This Week in Rixflix #15: June 16-22, 2017

As I predicted in last week's column, my revived interest in westerns due to the online film course in which I was taking part found me continuing my deep plunge back into the genre. While I purposefully avoided them for the first three days of the week in question, six of the last eleven films I watched were in the western genre, including my 84th John Wayne feature, Dakota, as well as The Hangman, The Last Frontier, Comanche Territory, and The Kentuckian. I had planned to watch the Duke in The Undefeated (and had announced it last week too), but it fell by the wayside at the tail end of the week when I ran into a 1946 Jacques Tourneur film called Canyon Passage.

With but a single viewing, I already have to count Canyon Passage amongst my favorite films in the western style (though it is more of a "pioneer" film and mostly takes place in a forest area). Tourneur, who directed many of my favorite horror films from the Golden Age such as Cat People, Night of the Demon, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, as well as the noir classic Out of the Past, is always on my must-see list, and being able to track down another one of his westerns had me diving into the film the moment that I found it online. For that matter, being a fan of Dana Andrews' acting too, it was grand to see him outdo himself in one of his finest performances here. Helpful, too, was the inclusion of Susan Hayward in the female lead, in a place where I would not have expected her. The best role was that portrayed by songwriter Hoagy Carmichael as a neighboring business owner who seems to end up in the middle of everything while roaming about playing his ukulele and singing songs (and getting an Oscar nomination to boot). Fully loaded with tough guy fist-fighting, swirling gun action, sordid business dealings, a romantic triangle bound for trouble, and those swell Carmichael tunes, I am most certain that Canyon Passage will get watched again by me rather soon.

I found myself with some unexpected downtime this week, and as a result, my numbers were really up overall. I had hoped by this time of the year that I would be tailing off and perhaps get down to just one or two films per day, but I have been far more focused on watching things lately than writing about them, or even in doing other projects. That will have to change – in fact, I rather demand that I change it by force – but with the TCM Hitchcock online course just starting (as of this writing), in which I will be most likely attempting to watch all 42 features (and two short films) of Hitch's they are spotlighting through the month of July, it will be interesting to see what happens. I also have some time on the road to see family coming up soon, and thus I will have no access to my normal channels for viewing in that span (though I will have an iPad with me). The two events should even each other out, but then again, with my ability to cram in film viewings at any given opportunity, you never know. (Hmm... maybe I will get my dad to watch Canyon Passage with me. That's right up his alley...)

The Numbers: 

This week's feature-length film count: 26; 19 first-time viewings and 7 repeats.
Highest rated feature-length film: The Big Sleep (1946) – 9/9
Lowest rated feature films: Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) – 2/9
Average films per day in June so far: 3.13
Average films per day in 2017 so far: 3.03
Consecutive days with at least 1 feature-length film seen per day: 191

The Reviews:

Raiders from Beneath the Sea (1964) Dir.: Maury Dexter – I record an awful lot of films simply because I hope that there will be a shark scene or two inside one of them. Quite often it is because I have heard there might be such a scene, but mostly, I look at the premise of the film or the shooting location or, in the case of this film, merely the title, and see promise that I might be graced with the presence of toothy, finny friends. A low budget creaker from "B" movie vet Maury Dexter (The Day Mars Invaded Earth, Surf Party, Hell's Belles), Raiders from Beneath the Sea is a true snooze-fest about four Neanderthals planning the dumbest armed robbery in the history of dumb armed robberies, specifically, holding up a small bank on Catalina Island while walking all the way from the pier and back in full scuba gear. Yeah, it doesn't go smooth, and while you only have to wait about an hour to get to the heist, that hour seems to take about fourteen. Sure, these raiders do indeed come from beneath the sea to do their crimes, but they barely hit the water in the buildup to those crimes. The bad guys certainly talk about diving a lot, but most of their time on the water is spent timing out their trips to the island via its famous ferry and working out how to make off with the loot afterward. (As it turns out, a magnetized plate that they slap to the underside of the ferry.) When they finally do get in the water, it is for the briefest, murkiest underwater footage this side of Catalina Caper, another 1960s heist flick that at least made some attempts at intentional humor, however hackneyed. (And if you've watched Caper as it was tortured on MST3K, it then became truly fantastic.) This one, though, has no such such saving grace; poorly made, poorly filmed exploitation, but apart from some peeping tom shenanigans on the part of the lead character's creepy, drunken brother as he gets off to Merry Anders, Raiders' tank barely allows it to make it offshore. And by the end, there is not one damn shark to be seen. At least Catalina Caper had an animated one in its opening credits.   – TC4P Rating: 3/9

S if for Stanley (2015) Dir.: Alex Infascelli – Hardly a week goes by that I am not surprised by the appearance of some new documentary on Amazon Prime, Hulu or Netflix about the making of a particular film or the work of a filmmaker. Last week, it was Becoming Bond; this week, there are two such films that I will cover, the first being S Is for Stanley, the story of Emilio D’Alessandro, Stanley Kubrick's driver and personal assistant for a thirty-year period beginning in the early '70s when Kubrick was making A Clockwork Orange. It seems that Kubrick was impressed by Emilio's demeanor when he showed up as the delivery man for that certain, massive ceramic phallic piece that is used in one of the attack scenes in that epic of ultra-violence, and instantly hired the man to be his Man Friday. The film takes us through each Kubrick film all the way through Eyes Wide Shut and Kubrick's death in 1999, mostly told by Emilio himself, a former race car driver who suddenly found himself immersed in Kubrick's obsessive nature. (His wife also plays a big part in relating events to us.) It is clear, at least from the material given here, that he and Kubrick formed a close bond that could not be shaken, even when Emilio left his employ for a handful of years. Usually, I find that a film documentary that is not rife with clips from the films under discussion is usually to be found lacking in flavor, but that is not the case here. There are enough behind the scenes details and set photographs to keep one interested throughout, and it is almost enough that Emilio has plenty of marvelous vignettes about his life spent catering to Kubrick's every possible whim that the film never gets tiresome. D'Alessandro is an engaging interviewee with a rather introspective way of looking at life, and it is perhaps that very quality that kept him at Kubrick's side for so long. I do wish someone from Kubrick's family had weighed in here and there, but overall, an enjoyable look at a side of filmmaking well off the set most of the time. – TC4P Rating: 6/9

A Canterbury Tale (1944) Dir.: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger – With every film by the Archers that I check off my list, I feel my cinematic knowledge and eye becoming purer and sharper. Such is the way that the films of Powell and Pressburger play off of me, always elegant, always studied, always balanced deeply with wit, irony, grace and heart. In A Canterbury Tale, while it starts out with a visual nod to the older work by Chaucer, this tale swiftly transports itself to then-modern times – during World War II in the British countryside – as we are introduced to a trio of "pilgrims" all making their way to the same location, or thereabouts, for differing reasons. We are given army sergeants both British (Dennis Price, the lead from one of my all-time faves, Kind Hearts and Coronets) and American (actual U.S. Army sergeant John Sweet) and a "Land Girl", a term used for women hired during the war to replace men on farms who were off serving in the army, here played charmingly by Sheila Sim. The three bond almost instantly over a mystery that they encounter when they reach the fictitious town of Chillingbourne (though supposedly set near Canterbury), when Sim has glue poured into her hair by a shadowy assailant. The mystery will consume most of their time and direct their actions during the film, during which they encounter the fourth major character of the film, the local magistrate played by Eric Portman, who will prove both daunting and helpful in turn during their investigations. Films by the Archers are almost always more than merely the sum of their parts, and that is the case here. There is so much going on in every scene, that it is easy to lose the plot because the characters and scenarios are each individually engaging enough to make you want to live inside the film for days. Especially effective is the non-actor Sweet, whose off-the-cuff but oddly effective delivery of his lines make you wish he had found greater acting opportunities on the screen elsewhere. (His IMDb resume only lists one other film, both biographical details do say he did some theatre in the ensuing years before he died in 2011 at the age of 95.) A very worthwhile and lovely experience, as is nearly every film by Powell and Pressburger. – TC4P Rating: 8/9

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) Dir.: John Campopiano and Justin White – This is the other film documentary that I mentioned briefly above in the S Is for Stanley review. Popping up on Amazon Prime at the exact moment that I really needed this type of film to fill some open time, Unearthed and Untold is a pretty detailed look at the production of the late '80s horror classic (yeah, I said it) Pet Sematary. While I was never a huge fan of the film at the time (though I liked it just fine), I have grown fonder of it over the years, during which I have had the opportunity to see it a couple of times more. Unearthed and Untold gathers just about any artist and actor who worked on Pet Sematary that was willing to recount their tales of working on the film, and despite there not being any actual final film footage from the production (probably because they didn't have the budget for it), this film is pretty thorough with its excellent use made of behind-the-scenes photos and video that gives us a neat glimpse into how it all went down on the set. Visits to the location sites in Maine are an added and sometimes rather creepy bonus. Even Marky Ramone, the sole main member of the Ramones left alive today, gets in briefly to talk about how they were brought in to provide songs on the soundtrack and record the title song. The big question is whether tiny Miko Hughes had turned into a murderous psycho after being subjected to some truly horrific scenes as a two-year-old (they even talk about being worried about at points in the film), but no... Miko is just fine and still acting at age 31, and seems a normal guy here in his interview scenes. The doc is sorely missing the inclusion of a fresh interview with King himself about the film, but I don't know that they didn't try to get one, so I will leave that as a stray thought. I am certain that somewhere in the near future, my writing partner Aaron and I will be re-reading Stephen King's original novel and watching Mary Lambert's film freshly to review and compare both for our Stephen King site, We Who Watch Behind the Rows. (Yes, this is an unabashed and unashamed plug.) – TC4P Rating: 6/9

Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) Dir.: Sean Patrick O'Reilly – There are many things that I really hate in films, but two of them are very evident here in Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom. First, I hate badly done computer animation. I can live with a single bad CGI shot or two in a larger film if their harm to the film is contained to a few seconds, and I can be accepting of a limited animation budget if the film in question is a mere few minutes and at least has a clever premise or voice performance to counter it. The other thing I hate is "Muppet Babying," where a franchise or character is cleaned up and/or dumbed down from its original form to appeal to a younger audience. This video feature is pretty much just "What if H.P. Lovecraft was a kid?" and has him having all sorts of misadventures on another dimensional plane with a monstrous tentacled pal that he names Spot, not knowing the creature is actually a younger form of the Elder god Cthulhu himself. I am a fan of Lovecraft's writing, but I am fairly certain that I am happy with the proper age for discovering his writing being approximately around the same as when I did, as a middle teenager, and not when young readers are six or seven, which seems to be the target audience for this film. It's not so much the existential dread and horrific implications of his words that causes me to state this, but rather the more than casual racism that also lurks within his stories, perhaps not in all of them but lightly throughout most and pretty hard in some. Such words might fly over the heads of many younger readers, especially since the style of his writing is itself antiquated enough by today's standards that his stories may seem rather dull to a generation that banks upon immediate thrills and not slow-boiling suspense and atmosphere. This is all for the better, and I find it fairly hard to believe that watching this animated crap pile will inspire anyone to seek out anything written on paper except perhaps to carefully edit their own self-penned suicide note.

This video pretty much jettisons anything worthwhile in Lovecraft's writing and mostly co-opts character and place names along with the occasional magical spell and slams them into a stiffly animated, witless, cliched children's film. The look of some of the goblin guards from Disney's version of Sleeping Beauty are also swiped for that of the villainous henchmen throughout the film as well. I have not read the graphic novels that form the basis for this film (nor for the planned sequel and the inevitable third production, since there are three comics in total), but taking a quick look at the first few pages of the Frozen Kingdom volume reveals that hewing closer to the style of the comic would have been a far more intriguing direction. At least in a visual sense, the comic doesn't look half bad (though a little generic). Instead, in the film version we get a design that pretty much made me feel like I was watching the truly atrocious Food Fight again, and goddamnit, I never needed to have that feeling! I've lived through it once. The only compliment I can give is that at least the story made a little more sense scene to scene than Food Fight, and for that I am truly thankful. The other thing that got my notice in Frozen Kingdom is that there are hammerhead sharks in the tank of the villain's fortress. Sure, they swim the same exact way, over and over again, in every single shot in which they appear, but there are at least sharks here. Otherwise, this video is a bloody mess. But without the blood, of course... this is for the kiddies, after all. Poor, poor kiddies... – TC4P Rating: 2/9

Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies (2016) Dir.: Dominik Hartl – Oh, it is Wednesday? Must be time for yet another goddamn zombie movie... OK, despite my living dead ennui here in 2017, I will say that if I had encountered Attack of the Lederhosen Zombies in 1988, I would have loved it without any reservations. However, it is 2017 and I am where I am at currently, having seen so many zombie films by now that I think I might be one. Sure, Jen and I love iZombie and watch it reverentially (it thrills me to no end that Jen loves a zombie show), but for me, that reverence might be mostly out of obeisance to Ms. Rose McIver. And I still love all the old zombie flicks that I grew up with in the '70s and '80s, and even many of the newer ones, but there are just so many out there now, and they just keep coming... almost like a zombie apocalypse. And everyone thinks they have the greatest, newest twist on the genre, and really, nearly all of them don't. But would I want everyone to stop trying? Of course not. That would block even the occasional innovation, and I don't want that. Lederhosen Zombies is a full-on slapstick gore comedy filmed at a ski resort in the Alps of South Tyrol where someone stupid has the idea to use this untested formula to create instant snow, but of course, what the formula really does is make someone sick enough to turn into an instant zombie instead and the fun begins. Crazy, non-stop action, Rube Goldberg-style gags involving snowboards and skiing equipment, a genuinely insane Austrian barmaid with a fully stocked arsenal for fightin' the undead, and some pretty noxious moments that even had me thinking about blowing chunks early on in the action... that sounds like fun to me. However, many of the jokes are too stilted and don't land with the impact that the filmmakers thought, the editing is pretty haphazard, and the (dubbed) acting is fairly wooden on occasion. Still the insanity is as infectious as a zombie plague, and the film goes by incredibly smoothly at under 80 minutes. A good film for a party night of horror heads. Not that I have been around one of those for, oh, far too many years. (I miss my horror peeps...) I can't rate this one too highly due to its many faults, but I will no doubt watch it again for kicks. – TC4P Rating: 4/9

Recently Rated Movies: Catching Up with Christopher Lee (the actor, not my brother…) Pt. 7

After a solid month of Halloween-oriented posts, it is time to return to the regular departments on The Cinema 4 Pylon. This time, we have three more wildly diverse films featuring the late, great Christopher Lee, as I attempt to see as many titles in his filmography as possible. 

Sherlock Holmes and the Incident at Victoria Falls (1992)

Dir: Bill Corcoran

TC4P Rating: 5

Over 25 years after his first effort to portray the famed Sherlock Holmes on screen was basically squandered by a German movie studio, Christopher Lee got a second (and third) shot at wearing the deerstalker cap in a pair of films that played as television movies and then went straight to video. The first film, Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, reintroduces Lee as the detective and Patrick Macnee as his Watson, both in their older years. Macnee was also getting another shot at his role after previously playing the good doctor in Sherlock Holmes in New York, opposite a fairly miscast Roger Moore.

In the second film in this pair, Holmes and Watson take to the Dark Continent under the orders of King Edward (Joss Ackland) to secure the Star of Africa diamond. On this adventure, they will end up cavorting with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt (a pretty good Claude Akins). The film makes an attempt at incorporating a storyline involving the making of the footage that Roosevelt shot on his journeys through Africa in the early days of cinema. Naturally, the diamond gets stolen, and as bodies start piling up, Holmes and Watson need to come to the rescue (with just a little bit of help of ol' Teddy himself).

While Lee and Macnee are pretty decent in their roles as the aging heroes, and Incident at Victoria Falls is nowhere near as bad as Lee's first Holmes attempt (1962's Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, discussed briefly here), the direction by Bill Corcoran is fairly by the book and a little dull, and it is not surprising to learn that the series of films was stopped after this one. It's a shame they didn't attempt a regular TV series instead, with briefer episodes, so we might have gotten a little bit more of this combo and let them stretch into the roles a little bit. It's a shame we never got a good Holmes film with Lee in his prime, as he may have been terrific in the original stories. Sadly, we will never know for sure.

Mask of Murder (1985)
Dir: Arne Mattsson
TC4P Rating: 4

"Psychiatrists have already taken a good look at him, and they can't make up their minds whether his problem is in his head or his balls." - Chief Superintendent Jonathan Rich (Christopher Lee)

Some creep wearing a sack with holes cut in it and a lipstick mouth commits a series of grisly straight razor murders of female victims one day, but is soon trapped by the police, led by Christopher Lee and Rod Taylor. Holed up on a snowy farm, the killer injures Lee, but is shot to pieces and dies. And with his death goes the string of murders. Or does it? 

Mask of Murder is directed by Swedish film veteran Arne Mattsson, and was filmed in Uppsala, Sweden rather than the "small town in Canada - Nelson" it purports to be via a brief subtitle at the beginning of the film. If you are unaware (or don't care), Uppsala is the hometown of film giant Ingmar Bergman, though there is absolutely no relationship between his justly revered oeuvre and this cheap, savage film to have been made there. (A trivial note, and nothing more.)

The series of murders pick up again not long after, and the film goes to no real great lengths at all to hide who is behind them. I will leave that to the viewer to discover, but when you watch the film, there can be no other choice. In the meantime, we get a lot of relationship/adultery drama between Taylor and Valerie Perrine, who plays his wife. Perrine has the best role in the film, and while I am not really a fan of hers, I did enjoy her in this one. She and Lee seem to be the only ones really engaged in their roles.

Mask of Murder has some gory parts (and not really all that well turned) and it also features the requisite '80s softcore nudity and strip club scenes. The winter backdrop of the town is a nice change from most films of this type, and lends an extra layer of atmosphere, even if the actors need to wear an extra layer or two of clothing. The vibe in the murder scenes is a bit eerie, and from the opening sequence of murders we can tell this is not going to go the normal slasher movie route. But that doesn't mean it goes anywhere really remarkable either. It looks like a horror film, but actually gets bogged down in the sort of territory that you would have seen Andrew Stevens directing and starring in at the beginning of the '90s. (There is even cheesy synthesizer music playing over the love scenes.) If only Shannon Tweed would show up to make it all look a little nicer.


The Keeper (1976)
Dir: T.Y. Drake
TC4P Rating: 4

"Now, whatever you do, don't let him hypnotize you!"

The Keeper is by far the most interesting film of the three I am including in this post, and that is by a long shot. Let me warn you at the outset, it's not good -- in fact, it's the worst film of the three -- but also the most interesting and least dull of the lot.

Written and directed by T.Y. Drake (who used to perform on The Andy Williams Show as a Good Time Singer), this low-budget Canadian effort stars Christopher Lee as The Keeper, a mysterious figure who runs a mental institution in what we are told is British Columbia in 1947. There are half-hearted attempts to convince us that the film takes place 29 years before it was filmed: jazz on the soundtrack, a tough guy detective in a trenchcoat (believe it or not, the dick's name really is Dick, as in Richard "Dick" Driver), fast-paced tough guy talk, period cars, and most hilarious of all, a totally out-of-place shoeshine boy working on a mostly barren, leaf-strewn avenue who dispenses helpful advice (this kid seems to shine shoes all hours). But none of it works at all to take us out of whatever present we are in when we watch it.

Dick Driver is trying to get to the bottom of a mystery involving the wealthy patients being "kept" in the Keeper's asylum. "I'm only a custodial physician. Patients here call me the Keeper," insists the crippled, older man Lee portrays, but there is clearly something else at play here. His obsession with hypnotherapy may provide a clue, since he seems to be able to trick any visitors to the institution into being hypnotized before they leave. When visitors leave the institution, they seem to bite the dust, leaving large inheritances directly to their relatives inside the Keeper's institution.

And so we get wild, psychedelic scenes of never-ending spirals, flashing lights, and images of attacking dogs, spinning watches, and subliminal spiders, as the Keeper tries to control his subjects to his truly undisguised nefarious ends. Practically everyone in the film undergoes hypnosis at some point, and with everybody under his influence, it would take a major misstep for the Keeper to be brought down. Hmmm... I wonder what it will be?

We also get the bumbling interference of a police inspector, who besides getting tripped up by some mild slapstick, also gets hypnotized into thinking he is a choo-choo train, which is the most over-the-top sequence in the film (at least until the final shot of Lee at film's end). Though the actor (his name is unimportant) looks more like Harold Peary, who played the Great Gildersleeve, the police inspector kept reminding me of classic porn star John Leslie throughout the film. It was probably the weird mustache he wears that did it, as it is similar to the one that Leslie wore in a number of films. It's strange that I made this connection, because my mind created another link to '70s porn when I heard the private eye's name was Dick Driver. I could not help thinking that with a slight change in location, this script, inane as it is, could have been used in a Johnny Wadd film.

Now there's a job offer Christopher Lee probably would not have accepted in his very prolific decade of the 1970s.

Recently Rated Movies: Catching Up with Christopher Lee (the actor, not my brother…) Pt. 1

In resurrecting many of the old regular columns on this blog, my favorite was often Recently Rated Movies, wherein I would shorthand my usual long-winded blathering and comment oh so very briefly on a series of films I had recently seen and rated on IMDb. To begin this column regularly again, I am tying it into a project in which I have been engaged for the past three weeks. I have been employing the Charts function on Flickchart to create lists that show me which films of one of my favorite actors I have yet to see. Because I have watched so many films overall (11,000+), for there to be films for someone like, say, Boris Karloff, they would either have to be films I have intentionally putting off for one reason or another, films that were harder to find in the past, or simply something I had little interest in viewing.

I began the project with Bela Lugosi, and quickly knocked out eleven of his films in short order (luckily most of them are barely over an hour long), including the infamously terrible (and justly so) Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla and Mother Riley Meets the Vampire. I then leaped over to the aforementioned Mr. Karloff (there was some slight crossover), and not only also took down eleven of his films, including three out of four of his late ‘60s Mexican flicks (where all of his scenes were directed at the same time by Jack Hill and then inserted into the films proper), but also four of his Mr. Wong films from the late ’30s and early ‘40s.

And now, I am on the chart for the recently departed Christopher Lee. He has 133 films listed on Flickchart (overall, he has 278 acting credits listed on IMDb), and of those 133 films, until the other day, I had seen ONLY 68 of them. That leaves a massive amount of his films left to see, and I doubt I have the time left or the energy to see them all. Lee himself had a quote he was fond of repeating where he is regularly told by fans, “I have seen all of your films!” His reply, “No, you haven’t.” Well, now I have ticked nine more films off that list over the last few days.

[Editor's note: All films are rated on a scale of 9.]

The Puzzle of the Red Orchid [German title: Edgar Wallace: Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee | Alt. English title: The Secret of the Red Orchid]

Dir: Helmut Ashley

TC4P Rating: 4

When is it called for to have the very British legend Christopher Lee, with his deep and memorable speaking voice, to have his dialogue dubbed into English? Specifically, an American accent? When he originally recorded his dialogue for this would-be thriller based on an Edgar Wallace story (as many European films were in the ‘60s), it was reportedly into what I have read in some places as some rather decent German. That aside, it is incongruous to say the least to watch Lee in numerous scenes while hearing a ridiculously square and far too rigidly pronounced American accent pour from his lips (and obviously not matching what he is really saying), especially given that there is no attempt at all to try and match the timbre of his famous voice. 

A minor plus is that this film moves pretty fast, though the characters are involved in a mystery I don’t really care about while Chicago gangsters are kidnapping people in London. There are some fairly stilted attempts at comic relief, but like everything else in this movie, the dubbing also kills the chance for any humor to translate properly for the viewer. It’s not as horrid as you think it will be going into it, but it’s still a bit of a chore to watch.

Hannie Caulder (1971)

Dir: Burt Kennedy

TC4P Rating: 6

Let’s not get carried away here. Sensei Tarantino loves this film and has pointed to it as an inspiration for Kill Bill. It is easy to see why he loves it, and it is also easy to see the inspiration it served. But this is not a great lost classic. It’s merely a fairly decent western with an excellent male lead in Robert Culp, and some good, disgusting supporting roles for Strother Martin, Ernest Borgnine, and especially Jack Elam. 

There is also a dandy small part for Christopher Lee as the expert gunsmith that Culp and female lead Raquel Welch call upon to customize pistols with which Welch’s title character can exact revenge on the raping and murdering trio played by Martin, Borgnine, and Elam. The movie has some wit to it, and is engaging from start to finish. Welch is hardly believable in her gunslinger role, especially in what she is allowed to wear during the era in which they purport to be, though I mark this up to the ‘70s and the need for the studio to sell her remarkable exterior (if only they knew how). 

I do have a complaint about the blood, which gushes forth from numerous bullet wounds throughout the movie, as being too obviously fake. It rather galls me about the third time it happens. Other than that, watch it for a prime example of just how assured and captivating Robert Culp can be in the right role.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

Dir: Does it even matter?

TC4P Rating: 5

Let’s talk about product. Pure product. Yes, I am one of those original Star Wars kids from 1977. I read the paperback (with the purple cover and the pre-film character designs by McQuarrie) numerous times before the film was released that summer, and I bought the comics, toys, LPs, trading cards, posters, blueprints, t-shirts, puzzles, games, prints, and what have you without a second thought. Like any other religious convert, I gave up my allowance on a weekly basis to the Force reverently for a handful of years, and it never once struck me I was being manipulated at all as I followed the adventures of Luke, Han, Leia and their pals through the next couple of films. Nor would I have cared if I did realize the manipulation at hand. I was in my teens, I loved what I loved, and I didn’t want to hear otherwise.

Though George Lucas has crippled my opinion of his creation due to his obstinate mishandling of it in recent years, I still maintain a soft spot for the original films, enough so that I am like everyone else who can’t wait to see what J.J. Abrams will bring us come winter. Likewise, I am equally excited about Disney’s plans for a new Star Wars Land in the park. While that might further define me as a “sheeple” in regards to blindly going along with the rest of the flock, the quality of the product is likely to be so high that I couldn’t resist if I wanted, lest I be branded a curmudgeon, hipster, or troll or some unholy combination of the three.

But there is a difference between product of a remarkably high caliber and just mere product, rendered to the blandness of pabulum, still to be considered sustainable entertainment but absolutely lacking in real character or emotional depth. Even more interesting is when product of the second variety spews forth from the same factory creating the higher form. And thus, from that off-white void, crawls out Star Wars: The Clone Wars, animated to the far brink of what was accepted as popular animation in the year in which it was released (but no further), brightly colored, swift moving, and sporting the mind-numbing, political denseness that plagued the three most recent Lucas productions. However, it does have several presumably exciting battle sequences, mostly involving the younger Obi-Wan and Anakin, along with a young Padawan named Ahsoka (sadly, Lucas did not name an older brother for her as Supasoka, but I feel he would have), for those that have not already seen similar scenes in many, many other films. Therein lies the key to the film’s existence, both as product and as a part of Star Wars culture. It is also the same key that explains my reticence to embrace the later productions from my once beloved font of space opera entertainment.

I am no longer twelve years old. I might act like it at times. I may still adore most of the things I loved when I was that age. I may even still own most of the things I owned from that time (and I largely do). But I am no longer twelve. I am a 51-year-old man watching a film designed to attract actual twelve-year-olds to a possible entry point into the Star Wars universe, or to keep the kids already inclined to be inside that universe further entertained and to get them to buy the comics, toys, etc. that go along with it. Just like when I was that age.

So, I am no longer the target audience for Star Wars: The Clone Wars. In fact, I am about thirty years past it. But it does not mean that I can’t watch the film, have an understanding of it, nor speak my piece on it. But I can't embrace it like I did those earlier films. It’s just really no longer mine. I knew this when it was released, and so I put off seeing it. And I only watched it last week because it was film highest up on the Flickchart list of Christopher Lee films I had yet to see, and if there was going to be a Chris Lee flick I hadn’t watched, it was not going to be a Star Wars one. And so watch it I did. Mr. Lee voices his Count Dooku character from the later films, and he does his usual excellent job. He is barely in the film, and the rest is taken up by the politics, battle scenes, and Jedi nonsense I mentioned earlier. What the ads should have read is "Come for the Dooku. Stay for the product."

Psychotronic Ketchup: Blackout (1978)

Director: Eddy Matalon
New World, 1:28, color
Cast Notables: Robert Carradine; Jim Mitchum; Belinda Montgomery; Ray Milland; June Allyson; Jean-Pierre Aumont
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

I would never have given Blackout the time of day if its title hadn't appeared in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film.

One of the few negative things about that volume is that it spends an inordinate amount of time with disaster movies. Sure, disaster movies can be fun (especially in an unintentional way), and they certainly fulfill the special effects aspect with which most films of the psychotronic sort find themselves involved. Certainly a case can also be made that disaster movies are not that far removed from monster flicks, with the earthquake or flood or, in this case, the city-wide blackout (and the reaction of the citizenry to its installation) substituting for the giant monster that would normally kill, maim, stop and generally terrify the people of the film.

But that is really pushing it as far as interest goes. After all the big effects used to bring to life the main star of the film -- the disaster itself -- disaster films most often boil down, at least for me, to simply being rote actioners or dramas. Each one seems to exist on a set number of predictable crises that most in the main cast will fail one by one to get past, a series of often poorly acted (often by overrated veteran actors) character scenes that set up the various reasons why this person should live and why this one should die, and one steadfast hero who will lead the survivors through to the end. There might be a modicum of surprising twists, but usually not much that veers too far away from the standard template. In these ways too, disaster films are much like monster films. Only the monster films are far weirder even in just conception, let alone actions, and deserve simply via that weirdness alone a definite place in a book of outré cinema, even the most average of entries in the monster genre. The problem I have with disaster films being in the Psychotronic Guide is that disasters are happening every single day somewhere in this world, natural or man-made. Disasters are a common reality, and therefore, the films concerning them are much, much too far from the usual head trip that a decent psychotronic movie should portray or invoke in the viewer.

Even so, the Psychotronic Encyclopedia has within it Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. Rollercoaster is in there, and so are the films in the Airport quartet. Again, because all of these are big-budget, special effects flicks, I can understand the impetus to put them in the book. Other tempting reasons for the author are probably their crazy-quilt, all-star casts, their unintentional humor, and inherent campiness. And I do like some of these films, and not just in an ironic way. I simply don't agree with the decision to put them in the book. I find the movies too stifling banal to go alongside something as goofy as The Hideous Sun Demon. But its not my book, except by purchase, so it was never my decision what to include. The disaster films are in the book all the same, and if I don't really care for them or find them monotonous, well, it's my own fault for coming up with a gimmick like trying to watch every film in the Psychotronic. All I can do is deal with them.

And thus, I run into a plain wanna-be disaster flick called Blackout, from New World Pictures in 1978. And then, once I find Blackout actually is available on DVD (one of the extra steps that is required in seeing these films), per my own rules, I have to rent and watch it.

Blackout has its own version of an all-star cast. It has the son of a real movie star as the dull but earnest hero (Jim Mitchum), it has the brother of two more famous actors as the crazed anarchist villain (Robert Carradine, and he is pretty effective in this), it has two old-timey movie stars in small roles (Ray Milland, one of my favorites and as grumpy as ever, and June Allyson, in her final screen role), and this Canadian production even goes for some international verve with the casting of Gallic film legend Jean-Pierre Aumont in another small, tragic role as a washed-up magician. But that's about it for the phrase "all-star". Unless you count Belinda Montgomery, whom you may not know, but whom I adored as a kid when she played the hottie doctor/love interest of Patrick Duffy on The Man from Atlantis TV series. And unless you count the porky, recognizable guy working in the city electric control center, who chomps his cigar muttering indecipherable epithets and instructions to his crew while all hell breaks loose and the city is plunged into a Stygian darkness.

Blackout is a big-budget disaster action film produced by people who only have about a tenth of the coffers they need to do so. This is fine. I am a tremendous fan of low-budget productions, where tenacity and filmmaking wit can bring about wondrous delight. Not here, though there are a couple of surprisingly tense action scenes (especially the closing battle between Mitchum and Carradine in a parking garage. You can always count on the '70s for some jarringly rough car action.) Needing to portray a citywide blackout without actually having a full city to blackout, the filmmakers place most of the concentration of their film on a single hi-rise tower, where a group of criminals who use the advantage of the blackout to escape from a police van, run amok and torment the mostly helpless people trapped inside the building. Mitchum is the tough cop who practically stumbles onto this rampage, and it is hard to not think of Die Hard when watching this, even if the films are miles apart in execution and design. Or quality, for that matter.

Cop Mitchum will do the following once he enters the building: rescue rape victim Montgomery and enlist her aid, while she is clearly in shock from being ravaged mere moments before; discover people trapped in an elevator; shoot down the rapist; mistakenly take Carradine into his trust; escape from being electrocuted; put out a fire; and also singlehandedly battle the entire gang, including most of the members in solo duels. It seems like a lot for one guy to handle in a single evening -- almost a cop version of After Hours, stuck inside one loony building which almost seems to stand in as a miniaturization of any point in the human universe -- but there is so much more in which he could have been involved. A baby is born amongst all this chaos, the child of the lady trapped in the elevator starts wandering throughout the building, and there is a Greek wedding on a higher floor that decides that the only way to get through all of this is to party, party, party! And people get murdered here and there.

A sharper group of filmmakers could have actually done something with this that didn't feel so by the book at every turn. (I think of how tense and muscular John Carpenter made what could have been a generic Rio Bravo rip in Assault on Precinct 13.) Once you accept just how cynical and unforgiving these criminals are, and once you get their individual tics down, all surprise is erased from the script. You know exactly where everything is going to end up, and you know who is going to live and who is going to die. In their effort to be part of the disaster trend of that era, in replicating the vapidity and predictability of their predecessors, the makers of Blackout probably considered their barely interesting product to be a success. It is certainly so if they indeed made money off this project. There is no art involved here, just commerce. That's not a crime, especially in the movie-making world, and if you are looking for filler when there are so many more entertaining things surrounding us -- well, if you are that type of person, then look no further. Consider your time filled and your standards average.

But this film is in no way "psychotronic." Perhaps I will just use some Liquid Paper to excise it and its boring ilk from the book once I am finished "accidentally" seeing films that shouldn't be in there. No one said I can't decide which films should be in the book after I've bought it...

Spout Mavens Disc #4: 13 Tzameti (2005)

About two days after I was halfway through my third, frustrating viewing of 13 Tzameti, I started having nightmares. Not the type of nightmares that leave you waking up -- cold sweat -- shaking -- whizzin' the bed, but the type where you wake up going, "What the fuck was that?" And the dreams had nothing to do with the ratcheted up gun violence in the center section of the film, where a high stakes daisy chain of pistol-packing morons blasting holes in each other's heads makes Hollywood positively cream over the thought of reaping even bigger profits than the illegal cash the winners in the film land by remaking 13 Tzameti in a country where professional football players can earn a little extra bling green via underground dogfighting, even if they occasionally have to kill an unlucky puppy by smashing its body into a wall. The dream actually involved a couple of incidental characters in the film: 1) a gangster named Jean-François Godon who overdoses early in the film in a bathtub, and whose death propels the main character into the game within the film, and 2) a toadie at the event named José who acts as both a source of enlightenment during the match for the main character, and eventually will also pose a minor threat to him later. (None of this gives away anything, and it doesn't matter anyway.)

The bathtub gangster appeared in my dream earliest, rising from his tub and telling me to fix the roof. Apparently, he thought I was the main character of the film, even though I was hanging out by a pool with my friends (and for those who know of my dislike of chlorine, they will know this is highly unlikely itself), his bathtub sat beside the pool, his naked, needle-jabbed gangster arm pointing at a sky which suddenly had a roof appear wherever he pointed, and always with a hole in need of repair in it. 'There... and there... and there..." For reasons only the dream makers understand, he disappeared, and suddenly my friends and I were climbing the outside of a skyrise to reach a mall on the top floor where we were to perform our Renaissance Fair puppet show -- and why we didn't simply take the elevator was never asked once as I can recall. The dead gangster in the bathtub never showed up again, and I will leave his strident call for roof-fixing to those who really give a shit about dream interpretation. I do not.

José, however, is another matter. He showed up the next night, though I believe he was not really José, but actually the Brazilian horror film legend Coffin Joe, whom I have been watching off and on in a series of films over the past couple of weeks, and with whom José shares a roughly similar beard and dark eyes. Not incidentally, Coffin Joe (and José) also reminded me a tad bit, via various features, of my little brother, the Eel. But it looked like José, including the sweater he wears in 13 Tzameti, and he was definitely not wearing a top hat or crazily long fingernails. José made a point of following me about for much of the dream, constantly trying to take things from my grasp and warning me to tip him, which would be a minute detail from 13 Tzameti. This night, though, instead of waking up and actually going, "What the fuck?," I merely resolved to not finish watching 13 Tzameti for the third time, and cease trying to determine what all the hubbub was about, Bub.

If I were to match up my opinion following 2-1/2 viewings of 13 Tzameti with that of my dreaded cover-judging curse that I inevitably fall into time and again, I would have to say that my feelings are just about at the same point as I expected them to be when the disc arrived in the mail at my abode. I am not one to shy away from gun violence in films: I watch an awful lot of westerns (Peckinpah, Leone and Mann are favorites) and my world would be nothing without Woo's The Killer and Hard Boiled and Tarantino's flicks, amongst others. I despise guns in real life, but I realize their practical purposes, and do not disparage those who wield them sensibly and by the laws of the land. Nor do I disdain hunting for food (though I do despise those who go trophy seeking). What I do tend to shy away from is this bullet-headed, pumped-up, Ultra-Xtreme world in which we increasingly find ourselves mired, where war and carnage are the only answer, diplomacy and understanding are tied to the tracks, attitude talks, and bullshit... well, it's what we are fed inside our fatburgers. And the cover of this disc, with its artfully arranged splatter effect and a shaved head bearing the title of the film, just shoved more of that crappy world in my face. To say I was reticent from the start is the mildest way that I can put it.

The pleasant surprise is that the film itself has far more in common with Melville or Dassin for large portions than it does with modern mega-mega-mega action. It's a black-and-white mood piece being sold with a UFC poster. Others have written here on Spout of the plot in detail, and while I don't normally care about spoilers nor worry enough to point them out to people when they are around the corner, with this film I feel that if one is to enjoy the story in any sense (outside of those who have boners for bullets smashing through a person's cranium), then the machinations of the characters surrounding of the game (as slim as they are) should be left to the viewer to discover, and not spilled carelessly about in a review. I don't often feel this way about a film all the way through, but this one depends on these minute revelations, even if none of them strike the viewer in any major way that one expects when told of the "twist" factor. That factor does not surface here; rather, the film is merely embellished by small, subtle strokes that add immeasurably to the flinty narrative. And I did get caught up in the story, such as it is, despite never really caring about the participants; that this film needs serious fleshing out will be readily apparent following the conclusion of the game, as the story loses its impetus quite swiftly afterwards.

But, story is not why people want to see this film, is it? They hear what is at the center of the film, and from there, it is equal parts morbid curiosity and primal bloodlust, which should be quelled for most once they find out that, while there is blood in the movie, it is in black and white. Sorry, red red krowy fans. You will find your color sense dulled. Roll your tongues back up until it rests against all of those cavities once again (and I don't mean the body ones, though I am sure there are some out there who won't have a problem with that...) It's all about the propulsive destructiveness of that massive cadre of guns, pointed at circle after circle of recidivist noggins (I assume, for the most part, except for our innocent main boy, that they are of the ilk). Some will feed off of the freak show quality of these scenes, and if you are the type, by all means, feel free to play along with the home version of our game. The world will be better off without you, and there are no consolation prizes.

Look, I love Halloween, but I have no urgent need to see butcher knives being thrust into people's chests; likewise, Reservoir Dogs is a great, gory time, but I never once went through a day thinking, "You know, there just aren't enough films with people getting their ears cut off these days!" With the Carpenter flick, the appeal was a genuinely creepy atmosphere, teenage characters that talked like people I went to school with (possibly the first time I had seen that in a film at that age), and just enough cheesy acting to give it a sense of heightened reality, all directed by a guy who, once upon a time, really knew how build suspense. The Tarantino flick also had that heightened sense, though far less cheesy, some great dialogue, and some quite interesting characterizations. Both films, though I loved them, never got close to the real world. Even in the most frightening or shocking moments, my feet were still on the theatre floor, no matter how lost in their worlds I got. And no matter if the film is drowning in import, heavy-going drama -- in most cases, I am fully aware that everything is fine off the set, and that I am watching actors. They are still entertainments -- still just movies.

With 13 Tzameti, it's different. The world outside of the game, before and after, unfolds like the real world: dull, monotonous, a man climbing up and down a ladder or two and then back up again and then back down again. Despite the fact I don't know personally know or knowingly consort with gangsters or criminals, the world they inhabit feels like ours. Where the reality would seem to get heightened is at the game, but though its filming is bravura as a short segment and there is a considerable amount of suspense that builds around the shooting cycles, all I feel is that this could happen down the street in any neighborhood in the world, given the right circumstances. I'm watching heads taking bullets, bodies hitting floors, survivors shaking themselves out of stupors to sludge towards their dressing rooms to prepare for the next possibly fatal round, loading up on morphine to get them through what must be a severe mental pounding... and I can't handle it. I don't want to know it anymore. If I want reality, I will watch the local news and feel this bad. I'm certain things like this go on, perhaps even down my street, but I do not want to think about it. To me, the film eventually starts to feel like snuff... it's not snuff, but it feels like it. I start to worry about the actors, and whether they are actors after all. I think "Who is this director? I've never heard of him -- perhaps he really had these guys killed!" I become certain that Videodrome is real... I will have to admit the game sequence is fascinating to me, but it's nauseating at the same time, in a way that even the worst torture porn never makes me feel. And the surrounding storyline is not strong enough to remind me that this small portion of the film (though the selling point of it, perhaps tellingly) is just a movie. I get stuck inside the dreadful game.

After 2-1/2 viewings, I'm sorry, but that's how I feel. I will not be finishing it for the third time. And hopefully, I won't start dreaming about the fat guy who bends over all the time...

Rixflix A to Z: Badlands (1973)

Badlands (Warner Bros., 1973)
Dir./Wr./Prod.: Terrence Malick
Crew Notables: Jack Fisk (Art Direction); Tak Fujimoto, Stevan Larner and Brian Probyn (cinematography)
Cast Notables: Martin Sheen (Kit), Sissy Spacek (Holly), Warren Oates, Gary Littlejohn, Alan Vint, Ramon Bieri, John Carter, Terrence Malick (cameo)
TC4P Rating: 9/9


"I saw her standin' on her front lawn just a-twirlin' her baton
Me and her went for a ride, sir, and ten innocent people died

From the town of Lincoln, Nebraska with a sawed-off .410 on my lap
Through to the Badlands of Wyoming, I killed everything in my path

I can't say that I am sorry for the things that we done
At least for a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun"
To say that Charles Starkweather's murderous rampage through the Midwest in the winter of 1957-58 caught the nation's attention would be a severe understatement. Not only did his desperate flight from Nebraska to Wyoming with his girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate, five years his junior and only 14 years old, become a phenomenon in the headlines and have half the country searching for them, but their flight is still impacting popular culture to this day, fifty years after it happened.

I really did not pick up on the term "Badlands" until I got my copy of Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town shortly after its release in 1978. It was my first Springsteen album (though I already knew Born to Run and Thunder Road by heart from a zillion listens on the radio), but it wasn't until I was flipping to our only cable channel a couple of years later that I ran into the movie Badlands. It was only the second half of the film, with a James Dean-like Martin Sheen shooting it out with the cops and working the media like it was his bitch. Even though he is doomed for the electric chair for a string of murders, and is probably a nervous wreck inside, he maintains a cool exterior and has the cops practically eating out of his hands. 

And the film itself was unlike anything that I had seen to that point: slow, methodical, and poetic in its juxtaposition of the eerie calm and emptiness of the landscape with the sudden savagery that sprung from its teenage protagonist's hands. And though I found their acts despicable and hard to fathom, I was then blossoming into the lovable misanthrope that I am today, and so the snotty anti-social behavior of the couple held a strange appeal to me as I devoured the film a few times more during the course of the next couple of months.

It didn't hurt that the two lead actors are terrific in the film. I was already a fan of Sheen from his appearances on television in The Execution of Private Slovick, where he played the lead, and in the Cuban missile crisis docudrama The Missiles of October, where he portrayed Bobby Kennedy. It was because I saw him on the screen immediately when I flipped on the cable that I stayed around to watch Badlands. 

I had also not seen Carrie yet, so this film was my introduction to Sissy Spacek, and her blank expression through most of this chaos also struck me as weirdly compelling. But I had no idea that they were playing cinematic versions of real people; to me, the film was just a lovers-on-the-run flick. Later, in the library, I looked up Badlands and found out the true story behind the film, and also ran into one of my first run-ins with the Law of "Based on a True Story": that filmmakers, no matter how talented or true in their intentions, have to change details. They don't have to; they just do. Call it "creative license".

I found out that the murders in real life were even more terrible than the ones committed in the film, and that Starkweather and Fugate killed 11 people in all, and that where Sheen's Kit shoots his girlfriend Holly's father, Starkweather also killed Fugate's mother and then strangled her two-year-old sister while she made lunch in the kitchen. Or so Charles claimed. He went to the chair claiming that Caril Ann was involved in most of the murders; she went to prison stubbornly insisting that she was a hostage the entire time. In the movie, Holly gets off scot-free. And characters that Kit lets live, like the rich man and his maid, met their doom at Starkweather and Fugate's hands. I've always wondered why Malick toned down their spree; my guess is that it would make his couple seem a little more sympathetic, even when Sheen is blasting someone with a shotgun. I know myself that if the film played by the real-life rules, that I would probably not have watched the film the same way -- or over again. The violence would have appealed to my teenage self, but I most likely would have truly despised the characters.

I find myself thinking about two other amazing films that played the same way to me at that age: Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde and Dillinger (the one with Warren Oates and Richard Dreyfuss). I was fascinated with the blood and machine guns, and found the Robin Hood antics of the bank-robbing desperadoes to be dangerously "right up my alley", even if I came away from both films, like this one, with the definite notion that crime not only doesn't pay, but that nihilism is a relentlessly stupid pursuit. I may have my problems with our society and government, but I still believe that things can always be changed for the better, and it is far more noble to take a positive stance than to think that life will never get better and that one should strike out violently at the world. For all the negativity that Hollywood withstands over the subject of violence in movies, and while I simply can't turn away from a good gangster flick, consider me one person who prefers the path of non-violence because I am watching films like Badlands.

The film world certainly didn't stop at Badlands in its screen portrayal of Starkweather and Fugate: it found its earliest form in the low-budget schlock thriller The Sadist (with the caveman-faced Arch Hall, Jr., in perhaps his only decent performance), and later inspired numerous other films and TV movies, including the overly famous Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone and written by Quentin Tarantino. I must say that I was shocked at first to see that Peter Jackson included Starkweather and Fugate references in his ghostly Michael J. Fox fantasy The Frighteners, but their name-dropping does add an effectively edgy dose of darkness to an otherwise fun film.

But, it all came around to Springsteen again in 1982 on his solo acoustic album Nebraska. When I dropped the needle on the disc (yes, it was in those days), and I heard the title track begin the record, the images from the film came rushing back into my head, even though at first I had no idea that the song was inspired by the film directly. I will let the remainder of the Boss' lyrics to that song close the show, because after I read them, I feel the same way I did after I heard them that first time, and the way that I feel when I watch Malick's movie: like there is a vengeful chill in the air. Like I am standing in the Badlands, with the cold wind of Justice bearing down on my neck, and with Love and Life ready to betray me for the crimes I have committed. I understand Kit's rage. And then I understand Starkweather's. I don't want to, but I do.

"Now, the jury brought in a guilty verdict, and the judge he sentenced me to death
Midnight in a prison storeroom with leather straps across my chest

Sheriff, when the man pulls that switch, sir, and snaps my poor head back
You make sure my pretty baby is sittin' right there on my lap

They declared me unfit to live, said into that great void my soul'd be hurled
They want to know why I did what I did? Sir, I guess there's just a meanness in this world"

Lyrics Copyright © 1982 Bruce Springsteen