B-TV: Part Three - Same Shit, Different Results

Even though I already posted this week’s edition of Rejected By Rod(?), I’m dipping back into my well of unposted Flick Attack reviews to start off this look at a B-TV classic. The FA part of this review was actually included in the first batch I ever sent to Rod, when I very briefly held myself to a very strict 250-word limit, which explains why it’s so much more pithy and succinct than my typical FA output.

Kiss Meets The Phantom of The Park

(1978)

 

The defining moment of the 1978 TV movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park comes when drummer Peter Criss (aka Cat Man) first speaks aloud and the familiar Saturday morning cartoon voice of male Wonder Twin Zan (Michael Bell) comes out of his mouth.  It’s then that you realize this film was: A) produced by Hanna-Barbara, B) stars a bunch of people who REALLY didn’t want to be involved in its production and C) is far more wonderful than mere mortals like us probably deserve.

Starring the world’s greatest all-time terrible rock band, the original members of Kiss play themselves—with the fictional license that along with being unapologetic cash whores, they also each possess super powers, which they’ll need in order to stop the titular villain (a slumming Anthony Zerbe) who is turning amusement park customers into robotic slaves.  The band is alerted to his evil doings by a pretty young fan named Melissa, (Deborah Ryan) who—in the film’s most fantastic and unrealistic contrivance—Gene Simmons doesn’t try to fuck.

Normally talented genre director Gordon Hessler (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad), couldn’t overcome the film’s non-existent budget and as a result the film has an almost Ed Woodian level of unintentionally amusing shoddiness (ie. Ace Frehley’s stunt double is clearly an overweight black man).  Definitely not for the serious minded, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park is one of those nostalgia pieces whose glaring imperfections actually makes it far more loveable than a well-made film.

I based the above review on multiple viewings of a really shitty bootleg copy I downloaded from Napster back when that was totally a thing you could do. As crappy as the quality was, the film itself was the same version I had seen several times play on weekday television when I was kid. So, you can imagine my surprise when I recently downloaded what I thought was merely a superior quality version of the exact same film, only to be stunned by the strange new movie that played before my eyes. Not only did it look 1000x better than my previous version, but right from the start I could tell that the editing was different, the soundtrack was better, and much of the overall suckiness had been removed.

Being the asshole film geek that I am, I didn’t even have to turn to the Internet to figure out what was happening. All I had to do was look through my personal poster collection and find my copy of the one sheet for Kiss en ataque de los fantamas­—the Spanish language version of the film, which had actually been released theatrically in Europe. I knew that when the original TV version aired, Kiss had refused to license their songs to play during non-concert/performance scenes in the films, but had changed their mind for the European release. This clued me into what I was watching. I had just been unprepared for how radically different the two films were.

That’s not to say that this version (which is credited as Kiss in Attack of the Phantoms) isn’t as hilariously and rapturously cheesy as the version I had seen dozens of times before—it just manages to leave out all of the parts that made the original look like the Ed Wood spectacle I described in the (thus-far unpublished) FA review I originally wrote over a year ago.

I’ve always said that the best way to teach people how much impact editing can have on a project is to show them the studio and director cuts of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which are as radically different as two films based on the same raw material can be. The differences between Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park and Kiss in Attack of the Phantoms aren’t that extreme, but they are significant enough to radically change the viewing experience.

The European theatrical version is close to 10 minutes shorter than the original, but by reordering and re-cutting important scenes, the plot actually feels much more organic and less haphazard—especially regarding Melissa’s search for her roboticized boyfriend. Gone are the shots featuring the overweight black stunt man dressed as Space Ace, and—most importantly—the Kiss tracks on the soundtrack bring a sense of fun and energy to the film that makes it many faults so much easier to digest. Just take a look at the difference between the classic scene where the evil robot version of Gene attacks a bunch of security guards. In the original the sequence is scored by what sounds like archival stock porn music:

While in the European theatrical cut, the same scene is scored to “Radioactive” from Simmons 1978 solo album:

In fact, the group’s (in)famous solo albums are the only sources the new soundtrack draws from—with Simmons getting the most attention. Beyond “Radioactive”, the film also uses his “Man of 1000 Faces” and “Mr. Make Believe”. Paul gets his “Love in Chains” in there, and Criss provides “Hooked on Rock ‘N’ Roll”. But the best moment belongs to Frehley, whose solo album produced the project's only lasting hit—the classic “New York Groove”, which turns the once-awful roller coaster fight sequence (see the clip embedded after the original FA review) into something pretty darn awesome:

Okay, maybe “awesome” is a bit much, but there’s no doubt that this alternative version completely changed my appreciation of this oft-mocked film. I already loved it when its imperfections couldn’t be ignored, but now that I’ve seen them successful hidden and disguised that love isn’t hipster-asshole-ironic, it’s hipster-asshole-genuine. And therein lies a whole heaping world of difference.

Rejected By Rod(?): Part Two - Warlock: The Armargeddon

Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:

Rejected By Rod(?)

Warlock: The Armageddon

(1993)

Watching this sequel to 1991’s Warlock, I started to wonder if maybe a young Michael Bay had seen it before he debuted with Bad Boys in 1995. The third film by second-generation director Anthony Hickox (whose father, Douglas, directed one of my all-time favs, Theatre of Blood), this second entry in the Warlock mythos not only shares a title with one of Bay’s films, but displays all of the same stylistic hallmarks that have made Bay both one of the most hated and successful filmmakers of his generation.

Filled with pointless close-ups shot at strange angles, hilariously dramatic pull-ins and a complete sacrifice of character in favor of constant momentum, Warlock: The Armageddon, like most of Bay’s films, plays less like an actual movie than an abridged version of one with all of the potentially boring bits cut out.

And that is so not a bad thing.

For those of you concerned about the plot, the film features a returning Julian Sands as the titular villain, an antichrist who rises in anticipation of a long-awaited lunar eclipse and who must find a collection of ancient stones in order to help his father, Satan, escape from Hell and take over the living world. Stopping him are Chris Young (TV’s Max Headroom) and Paula Marshall (who you know from a dozen cancelled shows—and my dreams), the youngest descendents of a tribe of California druids, whose deaths and subsequent resurrections make them the only warriors powerful enough to halt Sands in his tracks.

More goofy than scary, the film features a lot of dated effects, but is made highly watchable thanks to the game cast and Hickox’s stubborn refusal to give you enough time to dwell on the film’s many absurdities and enormous plot holes.

Consider it a film for those of you who wish a certain “director” would stop wasting his “talents” on racist toy robot movies and get back to the gloriously stupid basics.

Rejected By Rod(?): Part One - Viva Knievel!

For over a year now I've served as Flick Attack's second most fertile reviewer, behind only Mr. Rod Lott, who rather conveniently is the guy who decides what reviews get posted and when. Currently I have a collection of about 30 reviews that have been waiting on his slush pile for over a year now with no sign of their ever being used. He claims he's going to use them eventually (his direct email quote to me being, "I just haven't gotten to them yet because too many new one's have been brewing among all of us.") but only he knows when that is, so I've decided to start throwing one up every week because...well...that's one more post I don't have to write that week. Since I believe Rod is a man of his word, I've decided to included a parenthetical question mark in the title I've chosen for these posts, but until I see signs otherwise, I'm assuming this is the only place anyone will ever get to read these.

Rejected By Rod (?)

Viva Knieval!

(1977)

At the beginning of Viva Knievel!, the world’s most famous daredevil (playing himself) breaks into an orphanage in order to deliver a boxful of toys. While he’s there an adorable crippled moppet abandons his crutches and explains that Evel’s heroism served as the inspiration to get him to walk again.

It’s a moment so shameless it feels like the filmmakers are begging us to imagine Santa Claus and Jesus Christ combined in the body of a red-faced, side-burned hillbilly with a twisted motorcycle fetish.

And as over the top as this may seem, what makes Viva Knievel! so special and an absolute must see for anyone interested in classic WTF cinema is the astonishing fact that THIS IS THE MOST SUBTLE AND AMBIGUOUS SCENE IN THE ENTIRE MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!

With his life story having already been told in 1971s Evel Knievel (starring George Hamilton in the title role), Viva eschews typical biopic melodrama in favor of cheesy 70s era action exploitation. That is unless at one point in Knievel’s life there really was a conspiracy to sabotage his bike during a jump in Mexico, so a group of drug smugglers could load the semi carrying his corpse back into the States with millions of dollars worth of cocaine. In that case, the film could be considered unusually accurate.

To its credit Viva is surprisingly well made and looks like a real movie, unlike similar projects, which tend to resemble glorified TV pilots. To its discredit it manages to outdo Xanadu for featuring the most embarrassing performance of Gene Kelly’s career and also forces us to confront the terrifying image of Knievel (who is admittedly better in the role than Hamilton was) making out with Lauren Hutton, which ranks right up there with Jessica Alba kissing Danny Trejo in Machete for pure unintended horror.

So, whaddaya think? It's an okay review, isn't it? Not brilliant, but still worthy of being used on one of the slower weekdays, like a Tuesday or Wednesday after a long weekend when everyone actually has to get the work done they missed, instead of browsing at junk on the Internet. I think so, but apparently Rod doesn't....

Now's About the Time....

When I usually begin thinking about getting a jump on the latest week's Wynorski entry. 'Thinking' being the key word, since despite all my best intentions I almost inevitably end up watching the required movie at the last minute, forcing myself to come up with stuff to say about it just before I have to go to bed that Sunday night.

This week would have ended up being no different, were it not for the fact that I just remembered how fully booked I'm going to be Saturday and Sunday (I'm attending a local advertising industry awards show on the first night and seeing The Pixies perform Doolittle in its entirety on the second) and realized there's no way I'm going to find the time to watch a terrible soft-core sex movie starring Tanya Roberts and be able to write cogently about it (especially since I plan on being especially hungover on Sunday morning).

Were I a more ambitious and devoted blogger, I would attempt to correct this by writing the promised post now, but we all know that's not happening, so let's not kid ourselves. So, instead, I thought this week we might take a look at some of the reviews I've written recently for Flick Attack. Now I realize that all of you are already devoted Flick Attackers and dutifully visit the site each and every day, so this is probably a wasted effort on my part, but it beats producing original content, so what the hey.

WTF Musical Division:

 Times Square: Two teenage girls almost become lesbians, but then don't. Instead they enjoy charming hijinx on the mean streets while radio DJ Tim Curry makes them famous. I truly and deeply love this movie.

Sextette: A bizarre hate crime of a movie in which a group of filmmakers decided to cruelly indulge the pathetic whims of a senile old woman. Truly one of the most frightening films I have ever seen.

Saturday the 14th Strikes Back: While some may say that one musical number does not a musical make, I say it does when it's the only thing I actually remember happening in the movie.

Can't Stop the Music: I can honestly claim I have seen this Village People musical more times than I've seen Citizen Kane and I've seen Citizen Kane many, many times. True to the general tenor of my Flick Attack reviews, the central focus here is on Valerie Perrine's then ubiquitous boobies.

Remakes and Variations:

The Legend of the Lone Ranger: This forgotten flop proves that not every disaster gets to live on in "So-Bad-It's-Good" movie purgatory. I actually found it to be kinda charming, but then that may have been the nostalgia talking.

I Spit On Your Grave: I've never been shy about proclaiming my appreciation of Meir Zarchi's misunderstood masterwork, so you'd think I'd resent someone making a blatant cash grab by exploiting its infamy for a cheap Saw-inspired remake. Turns out, you'd have thought wrong.

Chained Heat: "But Allan," I imagine you proclaiming in a very high-pitched and annoying voice, so irritating it just really makes me want to--no offense--punch you right in the face, "Chained Heat wasn't a remake!" I never said it was (asshole!), but if you click the link and read the review you'll see how I noted its simularities to a much more respected prison saga that features several similar characters and a distinct absence of bras.

Funny Ha-Ha:

So Fine: Few people seem to remember this early 80s Ryan O'Neal comedy about a college professor who invents jeans with a see-through ass and bones Richard Kiel's hot Italian wife, which is a shame since it's pretty damn funny.

S.O.B.: Blake Edwards clearly thought there was money to be made exposing his wife's (Julie Andrews!) 46 year-old breasts on the big screen, so he wrote and directed an entire movie devoted to doing exactly that. It's why he's in heaven now, throwing pennies down onto Peter Sellers' head.

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Quite simply one of my favourite films of all time. 'Nuff said.

Happy Hour: From the mind behind the klassic Killer Tomato franchise, here's a comedy that stars Rich Little, Jamie Farr, Eddie Deezen and Tawny Kitaen that is actually pretty damn funny and worth seeking out.

Three That Start With 'B':

BMX Bandits: I can't decide which is cuter: 15 year-old Nicole Kidman or Australians pretending to make real movies like the grown-up countries do.

Breeders: This is a movie featuring a scene where a group of skanky 80s "actresses" are shown bathing in a pool filled with gooey alien semen, yet I still can't recommend it. Sometimes I even surprise myself.

Bitch Slap: I make some pretty big statements in this review and I stand by every single one of them. The greatest movie of all time? Probably not. The greatest test of strength the crotch of my pants has ever received? Definitely.