“Well, what can I say about Stevie Schmendrick? He had a funny last name that’s for sure. I always used to think he made it up as some stupid joke, but then one night I was real drunk and I needed his wallet to pay my bar tab and I took out his I.D. and I’ll be fucked if that wasn’t his actual name. He must’ve been a Jew. We didn’t talk about religion much. ‘Cept when we was in the ambulance, of course. Then he wouldn’t shut up about it. Luckily he didn’t talk about it for too long....”
“Okay kid, here’s your chance to prove yourself to the producer. You do that and you’ve got it made in the stunt business.”
“I dunno, Drake. It doesn’t seem safe.”
“That’s very perceptive of you, Stevie. This stunt isn’t safe at all. In fact I’m pretty sure it was designed to kill whoever does it.”
“WHAT?”
“Turns out our producer is a big crybaby who thinks big fancy breasts are more important than the bonds of true friendship. I’m pretty sure he wants to murder me.”
Athanael earns his living as a trumpeter for the Paradise Coffee Program; a radio hour of soothing lullabies intended to help listeners go to sleep. It turns out the programming works only too well, as he falls asleep on the job and dreams that he’s an angel in Heaven’s celestial orchestra. Thanks to the machinations of his lovely harpist friend Elizabeth he’s called out of the orchestra to help The Chief in charge of Small Planets to aid in the destruction of a small, unimportant orb called Earth. To do this Athanael must blow his trumpet at precisely midnight; a seemingly simple task turned awry through a combination of inadvertent human intervention and the deliberate interference of two fallen angels who know that once their life on Earth ends, their stay “Down There” begins. Much amusing mayhem ensues until our hero finally wakes up and gets his chance to really toot his own horn.
One of the strangest aspects of the artistic world is the way in which certain works attain a reputation for failure that often has nothing to do with their actual quality. Most often this happens to projects with famously tumultuous creative processes that upon their release do little to justify the heroic effort and expense required for their creation. Ishtar and Waterworld are two very famous examples of this. Since their release the titles for both films have become quick and easy shorthand punch lines available to anyone who wants to make a joke about an obvious financial fiasco.
Yet when either film is discussed amongst people who have actually seen them, more often than not someone will express the opinion that neither film is as bad as their reputation suggests. “Actually, Ishtar is pretty funny,” someone will say, while another will point out, “Y’know once you factor in worldwide gross, Waterworld turned a profit.”
As is so often the case, perception has little to do with reality—the punch line mattering more than the truth. Nowhere is this more apparent than with a now-forgotten B-Movie (from back when the term described the shorter, less-expensive second feature of a 4-hour movie program and not the kind of exploitation fare people associate it with today) that—thanks to its star—was once famous for being one of the worst movies ever made, despite the fact that the handful of people who actually did see it had to admit that it was actually pretty good.
As time marches on, people talk less and less about Jack Benny. Once one of the most popular comedians of his time, his work garners less attention that it deserves these days for a handful of reasons. The first is that his greatest triumph came in radio, a medium many no longer have any interest in. The second is that having died in 1974; he didn’t live long enough to earn the fourth act career resurgence enjoyed by his best friend George Burns (a fourth act that was spurred on by Burns Oscar-winning performance in The Sunshine Boys in a role originally offered to Benny, but given to Burns after his friend’s unexpected death). And the third is that the key to Benny’s success as a comedian had been his ability to develop one of the most recognizable characters in radio and television history. Anyone who encounters Benny’s comedy today will likely be lost if they come to it without knowing of the famous quirks he and his writers spent decades nurturing.
In fact the character of “Jack Benny” is a major reason why his film career never took off like it should have. Having so perfectly established his famous persona on radio (and later on television), people had difficulty accepting him in other roles. Even when he appeared in a controversial masterpiece like 1942’s To Be or Not To Be, his audience made it clear that they preferred it when he played “himself.”
Of course the irony is that the character of “Jack Benny” bore little resemblance to the man who shared his name. Rather than having been developed fully formed, “Jack Benny” was instead the culmination of whatever jokes had gotten the biggest laughs during the course of his career. When, early on, another character suggested Benny was cheap and it got a laugh, Benny and his writers took note and escalated his penny-pinching ways until he was one of the cheapest men in the world. Somone whose personal vault was guarded by alligators and who could earn one of the longest laughs in radio history merely by having a criminal threaten him with, “Your money or your life.”
So it was with The Horn Blows At Midnight. At the time of its release the film had been a mild B.O. and critical disappointment, but in the hands of Benny and his writers, it soon became the hugest debacle in cinema history—the worst film ever made. Whenever a guest appeared on his show who had suffered a public personal embarassment, Benny would soothe them by reminding them that he had starred in The Horn Blows At Midnight and the guest would concede that was far worse than what they experienced.
Since so few people had actually seen the film, Benny’s mockery of it was taken at face value and everyone assumed it had to be as terrible as he suggested. But as is so often the case, this perception had little to do with reality and those who had seen it could be heard to protest that it wasn’t anywhere as bad as people claimed. Having just watched it myself, I can report that this is the case. In fact, far from being a disaster, The Horn Blows At Midnight is actually a very entertaining light-weight comedy that had me laughing out loud several times during its brief 78-minute running time. What few faults it does have I suspect are more the result of interference from the censoring Hays Office than any outright artistic error on the part of its filmmakers.
While many of those who worked during that period have been known to suggest that the edicts of the Motion Picture Production Code (Hollywood’s self-appointed censorship body which was better known as the Hays Code after the former Postmaster-General, Will Hays, who was chosen by the studios to organize it) forced filmmakers to be cleverer than they would have been without it, I’ve always felt it ultimately did more harm than good. The Horn Blows At Midnight offers a good example of this with a very interesting premise that is neutered by its “Only a dream” narrative and inability to actually name the biggest danger the hero faces (the word “Hell” being verboten by name if not concept).
The most fascinating aspect of the film is that it is one in which the protagonist’s goal is the destruction of our planet—“…A six day job…” that has ignored all of the obvious signs its Heavenly lords have thrown its way and “…gotten completely out of hand.”
Unfortunately the chutzpah of this is significant lessened by the film’s main action taking place in a consequence-free dream. Without the Wizard of Oz-esque wraparound segments (as in Oz all of the characters in Athanael’s dream have real world counterparts) the film would have forced us to truly question where to place our loyalties. Do we cheer on Athanael in his quest to destroy our world merely because he’s a likable protagonist we can identify with or do we cheer for the villainous cads who are out to stop him purely for their own selfish needs, even though their interests are ultimately our own?
Today filmmakers would have the freedom to play with this concept however they wished, but in 1945 audiences were saved from such uncomfortable moral ambiguities. This is especially apparent in the film’s climax where Athanael is awaken from his dream just when he’s supposed to blow his horn. Even in a dream we are not allowed to see him succeed in blowing up the world, which not only leaves the viewer who spent the film cheering for him feeling unsatisfied but also leaves the film’s overall theme as something of a dangling question mark.
Still, for all they couldn’t get away with, director Raoul Walsh (White Heat and The Roaring Twenties) and screenwriters Sam Hellman and James V. Kern do manage to get some amusingly cynical licks in. The world Athanael sets out to destroy is one filled with some really lousy people, typified by Reginald Gardiner’s charismatic thief who can barely be bothered to ask, “What stopped you?” when a spurned lover admits his rejection caused her to try to jump off a hotel’s roof the night before.
That said, there are some benefits to the dream narrative. Mostly in how it allows us to forgive the film’s frequent lapses in logic (Apparently Heaven and New York are in the same time zone) and focus on the most charming aspect of the film, the nascent romance between Athanael and Elizabeth.
Benny does great work in the film, but the performance I found myself focusing on was Alexis Smith’s. Based on the IMDb she’s one of those actors who I have seen many times before, but never actually noticed until a specific role caught my eye. She’s great here—the perfect love interest and not just because her heavenly robes were clearly tailored to flatter her admirable figure. More than anyone, she’s responsible for us siding with Athanael as he valiantly attempts to destroy our world, because he’s clearly doing it to impress her and we want her to be impressed.
But as much as I enjoyed the romantic aspect of the picture, the parts I’m most likely to remember are the wild slapstick set pieces that build on the film’s dream logic and allow it to achieve a true cartoon reality. This is most evident in the film’s climax which finds Athanael, along with his allies and foes, on the edge of the hotel’s rooftop attempting to claim the trumpet before midnight. It all comes to a head in the kind of massive advertising creations that do not exist anymore and—I suspect—never really existed to that degree even then.
So the message of The Horn Blows At Midnight is that you should never base your judgment of a movie based solely on its reputation alone. Too often such reputations have little to do with the actual quality of a work, but instead outside factors that have absolutely nothing to do with the enjoyment you feel while watching them.
The annual Trans-America road race is so secret it doesn’t even have an official name. Announced via a single, unadorned want ad, it’s open to anyone with a valid license and four wheels. The goal is simple, start in California, finish in New York. The person who punches in with the quickest time wins the prize--$100,000. This year’s contestants are a motley group including: an arrogant German champion, two lovesick teens in a “borrowed” Corvette, three carhops in a rented van, a psychotic hothead sponsored by his traveling companions, a country-western singer and his manager mother, a family man with a cunning plan and a jiggly blonde waiting for him on the east coast, a jive hipster in a swank suit driving another “borrowed” car, and—most significantly—Coy “Cannonball” Buckman, who’s on probation after taking the fall for his best friend for the death of a passenger during a past race. Luckily for Coy, his probation officer is also his girlfriend and she’s joining him for the ride; unluckily for him, his brother has bet more than he can afford on Coy’s winning and his interference will end up having tragic consequences for almost all involved.
There are many frustrating aspects of working in creative industries. None are actually worse than those that come from having real jobs, but they are still incredibly irksome nonetheless. By far the worst has to be the shocking disparity between the works you take great pride in and that which is actually successfully received. The sad truth is that no one ever has any real idea which ideas will connect and which ones won’t. Very often the passion projects inspired by the blood, sweat and tears of your own personal experience will end up ignored in favour of (what you think are) uninspired brain farts that you offered up only out of desperation, rather than any faith in the quality of the material.
The thing is, though, the reason this happens is because artists are seldom worthy arbiters of their own material. The very closeness that connects them to one work over another is often the very thing that alienates the rest of us. The cinematic landscape is littered with terrible films made by talented artists whose previous “sell out” successes gave them the carte blanche they needed to make the film they’ve had playing in their head since they were 10 years-old. Distance, interference and a lack of faith in the material can sometimes be a good thing—forcing a filmmaker to try harder and reach further than they would on something that was completely their own. Reluctant works of art—those born of frustration, self-doubt and misery—are often the most satisfying, regardless of how the artist may feel about them once they are completed.
I write this, because even though I appreciate why Paul Bartel was dissatisfied with Cannonball! and regarded his work on it as a professional setback and personal failure, it and it’s immediate predecessor, Death Race 2000, remain—by far—my two favourite films he ever made.
Bartel may have regarded Cannonball! as nothing more than a paycheck, but I personally find it much more entertaining and enjoyable than more personal films like Private Parts, Eating Raoul and Not For Publication. Those films, though much reflective of his true voice, have always struck me as being essentially John Waters-lite (a comparison his Lust in the Dust makes unavoidable through the casting of Waters’ late muse, Divine), while his two Corman films remain utterly unique precisely because of the creative concessions forced upon him. Left alone and his whimsical gay satire proved ultimately as bland as the couple he and Mary Woronov played in Eating Raoul; forced to sell out and the result was corrosively biting satire no one else could have ever made but him.
Given its murdering-pedestrians-for-sport premise, Death Race 2000 should feel much darker than Cannonball!—and it does—but not as much as you’d think. Set in the present day, Cannonball! doesn’t have the previous film’s funny, futuristic art direction and special effects to lighten its load. Therefore, when it gets dark, we feel it that much more. The consequences in Cannonball! have more bite than in Death Race 2000. We feel them more. Bartel appears to have noticed this and sadistically goes for the jugular with a spectacular highway pile-up sequence that is virtually apocalyptic in its destruction. “You assholes want to see car crashes?” he asks us. “Then I’ll fucking give you car crashes!”
The sequence is so unrelenting and out of place in what is otherwise a somewhat light-hearted picture, it stands out as the most extreme moment in Bartel’s directing career. As a filmmaker who aimed to be a comic provocateur, it’s easily his most provocative moment. It’s thrilling, devastating and unlike anything you’ll ever see in any of the films his two drive-in hits inspired.
In a decade where “car crash pictures” (as Joe Dante, who has an acting cameo in Cannonball! and edited Grand Theft Auto, Ron Howard’s classic example of the oeuvre, calls them in his recent commentary for that film) supplanted westerns and musicals in terms of popularity, Cannonball! was the first in the sub-genre of films depicting the real world tradition of secret, illegal road races across the United States (unlike Death Race 2000, which depicted a fictitious government-sanctioned race that involved running over people for points).
It was followed by the much more light-hearted The Gumball Rally (which took its inspiration more from the “wacky” ensemble farce of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World than anything else), as well as the truly terrible Hal Needham duology The Cannonball Run 1&2. Though the title of Needham’s two films owe an obvious debt to Bartel's, their actual content is much closer to The Gumball Rally’s. The main difference being that in Rally the characters are played by talented, but non-famous character actors, while in the Run films they’re played by either slumming has-beens or well-known television personalities.
Though it would be a mistake to refer to Cannonball! as being a more realistic variation of the material, it is easily the least broad and cartoonish example of this strange sub-genre. Of them all, it’s the only one to depict the dangerous realities of participating in races such as this. In the other films, none of the characters so much as yawn as they go two days without sleeping to reach their destinations, while in Cannonball! the film’s hero wrecks his car when he briefly dozes off behind the wheel.
In the other films the sabotage the drivers inflict on each other is played off as comic—the real world equivalent of what you’d see in Hanna-Barbara’s Wacky Races cartoon—while in Cannonball! the majority of the attempts to stop other drivers are deadly in their intent and are often fatally successful.
Though this willingness to kill off characters likely had more to do with producer Roger Corman’s mandate that the film contain a certain amount of trailer-friendly explosions, it ultimately is what allows Cannonball! to work better than Rally or the Runs. Unlike those films, Cannonball! is a much more moral film where actions have consequences. In it, cheaters do not win, corruption isn’t rewarded and the prize goes to the young couple who go out of their way to take Coy’s injured girlfriend to the hospital and who decide to continue racing only out of a sense of completion, rather than monetary desire.
But that’s not to say Bartel’s film is anything close to being a drama. His particular comic sensibility dominates much of Cannonball! especially in the portrayal of country-western singer Perman Waters by Gerrit Graham, who appears to be playing the straight southern cousin of Phantom of the Paradise’s Beef. Bartel also gives himself a nice comic role as an effete gangster more interested in composing show tunes than breaking legs. And as the German driver who dies when his sabotaged car explodes as planned, James Keach is allowed a few inspired comic soliloquys before his demise.
That the film earns genuine laughs, while Needham’s Run films don’t is a perfect example of how a director’s seeming suitability for a project can actually be a negative rather than a positive for a production. Needham was a southern redneck car-nut who had actually participated in the real world version of the race, while Bartel was a sophisticated gay New Yorker who had no interest in cars at all. Yet Bartel’s film works and Needham’s two films don’t. Bartel’s initial lack of investment in the project forced him to find ways to keep himself interested, which elevated the material. Needham made the films that were in his heart and they really, really sucked.
Beyond the reasons noted above, another reason genre fans should go out of their way to check out Cannonball! is its excellent cast, filled with Corman and Bartel regulars. As Coy, David Carradine is essentially playing a less damaged version of Death Race’s Frankenstein and as his probation officer girlfriend, Veronica Hamel is given at least one great moment of kick ass awesomeness with which to shine. As the winning couple, Robert Carradine and Belinda Belaski are charmingly naïve, while Archie Hahn does an excellent job as Zippo, Coy’s best friend, whose cheerfulness barely masks the guilt he feels for his role in Coy’s imprisonment. Cormon fixture, Dick Miller gets one of the meatiest roles of his career as Coy’s desperate brother and Deliverence’s Bill McKinney is alternately comic and frightening as Cade, whose psychotic need to win proves to be his undoing.
Co-financed by Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers, the film also boasts a larger than normal budget for a Corman feature, which is evident on screen. The film especially benefits from the work of frequent Jonathan Demme collaborator Tak Fujimoto, who brings a colourful, yet realistic look to the film’s cinematography.
That said, b-movie fans are likely to get their biggest kicks out of the innumerable cameos of soon-to-be famous filmmakers found throughout the movie. I won’t spoil all of them for you, but I will say that there is a special delight to be had in seeing the future directors of New York, New York and Staying Alive pretending to be dangerous wiseguys with Bartel, while enjoying a meal of KFC.
Last week I discussed my belief that by completely stripping his films of any discernable subtext, Wynorski ended up producing works that are ultimately guilty of every criticism (usually unfairly) thrown at the slasher genre. For all his humorous riffing, the results are every bit as misogynist and misanthropic as most ignorant people incorrectly believe horror films to be.
What I didn’t say is that despite (or—more accurately—because of) this the two films are compulsively and irresistibly watchable. As disdainful as Wynorski seems to be of his audience, there’s no denying that he’s giving them massive heaps of what they want. The overt sexuality of the films goes beyond mere prurience to pornographic excess, but the quality of that excess is such that it’s very hard to look away. Wynorski clearly knows this. ‘Give ‘em enough T&A and they’ll forgive you anything,’ being the apparent unspoken motto that defines much of his work.
But is he truly at peace with this? After watching his brief cameo in Hard to Die this becomes a legitimate question. The scene in question occurs when two detectives (who only appear in the film because they also appeared in Sorority House Massacre II and no one could be bothered to figure out how to get rid of them in the rewritten script) break in on a porno shoot to interview an adult film actress (Wynorski regular, Monique Gabrielle, who appears twice in the movie—billed first as“Carolet Girard” in the part of the porn star and then as “Lucy Burnett” for the part of a homely Chinese food delivery woman, which is very similar to her short cameo in Not of This Earth. Two years later she would play the final girl in Fred Olen Ray’s Evil Toons, which is as much a remake of SHMII as HtoD is) who used to work at the lingerie company where all the mayhem is occurring.
Playing the part of the exasperated director is Wynorski himself, who—when accused of making “pornography”—defends himself by saying “…It’s tough enough making a picture these days without making certain—shall we say— ‘concessions’ to public taste….” On the face of it, it would seem like he’s winking at his audience again. Giving them an in-joke they can chuckle over and appreciate for its self-deprecating irony, but this ignores the fact that when the movie was made in 1990 Wynorski was still a fairly anonymous Corman hack who most genre fans wouldn’t recognize in a police line-up, much less in an in-joke cameo.
This makes me wonder if maybe he cast himself as the pornographer not because a handful of Corman insiders would find it amusing, but as a form of cinematic Freudian slip. Is it possible that Wynorski really imagines himself as an artist forced to debase himself to satisfy the public’s need for sex and violence?
Probably not, but it will be interesting to see if any similar cameo’s are made in later productions where he abandons all pretense of respectability and just flat out makes softcore porn (see future reviews of The Bare Wench Project 1, 2 & 3). I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the cameo is just a goof, but it’s the kind of goof pretentious asshole reviewers like me cannot help themselves from grasping on.
Beyond Wynorski’s cameo, though, the other interesting part about this scene is that it is clearly based on the scene in SHMII where the same two cops (the female half of whom is played by Wynorski regular Toni Naples, working under the name Karen Chorak) go to a strip club to talk to the younger sister of the girl who killed the maniac whose spirit is causing all of the mayhem back at the sorority house.
Watching as a hyper-aware genre-enthusiast, it was this scene that caused my brain to start doing backflips, because with it Wynorski manages to take SHMII and turn it from being an unrelated in-name-only sequel to Sorority House Massacre into an alternative universe sequel to Slumber Party Massacre, from which the flashback footage is taken. Having at that point already written about Slumber Party Massacre II (rather successfully—if a comment made at the 37 minute point of this YouTube video is to be believed) I was dumbfounded to see Wynorski take the character Deborah Brock had cast as a virginal member of an all-girl pop band into a slutty, fishnet clad stripper.
My first thought was of Uatu the Watcher, the big-header star of Marvel Comics What If…. series, in which popular Marvel Universe stories were upended with simple twists of fate. For example, issue #7 dealt with what would have happened if someone other than Peter Parker had been bit by that radioactive spider that fateful day. The most amusing aspect of the series was how it allowed the writers to let loose with their wildest apocalyptic, nihilistic fantasies, as virtually every scenario seemed to end with the destruction of the universe (thus proving that the way it “really happened” was truly meant to be).
As unintentional as this had to be on Wynorski’s part, it does force an inevitable comparison between his and Brock’s takes on the slasher genre and it’s one where he definitely does not come out on top. Whereas Brock was able to make the first slasher film that was set entirely in the pov consciousness of a young woman’s mind, Wynorski was only able to deliver a film that aims for moronic parody and fails.
More telling, though, is the profession chosen for the character in SHMII. The fact is that in a film already so full of gratuitous nudity the strip club sequence is by far the unnecessary and redundant. Knowing what I do about his previous work, I suspect both it and the rest of the police sequences were added late to the script when it became evident the original draft was too short. I’d even guess they were shot long after the film was first completed, were it not for the fact that the same scenes are all essentially replicated in Hard To Die, making this scenario highly unlikely.
Whatever the reason for the sequence, it speaks volumes about who Wynorski is as a person and filmmaker that in his universe, this character turns out to be a stripper. Brock imagined an innocent girl driven to insanity by her horrific experience, while her Corman co-hort simply saw an opportunity to add another pair of tits into the mix.
I strongly suspect that out there is an alternative universe where I prefer his take on the material over hers, but only Uatu truly knows.
Okay, so that’s it for these two flicks. Next week I’ll discuss a more serious work in the Wynorski canon that the director has gone on record as stating that he personally hates.
Five voluptuous members of a local sorority find themselves tasked with the clean up and renovation of their new chapter house. Before they begin working they’re visited by their weird neighbor, Orville Ketchum, who tells them the story of how the house’s previous resident, a maniac named Hokstader, went nuts and murdered most of his family before finally being killed himself. After a hard night of work, the girls decide to hold a lingerie Ouija board séance and unwittingly unleash the spirit of the murderer back into their midst. By possessing the bodies of the girls he begins his killing spree anew. Blood is shed, (many) breasts are bared, nothing explodes and Orville’s the only one who doesn’t die.
Hard To Die Synopsis
Five voluptuous temp and fulltime employees of a local lingerie company find themselves tasked with performing the annual inventory. Before they begin working they’re visited by the building’s weird janitor, Orville Ketchum, who tells them about his experience with a maniac named Hokstader, who went nuts and murdered five girls before finally being killed himself. Going through the boxes they have to inventory they inadvertently open a Chinese spirit box that contains the spirit of the murderer. By possessing the body of one of the girls he begins his killing spree anew. Blood is shed, (not quite as many) breasts are bared, nothing explodes and Orville finds true love at last.
Somewhere around October of last year, I sat down and watched Sorority House Massacre II and it kind of blew my mind. Not because I thought it was an amazing piece of cinema—it’s really pretty fucking terrible—but because it played so fast and loose with the idea of what qualifies as a horror movie sequel, going so far as to not only completely ignore the first Sorority House Massacre, but to actually employ flashback footage from a completely different series that had—by that time—already been sequelized twice.
The chutzpah of this is one thing, but when you go on to consider that while making SHM II Wynorski decided to reshoot the same script with only a handful of minor character and location adjustments and release it as an “original” movie called Hard To Die (which despite it’s title and advertising bares no resemblance to Die Hard) and you quickly come to appreciate that the famously bearded director has what must be the biggest pair of balls in the known universe. Or—at the very least—a pathological inability to experience shame.
If The Return of Swamp Thingrepresents the closest approximation of what Wynorski could have accomplished if he were a more ambitious, less cynical filmmaker, than the one-two punch of SHM II and Hard To Die serve as the harbingers of the jaded, dispassionate hackmeister he would eventually become.
Despite featuring all of the hallmarks of his established oeuvre, the two films mark the first time where his poking fun at the conventions of genre filmmaking no longer seems affectionate, but instead actively derisive. Whereas once his in-jokes seemed to be made in collaboration with his audience, now they seem to come at the expense of them. If before the subtext of his humour was “Hey, isn’t this stuff cool?” here it turns into a much darker and less entertaining, “So, this is the shit you assholes want, huh? Here it is.”
That this anger comes through despite the abundant spectacle of T&A he uses to disguise it, explains why I found the experience of watching SHM II so fascinating. How could something be so simultaneously craven and transgressive? And at what point does a filmmaker abandoning all personal dignity to give his audience exactly what he thinks they want, actually become a form of hostile artistic expression—the cinematic equivalent of the infamous Baltimore stripper described by John Waters, who used to shout “What the fuck are you looking at?” to the men watching her take off her clothes.
Without a commentary to explain the decisions that went into the making of the two films I am forced to guess at the reasons behind them, which is always a dangerous thing to do, but also a large part of what I find so intellectually intriguing about such stubbornly anti-intellectual films.
It doesn’t help that the credits only add to the confusion. SHM II is credited (on the actual print, not via the IMDb) to Bob Sheridan and James B. Rogers (a protégé of the Farraly Brothers who would eventually direct American Pie II), while Hard To Die is credited to Rogers and Mark McGee despite the fact the rewrite required to differentiate the two films couldn’t have taken more than a single day to complete. Wynorski takes full directing credit on SHM II, but credits the job on Hard To Die to Arch Stanton, a pseudonym I’m assuming is a reference to the name on the grave where the gold is buried in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
What I am 100% certain about is that in 1986 Roger Corman produced a movie called Sorority House Massacre. It’s an exceptionally unexceptional slasher effort; made memorable only by how ardently it rips off the plot beats of John Carpenter’s Halloween. And it would have been very easy to use footage from the film as flashback fodder for the sequel, but that isn’t what happened. Instead, at some point the decision was made to use footage from the original Slumber Party Massacre in its place.
And it would seem that this was a decision made while the script was being written, since the backstory Orville Ketchum tells the girls in both SHM II and Hard To Die bears no relation to the story of Sorority House Massacre. It also bears no relation to the story of Slumber Party Massacre either, but that’s easily solved via editing and Ketchem’s narration. Interestingly the story he tells changes in the two movies, despite the fact that the exact same footage is shown in both films.
The biggest question this begs is, simply, why? It would seem to me that the minimal time and effort expended to incorporate the footage from SPM into SHM II could have just as easily been used to change the script enough to justify SHM II’s sequel status, rather than confuse things with scenes from another franchise. Was it a matter of authentic confusion (it’s not hard to mix up the titles of the films), outright indifference, some random legal impediment (such as one of the actors in the original film refusing to have their likeness appear in the sequel) or just a deliberate “Fuck you!” to anyone devoted enough to the genre to notice?
Whatever the reason, the end result is a film that almost becomes its own meta-commentary on the strange relationship genre fans have with horror movie franchises that often seem to exist for no other reason than to anger and disappoint them.
While the motive behind turning a project into a franchise is the same regardless of genre—capitalizing on previous success—the nature of the horror genre dramatically lowers the standard by which that previous success is judged. During the 80s and 90s, the decision to make a horror movie sequel wasn’t based on how many people it was believed actually wanted to see it, but rather by how many video cassette units it was believed the sequel could sell. Video store operators were just as guilty as audiences of preferring the recognizable to the new and were much more likely to order the latest Leprechaun sequel than something original, despite the fact that no one you ever met ever actually claimed any desire to see Leprechaun 4: In Space.
For that reason, there were many franchise films that bore absolutely no relation to each other, often because they were retitled by their distributors simply to capitalize on a marketable name. SHM II would seem to be one of those films, but it takes the added step of implying it’s actually a sequel to a completely different franchise, one that by 1990 was already three films strong. The implication being that when it came to these kinds of films, the title was meaningless, so long as it sold a videotape, which made the actual content itself only an afterthought.
The cynicism of this appears to have inspired Wynorski to make two films that would seem to exist on no other than the most base exploitation movie level—80 minutes of non-stop tits, ass and blood—but he does so in such an extreme fashion that they transcend their LCD ambitions and force the viewer to reconsider what they are watching and why they are watching it. His apparent antipathy infecting the material in such a way that it actually achieves a strange measure of relevance.
Things get even more bizarre when you realize that two years later, Wynorski’s friend and sometime-collaborator would essentially remake both SHM II and Hard To Die as Evil Toons.
But, unfortunately, it’s getting late and I have to wrap this up so I can get it formatted and posted before the day ends. Next week I shall actually discuss the content of the films, such as they are.
At the urging of his Uncle Ephram, Dexter Ward seeks out Marissa Orlock, a beautiful blond recording artist whose father, Marinas, disappeared decades earlier with a dangerous mystical tome capable of unleashing terrible evil on the world. Just minutes after they meet, Marissa and Dexter learn that her father has died and they must travel to Transylvania to claim her inheritance and find the book. At Castle Orlock they are joined by her father’s old friend and executor, vampire hunter Victor Van Helsing, Marissa’s evil Uncle Byron, his manservant Stefan and his three busty “adopted daughters” Patty, Laverne and Maxine. Blood is shed, a lot of cleavage is exposed (but no breasts are bared), stuff explodes and there’s a happy ending for everyone but Uncle Byron.
I find myself stuck in a difficult position discussing Transylvania Twist. The problem is that I think there’s a lot of potentially great material in the film. Jokes that—on a purely conceptual level—display a lot of insight and wit. But I never laughed once. Intellectually, I appreciated what Wynorski and R.J. Robertson, the film’s screenwriter, were trying to do, but I never actually connected to the material. And I’ve yet to figure out why this is. Hopefully I’ll figure it out somewhere around the 1000 word mark.
Despite all of the humour found in his previous films, Transylvania Twist represents the first outright comedy Wynorski directed that was actually intended to be an outright comedy from its inception (unlike Deathstalker II, which turned from a straight sword and sorcery movie into a comedy during production).
According to the Internet (an admittedly shaky source of information) Wynorski actually replaced Charles B. Griffith, the screenwriter of the original Not of this Earth, The Little Shop of Horrorsand Death Race 2000, as director. While Griffith had moved on from scripting to directing with efforts like Smokey Bites the Dustand Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II, the fact that Transylvania Twist was written by Wynorski’s good friend and frequent collaborator, Robertson, suggests to me that he had always been its intended director, even if Griffith temporarily got the assignment first.
Unlike their previous three collaborations (Big Bad Mama II, Deathstalker II and Not of this Earth), Transylvania Twist marked the first time Robertson and Wynorski were able to create a completely original work, which I think explains why it doesn’t feel as laboured and tedious as those other films. Unfortunately they chose to strike out on their own in a genre that had already been mined clean over the past few decades.
Successful parody, I find, is very rare. Either filmmakers fail by being too toothless and doing little more than acknowledging a series of broad pop-culture references (see Repossessed or any of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s films) or they become too savage and essentially denigrate any audience knowledgeable enough to appreciate its jokes (Slaughter High strikes me as the best example of this). Even the most famous parodists exhibit, at best, spotty track records. Mel Brooks gave us the transcendent Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (a film whose success I believe should actually be credited more to star/screenwriter Gene Wilder than anyone else), but he also made Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, both of which suffered from being too overtly influenced by the Zucker-Abrahams-ZuckerAirplane! school of rat-ta-tat-tat 100 JPS comedy.
Not only does a film like Transylvania Twist suffer in comparison to a much better film like Young Frankenstein, but it also suffers when its inevitably compared to a much worse film like Transylvania 6-5000 (a film written and directed by occasional Brooks collaborator Rudy De Luca), because the association alone is enough to bring it down.
In terms of actual content, the film Transylvania Twist most resembles is John De Bello’s Return of the Killer Tomatoes, a film which does a good job of finding the fine line between childish mockery and prescient satire. Many of Twist’s best moments are ones that poke fun more at the medium itself than the horror genre. For example I appreciated the scene shot in one take in which the cameraman has to run through library stacks to catch up with his subjects, only to become distracted by a blonde’s abundant décolletage:
It’s a fun potshot at the pretentious done-in-one camera shots made famous by Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, even if it doesn’t even come close to matching their bravura grandiosity.
Equally good is the moment where Marissa (80s sitcom star Teri Copley) becomes aware of the sound of the bassoon playing on the soundtrack, only to open her closet and find Patty (Wynorski regular Monique Gabrielle who is oddly credited as “?” in the end credits) sitting there playing the large woodwind instrument. Pretty much the exact same joke can be found in De Luca’s Transylvania 6-5000—with a violin substituted for a bassoon—but it works much better here thanks to the way Copley and Gabrielle downplay it, refusing to offer any acknowledgment of its absurdity.
Unfortunately as clever as these moments seemed, they still failed to make me laugh. Some of this, I think, can be blamed on Wynorski’s failure to maintain a consistent tone. A dilemma faced by filmmakers who enter into this kind of comic territory is that much of the material will inevitably seem juvenile and broadly simplistic, which often makes the more sophisticated and adult material seem out of place. Another explanation is that for every clever conceit that comes close to working, there are several that fail abysmally instead. The best example of this is the scene where Marissa and Dexter wander onto the vacant set of The Honeymooners, which turns their world black and white and causes their every statement to be followed by canned studio laughter. Not only is it a detour away from the film’s horror parody theme, but it’s a terribly dated and tired reference even when you remember that the film was made 22 years ago.
And despite the bassoon episode I mentioned above, Wynorski ruins a lot of jokes by flashing a bright spotlight on them. Not intent on just being the 1000th director to feature Forrest J. Ackerman in a wordless cameo, he also has to make sure we get it by having the former publisher hold a copy of his Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, despite its incongruity with his role as funeral director.
Also adding to the lack of laughter is Wynorski’s tendency to direct his actors to play the material as broadly and over-the-top as possible. Many potential parodists forget that what made the early Z-A-Z films so enjoyable was that they featured recognizable actors playing their roles completely straight. Airplane! succeeds because it features Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges and Peter Graves giving the same performances they would have given if they had been cast in a drama instead. The humour comes not from any feigned wackiness, but instead the hilarious contrast between the normal and absurd.
That said, there is a great performance in Transylvania Twist thanks to Wynorski veteran Ace Mask (also a highlight in The Return of Swamp Thing), who plays Van Helsing. The flashback scene between him and Brink Stevens is about as close as the film came to arousing a chuckle out of me.
The rest of the cast is unfortunately hit and miss. Robert Vaughn as Uncle Byron never gels into his role, while Your Show of Showsvet Howard Morris as Marinas Orlock comfortably plays out the same shtick that made people confuse him with Arte Johnson for decades. Steve Altman as Dexter was obviously cast for his impression skills, which go a long way towards reminding me why I innately dislike impressionists and Angus Scrimm appears to have been cast as Stefan solely to justify the Phantasmjoke that comes near the end. Even Boris Karloff, who provides a posthumous cameo via clips from Roger Corman’s The Terror, fails to come off that well.
As per usual in a Wynorski film, the female cast was clearly chosen more for their ability to properly fill out their sexy costumes than to sell jokes. Copley tries her damnedest to do a good job, but at a certain point her Marilyn Monroe act starts to feels too overtly contrived. And I suspect that the kind of professional jealousy alluded to in the most recent commentary for Not of This Earth might explain both Gabrielle’s stilted, unconvincing performance and the bizarre non-credit she receives at the end.
In the final analysis Wynorski’s seventh film is one I wanted to like, but whose simple failure to compel the correct response from me forces me to deem it a failure. I dunno, maybe I was just in an especially assholish mood this week….
Beautiful blond Abigail decides it’s time to leave the safety of her plants and find out what really happened to her late mother. This means leaving California and visiting the estate of her evil stepfather, Anton Arcane, deep in the Louisiana bayou. Turns out he’s almost dead himself and requires Abby’s perfect genetic structure to complete the rejuvenation process necessary for him to survive. Fortunately for her, his mortal enemy is a dreamy living plant with muscles known as Swamp Thing, who takes an instant liking to the blond vegetarian. Very little blood is shed, no breasts are bared, stuff explodes and there’s a happy ending for our unique onscreen couple.
It sounds bizarre to suggest that a film that features a love story between Heather Locklear and a stuntman (Dick Durock) in a green plant suit is probably the closest Jim Wynorski has ever gotten to a making a satisfying mainstream movie, but it’s true. Of all his films so far documented on this blog, The Return of Swamp Thing is easily the most entertaining and professionally made. The film especially deserves credit for being better than the first Swamp Thing, a film directed by the more talented Wes Craven, that suffered due to unforeseen budget setbacks and the fact that the original Swamp Thing costume had an unfortunate tendency to disintegrate when put anywhere near an actual swamp.
While still full of classic Wynorski-isms (jokey references to his actors’ past work, Abbott & Costello type comedy, Monique Gabrielle, Ace Mask, running time lengthening opening and closing credits) the film doesn’t suffer under the weight of them like Deathstalker II and Not of This Earth did. I suspect a large part of the credit goes to producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan, who both remain best know for their involvement in the Batman franchise, beginning with Tim Burton’s 1989 film all the way to the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises, but it is entirely possible that this is just a coincidence and the film is simply proof that even a broken clock can be right two times day (see also Fred Olen Rey’s Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers).
Despite not being credited for the screenplay (that honour goes to Neil Cuthbert and Grant Morris), Wynorski’s influence on the script is obvious and in his commentary he credits Chopping Mall’s Steve Mitchell and Deathstalker II’s John Terlesky with helping him on the rewrite. It isn’t hard to guess who wrote what in the film, as certain scenes and jokes definitely feel more Wynorskian than others (ie. the subplot involving the two boys trying to get a picture of Swampy, the scene where Monique Gabrielle and Joe Sagal flirt—three years before Lethal Weapon 3—by comparing scars a la Jaws, all of Heather Locklear’s one-liners), but in this case Wynorski was fortunate enough to have a cast talented enough to wring some entertainment out of them.
Sarah Douglas, for example, is typically excellent as Dr. Zurrell (an almost Kryptonian sounding name that recalls her most famous role as Ursa in Superman II), as is Wynorski regular Ace Mask, who adds a layer of hilarious banality to his evil mad scientist. Sagal and Gabrielle are both great as Arcane’s chief henchpeople and the scenes featuring the two young boys are all saved by the gleeful performances of RonReaco Lee and Daniel Emery Taylor.
Both Louis Jourdan and Durock return from the first film and both give the weakest performances. Jourdan disdained the movie and returned only for the paycheck and his indifference is evident onscreen (Wynorski gets him back by having a parrot make a Gigi joke in one scene), while Durock was clearly cast more for his physique and experience as a stuntman than his dramatic chops. It doesn’t help that his voice is clearly dubbed by another (uncredited) actor.
That said, a huge amount of credit for the film’s success has to go to Locklear, a TV actress whose comedic talent has often been overshadowed by her seemingly inhuman blond California beauty. I remember that when the film first came out, my local newspaper reviewer suggested in his review that he couldn’t tell if her performance in the film was one of the best or worst he’d ever seen. That it’s impossible to tell whether or not she’s in on the joke is the key to the film’s success. As Abigail, Locklear is often funny, but never campy, a distinction that is also true for the whole movie as well.
Of course, though, the film’s humour is likely to be the element that alienates most comic book fans, who resent the dark worlds they take seriously being lightened in any way. This is especially true for Swamp Thing, a character who grew infinitely more complex after the 1982 release of Craven’s film via the pen of Alan Moore, whose reputation as the genre’s great literary genius was first earned from his work on Saga of the Swamp Thing. Fortunately for my enjoyment of the film, I’ve never actually read any of those comics and am therefore immune to any of the potential sacrileges committed onscreen, leaving me to admire it for what it is rather than detest it for what it’s not.
Truthfully, though, it is difficult to imagine how any filmmaker could be expected to bring the true comic book character onto the big screen. In comics the Swamp Thing is able to transcend his appearance and become a noble, tragic figure, but on film he’ll always be a guy in a silly green suit or (sometime in the future) a CGI cartoon. That’s not to say it couldn’t be done, just that in 1988—when the sequel was made—the budget Wynorski had to work with simply would not allow for a serious take on the material. And, it has to be said, if that was what the producers actually wanted, they never would have hired him in the first place.
Still, The Return of Swamp Thing isn’t a perfect film. It’s chief flaw being the kind of simplistic plot that people who’ve never actually read comic books typically associate with the genre. Were it not for the humour and absurdity of its central romance, it would be a much less satisfying, empty film where not much of consequence actually happens. The saving grace of Wynorski’s tone being that by reducing the dramatic stakes, it allows us to ignore how small the film really feels and instead enjoy it for what it is.
Six films in and I fear we might have reached the pinnacle of Wynorski’s career. The Return of Swamp Thing truly represents the bizarre miracle of cinematic alchemy in which a hack filmmaker's usual formula for once turns to gold instead of remaining lead. Knowing what I do about Wynorski's later work, it’s hard to hold out hope that I will be happily surprised to see its success replicated somewhere along the way. Perhaps there’s a hidden gem lost somewhere in his Jay Andrews filmography, but since that seems doubtful, it’s hard not to end this review without feeling a touch of melancholy. Is it possible that our subject made his last good movie over 20 years ago? For my sake, I hope not….
A member of a dying alien species, the mysterious Mr. Johnson is on a mission to determine whether or not the human race can be harvested to provide the blood his people need to survive. To continue his mission he himself requires daily transfusions administered by a beautiful young nurse named Nadine Story, who quickly becomes suspicious about her employer’s activities. Blood is shed, breasts are bared, stuff explodes and the film ends with a question mark regarding the fate of mankind.
A couple years ago I wrote an amusing little diversion called 50 Reasons No One Wants to Publish Your First Book and it occurs to me that #46 on the list is especially apt in the case of Jim Wynorksi’s fifth film. It suggests:
46. Historically, books written solely to settle a bar bet seldom make it to print, especially if they were written during a seven-and-a-half-hour period in the same bar where the bet was made.
I mention this because Wynorski freely brags in both of the two commentaries he’s thus far done for Not of This Earth that before production began on the remake, Roger Corman bet him he couldn’t get it filmed in the same 12-day schedule in which he shot the original. Wynorski took the bet, filmed his movie in 11 and 1/2 days and promptly took home a new car for his achievement.
Had I not listened to the commentaries I think I honestly might have guessed this was the case, because the resulting film very much looks and feels like a movie shot very quickly and indifferently by its director because he had something other than telling an interesting story on the line. At just barely 80 minutes (a nominal running time which he only actually achieves by creating a long opening credit montage of scenes from other Corman sf movies and by outright stealing a full scene from Joe Dante and Alan Arkush’s Hollywood Boulevard) the movie still manages to feel sluggish and dull, despite the clear intention to turn it into a lightly entertaining drive-in pastiche.
Between this and Deathstalker II it becomes clear that one of Wynorski’s greatest faults is his inability to transcend his production limitations. Many other directors have achieved great things under similar budgetary and time restrictions, but in their cases they were all invested in the outcome—they truly cared how the movie would come out. Wynorski, however, wanted to win a new car.
I’ve always found something interesting about the existence of journeyman directors. Without them Hollywood couldn't exist, since so much of their product couldn’t be made by filmmakers who actually cared about what they were doing, yet there’s something paradoxical about their very existence. Given the stress and personal depravation required to make any movie, it seems incredible that there are men and women out there who have worked so long and hard to achieve the position of director only to then subvert their personal vision in order to produce executive-friendly studio pabulum. Those of us outside the movie industry often wonder why its participants earn as much as they do, and the answer is obviously tied to the industry’s acknowledgment of the profound and soul-crushing ambivalence required by its workers just to make it through the day.
But this doesn’t apply to our subject. You cannot accuse Wynorski of “selling out” because he’s spent his entire career making the kind of films he wants to make. Nor can you accuse him of being an egoless director who lacks pride in his achievements. As seen in Popatopolis his home is a monument to his career with posters from all of his films decorating his walls. And unlike other directors who are reticent to discuss their films in DVD commentaries, he’s gone so far to provide them for films he’s directed under pseudonyms.
At this point I can only guess at the reasons behind the disconnect between his equally evident pride and disinterest in his work. The one that currently makes the most sense to me is the idea that the only project that truly interests Jim Wynorski is the myth of Jim Wynorski, but I have no idea if this project will truly bear this out.
Working from the original script by Mark Hanna and frequent Corman-collaborator Charles Griffith, Wynorski and R.J. Robertson (who previously worked together on the script for Big Bad Mama II) did little to the story of Not of This Earth but up the T&A quotient as high as they could.
And while his previous four films were all too happy to thrown in as much sex and nudity as they could get away with, Not of This Earth marks the first time where it starts feeling truly gratuitous. Part of this is because the script remains so true to the original that the film has a slightly dated, out-of-touch feel that is shown in strong relief each time a pair of large breasts intrude upon the screen. Also to blame is the film’s extremely limited production values, which gives the film the kind of low-rent ambiance typically associated with soft and hardcore pornography.
Which makes the presence of former underage hardcore icon Traci Lords, in the role of Nadine the nurse, more than a little ironic, because her performance is easily the freshest, most appealing aspect of the entire movie. Rather than make Not of This Earth feel more sordid than it already is, Lords manages to elevate it to a level it never would have achieved if, for example, Deathstalker II’s Monique Gabrielle had been cast as Nadine (complete with anachronistic white cap and uniform), instead of merely being regulated to a short, unrecognizable cameo as a crazy bag lady.
Wynorski actually deserves some credit for not only giving Lords her first mainstream film role, but for also casting her against type as the good girl heroine. Throughout the rest of her career filmmakers had difficulty looking past her infamy and sultry physical presence and cast her in a series of vixen and bad girl roles. Not of This Earth suggests she could have easily gone another way.
Unfortunately her character is betrayed by a climax that finds Nadine lost in the thrall of her alien employer and about to transport herself to his home planet for immediate vivisection only to be saved at the last minute when her policeman boyfriend’s piercing siren causes the noise adverse “Mr. Johnson” to plunge his car off a bridge. It’s a repeat of the distressing situation I reported in The Lost Empire, where Wynorski takes a strong, self-sufficient female character and turns her into a helpless victim who requires her boyfriend’s intervention to save her.
Despite this, Lord’s performance is almost good enough to redeem the rest of the film. While the most disappointing of his films thus far, Not of This Earth isn’t a complete disaster. Had Wynorski the time, money and inclination to make a better film I think he could have matched the charm of his first two films, but by this early point in his career he had already decided that he was more concerned with winning a bet than making an interesting film.
Near the end of last year the one-two punch of my watching the excellent documentary Popatopolis and the less-than-excellent slasher-spoof Sorority House Massacre II inspired me to begin composing a long essay on filmmaker Jim Wynorski that would serve as the introduction for an even longer deconstruction of the latter film. But about 2000 words into the first essay I began to worry that my negative conclusions were too self-righteous, considering I had only actually seen 8 of his 87 films in their entirety.
How could I seriously argue that Wynorski’s films almost always disappointed me for specific reasons, if I’d only actually been disappointed by less than 10% of his output? If I were an honest essayist I would have no choice but to sit through as many of his films as I could get my hands on. And so far, via the miracle of the Internet, that number is hovering around 40.
With the prospect of so much potential misery (and boobs!) ahead of me, it only made sense to turn this into the weekly blog project I had been looking for ever since I had to move The House of Glib to a new location and sacrifice 99% of its former content to the temple of my laziness. This is why, until my supply finally runs dry, I shall endeavor to review one Wynorski film each week in the order of their release. Based on what I know, this means some minor fun in the beginning, a whole lot of “meh” in the middle and some real pain at the end.
Sure does sounds like fun to me!
But first a brief primer on our subject for those of you unaware of his prodigious career:
Jim Wynorski is a director who is famous for making movies with large-breasted women in them. Having always worked in the world of low-budget B-movies, the majority of his films have been made with very small budgets in very short amounts of time. As a means to protect himself from the pitfalls inherent in these kind of productions, he often relies on either one of two strategies—turn the movie into a spoof that isn’t meant to be taken seriously (ie. Deathstalker II, Sorority House Massacre II) or direct it under a pseudonym (a meaningless gesture in an age where the IMDb reveals all). Because of this, films that should be simple, albeit guilty, pleasures, instead take on an air of defensiveness that negatively effect the finished product. At least that’s the case with the 8 I’ve seen thus far. Perhaps the other 30+ I have yet to see will prove my thesis wrong.
That said, let’s officially begin:
THE WYNORSKI PROJECT
PART ONE
THE LOST EMPIRE
I get the very real and very terrifying sense that the first Wynorski film I’m reviewing for this project may very well be the best one of them all. While it displays all of the hallmarks that have come to define much of Wynorski’s oeuvre (at least that which he’s been willing to put his own name on), The Lost Empire still feels like a real movie rather than a quickly produced facsimile of one.
Watching it you get the very real sense that it represents what he might have done had fortune allowed him to continue following his own muse, rather than force him to equip the tools of self-parody and denial in order to pay the bills. While nowhere near perfect, or even all that good, one can still feel a sense of playful effort in The Lost Empire normally absent from his later movies. Not only was Wynorski actually trying when he made his directorial debut, but he also appeared to be having fun doing it.
Right from the very first shot, it’s clear we’re in Wynorski territory as a floating optical spotlight moves across the screen before settling on the generous cleavage of Anita Merritt, who you all remember covered in mud, wrestling John Candy in Stripes. The comedic tone of the film is also quickly established by the horny befuddlement of the Asian jewelry shop owner, who is so transfixed by her endowments he runs her cash through one of those old-fashioned credit card machines.
It’s actually these silent moments of comedy that work best in the film. Unlike the jokes found in the dialogue, which are often too deliberately punny and referential to raise anything other than a groan, the film’s physical comedy does a good job of setting the mood required to get the viewer through a plot that is highly dubious even before you have a chance to start thinking about it.
After his busty patron has left, the Asian shop owner (played by an actor named Peter Pan, which I prefer to assume isn’t a stage name) is killed by a trio of mystical warriors whose throwing stars apparently have to do a weird spinning thing for about 10 minutes before they can do any damage. The warriors are in search of The Eyes of Avatar, a pair of ancient Lemurian glowing jewels their master requires for his plans of world domination and, which, the shop owner has been using as the eyes in a really cheap looking statue of a demon/dragon/whatever. The owner is killed in the melee, as are two of three police officers, whose appearance on the scene forces the last living warrior to flee with only one of the two “eyes”.
It just so happens that the lone surviving police officer is the rookie brother of Lieutenant Wolfe, a super bad ass Dirty Harry type who we first see blowing away a roomful of junkie thugs before they can make good on their promise to kill a bunch of school kids.
In a reveal familiar to anyone who played Metroid when they grew up, it turns out that the bad ass lieutenant is actually a smoking hot blond named Angel (Melanie Vincz, who spent the majority of her decade long career working in television) with a mustachioed FBI agent boyfriend (Paul Coufos, who resembles a poor man’s Lee Horsley, which I suppose would make him a poor, poor man’s Tom Sellick) and a preference for skintight outfits.
Her injured brother lives just long enough to give Angel one of the mystical throwing stars, which her boyfriend immediately identifies as belonging to a follower of Dr. Sin Do (Phantasm's Angus Scrimm), a cult leader devoted to worshiping Lee Chuck, a maniac who sold his soul to the devil for immortality, but avoided payment by killing an innocent person every day and giving away their soul instead.
Wanting revenge (I’m guessing, the script is kinda fuzzy on her motivations), Angel decides she has to travel to Sin Do’s hidden island fortress (which may or may not be the titular lost empire, again the script fails to illuminate) and take part in his potentially fatal games, which are only open to beautiful, athletic young women. The catch is that the games only accept participants in groups of three, forcing Angel to find three worthy partners to join her on her quest.
To that end she goes to the local reservation and calls forth the extremely busty spirit of Whitestar (Russ Meyer vet Raven De La Croix, who was dating Wynorski at the time and also appeared as a stripper in Screwballs, which he co-wrote, but did not direct), who appears out of nowhere and then goes on to show absolutely no signs of supernatural empowerment.
After getting a little Thelma & Louise action in a honky tonk parking lot, they travel over to a nearby women’s prison, where all of the convicts are busty centerfolds who settle their problems in courtyard mud fights. Along with the thrilled guards Angel and Whitestar watch as the buxom blond Heather (the late Angela Aames, whose cleavage you’ll recognize from the beginning of Bachelor Party) manages to take down the equally buxom, leather-clad Whiplash (former green-haired Star Trekvixen turned porn star, Angelique Pettyjohn), earning herself a spot on the team.
Together they descend upon the recruitment center and force their way onto the already-full list in what is probably the best scene in the movie:
Strangely, The Lost Empire actually noticeably deflates once the trio makes it to the island. Typically this is where the film would really begin, but the film’s low budget isn’t prepared to deliver on the promise of an island fortress or exciting sexy woman-on-sexy woman games and instead delivers scenes of the actresses running around the grounds of a local L.A. mansion and practicing their archery.
In fact, the only “game” we see is a poorly choreographed gladiatorial fight scene between Angel and a masked behemoth that won’t rank high on anyone’s action scale. Wynorski tries to make up for this by having Sin Do fall madly in lust with Whitestar, giving him the excuse to drug her and thus expose her abundant attributes onscreen.
But beyond this what bothers me the most about the island portion of the movie is the reappearance of Angel’s FBI boyfriend, who comes to the island because he found the missing “Eye of Avatar” hidden in her forgotten purse. Why he would think coming to the island with the one object Sin Do needs for his plan to take over the world is a good idea is never explained, but this is trivial compared to what his sudden appearance does to Angel’s character.
Despite introducing her as a Dirty Harry-esque bad ass, who has no problem kicking the butts of rednecks, cult guards and giant gladiators alike, Wynorski chooses to cut her honorary balls off by turning her into a standard damsel-in-distress during the climax, so her boyfriend can rescue her and save the day. For all her apparent strength and superiority, Angel apparently isn’t able to stop the madman using her own devices. And even when she has a chance to go against an odious minion, he's dispatched by his own incompetence rather than her intervention.
This, I’m afraid, is the first possible sign of a misogynist streak I suspect I may uncover as this project continues. I hope I’m wrong, but based on the other films of Wynorski’s I have already seen, I strongly suspect it is there.
Still, there is fun to be had in the end, most notably the moment where Whitestar preempts a gorilla attack by kicking the guy in the suit in the nuts.
Despite the protestations of no less than two different villains, there never was a sequel to The Lost Empire, which is a shame because even though the film stumbles in terms of plot, it does a good job of establishing aninterestingcompelling bouncy cast of characters who could have easily been put to good use in further adventures.
I think what sets The Lost Empire apart from what I’ve seen of the rest of Wynorski’s oeuvre is its refreshing lack of cynicism. While it contains the same large-breasted actresses, terrible jokes and references to old movies that define his later work, it features them less out of desperation than with genuine affection and joy. It’s the kind of film a young movie maniac would make after finally getting the keys to the kingdom, simple enthusiasm making up for all the deficiencies of pacing, budget and plot.
It is, for all of its flaws, a genuine movie made by a man who stopped making genuine movies a long time ago.
