(Gordon Hessler, 1978)
Hessler, you idiot, you are sitting on a gold mine! You've got KISS with superpowers, you've got a mad scientist, you've got an amusement park - what more do you need? Don't try to blame it on the drunken fools in the band - their garbled loutishness gives the film the only entertainment value it's got, and even then they're stuck with the lifeless wide-shot compositions and stupid cop-show repartee. And you don't even allow them on screen for the entire first act! Anthony Zerbe's ostensible supervillain does nothing but sit at a video switcher and hang around with a great number of mimes pretending to be automatons - are we supposed to be impressed? And with the whole park to play with, the best you guys can come up with is to have Zerbe maniacally turn on the machines, spin them for a couple minutes, then maniacally turn them off again. With sponsors Hanna-Barbera leaving their thumbprints everywhere in the form of stupid cops and laser beams, it can't help but retain a lot of camp value. But they never could figure out how to put together a proper feature, and no movie containing this particular Gene Simmons performance has any right to drag this badly.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
One More Time
(Ray Dennis Steckler, 2008)
No craft-versus-content tension here. Self shot on retina-scouring Hi 8, Steckler's final film is incredibly ugly and formless - not least because it expends half its running time on huge undigested slabs of "Incredibly Strange Creatures," to which it purports to be a sequel. It gains only the most passing smidgen of resonance from Steckler's autumnal moodiness. The downcast panorama of Santa Cruz, the extended run-ins with his shrink, the hairy bar band playing Steckler's Greatest Hits, the starlet's rejection at the pizzeria, the video store owner who can't scare up an investor for his next movie - all these things add up to a lament for the unfulfilled promise of his own career. But budget or no budget, it's hard to believe that someone who has been making movies for almost half a century could present these themes in such a crudely artless way - swinging his camcorder around aimlessly, squelching from one orphaned unlit episode to the next, the thing is damn near unwatchable. Rest in peace, Ray.
No craft-versus-content tension here. Self shot on retina-scouring Hi 8, Steckler's final film is incredibly ugly and formless - not least because it expends half its running time on huge undigested slabs of "Incredibly Strange Creatures," to which it purports to be a sequel. It gains only the most passing smidgen of resonance from Steckler's autumnal moodiness. The downcast panorama of Santa Cruz, the extended run-ins with his shrink, the hairy bar band playing Steckler's Greatest Hits, the starlet's rejection at the pizzeria, the video store owner who can't scare up an investor for his next movie - all these things add up to a lament for the unfulfilled promise of his own career. But budget or no budget, it's hard to believe that someone who has been making movies for almost half a century could present these themes in such a crudely artless way - swinging his camcorder around aimlessly, squelching from one orphaned unlit episode to the next, the thing is damn near unwatchable. Rest in peace, Ray.
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!?
(Ray Dennis Steckler, 1964)
Far and away the most tiki movie I've ever seen - and if it is bad, then it is bad the way tiki is bad: tasteless, delusional, and full of fun. With absolutely mesmerizing cinematography, competent editing, and constant surprises on the soundtrack, an obvious amount of technical know-how is on evidence behind the camera - the problem is that the director is in front of the camera. Not that Steckler/Flagg's monumentally perverse sensibility doesn't define the thing top to bottom. But the reason it works so well is the obvious tension between the dazzling cinematic presentation and the yard-sale Freudian antics onscreen. Every single character provides a new level of incongruity: the incomprehensible Atlas King, Madame Estrella's halloween-hobo sidekick Ortega, Sharon Walsh's dunderheaded square brother, Steckler's own hoodied layabout - all these clashing poverty-row types coalesce into a discordant symphony of quirk. And while you are right to be suspicious of any horror movie that is fifty percent musical performances, here they actually add to the momentum for once, growing more baroque and hallucinatory with every number.
Far and away the most tiki movie I've ever seen - and if it is bad, then it is bad the way tiki is bad: tasteless, delusional, and full of fun. With absolutely mesmerizing cinematography, competent editing, and constant surprises on the soundtrack, an obvious amount of technical know-how is on evidence behind the camera - the problem is that the director is in front of the camera. Not that Steckler/Flagg's monumentally perverse sensibility doesn't define the thing top to bottom. But the reason it works so well is the obvious tension between the dazzling cinematic presentation and the yard-sale Freudian antics onscreen. Every single character provides a new level of incongruity: the incomprehensible Atlas King, Madame Estrella's halloween-hobo sidekick Ortega, Sharon Walsh's dunderheaded square brother, Steckler's own hoodied layabout - all these clashing poverty-row types coalesce into a discordant symphony of quirk. And while you are right to be suspicious of any horror movie that is fifty percent musical performances, here they actually add to the momentum for once, growing more baroque and hallucinatory with every number.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The King's Regiment
(Allan Levine, 1984)
With zero production values, an incredibly blunt disregard for historical fact, and a bunch of outrageously inaccurate Scottish and English and Yankee accents, this tall tale of 1812 is in fact a glorious and (I think) quite self-aware farce. With its smart-asses and dumb-asses prancing around the Bruce Trail in tall hats and epaulets, it should by all rights have been a turgid disaster, but in fact it's as close as Emmeritus ever came to Cormanesque lightness and verve. The villains bug out their eyes and stamp their feet, the good guys wisecrack and riff and twinkle, and everyone puts out with such bounding enthusiasm that it transcends nitpicking questions of artistry. The narrative makes no sense whatsoever - how did the King of Spain get mixed up in this? What kind of moron would fall for this document-switcheroo scheme anyway? - but that only adds to the fun. The real giveaway is when one of the gratuitous arr-arr pirate guys lapses into - I kid you not - a word-for-word Captain Highliner tribute! What a hoot.
With zero production values, an incredibly blunt disregard for historical fact, and a bunch of outrageously inaccurate Scottish and English and Yankee accents, this tall tale of 1812 is in fact a glorious and (I think) quite self-aware farce. With its smart-asses and dumb-asses prancing around the Bruce Trail in tall hats and epaulets, it should by all rights have been a turgid disaster, but in fact it's as close as Emmeritus ever came to Cormanesque lightness and verve. The villains bug out their eyes and stamp their feet, the good guys wisecrack and riff and twinkle, and everyone puts out with such bounding enthusiasm that it transcends nitpicking questions of artistry. The narrative makes no sense whatsoever - how did the King of Spain get mixed up in this? What kind of moron would fall for this document-switcheroo scheme anyway? - but that only adds to the fun. The real giveaway is when one of the gratuitous arr-arr pirate guys lapses into - I kid you not - a word-for-word Captain Highliner tribute! What a hoot.
Tropic Thunder
(Ben Stiller, 2008)
How does a movie with this much talent and this many clever ideas wind up so resolutely unfunny? It's like a pitch session suspended in amber - a funeral march of high concepts. That potty-mouth dancing executive was no more or less of a laughless dud after I found out it was Tom Cruise in disguise. Also typical is the fate of the central conceit - they think they're making a movie but it's real! This idea could have been played for a lot of comic mileage, with clever variations stemming from the delusions of each lead. Instead it's worth about three gags in five minutes and then it's over. Whereupon Stiller gets shoved violently into the background - presumably he had his hands full directing, but with him gone the film loses its through line, its momentum, its point. Downey's faux-black routine and Jack Black's heroin withdrawal thing are genuinely inspired, but they are shtick in a vacuum, not least because they are saddled with two Zeppos - Jay Baruchel has a funny organ-loss shtick in the opening scene and then bubkes, while Brandon T. Jackson is there solely to provide distancing commentary on Downey's racial neurosis. This latter is a transparent market-driven plea for clemency and is the most offensive thing about the movie - if half their target audience had been Asians or 'retards', you know damn well they'd have hedged those juvenile burlesques as well.
How does a movie with this much talent and this many clever ideas wind up so resolutely unfunny? It's like a pitch session suspended in amber - a funeral march of high concepts. That potty-mouth dancing executive was no more or less of a laughless dud after I found out it was Tom Cruise in disguise. Also typical is the fate of the central conceit - they think they're making a movie but it's real! This idea could have been played for a lot of comic mileage, with clever variations stemming from the delusions of each lead. Instead it's worth about three gags in five minutes and then it's over. Whereupon Stiller gets shoved violently into the background - presumably he had his hands full directing, but with him gone the film loses its through line, its momentum, its point. Downey's faux-black routine and Jack Black's heroin withdrawal thing are genuinely inspired, but they are shtick in a vacuum, not least because they are saddled with two Zeppos - Jay Baruchel has a funny organ-loss shtick in the opening scene and then bubkes, while Brandon T. Jackson is there solely to provide distancing commentary on Downey's racial neurosis. This latter is a transparent market-driven plea for clemency and is the most offensive thing about the movie - if half their target audience had been Asians or 'retards', you know damn well they'd have hedged those juvenile burlesques as well.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
The Hijacking of Studio 4
(Joseph A. Gaudet, 1985)
This latest offering from the Emmeritus pile is surprisingly concentrated and coherent. Most of the first act consists of the crazy guy silently planning his terror campaign, and surprisingly enough it works pretty well - when they aren't looping transparently bogus dialogue over the back of his head. It was quite a task to measure this extended sequence into a narrative comprising some two dozen characters, and sure enough the arcs get lumpy and ends are left dangling; but while the individual players never mesh into an ensemble, that is appropriate to the varied neurotic preoccupations of the characters, and taken one at a time they're functional enough. The recasting of the terrorist as a heroic crusader in the third act is silly, and the expose of corrupt third-world dictatorship is not particularly daring or insightful, but at least they implicate first-world corporatism in the critique. And at the center of that critique is television itself; this made-for-TV movie is startlingly cynical about its chosen medium. Station grunts utter countless home truths about the gap between talent and success, and from very early on the film shows examples of how facts are bent to ideological and economic agendas. The commentary is lent flavour by the control-room procedural stuff, which is quite fun in its mid-80s detail, and it's pretty funny that the evil station owner is portrayed by none other than the Emmeritus mastermind, Lionel Shenken himself. Likable trash.
This latest offering from the Emmeritus pile is surprisingly concentrated and coherent. Most of the first act consists of the crazy guy silently planning his terror campaign, and surprisingly enough it works pretty well - when they aren't looping transparently bogus dialogue over the back of his head. It was quite a task to measure this extended sequence into a narrative comprising some two dozen characters, and sure enough the arcs get lumpy and ends are left dangling; but while the individual players never mesh into an ensemble, that is appropriate to the varied neurotic preoccupations of the characters, and taken one at a time they're functional enough. The recasting of the terrorist as a heroic crusader in the third act is silly, and the expose of corrupt third-world dictatorship is not particularly daring or insightful, but at least they implicate first-world corporatism in the critique. And at the center of that critique is television itself; this made-for-TV movie is startlingly cynical about its chosen medium. Station grunts utter countless home truths about the gap between talent and success, and from very early on the film shows examples of how facts are bent to ideological and economic agendas. The commentary is lent flavour by the control-room procedural stuff, which is quite fun in its mid-80s detail, and it's pretty funny that the evil station owner is portrayed by none other than the Emmeritus mastermind, Lionel Shenken himself. Likable trash.
Panic in the Streets
(Elia Kazan, 1950)
It may be about plague in New Orleans, but it's really about the nature of power and authority in America. City cop Paul Douglas and federal health agent Richard Widmark duke it out among themselves, while testing their jurisdiction over crooks, longshoremen, and the media. Meanwhile, "Walter Jack Palance" demonstrates his remarkably complex reign over the streets - with benevolence, persuasion and coercion all in the kit alongside his startling bursts of violence, he often seems to hold more cards than the 'authorities' themselves. The domestic power structure isn't ignored either, with wives asserting themselves all over the place and Widmark's young son at the center of a dozen tiny battles; the near-mutiny when the ship's captain tries to slough off the plague is another demonstration of the fragile consent on which authority rests. This latter insight insures that there's nothing pat or triumphalist about the film's conclusion; the game continues. The staging is as rich as the themes, strikingly modern in its approach to dialogue and character, and gorgeously designed to boot. Kazan is really on top of this material, and if it doesn't quite pack a knockout punch, that's only because he's playing a different game.
It may be about plague in New Orleans, but it's really about the nature of power and authority in America. City cop Paul Douglas and federal health agent Richard Widmark duke it out among themselves, while testing their jurisdiction over crooks, longshoremen, and the media. Meanwhile, "Walter Jack Palance" demonstrates his remarkably complex reign over the streets - with benevolence, persuasion and coercion all in the kit alongside his startling bursts of violence, he often seems to hold more cards than the 'authorities' themselves. The domestic power structure isn't ignored either, with wives asserting themselves all over the place and Widmark's young son at the center of a dozen tiny battles; the near-mutiny when the ship's captain tries to slough off the plague is another demonstration of the fragile consent on which authority rests. This latter insight insures that there's nothing pat or triumphalist about the film's conclusion; the game continues. The staging is as rich as the themes, strikingly modern in its approach to dialogue and character, and gorgeously designed to boot. Kazan is really on top of this material, and if it doesn't quite pack a knockout punch, that's only because he's playing a different game.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
