RorschachKovacs Reviews

The Nostril Picker (1993)

Mostly, it's just generically bad.

[10 October 2016]

On one thing, it seems all of us reviewing this movie agree regardless of our ratings: it's bad. On all else, it seems we disagree: I find The Nostril Picker to be neither as hilariously awful as some are making it out to be, nor yet the *Worst* *Film* *Ever* that others are claiming. To be sure, everything in it was some level of bad, from the writing and the acting to the directing and producing; just not bad enough to inspire much reaction from me either way.

In fact, The Nostril Picker mostly brings to mind an early Bloom County strip in which Opus gets a job as a film critic at the Bloom Picayune and proceeds to rip a certain movie up one side and down the other in an extremely negative review, only to pause for a moment of contemplation and then backtrack by saying "Well, maybe not that bad, but Lord, it wasn't good." To any critics saying this is the worst movie they've ever seen, I can honestly say you should be grateful if this is truly the worst movie you ever see in your lifetime: I have indeed seen worse. That said, I'll readily admit that I've only seen worse movies on very rare occasions; to paraphrase the penguin, it's not *that* bad, but "Lord, it wasn't good."

When a movie's plot isn't very original, critics often use the term "by-the-numbers" to describe the story. While such a description might apply here as well, I prefer to call it "plug-and-play plotting" for this movie. The general setup at the beginning makes the movie seem as if its script had originally been written for another cookie-cutter "erotic" (i.e. pornographic) movie, with the neighborhood creep with a hankering for high school girls learning a magic trick from a bum on the street that allows him to infiltrate their school by looking like he's a high school girl himself. Certainly, in the montage that follows his realizing that the magic trick actually works, he presses his advantage at every opportunity by infiltrating the girls' social circle and one of their school's bathrooms (and presumably their locker rooms and showers as well, though only the bathroom is shown on-screen).

Where a porno would subsequently have him either deceitfully seducing or forcibly raping these easily befuddled young girls, this movie swaps out sex for violence, turning this into a slasher flick in which he slaughters and violates them with his switchblade and cannibalizes them instead. With this sudden genre shift, it also turns into a kind of police procedural as the focus shifts to the police chief (who conveniently happens to be the father of one of the girls the villainous protagonist is targeting) in his efforts to apprehend him. Then, as with many horror flicks, it ends with the bad guy winning so that we can experience the final "shock" (which most of us could probably see coming a mile away) of watching him prey on his last victim just when she thought she was finally safe.

When famous actors give a lackluster performance in a movie, one often hears critics speak of their "phoning it in" for that movie. In this case, since nobody in this movie was ever famous, I would tend to refer to these poor performances as "reading it out" instead: while everyone on camera was speaking his and her lines with more expression than—say—the children in a Charlie Brown cartoon, every spoken line sounds like nothing more than a direct reading of the script with whatever emotion the characters are supposed to be expressing also sounding completely scripted. Watching the actors and actresses reciting their emotions along with their lines, one can hardly help imagining that for the entire duration, somebody was prompting them "Now say it again, but try to sound angry/sad/shocked this time."

Of course, in their defense, they weren't exactly working with the greatest material in the first place. The whole movie is rife with plot holes such as why, if the bum on the street knows a magic trick that he learned from his tour of duty in Vietnam that can make him look like anyone he wants, he didn't just use that trick to his own advantage. One also has to wonder why the writers felt compelled to have a lady psychiatrist about halfway through the movie dump a steaming load of exposition about the villainous protagonist's horrendously abusive childhood on us when no such background was really relevant or necessary; his personality is already established at the beginning, and he doesn't develop it any further in the rest of the movie.

The sum of all these messily spliced-together plot points and barely-competent performances in this low-to-no-budget "video nasty" is a boring mess of blood and female flesh that neither titillates nor horrifies as intended. So why am I giving this hopelessly incompetent waste of celluloid three stars instead of just giving it one and expressing the lay-critic's common wish that a no-star rating were available? Three reasons:

1) As mentioned, this is *not* the worst movie I've ever seen.

2) Most of the people involved in the making of this film did at least seem to be making a credible effort to make it entertaining. Though they failed, one does owe them a certain measure of respect for trying.

3) Somewhere in this misshapen mess, there's a good workable story people might actually want to see struggling to emerge. The underlying premise could be developed as a sexual psychodrama, or a black comedy, or even as a heart-warming tale of redemption (if the pervert protagonist could be reformed). Seeing this might inspire someone to write a better story.

In other words, maybe it's not a complete waste of celluloid after all; though if you're a writer looking for inspiration, one viewing ought to suffice for you to get what little value you can out of it.

Risen (2016)

It started pretty well, but wore out its welcome.

[7 March 2016]

It's nice to see a Christian film make an effort to stick a little closer to its source material than, say, Hollywood's special-effects-laden in-name-only "adaptations" of Noah's story from Genesis and Moses' story from Exodus. It's also nice to see the well-known story from Scripture as told from the slightly different perspective of an otherwise anonymous Roman tribune. Best of all is seeing the actors put some effort into their performances so that we in the audience don't feel we're merely looking at some cardboard cut-outs lackadaisically reciting their lines from the script.

Being better than Hollywood garbage like Noah (2014) and Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014) is a rather low bar for this movie to clear, however. Moreover, while expecting Risen to live up to something as brilliantly well-crafted as Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ (2004) might be setting the bar awfully high, I rather have to fault the movie for not being as good as Catherine Hardwicke's Nativity Story (2006) or even the direct-to-video animated Jesus: He Lived Among Us (2011). Honestly, a few tweaks could have made this movie much more of a contender.

To be sure, contriving for the tribune responsible for Jesus execution and for the unit guarding Jesus' tomb to be the same person, and giving him the name Clavius (from the Latin for "nails") to promote him to this movie's protagonist is an acceptable bit of artistic license, though I think the movie's makers could have gotten a lot more mileage out of following a named and known historical figure the way Christian novelist Paul L. Maier did with his historical novel about Pontius Pilate. (I still long for the day some movie makers dare to adapt that story to the big screen.) I could even have forgiven it for its canonical errors of portraying Mary Magdalene as a former prostitute (which she most definitely wasn't) and suggesting the guards at Jesus' tomb had actually been getting drunk that evening (they most certainly had not) if it had kept the quality of its storytelling consistent. After all, I was willing to overlook a few of Mel Gibson's mistakes in The Passion (including the one about Mary Magdalene, no less) on the same grounds.

Pilate and Clavius in particular are fun to watch throughout much of the movie, and some of their lines were particularly witty, though I would have liked to hear some more. Pilate's sardonically asking Clavius "Did you win?" when he reports to him in something less than a presentable condition right after a battle, for instance, was a good line, but I kept waiting for Clavius to make some witty retort ("You should see how the other side looks!") that he never did. To increase the potential irony, he also really should have made some snark about how frequent and forgettable these battles with Israelite insurrectionists were. ("The stones and arrows were raining down on our shields. In Judea, this is what we call 'Friday.'") While the circumstances under which Clavius is called upon to investigate Jesus' resurrection are awfully contrived, casting this as an open-ended mystery that focuses on the character development of the detective rather than the mystery to which we already know the outcome is a workable plot. In fact, this plot works perfectly fine, right up to the moment Clavius finally sees Jesus alive. While the story isn't completely over by then, this really should have been the climactic moment at which he either accepts or rejects the mystery's miraculous resolution. Instead, the movie makes the fatal mistake of forcing Clavius to continue putting off making this decision so he can tag along with Jesus' disciples to witness several more Scriptural events.

By the time the movie's former protagonist finally makes the decision he should have made back at the climax, it's not his movie anymore; and alas, it's not the movie we in the audience came to see either.

Are All Men Pedophiles? (2013)

Provides more questions than answers...

[28 July 2014]

Since Are All Men Pedophiles? deals with real life and its issues, it's classified as a "documentary" in contemporary parlance. However, unlike most documentaries which examine a historical event or set of events, this movie focuses more on a widespread cultural phenomenon which is only incidentally historical; I would prefer to term this an educational film or maybe a cinematic investigative report (basically a big-screen version of the hard-hitting exposes regularly available on news channels on TV).

Of course, such reports rarely come without an agenda, and a cinematic version is hardly likely to be any more neutral than TV. To hear this film's many hostile critics talk, though, I tend to think it more successful as a social experiment than as propaganda for much of anything. If the point of making it was to stir up a lot of self-righteous hysteria and make its detractors look like raving imbeciles, at this it has succeeded most impressively. Apparently, a vast majority of the hostile reviewers either didn't actually watch the movie, or were determined not to let any facts confuse their opinions by paying any attention to what it actually says.

In fact, what agenda this film does seem to have is as concise as it is modest. While it raises a great many questions about pedophilia and related topics, the only answer this movie unambiguously provides is to the question in the title. In this answer also lies the agenda: put simply, the popular definition of pedophilia in most contemporary cultures is far too broad. By this definition, not only are virtually all *men* pedophiles (apart from the odd asexual and gerontophile), but all boys and no small number of girls and women! What director Jan-Willem Breure would like us to do is accept the much narrower clinical definition of pedophile commonly used as the basis for our laws, which refers only to individuals (male or female) sexually attracted to prepubescent children; nothing more, and nothing less.

As to "justifying" pedophilia or hebephilia (or the less-commonly-used English variant "hebophilia" this movie uses) or advocating for changes in age-of-consent laws or any other sexual laws, neither this movie nor anyone in it attempts anything of the sort. It's not advocating for "men's rights" or "children's rights" or any other "rights" except for the individual rights all of us are already supposed to have that popular culture's insanely broad and hypocritical definition preemptively denies us: habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, and a fair trial. To this end, the movie points to a number of historical and contemporary realities that tend to contradict the tidy cultural narrative so many have adopted by which any male so much as a day over eighteen who finds anyone so much as a day under eighteen the least bit sexually attractive is to be condemned as a pedophile, which is to say a monstrous sexual predator whose humanity and very right to exist are questionable at best.

In all other matters, this movie seems to serve almost no purpose but to raise questions without answering them. It takes us on a brief tour of cultures from past to present, bringing up the practical concerns of childbearing in savage eras when the average lifespan was dangerously low and few would live to see the births of their grandchildren, and pitting them against more contemporary philosophical concerns about sexuality and its impact on our society. Through snippets of popular culture, sound bites from various individuals on the street, and in-depth testimonies from pedophiles and victims and various experts on related subjects, we hear a great many opinions and narratives that flatly contradict each other. At no time are we offered any simple resolutions to any of these contradictions.

If any actual pedophiles come looking to watch this movie for prurient purposes, chances are they'll be sorely disappointed. Its most potentially prurient sequence is exactly one brief and relatively tame animated example of Japan's "lolicon" line-drawings which employs all the usual censors' tricks to stop just short of showing us all of an obviously prepubescent girl's forbidden parts during a magical clothing transformation. Likewise, if they come looking for some kind of justification for molesting youngsters, they won't find one. Accepting the clinical distinction between hebephilia, pedophilia, and normal adolescent sexuality (as our legal systems already do to some degree) is not going to make statutory rape any more socially acceptable or make children and teenagers any more vulnerable to sexual predators.

Indeed, if anything, the popular broad definition of "pedophile" with all of its paradoxical inconsistencies is by far the greater danger to our children and our civilization. As Are All Men Pedophiles? points out, the popular definition of "pedophilia" already has men and boys looking over their shoulders as a sexist double standard bars males from seeking employment in schools and daycare centers, while boys (but almost never girls) are declared child pornographers and registered as sex offenders for "sexting" whether they are on the sending or receiving end. Beneath all their pretended concern for the safety of our children and our society's alleged need to crack down on sexual crime, our politicians know that if "pedophilia" can mean anything they and their media lackeys want it to mean, no dissenter will ever be safe from character-assassinating show trials.

Breure's report is far from being a complete recommendation for what kind of moral and social (not to mention legal) reforms we need to end the hateful hysteria-generated witch hunt against men and boys our supposed superiors have foisted on us through popular culture. Nevertheless, it's a start.

Twilight (I) (2008)

This would sure be better if everyone were trying a bit harder...

[24 June 2014]

Hating on Twilight in book or movie form has lately become a way for pretentious self-appointed critics and lecherous "players" who hate Stephanie Meyer's views on sexuality to establish their "street cred" with their fellow losers on the internet. To be sure, I can see why guys would tend to keep their distance from this series; in book and movie form alike it's got "chick flick" written all over it. The focus is firmly fixed on Bella to the point of rudely shunting several potentially interesting subplots aside.

On the other hand, unlike a great many of my fellow males, I can also understand its appeal to the girls who are its target audience. To any of the aforementioned blowhards who profess not to understand its commercial success, I can only say: the continuing presence and profitability of the Lifetime Channel and its movies-of-the-week must also be quite the baffling mystery to you. Hey, Twilight is all about a shy girl who can do no wrong and doesn't realize how ravishingly attractive she really is being at the center of attention for every single guy in range, including sexually idealized vampires and werewolves. What part of that, pray tell, would not appeal to young girls in their more awkward years of adolescence?

My main complaint about this film is what a waste everyone involved seems to have made of their potential. It's overlong for an adaptation of what was a relatively short and easy read of a book, and a lot of what would have been worth keeping from the book (a brief recounting of the Cullen clan's history, a scene in which Edward demonstrates that yes, he can still eat human food though it no longer appeals to him, etc.) is cut in favor of lots and lots of awkward silences, awkward stares, and awkward conversations that come off looking and sounding like nothing more than padding. Yes, such awkwardness is actually pretty common to real life. No, we in the audience do not care to be bored with these long pauses. Come on, cast and crew, do we really have to spell this out for you? The story's supposed to be a massive overdose on romantic feminine fantasy with lots of sexy vampires and werewolves thrown in. What part of that description calls for mundane realism?

Speaking of awkward stares, the relationship between Bella and Edward in this movie seems to consist of almost nothing else. I can understand the "show, don't tell" principle behind some of this (though Bella's many voice-overs are, I might point out, a massive violation of that principle), but what's being shown isn't really what we're supposed to be seeing according to the book. What we should be seeing is Edward as a predator who's falling in love with his prey. Heck, that's simultaneously the Twilight series' greatest appeal to its target audience and most disturbing aspect to its critics: that a lot of girls are strangely turned on at the thought of being the subject of a troubled handsome guy's obsessive and nearly-uncontrollable desires, even if those desires come dangerously close to making him a creepy stalker.

So fine, Stephanie Meyer wants this story to be all dark and edgy by exploring a predator's appeal to his prey? Then let it be dark and edgy. Let us see Edward licking his chops with that creepy gaze that fairly shouts "Why, Bella, you look good enough to eat!" While we're at it, fans and critics alike have noted that the whole Twilight series is a big metaphor about sexual temptations and promoting chastity. Fine: that metaphor actually mixes pretty nicely with the whole "A shy girl loves a stalker..." theory to make it the somewhat more palatable "...if he's polite about it and keeps his grubby paws to himself until she willingly gives herself over to him."

As long as we're being darker and edgier here, there's no need to apologize for those creepier implications: let the metaphor be writ large! Let Edward alternately stalk and try to restrain himself from stalking his prey, and let Bella mistake his hungry looks for the belligerent sexual tension it seems to be (and to which it does eventually convert). That's certainly better than what we actually saw up on the screen, which is Edward looking passive-aggressive and bipolar and not the least bit interested in Bella for either culinary or sexual purposes while she understandably keeps asking him what his problem is. Where's the chemistry?

While we're at it, since the movie departed considerably from the book by cutting away from Bella to other characters once in a while, why not roll with this by showing a few more scenes from Edward's point of view? In the book, he tells Bella something along the lines of "You don't think you're especially attractive? Yeah, well, that's because you don't have to hear all the other guys' thoughts the way I do." Letting us hear a sampling of those thoughts from his point of view would have gone a long way toward making this a better movie.

Hey, for all the narrowness of its appeal and the flack it gets, Twilight isn't really a bad flick. I've seen worse; in fact, I've seen a *lot* worse. What I'd really like to see, though, would be everyone trying a little harder. Were the cast and crew mostly just making this movie for the paycheck? Hey, that's all right: a lot of Hollywood's best movies were made by hardened mercenaries who'd rather have been doing something else. That's still no excuse for writers, editors, actors, and producers giving us a mediocre performance, though. It might not be quite Oscar-level material, but this story had the potential to be a very entertaining movie; how very disappointing to see so much potential frittered away.

Parents (1989)

A horror comedy? Yes, but more horror than comedy.

[25 April 2014]

Many critics seem eager to find some moral metaphor in the movie Parents to serve some political pet cause of theirs. Some films do have an obviously moral point to make, but Parents is not one of them. Other critics who attempt psychoanalysis of the movie's child protagonist Michael do have some rather fascinating hypotheses and alternate interpretations of events that occur in this movie, but I contend that the movie works quite well enough when taken at face value: it's just a story about a fairly ordinary (if rather shy and withdrawn) little boy whose suspicions about where his parents are getting their meat prove to be well founded, and how he deals with this rather disturbing situation.

Most who attempt to categorize this film place it firmly in the horror comedy genre, claiming that it uses the parents' cannibalism to "satirize" family life in the suburbs in the 1950s. While the conclusion is valid enough, I contend that this premise is faulty: at no point does the movie Parents ever make fun of the 1950s, the nuclear family, or suburbia. (In fact, the beauty of the setting actually makes it look like growing up in a nuclear family in the suburbs in the 1950s would actually be pretty swell, as long as you didn't happen to have cannibals or domestic abusers for parents.) Actually, there are really only two real jokes in this movie. One of these is rather a meta-joke, since it's the title. In the tradition of a great many "animal attack" horror flicks, the title of Parents manages to name the central threat of the movie in just one word; and just to take the absurdity a little more over the top, it's scribbled across the cover in clichéd dripping red lettering. Thus does whoever titled this movie manage to lampoon this tradition by pointing out that nearly any noun scrawled across a cover in dripping red is a convincing title for a horror movie. The other joke, at the end of the movie, is basically the punchline to the whole story: yeah, if your parents' mystery meat turned out to be human flesh, you'd never trust another meat sandwich anyone handed you either, would you?

If this movie really does have any purpose other than to play upon our common childhood fears for fun and profit, I'd say it's to point out the difference between an imagined horror and the real thing. One way Parents keeps us guessing about Michael's suspicions is by repeatedly showing us that his imagination tends to exaggerate traumatic memories. In flashbacks to a mildly traumatic incident in which he caught his (still mostly clothed) parents engaging in sexual foreplay, for instance, his imagination turns the lipstick they both had smeared on their mouths into a great splatter of blood dripping from their chins as if they'd just been messily devouring a raw corpse. While one can easily understand how his imagination could mix up two taboo subjects that are otherwise unrelated, this does call the accuracy of all his other perceptions into question.

This difference, in fact, is at the heart of the entire conflict on which the story turns. Splattering characters and scenery with blood makes sense in war stories, since the chaos of war typically doesn't allow anybody on the job much time to take care of personal hygiene. For stories in more orderly settings, such as a relatively prosperous 1950s suburban neighborhood, having everyone splattered with blood makes no sense whatsoever. As historians and sociologists can testify, anyone who actually butchers humans on a regular basis typically sanitizes this practice as much as possible through ceremony and ritual and orderly disposal of the remains. In keeping with this reality, what actual cannibalism Michael encounters in this movie is all very sanitary: evidently, his parents are very careful to drain off any excess blood before processing their "long pork" for dinner. The only bloody messes we ever see until the final act are in Michael's overactive imagination.

To Parents' credit, once it's revealed that yes, Michael's parents really are cannibals, the focus shifts immediately not to his disgust and horror at the cannibalism itself, but to the moral dilemma of what to do now that he knows. As his father points out, Michael doesn't really get along with society and its mores any better than they do, his only friend being a similarly quirky young girl who's a bit of an outcast herself. Also, try as he might to deny it, he and his parents really do love each other, and if he exposes their crimes to the world, he'll lose them. His parents haven't personally wronged him, and there's been nothing to indicate they'd ever killed anybody before now. Yet they demand at the very least that he stay silent about a murder they've just committed, and are pressing him to join them in eating the victim.

The way out of this dilemma this movie ultimately provides Michael, I think, proves just a little too morally convenient for the audience, though no less viscerally disturbing. Still, as in another masterpiece of horror, V.C. Andrews' infamous novel Flowers In The Attic, this movie does demonstrate the truly horrifying reality that under enough stress even true love can go cold and even genuinely loving relationships be destroyed. For all his strictness and vaguely creepy behavior, I like to think that originally, Michael's father really did love his son; as for his mother, the movie leaves no doubt that she loved her son right to the bitter end, even as she still loved his father.

In the end, the greatest horror this horror movie provokes in its viewers is the moral horror of Michael's being forced to choose between the loving thing to do and the right thing to do; which in the final analysis, is the most compelling kind of horror of all.

Out of the Blue (1980)

"'Sorry' just don't cut it. 'Sorry' just won't do..."

[25 February 2014]

Out of the Blue is a rather offbeat movie that demonstrates a lot of both the benefits and the pitfalls of "method" acting. On the one hand, Linda Manz as the troubled and whimsical adolescent CB and Dennis Hopper as her father did do some amazing acting in this movie; on the other, it's not really clear what their acting accomplished. "Nihilistic" doesn't begin to describe how utterly pointless this whole movie seems. Classifying it isn't incredibly easy either; "slice of life" might be a good working description, though we aren't given much to describe.

On the writers' end, giving a critique of the storytelling first requires asking: what is this movie's story? To be sure, it has continuity: it remains focused mainly on C.B. and her father, and most of the events in the movie are shown in chronological order, with the exception of a few flashbacks. Calling all of this a "story" requires us, however, to go with a terribly loose definition of the word, specifically "stuff that happens followed by other stuff that happens." C.B. and her father do stuff and stuff happens, but none of this stuff ever seems to be going anywhere. Character development is exceedingly minimal, plot development non-existent; there's no climax, and no real resolution.

To be sure, some of the individual events are interesting to watch; my favorite scene in the whole movie is the one in which CB's father gets fired from his job at the garbage dump after an old enemy badmouths him to his supervisor, and then he promptly takes his revenge by plowing over the supervisor's shack with his bulldozer. This incident occurs entirely without any audible dialogue, since all the noise the bulldozer is making would only drown it out anyway. Each of the actors involved therefore is left to demonstrate everything they're doing and saying through body language while a tragic song about the hopelessness of seeking forgiveness from merciless people blares over the soundtrack; at this, I must admit, all three of them did an excellent job.

I must also concede Linda Manz does an amazing job playing herself as the rough-cut CB who copes with her horrendously dysfunctional family life through regressing to childish fidgeting and thumb-sucking, immersing herself in Elvis and Johnny Rotten and punk rock culture, and reciting rambling phrases that initially sound profound ("subvert normality") but really aren't. From what the director's commentary says, Linda Manz's actual life was apparently just as horrendous as CB's, though it also says that she eventually married and settled down and had five kids. Really, this just makes her brilliant performance here more tragic in hindsight, since her character CB deserved a better ending too.

The real problem with this movie is not how bleak and depressing it is, or its extremely downbeat ending, or even the nearly constant stream of foul language everyone insists on using (though these things certainly don't make it any more entertaining to watch). No, its fatal flaw is simply that it never really accomplishes anything. There's no lesson for us here; nothing to be gained emotionally or intellectually by watching the lives of CB, her chronically alcoholic low-life father, and her chronically adulterous junkie of a mother gradually implode. For all their self-destructive behavior throughout the film, the murder-suicide ending seems rather forced, like a second-hand joke in which the teller has forgotten the original punchline and can't think of a new one. As Ben Bova once noted, suicide is the coward's way out for writers as well as their characters; as such, this movie takes the coward's way out.

Moreover, while the method acting greatly enhances the credibility and spontaneity of the characters, having the director be similarly laid-back and spontaneous produces rather mixed results. Concerning the supposed incestuous subtext between CB and her father, for instance, I honestly don't see any until near the end, when he starts drunkenly jabbering about CB's sexual inexperience and calling for his drinking buddy Charlie to take her virginity. Up until then, CB and her father seem to be rather friendly with each other, the only indication that her affection for him is going sour also being near the end when her counselor Dr. Brean can't get her to tell him why she's cut her father out of her plans for the future.

If anything, the creepy scene in which she finally slays her father doesn't seem to be an act of revenge at all, but a preemptive strike. The director's commentary notes that Sharon Farrell, who plays CB's mother, was actually flubbing her line and speaking out of turn when she starts weeping and saying she doesn't want her daughter "to be a dyke" while she's arguing with her husband. If so, the director was being rather lazy not to re-shoot the scene, or at least edit that part of the footage out in post-production. As it stands, this scene suggests that the mother was making a wholly credible prediction that such a "corrective" rape would only push CB that much further into "dyke" territory.

The director's commentary also reveals that the original script for this movie was supposed to have Dr. Brean rescue CB by helping her break herself free from her dysfunctional family, and that they never told Raymond Burr, who played him, that they had abandoned this plot and this wasn't really his movie anymore. To be sure, maybe this original ending might have been a little too upbeat to be a credible ending to this movie; real-life problems tend to be too complicated to lend themselves to solutions simple enough to require only ninety minutes on a movie screen to portray. Considering the movie these actors and actresses ended up making instead, however, I'm inclined to think the movie would have been better had they at least tried to make the original ending work, even if they'd failed. Alas, we'll probably never know now.

Red Dawn (1984)

A solid right-wing action propaganda flick

[19 February 2014]

Having grown up in the 1980s, I can testify that this film speaks to a very specific concern from a very specific era, though its message still resonates. Is the plot unrealistic? The answer to this question depends on which part of it one means. To its credit, the movie opens by listing a series of counter-factual events to help get the viewer over the most unrealistic premise, namely that the Soviet Union would ever have tried to invade the United States in the face of the Mutually Assured Destruction our nuclear arsenals could have effected. We can thank Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and a number of other believers in peace through strength that these events are counter-factual, and join with Milius in razzing the peace-at-any-price bleeding hearts who would sooner have made this scenario a lot more plausible with their endless calls for unilateral disarmament.

Of course, even with the counter-factual events, it's a bit of a stretch to suggest the Soviets would actually invade America rather than subvert it from within or just fire off their nukes and let the chips fall where they might. The Soviet Union was, after all, the wretched real-life dystopia that deliberately starved millions of its own peasants to death in order to collectivize farming, and its hellish collectivist system in turn is the one that left record crop yields to rot in the fields unharvested on numerous occasions while its peasants continued to starve; somehow, I doubt a government known to be so utterly heartless and indifferent to the starvation and suffering of its serfs in more agriculturally successful years would have behaved any differently in the event of a crop failure.

So why the invasion-and-counter-attack plot? Well, maybe Red Dawn could have been about a full-fledged nuclear war, but The Day After (1983) had pretty effectively covered that story already. Soviet subversion? The short film The Children's Story (1982) had that story covered too. Knowing this, and in view of what we'd seen of actual Communist invasions in other countries (such as Cambodia and Vietnam), a story about such an invasion happening here in middle America might not seem so far-fetched if presented with a few proper hand-waves to the aforementioned obvious objections.

In contrast to this one weakness, the vast majority of the rest of the story holds up a lot better to scrutiny, while critics' objections to it do not. Would Soviet and Cuban Communists really have been so cruel as to shoot up a high school (with RPGs, no less) the way they do at the beginning and then mass-murder civilians practically at random in reprisals for the young Wolverines' attacks? Anyone who asks this question must either be entirely disingenuous or thoroughly ignorant and naive: of course they would! Try reading about the killing fields of Cambodia, of Mao's mass murders in China, Stalin's daily massacres that rivaled and surpassed Hitler's in their cruelty and enormity, of the Soviet gulags and the torture and terror ordinary civilians daily faced for making the tiniest mistake; even the Nazis were never so cruel and evil to so many populations of entire countries as the Communists, albeit not for lack of trying. Really, Red Dawn is actually rather kinder to the Communists than they deserve.

Is it realistic having practically every one of the Wolverines be white and male? What kind of stupid question is that!? This is a war movie set in Colorado! Of course nearly everybody is white and male! Everybody's pulling his and her weight here, including the Hispanic guy (though I do wish the story could have made something of his fluency in Spanish; like maybe have him spy on the Cuban invaders for valuable intelligence) and race is thoroughly irrelevant.

Is the characterization of a homegrown insurgency realistic? Well, ask a member of the Dutch Resistance: NPR did, and he said it was a very accurate depiction of the kind of desperation, mistrust, and infighting he experienced as a resistance fighter in his own time. Could a few of the actors have given a better performance? Maybe. The scene where one of the kids' fathers yells after them to "Avenge me!" is likely to pull an unintentional laugh from the audience and probably should have been cut from the final product; but on the whole, I'd say everyone turned in at least a competent performance and some were quite excellent.

Is the propaganda a little heavy-handed? In places, sure. Has that ever stopped people from enjoying a movie? Screen Junkies's "honest trailer" for James Cameron's CGI-saturated propaganda crap-fest Avatar neatly and effectively summarizes that flick's message as "military=bad, trees=good." For Red Dawn, one could just as easily summarize the message as "Commies and gun control=bad, American patriotism and survivalism=good." Hey, if the gun control freaks and America-haters and grievance-mongering Commie parasites infesting Hollywood and Washington D.C. and nearly all of academia get to have their propaganda flicks, why shouldn't we patriotic right-wing gun-owning taxpayers get to have ours?

Red Dawn is not exactly perfect, but in the final analysis, it's fun, it's watchable, and it's far superior to the mindless action flicks Hollywood cranks out these days. Also, Commies and gun control ARE bad and patriotism and survivalism ARE good. The only thing appalling about this film's message is that anyone felt the need to remind us of these truths at all, a testament to the damage the Soviet subversives did to America's culture during the Cold War. More appalling still is that Hollywood actually thought it could dip back into this movie's success for a remake in this day and age when the Cold War is over and any idea even remotely patriotic and right-wing has been permanently banished from Hollywood's treasonous far-left culture forever. This movie came out in the right place at the right time, but now that time is past.

Phenomena (1985)

Too many ingredients, not enough coherence to the recipe

[3 June 2013]

Having seen the uncut version of Phenomena, I can testify that while trimming down a great many scenes in the censored versions probably did improve the pacing, it couldn't have done much to make the story make any sense and anyway, nothing much could rescue such a scatter-brained and poorly-written script. I can certainly see why Jennifer Connelly might consider this an old shame, though I'm guessing she's not to blame for all the third-act stupidity of her character as she was probably just following the script, and in no position to tell the director that the script was stupid and he was being stupid to insist that she follow it.

Considering that Dario Argento is credited as both writer and director, he truly has no one else to blame for the incompetent execution of this story but himself. A work's being derivative and formulaic need not be a bad thing, especially considering that the new is always necessarily born out of the old and even some of the most original ideas in cinema ever were actually just clever new twists on tried-and-true older ideas. That a great many of the story's elements would be all too familiar to a great many of us in the target audience is not the problem with this film. Yes, a psychopathic serial killer, an all-girls school with a ready supply of potential victims for that same psychopath, a hideous monstrosity chained up in somebody's attic or cellar, and horrific scenery involving corpses and swarming insects have all been done before and since elsewhere, and in some cases with better special effects, but none of these elements by themselves can be considered Phenomena's downfall.

No, the real problem with this film is that the writer and director simply tosses all these elements in seemingly almost at random with little to no effort to make the story binding them all together make any sense. The results of this scatter-shot story-telling are what the film's admirers and defenders prefer to call "surreal" and "atmospheric" whereas we critics and detractors who know better call this mess what it is: confused and incoherent. No matter how strikingly beautiful or ugly the imagery may be (and this film has plenty of striking imagery of both kinds), a film that can't bring all the imagery together in a way that makes sense is just not going to be very entertaining to watch. As an ostensible horror-mystery, Phenomena has too many questions left unasked and unanswered in favor of prolonged lingering over shots of gore and rotting flesh for this to be a decent mystery, and too much of a mystery plot requiring a resolution we're never given for this to be a credible horror story.

Really, Dario Argento would have done much better had he focused much more on the one original element of this story that truly shines through all the others, that being the protagonist Jennifer Corvino's mysterious connection to the bugs. In fact, this force-of-nature superpower is the central and only truly essential element of the story. Had he recognized this and been willing to chuck out any of the other elements in order to keep the focus on this amazing ability of Jennifer's where it belonged, he could have made a far better movie. Phenomena could have been a straight-up horror story that subverted the usual formula by having the seemingly perpetual damsel-in-distress use her powers to be the stuff of serial killers' nightmares rather than the other way around. It could have been a full-fledged mystery with the girl using her power to see things through the insects' eyes to catch and convict criminals (such as serial killers). It could even have been an offbeat superhero action story in which she learns to control and develop her powers to fight crime as David Dunn does in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (and it would have been decades ahead of that film).

Instead, alas, we get this incoherent mess of a film in which the killer (or one of the killers; who did each of the killings and why is one more plot point never really adequately clarified) actually taunts Jennifer at one point by asking her why she doesn't just call those swarms of her insect friends to come rescue her the same way they already have (twice!), and we in the audience have to ask "Yeah, why don't you!?" Jennifer Connelly is a lovely girl and (we know from other movies) an excellent actress. If Argento wanted her to play a girl with control over insects, he should have let her do it, and have her use her powers as early and often as the special effects budget allowed.

Masters of the Universe (1987)

Demonstrates a pulp culture axiom: always steal from the best sources.

[17 April 2013]

A complaint I commonly see in reviews of Masters of the Universe is that it seems to be an obvious "rip-off" or "derivative" of Star Wars. Fans of the He-Man cartoons also complain that it does not adhere very closely to the continuity of those cartoons. The latter charge has already been answered elsewhere: that this movie is, in fact, based more on the minimal storyline of the mini-comics that originally came with the toys than the animated series that was later plotted around those same toys. Hence, we have mainly just He-Man and Skeletor and some of their inner circles of friends and allies and no Prince Adam or other characters and identities later developed for the animated series.

Such creative decisions, as with particularly the decision to replace Orko with Gwildor for the live-action movie, were doubtless motivated partially by adaptive pragmatism and partially by budget concerns. Whereas whipping up a believable live-action facsimile of Orko would be ridiculously easy with the computer graphics technology of our times, this just would not have been feasible for most special effects departments back in 1987. Moreover, that the costumes and equipment the characters use in the live-action movie don't entirely match the ones in the cartoons is surely due to adaptive pragmatism as well: as pointed out in one of the live-action X-Men movies, it would hardly have been a good idea to dress all the mutants there in the same brightly-colored skin-tight spandex they wore in the comics and cartoons. In fact, the lighting and coloring of Masters of the Universe actually does give it a credibly cartoonish look for a live-action movie, and the director makes it clear on the DVD's commentary track that he and the cast and crew bent over backwards to achieve this effect by shooting most of the movie at night; looking at the finished product, one can see this effort paid off beautifully.

As for the charges of plagiarizing from Star Wars, that Star Wars itself plagiarizes heavily from (or, as Hollywood prefers to say, "is inspired by") other sources is fairly well known. What not so many of these critics realize is that Master of the Universe was actually "inspired by" a great many of the same sources as Star Wars. Try playing tracks from the classical composer Gustav Holst's "The Planets" intermingled with music from the Star Wars and Masters of the Universe soundtracks, and suddenly you'll realize that Bill Conti was not ripping off John Williams; rather, Conti and Williams were both plagiarizing from Holst. As for the characters and plots of each film, Marvel and DC's lawyers would likely have sued anyone who'd admit this into oblivion, but Star Wars and Masters of the Universe obviously both draw heavily from a lot of Jack Kirby's early Silver Age comics with their grotesque monsters and armies of invading alien stormtroopers, particularly the ones in which a power-hungry tyrant from a metallic and highly technologically advanced dystopian planet seeks out a mysterious source of cosmic power that can give him god-like control over the entire universe, aided by mindless hordes of minions and squads of quirky and monstrous super-powered warriors all seeking to curry favor with him; but enough about Darkseid and Jack Kirby's Fourth World stories.

On its own merits, apart from all its predecessors, is Masters of the Universe any good? On the whole, I'd have to say yes. Frank Langella's Skeletor clearly enjoys chewing the scenery at every opportunity, as does Detective Lubic, who's remarkably competent at his job even if he's a bit of a dick about it at times. Robert Duncan McNeill's performance as Kevin neatly foreshadows the same level-headed plain-spoken charming personality he would later bring to his roles as Nick Locarno and then Tom Paris in the Star Trek franchise, Courteney Cox is sweet and vulnerable as Julie, Meg Foster demonstrates considerable ruthless competence as Evil-Lynn in bringing a woman's touch to Skeletor's efforts to retrieve Gwildor's other cosmic key, and even Billy Barty does a decent job being the plucky comic relief as Gwildor. Dolph Lundgren, while playing a rather flat character with minimal dialogue, earns his paycheck by flexing those muscles and swinging that sword at every opportunity, and Skeletor's mercenary squad and stormtroopers are believably menacing and dangerous even though He-Man and his pals end up wiping the walls with them.

While a remake is rumored to be in progress now, I strongly doubt it will be able to improve much on this movie. Though the constraints of its relatively low budget do show in places and it has not aged as well as it might, Masters of the Universe is an enjoyable sword-and-sorcery space opera better than most of the kid-vids of its time and still well worth a viewing.

Angel (1983)

A B-movie plot with A-movie writing

[16 March 2013]

In many ways, Angel is quite an understated masterpiece of the film maker's art. To be sure, it's low-budget and as such works with a lot of themes common to exploitation flicks whose primary (and quite often only) purpose is to make a quick and tidy profit. Tell any prospective viewer from B-movie fandom that this movie is about an underage hooker being hunted by a necrophiliac serial killer, and he (or in some cases she) will probably think he (or she) knows what to expect. In the absence of expensive special effects, we can expect to see lots of exposed female flesh and gratuitous sex scenes and the killer knocking off our protagonist's fellow hookers in increasingly gruesome and inventive ways, with only a minimal plot stringing these scenes together to justify calling them a movie, right?

Wrong! The true genius of this film is how it defies such expectations. For all the rather titillating advertising on the cover, Angel is neither a slasher flick nor a skin flick. Yes, there's some killing, and yes, a few scenes have some female nudity, including some full-frontal. However, the camera never lingers over the killings longer than necessary, and for all the potentially prurient subjects this movie examines, there are no actual sex scenes. Angel, in fact, seems deliberately designed to swat the viewers' libidos in the very places where other exploitation flicks would tend to pander to them. Considering that it was a 25-year-old (!) Donna Wilkes playing the 15-year-old protagonist Molly "Angel" Stewart, and the other streetwalkers shown were indicated to be at least in their early 20s, Robert Vincent O'Neill certainly was at liberty to throw in a sex scene--or several of them--if he so desired. That he didn't suggests he was deliberately taunting more lecherous viewers by presenting the aforementioned nudity to us at only the most thoroughly unappealing moments. One of this movie's most impressive achievements has to have been making a scene showing half a dozen of Molly's nubile young classmates showering together and prancing around naked in a girls' locker room feel like nothing but an unwelcome distraction from the story.

Another impressive achievement is how this movie follows Molly's exciting adventures as a Hollywood hooker without making her occupation seem particularly glamorous. As attractive and sympathetic a protagonist as Molly is, Angel is not some clichéd "hooker with a heart of gold" story. Once again, the scripting seems intended to frustrate lechers, with the camera regularly following a small gang of Prostitutes Who Don't Do Anything; the only times we actually see them plying their trade is when they're about to run into the killer or (in Molly's case) some of his grisly handiwork. The story thereby brings the difference between "excitement" and "enjoyment" into stark relief: yes, turning tricks as a prostitute is rather exciting, in the same sense that being a bank teller during a heist or a soldier on the front lines during a war is exciting. Most of us, however, would rather not experience such excitement firsthand. Molly makes clear in numerous scenes that she knows just how risky prostitution is, the only reason she's in this business at all is to pay her bills, and otherwise she's trying to steer clear of it.

While O'Niell and Wilkes each deserve considerable praise for keeping us focused on Molly as a person rather than a sex object, the rest of the cast certainly deserve some acclaim for all having played such colorful characters so effectively while helping keep the story on track. Lieutenant Andrews provides us with a strong moral center to the story and his sometime partner Collins gives the movie a hint of the feel of a buddy cop film. The killer, nameless and voiceless until the very end, manages to be both pathetic and loathsome to behold in every one of his scenes. The only John we ever see with Molly is amply rude and obscene to help kill off any lingering romantic notions we might have had about prostitution, and the disgusting jerk jock Ric Sawyer and his gang make excellent secondary villains for us to love to hate.

"Mae" the transvestite and Solly the butch landlady provide a bit of comic relief with their bizarre personalities and (dare I say it?) a hint of heterosexual tension between them in several scenes where they argue like an old married couple. (Heterosexuality between a manly woman and a womanly man? It makes a twisted kind of sense, I guess.) Kit Carson and the Yo-Yo man turn in excellent performances as well and serve to remind us that one doesn't have to be a hooker or serial killer to appreciate some of the local color in the Hollywood Boulevard, with the bit parts of a "Jesus Peddler" and some Hare Krishnas helping round out the setting. Even the school guidance counselor Patricia Allen gets a moment in the limelight in a dispute with Solly, and Molly's adorably nerdy classmate Wayne garners a bit of sympathy at the beginning when she lets him down easy from his awkward attempt to ask her out on a date.

About the only fault I can find with Angel is that some of the language, particularly from Mae, Solly, Andrews, and Allen, was a lot fouler than it needed to be. Also, while the gratuitous nudity was cleverly made as unappealing as possible as mentioned, cutting it out altogether (as in the edited-for-TV version rumored to exist) could only be an improvement. Ultimately, seeing this movie made clear to me why it did so well at the box office and so poorly with its critics: the general public doesn't watch pornography for a well-written story, and doesn't go looking for pornography in a well-written story. The critics went looking for pornography in a well-written story, and were duly disappointed. Had they been looking for a good story as I was, they would have found Angel a lot more satisfying.

Skipped Parts (2000)

It's not so far-fetched, but awfully anachronistic.

[22 May 2012]

Frankly, I'm rather glad I didn't read a single review here before watching the movie. Several reviewers evidently take this movie as a convenient platform from which to bash the Religious Right™ for not adhering to the Christian-hating Left's benighted sexual libertinism. To be sure, Skipped Parts is rather brutally frank about all matters of sexuality, but as at least one reviewer pointed out already, the pro-abortion and anti-family bigots of the Left will find very little of this frankness to be at all friendly to their despicable ideology. Actually, one would be hard-pressed to find any "message" to this movie at all, as it is more a reflection of our times than an effort to shape them.

This brings me to one of the real strikes against this movie: though set in the 1960s around the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination, the protagonists (Sam, Lydia, and to a lesser degree her cousin Delores) all have ridiculously anachronistic points of view for people from the 1960s, while the antagonists (Sam Callahan, Dothan Talbot, Coach Howard Stebbins, to a lesser degree Maurey's parents, and to an even lesser degree the rest of the students and townspeople) are all basically contemporary Hollywood caricatures of people from the early 1960s. Someone is clearly guilty of either executive meddling or lazy writing.

Yes, there were "easy" girls and single mothers back in the 1960s, but none of them would have thought and behaved the way Lydia does, nor would society have dealt with them so mildly if they had; nobody would even have considered rolling out a welcome wagon for a single mother and her illegitimate child in the first place, nor allowed their children to hang around with Sam. Moreover, in those days when the "unwritten law" was still somewhat in effect, the threatened violence against Sam, played for laughs in this movie, would have been no joke. He would be fortunate if Maurey's aggrieved father didn't decide to invite him to a "shotgun wedding" ceremony that was all shotgun and no wedding.

As for the much-remarked hypocrisy of several of the characters (particularly Coach Stebbins and Maurey's mother), I'll concede that stereotypes — yes, even Hollywood's — are not entirely without foundation; hypocrisy and hypocrites we have with us always. Anyone who thinks this hypocrisy is offered as any kind of justification for Lydia's evil beliefs and behaviors, however, would do well to reconsider. Sincerity by itself, as Lydia demonstrates, is no virtue at all, and hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In this movie, vice pays a very grim tribute indeed to virtue in several truly horrifying scenes concerning Lydia's attempt to cover up Sam and Maurey's mistake by murdering their unborn baby.

Most horrifying of all is the scene in which Sam pleads that it's his baby too; doesn't he get any say in what happens to his child? No, Lydia insists, he doesn't. In fact, nothing he says can sway her, though he promises to take responsibility, get a job, marry the girl, do anything if only his mother will let them keep the baby. In the end, it's hypocrisy which proves to be both a deus ex machina and diabolus ex machina, as Maury's mother happens to be down at the very same illegal murder mill having her love child with Coach Stebbins butchered, traumatizing both mother and daughter when they meet and leading to a very awkward moment between Sam and Stebbins as well. How can I *not* see this as being a thoroughly damning portrayal of abortion and all of the cruel baby-butchering child-snatching misandrists calling themselves "feminists" who support it?

No, unlike some reviewers here, I would definitely *not* show this movie to teenagers as a part of their sex education. If we must have entertainment while educating our kids about sex, we have plenty of other more informative and positive movies that would serve the purpose far better: The Blue Lagoon (1980) and 17 Again (2009) come to mind. Honestly, did that gross-out moment with Lydia and the sock, or any of the references to oral sex (which also quite understandably grossed out Sam and Maurey) need to be in this movie at all? It would have been far more enjoyable to watch without them. Some movies really should be exclusively restricted to adults even if some of the main characters are kids, and this is one of them.

If anything, Lydia's efforts to expose Sam to too much of our unrated world too soon is a precautionary tale, not an example to be followed as some of the more foolish reviewers here seem to believe. Yes, Lydia does seem to be a bit more responsible by the end, having gotten a job and a man to support her so she won't end up being another welfare leech (the way so many single mothers these days are), but it's not clear that she's really learned her lesson; neither she nor anyone else shows any remorse for having nearly murdered her granddaughter, and there's no wedding scene, so it's not clear whether she's actually married to Hank even by common law.

Ultimately, however, the reason I don't like this movie very much is that the story is actually rather depressing. Skipped Parts is a comedy, yes, but a black comedy full of disgusting behavior leading to mood whiplash and coming to an only partially satisfying ending. I sympathized with Sam, laughed at the funny parts and was duly horrified at the horrifying parts. On the whole, I don't regret watching it, and I think anyone who can take a few revolting scenes and characters in stride and doesn't mind a few anachronistic attitudes could benefit from seeing this movie. All the same, I'd rather not see this movie again any time soon, if ever. It might be worth a rental, but the jury's still out on whether it will ever be worth a purchase.

Melody (1971)

Incredibly Innocent & Remarkably Romantic

[4 March 2012]

Unlike a certain previous poster, I can't say I really see there being any big "message" to this film, which is probably just as well. Far from being some screed about how oppressed children are or, conversely, how irresponsible, this is indeed a comedy, and all the moralizing comes from adults too shallow and silly to be taken seriously. This story is more like one of the tales one could find in a distinctly British genre of pulp literature that focuses on the antics of rowdy English schoolboys, albeit with the distinctly 1970s twist that the movie also focuses on the precocious flirtatiousness of rowdy English schoolgirls, making this a romantic comedy. I only got to see this film as an adult some four decades after it first came out, but I'd certainly recommend it as a date movie to any young couple looking to see something romantic without all the raunchiness of the garbage that passes for romantic comedy these days.

What's truly amazing about this movie is how it manages to sell us on the fantastic premise of two children who never even do any kissing on-screen (or, it's heavily implied, off-screen either) coming to decide in all earnestness that they want to get married. In their society, which also gets plenty of screen time as a backdrop to the main characters' antics, such a romance makes no sense and is duly dismissed as irrational. Still, as Shakespeare once noted, "...to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays!" In their mutual defiance of all the derision of their peers and all the attempts of the supposedly responsible adults (regularly revealed to be nothing more than petty-minded killjoys) to put them in their place, we can easily see how they come to be more than merely attracted to each other even at an age when hormones have not yet awakened any sexual desire for each other in them.

In view of its literary origins and all of this delightful irrationality, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that all of the building tension between the lovers and their society culminates in an impromptu wedding ceremony that manages to be simultaneously completely serious and utterly hilarious. (That Ornshaw plays such a convincing straight man to his own usually jocular self in this scene says a lot for Jack Wild's talent as an actor.) Everything ends in utter mayhem as the grown-ups raid the party and the guests fight back, precipitating the shredding of the teachers' clothes and the bombing of Mrs. Latimer's car while Daniel and Melody make their escape to a highly uncertain fate on a trolley.

This open ending, of course, did leave me wondering what happened next. I like to think that, as P.J. O'Rourke said in one of the similarly crazy stories he wrote for the National Lampoon, "Everyone concerned eventually came to his and her senses." However, I also like to think that Daniel Latimer and Melody Perkins might ultimately have spoken their wedding vows in full in front of a legitimate parson a few years later when they could hope to attain legal recognition for their love and marriage.