B-MOVIE BULLSH*T - Part Thirteen "Fair Is Fair!"

B-Movie Bullsh*t

Part Thirteen

The Legend of Billie Jean

(1985)

Synopsis

When Hubie, a local asshole, steals and wrecks her brother Binx’s beloved scooter, trailer park beauty Billie Jean Davy goes to his family’s store for the $618.00 required to get it fixed. Pyatt, Hubie’s father, tells her that he’ll give her the money, but only in $50 installments for which he expects “something” in return. She refuses and Pyatt catches Binx with the gun he keeps inside his cash register. Binx accidentally shoots Pyatt, which forces him, Billie Jean and their friends Putter and Ophelia to go on the lam. Billie Jean’s beauty turns the news story into a statewide sensation, causing them to be recognized wherever they go. She tries to turn herself in, in exchange for the money owed to repair the scooter, but Hubie and his friends try and grab her before the cops can. Out of cash, they break into an empty looking house, only to find Lloyd, the lonely teenage son of the district attorney. Inspired by a clip from Otto Preminger’s Joan of Ark, Billie Jean cuts her hair and has Lloyd film a video of her giving her side of the story. After the video hits the news, girls all across Texas cut their hair in solidarity with their new heroine. Lloyd agrees to serve as the group’s pretend hostage, which brings them into the literal crosshairs of local sharpshooters at the request of his powerful father. With the promise of a repaired scooter, the three of them return to the scene of the crime, only to have Binx shot while Billie Jean is disguised in the crowd. As he’s taken to the hospital, she confronts Pyatt in front of his shop, which she sees is now devoted to selling memorabilia depicting her slogans and image. He tells her he wants to end this and gives her a handful of money, but she throws it back at him and knees him in the groin, causing a lamp to ignite. A crowd gathers and watches as his store burns to the ground and—realizing their complicity in the madness—take off their Billie Jean hats and t-shirts and throw them into the fire.

Not too long ago I read Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s excellent book, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, which explains how to really make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In it they tell you that you don’t have to bother taking Robert McKee’s famous screenwriting course in order to figure out the perfect way to structure a screenplay. They advise that you instead watch Die Hard and do that—every single time, no matter what genre.

It’s great advice, only I would suggest that another film could easily take Die Hard’s place as the perfect example of narrative structure done right. And, as you have already guessed, that film is the subject of today’s post. Truthfully, I understand objectively that The Legend of Billie Jean is far from being a perfect movie, but subjectively I can think of few films whose journey from beginning to middle to end makes me so goddamn happy.

I say this not because I am blind to the dozen little absurdities that define the film’s best scenes, but because the film so effectively sails past them that I have no choice but to pay them no mind. I know they’re there, but I simply don’t care.

Take for example, the fact that every single thing that happens in this film happens because a kid’s scooter got messed up and requires $618.00 to be repaired. Intellectually I understand that this is laughable, but then again I remember that at least two classic films were entirely based on the theft of bicycles (shame on you if you don’t immediately know what the two of them are), neither of which had motors or looked as cool as Binx’s sweet ride.

Or how about the scene where a group of kids ask the now legendary Billie Jean to come and save their friend Kenny from his abusive father? I know in real life her heroism would end with her dead from a shotgun wound, but fuck you if that scene doesn’t make me tear up every single time—no matter how ridiculous it might be.

Sure, taken part by part the film is almost unimaginably stupid, but as a whole it’s brilliant. And do you know how I know this?

Because I’ve seen Thelma & Louise.

Callie Khouri won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for that film, but everyone who’s seen The Legend of Billie Jean knows it wasn’t as original as it seemed. 

Whether she knew it or not, Khouri was clearly inspired by the earlier work. Both films find their main characters becoming fugitives after they shoot the assholes who try to rape the two hot blondes with terrible southern accents. Both films feature sympathetic male cops who understand that the fugitives aren’t really to blame for what happened. Both films show how the protagonists newfound outlaw status allows them to do things they never would have done before. The main difference is that Thelma & Louise has to be all bleak and depressing to get its point across, while The Legend of Billie Jean just has to be fucking awesome to do the same thing!

(Of course, not everyone feels the same way. I’ve long praised Pat Benatar’s theme song as one of the main reason for the film's awesomeness, but apparently she’s not what you would call a fan of the production. Apparently in concert she introduces the song as being from the worst movie of all time, and it was apparently her refusal to sign off the DVD rights to the song that kept it off store shelves all this time. My guess is that her distaste probably has more to do with the producers of the film, Jon Peters and Peter Gruber, who were kinda like Simpson and Bruckheimer but without the scruples, taste or talent. Chances are they found a way to piss her off so severely she found it impossible to say a kind word about the film and felt justified in keeping it hidden away from the world. Either that or she was just being a major cunt. In the end, it doesn’t matter. She’s Pat Benatar and she’s allowed to do whatever the fuck she pleases.)

Obviously the majority of the film’s enormous appeal comes from its leading lady, who had just finished playing Supergirl when cast in the role. As Billie Jean, Helen Slater looks amazing. Sure she occasionally sounds really dumb and not every line is delivered as successfully as one might hope, but I guarantee that every time one of the characters calls her “a pretty girl” (and they do it a lot) you’ll find yourself nodding your head vigourously in agreement.

The film also features endearing performances by 20 year-old Yeardley Smith as the 13 year-old Putter, and future Mother Night director Keith Gordon as Lloyd, as well as a great turn by Peter Coyote as the film’s sympathetic lawman. Unfortunately, it also features Christian Slater as Binx, who begins and ends the film as an utter douche.

If it doesn’t seem as though I’m getting in as deep as I usually do in these entries, it's probably because I love the film too much to perform the evisceration necessary for a proper autopsy. It’s one of the projects that simply is what it is and what that is is perfect.

You just have to have faith.

Vanity Fear Coming Attraction

12/05/11

Fair is Fair.

The Adventures of Drake Wantsum, Hollywood Stuntman

Part Eleven

"Not What You Thought It Was"

“Bill?”

“Yes, Drake?”

“I feel like you’re angry with me.”

“You could say that, Drake.”

“I didn’t know she was your daughter. I thought she was Bill’s daughter, and I knew he wouldn’t have a problem with it. Would you have, Bill?”

“I’m sorry, Drake, I wasn’t paying attention. What were you two talking about?”

“The time I took Bill’s daughter to that church service.”

“Are you still pissed about that, Bill?”

“She joined that cult!”

“The Catholic church is many things, Bill, but it isn’t a cult.”

“Shut up, Bill! This is between me and Drake! Goddamn pope-lover.”

Rejected By Rod(?): Part Four - Ruby

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(?)

Ruby

(1977)

According to my trusty Leonard Maltin iPhone app director Curtis Harrington was so disappointed with one version of his 1977 film, Ruby, he insisted on it being given the infamous Alan Smithee credit once used by filmmakers who felt their artistic vision had been so catastrophically usurped they could not allow to have their name attached to a project, lest it negatively affect their career and reputation.

But having just sat through the unmolested director’s cut for which he took full credit, I’m having difficulty imagining how much worse that other version could have been for Harrington to not want to be associated with it. I say this because the film I watched is so relentlessly mediocre, it’s hard to figure out how it could ever be edited into an outright Smithee-worthy disaster.  As is, Ruby simply doesn’t take enough risks to ever be that bad.           

Pointlessly set in 1951 (a fact easily forgotten given how little effort is made to convincingly convey the period), Ruby is a supernatural gangster revenge thriller with a mute teenage girl thrown into the mix just so the producers could throw Exorcist and Omen references into the trailer. A post-Carrie Piper Laurie looks fabulous as the title character—a washed up singer/moll who runs a drive-in 16 years after the father of her daughter was gunned down by the other members of his gang—but overplays the part to the precipice of campy embarrassment.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of Laurie’s performance to turn the film into a so-bad-it’s-good classic a la Mommie Dearest. Instead, Ruby is the least satisfying kind of bad film there is—a dull, unimaginative one.

Which is something even Alan Smithee would be ashamed of.

50 Words or Less - Evilspeak

For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.

Howard plays a nerdy student at a military school who’s bullied by 28 year-old That 70s Show dad, Stark. Using a home computer, Howard joins forces with the spirit of Bull from Night Court and gets his revenge. The moral of the story is: Never mess with a geek’s puppy.

B-MOVIE BULLSH*T - Part Twelve "Ssssseriously?"

B-Movie Bullsh*t

Part Twelve

Sssssss

(1973)

Synopsis

Late at night a carnie named Kogen arrives at the home of famous herpetologist Dr. Carl Stoner to pick up a mysterious package that appears to contain some large, unseen animal. The next day Stoner visits Dr. Daniels, the chairman of the university’s zoological department. He’s come to request an extension on his research grant and to find someone to replace Tim, his student assistant who appears to have taken off without notice. Daniels can’t guarantee the grant, but he does recommend David Blake for the assistant position. David eagerly accepts and drives with Stoner to his isolated house and its basement laboratory. There he meets Kristina, Stoner’s attractive daughter, who’s surprised to learn of Tim’s unexplained disappearance. After showing David his impressive collection of snakes, including a black mamba and king cobra, Stoner gives him an injection he says is meant to protect him from venomous bites. Over the following weeks, David and Kristina start falling in love—a development her father strong disapproves of. David starts showing strange physical changes that the doctor insists are normal reactions to the injections, but the truth of what’s happening to him can be found at the freak show of a local carnival, where the half-man, half-snake is far more realistic than nature would ever allow. The depth of Stoner’s madness is proven when he sneaks into the room of a local football hero and slips the black mamba into the jock’s shower in order to get revenge for the death of his beloved pet python. On the final day of David’s transformation, Stoner sends Kristina away on a wild goose chase so he can attend to the creation of the first snake with a human mind. Doing this also requires that he feed Dr. Daniels to a large snake in his storm cellar. Unlike Tim, David’s metamorphosis proves successful and Stoner chooses to celebrate by gloating about his achievement to his king cobra, which ends with him being repeatedly bitten. Kristina finds her father dead in their backyard, and—having learned about what happened to Tim—realizes that the new king cobra in their lab is her boyfriend who—as the movie ends—is threatened by both an attacking mongoose and the gun of the local sheriff.

Sssssss was the first movie made by the famous producing team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown. The two of them first worked together as executives at 20^th Century Fox, the studio founded by Zanuck’s legendary father, Darryl. As far as cult film fans are concerned their most important achievements during this period were Planet of the Apes, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and the infamous WWTTM (What Were They Thinking? Movie) disaster, Myra Breckenridge. As independent producers they wouldn’t hit the big time until two years after Sssssss, when they helped changed cinema forever with another scary animal movie—Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

Watching Sssssss (which earns my personal nomination for worst movie title of all time) it’s hard to see just why they chose to set their shingle on this particular property, which suffers from the same conceptual flaw most animal related horror films cannot overcome. The logic behind these films is that by exploiting people’s natural phobias of frightening animals, you have to expend little effort in crafting an effective horror movie. Since many people are terrified by the mere sight of snakes, making a movie that features a lot of them is guaranteed to thrill. Right?

But this all falls apart when you realize that the kind of person who suffers from the sort of antipathy that makes it difficult for them to even look at a snake or spider or rat, is most probably not going to pay to do so in a movie theater. Tickets will instead be bought by folks who have no problem with such animals and who feel no tension when they appear safely on a movie screen (as opposed to directly in front of them).

I’m not afraid of snakes. Would I object if a rattlesnake showed up in the middle of my bed? Of course, but if you told me I could approach a large python or an adorable chimpanzee, I’d pick the snake every single time. Once you’ve done the right reading, you know that most snakes would rather just ignore you, while a primate will straight out fuck you up. Just ask that woman Oprah interviewed who had her face bit off.

Because of this, for me the horror of Sssssss (I mean, really! Can you think of a worse title?) depends entirely on the element of the mad scientist and his victim and in that direction the film veers away from terror and instead into pathos. Much of this can be blamed on what is actually the film’s most successful element—Strother Martin’s performance as Dr. Stoner.

In playing the insane snake doctor, Martin chose to avoid all of the usual clichés. Instead of being a cackling, insane, egomaniac, he’s instead a quiet, humble, idealist who genuinely believes his crackpot experiment will change the world for the better. Not only do we like him, we sympathize with him. Even when he kills the football player, the script so clearly stacks the deck in his moral favour (the jock killed his pet snake in self defense while he was trying to break into Kristina’s room to rape her) that it’s almost impossible to fault him for it. It’s only at the very end where he becomes the outright villain most other films would have shown from the very beginning.

And as interesting as this is, it upsets the balance of David and Kristina’s story. Played by Dirk Benedict and Heather Menzies, they’re a very appealing couple, but the horror of his eventual transformation is affected by our inability to fault her father until the very end. Rather than a horrific act that defies nature, David’s fate instead seems sadly melodramatic—no different than if he had cancer or some other fatal disease. Instead of thinking “Holy shit, he’s totally turning into a snake!” we spend the movie worrying about how hard it’s going to be on Kristina, “She really seems to like him.”

So you can chalk Sssssss as another movie that fails for many of the reasons it succeeds. If we didn’t care about the characters, chances are the horror elements might have stuck out more. As it is the quality of the main performances do more to highlight the film’s problems than disguise them. This includes the odd decision to obscure nudity by literally painting vegetation onto the frame (which—according to the IMDb—appears only in the home video version for unexplained reasons), the ridiculous death of Dr. Daniels (who appears to have been completely devoured by the snake in a matter of hours, which even I know wouldn’t be possible), the hilarious final transformation scene, and the whole football player subplot, which seems to have been added just to give Dr. Stoner something evil to do before the climax.

I’d actually be okay with all of this if the film didn’t completely fuck up its ending. Clearly the film originally ended with snake-David being killed, but that's the kind of thing that never survives audience testing. So, instead the film ends with Kristina screaming while her snake-boyfriend’s fate is in limbo (for about three seconds at least). My problem is that I actually think the film would have been far creepier if it allowed David to live and we watched as Kristina was left to decide what to do with a boyfriend who is now a venomous king cobra. More than anything I like this because it would have allowed for a sequel in which the situation has driven her mad and she uses her deadly reptile lover to kill all of the folks who refused to recognize her father’s brilliance.

Now that would have been

an awesome movie!

Vanity Fear Coming Attraction

11/28/11

We're gonna sink them in deep.

The Adventures of Drake Wantsum, Hollywood Stuntman

Part Ten

“Bill Problems”

“So what’s the gag this morning, Jerry?”

“You, Bill and Bill are going to drop off that dangling scaffold.”

“Which Bills? Couch and Madden?”

“No, Madden and McIntosh.”

“And what are we doing this afternoon?”

“The shot where you guys land in the pool, but Bill has a prior commitment, so Bill will be filling in for him.”

 “Gotcha. I think Bill has it in for me.”

“Can you blame him?”

“I didn’t know she was his daughter.”

“Yes you did. I specifically told you, ‘That’s Bill’s daughter.’”

 “I thought you meant the other Bill.”

“Oh, that would explain it.”

Rejected By Rod(?): Part Three - The Adventures of Hercules

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(?)

The Adventures of Hercules

(1985)

There are two reasons to love The Adventure of Hercules, the second of two films made about the famous demi-god by director Luigi Cozzi and star Lou Ferrigno.  The first is its refreshing dependence on a largely female cast (and that’s before a bunch of Amazons show up), which seems to have less to do with the narrative demands of the plot as much as the director’s desire to make a movie with a lot of really hot Italian chicks in it. As a reviewer who enjoys movies with a lot of really hot Italian chicks in them, this is a definite plus.

The second reason to love the movie is that it’s as insane as we’ve come to expect from the man who gave us Starcrash (in which Caroline Munro, in just one instance, is endangered by a giant lesbian robot) and the first Hercules (in which the hero is shown creating the constellations by throwing stuff into the sky). In this case, the insanity comes from Hercules search for Zeus’ seven stolen thunderbolts, which the god requires to quell the rebellion started by his (really hot) wife Hera. Said bolts are hidden inside a variety of foes, including a hairy monster, a busty Gorgon, Hades, a busty spider lady and a fire monster.

You just have to watch the final fight in which the battle between science and religion (Cozzi’s for the latter) is waged between an animated T-Rex and gorilla to understand the peculiar genius of this neglected auteur’s demented imagination.

50 Words or Less - Stuck On You!

For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.

The notorious Troma Entertainment's most mainstream film, Stuck On You! is probably still too vulgar and raunchy for most casual viewers. A broad comic deconstruction of romance through the ages, the film has the best joke to laugh ratio of Kaufman and Herz’s pre-Toxic Avenger oeuvre. Which isn’t saying much.