Tag Archives: Diana Scarwid

October True Crime: Party Monster (dir by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Michael Alig!  He was the flamboyant, self-declared “King of the Club Kids.”  He was a club promoter in New York City in the late 80s and the 90s.  He had money.  He had fame.  He had a huge following.  He used to appear regularly on the daytime talk shows.  He was a regular feature in the gossip columns.  He also had a raging drug addiction and an ego that most people couldn’t stand.  He tried to position himself as the successor to Andy Warhol, overlooking the fact that Warhol himself actually had a bit of talent.  And, in 1996, he became a murderer.

He and his roommate killed his drug dealer, a fellow club kid who was known as Angel.  They hit him over the head and suffocated him before then dismembering him.  Everyone knew that Alig was responsible for Angel’s disappearance, largely because he wouldn’t shut up about killing him.  Alig even threw a party where the macabre and bloody decorations left little doubt that Alig had murder on his mind.  Eventually, a group of children found Angel’s remains and Alig and his roommate were arrested.  Due to a plea deal, Alig was sent to prison for manslaughter.  He served 14 years before being paroled.  Alig died of a heroin overdose in 2020.

Released in 2003 (while Alig was still in prison), Party Monster is a biopic of Michael Alig and also a look at New York club culture in the 90s.  The film got a bit of attention when it came out because it starred Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green as, respectively, Michael Alig and James St. John, who was Alig’s mentor-turned-friend-turned-enemy.  Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t very good and both Culkin and Green are lousy in their roles.  Both of them come across like middle American high school kids trying to score cheap laughs by acting as self-consciously flamboyant as possible.  At the time the film was made, Culkin did bear a passing a resemblance to Michael Alig but the same could have been said of Michael Pitt and, at the very least, we know that Pitt is capable of playing a character who is capable of murder.  Culkin, on the other hand, seems to be trying so hard to make us forget that he’s Macaulay Culkin that he instead continually reminds us that we’re watching the star of Home Alone snort cocaine and urinate in wine glasses.  (Ewwwww!)  That said, Culkin and Green aren’t the only two giving bad performances here.  I started giggling as soon as Dylan McDermott showed up wearing an eyepatch.  Only Wilson Cruz as Angel and Chloe Sevigny as one of Alig’s associates feel in any way convincing in their roles.

For a film about a group of people who claimed “fabulousness” as their defining aesthetic, Party Monster is a visually dull film.  Many scenes are overlit, to the extent that the performers look wan and washed out.  That may be a good look for the drug-addled Alig who killed Angel but, in this film, Alig looks and seems burned out from the minute he shows up in New York City.  The end result is a rather boring film that doesn’t offer up any insight into the Club Kids or the murders.

Retro Television Review: After The Promise (dir by David Greene)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past!  On Sundays, I will be reviewing the made-for-television movies that used to be a primetime mainstay.  Today’s film is 1987’s After the Promise!  It  can be viewed on YouTube!

Mark Harmon is, in many ways, the ideal television actor.  He’s handsome in a distinguished but not overwhelming sort of way.  He projects a pleasant personality.  He’s likably low-key.  He’s a talented actor but he’s also a bit of a safe and predictable actor.  It’s been said that the difference between a TV star and a movie star is that a movie star combines charisma with danger whereas a TV star combines a likable screen presence with reliability.  Mark Harmon’s been a reliable TV presence for longer than I’ve been alive.

In 1987’s After the Promise, Harmon plays Elmer Jackson, a carpenter who is just trying to survive day-to-day in Depression-era California.  Though his wife (who is implied to be a Christian Scientist) begs him not to take her to the hospital when she gets ill, Elmer goes against her wishes.  When he gets her to the hospital, he is treated rudely by the staff.  A cop approaches him in the waiting room and brusquely orders him to move his car.  When a doctor finally does approach Elmer, he calmly explains that Elmer’s wife has did of TB and that she should have been brought to the hospital weeks ago.

Now a widower, Elmer is determined to keep the last promise that he made to his wife and give his four sons the best life that he possibly can.  Unfortunately, the government is determined to keep Elmer from doing that.  When Elmer goes to the government to try to get temporary financial assistance, the government reacts by taking his children away from him and forcing them into foster care.  When Elmer, during one of his weekly visits, tries to take the children for a ride, the government bans him from having any contact with his children.  When Elmer’s sons try to escape from the foster home, they’re separated and sent to separate facilities.

Informed that he can only get his children back if he proves that he’s financially stable, Elmer becomes an itinerant worker.  It’s only after he meets and marries Anna (Diana Scarwid) that Elmer finally gets a chance to be reunited with his sons but, after years of abuse, his sons have their own traumas to deal with before they can accept Elmer as being their father.

This is a movie that really pulls at your heartstrings!  There’s nothing subtle about it but, at the same time, its portrait of bureaucrats without empathy is one that feels very real and contemporary.  Over the course of the film, Elmer learns that the rules are not being written to help out a blue collar worker who doesn’t have a lot of money and, watching the film, it’s hard not to consider that the rules haven’t really changed that much over the years.  Elmer isn’t just fighting to reunited his family.  His fighting to save them from a system that is designed to dehumanize.  It’s an ideal role for a television star like Mark Harmon, as Elmer isn’t a terribly complex man but he is a very determined one.  It’s a role that demands a lot of sincerity and Harmon certainly delivers.  For that matter, so does this simple but emotionally resonant film.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Psycho III (dir by Anthony Perkins)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Norman Bates is back!

Released in 1986 and directed by Anthony Perkins himself, Psycho III picks up a few months after Psycho II ended.  Norman (Anthony Perkins, of course) is still free.  He’s still got his motel.  He’s still talking to his dead mother.  Of course, at the end of Psycho II, Norman was told that the woman who Norman thought was his mother actually wasn’t his mother.  Instead, Emma Spool told Norman that she was his mother, which led to Norman promptly hitting her with a shovel and then keeping her preserved body hidden away in the motel.  Got all that?  Great, let’s move on….

In Psycho III, business suddenly starts booming at the Bates Motel!  All sorts of people come by to visit.

For instance, there’s the obnoxious tourists who show up at the motel so they can watch a football game and get drunk.  Future director Katt Shea plays one of the unfortunate tourists, who ends up suffering perhaps the most undignified death in the history of the Psycho franchise.  Shea later ends up being stored in the motel’s ice chest.  At one point, the local sheriff grabs a piece of ice and tosses it in his mouth without noticing that it’s covered in blood.

And then there’s Duane Duke (a young Jeff Fahey!), who is superhot but also super sleazy.  For reasons that are never quite clear, Norman hires Duke to be the assistant manager at the motel.  Duke turns out to be thoroughly untrustworthy but he’s Jeff Fahey so he remains strangely appealing even when he shouldn’t be.

Red (Juliette Cummins) shows up at the motel so that she can have sex with Duke and then get stabbed to death while taking off her top in a phone booth.  That, I guess, is Psycho III‘s equivalent of the first film’s shower scene.  Later, Duke comes across Norman mopping up all the blood in the phone booth but he doesn’t say anything about it.  Duke knows better than to ask why there’s blood in the phone booth.

Tracy Venable (Roberta Maxwell) is a journalist whose sole purpose in life is to prove that Norman murdered Emma Spool.  Tracy’s main function in this film is to explain just why exactly so many different women have claimed to be Norman’s mother.  It’s a rather complicated story and you’ll get a migraine if you think about it for too long.

And finally, there’s Maureen (Diana Scarwid), the former nun who has lost her faith and her sanity.  She shows up at the motel and stays in Marion Crane’s old room.  She takes a bath instead of a shower and slits her wrists.  When Norman storms into the room to kill her, the barely lucid Maureen mistakes him for the Virgin Mary and sees his knife as being a crucifix.  Maureen survives and Norman is hailed as a hero for rescuing her.  Later, Norman and Maureen fall in love.  You can guess how that goes.

When compared to the first sequel, Psycho III is much more of a standard slasher film and there’s certainly never any doubt over who is doing the killing.  However, Perkins again does a great job in the role of Norman, making him both sympathetic and creepy.  Fahey, Scarwid, Maxwell, and Hugh Gillin (as the hilariously clueless sheriff) all provide good support.  There’s really not a single character in this film who doesn’t have at least one odd or memorable quirk.  Duane Duke, for instance, is one of the most amazingly sleazy characters in the history of American cinema.  Just when you think that the character can’t get any worse, he proves you wrong.

As mentioned above, Perkins directed this film.  It was one of two movies that Perkins would direct before his death.  As a director, Perkins had a good visual sense, even if he did allow the narrative to meander a bit.  There’s nothing particularly subtle about Perkins’s direction and several of the scenes — like the sex scene between Duke and Red — are so over the top that they become rather fascinating to watch.  That said, there was really no longer any need to be subtle when it came to Norman Bates and his story.

With the exception of the weird Gus Van Sant remake with Vince Vaughn, Psycho III would be the last Psycho film to be released into theaters.  It would also be Perkins’s second-to-last time to play Norman.  (The last time would be in a 1990 made-for-TV sequel, Psycho IV: The Beginning.  Despite it’s title, Psycho IV pretty much ignored everything that happened in the previous two sequels.)  Perkins passed away in 1992, at the age of 60 but the character of Norman Bates would live on, both in his own performances and in the later work of Freddie Highmore in Bates Motel.

Film Review: Extremities (dir by Robert M. Young)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1986 film, Extremities, begins with a woman named Marjorie (Farrah Fawcett) getting into her car and getting attacked by a masked rapist named Joe (James Russo).  Though Marjorie manages to escape, Joe grabs her purse.  Later, we watch as Marjorie gets no help from the police while Joe goes home to his loving family.

One week later, Marjorie is alone at her house when Joe lets himself inside.  At first, Joe pretends that he just needs to use the phone.  When Marjorie lies that her husband is taking a nap upstairs, Joe starts to call for him to come downstairs.  As Joe reveals, he’s been stalking Marjorie for days.  He knows that she’s not married and he knows that her roommates will not be home for a few hours.

However, what Joe doesn’t know is that Marjorie has a can of bug spray and, as soon as Joe lets his guard down, she sprays it in his eyes and his mouth.  When the stunned and temporarily blinded Joe stumbles back, Marjorie pushes him into the fireplace and ties him up.  Realizing that he may have ingested toxic chemicals, Joe begs to be released but Marjorie has other plans….

And I was all for it!  I was really looking forward to watching Marjorie torment her attacker.  Unfortunately, Marjorie’s two roommate show up before Marjorie can really get started.  Terry (Diana Scarwid) is shocked when Marjorie explains that she’s planning on burying Joe alive but, as a rape survivor, Terry also knows that, even after all of this, the police will still not be of any help.  Meanwhile, Pat (Alfre Woodard) is a social worker, which means that she has to be the tedious voice of moderation.  She’s the one who says that they can’t kill Joe and that Joe might not even actually be the man who attacked Marjorie….

And that, right there, is one of the main problems with Extremities.  We spend a lot of time listening to Pat argue that it’s not right to torture anyone and that Marjorie might be mistaken and maybe Joe really was just some innocent guy who needed to use the phone.  However, we know that Marjorie’s right, Pat’s wrong, and Joe’s the attack.  As a result, it’s impossible not to get annoyed when Pat keeps going on and on.  We know exactly who Joe is and what we want is to see Marjorie get both justice and her revenge.  We want to see Joe suffer.  What we don’t want to do is spend 30 minutes listening to two thinly drawn characters debate the ethics of what Marjorie’s doing.  Perhaps if the film had begun with Pat and Terry coming home and discovering Joe already trapped in the fireplace, Pat’s concerns would have carried more weight.  There would have been a hint of ambiguity and we’d have to decide if we believed the word of the obviously traumatized Marjorie or the obviously desperate Joe.   But we already know that Marjorie’s right about who Joe is so who cares what Pat thinks?

If you didn’t already know that Extremities was based on a stage play, you’d be able to guess it after watching the movie.  With the exception of the film’s opening scenes, Extremities plays out in one location and, as a result, the film feels very stage-bound.  While the late Farrash Fawcett gives a brave and emotionally raw performance as Marjorie, Alfre Woodard, Diana Scarwid, and James Russo all give overly mannered performances that add to the film’s staginess.

In both its visual aesthetic and its cultural outlook, Extremities is very much a film of its time.  With the exception of Fawcett’s harrowing performance, Extremities feels like a relic of the past.  If the film were made today, there’d be no question that Joe would end up dying in that fireplace.  The only suspense would  be rather Pat or Terry would be the one to dig the grave.

Horror Film Review: Strange Invaders (dir by Michael Laughlin)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

In 1983, two years after the release of Strange Behavior, director Michael Laughlin and Bill Condon teamed up for another “strange” film.  Like their previous collaboration, this film was a combination of horror, science fiction, and satire.

The title of their latest collaboration?

Strange Invaders.

Strange Invaders opens in the 1950s, in a small, all-American town in Illinois.  Innocent children play in the street.  Clean-cut men stop off at the local diner and talk to the waitress (Fiona Lewis, the scientist from Strange Behavior).  Two teenagers (played by the stars of Strange Behavior, Dan Shor and Dey Young) sit in a car and listen to forbidden rock’n’roll music.  A lengthy title crawl informs us that, in the 1950s, Americans were happy and they were only worried about three things: communists, Elvis, and UFOs.  On schedule, a gigantic UFO suddenly appears over the town.

Twenty-five years later, mild-mannered Prof. Charles Bigelow (Paul Le Mat) teaches at a university and wonders just what exactly is going on with his ex-wife, Margaret (Diana Scarwid).  In order to attend her mother’s funeral, Margaret returned to the small Illinois town where she grew up.  When she doesn’t return, Charles decides to go to the town himself.  However, once he arrives, he discovers that the town appears to still be stuck in the 50s.  The townspeople are all polite but strangely unemotional and secretive.  Charles immediately suspects that something strange is happening.  When the towns people suddenly start shooting laser beams from their eyes, Charles realizes that they must be aliens!

Fleeing from the town, Charles checks all the newspapers for any reports of an alien invasion.  The only story he finds is in a cheap tabloid, The National Informer.  The author of the story, Betty Walker (Nancy Allen), claims that she just made the story up but Charles is convinced that she may have accidentally told the truth.  At first, Betty dismisses Charles as being crazy.  But then she’s visited by an Avon lady who looks just like the waitress from the small town and who can shoot laser beams.

Teaming up, Charles and Betty investigate the aliens and try to figure out just what exactly they’re doing on Earth.  It’s an investigation that leads them to not only a shadowy government operative (Louise Fletcher) but also a man (Michael Lerner) who claims that, years ago, he helplessly watched as his family was destroyed by aliens.

Like Strange Behavior, Strange Invaders is a … well, a strange film.  I have to admit that I prefer Behavior to Invaders.  The satire in Strange Invaders is a bit too heavy-handed and Paul Le Mat is not as strong a lead as Michael Murphy was in the first film.  I was a lot more impressed with Nancy Allen’s performance, if just because I related to both her skepticism and her sudden excitement to discover that her fake news might actually be real news.  I also liked Micheal Lerner, so much so that I almost wish that he and Le Mat had switched roles.  Finally, I have to say that Diana Scarwid’s performance was so bizarre that I’m not sure if she was brilliant or if she was terrible.  For her character, that worked well.

Strange Invaders gets better as it goes along.  At the start of the film, there are some parts that drag but the finale is genuinely exciting and clever.  If the film starts as a parody of 1950s alien invasion films, it ends as a satire of Spielbergian positivity.  It’s an uneven film but, ultimately, worth the time to watch.

 

Embracing the Melodrama Part II #66: Desperate Lives (dir by Robert Michael Lewis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

DL-cov2YouTube, my old friend, you have failed me.

For the longest time, the 1982 anti-drug melodrama Desperate Lives has been available for viewing on YouTube.  I first watched it two years ago, after I read an online article about a scene in which a teenage Helen Hunt takes PCP and jumps through a window.  And, when I watched it, I was stunned.  I knew that the film was going to be over-the-top and silly, largely because it’s hard to imagine how a film featuring a teenage Helen Hunt taking PCP could be anything other than that.  But, even with my experience of watching over the top message movies, nothing could have quite prepared me for Desperate Lives.

So, I figured, for this review, that I’d say a few snarky words about Desperate Lives and then I’d just add something like, “And you can watch it below!”  And then I would embed the entire movie and all of y’all could just click on play and watch a movie on the Lens.

Unfortunately, Desperate Lives has been taken off of YouTube.  I assume the upload violated some sort of copyright thing.  And really, it’s kinda stupid because seriously, Desperate Lives is one of those films that really deserves to be seen for free on YouTube.

Oh well.  You can still watch a video of Helen Hunt jumping through that window.  The video below also features some additional elements from Desperate Lives.

For instance, you get to see Diana Scarwid playing the angriest high school guidance counselor in the world.  Scarwid knows that students like Helen Hunt are using drugs and that her fellow faculty members are turning a blind eye to everything’s that’s happening.  From the minute she first appears on screen, Scarwid is shouting at someone and she doesn’t stop screaming until the film ends.

And you also get to see Doug McKeon, playing Helen Hunt’s brother.  McKeon goes for a drive with his girlfriend, who has just taken PCP herself.  As their car goes flying off a mountain, she says, “Wheeee!”

In the video below, you also get to see that the only reason Helen Hunt used drugs was because her boyfriend begged her to.  That’s a scenario that seems to show up in a lot of high school drug films and it’s strange because it’s something that I’ve never actually seen happen or heard about happening in real life.  In fact, in real life, most users of hard drugs are actually very happy to not share their supply.

Unfortunately, the video below does not feature any scenes of Sam Bottoms as the world’s most charming drug dealer and that’s a shame because he gives the only good performance in the entire film (sorry, Helen!).

Even worse, the video doesn’t include any scenes from the film’s memorably insane conclusion, in which Scarwid searches every single locker in the school and then interrupts a pep rally so she can set everyone’s stash on fire in the middle of the gym.  Making it even better is that all the students are so moved by Scarwid’s final speech that they start tossing all of the drugs that they have on them into the fire.

Which means that the film essentially ends with the entire school getting high off of a huge marijuana bonfire.

No, that scene cannot be found in the video below.  But you can find Helen Hunt jumping through a window so enjoy.