Movie Outlaw

DRONES (2010)

2011-10-19T19:15:00.000-04:00

Dilbert, The Drew Carey Show, The Office and Office Space have worked hard over the years to shatter the illusions built up by pro-Capitalism extravaganzas like How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and Cash McCall. Modern entertainment has proven that corporate-culture office work can be more monotonous and soul-crushing than the first few weeks of military boot camp, certain to leave you a dry and empty husk alone in your cubicle. “Can be”, obviously; much different than “is”. Drones is the anti-“is” in this situation.
The cubicle civilization depicted in Drones is comprised of more or less comfortable workers. Unchallenged though they may be in most aspects of their lives, in and out of the office, the employees of Omnilink are not merely enduring their work-day. They work reasonably-hard doing reasonable tasks and at the end of the day, they go home. Even the artificial crises that pop up—the decreased lead time, the looming deadline—do little to jolt them from their routines. A key element in their daily existence is gossip, and that fills the space between forms and databases. Who is sleeping with who—the essential and possibly only ingredient. If Ian is such a creep, why does Miryam keep taking him back? When will Brian ever ask out Amy? These are the distractions from the database that corporate switched unwisely from its chronological to alphabetical structure. Discussions take place right out in the open because, well, the water cooler doesn’t work.

Encouraging the romantic pairing of Brian (Johnathan M. Woodward of Buffy and Firefly fame) and Amy (cult goddess Angela Bettis) is the centerpiece of Drones, setting the movie’s low-key catastrophes into motion. Office romances, you see, are discouraged by management for a reason. Breakups can lead to hostile working conditions or worse: galactic destruction. At best, it’s a distraction, so everyone would be better off keeping things professional. Unless you want a hostile race of aliens marking the human race for extinction and blowing up the whole planet? You don’t want that, would you? Bad for business.
Directed by Buffy co-stars Amber Benson and Adam Busch, Drones is a dry, droll comedy that has managed to fly under the radar for most of the film-going public. Well-received at Slamdance in 2010, theatrical exposure eluded it because of its very underemphasized nature. Critics dove into their thesaurus of clichés and hauled out that old indie standby, “quirky”, and slapped that appellation over every review. The problem is that Drones is not “quirky”. “Quirky” was coined for movies like Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and 500 Days of Summer and anything starring Zooey Deschanel or Parker Posey (the ‘90s version of Zooey). Drones on the other hand is quite the opposite of “quirky” as it’s the most perfectly-deadpan movie to come along in such a long while.

The strong script by Ben Acker and Ben Blacker (yes, I know; shut up) posits the time-tested hypothesis that aliens walk among us and in Men in Black fashion, they’re prepping reports, Xeroxing documents and shuffling data along with the rest of us. Opening with a Powerpoint presentation that will evoke dread in anyone who has ever endured the real thing, Drones’ company Omnilink is compared to a hive, with each member playing its part for the betterment of the colony. “A bee uses its tongue to extract pollan from a flower. We at Omnilink do the same thing. We use our tongues daily, but over the phone.”

The company’s interpersonal strategy: “The buzz of a job well-done is 1) keeping your cool; 2) reaching out; 3) and interacting with others.” Co-operation is vital and everyone should do their part by visiting neighbor’s cubicles, chatting—“Say, Bob, wasn’t that a great Powerpoint presentation Peter gave this morning?” Human relationships invigorate the hive.

Which is why everyone from supply-closet king Clark (Samm Levine) to spreadsheet crusader Cooperman are pestering Brian to ask out Amy. Not that he sees any problem with that. They’ve flirted in the past, but there are doubts. “She uses capital letters in her I.M.’s,” explains Brian. “I’m more of a lowercase kind of guy.”

“Tut,” tuts Cooperman. “Relish your differences; they're as important as your sames.”
Despite the shock of catching Clark “communicating” in the supply closet and revealing that he’s an alien, Brian retrieves a box of staples and delivers them to Amy. Then pops the question. Which envokes an extremely logical response. “You’ve asked me out in return for bringing me staples. It seems…disproportionate.” But they give it a shot, meet for drinks after work and over the weekend agree that they’re “dating”. Brian hardly gives Clark’s revelation a second thought.

By Monday, Amy is so excited about their new status as a couple that she drops her own bomb on Brian: She, too, is an alien, a race called Soyka, and the copier isn’t her “pet alien robot” but a communication device through which she talks to a co-worker (Jafe) on her own planet (Elg). But this, on top of Clark’s news and the sudden pressure of dating, makes Brian freak out. Unlike Clark’s people, who merely want to enslave the human race—

Clark: Nothing will really change except that I’ll be your boss.
Brian: Can I get a raise?
Clark: Sure!
Brian: Then I’m good.

—Amy’s people want to destroy the planet for fuel. But that plan is on hold “for now”. Brian’s reaction, though, drives a wedge between him and Amy and by lunch they’re no longer dating. The next day, he preps a Powerpoint presentation in which he uses a bar graph to declare that “Amy Is A Jerk”. Still getting used to her new human emotions, Amy doesn’t take well to this sort of thing, particularly as it had nothing to do with the new Planicka account and just serves to extend the meeting. So she contacts her people and tells them that it’s time to move up the deadline. The armada, she is told, will be there sometime after lunch.
Drones pulls this oddball story together with the conceit that, like any other office, this imminent disaster is met with the same urgency as any other client demand. Not only does everyone accept Clark’s and Amy’s extraterrestrial identities in stride but they pull together to help figure out the problem before the planet is destroyed or they have to work overtime. And with this approach, Benson, Busch, Acker and Blacker manage the ultimate triumph of zero cynicism.

Unlike so much of our entertainment, particularly in the realm of “indie” or “quirky”, the Omnilink drones are not the oppressed creatures from Office Space, comprised only of tension and teeth. Drones isn’t about revenge on corporate America but instead tackles the old fashioned notion of doing your job and going home. As ironic a term that “post-ironic” has become, that’s precisely what Drones is about. There’s no winking at the audience, no elbow-nudging or cooler-than-thou posturing. It asks, quite literally, what would you do if you found out a co-worker you liked and thought you knew was going to destroy the planet where you keep all your stuff? Would you go hysterical and attack her with a paper cutter? Or would you just try to talk her out? Because neither is going to make 5pm come any sooner and one seems like it would take more effort than the other. What is the corporate cubicle-jockey’s path of least resistence? And could it be done through interoffice email?

So many things could have scuttled Drones. In the hands of showier directors with something to prove, this alien-invasion-cum-coffee-break could have gone over-the-top, bug-eyes, hysterical mugging, punchlines with the extra punch. But Benson and Busch handle the material with knowing restraint. Even when Brian is at his most hysterical, Woodward’s performance barely raises beyond pitched incredulity. The movie they made is not about madcap artificiality and because of their mature approach Drones is delivered with likable characters and funny material. Nothing is ruined in the name of appeasing the Hollywood over-the-top machine. Which, of course, is why it was deemed an impossible sell.

As of this writing Drones is only available through Amazon’s on demand streaming service or through extended cable (I happened to catch it during a free weekend of Showtime). Reviews for the film thus far either stuff it into the aforementioned “quirky” category or dismiss it outright as a “nothing new indie thing”, citing the amusing score by Jonathan Dinerstein and Dan Bern (and Busch’s band Common Rotation)—especially the appropriate opening song “Strongly-Worded Memo”—as pretentious “prog-rock. (But again, that’s the too-cool-for-you crowd for you, and forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t being a hipster no longer cool? Or being knowingly uncool make you cool?) If you can watch it without falling prey to your own misconceptions of what a “festival movie” is or is not, you might find yourself charmed by Drones’ quiet story about humanity, aliens and spreadsheets.

Hail Soyka.

THE SWORD BEARER (2010)

2011-09-21T12:44:00.000-04:00

“Dude,” as I was addressed by a handful of people, “did you see that new Russian superhero movie, yet?”

I hadn’t. “What’s it called?”

“Mechano-something. I don’t want to give anything away but it’s awesome! The camera is all over the place and the effects are great.”

This was relayed to me a number of times over a period of about ten days. The description always vague and usually leaving me with less information than I had going in. Finally, one of these good Samaritan dudes (and one dudette) included an IMDb link to a movie called The Sword Bearer, aka, in Russia, Mechenosets. Based on writer Yevgeni Danilenko's book, directed in 2006 by Filipp Yankovsky, The Sword Bearer turned out to be something different from what was described. I suspect that these well-intentioned friends were trying to steer me towards the flying-car movie Black Lightning, produced by Timur Bekmambetov, or maybe even Bekmambetov’s Daywatch, because what I got with The Sword Bearer was not a slam-bang actioner, but a very quiet and occassionally disturbing story about a young man who has been ostracized by society for a unique flaw in his genetic make-up.

Unfolding slowly and deliberately, we are gradually introduced to Sasha (a remarkable Artyom Tkachenko), a withdrawn little boy who grows up to be an isolated teenager, shunned by many who know him because of his temper and the violence that results from it. When Sasha feels threatened, a gleaming, indestructable metal blade extends from his wrist. With it, he can cleave stone and wood as easily as flesh and bone, and he doesn’t seem to have the ability to control it, or even set it on “mild injury” much less “stun”. However, he doesn’t pop the blade like Wolverine; the sword bursts painfully through his skin, sometimes skewering the palm of his hand, leaving behind a bloody appendage he does his best to hide with bandages.

Returning to his childhood neighborhood after an unexplained absence, the adult Sasha happens across a girl he knew from school. Her mobster’s son boyfriend and his droogs arrive and beat the young man down in the street, then drive off in their flashy Yay-Capitialism sports car. Tracking them back to her home, Sasha uses a rusty pipe to destroy the car with the bullies inside, killing or severely injuring each one. Shocked by his violence, the girl withdraws and Sasha runs. The next morning, the boyfriend’s connected mother puts a price on Sasha’s head.

In a new city, he meets a woman about his age, Katya (Chulpan Khamatova). They bicker in a stairway then fall into each others’ arms, anger fueling passion. Then her lover arrives home. Instead of offering any explanation, Katya orders the man out of the house. When he attempts to shoot her, Sasha breaks a chair over his head and they leave him tied up. Once freed and out for revenge, he attempts to rape her in the back seat of her car. Sasha’s rescue of her is brutal and horrifying, even to himself. Slamming the would-be rapist overhand into the car’s windshield, Sasha straddles him. Without his bidding, the blade extends and leaves the man bloody and dead, half in and out of the car. Shocked and shamed, Sasha runs and the girl comes up behind him, watching him press the blade tip into the pavement to force it back into his body.

The brutality and revelation is too much for her and she collapses. Sasha takes her home and she wakes up terrified of him. He hands her the phone, tells her to call the police, but she can’t.

It’s at this very point that you realize that this will not, cannot end well for either of them. This is a movie borne of a tragedy with all the classic tropes—misunderstood hero, doomed lovers, society mistaking iconoclasts for the mentally ill, the disease of revenge—all distilled into an odd little metaphor that is rarely even visual. The blade represents Sasha’s isolation, his barely-controlable rage; the bloody path left behind him are predominantly accidents—just as the first time, as a child, when he defended his mother by murdering his stepfather; when he protected a schoolmate from an escaped prisoner. First we see the wooden sword in young Sasha’s hand, then the bloody corpse on the floor.

Restrained and disciplined, Yankovsky never allows The Sword Bearer to dab even a toe into X-Men territory. Preferring to show the aftermath of Sasha’s emotions, at no point does the director attempt to ape western testosterone set pieces. We never see, for example, Sasha racing down a hall, blade extended, mowing down assailants. (The best we gorehounds get is a shot at the rear of a police van, a cascade of blood spilling through open doors and around Sasha’s boots, once belonging inside the half-dozen men escorting him to prison.) He’s not a superhero; the blade isn’t a curse. It’s just a part of him he doesn’t understand. He can’t even extend it at will, to prove his story to a policeman who is eager to hear any rational explanation. When it does emerge, he can cross-cut forests, cleave tractor trailers in half. Even then, Yankovsky keeps the blade obscured by action, more a force than a weapon. When we watch Sasha slice off the tail of a helicopter, we realize that the blade’s length is as infinite as his rage and grief, and many more times powerful.

Going into the film blind, The Sword Bearer became for me a very pleasant surprise, but one that demanded my attention (and not just because all the subtitles were about a full-second off, making following the subdued story even more difficult). Not everything is explained but then not every detail is necessary. All we have to no that a very special man is in love with a very special woman, that they’re both damaged in their own way, and that the world is a cold, hard place that has no interest in understanding them. It’s a very simple story wrapped up in an atypical narrative.

Depending on your own tolerance for deliberately-paced movies (what some may call “boring” and not unjustified), you’ll either find The Sword Bearer remarkable or intolerable. And for this reason, in addition to the subtitles and the presence of actors who may be acclaimed in Russia but are virtually unknown here (until they’re hired to play thuggish villains for the next Jason Statham movie), Mechenosets did not receive a wide release in the U.S. It played festivals in the big cities but was not released on domestic DVD. But even abroad, the pacing and open-ended questions, primarily concerning Sasha’s origins and any explanation of the blade, have left many viewers frustrated.

It’s at this point in the review when I suppose I should ask, pretentiously, if subtlety and allegory have been completely bred out of our DNA, regardless of location. Because I found meaning and satisfaction instead of explanation doesn’t raise me above or place me below another viewer. The Sword Bearer is a story about a scream told in a whisper. Whether you dig it or not will depend on how loudly you want to hear a story like this and when you’re willing to hear it.

D.C. CAB (1983)

2011-09-20T17:44:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, the phrase “Directed by Joel Schumacher” was not met with the revulsion and disgust that it is today. Rather, the director was considered with thoughtful indifference. It wasn’t too long ago that filmgoers left a Schumacher film thinking “gee, that could have been a lot worse”, instead of cursing the god that created him. Flamboyant in life but not in his art, Schumacher can be best-thought of as a competent director, serviceable perhaps, before he started putting nipples on everything. In the mid-‘80s, the young writer and director had perhaps already risen to the height of his adequacy with back-to-back successes appealing to the shallow youth in us all, St. Elmo’s Fire (1986) and The Lost Boys (1987). Today, like most of his pre-Batman efforts, these are great soundtracks in search of better movies, but they still managed to rake in enough money at the box office to garner him subsequent work. After writing two flops—Car Wash and The Wiz—Schumacher made his directorial debut with the Lily Tomlin hit, The Incredible Shrinking Woman. And that led him to perhaps his most infamous achievement, D.C. Cab.

Like Car Wash and The Wiz (I guess), D.C. Cab is another street-wise, working class adventure set against a flashy backdrop of poverty. The set up is fresh from dozens of previously made movies: a group of multiculture misfits working in the same environment learn to unite thanks to the intervention of a brand new white boy. In this case, obviously, the titular company is a bottom-feeding hack outfit headed by Barney Miller’s own Max Gail, the fleet driven by the likes of Mr. T, Paul Rodriguez, Bill Maher, Marsha Warfield, Gary Busey, Charlie Barnett and the Barbarian Brothers. The new white boy with the big ideas is Adam “No Relation” Baldwin as Gail’s nephew. The movie has less of a plot than it does a board game goal: get the misfits from start to finish, band together and keep the company from folding into bankruptcy. Accomplish this by first focusing on the disparity of personalities, loudening the profanity and sex jokes (and racist and homophobic jokes, bless their hearts), and then manufacturing some larger-than-life crisis that will point out how these aforementioned differences can be cast aside when push comes to shove and lives are at stake.

You’ve seen this movie. Maybe not this movie, but surely Porky’s, Animal House, Quicksilver, Police Academy. There’s nothing wrong with this formula. It works. It always works. It always will work, no matter how much Paul Rodriguez you throw in there. It even works in spite of the movie’s structure, which seems to operate under the philosophy, “It doesn’t matter if one scene has anything to do with the next so long as we have a cool song playing, somebody swears, and, oh, what the hell, put a lap-dissolve at the end.”

Take, for example, the pre-credits sequence in which the shrill and soon-to-be-hated-at-least-by-me Barnett is chased in his cab by a platoon of other cabs, their drivers wearing comically-sinister rubber masks. After blocking in his ride, they corner him in a dark and locked parking garage. Just as you’re sure that the African-American man wearing a ‘fro of curlers is about to meet his doom, laughter ensues, masks are removed revealing vaguely-recognizable actors playing future characters. Cue credits and then never reference this situation again (except in a vague way towards new white boy Baldwin, who is told that all new drivers have to make “the run”). As a hook, it doesn’t work. As a character-building sequence, it doesn’t work. But as an ease-in for the target demographic, the pot-heads, it works like a dream. So do the multiple brawls, the dirty jokes and every scene where Gary Busey seems to be taunting an off-camera orderly armed with a tranquilizer gun.

In Sweet Liberty (1986), Alan Alda’s character posits that a movie has to contain three elements to be successful with modern audiences: 1.) Disrespect of authority; 2.) Destruction of property; 3.) People taking their clothes off. Check, check, and check. So while D.C. Cab wasn’t the box office smash the studio had hoped for—even with focusing all advertising on Mr. T, who’d become an overnight sensation following the previous year’s smash hit Rocky III—it led a long productive life in video stores and on cable television. This cemented the careers of Schumacher and T, at least and allowed Rodriguez to escape unscathed for another decade. Baldwin would move forward into much more psychopathic roles, culminating in the most beloved character of all time, Firefly’s Jayne Cobb. Eventually, Maher would hang up whatever persona he’d been trying to cultivate as an actor and would evolve into a political satirist. Marsha Warfield found a home on Night Court. And the “special guest star” Irene Cara would survive her inconsequential cameo appearance to become the singing sensation she had been three years prior.

What makes D.C. Cab so fascinating is the sheer number of famous faces present in the film. While working on the index for a collection of reviews, I discovered that 1-out-of-every-6 people I cited either had the movie on their resume or a six-degrees tie to it somehow. Bring the movie up to fellow ‘80s children and you’ll get fond memories from many provided they hadn’t actually seen it since grade school. It’s slipshod editing and seemingly-random direction definitely qualifies it for “guilty pleasure” status. There are plenty of good lines, though Busey gets most of them.

Dell: Heck nobody goes in the army any more, except blacks. Someday one nigger's gonna wakeup and say, "We got the guns and the mustard gas and the tanks, hey were runnin the army!" And they're gonna take over the whole damn country and we'll be in with them already - we'll be Token Whites. Think about it.

Dell: Bruce Lee ain't dead you know. They got him frozen in carbonite down under Chatsworth. They're gonna melt him down as soon as the economy gets better.

However, it’s Barnett, the most grating character, who gets the best tag of any movie of the era, because of a deadpan delivery that had to have been jettisoned early in favor of his shrill “jive-turkey” schtick. It begins when none other than Timothy Agoglia Carey sits down in the back of Barnett’s cab:

Tyrone: Where to?
Angel of Death: I am the Angel of Death. Take me to hell.
Tyrone: Got any luggage?

In short, it’s a movie that doesn’t ask anything of its audience. By the early ‘80s, this sort of controlled chaos was so familiar, the paint-by-numbers plot was unnecessary. The Underdogs become the Good Guys in the end. That’s the slug line that undoubtedly sold the script, that’s sold thousands upon thousands of scripts since the beginning of Hollywood. Nothing else matters except for the number of cars involved in the crash, the big set piece and how insane the various characters are allowed to be. Schumacher could have delivered a movie cobbled out of left-over frames from the countless comedies that came before it and it still would have made money. It’s the mantra of Meatballs: “It Just Doesn’t Matter”. A paycheck for the fantasy football cast; something to flash across the eyes in an air conditioned theater during a hot summer day. Subversive only to those who still believe that “they shouldn’t be allowed to say stuff like that!”

This low-expectation continues to attract the audiences today. There’s no difference between D. C. Cab and Hot Tub Time Machine or The Hangover or Hall Pass save the faces occupying the blank spaces where characters should be. We’re living in a green society; what better recyclable material than Hollywood comedy?

THE FRONT PAGE (1974)

2011-09-02T19:45:00.000-04:00

With the print industry dying a slow, strangling, agonizing death in the current climate of iEverythings, it seems not only fitting and nostalgic but grimly ironic to take a look at a story that has both lionized and demonized both the newspaper business and the crack journalists who work for The Fourth Estate. Written in 1928 by former Chicago writers Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page is as true in its cynicism as it is today, performed on stage almost constantly since its pre-Crash premiere and, without taking into consideration the numerous television versions, has been directly adapted for the big screen no less than four times.

The gist: The Front Page takes place on the day before poor Earl Williams, commie sympathizer or dupe and the alleged murderer of a black policeman, will be led to the gallows. Crammed inside the Press Room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building, reporters from most of the city big sheets play poker and make horrifically inappropriate jokes about the various horrors of the world as well as Earl’s big kick-off. Enter Hildebrand “Hildy” Johnson, crack reporter from the Chicago Examiner, there to say goodbye to the gang. He’s off to get married and get a respectable job. More importantly, he’s looking to get out from under the Examiner’s tyrannical editor, Walter Burns, who’d commit murder to get that scoop-worthy headline. Suddenly, shots rip through the windows—Earl Williams has escaped! When the other hacks race out to the scene, Hildy stays behind to bask in the quiet. Through the window crashes Earl Williams—a meek little guy who’s been railroaded by the Chief of Police and the Mayor (a corrupt Chicago mayor? Such fancy!) for an election-week stunt. Hildy is faced with a dilemma. He can either leave with his fiancée, Peggy, as planned, and escape Burns and the soul-killing news biz forever, or he can stay behind, shelter Williams and write a piece that will exonerate him once and for all. But to do that, he’d need the help of the hideous con man, Burns.

Keppler: “This is my first hanging.”

Hildy: “Don’t worry kid, this is Williams’ first hanging too.”

The play’s first trip to the movies came about in 1931, starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O’Brien. (Don’t “who?” me! Menjou was the original “Billy Flynn” in Roxie Hart, basis for Chicago. O’Brien was friggin’ Father Connolly in Angels with Dirty Faces. “Who” indeed.) It played pretty close to the original script with very little action occurring beyond the press room.

Murphy: “Update on the Williams hanging: Sheriff Hartman's just put 200 more relatives on the payroll to protect the city against the Red Army, which is leaving Moscow in a couple of minutes. Bet a dime.”

Arguably the most famous and beloved of the adaptations is Howard Hawks’ near-perfect His Girl Friday with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. (Spin the dial, so to speak, to one of the cable movie sections, guaranteed it’s playing on one of them this very minute.) Working from Charles Lederer’s script, Hawks flips Hildy’s gender and makes her the ex-wife of Walter Burns, which bringsWalter into the story earlier and adds not only the much-needed team-up but a bit of Hayes-approved sexual tension. It also stars the fastest-spoken dialogue in movie history.

Thus far, the last remake of The Front Page is an untidy and unpleasant little mess from 1988, starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner called Switching Channels, the setting a television news stage, rather than the press room. Mean-spirited and misanthropic rather than cynical, this movie reportedly suffered from the two leads’ mutual abject hatred of each other, which is reflected in the film’s energy. If it weren’t for Joan Cusak as a loony assistant, the movie would be a complete wash.

Between the sublime and the hideous is adaptation #3 which premiered in 1974. Starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Directed by Billy Wilder. With a script by Wilder and his astute partner I.A.L. Diamond. Gold, right? Sheer gold. Run with it, Duffy and let it hit the streets!

Well, gold plated, at least. Still a good value with today’s market.

Hildy: [to Sherriff Hartman] “You what I think, Hartman? I think you let Earl Williams out yourself so he could vote for you next Tuesday.”

By the ‘70s, Wilder’s career was faltering under the weight of his own greatness. Bitter at the Hollywood industry that he more or less owned in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Billy made some odd choices. For one thing, the snappy Hechtian/MacArthurian dialogue was “sweetened” by Wilder and Diamond, mostly to great effect, but so married were they to their own words that they forbade the rapid-fire overlapping delivery that made His Girl Friday such a hit. Even Lemmon and Matthau wanted to keep the furious pace, but Billy the writer wouldn’t hear of it, likely in direct opposition of Billy the Director.

Walter Burns: “Jeez, Hildy. why didn't you tell me? Kid, I woulda thrown you a little farewell party... “

Hildy: “Oh, no, no, no! I know your farewell parties! When Ben Hecht was leaving for Hollywood, you slipped a micky in his gin fizz. It took four of us to get on the California Limited.”

Walter Burns: “Ben Hecht! Used to be one of the greatest newspaper men I ever knew. Look at him now, sitting under palm trees writing dialogue for Rin Tin Tin.”

Secondly, given the freedom to not only use the spicy language of pre-code Front Page but also the saltier speech of the ‘70s, the use of profanity is almost constant. Not a big deal today, when Baby’s Day Out sounds like Scarface (hyperbole intended), but for a movie set in 1929, the language sounds incongruous, even if it is actually more accurate. All the “goddamns” and “bullshits” muck up the rhythm of the patter moreso than the line-then-next-line delivery.

Hildy: “I wouldn’t cover the Last Supper for you if you had it in the Pump Room of the Palmer House!”

Thirdly, when you go to see a Lemmon/Matthau movie, you expect the two of them to be in the room together for more than just the third act. By hewing to the original Hecht and MacArthur structure, Walter Burns (Matthau) is kept at the Examiner for far too long. Not that Lemmon (as Hildy) isn’t entertaining by himself (or surrounded by Charles Durning, Herb Edleman, a glib Harold Gould, a giddy Austin Pendelton), but the give-and-take that made The Odd Couple and The Fortune Cookie so wonderful and electric is held off to the point where the movie seems to slog along until the last forty minutes. Once Walter Burns finally shows up, things pick up steam again, but by then the meanness and the hysteria and the overacting (Carol Burnett and Vincent Gardenia) has worn a path through the audience.

Like Switching Channels later, Wilder’s The Front Page adds too many barbs to the wire. The cynicism doesn’t seem borne out of world-weariness on the parts of the newspapermen and the corrupt governing system, but out of some sort of utter hatred for the world. Some may find nihilism and fatalism funny, but here it crams the other elements against the wall. Wilder made his career revealing the skuzzy side of the world to the audience with black-humor. Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard spring immediately to mind when you think of cultural skewering and reversal of expectation. But towards the end of his career, Billy had started to see the world through smoked glass. That antagonism spilled into his work and literally weighed it down (just as it would in Fedora and Buddy Buddy).

For those like myself who believe that bad Billy Wilder is better than no Billy Wilder at all, The Front Page is hardly an appalling waste of time, but far from honorable satire. Maybe if Wilder had updated it to the decade in which it were made, the culture shock may have been lessened, the jokes seeming a little more biting with current issues addressed. But the idea of a “Red”, who’s reputation was made for sticking “Release Sacco and Vanzetti” into fortune cookies would have been too trite for 1929. In 1974, it was almost insulting and doesn’t adequately translate. (Although the idea that Williams got beaten up by a crowd of pimps for trying to get hookers to unionize is definitely funny.)

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: “Tell me, Mr. Williams, were you unhappy as a child?”

Earl Williams: “Not really. I had a perfectly normal childhood.”

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: “I see. You wanted to kill your father and sleep with you mother.”

Earl Williams: [to Sheriff Hartman] “If he's gonna talk dirty ...”

Even Billy himself would admit that The Front Page was, despite its moderate box office success, a mild misfire. “I'm against remakes in general,” he said, (Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography, Charlotte Chandler, 2002.) “Because if a picture is good, you shouldn't remake it, and if it's lousy, why remake it? . . . It was not one of my pictures I was particularly proud of.”

It wasn’t the remake status that held The Front Page back. The themes are universal even today in the era of information saturation: political malfeasance and nonfeasance; reporters out for blood to smear across their headlines (or click-through links) and the weariness that comes from a slow loss of soul; equally bloodthirsty readers ready to form a pitchfork-bearing Simpsons mob at the slightest change of wind, seeing injustice in jaywalking and racism in Neopolitan ice cream.

Think what Hecht and MacArthur would make of today’s “journalism”? Live blogging from anywhere, just so you can say “First”. (“First” being the new scoop.) Letters to the editor morphed into virulant posts left on Yahoo! News, revealing the basest of all human traits as misanthropy spews across the screen. Aside from the technology, nothing has changed since 1928, certainly not human behavior when one thinks nobody is looking.

BUDDY BUDDY (1981)

2011-08-26T12:05:00.000-04:00

In 1966, Billy Wilder wrote and directed what was considered to be his last inarguably great movie, The Fortune Cookie. Notable for many things, particularly the first on-screen pairing of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, a Golden Globe nod and an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Matthau, nominations for the screenplay by Wilder and his long-time collaborator I.A.L. Diamond, as well as for Cinematography and Art Direction. It was a box office hit and solidified that Wilder was an unmitigated Hollywood maestro.

Four years later, after a series of stalled productions, Wilder wrote, produced and directed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, meant to be an “event” picture it was butchered by United Artists and opened to critical applause but little financial success. Following that came a series of failures: Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974—surprisingly given the reteaming of Matthau and Lemmon) and Fedora, a movie whose tumultuous production almost forced Wilder into retirement.

After another three years, give or take, Wilder began to complain publically that he was being discriminated against in Hollywood, because of his age, because of his last few “failures”. Movie culture had changed underneath him. What used to be daring—the smoldering infidelity of Double Indemnity, promiscuity of Some Like It Hot and The Apartment—was now tame in the time of Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Jaws, Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate.

Then MGM acquired a quiet French black comedy from 1973, L'Emmerdeur, starring Lino Ventura and Belgian pop singer Jacques Brel. Screenwriter Francis Veber (Les Fugitifs, Le Chevre) adapted his play Le contrat specifically for Edouard Molinaro (La Cage aux Folles). A hitman named Milan who checks into a hotel to take out his next target, a witness for an upcoming trial. In the room next door is François Pignon, who keeps trying to kill himself now that his wife left has him. The resulting story is a comedy of misadventure as Milan is forced to deal with Pignon in one way or another to keep the sad sack from attracting unwanted attention.

In France, L’Emmerdeur was extremely successful (Veber himself would direct a remake in 2008), to the point that the Yiddish word “schlemiel” is translated as “François Pignon”. In the United States, L’Emmerdeur was released as A Pain in the A__, finding a decent-sized audiences in the Art Houses and on the emerging world of cable television (especially a young upstart channel called Home Box Office). MGM figured they had nothing to lose by remaking it for the casual, non-subtitle-reading American viewer, and to that end, they brought it to Billy Wilder.

Wilder, desperate to get back to work after a three-year black-out, leapt perhaps too quickly at the opportunity. He and Diamond hammered out the finished script in a matter of weeks and embarked on a whirlwind production. Later in life, Wilder would say, “If I were to meet all of my movies in a room, Buddy Buddy is the one I wouldn’t want to face.”

Buddy Buddy begins with a pair of murders—a mailman leaves a bomb in the box of one man and a milkman poisons the cowjuice of another. Both are the blank-faced Trabucco, who is working his way through the witnesses of a huge upcoming land fraud trial. Last on his list is mobster Rudy “Disco” Gambola, who has turned state’s evidence for the prosecution. “Hello Mr. Green?” he says, calling his bosses. “Oh, Mr. White... let me speak to Mr. Brown...” (Sound an eentcy bit familiar?)

Trabucco checks into a hotel room, begins to assemble his high-powered rifle when a loud noise comes from the room next door. Through the connecting passage, he finds Victor Clooney lying unconscious in his bathtub, around his neck a noose made from the curtain sash. Since Victor tried to hang himself from the shower pipe, water pours into the room and he’s now in more danger of drowning than strangling.

From there, Clooney continues to inadvertently make Trabucco’s life miserable. Mistaking the hitman’s insistence that Eddie the Bellboy not involve the police—“Can’t you see this man needs compassion? The warmth of human understanding?”—for genuine concern and the extended hand of friendship, Clooney bedevils the poor hitman to no end. Forced to assemble and disassemble his rifle more times than is necessary, Trabucco tries to first get incapacitate Clooney by tying him to a chair (“You’re making it very difficult for me to like you!”), then rid himself of Clooney entirely—thwarted by the sudden appearance of cops escorting a woman in labor to the hospital—then pawn him off at the same sex clinic where Clooney’s wife left him for the head therapist.

Each time, Clooney returns to wreak more havoc on Trabucco’s life and plans. This was his last job, of course; the one he could retire on. The one that could get him killed if he botched it. “This was gonna be it. Enough money to retire on because in this kind of work you don't qualify for social security.” An easy gig if he could just get this schlemiel of a François Pignon off his damned back! Along the way he grows to, well if not like Clooney per ce, at least begrudgingly tolerate him. This change in relationship lead to the movie’s best moments: those involving Matthau, Lemmon and their trademark back-and-forths.

Clooney: Have you ever been married, Mr. Trabucco?

Trabucco: Once but I got rid of her. Now I just lease. I once knew a guy, he had two heart-attacks. So they put in him a pace-maker. So his wife divorced him. She said it was interfering with the tv-reception.

Clooney: Are you from L.A.?

Trabucco: Not necessarily.

Even with the winning team of Matthau and Lemmon, and a bizarre supporting cast of Paula Prentiss, Klaus Kinski, future MacGyver co-star Dana Elcar and an early appearance from Ed Begley, Jr., Buddy Buddy never really gets up a full head of steam. Perhaps hewing a little too closely to the understated pacing of L’Emmerdeur, Wilder’s and Diamond’s manages a lot of chuckles but never the belly-laugh you’d expect from the team. The movie transitions from one scene to the other in fits and starts and only really comes into its own when Clooney is finally tired of the humiliation and becomes his own man, to defend Trabucco.

Trabucco: Do me a favor.

Clooney: Yes ?

Trabucco: Fuck off.

Cue screeching brakes and an entire audience suffering whiplash from severe brain disconnect. In the late ‘70s, such language was far from uncommon. The double-entendre had already been demoted to single and before too long, even Julie Andrews would pop her top (in Blake Edwards’ S.O.B.). But there was an oddness to hearing the word “fuck” come out of Walter Matthau. There’s also something unsettling watching Lemmon discuss orgasms and penis size with Prentiss and Kinski (heck, Kinski playing a man any woman would leave her husband for is unnerving enough). With one word, Wilder crashed into New Hollywood.

It wasn’t a new word for him. In fact, in his private life, he was known to enjoy using it. Probably even enacting it. I don’t like to think about that, though. Matthau was notoriously grumpy, acerbic, misanthropic. But he didn’t work blue—especially not with Lemmon. MGM saw a way to bring a tired workhorse in from the pasture for another go, thinking it would be a cheap way of getting a moderate hit on the screen. In an attempt to “spice things up” for modern audiences, Wilder and Diamond failed to realize that along with new viewers, older Wilder fans still came to the movies to see a Wilder Movie. That had been his point all along. He wasn’t too old and he was still big, Norma Desmond big and you don’t get bigger than that.

Those unfamiliar or dismissive of Wilder may think me prudish right now but the trouble was, Wilder didn’t work blue because he didn’t have to. Wilder was an intellectual and thrived by confounding the censors. He hid the dirty stuff between the lines of dialogue, between fade downs and fade ups. It was akin to Groucho Marx exposing himself to an audience—it wasn’t beneath him; there was no need. Wilder and Diamond’s script worked too hard for the new viewers. They gave them what they wanted and you should never do that. Wilder always gave the audience something new, something they hadn’t known they’d wanted. That was the key to Billy’s brilliance. Desperation for work forced him to sell out in every sense of the word. He didn’t make the movie he wanted to see, but what he wanted to sell.

Buddy Buddy failed at the box office but did reasonably well on cable. The critics jumped up and down on it for many reasons, language not being among them. The disinterested pace, the uncomfortable characters. Matthau was criticized for not being Clint Eastwood, whom many felt would have been a better choice for Trabucco, a sentiment that was shared by both Wilder and Matthau. And like Trabucco, many found Clooney very difficult to like. For years, Klaus Kinski denied he was even in it! (Think about that—you’re in the room with Kinski, the movie is on TV and he’s just shaking his head. “But…but Klaus—that’s you! You’re right there! Look, see you on screen?”) At the time, it seemed like a sour note on which to end. For Wilder, it would be the last feature he’d direct.

With thirty years of hindsight, Buddy Buddy can be viewed as a slight, flawed, but still reasonably solid offering from Billy Wilder. It wasn’t The Fortune Cookie, but the nice thing was Billy never sold you the same thing twice. In fact, it’s fun to watch it back-to-back with L’Emmerdeur for both the similarities and the differences. They’re both low energy comedies with light chuckles, no guffaws. They’re even both sporadically available on DVD (although Buddy Buddy is currently only available on a Spanish import).

While it’s not the case, it could be easy to leave a discussion of Buddy Buddy on one exchange of dialogue. It’s tempting, but it’s only partially true, just like the sentiment behind it:

Clooney: Here I am, almost didn't make it.

Trabucco: Almost doesn't count.

BUTCHER, BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER (aka NIGHT WARNING) (1980)

2011-08-24T11:16:00.000-04:00

In 1982, Vipco, the UK distributors of Abel Ferrara’s 1979 sleaze classic Driller Killer, committed the apparently reprehensible act of advertising their new acquisition by buying full page ads in British movie magazines. To further identify their new release as Driller Killer, Vipco had the audacity to include in their ads the movie’s box art. By these very acts of savagery, the company destroyed a large chunk of the British people’s moral fabric. A large number of concerned citizens, despite few of their ranks having actually seen the movie, complained to the Advertising Standards Agency to protest the film’s release and, perhaps, its very existence. All of this was spawned by the promotional artwork: a special-effects shot of the title character and one of his victims, a power drill between the two and splashes of red around. Either a movie called Driller Killer should have fluffier promotional art, or is grossly insensitive to those who may have succumbed to drill killings, in either event, it was wrong in its sheer and utter wrongness.

Add to this a nice little old woman named Mary Whitehouse, head of The National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, for whom moral outrage was her tea, biscuits and oxygen. An outspoken crusader against anything not wholesome and good in the British media, she was a watchdog who vigilantly harassed the BBC and, in particular, the BBC's Director General, Sir Hugh Greene. This made her a bit of a punching bag for satire shows, but that mattered not one whit to her. But then, another smartass distributor came along, this time with the brilliant idea of a publicity stunt. In order to promote the United Kingdom’s release of Cannibal Holocaust, Go Video wrote an anonymous letter to Whitehouse expressing their own outrage at this film’s release, nay, the film’s very exposure to light! Whitehouse responded as they’d hoped and decried the film, holding up the letter as proof that we’d all gone to hell and it was up to NVLA to save us all. What neither Go Video nor Vipco realized was that if you get enough busy-bodies riled up, someone will have to pay attention just to get them to shut up. And the morality police are always the fastest to mobilize, to prove that their civilization is good and decent and any outside contradiction is simply the motivations of minority freaks, sleaze-merchants, pimps and drug dealers.

Thus was born the Video Recordings act of 1984 and the rise of The Video Nasty. Under the authority of the British Board of Film Classification, and their enforcer the Director of Public Prosecutions (DDP), dozens of movies were yanks from the shelves of video stores and many were banned outright from classification, meaning that they would not be shown to anyone in the public, under any condition. And one of the movies that fell victim to this nationwide ban was Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker (also known as Night Warning), which dealt less with its gory killings and more with its intrinsic themes of sexuality of both the budding male and the repressed female, homophobia, reverse-Oedipalism, incest and the emotional results of a tragic loss early in one’s life. An exploitation film on the surface, it was nonetheless nominated for a Saturn Award for the Best Horror Movie of 1982 by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror, but has never been seen in the UK. And thanks in part to that country’s suppression, it’s become a veritable lost film today.

When Billy Lynch (Jimmy McNichol) was three-years-old, his parents were killed in a horrible (and lengthy) car crash, leaving him in the care of his aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrell). Now seventeen, Billy is about to graduate high school with the hope of going to college on a basketball scholarship. Aunt Cheryl, who displays an uncomfortable amount of barely-appropriate affection towards Billy, does not want to see him go. Playful kidding aside and familial reticence aside, she tells him point blank, “College is for rich kids and people with brains. You wouldn't fit in.”

Chalking it up more to “Oh, that Aunt Cheryl,” he dismisses it as one of her eccentricities, like her insistence on his drinking milk every morning and waking him up for school by pawing at his naked back and purring in his ear. Jimmy is just a wide-eyed dumb kid with a pretty photographer girlfriend, Julie (Julia Duffy soon to be of Newhart fame), and a coach that really believes in him. Things’ll all work out.

On the other hand, Aunt Cheryl is clearly a sexually repressed, regretful spinster and Billy’s imminent departure raises both her desperate libido and homicidal tendencies. In an attempt to seduce their television repairman, she gets dolled up in the best fashion she remembers. But Mr. Repairman Phil Brody (Caskey Swaim) refuses her attention. Enraged, Cheryl stabs the man to death in their kitchen, just as Billy returns home from school. Breaking down into hysteria, she insists that Brody tried to rape her and that the killing was in self-defense.

Police detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) sees things otherwise. The way he has it figured, it was Billy on the handle-end of that knife, enraged at seeing his Aunt in a romantic tryst. Cheryl is only covering for Billy. It’s obvious that Billy, tall, thin, sensitive Billy, is one of those blood-crazed homosexuals. The more he digs, the more convinced he becomes because Coach Landers (Steve Eastin) is also gay, and that he’d been in a relationship with Brody! And if Brody was “one of those”, what interest would he have in raping a woman? That can only mean one thing: a homosexual love triangle. Doing his duty, he pressures Landers to resign to remove that unhealthy influence from the impressionable young men on the team who have to shower together yet keep eyes up.

Carlson, who isn’t above using a gun to intimidate a suspect into a confession, becomes obsessed with Billy and eradicating his vile gay ways. (Which levers more suspicion on Carlson, if you ask me.) Fortunately, his partner, Det. Cook (Britt Leach—you’d know him if you saw him), doesn’t believe the whole triangle, er, angle, and starts doing some digging on his own, against Carlson’s orders. When he discovers that the cause of the crash that killed Billy’s parents was tampered brake lines, Cook is told to forget all about. Go on vacation and keep your nose out of it! Which is darned good detective work, again if you ask me. Why go with facts when hunches are so much more the policeman’s trade?

With the police watching them, Aunt Cheryl is even more insistent that Billy stays with her. The day of the Big Game complete with a scout from Denver University, which could make or break Billy’s educational career, she makes sure that he drinks his milk beforehand. Once it’s been properly prepared with some special medication. Billy not only blows the game but collapses unconscious on the court. So back to Aunt Cheryl he goes. But not to school. “You don't want to go back, you've learned enough. Besides, it's full of perverts!”

Now, in addition to both Carlson and Cook nosing around into their lives, Julie decides that Aunt Cheryl is definitely not on the up-and-up and begins her own investigation. This, of course, leads to deflowering Billy and getting caught by Aunt Cheryl and a brand new psychotic hissy fit from her.

The next morning, Aunt Cheryl has chopped her flowing locks into a shorter hairstyle resembling that of a startled badger. All the better to show off her wild and crazy eyes. Which prompts Billy to join the separate investigations, hoping to uncover the truth about his parents’ death and the real source of Aunt Cheryl’s obsession, now spiked in the red on the Creepy Meter. The real dilemma for Billy is who does he protect himself from first: Aunt Cheryl or Det. Carlson?

While taking occasional dips into exploitation territory, Nightmare Maker / Night Warning is more a character-driven thriller than a horror film. The bulk of the gore is crammed into the final act when Aunt Cheryl is full-blown bananas, and even that is largely restrained, more shocking in its rage and intensity than for its spurting red. On the surface, we have a pair of incredibly unnerving villains, a shocking decapitation, a naked Julia Duffy and an early appearance by Bill Paxton (as the team bully, Eddie), so that should be more than enough to lure even the vaguely interested.

But the screenplay by Stephen F. Breimer and Alan Jay Glueckman and Boon Collins (the unequivocal genius between Abducted and Abducted II: The Reunion), really packs a lot of social and psychological commentary in what could have been a routine slasher flick. Obviously the writers had strong feelings about homophobia and abuse of authority because the character of Carlson is such an toxic force in the film, and Bo Svenson does a good job of keeping the cop a dimension ahead of what could have been characture. While the direction by veteran television William Asher (the inventor of the television sit-com with hits like Our Miss Brooks, I Love Lucy and Bewitched) is serviceable and he excels at keeping up the claustrophobic and near-unsanitary atmosphere, he pays particular care to the scenes between Billy and Aunt Cheryl. This could be because of his tempestuous relationship with his own abusive and alcoholic mother drawing him to the material. Regardless, the scenes between Tyrell and Lynch are squirm-inducing and play not like exploitation but with real incestual overtones.

Tyrell, it should be noted, is the undisputed star of the movie. McNichol is only okay and Duffy is plucky and likable, Tyrell effortlessly transforms Aunt Cheryl from a lonely, sympathetic lady at one moment to a frightening immovable force in another. Her descent into psychosis is gradual, but when she hits bottom, it’s believable due to the surprisingly subtle bits of business she employs at the beginning. The little Psycho moments with her and a mummified corpse in the basement are unnecessary. Aunt Cheryl is frightening because Tyrell brings her to life. She’s a real person who could live next door to just about anybody, caring for a kid who has no idea what a “real” relationship with a devoted relative is like. From his perspective, the constant touch of an aunt, her walking in on him while he showers, dresses, etc., is normal behavior.

So why would this movie get lumped in with the other video nasties? Likely it had nothing to do with the underlying content. The incestual nature is not explicit, nor is it acted upon, and in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, the homophobia would have been applauded. Perhaps the sexuality both on screen and smoldering beneath, combined with the schlocky violence and the demented adult themes were too many ingredients for the BBFC. The unpleasant stew was too difficult to shrug off as another splatter fest. That it remains effective even today should give you an idea of how it was received by a very staunch and proper government concerned with moral authority. For an outwardly-trashy horror flick, Nightmare Maker is rife with uncomfortable subtext.

For a country that can be worked up over an advertisement, the entirety of Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker might have been just too much for them.

BRUTE FORCE (1947)

2011-08-22T12:38:00.002-04:00

In 1948, Darryl F. Zanuck, president of 20^th Century Fox, called Jules Dassin into his office. “Jules,” he may have said, since I wasn’t there. “You’ve been named in Congress as a Communist Sympathizer. You’ll never work in Hollywood again. But that won’t be for a while so you still have time to make another movie for us.”

Dassin finished filming Night and the City but landed on the blacklist after principal photography and was kicked off the studio, barred from editing the final cut, no input on the score, no say on even how the credits would look. He fled to Europe to find work, but American distributors refused to handle movies made by anyone on the blacklist. He didn’t work as a film director again until the French heist film Rififi, 1955.

Flashback to 1947. Dassin was still well-respected as a director and artist in the U.S. and Fox had just released his latest film, a blistering attack on the penal system starring Burt Lancaster and Hume Cronyn: Brute Force. Filmed during the adolescence of the Dies Act, also known as the House Un-American Committee. Congress was intent on rooting Communists out from under every bed and was coming down hard on Hollywood. Ten Men, The “Hollywood Ten”, refused to answer their “$64 Dollar Question” (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States”) and wound up with a one-year prison term.

With a script by Richard Brooks, story by Robert Patterson, there’s an argument to be made that Brute Force was Dassin’s judgment of HUAC. Set in the island-built Westgate Prison, Brute Force focuses on a battle of wills between the prisoners and the guards, headed by chief of security, Captain Munsey (Cronyn). Munsey is a small man with a sadistic streak that broadens as his power increases. He derives pleasure from manipulating the prisoners to inform on one another; even greater pleasure from lying to them or threatening them into betrayal. The men are crammed six-to-a-cell and spend their days working in the various shops or in “the drainpipe”, digging a sewer system from one end of the island to the other. Due to overcrowding, not every convict has a job—unemployment even in prison—and with nothing to do with their time, they focus on ugly thoughts.

The men of Cell R17 watch through their window as Joe Collins (Lancaster) is brought out of solitary on yet another rainy night. Munsey watches with satisfaction as Joe sneers at him. “Perhaps now you’ve learned not to carry a shiv, Joe. Or are you still maintaining that it was planted on you?”

In point of fact, it was planted on Joe, under Munsey’s coercion. And his fellow cons know who the culprit is. Their method of justice is to force him, using blowtorches, into a licence plate press.

The prison’s gutless Warden Barnes (Roman Bohnen) is under pressure to improve discipline, under penalty of losing his position. The murders and fights do not look good to the public eye. Munsey takes advantage of the warden’s predicament and sows further seeds of destruction, particularly amongst Joe Collins and his cellmates in R17.

A close-knit bunch, not quite a gang, have shared their stories of what they’re in for. In nearly every case, it involves a woman. Tom Lister (Whit Bissell), for instance, didn’t have the money to buy his wife a fur coat, the only thing she ever wanted. He enables this purchase by embezzling from his employers. “Soldier” (Howard Duff) has been in and out of prison since WWII, when he smuggled food to a resistence faction led by his wife. When she guns down an informant, he takes the rap. His quest to get back to her in Italy has been one stretch after another. Spencer (the terrific John Hoyt) has all sorts of stories, all of them involving dames, schemes and the wild life.

Joe’s wife (Ann Blyth) is an invalid. He turns to crime to finance her recovery. On his last job, he’s thrown in prison and she has no idea that he’s there. Now, according to his friend and attorney, she’s succumbing to cancer and refuses treatment until Joe returns. That ups the ante for Joe and he’s determined to escape.

Turning to a con named Gallagher (Charles Bickford) working for the prison newspaper, Joe tries to get the older man in on the scheme. In response, Gallagher turns to his star reporter, Louie. “Louie? The bust out still on?”

Louie: “Everything works, we go next Tuesday.”

Gallagher: “Next Tuesday. It’s been ‘next Tuesday’ for 12 years. Twelve years from now it’ll still be next Tuesday. They promised me my parole. When I go, I’m walking out of here.”

Lancaster (Collins) “Next Tuesday?”

Munsey ups the pressure on the warden using little tricks like lying to Lister that his wife is filing for divorce, prompting the man to hang himself. This paves the way to accuse one of the cellmates of murder. Which must go on official report, enraging the officials above. Privileges are revoked. The prison’s doctor, Walters, can see the strain on the prisoners, takes on that strain himself and tries to purge it with alcohol. As the only thing close to a conscience Munsey has, Walters is agast at the captain’s treatment of the convicts. “Kindness is a weakness,” Munsey says, smug smile and flared nostrils. “Weakness is an infection that will destroy us all.”

“I know in medicine that you don’t cure a sick man by making him sicker,” says the Doc. “In here, you’re returning a man into the world a worse criminal than he came in.”

Finally, with the prison about to blow, Gallagher’s discovers that all parole has been revoked “indefinitely”. He joins Joe and the men from R17 in a plot to escape. The prisoners begin scrounging for things they need: tools, Molotov cocktails, a revolver. The plan is to hijack one of the mining cars from the drainpipe and storm the guard tower. But there’s a traitor in R17 and Muncie learns about the plan at once. To get the details, he tries to beat info out of one of the prisoners, using a rubber hose and Wagner arias. Sheer brutality. The powderkeg finally blows in a firey and remarkably violent climax and a horrific end for R17’s Judas.

Whether or not Brute Force is an analogy for HUAC and the treatment of the Hollywood Ten is certainly open to debate. The parallels are undeniable. The sadistic Muncie in control and drunk with power (Senator Joe McCarthy), undermining a superior whose hands are tied with indecision (President Truman, arguably) and without the authority to over-ride the power he’s given Muncie’s actions (Congress). The prisoners with their code against betrayal and naming names (Hollywood and the rest of America), and six men crammed into a single cell for things they’ve done or might have done (The Hollywood Ten, some who were genuine communists, some who just attended meetings). The lone difference is that The Hollywood Ten didn’t have a Joe Collins. They definitely had a traitor in their midst (director Edward Dmytryk, again arguably) and Hollywood had plenty as well. As for Dr. Walters, he may well represent anyone in Hollywood or the Heartland who saw what was happening but was too afraid, too helpless, to powerless to speak up too loudly.

When Dassin finally returned to the United States, the blacklist had ended not with a speeding mine car and a wall of flame into which Joe McCarthy was hurled, but, among other acts of bravery, with Otto Preminger’s public announcement of his hiring Dalton Trumbo to write Exodus. There was no violent uprising from the American People, no growl of rage from Burt Lancaster. Hollywood just waited HUAC out, until Commie actors no longer seemed like a problem in the face of yet another looming war. In the end, it wasn’t Dalton Trumbo who brought an end to HUAC, but Dylan Thomas’ prescient words: “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”

THE FRONT (1976)

2011-08-21T18:32:00.000-04:00

“They’re selling the Cold War, Howard. And they use the Blacklist for anyone who isn’t buying.”

“I have here in my hand a list of 205,” said Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Senator from Wisconcin. “A list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” The day was Lincoln Day, February 9, 1950. Senator McCarthy was speaking to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, WV. “The State Department is infested with Communists.”

By the end of the year, McCarthy had America convinced that there was a Communist under every bed. Every neighbor, even family members, could be covert Communist agents working to subvert the American way of life. Even if they’d done nothing more than marched in a Pro-Union parade or attended a single Socialist meeting as early as 1920, they were suspect. Commies wanted nothing more than to take down Capitalism, the Free Market, America. FDR’s “New Deal”, which helped get America’s poor and unemployed back on its feet, was the insidious plot that started it all, straight out of Karl Marx’s handbook.

And anyone who disagreed with the above was also, clearly, a Communist. That was why we had to hold the ideals of Soviet Russia, of Red China, with deep contempt. And there was no worse an agent of those countries and their twisted policies than Hollywood. Motion Pictures and television were battling each other for dominance in the ‘50s. And do you know why? It had nothing to do with entertainment. It had nothing to do with the new technology’s captivation of the American family. The two mediums were fighting each other to the top in order to establish the best position to pervert American minds. Hollywood was rife with Commies, Dupes, Sympathisers and Pinkos. Just look at all those Unions! What need did actors have of Unions except to subvert the American Free Market? The Reds were slipping their subliminal message into otherwise normal, decent motion pictures and television shows. These treasonous men and women had to be rooted out. They had to be stopped!

It was time to move forward with the greatest tool in the United States arsenal, the Dies Act of 1938, better-known as the House Un-American Committee or HUAC. It was time that Americans stand up and turn in anyone they might think was a Red, before Congress and they eyes of God. It had been effective in the past. In October 1947, the Committee had successfully subpoenaed hundreds of professionals in the entertainment industry and nailed many with the “$64 Dollar Question”: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States.”

Being a member was not illegal. Not then, not before, not now. Still, the first victims, the ones who saw real jail time for “Contempt of Congress” by exercising their First Amendment rights and not answering such a question, came to be known as The Hollywood Ten and included such luminaries as Ring Lardner, Jr., Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole and Edward Dmytyrk. Playright and screenwriter Berthold Brecht escaped prosecution by “naming names” of other former members of the Party. A few months after their conviction, Dmytyrk apologized as well, named names and saw his career recover. The rest remained silent and served the full year of their term, only to find every door slammed shut upon their release. The studios took HUAC seriously, refused to hire anyone “unfit”, though not officially. Officially, there was no blacklist. Congress had no right to tell anyone who they could or could not hire. But they could make suggestions. They could “suggest” that it might not be, for instance, in RKO’s best interest for Floyd Odium to remain the owner of the studio. It would be in better hands if Howard Hughes, industrialist and engineer, took over.

This continued throughout the ‘50s. Some professionals like Elia Kazan and Lee J. Cobb stepped right up, eager to co-operate with HUAC and named names like auctioneers. Kazan would even make a pro-snitching film, On the Waterfront (co-starring Cobb), which raked in the Academy Awards. Even those who initially stood up to the Committee, particularly Humphrey Bogart, who had formed of the Committee for the First Amendment with John Huston and Lauren Bacall, saw his own career and standing jeopardized and felt compelled to announce publically that he was in no way a Communist sympathizer in an article for Photoplay Magazine. Walt Disney, certainly no Union man, had already cofounded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA), a political action group cofounded by Walt Disney, that declared prerogatives for a “real” American movie: "Don't smear the free-enterprise system ... Don't smear industrialists ... Don't smear wealth ... Don't smear the profit motive ... Don't deify the 'common man' ... Don't glorify the collective".

Screenwriters held the only ace when it came to the blacklist. While the studios saw through attempts to simply apply pseudonyms to their scripts, they found it useful to employ “fronts”—men and women, ostensibly (and preferably) non-writers who had no political blackmarks to their names, who could submit scripts for the blacklisted under their own identities. This allowed the writers to do what they did to make a living, namely writing. It wasn’t a safe solution—J. Edgar Hoover’s had FBI agents around every corner—but it was all they had.

In 1976, former blacklisted director Martin Ritt and writer Walter Bernstein sculpted a movie around this very scenario and called it, logically, The Front. A young Woody Allen plays Howard Prince, part-time bookie, part time diner cashier, full-time loser and deadbeat, is approached by his friend, a blacklisted writer named Alfred Miller (Michael Murphy, never better), to apply his clean name to Alfred’s scripts. Howard would get a commission of 10%— “I’d be paying an agent that anyway,” says Miller—to turn in the scripts and pose as the real writer to directors and producers. Out of the goodness of his heart and the emptiness of his wallet, Howard shows his loyalty to Miller and agrees.

Miller had previously worked for a weekly dramatic television series called Grand Central, narrated by famous funnyman Hecky Brown (Zero Mostel, blacklisted 1951). Producer Phil Susssman (Herschel Bernardi, blacklisted 1952) is happy to have good scripts pouring in again. Idealistic script editor Florence Barrett (Andrea Marcovicci) falls in love with Howard through his scripts, believing him to be the real author of such touching, dramatic, substantive stories. Howard takes advantage of her mistaken feelings, hoping to find an angle that will allow him to keep Miller’s secret and still have Florence. He does this, mostly, by avoiding any conversation regarding his process or his work. Which leads him into dangerous waters whenever a rush script-change is required. He can’t write, so what the hell is he supposed to do when Sussman has him virtually locked in an office?

Through Miller’s work, Howard’s star begins to rise, hobnobbing with industry stars, finally able to afford to pay back those he owes. He finds that being a famous writer really suits him. So he takes on a couple more “clients”, fronting for other blacklisted writers. Before long, he’s giving them notes. “I can’t turn this one in. I just didn’t feel it was ready. Hey, it’s my name going on these scripts. They’re expecting my best work.” With evasion his best defense, Howard’s greed starts to get to him further, wanting to front for even more. “I want good guys, Alfie. Just being blacklisted isn’t enough.”

Inevitably, the dishonesty catches up to him. Hecky Brown comes under investigation by the film’s version of the Grim Reaper, Mr. Hennessey of the “Freedom Information Services”. Even though he writes what he is “suggested” to write, to apologize for his activities in the Party—“there was this girl—with a big ass.”—he still winds up on the blacklist and Sussman is forced to let him go. “They’re taking the part in a new direction,” says Sussman. “Besides, you’re too big for the show. You should have your own show. Call me in a couple of weeks. We’ll, uh, we’ll have dinner and talk about it. I, uh, I already have something in mind that’d be great for you.”

Devastated by Hecky’s firing and Sussman’s caving in to what she sees as immoral government demands, she quits and asks Howard to help her publish a pamphlet speaking out against the blacklist. When Howard refuses, advising her to return to Sussman and beg for her job back, he shows his true colors and breaks her heart.

During their split, he accompanies Hecky to the Hamptons, where a former venue has agreed to hire him for a lounge show. Howard doesn’t realize that Hecky has been instructed to find out more about Howard for a chance to have his name removed from the list. “They” want to know who Howard’s friends are, where he goes, what he does in his personal life.

“So,” Hecky says in the car along the way. “Where’d you go last weekend?”

“Oh, you know. Out. Here and there.”

“What do you do in your personal life?”

“You know, the usual.”

“The usual,” sighs Hecky. “I used to love the usual.”

But even these low-payng gigs aren’t what they used to be. The hotel manager and former friend stiffs Hecky for half of what he was offered and the comedian responds violently. “You’ll never work in this town again, you Commie sonofabitch!” Hecky hears as he’s dragged off of the manager and through the back door. The word has gotten around already that he was blacklisted. And being on the blacklist must mean that you’re a Communist, otherwise, why would you be on the blacklist? Not that there is a blacklist.

“All it takes is one man to stand up to these bastards,” Miller tells Howard. “One man to say that he’s not putting up with this. It’s illegal what they’re doing. It’s wrong.”

Eventually, HUAC comes for Howard. But all he has to do is play ball, read a prepared statement, and apologize for any wrongdoing. Then he’s in the clear. The night before his informal hearing, tragedy strikes, and Howard decides that maybe evasion isn’t enough of a tactic. He might not be that “one man” of Miller’s, but he’s all they had.

As subtle as HUAC itself, The Front is bitterly hilarious and really nails home the despair Congress left in its midst with its Red Scare. Like every domestic hysteria, HUAC was merely keeping the engine running with its campfire stories of the invisible enemy. It was something for the “little” people to focus on while corporate rights and interests were maintained and increased. It would justify the Korean War and give the military something to do. WWII was so last-decade. Screaming “Commie” would get the people to fall in line, vote for whoever would make them “feel safe”, namely those who served the best interest of Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, etc. Those already in power. Before long, even those in power bought their own bullshit, because that’s what always happens.

Communists (terrorists, gay marriage, abortion, Al Qaida, whoever, whatever) will destroy our Great Nation. When the “little people” are fighting amongst themselves, they forget all about revolution.

While Woody Allen is fine as Howard—he gets the most satisfying and cheer-worthy line in the movie—it’s Zero Mostel who steals the movie. Hecky’s story mirrors that of comedian Philip Loeb, who committed suicide after losing his career to the blacklist and Mostel’s performance is bombastic and devastating.

Officially, the blacklist came to an end in 1960, when Otto Preminger announced publically that he’d hired Dalton Trumbo to write the screenplay for Exodus. Small victories over the years—Hitchcock’s hiring of Norman Lloyd as associate producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Betty Hutton’s insistence of Jerry Fielding for musical director on her own self-titled CBS show—had chipped away at Congresses non-existent life-killer throughout the late ‘50s. But HUAC still had piles of bodies in its wake. Lee J. Cobb and Sterling Hayden were haunted until their deaths at their betrayal of friends and co-workers, while Kazan insisted until his death that he did the right thing and even won an honorary Academy Award for his overappreciated body of work.

But Miller had it right. It did only take one man to stand up, and then others followed. In real life, the “one man” could be considered to be Edward R. Murrow, the respected journalist who called HUAC on the carpet with an episode of his show See It Now titled "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy". But the “one man” may also have been John Henry Faulk, the host of a CBS radio comedy show, fired for his left leanings. He turned around and sued CBS for wrongful termination. While the case dragged on for years, it kept HUAC’s unconstitutional activity in the public eye. In 1962, Faulk won his suit and the decision meant that those behind the blacklist were legally liable for all professional and financial damages to those they had harmed. Suddenly, the “real Americans” were the ones crying, that they’d been “duped” by Congress. But there was little mercy for the “Congressional Sympathizers.”

Thirteen years of government running roughshod over the country before the people had had enough. Before allowing it to happen again, with the Viet Nam War. And again with Iran/Contra Scandal. And again. And again.

Who will be our “one man” today? Matt Damon? Right now, he’s all we have.

BREAKOUT (1975)

2011-08-20T11:40:00.000-04:00

In August, 1971, a helicopter touched down inside the yard of Mexico City's Santa Maria Acatitla prison for just ten seconds. It took off with two men: Carlos Antonio Contreras Castro, a counterfeiter from Venezuela, and Joel David Kaplan, a 44-year-old businessman from New York. Kaplan, a former courier for Fidel Castro and the nephew of molasses baron, Jacob M. Kaplan, had been convicted of the murder of his business partner, Louis Vidal, Jr., in 1962. Despite serious doubts that the body found was that of Vidal’s, despite Vidal’s association with drug dealers and gunsmugglers, who, Kaplan insisted, had orchestrated an elaborate plot to fake his own death and disappear, Kaplan was sentenced to 28 years in the Mexican prison. (Time Magazine)

With his uncle’s J.M. Kaplan Fund under a 1964 congressional investigation under suspicion of acting as a money laundering conduit between Latin America and the CIA, the younger Kaplan had very few people to turn to in either country. Were it not for his sister, Judith Kaplan Dowis, and a rock star lawyer from San Francisco named Vasilios Basil Choulos, Kaplan may very well have died inside the prison. Instead, Choulos enlisted the help of pilot Roger Hershner, who painted a bell helicopter to look like that of Mexico’s attorney general’s. One hundred-and-thirty-six guards were interrogated for complicity but no inside man had been employed. In point of fact, nearly the entire population of the prison, employees and convicts alike, had been inside watching the first recreational movie shown in more than two years. Attorney General Julio Sanchez Vargas resigned in disgrace.

Once in the U.S., Kaplan was granted immunity—Choulos told the Mexican government that his client was a CIA operative, though that really didn’t satisfy anyone and was unlikely to be true anyway. Kaplan, Choulos and Hershner sat down with writers Warren Hinckle, William Turner and Eliot Asinof and the sextet released a book, The Ten-Second Jailbreak: The Helicopter Escape Of Joel David Kaplan. The book was excerpted in Playboy and immediately optioned by Hollywood producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin “I love disaster!” Winkler, to be directed by Mike Ritchie and to star Kris Kristoferson.

The story was eventually filmed and released in 1975 as Breakout, directed by Tom Gries and starring Charles Bronson, Robert Duvall, Jill Ireland, Sherree North, Randy Quaid, Paul Mantee, John Huston and Emilio “El Indio” Fernadez. The bizarre and exciting story of both Kaplan and Choulos and the ten-second rescue had been boiled down to the finest of all formulas, released with the taglines, “Sentenced to 28 years in prison for a crime he never committed. Only two things can get him out—a lot of money and Charles Bronson!” and more confusing, “No prison can hold…Charles Bronson!”

If you take the facts into consideration, which one should never do apparently, Bronson plays neither Choulos nor Hershner, but an amalgam named Nick Colton, a border country bush pilot and occasional con-artist. He owns a Cessna and a fishery in a partnership with Randy Quaid (as ‘Hawkins’) and is approached one hot afternoon by Ann Wagner, wife of wrongly-imprisoned Jay Wagner. She employs Colton to fly her into Mexico but doesn’t tell him why. She does pay his price, “Twelve hundred…and thirty-nine dollars. And fifty-two cents.”

In Breakout’s scenario, Jay is the grandson of a fruit magnate with CIA ties played by John Huston, turning in his usual solid worn-out criminal mastermind character. Harris Wagner makes some vague reference to Jay’s free-spiritedness proving to be a detriment to both the company’s stockholders and the interest of the Central Intelligence Agency, and therefore has a slick lawyerly-looking op named Cable (Paul Mantee) to frame Jay for a random murder. Despite Jay being in Chile and the murder taking place in Mexico, holds no sway over the judge, who pronounces swift and lengthy sentence.

Jay’s first attempt at escape goes badly. After paying some trustees to smuggle him out in a sealed coffin, laying bent-backed on top of the box’s other occupant. Because the warden and General is played by “El Indio”—better known to audiences as the ruthless Mapache in The Wild Bunch—he lets the prisoners simply bury Jay alive for a while. Jay then falls prey to choppy editing because the next time we see him, he’s back inside the prison looking only slightly worse for wear.

Colton and Ann have barely touched down near the prison when they come under fire and are forced to leave a running Jay behind. Presumably, Colton yells at Ann the entire way back to his airfield, because he emerges with a sentence starting with “And—!” But Ann sweetens the deal with some more money, getting Colton to thinking, which also doesn’t turn out well. Attempting to use Myrna (North), an old girlfriend and current worn-down wife of the Deputy Sheriff, as misdirection for the horny guards, she refuses and he’s forced to put Hawk in drag instead. “With enough make-up, anyone can look like a whore,” says Myrna philosophically. Except, of course, for Randy Quaid, who makes a less-convincing female than Bugs Bunny. He’s beaten up by the guards (taking an extremely painful and realistic blow to the head from a rifle butt) and thus the situation becomes, for Colton, personal. Even though it wasn’t his ass thoroughly kicked.

Meanwhile, Jay’s health is deteriorating inside the cell and unbeknownst to him (but not us, since we saw the violent and Peckinpah-ish slow-mo opening) his new cellmate is the actual triggerman in Jay’s frame-up, forced at gunpoint to shoot who seems to be someone quite close to him. Either that or Sosa (Jorge Moreno) bawls at the drop of a bullet. How unmanly. Jay’s unhappy at being incarcerated, he takes it out on Ann during one of their conjugal visits, which becomes extremely non-conjugal, lessening our sympathy for him a bit, but because Jill Ireland plays the rape scene with the same distracted indifference that she uses throughout the film, it isn’t really that affecting.

Eventually, Colton gets around to taking some helicopter piloting lessons but proves to be terrible—until it counts, of course. By the third act, his convoluted-yet-simplistic escape plan involves a still-broken Hawk, Myrna (“Keep poppin’ up to ‘borrow’ my wife? She ain’t a lawnmower!” exclaims Deputy/Hubby Spencer) and his soon-to-be-married flight instructor. As we know from the real-life story, Colton successfully liberates Jay, but since this is a Bronson movie and he hasn’t gotten to punch anyone for over an hour, the suspense is continued at the customs department in Mexico City, where everyone finally confronts the slick, sleazy CIA fellow.

I don’t mean to be harsh towards Breakout in pointing out its silly beats. The movie is actually extremely watchable and a good deal of fun. Jill “Mrs. Bronson” Ireland is a real drawback, with her dull accent, glassy eyes and implausible wigs. Duvall is mostly wasted, spending his time in the dark or in hospital beds, leaving one with the suspicion that most of his story was left on the cutting room floor in favor of more Bronson. Huston’s two scenes with Mantee seem to be from a different movie and he pretty much vanishes by Act II.

So what we’re left with is a surprisingly-relaxed and easy-going Bronson. In his fifties by this point, his squinty eyes and weathered skin makes his face resemble a catcher’s mitt, but he’s obviously having a good time playing the gutsy make-it-up-as-he-goes hero. Breakout must have been a relief for him after playing all of his famed anti-hero roles in The Mechanic, Mr. Majestyk and Death Wish. Gries direction is almost absent, but there is some magnificent photography courtesy of DP Lucien Ballard and 2^nd Unit Director Bob Bender, including a real hero shot of the rescue’s commencement featuring Colton’s convertible, the Cessna and the helicopter all framed against the desert backdrop. North and Quaid are both solid—North’s trampy character and yen for Colton are real low comedy highlights—and both the escape and the climax are tense and well-staged.

There’s even a surprising death for one villain where we see his entire body shredded by a plane propeller, rivaling Hungry Joe’s death in Catch-22. It’s an obvious effect today, as many IMDb reviewers point out, but in the ‘70s it had to have been quite shocking. Hell, it still packs a jolt at the moment.

But the film’s loss is not including the real-life hero Vasilios “Bill” Choulos. A fascinating character in and of himself, Choulos made a name for himself in San Francisco as a crusader for the common man in fhe face of government, corporations and industry. One of the first attorneys to ever file a lawsuit against the tobacco industry, a man who traveled all over the world to represent the families of pilots killed in crashes of the faulty F-104 Starfighter “widow maker” jets, he also represented members of Sonny Barger’s Hell’s Angels in a high profile murder case and served on the defense team for Jack Ruby. His clients included Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary and Abby Hoffman and was one of the few men to correspond directly with the Zodiac Killer. He opened his home to his counter-culture clients and over time it became a kind of artist community.

In his obituary in the SF Chronicle in 2003, his partner, Claude Wyle, said of Choulos, “A lot of the work he did in products liability paved the way for lawyers in this country today. He was a brilliant negotiator whose brutal honesty could get under people's skin, but somehow also endeared him to others. Anything that's timely today, he's already done it, and he was probably the first to do it.” (Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer)

Honestly, it might not have been too much of a stretch to turn Bronson into this brilliant crime-fighting legal mind. He certainly demonstraits in Breakout that he possessed a rarely-employed mischievous sense of humor. Rather than the down-and-out everyman tough guy that he delivered time and time again, the movie really could have benefited for another touch or two of the outrageous to throw off the beats and numbers just a little. But that’s just hindsight. You want Bronson, in Breakout you get Bronson, albeit just a little more relaxed and less murdery.

THE GIRL HUNTERS (1962)

2011-08-19T17:39:00.002-04:00

There’s little poetry in a Mike Hammer novel. Creator Frank Morrison “Mickey” Spillane never allowed it in; for in with it may come sentimentality and that didn’t fit in Spillane’s world-view. The world was a hard, sharp-edged thing that both slices and bludgeons. It’s a Burmese tiger-trap. It’s a beach in Guadalcanal, “[T]here in the muck and the slime of the jungle, there in the stink that hung over the beaches rising from the bodies of the dead”. What poetry that does exist has the same flint edge. Take this from the same passage in One Lonely Night: “…there in the half-light of too many dusks and dawns laced together with the crosscrossed patterns of bullets, I had gotten a taste of death and found it palatable to the extent that I could never again eat the fruits of a normal civilization.”

Hammer is far and away removed from Chandler’s knight-errant or Hammett’s cynical but upright detective. He’s an embittered, battered ex-soldier with wide streaks of racism, misogyny and extreme rage, which he acts out with either his hard-man’s fists or his .45 “Betsy”. His only guidance through this corpse-stench world is his own sense of justice, which can be summed up but the title of his debut, I, The Jury. He hides no secrets, doesn’t ask for understanding, knows that he can only trust his secretary and long-time fiancée, Velda. He has one friend in the police force he left behind, Pat Chambers, and even that relationship is tenuous.

Portrayed on screens both big and small (though doing much better on television) by Biff Elliot, Stacy Keach, Darren McGavin (in a popular show TV Guide itself called “the worst thing on TV”), Ralph Meeker and Armand Assante, perhaps only one man could ever really do the character justice. For Spillane, it was the man upon whom he based the character, a Newburgh, NY, police officer and fellow vet of the pacific theater, Jack Stang.

While Stang had appeared with Spillane in the 1954 thriller Ring of Fear and had even filmed a screen test for a version of Kiss Me Deadly, his turn as Hammer was never meant to be. So for The Girl Hunters, Spillane turned to a logical second-choice, himself. In one of the only occasions where the writer played his creation in a film, as the credits announce with bold intensity: “Mike Hammer IS Mickey Spillane.”

Spillane is completely appropriate to play the mean-willed side-of-beef with a carry permit. Looking like a particularly weary William Bendix when we first meet him, lying face-down, drunk in the gutter. Seems Hammer has been on a seven-year bender after the apparent death of his beloved Velda. He blames himself and so does Pat Chambers, who fishes him out of the drain to beat him up some more. Pat stops short of killing Mike because a fatally-wounded dock worker named Cole is asking for Hammer specifically. The slug they dug out of Cole matches the gun that was used to murder a senator years ago.

Dying in an oxygen tent, Ritchie Cole reveals that his killer was a top-level Soviet assassin nicknamed “the Dragon”. “Tooth and nail,” Ritchie says. Then reveals the Dragon’s next target: Velda. She’s still alive and Hammer is her only hope to remain so.

Seven-year drunk, nothin’—Hammer’s sober as a judge in seconds, hot on the Dragon’s trail. “Dragon’s have teeth and nails. Now I’m St. George.”

Pat wants nothing to do with his old friend, but the heat comes on from a fed named Rickerby, who tells Mike that Cole was a field agent. The fed can get Hammer anything he needs, so long as he leaves the Dragon alive for Rickerby.

Mike starts at what he thinks might be the beginning, at the dead senator’s mansion. There he meets the no-longer grieving widow, Laura Knapp (Goldfinger’s Shirley Eaton), sunbathing in her pool. The details of her husband’s murder don’t add up. It was staged to look like a robbery, but all that was taken were piles of paste jewelry. Senator Knapp had moved all of his secret papers to a safety deposit box the previous week.

The always-bikini-clad Laura comes on strong, eager to help Hammer in solving her husband’s murder, to help him find “that girl” he’s looking for. If Velda was just some girl, he wouldn’t be looking so hard. But seven years is a long time and with Laura’s bikinis come smoldering glances and thick eyelashes. For the next two acts, Mike runs back and forth across the city, into seedy bars and ritzy estates. Occasionally, he runs into television star Hy Gardner, playing himself, and the two go off for an investigation. Nearly every scene ends with a threat, a sap to the head or a stitch of bullets across the wall. But each scene also brings Mike closer to The Dragon. And Velda.

Spillane was never one for subtlety in his writing and that carries over into his acting. Though he is surprisingly (or not) good as Mike Hammer, his characterization is a lot like the detective’s surname. He’s blunt, he’s hard and he packs a wallop. His Hammer isn’t the narcissistic psychotic Robert Aldritch turned Ralph Meeker into in Kiss Me Deadly, but he’s hardly a soft-touch, though he does let his grief over Velda out in both small and large ways. Sometimes it’s a sad look, but more often it’s a fist to the furniture. But you don’t doubt Spillane’s Hammer. When he’s threatened in a skuzzy bar by a Cuban pimp with an ice-pick, Mike/Mickey stares at the man hard, then rolls a bullet down the length of the bar. Sliding a hand inside his jacket, his eyes never leave the pimp’s. “Eat it,” he orders. Choosing his life over his reputation, the pimp leaves the icepick imbedded in the bar and swallows the bullet. There is no misunderstanding in that scene. Maybe Hammer started out as a drunk and a punching bag at the beginning but make no mistake, if you’re in his way or even mildly annoying him, he’ll kill you, with his bare hands, and he will not be sobbing in church come Sunday.

Hammer talks plain too. He notices that Laura has a shotgun shoved barrel-down in a flowerpot inside the door, so he tells her exactly what would happen if she tried to fire that blocked barrel. “Won’t be nothin’ left above the neck. The coronor’ll be picking bits of skull out of that wall with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.” After cleaning the clay out of the gun, he hands it back to her and leaves. Laura responds with a firey glance, lowering the barrel out of frame as the camera dollies into the most suggestive scene in the film. And you just know that blocked barrel is going to come back into play.

The Girl Hunters also contains one of the most brutal fights ever staged. Hammer catches up to a bad guy and the two of them beat the living hell out of each other in a tool-laden basement. A buzz saw goes on, but there’s no false suspense involving the spinning blade. It’s just there to make noise and drown out the punching. In the end, both men are bleeding and exhausted, panting and unable to throw or take another punch. Hammer leaves the man on the ground and, for just a second, considers burying an axe in the man’s chest, even toeing open his ripped shirt for a better target. But instead, he keeps the man alive for later. Without a rope to secure the villain, he makes due with a mallet and a long iron spike, nailing the man’s hand to the floor. This isn’t the way Mike Hammer “rolls”; it’s how he looks at life. He may live in the gray, but he sees it as black and white. What does a guy have to do so he can move forward? Does he go over, around or, more often, through? Ironically, after he finally reaches his goal, his Velda, she’s only seen from the back, unconscious. His denoument is with Laura Knapp, not with his gal, not with Pat. In this case, Velda is Mike’s Maltese Falcon, she’s the stuff his dreams are made of. Rather than to cynically assume that her part was cut due to budget or time, it might make the world a better place to think that she’s someone private for Mike. We get to see the rough and the brutal, but not the man that Velda loves.

After The Girl Hunters, Mickey went on and Mike Hammer went on, sometimes together, sometimes separately, but never again would they be one and the same on the screen. Spillane popped up in guest star appearances on television; Mike Hammer went on to other adventures in filmmaking. Spillane wrote Mike until he died, then Max Allan Collins helped pick up the pieces where Mickey left off, most recently with a novel entitled The Goliath Bone, in which Hammer goes up against the Taliban. And he still hasn’t married Velda.

DR. COOK’S GARDEN (1971)

2011-08-15T20:45:00.000-04:00

By many accounts, Bing Crosby was a bit of a prick. According to half his kids, he was an abusive father, both physically and emotionally; to the other half, he was an adoring father and the living embodiment of Father Chuck O’Malley, his iconic character from Going My Way and The Belles of Saint Mary’s. A recovered alcoholic, devout pot enthusiast, former part-owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Crosby had many facets beyond crooner and “that guy in those road movies with that other guy”. Depending on who you talk to, or which ever-reliable Internet source you visit, Crosby’s last performance was either as himself in That’s Entertainment in 1974 or a brief and uncredited cameo in the Bob Hope vehicle, Cancel My Reservation in 1972. But do some original research and you’ll uncover the news that his last major role in a feature film was in a TV-movie in 1971, Dr. Cook’s Garden.

The movie was an adaptation of a disastrous Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby) Broadway play, directed by George C. Scott and starring Burl Ives. Seen as superficial, standard and convoluted without being interesting, the show closed after less than a week. Fingers were pointed. People fought. Lives and civilizations were ruined.

Of course, ABC thought it would make a terrific movie. Adapted by Art Wallace and directed by Ted Post, Dr. Cook’s Garden was tailored for the eternal, fatherly Crosby. The titular Dr. Leonard Cook is a kindly doctor in small-town Greenfield, an idyllic paradise that he had a hand in creating. Everyone is happy, healthy, free of crime, litter, hooligans, any and all minorities… The good doctor loves his patients, his town and, especially, his beautiful garden, right outside of his home office, which he tends to lovingly every day.

Hometown boy Dr. Jimmy Tennyson (Frank Converse) returns and becomes Dr. Cook’s assistant. After about nine minutes in his mentor’s presence he begins to notice something peculiar. Some—not all, mind you—of Dr. Cook’s patients start to, well, die. Of little things like colds and dandruff. But all of these former patients are the usual horrible little monsters of small townery: the alcolholics, the abusive husbands, guys with bad tempers who kick dogs (really). So when they die, the rest of the town goes “Enh” and returns to their normal activities of porch-sitting.

So it would seem that the good doctor is playing god (which brings to mind Dr. Hfuhruhurr in The Man With Two Brains, when he replied, “Somebody has to!”) But, like all men of conscience, Tennyson can’t abide by such a breach of the Hippocratic Oath, no matter how mildly-annoying these dead people are. Increasing his tension is the fact that his girlfriend, Janey, is played by Blythe Danner, and that can’t be healthy for anyone.

Originally broadcast as an ABC Movie of the Week in 1971, Dr. Cook’s Garden has been seen only rarely since. It wasn’t rebroadcast after its initial airing and it was many years before it showed up on late-night cable. It’s also mysteriously absent from Bing’s Wikipedia page and numerous biographies. Which is odd. Despite the turgid pace (particularly for a movie lasting barely over an hour) and one of the most beloved actors appearing as a serial killer, there’s little offensive about the movie. Quite the opposite, as the central message is quite intriguing.

What horrifies Jimmy is the central moral argument. Unlike the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Bing’s Dr. Cook isn’t helping his patients to die so much as choosing who gets to live. As he sees it, it’s his moral duty to the potential utopia of the town. His decisions of who to “put to sleep” are never rash, but are considered with great care. Where Jimmy disconnects is at the idea of how far will Dr. Cook go to keep Greenfield so idyllic. What if the kindly madman decides that litterbugs are the next line of offense? Or people who speak loudly at the movies? (Which, of course, most people would support 100%, but that’s hardly a moral choice as much as justifiable homicide.)

It’s this central theme that over-rides Post’s sluggish directing. There’s zero suspense nor even the attempt of casting doubt’s shadow over Dr. Cook’s complicity in the sudden deaths. After Cook suffers a brief cardiac episode minutes following the opening credits, anyone who has ever seen a movie before will anticipate the ending. It all leads up to the young doctor placed in his mentor’s position.

Predictable, sure, but still effective as far as discussion topics go. In the end, it’s the film’s rarity, the bizarro casting, and an excellent glimpse into Crosby’s dark side that make this movie worth hunting down.

Good luck with that. (Okay, the whole darned thing is on YouTube.)

For an even better analysis of Dr. Cook’s Garden, may I refer you to Amanda Reyes’ excellent essay here.

THE FINAL TERROR (1983)

2011-08-11T11:54:00.001-04:00

Say, did you ever see that movie where a bunch of attractive young people go on a camping trip and are picked off one-by-one by a shadowy, inbred maniac? No, not that one.

Not that one either.

The movie I’m referring to is 1983’s The Final Terror. Which was originally shot in 1981 and then finally released under the various titles of Three Blind Mice, The Creeper, The Campsite Murders and The Forest Primeval. It wasn’t shelved because it was bad, per ce, but because of the ‘80s slasher movie glut and the studios thought it might be best if they sat on it until some of its young stars got famous. Yes, okay, Mark Metcalf was already a beloved figure thanks to 1978’s Animal House, but it would be a few more years until his turn in that Twisted Sister video. But Sam Arkoff and Joe Roth were prescient; they just knew that within a year or two, Darryl Hannah, Rachel Ward, Joe Pantoliano, hell, even Adrian Zmed—would all be super respected, bankable and literally household names (except for Pantoliano, because to this day no one can pronounce his name correctly and refer to him as “Joey Pants”. True.).

Until then, their literally and figuratively dark morality tale of the forestry industry would just have to wait. And wait it did.

But even then, from the time of its conception and release, The Final Terror’s story about sex and slaughter in the forest was nothing really new. It certainly wasn’t the “final” anything, given the success-range of countless others before and after. It doesn’t even corner the market on the upcoming-stars cast list (that honor may have to go to The Burning, featuring performances by Holly Hunter, Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens, etc.). In point of fact, exchange “young forest rangers in training” with “camp counselors”, “spelunkers”, “smoke jumpers” or even “horny botanists”, and you have roughly the same movie as every other ‘80s gorefest.

But there’s something about The Final Terror that makes it stand out from the crowd. Maybe it’s the direction by future Under Seige and The Fugitive helmer Andrew Davis. Perhaps it’s the naturalistic lighting, making the beautiful California forest deceptively safe during the day and claustrophobic and foreboding during the very dark night scenes. Certainly, the cast helps, though Pantoliano has the best lines as the creepy driver Eggar, while Ward and Hannah barely have a dozen lines between them. Zmed is given far too much screentime, but that can be said about any movie he’s in, really.

It’s not that The Final Terror feels slicker or smarter than it’s ‘80s hack-em-up brethren. Heck, it isn’t even all that gory. So what is it about the sum of its meager parts makes it so enjoyable?

The MacGuffin of getting the characters out into nowhere is literally that. A routine work detail brings rangers-in-training to the forest, after a brief stop to pick up their girlfriends en route. After some character-defining bickering and the establishment that driver/mechanic Eggar is a by-the-numbers-weaselly-asshole, they finally make camp. The game plan is to reblaze a trail and then raft downriver where Eggar will retrieve them via his bus. Around the campfire, they talk about the local legend of a crazy woodswoman who raised a wilderness child and sent him off to live among people while she stayed amongst nature and killed hikers. Something about this pisses Eggar off so he climbs into the bus and into the night.

The story somehow manifests the legend to life, because before too long, an unseen force begins picking them off. We the audience see the killer in brief glimpses—a shape covered in fur and foliage, able to blend into the background, appearing as a mound of moss on a river stone, a clump of leaves on the forest bed. It springs to murder with sudden viciousness as its victims usually sit down right by it.

After two of their friends are slaughtered and one goes missing (for a time, he’s actually harvesting wild marijuana), the group becomes convinced that Eggar is behind it all, his brain finally snapped. From then on, the remaining most malcontent of the bunch, Zorich, puts himself in charge. A survivalist, he leads them to their final stand in a natural gully, where they woodland combat perfected by picts and ewoks—swinging logs, spear-pits, survival knives, etc.

And then suddenly, their hopes and dreams are destroyed when they discover it’s not really Eggar behind it, but someone very else. Maybe even crazier than either Eggar or Zorich or Zmed’s agent.

Davis uses the scenery to his advantage and minimizes the clichés when possible. Where many of its fellows go for the pile of mutilated bodies, The Final Terror keeps the body-count to the minimum. After the first couple of victims, the group opts for not splitting up to cover more ground. The unseen killer is used to great effect—it is not an unkillable invisible force, but could literally be anywhere as it stalks the rangers. The device makes every footstep beside every rock a moment of tension. Davis’ direction and the script by Jon George, Neill D. Hicks and Ronald Shusett refuses to play the clichés that we’re used to. Even in 1983, audiences were savvy to the fake scare-then-real scare formula, the creepy point-of-view, the sudden jump, all leading up to a single survivor girl. But The Final Terror frequently tosses that all on its ear. For some viewers, IMDb critics, for instance, this all adds up to “boring”, a movie where “nothing really happens”, “with almost no gore”. For the rest of us, this recipe results in a welcome and unexpected nail-biter.

Granted, The Final Terror is no masterpiece and it’s nearly forgotten today by all but the most encyclopedic of horror fans. The official DVD came and went in 2005 and fetches upwards of $40 through the official channels. The original VHS often runs just as high. (Althought you can watch it in parts or in whole online at places like YouTube and Dailymotion, if that's good enough for you.) I suppose the name Adrien Zmed just doesn’t carry the weight it used to. But it’s a taut, worthy thriller that has earned its place in horror history and deserves a reissue, if only for the day-for-night siege on the bus that had me, at least, on the edge of my seat. Like the rest of the film, even though I had seen that sequence in countless other movies, because of the way it zigged and zagged, I really hadn’t seen it before. That’s the best part of The Final Terror: you have no idea where the old and overgrown trail is going to lead.

BURKE AND HARE (2010)

2011-08-10T12:00:00.003-04:00

Up the close and down the stair,
In the house with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox, the boy who buys the beef.

Burke and Hare,
Fell down the stair,
With a body in a box,
Going to Dr. Knox.

—19th-century Edinburgh jumping-rope rhyme

Between November 1827 to 31 October 1828, a pair of Irish immigrants named William Burke and William Hare, murdered seventeen people and sold their bodies to Doctor Robert Knox. An anatomy instructor to students of Edinburgh Medical College, Knox needed cadavers for his “hands-on” lectures, but was hobbled by a silly little law that limited the supply of medical cadavers to that of executed criminals. Tragically, Scotland was experiencing a severe reduction in executions due to the scaling back of “The Bloody Code” (aka The Death Penalty) in favor of transporting criminals to Australia. As a result, less than six corpses were available to the growing rate of medical students. This gave rise to the carreer of “resurrectionist” (grave robbers, body snatchers) and, very quickly, “anatomy murder”. Which brings us back around to our heroes, Williams Burke and Hare.

With the assistance of Hare’s wife Margaret “Lucky” Laird and Burke’s lady-friend, “actress” Helen McDougal, the Williams became quite skilled in keeping Dr. Knox’s lectures going. They even developed a method of murder wherein they would sit on their drunk or drugged victims and crush their chests, while also smothering them. It was quick and clean, did no damage to the body beyond, you know, death. It came to be called “burking” (a term still used in the United Kingdom today, though it’s applied more to the peaceful or quiet suppression of dissent).

Because neither of the Williams or their ladyfriends could keep their bloody mouths shut, particularly when they were drunk—which, being Irish, was most of the time—they were eventually caught after a certain night when Burke “casually”—as casually as one known for a “ferocious and malignant disposition” [Newry Telegraph, 31 March 1829—Correspondence from the Northern Whig] can be—asked about the health of every single family member of a local business owner. Oh, and when most of Knox’s students recognized the fresh body of a local boy nicknamed “Daft Johnny”. (Knox dismissed this as nonsense and hurriedly removed the face, hands and feet of the corpse.)

Soon, the perpetrators of the “Westport Murders” were arrested (on admittedly thin evidence, according to the local constabulary). The ladies were acquitted due to lack of evidence; Hare struck a deal and pinned then entire mess on Burke, who was then hanged on January 28, 1829. Dr. Knox was never implicated in the affair but lost his standing at Edinburgh and by 1842 had taken a position at the London Free Cancer Hospital. He died quietly in 1862, was buried and was not resurrected. As a direct result of the actions of these villains, The Anatomy Act 1832 passed, increasing the methods of legal means for acquiring medical corpses and putting a kibosh on the incentive for grave robbing and anatomy murder. Little is known of Hare’s post-burking career, but the remains of both Williams ended up at the Edinburgh College, where they can be seen today.

In 1884, the pair were immortalized in Robert Louis Stevenson’s story “The Body Snatcher", which was made into a film starring Boris Karloff and produced by Val Lewton n 1945. In 1953, Dylan Thomas wrote a play inspired by them called The Doctor and the Devils, which was made into a 1985 film directed by Freddie Francis, who had previously directed an adaptation of the story, The Flesh and the Fiends, in 1960 starring Peter Cushing as Dr. Knox. The pair has shown up in one form or another in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dr. Who, countless short stories, novels and, as seen at the beginning of this piece, children’s jump-rope chants. Which just goes to show that body snatching takes many, many forms.

Burke and Hare, the latest telling of the exploits of this wacky duo showed up in the U.K., starring your favorite and mine, Simon Pegg as Burke, Andy Serkis as “Hare” (and not a motion-captured creature for a change), Tom Wilkinson as Knox and Tim Curry as Knox’s nemesis, Dr. Monro (who loves nothing more than to carry around new pairs of “display feet” to show to the upper crust). Directing this bloody, nasty, dark and brutal tale is none-other than John Landis. The film also features cameos by Jenny Augutter, Ronnie Corbett, Bill Bailey and a surprise visit from Sir Christopher Lee. Actually, this go-around isn’t dark, or nasty or very brutal. In fact, Landis has described it as a romantic comedy and the titular characters are really the heroes of this film! …Kinda. Depending on your definition of “hero”, I suppose. At the very least, they’re the most loveable serial murderers you’ve seen in a long time.

The lovable, hapless rogues are at the end of their rope (although not yet, literally), failing at numerous con-schemes and snake oil sales, and just when it seems all is lost, they hear about the plight of the anatomy professor. Seeing a hole in the supply end of this particular economics, they ponder the potential when Hare’s wife, Lucky (Jessica Hynes), declares that one of their upstairs tenants has passed on. And needs gotten-rid-of. Stuffing the poor gent into a barrel, the pair roll the fresh body (albeit, one snapped in half in order to fit into said barrel) over to Knox’s castle. Upon inspection, the corpse-poor anatomist offers them a large sum of money to bring him two bodies per week, no questions asked.

Elated at the prospect but unsure how to go about achieving their weekly goal, the Williams stop off for a pint and it’s there that Willie Burke meets and falls in love with Helen McDougal (Isla Fisher). The former prostitute is currently pursuing a career in acting, hoping to some day produce an all-female version of MacBeth. If only she could find a financier...

Returning home, joy-upon-joys, a drunken Lucky declares that their last tenant is so close to death he just needs to be reminded to shove-off. And that’s when the duo sits down (upon dying Joseph) and invent “burking”. Out of tenants but not ideas, our heroes set out to ply their new trade to greater or lesser success. Soon the money is rolling in. Hare begins saving up for his own funeral parlor, while Burke fancies himself as Helen’s future backer (and fronter, if he plays his cards right and you get my meaning).

Landis’ Burke and Hare follows the timeline and methods, more or less, of the real duo’s history, but plays around with the rest of the details for additional fun. For instance, while it’s true that Charles Darwin was a student of Dr. Monro’s for a time, rather than assisting in acquiring legal corpses for the obsequious surgeon, he was so disgusted by the man’s attitudes toward dissection—including showing up for business meetings still covered in the red of his trade—that it turned Darwin off medicine entirely, switching his attention to Naturalism and Natural History. (So you creationists out there should focus a little more of your bitterness onto Monro.) There is no evidence to support the film’s depiction of Monro’s literal foot fetish, and even less evidence to support that Hare did anything with his life following his betrayal of Burke, let alone establish a thriving funeral parlor. And the idea that Willie Burke was just a sweet, lonely lad with flexible scruples may well be the biggest fabrication of them all. But none of that should bother you unless you’re one of those anal compulsive experts on resurrectionists. And if you are, you undoubtedly have much bigger things to worry about.

Much has been made about Burke and Hare being John Landis’ first feature film in over ten years, but while that’s true, it isn’t like the famed director has been treading water all these years, what with his work on documentaries, episodes of The Masters of Horror, etc., so don’t call this a “comeback”. At least not to his face. Burke and Hare is a far cry from the chaos of The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London. Instead, it has the restrained absurdity and dignified slapstick of the classic Ealing Studios like The Lavender Hill Mob.

In fact, Ealing has had a bit of a resurgence in the last decade, thanks to the remake of the mysteriously-popular “St. Trinian’s Girls” movies. For further connection, “St. Trinian's” writers Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft penned the B&H screenplay, Pegg’s (and Wright’s) landmark Shaun of the Dead and Neal Marshall’s The Descent were shot on the Ealing lots. By Landis’ own admission, “This is very much my attempt to make an Ealing comedy, in the very black tradition of Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, where the whole cast murders one another.” (“Burke and Hare behind the scenes”, The Telegraph, Horatia Harrod 04 Oct 2010) According to Serkis (in the same article), Landis wanted the Burke and Hare dynamic to be “like an evil Laurel and Hardy”, and since the actors are getting along so well, we, as an audience, can forgive the nasty murder and corpse-abuse.

One final bit of geekery before we move on: most of the gory body parts were supplied by none-other than friend-of-Landis-and-horror-fans-all, Greg Nicotero. “You gotta pull favours in this industry, there’s no money”, said Pegg (same piece).

Like the majority of the Ealing Studios’ films, Burke and Hare is amusing but not hilarious, romantic but not saccharine, and has a slower pace than our modern deficient attention spans are used to without being boring. Sometimes the European and American sensibilities clash—we’re much more appreciative of the emptying of bed pans onto characters, moreso when the gag is repeated. We also appreciate it when our anti-heroes drop the “anti” in the third act, so that instead of one William betraying the other, the latter makes a noble sacrifice for the former. Whether or not we Yankees get the cameo by William Wordsworth or the numerous anachronisms is really beside the point. So, too, is the film’s message “who’s more evil, the killers or the doctors?” It’s not like those things will stifle enjoyment.

What will stifle enjoyment, or even the opportunity to decide, is the fact that Burke and Hare has come and gone in the United Kingdom, available on PAL DVD and Blu-Ray, the closest we here in the states can come to the film is to stream it on Amazon On-Demand. No formal DVD release date has been announced, let alone a theatrical screening. We, as a nation should protest. May I recommend petitioning the holders of the U.S. rights, IFC Films? We should all send them a fresh corpse to make our point.

THE LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER (1963)

2011-06-23T14:21:00.000-04:00

In 1963, larger-than-life-in-a-Hemingway-er-way director John Huston perpetrated a hoax on audiences far and farther. Not a huge hoax; actually more like a dirty trick. Thankfully, it was concealed inside a terrific movie.

A soft-spoken little thriller set amongst the near-royalty of the British top-most crust. After we witness a night-time murder and a name scratched from a list, we meet first Anthony Gethryn (George C. Scott), formerly of British Intelligence MI5, then unassuming writer Adrian Messenger (John Merivale). Messenger believes that a series of accidental deaths weren’t so accidental and that the men were likely murdered. He asks Gethryn to look into these seemingly unrelated events, then promptly meets his doom when his plane inexplicably (to everyone who is in the movie and not the audience) explodes. Before dying, Messenger manages to croak out a few disjointed sentences to the plane’s only survivor, Raoul Le Borg. Le Borg, as it turns out, was Gethryn’s Great War ally in the French Resistance, and he joins the former agent in his quest, now that it’s become personal. The main clue in Messenger’s utterings is the word “broom”, which Le Borg misremembers as “brush”. But who is giving the brush to whom?

Gethryn and Le Borg investigate Messenger’s list and their hunt takes them all over England, bringing them into contact with a crippled Cockney soldier (“Lost me barrel and keg [in Burma]”), a mysterious gypsy, an Italian food-cart vendor, and fox hunt protestors (“It’s the unspeakable after the uneatable!”), not to mention joining a couple of fox hunts themselves upon the Bruttenholm estate. All the while, the mysterious killer remains one step ahead of them, donning a series of disguises before revealing himself to be Kirk Douglas—er, George Brougham.

Incidentally, “Brougham” and “Bruttenholm” are both pronounced “broom”. And once we discover that old George is not only a distant heir to the Bruttenholm legacy but was also a prisoner of war in Burma with the entirety of the dead men on the list, it’s not too hard to place the rest of the pieces in the puzzle, especially when the corners are so well-defined and the size of dinner plates.

Ultimately, there’s not a lot of mystery in The List of Adrian Messenger, but there is an awful lot of fun. With Scott as our guide through the foggy underbelly of England to the magnificent grounds of the Bruttenholm estate, we meet a wonderful assortment of characters and red herrings. The opening credits boast a lot of names—Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum—and they’re present in the film in disguises, just like Douglas’ Brougham. In the film’s post-script coda, all the disguised cameo characters unmask themselves and reveal their famous faces. And we all laugh and delight in the trickery.

To modern eyes, the made-up characters are extremely easy to spot. Douglas’ first quick-change in a rest room, slipping out sclera contacts and replacing a bald cap, is still a marvelously-staged sequence, and was likely quite a shock to ‘60s audiences. Now that every film fan is world-weary, delighting in proclaiming “that’s so fake!” at every movie’s slight-of-hand, the masquerades designed by Bud Westmore in Messenger will be unlikely to impress. But if you’re heart isn’t two-sizes too-small, you’ll let it go and just have a good time.

But here’s where Huston’s hoax really comes into play. As it turns out, his trickery was not in the disguises but the disguised. With the sole exception of Robert Mitchum playing a sinister soldier, none of the famous actors are in the movie. They’re only in the unmasking sequence! Accounts differ as to who played whom and to what extent, but character actor Dave Willock definitely doubled for Douglas during some of the lengthier disguise sequences while the rest were likely portrayed by Space Patrol’s Jan Merlin. In fact, Merlin’s novel, Shooting Montezuma, involves the making of a movie where disguise and deception plays a key role. To add insult to injury, the legendary Paul Frees provided the voices for Sinatra, Curtis and Lancaster.

In the end, Huston makes monkeys out of us all twice. It’s up to the deceived to decide if it was a low-down rotten trick or a mastery of public relations. After all, he didn’t have to pay exorbitant fees for his cameo-ees, outside of a couple hours’ worth of scratch for the masking and reveal, and he still got some glamorous mugs for the curtain call and the advertising. You can’t say that Sinatra or Lancaster aren’t in the movie, just not in the way you expect. Not a rare rug-pull then and it’s still used today. The “Famous Face on the Box” Deception.

But that doesn’t make The List of Adrian Messenger any less a joy to watch than do the visible wires attached to the actors during the climactic fox hunt. It’s all Hollywood magic trickery, from the exciting but predictable plot (based on the 1961 book by Philip MacDonald) to the bombastic acting to Scott’s amused grin permanently-affixed beneath his impressive moustache. It’s a Golden Age film for an audience growing more and more sophisticated with each release.

Now, the usual sturm and drang: The List of Adrian Messenger can only be found on the Warner Brothers Collection DVD-R-on-Demand service, unless you want to try and catch it on cable (TCM runs it frequently). It might be one movie where the remastering is to its detriment. The clarity of the wires and seams (both in terms of make-up and plot threads) are made too visible by technology.

O. C. AND STIGGS (1987)

2011-06-18T12:19:00.002-04:00

My name is Mike Watt and I’m here to make a confession: I’m not a fan of Robert Altman. I heard a few cheers above the boos, so at least I know I’m not alone in this cinematic sin. But it is true: the consummate actor’s director makes movies that, save a few exceptions, I cannot get into. Yes, I know; heresy, thereasy, everywhereasy. Sorry but Nashville left me cold, Gosford Park left me cold and hungry and the actors were given so much freedom on The Prairie Home Companion that it was neglect. I will give you Brewster McCloud, The Player and half of M*A*S*H. The half with Robert Duvall, anyway.

There’s one Altman film, however, that I can say with certainty that I’m virtually alone in liking. That one movie is today’s entry, O.C. and Stiggs. In the mid-80s, Altman of all people was approached to make a raunchy teen comedy, ala Private Resort, Porky’s, Private School, etc. After virtually owning the ‘70s but hitting a recent slump with such fare as Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and Popeye, it must have made some sort of sense in the mind of Hollywood to bring this type of project to one of the biggest iconoclasts in the business. Like Ingmar Bergman’s Meatballs or Stanley Kubrick’s The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.

Based on recurring characters created by Tod Carroll and Ted Mann for the popular “entertainment” magazine National Lampoon, with a script from Mann and Donald Cantrell, the original intention was to tell the story of “the amazingly spectacular and lunatic summer” of the title characters, complete with sleeping around with friends’ moms, driving drunk, skinny dipping with “The Sluts” and terrorizing the Schwab family. The novel-length story that inspired the script dominated one particular issue of Nat. Lampoon and had developed a cult following within and without fans of the magazine. Look again at the above. Perfect material for Altman, right?

Anyway…

Altman, as it turned out, was not a fan of the horny high schooler genre of films but liked the idea of doing a satire of those sorts of things. Stripping away the “asshole” nature of the title characters and focusing on the anarchy, Altman’s vision of O.C. and Stiggs became the story of two best friends who live outside the realm of social graces. Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie (“O.C., it stands for ‘Out of Control’, sez Stiggs) and Mark Stiggs (“I want you to call me Stiggs; it sounds more ridiculous,”) live in a world of their own making. Bored to death in suburban Arizona, they look for original ways to pass the time. One of their primary sources of amusement is in the torture of the “horrible Schwab family”. Patriarch Randall Schwab (Paul Dooley) owns the successful Schwab Insurance Company (“In business for just over 11 years, Misery loves our company”), makes for a typical Altman target: sheltered, nouveau riche, bigoted and tacky. The rest of his family consists of his drunken wife Elinore (Jane Curtain), daughter Lenore (Laura Urstein), who is about to marry their “caddy”, Frankie Tang (Victor Ho), and last and definitely least, Randall Schwab, Jr. (Jon Cryer), with whom they attend school, so they get to torture him there, too (via exploding water fountains and general disdain).

But there is logic behind this laser-focused harassment, as Stiggs tells African President Bongo over the Schwab’s phone. You see, Schwab Sr. cancelled the insurance of O.C.’s demented ex-cop grandfather (Ray Walston), and now he’s going to lose his home and then O.C. will have to go live with hillbilly relatives. This doesn’t sit well with Stiggs because O.C. is his best, and only, friend, for reasons that are clear from the opening moments. The problem with their little vendetta is that Schwab Sr. is barely aware of who they are and has no idea that he’s in a war at all. In Schwab world, all misfortune is caused by foreigners and drug addicts. So when the pair, say, give Schwab Jr. a machine gun at Lenore’s wedding, Schwab Sr. bellows for someone to call the cops and laments at the money already wasted on marrying his daughter to some chink caddy.

This scene contains the funniest exchange in a film rife with funny lines:

Stiggs: “Randall, how would you like to have more fun than you've ever had in your life?”

Randall: “I don't know. I've had a lot of fun. I have Legos, you know.”

When they’re not torturing the Schwabs, they’re figuring out new ways to torture everyone around them. One ingenious idea they have is buying “The Gila Monster”—an enormous and hideous truck with which to terrorize their surroundings. Which leads to the film’s second-funniest exchange with the car dealer:

Stiggs: “Number 1, we want zero miles to the gallon.”

O.C.: “Right. No MPGs. It has to be a vulgarly inefficient mode of transportation.”

Stiggs: “Loud, real loud. It has to generate a terrifyingly seismic field of noise. If we could combine really loud noise with the ugliness of poverty, we'd have the ideal car.”

Stiggs: “...making people think that you're poor, so they know you've got nothing to loose if they crash into your car... Here's a list of places I want this car to be totally unwelcome. Number one: funerals. Number two: affairs of state, you know, real formal ones...ones with...chamber music. Number three: wet golf greens. Number four: the acropolis.”

O.C.: “Ah, yes. Driving this car right in the acropolis should be completely horrifying to every civilized guy on earth.”

As their covert war escalates, Stiggs employs the assistance of a lunatic Vietnam vet played by the quintessential Vietnam Vet-playing-actor, Dennis Hopper. A burned out former-military photographer (sound a wee bit familiar?), who grows acres of marijuana and shares company with an always-armed pilot named Goon and has audible flashbacks during conversations, Sponson is the source of all their mischievous needs. And when the boys are cornered by Schwabs, it’s Sponson who leads the aerial assault on Suburbia. “Where are you, Crazy Boy? All the houses look the same!”

O.C. and Stiggs is sheer elegance in its defiant inelegance. Instead of the intellectual Porkys they’d hoped for, the producers received this manic, stream-of-consciousness tale of hijinx set against a backdrop of adobe and cactus. As is his nature, Altman fills the screen with details and oddball characters (like Stiggs’ mother who, to get into her role for a community theater performance of Cactus Flower, has filled the house with cacti and shapes food into cactil shapes). It’s not all cacophony, however. There’s an under-developed romance between O.C. and a local socialite, Michelle (Cynthia Nixon), that serves as a subplot, as does a skinny-dipping-at-the-Schwabs comedy of errors sidetrip to the home of Pat Coletti (Martin Mull), the Muumuu King.

Like many of Altman’s movies, O.C. and Stiggs is short on characterization and long on bizarre sequences. There are a lot of deus ex machina resolutions to plot threads and an extended performance by King Sunny Ade that never seems to end. O.C.’s romance with Michelle never really goes anywhere, and even after things wind up predictably hunky and/or dory for our protagonists, they continue to plague the clueless Schwabs, which makes more or less sense than in the original magazine story where they harass Schwab Jr. for the duel reasons that “He lives near us and has an enormous head”.

The key to the film is in the performances of the main characters, played by Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry. Obviously, if you don’t like them, if you find them more obnoxious than endearing, you’re going to hate this movie, which even strident Altman fans did. However, the two wonderboy Merry Pranksters have a certain charm, even if they are indistinguishable from time to time (Stiggs wears sunglasses). And they have an unbreakable bond that gives their relationship gravity. Many modern reviewers have criticized the pair for their “homoerotic” tendencies—skinny dipping together, never appearing apart—but that isn’t apparent, particularly when viewed through ‘80s eyes. They’re inseparable chums because no one else gets them—because they don’t want anyone else to get them. They wear sombreros to the mall precisely because no one else does. Near the end, when Sponson lowers O.C. from the helicopter to Michelle’s window, the occasionally-jealous Stiggs yells out “I love you!” and gets one in return. They feel like a genuine exclamations, summing up the chaos of the day.

At the same time they’re being accused of homoeroticism, the same reviewers accuse them of homophobia, because of the way they stalk and harass two closeted teachers at a Mexican carnival. Yes, what they say seems intolerant today and yes it’s meant to be mean-spirited, but it doesn’t come off as particularly homophobic to me. Instead, it seems to strengthen the idea that these two “don’t-give-a-damns” hone in on the biggest insecurities of their “lessers” and exploit them for fun or for leverage. Combine this cruel trait with some of their sweeter or crazier moments, and they come off as real human teenagers, who are notoriously all of the above and more.

Like most other Altman movies, O.C. and Stiggs feels less like a complete story and more like a voyeuristic snapshot of the lives of disparate people. Nothing is wrapped up neatly because life doesn’t do that either. For better or worse, Altman obviously worked hard to make this fratboy lowbrow comedy into something more than the sum of its parts.

But audiences didn’t like it. After sitting it on a shelf from ’84 to ’87, MGM advertised O.C. and Stiggs as a typical Porky’s knock-off and felt cheated by the indifferent pacing and seemingly random storyline (despite the fact that the majority of the Porky’s-inspired films have similar episodic stories lacking in pacing or characterization). There’s also less nudity or profanity than one would expect from this type of thing. And hardcore Altman fans felt that their master had either flipped out or sold out, even moreso than when faced with Popeye.

So maybe it’s the contrarian in me that likes this particular Altman offering than his others. It sure isn’t because it seemed like Bob cared more about the characters. In fact, on the DVD, he spends more time apologizing for the film than discussing it. That could have something to do with my affection for this underdog as well.

Or maybe it’s because my best friend and I used to wear sombreros to the mall, and terrorized the neighborhood for no particular reason. Whereas I’ve never been to a French fashion show nor ever had anything to do with Lily Tomlin. Everyone needs something they can relate to.

30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 4: Favorite Drama

2011-05-27T11:05:00.000-04:00

Again, another toss up, particularly if you're talking about things with great rewatchability.

Jesus, how do you pick from such great and wonderful films made over history? However, I have to confess my personal tastes tend toward hybrid movies. Still, do I choose from

Ace in the Hole

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Thomas Edward Seymour's moving indie Everything Movies Alone

John Sayles' mystery/drama Lone Star

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs

Peter Medak directing Marat/Sade: (The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of The Marquis de Sade)

But I think it really comes down to John Huston's adaptation of Flannery O'Conner's Wise Blood

I seem to be very bad at this "One Favorite" thing.

30 Day Movie Challenge - Day 3: Favorite comedy

2011-05-26T14:15:00.000-04:00

Day 3: Favorite comedy - Do I go with Bringing Up Baby (1938)? My mother's favorite movie, shown to me at a very young age:

The Man With Two Brains (1983) - a movie I was probably too young to see when I did. Therefore, it delights me to this day.

The Bed Sitting Room (1969)? - which was high on my to-see list, but that I couldn't track down until three years ago. Practically every line of dialogue is a punchline.

Or, most probably, His Girl Friday (1940). Which is still and hopefully will be one of the funniest scripts delivered by two master actors. This is the movie that infused all of my adult comedy writing.

30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 2: Least Favorite Film

2011-05-25T12:28:00.000-04:00

This is an easy one. Loathsome egotist and suspected puppy-raper Frank Miller's vomitous cinematic-effluvia, The Spirit (2008) - Every frame of this film is a slap in the face to the character's creator, Will Eisner.

I've waxed ad nauseum about this creative holocaust Here (which was subsequently reprinted on Will Eisner's A Spirited Life blog Here). I'll not dignify this hate crime further with any trailer links.

30 Day Movie Challenge: Day 1 - Day 1: Favorite film

2011-05-25T12:16:00.002-04:00

Because I apparently have a few more daily minutes to waste, I started the official 30 Day Movie Challenge over on Facebook. I almost didn’t take part until I realized that what the list was asking was not for your gut reactions, but for film addicts to really think about their choices.

At least, that’s how I choose to interpret it, anyway.

So yesterday, the questions began with: Day 1: Favorite Film.

Which is silly. How can you choose one favorite film out of over 100 years of movies. I need to list at least three.

Tied For First Place In My All-Time Favorites:

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, Stephen Spielberg)

Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course, was the highlight of the Summer of 1980. I already hero-worshiped Harrison Ford and Han Solo—what five-year-old didn’t, when Star Wars hit the screens in 1977? When Raiders was released, I saw it eight and a half times (that half-time was when my father stayed for the next show so we could watch the beginning again) in ten weeks. I lived and breathed Indiana Jones, dressed like him for Halloween, and experienced the first “uh oh” shudder of innocence lost when Temple of Doom followed it in 1984. Still, it’s a movie I cannot and will not turn off, when it pops up on television, commercials and all. It was the first Laserdisk I ever bought. So where the hell is our Blu-Ray?

The Magnificent Seven (1960, John Sturges)

The Magnificent Seven was a staple in our house, in the years before cable. We’d gather as a family to watch it whenever it came on television, cut up, panned and scanned, didn’t matter. The first time I saw it letterboxed, many years later, on Laserdisk, I was happy to report that I finally understood why those four villagers were so afraid of Calvera and his six men, and why the Magnificent Never-On-Screen-All-At-The-Same-Time were hired for defense. I knew at a young age that I was watching something special. Not just a western, which I loved. Sure, it took me many, many years to appreciate Brad Dexter (or even pick him out of a line-up), but it turned me on as a kid to The Seven Samurai and the rest of Kurosawa’s oeuvre (I may have been the only second grader to have ever seen this landmark film, as a matter of fact!).

Just for fun, here's the beautifully awful second trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnfvPbvWOYA

Miller’s Crossing (1990, Joel and Ethan Coen)

Miller’s Crossing was my turning point, from film fan to film addict, first catching it at the Pittsburgh Playhouse during their repertory summer season, the year between my junior and senior year of high school. I lived in that cruddy theater, with its two carbon-stick projectors linked by an alarm to alert the projectionist. I had met up with my buddy John Bulevich to catch either Europa, Europa or Fantasia—regardless of memory-loss, I do know that whichever one it was had ended its run the day before. And Miller’s Crossing came as an unexpected delight. And while I had liked the Coen Brothers movies in the past (Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, so far), Miller’s Crossing came as a breakthrough because I understood it. I saw the Dashiell Hammet and Howard Hawks and John Huston influences. It was as if film history had revealed itself to me, through snappy dialogue and rich characters and, for the first time, I noticed direction. As well as editing, thanks to the wonderful tommy-gun scene with Albert Finney defending his life from would-be hit men. I knew I always wanted to write. With this movie alone, I understood that my life would be involved with movies, without question.

There are a variety of reasons these three are in my top, my “Desert Island” movies, if you will. The first two I saw early enough in my life for them to make an indelible impact on my psyche, infusing my childhood, molding me into the man I am today.

CANNIBAL GIRLS (1973)

2011-04-15T12:33:00.000-04:00

I guess I don’t have to tell you this but film fanatics have a mandate to find the most obscure movies they can. It’s like a genetic aberration, not dissimilar to those who haunt antique stores and garage sales. Everyone is looking for their own personal Holy Grail while at the same time keeping their eyes peeled for other gems along the way. For the hardboiled-to-the-core Master Film Geek, the search is for something even deeper: the Pure One. The one movie the Master is convinced only he has ever heard of. This is a delusion held in the very soul of every Film Geek since the beginning of Film Geekdom, whenever you’d like to place that all-important (or not-very-important) epochal genesis. Somewhere, there is a film so rare that even those who made it have not actually seen it. Such is the stuff that generates movie conventions and back-room autograph signings. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—to be fair, this evidence has only become overwhelming after the invention of the internet—even the Master Uber Evil Overlord of Film Geekery is certain that he and he alone owns, on VHS or Bootleg DVD, the key to Geek Transcendence. The ONE MOVIE that no one has ever heard of.

For many delusional years, Cannibal Girls was my One Movie. Discovered by accident while working at Incredibly Strange Video, during the internet’s fledgling years, I was convinced that I had found the most obscure movie ever made. Since it was a bootleg, its existence was only made privy to the most elite of customers. It was marked with only its title and shelf number, and neither were that inticing. It had never once been rented. In our hastily-scrawled “catalog”, Bruce Lentz, the owner, had written only “weird comedy-horror film directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Eugene Levy” and “Deposit for Rental required.” Well, if that isn’t weapons-grade catnip for the film enthusiast, nothing is. The clear case seemed hermetically sealed, and when I opened it, long-imprisoned air puffed out. It was like opening a little plastic tomb. The plain black video tape. Offering wonders to be explored.

And, of course, after all that mystical bullshit buildup, the actual movie was a bit of a let down.

How could it not be? That’s precisely the reason that the morlocks on the internet stab out “best movie ever? I think NOT!” on listings for Citizen Kane. How could it be? It’s impossible for a mere film to live up to the hype, either borne by decades of praise or merely a few seconds of interior-monologue hyperbole. So back into the shelf it went, and into my memories the viewing was stuffed, tossed among the refuse of other movies I’d watched that day. Still, something about Cannibal Girls still struck me as special. Maybe it wasn’t all I’d built it up to be as I walked it from shelf to in-store VCR, but it was still obscure. Maybe deservedly so, some may argue. Even over the following internet-heavy years, there was still little to learn about Reitman’s embryonic career step. It certainly wasn’t available in any form officially. I had to be one in a mere number of those who had laid eyes upon it.

Until now, thanks to the saints over at Shout! Factory. Recently, they made available on Blu-Ray and DVD my One Movie, complete with extras and the film’s “original” soundtrack. The degraded 35mm image was scrubbed to sparkling. And now Cannibal Girls can finally be seen the way it was intended: by an audience.

Right out of film school, a larvae-stage Ivan Reitman, with his business partner Daniel Goldberg, decided to make a feature-length movie. He browbeat a local equipment warehouse into giving him any unused 35mm equipment, then struck a deal with the processing lab to come aboard as investors in exchange for his fees reduced by 50%. Finally, enlisting the help of many of his friends, in particular two theater-junkies named Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin—he felt sufficiently prepared to make a horror movie. You know, the most commercially-marketable genre around. At the time. In 1972.

Script? Who needs a script when you have talented improvers on your hands. All that was deemed necessary were scene outlines, get everyone from A to B without bumping in to anything. A-to-B in this case: in the quaint and quiet Canadian town of Farmhamville, a local legend has spread about a trio of nubile young lovelies (Anthea, Clarissa, and Leona) who enjoy nothing more than murdering—and then eating—passers-through and other strangers. First, they lure men into lustful security with their naked wiles, then they butcher their prey, devouring some, er, bits, raw and saving the rest to be cooked and served later. They all lived together in the town’s sole stately, comfy bed and breakfast. But since they’re not there any more, here are directions to the place.

All of this bloody exposition is delivered by Mrs. Wainwright (played by wealthy, upper-crust heir to the Jarvis Family fortune May Jarvis, who happened to own the film’s primary location) to young hippie couple, Gloria (Martin) and Clifford (Levy), whose car has unfortunately broken down and need a place to stay. Sent up to this stately bed and breakfast, the young couple meet their host, the suave and tuxedoed Rev. Alex St. John and his three wards, Anthea, Clarissa and Leona.

Of course, there would be no movie if the pair turned tail and caught the next bus, so instead they stay for the night, have a nice meat-based meal, attempt to get it on (if only Gloria would shut up), smoke cigarettes, and await their turn in the being-picked-off department. Because in the meantime, the three usually-naked lunatics are out sexing up and butchering local inhabitants, assisted by their standard-issue mute and inbred caretaker.

The Reverend’s thrall knows no borders, so of course the whole town, more or less, is in on it (six inhabitants, at least), including the local sheriff, who does his share of assisting in the slaughtering of man-flavored livestock.

After a very scary dream Gloria has of sacrificing a bound Cliff to some dark entity, she becomes much more clingy while Clifford grows distant. He doesn’t even take the time to sing her any ear-scraping awful folk songs on his guitar. All he cares about is devouring “steaks” at the various eateries.

Then, a twist occurs, then some circular logic, the possibility of a sequel and scene.

Okay, so… what? So Ivan Reitman, the guy who made Ghostbusters and Meatballs and a bunch of other awesome cornerstones of our childhood, went out and made the same movie that Ted V. Mikels, H.G. Lewis and lesser-knowns have been making for years. And then he turned around and sold it to Sam Arkoff, whose company AIP was infamous for this sort of film. The story and execution of Cannibals Girls was stale at the time and just got staler until it went past its own decomposition and found new life as the plot of countless micro-budgeted movies found on any nook and cranny website. And you just said that it wasn’t very good.

In my defense, I was not alone in that assessment. The first completed cut ran only 65 minutes, leading investors and even the principal filmmakers to say, “It’s too short and it’s not very good.” Opting for reshoots with less gore, Reitman and company begged and borrowed $5,000 and returned to Cannibal Girls and inserted the now-notorious “scissors mutilation” scene, the infamous “pick-axe” scene and the most wonderful “three naked girls eat a guy alive” scene. So there. Now we had that.

Okay, the joy of Cannibal Girls is not the movie itself. Those watching for the crystalline beginnings of Levy’s and Martin’s comic talents will only strain their eyes. Because much of the movie was adlibbed, the dialogue comes off as more natural but that doesn’t make what they’re saying interesting. The closest we get to funny is a daffy Gloria trying to get their car to start by talking nicely to it. And even for true Levy enthusiasts, you’ll be hard-pressed to even recognize him at the film’s start. Instead of Bobby Bittman, we get a Levy who looks more like one of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers (Phineas to be precise), with his face buried beneath a hippie afro, beard and thick glasses. While there is some comedy to be mined from that, it loses its novelty after about half an hour.

Still, the gore is gory, the sets are nice and Canada is used to a decent purpose (though, while being a part of Canada that landed outside of Toronto, it still just looks like anyone’s backyard in the winter).

When Cannibal Girls was finally released to theaters, Arkoff added a gimmick in the “Warning Bell” (which sounds more like a “horror honk”) to warn viewers that a gore or nude scene is approaching, so one might avert one’s eyes. As dumb as this sounds on paper, it actually works to the movie’s advantage in that it creates suspense out of nothing. It turns a lull or a drag into actual anticipation. So this might have been a genius move on Sam’s part.

But you can overlook so much because of what the movie is. For many struggling independent filmmakers, Cannibal Girls is affirmation that you’re on the right track. No, of course the industry doesn’t work like this any more. You can’t just go out and shoot any piece of crap and hope that Sam Arkoff will rise from the dead and hand you an advance for $50K. What you can best hope for is that you go out and make a piece of crap and Lloyd Kaufman doesn’t punch you after you submit it to Troma.

This was a sell-it-quick movie made by amateurs with little expectation of the outcome. And the man behind it was the guy who made Ghostbusters. Starring two centerpieces from the magnificent SCTV. It’s “the little engine that could” scenario with the best possible outcome. The ultimate message to be gleaned from Cannibal Girls is not “a diet of human flesh will keep you young and beautiful if largely mute”, but “if as cool a director as Ivan Reitman can make a silly little trifle like this and then Ghostbusters and Stripes, and then have his silly little trifle become a highly-sought cult film, maybe there’s hope for the rest of us.”

As mentioned, Shout! Factory released two versions of this little gem, one on straight DVD and one to Blu-Ray (so far this is a Canadian release only) and the transfers on both are more gorgeous than they deserve to be and contain copious extras including an alternate soundtrack with that “warning bell”, which is the version most recommended to watch.

And if, in the end, this is no longer one of your Holy Grails, go back to your list. The thrill, after all, is the hunt.

UNCORKED (2011)

2011-04-14T12:54:00.000-04:00

The phrase “tour de force” gets tossed around liberally in our word-obsessed culture…

Okay, it really isn’t. However, if it were, it would be most-appropriately applied to Phil Hall’s performance in the one-man short film “Uncorked”. At the risk of accusations of nepotism and/or ass-kissing, I’d like to heap great amounts of praise upon Film Threat’s own journalist/thespian, not for who he is but for what he achieves in this very funny little movie.

Hall’s character is the premise of “Uncorked”. An unseen and largely unobtrusive camera crew happens upon a chatty man sitting alone in a park, sipping from a bottle of cheap cognac and eager to talk to anyone willing to listen. His stream-of-consciousness monologue touches upon his relationship with his wife—opposed to his smoking, his drinking, the usual—his dream of achieving a career as either a gynecologist or a lounge pianist, his brief career as a “first story” burglar partnered with a dwarf and his disdain for his brother-in-law who claims to have been abducted by aliens. “These creatures come from millions of miles to get here and where do they go? Do they go to New York? Do they go to Rome? No—they go to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. And they don’t even go to the mall there! And the first person they meet is my brother-in-law? Lemme tell you, I go to his house every year for the Fourth of July and I’m always disappointed. I can’t imagine how these creatures felt.”

Everyone, at some point in their lives, has met a person like the man Hall creates in “Uncorked”. Amiable and aimless, open-minded about some things, surprisingly bigoted about others, but above all eager to share his philosophies and observations and break up the tedium of the day. Hall’s portrayal of the unnamed protagonist is at once likable and disquieting, as a character like this would be, and at the same time both baffling and sympathetic. If you were to encounter this man in real life, you’d spend equal amounts of time, laughing, shaking your head in disbelief and checking your watch while trying to devise a graceful exit strategy.

Shot in crisp black and white for a mere $10 (the cost of the bottle of cognac) in more-or-less real time in Connecticut, filmmakers EM Schrader and Aaron Sandler hand the reins to Hall (who scripted the monologue beforehand). With Hall as the focus, the filmmakers only make their presence known in minor ways—passing the man a non-working lighter, allowing a boom to slip momentarily into frame. At its best, the camerawork becomes the perfect counterpart for the viewer when its attention wanders away to focus on a frolicking squirrel during the man’s rambling. It’s at its worst when it “participates” by nodding or shaking in response to inquiries. Fortunately, these latter missteps are utilized sparsely and only briefly. Because, wisely, they understand that this is Hall’s show from start to finish, and just as you would if encountering this character in real life, they almost have no choice but to just let him go.

Best of all, Schrader, Sandler and Hall know when enough is enough. “Uncorked” runs for just under 40 minutes. Any shorter and you might feel wanting for more of the oddball and, just as in real life, any longer and he’d have overstayed his welcome. As it is, “Uncorked” is a nearly perfect short.

BURIED (2010)

2011-03-23T12:20:00.000-04:00

This may be a strange thing to say, but thank god for the creation of Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place. Broadcast on ABC from 1998 to 2001 (retitled as the less-ponderous Two Guys and a Girl in the second season) seemingly run-of-the-mill sitcom was never a huge hit, but it was one of those in-offensive, young-white-and-mid-twenties best friends “making their way through the world” comedies that will dominate the airwaves until the cockroaches take over. It was pleasant and occasionally offered up out-loud laughter, but there wasn’t much to set it apart from the likes of Friends, Wings and whathaveyou. Today’s equivalent is likely How I Met Your Mother (which actually shares many of the same incidental traits with Two Guys and a Girl, what with both shows having indecisive architects in the forefront). What it had was a core cast of actors who had great chemistry together, playing people you more or less liked and rooted for, who took chances with their timing and characterization. Most importantly, Two Guys and a Girl introduced us to two hunky superheroes the world knows and loves today: Captain Malcolm Reynolds and our new Green Lantern, aka Nathan Fillion and Ryan Reynolds. At the time, neither of these two guys stood out particularly as “stars”, but their talent was obvious. And they were fun, self-effacing guys on and off screen (at least as far as Entertainment Tonight revealed), easy on the eyes and a big hit with the ladies. But even the biggest, diest-hardest fan of Two Guys and a Girl would have scoffed at the idea that one of these two could sustain an entire movie, all by themselves, for 90 minutes. And if scoffing hadn’t occurred, the smart money may have been on Fillion first, with Reynolds a distant second in the two-man race.

And yet, in 2010, after appealing turns in equally-disposable comedies like Van Wilder, The Proposal and a scene-stealing appearance in Wolverine (as fan-favorite “Merc with the Mouth” Deadpool), where tall, blonde wiseguy Reynolds proved beyond argument that he could hold his own against most competition, and, amazingly, could keep eyes glued to the screen all by himself in Buried.

Written by an under-the-radar screenwriter named Chris Sparling, produced by Peter Safran (a guy with as strange a resume as Bob Clark with such “classics”—but undeniable money-makers—as Scary Movie and Meet the Spartans under his belt) and directed by an award-winning but relatively unknown Spaniard named Rodrigo Cortés, Buried premiered in September, 2010, and starred Reynolds and Reynolds alone. His costars include various voices on a cell-phone, a pair of glow sticks and a very confused little snake, but for 90 minutes, it’s just “Berg” from Two Guys and a Girl. And not only does he hold our attention, he creates such sympathy for his character that we too, as the single organism known as “the audience”, are trapped right there with him, in a very small box, buried under the ground in very hostile land.

Reynolds plays a truck driver named Paul Conroy who takes a job with an American convoy to haul food and goods across Iraq. His employers are not affiliated with the military on either side and Paul has no particular political point of view. He just wants to earn enough money to provide a better life for his family. It may not have been the best of ideas, to state the obvious, but as he points out in an early phone conversation, with the economy “back home”, choices were few and hard to come by. But Paul’s convoy has been attacked and he wakes up in pitch black. After some panicked searching (which we hear but cannot view—no cheating on the part of Cortés), Paul finds his lighter and discovers himself bound hand and foot inside a crate that is only slightly larger than his own body. Sand trickling through the gaps in the slats tell him that he’s been buried alive. Then a cell phone rings. It’s not his—it’s been given to him by his abductors, who tell him that he’s being held for ransom. He argues; he’s not a soldier, he’s never done harm to the people who are holding him, but it doesn’t matter. He’s American. He’s being held responsible.

The first third of the film is intense panic as Paul dials frantically for anyone who can help him. His wife’s cell phone is off. His employers insist he call the “safety number” he was given, despite the fact that his abductors had taken it from his wallet. Finally, he reaches Dan Brenner with the State Department. The government won’t negotiate with terrorists, will not pay the demanded $5 million dollar ransom for him, cannot trace his cell phone but will still do “everything they can” to help him. Brenner insists that they’ve rescued people in similar situations, include a recent “win” with a man named Mark White. There is still hope—thin though it may be, but aside from the few things buried with him, hope is literally all that Paul has in that box with him.

The situation, the claustrophobia, the darkness, the brief fight with the snake that finds its way in through a hole in the crate—these are the things that make Buried a thriller. But it’s the underlying anger, frustration and general indifference towards Paul’s plight that makes Buried a horror film. If there’s ever been an argument in favor of the relentless masked killer, the gory thrill ride, it’s Buried. This movie’s story is a nightmare from start to finish, no matter what side of the political spectrum you take. Some viewers may argue that it’s liberal hysteria; others may find the unseen conservatives to blame. Regardless, at its core, we have Paul Conroy, average citizen, our everyman, caught between the stubborn ideology of multiple sides who created an unwinnable situation. If you’ve ever felt disgust or helplessness at the state of the world, this movie embodies it all.

In the classic scenario of “the ultimate bad day”, every call to or from the outside world worsens Paul’s situation. To avoid paying insurance money to his soon-to-be-widow, a bureaucrat from his company terminates his contract because of a loophole based on an untrue breach of protocol. Our country’s stance on non-negotiation reduces Paul Conroy to a statistic, a pawn in the game. To his abductors, the natives of the country who never asked for our “help”, use Paul as a scapegoat for the horror visited upon their people. There is no side of the nonsense left unargued and even all of the faceless voices are humanized, from the human resources guy (the familiar and officious Stephen Tobowlosky), to Robert Paterson’s Brenner, they’re all just people caught up in Paul’s horrifying day, told to do jobs they don’t want to do, forced to carry out orders with the worst possible consequences. In the case of the H.R. guy, he has to distance himself from Paul, has to make him the bad guy in the situation. Brenner wants to keep Paul’s hopes alive, but doesn’t wish to lie to him either. To others on the stateside end of Paul’s lifeline, all they can do to keep their sanity is to take umbrage with his panic-stricken tone.

In a conversation I had with one viewer, I was told that there could be no sympathy for Paul because he’s so unlikable. “All he does is yell at people—I wouldn’t want to help him.” And that’s the audience’s emotional dissonance. Paul’s situation doesn’t give him permission to “be an asshole”, as my conversationalist put it. And there’s the desensitization of our modern day society. A man buried alive is still expected to keep a polite tongue in his head. His panic isn’t our problem. A quick check of Netflix and IMDb posts backs up this theory. Paul isn’t “always” likable. Of course not—as portrayed by Reynolds, Paul Conroy is a fucking human being. Human beings aren’t always fucking likable.

But because he yells, loses his temper with a disinterested or bored secretary, some audience members can keep themselves out of that buried box, that very realistic hell. For horror fans, there’s no comic relief or cheesy effect providing a trap door out of the horror. This is something real that could happen to any of us, because of things we don’t understand, created by people who don’t particularly care about “the little guy”. Simplistic an attitude that may be, its what most political imbroglios boil down to: the bottom line of money, power and jingoistic ego.

Buried is a very angry movie. It’s not pro- or anti-Iraq or the United States. It’s not misanthropic—it’s holding us all responsible. If you want to make the argument that it’s one-sided because we have a white American as our protagonist, then you’re missing the point. We are human beings—we shouldn’t do these things to each other. We shouldn’t allow the innocent to suffer for political, economic or—let’s be honest—genital-centric means. All war is a pissing contest, and the wrong people are always caught in the splash zone. While it is disingenuous to think that a movie like Buried, with it’s hunky superhero front and center, could possibly solve any of the world’s problems, at least Cortés and Sparling decided that they had something to say that did not deserve to go unsaid. If you don’t feel for our fictional Paul Conroy on any level, for whatever reason, then you are somehow responsible for the deadening of human emotion. If for one moment you don’t feel like you’re inside that box, there’s a good chance you’re not part of society.

BELLS (1982)

2011-03-22T12:04:00.001-04:00

There’s a madman on the loose, killing people seemingly at random, all from the comfort of his own home. Yes, our twisted genius has figured out how to kill people over the phone, using a deadly oscillating frequency that causes (surprisingly gory) cerebral hemorrhage, eye-socket bleeding and electric feedback. Basically, he’s shooting high-pitched lightning at the unlucky recipients. And admit it—do you know a single person who doesn’t wish he had the same capability. (I have ever since I first saw this convenience displayed in John Frankenheimer’s 1977 Black Sunday). Where’s our app for that, AT&T? Where’s our app for that, AT&T?

After a former student is killed answering a ringing payphone in a subway, uber-liberal professor and environmentalist Nat Bridger (Richard Chamberlain) discovers that she was just an unlucky victim, at the wrong place at the wrong time. The bigger picture is that there’s a disgruntled former phone company employee on the loose, hellbent on revenge against his employers. And the phone company itself—still a giant monopoly prior to the government dissolution of “Ma Bell”—is covering the man’s tracks, lest the rest of the world discover that it’s their technology, funded by the Defense Department (naturally), that’s responsible for creating this monster. So the last thing they need is some nosy former-hippie on their asses, screwing everything up in the name of “Truth and Justice”. Doesn’t he know there’s a war on? Or will be eventually?

Bells is another of those great VHS gems long forgotten in the digital age. Logan’s Run director Michael Anderson took the reins of the Canadian tax shelter film, and despite the relatively simple story, he’s working with a script authored by three screenwriters (Michael Butler (Pale Rider), Dennis Shryack (Turner and Hooch), John Kent Harrison (Shock Waves and the director of A Wrinkle in Time) built on a “Story’ by no-less than four scenarists (James Whiton (The Abominable Dr. Phibes), Michael Butler, Dennis Shryack and George Armondo(his only credit, which implies he stopped by the office one day and said “The killer could use a rotary phone too!”). Surprisingly, the result is less incoherent than you might expect and moves along at a pretty decent clip. And with Chamberlain and Orson Welles’ buddy John Houseman heading the cast, the performances are above par, to say the least (one exception being Gary Reineke as a cop who seems to think that he has to shout every line—insert early ‘80s phone reception joke here). The oppressive atmosphere is aided by a better-than-average John Barry score.

Most revelatory of Bells is its unabashed bashing of corporate culture. Though early in the Me-Generation “Greed is Good” ‘80s, we have our do-gooder Democrat as one of the sole Jedi Knights of honor up against the faceless companies hell-bent on ruling the world. Anderson makes great use of towering skyscrapers to remind us all that we’re all under the monolithic thumb of Big Business. While this is nothing new of today’s world—between the paranoia of Yahoo! News message board posters, movies like Eagle Eye and The International reminding us just who’s in charge, and let us not forget the Supreme Court granting sentience and human rights to corporate entities—in the early ‘80s, this was still the stuff of the conspiracy-minded, who saw a Watergate-like scandal behind every brand-name. Which, of course, turned out to be nauseatingly prescient. Of course, Bells isn’t the first movie to tie the phone company juggernaut in with the shadowy forces of the government (1967’s satirical The President’s Analyst comes immediately to mind), it doesn’t make the implications any less chilling. And now we’re all-too aware that no industry has any of our best interests in mind beyond their bottom line, it’s depressing that this message was delivered—and ignored—by an ostensibly disposable horror/thriller: “We can’t let the public know one of our former employees is murdering people using “safe” technology—think of our stockholders!” It’s actually surprising that Hollywood hasn’t already remade this film for present day, capitalizing on the throwaway line that “there will be 1.4 trillion phones in the world by the year 2000”, incorporating ubiquitous cell-phones, skyping, blue-tooth and the like, and we’d have a game-changing paranoid genocidal nightmare making Luddites of us all.

During its initial release, Bells didn’t fare too well at the box office. Released in the U.S. under the title Murder by Phone, it became a staple of mom-‘n-pop video stores, hidden amongst the teen-slashers, and is mostly forgotten today. But just like its cheesy and misleading box-art, Bells’ cheap veneer hides an unsettling underlayer, dated yet relevant, and deserves to be rediscovered. Not currently available on DVD, and not even that easy to find from your friendly neighborhood bootlegger.

THE KILLING JAR (2010)

2011-03-21T16:33:00.000-04:00

The first rule of independent filmmaking is use what you have. It’s an axiom employed by such geniuses as Robert Rodriguez and Ray Dennis Steckler. Think about what your assets are while keeping your limitations in mind, and you can make the latter become the former. If you have a bulldog and a motorcycle, use them for your movie. If you do not have something, like, say, a Sherman Tank or a herd of camels, don’t put them in your script, that way you won’t look stupid when it comes time to shoot the “Sherman Tank chases the herd of camels’ and none of those things have materialized. You can just shoot the “bulldog rides the motorcycle’ scene instead.

Without knowing anything about the production of The Killing Jar, I can make the reasonably-educated guess that writer/director Mark Young (Tooth and Nail) understood that his limitations were likely to be budgetary. By confining his tense story to a single location ensured that he could concentrate his funds on hiring terrific actors to populate the story. Setting the movie in that classic noir “out of the way diner’, rather than, say, in the Taj Mahal, Young could afford solid performers and fan-favorites like Amber Benson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Drones), Harold Perrineau (Lost, Oz), Lew Temple (The Devil’s Rejects), the one and only Danny Trejo (Machete), Jake Busey and “Crazy Uncle Mr. Blonde” Michael Madsen. This cast also helped Young hedge other bets. If, at times, his script weren’t bullet-proof, water-tight or whatever other phrase you’d prefer, at least the cast would keep the story propelled forward.

Late one rainy night at the Copal Grill, two strangers arrive and throw the “nothing ever happens here” tedium out of whack. One moment, it’s just Deputy Lonnie (Temple) and trucker Hank (Kevin Gage) listening to waitress Noreen (Benson) fight with Jimmy the cook (Trejo) over the lack of air conditioning. He threatens to fire her; “Haven’t you fired me enough for one week?” she asks. One night like any other. Over the radio, the DJ announces the kick-off of the County Fair and then breaking news of the gruesome murder of a family in the next town over. The killer was seen driving away in a black pick-up truck. Enter two strangers: John Dixon (Perrineau) in his ill-fitting suit and sales convention name tag, and “Doe” (Madsen), a hulking, surly man in black leather jacket. Doe’s tense and unfriendly demeanor leads to an awkward confrontation—more a battle of machismo and control—with Deputy Lonnie. Doe storms out of the diner but returns moments later. Murdering two with an enormous shotgun, he corrals the others and holds them hostage, giving no indication of what he wants or what he’ll do next.

Soon, a third stranger arrives with a suitcase full of money, to pay the man who carried out the murder of the family mentioned on the radio. “Mr. Green” (Jake Busey(!) doesn’t know who he’s there to meet and Doe might not be the man he wants—but if not him, then who? Someone in the diner has a secret.

The Killing Jar should be required viewing for all indie filmmakers as a guide to overcoming limitations. Simple without becoming simplistic, Young makes good use of his space, the familiar story and allowing established actors to bring their own takes to archetypical characters. While the script offers few surprises, it’s never less anything than entertaining. It avoids the existential meandering of Headless Body in a Topless Bar as well as the tedious moralizing of Albino Alligator, and there’s none of the hipster pandering of the last two decades worth of straight-to-video Tarantino knock-offs—except for some repetitious back-and-forth dialogue, particularly in the third act, that does become momentarily grating. Young’s movie is precisely as advertised: a straightforward, neo-noir thriller, free of irony or tongue-in-cheek self-awareness that’s actually very refreshing.

Where The Killing Jar subverts expectations is in the performances. Since the characters are little more than utilitarian “types”, there is plenty of room for the actors to play and bring their own little quirks to the roles and thus avoiding stereotypes. Casting blonde, blue-eyed Benson as the small-town-girl-with-big-city-dreams waitress Noreen, the viewer has the instant recognition and understanding of the character’s job in the film, but the actress brings both the vulnerability but also the unexpected strength and human personality to the stock “type”. We’ve all seen Madsen scary and crazy, and he brings his playfulness along as well during the intimidation scenes, but he’s also perfect during the big “reveal” scene—which is also an aspect of Young’s script that can really be appreciated. “Doe” had no plan; by his own admission, he was having a bad day and just “snapped”, then could never turn back. Madsen makes that perfectly believable. The same can be said for the rest of the cast, right down to the two ancillary “Romeo and Juliet” runaway teens who serve no purpose but as additions to the body count, but they still feel like real human beings because of the performances. Strange as it is to say, by avoiding twists or tricks, Young’s movie is actually much stronger for it. By not trying to subvert the audience’s expectations, he actually manages to do so effortlessly.

Young should also be given high points for his direction, particularly in the manner of blocking. I could be completely off-base, but it seemed to me that The Killing Jar had a tight production time working around the tight schedules of his stars. By corralling the main players in the rear of the diner while Madsen takes certain characters aside for one-on-ones, Young is able to hide the fact that there are very few scenes where everyone is present at the same time. (Trejo, for example, never interacts physically with any other character, and dead bodies are dragged behind counters so that the actors aren’t simply corpsing around wasting valuable shooting time and money.) He and Cinematographer Gregg Easterbrook also utilize the over-the-shoulder to great effect—the best way of having a stand-in during shot-reverse-shots and a perfect money-saving technique. Best of all, he avoids calling attention to these limitations with tight, claustrophobic camera set-ups and only eagle-eyed viewers will catch these short cuts. (Of course, I just drew attention to the mind behind the curtain, but out of respect and not maliciousness, I promise!) Again, these are all valuable lessons to budgetarily-limited indies, who should definitely take note: let your actors do their jobs, think ahead, figure out the best ways to keep your movie moving. As Young also served as editor, it can’t be too absurd to think that he shot with the final edit in mind as well. Oh, and another lesson: hire Lisa Reynolds (Zombieland, The Walking Dead) for the special effects because The Killing Jar has some of the best on-screen blood of any move in recent memory—from pooling to spatter, there’s never once any of that give-away beading so familiar to the modestly-budgeted.

In fact, the only blatant misstep of The Killing Jar may be in its title. Referring to the container entomologists use to suffocate insects (as illustrated during the non-sequiter title sequence), The Killing Jar has no relation to the story told, and the only explanation I was able to summon is the suspicion that Young at one time hoped to use the moody song by Siouxsie and the Banshees for a credit accompaniment. But in its place, we get a perfectly lovely number sung by Benson herself to go along with the enigmatic title, so in the end, it’s just a shruggable element.

Best of all—and rare for this column—The Kiling Jar is readily available on DVD for your viewing pleasure. So if you’re in the mood for a good old fashioned thriller without any of that troubling post-modernism that’s become de rigueur, this one comes recommended. Official Site.

CURTAINS (1983)

2011-03-09T11:43:00.001-05:00

Those who consider themselves collectors and/or historians have an affection for old technology. In the music world, vinyl records are once again in vogue, the black-plastic discs are selling in second hand stores better than almost ever, turntables are back in fashion and indie bands who want to improve their cred will press their own singles and 7”. At the same time, this nostalgia hasn’t been revisited upon the 8-track or the cassette tape, but a quick glance at the gamer world reveals a yen for the simpler time of chunky 8-bit Atari games and even text-based adventures ala Zork. And though Betamax died a painful, lingering death (much like HD-DVD), for movie buffs there will always be love for the Laserdisc, no matter how blue our rays may be. But for lovers of trash, the obscure, the grotesqueries and hidden treasure, no format has endured at conventions and on Craig’s List like VHS. In the ‘90s the DVD boom ensured that these sturdy plastic bricks with their colorful sleeve covers filled landfills across the world by the millions. But because of the staggering home video revolution of the decades prior, it will be a very, very long time before the format vanishes from the face of the earth. VCR/DVD combos continue to sell at Wal-Mart right next to top-of-the-line DVRs and “Cash-In Culture” stores all over the US line their shelves with videotapes, the covers sun-drenched and color-drained, their recorded images fuzzy and smeary, often the tracking has been shot to hell. But like the imperfect pops and hiss of vinyl recordings, there’s something comforting and familiar about VHS. Maybe because its understandable or maybe because it was so essential to the formation of the Gen-X film-lover’s DNA. As we of the Reality Bites generation approach our forth decade on the planet, we sway in our rocking-out chairs and reminisce about the glory days of the mom-n-pop video stores with their Nirvana of oddities that you just can’t find on DVD.

Which is likely the crux of the VHS phenomenon. Because of the home video boom, stores were desperate for content. In the ‘80s, when YouTube was something beyond the scope of even the great visionary George Lucas, the hunger for near-instant satisfaction was growing. The phrase straight-to-video was concocted out of sheer necessity. Lorenzo Lamas’ entire career hinged upon it! The format brought forward rainmakers like Tim Ritter, Kevin Lindenmuth, JR Bookwalter, Ron Bonk, Jeffrey Arsenault. A whole new industry of entertainment (and “entertainment”) thrived during these years. “I have to return some videotapes,” wasn’t just Patrick Bateman’s catchphrase, it was a declaration of responsibility, maturity, and independence—you were taking your own entertainment requirements into your own hands. Sure, the porn industry was the real pioneer of this era, but it was the zeitgeist seized by low budget horror that propelled it forward. As far as labels like Vestron were concerned, every VCR-owning household in America should have a pneumatic tube system installed right next to it, so that the latest goreflic—Truth or Dare, Killing Spree, Blood Diner, Woodchipper Massacre, The Video Dead—would just suck away the minute it was kindly rewound, to be replaced just as quickly with a satisfying plunk. Wouldn’t that have been heaven, ‘80s babies?

For all its technological wonder, DVD never reached the frenzied heights—or depths—of the VHS era. So those bricks of the by-gone days filling under-the-table cardboard boxes marked “$1 each”, ubiquitous at garage sales and flea markets, are truly archeological finds. And for every die-hard horror fan, there’s a personal holy grail. For some, it’s Killer Party, for others, it’s Curtains.

At a time when slasher movies were a dime-a-dozen, renting Curtains would have netted you change. Despite the grotesque cover—often the best part of these VHS treasures (I’m looking at you, Richard Corben’s painting for Spookies)—the back of the box didn’t promise much. A killer in an “old hag” mask, a hand-held sickle, Samantha Eggar. So far, not sold. But hell, it’s in, it’s a three-day rental, and you have friends coming over. What the hell? Maybe there will be some good gore.

What we get, after the FBI logo and the requisite trailers for other offerings of low-rent joy, is an opening credits sequence involving Eggar berating someone off screen. She points a gun into the air and as the camera pulls back, she’s revealed to be alone on a spotlit stage. Her antagonist stands in the shadows behind the balcony klieg, urging her to go farther, to find “Audra”. Eggar is acclaimed actress Samantha Sherwood, and with her director, the extremely intense Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon), she’s about to embark on some unique research for what will surely be the role of her career. To play the emotionally-damaged “Audra”, Samantha allows herself to be institutionalized, with Stryker signing as her executor, so that she can study the other inmates of the asylum.

But then Stryker pulls a dirty trick on her. He abandons Samantha in the grim little nuthouse and turns his remote cabin into a beautifully-furnished casting chateau, inviting six eager starlets to a week-long audition session, so that he might “find the right ‘Audra’.” Among the invitees are stand-up comedienne Patti (Lynne Griffin), aging soap star Brooke (Linda Thorson), casting-couch regular Tara (Sandee Currie) and figure skater/aspiring actress Christie (Lesleh Donaldson). In addition, there’s a dancer with little dialogue, a potential leading man with no lines (Michael Wincott, who gets a hot-tub sex scene with Tara but no close up) and a sixth woman into rape games who never makes it to the party. She’s stabbed to death soon after her “whatever works for you” fun-n-games, and the murderer steals from her room the creepiest, most horrible-looking china doll ever created. The doll pops up throughout the film at the moment of someone’s death—which is preferable than looking at the miserable-looking porcelain waif. Stryker’s biggest surprise comes when Samantha shows up completely unexpectedly. It’s revealed that she had managed to escape from the asylum and has no intention of Jonathan casting anyone but her in the part of the demented ‘Audra’.

As is the normal course of action, one by one, each of our little budding ingénues gets picked off in increasingly-violent manners by a killer wearing an “old hag” mask that Stryker uses in acting exercises. The highlight best-remembered by the ‘80s gorehounds is Donaldson’s ice-skating routine interrupted by the hag on her own pair of skates, dashing towards the shrieking Christie like an deleted scene from Slap Shot.

Unfortunately, the movie bounces here and there without much thought towards either suspense or resolution. When he isn’t seducing his actresses, Stryker’s humiliating directing methods would make Josef Von Sternberg say “dial it down”. Meanwhile, those not being seduced, humiliated or murdered pontificate about the “type” of woman “Audra” might be and what they would do to get the part. “I was so eager to get into pictures, I slept with a guy from Fotomat,” says Patti during her routine. “You know how they say your pictures are in and out in 24-hours? He was in and out in 24 seconds.” Laughs, applause. And when there isn’t pontificating, characters vanish for long, long periods of time. Eggar, our prime suspect, is missing from the screen in order to cast suspicion upon herself. Others just stop being in the movie here and there. Wincott’s character is last seen driving drunkenly into the woods on a snowmobile, while Patti…who knows. Takes a long bath? Gets caught in the pantry? Explores the wonders of nature? For the last act of the film, she ain’t there.

The admittedly-tense and off-putting climax involves Tara in an annexed props warehouse, hiding from the hag amidst hanging costumes and mannequins, all the well fully aware that the hag is in there somewhere too. The claustrophobic setting, the creepy lighting, the misdirection, all elements for a perfect climax! But as more than one reviewer has pointed out, by this point, it no longer matters who the killer is because it could literally be any of them. We’re given nothing to hang our hats on in terms of character development and the actresses are clearly on their own to make the most of their roles. By the time Christie’s head pops up in Brooke’s toilet, the viewer is actually hard-pressed to remember just who that Sani-Flush-soaked face belongs to.

As it turns out, this befuddlement isn’t really the movie’s fault. The movie tries hard. The performers did their best. But Curtains, apparently, had a very troubled production history. Filming began in 1980, with Prom Night wunderkind Peter Simpson as producer, and acclaimed composer Paul Zaza behind the piano once again, to conjure moody musical atmosphere, just as he had done on other Canadian chillers like My Bloody Valentine and the aforementioned Prom Night series. At the helm was cinematographer Richard Ciupka (Atlantic City) making his directorial debut, with a script in hand by Robert Guza, Jr. (General Hospital and, oh yeah, Prom Night). Considering that Prom Night was such a moneymaker, this seemed like the perfect team to recreate slasher magic.

Problems began when Ciupka’s original choice for Brooke, Celine Lamez (The Initiation), reportedly “pulled a diva” on set. The pair allegedly had problems relating to each other on a professional level, but the final straw came several weeks in when she refused to do an agreed-upon nude scene. Production shut down, Simpson and Ciupka recast Linda Thorson, and much of the film had to be reshot, restaged, or scrapped. During all this, director and producer also, allegedly, clashed over the type of film they were making. Simpson, apparently, wanted another Prom Night, a money maker. Ciupka, however, also apparently, wanted to explore the psychology of actresses and their relationship with demanding directors, and how far “the method” should be employed by emotionally unstable thespians. Ciupka wanted long, langorous tracking shots (and many survived); Ciupka wanted the smash cut, the startle, the scream. In the end, Ciupka’s contract was cancelled, his directing credit is billed to the fictitious Jonathan Stryker (nice of ol’ Jonathan to continue directing even after he’s murdered in the third act), Simpson and his producer brother Richard finished the film as quickly as possible and, as a result, Curtains is a bit of an opening-night closure.

And perhaps, in the end, Simpson was right. When Curtains concentrates on the stalk-n-slash elements, the movie excels. The gore is minimal, but the scenes build with suspense and bring those familiar giddy chills so familiar from its VHS horror ilk. When the movie focuses on the brief and protracted relationships between Stryker and the actresses, the pace flounders, as if the movie itself is uncomfortable with this part of the story. There are also numerous plot holes shot through the narrative due to the mangled production schedule—the most glaring involving an exposition scene with Samantha not too long after her escape from the asylum, where she feeds the actresses’ headshots into a fireplace while discussing her escape and plan for revenge with a woman hidden half-off screen, allegedly her accomplice in the escape. This scene is never followed-upon and never referenced again. So, of course, because we horror fans are such typical humans, this now-throw-away scene is the most intriguing aspect of the story.

According to the ever-reliable Wikipedia, Echo Bridge released Curtains as part of the Midnight Horror Collection: Bloody Slashers DVD collection in 2010, but with crummy, non-lurid cover art, a lousy transfer (likely from a VHS dupe) and a handful of other movies that may have been cool to discover on some dusty back room, but not necessarily worth digging around in a discount bin to retrieve. Because of the troubled production, or perhaps because of other rights issues, or perhaps just due to lack of interest, Curtains remains in its VHS limbo. Copies can be found, if this is indeed your Grail, and it is fun to watch overall. But its status as “lost gem” may stem more from its unavailability than its content. Still, the DVD boom was definitely the poorer of the gold rushes due to its distinct lack of little oddities like this. Sure, Blockbuster shelves were filled with DVDs of Daddy Day Care, but post-Gen-Xers never experienced the little thrill of finding something weird and lurid lurking near the back of the brightly-lit, corporate and sanitary store. The big business of DVD just didn’t appreciate shadows in its stores.

MURDER BY DECREE (1979)

2011-03-08T18:29:00.002-05:00

Ironically, fandom by and large is fascinated by minutae. “Ringers”, as Tolkien fans are sometimes called, are encyclopedic in their knowledge of Middle Earth and its history. The same goes for fans of Star Wars, Marvel and DC comics, Star Trek and Harry Potter. (And Twilight, too, but those little girls should be outgrowing that triviality soon.) These obsessions aren’t limited to fictional worlds either, as any Civil War re-enactor, WWII buff, or Renfaire griper will demonstrate at the drop of a date. If an enveloping history contains multitudes and layers, there is someone—or a club of someones—eager to explore it all.

1979’s Murder By Decree, directed by Bob Clark (whose own bizarre and diverse oeuvre--Black Christmas, Porky's, A Christmas Story--deserves its own graduate-level study), combines the obsessive loves of the “Ripperologists” and the “Sherlockians” by combining two fascinating off-shoots of Victorian London—Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, the world’s greatest detective vs. history’s most elusive villain. By bringing the fictional exploits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s master sleuth and his real-world London into the seedier underside of a London even more real, director Clark and screenwriter John Hopkins merge the dizzying, labyrinthine details of both mythologies.

Cliff’s Notes for those unfamiliar with either scenarios: Sherlock Holmes is the world’s only “consulting detective”, a brilliant misanthrope and likely “highly functioning sociopath” (as he describes himself in his latest incarnation in the BBC’s Sherlock), finds joy only in pitting his vast intellect against baffling mysteries. One person in the world can stand to be around him: his only friend and biographer, Dr. John Watson. Under Doyle’s direction, Holmes and Watson embarked on dozens of adventures in the foggy, gaslamp-lit streets of London during the reign of her Majesty Queen Victoria. In real life and during the exact same period (1888), an unknown man (or men) was running around the poverty-stricken slums of London’s Whitechapel district, murdering and mutilating at least five prostitutes and may or may not be responsible for another half-dozen more. The details surrounding the “Jack the Ripper” case have been sifted through not only by the police force at the time (headed by Scotland Yard Inspector Fred Aberline), but by obsessive-compulsive historians over the following hundred-plus years. Because the crime was never solved, it seems the best and most-natural fit to involve Holmes, in what will certainly be his greatest mystery!

Taking its cue from the popular scenario put forth by author Stephen Knight in his book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, Holmes deduces that the five victims possess knowledge that could damage the Monarchy and are being silenced by a governmental assassins. With this game afoot, it’s up to Holmes and Watson to protect the last potential victim, Marie Kelly, and put a stop to the madness—even if it means bringing down the government and its shadowy Masonic machinations!

Despite even the best efforts of brilliant detectives throughout history, including FBI profiler John Douglas, who makes only a “best guess” in his book, The Cases That Haunt Us, and because we’re creatures who need to believe that someone has to be in charge, be they benevolent or malevolent, or else all is chaos, it’s too tempting to believe in a Machiavellian conspiracy involving Albert Prince Regent, an illegitimate child, and a quintet of prostitutes blackmailing the Queen, leading to their elimination by any means necessary. Mixing in the secretive Freemasons and adding a dash of occultism only sweetens the delightful stew. Despite a truckload of evidence against this story, it still makes for the most irresistible of solutions for many scenarists, not the least of which Alan Moore, whose holistic approach to the apocalyptic time of 1880s London resulted in the mad and wonderful graphic literature From Hell, and its bastard offspring film version featuring Johnny Depp as a too-young Abberline and Heather Graham as a too-clean Marie Kelly.

Placing the great Sherlock Holmes in the midst of one of the most notorious unsolved murders in history gives the viewer—obsessive or no—a sense of closure, if only temporarily. Murder By Decree, of course, wasn’t the first time Holmes was set upon the ripper’s trail. Other cases were recounted in the cinematically so-so (but excrutiatingly marketed—“Biff! Bang! Crunch! Here comes the Original Caped Crusader!”) A Study In Terror (1965, starring “Baron Munchausen" John Neville as a serviceable Holmes, and Frank Finlay as Lestrade—who also plays the Inspector in Decree). In print, we have the notorious and, to some, indefensible The Last Sherlock Holmes Story by Michael Diblin (in which Holmes himself is the Ripper!), as well as the better-received and Doyle-heir blessed Dust and Shadow: An Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. John H. Watson by Lindsay Faye. In any of the above cases, the pairing is natural and even necessary. We as a species abhor loose ends but adore our climactic showdowns with our greatest heroes and villains. So both intricate narratives weave together quite beautifully without ever—or necessarily—being true.

At least, for the casual viewer.

For the obsessive “Ripperologists” and anal-retentive “Sherlockians”, Murder By Decree may prove a bit maddening. If the viewer happens to be both, by the time the end credits roll, sedatives may be required. Utilizing the much-debunked Royal/Masonic Conspiracy theory will already cause some pain, but it gives Hopkins script a great amount of breathing room. While Knight’s solution implicates 1^st Baronet and Royal surgeon-in-ordinary Sir William Gull and his coachman John Netley, Hopkins changes their names to protect their maligned identities. A few events are shuffled around further and much more is made of the institutionalized Annie Crook (played here by a splendid Genevieve Bujold), alleged (by the theory) to have wed Prince Albert in a secret Catholic ceremony which would have eliminated him from the ascendancy to the throne.

More damning—or, okay, perhaps “darning” might be the better phrase—is the portrayal of Holmes and Watson by Christopher Plummer and James Mason, respectively. For hardened fans of the classic acerbic Holmes or the cinematically bumbling Watson (thanks ever so much, Nigel Bruce), the heroes in Murder By Decree may come as a complete—though not unpleasant—surprise. While the events of the case take place during the height of Holmes’ and Watson’s careers, their relationship is presented as comfortable and broken in. Holmes and Watson banter affectionately with each other (best exemplified in the “You squashed my pea, Holmes” scene -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPUHMuSxiEo) and seem more like a married couple than a crime-fighting partnership. It could also be argued that the actors are two old for the time-period, but that’s what you get for fighting with the experts. My personal biggest complaint is that Holmes does so little detective work. He acts on hunches and intuition, lets suspects go far too easily (as evidenced in the scene involving “psychic” Robert Lees—played here by Donald Sutherland—who is allowed by Holmes to avoid implicating either himself or the real culprit he “envisioned”).

But the movie excels in atmosphere—the thick fog of the streets, the dank horror of Bethlehem Hospital (aka “Bedlam”) where Annie Crook is held, the absolute tweediness of the costuming. And before one starts to think that Holmes might be too much of an old nellie, Clark stages an exciting climax pitting the Ripper’s sword-cane against the weighted ends of Holmes bolo-scarf. It also feeds us our cake and allows us to have it too, as an appeal to Holmes’ (characteristic, considering that he shot a "VR" for "Victoria Regent" into the wall of his apartment) sense of Queen-and-Country provides us with both the solution of the murders and the reason behind the Great Detective’s own silence regarding the matter.

What it all comes down to is exactly what lies at the nucleus of all movies: if you buy the premise, you buy the bit. If you’re a stickler and nitpicker, Murder By Decree may drive you absolutely batty. If your only Holmesian frame-of-reference is Guy Ritchie’s “Bam! Bang!” redeux with Robert Downey, Jr., you may find Clark’s take a bit too slow and old fashioned for your taste. But if you’re somewhere in the middle, if you’re neither a Sherlockian nor Ripperologist—or if you can divorce yourself from facts and canon—you may find yourself thoroughly entertained by Murder By Decree.

THE MIDNIGHT MAN (1974)

2011-02-09T11:51:00.001-05:00

There was this strange period beginning in the mid-60s and lasting through the late ‘70s where classic matinee idols felt forcibly removed from their “comfortable” periods and jammed headlong into the modern day. Sometimes, I refer to this displacement as “whitesploitation”, but that’s hardly accurate. While younger actors like Sidney Poitier, Tony Curtis and, later, Al Pacino and Clint Eastwood, seemed at home in movies that were both culturally relevant to the times they were made, others of the strong jawed hero variety didn’t fare too well. Watching guys like John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Mitchum, even Carey Grant, share screen time with hippies and yippies, dealing with “modern” drama, drugs and free love just seemed… uncomfortable. These weren’t guys who lived in the present. They were cowboys, pirates, gangsters. They belonged in their suits, their chaps and spurs, their hats of many styles. We grew up watching them gun down bad guys, not fight off co-ed chippies many, many years their younger. Maybe Wayne and Douglas and their ilk lived a past that never happened, invented by the studios and the directors who crafted the worlds, but that’s how we thought of “the past”, shaped by the movies encapsulating them. Take those guys out of the “then”, as artificial as it may have been, and shoehorn them into the—also artificicial—now just never felt right.

To put it in modern terms, how many people out there prefer the Harrison Ford of Working Girl as compared to his Indiana Jones—or even his comedic cowboy in The ‘Frisco Kid? Put Ford in a suit, he just looks uncomfortable, and that makes us uncomfortable. Sure, The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a misfire for multiple reasons, but it wasn’t because Indy looked out of place.

In 1973, Burt Lancaster stepped out of the foggy ‘40s and oppressive ‘50s and joined the modern world of the ‘70s by starring in and co-directing a here-and-now thriller titled The Midnight Man. Lancaster even co-wrote the script with his directing partner, Roland Kibbee, as well as author David Anthony, who wrote the book said script was based on, The Midnight Lady and the Morning Man. Who’s to say who excised the “Lady and the Mourning” from the title?

Set in then present day, Lancaster is an anachronism the minute he steps off a bus in the opening sequence, but for good reason—his Jim Slade is both an ex-cop and an ex-con, older and weary from his time spent in the joint. He takes a job as a night watchman at Jordan College (played by South Carolina’s Clemson University) and almost immediately steps into the middle of a murder conspiracy involving a Senator’s screwed-up daughter, blackmail, backwoods thugs, betrayal and profanity. (No greater shock have I had in my life than witnessing a long-haired hippie-freak tell stalwart Lancaster to “Fuck off” and retain his teeth.)

Burt’s charisma conveys him through a network of character actors including Cameron Mitchell, Charles Tyner, Ed Lauter, Harris Yulin and the future Daisy Duke, Catherine Bach, making her feature film debut. The central mystery begins with a late-night break-in. Several cassette tapes have been stolen from the psych professor’s office, containing the innermost confessions of a handful of students. Slade quickly dismisses two of the suspects—one of whom confesses to being “queer” in order to mess with the professor—and figures out that the target recording belonged to young, nubile Natalie, the emotionally-unstable daughter of a powerful politician. When she is subsequently murdered, Slade is drawn further into the labyrinth where he is frequently accused of various crimes, suspected of others due to his ex-con status, and involved in numerous late-night shenanigans. Meanwhile, he hangs out with his best friend from his police days (Mitchell) and attempts a romance with his fetching parole officer (Susan Clark).

During the course of this overlong movie, we are subjected to the horrors of Lancaster interacting with the various subversive college types straight out of Hair and the creeping discontent smears itself over the viewer by the end. When Lancaster is not attired in his night watchman uniform, he’s in a costume familiar to us: simple suit and fedora, as if he’d brought his wardrobe with him from the set of Sweet Smell of Success. But all around him is paisley and tie-dyed and groovy, long hair, bell-bottoms, joints are smoked and Burt is constantly disrespected. Regardless of your political leanings, you await the eventual hippie-beatdown but it never comes. The movie’s tension comes from the viewer’s disconnect with matinee Burt and the Burt before us, crammed into a world he should never be a part of.

You don’t put John Wayne in a Hawaiian shirt and you don’t surround Burt Lancaster with hippies. It may not be a law of Hollywood, but it should be.

Eventually, this Gordian knot of a drama that doesn’t so much unravel as it is solved using King Soloman’s methodology. So convoluted, the mystery can’t be “solved” so much as “summed up”, and Slade provides a voice-over that cleaves our knot in twain, literally explaining the preceding events, double-dealings, criss-crossings and nighttime muddlings. And even with Lancaster straight-out telling us what happened, the story still makes precious little sense, resisting all attempts to stuff it into the box labeled “hard boiled mystery”. The story, like Lancaster, doesn’t fit the ‘70s trappings either. It’s drunken, listing Chandler unfolded in a post-political South.

The Midnight Man was not a box office success, though likely for reasons other than existential disconnect, and Lancaster would never direct another film. It would be years before he returned to his rightful place in the past in Zulu Dawn (let’s forget his brief role as Ned Buntline in Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians), but it was too late to go back. Despite a brief stay in the old west in the largely unmemorable cowbrat adventure Cattle Annie and Little Britches, Lancaster never did find his foothold in the previous times. It wasn’t until he embraced himself as an anachronism—re-inventing his Birdman of Alcatraz Robert Stroud character in Atlantic City, a more subdued Elmer Gantry in Local Hero—that a glimmer of “classic” Burt was re-established. He even poked fun at his (and Douglas’s) matinee image in the hit-or-miss action comedy Tough Guys. But until Lancaster settled in the present, succumbing to distinguished dignity in later roles, did he finally make peace with the modern movies. He may not have gone out with a bang in Field of Dreams (transformed into a young Frank Whalley and back) and his later TV roles, but he went out like we expected: head held high, back straight, teeth gleaming.

In the movie afterlife, you can be sure no one ever again got away with telling Burt Lancaster to “fuck off”.

…

Oh, The Midnight Man pops up on TCM every now and then. It’s not currently available on domestic DVD but there's an expensive PAL Import available on Amazon.

HISSS (2010)

2011-02-08T12:15:00.001-05:00

According to Indian legend, there is a stone, the “Nagmani”, which will provide immortality to any who possess it. The Nagmani is protected by the snake goddess, Nagin, and she will not relinquish the stone willingly. If one can manage to capture her mate, Nagin can be persuaded to trade the Nagmani for his safety. But her anger will terrible and her grief will be vengeful. A curse will fall upon the land, causing miscarriage and misfortune, and the Nagin will transform from snake to woman and back again until she finds her mate and rights the wrongs that have been done.

This legend, depicted in the film’s prologue, provides the background for Hisss, a new film directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch (Boxing Helena). Set in modern day India, the story begins with an American named George States (Jeff Doucette) who is suffering from late-stage brain cancer and seeks the Nagamini in a last desperate attempt to save his own life. He and his hired mercenaries track down the Nagin while she is entwined around her mate. Separating the two snakes, George makes off with the male, leaving the female Nagin to thrash in anguish (as much anguish as can be depicted by a snake, anyway). Knowing the Nagin will follow, George and his fearful thugs take the male back to their underground bunker of a lair and wait for the snake goddess to make her move.

Meanwhile, police inspector Gupta (Slumdog Millionaire’s Irrfan Khan) is dealing with the chaos of Holi—the springtime “Festival of Colors”, a holy carnival celebrated en masse by dancing, reveling and spraying colored paint over everyone and everything. He and his wife (Divya Dutta) have tried desperately to conceive a child, only to result in miscarriage (the worst and most-recent coinciding with George’s kidnapping of Nagin’s mate). His job is stressful, his marriage troubled, his live-in mother-in-law demented (she refers to him as her “other daughter” and berates him for being too ugly for a man to want), Gupta is beleaguered.

Meanwhile, the Nagin transforms herself overnight into a beautiful woman (played by Mallika Sherawat). Mute like her snake form, Nagin is confused at first about the human world. She steals a sari to cover herself and makes her way into the city. Once there, she is caught up in the Holi and finds herself captivated by the rhythmic music. Distracted, she is led away by two young punks who intend to rape her. It should go without saying that attempting to rape a snake goddess is way at the top of the List of Very Bad Ideas. Later that day, Gupta is summoned to the blood-soaked flat and surveys the remains of the two punks. One is full of very large holes. The other is little more than a lump of meat, gristle, bone and fabric—as if his body had been regurgitated by a very large snake. Gradually, the stories of Nagin, Gupta and George intertwine, leading to an appropriately gruesome (but surprisingly low-key) climax.

Here’s the part of the article where I admit to having almost no experience with the cinema of “Bollywood”. During my research, I discovered just how deeply my ignorance runs as “Bollywood” refers only to Hindi-language movies, while Tamil-language films from Sri Lanka fall into the categories of “Jallywood”, while Indian Tamil cinema is referred to as “Kollywood”. Therefore, I am not only unfamiliar with one subset of the largest output of films in the world, but also two others. This realization was, to say the least, very damaging to my ego and is rectifying this is sure to suck up a lot of free time in the future.

My lack of education in this area meant that while I knew Irrfan Khan looked familiar (due to his appearing in Western films like A Mighty Heart and particularly Slumdog), I’m more versed in the ouvre of Newhart’s Jeff Doucette (he played “Harley”, the chronically unemployed goof). I was even less familiar with the beautiful Sherawat, who is gradually breaking through in Hollywood by co-starring (for good or bad) in Jackie Chan’s The Myth and William Dear’s upcoming Politics of Love (aka Love, Barack). And while my innate nerd provided me a passing knowledge of the “Naga” animal people (not primarily snakes) of Hindu culture, I was completely ignorant of the previous Indian films detailing the story, including Nagin (1976), Nagina (1986) and it’s sequel Nigahen (1989).

In truth, Hisss may have escaped my attention entirely were it not for my slavish devotion to special effects artist Robert Kurtzman, who designed the Nagin’s transformation and half-snake/half-human appearances. (On a personal note, I got to see some of these early designs in person during a visit to Kurtzman’s studio – I mention this only because I think it’s cool and I like to work it into casual conversation.) After Lynch Jr.’s disastrous Boxing Helena and the irritation Surveillance, were it not for Kurtzman’s involvement, I may have given Hisss a misss (sorry, couldn’t resissst) entirely, giant snake-woman or not.

While there is a rather beautiful partially-diagetic musical number set during the Hori, with Sherawat front and center of the dance amid swirling silk and spraying color, the emphasis in Hisss is definitely on the horror/mystery aspects, so the movie leans more towards the effects end of the spectrum. That being said, while Kurtzman’s practical makeup—the costume, prosthetics and larger puppets—are extremely satisfying for the horror geek, the CGI bounces along the “okay” to “what-the-?” on this harshly-scored scale. Keen-eyed effects hounds will also notice, very quickly, when Lynch’s direction lets the effects down, particularly during shots of the beautifully-crafted male snake puppet (the film is quick to point out at the beginning that no live snakes were actually used). Perhaps this can be shoved onto the shoulders of editor Tony Ciccone, but an editor can only work with what he’s given.

On the other hand, there are numerous “quiet” moments of both horror and beauty, particularly a standout scene where a naked Sherawat slithers up a lamp post and sleeps beneath its warmth. Khan’s fleeting moments with Dutta as they address their strained marriage also packs tiny gut punches unmatched by event the most glorious of gore (and an autopsy of the regurgitated lump of rapist is especially nasty—praise be to Ganeesh).

A quick view of the IMDb reviews reveals that Hisss was not well-received in its initial Indian release, with many reviewers from that part of the world denigrating it as “low-grade” and a “B-Movie” unbefitting of an actor of Khan’s stature. High marks are given all around to Sherawat’s body, but little is made of her nearly-silent and wonderfully communicated performance as the bewildered “Ichhadhari Nagin” in human form. One reviewer was confused as to the film’s setting, due to a number of different dialects spoken on-screen. When Hisss is finally released in the U.S., this is unlikely to be a problem, as Lynch shot the film simultaneously in English and Hindi and it’s not like many of the unwashed horror fans will catch the difference between Malayalam dialect of Kerala and the more-common Hindi speech of Mumbai. I certainly didn’t, though I did chuckle at the Hindi-dubbed voice of Doucette, expecting the “dum-de-dum” voice of Harley. But that’s because I am, sadly, a member of the unwashed Ugly American horror masses. (Another chuckle came from the fact that Hisss utilized the “studios of Filmistan”, which sounds like something Garry Trudeau would invent. I know, I’m a bad person.)

The version of Hisss I was fortunate enough to view was a Hindi-language foreign press screener DVD. There is no word on the film’s official website when—or if—there will be an American release. If one does not surface, it will be an honest shame because I, for one, am grateful to Hisss for opening the doors for me to Indian cinema and I think it’s a perfect introduction to that world for similar horror fans. No matter what the language or culture, nearly all of us appreciate a gorgeous girl who can turn into a giant snake. It’s one of those common loves that keeps this wonderful world turning.

Marketing Department: Why use this:

When there's something as boring as this available?

DEAR MR. GACY (2010)

2010-12-21T14:39:00.000-05:00

Just a few months into his freshman year at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Jason Moss became obsessed with serial killers. With a career in the FBI or forensics as his end goal, he sat down with an endless amount of texts on famous murderers and forensic psychology, took up a large sack of immortal teenage hubris and began to write to some of the most infamous monsters in modern history, from the point of view of someone who would most fit the profile of each one’s individual favorite victim. In the case of Charles Manson, Moss adopted the tone of a budding militant dissatisfied with “the establishment”. With Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez, Jason posed as the head of a Nevada Satanic Cult, seeking guidance from one who truly knew “the Dark Lord”. And with John Wayne Gacy, the notorious “Clown Killer” who raped and murdered more than thirty young men and boys, burying their bodies beneath his own house, Jason’s tactic was that of someone sexually-confused, emotionally and physically abused by family, and desperately lonely.

In the end, all of Jason’s intended targets wrote him back. In most cases, he maintained an ongoing penpal relationship with his pals in the pen. With Gacy, his relationship got much deeper, much more twisted, and much more difficult to sever as the letters continued. Recounting his experiences in his book, The Last Victim, Jason took on the persona not only of “Jason Moss, the timid victim” but also of his younger brother, “Jarrod Moss, the new disciple of John Wayne Gacy”. In attempting to manipulate Gacy into revealing personal secrets, as he had with the other killers, Jason forced himself to live out some of Gacy’s most twisted fantasies—at least in the narrative he had created in the letters—including becoming a subservient sexual slave to his brother. While brother Jarrod was real, the paper-trail Jarrod and his relationship with fictional Jason was not—as he emphatically points out multiple times throughout the book. It was all Jason Moss and his perceived control over Gacy.

The letter exchanges turned into weekend phone conversations. And as Moss juggled multiple “friendships” with the killers—forcing him to keep an elaborate time-line of record keeping so he knew who he was for each man—his schoolwork suffered, his real friendships and relationships deteriorated, his home life with his parents increased its normal tug-of-war, and he found himself living more and more internally, almost trapped in the roles he’d created. Yet he never once felt as if the control had slipped. It was always Jason Moss, the genius student, and not Jason Moss the fictional victim, who had control over the Clown Killer. There was no struggle; to Moss’s mind, Gacy bought his rap hook, line and sinker.

Until the day Gacy finally backed him into a corner, sending him money and a plane ticket to visit him in the Menard Correctional Institution, where he was awaiting execution following the rejection of his final appeal. Gacy even went so far as to bribe a guard into posing as the warden for Moss’s mother, to assure her that her son would be in perfectly safe hands. In reality, the hands Jason had played into were the most dangerous ones imaginable.

There has been a lot of debate as to the amount of veracity present in Moss’s book, The Last Victim. Having written it with his college professor and mentor, Jeffrey Kottler, PhD (who seems, if possible, even more narcissistic in his brief forward and afterward than Moss does throughout the entirety of the admittedly patience-wearing narrative), Jason is arrogant, self-absorbed and manipulative from the start, but all by his own admission, which makes his flat intentions easier to swallow. Again and again, Moss states that failure is never an option for him, whether be it a school assignment or an argument with his “controlling” mother. An important character in the book, Mrs. Moss is painted as set in eternal struggle with her headstrong son, forbidding him from going forward with his project despite her own fascination with true crime planting its initial seeds in him. For much of the book, it’s his mother who is the genuine antagonist in his life. The serial killers become little more than screwed up mail buddies.

But every now and then, Jason stops and seemingly thinks about what he’s doing, how these dark and twisted individuals are affecting him personally. But he doesn’t let that stop him, not even after his terrifying face-to-face with Gacy.

Which is where most people’s suspension of disbelief seems to come crashing down. Kottler, in his intro, says the question they got most was “why”—why would a straight-A, all-American kid (a weightlifter, a kickboxer, on his way to sainthood) involve himself with the damaged lives of these horrible people? Why would his parents ‘allow’ him to do so? Why would the killers bother to write him back? Why would the Menard prison, even if Gacy was days away from state mandated death, allow the historically unhinged killer to spend any time alone in a room with this naïve kid? For the latter, bribery is offered as an excuse for the climax. For the former questions, it’s always Jason’s will that surmounted the “why?”, barreling forward with the distinctly alpha male definition: “no one tells me what to do”.

After The Last Victim hit the bestseller lists in 1999, Moss hit the talk show circuit and Hollywood batted a big-screen adaptation back and forth. As it passed hands and was ultimately abandoned, Moss became a criminal defense attorney and weathered the predictable waves that he’d lied about it all, about some, about details. Further speculation was derived from the book’s odd shifts in tone and narration (possibly attributable to Kottler’s attempt to “humanize” Moss when he descends his deepest into me-first prickdom) that Moss was affected more than he ever let on, that he was living vicariously through his correspondents, relishing the crimes that he could never bring himself to do, but had always haunted and fascinated him.

It’s this speculation that forms the rubbery spine of Dear Mr. Gacy. Using genuine passages from letters to and from Moss and Gacy, Kellie Madison’s script tries to make sense out of Moss the man. Forced to shuffle around some details, Dear Mr. Gacy’s storyline focuses on Moss and his relationship with Gacy, jettisoning Manson, Dahmer, et al, for the sake of dramatic momentum. She proposes that his project was for a term paper on criminal psychology before setting down to the meat. Writing and rewriting his first letter to perfect the tone of a lonely, timid teenager, Moss manages to catch the Clown Killer’s attention, his letter standing out from the piles of daily mail Gacy received at his comfortable cell. Between painting and long phone calls with his lawyer, Gacy becomes intrigued by this on-paper Jason Moss and attempts to reel him in further, playing on this perceived need for friendship and guidance. He tests the waters with references to masturbation and homosexuality before opening up the possibility of an encounter between Jason and his brother (renamed “Alex” in the film). Clearly, Gacy has found something with which to entertain himself during those long days of confinement.

Right around Act 2, however, Madison’s script starts to veer into a speculative direction that does not exist in The Last Victim. While Jason intones over and again that his constant research of murder and mayhem to stay “in character” for his various pen pals took its toll on him emotionally and psychically, Madison takes that opportunity to turn the movie into Apt Pupil. Over the phone, Gacy instructs Jason on how to observe people in order to learn and manipulate them, which leads to Jason stalking a pretty co-ed and, later, a potentially violent encounter with a motel prostitute.

Whereas in the book, Moss doth protest almost too much about any trace of homosexuality, the movies goes out of its way to ensure that the audience knows that gay = fucked up and/or evil. When his research leads him to paying a male prostitute for instruction on lingo and jargon, the situation, of course, ends in a roofied Jason staggering out of the bar from Cruisin’, dodging sodomy left and right. While Gacy declares that he’s bisexual, the movie quickly mentions that he’s a “homo” who hadn’t had sex with his own wife for years before his conviction. And, of course, Gacy only wants Jason’s sweet ass for himself and that’s his sole motivation for his evil.

Whether this homophobia is inferred from elements in Jason’s story or from producer invective is not clear, but these moments stand out as false for minutes after they occur—particularly when the script bends some of the real instances to suit the narrative needs. In the book, Jason does contact a male prostitute through classified ads and does pay him for a brief interview, but it takes place in the middle of the day, in a Vegas strip diner, with both of them dressed for work. This transmogrification into something seedy and dangerous is unnecessary. As is a moment where Jason loses his cool with “Alex’s” schoolyard bully. In the book, Jason forces Jarrod to fight his tormentor on his own and put it behind him, which illustrates the sort of control Jason exerts over everyone. You stand on your own feet. In the movie, the sequence is not only out-of-place but only serves the film’s narrative that Jason is inherently weak-willed and under Gacy’s control the entire time. The cat-and-mouse aspect of the story—who is in control, the student or the killer?—is lost in the After School Special of “Never Write to a Gay Multiple Murderer”.

However, the homophobic overtones aside, these small detail-shifts will annoy only those familiar with The Last Victim. Viewers going into Dear Mr. Gacy blind will discover a competently-directed movie (by Svetozar Ristovski, produced by Clark Peterson of another serial killer movie, Monster) filled to the brim with terrific performances, particularly on the parts of Jesse Moss (no relation) and the great William Forsythe, as Jason and Gacy respectively. Forsythe exudes both menace and charisma in every scene and his presence dominates the film from the moment he’s introduced, even during long passage of his physical absence. Jesse Moss takes the occasionally unpleasant and even creepy Jason Moss and turns him into a sweet, even sympathetic kid who doesn’t want to admit he’s in over his head. But it’s the sweetness that stands out, not the arrogance, and that’s what Madison wants to focus on, as it underscores the “why?” Making Jason sweet and upstanding undercuts his ego-driven passion for “getting one over” on both Gacy and the FBI. And it opens the doorway to the almost-exhausted “You’re just like me!” confrontations. While this route is perfectly satisfying for a movie-of-the-week, it boils a complicated emotional and intellectual story down to very trite elements.

Which in no way harms the tension or the impact of the inevitable climax—indeed, the movie takes the final face-to-face with Gacy a little further and a little faster than the book and makes you wonder—likely not for the first time—if Jason was holding back his version of what actually happened when he finally met his correspondent and realized that he was trapped in his victim persona.

Ultimately, neither the book nor the movie is 100% satisfying on its own. Taken together, they seem to be two parts of a still-unfinished whole. Jesse Moss allows us a glimpse behind the dead eyed arrogance of the real Jason Moss (who is shown on Sally Jesse Raphael during the end credits) and find the human that resides there. The book gives us a peek behind the curtain of the facts and the research at the monsters that lurk in every town.

What the movie cannot do, of course, is reconcile who the “real” Jason Moss was. Of course, no one can. On June 6, 2006, Moss killed himself in his Nevada home, which reopened the speculative floodgates. Had he allowed Gacy too far in to his psyche? Had he come too close to the darkness within himself? Or was he afraid the bullshit he’d concocted, as many felt the book had been, would be revealed for what it truly was: the product of a disturbed and immature student from Las Vegas?

We’re left with questions from an engrossing best-selling book about serial killers, and a very tense and well-made movie based on what they had to work with (out on DVD from Anchor Bay as we speak).

MONSTERS (2010)

2010-12-03T11:19:00.001-05:00

Three things I know about the Human Race as a species:

1.) The sky is always falling;

2.) We can survive anything;

3.) We rarely, if ever, learn from our mistakes.

Those three elements are in constant play. We will always succumb to mass hysteria, a planet-wide Simpsons mob, over the smallest problem, whether caused by man or nature. After all the arm-waving and screaming we’ll overcome said problem. Then we will gleefully repeat the process, for we thrive on strife, drama and argument.

While Hollywood loves to exploit #1 for box office gains, setting drama right in the center of a catastrophic plummeting sky with disaster movies and hybrids of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, The Towering Inferno, Volcano—ad infinitum, the “little guy” working outside the studio system rarely has the budget for the disaster and has to focus on the fallout. While the big boys have gotten in on this act as well—The Road, The Book of Eli—their scripts are generally placed years after the disaster, portraying the human race as hard-scrabbling mutants fighting each other for scraps of food. The “little guy” knows that #2 is a much more believable scenario: after the screaming stops, life goes on. As long as the Wal-Marts continue to operate, everything will be fine. The ground-eye view of a world-changing event, through the eyes of its survivors, is not only easier to depict on a limited budget but is usually more interesting to view human drama after all the explode-y parts are done.

Which was the thought of British writer/director Gareth Edwards and his new movie, the festival-darling Monsters. Six years after an exploratory probe crash landed in Mexico, new “life forms” have begun to sprout up South of the Border—and by “life forms” we mean “the creatures”: hundred-foot-tall squid/jellyfish hybrids that float above the trees and toss vehicles far into the air. Enormous and frightening as these rarely-glimpsed creatures are, they’re also deceptively beautiful and graceful swimming over the “Infected Zone”, as the middle part of Mexico has come to be known, but the devastation they leave behind is obvious: burned out homes, wrecked and rusting overturned vehicles, the debris of vicious battles between the towering creatures and our military’s finest weapons of mass protection. Television news, omnipresent even in the most impoverished areas, blare constant warnings of new threats, of the dangers of the upcoming creature migration, while in more populated areas, signs and graffiti demand that the military stop bombing innocent people and their villages whenever a creature is sighted. In fact, little is said about “random” attacks by the creatures. The “infected zone” seems scarcely infected, save for odd fungus growing the creatures’ eggs, pulsing with color in response to light and outside stimuli. But how this “infects” or even affects civilization is never spelled out. It’s the military that seems to be doing the bulk of the damage. And, of course, exploiting the situation.

Following one siege between monster and military, we are introduced to photo-journalist Andrew Kaulder, who shoots the rotting carcass of a dead creature before inquiring the whereabouts of the closest hospital. His boss’s daughter, Samantha, heir to a publishing empire, has been injured and he’s been conscripted to help her reach the coast, to board a ferry to uninfected America. Irritated at this interruption to his goal of shooting a live creature and selling it to the magazine’s front page, Kaulder grudgingly accompanies Sam to the port. But the ferries from Mexico to the U.S. are few and far between, and passage is expensive. The monopolistic tour guide demands $5,000 for a single ticket, but that does come with a free gas mask to protect travelers from… well, it varies, some say the animals’ toxic breath and/or blood, others blame military chemical weapons. Either way, it’s a good idea to have one on hand.

Kaulder and Sam spend the evening in the village celebrating her departure with booze and dancing before observing a haunting firelight vigil for the seemingly thousands of people killed since the creatures’ arrival. After a series of almost-predictable events, including Kaulder seeking out a new bedmate after Sam spurns his drunken advances, they are robbed of their passports and miss the final ferry—the port is now closed due to migration and mating season. Forced to make their way over ground through the Infected Zone, Sam and Kaulder are placed in the hands of increasingly dangerous and seedy guides, including an armed gang of soldiers of fortune, all too aware that the danger could come from above them in the trees, beneath the water below the boats or at the hands of their all-too human opportunists.

Critically lauded for its invention in the face of a miniscule budget, Monsters is a simple little story as frustrating as it is suspenseful. Director Edwards’ motives are pure, wanting only to depict the resilience of the human spirit, while painting unsubtle metaphors—intentional or not—for everything from illegal immigration—the aliens have settled in Central Mexico but are making their way north towards “the Wall”—to our occupation of Afganistan. With a budget of less than $500,000, Edwards and his tiny crew shot the film over the course of a few weeks, often shooting in locations without permission. After principal photography wrapped, Edwards set out to generate the CGI creatures and wreckage with store-bought software, so the fact that the aliens are relegated to extended cameos can be not only understood but forgiven, particularly given how gorgeously-conceived and rendered the animals are: all floating, seeking tentacles and their internal bodies communicating with each other in flashes of brilliant colored light. The film’s climax—where virtually nothing happens but our observing the creatures up close for the first time right alongside the leads—is nothing short of breathtaking.

But the frustrating part lies squarely on the shoulders of the two leads. Due to the constraints of the budget and schedule, Edwards left story and dialogue largely up to his actors, in particular Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, which results in very little. Literally given nothing to do but travel, McNairy bitches and whines while the injured Able broods about a dissolving engagement and a damaged relationship with her father. The pair never really converse but make uncomfortable small talk throughout their journey—which is not only fine and acceptable and natural at the beginning, but becomes agonizing to sit through after the forty-five minute mark. Our leads have nothing to say and their model-frozen features convey even less. Their inevitable romance seems born out of boredom than shared adventure. While their journey would be fraught with danger even without the presence of the creatures, the fact that these enormous but nearly-silent attackers could be lurking camouflaged anywhere around them just adds to the tension parfait. And it’s been made apparent that even after six years, little attempt to understand the creatures has been made. They’re things for soldiers to fight or civilians to work around. “This happens every year,” a driver says, indicating the impending migration. “You just get used to it.”

Meanwhile, fully aware of their situation, the best improv our actors can conjure are meaningless and often head-slapping queries. A distant trumpeting sound, simultaneously ominous and beautiful, sending a tremor through the trees. Kaulder: “What is that? Seriously, what’s that sound?” When leaving one boat journey for the next leg of their trip, meeting their armed escorts who appear to have just dropped Indiana Jones off with the Hovitos, Kaulder: “Why do they have guns? Seriously, what do they need guns for?” Because, apparently, it’s easy to forget that 100-foot squids are lurking all around you. Meanwhile, Sam offers little input, preferring to smile enigmatically, sometimes grimly, always stoically, at the doom-filled situation. Upon seeing “The Wall” for the first time, constructed along the boarder—an awesomely-visualized shot from the steps of an Aztec temple—towering above both countries like a Republican’s greatest dream, Sam: “It’s like the eighth wonder of the world. Or something.”

Walking through an enormous burned-out hole in the side of the wall and encountering hastily-constructed signs pointing towards Quarantine, devastation around them with nary a soul to encounter, Kaulder: “What happened? Where is everybody?”

The banal discussion adds nothing to the already-long journey, every bit as exhausting for the viewer as the travelers, with the giant squids omnipresent Col. Kurtzes, and the actors do little to make their characters interesting enough to care about. Plucked from a mumblecore film, McNairy and Able are bland everymen, doing the fascinating premise a severe disservice. Edwards could have taken a page from Jacques Tati and kept the film dialogue-free and our sympathies would have undoubtedly increased. With Kaulder and Sam as our focal points, Monsters is like listening to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as read by Fran Drescher, wonderful and grating at the same time.

Unfortunately, its

U.S.

distributor Magnet Releasing seems to have found the attitude of our laconic leads to be the most enticing part of the film, since they dumped it onto a handful of screens with only a minimum of boring promotion—the poster’s tagline is “Beware” as if the studio itself wants the audience to stay away. If it weren’t for the strong word-of-mouth from those who caught it at South By Southwest, I don’t think I personally would be aware of it.

If your mind’s eye is strong enough to paint the two out and focus merely on the passage from point to point, you’ll find Monsters to be quite the enjoyable experience. Far from the “worst, most boring movie ever”, as decreed by the mouthbreathers on the IMDb, Monsters is a contemplative, smart little science fiction movie because of what it shows and never tells. Since little is known or learned about the creatures, we’re not let in on anything either, so our wonder remains from beginning to (obvious) end. But we get majestic scenery along the way and are left wondering, “then what?” by the end—and in this case, it’s not such a bad thing.