's film. Thirty years on, it still has the capacity to reach both the heart and mind.

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