Ask most people what their favorite Herschell Gordon Lewis flick is, and the common answers you’re likely to hear will be either Blood Feast, 2,000 Maniacs, or The Gore-Gore Girls, with the occasional vote for The Wizard Of Gore simply because it was mentioned in Juno, they saw it due to the fact that Diablo Cody gave it her “certified cool” stamp of approval, and they then proceeded to go no further in the “Godfather of Gore”‘s cinematic ouevre than that.
Fair enough. But for this armchair critic’s money, Lewis’ most fun — and most deranged (they usually go hand-in-hand with HGL) — work is 1967’s The Gruesome Twosome. The premise is pure genius, the humor is right up there at the forefront, and it’s as subtle as a hammer-blow to the forehead. What more could you possibly ask for?
Old Mrs. Pringle (Elizabeth Davis) is an eccentric yet hopelessly entrepreneurial senior citizen who runs not one, but two home-based businesses — a wig shop downstairs primarily catering to co-eds from the local college (yes, there was once a day when wigs were considered very hip fashion accessories by the under-65-and-without-cancer set), and a boarding house upstairs that pretty much rents rooms solely to — those same co-eds from the local college. It doesn’t take a seasoned exploitation viewer like myself or unobtainium13 vet Lisa Marie Bowman (who you can either thank, or blame, for getting me to start contributing to this site) to figure out at this point why Mrs. Pringle’s wigs have such fine-quality, completely-realistic-feeling hair, does it?
Well, okay, in case you’re slow on the uptake,the not-so-good Mrs. P.’s demented full-grown son, Rodney (Chris Martell), is taking the girls into the back room of the shop, scalping them, and then killing them — thus ensuring that their “room for rent” sign never has to come down, and that they never run out of wigs. And this is almost always shown in loving, close-up, excruciating, far-less-than-realistic detail. Truth be told, although Lewis had taken something of an extended hiatus from the gore genre he basically started single-handedly before returning to it with this film, he hadn’t been away so long that he forgot we wouldn’t have it any other way and he knew that his job was simply to deliver the goods. Sure, there’s a “plot” here of sorts — college student Kathy Baker (Gretchen Wells), a self-appointed “female James Bond,” starts doing the cops’ job for them and investigating the disappearances of all her classmates when one of her fellow residents of the all-girls’ dormitory doesn’t come home one night, much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, but as with any Lewis film, the payoff here comes primarily in the form of the ingenious set-up and the resultant heavy doses of viscera said set-up inevitably gives rise to — the rest is all filler.
And it’s the quality of that filler that sets The Gruesome Twosome apart. Whether it’s the truly hysterical conversation between two styrofoam wig-form heads at the beginning of the film (a scenario Lewis had to improvise quickly on the fly to pad out the runtime to 70 minutes when the original opening scene was inadvertently destroyed, thus making it a genuine example of necessity being the accidental mother to genius), or the extended slapstick-style sequence where Kathy sics the cops on the poor German- immigrant gardener/handyman who works at the school who just likes to bury bones for his dog in his back yard, or Mrs. Pringle’s constant back-and-forth (in her mind, at any rate) dialogue with her stuffed bobcat, Napoleon, the downright clever nature of the padding in this film marks it as a cut above (pun only somewhat intended) its contemporaries.
As is the case with pretty much every Herschell Gordon Lewis flick, The Gruesome Twosome is available on DVD from Something Weird Video in a “special edition” that features a remastered (and quite nice-looking) full-frame transfer, remastered mono sound, a full-length, and very entertaining, commentary track from Lewis himself, and the ubiquituous-on-these-things “Gallery of Herschell Gordon Lewis exploitation artwork.” Definitely an essential purchase either on its own or as part of the HGL box set that also contains A Taste Of Blood, She-Devils On Wheels, Something Weird, The Wizard Of Gore and The Gore-Gore Girls. If you haven’t got it, get it — and if you’ve got it already, there’s no such thing as a bad time to watch it again. Have fun — and don’t touch my hair.
(Warning: This review contains spoilers. A lot of them.)
Last week, I posted a poll and I asked you, the Shattered Lens readers, which film I should watch on March 20th and then subsequently review. You voted and the winner was the classic 1967 trashfest, Valley of the Dolls.
Based on a best-selling (and trend-setting) novel by Jacqueline Susann, Valley of the Dolls starts out with a disclaimer that informs us that the story we’re about to see is totally fictional and purely imaginative. That disclaimer is probably the funniest part of the entire film as Valley of the Dolls is notorious for being one of the first films dedicated to showing middle America just how miserable and screwed up those famous show business types truly are. As such, the main reason for watching a movie like this is so you can sit there and compare the cinematic troubles of a character like Neely O’Hara to the true-life troubles of an actress like Lindsay Lohan. Valley of the Dolls tells the story of three aspiring stars who, as they find fame, also find themselves dealing with heartbreak, insanity, and dolls. No, not the type of dolls that my mom used to collect. These “dolls” are a bunch of red pills that do everything from keeping you thin to keeping you awake and focused. (Though the pills are never actually called anything other than “dolls,” they appear to be the same pills that I take for my ADD.)
The least interesting of our three heroines is Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins). Unfortunately, Anne is also pretty much the center of the rather draggy first hour of the film. Anne is a walking cliché, a naive girl from a small town in New England who moves to New York, gets a room at the Martha Washington Hotel for Women, and a job at a local theatrical agency. “I want to have a marriage like mom and dad…but not yet!” Anne breathlessly tells us. Anne eventually ends up as the mistress of Lyon Burke (played by Paul Burke), a writer-turned-theatrical-agent who you know has to be a cad because his name is Lyon Burke and he takes Anne’s virginity but then refuses to marry her afterward. Anne eventually becomes a model and finds fame as the face of Gilligan Hairspray but she soon finds herself forced to watch as her two best friends travel down a path of self-destruction.
Anne is the film’s token “good girl” and, as such, she’s rather bland and boring. However, her character is interesting when considered as a symbol for the confused sexual politics of the time. Valley of the Dolls was made in 1967, at a time when Hollywood was still trying to figure out how to deal with the emerging counter-culture. The end result? A lot of rather old-fashioned films that were full of jarringly out-of-place counter-culture moments. By the time Valley of the Dolls came out, it was allowable to acknowledge that a single girl might actually have sex but she still had to, at the very least, feel an unbelievable amount of angst about it. That certainly is the case with Anne. Watching the film today, it’s hard to understand just what exactly Anne’s feeling guilty about. Lyon isn’t married. Anne finds success even as she pursues her relationship with him. Up until the final half of the film (at which point the morality of the time demands that both Anne and Lyon suddenly start acting totally out-of-character), Lyon treats her with about as much respect as you could probably expect to get from a man in the 1960s. And yet, Anne can’t feel complete simply because Lyon is hesitant about marrying her. When she and Lyon finally do make love, they do it with the lights off so the only thing the viewer sees are two shadowy figures holding each other. Following the film’s logic, if the lights had been left on, the character of Anne would have had to have been punished later in the film for allowing the audience to see too much of her.
When Anne first comes to New York, she befriends two actresses. The more tragic of the two is Jennifer North (played by Sharon Tate, who would be tragically murdered two years after this film came out), an insecure blonde who is valued more for her body than her talent. Jennifer spends her spare time doing bust exercises (“To hell with them!” she declares at one point as she glares down at her chest, “Let ’em droop!”) and dealing with phone calls from her mother, demanding that Jennifer send her money. Jennifer eventually ends up marrying a singer named Tony (played by Tony Scotti). Tony is a well-meaning if simple-minded guy who is married to a creepily overprotective sister (played by Lee Grant). Eventually, it turns out that Tony has a neurological disease and he’s eventually checked into a sanitorium. Penniless, Jennifer goes France and makes “art films.” (In one of Valley of the Dolls’ better moments, we’re shown a clip of this “art film” and it turns out to be a pitch perfect satire of every single pretentious soft-core film to ever come out of Europe.) Upon returning to America, Jennifer discovers that she has breast cancer and, declaring “All I’ve got is my body,” she commits suicide.
Though Sharon Tate gets considerably less screen time than her co-stars, she probably gives the strongest performance in this film. Certainly, her story is the most emotionally effective (even if it’s hard not to feel that, as is typical of the films of both the 60s and today, Jennifer is being punished for taking off her clothes on camera). Tate perfectly captures the insecurity that comes from being continually told that you have nothing more to offer beyond how you look. In her first appearance, she’s wearing an outrageously large headdress. “I feel a little top-heavy,” she says. “You are a little top-heavy,” some guy replies while leering at her breasts. If you doubt that Sharon Tate was a good actress, just watch her reaction. She perfectly captures a pain that I personally know far too well. Her subsequent suicide scene, which has the potential to be the most tasteless part of this film, is actually the most powerful and again, it’s because Tate plays the role perfectly.
(It’s been nearly four years since I lost my mom to breast cancer and I have to admit, I had a hard time watching the scenes where Jennifer discusses her diagnosis. Tate gave a great performance here and it’s a shame that she’s been permanently linked in the public imagination with Charles Manson and the later accusations against her husband, Roman Polanski. She had real talent.)
As poignant of Sharon Tate was in her role, the film’s fame (and infamy) ultimately rests with our third heroine, Neely O’Hara (played by Patty Duke in a performance that suggests that she was literally possessed during the filming). Neely is a scrappy, aspiring singer who is fired from a broadway show when her singing threatens to upstage aging star Helen Lawson (played by Susan Hayward, who was brought in to replace Judy Garland). Neely, however, refuses to let anything keep her down and soon, she’s singing at a Cystic Fibrosis telethon and becoming a big star. She marries her boyfriend Mel (played by Martin Milner, who grits his teeth and spits out every line) and moves to California where she soon becomes a big star and then finds herself hooked on “booze and dolls.” (“I need a doll!” she insists on several occasions.)
One reason the film’s 2nd hour is so much more fun than the first is because the film’s focus shifts from boring Anne to out-of-control Neely. Increasingly temperamental and unstable, Neely soon starts to spend all of her time with dress designer Ted Casablanca (a great name, if nothing else.) “You’re spending more time than necessary with that fag Ted Casablanca,” Mel tells her to which Neely replies, “Ted Casablanca’s no fag and I’m the dame who can prove it.” This, of course, leads to a divorce and soon Neely is living with Mr. Casablanca who informs her, after he gets caught cheating, “You made me feel as if I was queer…that little whore makes me feel 9 feet tall.”
When Lyon and Anne attempt to force Neely to enter a sanitorium, she responds to running off to San Francisco where she enters a bar and shouts, “I’M NEELY O’HARA!” before then wandering down a sleazy street and ranting, “Boobies, boobies! Nothing but boobies! Who needs them!?” Needless to say, this leads to her eventually overdosing and ending up in that sanitorium where she has a huge freak-out before singing a duet with Tony and resolving to get her life back in order. This, naturally, leads to her getting released, having an affair with Lyon, and then returning to Broadway where, in the film’s most deliriously odd moment, she steals Helen Lawson’s wig and flushes it down a toilet.
Valley of the Dolls is, admittedly, a terrible film but it’s also a lot of fun and that’s largely because of Patty Duke’s berserk performance as Neely O’Hara. Earlier, I said that Duke’s performance appears to suggest that she may have been possessed but, honestly, that barely begins to describe it. Whereas Tate managed to find some truth in the film’s melodrama and Parkins gives a performance that suggests that the script put her in a coma, Duke attacks every inch of melodramatic dialogue, barking out her dialogue with all the ferocity of a yapping little chiuaua. Duke gives a performance that is so completely and totally over-the-top that it’s hard not to respect her commitment to capturing every overheated, melodramatic moment.
I have to admit that one reason why I love this film is because I’m hoping that someday some enterprising director will remake it and cast me as Neely O’Hara. Everytime I watch this film, I find myself thinking about how much it would be to respond to every petty annoyance by screeching out, “I’m NEELY O’HARA!” Seriously, just think about it. As a character, Neely is a talented, ambitious, emotional, unstable, immature, demanding, bratty, spoiled, and determined. Sound like anyone whose film reviews you might have been reading recently? From my previous experience as a community theater ingenue, I can assure you that I can deliver melodramatic dialogue with the best of them and, unlike Patty Duke in this film, I can actually dance. Unfortunately, I can’t carry a tune to save my life but I’m thinking maybe they could bring in Kelly Clarkson to serve as my singing voice. (Or maybe Jessica Simpson. Did I ever mention that we both went to the same high school? Though not at the same time, of course.) After all, if Patty Duke could be obviously dubbed, why not me? I can just see myself now, wandering down some sleazy city street, singing to myself and declaring at the top of my lungs, “Ted Casablanca’s no fag and I’m the dame who can prove it!” I know that Lindsay Lohan will probably insist that this is the role she was born to play, but seriously, who needs Linsday when you’ve got a Lisa?
Beyond the so-bad-that-its-good appeal of the film, Valley of the Dolls is a fascinating cultural artifact for the reasons that I previously hinted at while talking about the character of Anne Welles. Valley of the Dolls was made in 1967 and, as such, it’s a perfect exhibit of an unstable time when Hollywood was unsure about whether it should embrace the “new morality” or if it should continue to recycle the same sort of old-fashioned filmmaking that had nearly bankrupted the big studios. The result was several films that felt oddly schizophrenic in their approach and that is certainly the case with Mark Robson’s direction of Valley of the Dolls. Whether it’s the way the film continually hints at nudity and sex while carefully not revealing too much or the way that random psychedelic sequences seem to suddenly appear on-screen, this is a movie that perfectly captures an uncertain film industry trying to figure out where it stands in a scary new world.
As always, I enjoyed watching this undeniably bad but just as undeniably compelling film. Our readers chose well! Thank you to everyone who voted and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this review almost as much I enjoyed writing it.
Yes, this trailer has been out there for a while and quite frankly, I’m not expecting this film to be that good (I get the feeling that the best moments are probably in the trailer) but still, I always smile whenever I see the trailer for Men in Black 3. Why? Well, there’s really only one reason and it’s not Will Smith being all Will Smith-like. And, no, it’s not Tommy Lee Jones because, even in the trailer, Jones looks absolutely miserable and ennui-stricken. And it’s not Jermaine Clement because, while he’s apparently in the film, he’s not in the trailer.
No, for me, this trailer — and probably the entire film — is all about Josh Brolin’s next-to-perfect imitation of Tommy Lee Jones.
Hi! I hope everyone had a good St. Patrick’s Day because I know that I had a great time honoring the Meehan side of my family. I danced so much that I am quite literally hopping about this morning. It was a lot of fun but now, it’s the day after St. Patrick’s Day. And that can only mean that it’s time for another edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film trailers! Now, admittedly, these trailers might not seem to have much to do with the Irish but look closer and you’ll see that they do have at least one thing in common … they’re all totally awesome in their own unique and special way.
1) Playing For Keeps (1986)
“The new Hotel Majestic … FOR KIDS ONLY!” You can tell this is a good movie just by the way that the title is introduced all Ten Commandments style. Marisa Tomei is in this trailer for a split second. The film itself was directed by future movie moguls Harvey and Bob Weinstein.
2) The Forbidden Dance Is Lambada (1990)
I just like this one because it’s not just about dancing but it’s about a forbidden dance! Passion, by the way, has a rhythm all its own…
3) Lambada (1990)
In fact, the dance was so forbidden that apparently a totally separate movie was made about it at the exact same time as The Forbidden Dance Is Lambada. This one looks a lot less fun, to be honest. “This is the 90s, man, kids got a right to choose…”
4) The Chicken Chronicles (1977)
Judging from the previous trailers and the title of this film, you would be justified in expecting this trailer to be about a bunch of dancing chickens that open up their own hotel. Sadly, this is not the case. However, this trailer does continue the theme of “the right to choose” and a school divided.
5) Coach (1978)
Hmmmm…I wonder how this film ends…
6) TheSister-In-Law (1974)
Like Coach, the Sister-in-Law is available in a few of those cheap-but-oh-so-fun Mill Creek box sets. Unlike Coach, the Sister-in-Law is actually a pretty good film. By the way, I’m built for love and trouble…
Having seen the new Spanish-language comedy Casa de mi Padre on Friday, I now know what I want for Christmas. I want a big white tiger that can talk and sit in trees and laugh, just like the big white cat that shows up and serves as spirit guide to Will Ferrell.
Seriously, let’s make it happen!
As for Case de mi Padre, the film is a deliberately absurd homage to both telenovelas and the B-movies of the 70s. Armando Alvarez (played by Will Ferrell) is a stupid but good-hearted Mexican rancher whose drug dealer brother (Diego Luna) is on the verge of marrying the niece (played by Genesis Rodriguez) of another drug dealer (Gael Garcia Bernal). Ferrell, of course, falls in love with Rodriguez and this leads to a deliriously over-the-top wedding party massacre and … well, listen the plot isn’t important. The plot makes no sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s not only a Will Ferrell movie, it’s a Will Ferrell movie based on telenovelas. In short, the film is deliberately designed not to make any sense and, on that count, it succeeds admirably.
Despite a lot of funny moments and Ferrell’s admirable commitment to the film, Casa de mi Padre ultimately works better as a concept than an actual film. In the past, Ferrell’s comedies have worked because they’ve satirized pompous institutions and people who generally take themselves far too seriously, with the obvious example being Anchorman‘s cast of self-important television reporters. However, the majority of telenovelas are already essentially satiric in their intent. Casa de mi Padre finds itself in the odd position of satirizing satire and, as a result, it never feels as outrageous as an actual telenovela. The end result is hardly perfect but it’s silly enough to be consistently amusing.
Casa de mi Padre is a pretty uneven film that’s never as funny as you want it to be but I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy watching it. Will Ferrell’s strength as both a comedic and a dramatic actor is his willingness to totally commit to his performance. No matter how ludicrous or silly things get, Ferrell gives 100% and that’s never been more obvious than in his performance here. Not only does he deliver all of his dialogue in Spanish (apparently he learned his lines phonetically) but he also totally throws himself into the melodrama of it all.
A similar commitment can be seen in just about every frame of the film. For me, the film’s best moments come from the small details that the filmmakers take the time to get right. It’s there in every scene from the film’s deliberately tacky sets to the way that the characters randomly break out into overdone laughter to the fact that every female character in the film down to even the maids who work for Ferrell’s father wander around showing off miles of cleavage. Perhaps my favorite scene in the film is when Ferrell and Rodriguez go for a horse ride and it’s obvious from the way the scene is framed that neither one of them is actually sitting on a horse. These are the type of details that will leave boring mainstream audiences scratching their heads but for those of us who speak B-movie, these are the details that make this film worth seeing.
Here’s the trailer for Tim Burton’s upcoming vampire film, Dark Shadows. A lot of people are excited about this one but the reaction to the trailer on my twitter timeline has been mixed, to say the least.
Personally, I love Johnny Depp but I think this all looks way too silly.
On Monday night, my movie before bedtime was an old one from 1970, John G. Avildsen’s Joe. Though Joe is an occasionally uneven and rather heavy-handed film, it’s also a brutally effective one that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since watching it.
Joe opens with Melissa Compton (played by Susan Sarandon, in her film debut) and her boyfriend, Frank Russo (Patrick McDermott). It is quickly established that Melissa is a “rich girl” who has dropped out of society while Frank is a drug dealer. Frank, incidentally, is probably one of the least likable characters in the history of cinema. When we first meet Frank, he’s taking a bath but it makes no difference as the character just seems to covered in a permanent layer of grime. Both Frank and Melissa are also drug addicts.
Patrick McDermott (left) and Susan Sarandon
When Melissa has a drug overdose and ends up in the hospital, Frank doesn’t really care but her father, advertising executive Bill Compton (Dennis Patrick) does. He promptly goes over to Frank’s apartment and after Frank taunts him by saying that Melissa “had a real hang-up about you,” Bill beats Frank to death in a fit of rage. Shaken by his actions, Bill goes to a neighborhood bar where he runs into a factory worker named Joe Curran (Peter Boyle). A drunken Joe rants about how much he would like to kill a hippie. Bill replies, “I just did.”
This leads to an odd relationship between the two men. While Bill originally fears that Joe wants to blackmail him, Joe appears to just want to be his friend. Soon, Joe is introducing Bill to his bowling league and Bill introduces Joe to his colleagues at the advertising firm. Bill and his wife even have a memorably awkward dinner with Joe and his wife. Bill’s wife worries that Joe might be dangerous but Bill smugly assures her that he is Joe’s hero.
Meanwhile, Melissa is released from the hospital and moves back in with her parents. One night, she hears them talking about how Bill killed Frank. Melissa flees from the apartment and when Bill chases after her, she shouts at him, “Are you going to kill me too!?” before disappearing into the New York night.
Searching for Melissa, Bill and Joe go to various hippie hangouts in Manhattan. Every hippie they meet tends to be dismissive of the suit-wearing Bill and the uneducated Joe. However, once Bill reveals that his car is full of drugs that he stole from Frank, the hippies are suddenly a lot more friendly. A group of hippies take Joe and Bill back to their apartment. At Bill’s insistence, both of the men smoke weed for the first time and then have sex with two of the hippie girls. While they’re busy doing it, the rest of the hippies steal their money and all of the drugs.
Suddenly, Joe takes charge of the situation, leaving Bill to watch helplessly as Joe repeatedly slaps one of the girls until she tells them where her friends have gone. (I’ve seen a lot of movies and I like to think that there’s little I can’t handle watching but the scene where Joe interrogates the girl was genuinely disturbing and I actually had a hard time watching it. This was largely due to the intensity of Boyle’s performance.) Joe drags Bill to the commune where the hippies live. Standing outside the house, as snow falls around them, Joe gets two hunting rifles out of his car and tosses one to Bill before the film reaches its inetivable conclusion.
Joe With Friend
Like many films released in the early 70s, Joe is distinguished by a continually shifting tone. The film’s opening (which feature Susan Sarandon getting naked and then watching her disturbingly unhygienic boyfriend shooting up) feels almost like it’s composed of outtakes from some lost Andy Warhol Factory film while the scenes immediately following Melissa’s drug overdose feel like a melodramatic Lifetime special. After Bill kills Frank, the film briefly becomes a Hitchcockian thriller just to then segue into heavy-handed social satire as we watch the development of Joe and Bill’s unlikely, hate-fueled friendship. The awkward comedy continues for a while until, somewhat jarringly, Joe suddenly becomes a violent revenge film. While many films have been doomed by the lack of a consistent tone, it actually works here. Joe‘s odd mishmash of comedy, tragedy, and exploitation actually perfectly reflects the uncertain worldview and hidden fears of Bill Compton. Much as the audience is often times left uncertain whether they’re watching a comedy or a tragedy, Bill is a man who is no longer sure how to react to the world around him.
And make no doubt about it, Joe may be the title character but the film is truly about Bill Compton. It’s Bill’s repressed anger (and desire for his own daughter) that fuels the plot. As played by Dennis Patrick, Bill Compton is the type of smugly complacent figure whose outward confidence hides the fact that he’s been rendered impotent by the world changing around him. For the majority of the film, Bill looks down on both sides of the cultural divide, looking down on both his daughter’s hippie friends and his new blue-collar acquaintance Joe. (He assures his wife that Joe would never attempt to blackmail him because Joe “looks up” to him.) It’s only at the film’s conclusion that Bill realizes just how powerless he is to control anything. In those final scenes, Dennis Patrick’s face reveals what the audience has already figured out. By trying to place himself above it all, he’s left himself with nowhere to go.
Dennis Patrick (left) and Peter Boyle
That said, the film truly is dominated by Peter Boyle’s demonic performance as Joe. For much of the movie, Joe is a buffoonish figure (he even gets his own mocking theme song “Hey Joe” which plays as he wanders around his house and scratches his navel) and it’s sometimes hard not to feel like you’re watching a long-lost episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Frank Barone remembers the time that he killed a lot of hippies. However, once Bill and Joe find themselves searching for Melissa among the hippies, Boyle slowly starts to pull back the layers and a new, far more threatening Joe emerges. By the end of the film, Joe has become a nightmarish figure and we’re forced to reconsider everything that we’ve previously assumed. By the film’s end, Joe almost seems to be a direct personification of Bill’s Id, a man who exists solely to force Bill to do what he’s always secretly wanted to do.*
When Joe was first released back in 1970, it apparently made a lot of money, generated a lot of controversy, and even managed to score an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Oscar nomination aside, Joe is the epitome of a well-made and effective exploitation film. While Joe and Bill are basically counter-culture nightmares of a murderous American establishment, the film’s hippies are portrayed as being so smug and so scummy that I’m not surprised to read that apparently audiences cheered once Joe and Bill started gunning them down. (Peter Boyle, however, was apparently so shocked that he swore he would never make another film that “glamorized violence.”) By embracing the best traditions of the grindhouse and attempting to appeal to both sides of the cultural divide in the crudest way possible, the filmmakers ended up making a film that, over 40 years later, somehow feels more honest than most of the other “generation gap” films of the 60s and 70s.
As any film lover knows, any film made between 1966 and 1978 tends to age terribly, to the extent that often times they’re impossible to take seriously when watched today. (And anyone who doubts me on this should track down films like R.P.M, Thank God It’s Friday, Skatetown U.S.A., Getting Straight, and Zabriskie Point.) However, watched today in our present age of Occupiers and Tea Partiers, Joe still feels relevent and, at times, downright prophetic.
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* In many ways, Joe Curran is a cruder, balder version of Tyler Durden.
Here’s the trailer for the film that will probably end up dominated my twitter timeline when it’s eventually released. I follow a lot of big Kerouac fans (and I think Big Sur is one of the great American novels) and I’ll be interested to see what they think of the long-delayed film version of On The Road. For now, I’ll just say that it’s rarely a good sign when the film version of an iconic novel is full of star cameos and I have a hard time imagining the dependably dull Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty.
(Already, I can hear people complaining about the prominence of Kristen Stewart in the film’s trailer….)
Well, here’s your chance to, once again, tell me what to do. I’ve randomly selected 12 films from my film collection. Whichever film gets the most votes will be watched and reviewed by me next Tuesday, March 20th.
Here are the films up for consideration:
1) Black Jesus (1968) — This Italian film stars Woody Strode as an African rebel leader who is captured by his country’s right-wing, American-backed dictatorship.
2) Capote (2005) — Philip Seymour Hoffman was an Oscar for best actor for playing writer Truman Capote in this film that details how Capote came to write his true crime classic, In Cold Blood. This film was also nominated for best picture.
3) Chappaqua (1966) — In this underground cult classic, drug addict Conrad Rooks seeks treatment in Switzerland while being haunted by a scornful William S. Burroughs. This film features cameo from Allen Ginsberg, The Fugs, and just about every other cult figure from 1966.
4) Crazy/Beautiful (2001) — Jay Fernandez and Kirsten Dunst have lots and lots of sex. This was like one of my favorite movies to catch on cable back when I was in high school. 🙂
5) An Education (2008) — In my favorite movie from 2008, Carey Mulligan is a schoolgirl in 1960s England who has a secret affair with an older man (played by Peter Sarsgaard), who has plenty of secrets of his own. Co-starring Rosamund Pike, Emma Thompson, Alfred Molina, and Dominic Cooper (who is to die for, seriously).
6) Female Vampire (1973) — In this atmospheric and ennui-filled film from the infamous Jesus Franco, a female vampire spends the whole movie wandering around naked and dealing with the lost souls who want to join the ranks of the undead.
7) Nightmare City (1980) — In this gory and fast-paced film from Umberto Lenzi, an accident at a nuclear plant leads to a bunch of blood-thirsty zombies rampaging through both the city and the countryside. Hugo Stiglitz plays Dean Miller, zombie exterminator! Nightmare City is probably most remembered for introducing the concept of the fast zombie and for serving as an obvious inspiration for Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later.
8) The Other Side of Midnight (1977) — Based on a best-selling novel, The Other Side of Midnight tells the story of a poor French girl who becomes a world-famous actress and who ends up sleeping with apparently every wealthy man in the world. Meanwhile, the man she loves ends up marrying Susan Sarandon. Eventually, it all ends with both a hurricane and a murder. Apparently, this film cost a lot of money to make and it was a notorious box office bomb. It looks kinda fun to me.
9) Peyton Place (1957) — Also based on a best-selling novel, Peyton Place is about love, sex, and scandal in a small town. Lana Turner is a repressed woman with a past who struggles to keep her daughter from making the same mistakes. At the time it was made, it was considered to be quite racy and it was even nominated for best picture. This film is a personal favorite of mine and it’s pretty much set the template for every single film ever shown on Lifetime.
10) Rosebud (1975) — From director Otto Preminger comes this film about what happens when a bunch of rich girls on a yacht are taken hostage by Islamic extremists. The film’s diverse cast includes Peter O’Toole, Richard Attenborough, Cliff Gorman, former New York Mayor John Lindsay, former Kennedy in-law Peter Lawford, Raf Vallone, Adrienne Corri, Lalla Ward, Isabelle Huppert, and Kim Cattrall.
11) Valley of the Dolls (1967) — Oh my God, I love this movie so much! Three aspiring actresses move to the big city and soon become hooked on pills and bad relationship decisions. Every time I watch this movie, I spend hours yelling, “I’m Neely O’Hara, bitch!” at the top of my lungs.
12) Zombie Lake (1981) — From my favorite French director, Jean Rollin, comes this extremely low budget film about a bunch of Nazi zombies who keep coming out of the lake and attacking the nearby village. Some people claim that this is the worst zombie films ever made. I disagree.
Please vote below for as many or as few of these films as you want to. The poll will remain open until March 20th and whichever film gets the most votes will be watched and reviewed by me.
On Friday, when I went to see Silent House, one of the pre-movie trailers was for an upcoming horror film called The Cabin In The Woods. In many ways, this looks like a standard slasher film but seeing the name Joss Whedon gives me hope.
