That’s really the main message that I took away from the 1982 film, The Seduction. In TheSeduction, Morgan Fairchild stars as Jamie Douglas. Jamie is a anchorwoman for a local news channel in Los Angeles. She has an older boyfriend named Brandon (Michael Sarrazin). She has a sex-crazed best friend named Robin (Colleen Camp). She has a beautiful home in the Hollywood Hills. She’s doing wonderfully for someone whose main talent is the ability to read what’s on the teleprompter. Much like Ron Burgundy, she’ll read whatever is put on that teleprompter without even thinking about it. Some might say that indicates that Jamie is a fairly vacuous character and …. well, they’re right. She is.
Jamie starts receiving flowers at work and mysterious phone calls from someone named Derek. Derek (Andrew Stevens) is a fashion photographer. He’s young. He’s handsome. He’s charismatic. His assistant, Julie (Wendy Smith Howard), is absolutely in love with him. In fact, Derek would seem to have it all but he’s obsessed with Jamie. Soon, he’s breaking into Jamie’s house so that he can watch her undress and then confronting her at the mall. At one point, he shows up in her living room and starts taking pictures of her. Jamie screams. Brandon beats him up. After Derek leaves, Jamie and Brandon go to the police and ask if there’s something that they can do about Derek. The police say that there are not many options because Derek has not technically broken the law …. uhm, what? I get that things were different in the 80s but I still find it hard to believe that showing up in someone else’s living ro0om without an invitation and then refusing to leave would have been considered legal back then. As you probably already guessed, Derek’s obsession soon turns lethal.
Perhaps the weirdest thing about The Seduction is that Derek is basically Jamie’s neighbor but she doesn’t ever seem to realize it. Watching this film, there were time when I really had to wonder if maybe Jamie was just an idiot. As well, throughout the film, Jamie reports on an unknown serial killer who is terrorizing Los Angeles. The killer is dubbed the Sweetheart Killer and, when I watched this film, I wondered if the Sweetheart Killer and Derek were one in the same. I don’t think that they were but, still, why introduce an unknown serial killer without providing any sort of resolution? It’s all indicative of just how sloppy the plotting on TheSeduction truly was. That’s especially true of the ludicrous ending of the film. A murder is committed in Jamie’s hot tub and when Jamie calls the police to report it, she’s put on hold. Meanwhile, Derek buries the body in Jamie’s backyard and somehow manages to do it without really breaking a sweat or being noticed by anyone. Derek’s big secret turns out to be not that much of a shock.
Morgan Fairchild’s performance isn’t great but that’s largely because she’s stuck with a character who is never allowed to behave in a consistent manner. Andrew Stevens is a bit more convincing as Derek, playing him as a photographer who doesn’t need cocaine because he’s already get his obsessive personality keeping up at nights. Michael Sarrazin, as Brandon, bellows nearly all of his lines and gives a performance that just shouts out, “Why did I agree to do this movie!?” He’s amusing. As for director David Schmoeller, he did much better with both Tourist Trap and Crawlspace.
Seriously, though, a lot of the horror and drama in this film could have been avoided by Jamie just getting to know her neighbors. I’ve been very lucky to have some very good neighbors over the years. When my Dad passed away, my neighbors Hunter and Hannah checked in on my nearly every day afterwards and let me use their hot tub whenever I wanted to. Neighbors, they can be pretty special.
1979’s Apocalypse Now reimagines the Vietnam War as pop art.
Jim Morrison sings The End in the background as slow-motion helicopters pass in front of a lush jungle. The jungle erupts into flame while in a dingy hotel room, Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) gets drunks, practices his karate moves, and smashes a mirror before collapsing to the floor in tears. The next morning, the hung-over and bandaged Willard ends up at a U.S. military base where he has a nice lunch with Lt. General Corman (G.D. Spradlin) and Col. Lucas (Harrison Ford) and a nearly silent man wearing an undone tie. Willard is asked if it’s true that he assassinated an enemy colonel. Willard replies that he did not and that the operation was classified, proving that he can both lie and follow military protocol. Willard is told that a Col. Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando) has gone rogue and his mission is to go into Cambodia and terminate his command with “extreme” prejudice. It’s a famous scene that features G.D. Spradlin delivering a brilliant monologue about good and evil and yet it’s often missed that Willard is getting his orders from Roger Corman and George Lucas.
(Roger Corman was the mentor of director Francis Ford Coppola while the pre-Star Wars George Lucas was Coppola’s business partner. Indeed, Apocalypse Now was originally somewhat improbably planned to be a George Lucas film.)
Up the river, Willard heads on a patrol boat that is populated with characters who could have come out of an old World War II service drama. Chief (Albert Hall) is tough and no-nonsense. Lance (Sam Bottoms) is the goofy comic relief who likes to surf. Clean (Laurence Fishburne) is the kid who is obviously doomed from the minute we first see him. Chef (Fredric Forrest) is the overage, tightly-wound soldier who just wants to find mangoes in the jungle and who worries that, if he dies in a bad place, his soul won’t be able to find Heaven. The Rolling Stones are heard on the boat’s radio. Soldiers on the other patrol boats moon the boat and toss incendiary devices on the roof. It’s like a frat prank war in the middle of a war.
Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is a badass calvary officer whose helicopter raids are legendary amongst the enemy and a dedicated surfer who tries to turn every night into the equivalent of an AIP Beach Party film. He’s a brilliant warrior who speaks with Malibu accent (“Charlie don’t surf!”) and who doesn’t flinch when a bomb goes off near him. “I love the smell a napalm in the morning,” he says and, for a few moments, you really wish the film would just abandon Willard so we could spend more time with Kilgore. “Some day this war is going to end,” he says with a reassuring nod, showing a non-neurotic attitude that is the opposite of Kurtz’s. Willard says that he could tell Kilgore was going to get through the war without even a scratch and it’s true. Kilgore doesn’t try to rationalize or understand things. He just accepts the reality and adjusts. He’s a true surfer.
The film grows progressively more surreal the closer the boat heads up the river and gets closer to Cambodia. A USO show turns violent as soldiers go crazy at the sight of the Playboy Bunnies, dressed in denim outfits and cowboy hats and twirling cap guns like the love interest in a John Wayne western. A visit to a bridge that is built every day and blown up every night is a neon-lit, beautiful nightmare. Who’s the commanding officer? No one knows and no one cares.
The closer Willard gets to Kurtz, the stranger the world gets. Fog covers the jungles. A tiger leaps out of nowhere. Dennis Hopper shows up as a photojournalist who rambles as if Billy from Easy Rider headed over to Vietnam instead of going to Mardi Gras. Scott Glenn stands silently in front of a temple, surrounded by dead bodies that feel as if they could have been brought over from an Italian cannibal film. Kurtz, when he shows up, is an overweight, bald behemoth who talks in riddles and who hardly seem to be the fearsome warrior that he’s been described as being. “The horror, the horror,” he says at one point in one of the few moments that links Apocalypse Now to its inspiration, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Directed by near-communist Francis Ford Coppola and written by the unapologetically right-wing John Milius, Apocalypse Now is actually less about the reality of Vietnam and more about how the images of the war shaped pop culture the world over. It’s a reminder that Vietnam was known for being the first television war and that counterculture was not just made up of dropouts but also of writers, actors, and directors. Kurtz may say that Willard’s been sent by grocery store clerks but actually, he’s been sent by the B-movie producers who first employed and mentored the directors and the actors who would eventually become the mainstays of the New Hollywood. The film subverts many classic war film cliches but, at the same time, it stays true to others. Clean dying while listening to a tape recording of his mother telling him not to get shot and to come home safe is the type of manipulative, heart-tugging moment that could have appeared in any number of World War II-era films. And while Coppola has always said the film was meant to be anti-war, Col. Kilgore remains the most compelling character. Most viewers would probably happily ride along with Kilgore while he flies over Vietnam and plays Wagner. The striking images of Vietnam — the jungle, the explosions, the helicopters flying through the air — stay in the mind far more than the piles of dead bodies that appear in the background.
It’s a big, messy, and ultimately overwhelming film and, while watching it, it’s hard not to get the feeling that Coppola wasn’t totally sure what he was really trying to say. It’s a glorious mess, full of stunning visuals, haunting music, and perhaps the best performance of Robert Duvall’s legendary career. The film is too touched with genius to not be watchable but how one reacts overall to the film will probably depend on which version you see.
The original version, which was released in 1979 and was nominated for Best Picture, is relentless with its emphasis on getting up the river and finding Kurtz. Willard obsesses on Kurtz and really doesn’t have much to do with the other people on the boat. It gives the story some much-needed narrative momentum but it also makes Kurtz into such a legendary badass that it’s hard not to be disappointed when Willard actually meets him. You’re left to wonder how, if Kurtz has been living in the jungle and fighting a brutal and never-ending guerilla war against the communists, he’s managed to gain so much weight. Brando, who reportedly showed up on set unprepared and spent days improvising dialogue, gives a bizarre performance and it’s hard to view the Kurtz we meet as being the Kurtz we’ve heard about. As strong as the film is, it’s hard not to be let down by who Kurtz ultimately turns out to be.
In 2001 and 2019, Coppola released two more versions of the film, Redux and The Final Cut. These versions re-inserted a good deal of footage that was edited out of the original cut. Most of that footage deals with Willard dealing with the crew on the boat and it’s easy to see why it was cut. The scenes of Willard bonding with the crew feel out of character for both Willard and the rest of the crew. A scene where Willard arranges for Clean, Lance, and Chef to spend time with the Playboy bunnies seems to go on forever and features some truly unfortunate acting. Worst of all, Redux totally ruins Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” monologue by having Willard suddenly steal his surf board. Again, it’s out of character for Willard and it actually feels a bit disrespectful to Duvall’s performance to suddenly turn Kilgore into a buffoon.
But then there are moments that do work. I actually like the lengthy French Plantation scene. By the time Willard, Lance, and Chef stumble into the plantation, the journey upriver has gotten so surreal that it makes a strange sort of sense that they would run into a large French family arguing politics while a clown tries to keep everyone distracted. The new versions of the film are undeniably disjointed but they also shift the focus off of finding Kurtz and place it more on Willard discovering how weird things are getting in Vietnam. As such, it’s less of a disappointment when Kurtz actually shows up. Much as with the French Plantation scene, the journey has become so weird that Kurtz being overweight and pretentious feels somehow appropriate.
What all the versions of the film have in common is that they’re all essentially a neon-lit dream of pop cultural horror. Is Apocalypse Now a horror film? Critic Kim Newman argued that it owed a lot to the genre. Certainly, that’s the case when Willard reaches the temple and finds himself surrounded by corpses and and detached heads. Even before that, though, there are elements of horror. The enemy is always unseen in the jungle and, when they attack, they do so quickly and without mercy. In a scene that could almost have come from a Herzog film, the boat is attacked with toy arrows until suddenly, out of nowhere, someone throws a very real spear. Until he’s revealed, Kurtz is a ghostly figure and Willard is the witch hunter, sent to root him out of his lair and set his followers on fire. If the post-60s American horror genre was shaped by the images coming out of Vietnam then Apocalypse Now definitely deserves to be considered, at the very least, horror-adjacent.
Apocalypse Now was controversial when it was released. (It’s troubled production had been the talk of Hollywood for years before Coppola finally finished his film.) It was nominated for Best Picture but lost to the far more conventional Kramer vs Kramer. Robert Duvall was the film’s sole acting nominee but he lost the award to Melvyn Douglas’s turn in Being There. Douglas was very good in Being There and I imagine giving him the Oscar was also seen as a way of honoring his entire career. That said, Duvall’s performance was amazing. In his relatively brief screen time, Duvall somehow managed to take over and ground one of the most unruly films ever made. The Oscar definitely should have gone to him.
As for the film itself, all three versions, flaws and all, are classics. It’s a film that proves that genius can be found in even the messiest of productions.
It’s one very busy night at a police station. Everyone who is brought in from off the streets has the right to remain silent but no one exercises it. Rookie cop Lea Thompson listens to everyone’s stories. LL Cool J is the documentarian who thought it would be smart to put on Klan robes and a hood and try to infiltrate a demonstration undercover. Patrick Dempsey is the drunk who killed a kid. Carl Reiner comes in and confesses to mercy killing his wife. Christopher Lloyd is homeless. Fisher Stevens is a trans streetwalker. Judge Reinhold, I don’t even know what he was supposed to be. Reinhold actually plays two characters in this film and he’s miscast in both roles. Amanda Plummer is a pizza delivery person who shoots someone in self-defense. No one asks for a lawyer. No one lies about what they did. Instead, they just talk and talk and talk and talk some more. Thompson listens while Robert Loggia, as the chief, growls about donuts.
The Right To Remain Silent is based on a play and that is its downfall. Instead of being a story about a rookie cop and her first night on the job, it’s just a collection of rambling stage monologues. Some of the actors, like Carl Reiner and Christopher Lloyd, do okay. Most of them still seem to be acting for the folks sitting in the back row. It ultimately doesn’t add up too much because the stories are too predictable to make much of an impression. Everyone in this film had the right to remain silent and I wish they had exercised it.
Ever since this film was first released in 1993, it’s usually held up as an example of a Hollywood fiasco. The script was originally written to be a modest satire of action films. The screenwriters wrote the character of Jack Slater, an movie action hero who comes into the real world, for Dolph Lundgren. Instead, the film became an Arnold Schwarzenegger extravaganza and the studio ended up tossing a ton of money at it. When the film was originally released, the reviews were mixed and the box office was considered to be disappointing. (That it went up against the first JurassicPark was definitely an underrated issue when it came to the box office.) Ever since then, The Last Action Hero has had a reputation for being a bad film.
Well, I don’t care. I like TheLastActionHero. Yes, it’s a bit overproduced for a comedy. (It breaks my own rule about how no comedy should run longer than two hours.) Yes, it gets a bit sentimental with ten year-old Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) using a magic, golden ticket to enter the film world of his hero, Jack Slater. If you want to argue that the film should have devoted more time to and gone a bit deeper into contrasting the film world with the real world, I won’t disagree with you. But I will also say that Sylvester Stallone starring as TheTerminator in Jack’s world was actually a pretty funny sight gag. Danny knowing better than to trust a character played by F. Murray Abraham made me laugh. Danny’s fantasy in which Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hamlet was made all the better by the fact that his teacher was played by Laurence Olivier’s wife, Joan Plowright. Danny DeVito as Whiskers the Cartoon Cat makes me laugh as well, even if it is perhaps a bit too bizarre of a joke for this particular film. (There’s nothing else about the Jack Slater films that would explain the presence of a cartoon cat.)
When you set aside the idea of the Last Action Hero being a symbol of Hollywood bloat and just watch it as a film, it emerges as an enjoyably goofy action movie, one that captures the joy of watching movies (because who hasn’t wanted to enter a movie’s world at some point in their life), and also one that features a rather charming performance from Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Schwarzenegger, I should add, plays both himself and Jack Slater. One of my favorite jokes is when the real Schwarzenegger is at a premiere and he mistakes the evil Ripper for Tom Noonan, the actor who played him in the previous Jack Slater film.) Yeah, the golden ticket is a little bit hokey but who cares? Underneath all of the special effects and action and money spent on star salaries, LastActionHero is an action movie and comedy with a heart. Danny meets his hero but also gets to become a hero himself. And Jack Slater turns out to be everything you would hope your movie hero would be. In the end, it’s obvious that a lot of the criticism of this film has more to do with the appeal of riding the bandwagon as opposed to what actually happens on screen.
LastActionHero is a movie that I’ll happily defend.
The 2009 film, Winter of Frozen Dreams, opens with a young woman named Barbara Hoffman (Thora Birch) in a Wisconsin courtroom in 1980. She is on trial, having been accused of committing two murders. The jury reads their verdict and the film flashes back three years to show us how how Barbara ended up in that courtroom.
It’s a bit of an odd way to open the film, one that robs the story of any suspense. The story of Barbara Hoffman is a true one but, unlike other true crime stories, it’s not a commonly known one. I had not heard of Barbara Hoffman until I watched this film and, after the film ended, I immediately went to Google to make sure that the film was actually telling the truth when it claimed to be based on a true story. Barbara Hoffman and her trial apparently were a big deal in 1980. (Her trial was the the first murder trial to ever be televised.) But it is now so obscure that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.
As seen in the film, Barbara Hoffman was a genius. She had a 145 IQ and was the valedictorian of her high school class. She went to college to study chemistry and was doing quite well academically. However, when she got a job answering the phones in a massage parlor, she realized that she could make a lot more money as a sex worker than as a chemist. She dropped out of college before starting her final semester and went to work for a pimp named Ken Curtis (Dean Winters).
Barbara was engaged to two different men. One was Harry Berge (Dan Moran), who has a taste for bondage and being ritually humiliated. At first, his co-workers thought he was kidding when he started introducing the much younger Barbara as being his fiancée but Harry actually signed over all of his property to her and allowed Barbara to take out a life insurance policy on him.
It was Barbara’s other fiancé, a mild-mannered video clerk named Jerry Davies (Brendan Sexton III), who Barbara called on Christmas to tell him that she had discovered Harry’s dead and battered body in her bathroom. Convinced that Harry had been murdered by Ken, Jerry helped Barbara to hide the body in the Wisconsin snow. Of course, even while Jerry was helping Barbara cover up Harry’s death, Barbara was taking out a considerable life insurance policy on him.
After Jerry has an attack of conscience and leads the police to the body, it falls to the pipe-smoking Detective Lulling (Keith Carradine) and his partner (Leo Fitzpatrick) to figure out who was responsible for Harry’s murder. Lulling’s instinct is to suspect Barbara but everyone else seems to think that either Ken or Jerry is the more obvious suspect. After all, Barbara’s a genius. Why would she kill someone?
It’s an interesting story, though Winter of Frozen Dreams is never quite as compelling as one might wish. Some of that is because, despite her genius IQ, Barbara herself never becomes that interesting of a character and Thora Birch never seems to be that invested in her performance. She delivers her lines in a rather flat manner, never really showing the charisma necessary to be convincing as a real-life femmefatale. That said, you do feel sorry for the two men, especially Brendon Sexton III. And Keith Carradine and Leo Fitzpatrick make for an amusing detective team. I almost wish the two of them had starred in their own series, where they traveled the Pacific Northwest and solved small town murders.
Of course, the biggest problem with this movie is that it opens with the verdict so we already know what’s going to happen. We know who is going to die and we know what’s going to happen to Barbara as a result. There’s zero suspense as to how things are going to work out. It’s an error on the part of the filmmakers and an unfortunate one.
The 1985 comedy, Clue, opens with a set of six strangers arriving at an ominous mansion in New England. They’re meet by Wadsworth (Tim Curry), an oddly charismatic butler who explains that all six of the strangers have a few things in common. They all work in Washington D.C. They are all, in some way, involved with the government. And they’re all being blackmailed by Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving), the owner of the house.
The six strangers have all been assigned nicknames for the night.
Miss White (Madeleine Khan) is the enigmatic widow of a nuclear physicist who may have had communist sympathies. Actually, Miss White is a widow several times over. All of her husbands died in circumstances that were a bit odd. Is Miss White a black widow or is she just unlucky? And what about the flames of jealousy that she occasionally mentions?
Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd) is a psychiatrist who once worked for the World Health Organization and who has an unfortunate habit of sleeping with his patients.
Mr. Green (Michaele McKean) explains that he works for the State Department and that he is also secretly gay. If his secret got it, he would be deemed a security risk or perhaps even a communist agent.
Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan) is the wife of a U.S. Senator who forced to resign after getting caught up in a bribery scandal.
Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull) is a somewhat stuffy war hero-turned-arms dealer.
And finally, Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren) is Washington D.C.’s most powerful and most witty madam.
Once everyone is in the house, Wadsworth explains that the police have been called and will arrive in 45 minutes, at which point Mr. Boddy will be arrested and everyone’s secrets will be exposed. Mr. Boddy’s solution is to suggest that one of the six kills Wadsworth. After tossing everyone a weapon, Mr. Boddy turns out the lights. When the lights come back on, Wadsworth is still alive but Mr. Boddy is not. But who murdered Mr. Boddy? And in what room? And with what weapon? And what to make of the other people who were either in the house or show up at the front door, like the maid, Yvette (Collen Camp), or the motorist (Jeffrey Kramer) who shows up to use the phone or the traveling evangelist (Howard Hesseman)? Can the mystery be solved before the police show up and presumably arrest everyone?
Based on the old board game, Clue is a hilariously exhausting film, one that mixes smart wordplay and broad physical comedy to wonderful effect. It’s not often that you see a film that gets equal laughs from two people colliding in a hallway and from characters accusing each other of being communists. In fact, it’s so easy to marvel at the physical comedy (especially the lengthy scene where Tim Curry runs from room to room while explaining his theory about who committed the murders) that it’s easy to forget that the film is also a sharp satire on political corruption, national paranoia, 50s morals, and the McCarthy era in general. Since all of the characters are already convinced that they’re either surrounded by subversives or in danger of being accused of being a subversive themselves, it’s not a great leap for them to then assume that any one of them could be a murderer. I mean, if you’re willing to betray your country than who knows what you might be willing do in the study with a candlestick?
The cast is full of comedy veterans, all of whom know how to get a laugh out of even the mildest of lines and none of whom hold back. Madeline Kahn, in particular, is hilarious as Miss White though my favorite suspect, in both the game and the movie, has always been Miss Scarlet. Not only is she usually portrayed as being a redhead in the game but, in the movie, her dress is to die for. In the end, though, it’s perhaps not a surprise that the film is stolen by Tim Curry’s energetic performance. The film’s final 15 minutes are essentially a masterclass in physical comedy from Tim Curry but he’s just as funny when he’s delivering his frequently snarky dialogue. Both Wadsworth the character and Tim Curry the actor appear to be having a blast, running from room to room and shouting out accusations.
When Clue was originally released, it was released with three different endings. Apparently, the audience wouldn’t know which ending they were going to get before the movie started. I guess that the idea was to get people to go the movie three times to see each ending but I imagine few filmgoers had the patience to do that and who knows how many viewers went to multiple showings just to discover that the randomly selected ending was one that they had already seen. I’m surprised that I haven’t come across any reports of riots breaking out. Fortunately, the version of Clue that is now available for viewing features all three endings. Of course, none of the endings make much sense. Hercule Poirot would demand a do-over, especially if he was being played by Kenneth Branagh. But the fact that it’s all so ludicrous just adds to the comedy. I watched Clue two Fridays ago with a group of friends and we had a blast. It’s definitely a movie that’s more fun when you watch it with other people.
(That said, as far as incoherent solutions are concerned, the third one was my favorite and I think Poirot would agree.)
As for the board game itself, I used to enjoy playing it when I was a kid. We had really old version from the 60s and I always used to imagine what all of the suspects were like when they weren’t being accused of murder. I always imagined that Mr. Green and Miss Scarlet probably had something going on. Today, I’ve got a special Hitchcock edition of the game. It’s all good fun, this never-ending murder mystery.
The 1989 film, Wicked Stepmother, was Bette Davis’s final film. She was cast as Miranda, an enigmatic woman who meets and marries a man named Sam (Lionel Stander). Sam’s daughter, Jenny (Colleen Camp) and her husband, Steve (David Rasche), are stunned to come home from a vacation just to discover Miranda living in their house. Miranda chain-smokes, despite Jenny and Steve asking her not to. Miranda cooks and eats meat, despite Jenny being a vegetarian. Miranda brags about her sex life which freaks Jenny out even though I suppose really old people do occasionally have sex. When it becomes apparent that Miranda is a witch who seduces and shrinks her victims, Jenny decides that something must be done.
Wicked Stepmother was not only Bette Davis’s last starring role but it was also the last production that she ever walked out on. Early on in filming, she announced that she didn’t like the script, she didn’t like the way she was being filmed, and that she didn’t like the director, venerable B-move maestro Larry Cohen. For his part, Cohen said that Davis left the movie because she was in bad health but she didn’t want to announce that to the world. In Cohen’s defense, Davis does appear to be rather frail in the movie and often seems to be having trouble speaking. (Davis has a stroke a few years before appearing in Wicked Stepmother.) Davis died just a few months after Wicker Stepmother was released so I tend to assume that Cohen was correct when he said that the main reason Davis left the film was because of her health. That doesn’t mean the script wasn’t bad, of course. But, in the latter part of her career, Davis appeared in a lot of badly written movies. She did Burnt Offerings, afterall.
Regardless of why she left, Davis’s absence did require that Wicked Stepmother work around her character. But how do you do that when Bette Davis was literally the title character? This film’s solution was to bring in Barbara Carrerra as Priscilla, Miranda’s daughter. It turns out that Miranda and Priscilla both inhabit the body of a cat but only one of them can use the body at a time. So, when Priscilla is in the cat, Miranda is among the humans. When Miranda is in the cat, Priscilla is …. well, you get the idea. In the film, Priscilla leaves the body of the cat and then refuses to reeneter it because “I’m having too much fun.” So, whenever we see the cat glaring in the background, we’re meant to assume that we’re actually seeing Miranda in the background.
Got it?
Now, believe it or not, the whole thing with the cat is probably the least confusing thing about Wicked Stepmother. Jenny can’t convince Steve that Miranda and Priscilla are actually witches. Steve actually has sex with Pricilla and is shocked when Priscilla starts to turn into a cat but the whole incident is never mentioned again and Steve quickly goes from being an adulterous jerk to a loyal husband. Sam goes on a game show and, with Priscilla’s help, wins a lot of money even though the questions that he answered were so simple that he shouldn’t have needed the help of a witch’s spell. (“Who won the election of 1876?” is one question. The correct answer, by the way, is Rutherford B. Hayes. Screw you, Samuel Tilden.) Jenny gets some help from a cop, a private detective, and a priestess of some sort. The whole thing ends with a big magical battle that involves Barbara Carrera mouthing pre-recorded Bette Davis dialogue.
None of it makes any sense. The special effects are incredibly cut-rate. It’s hard not to regret that Bette Davis didn’t go out on a better film. And yet, when taken on its own terms, Wicked Stepmother itself is oddly likable. Colleen Camp is sympathetic as Jenny, which is saying something when you consider that Jenny is written to be a humorless vegetarian. Lionel Stander appears to be having fun as Sam. Larry Cohen was a good-enough director that, even though he couldn’t save the film from its own bad script and miniscule budget, the movie itself is never boring. It’s cheap and stupid but its watchable in the same way that Michael Scott’s Threat Level Midnight was watchable. It may not be particularly good but you just can’t look away.
Long before the end credits of 22 Jump Street imagined Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum going to culinary school, the flight academy, and into outer space, the Police Academy films bravely tested just how far one already thin premise could already be stretched.
In Police Academy 4, Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes) comes up with another plan to make the city safer. (Since Lassard has been coming up with plans for three years without any success, it may be time to let the old man retire peacefully.) This time, he wants to institute Citizens on Patrol, which would mean training citizens to act like cops. It sounds like the type of terrible idea that could get a city sued into bankruptcy but considering that this is a city where a human sound effects machine and the former head of the 16 precinct’s biggest gang can become decorated police officers, I guess it’s as good an idea as any.
As usual, Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg) and the gang are ready to help Lassard. Bruce Mahler’s Fackler is no longer a part of the ensemble but Bubba Smith, Bobcat Goldthwait, Michael Winslow, David Graf, Tim Kazurinsky, Marion Ramsey, and Brian Toschi are all back. Also returning, after skipping out on the first two sequels, is Capt. Harris (G.W. Bailey). Harris wants to see Lassard fail so that he can take over the police academy. It’s the same thing as the first three films. As in previous Police Academy films, there’s a visit to the Blue Oyster leather bar and a last minute crime wave to give the Citizens on Patrol a chance to prove they belong in the program. The Citizens on Patrol include Billie Bird, Brian Backer, David Spade, wrestler Tab Thacker, and Corrine Bohrer as a love interest for Bobcat Goldthwait. Sharon Stone also makes an appearance, playing a journalist and improbably falling for Steve Guttenberg. Watching the film, it is obvious that the idea was that, in future Police Academy films, the Citizens on Patrol could replace any of the regular cast members who wanted too much money to return. As a result, almost every veteran of the cast has a doppelganger in the Citizens on Patrol. Brian Backer could replace Steve Guttenberg. Tab Thacker is there to put Bubba Smith on notice that no one is irreplaceable. Is Bobcat Goldthwait being difficult? Just remind him that David Spade can play a crazy eccentric too.
Police Academy 4 is the most crowded of the Police Academy films and, even by the franchise’s undemanding standards, most of the jokes fall flat. Jim Drake took over as director after the director of the previous two films, Jerry Paris, died of a brain tumor and Drake struggles to balance low comedy with police action. Guttenberg and company don’t have the same energy in this installment as they had in the previous three and the new cast members all feel as if they’re out place sharing scenes with the veterans, like a group of underclassmen who have been invited on the senior trip.
This would be the final Police Academy film for Steve Guttenberg. Would the franchise be able to survive without him? Check here tomorrow to find out with my review of Police Academy 5!
In an unnamed city that is probably meant to be Los Angeles but which looks like Toronto, a criminal gang known as the Scullions have taken over the 16th precinct. Led by the loud, marble-mouthed Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait), the Scullions are terrorizing the citizens and harassing one shop owner, Carl Sweetchuck (Tim Kazurinsky), in particular. The captain of the 16th precinct, Pete Lassard (Howard Hesseman), calls his brother, Eric Lassard (George Gaynes), and asks for the best cadets to have recently graduated from the police academy.
Carey Mahoney (Steve Guttenberg) and a few other of the cadets from the first Police Academy movie end up in the 16th. Tackleberry (David Graf) is there and so is accident-prone Douglas Fackler (Bruce Mahler). Bubba Smith is back as Hightower and so is Michael Winslow, the human sound effects machine. They’re determined to help Lassard’s brother but it’s not going to be easy because they have to work with Lt. Mauser (Art Metrano) who is basically a dick who wants to be captain. Mauser is exactly like Harris from the first film, except his name is Mauser and, instead of getting his head stuck up a horse’s ass, he gets his hands super-glued to his head.
Police Academy 2 is less raunchy than the first film but still not quite as family friendly as the films that would follow. There’s still one f-bomb dropped and a few adult jokes, as if the film wasn’t fully ready to admit that it was destined to become associated with juvenile viewers who would laugh at almost anything involving a bodily function. There is one funny moment where Steve Guttenberg goes undercover to join Zed’s gang, mostly because he’s Steve Guttenberg and he’s even less believable as a gang member than he was as a cop. The closest thing that movie has to a highlight is Bobcat Goldthwait’s manic turn as Zed and Tim Kazurinsky’s desperation as he watches his store get repeatedly destroyed. Tackleberry also gets an amusing romantic subplot, where he meets a police woman (Colleen Camp) who loves guns almost as much he does. Unfortunately, Tackleberry’s romance gets pushed to the side by all of the gang activity.
Police Academy 2 is stupid but, depending on how much tolerance you have for Bobcat Goldthwait, sometimes funny. It’s not as “good” as the first film but it’s still better than most of what would follow. Speaking of which, tomorrow, I will be reviewing the first Police Academy film to get a PG-rating, Police Academy 3: Back in Training.
Spenser Confidential, which is currently streaming on Netflix, is the latest Mark Wahlberg/Peter Berg collaboration.
It’s a crime film and it’s set in Boston and it will probably remind you every other Boston-set crime film that you’ve ever seen. It’s got all the usual ingredients. People sing Sweet Caroline. A fat gangster wears a tracksuit. We get a long overhead shot of the streets of Southie and there’s a scene set in an Irish bar. One of the film’s big scenes takes place at what appears to be a deserted racing track. (I’ve never been to Boston but, just from the movies, I know that the city is basically made up of Harvard, Southie, and hundreds of deserted race tracks.) The Red Sox get a shout-out. And, of course, the movie stars Mr. Boston himself, Mark Wahlberg. Seriously, if your Boston movie doesn’t feature Mark Wahlberg or an Affleck brother, it might as well just be a St. Louis movie.
In this one, Mark Wahlberg plays Spenser. Spenser was a cop until a gangster in a tracksuit murdered someone from the neighborhood and the head of homicide tried to bury the case. This led to an angry Spenser beating the man up in front of his own house. Spenser was sent to prison, where he served five years as an ex-cop in the general population. That’s right! He wasn’t even put in protective custody but somehow, he survived. Right before Spenser is released from prison, he’s attacked by a Neo-Nazi who is played by Post Malone. It’s not really that relevant to the overall plot but it does give viewers a chance to say, “Wait a minute …. is that Post Malone?”
Anyway, once he gets out of prison, Spenser moves in with his mentor and former boxing coach, Henry Cimoli (Alan Arkin). He also gets a new roommate, an aspiring MMA fighter named Hawk (Winston Duke). After Captain Boylan, the head of homicide — yes, the same guy that Spenser beat up five years ago, is decapitated by 20 sword-carrying assailants, Spenser is the number one suspect. Fortunately, for Spenser, another cop commits suicide and it’s quickly announced that the cop who killed himself also killed Boylan. It’s a murder/suicide! So, Spenser’s off the hook and I guess the movie’s over, right?
Nope, it doesn’t work like that. It turns out that Spenser has his doubts about the whole story and he wants to investigate because he has “a strong moral code.” Unfortunately, as a convicted felon, Spenser is not allowed to become a private investigator. So, Spenser and Hawk conduct an unofficial investigation, which largely amounts to talking to Spenser’s former partner, Driscoll (Bokeem Woodbine) and getting into a brawl while Sweet Caroline plays in the background.
It’s a Boston thing.
The mystery are the heart of the film pretty much leads exactly where you think it’s going to lead. For a 2-hour crime thriller, there aren’t exactly a lot of twists and turns to be found in Spenser Confidential, which is a problem. The mystery’s solution is so obvious that it’s hard not to resent the fact that Spenser is apparently too stupid to figure it out on his own. There’s an extended scene where he gets attacked by a dog and you know what? That would have never happened to any other movie detective because every other detective would have figured out who the murderer was long before getting attacked by that dog.
On the plus side, Peter Berg knows how to stage a fight scene and he also knows how to make the best use of Wahlberg’s mix of sensitivity and working class arrogance. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is let down by a script that doesn’t give them much to do. Winston Duke is physically imposing as Hawk but he spends too much of the film standing around and waiting for Spenser to take the lead. Alan Arkin appears to be having fun in the role of Henry but again, his character is underwritten. About the only person, other than Wahlberg, who gets to make much of an impression is Iliza Shlesinger, who is cast as Spenser’s ex-girlfriend. Shlesinger may be playing a stereotype (she’s loud, crude, and has a thick Boston accent) but she fully embraces the character and makes her seem like the only person in the film who actually has a life beyond what’s happening onscreen at any given moment.
Anyway, Spenser Confidential isn’t terrible as much as it’s just forgettable. It’s a generic Boston crime film and you can probably safely watch it if you’re not looking for something to which you would actually have to pay attention. Some of the action scenes are well-shot. If you liked Mark Wahlberg in other films, you’ll probably like him in this. Whether you enjoy it or not, you’ll probably forget about this film about an hour after watching it.
Through the Shattered Lens 