For actual October 31st viewing though I took a risk on one I never heard of before, just because it was an obscure one that took place on Halloween, TRICK OR TREATS from 1982. In my opinion in was not a good choice. But I did watch it, so it is my duty to document it.

You gotta respect an honest tagline like that

Like HALLOWEEN four years earlier this is the story of a babysitter stalked by an escaped mental patient. Unlike HALLOWEEN she spends most of her screen time yelling at the kid she’s babysitting for harassing her with pranks and magic tricks. And while HALLOWEEN seemed like geniuses elevating a simple horror story through pure filmatism this one feels more like a bunch of people fucking around. They obviously don’t take it as seriously or expect you to.

Until the very end, when it suddenly seems like it’s trying to be shocking, this is more of a comedy than a serious horror movie. The opening is actually pretty funny – a husband (Peter Jason) and wife (Carrie Snodgress) are having breakfast in the backyard on a sunny morning, he’s reading the newspaper, suddenly some orderlies come to involuntarily incarcerate him, and the wife watches calmly as the three of them wrestle all over the backyard and into the swimming pool until they manage to drag him away screaming.

We skip ahead several years. The wife has a sleazy new boyfriend (David Carradine) and they’re going to a Halloween party so they hire Linda (Jackie Giroux), a girl from an agency  to watch after their fat little bastard (Chris Graves, son of the writer/director Gary Graves). Meanwhile, the husband guy is in the mental hospital planning an escape. He does it by jumping a nurse and stealing her clothes (including bra and wig), then he actually goes out, punches a cop and gets coffee and things while pretending to be a woman in full nurse outfit.

The kid keeps throwing smoke bombs, setting up dummies and faking his death. Meanwhile she’s getting creepy phone calls which she assumes are from the kid, but she’s wrong. This is obviously gonna be a “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” type scenario, but just in case you don’t pick up on it there’s a scene where Linda tells the kid that story, and not even a shortened version. She tells the whole damn story. The movie seems pretty sure that we’ve never heard of that story or concept before and need it explained to us in detail.

It’s hard to feel sorry for Linda, because she’s such an idiot. It takes her about 2 minutes before she’s yelling at the kid that he’s a brat. I am not a babysitter but I would think some would have a sense of humor about their kids being into Houdini and throwing down smoke pellets. This bitch can’t take it. She completely loses her cool before he’s even done anything. Then he plays dead in the swimming pool and she apparently doesn’t know how to check for a heartbeat or breathing so she’s convinced for several minutes that the kid is dead and performs CPR on him until he finally gets up and says “Thanks for the kiss, baby!”

A little bit later he pretends to cut his finger off while cutting sausage and she falls for that too and starts screaming in terror. And if that wasn’t bad enough, also he sticks his tongue out at her. I mean, can you believe that? This is one bad kid.

(by the way, if he were to fake his death a bunch of times but also fall in love with an old lady and drive around in a hearse while Cat Stevens songs play it would be considered more endearing than bratty)

I’m not sure how seriously they really want you to take the horror part at the end, but there is a fairly involved chase with Linda running around screaming and being terrorized, so I think it’s supposed to actually be scary. It’s just hard to take it seriously after the whole movie has been so broad. For example the mental illness on display at the hospital is the kind where every patient has some funny gimmick, like two of them think they’re Marc Antony and Cleopatra. And one of the nurses refers to the soon-to-be-stalker as “mad as a hatter.” I don’t think you’re supposed to say things like that in that line of work.

Steve Railsback has a small part that’s pretty funny. He’s Linda’s stupid boyfriend who talks to her on the phone from back stage at his big stage debut. The joke is he’s playing Othello and she comments that he’s too young to play Othello.

(let me explain that, it’s because he’s white, that’s why it’s funny. Movies like this aren’t supposed to be Shakespeare but they should have some basic Shakespeare based jokes)

This definitely reminds me of the sense of humor of all those ex-Roger Corman guys like Joe Dante, Allan Arkush and John Sayles. It even has Paul Bartel in it. It has all kinds of Hollywood shit: Linda is a struggling actress, she somehow lives in a house full of old movie posters, there’s a scene about two women editors. They watch a clip of a cheesy-horror-movie-within-the-cheesy-horror-movie, complain about the popularity of horror and gore, and brag that the movies are made by the editors, not the directors. So I assumed this Gary Graves was an editor for Roger Corman and this was his shot to direct.

Well, he was in fact an editor (his first editing credit was a 1966 Casey Kasem-featuring biker movie called THE GIRLS FROM THUNDER STRIP) but at that time he was also starting out as a writer/director with THE EMBRACERS. On IMDb he has 137 credits as a director and 204 as a cinematographer. He also has a detailed biography written by one of his sons and it makes a big deal about his collaboration with Orson Welles. He worked with Welles in his later years doing mostly TV shows but also some movies, for example the documentary F IS FOR FAKE. I didn’t like that movie, but I know some people who do. In fact it has a Criterion Edition.

But this guy was hugely prolific, sometimes under different names. For example he directed a huge amount of movies under this name “Robert McCallum.” In 1982 TRICK OR TREATS was the only thing he did under his own name, but under the McCallum name he did three movies, GARAGE GIRLS, SATISFACTIONS and SOCIETY AFFAIRS.

Wait a minute, I recognize some of these titles. He directed CO-ED FEVER. And SUZIE SUPERSTAR 1 and 2. Not to mention BEVERLY HILLS EXPOSED and AROUSED with Tracy Lords and 10 1/2 WEEKS. The list goes on. THREE MEN AND A HOOKER, HOME BUT NOT ALONE, SILENCE OF THE BUNS, DRIVIN’ MISS DAISY CRAZY AGAIN, CAPE REAR, THE JOI FUCK CLUB, ORAL MAJORITY 9 and 10, FLESH AND BONER, HARD-ON COPY, MAVERDICK, and of course WORKING WITH ORSON WELLES.

You know, I think I get this movie better now that I’ve skimmed those titles. It’s not very good, but I’m glad he tried. Everybody’s gotta strive for something. He wanted to keep a toe in the world of the legit, non-penetration filmmaking. Or he just wanted to be able to work with his son, and he couldn’t find a role for him in GARAGE GIRLS. I can respect what this guy Graver was doing here. I hope he was happy with what he was able to express in this.

But don’t ever rent it for Halloween. You can do better.

I don’t know what I was expecting from THE STUNT MAN, but it wasn’t this. It opens with a shot of a dog licking his balls, which is appropriate because this is another movie about making a movie. Two cops are chasing Steve Railsback for crimes unknown. He gets away but, through a complicated series of events, winds up hiding out on the set of a WWII movie pretending to be a stuntman named Bert who is actually dead due to a stunt gone wrong. The identity-switch is arranged to cover the ass of the eccentric director (Peter O’Toole) and he quickly falls for the female lead (Barbara Hershey), who he considers famous because he recognizes her from a sexy dog food commercial.

The police keep hovering nearby and he continues to work on the movie as a stuntman, comparing his situation to a war buddy who stepped on a landmine and couldn’t step off because that’s how you get blown up. But strangely it never really goes back to the story of him being a fugitive. It’s just this really surreal, inventive story about his possessive love for Hershey, his friendship with O’Toole, and eventually his fear that it’s all a conspiracy to kill him in a re-try of the stunt that killed Bert.

The feel of the movie is so strange and dreamlike that I kept expecting a twist like he actually died and now he’s in Hell/Heaven/purgatory or something like that. But maybe that’s just director Richard Rush’s idea of what Hollywood is like. He has kind of a magical realism approach to making movies-within-movies. O’Toole is almost a god-like character who tends to just casually float in on a camera crane out of nowhere, intruding on people’s private lives. He also plays tricks on his actors to get more natural performances, so although we and Railsback think a stunt has gone wrong when he collapses through a ceiling into a bed with a naked couple, it turns out this is part of the scene, and a crowd of actors playing drunken Nazis surround him and strip him to his boxers.

Rush is the guy who did FREEBIE AND THE BEAN, and it turns out he’s really arty. Right from the opening shot I thought, “whoah, this is a stylish movie” (thought paraphrase) and it never let up. This thing is so full of cleverly planned out camera moves and tricks it’s like a 1980 Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. According to the DVD they even invented the rack focus for this movie. That’s one of my favorite focuses.

But I think it still qualifies as stuntsploitation because there are some incredible stunts shown when he’s working. A long series of rooftop stunts, fake gunfights, falls, jumps, etc. In this world, of course, a whole complex battle sequence is all shot in one go. There’s also some great editing tricks including when he crashes a bi-plane into a tree, flying out of the cockpit toward the camera and it cuts to a matching shot of him thrusting into Barbara Hershey as he orgasms. Kind of like the reverse of the ol’ cut-from-love-scene-to-rocket-taking-off gag.

Railsback is great in the movie. This is the opposite of TURKEY SHOOT – instead of getting nothing to do he gets to do everything. He gets to be tough, funny, crazy, in love, paranoid, terrified, insane, confused. Rush seems to be obsessed with scenes that start off one way and end up totally different, so there are a whole bunch of turnarounds. In one of many memorable scenes Railsback emotionally recounts to Hershey the story of why he’s wanted by the police. As he describes his crime he flies into an insane rage and starts knocking over furniture and throwing things at the walls. By the time he’s destroyed everything in the room and covered the floor in so many paint cans you can’t even walk across it, he and Hershey are both laughing and happily in love again.

Hershey is also very good and sexy, and also gives a pretty terrible old lady makeup performance in the movie-within-a-movie. But I think this is intentional, like Naomi Watts in MULHOLLAND DOCTOR. I mean, she does go from dog food commercial to WWII epic.

There’s a documentary on the Anchor Bay DVD that I didn’t get a chance to watch all the way through, but from what I saw it was very unique. It’s called THE SINISTER SAGA OF THE MAKING OF THE STUNT MAN and it’s a quirky first-person essay by Rush. Interviews with Railsback, O’Toole, Hershey and others are strung together by Rush as he talks to the camera, all the while travelling around in a low budget video version of the type of camerawork and gimmicks he used in the movie. So for example he seems to be flying a small plane while he tells a story about pitching to a producer on a plane. He also tells some funny stories like how no studio wanted to make a movie about a stuntman at all, then after three or four other movies beat them to it they thought it was a great idea.

So that’s why this isn’t the first stuntman movie, but it’s definitely the most original one. Also probaly the only one nominated for best actor, director and adapted screenplay Oscars. So far.

[ratings]

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Time to get back to my ongoing study of the works of Brian Trenchard-Smith. This one will also be part 1 in a Steve Railsback double feature.

TURKEY SHOOT is one of the Brian Trenchard-Smith pictures I had heard of before I started going through his filmography, although I knew it under the American title ESCAPE 2000 (which is what it’s called on the Anchor Bay DVD). It takes place in a dystopian future where “deviants” have been locked up in camps to be brainwashed and abused. Not sure if this happens at all of them but at this particular one, Camp 42 I believe, they also let the inmates run around in some wilderness to be hunted by rich people. Hence the title “TURKEY SHOOT.” It’s kind of like in the U.S. a couple years ago what we would’ve called “DICK CHENEY PHEASANT HUNT.” Means the same thing.

Our heroes are naive Olivia Hussey, sexy Lynda Stoner, and defiant Steve Railsback. Railsback gets a pretty badass setup because the headmaster, Thatcher, lists all the different camps he’s escaped from, and you know he’ll be adding Camp 42 to the list soon. I love Railsback from ED GEIN, LIFEFORCE, etc. but to be honest he doesn’t have that great of a character in this one. He mostly just runs around. Not that he’s not good at running around, it’s just not that memorable a part.

The weirdest moment in the movie is when you first see the wolfman. For some reason one of the hunters has a pet wolfman that he got from a circus. He wears clothes like a pilgrim and likes to eat people’s toes. I guess the guy pretty much uses him as a hunting dog, if a hunting dog could wrestle people and snap spines over his knee.

I mean that’s a pretty big shift in perception, you’re watching a movie thinking “okay, here is this movie, TURKEY SHOOT” and then out of the blue you realize “this is a movie that has a wolfman in it.” It changes everything, you have to adjust every assumption you made back when you thought it was a regular non-wolfman type of movie.

And for me it kind of fucked me up because I thought wait a minute, this is that movie? I remember that cover! But I was thinking of the wrong movie, I was thinking of this one:

I’ll have to check that one out, because this wolfman was pretty cool and he didn’t even have a boombox or American flag. So it is possible that the AMERICA 3000 wolfman will top this one due to those two props.

Anyway, maybe it’s because of the lack of boombox, but somehow even with a wolfman the movie seems a little bland. I mean, the bad guys are pretty colorful – a cool bald guy with a mustache, a lesbian with a bow and arrow. They get some mileage out of them, they’re more memorable than the heroes. There’s some pretty good gore here and there – an exploding head, an amazing shot of a wax dummy getting machine gunned. And you gotta admire any movie where a character says “Oh shit!” and the reason he says it is because he accidentally cut his pet wolfman in half with a bulldozer and needs to hurry up and fire his bazooka or Steve Railsback will get away. That is obviously a great moment in the history of cinema, but for the most part TURKEY SHOOT still has the lifeless feel of many ’70s sci-fi movies in the SILENT RUNNING vein. Something seems missing.

The DVD extras helped me put my finger on it. They explain that the budget got cut at the last minute, they had to tear out the beginning of the script, cut a helicopter chase, have less extras, less stunts. Trenchard-Smith seems to have only stayed on out of professionalism and not a belief in being able to still pull the movie off. He mentions not being able to have stuntmen fall out of towers, and Anchor Bay cuts in a shot of a watch tower shooting sparks, and that’s it. Nobody falls out and it doesn’t tip over or anything. And I realized that’s it, it just never is able to go that extra distance Trenchard-Smith would’ve in the days of his Grant Page movies (or later in DEAD END DRIVE-IN).

They interview Lynda Stoner, who gets upset talking about it, calling it “juvenile garbage.” It surprised me she talked about it with such disgust because she is strangely un-exploited in the movie. There’s foreshadowing that the guards will manhandle her, or worse, that she’ll mandhandle them. But it never happens. All the manhandleship is saved for Olivia Hussey and her boob double. There’s even an “ogling Lynda Stoner as she bathes in the river” scene where she’s fully clothed!

Her beef is not with her character. She seems upset that the setup of the world – the “1984 scenes” Trenchard-Smith says – were cut out of the script. But I wonder if they were really necessary. We get the idea that people who don’t fit into society’s norms lose their human rights, and aren’t allowed to reproduce. I guess it’s hard to judge without seeing what was in the script, maybe it was some seriously deep shit. But I suspect they were able to imply the important stuff in a simpler way. Why do you need more than that?

You don’t. But you do need guys falling out of towers. So this one’s not that great. Come to think of it, this guy’s made more interesting curiosities than he’s made actual good movies. But oh well, that’s better than most people. Or at least more curious.

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