B Plus Movies

With any given movie, there needs to be a reason to watch it rather than read the book or listen to it on CD, something that is unique to the medium. The movie Swordfish is entirely an excuse to do the opening bullet time scene, for instance.  Sex and the City worked because of the visual style which works better taken all in one glance than to have it described over time.

One person who understands this is director Jim Jarmusch  as proven by the movie Dead Man.

On it’s surface, Dead Man is a simple story: An innocent man is pursued through the Old West for a crime he didn’t dot, chased by bounty hunters and aided by an Indian. In the short pitch version, you’ve seen this movie a dozen times.

Now take a look at the details. The man is an accountant who arrives in a mining town only to find the job he came for has been filled while he travelled from the East Coast. The thing he didn’t do is kill a woman who showed him kindness and turns out to be the daughter of the head of the mining company. The indian is named Nobody and thinks that the accountant is dead poet William Blake, with whom the accountant shares a name.

The story is still linear. People chase Depp’s character, he runs. But this isn’t a movie to watch for the plot so much as the characters.

The actors that stared in this piece are amazing and were given quirky, dark and strange roles all of which were played to perfection:

• Lance Henriksen as a sadistic, possibly cannibal, bounty hunter.
• Michael Wincott (head villain in The Crow and badass with an eyepatch in Disney’s The Three Musketeers) as a glib bounty hunter with an inability to shut up.
• Iggy Pop as a the mother of a trio of nutjobs living in the woods.
• Crispin Glover in a cameo as a coal shoveler on a train.
•  John Hurt and Robert Mitchum… who cares what they’re playing.

This is a movie for film geeks and people who watch films for the sake of the impact of imagery and it’s marriage to motion and dialogue.

I can give this movie a B+ without hesitation, though I have a hard time saying what kind of movie it is. Saying it’s a western isn’t right, neither is it a drama. It’s just cinema and one that if you’re in the mood for something a bit out there, I recommend you watch.

Any action movie that comes out today has a high bar set for it. After the influence of Asian Cinema, which pushed up the standards for what action could be, anything that doesn’t make the viewer twitch in their seat a little or pump their fist in triumph is going to seem flat, even if fifteen years ago it would have been spectacular. If you doubt me, go back and watch any martial arts movie from the 80’s and then compare it to the lamest of Jackie Chan’s pics. Compare Commando against The Matrix for gunplay. You’ll see the difference in what audiences have come to expect.

Once you know how hard it is to make a good action flick, pop in Equilibrium.

The story Equilibrium  starts with a crawling bit of text that informs you that mankind has nearly bombed itself into non-existence and concluded from it’s mistakes that the enemy of peace was emotion all along. The totalitarian state that rose up out of the ashes removed that little problem with a powerful mood leveling drug. Take it and you can live out a dull, repetitive life without a care  because, well, you can’t care. Dont’, try to feel or look at art or have a pet and you face the enforcers of this grey world, the Grammaton Clerics.

Equilibrium was a film that came from development hell, sojourned in US theatres for a weekend or so, then found it’s devotees when it made to rental racks. It would have been a sadder world if this had never seen the light of day if for no other reason, we would have never been introduced to the fanboy’s wet dream of a martial art: Gunkata.

The clerics are trained in this mythical art, a series of postures and movements designed to make the user hard to hit in gunfights while at the same time raining lead down upon his enemies. And in the process, look damn cool.

A  Pre-Batman Christian Bale plays the hero of the film, a cleric who has dutifully served but through the course of the film misses a dose of his drug and begins to question the society he lives in. He has to hide his doubts from those he works with, a task that proves daunting as every senstion is suddenly new and vibrant. Bale does an excellent job with this, conveying a genuine wonder and bewilderment as his character sees the world for the first time with unclouded eyes.

The movie doesn’t pull punches when convincing you the government is evil. If you’re squeamish about the idea of soldiers executing animals, you may want someone to tell you when to close your eyes and when to watch again. The overall feel of the movie is depressing and harsh such that when we do see color or humanity injected into the landscape, even the most commonplace joy seems something worth dying for.

The cracks in the movie come from the fact that other characters, still loyal to the government, show a little too much joy in enforcing the will of the state. There are places that the pace feels a little odd and others where the plot seems a little too tidy. None of this makes the film less enjoyable.

Equilibrium is B+ and then some. If you are a fan of action films, martial arts films or dysotopian future films and you’ve not seen this, watch this movie next. Though I take no responsibility if you then grab a pair of toy pistols and start posing oddly in front of the mirror… don’t be ashamed, we all do it.

When you think post-apocalyptic action movie hero, your mind doesn’t usually jump immediately to Patrick Swayze. Dancing with girls who can’t be kept in a corner, yes. Messily making pottery while making out, yes. Swinging a sword at guys in biker leathers in a hellish future of our own making, not so much.

But then agian, that’s because you’ve never seen Steel Dawn.

Swayze plays a wandering swordsman named who walks the deserts of what’s left of world after World War III. World weary, he takes up the mission of a fallen mentor who was going to a small town with a lot of trouble brewing in it. He hires on with a lady farmer named Kasha who has a secret that makes her farm very valuable, attracting the attention of a local bully/landowner who wants her land. When she won’t sell, he hires someone to persuade her, a nasty, death dealing  piece of work named Sho, the man who made Swayze’s mentor “fallen”, and who sports a hairdo that makes you wonder if World War III wasn’t justified.

If this  plot line sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the plot of about every third western in existence.

If anything can be said for Steel Dawn’s story its that while it lacks anything resembling complexity, it uses it’s cliches as well as it can. In addition to the aformenetioned excuse for a end of the movie showdown, we also get Kasha’s son helping to soften up Swayze’s world weary exterior and adding some humanity to the movie. There’s also a bit of conflict with Kasha’s right hand man, played by the late B movie virtuoso Brion James,  who feels replaced by the new man in his boss’s life. Without watching this movie, I’m guessing you can guess which one of these guys gets kidnapped and which one gets stabbed.

This movie is a bit of a Frankenstien’s monster, a film cobbled together from existing movie plots and sewn together in a working if not terribly pretty package. While not the worst post apocalypse film to come out of the 80’s, there’s not alot to distinguish it besides having the star of Dirty Dancing in it.

Steel Dawn gets a C as it walks off into the sunset. It’s worth renting or even purchusing if you find it on the second half of a double feature DVD. Even without  going MST3K on it, it’s an interesting film.

Just please, somebody explain the hair to me.

When I was but a lad of six years old, my babysitter wanted to take me to a movie. I was very okay with this and we shuffled off to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Alas, Close Encounters wasn’t quite out yet, so we decided to watch the movie that was playing.

This is how I ended up seeing, in the theatre, The Kentucky Fried Movie.

Besides being an argument for expanded parental guidance warnings, The Kentucky Fried Movie is a series of short bits, most of which have nothing to do with one another. The film hit on themes of the day and 70’s pop culture references, including the energy crisis, kung fu movies and cheesy porn. The humor is driven by puns, sexual innuendo and weird sight gags.

The movie was under-financed and this may be both part of its charm as well as it’s downfall. Watching it thirty years later (pause for a moment while I cry a little) the humor is still there, but is a little stale in the 21st century. The pacing of the film is a few degrees off, something a little extra editing might have fixed. The actors, pretty much anyone the could grab to work for next to nothing, do a respectable job but the lack of Oscar nods to this pictures stars is not without reason.

If I were to do this movie justice, I’d rate each skit on it’s own, but as I’m not trying to write a novel here, I’ll just mention the hightlights:

• Fistful of Yen- The center of the film is a spoof of Enter the Dragon. This is the best bit in the film and if you’ve seen Bruce Lee’s classic, you’ll laugh. If not, you’ll still laugh.
• Catholic High School Girls in Trouble- A trailer for a fake porn movie, it has genuine giggle generating moments even if it’s not really that far off from a real porno ad.
•  The News Bulletins- If anything ties this picture together, it’s the news announcer coming on and saying “Film at 11″. If anything dates this picture, it’s the bad suit that the announcer wears.

Is this movie worth renting? Yes.

Is it worth watching all at once? Not so much.

The reason this format wouldn’t fly post Y2K is that we have YouTube now. Admittedly, you can’t show boobs on YouTube but if you overlook that, The Kentucky Fried Movie is like a prototype of the internet’s best time waster. Funny video clips are visual equivalent of a bag of Reese’s cups: one or two and you’re satisfied, three or four seems indulgent, but more than that and you start feeling a little sick.

Despite fond memories of my babysitter trying to shield my eyes with a popcorn box once she realised what it was we were watching, I have to give the Kentucky Fried Movie a C. If you find this one on special it might be worth having, but I wouldn’t consider one’s life unfulfilled if you miss it.

(Unless you’re me. Then you’d be sad for not having had gone out with a really pretty 18 year old girl, even if you were only six.)

Usually when I talk about B+ Movies, I’m referring to pictures that never made it to the big screen in America. Usually, the weird and interesting stuff just doesn’t get the funding or press or interest it takes to end up a major motion picture. There are, of course, some exceptions.

Take for instance 1989’s UHF.

For those six or eight of you that have never heard of the film’s star, Weird Al Yankovic is a musician who parodies popular songs and has been doing so for around 30 years. He brought this spirit into the realm of film, writing the story of a dreamer who can’t hold a job but who through a bit of happenstance ends up the manager of a UHF TV station.

Now you may be asking yourself “what the hell is UHF”. I’m glad you asked. UHF was the TV equivalent of AM radio. You got it through an antenna, it had crappier reception and almost no one actually tries to use it. It was local cable before local cable existed.

In the story, Weird Al’s station is expected to tank and nearly does until one day, Al puts the janitor on air, a character played by disgraced comedian Michael Richards. The station starts getting some viewers, causing the Network Affiliate to get angry and take steps to run the station out of business. Hilarity ensues.

The film is full of pop culture references to the 80’s with nods to Rambo, Conan the Barbarian and Geraldo Rivera. The comedy in the story is complimented by a host of wacky characters, including a reporter played by Fran Drescher, a midget camaraman and Al’s girlfriend, played by SNL alumni Victoria Jackson

This movie opened the same summer as Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Lethal Weapon 2. As a result, it did pathetic box office but remained a favorite of fans of Al’s music. It got critical approval, just hit the theatres at the wrong time.

Like a number of 80’s movies, it’s pacing feels very slow to modern audiences, at least modern audiences including me. The film’s jokes are a little cliche now, but that’s mostly because they are the very source of those cliches. When I saw it in the theaters, it was hold-my-sides laughing, now it’s good for a smile and a chuckle.

For that reason, I give UHF a B, not a B+. It’s still worth watching and is still a fun movie. It will make you believe that a man can teach a poodle how to fly. Or not.

A common misconception regarding Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is that it that “Frankenstein” is the name of the monster. The monster’s name is actually Adam, Frankenstein being his creator. This has not stopped people from adding “Franken-” to the beginning words to evoke the imagery of neck bolts, assembled body parts and things that should not be.

Examples include Frankenberry, Frankenweenie and today’s movie review subject: Frankenhooker.

Frankenhooker was made by the same minds that brought the cult horror films Basket Case and Brain Damage.  In the same over the top, stomach unsettling fashion, we are entertained with a tale of a young inventor who loses his girlfriend to a horrible accident involving a remote control lawnmower of his own design. In order to fix this, our mad scientist protagonist decides he will resurrect his love by the means of an estrogen based reanimation fluid and parts from the bodies of a collection of hookers.

Seriously, this is plot.

This movie is kind of a horror movie in-joke, the sort of thing you’d laugh at if you weren’t up to watching ReAnimator or From Beyond for the fourteenth time.  It’s humor rolls towards the macabre, occasionally taking a detour into the disturbing yet silly. The movie manages to take decapitations, crack cocaine, prostitution and a guy who relaxes by drilling holes in his head and make it all into a kind of slapstick nightmare.

Unearthed Films , a  distributor that specializes in obscure and over the top films (such as B+ Movie Rock and Rule ), released this on DVD in 2006. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but I find it interesting that there’s enough of an audience for it that someone decided to carry this on into the 21st century.

But how do I grade it… sadly, I give it a C. The movie is a niche picture for a sub-category of fans, not something that really touches a wider audience. This isn’t to say it is without charm, just without remorse and maybe without taste. If you walk into it eyes open, knowing that you’re going to be smirking at the screen one moment and then kind of ill the next, it’s worth checking out.

Me,  I rented this twice in 1990. The imagery was enough to stay with me 18 years later and disturbing enough that I think I’m probably not going to need to watch it ever again.

If you’d only watched John Woo’s recent American films (Windtalkers, Paycheck), you might miss why he is such an important figure in the evolution of cinema. Woo has, more than perhaps any other director, bridged the gap between Asian and American cinema. Directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, the Wachowski brothers and almost anyone who has made an action film in the last fifteen years have taken notes from John Woo’s style and touches.

Well before he was sending actors flying through the air, shooting a pair of pistols while surrounded by doves in a church, Woo was, like most Asian directors having people fight it out with swords. During this period in the director’s career, he gave us Show Lin Men which in the States was called Last Hurrah for Chivalry.

I found this movie by chance one day on cable and was amazed by what I saw. The plot is engaging and has more twists than a bowl of noodles. In the beginning, we meet Martial Artist 1 who who wants revenge against Martial Artist 2, but can’t gain it himself. He therefore seeks the aid of Martial Artists 3 & 4, both legendary swordsmen, one of which has sworn off fighting. The story includes in its telling villains both comical and deadly, a magic sword, heavy drinking, the best in male bonding and the worst in betrayal.

The reasons to watch this movie are manifold. It’s got beautiful action, exemplary of the Wu Xia style of martial arts movie. The characters and story are not neglected, giving each character having real and understandable motivations. The movie is nigh flawless for it’s genre.

Where the “nigh” comes into play is that the movie is hard to figure out at first and you have to trust that it is going to be understandable in the end (which it is). Also, especially towards the end, some of the sets look cheap and the special effects are kind of crap, but that’s mostly because it was made in 1979, not because they weren’t trying.

I just found out that the movie has been released on DVD and the new cut looks pretty spectacular, as evidenced by the trailer.

John Woo would go on to make even greater films, but I don’t have any qualms calling this one great. Last Hurrah for Chivalry is solidly in the B+ category and if you’ve got any appreciation for classic kung fu movies, this one is worth your time.

Ah, the prison film. This staple of B movie plot and setting has been around for almost as long as there have been movies. It sets up so many elements right off the bat: an enclosed setting full of bad guys, a easy way to limit the options of your hero and a motivation that anyone who watches can get into immediately, the fear of loss of freedom.

What could make it better? Make the prison and island. Now you can add elements of Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies while maintaining the grit and powerlessness of the central genre. Now set in the near future so that you can add deus ex machina as needed and you have No Escape.

Ray Liotta plays a soldier who is sent to prison for killing a superior officer. Put at the mercy of a sadistic warden, he gets shipped off to Guantanamo 2.0, a place that on the books doesn’t exist and which the warden reserves for the true hard cases. He first encounters the bad criminals, a group of cannibals and murderers led by a group of gang leaders, the chief of which is Marek (played by Stuart Johnson), a guy who kills anyone who bugs him and thus keeps his people in line.

After narrowly escaping this camp, our hero meets the good criminals, led by The Father (played by one of my favorite actors, Lance Henriksen), an M.D. who has taught his people to live in a more organized and peaceful manner. He also keeps a diary of how the warden has been illegally sending criminals to the island and trying to secretly find a way back to civilization to blow the lid off of the secret.

No Escape has a lot going on it. There’s a kid who looks up to Liotta’s character, a murky secret that was the motive for his crime in addition to the Warden’s efforts and the war between criminal tribes. The main characters feel real and believable and the setting keeps the premise within suspension of disbelief.

The closest thing to a complaint I can say is that some of the side characters feel a little one dimensional, a fact I can overlook considering they are throwing backstory at us in double handfuls. If you can accept that there is a secret island prison, then everything else comes pretty easy.

No Escape didn’t make much at the box office. That’s sad because there is really so much in this movie to like. I give No Escape a B+ and will refrain from ending this review with a prison joke.

There was a time not too long ago when the news was full of chatter about preachers and the controversy they caused. I’m not referring to anti-American sentiment or protecting a governor from witchcraft. I’m talking about a more pedestrian form of scandal, that of savings eating superchurches and the piles and piles of cash they rake in. Someone in the 80’s thought that the concept was funny enough to make a feel good movie about people fighting back at this opportunistic pulpit abuse, a picture now only to be found in VHS format.

The movie is called Pass the Ammo.

This flick did not want for recognizable faces. Annie Potts (Designing Women) plays the tall haired, gospel singing spouse of a corrupt, unctuous and unrepentant clergyman played by Tim Curry (if I have to tell you who Tim Curry is, stop reading my blog, look up his resume on IMDB and come back after you’ve watched a dozen or so). Bill Paxton (Aliens, Titanic, and B+ movie Near Dark) plays a would-be Robin Hood who, trying to get his girlfriend’s inheritance back, ends up kidnapping the preacher and his wife in their church/tv studio. From there, we get a few dramatic moments and a few sappy moments and a lot of 80’s flavored laughs.

The jewel in this film is Tim Curry whose acting brilliantly balances between a reality we can despise and a parody we can laugh about. The veteran actor brings a genuine smugness and condescending attitude to the character that makes you really want him to get what’s coming to him. The other performances in the film are worthy, but if you have a taste for Curry, this movie might be worth seeking out for his performance alone.

Bill Paxton’s performance wasn’t exactly Oscar material, but he does give us someone to sympathize with and the rest of the cast does their job well. In addition to the movie’s dry laughs, it has romance and a lot of characters really learning something about themselves (much as every other character in the 80’s did if they weren’t using a machete or an M-60).

I wouldn’t take its depiction of ecclesiastical finance as documentary, but if you ever thought about Jim Baker or Benny Hinn and sneered, you too may find something to relate to in this movie. The movie does share a great deal in common with other underdog-sticking-it-to-the-man movies of the Regan Era without completely disintegrating into pattern and formula.

I wouldn’t break my arm to see Pass the Ammo again but I would stop to watch it on cable and that’s enough to make me take out my “B” stamp and touch it to the screen.

Place your hand on the screen brothers and sisters. Feel the power of the B.

In continuation of a week of videos only available on VHS, I’d like to discuss three words that get my interest every time: women with guns. As we near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the bad ass gun toting chick is now a cliche. In earlier times it was an oddity, a role reversal taking the gender almost always put in distress and making them the aggressor, usually with style and deadly beauty. I think the concept has worked well in B movies mostly because it not only challenges an age old stereotype but it offers the possibility of naked boobs.

Take the British import Killing Time.

Like many good titles, Killing Time has a double meaning. The first nuance is characterized in the initial plot establishing moments in the film in which we meet a British cop who wants a mobster dead for killing his partner. He wants it so bad, in fact, that he’s willing to hire a smoking hot Italian hitwoman to do the job even though he has no way to pay her.  It’s time for some killing.

The second meaning comes from the situation that occurs after the hitwoman does her work and the story that takes up most of the movies time. She misses the mobster, but still eliminates a great number of said mobster’s thugs.  Her job done, she retires to a hotel room where she awaits her reward.  There she is targeted by a number of lesser hitmen who have been pressed into service by the cop to take her out so that he doesn’t have to come up with the cash. For most of the movie, she is in a hotel room, killing time.

The movie has lots of flying bullets, some sexy moments with the killer and a little buffoonery to compliment it’s film noir plot line. I found it clever and easy to watch, even bizarre at times. There are a lot of good points to this picture.

Alas, the movie has its issues. The person whose actions causes the most people to be killed is the cop, despite the fact he’s presented as a sympathetic character. Some of the scenes are a little ill paced. The movie also cribs notes off of other crime dramas, so much that its Tarintinoesque and John Wooian touches come off not as homage but imitation.

Killing Time falls solidly in the B slot. It’s not worth buying a VCR to watch, but it’s worth picking up in the dollar bin if you happen to see it.  Killing Time is an entertaining film and perfect way to … well… do I have to say it?

Just don’t expect it to rock your world.