The United Provinces of Ivanlandia

Reed ’Em & Weep: The Worst of 2011

2012-01-19T18:24:00.025-05:00

Not Contrarianism, But Genuine Dislike:
(if I hated ’em, you should, too)
In a list, the worst:
American: The Bill Hicks Story
Battle: Los Angeles
Dogtooth
Inception
Monsters
The Resident
Rubber
Skyline
Somewhere
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

These are the worst because they represented such colossal wastes of potential—on paper, I could see these movies working (maybe)—
Or else were hyped way out of proportion to their actual values—
Or else it was a case of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where I just can’t see what everyone else is marveling over (that, or maybe it’s the blows to the head I’ve taken over the years…).
Or else they were just BAD—I mean of absolutely no redeeming Ivanlandic value: boring, stupid and without entertainment value. These films made me angry because they were a complete waste of my time.

With The Worst, I tried to stick to those flicks released in or near 2011—no need to pick on Mr. No Legs again—and I didn’t include those unmentionable movies that I turned off after 15 or 20 minutes: that just doesn’t seem fair—who knows, it could have turned out great!

[There are flicks I no love that I despised while watching until about an hour in (and now I see how awesome that first hour is, knowing that the movie pays off), for example, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street.
Until about, say, the 65 minute mark, I hated this movie—then something clicked, and I LOVED it:
Everything started making perfect sense, and the performances, especially those from the godlike Edward G. Robinson and eternal sneering badboy Dan Duryea, became brilliant.
That said, there is no reason I can think of to go and have a second screening of Your Highness….]

But enough yapping about perfect examples of cinematic magnificence, onto the crap!

The Resident (2011)—Hammer Films’ “big comeback” is worse than the company’s zero-budget dreck from their early-1970s low point, like The Satanic Rites of Dracula.
Review HERE

Inception (2010)—Maybe if I’d seen this over-hype postmodern tribute to Philip K. Dick in a theater, I might have been impressed, but the dialog was flat-out exposition, and it’s impossible for me to see Leo DeCraprio as anything but a petulant and constipated pinch-face.
Review HERE

Rubber (2010)—A smarmy waste of potential that has utter contempt for the genre and for its audience. Awful, just awful.
Review HERE

Somewhere (2010)—THIS won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival? WTF?!?
Sofia Coppola better get back to adapting contemporary novels—writing about “what she knows” ain’t cutting it anymore. Somewhere was nowhere.
I love what Carson Reeves writes on Somewhere at his awesome website Script Shadow:
“When you’re asking people to pay ten bucks for your movie, a cohesive storyline is required. Or a goal. Or a purpose. Or a point. Somewhere is a film that feels cobbled together from random dailies and rehearsal takes.”

American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009)—I’m a big fan of the late comedian, and am already familiar with his life and routines—there was very little new this documentary had to offer me—and the cutesy animated bits were actually quite distracting.

Meanwhile, I was surprised at how little of Hicks’ stand-up was actually presented. I got the feeling that the legal or financial rights to a lot of footage was unavailable, like his performance on the late-1980s Impact Video Magazine.

And how was this documentary for someone unfamiliar with Hicks and his work? Well, the Missus of Ivanlandia had only heard a handful of the comedian’s routines before seeing his, and she, too, was very disappointed.

Another reason to include this mediocre movie on the worst list is because its existence will prevent a better, more comprehensive documentary on Hicks from being made for a long, long time.

Monsters (2010)
Skyline (2010)
Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
Wonderful effects ruined by cruddy scripts—
I most certainly love alien invasions, spaceships, monsters, mass destruction and colossal loss of human life in my movies, but these flicks made me gnash my teeth in frustration:
Their scripts were all willfully stupid, with unrealistic dialog that was beyond cliché, and without fail the characters were so unlikeable (or underwritten), I was constantly praying for their deaths.

Yes, the effects are stunning—but their exquisite quality and detail only further points out how little the filmmakers cared about the scripts of their movies,
and that’s why I would like to take all the effects-heavy moments (about 30 minutes from each flick, I guess), then edit/intercut them together; except start one of the films completely out of sequence—keep the films’ original music and sound effects, but lose all but the most rudimentary dialog. Trim it to 75 minutes (not including any credits), then have American-International release it and title it “Invaders From the Fifth Dimension”—

Lemme tell ya, as incomprehensible and post-modern as that mish-mosh I’ve conjured up might be, it would be a lot more fun than Monsters, Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles as they are now.

Dogtooth (2009)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
And these two are The WORSTEST of 2011!

Everywhere else in the blogosphere and beyond, these two movies were loved more than a drowning man loves oxygen, and for the life of me, I cannot see why. Did I see the same movies those other critics did? Do I not get it because I didn’t take enough “film theory” classes in college? Or is it because I haven’t sublimated my own personality to jibe with whatever “zeitgeist” is happening?

I’d heard and read good things about Dogpoop and Uncle BoreMe, and on renting them, I wanted to like them—I want to like every movie I rent! I do not get joy out of seeing a bad movie.

But these movies? Oy.
Dogtooth’s idea-free imitation of David Lynch was 25 years too late to be relevant; and Uncle Boonme was molasses-paced quasi-beatific religious hokum—

Whatever subject matter contained in either film could have been presented more effectively in a 10-minute short—self-conscious and pretentious ambiguity (which both flicks WALLOW in) is more welcome in a short film: in a feature-length pic, it’s cruel and unusual punishment.

Here’s what I wrote about Dogtooth in February 2011:
I fucking HATED Dogtooth. Art school wankery, through and through.
Antonioni-Lynch mashup cheered on only because the young leads are
easy on the eyes.
Had they been fat grotesques, that beautiful reality would crush the
pretentions of this Greek snoozefest.

C’mon, guys! Ted Post did this back in 1973 with The Baby, AND he hit
plenty more relevant socio-economic points while he did it.

Art movies that are enigmatic on purpose are, in my opinion, LAZY.
Jeez, man, either go the distance and be like Stan Brakhage (a GOD, I
might add), or at least be willing to focus and tell a story.

And ambiguity is delightful at times… but almost throughout all of
Dogtooth, I felt a smugness emanating from the film. I really cannot
put my finger on it. It was like they were screeching nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH!
I mean, I really this flick is a con, an example of the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Of course, maybe the joke’s on me: Dogtooth get’s 93% from the Rotten Tomato-meter!

And more recently, here’s what the magnificent Phantom of Pulp wrote about Uncle BonghitMe at his very recommended site:
It's on top of my Worst of 2011 list because it was an interminable bore. It got praised by professional critics and ended up on some 'Best' lists. Well, it ended up right here on a different list. Seriously, if this film had been in English instead of Thai, it would have been crucified for the steaming turd it is.

Mr. Phantom, I couldn’t agree more!

"Punishment Park" and Friends; Or: What I’ve Been Watching Lately

2012-01-17T18:30:00.005-05:00

MST3K: The Beatniks (1992) Joel and the bots rip apart Paul Frees’ awful The Beatniks, turning it into something better than it was.
Seen via Netflix Streaming.

The Big Boss (1971; Wei Lo); YES, but only the scenes of Bruce Lee exhibiting his mad martial arts skillz. The rest? FF through.
Seen via Netflix Streaming.

Perversion Story (a.k.a. One on Top of the Other) (1969; Lucio Fulci) MAYBE—
Lucio Fulci is an acquired taste, one that requires viewers to willingly put logic on hold and leap into Fulci’s patented fever dreams. And honestly, his films tend to be really depressing, too.
Loved this flick’s split-screen work, though.

Bored to Death Season One (2009) Well it was certainly amusing enough, but after watching the first four episodes, I didn’t feel the need to watch further. And I cannot stand sitcoms where the protagonists have no visible means of support.

Detective Story (2007; Takeshi Miike); NO! Miike enters the Post-Modern Serial Killer Genre Movie Sweepstakes (see Seven and Silence of the Lambs)….and loses.

Punishment Park (1971; Peter Watkins) YES!
In light of the massive militarization of local police departments; the civil- and human-rights abuses of Guantanamo Bay; the PATRIOT Act; the demonization of the Left; the scapegoating of those who disagree politically; the narrowing of the American mind; the extreme polarization of political discourse; and all the other myriad abuses of power done in the name of “National Security,” the fact is, as far as I’m concerned,
Punishment Park makes more sense than ever.

Directed by Peter Watkins (his best film, IMHO), this agitprop fake documentary follows a group of convicted political dissidents as they try and cross 50 miles of desert while being chased by cops and troopers.
Brutal and intense, Punishment Park is the epitome of “Savage Cinema” (and would make a great double-feature with the similarly-themed Battle Royale).

Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003; Bob Odenkirk) Maybe—for Bob Odenkirk fans only, I’d say.
Seen via Netflix Streaming.

Breaking Bad Season Four (2011) YES!

Mars (2010; Geoff Marslett) NO: The animation was interesting, but I couldn’t finish watching Mars—the humor was dreadful, below sophomoric: hipster, snark-cool lameness. Ugh.
Seen via Netflix Streaming.

Machine Gun McCain (1969; Giuliano Montaldo) This flick is almost awful, but saved by energetic perfs by John Cassavettes, Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, as well as some decent violence and mayhem.
But this flick’s ultimate saving grace is the copious location shooting in Las Vegas and San Francisco: this movie was a wonderful travelogue of two cities that have been changed so much that their 1969 versions wouldn’t recognize the 2012 versions.
Seen via Netflix Streaming.

Miss Foreign Affairs Presents: The 36+ Movies of December 2011!

2012-01-11T16:55:00.020-05:00

Films are mostly in the order that I saw them…

Teorema (1968); NO—If you told me Pasolini made this film with the sole purpose of getting star Terence Stamp in the sack, I’d believe you. Tame and meandering, the flick is a bit of a snooze, mainly because it’s so quaint.

The Message (1976); NO, but a fascinating film for trying to portray the rise of the Prophet Muhammed
(peace and blessing of God be upon him)
by the strict guidelines of Islam. That is, without showing him at all!
And if you’re not completely narrow-minded, you watch the film and realize, “Oh wow, just like Christians and Jews have their boring holiday movie epics, the Muslims have theirs, too.”
See? We can all get along!
A much better flick is director (and former Sam Peckinpah protégé) Mustapha Akkad’s later film Lion of the Desert—worth catching not only for its incredible battle scenes and one of Oliver Reed’s more subtler performances, but for its definite skew towards revolutionary Third World politics: Throw the Imperialist Colonizers into the sea! Lion of the Desert would be a good double feature with Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn!

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941); YES—American Dadaism, at its finest, courtesy of W.C. Fields! Genius, sheer GENIUS, I tell you!

Mail Order Wife (2005); YES—from Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko, the team that also unleashed The Last Exorcism and The Virginity Hit. These guys are taking the fake documentary sub-genre (I don’t like the term “mockumentary”) and going someplace unique with it. I’ve enjoyed all three of their films, and really like the mindgames they spring. Full disclosure: I’m in the Gurland-produced/Botko-cinematographed documentary on Al Goldstein, Screwed (1997).

Red Angel (1966); YES— Reviewed HERE

Secret Honor (1984); YES—Nixon Agonistes!

Tyson (2009); YES—Iron Mike does have a soul!

I Worked for Stalin (1990); NO—bitter old commies lying about each other.

Mock Up on Mu (2009); NO—try as he might, collagist/filmmaker Craig Baldwin has not impressed me since the incredible and third-eye-opening Tribulation 99; but keep trying!

The Crawling Eye (1958); YES—Reviewed HERE

Path to War (2003); YES; I’m working my way through all of John Frankenheimer’s films, and this docudrama about LBJ going into Vietnam is pretty good, considering that it looks like Frankenheimer wasn’t given much of a budget. I loved Gary Sinise’s cameo/return as George Wallace, though.

Drunken Wutang (1984); YES; so this is the madness that inspired the band? Now I get it.

Michael Palin: Around the World in 80 Days (1989); YES; the nicest man in the world takes a trip around the place he's the nicest.

Manon (1949); YES—because even when I don’t like a Henri-Georges Clouzot film, like Diabolique, it is always worth watching, and I liked Manon: it’s a high-energy l’amour fou death-trip from the get-go, about an amoral sexpot and a hot-headed, love-stricken ex-Resistance fighter—I often wondered while watching the movie whether director Clouzot is actually laughing at these doomed lovebirds? (Or at least snickering?) Which also wouldn’t surprise me since some of Clouzot’s other flicks (like Le Corbeau or The Wages of Fear) are not exactly upbeat—
No wonder Hitchcock was a fan!
And Manon is a flick that could NOT have been made in the US at the time: the lead’s stint in a bordello would not have been allowed.

The Brood (1979); YES—Reviewed HERE

The Beatniks (1960); NO—what the hell was Paul Frees thinking?!? Inept garbage written and directed by the God of the Voice-Overs—so bad it has to be seen to be believed…but you’ll be sorry—just like me. And the title is a lie—there are NO beatniks in this flick.

The Cell (2000); NO, although I did like the art direction and Vinnie DeeOh’s perf.

Rubber’s Lover (1996); NO, HELL NO: Annoying Tetsuo/cyberpunk noise. Maybe I missed something in the translation...

8 Mile (2002); YES—a hip-hop Rocky with Eminem playing himself: go Rabbit!

A Place in the Sun (1951); YES, yes, a thousand times YES! (And so, my George Stevens kick begins…)

Come Drink With Me (1966); YES, good old school Run Run Shaw sword fu—lots of fun.

Cube (1997); YES—although it honestly feels like a longer, missing episode of The Outer Limits, not that that’s a bad thing! And Nicole DeBoer is SO cute!

Breaking Bad: Season One (2008); YES—this show is the closest thing to a Donald Westlake novel on television; the show’s set-up (milquetoast genius chemistry teacher uses his mad skills to become a meth kingpin) is the missing third part to the themes started in his novels The Axe—made into a great film by Costa-Gavras in 2005—and The Hook. I’m only halfway through the second season as I write this, and the terms “Westlakian” or “Westlake-like” (“Westlike”?) keep coming to mind. Great stuff.

Stake Land (2010); NO—Reviewed HERE

Bad Biology (2008); YES; Frank Henenlotter ALWAYS delivers.

Alternative Three (1977); YES—excellent combo of a fake documentary and Gerry Anderson’s UFO—perfect double-feature with Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99, or Apollo 18; watch it HERE

Futurama: Volume 6 (2011) YES

Fight for Your Life (1977); YES—especially for unrepentant exploitation/grindhouse/white trash insanity.

Breaking Bad: Season Two (2009); YES

The Diary of Anne Frank (1959); NO—George Stevens makes an Otto Preminger film, and not one of the good ones.

Exodus (2007); YES—Definitely NOT the Otto Preminger flick—
If William “women are an alien species” Burroughs and Roman Polanski were hired to rewrite an Ed McBain book and set it in Shanghai, this would be it.

Shane (1952); YES—’cause it’s a CLASSIC! Seen before, but watched and enjoyed again as part of my George Stevens kick…I may skip Giant, though…

These Are the Damned (1960); YES—at first the flick seems all over the place, but then it comes together in a heartbreaking way, and I swear, I keep thinking about this movie long after I’ve seen it. This is the type of morally questioning/thought-provoking science fiction that’s so hard to come by—really worth a look—
Meanwhile
Oliver Reed is deliciously feral as a vicious Teddy Boy with very incestuous feelings for his trampy sis—
Great soundtrack, too! One of the best seen in 2011!

The D.I. (1957); YES; Jack Webb’s love-letter to the USMC is bonkers—the right-wing flipside to Full Metal Jacket, but just as intense and mindbending—like an Earthbound, contemporary version of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers—it’s also incredibly funny with that psychotic rat-a-tat dialog Webb is known for. The D.I. is a must-see, and like Full Metal Jacket, incredibly quotable: “If brains were dynamite, you couldn't blow your nose!”

Apollo 18 (2011); YES—what’s with all the hating? Sure, if I had had to pay real money to see it, I would’ve been annoyed by the film’s slow middle—but as a renter, this flick is great fun—like an Outer Limits episode, or a weird spin-off TV movie from a Gerry Anderson TV show.
I make no apologies for my enjoyment of genre flicks that use the “found footage/fake documentary” trick—
I even consider it a horror subgenre unto itself—and as the contemporary equivalent of the
epistolary horror story,
the diary or letters of a doomed man being swallowed by supernatural forces.
As such, I enjoyed Apollo 18’s combination of surveillance footage, electronic monitors, 16mm, 8mm and stock footage—all of it documenting a mission that was “doomed” from the get-go.
It doesn’t always make sense, but the flick is tense and weird on a low-budget, and I think its monsters were great:
And I don’t care if this is a spoiler, because it was my knowing that these unfortunate astronauts were going to run into MOON-CRAB-SPIDERS that made me want to see Apollo 18 even more.
Nasty silicon-based life forms that look like rocks when standing still—but when disturbed, they’re wretched and evil MOON-CRAB-SPIDERS that move really fast! Fun stuff all around.
(Hey, maybe the MOON-CRAB-SPIDERS are the watchdogs of the Selenites from The First Men in the Moon?)

Super (2010); YES—Excellent! Superheroes are psychopaths.
This is the movie that both Kick-Ass and Watchmen wanted to be, and then goes beyond that.
In this case, a man interprets his psychotic breakdown as a religious experience that tells him to be a superhero.
A moving modern fairy tale that effectively mixes gore, sick humor and pathos—there’s a happy ending, but you have to earn it.
While I didn’t love director James Gunn’s previous flick Slither, it has a HUGE cult following, and Super deserves the same. Gunn keeps getting better with each film, and it’s fun as a movie fan to find someone whose work is routinely interesting, growing and changing.
This film is also the first time I have ever really liked the actors Riann Wilson or Ellen Page: I thought they did great jobs playing flawed, weird kind-of real people.
Yeah, this is one of my favorites of the year.

Cobra (1986); NO—Stallone can’t write or act comedy, he shouldn’t even try.

Breaking Bad: Season Three (2010); YES; the first season was Westlakeian like The Ax; the second season was Westakeian like Dortmunder; the third season is starting to get like Richard Stark’s Parker—and I think that is great. Go Team Heisenberg!

Shorts—they’re shorts, so just fuckin’ watch them, okay?

Rosa (sexy cyber-killers in action)

Separation (kinky latex weirdness)

White Hunter Black Heart (1990)

2012-01-10T16:23:00.002-05:00

Slow pick-up, but if you appreciate Clint’s “Art” films (like this, or Bird, or Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—both of which I like a lot) you’ll dig it—especially if you’re familiar with John Huston’s antics or Peter Viertel’s book on the making of The African Queen. (The film is a roman a clef about the making of the film; basically Huston was willing to do it so he could go to Africa and shoot elephants.)

For those who aren’t ardent admirers of El Squinterino, there may be some disappointment that White Hunter Black Heart isn’t as emotional devastating as it needs to be. Personally, I consider the film a fascinating failure—always better than a dull success—and honestly, I’m not exactly sure what happens at the end (so why does the elephant kill Kivu?).

But Clint Eastwood is a director who always intrigues me, one whom I always return to.

For a reviewer that really loves the film, go HERE.

DRIVE to TRESPASS Spoilers

2012-01-08T17:50:00.011-05:00

Finally got around to seeing Nicholas Winding Refn’s DRIVE—

It’s a combo of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles neo-noir aesthetics—Walter Hill and Jacque Deray blended with some Michael Mann—with some copious gore and a fab supporting cast (yes, Albert Brooks is as good as people are saying—and Bryan Cranston was good enough to want to see more of his character, a smarmy but nice loser).

(Deray is the director of the excellent 1972 thriller The Outside Man, a flick I cannot recommend enough and am glad I own—thanks, Toestubber!—and one that I will be watching again soon.
The Outside Man is also referenced heavily in the must-see-for-all-cinephiles documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), another must-see.)

While I honestly do not think there was enough automobile-centric scenes in the film—they don’t all have to be chases, either—and there was way too much mushy maple-syrup-filtered boy-girl-romance-yawnage—
I do think the first hour of Drive was great, really top flight stuff that had me completely on-board.
But after a while, the flick’s existential Euro-cool bordering on autism shtick started to grind me down.
And I hate, hate, HATE a caper flick (and there’s certainly a caper flick in Drive) where the treasure is thoughtlessly left behind.
Doesn’t Ryan Gosling’s character think that cute Carey Mulligan could use that bread? (Don’t be mad: I warned you there’d be spoilers.)
(And leaving it behind is much different from endings, like Kubrick’s The Killing or Huston’s Treasure of Sierra Madre, where it is thematically important that the loot be lost.)

That said, I will be renting Drive when it becomes available—not only to examine and re-appreciate the movie’s good points, and maybe reassess what I’ve seen and like it more (the photography is fantastic, and I’m glad I saw this in a theater), but also because the gorehound in me NEEDS to slo-mo Big Red’s death scene!

Valhalla Rising is the only other film of Refn’s that I’ve seen, and like Drive is great until roughly the last 10-15 minutes. But I do recommend it! And I intend to hunt down Refn’s old films and keep my eyes peeled for the new ones.

Now, while I’ll be renting Drive when it’s on DVD, I fully intend to buy Walter Hill’s excellent 1978 existential neo-noir car chase thriller The Driver, a movie that surely must have influenced Drive.
Not so much a caper flick, The Driver is a cat-&-mouse struggle between the Driver (Ryan O’Neal) and the Detective, played by an awesome Bruce Dern.

Through the magic of Nflix Streeeeeemin’, I recently caught up with TRESPASS, Hill’s 1992 collaboration with Robert “chasing MoCap till I have a heart attack” Zemeckis and David Gale.
I’m a big fan of Hill’s early work, especially The Driver, The Warriors and Southern Comfort, but after the financial failure of a very personal (for the ultra-reticent Hill) project Streets of Fire, some sort of spark went out of his work—or else being forced to work with a mug like James Belushi in Red Heat killed his soul.
(Despite that, I’m a mega-fan of Hill’s collaboration with John Milius, 1987’s Extreme Prejudice.)

But Trespass is basically remembered as that flick where two guys named Bill face off against two guys named Ice. I can only recommend it for dedicated Hill completists: It’s a long slog, and Hill is strictly director-for-hire, letting bad acting and plot contrivances pile up—Jeez, whatever happened to Hill’s once-incredible screenwriting skills; see: Hickey & Boggs, The Getaway or Alien.

Beneath the Valley of the Astro-Memes for a White Parasol Girl Who Fell From Grace With the Sea and Became Mixed-Up Zombies

2012-01-08T02:16:00.021-05:00

While the Venn diagrams of our particular interests only intersect slightly,
The National Film Board of Ivanlandia deeply appreciates The Girl With the White Parasol, a delightful blog that gets its name from one of the most beautiful speeches spoken in one of the greatest movies ever made. (And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, what sort of film fan are you anyway?)

Proprietorized by Rachel, the blog covers “Classic Cinema, 1930-1965,” with genuine affection and detail, and last year, TGWtWP won the second prize in the Roger Corman blogathon for her sharp, but respectful and very detailed review/critique of The Haunted Palace—it’s a good read, check it out!

To celebrate reaching 50 followers—of which I am one—The Girl With the White Parasol is throwing a meme party, and has posted 12 questions for readers and followers to answer.
So let’s go quizzing/memeing
with
The Girl With the White Parasol’s “The New Year's Movie Meme!”

1. What is your all-time favorite Grace Kelly costume?
GK is a stunning goddess, the type of chick that could inspire a barbarian like me to invade a country. She always looked good.
That said,
Her outfit in High Noon, because it looks tight…
Or else that sleeveless number she’s got on in Rear Window…
Or the nightgown she’s wearing when the dude’s trying to strangle her in Dial “M” for Murder…
Or…

2. What classic film would you nominate for a remake?
Von Stroheim’s Greed—but the nine-hour version, as an HBO miniseries.
Michael Shannon would be perfect as McTeague! Dexter’s Jennifer Carpenter would make a good Trina, I think, and for Cousin Marcus, I say go with a wild card: either Patton Oswalt or Edward Norton.

3. Name your favorite femme fatale.
Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction.
Jeez, I mean, wow… Yeah, I’d kill for her.
In a fucking heartbeat.
I know I’d be signing my own death warrant, but a woman like that… What do you call her? Only the krauts could come up with the right sort of word to describe her—a word that combined “feral” with “genius” with “soulless” with “oozing sex appeal of the most dangerous sort.”
Yeah, that word would be her.
When you figure that word out, make sure to include it on my morgue form under “cause of death”….

4. Name the best movie with the word "heaven" in its title.
Until they finally make “Martians From Heaven Destroy the Earth,”
my favorite movie with “heaven” in the title is John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957) with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr.
During The Great Pacific War, a shipwrecked marine and a novice nun hide and survive—and struggle with erotic and sexual tension
(Waitaminit! Burt can score Debs, but Bob can’t? No wonder Mitchum blows reefer!)—
on an island overrun by the Japanese.

Meanwhile:
The best song in a movie about “heaven” is the one in Eraserhead that the tumor-faced “Lady in the Radiator” sings.

5. Describe the worst performance by a child actor that you’ve ever seen.
Dakota Fanning looking miserable or screeching horrifically in every damn scene of Spielberg’s excellent, but awful War of the Worlds.

It’s obviously heartfelt—War of the Worlds is Uncle Steve’s reaction to 9/11, and it comes from his gut—unfortunately leapfrogging over his brain, because despite the multitude of incredible action sequence and a nightmarish vision of “war coming home,” the movie is a fucking stupid mess, obviously made from a first draft script, or a bunch of cocktail napkins taped together.

Sneer-inspiring “family” scenes are shoehorned in, imposed by the respective father-trauma-psychoses that Spielberg and star Tom Cruise share;
I never got a feeling that the invasion went beyond the woods and suburbs;
Tim Robbins character mentally breaks down much too quickly;
Not killing any of the children is a bad habit Spielberg’s picked up, and needs to get rid of;
and keeping H.G. Wells’ original ending (germs did it) was not a good idea—or it was not executed well, I’m still not sure.

The death of the Martians in the 2005 version is handled rather ham-fistedly—there’s no build-up, or suspense. It just happens, and the whole “God in his infinite wisdom” bit doesn’t play as well these days, y’know? You need to earn bringing in Gee-Oh-Dee, and this one doesn’t do it.
With Spielberg & Co., the aliens’ lack of immunity to bacteria feels as dopey as the aliens in M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s Signs being allergic to water.

(At least in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume II, Alan Moore has Dr. Moreau splice together anthrax and streptacchocus bacterias to be used against the Martians.)

Personally, I’m against the deus ex machina of bacteria showing up at the conclusion and wiping out the aliens. It work for Wells because people in 1898, when WotW was first published, were unfamiliar with germs and the microscopic world.

Germs saving humanity works in George Pal/Byron Haskin’s WotW (1953) because
A) the flick has been building to a fever pitch, and something has to break (Haskin’s version is actually much better paced than Spielberg’s); and
B) the movie is a Christian film, and calls to the Lord have been made throughout the movie—at the end of the film, God responds.
You don’t think Jehovah is going to just sit there and watch soulless critters vaporize one of his preachers, do you?

Still, I do own a copy of Spielberg’s movie (and a copy of Pal’s version as well), and whenever I need a pick-me-up, I pop it in: the scenes of destruction are magnificent—and infrequent compared to all the “acting” we’re forced to suffer through—with flawless special effects.
There’s about 25 minutes of HOLY SHIT AWESOME in this flick, surrounded by lame blorp-blorp-blorp.
Like I said, excellent, but awful.
And young Ms. Fanning’s attempt to mimic a nail on a blackboard helps the awful.
(BTW, who out there thinks Elle Fanning is a baby Princess Grace? I do.
And I think Dakota is planning to kill her more beautiful younger sister….)

6. Who gets your vote for most tragic movie monster?
Lon Chaney Jr.’s Wolfman is my go-to tragic monster.
Poor Larry Talbot…

7. What is the one Western that you would recommend to anybody?
Shane (1952), because it takes a hot dump on the whole “open range” “macho cowboy” mythos, while using the same to excite and entertain us—but still stressing that the approach of civilization is not only inevitable, but good.

8. Who is your ideal movie-viewing partner?
Honestly, no one. I love it when a theater is almost empty and it becomes my personal screening room.

9. Has a film ever made you want to change your life? If so, what was the film?
2001: A Space Odyssey made me want to know all about this kooky thing called “making movies.”

10. Think of one performer that you truly love. Now think of one scene/movie/performance of theirs that is too uncomfortable for you to watch.
Jack Nicholson in Batman. Not only do I think the flick is paced like sludge, but slapping a fake smile on Nicholson has to be the greatest case of gilding the lily in cinema.
The man has the BEST smile in the world—why hide it under a latex mask? And one that looked so FAKE!

11. On the flip side, think of one really good scene/performance/movie from a performer that you truly loathe.
Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (runners-up: the whiny dope peddler in The Falcon and the Snowman, and his crooked lawyer in Carlito’s Way—both roles which, I feel, are probably the closest to the truth of his actual personality)

12. And finally, do you have any movie or blogging-related resolutions for 2012?
To publish more at Ivanlandia; to work through my insanely long Netflix Streaming list; try and see more movies in the theater; see more revival shows, too! And write about them! Exclamation point!

Thanks for letting me participate!

The Best Movies (and a little TV) Seen in 2011

2012-01-07T10:45:00.023-05:00

The Best/The Silver Medals/Honorable Mentions

These are my faves that I saw this year—it’s impossible for me to see everything on my meager salary, and who in their right mind would want to see every film released in a year?
That’s like saying that a person has to eat in every one of NYC’s restaurants and diners: it’s an almost impossible task that’s sure to make you sick to your stomach.

And if a movie from 1928 that I’ve never seen before turns out to be better than any other film I’ve seen this year, then why not include it on my “Best Of"?

That said, the majority of the films listed are first-time-viewings—unless otherwise indicated.
As for the films listed that I’ve seen before, what can I say?
These flicks are perennial favorites, movies that are, to me, CLASSICS and always deserve to be on a “Best Of” list.
(That might not be fair—what? I’m gonna put Casablanca on my list every year I see it? Maybe…
—but when a masterful old timer stomps some young pup and its new tricks, The National Film Board of Ivanlandia is there to cheer them on.)

Then there are those movies that click so just right with me that I know they’re a “new perennial fave.”

Meanwhile, I am sorry that I never got around to writing up many of these flicks, but that’s what the future is for, right? (Jeez, I’m full of rhetorical questions today, aren’t I?)
And films I have written about have been URL’ed so’s you can have yourself hours of fun! (A few films, like Up Tight!, Crawlspace and The Monitors, have links to sites that covered these worthwhile flicks when I didn’t.)
Enjoy!

THE BESTEST/THE FAVES
(in order of year released)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928; Carl Theodor Dreyer)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943; Alfred Hitchcock)

These Are the Damned (1963; Joseph Losey)

Kitten With a Whip (1964; Douglas Heyes)

The Naked Prey (1965; Cornell Wilde) new perennial fave

Skidoo (1968; Otto Preminger) seen before/perennial fave

Up Tight! (1968; Jules Dassin) new perennial fave

The Devils (1971; Ken Russell) seen before/perennial favorite

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003; Thom Andersen) [Interesting gap in the years there, between this film and the previous one…]

Aachi & Ssipak (2006; Jo Beom-jin)

There Will Be Blood (2007; Paul Thomas Anderson) seen before/ new perennial fave

I Saw the Devil (2010; Kim Ji-woon)

Super (2010; James Gunn)

13 Assassins (2010; Takashi Miike)

Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil (2010; Eli Craig)

Insidious (2011; James Wan)

Rango (2011; Gore Verbinski)

SILVER MEDALS

Macbeth (1948; Orson Welles)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961; Alain Resnais)

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966; Fielder Cook)

The Wild Angels (1966; Roger Corman) perennial fave (and an award-winning blog entry! YOWZAH!)

Why Man Creates (1968; Saul Bass; short film)

Brewster McCloud (1971; Robert Altman) seen before/perennial fave [mega-post on this fave in the works…probably ready in a year or so…}

The Outside Man (1972; Jacques Deray)

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976; John Carpenter) seen before/perennial fave

Dreamchild (1985; Gavin Millar) seen before

Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County (1998; Dean Alioto) seen before

Dream Home (2010; Ho-Cheung Pang)

HONORABLE MENTIONS

My Son John (1952; Leo McCarey) (HINT: replace the word “communist” with “homosexual” and the flick becomes even more inadvertently hilarious—a camp classic that clearly craves a cult!)

Run Silent Run Deep (1958; Robert Wise)

Ikarie XB-1 (1963; Jindřich Polák)

Battle of the Bulge (1965; Ken Annakin)

The Monitors (1969; Jack Shea)

Riot (1969; Buzz Kulik—and produced by William Castle!)

Sometimes a Great Notion (1970; Paul Newman)

Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971; Roger Vadim & Gene Roddenberry)

Crawlspace (1972; John Newland) (Arthur Kennedy, not Klaus Kinski)

ZPG (1972; Michael Campus)

A Cold Night’s Death (1973; Jerrold Freedman) seen before

Cops and Robbers (1973; Aram Avakian) –from an original script by Don Westlake!

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974; Jorge Grau)

Airport ’77 (1977; Jerry Jameson) It’s not so much a disaster movie, as an all-star action-adventure/caper/soap opera (keep your eyes open for a youngish M. Emmet Walsh playing a hero!), with the film’s last third being a high-tech rescue mission.
Most inadvertently interesting scenes from a sociological point of view? James Stewart on the Navy ships: Airport ’77 was made with the cooperation of the DoD, and all the sailors you see are the real deal. Meanwhile, Stewart—although retired by then—was a general in the US Air Force. The respect those swabbies show to Jimmy Stewart is quite genuine!

Fast-Walking (1981; James B. Harris)

Lion of the Desert (1981; Mustapha Akkad)

Pet Sematary (1989; Mary Lambert)

Scandal (1989; Michael Caton-Jones)

G.I. Jane (1997; Ridley Scott) I don’t know why this flick was so hated when it came out—I found it really enjoyable.

Mission to Mars (2000; Brian De Palma) See above—additionally, I found this flick’s conclusion (inside the Martian Head-structure) to be quite moving.

Linda Linda Linda (2005; Nobuhiro Yamashita)

[REC] 2 (2009; Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza)

The Other Guys (2010; Adam McKay)

Apollo 18 (2011; Gonzalo López-Gallego)

Ironclad (2011; Jonathan English)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011; Rupert Wyatt)

2011’s Best TV
Sons of Anarchy Seasons 1-3 (2008-2010)
Parks and Recreation Seasons 1-3 (2009-2011)
Breaking Bad Seasons 1-3 (2008-2010)
Louie Season 1 (2010)
Downton Abbey Season 1 (2010)
The Shield Season 6-7 (2007-2008);

(No surprises here, really—everybody loves these shows, right? But what’s funny is that, aside from these shows and an occasional episode of Dragnet, Adam-12 or the 1960s version of The Outer Limits, that’s about it for my TV viewing. I don’t have the time to watch TV shows, there are too many movies to see!)

For a look at 2010’s “Best Of,” go HERE

Coming Soon (promises, promises…):
—The Worst of 2011~I swear I’m not being contrarian!
—2011’s Index!
—December’s Movies: time off from work meant plenty of couch time!

The Abysmal Swarm

2012-01-06T07:12:00.012-05:00

The phrase “mistakes were made” was custom-built for use after a night of boozing: The Missus was already trashed and I was half in the bag, so the idea of popping Irwin Allen’s 1978 sci-fi ecological disaster movie onto the Netflix Streaming seemed like a good idea at the time, a pleasant dose of mega-cheese to wind down the night.
Boy, were we wrong….

Aside from vague generalities regarding the plot—killer bees (remember that boogeyman?) arrive in the US and cause all sorts of havoc for an all-star cast—all I remembered about the flick was that I sat through it twice during its initial run at Brooklyn’s King Plaza movie theater (yep, that theater’s been there since forever—listen, sonny, I remember when it was a duplex!).
Jeez, my parents must’ve been fighting a lot during that summer, because The Swarm is a bad, bad film.

Honestly, although short on logic, there is much more excitement, surprises, craftsmanship, smarts and pure entertainment in Plan Nine From Outer Space or Attack of the Crab Monsters than this flick.
The Swarm is the type of bloated H’wood nightmare than must make Roger Corman grind his teeth to nubs thinking about what he could have done with its budget.

Meanwhile, The Swarm has to absolutely have the ugliest color scheme and art direction ever. (And that the movie was nominated for an Oscar in costume design is further historical proof that at least one branch of the Academy has always been out of it.)

Actually, everything about The Swarm is awful, starting with a script that is colossally-overburdened with exposition:
People stand for sheer, excruciating minutes telling each other about the awful stuff they’ve seen.
What is this, a first draft?
Sheesh, the “Carrot Man” episode of Irwin Allen’s Lost in Space TV show had a better script!

Usually I appreciate it when a film tries to be mean-spirited, but in The Swarm it just seems lazy and cheap—cynical attempts to pull at our heartstrings, but ineptly maneuvered.
Regarding the plot, so much is picked up and then put down inexplicably, the basic rules of storytelling and coherent lively filmmaking ignored so completely, that only that all-star cast chock-a-block full of Hollywood has-beens kept me from thinking that The Swarm was actually a kind of cheap Eastern European anti-film.

Because how else do you explain that all the dead bodies show no signs of bee stings? There is zero attempt to apply any makeup onto the extras playing victims. No welts, no discolorations, no swelling—
It was kind of shocking the…gross incompetence that allowed something like that to get by. It’s insulting.

Also,
The effects are pitiful, a shame on L.B. Abbott’s lustrous career (the stuff he did for weekly shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Batman were infinitely better than the coffee grinds in the sky or Tinkertoys set on fire here), and the cinematography looks like it was shot through a turd filter.

That is, with the exception of any shots that prominently featured female lead Katherine Ross: she always looks great in this flick—her close-ups are like perfume ads—it’s like director of photography Fred Koenekamp had a HUGE crush on her! Not that I can blame him…so do I…

Film was never really Irwin Allen’s forte if you ask me—
Of his theatrically released films and TV movies, The Poseidon Adventure is the only one that I think is a genuinely good film, with moving performances and an excellent technical side. Many will point out that Allen only produced that film.

Allen really shined with TV—specifically his mid-1960s output: who still doesn’t love shows like Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Land of the Giants? That stuff was really cool and weird, and at the time probably more popular than Star Trek!

It was the fickle taste of the public killing off his TV shows that eventually pushed Allen into imitating and jacking up the formula introduced in Airport, a flick many say is the first “disaster movie,” with the all-star cast in danger (in Airport’s case there’s a maniac with a bomb on an airliner).

The PoopSideDown Adventure (hee-hee!) was a goldmine, and Allan imitated and jacked up his own formula again with The Towering Inferno (a movie I don’t like, because unlike Poseidon, it has no socio-political relevance—I choose to interpret The Poseidon Adventure as a metaphor for the US at the end of the 1960s: everything’s upside-down and fucked-up, including “…and a child shall lead them,” and going to the bottom is the only way to get to the top, dig? Meanwhile, Inferno only exists to hurt. It’s a mean and nasty movie. McQueen’s cool, though—as always.)

It’s obvious that Allen wasn’t in tune to popular tastes after a certain point, but a film as incompetently put together as The Swarm never deserved an audience.

The always-readable This Island Rod (where I swiped the awesome frame-grab/title card below) has an impressive review/commentary/essay on The Swarm, read it HERE.

Today's Early Morning Movie: Wrong Turn 4

2012-01-04T08:31:00.004-05:00

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011; NO, can't recommend it, although it was very gory (yeah, gorehounds should check it out), and I kind of dug the flick’s bleak, bleak outlook/although, maybe I shouldn't have watched this first thing in the morning...)

New Year's Ivanlandia: Classics Revisted!

2012-01-02T18:03:00.005-05:00

The First Movies of the New Year
It’s the start of a new year, and the first two movies screened were old favorites—as well as groundbreaking innovators when first released:
The Wild Bunch (1969; DVD from NYPL)
Dr. No (1962; Netflix Streaming)

We started with
Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece The Wild Bunch (1969)
Starting the year with one of the greatest films ever made is always a good idea—and I cannot recommend enough the DVD’s supplemental features:
Peckinpah caught lightning in a bottle, and it was wonderful to learn all about it.
“All it is, is a simple adventure story,” said Sam about his film, but he poured his soul into it.

Just imagine how amazing, how breathtaking, how utterly shocking that movie must have been when it was first released? I’d love to have a time machine and go back to experience a 1969 movie audience’s first reaction to a screening of The Wild Bunch.

After The Wild Bunch, the
WayBack Machine known as Netflix Streaming allowed the National Film Board of Ivanlandia to revisit 1962’s Dr. No, the first James Bond film—
Made before the series became totally codified, Dr. No is more like a regular spy movie, although one with garish Hammer Movie lighting and Pop Art titles (fitting for London’s late-50s Jazz boom), but a somewhat conventional “man on a mission,” nonetheless, until the plot takes a wonderful twist into a Fu Manchu-style “secret weapon” territory—the flick’s “ticking clock” (the launch of a space probe) is hardly there at all, and usually brought up as an afterthought—but it doesn’t matter as Bond and No play cat and mouse, via banter and combat; and various traps are sprung and overcome.

Thinking about it, until the super-science villain with the bionic hands shows up, the film is more like an English spy version of Kiss Me Deadly, where a sadist thug stomps his way towards figuring out the “Great Whatsit” (and like KMD, Dr. No’s GW features radiation, albeit more tamed—Ursula Andress only needs a few showers, and all worries of carcinoma are gone!).
Of course, Broccoli & Saltzman’s concerns are more mundane/pecuniary than Robert Aldrich’s, and Dr. No takes that turn in the third act that ditches Graham Greene for Sax Rohmer, and production designer Ken Adams is allowed to go wild (and ensures his being hired for Dr. Strangelove).

Two classics for the beginning of 2012! Now we can revel in the sleaze with absolutely zero guilt!

And the day’s not over yet! Who knows what else will be—or could be—watched?
[Cue spooky Theremin music]

American Christmas Devil and the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

2011-12-23T12:31:00.029-05:00

In November, We Were Thankful for Movies

2011-12-08T18:41:00.007-05:00

Holidays,
ennui,
work,
other forms of art,
sicknesses, and [FILL IN THE BLANK/excuses, excuses!] have conspired to slow down my output over the months of November—
That’s right, the 11th month is SO long that it becomes a plural here in the United Provinces of You-Know-Where!—

I still managed to catch some flicks—none in the theater, I’m almost sorry to say, but such is life…—
but via Nflickles (both DVD and streaming); the Public Library’s huge collection of DVDs; and the Intertubes, I’ve caught a nice batch of films.

And I know I’m late getting to this party,
but I’ve just started finding and
watching full-length, not-available-on-DVD movies at various on-line locations—but mainly YouTube for now—
& it’s been wonderful finally getting my paws on some of these flicks (like Ikarie XB-1)!

And Thanks Be To Cthulhu for trailers on-line
(& we loves us some of that Trailers From Hell),
because after seeing their trailers,
I have no need or desire to watch War-Gods of the Deep or Warlords of Atlantis—
However, the trailer for Cry of the Banshee (1970) has me hooked—and then I found out that the movie’s title sequence was animated by Terry Gilliam!
I gotta see this movie!

NOVEMBER 2011 MOVIES—(in no particular order)

Panic in the Streets (1950)
Excellent thriller, brilliant use of NOLA locations.
Very recommended neo-realistic neo-noir—and a predecessor of flicks like The Andromeda Strain, Outbreak and Contagion: the plot is about doctors and the police trying to stop a plague from breaking out in New Orleans.
Great performances—what you’d expect from director Elia Kazan—but especially from Richard Widmark (cast against type), Jack Palance (very to type as a soft-spoken but extremely menacing hood) and Zero Mostel (as Palance’s weak-willed sidekick).

The Passion of the Christ (2004)
I felt I owed it to myself as a gorehound to finally catch this flick, and while the scourging is pretty damn nasty, Mel Gibson’s magnum opus is too damn boring and overlong. It’s a Hallmark Card movie, with maximum preachiness.
The religious epics of the 1950s are much more entertaining and enlightening for me than Mel’s hubris. I did like the demons, though.
My fave Biblical Epic, however, still has to be Alex’s daydreams from A Clockwork Orange.

Super 8 (2011)
Fast-paced, but shallow and ultimately forgettable.
Also kinda stupid: how the FUCK does a pickup truck derail a serious set of railcars in such an explosive fashion?

I will say that Elie Fanning is going to grow up to be as beautiful and “classy” as Grace Kelly—
if her jealous sister Dakota doesn’t kill her first…

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010)
SYNOPSIS: Polite, decent, gentlemanly disenfranchised Caucasians from the Southern region are mistaken for psycho-killers by loathsome sociopathic spoiled college students who’ve been brainwashed by Hollywood’s determined misinterpretation and denigration of the life experience of citizens from below the Mason-Dixon Line.

This flick is High-larious! Genuinely, gut-busting, rewind-often funny—the Missus and me were on the couch, our sides in stitches from laughing.

Personally, I just loved this comedy’s subversion of the undying Hollywood myth of Southern Redneck Villainy—Straw Dogs remake, I’m lookin’ atchew, boy.

I truly would love to see a series of “Tucker & Dale” flicks, a la Hope & Crosby or Abbott & Costello or Martin & Lewis (yes, I would include these two newcomers in such august comedy company—this movie made me laugh a LOT!), where they get into all sorts of mishaps in a variety of genres—rednecks vs. James Bond? Versus Godzilla? I can only hope!

For a more in-depth review (that I agree with completely) go visit DVD Late Show.

Rabid (1976)
Because people tend to think of this as Cronenberg’s “Marilyn Chambers” movie—and therefore more of a sex/horror flick (of course this is reinforced by the very sensual way Chambers “kills”)—they forget that there’s a “zombie plague” in this flick as bad as the ones in 28 Days/Weeks Later and both versions of The Crazies!
I love how the killing of zombies and the subsequent clean-up becomes a bureaucratic process: murder as street-sweeping. But it’s done in a way to make you think the entire province (it’s Canada, remember?) is under martial law. Cronenberg does a lot with his small budget and gives this movie an “epic” feeling that others would have missed.

Unlike other “contagion” films, no one actually knows why or how the “plague” is spreading—
While there is a search going on for Marilyn Chambers’ character, it is not because she’s Patient Zero! There’s an anarchic feeling to the movie that is...infectious….

Now I can’t wait to see A Dangerous Method!

Long Live Dave C.!

Batman: Year One (2011)
Such an absolutely, completely, down-to-mimicking-the-panels-of-the-comic-itself faithful adaptation of the graphic novel/comic book that this animated film is a total snooze.
And BTW, fuck Frank Miller.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
It’s tough for a feature-length film to maintain the momentum and humor of the shorts that inspired it, but Rare Exports does a valiant effort—and further blows the lid off the Satanic myth of Santa! This film is really a “Boy’s Own Adventure” tale rather than a horror story—and as such, it’s a blast.
Perfect double feature with Trollhunter, its fellow Norwegian genre flick dealing with local legends in an unconventional manner.

ADAM-12 “A Sound Like Thunder” TV episode
This episode from the show’s second season of 1969 is one of the few times it strays from its non-judgmental beautiful cop android protectors of White Man’s America and their “just the facts, ma’am” antics—

Reed and Molloy are visiting a ghost town (?!) with their chicks, when a biker gang, the Satan’s Sinners MC shows up. Headed by veteran character actor Bruce Glover (and Crispin’s dad), the gang surround the cops and there’s a mediocre low-rent Straw Dogs/Rio Bravo thing going on—
This episode of Adam-12 is pretty typical of the standard media depiction of the motorcycle aficionado in the mainstream/corporate media—at least Adam-12 is honest enough to make the bikers human, as opposed to almost all other cop shows from the 1970s (and even till today—with the exception of Sons of Anarchy)—
which generally present motorcycle clubs as cabals of cyborg werewolves with super-powers, or things equally implausible.

But what makes this interesting is the moral war waged between Glover’s biker and the cops’ girls: they argue about why he’s doing what he does and how his talents are wasted, and he’s just jealous—and a snob.
Y’know, the beautiful heavy-handed pretzel-logic sermons we have come to love from Jack Webb.
BTW, I don’t think the episode’s title is a reference to a Ray Bradbury story…

Winnie the Pooh (2011)
As a kid I LOVED the Winnie the Pooh films, so watching this restart/retcon was a nostalgic and fun trip down memory lane—and the film itself is often full of Dumbo-style psychedelia; great stuff all around.
And the voice casting was spot-on!
Although I knew John Cleese was not involved in the original Pooh cartoons, he has the perfect sound.

Lion of the Desert (1981)
War movie buffs should check this out—
Epic about Italy’s invasion of Libya, made on location—this flick looks like it cost a LOT of money to make; great battles backed by good perfs by Anthony Quinn and an excellently underplayed Oliver Reed (as the Italian commander).
Rod Steiger’s cameo as Mussolini is a hoot, as well.
Director/producer Mustapha Akkad (RIP) went on to produce Halloween, BTW.

The Venture Bros. Season 4.5 (2010) TV-series
Awesome craziness—jeez, how long can they keep the quality this high?
And what IS a “rusty venture”?

Crossing the Line (2006)
Although it feels unfinished, this documentary about American defectors to North Korea needs to be watched with a cynic’s eyes, I feel.
Nothing these traitors say can be trusted and their words need to be scrutinized.

Gattaca (1997)
I can see why this is a cult fave, but lordy! I couldn’t stand this pretentious, constipated, smug-in-tone-and-manner movie—
And dig this: while I recognize the unfairness of this future world’s genetic profiling, there’s still the question of some jobs needing certain refined physical skills—like jet pilots and astronauts need to have perfect vision (can’t risk a contact lens popping out while in orbit) and excellent cardiovascular systems (no heart palpitations at Mach 4, please).
So lead character Ethan Hawke WANTS to be an astronaut, and so we should root for him—even though there is the possibility of unknown negative health effects and the resulting failure of a costly and important space mission?
A space mission so important, I may reminder viewers, that the head of the space program commits murder to protect it?
No, I’m not buying it. (And tough shit about any spoilers, if you haven’t seen Gattaca, you shouldn’t, so if I’ve ruined any potential viewing experience, good.)

The Night Stalker (1971) TV-movie
The original TV movie is showing its age, but for horror buffs with a nostalgic bent, is still a joy, especially Darren McGavin’s prickly character (who was “sweetened up” substantially later for the classic Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV series)—and the shots of Vegas back in the day? Oy, it was great to see it. Written by genre grandmaster Richard Matheson.

Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow (1964) TV-movie
Awesome scarecrow mask!
A flick with nary a wasted moment and an almost breathless pace! This movie is tense, exciting old school action from the House of Mouse that is deliciously anti-authoritarian.
It is not the deepest of entertainments, but worth a look.
Meanwhile,
Loving Patrick McGoohan is a cinematic law here in Ivanlandia—
Of course, his landmark miniseries The Prisoner is justly praised—required viewing, actually.

Patrick McGoohan was a fantastic, if somewhat limited, actor—limited like Bronson or Eastwood, but perhaps a tad classier—and what a weird and eclectic career! A violently moral individual, McGoohan would reject roles on principle.

Vera Cruz (1954)
Great Robert Aldrich western with a fantastic cast,
and, what looks like to me,
a huge influence stylistically on Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.

Your Highness (2011)
NOT FUNNY.
Jeez, this flick was so unfunny, I had to turn it off after 20 minutes, even though I really wanted to see Natalie Portman(‘s double) in a medieval bikini! (see above)

Angel-A (2005)
Speaking of hotties, Rie Rasmussen is SCORCHING in Angel-A, and the sole reason to ever pop this waste of polycarbonate into your DVD player—
It’s a perfume ad about the most annoying pest of a man who somehow gets an actual ANGEL—and Lordy!, Rie is STONE FOX—to help him and he still screws up the deal.
Only Rie’s utterly breathtaking beauty redeemed the time wasted screening this movie.

Evangelion: 1.11 You Are (Not) Alone (2007)
What can I say? Every once in a while, I am overcome with the urge to watch some megacheese Japanimation.
This was fun to watch, but I couldn’t tell you if it is a good example of the schoolchildren-coerced-into-piloting-colossal-combat-megarobots genre.
Decent enough sci-fi adventure, though, that literally drops you into the middle of a crazy battle at the very beginning—
Lots of animated explosions, too! The teen angst is a drag, but there’s plenty here for stoner fanboys.

Pet Sematary (1989)
An overwrought B-movie ghost-story/tribute to William Castle that I wound up really liking—good gore, good scares—
Supernatural atmosphere established well—
Either inadvertent camp—or camp so subtle, played so well that it approaches genius.
Damn good horror flick!

The Botany of Desire (2009) PBS documentary
Michael Pollan’s companion piece to his very good non-fiction book from 2001 about humans’ relationships with four distinct plants: potatoes, cannabis, tulips and apples.
Good, informative, well-paced documentary with plenty of excellent extreme-close-up plant photography, especially the reefer, which looks like it comes from Venus or Jupiter when you look at it that close. Triffids!

The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Whew! This montage of close-ups of faces is still probably one of the most intense movies ever made—
Finally watched because it is referenced/name-checked heavily in Steve Erickson’s excellent novel Zeroville; a book that feels like it was written expressly for me; a book so marvelous that after reading twice, I still haven’t been able to express how wonderful it is except by jumping up and down and shrieking, “Read it! Read Zeroville now!”
Zeroville is my new favorite book.
And it made me watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, a genuinely legendary piece of cinema.

[REC] (2007)
First I saw the US remake Quarantine (which I liked), then [REC]’s sequel [REC] 2, which I also liked a lot—and recommend highly—so I thought it was about time to catch up with the original:
It is the best of the bunch, and still very effective even though I essentially knew everything that was coming. (And I prefer [REC]’s exorcism/virus as opposed to Quarantine’s rabies-variant.)
Like I’ve said before, I’m a fan of the “handheld/found footage” subgenre, and [REC] is one of the best.

Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County (1998) TV-movie
Speaking of the “handheld/found footage” subgenre, Alien Abduction is one of the first—and while it is not available via standard home viewing formats, you can watch it on-line—

Alien Abduction: Incident at Lake County holds up still!
Set on Thanksgiving (and watched by me just before Turkey Day, BTW), this movie wisely doesn’t present a “normal” family—this family has problems: Dad’s dead, Mom’s drinking too much, one brother is an angry racist, the other is a stoner, the third is the neurotic cameraman, and so on, and this makes the family more “normal” than if they had been presented with no problems whatsoever.

I’d seen this before—and y’know—the version I watched recently on-line was different from what I’d seen way back when—
But I liked this “new” version—which I think is the genuine original that was then re-edited with new “interview” footage for the UPN-TV broadcast. (Or else I recently saw the “original” Alien Abduction: The McPherson Tape.)
(So it’s “new” to me. )

The tension is high, the performances are good, the flick is tight: moving at a fast pace, with many, many creeeeepy moments (which I don’t want to ruin).
Highly recommended.

Zulu (1964)
This classic war film about “The Thin Red Line” never tires me, and was watched in preparation for my upcoming screening of The Sands of the Kalahari, the follow-up film by Zulu’s director and producer/star Cy Enfield and Stanley Baker, respectively.
Screened the night before Thanksgiving from the rug in my mother-in-law’s living room.

Sorority Girl (1957)
Unavailable on any format, except for the glorious YouTube!

WOW! Roger Corman directs this supernihilistic post-adolescent melodrama (with a fantastic animated/expressionistic title sequence) that’s kind of heart-wrenching:
Sexy Susan Cabot’s Sabra is a total inadvertent-Iago character, being hurtful and planning long-term torment and destruction, but also hating herself for it!
The poor maniac tries to get help, but she really has no idea how to ask for it.

Sorority Girl would be a good companion piece to both The Todd Killings and the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. This film might not be as “good” as those other creative examinations of “bad seeds,” but for something made very quickly on the cheap, Sorority Girl is certainly worth a look.

BTW, Susan Cabot looks swell in her tres chic black one-piece swimsuit.

Nightfall (1957)
This script felt like a first draft—the flick’s half-baked, not hard-boiled enough, and far too talky.
Young Anne Bancroft is delicious, and it was great seeing James Gregory (who I don’t think ever looked young) playing a “genuine good guy,” but this movie can’t be recommended.

Ikarie XB-1 (1963)
Unavailable forever, finally I caught this via YouTube. I first learned of this film in the mid-1970s via Philip Strick’s excellent history of science fiction films.

Like Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, Barbarella, Planet of the Vampires, Lost in Space and Disney’s The Black Hole—and unlike 2001, Alien or Silent Running—the sets and effects of Ikarie XB-1 are hardly realistic or extensively detailed (although I love their spacesuits!).

The effects are fun and quaint in that L.B. Abbott kind of way, but this movie isn’t about effects anyway:
It’s a heavy flick, with fear as a main theme, as well as the oppressive terror of the great unknown these intrepid cosmonauts are flinging themselves into.
The exquisite B&W cinematography keeps things properly somber—

Not so much a plot as a series of vignettes, the influence of Russian SF giant Stanislaw Lem can be felt—this film feels like one of those sci-fi books made up of chapters previously published as stand-alone stories in some pulp sci-fi mag.
Set in the far, far future, the film’s highlight is the exploration of a derelict spacecraft, a decadent gambling vessel, from the late 20th Century,
but the subplot about the crazed radiation-poisoned cosmonaut goes on for far too long—one plus is how the film deals with all the mundane stuff that a long-range spacecraft on an over-a-decade-long mission would have to undertake.
I think I would have appreciated this movie much more had I seen it when I was a kid and discovering other serious “deep space exploration” movies of the period, like Forbidden Planet or This Island Earth.

Many say that Kubrick screened Ikarie XB-1 in prep for 2001, but I see more of Ikarie’s influence on Tarkovsky’s Solaris, actually.

PERSONAL GRIPE: Who the HECK names their ship “Icarus”? (Ikarie is Czech for Icarus)
Icarus fell! He FAILED. (At least name your spaceship after Icarus’ successful father, Daedelus.)

A Cold Night’s Death (1973) TV-movie
Perhaps not perfect, this film is overflowing with tension as acting greats Robert Culp and Eli Wallach stress out at a remote Arctic research station. The pace is relentless, aided by Gil Melle’s excellent electronic music score (which is mixed with a variety of unnerving sound effects: howling wind, shrieking monkeys, and so on), with a “twist” ending that has now become legendary.

For some reason A Cold Night’s Death has never been given any sort of “home viewing” release, even though it’s one of those TV-movies that an entire generation of genre fans remembers fondly, if not atavistically (because the movie’s so tough to come by).
I think I actually caught the movie’s last broadcast in the NYC area in the late-1980s on ABC-TV’s incredible and sorely missed 2AM movie series….

But it’s out there if you know where to look!

Baron Prášil (1961)
Another flick unavailable in your standard North American home viewing format except via my new best friend, YouTube.

A delightful—if quaint—romantic fantasy,
also known as “The Fabulous Baron Munchausen,” this 1961 Polish flick is an example of style and design OVERLOAD, and I would not be surprised if this movie was not only an influence on Terry Gilliam’s subsequent Munchausen movie, but on the director/designer’s overall style as well.

This movie is also something perfect for stoners: it’s optical-printer madness throughout, with tons of starkly-colored animation of all kinds.

A cosmonaut lands on the moon, and there is found by the Baron and other literary/fantasy figures, like Cyrano de Bergerac. They think the cosmonaut is actually a moon-man, and the Baron volunteers to show the “Lunarian” the earth—flying home in a sailboat pulled by mermaids (if memory serves…)—
but it’s the 17th Century historical-fantastic earth, and the Baron gets the cosmonaut in all sorts of troubles/adventures with angry Turkish armies, hungry whales, coy princesses and so on, with tons of excellent old school special effects.

Baron Prášil is an Eastern European movie from the early-1960s, so remember: its pace will be deliberate. But give it time, you’ll be rewarded.

Fuck It; It's TOTAL MONKEY WAR!!!

2011-12-07T20:21:00.018-05:00

Inspired by this comment thread, and suffering from the flu, and kinda feeling in a desk-clearing mood... Here's comes another pict-o-rama!

SUPER-SIMIAN-MINI-REVIEWS (to assuage my guilt)

Stake Land (2010) I dunno, another Zombie-esque Apocalypse flick? Sheesh, I'm burned out.... I didn't like Zombieland the first time, Bill Murray cameo excepted.

The Crawling Eye (1958) Y'know, this could very easily be an episode of The X-Files, or whatever "Cops As Paranormal Investigator" show is popular now. Sure, it's far-fetched, but if you treat it as the "pilot" for a TV series, it's great: engineer Allan (F-Troop's Forest Tucker) comes to the Trollenberg mountain in Switzerland at the behest of the Professor: in addition to a series of gruesome murders, there has been a cloud with high levels of radiation hovering in the exact same spot for several days right next to the mountain.

On the train ride, Allan meets a woman with psychic powers--who ends up in telepathic contact with the hideous H.P. Lovecraft/nightmare-giant-eyeballs living in the cloud.
It seems Allan and the Professor encountered a very similar situation in the Andes a few years earlier. With the help of the telepath and her sister, as well as an intrepid reporter, these humans prepare to battle an intergalactic menace!

Damn! That sounds like a great TV show! I'd watch it! So ditch that snarky MST3K mindset, and dig the orb!
(HOLY MOLY! I just checked--and The Crawling Eye was a TV before it was a movie! Whaddaya know!)

The Brood (1979) Almost perfect. Now that I'm older, I get a lot of Cronenberg's flicks much better than when I was a kid. And this is one of them.

Red Angel (1966) I still haven't gotten around to seeing director Yasuzo Masumura's Blind Beast, but I own his Giants & Toys, so there.
Set on the front lines at a combat hospital in China, Red Angel is shocking in its realism towards showing the horrors of surgery, as well as broaching subjects usually unspoken: like horny soldiers raping nurses, how crippled soldiers are never sent home so no one can see the horrors, and how does a man with no arms masturbate?

And all this is the fault of
Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) Which I discussed here, but need to add:
ROLL ON, OH MIGHTY SIMIAN WARLORDS!

Ten Posters I Like

2011-12-06T16:07:00.012-05:00

An incredible image--that doesn't give away how campy the flick actually is.

A classic! (Although the poster is a little busy, but that in itself is highly representative of the time...)

Oh yeah, I need to see this flick toot sweet!

Jack Davis perfectly captures, and enhances what this classic is all about.

Haven't seen this flick; would like to; and need to post something to keep the "Zexy Replikantz" fans happy....

When this was originally released, I saw this in the theater (the old Georgetown Twin in Brooklyn), twice! For fans of 1970s dystopic future flicks like Soylent Green or The Omega Man/
Chosen Survivors is worth a look.

Boobies! (And a great piece of cinema from good old Otto Preminger.)

A childhood favorite--the poster and the ad campaign on TV, that is. When we finally got around to seeing The Legend of Boggy Creek (at the Tannersville movie theater in upstate NY), well...I learned a lesson, that's all.

I'm not sure if I've ever seen any of these flicks--they're the type of movies that probably had lots of different titles over the years... But I've loved this poster since I was a kid, and saw it advertised in the late, great and lamented The Monster Times.

Gotta love Oliver Reed! (And Sitting Target is highly recommended!)

....presenting: Donald Siegel's "Monster Zero"!!!

2011-11-27T14:52:00.022-05:00

“Instead of watching horror movies and nothing but, in October I watched…”

2011-11-06T12:35:00.029-05:00

Jeez, look at that list, willya?
Compared to September’s movie madness, it’s positively mundane!

A big chunk of viewing time was spent in massive marathon sessions catching up with my missed television viewing—

Parks & Recreation: Season Three (I’m proud to say that I was probably in one of the last classes Amy Poehler taught at the old UCB Theater on 22nd Street);

The Walking Dead: Season One (great gore, but JEEZ! Shut up about your damn feelings already!);

and my new super-fave, the third season of Sons of Anarchy—a biker gang—excuse me, “motorcycle club” soap-opera based on Hamlet? Of course I love it!

[Don’t know about you, but I can’t watch weekly TV anymore—I don’t like having to be on someone else’s schedule; I do that enough at work, y’know? Besides, I prefer to take it all in at once, treating a show’s season like a mini-series or novel—
which isn’t too difficult since The Walking Dead and Sons of Anarchy are shows with a definite story arc (they’re essentially mini-series),
and while it’s a more “traditional” show, and doesn’t stray too far from the sitcom rule that each episode must be a self-contained unit, Parks & Recreation does build on progression—the slate is not wiped clean every week.]

So for October, it was
Thirty-three movies (if you allow the counting of a whole season of a TV show as one movie—and you better!)—the same number of years in age Our Lord was when nailed to the cross….

Not too many Halloween-centric flicks, I’m afraid to admit…
But the numbers admit that I could partake in one of those 31 Days of Shocktober blogathons if I wanted to (next year. Maybe).
(On the other hand, what do I care? Who do I have to prove my horror movie bona-fides to? I guess I just want to belong, to hang out with all the cool kids….)

It’s an
Odd group of films for October, I must say—no real patterns of themes that jump out—except maybe stuff the NYPL’s finally gotten around to shipping to me; or “desk-clearing” the uber-volume of boots passed on to me by good buddies from the gray market.
Otherwise, just a typically cinephiliacal month…

What We Watch in October When We Watch Movies in October:

Parks & Recreation: Season Three (2011; 16 episodes)

The Walking Dead: Season One (2010; 6 episodes)

Sons of Anarchy: Season Three (2010; 13 episodes)

Super Troopers (2001)
Funny, funny movie that’s often all over the place—but the pre-credits sequence (“Littering, and… Littering, and… Littering, and… Littering, and…”) could be a perfect short film on its own, and Brian Cox as the befuddled, angry but basically sweet commander is a joy.
My only gripe? They never used the Abba song on the soundtrack!

Jack, the Giant Killer (1962)
I like this more than the flick it rips off, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad—Jack is faster-paced, it’s crazier, it has more monsters, and while the stop-motion animation isn’t as smooth and balletic as Harryhausen’s, neither is it as pretentious—I always feel like Harryhausen is trying too hard, and misses the forest for the trees:
While the effects of Seventh Voyage of Sinbad are “better” (and I do LOVE the dragon and its horizontal spout of flame), Jack’s effects are punchier, weirder—and there are more of them!

Jack’s stop-motion effects were created by Gene Warren and Wah Chang (and an uncredited Jim Danforth), who also worked on the original The Outer Limits and plenty of George Pal’s films.

Rubber (2010)
AWFUL! The post-modern, self-referential bits RUIN what could have been an interesting movie.
I mean, what if an old rubber tire came to life with terrible psychic powers and went around killing everyone by making their head explode? Sure, about five rounds out of a cop-issue pump-action shotgun would turn that tire into chucks of carbon black scattered all over the asphalt, but before that? That damn tire could do a lot of damage.
This flick is a completely missed opportunity, and far too “clever” for its own good.

Kings of Pastry (2009)
Intense foodie documentary—earning/winning the tri-colored collar of the Meilleur Ouvrier de France is frickin’ tough!
Some moments are heartbreaking (an elaborate sugar scultpture collapses and shatters moments before the judges look at it), but a good view for food-fans.

Detour (1945)
Another flick I’d heard too much about before seeing, and as such couldn’t be surprised or properly entertained. But yeah, it’s way fucked up—absolutely fascinating, and a must-see for film historians or noir buffs.

Three and Out (2008)
Great premise given the lamest sit-com treatment. I couldn’t even finish watching it. “Eye wuz dizguztedz!”

A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966)
Fans of gambling/con game movies need to check out this sharp western-comedy that keeps the tension high—it helps that the cast is all master thesps, but especially foxy Joanne Woodward and eternal sly fox Kevin McCarthy. This is a flick I was so glad I watched knowing extremely little about going into it.

The Magician (1958)
Beautiful mind games courtesy of Grandmaster Ingmar Bergman

Exodus (1960)
Directed by Otto Preminger, and watched as R&D for my Skidoo post. Exodus is… very dated, especially socio-politically, and has a… very quaint feeling about it.
The movie is “Shot On Location!” and beautifully so, but it’s also kind of a… snooze: a hotel is blown up, and we’re shown a long-distance shot of a big fireball, but no scenes of destruction. No combat scenes (this IS about the creation of the nation of Israel), although there is a pretty damn neatly choreographed prison break-out scene…

If you like Stanley Kramer’s movies, you might like Exodus.

Brewster McCloud (1971)
Altman’s bird-shit crazy follow-up to M*A*S*H, loosely adapted from a script by Skidoo’s screenwriter, Doran William Cannon—
Megapost about this wild film and Ivanlandia Favorite in the works—promise!

The Battle of Britain (1969)
About 20 minutes too long—especially since the air battles all look the same after a while—although the last one is the best: no dialog, no sound effects, just a stirring score against a brilliantly cut montage of aerial combat, with close-ups of its participants and observers intercut throughout—

The Battle of Britain is often incredibly moving (don’t get attached to anybody), and with the type of massive production scale that “epics” of the time did well on a regular basis.
Director Guy Hamilton (of many James Bond flicks) does a great job for the most part guiding the viewer through a complicated tale.
And if you’re like me and cannot understand what the fuck those goddamn limeys are yakkin’ about, thank God for subtitles.

Shakedown (1950)
Unavailable since forever, but probably not because of some dark secret but because while there are some brilliant moments, occasional flashes of genius, much of the flick is tepid confusion.
However, the bootleg I watched was of middling quality, with plenty of glitches—and the flick often has some gnarly scenes, like the lead (a news photographer) “directing” a chick as she attempts to jump out of a building, or telling a guy to wave his hands more—as his car sinks into the river—so the photo’s better. After snapping the pic, the cameraman splits—leaving the guy in the river.

I’ve known about Shakedown since the mid-1980s, when I read about it in the (once very awesome, but now perhaps dated) Catalog of Cool, a book that was, back in the day, many a kids’ bible/playbook for what was needed to be seen, read, heard, worn or left around the house as decoration.
Was the Catalog of Cool the Big Bang of our current hipster infestation? Perhaps, but I was glad to have it when I did.

The Satan Bug (1965)
Wow, John Sturges really drops the ball here—great Jerry Goldsmith score and cool animated titles, though. There’s a good reason this flick has been unavailable since forever….

Whirlpool (1949)
More Preminger R&D, and a snoozer

Throne of Blood (1957)
Kurosawa’s classic—but why the original Japanese title, “Spider Web Castle,” isn’t used is beyond me; it’s a much better title. I guess it wasn’t “arty” enough; it was too “exploitative,” or something…

Modern Times (1936)
Dude, I don’t know why, but seeing Charlie Champlin’s simpering face makes me want to smash it in with a tire-iron. I’ve never liked his brand of silent movie comedy—it seems to be begging “Love Me!” more than making me laugh. Fuck him, the rotten baby-fucker. Give me Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd or Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle any day of the week.
Paulette Goddard is a stone fox, though, and really is quite fetching as a feral child.

Ned Kelly (1970)
After the mind-blowing incredible that was Mademoiselle (a flick that was SAVAGED on its release), Tony Richardson started slipping—first, with the meandering The Charge of the Light Brigade, then with Ned Kelly. While he’s a terrible actor, it’s not really Mick Jagger’s fault the flick’s a snoozer—the script is… dreadful.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)
A camp horror classic, re-screened in prep for the Sergio Leone Etc. Quiz.

My Dinner With Andre (1981)
It could be really easy to slam this flick as pretentious, wool-gathering, navel-gazing twaddle—but then the flick acknowledges that its participants are of the moneyed class, and that pretentious, wool-gathering, navel-gazing is kind of what they’re doing—and by subverting that, the film then treats us to some incredible philosophical conversations.
I’m surprised it took me so long to see it, though….

Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions (1991; short)
Before Henry Selick was given the go-ahead to direct The Nightmare Before Christmas, he was prepping this as a pilot for MTV. I’m not sure how it would’ve worked as a weekly series, but it’s a kooky, krazy visual delight, with some creepy undertones. Worth hunting down, especially for stop-motion animation fans.

Universe (1960; short)
Cool old educational short from our pals at the National Film Board of Canada, that is probably best remembered as an influence on the Great Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—in fact, Douglas Rain, who narrates Universe, was picked by Stanley K. to replace Martin Balsam’s voice-over of HAL 9000, when the director felt Balsam packed too much emotion into his voice-over.

The People Vs. George Lucas (2011)
There but for the grace of God go I….
But y’know what? Back in 1977, I saw a movie named Star Wars, not Star Wars Episode Whatever: A New Pooper-Scoooper.
That movie, the one that was released into theaters in May 1977, I loved--and still do--and I actually prefer to not think about any of the sequels, including the one that everyone loves but that has no ending, Empire Strikes Out.

Star Wars was a fun spoof of action comics/Flash Gordon serials, and was also really the best stoner movie ever: medium level intellectual stimulation (no “what does it all mean” headaches like with 2001) with plenty of eyeball kicks.

BTW, The Pimples Vs. Gorge Suckass fails because it never brings up the director’s divorce, and how by intrinsically changing the movies, he gets to cut his ex out of the money loop.

The Black Marble (1980)
A bit too “shaggy dog” and Romantic Nowheresville for my tastes, but this mature, bittersweet romance-drama-thriller is a fascinating flick where the parts (especially every scene with Harry Dean Stanton) are better than the whole.
The unclassifiable nature of this flick makes it very much part of that 1970s New American Wave/Whatever movement that included Scarecrow, Night Moves and The Late Show.
But man! Is Paula Prentiss hot! (And brainy! Mrow!)

Kill Baby… Kill! (1966)
Dude, Fellini TOTALLY ripped off this flick when he made Toby Dammit. Mario Bava should've sued.

High School Confidential! (1958)
Sex, drugs, beatniks, 1950s rock 'n' roll, hot rods, hep talk, beat poetry, people too old to be teenagers playing teenagers, dope, reefer, smack, The Big “H,” and best of all:
Check out Mamie Van Doren! Va-va-VA-VOOM!

Dinosaur (2000)
I got smashed and watched some well-designed Disney computer-cartoon dinosaurs.
And liked it. So sue me.

Jabberwocky (1977)
Terry Gilliam’s first solo directorial effort—and it shows: he hasn’t figured out how to balance comedy and misery properly yet, and Michael Palin’s character is a bit too much of a saccharine dim-bulb—I prefer it when Palin plays someone sharper or more menacing (see “Ken Shabby,” or one of the Italian gangsters he’d regularly perform on Monty Python or “Jack Lint” from Brazil).

And I can’t be the only one who wished that Gilliam never abandoned the animation technique and style that we got to know him by, can I?

Promised Land (1975)
GOREHOUND ALERT!
About an hour into Andrzej Wajda’s quasi-epic about the construction of a factory in late-1800s Poland and the corrupting influence of capitalism, there’s a scene where a factory engineer and the company owner get into a fight because the boss has been shtupping the engineer’s teenage daughter for kicks.
The two men argue violently, struggling near some big machines (with those BIG iron wheels spinning round and round, so hypnotically…), then they topple, falling into the gears—the two disappear inside the enormous metal contraption, and then…
SPLOOSH! Fuckin’ blood and body parts and gory chunks everywhere. It looks like a sheet of stripped flesh is being splashed against the wall! Arrrrrrrrgh…
As the scene ends, the gnarled head of the boss (I think it’s him) pops out of the wheel housing, wobbling about.

The whole scene is so damn fucked up, it’s brilliant. I love heavy-handed metaphors when they are drenched in blood.

Willam Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet (2009)
Uhhhhh… This is only for Shatner completists, only—really.
No, really.
Unless you show up at BBQs wearing a Mr. Spock shirt.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2011)
Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop Whining, you mean—turned off in disgust after 20 minutes. What a creep.

“I See Mathematics!!!”—98 Minutes of AWESOME: Otto Preminger’s SKIDOO!

2011-11-03T22:11:00.047-04:00

Skidoo (1968)
Produced and Directed by Otto Preminger
Written by Doran William Cannon (with, uncredited, Otto Preminger, Elliott Baker, Stanley Ralph Ross, and others, including Mel Brooks and Rob Reiner)
Original Music and Songs (Harry) Nilsson
Cinematography Leon Shamroy
Film Editing: George R. Rohrs
Art Direction: Robert Emmet Smith
Costumes: Rudi Gernreich (who also created the costumes for the first season of Space: 1999)

Starring: Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing, Alexandra Hay, John Phillip Law, Frankie Avalon, Cesar Romero, Groucho Marx, Austin Pendleton, Mickey Rooney, Arnold Stang, Michael Constantine, Frank Gorshin, Richard Kiel, Peter Lawford, Burgess Meredith, Fred Clark, George Raft, Doro Merande, Slim Pickens, Thomas Law, Roman Gabriel, Harry Nilsson, Donyale Luna.

Originally released in 1968 by Paramount Pictures, in July 2011 the film was finally made available in DVD and Blu-Ray formats by Olive Films

Released in 1968 to almost-universally scathing reviews, the film Skidoo was never released to VHS, and shown rarely in cinemas—
a screening at NYC’s Film Forum in the late-1990s used a work print of the movie because copies are so rare (although the MOMA had a beautiful print just a few years earlier)—
and TCM’s miserable pan & scan presentation (at 2am on a Sunday into Monday!) a few years ago was pathetic, a new low for an ill-treated film—TCM of all people should know that Preminger’s films, with their exquisite use of the widescreen Panavision frame demand letterboxing!

Now, Otto Preminger’s masterpiece and downfall, SKIDOO, is finally available on DVD from Olive Films.
Hooray for Olive Films! And Thanks!

“She has my ears!”

Yes, the widely and unfairly reviled Skidoo is one of my favorite films, right up there with 2001: A Space Odyssey (released the same year as Skidoo—something was in the air!)—another flick that still has too many detractors!

Kubrick has been a favorite filmmaker of mine since I was a kid seeing 2001 for the first time in a 1975 re-release.
And although I’ve loved Skidoo since first seeing it in the mid-1990s, lately, in search of cinematic kicks, I’ve been checking out more and more of Otto Preminger’s flicks—

And I must say that I have been very pleasantly entertained by several of them
(sometimes for the wrong reasons, I’ll admit, like Michael Caine’s wonderfully ill-advised Southern accent in Hurry Sundown (1967)—as well as the brain-smashing awesomeness of seeing sexy Jane Fonda fellate a saxophone!),
disappointed by others (while recognizing their status as classics or sentimental/audience favorites,
like the used-to-be-always-shown-on-WOR-Channel-Nine-during-the-Jewish-holidays Exodus (1960)),
and others are just plain dopey, like 1949’s Whirlpool, where The Preming reunited with Laura star Gene Tierney—
and worse than the ridiculous script, he makes her unsexy! Sheesh!
If you’re a fan of Brooklyn’s own Gene Tierney, or think she’s hot—check out 1945’s Leave Her to Heaven: in it, she’s a fucking incredible Nietzchean goddess too willful to live in “our” world of busybodies and feebs. She even drowns a crippled boy to get closer to the man she loves: niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice!

Don’t forget: As dated and lumbering as Preminger’s flicks may appear today (Does The Cardinal (1963) really NEED to be over three hours long?),
they were EVENT movies back in the day—just like Big Stanley K.’s flicks became since the mid-1960s.

But with the exception of his noir films (like the classic Laura), Preminger does not seem to be too well remembered these days—
Perhaps because his “style” was so…invisible, so quasi-documentarianistic—yet so completely “Hollywood.”
The obvious epic, perhaps?

“Skidoo! Skidoo! Between a one and three, there is a two!”

Honestly, it is kind of hard for me to explain how or why I love SKIDOO—but every time I watch the flick, I am amazed—almost stunned.
Perhaps even flabbergasted.
But so far every time I’ve screened the flick (and now thanks to The Missus, I own the legally-released DVD!),
I feel joy as well—the movie is a total and complete source of enjoyment for me.
(And I feel a bit of vindication: in the late-1990s, I found out via conversation with filmmaker/photographer and all around swell guy Richard Kern that
Skidoo was also one of artist/writer David Wojnarowicz’s favorite films.)

Because Skidoo is one of the greatest movies ever made.
Perhaps it’s an insane mess, but it’s an insane mess I LOVE.

Why do I love Skidoo? One man’s meat is another man’s poison: all I can say is that the combination of ingredients that comprise Skidoo all synergistically connect with those influences that create my sense of taste (or lack thereof, some may say) and we find ourselves in cinematic nirvanarmaggedon: a joyous meltdown.

(Another more sinister theory as to my Skidoo-love is that since I have no love for the hippies, that specific era or Baby-Boomers in general, the film isn’t a “violation” of anything that I hold sacred.)
If I may quote Christian Devine, world’s greatest Skidoo fan—a man with whom I agree on Skidoo:
“Skidoo is always entertaining, never boring, with some terrific performances, an infectious Harry Nilsson soundtrack
“The tonal shifts are positively kinetic as each scene manages the impossible feat of being more bizarre than the previous one. Just when you think Skidoo can't get any stranger, it does, all the way until the transcendent final shot, one of the greatest in Hollywood history.”

Yes, in 1968, it was an almost revolutionary act to end a film with Groucho Marx, a Legend of the Old Square Hollywood, wearing monk’s robes and smoking a joint, sailing away in a psychedelic sailboat—scene co-star Austin Pendleton’s joy at getting stoned with Groucho is OBVS—especially when that expensive movie is financed by Paramount Pictures, which was, at the time, a unit of scary mega-corp Gulf & Western.

“While AIP movies like THE TRIP had to show Peter Fonda's head crack open in the final freeze frame and run disclaimers to appease nervous producers, SKIDOO sets sail with God on a candy-colored sailboat tab on tongue... pro-LSD down to its prison-striped socks,”
wrote Erich K. of Acidemic, and I agree!

Is a synopsis of Skidoo even necessary? A detailed one is pointless, but the film is “about” Tough Tony Banks and his family—he’s an ex-mobster, his wife’s an ex-whore and his daughter’s a teeny-bopper dating a hippie.

The Mob wants him to rub out Mickey Rooney (in a brilliant cameo) because Tony is his best friend, and the only one who could get close to him. But Mickey’s in prison—

To force Tony to do it, they (The Joker and Annette Funicello’s boyfriend) shoot Top Cat’s Voice in the face.

An opera singer confuses the guards, and Tony sneaks onto Alcatraz where the Riddler speaks but doesn’t move his lips and Richard Kiel looks like he’s still serving man.

Introducing righteous & groovy Austin Pendleton as a hippie—he’s smuggled a bunch of LSD into prison because that’s what you do.
The Principal from Room 222 wants to rape you.
Jackie Onassis Minnesota Fats Domino takes a trrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiipppppppppp.
And y’know what? I think it gets it more “right” than a lot of “hipper” and “cooler” flicks do—
—The extreme close-ups of Jackie’s face when the acid is kicking in are perfect!

—Watch Preminger-regular Burgess Meredith’s hands when he’s tripping: They add so much to the performance!

—The mindfuck of a gangster playing a god named Groucho! (Uhhhh…)—and if interpreted in a religious manner, nearly ever mention of “God” is blasphemous!

—And the flick is certainly disrespectful towards then-Governor Reagan of California!

And synopsis-synapse overload-wise, I haven’t even gotten into Carol Channing’s Whorey McWhoring around;
Preminger’s patented-long-take scenes of hippies that spill into documentary territory;
optical printer overload with massive solarizations;
Harry Nilsson’s songs;
Harry Nilsson’s cameo (put that tongue away, boy!);
THE TRASHCAN BALLET (!!!);
the kitchen sink (literally!)—and MORE.

A perfect candy-colored freak-out triple feature?
Skidoo, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
With a midnight screening of Timothy Carey's The World’s Greatest Sinner!

(For more intellectually-existentially inclined viewers, we have the Wednesday-Thursday triple feature of Skidoo, The Holy Mountain and Last Year at Marienbad.)

"Gimme a flower!"

A lot of the hatred Skidoo had heaped on it on its initial release, and by snooty snobs since then, stems from, I think, the film’s pedigree—that it’s a grand Hollywood production of the Old School taking a look at what should be the sole province of the young.

“A very expensive major studio version of a three-dollar AIP beach blanket Psych-Out Easy Rider money train,” is what Acidemic has called it, and from a description like that, you can see why both young and old avoided Skidoo.

Had the flick been made in, say, somewhere in Eastern Europe in a foreign language, I think it would have been much better received at the time (and more fondly remembered today). Think bourgeois middle-brow Dušan Makavejev.

Skidoo’s also part of a zeitgeist: the sympathetic—or at least curious—squares taking a gander at the counter-culture: The Love God? (another of my faves);
Ann-Margaret in The Swinger (imperfect but worth a peek—still on Nflix Streme, I believe), and
Riot on Sunset Strip (which I need to see again, but remember fondly).

Like I said: “zeitgeist”—a term Vienna-born Preminger would appreciate:
“1968 in fact was a big year for acid movies,” wrote Millie de Chirico for TCM. “Psych-Out, Wild in the Streets, Alice in Acidland, Mantis in Lace and others were released in the wake of Roger Corman's The Trip (1967)—
and Easy Rider (1969) was just around the corner.”

While Reverse Shot’s Leah Churner is a bit of a snob regarding the film, she does make some interesting points—
Skidoo, she writes, “may also be seen as a middle-aged, bummer-trip version of Bob Rafelson’s Head (1968)….”
—which I think sounds incredible, like this film is a bloodbrother with something like The Swimmer or Seconds—
“…[and] the disturbing consequence of Otto Preminger left too much to his own devices.”

Annnnnnnnnnd maybe that’s a good thing!

Critics of Skidoo should compare it to the craptastic The Big Cube (1969), where Lana Turner is repeatedly dosed with LSD to drive her to suicide, for an inheritance.
The Big Cube uses LSD as a gimmick for a crime thriller, sort of like in John D. MacDonald’s Nightmare in Pink, but not near as smart or cool.
It’s too bad the script isn’t up to it, more fit for some third-rate overwrought telenovela.

However, I did like The Big Cube’s old school attempts at psychedelica via optical printer, and various location scenes and outdoor shoots showing off modern Mexico City.

For me, Skidoo works because it is sincere, especially in its treatment of hippies.
Preminger may not understand them, but he sympathizes.

Meanwhile, the gangsters are all clowns (many of whom were cartoonish villains on the Batman TV show—just like Preminger, who played Mr. Freeze).
But basically all the adults in the film are gangsters—thus clowns. What is Preminger saying?

Now, I’m not completely sure what Preminger is trying to do with this film—but Big Otto is trying to do something: he believes in this project, and it shows.
(“…the disturbing consequence of Otto Preminger left too much to his own devices...”)

He’s now a True Believer—like Jodowrosky or Coffin Joe or Timothy Carey or Brando when he made One-Eyed Jacks…
He’s created a personal symbology—and Skidoo could only have been better if Otto himself played Jackie Gleason’s part—
Or Carol Channing’s—or even better, both.

The film is weird and inappropriate and “off” at times—but in its “failure,” Skidoo catches the LSD experience on a metatextual level—things appear “normal” but everything is “off”—a sense of giddy disquiet.
Christian Devine says: “To understand the LSD experience in the script, the 60-year-old German director took acid under the brief tutelage of Timothy Leary, who later appeared in the Skidoo trailer.
During his trip, Preminger had a vision that would be used for Gleason's. He recalled, ‘My wife appeared very, very small. I told her, “You are so little, so charming.” ' ”

(BTW, Sammy Davis Jr.—who had appeared in Preminger’s Porgy & Bess (a flick that will probably never get a proper release in any home format, thanks to the George Gershwin estate)—
also appeared in trailers for Skidoo, referring to the flick as a “the gassiest, grooviest, swingingest, trippiest movie you’ve ever seen!” And Sammy, God bless him, is right.)

And the whole movie is all “off” on a big budget—sets are tacky but elaborate.
Churner thinks she’s griping, but she’s really giving a compliment when she writes that
Preminger “recreates [Batman’s] singularly grotesque Pop Art camp.
Throughout, Skidoo has the dull gaudiness of so many LBJ-era sitcoms, with a ‘jazzy’ score of flutes, bongos, xylophones, and occasional sound effects from the Hanna-Barbera library. (Stang bumps into Gleason: “BA-WOING!”).”

(I don’t really see the problem…)

The film is also a collision (mélange?) of different cinematographic styles and tricks: split-screens; B&W herky-jerky silent movie style footage; TV channel visual salad courtesy of a War of the Remotes; I think the Trashcan Ballet could be a short film of its own…

I especially am taken with Mickey Rooney’s scenes, where he’s “speaking” with Tony through an electronic gizmo—and Mickey is staring right into the lens of the camera—speaking to Tony, but at us, with some particularly menacing dialog.

"No, I never watch films on TV…. They always cut them to pieces.”

As New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby wrote about Preminger’s style in his review of Skidoo (published March 6, 1969),
“Whenever possible, he shoots his films on location; yet his films, despite their often marvelous mise en scène, are as unmistakably Hollywood as anything ever turned out by Monogram Pictures.”

(Dude, that’s a good thing! Sheesh!)

The director became famous for widescreen frames—there are hardly ever any close-ups in his flicks from the 1950s and 1960s—Skidoo is a notable exception—
And loooooooooong takes—two minutes without a cut is amazing—especially these days—
and Preminger was doing this routinely in his “Epic” flicks, staging frighteningly complicated scenarios, with big chunks of dialog, pushing his big Panaviz Kamz alongside—stuff that’s brobdingnagianly complex!

That’s why huge stretches of his films feel so much like a documentary to me—Preminger has planned this to the nth degree—and then sets the camera back, somewhat distant—and lets it roll.
I’m referring especially to how Preminger shoots in Exodus, The Cardinal, Hurry Sundown, In Harm’s Way (an underrated flick) and somewhat in Advise & Consent.

The very long takes and semi-elaborate camera moves are also there in The Man With the Golden Arm (a film I actually don’t like), Bunny Lake Is Missing (also underrated—it’s Preminger’s William Castle movie: beautiful B&W cinematography accents a super-creepy paranoia-thriller only spoiled by a conclusion that needed a rewrite from Robert Bloch to spice it up), Anatomy of a Murder (a classic, nuff said) and Angel Face.

[BTW: Angel Face (1952) is an insane noir with Robert Mitchum being given the Big Headache by jailbait sweetie Jean Simmons—fans of 1940-1950s melodrama or noir need to see it.
Angel Face is also a flick Destructible Man simply MUST do a posting on—sometime in the next decade, if possible—there are TWO wonderfully nasty car-over-the-cliff crashes in this movie, and in both, the dummies/victims splay about in such obvious—but brutally horrific—manners that the scenes required multiple rewindings. Chillingly brilliant!]

Meanwhile,
Preminger gave a LOT of work to Saul Bass, too.
Gotta love that.
(The director gave Bass his first Hollywood gig, hiring the designer to create the poster for his Carmen Jones (1954), but, according to The Title Design Project, “an initial commission to produce a poster design for the film developed into a title commission after Preminger was impressed by Bass’ initial work.”)

Suffice to say, I’ve been enjoying discovering Preminger’s body of work—once you realize that he makes MASSIVE soap operas, you’ll be fine—his films are melodramas through and through, unrepentantly so—and why not?

For YEARS, he was the tits as far as Hollywood was concerned: his flicks came in on time and under budget; they garnered press; they were prestigious productions, aimed at BIG, IMPORTANT THEMES—and most importantly:
They reaped boffo box.

Until Skidoo.

“It's a great, big, beautiful blob of nothing!”
Skidoo was also the first film that Preminger had made in a long time that wasn’t from an already established source, like a best seller or a hit play--
Is this where he went “wrong”/“right”?

I think Dave Kehr hits on something, even when it’s for a review of Such Good Friends, Preminger’s 1971 follow-up to Skidoo:
“Preminger is drawn to the new freedoms but also unsettled by them: they create clutter, not clarity, a circle of endless possibility in which there is no satisfaction and from which there is no escape.”

And I think this schizophrenia was there during the making of Skidoo—as open-minded as Otto was to the youth culture, old men tend to be reactionary, although it might be only subconsciously so…
(“…the disturbing consequence of Otto Preminger left too much to his own devices...”)

[A Kubrickian aside since we’re on the subject of Youth Culture Movies and zeitgeists—
While Stanley’s 2001 in 1968 may have been the apex of the “ACID” movie, while solidly being the creation of another genre, his follow-up was born out of the fallout of Youth Culture flix.
According to John Baxter’s Kubrick bio (and as memory serves), Warner Bros.’ deal with SK was heavily reliant on his tackling a more commercially viable product, preferably in the Youth Culture genre/market—or one that could be marketed that way.
Big Stan the K. subsequently delivered A Clockwork Orange.]

Looking at Otto’s resume, you can chart topical subjects regarding civil rights, government, sexuality, race, religion, and so on.
With LSD in the news, and the counter-culture exploding—especially in well-off Hollywood/Los Angeles, no wonder the producer-director took an interest.

Originally, OP was going to adapt John Hersey’s anti-LSD novel, Too Far To Walk.
To do that would have meant OP was sticking to form: adapting from already-established source material with a built-in fan-base.

But the brother of actor John Phillip Law convinced the director that many more people had had positive LSD experience than negative.

Screenwriter Doran William Cannon (who had worked on pre-production for The Graduate) had initially been hired to adapt Too Far To Walk.
Preminger had already read Cannon’s spec script Skidoo, and after his “conversion,” he wanted to buy it.

Cannon had been inspired to write Skidoo after reading a newspaper article: “I saw an article about two prisoners who had escaped in a hot-air balloon. I thought, ‘Oh, that's so neat.’ That's how it got started,” Cannon said to Christian Devine in an interview.

Advised by Francis Ford Coppola, Cannon sold the screenplay for $75,000 (!).
At TCM, Cannon is quoted as saying his script “delivered an important message of peace and love at a time when America was engaged with the war in Vietnam.”

After buying the script, writes Christian Devine, “Preminger immersed himself in the world of the hippies with a paisley vengeance,” including taking LSD (as already mentioned), and “wearing Nehru jackets, too,” Cannon said.

Supposedly Preminger was drawn to Skidoo’s script because of its “irreverent vibe,” wrote TCM’s Millie de Chirico. However, “Cannon's script was, in fact, written in earnest.”

Uh-oh.

Although seeing it as a comedy, Preminger wanted to up the mayhem and violent quotient, but Cannon, a pacifist, refused and was shown the door.
Others, including Preminger and Elliott Baker (author of A Fine Madness, made into a film by Irvin Kershner), Mel Brooks (who quit after a day) and Rob Reiner (hired because he was a hippie), took stabs at the screenplay, and eventually songs were added.
About halfway through shooting, Preminger brought in Stanley Ralph Ross, former writer for Batman, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Monkees, to add jokes.

[The NYPL has some of Cannon’s original scripts and I’m trying to get ahold of them for further R&D. Cannon also scripted the Ivanlandia favorite Brewster McCloud. Directed by Robert Altman, that film has a similarly twisted screenplay history. Cannon and Brewster McCloud are subjects for a forthcoming Ivanlandia post, please be patient…]
Just as the LSD was probably opening up all sorts of strange emotional memories and feelings in the 63-year-old Otto Ludwig Preminger, he meets the 22-year-old son he never knew he had!

Churner writes,
“According to the screenwriter… Preminger revised the story to emphasize Tony’s paternity anxieties, arguing that the character needed more of a ‘realistic’ psychological motivation.”
Then throw in that grotesque cast! Really, such human abominations hadn’t been together on the screen like this since Tod Browning’s Freaks….

Cannon said: “I told Otto if he directed Skidoo the way he directed a serious drama like his In Harm’s Way (1964), that it would turn out to be very funny. He couldn't get that. Comedy is subtle; comedy is timing. Otto's Germanic persona just couldn't do it.”

Well, Big Otto rewrote most of the script as he went along—with further tinkering, I’m sure, in the editing room—and voila!

One of the greatest movies ever made: Skidoo.
It deserves our love.

(“…the disturbing consequence of Otto Preminger left too much to his own devices…”)

“I'm an angel! I'm a goddamn angel! Hallelujah!”

However, I will heap scorn on Olive Film’s art department for the awful cover art they’ve chosen for the DVD/Blu-Ray release—

It’s a mediocre photoshopped pic of Gleason looking haggard! Using that instead of the original poster? Ugh…
Or at least try something somewhat psychedelic!
Or how about at least colorful?
Are you trying to sabotage your own release?

Is this history repeating itself?
When a befuddled and confused Paramount released Skidoo in 1968, it had no faith in the movie, and put it on a double-bill with another flick the studio resented/despised, Jules Dassin’s incredible Up-Tight! (1968), a brilliant social commentary disguised in a quasi-blaxploitation crime thriller.

As you might have guessed, The National Film Board of Ivanlandia LOVES Up-Tight! and would have killed to see that double-feature back in the day—
Although Skidoo and Up-Tight? Whew, my joy would’ve caused my head to explode.

And YES, if you count, this is now officially the 200th post of The United Provinces of Ivanlandia!
Huzzah!

The Next Book You Read MUST be Mike Edison’s “Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!”

2011-10-28T14:22:00.022-04:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah, book review—but first
let’s talk about
ME, ME, ME!

A link was surreptitiously dropped into the last posting here at The United Provinces of Ivanlandia, during the Dr. Phibes Quiz (hint: “groinal units”), but further explanation is due:
Director and new dad (congratz!) Josh Litwhiler cast me in the electronic press kit (EPK) for the Massachusetts-based band Township—

I play the host/professor of a community college cable access show, and if my perf deserves any praise, equal measure should be doled out to Mr. Litwhiler for being such a fine director and editing the footage to make me look good—not to mention my being in a video with a band that rocks.
Nice tunes and a damn fine concept brought to fruition—CHECK IT OUT!

And now, some more about
ME, ME, ME!

Some of you may be aware of my tenure as an executive editor for the notorious porn rag SCREW magazine in the late-1990s—

Both I and Chip Maloney—
who was my successor at SCREW after yours truly split for a gig with the military-industrial complex—
were recently interviewed on the internet-based “radio” program The Mike & Judy Show
concerning our tenures at The World’s Greatest Newspaper—and a righteous and riotous time was had by all!
GIVE IT A LISTEN HERE!

Some background and disclosure:
The Mike & Judy Show is/are my friends Mike Edison and Judy McGuire—both writers par excel-lance!—with McGuire the scribe behind the sick and humorous book How Not to Date—and why isn't this on your bookshelf yet?--

And on the show, Mike was “interviewing” Chip and me as promotion for his soon to be published book,
Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers—AN AMERICAN TALE OF SEX AND WONDER

It’s the history of the modern men’s magazines—put into a marvelous context, focusing on The Big Four: Hefner, Guccione, Flynt and Al Goldstein, the former publisher of SCREW—
and my ex-boss.
Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is a must-read for anyone interested in pornography, the counter-culture, publishing, politics, exploitation, Americana, success, humor and self-destructive behavior leading to utter, absolute and disgraceful failure.

It is the follow-up to author Edison’s mad cyclotron of a memoir, I Have Fun Wherever I Go, and as all over the place as that book was, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is laser-focused. Sometimes I was amazed at how much Edison crams in—without making it seem too overloaded.

Edison’s got the shimmy-shimmy-ko-ko-pop to keep things lively and intellectually stimulating—without ever falling into the pseudo-academic distancing that tourists to the Land of Porn use when dealing with the Jizz Biz (David Foster Wallace, I’m looking at you!).

A damn fine historian, Edison has taken a healthy step back—the squack racket don’t put stars in his eyes, nosiree.

And he’s wise in pointing out that Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex & the Single Girl as well as Betty Friedan’s work “helped” the Sexual Revolution more than anything that closet case Hef ever did.

Meanwhile, Larry Flynt’s empire is still a potent force because The Man With The Golden Wheelchair is a businessman first and foremost.
Not to knock the initial business acumen of Hef, Goldstein and Guccione—but after a certain point in their careers, these three publishers had insulated themselves from genuine reality a wee bit too much—
and they began making very bad financial decisions.

This book is the right combination of voluminous research, respectful disrespect, insider insight and zing-bang-boom-rat-a-tat style—and makes for a fitting, if eventually sad epitaph for “The Golden Age of Magazine Porn.”

And after reading Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, I no longer
HATE
Al Goldstein. I just hate him.

Super-mega-full disclosure: I’m in Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! Only my first name (and just mentioned twice), but still, it’s me! ME!
ME! ME! ME!

That said, Edison’s book is spot on.
Until you buy yourself your copy, grab your 3-D glasses and check out the trailer for Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!, produced by Tricia McLaughlin, my awesome and lovely missus! Yee-ha!

The Real Deal Post #199 (and other mysteries solved)

Baron Otto von Mannix took time out of his busy schedule of strafing the French countryside from his armored zeppelin to point out that we of the High Command in the Imperial Palace were wrong!

It seems that what I thought was the 200th post was actually the 197th post. Which means that right now you’re reading the 199th post of The United Provinces of Ivanlandia. So the NEXT post will be the special second—but really the first—200th anniversary posting.
So there.

The Horror! The Horror! (Or: Getting the Dr. Phibes Vibe)

2011-10-23T09:13:00.039-04:00

The mighty, mighty Dennis Cozzalio of the infinitely awesome—but far too infrequent—Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has sprung another of his patented magical mystery movie quizzes—this one inspired by the Fab Vinny the P.’s 100th movie, The Abominable Dr. Phibes—
DR. ANTON PHIBES’ ABOMINABLY ERUDITE, MUSICALLY MALIGNANT, CURSEDLY CLEVER HALLOWEEN HORROR MOVIE QUIZ

And The United Provinces of Ivanlandia has taken the bait!

(Don’t worry, faithful followers, we’ve done this before)
(And NO, we never did find out what happened to Konan the Vegetarian!)
[Meanwhile, not even Dr. Phibes Clockwork Wizards will make me read anybody else’s answers till I’ve completed mine!]
[BTW: Photos are not necessarily genuine representations of films under discussion, but establishers of mood. 10-Q.]

Gentlemen, start your engines!
1.
Favorite Vincent Price/American International Pictures release.

AIP released The Conqueror Worm, but did it produce Witchfinder General?

I’m also a big fan of Price’s turn as the murderous drunken, poverty-stricken undertaker in The Comedy of Terrors.

And while it’s mack-daddy Peter Lorre who steals the show in Corman/Matheson’s Poe-spoof The Raven, Price gives one of my favorite reaction shots in cinema in that flick:
Early in the film,
he’s heading down through subbasements to the crypt, with a raven perched on his upheld arm, when a prop skeleton hanging nearby suddenly falls—
It’s probably a mistake, but cheapskate Corman kept it in—besides,
Price’s reaction, as the skeleton clattered and the startled raven freaks out, is CLASSIC double take hysterics: hair flips, “what the hell” expression, the near-ubiquity of genuine offense being taken—
This pure shock of SOMETHING REAL in the most artificial of presentations—
an obvious film set that lets you know that these are sets that have been used in films before—meta-cinema meltdown.
Brilliant!

(In praise of Price, continued: Let us not forget his stellar work with that exploitation goliath William Castle! My fave? The Tingler, especially the scene where Price injects himself full of LSD-25 and has the first cinematic acid trip! Scream for your life, indeed!)

2.
What horror classic (or non-classic) that has not yet been remade would you like to see upgraded for modern audiences?

If you must do a remake, go for
Peter Lorre’s incredible Mad Love (1935), with Paul Giamatti in Lorre’s role; with Steve Buscemi as Colin Clive, and Philip Seymore Hoffman as the wiseguy reporter—and let them overact WILDLY. (Get John Waters to direct? Have him amp up the madness and give zing to the dialog.)
If you really want to keep with one of Mad Love’s themes, a supermodel should be cast as the female love interest—y’know, ’cause she’s gonna be just standing there mainly anyway.
Just rent the film and marvel at the moody weirdness.

Also:
I’d love to see a splatterpunk version of 1977’s The Car—
I mean more gore, more realistic gore, really show what Satan’s Supersonic Cadillac can do to a human body!
Vroom! Crunch! Splat! Aaargh!

3) Jonathan Frid or Thayer David?
Thayer David, for such an extensive body of work, including Mr. Dragon, the ex-Nazi albino espionage expert from The Eiger Sanction.

4) Name the one horror movie you need to see that has so far eluded you.
I hate to admit that my knowledge is far from encyclopedic—Jeez, I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a Jess Franco flick, or any Italian horror beyond the Bava-Argento-Fulci trinity—
But one flick that I’ve been meaning to catch, and since it’s finally been released some friends have copies and have even invited me over to watch it, but something always keeps me from seeing These Are the Damned.

I’ve known about the flick for years, either from the writings of John Brosnan or Philip Strick—or The Monster Times (the BEST friend a preadolescent monster fan could want)—but it hasn’t been available until recently.

With the exception of The Servant, most of director Joseph Losey’s films have been snoozers, so I don’t feel like rushing it—but this great post at the always awesome Monster Movie Music has piqued my interest in These Are the Damned again.

But a flick I’ve been DYING to find is a French short stop-motion animation film from 1968, titled
“Certain Prophecies”
What I remember is: a couple of aliens arrive in a flying saucer—but it’s the size of a makeup compact, and they have landed on a table at a restaurant after a meal has been finished.
The aliens, looking like cute robo-bug-lizards, wander the apocalyptian wreckage of earth’s civilization, or so they think.
Half-empty wine flutes are scanned and thought to be sources of energy, a fly is mistaken for an atomic mutation and is zapped with ray guns; the bones of the fish dinner are regarded in awe…and horror.
A waiter shows up, and the saucer dudes have to make a getaway.

I first—and only—caught it on Chuck Jones’ wonderful Curiosity Shop (which will NEVER be on DVD because of various licensing issues)—probably around 1971 or 1972.

Philip Strick has mentioned "Certain Prophecies" in his collection of essays Science Fiction Films but I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else--ever.
Do YOU know something? Let me know.

There are also flicks I saw once, a long time ago, usually on some local TV channel, that I’ve never been able to see again—many of which I don’t remember the names of—but some are
The Crawling Eye, Island of Terror, and I’m dying to see The Beginning of the End again: grasshoppers vs. cardboard cutouts! (see question #18)

5) Favorite film director most closely associated with the horror genre.
John Carpenter—LOVE his Apocalypse Trilogy!
(followed by that master trickster, Brian De Palma)

6) Ingrid Pitt or Barbara Steele?

Babs, FTW!

7) Favorite 50’s sci-fi/horror creature.
Go go Godzilla!

8) Favorite/best sequel to an established horror classic.
The Bride of Frankenstein, of course.
But I have a special place in my heart for Larry Cohen’s Island of the Alive, the third of his mutant babies flicks, and the one that expands on the critters and their lives.
Several killer babies get exiled to a deserted island and grow into huge beasts—just add one of Michael Moriarty’s goofiest performances—and you get magic!

9) Name a sequel in a horror series which clearly signaled that the once-vital franchise had run out of gas.
Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein

10) John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr.?
Carradine was the better actor, but I have no memory of him bringing pathos to ANY of his horror perfs, unlike Chaney Jr., who brought deep melancholia to his roles.

11) What was the last horror movie you saw in a theater? On DVD or Blu-ray?
Theater: Insidious (2011)—which kicked ass!
DVD: Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby… Kill! (1966)
Streaming: Paul Morrissey’s Blood for Dracula (1974)

12) Best foreign-language fiend/monster.
Dr. Mabuse

13) Favorite Mario Bava movie.
Black Sunday, natch—

14) Favorite horror actor and actress.
Boris Karloff
Dick Miller
William Shatner

Barbara Steele
PJ Soles
Martine Beswick (in Dr. Jekyll & Sister Hyde)

15) Name a great horror director’s least effective movie.
John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned

16) Grayson Hall or Joan Bennett?
What’s with the Dark Shadows obsession? For some of us, it never aired in our particular region. Besides, isn’t this post supposed to be centered on Dr. Phibes? Stop mixing metaphors!

17) When did you realize that you were a fan of the horror genre? And if you’re not, when did you realize you weren’t?
I grew up on horror (and sci-fi and fantasy and weirdness in general)—my stepdad was a fan—
and horror movies were playing in the house before I could think rationally.

18) Favorite Bert I. Gordon (B.I.G.) movie.
The Mad Bomber
The Beginning of the End
War of the Colossal Beast

19) Name an obscure horror favorite that you wish more people knew about.
Filipino horror movies in general (Go see The Twilight People! Pam Grier’s in it!)

And here are 20 horror movies that I think more people need to know about (in no particular order):

The Horrors of Malformed Men
The Todd Killings
The Hellstrom Chronicle
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Tales From the Hood
Herzog’s Nosferatu
Five Million Years to Earth
Below
Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County (1998) Unseen since it was first broadcast, this “found footage” pseudo-documentary scared the CRAP outta me back in the day.

The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare (1968)
Dagon
Burn Witch Burn!
The Flesh Eaters
The Possession of Joel Delaney
The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
The Amazing Screw-On Head (2006) (horror-comedy animated short from Mike “Hellboy” Mignola—totally brilliant)

SALVAGE (2006)
Turkey Shoot
The Night Stalker—Dan Curtis’ TV movie, scripted by horror grandmaster Richard Matheson, was the most watched TV movie in history when it aired—it was also the first time that the vampire was brought to a contemporary US city: Las Vegas.

The flick inspired a sequel, and the short-lived TV series, where hardboiled, proto-gonzo journalist Carl Kolchak (played by Darrin McGavin, a god!) tangles with the supernatural weekly. I think a lot of people have heard about the show, but haven’t seen it—the must-see episode, “The Horror in the Heights” was written by Hammer Horror vet Jimmy Sangster.

That said, I’m including The Night Stalker on this list because it’s a damn fine horror movie that I think people have forgotten about—mainly because it was overshadowed by the TV show.
And Dan Curtis created Dark Shadows—thus tying us back in to Dennis C.’s sick obsessions.

20) The Human Centipede-- yes or no?
I haven’t seen it, and probably won’t—I hear it’s pretty bad—not the gross stuff, just that it’s stupid and dull.

21) And while we’re in the neighborhood, is there a horror film you can think of that you felt “went too far”?
Since I’m a gorehound, going too far is never about blood & guts, but rather themes:
as such, Frank Darabont really screwed the pooch with the ending of The Mist.
Darabont “tweaked” Stephen King’s original ending, and made it into a sick, awful joke that leaves a bad taste in the mouth, and defies logic as well.

Meanwhile, Mario Bava’s Rabid Dogs (while technically it’s not a horror flick, it was directed by Bava!) is a flick SO mean and nasty that I still haven’t been able to finish watching it.

22) Name a film that is technically outside the horror genre that you might still feel comfortable describing as a horror film.
The Power of Nightmares
The Todd Killings
Night of the Hunter
High Plains Drifter
Dear Zachary
United 93
The Devils
Eraserhead
Orson Welles’ Macbeth

23) Lara Parker or Kathryn Leigh Scott?
Kathryn Leigh Scott, because she was on Space: 1999.
Now knock off the Dark Shadows stuff!

24) If you’re a horror fan, at some point in your past your dad, grandmother, teacher or some other disgusted figure of authority probably wagged her/his finger at you and said, “Why do you insist on reading/watching all this morbid monster/horror junk?” How did you reply? And if that reply fell short somehow, how would you have liked to have replied?

This never happened; I was a feral child with few social skills dropped off at the movies routinely from the age of seven, until I turned nine, when, after bugging mom to take me to the movie theater, she gave me some money and told me to take the bus. Nine!

25) Name the critic or Web site you most enjoy reading on the subject of the horror genre.

Arbogast
Vulnavia Morbius
DVD Savant

26) Most frightening image you’ve ever taken away from a horror movie.
Honestly, it’s when the acid-blood splattered the front of Hicks’ armor in Aliens, and he’s freaking out and shrieking “Get it off me! Get it off me!” as the armor is melting into hot slag that’s dripping onto his flesh! Ow-ow-ow-ow!
That scene gets me every time I see it (perhaps due to personal phobias: bad plastic burns on my arm when I was a kid).
Ow-ow-ow-ow!

27) Your favorite memory associated with watching a horror movie.
Seeing Romero’s Dawn of the Dead when it first came out in 1978—I was either 12 or 13—and the flick so freaked me out, I began laughing uncontrollably, SHRIEKING
(like Vik in Steve Erickson’s Zeroville, when he sees The Exorcist for the first time).

It was like I’d been given some deranged nitrous oxide and LSD cocktail.
Wonderful.

28) What would you say is the most important/significant horror movie of the past 20 years (1992-2012)? Why?

Scream brought us self-referential snark (which I hate); The Blair Witch Project popularized “fake found footage” (which I like) and gore made a comeback, like it’s supposed to.

And as such, I want to give a big shout-out to Hostel 2, for its ferocious raw meat look at capitalism: I love that the girl survives because she’s rich—it’s a blatant, heavy-handed message, but in an insane flick with so much bloodletting? Why not.

29) Favorite Dr. Phibes curse (from either film).
From Phibes the First:
The vampire-bat shred is super-creepy, thanks to close-ups of vampire bats, and the green goop on the face, followed by locusts has a certain amount of groinal units,
but it’s the frog-mask murder that rules: it can stand alone as a gruesome little short film.

(BTW, has anybody ever noticed that Fincher’s Seven is essentially a humorless cop-centric remake of The Abominable Dr. Phibes? Uh-huh, that’s right.)

(Additional BTW: I feel Dr. Phibes is a psychedelic movie—like Barbarella or Silent Running, it is not necessarily about “Hippies,” or “Acid,”
it’s the zeitgeist allowing its production designer and art directors to run wild—to be phantasmagorical!)

30) You are programming an all-night Halloween horror-thon for your favorite old movie palace. What seven (that’s right, Dennis C., I added two more! Bwah-hah-hah-HAH!) movies make up your schedule?

6pm: The 1970s “I smelllll…children!” Double-Feature—
It’s Alive (1974)
The Brood (1979)

10pm—the Rarity Showcase—
A Cold Night’s Death (1973) Totally forgotten because it’s totally unavailable
Altered (2006) I wasn’t just going to put this on question #19’s list! This is the best, goriest Outer Limits episode never made! Ya gotta see it!

Midnight—New Asia GORE—
I Saw the Devil (2010; Korea)
Dream Home (2010; China—splatteriffic socio-economical satire that is very bloody and sickly funny. With really, really, really disgusting sound effects!)

The New Dawn 6am show—“See the Devil Again!” (with free coffee and doughnuts in the lobby, too!):
The Prophecy (1995; with Christopher Walken, and an awesome cameo by Viggo Mortensen as Lucifer)

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

The 200th Episode of The United Provinces of Ivanlandia (and a mess o’ movie reviews)

2011-10-18T18:14:00.028-04:00

Before we start the festivities, check out above:
the Stupendous Gil Kane rendered a near perfect caricature of me—
as a demon tormenting an artist named… “Gil Kane”!
(Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!)

And he drew this a LONG TIME before I came near looking like that.
That drawing is me at 32! And was done when I was probably--mumble, mumble--12 or 13...?

Meanwhile I love Kane’s superclean pencils—jeez, such purity of line! I never read any of the comics he illustrated regularly, but I always loved it when he’d “guest” pencil for a vacationing regular: his two-issue run early in the publication of Conan the Barbarian is one of my faves (issues #17 & 18, summer 1972), and he had a way with technology—there’s Kirbytech, and then there’s Kanetech.

Therefore, it is with plenty of Gil Kane samples that we illustrate the 200th posting at The United Provinces of Ivanlandia!
The Gil Kane samples will share space with images of the lovely Martha Hyer, star of Pyro, one of the films reviewed in this post.

And to repeat, this is the 200th Edition of The United Provinces of Ivanlandia!
I’m spraining my arm patting myself on the back! Yee-ha!
And thanks to the “followers” and to everyone who leaves comments!

Here’s to 2,000 more!
(I guess to some folks 200 posts would be nothing—I mean, some blogs seem to put out 200 posting a month—and then there are the sites where somebody actually writes something for each of those posts—usually whining and whinging about TV shows, or health, or politics, or mainly morbidly self-involved navel gazing… Not that that’s all of what Maximum Posters do—just some of ’em.)

Hmmm….Well it appears I could have joined in all the 31 days of Halloween celebrations taking place across the blogosphere, but I watched more than 30 movies in September, and there are more day(s) in October.

Yeah, like a lot of nerds, I keep lists, and I noticed that the flicks viewed during September 2011
(whether via DVD or streaming—no theatricals this month—or for a while; the treasury’s short)
tended towards the…eclectic as a group—I find myself saying, how did I wind up watching these flicks in the course of a month?

September Cinema In Random Order

Seven Beauties (1975)
Swept Away (1974)
Yeah, I’m catching up on my Lina Wertmuller flicks—great, smart, cutting socio-political ideas churned up with some major emoting—go, go Giannini!

Pyro (1964)
Martha Hyer! Hubba-hubba! Often she’s in leather pants (not tight enough, though) or bright red satin high-collared Asian dresses (ditto).
Hyer is fab in all her scenes, but she’s not really in the film enough, as it mainly follows Barry Sullivan’s revenge-driven jerk.

But Hyer emotes a storm, and looks good doing it.
My fave Hyer role, however, is her trashiest, as the starlet/whore in The Carpetbaggers—jeez, she’s so hot in that flick, she’s volcanic!

Why she was cast as the prim girl in Some Came Running is beyond me, but she does make the bourgeois life seem desirable.
I’ve seen Hyer in plenty of flicks, but most seemed too scared to let her let go, to really kick out the jams.
But there are still more to see/here’s hoping!

George Wallace (1997)
Only watched this b/c I’m a John Frankenheimer completist. It’s a good TV movie biopic, but nothing genuinely sensational—although Gary Sinise fans should check out his performance, there’s a certain sort of…geometry about it.

Deep Cover (1992)
The Undercover Cop Posing As A Drug Dealer flick that Sam Fuller never got to make—Larry Fishburne is good as the cop, but Jeff Goldblum sends the movie into the stratosphere as the hyper attorney-turned-dope-peddler.
Great script, moral confusion, snappy dialog and unique supporting characters add up to a very recommended B-movie.

Inception (2010)
The most inadvertently funny movie I’ve seen in ages. All the dialog is exposition and nothing but. DeCraprio still looks like a constipated child. I’m sure the effects looked cool in the movie theater, but otherwise, lamesville.
And laughable, so damn laughable.

Of Unknown Origin (1983)
Yuppie Vs. Giant Rat—
Decent B-movie, but it really needed the hand of a Larry Cohen or Roman Polanski or Cronenberg to delve into the socio-psychological issues that this flick only hints at. Verdict? Interesting misfire.

ZPG (1972)
Reviewed HERE

Red (2010)
Reviewed HERE

42nd St. Forever: Exploitation Explosion (2007)
42nd St. Forever: Alamo (2009)
Getting drunk and watching about 100 movie trailers with the Squeekster is always fun—especially when Mike Edison bursts into the room and declares that we’re nerds. Yeah, right, Mike, like you never obsessed about something dumb or geeky!

Run Silent Run Deep (1958)
Reviewed HERE

The Valley of Gwangi (1969)
Jeez, this flick was made at the height of the Vietnam War—I wonder if it was shown on bases overseas?
I guess I should comment more on this Ray Harryhausen effects extravaganza, but I didn’t think this cowboys vs. dinosaurs movie went far enough, y’know?

Ripping Yarns (1975)
Been catching up on a lot of Monty Python lately, as well as the Python’s ancillary projects. Some of these are too… quaint for my tastes, but I still LOVE “Tomkinson's Schooldays”—a brilliant piece of satire that could’ve fit right into Python’s run, alongside more subdued, longer narrative episodes like “The Cycling Tour” or “Michael Ellis.”

Caltiki, The Immortal Monster (1959)
The movie is almost garbage, but some gross and mysterious scenes saved it. Watch only if you’re an absolute Mario Bava completist. Otherwise, just check out the trailer and Ernest Dickerson’s commentary at Trailers From Hell—that is much better than the actual movie which is, uh, misguided at best.

The Big Cube (1968)
Mexico! A more detailed review of this Lana Turner LSD-murder-thriller is forthcoming, but I will note that it was the latest in a bunch of flicks I’d screened recently (including The Holy Mountain, The Black Scorpion and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) that had been filmed in Mexico and often used modern Mexican architecture, and I really have been enjoying checking out the scenery—I guess I haven’t seen too many films set in contemporary Mexican cities, and I’m finding it a unique experience. Viva Mexico!

Mr. No Legs (1979)
Reviewed HERE

Microworld (1980)
William Shatner hosts this AT&T industrial film that is fascinating because of HOW MUCH IT GETS RIGHT. These technicians KNOW what they’re doing.

The Naked Prey (1965)
A fave—
Reviewed HERE

Hurry Sundown (1967)
Holy Moly! Michael Caine’s southern accent in this flick is AWFUL!, and must be seen to be believed. It’s borderline incomprehensible, and nearly impossible to imitate: I double-dog dare ya! But Jane Fonda’s saxophone fellatio scene is FUCKING BRILLIANT, and Otto Preminger delivers an entertaining, if colossal and disjointed soap opera, with an all-star cast, and magnificent Panavision vistas.

Where the Money Is (2000)
Linda Fiorentino has been in far too few films. She’s good in this cute, unassuming fable for grown-ups about a nurse meeting a bank robber—who’s faking a stroke to get out of prison. Pleasant diversion for a rainy afternoon.

Stuart Saves His Family (1995)
Too much 12-Step humor for the average sane person “to get,” but for Friends of Bill and their friends, this pic is a comedy bonanza. I especially like Vincent D’Onofrio’s angry stoner brother.

Ragtime (1981)
Doesn’t hold up; nope.

El Topo (1970)
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s breakout movie, and still supremely weird—but to me, also very dated.
I much prefer the director’s later magnum opus, The Holy Mountain (followed by his Santa Sangre).

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
Albert R. Broccoli tries to bust out another Ian Fleming-inspired franchise, but let’s CCBB get overloaded. It’s much too long, and not action-packed enough, feeling slow and lugubrious often.
Several songs are unnecessary, but on the other hand, I was shocked to see how many songs I remembered (CCBB was on TV all the time when I was a kid)—and the flick wound up having a great nostalgic appeal for me.

Gamera Vs. Guiron (1969)
Giant atomic turtle vs. knife-head lizard—GENIUS!

Gamera Vs. Jiger (1970)
So the bad guy monster, Jiger, injects something into Gamera’s neck from the stinger in its tail. Paralyzed, Gamera collapses in Osaka harbor. The two young boys (because the Gamera flicks from this time weren’t kaiju so much as “boys adventure” movies) take their miniature submarine and maneuver through Gamera’s mouth, down his throat, into his lungs, where they encounter dry “land.”
Inside the lung, the boys find that Jiger has injected an egg into Gamera (eewwww!) and that the egg has hatched a baby Jiger, presumably to feed on Gamera.
What the filmmakers have done is use the same Jiger monster suit they used to fight Gamera and smash the city, but at a different scale—normal human scale; hence the boys are actually larger than the Jiger suit—but they are inside a monster-turtle’s lung: mega-scale shift.
Let these things mess with your head: it’s fun.

Skidoo (1968)
One of the greatest films ever made, longer review in the works….

Red Cartoons: Animated Films From East Germany (2007)
Don’t bother—very dated humor, mediocre animation and watered-down social commentary (pretty much what you’d expect from Stasi-era East Germany).

Paul (2011)
Made me laugh a lot, but only after the alien enters the picture—and I am routinely annoyed by any comedy that automatically makes every church-going Christian as a loony, with cheap jokes. Mocking them so simplistically only makes them stronger.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Beautiful, beautiful super-weirdness: I’m a better person for having seen it.

The League of Gentlemen (1960)
The mediocre heist flick that gave the great, sick humor group its name.
I’ll assume that if you grew up in the UK at a certain time, that this flick was an action movie that everybody watched at one time or another and had become really familiar with, even though it’s quality is not necessarily top-notch—like Von Ryan’s Express, to anybody familiar with NYC’s "The 4:30 Movie."

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
Classic, still funny—survives multiple viewings, and is even more relevant today.

Deadlier Than the Male (1967)
Low-budget James Bond rip-off that is goofy and groovy enough (that chessboard!), with plenty of foxy broads.

The Holy Mountain (1973)
Pure fucking genius.

Ganja & Hess (1973)
Had I discovered this in 1987 on my own at the Thalia (RIP), I’d probably have loved it. But after hearing about this flick for years, it could never live up to the hype.

Must-See Triple Feature at the Ivanlandia Expanding Consciousness Drive-In?
Last Year at Marienbad, The Holy Mountain and Skidoo

BTW, I’m not sure I remember where I borrowed many of the Gil Kane jpegs illustrating this post, but I’m sure many of them came from the always awesome Diversions of the Groovy Kind. Thanks! And bookmark them today!

David O. Selznick's "Invaders From the Fifth Dimension"

2011-10-10T19:19:00.029-04:00

I read the news today, OH BOY!

2011-10-09T19:20:00.019-04:00

“ZPG” (1972) needs to be rediscovered!

2011-09-19T15:22:00.011-04:00

ZPG: Zero Population Growth (1972) is a great look at a futuristic fascistic state, albeit a “soft” one: gentle-voiced TV psychotherapists with hypno-beams, instead of jackboots and billyclubs.

On a pollution-shrouded Earth of the not-quite-near-future, because of the horrific overpopulation problem, having babies is declared illegal for the next 30 years, punishable by death.

If you want a kid, you have to wait on a very long line for your chance to buy an ugly robot child (see above), that chirps a creepy “Mummy, I love you” constantly.

The future is a fucked up awful mess. The museums are full of stuffed cats and dogs—because even household pets are extinct. Gasmasks are always needed outdoors.
Propaganda movies—consisting of footage of people eating—criticize the “past” (our present!) for being so wasteful with food, fuel and the environment.

Had ZPG been only 45 minutes, it would be perfect (and could easily have passed as an episode of The Outer Limits).
As is,
ZPG has a measured pace that some might find infuriating, and the characters often act like real people: selfish and petulant—which many viewers of sci-fi can’t stand; they need their Mary Sues.

But I happen to enjoy grim, early-1970s bummer sci-fi, so ZPG was a pleasant surprise (so to speak).

What really makes ZPG fascinating is all the “little stuff”:
The almost throwaway details that give the viewer a fuller picture of how dreadful life is in this world—
Stuff like:
--the ubiquitous gasmasks
--the museum tour and propaganda films which demonize the “now”
--extra food rations for snitches
--the long lines and constant crowds
--the omnipresent pollution
--the semi-omniscient police state, that even monitors what you “read” at the library

ZPG is a flick that needs to be rediscovered (and perhaps rediscovered as a socio-political philosophy, as well, what with the world’s resources diminishing so much—and with so many stupid people constantly having babies!).

BTW, the effects were created/supervised by the legendary Derek Meddings, and I think they’re effective for a low-budget early-1970s flick—and basically equal to, although more low-key than Meddings’ work for Gerry Anderson.
Meddings’ presence is always a plus for me!

File ZPG With Films Such Ecological Disaster/Dystopian Fascistic Visions As:

Michael Radford’s 1984 (1984)
Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451
Death Race 2000
Logan’s Run
Rollerball
Children of Men
Punishment Park
Soylent Green
Escape from New York/L.A.
THX-1138
A Clockwork Orange
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil
Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running
No Blade of Grass
Robocop
Blade Runner
Idiocracy
(Have I missed any? Leave a note in the comments section!)

Full disclosure: While I had been aware of ZPG for a long time (probably through a blurb in a John Brosnan book), it was John Kenneth Muir’s impassioned review/critique that made me add the film to my Netflix list.

The Naked Prey (1965): A New Ivanlandia Fave!

2011-09-14T17:05:00.010-04:00

Cornell Wilde’s incredible The Naked Prey is the baby that Sam Peckinpah and Werner Herzog would have had—except it was made in 1965, before either of those filmmakers really hit their stride.

The Naked Prey feels like PURE CINEMA—as close to a documentary as possible (plunk a guy in the middle of the veldt and make him run for his life), while still being fiction; one of those flicks, like Herzog’s Aguirre or John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, for example, that feels like it was just as tough for the filmmakers to make as for the “fictional” characters to go through.

This film is mostly a visual experience, with extraordinary, often brutal images (men stepping out of an elephant carcass; cheetah versus baboon; the various animals we seeing surviving the so-called wastelands), and is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the best action movies ever made.

According to Michael Atkinson’s essay for the Criterion Collection DVD release of The Naked Prey,
Wilde has a “damned-on-holiday visual approach,” and:

The African plains have never been shot so unromantically, the clichéd loping-giraffe-and-baobab-tree imagery swapped out for raw dust, thorns in the skin, and hurtful sunshine. It’s a berserkly hostile landscape, teeming with predatory beasts of all sizes. The film’s expressionistic framing and cutting have an amateur’s faith in totemic meaning, and a soldier’s impatience with ambiguity and trickery.

The fights are fast, merciless, and full of jump cuts; Wilde would cut from somebody throwing a spear to an already impaled body for lack of expensive opticals or prosthetics, but the impression is that the camera just couldn’t keep up. The net effect is of a film on the run for its own life, caring nothing for aesthetics and everything for surviving the experience.

It may not be possible any longer for a filmmaker to approach the innocence and immediacy of Wilde’s ideas—try to imagine a pulp work today that doesn’t have its source in the filmmaker’s adolescent junk-culture memories but instead comes out of an authentic sense of life’s brutality and merciless fortune.

Cornel Wilde is among those “old” directors that I’ve known about, but am in the process of rediscovering—and finding goddamn gems, like The Naked Prey.

Other “Old New Directors” for Ivanlandia, include:
Otto Preminger
Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties, wow!)
Alejandro Jodoworsky (The Holy Mountain, wow!)
Basil Dearden (All Night Long—a must-see for fans of jazz or Patrick McGoohan!)

The list is growing, and may be the subject of a future Ivanlandia post (promises, promises…), but it is something that makes me happy:
There I was thinking I’d just about exhausted all of my “old school” (in other words, non-contemporary) cinematic possibilities—and then I go and discover some stuff that’s very new to me! It’s like striking oil, or discovering gold. Yes, sir.

For further adventures on the “Dark Continent,” please visit the eternally awesome site Diversions of the Groovy Kind, and read a gruesome comic (SPOILER IMAGE BELOW—hahahahaha!) titled “The Laughing Man,” written by sick genius Bruce Jones and illustrated by even sicker genius Berni Wrightson.

Super-brief review of a New Ivanlandia No-Fave!
Mr. No Legs (1979)
(Also known as “The Amazing Mr. No Legs,” but calling the movie that would be a lie.)

Jesus H. Palomino! What a film—The Missus and I watched it last night,
and we were STUNNED by its unrelenting incompetence!
We were AMAZED by its nonstop incomprehensibility!
And we were SHOCKED by the unstoppable ugliness of Tampa!

Mr. No Legs makes Ray Dennis Steckler seem like a goddamn David Lean!

My fave bits? The black dwarf in the bar,
and the fact that at one
point a dope peddler turns over the "stuff" to a customer before getting the cash--even The Missus was shocked: "Do these people know
ANYTHING about buying drugs?!?" she yelled at the TV.

Thanks to Toestubz for the boot…