What better way to celebrate Halloween than with a REALLY crappy nu-slasher and a moderately less crappy stoner comedy about a vulgar hockey player?
Double Review: Hell Fest / Army & Coop
Showing posts with label exploitation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label exploitation. Show all posts
Friday, October 19, 2018
Saturday, October 22, 2016
Paying Tribute To The Godfather of Gore ... and Direct Marketing
Herschell Gordon Lewis wasn’t just a pioneer in exploitation movies and aggressive advertising. Indeed, his long, unsung career embodies everything that makes America truly great.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X
Unless you are somebody really into either gory 1960s B-movies or general advertising copywriting, you've probably never heard of Herschell Gordon Lewis, who died Sept. 26 at the ripe old age of 90. But if you do know who Lewis was, he probably made some sort of palpable impact on your life. Indeed, if you've ever watched a John Waters movie (or tossed a handful of direct mail in the garbage), you are indirectly feeling the second-hand impact of the man himself.
Nicknamed "The Godfather of Gore," Lewis is probably best known for helming 1963's Blood Feast, a drive-in classic often considered the first true "splatter" film in the annals of American cinema. The pastel-colored horror flick (legend has it, the entire thing was filmed in just a couple of days) was notorious for its groundbreaking (and stomach-churning) violence, including scenes in which nubile young women have their tongues bloodily sawed off and their eyes gruesomely plucked out by, of all things, an evil, Egyptian-deity worshiping … caterer. Believe it or not, such fare was probably a step-up from Lewis' previous bread and butter, a series of nudist colony "musicals."
While Lewis' directorial oeuvre only span from 1959 to 1972 (although he did make a few cheapies in the early 2000s), he nonetheless managed to produce a high volume of all-time degenerate cinema masterpieces. Who can forget his 1964 hillbilly magnum opus Two Thousand Maniacs!, which centered on a bunch of Yankees traveling down south only to be held captive by Confederate ghosts (cleverly discussed as Georgian rubes) and mutilated and tortured to death via such ingenious execution methods as being rolled down steep hills in barrels lined with razor sharp nails? Or what about 1970's Wizard of Gore, about a magician who brutally murders women on stage while the audience thinks all of the neon blood splashing all over the place is just a larf? And that's nothing to say of his other genre works, including the moonshining epic This Stuff'll Kill Ya!, the wife-swapping "drama" Suburban Roulette and the juvenile delinquency-fest Just For The Hell Of It. Heck, he even made a couple of kids movies while he was at it, stuffing in offerings like Jimmy the Boy Wonder and The Magic Land of Mother Goose in between A Taste of Blood and She-Devils on Wheels.
Ever the renaissance man, Lewis gave up the B-movie trade in the early 1970s and promptly began his second career - this time, as one of the pioneers of "direct marketing" advertising. Indeed, he wrote no less than 21 books about his experiences in copywriting, many of which - such as Open Me Now and Marketing Mayhem - conveyed the same sensational bluntness that made his cinematic exploits so (in)famous.
Clearly, they don’t make them like Lewis anymore, that’s for sure. The living embodiment of the practically deceased Protestant Work Ethic, the man immortalized as “The Godfather of Gore” was utterly obsessed with production. Whether or not what he churned out was particularly good was an afterthought; the important thing was that he got that damned movie out about a dude who paints pictures of posies with hobo blood or that manual about antique dinner plate collection out under-budget and ahead-of-schedule. Some say he was a cheapskate, others say he was a brass-balled exploiter. Indeed, many call him a legitimate con artist, seeing as how he actually spent three years in prison for running all sorts of schemes to finance his film ventures, including a fake abortion clinic. But the one thing you can’t ever call him was “lazy.” While many of his contemporaries were layabouts complaining about “a lack of funding,” Lewis went out there and made movies, regardless of the budget, the filming locations or even the actors’ basic ability to speak decipherable English. Lewis was a man who was hell-bent on fulfilling his grandiose visions, and no trifling matters like “a lack of equipment” or “the ability to pay the cast” was going to stop him, either.
Lewis was really the reverse hipster. Instead of reveling in the dull irony of modern existence and worshipping effortlessness as virtue, he was dedicated to getting something out there, no matter the costs or production limitations. The artistes out there can spend three months trying to get the lighting on their abstract macaroni noodle portraits against sexism just right, but for a man like Lewis? Life was too short for “perfectionism,” and instead of wallowing in his own idealism as an excuse for never trying, he was more than content pushing out less-than-high-quality works if it meant being able to move on to the next even better idea. The man was an absolute degenerate cinema (and later, direct marketing) machine, pushing out material like a diarrhetic goose. Sure, nothing he produced can rightly be considered a cinema masterpiece, but then again, Lewis wasn’t in the cinema business - he was in the movie-making industry. And that, ultimately, is what separates him from other cult auteurs like Ed Wood and Ray Dennis Steckler - he was actually a competent filmmaker.
It’s utterly impossible to watch something like The Gore Gore Girls and Monster A-Go Go and not be entertained. Lewis may not have had the storytelling chops of Kurosawa or Fellini, but when it came to making nudity-filled, psychotonic, hyper-technicolor bloodbaths, his work remains unparalleled. Try as they may, not even the heavy hitters of Italian gore cinema like Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci could successfully replicate that redder-than-red meat and potatoes aesthetics of Lewis’ filmography. Even trash cinema icons like John Waters continue to sing Lewis’ praises - when it comes to nailing the atmosphere of Vietnam era, burlesque and acid grindhouse blood and guts jubilee low culture, nobody has ever been a better curator of the times.
While Lewis may not be the greatest American filmmaker of all-time, he may very well be the most American filmmaker ever. Nowhere else in the world could a man like Lewis - an advertising professor turned B-movie kingpin turned white collar felon turned copywriter extraordinaire - ever possibly blossom. No other culture or society on earth could have laid down the soil from which films like Blood Feast or Color Me Blood Red - those idiosyncratic time capsules/condemnations they are - could have sprouted. Only in America, as boxing promoter Don King oft states, would someone like Herschell Gordon Lewis not only have an opportunity to make such out-there movies, but actually complete them, sell them and make enough money off them to live in relative financial security for the rest of his life.
Many, many moons ago, an interviewer asked Lewis what he wanted his epitaph to read. His response? “He seen somethin’ different. And he done it.”
Indeed, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate what made the life of this cheesy horror movie director-turned direct marketing guru so noteworthy. He was just a normal - albeit incredibly dedicated - man, who wanted to make movies and even more money. And where he lacked both financial and technical capital, he responded by pumping out a faster glut of “the advertising sells itself” B-movies than anybody else, with an emphasis on the prurient, the icky and the proletariat baiting so keen, one can’t help but consider Lewis a sort of anti-commercial hero - a DuChamp, if you will, who was really, really deft at making no-budget shlockers involving lots of blindingly bright crimson flying all over the place.
Or as the man himself so elegantly put it?
“History books will point out Columbus as the person who made the Americas available for exploitation,” Lewis once remarked. “I guess I can make the same kind of ridiculous claim.”
Nicknamed "The Godfather of Gore," Lewis is probably best known for helming 1963's Blood Feast, a drive-in classic often considered the first true "splatter" film in the annals of American cinema. The pastel-colored horror flick (legend has it, the entire thing was filmed in just a couple of days) was notorious for its groundbreaking (and stomach-churning) violence, including scenes in which nubile young women have their tongues bloodily sawed off and their eyes gruesomely plucked out by, of all things, an evil, Egyptian-deity worshiping … caterer. Believe it or not, such fare was probably a step-up from Lewis' previous bread and butter, a series of nudist colony "musicals."
While Lewis' directorial oeuvre only span from 1959 to 1972 (although he did make a few cheapies in the early 2000s), he nonetheless managed to produce a high volume of all-time degenerate cinema masterpieces. Who can forget his 1964 hillbilly magnum opus Two Thousand Maniacs!, which centered on a bunch of Yankees traveling down south only to be held captive by Confederate ghosts (cleverly discussed as Georgian rubes) and mutilated and tortured to death via such ingenious execution methods as being rolled down steep hills in barrels lined with razor sharp nails? Or what about 1970's Wizard of Gore, about a magician who brutally murders women on stage while the audience thinks all of the neon blood splashing all over the place is just a larf? And that's nothing to say of his other genre works, including the moonshining epic This Stuff'll Kill Ya!, the wife-swapping "drama" Suburban Roulette and the juvenile delinquency-fest Just For The Hell Of It. Heck, he even made a couple of kids movies while he was at it, stuffing in offerings like Jimmy the Boy Wonder and The Magic Land of Mother Goose in between A Taste of Blood and She-Devils on Wheels.
Ever the renaissance man, Lewis gave up the B-movie trade in the early 1970s and promptly began his second career - this time, as one of the pioneers of "direct marketing" advertising. Indeed, he wrote no less than 21 books about his experiences in copywriting, many of which - such as Open Me Now and Marketing Mayhem - conveyed the same sensational bluntness that made his cinematic exploits so (in)famous.
Clearly, they don’t make them like Lewis anymore, that’s for sure. The living embodiment of the practically deceased Protestant Work Ethic, the man immortalized as “The Godfather of Gore” was utterly obsessed with production. Whether or not what he churned out was particularly good was an afterthought; the important thing was that he got that damned movie out about a dude who paints pictures of posies with hobo blood or that manual about antique dinner plate collection out under-budget and ahead-of-schedule. Some say he was a cheapskate, others say he was a brass-balled exploiter. Indeed, many call him a legitimate con artist, seeing as how he actually spent three years in prison for running all sorts of schemes to finance his film ventures, including a fake abortion clinic. But the one thing you can’t ever call him was “lazy.” While many of his contemporaries were layabouts complaining about “a lack of funding,” Lewis went out there and made movies, regardless of the budget, the filming locations or even the actors’ basic ability to speak decipherable English. Lewis was a man who was hell-bent on fulfilling his grandiose visions, and no trifling matters like “a lack of equipment” or “the ability to pay the cast” was going to stop him, either.
Lewis was really the reverse hipster. Instead of reveling in the dull irony of modern existence and worshipping effortlessness as virtue, he was dedicated to getting something out there, no matter the costs or production limitations. The artistes out there can spend three months trying to get the lighting on their abstract macaroni noodle portraits against sexism just right, but for a man like Lewis? Life was too short for “perfectionism,” and instead of wallowing in his own idealism as an excuse for never trying, he was more than content pushing out less-than-high-quality works if it meant being able to move on to the next even better idea. The man was an absolute degenerate cinema (and later, direct marketing) machine, pushing out material like a diarrhetic goose. Sure, nothing he produced can rightly be considered a cinema masterpiece, but then again, Lewis wasn’t in the cinema business - he was in the movie-making industry. And that, ultimately, is what separates him from other cult auteurs like Ed Wood and Ray Dennis Steckler - he was actually a competent filmmaker.
It’s utterly impossible to watch something like The Gore Gore Girls and Monster A-Go Go and not be entertained. Lewis may not have had the storytelling chops of Kurosawa or Fellini, but when it came to making nudity-filled, psychotonic, hyper-technicolor bloodbaths, his work remains unparalleled. Try as they may, not even the heavy hitters of Italian gore cinema like Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci could successfully replicate that redder-than-red meat and potatoes aesthetics of Lewis’ filmography. Even trash cinema icons like John Waters continue to sing Lewis’ praises - when it comes to nailing the atmosphere of Vietnam era, burlesque and acid grindhouse blood and guts jubilee low culture, nobody has ever been a better curator of the times.
While Lewis may not be the greatest American filmmaker of all-time, he may very well be the most American filmmaker ever. Nowhere else in the world could a man like Lewis - an advertising professor turned B-movie kingpin turned white collar felon turned copywriter extraordinaire - ever possibly blossom. No other culture or society on earth could have laid down the soil from which films like Blood Feast or Color Me Blood Red - those idiosyncratic time capsules/condemnations they are - could have sprouted. Only in America, as boxing promoter Don King oft states, would someone like Herschell Gordon Lewis not only have an opportunity to make such out-there movies, but actually complete them, sell them and make enough money off them to live in relative financial security for the rest of his life.
Many, many moons ago, an interviewer asked Lewis what he wanted his epitaph to read. His response? “He seen somethin’ different. And he done it.”
Indeed, I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate what made the life of this cheesy horror movie director-turned direct marketing guru so noteworthy. He was just a normal - albeit incredibly dedicated - man, who wanted to make movies and even more money. And where he lacked both financial and technical capital, he responded by pumping out a faster glut of “the advertising sells itself” B-movies than anybody else, with an emphasis on the prurient, the icky and the proletariat baiting so keen, one can’t help but consider Lewis a sort of anti-commercial hero - a DuChamp, if you will, who was really, really deft at making no-budget shlockers involving lots of blindingly bright crimson flying all over the place.
Or as the man himself so elegantly put it?
“History books will point out Columbus as the person who made the Americas available for exploitation,” Lewis once remarked. “I guess I can make the same kind of ridiculous claim.”
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
The Nine Most Incredible Things About 'Fight For Your Life!' (1977)
Highlighting the most amazing, awe-inspiring elements of the legendary blaxploitation masterpiece!
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X
Back in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, there was a big kerfuffle once VHS tapes starting becoming commonplace. What was effectively the U.K.’s equivalent of the Moral Majority decided they didn’t like the idea of kids getting their hands on bloody exploitation and horror movies, so the Director of Public Prosecutions drew up a list of 72 movies they wanted BANNED across the isles. Now, for the most part, the movies were your expected grab bag of grisly horror, pseudo-snuff and crass exploitation - Tenebrae, Faces of Death, S.S. Experiment Camp, etc. - but taking a nice, long gander at the full list, one movie in particular jumps out at you.
OK, so including stuff like Driller Killer, I Spit On Your Grave, Cannibal Holocaust and even The Evil Dead, as fantastical as they may be, kinda' sorta' makes sense, but how in the world did some seemingly random blaxploitation flick called Fight For Your Life make the cut?
On the surface, Fight For Your Life may appear to be just another late 1970s grindhouse cheapie, but folks, this movie is without question one of the most remarkable exploitation films in the history of cinema. I've been watching movies of its ilk for the better part of 20 years, but I don't think I've ever seen a film comparable to this one. It's just so unabashedly sleazy, trashy and nihilistic, but at the same time, it's absolutely impossible to look away. And of course, it being in the vein of your tried-and-true E.C. Comics morality play, you know it's only a matter of time until the victimized get their revenge, and when they do? Boy howdy, is it a sight to behold.
I know it sounds like hyperbole, but this really is one of the most incredible movies I've ever seen in my life. There's just such an insane amount of unrepentant nastiness to it, that even with the (mostly) crappy acting factored into the mix, you can't help but stare in awe of what's happening on screen. While exploitation cinema in the late 1970s was pretty much hellbent on pushing buttons and not giving half a fuck what the majority considered appropriate, this movie just takes it to an entirely different level of scumminess, with scenes so brutal and unnerving - including sequences involving child actors - that you kinda' have to wonder if the director isn't liable for some emotional abuse damages. As thoroughly unpleasant as the central premise of the movie may be (a remorseless racist breaks into a black family's home and berates them with horrific slurs until they slowly turn the tables on their captor), the movie still ports about that libertine, carefree attitude that just about every sensational B-movie of the late 1970s conveyed, and good lord, it even halts the parade of "n-words" and protracted sexual assault sequences every now and then to make some strangely coherent points about the nature of race relations in the U.S., complete with a morally ambiguous ending that is way more intriguing, philosophically, than you could ever possibly imagine a film with a title like Fight For Your Life mustering.
So without further adieu, let's hop knee-deep into that superlative seventies sleaze to mine out the nine most brain-breaking, jaw-dropping, blood-boiling and audience-discomfiting aspects of one of the grand lions of degenerate cinema. Gear up, folks, it's time to ... wait for it ... Fight For Your Life!
The Completely Gratuitous Interracial Romance Subplot!
There are quite a few subplots within Fight For Your Life, but the one involving the family's "mysterious" white friend is probably the movie's most superfluous. So early on, we learn that the Turner family had a young adult son who went off to Vietnam and got killed. While the characters kinda' sorta' tiptoe around the relationship between this seemingly random white girl and the deceased elder child, the film itself makes it clear as day: in flashback scenes spliced around a telephone call, we learn that, yeah, the dead son and this white girl were doing the nasty rather frequently, and if the soundtrack is meant to be any sort of diegetic authority, it was all kinds of soulful lovemaking, too. In a movie glutted with sensationalism, this is probably the most shameless attempt at stirring the proverbial pot; all the filmmakers had to do was throw in one measly line of dialogue about "our deceased son's fiancee" and we would be good to go, but nope! We've got to get that controversial chocolate-on-vanilla doin' it in there, because if there is any sort of reel space that could be used to alienate the hell out of the far less "tolerant" moviegoing masses of the late 1970s, by golly, you had to capitalize on it.
The Insane Amount of Sadism!
The movie's big bad, Jessie Lee Kane, has to be one of the ten greatest villains in the history of the motion picture. Not only is the dude an unabashed racist who thinks it's funny to make black preachers dance like minstrel show characters for his own amusement, he's certainly got quite the homicidal streak runnin' up and down his yellow spine. Before the five minute mark of the movie, he's already blown away a prison guard and robbed a pimp, and if it wasn't made clear as day that this Kane fellow ain't no good, by the time he guns down a liquor store owner in front of his own crying toddler, you'll know this is one all-time son-of-a-bitch we're dealing with right here. And my goodness, the racial pejoratives that fly out of this dude's mouth, even when he isn't raping young women and threatening to engage in lynchings! To give you an idea just how bad his tirades get, his utterances of the euphemisms "monkey-face," "black little booger," "brown dirtballs on a fender," "the most cooperative darkie," and even "jive-ass-coon-nigger" are among his more polite lines of dialogue.
The Wacky, Multicultural Cast of Villains!
Now here's were things get really peculiar. Considering Kane's less-than-secretive white supremacist viewpoints, you really wouldn't expect his two best friends to be anything darker than a jug of mayonnaise, but what do you know, his two partners in crime just so happen to be Asian and Hispanic. As bad as Kane may be, his comrades Chino and Ling might be even more deplorable, seeing as how they usually wind up doing the brunt of the physical dirty work. While there are some signs of tension in the three-way relationship (for example, Chino flips his wig when Kane calls him a "spic" during a dinner sequence that sees Ling eating macaroni and cheese with his bare hands), the three work surprisingly well as a team ... thus, giving us all hope that diversity, especially as it relates to organized crime, might just work out after all.
The Insanely Blunt Sociocultural Commentary!
Of course, it's pretty hard to read Fight For Your Life without exploring its deeper subtext on United States race relations. And here, it's actually quite a bit different from its blaxploitation contemporaries, in the sense that its primary protagonists aren't necessarily railing against the white hegemony a'la Shaft, Superfly and - my personal favorite - Boss Nigger. Indeed, the world of Fight For Your Life, nestled in upstate New York, is a remarkably peaceful one, devoid of any palpable racial hostility. White kids play with black kids and the local police do nothing but speak highly of the patriarch of the Turner household (a local reverend who, as a hilarious coincidence, is named "Ted.") In that, Kane can be seen as some sort of non-cultural force from the woodworks, sort of a throwback to our less civilized, extremely ethnocentric ways as a collective. Interestingly, the filmmakers never attempt to posit Kane's hateful ideology as anything even remotely resembling the consensus, mainstream "white" viewpoint whatsoever - indeed, he's just an aberrational sociopath that hates everybody - white, black, brown, yellow, red, or periwinkle - indiscriminately. From a "reading way too much into this shit" perspective, I wonder what sort of subconscious statement the filmmakers intentionally or unintentionally sought to make with the film - and with scenes in which photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Kennedys and even Muhammad Ali are "trapped" in between two omni-bigoted lunatics wearing ropes for suspenders, I assure you there is plenty of material to work with.
The Totally Unmentioned Halloween Aesthetics!
OK, this one is merely cosmetic and a completely superficial reason to enjoy the movie, but man, do I love the festive fall decorations in this flick. Although they never really come out and tell you when the film takes place, it's probably a safe bet to assume that ... because of all of the jack-o'-lanterns and papier-mache turkeys all over the place, not to mention the very crispy leaves dotting the woodlands ... it takes place sometime in fall. Really, trying to find out which holiday is closer - Halloween or Thanksgiving - in the diegesis of Fight For Your Life is kinda' like trying to figure out which state Springfield is in on The Simpsons. Regardless, pretty much ever scene features some sort of autumnal kitsch, from skeletal decorations to big old heaping helpings of pumpkin pie. And while holiday dysmorphia is usually points off for most films, here, it actually works in Fight For Your Life's favor - by keeping the timeline vague, it's equally suited for both perennial Halloween and Thanksgiving viewings.
Anybody Can Die At Any Minute ... And I Do Mean Anybody!
As the undisputed god of B-movie sleaze Joe Bob Briggs can affirm, the ultimate hallmark of a great exploitation movie is the simple tenet that, at any given moment, any character in the film can die. Well, Fight For Your Life is a movie that DEFINITELY keeps that unwritten degenerate cinema rule close to heart, with numerous characters you feel are "off-limits" - practically out of nowhere - getting killed in horrifically brutal ways. Women, children, cops, bad guys, supporting characters, the main characters ... not a single one of them is diegetically "protected" from an early exit from the canonical mortal coil, and knowing the filmmakers are crazy enough to off anybody at anytime definitely gives the film a much more intense vibe than its chronological genre contemporaries.
Kane's Comeuppance!
Of course, you know it's just a matter of time until the tables turn and Kane ends up becoming the victim instead of the victimizer, and the great reversal of fortune does not disappoint. While the police surround the Turner household, the family slowly manages to overpower their captors and devise an escape plan. First, Chino literally gets his penis shot off, and then Ling gets defenestrated, complete with a huge-assed shard of glass puncturing his sternum like a stalactite. While Kane manages to fend off the knife-wielding brood for a little while, it's not long before he finds himself starring down Mr. Turner in the film's riveting denoument. But before we get to the thrilling conclusion of Fight For Your Life, first, let us reflect on the movie's most memorable protagonist...
Granny's Sassiness!
While William Sanderson's Kane is definitely the star of the movie, Granny Turner is definitely going to be the audience's favorite character. Even before the proverbial doo doo hits the metaphorical fan, she's already sassing it up like a more melanated Sophia Petrillo, at one point encouraging her grandson to rally behind the "black power" cause instead of embracing his father's more pacifistic approach to racial equality. And of course, by the time Kane and his thugs invade the Turner household, Granny is the first to start mouthing off to her captors, at one point calling Kane "white trash" to his face! While Granny definitely has some great lines in the flick, absolutely NOTHING compares to the moment where she finally gets her hands on Kane's gun, lays a bead on his ass and states the single greatest line of dialogue in the history of cinema: "don't move or I'll blow your motherfucking balls off!" To this day, why Granny Turner didn't star in at least seven or eight spinoff movies of her own remains one of the greatest cinematic enigmas of the 20th century.
The Concluding (yet peculiarly demoralizing) Gunfight Finale!
 |
| Black supremacist, white supremacist ... this movie has something for everybody, no matter who your sworn racial enemy is! |
Folks, I simply cannot overstate how badly you need to see this movie. It's shocking and corny and the acting is impossibly shitty and great at the very same time and it's sensationalistic as all fuck but it's also strangely philosophical without beating you over the head with blunt subtext. It's an immensely depraved film, but it's also immensely entertaining, the sort of good old fashioned American degenerate cinema that hasn't been en vogue since the early 1990s and the heyday of Blockbuster Video and Pay-Per-View softcore erotica. It's an absolute masterpiece of the theatre of the American proletariat, and in a just world, it would be considered a genre masterpiece on par with Petey Wheatstraw and Dolemite.
Per IMDB, this was the only major motion picture the director - some dude named Robert A. Edelson - ever helmed. Strangely enough, it was written by a guy named Straw Weisman, whose oeuvre runs the gamut from Godzilla 1985 to the 2002 John Ritter vehicle Man of the Year. As far as the cast goes, most of the actors gave up the thespian craft shortly after the film (gee, I wonder why) but quite a few players went on to have sustained careers in show business. William Sanderson, for example, has had quite the career as a character actor, later starring in Blade Runner and portraying one of the Larrys on Newhart. The little kid, Reggie Rock Blythewood, grew up to be a pretty successful TV writer, penning several episodes of A Different World and New York Undercover in addition to mainstream Hollywood releases Get on the Bus and Biker Boyz. And yes, even Chino himself - Daniel Faraldo - hasn't had a shortage of work, with his IMDB page listing numerous gigs on The A-Team, Magnum, P.I., and virtually every other TV show in the 1980s, too.
So what are you waiting for? The movie isn't hard at all to find on the YouTubes and Dailymotions, and it's one of the few completely buried hidden treasures from the late 1970s grindhouse era that hasn't been memed and overanalyzed to death yet. It's abrasive and aggressive and offensive and awkward and cheesy and sinister and prurient and demoralizing all at the same time, and unlike throwaway larfs like Brotherhood of Death, this one actually manages to stick with you long after the VCR cogs stop a spinnin'. It's long past time this movie got recognition as the indie classic it truly is ... and trust me, you definitely will not be disappointed or dissatisfied once the screen fades to black (power?) here...
Friday, July 1, 2016
A Drive-In To Diversity?
How B-movies and exploitation flicks of the 1970s helped the masses embrace multiculturalism.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X
The term “multiculturalism” gets thrown around a lot these days. Alike all dogmas and doctrines, its definition is loosely-defined and what it entails, precisely, fluctuates a great deal from person to person. That said, the basic premise of the ideology is that it’s communally beneficial for everybody to respect the racial and cultural background of everybody else.
Now, for all of us Gen Y and Gen Z kids, that kind of thinking is almost second-nature. Well, duh, of course you are supposed to respect the belief systems and customs of people different from you. Why in the world wouldn’t you? Alas, such a mentality is still a fairly new concept in the American consciousness, which really, remained until very recently – and in some parts of the country, still remains – locked into ethnic enclaves.
There has been a lot of conjecture as to how “multiculturalism” became an ingrained, if not wholly expected, aspect of the American condition. Obviously, the demographical changes over the last 50 years almost necessitated it, as did the expansion of international trade. Some have said it is an aftereffect of neo-neo-liberalism – with its detractors accusing it of being a Trojan horse for globalization and hyper-political-correctness – and others declare it the end result of rapid technological breakthroughs (the internet being the most obvious example) flattening the “global village” into a much more interconnected place.
But me? If anything, I’d credit it to something a little less obvious – namely, the proliferation of B-movies in the 1970s.
“You mean to tell me that grindhouse and drive-in movies from the Watergate era represents the birth of the American multiculturalism movement?” you may be asking yourself. I know, it’s an absurd premise. Regardless, the fact remains that few cultural movements had as much influence on the public’s perception of diversity as the rise of the often-foreign and always-independently-produced non-Hollywood cult flicks of the disco decade.
In 1975, there was no Internet. Nor were there any smartphones or streaming services like Netflix. For crying aloud, you didn’t even have cable television or VCRs yet. And since the network programming back then was heavily censored to comply with the FCC’s super-strict guidelines, pretty much the only place you could see (relatively) uncompromised moving images was at the local picture show – and whatever they were showing was pretty much your only unfiltered media window to the outside world.
While the local cineplex was treating you to mainstream stuff like The Towering Inferno and The Aristocats, those who ventured to the local B-venues – namely, the scummier in-town, non-chain-operated movie houses and especially the drive-in theaters – saw something completely different. Through a deluge of cheap-o productions and even cheaper acquired films from overseas, the non-mainstream-movie-going masses witnessed a mini-cultural revolution, screening hundreds and hundreds of off-the-beaten-path flicks furtively celebrating the pro-diversity, ultra-progressivist ethos that epitomizes current U.S. culture.
With the elimination of the Hays Code in 1968 (a downright puritanical film production protocol that greatly limited what could be shown on screen), the floodgates immediately burst wide open with all sorts of artistic, poignant films with declarative sociopolitical messages that weren’t previously allowed in the medium. Overnight, visually graphic films with mature plotlines like Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider and The Wild Bunch became the new Hollywood standard, while outside-the-mainstream filmmakers now found themselves with free rein to pretty much show as much simulated sex and violence in their films as they’d like.
While this certainly allotted more thoughtful and provocative mainstream films like Last Tango in Paris and A Clockwork Orange, the relaxing of MPAA standards also proved a boon to indie filmmakers domestic and abroad. This was especially true for those who targeted the often content-starved drive-ins and grindhouses, which would screen just about any set of 35mm reels mailed to them.
America’s first flirtations with multiculturalism as a social construct wasn’t in the hallowed halls of academia or even the rapidly liberalizing mainstream Hollywood industrial-complex (which was seeing its gung-ho patriotic propaganda from stars like avowed racist John Wayne displaced by more morally relativistic and culturally critical films like The Deer Hunter and Dog Day Afternoon.) Rather, it was through all of those abstruse and obscure movies that served as the second half of many a drive-in and arthouse double feature, which not only gleamed real insight into the non-white world, but gave many people of color their first shots at financing, producing, directing and distributing their own works.
For most American filmgoers, their first encounter with international cinema wasn’t the critically acclaimed films of Bergman or Fellini. Rather, their introduction to non-American filmmaking came in the form of bloody Italian slasher flicks like Suspiria and The Twitch of the Death Nerve, Japanese kaiju flicks a’la Godzilla and Rodan and Hong Kong chop-socky masterpieces starring Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan – all the kinds of flicks ignored by chain theaters and lovingly embraced by B-movie venues.
Modern black cinema didn’t begin with the works of Spike Lee, or even the films of Sidney Portier. Rather, the starting point for true African-American filmmaking began with drive-in baiting fare like Shaft, Superfly, Cooley High, Blacula, Ganja & Hess and especially Sweet Sweetback’s Badasssss Song, which was marketed with one of the greatest taglines in the history of the motion picture: “rated X by an all-white jury.”
Think feminist and LGBT cinema started in the mid-1980s? One of the first U.S. movies directed by a woman to get any kind of wide release in the waning days of the Hays Code wasn’t some artsy-fartsy, pro-women’s lib screed, but rather, Stephanie Rothman’s campy, exploitative vampire opus Blood Bath in 1966. Beating her to the punch by two years was acclaimed filmmaker Shirley Clarke, whose 1963 drive-in potboiler The Cool World is now considered not only one of the greatest proto-blaxploitation films ever, but is deemed “culturally and historically significant” by the National Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. And where would American LGBT cinema be without the pioneering efforts of B-movie aficionado John Waters, whose groundbreaking late ‘60s and early ‘70s films Pink Flamingos and Mondo Trasho made their marks not in the bohemian galleries of Manhattan, but the grimy, rundown theaters and dilapidated drive-ins flanking the north Atlantic countryside?
Years before mainstream Hollywood film got on board The Silent Spring-spawned environmentalism bandwagon, low-and-no-budget shlockers like Day of the Triffids, Frogs, Kingdom of the Spiders, Piranha and The Prophecy were already indoctrinating viewers with the virtues of ecological sensitivity. And literally decades before the namesake became an inescapable academic construct, drive-in fare like The Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave were getting down and dirty exploring – and criticizing – America’s “rape culture.”
That’s to say little of the genre classic that furtively explored deep, complex sociopolitical matters that mainstream film at the time didn’t have the guts to address, like rural racism (Night of the Living Dead), post-traumatic stress disorder (Deathdream) and the interwoven nature of cyclical poverty and the drug trade (The Harder They Come.)
Even the films that occupied that intersectional “safe space” between studio-backed populism and low-culture indie sleaze in the grindhouse era had a tendency to promote more progressive, anti-traditionalist values. Perhaps the ‘70s most iconic action movie star was Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack, an anti-racist, make-believe-Native-American “pacifist” who walloped bigots and spread the gospel of new-wave leftism in a series of three surprisingly lucrative films throughout the decade. Even the filmography of Burt Reynolds – the veritable John Galt of 1970s American cinema – carried a proud anti-establishment theme. Years before Black Lives Matter activists were doing it, the great mustachioed one was already criticizing mass incarceration and police brutality in drive-in hits like The Longest Yard and White Lightning.
While the double-dose of Jaws and Star Wars paved the way for mainstream cinema to strike back with less subversive and far more profitable box office rejoinders in the 1980s – which, as David Sirota observed in his book Back To Our Future, sort of swung the cultural gong back towards the side of conservative traditionalism through flicks like First Blood, Red Dawn and Top Gun – the exploitative, yet surreptitiously socially aware offerings of the drive-in age nonetheless reverberated much longer than expected. The influence of 1960s and 1970s grindhouse aesthetics and themes is evident in the work of celebrated contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Harmony Korine and Takashi Miike, and it’s hard to find any critically acclaimed indie flick nowadays that doesn’t at least obliquely pay homage to one of its spiritual forerunners from 40 years ago (all of the shoutouts to the works of Herschel Gordon Lewis in Juno immediately spring to mind.)
So is it really accurate to say B-movies from the Watergate era are responsible for the proliferation of today’s pervasive, pro-diversity ideologies? On the surface, it may seem to give way too much credit to a medium usually thought of as hardly anything more than trashy entertainment. But again, each film represented a tiny inoculation of a non-majority culture, giving us just a pinch here and there of a different worldview and perspective on the modern American experience. Little by little – be it Carwash, Penitentiary, Caged Heat or The Slumber Party Massacre – we learned just a wee bit more about the cultures outside of our own purview, of the customs and beliefs and lifestyles of those superficially different from us. While mainstream filmgoers were – and to a certain degree, still are – receiving a steady diet of white, hetero and male, the drive-in and grindhouse film faithful were experiencing a greater easel of the human condition and a broader array of philosophical concepts all the way back in the heyday of bell bottoms and burning draft cards.
Sure, it’s absurd to think that today’s multiculturalism ethics – taught in schools, mandated by employers and considered a virtual social code of conduct as sacrosanct as what’s actually printed in our law books – arose from stuff like Infra-Man and Hell Up in Harlem, but without such early intercultural cinematic experiences, just how successful could the first diversity initiatives have been as heralders of today's ubiquitous multicultural Tao? Although sometimes hokey, risqué, perplexing and maybe even offensive, those 35mm introductions to different cultures and different schools of thoughts nonetheless got us thinking outside our own narrowed perspectives and looking at the world, and those around us, through less ethnocentric lenses.
The old B-movies of yesteryear let us see “the other” as something more than alien or exotic, in the process helping us understand different ways of life and thought and illuminating a larger, clearer portrait of humanity as a whole...
... yes, even when the pro-diversity message was sometimes sugar-coated with rubber monsters, kung-fu fights, gallons of fake blood and ample – if not downright gratuitous – nudity.
Even the films that occupied that intersectional “safe space” between studio-backed populism and low-culture indie sleaze in the grindhouse era had a tendency to promote more progressive, anti-traditionalist values. Perhaps the ‘70s most iconic action movie star was Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack, an anti-racist, make-believe-Native-American “pacifist” who walloped bigots and spread the gospel of new-wave leftism in a series of three surprisingly lucrative films throughout the decade. Even the filmography of Burt Reynolds – the veritable John Galt of 1970s American cinema – carried a proud anti-establishment theme. Years before Black Lives Matter activists were doing it, the great mustachioed one was already criticizing mass incarceration and police brutality in drive-in hits like The Longest Yard and White Lightning.
While the double-dose of Jaws and Star Wars paved the way for mainstream cinema to strike back with less subversive and far more profitable box office rejoinders in the 1980s – which, as David Sirota observed in his book Back To Our Future, sort of swung the cultural gong back towards the side of conservative traditionalism through flicks like First Blood, Red Dawn and Top Gun – the exploitative, yet surreptitiously socially aware offerings of the drive-in age nonetheless reverberated much longer than expected. The influence of 1960s and 1970s grindhouse aesthetics and themes is evident in the work of celebrated contemporary directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Harmony Korine and Takashi Miike, and it’s hard to find any critically acclaimed indie flick nowadays that doesn’t at least obliquely pay homage to one of its spiritual forerunners from 40 years ago (all of the shoutouts to the works of Herschel Gordon Lewis in Juno immediately spring to mind.)
So is it really accurate to say B-movies from the Watergate era are responsible for the proliferation of today’s pervasive, pro-diversity ideologies? On the surface, it may seem to give way too much credit to a medium usually thought of as hardly anything more than trashy entertainment. But again, each film represented a tiny inoculation of a non-majority culture, giving us just a pinch here and there of a different worldview and perspective on the modern American experience. Little by little – be it Carwash, Penitentiary, Caged Heat or The Slumber Party Massacre – we learned just a wee bit more about the cultures outside of our own purview, of the customs and beliefs and lifestyles of those superficially different from us. While mainstream filmgoers were – and to a certain degree, still are – receiving a steady diet of white, hetero and male, the drive-in and grindhouse film faithful were experiencing a greater easel of the human condition and a broader array of philosophical concepts all the way back in the heyday of bell bottoms and burning draft cards.
Sure, it’s absurd to think that today’s multiculturalism ethics – taught in schools, mandated by employers and considered a virtual social code of conduct as sacrosanct as what’s actually printed in our law books – arose from stuff like Infra-Man and Hell Up in Harlem, but without such early intercultural cinematic experiences, just how successful could the first diversity initiatives have been as heralders of today's ubiquitous multicultural Tao? Although sometimes hokey, risqué, perplexing and maybe even offensive, those 35mm introductions to different cultures and different schools of thoughts nonetheless got us thinking outside our own narrowed perspectives and looking at the world, and those around us, through less ethnocentric lenses.
The old B-movies of yesteryear let us see “the other” as something more than alien or exotic, in the process helping us understand different ways of life and thought and illuminating a larger, clearer portrait of humanity as a whole...
... yes, even when the pro-diversity message was sometimes sugar-coated with rubber monsters, kung-fu fights, gallons of fake blood and ample – if not downright gratuitous – nudity.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Steven Spielberg: The King of Child Exploitation Cinema?
A look at the most successful director of all-time’s peculiar interests in celebrating (or is it abusing?) child actors
Many, many years ago, Adam Parfrey wrote an essay titled “Pederastic Park?” The piece made a fairly shocking -- but convincing -- claim concerning the oeuvre of Steven Spielberg; namely, the fact that his films allude to a staggering amount of seeming paedo subtext.
Now, I’m not really the biggest Spielberg fan out there; generally, the only two films of his that I can say that I truly enjoyed were “Schindler’s List” and “Lincoln,” whereas the totality of his filmography I would describe as flippantly overrated. With Parfrey’s little thought nugget in mind, however, the cinematic works of the most acclaimed Hollywood director of all time becomes something a bit more interesting -- and without question, more unnerving as well.
To begin, pretty much EVERY movie Spielberg has directed or produced has had a pretty huge emphasis on child actors. “E.T.,” “Hook,” “The Goonies,” “Super 8” -- all films rife with young thespians, whom frequently find themselves coming into close contact with older male characters. Whether it’s Roy Scheider kissing his son on the lips in “Jaws,” Sam Neil giving that one kid mouth to mouth in “Jurassic Park” or even Daniel Day Lewis draping his son over his back and lugging him around like a potato sack in “Lincoln,” there’s certainly an aberrant amount of adult-on-young person touching going on Spielberg’s movies.
Similarly, a large portion of Spielberg’s oeuvre relies upon the same motif: a young child encounters a “magical” grown up who, to some extent, helps them in the uneven transition from adolescence to adulthood. In “The Temple of Doom,” Indiana Jones became “guardian” of Short Round, John Malkovich shows Christian Bale the ways of manhood (in the absolute creepiest of tones, no less) in “Empire of the Sun,” Chunk in "The Goonies" forms an unsettling intimate bond with mutated man-child Sloth and in "A.I.," the robotic facsimile of a youngster is shepherded by what, for all intents and purposes, could be adequately described as a real-life “pedo-bear.” Of course, the ultimate example rests within perhaps Mr. Spielberg’s grandest work: the bald, wrinkly, loose-skinned E.T. becoming Elliot’s literal savior via the power of skin on skin touching. Hell, Spielberg even takes this thing trans-species, with the peculiar mentor-mentee relationships of both teenage soldiers and thoroughbreds in “War Horse.”
If you’ve ever taken a class on film theory (or, unfortunately, any kind of "gender studies" course), you’ve probably heard of something called the “male gaze” before. In essence, it’s the concept that the camera that records the film itself is a male, and as such, has a tendency to linger on the female form during scenes. Well, needless to say, there is not a whole lot of lingering on the female form in Spielberg’s works, but there sure is hell is a lot of lingering on the form of the child. Who can forget the obsessive lock on Haley Joel Osment in “A.I.,” or the way the lens basically fawned over 12-year-old Christian Bale throughout “Empire of the Sun?” Word has it on that last one, more than FOUR THOUSAND boys were screened before Spielberg found the right “lead” for the picture, too.
Similarly, have you ever noticed how much bare skin Spielberg has his younger actors showing in his films? Elliot in “E.T.” spends half the movie shirtless and hooked up to medical equipment, the “Lost Boys” in “Hook” merrily prance about in their skivvies and even in “The Goonies,” executive producer Spielberg has an overweight kid rubbing his fat much to the amusement of his abusive colleagues…and, perchance, the man behind the camera, as well?
While Spielberg seems to have a fixation on the male child form, he seems to have an opposite obsession with the young female, with an over-representation of child actresses in his films serving as terrorized objects. Carol-Anne in “Poltergeist,” the girl that’s almost turned into a velociraptor chew toy in “Jurassic Park,” Dakota Fanning in “War of the Worlds” -- and of course, the little girl in the red dress in “Schindler’s List,” who ultimately found herself heaped upon a tower of dead bodies sans a single line of dialogue. In Spielberg’s works, the boy (or at least, the image of the boy) is endlessly celebrated, while the young female is perpetually imperiled. Even in Spielberg’s animated forays, such seems to hold true; main character Fivel (via the assistance of an elder cat voiced by Dom Deluise) embarks upon epic adventures in the “An American Tail” films, while his sister is constantly on the (usually, unacknowledged) precipice of death. Taking things a step further, there doesn’t even appear to be female children in the director’s lackluster “The Adventures of Tin Tin” from 2011.
That’s not to mention the heavy amount of incestuous overtones in Spielberg’s films, be they directly stated (“The Color Purple”) or slyly implied -- lest we forget Michael J. Fox’s played for laughs spit-swapping session with his mama in the first “Back to the Future” flick. Even more damning are the ideas that Spielberg never got off the drawing board; an ill-proposed sequel to “E.T.” would’ve consisted of Elliot being tortured by menacing alien creatures throughout the film, while an early draft of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” made mention of Indiana Jones’ proclivities for bedding minors. If nothing else, it definitely gives a less enthusiastic ring to the Spielberg produced spin-off "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles," to be sure.
Of course, none of this is to say that Spielberg himself has a thing for young actors and actresses. Maybe, just maybe, the guy does have a huge “Peter Pan” hang-up, and he finds it easier to capture that iconic “Spielbergian” glow through child actors. But, with such unusual recurring themes playing out through his entire filmography, it does make one wonder a bit.
Perhaps, or perhaps not, the following may be worth noting. According to Wikipedia, among other properties Spielberg has considered turning into film projects are the titles “Chocky” and “A Steady Rain.”
“Chocky” is about a young boy whose mind is possessed by an alien spirit, who hails from a planet with only one sex. Meanwhile “A Steady Rain” is a drama about a young Vietnamese child who is ultimately killed and eaten by a Jeffrey Dahmer analogue.
Needless to say, it’s hard to think of an auteur better suited to handle the material at hand, no?
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
B-Movie Review: "The Driller Killer" (1979)
It’s a lot like “Three’s Company”…only with WAY more lesbianism and dudes running around killing homeless people with battery-operated power tools
One of my least favorite things in the world are movies with really nondescript titles. For example, a movie called “Courageous” or “Hero” or “Warrior” could really be about anything, so if you never caught a trailer or got a good look at the movie’s DVD box art, you truly have no idea WHAT you’re getting into.
Then, there are films whose titles leave ZERO questions as to what the contents of said film are. “Bloodsucking Freaks,” “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”…with flicks of the like, NOBODY feels like they’re getting misled as moviegoers. And with that in mind, I’ll give you two guesses as to what Abel Ferrera’s 1979 cult-classic “The Driller Killer” is about.
If the name Abel Ferrera sounds a little familiar to you, it’s because he’s the director of such illustrious works as “Ms. 45” and “Bad Lieutenant” - the rare kinds of films that seem to be revered by both snotty high-art crowds and scummy degenerate cinema fans in equal proportions. “The Driller Killer,” one of Ferrera’s earliest legit films - before that, he was making low-rent XXX features starring his own girlfriend - is a public domain flick, and a movie that’s garnered a pretty sizable cult-following over the years. And while it’s clearly a B-movie through and through, it’s actually a film that teeters on the brink of being a straight-up GOOD low budget horror flick and not just hyper-exploitative sleaze and cheese. And if absolutely nothing else, it’s a WAY better movie than any film called “The Driller Killer” has any right to be.
The film begins with one of the most awesome title cards ever; a single screen shot that advises theater owners to play the film, and I quote, “loud.” There’s definitely a certain punk aesthetic to the film…and that’s something that, as you will soon see, I mean quite literally.
After the proper credits, we’re introduced to the main character of the film, a guy named Reno, who bears more than just a passing resemblance to Richard “The Night Stalker” Ramirez. Anyway, he’s hanging out in a church, sitting next to this old bearded guy who kinda looks like the next-door neighbor in the first “Home Alone” movie. The old dude snaps on him all of a sudden, and Reno runs out of the church, screaming “he touched my hand!” like a nasally John Travolta before hopping in a taxi with his girlfriend. So, he and his GF talk for awhile, and then they start making out. They stop at a club - where really, really awful punk rock music is being played - and the girlfriend seems to pick up this one chick. Next scene, we are in an apartment, where Reno and the blonde chick from the club argue about how to drill holes in the wall. That may or may not be foreshadowing or allusion or some other bullshit term I picked up in seventh grade literature, by the way.
Apparently, Reno, his girlfriend and the girl from the club all live together in the same apartment, “Three’s Company”-style. They argue about bills, and Reno returns to his magnum opus - this giant-assed painting of a buffalo he’s been commissioned to create by some art dealer fellow. Reno plays around with the drill some more (Freudian scholars, you are going to LOVE this movie) and has nightmares about the old man from the church. We’re introduced to the art dealer that’s paying Reno to make the bison painting, and Reno asks him for a loan. After he turns him down, Reno decides to break out some binoculars and watch street muggings from the rooftop (complete with ample stock footage of ambulances, of course.)
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| Rare footage of Sonic Youth from when Tommy Tallarico was their frontman. |
So, this band called “The Roosters” move in next door. You know that’s the name of the band, which apparently has more members in it than The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, because those are the words spray painted on the side of their crappy rust-mobile. So, the brunette roomie (Reno’s girlfriend, Carol, who sounds just like Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth) argues with her boyfriend some more about money and the painting. Reno says all she ever does is “bitch and shit,” and then the blonde roommate (named Pamela) starts arguing with Carol because they don’t have any dope lying around the place. The band next door starts practicing, and Reno goes outside to sketch a few homeless people. In the next scene, the trio are sitting in their apartment, watching infomercials about this portable battery pack thingy. Well, I’m sure that’s not important to the plot of the movie or anything, right?
We get another scene featuring the punk band practicing, while Reno works on his bison painting at two in the morning. He starts having visions of blood splashing all around him, and then he goes outside to have a chat with a random homeless guy. We get some more band rehearsal, and then…BAM! FULL ON SHOWER LESBIANISM, OUT OF THE BLUE! Then, the background singers in the punk band start arguing, and Carol reads a letter from her ex-boyfriend, asking her to move back in with him. Cue ANOTHER BAND REHEARSAL SCENE. Reno complains to the super about all of the noise coming out of the apartment next door, but he says he can’t do anything about it. Instead, he gives Reno a skinned rabbit (which sort of looks like the baby from “Eraserhead,” by the way), which Reno takes back to his place and starts stabbing it like a guy that is really, really upset about stuff. Then, we have a scene where he just stares at a hardware store window. And then, his painting starts talking to him. Well, I think we all know where this headed, don’t we?
Reno has some more hallucinations, and he accosts some homeless dude on the street. They bicker for awhile, and then Reno whips out his BATTERY POWERED HAND DRILL and starts stabbing the dude in what has to be the most sexually suggestive on-screen death ever. I mean, the dude is pretty much RIDING him while he drills his stomach open, so…yeah, wake up the kids for this one!
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| BOO! It has nothing to do with the rest of the movie, but still... |
After that, one of the girls in the band uncovers the rabbit carcass from earlier in the trash. She’s not too happy about it, as I’m sure you could guess. We have another rehearsal scene, and then the trio argue about going clubbing. Reno starts talking to his bison painting again, while The Roosters show up at their gig. The girls in the band argue in the bathroom, while Reno plays some pinball. The bandmates start putting on some make-up (the dudes, too) and the lead singer warms up by, apparently, speaking in tongues for about a minute and a half. Reno says that the club is too loud, while Carol tries to convince him to stay because they met at a similar bar. And after that, Reno goes on a hobo drilling spree, killing one dude while DANCING LIKE ONE OF THE BEE GEES and just flat out drilling a wino that waves at him. Reno chunks one of the corpses on the subway tracks, and we have a brief scene involving this one schizophrenic guy at a bus stop that keeps yelling at random pedestrians. Shortly thereafter, Reno shows up and drills him from BEHIND the Plexiglas terminal. And after that, that’s when the movie starts getting REALLY violent.
Before long, Reno is lumbering around the neighborhood, with his arms stretched out like Dracula and shit. He chases this one guy down, and finds another bum and DRILLS HIS FACE OPEN while he’s sleeping. After the mini hobo-massacre, Reno goes home, chugs some milk and beer and talks to this one guy, who apparently has the hots for Pamela. They talk about art for awhile, and he commissions Reno to do a self-portrait of him. Something tells me he’s REALLY going to regret that, for some reason or another.
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| Believe it or not, the dude in the background ISN'T the craziest person in the movie. |
Carol reads about the hobo murders in the morning paper, and Reno, understandably, I guess, gets a little hostile. He and the roomies decide to have a pizza, which results in another argument, which segues to Reno beginning his portrait of that one guy from earlier (as fate would have it, he just so happens to be the lead singer of the band next door. Who’d thunk it?) The lead singer - a dead ringer for “Ducky” from “Pretty in Pink - plays the guitar for awhile, as some homeless guy sleeping in a box gets highly irritated by all of the commotion. We get a brief sex scene, which is followed up by a scene in which the homeless prowler gets his hands drilled to a brick wall before Reno scrambles his guts with a Black and Decker. Reno then sneaks into his roommates’ bedroom and tells them, not at all ominously, that his project “is finished.”
So, the art dealer gets his first peek at the bison painting, and he ain’t exactly pleased by the final product, calling it “shit” and just a “goddamn buffalo.” At this point, you just KNOW his death is going to be all kinds of exquisite. Carol just can’t take it anymore, and decides to run away. She and Reno have an argument in the street, Pamela does some sobbing and Reno goes home and starts playing with this extended, light-saber-looking flashlight thingy, before he starts having hyper-gory dreams again. Then, he calls up the art dealer, and say he has something that he wants him to “check out.” Nothing bad, surely, can come of this.
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| The protagonist of "The Driller Killer," seen here looking A LOT like Australian pop-sensation Gotye. |
We get our umpteenth band rehearsal scene, while Reno starts piling on the makeup (concluding his ritual by strapping on the battery pack a la “Rambo”.) The dealer shows up and…well, I’ll let you see what happens for yourself.
So, Pamela uncovers the art dealer’s corpse, and we cut to a scene where she’s bound and gagged. The screen fades out, and we now find ourselves with Carol, who has just moved back in with her boyfriend (who, judging from his General Zod-like regalia, just got back from Krypton.) He makes some tea while she showers, and what do you know! Reno decides to stop by and say “hello” for a bit. Get it, “bit”? Because drills have these things called “bits” and…well, yeah. So, Carol climbs out of the shower, slinks into her darkened bedroom and then…the credits roll. Band rehearsal music starts playing, which slowly transitions into elevator muzak over a blue screen, which then segues into the sound of homeless people begging for change on the streets. The film concludes with a message that may or may not be satirical; “Dedicated to the people of New York…the city of hope.”
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| Clearly not what she had in mind when he asked her if she wanted to "hang out" tonight... |
Needless to say, this is one splatter flick that DEFINITELY deserves all of the acclaim and approbation it gets. It’s gruesome, yet good-humored, and there’s even a bit of character development in there before things get all stabby and intestine-covered. I’m not really sure if Ferrera was trying to make some sort of political or social point with the movie (is the whole thing about homeless rights, or consumerism, or the vapidity of punk culture, or the soullessness of modern art, or what?), but whatever his intent with the picture is, that message never gets so gummy that it keeps the onscreen mayhem from unfurling with a fury. Alike William Lustig’s legendary “Maniac” from 1980, this is a minor masterpiece of trash cinema, the kind of flick that’s persecuted by egghead film critics but will remain eternally beloved by obscure movie fanatics that, yeah, you probably wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, ever.
In other words? This flick is required viewing for all degenerate cinema aficionados - and if you watch it, you better take the director’s advice and watch this one L-O-U-D.
Three and a quarter stars out of Four. Jimbo says check it out.
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