maxbemba Reviews

THX 1138 (1971)

METROPOLIS IN WHITE

[17 May 2001]

***SPOILERS EVERY SINGLE WHERE***

Probably the best movie that George Lucas would ever hope to make.

Since it was made on a relatively low budget, didn't look or feel like any other American sci-fi movie, and didn't even tried to pull the emotional strings of other studio productions, it was mostly dismissed by the double-u bee executives which, reportedly, where horrified by its lack of audience potential. It was recut (four minutes were excised, later restored), released with little promotion to a few theaters, and allowed to quickly die at the box-office.

A young Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a proletarian worker in a dull, machine-controlled underground society in the 25th Century, where every human need is scrupulously regimented and love is forbidden. Human nature is unchangeable, though, and his rebellious female roommate, LUH 3417, (Maggie McOmie) willingly switches THX's daily dosage of State-provided soul-numbing narcotics with stimulants, and THX painfully awakens. Soon they start making love. To further complicate matters, SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasence), THX's homosexual neighbor, murders his roommate (off camera) and plans to change the computed roommate matching system so he and THX end up living together. They are all caught for their individual crimes and are sent to prison, a vast white expanse where the criminal, the senile, the deformed, and the insane are housed together.

Wanna know more? See the movie. When it came out it was criticized for being slow and humorless. It IS leisurely, but it is certainly NOT boring. And what it lacks in drama, it makes it up with considerable wit and atmosphere and imagination. For instance, just wait for those briefly self-satirical off-the-wall shots (and snatches of dialogue) peppered throughout. They might not have you rolling in the floor laughing (they are throwaways, really), but they may give you pause to think about the talent and strange career of George Lucas.

***ULTRA-SPOILER*** ***IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE, DO NOT READ THIS!!!***

One small correction: some reviewers have made the (very human) mistake of saying that, at the end, there is a (stereotypically hopeful) sunrise. It is not. It is a (scarily bleak and cruelly deliberate) sunset. Thank you, George.

Heartbreakers (2001)

A SMALL CON JOB

[12 May 2001]

***SPOILERS***

Where did they spend the budget on this movie? Visually it's a swampy mess: the color is in unvaryingly muddy orange-golden tones, the camera seems to be misplaced in almost every shot, and the editing is a shambles, often catching the action at the wrong moments, making the performers look gawky and foolish. Some crucial plot elements also seem to be missing (there is a corpse that is never accounted for) and promising ideas are barely carried through or not carried out at all.

What's amazing about "Heartbreakers" is that the actors sustain their dignity among the ruins, trying their damnedest to make us ignore the debris. That they fail to do it should not be held against them; their gallantry amidst chaos is truly admirable.

Sigourney Weaver and Jeniffer Love Hewitt play Max and Page, a mother-and-daughter team of scam artists whose specialty is duping men out of their bank accounts. Their modus operandi is simple: Max seduces a wealthy mark into a swiftly arranged marriage, falls dead drunk asleep during their honeymoon night, the poor horny sucker is rigged to leap after Page's tarty little bottom (they work separately so they don't seem connected to each other), Max catches him with his pants down and, Voilá!, she demands and gets a quickie divorce along with a big, fat cash settlement. They're professionally swift greenback devourers; women as a matriarchy of flippantly greedy manipulative gorgons: the self-made American male's worst nightmare.

At the beginning we watch how they operate as they swindle a swaggering-macho, Italian-American car chopper (Ray Liotta) and then hastily leave town. Page wants to break out on her own, and Max agrees to divide their earnings. But after an unaccounted brush with the IRS, and now left penniless and owing money, they decide for a last big one together in Palm Springs, land of the plenty and the very, very rich.

Sigourney Weaver is a gracefully physical female actor with seemingly endless reserves of energy and good will, and she is not wrong for the part, but she is the one most affected by the technical ineptitudes (sometimes they cut to or away from her in the middle of a word) and by what seems to be the director's indifference. Undaunted, she forges ahead, giving her role (and the movie) everything she has. Like Weaver, the young Jennifer Love Hewitt (a lovely, still-unexperienced, but bravely resilient performer) desperately tries to give this movie some semblance of comic life. And so does Nora Dunn as a treacherous chambermaid, while Anne Bancroft and Carrie Fisher evaporate in their bit roles.

It's the leading men who come out much better.

Ray Liotta is a terrific screwball performer. Making the most of his screwily expressive pale blue eyes, mischievous little-boy smiles, and lightning-fast delivery, he has some of the best lines of the movie, even tossing out the flattest ones as if they were million-dollar zingers. He's a whirlwind of an actor that has never been given his due.

As the young romantic lead, the talented Jason Lee brings the movie a welcome presence (we can see why Page is attracted to him). His soft, dazed delivery is an oasis of calming sanity amidst all the laboriously overheated frenzy going on around him (and around us, too; he looks as bewildered as we are).

But it's the apparently indestructible Gene Hackman, as William B. Tensy, the billionaire whom Max targets for her next scam, who walks away with the movie, or, rather, strolls out of it, without a single visible scratch. In a world seemingly of his own, with a wormy complexion and a perpetually burning cigarette protruding from between foul, yellow-grey lips and teeth, Hackman gleefully satirizes the detached smug casualness of the filthy rich; he coughs and retches and spits and growls his few lines of tar-and-nicotine-infested dialogue with nary a touch of affectation. He's an amiably revolting wreck, always on the verge of asphyxiation, and the more we see of him the more we like him for his innocent indifference to his own disgustingness; once he departs we miss him being around.

Something awful happened to this movie between its inception and delivery. We watch as the plot thickens and the complications pile up and bump into one another, but we do not feel them building up pleasantly. Why, for instance, do the female characters come out as so unsympathetic in relation to the males? In terms of character, the women are no worse than the men. Both are just as greedy and self-centered. Why this discrepancy in feeling? Is this negativity directed against the female performers? Whatever the reason is behind the spite, and whoever is responsible for it, I must say that it fails; "Heartbreakers" crashes down as a movie, but the actors, both male and female, rise well above it and make what might be intolerable agreeably passable.

Dark Passage (1947)

NOIR NON-SEQUITUR

[12 May 2001]

This ghoulishly entertaining noir balderdash is a star vehicle obviously assembled to pair off Bogart and Bacall after they scorched the screen together with their sizzling repartee in "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep". Not a lot of sexy banter this time around; it's all coincidences and threats and double crosses, with Bogie's face wrapped in bandages (he is an escaped convict from San Quentin who undergoes plastic surgery), and sleazy rascals ignominiously falling to their deaths for reasons too contrived to give a damn about. With all the overplotted razzle-dazzle going on, and since we don't see Bogart's face until the last third of the movie, this is like a screwball farce played by cadavers - loony things happen all over but nobody musters the required wit to play them for laughs. Featuring an understandably befuddled Humphrey Bogart in the kind of role Bela Lugosi could have brought off to insanely brilliant perfection. Also with Betty Bacall as a ravishing cardboard cutout, and Bruce Bennett, Tom D'Andrea, Clifton Young, Douglas Kennedy, and Agnes Moorehead again playing an unpleasantly vicious bitch with all the contempt her part really deserves.

Delmer Daves carefully directed the traffic, following his hilariously outlandish script, based on the novel by David Goodis, a writer of masochistic skid row fables that must have been admired by Eddie Wood, whose own crime books and movies "Dark Passage" almost uncannily resembles.

Well shot by Sid Hickox, mostly on location in San Francisco, using the then-faddish subjective camera technique (where we literally are the eyes of the hero/camera), also used in "Lady in the Lake", a Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe/Robert Montgomery thriller released the same year by MGM, directed by Montgomery.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

RUFFIANS

[17 April 2001]

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

A few minutes into the beginning of "The Usual Suspects", U.S. Customs Agent Dave Cujan is giving the third degree to Verbal Kint, a gimpy, ornery con man who inexplicably was the sole survivor of a fiery waterfront massacre involving him, four other even ornerier outlaws, and a shipload of Hungarian drug traffickers. As Verbal rattles on, he slowly uncovers a labyrinthine criminal underworld of riffraff, professional thieves, and viciously competitive corporate gangsters where the orneriest of them all is the diabolical Keyser Soze, a legendary killer so powerful and mean and ruthless and vindictive that no self-respecting hood who values his own life dares double-crossing him, even though most are not even sure who he is, where and how does he operates, or if he exists at all.

This slyly entertaining jigsaw puzzle of a movie is a brilliantly constructed noir exercise on the mechanics of deceit, as well as a joke on the paranoid gullibility of the audience. When the jagged last piece of the puzzle is finally laid down the movie is over, and we might find ourselves laughing out loud in delighted disbelief.

With Gabriel Byrne, Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, and Benicio del Toro as the four desperadoes, Chazz Palminteri as Agent Cujan, Pete Postlethwaite as a shady Japanese lawyer, Suzy Amis as the love interest, Giancarlo Esposito as an agent with a hunch, Dan Hedaya as an agent with no clue at all, Paul Bartel in a bit role as a miscellaneous crook, and Kevin Spacey as the fifth desperado and Verbal Kint.

Editing and Music by John Ottman. Written by Christopher McQuarrie. Directed by Bryan Singer.

The Day of the Beast (1995)

A DEVILISH DELICACY

[17 April 2001]

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

Padre Angel, a scholarly priest, figures out the exact date of the birth of the Antichrist and, totally alone in his discovery (a gigantic cross casually drops over his only confederate), decides to embark on a suicidal quest to vanquish Beelzebub (while learning how to do some evil while he's at it, naturally). The fact he is a mild-mannered pedantic theologician who has never been exposed to the outside world and that he measures less than 5 ft. apparently is of little importance; he might be an innocent, but he carries the greatest of weapon of them all: an obstinately unyielding, Old Testament belief in Him. Along the way he meets, picks up, forces into recruitment, and avoids the bullets of a weird assortment of frauds, fascists, Heavy-Metal fanatics, and other indiscriminately demented weirdos who inhabit the lunar night world of the beautiful city of Madrid.

This wickedly funny horror satire was given the short-shrift by the critics and by audiences who expected a terrorific scare-fest like "The Exorcist" and its other corporate-assembled brethren. In its stead, we get a sweet-natured sadistic comedy about the paradoxical nature of faith. It moves very fast; so fast, in fact, that some of its "action" sequences and special effects are a tad confused (at times we are not sure how we got where we are or what are we supposed to be seeing), but even these (frankly insignificant) details doesn't detract from the zesty charm of this small unpolished jewel.

It's a wonderfully entertaining movie.

With Alex Angulo as the heroic Padre Angel, Armando de Razza as the intrepid Profesor Cavan, Santiago Segura as the handsomely gallant Jose Maria, Terele Pavez as the dangerously deranged Dona Rosario, Nathalie Sesena as the fair proletarian maiden Mina, and Pololo as the wacked-out Abuelo Terminal.

Alex de la Iglesia directed, and co-wrote the screenplay with Jorge Guerricaechevarria.

Cast Away (2000)

Falling Coconuts

[7 April 2001]

*** SPOILERS AHEAD FROM THE BEGINNING TO THE END! ***

I regret to say that "Cast Away" is a terrible movie. Even the title is a dead giveaway that we are about to be subjected to one of those unforgettable moral lessons that should be cast in bronze for the future generations to behold. Which is too bad because I like the gentle quirkiness that Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis bring to the movies they do together. One can almost feel the love they pour into their work: well-thought-out, carefully crafted, professionally done pieces of entertainment. Humble fables on a grand scale. They consciously try not to insult the audience's intelligence or offend them in any way. But the operative word I'm using here is "consciously". And, once we finally recognize what the moral of the fable MEANS, what it is is deeply disturbing.

Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) is a time-obsessed overseas manager for Fed Ex whose plane crashes and gets stranded alone in a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean and, when he gets back, he finds that he has lost everything that mattered for him and helped him survive his ordeal. Now, totally lost and alone, he must decide what road to take to go on with his life. Not a bad idea for an adventure movie, even if they turned it into a silly no-brainer, which this movie clearly isn't. Being that so, what happened?

For starters, there is not one moment in "Cast Away" where I felt that anything was at stake. Not once. Since we know that at some point he will get back home (those fat exposition scenes at the beginning are ripe for some neat payoffs), we at least expect for something terrifying to happen to him while he is in the island. And so we sit back and wait for those moments of transcendence to happen, those shocking instants when he suddenly realizes that he is alone, that he is mortal, that he will never be rescued, that he does not want to die. We just don't want to watch him as he buries a dead body, opens coconuts, makes a fire, knocks out an abscessed tooth, or builds a raft. We in the audience want to FEEL what is going on inside this man. Those moments never do come. Perhaps the most significant episode, where he tries to take his own life, is never actually shown (but rather "explained" later in the most naked, and weakest, scene of the movie). What we end up getting is a gleam in his eye, a volleyball, and the sound of falling coconuts, and that last one is played for a couple of startlers and a laugh.

Hanks works very hard. Harder than on any other thing he has done up to this point (production was shut for one year until he lost fifty pounds), and he IS impressive (he is a gifted actor); but he is (still) a lightweight actor, and he is paralyzed by the too-worked-out conception, this goddamned control-freak mania among filmmakers to tie every single loose filament together until there is nothing, not a single open space for us to walk into and rightfully reclaim as ours.

There is something else simmering under the surface of this movie. "Cast Away"? What it is being casted away? Is it doubts? Hopes? Fear? Jealousy? Love? Chuck Noland hated that island and returned to the white middle-class values he was violently torn off; he has ice in a glass again; his work; he lost his girl but still has another chance.

At the end, we get our moment of transcendence, the conception this movie was working towards from the beginning: Noland, alone in the intersection where the movie started, looks around at the four roads he has to choose from. His brow is clean. No words come out of his mouth. What decision is he going to make? Music. Fade to black. End credits.

My guess is he doesn't need to make any decision: he is Everyman: we are meant to decide for him. We witnessed his decency, concern, bravery, toughness, tenacity, and self-reliance. He didn't really need anyone to survive. We can do.

If Tom Hanks doesn't hurry up and cleans up his act he will turn into the favorite poster boy for the ultra conservative right.

Book burnings and Nazi flags should be the next step.

15 Minutes (2001)

A THRILLER IN CYAN

[27 March 2001]

What can you say about any run-of-the-mill yarn (such as this one) that hasn't been said already?

Well…

"Fifteen Minutes" is a knockout of a thriller.

It's taut, slick, fast, clever. With plenty of shocking surprises. Featuring two memorably vicious amoral villains. And well-written roles for Robert De Niro and Edward Burns.

Er…

The action sequences are well handled.

Um…

The release prints are repellently bluish (as it is with any other New Line and Fine Line movies; if you don't believe me, check it out).

Even the reds, yellows, and oranges are steeped in blue (you can go and check that one out, as well).

What else… What else…

Oh, yeah!

It's a simple-minded critique on the unworthiness and untrustworthiness of the media. A xenophobic rabble-rouser. A reactionary call for isolationism. Dirty Harry crossed with Death Wish crossed with the comic strip meanness of a Tarantino manifesto crossed with Stanley Kramer.

"Fifteen Minutes" is a knockout of a thriller.

The Big Lebowski (1998)

A DUDE AND HIS RUG

[27 March 2001]

SPOILERS, SPOILERS AND EVEN MORE SPOILERS! SO, WATCH OUT!

Basically, this movie is about a dude and his rug. Jeff Lebowski (who likes to be addressed as "The Dude") is an amiably indolent aging hipster that demands retribution when two strangers, mistaking him with another Lebowski, break into his apartment, push him around, and pee on his rug. When the other Lebowski, a gaseous old tycoon, refuses to do anything about the matter, The Dude simply helps himself with one of the old-timer's rug on his way out. That's the beginning of "The Big Lebowski", a sunny, shaggy-dog valentine for all the idlers and drifters, dreamers and non-conformists that languidly float around the periphery of the city of Los Angeles, the City of Dreams.

The movie was obviously written with Jeff Bridges in mind by Ethan and Joel Coen and, for once, their stylized off-the-wall pyrotechnics make better sense. Sporting an unkempt goatee and a pot belly, Bridges, the most unfussy of actors, disappears inside The Dude and gives the movie its own scruffy soul (he's in almost every scene), steering it effortlessly while he casually strolls across the screen. It's a classic comic performance.

The Coen Brothers are excellent kinetic filmmakers who, aware that film time and film space is geometrical, and that human nature is ridiculous, come out with prodigiously complex cosmic jokes, like two freak astrophysicists on an acid trip. Sometimes the ride is memorably amusing, as in "Fargo" and "Raising Arizona", and sometimes it is ornately mindbending, as in "Miller's Crossing" and "Barton Fink". On "The Big Lebowski" the joke is that the joke itself gets forgotten. Even the persian rug that The Dude snatches away is stolen midway through the film and barely ever gets mentioned again.

Apart from the rug, the movie features a tumbleweed, a good-ole-boy drawlin' narrator, bowling balls, two bowling pals, a bowling alley, a guy named "Jesus", the tycoon and his secretary, an abducted girl, a suitcase full of money, some Norwegian punks, a prattling nympho painter, a fat performing artist, an oily gangster, a mean policeman, an even meaner cab driver, a sawed-off toe, a bitten-out ear, an otter, a can full of ashes, and Jeff Bridges, who grounds this whacko comedy into the real world. Without him it would have turned into another abstract pattern.

The Devils (1971)

A DEMONIC CRAVING, OR: BRING ON THE EMPTY GUILLOTINES!

[27 March 2001]

The first time I saw "The Devils" was in a moviehouse in Cordoba, Spain, in the summer of nineteen seventy-eight, and from time to time I rent it (in that HIDEOUSLY grainy and muddy-colored full-screen video version) to see if it has gotten any better or any worse.

I did so recently, of course, and, well, it is no MORE an adorable film today than it was back then. It's still a BARBAROUSLY obscene pageant of dementedly cruel tableaux but, honestly, after the CARTE BLANCHE that the free world has given to the media to DELIGHT us with the unimaginable (and then some), it has lost, well, some of its pizzazz, really.

Whether it is a masterpiece or not it is a matter that is better left to the ESTIMABLE opinion of the film intelligentsia.

Needless to say, it is a film that I do NOT like.

Anyone who SAYS that LIKES a movie that features (among other grotesqueries) a transvestite Huguenot-shooting Louis the Thirteenth, a masturbating hunchbacked NUN, two repulsively leering hair-stylists CUM medical practitioners, more nuns going berserk, Murray Melvin making funny faces, still MORE rampaging nuns, and the bubbling skin of Oliver Reed as he BURNS at the stake, should have his (or her) head examined.

Anyway, it is not a movie to be LIKED, but rather to be EXPERIENCED. Vicariously.

Ah, yes. I cannot help but ADMIRE the sheer gall of Russell for actually conceiving this stuff. Then persuade sober and rational human beings to finance it. Thereupon, scream "Action!", yell "This is a wrap!" And afterwards slap together and help USHER into release this outrageous contraption.

I can VIVIDLY imagine the eyes of the double-u bee executives popping out of their sockets.

Hopefully, some day, us film lovers we'll be REWARDED with a few wide-screen and color-corrected screenings. The print I saw twenty-three years ago was MARVELOUS: the print was untouched, the colour lustrous, the definition extraordinary. I wouldn't care for anything less.

Atrocity has NEVER looked any better.

(I certainly hope they don't keep us WAITING for too long on that account; things are getting just so COMPLICATED in this crazy world.)

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

A LAST MESSAGE

[24 March 2001]

Reportedly, when the executives of one, now defunct, American film company saw "Saló", which they helped co-finance and had distribution rights on, they were so disturbed and embarrassed that they didn't know what to do. Are we going to release this thing? With our company name on it? Where?

They had to show that they released it somewhere in the U.S. or territories.

So they did. In a small theater in El Condado area near San Juan, Puerto Rico.

There's where I saw it. In the mid-70's. With the film company's name on it.

Is it any good? Well, I'm no great admirer of Pasolini. Frankly, I find his movies intolerable. And "Saló" is no exception. But, unlike his Trilogy of Life ("The Decameron", "Canterbury Tales", "Arabian Nights") where he at least displayed some flair and humor, this one is a different animal.

His style was always somewhat ponderous. In "Saló" it is heavily, oppressively didactic: static tableaux-style framing, a deliberately slow pace, no humor whatsoever, and actors who don't play characters but conceits. Although Pasolini uses De Sade's "120 Days of Sodom" as scaffolding and as a pointed commentary, "Saló" is actually based on real events that happened in the Republic of Saló in Northern Italy, where a group of wealthy fascists abducted a large group of young men and women, went on to debase them, and after they were done with them they killed them. Pasolini staged all the scenes as demonstrations of degradation and cruelty. And he does not flinch.

At the end he includes a bibliography.

It's an unpleasant experience.

Clearly, Pasolini, an award-winning poet and one of the leading intellectuals of his time, was very angry when he did this moving picture. He wanted to send a message to Italy and to the world.

It was his last film.

Months later he was murdered.

After several weeks of being in release, the theater was raided by our local vice authorities.

Manster (1959)

THE THIRD EYE

[24 March 2001]

I saw this thing as a child, for chrissakes, and still vividly remember that darned eye! Since I didn't exactly knew what a movie was (I was a VERY SMALL little runt) and didn't understand a word of English, and though the movie was subtitled in Spanish I didn't yet know how to read, I was absolutely terrified! Were there really people around us who grew eyes on their shoulders, turn into really scary monkeys that split in half, and then each half tried to strangle each other? I don't understand. Is this for REAL!?

It really took me a while to get over that one, I'll tell ya, until I saw The H-Man Monster and the whole stinking nightmare started over again.

Is this for REAL!?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Drawlers

[22 March 2001]

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Ethan and Joel Coen are endlessly imaginative minimalist filmmakers who suffer that paradoxically debilitating disease that attack most filmmakers who want to work on a larger scale: the bigger their budget is, the worse the films come out. "O Brother, Where Art Thou" is not the nightmare that "The Hudsucker Proxy" was; this time they keep their energy in check and the film buzzes along pretty smoothly. That's not the problem, but THE problem. They are, like Terry Gilliam and Oliver Stone, helplessly and inevitably at the mercy of their own compulsive inventiveness. They simply cannot stop that stream of ideas that come out. They have to put it up there on the screen. It's their temperament. But, unlike Gilliam, who is a babbler, and Stone, who is a screamer, both Coens are drawlers. They seem enthralled by the infinite possibilities of shaggy dog looseness. Perhaps their most successful demonstration was "The Big Lebowski", where they had the talented Jeff Bridges, who is easygoing drifting negligence incarnate, as the motor that drove the movie towards a satisfying nowhere. This time around they weren't so lucky. "O Brother, Who Art Thou", based on Homer's "The Odyssey", is a chore to get through. Their unrelentingly lazy pace is not helped by all those production values, as well by a grossly misconceived scene at the middle of the movie where a crazy fat psychopath realistically machine-guns down a cow and another gets run over with a car. When that happens the movie stops cold, and no amount of the tons of talent of George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson or of the other members of the cast, and no matter how funny or ingenious the filmmakers could ever get, literally nobody can resurrect this movie. After that, their creativeness gets oppressive.

Traffic (2000)

A positive urge

[22 March 2001]

A marvelous movie. Now that the Hollywood executive's marketing mentality has entered the mainstream via those hilariously mindbending paradoxes ("High Concept" = No-Brainer), I should safely guess that we all wonder what tortures of the damned Soderberg went through as he shopped around his movie to the studios. That he finally made it is a testament to his force of will, as well as to the bravery of his producers, his actors and technicians, and of USA Films.

Since I don't want to spoil this movie by saying too much, I'd rather go Hollywood and try my best to describe it in one phrase.

It's an intricate study of the drug trade between Mexico City, Tijuana, the border towns of California, and Middle America.

It's a star-studded ensemble piece where we follow four sets of characters in (please, don't laugh) color-coded sequences.

It's a moral study of hope amidst corruption.

It's a feel-good movie for intelligent adults.

More, please.

Bride of the Monster (1955)

A HOMAGE FOR THE FALLEN

[22 March 2001]

SPOILERS FROM THE BEGINNING, SPOILERS ALL THE WAY AND TO THE VERY END.

Edward D. Wood, Jr. directed this movie under the direst of circumstances. He had no money. The big studios rejected him. His penchant for hard drinking and for wearing women's clothing marked him as a dangerous misfit in the eyes of the civilized world.

Very early, he mastered the convoluted and treacherous waters of the no-budget, Z-grade, -and-grits world of 50's exploitation underworld. A passionately ambitious young man with admittedly little filmmaking gifts and a wild sense of humor, he had the uncanny ability for cutting corners at exactly the wrong turns. He was a better editor than actor, a better actor than a screenwriter, a better screenwriter than a director.

"Bride of the Monster" (or "Bride of the Atom", before those greedy financiers recklessly retitled it to fit their grandiose investment-return plans) concerns the tragic last days of Dr. Eric Vornoff. A woman reporter, investigating the disappearances of several locals, discovers the mansion of Vornoff, where he lives with Lobo, an early experimental mistake and faithful manservant, and an mean-spirited octopus. Vornoff is inflamed with great vengeance and furious anger at the world, which, once he perfects his experiments, he plans to take over with a legion of atomic supermen. After several interesting scenes, the woman is abducted by Vornoff and is about to be subjected to another of his experiments and mate her with Lobo, but her boyfriend arrives just in time to save her and get into a really exciting wrestling match with Lobo. Minutes later, Lobo straps Vornoff to the table, releasing a frightful amount of atomic energy that transforms the beleaguered scientist into a gigantic monster. Vornoff vanquishes Lobo in a thrilling arm-to-arm battle, and after some more hair-raising pyrotechnics, the hero and heroine and the police pursue the colossal Dr. Vornoff across the swampy night. Vornoff falls into the octopus pit where the unequal magnetic forces of the octopus, his own atomic power, and a bullet fired by a policeman unleashes a ghastly nuclear explosion, and the surviving characters walk away to face a (presumably) uncertain future.

This atmospheric chamber drama, shot in magnificently greyish black & white, offers no suitable answers because it poses no coherent questions. Shrewdly, Wood, Jr. constructs a deliberately contrived plot to deceive his audience: the heroes are not the young couple, who are obviously standard-issue stereotypes (he has no sympathy for them at all!), but Vornoff and Lobo. He shifts his allegiance to the visionaries and to the downtrodden who, ultimately and tragically, fail and die.

Using spit-and-cardboard sets, cheap technicians, bad actors and non-actors, an inert rubber octopus, and the aging, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi as Eric Vornoff (a casting coup if there was ever one), Wood, Jr. artlessly tells the ultimate Poverty-Row tale about a tremendous fall from grace.

It's a horrible movie.

Instinct (1999)

Conceits and Rethreads

[19 March 2001]

No more a movie than a concoction of wildly disparate conceits thrown together in the most opportunistic manner possible: a rethread of several movies all running in the same screen at the same time, from "Silence of the Lambs" to "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" to several animated Disney feature cartoons (where the baddies and the cuties clearly belong) to the repulsive mawkishness of an old MGM tearjerker of the thirties: toss a young-and-callous-and-ambitious-but-naïve-and-good-hearted black psychiatrist (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) inside a grotesquely unpleasant insane asylum (where everything and everyone is lit in the same repellent bluish hue), add some seriously deranged lunatics, a couple of cute-as-button bunny-loonies, several insanely sadistic guards, a nice looking gal for love interest, Anthony Hopkins in another one of his automatic-pilot Oh-well-let's-do-this-one-to-pay-the-rent performances, and several dozen pounds of fraudulent and racist psycho-nonsense about murder and instinctual behaviour. The result is an offensive mess: not good as entertainment, and not even good as the demonstration of a theory. It's sham.

The Hunting Party (1971)

Enthralling Nonsense

[19 March 2001]

The last (and only) time I saw this somewhat odd western (an American production made with British financing and shot in Spain) was in 1974 on a second-bill and I have never been able to shake off the effect it had on me after all those years. It's an awfully flawed movie: beautifully photographed locations alternating with appallingly cheap process shots, a totally wasted supporting cast of wonderful character actors (Mitchell Ryan, L.Q. Jones, Simon Oakland, G.D Spradling), main leads with different acting styles that don't completely jell (with Reed being the most exaggerated, Hackman the most effective, Bergen the most detached), and violence so horrifyingly mean and relentless that it kicks down the rather slim scaffolding in which the movie is built (and which was reused again in "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing", another Bill Norton-scripted movie). Not a classic western or anything else by any means, it still has some great scattered moments, though. My favorite (and, I dunno, this might be a spoiler): right after the first massacre, Reed benumbedly stares at the far away hills where Hackman and his rich hunting companions are safely stationed. Hackman has Reed right in the crosshairs of his telescopic sight, and Hackman's friends goad him to kill Reed once and for all. Hackman looks at the almost forlorn-looking Reed and, lowering his rifle, decides not to rub him out, for the time being. But, did I like the movie as a whole? As I said, I saw it 27 years ago in a crystal-clear, uncut wide-screen print and was absolutelly enthralled by the hypnotic power of this nonsense, but I am not going to fool myself or others into believing that it is a "marvelous" movie, because it isn't.