Thursday's Game (1974)

Once a week for 4 years, a group of people got together to play poker. One of them decides the stakes aren't high enough, so they play for more money. After all but two lose a considerable amount of money, a fight breaks out and they decide they aren't playing anymore, but Harry (Gene Wilder) and Marvin (Bob Newhart) decide they enjoy their one night a week away from home too much to give it up, so they agree to keep meeting on Thursdays to do whatever they want without telling their wives otherwise. Harry and Marvin weren't friends before this, but over the next three months they form a solid friendship. While Marvin has recently found success in the garment industry, Harry is fired from his job as a television producer after his ratings have been steadily slipping. Both of their marriages, however, are falling apart. While Marvin is shallow and spends all of his energy finding a way to leave his older wife, Harry's unemployment causes him to slip into a depression that pushes his wife away from him to the point of separation.

This was a made for TV movie filmed in 1971 that finally aired on ABC in 1974. Written by James L. Brooks, this film is at once funny and depressing. The budding friendship between Harry and Marvin is interesting to watch unfold. Together they talk about their marriages, employment problems, etc, but neither of them spend any time with their spouses discussing their problems at home. It's all very relatable, and the set-up is as good as any to deal with this mid-life crisis business. The best scenes are with Harry and his wife, Lynne (played by Ellen Burstyn). All of her attempts at consolation are batted away and she reacts as one would expect under those circumstances. As this was made for TV, it's loaded with television stars (Bob Newhart, Cloris Leachman, Valarie Harper, Rob Reiner, Norman Fell), all delivering solid performances. Thankfully, Gene Wilder has a few scenes where he loses it and goes manic, as he does so well, but his brooding, darker scenes are just as great. James L. Brooks is a great writer, and this cast does a decent job with his work.

You wont find this on DVD, but I found a copy on VHS here at a secondhand shop. Someone's uploaded the entire thing on YouTube, so it's there if you want it. Nothing life changing, mind you, but you'll likely find something of yourself in this movie somewhere. Recommended. 

3/5

 

Dead End Drive-In (1986)

Making an exit with style!

Not exactly a post-nuke movie, but set in the not-so-distant future after total economic collapse. The government sweeps go-nowhere youth off the streets and imprisons them in the local drive-in, sort of a concentration camp, but with all of the luxuries lazy, unmotivated teens could want: free movies, junk food, drugs, etc. Despite being patrolled by armed police and kept in by electric fences, everyone is complacent. Nobody has any desire to leave. Nobody but Crabs, that is. Crabs just wanted to take his girl to the movies in in brother's '56 Chevy, but was imprisoned in the process. He spend the entire film trying to get back out, butting heads with the owner/warden of the drive-in and with other punks who themselves have surrendered to their new lifestyles, but are irritated by Crab's refusal to accept the situation.

This takes place in the future, in 1990, but the costumes, music and everything else about this movies is 1000% of the 80s. It severely dates this film, but also provides it with most of it's charm. It's fairly cheesy, but fun because of it. There weren't any subtitles on the disc, so I struggled with some of the dialogue as the Australian accents were quite thick at times, but I understood most of it. Crabs was a likeable enough character, maybe the only likeable person in the film. While everyone else was stupid, vapid and lazy, he just wanted to get his tires back so he could go home. As with a lot of Aussie films I've seen, there's some great stunt work involving car smash-ups. There's a decent fight scene, more than one pair of exposed breasts, a sex scene, shower scene and some neat-o explosions. There's even a side story involving Aussie racism against Asians that sets somewhat of a moral tone, but it's quickly interrupted by gun fire and giant fireballs before it goes anywhere.

This was a fun way to spend an hour and a half. Nothing mind-blowing, mind you, but enjoyable. I'd have no problem with drinking a few beers and watching this one again.

3/5

Uptown Saturday Night (1974)

"I get mean when you mess with my green!"

Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby star in this 1974 comedy about two working stiffs looking for a good time. Wardell (Cosby) convinces Steve (Poitier) to cut loose for a night of his vacation and pay a visit to Zenobia's, an illegal night club. While there, the place is held-up and everyone's money, jewelry and personal effects are stolen by masked men. The next morning Steve recognizes his winning lottery numbers in the newspaper, but remembers his ticket is in his wallet that was stolen the night before. The rest of the movie is one madcap adventure after another in an attempt to get his wallet back from the thieves who stole it. 

Poitier isn't known for his comedic skills, but he had a lot of support in this movie by way of Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, Harry Belafonte, and of course, Bill Cosby. Cosby steals the show, not surprisingly, but the single scene with Richard Pryor was the stand-out of the movie for me. Poitier directed and produced this movie as well, and at a time when most black movies were mostly low budget blaxploitation affairs that did more harm than good to the people involved. It was because of Poitier's success he was able to make a movie like this, though, and the roles could have easily been switched out for an all-white cast with similar results. This isn't a comedy for black people, it's just a comedy with black people in it. There were a lot of funny scenes, but it also felt really "clean". A little more grit would have made this more enjoyable for me, but then we'd be moving right into the stereotypes Poitier was trying to avoid. In general, PG rated movies aren't my thing.

I liked this, but it's probably not something I'll ever want to see again. As a result of watching this, I'd be keen to see more of Cosby's work from the 70s, though. With the exception of "Mother, Jugs & Speed", this is the only pre-"Cosby Show" movie I've seen.

2/5

Cut and Run (1985)

"Come give Daddy a kiss!"

I picked this up here at a local shop because Rugerro Deodato's name was on the cover. I had never heard of it before then, but the synopsis on the back looked like it might be okay. It ended up being way better than I expected it to be.

There's a short introduction at the beginning of the disc from Deodato himself explaining that this film was his answer to people begging him to do a sequel to "Cannibal Holocaust". While he liked working in that style, he wasn't interested in making a sequel, so with what he felt was the right script (written by Wes Craven) he made something he thought would satisfy audiences. He goes on to explain that the Italian market demands more violence in their films than the Americans prefer, so there were scenes shot specifically for the Italian release that we're never available here in the states. Because the original English audio doesn't exist for those scenes, they were re-inserted with Italian language and English subtitles.

To put it bluntly, this script is a mess, but I'll do my best to outline the plot. A string of grizzly, drug-related murders in the United States draws the attention of a cable news company. Fran, a reporter, recognizes one of the people in a photo she finds at a crime scene as Jim Jones' right-hand man at Jonestown and convinces her boss at CVN (Cable Video News) to fly her and a cameraman to Columbia in hopes of finding him and gaining access to an interview. He agrees, as his son (played by Willie Aames) ran away yeas ago to join the cult and he hopes to find him in the process. It's never clear how this new cult came to be or what the connection to Jonestown is, if any, but the members are held against their will and are being used to manufacture cocaine for sale in America.

The guy from the photo is Colonel Horne, a reclusive Colonel Kurtz-type character that just wants to be left alone. Horne runs another drug operation deep in the jungle and sends out his army of native Indians (led by the deformed dude from "The Hills Have Eyes") to kill his competition. Apparently, his family of killers extends to America and he's responsible for the massacres CVN is reporting on. Why he and his followers would need millions of dollars in drug money deep in the jungle is never explained.

The plane carrying the news crew arrives at the camp at the tail end of a massacre and the pilot is killed by Horne's' savages forcing the Fran and Mark to run for safety. They find a sole survivor from the camp, Ana (played by the yummy Valentina Forte), and together they take off on foot for the nearest camp thought to be 20 miles away. In the process, Ana is killed by Horne's men and the other two are captured. Horne vows to kill the reporters, but grants them their interview anyway. Help comes in the form of CVN's CEO to rescue them before they are killed.

Let's face it, we watch these kinds of movies for the blood and gore - not the plot. Deodato had quite a bit of money for this film, and it's evident in the results. The actors all seem to have had prior experience, the locations are visually stunning and the gore effects imaginative and well executed (pun intended). "Cut and Run" does a nice job of blending the cannibal/jungle genre with action/adventure, and there's even a side story about a father trying to locate his estranged son. It doesn't have the same impact as "Cannibal Holocaust", but I didn't expect it to. On a technical level, though, "Cut and Run" is leaps and bounds above Deodato's most famous film. There were so many terrible jungle films released to cash in on the success of just a couple, I was expecting this to be a total failure. Save for Willie Aames atrocious performance as Tommy, this was really enjoyable, but every time Tommy was on screen I wanted to punch him in the face. Fuck that guy. Just make sure you're getting the "hard" uncut version from Anchor Bay when you watch this, because without all of the blood, guts and rape scenes you're left with just the story, and the story itself isn't all that interesting.

3/5


 

Fay's 12 Days of Christmas (1995)

Santa Fay, nowhere near New Mexico.

Fay and her three pups return for what should be a holiday classic in more households than already is. The same light-hearted, absurd comedy displayed in "William Wegman's Alphabet Soup" can be found here. Released the same year as "Alphabet Soup", the set-ups are similar.  The twelve days are counted up, each with the dogs forming the corresponding number, then a scene is acted out for each day's activity (making Christmas cards, baking cookies, decorating the tree, etc).

As this is geared for the preschool age, there's a lot of repetitive counting, shape recognition and color identification. On the 4th day Fay reads a book that illustrates the importance of sharing. Through "shrewd dealings" one of the pups acquires all of the other pups' toys, but decides she still isn't happy and gives them back because she would rather have friends than possessions. There's a good deal of teaching going on here, but never so obvious that a child would resist it (I don't think, anyway). Wegman's narration is calm, soothing and loaded with jokes inserted for the adult's benefit. A great example of Wegman's humor can be found during a segment where the dogs are demonstrating how to make snowflakes out of paper. During this scene aimed at 3-year-olds he says "Did you know that snow is solid precipitation in the form of white or translucent crystals of various shapes originating in the upper-atmosphere as frozen particles of water vapor?" I laughed out loud at that line, and it wasn't the only time during the 30 minutes that happened.

I'm looking forward to trying this out on my grandson next Christmas. He'll be three then, so the educational bits will be right on target. We're already working on this stuff now, but it'll be fun to see his reaction. I'm thinking the pacing will be too slow for him, though. It was just right for me.

5/5

William Wegman's Alphabet Soup (1995)

Chundo loves milk. Mmmmmm.... Milk!

We've all seen William Wegman's photos of his Weimaraners dressed as humans. Some of them are quite famous and hang in the Museum of Modern Art, even. I've always thought they were stupid and never cared to look into them. I suppose I first saw them in the mid-90s, about the time this movie was released, but as an angry teenager, this was as far away from my interests as you could get. Last week my friend Paul sent me a package with some of his band's records and some other things - including two of William Wegman's DVDs. I just assumed he sent them as a joke, but decided to watch them anyway. I'm so happy I did.

Wegman was an art student in the 1960s and holds degrees in painting. After seeing people's interest in visual art declining, he started doing video experiments with a camera he stole/borrowed from the university. The dog he bought for his wife kept interrupting the floor scenes he was doing, so he eventually started incorporating him into his works. Eventually Man Ray (named after the great "dada" artist) became the focus of most of his works and the rest is history.

"Alphabet Soup" is a delightful 30 minute short with Fay Ray and her three pups (Batty, Crooky and Chundo) physically forming each letter of the alphabet, acting out scenes, then making alphabet soup with ingredients representing each letter. The narration is genuinely funny and most of the time completely absurd. Wegman's Sahara-dry sense of humor mixed with dogs dressed in costumes yields some bizarre results. This is low budget stuff produced for children aged 3 and up, but I was completely captivated by it the entire time. I hate to make the comparison because they're completely different in content, but this plays like a wholesome, well-made version of Len Cella's "Moron Movies", but with way better editing and for preschoolers. I can't even begin to imagine how much work it must have been to set up these shots. The whole thing is very surreal and has to be seen to be appreciated. It's important to note that at no point did it seem as if the dogs were stressed or having a bad time of it. In an interview I watched today after viewing this DVD, Wegman said the shots usually lasted around 30 seconds each and the dogs were free to do what they wanted to the rest of the time. Unlike those horrid "Dogville" shorts from the 1930s, these pooches seem to be okay with all of this nonsense. 

There's really nothing to compare this to as it's completely in a class of it's own, so I have no choice but to give it the highest possible rating. It deserves that rating, though. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed something as much as this and so unexpectedly. As soon as I was done watching this, I was online looking for more of his stuff. I can't wait to watch the other DVD Paul sent me now.

5/5

Private Parts (1972)

George was never any good with the ladies.

Cheryl is a teenage girl that runs away from her home in Ohio with her friend to live in California. After getting caught peeping on her friend while screwing her boyfriend, Cheryl leaves and moves into a creepy old hotel in the city run by her Aunt Martha. Martha is a puritanical old woman obsessed with funerals and has a strange relationship with her tenants. The hotel is filled with a bunch of screwy people, including a homosexual priest who sticks his nose in everyone else's business, and George, a sex-starved photographer who most of the movie centers around. During her stay there, Cheryl finds things left on her bed (notes, sexy outfits, etc) and becomes aware that someone in the room next door is watching her through holes in the wall. Cheryl takes a liking to George and learns he's the one watching her in the bathroom. Martha does her best to keep the two apart, for both of their safety, but fails in doing so and everything gets really weird at the end.

To tell the truth, this movie didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I picked it up because it was directed by Paul Bartel (his directorial debut, actually) and I loved his work in "Eating Raoul" and "Rock 'n' Roll High School". I was never quite sure if this was supposed to be a horror movie, suspense thriller or black comedy, and it seemed to bounce around from each of those genres throughout the movie. I kept waiting for it to make sense, but when it ended, I still had no clue what was going on. I have the feeling that if I sat down and watched it again it would make more sense to me. The pacing was a little slow at times, but never so bad that I wanted to turn it off. There were some funny moments in the film, though intentionally or not is debatable, and the scene with George in bed with the doll was genuinely creepy. The acting was pretty good, overall, but the actress who played Cheryl was irritating. There was more than one nude scene, a decent amount of blood (including a beheading) and the score by Hugo Friedhofer was really suspenseful and eerie.I dunno, I guess it was okay...

2/5

House At the End of the Street (2012)

"You better get ready, 'cos at 3 o'clock today... I'm gonna rape you."

As far as PG-13 horror films in 2012 go, you could do a lot worse than this one. I probably would have skipped it altogether, but my wife bought a copy and I ended up watching it with her. It was a lot better than I expected it to be.

A 17 year old girl, Elissa, and her mother (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Elizabeth Shue) move in to a secluded house in the woods and quickly find out that a double murder occurred at the house nearest them only four years earlier. Elissa befriends Ryan (played by a guy who looks exactly like the rapist kid from "Welcome to the Dollhouse"), the only surviving member of the household, who just happens to be a boy her own age. The whole town hates Ryan because he's driving their property value down, so Elissa is his only friend. Her closeness to him reveals facts about the murder nobody else knew and soon things spiral out of control.

There were loads of plot twists in this movie and the big reveal doesn't happen until the very end. After 60 minutes, I thought I had the ending worked out, but I was way off. I like it when that happens. Even as the credits rolled, there were parts that didn't make sense. It could have been unresolved elements in the script, but I might have just missed something, too. With very first scene that sent my eyes rolling to the back of my head, I was expecting a haunted house movie, but it quickly moved away from that into a fairly captivating story.

As this was PG-13, there was very little blood and most of the violence happened off screen. I didn't know of the PG-13 rating before watching it, so I spent the entire time hoping Elizabeth Shue would show some skin. No such luck, of course, but she still looks great. Nobody in the cast was particularly good or bad, but the ever-shifting story held my interest until the end.

This wasn't a total waste of time, and probably would be really good for the demographic it's aimed at. With points lost for the lack of nudity and blood, it still fares quite well.

3/5

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Shit like this is the reason I can't throw my full support behind this movie.

This is only my second time seeing "A Clockwork Orange". The first time was at some point in the late 90s. Well before that, I was aware of it's reputation of being a stylized, violent masterpiece and hearing it was banned in certain countries (true or not, I  never bothered looking into), but it fell flat with me when I finally got to see it - mostly because of how vocal people were with telling me how great it was. These were the same people, mind you, who would go on and on about how great the Misfits were, and I could never get into them, either. Recently I bought a 3 pack of Kubrick's films on Blu-Ray, so I revisited it today for the first time in almost two decades.

It wasn't as stupid as I remembered it being, but Alex's narration was still mostly annoying to me. I've gotten to know some British people in the past few years by chatting with them online, and I guess they do talk like morons a lot of the time. No clue as to how exaggerated Alex's dialogue was compared to how people really spoke to one another in those days, but it bordered on "baby talk" most of the time. I know people love Kubrick for how stylized his films are, but the costumes and set designs really date this and often distract from the story itself. Sure, we all like seeing milk pour from the teats of ceramic women at milkbars, but what did it have to do with the movie, really? And those white jumpsuits and masks were fucking stupid, admit it. Every time I see those things I think of that shitty punk band, The Adicts. Fuck that band.

Those things aside, the movie was pretty enjoyable. Everybody's seen it by now, so there's no point in recounting the plot. The movie really takes off for me in the second half when he's in prison. The prison guard that looked like Michael Palin and sounded like John Cleese was awesome. The whole bit with the Ludivico Treatment was great and I like that he came into contact with characters from the first half of the film again towards the end. I know Wes Craven said "Last House on the Left" was sort of a remake of "Virgin Spring", but there was a similar sort of thing going on in this movie released only a few years before. Wendy Carlos' score was excellent. The cat lady's low-brow porno artwork was excellent as well (see below).

Alan Clarke probably could have made this book into something I would have enjoyed a whole lot more. I probably wont feel the need to revisit this for another 20 years or so, but I liked it okay. As far as "essential" movies go, this one was pretty "meh". I enjoyed "2010: A Space Odyssey" from this set a lot more. 

3/5

Chained Heat II (1993)

Shower time's over, thanks to Rosa.

Brigitte Nielson stars as Magda, the junkie, lesbian warden of Renzik Prison. The movie takes place after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia where a dilapidated prison has been privatized and opened for profit. With the exception of a gay dress maker the warden keeps on to supply her with a wardrobe, the inmates are all female. The lead character (who's name isn't important) is an innocent young woman scooped up from the train station after having drugs planted on her and thrown in prison after a bogus trial because they need a fresh supply of attractive young girls for their enterprise.

The set-up for this movie leaves no room for disappointment, yet somehow it falls flat on it's face. The prison doubles as a heroin distribution center and the inmates are forced to work completely nude to insure no product is smuggled out. Only once is this addressed in the movie, early on. On top of this, the mansion adjacent to the prison is a brothel and the women are made to perform without consent. They also produce snuff/porn at the prison for sale on the black market. Any one of these enterprises would be fodder enough to carry a better-than-average WIP movie through to the end, but this clunker barely touches on any of them and instead focuses most of it's attention on the fem/dom relationship between the warden and her butch, inmate girlfriend, Rosa. The warden likes it rough, apparently, and as the cliche goes, her position of power at the prison means she plays the submissive role in the sack. That's well enough, but Brigitte doesn't take off any clothing during the movie and no sex is ever shown on screen. No domination is shown, either. There's an abundance of nudity throughout the film (including bush shots), shower scenes, etc, but nothing even remotely arousing, demeaning or embarrassing transpires. There's a scene where the lead is thrown in the hole with another attractive inmate. They're cuddling in next to no clothing, comforting each other, but nothing happens. Even during the filming of the snuff/porn scenes we see only a tight shot of the womens faces screaming "No!" followed by a quick cut-away. Every opportunity for sleaze is ignored completely. This mess crescendos (if you can call it that) into a ridiculous machine gun fight that frees the inmates, but there's little more than a teaspoon of blood in total, despite nearly all of the prison's staff being gunned down.

This whole thing stinks of Showtime after-hours, and not in a good way. Possibly the worst movie of this kind I've seen. Fuck this movie.

1/5