(Michael Mazo/Lloyd A. Simandl, 1987)
Ostensibly a movie about a psychopath in thrall to his mother - now where have we heard that one before? - this movie achieves the remarkable feat of running out its entire narrative in the first fifteen minutes. Given the calibre of performances, you might in fact be grateful that things then revert to the usual menaced ladies in a cabin, and since these ladies in fact comprise a home-based escort service, the so-called directors (Simandl has learned nothing in the eight years since the hateful amateur hour that was "Autumn Born") claim ample resort to the female torso. They can't act - best line: "You were in a BAR?!" - and they're pretty obnoxious, but they sure come as a relief after the nondescript frump of a mother and the dull-ass lump of a psycho. The first problem, though, is that the opening teased us with the promise of a plot, thus calling attention to the sad nothingness of all that follows; these clowns can't even stage a decent stabbing. The second problem is that the psycho is still with us. John Robert Johnson is like a guy doing a retard impression at a frat party only less subtle, and by the third stroll in the woods you'll wish the credits had rolled as soon as his dinghy exploded.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Paperback Hero
(Peter Pearson, 1973)
No boring smalltown prairie slice of life here. This character study of a rebel in his own mind is full of wit and critique, from the slush on the surface of the doomed hockey rink to the showdown climax that finally nails Kier Dullea's good ole boy to the wall. The main concern is with rural systems of power. Still living at his parents' place, Dullea draws status from his hockey coworkers and from the many women he romances, as he thumbs his nose at bosses and cops. For all his attitude, though, he's still at their mercy, and as the owner pulls the plug on his team and the women in his life get fed up with him, he learns the limits of playing cowboy as a resistance strategy. The filmmakers understand the crushing closeness of country society well enough to draw out universal truths about the difficulty of opposition, without ignoring the countless ways that the status quo is well worth opposing. These complexities express themselves through dynamic gray shadings that are given compelling shape in just about every scene. And it's most impressive that the desperate highs and lows of sexual questing on both sides of the gender divide get the most vivid and humane treatment of all.
No boring smalltown prairie slice of life here. This character study of a rebel in his own mind is full of wit and critique, from the slush on the surface of the doomed hockey rink to the showdown climax that finally nails Kier Dullea's good ole boy to the wall. The main concern is with rural systems of power. Still living at his parents' place, Dullea draws status from his hockey coworkers and from the many women he romances, as he thumbs his nose at bosses and cops. For all his attitude, though, he's still at their mercy, and as the owner pulls the plug on his team and the women in his life get fed up with him, he learns the limits of playing cowboy as a resistance strategy. The filmmakers understand the crushing closeness of country society well enough to draw out universal truths about the difficulty of opposition, without ignoring the countless ways that the status quo is well worth opposing. These complexities express themselves through dynamic gray shadings that are given compelling shape in just about every scene. And it's most impressive that the desperate highs and lows of sexual questing on both sides of the gender divide get the most vivid and humane treatment of all.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Porky's Revenge
(James Komack, 1985)
With Bob Clark having fled the country, so goes the patina of "quality". As the guys' sense of ensemble deepens they also start to show their age, especially Meat who appears to have developed a steroid dependency; the women are pure window dressing and are given zilch to do. The only thing dumber than the plotting is the execution, which goes out of its way to underline every improbability, longueur and logical lapse. The sexual liberation of Balbricker is such a botch from top to bottom that the quantum leap in kindness from previous installments is rendered a liability, and the paddleboat destruction of the end sequence is predicated on a 'big scheme' of unbelievable sloppiness. But while this is obviously a far, far lousier piece of filmmaking than the original "Porky's", I still find it just a bit more watchable - because high moral seriousness is not even on the radar, because its idiocy is harmless, because absurdly overdrawn boner gags still touch the child in all of us.
With Bob Clark having fled the country, so goes the patina of "quality". As the guys' sense of ensemble deepens they also start to show their age, especially Meat who appears to have developed a steroid dependency; the women are pure window dressing and are given zilch to do. The only thing dumber than the plotting is the execution, which goes out of its way to underline every improbability, longueur and logical lapse. The sexual liberation of Balbricker is such a botch from top to bottom that the quantum leap in kindness from previous installments is rendered a liability, and the paddleboat destruction of the end sequence is predicated on a 'big scheme' of unbelievable sloppiness. But while this is obviously a far, far lousier piece of filmmaking than the original "Porky's", I still find it just a bit more watchable - because high moral seriousness is not even on the radar, because its idiocy is harmless, because absurdly overdrawn boner gags still touch the child in all of us.
Porky's II: The Next Day
(Bob Clark, 1983)
Is it really so hard to see this movie as the atonement and improvement it is? Winning my heart up front is a scene in which Kaki Hunter finally gives voice to a female perspective on teen sex, insisting that she does it because she enjoys it and describing the painful experience of being labeled a slut. Sure, there's something a little, oh, self-serving about Clark comparing his brand of smut to Shakespeare and/or the Bible. But the juxtaposition gives the franchise a goose, creating comic opportunities (many of which are of course flogged to within an inch of their lives) even as it startlingly displaces much of the sexual humour in favour of the social commentary that is obviously Clark's more pressing concern. Here's a movie where a bunch of frat boys team up with the Seminoles to defeat a hypocritically puritanical coalition of government, the religious right and the KKK! The preacher is a Billy Graham lookalike, the politician is named "Gebhardt". And this time it's handled with a touch so much lighter and friendlier than the original that it actually does make irresponsibility seem responsible. In other words, this is the long-sought missing link between the original film and Clark's classic "A Christmas Story" - there's even a cameo appearance from what I'll swear is the exact same mannequin leg that shows up in Darren McGavin's lamp.
Is it really so hard to see this movie as the atonement and improvement it is? Winning my heart up front is a scene in which Kaki Hunter finally gives voice to a female perspective on teen sex, insisting that she does it because she enjoys it and describing the painful experience of being labeled a slut. Sure, there's something a little, oh, self-serving about Clark comparing his brand of smut to Shakespeare and/or the Bible. But the juxtaposition gives the franchise a goose, creating comic opportunities (many of which are of course flogged to within an inch of their lives) even as it startlingly displaces much of the sexual humour in favour of the social commentary that is obviously Clark's more pressing concern. Here's a movie where a bunch of frat boys team up with the Seminoles to defeat a hypocritically puritanical coalition of government, the religious right and the KKK! The preacher is a Billy Graham lookalike, the politician is named "Gebhardt". And this time it's handled with a touch so much lighter and friendlier than the original that it actually does make irresponsibility seem responsible. In other words, this is the long-sought missing link between the original film and Clark's classic "A Christmas Story" - there's even a cameo appearance from what I'll swear is the exact same mannequin leg that shows up in Darren McGavin's lamp.
Porky's
(Bob Clark, 1981)
Unlike most subsequent comedies of sexual humiliation, this trailblazer is a 'real' movie, made by a capable craftsman. In between the sex talk, Clark explores his themes of machismo and racism with palpable seriousness, and the scenes at Porky's sex bar have an undertone of real malevolence, not the usual fun stuff. In fact, it's not fun at all. The unrelenting, smug cruelty of the humour is painful to endure; Clark may think he's building bridges by showing women and black guys joining in the escapades, but the result feels evasive and wrong. In this context, and sincere though it might be, the (highly compromised) anti-racism subplot feels like a diversion: at no point does anyone issue a comparable challenge to the view of sex as guys getting women to do what they want by any means necessary. The fat-phobic stuff certainly doesn't help, nor do the exhaustingly endless prompt-shots of guffawing bystanders. I will only confess to laughing twice: Peewee's naked night run is handled with uncharacteristic finesse, and the long-take penis identification conference in the principal's office takes broad as far as it will go, climaxing with a zoom that puts the project's normative mission in a nutshell.
Unlike most subsequent comedies of sexual humiliation, this trailblazer is a 'real' movie, made by a capable craftsman. In between the sex talk, Clark explores his themes of machismo and racism with palpable seriousness, and the scenes at Porky's sex bar have an undertone of real malevolence, not the usual fun stuff. In fact, it's not fun at all. The unrelenting, smug cruelty of the humour is painful to endure; Clark may think he's building bridges by showing women and black guys joining in the escapades, but the result feels evasive and wrong. In this context, and sincere though it might be, the (highly compromised) anti-racism subplot feels like a diversion: at no point does anyone issue a comparable challenge to the view of sex as guys getting women to do what they want by any means necessary. The fat-phobic stuff certainly doesn't help, nor do the exhaustingly endless prompt-shots of guffawing bystanders. I will only confess to laughing twice: Peewee's naked night run is handled with uncharacteristic finesse, and the long-take penis identification conference in the principal's office takes broad as far as it will go, climaxing with a zoom that puts the project's normative mission in a nutshell.
Paradise
(Stuart Gillard, 1982)
It is a positively heroic quest to endure the ten thousand walking-camel shots that stand between the viewer and Phoebe Cates' teenage anatomy. And after the horndogs are thrown their meat, we are then forced to endure running commentary from a truly hateful pair of trained chimps, who eventually start clocking more screen time than the hairless bipeds. Since by then the human performers are down to Cates and the grotesque Willie Aames, this might seem like a small mercy, but believe me when I tell you that it is not. The protracted flight from danger, the narrative of sexual awakening, the abrupt resort to nuclear-family domesticity, and the 'climactic' battle scene are unified by a jaw-slackening contempt for the audience, lazily connecting the Blue Lagoon dots like grade-schoolers acting out Star Wars in their treehouse. It is so hopelessly bad that when they renege on the familiar not-really-dead trick ending, you actually resent it - not least because of the missed opportunity to take a machete to Aames.
It is a positively heroic quest to endure the ten thousand walking-camel shots that stand between the viewer and Phoebe Cates' teenage anatomy. And after the horndogs are thrown their meat, we are then forced to endure running commentary from a truly hateful pair of trained chimps, who eventually start clocking more screen time than the hairless bipeds. Since by then the human performers are down to Cates and the grotesque Willie Aames, this might seem like a small mercy, but believe me when I tell you that it is not. The protracted flight from danger, the narrative of sexual awakening, the abrupt resort to nuclear-family domesticity, and the 'climactic' battle scene are unified by a jaw-slackening contempt for the audience, lazily connecting the Blue Lagoon dots like grade-schoolers acting out Star Wars in their treehouse. It is so hopelessly bad that when they renege on the familiar not-really-dead trick ending, you actually resent it - not least because of the missed opportunity to take a machete to Aames.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Pit
(Lew Lehman, 1981)
Any movie about a bullied autistic kid who enlists a cave full of man-eating "tra-la-logs" to exact revenge on his nemeses would seem to be tilting toward some kind of a positive social statement, especially when the kid is also actively interested in sex. It's even possible that the extreme mildness of this particular case of autism is a positive reaction against cinematic norms rather than a token of incomprehension. But the kid's monstrousness is so convincingly conveyed by both the director and the brat who plays him that by the time he pushes the old lady's wheelchair into the crevice it looks more like a Struwwelpeter-style middle finger to the whole notion of positive social statements. In this context, the pubescent misanthropy is startling and holds your attention up to a point, but the plot pushes all the carnage so far to the back end that one starts to wonder whether this was intended as a horror film at all. And so, in a transparently belated attempt to correct this miscalculation, the producers preview one death scene in its lengthy entirety before the opening credits, then paste on ten minutes of absurdly gratuitous tra-la-log rampage at the swimmin' hole in the third act. Throw in the babysitter's ghost and one of the cheapest end gags of all time, and you've got one weird movie.
Any movie about a bullied autistic kid who enlists a cave full of man-eating "tra-la-logs" to exact revenge on his nemeses would seem to be tilting toward some kind of a positive social statement, especially when the kid is also actively interested in sex. It's even possible that the extreme mildness of this particular case of autism is a positive reaction against cinematic norms rather than a token of incomprehension. But the kid's monstrousness is so convincingly conveyed by both the director and the brat who plays him that by the time he pushes the old lady's wheelchair into the crevice it looks more like a Struwwelpeter-style middle finger to the whole notion of positive social statements. In this context, the pubescent misanthropy is startling and holds your attention up to a point, but the plot pushes all the carnage so far to the back end that one starts to wonder whether this was intended as a horror film at all. And so, in a transparently belated attempt to correct this miscalculation, the producers preview one death scene in its lengthy entirety before the opening credits, then paste on ten minutes of absurdly gratuitous tra-la-log rampage at the swimmin' hole in the third act. Throw in the babysitter's ghost and one of the cheapest end gags of all time, and you've got one weird movie.
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