(Ron Merk, 1974)
The main selling point of this poor excuse for a movie is Pinocchio's status as a life-sized marionette among humans; he's pretty creepy. With the puppeteer a good twenty feet's length of string away, he's also pretty haphazard, flopping around on roller skates or dancing on the table - the actors have to keep nudging him back on track. Apart from this dazzling technical innovation, the movie resembles a typically desperate local-affiliate kids' show, adorned somewhat by the colorful artifice of the studio sets and the "Hair"-ish tinge of the stiff-as-a-board musical numbers. The idiot child Pippafax does inspire unhealthy fantasies of violence, but don't worry, he disappears along with everything else to make way for two staggeringly extraneous, threadbare cartoons which someone probably found behind the radiator and which take up fully half the film's running time. I mean, there's bad and then there's bad. Pity poor Sean Sullivan and especially Nancy Belle Fuller, who in a just industry would have rode her Hard Part Begins role to an actual career instead of hopscotching from here to oblivion.
Monday, July 26, 2010
The Peanut Butter Solution
(Michael Rubbo, 1985)
Working for Rock Demers, Rubbo finds the perfect tone for this kid's film: conversational, casual, bemused. There's nothing scrubbed-down or idealized about the chaotic family at the film's center; they pursue their petty obsessions, they get in each other's way, they chat on about nothing. In particular, the kids' eccentric artist dad seems to live on another planet, as does his evil opposite number, a diabolical art teacher who demands strict realism with an obsessiveness that resonates with the filmmaker's NFB pedigree. So, all mixed up with the haunted houses and phantom panhandlers and household magic gone wrong, we get a delirious child's-eye view of the neuroses of the art world - as well as, eventually, a completely deadpan introduction to the cruelties of sweatshop labour. Such things are not exactly staples of the genre, and they're heartfelt and whimsical, played for enjoyable absurdity instead of redeeming social value. In fact, each pivotal touch of fantasy and heroism is so cockeyed and so offhand that the film could have been written by an 11 year old, with the tossed-off pubic hair gag emblematic of the whole enterprise's brilliant lack of propriety.
Working for Rock Demers, Rubbo finds the perfect tone for this kid's film: conversational, casual, bemused. There's nothing scrubbed-down or idealized about the chaotic family at the film's center; they pursue their petty obsessions, they get in each other's way, they chat on about nothing. In particular, the kids' eccentric artist dad seems to live on another planet, as does his evil opposite number, a diabolical art teacher who demands strict realism with an obsessiveness that resonates with the filmmaker's NFB pedigree. So, all mixed up with the haunted houses and phantom panhandlers and household magic gone wrong, we get a delirious child's-eye view of the neuroses of the art world - as well as, eventually, a completely deadpan introduction to the cruelties of sweatshop labour. Such things are not exactly staples of the genre, and they're heartfelt and whimsical, played for enjoyable absurdity instead of redeeming social value. In fact, each pivotal touch of fantasy and heroism is so cockeyed and so offhand that the film could have been written by an 11 year old, with the tossed-off pubic hair gag emblematic of the whole enterprise's brilliant lack of propriety.
The Pink Chiquitas
(Anthony Currie, 1986)
What promises to be a mythic showdown between Frank Stallone and a bunch of Amazonian bimbos from space is mainly a showcase for some Second City second-stringers to chew the scenery. Of these guys, John Hemphill does the least damage, playing a twitchy mayoral candidate/Howard Zinn lookalike as if he actually knows the camera is there; but the director doesn't seem to quite know what to do with his repressed mugging. Meanwhile, Ron Lake's doofus cop and Bruce Pirrie's doofus weatherman shout at the back of the presumably empty theatre in perfect accord with the script's lead-sledgehammer touch. There's more than a touch of male-chauvinist anxiety in the setup, so it's a relief that it's too silly to be particularly offensive. Still, the women are uniformly more interesting (though no less annoying) before they mutate into sex-starved marauders, Frank is a less compelling performer than the kid who plays him in flashback, characters disappear from the narrative left and right, and the gags only make you laugh in that horrified head-shaking way that you do when a joke is stretched and squeezed to within an inch of its barely existent life.
What promises to be a mythic showdown between Frank Stallone and a bunch of Amazonian bimbos from space is mainly a showcase for some Second City second-stringers to chew the scenery. Of these guys, John Hemphill does the least damage, playing a twitchy mayoral candidate/Howard Zinn lookalike as if he actually knows the camera is there; but the director doesn't seem to quite know what to do with his repressed mugging. Meanwhile, Ron Lake's doofus cop and Bruce Pirrie's doofus weatherman shout at the back of the presumably empty theatre in perfect accord with the script's lead-sledgehammer touch. There's more than a touch of male-chauvinist anxiety in the setup, so it's a relief that it's too silly to be particularly offensive. Still, the women are uniformly more interesting (though no less annoying) before they mutate into sex-starved marauders, Frank is a less compelling performer than the kid who plays him in flashback, characters disappear from the narrative left and right, and the gags only make you laugh in that horrified head-shaking way that you do when a joke is stretched and squeezed to within an inch of its barely existent life.
Pin
(Sandor Stern, 1989)
Towards the end a good boyfriend tilts the rhetoric toward the usual mental-illness frame, threatening the film's very impressive balance of thematic concerns: patriarchy, misogyny, repression, false idol as ventriloquist's dummy. Stern gets serious mileage out of his central conceit of visible man as imaginary friend, and I was afraid that he'd cop out instead of summing up. These worries proved unfounded, though. Up against dad's relatively sympathetic vacuity, the one-dimensional status consciousness of the mother figure is problematic too; but both characters are dispatched early enough to shift focus to Cyndy Preston's strong, resourceful, sympathetic sister, who winds up being more than a match for David Hewlett's dangerously stunted teen head case. A bit stiff and a bit annoying, Hewlett still impresses in his center-stage role, digging ever deeper into the hole of avoidance which his wrong-headed rearing has deposited him in. The narrative rarely lets its considerable creepy thrills distract from the working through of its ideas, although the reverse may be true; this is almost too cerebral, too schematic, for real classic horror status. Still, this remains a near-poster child for the intellectual attainments of modern genre cinema at its best.
Towards the end a good boyfriend tilts the rhetoric toward the usual mental-illness frame, threatening the film's very impressive balance of thematic concerns: patriarchy, misogyny, repression, false idol as ventriloquist's dummy. Stern gets serious mileage out of his central conceit of visible man as imaginary friend, and I was afraid that he'd cop out instead of summing up. These worries proved unfounded, though. Up against dad's relatively sympathetic vacuity, the one-dimensional status consciousness of the mother figure is problematic too; but both characters are dispatched early enough to shift focus to Cyndy Preston's strong, resourceful, sympathetic sister, who winds up being more than a match for David Hewlett's dangerously stunted teen head case. A bit stiff and a bit annoying, Hewlett still impresses in his center-stage role, digging ever deeper into the hole of avoidance which his wrong-headed rearing has deposited him in. The narrative rarely lets its considerable creepy thrills distract from the working through of its ideas, although the reverse may be true; this is almost too cerebral, too schematic, for real classic horror status. Still, this remains a near-poster child for the intellectual attainments of modern genre cinema at its best.
Pick-Up Summer
(George Mihalka, 1980)
They changed the name, but at least they didn't change the theme - "Pinball Summer" is typical of a Brian-Wilson-meets-Rupert-Holmes soundtrack that is as catchy and competent as it is obnoxious. Kind of like the movie itself. The broad smuttiness is executed with a fair degree of technical finesse, adding an extra half-dimension to the prototypical 80s comedy of sexual cruelty: the fat kid named "Whimpy" undergoes a moral awakening, the biker dude turns out to be a closet nebbish, and the obligatory nerd is actually a rich twat who pretty much deserves the treatment he gets. No such complications among the main protagonists, two blow-dried nonentities who are as bland as they are irritating plus girlfriends with camera-friendly asses. You really don't care to see these people pitching woo on the beach or driving their customized van around town. The chase scenes get old fast, but the pinball showdown at the end is more engaging than you'd expect, and the way the drive-in movie echoes the idiocies of the main narrative is a genuinely inspired touch. Which is not to say that this is anything more than a barely watchable piece of sexist garbage, but for what it's worth its makers do seem to have their eye in the viewfinder most of the time.
They changed the name, but at least they didn't change the theme - "Pinball Summer" is typical of a Brian-Wilson-meets-Rupert-Holmes soundtrack that is as catchy and competent as it is obnoxious. Kind of like the movie itself. The broad smuttiness is executed with a fair degree of technical finesse, adding an extra half-dimension to the prototypical 80s comedy of sexual cruelty: the fat kid named "Whimpy" undergoes a moral awakening, the biker dude turns out to be a closet nebbish, and the obligatory nerd is actually a rich twat who pretty much deserves the treatment he gets. No such complications among the main protagonists, two blow-dried nonentities who are as bland as they are irritating plus girlfriends with camera-friendly asses. You really don't care to see these people pitching woo on the beach or driving their customized van around town. The chase scenes get old fast, but the pinball showdown at the end is more engaging than you'd expect, and the way the drive-in movie echoes the idiocies of the main narrative is a genuinely inspired touch. Which is not to say that this is anything more than a barely watchable piece of sexist garbage, but for what it's worth its makers do seem to have their eye in the viewfinder most of the time.
Phobia
(John Huston, 1980)
Here's a lesson for all you auteurists out there - proof that even a Great Director is no match for a Bad Producer of Zale Magder's calibre. Magder's philistine fingerprints are all over this hoary whodunit, a fraudulent condemnation of the psychiatric establishment that takes its audience for a truckload of idiots. Leading with the laughable spectacle of an exploding filing cabinet and closing with the least convincing armchair Freud routine in the canon, the yawning midsection comprises a then-there-were-none shtick whose only unfamiliar element is the startling asininity of Paul Michael Glaser's shrink. Repeatedly leading his fragile charges on pointless wild goose chases, reacting to their spectacular deaths with lackadaisical trips to the rink and tin-eared paeans to professional detachment, this character is so transparent as to absolutely destroy the credibility of both the mystery and the "message" that decorates it. Speaking of tin-eared, Andre Gagnon ain't no Bernard Herrmann, and Kenneth Welsh offers a textbook rendering of the Stupid Detective, waving his accusatory finger around with a random certainty that only underlines the attention deficit of the production as a whole.
Here's a lesson for all you auteurists out there - proof that even a Great Director is no match for a Bad Producer of Zale Magder's calibre. Magder's philistine fingerprints are all over this hoary whodunit, a fraudulent condemnation of the psychiatric establishment that takes its audience for a truckload of idiots. Leading with the laughable spectacle of an exploding filing cabinet and closing with the least convincing armchair Freud routine in the canon, the yawning midsection comprises a then-there-were-none shtick whose only unfamiliar element is the startling asininity of Paul Michael Glaser's shrink. Repeatedly leading his fragile charges on pointless wild goose chases, reacting to their spectacular deaths with lackadaisical trips to the rink and tin-eared paeans to professional detachment, this character is so transparent as to absolutely destroy the credibility of both the mystery and the "message" that decorates it. Speaking of tin-eared, Andre Gagnon ain't no Bernard Herrmann, and Kenneth Welsh offers a textbook rendering of the Stupid Detective, waving his accusatory finger around with a random certainty that only underlines the attention deficit of the production as a whole.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Perfect Timing
(Rene Bonniere, 1986)
Saddled with a painfully anachronistic script confined almost entirely to a single set, the filmmakers set out to dress the turkey with great quantities of frontal nudity - even a splash of male dangle, ooh la la. But while by and large the babes come on with more energy and verve than the material deserves, the dangler in question is about the most hateful lech ever to appear in the smut-comedy genre, so the gesture doesn't come off as especially generous. At least Paul Boretski does appear to be performing, which cannot be said for Stephen Markle's narcoleptic turn as the photographer, a sucking black hole worthy of the film's self-serving take on the art-versus-commerce dilemma. In order to fill out his less than onerous 87-minute running time, Bonniere really, really drags 'er out, stretching each dead-end shtick like a botched facelift whether it's a running gag (Michael Rudder waving endless impotent implements of destruction at his plaster-imprisoned model) or a set piece ("Introducing Papusha", who blows almost ten 'climactic' minutes doing her witlessly heterofied Carole Pope impersonation - the last straw).
Saddled with a painfully anachronistic script confined almost entirely to a single set, the filmmakers set out to dress the turkey with great quantities of frontal nudity - even a splash of male dangle, ooh la la. But while by and large the babes come on with more energy and verve than the material deserves, the dangler in question is about the most hateful lech ever to appear in the smut-comedy genre, so the gesture doesn't come off as especially generous. At least Paul Boretski does appear to be performing, which cannot be said for Stephen Markle's narcoleptic turn as the photographer, a sucking black hole worthy of the film's self-serving take on the art-versus-commerce dilemma. In order to fill out his less than onerous 87-minute running time, Bonniere really, really drags 'er out, stretching each dead-end shtick like a botched facelift whether it's a running gag (Michael Rudder waving endless impotent implements of destruction at his plaster-imprisoned model) or a set piece ("Introducing Papusha", who blows almost ten 'climactic' minutes doing her witlessly heterofied Carole Pope impersonation - the last straw).
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