Viggo Mortensen is a damn contortionist of the face. He stretches and twists that motherfucker from regular Viggo face into badass Russian gangster face. His eyebrows and the lines on his forehead turn into an arch. His mouth twists and curls into an arrogant smirk. The slash-like lines on his cheekbones suck extra deep into his skull. I could've sworn the motherfucker even created a dimple on his chin somehow, like through some weird breathing technique, but I checked photos and it turns out he already had that. But it fits his character well. That's just the chin dimple a Russian gangster like that would have.
After all those years of great supporting performances, and then hitting the lottery by being the king that returned in RETURN OF THE KING, now he is getting the roles he was born for. A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is my favorite of his movies so far, so I'm glad he's reteaming with Dave Cronenberg here. Hopefully they will continue to collaborate for at least one more movie, it could be known as "the Viggronenberg Gangster Trilogy."
I think this is a really good, smart and original movie. But I don't want to talk it up too much. Part of the appeal is the subtlety. It leaves alot of things unsaid, it's pretty short and it's small in scope. It deals with a family of Russian gangsters, but it doesn't feel like an empire - they live in London, after all, and all the activity is centralized at one restaurant.
In fact I'm a little surprised that the reactions aren't more divided. I heard nothing but good things from all the people I talked to who saw it before me, so I bet you'll like it too. But still, you can't go in expecting THE GODFATHER, which is what the critic's quotes in some of the ads ask you to do. I heard a radio ad with a quote that was something like "Francis Ford Coppola. Martin Scorsese. And now David Cronenberg can be added to the list of directors of the greatest gangster movies of all time." That's kind of a cheating quote because it might be literally true but you fucking know it sounds like you're saying this movie is as good as THE GODFATHER and GOODFELLAS. So you get to go into the hyperbole and then say you didn't mean it.
So I was hoping maybe to do a quote like "EASTERN PROMISES makes THE GODFATHER look like the fucking BOONDOCK SAINTS." Or maybe "EASTERN PROMISES makes GOODFELLAS look like CORKY ROMANO or JANE AUSTEN'S MAFIA." But one of my buddies told me I should just leave people scratching their heads with "EASTERN PROMISES makes THE GODFATHER look like GOODFELLAS." So that's my quote for the DVD cover, Focus Features. Please use a large font.
Anyway, the movie stars Naomi Watts as a London midwife whose father was Russian, who happens to be there when a young prostitute dies during childbirth. She finds the girl's diary, in Russian, and wants to get it translated so she can find out who the girl's family is before the baby goes to an orphanage. But of course there are secrets in that diary that Russian gangsters don't want her to know, and she gets into trouble.
I love Naomi Watts, she does a fine job and she looks cute in her motorcycle gear. But at least on my initial viewing I felt like this wasn't her movie, this was stolen by the men. You got Armin Mueller-Stahl as the owner of the Russian restaurant. Somehow he plays it entirely as a kindly old man on the surface while being completely menacing. There are perfectly uncomfortable scenes where he keeps trying to get her to give him the diary while trying to seem like he's not threatening her, and she either doesn't pick up on it or knows how to play it cool like she doesn't pick up on it.
Then there is his son Kirill played by Vincent Cassel. I think this is one of the best performances I've seen by that guy. He does an amazing combination of jolly, crazed, hurt, jealous, cruel, in love, and repressed. And his face is so weird looking. Great performance + weird looking face = classic.
But of course the guy everybody is gonna remember is Viggo as Nikolai. He's Kirill's driver/mortician, and at first it seems like the type of supporting role that Viggo did for so many years before LORD OF THE RINGS. But he becomes more central to the movie the more it goes along. You sort of think of him as the main character ultimately but alot of what's going on with his character is never spelled out. I have plenty of ideas about what he wants but it's sort of up to interpretation, or at least they purposely leave it unexplained.
There's one particularly memorable scene that would just about be a shoo-in for some kind of Outlaw Award if they happen to occur this year. I wouldn't want to give it away but it's been mentioned in every review I've seen in the movie so I already knew about it going in and you probaly do too. This is not an action movie, but it's kind of like Takeshi Kitano where it occasionally explodes into bursts of brutal violence. And there's one amazing fight scene in a bathhouse. Roger Ebert and others have declared it a landmark scene, and I was worried I would have to be the asshole pointing out that 50 Cent already did an amazingly realistic prison shower fight scene in his otherwise pretty crappy GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN movie. Fortunately the EASTERN PROMISES scene doesn't have the same feel at all. What it does have is the dude from LORD OF THE RINGS fighting two guys while butt ass naked. And there's not any Austin Powers type tricks here, he's got the balls swingin the whole time. I hate to say "no pun intended" but it took balls to do this scene. Holy shit.
I think Viggo has a real good shot at an Oscar nomination for this, I hope he gets it. There's all the surface reasons, the fact that he speaks Russian, does a Siberian accent and accurate broken English, the way he physically transforms himself with his expressions and the way he carries himself. Then there's the more interior reasons, the way he plays this scary guy but then shows his other side, the way he implies other secrets. It's a hell of a performance, with so many dimensions to it, but hopefully the Oscar clip will be him naked stabbing a dude in the eye.
It's a movie that's hard to peg. It's not weird like you expect from Cronenberg, but it's not a traditional thriller either. It has a plot twist that I suspected long ahead of time, but I wasn't sure if I was ahead of the movie or right where it wanted me to be. Alot of people have told me the ending was abrupt, but I thought it was perfect. For one character it's happy, for another it's victorious, but also ironic and sad. And it does kind of feel like the end of chapter one. They could definitely do another movie, and I would be excited to see it. But I also have to wonder if maybe the continuing story should just be implied. Sort of like how the end of THE MATRIX leaves you wanting to see the revolution, but most people now probaly realize they should've left it to their own imaginations.
One thing for sure though, I keep thinking about this movie and will have to see it again. I think it has alot of things that seem small and unimportant that looking back are very significant. Here's an example. I'll be kind of vague so it won't give too much away, but if you've seen it you'll know what I'm talking about. There's a quick little part where Anna's uncle makes a horribly offensive comment, she gets upset and storms out. It completely works as just a moment, a weird uncomfortable thing that happens and makes the uncle flawed. But then if you go back and think about it it accomplishes a whole lot of storytelling in that one moment. Most important is that it gives us a piece of Anna's history that makes us understand why she is so attached to this baby. At the same time it establishes the relationships between Anna, her uncle and her mom. And it gives her a reason to trust the other Russian family when she should stick with her own. And not only that, it sets up this theme of the "old school" Russian ways, that they can be backwards and prejudiced, so that also pretty much explains Kirill's entire character and why he does everything he does throughout the movie. Think about it. So that one little goofy part that seems almost random is actually a crucial piece of the machinery.
But it leaves alot for you to puzzle over. For example, what the hell does the title mean? Okay, I get the EASTERN part, but what about the PROMISES? In the sense that it's hard to figure out the title fits the movie well.
So I guess this is more of a critic's movie or an arthouse movie than a mainstream crowdpleaser. But I suspect it will make at least a small dent in pop culture thanks to rappers and their fascination with gangsters. It's not gonna be GODFATHER or SCARFACE popular but maybe in that area a little below CARLITO'S WAY. If I'm right that's kind of interesting because Russians have never been considered cool in America. Their image took a beating during the Cold War, especially in the '80s when they were called "commies" or "Russkies" and were the go-to bad guys in action movies. They were evil and mostly faceless, personality-less. With the possible exception of Ivan Drago there wasn't even a bad guy Russian that it was cool to like, like a Darth Vader. I don't think Drago even counts, I don't know who was rooting for him. Even today Russian gangsters are just cheesy villains in DTV action movies.
As far as good guy Russians all we had was Yakov Smirnoff. And I don't know about you but I never realized that guy was really Russian, I thought it was a character like Father Guido Sarducci.
This movie not only has a great badass Russian, it has a fascination with this whole world of Russian gangster traditions, in particular the symbolism of their prison tattoos. So there will finally be something about Russians that Americans will think is cool.
Wait, maybe Nikolai Volkoff from the WWF, he was a Russian bad guy character that people liked. But he's gonna be surpassed by this new Nikolai, I guarantee it.
EATEN ALIVE 2-disc special edition DVD review
NOTE: If there are out-of-place references in this review it's because I originally submitted it to The Ain't It Cool News. However, due to its controversial nature (i.e. nobody gives a shit) they didn't run it so here it is.
This week the 25th anniversary edition of Tobe Hooper's POLTERGEIST comes out, you may have seen that mentioned once or twice. But this week also marks another important landmark for Tobe Hooper: the two week anniversary of the release of Dark Sky's EATEN ALIVE (aka DEATH TRAP) special edition.
Okay, yes, this review is two weeks late. I wish I got it up before September 26th, but let's just say it got delayed. The EATEN ALIVE (aka STARLIGHT SLAUGHTER) DVD itself almost got onto the shelves a year ago just as they discovered new materials in the Disney Vault (or some kind of vault anyway, they didn't specify if it was the Disney Vault) and decided to start over. At least my delay wasn't that long. In my opinion this is actually an early review, somehow. So just drop it.
Tobe Hooper is a real mystery to me. He directed pretty much my favorite movie of all time (SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION) but has never reached those heights again. Most people tend to say all his other movies are garbage, and in many cases I have to agree with them. These days he keeps churning them out, but he doesn't have the opportunities somebody who directed one of the greatest American independent films of all time oughta get. He's always straight to video or TV. And although I'm starting to enjoy his stuff again (MORTUARY and especially TOOLBOX MURDERS were surprisingly watchable DTV - no, seriously guys) he's about 93 million miles away from the guy he was when he directed that masterpiece all those years ago.
Okay first of all I was just jerkin your chain, SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION is not his masterpiece. You know which one I was actually talking about (not THE MANGLER either), and alot of people say that one was some kind of amazing fluke. I don't buy it though because Hooper also directed you-know-which-one-I-was-actually-talking-about Part 2 which is totally brilliant in different ways than the original. And I think Hooper has alot of other flawed but interesting movies, mainly THE FUNHOUSE and LIFEFORCE and I guess SALEM'S LOT and of course there's always the ol' POLTERGEIST, which I figure has his fingerprints on it no matter what Zelda Rubinstein tells Quint.
But of all his movies it's the movie in question here today that puzzles me the most. I've watched it a couple times over the years, always hoping to appreciate it better this time. And it never turns into a good movie but it keeps getting more interesting. Especially this time.
EATEN ALIVE (aka MURDER ON THE BAYOU) is about a weird one-legged redneck named Judd (Neville Brand) who runs a shitty hotel called the Starlight and enjoys murder. He's not like Norman Bates though because he's not charming, he's obviously crazy as soon as you see him. He accuses people of being whores (sometimes correctly), kills them with a scythe or just tosses them to his huge African crocodile.
Come to think of it I'm not clear if he is the owner of the hotel or just the manager. Because if there's another owner somebody might want to write and complain about this guy.
Anyway that description might sound like some good ol' TEXAS CHAIN SAW fun, but the opening shot is of the moon. The opening shot of CHAIN SAW is the sun so that kind of shows how they're opposites. Instead of the scorching Texas sunlight this one takes place entirely at night. Instead of documentary-like realism it's all shot on a soundstage with stylized lighting like an Italian such as a Bava or an Argento might do. Alot of the scenes outside the hotel are so drowned in red lights it looks like it's shot black and white and tinted red.
Let me give you a scenario that exactly describes the feel of EATEN ALIVE (aka HORROR HOTEL). You have a 110 fever and you're laying in bed for hours not able to get to sleep. You got nothin to do but lay there and sweat so in your boredom you turn on your clock radio and are able to almost tune in to some weird classic country station. Eventually you finally drift off and suffer through what seems like hours of a crazed fever dream, still hearing the fuzzy country tunes the whole time, trying to wake yourself up so you can turn it off, but you just can't do it.
Judd is playing that damn radio through most of the movie, so you can usually hear it at least off in the distance somewhere, overlapping with the sounds of crickets and bird calls, or the muffled cries of Judd's victims which if you listen carefully you can sometimes hear through the walls. And then there's the score by Hooper and Wayne Bell, which takes the moody noises of TEXAS CHAIN SAW a step further. This one is bizarre electronic blurps, wind chimes and broken music boxes.
You know what else this movie is sort of like? Trying to listen to two radio stations at the same time. It's all very chaotic and has no sense of momentum. When people say a movie has no plot, even though it technically does, they are talking about a movie like this. There are long scenes of people doing ordinary things like getting ready for bed in real time. Gus Van Sant probaly got the idea for his last three movies from this one, except he didn't know how to get the crocodile in there.
Judd fills the role of the crazy TEXAS CHAIN SAW type - with his shag hair and glasses he even looks like Chop Top before he loses his wig. But I had a harder time enjoying his craziness because he spends most of the movie pacing and mumbling to himself and I couldn't tell what he was talking about. The DVD does have English subtitles, but I thought that would be cheating since they didn't have that option when this showed in drive-ins.
Another thing that's hard to take is that most of the victims are almost as insane as Judd is. For example there's this family whose dog gets eaten by the crocodile. The daughter (HALLOWEEN's Kyle Richards) won't stop crying, so the parents (TEXAS CHAIN SAW's Marilyn Burns and PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE's William Finley) bring her into the hotel, and the dad freaks out, cries, rants about his eye being poked out, barks like a dog, and then suddenly turns vengeful, gets a gun and goes to put down the croc. Also there's Buck (A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's Robert Englund), and he opens the movie with the famous line "Name's Buck and I'm rarin' to fuck" and proceeds to try to rape a prostitute. Not cool, Buck. Not cool. That whiny Franklin in TEXAS CHAIN SAW is god damn Cary Grant next to these freaks.
It's all this craziness and it doesn't even build to a whole lot. The climax keeps cutting between Buck having sex with an underage girl (HILLS HAVE EYES's Janus Blythe, I think), Marilyn Burns gagged and tied to a bed trying to escape, her daughter crying and crawling around beneath the hotel, and Judd pacing in the lobby. Or just sitting there. Mumbling to himself. Turning off a lamp. Listening to Robert Englund's door. This seems to go on forever. And the whole time that radio is playing. And you can't wake up. This god damn fever is eating you alive.
Eventually Robert Englund comes out, pissed and yelling for Judd to turn off the radio. But he hears the little girl, so he goes outside and gets eaten by the crocodile. This is the type of excitement you're in for. But mostly the pacing and mumbling and turning off lamps.
Okay, I admit it, I kind of like this movie. More as a curiosity than as a movie. If you have any interest in it you must check out this excellent DVD. The new transfer is a nice improvement without taking the rough edges out. It's not one of those slick, pristine transfers like the TEXAS CHAIN SAW ultimate edition. That one is amazing but this one seems more appropriate for the material. There are scratches and it's still real grainy. But the image is so much clearer, the colors so much more vivid than it ever was in those dark, blurry VHS versions. I never realized what a great look this movie has.
I can't say enough about the extras, which seem to be mostly or all produced by Red Shirt Productions, same guys that did the featurettes on the recent CHAIN SAW DVDs. There's an interview with Hooper where he gives a pretty good explanation of what he was trying to do with the movie, which he calls "such a damn carnival of insanity" and "kind of like a slice of something that I don't think you can get any place else." Then there's an interview with Robert Englund. A short interview with Marilyn Burns. There's an interesting documentary called "The Butcher of Elmendorf: The Legend of Joe Ball" about this WWI veteran who had an alligator pit outside of his tavern, who murdered a series of wives and was rumored to have fed them to the gators (although his nephew, whose interview is the basis for the documentary, doesn't believe that part). Weirdly this guy is not mentioned anywhere on the DVD as an inspiration for the story, but the parallels are undeniable.
Then of course you got your various trailers and radio spots, even a super rare Japanese trailer, and alternate credit sequences with some of the many titles it was released under.
The commentary track doesn't have Hooper or writer Kim Henkel on it, but it still manages to be great. It alternates between businessman producer Mardi Rustam, William Finley (who says his character was supposed to be retarded), Kyle Richards (whose childhood trauma seems to be coming back to her as she comments) and make-up artist Craig Reardon (who is a good old Hollywood storyteller type). They all have good stories and insights but definitely the greatest OH SHIT moment is when the actress Robert Collins shows up during her scenes. She talks happily about what a great time she had on the movie before launching into a scary story about Neville Brand inviting her over for dinner, flipping out and attacking her so she had to flee for her life and never saw him again. She laughs about it and says it's too bad because they had been such good friends.
All this stuff is good but definitely my favorite extra is the one that sounds least impressive on the packaging, "Comment cards." It's a gallery of comment cards filled out at some screening, and all but one or two hated the movie. The cards range from the person who just writes "SICK" in huge letters across the whole card to the film student who fills the card in tiny letters offering suggestions for better camera angles. One commenter crossed out the part that says "FILM WAS: FAIR___ GOOD ___ EXCELLENT ___" and put a check next to their own category, "ABSOLUTE, UNREDEEMED TRASH." For "COMMENTS" they wrote "BURN IT." There's a contest on the cards for the person who can come up with the best new title for the movie, and some suggestions include "BORED TO DEATH," "TO NEVER BE RELEASED," "BURP," and "FORGET IT."
EATEN ALIVE (aka BORED TO DEATH) has always been the key to the Tobe Hooper mystery, and this DVD does a good job of trying to explain it. As far as the business of telling some coherent story and not boring the shit out of the audience - two important goals for filmatists, in my opinion - the movie is a failure. But the general vibe is so sleazy and weird and fucked up and the photography and sets are so beautiful - I just don't know another movie like this. It's a nice try by Tobe Hooper, anyway. Good effort champ. Way to hustle.
Of course, that makeup artist Reardon says during some of the scenes that Hooper wasn't there when they were shot, because he had quit at that point. Nowhere on the DVD is this explained. He says the director of photography was directing, but I bet it was actually Spielberg. I'll see if Quint can ask Zelda Rubinstein about that one. Anyway, the mystery continues.
--Vern
http://www.geocities.com/outlawvern
http://www.lulu.com/outlawvern
ELEKTRA was considered sort of a flop when it came out a year or two ago, and that made the studios think there just isn't money in female action heroes or female biopics. This may have led to the troubles with the Edie Sedgwick movie, the limited release of the Betty Page movie, etc. However, this very unorthodox and presumably fictionalized biography of Carmen Elektra is not really as bad as I thought it would be.
Jennifer Garner (Felicity) plays Elektra (they never call her Carmen) as a brooding, obsessive compulsive ninja assassin who has recently returned from the dead. (a little exaggerated there, in my opinion.) She imagines herself as a major player in some kind of mystical war between good and evil forces. I think you can interpret it a couple of ways, alot of people probaly take it literally and figure this is like CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND, this is telling us that the whole time we thought Carmen Elektra was just some chick on BAYWATCH or SINGLED OUT or whatever, she was actually also a ninja assassin. On this mission she goes to an island somewhere, it is not exactly a beach paradise but still she could be filming some pickups for BAYWATCH or MTV Spring Break while she's there and then after she's done with those she's gonna assassinate some people.
However, I think you could also take this as some poetical type of shit. Because she has this manager, he is actually called a manager and he is a dumbass Hollywood type of dude, and this is the guy who gets her work. So I think that sort of indicates that it is all a metaphor, the murdering with swords and ninja stars is actually symbolic of all of the acting or modelling or strip aerobics or whatever it is she does. This is more like DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY, it is telling the story of her life but it is kind of taking some artistic license so there's demons and crap.
Of course also there is the issue of rights, like in that movie PERMANENT MIDNIGHT they couldn't say that Jerry Stahl wrote for ALF while he was high, so they had to make up a fake puppet character. Well, they were not able to show that Prince was Carmen Elektra's mentor so instead they made up this Prince-like character named Stick, who is played by Terence Stamp (THE LIMEY). Instead of a musician he is a martial arts instructor and instead of being an awesome guitar player he's blind. He wears some pretty cool martial arts type clothes which, fortunately, cover the ass area completely. But still, it's obviously Prince.
In the story she is fighting against some ninjas or gangsters or something called The Hand. This is not supposed to be the Pussycat Dolls I don't think, maybe there were actually some ninjas she fought in real life, I don't know. These guys have mystical powers, the tattoos of snakes and birds and stuff that they have on their chests can come to life and fly around to chase their prey. There is one guy who's pretty cool, he's a huge black dude with skin so strong it breaks Elektra's sword, I think he might represent Dennis Rodman but I'm not sure. If so then when she drops a tree on him that means divorcing him.
I liked the mystical stuff and some of the fighting, but the overall tone of the movie is very quiet, serious and brooding, maybe a little too much. I appreciate that they take it seriously but it could use a little more badass to make it more fun. The opening (where Carmen is a scary unseen force coming in to murder a guy) is pretty cool, then she goes to stay in a cabin and starts building a relationship with her neighbor and his daughter, and it seems like a serious for-grownups-who-don't-like-ninjas movie. Then her manager sends her the file of who she has to kill, it's actually two people: her neighbor and his daughter, who she just had Christmas dinner with.
So obviously she's gonna be upset - oh shit, this is the little girl, she's so nice, and she reminds me of myself, what am I gonna do? She looks at it for a minute and then she says, "I'll call you when it's done," and gets out her big ass bow and arrow and goes to murder these people. A nice way to celebrate the Lord's birthday I guess.
That was a good moment, that was a surprise and that was a movie I wanted to see. At this point in the movie I actually thought wow, is this gonna turn out to be good? But of course, after targeting them and pulling the arrow back she has a change of heart and it goes back to what you originally assumed, the less interesting, more obvious movie where she decides not to kill them. Oh well.
So then she ends up protecting them from some other ninjas. There is some ninjas on the roof and instead of saying "Hey neighbor, watch out for the ninjas on the roof" she comes over and says, "Can I talk to you for a minute? Inside?" And the dude goes inside and while he has his back turned for a second she turns around, jumps up and stabs a sword through the roof right into the ninja. I mean she just knows where to stab - one stab and she hits ninja meat. Take that, ninja! That was some good ninja shit, but I think the problem with the movie is it needs more ninja shit.
Jennifer Garner looks a little bit like Carmen, I can see why they cast her, but they are trying to portray her as this hard-assed ninja bitch, and she isn't entirely convincing as that. She can fight a little bit from that TV show she did briefly after Felicity, but she's no Sonny Chiba. There aren't any really extended fights. Every once in a while there's a pretty cool move though. I liked when she was in a shrubbery maze and she used ninja sense to guess where her enemy was and then just threw the sword through about ten layers of bushes and hit her target in the head. Good job. Still, there is only one beheading in the movie, and she's not the one that does it. So it could be better. What kinda ninja movie only has one beheading?
The big problem is we don't get enough screen time of her as a ninja bitch. We get the opening scene and the part where she almost kills the neighbors, the rest of the time she's pretty nice. When she has no morals she's an interesting anti-hero, the rest of the time she's more what you'd expect. At the end of the movie I guess she's not an assassin anymore, so if she was a real person we'd feel proud of her but since she's not, she's a movie character, it's kind of a bummer. I don't think we ever did get to see her kill anybody with that bow and arrow. And now she's retired.
See, we Americans got this problem where we sometimes try to do martial arts movies, but starring people who aren't martial artists. If you saw GYMKATA like I did recently, you know what I'm talking about. Yuen Woo Ping has figured out how to train some of these people pretty good, they made it work in THE MATRIX and KILL BILL. But this is not on that level. If they had this same story but it was stringing together a bunch of amazing knock you on your ass and then you get up again and then before you can brush the dirt off your ass it knocks you on your ass again martial arts sequences, then I think we would've had something here. But when it only has the story to lean on it's not much.
At the same time it's not terrible, nothing was really unintentionally funny in it. And it did make me feel bad for Carmen Elektra, I didn't realize she was going through all that. So, nice try. It's an interesting idea.
UPDATE: Well, I feel stupid. It turns out this movie has nothing to do with Carmen Elektra, it is actually a spinoff of the movie DAREDEVIL. I thought I dreamed that movie but I looked it up and sure enough it exists, it is this crazy movie where Ben Affleck is a blind dude in a red gimp outfit that makes him look kind of chubby, and then the bad guy is Colin Farrell, whose super power is he can flick peanuts and paperclips really good. With that in mind ELEKTRA is actually a fuckin miracle, because its problem is it's not very good, while DAREDEVIL is aggressively bad.
anyway I regret the error, sorry everybody
ELEPHANT
Who the fuck knows what to make of Gus Van Sant? Fierce independence and idiosynchricity or whatever for many years. Openly gay independent filmatist working out of Oregon, adapting underground literature and hanging out with Burroughs and shit. Suddenly out of the blue he does this huge hit studio movie with no gay people, but Robin Williams and a math genius garbage man or whatever the fuck that movie was about (I never saw it). How bout them apples I guess is what a guy says in it, I don't know. So suddenly Van Sant is a mainstream super star and he can do whatever he wants... so what he does, he announces that he's gonna do a shot for shot remake of Mr. Hitchcock's famous picture PSYCHO. With the same score and everything. And hire the same screenwriter just to change like ten or fifteen words in it.
Now I know I am against the wheat grain on this one but for me, that was the thing that SOLD me on this Van Sant, not the thing that lost me. Sure, DRUGSTORE COWBOY was a great one and there was some good business in his other pictures, but it was the day he cashed in his mainstream clout to do something THAT fucking ridiculous that made me think this was a guy I could really respect. Nobody else would get the chance to try something like that, nobody else would WANT to try something like that, and anybody, including him, is not likely to get out of that one unscathed. It was a god damn kamikaze mission, or "homicide bombing" as our friends at Fox "news" call it in their unending quest for a new, less accurate form of speaking.
I mean, it's not like these remakes they have now where the implied message is yeah, that was a good movie at the time, but young audiences can't relate to that, it's really obsolete now so it's about time somebody stepped in here and made more of a modern, shitty type version so that the young, retarded victims of our crass commercial culture of aggressive mediocrity can enjoy it between beyonce's pepsi commercials. No, the implied message was that Hitchcock's movie was so perfect that the only way you can remake it is to try to copy it exactly. And even then, it turns out, it's not really gonna work. Oh well.
So I'm all sold on the dude but then after going out in a blaze of glory with that one the very next thing Van Sant does, he gets reborn from the ashes as the guy who still wants to keep doing inspirational math teacher movies. Because there was another movie I never saw starring that clueless old fuck Connery, called YOU'RE THE MAN NOW, DOG. And that one wasn't even allegedly good.
No problem. Turns out Van Sant was just getting his clout back so he could come out with some ridiculous hiking movie and one about elephants called COLUMBINE. Or, I mean, vice versa.
And to me ELEPHANT is almost as much of a mystery as Van Sant himself. It's a movie about that horrible high school massacre they had a few years back, but without really trying to make a statement about it. When it was over I knew that it was very effective, but I didn't know what Van Sant was trying to say about Columbine, or even if he was trying to say something about Columbine. The more I think about it the more I think that the lack of a message is the message. That you can't exactly quantify something like Columbine, or explain what led to it mathematically.
I mean who the fuck knows. There is a group of kids here (the same period of time leading up to the murders is shown many times from the perspectives of different kids, often intersecting with the other perspectives that we've already seen). All of them have their own teenage problems (my dad's an alcoholic, I'm not comfortable with my body, people make fun of me, me and my friends like to vomit up our lunch, my parents won't let me go to the concert) but they all deal with them in different ways.
If there's a main kid it's probaly this blond kid that almost could be out of a calvin klein commercial. He has to take care of his drunk dad, his principal has it in for him, he can't seem to get a break. And we know he has guns in the house because his dad invites him hunting. You could argue that he deserves to flip out and kill everybody more than the kids that actually do it, but he doesn't.
After the real massacre, asswipes like Joseph Lieberman used it as an excuse to blame the evil clown rock that kids listen to and the violent video games they play. Van Sant deals with both of these issues in a clever way. There's no rock music in this picture. But shortly before the killings, there is a long scene of one of the killers playing Fuer Elise on a piano as his buddy plays video games on a laptop. I mean everybody's heard that song so many times it completely loses its power, but when you hear it in this movie you just kind of go whoah, what a beautiful fucking piece of music. So many changes in emotion too. Exactly the kind of thing that could make this kid snap, right? Don't let your kids listen to this death obsessed classical music. You hear the song again as they go on their spree and it's pretty creepy.
As for video games, you see the other kid playing a shooting video game like Doom (which the real killers played I think - or was it Pac-Man? I don't know video games that well). Later there's a short piece of his killing spree that you see in the same perspective with the gun right under the camera. And I think somebody already pointed this out but there are other scenes of other characters that look like video games. The opening shot of the blond kid's dad driving drunk is shot exactly like Grand Theft Auto. And there are a whole bunch of scenes with characters walking around with the camera following them from the back, just like a game.
I'm pointing that out but I don't know what it's supposed to mean. So don't look at me man.
(I might've pointed this out before, but those columbine killers really missed out... they never got to play Grand Theft Auto. They would've LOVED that shit and it wasn't even invented yet.)
I know exactly how to describe the style of this movie. It's a more polite Larry Clark directing one long Brian DePalma suspense sequence. Think of the part in CARRIE where you know the bucket of blood is gonna drop on the poor gal's head, and that she's probaly gonna go ape shit with her carrie-powers when that happens. You know that, but DePalma makes you sit there and wait for it in excruciating slow motion. And that's why it's so great.
This is the same thing - you know there's gonna be a high school shooting. You even see the kids walking in with all their guns and telling the blond kid to leave. And then it skips back again. So you know the general time of the day that it's gonna happen and you keep dreading it. There's a scene where some vapid girls sit in the cafeteria planning a shopping trip and in the background you can see kids walking by outside, and every time one walks by your stomach tightens a little 'cause you think it's gonna be those little fucks with the guns.
At the same time I say the style is Larry Clark because it's got that same deal with the naturalistic non-actor cast, lots of handheld cameras and long takes showing unneccessary details like somebody walking away after a conversation. To give it that matter of fact realistic type feel. I don't think there's any crotch shots though, and only one out of the blue shock value moment that was very Clarkian but much briefer and less graphic.
Anyway what makes this a powerful movie is that it doesn't try to give you a fuckin essay. It's more like a sketch. It kind of puts you standing in that school to watch from the perspective of these kids instead of from the perspective of a bunch of clips on the news. I don't know what it means but I know it kicked me in the balls. And most movies can't get away with that.
ENCHANTED
I like to think I'm a pretty tough individual, even on a cellular level. So I don't usually watch movies like this and I don't usually get sick. A year or two ago I got some crud that really knocked me out, so while I was laying there a useless husk of my regular self I decided that God had opened a window - a window of opportunity for me to watch KILL BILL VOLUME 1 and VOLUME 2 in a row. The movie seemed even better in one sitting and I was healed the next day. Thanks God. You got good taste in movies.
So the next year when I got real sick I did the same thing, with the same success. Only trouble is when I got sick again this month and it was the worst I had in years. My KILL BILL treatment had been too recent, I didn't know if it would work and I didn't want to overdo it and create a KILL BILL-resistant supervirus. So I watched a bunch of other DVDs I had laying around.
But nothing worked. The shit was stuck in me. I watched alot of movies but they were hard to enjoy, they somehow left a bad taste in my mouth and brain. On about day 3, laying there in my feverish state, I became some kind of naturopathic theorist. My ideas were so revolutionary I could've been one of those doctors interviewed on THE SECRET. I decided that KILL BILL's power was a two-tiered regimen: its classic fight scenes and high quality filmatism got my adrenaline level up, but it was the sweet ending, with the lioness crying in happiness that her cub has been returned to her, that really did the trick. The pure joy raised my metabolism or my anti-bodies or my something-something... you know the thing. The thing that makes you healthy, in my opinion. That meant what I needed was not the usual mayhem I watch but some kind of fluffy sweetness.
So I crawled to the video store and when I came back it turned out I had rented Walt Disney's ENCHANTED.
You and your whole family will be enchanted by ENCHANTED. You'll have a magical time. If you and your family ever dreamed of fucking a magic cartoon princess whose best friend is a squirrel then ENCHANTED is a dream come true. Is what Gene Shalit might've said. But personally I did not like ENCHANTED, I was disenchanted with it. (take that Shalit you fuck)
What this is is a high concept romantic comedy by way of a tribute to the old Disney animated movies from before they got all concerned about the environment and told everybody to draw on computers instead of paper. Its heart is in the right place I guess but they don't have the skills to pull off what is really only a halfway there idea: an animated princess from a non-existent Disney fairy tale movie (depicted through actual hand drawn Disney animation) is sent through a magical portal and appears in live action (depicted by Academy Award nominee Amy Adams) in the "real" New York. There is no way to predict whether her naive ways will make it impossible for her to survive on the mean streets and it will turn into a DEATH WISH movie real fast or if she'll bump into dreamy Patrick Dempsey just before his wedding and teach him to slow down and learn the lessons of a magical cartoon from another dimension so that he can stop working too hard and be happier and ditch his woman for a better looking lady who barely has a brain and literally doesn't belong on this plain of existence but talks to animals and turns every day life into musical numbers. It could go either way, take your pick.
Dempsey of course is a divorce lawyer (how will he ever learn about love?) and a single father to a young girl (oh, what a sweet guy) and when his daughter spots live action Princess Giselle and her giant ball gown stuck on a billboard that she thinks is her castle he rightfully assumes she is a lunatic or perhaps a very, very well dressed and made-up crack ho. He tries to help her (like Eddie Murphy would do) and brings her to his apartment but then his fiancee thinks he's fucking her (Three's Company) and also Giselle ruins his drapes by making them into a dress, then humiliates him by singing as they walk through the park together. Of course, all the everyday New Yorkers they run into love her and instinctively take part in her musical numbers. It's only the cold, shriveled heart of the leading man that can't see that the magical toys of Mr. Magorium's Magical, Magical, Magical Emporium are full of imagination, wonder and dazzle. Or that might've been a shitty trailer I saw but anyway this guy at first doesn't understand the lessons of cartoon fairyland until something happens that makes him believe, and I will not give away what it is that happens. Because whatever it was I fell asleep during it. But when I woke up he presumably had learned that she is actually a cartoon and because she's so nice and caring and knows how to enjoy life he starts to fall in love with her anyway.
Now I don't want to seem like a backwards guy or some kind of anti-cartoon bigot like Bob Hoskins in ROGER RABBIT but I have to say that I am against this live action guy marrying this cartoon. There are alot of issues here, for example we learned in the movie COOL WORLD that if a live action guy fucks a cartoon girl it will destroy the very fabric of cartoon/live action reality. So guys, keep your dick in your pants. Or if you are a cartoon like Donald Duck then put some pants on. I know many live action youths had a thing for a cartoon lady such as a Betty Rubble or a Penelope Pitstop but that doesn't mean those cartoon gals should come into the world of live action and that you should marry them. First of all Betty is already happily married to a nice hard working guy and has a kid, so that's fucked up. Second of all, if you married Penelope Pitstop can you imagine, you couldn't even drive to the store without some asshole grabbing your wife and tying her to some railroad tracks. What a pain in the ass. I know that opposites attract and everything but you gotta take into account if your lifestyles are compatible or not. A regular guy marrying a cartoon princess is like a spider marrying a fish. It's just not gonna work.
In fact "opposites attract" is an important phrase to bring up because I think today's acceptance of live action/cartoon love goes back 20 years to Paula Abdul's famous video "Opposites Attract." If you're too young to remember I will just say that Paula Abdul, the alcoholic judge from Star Search or whatever it's called now, was once a famous R&B pop singer and this was a video where she danced around and sang a duet with an animated rapping cat sporting a high top fade and a wifebeater. He's also a very talented dancer who tap dances, moonwalks and, ironically, does the Roger Rabbit. In the video they sing about how different they are - one only watches movies, the other only watches TV (?), one has a more serious demeanor than the other, one goes to bed early while the other one stays up all night freebasing cocaine and having huge orgies on the roof of the house ("I party all night" the lyric says), only one of them smokes, one of them steals the covers while the other is very courteous about the covers, etc.
So they list alot of different things but they leave out the most important ones. For example, I don't want to assume too much but I have a hunch that Paula Abdul uses a toilet while MC Skat Kat shits in a box. If I'm right about that then you gotta admit that is a pretty fuckin big lifestyle difference in my opinion, they shoulda mentioned that in the song. To be fair, if they were out on a farm somewhere and MC Skat Kat had to shit he would probaly dig a little hole and shit in it and then he would bury it. It would be way worse if she was dating Goofy. But you can see in the video that he lives in some sort of urban environment where it would be difficult to find a place to dig a hole for shitting in. In the concrete jungle he is equal to Goofy.
Anyway the important thing is I looked up Paul Abdul's bio. Her mom was a concert pianist, she wasn't raised on a farm. Paula studied broadcasting, left to become a Laker Girl, then she left that to become the choreographer for Janet Jackson's videos and for movies (she worked on THE RUNNING MAN, ACTION JACKSON and even did Tom Hanks's giant keyboard dance in BIG - no shit), and she already had three other huge smash singles by the time she made the catfucking video. So she was most likely used to some high livin. What I'm getting at is that in the circles she ran in those days I'm pretty god damn sure she wasn't accustomed to dating people who shit in a hole in the backyard or in a box in the laundry room. Maybe that was part of the attraction, the whole bad boy/forbidden fruit thing, but I don't know man. That oughta be a dealbreaker, in my opinion.
Now, I've seen the stand up comedy. I know that men are from one planet while women are from a different planet from the one the men are from, that women go to the bathroom in groups, men are always scratching their balls while they watch football to ease the pain of the women using their credit cards to go shopping (by the way that last one happens in ENCHANTED - his daughter has his credit card "for emergencies" like going dress shopping with a magical cartoon princess). But even though your lady or fella is gonna have different interests and tastes from you I'm telling you, there should be some overlap there. If not you're gonna be miserable. This I fear is the case for Patrick Dempsey. I feel sorry for MC Skat Kat being a one-hit wonder, but he should thank the Egyptian cat gods that Paula ditched him for Emilio Estevez. That relationship would've driven him over the edge, next thing we'd hear he was stuck up a tree or ODd on catnip somewhere. Opposites may attract but that doesn't mean they should stick.
Yes, Princess Giselle becomes a live action woman when she comes to New York. So that probaly solves the COOL WORLD dilemma. And makes this whole enterprise more biologically feasible. And yes, she could probaly be trained to use a toilet, although they most likely did not have that technology in her castle. It is also true that Amy Adams is gorgeous and adorable. So I can't really blame Dempsey for falling for this one. They don't make 'em like Amy Adams in live action world.
But still, I mean jesus. This is not a human being. This is a one-dimensional, one joke cartoon character. Dempsey is supposed to be an adult human being with responsibilities such as a job and a human daughter he is expected to raise. He is in a long term relationship with another adult human being. And he makes the decision to instead spend his life with a lady who doesn't understand anything at all about the world around her or even what time period she's in, but she does love fancy dresses and can dance around with animals and sing songs about kissing. That is not rational on this dude's part. What are they gonna talk about once he's tired of talking about true love? And is he gonna let all her animal friends come over for dinner or is it gonna eventually be too much for him? Sure it's cute at first, and she's less annoying than Snow White, but still, she'd get on anybody's nerves after a while. You can't have Christmas all year.
And you know what, even if you were gonna be a jackass and marry a Disney character you might be able to better than this. Because if Princess Giselle was a real Disney movie it would be one of the worst ones. It's not even a real fairy tale, it's just a cheap ripoff of SLEEPING BEAUTY. It's the old movie-within-a-movie problem - if you had a good idea for a movie you would make a real movie out of it, so the fake movie is always gonna suck. And they didn't want to waste an actual fairy tale on these bookend cartoon scenes. So instead they just have a lady and some animals and a doofus prince that rescues her from a troll (thankfully without a Scottish accent or farting) and an evil queen. They did get a couple things right to make it seem like a real Disney movie - the villain is a celebrity voice (Susan Sarandon) and plummets to her death (spoiler). But still. Who wants to see a non-specific fairy tale movie?
And by the way, if you're feeling bad for Dempsey's human fiancee, don't worry about it. She gets dumped but then she falls in love with the cartoon prince and goes to live in the cartoon world. Guess she hated her job, family, friends, home, reality, even her skin which she is willing to replace with drawings.
I know how to suspend the disbelief but for me this concept was too much, I can't accept that not one but two sane individuals would marry cartoon characters from another dimension. I don't buy it.
But alot of people did, and the movie was very well reviewed for such a sitcom concept. There's exactly one reason why it was considered passable at all, and her name is Amy Adams. I honestly don't think there's another actor in the world who could've played this role without looking like an idiot. Everything about Amy Adams from her perky nose to her perfect doll hair really does make her look like a VIP member of the Disney Princess Club. She doesn't even look like a Disney princess come to life, she's not one of those gals in the Disneyland parades. She looks like the actual living being who the character was based on. And she talks and sings like it too. And she's great at playing these innocent, uncynical characters. If I were her I'd worry about getting typecast, but since this kind of seems like the role she was born to play I guess she might as well run with it.
I don't keep track of the ratings but Amy Adams is so lovable I think she may be America's Top Sweetheart, and if so I'd just like to point out that I predicted this years ago. Most people never caught on to her until her Oscar nominated performance in JUNEBUG in 2005. But guess what, early in 2001 I was onto her lead role in the straight to video CRUEL INTENTIONS 2, of which I wrote:
"The rest of the casting isn't too bad. The Catherine is no Sarah Gellar but you could get used to her, I guess."
You see that? "You could get used to her, I guess." And years later the whole world would get used to her. By the way when I said she's "no Sarah Gellar" I think I just meant she would not be in SOUTHLAND TALES. So I'm way ahead of the curve on these things. I was practically psychic on that one.
In conclusion, don't fuck cartoons.4/22/08
THE ENFORCERIn the third Dirty Harry picture Inspector Callahan has become some sort of an enforcer, a guy who travels around enforcing things. Alot of people tend to dismiss the series after MAGNUM FORCE, and it's true that this one isn't as good as the two before it, but I gotta admit I like it.
Alot of the goofiest shit from '70s and '80s cop movies, the cliches that get made fun of all the time, might be traced directly to this movie. This is definitely a prime example of the cartoonishly out of line bureaucrats in the police headquarters who demand the police "clean up the streets" but get mad at them when they do. "I didn't say to use violence." It's got the scene where he gets suspended and has to give back his badge, which is memorable because Harry calls it a "seven point suppository... you heard me, stick it up your ass!" And the opening section of the movie is about him driving around encountering different police situations unrelated to the plot just so they can show the funny/abrasive way he deals with criminals, like the guy supposedly having a heart attack in a restaurant who he kicks and tells to get up or the liquor store hostage-takers who demand a car, so he "gives it to them" by driving through the front of the liquor store. (Of course followed by a scene where the aforementioned bureaucrat yells at him with a tally of all the damage done.)
At first it looks like the politics of the series are gonna swing back hard to the right after the unexpected "you know what, maybe it's not okay for cops to just execute criminals" questioning of MAGNUM FORCE. The villains are the People's Revolutionary Strike Force, who seem to be some kind of SLA or Weather Underground type leftist extremist group led by a disgruntled Vietnam vet. The bureaucrats tell Harry that "the minority community" won't stand for police brutality and we're obviously supposed to consider that an unreasonable demand. And when the police force wants to start promoting women Harry gives voice to all the chauvinist concerns about how they might get their partner killed because they don't know how to handle themselves. His opposition is an uptight middle aged scold of a feminist with hair and glasses like a librarian.
But of course the way you tell a story alot of times is to set up one thing and then go in a different direction. And the DIRTY HARRY series is a little smarter and a little more thoughtful than people want to give it credit for. So all of these political elements get turned around. The leftist extremists turn out to be faking their politics like Hans Grueber, they're just in it for the money. The "minority community" gets some sympathy when Harry investigates a Black Panthers type group led by a guy called Mustapha (Albert Popwell, the guy who may or may not have felt lucky in the first DIRTY HARRY - and Harry asks him if he knows him from somewhere). Harry knows they have nothing to do with this and even gets Mustapha to agree to give him some information, but then the department has them raided and tries to pin everything on them because they had a hunch it was "black militants."
The most central political theme is the one about feminism. A young and likable Tyne Daley plays Harry's new partner, prematurely promoted to inspector so the department can look more diverse. Harry openly hates that she has no experience on the streets but we see in his expressions that he at least has a grudging respect for her encyclopedic knowledge of law gained from years in the records department. When they try to pin their problems on Mustapha the city calls a press conference, gives her credit, gets her in all the pictures with the mayor. I like the way the movie deals with this, not discussing it in dialogue but showing on her face how uncomfortable she is. She knows this is phony but has a hard time just walking away because it's so important to her to be recognized as a real cop.
And over the course of the movie, of course, she proves to Harry and to the audience that she is a real cop, and she is able to represent women through her accomplishments instead of through ceremonies held by politicians.
I wasn't sure who this director James Fargo was, so I looked him up. As some people might guess he directed some TV shows like The A-Team and Hunter. But he made sense for DIRTY HARRY because before THE ENFORCER he was an assistant director to John Sturges on JOE KIDD and to Eastwood on HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES. (Later he did EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE.) It doesn't look as artful as the other two but I don't think it's crappy or anything. The city looks good, there are lots of cool shots of Eastwood from inside moving cars, it all kicks off in a dynamic way with a dude driving fast who you assume is going to be some cool guy but then when he asks a young female hitchhiker where she's going she says "nowhere with you, numb nuts" and the story follows her instead of the dude. Incidentally there are tight jeans butt shots for everybody - one of her, one of the male counterpart on her team. So Fargo knows what he's doing.
The great Lalo Schifrin is no longer the composer, but they found the right replacement: Jerry Fielding (THE OUTFIT, BRING ME THE HEAD OF JERRY GARCIA). The theme is bold with a hint of Schifrin, but the overall feel of the score is more jazzy. I especially like the foot chase over buildings and fire escapes. It would feel so cliche if they used wah wahs and shit but having big band jazz and a scorching electric piano solo in the background gives the scene an original feel.
So it's not the first one, and it's not the second one, but I don't care what anybody says, I think it's a worthy third one. There are so many good touches and funny parts. There's a scene in this one where Harry goes into a brothel looking for a certain call girl to question, and his way of not looking like a cop is to wear a Giants hat. It's a funny idea because the hair is such an important part of Dirty Harry as an icon, so you gotta contain the hair to make him seem less superhuman. If you look back at MAGNUM FORCE and the scene where he pretends to be a pilot they use the same technique. Dirty Harry undercover wearing funny hat = automatic laugh.
Also the ending to this one is perfect. I never bought the idea of the city being willing to pay the ransom for the kidnapped mayor, it seems like a pretty forced way to prove that the authorities are sissies and Harry isn't. But if you're gonna go with that then what better way to end it than to have the helicopters arrive with the money as Harry is walking away, having rescued the mayor and blown up the villains already? The authorities are clueless and are speaking over loudspeakers to the dead terrorists about where they're gonna put the money. This is funny-ironic and totally badass, but Fielding's music is downbeat like the original DIRTY HARRY so it leaves you with kind of a sad feeling about this allegedly broken system.
6/25/08
ENTER THE DRAGONBREAKING NEWS: ENTER THE DRAGON is a classic and it's mainly because of Bruce Lee's performance. More on this story as it develops.
Okay maybe that's old news. He'd been trying for years to become a superstar in the US (he only went back to hong kong after being dissed one too many times by the white man). So it was a big deal for him to have his big american co-production. And in the movie he has so much screen presence that they had to build a special type of camera to film him, after going through six different regular cameras that broke because of his power.
Actually that's complete bullshit, I just made that up. That woulda been cool though. Anyway anything you need to know about why Bruce Lee is such an icon is in this movie: the arrogant persona (his character is actually kind of a dick), the perfect physique, the powerful moves, the cool nunchucks, the occasional philosophy, the greatest theme song of all time (thank you Lalo Schifrin). But everybody knows that. I'm not telling you anything you don't know if I talk about that. So let's give some credit to the rest of the movie. For example, co-star John Saxon.
Now right now I gotta apologize to John Saxon. More than once in other reviews I used him as an example of a certain type of action direction. I said that in this movie, they pulled the camera back to show everything Bruce was doing, and pushed it in to hide what John was not doing. Maybe I imagined it, maybe it just looks that way on the pan and scan tv version. But seeing the widescreen version I see that John Saxon (or stunt double) does do some good kicks and punches and crap. What I said was true to a certain extent but not as bad as I remembered it. And most of all I should acknowledge that Mr. Saxon did fine and apparently has a blackbelt in karate even though he was hired for his acting, which he has a brown belt in.
Even not counting Bruce there's a real good cast. Sammo Hung is in there (fighting Bruce in the opening scene and doing amazing fat man handsprings), Bolo "Chinese Hercules" Yeung is in there as the imaginatively named henchman character Bolo, and of course you got Jim "Blackbelt Jones" Kelly and John Saxon as Bruce's fellow good guy competitors. Jim and John both get flashbacks to explain why they're on this island, and that makes me root for them. John owes a bunch of money to some mafia types, he's only got 63 bucks in the bank and he needs to win the competition to get the money. Jim was about to go anyway but some fuckin pigs started harassing him, so he beat the shit out of them and stole their car. So it's probaly best he's on an island somewhere for a while. (Although he ends up staying there longer than you would wish. Spoiler.)
Bruce tops them all though because he has a landmark three motives for this movie. I can't think of another kung fu movie that has to give three different motives. #1, he is sent on a mission to restore the honor of the Shaolin Temple, because this former shaolin monk Han is going around being an asshole, giving the Temple a bad name. #2, some british dudes want to send him there on a secret agent type mission to prove that Han is responsible for all these girls who keep turning up dead. It seems like Bruce lucked out getting sent on a secret agent mission to do something he was about to do anyway. And then he finds out #3, Han's henchmen killed his sister. Or at least cornered her so she killed herself.
At the beginning we see that Bruce is from Shaolin, which I figure means he's a monk. But he doesn't seem like a monk because he wears a suit and tie sometimes, he goes on secret agent missions, he suggests killing the villain with a gun, and he even gambles. (It's cool gambling though, he wins a hundred bucks on a praying mantis fight.) In comparison to Han though, he's pretty straight laced. That fucker is no monk. He has a self sufficient island fortress with its own harem, heroin production plant, grape-feeding, and more. He not only wears a suit like Bruce does, he also has a collection of metal prosthetic hands. Some are like regular hands but one of them has fur on it and another one is like a bird talon. And one like Wolverine from the x-man movies. I figure if he was a monk he wouldn't even get one prosthetic hand because you're supposed to be humble and not own stuff, are you? But definitely not a variety of styles.
The writer of the movie (some gwilo named Michael Allin who later wrote TRUCK TURNER) admits he didn't know shit about martial arts or kung fu movies, but that helps I think because it's weird seeing a kung fu movie that thinks it's supposed to be a James Bond or a Flint movie. You got this crazy island and a weird villain ("straight out of a comic book" says Jim Kelly) and a bunch of deadly killer babes and a gimmicky end scene. Bruce sneaks around a secret fortress at night, but he's so good at it that he gets bored and yawns. This movie also takes the one-man-against-many cliche to the highest possible level. There is literally dozens of dudes swarming down the hallway toward Bruce and for him dispatching them is about as hard as swatting a bunch of ping pong balls with a tennis racket.
I mentioned Flint a minute ago and that reminds me, James Coburn was one of Bruce Lee's celebrity students. He tried to help Bruce develop american projects like KUNG FU and the one that became CIRCLE OF IRON. There's a documentary on the ENTER THE DRAGON dvd that has footage from Bruce's funeral here in Seattle. And James Coburn and Steve McQueen were two of the pallbearers. Can you imagine that? James Coburn and Steven McQueen were both learning kung fu from this guy. Of course it's a real bummer he had such a young death by misadventure but especially if you figure he coulda made a kung fu movie with him, Coburn and Steve McfuckingQueen. The Great Escape 2, maybe.
One of these days I'm gonna do a thorough study of the works of Robert Clouse. This guy directed all across the spectrum of martial arts because he did everything from this to BLACKBELT JONES to GYMKATA and CHINA O'BRIEN. Also THE BIG BRAWL with Jackie Chan which alot of people say is bad but I liked it years ago. Partly due to Lalo Schifrin's funky theme song though.
In the end though I gotta wonder, what the fuck happened to John Saxon's character, Roper? He gives Bruce a thumbs up but here he is with no tournament and no money. Did he get killed when he came back? Did he just stay on the island? Maybe he stole some of Han's artifacts, sold them on '70s ebay, and paid the guys back. I don't know but I hope some day they make a sequel to explain it. Dear America, we plan to make a sequel to Enter the Dragon, but since Bruce Lee is dead it will be only about John Saxon's character. Thank you for your understanding. It is mainly for Vern, he requested this. Your friend, international co-production. I'm sure that would go over well.
ENTER THE NINJA
This week I followed an anonymous tip to take a look at an individual name Sho Kosugi. This guy starred in a series of ninja movies and was said to be a missing link in my badass studies to date. I looked him up and found that ENTER THE NINJA is also known as NINJA 1 because it begins a series, so I started with that.
The movie opens promisingly with the badass in question, Mr. Sho Kosugi, in full ninja uniform, standing in front of a black void, demonstrating every weapon he knows. Nunchakas, throwing stars, arrows, daggers, grappling hook, blow gun. You name it, he spins it around or shoots it. The guy is obviously good and it's kind of cool how he is basically doing show and tell for you throughout the opening credits. It might as well be some Ninja How-To video. But then all the sudden a ninja in all white flies onto the screen and "kicks" him in the head (although it doesn't look like he makes contact at all).
Then we go into the opening scene, where this White Ninja fights Sho Kosugi. I call him White Ninja because not only is he wearing all white, but you can tell by his eyes that he's a white man. White Ninja faces Sho Kosugi and his men (red ninjas), who chase him through the woods, over a waterfall, into a temple where he bows to an old man and then chops off his head.
Up to this point there is no dialogue, no explanation. But I think it's pretty clear what's going on here. White Ninja is mad because everybody makes fun of him for being White Ninja. Nothing against us white men, but we are not the best ninjas, in my opinion. It's just not one of the things we're good at. So to shame him for his whiteness the other ninjas call him White Ninja and force him to wear an all white ninja outfit. This is clearly a mocking gesture because why the hell would you wear a white ninja outfit unless you were going to assassinate somebody in the snow, or in DMX's all white apartment from BELLY? Otherwise you stick out like a sore thumb, as demonstrated when he runs through the trees. There's a reason why polar bears live in the snow and brown bears live in the woods, but ninja logic doesn't follow nature, I guess. It is anti-nature. My guess is they tricked him and told him that wearing all white means you're the most powerful ninja. And he fell for it.
To be fair, an argument could be made for an all white ninja outfit being a "Just Don't Give a Fuck" type of boastful ninja maneuver. As if to say I will wear an all white outfit and still disappear into the shadows. Maybe the rank of White Ninja is the second highest ninja honor behind Reflective Fluorescent Orange Ninja. Well, if so this White Ninja clearly didn't earn that honor. He's good for a white man, but as far as we can see he couldn't even do 1/8 the shit Sho Kosugi did in his show and tell. This guy is a punk. Then he chops off an old man's head.
Well don't worry, turns out it's all fake, it's a trial for Ninja School. A final exam to prove that he's a master of ninjitsu. Sho Kosugi's character Hasegawa (namesake of former Seattle Mariner Shigatosi Hasegawa) though doesn't agree that the white man should get this honor and he's real pissed. And it's no wonder, when White Ninja takes his mask off he turns out to be the Italian actor Franco Nero. Despite his '70s white-karate style mustache, Franco Nero is not a martial artist or a master of ninjitsu, no matter what he may tell you. He knows less martial arts than Dolemite or Billy Jack in the first two BILLY JACK movies (including BORN LOSERS).
Now unmasked and openly mustached, White Civilian Ninja leaves Japan and goes to Manila. An old war buddy named Frank sent for help because some assholes are trying to squeeze him out of his property. So most of the movie is about Nero without his ninja outfit acting as a one man army warding off the various thugs that come after his buddy.You can't really take the movie very seriously because the casting is so phony. Why do so many movies take that route of wanting to show some culture, but only by having a white guy infiltrate that culture? Some day there will be AMERICAN SUMO starring James Gandolfini and THE LAST GEISHA starring Sandra Bullock. Anyway, at the end Nero has to face Sho Kosugi in a ninja duel and it's just ridiculous. It's like if Ben Affleck had to play a muay thai boxer who competes with Tony Jaa. And then not only would the plot call for Ben Affleck to win the duel, but Tony Jaa would announce that Affleck had beat him with honor and would ask him to cut off his head. I don't buy that from Ben Affleck and I don't buy it from Franco Nero. (Although Franco could take Ben, even now.)
That casting guarantees that the movie is mostly good for laughs, but director Menahem Golan (of the notorious Cannon Group, also directed DELTA FORCE) delivers all kinds of fun badass moments. There's a good scene where Frank goes to talk with one of the guys who's after his property. While he's coming into the mansion White Ninja sneaks around (still not in ninja outfit) killing or knocking out all the security guys. Later, the bad guy signals for his security. Only six guys come out, he gets embarrassed and has to figure out what happened to the other 14. Then White Ninja and Frank only have to take on the remaining six.
After the big fight they go to the bar, where Frank reveals that lately he can't get it up for his wife Mary Ann (Susan George). It's kind of weird because okay, some guys are trying to steal your property, in that case you can call on the skills of a ninja. But now you're telling him you can't get it up? I don't see how he can hel-- oh. Wait a minute.
Indeed, Mary Ann uses her own amateur ninja skills to sneak into White Ninja's bed. So you see, this really is a guy who travels around the world helping people.
Eventually the bad guys stop fucking around, they find out that White Ninja is a ninja so they hire their own, Hasegawa. Hasegawa kills Frank and kidnaps Mary Ann. White Ninja paces around the ranch yelling "Mary Ann! Mary Ann!" and then suddenly it cuts to him with the full ninja outfit armed with every sword, bow, blow gun, ninja star and smoke bomb he can carry. This is a hilarious cut because he hasn't had the ninja outfit since the first scene in the movie. That's the kind of badass momentum I like. Golan knows there is no need for the dramatic suiting up scene. You kidnap a woman, you gotta deal with a fuckin NINJA. In costume. That's just what happens.
Now, on this particular mission of revenge, it turns out that the White Ninja costume really is useful. He sneaks into the villain's building, which is lightly colored and lit naturally by sunlight. The white costume is more camouflaged than traditional black would've been. Plus, all the bad guys wear white suits, so if you saw White Ninja out of the corner of your eye you might think he works there. White Ninja needs that extra advantage because he is Nero, not a stunt double, and he's not very graceful.
The bad guy isn't there, but his right hand man tells White Ninja "Mr. Venarius has been expecting you." They get in the car and drive to the cockfighting pit where, for some reason, Mr. Venarius is waiting. Even though everybody knows White Ninja's name and what he looks like, he rides in the car wearing the full ninja costume and mask, which is awesome. Right hand man gets out of the car to tell Venarius they've arrived, and when he goes back to the car White Ninja is gone and all the security guys are piled up dead everywhere. Nero is not very convincing doing ninja moves on screen, but off screen - perfect. Good job, White Ninja.
It may be disrespectful for me to call this guy White Ninja (his name is actually Cole.) But Venarius knows his name too, and he just calls him "Ninja." At least I specify which ninja I'm talking about. Later there are smoke bombs, the Right Hand Man gets an arrow through his right hand, and then White Ninja fights Hasegawa and wins way too easy.
The last scene is pretty funny. Nero (back in his civilian persona) is talking to somebody about what he'll do next, and he implies that he might be doing some more ninja murders. Then he looks at the camera and actually winks, and it freezes. You always gotta appreciate a Wink and Freeze Ending, but this one's especially funny since there is a whole series of NINJA movies, but Nero isn't in the other ones. Sho Kosugi is.
ENTER THE NINJA is no ENTER THE DRAGON, and not a very good showcase for Sho Kosugi. He seems good but they don't show enough to make a proper judgment of his level of badassness. Still, it's a good time, I recommend it.
REVENGE OF THE NINJA
(aka NINJA II)REVENGE OF THE NINJA isn't connected to the story of ENTER THE NINJA. Franco Nero's White Ninja character is nowhere to be seen, defying the promise of his final freeze-frame wink. Which is bullshit, man. If you're gonna wink - especially if you're gonna freeze-frame wink - you better fuckin mean it.
However, Sho Kosugi (who died in part 1) is reborn as a different character, a collector of Japanese antique dolls whose family is killed by ninjas. His white friend convinces him to take his son and mom to AMerica to open a gallery for his dolls. And I don't think I need to point out that any time in an action or fighting movie where you are discussing the hero's doll collection you are on some paper thin ice. But I'll be charitable and accept this as a fulfillment of the Theory of Badass Juxtaposition.What Sho doesn't know is his white friend is an asshole and set the whole thing up so he could smuggle heroin in the dolls. Which seems like a lot of trouble to go through, but I can understand if he's uncomfortable with the traditional balloons up the butthole business model. He probaly saw MARIA FULL OF GRACE like I did. Anyway, Sho's son - played by his real son, Kane Kosugi - is a little badass. There's a funny scene where he gets picked on by bullies who could be the junior members of a gang in a Michael Jackson video. And of course he deals with them ninja style.
Little Kane is in that classic predicament: he's trained in ninjitsu fighting and swords but he isn't allowed to use it. It's tradition to practice, but the family doesn't believe in violence, he's told. That's one of the classic scenarios, the Ticking Time Bomb of Badass.
Sho also has a white assistant lady who takes care of Kane and tries to seduce Sho by training with no pants on. But it doesn't work. Later it turns out she's in on the heroin deal, and still later it turns out she's actually nice, but she's hypnotized.
In this one of course Sho is the hero, and the villain is the heroin smuggler, a Caucasian ninja. So it's a nice reversal of Part 1. This guy doesn't wear a white ninja outfit like White Ninja. He wears orthodox black with a silver demon mask to distinguish him from Sho. So I call him White Devil Ninja.
The fights are pretty cool, with lots of the ol' ninja shit that ninjas are known to get up to. Marbles in a hall so you fall and land on tacks. Tacks in the face. Grappling hook between skyscrapers. Duel on top of skyscrapers.
It's a much more respectable ninja movie than part 1, with more convincing martial arts. But the badass beats aren't quite as solid and the other one is so much more silly that it's more fun to watch. This one could've used a freeze-frame wink, in other words.
EQUILIBRIUMWhen this picture first showed up a ways back I wrote it off, just like any reasonable individual would. I wouldn't give EQUILIBRIUM the time of day. Or watch it. I figured it was a poor man's MATRIX. Nothing against the poor, we are good people. I'm just saying a poor man can't make the real matrix, only a fake one starring Jim Belushi and Coolio. Admittedly, this one stars Christian Bale and Taye Diggs, so it's not that poor. Still, I really wasn't too curious to see the movie, the only thing I was curious about was how poor Christian American Psycho Bale wound up trading his unending integrity for a leather coat and a pair of pistols. But the picture has stuck around sort of, kept alive by a small but dedicated cult following. Which I guess is the definition of a cult following, small but dedicated. Man, let's just move on to the next paragraph.
Point is, I've seen a whole lot of weirdos on the internet calling the director Kurt Wimmer a genius who reinvented action and why can't Kurt Wimmer direct X-Men 3 and Mission Impossible 3 and Brown Bunny 2 and etc. Actually it was probaly just one guy but it seemed like more than one at the time. So all the sudden it turned out I was curious just what the hell this EQUILIBRIUM was all about. Incidentally, I don't know if you know this but curiosity is the number one suspect in the murder of the cat. Just a little aside there.
Well I can sort of understand why these guys are in love with EQUILIBRIUM. Sort of. It's involving enough, it's got a couple original spins on alot of shit you've seen before. But mainly it's got Christian Bale. This guy is Batman by the way, you would recognize him. But he doesn't wear a cape in this one though, this was before.
Christian Bale plays an elite government enforcer in a dystopian future, A WORLD WHERE FEELINGS ARE AGAINST THE LAW. It seems that ONLY ONE MAN - and I'm talking about Christian Bale here - well, you've heard narration before, you can probaly figure out what the one man will do in the world where etc. But first of all he's on the wrong side. His job is to go around burning art (in fact he burns the Mona Lisa, which is a pretty fuckin big notch in the belt for a guy with the job of burning art, so way to go on that one Christian Bale, you deserve a promotion) and executing people for listening to records or reading book of Yeats poetry. My poems are not mentioned. Everybody looks grim all the time and wears black, and the insdes of buildings and even car interiors are white. You know, like THX-1138, or DMX's house in BELLY. This is one of them futures where everybody has to take drugs and there's big video screens and loudspeakers in public squares where Big Brother, whose name is Father, has to fuckin yap about it all the time, like they don't already know the premise of the world they live in. A world without feelings, love is against the law, our great society blahgety blahgety blah. It looks like a dystopian future that would be created for a car commercial.
Of course, Christian stops taking his drugs, listens to a record and helps the rebels overthrow the fuckin Man. He's good at fighting because he's "GRAMMATON CLERIC JOHN PRESTON," a phrase the director tosses around casually on the commentary track like it captured the popular consciousness and kept it in a little baggie all summer. Little kids running around wearing EQUILIBRIUM pajamas talkin about Grammatron Cleric this and Grammatron Cleric that. E.T. phone home, Luke I'm your father, I'll be back, Grammatron Cleric John Preston.
I don't know why I'm explaining this to you, it's not like you've been living in a cave, but KURT WIMMER'S GRAMMATON CLERIC is a specially trained Mona-Lisa-burner who does GUN-KATA, a special type of karate where you hold two guns and every time you do a karate WHOOSH or WHAP you also fire off a couple shots. Also the guns have little spikes that pop out of the handles so you can hit people with them. And there's this whole thing about how they memorize the statistical probability of each gun move for maximum accuracy in busting caps in asses. That part of the concept seems about 99% bullshit to me, but I am no statistician. Anyway, this gun version of gymkata is a silly idea but I thought it worked, it made for an interesting new take on matrixy action. And no matrixy camera shots, by the way. That helped.
One problem with the action, they gotta play dance music every time GRAMMATON CLERIC JOHN PRESTON is gonna fight. Isn't it time we moved on from that one? I want to see karate with a jazz score. Or maybe some old country. Willie Nelson's "crazy" is a pretty song, isn't it? How bout a piano version of "I Get a Kick Out of You." I always figured that would make a good end credits song on a KICKBOXER sequel. At least try something else besides the ol' dance music is what I'm saying.
It's hard not to get involved in a movie like this, because Christian Bale is real good as always, and he gets to kick people and shoot guns and at the end he puts on an all white suit for the final battle. (Statistics prove that wearing a white suit improves the probability of dodging bullets, maybe. I don't know, you'd have to ask a GRAMMATON CLERIC.) And as matrixy as the ending is, it's alays a thrill to see the revolution, the masses actually throwing down, revolting against the system, throwing shit at the riot police. Little kids in class, smiling because they hear the drug factories exploding across town. I mean you gotta enjoy a movie like that. It's an easy ball to hit.
BUT. But there's a big but. The but is I couldn't really cotton to the basic science fictional premise here. And that made it a little hard to swallow. I'm not talking about the plausibility, although you could pick at that. It's fun to pick at scabs. But my trouble is, why does this Kurt Wimmer imagine a dark future where feelings are against the law? I listened to some of his commentary track to try to understand where he was coming from, but I'm still in the dark. He says 1984 is about socialism, and Fahrenheit 451 is about McCarthyism, but Equilibrium is about, um, "numbness."
Come on man, NUMBNESS? 1984 is still relevant today, Orwell comes up on pretty much a daily basis because the problems he was writing about, the future he was extrapolating, that shit is as relevant as ever now. The memory hole, war is peace, Department of Peace, 3+2+4, all that shit. Orwell saw all that and what Kurt Wimmer sees is... fucking numbness?
That's the best you can do, numb nuts? Come on.He brings up psychiatric drugs, "oversaturation of media" and even the MPAA. You know, things I'd whine about too, but how the fuck do you leap from that to A WORLD WHERE FEELINGS ARE AGAINST THE LAW? People have been freaking out about Elvis's hips since before Elvis was born, now you think they're gonna outlaw poetry and burn the Mona Lisa because they think it causes feelings and feelings causes wars?
I mean I know it's not meant to be taken 100% literally, but it seems like a half assed premise to me. I couldn't shake the feeling that the guy was into the style of sci-fi stories with a message, but forgot his message at home and didn't have time to go back and get it. I just never felt a resonance, like this is a logical extention of problems we have today. I don't think this type of future story has to seem like it might really happen, but come on. There is NO FUCKING WAY this world ever happens, either literally or metaphorically. It doesn't even make sense.
And the tyrannical government in this one destroys art not to control the people, but to STOP WAR. And it seems like it actually worked. Man, don't you wish you could even imagine a future where the biggest problem is the leaders trying to STOP WAR? And the leaders really believe what they're telling us! We can't worry about that, we don't have that luxury.
EQUILIBRIUM has the ring of familiarity, because we've seen movies like that. But it doesn't have the ring of truth. It's too bad because you can live with a stupid sci-fi movie, but it's harder to give a pass to a stupid sci-fi movie that thinks it's Albert Einstein.
Nice try, good action, but no dice.
NOTE: I thought the commentary track might improve my appreciation of the movie, but that plan backfired. The guy seems like kind of a jackass. First he tries to be open about the movie being similar to other sci-fi movies, but then he spends half the thing explaining why actually this part is not taken from Clockwork Orange, and actually this part is not taken from the Matrix, and etc. Oh well. I still plan to check out Wimmer's directorial debut though, a Brian Bosworth movie originally titled ONE TOUGH BASTARD. I'm not seeing it for Wimmer though, I'm seeing it 25% for the Boz and 75% for the title. Ask any GRAMMATON CLERIC they will draw you a chart.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK vs. ESCAPE FROM L.A.
Recently some joker spread a phony story on the internet about how Kurt Russell had tricked Paramount into greenlighting ESCAPE FROM EARTH, a third Snake Plissken movie, as part of a three picture deal. I knew it was too good to be true, but I also know that Russell always says Snake is his favorite character he's ever played, and he clearly loves working with John Carpenter. Carpenter could use a return to the big screen, and I wouldn't be surprised if after Tarantino's DEATH PROOF comes out next year (starring Kurt Russell as a killer stuntman and scored by Carpenter) there is a rise in popularity and nostalgia for the classic Kurt Russell badass roles. I think it would actually be smart to make a new Plissken movie right now as long as it wasn't a huge budget and it wasn't a rehash of the other two. So, their loss I guess. And the world's.
Of course, reading this horse shit got ME nostalgic for the old John Carpenter badass movies, so I watched THEY LIVE again, because that's my favorite (sorry Kurt). And then I did something I never did before, I watched ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ESCAPE FROM L.A. in a row, to get a better comparison. It's sort of like one of those puzzles where there's two similar drawings and you have to pick out what's different. Hey, wait a minute, that baseball player is holding an ear of corn instead of a bat and shit like that. I don't know if you've ever been to a doctor's office, but they have Highlights there sometimes.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK is of course a classic. It's a good dark-future concept, the idea of Manhattan being turned into a maximum security prison where the country's most notorious outlaws are walled in and are free to live or fight as they please (they have prisons kind of like that in some countries, see the movie CARANDIRU for example). I'm not sure it's meant as a comment on the "hard on crime" poses politicians took in the '80s, but there is something beautifully horrible about the Statue of Liberty being turned into the lookout tower and security headquarters of the world's biggest prison. Poetic injustice.
The low budget and the now-dated idea of futuristic computer technology help to create the cool, gloomy vibe of the movie. Almost the whole thing takes place at night, and the apocalyptic, burnt up city streets match pretty well with the fake but cool looking model shots of the city. All the maniac WARRIORS and ROAD WARRIOR types look right at home in this world, as does Isaac Hayes as the A-#1 Duke of New York. And it's all glued together by yet another classic John Carpenter keyboard score with a catchy theme song and lots of atmospheric low droning bass vibrations. It's a very dark and cynical feel only occasionally pierced by the cab driver played by Ernest Borgnine, who likes to play the American Bandstand theme song from his tape deck.
Just as great as this world is the concept of the story: the president (Donald Pleasance) has crash-landed in Manhattan, and he has in his possession an audio tape that is needed to stop a world war. The criminals inside have the president hostage and will kill him if the police come close. So they decide that the only way to save the world is to send a criminal - legendary war hero turned infamous bank robber Snake Plissken. And to secure Snake's cooperation they inject him with an explosive capsule that they will only neutralize once he's returned with the president and the tape.
Still, none of this would work that well if you didn't have a great, charismatic anti-hero badass at the center. Luckily, Snake is just that. Russell is clearly copying Clint's quiet voice and stoic presence, but he does it well. And his look (eyepatch, long hair, scowl, sleeveless black shirt) is as iconic as just about any character in the history of badass cinema. You barely see or hear from him in the first 15 minutes of the movie, but when they give him his mission his "I don't give a fuck" attitude is established quickly. My favorite bit is when they start talking to him about the president and he asks, "The president of what?"
You also got a great supporting cast. Of course there's Hayes and Borgnine, and COCKFIGHTER's Harry Dean Stanton as Brain. But most of all there's Lee Van God Damn Cleef as the government asshole in charge of Snake's mission.
As great as this movie is, I have to admit that it is lacking a small little something. It has the characters, it has the story, it definitely has the atmosphere. But to me it doesn't quite have the slow but powerful drive of the best Carpenter movies. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13, THE THING, HALLOWEEN, and yes, even THEY LIVE... these are movies that pull you along with the slow, determined rhythm of a heartbeat, and imperceptibly stack on the tension a little at a time as they march toward the climax. To me, no matter how many times I watch it, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK doesn't quite have that. It makes me a little sleepy after a while. I'm not trying to diminish the legend or anything. I love this movie. I just have to admit that it's not perfect.
Now, I'm gonna catch hell for this, but I gotta be honest. I don't think ESCAPE FROM L.A. has that problem as much. In that one, the action escalates until it gets ridiculous, then Snake jumps from a flaming helicopter to have his ultimate showdown with the authorities and give the whole world the middle finger. A very satisfying ending, and the one I always point to when I get pissed off thinking about how Vin Diesel sold out to the government at the end of XXX and instead of turning the tables on them just took their money and hung out on a beach. Snake would rather cut off his own dick than do something like that.
This sequel definitely has other problems though. I can partly understand why it has such a bad reputation. The main thing is that it's more of a remake than a sequel. They take the template of the first movie but mix things around to fit the culture and the landmarks of Los Angeles. Snake gets caught again, he's given a virus again, he's sent on a mission again. He comes in on a submarine instead of a glider, but his closeup inside the cockpit looks almost the same. Instead of Borgnine's taxi driver as his guide and transportation he has Steve Buscemi as Maps To the Stars Eddie. Instead of facing the Duke of New York, who has chandeliers on his car, he fights Cuervo Jones, who has dollheads and a disco ball on his car. Instead of a tape he has to get a disc, and he pulls a switch again. He even uses some of the same lines ("Call me Snake") and instead of "I thought you were dead" everybody tells him "I thought you were taller." Instead of fake looking models there's fake looking CGI (which is not as charming).
The best and most misunderstood remake element is what they chose to do as the L.A. version of gladiatorial combat. In the first one, Snake is forced into the ring to fight a huge, scary looking wrestler, and he ends up killing him with a wooden plank with nails in it. In ESCAPE FROM L.A. it looks like the same thing is going to happen, but they lead him through all the gladiatorial fighting and into a fenced off basketball court. Instead of fighting a guy he has to fight the shot clock. He has to make ten points going from hoop to hoop, but if he misses a shot or fails the ten second shot clock then they'll execute him.
Plus, he's getting tired and dizzy from the Plutonium-7 virus he's been injected with. But of course, Snake turns out to be really good at basketball, and he pulls it off. Who would've ever guessed Snake Plissken was good at basketball? This is not something I ever considered. I love this scene.
There are other, more Californian encounters. Peter Fonda plays a surfer always looking to ride tsunami waves, and this leads to a hilariously ridiculous action sequence where Snake jumps from a surfboard onto a car. There's also a little run-in with some OMEGA MAN type hooded freaks who kidnap Snake and bring him to Bruce Campbell as "the surgeon general of Beverly Hills" who needs fresh parts for vanity transplants. And the climactic battle (involving a phony looking hang glider battle) takes place at Happy Kingdom By the Sea, formerly Disneyland. (Apparently Anaheim is included in Los Angeles Island.)
So it's a rehash and it's a little more silly and absurd than the original, and that's what people hate. But I think this movie is really underrated. The most important aspect of both movies is Snake Plissken, and I think he's improved with age. He looks tougher, he gets to fight alot more, he gets to do more stunts, and he shows his amoral side even more. When he's given a mission by the president at the beginning, he doesn't even know who the guy is, then when he finds out he tries to strangle him. When he's about to leave on the submarine he asks the agents in charge of him if they will be administering the antidote to him when he gets back, and when they say no he immediately tries to gun them down. He has a great scene where he's surrounded by gunmen and he offers to "give you assholes a chance." Then he beats them by cheating. I can't get enough of this character. I wish he would come back.Of course, Carpenter hasn't made a theatrical movie since the bummer of GHOSTS OF MARS in 2001, he's only done a little bit of TV. My internet pals Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan wrote two episodes of the cable anthology series MASTERS OF HORROR that were directed by Mr. Carpenter. I actually thought their "Cigarette Burns" was pretty good for TV, with a fun concept and some crazy fucked up shit (my favorite part is when Udo Kier casually reveals that he has a weird albino angel boy with its wings cut off chained up in his living room, and he keeps it on a turntable so he can properly display it to people. You don't see that shit on CRIBS). But I've heard nothing but bad things about the series in general. Some people like "Homecoming," the Joe Dante one where the restless dead Iraq veterans come back as zombies and instead of eating brains they demand the right to vote. Of course I like that concept, but I thought the execution was corny and didn't ring true.
So it might be premature to be expanding on that type of Masters-of-You-Name-It format, but still... why not a MASTERS OF BADASS? We team the great badasses, new and old, with directors of action classics as well as visionaries who maybe wouldn't normally work in action. And with the low budget and hour long format they will be more willing to experiment. Of course you gotta have Seagal, Van Damme, Stallone, Bruce, Chow Yun Fat, Wesley Snipes, Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu, maybe dig up Bruce Li if he's still alive. You could try for Clint. And of course Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Pam Grier. Roddy Piper. You could ask Jet, Jackie, Tony Jaa. Brian Bosworth if you need a slot to fill.
For directors you gotta get John McTiernan, John Woo, maybe Andrew Davis, Michael Winner, Mike Hodges, Takeshi Kitano, John Flynn, Craig Baxley. You could ask Tarantino and Eastwood, might as well try.
But most of all you gotta have a John Carpenter/Kurt Russell episode. Maybe you don't trust the tv anthology format, maybe you think Carpenter lost it because of GHOSTS OF MARS, maybe you're one of those weirdos in the majority who don't like VAMPIRES. But you'd still watch the Russell/Carpenter reunion, right? Come on pay cable, let's do this.
E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL: THE SPECIAL EDITION: FOR THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY: THE MOVIE
This is one of those things where they take an old movie that was very popular, and then they change it, because they think the only way anybody would want to see a movie they loved on the big screen again would be if somebody just completely fucked with it and tried to ruin it. They did the same thing with the Star Trek pictures, and the exorcist (see below) and Night of the Living Dead on video (I'm still staying away from that one).
This goes into the Star Trek category where the individual who made it (Steve Spielberg) gets old, forgets everything that made him vital when he was young, and decides to change things, but claims it's actually perfectionism. The most infamous thing here is that he wanted no guns in the movie at all. Which is kind of weird for a movie where the main characters get chased by a mob of cops. So there they are, a bunch of fuckin cops and government spooks, running around all holding a walkie talkie with their trigger fingers poised to, I don't know, hit the little beeper button that you use for Morse code.
What they didn't pussy out on was the language, because there is a bit of cussing from out of babe's mouths and shit. The famous one is the little boy, Elliot, yells "SHUT UP, PENIS BREATH!" to his brother. Congratulations to Steve Spielberg for leaving that in, although I would have liked him to update it to the more common "COCKSUCKER!"
I don't know what it is about the mentality of these hollywood people that they think something that is already universally loved by parents and children needs to be toned down for their sensibilities. According to my Nerd Issues Correspondent, the same thing was done with the Henry Porter movie. They followed the book very faithfully on a scene by scene basis, but not in its spirit. They removed almost all references to rule breaking and illegalities (like in the book, I guess owning a dragon was a crime, in the movie owning a dragon was really cute). They also took out a joke about a kid being nailed real hard in the face, then cheering for Henry while blood sprays out of his nose.
I mean what are they thinking - ten billion kids read these books obsessively, all parents who are not some kind of christian nut love the books and are so happy to have something to capture the imagination of their little crumb crushers, etc. etc. BUT, we gotta tone it down for the children. Same thing with E.T. The kids all loved it, the parents cried - they'll never see it again unless we clean it up! I'm surprised they didn't put pants on the little fucker.
To be honest though all that shit wasn't that distracting. I never memorized the movie anyway, I probaly wouldn'ta noticed if I hadn't read about it. But touching up the effects using computers was just a bad idea. The effects in the movie ALREADY LOOKED REAL. When you see the new shit, you see what is obviously computer animation. What's the difference? It doesn't look more real, it doesn't look like it should be there. It's just a waste of money and time for the haitan refugees they have animating in the ilm sweatshops.
Those were great effects before. The only parts that look phoney are the parts they left in, where E.T. is a midget (or emperor penguin?) in a rubber suit instead of a puppet, and he looks really bloated. All the stuff they changed was the stuff that already looked perfect. Why would you want to take out such great effects just to make something look more modern, and not as good? Would you do that to King Kong, you hollywood fuckwipes?
I got an idea for you little shits. Why don't you make a special edition of PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. Use digital technology to fix those little imperfections that they didn't have the money or technology to avoid. Make it stop switching from day to night randomly, to capture Ed Wood's true vision from the time. Make the space ships and aliens really spectacular. Clean up the shots of the cemetery, so the tombstones don't wobble. Create a Final Fantasy style computer double of Bela Lugosi and dig up Mr. Wood's handwritten notes to piece together the performance he might have given had he not passed away.Finally, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE can be seen the way it was meant to be seen: the way it never was!
Otherwise the E.T. movie is pretty okay. It's about this little kid that finds a weird alien dude in his yard. He keeps it as his dog and then it drinks beer. Later they have some kind of weird psychical connection, as if they were twins. So the boy kisses Erika Eleniak, and lets the frogs go. Then the government sends a bunch of astronauts to his house, the alien dies and comes back to the life, and ascends to the sky. This story is very similar to the New Testament as well as the end of Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.
At the end the boy's dog Harvey almost runs onto the spaceship. I thought that woulda been a pretty good ending.
Also I mean what would happen? Have you ever tried to take a dog on a car ride before? I mean Harvey probaly woulda gone ape shit and started shitting all over the place. And that was not a big spaceship. Can you imagine how far they probaly had to fly? And there'd be this dog shit in there the whole time. Or who knows even if he didn't shit all over the place, that dog could just start trying to eat the E.T.s or something. I mean they do it to babies sometimes, who knows. I don't think E.T.s carry laser guns. Jesus this shit is just freakin me out man, some dog takin a big bite out of an E.T., and what the fuck are they gonna do about it? Except keep healing each other, and the dog keeps eating them again and again, all the way back to their planet.
Man now that I think about it those E.T.s really lucked out that the dog didn't get on the ship.
Anyway what works in this picture is the kids, they are real little but they're good. Elliot and Gertie act more like real kids than like movie kids. Like when Elliot shows off his toys to E.T., or Gertie says "I don't like his feet." Drew Barrymore is really good and she seems almost the same now. Man Drew Barrymore must be pretty young. I'm gonna feel guilty if I think she's hot next time I watch Charlie's Angels.
That said there is alot of magical shit that doesn't make any damn sense. I mean how come E.T. has to run away from guys that are trying to catch him but when he's trying to impress Elliot he can make bikes fly? It's ridiculous. I believe in the magic of a young boy's dream as much as the next guy but jesus, Spielberg, give us a fuckin break.
Also, with the new computer animated chase at the beginning, E.T. hops like a limber bunny, but at the end when he's gettin back on the ship he still waddles like an elderly penguin. Maybe it's all that beer and candy he's been living off of.
But enough of that review bullshit. The real reason I wanted to Write about this movie was to tell you about this dude that was sitting in front of me at the theater. He kept talking to himself, but then would turn around and shush the kids that were whispering in the back. He would clap during any famous scene in the movie. When the music swelled, he started to wave his arms around pretending that he was conducting. Then he calmed down a little for the sad part and I heard him blowing a wad of snot out. I mean he really had an attachment to E.T., but he hated kids. He perked up for the ending, applauded, loudly hummed along and pretended to conduct the orchestra for the entire end credits, with the exception of a small break to put on his jacket. This is the type of dude you usually see on the bus, but apparently they also like E.T.
Clint Eastwood is Philo Beddoe in...
EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE
Don't you hate it when you and your orangutan are driving somewhere in your pickup truck minding your own business and some fuckin biker assholes pull up and start harassing you about there being an ape? Why can't a man and an ape travel together as equals without getting stared at and made fun of? And also, does someone who wears a viking helmet really have a leg to stand on in making fun of your choice of animal companion? And no wonder those morons put swastikas on everything, going around harassing different races and species.
Well when and if this happens to you you might get fed up and try to chase those fuckers down, possibly steal a street sweeper and tail them until they hop a train, at which point you will at least get to steal their bikes. This is a worthwhile option and one that works out for trucker/mechanic/bareknuckle brawler Philo Beddoe in this movie, but it also begins a war that leads to many fights and the destruction of more than a dozen motorcycles. So just know what you're getting into here is all I'm saying.
EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE has a reputation as a monkey movie, because Philo happens to hang out with the aforementioned orangutan named Clyde. But actually Clyde's heritage is incidental, it's not a movie where Clint has to protect the ape from greedy developers or somebody, or the law tries to take him away and put him in a zoo. This is not the type of movie that Ghost Rider enjoys while sipping his glass of jellybeans. Clyde isn't even the co-lead or sidekick, he's just a member of the ensemble, one of the many quirky touches in a light-hearted comedy about this professional street fighter who thinks he's in love with a traveling country singer (Sondra Locke - not trustworthy).
In fact, Clyde is Philo's badass juxtaposition. We know that Philo makes his living by going around to bars, construction sites and meat packing plants and taking bets to take on their best fighters. But later we learn that he made a big risky bet to win Clyde from a roadside attraction somewhere. Why? He couldn't stand to see him in that little cage. Now he drives him around town, treats him with respect, breaks into the zoo to get him laid, sometimes even confides in him.
Philo's other best friend Orville Boggs is played by Geoffrey Lewis. He's been in other Eastwood movies (and is Juliette Lewis's dad) and he's good at playing rednecks. I like that he still plays that type but not a buffoon - he's mischievious and smarter than he appears and will sometimes play dumb just to fuck with people who actually are dumb, like when the bikers try to scare him with their black widow tattoos and he pretends to really be interested and asks questions. Also he's constantly changing the direction of his baseball cap. Sometimes it's forward, sometimes backward, sometimes crooked. But he always switches it when he's about to do something. You actors might experiment with that one after you get tired of Michael Caine's not-blinking trick.
This is also Clint's tribute to country music and to California's working class and rural types who are usually ignored in movies. You got these small town dudes in their shitty pick up trucks, going to the honky tonk to watch live country music and get in fights, I assumed it was supposed to be somewhere in the midwest or the south until I noticed the City of Los Angeles logo on the street sweeper. Personally I'm all for urban living but Clint was mayor of Carmel out in artichoke country, so this probaly more true to his lifestyle. It's nice to see a movie about places like this but where only some of the bad guys are stereotypical hicks and rednecks.
I'm really curious where this thing came from. It's closer to a straight comedy than most anything else Clint has done. It's a serious fighting and relationships storyline but it has some really broad and cartoonish humor. In some ways it reminded me of THE BLUES BROTHERS, because he keeps encountering these sort of one-dimensional villains who he doesn't pay much attention to but he pisses them off so bad they stalk him cross country. This is a guy who literally gets into a fight over peanuts, and just about everybody he gets into a fight with (the bikers, the police) ends up trying to hunt him down, and failing spectacularly. There are parts of the movie that feel pretty down to earth, but you're more likely to remember the scene where the ape crashes a stolen street sweeper. That's something you would not see in a DIRTY HARRY movie. (I haven't seen MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL or CHANGELING yet, maybe it happens in one of those.)
You know, come to think of it municipal vehicles are often used for unethical purposes in this one, for example during one of the many confrontations with the incompetent Black Widow biker gang Orville suddenly appears in a garbage truck which he uses to scoop up and destroy their bikes. There's a lot of stickin-it-to-em comedy that really has no consequences - he doesn't get brought up on charges for stealing the truck, and they don't kill him for destroying all their bikes. They just look real steamed and we laugh at them.
Also I haven't even mentioned that Ruth Gordon of HAROLD AND MAUDE fame plays Orville's Ma. She's always whining in her Ruth Gordon way that Clyde steals her Oreos, etc. When the Black Widows come to her house looking for Philo she pulls out her shotgun and shoots several of their bikes in that movie sweet spot that causes them to explode.
By the way, there's more than one scene where Clyde gets to flip people off. I think you could argue that orangutans flipping people off is the lowest form of comedy besides the current "spoof" genre. But I won't complain. Also I gotta wonder if the ape in the movie ever caused uncomfortable situations by doing that later on. I would think once he has that in his repertoire he would return to it every now and then.
But it's not all comedy. The fist fights are still cool. Clint apparently had the same trainer as Stallone did for ROCKY. And in a weird way the style they're shot in predicts the less comprehensible fights in the Greengrass BOURNE sequels, because they do alot of handheld close up to the fighters to make you feel like you're right in there about to get punched. But it works pretty good.
So how did Clint get involved in this? It wasn't written for him, because apparently Burt Reynolds almost did it first. The writer is Jeremy Joe Kronsberg, whose only other credit is GOING APE! starring Tony Danza, which he also directed. Does that mean he specializes in ape movies and really intended this to be one? Or did the success of this one mean he could only do another movie if it had apes in it? I don't know. Also, I cannot explain how he also happens to be credited with writing a song in the completely unrelated but totally fuckin badass Parker adaptation THE OUTFIT.
Director James Fargo was Clint's assistant director on several movies including HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and had previously directed THE ENFORCER. Not a great director or anything but his workmanlike chops in combination with Clint's charisma and this odd script make for a hell of an entertainment.2/13/09
ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN
At first I was a little concerned about this sequel. Sondra Locke comes back, and that seems pretty fishy because she totally screwed Philo over in the first one. She was not a good person and nobody in their right mind would think "why didn't those two crazy kids work it out?" So I was a little disappointed in Philo for forgiving her, and maybe in Clint for casting her. It smelled like girlfriend nepotism.
But by the end I realized that this letting-bygones-remain-in-their-original-state-of-being-bygones business is the central theme of the movie and the reason why it's so enjoyable. It's about friendship and bonding and forgiveness, about enemies becoming buddies. When mustache-sporting tough guy William Smith shows up in town and goes jogging with Philo you know right away that he's gotta be the big mafia-sponsored underground fighting opponent Wilson coming to spy on Philo. That's easy to predict. What's not as expected is that they instantly like each other, and it stays that way. They help each other out and there's alot of talk of owing one and being even, but it seems to me that's all a front. There's just no animosity between them, nothing but professional respect and a shared disgust for the people they're working for. I didn't pick up on that at first. I thought Philo would outsmart Wilson and show him up. Maybe he could if he wanted to, but he respects him too much. When they finally do have their fight you're not rooting for one side like you traditionally do in a fight movie. They're not fighting for any kind of grudge or to prove anything, but just out of love for their sport of bareknuckle boxing.
At the end (SPOILER) even the Black Widows, who have been at war with Philo for two movies and have been repeatedly humiliated (as well as had their property destroyed) decide they like Philo so much they endorse him for president. That's the real message of the movie, that anybody can get along, even if they've been punching each other in the face or tricking each other into being covered in tar. In retrospect I realize this is all established in the song over the opening credits, a country duet between Ray Charles and Clint himself (!) called "Beer's To You." The song is about how Ray and Clint are amigos because of all they've been through. They even reminisce about roughing up the locals at a bar in Tucson and then buying them beers all night. That's the philosophy of the movie.
I bet it's nurture, not nature. It's the community he lives in that fosters his Beer's To You attitude. Philo gets in alot of fights but I think he lives in a tolerant part of rural California, considering they let him bring Clyde in the bar. In fact, Clyde comes in on his own sometimes and most people know better than to bother him. And incidentally I want to mention that even regardless of their liberal orangutan policies this town has the world's greatest country dive bar, considering that Fats Domino himself performs there. No cover either.
There's a few things I want to discuss about that jogging scene. First of all, I'm surprised that Clint would run that many miles out into the desert wearing jeans. He should probaly get a track suit or some sweats like Shaft had when he went jogging before he went to Africa. I know Philo has his image to hold up but seriously, it would be more comfortable. Secondly, I like how when Wilson asks him if he can join him Philo says "Hell yes!" If he just said "Yes" that would be normal but for some reason he's being emphatic about it. Is it because he knows who he is and wants to use the opportunity to scope him out? I think it probaly is. Or maybe he has no idea and just likes the idea of jogging with a total stranger. Either one fits the "Beer's To You" philosophy. A random dude with a mustache wants to jog with me? Sounds great! Oh, he's the guy I have to fight who is possibly going to kill me? No problem, let's hit the road!
The director is an old Clint Eastwood buddy, Buddy Van Horn. He's a stuntman who doubled for Clint going back to COOGAN'S BLUFF. He was second unit director for MAGNUM FORCE and a couple other ones, then he directed this, THE DEAD POOL and PINK CADILLAC. I wonder if him and Clint started out as enemies and then became friends? If so it's not mentioned on his IMDB trivia.
I have to say though that Orville gets kind of screwed in this movie. He gets left behind a bunch and they even mention that he feels kind of left out since Philo is back with Lynn. And they don't mention it but Echo has disappeared since the last one and there is no new lady in his life. He's still the trusty sidekick but it seems to me like he doesn't get as much amigo acknowledgment as he ought to. It seems like Clyde and Wilson get all the credit as Philo's cool friends, but Orville is always there for him. Orville would and in fact does take a bullet for him in the line of friendship. So really that "Beer's To You" song I think should be primarily dedicated to Orville while also acknowledging the contributions of "Right Turn" Clyde and "We're Even" Wilson.
ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN is broader and maybe a little sloppier than the first one, but I think I like it even better just because it has such a warm feeling to it. It makes me want to take a friendly swing at it and then help it up and buy it a drink.2/19/09
When I brought THE EXTERMINATOR back to the video store I went to the action section and grabbed part 2. But it was a VHS box and the cover was just a picture of Mario Van Peebles wearing a ROAD WARRIOR type outfit, so for a second I thought I grabbed the wrong one, so then I picked up the other one next to it with the badass painted cover that seemed more right than the Van Peebles one.
But wait a minute, this is THE EXECUTIONER PART 2, not THE EXTERMINATOR 2. Where's THE EXECUTIONER PART 1? I didn't see one. But I decided to rent part 2 anyway.
Turns out there was a good excuse for part 1 not being there: it doesn't exist. This "part 2" really is designed to trick people into thinking it's a sequel to the movie it's a rehash of, THE EXTERMINATOR. It starts in Vietnam, it goes to New York, a Vietnam vet has traumatic flashbacks that cause him to go around murdering criminals (in this one his buddy doesn't get killed), and there's also the cop who tries to catch him but sort of understands him (Chris Mitchum from RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE and from Robert Mitchum's loins).
But while THE EXTERMINATOR was kind of a cheap ripoff of DEATH WISH and ROLLING THUNDER, this is another step down in quality. It makes the actual EXTERMINATOR 2 look like THE GODFATHER PART II. The storytelling is awkward and sometimes hard to follow, the voices are dubbed, and they explain all the moronic themes of the movie by having a radio announcer just say them as narration. While alot of the shittiness is funny there's also a rape scene and some long scenes of a dude roughing up a young prostitute. Generally that type of business is a comedy killer.
The funniest part is the Executioner's favorite method of execution, which is to stick a grenade down somebody's pants. The first time we see this method is a little different actually, he finds some guys raping a girl on a rooftop, so he puts the girl's panties over a guy's head and sticks the grenade into the panties. Then it cuts to scratched up stock footage of an explosion. And of course it's the same explosion every time he does this trick.
The director is James Bryan who also did DON'T GO IN THE WOODS... ALONE! That one's dubbed too. I tried to watch it around Halloween time but I had to turn it off after about ten minutes. So I was not able to get far enough into it to find out why they hell they need that dramatic pause in the title, or even the word "ALONE." Why isn't DON'T GO IN THE WOODS enough? I'll never know, 'cause I ain't watchin that shit. Bryan also did LADY STREETFIGHTER, which may or may not be designed for you to confuse it for SISTER STREET FIGHTER. And he did one called BOOGIEVISION.
This fake sequel business is interesting - I wonder how many more of those there are? The only one I can think of is Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE, which was released as ZOMBI 2 in Italy, to make people think it was a sequel to ZOMBI, which is what they call DAWN OF THE DEAD. I guess I've been on a vigilante kick lately because I also saw THE BRAVE ONE with Jodie Foster. Maybe somebody should make a rehash called THE BRAVE 1 PART II. Or how about some fake Jason Bourne sequels? THE BORN ULTIMACY, THE BORN ABSOLUTION, THE BORN SHENANIGANS. And of course THE BORN NOEL, where he has to remember the true meaning of Christmas. And THE BORN ACQUAINTANCE for New Year's.
THE EXTERMINATORTHE EXTERMINATOR is a crude but enjoyable vigilante action movie from 1980. It's kind of in the vein of ROLLING THUNDER but closer to the quality level of THE PARK IS MINE. Robert Ginty plays a troubled Vietnam vet whose best friend (Steve James, more on him later) gets paralyzed by a gang so he kills them in revenge, then decides to declare himself The Exterminator and go murder various criminals. Now that I think about it this is actually in the vein of THE PUNISHER (either version), but it came before those movies.
You know this movie means business when the very first shot is the main character being tossed through the air by a huge explosion. There's not even a studio logo before that, that is the very first shot. It starts out with a gruesome battle in Vietnam that explains why a dude would be troubled enough to become The Exterminator. There's a very realistic and disturbing beheading in this scene. Stan Winston was one of the effects guys. It's one of those action movie paradoxes because on one hand these things are what torments the main character, they are what cause him to go crazy and what he flashes back to when he's murdering criminals. But on the other hand we think they are awesome. We want to see explosions and beheadings. As viewers, what's worst for him is best for us. We are cruel gods.
(Not so, by the way, in most horror movies. In horror movies if they're working you are hoping the person gets away. I mean how many beloved horror movies can you think of that show very little violence? HALLOWEEN, TEXAS CHAIN SAW, and many earlier classics. There are many. But an action movie is not an action movie if it doesn't show the action. That makes it a drama. I don't know why these "torture porn" people aren't up in arms about action movies. I guess we'll have to wait until they start making good ones again, then they'll go after them.)
Once he becomes a vigilante, The Exterminator goes on a pretty good rampage. He puts a mafia don through a meat grinder. He kills a chicken hawk senator (chicken hawk as in pedophile, not as in warmongerer who avoided military service, although I bet he's that too). He kills a doberman with an electric kitchen knife (but in self defense). I'm not really sure if the movie wants you to think he's a hero or that he's a nutball, probaly a little of both. They also keep switching to the story of the cop who's trying to catch him (Christopher George). I liked that because it's good to have a hero in his '50s and because in one scene he plugs a hot dog into the wall so he can cook it at his desk. That's a technique you see in real life but not in too many movies.
Also this cop is dating a doctor (Samantha Eggar) and that relationship gets a surprising amount of screen time. He even gets laid at the hospital. Way to go, Detective. And this sets up his first encounter with the Exterminator. He sees the Exterminator getting into an elevator, they make eye contact, and the Exterminator tells him his fly is down. A few moments later he realizes who it was he just saw. He later catches up to him but man that would be sad for him if that was the only time they came face-to-face. "Yeah, I could've caught him, but I didn't realize it was him. And he told me my fly was down."
That could be an alternate title for the movie too: THE EXTERMINATOR TOLD ME MY FLY WAS DOWN.
I think this Exterminator guy is flawed, and not just because of all these murders. I think we know right away because of how him and his friend Steve James handle some assholes stealing beers from their workplace. See, these two work at the docks. They catch some WARRIORS type gangsters drinking some beers from a shipment and they confront them. This is admirable because we've already seen how the boss gave Steve James a raise but wishes he could afford more. He's not doing too well financially because the mob takes too big a cut of his money.
But in the process of stopping these guys from stealing a couple beers they end up destroying a couple pallets of beers! They knock a bunch of them over and Steve bodyslams a guy on top of a stack of them. Ultimately I think they end up costing the company way more money than if they just let it go. That might even be symbolic of what happens later, he's cutting off people's noses to spite crime's face, or something.
These gangsters are mean. They're called The Ghetto Ghouls and they have a flashy hot rod with flames and their logo painted on it. They're some cold-blooded dudes but then you see their "clubhouse" where they bring girls and dance to "Disco Inferno." Are you kidding me? You guys are still listening to mainstream disco in 1980? And we're supposed to be afraid of you? I know The Warriors listened to some pretty bad music, but Disco Inferno? No way they've would've listened to that.
I also question The Exterminator's relationship with Steve James's wife. It seems like he thinks he does a real good job of looking out for her, but he really doesn't. For example, at the beginning of the movie Steve gets attacked, and he's in the hospital, and then the Exterminator goes to the wife and tells her that her husband was mugged and he may never walk again. You can only interpret that he went to the hospital and waited around for hours to get the diagnosis from the doctors, and only then did he go tell the wife.
Then near the end of the movie he goes one step further. Steve is still paralyzed at the hospital. They communicate through blinking, Steve gives his permission to pull the plug and put him out of his misery. The Exterminator does it, then goes to the wife and tells her. Motherfucker, include the wife in all matters of euthanasia. It's called etiquette, Exterminator. Come on. Be more courteous next time.
I said I'd get back to Steve James, so here I am. I don't know if you're familiar with this guy, but he's a good badass actor who never really got his due. He's known for playing a sidekick for Michael Dudikoff and Chuck Norris. And I just learned from IMDb that he was a Baseball Fury in THE WARRIORS. He had a small appearance in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., and you might remember him as Kung Fu Joe if you saw I'M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKA. He died in 1993 so he never got enough chances at starring roles. Unfortunately THE EXTERMINATOR was the one that started him on that career trajectory. He gets to kick ass in the Vietnam scene and the fight over the beer, but after that he spends the whole movie in a hospital bed, where he is so miserable he decides he wants to die. Too bad.
THE EXTERMINATOR is not a good movie. It's not smart about vigilantism, and it's crudely put together. But damn, for some reason I liked it. It's sleazy enough and has enough weird little touches (the hot dog, the fly undone, the cynical ending) that it's very enjoyable. Bravo.
THE EXTERMINATOR 2The Vietnam Vet turned psychotic New York criminal assassinator is back, and still played by Robert Ginty, but now directed by part 1 producer Mark Buntzman. I was impressed that part 1's very first shot was the hero flying away from a fiery explosion. No studio logos, even. Part 2 starts with the Cannon Films logo, but the opening shot is a good one: The Exterminator stepping out into an alley wearing a welding mask, he sprays his blowtorch into the camera and the title appears in the fire.
I didn't enjoy part 2 nearly as much as part 1, but some bad movie aficianados may like it better. Part 1 is clumsy and raw, but part 2 is just cheesy and stupid. But it's way more ridiculous. This time there's no cop character, there's just The Exterminator going around like a masked slasher killing criminals. In the first one I think he used a welding torch for a little American style perfecly legal and ethical interrogation techniques. In this one they act like a welding mask is his Jason mask and a blowtorch is his Freddy glove. The creepy part is he only appears after they've committed crimes, and it's even said "it's like he was waiting for us." So you wonder why he doesn't intervene before some gangsters murder an innocent elderly couple. Instead he just waits outside so he can light them on fire after they're done. (Trivia: One of the first guys he lights on fire is played by Reggie Rock Bythewood, writer of GET ON THE BUS, director of BIKER BOYZ.)
Then when he's in his daily life the movie just acts like he's a great guy, and not crazy. Not even a little tormented. He doesn't seem to have a job anymore. Not sure how he pays for his blowtorch fuel.
The bad guys are a gang led by a guy named X, played by Mario Van Peebles. This is where the movie is most ridiculous - X thinks he's in the future. He wears post-apocalyptic clothing such as ROAD WARRIOR shoulder pads made out of tires. He always stands in super-hero type poses, he does flips, he has an X spraypainted on his bare chest, he throws a guy under a subway and then dramatically puts his forearms into an X shape. He makes his gang carry torches around and makes big speeches to them. He has a messiah complex - this I know because he says "I am the messiah." He must've seen THE WARRIORS so he makes a big speech about how by everyone working together they can rule the city. But he has a big ego so he actually says "Together, I can rule the city."
In one respect he actually is ahead of his time: he wears a version of a hi-top fade in 1984, a couple years before they became popular. But otherwise I think he's just a sci-fi nerd. Might as well be wearing a Star Trek uniform.
The movie wants to be like THE WARRIORS or CLOCKWORK ORANGE by exaggerating how bad and psychotic the inner-city crime gets. One nice touch is that they shoot down a police helicopter. But it's all so cheap looking. The first one was the kind of cheap that makes it kind of more authentic, this is the kind that makes it less. It's one of those movies that takes place in New York but it seems like nobody lives there except the main characters of the movie.
Of course the gang ends up paralyzing his stripper girlfriend and killing his Steve James-like garbage man friend, so he has to get revenge, even though he was already trying to kill them anyway so the revenge part is kind of redundant. He already drove his friend's garbage truck alot, now he soups it up with a bulldozer front, armor and machine guns. But even though this sequel ups the ante in over-the–topness it pulls back in other areas. There's lots of lighting people on fire but little to no gore. He puts a guy in the back of the garbage truck, and you think it's gonna be a new take on his famous meatgrinder stunt from part 1, but then he doesn't even crush the guy.
And all of this might be great but it also has one of those terrible 1984 keyboards-trying-to-rock-out type of scores from beginning to end. And for me that's kind of a dealbreaker. It's a pretty funny movie but I'm more of a part 1 type I guess.
If you ever wanna see a really good horror picture that perfectly melds the classic horror type feel with the modern Psycho and later type feel, this is a good fucking start. It is a french movie from a gentleman by the name of Franju. Now I am familiar with this individual because I also watched a documentary by him called Blood of the Beasts. I don't know what I was thinking man that is what the kids call "some fucked up shit."
You see the documentary starts out showing the beauty of Paris, young lovers holding hands strolling through the park, etc. Then it zooms into a slaughter house and shows some motherfuckers killing horses, cows, sheeps, etc. For real. These tough motherfuckers smoking cigarettes and singing as they casually chop these things heads off, pull off the skin and what not. Lining up a big row of sheep and slicing their throats halfway through. Shooting a bolt into a live horse and watching him drop like a brick.
Holy jesus I always thought vegetarians were a bunch of fruits but I'm gonna have trouble eating a big piece of meat as long as I can remember this movie. It's one thing to say "Ha ha ha I saw Chicken Run and then I went out to KFC, ha ha ha I showed those little fuckers ha ha ha ha". Believe me I've said it many times myself. Same thing with Babe. But when you see what they do to these cows, I mean you can't even make eye contact with the things. They look so sad. "Hey, sorry about all this Mrs. Cow, I just need a cheeseburger is all."
Even if you're just some heartless asshole shithead, there is still the whole grossout factor. I mean these guys who do this job have gotta be total sickos. They obviously enjoy it. Cutting these things open and pulling out a giant ball of intestines. And then you see unborn baby cowlings laying around on the floor. And you're not necessarily thinking, "I wanna put some ketchup on that." This movie is only 22 minutes long but it is hard to get through. You're thinking, "It's only a movie... it's only movie... it's-- wait a minute." And then you look down at the hotdog you're eating.
Anyway point is, if you want to eat another hamburger without feeling like an asshole, you probaly shouldn't watch Blood of the Beasts. This Franju knows what he's doing and I think he took a little bit of that documentarian experience into his gothic horror masterpiece Eyes Without a Face.
What this one is about is a young gal who has been disfigured in a car accident. Her father is a pioneering plastic surgeon who has just not been the same since his wife died. He pretends that his daughter is also dead and with the help of his secretary he kidnaps young girls and attempts to transplant their faces onto his daughter Christiane.
Christiane is such a classic figure of tragedy. She doesn't really want to do this and would rather be dead. She feels just like the dogs that her dad keeps locked up in the basement for experiments. She keeps her back turned to people or her face buried in the ground because she is so ashamed of it - and no surprise she is so self conscious when her dad the plastic surgeon raised her this way. And they make her wear an expressionless white mask to hide her shame. This is very creepy and its almost too bad, if she were in a different time period I think she and Michael Meyers could have really hit it off. Obviously they have a lot in common and I think they would make a real good couple. If you think about it from Michael's perspective this is a real hot looking young gal. She's got a hip type of raincoat and that cute little bob haircut and the white mask. Plus the french accent. If they had each other maybe Michael would be able to cut down on the killing. Well I don't know on second thought I don't want this poor gal hanging out with a crowd like that but still. She should know there are some motherfuckers out there who wear masks who would probaly consider her beautiful. It is not all about the european standard of beauty in my opinion.
Anyway I really think the theme in this movie rings true. Christiane's outer beauty is only so important to her because it is so important to her father. The men in this movie always treat gals that way too. The good guys are some cops who trick a young shoplifting girl into going undercover for them. They don't even explain to her what she's getting into, and she wakes up in this texas chainsaw kind of moment, where she is all prepped for surgery with a line drawn on her face and some freako in a white mask sitting there staring at her. I mean holy jesus imagine waking up like that.
Where the Blood of the Beasts action comes in is in the first scene where the doctor does surgery on one of his abductees, a gal named Edna. He gets her all prepped, and then he cuts the skin and slowly pulls it off. And this is a loooonggg fucking scene. And this was years before the surgery channel in my opinion. It really gets you believing in and being horrified by what these people are doing.
I thought it would be funny though if they took off Edna's face and then they ended up liking her so much they had to kidnap somebody else to cut off her face and transplant it onto Edna. But that would be a different movie though.
Anyway there is also a documentary type technique used to show how Christiane's face rejects the transplant. They have a series of still photographs showing the progression of the skin rotting throughout the month. It reminds me of those before and after photographs they have on ads, her expression is so blank and she's wearing no makeup.
So that documentarian type shit is what it makes it very believable but what I came out remembering is the more poetic fairy tale type images, especially in the end when Christiane frees a caged bird and it lands on her shoulder. This is the type of beautiful images of horror you haven't seen since bride of frankenstein. If you are a horror fan and haven't seen this one it is a must see. Believe it or not those frenchies really know what they're doing when it comes to the horror. At least this Franju does. Way to go Franju you maniac. Stay out of the slaughterhouse and keep making these babies, if you are still alive.
thanks franju