PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY is a weird one – a foolish but also pretty enjoyable shot at catching lightning in a bottle. On one hand the gang from part 1 kind of seem like they’re your buddies, so it feels natural to go back to school with them. On the other hand the fresh feel of the first one came from trying to make a different kind of movie, and from basing it on stories from Bob Clark’s youth. For this one, to a certain extent, he’s trying to make the same kind of movie, and making up new stories that might remind you of the real ones. So it’s kind of forced. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Bob Clark’
Porky’s II: The Next Day
Monday, September 28th, 2009
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Sunday, September 27th, 2009
PORKY’S is a monument to young men and the issues that interest them. It’s about trying to get laid, spying on naked girls, fake IDs, sneaking into titty bars, dick size, the proper use of condoms, practical jokes, convincing cops to let you go, getting in fights, standing up to fathers. But mostly it’s about giggling – lots of giggling about dicks and what not.
It also takes place in the ’50s, and it’s kind of a fantasized nostalgia where men play 16 year old boys (director Bob Clark points out that people looked older back then) and everybody’s friends with everybody else and the boys can pull of anything and get a fantastical revenge on a seedy character they really shouldn’t fuck with if this were real life because somebody would get their legs broken. So it’s a nostalgic look at their coming of age years but it’s not the same type of nostalgia George Lucas and others of this generation had. It mostly ignores the cars, the music, the dances, the hairstyles and all that shit that usually gets fetishized in anything about the ’50s. (more…)
Black Christmas
Monday, September 25th, 2006You probaly know director Bob Clark as the guy who did PORKY’S and A CHRISTMAS STORY. More recently he did the two BABY GENIUSES movies and something called KARATE DOG which, judging by the cover, is not a metaphorical title. But back in the day he was a pretty good director of horror movies. One of the ones he did was DEATHDREAM, a really eerie movie about a guy coming back undead from Vietnam and everybody is sort of in denial that he’s different. I liked that one a hell of alot better than HOMECOMING, Joe Dante’s sort of similar anti-war zombie thing from the Masters of Horror show.
But right after DEATHDREAM Clark did his most famous horror movie, BLACK CHRISTMAS, and it’s a pretty good one.
There are no killer Santas, not even maniac elves or savage, carnivorous reindeer. In fact there’s not too much of a Christmas ambience in the thing. But it does take place over Christmas break. This sorority house has been getting weird phone calls from some anonymous pervert. In the opening, one of the girls is attacked and suffocated in her room and taken up to the attic. The rest of the characters spend the whole movie trying to find her.
The next day, the girl’s dad shows up on campus to pick her up. After waiting forever he starts asking around for help and ends up meeting people who know his daughter, and together they look for her. Luckily her boyfriend has an in with the John Saxon at the police department so they are miraculously able to put together a search party when she hasn’t even been gone a day. (It’s refreshing to see a movie with a missing person where they don’t mention that “she has to be gone for 24 hours before she can be considered missing” thing.) (more…)
Deathdream
Saturday, January 1st, 2005Like ROLLING THUNDER and FIRST BLOOD, but before both of them, this is a genre movie about what happens to soldiers when they come home. Andy is a soldier who dies in Vietnam (well, they never actually say it’s Vietnam). And his family gets a letter and they cry and they deny it and his mom says it’s a lie and wishes it wasn’t true and sure enough that night they find him downstairs, back from the dead.
Even though he’s a zombie, he’s also a metaphor for people who survive war. They come back changed and nobody knows what to do to help them. Andy doesn’t get his hand in a garbage disposal like in ROLLING THUNDER, he doesn’t get bullied by the sherriff for being a longhair like in FIRST BLOOD, he doesn’t get spit on by protesters like in the urban legends. On the surface people treat him real good, like a great hero, but they just don’t understand him. They don’t even try.
At first the family thinks it’s a miracle, the state department made a mistake. But it’s immediately clear that their son has come back different. He barely talks, he stares off into nothingness, he smiles worse than Dick Cheney, he strangles a dog in front of a bunch of little kids. Also he’s been going around killing people, draining their blood and shooting it up (a little vietnam drug reference for you there). And then he starts to rot. Andy never had maggots crawling out of him before Vietnam.
But nobody seems to notice that Andy is different, or at least they don’t want to admit it. They welcome him home and ask him questions and then answer them for themselves and don’t notice that he’s not talking to them and maybe not listening. They tell him anecdotes about world war 2 and act like they’re his buddy and don’t notice that they aren’t connecting with him on any level, or that he literally doesn’t have a soul. Or a pulse either. (more…)
