miss flickchick

In Praise of Ernie Kovacs

2011-08-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Ernie Kovacs Collection
Six Discs (Shout! Factory)

Not my usual beat and no, I don’t think horror and humor are two sides of the same coin, but petty consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so I'm going to sing the praises of Ernie Kovacs, the television pioneer who died shockingly young -- 42 -- in a 1963 car crash but left a rich legacy of innovative television... a legacy handed down for decades within the comedy community but largely unknown to outsiders because the stuff was so damned hard to see. The Ernie Kovacs Collection takes care of that.

So, why would you want to take a chance on some guy who was on TV before you were born? Well, for one thing, the surrealistic, medium-bending humor we take for granted today didn’t start with Scrubs (2001-2010) or David Letterman (1980) or Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969-1974) or even Green Acres (1965-1971). Ernie Kovacs was stretching, subverting and mocking at the conventions of television in 1951... take a moment to think on that: 1951. TV was so young it barely had conventions to mock, subvert or undermine, but Kovacs had an unerring eye for fledgling clichés and lampooned them mercilessly.

You can see Kovacs in Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live (Chevy Chase thanked him in his 1976 Emmy acceptance speech), and in the self-referential patter of Steve Allen, George Carlin and Craig Ferguson. Try not to think about SNL's fake commercials ("puppy uppers and doggie downers," anyone?) or Second City TV's Joe Flaherty as Count Floyd while watching Kovacs play the shameless host of a late-night Hungarian movie show (Kovacs' family was Hungarian) shilling for 'Molnar’s Budapest Krisplies.' "They’re 100% junk!" he says gleefully. They "don’t pop snap or crackle… who wants all that noise from spoon?" To serve: Combine cereal, two cups of sugar and a bottle of cheap Hungarian wine in a punch bowl, then discard cereal.

Before you dismiss Kovacs’ effete poet Percy Dovetonsils as a retro gay stereotype, listen closely to “Roughing It,” his guide to hunting bear like a man’s man, which starts with a shopping spree at Abercrombie and Francine. If that isn’t a joke that plays better 50 years down the line than when it was new, I don’t know what is.

And then there’s the Nairobio Trio, which consisted of Kovacs, Edie Adams – his wife, muse and partner in crime, the rare bombshell willing to go goofy for a laugh – and various third wheels performing classical-light composer Robert Maxwell’s novelty number "Solfeggio" dressed as mechanical apes in bowlers. Their legacy includes a New Zealand jazz quartet who appropriated the name, Harry Nilsson's video for his novelty hit Coconut and columnist Jim Knipfel's Quitting the Nairobi Trio: A Memoir, his sardonic account of spending six months in Minneapolis mental institution after a botched suicide attempt.

None of Kovacs' routines sound anywhere near as funny as they are, even the word-based ones: They’re too intricately time, distinctively delivered and just plain loopy to translate. Which is where The Ernie Kovacs Collection comes in and I step out: There may be someone out there who could watch the entire set without cracking a smile, but when it comes to comedy I’m a notoriously tough audience and Kovacs makes me laugh.

Jules Dassin/Night and the City

2011-06-06T18:51:00.000-07:00

I interviewed Jules Dassin, still dapper and articulate, in the mid 1990s and brought along a vintage paperback copy of Night and the City, hoping I'd have the nerve to ask him to sign it. Fortunately, we got along like a house afire: Though I was much younger than he was, we both grew up in a New York that bore little resemblance to the new, improved version. So at the end of the interview I bit the bullet and handed him the movie tie-in paperback and asked.

He looked at it intently for a moment and then said, "Would you mind

if I wrote my name across Gene Tierney's creamy bosom?" And he did.

The revolution will not be televised...

2011-06-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Musician, poet and social activist Gil Scott-Heron died on May 27th, and while reading his obit I got hit with one of those "how'd I get that so wrong" broadsides.

I always took the signature line from Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word screed (contrary to what every over-stressed, culturally under-educated online writer seems to have taken at face value because someone once wrote it somewhere, Scott-Heron's legacy isn't rap -- it's the apparently spontaneous but meticulously-crafted verse of poetry slams)"The Revolution Will Not be Televised” as a defiant warning that when the poor, alienated and disenfranchised finally get up off their asses to fight the power, the carnage will be overwhelming, up against the wall motherfucker real, not some happy news kicker or an intensely manipulated, reality-tv style spectacle. Talk about prescient.

Interestingly, my husband's take was the complete opposite: He interpreted it to mean that the ruling class would suppress real reporting and spin the whole thing into insignificance… also prescient.

But I'd never listened to or read the full piece (shame on me) and it was a revelation. Yes, Scott-Heron addresses racism, police brutality, addiction and entrenched social injustice. But this excerpt sums up what really burned his ass:

“The revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruptions…

"The revolution will not be brought to you by the Schaefer Award Theater and will not star Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle as Julia.

"The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.

"The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.

"The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, brother."

Damn – that is more prescient than I ever imagined.

http://youtu.be/qGaoXAwl9kw

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds named a 2010 best non-fiction title!

2011-01-30T14:20:00.000-08:00

Thank you Google Alerts! Without you I would never had known that PopMatters just named the revised and updated edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento (University of Minnesota Press) one of the best non-fiction books of 2010.

Sneaky movie cameos by musicians... did you spot them?

2010-12-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about Keith Richard as Captain Jack Sparrow's dad (duh) in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End or Alanis Morrisette as one attitudinal God Almighty in Kevin Smith's Dogma — everyone knew about those long before the movies opened.

And I'm not talking about bands or soloists appearing as themselves in a performance context, so Bauhaus-era Peter Murphy doing "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in The Hunger is a no go.

But Iggy Pop in a ladies' dress and sunbonnet, talking all holy while fingering Johnny Depp's soft, pretty hair in Jim Jarmusch's existential western Dead Man? That one took me by surprise. So did Miles Davis is Scrooged; what the.......?

You can see all ten by clicking here.

...and a big hand for Sharktopus

2010-12-13T21:30:00.000-08:00

So, you thought Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus reset the exploitation bar... oh, ye of little imagination! Prepare to feel the earth shift beneath your feet again, because Sharktopus is here. I live for press releases that read like Onion parodies.

Less than a year after receiving an honorary Oscar for inundating 1950s movie theaters with teen-friendly monster movies, biker flicks, rock ‘n’ roll showcases and WIP pictures, along with helping launch the careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Joe Dante, James Cameron, Bruce Dern, Jonathan Demme, John Sayles, Sylvester Stallone, Monty Hellman, Jack Nicholson, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Bartel, Curtis Hanson, Gale Anne Hurd, Alan Arkush, William Shatner, Penelope Spheeris, Curtis Harrington and Peter Fonda, and barely a month after Alexandre Aja’s 3D remake of Piranha opened, 84-year-old exploitation legend Roger Corman proved he’s still in the game with the too-shameless-to-be-believed Sharktopus.

Yes, the hybrid-horror effort, which follows in the drag marks of such recent Corman-produced projects as Dinoshark, Supergator and Dinoshark vs. Supergator debuted on the SyFy channel, but that’s the name of the game these days: The age of theatrical openings for, say, a mutant rapist fishmen movie like 1980’s Humanoids from the Deep is long gone.

But the likes of Sharktopus keep up-and-comers and downward dogs (I leave it to you to fill in the names) in mortgage payments and help feed memories of exploitation pictures past.

And dig that crazy theme song by the Cheetah Whores! Thank you, SyFy and Anchor Bay.

Sharktopus is available on DVD and Blu-ray (like I care) on March 15th… start planning your alcohol-fueled viewing party now.

Memories of horror... good ones!

2010-11-14T11:33:00.000-08:00

The horror website Terror Trap recently invited me to contribute a piece about a memorable horror movie viewing experience. It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that I chose an Argento movie. But I got a pleasant surprise when the luck of the layout placed me next to Jessica Harper. And she nails who the terror of The Wizard of Oz, namely those damned creepy flying monkeys, with their silly hats, bellhop vests and nasty simian smiles.

Anyway, if you're up for a stroll down sleaze-memory lane, my recollection of seeing Deep Red in one of Times Square's many long gone theaters is here.

Pumpkinhead and Pinhead Sitting in a Tree...

2010-11-09T11:12:00.000-08:00

What other explanation can there be for this monstrous gourd except that it's the unholy spawn of Pinhead, dark prince of cenobites, and everyone's favorite demon from the wrong side of the pumpkin patch? Naughty, naughty!

And no wonder it's behind a fence... (Photographed at the Mobilization for Change Community Garden, 107th Street and Columbus Avenue, NYC)

Halloween decor!

2010-11-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

I confess: I failed to start planning before there was so much as a nip of frost in the air. My bad.

But for a last minute creation — we're talking an hour from start to finish, and that's with the time it took to hollow out and carve the big pumpkin — it came out pretty well.Of course, it helps that our place is awash in skulls (wooden, ceramic, crystal, plaster, wax... everything but bone, at least when we're talking human), glow-in-the-dark spiders and miscellaneous other cheerfully macabre stuff.

It takes a little pre-planning to do the place up for Christmas, but Halloween is a snap.

Why is my cat reading such filth?

2010-10-25T15:51:00.000-07:00

I just retrieved this book from Chip's room (also known as the cardboard box he claimed last year after my husband and I made a whirlwind NYC-Morgantown-NYC trip to collect some stuff from his childhood home) and would like to know why my cat is creeping around reading purportedly anthropological accounts of pervy sex crimes.

I mean, he's a cat, for God's sake. As those of us who've read Saki's Tobermory know, cats are wise to everything everyone is

doing all the time, what with their skulking around under beds and behind doors and inside closets. So it's not as though Chip needs to study what folks get up to. And much though I love him, there's a reason Chip has a frat-boy name: He isn't exactly what you'd call a feline intellectual. In fact, he's pretty damned dumb... but he knows about the bishop and the actress.

The necklace with a "Dum Dum Dum Dum" soundtrack...

2010-09-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

"The jeweler Eddie Borgo," writes the New York Times (Sunday Styles, Septermber 12, 2010, p.3) "based his Horror Collar [left] on the Mayor of Halloween Town in Tim Burton's 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas. 'His wild mood swings make his cone head spin around from a happy face to a scary one,' M. Borgo explains. 'It's a figurative representation of a two-faced politician.'"

Yeah, okay, sure. And that has what, exactly, to do with this Jaws necklace?

All rise for Animal House (and that means you, Snooki)

2010-09-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

In yet another sign of the times, Animal House's villain-in-residence d Dean Wormer is sounding more reasonable by the minute.

And I can't help but hear an echo of his admonition to Kent "Flounder" Dorfman ("Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.") in New Jersey Judge Damian G. Murray's advice to Jersey Shore's fat, drunk and stupid Snooki Polizzi who was also fined $500 and ordered to perform community service for being blotto (note that I refrained from saying Bluto) and disorderly on a Seaside Heights beach: "Going through life rude, profane, obnoxious and self-indulgent — that's not the way you want to live your life."

Not as pithy, but the point is the same.

Why I Love Werner Herzeg (and his "fights" with Abel Ferrara and Chuck Norris)

2010-08-25T09:26:00.000-07:00

I mean, let's face it: Herzog is a nut. Or a mad genius... whatever. However you phrase it he's always been, let's just say, as eccentric as he is talented. And yet these days he sounds like the most reasonable guy in the room.

Astronomy is dirty!

2010-08-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, please: Does this “Weird but True” item from the New York Post sound like a world class prank or what?

"Space geeks have something new to snicker about. Astronomers, including one named John Johnson (above), have discovered planets orbiting a star called Sextanis 24 and have named the planets "Sex B" and "Sex C." 'This new planet pair came in an unexpected package,' said Johnson, of the California Institute of Technology. He apparently said that with a straight face."

But it appears that it’s basically true: It just sounds less smarmy in real science speak, which could the make the plot of a bona fide, hard-core porn movie sound dull.

Stop the presses: Nicolas Cage is bughouse crazy

2010-08-04T11:35:00.000-07:00

I have to hand it to Nicolas Cage: His antics have actually made me feel sorry for Joel Schumacher. I don't spend a lot of time feeling sorry for Schumacher, whose lengthy career defines the word "uneven." Yes, I have a soft spot for The Lost Boys. I like Tigerland and Phone Booth, and I confess to loving 8mm for many, many reasons, none of them good: I could put it on right now and fast forward to Peter Stormare's scenes as demonic pornographer Dino Velvet. (An aside: I always thought his name was pronounced store-mar-ee, until I heard him introduce himself in a behind-the-scenes segment on the DVD of a piece of crap called Insanitarium and he said it Store-mere.)

The story so far is that Cage (the star of 8mm, as it happens) signed on to Schumacher's Louisiana-set thriller Trespass, about a husband and wife kidnapped by lowlife thieves, in the role of the husband (Kidman was cast as the wife). Then Cage decided he'd rather play the head lowlife. Then, after being recast, he did a vanishing act -- two weeks before the movie's start date -- prompting a flurry of articles about the frantic search for a replacement. And now it appears that he's come back, but wants to return to his original role.

Yeah, I'd really look forward to working with that guy, especially since he officially stopped acting after Leaving Las Vegas. I mean it's one thing to show up, do your schtick and collect a paycheck. It's another to show up, do your schtick and collect a paycheck after putting the rest of the cast and crew through the tortures of the damned. Sean Penn may be a pain in the ass, but no one has ever said he was unreliable or gave less than his best, which has been consistently pretty damned good for going on 30 years. The bast anyone seems to be able to do with Cage is put him in roles as crazy as he is and hope the result has train-wreck appeal.

Argento posters, stripped to the essentials

2010-08-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

So, apparently there’s this fad among artists and designers for creating elegantly stripped-down posters for well-known films -- Google “minimalist movie posters” and see for yourself.

An Italian designer/photographer named Federico Mauro took it upon himself to do designs for the entire Argento canon. See them here.

Overall I think they’re very cool, and no Argento fan will have to read the title copy to match these elegantly unadorned images to the appropriate film.

And I have to say that I’m amused by the way Mauro appropriated the knife design used on early Giallo posters (itself appropriated from the Italian cover of Roberto Saviano's book Gomorra) and assigned it to The Bird With the Crystal Plumage.

Clouds and Kitties: Reviews

2010-08-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

My reviews of Cats vs. Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Charlie St. Cloud and are online now and, well, what is there to say?

Cats vs. Dogs is a typical Hollywood's kid pic: Noisy, coarse and pretty stupid. But the credits sequence is a stunner: Read more here — Cats vs. Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. The Zac Efron showcase Charlie St. Cloud is the answer to a dreamy teenage girl's dream: For everyone else — especially anyone who's seen both The Sixth Sense and the Swedish film The Invisible — it's a mopey slog.

Predators on the prowl, sparkly vampires in love and zombies -- new reviews!

2010-07-14T11:35:00.000-07:00

If I've said it once, I've said it often enough that my nearest and dearest don't want to hear another word: I like my vampires nasty and/or dangerously sexy (which is why I'm totally hooked on True Blood... but more on that another time), so the tween-friendly swooning and moping of the Twilight series leaves me cold. None the less, when I reviewed Twilight I effectively signed myself up for the whole series, hence my review of Twilight: Eclipse.

I loved [REC], and while [REC] 2 suffers the curse of the sequel, I had a damned good time watching it. The same can't be said for Predators — after an hour of watching sundry humans run through some alien jungle, all I could think was, "There's no way that sniper gal wouldn't have pulled her hair into a pony tail rather than let it hang around her face in fetchingly sweaty tendrils." Thoughts like that are a sure sign you haven't surrendered to the fiction.

And finally, I was pleasantly surprised by the documentary Racing Dreams, about three adolescents pursuing their shared dream of becoming professional NASCAR drivers. It could have been feel good, "triumph of the human spirit" pablum, but it's a much tougher and smarter movie than that.

Superman the musical... Broadway bound?

2010-07-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

Back in 1966, just as camp TV series Batman was turning the dark knight into a national joke, the musical It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman opened on Broadway.

The book was by soon-to-be Academy Award-nominees David Newman and Robert Benton (Bonnie and Clyde) and the songs by Bye Bye Birdie’s Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; it opened to generally favorable reviews, picked up three Tony nominations (all for members of the cast) and closed after less than four months.

The news that it just might be Broadway-bound again boggles the mind… my mind, anyway, but fair is fair: I — like most people, given that abbreviated run — know the show only from the 1975 TV version, which is so staggeringly awful that it really is, well, staggering.

The TV special has never been available on commercial video or DVD, but like so many other ghastly gems (The Star Wars Holiday Special, anyone?), the bootlegs are out there for those who just have to see it. And, dear reader, I did.

The plot, such as it is, involves the collusion of mad scientist Abner Sedgwick (David Wayne, Batman’s Mad Hatter) and reporter Max Mencken (Kenneth Mars, who sometimes sounds remarkably like Gene Hackman playing Lex Luther) to destroy Superman by undermining his self-confidence, Sedgwick because he wants to rule the world (the better to punish Sweden because he’s never won a Nobel Prize) and Mencken because he’s a jealous schmuck. Plucky girl reporter Lois Lane (Lesley Ann Warren, then just plain Lesley Warren) swoons over Superman (David Wilson) but barely knows his alter ego, Clark Kent, is alive. Clark nurses a crush on Lois, while his comely colleague, Sydney (Loretta Swit) pines for Mencken, who only has eyes for Lois. Sedgwick and Mencken’s plan appears to be succeeding until Superman crosses paths with a couple of wise hippies who think he’s just great because he’s a freak — all the cool people are freaks. Very ‘60s.

Granted, Superman: The Movie (1978) — which Newman and Benton co-wrote along with a host of others, credited and uncredited — but big special effects can distract viewers from a multitude of sins. It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… had none, and I found the songs insipid beyond belief. The comic-bookish sets are hideous and cheap-looking, and the episodic construction (complete with a narrator who hypes the next installment) is straight out of the Batman series which, for the record, I always hated. The script, which tinkers with that of the show (there are, for example, no Chinese acrobats; the original play had five) is full of “timely” allusions, from mobster Malachi Thorne’s solemn “My fellow hoods, let me make one thing perfectly clear… there’s someone we gotta take out” to Mencken’s threat that an errant computer is going to get the 2001 treatment if it doesn’t look out. Not clever. Not funny.

The show was revived in 1992 at the Godspeed Opera Housein Haddam Connecticut, and got a very decent review from the New York Times’ Stephen Holden that apparently impressed no-one. But the Dallas Theater Center’s new production seems to be making an impression, which I suspect is proof that timing is everything — there is, after all, a mega-budget Spider-Man musical lumbering its way to Broadway as I write.

This new version of It’s a Bird… It’ a Plane… reportedly dials down the camp, features several new songs (and eliminates others) and got an extensive overhaul by playwright Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, whose credits lean to the macabre, including a 2009 adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Variety’s reviewer liked it, but all I can say is that it would have to be pretty damned fabulous to erase the memory of that excruciating TV special.

Tinto Brass exposed!

2010-07-03T12:22:00.000-07:00

My piece about the long and surprisingly varied career of Tinto Brass is in the July/August issue of Film Comment magazine, and there's more to him than Caligula, Salon Kitty and a slew of booty-licious softcore odes to ladies with yummy rumps. I swear!

Just check out this trailer for his 1967 swinging London pop-thriller Deadly Sweet, starring Jean-Louis Trintingnant and Ewa Aulin: It's less a knock off of Blowup than its bizarro world doppleganger.

Trailer for the US remake of Let the Right One In...

2010-07-01T18:57:00.000-07:00

I have my doubts, because Let the Right One In is the epitome of movies that don't need to be remade.

But this is a pretty decent trailer, so fingers crossed — maybe this will be an absolutely terrific do-over.

Cat and tiny face hugger are friends...

2010-06-29T20:31:00.000-07:00

My cat Chip is suddenly obsessed with this little (maybe three inches long) plastic Alien face hugger.

I've had it for years and he never showed the slightest interest in it; it's been sitting on the back of a pottery armadillo I bought as a teenager since I don't know when.

And yet I just took it away from him for the second time today. I really don't think the little plastic face hugger has changed, so what gives?

That is, of course, a rhetorical question... everything cats do is a mystery.

How Paul Bartel taught me to make smoothies...

2010-06-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

Yes, the Paul Bartel, who directed Private Parts (1972, no, not the Howard Stern movie), Death Race 2000 (1976) and many other slyly clever exploitation movies.

I was in Los Angeles in 1990, doing interviews for my book Filmmaking on the Fringe; I had interviewed Bartel before over the phone, but never in person. I was thrilled to be catching up with him, but I was also running late and hadn't had time to eat. I bought a couple of bananas to eat in the car, but I was a new driver and the freeways scared the hell out of me, so I didn't dare take my hands off the wheel.

Bartel was the gracious host personified, and when I asked whether he minded if I ate while we talked he said, "Let me make you something delicious — I learned how when I was at Centro Sperimentale in Italy." And then Paul Bartel beetled off to the kitchen and made me a banana smoothie, which was delicious as promised.

Bartel is gone, but his banana smoothies live on. I've modified the recipe (if bananas, milk and ice constitute a recipe) by using coffee ice cubes instead of regular ones, but I don't think he'd mind. Coffee and bananas taste great together and that's what counts... I wish I could have shared a banana-coffee smoothie with him.

And now, a shoutout to the late, great Psychotronic Magazine

2010-06-22T17:49:00.000-07:00

I'll spare you the convoluted but not especially interesting chain of associations that led me to visit the website of Michael Weldon's Psychotronic magazine, but I was immediately compelled to flip through the real, live issues — 41 in all — I accumulated between 1989 and 2004, when it ceased publication. They're a treasure trove of trash, which I mean in the best possible way: Reviews of obscure, overlooked and marginal movies of every stripe, along with interviews and sundry features aimed squarely at connoisseurs of the freaky and forgotten.

Yes, the web is full of specialized movie sites, some of them great. But when issue number one of Psychotronic came out, there was no web, just a jumble of irregularly published 'zines that you might just run across if you happened to be in the right book or record store on the right day at the right time. Michael's 1983 Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film grew out of his own weekly 'zine, an "alternative TV Guide" that singled out the kind of movies that never got a TV Guide spotlight, was the bible of movie fans like me. Michael was a scholar and a connoisseur of trash culture before it was cool, and Psychotronic was where you could find things like this piece on Ron and June Ormond, regional filmmakers/distributors who made exploitation pictures like the astonishing Exotic Ones (1968, aka The Monster and the Stripper until they survived a plane crash, saw the light and switched to making Jesus movie. Great stuff.

So visit the website, check out the Facebook page and buy Michael's Psychotronic Video Guide (the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film is tough to find and scary expensive): If you're reading this, you won't be sorry.

Best junk email subject line ever

2010-06-21T12:13:00.000-07:00

It's not everyday you get junk email that advises: "Don’t let anybody call you homunculus because of the length of your device."

Um, yeah, don't... you might develop neurasthenia or something. So just tell that son of a mandrake root to piss off, and don't even read the rest of the subject line, with its enticing assertion that "the easiest way to become a real dandy is to enlarge your device."

"Homunculus?" "Dandy?" Who in the name of Harry Potter and the Scarlet Pimpernel is writing copy for pizzle-plumping spam these days? And how did the word "device," with its vaguely orgasmatronic connotations, make its way into this riot of antiquated allusions?

And finally, though spam is by its nature a blunt tool (yes, Beavis and Butthead, I said "tool"), you'd think even a broad-sweep filter might recognize that an email address ending "@missflickchick.com" probably doesn't belong to a member (yes, I said "member," too) of the target market for this sort of product.

Hot off the presses: Zombie movies reflect cultural anxieties!

2010-06-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

Not to be snotty, but anyone who watches a lot of horror movies has already noticed that a.) horror is cyclical — it never goes away, but there are peaks and valleys, b.) horror movies flourish in anxious times and c.) ever since George Romero liberated the zombie from its narrowly defined roots in Haitian folklore, they've become the go-to monster metaphors for fear of everything from the oppressed underclass to nature run wild, global pandemics, mindless fanaticism, archaic disaster response systems, sinister mind control programs and the fragility of social structures and the ties of friendship and family.

Which is not to say that this Freakonomics graph correlating social upheaval and zombie-movie production that just appeared on the New York Times website isn't cool. Just that it's a blinding glimpse of the obvious.

RIP Dennis Hopper, the Madman of Movies (1936-2010)

2010-06-07T14:54:00.000-07:00

If you laid all the "crazy Dennis Hopper" stories end to end... well, you'd still be at it next year.

Like the time he got all method actorish on old Hollywood hand Henry Hathaway on From Hell to Texas and Hathaway made him do 80 takes until he goddamned well got exactlywhat he wanted and the 22-year-old actor had been reduced to tears. Or the time John Wayne chased him around the set of True Grit with a gun, apparently because black radical Stokely Carmichael had used the word "f**k" in a speech at UCLA, where Wayne's daughter was a student, and as far as Wayne was concerned, Hopper was to blame for the 60s, period end of report. Of course, Wayne also got Hopper movie work when no one else would (the fallout from that little tiff with Hathaway); what little career he had left was in episodic TV (from Twilight Zone and Naked City to Bonanza, Wagon Train and Petticoat Junction). Granted, Wayne did it at least in part because his old pal, golden-age Hollywood star Margaret Sullivan (then Hopper's mother-in-law), asked him as a personal favor; but he did it, and Hopper always gave the Duke props for resuscitating his moribund career... even if the first movie in which Wayne got him cast was the western The Sons of Katie Elder (1965), directed by, yes, that old bastard Hathaway. Or maybe that made it better... who knows?

Hopper's most regular employer for the next seveal years remains Roger Corman, who put him in sci-fi/horror movies like Queen of Blood (1966), drug movies like The Trip (1967) and biker pictures like The Glory Stompers (1968). But he was back in the game, and in 1969 he drew the card that got him a seat at the heavy hitters' table: Easy Rider

Best Hopper performances:

Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
It's a small part and Hopper's pal James Dean blows him out of the water (of course, Dean blew everyone out of the water), but seeing him in Rebel is nothing short of fascinating because it's all already there -- everything that made Hopper so mesmerizing, in fledgling form.

Night Tide (1961)
Beach bum who falls in love with a carnival mermaid who might just be the real thing in this eerie, atmospheric, low-budget variation on Cat People, directed by Curtis Harrington, one-time protege of avant-garde film pioneer Maya Deren.

Easy Rider (1969)
Not much to say that hasn't been said; Hopper's Billy is the distilled embodiment of the 1960s...

The American Friend (1977)
Wim Wenders' eccentric version of Ripley's Game stars Hopper as Patricia Highsmith's handsome, amoral con artist, and Hopper nails the role -- his Ripley is charming, duplicitous, offhandedly sexy, dangerous, self-centered and in the end, oddly principled, though his principles are purely self serving.

Apocalypse Now (1979)
As the fever-addled photographer mesmerized by Mr. Kurtz, Hopper damned near steals the show from Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen, his blue eyes a blaze as he waxes rhapsodic about Kurtz's keen insights into the deepest nature of the universe. "Do you know," he says to Sheen's exhausted, beyond burnt-out Willard, "that 'if' is the middle word in life?" Simultaneously hilarious and chilling.

Rumble Fish (1983)
Repeat after me: No small roles, just small actors. The proof: Hopper as Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke's defeated, alcoholic dad in Francis Ford Coppola's hallucinatory adaptation of S.E. Hinton's much-loved young adult novel.

Blue Velvet (1986)
Frank Booth: what is there to say? The friend with whom I saw Blue Velvet said it was like two hours of doing bad drugs with people you don't like, and Hopper is a big part of the reason why.

True Romance (1993)
Ex-cop Hopper vs. Mafia lawyer Christopher Walken, who's "in a vendetta kind of mood:" Imagine the possibilities. Or just take a look.

The Argento that Got Away: Profondo Rosso: il Musical

2010-05-22T20:31:00.000-07:00

How did Profondo Rosso il Musical fly entirely under my radar? I mean, it’s not as though I would have flown to Italy to see it, but I can’t believe I had no idea it even existed until a few days ago.

Were you to have asked me which Argento film I thought best suited to adaptation into a theatrical musical, I’d say Suspiria. The narrative is stylized and dreamlike the existing score is strong and it’s set at a ballet school, so dance numbers would flow naturally from the narrative. And that art nouveau fever-dream production design is just screaming to be adapted into spectacular stage sets.

I would not have suggested Deep Red, but lo and behold, it was Profondo Rosso il Musical that premiered on January 21, 2008, at the Teatro Civico in Vercelli , a Northern Italian town best known for its lavish annual carnivale. The show went on to play dates in Varese, Sassari, Novara, Castiglione, Savona, Lugano, Venaria and Assisi before winding up in Milan’s Teatro Smeraldo five months later, hard on the heels of Hair.

Argento was credited with the production’s artistic supervision, and longtime collaborators Claudio Simonetti and Sergio Stivaletti provided, respectively, the music and special effects. Profondo Rosso il Musical, was hyped in typically breathless Italian pre-release pieces as a hybrid of France’s legendary Theatre du Grand Guignol and such tongue-in-cheek horror musicals as Little Shoppe of Horrors, The Phantom of the Paradise and, of course, The Rocky Horror Show.

Conspicuous by its absence was any mention of Carrie (1988), easily the closest precedent — a serious work of dramatic musical theater based on an acclaimed horror movie. But of course, it was also a disaster of legendary proportions (you can see a clips — including the climactic horror-at-the-prom scene on youtube — though the video quality is pretty poor, the train-wreck appeal is off the scale.

Profondo Rosso il Musical starred Italian-French actor/singer Michel Altieri — one of those European sensations who never cracked the US market — in Hemmings’ role.

Yes, Altieri, like Detective Altieri in Opera (1987) and diva Carlotta Altieri in Phantom of the Opera (1998), which is one of many reasons I at first assumed that Profondo Rosso il Musical was an elaborate in joke.But no, the guy’s name really is Altieri; he started out in a 1990s Euro-boy band and was supposedly handpicked by Luciano Pavarotti for a secondary role in the 2000 Italian production of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, though that may be pure press puffery. In any event, the exceptionally pretty Mr. Altieri came to Profondo Rosso fresh from a hugely successful run in Italian playwright Tato Russo’s 2002 musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. You couldn’t make it up… at least, I couldn’t.

The musical included all the film’s main characters — doomed psychic Helga Ulmann (Claudia Donadoni); ballsy reporter Gianna Brezzi (Silvia Specchio, in the role originated by Daria Nicolodi); Mark’s fragile friend Carlo (Alberto Pistacchia) and his possessive mother (Maria Maddalena Trani); unfortunate writer Amanda Righetti (Alessandra Azimonti) and poor Professor Giordani (Claudio Lobbia), whose big death scene is hijacked by a mechanical doll — along with dancers and a trio of mysterious figures in masks.

To be honest, it sounds like a total disaster, and I haven’t been able to track down anything that suggests otherwise. But oh, what I wouldn’t give to have seen it!

Leigh Bowery and Lady Gaga: Separated at Birth?

2010-05-19T16:09:00.000-07:00

In recognition of the fact that the '80s are already well into their second-time-around spin recycle, I feel compelled to point out that Our Lady Gaga of the damnably catchy synth-pop earworms and mad, camp, outrageous-to-know Leigh Bowery were truly separated at birth (and yes, that's a call out to Spy magazine in its glory years; who knew it limped along until 1998?).

Sure, Bowery was a plus-sized man from Sunshine, Australia (uh-huh, Sunshine), and Lady Gaga is a slim-hipped little gal (as in gal; this hermaphrodite stuff is beyond played out) from New York City. She's the quintessential viral-marketing friendly fame monster; he was a self-made, totally original party monster. Leigh and his art-rock group Minty aimed to offend and did (though the right combination of MTV-worthy visuals and uncompromising Minty-ness produces this thoroughly commercial result); Lady Gaga's shows are the essence of controversial chic — you don't get six Grammy nominations by being really, truly, seriously offensive.

Which is, of course, where the "separated at birth" part comes in. That said, I could watch Telephone six times in a row tonight and start all over again tomorrow in the morning. Funny how that works, isn't it?

UPDATE The Museum of Air Sickness Bags

2010-05-18T11:26:00.000-07:00

When I first discovered this site, it was experiencing some technical problems caused by its host (anyone who reads Miss Flickchick regularly knows I've had similar problems and can empathize). But curator Steven J. Silberberg kindly sent me an email that his online museum is now back up and running they've been ... so to experience the amazing world of airsickness bags, dive right in here!

Thank you, AOL, for posting those distracting top "news" items where I can't help but see them every time I log on or open my email. Yes, the overwhelming majority are either redundant or pointless, but every once in a while they lead me somewhere weird and wonderful.

Like this morning, when a feature reporting the rumor that the airline industry may try to save some money by eliminating airsickness bags led me to the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum, curated by one Steven J. Silberberg.

I had a lot of trouble navigating the site, but the Gift Shop works fine and it's a kick. My favorite Barf-bag poster by far is the hurling reindeer.

Dario does Dracula?

2010-05-14T17:05:00.000-07:00

So, the news from Cannes is that Argento's next movie will be a 3D version of Dracula that hews closely to Bram Stoker's novel. Argento seems to have been thinking about 3D for a while; last year a flurry of rumors had him making a 3D remake of Deep Red. There's no casting, but Dracula is apparently supposed to start shooting in January 2011.

I'd like to be thrilled, but the best I can manage is cautious optimism. After all, Argento was profoundly influenced by seeing the 1943 version of Phantom of the Opera, but his own 1998 Phantom was, shall we say, deeply flawed. Back in the '70s Argento talked about making a WWII-era Frankenstein that equated the monster's creation with the rise of Nazism; it got to the script stage and attracted the attention of Timothy "One-Time Bond" Dalton. Co-writer Luigi Cozzi claims the project fell apart because Universal executives decided that "Frankenstein was dead and anyway, no one who wanted to see a horror movie cared about politics."

But I've never heard Argento express the slightest interest in Dracula. Still, you never know...

RIP Lena Horne, actress, singer and trailblazer...

2010-05-10T14:06:00.000-07:00

The extraordinary Lena Horne died last night at the age of 92, and it's a sign of the times that she's being given her due in newspapers and web publications everywhere.

Horne broke mainstream entertainment ground for African-American singers, actresses, dancers and other performers at a time when challenging the racial divide had real — sometimes brutal — consequences. And unlike the equally bold but less-resilient Dorothy Dandridge, Horne lived to see generations of younger artists benefit from her courage and determination.

And she was never less than fabulous. So a moment of silence, please, for the kind of star they just don't make any more. Lena Horne fan site.

Shocking! Controversial! The Human Centipede and Elm Street remake

2010-05-04T13:00:00.000-07:00

My reviews of The Human Centipede, the sick and twisted Dutch horror film everyone's talking about, and the remake of Wes Craven's classic A Nightmare on Elm Street are online. Check them out and let me know what you think...

High Noon...with Sheriff Terminator!

2010-05-04T12:53:00.000-07:00

Cheap joke? Yeah, sure: High Noon with an android sheriff... how much film-geek snarkier can you get?

But it's also pretty clever: This clip has been kicking around for a while, but now that it's come to my attention I feel compelled to share it. Check it out here.

Say it with slang... UK slang!

2010-04-28T09:22:00.000-07:00

So, I'm watching a Ken Loach movie — a pretty funny one, I might add, in a vaguely depressing kind of way — and I went online to look up some bit of Mancusian slang. And that led me to this page, which will translate your plain vanilla, American English sentences into various types of UK slang.

I particularly like the Scouse translater, but the Irish one is pretty good, too.

Oh, the movie is Waiting for Eric... and don't be put off by the fact that one of the two Erics is Manchester United soccer star Eric Cantona (the other is a suicidally depressed postal worker; as I said earlier, funny in a depressing kind of way). I don't give a good god-damn about soccer — sorry football — and Cantona is hilarious. He either has one hell of a sense of humor about himself or is so self-absorbed that he has no idea how

Broken Mirrors/Broken MInds mugs: Be the first on your block!

2010-04-27T14:08:00.000-07:00

Imagine sipping your morning coffee/tea from a Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds mug... now imagine that you don't have to imagine. You can order one here: All three covers are available, and they look fabulous.

New Reviews: Pornography: A Thriller, the Red Riding Trilogy, Behind the Burly Q and more...

2010-04-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

Check out my reviews of delightful burlesque documentary Behind the Burly Q, darkly twisted thriller Pornography: A Thriller, the epic UK crime films that comprise the Red Riding Trilogy and art-world satire Boogie Woogie.

Next week: Survival of the Dead!

Words I Wish I'd Never Heard... (An Occasional Series)

2010-04-18T12:21:00.000-07:00

Hey, every occasional series has to start somewhere. Today's word is "vajazzling," and it means exactly what just streaked through your head. Suddenly Damian Hirst's diamond-encrusted human skull is no longer the most vulgar thing I've ever seen.

1980s Video-Game Characters Stomp Manhattan... Film at 11!

2010-04-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

Space Invaders reduce yellow taxis to heaps of multi-colored cubes. Frogger snarls midtown traffic and subway stations vanish as Pac-Man gobbles his way through the MTA map. Tetris stacks permanently alter New York’s iconic skyline… what the hell is happening here? Welcome to French writer-director Patrick Jean’s Pixels, produced by the Paris-based visual-effects house One More Production.

So yes, it was made by corporate cogs in the robo-consumer machine… welcome to the 21st century, Rip van Atari. But if the thought of Donkey Kong going all Gojira on Manhattan’s ass shivers your joystick, it’s two minutes of sheer, retro-geek bliss.

It's Spec...... sorry, Splice -- I'm So There!

2010-04-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

...and not just because this is a great trailer.

But also because it has a serious pedigree: Produced by Guillermo del Toro, co-written and directed by Vincent Natali (Cube) and starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley — sure, they've both done less than fabulous movies, but neither is a crap-film whore.

For my money, June can't come soon enough...

Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds... on Miss Flickchick.com

2010-04-07T14:30:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder that in addition to the Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento Facebook page I created for the new edition, there's also a page on MissFlickChick.com where I'm posting news and links to interviews. The plus with this page is, of course, that you don't have to belong to Facebook.

And now, one for the fans: Above, the real Mother of Tears, as glimpsed in Inferno.

New interview about the expanded edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds is online...

2010-03-29T12:18:00.000-07:00

I was recently interviewed by Film Threat about the new edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento and the director's films.
You can read the interview here.

The book will be available in April... just a few days from now, which means I can officially start fretting about reviews. Oh, and if you're on Facebook, please become a fan of my straightforwardly named group Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.

The Strange Case of the Argento Movie Tie-in Novel...

2010-03-26T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is the paperback tie-in paperback published in 1971 to accompany the US release of The Cat O’Nine Tails. I never knew it existed until I was walking down Broadway one day and stopped to look at some tatty used books being sold from a blanket spread out on the sidewalk. And there it was. To the best of my knowledge, The Cat O’Nine Tails is the only English-language Argento-movie tie-in novel.

The author was Paul J. Gillette and the publisher was Award Books, a small, New York-based house that was eventually bought out by and absorbed into Berkeley Books, an imprint of Penguin. I don’t know much about Award Books, but they seem to have been in business from the early 1960s through the mid-’70s. Their early titles included books about the drug culture and other “daring” topics, but starting in the late ‘60s they specialized in movie and TV tie-ins. They published original novels inspired by popular shows like Gunsmoke, Adam-12, Medical Center and Then Came Bronson, as well as novelizations of movies ranging from Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets to Radley Metzger’s Carmen, Baby. Award also published a number of science fiction books in the mid ‘70s.

It looks to me as though many — maybe most — of Award’s tie-in books were published under pseudonyms, but a handful bore names like David Gerrold (Battle for the Planet of the Apes, 1973) and poet/artist/writer/Paul Buck (The Honeymoon Killers, 1970). Literary agent Agnes Birnbaum of Bleecker Street Associates worked for Award, as did Tor/Forge Books editor James Frenkel, but the company itself is a will o’ the wisp.

Gillette was a cat of a different color: He translated Petronius and the Marquis de Sade, and was nominated for two Pulitzer prizes. He worked for mass-market magazines ranging from Esquire to Playboy, hosted the TV shows Camera Three and Enjoying Wine With Paul Gillette; and edited the trade magazine Wine Investor. Gillette’s nonfiction books included Inside the Ku Klux Klan and The Lopinson Case, about a notorious 1964 double murder in Philadelphia.

In addition to The Cat O’Nine Tails, he wrote the tie-ins for Play Misty for Me (1971) and How Did a Nice Girl Like You Get Into This Business? (1968), adapted from a briefly notorious, German-made sexploitation movie whose claim to fame was a brief appearance by the 18-year-old Barbi Benton. She parlayed her seven-year stint as Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend into a fairly successful career as a singer and actress, to which I can only say, “Run, Barbi, run!”

Gillette died in 1996 at the age of 57 and curiously, all the obituaries I tracked down describe Play Misty for Me and The Cat O’Nine Tails as original novels that were turned into movies.

That pretty much sums up what I know, but I’m dying to find out more about Award Books… partly because I’m fascinated by vintage pulp magazine/paperback publishers in general and partly because NYC-based houses exercise a particular hold over my imagination.

Profane movie titles and the women who say them...

2010-03-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

I was recently invited to become a fan of the Facebook page "Intelligent, Classy, Well-Educated Women Who Say "F*ck" a Lot." I'm not a big fan of becoming a fan, but that made me laugh and got me thinking about movies with, shall we say, problematic titles... the kind the authors of Hollywood's 1927 production code must have had in mind when they specifically warned frisky filmmakers against using profanity in movie titles.

Not adult movies. And not movies like Damn Yankees! (1958) or That Darn Cat! (1965), because even back then those were words you could say under most circumstances and in most company without being branded a potty-mouthed pariah (except maybe in church with your great-grandma and some elderly nuns, and why would you want offend some nice old ladies anyway). Only real movies that got reviewed in mainstream publications counted.

Anyway, this is what I came up with:

Young People F*cking (2007), a Canadian comedy about looking for love in all the wrong places. It went straight to DVD in the US as YPF, thereby bypassing all potential editorial issues.

Baise Moi! (2000), which was one of a mini-wave of sexually explicit films designed to epater le bourgeois by forcing them to ponder the line between art and pornography. Ooh la la! The title literally means “F*ck Me,” but it was released in the US under the less offensive title Rape Me. Yes, someone thought “Rape Me” was the less offensive title. In New York it opened as Baise Moi! because, you know, anybody who speaks French no doubt has an enlightened attitude about that kind of thing.

Fucking Amal (1998), which is not about f*cking someone named Amal and thank God for that, because if there’s anything I hate it’s a gerund title. It’s about restless teens stuck in a boring Swedish town called Amal, as in, “I hate f*cking Amal.” Apparently Amal wasn’t boring enough, so most of the film was shot in nearby Trollhattan. I'd see "F*cking Trollhattan" before I'd see something with a wussy name like Show Me Love, which was F*cking Amal's US release title.

And I guess you have to include the coy, self-censoring titles.

Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? (2006) is a documentary about a thrift store painting that may or may not be by Pollock – the good ol’ gal who paid $5.00 for the canvas at a thrift shop and asks the title question says f*ck a lot, especially when speculating about why snooty art-world types don’t take her or her f*cking painting seriously.

What the Bleep do We Know? (2004), a documentary about the mind-blowing intersection of quantum physics and faith, which I might have found more thought provoking if it hadn’t been underwritten by the nutty Ramtha cult.

And that's it for now...

Wes Craven on Scream 4, then and now...

2010-03-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

What a difference a year makes. When I asked Wes Craven last February whether there was any truth to the rumors that a fourth Scream movie was in the works, this is what he said: “Yeah, it's a possibility. And that's pretty much where it is with me right now. I should probably pick up the phone and call Bob and Harvey [Weinstein] to see what's up. I've heard that [Kevin Williamson] has an idea, and what I've said to my agents is that I'm interested if it's terrific — I'm interested in any project that's terrific — and I'm not interested if it's not.”

That’s what I call noncommittal. Flashforward to the Dimension Films email announcing that Scream 4 is going into production this spring for an April 15, 2011, release. Craven is on board, and is quoted saying, "I am delighted to accept Bob Weinstein's offer to take the reins on a whole new chapter in Scream history. Working with Courteney [Cox], David [Arquette] and Neve [Campbell] was a blast ten years ago and I'm sure it will be again. And I can't wait to find the talent that will bring new blood to the screen as well. Kevin is right on his game with the new script — the characters and story crackle with energy and originality — to say nothing of some of the most hair-raising scares I've seen in a script since... well, since the original Scream series. Let me at it."

Now that's one upbeat quote, and in all honesty, I'm glad to hear it. Yes, it's part of a PR machine whose gears won't stop grinding until the last Scream 4 market has been exploited. But the Weinsteins made the effort to get Craven onboard — whatever bad things have been said about them (and there have been plenty), they respect creativity.

The upcoming Nightmare on Elm Street, by contrast, was made without Craven's input, let alone participation, and no, nobody had to include him. Craven signed away future rights as part of his financing deal with New Line — as he's said many times, he was not only broke but deeply in debt and in no position to make a good deal. But Freddy Krueger and the world of Nightmare were stunningly original creations. Not making so much as a token overture to the creator — remember, Craven both wrote and directed — is indicative of the default attitude in Hollywood: Artists, even artists who understand that making movies is a business, are a pain in the ass, all hung up on the idea that they know better than focus groups and data crunchers and marketing departments. Remember that the next time you wonder why so many American movies are so painfully mediocre.

Ten Things I Hate About Casablanca...

2010-03-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

D'oh... why didn't I write this contrarian take on the the best move ever made... ever? I mean, I like Casablanca as much as the next person, but Casablanca fans can really work my last nerve, especially the ones who've been polishing their Bogart impressions since high school.

Anyway, Ten Things I Hate About Casablanca isn't as snarky as the headline makes it sound, and he has to reach a little to fill out the list... actually, a lot. Even he admits it — by the time he gets to eight, we're into serious nitpick country. Number six is a product of its time, but it's still a sour note: There's a similar moment in Rear Window involving Lieutenant Doyle's maid, and it makes me clench my teeth every time. But his pick for the number one most annoying thing about the movie is right on the money — in a screenplay as good as this one, it really sticks out as a piece of sheer, "oh, nobody cares about that anyway" laziness.

Die! Die! My Darling! on Broadway

2010-03-20T17:14:00.000-07:00

What, you may ask, was I doing at Looped, a Broadway play starring Valerie Harper (Mary Tyler Moore’s brash pal Rhoda and star of my favorite underrated TV horror movie) as pioneering celebutante Tallulah Bankhead?

Well, I love a vintage Hollywood scandal and Bankhead could shock ‘em in Sheboygan like nobody’s business. A daughter of Southern privilege and influence, if not wealth, she was raised to be a proper lady and willfully fashioned herself into an unrepentant tramp — a beautiful, talented, scathingly witty tramp whose brazen bon mots weren’t just outrageous for the time... they were just plain outrageous."My father warned me about men and booze,” Bankhead once drawled in her honey-and-bourbon drawl, “but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine." Oh no she didn't! Yeah, she did. Bankhead eschewed undies more than four decades before Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton were a glimmer on the tabloid horizon, and she didn’t just flash paparazzi: Her southern exposure was the talk of the set during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944). Hitchcock, the story has it, drolly wondered which department was best equipped to handle the problem — make-up or hair.

Anyway, back to Looped. Playwright Matthew Lombardo was inspired by one of those show-business anecdotes that would sound too good to be true were it about anyone but Bankhead. In 1964, Bankhead was called to a UK sound studio to loop several lines of dialogue from the Hammer thriller Fanatic/Die! Die! My Darling!, which wound up being her last film. The session, which should have taken no more than an hour, became an all-day endurance test; a 45-minute piece of audiotape survived and bears witness to the antics of an aging star who was unfocused, drunk, very possibly high and thoroughly impossible.

Lombardo used the legendary incident as a jumping off point for his three-person psychodrama: Relocated to Los Angeles, it traps Bankhead and her reluctant director — actually a hapless editor pressed into service because he's there and the real director has decamped in disgust. He tries to coax Bankhead into looping a single line — “As I was telling you, Patricia, that deluded rector has in literal effect closed the church to me" — while an unflappable sound technician observes from his second-story booth. Souls are bared, secret traumas revealed and the relationship between image and reality parsed. The play itself is formulaic, but Harper is terrific; if God had granted her Kathleen Turner’s voice her performance would be pitch perfect.

That said, the horror geek in me came away wishing that Fanatic hadn’t been reduced to dramatic shorthand for “crass, humiliating exploitation of aging movie goddesses cruelly discarded by Hollywood," the epitome of hag horror. Whatever the movie’s flaws, I can't help but admire the malicious wit inherent in casting a godless reprobate like Bankhead as a puritanical religious zealot, let alone one unhinged by the strenuously repressed knowledge that the beloved son she lost to a single-car “accident” was gay and killed himself rather than deal with her deluded expectations. After all, Bankhead — the uber-idol of acid-tongued drag queens — loved her gays long before Kathy Griffin. The screenplay was adapted by Richard Matheson from Elizabeth Linington’s Edgar Award-nominated novel Nightmare, and it was was directed by Silvio Narizzano, who made the swinging sixties classic Georgy Girl... my point being that Fanatic was at least as respectable as the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford shocker What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), which got five Oscar nominations.

Now remind me again why celebrities like Simon LeBon, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Bruce Willis/Demi Moore, named their daughters Tallulah? Yes, Bankhead was fabulous... fabulously tormented, self-destructive and ultimately miserable. You might as well curse your little girl with Tamar and be done with it.

110,000 page views: A MissFlickChick High!

2010-03-16T17:13:00.001-07:00

Followers and readers, this post is all about you. Last month, MissFlickChick.com broke the 100,000 views-per-month mark, and that's all your doing. So thank you!

I don't presume to think you're all rabid fans of Dario Argento and/or my book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, but if you are, please accept this as a small token of my appreciation: A 30% discount if you order the new, expanded edition directly from my publisher, University of Minnesota Press. The discount code is MN70310, and you can also order by phone: (800) 621-2736.

RIP Peter Graves, Exploitation Star!

2010-03-15T12:05:00.000-07:00

Peter Graves, the soberly handsome star of TV's iconic Mission: Impossible (1967-1973), died of a heart attack yesterday (March 14th). He was just a few days short of his 84th birthday. Born Peter Aurness in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Graves was the younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness, and followed his brother to Hollywood after studying drama on the G.I. Bill — he served in the Air Force from 1944 to 1945.

Since I'm far from the only person fondly eulogizing Graves, I'm going to skip over Mission: Impossible and Airplane! (1980), which hauled his flagging later career out of the doldrums. Instead, let me sing the praises of his work on the exploitation fringes, which — to his eternal credit — he approached with the same manful gravity he brought to his more mainstream parts.

Like Red Planet Mars (1952), a Cold War thriller in which he plays a scientist who uncovers a dastardly Soviet plot to foment worldwide chaos with fake transmissions from an advanced Martians race. Thank goodness the real Martians turn out to be a pious lot who have no truck with godless communists! A lesser actor might have phoned it in, but not Graves, who — after ten years in the business — was about to get his first break, a small but striking part in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953).

A pettier performer might have been too pissed off to bother trying when, a year later, he was busted back to Killers from Space (1954), a micro-budget UFO/commie scare picture directed by Billy’s less talented brother, W. Lee Wilder. But no: Graves squared up his jaw and played it straight. I suspect, though, that he’d have gotten a kick out of Don't Ask Don't Tell (2002), which added new footage and redubbed dialogue to Killers from Space, turning it into a comedy about aliens trying to take over the world by turning everyone gay, starting with — yes — the stalwart military scientist played by Graves. After all, he was game to twit his own rock-ribbed persona by playing Airplane! and Airplane II’s pervy Captain Oveur ("Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?" "Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?").

After nabbing another minor but good part in Charles Laughton's extraordinary The Night of the Hunter (1955), we find Peter Graves, science guy, helping to defeat a bad Martian that looked kind of like a mutant carrot (one of veteran effects artist Paul Blaisdell's most fondly remembered creations) in Roger Corman's It Conquered the World (1956); and carelessly creating giant, irradiated grasshoppers in Bert I. Gordon’s The Beginning of the End (1957), a blatant ripoff of 1954's Them!, which just happened to have starred his big brother. And let's not forget his turn as a naïve, big-city architect among the low-life Cajuns in the swamp melodrama Bayou (1957); with a new, more lurid title, it was re-released as the exploitation hit Poor White Trash.

After Mission: Impossible ended, Graves made numerous TV-movies, including Scream of the Wolf, a Richard Matheson-penned werewolf story with a nifty twist, and John Llewellyn Moxey's desolate "end of the world as we know it" sci-fi picture Where Have All the People Gone; both first aired in (1974).

And finally, Graves was unforgettable as a rich bastard in the still-underrated Parts: The Clonus Horror (1979). Yes, it suffered the constraints of a lower-than-low budget, but its cynical story was a killer — the fact that its writer won a lawsuit claiming that 2005's big budget The Island was pure plagiary tells you something.

So thank you, Peter Graves, for some wonderful movie memories!

R.I.P.: Charles B. "The Legend of Boggy Creek" Pierce

2010-03-13T12:13:00.000-08:00

… not to be confused with noted female impersonator Charles Pierce, who died in 1999.

Regional filmmaker Charles B. Pierce made a series of low-budget movies in the 1970s and '80s, of which the most famous was the first: The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972), a faux-documentary about a Sasquatch-like creature that scared the bejabbers out of the good people of Fouke, Arkansas. It cost some $160,000 dollars and made a reported $25 million, and helped launch a wave of exploitation-oriented mock-docs.

Director Daniel Myrick has regularly cited Boggy Creek as one of the films that inspired The Blair Witch Project. Pierce went on to direct a total of 11 genre features between 1972 and 1987; he made Westerns with a Native-American slant — Winterhawk, 1975; The Winds of Autumn (1976); Greyeagle (1977); Sacred Ground (1983) and Hawkin's Breed (1987) — a Viking picture (The Norsemen, 1978) and a southern-fried action comedy (Bootleggers, 1974. But he's best remembered for Boggy Creek and its sequel, Boggy Creek II: The Legend Continues (1985), along with the deeply disturbing The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1977), inspired by an unsolved series of murders committed in post-WWII Texarcana.

Pierce was born in Hammond, Indiana, and raised in Hampton, Arkansas, where he grew up with future producer Harry Thomason (Designing Women). He sold advertising in Texarkana, spent 30 years working as a Hollywood set decorator for both film and TV; and died in Dover, Tennessee at the age of 71. In addition to directing his films, he wrote or co-wrote them, often with Earl E. Smith.

Pierce is also widely credited with coining the Clint Eastwood catchphrase, "Go ahead — Make my day," first heard in Sudden Impact (1983), the fourth Dirty Harry picture. While that sounds like so much Hollywood malarkey, it may well be true: Sudden Impact lists only one screenwriter, Joseph Stinson, but Pierce and longtime collaborator Earl Smith share story credit.

Pierce wasn't a genre-expanding talent on a par with George Romero, David Cronenberg or John Carpenter, but his movies, especially Boggy Creek and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, were an integral part of my exploitation-movie education. And let me tell you, when I saw David Fincher's Zodiac (2007), it brought back a flood of Town That Dreaded Sundown memories; they're very different movies made in very different times, but the hooded sociopaths who haunt both are the pure, unadulterated stuff of nightmares — just say "trombone bayonet" to any one who's seen it and watch them go pale.

So a moment of silence, please, for an unpretentious, largely unlauded filmmaker who nonetheless left his mark.

Time Travel Terror!

2010-03-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

Time travel: Sounds like so much fun, always turns out to be a frakkin' nightmare. At least, that's the way it goes in movies, and until I meet someone who can share some real-life time travels experiences (and whom I don't think belongs in he loony bin), I'll have to go by what I see onscreen.

I've compiled some of my favorite cautionary time-travel film in Future Shock - The Horror of Time Travel. Check it out and let me know what you think...

Things I learned from the Oscars...

2010-03-07T21:18:00.000-08:00

American Family's Eric Stonestreet and Jesse Tyler Ferguson are funnier than Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

J.C. Penney is so not cool.

Deaf people are just like regular folks; they like fast food even though it's crap (thanks for clearing that up, Mickey D).

Faux-perfume ads that turn out to be about cervical cancer are scary

I don't want manta rays coming out of my TV... sorry, that's what I learned from Oscar commercials.

Jamal Sims is the worst choreographer ever: I won't go so far as to take back all the disparaging things I've said about Debbie Allen's awful Academy Awards numbers, but I will venture to say that insipidness is actually better than sheer, willful ridiculousness. What does some guy in white pants doing a retro robot dance have to do with Michael Giacchino's saccharine score for Up? What's the connection between a ripoff of Jerome Robbins' gym dance from West Side Story and Hans Zimmer's score for Sherlock Holmes? Seriously, I've seen better choreography for competitive cheerleading teams.

Someone at Dior Couture hates Charlize Theron — How else did she wind up at the Kodak Theater wearing a dress with icing-swirl bull's-eyes over her boobs?

Miley Cyrus and Amanda Seyfried should not be allowed to select their own formal wear: They presented the best song award dressed like music-box ballerinas, which is only okay if you're, like, five.

The cult of John Hughes has overstayed its welcome: I like Sixteen Candles as much as the next person who had a blast during the '80s and doesn't care who knows it (hell, I might even go see Hot Tub Time Machine) but The Breakfast Club is not The 400 Blows. Though I must concede that the footage of Hughes' young stars — Ally Sheedy, Anthony Michael Hall, James Spader, Emilio Estevez, Lea Thompson, Matthew Broderick, Jon Cryer, Judd Nelson and all the rest — looking as dewy and sweetly unformed as newly hatched chicks was heartbreaking. "Don't You (Forget About Me)" is still a great song. "When you grow up, your heart dies" is still a cringe-inducing line.

The pompous gasbaggery about James Cameron's visionary vision must stop: Avatar is a shiny, candy-colored cartoon, not a divine vision of the future of cinema.

Ben Stiller isn't as funny as he thinks he is: His Avatar-mocking introduction to the best make-up award was painful. And what's with pitting movies like The Young Victoria and Il Divo against Star Trek? Apples and oranges, anyone?

Sometimes there is such a thing as a sure thing: Like Mo'Nique for best supporting actress (Precious); Christoph Waltz for best supporting actor (Inglourious Basterds); Jeff Bridges for best actor (Crazy Heart); Sandra Bullock fr best actress (The Blind Side).

Costume designer Sandy Powell is a class act: She dedicated her Oscar for The Young Victoria to all the designers who dress "contemporary films and low-budget ones" and are consistently overshadowed and underappreciated.

No one outside the business has any idea what sound mixers and editors do, even after that stultifying educational video narrated by Morgan Freeman. And you know what? Nobody outside the business cares, either, which is fine. They don't vote for Oscars.

You can't top an acceptance speech that begins "Thirteen years ago, my doctors told me I [wouldn't] survive" (Kim Sinclair, winner for Set Decoration), so don't try.

Dario Argento Loves Red Velvet!

2010-03-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

For some inexplicable reason (is there any other kind on the web?), the post I did a month ago about Dario Argento's praise for Red Velvet (2009), a smart, gory, stylish slasher movie produced by my friend Sean Fernald, has vanished.

So I'm reposting it, because hey — you can't just pick up an Argento endorsement at the corner drugstore. To this day I remember how thrilled I was when Argento praised the very first version of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds, the one I submitted as my Columbia University masters' thesis.

That encounter wss rivaled only by veteran English filmmaker Michael Powell's response to my first published film article, a very formal, academic analysis of his recently rereleased Peeping Tom. I was still an undergraduate, paying for my education by working in the New York City Ballet's press office, and a dance-world friend was involved with one of the earliest attempts to bring The Red Shoes to the New York stage (the end result was the disastrous 1993 production that opened and closed in four days); he slipped Powell a copy and then introduced us at a backers' audition.

I held my breath as Powell, then in his 80s, looked at me for a moment and then said, "You know, I never intended any of those things you wrote about when I made Peeping Tom." My heart sank. "But you saw them," he continued, "so they must be there."

If that's not graciousness incarnate, I don't know what is.

The Crazies and Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds

2010-02-26T07:52:00.000-08:00

My review of the remake of George Romero's 1973 The Crazies is live on MissFlickChick.com, and here's the surprise: It's good.

And Fangoria just did an online item about the upcoming new edition of my book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, which is due out in April. Read it here.

Attack of the monster beach party movie pastiches — kind of cool and way camp

2010-02-16T19:54:00.000-08:00

Hallelujah! My technical problems have been solved (it only took my web host's IT department a week or so, but hey — I'm trying to count my blessings) and I can post again.

So to celebrate, I added reviews of Charles Busch's Psycho Beach Party and the recent Monster Beach Party A-Go Go.

The're both flawed, but Psycho Beach Party features an early turn by the then-unknown Amy Adams, and Monster Beach Party A-Go Go has a slammin' sound track. Take a look and let me know what you think!

Clap for The Wolfman... or Not

2010-02-11T21:57:00.000-08:00

It's opening under a black cloud of gossip and dire speculation — why has its opening been delayed so many times; how come there was only a single screening; could it possibly be as bad as Van Helsing — and I certainly can't say it's great. But I didn't hate The Wolfman: Del Toro is good, the look is pure '60s Hammer, and at least there are no sparkly vampires. M review is live here.

The Who on the Superbowl

2010-02-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

So, I'm rewatching White of the Eye ("I believe in miracles, oh baby... you sexy thing") -- which to my dismay remains unavailable on region 1 DVD; I own a Dutch copy -- but I took a break to see The Who do the Superbowl half-time show.

Am I the only person who wanted to cry? Not that they put on a bad show -- they didn't.
But there's something painful about seeing game-changing musicians rehashing songs that put them on the cultural map 40 years ago.

And now a digression. I just went to the gas station across the street -- staffed entirely, I think, by emigrees from Lagos -- to buy a litre of coca-cola for my better half and the fellow at the window, whom I've seen many times mopping the floors and tidying the shelves, looked at me and said, "You're not American, are you? You're European -- where are you from?"

Odd moment. Because I was born in the United States, but my mother is English and my upbringing was so much more English than American; my nightmares were about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, not Charlie Manson and his girls. In fact, the first time I heard about Manson's family I was in London... odd. And You Sexy Thing will haunt me forever.

History, Bollywood style!

2010-01-31T07:54:00.001-08:00

I've been remiss -- I should have posted a link to my review of Salman Khan's new movie, Veer, days ago. Mea culpa! So here it is: Veer. It's set in 19th- and early 20th-century India and celebrates the Pindari, tribal insurgents with a ferocious martial tradition, and their brief but celebrated resistance to the British Raj. Freedom fighters or terrorists? Good and complex question, which the movie ignores in favor of broad comedy, sweeping battle sequences and a classic doomed love story: While studying in London, Veer (Salman Khan), the son of a legendary Pindari leader, falls for a princess Yashodhara (Zarie Khan — no relation), only to find that her father is the sworn enemy of his people. The verdict: It's bad history — make that terrible history — but a pretty decent trashy spectacle, despite the baffling timeline and rubber "metal" breastplates.

Can't hold a candle to Jodhaa Akbar (2008), though: Think sexed-up historical spectacle a la Forever Amber, but with elephants, dervishes, velvet-tasseled horses, two of Bollywood's most beautiful stars — Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai — and enough ropes of pearls and rubies to choke at least a couple of the aforementioned elephants. Now that's entertainment.

My review of Legion is now live...

2010-01-22T17:33:00.001-08:00

An angel with wicked cool tats and a machine gun... I'm so there. And yes, that's the legacy of the Catholic school girl I once was. My review of Legion is live and Id love to know what you think!

New edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento...

2010-01-19T09:15:00.000-08:00

The University of Minnesota Press web page for the expanded edition of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds is online and it's finally starting to feel real to me.

I really can't believe it's been 15 years since the last edition and 20 since the first... let alone that it's been 25 years since I started the research that would become my Columbia University master's thesis and get the whole ball rolling. I mean, I wrote that thing on an electric typewriter! And I did the first book manuscript on a Kaypro (look at this dinosaur of a computer; it was "portable" because you could latch the keyboard to the CPU, revealing a handle, but trust me -- by the time you lugged that thing to your local coffee joint, you'd be too exhausted to write anything... and they wouldn't have had an outlet for you to plug it into anyway; the Kaypro didn't have a battery), back when floppy discs were floppy. And that was after an ordeal by scanning I would love to forget... let's just say that character-recognition software then wasn't what it is now.

In defense of Sherlock Holmes...

2010-01-16T21:19:00.000-08:00

Yes, the Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law/Guy Ritchie version of Sherolock Holmes has problems. But they're not the problems most critics are complaining about. My review is live (finally!) and I'd love to hear what you think.

Apocalypse... Could We Do This Later?

2010-01-16T19:31:00.000-08:00

I'm not waiting for the end of the world, I'm tired of the post apocalypse , and so help me God, I really don't want to see portentous movies that look like some bizarre mash up of The Road and Fahrenheit 451... which brings us to
The Book of Eli. I probably shouldn't admit that I hated it from the moment — about five minutes in — that it tried to pass off a sphinx cat as a hellish mutant from the not-too-distant future, but I did. And things only went downhill from there...

I don't such care for the Golden Globe Awards, either, though the fact that the attendees are plied with liquor from the moment they sit down (at tables, not in theater seats like the Oscars) pretty much guarantees that the last half hour will be unpredictable fun (Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech for The Wrestler, anyone?)

But I did kind of enjoy writing a piece about the Globes and horror movies... they've been relatively good to the genre over the years. I mean, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association even scraped up a reward for The White Reindeer, God love 'em.

New Movies for the New Year!

2010-01-10T18:43:00.001-08:00

The first horror movie of 2010 is here! Read my review of Daybreakers and tell me what you think.

In addition to Daybreakers, however, I've been catching up on some older movies. All these reviews are in the Horror section of my site, and range from oldies but goodies to, well, some pretty crappy recent stuff. But I watched, so I reviewed.

Someone's Watching Me! (1978) — Vintage John Carpenter.
Eyes of a Stranger (1981) — Lauren Tewes (The Love Boat), a very young Jennifer Jason Leigh and a sex killer... nasty!
The Curse of El Charro (2005) — Formulaic stalk-and-slash with Southwestern twist.
Decadent Evil (2005) — Ever wonder what '80s schlockmeister Charles Band is up to these days? Me either... but here's the answer.
Unspeakable (2007) — Home invasion, sex abuse and suburban secrets!

The Ten Worst Horror Movies of 2000 - 2009

2009-12-24T16:38:00.000-08:00

Oh, and I've just posted my list of the ten worst horror movies of the last decade; it's in two parts. Part One is here and Part Two is here.

This piece was originally posted on AMCtv's Horror Hacker site, which is why it's skewed towards US/English-language release.

I'll be posting my Ten Best of the Decade list soon.

And finally, as the holiday season finally begins to wind down, I'd like to put in a plug for one of my favorite documentaries of the decade: What Would Jesus Buy?; it documents the ongoing progress of performance artist/social activist Bill Talen's efforts to rip the scales from the eyes of compulsive consumers via his alter-ego Reverend Billy's Church of Stop Shopping. It's funny and so on-target that it hurts.

New Reviews: Invictus, The Lovely Bones and more...

2009-12-24T16:27:00.000-08:00

Yes, I've been neglectful. But my recent reviews of Invictus, Crazy Heart, The Lovely Bones and Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, a surprisingly sharp Bollywood picture about the dog-eat-dog ethics of the 21st-century workplace, are live.

RIP Paul Naschy, 1934 - 2009

2009-12-24T15:56:00.000-08:00

I must confess upfront that I was never a fan of Spanish actor/producer/director Paul Naschy (born Jacinto Molina; he adopted his nom d’ecran at the behest of a German distributor) and his hairy histrionics. But I’m saddened by the news of his death after a long battle with cancer. Naschy was was 75.

Naschy figures into two of my indelibly vivid grindhouse memories… one of which didn’t even involve an actual grindhouse. In 1973, intrigued by a creepy newspaper ad for something called Sisters, I made my way to a fairly respectable, if slightly rundown, theater on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It wasn’t in the swank part of the Upper East Side; in fact, I’m pretty sure it was East 86th Street, which was then a low-rent shopping strip studded with movie theaters that only a few years later — right around the time I was a student at Hunter College, which was (and is) on Lexington Avenue and 68th Street, a couple of subway stops south — had devolved into real pits. Anyway, I thought Sisters was pretty great, even if the then-unknown writer/director wore his movie-geek crush on Alfred Hitchcock a little too obviously.

But Sisters was preceded by trailers for a whole lot of crap, including some ridiculous-looking thing called Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror that looked like some bottom-of-the-barrel 1950s b-movie , except that it was in color. Where did they get that fruity voice-over guy? Vincent Price at his campest sounded butch by comparison. What was with those Saturday matinee, monster movie come-ons scrawled in spooky type? “See The Wolf-Monster! The Vampire-Doctor! The Ghoul-Woman!” Please.“A super-shock spectacle of hideous horror in chill-o-rama 70 and gory color?” For God’s sake, who would go see such a thing?

Well not me, that's for damned sure. It was years before I caught up to La marca del Hombre-lobo (1968), the first of some dozen-odd movies featuring of Naschy as reluctant werewolf Count Waldemar Daninsky, and I can’t say it particularly impressed me. But props to Naschy for being so unabashedly into the classic movie monsters — apparently seeing Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) at the age of 11 was a life-changing experience — even if comparisons to Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Jr. were more a product of fanboy fantasies than critical perspective.

Flash forward to 1979, by which time I was a regular denizen of the gloriously seedy grindhouses that lined the late, great Times Square. The ones that didn’t even bother to buy tiny one-by-one inch ad space in the down-market Daily News or New York Post: The only way to know what was showing was to take a stroll down the Deuce on Friday morning.

Which is how I happened on Nurse Sherri (1978), which proved to be a super cheap and stupid Al Adamson movie...

Dig those scratched-into-the-emulsion effects. But then there was House of Psychotic Women, aka Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll/House of Doom/Los ojos azules de la muneca rota (1972), the first Naschy movie I saw on a big screen. It turned out to be a terrific Spanish/French giallo in which rootless ex-con Gilles (Naschy), who’s just served a prison term for rape and fantasizes about strangling women, blunders into a caretaking job at the isolated farm of three weird sisters — beautiful Claude, who has a creepy fake hand; imperious, wheelchair-bound Yvette, who requires the care of a live-in nurse; and nymphomaniacal Nicole, played respectively by Euro-tarts Diana Lorys, Maria Perschy and Eva Leon.

Nicole is upfront with her expectations of Gilles: She wants him in her bed as soon as he's done with his more mundane chores. But it’s pretty clear that her sisters could also use some sexual healing. Oh, and their father committed suicide, their mother went insane, Yvette has a new nurse because the old one was murdered and there’s a serial killer who targets blue-eyed women on the loose.

It all works out about as well as you’d imagine… and I never again want to see Naschy — whose resemblance to John Belushi is remarkably distracting — milk another cow. That said, after having seen many other Naschy films in the interim I feel confident saying that it’s among the best credits of his lengthy career. Not that you'd know it from this awful trailer, whose sole objective seems to be concealing the fact that the movie wasn't made in the USA.

Sadly, that’s about all I have to say about Naschy: For the most part, his lumpen charm eluded me. But I was genuinely moved by these two obituaries. The first is by Arbogast, whose blog Arbogast on Film is one of my must-reads, and the second by Tim Lucas, whose Video Watchblog needs no introduction.

Where's the Fire?

2009-12-14T17:03:00.000-08:00

There are 14 or 15 emergency vehicles directly across the street from my Manhattan apartment building (see the highly impressionistic view at left).

We're located between two sizable hospitals and there's a firehouse nearby, so sirens are a regular thing... it's remarkable how quickly they become part of the white noise of the city. I do a weekly radio segment on an Atlanta-area radio show and the wailing has become a running joke. I know it confirms their worst ideas about New York, so virtually every week I hear myself saying, "Just so you know, that's an ambulance going to the major hospital center a couple of blocks from my apartment..."

But I have to say, I'm a little unnerved by the sheer volume of flashing lights outside my windows just now. Not so unnerved that I'm doing anything about it, though.

Transylmania and Up in the Air reviews...

2009-12-04T17:40:00.000-08:00

...are live on my main site.

I'm not sure I agree with the National Board of Review that Up in the Air is the best movie of 2009, but it's a smart, grimly funny and grown up movie.

Transylmania is boring, bloody dumb-assery, but it least it's trying to be a real horror movie spoof, unlike the Scary Movie franchise, which just string together random, witless pop-culture gags.

The Road to Nowhere... My Review

2009-11-25T13:07:00.001-08:00

My review of the ultimate holiday downer of a movie, The Road is live. Though extravagantly praised by many critics, I found it admirable but oddly unaffecting, using my own personal "how much time did I spend trying not to let people see I was crying" meter. Because here's the thing — it's really, really easy to make me cry at movies. I'm especially susceptible to cute animals falling into rivers: Benji the Hunted destroyed me, and I saw it on a tiny TV, in a bar, with the sound off while I was waiting for a friend, and I was in my hardboiled twenties. I had to beat a hasty retreat to the ladies room and when I'd composed myself sufficiently, I asked the bartender whether there wasn't a game on somewhere. And I hate sports.

Anyway, I recount this embarrassing tale to give some context to the fact that The Road left me absolutely dry eyed. It isn't meant to be a cheap tear-jerker, which is one of the things I admire about it. But the fact is that the resolution of the film's central relationship — between a boy born immediately after some disaster sent the Earth into a slow death spiral and the father who's trying to raise him to survive in a savage world without becoming savage — should leave any thinking person devastated: Their story is the story of the whole world writ small.

I actually think director John Hillcoat's previous movie, an underrated Western set in 1880s Australia called The Proposition, does a better job of exploring the strength of human connection in the face of unrelenting brutality.

Tell me what you think...

New Moon Review and Anna Kendrick Interview

2009-11-20T18:00:00.000-08:00

Emo vampires, studly werewolves and teen angst: That's the Twilight saga in a nutshell. I see why the books and movies appeal to tween girls, but those Twilight Moms... they're a mystery to me. What grown woman fantasizes about sparkly waif-boy vampires so exquisitely sensitive that they're the ones putting the brakes on while you squirm with unconsummated lust? Sorry, not my kind of vampire. Read my review of New Moon, and hell, check out what I thought of Twilight.

And as a bonus, here's an interview with the astonishingly talented Anna Kendrick, who plays Forks High School's resident mean girl. She's got a co-starring role in the upcoming George Clooney movie Up in the Air, and she stole Camp with this showstopping rendition of Stephen Sondheim's "The Ladies Who Lunch," a song written for a character twice her age.

Stunning, right? Oh, and yes that is little Dakota Fanning looking all red-eyed and evil in the photo up top. She's one of New Moon's wicked Volturi, a cabal of bad, bad vampires led by Michael Sheen, of Frost/Nixon and the Underworld werewolf pack. Now, the Volturi... those are my kind of vampires!

Plan 9 from Outer Space version 2.0...

2009-11-15T16:12:00.000-08:00

Here's an idea whose day should never have come: A remake of Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, widely acclaimed as the Citizen Kane of bad films ... I'm not really sure what else to say.

Ed Wood was an appealing eccentric who adored moviemaking and had absolutely no aptitude for it; Rudolph Grey's biography, Nightmare of Ecstasy, and Tim Burton's Ed Wood are loving tributes to the man and his passions. But Plan 9 from Outer Space is a terrible movie. Terrible from top to bottom. We're not talking a good idea undermined in the execution. We're talking a banal, boring idea whose ludicrous execution — from the wretched acting to the cardboard sets to celebrity psychic Criswell's incomprehensible introduction — is the only thing that makes it watchable.

And yet some guy named John Johnson wants to "honor" it with a remake/ (Here's the trailer). I can't see any good coming of this project, no matter how sincere Johnson's website sounds.

I mean, I think Aris Iliopulos genuinely meant well when he brought Woods' unproduced I Woke Up Early the Day I Died back from the dead ten years ago, but I can't say it turned out especially well. Just saying.

The Awesomeness of 42nd Street...

2009-11-14T19:03:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder where all those backstage-musical showbiz cliches came from? Wonder no more: 42nd Street (1933) is movie zero. And no matter how many times I see it, I never cease to be amazed by how modern it seems: Take away the cloche hats and the silk rehearsal tap-pants and the dated slang and I swear, the backstage scenes could have been set in the 1980s, when I worked for a major NYC-based ballet company.

42nd Street

Arguing With Myself | MySpace Video

The more things change, the more showbiz stays the same.

Fantastic Mr. Fox... really is fantastic

2009-11-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

I'm not a fan of Wes Anderson. I'm not a fan of Noah Baumbach. And I didn't like children's movies when I was a child. So no one could be more surprised than me by how much I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox.

I wish I could say the same of Where the Wild Things Are, but I can't. It's intelligent and beautifully acted, but it left me ice cold.

Tell me what you think...

Clash of the Titans Remake -- What the World Needs Now

2009-11-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

Specifically, a star-studded, big-budget remake of the mythological monster mash with loads and loads of CGI effects. (see trailer).

Let me be clear: I'm not arguing that the 1981 Clash of the Titans (see trailer) was any great shakes, even if it did feature the likes of Sir Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith as various Greek gods, which was a big deal 25 years ago (now actors of their caliber, including Smith herself, are regulars in Harry Potter). It also starred the magnificently wooden Harry Hamlin, whose main qualification seems to have been that he looked nice in a short toga, as the Greek hero Perseus.

But I'm not convinced that a remake that dirties up the action, reimagines Perseus (Sam Worthington, of Terminator Salvation) as a guy who's mad as Hades and isn't going to take it anymore ("it" apparently being marauding monsters), and looks like a high-end video game is going to be any better. Even with Liam Neeson as Zeus (need I say that was the role Olivier played in the original?), Ralph Fiennes, Mads Mikkelsen, Danny Houston and a host of highly acclaimed character actors on board.

Nice harpies, though, and the gorgon's scalp-full o' snakes looks pretty convincing, at least from the glimpse in the trailer.

Vampires Are Officially Too Popular...

2009-11-10T11:30:00.000-08:00

Far be it from me to begrudge the undead their day in the sun (so to speak), but I find myself feeling nostalgic for the days when vampires didn't sit at the popular-kids table. But with Twilight and Tru Blood casting a long shadow over this year's People's Choice Awards (aka "the lowest-common-denominator popularity contest"), there's no getting around it: They're so mainstream it hurts. At least, it hurts old school fans like me.

Some of which is probably just that I hate the Twilight franchise: Abstinence fables wrapped in a layer of vampire mythology are not my idea of a bloody good time. But it's also that once upon a time, vampires (and horror in general) were a litmus test: People who shared your interest in such things were probably people who were going to be your friends. Even if I were 11 years old, I suspect that I'd find as many kindred spirits among the Twi-heads as I would at a Disney Princess club. And I hate to see vampires — even silly sparkle vampires — hanging out with such simpering wimps.

What's in The Box?

2009-11-05T22:13:00.001-08:00

I'm a Richard Kelly fan: I love Donnie Darko and I actually liked Southland Tales... it's flawed, but there's great stuff in it. And that's why I was disappointed by The Box, which gets off to a great start but loses its way in a tangle of big ideas and loopy conspiracies.

What do you think?

Lady Gaga or the Elephant Man?

2009-11-04T09:01:00.001-08:00

Not to be frivolous, since this photo comes from a red-carpet event at which a paparazzo died of a heart attack, but no wonder.

I mean, it's not just me, right? When diminutive neo-disco queen Lady Gaga comes out looking like the Elephant man, it's pretty shocking.

Read My Review of Eulogy for a vampire...

2009-11-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

Or not, depending on how interested you are in gay-themed erotic horror movies. But what the hey — it's a change from the umpteenth remake of some 1970s horror movie that was just fine the way it was, right?

Eulogy for a Vampire.

Wired's Halloween Movies for Kids

2009-10-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

As a child I wanted nothing to do with childish things: I wanted to read grown-up books, watch grown-up movies and do grown-up things. But Wired's list of Halloween-themed moies suitable for children is actually pretty good.

Read it here. A far as I'm concerned, any list that includes The Monster Club and The Corpse Bride is aces!

Halloween Horror Round Up!

2009-10-30T14:26:00.000-07:00

Halloween is here, bringing a bumper crop of theatrical horror-movie releases for every taste!

If you need a little guidance, check out my reviews of:

The House of the Devil

Paranormal Activity

Saw VI

Zombieland

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant

The Stepfather

See "Saw" — Or, Rather, Don't

2009-10-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

Forgive my tardiness — editing Halloween content for AMC's Horror Hacker site has kept me frightfully busy, if you'll excuse the obligatory "funny" seasonal wordplay. I promise to do better, starting with two, count 'em, two posts today.

First up: What I thought about Saw VI and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant.

Check out my Stepfather review and my interview with Amber Heard

2009-10-18T09:26:00.000-07:00

More than 20 years later, the original Stepfather, starring Terry O'Quinn (now of TV's Lost) as a would-be family man who just wants the perfect wife and kids, painted a chilling picture of a control freak with no tolerance for failure. How does Dylan Walsh, of TV's Nip/Tuck, fill O'Quinn's shoes in the current remake? Read my review...

And you might also want to check out my interview with Amber Heard, who co-stars in The Stepfather and has a small but memorable role as an undead babe in Zombieland.

Zombiemania post mortem

2009-10-14T07:30:00.001-07:00

So, fortified with snacks and delicious beverages, some friends and I gathered to watch the premiere of Zombiemania, directed by Canadian documentary filmmaker Donna Davies... and it was pretty entertaining. Definitely a light, very mainstream look at the cultural history of zombies (that's Starz), but some great interview footage with George Romero (I love that he still wears those giant '70s glasses!), Tom Savini, Greg Nicotero, Max Brooks (yes, son of Mel; allow me to put in on more plug for his novel World War Z, which is brilliant), Wade Davis, the ethnobotanist who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow, and various zombie experts. As promised, I got plenty of screen time.

A warning if you decide to DVR a future showing: It may not be listed as Zombiemania. On our system (the one that comes with RCN), it's listed as "Starz Inside," which is the collective name for the channel's behind-the-scenes documentaries. After inviting friends over to watch, Frank and I had a couple of sticky moments when we couldn't find a Tuesday listing for Zombiemania.

In any event, we finally figured out that it was listed as "Starz Inside" (the generic name for all the channel's behind-the-scenes docs) and a good time was had by all. Except, of course, my cat, who was bored to death and annoyed that all of a sudden everyone was watching the television instead of paying him the attention he feels is
his due. (Confession: the photo was not taken during the showing of Zombiemania -- the sunlight streaming through the window is the tip off -- but is an accurate depiction of Chip's attitude towards anything that isn't all about him.)

Zombiemania Tomorrow at 10PM on Starz!

2009-10-12T18:59:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is final reminder — no more annoying reminders. But Zombiemania will make its debut on Starz tomorrow night, and I'm interviewed in it... at some length, I've been told.

Here's a preview:

Zombiemania

Me and Call of Cthulhu in Stamford, CT, October 7

2009-10-06T10:20:00.001-07:00

I'm going to be introducing The Call of Cthulhu, the best H.P. Lovecraft movie no one's ever see, at the Avon Theater in Stamford, CT, tomorrow at 7PM.

It's a terrific movie, made in the style of a silent movie from the late 1920s and extremely faithful not only to Lovecraft's story, but also to his unique tone, which is the far harder thing to capture. And the Avon is a great theater (click here for their website, which includes directions). I'll be doing a Q&A after the movie, so come one, come all!

See Me on Starz Talking Zombies!

2009-09-26T10:19:00.000-07:00

Back in March, I went to Hallifax to be interviewed about zombies by documentary filmmaker Donna Davies; I worked with her previously on Pretty Scary, her doc abut women in horror.

Th result, Zombiemania, now has an airdate: October 13th.

Here's the office press release:

Zombies the new Vampire? Starz Premieres "Starz Inside: Zombiemania" on Oct. 13th

Move over, Twilight, “True Blood” and “Vampire Dairies,” there is a new breed of monster in town. With the premiere of Zombieland with Woody Harrelson in theaters today and two other projects in the works for DreamWorks, Xombie and Rainbow Ridge, zombies are set to pose some stiff competition to their monster genre counterparts. Starz will explore the world wide craze, from its history to its current role in pop culture with the premiere of Starz Inside: Zombiemania on Tuesday, Oct. 13th at 10pm et/pt. Zombie ‘experts’ including Max Brooks, author of “The Zombie Survival Guide” and “World War Z” and the “Grandfather of Zombie films” George Romero will weigh in on the impact of high-profile films like Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead and the proliferation of independent zombie films across the country.

...and I talk about pretty much everything else, from Italian zombies to the evolution of the walking dead from Haitian folklore to all purpose metaphor (AIDS, spiritual suicide, the disenfranchised underclass... and much, much more, as the carnie spielers used to say) to Nazi zombies to the great slombie/zombie schism.

I'm sure Starz will be airing it throughout October so please tune in!

Pandorum = Alien + The Descent +...

2009-09-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

...plus a whole lot of other space horror movies. Which isn't to say it isn't pretty entertaining most of the time, only that if you're a genre fan, you'll be ticking off boxes in your head from start to finish.

Read my review here, and then check out my review of German-born director/co-writer Christian Alvart's debut, the serial-killer picture Antibodies — which I liked a lot — here.

Freaky Emmy Award Facts!

2009-09-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

OK, not such a huge fan of award shows generally and the Emmys in particular, because I really don't watch enough TV to have a dog in that fight.

But my ears prick up when I hear the words "kidney" "Jeannie Epper" and "donate" in the same Emmy Award thank-you sentence.

Jeannie Epper is part of the famous stunt family — she was Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman double (if you haven't seen the documentary Double Dare, starring Epper and Zoe Bell of Kill Bill and Xena: Warrior Princess, do so immediately — and apparently donated a kidney to newly minted Emmy-award winner Ken Howard (Grey Gardens).

Now that's a friend and one hell of a woman.

Cole Clemens, So You Think You Can Dance and the Exquisite Embarassment of Silence...

2009-09-10T10:55:00.000-07:00

True confession: I've never watched So You Think You Can Dance and I don't plan to start. But I don't live under a rock, so the derisive hubbub that accompanied Cole Clemens' decision to do a solo without music — the consensus seems to be that he's a world-class nutbag (as though that's a bad thing in realitytvworld) — didn't escape my notice.

Before we proceed any further, here's a link to the clip:

Cole's notorious number

A little background: I grew up in the New York dance world and worked for New York City Ballet for twelve years. I think Clemens' piece is pretentious, juvenile folly, plus his hair sucks and he uses the phrase "very unique."

But I also feel compelled to point out that the very idea of dancing without music is neither crazy nor new. Cue the second clip, which includes both commentary and footage of Jerome Robbins' 100% music-free Moves. That's Jerome Robbins as in arguably the greatest American dance maker of the 20th century, the guy who choreographed both crowd-pleasing Broadway shows like West Side Story and purely classical works like The Goldberg Variations.

Moves clip

Moves was first performed in 1959 — that's 50 years ago. And if you're a judge on a show called So You Think You Can Dance, you should know and/or acknowledge as much instead of sniggering.

The Final Destination? Hah!

2009-09-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Let's see now, two weeks at the top of the US box office, including Labor Day weekend.

Is Death finally going to take a holiday? Somehow I don't think so. Brace yourself for more Final Destination pictures, and remember: When Death comes for you, just save yourself and everyone you know a whole lot of grief and go.

Top 25 Beatles Songs -- Do You Agree with EW? I Don't.

2009-09-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’m not really a huge one for making top “Fill in the Blank” lists, and that’s partly because sometimes biology really is destiny. Take it from novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity): Compulsive list making is a guy thing, like slavishly alphabetizing your CDS and books. We don’t understand.

And yet here I am, doing it, because I just can’t get with Entertainment Weekly’s list of “Top 25 Beatles songs,” which appears in the new issue (September 11, 2009). Actually, it’s a top 50 list, but I don’t have the energy for that, so I cut it off at 25 in the name of having the energy to then compile my own alternate list.

Here they are:

EW’s List:
1.) A Hard Day’s Night
2.) A Day in the Life
3.) Yesterday
4.) Strawberry Fields Forever
5.) Something (in the Way She Moves)
6.) She Loves You
7.) Let It Be
8.) Tomorrow Never Knows
9.) Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
10.) Across the Universe
11.) Eleanor Rigby
12.) Penny Lane
13.) Help!
14.) Hey Jude
15.) In My Life
16.) While My Guitar Gently Weeps
17.) You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
18.) Blackbird
19.) Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
20.) Can’t Buy Me Love
21.) Revolution
22.) If I Fell
23.) We Can Work It Out
24.) I’m Only Sleeping
25) I’m a Loser

My List:
1.) Hard Day’s Night
2.) Yesterday
3.) Eleanor Rigby
4.) I’ve Just Seen a Face
5.) I’m Looking Through You
6.) Penny Lane
7.) Your Mother Should Know
8.) With a Little Help from My Friends
9.) She’s Leaving Home
10.) Let it Be
11.) You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
12.) Money Can’t Buy Me Love
13.) Paperback Writer
14.) I Want to Hold Your Hand
15.) Get Back
16.) Come Together
17.) Got to Get You Into My Life
18.) Girl
19.) We Can Work It Out
20.) I Saw Her Standing There
21.) Hello Goodbye
22.) She Loves You
23.) When I’m Sixty-Four
24.) Yellow Submarine
25.) Run for Your Life

Clearly, there’s plenty of overlap: “Hard Day’s Night,” “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be,”“Penny Lane,” “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” “We Can Work It Out…” I mean, some of them really are beyond argument. And some of the titles in my top 25 appear farther down on EW’s list, like the seductive, sinister “ComeTogether” (their no.44), the bitingly witty, compulsively melodic “Paperback Writer” (their no.26), the brittle, melancholy “With a Little Help From My Friends,” (their no.40) and the exuberant “I Want to Hold Your Hand” (their no.43).

But for my money (you know, the stuff that can’t buy me love), there’s a whole lot ofpretentious, overrated, simplistic junk on EW’s list. Naysayers can mock “Yesterday” as sappy until they turn blue (meanies) and it will still be a rueful heartbreak song as vivid and timeless as Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One formy Baby (and One More for the Road).” But I hate “Hey Jude” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and think “Girl” is a way better song than “Norwegian Wood.”

I find “Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End,” “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “A Day in the Life” painfully dated, and “Blackbird” and “Revolution” obvious and preachy.

I love the way the bitterness of the lyrics is at war with the bouncy tune of “I’m Looking Through You” and “Hello Goodbye.” “She’s Leaving Home” is an amazing feat of narrative songwriting that manages to contain two completely contradictory perceptions of the same event.

Yes, “Yellow Submarine” is viciously catchy and kinda goofy, but it’s so upfront that its silliness is downright ballsy. And “When I’m Sixty-Four” is all that and then some — marrying a music hall-style, novelty song tune to lyrics that evoke both the first flush of overwhelming love, the kind that makes you imagine blissfully growing old together, and the nagging fear that maybe it won’t last takes a kind of pop genius. Especially when you’re 16, as Paul McCartney was when he wrote it in 1958 (it wasn’t recorded until nearly ten years later).

As to “Run for Your Life,” well, that’s sheer blood mindedness on my part: Recorded for 1965’s “Rubber Soul,” it’s so not early Beatles, and I don’t care that it’s derivative (of “Baby, Let’s Play House, which Elvis Presley recorded in 1955), or that it’s misogynistic or and that John Lennon (generally cited as the sole author, despite the Lennon/McCarthy credit) said it was his least favorite Beatles song. he hated it. I like it. So there.

What about you? (Oh, and check out my review of Across the Universe (pictured above), the Julie Taymor movie that looks at the turbulent 1960s through the prism of the Beatles song catalog. It’s uneven, but when it’s working it makes you hear classic Beatles songs as though they were brand new. That’s no mean feat, and it’s never less than gorgeous.

Halloween and Friday the 13th Intersect at a Jersey Movie Theater...

2009-09-03T12:35:00.000-07:00

So here I was, minding my own business and trying to see whether Carriers was playing anywhere in the greater New York area on September 4.... Since the answer appeared to be "no," I widened my search area and low and behold, this theater appeared:

Ritz 16 Theaters
900 Berlin-Haddonfield Road
Voorhees, NJ 08403

Yes, there is a movie theater on Berlin-Haddonfield Road in Voorhees New Jersey. How can these things be?

Dalek Love

2009-09-02T12:25:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big Who-head (Torhwood is more my style), but I always loved the Daleks. So this video, which recuts clips from a relatively recent episode (the Christopher Eccleston series) into the soiry of a Dalek in love with the Doctor's sidekick really tickled me. Especially because it's cut to a remix of "Tainted Love" and the classic Dr. Who theme.

Click here... and prepare to be amazed at just how many other Dalek-related clips there are on YouTube.

Halloween II and The Final Destination Reviews

2009-08-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

My reviews of The Final Destination — yes, in 3D — and Halloween II are online — have a look.

Oh, and may I just say that $16.50 (no, that isn't a typo) is an absolutely outrageous price to pay for The Final Destination in 3D? Not even IMAX — just at a regular neighborhood theater.

Seeing Halloween II and The Final Destination back to back was kind of reminding me of the days of Times Square double bill, until I remembered that I'd just paid $22.50 for the priviledge.

Mac is from Mars....

2009-08-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm in the process of switching over from a PC to a Mac and I'm committed, even though I have to say that the much-bruited intuitiveness of the Mac icon system doesn't feel so intuitive to me. I think when push comes to shove, I'm a word (as opposed to an MS Word) girl at heart.

In any event, I just got my copy of MS Office for Mac and I have to ask: Is it just me, or is the cover of my software package written in an alien language? Not alien as in "foreign" but alien as in "from another planet."

A Trip Down Halloween Memory Lane

2009-08-26T17:57:00.000-07:00

With Rob Zombie's Halloween sequel about to open, it seems time to revisit the original eight-movie franchise, from the highs — the original, of course — to the lows. Was Halloween III really the nadir, or was it just misunderstood?

What do you think?

For my take, visit my Halloween retrospective on AMC's Horror Hacker site.

Mother's Day Remake... Will it Never End?

2009-08-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

Apparently not.

I must confess that Mother's Day (1980), written and directed by Charles Kaufman — not the Charles Kaufman who wrote the brain-teasing Adaptation, Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but the brother of Lloyd Kaufman, who co-founded Troma Entertainment — looms large in my Times Square memories.

Not because it was good, I hasten to add, but because it was so fucking nasty that even the typically skeevy Times Square popeyes and horndick daddies with whom I shared theater space seemed kinda spooked out. Oh, and I have to mention that for a few months Billy Ray McQuade and I used the same second-floor Bally's Fitness Center on Broadway between 73rd and 74th Streets; it creeped the hell out of me every time I saw him on the treadmill... But I digress.

Before we go any farther, here's the plot:

Wolfbreath college grads Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), Jackie (Deborah Luce) and Trina (Tiana Pierce) thought they'd be bffs forever, but no longer have much in common: Trina is living the high life in Beverly Hills; Abbey lives in Chicago and tends to her needy, demanding mom; while Jackie is barely scraping by in New York, in large part because her boyfriend is a boorish, junkie loser (some things never change). Their lives have gone in dramatically different directions, but they cling to their annual tradition of vacationing together, and for their tenth anniversary trip they go camping in New Jersey.

Unfortunately, the girls cross paths with psycho-rapist, junk-culture-addled brothers Ike and Addley (Holdem Mc Guire, Billy Ray McQuade), who share a squalid cabin with their beloved, sadistically deranged mama playeed by one "Rose Ross," the pseudonym behind which veteran character actress Beatrice Pons of TV's Sergeant Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? chose to hide. She may have been a sufficiently supportive mom to appear in her boys' little movie — yes, she's Charles and Lloyd's mom — but she also knew better than to put her name on it.

Now is the point at which I have to admit that Mother's Day does some things remarkably right. The women's back stories, crudely sketched though they are, have stuck with me for the better part of 30 years, and their late night abduction from the tranquil woods is totally terrifying: One minute they're snug in their sleeping bags, the next minute Ike and Adderly have tightened the drawstrings and hauled them away like so much writhing loot. Hey, that's how misogynistic psychos are.

And then there's Abbey and Trina's reaction to finding Jackie, raped and brutalized by Ike and Adderly and stuffed in a dresser drawer like so much stinky laundry. Do they run or scream or faint? No way: They haul themselves up by their shiny spandex bra straps (remember, this was 1980) and give the brothers hell they never knew existed. Oh, and let's not forget that the momster is smothered with a clear plastic pillow shaped like a pair of breasts. Cheap irony? Sure. Disturbingly potent image? Hell, yeah!

But a remake? Mother's Day was thoroughly of a time, so why would anyone bother redoing it? What does the greasy, gritty, them-against-us Mother's Day have to do with a 21st-century America teeming with rich, privileged, blindingly white tartlets so invested in the notion that they're God's chosen chippies by virtue of their perfect teeth and slammin' figures that they don't even realize there's a notion.

Sure, you can read feminist and anti-consumer subtexts into the original Mother's Day… but seriously, don't bother. And yet Darren Lynn Bousman of the Saw franchise is on the case and fresh-faced young things like Jaime King and Alexa Vega have signed on to feign being abused and humiliated.

The Hollywood Reporter says the new, improved screenplay sees Ike, Adderly and Mama returning to their cabin and terrorizing the white-bread family who have the temerity to be living there. Which actually doesn't sound like much of a remake... wait, it must be a reimagining. And ooooh, do I sense an allegory about gentrification? Heavy, dude. Can I go now?

Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan Stopped at Newark Airport

2009-08-18T07:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm not going to say that the fact that Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan was recently stopped for questioning at Newark airport as he attempted to catch a flight from NYC to Chicago was an outrageous case of racial profiling, mostly because I think everything there is to be said on that subject has been said already.

I've been pulled off the line at airports for special screening on more occasions than I care to remember, and believe me -- I don't fit any profiles I can think of... oh, except for all those times at Heathrow, because believe me, it's axiomatic with airport (and water port) security in the UK that all Americans with Irish surnames are IRA sympathizers. Ask me about the time I was stopped at Dover, where I was supposed to be catching a ferry to France, and my luggage searched so thoroughly that I missed my connection -- we're talking my toothpast slit open and my soap cut into pieces to make sure there was nothing hidden inside -- and was put on some smelly little commercial boat in the middle of the night because there wasn't going to be another passenger ferry until the next day. Be that as it may, I doubt that the screeners at Newark even know that Khan is a Muslim surname.

What floors me about this story is that Khan, who was traveling for business -- he was promoting a new film with appearances at India Day events in both cities -- wasn't pre-cleared through some super-deluxe first-class flyers program. I mean, do you think Brad Pitt has ever been singled out for special screening anywhere? That's how big a star Khan is -- mega-superstar, can't-take-a-walk-without-a-parade-license famous. Oh, and the best part is the movie he's promoting: My Name is Khan, about the post-9/11 profiling of Muslims. You couldn't make it up.

Kurt Russell and Elvis Presley: A History in Clips...

2009-08-17T10:57:00.000-07:00

Okay, I missed the anniversary of Elvis Presley's' death by a couple of days, but these clips are too good not to share; they start with Kurt Russell as a Disney child actor with Presley in It Happened at the World's Fair (1963) and ends with a tribute Russell did for Turner Classic Movies.

Russell With Elvis
Russell as Elvis (Elvis — the Movie, 1979)
Russell as "Elvis" (3000 Miles to Graceland, 2001)
Russell on Elvis