When we hear the word “freak” our minds automatically leap to the deformed human oddities presented for our twisted amusement in carnival tent shows, but the true essence of the word is that of someone uniquely special who stands out from the rest of mainstream society. By this definition, “freak” not only refers to the kinds of characters most often found and celebrated in B-Movies, but also the audience members most likely to reject traditional Hollywood entertainment in favour of the less popular, lower budgeted alternatives.
In mainstream films, protagonists are carefully crafted to be as universally likable and relatable as possible. They’re just like us only better and much more attractive. They represent the person we want to see in our mirrors. B-Movie protagonists, on the other hand, are much more likely to be the people we actually see in our mirrors. They are outsiders. They have flaws.
They are freaks.
Sometimes this is a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers; sometimes it’s the accidental result of having to cast a cheap, but otherwise talented actor who isn’t handsome enough to make the A-list. It doesn’t matter. The main benefit of making genre, niche films is that you can afford to not please everyone—your investment isn’t big enough to demand that you whitewash reality in order to please the greatest number of people.
And this is a major reason why B-Movie buffs are attracted to these often flawed films. In most cases they are freaks themselves and more closely identify with flawed heroes than the Golden Gods Hollywood would prefer we worship and admire.
When most people hear the term “exploitation movie” they tend to imagine kidnapped runaways forced to perform sexual acts against their will by sweaty goateed pornographers. The real meaning of the term, though, is much more benign and seldom, if ever, involves actual slavery.
When it was originally conceived, the term simply referred to any low budget movie that exploited a specific gimmick in order to convince theatergoers to buy a ticket. The nature of the gimmick could literally be anything—a bizarre concept, the promise of risqué nudity, the acting debut of a non-acting celebrity, the pretense of educational content in order to disguise taboo subject matter, extreme violence, a plot ripped straight from today’s headlines, weird promotional campaigns that had nothing to do with the film itself, etc.
The one common factor that united these films was that they were specifically made for one reason: To earn as much money as possible. Some potential exploitation films, though, have been able to transcend their origins and become art, which disqualifies them from earning the label. For this reason two similar films from the same genre might not both qualify as exploitation movies, despite their apparent similarities. The best example of this being Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13thand John Carpenter’s Halloween. Though both films were made quickly, cheaply, and in pursuit of a quick buck, Carpenter’s ambition is immediately apparent from the first shot. On the other hand, Cunningham’s indifference is just as obvious. Made for the same reason and under the same circumstances, only Friday the 13th qualifies as exploitation. Halloween is art.
That’s not to say that an exploitation movie is therefore automatically without merit. So long as it doesn’t make its audience feel like it was ripped off or suckered in by an unmet promise, it can be considered a success. Every exploitation film makes a promise. The good ones deliver on that promise and the bad ones don’t.
As frequently noted by exploitation movie legend Roger Corman, exploitation films are no longer the sole domain of low-budget filmmakers. By the standards described above, many major Hollywood blockbusters easily qualify as exploitation movies.
During the height of their popularity drive-ins become synonymous with B-Movies in the minds of many filmgoers. This was not originally the case, as many drive-ins did show first run prestige studio pictures when they first started, but stopped when they discovered they could sell just as many tickets for the much cheaper to rent films made available by smalltime regional distributors.
The fact was that for most people the film itself was secondary to the whole drive-in experience. With often-inferior sound and projection, the film mattered less than the combination of communal ritual and the privacy afforded by your vehicle. An excuse to get out of the house, hang-out and perhaps get lucky with your date, it really didn’t matter what was playing, so long as it offered some action, sex and an occasional laugh or scare.
As a result “drive-in” and “B-Movie” grew to mean the same thing. If you wanted to see the latest major studio blockbuster, you went to a “hard top” theater. If you wanted to see the latest Roger Corman movie you went to the drive-in.
Eventually, though, the drive-in habit began to wane. The privacy that made the ritual so appealing was made unnecessary with the popularity of the VCR and people found other places to hang out. Many drive-ins tried to fight their own obsolescence by once again showing major studio films (the first memory I can put a date on occurred at the Twin Drive-in. There I watched Star Wars in the back of the Dombrosky's wood panelled station wagon during the film's 1978 summer re-release. I was 2 and ½ years old), but by then it was too late.
Today the association between drive-ins and B-Movies remains, largely due to the efforts of enthusiasts such as John Bloom (aka Joe-Bob Briggs) who have worked hard to keep the memory of the drive-in experience alive.
Popularized by Toronto film reviewer, Paul Corupe, the term "Canuxploitation" can be used to reference any Canadian made exploitation film, but is traditionally associated with a specific period in the history of Canadian film in which the federal government offered tax incentives to anyone who invested in a film production as a way to spur the the country's movie industry. Though the plan proved successful in increasing production, the legislators responsible for the initiative failed to take into account that the kind of investor most likely to take advantage of it would also be inclined to invest only in those productions capable of turning a profit. As a result the arthouse was ignored in favour of the grindhouse.
C-List American actors were shipped across the border to star in low-budget versions of traditional Hollywood genre fare. Very few of these films acknowledged their Canadian roots and were set in generic American cities. This allowed them to more easily play in American cinemas, which enabled efforts such as Meatballs and Porky's to quickly become the most successful Canadian films up to that time. That said, a specifically Canadian aesthetic did manage to transcend Canuxploitation's deliberately generic packaging. Canadian genre films of the period were noted for frequently having a bleak quality that stood out amongst their American counterparts. They also often featured more subdued colour palates that made them stand out visually.
Eventually the government ended the tax shelter program, but Canadian filmmakers benefited from "runaway" Hollywood productions that moved up north to take advantage of the then-favourable exchange rate and lower labour costs. While some of these films can be considered Canuxploitation, many are virtually impossible to distinguish from traditional Hollywood product and are instead thought of as American productions made in a foreign location.
In 1971 Hollywood made a shocking discovery--black people went to the movies too. The two films that allowed them to reach this conclusion were Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The first was a studio picture, the second was made independently and both would have a tremendous impact on the entire decade. It turned out that "urban" audiences were desperate to see images of themselves onscreen and went to the movies more often than their less-"urban" contemporaries. The result was a genre unto itself given the controversial name of Blaxploitation. Though most often associated with low-budget action films, Blaxploitation encompassed virtually every known genre, including horror, westerns, musicals, melodrama, romance, and comedy.
Blaxploitation faced criticism both as an overall concept and for its content. Some of those who participated in the making of the films bristled at the notion that they and their audience were some how being "exploited". They argued that for the first time black actors had the chance to play leading roles in mainstream films and black audiences now had characters they could identify with. How was that exploitation? The answer to this came from (mostly white liberal) critics who argued that Blaxploitation films placed too much of an emphasis on negative cultural stereotypes and featured many films made by white writers and directors in which the black protagonists were pimps, hookers, drug dealers, addicts, thieves, con men and other kinds of anti-heroes that helped perpetuate urban criminality rather than serve as an uplifting respite from it.
As is often the cases in these situations, both points of view were entirely valid. These films did allow many talented black actors to play roles they had never played before and never would again, but too often these roles did require them to enact a white scenarist's skewed view of a culture they obviously didn't understand.
Today, Blaxploitation is fondly remembered more for its dated fashion and slang than the actual quality of the film's themselves. Parodies of the genre, such as the hilarious Black Dynamite, are invariably more affectionate than biting. And though the genre petered out at the beginning of the 80s, largely due to the rise of suburban multiplexes and a general dissatisfaction with the overall quality of the films, its influence remains today and can be seen in any urban action film starring the latest rapper looking to expand upon his record career.
Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson did not believe movies were art. They had no reverence for relevance. They were businessmen, pure and simple. Their methodology was ingenious. Come up with an insanely catchy tile (I Was a Teenage Werewolf). Hire a talented artist to create a poster based on that title. Show the poster to film buyers. Rake in the cash, and then hire people to actually make the movie. As backwards as this may sound, there was no arguing with their success. During a time when the studios were fighting a losing battle against television, A.I.P. understood that the real money was in the kids who couldn't stand being cooped up inside with their parents, so they made movies for drive-ins that offered up all of the scares, skin and laffs kids craved.
For star power they hired older actors who the studios no longer wanted. The result was big names for budget prices. They formed a deal with a plucky young go-getter named Roger Corman, and as a result grandfathered the 70s movie revolution. They made good movies (Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machines). They made bad movies (Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs). They even ventured out and made some expensive movies (Meteor), but in the end the quality meant less than the quantity--A.I.P. made a lot movies and ended up defining B-Movie cinema as we still know it.
So, as a means of providing y'all with more frequent content, I've decided to occasionally throw together random lists of stuff related to this blog's raison d'etre. For my inaugural list I'm going to take a look at the best B-Movie theme songs of ALL TIME. And when I say "ALL TIME" I really mean "the first ones that came to my head when I first thought up the idea." Seriously, if I actually thought about it and made an attempt to represent different sub-genres over the past five decades or so, I'd probably come up with a completely different list.
1. The Ramones "Pet Sematary"
It should come as no surprise that my favourite band of all time would be responsible for my favourite horror movie theme song, but even if it had been recorded by someone else the song alone would likely make my list. There's a genuinely sad, mournful quality to the lyrics and melody that transcend the potentially ridiculous chorus. It reminds me a lot of "Poison Heart", another uncharacteristically somber Ramones song from their Mondo Bizarro album, which was also written by Dee Dee, the most troubled member of the band. For some these efforts stand out as evidence of the band's inability to transcend their apparent limitations, but I've always found them strangely affecting. Much more so than the movie that inspired the song, which is another example that proves my contention that the worst Stephen King adaptations are the ones where he was directly involved in the production.
2. The Dickies "Killer Klowns From Outer Space"
Like The Ramones, The Dickies were another classic punk band with a sense of humour, which made them the perfect choice to write and record the theme song for The Chiodo Brothers insta-cult classic. Like the film that inspired it "Killer Klowns From Outer Space" is inherently goofy without sacrificing a sense of essential strangeness that allows it to become far creepier than it has any right to be. Starting with the perfect opening that turns Julius Fučík's "Entry of the Gladiators" into a cool guitar riff, the song plays with our perceptions of what a pop should be--managing to be simultaneously catchy, disturbing and funny at the same time. Fortunately the same is true of the movie, which is well worth checking out if you haven't seen it already.
3. Alice Cooper "He's Back (The Man Behind the Mask)"
I'm probably alone in my defence of Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI as the best entry in the entire series, but I've always found Tom McLoughlin's take on the material to be the closest match to my own personal sensibilities. I've met many people who insist that its predecessor A New Beginning is far funnier, but I've always found its campiness to be the result of incompetence rather than design (that said, Part V does have the best nudity to be found in the entire series). Part VI, on the other hand, was clearly intended to be a comedy and features many moments likely to go above the head of its intended audience (for example the shot where one of the young terrified campers is shown reading Sartre's existentialist treatise No Exit). For that reason Cooper's theme song (whose title refers to the fact that Jason was noticeably absent from Part V, where *SPOILER* the killer turned out to be an ambulance driver no one gave a fuck about) fits perfectly as a fun ode to the pure joy of horror movie escapism. Cooper also previously set the tone of another classic B-Movie, Class of 1984, where his "I Am the Future" echoed the arrogance and alienation of that film's disaffected teenage antagonists.
4. Ernie Andrews "The Glove"
Performed by Andrews, the theme song for Ross Hagen's interesting late 70s combination of bounty hunter thriller and depressing drama was written by Robert O. Ragland and Sid Wayne. As you can hear below, the song is hilariously over-the-top and actually doesn't come close to matching the sad, existential tone of the film that follows it, yet there's no way you can deny any theme song that features the impossible to forget lyric, "You can't escape / the kiss and rape / of The Glove!" That said, I highly recommend you check The Glove out. Not only does it feature John Saxon's best performance, but it manages to be genuinely moving in a way only a film from that period could be.
5. John McDermott "The Ballad of Harry Warden"
I actually quite liked the remake of My Bloody Valentine, but there's a good reason why the original will always live on in my memory as the superior version and you can listen to it below. Written by Paul Zaza, the song (which plays during the end credits) is a charming folk ballad that tells the tale of the crazed minor who escaped from an insane asylum and killed a bunch of folks before the Valentine's Day dance, which in turn caused a young boy to go insane and replicate his crimes a couple decades later (...aum...spoiler?). The other reason why I prefer the original movie is because it is--by far--the most explicitly Canadian horror film ever made.
Horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes is accosted outside a bookstore by a desperate looking man, who claims to have not eaten for weeks. The kindly author attempts to give the poor soul a few dollars, but the man refuses the offer and instead sinks his large fangs into R’s neck. Luckily for R, Eramus is a rare ethical vampire, who only takes enough blood to quench his thirst, leaving his victim both alive and human. It turns out he’s a fan of R’s work and invites him to The Monster Club, the local spot where all of the area’s vamps, werewolves and ghouls like to hang out. R agrees and stays long enough to hear 3 tales of terror, listen to some fine 80s British rock music, enjoy the performance of a very unique stripper and, finally, become the club’s latest member—an honor made possible once Eramus explains to his fellow monsters that as a human, R belongs to a species responsible for more horror than all of theirs combined. Then they all dance.
While the popularity of the horror genre is one of cinema’s few constants, the various sub-genres that make up its existence come and go as quickly as the zeitgeists that inform them. Like all fashion, there comes a moment where what was hip and stylish yesterday, now looks oddly ridiculous today, only to become retro-cool sometime in the future. Pinpointing this moment, though, is frequently very difficult. Just as there were folks still wearing bell-bottoms when skin-tight jeans were the rage, there are always going to be movie producers who insist on repeating past successes, even when they no longer resemble the kinds of movies current audiences actually want to see.
Born in New York, Milton Subotsky was a writer/producer/fanboy who eventually moved to England and formed Amicus Productions with Max Rosenthal, a fellow genre enthusiast. Today Amicus remains best known for the 7 British Horror Anthology (BHA) films it produced between 1965 and 1974, starting with Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and ending with From Beyond the Grave. Each film consisted of several short horror stories combined together via wraparound segments whose settings ranged from the clever (From Beyond the Grave’s curio shop) to the lazy (The House That Dripped Blood’s…uh…house).
The main benefit of these productions were that they allowed Amicus to fill their films with talented actors on very low budgets, since it cost far less to hire them for only a few days, than it would for the month or so required for a regular movie. The presence of talented, charismatic actors not only elevated the material, but also made up for the fact that the short segments essentially made significant character development impossible. By casting actors such as Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Donald Pleasance, Jack Palance, Michael Ripper, Burgess Meredith, Tom Baker, Ian Oglivie, Joan Collins, Michael Gough, Donald Sutherland, Denholm Elliot, Joss Ackland, Ingrid Pitt, Terry-Thomas, Glynis Johns, Ian Hendry, Patrick Magee, Herbert Lom, Barry Morse, Charlotte Rampling, Lesley-Ann Down and David Warner, Amicus made it much easier for audiences to forgive flaws that might have doomed films with less-accomplished performers.
It also helped that the very nature of the films kept them from the potential narrative pitfalls that can affect more conventional films. If an audience member was bored by one particular segment (and each film seemed to feature at least one boring and/or unsuccessful segment) they at least knew it would end soon and be replaced by one they’d likely enjoy a lot more.
And chances were there would be at least one segment that would leave an indeliable mark on your psyche. A fun game to play with any true horror movie fan is to ask them to describe their favourite BHA moments. Personally I'd begin with a detailed description of Torture Garden's possessed piano sequence, which actually ends with the piano coming to life and attacking poor Barbara Ewing, and then go on to tell the tale of that same film's wonderful "twist" ending (turns out, Burgess Meredith is actually...well...I won't spoil it for you).
Amicus’ anthology formula proved so successful that it became easy for people to forget that they produced close to 20 more traditional films (including some hard sci-fi, several “lost world” fantasies and even a romantic comedy) and assume those were the only kind of films they made. But by 1974, when From Beyond the Grave was released, the formula began its inexorable slide into irrelevance. For all the reflected class of their talented thespians, there was always something slightly childish and goofy about the Amicus anthologies. They were cinematic versions of the kind of campfire ghost stories we told as children, and those stories no longer seemed as frightening in the wake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Horror films were now either deadly serious (The Exorcist) or disconcertingly realistic (The Last House On the Left) and anything that mixed humor with the supernatural suddenly felt childish and old-fashioned.
But old habits die hard. In 1977, Subotsky produced the Canadian co-production, The Uncanny, an anthology featuring feline-inspired horror tales and—seven years after the last official Amicus anthology hit the screens—he tried again with The Monster Club.
By 1981, movie houses were dominated by a new kind of horror, best typified by the slasher film, in which sex and violence took precedence over everything else. Compared to that same year’s An American Werewolf in London, Friday the 13th Part 2, and The Evil Dead, The Monster Club seems as dated and quaint as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Ironically, this has as much to do with its blatant attempts at relevance than it does the antiquated sensibility of its horror tales.
As if fully aware of how old-fashioned the whole project was, the filmmakers (including Hammer warhouse Roy Ward Baker, who ended his long feature film career with this effort) decided to attempt to bring it screaming into the 80s by featuring the most popular affordable musical acts of the period and have them perform their appropriately themed songs on camera. And the club itself was clearly inspired by the cantina scene in 1977’s Star Wars, the key difference being that the monster mask budget for The Monster Club was less than what it cost to manufacture C-3PO’s codpiece.
The overall effect of this attempt to “modernize” the Brit-horror anthology is that The Monster Club actual feels twice as dated as any of its predecessors. Nothing dates a movie faster than the use of “current” pop music, and the ludicrous monster effects adds a lair of camp ridiculousness that the other Amicus anthologies mostly managed to avoid.
It doesn’t help that the 3 horror tales have to rank amongst the most anemic of all the Amicus films and prove far less memorable than the club sequences that surround them. The overall effect is closer to that of a children’s film than anything else, and I’d suggest it wouldn’t even be scary enough for that audience, if I didn’t know for a fact that this wasn’t the case.
I can’t place an exact year when it occurred, but it would have to have been around 1985-1987. It was around Halloween and we were visiting my Auntie Lynne (I really wish I could be cool and identify my mom’s late sister as “my Aunt Lynne” instead, but the sound of it is so unnatural I have no choice but to use the more juvenile alternative. If you had ever been lucky enough to meet her, you'd know why) and Uncle Joe. With us was the family of Uncle Joe’s brother, including his two sons, Darren and J.P., who not only closely matched me and my brother in age, but also in interests and overall personalities.
Darren and I were the older brothers and were both bookish geeks with precocious interests in popular culture, while J.P. and my brother, Chris, were much more athletic types who considered reading more of a punishment than a recreational activity. That night we found ourselves downstairs in the basement, where the TV was, while the adults did whatever adults do. Because of the approaching holiday one of the local stations was showing a week’s worth of horror movies and that night’s selection was today’s subject.
I adored movies, but my young fertile imagination had a tendency to become inflicted by brutal nightmares whenever exposed to horrific imagery, so when The Monster Club came up during our exploration of the programming landscape, I demanded that the channel be turned ever onward. Darren, who also shared my “big pussy” sensibilities, agreed with me, but we were stymied by the fact that our younger brothers sadistically enjoyed exploiting any opportunity to torture us.
In front of us the movie played out as either Chris or J.P. (I think it was J.P.) paused with their hand on the dial and allowed it to continue. This is what we saw:
25 years later and it seems amazing that we could be disturbed by something so benign, but Darren and I both protested loudly enough to finally compel the channel to be changed. I have no idea what we ended up watching, but I’ve never forgotten that moment of The Monster Club, so I know for a fact that in at least one instance it proved to be an effective horror vehicle.
Not surprisingly, Darren and I both went on to become professional writers. Eventually we found ourselves reunited years later when we both worked for the same publisher. Ironically, we found ourselves working in the genre we were once too sensitive to endure—specifically, tales of the supernatural. He would write Werewolves & Shapeshifters, I would write Gothic Ghost Stories and together we would collaborate on Native Ghost Stories (which, for various complicated reasons, I chose to have credited under the pseudonym of Amos Gideon).
Life, as they say, is fucking weird.
And perhaps it’s the nostalgia of this memory that forces me to admit that for all of its flaws, I kinda loved The Monster Club when I finally revisited it a few days ago. In fact, if anything it’s those flaws that I find so endearing. It’s a film that ultimately understands it has no right to exist, yet continues to do so anyway, defying its own irrelevance if only for the pure joy of it.
It doesn’t hurt that—as dated as they sound—the songs provided by now-forgotten Brit pop acts like Night, B.A. Robertson and The Pretty Thingsare all pretty awesome, especially The Viewers’ “Monsters Rule O.K”, which I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I first heard it. (Ironically the only band in the movie you’ve likely heard of—UB-40 of ”Red, Red Wine” fame —are regulated to being the background house band and don’t get their own moment in the spotlight.)
We also can’t ignore the presence of Vincent Price, who somehow managed to avoid being in any of the other Amicus anthologies (despite having starred in their productions of Scream and Scream Again and Madhouse), but who adds his trademark touch of amused class to the proceedings. There’s a reason why he remains my favourite all-time actor. He was that rare performer who could be both sincere and glib at the exact same time—a trait that I like to think defines the existence of this particular blogging enterprise.
Of the film’s three narrative sequences, the first—from which the clip that once so frightened me is taken—is easily the most effective. Interestingly, it and the second story both invert the traditional formula and feature monsters as the sympathetic characters. The first story goes so far as to take its cue from the old E.C. comic books (which Subotsky clearly loved, having made not one but two movies based on them—Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror, both of which feature early adaptations later remade for the popular HBO TV show) and features an ethically challenged protagonist, who eventually gets what’s coming to her, as its lead.
Angela (Barbara Kellerman) is engaged to George (Simon Ward), a con man looking for one last score they can use to move away and get married. In the want ads he finds the perfect mark in the form of an antiquities collector who requires an assistant to help him index his collection. Angela goes to get the job, but runs away when she sees the cold, dead face of Raven (John Laurenson), a pathetic recluse who has grown quite used to people reacting to him this way.
George convinces Angela to return and she manages to swallow her revulsion long enough to take the job, which delights the extremely lonely collector. It’s clear that Raven is a wounded, sensitive soul, who counts the pigeons he feeds as his only friends. What Angela does not know is that he is a Shadmock, a creature whose status as the lowest creature in the monster hierarchy doesn’t stop them from being the most feared and dangerous. For all his meekness, Raven can wreck untold damage merely by deciding to whistle at the object of his displeasure.
Raven, unused to being in the presence of a beautiful woman, quickly falls in love with Angela and proposes marriage. She agrees, but only as a pretense to carry out her and George’s scheme. During their engagement party (where all of his monstrous family members disguise themselves with masks) she breaks away from their dancing and is caught by Raven as she attempts to empty his safe. He tells her that she can have his money and everything else he owns, so long as she stays with him and loves him. Angela screams at the mere thought of this, which compels the wounded Raven to lash out at her the only way he can--he whistles.
For all the film’s camp, this segment’s final shot of the devastated monster sitting, weeping, on his ballroom floor while surrounded by his relatives does manage to pack an emotional punch. It’s less frightening than genuinely sad, thanks to Laurenson’s moving portrait of the misunderstood monster.
The film’s second segment is an example of one of the odder BHA traditions—the overtly comedic story. This goes all the way back to the pre-Amicus days and one of the best BHA’s, 1945’s Dead of Night, whose otherwise chilling effect (bolstered largely by the justly famous segment featuring Michael Redgrave as a ventriloquist haunted by his caustic dummy) is somewhat undone by the comic sequence in which a golfer’s game is hamstrung by the ghost of a romantic rival who committed suicide after losing the match that determined which one got to marry their mutually beloved. In the case of The Monster Club the comic sequence is especially egregious since it isn’t actually funny, which kinda goes against its only reason to exist.
Introduced as a film clip by a vampire film producer (which Price admits is somewhat redundant), the story focuses on a wimpy boy named Lintom Busotsky (William Saire) who wonders why his tuxedo-clad father sleeps all day and works only at night. His father insists he isn’t a waiter, and both of his parents warn him to never talk to strangers, especially those who carry violin cases.
One day at school, Lintom is approached by a man dressed as a priest (Donald Pleasance), who attempts to befriend him. Lintom recalls his parents’ warnings and gets away, but the next day the same man—now dressed in regular clothes and carrying a violin case—accosts him and, along with two partners, breaks into his house while his mother is out shopping and his father is asleep in the basement. Turns out the men work for the government department devoted to keeping people safe from vampires and Lintom’s father has proven to be their most elusive target.
With a great sense of accomplishment the head vampire hunter drives a stake into Lintom’s father’s heart while he and his mother watch with horror. But before he can celebrate, Lintom’s dad awakes and manages to sink his fangs into the hunter’s neck before he dies. Lintom’s mother points out to the man’s partners that the bite was deep enough to ensure that their leader is about to become a vampire himself. He protests, but his long fangs prove she’s right and his partner’s have no choice but to stake him right then and there.
Fortunately for the Busotsky’s, Lintom’s father was only pretending to be dead. Fearful of such an unwanted intrusion ever happening, he took the precaution of wearing a stake-proof vest (along with a ketchup packet over his heart to achieve the proper bloody effect). And at that point everyone watching can be heard to groan, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I suspect I’m being a bit too hard on this sequence. It’s a light, innocent piece of fluff, but there’s simply no "there" there to justify its inclusion. We know right from the beginning that Lintom’s father is a vampire, because the vampire producer who introduces it tells us that its based on his childhood, so the only twist is that there is no twist, apart from the hunter being the true villain of the piece. That said, if you rearrange the letters of Lintom Busotsky, you get Milton Subotsky, which I suspect explains everything about why this particular story made it into the final script.
This now brings us to what is probably the film’s most famous sequence, which occurs between the second and third stories. While Night performs their big hit (I’m guessing, I’d never actually heard it before) “The Stripper”, the camera focuses on an attractive, blond exotic dancer (Suzanna Willis) who goes that extra mile during her performance:
It’s a fun moment, achieved by some great animation, but it does seem to feel somewhat at odds with the childish tone of the rest of the film, which suggests that the retro-innocence of the film is more the result of the filmmakers’ outdated view of what constituted proper cinematic horror than a deliberate attempt to appeal to young viewers.
For fans of BHA, the film’s third sequence is easily the most typical of the genre. It starts out VERY promisingly with a shot of a buxom gothic beauty walking down a flight of stairs with a candelabra in her hand, as the light from the above doorway allows us to catch glimpses of what is occurring beneath her diaphanous gown. But before we can get too excited, it turns out we are on a film set. Sam (Stuart Whitman), is the film’s director and he is insistent that his latest production requires the realism of a proper out-of-the-way English village for the affect he’s wants to achieve.
To that end he decides to drive to just such a village and determine if it has the look he’s aiming for. He doesn’t seem to notice the thick cloud of strange fog that separates the village from the outside world, but soon realizes he should have when he finds out that it’s populated by flesh-eating ghouls, who—he soon learns—are supported by powerful outside authorities.
While not quite as disappointing as the second story, the third lacks both a sympathetic protagonist and a compelling villain, meaning we ultimately feel nothing when the director’s escape turns out to be futile, as we don’t care who wins this battle either way.
Thankfully, the film still manages to end on a high note when Eramus asks the club’s secretary (a werewolf) to admit his author guest as a permanent member. The secretary informs him that they couldn’t possibly allow a human to become a member of The Monster Club, but Eramus eloquently convinces him otherwise in a moving speech that argues that humans are really the worse monsters of all.
It’s a great moment, made even greater by its being followed by Price and Carradine dancing together while The Pretty Things play “(Welcome to) The Monster Club”, which is really as sublime a moment as any BHA fan can ever hope to expect.
So, yeah, on an objective level The Monster Club is definitely a dated failure—a film whose tone and relevance would have been questionable even a decade before it was made—but on a purely subjective level, it’s a delight and proof that what once could so easily terrify me as a child is pretty much my main reason for living today.
Rip (no last name given, no last name NEEDED) is the heavyweight champion of the World Wrestling Federation and a thorn in the side of Brell, the sociopathic network president of WTN. Unable to convince Rip to jump to his channel through bribery or violence, Brell decides to make a star out of Zeus, a demented ex-con behemoth who quickly becomes a national sensation fighting in anything goes “No Holds Barred” matches. Rip succumbs to Zeus’ taunts for a match when he cripples Rip’s beloved younger brother, Randy. The night of the big match, Brell kidnap’s Rip’s girlfriend, Samantha, and orders him to give Zeus a good ten minutes before throwing the match. For a time it seems like Rip won’t have to throw anything, but when he sees that Samantha is safe, he finds the inner-strength he needs to defeat his opponent and ensure that Brell never hurts anyone else ever again.
Like most children of the 80s, I fully embraced the lovably theatrical world of professional wrestling. With their inhuman bodies and high-flying acrobatics, professional wrestlers were the closest we ever got to watching real live superheroes in action. The best matches had a beauty, drama and grace to them that was as compelling as any movie you could name. I can still feel the pure joy I experienced when Ricky “The Dragon” Steamboat finally pinned Randy “Macho Man” Savage during Wrestlemania III, after the most tense and excruciating 15-20 minutes of my life. Even though I first saw it on videotape months after it actually happened, I clapped and cheered so loudly I’m sure Steamboat must have heard me wherever he was in the world at the time.
But despite the enjoyment I derived from wrestling, I can honestly say that I never really understood the phenomena of Hulkamania. Even at a very young age I appreciated the fact that the “professional” part of “professional wrestling” was pretty much synonymous with “bullshit” and therefore enjoyed watching the wrestlers who I thought told the best stories in the ring and made it seem almost-kinda legitimate. For all of his enormous popularity, Hulk Hogan was clearly not one of these wrestlers. While many of my peers marveled at the size of his “pythons” I couldn’t help but notice how slow he was, how few moves he seemed to have and how predictably tedious it was whenever he came back from the brink of defeat by feeding on the cheers of the crowd.
It didn’t hurt that as the smallest boy in each and every one of my classes, I was naturally inclined to be suspicious of those whose only claim to fame was that they were bigger and stronger than everyone else was. Hulk Hogan clearly benefited from the phenomenon that causes most young kids to assume a nickel is worth more than a dime, because it seems ridiculous that the smaller coin could ever be the more valuable of the two. I, however, knew bigger did not mean better and therefore had little time for those wrestlers who brought nothing else but bulk to the table (although that didn't stop me from loudly cheering for Andre the Giant that same night I cheered for Ricky Steamboat).
I’d like to say that by 13 I had grown too old for all of this, but that would be a ginormous lie. I was still a faithful fan when the Hulkster’s leading man debut was released to theaters (hell, I even occasionally bought the fucking magazine), but my disdain for him kept me from seeing it. If they had released a movie starring Randy Savage, Jake Roberts or (most especially) Miss Elizabeth, I would have probably been there opening day, but I had no time for No Holds Barred, especially since even at that age I could tell that there was no way it could be anything but awful.
Twenty-two years later and my relationship with pro-wrestling is now exactly like the one I have with hardcore pornography—I find the actual product to be mind-numbingly tedious, but the industry itself endlessly fascinating. I can’t get through more than five minutes of any episode of Raw, Smackdown or Impact, but I still enjoy reading the behind the scenes stories about the men and women who made wrestling famous and those who continue on the tradition today.
For this reason I decided it was time to check out Hogan’s famous folly, a film supposedly so terrible that it somehow tarnishes the filmography of the man who starred in Mr. Nanny, Santa With Muscles and Three Ninjas III. Before I even pressed play on my AppleTV remote, I knew I was in for some serious pain, but I never would have dreamed what I would feel when it was over and the end credits began to roll.
Admiration.
Now before you assume I’m writing this while trying to fatally overdose on crazy pills, please understand that I never for once thought that No Holds Barred was a good movie, but instead that I quickly realized that what I was watching wasn’t terrible as a result of filmmaking incompetence, but instead the result of a phenomena I myself know only too well.
There were two groups of people on the set of this film when it was made. The first group consisted of Hogan, producer Vince McMahon and—I’m guessing—leading lady Joan Severance. They believed they were making a real movie—one that would entertain and excite a large mainstream audience. The second group consisted of everyone else who worked on the picture, including director Thomas J. Wright, (the unfortunately named) screenwriter Dennis Hackin, and—especially—co-star Kurt Fuller, who played the part of Rip’s evil network president antagonist.
The folks in the second group did not share the first group’s delusions of grandeur. They knew full well that they were trapped in the middle of a ridiculous vanity project that had no hope of being anything approaching good, so they all said a collective “Fuck it!” and decided that if it was going to fail, it might as well fail on their own spectacular terms.
I came to this conclusion when I finally realized why the film felt so familiar. There was something about its tone that felt so oddly recognizable. It was only a few minutes after Hogan’s character so completely terrified a potential kidnapper that he literally shit his pants that I realized I was watching the greatest film Lloyd Kaufman never made.
As the co-owner of Troma Studios, Kaufman is responsible for such films as The Toxic Avenger, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, Tromeo & Juliet, Terror Firmer and Poultrygeist. His films are (in)famous for reveling in bad taste, but in such a way that feels deliberate and—almost—artful. There’s a rebellious quality to his nudity, violence and scatological jokes—each film serving as a cinematic middle finger to what he sees as mainstream Hollywood’s embrace of mediocrity in favor of originality. “You want terrible?” he asks. “I’ll fucking give you terrible.”
As bizarre as it may sound, I finished watching No Holds Barred convinced that it was made with this same attitude in mind. And I completely understood why.
I’ve written before that few, if any, artists, whatever their medium, take on a project expecting it to fail, but it doesn’t take long for the signposts of failure to become impossible to ignore. And once you’ve seen enough of them, you have two choices—succumb or rebel. Succumbing means biting a bullet and creating something that you know is shitty and nothing else; rebelling means becoming subversive and creating something that’s still shitty, but on your own terms and not in the way the people paying your paychecks expected.
Whether it’s an artist who plants a subliminal penis in a Disney movie poster or an author who writes a ghost story called “A Boy and His Instrument” in a book called Haunted Schools that’s all about masturbation if you read it correctly (hey, that was me!), these acts of rebellion often go unnoticed by even the most perceptive of audience members, who simply assume that the artists lacked talent and nothing more. But we brave few who have been in these situations ourselves know deliberate, subversive shittyness when we see it and have no choice but to salute and admire it when we do.
It definitely helps my case that the film bears little relation to those found in Group Two’s various filmographies. Although Wright only got the chance to direct one other feature, he’s still managed to amass an admirable amount of credits directing some of the best (The X-Files, Angel and Firefly) and most popular (C.S.I. and N.C.I.S.) episodic shows found on television. Hackin began his career with the critically acclaimed Clint Eastwood comedy Bronco Billy and Fuller remains one of the funniest character actors working today (his crowning achievement being his role in The Tick, where he played Destroyo, a genocidal supervillain whose hatred for mankind derived from the cruel taunts of “Dance, Fatboy, dance!” he received when he was an overweight ballet prodigy. I still quote the line he delivers to Liz Vassey’s Captain Liberty—“You’re not needy, you’re wanty. There’s a difference!”—whenever I can get away with it).
This is not your standard collection of deluded, untalented assholes. These are skilled professionals who found themselves caught in an absurd situation and decided to not go gently into that good night in order to deal with it.
The question then is how did Group Two manage to make a movie that was deliberately and subversively hilarious without Group One noticing?
To answer this, I’m going to go back to the connection I made between wrestling and hardcore pornography a few paragraphs back by looking at two films that were doomed in their conception due to the inability of their directors to appreciate how much their perspectives had been shifted by their previous work.
Starring Clint Howard as the serial killing title character, 1995s Ice Cream Man sets itself apart by being a violent, r-rated, nudity-filled slasher movie whose reliance on pre-pubescent protagonists makes it feel like the most socially irresponsible kids movie of all time. Too violent and profane for its target audience and too juvenile for adults, it was a film that could have only been made by someone whose sense of what was and was not appropriate had been lost a long time ago.
Norman Apstein was just such a someone. Before making Ice Cream Man, he had—as Paul Norman—directed over 120 hardcore adult movies, including Edward Penishands (in which Tim Burton’s famed romantic hero was reimagined as dude with penises where his hands should be) and Cyrano (in which Edmond Rostand’s famed romantic hero was reimagined as a dude with a penis where his nose should be--sense a theme here?).
Having spent so much of his life focusing his frame on the most intimate of human acts (and putting penises where other body parts should be), Apstein had lost all sense of what did and did not work in the context of a mainstream film.
The same thing happened to Shaun Costello, another hardcore filmmaker, who in 1977 attempted to break into the mainstream big time with Water Power. Intended to be a gritty crime drama, Costello crucially misunderstand the limits of mainstream tolerance by making his villain an obsessed rapist who kidnaps women in order to give them enemas, which Costello showed in close-up pornographic detail. Rather than be hailed as a breakthrough in crime cinema, it was retitled The Enema Bandit and played in exactly the kind of grindhouse porn houses Costello wanted to break away from.
In the case of No Holds Barred, I believe the members of Group One were too immersed in the world of professional wrestling to see how inappropriately it translated into the medium of long-form narrative filmmaking.
Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes watching anything the WWF produced in the 80s, can appreciate how Hogan and McMahon would have developed this blind spot. They worked on a spectacle designed to appeal to the folks in the cheap seats, who did not demand—and thus were not given—anything approaching subtlety. Pro-wrestling during the Reagan era was a time of black & white and good & evil. The babyfaces were brave, virtuous men who said their prayers, ate their vitamins and loved America, while the heels were capricious cowards who lied and cheated and—worst of all—saluted the communist flag.
You can only produce this kind of entertainment for so long before you either a) buy into it wholeheartedly or b) become so innately cynical that you lose all sense of perspective of what is and is not appropriate. I can’t say for sure which applied to Hogan or McMahon, but if I had to guess it was probably a combination of both.
The reason why people my age loved the WWF in the 80s was because it was squarely aimed at 10 year-old audiences at the exact moment when we were 10 years old. This was a departure from previous decades, where wrestling was considered a largely adult entertainment—boxing with a bit more flair and drama. Yet this change in direction did not drive adults away. If anything wrestling reached its highest peak of mass popularity during this period (Hogan forever supplanting Gorgeous George in the public’s consciousness).
You could be generous and say that the WWF’s 80s product reflected the innocence and simplicity of the era, or you could say that it was adored by morons who wouldn’t know quality entertainment if it set its testicles directly upon their faces (Tea Party reference totally intended). To be fair the exact same thing could be said about the majority of low-budget action movies produced during that time (see, for example, Invasion U.S.A.). I think in order to successfully produce this kind of product you really have to believe in it and disdain it at the same time.
While it is popular for artists to suggest that they are no different than the audiences they work so hard to entertain, I think most know in their hearts that this is bullshit. The difference between creating and consuming product is that the creator has no choice but to be aware of everything that goes into the process required to make the art happen. At the time No Holds Barred was produced the wrestling industry still practiced the tradition of kayfabe—keeping up the pretense of wrestling’s reality into everyday life so as not to betray its essential artifice. That’s why the industry’s slang word for fans was the exact same one con men use for their victims—mark, a term synonymous with “sucker”.
(Kayfabe, more than anything else, is the most fascinating part of wrestling’s history. Imagine if Laurence Olivier had to pretend he was a Danish prince every time he went to a town and played Hamlet. Or if Joan Collins and Linda Evans had to catfight in a water fountain whenever they were spotted somewhere off the set of Dynasty. The only real Hollywood equivalent would be all of the gay and lesbian performers who have pretended to be happily married heterosexuals over the years.)
McMahon and Hogan clearly made a film they thought the “marks” would love, demanding that it be filled with the same black and white moral dramatics that made them so rich to begin with. Hogan’s “Rip” character had to be virtuous to the point of audacity—proclaiming that he was far more interested in charity than self-promotion, gentlemanly setting up a privacy curtain when circumstances force him to share a one-bedroom hotel room with one of the most gorgeous women in the universe, and heroically spending all of his time rehabilitating his injured brother instead of training for the most dangerous match of his life.
At the same time his opponents are as venal and mindlessly evil as any ever seen onscreen. Made just a year after Ted Turner bought Atlanta’s NWA promotion with the intention of turning it into the nationally televised WCW (and thus become the first non-regional competition that the WWF faced in years), it doesn’t seem like an accident that the main villain is a network president with the moral compass of a dung beetle. That said, Brell bears no signs of Turner’s distinctive manner or personality. I’d say this was to avoid a potential libel suit, but I remember a few years after No Holds Barred was released McMahon aired a series of skits featuring a Turner clone behaving like a redneck buffoon, so it’s not like he wasn’t afraid to go there.
Even more hilarious is Zeus, who plays the same role Clubber Lang and Ivan Drago did in Rocky III & IV, but without any of their depth, subtlety or nuance. Tommy (“Tiny” to his friends) Lister’s performance is so perversely over the top that it takes on a kind of absurdist genius. With his crossed eyes, tatooed head, and penchant for uncomfortable metallic clothing, he actually seems too over the top even for wrestling, which turned out to be true when the character was unsuccessfully transplanted into the real WWF to promote the movie (it didn’t help that Lister had no professional wrestling experience and managed to be even clumsier in the ring than Hogan). Amazingly, out of all the performers in the film, he’s probably had the most consistently successful career, having not only worked non-stop since his appearance in No Holds Barred, but also making his mark in high-profile productions like The Fifth Element, Jackie Brown and The Dark Knight.
That said, the bad guys are at least given the chance to develop actual onscreen presences, which cannot also be said for Rip’s friends. The brother who inspires him to win all of his matches is just a handsome blond guy with a goofy 80s haircut (who would, funnily enough, go on to become Jacob, Lost’s mysterious protector of the golden spring). His trainer is just an old black dude and at least two of the other people who hang with him are never even introduced onscreen.
The film’s only other character with a personality is Sam (short for Samantha, which just boggles Rip’s mind), Rip’s new business manager who has to work harder at her job than a man would because she looks just like Joan Severance and everyone within a hundred mile radius wants to have crazy-hot-monkey-sex with her. There’s no doubt that Severance is astonishingly attractive, but in such a way that detracts rather than adds to her credibility. She’s one of those actresses who is simply too good-looking, since it becomes impossible to imagine her in any other role than that of model or actress. It doesn’t help that she’s precisely the kind of limited performer required to make sure that Hogan doesn’t get wiped off the screen.
As I’ve already said, there are two films at play here, although sometimes the lines do seem to cross. The film’s bizarre penchant for scatological or inappropriately sexual jokes(turns out the bed’s noisily jiggling is the result of Rip exercising, not furiously masturbating) has a direct connection to similar material that has shown up on McMahon’s wrestling shows over the years, but at the same time they are taken to such perversely extreme levels that they extend beyond the realms of mere bad taste to that of deliberate transgression.
This is most evident in the moments Hogan and McMahon obviously did not intend to be funny. I’ve complained in the past of films that were so badly made that they transformed into inadvertent self-parody, but in the case of No Holds Barred I am certain this is only half the case. Hogan and Severance are clearly sincere, but everyone else around them is just as clearly cognizant of how ridiculous the whole enterprise is and they show it.
For someone like me the result is fascinating, but for the average wrestling fan for which it was intended it was clearly bewildering. For most people deliberately shitty is still just shitty and a waste of time and money, which explains why the filmmakers’ efforts here went almost completely unnoticed.
I say “almost”, because I know the film has at least one acolyte out there. Back when I was 19, I was in my second year of university (the last that would actually count, as my third and final year was pretty much a write off) and taking a film studies course that examined the auteur theory by looking at the films of Dreyer, Bresson, Fuller and Kurosawa (among others I may have forgotten). Among the students was another young man, whose name has been lost to time. He suffered from Down syndrome and was there as part of a program that allowed those with special disabilities to enjoy the university experience. It was a noble idea to be sure, but in practice it meant we all had to listen to his loud snoring after one of the boring foreign films or lectures inevitably put him to sleep.
Near the end of the year, he finally lost his patience during a lecture and threw up his hand. Professor Beard (who would go on to write The Artist as Monster, an excellent analysis of the films of David Cronenberg) asked him what his question was and it became clear that he had spent all of this time in class waiting for the subject of his favourite film to finally be discussed and he could no longer wait for this to happen organically.
With the floor now his he proceeded to describe in detail the climatic match between Rip and Zeus. Everyone listened patiently and it was only when it became painfully clear that he wasn’t about to stop that Professor Beard interrupted him and explained that he couldn’t answer the “question” because he hadn’t seen the film.
In retrospect, I wish he had. I would have vastly preferred to debate the symbolism of Rip’s “Rip ‘Em” T-Shirt than hear another word about Diary of a Country Priest ever again.
Of course, the greatest irony of the film is that five years after the failure of No Holds Barred, Hogan did what Rip would not and jumped over to Turner's WCW following the promise of a bigger paycheck. As the innocence of the 80s turned into the cynicism of the 90s, Hogan eventually abandoned his babyface image and became Hollywood Hogan, the leader of the renegade N.W.O. He would eventually return to McMahon's company, but by that point he was purely a nostalgia act. Though he would gain fame as a reality tv star, his film debut clearly represented his jump the shark moment. No Holds Barred was supposed to be proof that he was more than a mountain of muscle, but it ended up being proof that he was little else. The lesson being that it's better to be the biggest of all fish in a disrespected pond than the asshole who's crying while everyone else is trying not to laugh out loud.
Ann Gentry, an attractive social worker still mourning the loss of her architect husband, becomes unusually involved with one of her district’s strangest cases. The Wadsworths are a somewhat trashy family made up of a blowsy middle-aged mom, her two sexy daughters and—most uniquely—“Baby”, her fully-grown adult son who has never intellectually matured past infancy. Ann appears to be convinced that there’s nothing wrong with “Baby” and that his infantile state is the result of severe negative reinforcement from his bitter, man-hating mother, but, then again, her interest in the case may not be as philanthropic as it seems….
Sometimes the best gift you can give an unconventional script is an extremely conventional director. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, the danger of giving a script with a strange premise to a “daring” and/or “imaginative” filmmaker is that they will push the strangest aspects of the work past the breaking point into either incoherence, pretension or self-indulgence. A journeyman, on the other hand, will simply shoot the story as straightforwardly as possible, with the result that the strangeness fades into the background and ceases to be a potentially alienating element, allowing the audience to enjoy the film as a narrative rather than a spectacle.
Ted Post, the director of The Baby, was just such a journeyman. Having spent most of his career in television his most famous film work came as the result of his directing a sequel none of the original filmmakers wanted anything to do with (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) and his ability to take a back seat to a superstar performer who was less interested in a director than a yes-man willing to make the films he wanted to make (Hang ‘Em High and Magnum Force). A textbook “point and shooter” Post briefly flirted with the 70s counter-culture with three films that actually bore little connection to the zeitgeist they were based on. The first was the strange psychodrama under discussion today, the second was the “free-love” drama, The Harrad Experiment, and the third was the miserable M*A*S*H-wannabe, Whiffs. Of these, only The Baby can be considered a success, but more so for what Post failed to bring to the project, rather than what he actually did.
From a visual standpoint The Baby looks and feels like a somewhat standard TV movie from the era. This is understandable considering its budget and the fact that Post did the majority of his work in that medium (including the classic Dr. Cook’s Garden, which featured an unusually dark turn from Bing Crosby in the title role). Rather than detract from the experience, the film’s lack of visual interest gives it an authenticity that obscures the lapses in logic that could have easily derailed the film from the very start.
Sold in the poster and trailer as a bizarre expose of the depths of human depravity, the actual film has more in common with the “social message” TV movies of the era than it does with other sleazy grindhouse depictions of torture and perversion. In fact the moments that do extend into the perverse stand out to such a degree that they feel like last-minute additions to the script thrown in to please concerned financiers—every one of them could be excised completely from the film without affecting the plot.
The film's avoidance of obvious exploitation is made evident by how accepting everyone is of Baby’s condition right from the start. Not only is Ann, the social worker, not horrified by the site of a grown man acting like a baby, but it’s also made clear that the Wadsworth’s have made no effort at all to hide his condition. Along with semi-annual visits from other social workers, they’re completely comfortable hiring young babysitters to watch him while they enjoy a night out and have no problem inviting all of their friends to his birthday party. Rather than being presented as something perverse and strange, Baby is shown in the film to be exactly what he is, and though it does flirt with the idea that his condition is instilled rather than inborn, the film pretty much abandons this theme by the end, when it finally becomes the horror movie everyone’s been expecting from the very beginning.
Written by Abe Polsky (who also co-produced), the script for The Baby is a surprisingly adept affair. Having been previously clued in to expect a “twist ending” I assumed it would inevitably feature the revelation that Baby was merely faking his condition all along or that Ann’s interest was much more sexual than philanthropic in nature. Turns out I was wrong on both counts and found myself genuinely surprised by the film’s last scene, despite the clues I retroactively realized Polsky had peppered throughout his screenplay.
Polsky’s work is especially commendable for how he keeps us from siding too strongly with Ann. Though the Wadsworth’s do often come across as outright antagonists (younger daughter, Alba, repeatedly shocks Baby with a cattle prod, insisting, “Baby doesn’t walk! Baby doesn’t talk!”, while the oldest daughter, Germaine, is shown using Baby as an effective late night male substitute) the script works equally hard to show that things are not entirely what they seem. Mrs. Wadsworth (Ruth Roman, giving a great performance) is actually more often shown as a fierce mama bear ready to protect her unique child than the monster who made him what he is. When she catches Alba with the cattle prod, she grabs it away and uses it on her to show her what it feels like. She beats the snot out of a teenage babysitter who allows Baby to suckle at her breast (which strongly suggests she does not know about and would not approve of her daughter Germaine’s nocturnal visits), and she becomes extremely angry when Alba later suggests the family should have sold Baby to a circus freak show when they had the chance to years ago.
It’s these moments that suggest her suspicions regarding Ann are less self-protective than genuinely maternal. We’re so intent on blaming her for her son’s disability that we naturally assume she’s a villain with something to hide, which the film’s conclusion suggests isn’t exactly fair. But, then again, her actions are not entirely blameless. The fact that the family owns a cattle prod to begin with doesn’t speak entirely well of her mothering methods, and the solution she comes up with for the problem of the pesky social worker (a problem, the film suggests, she may have dealt with murderously at least once before) is clearly criminal and inexcusable.
Both Post and Polsky are well-served by their cast, who manage to keep the film from rising to the level of camp most viewers are going to insist on stamping the film with regardless (that terrible trailer does not help matters any). The actresses all adeptly keep up with the film’s moral ambiguities and the effectiveness of the film’s denouement rests largely on their shoulders. David Manzy (now Mooney) has the most difficult role in the film as Baby and is mostly able to keep his scenes from being ridiculous, if not entirely credible. He isn’t helped by some poor ADR that asks us to believe his mental deficiency has wrecked havoc on his vocal chords as well.
I suspect the very aspect that allowed me to enjoy The Baby as much as I did is what’s going to disappoint the kind of person likely to seek it out. By avoiding kitsch and camp in favour of an actual plot with some compelling twists and turns, it’s an admirably straightforward thriller with an admittedly bizarre premise. As I mentioned at the beginning of this short essay, I suspect this can be attributed to a director who simply lacked the ego to paint outside the lines or get wild and overly creative. The result is a film that’s made unique by its almost perverse lack of distinction.
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.
This is the photo I took before I found out I wasn't supposed to take any photos.Standing a few feet away from her, I can tell that Linda Blair is pissed. A last minute replacement for beloved zombie-movie director George Romero, she faces the indignity of being a horror icon at a convention where most of the attendees are science-fiction fans, there to meet Captain Kirk, River Tam, Commander Riker and—if they have time after waiting in all of those long lines—maybe, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. The middle-aged woman who once masturbated with a crucifix in The Exorcist when she was 13 is a curiosity at best, and not worth paying $25 for a brief moment of her attention (especially after waiting three hours and shelling out $75 to do the same with Mr. Shatner).
In another place and time, she’d be the center attraction and have a line of autograph seekers as long as her fellow celebrity guests, but not today and she’s clearly not happy about it. It doesn’t help that hers is already a hard and somewhat humiliating task—charging folks for the nostalgic thrill that comes from a handshake and a signature from someone who used to be a lot more famous than they are now. The gentleman in front of me wants her to sign a Blu-ray and 3 posters (all for the The Exorcist, an inevitability she has clearly come to accept since all but four of the 20 or so photos she has displayed on her table are stills taken from that film and the four exceptions are all devoted to her first love—animals—and none of her other 60+ film or TV performances). He’s paid for three signatures ($75—she charges her fee every time her pen touches paper), but wants her to donate the fourth to a charity devoted to helping the victims of the devastating fire in Slave Lake.
An American, she hasn’t heard of the recent Albertan disaster. Plus, the gentleman doesn’t appear to be very bright and has difficulty getting his point across. He doesn’t tell her he’s already paid for 3 of the 4 signatures and she assumes he wants her to sign all of his items for free. Naturally she’s wary and asks if he has any documentation to prove that the charity he’s talking about is legit. For all she knows, he’s just a hustler trying to get some free signatures so he can make a quick profit on e-bay, which would mean money being taken away from her charity, an animal rescue organization to which the majority of her fee goes. After minutes of bargaining (there’s no hurry, only a handful of us are waiting) she discovers he only wants one free signature and gives it to him. He thanks her and leaves and I take his place at the head of the short line.
It definitely beats Skatetown U.S.A. for best roller disco movie ever made.She’s clearly distracted by something and doesn’t make eye contact. I greet her with the same gregarious, “Hello!” I use for store clerks and bank tellers as a means to indicate that I am not another asshole customer to be endured, but a friendly ally grateful for their service and attention. She doesn’t respond. An awkward second passes and she looks at me and says, “Hi,” as if I’ve rudely refused to greet her first. I repeat my greeting and hand her the small poster I’ve brought from home. It’s for Roller Boogie, a guilty-pleasure she starred in six years after the film that made her famous and cannot escape. Without comment she asks my name, grabs a black felt marker and writes To Allan, Keep on Rolling, Linda Blair. She does not show any indication of pleasure signing something unrelated to the reason she has been invited to the Expo and it’s clear that I have received the rote sentiment she reserves for all Roller Boogie related merchandise. Having signed my poster, she proceeds to get down to her real life’s purpose and gives me two computer printed handouts devoted to the efforts of her personal charity. I thank her, wish her a good day and leave.
Unlike many other fans, whom I imagine would take her coldness far more personally; I find it impossible to begrudge her obvious displeasure. I understand that hers is a strange form of customer service job and—having worked those myself—I know how unfair it is for every random asshole you encounter to assume the honour of their patronage always merits a sincere smile and your heartfelt gratitude. People can be a pain in the ass and no Academy Award nominee (1973 “Best Supporting Actress” The Exorcist)—living or dead—is a good enough actor to always pretend otherwise.
Still, I cannot help but wonder why I felt compelled to put myself through that experience. I find my introductions to normal everyday people are usually awkward at best, why would I assume one with a celebrity I admire would be any different?
Best. Book. Cover. Ever.Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. An hour before I met Ms. Blair, I had a brief encounter with Adrienne Barbeau that was just as uncomfortable, but far more satisfying. Her line was also short, but she seemed to be taking it in stride. Unlike Ms. Blair who had nothing to say about my Roller Boogie poster, she visibly brightened when I handed her a copy of her autobiography. “That’s what I like to see,” she announced to everyone within earshot, obviously proud of her work. Sensing this was my best opportunity, I launched into the spiel I had been preparing in my head since I found out I was going to be able to attend the event.
There was then a pregnant pause as I waited for her to make a comment regarding the quality of the interview or the fun she had doing it. Instead she broke the short silence by saying, “Of course you realize I don’t remember your name.”
Rather than be stung by her terse honesty, I couldn’t help but revel in it. It was the exact same quality that drew me to her performances and writing in the first place. Any other response would have felt false and insincere. I could honestly say I met the real Adrienne Barbeau.
I gave her my name and she signed my book before getting up and throwing an arm around my back. Her assistant took a photo with my cracked iPod touch and that was that. The line continued and I left happy. (That said, I must have made a tiny impression. The following Monday I found I had a message from a new Twitter follower. It turned out to be the assistant who took the photo.)
It's taking all of my effort and will not to edit the fat fucking dork out of this photo.
As happy as I was when I left, though, the point of the encounter still eluded me. Why did I want to do that? What did it mean to me? Why does this matter?
At least I got off lucky. As a b-movie horror fan, I didn’t have to wait three hours to share an uncomfortable moment with my idols (although I would have liked to have seen Cassandra Peterson up close) and pay a truly outrageous fee to do it. I enjoyed my awkward connection without much effort and for bargain prices. Still, why?
Awesome.Of all my encounters that afternoon (not counting the moment where I literally bumped into a very attractive woman in cat ears, who I later learned was once the pretty young star of Hellraiser) the only one I “got” was the 10 minutes I spent as I watched Amanda Conner, my favourite comic book artist, doodle a portrait of one of my favourite comic book characters. For my time and money I got to see the actual creative process happen right before my eyes. I got to see someone I admire do something I myself could never do. It was beautiful and moving and I got to take the result home.
For all my confusion, though, I must admit to deeply enjoying my first geek expo experience. Part of this was purely the pleasure of the company of the friends from work who joined me on the adventure. Much male bonding was had and the joy of it cannot be dismissed. But on a larger level it’s always comforting to be reminded that you are not alone out there in your beloved enthusiasms, even if the downside of this reminder is the knowledge that you are not quite the precious snowflake you imagine yourself to be. Every time I saw another short, overweight dude with a beard in an amusing pop-culture t-shirt with archaic headwear and dress pants, my precious sense of uniqueness died just a little, but the toys and comics and clothes I brought home were worth it.
Following the death of his high priestess mother Willis is rejected as leader of his local voodoo cult. To get his revenge he buys some bones from another of the cult’s cast-offs, unaware that the ritual he will perform with them will result in the resurrection of the centuries old vampire known as Blacula. Once an African ruler named Prince Mamuwalde, Blacula was cursed to walk the earth as a member of the bloodthirsty living dead by a racist Count Dracula. Desperate to get the evil demon that compels him to murder out of his body, Blacula enlists the aid of a beautiful voodoo priestess named Lisa in the hopes that she can free him from his curse. But Lisa’s boyfriend—an ex-detective turned wealthy writer and African artifact collector named Justin—has different plans and intends to put a permanent end to Blacula’s legacy of blood.
Whether the term “dated” is an insult or affectionate compliment depends entirely on the person who is using it. In both cases it refers to a work whose style, themes and relevance are entirely of a different era, which for some viewers means feeling alienated from what they're watching, while for others it means being given a historical snapshot of a time long past, be it one they remember or never got to experience on their own.
Most often, though, “dated” is an indicator of obvious artifice. A film that is so fully realized it feels less like a composed narrative than life caught on film inevitably transcends its "best-before" date. A film that looks “dated” today probably looked just as ridiculous the year it was released. In some cases this is the result of tone-deaf filmmakers trying to capture the flavour of a zeitgeist they themselves don’t understand. In others it’s a case of focusing on a cultural event so ephemeral you could literally mark on your calendar the moment it would cease to have any meaning. But mostly it’s just the result of a generalized failure of all involved.
Making movies is hard.
Not every one can be a timeless classic.
That said,
Scream Blacula Scream is dated.
Profoundly dated. Exquisitely dated. Exuberently dated. It’s also wonderful in that way only 70s Blaxploitation can be with its equal parts racist stereotype and affecting humanity. Capturing an age I’m pretty certain never existed, it’s an all out fantasy made deliriously transcendent by one of the greatest combinations of role and actor ever put to film.
In a fairer world William Marshall never would have had to settle for playing Dracula’s tragic African cousin. Standing six foot five and possessing a classically trained baritone that demanded your full attention, he was every bit the equal of Christopher Lee--the most famous Dracula of his generation. Instead he had to settle for Blacula (and I suspect we’re better off for it).
Speaking of Christopher Lee, it’s hard not to watch Scream Blacula Scream and not think of Hammer’s regrettable attempt to move their most successful gothic horror series into the 20th century--the previous year’s Dracula A.D. 1972. Replace that film’s “swinging” London setting (which includes a scene where the crazy hipsters crash a private party featuring a band that must have been terribly important at the time, since they’re mentioned in both the opening credits and by the party’s host during their performance) with Los Angeles’ black yuppie voodoo community (?) and the films are markedly similar, right down to both title characters transforming from bleached white bones to fleshy bloodsuckers.
But unlike Hammer’s film, the two Blacula films (the first came out the same year as Dracula A.D. 1972) rise above their questionable taste and premise through their insistence on portraying their title character as a sympathetic, tragic figure. Less a monster than a genuine victim of circumstance, the cursed prince is a character we root for, not against.
Several years before playing Blacula, Marshall understudied for Boris Karloff’s Captain Hook in a production of Peter Pan and it’s easy to see why someone would think to have the two actors play the same role. He brings so much desperate humanity to Blacula that its closest horror equivalent is Karloff’s performances in both Frankenstein and (especially) Bride of Frankenstein. Both actors present us with so-called “monsters” who did not choose to be monstrous and whose most horrific acts are either the result of misunderstandings or uncontrollable rages that cloud their better judgment.
If Karloff’s monster is the ultimate portrait of a lonely, ugly man frustrated by his inability to find love, then Marshall’s is one of the horrors of addiction. At his best moments, he retains all of the honor, power and dignity that befits his royal station, but when his hunger strikes he loses his rational mind and is forced to act out in the most antisocial of ways. That said, he tries to select deserving victims when he can. In the case below, he even goes so far as to lecture his next two meals about the damage their crimes are doing to their people:
Suffice it to say, William Marshall’s performance is not dated.
Filled equally with serious black professionals who expertly discuss African history while drinking fine wine, and over-the-top preening pimp daddies in your choice of either ridiculous hat or enormous James Brown hairdos, the film presents us with a clear one-step forward, one-step back situation that is admittedly only a few steps away from your typical Tyler Perry production.
And just like a Tyler Perry movie, the overtly racist characters are much more entertaining than the serious ones, especially Blacula’s resurrectionist and subsequent lackey, Willis, who is played by Richard Lawson in the kind of gleefully over-the-top performance many black actors give when presented with possibly questionable characters to play.
Admittedly a failure as a horror movie, Scream Blacula Scream succeeds instead as a bizarre character drama that just happens to feature scenes where black folks walk around in ridiculous vampire makeup. Ironically its biggest failure comes about as a direct result of its biggest success.
I say this because the film doesn’t so much end as it just freezes mid-scene. Having tried and failed to rid Blacula of the demon that dwells within him, Lisa is horrified by his true face and—as he attacks her boyfriend—tries to stop him by stabbing the voodoo doll she crafted for the occasion with a wooden arrow. This causes him to stumble with pain, but does not kill him. Instead, the film freezes as our sympathetic villain looks up to the heavens and screams in frustration. (Or at least that’s how it ends in the version I saw. According to Wikipedia, “Lisa stabs the prince's voodoo doll killing Mamuwalde and forever destroying Blacula.” I’m not sure if this description is the result of an alternative cut of the film or the writer coming to a conclusion not actually justified by what is presented on-screen.)
From a script standpoint, this ending doesn’t make any sense (even if it does provide the film with its title), but from a marketing standpoint it’s the only one the filmmakers could present without filming a whole new sequence. The problem with making Blacula so sympathetic is that as an audience we don’t want to see him vanquished, even though the film has gone to the trouble to present us with a more typical hero in the form of Lisa’s boyfriend, Justin.
Interestingly, the tension we feel during the climax where Justin and the police are besieged by Blacula’s legion of vampires while on their way to rescue Lisa doesn’t come from our fear that they won’t get to her in time, but instead that they will. For this reason Blacula’s subsequent rage over the interruption of the ritual meant to make him human feels totally justified and we resent both Lisa’s turn against him and Justin’s attempt to kill him. My guess is that the ending once did explicitly show Blacula dying as a result of Lisa’s voodoo magic, but that test audiences roared with disapproval over this outcome. Having no other option, the filmmakers chose to go with a non-ending rather one guaranteed to piss the audience off.
The good news was that this ending easily allowed for another sequel. The bad news was that the film didn’t do well enough to justify one. It’s a shame, because Marshall’s performance more than deserved a lengthy franchise. Sadly, he never received as good a role again and probably remains best known to members of my generation as the second King of Cartoons.
Still, two great performances are better than none, especially when—unlike the movies they’re in—they’re guaranteed to stand the test of time.
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.
Some of you might have noticed that I failed to get anything posted last Sunday. I wish I had a good excuse for this, but I don’t. The reality is I was simply uninspired. I tried watching a half dozen movies over the course of the long weekend and couldn’t find one I felt compelled to write about. Today, however, is different, so I am happy to be able to bring to you:
B-Movie Bullsh*t
Part Two
Piranha Part 2: The Spawning
(1981)
Synopsis
A few years after a military experiment went wrong and a school of ultra-vicious piranhas were released into an American fresh-water river system, history repeats itself when a ship carrying an even more dangerous breed of the carnivorous fish (they can fly!) sinks near the Caribbean resort of Club Elysium. The first person to become aware of their presence is the resort’s (very) attractive scuba instructor, Anne Cavanagh, who is currently separated from her husband Steve, the island’s sheriff, and engaged in an enjoyable flirtation with Tyler Sherman, a mysterious New Yorker who may know more about the deadly fish than he lets on. Will the three of them be able to save the resort’s tourists from becoming fish chow? And, more importantly, will Anne and Steve’s teenage son, Chris, get some action from the super hot rich girl?
Okay, I’m confused. Based on everything I’ve read, Piranha Part Two: The Spawning is supposed to be atrociously terrible—laughably bad. Yet the experience I’ve just had watching it was one filled with genuine elation and delight. I didn’t just like this movie—I loved it! And not in any sort of ironic-bad-movie way. No, as the credits began to roll I felt the sensation of having seen a legitimately great B-movie. Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a fever? Did I somehow magically receive a copy of the film that is vastly superior to the one that remains so critically derided? Or are the rest of you a bunch of assholes who wouldn’t know a good piranha movie if it came and stripped the flesh off your bones in less than 60 seconds?
Guess which one I’m going with!
As a film The Spawning remains best known as an odd footnote in the filmography of the then-future King of the World, James Cameron. It’s the movie writers always bring up to show that even the most consistently successful director in Hollywood has a so-called stinker in his past. Cameron apologists defend their hero by insisting he was fired sometime during the production (versions of the story range from this happening just two days to several weeks into production) and either had no role in the post-production process or managed to take complete control of it, but could only work with what producer Ovido G. Assonitis shot in his absence.
Knowing what I know about writers (having been guilty of their crimes myself) I’m certain that the majority of those who have mocked The Spawning have never actually seen it and do so based more on the concept of killer flying fish than anything else.
That still doesn’t explain the hostility the film has engendered from fellow B-movie enthusiasts who actually have seen it and describe it as laughably inept. As I suggested above, I have to wonder if they’ve actually seen the same movie I have. Sure, the special effects are pretty cheap, but no cheaper or any worse than those found in Joe Dante’s 1978 original.
In fact, the main source of derision seems to be that The Spawning isn’t a direct copy of Piranha, insofar as it more resembles a Euro-schlock Jaws rip-off than the semi-comedic pastiche of 50s horror films and 70s eco panic movies Dante and screenwriter John Sayles threw together on the sly. It’s another case of critics deriding a film not for being what it actually is, but for not being what they expected. Yes, The Spawning is an outright Euro-schlock Jaws rip-off, but it also happens to be a very fun and exciting Euro-schlock Jaws rip-off that—shockingly to me—features far more likeable characters than those found in Dante’s acclaimed original.
I admit it doesn’t hurt that, like Cameron, I have a total hard-on for strong female characters. Perhaps the greatest injustice done to The Spawning by its critics is that by automatically dismissing it wholesale they fail to include Tricia O’Neil’s great performance as Anne Cavanagh with those of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Conner and Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley whenever describing Cameron’s most compelling female characters. She is easily their equal and I’m not just saying that because I’ve had a crush on O’Neil since I first took note of her while reviewing The Gumball Rally for Flick Attack last year.
The truth is, the question of how much of The Spawning Cameron directed is somewhat moot, since the credited writer, H.A. Milton, is actually a pseudonym for Cameron, Assonitis and Charles H. Eglee (who eventually created and executive produced Cameron’s post-apoc Jessica Alba TV show Dark Angel) and Cameron’s distinctive fingerprints can be found all over the script. Who else would write a sequence for a low-budget trash-horror sequel in which the sheriff (played by Lance Henrickson no less!) chooses to jump out of the helicopter he’s flying solo in order to rescue his son and the busty young strumpet with whom he’s stranded? That level of foolish ambition is what made Cameron’s The Terminator and Aliens stand out from the rest of the pack and it’s there to be found throughout The Spawning if you care to look for it.
That’s not to say the film is perfect. It is Euro-schlock, right down to some occasionally terrible dubbing and a few questionable comedic performances from the actors playing the tourists, but any genre critic who has ever praised the likes of Bava (be it Mario or Lamberto), Argento or (especially) Fulci has seen this all before and seldom done this well. And, yes, the effects are terrible, but the premise behind them isn’t anywhere near as ridiculous as others may suggest. Through just a few expository lines, the script explains that the piranha have had their gene’s altered with grunion (who can survive outside of the water) and flying fish, which to my ears sounds just as plausible as an enormous great white shark that spontaneously decides to exclusively dine on a form of prey the species traditionally avoids.
Speaking of sharks, the script’s devotion to ripping off Jaws is almost admirable in its lack of subtlety, but compared to Killer Fish, Great White and Orca, its mimicry is clever and never fails to entertain. As absurd as it sounds, I found The Spawning’s climatic last 10 minutes to be as thrilling and emotionally satisfying as Spielberg’s—the script literally adding a ticking time bomb to up the stakes of Anne’s thrilling escape away from the undersea predators (even if the thought behind the explosion doesn’t actually make much sense when you think about it).
The Spawning also proves itself to be very worthwhile for those of us who enjoy exploitation movies for their unapologetic use of extremely attractive actresses. Beyond O’Neil (whose amazing cheekbones made me recall a dark-skinned Jacqueline Bisset), the film also features the dark-haired beauty of The Rapture’s Carole Davis, as well as Leslie Graves (a former child actress and nude model, who appeared in a early 80s soap opera before fading into obscurity and dying of AIDS in 1995), all of whom will likely linger in the consciousness of any heterosexual man lucky enough to see them.
Suffice it to say, you can add Piranha Part 2: The Spawning to my list of nearly-universally despised sequels I love (which includes The Exorcist II: The Heretic and Warlock II: Armageddon). James Cameron has absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.
