Kidnapping Stella — a
German remake of the British flick The
Disappearance of Alice Creed (2009 / trailer), a movie
that few people saw and was already remade in The Netherlands in 2014 as Bloedlink / Reckless (trailer)
— is pretty much a movie that no one needs to see. (Really, how often does a
movie need to be remade within one single decade?) For much of its running
time, at least for those who are unfamiliar with the other two versions, the
narrative's development leads one to expect a new, three-person version of The Grissom Gang (1971 / trailer)
and/or No Orchids for Miss
Blandish (1948 / trailer),
but the film has an unexpected twist that takes it into a different direction
but doesn't really make it any more interesting.
Set a gray and
depressingly urban Berlin that seems neither populated nor short on housing
(fact: Berlin, population roughly 3.6 million, has a definite shortage of
housing — hell, even hipsters are moving outside the inner-ring by now), the
movie starts off like a documentary on how kidnapping someone is a truly
expensive act, as the prep work shown would probably break the budget of the average deplorable or hipster or minimum-wage earner, stolen van or not.
Clemens Schick is
rather effective as the hardboiled kidnapper Vic, and both he and his character
should be in a better movie. Max von der Groeben, however, as the movie's
nominal identifiable figure (Not!) Tom, is a dislikable, whiny and stupid wet
rag, and all the more so once the movie's twist is revealed. Stella (Jella
Haase) is an enigma, but is also given relatively little to work with;
nevertheless, the actress can almost emote well enough to almost be as
believable as Schick's Vic — not enough, however, to save the movie in any way.
Kidnapping Stella is slow
and predictable up until its mid-film twist, but once the movie's "Surprise! Surprise!
Surprise!" is revealed, predictability returns even as the action
increases. The Hemingwayesque ending does little to save Kidnapping Stella from conveying the feeling that at worst it is
totally unnecessary or, at best, a film school grad project. May the grads move on to bigger and better things...
For
the January 2020Short
Film of the Month, a wasted life took a look at
a short film we saw long ago and that The Dwrayger Dungeon,
one of the fine blogs we have listed to the right (as 13), reminded us about: the first film directed by Paul Bartel (6
Aug 1938 – 13 May 2000) to make any waves, the low budget B&W short film
from 1968, The
Secret Cinema. This month, February 2020, for our Short Film of the Month we're taking a look at something the Dungeon introduced us to, the ancient Ub Iwerks animation
short, Room Runners,* featuring the mostly forgotten
character Flip the Frog — indeed, before stumbling upon this film at the Dungeon, we had never even heard of
Flip.**
Flip
the Frog was created by Iwerks after the animator left Disney and opened his own
studio. Between 1930 and 1933, Iwerks produced roughly 40 Flip shorts [per Big
Cartoon Database], of which Room
Runners, released 10 October 1932, lies roughly in the middle. Of all the
Flip the Frog cartoons, Room Runner
is perhaps the most obviously and consistently pre-Code, and features jokes of
a suggestive and overt sexual nature that completely died on screen after 1934, when the
Hayes Code kicked in. (One or two jokes might even still raise an eyebrow today.)
Dr Grobs, which says "If you can watch
only one Flip the Frog cartoon, this one should be it," has the plot:
"Room Runners
starts with Flip trying to sneak out of his apartment block to escape six months
of arrears. Unfortunately, he's discovered by the landlady, and a long chase
starts, which also involves a policeman and a running gag of a man with a tooth
ache."
TV
Tropes mentions
that, "Flip the Frog cartoons are almost the defining example of animation
from the pre-censorship era. An angry Flip often reacts to trouble with a shout
of 'Damn!' Nude or scantily-clad women often appear, usually to place Flip in
compromising positions. Innuendo is everywhere; in The
Office Boy (1932), a sexy office clerk unwittingly walks around with a
'private' sign hanging from her backside. [Astute viewers might notice she is
the same babe as the babe in the bathroom in Room Runners.] Finally, typical cartoon violence has consequences:
in Puddle Pranks (1930),
a character is eaten by a monstrous bird and appears to die permanently (being
chewed up and swallowed)."
In
any event, enjoy a forgotten jewel from yesterday, Flip the Frog in…
Room Runner:
*Coincidentally enough, this ancient animated
short — it's only 12 years shy of being a century old — is not the first Ub Iwerks short
that the Dungeon has brought to our
attention: way back in October 2014, the blog also drew our eye to the great
Iwerks/Disney Silly Symphony Hells
Bells (1929).
As for Iwerks's works in general here at a
wasted life, Hells Bells was
preceded by the Iwerks/Disney Silly Symphony Skeleton
Dance (1929), the short film for March 2010, and by the totally "what were they thinking?" Iwerks'ComicColor Cartoon, The
Balloon Man (1935), aka The Pincushion
Man, our short film for August 2014. Now, with Room Runners, Ub Iwerks is officially the most represented filmmaker
of our Short Film(s) of the Month.
(Should you like Room Runners, and
also like Skeleton Dance, dare we
suggest you check out the Flip the Frog short, Spooks [1932]?)
** In retrospect, though, we cannot help but wonder whether Flip might not have been an inspiration behind Sally (née "Sarah") Cruikshank's acid trip of a short, Face Like a Frog (1987), our Short Film of the Month for October 2011 — the end credits of which, we must mention, offer "Thanks" to Dick Miller!
Wow. Who would have thought it possible: an Anne
Hathaway film that not only doesn't suck, but is amazingly non-mainstream and
interesting. Too bad she doesn't make more movies like this one. As the for the most part not very likeable Gloria, Hathaway plays less a party-girl "writer" suffering setbacks in life than an in-denial
alcoholic at the start of the skids. Tossed out of the apartment by her hunky,
non-enabling boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens of Apostle
[2018 / trailer]),
Gloria retreats to the empty family house in her old hometown, where she more or
less spends her time doing nothing until she unexpectedly meets an old
classmate, Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a disillusioned but seemingly likeable
townie who runs a bar. What initially seems like the prelude to a generic
rom-com about two losers finding and saving each other takes a turn to the
weird and leaves the rom-com far behind once the multi-storey-tall monster
destroying Seoul, Korea, enters the picture — and is soon followed by a second
monster, a huge robot…
Trailer to
Colossal:
Spanish director/scriptwriter Nacho Vigalondo does a good job at
making the entire wacky idea work, and the final result is a well-made movie
that is far less a brainless monsters-destroying-Seoul flick than an exploration of
responsibility and the corruptive nature of power — though, in truth, if one
picks up on some of the fleeting asides throughout the movie, the major
personality change of one of the characters is hardly surprising or out of
place. The guy was an asshole from the start, he only hid it behind a
smokescreen of nice-guy antics. (Psychos are amazingly good at that, as anyone who's ever dealt with one knows.) More surprising is the unexpected later
revelation that he isn't the only dickhead: when Gloria's boyfriend Tim shows up
towards the end, seemingly out of concern, he may not reveal himself as a psycho, but his true colors do definitely fall in the direction of excessively
critical in that passive aggressive "for-your-own-good" way typical
of manipulative egoists.
Colossal definitely does not paint the modern male in positive colors… but then,
even if Gloria does do the right thing in the end, the only thing that truly
separates her from the other egoists in the movie is a moral compass that the
others lack — for much of the movie, she's an egotistical jerk herself, if one
driven by a drinking problem. She only truly begins to change after she finds
out her odd connection to the mega-monster trampling Seoul.
Wrongly sold as a comedy when it came out, it is
hardly surprising that this intriguing and oddly thought-provoking movie was a
flop: anyone who could get past the weird premise and went expecting to see a
quirky rom com, got anything but. This is a truly serious movie, populated by
(other than the monsters) realistic characters not viewed through rose-colored
glasses. True, Gloria does manage to untangle herself from a trap which, in
real life, way too many women are caught in, but even her victory is not
permitted to remain a feel-good ending celebrating self-empowerment. Instead,
it is undermined by a truly simple question posed by a Korean barmaid.
Quirky but serious, Colossal is the type of movie that gives marketing men nightmares
because it fits too many shoes and none at all. That alone makes it worth viewing.
One thing for sure, we definitely want to check out some of Nacho Vigalondo's
earlier Spanish movies, as both Time
Crimes (2007 / trailer)
and Extraterrestrial (2011 / trailer) sound equally quirky.
The American thespian treasure known as
Dick Miller, one of our all-time favorite character actors, entered the Great
Nothingness almost a year ago to the day on 30 January 2019.
A Bronx-born Christmas Day present to the
world, Miller entered the film biz doing redface back in 1956 in the Roger
Corman western Apache Woman (trailer). He quickly
became a Corman regular and, as a result, became a favorite face for an
inordinate amount of modern and contemporary movie directors, particularly
those weaned and teethed in Corman productions. (Miller, for example, appears
in every feature film that Joe Dante has made to date.)
A working thespian to the end, Miller's
last film, the independent horror movie Hanukkah (trailer), starring fellow
deceased low-culture thespian treasure Sid Haig (14 July 1939 – 21 Sept 2019),
just finished production. In it, as in many of Miller's films, his character is
named Walter Paisley in homage to his first truly great lead role, that of the
loser killer artist/busboy Walter Paisley in Roger Corman's classic black
comedy, A
Bucket of Blood(1959).
What follows is a multi-part career review
in which we undertake an extremely meandering, highly unfocused look at the
films of Dick Miller. The films are not necessarily looked at in the order
of their release... and if we missed a film you deem worthy of inclusion, let us know. (P.S.: Top Gun [1986] is not worthy of inclusion.)
Scripted by Anthony L. Greene, who two
years previously wrote Cirio H. Santiago's Angelfist (seePart
VIII) and has since pretty much specialized in erotic thrillers — which is
pretty much what this pale and obscure, sex-heavy Fatal Attraction (1987 / trailer) imitation is.
Director Simpson came from music videos (for example, the one for Chaka Khan's I
Feel for You), and went on to do one more D2V movie, Little Witches (1996 / trailer), not famous for
a nude fat-girl scene, before disappearing into videos again. In Number One Fan,
Dick Miller has a bit part as a night manager.
Music video to
Chaka Khan's I Feel for You:
The plot description as found at the
illegal download site Rarelust:
"Hollywood's biggest action star, Zane Barry, played by Chad McQueen (son
of Steve McQueen*) is seduced by his gorgeous number one fan, Blair Madsen,
played by Renee Griffin (of Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow [1993 / trailer]). For Blair,
it's the beginning of a romance she's dreamed about all her life. But for Zane
it's a one-night stand. After all, he's about to be married to a gorgeous
costumer (Catherine Mary Stewart of Night
of the Comet [1984]). As Blair's obsession turns to violence, Zane's life
mirrors one of his action movies. Zane must take matters into his own hands in
order to overcome the final fury of his Number One Fan."
*Less interesting among less talented
thespian offspring that appear in movies is the guy playing Zane's manager,
Scotty Youngman: Charlie Matthau, the son of Charles Matthau (1 Oct 1920 –1
July 2000).
TV Guide
calls the film "trashy and opportunistic", and explains why they
think that: "Despite the presence of a woman director, Number One Fan is sexist
in any number of ways. This is yet another film in which the male protagonist
get to have his cake and eat it too, cheating on his loving girlfriend with a
hot two-night stand yet remaining a blameless victim in the film's eyes when
the seductress won't let him go. And the male target audience is clearly
supposed to lust for Blair as she bares her gorgeous body yet fear her
predatory sexuality at the same time. As a thriller, the film is both
predictable and unconvincing […]. Aside from the introduction of Billy (Mark
Dalton), a character whose potential goes largely undeveloped, the story
proceeds with barely a hint of surprise. Indeed, considering its tacky
exploitation of such stalking cases as the Rebecca Schaeffer murder,
the biggest mystery in this movie is why Paul Bartel, who directed and
costarred with Schaeffer in Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills (1989),
agreed to take part in it as an actor."
For that, they also point out the good
aspect of the flick: it contains "Violence, extensive nudity, sexual
situations, profanity." Deaths include a strangling, a meat-cleaver
murder, and someone getting beaten to death with a mannequin arm.
Tales from the Crypt: Demon
Knight
(1995, dir. Ernest R. Dickerson)
Once upon a time, from 1989 to 1996, there
was a really successful weekly horror series on HBO called Tales from the Crypt.
Based on the EC Comics comic book of the same name from the 50s, most of the
individual episodes were based on tales taken from issues of that and other
classic EC Comics of the Atomic Age,
such as The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, Crime SuspenStories, Shock
SuspenStories, and Two-Fisted Tales. The series, which was hosted by a skeletal
version of the Cryptkeeper (the host of the comics who introduced each story),
was hardly the first filmic interpretation of the comics. Of the many
portmanteau horror anthologies Amicus released in the late 60s and early 70s,
two took all their tales directly from EC: Tales from the Crypt (1972 / trailer) and Vault of Horror
(1973 / trailer).
But back to the TV series. Towards the end
of its run, Universal Pictures decided to do a spin-off series of Tales from
the Crypt movies, beginning with this one, Demon Knight. A hit, it resulted in
the greenlighting of two more Tales from the Crypt flicks, but the utter
failure of Bordello of Blood (1996 / trailer) scuttled the
planned trilogy and resulted in the final film, Ritual (2002 / trailer), being more or
less treated like an unwanted stepchild.
Trailer to
Demon Knight:
But back to Tales from the Crypt: Demon
Knight, the third directorial project of the talented Afro American genre
director and (former) cinematographer Ernest R. Dickerson (Bones [2001]),
a man who has, regrettably, remained active primarily on TV for the past couple
of decades — his last feature film, the drama Double Play (2017 / trailer), was his first
in 13 years. (For a fun neo-blaxploitation take on the old PD chestnut Most
Dangerous Game [1932 / trailer],
catch his second feature film, Surviving the Game [1994 / trailer].) Unlike the
tales told on the TV show, the tale told in Demon Knight — and the subsequent
two films of the series — was an original one and not adapted from the comic
books. And among the fun faces on the cast: Dick Miller as Uncle Willy, a
hapless fellow who falls to the temptation of "a dairy farm",
otherwise known as a bevy of topless babes. (His character is, basically, the
driving source of the movie's sudden and temporary excess of gratuitously naked
T&A, all of which gets covered by bikinis when the film gets screened on
TV.)
Dr
Gore, which gives the movie a "4 out of 4 demonic Zanes" rating,
has a plot description of sorts: "The Collector, (Billy Zane of The
Phantom [1996]), wants his key. Brayker (William Sadler of Disturbing
Behavior [1998] and Freaked
[1993]) has it and won't give it back. Sadler escapes to a motel in the middle
of nowhere. The main man Zane follows in hot pursuit. Soon the humans will have
to do battle against Demon Knight Zane and his hordes of undead ghoulies.
Blood, guts and green ooze spurt out in abundance."
While not many websites claim, as does Classic Horror,
that the movie is one of "the 40 or so best horror films of the 90s",
most do tend to give the movie good press. Over at Awful
Horror Movies, for example, they say "This is by far the best movie
that we have reviewed for the site […]. The plot is your basic 'demon trying to
take over the world' story but it still has enough originality to entertain the
audience. The acting was pretty well done with many actors who actually
have real movie resumes (unlike some of the garbage we usually review). Billy
Zane does an incredible job as the main villain. The effects are not up to
today's standards but are still done well for the time period. […] This is not
an awful horror movie."
All Horror,
by the way, which raves that "Demon Knight is dripping with both
personality and slime (from exploded demon heads of course)", also points
out how much Hollywood cannibalizes itself: "I had a lot of fun watching Demon
Knight, which only got on my radar after watching The Nun (2018 / trailer) and hearing that
it ripped it off. James Wan's 2018 Conjuring (2013 / trailer) spin-off ripped
off a Tales from the Crypt movie from '95? Turns out that yes, yes it did. The
mortal protectors, the demonic collectors, the key, the Jesus blood, the demon
teeth, even the big ending scene are the same. The only key differentiators
(pun intended) were the location and the genre. The Nun was a horror from start
to finish while Demon Knight is a blend of comedy, action and gore. Lots of
gore."
Battleship
Pretension explains an aspect of why Demon Knight is so good that is
generally overlooked: "Ernest Dickerson […] may be at his best tasked with
the impossible: generate inspired scares in a purposefully campy endeavor that
begins and ends with an almost literal wink. Dickerson establishes the world of
Demon Knight quickly. Both recognizable within our reality and distinctly
specific to 90s horror, […] there's something to be said for Dickerson's
ability to wrangle a number of drastically different acting styles into a
cohesive whole. In addition to Billy Zane's penchant for broad caricatures and
William Sadler's blue-collar badass character study, Thomas Haden-Church and a
young Jada Pinkett (of Set
It Off [1996]) deliver large performances that could easily swallow up the
earth around them, let alone their co-stars. But somehow, they not just gel but
are capable of generating general empathy. I'm speaking un-ironically when
I say there's a death in Demon Knight that is one of the more
gut-wrenching kills of any 90s horror movie."
The Second Civil War
(1997, dir. Joe
Dante)
An oddly precognizant HBO satire with a
killer cast (large enough for a Robert Altman film) that reveals that what is
laughable on film is often not all that funny in real life — which doesn't mean
that this flick isn't funny as hell. Dick Miller shows up amongst the faces to
play a cameraman named Eddie O'Neill, who you see all of a split second in the
trailer.
Trailer to
The Second Civil War:
The plot: "It's the near future, and
the liberal but unscrupulous governor of Idaho (Beau Bridges) has announced the
closing of the borders to appease the state's right-wing reactionaries'
anti-immigration stance, which winds up coinciding with the scheduled arrival
of hundreds of Pakistani children displaced by India's use of nuclear weapons against
its neighbor (other U.S. states have taken in refugees from other countries;
there's even a Chinatown district in Rhode Island now.) This pits the governor
against the president of the United States (Phil Hartman), quintessentially
obsessed with winning a second term to where he's neither for or against the
governor's plan — it just depends on what the latest poll numbers indicate. A
second-rate New Jersey-based news network welcomes this conflict, though: with
the Gulf War a past memory and their ratings in decline, the director (Dan
Hedaya) fastens upon the governor's scheme to boost the station's Nielsen's
share from single to double digits; and being that he has his ace reporter
already in Boise, a Hispanic woman (Elizabeth Peña) who just happens to be
currently bedding the married governor, he's counting on the inside scoop to
keep him ahead of the competition. […] Initially, the White House doesn't take
the governor's plan seriously, but when the state's National Guard is mobilized
and the governor's inflammatory comments increase, public opinion starts to
sway in the governor's favor. In response, the president deploys soldiers to
the Idaho borders, with America on the brink of the first inner-country
conflict since the Civil War, with the governor taking his cues from his
knowing lieutenant governor and the president from the best media lobbyist
(James Coburn) in the business. [eFilm]"
AsThe
Pink Smoke points out, "Joe Dante's underseen gem […].was funny if
far-fetched back in 1997. These days it just seems pertinent, taking on targets
it's hard to believe weren't based on what's happening in the country right
now. It's telling, for example, that Huffington Post has run articles referring
to the division of Trump supporters and opponents as the 'second Civil War,'
citing his reliance on xenophobic hypernationalism and extremist rallying. Having
Bridges, a former liberal who caters to his state's conservative majority,
exploit the outrage against illegal aliens for political gain — especially
coupled with subplots about a dimwitted president whose cabinet makes all the
decisions for him and a terrorist attack on New York City — makes the
screenplay by Canadian filmmaker and satirist Martyn Burke all the more
prescient. […]"
Film Threat,
however, is less satisfied by the movie: "On a technical level, the
switching of these narratives […] is done expertly by Joe Dante, who seamlessly
flips from hand-held cameras to typical dolly and crane shots. It's an energy
that […] nicely captures in the mania of Dante's America. Yet if The Second
Civil War contains a prime weakness, it's in being swept away by this frantic
pace, its climax wildly shifting characters and settings as matters around the
nation turn to violence. Some films, assisted by skilled editors, can make this
breakneck narrative action work. And sometimes, as in the case of The Fifth
Element (1997 / trailer),
it can even thrive. However, War's sheer volume — of cast, characters and
situations — is too overloaded, too top-heavy to come together. This, despite
many fine acting performances by James Earl Jones, Denis Leary, Ron Perlman,
Joanna Cassidy and James Coburn as a D.C. media lobbyist ('I'm an information
facilitator') plus a spray of other Dante alum (Dick Miller, Robert Picardo,
Kevin McCarthy). But again, it's all excess content piled up around a troubling
climax. A sensory overload amidst a sharp, intelligent satire on media and
politics that, in The Second Civil War, at last proves too ambitious for its
own good."
Over in France, in any event, the Rocky
Horror Critic Show gives the movie four out of five Rocky Horror lips.
Scriptwriter Martyn Burke also wrote and
directed the not so funny black comedy, The Clown Murders (1976 / full movie), and was
also on hand to help write one of our favorite underappreciated comedies, Top
Secret (1984 / trailer below).
Trailer to
Top Secret:
Small Soldiers
(1998, dir. Joe
Dante)
Dick Miller shows up to play Joe in yet
another Dante project which, like so many of his movies, was a moderate success
at best but now enjoys cult popularity. "Pitched to children as a
90-minute toy commercial and to adults as a Gremlins (1984, see Part
VI) redux about a town plagued by murderous li'l bastards — with vivified
plastic army men standing in for Dante's previous party monsters — Small
Soldiers was a film that seemed split against itself from the beginning. [tiff]"
Notable as the last movie to feature
comedian Phil Hartman (24 Sept 1948 – 28 May 1998), as Phil Fimple: he was shot
in his sleep by his wife prior to the film's premiere. Small Soldiers is also
notable as the last movie in which former beefcake Clint Walker (30 May 1927 –
21 May 2018), seen above in his prime, participated: he supplied the voice of
Nick Nitro — the presence of his voice, along with that of the voices of George
Kennedy (18 Feb 1925 – 28 Feb 2016), Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine (24 Jan 1917 –
8 July 2012), is because Dante used the surviving members of the cast of The
Dirty Dozen (1967 / trailer)
to voice the animated Commando Elite soldiers. (BTW: Dick Miller is also found
in The Dirty Dozen – see Part
II for more details.) Richard Jaeckel (10 Oct 1926 – 14 June 1997, of Day
of the Animals [1977]), another actor of The Dirty Dozen and who was set to
voice Link Static, died prior to the shooting and was replaced by Bruce Dern
(of The
Glass House[2001]).
Trailer to
Small Soldiers:
Small Soldiers is, in the end, a semi-remake
of Dante's Gremlins (1984), but instead of furry little critters that spawn
evil gremlins that cause havoc, this movie features sentient toys that cause
havoc. The final product reeks of the hope of raking in the bucks with tie-ins,
though this was perhaps not the original case, if we are to believe what Dante
himself says over at Psychotronic
Cinema: "[…] Small Soldiers is
an example of a movie that the studio could never decide who the audience was.
When we started it was supposed to be an edgy movie for teenagers, and by the
time we were finished with it was supposed to be a pre-teen movie that had
toe-ins with toy companies and hamburger companies. […]"
The plot, as fully detailed at Screen It –
Movie Reviews for Parents: "When toymaker Heartland Play Systems is
acquired by Globotech, a military-based conglomerate, toy designers Larry
Benson (Jay Mohr of Cherry
Falls [2000]) and Irwin Wayfair (David Cross) worry about their job
security. CEO Gil Mars (Denis Leary) isn't crazy about their latest designs —
some military action figures called Commandos and their enemy, the pacifist
Gorgonites — until he orders the designers to make [...] move and talk. With a hurried delivery
schedule, Larry uses a batch of top-secret Globotech military microchips to
power the toys and ships them off to toy stores without testing them. In the
small suburban town of Winslow Corners, Ohio, Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith of Hobo
with a Shotgun [2011]) is the teenage son of Stuart (Kevin Dunn) and Irene
Abernathy (Ann Magnuson, also seen in Tank
Girl [1995]) who runs his father's small corner toy store when his dad
isn't around. Receiving a new shipment of toys, Alan convinces the delivery man
(Dick Miller) to lend him a series of Commando and Gorgonite toys headed for a
larger chain store. Unbeknownst to Alan, the archenemy toys come to life.
Archer (voice of Frank Langella), the leader of the Gorgonites, hides in Alan's
bag and returns home with him where Alan discovers that there's more to him
than just a toy. Meanwhile, Chip Hazard (voice of Tommy Lee Jones) assembles
his muscle-bound toy soldier allies to find and attack the remaining Gorgonites
who've gone into hiding. Returning to his father's store the next morning, Alan
finds the place a mess and the new toys missing. Getting help from Christy
Fimple (Kirsten Dunst of Kaena
[2003]), a friendly girl he has a crush on, Alan cleans up the place, but gets
in trouble with his dad who won't believe his story about the toys being alive.
After Chip Hazard and his commando forces later assemble for an attack on the
Gorgonites and their human sympathizers — which include Christy's parents Phil
(Phil Hartman) and Marion (Wendy Schall) — in the Abernathy 'stronghold,' however,
everyone realizes these are no ordinary toys and that their lives are in
danger."
A few words from B&S
About Movies, who liked the film: "A Joe Dante movie always like a
conflict — a battle between blockbuster and personal statement, led by a
filmmaker with keen commercial instinct, yet the heart of a non-conformist.
Through it all, one walks away with the feeling that while the film itself may
have some rough edges, there's a true love for moviemaking (heck, movies
themselves) at the core. […] Small Soldiers may have NASCAR, fast food and toy
tie-ins, but it feels like a deeply personal film that savors biting the hand
that fed the beast that financed it. It may be many things, all at once, but
above all, it does not commit the most grievous of all movie sins. It is never,
ever boring."
A few words from The Stop
Button, who did not: "[…] Watching it, all I could think about was how
Dante and DreamWorks studio chief Steven Spielberg ignored they had a terrible
script. Of course, Dante still does a good job. […] The casting has some
problems. Kevin Dunn plays Gregory Smith's father […] and he's really bad.
Dunn's usually good, but his character is just too terribly written for him to
work with it. All of the characters are terribly written — except maybe David
Cross and Jay Mohr's characters, who are disposable and funny. Smith is
supposed to be playing a problem teenager — it's never explained why, but
presumably has something to with Dunn's bad parenting. Smith and Kirsten Dunst
are supposed to be fifteen — too young to drive — and they show the real
problem. Small Soldiers is a kid's movie made by people who don't know how to
dumb it down enough. […] It works best as a showcase for outstanding practical
and CG effects. Thinking about the movie just hurts one's head, especially when
they get into the science."
A revised version of Small Soldiers was
recently (but unofficially) in redevelopment hell over at 20th cum 21st Century
Fox, where the new version was to be entitled called Toymageddon. The project
got scrapped, along with innumerable others, when Disney strengthened its
film-making monopoly by acquiring 21st Century Fox.
The Warlord: Battle for the Galaxy
(1998,
dir. Joe Dante)
This TV movie, aka The Osiris Chronicles,
was the third Dante project released in 1998 and perhaps the most obscure; it
was intended as a pilot to a series that never happened, and for a long time
remained almost unavailable. But that was before the advent of YouTube, where
you can now easily find the
whole pilot. (Foreign DVDs — as in, from non-English speaking countries — do
exist, however, and you might pick up the ancient VHS version once released in
GB online somewhere). Dick Miller shows up to play a peddler (seen below), and
even gets mentioned in the credit sequence.
"Warlord was made for CBS in 1997 but
was not picked up and eventually aired as a 'movie' on UPN in 1998 with little
to no fanfare. Why? Because it's fucking BORING. This being a pilot it was a
two-hour exposition dump of backstory, character dynamics and future plot
threads mixed with cheap sets, bizarre costumes and stilted dialog. As a series
all of this could have been fixed but as it stands the 'movie' is just yap yap
yap, space battle, yap yap yap, gun battle, yap yap yap, space battle… with no
arc, no point and even less substance. [Forces
of Geek].
The basic set-up, as found in the book Encyclopedia
of Television Pilots: "In a futuristic era an interstellar war with Rebels
battling the Galactic Republic created a new Dark Age when all progress that
had been accomplished became lost or destroyed. Through the recollections of
one man, Heenoc Xian (John Pyper-Ferguson of Pin [1988 / trailer]), a soldier,
freedom fighter and eventual warlord (ruler of the planet Caliban 5) incidents
in the world are seen. Justin Thorpe (John Corbett) is the petty thief (pilot
of the ship Osiris) who seeks to rebuild the world he once knew with the help
of Heenoc Xian; Nova is his younger sister; Rula Kor (Carolyn McCormick of The
Shells [2015 / trailer]) is the
Arbitrator (a diplomatic mercenary)."
Credit sequence to
The Osiris Chronicles:
"Curiously, [The Osiris Chronicles]
bears enormous resemblances to Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda (2000-05 / trailer) which would
debut in syndication two years later: both involve an attempt to restore
a fallen Republic, with the help of the last surviving top of the line ship of
the once great fleet; in both, an important and highly respected race proves to
have a secret plan of conquest (and for our own good!); and both assemble a
rag-tag crew, made up of people who were once enemies. Considering how
poorly this film performed, it seems unlikely that anyone would have stolen
from it. But you never know. […] And then there’s the rather strange fact
that Caleb Carr, the author of novels like The Alienist, wrote the script. Which doesn't change the fact that it is…unremarkable. […] Perhaps the
one standout element is the Sublime Plenum, the supreme council of the race of
Engineers. It is marvelously grotesque and features some standout effects
work. And it is true that the ships and sets are quite well done, in a
routine sort of way. Oh, well, you completists know you'll have to see it.
It isn't bad. It's just sorta…there. Which, ultimately, is the real
problem. [Rivets
on the Poster]"
E! Mysteries & Scandals – Susan Cabot
(Aired: 7 Aug 2000)
In the entertainment industry, regardless
of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around long enough,
they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking head for
documentaries. In Miller's case, he already started appearing in Making Ofs way
back in 1984 (with The Terminator [see Part
VI], and throughout the 90s made regular talking head appearances on
diverse video and TV documentaries about genre films and filmmakers. Including
this short one on the cult actress and Corman regular, Susan Cabot (9 July 1927
– 10 Dec 1986), a Season 3 episode of the E! channel's wonderfully trashy Mysteries
& Scandals series, which lasted a full 152 episodes and featured names
well-known and forgotten.
Miller, you may remember, worked with Cabot in three
films: War of the Satellites (1958), Sorority Girls (1957) and Carnival Rock
(1957), all of which we looked at inPart
I. Cabot's story is rather a sad one, and somewhat sordid towards the end…
The Full Episode:
Schlock! The Secret History of
American Movies
(2001, writ. & dir. Ray Greene)
"In the entertainment industry,
regardless of level (high-brow vs. low-brow), when a person has been around
long enough, they invariably reach the point where they become a viable talking
head for documentaries."
That is a true for Dick Miller (above from the documentary) as it was for
the producer Harry H. Novak, who, like Miller, appears as a talking head in
this documentary — which is why we took a look at Schlock! The
Secret History of American Movies way back in 2015, in R.I.P.:
Harry H. Novak, Part XV – Other People's Films & Addendum, where we more
or less wrote: "[Dick Miller] appears as a talking head in this
documentary. The description of the film found everywhere online (and now here,
too) is written by Mark Denning, who wrote: 'Pauline Kael once wrote that since
movies were so rarely great art, if one weren't interested in great trash,
there wasn't much reason to pay attention to them, and one could reasonably
argue that few periods brought us more top-quality cinematic trash than the
1950s and '60s. With drive-ins and grindhouses across the United States making
room for low-budget exploitation films of all stripes (such as horror, science
fiction, teen exploitation, biker films, beach pictures, nudies, and much more)
as the major studios were focusing their attention on big-budget blockbusters
and television, this was a boom time for inspired trash, and Schlock! The
Secret History of American Movies takes a look at the low-budget wonders of the
1950s and '60s, as well as the men and women who made them and the social and
psychological subtexts lurking behind many of these movies. Schlock! includes
interviews with Roger Corman, Peter Bogdanovich, David
F. Friedman, Doris Wishman, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Dick Miller, Vampira, and
more.'"
"The busty babe on the poster is of course Pat Barrington, and the image
itself taken from the poster to one of her 'best' movies, The Agony of Love (1965
/ poster above), which we looked at inPart
III of [Harry Novak's] career review." Agony is currently easy to find online —
for example, here
at the porn site XHamster.
Hey! We saw this third-rate horror movie back
in 2015 and even reviewed it here at a
wasted life — hit the linked title to go to our typically verbose and
meandering review. As we said in the first sentence of the review, "The only
reason why watched Route 666 is because many, many years ago, when we were but
a young spud — so long before this flick was even made — we sort of found Lou
Diamond Phillips hunkadelic." That's him directly below in his prime, from
some movie entitled El Cortez (2006 / trailer).
Of Dick Miller, in the review we wrote:
"Route 666 begins pleasantly enough, once you get through the oddly
annoying and overly long credits sequence, in that the great Dick Miller (of The
Terror [1963] and much, much more) appears for all of 5 minutes in the
opening bar scene. He quickly disappears, and the movie goes downhill real
quickly."
Trailer to
Route 666:
(Spoiler!) For another bad movie (with way
more boobs and way more badly made) about an un-dead dad that saves his child
from other undead, check out the Eurotrash disasterpiece Zombie
Lake (1981).
Trailer to
Zombie Lake:
Looney Tunes: Back in Action
(2003,
dir. Joe Dante)
Another Dante movie, though word has it he
had little to do with the final product and that he found the whole production
a nightmare. "Given that Dante's films had so often been compared to
live-action cartoons, the pairing of the director with the original Looney
Tunes should have been a perfect match. Unfortunately, Looney Tunes: Back in
Action — a semi-sequel to the 1996 hit Space Jam (1996 / trailer), which paired
Bugs Bunny with Michael Jordan — was a disappointment for many, not least
Dante. 'There's some nice things in it, but it's kind of a loud, annoying
movie. If I had it to do over I wouldn't do it.'"
The third feature-length
live-action/animation hybrid film to feature Looney Tunes characters — it was
preceded by Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988 / trailer), which
basically featured a guest appearance of any and all important animated
character found in film history, and Space Jam, which was a Looney Tunes
project — Back in Action was also a major box office bomb and basically killed
Warner Bros' feature animation department… which aims, perhaps, to rise from
the dead in 2021, when Malcolm D. Lee's Space Jam II is set for release.
"Gee, it was really nice of Wal-Mart
to give us all this free Wal-Mart stuff just for saying 'Wal-Mart' so many
times."
Bugs Bunny
All that aside, Combustible
Celluloidsays, "Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action […] is a
vintage Dante production, full of his passionate regard for cartoons and
sci-fi/horror pictures, as well as his funny little cameos (no one does cameos
like Dante) and chaotic flourishes. He had one massive hit back in 1984 with Gremlins
and he's been successfully revisiting the same material ever since with cold
reception after cold reception. The biggest mystery is how kids missed out on
the fun." They also point out: " Dante knows he's working with two
comedy legends in Bugs and Daffy (both voiced by Joe Alaskey) and he remembers
to give them a few great one-liners, independent of his overall vision. Like
the original cartoons, youngsters will enjoy themselves, even if they don't get
all the jokes. For all the references and product placements […] Dante plants
tongue firmly in cheek. In this as well as his other films, he uses these gags
to air his mistrust for large organizations, advertising and consumerism, as
well as human beings' warlike tendencies. In other words, he wants us to have a
good time, but he also wants us to think twice before rushing out and buying a
Brendan Fraser doll."
"It's a pain in the butt being
p-p-politically correct."
Porky Pig
"You're telling me."
Speedy Gonzales
Trailer to
Back in Action:
Some Fat
Guy at the Movies has the plot: "Looney Tunes: Back in Action begins
with the standard premise that cartoon characters are real and Bugs and Daffy
are actual stars on the Warner Bros. lot. The new lean and hungry VP of Comedy
Kate Houghton (played by a shocking lean and hungry Jenna Elfman) is leading a
crusade to revamp the Looney Tunes line-up. Her first item of business is to
fire Daffy Duck because he only has appeal to chubby guys in their mid-30s
living in their parents' house. […] Daffy joins forces with ex-security guard
DJ Drake (Brandon Fraser of Passion of Darkly Noon [1995 / trailer] and, as seen below, George of the Jungle [1997 / trailer]) who is also the
son of the fake James Bond rip-off Damian Drake (Timothy Dalton, a casting
choice that is an excellent inside joke to the industry). Together, Daffy and
DJ learn that the Chairman of ACME Corporation (Steve Martin of The
Spanish Prisoner [1997]) is trying to get his hands on a magical diamond
called the 'blue monkey' and they are the only ones who can stop him."
Some guy named Anthony
saw Looney Tunes: Back in Action and thought, "You might remember the live action/animated
film Space Jam, in which basketball star Michael Jordan finds himself in the
cartoon world and helps the Looney Tunes win a basketball game. It wasn't bad,
but what [Back in Action] does is to have an equal mix of live action and
animation. We don't have a human character in an animated world. Instead, our
favorite cartoon characters inhabit our world. Consider what you see in this
movie: Yosemite Sam owning a Las Vegas casino, Marvin the Martian in Area 51,
Granny with Sylvester and Tweety as next-door neighbors, Wile E. Coyote working
for the Acme Corporation, and Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck in a meeting with
executives at Warner Bros. […] The movie has a lot of humorous gags and fun
action scenes along the way, including a car chase in Las Vegas with Yosemite
Sam and his gang and, my favorite one of all, Elmer Fudd chasing Bugs and Daffy
through some famous paintings at the Louvre. There are numerous pop culture
references that will provide something for the adults, including a spoof of the
shower scene from Psycho (1960 / trailer). These jokes
may fly over the kids' heads, but they will still love the movie. The point is
that the movie works well for both kids and adults. There's a reason for anyone
to smile during the film. These animated characters have been around for
decades, yet they still can be entertaining in this modern age."
And while most people seem to like Back in
Action and feel it underrated, let us offer a word to the contrary from Shadows on the Wall:
"The script just isn't smart enough to stay at this level of
inventiveness; it falls back on movie in-jokes that are often unfunny, while
the amusing spoofs are irrelevant because they're not even Warner Bros films!
It's not like Warners doesn't have perhaps the most memorable back catalogs in
Hollywood. So why are they satirising things like Psycho (Universal), James
Bond (MGM), Star Wars (Fox) and Men in Black (Columbia)? […] And Martin is
unspeakably awful, overplaying to extremes that are, frankly, unforgivable. But
I blame Dante, who seems to feel that throwing everything at the screen all the
time will make a lively, energetic movie. But it lacks coherence and soul; it's
just exhausting noise with brief sparks of wit."
Amidst all the anarchy, among other Dante
regulars showing face Dick Miller is there to play a security guard. Two
non-Dante regulars of note are faces found in many a movie Dante probably knows
and loves, Peter Graves (18 Macrh 1926 – 14 March 2010, of Beginning of the End
[1957 / trailer] and
so much more) and the great character actor Marc Lawrence (17 Feb 1910 – 27 Nov
2005 of The Monster and the Girl [1941] and so much more). In both cases, Back
in Action is the last feature film they were to appear in.
Maximum Surge
(2003, "dir." Jason
Bourque)
Aka Game Over, this "movie" was
"written" by Keith Shaw, who's since gone on to writing and producing
a yitload of shitty trash flicks starring has-beens and never-beens, as has
director Jason Bourque. Neither name ever promises quality — and neither does
this "film" either.
"There are movies out there, like Birdemic:
Shock and Terror (2010 / trailer)
or The Room (2003 / trailer),
which are both crazy and wonderful for reasons that we can never fully explain.
They're more like emotions that you can't completely put into words, and that's
how I feel about a movie titled Game Over; a piece of made-for-TV cinema that
stars, at least according to the movie's DVD box art, Yasmine Bleeth and Walter
Koenig (of Nightmare Honeymoon [1974 / trailer]). In reality,
the movie actually stars Dominika Juillet (aka – Dominika Wolski) and Woody
Jeffreys (of Valentine
[2001]) […]. [CGM
Backlot]"
Trailer to
Game Over:
"Back in the 90s, the gaming industry
collectively looked behind its sofa, found a forgotten carton of orange juice
that had been sitting next to the radiator for a few years, and decided to see
how it tasted. In the fermented insanity that followed, developers everywhere
became convinced that the way forward for games wasn't to make them deeper or
more exciting, but to make them into films. Interactive movies, if you will.
The excitement lasted a couple of years. The hangover and regret never quite
faded. Game Over is the obscene tattoo around the nipples of that whole sorry
affair. [PC
Gamer]"
"Canadian film company Insight Film
Studios Ltd. bought old footage from company Digital Pictures used in released
and canceled Sega Saturn/Sega CD video games from the 90s! What you are
actually watching is the original footage from actual games: 1995's Ultimate
Warrior (the Chinese fighting portions), 1994's Corpse
Killer(the Jamaican Zombie scenes), 1997's Quarterback Attack, 1993's Prize
Fighter, and the canceled game Maximum
Surge from 1996! Each of these games has a page on IMDB! […] You can even
watch the game footage on YouTube! [Film Obscurities at Wayback
Machine]" (Dick Miller shows up in the bits taken from
Prize Fighter.)
Plot: "It's fun to watch [Game Over] from
the perspective of a gamer, but it's cinematic value is somewhat lesser than
most straight-to-DVD releases. When a super computer is hooked into a gaming
network, the programmer who designed the game has to enter the virtual reality
world of his fantasies and defeat the computer before it causes worldwide
catastrophe. Um... yeah, OK. I can't say you'll enjoy this as a movie experience, but you may find it
interesting as the footage is readily discernible as film and game segments. [8-bit Central]"
Trapped Ashes
(2006, multiple
directors)
Among the five directors that participated
in this multi-segment flick is Ken Russell, which why we took a look at the
movie way back in 2011 in our R.I.P. Career Review of Ken Russell,
where we wrote:
"Russell's last directorial project
was his segment for this overlooked and forgotten horror anthology film, which
very much follows the structure — as well as the traditional ending — of the
classic Amicus
horror anthology films of yesteryear. Among the six (sic) directors involved
aside from Russell are Sean S. Cunningham, Monte Hellman, [John Gaeta] and Joe
Dante — and among the cast are no less than Dick Miller and John Saxon.
Neither appears in Russell's segment, however, though Russell himself does as
the crazed Dr. Lucy. Entitled The Girl with Golden Breasts, the segment is
properly Russellian: The blonde actress Phoebe (Rachel Veltri) is of the
opinion that babes with bigger boobs get all the parts, so she decides to lift
her career with an augmentation. But she chooses the wrong doctors […] and ends
up with a pair of breasts that give breastfeeding a new meaning. Not a segment
for the more mammary-obsessed among us..."
Trailer to
Trapped Ashes:
"Joe Dante gets the honor to direct
the hardest part of the show (as usual), the wraparound. This time it's the
always excellent Henry Gibson […] playing a guide at a sinister, deserted, film
studio, driving around with the guests in one of those small open mini-buses. When
he tells a story about a mysterious house in the middle of the studio area, the
guests — among them John Saxon — talk him into letting them into the house. Bad
idea. They're soon trapped in the twisted house and sooner or later they end up
telling each other horror stories... […] Trapped Ashes is high on sex, nudity
and some good graphic, gory violence. The special effects are very well done,
especially the physical effects. It's a damn fine production. I'm pretty sure
not everything is for everyone, but I like the mix of styles and how veterans
who've done everything can squeeze out excellent productions with very little
money. […] Anthology movies […] belong in a grand tradition of Grand
Guignol theatre. A new chapter whenever the audience is getting bored, a new
bloody surprise around every corner. Trapped Ashes is one of the better films of
this fine genre I've seen in the last couple of years. It doesn't reach the
originality and high class of old favorites like […] the criminally underrated
and absurdly dark masterpiece From a Whisper to a Scream (1987 / trailer), but watch it
anyway. [Ex-Ninja]"
Dick Miller, as you may surmise, also
appears in Joe Dante's wraparound segment, playing Max the security guard,
someone not overly involved in the tale(s) that transpire.
For years we thought that the
trailer to this movie was simply another funny faux trailer that appeared in
the aftermath of Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007) double feature.
(Follow the linked titles for our opinion of Rodriguez's Planet
Terror [2007] and for our opinion of Hobo
with a Shotgun [2011], the latter of which is based on one of the faux trailers of Grindhouse.)
Little did we suspect…
Trailer to
Trail of the Screaming Forehead:
Trail of the Screaming Forehead, obviously
enough, is a parody of the style of alien invasion movie so popular in the 50s
and early 60s (and still made today, if with far less innocence). Over at All
Movie, Nathan Southern explains the plot: "Aesthetically and
thematically, director Larry Blamire's outrageous camp-fest Trail of the
Screaming Forehead resuscitates and satirizes bottom-of-the-barrel 1950s sci-fi
movies such as X the Unknown (1956 / trailer) and The
Creeping Terror (1964 / trailer).
Blamire's tale revolves around the scientific discovery that foreheads (and not
brains) house human intelligence. In a misguided attempt to prove this axiom,
scientist Dr. Sheila Bexter (Fay Masterson of Sam's Lake [2006 / trailer])
injects a serum called 'Foreheadazine' into the cranium of her colleague, Dr.
Phillip Latham (Andrew Parks) — whose head rapidly balloons to the size of a
watermelon. Meanwhile, a spaceship packed with 'furrowed brows' crash-lands on
Earth, and the brows promptly attach themselves to every human in sight. To
complicate matters, dozens of locals also get wind of the scientists' project
and decide to investigate; before long, the entire seaside community is
swarming with addicts of the Foreheadazine drug, a problem that doubles in size
when two liquor-happy sailors arrive in town with a boatload of frozen human
bodies. Blamire re-creates the visual look of '50s sci-fi films such asThe Blob
(1958) by shooting in shockingly bright rotogravure colors — a photographic
process he dubbed 'Crainioscope.' Stop-motion demigod Ray
Harryhausen — who reportedly inspired this work thanks to such classics as Jason
and the Argonauts (1963 / trailer)
and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958 / trailer) — is listed as
'presenter,' and his influence can be seen via the special effects of the ballooning
heads."
Seriously? The Manhattan Transfer sing the
title song to
Trail of the Screaming Forehead:
"As one of the most consistently funny
and stylistically pure filmmakers working today, [Blamire's] career spans
across different genres, the majority of which are untouched by modern
filmmakers. His best works are arguably his forays into horror — the hilarious Lost
Skeleton of Cadavra (2001 / trailer) being a
personal favourite.* His films seem simple enough but once one looks beneath
the surface it's possible to see just how complex they really are […]. They are
non-ironic but deeply self-aware; they are an affectionate piss-take of films
that are routinely mocked, but a piss-take that is done with a real sense of
what makes those classic movies so wonderful to watch. His films are for those
who enjoy The Thing from Another World (1951 / trailer) rather than The
Third Man (1949 / trailer);
The Cat People (1944 / trailer)
rather than Casablanca (1942 / trailer). With this in
mind, Blamire's [Trail of the Screaming Forehead] is a triumph. It is a
masterpiece of mis-delivered lines, bizarre musical queues and confused
dialogue. It's difficult to express just how this is achieved as Blamire always
seems in complete control of the chaos. It may well be difficult to make a good
movie, but it must be even harder to make a good bad movie. It's standard
Blamire territory but somehow he is able to present audiences with something
new and fresh every single time. […] If alien foreheads don’t strike you as
inherently funny, then perhaps this film is not for you. If that’s the case,
you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. [Rob Bachelor @ Roobla]"
*What grammar.
"One of the most amusing aspects about
Trail of the Screaming Forehead (and Larry Blamire's films) is the dialogue. It
is as though Blamire has taken the colloquial prose from a cheap 40s pulp novel
or 50s SF film and put it through a blender that feeds back on itself. The
nearest comparison one can make is to the dialogue in the films/plays of David
Mamet [see: The
Spanish Prisoner (1997)]. This may seem an odd comparison but Mamet writes
the same cornball adverb and archaic colloquialism-heavy dialogue and gives it
a rhythm that comes as though actors are often intoning specifically written
prose from a bygone era. […] The film is tricked out with requisite cameos from
Dick Miller and Kevin McCarthy (of Piranha
[1978] and so much more), original 1950s stars whose presence was mandatory in
any 80s/90s B movie genre parody, as well as Daniel Roebuck and James Karen (of
The
Butterfly Room [2012] and so much more) who appeared in a good many other B
movies of the 80s/90s. [Science
Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review]"
