tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23073851913175673852024-03-18T16:32:08.934-07:00PsychoplasmicsSponsored by the Somafree Institute.billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.comBlogger26125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-50634402855339479712017-03-31T09:38:00.003-07:002017-03-31T11:33:29.624-07:00Kuroneko (1968)<br />
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Directed by: Kaneto Shindo<br />
Screenplay by: Kaneto Shindo<br />
Starring: Kichiemon Nakamura, Nobuko Otowa, Kiwako Tochi, Kei Sato<o:p></o:p><br />
Running Time: 99 minutes<o:p></o:p><br />
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10<sup>th</sup> century, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Japan</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s
warring states period. A group of filthy, ragged samurai, fleeing a battle,
descend upon a secluded farmhouse like a pack of starving wolves. Inside are
only two women, Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law Shige (Kiwako
Taichi). The only man of the house, Hachi, (Kichiemon Nakamura), Yone’s son and
Shige’s husband, was forcibly conscripted to fight against barbarians in the
east months ago. The samurai greedily take any food and water they can get
their hands on before attacking the women and gang-raping them, then set the
farmhouse on fire to cover their crime. Curiously, despite the farmhouse going
up in a fairly impressive blaze, Yone and Shige’s corpses are left completely
unharmed by the fire. The only witness to this is their pet black cat, who
proceeds to lick the two women’s wounds. Three years later, samurai traveling
through the grove behind Rajomon Gate start turning up dead, their throats torn
out and their blood drained. Under pressure from the shogun, boorish governer
Raiko Minomoto (Kei Sato) dispatches his newest retainer Yabu-no-Gintoki to
find out who or whatever is leaving dead samurai on his doorstep. Needless to
say, it becomes readily apparent that Yone and Shige, reborn as shapeshifting
feline specters, are behind this rash of murders, swearing vengeance not just
against the men who murdered them but all samurai, and it falls to Gintoki to
kill these wraiths. There’s but one minor little detail that just might
complicate matters, though, because you see, Gintoki didn’t always go by
Gintoki; that name was bestowed upon the samurai by Raiko as reward for slaying
a fearsome warrior in battle. Before then, he was known as Hachi…<o:p></o:p><br />
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KURONEKO is a spiritual sibling to Kaneto Shindo’s more famous film ONIBABA,
which also dealt with a mother and daughter duo who turn into monsters after
they become victims of war. (Unlike KURONEKO’s pair, ONIBABA’s women needed no
supernatural assistance to do so.) Drawing on numerous folktales about vengeful
ghosts and trickster cat spirits, Shindo crafts an eerie
revenge-from-beyond-the-grave story that slowly develops into something far more
complicated, haunting, and tragic. It’s an anti-war film; in one early scene, a
samurai comments on how the land itself seems to come unhinged in times of war,
suggesting that war is a crime against nature itself. It’s also a
proto-feminist reaction against a world where men are allowed to take whatever
they want regardless of whom they destroy. More specifically KURONEKO is taking
aim at one of Shindo’s favorite targets: the samurai class. <o:p></o:p><br />
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Don’t come into Shindo’s films expecting something like Kurosawa’s mythic
paladins searching for purpose or even Hideo Gosha’s broken anti-heroes. To put
it bluntly, the samurai in KURONEKO are a bunch of utter cretins, arrogant
braggarts who view themselves above the commonfolk and boast about how great it
is their position allows them to rob and abuse to their hearts content. This is
something best exemplified by the film’s depiction of Raiko Minomoto, who was
an actual historical figure refashioned into a demon-slaying mythological hero.
Here Shindo’s lets all the air out of that particular image of the man. His
Raiko is a hypocrite, – he trashes the nobles he serves for doing nothing but
dallying around with women, but he himself isn’t seen doing much else besides
fooling around with his harem of concubines – a fraud who reveals that his
famous battle with the oni Shuten Doji was a complete fabrication (because
there’s nothing particularly glorious about killing a simple bandit) and
clueless as to why the ghosts of a couple peasants would hold a grudge against
samurai right after he monologues about how peasants are worthless and exists
only to serve them. It’s no wonder then that Yone and Shige’s vengeance goes
beyond a simple I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE vendetta against their killers; their rape
and deaths at the hands of those samurai were the end result of an inhumane
system that thrives on men becoming victimizers. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
At the core of KURONEKO is the bittersweet story of a doomed family caught
between their heart’s desire and damnation. Yone, Shige, and Hachi want nothing
more than to be reunited and for things to go back to the way they were but
realize that it’s too late. If Hachi doesn’t slay his mother and wife, Raiko
will have him executed; if Yone and Shige don’t kill Hachi, than the demonic
forces that restored them to life will drag them back to hell. It’s a dire
situation where no one can do anything but lose and our central trio will try
to put off the inevitable as long as possible and from there things will begin
to spiral further and further downward until…well, Japanese horror films don’t
have a reputation for ending happily, do they? <o:p></o:p><br />
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Of course, much of KURONEKO’s strength comes from just how beautiful a film
it is. Compared to something like the lush imagery of Kobayashi’s KWAIDAN,
KURONEKO is fairly stripped down, often to the point that much of the film’s
sets resembles a stage in a Noh theater play. But don’t look at this as a
limitation as Shindo creates a marvelously hushed, dream-like ambience through
the use of minimalist sets, light and shadow. Shige’s first post-resurrection
appearance is that of a woman dressed in white emerging from the darkness, the
contrast of the brightness of her outfit against the backdrop giving her a
rather unnerving phantasmal glow. Shindo also shows a deft hand at being able
to switch between the more dream-like scenes and moments of grounded realism
and keeping his audience off-balance by changing up the film’s pace and tone in
unpredictable ways. Within the first half hour or so, we go from a completely
wordless opening to a hallucinatory meeting between a samurai and the two women
that comes to a grisly end. Just as we’ve settled into watching that scene play
out over and over with the two women’s other victims, we’re suddenly dropped
into a corpse-strewn battle field with Hachi trying his best not end up rust on
the club of the only other survivor of this gruesome skirmish. Then it’s not
too long before the film goes through a touching and genuinely erotic interlude
as Hachi and Shige spend their last days together before everything concludes
with a chillingly surreal face off between Hachi and his mother’s demonic self
in a temple. This is all ably supported by the film’s talented cast. Nakamura
and Sato are, of course, fantastic as the conflicted Hachi and oafish Raiko,
but it’s Otawa and Taichi who really shine here. Taichi’s Shige manages to give
off an air of serene beauty and vulnerability even as she’s tearing some poor
goon’s throat out and Otawa is just a fierce, dominating presence all around.
Otawa – a frequent collaborator with Shindo who would eventually marry him –
got her start as member of a famous all-woman theater troupe and even gets to
show off some of the skills she learned from it, performing theatrical dances
as Shige goes to work on seducing and killing their latest victim. <o:p></o:p><br />
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KURONEKO is actually one of Shindo’s lesser known films; which I’ll admit
doesn’t quite compute with me because it’s the first of his that I’ve heard of
and the first film of his that I’ve seen. Upon release it was viewed as
something of a throwback, having more in common with earlier, more understated
period films and never made much of an impact outside of its home country, as
inter-committee struggles kept it from being shown as Cannes and it saw only a
brief release in the U.S. Thankfully, time has seemed to turn things in its
favor and the film is getting more of the recognition it deserves. Simply put,
if you’re looking for a movie that succeed as both a pointed social commentary
and as a campfire story, you’d be wrong to pass up this one.<o:p></o:p>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-34087593977378901902017-03-29T11:08:00.001-07:002017-03-29T11:08:51.117-07:00What's this? A sign of life!
It sure has been a while since anything's happened here, hasn't it?
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Well, don’t worry, I haven’t given up on Psychoplasmics, though I
will admit there was a strong temptation to do so for a while. After all, with
all that’s going on the world and things going on in my personal life, I found
myself wondering what the point of devoting time and energy to yet another blog
about some dork goofing on whatever screwball movie he’s seen lately was. And
as time passed it became easier to let time pass rather than devote effort to
what felt like an empty and pointless thing. Then I fortunately realized that
this is no way to be. After pouring so much into it so far, the only truly
empty and pointless thing would be to let this blog gather dust. So, I picked
myself up and got back to work on a review that I’ve wanted to write for a
while. <o:p> </o:p></div>
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This then, of course, got delayed just a tad more when I got
an itch to replay DARK SOULS again. What can I say, folks? When you find
yourself staring at a blank page, trying, possibly too hard, to come up with something
unique to say, the temptation to just screw off and go backstab monsters in
Lordran is mighty indeed. </div>
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But Lord Gwyn has been put to rest and the fire linked, so I don't really have an excuse to keep putting this off, which is part of why I'm making this post right here: to light a fire under my lazy behind so that I have to get the damn written now, instead of putting it off.</div>
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Keep your eyes peeled over the next few days!</div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-395466836991001962016-11-08T11:30:00.001-08:002016-11-08T12:45:59.215-08:00The Mist (2007)<br />
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Directed by: Frank Darabont<o:p></o:p></div>
Screenplay by: Frank Darabont, based on the novella “The
Mist” by Stephen King<o:p></o:p><br />
Starring: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden,
Andrew Braugher, Toby Jones, William Sadler, Jeffery DeMunn<o:p></o:p><br />
Running Time: 126 minutes<o:p></o:p><br />
Tagline: “Fear Changes Everything.”<o:p></o:p><br />
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This is what happened.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane) isn’t happy when he
emerges from the cellar of his home with his family the morning after the small
town of Bridgton, Maine (played by Shreveport, Louisiana, I say with some pride)
is hit by what has got to be the most savage thunderstorm in recent memory.
There’s a gigantic tree parked on top of the extension that he used for a
studio, not only wrecking his work space but completely ruining his latest
project, -- a poster for a movie adaptation of THE DARK TOWER, no less -- and
if that wasn’t bad enough, the Drayton’s boathouse has been completely
flattened by another tree, an old dead one that belonged to his next door
neighbor, New Jersey lawyer Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), and has been a bone
of contention between the two men, whose relationship can be described as
adversarial at best. So you can imagine Drayton’s relief when, due to yet
another tree getting dropped on Norton’s vintage Mercedes, his normally bull-headed
neighbor is willing to call a truce and even asks to join Drayton and his son
Billy (Nathan Gamble) when they make a supply run into town. It seems that the
whole town had the same idea that Drayton and company did, though, because when
they arrive at the local supermarket, the place is packed. Unfortunately, the
power is out and with the market’s generators only there to keep the freezers
running, everyone’s going to have to be rung up the old fashioned way. That
little supply run is going to take a lot longer than anyone expected.<o:p></o:p></div>
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With more immediate problems on their mind, you can’t really
blame Drayton, Norton, or anyone else around town for not giving too much
thought to some rather strange goings on. All radio, cell phone, and land line
communication seems to be inoperable, for one. Not too alarming, I suppose,
considering the storm last night, but then there’s the unusually large number
of military vehicles heading en masse to the army base located on the other
side of the lake. That base would home to the enigmatically named Arrowhead
Project, the exact purpose of which has been the topic of gleeful speculation
for the more conspiracy minded of Bridgton residents. Stranger still is this
weird fogbank that’s been hanging around since the storm. It seems to originate
from the same direction as the Arrowhead Project, and while fog obviously isn’t
unusual for a lakeside town, this particular one doesn’t seem to be behaving
like any natural phenomena anyone’s seen before. It’s moving <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">against</i> the wind for one and as it
slowly makes it way further and further into town, we get more and more signs
that something’s wrong. Emergency vehicles come roaring down the road outside
the store with their sirens blaring; the firehouse warning horn goes off; then,
as the mist begins to envelope the store itself, local man Dan Miller (Jeffery
DeMunn) stumbles in covered with blood and screaming his head off about
monsters in the mist killing his friend…<o:p></o:p></div>
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“The Mist” was written in 1976 and first saw publication in
1980 as part of Kirby McCauley’s famous “Dark Forces” anthology and you can
tell with a glance at the cover of the old hardcover edition that it was meant
to be the main attraction; the words “A Short Novel by Stephen King” are
printed in noticeably bigger letters than any other name on there. And you should
note that the other names listed on that cover includes heavyweights like Ray
Bradbury, Theodore Sturgeon Joyce Carol Oates, Ramsey Campbell, and Robert
Bloch, in case you need a reminder of just how big a deal Stephen King was at
the height of his popularity. (I actually had a chance to get my hands on a
copy of “Dark Forces” while browsing my favorite used book store once and I
don’t think I could tell you why exactly I passed it up even if you put a gun
to my head.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As the story goes in the
afterward of “Skeleton Crew,” inspiration came when King found himself in much
the same situation that Drayton finds himself at the start, stuck in line with
his son at a crowded grocery store after a storm had wreaked havoc, when he was
suddenly struck with the image of a prehistoric monster flying around in the
store with them. Loving that image, he took to writing as soon as he got home,
resulting in a story he described as “THE ALAMO as directed by Bert I. Gordon.”
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I definitely think “The Mist” is one of King’s best pieces
of short fiction, exciting and fast moving despite clocking in at a
hefty-for-a-novella one hundred and thirty plus pages. It’s certainly the story
by the man that I’ve read the most over the years. You also don’t have to look
far to see the story’s tangible influence on horror and science fiction. The
popular video game franchise SILENT HILL begins with a father searching for his
child in a town enshrouded by an otherworldly fog that hides pterodon-like
creatures and other monstrosities. One of the streets in the town is named
after King. HALF-LIFE, which also deals with an intrusion by an alien reality,
was originally called QUIVER, a tip of the hat to The Arrowhead Project. Brian
Keene’s novel THE DARKNESS ON THE EDGE OF TOWN simply swapped out the mist for
some all consuming Lovecraftian darkness and well, word of advice to all
writers: namechecking the work you’re pretty much lifting wholesale from is not
the best of ideas. Heck, there was even an episode of ULTRAMAN TIGA that lifted
its threat from King’s story and they even titled it “The Mist.” So, with all
this in mind, one could wonder why it took until 2007 for a movie based on this
story to happen, when even stories like “Graveyard Shift” and “The Mangler” had
gotten film adaptations – seriously not very good adaptations -- in the
interim. Well, that would have something to do what King would come to refer to
as “The Dollar Babies.”</div>
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The term “Dollar Baby” is used interchangeably to describe both creators and
creations. In 1977, King, after receiving letters from college students seeking
permission to make films and plays based off of his work, decided to set up a
policy that someone could have the one time right to adapt any of his short stories
(and only the short stories, mind) in exchange for a single dollar. These works
could not be exhibited commercially without approval from King first and he was
to receive a video taped copy of the short film once completed. The Dollar
Babies were generally not seen outside of film festival circuits and school
presentations, and the general impression is that a lot of them weren’t very
good, but three of them were considered quality enough to be packaged together
and sold as an anthology movie titled STEPHEN KING’S THE NIGHT SHIFT COLLECTION,
which was released by Granite Entertainment Group. This trio would include
adaptations of “The Boogeyman,” “Disciples of the Crow,” and most importantly, “The
Women in the Room” by a then twenty year old aspiring filmmaker by the name of
Frank Darabont. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Born in a French refugee camp in 1959 to parents fleeing the
Hungarian Revolution, Darabont came to the <st1:country-region w:st="on">United
States</st1:country-region> while still an infant, his family eventually
settling in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:place></st1:city>
right around the time Frank was the age of five. Inspired to pursue a film
career after a chance meeting with George Lucas during the filming of THX-1138,
Darabont got his start as a production assistant on movies like HELL NIGHT and
the original TRANCERS, before taking his first crack at filmmaking with “The
Woman in the Room.” By all accounts, Darabont wasn’t particularly happy with
how “The Woman In The Room” turned out, but King apparently saw something in it
that impressed him and got in touch with Darabont. (The short would also wind
up on a semi-finalist list for an Academy Award.) This meeting would be the
beginning of a long standing association and friendship between the two men and
after Darabont expressed interest in directing another of King’s works as a
feature film, the prison drama “Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption,”
King famously gave the rights to that story to Darabont for a handshake. <o:p></o:p></div>
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If you only know Darabont’s work from the likes THE
SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, THE GREEN MILE, and THE MAJESTIC, films with painterly
visuals and a tonal sensibility influenced by Frank Capra, he might sound like
an odd choice for “The Mist.” A quick look at the man’s career between “The
Woman In The Room” and THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION would dispel this notion.
Darabont would spend much of his career during that period as a screenwriter,
his first big successes coming via collaboration with Chuck Russell, and he had
a hand in writing the screenplays for a number of genre movies that were better
than they probably had any right to be: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: THE DREAM
WARRIORS, the 1988 remake of THE BLOB -- where else can you see one of the most
spectacularly gruesome deaths in b-movies <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and
</i>Shawnee Smith, dressed as cheerleader, spewing profanity and machine gun
fire at the titular beastie? – and THE FLY II. His credits also include
episodes of TALES FROM THE CRYPT, a regular writing stint on THE YOUNG INDIANA
JONES CHRONICLES, unaccredited work on the screenplay for THE ROCKETEER and the
recent American GODZILLA film, and probably most tantalizingly an unproduced
screenplay for a sequel to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s muscles-and-machine-guns
opus COMMANDO. One can only speculate on what that was like.<o:p></o:p></div>
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-- “I didn’t think much of John Matrix when he first arrived
at Shawshank…” And clearly Red would be played by Carl Weathers in this
version. --<o:p></o:p></div>
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Heck, the man was about ready to accept an offer to direct
CHILD’S PLAY 3 before the opportunity to make SHAWSHANK finally came up, if you
want another What Could Have Been to dwell on. And an adaptation of “The Mist”
was always in the cards for Darabont, weighing it as a possible choice for his
first crack at directing a film, and he had King’s full support. Over the
years, whenever someone would come around making offers for the film rights to
“The Mist” King would inform them that he had already given the rights to
Darabont.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It seems that even Darabont understood that he seemed like
an unusual choice for this project and intended to make something wildly
different from what he had done before. Though the budget is substantially
higher than most, he intended to shoot the film in the same manner as a low
budget horror movie. To help get a handle on shooting things quick and dirty on
limited resources, Darabont took to directing episodes of FX’s gritty cop drama
THE SHIELD and would hire on the same director of photography, camera crew and
editor for this project. THE MIST’s camera work possesses an almost documentary
like feel and I think that approach goes a long way in instilling it with a
genuine intensity, even outside of its more chaotic scenes. Though it is a nice
little touch that those brief moments of calm before and during the monstrous
siege are shot more traditionally. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“The Mist” contains what has to be one of the largest and
most varied monster menageries you’re likely to find in one of King’s stories,
which would probably go a long way to explain why its one of my favorites.
There are swarms of man-eating tentacles (“What were those things attached
to?”), dog sized spiders, skyscraper dwarfing behemoths, winged insects the
size of your head, that “ptero-buzzard” that started it all and gigantic
lobster-like monstrosities. So, it’s a little disappointing that the creature
effects are something of a mixed bag. Due to the short shooting schedule and
prep time, they’re primarily realized through CGI and while there are a number
of shots that are absolutely fantastic looking, such as the enormous tentacle
that reaches inside the loading dock during the first monster attack or the
enjoyably Ray Harryhausen feeling bird creatures, others, such the insects once
they’re in the store, stick out too much. (Darabont originally wanted to shoot
THE MIST in black and white and this version is included with the DVD release
of the film. It does go a long way to covering up some of the rough edges.) On
the upside, the monster <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">designs,</i>
handled by KNB EFX and artist Bernie Wrightson, are aces, my personal favorite
being the “Grey Widower” spiders and their distressingly human like faces. (A
nod of the head to a classic OUTER LIMITS episode, it seems) I was also very
pleased to see that they completely nailed the scene with the behemoth creature.
When word that an adaptation of “The Mist” was being developed, me and probably
everyone else who was a fan of that story was hoping they got it right and boy
did they ever. Seeing that big sumbitch looming over our characters as it
strides on by, blocking out what little of the sun there is has got to be one
of my favorite visual spectacles to come out of the past decade and change.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Right about now, you may be asking yourself, “Bill, this is
Political Science Fiction review round table. Just what the hell does THE MIST
have to do with either of those things?” Well, the science fiction part is easy
enough, since we’re on the topic of the film’s monsters. At its heart, THE MIST
is an alien invasion story. Or to pit more aptly, an alien intrusion story, the
accidental collision between otherworldly life and our own. As unbelievable as
these creatures are, they aren’t the Great Old Ones coming forth to overthrow
man but animals from a wholly different ecosystem that’s so very not compatible
with our own. The spiders only attack because people intruded on their nest,
the insects were drawn to a light source like any other bug and the birds were
there because they wanted to eat the insects and found something else tasty to
gnaw on. This is part of the reason why the actions of Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay
Harden), your standard King small-town-religious-looney who comes to believe
that this mist is some kind of harbinger of the apocalypse and only a “The
Lottery”-style blood sacrifice from their number can save them, are so
dangerous: predators don’t abandon a convenient food source. <o:p></o:p></div>
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It’s the threat that Mrs. Carmody and her mad beliefs
represent to the people inside where the political aspect of the film comes in.
For that, we must look from Stephen King to another horror icon whose work holds
just as much influence over THE MIST as he does: George Romero. As much as it
is an adaptation of King’s work, THE MIST is in many ways a spiritual successor
to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. Like Romero’s film, THE MIST is an examination of
how easily systems can fall apart and groups can cease to function together in
times of crisis and you can see traces of NIGHT’s legacy throughout. The film
adds in a romance between a local army officer (Sam Witwer) and a cashier
(Alexa Davalos) and much like Tom and his girlfriend in NIGHT, being Beautiful
Young People In Love does absolutely jack squat to protect them from their
eventual grisly ends. Then there’s the character of David Drayton. Now, in
King’s novella Drayton <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> the
protagonist but his role in events isn’t nearly as proactive as his movie
counterpart. He’s more of a supporting character, in a way, to the story’s
version of Dan Miller, and the two men seemed to have switched roles in the
transition from source to screen. (Interesting to note that it’s with the death
of Miller and another more proactive character in the novella that things really
go to hell for people in the store.) Here it’s Drayton that people look to as a
leader because he offers a solution considerably more sane than Norton’s
willfully oblivious insistence that the mist is nothing to worry about or Mrs.
Carmody’s More-Old-Testament-Than-Old-Testament blood and guts approach. Trouble
is that David Drayton’s as confused, out of his depth and grasping for
solutions as anyone, and much like Ben in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, his role
exists to pull the rug out from under the idea of The Hero That Saves The Day…but
I’ll get to that in a minute.<o:p></o:p></div>
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What separates the two is the angle they approach
this from. NIGHT is all about how Ben and Cooper’s clashing personalities and their
need to be the one in charge played a major factor in dooming the people
trapped in that farm house. THE MIST comes at it from the idea that if you
scare people bad enough, they’ll come running to anyone who offers a solution,
whether or not the person offering that solution actually understands what they
are dealing with or even if the solution that person offers could potentially
be worse than threat. Furthermore, both the story and film are about how
mishandling that fear can bring out an ugly side in people who you thought you
knew. Mishandling fear is what causes the people in the store to split into
factions in the first places. It causes Brent to refuse blatant evidence that there’s
more going on than a simple fogbank and his suicidal decision to lead a group
out into it early on. We are left to only guess at what their fates are. It's people's fear that empowers Mrs. Carmody and as more and more tragedies occurs, she uses that fear to whip them into a frenzy, leading to the death of an unfortunate convenient scapegoat. </div>
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I will agree that things escalate rather quickly in this movie but well, it's a movie. You have only a certain amount of time to get your point across. Fortunately, despite the expediency in which thing go full-on "Lord of the Flies," THE MIST never quite devolves into becoming a cartoon. The documentary feel and Darabont's writing plays a part in that
but a lot of it comes from the fact that the movie is blessed with an incredibly good cast, including Jane, Jones and Braugher, as well a number of regular players in Darabont's movies. We've got Jeff DeMunn, Laurie Holden, Brian Libby and William Sadler, who funnily enough played David Drayton in an earlier audiobook adaptation of "The Mist." Special consideration must go to Marcia Gay Harden, looking very much like Karen Black, as Mrs. Carmody. Such an extreme character is difficult to pull off and one could easily see the character being too much. She almost is in the story, with her bright yellow pantsuit, crone like appearance, and King's tendency to remind us of her existence by having her cry out "Death!" in the background of certain scenes, which reminds me a little too much of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDBP0DqQuss" target="_blank">Grandpa Simpson.</a> But Harden pulls it off, giving a performance not all that far removed from Jack Nicholson in THE SHINING; a dangerously unhinged person letting a fevered nastiness to come out and play. The result is one of the most utterly hissable villains to show up in a Stephen King adaptation. I was lucky enough to be one of the few people to see this movie in theaters and when Carmody bought it, <em>the audience cheered</em>.</div>
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<br />
Audiences were a little more divided in their reactions to the ending which brings us to what becomes of David Drayton and the world at large in THE MIST's closing moments. Spoilers ahoy, obviously. Like I said, Drayton isn't quite as successful a hero that his role in the films usually is and his attempt in the film's ending to spare his loved ones a horrible death ends up backfiring in the worst possible way. This isn't the ending of King's story, which more or less stopped at a good enough point, leaving the characters fates ambiguous. Darabont wanted something more concrete for the conclusion to this film, however, and it's not quite the ass-pull that many of its critics claimed it was. Rather it was Darabont taking one of the more chilling thoughts David has while he and others make his escape in the story and carrying it on through to the worst possible result. I can understand why people hated it. Rewatching the film for Halloween, I came away from it feeling like David Drayton's fate, when piled on top of all the other horrors that occured in the movie was simply too much. It comes dangerously close to simply wallowing in misery, something that THE WALKING DEAD, which Darabont served as a showrunner on for the first two season, is regularly criticized for. But I can't deny that I find it be an effectively done scene, some wonderful bits of acting done almost completely with glances and moments of silence and no matter how many times I've watched this movie, and believe me, I watched it a lot the year it came out, I still flinch when that first gunshot goes off.<br />
<br />
But for all the attention the meaningless of Drayton's actions have received, there's something else horrifying about the ending, I find, which gets things back to the political part of the review. There seems to be a curse of sorts for horror films that are allegories of their time to become only more prescient as the years pass. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was never about "THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE COULD, LIKE, TOTALLY HAPPEN BRUH!" but about underlying tensions in the country and a growing distrust with the powers that be. Watch it today and not only has not much changed but one can't help but bring to mind Tamir Rice and others when Ben, a black man, is shot down by law enforcement officers who don't even bother to confirm whether he's a threat or not before they open fire. Likewise, one can easily see THE MIST as playing on tensions of the post 9/11 / Bush-era, with a group of people splitting apart and turning against each other in reaction to a sudden and destructive event. Well, it's unfortunate to say that just under a decade from the film's release, a lot of those tensions and fears are still here and strong as ever. Wouldn't you know, this election year we happen to have a Mrs. Carmody of our own, a candidate who rose to prominence by playing on those fears, by pandering to and whipping the worst parts of the country's psyche into a frenzy, regardless of whether he actually believes or plans to follow to through with any of it. It's unearthed something genuinely ugly. THE MIST ends with the threat banished but the people who survived it will never be able to go back to normal. David Drayton, the others at the supermarket, they'll have to live with what they've done for the rest of their lives. Regardless whether or not that idiot is elected today, the damage he's and his ardent supports have done with this campaign's fearmongering won't go away when the polls close tonight. I doesn't matter if we settle back into our routines, that ugly thing they unearthed is still going to be there, hungry and snapping at our doors. Hell, I can at least empathize with the people in that supermarket. They feared for their lives. What are the hardcore Trumpers afraid of? Being forced to admit that there are different kinds of people in the world? That it's not all aboout them? Is that why they stirred all this crap up, something that we'll have to deal with the ramifications of further down? That doesn't make me want to empathize with them. That just makes me angry.</div>
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<em>This review was part of the Celluloid Zeroes </em>Political Science Fiction Roundtable, <em>because we had to do something besides lose our dang minds in anticipation of whatever happens. Hop on over Checkpoint-Telstar to read his take on <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-celluloid-zeroes-present-political.html" target="_blank">THE PARALLAX VIEW</a>, Microbrew Reviews for <a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-celluloid-zeroes-proudly-present.html" target="_blank">INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS,</a> and The Terrible Claw Reviews for <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2016/11/shin-godzilla-2016-political-science.html" target="_blank">SHIN GODZILLA</a> before stopping off at Web of the Big Damn Spider for <a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/a-report-on-the-party-and-guests-1966/" target="_blank">A REPORT ON THE PARTY AND GUESTS.</a></em></div>
billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-52152542493760531022016-10-31T13:14:00.002-07:002016-10-31T13:14:37.417-07:00Galaxy of Terror (1981)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrempHxyT3FX7lMS91DFEyqlwo8Ts4TTbUT4ffAF4sacf0Un2ArC8nz7-dxLqUk66pF2btFRNoiqZpAGIQW4kunh9z-Y8qf0n8kkdBS6q-Z9kvvSuXJaSEqhKDDbE0wfo9JinyPd9_AHZy/s1600/Galaxy-of-Terror+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrempHxyT3FX7lMS91DFEyqlwo8Ts4TTbUT4ffAF4sacf0Un2ArC8nz7-dxLqUk66pF2btFRNoiqZpAGIQW4kunh9z-Y8qf0n8kkdBS6q-Z9kvvSuXJaSEqhKDDbE0wfo9JinyPd9_AHZy/s400/Galaxy-of-Terror+%25281%2529.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Directed by: Bruce Clark</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Screenplay by: Marc Siegler and Bruce
Clark</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Starring: Eddie Albert Jr., Ray
Walston, Erin Moran, Sid Haig, Grace Zabriskie, Robert Englund,Taaffe
O’Connell</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Running Time: 81 min.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tagline: “Hell Has Just Been
Relocated.”</div>
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On the desolate planet of Morganthus, the last surviving
member of the starship <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Remus</i> attempts
to escape some unseen threat by sealing himself away in the ship’s morgue but
whatever it is chasing after him, the crew member’s barricade does nothing to
stop it and the man is violently killed by the seemingly invisible assailant.
Back on the Remus’s homeworld of Xeres, the strange, god-like Planet Master, a
robed figure whose face is obscured by an orange glow, is taking part in a
strange game with an old crone named Mitiri (Mary Ellen O’Neil) when he receives
word of the disappearance of the Remus on Morganthus. Surprisingly, Planet
Master seems pleased by this news and is prompted by it to make a particularly
daring move in whatever this game they’re playing is. Mitri is taken aback by his
boldness but he sees what has happened on Morganthus as a sign to put a long
gestating plan into motion and will not be deterred. A rescue mission by the
starship Quest is quickly arranged, to be headed up by Commander Ilvar (Bernard
Beherns) – a puzzling request since Ilvar seems to have been retired from
active duty for a number of years – and manned by a crew personally selected by
Planet Master himself.<o:p> </o:p></div>
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And what a crew it is! Captain Trantor (Grace Zabriskie) is
an absolute lunatic suffering from severe PTSD as the result of being the lone
survivor of something called The Hesperus Massacre, the mere mention of which
triggers traumatic flashbacks in the woman. Officer Baelon (Zalman King) is, to
not put too fine a point on it, a complete asshole, who is particularly hostile
to fellow crew member Cabren (Eddie Albert Jr.), very likely due to Cabren’s
relationship with Alluma (Erin Moran), who also joins the crew. Alluma is a
psychic and you’ll be happy to know that in the grand tradition of movie
psychics, her abilities end up being completely useless. Rounding out the crew
are cook Kore (Ray Waltson!), Quuhod (Sid Haig!), a monastic warrior who
eschews firearms for a pair of crystal throwing weapons and barely speaks (Haig
agreed to do the movie on the condition that he could play character as a mute
to get out of having to say some apparently horrendous dialogue.), rookie Cos
(Jack Blessing) who’s so nervous about his first mission out he’s barely
holding it together from the looks of things, and tech officers Dameia (Taaffe
O’Connell) and Ranger. (Robert Englund!) To call the Planet Master’s choice of
personnel a tad questionable is a bit of an understatement.<o:p> </o:p></div>
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Things go wrong as soon as The Quest reaches Morganthus.
While in orbit, the ship is seized by some unknown force and pulled down to the
planet’s surface, a rather inhospitable looking graveyard of wrecked ships, and
while the crew comes out unscathed, the rough landing did the Quest no favors.
Not that the ship being fully functional would be much help at the moment, as
whatever snatched the Quest out of orbit won’t let go of it unless they can
find its power source and shut it down. Fortunately, the Quest was put down in
relatively close proximity to the wreck of the Remus and Ilvar dispatches a
team to look for survivors. All they end up finding is corpses, which for
reasons never remotely explained, Baelon immediately incinerates upon
discovery. However, a thorough search of ship reveals there’s still several crew
members unaccounted for and so it’s possible that some remnant of the Remus’s
crew is still alive somewhere. Strangely enough, Alluma’s psychic radar does
detect a lifeform of some sort, though it’s identifiably not human. Even more
confusing, the presence she’s detecting seems to originate with Cos, who spent
the better part of the search through the Remus jumping at shadows. Well, turns
out that <st1:place w:st="on">Cos</st1:place> had a very good reason to be
afraid, because as soon as everyone else is off the Remus, he gets attacked and
killed by a dog-sized creature that seems to be a mixture of insect and
reptile.<o:p> </o:p></div>
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Dameia and Ranger, who are apparently also the ships
surgical team as well as tech crew, perform an autopsy on <st1:place w:st="on">Cos</st1:place>
and the one corpse found in the Remus that Baelon didn’t reduce to charcoal
briquettes but are unable to determine what killed them. That mystery will have
to wait, because Commander Ilvar’s scans of the nearby area have turned up
something interesting. Something nearby is putting out enough energy to
scramble the Quest’s scanners and that’s enough to convince Ilvar that the
source of whatever is trapping the Quest on Morganthus may lay in that
direction. Another team is dispatched to investigate and this time Ilvar will
join them. What they discover is a massive pyramid, which immediately spooks
out Alluma, as she says she’s never encountered anything in her life that feels
so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">empty</i> when scanned by her psychic
abilities. Despite her protests, heading inside that pyramid may be the only
way for them to find answers to what is going on. <o:p> </o:p></div>
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It goes without saying that the discovery of the pyramid is
the cue for whatever is behind all this to start picking off our cast in
earnest. Ilvar is killed by another alien life form as he rappels down into a
shaft on the side of the pyramid. Quuhod gets attacked by his own weapons
before bizarrely being finished off by his own severed arm! Trantor, believing
that they’re under attack by the same alien force responsible for the Hesperus
Massacre, ends up burned alive and in the most infamous scene in all of GALAXY
OF TERROR, Dameia is overwhelmed by a giant maggot that tears her clothing off
and um, has its way with her before she dies. Ew. As their numbers are whittled
down, the remaining survivors realize that something within the pyramid is
tapping into their subconscious fears and siccing their own personalized id
monster on each of them. They’ll also discover that their walking into this
deathtrap was very much part of that mysterious plan of the Planet Master’s
alluded to in the early scenes and if they want to get out this alive, they’ll
have to figure out what his game is.<o:p> </o:p></div>
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In 1970, after spending the previous decade and change
directing several dozen films for American International Pictures, Roger Corman
parted ways with A.I.P. and with his brother Gene, founded New World Pictures
Ltd. Corman’s intent was to take a brief sabbatical and work primarily on the production
side of things for about a year or so before he hopped back into the director’s
chair. Well, as it turns out, New World Pictures would keep Corman so busy on
that end of things that he would never direct another movie but since production
and supervisory roles were where Corman’s real talent lay, I think we can all
agree that things worked out for the best there, right? Anyway, much like
A.I.P. before it, the independent New World’s focus was to be on the creation
and distribution of small scale, low budget exploitation films made to cater to
popular tastes that could be made fast and recuperate their budgets quickly,
while also bolstering their library by picking up the distribution rights for
foreign films by the likes of Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bergman. And also
STARCRASH, for which we are eternally greatful. Think of them as the 70’s and
early 80’s counterpart to Cannon Films and hey, guess who Menaham Golan got his
start with?<o:p></o:p></div>
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As I mentioned, where Corman’s excelled was on the
production side of things, in particular his knack for spotting potential great
talents and motivating them to learn and grow as filmmakers by doing. You were
given an idea to develop into a script and you had so many days to shoot the
movie for so much money. If you’re capable of working under those restrictions,
then you can pretty much do whatever the hell you wanted on the movie. Corman
would be relatively hands off most of the time but wasn’t afraid to pop in and
suggest (often insistently so) changes or ideas that he felt would make the
film more appealing to the markets he would be selling the films too. It was an
approach that worked and if you need evidence thereof just look at the numerous
heavyweight directors, writers, and others who inform so much of modern day
filmmaking that got their start and proved themselves working for the man, a
list that includes the likes of Joe Dante, Paul Bartel, John Sayles, James
Horner, William Stout, Ron Howard, Jonathon Demme and Gale Anne Hurd, not to
mention special effects experts who would work on everything from NIGHTMARE ON
ELM STREET to AVATAR.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
However, this was also the time period where the arrival and
massive success of films like JAWS and STAR WARS initiated a major shift in <st1:place w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> filmmaking for better or worse. “What is JAWS,”
Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “but a big budget Roger Corman
picture?” The <st1:place w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:place> studio machine was now
catering to the exact same audiences that Corman was but were able to throw a ton
more money into it. If he wanted to compete, the famously pennywise producer was
going to have to risk opening up his pocket book a teensy bit more. Therefore,
he needed to be certain that people would come out to see the movies he
produced, and so got into the practice of making movies that mimicked whatever film
was popular at the time just enough to grab the attention of fans looking for a
something familiar. The difference between the best of these and say, the
“mockbusters” shoveled out by the Asylum a couple of decades later is that for
the most part they aimed for something different than simply recreating a more
successful movie for (a whole lot) less money. Instead, they would look at the
most basic, core concepts behind these movies as a jumping off point for
something unique. Yes, Dante’s PIRANHA is about a resort town getting chewed up
and spit out by an aquatic menace but the movie itself is a gleefully self-aware
mixture of ‘50’s “science run amok” and black comedy. BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS
pared down STAR WARS to “Kurosawa jideki film meets WWII dog fight movie” and
gave us SEVEN SAMURAI in space, even bringing in Robert Vaughn to play a riff
on his character from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
GALAXY OF TERROR – submitted as PLANET OF HORRORS, produced
under the title QUEST, and initially released under the truly god-awful title
of MINDWARP: AN INFINITY OF TERROR to tepid response until, in true Corman
fashion, they slapped a new title on it and re-released it -- is an ALIEN
cash-in and isn’t afraid to admit it. But despite the repeated swipes from
Ridley Scott’s film and of H.R. Giger’s design sensibility, I wouldn’t say that
it’s wholly accurate to describe GALAXY OF TERROR as a complete ALIEN
knock-off. Certainly, the film plants itself firmly in much of the same
territory as its inspiration for a good chunk of its first act, what with a
crew setting down on a hostile alien world to explore the wreckage of a derelict
spacecraft. It even cribs the ominous alien pyramid structure from the original
script of ALIEN. (Coincidently, back when ALIEN was known as STARBEAST,
O’Bannon and Shusett had intended to sell the script to Corman to help pave the
way for their dream project, an adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s “We Can
Remember It For You Wholesale.”) But as GALAXY OF TERROR moves along, it
reveals a movie that shares as much if not more in common with the likes of
FORBIDDEN PLANET or Mario Bava’s PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES as it does Scott’s
film. Furthermore, the fictional universe its set it couldn’t be further
removed from ALIEN and is more like something you’d run across in the pages of
HEAVY METAL or 2000 A.D. magazine. Certainly, off the top of my head, I
couldn’t name any other ALIEN-like which featured a psychic as standard part of
a spaceship crew, a warrior order that wields crystal shuriken, a ruling body led
by an alien demigod who governs by playing what amounts to a gussied up Atari
game with a freakin’ witch or a nebulous psychic threat that unleashes a whole
menagerie of different beasties to dispatch our cast of characters. The result
is something that feels like a grindhouse STAR TREK episode.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
That sort of off-kilter, throw it at all wall strangeness
grants GALAXY OF TERROR a considerable amount of charm and part of the allure
of the movie is watching to see just how bizarre it’ll get. That’s certainly
helped by the film’s cast, as you’d be hard pressed to find a movie of this
type with such an eccentric mix of recognizable faces. We’ve got Freddie
Krueger, Captain Spaulding, Laura Palmer’s mom, the guy from THE RED SHOE
DIARIES, Joanie from HAPPY DAYS, and the star of MY FAVORITE MARTIAN all in one
package. (And it could have been even screwier. Mark Hamill was apparently game for a role in this.) But if GALAXY does have one major stumbling block though, it all has
to do with this cast of characters. If there’s one aspect of ALIEN that GALAXY
OF TERROR could have benefited more from following, it’s the way in which ALIEN
takes time establish the personalities, relationships and tensions of the Nostromo’s
crew members before their nasty little stowaway shows up. GALAXY OF TERROR has
an even larger cast and the fact that so much of what befalls the Quest’s crew
hinges on their psychological make-up makes getting to know these people even
more vital. As it stands, the characters are more memorable because of the
disparate actors in the roles and their outlandishly gruesome death scenes and
more often then not, you’ll be left scratching your head trying to figure out
how exactly each person’s death translates to their “greatest fear.” Trantor’s
PTSD, Alluma’s claustrophobia, and Cos’s paranoia aren’t too hard to figure out
but how exactly does one character fearing that he’s too old and out of touch
to be a competent leader lead to him getting killed by blood sucking worms? Or
Quuhod’s weapons and eventually his own body turning against him? Sure, seeing
Freddy Kruger getting menaced by his own evil doppelganger is fun, but why is
he the only one that gets a human manifestation? And for the love of God, how
does Dameia’s disgust at worms translate into her getting raped to death by
what looks like friggin’ Mothra’s larval form!?<o:p></o:p></div>
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Well, I can actually answer that one: it was all Corman’s
idea. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Corman had sold GALAXY OF TERROR
to distributors due to the promise of a certain degree of sexual content, most
of it involving Taaffe O’Connell. Apparently he even promised a sex scene
between her and Eddie Albert without telling anyone involved in the actual
making of the movie. So, to add in the sleaze he had sold the film on, Corman
decided at the last minute to change what was originally supposed to be a
straight forward monster attack scene into not only a monster rape scene but
one where the victim seems to actually enjoy the experience! (Corman’s
explanation would be that what Dameia truly feared was her own sexual desires.
Sure thing, Rog.) The film’s director, screenwriters, and Taaffe O’Connell, who
had taken the job because she was drawn the idea of getting to play a rare
non-sexualized role, were not amused. According to the commentary on Shout
Factory’s Corman Classics release, O’Connell even had to talk with her priest
before she agreed to do it -- would I have liked have been a fly on the wall
during that conversation -- while <st1:place w:st="on">Clark</st1:place>
refused to do it, forcing Corman to come in and handle it himself. Shooting the
scene itself was also a trial, with O’Connell just narrowly avoiding getting
crushed by the immense hydraulic puppet at one point, and it was subjected to
numerous edits and cuts to keep the film from getting slapped with an X-rating.
Thing is, Corman was right. This moment is so completely out of left field and
thoroughly “what the hell?” that it sticks with you more than any other scene
in the film. Being “that movie where a lady gets screwed to death by a giant
slimy maggot” gave GALAXY OF TERROR the kind of sleazy infamy that translates
to ticket sales, video rentals, and cult fascination years later. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Fortunately, the other major reason why GALAXY OF TERROR managed the longevity its had is considerably more pleasant than That Scene. Reports
vary on how much GALAXY OF TERROR cost to make exactly – one apocryphal story
has it that Corman was able to recoup the film’s budget by simply renting a
couple sets out for an Italian watch commercial one weekend – but it couldn’t
have been much. Therefore one can’t help but be impressed at what the film’s
production team was able to accomplish on such a limited budget. You wouldn't believe that much of movie's sets a props were built out of spray-painted cardboard and discarded scraps as the production
design on the ship and pyramid interiors, the effects of the ship’s take off,
the matte paintings of Morganthus’s storm wracked surface, and the creature
work are all of a surprisingly high standard. Of course, that means when the
production design does slip up, such as how it doesn’t try to hide the fact the
restraints used by the Quest’s crew to strap themselves down during hyper space
jumps are just car seatbelts, complete with visible logos, it sticks out all
that much more. But we really shouldn’t be too surprised that they were able to
accomplish this much, as the teams in charge of these aspects of the
movie were headed up by a hungry young filmmaker by the name of James Cameron, who Corman had hired on as a production assistant and effects technician for BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, wherein he was responsible for designing a number of the spaceships featured in that film. </div>
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GALAXY OF TERROR would be his second feature for Corman, (between the two films Cameron and his crew would also work on a little film called ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) and you could make a fairly strong argument that GALAXY was more the James
Cameron Show than it was Bruce Clark’s. The future TERMINATOR director not
only had a hand in painting the concept art, designed most of the creatures -- an
exception would be the one that settles Baelon’s hash. That had been donated to
the production by a former Corman<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>EFX
artist and written into the movie at the last minute – acted as a second unit
director, and by all accounts, served as Roger Corman's representative there on the set. It shows and with Cameron's fingerprints all over this movie, it wouldn't be too hard to view GALAXY OF TERROR as a warm-up for what he would eventually do with ALIENS. Some scenes even presage the later movie: try not to think of the Space Marine's initial sweep of Hadley's Hope when the Quest's crew investigate the wreckage of the Remus or how the alien pyramid paved the way for the xenomorph's hive. And Cameron wasn't the only GALAXY OF TERROR alumni to work on ALIENS either, the two films also share visual effects supervisor Robert Skotak and Hudson himself, Bill Paxton, worked on GALAXY as a carpenter.<br />
<br />
By the way, if you ever get your hands on Shout Factory's disc, I recommend watching the behind-the-scenes documentary on it. There's a whole segment of it devoted to anecdotes about what it was like working with the famously confrontational filmmaker and not all of them are positive ones.<br />
<br />
Would I recommend GALAXY OF TERROR to just anyone? Probably not. The lack of characterization, sometimes odd performances from its eclectic cast, and moments of gratuitous sleaze and extreme gore would likely turn a quite a few people off to it. But, if you have a love for a bygone era of B-movie filmmaking, are interested in seeing a small if notable step in the career of one of the most influential popular filmmakers of the past thirty years, or are just hankering for something incredibly strange, give it a try.<br />
</div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-42750424411760617312016-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:002016-10-31T00:00:00.146-07:00Return of the Living Dead (1985)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Directed by: Dan O’Bannon<o:p></o:p></div>
Screenplay by:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dan
O’Bannon<o:p></o:p><br />
Starring: Clu Gulgar, James Karen, Don Calfa, Linnea
Quigley, Thom Matthews, Beverly Randolph, Miguel Nunez<br />
Running Time: 91 minutes<o:p></o:p><br />
Tagline: “They’re back from the grave and ready to party!”<br />
<br />
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“The events portrayed in this film
are all true. The names are real names of real people and real
organizations.”</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Back in 1968, an independent film
production out of Pittsburgh made a low-budget fright flick that
delivered such a wallop to popular culture that its fingerprints can
still be found on popular media decades later and the director’s
very name was transformed into descriptive shorthand. You might’ve
heard of it; it was this stark, mean little bugaboo of a film called
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. To go into the exact whys and hows of what
a shock to the system NIGHT was deserves a post all of its own, so we
won’t go into that, but you can’t really discuss RETURN OF THE
LIVING DEAD without mentioning NIGHT because of how much the former
film hangs over the latter. After all, RETURN was originally
conceived as a direct sequel to NIGHT, based on a novel by NIGHT’s
co-writer John Russo, who had won the legal right to create his own
follow ups separate from Romero’s sequels. Russo had intended for
the film adaptation of RETURN to kick off a franchise all of its own
and well, that is what happened, it just did so without Russo.
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This came about when ALIEN screenwriter
Dan O’Bannon became attached to the project as both writer and
eventually director, taking over from Tobe Hooper, and he was
uncomfortable with how much the source material lifted wholesale from
Romero. So, rather than proceed with what he perceived as a pale
imitation he through out almost all of Russo’s material and
refashioned the project into something of tongue-in-rotting-check
tribute to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF DEAD . Now, when you
hear the title RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, you don’t think of people
caught between a crazed religious cult and a gang of LAST HOUSE ON
THE LEFT-esque thugs with the dead rising to inconvenience everybody,
do you? Heck no, what comes to mind is that poster up with the
corpses sporting chains and mohawks, “The Surfin’ Dead” by the
Cramps, and Linnea Quigley doing a striptease on top of a crypt. Much
to Russo’s chagrin, I imagine, it would be O’Bannon’s version
that would leave its mark – hungering for brains as a generally
accepted Thing That Zombies Do originates here –and much like THE
HOWLING, reduce the novel to little more than a footnote. (Amusingly
enough, Russo would write the film’s novelization, which means
there are two different books titled RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD by the
same guy.) Give the film a watch and it’s easy to see why that is.
Not only is it just a damn fine horror-comedy in its own right, like
all good parodies, as much as it subverts and thumbs its nose at
Romero’s blueprint, it understands the through line of his zombie
fiction far better than any of his imitators.</div>
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We’re not even a few minutes in and
RETURN is playing with our expectations. Yes, this <i>is</i> a sequel
to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, just not the NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD we
know. You see, Romero’s film was loosely based on actual events,
where the test of a new chemical compound, 245-Trioxin, went awry,
returning a morgue full of dead bodies to some semblance of life. The
military hushed things up, threatening Romero with a lawsuit if he
told what actually occurred, and sealed the reanimated corpses up
tight in airtight tanks to be shipped off some undisclosed location.
At least, that’s the story Uneeda medical supply warehouse manager
Frank (James Karen) spins for Freddy (Thom Matthews), the new
stockroom clerk, while closing up shop. How is it that Frank knows
all this? Simple; due to what he describes as a “typical army
fuck-up,” the tanks containing the corpses were shipped to the
wrong address and for the past fourteen years have been sitting off
in a corner in the basement of Uneeda Medical Supply. While Frank is
showing off the tanks and their grisly contents to the rookie, Freddy
asks if there’s any danger of the tanks leaking. Nothing to worry
about, Frank assures him, these were made by the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, and gives the tank a good solid swat on the side. Cue
leak.
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Both Frank and Freddy get hit with a
face full of 245-Trioxin and from there the gas makes its way into
the ventilation system and out into the warehouse proper, where it
reanimates anything dead it touches. This includes the butterflies
pinned to boards, the split dog corpses used for veterinary schools,
and of course, the human cadaver currently locked in the freezer.
Realizing that things have going completely south on them, Freddy and
Frank decide to call in their boss, Burt (Clu Gulager) for help.
After reading Frank the profanity laden riot act for even going near
those tanks, Burt decides the best course of action is to dispose
everything and everyone keeps their mouths shut. Of course, to do
that means letting that cadaver out of the freezer so they can kill
it. That shouldn’t be too hard to do. Destroying the zombies’
brains worked in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, right? Well, as Freddy
will astutely point out, the movie lied: the first attempt to kill
the thing by bashing its skull in doesn’t take; the next results in
the three of them having to chase a headless corpse around the
warehouse. Whatever 245-Trioxin is, it creates a ghoul that is
substantially more durable than anything that came after Ben and
company in that farmhouse. Fortunately, Burt remembers that his
friend Ernie Kaltenbrunner (Don Calfa) works in the mortuary at the
nearby funeral parlor and has access to a crematorium, which,
needless to say, is looking like it would come in pretty handy right
about now.</div>
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As all of this hilarity is going on,
Freddy’s friends find themselves faced with a Friday night with
nothing to do. This little group includes punk rockers Spider (Miguel
Nunez), Scuzz (Brian Peck), Casey (Jewel Shepard), death-obsessed
Trash (Linnea Quigley), and “one spooky motherfucker” Suicide
(Mark Venturini), as well as hanger-on Chuck (John Philbin), and
Freddy’s girlfriend Tina, who is such a Wholesome Girl Next Door,
the type that says “oh fudge!” when frustrated, that I can only
assume that she and Freddy have a VALLEY GIRL thing going.
Eventually, the group comes to agreement that if anybody knows where
the good times are to be had, it’s Freddy. Thing is Freddy doesn’t
get off work for a couple of hours and nobody is happy with the idea
of sitting outside Uneeda Medical Supply in the summer heat for that
long. Scuzz makes the suggestion that they could kill time by fooling
around in the nearby cemetery, which unbeknownst to them, happens to
be at the back of the same funeral parlor where Freddy, Burt, and
Frank are smuggling in the cadaver, now hacked into convenient pieces
and stuffed into garbage bags. Burt’s cover story about being
saddled with a bunch of rabid weasels that he needs to dispose of
doesn’t go over so well, so he has to show Ernie what really is in
those bags. Well, nearly getting your foot wrenched off by a still
moving severed arm makes a fairly convincing argument. Into the
furnace the cadaver goes and for a moment, it looks like the problem
is solved. Except Freddy and Frank have been getting progressively
more ill since their exposure to the gas and not to spoil things,
there’s a reason that when they let that cadaver out of the
freezer, it ignored them and went straight for Burt. Second, Tina has
wandered over to Uneeda so she can meet up with Freddy when he gets
off work and is attacked by a zombie that escaped from the drum that
started this whole mess, a particularly nasty revenant that looks
like a walking pile of bones and sludge. Finally, yeah, they burned
up the cadaver but that smoke, saturated with 245-Trioxin, had to go
somewhere. Somewhere, like say, into those passing storm clouds,
where it triggers a sudden thunderstorm and torrential downpour,
dumping several gallons of instant zombie juice right on the
graveyard. Whoops.</div>
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With apologies to Uncle George, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD
may be my single favorite zombie movie. It’s just so much thoroughly twisted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fun</i>, filled to the brim with wonderfully
sick jokes and sight gags, a fantastic punk rock soundtrack, and top-notch make
up and effects. For my money, you’d have to look to something like AN AMERICAN
WEREWOLF IN LONDON to find a movie that comes as close to working as
effectively as both a comedy and a straight horror movie. And credit for much
of what makes it work so magnificently has to go to Dan O’Bannon. Watching this
film, you’d have a hard time believing that this was O’Bannon’s first rodeo as
a director because he pulls it off with the skill and self-assurance that one
expects from a seasoned professional. With help from William Stout’s excellent
EC Comics influenced production design, O’Bannon manages the fairly difficult
trick of giving the movie a visual look unique from other horror films being
made at the time without actually calling attention to that. Furthermore, by
giving his cast, a mix of veterans and talented newcomers, a longer than normal
rehearsal period, the characters genuinely do come off as people who’ve known
each other for years and are as much fun to watching simply hanging out
together as they are being pursued by zombies. But as fantastic as his
direction is – and it’s a crying shame that he would go on to only direct one
more movie in his life: THE RESURRECTED, a fairly decent low budget adaptation
of H.P. Lovecraft’s THE STRANGE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD – it’s his
screenplay where he really shines. Not only is it quotable as all get out
(“Ain’t you never been to a funeral?” “I never knew nobody that died!”) but it
has all these great moments of the sort of bleak absurdity, horror, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> humanity that comes from being
trapped together in a situation where you are well and truly screwed. Sometimes
all at once: take the scene where a zombified Freddy has Tina and Ernie trapped
in an attic. A teenage girl hiding from her boyfriend who is calling to her to
let him eat her brains is utterly ridiculous but you can’t deny that both
Tina’s sheer terror and Ernie trying to work up the courage to deliver a mercy
shot to the hysterical girl before Freddy breaks in comes across as completely
believable. </div>
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<o:p> </o:p></div>
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It’s no wonder that O’Bannon “gets” Romero so well; the two
men have such a similar world view. Like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD before it,
being an alpha male type or having the best intentions behind your actions
doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make it to RETURN’s final reel and sacrifice and
attempts to fix things can easily make things worse. There’s also the fact that
while wildly different in execution – RETURN’s ghouls can be every bit as
agile, strong and intelligent<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>as a
human being, as opposed to Romero’s shambling hordes --<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>NIGHT and RETURN understand that what really
makes the undead so terrifying is how pathetic they are. With Romero they’re
recognizably human society slowly decaying into an identity-less mass while
O’Bannon’s are amped up junkies – we learn from a captured one that ingesting
brain endorphins is the only relief from the constant pain that comes with
their existence as a rotting corpse – whose need for a fix is so all consuming
it reduces them to animalistic savages. And of course, it wouldn’t be a Romero
influenced zombie film if the whole notion of The Proper Authorities Are Not
Your Friend didn’t rear its head at some point, as the military decides to let
God sort ‘em out when finally implementing its contingency plan for dealing
with a borderline indestructible zombie outbreak, a truly spectacular
escalation of NIGHT’s own subversive ending. I mentioned Russo’s novelization
of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD earlier and one of the truly baffling additions he
made for the novelization was a framing story that casts the whole incident as
the result of a conspiracy by Communist sympathizers to destabilize the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">United States</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
(!!)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously, it’s generally agreed by
anyone aware of this of what a wrongheaded decision <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> was because not only does it no damn sense from any logical
standpoint – why exactly don’t these fifth columnists just unleash the gas
themselves instead of leaving the tanks there in hopes that a couple of
knuckleheads will one day accidentally do so – but also illustrates how Russo
didn’t get what Romero was trying to say and O’Bannon did. In Romero’s movies,
the reason that the system fails so badly in fixing the problem is because
systems are inherently broken by design because people created them, people run
them, and people can be some seriously dumb and narrow minded sumbitches when
they put their mind to it. That’s part of the reason why leaving the domino
that started it all a “typical army fuck up” works better; a horrible tragedy
caused by the authorities’ incompetence and exacerbated by their willingness to
implement blunt solutions while showing casual disregard to collateral damage
and long term consequences to cover up their mistake is something I find a load
more believable and terrifying than some elaborate conspiracy waiting in the
shadows.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u></div>
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Oh come on...what else did you think I was going to throw in at the end of this review? This flick has got one of the best soundtracks in 80's horror and arguably, of all time: </div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-72577107437704734322016-10-07T12:00:00.000-07:002016-10-31T09:52:58.656-07:00Blood and Black Lace (1964)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Directed by: Mario Bava</div>
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Screenplay by: Mario Bava, Giuseppe
Barilla, and Marcello Fondato</div>
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Starring: Cameron Mitchell, Eva Bartok,
Thomas Reiner, Ariani Gorini, Luciano Pigozzi, Mary Arden, Calude
Dantes</div>
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Running Time: 89 minutes</div>
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<span style="color: black;">A masked killer
in black clothing, fever dream colors run riot, brutal and
elaborately staged murder set pieces, ineffective police detectives,
and a mystery that isn’t actually solved so much as the movie just
comes out and tells you whodunit. Yep, it sounds like Psychoplasmics
is paying another visit to our good friend the giallo this
Halloween. The </span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a class="western" href="http://psychoplasmics.blogspot.com/2015/12/dont-torture-duckling-1972.html"><span style="color: black;">first
time</span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;"> we did
so, we dug into a movie that diverged rather dramatically from what
we'd come to expect when we hear the term "giallo." Here
we're shifting in reverse and taking a look at the movie that
codified many of those elements in the first place and still manages
to pack one hell of a punch despite decades of imitators ramping up
the shocks. I give you Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">The backdrop for
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is the glamorous Christian Haute Couture fashion
house in Rome, run by the widowed countess Christiana Como (Eva
Bartok) and her current paramour Massimo. (Cameron Mitchell) It's the
kind of place where every single one of its occupants has some dirty
secret that they'd like very much to keep hidden, so when one of the
models turns up strangled to death on the fashion house grounds, the
police have their work cut out for them in narrowing down the
possible suspects. Thing is, this is but the first in a series of
murders, because our first victim, unknown to the police, kept a
diary which detailed a lot of the shady goings on at Haute Couture
and several people there would do anything to keep it out of their
hands. As the diary ends up passed from person to person, our killer
-- a figure in black wearing a featureless gauze mask -- hunts them
down and dispatches each one of them in spectacularly brutal fashion.
That the victims are all beautiful women and the vicious nature of
each of the murders have the police mistakenly convinced that they're
after a deranged sex maniac, which ends up indirectly giving the
killer a perfect alibi to throw them off their trail. Now all they're
going to need to get away scott free is someone to pin the blame on.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black;">While discussing
briefly the origins behind the term </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallo</i></span><span style="color: black;"> in
my post about Fulci's DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, I neglected to go
into the importance of the German </span><span style="color: black;"><i>krimi</i></span><span style="color: black;"> film
on the genre's development. </span><span style="color: black;"><i>Krimis</i></span><span style="color: black;"> or
"Kriminalfilms" were a series of crime movies (produced
mainly by Rialto Films) that primarily adapted the works of 20's pulp
crime writer Edgar Wallace, beginning with 1959's THE FELLOWSHIP OF
THE FROG and ending with 1972's PUZZLE OF THE SILVER HALF
MOONS. </span><span style="color: black;"><i>Krimis</i></span><span style="color: black;"> had
plots that were straight out of old fashioned murder mysteries,
usually revolving around individuals or group thereof hiding a dark
secret being menaced by a masked villain, stylishly shot and with
added touches of more graphic violence and sexuality than one would
come to expect. If that sounds familiar, it should. BLOOD AND BLACK
LACE was a German-Italian co-production, intended to be a crime
thriller in the Edgar Wallace tradition. (According to Tim Lucas's
commentary on the Arrow Video release of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the
film seems to have lifted rather liberally from a Wallace story
titled WHITEFACE, to the point that apparently it ended up being more
faithful to it than that story's actual adaptation.) You can find
traces of the </span><span style="color: black;"><i>krimi</i></span><span style="color: black;"> throughout
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE; the collection of suspects and their entangled
sins, the bizarrely dressed killer (who looks a lot like comic book
superhero The Question), the bossa nova theme music by Carlo
Rustichelli, and police detective hero. (Thomas Reiner) Or, well,
about as close as you're going to find in this movie.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">However, for all
their flourishes, </span><span style="color: black;"><i>krimi</i></span><span style="color: black;"> films
were police procedurals at heart and Bava, bored with the cliches of
whodunits, aimed for something a little different. So, the role of
the police in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE is pared down considerably. Their
investigation plays no role in the reveal of the killer's identity
except in how it pays off a visual clue for the audience and they are
not involved in the mystery's resolution. In fact, their one big move
to capture the killer ultimately ends up giving that killer an
opportunity to escape justice. You also won't be seeing any of the
film's remaining cast members becoming amateur sleuths and taking it
upon themselves to solve the mystery themselves. If anybody ends up
being proactive in any fashion, it's usually to work up an alibi to
cover their own ass than help anyone else. No one uncovers the
killer’s identity; the movie just comes out and tells you. Instead,
it’s the actions of our mysterious killer and the stalk-and-murder
scenes become the real focus of our film. Therefore, by diverging
from the krimis that formed its foundation and moving towards
something much darker and harsher. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE becomes a
missing link between film noir’s nihilism and horror’s
viciousness. Obviously, our bizarre killer and the brutal methods he
uses to dispatch his victims – strangulation, drowning, shoving
them face first into a furnace, and stabbing them in the face with a
barbed gauntlet – paved the way for the Michael Myers’ and Jason
Voorhees’ to follow but when its revealed that the killings are
driven by greed and the last act follows our killer as they try to
clean up loose ends, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE doesn’t feel too far
removed from the likes of DIABOLIQUE and DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Almost
joyously misanthropic, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE presents a world that,
underneath all the riches and glamour, is more corrupt, cynical and
savage than anything else.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">Of course, it
wasn't just the shift in content that helped BLOOD AND BLACK LACE
kick off a sub-genre of its own but also the presentation of it. It's
important to note that early in life, Mario Bava had aspirations to
be a painter. When that career went nowhere, Bava moved on to
work with his father in the Italian film industry but that
inclination stayed with him. After a number of years working as
a cameraman and co-directing whatever movies Riccardo Freda
didn't feel like finishing, Bava would graduate to helming films all
by his lonesome, starting with his More-Hammer-Than-Hammer gothic
BLACK SUNDAY. He would direct his first color feature with 1961's
HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD, which would be the first to feature
the hallucinatory color cinematography that would become synonymous
with the phrase "a Mario Bava film." See, as a
director, Bava was concerned more with the staging and
lighting of a scene than whether or not it made complete logical
sense. To him, the script was generally little more than a vague
outline to follow, which considering the quality of the scripts
that the man usually worked with, maybe was for the best. While
this does lead us to wonder what he could have pulled off if he had
an actual decent script to build on, it ultimately isn't as big of
the drawback as it sounds because in Bava's films, it's the pictures
that do the talking. While the writing in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE never
manages to rise above adequate enough to not be intrusive, the images
contained within the film are potent enough to pick up the slack. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">It was Bava’s
intent to make this film look like one of the lurid covers to an old
Mondadori paperback brought to life and it goes without saying that
he succeeded. Through the use of wildly varied and vivid color
schemes and lighting and strange camera angles, Bava makes normal
spaces take on surreal dimensions. A simple cellar gets warped into a
gothic dungeon. An antique store becomes a phantasmagorical nightmare
world that our killer, seeming to merge with the shadows, stalks his
victims through. A furnace glows red with an unnatural intensity. Red
is a very important color in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. (Hey, considering
the title it better be.) The film opens and closes with lingering
shots on an object of that color and it reappears time and time
again, most notably via a strange mannequin that is shown posing with
some of the cast during the film’s marvelous opening credits and
pops up again and again like some sort of impartial observer to the
decadence on display. Most interestingly, though, is when Bava
</span><span style="color: black;"><i>restrains</i></span><span style="color: black;">
himself from using his strange color schemes. Scenery that’s so
delirious at night is rendered almost unrecognizable when shown in
the light of day. It’s in these scenes that much of the police
investigation takes place and well, no wonder they can’t solve it.
It feels like they’re in a completely different world. This visual
mastery is made even more impressive by the fact that Bava was
working with a limited budget and could only get the shots he wanted
by resorting to such methods as dragging the camera around in a
child’s wagon or rigging up a see-saw-esque device in place of a
crane.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">The year previous
to BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, Bava directed another film that’s often
credited as the first </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallo</i></span><span style="color: black;">:
THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH / THE EVIL EYE, starring John Saxon and
Leticia Roman. There’s no argument that it created the template for
much of what we westerners know as </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallo</i></span><span style="color: black;">
– the outsider protagonist turning amateur sleuth after witnessing
a murder, the travelogue like depictions of its European setting, and
even a touch of supernatural weirdness that other </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallos</i></span><span style="color: black;">
would run with – but it’s not quite there yet. It’s still
nestled comfortably within the boundaries of your Hitchcockian
thriller – in fact, it was originally intended as a comedic send-up
of Hitch’s films, as the title suggests, until Bava concluded that
the film’s absurdity would work better played completely straight.
So, more of an evolutionary step then. BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, on the
other hand, can’t be mistaken for anything else, not just for its
cynicism and candy-colored visuals but simply just for how
horrifically brutal it is. Even with the on-screen gore kept to a
minimum and years of the likes of Argento, Sollima, and Fulci amping
up the shocks, the violence in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE remains effective
because Bava knows how to make the audience </span><span style="color: black;"><i>feel
it</i></span><span style="color: black;"> in a way that many of his
imitators never grasped. Stabbing someone in the face with spikes is
bad enough but throw in a lingering shot from the victim’s point of
view showing those barbs are at eye level before they plunge in?
Yikes. While subsequent giallos and especially their bastard
offspring, the slasher, would victimize scantily clad women for cheap
titillation, the sexualization of the victims here just serves to
make the violence against them all more disturbing. Thanks to Bava’s
whole filmmakers-as-painter approach, shots like a pair of corpses
posed as for a magazine spread or that of a drowned women, the
briefest lingering on blood spreading over the water’s surface,
come across like macabre art pieces about the destruction of
something beautiful.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">It’s strong
stuff, to say the least, and so it should come as little surprise
that audiences weren’t quite ready for it when it hit theaters.
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE flopped in its native Italy and was dismissed by
critics. AIP, who had distributed Bava’s films stateside in the
past, deemed the film’s content too disturbing for the teen and
drive-in audience they marketed to and passed on it, the film
eventually getting released over here thanks to the Woolner brothers.
A bit amusing that the movies that Bava is best known for are among
his least successful. West Germany loved the movie though and you can
see BLOOD AND BLACK LACE’s influence all over the </span><span style="color: black;"><i>krimis</i></span><span style="color: black;">
that followed in its wake, eventually leading to German-Italian
co-productions that combined </span><span style="color: black;"><i>krimis</i></span><span style="color: black;">
with </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallos</i></span><span style="color: black;">
even further. It would be years before it kicked off a similar trend
in its home land though, brought about when Bava’s disciple Dario
Argento would basically Brundefly THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE into THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and
thereby open the floodgates.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;">But BLOOD AND
BLACK LACE did it first and in my opinion, did it best. It’s a
truly exceptional piece of filmmaking art and one of my all time
favorite movies. If you haven’t seen it yet and are interested, may
I recommend the recent release by Arrow Films, now available for us
knuckleheads in the U.S.? Not only is the new picture transfer
absolutely gorgeous but it comes with an absolute bounty of
supplemental features. Included are an article / interview with Joe
Dante about his love for Bava, a commentary by Tim Lucas – the man
who literally wrote the book on Bava -- , a feature length
documentary interviewing Italian screenwriters, directors, and
critics about the history and influence of the </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallo,</i></span><span style="color: black;">
YELLOW, a short film created as a tribute to the </span><span style="color: black;"><i>giallo</i></span><span style="color: black;">,
a fascinating video essay about distinct portrayals of gender
throughout the genre, and an episode of The Sinister Image guest
starring BLACK LACE star Cameron Mitchell. It’s probably my
favorite feature of the bunch, as Mitchell discusses his entire
career with a mix of good humor and professionalism. Mitchell regarded Bava as
his favorite director to work with (and this is man who got his start under John Ford, remember) and you can hear the genuine affection he
has for the man whenever he’s brought up. Seek it out, it’s worth
the price.</span></div>
</div>
</div>
billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-75216990699646953322016-08-18T16:07:00.003-07:002016-08-18T20:22:40.138-07:00The Super Inframan (1975)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm4wXsF4wWq-tU41GmkG_eQxXETrekOEmZDRd7oYCkgGI-J2VGTEl28X3upc3mucVjqlSjzAerhfhFczhkq0w_xXDu5G3XkB5HiW8e_csclt3z2Zlqv1F5-BUHr_zeEkrtMr4X67JZU0fJ/s1600/inframan_poster_01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm4wXsF4wWq-tU41GmkG_eQxXETrekOEmZDRd7oYCkgGI-J2VGTEl28X3upc3mucVjqlSjzAerhfhFczhkq0w_xXDu5G3XkB5HiW8e_csclt3z2Zlqv1F5-BUHr_zeEkrtMr4X67JZU0fJ/s400/inframan_poster_01.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Directed by:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hua Shan</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Screenplay by: Ni Kuang</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Starring: Danny Lee, Wang Hsieh, Terry Liu, Bruce Le, Yuan
Man-Tzu</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Running Time: 90 min.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Tagline: “The Man Beyond Bionics!”<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
There must be something in the water because lo and behold,
as soon as I decided that I’d be reviewing THE SUPER INFRAMAN for
Psychoplasmics to mark its first year anniversary, both Teleport-City and 1000
Misspent Hours tossed up pieces of their own about Shaw Bros. Studios
thoroughly loopy attempt to cash-in on <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Japan</st1:country-region></st1:place>’s tokusatsu craze. Thankfully,
rather than getting discouraged over somebody beating me to the punch, I took
this as a pretty clear sign to do as the Romans instead. THE SUPER INFRAMAN is an
infectiously joyous bit of B-movie obscura that deserves as much attention laid
on it as it can get and my only slight regret in discussing it is that I don’t
have an anecdote of my own to contribute along with the two aforementioned
reviews of how they discovered this doozy of a movie when they were kids. Me? I
just rented it off of Netflix a couple years back, give or take but I was
fortunate enough to revisit the movie this year as the closer to the B-Fest
film festival in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Chicago</st1:place></st1:city>
this past January. It’s as much of a comment on how great it was to see this in
a packed auditorium with a crowd of super-enthusiastic nerds as it is,
unfortunately, a comment on the rather anemic offerings we’re having at the
theater this year that I can say that nothing is going to top that as a movie
going experience in 2016.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
To swipe that line from Tim Lehnerer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">yet again </i>because it’s too good not to, the first fifteen seconds
of THE SUPER INFRAMAN are kind of slow but then a pterodactyl monster
bellyflops onto a highway in front of a school bus full of children, an
earthquake happens and Hong Kong explodes. Then things start to get weird. If
nothing else, you have to admire this movie for not wasting time screwing
around. This string of disasters – which dialogue indicates also includes
monster attacks that they clearly didn’t have the budget to show but hey, take
their word for it – culminates in the eruption of the long-dormant Mt. Devil, revealing
a massive fortress topped off with a gigantic stone dragon head. Naturally, the
Chinese government takes note of a supervillain lair popping up in their
backyard, and enlists the help of Professor Liu Ying-de (Wang Hsieh), head of
the Scientific Headquarters (of Somewhat Ambiguous Science) to figure out just
what the blazing blue hell is going on. While scanning <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Mt.</st1:placetype> <st1:placename w:st="on">Devil</st1:placename></st1:place>,
Professor Liu and his team intercept a transmission from the pterodactyl
monster from before, who transforms into a blonde Chinese woman dressed up as
some sort of draconic Brunhilda. <o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
This would be Princess Dragon Mom (Terry Liu) – or Princess
Elzebub if you’re going with the subtitles – which I can only assume was meant
to be Princess Dragon Ma until somebody involved in INFRAMAN’s dubbing fell
asleep at the wheel. She rattles off the usual evil overlord spiel about how
she has come to conquer the Earth and it would be in all of our best interests
to surrender to her and her forces right now. While I myself am completely okay
with being ruled over by an evil sexpot who’s part dinosaur, the rest of the
world isn’t so keen on that idea and therefore the authorities gather together
for an intelligence briefing to determine what is to be done about this
situation, which I quote, “is so serious it’s the worst in all of human
history!” Profession Liu is present at this meeting and informs all assembled
that he has determined that Prince Dragon Mom is a member of some prehistoric
race which once ruled the Earth but was driven beneath the planet’s surface by
the Ice Age and has spent the past few million years in suspended animation.
Now revived, she’s declared war on the human race and has an army of mutants
breed from prehistoric monsters to back her up. Seeing as Professor Liu has the
best grasp of the situation, the Chinese government puts him and Science
Headquarters in charge of the effort to combat this menace.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Now the name Science Headquarters seems to be something of a
misnomer because as far as I can tell from the many times I’ve watched this
movie, Professor Liu seems to be the only actual scientist employed at the
place. (They do, however, have the requisite of every B-movie science lab: huge
computer banks covered in blinking light that don’t seem to actually do
anything.) The rest of Science Headquarters’ staff seems to be some sort of
paramilitary disaster response team made up entirely of motorcycle riding
martial artists, led by the heroic Lieutenant Rei Ma. (Danny Lee) Professor Liu
realizes it’s going to take more than a bunch of guys in matching silver and
blue jumpsuits to put a stop to the Princess’s evil schemes but fortunately, he
has something up his. Taking Rei Ma to his personal laboratory, Professor Liu
reveals his plans to transform a volunteer into The Inframan, an invincible,
atomic powered cyborg superhero that can be more than a match for whatever
Dragon Mom throws at them. Despite the very real risk of the operation killing
him, Rei Ma agrees to undergo the transformation, which mostly involves him
lying on a cruciform slab while Professor Liu glues computer parts to him.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Princess Dragon Mom, however, has no intention of waiting
around for whatever Science Headquarters is cooking up. She recognizes what a
threat the organization poses and assembles her legions of mutants to launch a
pre-emptive strike and oh, what a collection of monstrosities it is. We’ve got
her army of cannon fodder mooks, the explosive spear wielding Skeleton Ghosts.
(Skeletons can have ghosts?) We’ve got her right hand henchwoman She-Demon
(Dana Tsen Shu-Yi), a lady in silver booty-shorts who has eyes in the palms of
her hands that can shoot lasers. There’s a pair of robots that seem to act as
the princess’s elite guards and can extended and retract their heads and
weaponized limbs<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>via wire coils. Then
there are the mutants themselves: a lumpy toad man with a drill and shovel for
hands, a tentacled plant monster, a humanoid dragon man, an onibaba-style demon
with long hair, and a frankly adorable looking red bug monster. Toad Man and
Plant Monster are dispatched first. Toady ambushes and kidnaps a member of
Science Headquarters named Chu Ming (Lin Wen-Wei) – who, while every one else
gets a cool motorcycle, is struck driving a beat-up Volkswagen – and takes him
back to Mt. Devil to get brainwashed while Plant Monster attacks Science
Headquarters’ um…headquarters itself by transforming into a cluster of massive
vines and tearing the building apart. The damaged caused cuts off the power to
the professor’s lab and nearly kills Rei Ma until somebody manages to switch on
the back up generator. Being subjected to an invasive full body surgery and
nearly dying does nothing to slow down Rei Ma, who promptly transforms into
Inframan and gets to try out his new abilities by flipping around the
professor’s lab and smashing some of his equipment. Professor Liu doesn’t seem to mind that much though, likely
because that’s totally coming out of Rei Ma’s next paycheck. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
Despite the Inframan being a top secret project not five
minutes ago, everyone excitedly exclaims “It’s Inframan!” immediately upon
seeing him spring into action. The plant monster puts up a good fight but in
the end is no match for the super-powered Rei Ma. Good thing for Princess Dragon Mom that she already had a
back up plan in place, as that poor sap that Toady captured, Chu Ming, has been
brainwashed into turning traitor and is sent back to Science Headquarters to
swipe Inframan’s blueprints so she can scan them for an exploitable weakness. Chu
Ming gets caught in act but intervention from Toady, Red Bug and Onibaba help
him get away, though not without the latter two monsters getting destroyed in
the process. With the plans for Inframan in Dragon Mom’s hands, Professor Liu
decides to upgrade Rei Ma with a number of new weapons to counter act whatever
traps she may throw at him, leading to a favorite and off-quoted exchange among
friends of mine: “To have success, it is necessary for you to have Thunderball
Fists!” “I can have such a thing?” “That’s right. Thunderball Fists!” Well,
those Thunderball Fists are going to come in really handy real soon because
Princess Dragon Mom has Chu Ming and Toady kidnap Professor Liu’s daughter in
order to force the Professor into building her an Inframan of her own. This leads
to Rei Ma heading up an all-out assault on <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Mt.</st1:placetype> <st1:placename w:st="on">Devil</st1:placename></st1:place>
with the other members of Science Headquarters and a massive battle royal as
Inframan fights his way through a gauntlet of mooks, mutants, and deadly booby
traps on his way to a final confrontation with Princess Dragon Mom. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
Much like the term <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">giallo</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tokusatsu</i> started as a general
catch-all before transforming into a specific genre all of its own. Meaning “special
filming,” it was coined in regards to the original GODZILLA, the first Japanese
film to utilize special effects such as actors in suits and miniature sets on
the scale that it did, and would later be used to refer to science fiction
films in general. That shifted with the popularity of serialized television
such as MOONLIGHT MASK, AMBASSADOR MAGMA, SUPER SENTAI, METAL HERO and the
ULTRAMAN and KAMEN RIDER franchises, which resulted in the
term becoming more associated with Japan’s equivalent of costumed superheroes. They
never fully abandoned their roots in the kaiju genre, however, as many episodes
of these shows would climax with the rubber monster of the week growing to
gigantic size and wrecking havoc in a model city before being stopped by hero /
heroes who themselves can undergo such a transformation or summon a gigantic
robot that they can pilot into battle. In fitting bit of cross pop cultural
pollination, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> American superhero
of the time, The Amazing Spider-Man, would get his own tokusatsu series,
complete with big dang robot, and United Artists would pick up the popular ULTRAMAN
for American audiences.<br />
<br />
As is expected, something achieving that degree of international success means
other studios out there start looking for ways to cash in and one studio in
particular would be the <st1:place w:st="on">Hong Kong</st1:place> based Shaw
Bros. Studio. Founded in 1925 as the Tianyi Film Company by brothers Runje,
Runme, Runde and Runrun Shaw, the Shaw Bros. Studio is known today mostly for
their martial arts output, with movies like THE 36<sup>TH</sup> CHAMBER OF
SHAOLIN and THE FIVE DEADLY VENOMS needing no introduction, but released films
in a number of genres, including horror, spy thrillers, and exploitation flicks
and would even collaborate with western studios for international
co-productions. (Did you know Shaw Bros. had a hand in making BLADE RUNNER?
Well, you do now!) By the 1970’s, though, the studio had never done a science
fiction film and Run Run Shaw, a long admirer of the Japanese film industry,
figured doing their own spin on tokusatsu shows was the way to go. <br />
<br />
THE SUPER INFRAMAN isn't exactly shy about the fact that it is, in fact, a literal made-in-Hong-Kong knock off of ULTRAMAN and KAMEN RIDER. Not only does INFRAMAN'S "Science Headquarters" scream "ULTRAMAN'S Science Patrol but with the serial numbers filed off" but INFRAMAN rather gleefully cribs a number of Ultraman's signature moves and abilities for its titular hero -- including the ability to spontaneous grow several stories tall, something that is neither eluded to beforehand or ever mentioned again afterward -- but it's no accident that Inframan's bug eyed helmet and biker jumpsuit get up invokes Kamen Rider's hero; Michio Makami, INFRAMAN's special effects director, created a number of monster suits for Toei's tokusatsu shows at Ekisu Productions. On top of that, the film's musical score mixed in a number of cues from ULTRA SEVEN and MIRROR MAN with Yung Yu-Chen's own contributions.<br />
<br />
To direct the film Shaw enlisted Hua
Shan, a cinematographer who had got his start as an assistant on COME DRINK
WITH ME and lensed a number of films for the studio. Screenplay duties would be
handed to Shaw Bros. regular Ni Kuang, who’s an interesting character. A former
public security official for the CCP, Ni Kuang left <st1:country-region w:st="on">China</st1:country-region>
due to fears for his own life and set up shop <st1:place w:st="on">Hong Kong</st1:place>
where he found success as a writer / co-writer of serialized novels, including
the Wisley series, Dr. Yuen, and the wuxia series Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils. He
would also contribute a staggering number of screenplays for Shaw Bros.
including THE 36<sup>TH</sup> CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN, 8 DIAGRAM POLE FIGHTER, THE
ONE ARMED SWORDSMAN, and my personal favorite of the Venom Mob movies, CRIPPLED
AVENGERS, as well as Bruce Lee’s international hit FIST OF FURY. A number of contract players would be tapped for key roles in the film, two of the most notable being Huang Jian Long and Danny Lee. Long, better known as Bruce Le, would be one of the myriad actors who would make a career in the seventies and eighties out of the fact that if he combed his hair just right and you squinted hard enough he could sort of pass for Bruce Lee, appearing in faux-sequels to The Little Dragon's films and truly weird Brucesploitation entries like THE CLONES OF BRUCE LEE. Here he plays Xiao-Long, Rei Ma's right hand man at Science Headquarters, and even gets to show off some of his martial arts skills during a couple of big battle scenes. Danny Lee is probably the most recognizable actor in the film, thanks to the international success of John Woo's bullets and male bonding epic THE KILLER, where he played the cop determined to capture Chow Yun Fat's reluctant assassin, and has definitely had one of the most bonkers careers of anyone I've heard of. Lee (born Li Hsiu-hsien) turned to acting after his original plan of becoming a police officer flamed out due to difficulty completing the training exams and spent a number of years primarily as a "hey, it's that guy" supporting actor in a number of Shaw's films until he landed the lead role in INFRAMAN, which seemed to cement his status as Shaw Bros. go to guy for the studios battier productions. His later credits with Shaw would include BRUCE LEE AND I, a softcore film based around Bruce Lee's final days and relationship with Betty Ting Pei; the King Kong rip-off THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN; the nutso kung fu fantasy film BATTLE WIZARD; and something called THE OILY MANIAC, which, according to the IMDB, is about a "cripple taking revenge on criminals by using a magic spell that transforms him into an oily monster/superhero." Co-starring his INFRAMAN cast mates Terry Liu and Wang Hsieh, by the way. Lee would eventually cut ties with Shaw Bros. and form his own production company where he would regularly cast himself in the same "tough but honorable" cop role he would eventually play in THE KILLER and in the nineties release a number of rather infamous CAT III films. (Short for "Category III" a designation comparable to the American NC-17 rating.) The most successful of these would be the rather innocuous sounding THE UNTOLD STORY, which featured Anthony Wong as a criminal who takes a Sweeney Todd approach to the disposal of his victims. As Tim put it when he introduced INFRAMAN at B-Fest, "that's one <em>hell</em> of a resume!"<br />
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Unfortunately, despite the major marketing push, which apparently included a hot air balloon being used to promote the film -- and let me tell you how disappointed I was that wasn't able to dig up a picture of <em>that --</em> INFRAMAN underperformed at the Hong Kong box office, forever denying us any further adventures of Lieutenant Rei Ma and Science Headquarters. Of course, the fact that I found myself sitting in a crowded college auditorium full of like-minded nerds whooping it up as THE SUPER INFRAMAN played across the screen makes it pretty clear that the film developed something of a cult following in the -- holy crap -- forty years since its initial release. Believe it or not, we very likely have Rogert Ebert to thank for that, as not only did the famous critic give the film a glowing review upon it's initial American release, not only did he feature it on Siskel and Ebert's "Guilty Pleasures" episode -- which is likely how a number of people first heard of it -- but when reviewing the video release of THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN, he announced that as much as he enjoyed that movie, he couldn't with good conscience give it a higher score than INFRAMAN and went back and added an additional star to the earlier film's score. That's just beautiful.<br />
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It's easy to see why one could come to champion this movie. THE SUPER INFRAMAN is a thoroughly delightful film, one that aims at being a frenetic adventure through a bizarre comic book world and succeeds at doing so with considerable flair. It's very episodic feeling, almost as if someone took three or four episodes of a television series and spliced them together, trimming all but the minimum necessary scenes that didn't revolve around punching monsters. As a result, there's hardly a moment in this movie that makes one lick of sense but thanks to the film's enjoyably crazed sense of pacing, you won't care as the film throws yet another bit of pure insanity your way before you can question just what happened in the scene previous. The highlight of this would have to be the climatic confrontation between Inframan and Princess Dragon Mom's monstrous true form, where Inframan blasts her head off with one of his many laser weapons, only to discover that she can regenerate. At which point, Inframan just blasts her head off again. And again. And again and again, creating a modest sized pile of severed dragon heads, until Rei Ma finally remembers he brought Thunderball Fists to this fight and lets her have it. The film's budget doesn't always back up its ambitions -- a number of its monster suits have visible seams and zippers and more than one suit actor is clearly wearing shoes -- but it's creatures are just cheap looking enough to be charming and the rest of the production more than makes up for it with inventive sets and action set pieces that are on a much bigger scale than your standard Shaw Bros. martial arts film. (In fact, the action scenes were so elaborate and expensive, INFRAMAN became the first Shaw production to use pre-production storyboarding.) There's motorcycle stunts, a miniature power plant destroyed in a battle between a giant Inframan and the Red Bug, a final showdown in a lair fitted out with everything from volcanic pit traps and death rays, and so many explosions, all supported by the quality martial arts choreography and stunt work that were Shaw Bros. standards. And let's not forget the film's wonderfully absurd English dubbing which just ads to the entertainment value.<br />
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As I said, it's a movie that wants nothing more than for its audience to have a good time and that earnestness is another factor that makes this movie so appealing, especially in this day and age when superhero comics and superhero comic films have maybe become too serious for their own good. Even friggin' Superman is in the hands of people who balk at the idea of a hero who smiles and wears bright colors, Batman is grimmer and grittier than ever and every superhero film seems required to be a two and half hour plus epic. So it's refreshing then to be able to kick back and enjoy a fleet-footed movie clocking in at just under ninety minutes and starring a colorful hero who doesn't have time for things like existential angst about what his transformation means for his humanity because he's just too dang excited about being able to beat down alien invaders with his shiny new Thunderball Fists.<br />
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u><br />
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"Monster Man" by Devo, which also features an off-brand Ultraman.<br />
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-63768505245324689242016-06-17T10:45:00.003-07:002016-06-17T13:09:53.983-07:00Q, The Winged Serpent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Directed by: Larry Cohen<br />
Screenplay by: Larry Cohen<br />
Starring: Michael Moriarity, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree<br />
Running Time: 93 min.<br />
Tagline: "You'll just have time to scream "Q" before it tears you apart!"</div>
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Some directors out there just aren’t
built to work within something as play it safe as the Hollywood
studio system. Larry Cohen, an exploitation auteur whose output
includes everything from blacksploitation films like BLACK CASEAR and
ORIGINAL GANGSTERS to bizarre science fiction thrillers like the long
lost relative of the X-FILES, GOD TOLD ME TO, would be one of them.
This isn’t a criticism, mind you, and I think the world of B-movies
is better off because of it. But I bring it up because it’s
pertinent to the movie we’re talking about here. Because you see,
back in the early 80’s, Cohen was taking a stab at his first major
studio picture, I, THE JURY with Armand Assante, an adaptation of
Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and wound up butting heads with the
studio executives over the production not having enough money. Cohen
worried that his reputation with the various New York businesses he
had worked with on several other films before would be damaged by his
inability to pay the production costs and called them up to warn them
“Look, you better get paid now or you might not get paid at all.”
Well, that resulted in Cohen getting the boot from I, THE JURY barely
a week into filming.
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But here’s the thing about Larry
Cohen; he’s what you would call a resourceful type and has a knack
for putting together a movie in less time than…um, insert your own
overdone metaphor here. If the studios didn’t want him to make I,
THE JURY, well then, he was just going to go make his own. And he did
just that. Within a week, he had a script, a cast and had secured the
necessary budget, in the neighborhood of a million dollars, from none
other than Samuel Z. Arkoff himself. You couldn’t find a more
fitting producer for the project, because Arkoff, along with his
former partner-in-crime Roger Corman, had pretty much wrote the
closest thing to the Ten Commandments for how to produce, film, and
market low budget B-movies in the 50s through the 70s via American
International Pictures. (Google “The Arkoff Formula.”)
Furthermore, Arkoff had a hand in bringing movies such as THE
SHE-CREATURE, IT CONQUERED THE WORLD, VIKING WOMEN AND THE SEA
SERPENT, REPTILICUS and even a few selections from the GODZILLA
franchise to American screens and despite the gritty Reagan-era New
York setting and comparably higher level of gore, the film Cohen had
in mind, a mix of police procedural and giant monster film, would fit
in right at home with those movies.</div>
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I imagine that detectives Shepherd
(David Carradine) and Powell (Richard Roundtree) have seen their
share of weird shit as New York police in the early eighties but I
don’t think anything they’ve run across so far prepared them for
the two different corpses that drop into their laps on this day. The
first was a window washer who, while using his job as an excuse to
leer at a woman working in the same building, rather suddenly finds
himself deprived of everything from the neck up. There doesn’t seem
to be any clear sign of what decapitated the man and even more
bizarre, his head is nowhere to be found! That’s one for the books
by itself, but the second dead body Shepherd and Powell are called in
to investigate manages to top that: a skinned corpse found in a hotel
room. And the grisly strangeness of the crime doesn’t end there.
When Shepherd consults an expert at the Museum of Natural History
that our victim was in town to visit, he learns that the second crime
is reminiscent of the manner in which the ancient Aztecs would offer
up a human sacrifice by flaying them alive. The kicker? The one
being sacrificed in this ritual has to offer themselves up willingly!
Well, unfortunately for Shepherd and Powell, this is simply the start
of it, because faster than you can say Johnny Gossamer (go watch
Shane Black’s KISS, KISS, BANG, BANG if you don’t get that
reference), it turns out the two cases are connected and what
connects them just happens to be this big flying <i>something</i>
that’s snatching up and devouring any New Yorker it can get its
claws on.</div>
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This is where Jimmy Quinn (Michael
Moriarty) enters the picture. Who is Jimmy Quinn, you may ask? A
“nobody” if we’re being honest. One gets the feeling calling
Jimmy a two-bit crook would be a bit generous. To his credit, though,
he wants to go straight and has dreams of a career as a jazz
musician, working at the same bar as his girlfriend, Joan. (Candy
Clark) -- Just like to add, that this was a touch added to the
script after Cohen discovered that Moriarty was himself an aspiring
piano player. The song he plays for the audition is one that the
actor wrote. -- Well, the audition doesn’t go to well, leaving
Jimmy with only one option to procure any money; going in with a gang
of mob goons on a diamond store heist. Jimmy is the squeamish type and argues that he doesn’t like guns or taking part
in the actual robbery itself and will serve only as the wheelman.
Unfortunately for Jimmy, his argument isn’t nearly as convincing as
the one Ryan Gosling would give a couple decades and change later so
he ends up right smack dab in the middle of the robbery when it goes
south, holding the case full of diamonds. He doesn’t hold onto it
for long, mind you, losing it after getting clipped by a cab while
fleeing the scene and I’m willing to bet that the mobsters aren’t
going to be too happy about that, if they believe his story at all.
When his lawyer up closes up shop following Jimmy’s panicked plea
for help, needless to say, Jimmy is in deep shit.
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One thing does go Jimmy’s way, though
he doesn’t quite realize it yet. His lawyer’s offices happen to
be in the Chrysler Building, you see, and Jimmy’s attempt to get
into it gets him chased by security. It’s there in the maintenance
area at the very, very top of the skyscraper, hiding from a guard,
where Jimmy stumbles across the nest of whatever it is that’s been
attacking people. The creature isn’t home when Jimmy finds it but a
giant egg it laid is and the corpses of several people it’s been
snacking on. That’s enough, though, to tell Jimmy that he’s
better off any where but here and he amscrays. That nest comes in
handy for Jimmy, however, when the mafia goons come calling at his
girlfriend’s apartment later on. When they finally corner Jimmy, he
gets the idea to lure them to the nest so that whatever has made
itself at home can take care of his personal problem for him and
that’s just what happens. It is also isn’t too long before Jimmy
makes the connection between the attacks and the nest he discovered
and he realizes that he’s in possession of information that the
authorities would really like to get their hands on. From there all
three separate plotlines join up, as Shepherd discovers that not only
are the attacks being carried out by some sort of prehistoric
monster, not only is there are an Aztec death cult running loose in
New York that reveres this beastie as the god Quetzalcoatl – though
you’d think they of all people would know that ole Quetzie was one
of the Aztec gods who <i>wasn’t</i> big on human sacrifice – but
he if wants to stop this insanity, he’s going to have to wrangle
with a low life who’s willing to hold the city hostage if it means
he’s can weasel some serious money and an official pardon out of
it.</div>
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I know everyone says “they don’t
make ‘em like this any more” about any old movie but seriously,
they really don’t make ‘em like this any more. As I said earlier,
even when released, (Guh, over thirty years ago!) Q was a bit of a
throwback to an earlier era of monster movie making. The early
eighties were the hey day of the slasher film and if monsters
rampaged through anything back then, it was usually through
spaceships or sewers, something of considerably smaller scale than
the Big Apple, so a movie which featured a claymation beastie
snatching sunbathers off of New York roofs was going to stick out
somewhat. Then there’s New York itself. Like many of Cohen’s
movies, such as the aforementioned GOD TOLD ME TO and the MANIAC COP
trilogy he wrote and produced, Q is a snapshot of a city that doesn’t
exist any more, the New York of the seventies and eighties; grimy,
crowded, and covered in graffiti but feeling alive in a way that few
places do. This is one of those movies where the city itself is as
much a character as anyone in it. Part of the reason for this is that
Cohen shot a lot of the film documentary style right there in the
streets and alleyways of the city, often improvising scenes on the
day and grabbing who or whatever was nearby that he could get some
use out of. Those baskets hanging off the side of the Chrysler
Building that the police use to shoot at Q during the film’s
climax? They were already there, being used by electricians to
install lights. Most of the “police” you see in that scene were
the steeplejacks that were working up there when Cohen showed up.
It’s movie-making without a net and unfortunately, I doubt you
could get away with shooting a film this way in the New York of
today. A production of a scale this small certainly wouldn’t be
able to use the Chrysler building as its major set piece and that
would be a shame. I mean, where else in New York would a giant
bird-god want to make itself home at?</div>
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A fairly ridiculous premise, low budget
and short shooting schedule, with a lot of scenes made up as they
went along, starring actors that didn’t even know the sort of movie
they were in until they showed up on set and were handed the script.
– David Carradine was an army buddy of Cohen’s who agreed to do Q
as a favor – and a special effects team that had to integrate their
stop motion monster into footage that wasn’t shot to accommodate
that. All in all, it sounds like a recipe for utter schlock and to be
honest, Q, THE WINGED SERPENT is schlock but its schlock of a very
entertaining and smartly written sort. Oh sure, it has some plot
absurdities to it. Nobody thinks to call the military in, somehow our
monster can snatch people up and there be no witnesses, and it’s
never explained how Q can reproduce without a mate. (Though <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2013/06/q-1982.html" target="_blank">Tim</a> has
interesting take on that.) But it gets things right where it counts.
Cohen knows how to make even minor characters feel distinctive,
giving them their own little stories -- like a construction worker
whose lunch keeps getting stolen -- so that they feel like actual
people with lives instead of just cannon fodder there to get gobbled
up by an airplane sized death-turkey. The movie also contains a
number of witty little touches: whether it’s the monster coming to
rest on a pyramid like building in its death throes or that whole
requirement of the sacrifice having to be a willing one saving
Jimmy’s bacon when the cult leader comes after him. There’s humor
here and a lot of its pretty funny, occasionally dark (like some
suggesting that the monster’s here because New York’s “known
for its good eating”) but thankfully no matter how goofy it gets,
with kite jump scares and scenes of a cop undercover as a mime, Cohen
never plays things less than one-hundred percent straight. He knows
not to talk down to his audience but invite them along.</div>
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It helps a lot that Cohen has the cast
that he has to work with, and the stand out performance among all of
them is unquestionably Michael Moriarty as Jimmy Quinn. Moriarty was
an actor who had a few film credits under his belt, including
co-starring in BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY with Robert DeNiro, but mostly
thrived on television and stage, winning several Tony and Emmy
Awards. (He would be one of the main cast in the early seasons of a
little show called LAW & ORDER, too.) He was a largely
improvisational actor, and since Cohen was a largely improvisational
director, it’s no surprise that two enjoyed working together
immensely. According to the commentary track, Cohen would come up
with and shout lines for Moriarty to say while they were shooting
scenes and Moriarty would slip them in without missing a beat. Q
would be their first collaboration together and the two would work
again on THE STUFF, IT’S ALIVE III: ISLAND OF THE ALIVE, RETURN TO
SALEM’S LOT and Cohen’s MASTERS OF HORROR episode “Pick Me Up.”
There’s a rather infamous anecdote involving Rex Reed meeting Cohen
after a screening and exclaiming “All that dreck…and right in the
middle a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!” Cohen
responded with “That dreck was my idea.” It’s easy to see why
Moriarty leaves such an impression though, with the way he manages to
instill Jimmy Quinn with such nervous, fast talking, unable to sit
still or slow down manic energy. (Anybody who’s been around drug
addicts much will see a lot that’s familiar.) Let’s be honest
here, Jimmy Quinn isn’t remotely what you’d call a decent person,
especially once his negotiations with the city give him carte blanche
to act like a real asshole, but dang if Moriarty doesn’t make him
mesmerizing and even make you want to root for him a little. In a
weird way, Jimmy Quinn is the heart of the movie and if you took out
everything around him, leaving only his relationships with his
girlfriend and Detective Shepherd, you’d still have a pretty good
flick on your hands. I’m not exaggerating when I say the scene with
him and Carradine in the coffee shop is the most entertaining “cop
and crook have coffee” scene this side of HEAT. Quinn’s
suggestion of how they should catch Q and Carradine’s disbelieving
and sarcastic reaction to it crack me up every time. The rest of the
cast acquits themselves well, though it is a shame that Richard
Roundtree is given so little to do.</div>
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Fittingly, Q, THE WINGED SERPENT
opened the same week and almost right up the block from where I, THE
JURY finally opened and proceeded to outdo the much bigger budgeted
movie in terms of both box office and critical reception. I’m not
saying I believe in karma but if I did… And if you want my opinion,
I feel pretty sorry for whatever dimension in the old multiverse
where Cohen’s I, THE JURY went off without a hitch and were
deprived of this little gem as a result.
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Hey, speaking of how things could have
been different, here’s a little bit of trivia that might blow your
mind. When casting the film, Cohen had strongly considered two other
people for the roles of Shepherd and Jimmy Quinn; one a struggling
actor working as a bartender that had auditioned for I, THE JURY, the other a comedian who Cohen had
caught at an improv-comedy show. However, Cohen was shot down
because the distributors wanted actors that would be more
recognizable, making it easier to sell the film to foreign markets.
So, next time you settle down to watch Q, play a game of “what could
have been” and try to image how this flick would have
played starring Bruce Willis and Eddie Murphy!</div>
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<i>This review is part of NATURE'S FURY, a blog-a-thon hosted by Cinematic Catharsis for the weekend of June 18th through the 20th and dedicated to those movies where Mother Nature really, really has it in for you. Click on the image below to see the what the other blogs taking part have to contribute...</i></div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-21792678787801088582016-06-01T16:21:00.001-07:002016-06-01T16:28:09.013-07:00The Death Wish Series (1974 -1994)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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I’ve never read Brian Garfield’s novel DEATH WISH but
everything I’ve heard about it makes it sound a world and a half away from the
image of Charles Bronson stalking hellish urban landscapes. Published in 1972,
“Death Wish” told the story of Paul Benjamin, a New York CPA, and his downward
spiral following his wife’s murder and daughter’s brutalization during a home
invasion. Inspiration for the novel came from incidents in Garfield’s own life,
the theft of his wife’s purse and his car getting vandalized, leaving him so
enraged he was ready to quote, “kill the son of bitch” should he ever get his
hands on him, which left Garfield wondering what would happen to a person that
fell into that way of thinking and couldn’t pull themselves out of it. Clocking
in at a slim two hundred and nineteen pages, Paul doesn’t even get his hands on
a firearm until the book is nearly three quarters over, with the bulk of its
page count being devoted to detailing our protagonist’s unraveling mental state
before he turns to violence as a way to retake the control he’s felt he’s lost.
As Zack Handlen noted in own discussion of the book and original film on his
much-missed site The Duck Speaks, the “death wish” of the title is Paul’s, his
vigilante spree motivated as much by a desire to commit suicide by cop or crook
than anything else, really. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With this in mind, I guess we can all understand why <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Garfield</st1:city></st1:place> wasn’t too happy
with the film series that sprung from his novel. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Garfield</st1:city></st1:place> had sold off the film rights to
DEATH WISH with those of another of his books, RELENTLESS, to producers who
eventually took the project to United Artists. Early drafts of the script were handled
by Wendell Mayes, as <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Garfield</st1:city></st1:place>
had chosen the write the RELENTLESS adaptation himself. By all signs, Mayes
work stuck relatively close to source material, and Sydney Lumet was slotted to
direct the film with Jack Lemon and Henry Fonda in the lead roles of vigilante
and pursuant cop respectively. However, a chance to direct a certain movie
named SERPICO came up and Lumet jumped ship to that project instead. British
director Michael Winner was chosen to step in for his experience in directing
violent action films like THE MECHANIC and THE STONE KILLER, both of which
starred Charles Bronson, who would be slotted into the role of Paul Benjamin,
now re-christened Paul Kersey for the final film. The production would hit a
few more speed bumps before it finally made its way to the screen though.
Budgetary constraints would lead United Artists to drop the project and the
original producers were forced to give up the film rights which would
eventually find their way into the hands of infamous Italian film giant, Dino
‘When monkey die, everybody cry” DeLaurentis, who would take the project to
Paramount Pictures. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Paramount</st1:city></st1:place>
would eventually release the movie in 1974.<o:p></o:p></div>
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The original DEATH WISH couldn’t have hit theaters at a more
opportunistic time. It was an era where a mixture of economic hardships and
high crime rates lead to the general perception that any major city was a borderline
demilitarized zone where vicious criminals lurked in every shadow and any
system of law was incapable at best and an outright hindrance to justice being
done at worst. Furthermore, this was the hey day of the DIRTY HARRY franchise, another
film series about a man pushed too far who takes a hardliner approach to
violent crime, whose first sequel had come out just the year before. So, with
an audience fed up with the world outside their doors and longing for fantasies
where the solution was as cathartically straight-forward as “just shoot the
son-of-a-bitch,” it comes as no surprise that DEATH WISH was a huge hit. <o:p></o:p></div>
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To give it credit, the original film has some actual merit.
There seems to be some genuine attempts at a form of social commentary here and
unlike later installments where he would skate by on his tough guy image,
Bronson is playing an honest-to-god character in this one. The violence is
depicted as horrific and nasty and when set against the seedy, dystopian
feeling backdrop of 70’s <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">New York</st1:state></st1:place>,
the result is something that feels more like an apocalyptic horror movie than
anything. No wonder then, that John Carpenter cites this as one of the big
inspirations for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. <o:p></o:p></div>
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With that said, when I rewatched DEATH WISH for this write
up, I noticed an intriguing idea peaking around the edges that the film itself
never quite fully commits to. Kersey gets the gun he uses for his vigilante
slayings during a trip to <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:state w:st="on">Arizona</st1:state></st1:place>,
a gift from a client of his architectural firm. While there, he takes in a Wild
West stunt show where an announcer gives this big spiel about men standing up
for justice and all that. Later in the film, Kersey gives this big speech about
how Americans used to be pioneers, tries to goad one mugger he goes after in a
quick draw showdown, and when the police, who want him stopped but can’t help
but acknowledge that his actions are having an effect on crime rates, tell him
to get out of town after they catch him, Kersey replies with “by sundown?” This
suggests a more interesting movie, one that actually dovetails rather nicely
with what Garfield was getting at with his novel, of a man who buys into a
macho bullshit myth of the old west as a time when Men Were Real Men Who Took
Justice Into Their Own Hands in order to cope with what’s happened to him. While
casting a noted hard man like Bronson in the role of an average joe (remember,
Jack Lemmon was originally up for it) could be seen as a mistake, if looked at
from this angle, casting Harmonica and Bernado O’Reilly to play a man who has
deluded himself into thinking he’s a modern day gunslinger cleaning up this
corrupt town is fitting. However, when we take the next two films in the
series, also directed by Winner, and the director’s other movies into account,
it becomes apparent this was likely by total accident, a result of a ham-handed
attempt to highlight DEATH WISH’s ancestry. Ah well, what could have been.<o:p></o:p></div>
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And yes, that is Jeff Goldblum as one of the goons who
attack Kersey’s wife and daughter (credited as “Freak #1”) and along with
Goldblum, you can also catch some blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em appearances by
Denzel Washington, Olympia Dukakis, Christopher Guest and Sonia Manzano. Yes,
Maria from freakin’ <st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">SESAME STREET</st1:address></st1:street>!
The whole series contains a murderer’s row of recognizable faces before they were
recognizable, including Laurence Fishburne, Alex Winter, Danny Trejo, Mitch
Pileggi, Rico Ross, and two, count ‘em, eventual STAR TREK alumni with Marina
Sirtis and Tim Russ. Well, okay…Danny Trejo would.<o:p></o:p><br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
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DEATH WISH ended with the clear implication that Kersey’s
vigilante rampage was far from done but it would be years before he finally hit
the screen again. In the interim, Garfield, so displeased with how he felt the
film glorified the vigilante violence the book condemned, wrote his own sequel,
DEATH SENTENCE, which ended with Paul Benjamin arrested for his crimes.
However, this book would not be the basis for the eventual sequel, though
amusingly enough, it would get adapted in the Aughts by the writer-director
combo behind the SAW series as a DEATH WISH clone starring Kevin Bacon. (What
does <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Garfield</st1:city></st1:place>
think of that movie, I wonder?) Like I said, the cinematic sequel to DEATH WISH
wouldn’t come out until 1982, by which point Dino DeLaurentis had handed the
film rights off to the one production company in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:city></st1:place> that was more shameless than he
was...good old Cannon Films.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While not founded by the duo, Cannon
Films rose to prominence when it was bought by Israeli filmmaker (and Roger
Corman protégé) Menaham Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus. Taking notes from the
master himself, Cannon Film’s made its name by primarily cranking out dozens of
cheap exploitation pictures per year that would cash on whatever trends were
running through popular culture and film at the time, with the occasional
oddball personal project thrown into the mix. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(If you want an in-depth look at the history
of the company, I once again heartily recommend the fantastic documentary
ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, currently available on Netflix Instant. I’ve watched that
thing more times than THE GODFATHER and CITIZEN KANE combined.) Golan was once
quoted as saying that if you made an American film for less than five million,
you’d have to be an idiot to lose money. Producing sequels to DEATH WISH was
their way to add some affordable name recognition and star power to their
product. After all, “guy walks around back alleys and shoots people” wasn’t a
huge strain on the pocket book. Menaham Golan would produce a grand total of
four sequels to DEATH WISH from 1982 to 1994’s DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH
through Cannon Films and his successor production company 21<sup>st</sup>
Century Films. Not only would Bronson star in all four of them, he would appear
in a number of vehicles that might as well have been DEATH WISH movies, like 10
TO MIDNIGHT. Bronson became one of
the big star players at Cannon and story goes that any script sent into their
offices was to go into one of two stacks to determine which of the two Chucks,
Bronson or Norris, it would be pitched to.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Note that DeLaurentis would later regret letting Cannon get
their hands on the rights to DEATH WISH and after an attempt to wrangle them
back fell through, produced his own DEATH WISH clone, FIGHTING BACK in 1983. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While the original DEATH WISH was, as I said, an actual
movie, the sequels were straight up exploitation fodder. Each sports the same
general plot; Paul Kersey taking up arms and wrecking bloody vengeance once more
when someone close to him is violated by criminals, who are usually
multi-ethnic groups of young people in dire need of a cranky old white guy to
put boot-to-ass. (The series’ overriding theme seems to be “Get offa my lawn!” delivered
via hot lead.) Think of them as FRIDAY THE 13<sup>th</sup> movies for The Good
Guy With A Gun crowd. The only thing that changes from installment to
installment is being set in either <st1:state w:st="on">New York</st1:state> or
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:city></st1:place>,
which hinged on whether or not Bronson felt like traveling, it seems.<o:p></o:p></div>
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DEATH WISH II is one of the ones set in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:place></st1:city>, where Paul Kersey lives with his
reporter girlfriend (played by Jill Ireland, Bronson’s wife) and his daughter,
who was rendered catatonic by the attack in the first movie. While on a family
outing, Paul gets his wallet stolen by a gang of hoods, who later break into
his house, assault his maid, beat him senseless and kidnap his daughter. When
his daughter commits suicide, (in one of the most flat out tasteless scenes I
ever witnessed) Kersey breaks out the firearms and sets up a base of operations
in the seedier part of town so that he can hunt down the men responsible, while
at the same time being tracked down by the police detective who caught him in
the first movie. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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If DEATH WISH felt like a horror film that was disguised as
an urban crime thriller, then DEATH WISH II is the cinematic equivalent of
talking a nice long walk through a flooded sewer. Picture a version of TAXI
DRIVER that tells you you’re supposed to be rooting for Travis Bickle to go on
his murderous rampage and you’ve got a good idea just how slimy this movie
feels. “He’s doing it for you,” trailers would declare, which lets you know
where it comes down on the whole “vigilantism, right or wrong?” debate and any
attempt at social commentary this go around is drowned out by the cartoonish sleaze
and misogyny the film revels in. (For starters, this would be the first
installment to feature what would unfortunately become a staple of the series:
rape scenes used as a way to work in female nudity for cheap titillation.) It’s
in this movie that we also see the first signs of the ludicrousness to come.
The action in the first film was grounded, with Bronson using only his gun or a
sock full of quarters to fight off his switchblade and revolver carrying
attackers. Here, the sixty year old Bronson, now slipping into his screen
persona rather than trying to act, is shown being able to hold his own in a
fight against much bigger, younger men and getting into protracted shootouts
with machine gun wielding goons. It all comes to a head in the film’s
thoroughly silly finale, which sees Bronson disguising himself as a doctor to
sneak into the hospital where his last target is being held in police custody.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Repugnant as it is, that didn’t stop DEATH WISH II from
turning a tidy profit at the box office, which meant that another Cannon-produced
sequel was inevitable and so, DEATH WISH 3 would see release in 1985. Yes, a
hair over twenty-two hundred words into this write-up and I’m just now getting
started discussing the movie that was supposed to be the focus of this post. <o:p></o:p></div>
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DEATH WISH 3 was originally going to be titled DEATH WISH
III until a survey conducted by Cannon Films stated that most Americans
couldn’t read roman numerals, which I think sets the tone for the whole project
right there. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Michael Winner, in need of
a big hit after his last two films flopped, would return for his last stint as
a director in this series. Bronson was given a one and a half million dollar
paycheck, nearly one fifth of the movie’s budget, to come back. The script
would be written by Don Jakoby, co-writer of one of my favorite Cannon films,
the thoroughly berserk sci-fi epic LIFEFORCE, who would later ask his name be
taken off the script after Winner got his hands on it. Being one of the odd
number DEATH WISH films, this one is set in New York, though don’t expect to
see much footage of the Big Apple outside of the film’s opening credits, as the
majority of DEATH WISH 3 would be shot in London (Lambeth and Brixton,
specifically) as a way to reduce production costs. British locals used as
extras would later be dubbed in by U.S. Air Force personnel stationed at a
local military base. <o:p></o:p></div>
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An urgent message from an old Korean War buddy is what
brings Kersey, now going by the name Kimball, back to <st1:state w:st="on">New
York</st1:state>, who finds his friend savagely beaten to death when he
arrives at the <st1:place w:st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place> housing project where
he lives. The police, useless as always in movies like this, barge in at that
exact moment and arrest Kersey. While in lock-up, Kersey is recognized by a
perpetually ticked off police captain (Ed Lauter) whose views on crime
reduction are somewhere in the neighborhood of Judge Dredd’s. (At one point he
informs his men to not just bring him arrests, but to put a couple bodies in
the morgue. “Theirs or yours. Your choice.”) Of course, little inconvenient
things like due process and civil rights prevent Shriker from going all “let
God sort-‘em out” on the criminal element like he wants to, so Paul Kersey
dropping into his lap presents something of an opportunity. Help him
exterminate the street gang that’s primarily responsible for the high crime
rate in his dead friend’s neighborhood, he tells Kersey, and he'll forget about
those pesky vigilante murders. Kersey is initially reluctant to go along with
it but changes his tune once he’s put into a holding cell with the gang’s
psychopathic leader, Fraker.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Fraker. Oh lordy, lordy, Fraker. Fraker, Fraker, Fraker. For
both a decade and company whose cinematic output delivered a wondrous bounty of
ridiculous looking villains, Fraker still manages to stand out. THE EXETERMINATOR
2, Cannon’s off-brand DEATH-WISH-with-a-flamethrower, had Mario Van Peebles as
an Anti-Christ wannabe gang leader who dressed up like a FIST OF THE NORTH STAR
villain and even he didn’t come off as goofy. For starters, he’s played by
Gavan O’Herlihy, who you might remember as Richie’s older brother from HAPPY
DAYS who vanished without a mention after the first season. Not exactly my
first choice for “menacing street gang leader” and it’s not helped by O’Herlihy’s
performance and general screen presence, which can be summed up as, as Tim and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Chad</st1:country-region></st1:place>
put it better than I ever could, a poor man’s Jake Busey. By the way, my dad
was convinced Fraker was played by Clancy Brown and how awesome would <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> have been? That said, I don’t know
if the Kurgan could have come off much better had he been saddled with the same
ridiculous reverse-mohawk haircut as O’Herlihy is, or the stripe of red paint
he’s got running down the center of his head because I guess the costume
designer took a long look at his ‘do and said, “Hmmmm, nope…not stupid enough.”
And as we’ll see, Fraker’s whole gang shares his rather egregious fashion
sense, looking less like any actual street gang that’s ever existed and more
like they escaped from some post apocalyptic version of Cannon’s BREAKIN’
series. The Warriors would kick these guy’s asses for a warm up.<o:p></o:p></div>
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On the way out of the police station, Kersey meets up with
the public defender played by Deborah Raffin who is baffled that “Mr. Kimball”
refuses to press charges against the police for their mistreatment of him. And,
well, it’s no prize to you if you guessed that this wholesome looking young
lady is going to serve as Kersey’s perfunctory love interest for this go round,
the movie hoping that you won’t notice that Bronson’s old enough to be Raffin’s
father. Also, no prize to you if you guessed that her ultimate fate is going to
be to die at Fraker’s hands, thereby kicking off Kersey’s climatic mass murder
spree. The mortality rate of Paul Kersey’s girlfriends has got to be somewhere
between Matt Murdock’s and Golgo 13’s. But we’ll get to that later, because it’s
back to his dead friend’s neighborhood Kersey goes and the place is such a
nightmare that Paul’s not there for five minutes before he has to beat down
some thugs for attacking a woman.<br />
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If DEATH WISH paid lip service to the
idea that the film was an urban western, DEATH WISH 3 goes all in, as
this neighborhood is unquestionably the 1985 equivalent of your
standard lawless Western town, with the painted savages having the
run of the place and the good citizens cowering in fear, waiting for
some wandering stranger with a knack for violence to unite behind.
Chief among them are Bennett (Martin Balsam); the apartment
building’s land lord, a friend of Bronson’s dead buddy, and yet
another war veteran. Others will include an elderly Jewish couple and
both a young Hispanic couple (Joseph Gonzalez and Marina Sirtis) and
black teenager who will be serving as the film’s token “good”
minorities so that it can say it’s not being incendiary while still
feeding into middle age white guy fantasies about blowing away “those
punks that ruined the neighborhood.”
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With the set up out of the way and
dramatis personae introduced, Kersey moves into his dead buddy’s
apartment and proceeds to declare war on any 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS
escapee he sees. He booby traps his apartment, takes time out from
dinner with that lovely Jewish couple to cold bloodedly gun down two
thugs that try to break into his car, and baits a purse snatcher
called “The Giggler” into stealing from him so he can blow him
away with a .475 magnum handgun. With “The Giggler’s” death
(“THEY KILLED THE GIGGLER!” “That wasn’t right. He shouldn’t
have done that.” Oh eat your heart out, John Sayles.) Fraker
decides its time to retaliate. His goons abduct and rape Mrs.
Rodriguez, who later dies from her injuries. He has another goon,
simply named the “Puerto Rican,” get ripped on cocaine and sends
him to murder Kersey, only for Paul to pitch him head first off of a
roof. His gang murders an old woman, bombs Bennett’s shop and puts
the old man in the hospital but most importantly, kills Deborah
Raffin’s character while she’s in the middle of a romantic
evening with Paul. Come on, we knew this lady was doomed the moment
she appeared on screen and once she and Kersey start sleeping
together, I went ahead and timed how long it was until she met her
fiery end, her car sent careening into another that, judging by the
resulting explosion, must have been carrying a trunk load of
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Two minutes and thirty five seconds, if
you’re curious.</div>
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Well, that’s the official signal that
it’s clobberin’ time. Shriker places Kersey in police custody but
he escapes and makes it back to his friend’s apartment, where he
breaks out a little memento his friend brought back from WWII - a
friggin’ .30 cal. machine gun! –and proceeds to go all Urban
Combat John Matrix on Fraker’s gang. The other law abiding
citizens, rather than getting as far away from these two maniacs waging bloody warfare in the streets like any
sane human being, break out weapons of their own and join in. Not to
be outdone, Fraker calls in some back up from a biker gang and then
even Shriker and the police decide “Hell, when in Rome.” The
result is a good twenty plus minutes of glorious nonsense as
everybody just starts shooting everybody else. It’s clear this is
where the film’s budget went as it pulls out all the stops in terms
of stunts and pyrotechnics. With apologies to Joe Bob Briggs, we’ve
got kung fu, pistol fu, machine gun fu, grenade fu, Molotov cocktail
fu, raging out of control fire fu, board with a pointy thing in it
fu, chain fu, roving bands of armed old people fu, helicopter fu,
motorcycle fu, crashing police car fu, defenestration fu, old lady
with a broom fu, old lady with a double barrel shotgun fu and as
Fraker discovers to his chagrin,
Paul-Kersey-has-a-rocket-launcher-he-saved-for-a-special-occasion fu.
With their leader reduced to a pink mist, Fraker’s gang decides to
take their ball and go home. (I mean, if you’re just going to get
<i>mean</i> about it, Mr. Kersey.) His job done, Kersey heads off
into the sunset, but not before paying his respects to Shriker, the
scene of them staring into each others eyes inexplicably set to same
romantic music as the scenes between Bronson and Deborah Raffin
because this movie needed to go out on one more “Oh what the hell?”
moment. The film then ends in the most perfect way that it could: a
lingering shot on burning real estate set to sounds of screeching
police sirens.
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My God, this movie. Much like the RAMBO series, DEATH WISH is another
Reagan-era example of taking a gritty, somber
story and turning completely into ridiculous right wing fantasia. Sure, DEATH WISH I & II had their share of
reactionary politics, but they’re downright socialist compared to
3, which runs around waving a giant banner that has “VIGILANTISM
RULES” written on it in big, bright letters. Seriously, this isn’t a movie that supports the
second amendment so much as it writes racy love letters to it. At one
point in the film, the police, being the obstacle to Real Justice as
they are, force the Jewish couple to hand over a pistol they used to
scare off a couple gang members. “But it’s our protection!” the
wife shouts at them before ranting that the police should be going
after the real criminals all while sad music plays. Very next scene,
the gang members are in the house attacking them and telling them
that they’ll come back in any time they want, as if taking the gun
away removed some sort of mystical protection field. When Kersey
kills The Giggler in a way that can’t be seen as anything but
premeditated murder, the reaction from onlookers isn’t horror but
for <i>the entire block to start applauding him</i> for blowing a
gaping hole in that dude’s chest. Hell, the scene where Kersey
first gets to show off his fancy new hand cannon is practically an
advertisement for it and you almost expect him to turn to the screen
and go “That .44 Magnum Dirty Harry carries around? It’s for
<i>wimps</i>.” Not surprisingly, the gun manufacturer who made it
apparently saw a huge upswing in sales after this movie came out.</div>
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Of course, why shouldn’t they applaud
criminals dying? According to DEATH WISH 3, criminals aren’t
human beings who turned to crime mostly as the result of societal and
economic turmoil. Nope, they’re zombies, orcs, and xenomorphs;
avatars of evil that indiscriminately commit any crime against any
one and probably eat orphan babies and disabled kittens for lunch.
Therefore they deserve to be massacred en masse and with extreme
prejudice. I mean, for god’s sake, they dress weird and are into
things that nostalgic for ‘50’s values types don’t understand,
the monsters! Both Shriker and Kersey compare them to roaches that
need to be exterminated and even the supposedly bleeding heart
defense attorney gives an impassioned speech over chicken dinner on how
sick she is of defending creeps in court and how good people need to
rise up just in case you were worried the movie might seriously
consider an opposing viewpoint. I certainly hope no one’s gone to
jail as a result of that somewhat unethical attitude she has there.</div>
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It would all be so very offensive and morally repugnant if not for the fact that this movie takes these notions to such extremes that it ends up turning into the whole thing into a damn cartoon. Winner apparently wished to forego the grittier tone of the first two movies for something, in his words, "more gung ho" and the result is a movie that gets so bizarre and over-the-top that at times I was convinced that what I seeing wasn't an actual DEATH WISH sequel but some thoroughly lunatic Italian knock-off of DEATH WISH that somehow lucked out and become part of the series proper. C'mon, look at this movie and tell me you couldn't see this starring Franco Nero and Enzo G. Castellari's name on the credits. None of the characters react to things in ways that any actual human being reacts (like I said, when Kersey breaks out the .30 cal, the reaction from Rodriguez is to smile and not to run screaming bloody murder in the other direction) and on the whole the movie never feels like it takes place anywhere resembling planet Earth, so it's hard to get too bent out of shape over it. DEATH WISH 3 takes the tropes of vigilante movies as close to parody as one can get without tripping over into the real thing. It's exactly the kind of movie that Paul Verhoeven would send up with ROBOCOP and between you and me, ROBOCOP almost feels restrained by comparison. The jaw dropping, cackle inducing absurdity of it all is not lessened by repeat viewings.<br />
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And seriously, what was up with the random gang member that was carrying a plunger around?<br />
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Something that does spoil the fun a bit is yet again, we have multiple examples of rape being treated as a way to work in nudity. Director Michael Winner had a rather unsavory reputation for being a misogynistic sleaze and as reported in ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, the general impression people had of him is that of a guy who got into filmmaking so he could abuse people. DEATH WISH 3 would be the second time with Winner that poor Marina Sirtis would have to go through with this. During the making of Winner's previous movie, the smut-a-thon THE WICKED LADY, Winner apparently just decided out of the blue to have a scene where Sirtis gets stripped naked and whipped for no real reason. Here she was treated worse, as not only was she stripped naked yet again but the temperatures on set were incredibly cold and when someone tried to give her a coat so she wouldn't freeze to death, Winner had them thrown out. I imagine these two movies weren't far from Sirtis's mind when she gave fans of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION an emotional thank you for making the show such a hit, since it meant she wouldn't have to put up with crap like this anymore. Unfortunately, the second example, of a nameless black woman being dragged out of building during the final shootout is even skeevier because that woman would be one Sandy Grizzle, who was Winner's girlfriend at the time and would later reveal that Winner abused her regularly. Bleech, is about all I can say to that.<br />
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Winner's career would enter a major decline after DEATH WISH 3 and Bronson was reportedly so displeased with the resulting film he refused to work with him ever again. But, hey, DEATH WISH 3 turned a profit and I'm assuming that Bronson would need to make a boat payment at some point so further, considerably cheaper DEATH WISH sequels were inevitable. DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN would hit cinemas in 1987 and in the director's chair for this go around would be J. Lee Thompson, director of THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, the original CAPE FEAR, both the strongest and weakest of the PLANET OF THE APES sequels, and WHITE BUFFALO, the best mashup of JAWS knock-off and "dying of the Wild West" movie you're likely to see. Bronson seemed to enjoy working with Thompson, as the two collaborated several times, and both gained a second wind for their career working with Cannon Films. THE CRACKDOWN would essentially be a reworking of DEATH WISH II into something considerably less heinous, as Kersey is back in L.A. living with yet another crusading reporter girlfriend and her daughter. When Kersey tells his girlfriend that he's come to regard her daughter like she was his own child, you know she's doomed, and it's isn't much longer than it took for Deborah Raffin to bite it before she's dead from a drug overdose. With backing from a mysterious billionaire, Kersey pulls a page from Harmonica's grandpappy Sanjuro and plays the two biggest drug cartels against each other before cleaning up what's left, only to discover that he's been duped into clearing out the competition for the actual drug operation behind his girlfriend's daughter's death. The result is arguably the best made of the four DEATH WISH sequels. Thompson has a slick if un-intrusive directorial style and manages to pull off some surprisingly good scenes, including an opening stalking through a parking garage that could have been pulled from a giallo and the particularly well-staged shoot out at a roller rink which closes the movie out. It never quite reach the heights of crowd pleasing ludicrousness that its predecessor hit, for better or worse, and it's obvious that the film was straining against its lower budget, a result of the financial difficulties Cannon Films was suffering at the time. Still, if you're in the mood for a decent b-movie actioner clearly Of Its Time, you could do worse. If nothing else, it is the only franchise installment that inspired a Bollywood musical knock-off.<br />
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Wish I could be quite as charitable to the last movie in the series, DEATH WISH V: THE FACE OF DEATH, though DEATH WISH V: SO VERY TIRED might have been a more fitting title for it. By this point, as I mentioned, Cannon Films had closed shop and Menaham Golan independently financed the film through his short lived 21st Century Films. It was released in 1994, seven years after THE CRACKDOWN, and the script used was apparently one that was rejected for Part 4. It's exactly the kind of cheap cash-in sequels released years after the franchise's heyday you'd expect it to be, a incredibly dull affair that finds Bronson, now in his mid seventies, avenging Yet Another Dead Girlfriend slain by Irish mobsters. Bringing things back around to my earlier FRIDAY THE 13TH comparison, if Kersey was an average joe in DEATH WISH I, and II through THE CRACKDOWN chartered his transformation into another machine gun toting 80's action hero (he even has a massive arsenal hidden away in a special compartment like Schwarzenegger in COMMANDO), then THE FACE OF DEATH presents him as something of an aging, gun toting Jason Voorhees, stalking his victims and murdering them in creative ways. The scaled back body count and excessively gruesome demise of Kersey's targets (one man has his head set on fire, another thrown into a wood chipper, and the central villain takes a swim in a chemical vat) just adds to the feeling that you're watching an erstatz slasher film. Amazingly enough, THE FACE OF DEATH was released in theaters, where it died quickly after only grossing half a million dollars. (Ouch) It would be the last theatrically released film that Bronson would appear in, which I have to say is a rather sad little ending note for the career of such an iconic actor.<br />
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Good grief, what I had originally intended to just be a post about DEATH WISH 3 ballooned over a few weeks into a nearly six thousand word (!!) rambling about the series entire. Sorry for making you read all of that, people. Still, I guess this is a series where it's impossible to talk about one installment without bringing in the others. If nothing else, it's interesting to chart the progression and transformation from the source material to the entire film series and how it changes with and reflects the times it existed in. I mentioned RAMBO before and as I'm writing this closing paragraph, it finally clicked how similar the two franchises are, starting as novels that were firmly against the thing later film installments glorified and both having fourth movies that were better than they really had any right to be. And of course, that got me thinking about what it would have been like if other gritty, somber films had become 80's action franchises. In some alternate reality somewhere did 80's audiences sit in a theater and get to see Travis Bickle machine gunning cartel members in TAXI DRIVER 4: CAB FARE OF DEATH. One can only hope.<br />
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Yeah, I think I'll take that as a sign this has gone on long enough and end this here.</div>
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<u>A Little Something Extra.</u><br />
Did you know that DEATH WISH 3 inspired a computer game? Yep, released on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. From the footage I've found on-line it seems that you play as a green jump suited Paul Kersey as he wanders around lost among various city streets, blowing away criminals while civilians wonder around like nothing is happening. Pretty faithful adaptation, all things considered. </div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-8912689711169286122016-04-24T16:10:00.003-07:002016-05-09T17:05:01.508-07:00The Gate (1987)<br />
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Directed by: Tibor <span class="itemprop" itemprop="name">Takács</span><br />
Screenplay by: Michael Nankin<br />
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Christa Denton, Louis Tripp<br />
Running Time: 85 minutes<br />
Tagline: "...Pray It's Not To Late."<br />
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Kids are a lot tougher than most adults
will give them credit for and stuff that parents are certain will
scar ‘em for life may very well end up rolling off of them like
water off a duck’s back. Personal example: when I was a wee little
sprout, probably not too long after my family had purchased a VHS
player, we ended up renting ALIEN to watch some weekend afternoon.
Memory is a little fuzzy on whether or not somebody told me that the
film would be too scary for me or I came to that conclusion myself
but I had elected to sit out the movie and went to play in my room.
However, curiosity would eventually get the better of me and so being
a stealthy little ninja, I snuck out of my room and stood at the end
of the hallway, peaking around the corner at the TV screen, my family
unaware of my presence.
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This, coincidently, happened to be
right at the time in the film where that nasty little phallus monster
announced itself by exploding out of John Hurt’s chest cavity.
After taking a moment for the shocked crew of the Nostromo to take in
what just happened, the wormy little critter let out a weird shriek
and skittered across the dining hall table, scattering glasses and
dishes as it exited stage left.</div>
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I laughed, which probably startled my
parents and my sisters, and sat down to join them for the rest of the
movie. No nightmares at all that night about H.R. Giger’s
Xenomorph, though weirdly enough I do remember having bad dreams
about another movie I watched right around the same time: THE LEGEND
OF BILLIE JEAN. Go figure on that one.</div>
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What does this have to do with THE
GATE? Well, for starters, I was struggling with the opening for this
write up for a bit and even if it ultimately fit into things a bit
clumsily at the very least it worked that little writer’s block
loose for me. More importantly though, my reaction to ALIEN as a kid
does make me wonder how I’d have taken to THE GATE if I had caught
it back then, back before I had even heard of H.P. Lovecraft*, as
opposed to how dumbfounded I was when I saw it a couple of years ago
via Netflix. How, I asked myself, even in the days when movies that
had monsters getting exploded in the microwaves and guys getting
their hearts ripped out in cultic ceremonies could be marketed as
tentpole family entertainment and even R-rated gorefests like ROBOCOP
and PREDATOR had action figures kids could sit on their shelves next
to Transformers and G.I. Joe, had the makers of this movie managed to
get away with making what amounted to a kid oriented Cthulhu mythos
tale?</div>
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OK, now that I think about it, maybe
this isn’t too weird. It was the eighties, after all, a lucrative
time to be an effects-driven horror movie. At the same time,
Spielberg and Joe Dante had made a ridiculous amount of money with a
movie about a swarm of tiny monsters laying waste to suburbia. It
wouldn’t be too far of a reach to suggest that some producer looked
at screenwriter Michael Nankin’s script about kids being menaced by
vicious little creatures and saw a chance to get some of that sweet
GREMLINS cash. Heck, this is probably the only time a movie like this
could have gotten made at all.</div>
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We’re introduced to the first of our
three main characters, Glen (Stephen Dorff, in his first role) as he
awakens from a nightmare. In it, he was trapped in his tree house as
a violent storm blows up and the tree is cut down by a sudden
lightning strike. You can imagine Glenn’s surprise when he wakes up
the next morning and discovers that there <i>was</i> a storm last
night that did tear that tree down. As the crew Glen’s parents
hired to clean up this mess chop up the tree to be hauled off, a
strange stone gets dislodged from its roots, which Glen’s heavy
metal fanatic friend Terry (Louis Tripp) identifies as a geode. With
thoughts of all the money they could make by selling it on their
minds, Glen and Terry grab a shovel and start digging to see what
else they can unearth. Their attempts pay off, even if Glenn does end
up gashing his hand on a splinter from the shovel handle, with
discovery of another geode, this one roughly the size of a
basketball. Weird thing about that hole, though, it seems to be
considerably deeper than it at first appears to be and despite
repeated attempts to do so, can’t seem to stay filled in.
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Glen and Terry don’t have time to
dwell on that or the rather unnatural number of moths that have been
gathering around his house since Glen found the stone the day before.
Mom and Dad are going on a trip for the weekend and for the first
time, Glen and his older sister Alexandra (Christa Denton) will not
be having a babysitter. A couple of things undercut Glen’s
excitement at this prospect, though. He’s grounded, for one,
punishment for the burn mark one of his toy rockets left on the roof
of the house, and while he and “Al” were close once, she’s
reached that age where things like high school and boys take
precedent over whatever little brother had planned. Once mom and dad
are out of the house, Al gives in to her friends’ insistence on
having them over for a party. For Glen it looks like it’s a weekend
of nothing but sitting in his room and hanging out with Terry.</div>
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Then strange stuff starts to happen.
First, Glen and Terry crack open that large geode, from which strange
glimmers of light spill forth, and the metal shavings in one of their
magnetic drawing pads arrange themselves in the shape of words and
arcane symbols. Never a good idea to read strange words that just
appear out of nowhere aloud, especially if you’ve have just dripped
into a little blood in a strange, creepy hole, but that’s exactly
what Glen does. It’s then that everything really starts to come
unhinged. Glen is nearly hurt when a party levitation trick ends up
working too well and after both he and Terry suffer bizarre dreams
during the night, Angus, the family dog is found dead. (Whether the
dog died due to natural causes or was some killed by Terry while
sleepwalking isn’t clear.)</div>
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Just what is going on here? As good an
explanation as any comes from an unlikely source. I mentioned that
Terry is a metal head, an image he seems to be using to cope with the
recent death of his mother and already distant father becoming even
moreso. Well, one of his most prized possessions is a gift from his
father on return from a trip to Europe, the sole album put out by
British band Sacrifyx, died in a plane crash after releasing the
album. Terry believes that there might be some sort of connection
between what’s going on with Glen’s house and the song’s
subject matter, which speaks of prehistoric evil that was banished
long ago but can re-enter our world through interdimensional
gateways. It’s looking more and more like that hole in Glen’s
backyard is one of those rifts and they’ve cracked it open only
tiny sliver; who knows what kind of nastiness will come boiling out
if it’s thrown open all the way. They need a way to shut it, and
while i doubt their local library has copies of The Book of Eibon and
The Necronomicon stashed in the back, Sacrifyx helpfully provides one
via an incantation that will close the gate if recited aloud over it
backmasked into one of their songs. Unfortunately, it seems that
the incantation is rendered useless if a sacrifice is sent through
the gate beforehand and what Glen and Terry don’t know is that Al
passed the responsibility of burying Angus to one of her friends
before they all went to the that afternoon. Antsy to head out with
everyone, he concluded that that hole in the backyard is as good of a
place to dispose of the dog as anywhere. Hey, nothing said it had to
be a human sacrifice…</div>
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Getting back to what I discussed
earlier, I can see myself having had a much more visceral reaction to
THE GATE than I did ALIEN as a child. While yes, big scary thing
hiding in the shadows is a fear for all ages, where ALIEN really got
under your skin was by clawing at things that were much more adult
oriented; twisted phallic and rape imagery, and more importantly,
body horror that took every bloodcurdling nightmare a woman has had
about pregnancy and inflicted them on a man. No wonder that ALIEN
didn’t quite get it’s hooks into me until I caught it again on
cable TV during high school and had the everlovin’ bejeezus scared
out of me; at age six or seven, whenever I had seen it, such things
would have flown right over my head. THE GATE, by comparison, is a
film <i>all about</i> childhood fears and anxieties, whether real, such as Glen’s anger
and frustration that the big sister he’s been so close to now no
longer has time for him, or imagined, like the first monster attack
coming from under Glen’s bed. Those would hit much closer to home
to someone my age at that time. The fact that the film is told
entirely from the children’s point-of-view and there’s no adult
presence for most its running time emphasizes all this.<br />
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None of that would work as well as it
does if Glen, Al, and Terry weren’t believable as actual children, of course, so
kudos to THE GATE to pulling that off. Dorff, Denton, and Tripp successfully sell the characters they're playing and it's nice to see, in a day when horror movies were passing off people in their twenties and even thirties as teenagers (I swear I remember one of the "teenagers" in FRIDAY THE 13TH Part 3 having gray hairs), actors cast who are the appropriate age. Credit must also go to the ways in which Nankin and director Tibor Takacs manage to communicate a very complicated personal dynamic between and personalities of the three main characters while saying very little. Moments like Alexandra, dressed in kid's pajamas, giving herself a fairly self-conscious once over in a mirror, or how Terry, dressed in denim and his wall's covered with heavy metal posters, using his rainbow colored blanket like some sort of cloak while singing along with his music. </div>
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Of course, this is a review round-table devoted to bizarre and surprisingly hardcore kids movies, (At least it was when we started, priorities seemed to have shifted.) and now that I've established what makes this a movie for children, allow me to now go into what makes it so unsual. The film has an appropriate title because, despite the suburban California setting and protagonist's age, it really does feel like an unofficial entry into one of Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" movies. When THE GATE gets down to business it has no problem going for the same kind of surreal, doesn't-give-a-damn-if-it-makes-sense-or-not nightmare logic that marked that trilogy of films. You might even be reminded of THE BEYOND's cranky undead sorceror when the reality warping powers of this particular hellmouth makes Terry's ghost-story about a dead worker walled up in Glen's house come unpleasantly true. Jesus Christ, in fine Fulci fashion, THE GATE even contains multiple examples of horrific eye trauma! THE GATE ends up being such a perfect little primer for the kind of batshit insanity and repulsion that you can find in Italian horror films, I'm honestly amazed that nobody from Italian film industry was involved in making it!</div>
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I imagine a good bit of this is what's leftover from what writer Nankin originally intended the film to be. He had written the script at a low point in his career following the collapse of a film project and, drawing on what he called "the nastier impulses from childhood," had envisioned it as a hard-R horror film starring even younger protagonists. Obviously that wouldn't fly at all, so when the project was picked up it was refashioned into a more family-oriented PG-13 movie with some year's added to the protagonist's age. However, these changes I think may be a major cause for what ends up being one of THE GATE'S big missteps: the monsters themselves.</div>
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THE GATE, as a stated, is a horror film cut from the same cloth as H.P. Lovecraft, where mankind is constantly threatened from reality warping alien gods and their spawn. When it came to visualizing his creatures, though, Lovecraft had the benefit of being a prose writer, and so therefore he all needed to do is provide a few vague hints at whatever squidgy tentacled terror from beyond currently threatening his neurotic protagonists looked like with a few greater implications hanging on the fringes of the narratives and his audiences imagination could do the heavy lifting for him. Movies have had a much more difficult time selling whatever eldritch creatures they create as an apocalyptic terror. Just being able to see the thing undercuts some of that, after all. And the problem with THE GATE is that it never quite successfully sells its creatures as the world ending threat that it wants you to believe they are. These things seem to have a difficult time bringing down three kids no matter what form they take and the chief demon that appears in the final act, impressive looking as it is, doesn't seem to do that much. Which is disappointing because the techniques used to create these creatures are absolutely fantastic. The aforementioned boss demon is an amazingly well done piece of Harryhausen-esque stop motion animation and its imp-like minions are realized through a combination of men-in-suits and some of the most seamless forced perspective cinematography I've seen. It's no surprise that the film's FX supervisor would go on to work on Peter Jackson's LORD OF THE RINGS films.</div>
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THE GATE had a successful run at the box office but really took off once it hit home video and cable, which convinced the studio to green light at sequel, though behind-the-scenes troubles kept THE GATE II: TRESPASSERS from being released for nearly two years. The film is considerably different from the first and involved a teen aged Terry (Louis Tripp again) summoning up and binding one of the little imp creatures so that he can use its wish granting abilities to help his alcoholic dad. There's some interesting things going on in the sequel; Terry's increased interest in the occult is a logical enough step for the character, the finale features yet another impressive stop motion monster and the film takes some stabs at dealing with a home broken by the loss of a loved one in the same way the first dealt with childhood anxieties. However, it never quite comes together and later developments in the movie feel like the filmmaker's couldn't quite decide what they wanted the sequel to be about. There was talk of a remake not to long ago, directed by Bill S. Preston, Esq. himself, Alex Winter, that used Nankin's original screenplay and creature designs by ALIEN's H.R. Giger but nothing ever came of it and Giger's recent passing probably means nothing ever will. Oh well, what could have been.</div>
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<i>This review is part of the "You Know, For The Kids" round table hosted by the Celluloid Zeroes blogging cabal, dedicated to both the weirdest movies aimed at kids and movies that serve as gateway drugs for future cinema junkies. If you're itching for more, click on the links: <a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-celluloid-zeroes-proudly-present.html">THE MAGIC SERPENT</a> at Micro-Brew Reviews, <a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/the-5000-fingers-of-dr-t-1953/">THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T</a> over at Web Of The Big Damn Spider, <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2016/04/time-bandits-1981.html">TIME BANDITS</a> at Checkpoint Telstar, <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2016/05/gamera-vs-viras-1968-you-know-for-kids.html">GAMERA Vs. VIRAS</a> at The Terrible Claw Reviews, and <a href="http://seekerofschlock.blogspot.com/2016/04/spider-man-2002.html">SPIDER-MAN</a> at Seeker of Schlock. </i></div>
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u></div>
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Obviously, I couldn't write up a review about a movie where heavy metal music plays such a big role with out throwing in something at the end? So here's arguable one of the most metal tunes of all time: "Number of the Beast" by Iron Maiden.</div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-47525273029775694472016-03-20T10:22:00.002-07:002016-03-23T09:20:03.248-07:00The Delta Force (1986)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUXFtDYlksPYtffpXR_hVlV4bd-kLSGVM2oVOehpfFAhwd8Ydf4hiBbvBjMOIXmU62998ovLSEn8xNbOx1sLGGf2fqsjOfaooGd4KIpBW2NsUu1d9aHECmjjKaKQClL2uQNynvdn8h5lVb/s1600/MV5BMTM3NzY5MTg3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjAwODM2NA%2540%2540._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUXFtDYlksPYtffpXR_hVlV4bd-kLSGVM2oVOehpfFAhwd8Ydf4hiBbvBjMOIXmU62998ovLSEn8xNbOx1sLGGf2fqsjOfaooGd4KIpBW2NsUu1d9aHECmjjKaKQClL2uQNynvdn8h5lVb/s400/MV5BMTM3NzY5MTg3MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMjAwODM2NA%2540%2540._V1_.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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Directed by: Menahem Golan<br />
Screenplay by: Menahem Golan and James Bruner<br />
Starring: Chuck Norris, Lee Marvin, Robert Forster, Shelly Winters, George Kennedy, Martin Balsam, Robert Vaughn.<br />
Running Time: 2 hrs. 5 min.<br />
Tagline: "The Siege...The Ordeal...The Rescue..."<br />
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EDIT: Unfortunately, no matter how muuch messing around with the settings I do, seems that half the text in this is locked in at "eyestrain," so you might want to adjust your browsers zoom settings accordingly. Thanks a lot, Blogger.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Well, if things had gone according to plan, the next thing you'd have read on this blog would have been the first of my requested reviews; DEATH WISH 3, one of the most ludicrous sequels ever filmed and standee alongside COBRA and INVASION U.S.A. in Cannon Film's Glorious Trinity of garbage action movies. But ya'll know that line from DEADWOOD I'm always quoting. The passing of George Kennedy, co-star of COOL HAND LUKE, THE DIRTY DOZEN, THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT, and numerous other films and television series and a welcome sight whenever he appeared, couldn't go un-remarked upon. So me and the other knuckleheads in the CELLULOID ZEROES blogger cabal decided it would only be right to pay tribute to the memory of Captain Ed Hocken by doing a round table about some of the loopier movies he's put an appearance in. For my contribution, I give you THE DELTA FORCE, yet another in a long line of movies that illustrate why getting on a plane with George Kennedy is a bad idea.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">THE DELTA FORCE kicks off, like all good military themed exploitation movies, with a big explosion, as in the very first thing we see is a helicopter go up in flames. It's 1980 and we're dropped into the tail end of Operation Eagle Claw, a real-life attempt to put a kibosh on the Iranian hostage crisis that went south due to mechanical failure and bad intel, resulting in the death of eight American serviceman and at least one Iranian civilian. As the troops are getting the hell out of Dodge, Captain Scott McCoy, since he's being played by Chuck Norris, establishes himself as our movie's Gung Ho Man of Action type by ignoring his commanding officer Colonel Alexander’s (Lee Marvin, in his final film role) orders and charging recklessly into the burning wreckage of that helicopter we saw get blown up really good to rescue one of his comrades, who is actually in fairly good condition considering he was just in the center of a huge fireball. Once he's back on the plane, McCoy, obviously not happy with how the powers that be caved to public pressure and ordered a hastily thrown together op that was botched from the get go, announces that he's resigning from the military when he gets back to the States. Obviously, since that's Norris's name and granite mug right up there front-and-slightly-off center on the poster, we can safely bet that his retirement isn't going to last for very long.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Anyhow, with our heroes properly established, the film now needs to set up the stakes and introduce those enemies of freedom, mom and apple pie that are going to be in dire need of a good old fashioned all-American boot to the face. Fast forward about five years and things pick up again at the Athens International Airport, where an American airliner is hijacked by a pair of Lebonese terrorists and forced to fly to Beirut. Proclaiming themselves as members of the New World Revolution, the terrorists (Robert Forster and David Menaham) announce that they are declaring war against “American imperialists, Zionist and all other anti-socialist atrocities” and will kill the hostages if their demands are not met. Which, y’know, I’ve seen this movie about three or four times, twice just for this write-up, and I don’t think they ever actually specify what those demands are. Regardless, news of the hijacking makes its way to the proper authorities and the Delta Force is called in to deal with the situation. And yes, it should come as no surprise that that they’ll be joined by Captain McCoy, who was given a presidential decree by Ronnie Reags himself to come out of retirement (and a promotion to Major) for this mission because Chuck Norris is just that dad-blasted important to the American military.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Of course, the hijackers aren’t just sitting on their hands while all of this is going on. For starters, they separate the Jewish passengers and a trio of Navy divers from the other hostages to have them smuggled off the plane while bringing in at least a dozen more terrorists on board. With a clutch of hostages stashed away in a militant controlled section of Beirut, the terrorists now have a bargaining chip in place should the authorities try anything. That done, they order the plane to take off and fly to Algiers, where after landing they agree to let the women and children go. Delta Force is on stand by to raid the plane once the freed hostages are clear. Unfortunately, the order to go ahead is given moments before Colonel Alexander learns about what transpired on the plane from a stewardess and his attempt to warn the McCoy and the others that they’re about to go charging into a death trap tips the hijackers off. There’s a brief gun battle and one of the hostages ends up getting executed before the plane takes off again, returning to Beirut.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">If you were alive and aware of things in any capacity at any point during the mid-eighties than it’s pretty clear to you that what we’ve just seen is Menaham Golan and company doing a serial-numbers-filed-off version of the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by members of Hezbollah. Quite a few of plot points in THE DELTA FORCE’s first half were pulled from the hijacking itself, such as a German stewardess being forced to help the hijackers determine which passengers were Jewish and the murder of a Navy diver whose body was then dumped on the tarmac. There is a key difference between the film and actual events, though. In real-life the situation was resolved when Reagan negotiated the release of over seven hundred Shi’ite Muslim prisoners in exchange for the hostages, something that’s conveniently forgotten when Reagan-worshippers blow a gasket over two or three prisoners being let out from Gitmo. In the alternate universe that THE DELTA FORCE takes place in, however, the president has no patience for resolving things peacefully and informs Delta Force that it’s clobbering time. Sure, the hostages are scattered throughout Beirut but Beirut just happens to be within spitting distance of Israel and by total coincidence, the American heroes of this Hollywood film produced, co-written and directed by an Israeli guy (the film was shot in Israel, too!) will have the full cooperation of the Israeli government in launching a small-scale invasion on the terrorist’s base of operation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Yes, what started as a fairly straightforward “ripped from the headlines” scenario transforms at the film’s midpoint into a whole lotta exploding, bullet riddled jingoistic wish fulfillment. THE DELTA FORCE is what I like to call a “We Get To Win This Time” movie, where thanks to Hollywood, the United States can take a mulligan and get to do over situations that didn't go so hot for them in real life but with the messy and complicated situations of actual reality now simplified into something that can be solved with a lot of crowd pleasing brute force. It probably won't come as a surprise that this type of movie really found its home in the Ronald Reagan-era, where the country was still smarting from that whole Vietnam thing. RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART 2 would be the iconic example of this sort of film, which ditched the original FIRST BLOOD'S somberness for a lot of triumphant chest thumping and presented a new version of the Vietnam War where all we needed to win it was a muscled up, stony-faced super-soldier with a machine gun. Funny thing is that FIRST BLOOD, PART 2 wasn't the first movie to tackle this subject: Golan and Globus beat Stallone to the punch by about a year with their own Vietnam Revenge flick, MISSING IN ACTION (another Chuck Norris vehicle) and the original FIRST BLOOD'S director Ted Kotcheff and writer John Milius gave us UNCOMMON VALOR the year before that. UNCOMMAN VALOR, which featured Gene Hackman leading a Dirty Dozen-esque team in a raid on the prison camp holding his son, is actually my favorite of the bunch, as rather than going for the obvious gung-ho route, becomes a story about coming to terms with loss and in many ways, feels like more of an actual successor to FIRST BLOOD than anything with RAMBO in the title. Stallone’s movie was the one that made all the money, though, so it was the one that set the template for the imitators that followed, which included the other Rambo sequels, which saw our All-American hero winning other countries’ “Vietnams.”</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">- I’d actually love to see a better writer than me take a stab at examining the different kinds of action films that were born from the post-Vietnam mentality. If movies like RAMBO and MISSING IN ACTION presented a fiction where real life events weren’t losses just delayed victories, on the opposite end you’ve got movies like ALIENS, SOUTHERN COMFORT, and PREDATOR which present fictionalized faux-Vietnam operations that are doomed from the word go. Plus, I’d like to see someone go further into how the DNA of these sorts of movies live on in the modern action / superhero blockbusters of today, where we’ve got Iron Man fighting the War on Terror and The Avengers and Superman stopping airborne attacks on major American cities. -</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Which brings us back to THE DELTA FORCE. We’ve got the same idea as RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD, PART 2, it’s just applied to a different conflict. In fact, THE DELTA FORCE gets two for the price of one, because this faux-TWA hijacking also gets to be framed as payback for the Iranian hostage crisis. Hell, Ruhalloh Khomeini gets name checked at one point, with our Delta Force heroes laughing at how their monkey wrenching of the terrorists’ attempted escape into Syria is really going to give the Supreme Leader the ole stink-eye. You will note that our hero is still a Vietnam vet, though, which begs the question of how we managed to lose Vietnam in the first place if we had a bunch of invincible super-soldiers like Rambo, Braddock, and McCoy on our side. Willing to bet INVASION U.S.A.’s Matt Hunter was running around there somewhere, too. Weirdly enough, THE DELTA FORCE also seems to be a bigger-explodier quasi-remake of another film Menaham Golan made back in Israel, OPERATION: THUNDERBOLT, which itself was based on a real-life hijacking that took place in Uganda.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="line-height: 16px;">Throw all that together and you’ve got one very odd movie. Like I said, THE DELTA FORCE has that whole FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN thing going for it where it starts out as one movie and shifts into a completely different one halfway through only this time it’s a bug, not a feature. For the first hour or so, it’s this claustrophobic suspense film which, turns out, actually succeeds at generating some drama and even genuine tension, such as a stewardess having to stick the pin back in a grenade or Colonel Alexander’s rush to warn the assault team about the trap they’re about to go charging into. Even the terrorists get have some sympathetic moments, like one telling a young girl that he’s only fighting because his family was killed or helping out a pregnant hostage. Of course, it also has a scene where the same guy says “six million Jews wasn’t nearly enough” when the German stewardess refuses to help them single out the Jewish passengers on the grounds of that whole Nazi thing. Something of a mixed message there, movie. Regardless, you get the sense that for the first half of this film, Cannon is attempting to make something that resembles, y’know, an actual movie, rather than the assembly line schlock they were known for. People coming here to see Chuck Norris kicking ass from minute one will probably get rather frustrated waiting on that to happen, as it’s a good hour before a single shot is fired or karate kick is thrown. Once the action does ratchet up, though, the film goes into total la la land and becomes exactly the kind of movie that one would expect from Golan-Globus. What started as a fairly grounded movie ends with Chuck Norris sliding down zip lines while firing a machine gun and nailing faceless terrorists a hundred yards away with pinpoint accuracy while everything explodes around him. The last half hour to forty minutes of this flick is almost one extended action scene as the raid on the terrorist compound leads into a chase through the desert which gives way to the Delta Force finally retaking the plane, with Norris taking a detour to hand out an incredibly one sided beat down to the terrorist leader before blowing him up with a rocket launcher. Hey, come to think of it, that’s how INVASION U.S.A. ended, wasn’t it? Well, wouldn’t you know it; both movies have the same screenwriter. (“INVASION U.S.A. had a script?” we ask, horrified.) Heck, with its crack commando unit running around the desert driving dune buggies and motorcycles with rocket launchers mounted on them, the second half of THE DELTA FORCE feels like Menaham Golan decided what the world really needed in 1986 was a gritty reboot of Hal Needham’s MEGAFORCE. Can’t help but wonder how this movie would have played if somebody stuck Norris in the gold spandex / blue headband combo that Barry Bostwick was rocking in that flick.</span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; line-height: 100%;"> </span><br />
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Better, probably.<br />
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I don't know how much THE DELTA FORCE made at the box office but the film was successful enough to get two sequels greenlit and even inspired a Pre-Asylum made-for-video cash-in called OPERATION DELTA FORCE which managed to get more sequels than the movie that inspired it. I also remember this movie playing all the time on TBS's MOVIES FOR GUYS WHO LIKE MOVIES back in high school, so I'm willing to bet that video and cable played a part in that. As for the critical reception it received upon release, well you can imagine that it was quite a bit chillier. (Though the film did get a <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-delta-force-1986">good review from Roger Ebert</a>, oddly enough.) Naturally, people weren't too happy to see an actual tragedy that occurred a year before being used as an excuse for Chuck Norris to blow up foreigners. (I especially don't think the family of Navy diver Robert Stethem appreciated seeing their loved one's murder recreated for that purpose.) One wonders how RAMBO would have gone over in 1976. Now, if you've seen ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, Mark Hartley's amazing documentary about the rise and fall of Cannon Films, you'll know that Menaham Golan actually had people at the site of the hijacking, reporting back to him to what happened. He was developing this movie while the actual event was going down. Damn, even by the standards of Cannon Films, that is pretty shameless.<br />
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But, jingoistic political leanings and
tasteless origins aside, I do think that THE DELTA FORCE is a fairly
decent b-level action movie. I will admit that a good chunk of this
is due to the fondness I have for Cannon Films in their hey-day. The
Go-Go boys were this weird, one-of-a-kind mix of opportunists looking
for the latest trend to cash in on and filmmakers who sincerely loved
making movies. They were the kind of studio that could be producing
some chintzy ninja movie one minute and then give someone like John
Cassavetes carte blanche to make whatever movie he wanted to make the
next. Sure, a lot of their output was schlock but there was something
genuine behind it, something that gave it more character than you’ll
find in a dozen “you’re supposed to like it ironically” movies
today. Lord knows that something as completely insane as THE APPLE
couldn’t have been made by someone who wasn’t being one hundred
percent sincere. (And, yeah, high on cocaine. So much cocaine.) The
other thing about being a schlock assembly line is that Golan and
company had been doing for this for so long they had managed to get
making this kind of movie down to something of a science. THE DELTA
FORCE clocks in just a hair over two hours but the film keeps things
moving quickly enough that it never feels like you’re watching a
two hour movie. Considering the bloated, two and a half hour plus
action blockbusters were getting inundated with today, I’ve come to
appreciate Cannon’s no-frills approach more and more. Hey, anybody
ready for that three hour long cut of BATMAN V. SUPERMAN?</div>
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Another thing in its favor is that THE
DELTA FORCE was made in that weird little space where Cannon wasn't
quite overreaching themselves like they would when they made SUPERMAN
IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE or MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE but could still
throw some actual money at some of the movies they were making. It's
a favorite joke among my friends and I that THE DELTA FORCE is the
flick where Cannon could afford to wreck two fruit carts during the
big car chase. This was the period where Cannon could afford
Sylvester Stallone's paycheck, remember. Not only does this mean that
the movie could get away with having some pretty elaborate stunt work
and a lot of it, but could also have a cast of recognizable faces in
front of it. Now, Marvin, Forster, Kennedy, and Vaughn weren't of
Stallone's pay grade but these are people that starred in actual
movies that folks have seen. Furthermore, they’re a group of actors
that know how to not overplay things and prevent things from getting
too histrionic. (Norris is still Norris, though, his face stuck in
that perpetual grimace that’s either communicating steely-eyed
determination or profound confusion depending on the camera angle.)
Which brings us back around to talking about George Kennedy, finally.
It had been a while since I had seen this movie, so I was a surprised
to discover that his role wasn’t nearly as big as I remembered from
my last viewing of the film. His Irish priest is a major supporting
character for the first part of the movie but once the hostages are
removed from the plane, he’s regulated to the background, only
coming forward to say a prayer over a dying soldier in the film’s
closing moments. He does get one of the better moments of the film,
where he throws in his lot with the Jewish hostages, informing the
terrorists, “I’m Jewish, just like Jesus Christ.” Yeah, you
could argue that’s a pretty corny line, but I’ll be damned if
Kennedy doesn’t sell it like a pro. So, I’m putting my memories
of Kennedy having a more substantial role down to his skills as a
seasoned character actor who knows how to make the most of his
limited screen time.
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I am disappointed that Lee Marvin gets
little to do beyond barking orders at people. I had almost hoped that
during the film’s closing moments, where scenes of the hostages
being joyfully reunited with friend and family are being contrasted
against the Delta Force members solemnly carrying away the body of
their slain teammate, for him to turn to Norris and declare, “No,
it was the hostages who won. We of Delta Force always lose.”</div>
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<i>This review is part of PETRONI FIDE! a round table review session dedicated to the memory of George Kennedy, presented by the Celluloid Zeroes blogger cabal. Want some more? Pop over to Micro-Brewed Reviews for their look at </i><a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-celluloid-zeroes-proudly-present.html" style="font-style: italic;">NIGHTMARE AT NOON</a><i>, then onto Cinemasochist Apocalypse for </i><a href="http://cinemasochistapocalypse.blogspot.com/2016/03/uninvited-1988.html" style="font-style: italic;">THE UNINVITED</a><i>, and settle into the Web of the Damn Spider for </i><a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/2016/03/13/the-celluloid-zeroes-petroni-fide-roundtable-strait-jacket-1964/" style="font-style: italic;">STRAIT-JACKET</a><i>. And if that's still not enough for ya, Checkpoint Telstar has a look at <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-celluloid-zeroes-petroni-fide.html">THE HUMAN FACTOR</a> and The Terrible Claw finishes things off with <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2016/03/demonwarp-1988-petroni-fide.html">DEMONWARP</a>.</i><br />
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u><br />
"The Delta Force" by Alan Silvestri of PREDATOR and BACK TO THE FUTURE fame, from that weird period where every composer seemed to be slathering everything in synthesizers:<br />
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-27014711529812054612016-02-12T17:08:00.001-08:002016-03-10T18:45:47.489-08:00PSYCHOPLASMICS Goes To B-Fest 2016!<div style="text-align: left;">
And we are back! Apologies to anyone who was sticking with this blog for the past couple of months and getting nada in return, but circumstances had motivated me to put Psychoplasmics on the back burner for a brief spell. Irregularly scheduled updates should begin again in the next few weeks, including a series of reviews requested by friends of this blog from various spaces around the internet. Heck, if you want to add to that particular workload, feel free to drop into the comments and request a movie / book / video game / whatever that you'd like to see covered here. </div>
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Now, as to why I've been quiet for the past few weeks...</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Poster by <a href="http://mitchoconnell.com/">Mitch O'Connell</a></span></div>
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...that would be because the year of our Lord two thousand and sixteen would be the year that I would finally attend <a href="http://www.b-fest.com/">B-Fest</a>, a marathon session of as many of the weirdest and worst movies you could cram into twenty four hours, hosted by the good people at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It was crazy. It was exhausting. It was an absolute test of one's endurance.<br />
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Damn straight I'm going again.<br />
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Some quick backstory: Without digging too much into the gruesome details, I was in something of a slump personally last year and had to finally admit to myself that the current direction I was headed was a dead end street. College and the career path I had chosen was a complete bust. I found myself struggling with staying employed and an emotional mess. I needed a change.<br />
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So, I'm going back to school. Local technical college, taking a year long course in instrumentation tech and then we'll see where things go from there. Classes won't be starting until later this year, though, which left the question of what I'm going to do in the meantime. And this got me to thinking, "Y'know, I've never really taken a trip by myself."<br />
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Which brings us back around to B-Fest. First heard of it through the B-Movie Message Board, former mutant appendage of the old Stomp Tokyo movie review site and one of the first Internet forums I posted at with any regularity under the alias "NeoKefka." (Because when you're a video game fan fresh out of high school, you think naming your on-line identity after the villain from FINAL FANTASY VI with "Neo" prefixed on sounds like a Good Idea. A decade and change later, however...) B-Fest, started way back in the 80's, had become the defacto annual meet-up for folks from the forum and myriad associated sites. It sounded like fun but y'know, that whole "It's in Chicago, I'm in Louisiana and just shy of broke most of the time" deal put the damper on any notions I had about attending for the time being, which was always a huge disappointment. Because let me tell you something I've learned: In a final analysis, geography doesn't mean squat when it comes to connecting with people. The folks I had met through that message board and kept in touch with had, over the years, become this weird little extended family of mine, a much needed constant over my life's shifts and turns and that geography <i>was</i> a factor in preventing me from meeting with them was frustrating.<br />
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Well, when faced with the fact that you really have no idea where your life is going to take you in the next couple of years, you realize there some things you don't want to find yourself looking back on and thinking "It would have been nice if I had done that." So, I said to myself "Just go."<br />
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Obviously, this whole deal was going to be a little more complicated than just up and going. First off, I needed some extra cash to pay for all of this, which lead to me taking a seasonal stint over at nearby Best Buy. I got hired to do the early morning inventory shift, which meant I got to spend the next two months completely wrecking my sleeping and eating habits so I could get the real important work done, like peeling price stickers off and making sure we could cram one more friggin' Disney Infinity Star Wars figure on that shelf. Granted, the money and a little something extra to throw on the resume was appreciated but when I was done, I came to the conclusion that if I ever tried to get another retail job again, I want someone to please slap some sense into me. (If I try to get said job during the holidays again, slap me twice.) I'll die a happy man if I never see another Fitbit or Beats by Dre headphone set again, let me tell you.<br />
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Then, of course, there was the whole to-do about getting there. Naive goof that I am, I had planned to make this big road trip adventure out of it, driving over two days from Louisiana to Chicago. In the middle of winter. Considering that I've lived most of my life in a place that shuts down if there's more than an inch of snow on the ground, where the biggest city that I've driven in is Shreveport, which would probably make up a modest sized suburb for Chicago, and the fact that my car is a Ford pick-up, which is not well suited for traveling on icy roads...this was not one of my brighter ideas. Thankfully, my Dad (and a "service brakes soon" light on my dash) convinced me to take a flight out of Little Rock instead. Definitely glad I did so, because not only did the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel convince me that had I gone with my original plan, Chicago traffic would have eaten me alive, but the view from the plane as it flew over the snow covered landscape was absolutely amazing. Roads and cities were little more than blue lines etched into fields of white and words can't do seeing Lake Michigan from the air justice. Wish I had snapped a photo or two. That a eight hundred mile plus trip that was originally going to be spread over two days got hacked down to just a skoosh under three hour drive to the airport and an even shorter flight is nothing to sneeze at either. Unfortunately, my carry-on bag, too big to fit in the overhead compartment, got caught on something when I put it under the seat and I ended up tearing a good sized rip in it trying to get it loose. Crud.<br />
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Got to the hotel somewhere around three o'clock. This would be the Best Western Morton Grove Inn, which has become the unofficial official gathering place for the BMMB people coming to B-Fest for the past few years. Cool thing is that since the B-Fest crowd has brought so much business to the hotel and generally behaved themselves, <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Tim Lehnerer</a> was able to convince the hotel to offer a discount if you were staying for the fest. My checking account definitely thanks him. Ran into two of the B-Fest regulars, Natasha Lynn Haney and Jacob Smith, in the hotel lobby when I checked in, then stopped by room to drop off my stuff and take a shower to clear my head. Sent Tim a text to let him know I was here, to which I got a reply that he had no idea who this was because I wasn't in his contacts. (Whoops) Thankfully, a phone call cleared that up, and I ran into Tim on the way to the hotel lobby where everyone was gathering up to go to dinner, so we took a quick detour so Tim could hand off the B-Fest mix CD's he had made for me. Since this was my first B-Fest, said CD's ended up being every disc he's whipped up since he started throwing them together in one big brick. I figure I'll finally get done listening to all of them by the time I get another chance to head up to B-Fest.<br />
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It had been decided that we'd be having dinner that night at <a href="http://thesquaredcircle.biz/" target="_blank">the Squared Circle</a>, a pro-wrestling themed restaurant owned by ex-WWE star Lisa Marie Varon, and then later hit up a used bookstore called <a href="http://www.myopicbookstore.com/" target="_blank">Myopic Books</a>. Not a big wrestling fan but hey, food is food, and telling me there's a place that I can get books at a discount is like telling Dr. Zoidberg the buffet is free, so I was down for it. So, we met up with the rest of the crew - <a href="http://cinemasochistapocalypse.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Bryan Clark</a>, <a href="https://horrorbunnies.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Lisa Mary</a>, and <a href="http://1000misspenthours.com/" target="_blank">Scott Ashlin</a> and <a href="http://sugarbang.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Jessica Ritchey</a>, - and headed over to the nearest L-train station. After grabbing our CTA day passes (and then checking to make sure the station was clear of roving bands of Turnbull AC's) we hopped on the train and headed to another station that where we were assured by the Magic Voice Lady on Tim's phone, it was just a short walk to The Squared Circle.<br />
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Turns out Magic Voice Lady was a damn liar, as that short walk turned out to be a half hour plus hike through whatever section of Chicago we were in. When I recounted this on twitter the next moring, <a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Sean Frost</a> commented that he was glad to see that the Fiasco Field was still in effect, which tells me that one, things go wrong during these little excursions and two, have done so with enough frequency that they came up with a term for it. The hike wasn't actually too bad, though. First, I'd expected the weather to be a bit worse in the lead up to this trip but when I finally got there things had warmed up from the previous weeks' "somewhere between Hoth and north of the Wall" temperatures to something around the mid-to-upper twenties. Heck, that's downright balmy. Second, the whole "what have we gotten ourselves into" vibe and getting to briefly talk with people on the way over helped take the edge off a bit. See, I was a bit intimidated coming here and meeting everyone. I've never been what you call the most social of people and I don't talk much, so fears that everyone was going to think I was some kind of weirdo had made themselves right at home in the back of my mind. But as someone said later, when I admitted my nervousness, "Have you <i>seen</i> your friends?" Point.<br />
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Anyway, we finally get to The Squared Circle. Going there was Jacob and Natasha's suggestion as they're the big wrestling fans and they got to fill us in on various trivia while we were waiting on our food. I ended up getting a macaroni, cheese and bacon calzone, which turned out to be big enough that I could possibly have cut it open and crawled inside it. Not bad, but one can take only so much starch and gooey cheese in one go, so I wasn't able to finish it. (My eyes being bigger than my stomach turned out to be a reoccurring thing on this trip.) That I was snagging fries, chicken strips and what not from other folks when offered probably didn't help things. Still, I had a good time. Then it was another train ride and much shorter "wait, where are we?" walk to Myopic Books, where I managed to snag copies of Stephen King's THE RUNNING MAN, (written under the name Richard Bachman, and nothing like the Schwarzenegger movie), Clive Barker's fantasy novel IMAJICA, and Ray Bradbury's DANDELION WINE, which is one of those books that I've been wanting to get but always seem to vanish from the bookstores in my area whenever I finally have cash on hand. Didn't have a copy of James Ellroy's THE BIG NOWHERE, the only book in the L.A. Quartet I didn't have and another one I've been scouring second hand bookstores for, but Tim was able to snag that for me when he stopped by Half Price Books later on in the week.<br />
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So, with our outing for the evening done, we headed back to the hotel, where we all gathered up in Jacob and Natasha's room and let Scott and Jess inflict the "Spock's Brain" episode of the original STAR TREK series on us. There's a workable enough idea at the core the episode, which is basically "what if the Eloi got their hands on the Krell lab from FORBIDDEN PLANET," but the execution is just goofy as all get out, featuring things like a remote control cyborg Spock, costumes that suggested they just threw on what was available in the closet, some prime hammy "in pain" acting from Shatner and company, and choice bits of dialogue like one actress angrily shouting 'BRAIN? BRAIN? WHAT IS BRAIN!?," a line I'm certain Ed Wood's pissed somebody beat him too. Amazingly enough, this was the <i>first</i> episode aired for the series' third season, which means it would be the first new TREK episode fans would be greeted with after they launched a campaign to overturn the show's cancellation. Good grief. With that, I bid everyone good night, deciding that I couldn't stay up too late tonight...and then proceeded to spend another hour and a half watching TV in my room before passing out.<br />
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The next day started off with breakfast at Seven Brothers, a restaurant that's a short walk from the hotel, (where again, I ate too much. Next time, order just the pancake stack w/o sides, goofus.) before everyone split off with their little groups to do whatever. Tim, Bryan, Lisa and I, along with new arrivals Kelvin and Melissa, decided to head over to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Naturally, it was in the middle of winter so most of the bigger animals had been moved indoors but there was still plenty to see. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to charge my camera battery, which crapped out about halfway through, so I wasn't able to get any photos of things like the primate houses, where I got to see a baby monkey using a rather resigned adult's tail as a swing, or the big cat house, where a lion was gnawing down on a hunk of meet. Thankfully, I was able to snag some pictures before it gave up the ghost, including this nice shot of a lioness lounging on a snow covered rock.<br />
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Plus, I got some shots of a family of meerkats, so it wasn't a total loss. We had also discovered that one of the primate houses had a Mold-O-Rama machine. Y'know, drop a couple buck in and it gives you this cheap-o plastic figurine? Of course, I got one of 'em, which was a green chimp that I think Tim ended up dubbing Green Lantern Monkey. (Sounds like a very Tim thing to say.) Melissa loved the Mold-O-Rama, so she looked up whatever info she could on them. Who'd have thunk it, an injection molding machine is, in fact, pretty expensive, somewhere to the tune of $60,000. She also found out there was another Mold-O-Rama machine at the zoo...this one for cows. Figure that one out.<br />
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After seeing everything we wanted at the zoo, we hopped on a bus and headed towards the nearest L-train station. We had get off the bus and walk a couple a few blocks to get to it and en route, we ran across some store called Hollywood Mirror and decide to pop in for a few minutes. Mostly it was costume supplies and vintage clothing but in one of the back corners, we discovered a shelf full of Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and Godzilla toys. The plan to distract the store clerks so we could haul it out of there, possibly with a hat and scarf draped over it as a disguise, sadly, went nowhere and I decided to get stingy with my cash at that moment, so I didn't buy any. Considering I had a fair amount of cash leftover, I'm a little disappointed I didn't take the chance to grab an extra souvenir or two. For next time, I guess.<br />
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That evening we ate dinner at the Palace, a Chinese place that was near the hotel, where we were joined by Mike Bockoven and Matt Campbell. I had the pressed almond duck, "duck brownies," on Bryan's recommendation, which was pretty good but as is becoming the regular refrain for this write-up, the portions were a bit larger than I could handle. From there we went back to the hotel to get ready for a B-Fest, tradition, the trip to the<a href="http://www.halakahikilounge.com/" target="_blank"> Hala Kahiki Lounge</a>, a Hawaiian kitsch themed bar. Tim had the idea for as many of us as possible to wear these horrible looking jackets and ties he had unearthed from various thrift stores, with Bryan coming out the...uh...winner, I guess, with his nuclear nightmare of a jacket and tie. Pop over to his blog to see a picture of it. For better or worse, very likely better, nobody took a picture of me in the 70's drug dealer's accountant jacket that I got saddled with. And if the jacket wasn't bad enough, I was also wearing a black and blue flannel shirt and orange t-shirt with it, and didn't even bother tying the tie because it had been so long since I'd ever needed to do so. The cumulative effect of these very poor fashion choices was, as Jessica described, an "80's action movie henchmen who stopped caring." Funny thing was, when I got home, I showed the jacket to my dad and he didn't think it looked too bad. Didn't really fit him either, though, so back to a thrift store it will likely go. As far as the bar went, I've never been much on alcohol ever since I tried some dark rum my granddad had back in high school, so I played it safe this go around and stuck to the non-alkie drinks and sodas but still had a good time and got to meet some other folks from the forum.<br />
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After the bar, and uh..."taking the scenic route" back to the hotel, a group gathered up in the lobby to watch TARKAN Vs. THE VIKINGS, a thoroughly delirious Turkish film about a Hun Turk hunting down the Viking raiders who killed one of his pet wolves like a 10th century John Wick. Highlights include: learning that having two wolves makes you twice as invincible, that both of Tarkan's wolves are named Kurt, which is apparently just the Turkish word for "wolf" anyhow, the Viking's offering up sacrifices to an inflatable octopus pool toy whose appearance is always accompanied by Also Sprach Zarathustra, Tarkan being somewhat terrible at the whole hero deal and Kurt the Younger having to do most of the heavy lifting, the Viking's outfits seeming to made of recycled bathmats, random Chinese villains and a snake pit of doom that is populated with about a dozen or so sleepy garter snakes. That's just the tip of the iceberg and happy days, this movie is the first in a series. I checked to see if it was available to watch on YouTube so I could link it here but it's cropped all to hell. Once TARKAN finished up, a few of us stayed up to watch GYMKATA and chatted with the desk clerk at the hotel, who was enjoying watching these crazy flicks with us knuckleheads. (And was also in training to be a mercenary / bodyguard for hire. Wow.) Unfortunately, the day finally caught up to me and I had to bow out midway through GYMKATA and call it night.<br />
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We never did get around to watching any of the movies I brought: CONAN THE BARBARIAN, FLASH GORDON, and HARD BOILED. (Which I was informed broke "the rules" by bringing flicks sane human beings would actually want to watch.) Maybe next time, with something like NINJA III or STARCRASH thrown in.<br />
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Kicked off Friday with everyone in our group, which had grown substantially since Wednesday, descending upon The Omega, a fairly fancy little restaurant, for breakfast, Totally recommend it if you're ever up that way because the food was great and they give you complementary coffee cake. Then it was a brief stop back by the hotel to pick up whatever supplies we figured we were going to need for B-Fest before I joined up with Scott, Jessica, Lisa, Brian and some of Brian's buddies for a drive into Berwyn, where we checked out <a href="http://horrorbles.com/" target="_blank">Horrobles</a> and <a href="http://www.reelart.biz/" target="_blank">Reel Art</a>, a pair of shops located next door to each other that specialize in horror and sci-fi / comic book merch and memorabilia, respectively. I saw a good bit at both that I was tempted to grab, including a photo of the Faun from PAN'S LABYRINTH that was signed by actor Doug Jones and some full size posters, but the mix of the prices and little room left in my luggage to carry anything put the kibosh on that. I ended up settling for a DVD of SUPER INFRAMAN, so I could take home one of the movies we'd be watching in the Fest. Anyway, it's likely I'd have had to duel Jessica for that PAN'S LABYRINTH photo and I hear she fights dirty.<br />
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Oh, and yes, Virigina, that coloring and activity book based on David Lynch's adaptation of DUNE you see pop up here and there on the internet really exists.<br />
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Once we were done poking around the shops, it was time to head into Evanston. Before we hit the Fest itself, we decided to grab dinner at the first place that caught our eye, which turned out to be an Ethiopian place called <a href="http://www.addisabebaevanston.com/" target="_blank">Addis Abeba</a>. If you've never eaten at an Ethiopian joint before, they'll bring out everyone's food in one giant platter and then rather than utensils, they hand out these baskets of flat bread called injera, which is like a big spongey tortilla, and you tear off bits of that and use it to scoop up your food from the platter. I ended up having these beef tips with spices that was absolutely delicious and even got to try some stuff that was served raw. First time that I had ever eaten at an Ethiopian place and needless to say, we're going to have to stop by one whenever and where ever I meet up with my crew again. And of course, recounting all this got me craving some more, so I just checked to see if there were any restaurants near where I lived and discovered the closest one to me is in Wylie, Texas, which is over three hours away.<br />
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Bummer.<br />
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We made it to the University and into Norris Auditorium about a half and hour before the Fest started and the place was already packed. Still, I managed to find a spot down towards the front in the general area where most of the BMMB folks had gathered and settled in for the first real stretch of the Festival. Things got off to a great start even before the movies started (I'll discuss those more in-depth in the next post) when Tim, Bryan and a couple other guys went up on stage and did an impersonation of FURY ROAD'S War Boys, spraying their faces with this edible silver paint and shouting "WITNESS ME!" and getting the crowd worked up and chanting "WITNESS!" back at them. I have it on Bryan's word that that paint tasted absolutely godawful.<br />
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We had some technical issues with our starter, THE ADVENTURES OF HERCULES, where the volume was too low to be able to hear anything, especially over all the noise the crowd was making, and then the volume was almost too loud when they did get it turned up. Despite all that, HERCULES was the perfect movie to kick things off with, fast paced and completely bonkers. Making it even better it that whenever Hercules (Lou Ferrigno!) would punch somebody, somebody would hold up a sign done up like the old Batman show starring Adam West - y'know, BAM! BIFF! POW! - only they were written in Greek, Everybody absolutely loved that. They'd also break out a really well done drawing of Mothra whenever the twin oracles showed up. It was the only real stage skit that we had for the whole show but it hey, it was a good one. Following up HERCULES was CALTIKI: THE IMMORTAL MONSTER, an Italian riff on THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT probably best known for having it's cinematography done by Mario Bava and the bizarre-yet-distressingly-prescient comedy AMERICATHON came after that, Tim told me that at your first B-Fest that you'd run up against your limits and I ended up crashing and dozing off during movie numero four, the Inner Sanctum mystery CALLING DR. DEATH. However, I was told I didn't really miss anything except Lon Chaney Jr. having an hour long inner monologue, so good timing there. After that came the special effects short <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLhLn9hVkE" target="_blank">THE WIZARD OF SPEED AND TIME</a>, which is shown every year and is one of the big audience participation dealies at the Fest and since it was my first time at B-Fest, I had to take part. Basically, you just go on stage, lay down and stomp your feet in time with the short as they play it forwards and then in reverse. Doesn't sound like much but man, my legs were freakin' humming when we were done and I nearly fell over trying to get off the stage. I also ended up dumping the change in my pocket on the floor while I was stomping along. After that was the other B-Fest tradition, a midnight showing of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. I stuck around for most of it, throwing paper plates along with the rest of the crowd. but stepped out for a bit towards the end to stretch my legs and get some water. I headed back in for the next movie, the completely nutbar blaxpo-flick THE HUMAN TORNADO starring Rudy-Ray Moore. I started drifting off at points during this, so I came half convinced I dreamed some scenes in this movie until I found it on YouTube a couple weeks ago and gave it another watch. Nope, it was all real. After this was THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS movie. Yes, somebody made a movie based on those gross-out cards from the 80's. Everything I've heard about this movie makes it sound absolutely god awful in all the wrong ways. By total coincidence, I started to feel like I could really use a nap about this time and went and crashed on a couch in the student union, Slept through all of THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS and most of BLOOD MANIA, the movie that came after. I'm all broken up about that, let me tell you.<br />
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When I got back in the auditorium, I had no real interest in muscling my way back to where my seat was, so I just plopped myself right down on one of the steps and leaned against the wall for the next movie, MOON ZERO TWO. Hilariously enough, this turned out to be the best seat in the house. MOON ZERO TWO, despite some wonderful production design and being from the same director as QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, ended up being a total slog. When it was apparent that LOW BLOW, the next movie, wasn't doing much for me, I decided to head back to the food court to grab a cinnamon roll and sweet tea at the Dunkin' Donuts they had there and then hung out with Jessica and Scott in the student union for a while. (I heard later that LOW BLOW livened up considerably after I had left, including a scene where a guy basically gets snuggled to death by rotwiller pups.) The student union had a <i>great </i>view of Lake Michigan and so, adding to the ever growing list of things that I need to do next time is snag a photo of it. We all headed back in for the next movie, THE FIFTH MUSKETEER, which turned out to be actually a surprisingly decent movie, maybe even too good for B-Fest. We eventually concluded that the main reason THE FIFTH MUSKETEER was shown due to its rather odd cast, including Beau Bridges (who, as Bryan observed, had the same haircut as Audrey Hepburn), Ursula Andress, Emmanuelle-herself Sylvia Kristel, Loyd Bridges, Alan Hale, Ian McShane ("Welcome to Gay Paree! It can be combative!"), and Bernard Bresslaw. Throw in music by Riz Ortolanti of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST fame and we were expecting some weirdly miscast craziness and instead got a fairly entertaining flick, like something you'd watch on a Sunday afternoon as a kid.<br />
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After that was lunch and then a raffle where I actually won something! I wasn't paying attention, though, so I had no idea until I got down there to collect it what I had won. Turns out I got a copy of THE MUPPET MOVIE and MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND on VHS. Yeah, I think my niece will enjoy getting those. What came next was one of the movies I had been most curious about when the line-up was announced, ROAR, Noel Marshall's attempt at a SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON-style adventure set on his and Tippi Hendren's large cat preserve but played out more like EVIL DEAD 2 in denial, with lions. The result was complete insanity. Unfortunately, the next movie up, KANSAS CITY BOMBER, somehow managed to make "Raquel Welch does roller-derby" completely uninteresting and felt like it went on forever. Realize that at this point we had been there for over twenty hours, so even if the movie was good, we'd start to feel every minute of it, so no surprise most of this snoozer was spent hanging out and chatting. Thankfully, the movie that followed up would be the closer for the festival and what a note to go out on...SUPER INFRAMAN, a Family Dollar knock-off of ULTRAMAN and KAMEN RIDER produced by the Shaw Brothers. Tim, who sponsored the movie, summed it up best in his intro, "the first fifteen seconds are little slow...then a pterosaur belly flops onto a highway in front of a bus full of kids and causes an earthquake and then Hong Kong explodes. After that, things just get turbo loopy." One of the most bugnuts crazy movies ever made, and honestly, I don't think that I'll have a movie going experience in the remainder of 2016 that can even come close to watching this movie on the big screen with the enthusiastic crowd we had.<br />
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And so ended my first B-Fest.<br />
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On the way back to hotel we talked about what were our favorites of the bunch, with HERCULES, ROAR, and INFRAMAN being the unanimous winners, with AMERICATHON being something of a dark horse. After a brief stop at the Best Western to shower off the fest-funk we had accumulated, we all headed out to a place called Portillo's, where I got to try my first Chicago hot dog. Also ran into <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Gavin Smith</a> and his son Ian, who was just adorable. I had him give me a high five when I got there and every time I walked by afterward he held up his hand and wanted me to give him another one. Afterwards, Scott and Jessica invited me and couple other people to go track down this whiskey bar called Delilah's. Unfortunately, I had to head out early the next morning to catch my plane home, so I had to turn them down and say goodbye. (Boo!) As it turned out, I probably could have gotten away with it because I was so keyed up from everything I barely slept at all that night. Like I said earlier, I'm not much on alcohol, but really would have liked to have one last hurrah with my friends. Oh well, I guess that just means I'll have to come back, maybe stay an extra day. Thankfully, I was able to hang out a little more with Tim, Mike, and Matt the next morning while waiting for the taxi to take me back to O'Hare airport. \<br />
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Amusingly enough, I had a much, much easier time getting through security at one of the biggest airports in the country than the one in Little Rock, where I damn near had to strip before I could step in the X-Ray machine. The flight back actually managed to be even shorter than the one over and Dad picked me up when I got to the airport, which meant I could catch some much desired z's on the drive back home. My throat had started to get a little sore that day, and as much as I hoped that I just made raw hamburger out of it hooping and hollering at B-Fest, nope, it turns out that I had caught a case of Con-Crud and decided to stay over at my parent's place for a day or so to recover.<br />
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Like Bryan said in<a href="http://cinemasochistapocalypse.blogspot.com/2016/01/b-fest-2016-part-1-what-day.html" target="_blank"> his recap</a> over at Cinemasochistic Apocalypse, it took forever get to B-Fest and then it was over before I was ready. But it was worth it. It was exactly the little kick I needed after a fairly rough few months, so you bet your life I'm coming back. Don't know when that will be and y'know what? I may keep it a secret when I do find out, just to surprise everybody.<br />
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Want to read more about this year's B-Fest. Hop over to Checkpoint-Telstar and check-out <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2016/03/b-fest-2016-calm-before-films.html" target="_blank">Tim's</a> <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2016/03/b-fest-2016-part-ii-movies.html">take.</a></div>
billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-84461254039630336692016-02-08T19:17:00.003-08:002016-02-20T16:40:29.321-08:00The Most Beautiful Thing In The World Must Be Shadow<div align="center">
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APOCALYPSE NOW (1979); Dir: Francis Ford Coppola</div>
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BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974); Dir: Bob Clark</div>
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BLACK SUNDAY / THE MASK OF SATAN (1960); Dir: Mario Bava<br />
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BLADE RUNNER (1982); Dir: Ridley Scott<br />
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BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1963); Dir: Mario Bava<br />
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BLOODBORNE (2015); Dir: Hidetaka Miyazaki<br />
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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977); Dir: Steven Spielberg<br />
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DARKMAN (1990); Dir: Sam Raimi</div>
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THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980); Dir: Irvin Kirshner<br />
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GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995); Dir: Mamoru Oshii<br />
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GREMLINS (1984); Dir: Joe Dante<br />
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HALLOWEEN (1978); Dir: John Carpenter<br />
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THE HUNGER (1983); Dir: Tony Scott<br />
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IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000); Dir: Wong Kar Wai<br />
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JOHN WICK (2014); Dir: Chad Stahelski and David Leitch<br />
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KWAIDAN (1964); Dir: Masaki Kobayashi<br />
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MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015); Dir: George Miller<br />
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THE MACHINE (2013); Dir: Caradog W. James<br />
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NEAR DARK (1987); Dir: Kathryn Bigelow<br />
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NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007); Dir: Joel and Ethan Cohen<br />
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PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987); Dir: John Carpenter<br />
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PRINCESS MONONOKE (1999); Dir: Hayao Miyazaki</div>
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PUNISHER: WAR ZONE (2008); Dir: Lexi Alexander</div>
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RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981); Dir: Stephen Spielberg<br />
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ROBOCOP (1987); Dir: Paul Verhoeven<br />
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SAMURAI SPY (1965); Dir: Masahiro Shinoda<br />
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SKYFALL (2012); Dir: Sam Mendes<br />
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SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (1952); Dir: Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen<br />
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STAGECOACH (1939); Dir: John Ford<br />
(Courtesy of <a href="http://oneperfectshotdb.com/" target="_blank">One Perfect Shot</a>)<br />
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THE TERMINATOR (1984); Dir: James Cameron<br />
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THEM! (1954); Dir: Gordon Douglas</div>
billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-66669260842932294722015-12-06T12:23:00.000-08:002015-12-14T18:03:41.363-08:00Don't Torture A Duckling (1972)<br />
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Directed by: Lucio Fulci<br />
Screenplay: Lucio Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, and Roberto Gianviti<br />
Starring: Barbara Bouchet, Tomas Milan, Florinda Bolkan, Marc Porel, Irene Papas, Georges Wilson<br />
Running Time: 102 minutes<br />
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As the old saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I had two other choices in mind for this VENGEFUL WITCH films round table and both had to be put on the back burner. SUSPIRIA was going to be my go to choice for this but that had to be put aside because I've decided to save that for a special project I'm working on for this blog. The next choice was going to be the bizarre Dutch silent "documentary" HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES but then that got hit with that bane of Netflix queues everywhere "Short Wait." Fortunately, I still had some notes left over from another project that ultimately didn't pan out, a series of posts about the films of Lucio Fulci that I planned to post this Halloween, so I had a back up handy. And unlike those other two, this one actually does feature a vengeful witch in a predominant role. "Vengeful" was more of a guideline than an actual rule, you see... From 1972, Lucio Fulci's unique entry into the Italian giallo genre, DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, or as it's known in its native country, NON SI SEVIZIA UN PAPERINO.<span style="color: #252525;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 22.4px;"><i style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold;"> </i></span></span><br />
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So, what's a giallo? I guess the first time you really start to discuss this genre on your movie review blog, you're sort of required to do a quick recap of the origins of the term. In 1929, an Italian publisher named Mondadori released a series of cheap crime / mystery pulp novels, most of which being Italian reprints of American and British crime authors such as Agatha Christie, Ed McBain, Ellery
Queen, Raymond Chandler and others. The book series was titled "Il Giallo Mondadori" due to their trademark yellow covers. ("Giallo" being the Italian word for "Yellow.") The series proved to be popular and some other publishers wanted in on some of that fat cash, so they too put out their own series of crime novels, complete with yellow covers. Cultural osmosis being what it is, "giallo" would eventually become synonymous in Italian pop culture with any type of detective / mystery thriller. Movies like Hitchcock's PSYCHO and VERTIGO would be considered "giallo" by Italian audiences, for example. However, what is popular considered a giallo wouldn't really be established until the 1960's, which is when Mario Bava released two films: THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. These two films, the latter especially, would be what would codify the basic tropes of a giallo: mysterious killers in black gloves, heavily stylized visuals, baroque titles, elaborate murder set pieces, outsider protagonists, glamorous women as the victims, etc. But while critical hits, neither of these movies apparently made much bank at the box office. The movie that would do for the giallo what A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS did for the spaghetti western wouldn't be along until 1970. That film would be THE BIRD WITH CRYSTAL PLUMMAGE, the directorial debut of Dario Argento, a former film critic and screenwriter. (Prior to this, he had co-written the screenplay for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, one of my favorite movies.) The film, which apparently drew heavily from Bava's BLACK LACE while ramping up the stylized violence, was an international success and kicked off the giallo's stint as a viable money maker. Between 1970 and 1973, Italy alone produced more than sixty five of the damn things and even the Spanish and German film industries would get in on the act. Their influence can even be seen in notable American films, such as Hitchcock's FRENZY, Brian DePalma's controversial DRESSED TO KILL, Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and the original HALLOWEEN, which John Carpenter would call "his Argento movie," making them a connective tissue of sorts between Hitchcock-ian thrillers and slasher films.<br />
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I must admit, that while I'm a familiar enough with them to recognize a giallo film or the elements in other movies that were influenced by them, the whole giallo genre is one of my big blind spots as far as my movie watching goes. I think I've seen more movies that take their cues from them, like some of the ones mentioned above, than I have the real deal, completely unfiltered pure uncut giallo experience. From memory I can only name DEEP RED and PHENOMENA, both by Argento, and seeing part of Bava's BAY OF BLOOD / TWITCH OF THE DEATH NERVE a while back. SUSPIRIA is one of my favorite horror films and it definitely has a lot of giallo in it's DNA, for obvious reasons, but ultimately it's more of a supernatural horror film / dark fairy tale. Well, I've been off and on something of an Italian horror kick since the middle of October as of late, so I've decided to correct this. DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING was the movie that started me on this, in fact.<br />
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I've seen DUCKLING described as Fulci's fun house mirror version of Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and, y'know what? That's actually not as absurd as it might seem at first glance. At their heart, both stories are of the manner in which a town's suspicions and prejudices escalate due to a horrible crime and how the fallout of that leads to the death of an innocent scapegoat. (Movie Morlocks has a good little write-up about how the influence of the 1962 film adaptation of MOCKINGBIRD can be traced through the entire horror genre. <a href="http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/11/16/fear-itself-to-kill-a-mockingbirds-nightmare-legacy/">Read it here.</a>) Even the title is somewhat evocative of it. The setting is Southern Italy rather than Alabama, here the rural village of Accendura standing in for Maycomb and in many ways, Accendura itself seems to be more of the main character of the story than any of the people in the film. When a twelve year old boy goes missing and is later found dead, Accendura finds itself the center of attention from both law enforcement and the national media. This is just first of several murders that will take place in this seemingly quiet town and as more and more young boys turn up dead, the town turns its suspicion and rage towards its various pariahs, culminating in one, a disturbed woman who practices witchcraft (Florida Bolkan), getting savagely beaten to death. When another of the town's outliers (Barbara Bouchet), a drug addict who was in a habit of making sexually provocative advances towards the victims, finds herself as the new prime suspect, she's forced to work with a reporter (Tomas Milan) to uncover who the real killer is.<br />
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DUCKLING is nestled in an interesting spot in Fulci's overall career. Like a lot of Italian directors, Fulci was a jack-of-all-trades, getting his start directing screwball comedies and westerns (one of which featured a pre-DJANGO Franco Nero) before tackling crime thrillers, horror films, and even dipping his toes into CONAN THE BARBARIAN knock-offs with his truly "What the hell?" CONQUEST. It was his horror work that made him an international success, marking him as one of the "big three" of Italian horror with Bava and Argento. The flashpoint, in this case, being ZOMBIE, his notoriously gruesome and grotty gutmuncher that was marketed in Italy as a sequel to George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It's ZOMBIE or perhaps his unofficial "trilogy of death;" CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD / THE BEYOND / HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY that horror fans know him for best over here and made "A Lucio Fulci movie" practically into a genre unto itself. However, before ZOMBIE, he made a trio of giallo movies that, like I said, are interesting to look at in the context of his entire career because they seem to represent something of a transition for Fulci from his earlier to later movies. 1969's PERVERSION STORY seems almost like an ancestor to 90's erotic thrillers ala BASIC INSTINCT, while LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN seems to be Fulci's first attempt at the hazy, hallucinatory narratives that would define his later work. DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING would be the third film of the bunch, and it's probably the most interesting, not only for how much it diverges from what we've come to expect from Fulci's films but from gialli as well.<br />
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First off, there's how it differentiates itself from other films by Fulci. When you think of a Lucio Fulci horror film, odds are you'll be thinking in terms of something like the aforementioned ZOMBIE or the GATES OF HELL trilogy. These are movies that run on a sort of feverish dream logic. Stuff just happens in them, basically, as if Fulci and his screenwriters had ideas for scenes and then whipped a vague idea to connect all of them. (Like say "You really shouldn't build your hotel over a Hellmouth.") Thing is, when Fulci's has a handle on things, this ends up working in the film's favor, such as in THE BEYOND, where the incomprehensible narrative actually helps instill the sense that reality is becoming more and more unhinged. His movies are also known for their extreme gore, even by the standards of the Italian horror film, with his trademark being something truly egregious happening to a character's eyes. (Poor Paola Menard.) Hell, ZOMBIE's level of grue was so infamous it had barf bags made and distributed as a promotion. His previous giallo, LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN, had a scene which featured eviscerated dog props that were so realistic looking Fulci and special effects artist Carlo Rimbaldi had to prove in court that they were fake! Here, content serves story and the
tangents the film ends up going on, like whole subplot with the
witch Maciara, actually work as a part of the whole.
As for extreme violence, there’s really only two scenes. One is the
attack on the witch Maciara by the townspeople, a vicious whipping
with chains that presages a similar scene that opens up Fulci’s THE
BEYOND. The other is the death of our killer, who smashes their face
on rocks repeatedly as they fall from a cliff. It has to be said,
this would already be a fairly ridiculous sequence but that it
features a dummy that couldn’t be more unconvincing if you tried
doesn’t help. Sparks shoot out of the thing’s face at one point!
The rest of the time, we only come across the aftermath of the
violence, the discovery of the boy’s bodies. The only other killing
depicted on screen is a brief strangling. Obviously, there’s a very
simple explanation for this. I imagine that even with it’s lighter
restrictions on violence and sexuality, the Italian film industry
still considered depicting graphic murder of children something of a
no-no, so much of DUCKLING’s running time, Fulci had to find other
ways to get his shocks across. This would be achieved either through
imagery such as the film’s opening scene where we witness Maciara
digging bare-handed in the dirt, unearthing the bones of a small
child, or in edits like the one where we cut from one of the boys
still alive immediately to the discovery of his battered body face
down in a stream. Not yelling “influence” here but I’d like to
note that depicting the results of the violence, rather than the
violence itself, would also be put to good use in David Fincher’s
gialli influenced SEVEN.<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It’s effective and the fact that
DUCKLING doesn’t rely on over-the-top murder sequences to knock you
on your ass gives it a feel that’s fairly distinctive from other
movies of its kind. The violence itself isn’t the only way in which
DUCKLING goes out of its way to differentiate itself from other
giallo. Many popular giallo elements rear their head here; the
“outsider” protagonists, the mystery that’s “solved” more
by not letting yourself get tripped up by red herrings than any
actual piecing together of clues, and yes, the one murder we do see
is carried out by an unseen figure wearing black gloves. But in many
other ways, DUCKLING likes to screw with your expectations. Getting
back to what I was talking about earlier, whereas most giallos would
rack up a body count primarily of attractive women, much like slasher
films, DUCKLING goes the more taboo route of makings its victims male
children. In fact, the women are among the film’s more sympathetic
characters, the movie even allowing Patrizia, a promiscuous drug
addict, to become one of the heroes. Then there’s
common technique of keeping your killer hidden, by only showing their
hands as they prepare or stalk their victims. This is used here but
that’s to help set up Maciara as a red herring!
</div>
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How about how this movie looks? There
is certainly some memorable imagery, such as the skeletal grim reaper
figure that looms over the boys while at prayer, and some
disorienting camera angles are used, but you won’t see much in the
way of garishly colored, baroque visuals and sets. This wouldn’t
fit with the story Fulci’s trying to tell. Instead, DUCKLING opts
for a more naturalistic, earthy look and many of the locations used
in the film wouldn’t look too out of place in a spaghetti western,
in fact. That film’s other eventual hero is played Tomas Milan,
star of THE BIG GUNDOWN, Sergio Corbucci’s COMPANEROS, and one of
the myriad DJANGO sequels, adds to this. (Also, good lord, that’s
mustache he’s sporting.) Patrizia’s modern home is the only set
piece in the movie that resembles anything you’d expect to see in
an Argento movie and that’s <i>supposed</i> to stick out like a
sore thumb, the home’s inconsistency with the surroundings, not to
mention her modern brightly colored outfits serving as marks of her
outsider status.
</div>
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It’s actually a bit frustrating that
information about Fulci’s childhood and early life is so hard to
come by. All I was able to dig up was that the man had a Catholic
upbringing, which isn’t surprising – a Catholic Italian? Come on!
– because Catholicism and more importantly, Catholic guilt hangs
over everything in the movie. Fulci got into a bit of hot water, in
fact, with the Church with this movie because it felt that it
presented a negative image of the organization. The reason I became
interested in learning about Fulci’s early life because Fulci cited
DUCKLING as his favorite out of all of his films and called it his
most personal movie. There’s something incredibly autobiographical
about this film and the way it depicts life in small town Italy.
Unlike his much of his later work, you get the sense that Fulci is
trying to really say something here about this. And well, whatever
he’s trying to say, it’s not too good. In DUCKLING, small town
life isn’t presented as some sort of wholesome counterpart to the
decadence of the city, but rather a place that has its own form of
corruption simmering under the surface. The modern world is
encroaching on Accendura, represented by a newly built highway on the
town’s outskirts, and the people there aren’t happy with it.
Repression is the name of the game here, with the town showing
suspicion and prejudice against anything that doesn’t fit their
ideals. At one point, a Catholic priest tells a reporter that the
church has final word on what magazines and other publications can be
distributed in Accendura. This repressive attitude is taken to its
most cynical extreme when we finally uncover the identity of the
killer, who was murdering the children because they had began to show
interest in things like smoking and sex and didn’t wish for them to
fall into sin. Of course, no one in the movie (or in real life,
either) grasps that it’s this repressive attitude that’s driving
them to behave like this. When you emphatically tell a kid to not do
something, well, that’s going to make them what to do it even more
but without any real understanding of what they’re dealing with.
Take the movie’s most infamous scene, where Patrizia teases one of
the boys after he stumbles across her sunbathing in the nude. That
kid, who was all bravado earlier, becomes scared, timid and is in
completely over his head. Man, way to make “nude Barbara Bouchet”
disturbing, Fulci.
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It’s this whole repression angle that
ties into my observation that real main character of DON’T TORTURE
A DUCKLING is Accendura. The idea that the environment they’ve
created made the murders possible and that a moral authority may be
the one responsible for it never crosses the villagers’ minds.
Instead they turn against the freaks, the weirdos, the Others,
because in their minds they’re a convenient, guilt free target.
They don’t fit with whatever moral standard we’ve imposed on
ourselves so obviously only they could be capable of doing this
horrible thing. Whenever a scapegoat is offered up, the townspeople
immediately form a faceless mob and start baying for blood. (A theme
Fulci would briefly touch on again with CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD)
Which leads to the entire subplot with Maciara, who, to get back to
the TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD parallels, is our Tom Robinson figure.
Maciara confesses to the murders but when her confession entails
putting a “curse” on the initial victims in revenge for their
defiling the grave of her stillborn child, the police realize that
these are simply the ravings of a disturbed woman and let her go.
What follows is without a doubt the stand out stretch of the film and
one of the best scenes Fulci ever staged. Walking through Accendura’s
sun-baked streets, Maciara is spat upon by old women and then later
followed and corralled into a local cemetery by some of the men,
where she’s beaten bloody all while pleasant music from a local
radio plays over the scene. Shades of Tuco’s torture scene from THE
GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, perhaps? Maciara doesn’t die there,
managing to drag herself to the local highway before expiring,
passersby ignoring her or deciding that they don’t want to get
involved. When the police arrive on the scene, the officer in charge
pieces together fairly fast what happened and just by glancing at the
gathered crowd, knows that the entire town had a part to play in the
murder of an innocent women. You can’t arrest an entire town,
though, and police can’t do anything but leave the one’s
responsible to live with what they’ve done.
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This, I think, represents another
transition in Fulci’s horror films. While I haven’t seen them,
discussions of PERVERSION STORY and LIZARD IN A WOMAN’S SKIN made
them out to be very moralistic films, stories about how these people
have done wrong and they’re getting their just desserts. This isn’t
quite the case with DUCKLING. Yes, the killer is eventually unmasked
and dies but look at the damage left in their wake: families
destroyed, an innocent woman dead, and people with her blood on their
hands. ZOMBIE, THE BEYOND, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, etc. all seem to
be set in an uncaring universe, where, to quote UNFORGIVEN “deserve’s
got nothing to do with it.” We see the beginnings of that here,
where it doesn’t matter if what age you are, what walk of life
you’re from, how moral you are, if circumstances deem that you are
screwed, then buddy there’s nothing you can about it. <br />
<br />
Or to
put it another way, “Forget it, Jake…it’s Accendura.”</div>
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<i>This review was a part of <strong>DIRTY HEX APPEAL: A Vengeful Witch Round Table</strong>, presented by the CELLULOID ZEROES blogger group. First up is WEB OF THE BIG DAMN SPIDER and their take on <a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/the-celluloid-zeroes-vengeful-witch-roundtable-ator-the-fighting-eagle-1982/">ATOR, THE FIGHTING EAGLE</a>, then hop over to MICRO-BREWED REVIEWS for <a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/search/label/Midnight%20Offerings">MIDNIGHT OFFERINGS</a>. Still not enough? Then swing by CINEMASOCHIST APOCALYPSE, who's cooking up some <a href="http://cinemasochistapocalypse.blogspot.com/2015/12/black-magic-1975.html?spref=fb">BLACK MAGIC</a> or stop off at THE TERRIBLE CLAW REVIEWS for <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2015/12/the-haunted-palace-1963-hex-appeal.html">THE HAUNTED PALACE!</a></i><br />
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u><br />
"Burn The Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age. Getting into the music of Brody Dalle also lead me to check out Josh Homme, her husband's music, which includes Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal and this band right here. A mix of classic and stoner rock, Queens have joined Monster Magnet and White Zombie on that list of bands where the volume just can't go high enough...<br />
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</iframe><br />billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-60806306459359657272015-11-17T00:00:00.000-08:002015-11-20T09:16:36.612-08:00Cronos (1993)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Directed by: Guillermo Del Toro<br />
Screenplay: Guillermo Del Toro<br />
Starring: Fedirico Luppi, Claudio Brook, Ron Perlman, Tamara Shanath<br />
Running Time: 94 minutes<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Guillermo Del Toro was bound to turn up here at some point. It was inevitable. The big Mexican is unquestionably my favorite director to
come along in the past decade and a half and one of the few whose
movies I make every effort to see in theaters when I can. I first
crossed paths with him when I rented MIMIC from Springhill’s local
mom and pop in a stint between semesters at Louisiana Tech – not a
movie that floored me, but enough of it has stuck with that I think
it’s overdue for a re-watch – but the real gateway drug was BLADE
II, his bloody, crazed sequel to Marvel and New Line’s surprise
hit. Its mix of Hong Kong action and ALIENS channeled through gothic
horror was right up my alley but it was the intelligence, humor and
enthusiasm that Del Toro showed on the DVD’s special features that
completely won me over. </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span>I wouldn’t call Del Toro and myself kindred spirits but there’s enough in his obsessions and sensibilities that parallels what I enjoy in movies and art in general that I can jokingly describe him as a director who makes Movies Just For Me.<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> His films are celebration of the strange and fantastic, undercut with a sense of melancholy and genuine empathy for the imperfect, the broken and the monstrous, whether they're heroes or villains. In Del Toro's world, monsters are more often than not tragic victims, something that runs throughout his entire body of work and can be seen as recently as his lavish gothic horror CRIMSON PEAK.</span></span> As I stated when discussing Paul Verhoeven, in an industry that relies too much on "safe bet" entertainment, there's something quite wonderful about sitting in the theater and experiencing a film by a director that clearly doesn't care one bit for whatever the mainstream dictates. So, you can imagine how happy I was when I got hooked into participating in the Criterion Blogathon and while perusing the selections saw that not one but two of his films were available: His Spanish Civil War set ghost story THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE and my choice, CRONOS, his wholly unique twist on vampire mythology. I went with CRONOS because I feel that it may be in danger of getting lost in the shadow of Del Toro's later, more visible output. CRONOS isn't a perfect film, too obviously the work of a young, inexperienced artist who was still working on how to best express himself, but much of what would become Del Toro's trademarks are very much in evidence here and that definitely makes this movie worth your time.<br />
<br />
<div style="orphans: 1;">
CRONOS's story is a simple one by design: <span style="orphans: 1;">In
the year 1537, an alchemist completes his work on the titular Cronos
device, a gnarly crossbreed of mechanical scarab and Faberge Egg
which our narration informs us will grant everlasting life to anyone
who uses it. The device was obviously a success because when we jump
ahead almost four hundred years later, we find the alchemist is still
alive…but not for long, as he has been grievously injured by debris
in a collapsing building. His invention was never recovered, hidden
away in the base of a wooden archangel statue. That statue eventually
finds its way into the possession of Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), an
elderly antique dealer who lives in Mexico with his wife and orphaned
granddaughter (Tamara Shanath), who discovers the device while
cleaning up a roach infestation. (An amusing touch, I thought.
Resilient insects and all that.) While examining it, Jesus ends up
activating the device, which sprouts several needle-like appendages
that drive themselves into his flesh. The serious damage does to his
hand will be just the beginning of Jesus’s problems. Come night
time, his injuries won’t stop itching; he’s burning up with a
fever and can’t seem to slake a powerful, sudden thirst. Most
disturbingly, he can’t seem to take his eyes off of that piece of
bloody meat in the refrigerator. Desperation for any kind of relief
will drive him to use the device again and its here that we learn
that the Cronos device houses an undying insect that lives off of the
blood of its victim. In return, this creature injects them with a
strange fluid of its own that restores their youth and vitality,
ensuring that the creature has a healthy and grateful host to feed on
for the foreseeable future. At first, Jesus enjoys his rediscovered
passion and vigor but as he uses the device more and more, he's
unsettled by the developing side effects; an aversion to sunlight, a
weird substance oozing out of the wounds the machine inflicts on him,
and those pesky cravings for blood. Those really don’t want to go
away. </span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="orphans: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="orphans: 1;">Further danger comes from industrialist Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook) and his thuggish nephew Angel (Ron Perlman). The Cronos device is de la Guardia's obsession, a possible escape from the grotesque half-life a terminal sickness has reduced him to. He can't leave the clean room that rests at the heart of his factory, can't consume anything but pills for nourishment and many of his internal organs have had to be removed. (He keeps those in a display case like some sort of Cronenbergian trophy set.) Dieter will do anything to get his hands on the device and while Angel doesn't understand his uncle's madness -- "All that man does is piss and shit and he wants to live longer?" -- he's willing to play along if it means he can get his hands on Dieter's business empire. The fight over the Cronos piece comes to a head at a New Year's Eve party, where Angel kidnaps Jesus and savagely beats him before shoving him over a cliff in a car. That would be the end of Jesus's story right there...except for the little detail that thanks to his repeated use of the Cronos device, Jesus <i>can't</i> die...</span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="orphans: 1;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
Del Toro describes himself as a filmmaker who nearly kills himself making the kinds of movies that others would dash off for a quick buck. CRONOS's creation was exactly that sort of uphill struggle for the director, who wrote the screenplay at twenty one but wouldn't film it for another seven years. To gain the necessary experience to direct feature films, Del Toro served as a regular director on HORA MARCADA, Mexico's equivalent to THE TWILIGHT ZONE. He had to found his own make-up and practical effects house specifically for the production of CRONOS due to the lack of any sort of special effects company in his home of Guadalajara. (Once the film was completed, the company was shut down.) Despite the film's budget being the highest for any Mexican film production -- Two million dollars -- money issues plagued the production. Del Toro had to resort to mortgaging his house and selling his van in order to make up for the lack of funds and barely had enough money to fly his wife and himself to the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The struggling production and Del Toro's growing pains as a director transitioning from television to film is readily apparent in the final result. Del Toro's movies are noted for their elaborate spectacle, camera work and sets, with the man himself regularly regarded as one of the industry's best visual designers but we catch only glimpses of it here. At times, CRONOS feels more like an elaborate television production than anything. The
characters as they stand are more prototypes for what would come
later than they are their own, though the cast is capable enough to
do the heavy lifting. (It's no surprise that Perlman and Luppi would make regular appearances in Del Toro's movies.) The attempts at humor, including a comical interlude with a mortician and
Ron Perlman’s nose job obsession, are genuinely amusing but seem so at
odds with the sense of melancholy and loss elsewhere that they almost
feel like intrusions from another film. There's strong imagery and
moments of greatness here -- an undead Jesus's return home to his
granddaughter after his funeral is a standout sequence -- but they
come in between scenes where its obvious that Del Toro is still
stretching his wings.</div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's
those moments of greatness, intermittent though they are, that make
CRONOS worth watching. Del Toro may have still
needed to get a handle on his filmmaking craft, but even at this point in his career his considerable talent is on display and we can see the first explorations of themes and ideas that would be refined in subsequent films. The extraordinary forcing its way into ordinary lives, discovering beauty in ugliness, the re-examination and re-purposing of classical imagery -- religious or otherwise and the aforementioned monster as a tragic victim. CRONOS is a vampire movie but it's view of the vampire is definitely not a romantic one. There's no regal aristo in suit and cape here but a poverty row junkie suffering from a near animal need for their next fix. (An idea continued with BLADE II's Reapers.) Jesus is so agonized by his newly developed craving that he'll lick up drops of blood from a bathroom floor. He becomes even more pitiful after his "death," his flesh rotting and peeling away and dressed in the tattered remains of his funeral clothing. His vampire's cloak is an old blanket he retrieves from the garbage and his coffin is his granddaughter's toy box. Even the Cronos device is revealed to be nothing more than a cage for a tick-like parasite. In an interview about the movie, Del Toro states "Life is beautiful because it has a beginning and an end." To attempt to go beyond this limit is to commit a crime against nature itself, something CRONOS illustrates not only with the fate of the alchemist and Jesus's deteriorating condition, but in the pathetic state de la Guardia's attempts to staving off his impending demise has left him in. Indeed, it's only when Jesus finally rejects the Cronos device and its costly immortality that he's allowed to regain his dignity. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">It's his love for his granddaughter Aurora that gives him the strength to destroy the device and it's this relationship that forms the heart of the film. This is another theme that crops up again and again in Del Toro's movies: familial bonds across generations. Yet another appears when you contrast Aurora and Jesus against de la Guardia and Angel; that of families that act in opposition to one another while serving as distorted mirrors of each other. Where the latter is an abusive, adversarial one, defined by what the two can get out of the other, the former is ultimately defined by selflessness and sacrifice. When Dieter is mortally injured, Angel wastes no time in finishing the old man off to that he can take over. When Jesus is similarly hurt during his confrontation with Angel, Aurora does whatever she can to save him, even offering her blood to him. No matter how monstrous Jesus becomes, Aurora's love for him never wavers. It's interesting to note that Aurora was adopted by Jesus after his son's death because we see over and over that the strongest bonds in Del Toro's films are those formed by surrogate families formed by circumstance. Blade and his mentor Whistler, for example. The orphans of THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE. Stacker and Mako In PACIFIC RIM and the "freaks" of HELLBOY I & II's B.P.R.D. </span>The connections with the most solidarity are the ones that gain the strength to overcome hardships placed before them.</div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="orphans: 1;">
Finally, beyond the thematic elements, CRONOS shows that Del Toro was already firmly aware of how to distill down his numerous influences into something that is uniquely his own. The story is stuff of classical fairy-tales, the feel is like that of Hammer horror, and the visual influence of gothic art and Italian horror is all over the place. Notice how the face of the archangel statue has crumbled to the point it resembles a skull? Or that de la Guardia's clean room is like a sterile, industrial counterpart to the witch's lair in SUSPIRIA? Not to mention Del Toro shows a knack for bodily horror that puts him in company with Barker and Cronenberg. He may not strive for their flesh ripping extremes -- though I assure you that flesh does get ripped to spectacular effect in CRONOS's finale -- but he's clearly taken notes from them in how to make you squirm in your seat. Try not to cringe when the device's scorpion like appendage hovers over Jesus's bare wrist, almost as if in anticipation, before plunging in or the delight taken in giving us an up close look at Jesus's mouth being stitched shut by a mortician. The way Jesus cuts those stitches is equally unpleasant. These are not mere references and quotations though but rather recognizable elements that make up a unique piece's DNA.<br />
<br />
Speaking of Barker, he's the creator I'd say Del Toro most resembles. Not only in their usage of violence and nightmarish transformations but in how both men love to re-purpose and subvert the religious iconography of their upbringings and that their sympathies lie steadfastly with the Outsider and the Other. You wouldn't be crazy for seeing a lot of NIGHTBREED in Guillermo's comic book adaptations and CRONOS is definitely Del Toro's HELLRAISER, his story of an ancient artifact that transforms a man into a vampiric monster. If you ask me, I think the Cronos device would look marvelous on a shelf next to the Lament Configuration.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
One can imagine the relief when CRONOS became one of the big prize winners at Cannes, later sweeping the Golden Ariel Awards, Mexico's answer to the Oscars, and receiving considerable praise from notable critics, including Roger Ebert. It was an entire lifetime's worth of hard work paying off, opening doors and securing the career he wanted so badly. If he was to make CRONOS today, Guillermo muses, it would be a different movie because the director is so different now. Would it be a better movie? Maybe not. Flawed though it is, CRONOS was a necessary step in his development as a filmmaker. It's exactly the movie that he needed to be make when he did.</div>
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<i>This review was part of the Criterion Blogathon, a six-day event celebrating film sponsored by Criterion Films. Click <a href="http://criterionblues.com/blogathon/">here</a> to go to the Blogathon's main page and check out the other entries by participating blogs. Some friends of PSYCHOPLASMICS are also participating in the event and direct links to their reviews will be added as they go up.</i></div>
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<em>Three Beer Theater: Micro-Brewed Reviews: <a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-criterion-blogathon-taking-form.html">The Fiend Without A Face</a></em></div>
<i>Yes, I Know: <a href="http://drfreex.com/2015/11/18/the-seven-samurai-1954/">Seven Samurai</a></i><br />
<em>The Terrible Claw Reviews: <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2015/11/godzilla-1954-godzilla-king-of-monsters.html">Godzilla / Godzilla: King of Monsters!</a></em><br />
<em>Checkpoint Telstar: <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2015/11/robocop-1987.html">Robocop</a></em><br />
<em></em><br />
<i><br /></i>
<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=psychoplasmic-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B0043VUHUU&asins=B0043VUHUU&linkId=W2OTHDG2XFRSB4SQ&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;"></iframe>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-80679587300885144502015-10-31T11:25:00.004-07:002015-10-31T11:25:58.723-07:00Eyes Without A Face / Le Yeux Sans Visage (1960)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGHENqGLmJJ_C0BaAIfyGe8USWgQ_syuFwFCFw1I7NnIGeKtRQnhMnouH62NGR00S5VEdWCev9eUTtmDWuvSHfY0yFDLB3H8Yi2YvCVocZ7z7oQhKYeAG5vJbtH-koU1sjJ2QOZtqWSkN/s1600/tumblr_nvj2clBnBs1qea57bo1_540.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlGHENqGLmJJ_C0BaAIfyGe8USWgQ_syuFwFCFw1I7NnIGeKtRQnhMnouH62NGR00S5VEdWCev9eUTtmDWuvSHfY0yFDLB3H8Yi2YvCVocZ7z7oQhKYeAG5vJbtH-koU1sjJ2QOZtqWSkN/s400/tumblr_nvj2clBnBs1qea57bo1_540.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Directed by: Georges Franju<br />
Screenplay: Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, and Pierre Gascar; based on the novel by Jean Redon<br />
Starring: Edith Scob, Pierre Brassuer, Alida Valli, Francois Guerin, Juliette Mayniel<br />
Running Time: 90 minutes<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnTDfQk7SDSm84hwrZ4amVEL_CtLyRJIVF4HzNZCYyMjJoEzy5b1MAu6Tfgt0phsYKEY5ZjEYMfKBRdkg7oNd0c4aywm8x3yIwzEO0sV5zZI_2vm1nGiO1uQRZjC561Bdm8UQBFy8rC1kW/s1600/tumblr_nqcskfAdGS1r4ofpvo1_1280.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnTDfQk7SDSm84hwrZ4amVEL_CtLyRJIVF4HzNZCYyMjJoEzy5b1MAu6Tfgt0phsYKEY5ZjEYMfKBRdkg7oNd0c4aywm8x3yIwzEO0sV5zZI_2vm1nGiO1uQRZjC561Bdm8UQBFy8rC1kW/s320/tumblr_nqcskfAdGS1r4ofpvo1_1280.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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In the 1950’s, the French weren’t known for producing horror
films. French cinema, after all, was the home of the New Wave, Goddard, and
Truffaut, they didn’t have time for such “artless” movies. But it just so
happened that during this decade, a studio in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> was finding world-wide success
by cranking out that very sort of film that the French had stigmatized. That
would be Hammer Studios, and needless to say, when the French film industry saw
the way Hammer was raking in cash hand over fist with the likes of THE HORROR
OF DRACULA and THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, they started to have a change of
opinion on that so-called “disreputable genre.” “Money talks,” to quote AC/DC.
The first producer to jump at this was Jules Borkon, who had purchased the film
rights to a novel by Jean Redon titled LES YEUX SANS VISAGE / EYES WITHOUT A
FACE and enlisted one of the founders of the famous French film club
Cinematheque Francaise, Georges Franju, to direct it. Franju was a documentary
filmmaker who had made a name for himself for such reactionary works as THE
BLOOD OF BEASTS, PASSING BY THE LORRIANE, and HOTEL DES INVALIDES (which he
fondly refers to as his “slaughter trilogy”) and had moved on to making fiction
films with LE TETE CONTRE LES MURES / HEAD AGAINST THE WALL, a film set in a
mental hospital which was released as THE KEEPERS on our side of the Atlantic. Thing
about Franju is that unlike the other notable filmmakers that were members of Cinematheque,
who were former film critics who decided to take that old comment section
refrain of “Well if you didn’t like it, make one of your own!” to heart, Franju
was simply a cinema buff through and through and jumped at it when Borkon
offered him a chance to make his own addition to cinema of the “fantastique.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There were to be some restrictions, Borkon told Franju.
While Borkon wanted a horror film that could compete with the blood-spattered
gothics Hammer was putting out, the film couldn’t show any real bloodshed. That
was would be a big no-no with the French film censors. He couldn’t depict
animals being tortured. That wouldn’t fly with the English and Americans.
Furthermore, the film could not feature a mad scientist performing horrible
experiments on innocent people. The Germans…for obvious reasons. With those set
in place, Borkon handed Franju the story of a mad scientist who experiments on
animals and kidnaps beautiful women so he can cut their faces off and told him
to make a movie out of it.</span> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<o:p> </o:p></span></span><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHgq-pyzGy1t7DI1yaYYqomS13kBDEO7x4Kc8nIVVkpasLkaH10xArfip9ZCXiwSsCliPfJfSIFINGY925Al2RXT3tLps7mmhb7WhkmCb9h_g9k6ueIxPcFSyq6REz-QBKcokGBxxt9Mtx/s1600/tumblr_nwm1gh5pat1uv8uc2o9_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHgq-pyzGy1t7DI1yaYYqomS13kBDEO7x4Kc8nIVVkpasLkaH10xArfip9ZCXiwSsCliPfJfSIFINGY925Al2RXT3tLps7mmhb7WhkmCb9h_g9k6ueIxPcFSyq6REz-QBKcokGBxxt9Mtx/s320/tumblr_nwm1gh5pat1uv8uc2o9_1280.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The film starts with a completely wordless opening
that does a marvelous job of setting the tone. It’s night time in Paris and a
nervous woman (Alida Valli, the intimidating dance instructor from SUSPIRIA) is
driving an old Citroen taxi up to the Seine River, where she dumps a woman’s corpse
that she’s had disguised as a passenger in the back seat. The corpse was so
completely covered by a trench coat and hat that we can’t get much of a look at
her but if we look close enough, we can get a tiny glimpse of her face and
whatever has happened to them couldn’t have been pleasant. The next day,
respected surgeon Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brassuer) is called away from a
speaking engagement by the Parisian police. They’ve found that body that the
woman disposed of and there’s very good chance that it could be Genessier’s
daughter Christiane, who disappeared following a car accident that ended up
horribly disfiguring her. Thing is, the body could also be that of another
missing woman, the damage done to her face an attempt to hide her identity.
Both Genessier and the missing woman’s father are called in to identify the
body, but Genessier gets there first and confirms that yes, it’s
Christiane, before leaving to make funeral arrangements. Some of the details
don’t completely add up but Genessier’s identification is enough for the police
to conclude that Christiane committed suicide and consider the case closed.
It’s at Christiane’s funeral, however, that we get the idea that there’s more
going on here, because attending with Dr. Genessier is his assistant Louise,
who is the nervous woman from the opening. When we look at the way the two of
them act when they are alone after the funeral is over, it’s becomes clear to
us that that whatever Louise is doing, she’s doing so on Genessier’s orders. It’s
when Genessier returns to his home, a mansion located near the clinic where he
works, that our suspicions are confirmed: the body in his daughter’s crypt is
that of the missing woman and Christiane (Edith Scob) is very much alive. Seems
Genessier is responsible for the death of the other woman, who died while he
was performing “an experiment” on her. However, the woman’s death ends up
working to Genessier’s advantage. By making everyone believe that Christiane is
dead, Genessier doesn’t have to worry about anyone, such as her fiancé Jacques
(Francois Guerin), stumble across his work in the process of searching for her.
<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s work of particularly grisly sort. Genessier is
convinced that a new skin grafting technique that he has developed could
restore Christiane’s ruined face, which he has her hide behind a featureless
white mask. Problem is, this technique requires a donor that’s close in age and
physical appearance to Christiane and needless to say, most young women aren’t
going to give up their skin willingly. That’s where Louise comes in, stalking women
that fit the necessary body type and luring them to Genessier’s mansion where
he can drug them and surgically remove their faces. Louise is horrified by this
but goes along with it because she’s grateful to the doctor for restoring her
own disfigured face (the sole remnant of which is a tiny scar she keeps hidden
with a pearl choker) and because she’s become something of a surrogate mother
to Christiane during her time with Genessier. A second woman falls into the
pair’s trap and it seems that this time, the facial transplant takes. The
second victim obviously doesn’t appreciate receiving the Castor Troy treatment
and ends up either committing suicide or falling to her death in an escape
attempt, so now Louise and Genessier have another body to dispose of. More
troublingly, though, is during dinner a few days later that Genessier begins to
notice something has gone wrong with the skin graft. Within a couple of weeks,
Christiane’s body rejects it and her father is forced to remove it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKZ7W7nSww2qL4bigf2zitU3zWk-bR-_xyZUQHHWe7YwcAb1riJbhI_ISgl8HpXaHhZOm45Oyul2kVZuO9uhCzugFcgFz3skkPDhDjM2pnGB6qrT9LzQV_B_RY_hhSkhLPka6CToB7sfsM/s1600/tumblr_nuncerN1sN1ud3wago1_1280.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKZ7W7nSww2qL4bigf2zitU3zWk-bR-_xyZUQHHWe7YwcAb1riJbhI_ISgl8HpXaHhZOm45Oyul2kVZuO9uhCzugFcgFz3skkPDhDjM2pnGB6qrT9LzQV_B_RY_hhSkhLPka6CToB7sfsM/s320/tumblr_nuncerN1sN1ud3wago1_1280.png" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This leaves Christiane on the edge of a suicidal despair and
in her desperation, she calls Jacques. Jacques, obviously, is more than a
little weirded out by hearing his supposedly dead fiancé calling his name over
the phone and goes to the police. While talking with them, Jacque’s catches the
description of the woman last seen with missing woman and damned if it doesn’t
sound a lot like Louise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Realizing that
this may be the break they need, the police blackmail a shoplifter into acting
as bait for Genessier, hoping to catch him in the act. Unfortunately for our
poor shoplifter, Genessier is able to cover his tracks well enough to send the
police looking elsewhere, and she ends up on the good doctor’s operating table.
Now her survival will depend on whether or not Christiane can stand being
complicit in whatever crimes her father commits in her name any longer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Like I said earlier, Franju was put under several
restrictions when he was given EYES WITHOUT A FACE, but it’s the sign of damn
good filmmaker when they use the limits placed on them to discover the
considerable spaces they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> work in.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To deal with the whole “mad scientist”
angle, Franju and his screenwriters (which included the writing duo behind
DIABOLIQUE and Hitchcock’s VERTIGO) made a notable change from the novel:
moving the story’s focus away from Genessier and put more emphasis on
Christiane. Doing so ends up having the effect of helping us understand more
why Genessier is willing to do such horrible things. See, the key detail here
is that it was Genessier who was driving (“like a lunatic”) when the accident
that disfigured Christiane occurred and the distraught young woman blames him
for it. It’s the anguish brought about by his love and guilt that drives him to
such extremes and had Christiane not stopped him would have likely lead him to
continue butchering woman in his pursuit, unable to admit that his technique
may not work and there could simply be no hope for her. What we have then, is a
mad scientist movie where the mad scientist isn’t mad, but haunted. (It’s no
accident, that Christiane, dressed all in white and wearing that unnervingly
serene looking mask, is every bit the ghost you’d find roaming the halls of
some decaying old gothic estate.) I think it’s telling that when EYES WITHOUT A
FACE was released in the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">United
States</st1:country-region></st1:place> under the thoroughly blunt-instrument
title of THE HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUTUS (Really guys? Dr. Fautus?) the only scene
removed had nothing to do with any of the film’s violence but a moment in where
we see Genessier comforting one of his patients, a little boy, and his
distraught mother. Apparently we’re fine with showing people being monsters but
God forbid we have to deal with the uncomfortable truth that monsters can have
a human side as well. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<o:p> </o:p></span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgetHYJ7qMeECImqzC8O33SVSBtO4LGDai24eTrhk4MGFr0lD3DR5Sa2V7HvKa3nk6EVfiuBUT9phM9xBnDwXz8WFS8qJDrCB_OBpRzqRkIbM6WSsiIcfG-2EAqX-BVu95GGJi_M1NZgKYL/s1600/tumblr_nwgefpK55J1r04xpko1_540.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgetHYJ7qMeECImqzC8O33SVSBtO4LGDai24eTrhk4MGFr0lD3DR5Sa2V7HvKa3nk6EVfiuBUT9phM9xBnDwXz8WFS8qJDrCB_OBpRzqRkIbM6WSsiIcfG-2EAqX-BVu95GGJi_M1NZgKYL/s320/tumblr_nwgefpK55J1r04xpko1_540.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With that one major change from the source, one of the
hurdles Franju had to deal with was overcome and the animal experimentation
aspect of the story wasn’t that difficult to work around either. We see that
Genessier has numerous stray dogs, some covered in bandages, locked up in part of
his hidden lab and we see one after he’s experimented on them. It’s nothing too
messy and tells us all we need to know, so nothing to get upset over. Which
leaves us with how the bloodshed was going to be handled. Make no mistake, EYES
WITHOUT A FACE is a violent movie. This is after all, a movie about a guy
cutting women’s faces off. But there’s a reason why decades later, after
advances in special effects technology and relaxing of restrictions on violent
content would have dulled the edge of other movies, it’s still so incredibly
effective and squirm inducing. A lot of that, I think, comes from the fact that
EYES WITHOUT A FACE is just so low-key and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">quiet</i>
of a movie. Its tone is somber and melancholy (in that way that only the French
can do) and the film goes long stretches without dialogue. Couple that with the
fact that we’ve probably conditioned ourselves to not expect to see somebody
get a scalpel in the throat or their face chewed off by dogs in a black and
white movie from the time, and so when the shocks come, they’re genuinely
shocking, like a slap to the face. Furthermore, as noted earlier, Franju made
documentaries before he moved on to film; his first, THE BLOOD OF BEASTS, being
about the inner workings of Parisian slaughterhouse. In an interview excerpt
that came on the Criterion disc, Franju also discusses how the single most
horrific film he ever watched was footage of a trepanation being performed on a
conscious patient with a brain tumor. You can definitely see how both informed
his approach here, as the whole film is shot with the kind of clinical
detachment you’d find in a medical documentary. This level of remove, I feel, was a major factor in getting the film past the censors, however, in terms of how it affects the views, it has
the opposite effect of what you’d think. It forces us to face (no pun intended)
the violence being done rather than disengaging from it. I’m not surprised that
people at screenings were actually fainting when EYES infamous face surgery
scene came along. It’s excruciating to watch, poking and prodding at every
subconscious nightmare that we’ve had about going under the knife and we’re
with it every single step. The scene is probably even worse, if, like me,
you’ve had family members hurt by a botched surgery. Really, this where a lot
of the horror in EYES stems from. Vitally important as it is, Franju is forcing
to face that there can be something dehumanizing and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wrong</i> feeling about medical science. (Part of the reason hospitals
creep me out.) Take a look at that contraption the shoplifter gets hooked up to
test her brain patterns. Or most effectively, how about the scene that details
the deterioration of Christiane’s condition when the graft fails via a
photographic montage. The calm manner in which Dr. Genessier throws out such
gruesome sounding terms as “heterograft,” “ulceration,” and “necrosis” as we
see Christiane’s face get worse and worse would be bad enough without the added
touch of this being a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">father talking
about his daughter’s face rotting off.</i> Brrr… You’d likely have to turn to
David Cronenberg to find anything that does as good a job of tapping this vein
of medicinal horror.<br /><br />EYES WITHOUT A FACE was met with considerable controversy on release; critics who didn't condemn it outright either having to jump through hoops to justify their appreciation, one English critic nearly getting fired for praising the film and another famously arguing that a respectable French filmmaker couldn't have made something disreputable as a horror film and EYES WITHOUT A FACE was actually a film noir. Anyone else getting flashbacks to SILENCE OF THE LAMBS'S magical transformation into a "psychological thriller" once it was nominated for Oscars? But, as with a number of films that stir up the hornets nest because they force people outside their comfort zone, it has endured and influenced a number of filmmakers sense. I've never heard Cronenberg talk about this film but it stands to reason that he'd be a fan, right? You can chalk it up to this film and that shot with Christiane and the doves as the reason why there's a scene involving birds in the every damn John Woo movie. Can't blame him, it's a fantastic image. John Carpenter was so taken with Edith Scob's eerie, spectral performance that it influenced the creation of his own faceless wraith, Michael Myers. (One a remnant of humanity, the other completely void of it.) Maybe, it's because I saw it in the same weekend as CRIMSON PEAK that I could trace the influence of this film's use of sudden intrusions of violence to Guillermo Del Toro's. Hell, it was Del Toro's recommending the film on twitter that finally motivated me to check it out. (P.S.: Go see CRIMSON PEAK. It's good!) If what they say about imitation and flattery is true, well, notorious Euro-sleaze director Jess Franco is a huge fan, as he spent a good chunk of his career making the like of FACELESS and THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF that are remakes of EYES in all but name. Could explain why I'm not too hot on the American title, sounds a little too much like one of Franco's knock-offs.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Once you see it, you'll understand why. EYES is one of those films that sticks with you after its over. It ends rather abruptly, with Christiane's fate unknown, and some people may be off-put by that. For me, after mulling it over for a day or two, I found that I actually am quite fond of its ending. Strange to say about an ending that features a young woman turning against and killing her family but bear with me. While EYES'S conclusion isn't what you would call uplifting, I do feel that there's a hopeful message at the heart of it. A lot of it has to do with Jacques final scene. Believing Christiane truly gone forever, Jacques decides to move on, with one of the detectives commenting that he's young and has his whole life ahead of him as he departs. To me, that's what EYES WITHOUT A FACE is really about. The events of the past change us, tragedies harm us, and we will carry the effects of that forever. There's no going back and "fixing" that. Dr. Genessier and Louise tried that and look where that got them: they became murderers and ultimately were destroyed by the very person they damned themselves for. The best thing you can do is pick yourself up, move on, and live your life. even if it means facing an unknowable future.</span><br />
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</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><u>A Little Something Extra:</u></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> What? You thought I was going to post that Billy Idol song? Now, I would have gone with "Eyes Without A Face" by The Flesh Eaters from THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD soundtrack but after giving it a listen, I realized it wasn't my particular favorite song from that; so the hell with it, here's "Surfin' Dead" by The Cramps. Remember folks, life is short and filled with stuff.</span><br />
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<img height="43" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivBF3KmW0rpk_T1tE2p10NXdPQJVzurSDKAyIoa4L20A-JQHJx4wW7FpL03vLA_JXr-TkdCIhZfxUUgvakwn0qXeXWjYPStuDCgkERF2JuEpNlNkv9ekd_0ugiOpkpstnlZQZdj4qqqfR2/s320/tumblr_nvj2clBnBs1qea57bo8_540.png" style="left: 200px; opacity: 0.3; position: absolute; top: 4100px;" width="96" />billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com311tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-22266084484705635182015-10-31T11:25:00.002-07:002015-10-31T11:42:10.931-07:00"The Rats" by James Herbert<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhySPikruiwmjQsD2qUj_cgSB3kafgqj9mjww_XfQCVjAXtcS0JZqT9pHCU61jkho18-aj5ZEZY0QiR5Tj0FRxbUxkICsBCuvpms7sbebl32djQwN6ugRm5IfIFejHysK1b1rwN0Q21vsTQ/s1600/therats.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhySPikruiwmjQsD2qUj_cgSB3kafgqj9mjww_XfQCVjAXtcS0JZqT9pHCU61jkho18-aj5ZEZY0QiR5Tj0FRxbUxkICsBCuvpms7sbebl32djQwN6ugRm5IfIFejHysK1b1rwN0Q21vsTQ/s400/therats.jpg" width="300" /></a>Early on in DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King
tells this anecdote about the writing of his vampire novel SALEM’S
LOT where, in the first draft, one of the characters meets a fairly
unpleasant end at the teeth of a swarm of rats loosed on them by king
vampire Barlow. In his words, King had wanted to riff on a similar
moment in Stoker’s DRACULA but add a gruesome E.C. Comics touch to
the proceedings, and was gleefully happy with the result. However,
King’s editor, Bill Thompson, found the scene to be so revolting he
asked for it to be changed in subsequent rewrites, with the character
instead biting it when he sets off a booby-trap on a stairway. A
nasty way to go, but not as spectacular as his earlier demise - a
“middle-of-the-roader” as King puts it - and the change had the
effect of leaving the build up to that, repeated mentions of the
number of rats infesting the town, with no real pay-off.<br />
<br />
I
wonder what ole Bill would have made of James Herbert’s debut
novel, THE RATS?</div>
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There’s not as much of a leap between the two
books as you’d think. Stoker’s DRACULA was the key inspiration
for both and in fact, it was that very scene King was putting his own
disgusting spin on that sparked Herbert’s novel. But whereas King’s
novel is a good, hefty sized volume - maybe not the doorstoppers IT
and THE STAND were, but still clocking in at over six hundred pages –
Herbert’s is a speedy little shocker that comes in at around a
third of LOT’s page count, the kind of slim paperback that you
could slip into your back pocket and carry around all day, for
whenever you find a quiet corner and moment to yourself. (Those are
the best kind, aren’t they?) And while King was using DRACULA as a
template so he could dig into what might happen if the Count had
found his way to an American small town, Herbert, the son of street
traders from London’s East End, used it as a jumping off point to
put a voice to his frustration at how the powers-that-be were letting
his old home fall into ruin. Simply put, the events of THE RATS could
have been avoided had the city not left an old house to rot.
</div>
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<br />
The plot is as straight-forward as
they come. There are these swarms of bigger-than-normal rats running
around London eating people. Any survivors who have been bit will die
painfully within twenty four hours from a virus that the rats are
carrying. Someone has to put a stop it and of course, that job falls
into the lap of Harris, an art teacher whose student was among the
first victim of the virus. What? You thought the authorities were
going to do it? They’re the ones that gave the rats their breeding
ground by neglecting the bombed out buildings around London, or the
homeless problem, which is how the nasty little buggers got their
first taste of human flesh. No, it’s only with the help of our
working class hero with no first name (I’ve read this book twice
and never spotted one) and the kind of anti-establishment streak that
has him locking horns with and ready to slug any authority figure
that he meets that The Man is able to get anywhere with combating
this menace before it wipes the entire city.</div>
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As you can tell, THE RATS is nestled
very firmly and proudly within old-fashioned B-movie, pulp horror
territory of the nature / science gone amok branch. We never get a
description of Harris but it’s easy to picture him as the sort of
virile looking, broad shouldered, square jawed manly man we associate
with these stories. Scientists are here to spout off jargon, suggest
solutions and then get the hell out of the way so men of action can
take over and save the day through applications of violence and
mule-stubbornness, usually after the initial attempt to stop the
threat fails or even makes it worse. Women are um…here…basically,
though of course, the only one who has any major role outside of
potential rat fodder is Harris’s lovely girlfriend, Judy, she of no
<i>last</i> name. Even that old monster movie boogeyman Atomic
Radiation sticks its nose in with a near blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
suggestion that these killer rats were spawned from mutants
originating from a nuclear testing site. THE RATS is very much aware
of its pedigree, as two of its set pieces, an attack on a school and
one at a movie theater, feel like deliberate nods to THE BIRDS and
THE BLOB. (Even the title is suggestive of such.)
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You wouldn’t have found the level of
graphic violence and explicit sex in those old B-movies that you do
in Herbert’s books, though. Imagine one of those old flicks having
a gruesome baby with a considerably harsher horror film of the
post-NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD –era or a step between classical
horror and the splatterpunk movement. Getting back to DANSE MACABRE
for a moment, in his segment on Herbert and Ramsey Campbell, King
accurately describes Herbert as “putting his combat boots on and
assaulting the reader with horror […] …seizing us by both lapels
and screaming in our faces.” A writer that has gone on record
stating he loves to see how much he can get away with, Herbert is
willing to charge full-bore into some very unpleasant places. This
is, after all, a book about people being devoured by a swarm of
disease carrying vermin. Herbert is clearly having a blast playing
with our old fear of cloth and skin not being much of a defense
against teeth and smashes fiction taboos about what’s okay and
what’s not early. Within the first twenty pages, a baby and the dog
protecting it fall victim to the rats, a scene that got Herbert in
trouble in his home country, one reviewer saying that that the book
was enough to make a rodent retch. While the remainder of THE RATS
never quite matches that mean spirited shock, it still manages to
sustain a level of nastiness comparable to some Italian gore flicks.
A good part of the motivation to keep reading is seeing not only
whether or not he’s going to go there but <i>how.</i>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What THE RATS lifted from those old
movies most successfully was the pacing of those drive-in monster
films. This is a book that <i>moves,</i> never letting the action
lull for a moment. There are probably two chapters out of the twenty
that don’t deal with the menace of the rats. If it looks like one
of those lulls is coming, Herbert just takes the camera off his main
characters for a moment and switches to a minor character for a
little side vignettes, usually a few pages of back story and “…and
then they got ate by rats” as the denouement. The episodic chunks
are actually fairly successful at giving the reader a cross-section
look at what life was like in post-war London and helping us grasp
that there’s an entire city in danger, not just our Chuck Meatslab
hero and company. It’s this refusal to let things lag for too long,
coupled with our desire to see where he’s going to take it, and its
short length that makes THE RATS such a quick, exciting read.
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
However, if you’re interested in
checking out Herbert’s work, I wouldn’t call it the best place to
start. That would be the first Herbert novel that I read and his
second written, THE FOG. (No connection to the John Carpenter’s
movie.) Reading THE RATS afterward, it feels like something of a dry
run for THE FOG; an amorphous threat, similar cast of characters and
story structure, as well as the same reckless abandon in regards to
its content. But the scope of THE FOG is grander and the characters
are given a tiny bit more weight. The nature of THE FOG’s threat,
an insanity causing microbe, is also more interesting one than THE
RATS swarm. There are, after all, only so many ways you can describe
people fighting against rats crawling all over them before such
scenes start to sound the same. Again, a reason the short length
plays into its favor. When THE RATS reaches that point, its ends soon
afterward. THE FOG on the other hand, is able to throw out such
varied and memorable horrors as a entire town committing suicide,
man-eating pigeons, and a whole class of murderous school children.
(Also, THE FOG doesn’t have a moment where its main character ogles
one of his young students. Seriously, ew.) Once you’ve read THE
FOG, THE RATS is as good a place as any to go next. Despite the
backlash he got from it, THE RATS was successful enough that Herbert
wrote two sequels to it. The first, LAIR, sounds a little too much
like THE RATS…AGAIN to really interest me, but I’ve seen someone
describe the third post-apocalyptic installment, DOMAIN, as “George
Romero’s DAY OF THE DEAD with rat monsters.” Now that I’ve got
to check out.<br />
<br />
<i>There was a film adaptation of THE RATS, but not a particularly faithful one. (According to the screenwriter, he didn't really read the book and instead just ripped off PIRANHA.) It's worth checking out, though, because the way they went about portraying the rat swarm is somewhat infamous...and adorable. Would you like to know more? Hop over to Checkpoint Telstar for Tim's review of <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2015/10/hubrisween-3-day-4-deadly-eyes-1982.html">DEADLY EYES</a>.</i><br />
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</iframe>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-36067025812512617552015-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:002015-10-31T00:00:00.952-07:00You've Got Red On You<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981), Dir: John Landis</div>
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<br />
THE BEYOND (1981); Dir: Lucio Fulci<br />
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BLADE (1998); Dir: Stephen Norrington<br />
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BLADE 2 (2002); Dir: Guillermo Del Toro<br />
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THE BROOD (1979); Dir: David Cronenberg</div>
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CARRIE (1976); Dir: Brian DePalma</div>
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CREEPSHOW (1982); Dir: George Romero</div>
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DEAD RINGERS (1988); Dir: David Cronenberg </div>
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THE DESCENT (2005); Dir: Neil Marshall</div>
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DON'T LOOK NOW (1973); Dir: Nicholas Roeg</div>
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THE EVIL DEAD (1981); Dir: Sam Raimi</div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
EVIL DEAD 2: DEAD BY DAWN (1984); Dir: Sam Raimi</div>
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HELLRAISER (1987); Dir: Clive Barker</div>
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HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973); Dir: Clint Eastwood</div>
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HORROR OF DRACULA (1958); Dir: Terence Fisher</div>
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LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008); Dir: Tomas Alfredson</div>
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MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE (1966); Dir: Harold P. Warren</div>
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THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964); Dir: Roger Corman</div>
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NEAR DARK (1987); Dir: Kathryn Bigelow</div>
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A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984); Dir: Wes Craven</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">PAN'S LABYRINTH (2006); Dir: Guillermo Del Toro</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">(Contributed by Jessica Ritchey)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">RAVENOUS (1999); Dir: Antonia Bird</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">RE-ANIMATOR (1985); Dir: Stuart Gordon</span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;">SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004); Dir: Edgar Wright</span></div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNPYQDdkHYnp5Xb0d8W7THbviiSjo8ShocpQFEezrn-szA1kZYhivsxoSpcYc5hbDTo9Hcc8d4QjRl8iRq-PnhCuWF6lh8vQtSBRxfRp_GhC3VCl62s4pr5WYGRngi6QZzXP-HsZCQhyphenhyphen7A/s1600/the-shining-25.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNPYQDdkHYnp5Xb0d8W7THbviiSjo8ShocpQFEezrn-szA1kZYhivsxoSpcYc5hbDTo9Hcc8d4QjRl8iRq-PnhCuWF6lh8vQtSBRxfRp_GhC3VCl62s4pr5WYGRngi6QZzXP-HsZCQhyphenhyphen7A/s400/the-shining-25.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div>
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THE SHINING (1980); Dir: Stanley Kubrick<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13.2px; line-height: 18.48px;">SUSPIRIA (1977); Dir: Dario Argento<br />(Though frankly, I could have posted the whole movie.)</span></div>
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THE TERMINATOR (1984); Dir: James Cameron</div>
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TERROR TRAIN (1980); Dir: Roger Spottiswoode</div>
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THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974); Dir: Tobe Hooper</div>
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VERSUS (2000); Dir: Ryuhei Kitamura</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyshuoz5XHaVs-r0uYX2F3hKnqDY5OFbEn54invqjyg9KnWejsIcT3cuWq7Ob-UeusjeqK3C3cMZXf3kEAmvAhY2LyXLXuNSxDSjWbssXABQSNsV0TGCK9tX4qDkUot0Z_F1crJVD-fSJc/s1600/what-we-do-in-the-shadows%252520%25283%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyshuoz5XHaVs-r0uYX2F3hKnqDY5OFbEn54invqjyg9KnWejsIcT3cuWq7Ob-UeusjeqK3C3cMZXf3kEAmvAhY2LyXLXuNSxDSjWbssXABQSNsV0TGCK9tX4qDkUot0Z_F1crJVD-fSJc/s400/what-we-do-in-the-shadows%252520%25283%2529.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014); Dir: Jemaine Clement<span class="_Xbe kno-fv">, Taika Waititi</span></div>
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<span class="_Xbe kno-fv">(Contributed by Gavin Smith)</span></div>
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billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-33434380594038079842015-09-27T00:00:00.000-07:002015-09-28T09:07:29.661-07:00An American Werewolf In London (1981)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUGm4pT1DSHhY7BNE1Rcd-L-S3JILaiAt-uVINHTEqJ9rsMNjZAQ-LekT3ApcqNtVdSIlyucOpGEYXsYSzKxRISk_TPQ-OlOEKX4DjxJbNGLgT73ATSJqyDfKm_kSLz9kZnjnSas5USGBO/s1600/awil-title.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUGm4pT1DSHhY7BNE1Rcd-L-S3JILaiAt-uVINHTEqJ9rsMNjZAQ-LekT3ApcqNtVdSIlyucOpGEYXsYSzKxRISk_TPQ-OlOEKX4DjxJbNGLgT73ATSJqyDfKm_kSLz9kZnjnSas5USGBO/s400/awil-title.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Director: John Landis<br />
Screenplay by: John Landis<br />
Starring: David Naughton, Griffin Dunne, Jenny Agutter, John Woodvine, Brian Glover<br />
Running Time: 97 minutes<br />
Tagline: "From the director of ANIMAL HOUSE...a different kind of animal."<br />
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"Beware the moon, David."<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIaPVQ64kNG9uesllnCbunj_w0g1cZYLhBQaLNpZf0Y6p0KBdzM1QkWqL6h9HqMhrm1Eln1oNChDSDy4wlJe58I9dMBqclCv4Qip9F2ajq3uzQfunJQcfMufQjVA3f9OEG-eV43blfCcVS/s1600/awil-stare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIaPVQ64kNG9uesllnCbunj_w0g1cZYLhBQaLNpZf0Y6p0KBdzM1QkWqL6h9HqMhrm1Eln1oNChDSDy4wlJe58I9dMBqclCv4Qip9F2ajq3uzQfunJQcfMufQjVA3f9OEG-eV43blfCcVS/s320/awil-stare.jpg" width="320" /></a>AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON came to Landis in a moment
that sounds like it could have been the opening of a werewolf movie itself. It
was 1969 and he was working as a production assistant on KELLY’S HEROES in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Yugoslavia</st1:place></st1:country-region>.
While being driven to a shooting location in the countryside, Landis witnessed
a burial being performed at a crossroads by a group of gypsies. The man being
buried was done so feet first and had his body wreathed with garlic. When
Landis inquired as to why he was being buried in this manner, his driver
informed him that this was to prevent the man from rising from the dead. Wondering
what would happen if the man didn’t stay in his grave was all that it took to send
Landis on a writing jag, resulting in a script that was a contemporary update
of THE WOLF MAN. Had things gone as planned, WEREWOLF would have been the
follow up to SCHLOCK!, Landis’s 1971 debut feature. It was going to be his
second collaboration with special effects and make-up man Rick Baker, who
created SCHLOCK’s ape-suit and Landis, correctly, thought was just the guy to
pull off this ambitious idea he had for how they would approach the werewolf’s
transformation scene. Things had to be put on hold, however, due to studios not
wanting to pony up the funds it would have cost and furthermore, not
understanding how to sell a movie that was too horrific to be a comedy and yet
too comedic to be a horror film. So, onto the back burner it went and there it
remained for a nearly a decade, until the success of ANIMAL HOUSE and THE BLUES
BROTHERS gave Landis the clout he needed to get the project off the ground.
That Rick Baker had worked on this small, independent movie called STAR WARS in
the interim probably didn’t hurt, either.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WS5Lxtqd7t0DQDXhEFPCg1q5jYYay8eoCMQ1eIF02WCZ_iZwN6G551aPMKlwnewkd4Gl9KTmI1otnxnS2aaEkgWeOKk5NwDiWJX39yOTmLvKK7cthN9l4QsaSduFIUI7EYhBBjIP1zEe/s1600/awil-baddream.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4WS5Lxtqd7t0DQDXhEFPCg1q5jYYay8eoCMQ1eIF02WCZ_iZwN6G551aPMKlwnewkd4Gl9KTmI1otnxnS2aaEkgWeOKk5NwDiWJX39yOTmLvKK7cthN9l4QsaSduFIUI7EYhBBjIP1zEe/s320/awil-baddream.jpg" width="320" /></a>Two American college students, David Kessler (David Naughton) and Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), are backpacking across north England when they come across the sleepy village of East Proctor on a stormy night. The place makes a rather ominous first impression; what could charitably be called the center of town is dominated by an Angel of Death statue and the local pub carries the rather uninviting name of The Slaughtered Lamb, its sign depicting a severed wolf's head impaled on a pike. ("Where's the lamb?") But the boys are cold, hungry, and could use a rest, so despite their misgivings, they head inside. Once there, they run into the expected throng of suspicious-of-strangers types you find populating sleepy English villages in this sort of movie, and when Jack inquires to the purpose of a five pointed star on the wall,"The sign of the wolf man" according to him, they're asked none politely to move on. Their departure sparks an argument among the bar patrons, with some saying that they've just committed murder by sending the boys out on this particular night before the village leader (Brian Glover) shuts them all down with the usual "outsiders shouldn't be stickin' their nose into our business" spiel. Besides, they reason, the boys will be alright as long as they obey the cryptic warning to stay on the road, steer clear of the moors, right? Maybe nothing will happen...<br />
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Almost as if it that was its cue, something that sure as hell isn't a dog cuts loose with a very unpleasant sounding howl. The creature, a hulking beast that looks like a shaggy bear with canine features, chases the boys down, tackles Jack and rips him to pieces before David can come to help, and all that little act of bravery earns him is some teeth in his shoulder. The villagers, finally deciding they don't want the boys' blood on their hands, intervene and shoot the creature dead. Before David loses consciousness, he catches a glimpse of their attacker, which, strangely enough, is now a naked man.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmynkcDcs41PMqwcfVaiuoS4epkNA1ICEMFSV_XsOATHpyNu4fxLqjr7cBnrn5kEW1hkf1uXOUdj83yYLdUD1w4RsSK0vkcv89wnsqhJkrk_C6mtK_X1Mb-2x_JapLZlhMQOfwCz8Nz1nJ/s1600/awil-nightmare.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmynkcDcs41PMqwcfVaiuoS4epkNA1ICEMFSV_XsOATHpyNu4fxLqjr7cBnrn5kEW1hkf1uXOUdj83yYLdUD1w4RsSK0vkcv89wnsqhJkrk_C6mtK_X1Mb-2x_JapLZlhMQOfwCz8Nz1nJ/s320/awil-nightmare.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
David comes to in the hospital and discovers that weeks have passed. Jack's body has already been shipped back home and buried. Confusing David even further is when officials question him about the attack and he discovers that several witnesses blame it on an escaped lunatic. David's claims that his friend was killed by a monster are dismissed as the ravings of someone who's just been through a very traumatic event. That would be all she wrote, but David's having these dreams, you see: real vivid ones. Ones where monsters are killing his family or he's going through some form of transformation. Then there's the visit from his good buddy, the dearly departed Jack Goodman, Jack, who now looks like he's been thrown face first into a threshing machine, informs David that they were attacked by a werewolf. Seeing as David survived the werewolf's attack, the creature's curse has passed onto him and as long as the bloodline of the werewolf lives, Jack is condemned to walk the earth as a ghost, unable to pass on. As much as for wanting to save his friend from the cruel fate in store as he is wanting to be free from his own horrible unlife, Jack urges David to kill himself before the full moon rises.<br />
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If there's one bright spot for David in this whole mess, it's the Florence Nightingale-esque romance he's struck up with Alex (Jenny Agutter), the nurse who has been serving as his primary caregiver during his recovery. It's a testament to the actors and the filmmakers that they're able to sell us on this relationship despite it developing so fast, so we don't bat an eye, much, when he goes home with her once he's discharged. (And hey, it's Jenny Agutter.) The two sleep together that night but David's good mood doesn't last, because Jack makes a return appearance looking much worse for wear, and again warns him of what's coming. Up until now, David's been able to convince himself that everything; the monster, the dreams, Jack's ghost; was all in his head but he's beginning to question that. He won't have to wait long to get a definitive answer. The full moon is tomorrow night.<br />
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If you’re going to discuss AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF at any
length, you’re almost required to discuss that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> werewolf movie that opened in 1981 and also featured a
totally boss transformation sequence, Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING. They’re practically
joined at the hip at this point. I had even planned on reviewing both movies in
one go for this blog entry, only to find my copy of THE HOWLING had
deteriorated to the point of being unplayable. Despite the close proximity of
their release dates, the two movies are pretty dramatically
different. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">LONDON</st1:place></st1:city>
is a fairly traditional werewolf story by design, adhering close to the
template established by THE WOLF MAN. We’ve got the male American outsider in a
foreign country, the mysterious societal outliers for whom the patient-zero werewolf
is their dirty little secret, transformations that come with the full moon, and
our hero’s doomed love with a local girl. Only deviation from the norm here is
that silver isn’t necessary to kill him (good ole buckshot will do just fine)
and there’s no old lady with a thick accent to proclaim “the way you walked was
thorny…” THE HOWLING, on the other hand, wants to put as much distance between
it and Lon Chaney Jr. as it can; portraying werewolves as a secret society of competing factions and philosophies, tossing out any overt supernatural elements, and picking up the ball and running with the Freudian and sexual underpinnings of the werewolf archetype, all while skewering mental health fads and the news media culture in the process. (I saw someone describe THE HOWLING as the closest thing we'll get to a Brian DePalma werewolf movie and can only nod.)<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtOA1kvOJAjKAOM65DICXS9ijd3p_FywjBflekuSppgsaW8s1UC0qtsVQQkpRKlQB_DLNb_bdvcQdGlEVsAq3y9Tw7Jar6gvkv0is49iHbGS2X9TAvaDlH2Zc73DuwNH_T2Ky8uHqXpd7v/s1600/awil-subway2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtOA1kvOJAjKAOM65DICXS9ijd3p_FywjBflekuSppgsaW8s1UC0qtsVQQkpRKlQB_DLNb_bdvcQdGlEVsAq3y9Tw7Jar6gvkv0is49iHbGS2X9TAvaDlH2Zc73DuwNH_T2Ky8uHqXpd7v/s320/awil-subway2.jpg" /></a>Both were noted for their pitch-black humor, but THE HOWLING approached that through inside jokes and satirical touches, while AMERICAN WEREWOLF goes broader and more absurd, it's success laying in knowing exactly how to utilize that mixture of comedy and horror that so confused studios and later critics; when to contrast imagery and tone and when one needs to intrude on the other. Think of David's dream where he sees his family butchered by shrieking, monster headed Nazis while The Muppet Show plays in the background. The image is so over-the-top and bizarre that it's certainly amusing, like escapees from a creature feature crashed into some Family Ties-style sitcom, while at the same time...<em>Holy Shit</em>, right? Or the scenes late in the film where he sits in a theater with a particularly naff porno playing, surrounded by the bloody shades of his victims, all of whom are suggesting any number of methods he can use to kill himself in chipper tones of voice. It also helps that WEREWOLF knows when to pull back and let one aspect take over completely. The moments that are just straight comedy, like David having to escape from the zoo after waking up naked in the wolf's enclosure are legitimately hilarious. ("A naked American man stole my balloons!") Then, scenes that focus entirely on horror, such as the initial attack on David and Jack or a transformed David stalking his victims, still effectively generate a palpable amount of tension even after any number of repeat viewings. (I watch this flick at least once a year around this time, for obvious reasons.) The distance between terror and laughter isn't as far as many people think, and the best horror comedies like this or RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, know how to use one to underline the other. It doesn't hurt either that AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF may be the most quotable skinwalker flick, some of its best lines coming from the banter between David and Jack's ghost. ("Have you ever talked with a corpse? It's boring!" "I will not be threatened by a walking meatloaf!" "He is your good friend, whereas I am a victim of your carnivorous lunar activities!")</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh56c0ZPc2PiIq2hn69MkucbEfXQC7vmCUnYbDjJ9qbwyA5_FbnJFUd7bOVQq0h192ocdJqq8LgxKXqT0Ij7o88nu94OZvRnH8RsvcbBEUDK-aKxsWg14WMiVKVp0DKZvdlhn6SqUjrTW1b/s1600/awil-news.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh56c0ZPc2PiIq2hn69MkucbEfXQC7vmCUnYbDjJ9qbwyA5_FbnJFUd7bOVQq0h192ocdJqq8LgxKXqT0Ij7o88nu94OZvRnH8RsvcbBEUDK-aKxsWg14WMiVKVp0DKZvdlhn6SqUjrTW1b/s320/awil-news.jpg" width="320" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuDIZnxOwUl7NINPIPjI212gruHkrIu-nIrlI-V3_PbJ9gI1J62YS2PXwjLk-VOXrBVPUlYFx7Ckn88i1yE4e0-bcjQO8uWbo85sy6ZHJg5XayBO_k_Ba27F7Gr9YuJ49dK20wybWcd2lr/s1600/awil-gibblets.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a>If there's one thing that both AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF and THE HOWLING have in common it's the major shifts they represented in the werewolf genre. The biggest one being that, after these two movies, just dissolving between shots of an actor with more hair glued to his face wasn't going to cut it for a transformation anymore. Special effects technology had finally reached a point where you could show the hair grow, claws sprout, the limbs and face distort, selling you on the idea that yeah, changing into a completely different species was horrifying and painful to watch. Horror fans will debate 'til kingdom come which movie had the better wolf-out scene but neither are anything to sneeze at. Coincidently enough, Rick Baker was attached to do the effects work for THE HOWLING but decided to jump to WEREWOLF due to his earlier commitment to Landis, handing Dante's movie off to his protégé, Rob Bottin. I'd say things worked out for both. THE HOWLING made Bottin's career and opened the door for projects like THE THING, ROBOCOP, and TOTAL RECALL and Baker received the first Academy Award for Make-Up Effects thanks to WEREWOLF. (Presented by Vincent Price!) Thirty odd years later, they still impress, WEREWOLF's even more so because it makes no effort hide it through dim lighting or excessive editing. Landis had complete confidence in Baker's skill and lets the audience linger on every detail.<br />
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Not only did these two films change the way in which the werewolf's transformation was depicted, but the werewolves themselves. Before then, the popular image of the werewolf in cinema was Larry Talbot stalking through a fog shrouded forest in the shadow of his family castle. I can't think of too many werewolf films before these that used a then modern urban setting as its backdrop; moving away from the moors so its creature can run down its prey in subway stations or the seedier side of Los Angeles and cause all manner of carnage at Piccadilly Circus. But more importantly, after 1981, filmmakers finally got it into their head that maybe it was high time that werewolves started looking like <em>wolves, </em>damn it. Now, werewolves weren't just some brute with fangs and a mighty need for a wax job but gigantic hellhounds and towering wolf-headed bipeds. Even designs which were meant to evoke the older form would incorporate aspects of these new ones, i.e. THE MONSTER SQUAD. 'Bout time.<br />
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There’s one more thing I’d like to
discuss about AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF before I close out this post,
something that stuck out at me when I re-watched it for this review.
Now, we’re all familiar with the various spiels about what fears
your classic monsters represent, right? The vampire is unrestrained
sexuality, zombies are the inevitability of death and societal decay
through conformity, etc. etc. Our good friend the wolf man? Loss of
control. Giving in to your subconscious primal impulses. The Old
Adam, as Stephen King calls it in his treatise on the horror genre,
DANSE MACABRE, which is a phrase that I love and so badly want to use
as a title for a horror story that I’ll probably never write. The
beast beneath the skin is the go to supernatural archetype for
stories about someone’s bad side coming out to play and has been
used as such for everything from abusive relationships (an episode of
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) to young girls going through puberty.
(GINGER SNAPS) What I find interesting though, is how rarely
lycanthropy is used in fiction and film in connection with mental
instability, especially when so many stories of it from history and
folklore come across sounding a lot like a person suffering from
that. Just ask Nebuchadnezzar. THE WOLF MAN touches on it a bit, but
in the end, that’s simply Larry Talbot desperately trying to find a
rational explanation for what is happening to him. THE WOLF MAN is
too straightforward a movie for the connection between the two to
take. THE HOWLING definitely plays around with it, what with its
setting being a mental health care retreat that its beasties use as
way to hide in plain sight while learning to keep their animal side
under control. Werewolf rehab, if you will. But in the end, its focus
remains primarily on the tried and true angle of werewolf as the
monster from the id. (No, not that one.) Discussing this with some of
my fellow movie buffs, the only movie that uses werewolves explicitly
as a metaphor for mental illness we could name was one of the GINGER
SNAPS sequels. In that, it’s basically a medical condition and if
the main character doesn’t get the medicinal herbs she needs to
keep it in line, she starts self-harming and doing other things that
you often see in cases of people who need treatment for depression.</div>
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What does this have to do with AN
AMERICAN WEREWOLF? Well, look at what David experiences through the
whole movie. He suffers from nightmares and hallucinations so
frequently he begins to wonder what is real and what isn’t. He
struggles with suicidal impulses. When he transforms into his wolf
form, he blacks out and has no memory of anything that he does. Alex
and David’s doctor certainly don’t buy into any of this talk of
werewolves but they certainly believe that David is in a state where
he could be a harm to himself or others. And consider that what
starts this is seeing a close friend get killed horribly before he
himself is badly injured and put into a coma. I don’t know about
you guys but I’ll be damned if this doesn’t read like some of the
more extreme cases of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. AN AMERICAN
WEREWOLF does a fantastic job of making you experience its main
character’s disassociation with reality, with only its repeated
cuts to the perspective of other characters preventing it from being
on par with say, MIRACLE MILE, in that regard. What’s surprising
about this and a good indicator of how sometimes the end result can
get away from a creator’s intentions is that I don’t think that
was exactly what Landis and company were going for. The reoccurring
instance of David waking up from dream after dream until you’re
left unsure whether what he’s seeing is real or not, Landis admits,
was something he lifted from a Bunuel film that achieved a similar
effect through that motif. You also have to account for how much AN
AMERICAN WEREWOLF draws from THE WOLF MAN, so of course, it would
feature characters blaming what’s happening as the result of the
protagonists fractured mind. Then there’s the fact that in
interviews with Landis and Naughton, they show that while they did
think of David’s condition in terms of a disease, it was a physical
sickness, not mental, they approached it as, playing him as someone
who refused to face that he has a terminal disease. So, as it turns
out, the most effective “werewolf-as-mental-problem-stand-in”
story may have been the result of an entirely coincidental
combination of influences and shooting close to the mark, with what
we understand about the werewolf represents filling in the blanks as necessary. </div>
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<i>This review was part of the Celluloid Zeroes ADULT ONSET LYCANTHROPY ROUNDTABLE. Want more? Head over to Checkpoint Telstar for Tim's review of <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-bat-people-1974.html">THE BAT PEOPLE</a>, or maybe stop by The Terrible Claw Reviews for Gavin's opinion on <a href="http://deinonychusreviews.blogspot.com/2015/09/sssssss-1973-adult-onset-lycanthropy.html">SSSSSSS</a>. Still not enough? Cinemasochistic Apocalypse bites into the samurai werewolf flick (!!) <a href="http://cinemasochistapocalypse.blogspot.com/2015/09/kibakichi-2004.html">KIBAKICHI</a>, 3-Beer Theater is inflicted with <a href="http://microbrewreviews.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-celluloid-zeroes-present-adult.html">THE CURSE OF THE BLACK WIDOW</a>, The Tomb of Anubis takes on <a href="https://thetombofanubis.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/episode-59-romasanta-2004/">ROMASANTA</a>, Las Peliculas de Terror deals with a were-cicada infestation with <a href="https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Flaspeliculasdeterror.wordpress.com%2F2015%2F09%2F28%2Fcelluloid-zeroes-presents-the-beast-within-1982-adult-onset-lycanthropy%2F&h=oAQFotLuB">THE BEAST WITHIN</a>, and Web of the Big Damn Spider goes back to <a href="https://bigdamnspider.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/summer-school-2006/">SUMMER SCHOOL</a>.</i></div>
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</iframe><br />billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-12332043704812757712015-09-13T17:35:00.001-07:002015-09-13T17:39:31.098-07:00Miracle Mile (1989)<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-small;">Y'know, considering MIRACLE MILE's subject matter, whoever decided on "A Welcome Blast!" for the pull quote there needs to be sat down and given a good talking-to. </span><br />
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Director: Steven de Jarnatt<br />
Screenplay by: Steven de Jarnatt<br />
Starring: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar, Lou Hancock, Robert DoQui, Denise Crosby, Mykelti Williamson, Kurt Fuller, Brian Thompson, Earl Boen<br />
Running Time: 88 minutes<br />
Tagline: "There are 70 minutes to the end of the world. Where do you hide?"<br />
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You won’t realize it the first time you watch it, but
MIRACLE MILE’s opening is a fantastic piece of misdirection. It introduces us
to geeky jazz musician Harry Washello overlooking the city of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Los Angeles</st1:place></st1:city> as he’s playing his trombone and
gazing longingly at a picture of his newfound love, Julie Peters. Harry’s
narration establishes that this scene is taking place in media res and we’re
settling in for his recounting of how he and Julie first met and the whirlwind
romance that follows. Going by the rules of your standard cinematic romance, we’d
eventually circle around to that opening moment again somewhere between the
tearful break up and whatever crazy stunt Harry is going to pull to win Julie
back. However, MIRACLE MILE, as it turns out, is most definitely not your standard movie and more importantly, we never return to that opening scene at any
point. It leaves you wondering whether or not that happened or if it’s the film
asking “What could have been?” Is this where things would have gone if they had
played out as expected and Harry and Julie’s lives not been completely disrupted?
Who knows? But it makes it clear that MIRACLE MILE loves to
mess with you, leading you in one direction before gleefully sending you hurtling down another.<br />
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Pausing to note how eerily prophetic the backdrop for it is
going to ultimately be, we see Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie (Mare
Winningham) have their regulation meet cute during a tour of the La Brea Tar
Pits’ George C. Page museum. Harry admits he’s never been one to have much luck
with the ladies so you can imagine his elation at how well he’s hitting it off
with her. The two end up spending the whole day together; attending a charity
concert that Harry’s playing at, buying lobsters from a restaurant and
releasing them back into the ocean (“FREEDOM! HORRIBLE FREEDOM!”), rides on the
carousel; the usual quirky boy-meets-girl montage. Only an awkward encounter
with Julie’s estranged grandparents (John Agar and Lou Hancock) puts a bit of a
damper on the good mood but doesn’t stop Harry and Julie from making plans to
go dancing later that night, right after Julie’s finished her shift at the
diner where she works. Unfortunately, a freak accident knocks out the power in
Harry’s building, meaning his alarm doesn’t go off when it’s supposed to and by
the time he makes it to the diner, a heartbroken Julie is long gone. Desperate
to explain himself and make things up with her, Harry calls her on the pay
phone outside the diner but only gets her answering machine. Before Harry can
head back into the diner for an early breakfast, the phone rings again and he
jumps on it, hoping that it’s Julie.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It ain’t Julie and this is where MIRACLE MILE really shifts gears and gives us the biggest tonal swerve in a movie this side of DUCK YOU
SUCKER and FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The panicked
voice on the other end belongs to a soldier stationed at a missile
silo somewhere in <st1:state w:st="on">North Dakota</st1:state> who dialed the
wrong number trying to get in touch with his father in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Orange</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">County</st1:placetype></st1:place>.
From what Harry can decipher of his frantic ravings, something’s gone
wrong and the warheads have been launched. In fifty minutes, they’re going to
hit <st1:country-region w:st="on">Russia</st1:country-region> and in an hour
and ten minutes, the U.S.S.R’s retaliatory strike will hit <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">L.A.</st1:place></st1:city> At first, Harry is convinced that he’s
the victim of a random prank caller, but when he hears the sound of gunfire and
a sinister voice tells him to ignore everything he’s heard and to go back to
sleep, he realizes this may be the real thing after all. World War III could very well be on its way and convincing anyone of this and more importantly, getting to Julie so the two of them can get the hell out of Dodge, becomes Harry's number one priority. From here, MIRACLE MILE switches over to real-time for its last hour and ten minutes and takes on a hazy, fever dream-like feel, as though we've become trapped in Harry's rapidly escalating nightmare. The film will play its cards close to its chest, leaving you wondering for much of its running time whether the phone call is real or if Harry, in his own words, is being another Chicken Little, kicking over dominoes and causing chaos in the lives of those he comes across. When we finally do get a concrete yes or no answer to what is going on...well, you'll have to see for yourself.<br />
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The switch over from a sunny romantic jaunt to paranoid end-of-the-world thriller is a difficult trick to pull off, so credit to writer / director Steven De Jarnatt for doing so without a solitary hitch. He penned the script for MIRACLE MILE in 1978 but despite the positive response to it, his refusal to change the ending meant he couldn't get it produced for nearly ten years. (At one point it was going to be a segment of the TWILIGHT ZONE movie.) This delay may actually have worked out in MIRACLE MILE'S favor, however. The film's 1989 release date, right in the ending stretch of the Cold War, makes MIRACLE MILE feel like an exclamation point, a final word on the past decade. Here's everything we were in the eighties; here's how bloody terrified we were that it was all going to be gone in an instant, swept up in a nuclear fireball courtesy of the U.S.S.R. Though the two film's are wildly different in terms of tone and approach to storytelling, I can't help but be reminded of John Sayles' THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET. Both are snapshots of an incarnation of a major city that no longer exist; pastel-and-neon Los Angeles for MILE; seedy, graffiti covered New York for BROTHER; their protagonists' odysseys cross-sections of the lives and experiences of the different people who inhabited them. I would have loved to have visited these places; wandered their streets just to see what I could see. Money, distance and the passage of years have made that hard if not outright impossible, so I'm much obliged when I can find a movie that captures a place and time so vividly you feel like you could crawl in the screen and live there.<br />
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(Keeping with the whole "snapshot" idea, I enjoy how the film's cast features a plethora of recognizable faces from eighties pop culture. Not only Anthony Edwards, who was coming off the success of REVENGE OF THE NERDS and TOP GUN, and Mare Winningham, queen of eighties TV movies, but keep an eye on the rest. You'll spot the chief from ROBOCOP (Robert DoQui), Henrietta from EVIL DEAD 2 (Lou Hancock), Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby), one of the Sorels from STREETS OF FIRE (Mykelti Williamson), Vasquez from ALIENS (Jenette Goldstein) and Dr. Silberman from THE TERMINATOR. (Earl Boen) Even the Night Slasher himself (Brian Thompson) puts in an appearance.)<br />
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As much as it is as love letter to Los Angeles, MIRACLE MILE a movie about fate, that it doesn't matter that you just met this great girl or had this child or got this promotion; things are going to happen that are going to be out of your control. It's an idea we don't like to think on that much, because it's just so big. That's what makes MIRACLE MILE so damned effective. By keeping its stakes on a smaller, more personal scale; get the girl, get out of the city; and leaving its threat off-stage for much of its running time so it can focus on them, it succeeds better at selling you on what's at risk and really digging into the whys and hows of people's reactions to knowing what's coming for them. This wouldn't have been possible if it started dropping real estate on everybody's heads from the word go. How Harry reacts is one of the things that makes the film so interesting, Going back to my earlier statement about MIRACLE MILE loving to play with your expectations, take a look at him. He's this wholesome, nice fellow, the straight white guy out to rescue the woman he loves. By the way popular culture has coded us to think, he should be the hero, right? Matter of fact, Harry is one of the film's most self-centered characters, willing to lie, manipulate and even coerce others if it can get them to work for his benefit. He even does this to Julie, deliberately keeping her in the dark about what's going on until he can get her to safety. We still root for him, poor sap's just in over his head, after all. It's when you compare Harry's behavior to the other characters that it become even more significant. Who keeps calm and organizes an evacuation? A woman. The one person who is running around L.A. trying to rescue someone for selfless reasons? A black man, a minor character who returns for a truly tragic send off. Hell, the most heroic character in MIRACLE MILE is a gay helicopter pilot. Considering how often characters like this were depicted as sidekicks, jokes, crazies and cannon fodder in eighties movies, (and today, really) it's unique to find a movie that sympathizes so much with the misfits and outliers.<br />
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In the original screenplay, the main characters of MIRACLE MILE were intended to be an older couple. Subsequent drafts moved them into supporting roles, that of Julie's grandparents. It's fitting then, that they quickly realize what it takes Harry the whole movie to understand: you can't run from the inevitable. Sometimes all you can do is find something worth holding onto as you wait for what's coming. The conclusion is an incredibly emotional one and difficult to pin down; definitely not a happy one but I wouldn't call it hopeless either. A lot of apocalyptic fiction doesn't understand that there needs to be slivers of light amidst all the horror or you're just being a depressing slog. MIRACLE MILE understands this and that is what gives its ending its punch, which is not lessened one bit by repeat viewings. I watched the film multiple times in preparation for this, and damned if I didn't need to compose myself when the credits rolled every single time.<br />
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<u>A Little Something Extra:</u><br />
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Tangerine Dream - "Teetering Scales." Continuing with the whole "80's in summation" theme, MIRACLE MILE features a great, gloomy synth score by Tangerine Dream, who supplied the soundtrack for several notable genre films from that decade.<br />
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<i>Want to know what some friends of Psychoplasmics thought of MIRACLE MILE? Tim Lehnerer tackles it over at <a href="http://checkpoint-telstar.blogspot.com/2013/03/miracle-mile-1988.html" target="_blank">Checkpoint-Telstar</a> and Jessica Ritchey talks about what it means to her personally over at <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/demanders/love-survives-us-steve-de-jarnatts-miracle-mile">RogerEbert.com.</a></i><br />
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</iframe><br />billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-68794751421022278972015-09-11T13:14:00.000-07:002015-09-23T15:23:59.004-07:00Going Out With A Smile<br />
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ATTACK THE BLOCK (2011); Dir: Joe Cornish</div>
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BREAKING BAD "Felina" (2014); Dir: Vince Gilligan</div>
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COWBOY BEBOP - "The Real Folk Blues, Part 2" (1998); Dir: Shinichiro Watanabe</div>
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DIE HARD (1988); Dir: John McTiernan</div>
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FLASH GORDON (1980); Dir: Mike Hodges</div>
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(Suggested by Tim Lehnerer)</div>
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THE HITCHER (1986); Dir: Robert Harmon</div>
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MAD MAX 2 / THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981); Dir: George Miller</div>
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MEGAFORCE (1982); Dir: Hal Needham</div>
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(Suggested by Sean Frost)</div>
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984); Dir: Sergio Leone</div>
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PAN'S LABYRINTH (2006); Dir: Guillermo Del Toro</div>
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PERFECT BLUE (1997); Dir: Satoshi Kon</div>
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PIRANHA (1978); Dir: Joe Dante</div>
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ROBOCOP (1987); Dir: Paul Verhoeven</div>
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SHAUN OF THE DEAD (2004); Dir: Edgar Wright</div>
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STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982); Dir: Nicholas Meyer<br />
(Contributed by Jessica Ritchey)</div>
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STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK (1984); Dir: Leonard Nimoy</div>
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(Contributed by Jessica Ritchey)</div>
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SUPERMAN: THE MOVIE (1978); Dir: Richard Donner</div>
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(contributed by Travis Hunt)</div>
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SUSPIRIA (1977); Dir: Dario Argento</div>
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(Suggested by Sigmund Shen)</div>
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THEY LIVE (1988); Dir: John Carpenter</div>
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THE THING (1982); Dir: John Carpenter</div>
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TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948); Dir: John Huston</div>
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WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2014); Dir: Jemaine Clement<span class="_Xbe kno-fv">, Taika Waititi</span></div>
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<span class="_Xbe kno-fv"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrnQVW_F3jDwAAUlgIPoc-TWgse18C_lrd_reKTgm1t1LPhKuEurJ0Rp06K8qipk5EKexZai1NfAzIciaBUNWK8syNUR6GFwPwjOy-Y4i9CcI-A6MMNS78imMkNfT5y4s43GCM_BDtOgKt/s1600/tumblr_n2ne30CJ571trfa8po9_1280.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrnQVW_F3jDwAAUlgIPoc-TWgse18C_lrd_reKTgm1t1LPhKuEurJ0Rp06K8qipk5EKexZai1NfAzIciaBUNWK8syNUR6GFwPwjOy-Y4i9CcI-A6MMNS78imMkNfT5y4s43GCM_BDtOgKt/s1600/tumblr_n2ne30CJ571trfa8po9_1280.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span class="_Xbe kno-fv">THE WILD BUNCH (1969); Dir: Sam Peckinpah</span></div>
billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-84946292769591331032015-09-06T14:56:00.001-07:002015-09-08T13:16:37.741-07:00Flesh + Blood (1985)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Director:
Paul Verhoevan</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Screenplay
by: Gerard Soeteman and Paul Verhoeven</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Starring:
Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Burlinson, Susan Tyrrell,
Brion James, Ronald Lacey, Jack Thompson</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Running
Time: 2 hours and 8 minutes. (Unrated Edition)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Tagline:
“Betrayed by power. Corrupted by love. Bound by honor.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Hop
in the Way-Back Machine and set the dial for the summer of 1987.
Little Bill Smiley is living with his parents and two older sisters
in Union Grove, a wide place in road somewhere in the hills of rural
Alabama. He loves watching movies, has ever since his family took him
to see a re-release of STAR WARS in theaters, and right then there
was one movie that he wanted to see more than anything. You can
imagine how happy he was when his mom informed him that a friend of
the family, her name forgotten thanks my increasingly fuzzy memory,
was going to be taking her son and couple of his friends to the movie
theater over in Huntsville and asked if he would like join them. No
question what his answer was. Once he was in the car and couldn’t
back out, though, he was given some disappointing news. See, she was
concerned that the movie he wanted to see may have been “too scary”
for her kids to watch and wondered if he was open to the idea of
seeing a different movie. This was a big let down for Little Bill, he
really wanted to see that other movie, but the one they suggested
sounded cool. Something about a robot cop.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It’s
a shame that I don’t remember who that woman was and neither would
anybody else who’s still around for me to ask. Even if, I doubt
that she would remember that day anyhow because that’s close to
thirty years now. Good God. But I’m still curious to know that if
at any moment sitting in that Hunstville theater, watching ROBOCOP,
she ever considered that maybe we should have gone to that other
movie I wanted to see. ROBOCOP was not, as we assumed, some safe
action adventure full of wacky hijinks to please the popcorn crowd
and little else. The violence was bigger and messier than everything
else, the level of excess wasn’t so much turned all the way up as
it was somebody tore the dial off, and the humor was of the pitch
black variety. Within fifteen minutes, we witness our hero getting
tortured and cut to pieces with shotguns. Corporate executives talk
about an accident that resulted in a horrific death more in terms of
what it would mean to them financially rather than show concern for
the schmuck that got turned into paste. A rapist takes a bullet in a
very uncomfortable but deserving place, an executive is snorting coke
out of a model’s cleavage before he’s executed by his rival’s
henchman, and one goon ends up doing an extremely unhealthy
impersonation of the Toxic Avenger. She must have been horrified, or
maybe she wasn’t, since we stayed through the whole movie. We’ll
never know. I can tell you what I thought of it and what the other
kids thought of it, we thought it was the greatest thing we had ever
seen. It warped my fragile little brain in the best possible way.
Naturally, when my sister Susan wanted to go to the mall a couple
weeks later, you can guess who convinced her to take him along and
what movie he wanted her to take him to see. I wish could say this
was the story of how ROBOCOP is the only movie I’ve seen more than
once in the theater but that would be a lie. I really don’t like to
advertise that I also saw CROCODILE DUNDEE II twice, you understand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Such
went my introduction to director Paul Verhoeven, seen here being his
usual restrained self on the set of ROBOCOP:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">If
you want my opinion, it’s a crime that we’re no longer getting a
new movie from Verhoeven every two or three years. Like John Milius
before him, he was a filmmaker who managed to find mainstream success
making movies that grabbed their audience by the throat and didn’t
give a flying damn whether or not their precious sensibilities got
offended in the process. Back then, discovering a film like that was
like taking a big hit of the strong stuff when all you’ve ever had
was flat soda, and even today, with too much of our popular genre
entertainment made up of PG-13 no-risk safe bets, revisiting
Verhoeven’s filmography feels particularly revelatory. Come to
think of it, it’s a crime that Milius isn’t making movies any
more too or, though he had a major hand in DEADWOOD, my favorite TV
show, the only thing of Walter Hill’s that’s made into cinemas in
the past decade and change was the simply adequate buddy actioneer
BULLET IN THE HEAD. That could have been directed by anybody,
climatic STREETS OF FIRE-style axe duel between John Rambo and Khal
Drago aside. When these men stopped making movies or were forced to
find work elsewhere, testosterone cinema got a good deal less
interesting, now mostly a home for aging action stars to show that
grandpa can still hang with the cool kids. Said he, with a knowing
nod to the copies of THE EXPENDABLES 1 & 2 he owns on blu-ray.
Yes, I’m eyeing the Unrated edition of the third one too. Anywho,
back on topic…</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; text-align: left;">A disposition for splashing more blood around and showing off more bare breasts than the other guys is appreciated but that’s not all that Verhoeven has going for him. I may not have been able to put into words why, but even back then, I kept wanting to return to ROBOCOP and his other efforts for reasons that went beyond just tickling my reptile brain. A movie doesn’t leave the impression on somebody that this one did me if all it’s going for is simply being edgier-than-thou. There’s the funhouse mirror effect the movie has, highlighting the insane bullshit of the nineteen eighties and American culture by distorting the hell out of it. Like I said in my review of COBRA, Robocop is the Reagan-era action hero taken to its most logical extreme: an actual killing machine programmed to spout inane catchphrases while blowing people away. Tip of the ice berg. The film is interrupted by news breaks where anchors with fake smiles cheerfully report that dozens of people died when a satellite laser malfunctioned or commercials where families bond over a Battleship-clone based around thermonuclear war. Criminals discuss their drug empire using the same jargon that the corporate executives do. Violence that’s horrific when inflicted on the hero becomes triumphant when aimed at more deserving targets. Verhoeven makes it clear that he’s in on the joke and it carries over to his other movies as well. Of course, TOTAL RECALL’s Doug Quaid is really an invincible secret agent who can wipe out small armies single-handedly, he’s played by Arnold Schwarzenegger! STARSHIP TROOPER’s cast being made up of so many bland pretty people is a feature, not a bug, no pun intended. I haven’t seen SHOWGIRLS but I have seen BASIC INSTINCT and just going by the latter I could tell both were made with the understanding that the best way to goof on Joe Ezsterhas’s coked up screenplays is to let them speak for themselves. It’s not just satire and excess though. For big budget blockbusters, they can be strangely personal movies. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Verhoeven grew up in </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">the shadow of WWII in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and what he experienced there informs not only STARSHIP TROOPERS'S farcical spin on facism but his whole filmography. When Verhoeven discusses</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> how a re</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">ligious experience left him doubting his sanity and he took up filmmaking to keep himself grounded, TOTAL RECALL<span style="font-size: x-small;">
</span>suddenly looks like a bit of wish fulfillment, a man solving his own
upset mental state via simple brute force. Underneath all the blood,
guts, feathers and eyeballs flying everywhere, ROBOCOP’s story is
tragically humane. A family man has his life and soul stripped from
him, rebuilt as a walking coffin with a knight-in-shining-armor
exterior, all so some yuppie can stick it to his business rival and
get a cushier office. What follows is his fight to get something of
that back and I never fail to do a little fist pump when, at the end,
a smile crosses Peter Weller’s face as he answers “What’s your
name?” with “Murphy.” That the moment is punctuated by Basil
Poledouris’s fantastic score immediately kicking in helps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">But
I’m not actually here to talk about any of those movies. The last
couple of pages you just read there was an introduction that grew in
the telling. See, Verhoeven made several films before he hit it big,
most in his native homeland which can be frustratingly hard to get
one’s hands on over on this side of the pond. He did make one
English-language movie before ROBOCOP and I think it deserves a good
bit more attention than it’s received. Like everything the man
does, it’s an unusual and unique movie that as it turns out, was
even a little ahead of its time. From 1985, Verhoeven’s medieval
action-drama FLESH + BLOOD.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxIjyufeqg_o2T4sUD061eU6weY1etdEcJKAPhTyEe6fWSO60_VT0mfpHyjndOw2yKwvZSw3JkrDa4DLP91T3zq8H_qWGxAWW57soe7qgvIDH4LdB78e4iTJ5-oFXf4hRovqUCXG5PIr3/s1600/PDVD_005.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgxIjyufeqg_o2T4sUD061eU6weY1etdEcJKAPhTyEe6fWSO60_VT0mfpHyjndOw2yKwvZSw3JkrDa4DLP91T3zq8H_qWGxAWW57soe7qgvIDH4LdB78e4iTJ5-oFXf4hRovqUCXG5PIr3/s400/PDVD_005.BMP" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">The
year is 1501 and we’re somewhere in Italy,
dropped in the middle of the siege of some nameless city by the
forces of nobleman Arnolfini. (Fernando Hulbrek) See, Arnolfini used to rule over this
city and I think it can be deduced by the good sized army of soldiers
and mercenaries he’s brought with him, he’s somewhat displeased
with his being ousted from it. Capture the city before the end of the
day, he informs the troops, and you’ll get free reign over it for
the next twenty four hours. Goes without saying that the offer of a
full day of unrestrained looting and pillaging is all it takes to
motivate Arnolfini’s forces, lead by Hawkwood (Jack Thompson) and
the ruthless Martin (Rutger Hauer), to finally break the siege and
begin the attack proper. One other person of note we’re
introduced to here is Arnolfini’s son, Steven (Tom Burlinson), an
engineering genius in the DaVinci mold, who is taking part to show
off some of the siege weaponry he’s invented. (There are still a
few minor problems he hasn’t worked out yet, as that sap who
volunteers to test his mobile bomb finds out the hard way.)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcsDaMzkRJCJ_VU3plowYQJ3wy6maTPWPOTGeK1V-KPzmvXPHMU6y_877wjEvDd7Ul5QQPzMPicfA0fFSL20oRGwcL49t3T7AMR2Z8ulvPN7qK8bu0NFILz8ravpHC8tzbn_aVxC1OL_1I/s1600/PDVD_004.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcsDaMzkRJCJ_VU3plowYQJ3wy6maTPWPOTGeK1V-KPzmvXPHMU6y_877wjEvDd7Ul5QQPzMPicfA0fFSL20oRGwcL49t3T7AMR2Z8ulvPN7qK8bu0NFILz8ravpHC8tzbn_aVxC1OL_1I/s320/PDVD_004.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Arnolfini
soon comes to regret his offer when he sees the alacrity with which
the mercenaries take to their sacking of the city. There’s a good
chance that there won’t be much of the place left before the day’s
even half over and he’s not about to let some sellsword rabble tear
apart what he worked so hard to reclaim. When he learns that during
the battle that Hawkwood injured a young nun and the old soldier is
willing to do anything to help the girl, he seizes the opportunity.
Using the girl as leverage, Arnolfini convinces Hawkwood to turn on
his former comrades. Forced to surrender, Martin and his mercenaries
are stripped of their weapons and loot and then driven out of the
city. When we rejoin them later, their numbers have dwindled down to
only a handful of thugs and camp followers. When Selene, a prostitute
who is pregnant with Martin’s child, gives birth, the child ends up
dying. While digging a grave for the baby, they discover a statue
of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_of_Tours" target="_blank">St. Martin of Tours</a>, the patron saint that Martin himself was
named offer. One of Martin’s men, a loony nameless Cardinal (Ronald
Lacey, the creepy Peter Lorre-esque Nazi from RAIDERS OF THE LOST
ARK) takes this as a sign from God that Martin is a chosen one who
will lead them to glory. Now, one gets the impression that Martin
doesn’t completely buy into this but the man is itching for revenge
against Arnolfini and Hawkwood and as history has proven over and
over, saying God is on your side with enough conviction gets people
to rally behind your cause. </span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9y__LxA8Bj1bp4ObVzpcLRsbhM6-ff6MHDpgl4taGKcVyuwP9KCkvt-ihiiUKYYtFM2bnIqMEG2iOHwlQX9x5XaQ3-BeeIpMoNLd0z7nd6hVu-rzkWm7HFqxxf9Ui3X01SpOF0kWRZC7W/s1600/PDVD_007.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9y__LxA8Bj1bp4ObVzpcLRsbhM6-ff6MHDpgl4taGKcVyuwP9KCkvt-ihiiUKYYtFM2bnIqMEG2iOHwlQX9x5XaQ3-BeeIpMoNLd0z7nd6hVu-rzkWm7HFqxxf9Ui3X01SpOF0kWRZC7W/s320/PDVD_007.BMP" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">There’s
still one more important character that needs to be introduced and
she makes her way into the narrative right about now. Agnes (Jennifer
Jason Leigh) is the daughter of a local prince and Arnolfini has
arranged for her to be Steven’s wife. The young scientist scoffs at
the idea, too interested in his studies and inventions to want to
settle into the married life just yet; his father has to trick him
into coming along on a “hunt” to get the boy to even meet up with
her. Once the two do manage a few moments alone, however, Agnes wins
him over. It’s during her seduction of Steven that we pick up that
Agnes possesses a good degree of cunning and knows how to play people
to her advantage. This skill is going to come in handy because things
are about to go south real fast. On their way back to Arnolfini’s
castle, they’re ambushed by Martin and his cohorts disguised as
pilgrims. Arnolfini gets laid out with a spear wound to the chest and
Agnes is unable to escape from the wagons before Martin’s crew
steals them. Later that night, as the mercenaries are reveling in
their victory and enjoying their newly acquired spoils, they stumble
across Agnes in her hiding place and despite her attempts at
bargaining with them, she ends up thrown to the wolves. Agnes is
quick to notice that Martin doesn’t seem quite so keen on sharing
her with the rest and it’s while Martin is raping her that she
decides to start acting as though she enjoys it. Horrifying and hard
to watch as this scene is, her gambit works and as one of his men
makes a move towards her Martin starts a fire as a distraction.</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuOtJvNwNLWIJZdIcqMOBiIQcD1QvyO93OuTj_n4eHQyiYbMlszehiphR1lXWfzNLlCmjhMJt9Yq9-LYvt3_ntXg_jPu0DctywOMKTxiWblNDghjK4rYK3EHcJXMUbGTe2qRQPhvXIFj1v/s1600/PDVD_012.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuOtJvNwNLWIJZdIcqMOBiIQcD1QvyO93OuTj_n4eHQyiYbMlszehiphR1lXWfzNLlCmjhMJt9Yq9-LYvt3_ntXg_jPu0DctywOMKTxiWblNDghjK4rYK3EHcJXMUbGTe2qRQPhvXIFj1v/s320/PDVD_012.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">When
the fire results in the St. Martin statue they’ve been dragging
around with them shifting around, Martin tells everyone this is
another sign pointing towards their future fortunes and has them move
out. When they pass by a castle the next day, Martin decides this is
as good of a place to as any to set up shop. He has Agnes accompany
him when he breaks into the place so he can open the gates and let
the rest in to kill the occupants; they waste no time in making
themselves the lords of their new little domain. Tensions are already
building, though, as it becomes apparent that whatever new fangled
rules the mercenaries have sworn to live by, Martin certainly doesn’t
think they apply to him or his new playmate. The party gets cut short
anyway because the daughter of the castle’s lord, a sickly young
girl, was able to escape the attack and was found by Steven. Before
she expired, her raves about “devils” breaking into her home are
enough to clue Steven in that he’s headed in the fight direction.
He’s brought some help too: a few dozen of his father’s soldiers
and Hawkwood, who he’s extorted into helping him. Unfortunately,
that girl they found was infected with the bubonic plague; now
Hawkwood has caught it and the bloodletting used to treat him doesn’t
seem to be doing more than hastening along his demise. With him out
of action, it’s up to Steven, using both his engineering acumen and
a willingness to be every bit the ruthless bastard his father is, to
find a way to get into this castle and Agnes out. Yes, ladies and
gentlemen, we’re in Robert E. Howard’s favorite hang out:
Barbarism vs. Civilization, and Agnes, caught in between the two, is
going to do whatever she can to make sure she’s still alive when
the smoke clears.</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwWAL_mnc3UbyaXhdQ1sxfi8pSYmOA8u8hKcaGoyRlyTpvgooCM0dZwQ33gO6kxDuQSQoWxa-H3HURbR0UVclC16EUchXzF7fAT_HpxPzltda6UY5u7B9QlowOnQoeUQrRzzlNUnVlodvm/s1600/PDVD_011.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwWAL_mnc3UbyaXhdQ1sxfi8pSYmOA8u8hKcaGoyRlyTpvgooCM0dZwQ33gO6kxDuQSQoWxa-H3HURbR0UVclC16EUchXzF7fAT_HpxPzltda6UY5u7B9QlowOnQoeUQrRzzlNUnVlodvm/s320/PDVD_011.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It’s
impressive that FLESH + BLOOD comes together as well as it does
because by all accounts, it was an absolute nightmare to shoot. The
America-Dutch co-production was Verhoeven’s first English language
film and he was still learning to speak it while filming, which often
made communication with its multi-national cast difficult. While the
film’s six million dollar budget was larger than anything Verhoeven
had to work with back in the Netherlands, it didn’t quite match the
ambitions of this project and you can tell things were getting
stretched a little thin by the time the finale rolls around. Disputes
over the portrayal of Martin ultimately lead to Verhoeven’s
refusing to ever work again with Hauer, who had been his lead actor
of choice back in the home country. Most notably, is that due to
studio interference, the movie we ended up with wasn’t the movie
that Verhoeven had set out to make. What he was originally going for
was something akin to THE WILD BUNCH with swords; Martin as Pike
Bishop and Hawkwood as Deke Thorton, respectively. The studio, on the
other hand, wanted the focus to be more on the supposed love triangle
between Martin, Agnes, and Steven, so Hawkwood ended up being
relegated to a supporting role. Well, as much as I hate to side with
the bean counters over an artist, this worked out in the film’s
advantage. Of the two stories, that’s simply the more compelling
one and it all due to the character of Agnes. Women who will do
whatever they can to survive, even if it means crawling over a dead
body or two, are a staple of Verhoeven’s films and she’s without
a doubt one of the best examples. She’s smart enough to realize
that Martin claiming her as his woman is the only way to ensure any
degree of safety and is willing endure his brutal attentions if it
means staying out of the hands of the others. What surprises her is
that, as the movie goes on, her medieval Patty Hearst act gets her in
touch with a more devilish side of herself and danged if she doesn’t
find something a little liberating about being the queen of this
bunch of lunatics. Of course, once Steven and company come knocking,
that’s not going to slow her down one iota in letting him know that
he needs to hurry up and get her out of there. </span>
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii4ocrJwlMaH7ZNVJra3GJF_z1eqfahj8_DlIr2nI8U4TakkfonhE2sVYopGm8Oxxp9zHbqhrxjlUsOYNIKAuZstyPF6XRzgEltA5T7R7fqA018hidtQxZ8Lz6dTqLgBJr7WPmtFOSLEDd/s1600/PDVD_024.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEii4ocrJwlMaH7ZNVJra3GJF_z1eqfahj8_DlIr2nI8U4TakkfonhE2sVYopGm8Oxxp9zHbqhrxjlUsOYNIKAuZstyPF6XRzgEltA5T7R7fqA018hidtQxZ8Lz6dTqLgBJr7WPmtFOSLEDd/s320/PDVD_024.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It’s
an understatement to say that FLESH + BLOOD is a wildly different
movie from the other medieval adventure and sword and sorcery flicks
that were popular in the eighties. With its constantly shifting
character relationships, symbolism and imagery, cast of characters
that runs through nearly every social class, and the way that it goes
completely scorched earth on that cast for its apocalyptic finale, it
wouldn’t be too presumptuous to call it the closest thing we’ve
gotten to Verhoeven doing a Shakespeare adaptation. Even the film’s
original concept, which would have been about shipwreck survivors
falling under the thrall of a religious heretic exiled to the island
they crashed on, can’t help but call THE TEMPEST to mind. Whether
you agree with that reading or not, you have to admit that one
shouldn’t go into it expecting something along the lines of CONAN
THE BARBARIAN or John Boorman’s EXCALIBUR. There is one medieval
fantasy series I would say FLESH + BLOOD closely resembles, though,
and that takes us back to my earlier comment about it being ahead of
its time. That’s because the series in question wouldn’t be along
until a decade later and wouldn’t become a household name for
another fifteen years when its television adaptation hit HBO: George
R.R. Martin’s A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE and A GAME OF THRONES. Sure,
FLESH + BLOOD doesn’t feature much in the way of the supernatural
or magic (though as Scott Ashlin elaborates on in <a href="http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewse-g/fleshandblood.htm" target="_blank">his review</a>, Steven might as well be a wizard) and Agnes never gets her hands on a trio of
newborn dragons, which would have been a big help. What
connects the two is how they enjoy knocking holes in the notion of
the romanticized idea of medieval life. Much like
Martin’s Westeros, Verhoeven’s 16th century Italy is a land where every authority figure is
pettily corrupt, horrible bastards thrive, women have to find ways to move within what spaces a society that actively hates them allows and everything's covered in a layer or two of grime, filth and squalor. Whether or not this gritty approach is really a more realistic depiction of the Middle Ages than verdant hills dotted with shining castles and gallant knights astride white horses is a whole other discussion but there's no denying its effectiveness as a backdrop if handled correctly. FLESH + BLOOD success at doing this comes down how Verhoeven handles the difficult balancing act of never standing in judgement of its characters while at the same time making no excuses for the horrible things they do. He may be an extremely charismatic example of one but the movie never wants you to forget for a moment that Martin is a vile thug. At the same time, it's impossible not to feel sympathy for him when he has to bury his stillborn child in the only casket available, a small wine barrel, and is shocked into </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; text-align: center;">stunned silence when he catches sight of the infant's small hand. Its penchant for finding moments of humanity in the worst and viciousness in its best (granted, by comparison) gives the narrative much of its strength, going beyond simply saying "there are, like, no real heroes and villains, man" like that 22-year old who gets how the world works.</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpxHgCtSpNOkSOGAPqZ2XC1oCM-J58rJATkvsX0tElcOBZp7kfdWyLe44IkqdVrTXr-PtoMR3F9JEfhO7-8bPEznFF9K9fwe0cmfI061jYF7_9cOr3shD3HvoKgt1jwR-Ga-3vphCT-7a/s1600/PDVD_028.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: small; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="162" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVpxHgCtSpNOkSOGAPqZ2XC1oCM-J58rJATkvsX0tElcOBZp7kfdWyLe44IkqdVrTXr-PtoMR3F9JEfhO7-8bPEznFF9K9fwe0cmfI061jYF7_9cOr3shD3HvoKgt1jwR-Ga-3vphCT-7a/s320/PDVD_028.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">It helps that FLESH + BLOOD happens to be such a good looking movie. Cinematographer Jan de Bont, who would also work on DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> before becoming a director himself, was a frequent collaborator with Verhoeven and between the two of them they hit on some fantastic shots and compositions of smoke shrouded battlefields, candle lit chambers, and groups of dirty face flashing wolf-like grins full of yellow teeth. It took me a while to decide on what screenshots to use with this write-up because there's so much memorable imagery in it, whether its Martin's head haloed by a burning wheel or (God, only in a Verhoeven movie) Steven and Agnes's first kiss taking place beneath a pair of hanged, rotted corpses. The film's score was composed by another Verhoeven regular, Basil Poledouris, and his orchestral themes support the visuals more than admirably, the rousing music sounding like how an exciting adventure story reads. Verhoeven hired Poledouris after hearing his score for CONAN THE BARBARIAN and would work with him again on ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS and it's understandable why. </span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qsPtdi5MNPMuakUQLh_vYcfM4QvVpO6Zqw1G6hF9UMwF-ODf_L3QMwIn2atOUua5YUTxGlsACYIGUzElNF0TUDFsHfOXWDzxFjuKd1X8x5GPLSbe6MZiJh71oxkqtkPdHkOjfOd9VSj5/s1600/PDVD_006.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9qsPtdi5MNPMuakUQLh_vYcfM4QvVpO6Zqw1G6hF9UMwF-ODf_L3QMwIn2atOUua5YUTxGlsACYIGUzElNF0TUDFsHfOXWDzxFjuKd1X8x5GPLSbe6MZiJh71oxkqtkPdHkOjfOd9VSj5/s320/PDVD_006.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Considering that there was little else like it at the time and the biggest audience for it wouldn't be along for almost two and half decades, it's not surprising that Orion Pictures had no idea how to market the film. </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3djxsIb9KHc" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">The trailer</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> released for it is impressively able to spoil the entire movie without telling you a single thing about it. If you were going by any of the posters used to advertise it (save for </span><a href="http://www.impawards.com/1985/flesh_and_blood.html" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;" target="_blank">one</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">) you wouldn't be blamed for thinking that you were in for a romantic adventure like that other medieval Rutger Hauer movie from '85, LADYHAWKE, which FLESH + BLOOD almost feels like a savage response to. Even the summary on the Netflix envelope did that. Won't lie, though, I would have liked to been in a theater to see the reaction of someone expecting a movie like LADYHAWKE and got one where its cast is pelted with chunks of plague ridden dog meat instead. ("Oh that Rutger Hauer is so dreamy, I can't wait toO<i>H MY GOD!</i>") Nothing says romance like The Black Death, I guess.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Oh, I almost forgot! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><br />I never told you what the other movie was. Y'know, the one that I had wanted to see on the afternoon I went to see ROBOCOP? The one that we ended up not going to because she thought it would be <i>too scary</i> for us kids to see. Ummm...yeah. 'bout that...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">We can all agree that I came out ahead here, right?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><u>A Little Something Extra:</u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Basil Poledours - "FLESH + BLOOD Suite"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">But that's not all!<br /><br /><a href="http://grantland.com/features/career-arc-paul-verhoeven/" target="_blank">Grantland's Career Arc: Paul Verhoevan </a>- A fantastic retrospective on the man's career, though I must deduct points for it leading off with a shot from ROBOCOP 3, for cryin' out loud.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.filmcomment.com/article/paul-verhoeven-total-recall-interview/" target="_blank">On Dangerous Ground: Paul Verhoevan Interviewed:</a> An in-depth interview with the man himself from circa TOTAL RECALL.</span></div>
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</iframe>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-6270412564055153092015-08-31T09:46:00.002-07:002015-09-08T13:16:55.258-07:00Wes Craven 1939 - 2015<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOydHi1cRRIyUThEJjoYvmI84N1FVVWFYWAPLfN7elDQHTPO7i1ad7xYMrfc5sAB8jrUev20uHFOjVGQfAXKfDz37yZ5tln4OZDGGxPz_k0oBWL26TRz4uHZSHMIAmoPD8HeLUa1VmAoz/s1600/tumblr_ntyg8rxoqB1qm5jbro1_500.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOydHi1cRRIyUThEJjoYvmI84N1FVVWFYWAPLfN7elDQHTPO7i1ad7xYMrfc5sAB8jrUev20uHFOjVGQfAXKfDz37yZ5tln4OZDGGxPz_k0oBWL26TRz4uHZSHMIAmoPD8HeLUa1VmAoz/s1600/tumblr_ntyg8rxoqB1qm5jbro1_500.jpg" /></a>A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET could have been the only movie Wes Craven ever made and it would have been enough. Age, the numerous sequels and imitators, Freddy Krueger’s transformation into a pop culture icon have done nothing to diminish how original and legitimately terrifying the first movie was. From the opening moments, as we watch Krueger assembling his signature glove, we feel like we’re trapped. We’re in that boiler room with him, curled up in a corner, and he’s about to use that thing on us. It never lets up from there, dragging us into this dark fantasy about parents’ sins coming back around on their children in the worst way. Before he was reshaped into a wisecracking cartoon character, Krueger was the boogeyman through and through. When he corners his first victim in the original movie and she begs God for help, there are no wisecracks, no gimmicks. He just brandishes that damn glove at her and with a gleefully sadistic smile on his face, snarls “THIS is God!” For years afterward, late at night, as I’m lying in bed, trying to get to sleep, my subconscious would love to occasionally poke me with that moment. It’s only fitting. <br />
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Funny thing is, I didn’t get around to seeing to seeing the first NIGHTMARE until I was in college, renting it from Video Warehouse, one of those mom and pop places that don’t exist anymore. Y’know, where you could walk in with ten dollars and walk out with a big stack of VHS cassettes and still have enough left over to go grab a burger and a soda. My first NIGHTMARE movie was the third one, THE DREAM WARRIORS, which one of my sisters rented back when I was a sprout. Craven didn’t direct that one but he was involved as a producer and wrote the story, hoping to right the ship after New Line Cinema rushed out a cheap sequel, the amazingly inept FREDDY’S REVENGE. Even before that, though, little Bill Smiley knew who the hell Freddy Krueger was. If you did any growing up in the mid-to-late 80’s, you couldn’t escape him. He was at the theater, he was on TV, magazines, comics, he was showing up in commercials. To me and other like kids me, the man with hat and glove and certain hockey-mask wearing hulk were our Dracula and the Wolf Man. Our Godzilla and King Kong. They were the guys in those movies that your parents and the Helen Lovejoys of the world didn’t want you to see, which just made you more determined to get your hands on them. ALIEN may have been my first horror movie but it was the NIGHTMARE series that made me sit up and take notice of the genre.<br />
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Had NIGHTMARE been it, that would have been enough and Craven’s death yesterday from cancer would have hit fans of horror films every bit as hard. Thing is, Craven did more than give the world Freddy Krueger. I don’t know if I could unequivocally say that he had the most impact on the horror genre when compared to his contemporaries. That would have to be settled via a fight with John Carpenter while George Romero referees, but nobody did it in the way that Craven did. Most directors would give their good teeth to make a movie that had an impact on popular culture that something like HALLOWEEN or THE EXORCIST did. With LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, NIGHTMARE, and SCREAM, Craven did that three times across as many decades. Dig deeper than that and you’ll see how ahead of his time his output could be. The only NIGHTMARE sequel he directed, THE NEW NIGHTMARE, was doing meta-fictional horror years before every Inky, Blinky, and Clyde in the film industry was having their characters go “Wow, this totally like a horror movie!” THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS had an African-American kid and a young girl as its heroes back when that was something that didn’t happen. Heck, Craven was pretty big on giving memorable roles to women in his movies. Apologies to HALLOWEEN’S Laurie Strode, NIGHTMARE’S Nancy Thompson is the Ur Final Girl of slasher movies as far as I’m concerned, an ancestor of characters like Buffy Summers. Not surprising that the best NIGHTMARE movies not only have Craven’s heavy involvement but have Heather Langenkamp in the cast, too. (<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We at Psychoplasmics are all LANGENKAMP UBER ALLES up in here.)</span><br />
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Significant thing about this is that Craven managed to do it without really being the best of directors. Even his strongest works can be crude and messy in places. He certainly wasn’t a Carpenter-level craftsman or an extravagant stylist like Dario Argento. But remember the motto of this blog, “bad” or “not good” (there’s a difference!) doesn’t translate to not interesting or worth talking about and Craven was definitely an interesting director. He wasn’t the type of filmmaker that threw out a high concept and left things at that but drew heavily from his own experiences <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">and
ideas that he felt strongly about. When you have someone like that behind the
camera, it doesn’t matter what the result is, something about it will stick
with you. When you get a director like that material that they can get a good
handle on? Look out. Need an example? Check his first two movies. THE LAST HOUSE
ON THE LEFT isn’t a great movie by any stretch of the imagination but it has
these moments that you can’t shake off no matter how hard you try. It’s an
exploitation version of Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING, for crying out
loud! What did he follow it up with? THE HILL HAVE EYES and you can take my
word on it that that is a horror movie that will kick your butt all over the
room. It’s also fashionable to kick the SCREAM franchise around but you won’t
see me do it. Rather than the notion that “anybody could have directed Kevin
Williamson’s script” I believe in the complete reverse: only Craven could have
gotten as fun of a movie out of that screenplay. I mean, Good God, have you
seen the other stuff Williamson has written? And even if I wasn’t the biggest
fan of the series, I’d still come to its defense because it’s central to some
of my favorite movie going memories. One was seeing the original on a free
movie night at my future alma mater, Louisiana Tech, and I can’t tell you what
a phenomenal experience, how much it adds, sitting in an auditorium full of
people who are shrieking like little kids or laughing or applauding at all the
moments the movie wants them too. I saw SCREAM 2 in theaters with my Dad. My
Dad doesn’t like modern horror movies and especially doesn’t like slashers, but
when we came out of the theater, he was telling me how much he enjoyed it and
even said that there were parts that had him on the edge of his seat as bad as
anything by Hitchcock. Considering my Dad regularly declares they haven’t made
a good movie since insert Clint Eastwood title here, that’s saying a lot. Even
SCREAM 4 had its moments.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Not only did I respect the movies he made but I respected the man. You listened to one of his commentary tracks or watched or read an interview he gave, you didn’t get the deviant that I’m sure the self-appointed moral guardians pictured. Instead, what you saw was a very well-spoken, thoughtful, and intelligent man. He looks like one of those fatherly teachers that inspires his students to greatness in a TV movie. You were always going to hear something worthwhile when you listened to the man, whether it was talking about his sheltered religious upbringing or working with Robert Englund or his understanding of horror itself. That was the other great thing about Craven. He got it. He knew that horror stories aren’t the cause of the world’s great evils, but that they’re the latest in one of the oldest tradtions, going back to the old myths and campire tales. They don’t create them but they arm us with what we need to confront them.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">How much better off would the horror genre be if we had a dozen directors like him? Unfortunately, we only had the one, and now he has passed. With his passing, something big for me and lot of other people has come to an end.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Rest in peace, sir.</span></span></div>
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</o:p> </span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-43057436565648876602015-08-25T11:36:00.002-07:002015-09-07T12:01:31.764-07:00In Defense of Utter Garbage and Other Thoughts<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwvc5bgLAa-d1VwAYglVvbHVWza8HXe2lbbGbEFJNkOCwyPbIlvYLoUghIlTE2XzHB9i0v69HEEFXILrs2G_1oq2zpZEnD9woi5RmZHXhIBoQBkVC7qj8HFalBRFgG1E9qQjHPaSst94N/s1600/1986-cobra-poster1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwvc5bgLAa-d1VwAYglVvbHVWza8HXe2lbbGbEFJNkOCwyPbIlvYLoUghIlTE2XzHB9i0v69HEEFXILrs2G_1oq2zpZEnD9woi5RmZHXhIBoQBkVC7qj8HFalBRFgG1E9qQjHPaSst94N/s320/1986-cobra-poster1.jpg" width="213" /></a><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">PSYCHOPLASMICS
could have been a podcast. If, y’know, had I the time, equipment, money or even
the slightest idea at all of how to begin making one of those. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or maybe even a YouTube channel, except we run
into the same problems, and between you and me, folks, I don’t think YouTube needs
yet another goof on there rattling on about movies and how great he thinks DARK
SOULS is. I know a couple of guys who do that already and I don’t really want
to be barging in on their turf, anyway. Still, it had to exist in some form. It
was an itch that needed to be scratched and saying “no” to it was not an
option. So, I looked into setting up something on blogspot, was pleased to
discover that I was already signed up as part of my g-mail account, and then a
little miffed to find that I had been beaten to the name THE CATHODE RAY
MISSION. Fortunately, David Cronenberg movies have plenty of other weird,
catchy sounding names and terminology to swipe. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Well,
that covers the “how” this blog came about but maybe you’re curious about the
“why?” Most likely not, but this is my little corner of the internet, so I’m
going to tell you anyway. Simple: I was checking twitter one day a few weeks
ago and ran across some friends talking about a certain Stallone movie, you
know the one, and this prompted me to dig out my copy, snagged years ago out of
a discount bin. When it was over I was amazed and pretty baffled by what I
watched. I mentioned in my first post that COBRA never takes itself less than
one hundred percent seriously and I think that grim straight-faced tone is
major reason why I don’t remember that movie being nearly that batshit insane
the last time I watched it. I went and made some comments about this on
twitter, but it turns out that wasn’t enough. I found that I had more that I
wanted to say and it wouldn’t leave me alone. So, couple weeks ago, while I was
helping my sister out with watching her kid during the day, I swiped her laptop
and started hammering on that COBRA review. It took about three or four attempts
before I could get it to where I deemed it acceptable and I stayed up so late
finish it up and polish it a couple of nights that the amount of sleep could be
considered a glorified nap but it was worth it, I think. Could’ve been better,
sure; it always can. I think it’s a little long and scattershot; the result of
me trying to work in every single comment I could think of and rewriting big
chunks of it right up to the morning I posted it. Still, I think it a makes fun
little read. More importantly to me, people responded to it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They</i> thought it was a fun little read.
They liked the observations I made and they enjoyed talking with me about it.
That is a kick, right there. That’s what makes all the time and effort I put
into that worthwhile and that’s why I’m going to keep on doing it. Because when
I’m struggling with writing something and I think that I don’t know what I’m
doing and wasting my time, I have something I can point at and tell myself,
“Calm down, you panicky git. People like this. Write more for them.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">And
yes, this is all due to COBRA. Not JAWS, which is my favorite movie of all
time. Or something by Peckinpah, who is my favorite director. Or anything by
Kurosawa, Kubrick, Bergman, Melville, Leone, Coppola, Kobayashi, or Scorsese.
The movie that made me want to take up writing about movies for the first time
in years; to actually give serious consideration to seeing if I could make
something out of my writing, was a friggin’ Stallone shoot-‘em-up from the producers
that gave us THE AMERICAN NINJA series, a stack of Chuck Norris movies, and
competing films about <em><a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/lambada-the-forbidden-dance" target="_blank">the lambada</a></em>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Really, though, what’s so wrong with that?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why not COBRA? (Why *not* Zoidberg?) There's this mindset, probably been around as long as we’ve had the
arts and entertainment but has become more visible to me with the advent of
stuff like YouTube or sites like Cracked.com or Buzzfeed or social media in
general. Two of them, really, though they’re connected. One is the whole idea
that movies are some kind of math problem. That if you point out all the
mistakes, the goofs, all the plot holes, how this would not work in real life
etc. etc. and do it as loudly and with much snark and profanity as possible,
you’ve “solved” the movie. What “solving” it gets you I can’t tell. That you
can notice a mistake? Show what a smartass you can be? Nothing wrong with that,
I guess. There are probably places you can put that to better use. This is<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"> everywhere, too. “Honest” movie trailers, “Everything Wrong With…” videos, “How
It Should Have Ended,” 248 PLOT HOLES YOU MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED BECAUSE YOU WERE
ACTUALLY ENJOYING THE MOVIE, on and on and on. Like they’re all hoping to be
the one who discovers the next “You know that if Indiana Jones wasn’t in
RAIDERS it would have ended the same way?” Then there’s this
whole idea of liking things “ironically.” That it’s okay to like this dumb movie
but you have to do it at a remove. That you’re not really enjoying this stupid
thing, you’re enjoying saying “Look at how stupid this is! Isn’t this stupid?” This is why we have three SHARKNADO movies. Three of them. Contemplate that on the Tree of Woe.<br /><br />(Note: "This Guy Will Not Shut Up About CONAN / THE TERMINATOR / ROBOCOP" was also a possible title for this blog. Reviewing them here would likely be superfluous because of how often I'll refer back to them.)</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
</span>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">To
quote one Crow T. Robot, these approaches need to get a stepladder so they can
jump off my butt. Both of them come from the same source, which I think is the
absolute worst thing to happen to discussion of any form of art: this smug need
to prove how much smarter you are than what you constantly consume. I hate that
so much for one simple reason: it’s all about detachment. It’s all about
unwillingness to come at something at its level and see what it was aiming for,
how it fits together and how it ticks. Why would you do that? It adds nothing to the experience. You don't win a prize by doing this. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p> </o:p> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Let me tell you why I watch movies. I don't throw on The
DOLLARS trilogy because they’re full of realistic gun battles and a
historically accurate depiction of Civil War-era <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>. For me, A FISTFUL OF
DOLLARS is that close up on The Man With No Name’s face.
Seeing his hat brim come up and that look in his eyes and knowing he’s done
joking about those goons apologizing to his mule and things are about to set
off. Or in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY, when Tuco’s lies to save face over
his disastrous reunion with his brother and Blondie, knowing he’s lying, smiles
and hands him a cigar. It's that feeling you get in JAWS when you
hear Chief Brody yell in victory when he finally blows up ole Bruce. (God, if
winning by the skin of your teeth has a sound…) It’s Robocop turning to the OCP
President and telling him that his name is Murphy. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">Monument</st1:placetype> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Valley</st1:placetype></st1:place>
in all its glory in a John Ford western. When the music <em>really</em> kicks in
during the truck chase in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. They're about how striking this person or this place or this camera motion
looks. They’re about the ghost of a smile on a face, the light of greed in
a person's eyes, a touch between two people, colors, sounds, rhythms…and yeah,
sometimes, it’s simply “that blowed up real good.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You cannot boil this down to some formula
because what is exchanged between the screen and the audience is unique for each individual. Somebody
can see something truly beautiful and life affirming in a cheap MAD MAX
knock-off out of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Italy</st1:place></st1:country-region>
as much as someone else can in an “important” movie from an “important”
filmmaker. There is no distance between the two.</span>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
</span>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Which
brings us back to COBRA. COBRA is trash. It’s a bad movie. Here’s the thing,
though, whether or not something is “bad” does not determine whether or not
it’s entertaining or interesting. It does not mean that there is nothing worth
saying about it. People who are a lot smarter than me and have written more
about art than I probably ever will have emphasized that and y’ know what? I’ve
seen it proven time and time again. It’s going to be the unspoken mantra of
this blog. I’ll take it one step further. As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t
engage with a trashy movie, I don’t believe you’ll be able to with
a legitimately great one. Need proof? Scroll back a couple entries. DIRTY HARRY
is a good movie. COBRA takes all the wrong lessons from it to a ridiculous
extreme. By talking about what the latter does in handling the same subject
matter helps underline how the former handled it more than if I was talking
about it alone. Had I not spent all that time working my brain to piece
together what appeals to me about COBRA and all its lurid, fascist nonsense, I either
could not articulate why I loved THE APARTMENT so much or I would have had a
much harder time doing it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know
what’s something I’m considering writing about for this blog? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">M.D. GEIST</i>. Have you people seen M.D.
GEIST? There’s a reason it’s called “The second worst anime ever made.” And yet
you can look at M.D. GEIST and use it talk about the anime industry at the time
it was made or parse out what was going on with the American anime fandom that
made that it successful enough to get a sequel produced for the Americans
despite it being unappealingly awful in everyway. You can say something about
Albert Pyun movies, for crying out loud, even if it’s only “how can this guy
keep screwing up what should be at least watchable via the bizarre concept alone?”
To discuss any form of art and make no effort to understand the hows and whys
of it is insulting and lazy and I will not contribute to that.</span></span></div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">So
this is what you are going to get with PSYCHOPLASMICS. Doesn’t matter if it’s a
blockbuster or this obscure, bizarre curio that no one else has ever heard of,
if it gets its hooks in me, I’m going to write about it. NINJA III: THE
DOMINATION has as much pull around here as THE WILD BUNCH or Scorsese’s MEAN
STREETS. Know what? I may end up not writing only about movies here. You may
see a video game wind up on here, or a novel, or a Hellboy comic or some crazy
manga or a grocery list if clicks with me. Sometimes I won’t even talk about
the whole movie or I could be talking about an entire category of movies that
appeals to me. Already one of each is kicking around in my head. In the near
future there’s going to be a post about why I love the opening to the Tommy Lee
Jones movie BLACK MOON RISING so much and another about knock-offs of Kurosawa’s
YOJIMBO. I hope. Remember the words of Al Swearengen, that announcing your
plans is a good way to make God laugh, and let’s keep our fingers crossed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Furthermore,
you are going to get a lot of writing about “me” here. I’m not the most social
guy in the world. I’m quiet and difficult to get close to (unless you’re a dog)
and internalize a lot of things. I’m constantly worrying that this makes me
come off as more off-putting than I really am and talking about it is a struggle.
But I’m finding that with writing about something that I love, the movies,
makes it easier to put these things into words. I’ll admit, I was terrified
wondering what reaction you all might have to some of the stuff I wrote in that
post about THE APARTMENT. That I was letting you see me bleed too much, that I
was being maudlin and embarrassing myself. Turns out that my fears were
unfounded. There was no reaction and people still liked what I wrote. But the
important thing is, I was able to talk about things that have been nesting in
my gut for years in a space with people I trust and now that’s out of there. If
that’s what it takes, I’ll be maudlin and embarrass myself if I have to. (But
not too often.) Even if my writing just stays this thing I do for fun and never
opens up a way to a more professional gig, I’m already convinced that this will
be good for me in the long run. Fingers crossed, though. I think I might
actually have a knack for it and would love to see how I’d do with a good
editor around to keep me in line. God forbid, I might even post something
original here. (That’s not going to happen any time soon, you can breathe a
sigh of relief.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">One
more thing before I go and that’s to give credit to where credit is due. To my
crew from the old Stomp Tokyo B-Movie Message Board and associates,
PSYCHOPLASMICS would not exist at all without you. Those boards were where I
got the first taste of people being interested in what I have to say about
anything and as the years have gone on, you’ve affected me even more. Not just
the writing that some of you have done, though that is a big factor, but
knowing you and being friends with you have influenced and helped me in ways
that I can’t list, not only with talking about movies but with life. At the
very least, if it weren’t for you guys I wouldn’t have even considered in a
million years seeing a lot of films that I love to death now. So, Gavin, Zack,
Travis, Tim, Other Tim, Dave, Other Dave, Chad, Other Chad, (I’ll let ya’ll
fight over who is who) Mike, Jessica and Scott, Sean, Lisa, Freeman, Amelia,
Bryan, and so many others I could name…you are my audience and this whole
project is for you guys as much as it is for me. Hope that it’s around for a
long time. For the rest of you, welcome aboard and please click on my friends’
links up there in the corner, which you can now see because I changed the
template and got rid of that damn pop-up sidebar. Give ‘em a read.
<Subotai>It’s the good stuff.</Subotai><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Oh,
and I’m coming to B-Fest someday. Count on it. Don’t know how, don’t know when,
but you knuckleheads aren’t going to be able to hide from me forever. I’ll
crate myself up and get myself shipped to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Chicago</st1:place></st1:city>
if I have to. I’ll hitch a ride on the wing and scare the crap out of William
Shatner if that’s what it takes.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><br />
Ok, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i> more thing. That whole deal
about how RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK would have ended the same way if you took
Indy out of the story? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shut up.</i>
Enough of that nonsense. Try to actually imagine a version of RAIDERS that
doesn’t have Indiana Jones in it. That’s a version where <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marion</st1:place></st1:city> gets killed, there’s no Sallah, no
Captain Katanga, probably no Nazi accidentally Sieg-Hiel-ing a monkey,
certainly wouldn’t have the greatest action sequences put on film. It’d be <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">nothing
but us hanging out with Nazis and this French jerk who then die horribly.
All pointing out that proves is that there could be a take on RAIDERS that nobody would want to watch. Stop it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><u><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">A
Little Something Extra:<br />
</span></u><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">”Automatic
System Habit” by Garbage, because some days we need to hear Shirley Manson
going on about how she wants to be “your dirty little secret.” We call those
days every day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/vb1F1a3OEeA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vb1F1a3OEeA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=psychoplasmic-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=B007H9B8FS&asins=B007H9B8FS&linkId=KCIB5YBGD4ZRTNRD&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
</iframe>billhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17505774427464706342noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2307385191317567385.post-2499643997995890942015-08-21T11:24:00.000-07:002016-11-09T11:56:18.972-08:00THE APARTMENT (1960)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsoR8k8-piWysEj03JZnOb4UHHk69ERUYUEq3wRRc2Jb7-Ldv1fdb3hMHG5o4doDBVlZn0emdEymLSo_vzv8B8MQob8U0XDuE5hxjuW5UVr-kpFehutBb8UlGdZuNGDfJ6jyuBawHuF8Qa/s1600/PDVD_001.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsoR8k8-piWysEj03JZnOb4UHHk69ERUYUEq3wRRc2Jb7-Ldv1fdb3hMHG5o4doDBVlZn0emdEymLSo_vzv8B8MQob8U0XDuE5hxjuW5UVr-kpFehutBb8UlGdZuNGDfJ6jyuBawHuF8Qa/s400/PDVD_001.BMP" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Director:
Billy Wilder</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Screenplay:
Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Starring:
Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurry, Jack Kruschen, Ray Walsten</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Running
Time: 125 minutes</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">
Tagline:</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"> “</span><span style="color: #333333; font-size: 10pt;">Movie-wise, there has never been anything like it - laugh-wise,
love-wise, or otherwise-wise!”</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDjejovxl3eKGbdAqjNdKEs1Q5A7YWEh9jHi8E1H24VGPsK2UQaDXrz7AlPNMf41I0J2_odYKns3ik-uDoEaidwXEhrocbPipXDzLNFKSKoo6fx2txZP2ur7HkR2Cijp2_lea8esPXkuw/s1600/PDVD_011.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="163" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisDjejovxl3eKGbdAqjNdKEs1Q5A7YWEh9jHi8E1H24VGPsK2UQaDXrz7AlPNMf41I0J2_odYKns3ik-uDoEaidwXEhrocbPipXDzLNFKSKoo6fx2txZP2ur7HkR2Cijp2_lea8esPXkuw/s320/PDVD_011.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">I had plans to do at least two different things for my second post here at PSYCHOPLASMICS.
One was a review of Paul Verhoeven’s medieval sword and scoundrel film FLESH +
BLOOD. The other started as a little tangent from an earlier version of my
COBRA review that ended up getting up cut out but I liked the idea of it enough
to want to expand it into a post that would serve as something of a mission
statement, both from this blog and for me personally. But those had to be put
aside for the time being for a couple of reasons. One was that trying to decide
which to do next was giving me trouble getting either of them started. The
other was that I finally got around to seeing, on a friend’s recommendation,
Billy Wilder’s romantic comedy THE APARTMENT. As only the most interesting
movies can, (I was going to say “the best movies” but, y’know…COBRA.) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it moved right into my headspace and refused
to leave until I said something about it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, this isn’t the first movie I’ve seen by
Wilder; I caught SOME LIKE IT HOT years back (that’s due for a rewatch) and
recently had the good fortune to see his two incredibly influential noirs,
SUNSET BOULEVARD and DOUBLE INDEMNITY, within a short span of time. (Sure, your
movie is good, but is it “every single second Edward G. Robinson is on screen
in INDEMNITY” good?) Credit where it is due to those other films, THE APARTMENT
is easily my favorite of the Wilder movies I’ve seen and I have no doubts of it
becoming one of my favorite movies period.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is a little guy in the big
city, <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">New York</st1:place></st1:state>
in this case. He’s a clerk at Consolidated Life, one of the biggest insurance
firms in the city. Outside of his job, he doesn’t seem to have much of a life
that we can see. A frozen chicken dinner and trying to find something to watch
on TV appears to how his nights usually go. “I lived like Robinson Crusoe.
Shipwrecked in a city of eight million people” is how he describes himself at
one point. So, it’s not that big of surprise to us that advancing his career
takes such priority…which brings us to this problem with his apartment. How it
exactly came to be is only hinted at but Baxter’s apartment has become the
location of choice when his bosses want to steal away for a little time with
their mistresses and don’t want to run risk of word of their dalliances getting
back to their wives. Getting thrown out of his apartment at all hours plays hell
with his sleeping schedule and health; the women constantly coming and going
and sounds of partying night after night have also resulted in his next door
neighbors thinking that Baxter is some kind of hedonistic letch; but, letting
his bosses take advantage of him like this may be the only way Baxter can get
the promotion he wants without spending years in the coal mines, so to speak. You
can imagine his disappointment when a chance to get that promotion finally
comes and its not a reward for all his hard work but because his personnel
manager Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) wants to make use of his apartment, too.
Baxter goes ahead and gives him a spare key though, because, well, his job is
all he’s got.</span>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The one bright spot in Baxter life is Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), the
woman who operates the elevator that Baxter takes every day. Baxter is pretty
clearly smitten with her (God, who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">wouldn’t
</i>be? MacLaine was not only a serious cutie back then but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that haircut..</i>.) and the two seem to truly
enjoy each other’s company. So, it’s something of a revoltin’ development, to
quote Ben Grimm, when it turns out that Miss Kubelik is Sheldrake’s latest
fling. It’s clear to Fran that Sheldrake is exactly the kind of arrogant
narcissist who will string a woman along with promises of divorcing his wife
and running off to some romantic future but will not follow through; not out
love for his wife, mind you, just that a divorce would be so damned
inconvenient. Fran still holds a torch for the man and it’s causing her no
small amount of emotional distress. Things come to a head on Christmas Eve, after
Sheldrake’s secretary drunkenly informs Fran that she’s not the first thing on
the side Sheldrake’s had, and following an argument with Sheldrake at Baxter’s</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">apartment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The moment when he hands Fran a hundred
dollar bill and tells her to get herself something nice for Christmas in lieu
of actually getting her a gift was so cluelessly cruel it had me yelling at the
dad from MY THREE SONS for what a monumental ass he was being.) Fed up and heartbroken,
Fran takes this as the last straw and decides to end it all by downing a bottle
of sleeping pills. It’s fortunate for her that Baxter comes home a few minutes
later, himself three sheets to the wind over learning of Sheldrake and Fran’s
relationship, and discovers Fran unconscious in his bedroom. He’s lucky enough
to live right next door to a doctor (Jack Kruschen) and the two of them are
able to pump Fran’s stomach and keep her conscious long enough to get her out
of danger. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">It looks like Fran will recover but she’s in no condition to go anywhere.
Sheldrake, who wants to keep his name as far away from his mistress’s suicide
attempt as possible, isn’t going to be any help. While Fran has a family, a sister
and brother-in-law, Baxter is too scared of what might happen to contact them, so
it looks like he’s stuck with caring for the convalescing woman for the next 48
hours. Funny thing, though, that turns out to be the best thing that could
happen to the two of them…</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">Story
goes that the idea for THE APARTMENT came to Billly Wilder when he was watching
the David Lean film A BRIEF ENCOUNTER. In that movie, there was scene where a
friend of the main characters, a couple having an affair, allowed them to use
his apartment for one of their trysts. Wilder apparently found this character,
who appeared only briefly, far more compelling than the leads. Who exactly
would do something like that? How would they react to coming home afterwards? (Like
most artists who show a knack for picking apart American culture, Wilder was an
outsider looking from within; a German immigrant who fled the Nazis and came to
the U.S. to make films.) Learning of a number of real life incidents that
involved more or less the same situation around <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Hollywood</st1:place></st1:city> inspired Wilder further. However,
at the time the restrictions set in place by the Hays Code meant that getting a
comedy-drama based around infidelity produced was highly unlikely. Thankfully,
by the time the late 50’s rolled in, the Code was becoming a thing of the past,
thereby freeing Wilder to make the film he wanted.</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">In
his words, THE APARTMENT was a story about the “emancipation of two people” who
are victims of corporate callousness and for the emancipation part of the story
to work at all, you needed to see just what it was they need to be emancipated
from. Needless to say, being cogs in the machine isn’t doing Baxter and Fran’s
well-being any favors. She’s an emotional wreck over a man who couldn’t be
bothered to buy her a Christmas present and he’s a schmuck who lets his bosses,
who could most charitably be described as a bunch of shallow, smug pricks, walk
all over him. It’s only after they’ve been knocked down to their lowest point
that they find something else worth grasping on to. This brings me to one of
the things that stuck out at me as I was looking into the history of the film;
while a financial success and later an Academy award winner, THE APARTMENT got
a mixed reaction from critics. Many found the film’s subject matter
objectionable and furthermore couldn’t reconcile with the way that the film
mixed pathos and slapstick humor. Pauline Kael rather infamously called the
film “a dirty fairy tale.” Amusingly, I actually like that phrase a lot. I
think it describes THE APARTMENT beautifully. We’ll ignore that she meant it as
a condemnation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Well, the audiences disagreed, and time has proven
them incorrect but I still feel compelled to kick a little more dirt at the
dissenters. Seriously guys, you couldn’t have been more wrong. Had THE
APARTMENT been this fun, frothy little comedy with charming dialogue and
performances and never bothered to go to the dark places that it does, I
probably would’ve enjoyed it but it wouldn't have had much of a lasting effect.
It’s Fran’s suicide attempt and the events that follow that make this movie
such a compelling piece of film. THE APARTMENT is willing to go to some pretty
dark places but remains completely humane while doing so, never once losing its
warmth and empathy towards its two lead characters. No scene in the movie best
exemplifies this than the one where Baxter makes light of his own botched
suicide to cheer up Fran. (One line in particular speaks volumes: “I couldn’t
bend my knee for close to a year, but I got over the girl in three weeks.”) It
certainly helps that Wilder cast the two roles so perfectly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a good chunk</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">
of the film’s running time, Baxter doesn’t display much in the way of redeeming
qualities but we like him anyway, simply because Jack Lemmon is so dang
likeable. His performance is <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both low
key and incredibly physical, giving us everything ranging from his comical
reactions to having to shuffle around his bosses scheduled stopovers to a
quietly<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>played moment when he learns
just what Fran’s relationship with Sheldrake is. He’s so good here that it’s no
surprise that he was Wilder’s choice for the role from moment one. Rumor has it
that Marilyn Monroe was going to play Fran. Now I don’t know if that was true
but if it was well, I can’t see her working in the role, can you? Having Fran
be this breathy voiced blonde bombshell would have taken something away from
the character while MacLaine easily brings the right mix of sharp wit and
extreme vulnerability it needed. It’s no surprise then this was her breakout
role. Or that I started crushing on Fran so easily. I mean, come on: cute,
funny with a lot of flair, but masking an emotional turmoil that’s on-par with
an F5 tornado? That’s my kind of woman.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKMPPU8aYPuoiAUOl1P5utJ9O7cfr-3I7yraD1-J6uzeYEnZQWs_VceWpXduIGzoCOl3RXfb59Y8yTfmC75iS2vLE7OZJ_LZVX0zaUYCaL6f5OyYZzeikdzRriCxMhvplQhqYID7WiFzU/s1600/PDVD_021.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="164" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKMPPU8aYPuoiAUOl1P5utJ9O7cfr-3I7yraD1-J6uzeYEnZQWs_VceWpXduIGzoCOl3RXfb59Y8yTfmC75iS2vLE7OZJ_LZVX0zaUYCaL6f5OyYZzeikdzRriCxMhvplQhqYID7WiFzU/s320/PDVD_021.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">It
may come as a shock to you, but beneath this grand façade of overpowering
machismo is the heart of a romantic fool. I don’t think there’s a more “it me”
line of dialogue in cinema than Holly Mason in THE THIRD MAN drunkenly stating
“Oh, I’m nobody. I’m just a hack writer…who falls in love with girls.” I’m not
ashamed to admit it, I love a good love story; poor old Holly watching the
woman he loves walk right by him at Harry Lime’s funeral; Rick sacrificing his
own happiness for Ilsa; Kyle Reese crossing time for Sarah Conner; Valeria
telling Conan The Barbarian “Let us take the world by the throat and make it
give us what we desire.” (Now, you can argue with me that isn’t the most
romantic line of dialogue ever written but I must warn you if you do: knives
will come out and shall not return to their sheaths until they have drawn
blood.) For the longest time, though, I didn’t really have much interest in
romantic movies by themselves. Clueless that I was, I figured it was a genre
that was Not For Me; the home of stories about generic pretty people wandering
if their love will survive this trip to Paris or workaholics whose lives are
changed by a quirky free spirit who’s dying of one of those diseases that makes
them look more saintly and beautiful. Well, I can’t stand “quirky,” I have a
face for radio, and my bank account is such an abyss I’d be lucky to afford a
trip to </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Paris</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">. </span><st1:state style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Texas</st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">. </span><st1:place style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;" w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Paris</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">Texas</st1:state></st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">.
I was proven wrong, however, when I finally decided to fill in one of the big
gaps in my movie watching experience and check out some of the films of </span><st1:place style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;" w:st="on">Hong Kong</st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;"> director Wong Kar-Wai. I don’t know if I can do
the man’s career justice so I’ll keep things simple: CHUNGKING EXPRESS was
fantastic and FALLEN ANGELS was pretty okay but felt too much like CKE 2.0, but
both of those films are overshadowed in my mind by his 2000 release, IN THE
MOOD FOR LOVE. (I still need to get off my butt and see 2046.)</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">I
can’t call this movie anything but beautiful. It’s also an achingly sad one. I
think all the best romances need a bit of sadness to them, don’t you? Starring
Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, it tells the story of two neighbors in mid-20<sup>th</sup>
century <st1:place w:st="on">Hong Kong</st1:place> who are doing everything
they can to deny the bond forming between them as they drift away from their
spouses. (Who, unbeknownst to them, are cheating on them with each other.)
There’s nothing of the nonsense I mentioned or say like “It’s totally okay that
character X is cheating because their spouse / partner is a dick and in the way
of Twu Wuv!” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">OH HOW WE HATES THAT,
PRECIOUS!</i>) It’s simply about two people who want to feel that connection
again, finding it over little things like eating cheap noodles together or
writing a kung fu serial. That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is something
I can relate to. I was hooked then and wanted more. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">Ironically,
another one I would enjoy was BREEZY, directed by Clint Eastwood, which does
feature a lonely workaholic whose hum drum life is brightened by the entrance
into by a quirky free spirit. Granted, she’s not dying in that. Maybe that’s
it?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Watching THE APARTMENT helped coalesce something in my
head about why I’ve suddenly turned around on romances. Obviously, a big part
of it is just “You’re watching good movies, duh” but that not the only thing.
You see, I need movies like this. Love is great, they tell me, except when it
isn’t, and if you wouldn’t mind me getting all personal for a bit, I
can say that my experiences with it have been more the latter than the former.
Relationships that fizzled before</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> they</span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 10pt;">even
started; someone you thought was going to be something major, only for them to
up and leave you one day, no explanation given. A one sided attraction that
lead you to do and say things you still regret a decade and change later, and
cost you friends. Even worse, they don’t even hate you for it, you’re just a
joke to them now. Finding yourself in that same situation again, hoping that
you’re older, wiser, at least more aware enough to keep history from repeating.
Terrified that you’re not. It’s not right, is it, that the same people who make
us feel admiration, affection, attraction towards them also by equal turns make
you feel angry and confused; resigned to idea that it’s always going to be this
way; so frustrated you want to punch a wall, just so your scraped knuckles will
give you something else to think about. It’s not fair to them either. They
aren’t doing this to you; it’s all that nonsense that refuses to turn loose of
your brain and heart that’s at fault here. Believe me, folks, when a despondent
Fran asks “Why do people have to love people, anyway?” or “I wonder how long it
takes to get someone you’re stuck on out of your system. Do they make a pump
for that?” Baxter isn’t the only one nodding his head and going “I know what
you mean.” (I’m wishing for a switch that I could just turn on and off myself.)
It’s a joke in our culture but I can understand why watching these movies make
people want to sob into a bucket of ice cream. They can grab a hold of some
thoroughly ugly emotions, things you don’t want to look at and force you to do
it. Just takes a line of dialogue, a look on someone’s face, a note on the
soundtrack and something you want so desperately to stay in place gives way and
aw crap; here comes the waterworks and the snot and that noise that sounds more
like something a small dog would make.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUQP9CT6VWmx5xs-dC41iBmZKCa7EkshrGY74KBhfqr93HAN9BTDXIPxJBO0LtySM6EUXNBU83rCJVe8teEZ0_DShonZFVOyv4hkbkWQHuzsNgmZel7jXj9Q-8HPH5v_2tQU37C10_R6AP/s1600/PDVD_010.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUQP9CT6VWmx5xs-dC41iBmZKCa7EkshrGY74KBhfqr93HAN9BTDXIPxJBO0LtySM6EUXNBU83rCJVe8teEZ0_DShonZFVOyv4hkbkWQHuzsNgmZel7jXj9Q-8HPH5v_2tQU37C10_R6AP/s320/PDVD_010.BMP" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">It
hurts. God, it hurts. It feels like you broke something. But y’know what?
Sometimes you need to do that so that an earlier injury can heal properly.
That’s why I’ll keep seeking out these movies. They’re catharsis; therapy. If I
hadn’t watched THE APARTMENT, I don’t know if I’d ever have been able to write
that last stretch, because bloody <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hell</i>,
it wasn’t easy. It’s a movie that tells you that, despite how bad things look
now, things can turn out OK and you can end up becoming a better person for it.
I’d say that’s a message worth enduring a little heartache over, wouldn’t you?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-e_8yBtc-Jzs9nwdePOuKE8FT0Nz1KkzRlNl-vucDyJhYaAjnvfhmB_i8IoVu_oRqXBzsK6MfZ6cROlxhoOFhOw5MQIL_G0uca_Jb075LLJ1NSt1_-JAsIIoluXD6yxzNtmow0MSM2uJF/s1600/PDVD_023.BMP" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-e_8yBtc-Jzs9nwdePOuKE8FT0Nz1KkzRlNl-vucDyJhYaAjnvfhmB_i8IoVu_oRqXBzsK6MfZ6cROlxhoOFhOw5MQIL_G0uca_Jb075LLJ1NSt1_-JAsIIoluXD6yxzNtmow0MSM2uJF/s400/PDVD_023.BMP" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">“Shut
up and deal.”<br />
<br />
<u>A Little Something Extra:<o:p></o:p></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">That’s
a heavy note to end things on, isn’t it? What say I leave you with something
that gets your blood going? Among the positive things I’ll have to say about
the year of our lord 2015 will be discovering the existence of Australian
musician Brody Dalle. I wish I had learned about her and her band The Distillers
back in college, because I get the feeling they would been Very Important to
Young William. Certainly would have been better than all that terrible nu-metal
I listened to. (Yes, <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Virginia</st1:place></st1:state>,
I owned a Slipknot album.) Here’s one of my favorite tracks from her band
Spinnerette. Give it a listen, get up and move.<br />
<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">C’mon babe, I never needed you so bad,</i></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">You were born under a
full moon,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt;">But baby, I’m the
only one howlin’.</span></i></div>
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