Don't think too hard about the title, it doesn't mean anything, I just needed something to put there so I went with randominance. It was either that or What's Inside A Homonculus: or, All Flesh Is Gruel. Which is still better than Heed Ye The Chatterings Of The Monkey-Priest; or, A Serenade of Bean Music.
Oi loike madness! Es tasty!
I’m kinda bleh at the moment ‘cuz I’ve had kinda a Guantanamo-style weekend and I‘m pretty sure an MRI would show my spine looking like a flute full of bubblegum, so this probably won’t be much of a blog ‘cuz I don‘t wanna sit here long. Horizontal sounds really good right now. I didn’t wanna break the habit, though, because my laziness is of a cumulative nature, and once I do that, the snowball’s going down the hill and destruction doth reign.
I found another YouTuber I’m addicted to. I honestly don’t seek out pretty 20-year-old girls there (I’m too freakin’ old for ‘em) but somehow that’s how it works out. I’m still checking out Cutiemish but she’s putting most of her vids on her own website instead of YouTube, probably to avoid all the “sit on my face!” comments that the jerks there live to put up. Anyway, she’s still recommended, especially if you’re ever feeling bummed out; it’s impossible to watch that adorable goofus and not feel happier. It’s like listening to the Ramones. If you don't like Cutiemish, you don't like ice cream or puppies or kittens. Anyway, the new girl I found is also gorgeous, but that’s not why I like her (it’s not why I like Mishy, either, although it doesn’t hurt in either case). This girl, Laci Green, is an atheist, and she’s super-smart. She’s been in college since she was 15, and even though she’s only 19 now she expresses herself better than most adults. Unless you’re a theist of some sort and don’t feel like sitting through the rhetoric (which I could understand if you didn't - it definitely appeals only to a like-minded audience, and otherwise it'd probably be a pain in the ass), check this out, it’s pretty amazing.
She gets a lot of intelligent replies (on either side of the issue) but it makes me misanthro-pissed that idiots will reply to things like that with “Tits or get the fuck out!” I don't get trolls.
One thing ya’ll might want to be prepping for, if you want to participate, is an upcoming NaNoWriMo. The official one is in November, but screw that: at work we came up with our own “NaNoWriMoSouth” thing, which is in July. Dunno if they’re doin’ it at work this year again, but I think I will, regardless of what they do (punk rock!), and if I can drag any of ya’ll into this hell with me, I will! What it entails is, you’ve got to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Starts July 1st, so start coming up with yer plots and characters… or your lame excuses. I’ve done this for the past two years, and I’ll admit that it’s only satisfying in the aftermath. During the month it’s pretty much a-much-much-much-wimpier-version-of-Navy-SEAL-training. You won’t get to do much else and will get interesting new forms of carpal tunnel, but afterward you get major bragging rights! If you can find anybody who‘s actually impressed with such activities, that is, which admittedly isn‘t easy in a world where people are often proud of not even reading books, much less writing them. Mostly it’s a discipline exercise, and a way to test your iron will against your own pitiable laziness. I completed it in 2007, turning out the zombies-in-the-storm-drain gorefest - Signal 30 - (which I’ve previously discussed/disgust). Last year I failed with Steve’s Trailer, but I did finally finish the novel when I un-lazied myself for a couple of hours about a month ago, and that’s the main thing that counts, I think. So, this is yer head’s up, kids. Be thinking on it. I think I’ve already got a plot brewing in my head, and lord, is it ugly! It's kinda a Deliverance meets Lord of the Flies with LSD-birth-defect-inbreeding thrown in. In other words, lit-er-a-toor, yeah-huh buddy, you know it! I'm gonna try to work in a scene were somebody masturbates in public with a baby's head, as a homage to Henry James!
Oh, wait, I already did that in Death Metal Creeps, sorta. Oops.
Also I finally scored another rare horror flick I’ve been looking for for years, so the review of that will be below, so there’ll at least be something somewhat substance-like in this post.
Blood And Lace (C, 1971) A young lady named Ellie has dreams about a hammer murderer who killed her mother. Detective Vic Tayback takes an interest in her (and not an entirely wholesome one) and wants to protect her since she could identify the killer and therefore might become his next target. Ellie moves into an orphanage (even though she looks like she’s in her 20’s, but then so do all the other “orphans”), little knowing that the people who run it are crazy and have been murdering their charges and keeping their corpses in a freezer. There’s also a golem-looking zombie guy lurking around, girls chained up in the attic, and mental illness in general. The film’s very cheap and stuck with a music score that’s about 40 years out of date, but it maintains a twisted atmosphere and is pretty darn effective overall. It’s also incredible that this movie got a PG rating, given the graphic nature of some of the violence and the psychotic, sadistic themes. The surprise ending is freaky and ridiculous, but has some disturbing implications. Hard to find, but a DVD-R is available from Midnight Video, and it looks great.
Here, watch the trailer:
Oh, and I finally got to see Norma Rae, inspired by Kicker Of Elves’s review several weeks back (write some more of those!) - he was absolutely right about this movie, I dug it big-time. So make that two thumbs up, definitely something worth seeking out.
Also, one last thing to leave you with, just because I tripped across it on YouTube… a video from Celtic Frost’s horrible, ill-fated flirtation with poser-metal… the infamous Cold Lake album, which it is forbidden to speak of! God, that album was some doodoo. This song, however, actually kicks ass (and is pretty much the only thing on that record that does). But only if you listen to it without the hilariously bad poofy-hair video, which is funnier than a ventriloquist in a morgue. I remember when this first showed up on MTV, and my Hellhammer-crazy self getting extremely disoriented. Surely these thalidomide poodles couldn’t be from the same gene pool as the mighty creators of such songs as "Necromantical Screams" and "Circle of the Tyrants?" Yep. And it’s got fretboard-cam, stoopidt drummer tricks, and everything! Feel the shame as you fall in love with this massive riff as you watch guys with hair that's been teased like a fourth-grader with an Urkel lunchbox make goo-goo eyes at you and stab at the camera with their gee-tars, and "rock" into each other wearing strappy pants.
And is anybody waiting the Anvil documentary as anxiously as I am? I actually liked this band, but I can see how this is gonna be a for-real Spinal Tap. Can't wait!
"It's so unfair to Anvil, it's so unfair to Anvil..." But seriously, does cheese get any more lovable than this?
Man, I've just figured out this isn't even a blog post, it's just an episode of "Let's watch YouTube with Zwolf." Sorry, guys.
4.12.2009
buncha movies 'n' a couple books
Nothing wildly original is occurring to me, but I'm still striving to be a workhorse, so I figured I’d toss a few reviews in here. Haven't proofread them much so they're probably sloppy. God, I hope so... messy is charmin'. If I could figure out a way to put feedback and reverb into prose, I'd do it. Eerrrreeeegggh.
First some movies:
Book Of Stone (C, 1969) aka El Libro de Piedra. Tragically obscure horror film from Mexico in which a woman is hired as a nanny to a little girl named Sylvia, who many consider mentally ill. The girl has a friend named Hugo who no one else ever sees. They think she’s formed an imaginary friend around a centuries-old statue of a little boy holding a huge book, but certain events (the recovery a necklace she lost in a river, prediction of events, knowledge of a long-destroyed Austrian town Hugo supposedly hails from) lead the nanny to believe that Hugo might be real, or that the statue is actually the petrified body of a wizard’s son, who was left to guard his father’s book of black magic spells. When little Sylvia starts making voodoo dolls (that work) and drawing pentagrams on the floor, they fear that Hugo is teaching her things, or perhaps possessing her, and things get dangerous. Atmospheric and creepy horror (some have compared it to The Innocents, which is apt) that rates highly on the scary scale (especially when that damn little Hugo starts showing up!) but has somehow slipped under the radar to such a degree that I can’t find mention of it in any horror reference book. That’s a shame, because this one really deserves to be seen, and I hope some DVD company will make the discovery and release it. It’s currently available as a DVD-R from notavailableondvd.com and you’re encouraged to go there and snag it. When you come across something this classic and nobody’s ever heard of it, you have to wonder what else may be luring out there, unseen. Chilling final shot.
Bryan Loves You (C, 2008) Yeah, well, I hate Bryan. The title of this no-budget, shot-on-video horror flick is very original and intriguing (I love horror titles that don’t sound like horror titles), but, alas, the goodness ends there. When reputable actors like George Wendt and Tony Todd showed up on screen, I became concerned about how their careers were doing, because this thing is a boring fucking mess that almost defies viewing. Lloyd Kaufmann, from Troma, also makes an appearance, like anybody gives a fuck if that jerk-off is around or not. Purporting to be “found footage” of a videotape a psychotherapist made to document a cult spreading in his town, it also includes bits supposedly shot by security cameras. The cult centers around a supposed messiah named Bryan, who was murdered by “the devil,” whose name is Tansy. Members of the Bryan cult often wear expressionless white masks with cracks painted on them, and deaths and insanity surround them. The psychotherapist is eventually institutionalized because people claim he’s crazy They try subjecting him to therapy that’s also indoctrination into the overbearing Bryan cult, which has no tolerance for nonbelievers. He tries to escape and eventually broken out by a resistance group of unbelievers. Living amidst the Baptist Taliban of the South, I can relate to his situation, but it’s still incredibly boring and so poorly told that it borders on nonsense. The camera lingers forever on the most uninteresting things imaginable (at one point the guy sets the camera down and we look at an easy chair in an empty house for over a minute) and the horrifying, disturbing, gruesome stuff Tony Todd’s grave warning prolog promised never shows up. The ending is a total non-ending, too, so your patience isn’t even rewarded with a payoff. When you combine hard-to-follow filmmaking with a hard-to-stay-interested-in storyline, you get something like this. I could probably have lived with it if it was on some cheapo 50-movie box set, but it’s ten frickin’ bucks, and I was sad to see it released by the once-mighty Anchor Bay. Anchor Bay, what the hell happened to you? The commentary track shuts off 15 minutes before it’s done with a fake assault, but I suspect the truth is that not even the filmmakers felt like sitting through it. Borrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnnnng.
Cannibal Curse (C, 1987) aka Curse, Chu Nv Jiang. Wacky Hong Kong witchcraft flick. First, a young woman married to an evil letch in a wheelchair tries to find a way out of her terrible situation by having a witch marry her to her secret lover’s corpse. Then, apparently reincarnated, she seeks his reincarnated form. Meanwhile, her cousin gets mixed up with a laughing sorcerer who looks like an Asian version of Bootsy Collins, who runs a tribe of cannibalistic dwarfs. The sorcerer helps her win her man (even though he turns out to be married) on the promise that she give him her body. She doesn’t keep her end of the bargain, so he casts a snake spell on her lover. A Taoist priest tries to battle the evil sorcerer but is overwhelmed, so his virgin daughter tries to get revenge by having sex with the sorcerer (which consists of him sucking her toes and then puking up frogs and worms while snakes slither out of his split-open belly). Despite some lurid craziness, particularly at the climax, this would be tedious under the best of circumstances… and the Video Asia DVD is far from the best circumstances. The copy they used on the Grindhouse Experience Presents Eye On Horror set is in Chinese, and the soundtrack has a horrible echo problem throughout. The subtitles are badly translated, and are mostly unreadable since they’re off the bottom of the screen. If your DVD player has a shrink-screen option, that helps. Also very handy is the fast-forward button, or, better yet, eject.
Ghostwatch (C, 1992) A big scary Halloween prank the BBC played on the United Kingdom, which provoked some controversial panic (and even got written up in the British Medical Journal for having caused Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children). Shot documentary-style and presented as a live newscast, using actual BBC newscasters as actors, this is a supposedly-live feed from an extremely haunted house, and the supernatural activity (perpetrated by a spirit called “Pipes,” because a little girl misunderstood her mom’s explanation of the poltergeist’s knocking sounds as being “pipes”) escalates, enters the BBC studios, and supposedly spreads through the broadcast into the homes of viewers across the country. The film expertly manipulates the tension, building intensity, then providing some relief by revealing an apparent hoax… right before everything gets even more horrific, involving possession and spreading the phenomena around until no place seems safe, including your own living room. The film uses a lot of subtlety, not showing you much, just giving you some brief, almost-subliminal glimpses of the ghost. By the end this thing’s DAMN scary and that’s even when you know it’s not real; I can’t even imagine how badly freaked out the original viewers who got War of the Worlds-ed with this thing must have been. And the filmmakers wanted to mess with them even further by hiding high pitched noises in the soundtrack, which would be inaudible to humans but would make your pets go running around the house! This thing needs an official U.S. DVD release badly (I got a DVD-R from notavailableondvd.com) but so far it’s only on region 2. I believe you can watch it online in pieces at YouTube. See it any way you can, because this predecessor to Blair Witch-style horror really delivers.
Kill Them All And Come Back Alone (C, 1968) aka Ammazzali Tutti E Torna Solo, Go Kill Everybody And Come Back Alone. Action-packed Spaghetti Western in which Chuck Connors is contracted by the Confederacy to put together a “Dirty Half Dozen”-style team of unusually-talented mercenaries capable of stealing a fortune in gold coins that the Yankees are hiding inside sticks of dynamite. Chuck’s team is made up of a super-strong guy named Bogard, an Indian/Mexican knife expert creatively named Blade, a pole-vaulting acrobat called The Kid, a dynamite expert named Deker who uses an air-gun bazooka that looks like a banjo, a gun expert named Hoagy, and a ruthless spy named Lynch. Connors is directed to kill everyone else on his team once the mission is completed. He betrays them, all right, but doesn’t kill them, which could prove to be a mistake. In fact, he’s kind of lucky when he and the rest of them are captured and sent to a Union labor camp. O’ course they eventually escape and scramble to be the last man standing with the gold. Good stuff directed by Enzo G. Castellari.
Let The Right One In (C, 2008) aka Lat den ratte komma in. A wimpy picked-on 12-year-old named Oskar finds a new friend in Eli, the creepy weird girl next door. She can work Rubik’s cubes almost instantly, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and sometimes has a nasty smell, but since all the kids in his school are hateful to him he still falls instantly in love with the repellent girl. He doesn’t know that Eil is actually a vampire, and her father has been murdering and draining people to keep her fed. It’s a very well-made film (although it backs up my theory that everybody believes slow pacing and sterile atmosphere instantly means art) and is very highly-praised, and I can understand reasons why even though I’ve got to admit I’m not sure what the big deal is. There’s nothing even slightly unpredictable in the story and it went exactly where I thought it would, and the characters and situations are comic-bookish and patently manipulative. That may sound like I’m dogging the film, but I’m not; I liked it fine, even though I’m pretty worn out with the tired, done-to-death vampire genre, and think they did a great job with it. I just don’t know why it’s special: we’ve seen this story before in everything from Little Shop of Horrors to Basket Case. I guess it grabbed people who are into adolescent-alienation-love-stories more than I am, because I thought they overdid the shmaltz a bit. I do like that they left some things vague (is the guy killing for Eli her father? Or did he start when he was Oskar’s age? Is she even a girl?). Still, this may be the least-glowing review of it you’ll find, and I’m still telling you it’s really good and you should see it, so, there you go.
The Punisher: War Zone (C, 2008) aka The Punisher 2, The Punisher: Welcome Back Frank. After the Thomas Jane film that de-emphasized action, this sequel dispensed with plot for the most part and got a new Punisher (Ray Stevenson). I like Thomas Jane but he wasn’t really right for the part; Ray is better, but Dolph Lundgren is still my hands-down favorite. I’m in a vast minority on this one, but thought Dolph’s non-acting really worked for the character. Anyway, this one gives you the origin of Jigsaw, and sees the usually-absolutist Punisher facing a moral crisis when eh mistakenly kills an FBI agent. Jigsaw and his homicidal maniac brother Loonie Bin Jim go after the Punisher… which is convenient since he’s also looking for them anyway. What’s not so convenient is that Jigsaw has recruited all the criminals into the city into one big army intent on killing the Punisher. This movie had one aspect that annoyed me to the point of distraction : some fashionista fool in wardrobe mistakenly thought it’d be cool-looking if the Punisher had a big funnel-like collar on his coat, almost like one of those things the vet puts on your dog to keep him from gnawing at his wounds. It’s like a spacesuit with the helmet off, so he always looks like a guy peeking out of a manhole. I guess it’s supposed to be body armor, but if that’s the case, why not a helmet, too? He never wears that collar thing in the comics… because he’d look like a clown there, too. Anyway, it’s so stupid-looking it compromises the bad-assedness of the movie… which is less than some of the comics, anway. There’s still a ridiculous amount of graphic violence but someone seemed intent on showing Frank Castle’s softer side, having him interact with little girls and what-not. Some of the mayhem is silly, too, such as hanging upside down from a chandelier and letting recoil spin you around. Probably fun, might look nifty, but the accuracy of your fire would be zilch-nada-fuckall. Anyway, this still isn’t perfect and you’re still better off with the comics, but it’s not bad.
Punk’s Not Dead (C, 2007) Documentary on punk rock is amazingly comprehensive; no band gets covered for more than a few seconds because they interviewed and got footage of so many of them, from the classic to the obscure, from the really important bands that built the genre to the pop-punk posers who (however sincerely) cashed in and capitalized on it, to little bands in strange little place in the world who are probably getting the entirety of their 15 seconds of fame right here. I’m not even going to try to name all the bands because it’s so exhaustive and the movie’s not really about any of them, but just about punk rock as a whole -- how it was born, grew, mutated, and still lives and thrives in various forms, from mall bands to hardcore units that are still very much underground. If you’re not a punk this is an education, and if you are it’s a celebration; I felt happy just recognizing so much of the music (at least until they got to the mall band section). Well-made and perfect for viewers with short attention spans.
Sinful Dwarf, The (C, 1973) aka Abducted Bride, Dvaergen. Twisted sex sickie in which a scar-faced former showgirl and her crippled dwarf son (Torben, host of a children’s TV show in Denmark, who looks like Jack Black’s Mini-Me) run a boarding house with a brothel in the attic. The women staffing the brothel aren’t willing participants; they’ve been abducted and hooked on heroin, and occasionally get whipped. A young couple of meager means unwittingly rent a room there until they can find someplace better, and they get spied on by the always-leering-and-smiling dwarf while his mother and her old friend get drunk and sing show tunes all day, and the white-slave harem suffer from smack-jonesing. The dwarf and his mom are also involved in smuggling heroin in teddy bears. Eventually the wife of the renting couple figures out something’s going on and that gets her chained up in the attic as part of the prostitute stable. Even though they make it look like she’s run away, her husband gets a clue. Can he rescue her from the perverted hell she’s landed in? Crude and highly unpleasant film looks like it was mostly shot in some dirty basement, and dwells on lots of full-frontal nudity and Torben’s ability to make disturbing faces. The fact that he giggles and plays with toys whenever he’s not mistreating women makes it all worse. This was a really-seen “holy grail” film for a lot of exploitation movie fans, but once it was released on DVD and they got to see how soulless and mean-spirited it is, they usually learned to be careful what they wish for. No gore but disturbing, especially to people who have a fear of dwarfs (as ridiculous as that is).
There Will Be Blood (C, 2007) aka Oil! When this movie first came out I thought it was going to be some kind of blatant Saw ripoff, since the title is one of Saw II’s promo lines. It’s a weird title, especially since it’s an adaptation of a book by a major author (Oil by Upton Sinclair). Daniel Day Lewis is an ambitious oil man who’s misanthropically building an empire even at the cost of his humanity. At first he’s pretty single-minded but still has sparks of kindness (adopting the son of a friend killed in an on-the-job accident) and can be charming, even if psychopathically, but the more successful he gets the colder her becomes. As a foil he has an ambitious young preacher/ faith healer who’s trying to build an empire of his own, and his aggression is more passive but nearly as nasty. The conflict between the two heats up when the oil man’s son is stricken deaf in an accident, which also starts Lewis’s alienation from his son, and escalates it against the rest of the world. The fierce (and unreasonable) competitive nature in him increases his misery the more successful he gets, until his fortune becomes a hell. This is a very well-made (if overly slowpaced) film and watching Lewis’s performance (he really does seem more at home at the beginning of the 20th century than in the 21st) is the drive of the film. It was a major Oscar contender, and it is a great film, but it’s flawed in that Lewis’ actions never really seem to stem from anything or are built from anything. He seems to just occasionally snap into actions without real motivation, and that weakens the message. Sometimes the artistic nature of the film also becomes self-conscious and false. But despite this it’s a great-looking film and it’s oddly more absorbing than anything so long and uneventful has a right to be. The cinematography’s great and helps you stay locked-on even though there are long stretches with no dialogue. A bit overrated but definitely worth a look.
What We Do Is Secret (C, 2008) Biopic about Darby Crash and the Germs is pretty well done and appropriately messy, just like the Germs’ music and Darby’s brief life. Shane West does a good job depicting Darby, although if you’ve ever seen any live footage of the Real Darby, West cleans his performances up a good bit and makes him more articulate. It barely touches on Darby’s Machiavellian tendencies and his plans for cultish world conquest, and it also nearly avoids any mention of Darby’s latent homosexuality, which was some contributing factor to Darby’s destructiveness and suicide. These things being left out robs the film of much potential depth, and what you’re mainly left with is a tale of struggling and barely competent band who amassed a huge following despite being banned from every venue in town, and how Darby took a lot of drugs and didn’t seem to really know what he wanted to do with his band and his fame, despite all of his talk of five-year-plans and assurances that he knew what he was doing. Best suited for Germs fans; even though it’s very well-acted and almost perfectly cast, it’s pretty much the same story you’ve heard before (be it from punk rock or stuff like Bad Company’s “Shooting Star”) and isn’t likely to intrigue many people who aren’t punk fans.
As a bonus, a few books….
A Dull Roar: What I Did On My Summer Deracination 2006 - Henry Rollins, 2.13.61, 2006. Today I’d told myself I was going to read some Henry James today (I hate Henry James but I still force myself to read some every once in a while just as a discipline exercise), but I veered off and read a much more entertaining Henry instead… which is ironic, ‘cuz Rollins’ life seems to be one big long discipline exercise and he derailed me from mine. I’m not quite done with it yet but I’m far enough to review it. If you’ve read any of his journals before, you know what to expect from this one. He is obsessive and revisits the same topics over and over again; he’s pretty much the Greta Garbo of punk rock with the constant “I want to be alone” shtick, and if I had a nickel for every time he defensively writes “I don’t hate people” (trying to convince himself more than us, I think) then this book would have been free. Yet despite this repetitive stuff, I can hardly put the book down, just like his other books. This one covers his work on the movie Wrong Turn 2, his IFC TV show, and a tour the reunited Rollins band did in support of X. Tours for Henry involve a helluva lot of physical training, and that’s detailed, too, as is his righteous anger at the Bush administration. And, as often happens, there’s a lot of Henry’s fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. I think he’s secretly trying to convince me to read that book. If you haven’t liked his other books you won’t like this one, either, but as for me, I always like spending time with good ol’ Hank. *** ½
A Feast Of Snakes - Harry Crews, Scribners Paperbacks, 1976. Redneck slice of life… if you really want to call that a life. A big rattlesnake roundup in Mystic, Georgia is the scene of all sorts of degenerate tragedy (or what might be tragic if the people it was happening to were worth a damn) when dissatisfaction catches up with some of the locals. One guy gets his dick cut off by a demented would-be girlfriend with a snake fixation. Another guy, Joe Lon Mackey, figures out that his glory days were over when he was done with high school football, and the sullen anger inspired by all he has left is set to explode. And his soulless father is not faring much better with his dog-fighting business, and Joe Lon’s girlfriends are still obsessed with baton twirling even though their high school majorette careers are over, too. This is a well-written, existential drama of hellish lives, everyday horror, and black humor, and even though it’s an unflattering picture of the South there’s a lot more truth in it (about certain segments of Southern society, at least) than many would like to admit. *** ½
First some movies:
Book Of Stone (C, 1969) aka El Libro de Piedra. Tragically obscure horror film from Mexico in which a woman is hired as a nanny to a little girl named Sylvia, who many consider mentally ill. The girl has a friend named Hugo who no one else ever sees. They think she’s formed an imaginary friend around a centuries-old statue of a little boy holding a huge book, but certain events (the recovery a necklace she lost in a river, prediction of events, knowledge of a long-destroyed Austrian town Hugo supposedly hails from) lead the nanny to believe that Hugo might be real, or that the statue is actually the petrified body of a wizard’s son, who was left to guard his father’s book of black magic spells. When little Sylvia starts making voodoo dolls (that work) and drawing pentagrams on the floor, they fear that Hugo is teaching her things, or perhaps possessing her, and things get dangerous. Atmospheric and creepy horror (some have compared it to The Innocents, which is apt) that rates highly on the scary scale (especially when that damn little Hugo starts showing up!) but has somehow slipped under the radar to such a degree that I can’t find mention of it in any horror reference book. That’s a shame, because this one really deserves to be seen, and I hope some DVD company will make the discovery and release it. It’s currently available as a DVD-R from notavailableondvd.com and you’re encouraged to go there and snag it. When you come across something this classic and nobody’s ever heard of it, you have to wonder what else may be luring out there, unseen. Chilling final shot.
Bryan Loves You (C, 2008) Yeah, well, I hate Bryan. The title of this no-budget, shot-on-video horror flick is very original and intriguing (I love horror titles that don’t sound like horror titles), but, alas, the goodness ends there. When reputable actors like George Wendt and Tony Todd showed up on screen, I became concerned about how their careers were doing, because this thing is a boring fucking mess that almost defies viewing. Lloyd Kaufmann, from Troma, also makes an appearance, like anybody gives a fuck if that jerk-off is around or not. Purporting to be “found footage” of a videotape a psychotherapist made to document a cult spreading in his town, it also includes bits supposedly shot by security cameras. The cult centers around a supposed messiah named Bryan, who was murdered by “the devil,” whose name is Tansy. Members of the Bryan cult often wear expressionless white masks with cracks painted on them, and deaths and insanity surround them. The psychotherapist is eventually institutionalized because people claim he’s crazy They try subjecting him to therapy that’s also indoctrination into the overbearing Bryan cult, which has no tolerance for nonbelievers. He tries to escape and eventually broken out by a resistance group of unbelievers. Living amidst the Baptist Taliban of the South, I can relate to his situation, but it’s still incredibly boring and so poorly told that it borders on nonsense. The camera lingers forever on the most uninteresting things imaginable (at one point the guy sets the camera down and we look at an easy chair in an empty house for over a minute) and the horrifying, disturbing, gruesome stuff Tony Todd’s grave warning prolog promised never shows up. The ending is a total non-ending, too, so your patience isn’t even rewarded with a payoff. When you combine hard-to-follow filmmaking with a hard-to-stay-interested-in storyline, you get something like this. I could probably have lived with it if it was on some cheapo 50-movie box set, but it’s ten frickin’ bucks, and I was sad to see it released by the once-mighty Anchor Bay. Anchor Bay, what the hell happened to you? The commentary track shuts off 15 minutes before it’s done with a fake assault, but I suspect the truth is that not even the filmmakers felt like sitting through it. Borrrrrrriiiiiiinnnnnnnnng.
Cannibal Curse (C, 1987) aka Curse, Chu Nv Jiang. Wacky Hong Kong witchcraft flick. First, a young woman married to an evil letch in a wheelchair tries to find a way out of her terrible situation by having a witch marry her to her secret lover’s corpse. Then, apparently reincarnated, she seeks his reincarnated form. Meanwhile, her cousin gets mixed up with a laughing sorcerer who looks like an Asian version of Bootsy Collins, who runs a tribe of cannibalistic dwarfs. The sorcerer helps her win her man (even though he turns out to be married) on the promise that she give him her body. She doesn’t keep her end of the bargain, so he casts a snake spell on her lover. A Taoist priest tries to battle the evil sorcerer but is overwhelmed, so his virgin daughter tries to get revenge by having sex with the sorcerer (which consists of him sucking her toes and then puking up frogs and worms while snakes slither out of his split-open belly). Despite some lurid craziness, particularly at the climax, this would be tedious under the best of circumstances… and the Video Asia DVD is far from the best circumstances. The copy they used on the Grindhouse Experience Presents Eye On Horror set is in Chinese, and the soundtrack has a horrible echo problem throughout. The subtitles are badly translated, and are mostly unreadable since they’re off the bottom of the screen. If your DVD player has a shrink-screen option, that helps. Also very handy is the fast-forward button, or, better yet, eject.
Ghostwatch (C, 1992) A big scary Halloween prank the BBC played on the United Kingdom, which provoked some controversial panic (and even got written up in the British Medical Journal for having caused Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in children). Shot documentary-style and presented as a live newscast, using actual BBC newscasters as actors, this is a supposedly-live feed from an extremely haunted house, and the supernatural activity (perpetrated by a spirit called “Pipes,” because a little girl misunderstood her mom’s explanation of the poltergeist’s knocking sounds as being “pipes”) escalates, enters the BBC studios, and supposedly spreads through the broadcast into the homes of viewers across the country. The film expertly manipulates the tension, building intensity, then providing some relief by revealing an apparent hoax… right before everything gets even more horrific, involving possession and spreading the phenomena around until no place seems safe, including your own living room. The film uses a lot of subtlety, not showing you much, just giving you some brief, almost-subliminal glimpses of the ghost. By the end this thing’s DAMN scary and that’s even when you know it’s not real; I can’t even imagine how badly freaked out the original viewers who got War of the Worlds-ed with this thing must have been. And the filmmakers wanted to mess with them even further by hiding high pitched noises in the soundtrack, which would be inaudible to humans but would make your pets go running around the house! This thing needs an official U.S. DVD release badly (I got a DVD-R from notavailableondvd.com) but so far it’s only on region 2. I believe you can watch it online in pieces at YouTube. See it any way you can, because this predecessor to Blair Witch-style horror really delivers.
Kill Them All And Come Back Alone (C, 1968) aka Ammazzali Tutti E Torna Solo, Go Kill Everybody And Come Back Alone. Action-packed Spaghetti Western in which Chuck Connors is contracted by the Confederacy to put together a “Dirty Half Dozen”-style team of unusually-talented mercenaries capable of stealing a fortune in gold coins that the Yankees are hiding inside sticks of dynamite. Chuck’s team is made up of a super-strong guy named Bogard, an Indian/Mexican knife expert creatively named Blade, a pole-vaulting acrobat called The Kid, a dynamite expert named Deker who uses an air-gun bazooka that looks like a banjo, a gun expert named Hoagy, and a ruthless spy named Lynch. Connors is directed to kill everyone else on his team once the mission is completed. He betrays them, all right, but doesn’t kill them, which could prove to be a mistake. In fact, he’s kind of lucky when he and the rest of them are captured and sent to a Union labor camp. O’ course they eventually escape and scramble to be the last man standing with the gold. Good stuff directed by Enzo G. Castellari.
Let The Right One In (C, 2008) aka Lat den ratte komma in. A wimpy picked-on 12-year-old named Oskar finds a new friend in Eli, the creepy weird girl next door. She can work Rubik’s cubes almost instantly, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and sometimes has a nasty smell, but since all the kids in his school are hateful to him he still falls instantly in love with the repellent girl. He doesn’t know that Eil is actually a vampire, and her father has been murdering and draining people to keep her fed. It’s a very well-made film (although it backs up my theory that everybody believes slow pacing and sterile atmosphere instantly means art) and is very highly-praised, and I can understand reasons why even though I’ve got to admit I’m not sure what the big deal is. There’s nothing even slightly unpredictable in the story and it went exactly where I thought it would, and the characters and situations are comic-bookish and patently manipulative. That may sound like I’m dogging the film, but I’m not; I liked it fine, even though I’m pretty worn out with the tired, done-to-death vampire genre, and think they did a great job with it. I just don’t know why it’s special: we’ve seen this story before in everything from Little Shop of Horrors to Basket Case. I guess it grabbed people who are into adolescent-alienation-love-stories more than I am, because I thought they overdid the shmaltz a bit. I do like that they left some things vague (is the guy killing for Eli her father? Or did he start when he was Oskar’s age? Is she even a girl?). Still, this may be the least-glowing review of it you’ll find, and I’m still telling you it’s really good and you should see it, so, there you go.
The Punisher: War Zone (C, 2008) aka The Punisher 2, The Punisher: Welcome Back Frank. After the Thomas Jane film that de-emphasized action, this sequel dispensed with plot for the most part and got a new Punisher (Ray Stevenson). I like Thomas Jane but he wasn’t really right for the part; Ray is better, but Dolph Lundgren is still my hands-down favorite. I’m in a vast minority on this one, but thought Dolph’s non-acting really worked for the character. Anyway, this one gives you the origin of Jigsaw, and sees the usually-absolutist Punisher facing a moral crisis when eh mistakenly kills an FBI agent. Jigsaw and his homicidal maniac brother Loonie Bin Jim go after the Punisher… which is convenient since he’s also looking for them anyway. What’s not so convenient is that Jigsaw has recruited all the criminals into the city into one big army intent on killing the Punisher. This movie had one aspect that annoyed me to the point of distraction : some fashionista fool in wardrobe mistakenly thought it’d be cool-looking if the Punisher had a big funnel-like collar on his coat, almost like one of those things the vet puts on your dog to keep him from gnawing at his wounds. It’s like a spacesuit with the helmet off, so he always looks like a guy peeking out of a manhole. I guess it’s supposed to be body armor, but if that’s the case, why not a helmet, too? He never wears that collar thing in the comics… because he’d look like a clown there, too. Anyway, it’s so stupid-looking it compromises the bad-assedness of the movie… which is less than some of the comics, anway. There’s still a ridiculous amount of graphic violence but someone seemed intent on showing Frank Castle’s softer side, having him interact with little girls and what-not. Some of the mayhem is silly, too, such as hanging upside down from a chandelier and letting recoil spin you around. Probably fun, might look nifty, but the accuracy of your fire would be zilch-nada-fuckall. Anyway, this still isn’t perfect and you’re still better off with the comics, but it’s not bad.
Punk’s Not Dead (C, 2007) Documentary on punk rock is amazingly comprehensive; no band gets covered for more than a few seconds because they interviewed and got footage of so many of them, from the classic to the obscure, from the really important bands that built the genre to the pop-punk posers who (however sincerely) cashed in and capitalized on it, to little bands in strange little place in the world who are probably getting the entirety of their 15 seconds of fame right here. I’m not even going to try to name all the bands because it’s so exhaustive and the movie’s not really about any of them, but just about punk rock as a whole -- how it was born, grew, mutated, and still lives and thrives in various forms, from mall bands to hardcore units that are still very much underground. If you’re not a punk this is an education, and if you are it’s a celebration; I felt happy just recognizing so much of the music (at least until they got to the mall band section). Well-made and perfect for viewers with short attention spans.
Sinful Dwarf, The (C, 1973) aka Abducted Bride, Dvaergen. Twisted sex sickie in which a scar-faced former showgirl and her crippled dwarf son (Torben, host of a children’s TV show in Denmark, who looks like Jack Black’s Mini-Me) run a boarding house with a brothel in the attic. The women staffing the brothel aren’t willing participants; they’ve been abducted and hooked on heroin, and occasionally get whipped. A young couple of meager means unwittingly rent a room there until they can find someplace better, and they get spied on by the always-leering-and-smiling dwarf while his mother and her old friend get drunk and sing show tunes all day, and the white-slave harem suffer from smack-jonesing. The dwarf and his mom are also involved in smuggling heroin in teddy bears. Eventually the wife of the renting couple figures out something’s going on and that gets her chained up in the attic as part of the prostitute stable. Even though they make it look like she’s run away, her husband gets a clue. Can he rescue her from the perverted hell she’s landed in? Crude and highly unpleasant film looks like it was mostly shot in some dirty basement, and dwells on lots of full-frontal nudity and Torben’s ability to make disturbing faces. The fact that he giggles and plays with toys whenever he’s not mistreating women makes it all worse. This was a really-seen “holy grail” film for a lot of exploitation movie fans, but once it was released on DVD and they got to see how soulless and mean-spirited it is, they usually learned to be careful what they wish for. No gore but disturbing, especially to people who have a fear of dwarfs (as ridiculous as that is).
There Will Be Blood (C, 2007) aka Oil! When this movie first came out I thought it was going to be some kind of blatant Saw ripoff, since the title is one of Saw II’s promo lines. It’s a weird title, especially since it’s an adaptation of a book by a major author (Oil by Upton Sinclair). Daniel Day Lewis is an ambitious oil man who’s misanthropically building an empire even at the cost of his humanity. At first he’s pretty single-minded but still has sparks of kindness (adopting the son of a friend killed in an on-the-job accident) and can be charming, even if psychopathically, but the more successful he gets the colder her becomes. As a foil he has an ambitious young preacher/ faith healer who’s trying to build an empire of his own, and his aggression is more passive but nearly as nasty. The conflict between the two heats up when the oil man’s son is stricken deaf in an accident, which also starts Lewis’s alienation from his son, and escalates it against the rest of the world. The fierce (and unreasonable) competitive nature in him increases his misery the more successful he gets, until his fortune becomes a hell. This is a very well-made (if overly slowpaced) film and watching Lewis’s performance (he really does seem more at home at the beginning of the 20th century than in the 21st) is the drive of the film. It was a major Oscar contender, and it is a great film, but it’s flawed in that Lewis’ actions never really seem to stem from anything or are built from anything. He seems to just occasionally snap into actions without real motivation, and that weakens the message. Sometimes the artistic nature of the film also becomes self-conscious and false. But despite this it’s a great-looking film and it’s oddly more absorbing than anything so long and uneventful has a right to be. The cinematography’s great and helps you stay locked-on even though there are long stretches with no dialogue. A bit overrated but definitely worth a look.
What We Do Is Secret (C, 2008) Biopic about Darby Crash and the Germs is pretty well done and appropriately messy, just like the Germs’ music and Darby’s brief life. Shane West does a good job depicting Darby, although if you’ve ever seen any live footage of the Real Darby, West cleans his performances up a good bit and makes him more articulate. It barely touches on Darby’s Machiavellian tendencies and his plans for cultish world conquest, and it also nearly avoids any mention of Darby’s latent homosexuality, which was some contributing factor to Darby’s destructiveness and suicide. These things being left out robs the film of much potential depth, and what you’re mainly left with is a tale of struggling and barely competent band who amassed a huge following despite being banned from every venue in town, and how Darby took a lot of drugs and didn’t seem to really know what he wanted to do with his band and his fame, despite all of his talk of five-year-plans and assurances that he knew what he was doing. Best suited for Germs fans; even though it’s very well-acted and almost perfectly cast, it’s pretty much the same story you’ve heard before (be it from punk rock or stuff like Bad Company’s “Shooting Star”) and isn’t likely to intrigue many people who aren’t punk fans.
As a bonus, a few books….
A Dull Roar: What I Did On My Summer Deracination 2006 - Henry Rollins, 2.13.61, 2006. Today I’d told myself I was going to read some Henry James today (I hate Henry James but I still force myself to read some every once in a while just as a discipline exercise), but I veered off and read a much more entertaining Henry instead… which is ironic, ‘cuz Rollins’ life seems to be one big long discipline exercise and he derailed me from mine. I’m not quite done with it yet but I’m far enough to review it. If you’ve read any of his journals before, you know what to expect from this one. He is obsessive and revisits the same topics over and over again; he’s pretty much the Greta Garbo of punk rock with the constant “I want to be alone” shtick, and if I had a nickel for every time he defensively writes “I don’t hate people” (trying to convince himself more than us, I think) then this book would have been free. Yet despite this repetitive stuff, I can hardly put the book down, just like his other books. This one covers his work on the movie Wrong Turn 2, his IFC TV show, and a tour the reunited Rollins band did in support of X. Tours for Henry involve a helluva lot of physical training, and that’s detailed, too, as is his righteous anger at the Bush administration. And, as often happens, there’s a lot of Henry’s fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is The Night. I think he’s secretly trying to convince me to read that book. If you haven’t liked his other books you won’t like this one, either, but as for me, I always like spending time with good ol’ Hank. *** ½
A Feast Of Snakes - Harry Crews, Scribners Paperbacks, 1976. Redneck slice of life… if you really want to call that a life. A big rattlesnake roundup in Mystic, Georgia is the scene of all sorts of degenerate tragedy (or what might be tragic if the people it was happening to were worth a damn) when dissatisfaction catches up with some of the locals. One guy gets his dick cut off by a demented would-be girlfriend with a snake fixation. Another guy, Joe Lon Mackey, figures out that his glory days were over when he was done with high school football, and the sullen anger inspired by all he has left is set to explode. And his soulless father is not faring much better with his dog-fighting business, and Joe Lon’s girlfriends are still obsessed with baton twirling even though their high school majorette careers are over, too. This is a well-written, existential drama of hellish lives, everyday horror, and black humor, and even though it’s an unflattering picture of the South there’s a lot more truth in it (about certain segments of Southern society, at least) than many would like to admit. *** ½
4.04.2009
Sexy Violent Trash Lit! or, How I Spent My High-School Vacation
A while back I promised (or perhaps threatened) to do a post about the “action” paperbacks that appeared in the early 70’s and flourished during the lunkhead 80’s, when America was drunk on Reagan and Rambo and “action hero” was almost a profession you could look for in the yellow pages. I read a lot of these things back then, because I went to a crap private school that was basically a scam: it was overpriced, had mostly substandard teachers, occasionally used us for free labor, tried to indoctrinate us in Baptist-Madrassa style, and wasted two hours every day on “study halls,” also known as "day care for teens." I never did my homework in study hall. Instead I’d flirt (incredibly clumsily, in embarrassing retrospect) as much as I could get away with with a girl I had a crush on (even though we were totally unsuitable for each other and it was pointless. She was cute at the time, but I bet now she looks like she’s carved out of turkey bacon. You could just tell she’d be one of those… mmm, sour grapes). And read.
And read and read. Actually, given the quality of most of the teachers, study hall probably was the most educational part of the day for me. I read a lot of my dad’s old Max Brand and Louis L’amour Westerns (which are actually really well-written) and Edge books. Edge books were “The Most Violent Westerns In Print,” and I got turned onto them by buying a couple at a neighborhood yard sale and eventually collected all of ‘em (the ones that sold in America, anyway - turns out they were a British creation). They were spaghetti-westernish and, indeed, violent. Edge was always sticking knives in people’s mouths and slicing their cheeks open and such.
Anyway, that bad influence sparked me into seeking more violent literature in the form of these “men’s adventure” paperbacks I’m going to discuss here. These series were the bastard sons of pulp magazine heroes like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, The Green Lama, the Phantom Detective, the Black Hood, G8 and his Battle Aces, Secret Agent X, Operator 5, and others. I won’t go into those too much, but you can still find reprints of them at places like Vintage Library, and I’ve read a good many of those, too. The Spider especially kicks ass, and even though they were written in the 30’s they’re crazy-violent, with body counts sometimes reaching the tens of thousands as terrorist masterminds put cholera in New York’s water supply, topple buildings, turn people into deformed homicidal maniacs, etc. How could you pass up hyperbolic titles like The Devil’s Death Dwarfs, Death Reign of the Vampire King, Machine Guns Over The White House, or King of the Fleshless Legion?
Anyway, back to the 70’s and 80’s paperbacks. I bought lots of these at used book stores for pennies, and - being a total trash-fiend who buys so much library-sale crap that rooms in my house are now literally impassible - I still snag ‘em if they’re cheap enough. I even still read them once in a while. They’re often printed on cheap paper (though better quality than the pulps), sometimes have cigarette ads in the middle (because apparently there’s nothing like reading about a bereaved psychopath killing Mafiosi to make you crave the smoooooth taste of a micronite-filtered Kent), and the cover art is sometimes priceless. It’s fun to think about artists making their livings doing endless paintings of angry people firing guns. This will probably be a multi-part project because there are so damn many of these series, and I’m not even going to try to be organized about it; I want to hit the popular ones as well as the obscure junk nobody remembers. At some point I may do a “reviews-of-action-series-that-don’t-exist” post because these things are so easy to satirize, but all of the following do exist, even if they sound over-the-top. You probably shouldn’t read them, though, because they’d distract you from something more worthwhile, like a study of Leviticus.
And now, randomly…
1. The Executioner - Don Pendleton, Pinnacle Books. Okay, this one’s not so random, because along with the Nick Carter Killmaster books, they kicked off the whole party. They were here first, and they’ve outlasted all their competitors; you can still find Executioner books (and their spin-offs, Mack Bolan and Stony Man) in your grocery store. First in and last man standing, baby! Mack Bolan, a.k.a. The Executioner, Sergeant Mercy, and “that Bastard Bolan,“ was a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran whose family was murdered by the Mafia, sparking him to use his military skills to declare a one-man war against them. After reaching 38 books in the series, Don Pendleton turned it over to a corporate author team and Bolan wrapped up his Mafia vendetta and went to work for the government, where he rescues us all from international terrorism to this very day (even though he’s probably pushing 70). The Executioner spawned a zillion other “one man war against the Mafia” series (most lacking any class whatsoever), which were so blatant that they even borrowed the title shtick of using a city’s name in the title (such as Vegas Vendetta, Colorado Kill-Zone, Miami Massacre, etc.). Marvel Comics’ The Punisher is also a direct steal of Bolan, and is another way the long arm of the Executioner is still influential today. Ya just can't kill 'im.
2. The Butcher - Stuart Jason, Pinnacle Books. This was one of my favorites until I noticed the pattern, and the fact that some books would have entire chapters lifted from previous books with a few names changed! This was an Executioner variant, with the novel twist that the badass antihero was a former Mafia goon himself. He’d gotten sick of all the crime and quit the mob. But nobody quits the Mafia, you say? Of course not, which mean that our hero not only had to carry out international spy missions for the government, but also had to fend off Mafia torpedoes who were after the $100,000 dead-only price the mob put on his head (which was upped to $250,000 as the series moved on and inflation devalued the dollar). They usually showed up in the first chapter, got dispensed with, and then it was off to Angola or whereever. The Butcher was an expert shot with his Walther P-38 (equipped with a silencer “it was illegal for Jesus Christ himself to own”) and also used a switchblade and brass knuckles a lot. He usually had time to engage in some badass dialogue with the inept (and usually perverted) hitmen he “chilled,” and sometimes did outlandish feats like firing down the barrel of another guy’s gun or killing an ox with one brass-knuckled punch. The bad guys were always comically gruesome fiends, covered with pus-filled warts and such, and so sexually depraved they'd rape a rock heap if they thought there was a snake in it. Even though Butcher always came out on top, every book ended with him having “the bitter ashy taste of defeat on his tongue.” Oddly, some of these books had a picture of a real guy on the cover instead of artwork. Wonder what that guy's doing now. Probably sitting in some nursing home telling people "I used to be The Butcher!"
3. .357 Vigilante - Ian Ludlow, Pinnacle Books. The movie Death Wish inspired almost as many of these series as The Executioner, and this short-lived series (a trilogy) was a standout. Written by a cash-needing college student Lee Goldberg, who went on to write for a bunch of TV series, these stories of “Mr. Jury” taking on neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and criminal punks weren’t bad and sometimes winked at you, making you think they might be parodies of the genre, just a little bit.
4. Mondo - Anthony DeStefano, Manor Books. Extremely tough and hardboiled action about a maladjusted, misanthropic badass who’s a thief by profession but ends up killing people more often than not. As he battles ninjas and drug kingpins, our fiercely-alienated antihero takes a lot of abuse himself (even getting hooked on heroin while in captivity and having to go cold-turkey by chaining himself to a tree). Realistically grim and cold-blooded. It's highly obscure and I’ve only got one (Cocaine Kill) but may seek out others, because it was kinda impressive.
5. The Rat Bastards - John Mackie, Jove Books. Oh, how I loved the fucking Rat Bastards. It was impossible to tell one book from the other, but they were so violent, vulgar, and over the top that you couldn’t help but be a fan, if only for the reason that you got to take a book to school that had "Bastards" right there in the title. If they'd had a series called The Gun-Toting Motherfuckers I'd've been the happiest kid in the world. I always imagined the “Bastard Squad” show mentioned in The Young Ones show would be like this series. It’s basically a Dirty Dozen ripoff set in the Pacific theater of WWII, following a squad of criminal types who killed Japanese while they weren’t beating each other up, trying to find something to fuck, a place to take a dump, something to steal, or something to get drunk off of. They were cowards, lowlifes, goldbricks, thieves, and would frequently get badly wounded or killed( so you’d always get new replacement scumbags coming into the cast), but they sure perpetrated a lot of mindless violence. The books were so action-packed that there wasn’t really anything but action, which made them completely interchangeable. Only one book - where the boys got some R&R time and got in violent trouble amongst the civilian population in the form of whorehouse fights and such - was in any way different from the others, and the series continued to the end of the war. Trashy, reprehensible fun.
6. The Marksman - Frank Scarpetta, Belmont Tower. Bottom-of-the-barrel Executioner rip-off, turned out cheap, fast, and sleazy. These are great mostly because of the violent titles (one’s just called Kill! - ya can’t get more straightforward than that) and cheap, gory cover art. Phillip Magellan is a guy killing off all the Mafia goons he can find because they killed his wife and kid. Even though the writing’s pretty crap (with such weird author tactics as using exclamation points outside of dialogue), you gotta love titles like Icepick In The Spine, Kill Them All, Mafia Wipe-Out, etc., and declarations on the back like “Tortured Death!,” “Garbage Disposal,” “Open Season On Rats!” and hyperbole about “squashing Mafia lice.” The kind of book you often find used, still smelling of cigarette smoke and spilled Pabst.
7. The Sharpshooter - Bruno Rossi, Leisure Books. I strongly suspect that the author was also writing the Marksman books, because I’ve seen him slip and call the hero, Johnny Rock, “Magellan” once or twice. I imagine he was turning these things out so fast that he oversaturated one publisher and branched out to another and forgot which guy he was writing, since they’re exactly the same. Again, cover copy and paintings are the charm in these blatant Executioner rip-offs. Neither the Marksman or the Sharpshooter books ever decided what their hero was supposed to look like, so his appearance changes from cover to cover, making these sloppier than most. One of ‘em looks like they just painted Clint Eastwood, complete with Dirty Harry .44 Magnum.
And speaking of…
8. Dirty Harry - Dane Hartman, Warner. Yep, they made a series based on the Dirty Harry movies, even featuring paintings of Clint Eastwood on the covers. These are really good and stay in the spirit of the movies, and if - like me - you can’t get enough of the movies, these are a welcome addition to the canon, and would have made good movies. Ironically, Clint’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns also spawned a series of Western novels, expanding on their mythology.
9. The Chopper Cop - Paul Ross, Popular Library. This very obscure series’ biggest claim to fame is probably that Raging Slab used one title - Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert - for one of their CD’s. From the back copy: “Terry Bunker is a cop other cops don’t like. He’s too hip, too honest, too much his own man. He plays the game his way or not at all, but he gets the job done.” Basically, this is a “hip” cop who rides a motorcycle and hangs out with hippies, weeding out the crime in their midst. These are pretty rare, I’ve only run across one.
10. Bronson: Street Vigilante - Philip Rawls, Manor Books. How blatant is this? It’s such a Death Wish ripoff, the hero’s named after the movie’s star. Gotta admire the panache of that, at least they're not fuckin' with ya. “He was a knee-jerk liberal until they murdered his family. Then he became even more savage than the street scum he stalked.” I remember these being pretty over-the-top sick as far as the violence went. It got pretty depraved. Not a healthy read.
11. Operation Hang Ten - Patrick Morgan, Macfadden Books. Odd and very obscure series (I’ve only seen the two I bought, but apparently there were at least ten of ‘em) with a spy surfer keeping Communists and killers out of the surf scene. Odd titles like Cute & Deadly Surf Twins, Freaked-Out Strangler, Topless Dancer Hangup, Too Many Murders, and Beach Queen Blowout leads me to believe these are probably tongue-in-cheek, but I haven’t read one yet.
12. Keller/ Ryker - Jack Cannon/Edson T. Hammill/ Nelson DeMille. Manor, Leisure, Pocket. This Dirty-Harry-inspired asshole-cop series has a storied history, being put out under various pseudonyms and by various publishers, with even the main character’s name being changed as a dodge for copyright litigation or something. Anyway, the main character is a racist, sexist, rule-bending (but effective) dick of a police sergeant who has to take on the slashers, cannibals, drug dealers, snipers, psychotics, etc. that plague his city. This one really works hard to make the hero completely unlikable, which is fun.
13. The Outrider - Richard Harding. Pinnacle. One of the early Road Warrior ripoffs. The hero, a guy named Bonner, drove around a post-apocalyptic wasteland, having rather boneheaded battles against gangs of scumbags, most of them led by a guy named Leather. Leather had knives for hands because Bonner had cut his real ones off. Ammo is pretty scarce in the post-nuke world, so Bonner mostly used knives. The oddest thing about this series is the weird choice for cover paintings: Bonner looks like Andrew Dice Clay with Downs Syndrome! Look, I’m not kidding.
Rather than looking tough, he looks like he could be distracted in the midst of a fight by a kitten or a shiny red apple. They changed cover artists after the third book, but by then he was pretty well-established in my mind as being goofy-lookin’.
14. M.I.A. Hunter - Jack Buchanan, Jove - Rambosploitation with veteran Mark Stone (seems like every action hero has a last name dealing with either rocks or birds of prey; they were born to be tough!) going back to Vietnam and elsewhere to liberate P.O.W.’s. Thin plots that exist only to propel cartoonish action make this read like a transcript of a video game, with lots of cheesy gushing about how heroic Mark and his friends are. The narrative sometimes stops to say things like “Damn right!” and the action scenes tend to be of the “he shot this guy and then spun and shot another guy and then a guy came up on the right and he shot him too,” etc. Pretty average.
15. Fox - Adam Hardy, Pinnacle. This is an oddball for an action series, since it’s a period piece, and the writing is actually verging on classy and highbrow. It’s a naval adventure about a complete bastard trying to rise in the ranks of the British Navy in the old sailing ship days. This anti-hero, George Abercrombie Fox, is a real prick and even a psychopath, with some kind of brain-damage condition that causes temporary blindness if his blood pressure gets jacked too high. He mistreats his men, press-gangs citizens, and mostly looks out for himself, but he’s effective, and the action scenes are realistic and strong. These were much better than most series books, and the author is so knowledgeable about the topic that you may need to study up on your period nautical terminology just to keep up.
16. K’ing Kung Fu - Marshall Macao. These came from an obscure publisher and are hard to find used, but I just noticed on Amazon that they’re back in print, apparently from some print-on-demand place. Wise move on the part of the author, I think. I haven’t read any of ‘em yet, but they’re martial arts adventures following a fighter known as “the Son of the Flying Tiger.”
17. Black Samurai - Marc Olden. Signet. These actually inspired a movie version, with Jim Kelly. Haven’t read one yet, but they deal with an African-American G.I. who gets trained in martial arts while in Japan, and uses his skills to combat various evildoers. The Blaxploitation thing spilled over to a lot of obscure books (most notably the Holloway House back catalog) but this was as mainstream as it got. They’re reportedly pretty good, and I’ll have to get around to actually reading some of ‘em one of these days.
18. Narc - Robert Hawkes, Signet. I’ve read a couple of these badass-D.E.A. agent John Bolt vs. drug dealers books and have been pretty impressed with the level of writing. He usually faces off against some particular cartel led by a colorful badguy, and the action is less brainless than most.
19. Mafia: Operation ________ - Don Romano, Pyramid. These were apparently all concerned with inner-Mafia conflicts, like the Sopranos or something, with no real heros around. I haven’t read any yet, and only have Operation Hit Man, but one called Operation Porno sounds promising.
20. Soldato! - Al Conroy, Magnum Books. More Executioner variation, kinda in the Butcher school, as the hero, Johnny Morini, is a Mafia goon who turned traitor and is hunted by the mob, and basically declares war on them out of self-preservation. The action in the one I read was more realistic than most books in the genre, and kept things at a this-could-actually-happen level.
21. Israeli Commandos - Andrew Sugar. Manor Books. A series from the author of another series, the body-hopping clone action series The Enforcer. This one took the unusual tact of focusing on a team of Jewish harasses battling Arab terrorists in defense of Israel. It’s a rare example of Jewsploitation, competently handled from cheap ‘n’ pulpy Manor Books.
22. The Revenger - Jon Messmann, Signet. Yet another direct rip-off The Executioner, with another gun-totin’ fella (this one named Ben Martin) “teaching the Mafia to sweat with fear” and “teaching the most feared men in America the meaning of blind, gut-wrenching terror.” And, presumably, teaching us all the power of unrestrained hyperbole. Forward, mush!
23. Joe Gall books - Philip Atlee, Fawcett Gold Medal. This series never had an official name, although the antihero, Joe Gall, was known as “The Nullifier.” He was depicted on the covers in both paintings and photographs as a craggy, ugly guy with a badly pock-mocked face, and he was a contract counter-espionage agent and “take-out artist.” Apparently this guy’s a real jerk (one back cover has sequential photos of this guy smoking a cigarette in an infuriatingly assholish manner) which is usually a fun thing in these books. Haven’t read one yet.
24. Nick Carter, Killmaster - Ace Books. Not to be confused with the Backstreet Boys guy, this is possibly the most prolific action hero of ‘em all, having his roots in a detective incarnation back in 1886! The 70’s and 80’s version was an espionage agent working for an organization known as AXE, and he was armed with three weapons - a stripped-down Luger named Wilhelmina, a stilleto named Hugo, and a gas bomb he kept taped under his balls which he called Pierre. There were hundreds of these books (you’ll find some in almost every used bookstore, guaranteed) and they were written by a variety of authors (including some notables such as Michael Avallone and Martin Cruz Smith) although no author was ever listed on the cover. Some were in first person and some in third, but the quality of the writing in these usually isn’t bad. Nick beds a lot of women and usually endures torture at some point. One of them I’ve read, The Sign of the Prayer Shawl, was amazingly prescient: the plot involved former Japanese kamikazes who planned to hijack planes and crash them into America’s financial centers and government buildings. Sound familiar? And it was published in 1976!
25. The Doomsday Warrior - Ryder Stacey, Zebra Books. A survivalist named Ted Rockson heads a group of resistance fighters against the occupying forces in post-Nuke America. Mostly he battles against an evil KGB agent, Colonel Killov, and he gets captured a lot. These were pretty goofy but did move nicely and were engaging in a comic-bookish way. Every cover had a hand holding up something (a weapon, a burning flag, a Statue of Liberty, a Declaration of Independence, etc., and most titles had “America” in there somewhere. There were a lot of these, and I think the last one actually came to some kind of conclusion. You could do worse. Apparently you can even get these as audio books!
I better let off here, because this thing’s huge already. I do feel neglectful not covering such series as The Lone Wolf, The Vigilante, Traveler, The Black Berets, Stormrider, Roadblaster, Hawker, The Specialist, Enforcer, Hellrider, Mutants Amok, Mac Wingate, Gannon, Confirmed Kill, Phoenix, the horrible Ashes series, The Liquidator, Overload, The Assassin, Justin Perry: Assasin, TNT, Stryker, The Hunter, The Avenger, Kung Fu Featuring Mace, Detroit P.D., Jason Striker: Master of Martial Arts, Death Squad, The Mercenary, The Last Ranger, The Bounty Hunter, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, Man From O.R.G.Y, Cherry Delight, S.O.B.’s, The Zone, Omega Sub, Survival 2000, Black Eagles, Headhunters, the Death Merchant, and dozens more… but, maybe sometime in the future if I get around to it, who knows? Just too big a task for one post.
And read and read. Actually, given the quality of most of the teachers, study hall probably was the most educational part of the day for me. I read a lot of my dad’s old Max Brand and Louis L’amour Westerns (which are actually really well-written) and Edge books. Edge books were “The Most Violent Westerns In Print,” and I got turned onto them by buying a couple at a neighborhood yard sale and eventually collected all of ‘em (the ones that sold in America, anyway - turns out they were a British creation). They were spaghetti-westernish and, indeed, violent. Edge was always sticking knives in people’s mouths and slicing their cheeks open and such.
Anyway, that bad influence sparked me into seeking more violent literature in the form of these “men’s adventure” paperbacks I’m going to discuss here. These series were the bastard sons of pulp magazine heroes like The Shadow, The Spider, Doc Savage, The Green Lama, the Phantom Detective, the Black Hood, G8 and his Battle Aces, Secret Agent X, Operator 5, and others. I won’t go into those too much, but you can still find reprints of them at places like Vintage Library, and I’ve read a good many of those, too. The Spider especially kicks ass, and even though they were written in the 30’s they’re crazy-violent, with body counts sometimes reaching the tens of thousands as terrorist masterminds put cholera in New York’s water supply, topple buildings, turn people into deformed homicidal maniacs, etc. How could you pass up hyperbolic titles like The Devil’s Death Dwarfs, Death Reign of the Vampire King, Machine Guns Over The White House, or King of the Fleshless Legion?
Anyway, back to the 70’s and 80’s paperbacks. I bought lots of these at used book stores for pennies, and - being a total trash-fiend who buys so much library-sale crap that rooms in my house are now literally impassible - I still snag ‘em if they’re cheap enough. I even still read them once in a while. They’re often printed on cheap paper (though better quality than the pulps), sometimes have cigarette ads in the middle (because apparently there’s nothing like reading about a bereaved psychopath killing Mafiosi to make you crave the smoooooth taste of a micronite-filtered Kent), and the cover art is sometimes priceless. It’s fun to think about artists making their livings doing endless paintings of angry people firing guns. This will probably be a multi-part project because there are so damn many of these series, and I’m not even going to try to be organized about it; I want to hit the popular ones as well as the obscure junk nobody remembers. At some point I may do a “reviews-of-action-series-that-don’t-exist” post because these things are so easy to satirize, but all of the following do exist, even if they sound over-the-top. You probably shouldn’t read them, though, because they’d distract you from something more worthwhile, like a study of Leviticus.
And now, randomly…
1. The Executioner - Don Pendleton, Pinnacle Books. Okay, this one’s not so random, because along with the Nick Carter Killmaster books, they kicked off the whole party. They were here first, and they’ve outlasted all their competitors; you can still find Executioner books (and their spin-offs, Mack Bolan and Stony Man) in your grocery store. First in and last man standing, baby! Mack Bolan, a.k.a. The Executioner, Sergeant Mercy, and “that Bastard Bolan,“ was a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran whose family was murdered by the Mafia, sparking him to use his military skills to declare a one-man war against them. After reaching 38 books in the series, Don Pendleton turned it over to a corporate author team and Bolan wrapped up his Mafia vendetta and went to work for the government, where he rescues us all from international terrorism to this very day (even though he’s probably pushing 70). The Executioner spawned a zillion other “one man war against the Mafia” series (most lacking any class whatsoever), which were so blatant that they even borrowed the title shtick of using a city’s name in the title (such as Vegas Vendetta, Colorado Kill-Zone, Miami Massacre, etc.). Marvel Comics’ The Punisher is also a direct steal of Bolan, and is another way the long arm of the Executioner is still influential today. Ya just can't kill 'im.
2. The Butcher - Stuart Jason, Pinnacle Books. This was one of my favorites until I noticed the pattern, and the fact that some books would have entire chapters lifted from previous books with a few names changed! This was an Executioner variant, with the novel twist that the badass antihero was a former Mafia goon himself. He’d gotten sick of all the crime and quit the mob. But nobody quits the Mafia, you say? Of course not, which mean that our hero not only had to carry out international spy missions for the government, but also had to fend off Mafia torpedoes who were after the $100,000 dead-only price the mob put on his head (which was upped to $250,000 as the series moved on and inflation devalued the dollar). They usually showed up in the first chapter, got dispensed with, and then it was off to Angola or whereever. The Butcher was an expert shot with his Walther P-38 (equipped with a silencer “it was illegal for Jesus Christ himself to own”) and also used a switchblade and brass knuckles a lot. He usually had time to engage in some badass dialogue with the inept (and usually perverted) hitmen he “chilled,” and sometimes did outlandish feats like firing down the barrel of another guy’s gun or killing an ox with one brass-knuckled punch. The bad guys were always comically gruesome fiends, covered with pus-filled warts and such, and so sexually depraved they'd rape a rock heap if they thought there was a snake in it. Even though Butcher always came out on top, every book ended with him having “the bitter ashy taste of defeat on his tongue.” Oddly, some of these books had a picture of a real guy on the cover instead of artwork. Wonder what that guy's doing now. Probably sitting in some nursing home telling people "I used to be The Butcher!"
3. .357 Vigilante - Ian Ludlow, Pinnacle Books. The movie Death Wish inspired almost as many of these series as The Executioner, and this short-lived series (a trilogy) was a standout. Written by a cash-needing college student Lee Goldberg, who went on to write for a bunch of TV series, these stories of “Mr. Jury” taking on neo-Nazis, child-pornographers, and criminal punks weren’t bad and sometimes winked at you, making you think they might be parodies of the genre, just a little bit.
4. Mondo - Anthony DeStefano, Manor Books. Extremely tough and hardboiled action about a maladjusted, misanthropic badass who’s a thief by profession but ends up killing people more often than not. As he battles ninjas and drug kingpins, our fiercely-alienated antihero takes a lot of abuse himself (even getting hooked on heroin while in captivity and having to go cold-turkey by chaining himself to a tree). Realistically grim and cold-blooded. It's highly obscure and I’ve only got one (Cocaine Kill) but may seek out others, because it was kinda impressive.
5. The Rat Bastards - John Mackie, Jove Books. Oh, how I loved the fucking Rat Bastards. It was impossible to tell one book from the other, but they were so violent, vulgar, and over the top that you couldn’t help but be a fan, if only for the reason that you got to take a book to school that had "Bastards" right there in the title. If they'd had a series called The Gun-Toting Motherfuckers I'd've been the happiest kid in the world. I always imagined the “Bastard Squad” show mentioned in The Young Ones show would be like this series. It’s basically a Dirty Dozen ripoff set in the Pacific theater of WWII, following a squad of criminal types who killed Japanese while they weren’t beating each other up, trying to find something to fuck, a place to take a dump, something to steal, or something to get drunk off of. They were cowards, lowlifes, goldbricks, thieves, and would frequently get badly wounded or killed( so you’d always get new replacement scumbags coming into the cast), but they sure perpetrated a lot of mindless violence. The books were so action-packed that there wasn’t really anything but action, which made them completely interchangeable. Only one book - where the boys got some R&R time and got in violent trouble amongst the civilian population in the form of whorehouse fights and such - was in any way different from the others, and the series continued to the end of the war. Trashy, reprehensible fun.
6. The Marksman - Frank Scarpetta, Belmont Tower. Bottom-of-the-barrel Executioner rip-off, turned out cheap, fast, and sleazy. These are great mostly because of the violent titles (one’s just called Kill! - ya can’t get more straightforward than that) and cheap, gory cover art. Phillip Magellan is a guy killing off all the Mafia goons he can find because they killed his wife and kid. Even though the writing’s pretty crap (with such weird author tactics as using exclamation points outside of dialogue), you gotta love titles like Icepick In The Spine, Kill Them All, Mafia Wipe-Out, etc., and declarations on the back like “Tortured Death!,” “Garbage Disposal,” “Open Season On Rats!” and hyperbole about “squashing Mafia lice.” The kind of book you often find used, still smelling of cigarette smoke and spilled Pabst.
7. The Sharpshooter - Bruno Rossi, Leisure Books. I strongly suspect that the author was also writing the Marksman books, because I’ve seen him slip and call the hero, Johnny Rock, “Magellan” once or twice. I imagine he was turning these things out so fast that he oversaturated one publisher and branched out to another and forgot which guy he was writing, since they’re exactly the same. Again, cover copy and paintings are the charm in these blatant Executioner rip-offs. Neither the Marksman or the Sharpshooter books ever decided what their hero was supposed to look like, so his appearance changes from cover to cover, making these sloppier than most. One of ‘em looks like they just painted Clint Eastwood, complete with Dirty Harry .44 Magnum.
And speaking of…
8. Dirty Harry - Dane Hartman, Warner. Yep, they made a series based on the Dirty Harry movies, even featuring paintings of Clint Eastwood on the covers. These are really good and stay in the spirit of the movies, and if - like me - you can’t get enough of the movies, these are a welcome addition to the canon, and would have made good movies. Ironically, Clint’s “Man With No Name” Spaghetti Westerns also spawned a series of Western novels, expanding on their mythology.
9. The Chopper Cop - Paul Ross, Popular Library. This very obscure series’ biggest claim to fame is probably that Raging Slab used one title - Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert - for one of their CD’s. From the back copy: “Terry Bunker is a cop other cops don’t like. He’s too hip, too honest, too much his own man. He plays the game his way or not at all, but he gets the job done.” Basically, this is a “hip” cop who rides a motorcycle and hangs out with hippies, weeding out the crime in their midst. These are pretty rare, I’ve only run across one.
10. Bronson: Street Vigilante - Philip Rawls, Manor Books. How blatant is this? It’s such a Death Wish ripoff, the hero’s named after the movie’s star. Gotta admire the panache of that, at least they're not fuckin' with ya. “He was a knee-jerk liberal until they murdered his family. Then he became even more savage than the street scum he stalked.” I remember these being pretty over-the-top sick as far as the violence went. It got pretty depraved. Not a healthy read.
11. Operation Hang Ten - Patrick Morgan, Macfadden Books. Odd and very obscure series (I’ve only seen the two I bought, but apparently there were at least ten of ‘em) with a spy surfer keeping Communists and killers out of the surf scene. Odd titles like Cute & Deadly Surf Twins, Freaked-Out Strangler, Topless Dancer Hangup, Too Many Murders, and Beach Queen Blowout leads me to believe these are probably tongue-in-cheek, but I haven’t read one yet.
12. Keller/ Ryker - Jack Cannon/Edson T. Hammill/ Nelson DeMille. Manor, Leisure, Pocket. This Dirty-Harry-inspired asshole-cop series has a storied history, being put out under various pseudonyms and by various publishers, with even the main character’s name being changed as a dodge for copyright litigation or something. Anyway, the main character is a racist, sexist, rule-bending (but effective) dick of a police sergeant who has to take on the slashers, cannibals, drug dealers, snipers, psychotics, etc. that plague his city. This one really works hard to make the hero completely unlikable, which is fun.
13. The Outrider - Richard Harding. Pinnacle. One of the early Road Warrior ripoffs. The hero, a guy named Bonner, drove around a post-apocalyptic wasteland, having rather boneheaded battles against gangs of scumbags, most of them led by a guy named Leather. Leather had knives for hands because Bonner had cut his real ones off. Ammo is pretty scarce in the post-nuke world, so Bonner mostly used knives. The oddest thing about this series is the weird choice for cover paintings: Bonner looks like Andrew Dice Clay with Downs Syndrome! Look, I’m not kidding.
Rather than looking tough, he looks like he could be distracted in the midst of a fight by a kitten or a shiny red apple. They changed cover artists after the third book, but by then he was pretty well-established in my mind as being goofy-lookin’.
14. M.I.A. Hunter - Jack Buchanan, Jove - Rambosploitation with veteran Mark Stone (seems like every action hero has a last name dealing with either rocks or birds of prey; they were born to be tough!) going back to Vietnam and elsewhere to liberate P.O.W.’s. Thin plots that exist only to propel cartoonish action make this read like a transcript of a video game, with lots of cheesy gushing about how heroic Mark and his friends are. The narrative sometimes stops to say things like “Damn right!” and the action scenes tend to be of the “he shot this guy and then spun and shot another guy and then a guy came up on the right and he shot him too,” etc. Pretty average.
15. Fox - Adam Hardy, Pinnacle. This is an oddball for an action series, since it’s a period piece, and the writing is actually verging on classy and highbrow. It’s a naval adventure about a complete bastard trying to rise in the ranks of the British Navy in the old sailing ship days. This anti-hero, George Abercrombie Fox, is a real prick and even a psychopath, with some kind of brain-damage condition that causes temporary blindness if his blood pressure gets jacked too high. He mistreats his men, press-gangs citizens, and mostly looks out for himself, but he’s effective, and the action scenes are realistic and strong. These were much better than most series books, and the author is so knowledgeable about the topic that you may need to study up on your period nautical terminology just to keep up.
16. K’ing Kung Fu - Marshall Macao. These came from an obscure publisher and are hard to find used, but I just noticed on Amazon that they’re back in print, apparently from some print-on-demand place. Wise move on the part of the author, I think. I haven’t read any of ‘em yet, but they’re martial arts adventures following a fighter known as “the Son of the Flying Tiger.”
17. Black Samurai - Marc Olden. Signet. These actually inspired a movie version, with Jim Kelly. Haven’t read one yet, but they deal with an African-American G.I. who gets trained in martial arts while in Japan, and uses his skills to combat various evildoers. The Blaxploitation thing spilled over to a lot of obscure books (most notably the Holloway House back catalog) but this was as mainstream as it got. They’re reportedly pretty good, and I’ll have to get around to actually reading some of ‘em one of these days.
18. Narc - Robert Hawkes, Signet. I’ve read a couple of these badass-D.E.A. agent John Bolt vs. drug dealers books and have been pretty impressed with the level of writing. He usually faces off against some particular cartel led by a colorful badguy, and the action is less brainless than most.
19. Mafia: Operation ________ - Don Romano, Pyramid. These were apparently all concerned with inner-Mafia conflicts, like the Sopranos or something, with no real heros around. I haven’t read any yet, and only have Operation Hit Man, but one called Operation Porno sounds promising.
20. Soldato! - Al Conroy, Magnum Books. More Executioner variation, kinda in the Butcher school, as the hero, Johnny Morini, is a Mafia goon who turned traitor and is hunted by the mob, and basically declares war on them out of self-preservation. The action in the one I read was more realistic than most books in the genre, and kept things at a this-could-actually-happen level.
21. Israeli Commandos - Andrew Sugar. Manor Books. A series from the author of another series, the body-hopping clone action series The Enforcer. This one took the unusual tact of focusing on a team of Jewish harasses battling Arab terrorists in defense of Israel. It’s a rare example of Jewsploitation, competently handled from cheap ‘n’ pulpy Manor Books.
22. The Revenger - Jon Messmann, Signet. Yet another direct rip-off The Executioner, with another gun-totin’ fella (this one named Ben Martin) “teaching the Mafia to sweat with fear” and “teaching the most feared men in America the meaning of blind, gut-wrenching terror.” And, presumably, teaching us all the power of unrestrained hyperbole. Forward, mush!
23. Joe Gall books - Philip Atlee, Fawcett Gold Medal. This series never had an official name, although the antihero, Joe Gall, was known as “The Nullifier.” He was depicted on the covers in both paintings and photographs as a craggy, ugly guy with a badly pock-mocked face, and he was a contract counter-espionage agent and “take-out artist.” Apparently this guy’s a real jerk (one back cover has sequential photos of this guy smoking a cigarette in an infuriatingly assholish manner) which is usually a fun thing in these books. Haven’t read one yet.
24. Nick Carter, Killmaster - Ace Books. Not to be confused with the Backstreet Boys guy, this is possibly the most prolific action hero of ‘em all, having his roots in a detective incarnation back in 1886! The 70’s and 80’s version was an espionage agent working for an organization known as AXE, and he was armed with three weapons - a stripped-down Luger named Wilhelmina, a stilleto named Hugo, and a gas bomb he kept taped under his balls which he called Pierre. There were hundreds of these books (you’ll find some in almost every used bookstore, guaranteed) and they were written by a variety of authors (including some notables such as Michael Avallone and Martin Cruz Smith) although no author was ever listed on the cover. Some were in first person and some in third, but the quality of the writing in these usually isn’t bad. Nick beds a lot of women and usually endures torture at some point. One of them I’ve read, The Sign of the Prayer Shawl, was amazingly prescient: the plot involved former Japanese kamikazes who planned to hijack planes and crash them into America’s financial centers and government buildings. Sound familiar? And it was published in 1976!
25. The Doomsday Warrior - Ryder Stacey, Zebra Books. A survivalist named Ted Rockson heads a group of resistance fighters against the occupying forces in post-Nuke America. Mostly he battles against an evil KGB agent, Colonel Killov, and he gets captured a lot. These were pretty goofy but did move nicely and were engaging in a comic-bookish way. Every cover had a hand holding up something (a weapon, a burning flag, a Statue of Liberty, a Declaration of Independence, etc., and most titles had “America” in there somewhere. There were a lot of these, and I think the last one actually came to some kind of conclusion. You could do worse. Apparently you can even get these as audio books!
I better let off here, because this thing’s huge already. I do feel neglectful not covering such series as The Lone Wolf, The Vigilante, Traveler, The Black Berets, Stormrider, Roadblaster, Hawker, The Specialist, Enforcer, Hellrider, Mutants Amok, Mac Wingate, Gannon, Confirmed Kill, Phoenix, the horrible Ashes series, The Liquidator, Overload, The Assassin, Justin Perry: Assasin, TNT, Stryker, The Hunter, The Avenger, Kung Fu Featuring Mace, Detroit P.D., Jason Striker: Master of Martial Arts, Death Squad, The Mercenary, The Last Ranger, The Bounty Hunter, The Destroyer, The Penetrator, Man From O.R.G.Y, Cherry Delight, S.O.B.’s, The Zone, Omega Sub, Survival 2000, Black Eagles, Headhunters, the Death Merchant, and dozens more… but, maybe sometime in the future if I get around to it, who knows? Just too big a task for one post.
3.28.2009
A Field Guide To Certain Citizens
"Here we go now... another sociology lecture, with a bit of psychology, a bit of neurology, a bit of fuckology..." - Johnny Rotten
I saw a weird thing a couple of days ago, and it wasn't the usual walrus-riding-a-tricycle that shows up whenever I close my eyes for a minute. No, this was some old guy - probably in his mid-60’s - who was walking along and his cell phone went off. The ringtone didn’t go with the guy at all. It didn’t go with anybody, really. It wasn’t music, but a burst of crazy, squeally chatter, like Alvin & The Chipmunks arguing. It sounded like free cupcake day at the asylum, and I don't know where he got it, and - more crucially - I don't know why.
I don't really mind the surreality of it, but I would have felt better had I been prepared for it in some way. You never know when weirdness will encroach upon your day, and most agents of weirdness are fellow human beings. Therefore I thought it might be helpful to categorize some of the strange people we all run into on a daily basis. These people aren’t necessarily dangerous or evil - some you may even want to cuddle! - but still, forewarning can save you some alarm. So, I shall attempt to create a partial taxonomy of types of people I see around. I think you'll see them, too.
1. THE MAGNET PEOPLE. These are people who will veer towards you as you’re trying to get out of their way. No matter how wide the sidewalk, they head right at you, and if you adjust to clear a path and avoid a collision, they’ll step in the same direction to get in your way again. You correct, and they'll swerve again. It’s like you’re involved in a dance you haven’t been informed of, or somebody's trying to trick you into thinking you're walking into a mirror.
2. COMPUTERLESS TWITTERERS. These people go into a public place and loudly start talking about anything on their mind to no one in particular, regardless of who’s around. They also give you a rundown of whatever they're doing even though you can see them. I run into these at the post office a good bit. One is a dissatisfied-lookin older lady, with her hair all done up in this crazy roostertail explosion thing. You would think anyone who could get it together enough to find someone to do that to her hair could figure out how to mail things, but noooooooo. She wanders up and down the post office in a tizzy, loudly announcing everything she’s doing to nobody in particular. “Now I’m going to check my mail! I get a lot of junk mail! I don’t know why they send it! I throw it away, is what I do! After I've looked at it! I need to send a package to my son! I don’t know how to tape it shut! I wonder if three dollars will be enough postage! I don’t know postage! Postage isn't my thing! I can make good cornbread, though! Got a recipe! That's how I cook it, I use a recipe! I parked right outside there! Got lucky to park! Sometimes it's hard to park! Lord is it! People! It’s warm! Okay, getting in line now! This is a long line! Don’t know if I can wait! All these people in front of me! Gotta mail a package! Hope it doesn’t cost more than three dollars! That’s what I’ve got! Three dollars! Need to get it there by Tuesday! I should have mailed it earlier, but I didn’t know how to tape it shut!” And on and on the entire time she’s in there. I think the only reason nobody yells “Why don’t you just shut up and enjoy your hair!” at her is because nobody’s sure who she’s talking to, and people are mostly polite, they don't want to interrupt in case someone's feeling engaged by this. Unfortunately for me, I also work with one of these twitter-twits. She craves attention like a vampire craves blood. She’s Notice-feratu! She talks about everything she’s doing, and if anyone replies, it's like candy! Happy, happy! And then she tells everyone else who walks by what she said and what they replied. “I said I was putting new staples in mah stapler, and Hortense told me to be sure not to staple mah fanger! Wouldn’t that hurt? Oh my! Don’tchew hate when yew staple yore fanger? That hurts, don‘t it?” And it goes on like this. All day. Five days a week. So if they ever find me hanging from the light fixture in my carport, you’ll know why. And, she also belongs to our next group…
3. GIGGLING OAFS. These are people who laugh when they do something stupid. They’re the lead clown and the audience in their own little circus, delighted with their own dumb mishaps and moronic hijinks. Such as, the other day I was trying to get into my workplace, but there was this girl trapped in the doorway because she’d made the effort (and believe me, this isn’t easy to do) to try to get out of the building through the entrance door. I don’t know how she even did it, because the automatic door won’t trigger to let you out. And rather than turn around and go back out the right door, she'd decided to just wait there, grinning, until somebody came along. I had to step up to let the door trigger and then step back so she could get out, and she was just filled with glee at this brainless thing she’d done. I also hear this all day, too. “Ah just stapled mah fanger! Ha HA!”
4. CELLPHONE GLACIERS. These people get so involved in cellphone conversations that they achieve stasis. They’re in front of you and moving very slowly, and you can’t get around them because they’re drifting from side to side like an unmoored dinghy, taking up the whole sidewalk. Sometimes they’ll stop completely in an inconvenient place, unaware that anything's behind them. They make you feel like a stalker, looming behind them and eavesdropping, when all you're trying to do is get gone. I think public use of cellphones is proof that we’ve evolved past Darwinian theory; there’s something wrong if survival instincts allow you to get so comfortable in public that you’re no longer even aware of your surroundings. Fight-or-flight is completely overriden by the need to find out what Britney's doing. These people are oblivious, mindlessly marching with their phone pressed to their skull like a soldier holding a compress to a headwound as he leaves a battle, dizzy, stunned, and shell-shocked. Or cell-shocked in this case. And that leads us to the next subset:
5. FRIENDS OF BROOKE. These are cellphone girls who are talking to or about Brooke. I don’t know who Brooke is, but she is apparently Miss It, because this world is all about her. I don’t think I’ve gone a week since around 2005 without encountering one of Brooke’s girls. They always have their faces screwed up in a whiney look as they talk, like the topic of Brooke makes their loins itchy. In coming years we may find an influx of something called Brooke’s Disease. You'll notice a lot of other names, too (Page, Heather, Stacey), but Brooke seems to reign o'er all of 'em.
6. THE CAMEL FOLK. These people are laden with water. They always have a bottle in their hand and at least one more tucked in a backpack, as if they're on a great transcontinental trek instead of a brief foray out of the apartment. Their bladders must be made out of high tensile steel to handle the kind of traffic they inflict on it. I always worry that one of them will be hit by a car, and the surrounding buildings will be swept away in the resulting torrent. I don't know if they're actually that thirsty, or if they've bought into that "hydration" myth that was going around a few years back. (Hint: you don't need to drink unless you're actually thirsty. You don't actually need "X number of glasses of water a day" - your body will let you know.) Anyway, it's good to spot these people, because in a crisis situation, you can take them down and steal their water. Just think of it as they're carrying your water supply for you if anything happens.
7. THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE NAMES FOR EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T KNOW THEM. Some people you just see around a lot, and you start recognizing them. If you spot them enough you start feeling like you kind of “know” them, even if you’ve never made eye contact, and you come up with names for them in your internal dialogue. Many are known to you by some physical characteristic, sometimes flattering but more often not (“It’s Baby Shark Guy!”) or by some resemblance to a famous person (“There goes Lee Marvin Dude!”) or movie character type (“Hmmm, Mafia Boss is about to talk to White Eyebrow Priest! I didn’t know they knew each other… whoever they are.”). Some you actually go through enough mental self-amusement to come up with actual names and sometimes even elaborate backstories for (“Hey, it’s Javier! I hope his wife Dolores and their kids, Sondra and Eugene, fixed that leaky washing machine before it could ruin the tiles in that little yellow alcove off the kitchen."). You decide you like or dislike these people you've never met, based on nothing, except maybe that they nod back if you nod at 'em. Even though the private nicknames you come up with are seldom flattering (sorry, Billy Jerkoff and Thing-On-Her-Face Tiffany!), you still can come to oddly care about the People You Have Names For Even Though You Don’t Know Them. Like, I don’t know whatever happened to Wacky Tai Chi Guy who I used to drive past every day, but I hope he’s okay. If anybody sees him, tell him the Vlad The Impaler Fella says hello.
8. STOMPERS. Some people walk comically hard, making a lot of noise, and you image they’re running films of Wehrmacht stormtroopers in their heads. "Here I go through the Arch de Triumphe!" They like to hear themselves, I guess. I whump-whump-whump, therefore I am. I always hear Crown Of Thornz’s “Juggernaut” in my head when our office Stomper (who’s an ironically skinny lady) thunders past my desk. Some day I may start singing “She’s her own judge, and her own jury! I hear the footsteps! I feel the tremors! No one can stop her! The Juggernaut!” (I don’t really mind, ‘cuz that song has one of the most killer fucked-up break riffs ever. Quit readin' this sillyshit 'n' go watch the vid).
9. PETROGLYPH PEN PAL PERVERTS. You never actually see these people, just their artifacts. They’re the people who live secret lives by writing weird things on bathroom walls, most of it latent. They’re always setting up dates to meet and do unspeakable things with whatever stranger decides to show up at the given time. I doubt they show up; the writing down of the appointment probably is the sex act. Some of them also like to brag about their conquests anonymously, as if somebody is going to be impressed with their secret fantasies. "Wow, some guy I don't know screwed three chicks I don't know. If only my life were so exciting! Wait, I've got a pen, I'll say it is..."
10. BICYCLE HELMET GUY. This is an odd guy who feels comfortable walking around in public wearing a bicycle helmet even when his bike’s nowhere in sight. It’s like a fedora. You almost have to admire it; here’s a guy who’s wrestled his ego down, hit it with a rock, and had his way with it with no orifice left undefiled. Nothing says “I don’t care what you and your stupid society think, I've conquered the need for respect” like walking around inside a building wearing a bicycle helmet. I just ain’t punk rock enough.
11. BUMPER STICKER MANIACS. These people have at least a half dozen bumper stickers on their car, promoting various causes from the reasonable (stop war, recycle, look out for breast cancer) to the very obscure and personal (I may never know what “FRY BREAD POWER” is, but it makes me want a “THOSE POPSICLE THINGS IN THE PLASTIC TUBES KICK ASS, YO!” bumper sticker just so I can represent to my peeps, too). When you see one of these people getting into their car, they usually have wild, desperate eyes and are often wearing some kind of odd hat.
12. PERIPHERAL CLOWNS. These are those clowns that lurk just on the edge of your vision, and then disappear when you try to look directly at them. They’re not the FUNNY sort of clowns… and they have a SMELL. In fact, I’m not certain they’re clowns at all. Just because something won’t stop smiling doesn’t mean it’s a clown. Anyway, ya’ll know what I’m talking about, right? Please tell me ya’ll know what I’m talking about…
Anyway, this is a far from incomplete field guide*, so feel free to add your own observed species in the comments. I may put up a more substantial, less silly post later, but for now, this seemed like the thing to do. It was either write it out for you folks, or yell it out loud in the post office...
* actually that should say "far from complete field guide" but I kinda like my typo because I have to think pretty hard to figure out what "far from incomplete" would even mean - and what would "close to incomplete" mean, for that matter? - so I'm leavin' it in as possibly the most cerebral thing I've written today.
I saw a weird thing a couple of days ago, and it wasn't the usual walrus-riding-a-tricycle that shows up whenever I close my eyes for a minute. No, this was some old guy - probably in his mid-60’s - who was walking along and his cell phone went off. The ringtone didn’t go with the guy at all. It didn’t go with anybody, really. It wasn’t music, but a burst of crazy, squeally chatter, like Alvin & The Chipmunks arguing. It sounded like free cupcake day at the asylum, and I don't know where he got it, and - more crucially - I don't know why.
I don't really mind the surreality of it, but I would have felt better had I been prepared for it in some way. You never know when weirdness will encroach upon your day, and most agents of weirdness are fellow human beings. Therefore I thought it might be helpful to categorize some of the strange people we all run into on a daily basis. These people aren’t necessarily dangerous or evil - some you may even want to cuddle! - but still, forewarning can save you some alarm. So, I shall attempt to create a partial taxonomy of types of people I see around. I think you'll see them, too.
1. THE MAGNET PEOPLE. These are people who will veer towards you as you’re trying to get out of their way. No matter how wide the sidewalk, they head right at you, and if you adjust to clear a path and avoid a collision, they’ll step in the same direction to get in your way again. You correct, and they'll swerve again. It’s like you’re involved in a dance you haven’t been informed of, or somebody's trying to trick you into thinking you're walking into a mirror.
2. COMPUTERLESS TWITTERERS. These people go into a public place and loudly start talking about anything on their mind to no one in particular, regardless of who’s around. They also give you a rundown of whatever they're doing even though you can see them. I run into these at the post office a good bit. One is a dissatisfied-lookin older lady, with her hair all done up in this crazy roostertail explosion thing. You would think anyone who could get it together enough to find someone to do that to her hair could figure out how to mail things, but noooooooo. She wanders up and down the post office in a tizzy, loudly announcing everything she’s doing to nobody in particular. “Now I’m going to check my mail! I get a lot of junk mail! I don’t know why they send it! I throw it away, is what I do! After I've looked at it! I need to send a package to my son! I don’t know how to tape it shut! I wonder if three dollars will be enough postage! I don’t know postage! Postage isn't my thing! I can make good cornbread, though! Got a recipe! That's how I cook it, I use a recipe! I parked right outside there! Got lucky to park! Sometimes it's hard to park! Lord is it! People! It’s warm! Okay, getting in line now! This is a long line! Don’t know if I can wait! All these people in front of me! Gotta mail a package! Hope it doesn’t cost more than three dollars! That’s what I’ve got! Three dollars! Need to get it there by Tuesday! I should have mailed it earlier, but I didn’t know how to tape it shut!” And on and on the entire time she’s in there. I think the only reason nobody yells “Why don’t you just shut up and enjoy your hair!” at her is because nobody’s sure who she’s talking to, and people are mostly polite, they don't want to interrupt in case someone's feeling engaged by this. Unfortunately for me, I also work with one of these twitter-twits. She craves attention like a vampire craves blood. She’s Notice-feratu! She talks about everything she’s doing, and if anyone replies, it's like candy! Happy, happy! And then she tells everyone else who walks by what she said and what they replied. “I said I was putting new staples in mah stapler, and Hortense told me to be sure not to staple mah fanger! Wouldn’t that hurt? Oh my! Don’tchew hate when yew staple yore fanger? That hurts, don‘t it?” And it goes on like this. All day. Five days a week. So if they ever find me hanging from the light fixture in my carport, you’ll know why. And, she also belongs to our next group…
3. GIGGLING OAFS. These are people who laugh when they do something stupid. They’re the lead clown and the audience in their own little circus, delighted with their own dumb mishaps and moronic hijinks. Such as, the other day I was trying to get into my workplace, but there was this girl trapped in the doorway because she’d made the effort (and believe me, this isn’t easy to do) to try to get out of the building through the entrance door. I don’t know how she even did it, because the automatic door won’t trigger to let you out. And rather than turn around and go back out the right door, she'd decided to just wait there, grinning, until somebody came along. I had to step up to let the door trigger and then step back so she could get out, and she was just filled with glee at this brainless thing she’d done. I also hear this all day, too. “Ah just stapled mah fanger! Ha HA!”
4. CELLPHONE GLACIERS. These people get so involved in cellphone conversations that they achieve stasis. They’re in front of you and moving very slowly, and you can’t get around them because they’re drifting from side to side like an unmoored dinghy, taking up the whole sidewalk. Sometimes they’ll stop completely in an inconvenient place, unaware that anything's behind them. They make you feel like a stalker, looming behind them and eavesdropping, when all you're trying to do is get gone. I think public use of cellphones is proof that we’ve evolved past Darwinian theory; there’s something wrong if survival instincts allow you to get so comfortable in public that you’re no longer even aware of your surroundings. Fight-or-flight is completely overriden by the need to find out what Britney's doing. These people are oblivious, mindlessly marching with their phone pressed to their skull like a soldier holding a compress to a headwound as he leaves a battle, dizzy, stunned, and shell-shocked. Or cell-shocked in this case. And that leads us to the next subset:
5. FRIENDS OF BROOKE. These are cellphone girls who are talking to or about Brooke. I don’t know who Brooke is, but she is apparently Miss It, because this world is all about her. I don’t think I’ve gone a week since around 2005 without encountering one of Brooke’s girls. They always have their faces screwed up in a whiney look as they talk, like the topic of Brooke makes their loins itchy. In coming years we may find an influx of something called Brooke’s Disease. You'll notice a lot of other names, too (Page, Heather, Stacey), but Brooke seems to reign o'er all of 'em.
6. THE CAMEL FOLK. These people are laden with water. They always have a bottle in their hand and at least one more tucked in a backpack, as if they're on a great transcontinental trek instead of a brief foray out of the apartment. Their bladders must be made out of high tensile steel to handle the kind of traffic they inflict on it. I always worry that one of them will be hit by a car, and the surrounding buildings will be swept away in the resulting torrent. I don't know if they're actually that thirsty, or if they've bought into that "hydration" myth that was going around a few years back. (Hint: you don't need to drink unless you're actually thirsty. You don't actually need "X number of glasses of water a day" - your body will let you know.) Anyway, it's good to spot these people, because in a crisis situation, you can take them down and steal their water. Just think of it as they're carrying your water supply for you if anything happens.
7. THE PEOPLE YOU HAVE NAMES FOR EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T KNOW THEM. Some people you just see around a lot, and you start recognizing them. If you spot them enough you start feeling like you kind of “know” them, even if you’ve never made eye contact, and you come up with names for them in your internal dialogue. Many are known to you by some physical characteristic, sometimes flattering but more often not (“It’s Baby Shark Guy!”) or by some resemblance to a famous person (“There goes Lee Marvin Dude!”) or movie character type (“Hmmm, Mafia Boss is about to talk to White Eyebrow Priest! I didn’t know they knew each other… whoever they are.”). Some you actually go through enough mental self-amusement to come up with actual names and sometimes even elaborate backstories for (“Hey, it’s Javier! I hope his wife Dolores and their kids, Sondra and Eugene, fixed that leaky washing machine before it could ruin the tiles in that little yellow alcove off the kitchen."). You decide you like or dislike these people you've never met, based on nothing, except maybe that they nod back if you nod at 'em. Even though the private nicknames you come up with are seldom flattering (sorry, Billy Jerkoff and Thing-On-Her-Face Tiffany!), you still can come to oddly care about the People You Have Names For Even Though You Don’t Know Them. Like, I don’t know whatever happened to Wacky Tai Chi Guy who I used to drive past every day, but I hope he’s okay. If anybody sees him, tell him the Vlad The Impaler Fella says hello.
8. STOMPERS. Some people walk comically hard, making a lot of noise, and you image they’re running films of Wehrmacht stormtroopers in their heads. "Here I go through the Arch de Triumphe!" They like to hear themselves, I guess. I whump-whump-whump, therefore I am. I always hear Crown Of Thornz’s “Juggernaut” in my head when our office Stomper (who’s an ironically skinny lady) thunders past my desk. Some day I may start singing “She’s her own judge, and her own jury! I hear the footsteps! I feel the tremors! No one can stop her! The Juggernaut!” (I don’t really mind, ‘cuz that song has one of the most killer fucked-up break riffs ever. Quit readin' this sillyshit 'n' go watch the vid).
9. PETROGLYPH PEN PAL PERVERTS. You never actually see these people, just their artifacts. They’re the people who live secret lives by writing weird things on bathroom walls, most of it latent. They’re always setting up dates to meet and do unspeakable things with whatever stranger decides to show up at the given time. I doubt they show up; the writing down of the appointment probably is the sex act. Some of them also like to brag about their conquests anonymously, as if somebody is going to be impressed with their secret fantasies. "Wow, some guy I don't know screwed three chicks I don't know. If only my life were so exciting! Wait, I've got a pen, I'll say it is..."
10. BICYCLE HELMET GUY. This is an odd guy who feels comfortable walking around in public wearing a bicycle helmet even when his bike’s nowhere in sight. It’s like a fedora. You almost have to admire it; here’s a guy who’s wrestled his ego down, hit it with a rock, and had his way with it with no orifice left undefiled. Nothing says “I don’t care what you and your stupid society think, I've conquered the need for respect” like walking around inside a building wearing a bicycle helmet. I just ain’t punk rock enough.
11. BUMPER STICKER MANIACS. These people have at least a half dozen bumper stickers on their car, promoting various causes from the reasonable (stop war, recycle, look out for breast cancer) to the very obscure and personal (I may never know what “FRY BREAD POWER” is, but it makes me want a “THOSE POPSICLE THINGS IN THE PLASTIC TUBES KICK ASS, YO!” bumper sticker just so I can represent to my peeps, too). When you see one of these people getting into their car, they usually have wild, desperate eyes and are often wearing some kind of odd hat.
12. PERIPHERAL CLOWNS. These are those clowns that lurk just on the edge of your vision, and then disappear when you try to look directly at them. They’re not the FUNNY sort of clowns… and they have a SMELL. In fact, I’m not certain they’re clowns at all. Just because something won’t stop smiling doesn’t mean it’s a clown. Anyway, ya’ll know what I’m talking about, right? Please tell me ya’ll know what I’m talking about…
Anyway, this is a far from incomplete field guide*, so feel free to add your own observed species in the comments. I may put up a more substantial, less silly post later, but for now, this seemed like the thing to do. It was either write it out for you folks, or yell it out loud in the post office...
* actually that should say "far from complete field guide" but I kinda like my typo because I have to think pretty hard to figure out what "far from incomplete" would even mean - and what would "close to incomplete" mean, for that matter? - so I'm leavin' it in as possibly the most cerebral thing I've written today.
3.25.2009
I Don't Read the Script - The Script Reads Me
With a nod to and shudder of fear at the formidable Zwolf, I give you some movie reviews of my own.
Tropic Thunder (2008) Let’s just pounce right on the sweetbreads, shall we? The real reason you need to see this movie is Robert Downey, Jr. Yes: Ben Stiller is a goofball, Jack Black is a maniac (the scene where he’s tied to a tree to kick heroin is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see), Tom Cruise as a disgusting movie mogul with the foulest of mouths is anachronistic fun, and the twist-on-a-familiar-theme plot is engaging (actors and crew set out to make a war movie called Tropic Thunder, stumble into actual guerilla warfare with a Southeast Asian heroin syndicate). But Robert Downey, Jr. is absolutely fucking brilliant. He plays a five-time-Oscar-winning Australian method actor named Kirk Lazarus (who might be based on Russell Crowe), and this dude is so method-y that he undergoes a “controversial pigmentation procedure” to look more like his African-American character in Thunder, Lincoln Osiris. And look the part he does (just check out the poster), though he’s even better at walking and talking like him – think Keith David’s character King in Platoon, only blaxploited to the hilt and far more bellicose. Everything he says and does is ridiculously funny, but he also manages to drop some knowledge about the essence of acting and of inhabiting a character, stuff Kirk Lazarus probably believes even though it’s all delivered as though Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield are pumping in the background. (e.g.: While discussing Simple Jack, Ben Stiller’s character’s awful Forrest Gump ripoff, Osiris tells him, “Everybody knows you never go full retard.”) This film has more war-movie homages than you can point a Howitzer at, though my favorite happens when Ben Stiller is taken hostage by the heroin guerillas and then ends up being worshipped by them Col. Kurtz style when they discover he is Simple Jack, the lead in their favorite movie (on VHS, of course). Hell, one of Osiris’s best lines summarizes it all better than I can: “I know who I am – I’m the dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!”
Norma Rae (1979) One of the sweatiest movies ever, Norma Rae is all about the process of unionizing an Alabama textile mill, with Sally Field as the firebrand and cute-as-a-button title character. Field won an Oscar for this role, and it’s easy to see why: one of the climactic scenes in particular – where Norma stands on a mill cutting table and holds up a handwritten, cardboard sign saying “UNION” until all the workers turn off their machines – is gritty and breathtaking in a way that makes it hard to imagine anyone else even attempting the role. As good as Field is Ron Liebman, who plays union organizer and über-Yankee Reuben Warshowsky. Liebman is so good in this role that many of his scenes seem like documentary footage, so naturalistic is his execution. Having grown up in north Alabama, I can also tell you that the movie as a whole nails the 70s rural-poor vibe in a way that just doesn’t happen anymore, probably because most moviemakers are afraid to put truly ugly people onscreen (Penelope Cruz’s nose notwithstanding). And Norma Rae contains one of the best sequences of dialogue you’ll ever hear: When Norma is trying to convince her anti-union preacher to let her use his church for a rally, he refuses and ends up scolding her patronizingly by saying, “We’re gonna miss your voice in the choir, Norma.” Her response? “You just gonna hear it raised up someplace else.” I said goddamn, goddamn…
No Country for Old Men (2007) This is lit-major heresy, I know, but as fantastic as Cormac McCarthy’s book is, the movie version of No Country for Old Men is even better. I think one of the main reasons for this is silence: the filmed version allows the story’s desolate pauses to happen, whereas in book form you’d have, what, blank pages? Not sure that would capture the necessary bleakness. Even when McCarthy isn’t giving us dialogue, the book has lots of description, which is a kind of talking; in the film, you just see. You see scrub-brush plains that look too expansive and forbidding to be real. You see bloated dog corpses and burning automobiles and impressive-looking cowboy hats. You see a man looking at $2 million worth of abandoned-in-a-shootout drug money in a fancy satchel under a tree in the middle of nowhere and trying to mentally (read: silently) talk himself out of what he knows is going to happen if he takes this money with him. You see a dewy milk bottle and lots of cheap wood paneling. You see holes in door locks and holes in foreheads made by a captive bolt pistol, the main weapon of hitman Anton Chigurh, played to utter perfection by Javier Bardem. You see dreadfully injured people somehow nursing and dressing their own wounds because going to a hospital = getting caught. And etc. I’m tempted to put the same superlatives on Bardem as I do on Downey, Jr. above, and it’s close to correct that Bardem is the main reason to see this film, but, really, the whole thing is badass. Other fun bits: Stephen Root’s phrase “that colossal goatfuck out in the desert”; Tommy Lee Jones's hilarious understatement "Yeah, appears to have been a glitch or two" as he surveys a staggering amount of blood, bodies, and spent shell casings, the tableau of a botched drug deal; Josh Brolin being chased down a fast-moving river by a pit bull; Bardem’s grotesque strangling of a deputy with handcuffs; and our intense desire to scream at Josh Brolin, “NO, YOU STUPID HICK! DON’T TAKE AGUA TO THE HOMBRE! GET THE FUCK BACK IN BED!” Oh, but he does it anyway, which is what moves the plot forward, so maybe it had to be.
Tropic Thunder (2008) Let’s just pounce right on the sweetbreads, shall we? The real reason you need to see this movie is Robert Downey, Jr. Yes: Ben Stiller is a goofball, Jack Black is a maniac (the scene where he’s tied to a tree to kick heroin is one of the funniest things you’ll ever see), Tom Cruise as a disgusting movie mogul with the foulest of mouths is anachronistic fun, and the twist-on-a-familiar-theme plot is engaging (actors and crew set out to make a war movie called Tropic Thunder, stumble into actual guerilla warfare with a Southeast Asian heroin syndicate). But Robert Downey, Jr. is absolutely fucking brilliant. He plays a five-time-Oscar-winning Australian method actor named Kirk Lazarus (who might be based on Russell Crowe), and this dude is so method-y that he undergoes a “controversial pigmentation procedure” to look more like his African-American character in Thunder, Lincoln Osiris. And look the part he does (just check out the poster), though he’s even better at walking and talking like him – think Keith David’s character King in Platoon, only blaxploited to the hilt and far more bellicose. Everything he says and does is ridiculously funny, but he also manages to drop some knowledge about the essence of acting and of inhabiting a character, stuff Kirk Lazarus probably believes even though it’s all delivered as though Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield are pumping in the background. (e.g.: While discussing Simple Jack, Ben Stiller’s character’s awful Forrest Gump ripoff, Osiris tells him, “Everybody knows you never go full retard.”) This film has more war-movie homages than you can point a Howitzer at, though my favorite happens when Ben Stiller is taken hostage by the heroin guerillas and then ends up being worshipped by them Col. Kurtz style when they discover he is Simple Jack, the lead in their favorite movie (on VHS, of course). Hell, one of Osiris’s best lines summarizes it all better than I can: “I know who I am – I’m the dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!”
Norma Rae (1979) One of the sweatiest movies ever, Norma Rae is all about the process of unionizing an Alabama textile mill, with Sally Field as the firebrand and cute-as-a-button title character. Field won an Oscar for this role, and it’s easy to see why: one of the climactic scenes in particular – where Norma stands on a mill cutting table and holds up a handwritten, cardboard sign saying “UNION” until all the workers turn off their machines – is gritty and breathtaking in a way that makes it hard to imagine anyone else even attempting the role. As good as Field is Ron Liebman, who plays union organizer and über-Yankee Reuben Warshowsky. Liebman is so good in this role that many of his scenes seem like documentary footage, so naturalistic is his execution. Having grown up in north Alabama, I can also tell you that the movie as a whole nails the 70s rural-poor vibe in a way that just doesn’t happen anymore, probably because most moviemakers are afraid to put truly ugly people onscreen (Penelope Cruz’s nose notwithstanding). And Norma Rae contains one of the best sequences of dialogue you’ll ever hear: When Norma is trying to convince her anti-union preacher to let her use his church for a rally, he refuses and ends up scolding her patronizingly by saying, “We’re gonna miss your voice in the choir, Norma.” Her response? “You just gonna hear it raised up someplace else.” I said goddamn, goddamn…
No Country for Old Men (2007) This is lit-major heresy, I know, but as fantastic as Cormac McCarthy’s book is, the movie version of No Country for Old Men is even better. I think one of the main reasons for this is silence: the filmed version allows the story’s desolate pauses to happen, whereas in book form you’d have, what, blank pages? Not sure that would capture the necessary bleakness. Even when McCarthy isn’t giving us dialogue, the book has lots of description, which is a kind of talking; in the film, you just see. You see scrub-brush plains that look too expansive and forbidding to be real. You see bloated dog corpses and burning automobiles and impressive-looking cowboy hats. You see a man looking at $2 million worth of abandoned-in-a-shootout drug money in a fancy satchel under a tree in the middle of nowhere and trying to mentally (read: silently) talk himself out of what he knows is going to happen if he takes this money with him. You see a dewy milk bottle and lots of cheap wood paneling. You see holes in door locks and holes in foreheads made by a captive bolt pistol, the main weapon of hitman Anton Chigurh, played to utter perfection by Javier Bardem. You see dreadfully injured people somehow nursing and dressing their own wounds because going to a hospital = getting caught. And etc. I’m tempted to put the same superlatives on Bardem as I do on Downey, Jr. above, and it’s close to correct that Bardem is the main reason to see this film, but, really, the whole thing is badass. Other fun bits: Stephen Root’s phrase “that colossal goatfuck out in the desert”; Tommy Lee Jones's hilarious understatement "Yeah, appears to have been a glitch or two" as he surveys a staggering amount of blood, bodies, and spent shell casings, the tableau of a botched drug deal; Josh Brolin being chased down a fast-moving river by a pit bull; Bardem’s grotesque strangling of a deputy with handcuffs; and our intense desire to scream at Josh Brolin, “NO, YOU STUPID HICK! DON’T TAKE AGUA TO THE HOMBRE! GET THE FUCK BACK IN BED!” Oh, but he does it anyway, which is what moves the plot forward, so maybe it had to be.
3.21.2009
reviews of a dozen films that don't exist
I’m not in the mood to write anything particularly constructive yet I'm still stubbornly whackin' this dead horse we got here, so this will be idiocy. I wanted to go see the Persians tonight (the Persians effin' RULE okay) but this congestion has me feeling two-thirds-of-the-way sick and all-the-way antisocial, so a crowd’s probably not a good environment for me at the moment. Plus I’m bleedin’ pretty good from running into something some idiot left in the doorway of a dark room, and nobody really wants bleeding people hanging around… it‘s unseemly. I know I’m gonna miss out on a good show, though. But, hey, the world will get *this* as a result. Hoofuckingray and god damn us, every one.
So, just out of my nasty contemptuous mood, here’s a throwaway blog post filled with movie reviews… of movies that don’t actually exist! That’s right, don’t search for these in your Netflix, ‘cuz I made ‘em all up. Pulled ’em right out me arse, boy-o! I can do that! And they may amuse no one but me, but, that’s how life goes, iddnit? Punk rock. So onward with the useless falsehoods and untruths. Oi, oi, oi!
1. SHIT TWICE AND DIE (C, 1978). A script passed over by Charles Bronson, who at the time was worried about being typecast as a “Death Wish” style vigilante, this was instead turned into a vehicle for Buck Owens, who was trying to turn his Hee Haw stardom into a film career. After his brothers (one played by Roy Clark as a favor from Buck) are killed by a gang of biker dwarfs, Buck becomes a vengeance-crazed killer with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun which he’s converted (using prowess earned as a weapons expert in Vietnam) into a belt-fed fully-automatic weapon. One of the film’s shortcomings is that Buck loses this weapon over a waterfall before it can even be fired; despite this disappointing fact, the film’s trailer is very preoccupied with the building of this gun. The climax, with Buck laughing triumphantly over the bodies of several dead biker dwarfs, is unintentionally hilarious and may be why the film was pulled from theaters too early. The band that did the soundtrack, a hard-rock outfit known as In God We Thrust, later re-formed as the emasculated Air Supply.
2. SHRINKY DINKS - THE MOVIE. (C, 1982) Cheap film made to cash in on the minor craft phenomenon, starred a cast of unknowns, the only one of whom had any kind of career was Dana Plato. Craft-making kids used “the power of imagination” to reduce themselves in size and foil a gang of dognappers. The film’s lack of success almost broke the company that made Shrinky Dinks, and is one of the most legendary failures of a company trying to cross over into movies and almost destroying themselves by trying to cross over into film production. Which brings us to our next film…
3. BOBBY BB-GUN (C, 1976) A wretched film made by the Daisy BB Gun company about a boy and his BB gun. All the other kids view him as some kind of hero because he has a BB gun, which he uses to foil a gang of (you guessed it) dognappers. Dognappers were a popular foe in 70’s kiddie films that weren’t successful. Because the Daisy company wanted to avoid lawsuits, they emphasized that BB guns should never be pointed at a person, so “BoBBy BB-Gun” always shot at conveniently-placed cans of paint, axel grease, or “BuBBle Gum Gas” (?!) to thwart the dognappers. Obnoxious, annoying, buck (and chipped)-toothed-and-freckle-faced “star” Chet Furd takes an almost insufferable joy in his own performance, shouting all his lines inarticulately. He was never to appear on screen again except for an episode of the short-lived Bert Convy cop drama, Toole. Daisy’s tried so hard to bury this embarrassment you can’t even find clips on YouTube.
4. PISSANT BROWN (C, 1977) An attempt to turn then-hot Jimmy “J.J.” Walker into a tough action star, this is left off of even the most extensive blaxploitation film lists, and Jimmy Walker denies its existence to this very day, even though Morgan Freeman, Antonio Fargas, and Yaphet Koto all have bit parts. Jimmy plays the brother of a pimp who, for some reason not made clear in the plot (which was rumored to be written by William Golding under another name!) tries to stop Italian mobsters from building a casino on the corner where his brother’s whores work. Despite a few rousing scenes (Walker using a backhoe to push a mob boss’s Lincoln Continental into a fountain, Walker escaping from a group of hit men by driving a golf cart through a fruit market), this film’s most indelible image remains Walker using a wrist-rocket slingshot to shoot a pocketknife at the machine-gun-toting mob boss (Norman Fell) to kill him. Oh, damn, now I’ve gone and spoiled it.
5. OH, HELL, IT’S THAT FISHMAN! (C, 1980) Superhero vehicle starring Christopher George as an oceanographer who gets an emergency blood transfusion from a trout and ends up gaining fish powers. The problem is that almost as soon as George gets his powers, he’s whisked off to Wyoming, with no water anywhere for miles! He tries to stop some timber pirates, but with no water around he’s just a guy in an awkward costume. John and Keith Carradine are both in it, and Rick Wakeman did the soundtrack but had his name pulled. It was rumored that the script was originally for an Aquaman movie, but DC Comics decided not to go through with it, so the producers made up a similar character and put him in Wyoming to show how lame Aquaman’s powers actually are. Christopher George once referred to this film as the most embarrassing thing he was ever involved with, and said it haunted his career “like an angry terrier pulling at my socks.” Despite the fact that it’s not a well-regarded film, M. Night Shylaman has expressed great interest in directing a remake. Idiot.
6. TRIUMPHS OF THE GOLDEN WEASEL (C, 1992) Comedic rip-off of the Indiana Jones series, starring Ed Asner doing a Pauly Shore imitation throughout. Pauly even produced the film, thinking that audience would crack up seeing a guy like Asner doing his “weasel” shtick, but by that time people were getting pretty sick of seeing Pauly do that act, much less Asner. Film is too by-the-numbers to be of much interest, and is funny only to those whose idea of high comedy is watching somebody fall off a ladder. A controversy sprang up involving the TV spot, because it included Asner’s line “Look out for my balls, there, buddy!” and a swimming pool fart joke.
7. BASTILLE DAY (C, 1984) Slasher films were running out of holidays to exploit, and their audiences weren’t quite sophisticated enough to understand the references in this one, but it does boast some good decapitations courtesy of FX artist Ed French (fucking clever, that. French, get it?). A maniac disguised as Robespierre terrorizes an annual French festival in Nebraska, dispatching most of his victims with a portable guillotine that looks something like a cigar trimmer. Fairly ordinary until the end, where the killer’s mask comes off and he’s revealed to be… Jon Voight! Voight was just beginning his pathetic descent into mental illness around this time.
8. GALLOPING TOWARDS SODOM (C, 1983) Weird attempt at an “art Western” from Oliver Stone (who disowned the film, which is why the film is credited to “Otis Placestinks” instead). Rod Steiger (who’s overacting even for Rod Steiger) plays a drifter who - in a twist on the traditional plot - sides with a cattle rancher against oppressive prairie farmers. In one memorable scene, he guns down a schoolmarm who he thinks is a “communist.” Then, somewhere around the middle of the movie, Steiger eats some peyote and rides into modern Manhattan, and the movie turns into a courtroom drama, where corporate logos such as Zip The Postman, Speedy the Alka-Seltzer kid, and the Frito Bandito are on trial! And all the judges and lawyers are young children! Steiger does the best he can, but when he’s given lines like “You think you’re a smarty-pants but really you’re a stupid-pants!” and “May you find midgets in your marriage bed!” there’s only so much that even he can do.
9. DEUTERONOMY: THE MUSICAL (C, 1995) Too-ambitious project funded by churches to do the story of Moses’ sermons in an all-singing, all-dancing format. They just didn’t have the money or talent to pull this off, and some musical numbers, such as the one about the edict against blemished animals being used in sacrifices, are downright embarrassing. The soundtrack, on the Amalekite label, can sometimes still be found at yard sales of houses where insane people live.
10. BUNNY HIDORA AGAINST SUPERCOPS! (C, 1993) Anime entry into the unpopular Bunny Hidora series, which also includes such films as Bunny Hidora Against Clown From Space!, Bunny Hidora Fighting Asparagus Master!, Bunny Hidora Make Big Score!, Bunny Hidora Against Funny Poot!, Bunny Hidora Vs. Frankenfascist!, Bunny Hidora Defeating Evil Judge! Bunny Hidora Take No Crap From Bitches! and Bunny Hidora Against Ass Society! Like most anime, it makes no sense but has lots of action, with a rabbit who has poorly-defined superpowers battling all kinds of enemies who I suppose are supposed to be bad guys. To keep translating costs down, most of the dialogue is limited to “HA!” and “POW-ZINGA!” This film causes seizures, and there’s not enough vodka in the world to make an adult sit through more than fifteen minutes of it. You can't even heroin this thing pretty.
11. HARD-ONS NEVER LIE (C, 1979) It’s been suppressed, but Mickey Spillane once wrote a porno film. Jamie Gillis plays Mike Hammer, who’s trying to find out who gave him the clap. Gillis actually makes a pretty good Hammer, and Seka isn’t bad as Velda, but the script was a phoned-in deal, with obvious “gun/penis” jokes being used far after they became tiresome. The “or are you just happy to see me” thing is used FOUR DAMN TIMES!
12. DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN (C, 1979) Tasteless film made as a vehicle for the band Cheap Trick. Originally they wanted more of a “Wizard of Oz” type story (with Ozzy Osbourne guest starring as the Great Oz, and Alice Cooper playing the Wicked Witch of the West) but they couldn’t get the rights and had to rush into production using a script that had originally been written for Jerry Lewis, who was still gun-shy after that Day The Clown Cried fiasco. The film was, in fact, left unfinished, and later the missing scenes were acted out by hand puppets. Variety’s review read “Cheap Trick - Dead In Budo-Cannes!”
Remember, all of the preceding is bullshit, so don’t sue me, Chet Furd.
So, just out of my nasty contemptuous mood, here’s a throwaway blog post filled with movie reviews… of movies that don’t actually exist! That’s right, don’t search for these in your Netflix, ‘cuz I made ‘em all up. Pulled ’em right out me arse, boy-o! I can do that! And they may amuse no one but me, but, that’s how life goes, iddnit? Punk rock. So onward with the useless falsehoods and untruths. Oi, oi, oi!
1. SHIT TWICE AND DIE (C, 1978). A script passed over by Charles Bronson, who at the time was worried about being typecast as a “Death Wish” style vigilante, this was instead turned into a vehicle for Buck Owens, who was trying to turn his Hee Haw stardom into a film career. After his brothers (one played by Roy Clark as a favor from Buck) are killed by a gang of biker dwarfs, Buck becomes a vengeance-crazed killer with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun which he’s converted (using prowess earned as a weapons expert in Vietnam) into a belt-fed fully-automatic weapon. One of the film’s shortcomings is that Buck loses this weapon over a waterfall before it can even be fired; despite this disappointing fact, the film’s trailer is very preoccupied with the building of this gun. The climax, with Buck laughing triumphantly over the bodies of several dead biker dwarfs, is unintentionally hilarious and may be why the film was pulled from theaters too early. The band that did the soundtrack, a hard-rock outfit known as In God We Thrust, later re-formed as the emasculated Air Supply.
2. SHRINKY DINKS - THE MOVIE. (C, 1982) Cheap film made to cash in on the minor craft phenomenon, starred a cast of unknowns, the only one of whom had any kind of career was Dana Plato. Craft-making kids used “the power of imagination” to reduce themselves in size and foil a gang of dognappers. The film’s lack of success almost broke the company that made Shrinky Dinks, and is one of the most legendary failures of a company trying to cross over into movies and almost destroying themselves by trying to cross over into film production. Which brings us to our next film…
3. BOBBY BB-GUN (C, 1976) A wretched film made by the Daisy BB Gun company about a boy and his BB gun. All the other kids view him as some kind of hero because he has a BB gun, which he uses to foil a gang of (you guessed it) dognappers. Dognappers were a popular foe in 70’s kiddie films that weren’t successful. Because the Daisy company wanted to avoid lawsuits, they emphasized that BB guns should never be pointed at a person, so “BoBBy BB-Gun” always shot at conveniently-placed cans of paint, axel grease, or “BuBBle Gum Gas” (?!) to thwart the dognappers. Obnoxious, annoying, buck (and chipped)-toothed-and-freckle-faced “star” Chet Furd takes an almost insufferable joy in his own performance, shouting all his lines inarticulately. He was never to appear on screen again except for an episode of the short-lived Bert Convy cop drama, Toole. Daisy’s tried so hard to bury this embarrassment you can’t even find clips on YouTube.
4. PISSANT BROWN (C, 1977) An attempt to turn then-hot Jimmy “J.J.” Walker into a tough action star, this is left off of even the most extensive blaxploitation film lists, and Jimmy Walker denies its existence to this very day, even though Morgan Freeman, Antonio Fargas, and Yaphet Koto all have bit parts. Jimmy plays the brother of a pimp who, for some reason not made clear in the plot (which was rumored to be written by William Golding under another name!) tries to stop Italian mobsters from building a casino on the corner where his brother’s whores work. Despite a few rousing scenes (Walker using a backhoe to push a mob boss’s Lincoln Continental into a fountain, Walker escaping from a group of hit men by driving a golf cart through a fruit market), this film’s most indelible image remains Walker using a wrist-rocket slingshot to shoot a pocketknife at the machine-gun-toting mob boss (Norman Fell) to kill him. Oh, damn, now I’ve gone and spoiled it.
5. OH, HELL, IT’S THAT FISHMAN! (C, 1980) Superhero vehicle starring Christopher George as an oceanographer who gets an emergency blood transfusion from a trout and ends up gaining fish powers. The problem is that almost as soon as George gets his powers, he’s whisked off to Wyoming, with no water anywhere for miles! He tries to stop some timber pirates, but with no water around he’s just a guy in an awkward costume. John and Keith Carradine are both in it, and Rick Wakeman did the soundtrack but had his name pulled. It was rumored that the script was originally for an Aquaman movie, but DC Comics decided not to go through with it, so the producers made up a similar character and put him in Wyoming to show how lame Aquaman’s powers actually are. Christopher George once referred to this film as the most embarrassing thing he was ever involved with, and said it haunted his career “like an angry terrier pulling at my socks.” Despite the fact that it’s not a well-regarded film, M. Night Shylaman has expressed great interest in directing a remake. Idiot.
6. TRIUMPHS OF THE GOLDEN WEASEL (C, 1992) Comedic rip-off of the Indiana Jones series, starring Ed Asner doing a Pauly Shore imitation throughout. Pauly even produced the film, thinking that audience would crack up seeing a guy like Asner doing his “weasel” shtick, but by that time people were getting pretty sick of seeing Pauly do that act, much less Asner. Film is too by-the-numbers to be of much interest, and is funny only to those whose idea of high comedy is watching somebody fall off a ladder. A controversy sprang up involving the TV spot, because it included Asner’s line “Look out for my balls, there, buddy!” and a swimming pool fart joke.
7. BASTILLE DAY (C, 1984) Slasher films were running out of holidays to exploit, and their audiences weren’t quite sophisticated enough to understand the references in this one, but it does boast some good decapitations courtesy of FX artist Ed French (fucking clever, that. French, get it?). A maniac disguised as Robespierre terrorizes an annual French festival in Nebraska, dispatching most of his victims with a portable guillotine that looks something like a cigar trimmer. Fairly ordinary until the end, where the killer’s mask comes off and he’s revealed to be… Jon Voight! Voight was just beginning his pathetic descent into mental illness around this time.
8. GALLOPING TOWARDS SODOM (C, 1983) Weird attempt at an “art Western” from Oliver Stone (who disowned the film, which is why the film is credited to “Otis Placestinks” instead). Rod Steiger (who’s overacting even for Rod Steiger) plays a drifter who - in a twist on the traditional plot - sides with a cattle rancher against oppressive prairie farmers. In one memorable scene, he guns down a schoolmarm who he thinks is a “communist.” Then, somewhere around the middle of the movie, Steiger eats some peyote and rides into modern Manhattan, and the movie turns into a courtroom drama, where corporate logos such as Zip The Postman, Speedy the Alka-Seltzer kid, and the Frito Bandito are on trial! And all the judges and lawyers are young children! Steiger does the best he can, but when he’s given lines like “You think you’re a smarty-pants but really you’re a stupid-pants!” and “May you find midgets in your marriage bed!” there’s only so much that even he can do.
9. DEUTERONOMY: THE MUSICAL (C, 1995) Too-ambitious project funded by churches to do the story of Moses’ sermons in an all-singing, all-dancing format. They just didn’t have the money or talent to pull this off, and some musical numbers, such as the one about the edict against blemished animals being used in sacrifices, are downright embarrassing. The soundtrack, on the Amalekite label, can sometimes still be found at yard sales of houses where insane people live.
10. BUNNY HIDORA AGAINST SUPERCOPS! (C, 1993) Anime entry into the unpopular Bunny Hidora series, which also includes such films as Bunny Hidora Against Clown From Space!, Bunny Hidora Fighting Asparagus Master!, Bunny Hidora Make Big Score!, Bunny Hidora Against Funny Poot!, Bunny Hidora Vs. Frankenfascist!, Bunny Hidora Defeating Evil Judge! Bunny Hidora Take No Crap From Bitches! and Bunny Hidora Against Ass Society! Like most anime, it makes no sense but has lots of action, with a rabbit who has poorly-defined superpowers battling all kinds of enemies who I suppose are supposed to be bad guys. To keep translating costs down, most of the dialogue is limited to “HA!” and “POW-ZINGA!” This film causes seizures, and there’s not enough vodka in the world to make an adult sit through more than fifteen minutes of it. You can't even heroin this thing pretty.
11. HARD-ONS NEVER LIE (C, 1979) It’s been suppressed, but Mickey Spillane once wrote a porno film. Jamie Gillis plays Mike Hammer, who’s trying to find out who gave him the clap. Gillis actually makes a pretty good Hammer, and Seka isn’t bad as Velda, but the script was a phoned-in deal, with obvious “gun/penis” jokes being used far after they became tiresome. The “or are you just happy to see me” thing is used FOUR DAMN TIMES!
12. DIARY OF ANNE FRANKENSTEIN (C, 1979) Tasteless film made as a vehicle for the band Cheap Trick. Originally they wanted more of a “Wizard of Oz” type story (with Ozzy Osbourne guest starring as the Great Oz, and Alice Cooper playing the Wicked Witch of the West) but they couldn’t get the rights and had to rush into production using a script that had originally been written for Jerry Lewis, who was still gun-shy after that Day The Clown Cried fiasco. The film was, in fact, left unfinished, and later the missing scenes were acted out by hand puppets. Variety’s review read “Cheap Trick - Dead In Budo-Cannes!”
Remember, all of the preceding is bullshit, so don’t sue me, Chet Furd.
3.15.2009
movie reviews - the all-shit edition!
Another lazy blog post, just mining reviews out of one of the giant notebooks. This time I focused entirely on terrible movies.
An American Haunting (C, 2005) Pathetic horror film based on the supposed-true story of the Bell Witch, a supernatural even that took place in 1800’s Tennessee. After taking financial advantage of a local woman who’s supposed to be a witch, John Bell and his daughter are tormented by an unseen, malevolent spirit… and that’s pretty much it. The book (which was a bogus “found manuscript” deal, but interesting at least) had a lot more to it, such as the spirit talking, taking hundreds of visitors, etc. This dispenses with all that and becomes one tiresome, plotless, cliché-filled poltergeist attack that has the cheap over-glossed, overproduced look of something filmed for the Hallmark Channel. There is not even one remotely original aspect about this film. It’s all a lot of noise and screaming that tries to substitute for suspense or scares, and it uses CGI as a crutch, re-creating stuff seen in other movies (glimpsed shapes, a Holly-Hobbie monster-dealie who looks like a Grudge leftover). There’s also the usual prowling subjective camera, glowing blue nighttime scenes, overuse of lightning flashes, bad editing to make things jump out and then disappear, the film fading to black and white or blue or negative to the point of distraction. This movie flashes and bounces around so much it looks like it was filmed inside a pinball machine. I was excited about seeing this one but it ended up being such a conglomerate of done-to-death crap that I actually felt insulted by it. Doubly irritating is the fact that the DVD brags of being “unrated” but contains nothing that would get it past a PG rating. The fact that the director spent all his commentary time on the DVD discussing the marketing of the film and bitching prissily and bitterly about critics is pretty telling; I don’t think this guy had anything on his mind but creating a marketable product, and fuck-you to the movie fans who wanted anything that hadn’t been done before. The movie does have a decent cast -- Sissy Spacek (ironically now playing the mother to a Carrie-like girl) and Donald Sutherland (who deserves better material than having to deliver lines like “There’s something evil here!”) and James D’Arcy do their best to elevate this pablum, and young Rachel Hurd-Wood as Betsy Bell does an admirable job. Anyway, since I liked the book and was looking forward to seeing this, I was majorly disappointed to get this TV-movie-looking bundle of worn-out clichés, and I felt like the filmmakers had real contempt for the viewer, hyping this piece of shit. If you haven’t seen as many horror movies or have any expectations of it you may be more tolerant of it than I was, but basically this was a compilation of everything I’m sick of seeing in modern horror films. In fact, if you make horror movies, you should watch this to learn what you shouldn’t do. The director’s prissy bitch-out of movie critics (which he offers in lieu of a commentary track) almost makes you feel sorry for him, because he’s revealing a lot more about himself than he intended. I wouldn’t hire this guy to direct a YouTube vid.
Bad Girls Do Cry (B&W, 1965) …and so will you, with tears of boredom if you struggle to watch this man-they-were-easily-titillated-back-then fest, which was filmed in 1954 but not released until about 10 years later. A not-terribly-bright girl named Sally Downs (like the syndrome), played by stripper Misty Ayers, goes to a new town and wanders from place to place, dressing, undressing, and posing a lot between the processes of dressing and undressing. First she undresses and takes a relentlessly uneventful bath, then gets a job, is hired for a modeling gig by a guy whose whole job interview consists of getting her to hike up her skirt (“it’s okay, that’s how they can tell”), and while changing clothes (again) she’s attacked by a mob-looking guy who drugs her and forces her to work for an escort service (that apparently caters to men who are into retarded chicks). There’s a catfight, followed by a date with Tommy Cole, a guy who’s been teased for not going to whorehouses. After an interminable amount of time spent fiddling with his tie while she brushes her hair, nothing happens. There’s some comedy involving a drunk madam that’s of the type I thought went out when they quit making Pathe shorts. Back to Tommy and Sally, who kiss. Tommy seems to have Taxi Driver syndrome and wants to rescue Sally, but the mob isn’t going to give her up that easily. Meanwhile, other whores try to have dates, which consist of a guy sitting there while the girl dances the hucharacha (I don’t know if that’s a real name for a real dance but that’s what it looks like it ought to be called). Tommy tries to drive a car (let out the clutch, igmo!) and fights with a hood who shoots at him. Luckily, Tommy hides behind a telephone pole, which totally thwarts the guy… until he tricks Tommy into coming out. This movie desperately tries to fill 59 minutes of running time with about 8 minutes of story, which means everything is drawn out forever, from lighting a cigarette to opening the mail. It was shot silent, and they spared themselves having to synch lip movements by always keeping the camera on the listener during conversations. Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent of their cleverness. There are no dream sequences, but that harp riff that usually signals you’re going into one is heard a lot. This is the kind of junk you imagine Eddie Haskel on Leave It To Beaver sneaking out to see. Wait for a remake instead.
New Barbarians (C, 1982) aka Nuovi Barbari, Metropolis 2000, Warriors of the Wasteland. In the stupid future, everyone will dress in goofy outlandish white clothes, drive crappy modified weapon-equipped Death Race 2000 cars that sound like vacuum cleaners, and shoot each other with wimpy-looking guns that make sparks and tapping-the-guy wire-with-a-hammer noises. George Eastman is “one,” the leader of a violent scavenger gang. Along comes this road warrior dude (who really should be doing comedy ‘cuz he looks like what Eugene Levy might look like if he plucked his eyebrows) who drives a car with a big bubble on top and air conditioner hoses all over it. His mechanic is that weird blonde kid who was in House By The Cemetery and every other Italian movie that was made in the early 80’s. The road warrior guy’s name is Scorpion, and he’s the mortal enemy of One and his Templars. Fred Williamson wears a headband and gold disco armor; he looks like he raided the dressing room of some incarnation of The Gap Band or Funkadelic. He shoots explosive arrows and helps the Scorpion protect a bunch of religious idiots from the Templars, who want to wipe out religion since it caused the nuclear war in the first place. The Templars capture Scorpion and almost butt-rape him in their weird plexiglass/colored-lights compound, but then they get distracted. Some other guys drag Scorpion around until Fred blows them up with arrows, which at least provides this lame fest with a little unimpressive gore. If you have a fetish for shoulder pads then this is your movie. Director Enzo G. Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors was a trash classic, but this one is just terrible. Fred “The Ham” Williamson’s acting couldn’t be worse (you can see him concentrating on enunciating words, and he takes that Shatner thing past the red line). I’m a fan of his, but jeez. The costumes are so impractical you can’t believe anyone would wear them (at one point you see a space suit with clear plexiglass breasts) and contain so much plastic sheeting I bet the actors all got rashes. All of the stunts look like nothing but choreographed stunts. The weapons and cars all look weak and silly (somebody must’ve cut them a helluva deal on clear plastic domes ‘cuz they’re on everything). Our hero mostly drives around cutting doughnuts for no reason, and the final shot looks like some bizarre commercial for NAMBLA. Most of the budget must have gone for aluminum foil and silver spray paint, and it seems to have been filmed in a junkyard for industrial air conditioning parts. Most apocalypse Italian sci-fi is bad, but this abuses the priviledge. You can get a nice DVD of this or be smart, save money, and find it in a cheap multi-pack instead -- it’s on several. Get some smartass friends to watch it with you. You’ll need ‘em.
Phantom Killer, The (B&W, 1943) Dumb waste-of-time B-movie remake of The Sphinx, in which a young D. A. doggedly pursues a deaf-mute philanthropist who he’s certain murdered a guy, even though witnesses swear he was somewhere else at the time. Mantan Moreland (who’s not in the movie long enough to rescue it) even swears the supposed deaf-mute talked to him. The D.A.’s pretty reporter girlfriend interviews the deaf-mute and believes he’s innocent, because she was interviewing him at the time another murder happened. And o’ course there’s no way he could be in two places at once, could he? If you can’t figure out the trick that’s going on in this one you may officially count yourself among the world’s truly stupid people. I thought it was something else because I thought they surely couldn’t be so obvious, but, nope, they had no shame. Often sold as a horror movie but it couldn’t be further from that. Directed by William “One Shot” Beaudine.
Poor Pretty Eddie (C, 1975) aka Black Vengeance, Heartbreak Motel, Redneck County Rape. The lady with the baby-talk surname, Leslie Uggams, has car trouble while on vacation and ends up at a backwoods motel full of weirdoes. Eddie is a narcissistic idiot who wants to be another Elvis. Shelly Winters drinks a lot and tries to seduce Eddie even though he doesn’t give her much encouragement. Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family) looms around and is quietly menacing, and the unbeatable hick pairing of Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor show up just to wallop you over the head with local color. Although Eddie spends much of his time running around in a sequined jumpsuit and finding himself irresistible, he finds time to rape Leslie (a scene tastelessly intercut with scenes of dog breeding). She reacts to this as if it were just really rude behavior rather than something traumatic, but still plans to get out of there as soon as possible and fantasizes about killing Eddie. Instead, another redneck tries to have his way with her, Eddie catches them, and he beats her up and rapes her again. The local sheriff (Pickens) is just titillated by the whole thing when she tries to press charges. Eddie’s solution for making things right is to insist on marrying her. Leslie’s less than thrilled. Weird hick-town melodrama usually gets marketed as a horror movie even though it’s not really. The ‘70’s filmmaking adds a little ambiance, but it’s still junk that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and I’m not a big fan of rape scenes, even when they’re badly filmed.
Twister’s Revenge (C, 1987) I thought it’d be impossible to make a monster-truck movie that could insult the intelligence of its intended audience, but fuck me if I don’t think Bill Rebane’s done gone ‘n’ done it! This video diaper-stuffing is so moronic it could get Dukes of Hazard fans to say “This movie’s kinda stupid.” This is the film that answers the question that absolutely nobody wanted answered: “What if that car from Knight Rider was a monster truck?” For some reason a guy and his tech-whiz fiance decide to put a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of artificial intelligence equipment into their monster truck, Mr. Twister. Three total dumbass auto mechanics decide they should steal it, and lowbrow idiotic mayhem ensues, with things blowing up, people running around in sped-up-like-a-silent-movie footage, and general behavior that makes you embarrassed to be part of the same species that created this. The human driver and the truck argue and exchange lame quips as they try to find the fiance, who’s been kidnapped. Meanwhile the would-be truck thieves are blowing up their own cars with rocket launchers and falling into outhouse pits. Everybody shoots guns a lot without hitting anything. People in cars or houses flattened by the truck emerge dirty but uninjured, kinda like Wile E. Coyote after a bomb goes off. Eventually a tank is brought in to go after the truck, but even that isn’t very interesting. Top it all off with the same 80’s music score that backed every generic direct-to-video movie back then and you’re left with a feculent mess that should only be viewed in the company of smartass-remark-making friends. Maybe the worst film of one of the all-time worst directors. At least you can get it really cheap as part of the 50-movie Drive-In Classics box set (it’s not listed on the back but was a last-minute swap for Fiend).
UFO Target Earth (C, 1974) aka Target Earth. Dry sci-fi has a researcher teaming up with a psychic to investigate UFO sightings in the backwoods. They determine that a flying saucer that lost power during a solar eclipse years earlier is still lying at the bottom of a lake. They philosophize about it, set up equipment that draws graphs we’re supposed to be impressed with because we have no clue what they’re supposed to mean, and then everyone gets fascinated by images on TV (they’re supposed to be pure-energy aliens but they look like what happens when you aim a video camera at its own monitor) which makes everyone babble a lot of hippie-sounding nonsense (“Fears create forms! Your fears create the forms you see! Cast them aside!” “It is you we seek. We are beyond the jaws of darkness, where the light springs from the consciousness of your mind and bends upon itself to become the truth.”) Astoundingly boring no-budget junk that seems to have been plotted by some people who were tripping on ‘shrooms and thought they were making something profound. The dialogue is forced and artificial pretension by some Brainy Smurf who probably wanted to be writing mission statements instead. Maybe if you were completely baked you’d get something out of this waste of time but since I don’t do that shit I can’t swear to it. Available on the Nightmare Worlds 50 movie DVD set, or you could just eat some bad clams.
An American Haunting (C, 2005) Pathetic horror film based on the supposed-true story of the Bell Witch, a supernatural even that took place in 1800’s Tennessee. After taking financial advantage of a local woman who’s supposed to be a witch, John Bell and his daughter are tormented by an unseen, malevolent spirit… and that’s pretty much it. The book (which was a bogus “found manuscript” deal, but interesting at least) had a lot more to it, such as the spirit talking, taking hundreds of visitors, etc. This dispenses with all that and becomes one tiresome, plotless, cliché-filled poltergeist attack that has the cheap over-glossed, overproduced look of something filmed for the Hallmark Channel. There is not even one remotely original aspect about this film. It’s all a lot of noise and screaming that tries to substitute for suspense or scares, and it uses CGI as a crutch, re-creating stuff seen in other movies (glimpsed shapes, a Holly-Hobbie monster-dealie who looks like a Grudge leftover). There’s also the usual prowling subjective camera, glowing blue nighttime scenes, overuse of lightning flashes, bad editing to make things jump out and then disappear, the film fading to black and white or blue or negative to the point of distraction. This movie flashes and bounces around so much it looks like it was filmed inside a pinball machine. I was excited about seeing this one but it ended up being such a conglomerate of done-to-death crap that I actually felt insulted by it. Doubly irritating is the fact that the DVD brags of being “unrated” but contains nothing that would get it past a PG rating. The fact that the director spent all his commentary time on the DVD discussing the marketing of the film and bitching prissily and bitterly about critics is pretty telling; I don’t think this guy had anything on his mind but creating a marketable product, and fuck-you to the movie fans who wanted anything that hadn’t been done before. The movie does have a decent cast -- Sissy Spacek (ironically now playing the mother to a Carrie-like girl) and Donald Sutherland (who deserves better material than having to deliver lines like “There’s something evil here!”) and James D’Arcy do their best to elevate this pablum, and young Rachel Hurd-Wood as Betsy Bell does an admirable job. Anyway, since I liked the book and was looking forward to seeing this, I was majorly disappointed to get this TV-movie-looking bundle of worn-out clichés, and I felt like the filmmakers had real contempt for the viewer, hyping this piece of shit. If you haven’t seen as many horror movies or have any expectations of it you may be more tolerant of it than I was, but basically this was a compilation of everything I’m sick of seeing in modern horror films. In fact, if you make horror movies, you should watch this to learn what you shouldn’t do. The director’s prissy bitch-out of movie critics (which he offers in lieu of a commentary track) almost makes you feel sorry for him, because he’s revealing a lot more about himself than he intended. I wouldn’t hire this guy to direct a YouTube vid.
Bad Girls Do Cry (B&W, 1965) …and so will you, with tears of boredom if you struggle to watch this man-they-were-easily-titillated-back-then fest, which was filmed in 1954 but not released until about 10 years later. A not-terribly-bright girl named Sally Downs (like the syndrome), played by stripper Misty Ayers, goes to a new town and wanders from place to place, dressing, undressing, and posing a lot between the processes of dressing and undressing. First she undresses and takes a relentlessly uneventful bath, then gets a job, is hired for a modeling gig by a guy whose whole job interview consists of getting her to hike up her skirt (“it’s okay, that’s how they can tell”), and while changing clothes (again) she’s attacked by a mob-looking guy who drugs her and forces her to work for an escort service (that apparently caters to men who are into retarded chicks). There’s a catfight, followed by a date with Tommy Cole, a guy who’s been teased for not going to whorehouses. After an interminable amount of time spent fiddling with his tie while she brushes her hair, nothing happens. There’s some comedy involving a drunk madam that’s of the type I thought went out when they quit making Pathe shorts. Back to Tommy and Sally, who kiss. Tommy seems to have Taxi Driver syndrome and wants to rescue Sally, but the mob isn’t going to give her up that easily. Meanwhile, other whores try to have dates, which consist of a guy sitting there while the girl dances the hucharacha (I don’t know if that’s a real name for a real dance but that’s what it looks like it ought to be called). Tommy tries to drive a car (let out the clutch, igmo!) and fights with a hood who shoots at him. Luckily, Tommy hides behind a telephone pole, which totally thwarts the guy… until he tricks Tommy into coming out. This movie desperately tries to fill 59 minutes of running time with about 8 minutes of story, which means everything is drawn out forever, from lighting a cigarette to opening the mail. It was shot silent, and they spared themselves having to synch lip movements by always keeping the camera on the listener during conversations. Unfortunately, that seems to be the extent of their cleverness. There are no dream sequences, but that harp riff that usually signals you’re going into one is heard a lot. This is the kind of junk you imagine Eddie Haskel on Leave It To Beaver sneaking out to see. Wait for a remake instead.
New Barbarians (C, 1982) aka Nuovi Barbari, Metropolis 2000, Warriors of the Wasteland. In the stupid future, everyone will dress in goofy outlandish white clothes, drive crappy modified weapon-equipped Death Race 2000 cars that sound like vacuum cleaners, and shoot each other with wimpy-looking guns that make sparks and tapping-the-guy wire-with-a-hammer noises. George Eastman is “one,” the leader of a violent scavenger gang. Along comes this road warrior dude (who really should be doing comedy ‘cuz he looks like what Eugene Levy might look like if he plucked his eyebrows) who drives a car with a big bubble on top and air conditioner hoses all over it. His mechanic is that weird blonde kid who was in House By The Cemetery and every other Italian movie that was made in the early 80’s. The road warrior guy’s name is Scorpion, and he’s the mortal enemy of One and his Templars. Fred Williamson wears a headband and gold disco armor; he looks like he raided the dressing room of some incarnation of The Gap Band or Funkadelic. He shoots explosive arrows and helps the Scorpion protect a bunch of religious idiots from the Templars, who want to wipe out religion since it caused the nuclear war in the first place. The Templars capture Scorpion and almost butt-rape him in their weird plexiglass/colored-lights compound, but then they get distracted. Some other guys drag Scorpion around until Fred blows them up with arrows, which at least provides this lame fest with a little unimpressive gore. If you have a fetish for shoulder pads then this is your movie. Director Enzo G. Castellari’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors was a trash classic, but this one is just terrible. Fred “The Ham” Williamson’s acting couldn’t be worse (you can see him concentrating on enunciating words, and he takes that Shatner thing past the red line). I’m a fan of his, but jeez. The costumes are so impractical you can’t believe anyone would wear them (at one point you see a space suit with clear plexiglass breasts) and contain so much plastic sheeting I bet the actors all got rashes. All of the stunts look like nothing but choreographed stunts. The weapons and cars all look weak and silly (somebody must’ve cut them a helluva deal on clear plastic domes ‘cuz they’re on everything). Our hero mostly drives around cutting doughnuts for no reason, and the final shot looks like some bizarre commercial for NAMBLA. Most of the budget must have gone for aluminum foil and silver spray paint, and it seems to have been filmed in a junkyard for industrial air conditioning parts. Most apocalypse Italian sci-fi is bad, but this abuses the priviledge. You can get a nice DVD of this or be smart, save money, and find it in a cheap multi-pack instead -- it’s on several. Get some smartass friends to watch it with you. You’ll need ‘em.
Phantom Killer, The (B&W, 1943) Dumb waste-of-time B-movie remake of The Sphinx, in which a young D. A. doggedly pursues a deaf-mute philanthropist who he’s certain murdered a guy, even though witnesses swear he was somewhere else at the time. Mantan Moreland (who’s not in the movie long enough to rescue it) even swears the supposed deaf-mute talked to him. The D.A.’s pretty reporter girlfriend interviews the deaf-mute and believes he’s innocent, because she was interviewing him at the time another murder happened. And o’ course there’s no way he could be in two places at once, could he? If you can’t figure out the trick that’s going on in this one you may officially count yourself among the world’s truly stupid people. I thought it was something else because I thought they surely couldn’t be so obvious, but, nope, they had no shame. Often sold as a horror movie but it couldn’t be further from that. Directed by William “One Shot” Beaudine.
Poor Pretty Eddie (C, 1975) aka Black Vengeance, Heartbreak Motel, Redneck County Rape. The lady with the baby-talk surname, Leslie Uggams, has car trouble while on vacation and ends up at a backwoods motel full of weirdoes. Eddie is a narcissistic idiot who wants to be another Elvis. Shelly Winters drinks a lot and tries to seduce Eddie even though he doesn’t give her much encouragement. Ted Cassidy (Lurch from The Addams Family) looms around and is quietly menacing, and the unbeatable hick pairing of Slim Pickens and Dub Taylor show up just to wallop you over the head with local color. Although Eddie spends much of his time running around in a sequined jumpsuit and finding himself irresistible, he finds time to rape Leslie (a scene tastelessly intercut with scenes of dog breeding). She reacts to this as if it were just really rude behavior rather than something traumatic, but still plans to get out of there as soon as possible and fantasizes about killing Eddie. Instead, another redneck tries to have his way with her, Eddie catches them, and he beats her up and rapes her again. The local sheriff (Pickens) is just titillated by the whole thing when she tries to press charges. Eddie’s solution for making things right is to insist on marrying her. Leslie’s less than thrilled. Weird hick-town melodrama usually gets marketed as a horror movie even though it’s not really. The ‘70’s filmmaking adds a little ambiance, but it’s still junk that doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and I’m not a big fan of rape scenes, even when they’re badly filmed.
Twister’s Revenge (C, 1987) I thought it’d be impossible to make a monster-truck movie that could insult the intelligence of its intended audience, but fuck me if I don’t think Bill Rebane’s done gone ‘n’ done it! This video diaper-stuffing is so moronic it could get Dukes of Hazard fans to say “This movie’s kinda stupid.” This is the film that answers the question that absolutely nobody wanted answered: “What if that car from Knight Rider was a monster truck?” For some reason a guy and his tech-whiz fiance decide to put a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of artificial intelligence equipment into their monster truck, Mr. Twister. Three total dumbass auto mechanics decide they should steal it, and lowbrow idiotic mayhem ensues, with things blowing up, people running around in sped-up-like-a-silent-movie footage, and general behavior that makes you embarrassed to be part of the same species that created this. The human driver and the truck argue and exchange lame quips as they try to find the fiance, who’s been kidnapped. Meanwhile the would-be truck thieves are blowing up their own cars with rocket launchers and falling into outhouse pits. Everybody shoots guns a lot without hitting anything. People in cars or houses flattened by the truck emerge dirty but uninjured, kinda like Wile E. Coyote after a bomb goes off. Eventually a tank is brought in to go after the truck, but even that isn’t very interesting. Top it all off with the same 80’s music score that backed every generic direct-to-video movie back then and you’re left with a feculent mess that should only be viewed in the company of smartass-remark-making friends. Maybe the worst film of one of the all-time worst directors. At least you can get it really cheap as part of the 50-movie Drive-In Classics box set (it’s not listed on the back but was a last-minute swap for Fiend).
UFO Target Earth (C, 1974) aka Target Earth. Dry sci-fi has a researcher teaming up with a psychic to investigate UFO sightings in the backwoods. They determine that a flying saucer that lost power during a solar eclipse years earlier is still lying at the bottom of a lake. They philosophize about it, set up equipment that draws graphs we’re supposed to be impressed with because we have no clue what they’re supposed to mean, and then everyone gets fascinated by images on TV (they’re supposed to be pure-energy aliens but they look like what happens when you aim a video camera at its own monitor) which makes everyone babble a lot of hippie-sounding nonsense (“Fears create forms! Your fears create the forms you see! Cast them aside!” “It is you we seek. We are beyond the jaws of darkness, where the light springs from the consciousness of your mind and bends upon itself to become the truth.”) Astoundingly boring no-budget junk that seems to have been plotted by some people who were tripping on ‘shrooms and thought they were making something profound. The dialogue is forced and artificial pretension by some Brainy Smurf who probably wanted to be writing mission statements instead. Maybe if you were completely baked you’d get something out of this waste of time but since I don’t do that shit I can’t swear to it. Available on the Nightmare Worlds 50 movie DVD set, or you could just eat some bad clams.
3.08.2009
pokey: feel the burn #1
So here is the start of a regular to semi-regular comic strip series. An introspective musing on the nature of free will in a deterministic universe, a modern Job with no job... Along with some speculative fiction that tries not to take itself too seriously...
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