B-MOVIE BULLSH*T - Part Fourteen "The (Ape) Butler Did It"

B-Movie Bullsh*t

Part Fourteen

Link

(1986)

Synopsis

Jane Chase, a young American woman going to school in England, convinces anthropology professor Dr. Steven Phillip to take her on as his assistant. When she arrives at his country estate, she finds that it is inhabited by three primates. They include an aging female chimp named Voodoo, a young male chimp named Imp, and an old performing orangutan named Link, who dresses in a butler’s outfit, enjoys lighting his own cigars, and is clearly taken in by the new beautiful blonde in his midst. Unbeknownst to Jane, Dr. Phillip is planning on having Link put down, but the intelligent primate figures this out and decides to take some pre-emptive action. He kills the professor and contrives to keep Jane to himself by disconnecting the phone and pushing their only car off a cliff. Unable to get to town by foot because of the local packs of feral dogs, Jane is forced to confront Link as his behaviour grows more and more uncivilized.

Every fan of “bad” movies will eventually have the experience I had when I sat down to watch Link just a few hours ago. I’ve had it more times than I can count, so I should be used to it, but it still surprises me every single time. What I’m talking about is the shock that comes from finding out that the supposedly terrible film you are watching is actually nowhere near as awful as its supposed to be. In this case, Link is pretty damn good if you ignore one obvious, but not fatal flaw.

Ever since I read Leonard Maltin’s “Bomb” rating in his book of capsule reviews years ago I assumed the worst about Link—an assumption that wasn’t dissuaded by the subsequent reviews I read from genre critics who should have been much more open to the material than the notoriously horror-adverse Maltin.

How then to explain the disconnect between the terrible film they reviewed and the enjoyable film I’ve just seen? I think it comes down to one significant factor—Elisabeth Shue.

I say this because Shue is one of those actresses whose appeal does not seem to cross over generational divides. To Baby Boomers no Oscar nomination will ever eclipse the fact that she shall always be the young frivolous blond cipher who starred in Adventures in Babysitting, while to folks my age (Generation X represent!) no Oscar nomination will ever eclipse the fact that she shall always be the hot, gorgeous awesome blond who made us feel funny in our pants when she starred in Adventures in Babysitting.

Link pre-dates her most famous starring role, but my inherent affection for her allowed me to sympathize with her character to a far larger degree than L.A. Morse, for example, who suggested in a short review from his classic Video Trash & Treasures that her performance is easily outshined by that of her orangutan co-star. (In the same review Morse also accuses the film of mistakenly referring to Link as being a chimp, but if any such reference in the film actually occurs, I missed it).

Morse also accuses the film of merely replicating the standard hot-girl-threatened-by-a-maniac premise rather than transcending it, which is another explanation why I enjoyed the film far more than its past critics. I’m perfectly happy watching the ritual of horror clichés followed with religious fervor, so long as the results are entertaining.

Another major factor for my appreciation of Link is one I touched upon in my review of Sssssss from a few weeks ago. Horror movies about animals are only ever as creepy as our own personal distaste for the animals they feature allow. In my case, I am genuinely unnerved by primates. Whenever I see one in a scene with a human actor I feel genuine tension, not because of what is happening onscreen, but because I know that if that “adorable” animal suddenly wanted to, it could seriously injure it’s co-stars in a matter of seconds. This terrifying reality is perfectly expressed in an anecdote the professor shares with Jane during dinner:

Part of Link‘s overall theme is how easy it is to forget how truly unpredictable and fiercely dangerous primates are, simply because of how much they remind us of ourselves. But once you know the truth—like the fact that their adorable “smiles” are actually fear grimaces whose bared teeth are meant to frighten you away rather than indicate you should go in for a hug—its hard to see the cuteness. (I especially love the film’s ending, in which Jane and her injured boyfriend drive away from the burned out husk of an estate and drive by baby chimp, Imp, along the way. Jane’s boyfriend understandably doesn’t want the animal anywhere near him after what he’s just been though, but Jane insists that, “He’s just a baby,” and therefore completely safe. Her delusion is made evident as the camera films the car driving away and reveals a field filled with freshly slaughtered sheep.)

Link worked as well as it did for me because its whole premise is built upon upending the likes of Every Which Way But Loose and Going Ape! or any other film based on presenting apes as just another pet. It helps that it was directed by Richard Franklin, the late Australian Hitchcock acolyte who previously collaborated with screenwriter Everett De Roche on the Ozploitation classics Patrick and Road Games. Watching the film today, much of the fun comes from Franklin’s inventive camera moves and clever shots, which do make you think about what his mentor might have done with similarly loopy material. (It's probably not a coincidence that my favourite scene in the film is the one where Link creeps Jane out by taking off his suit and staring at her while she attempts to have a bath--its overtly sexual overtones are so perverse its clear Hitchcock would have loved it.)

That said, there is a major aspect of Link that does keep it from being better than it is, and that’s Jerry Goldsmith’s terrible score. While it makes sense to play on the comic cuteness of the apes early on in the picture, Goldsmith refuses to drop the comic motif once the cuteness is revealed to be a façade. Rather than give us the kind of classic horror score these scenes deserve, he instead gives us something better suited for the likes of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice or a comic mystery like Jonathan Lynn’s Clue. Were I not more invested in the film, I could easily see myself being taken out of it for this reason.

I suspect I might be overselling the film, since mine is so clearly the minority view, but Link is nowhere near the disaster its reputation suggests it is. Replace the orangutan with a human assailant and I believe it would still make for an entertaining 100 minutes. The fact that it’s got an ape in a butler suit instead just makes it that much better.

The Adventures of Drake Wantsum, Hollywood Stuntman

Part Twelve

"Going Apeshit"

“Hey Jerry, have you seen Drake?”

“Hi Eddie. He’s up there with Bill and Bill on the scaffold waiting for the go ahead.”

“You put him with Bill? Is that a good idea?”

“Probably not.”

“You don’t look too concerned.”

“You may not know this, but I have a daughter too.”

“Gotcha. But, still, couldn’t you have waited? This production already has one death on the books.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Guilty, but it’s not going to make promoting this flick any easier.”

“People love those monkeys. They don’t care about dead stuntmen.”

“From your lips to God’s ears.”

Rejected By Rod(?): Part Five - Repossessed

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(?)

Repossessed

(1990)

How much should a group of men be blamed if their works of genius are inexpertly imitated by morons and result in creating far more pain than the amount of pleasure originally wrought? As great as The Naked Gun, Kentucky Fried Movie and Top Secret remain today were they worth the terrible scattershot “parody” films they inspired? Does one Airplane justify the existence of one Disaster Movie?

It’s a tough question and it’s not made any easier by Repossessed, a early 90s rip-off of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker formula that proves if you try hard enough it is possible to attempt a joke in every single shot of your movie and still fail to earn a single laugh.

It’s really rather simple. All you have to do is fail to understand what a joke actually is.

What it isn’t is the repetition, replication or mere invocation of a pop cultural artifact. Having a character repeat someone else’s famous catchphrase is not a joke, unless they do it in a way that comments on the significance of the phrase and its place in the zeitgeist. Without that commentary you’re no different than that asshole at work who expects you to laugh every time he repeats something from an old Mike Myers or Jim Carrey movie. And you don’t want to be that asshole, because we all hate that asshole. 

Seriously, asshole, we all want you to suffer and die.

That said, I can’t knock Repossessed too much, because it stars Linda Blair and I love Linda Blair, except when she’s in the original The Exorcist, which I hate and which Repossessed is a parody of and which therefore requires me to admire it, if only just a little.  I’m complicated like that.

50 Words or Less - Once Bitten

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.

Carrey’s star debut, Once Bitten posits a world where he’s Los Angeles’ last virgin, which poses a problem for vampire Hutton, who needs his untainted blood to retain her beauty. Bizarrely Carrey plays the straight man, making the ungodly hot 42 year-old supermodel the only reason to check this out.

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.

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!

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.”