Also there is arm wrestling.

I always wondered how the fuck Sylvester Stallone made a whole movie about arm wrestling. Boxing – of course that works, there’s so much training and politics and the fights can go on for a long time if they’re well matched. And I haven’t seen DRIVEN yet, but I can see how he could do one about being a race car driver. There’s alot of preparation that goes into building that car and getting the team together and everything. But arm wrestling? It would almost make more sense to make a movie about the hand slap game from ON DEADLY GROUND.

Well, the answer to my question is that the movie is mostly about him hanging out with a little kid.

Still, this is a story about how winner takes all, loser takes a fall. It’s about how you should never turn away when the challenge is alive because the choice is yours to make in every chance you take. It argues that first the mind, then the soul, and when the heart gets pumped up for the goal, there’s no defeat because you’d sooner die and it’s man to man as we stand eye to eye. It’s also about how you should follow your heart no matter where the path may lead because in this country our hearts are open, we are free to fly again. It tells you that you know you got to break on through, there’s only one thing you can do. And that’s only from the first three songs on the soundtrack, by Sammy Hagar, Robin Zander and Larry Greene. We didn’t even get to Frank Stallone, Kenny Loggins or Eddie Money yet.

Stallone plays Lincoln “Hawk” Hawk, a truck driver who as the movie begins is already signed up for the Arm-Wrestling National Championships or whatever in Las Vegas. But his mind is on family. He doesn’t have one, but he used to. The wife that he left ten years ago (Susan Blakely) is about to have surgery, and she wants him to pick up his estranged son Michael from military school and bring him to the hospital. She seems to know this could be the end and she wants to let bygones be bygones and try to reconnect father and son.

Michael (David Mendenhall) couldn’t be more different from Stallone’s working class character Hawk if he was Dolph Lundgren. He talks alot, has a high-pitched voice, wears his school uniform, grew up rich with his grandfather (Robert Loggia) in a mansion (the same one they used in the Beverly Hillbillies tv show). He’s used to  traveling in grandpa’s private jet, but now he has to ride cross country in a semi with a Brut ad on the side. When Hawk shows up at the school to pick him up, Michael asks to see some ID. He keeps calling Hawk “sir” and lecturing him about cholesterol-heavy food and saying condescending things like “You don’t read much, do you?” He really doesn’t want to be hanging out with his dad, to the point that he actually climbs out of the truck and tries to make a run for it through freeway traffic.

Hawk knows he’s been a terrible father (really, not one at all) but he doesn’t know that it’s even worse than he thinks: grandpa never gave Michael any of the hundreds of letters he wrote to him over the years. I guess he should’ve been suspicious that he never got a response. It’s one of those things, like Bruce never having been sick before in UNBREAKABLE, where it seems like it would’ve had to have occurred to them at some point before.

Father and son tension comes to a head when Michael doesn’t like the music on the radio, so he turns it off. Hawk responds by turning it back on. Michael’s counter move is to then turn it off. So Hawk turns it back on again. But Michael has another trick up his sleeve: he turns it off, at which point Hawk turns it back on. Then Michael turns it back off. This goes on for a while, and every time one of them takes their turn it seems like they’re convinced that’s gonna be the end of it. It’s one of those really dramatic, fascinating competitions to watch like tic tac toe or, uh, arm wrestling.

But like I said, this is a movie with inspiration rock in it, so Hawk and son spend the night sleeping in the truck and wake up to a sunny training montage set to (I think) Kenny Loggins singing about new beginnings. They do pushups together, they tear the sleeves off the kid’s jacket and Hawk must say something really charming because before the song ends the kid is laughing and they seem to have grown closer.

But a true bond can’t just pop up during a montage. Hawk has got to share his culture with his son. This first happens when they stop at a diner and some muscleman taunts him into an arm wrestling match. Later, at another truck stop, there are some bigger kids playing video games and he pushes his kid into arm wrestling them in order to teach a valuable lesson about losing but then believing in yourself so that you get best 2 out of 3. I don’t know if maybe there’s something in their genetics or something but somehow these Hawks seem to defy the laws of physics the way they can overpower larger, stronger opponents in contests of pure strength.

There’s also a scene where Hawk gets fed up with his son making condescending comments about truck driving so in order to prove how hard it is he forces the kid to take over driving. Hawk is very proud and doesn’t seem to realize that he lost the argument when the kid turns out to be able to drive it surprisingly well. But jesus man, I don’t agree with his decision to force a little kid to drive a giant truck and trailer on a windy road like that. He’s incredibly lucky the kid didn’t plow into some family in an RV and kill 8 people including themselves. You don’t get best 2 out of 3 on something like that. But I guess it would’ve proved his point that not just anybody can drive a truck.

It’s never mentioned why Hawk left his family other than “Well… I had some reasons,” and he thinks the important thing is that it was a mistake and he has to make up for it now. The wife doesn’t seem too bitter about the whole thing, in fact she seems to love Hawk and want to give her son back to him and never seems to have any negativity about it. But Grandpa despises Hawk, teaches Michael to hate him and tells him lies like that he’s a drug dealer. Grandpa comes off like a real asshole, and obviously looks down on Hawk for being an uneducated truck driver and not very well spoken. But you gotta admit he has pretty good reason to want to get custody of the kid. He’s raised him himself, and he has plenty of money. Hawk fucking abandoned this kid and now he wants custody again – what’s he gonna do, home school him in the truck while he makes his cross country cologne deliveries?

On the other hand Grandpa has Terry Funk (wrestler profiled in BEYOND THE MAT, also appears in ROAD HOUSE) and some other henchmen who he sends to kidnap the kid, and that’s not cool. Also he’s always trying to pay people off to get what he wants. I don’t like this guy, even though he’s kind of right.

Hawk is trying to make amends and be there for this kid, but he’s not doing the best job. First of all, by the time they get to the hospital mom has already died, and it’s not lost on the kid that Hawk chose bond-with-your-deadbeat-dad-road-trip over tell-your-mother-you-love-her-before-she-dies. Michael correctly cries, “You’ve never been around when anybody needed you.” This would be a good chance for Hawk to stick around and prove otherwise, but he chooses option B: get up and walk away in the middle of the fucking funeral. Right in front of everybody. At least wait until afterwards, don’t rub it in for the poor kid.

Hawk could still have legal custody, but physically the kid is at the Beverly Hillbillies mansion and Terry Funk and the boys won’t let him in to talk. This is another point where in my opinion he doesn’t use the best possible judgment. What he does, he drives his semi through the gate and the side of the mansion.

So, you know, by the time he gets to Vegas for the arm wrestling he’s in some debt for property damage, has pawned off his beloved truck (but kept the hawk-shaped hood ornament, see poster) and signed over custody of the kid (at the kid’s request). With this shit going on in his life you figure he’s not gonna have the eye of the tiger, and also it’s hard not to notice that pretty much every other competitor has arms bigger than his head. So this doesn’t look good.

Remember when I complained about the races in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS being uncinematic because it’s just driving in a straight line and when you’re not going fast enough you push a button that makes you go faster? Arm wrestling is pretty much the same. Instead of pushing a button you shift your hand a little.

And this has the extra disadvantage of not being even remotely believable. After RAMBO Stallone become synonymous with bodybuilding, but the real life arm wrestlers who are cast in the movie would make Schwarzenegger look scrawny. They’re these crazed giants and he’s “a newcomer from the trucker division.”

We’ve all discussed different types of fights where a smaller opponent can defeat a behemoth through knowledge of chokes and armbars and shit. I’ve seen a UFC fight where a little guy beat a Yokozuna sumo wrestler by breaking his nose on the way down to the mat and certain doom. But there is no fucking way that Stallone could beat any of these monsters in arm wrestling just because he believes in himself. This is not DUMBO. This is not THE SECRET. This is a simple matter of one arm that is heavier and stronger than another arm.

I mean, even in this bullshit cinematic version of arm wrestling they don’t pretend there’s any skill to it. The main training that Stallone does is pulling on a weight inside his truck while he’s driving. And you see guys at the competition just carrying around dumbells in the crowd. This is not kung fu, you don’t need total concentration. You just lift heavy stuff while you’re going about your daily routine.

For the final match (against a real arm wrestling champion, I think) their idea for making it more dramatic and suspenseful is that there’s a part where their grip slips, so they have to be tied together. I think this is supposed to seem like an upping of the ante, like when Van Damme had the glass shards glued to his forearms in BLOODSPORT or KICKBOXER (I always forget which one is which), but I mean they were supposed to hold onto each other anyway. The strap just makes sure they do a better job.

What is pretty cool about the climax though is that the kid finds out some new information and decides he wants to give his two-time deadbeat dad a chance. So he sneaks out, illegally drives a pickup truck to the airport and flies to Vegas, getting to the casino just in time to cheer his dad on. I like it because I’ve seen about ten thousand movies and TV shows where a fuck up dad has to race against time to try to get to his son’s sporting competition, but I don’t think I’ve seen one where the son has to race to get to the deadbeat’s sporting competition.

Also he gets a break between matches to punch Terry Funk through a set of doors.

OVER THE TOP was actually directed by Menahem Golan, co-head of Golan and Globus/Cannon Films. I guess this is probly his best known directorial work, closely followed by DELTA FORCE and then ENTER THE NINJA. Despite its complete ridiculousness it’s not made as shittily as alot of the movies he just produced, and it has one unique directorial touch when he works in some interviews with the real arm wrestlers about what they do. Stallone even does a good job seeming cinema verite in his interview, where he explains the philosophy of something we already noticed earlier, that he likes to turn his hat around backwards before a match.

The script was by Stallone and Sterling Silliphant, the student of Bruce Lee and Academy Award winner for IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. (He also wrote SHAFT IN AFRICA and THE ENFORCER.) I don’t know what in fuck’s name these guys were trying to do here, but it’s a pretty funny movie. I enjoyed it. I think maybe Stallone’s best quality is that he wears his heart on his sleeve. He tries to be a poet for the big lugs, he tries to show that they have a heart and soul even if they don’t know how to put it into enunciated words. People remember him for his muscles, guns and explosive tipped arrows, but most of his movies are as much about his emotions, his relationships. To me FIRST BLOOD is more about his break down at the end than all the awesome survival tactics.

So I appreciate that even when he does a stupid movie like this I can tell that it came from his heart. When his idea muscles are in top condition he comes up with ROCKY, when they’re not he comes up with this. But I can get some enjoyment out of both.

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It’s 22 years after the events of PSYCHO. Norman Bates has been in an institution, having been found not guilty by reason of insanity, but is now considered fully rehabilitated. Against the petitioning of Lila Loomis (formerly Crane, and still played by Vera Miles) Norman is released. His doctor (Robert Loggia) seems to truly care about and believe in his mental stability, but regrets that cutbacks prevent society from having more social workers to look after him. For Norman’s sake and for ours.

So Norman returns to the scene of the crime, the Bates Motel still in operation, run by Dennis Franz and mostly used by prostitutes and junkies. To stay in touch with humanity or something Norman is set up with a job at a small nearby diner, where he meets young Mary Samuels (Meg Tilly). When she gets in a fight with her boyfriend and has no place to stay Norman tells her about how he owns this motel with plenty of vacancies.

Ah shit, Norman! Not this again. I know you mean well. I know you’re genuinely trying to help this girl. But what the fuck, man. If you’re an alcoholic you shouldn’t hang out at bars, if you’re on a diet you shouldn’t go to the all you can eat buffet, and if you’re Norman Bates you shouldn’t invite pretty young girls to stay in cabin 1. That’s just how it is, man. Don’t tempt yourself.

Of course he starts thinking about mother, he starts seeing things. Is he losing it already? Is someone trying to make him lose it? If so will he actually lose it? There’s plenty of things to be tense about in this movie.

Tarantino has infamously said he likes it better than the original, but he’s just showing off. He’s allowed to do that because he directed a bunch of great movies, but I haven’t done that so I’m not gonna go that far. I do think you could argue that it holds up better as a suspense-creating-machine, just because of the particular mysteries it holds and the less iconic status it has in pop culture. I always remember what happens to Marion and what you find out about Norman at the end of PSYCHO, but somehow this is the third time I watched part 2 and I couldn’t remember the details. So it kept me guessing until the end. And it’s a great ending.

What makes it great though is this time you know from viewing #1 that he’s a psycho, and you root for him anyway. According to some people (both critics and fans) ’80s horror was all about cheering for Jason to kill stupid characters you didn’t like. But here’s one that’s all about rehabilitation and second chances. You want Norman to prove people wrong by staying sane and not killing anybody. Come to think of it that would be pretty cool if there was a Jason movie where he had gone through years of therapy and now he’s just working as a landscaper or something and trying to keep his urges in check. That’s a freebie, Platinum Dunes, I’m sure you can do something with that.

The only messed up part is that poor Vera Miles comes across as a bad guy. That’s not really fair, I mean the guy did murder her sister. It is kind of weird though that she married her sister’s boyfriend after bonding with him over trying to find her when she was missing with the money. And that she apparently (SPOILER) gave her daughter the same fake name that Marion used to register at the motel with when she was murdered. But I’m not gonna judge her. She’s been through alot.

I’m so glad they didn’t just give PSYCHO II to some chump. Instead they got Richard Franklin, the great Australian director who was more obsessed with Hitchcock than even Brian De Palma. If you haven’t seen it yet you really should see his “what if REAR WINDOW and DUEL fell in love and had a baby?” movie ROAD GAMES. That was the best of many gems I saw during my recent Australian film marathon. Franklin apparently pushed writer Tom Holland (director of CHILD’S PLAY) really hard. He talks a little bit about it in this interview Mr. Beaks did for The Ain’t It Cool News.

PSYCHO II is an honest to God great sequel, because this really is a character you want to find out more about, and it makes perfect sense for it to take place all this time later when he returns to society. It’s completely respectful of the original while having a very different feel just from being made in a different era, on color film, and with the audience already knowing Norman’s story. It goes to show that you can’t be a purist about everything. You can imagine the fury that would go on in talkbacks if somebody proposed making a sequel to a Hitchcock classic now. But here’s a case where they would’ve been wrong.

[ratings]

But now I’m making it sound stranger than it actually is. All I can figure to describe it is “ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST meets ROLLING THUNDER.”

The story takes place in an old castle “in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.” Which is funny because I’m pretty sure the Native Americans who lived here first didn’t build castles. And we don’t have Mideival Times restaraunt here so it can’t be that either. Anyway this castle is being used by the military as an experimental mental facility for mentally ill (or possibly faking) Vietnam vets. Neville Brand is an angry drill sergeant type but he pretty much just lets them have the run of the place, going around dressed as pirates and Superman and crap. One guy is busy casting a dog version of Hamlet (which perhaps could be an influence on Ang Lee’s racoon version). Robert Loggia does a blackface routine. One guy has a funny hat. etc.

There’s some funny lines in her but I have to admit I’m not entirely on the movie’s wavelength. This is in the SHOCK CORRIDOR kind of vein where each insane person has some gimmick or is wacky and cute. There’s all kinds of random dialogue like “the man on the moon fucked my sister!” and people do wacky things like read the miranda rights to a boar’s head on the wall or show up at 3 in the morning dressed in beach gear and dump a bucket of wet sand on the colonel’s desk. Sometimes it’s funny but I feel like it’s kind of forced and because so much of the dialogue has no meaning I found myself starting to tune out what people were saying.

But what makes the movie work is Stacy Keach as the main character, Colonel Kane. He’s the psychiatrist who’s just arrived at the castle determined to figure out how to help these people. He demands that the inmates be allowed to come into his office whenever they want, and he indulges anything they want to talk about, never dismissing their nonsense as nonsense. And he talks in an eerily calm voice like HAL in 2001. You start to realize that maybe he’s crazy too.

He’s especially fixated on helping one particular inmate, an astronaut who freaked out right before take off and was too scared to go to the moon. According to IMDB this is supposed to be the same astronaut character who (not that I remember this) is told by Regan in THE EXORCIST that he’s going to die in space.

And then a little more than halfway through there’s a big twist that you maybe saw coming and that’s when the movie gets much more interesting. There’s more going on here than you were told at first, and Kane and some of the others become much more interesting and tragic characters than they seemed at first.

The reason I finally got around to seeing this is a reader named Sean recommended it to me and he mentioned that there’s a fight scene in a bar. This was a real good scene, kind of like a more drawn out version of something that might happen in a Seagal picture. Unfortunately this was made in 1980 so you’ve got a certain cheeseball feel to it. The opponents are some kind of bisexual biker gang with a leader who looks like Gary Glitter. And they’re those kind of Troma style villains who just bully somebody for no reason at all. It might be better if they had even the slightest reason to be mad at these guys before they start picking on them. There’s a nice touch though, I didn’t make the connection until watching the movie again with the director’s commentary, but you see the biker gang driver by in the very beginning of the movie, and then forget about them.

Anyway, maybe the most significant thing about this movie that makes it different from others is that Blatty, who apparently is a Jesuit, is trying to have a religious discussion with this movie. THE EXORCIST showed that he believed in evil monsters but now he’s trying to show his feelings about God. The movie brings up this idea that if people are just molecules or animals, why do they sometimes do nice things for each other instead of only focusing on survival. It’s an interesting philosophical question but I don’t buy Blatty’s idea that it PROVES there’s a God. I figure most atheists don’t know why men have nipples or why people do nice things or even why the sky is blue, even though there is an official scientific explanation for that one. All they have to figure is that things are complicated and people don’t necessarily understand how they work. That doesn’t mean there is a God or there isn’t one, it just means that humans don’t know everything there is to know.

Still it’s a nice notion and I like that he is using movies to make statements that are that personal and profound to him. And especially weird ass movies like this. Put this in the not great but very original category.

[ratings]

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This is the perfect exaggerated painting of the 1980s and the cocaine wars. The good old days. And it even makes you root for this psychotic egomaniac shithead, Tony Montana (Al Pacino [Scarface]). ‘Cause first you see him as an immigrant getting hassled by the man, working as a dishwasher and tough talking his way into bigger work, dropping off some money for some cocaine. His higher ups (small time hoods themselves) don’t believe in him. But when the dealers pull a cross on Tony and his friends and it turns into an insane bloodbath (literally, come to think of it, because alot of the mayhem takes place in the shower), all involved must admit that he handles it with, uh, flair. He leaves with the money and the yayo (a term now popular because of the movie), tells the middlemen to fuck off and brings it all straight to the area boss, who is very impressed. This is typical of his quick rise up the totem pole. Initiative, elbow grease, bootstraps, etc.

Then of course you got the usual gangster/mogul/rock star story arc – good times, lady trouble, betrayal, paranoia, addiction, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, big awesome shootout. (that last part was the main thing missing in THE DOORS in my opinion.)

Al Pacino of course is legendary for playing this character. His accent is way the fuck over-the-top but it works. He exudes such a ridiculous confidence that you have no trouble believing this little dude can take on all comers. He says he purposely made the character 2-D and not 3-D, but that’s okay. He’s perfect. As cartoonish as he is you definitely believe he’s a real guy.

You also gotta like Steven Bauer (a bonafide Cuban American actor) as Manolo, best friend and right hand man. He’s so loyal and supportive you feel like he’s your best friend too. Not that Tony Montana appreciates it.

This is obvious but I think part of what makes the movie so vivid and tense is the occasional bursts of outrageous violence. It’s not always just the guns you usually see in crime movies – they tried to mimic the type of maniacal shit that was going on in drug cartels and they got a couple genuinely shocking scenes. My favorite part is when Tony and his asshole colleague Omar are visiting their hot shit supplier in Bolivia. There’s tension between Tony and Omar and then you know something’s going on when the big man leaves to take a phone call, and you see him and one of his thugs talking and watching our guys coldly through the window. They politely arrange for Omar to take a flight back to talk to his boss and come back the next day, leaving Tony behind. You know something’s fishy but you don’t know if this is bad news for Tony or for Omar.

The big man tells Tony how much he likes him but that he doesn’t like Omar, as he casually looks through binoculars at the helicopter… where they are cutting up Omar. Then they tie a noose around his neck and toss him out the fuckin helicopter! You see the body fall and jerk and then flail around. I couldn’t believe I was seeing that shit, and it looks so real. (Turns out they used a real stuntman – don’t ask me how. I don’t know.)

Of course the director is my man DePalma, but other than being well crafted and uncompromising, this doesn’t feel all that much like your typical DePalma picture. The one scene that’s vintage DePalminator is the infamous chain saw scene. Tony’s first big coke buy goes sour and him and his guy end up cornered in the bathroom, his friend shackled to the shower rod about to get brutally power tooled to death. So right as the massacre starts, the camera lazily floats out the window and down to the street where we see that the two back up guys waiting in the car outside are busy flirting with some blonde chick in a bikini. Then the camera floats back up to the apartment bathroom of horrors, which is now noticeably more red and wet than a minute ago.

And during this ingenius camera maneuver I’m pretty sure you can just make out, real quiet, some screaming and sawing sounds from inside. Mixed in with the dialogue and sound effects from some movie showing on the TV set.

DePalma handles the material just about perfect, but alot of the credit I think should go to Oliver Stone for his script. Remember back then he was in an insane coke haze that caused him to accidentally type out a couple great genre scripts including this one and CONAN THE BARBARIAN. I guess this was written for Sydney Lumet, who wasn’t so interested when he read how it turned out. I think that makes it all the more admirable that Stone came up with this fucked up nightmare instead of making the more socially acceptable version Lumet was interested in. The world is yours.

For the most part I wouldn’t say this movie was dated. Like I’ve said before, I consider the 1980s to be a dark and evil time for art, culture, humanity, etc. But this movie seems more like a period piece, a document of a time and place, than some cheesy movie from the ’80s. The one exception is some of the music. The mostly keyboard score is made by some guy Giorgio Moroder, who I thought I recognized as a respectable name but it turns out he’s some guy who wrote songs on TOP GUN and crap like that. Anyway I think most of his score fits for these asshole cokeheads. Occasionally the fake drums and shit get on your nerves but not too bad. The one major failure on the musical front is the montage near the end set to some god awful pop song, or top 40 as it was called in those days. I could do without that horseshit.

The twentieth anniversary edition of the DVD has a couple notable extras on it. First you got this documentary where a bunch of famous and not so famous rappers talk about how much they love SCARFACE. For some reason, all rappers want to be Scarface when they grow up. This featurette is actually pretty disturbing because alot of them either really believe, or pretend to believe when the cameras are around, that Tony Montana is a good role model because he came from nothing and made lots of money. This materialistic attitude is a sad trend in modern music and if you ask me it is pretty much a 180 degree misreading of what the movie is about. I mean seriously, who is the better person in this movie: Tony, because he makes millions of dollars, kills alot of people including close friends, gets addicted to coke and gets murdered, or his mama, who won’t let him in her house because he’s a bad influence on his sister? I know it’s not a preachy movie and that’s good, but at the very least it’s a tragedy. Did they think he looked happy with all that money and the pile of cocaine on the table? Maybe they never got all the way to the end.

Discussing the scene where Tony murders his best friend for a dumb reason, Eve says, “Honestly, I think he overreacted.” Most of the interviewees agree, but one of them actually argues that Tony was justified!

Anyway, a better special feature is something I’ve been wishing for on alot of other DVDs: clips from the ridiculous TV version of the movie. They compare scenes from the actual version to the bastardized cut, which includes such great redubbed lines as “How’d you get that scar, eating a pineapple?” and “This city is like a big chicken, waiting to get plucked.”

Anyway, if you haven’t seen SCARFACE, get to it. If you know Method Man or somebody they would probaly loan it to you.

[ratings]

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