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It may strike many of you as odd, but it is surprisingly difficult for
me to offer up a contribution to this current RPS summer series. Like
many other contributors have pointed out in their prefaces, I don't
believe in guilty pleasures...85% of the time anyway...and like The
Tick pointed out, bad is just plain BAD - you don't cotton to it, you
gotta smack it in the nose with the rolled up newspaper of goodness:
BAD DOG! BAD MOVIE! I would liken my dividing line to, say, the
difference between a beleaguered city-appointed attorney defending a
maligned client who he genuinely believes is good and innocent, and the
slick intelligent professional who represents scoundrels he knows damn
well are guilty because there's just something about them he can't
resist. As such, many of the movies that have been cited by my
esteemed colleagues fall into that first group, and I will not put the
"bad" word on them. But yes, there are a fair number of films that,
for me, are in that latter camp of criminality. I once wrote about
these kinds of unlovable movies and why I stood by them when I
offered a huge mea culpa for SUCKER PUNCH, a movie which served the
same purpose as a cheap bottle of bitter vodka would if I had spent a
month in captivity with that wing of my family that don't allow drink,
cable, or dirty jokes, in a house where the walls are too thin for any
noisy private stress relief. And after dusting off the skeletons in my
closet, I have found a few more rogues for this gallery.
THE BLACK DAHLIA (2006)
It seems that on the subject of Brian DePalma and his less-than-loved
movies, you can find apologists for THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES, you
can find defenders of SNAKE EYES, hell you can find sincere
appreciations for MISSION TO MARS, but it's readily apparent that
nobody wants to stand up for THE BLACK DAHLIA. And with good reason.
The acting is wooden, the story perfunctory and predictable,
and...goddammit, there were NEVER any clandestine lesbian nightclubs in
the late 1940's with that level of production value! There's poetic
license, and there's GILLIGAN, YOU'VE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME! This movie
is so phoned in, that instead of spotting those red antipiracy
watermark dots on screen, I spotted a caller ID number from Bulgaria.
And yet...it's still DePalma, with the excessive cranes and the
tracking shots and the super-slow-motion reveals and the lush music
score. For as much as the last generation of film school brats say they
love him, you rarely see his technique being emulated in a world of "Oh
my god, I've let this scene run for 10 seconds without cutting? BLAM!",
so even when it's executed badly, there's that part of me that's happy
to be there.
BURIAL GROUND (1981)/ NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES (1980)
I'm lumping these two movies together, because I saw them in the same
marathon screening event back in my early L.A. days, they are both
films about the dead and their thirst for blood, both made by Italians
in the '80's, and films I remember playing drive-ins in Cincinnati as a
kid, but never saw then. The first, BURIAL GROUND, struck me as the
horror equivalent of one of those "wall-to-wall" porn highlight tapes
that were so popular in the dying days of VHS smut: almost no plot, but
nonstop action and gore. No explanation for why the dead have come
back, or the characters' links, or that creepy "kid" who, dubbed by an
adult trying to emulate a teenager, came across even more freaky. In
short, ludicrous, stupid, but filling. It was so obvious this thing was
cut by an impatient American trying to save money on film stock.
The second film, NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES, was even more gonzo. This one I
was familiar enough to know that the director was Bruno Mattei, not
"Vincent Dawn" as the badly Anglicized credits would have you believe.
This one did attempt to present a plausible explanation for the dead's
return, a covert conspiracy by world governments (See, the man is
keepin' us down, bro!). But it had been padded out with an absurd
amount of stock footage of random jungle animals and weird "native" rituals, like someone stole some cans from Discovery channel
or something. Then again, that's pretty much what Terrence Malick did
with THE THIN RED LINE, and his movie didn't have much of a plot
either. Maybe Mattei is a genius. NAAAH! Again, lots of story lost
along the way from Italy to America. Looking at the posters for these
two films, I seemed to recall a story, maybe in Fangoria, that for a
while, certain mobsters were operating film distribution companies as
legit fronts, and I think at least one these movies originally were released
by one of these folks. That would explain the choppy editing:
"Explanation? Fahgeddaboudit--let's see some more blood."
KING FRAT (1979)
Joe Bob Briggs once said that part of the effectiveness of THE TEXAS
CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was that it looked as if it were filmed by actual
cannibals. In a sense, that is the same aesthetic that makes me
appreciate a completely derivative and puerile wallow in the muck like
Ken Wiederhorn's KING FRAT, a college comedy so tasteless that after me
pressing him to watch it, fellow blogger Witney Seibold actually wrote
"Screw you, movie!" in his review. I cannot argue that there's any
originality to this low-budget ANIMAL HOUSE ripoff, or any characters
worth sympathizing with, or anything redeeming about the horrid
behavior depicted in the name of comedy. But what it does have that I
can't resist is a peculiar stench of authenticity: it looks as if it
were conceived and shot by
actual drunken frat boys! It's as
if some producer said, "OK, here's a 16mm camera, here's three kegs of
Schlitz. Knock yourselves out!" As such, you get the sensation that,
compared to the wild but well-thought-out and smartly-scripted hijinks
of National Lampoon's classic, this level of lowbrow stupidity is
closer to the real mentality of the average alumnus of your local I Bea
Dipshit chapter. I would daresay that if one called ANIMAL HOUSE the
Big Star "Radio City" of fraternity movies, KING FRAT is The Memphis
Goons "Teenage BBQ" - a much more crude punkish creature that, well, is
still kinda groovy. An ultra-cheap DVD, mastered from 3/4" tape and
paired with Harry Kerwin's CHEERING SECTION, was briefly released by
Code Red, and for reasons I still do not understand, an extremely
unflattering picture of me wound up gracing the cover, which of course
makes my father REALLY proud. "That's my son: the retro slob!"
MOTHER OF TEARS (2007)
After Dario Argento had kept people waiting for over two decades for
the completion of his "Three Mothers" trilogy, the general consensus is
that he should have just never completed it. In interviews, he stated
that he wanted to try a different approach to this installment, to not
indulge in the saturated surrealism of SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, and
instead set it in a more realistic environment. A noble idea, except
for the fact that consequently, the first half of this movie plays like
an episode of "C.S.I. ROMA", and his budget, higher than recent memory
but still a pittance, means that while we are supposed to believe an
ancient curse has fostered chaos in the streets, the best he can summon
up to demonstrate that notion looks merely like two Italian soccer
hooligans fighting over a game ball. Thankfully, once Udo Kier shows
up we finally begin to get more of the classically batshit Argentoverse
us faithful fans have loved him for. And while she's not as hypnotic as
Ania Pieroni was in her brief INFERNO tease (which the now-retired
Pieroni refused to reprise for Argento), Moran Atias is certainly an
alluring Mater Lachrymarum. Besides, there's always
la ragazza Asia. In short, between reminisicing on
the better days and watching his daughter running from scissors, I'm
willing to forgive ending this series on a whimper.
SNOWBALL EXPRESS (1972)
There are plenty of fond memories of multiple Disney eras for multiple
generations - the rise of their animation brand in the '40's, the
family dramas of the '50's, the exquisite Sherman Brothers musicals of
the '60's, the Eisner/Katzenberg revolution of the '80's, the Jerry
Bruckheimer action epics of the '90's - oops, did I leave out the
'70's? Yes I did! Because nobody wants to remember that period. It's
a time of TV stars collecting slightly bigger paychecks, former
greats trying to stay active or do one for their grandkids, and theatre
operators dutifully running this treacle in order to get the lucrative
reissue of MARY POPPINS in a year or so. When you watch Paul Schrader's
AUTO FOCUS, do you sense that Bob Crane's lowest point is his sex and
videotape addiction, or when SUPERDAD is playing to an empty El Rey
theatre? If, in trying to be generous to the Ron Miller era of the
studio, you consider that comedy lovers like me will look kindly to the
Knotts/Conway chemistry of the APPLE DUMPLING GANG series, and that
FREAKY FRIDAY, ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, and even friggin' Herbie the
Love Bug were considered worthy of remaking for new generations, that
there is still a whole body of films that are never discussed and have
been left to the memories of sugared up Baby Boomers and their
barely-patient parents...you may just understand
how badly back then, beneath the Magic Kingdom, the ground was sour.
And SNOWBALL EXPRESS is just one of many forgettable fluff flicks that
let the multiplex pretend they were family friendly while they knew
teens were buying these tickets and sneaking into THE EXORCIST. So why
do I remember
this one and speak for it today? Well, it's an
early movie memory for me: I went to a drive-in with my parents, while
they were still together and ostensibly happy, to see it on a double
bill with THE WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE, another dim Disney comedy. I
remember that I liked it though I could recall very little of it, so
much that years later, when my grade school would have that monthly
Arrow Book Club order solicitation from Scholastic, there was a
novelization available and I bought it, and liked what I read. Then it
popped up on that pre-cable subscription service ON-TV, and I taped it
and rewatched it, and it still amused my
tweener-anxious-to-get-grown-up sensibilities. I like that it had
Johnny Whitaker who played Jody on "FAMILY AFFAIR" in it, because I
thought he seemed nice, and nowadays I always think of him when I see
the fine UK actress Jodie Whittaker from VENUS and ATTACK THE BLOCK,
and wonder if she'll ever play a character named Jonni? And I think at
the core, I just have a soft spot for Dean Jones. Disney will treat
and talk up Dick Van Dyke and Hayley Mills and Annette Funicello like
royalty for life and beyond, but you're never going to see them
acknowledge this steady friendly face that spent so many years keeping
families in theatre seats. There's no "Dean Jones Golden Collection"
on DVD! Watch the long loud character parades at Disneyland and you'll
never see a tribute float for THE CAT FROM OUTER SPACE! (At least a
certain murder specialist in HORRIBLE BOSSES seems to appreciate the
man.) Maybe that's why I'm so compelled to speak fondly of this
artifact, so that history will not forget a dying Dean.
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