Tuesday, August 18, 2020
Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Short Film: X-Ray Film (USA, 1968)
Director Chris
Munger, like so many people in the film industry, mainstream or not, appeared more or less from
nowhere (the little we found we supply further below) and disappeared into nowhere.
This long-gone
Munger should not be confused with the currently active music-minded Chris
Munger, the composer of the music to the D-2-DVD flick Aliens vs. Zombie
(2017 / trailer). Unlike so many "filmmakers", Munger the First at least left behind two intriguing projects: the
Blaxploitation sleaze fest that is Black Starlet, and the Georgia-shot cult creepy-crawly chiller Kiss
of the Tarantula (1976 / trailer), the latter "a Willard
(1971 / trailer) inspired movie with
spiders in place of rats, a female protagonist, and a much lower budget". The
end of his known directorial career seems possibly to have been an episode of Grizzly Adams in 1978, after which one can
only say, "Oh Munger, Munger, wherefore
art thou Munger?"
While we don't know
where the Chris Munger the First went, we were able to find out a little about whence he
came: as per the Los Angeles Free Press, Vol. 6, Issue 244
(3/21/1969), Chris Munger was one of six UCLA student filmmakers — the other
five being John Gufiderson, Bill Haugse, Jim Martin, Kent Smith and future
bad-movie auteur Jim Bryan — who, as a self-help
cooperative called "the Venice Film Group", hosted a program at the
Los Angeles Cinematheque to earn money to
finance their own projects. Considering
the year, it might be feasible that the screening included Munger's
not-but-almost forgotten experimental short X-Ray Movie (filmed 1968, released
1971, according to the Library of Congress Catalog: Motion Pictures and
Filmstrips), which "makes a cynical comment on our romantic naiveties
of our bodies, particularly in terms of lovemaking. [alternative projects]" The music is
from the Dutch composer Hank Badings. "In Chris Munger's X-Ray Film (1970, 4:20 mins, 16mm), the entire arc of life, from
birth to death, is played out with medical footage. [bampfa]"
Chris Munger's 1968 short,
X-Ray Film:
[X-ray film] from
I•HATE•THIS•FILM
on Vimeo.
Speaking of
Munger's fellow UCLA film studies classmate, the bad-film auteur Jim Bryan, Chris
Munger — or, rather, "C. E. Munger" — was an associate producer of Bryan's "low-budget
crime film with a lot of soft sex thrown in", Escape to Passion (1971 / full
film), featuring the Babes of
Yesteryear Kathy Hilton ("Oh Kathy, Kathy, wherefore
art thou Kathy?"), Barbara Mills (23 Feb 1951 – 15 Dec
2010) and Bambi Allen (2 May 1938 – 21 Jan 1973, billed as Holly Woodstar). Three
years earlier, in 1968, Munger was the
cinematographer on Bryan's equally sleazy The
Dirtiest Game — Bryan: "My budget was well under $20,000. [love
it loud]" — which
didn't get released until 1971 (full film)
and is "all near-hardcore
exploitation until the wife goes berserk, leading to a bloody, violent ending
with razor blades and a gun". Bryan's most notorious film is probably the
disasterpiece that is Don't Go in the
Woods (1981 / trailer), but his last
directorial effort was Jungle Trap
[2016 / trailer],
starring the infamously untalented Renee Harmon (see: Frozen Scream [1975]), with whom he
collaborated regularly. Unlike Munger, Bryan managed to carve himself a niche
as a jack-of-all-trades in no-talent independent filmmaking....
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Wednesday, August 5, 2020
The Stepfather (USA, 2009)
What
a poopsicle. In theory, we here at a wasted life
have nothing against remakes, or "reboots" or "re-envsionments" or whatever they are wont to be
called today. Admittedly, however, we also like them to try to go a totally new direction — as
such, though it is a perfectly fine film in its own way, we find The House of Wax (dull
trailer), the 3-D 1953 Vincent Price remake of
1933's Mystery of the Wax Museum (trailer), far more superfluous than, say, Jaume Collet-Serra's version from 2005 (trailer), which is pretty much a completely different movie, even if it
is in the end not much more than a dead-teenager bodycounter populated by
over-aged teens (its overall genericness is primarily redeemed by its setting
and some unsettling wax-related gore scenes). Collet-Serra tried to take the basic wax idea someplace else, at least, and
wasn't frightened of an R-rating.
Unlike, on the otherhand, the loser that made this flick here, Nelson McCormick,
who basically only changes the brand of salt and pepper to no-name this time around but keeps the recipe
pretty much the same, even as he does somersaults to get a PG-13 rating. (Note:
we saw the "unrated" director's cut, and it still felt like the ballsack of
a castrated cat.)
Trailer to
The
Poopsicle (2009):
Joseph Ruben's
original Stepfather (1987) is a
pretty good, well-acted flick with some nice twists, including one that was
probably lifted from The Shining (1980
/ trailer) but that also works really well and adds an intriguing
"sisters are doing for themselves" aspect uncommon to most horror
flicks (especially back in the 80s). Unluckily, the new version jettisons all
that made the first flick good and instead goes full generic and dumb. (And the
substandard acting doesn't exactly help, either.)
The young, doubting-daughter
heroine of the first flick, for example, has been replaced by an oddly dislikable young,
untrusting son hero (Penn
Badgley), and any possible non-intentional feminist
intonations are squashed by the presence of an unneeded girlfriend eye candy, Amber
Heard (of All the Guys Love Mandy Lane
[2006 / trailer]), who spends most of her time looking droolable in a bikini. The
impulsive mom (Sela Ward), already on the edge of believability in the original, is even
less of a believable figure in this flick, a woman who doesn't even bother with
doing the now-universal internet search common to contemporary dating-and-mating habits and etiquette. The deaths are all PG-13, a rating which not only explains
the bikini but also means the movie never really manages to transcend the level
of a contemporary pay-TV filler film. As for Stepdaddy (Dylan Walsh
of that guilty pleasure known as Congo
[1995 / trailer] and Fright Fest [2018
/ trailer]), well, maybe the actor wasn't given all that much to work with,
but he also doesn't exactly have presence. (But he does seem to have ESP, which
is very helpful when you're a murdering psychopath.)
As
for the ending, obviously enough the filmmakers were hoping for a hit and thus
they wanted to leave the movie open for a sequel (indeed, the original spawned
two successively worse films, The
Stepfather II: Make Room for Daddy [1989 / trailer] and The Stepfather III:
Father's Day [1992 / trailer]), but the manner in which they allow the possibility of a sequel
is a groaner — as is most of the movie. But before the final groaner, the
hospital-set expository scene, one is faced with a protracted "climactic"
segment of running around, non-kills and fighting that lacks creativity,
tension, unpredictability, horror or anything that might have made it
interesting. And then there is the rooftop fight, the biggest joke of the
movie: one literally has to start laughing when Stepdaddy reappears in a way
that indicates he can fly like Superduperman.
What
a poopsicle. Do yourself a favor, skip this third-rate piece of uninteresting,
by-the-number pap and go for the original. Sure that one is over 30 years old and
looks and feels a bit dated — as does this one, actually — but unlike the
remake it not only doesn't feel like a lazily made pay-TV movie, but also
displays thespian and directorial talent and comes across as a decent suspense
movie with some unexpected twists that really work.
Trailer to the first version of
The Stepfather (1987):
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