Posts Tagged ‘Alan Ormsby’
Tuesday, October 1st, 2019
In 1982 Paul Schrader followed AMERICAN GIGOLO with a look at another oft-ignored segment of society, the CAT PEOPLE. It’s a much hornier movie than GIGOLO – some of the posters even call it “AN EROTIC FANTASY” – and it compares sexual desire to turning into a hungry animal. That may sound like some ‘Schrader was raised as a strict Calvinist’ shit, but he actually didn’t get a writing credit on this one. Believe it or not he used a script by Alan Ormsby (CHILDREN SHOULDN’T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS, DERANGED, DEATHDREAM, PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY, POPCORN, THE SUBSTITUTE)! I’ve read that he rewrote the ending, but I don’t see how he could’ve changed the very premise. So I honestly don’t know what this one is supposed to be saying – it seems to be a sexy anti-sex movie – but it’s artful and weird and compelling in all the right ways.
Irena (Nastassja Kinski, TERMINAL VELOCITY) is a pescatarian virgin orphan who arrives in New Orleans to reunite with her long lost brother Paul (Malcolm McDowell, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR). Paul lives in a big house with his Creole housekeeper (Ruby Dee, UP TIGHT) whose name is pronounced “Feh-molly” but spelled “Female.” The brother and sister do a juggling act together as they reminisce about playing circus as kids, and Paul is immediately standing uncomfortably close to her and doing weird incestuous nuzzling. The movie never addresses that if the actors are playing their real ages Paul would’ve been 18 when she was born. But Ruby Dee seems to be playing her real age of 60 while looking about half that, so what is age, anyway? (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, Annette O'Toole, David Bowie, Ed Begley Jr., Giorgio Moroder, John Heard, Lynn Lowry, Malcolm McDowell, Nastassja Kinski, Paul Schrader, remakes, Ruby Dee, Tom Burman
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 9 Comments »
Tuesday, July 10th, 2018
June 19, 1998
MULAN is the Disney animated feature of summer ’98. It’s another Broadway-style musical loosely based on an old tale, in this case the legend of Chinese warrior Hua Mulan, as described in The Ballad of Mulan. Fa Mulan – voiced by Ming-Na Wen (STREET FIGHTER), singing voice Lea Salonga (NINJA KIDS) – is a young woman in Han dynasty China in the midst of training to be a great warrior. Oh, whoops, that’s a typo – in the midst of training to be a great wife. She gets all painted up and tries to walk in confining clothes and know all the etiquette for tea drinking and what not. But she’s not up to it, even has to write notes on her hand before a test, and completely fucks it up.
Luckily there is another option. The Huns are invading and every family must provide a man or boy to fight in the army. The only male in her family is her dad Fa Zhou (Soon-Tek Oh, STEELE JUSTICE, DEATH WISH 4), a war vet who is all for going again but he’s an old man who can barely walk and she’s sure he’s gonna get fuckin killed in like two seconds so at night she steals his armor and conscription notice and runs off to pretend to be a dude and fight in the army on his behalf.
Which she’s actually worse at than being feminine. There’s lots of, you know, humor about how she says something in a normal voice and then says “er, I mean” and repeats it in a not even remotely convincing fake-masculine voice. She starts to pick up other things like to spit and do gross things to be accepted as a man. It’s like JUST ONE OF THE GUYS I guess but when they see her boobs it’s off screen. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, Disney, Donnie Osmond, Eddie Murphy, Gedde Watanabe, George Takei, James Shigeta, June Foray, Lea Salonga, Miguel Ferrer, Ming-Na Wen, Miriam Margolyes, Pat Morita, Soon-Tek Oh, Summer of '98
Posted in Cartoons and Shit, Reviews | 53 Comments »
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
In further Halloween leftovers I have a double feature of “cursed movie” movies.
After seeing THE SUBSTITUTE and PORKY’S 2: PORKY IS NOT IN THIS ONE THOUGH I wanted to catch up with all the other movies Alan Ormsby had anything to do with, and POPCORN seemed like a good choice for Halloween. It’s about some film students who put on a big vintage horror marathon complete with William Castle style gimmicks. It happens at a big old style movie house and the patrons come in costume and ready to be obnoxious.
But the most obnoxious is a mystery maniac who’s terrorizing the place, possibly for reasons related to a “film cult” whose unfinished last film POSSESSOR these students happened to find a print of. Apparently this cult leader/auteur named Gates showed the movie before burning down a theater… and they never found the body. Not sure if that is relevant but thought I’d mention it just in case, I don’t know. Might be an unnecessary detail. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, Australian cinema, Dee Wallace-Stone, meta-slashers, Molly Ringwald, slashers
Posted in Horror, Reviews | 21 Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, back to school, Bob Clark
Posted in Comedy/Laffs, Reviews | 13 Comments »
Friday, September 11th, 2009
Since Labor Day was last Monday I figure the kids are either back in school or about to go back to school, so I might as well do VERN’S BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL. And if I’m gonna do that there is one movie that I would have to be a fuckin moron not to start with. And I’m not talking about BACK TO SCHOOL.
THE SUBSTITUTE is not necessarily a great action movie. It doesn’t have any particularly memorable action scenes or anything. But I really like this movie for the simple fact that the idea behind it – combining a mercenaries/drug gangs action movie with a DANGEROUS MINDS style white-teacher-makes-a-difference-in-the-big-city movie – is flat out brilliant, a once-in-a-cinematic-history opportunity. Seriously, I sit around trying to think of genre combinations this absurd and yet this natural. There aren’t many left. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, back to school, Ernie Hudson, Luis Guzman, Raymond Cruz, Tom Berenger, William Forsythe
Posted in Action, Reviews | 64 Comments »
Thursday, October 14th, 2004
Like 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. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, Bob Clark, zombies
Posted in Horror, Reviews, War | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, January 1st, 2002
(a.k.a. Deranged – The Confessions of a Necrophile)
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a serial killer out of Wisconsin called Ed Gein. He is the most fucked up motherfucker that ever was fucked up. He is the original American Psycho as they would say on Entertainment Tonight. When they caught him he had a dead lady hanging in his shed cleaned out like a deer. He had a heart on his stove and all kinds of heads and skulls and chairs and clothes made out of human skin. He started out digging up graves and then started killing people, collecting their body parts, wearing them and possibly eating them. I mean jesus, I’m not making this up, but don’t read it if you’re eating – the dude had a box full of vaginas and he liked to dance around in the moonlight wearing a belt he made out of nipples. In my opinion, he had a problem with women.
Anway this fucker inspired alot of the most famous horror pictures, from Psycho to Texas Chainsaw to Hannibal Lecter and, I forget which other ones, possibly The Fly or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or one of those. But this picture Deranged is a more obscure one from 1978 which is based much more closely on the actual case. (read the rest of this shit…)
Tags: Alan Ormsby, Ed Gein, true crime with the names changed but you know who I'm talking about
Posted in Crime, Horror, Reviews, Thriller | 1 Comment »
