Archive for July, 2009
Chevy Chase proves, once again, that cocaine is a hell of a drug.
Fletch (Chevy Chase) is an undercover reporter, trying to expose drug ring at the beach. One day, Fletch is approached by Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson) who claims to be dying of cancer and wants Fletch to kill him. Fletch, immediately suspicious and sensing an opportunity to put on a great many disguises and make a great many snarky comments, turns his muck-raking eye on Stanwyk and starts to unravel the tangled connections between the drug ring and Stanwyk. [...]
Tags: 1980s, Andrew Bergman, Chevy Chase, Comedy, Fletch, Gregory McDonald, Michael Ritchie, Neo-Noir, Tim Matheson
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I'm not only a writer, I'm also a spokesperson for the NRA.
In 1974, Meir Zarchi and his eight-year-old daughter were driving to a park when they saw a woman crawl naked out of the bushes. The woman had been raped by two men and Zarchi helped her to the police, where they had the misfortune of running into a singularly unhelpful police officer. It was this episode that inspired Zarchi to write and direct Day of the Woman. While the very fact that Zarchi chose to make a B-movie about rape is exploitative, in its first release, Day of the Woman wasn’t marketed as exploitation and didn’t create much controversy, but went mostly unnoticed. However, the film was re-released in 1980 as I Spit on Your Grave and sold on its, not insubstantial, exploitation trappings. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Anthony Nichols, Camille Keaton, Day of the Woman, Drama, Eron Tabor, Exploitation, Gunter Kleemann, I Spit on Your Grave, Meir Zarchi, Rape, Revenge, Richard Pace, Thriller, Vengeance
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This is a story that happened yesterday. But I know it’s tomorrow.
Nikki Grace (Laura Dern) relaxes at home.
Shot on the cheap on digital video, Inland Empire was filmed without a complete script, and Lynch instead mostly made it up as they went along. Amazingly, this somehow works — fragmented, but still with a general, thematic cohesion. It stars Laura Dern as Nikki Grace, an actress who has just gotten the role of her life. The film they’re shooting, On High In Blue Tomorrows, starts bleeding into reality, and the nature of reality and fiction become even more confused when it turns out the On High is a remake of an old Polish play, 47, rumoured to be cursed. [...]
Tags: 2000s, David Lynch, Drama, Hyper-Real, Identity, Inland Empire, Laura Dern, Surreal, Thriller
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Canady girls start training for a life of piracy at an early age.
May Dove Canady (Angela Bettis) had an isolated childhood with only one real friend: Suzy, a doll in glass case. As her mother told her, “If you can’t find a friend, make one.” She works in a veterinary hospital with Polly (Anna Faris), who seems attracted to May but makes fun of her weirdness. Then one day she meets Adam (Jeremy Sisto), a mechanic who claims to “like weird.”
All May really wants is to fit in, to connect to someone, but the more she tries, the more put off people are by her; it’s ironic that she’s most conventionally attractive once she stops pretending to be “normal” and just turns all the crazy dials to eleven (the oddly anachronistic slang is a touch of genius, by the way). [...]
Tags: 2000s, Angela Bettis, Anna Faris, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Jeremy Sisto, LGBT, Lucky McKee, May
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You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Probably the most quotable comedy of all time, and definitely one of the top three funniest. Like all Python films it’s a bit front-heavy — most of the most memorable bits are in the first third of the film — but it holds together surprisingly well for a film that’s basically a series of sketches with only minimal amounts of plot stringing them together. The Pythons at the height of their powers were funnier than just about anything before or after. There’s a kind of effortless whimsy and freedom to the structure of Holy Grail that is very attractive, and that no-one, not even the Pythons themselves, has ever really managed to duplicate. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Comedy, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Monty Python, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones
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Do like my eye shadow? It's modelled on an SAS balaclava.
Lady Vengeance is the third and final instalment in Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy. I haven’t seen the previous parts — Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003) — so I will be reviewing this as if it stood alone.
After a gorgeous credits sequence, featuring Vivaldi’s “Ah ch’infelice sempre” — oh, how I love a good harpsichord —, we are introduced to Lee Geum-ja (Lee Young Ae), who has spent the last thirteen years in prison after being forced to confess to the murder of a young boy. The real murderer, Mr. Baek (Choi Min-sik), kidnapped Geum-ja’s daughter to make her confess, and now she wants revenge. [...]
Tags: 2000s, Choi Min-sik, Drama, Jeong Seo-kyeong, Lee Young Ae, Park Chan-wook, Revenge, Vengeance
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Also known as Cave Dwellers and The Blade Master.
Written and Directed by Joe D’Amato.
If there was a script for this movie, I doubt whether anyone involved had actually seen it; the movie doesn’t seem to know in what time period it’s set, and the actors mostly walk around looking slightly confused and talking really, really, really slowly. If you like bad movies, this is the movie for you. Otherwise, stay way. Far away.
(Add two stars if you’re watching the MST3K version.)
Tags: 1980s, Fantasy, Joe D'Amato, So-Bad-It's-Horrible
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Also known as Ilsa: The Wicked Warden, Ilsa: Absolute Power, Wanda: The Wicked Warden, and half a dozen other titles.
Directed by Jess Franco.
Written by Erwin C. Dietrich, Jesus Franco.
More exploitation sleaze from the master of the genre. Like all the other films in the series, there’s plenty of flesh on display and plenty of disgusting torture scenes. And like all Franco films, you get the feeling that there’s an interesting “normal” film somewhere underneath all the sleaze (Lina Romay’s character in particular is interesting, and could have been better developed), but it never reaches the surface. Recommended for fans of the genre; the uninitiated are better off staying away.
Tags: 1970s, Exploitation, Jess Franco, Lina Romay, Women in Prison
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Downtown stars Jess Franco himself as Al Pereira, a down-trodden, debt-ridden private eye. One day a dame enters his office and, stop me if you’ve heard this one before, offers him a job he can’t refuse. The dame (Lina Romay) claims she’s the wife of a local mobster and wants Pereira to get photos of him (the mobster, not Franco) cheating on her. As you might already have guessed, things don’t go quite as planned, and Pereira gets entangled in the con Lina Romay’s character, Cynthia, has got going with her girlfriend, Lola (Martine Stedil). As you do. [...]
Tags: 1970s, Exploitation, Jess Franco, LGBT, Lina Romay, Martine Stedil, Neo-Noir
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Also known as Girl Slaves of Morgana le Fay (Bruno Gantillo, 1971).
The 70s: drugs, disco, and lesbian horror. Morgane et ses nymphes is one of the better examples of the latter — atmospheric and sensual, if, as is typical for the genre, a bit slow. There’s a lot of skin on display, and lots of, fairly tame, lesbian sex. Like the best lez horror films, Morgane relies more on a dreamlike mise-en-scène than on cheap thrills, and is better for it. The acting is highly variable, but Alfred Baillou plays the dwarf Gurth with great pathos and Dominique Delpierre is commanding as Morgane.
Endings often disappoint me in lez horror, but Morgane gets it right. Definitely watchable.
Tags: 1970s, Alfred Baillou, Bruno Gantillo, Dominique Delpierre, Exploitation, Lesbian Horror, LGBT
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