White Dog (1982)

Kristy McNichol plays Julie, an actress who hits a dog while driving home one night. After taking it to the vet, she places ads trying to locate its owner. She decides to keep it and learns that not only is he an attack dog, but a "white dog" trained to attack and kill black people. Rather than have the dog put down, she takes it to an animal trainer in an attempt to have it reprogrammed.

This film was completed in 1982, but Paramount shelved after the NAACP protested it's controversial subject matter. It didn't see a release until nearly a decade later, and then as an edited for TV version or in arthouses. It is an uncomfortable film, I imagine so for both sides, dealing not only with racism in the present, but also with passing down prejudices to future generations. The dog is the face of evil, but in reality, is completely innocent. He's a tool acting on his training, making man the monster. Julie's compassion for the dog is strong, but not as strong as trainer Keys' persistence in reversing his training, even after discovering the full extent of the violence he's capable of. Julie finally gives up on the dog after a pivotal scene in the film and asks Keys to shoot him, but he refuses. His devotion to correcting this racism is undying, claiming "you can't experiment on a dead dog." Can racism be unlearned, though?

This is the only Sam Fuller film I've seen, but I've read he had a history of making confrontational films. He was so disgusted with Paramount's decision to shelve the film, he moved to France. Stylistically, this was fine. There were a few too many slow motion shots for my tastes and the casting of Burl Ives is a bit of a head scratcher, but everything else seems okay. Kristy McNichol did a decent job, though her character was a little underdeveloped. Paul Winfield (Keys) and the dog are the real stars here. There was no need to expand on Julie's character when there was so much going on between the dog and its trainer. The ending is great, no giving it away here. This one's worth seeing. Not a fun film, but entertaining.

4/5

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


 

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