The Most Dangerous Jaws: William Girdler and Grizzly (1976)

by Tyler Harris, posted in Editorial, Film Review, Film Review, Horror movies

David Sheldon, who had been a producer for Bill Girdler starting on the Louisville-bound Combat Cops, AKA The Zebra Killer, AKA The Get Man, three whole films and two mere years before Grizzly — if that tells you anything about the furious productivity of Girdler and the dollar signs floating within his eye sockets — wrote a script with one-time Girdler alumni Harvey Flaxman, based on a terror-induced encounter with a bear on a camping trip Flaxman had taken with his family years prior. (Jaws also happened to have come out a few weeks before the two actually wrote the script… but I’m sure that had nothing at all to do with it… nothing at all.) Girdler, always looking for the next big money-maker, spotted the screenplay on Sheldon’s desk, read it, and nicely offered to help finance the beat-by-beat Jaws-in-the-woods extravaganza… on one major condition… he gets to direct the movie, of course.

Lee Jones, who had served as assistant director and production manager on Bill’s first local film, Asylum of Satan, and upgraded to producer on his second Kentucky-fried Psycho rehash, Three on a Meathook, helped Girdler find financing within a week’s time — and just as Warner Brothers themselves were about to reach out to Sheldon and Flaxman to make the movie, Bill and Lee quickly swept in with the financial backing of one Edward Montoro, an unstable former airline pilot from Cleveland whose air career had been cut short by a major plane crash, which he survived, and whose life was subsequently shifted and promoted to serve as Georgia’s Film Commission by then-Governor, Jimmy Carter. Montoro, now a sexploitation and b-horror maestro, backed the film independently with $750,000, locked everyone into production contracts, and eventually… took the money and ran, a pattern that arises all too often in the strange tale of Montoro’s film producing career.

Montoro (right), soon to escape into the ether of the unknown, promoting the release of Bill Girdler’s film, Day of the Animals.

Grizzly would become the highest grossing independent film of 1976, beating out even Monty Python and the Holy Grail in box office proceeds, but Montoro had bigger and better ideas. He kept all the profits to himself, leading Girdler and others to file suits against him. Despite being left destitute, living out of Leslie Nielsen’s guest house for a period of time after production, clearly Girdler had nothing against Montoro, seeing as he’d come back as producer on Day of the Animals the following year. But Montoro’s saga in Bill’s life would end there and carry on into bizarre, obscure legend. Grizzly wasn’t the last Jaws rip-off Montoro would make. He was sued by Universal Pictures in 1981 over The Last Shark and, after a string of unsuccessful b-movies in the early 80’s, truly nothing is known about Montoro or his whereabouts after the year 1984 when he mysteriously vanished, never to be seen again, with the millions of dollars he had stolen from the account books of his production company, FVI, which would end up bankrupted less than a year later.

Grizzly as advertised in the Courier Journal, Girdler’s hometown paper. Friday, May 14, 1976.

The film itself that ended up being cobbled together by these lunatic men is indeed a blast. A campfire gorefest that follows the exploits of the most frustrated, cynical department of park rangers you’ll ever meet as they try to halt a murderous bear and wage battle with the state officials who refuse to close the park down. To call it campy would be too puntastic and on-the-nose, but it’s the only valid description. Promotional materials say the bear is 18-feet tall, the characters say the bear is 15-feet, and reality says the bear — Teddy, as he was known on set — was 11-feet, close to hibernation, irate and prone to bursts of anger. Oh, and did I mention the bear was mostly untrained and the cast had to stay far away from him? That’s about right.

Meanwhile, Girdler directs with a certain accelerated type of gravitas when compared to his previous films. This is very much a case of Billy Goes to Hollywood. The gore sequences have a fun, lean, mean-spirited, European flavor to their jarring nature. Girdler gives us the flip-side of the Spielbergian experience. We don’t watch Jaws and cheer on Bruce the Shark. We genuinely care for Brody, his family, his men, and even the townsfolk like the Kintners and Ben Gardner. That’s because Spielberg is the ultimate empathy artist. But Bill Girdler? He’ll make you cheer on the bear. Whether it’s punching its way through the roof of a house, swiping the camera with its furry claws matted in blood, or mauling a poor, innocent child to death in purely horrific fashion — you just can’t help but clap your hands together and howl to the heavens.

There’s an ironic, authentic heartbeat to the madness here, just like in every other cheap Girdler film, but it’s manifest in a different way than Spielberg’s type of heart. You can feel the sterling ingenuity, the love of making films, and a locally-born fervor at every turn. (And keep your eyes peeled, by the way, for Louisville’s own late, great Charlie Kissinger, Girdler veteran and Fright Night “Shock Theater” host, the Fearmonger himself, as the doctor after the initial bear attack.) Girdler’s empathy was always rooted in money — which he definitely didn’t have after the revenue of this sleeper hit was stolen from him — but he was smart and knew that even if you were to rip-off all the bigger-budget films in the world, you wouldn’t make any money unless you won the audience on to your side. Or, in this case, the grizzly’s side…

Grizzly is now available on Blu-Ray from Severin Films, including a behind-the-scenes documentary entitled Movie Making in the Wilderness offering the rare opportunity to see Girdler working on-set. Order it here.

______

Tyler Harris is a film critic, English teacher, and former theater manager from Louisville, Kentucky. His passionate love for cinema keeps him in tune with his writing.

John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

It’s fascinating how human beings crave resolution, airtight narratives, explanation and a clear roadmap of where they’re going at all times, characteristics that that are evident in our creation and consumption of art. Every time a narrative comes along that eerily ducks the expectations of a clean, neatly wrapped and satisfying ending the resulting reaction can be hostile and downright explosive, and some of the reactions to John Lee Hancock’s unconventional cops vs killer thriller The Little Things have been just that. This is a script that was written in the 90’s I’m told, and shelved until it was dusted off for production this year, so naturally we have a measured, paced, atmospheric and story based film that feels not necessarily dated but just a little bit.. “untethered from time’ in a sense, and the effect is mesmerizing. Denzel plays Joe Deacon, a once hotshot homicide detective who lost it all over an obsessive hunt for a serial killer that resulted in divorce, a heart attack and being relegated to county sheriff somewhere far outside LA. When he returns for a simple day trip to evidence swap with colleagues, he swiftly gets pulled into the mystery of another killer operating near the city and teams up with the eager rookie detective (Rami Malek) assigned to the case, much to the concern and unimpressed huff of his former lieutenant (Terry Kinney). Is this the same killer who once drove him to the absolute edge? Is this case related in any way to the tangled web of mysteries from Joe’s past? Who is the impossibly creepy loner (Jared Leto) who taunts them both with very real details from the murders yet always seems to be one step beyond any suspicion or proof of involvement? This is a tantalizing, deliberately opaque jigsaw puzzle with quite a few pieces missing, hidden or otherwise unaccounted for, and the result can be maddening for some, mildly frustrating for others or an outright dealbreaker for those who simply can’t reconcile a story left unfinished. One has to invest laser focused attentiveness and studious detection skills to arrive at the same conclusions alongside our leads and have any idea what just happened, and this is even before the big reveals, or lack thereof. It evokes a genuine sense of mystery and I honestly wish more big Hollywood films had the nerve to pull narrative stunts like this, because it would effectively ween viewers off of the oversimplification, excessive exposition and ravenous need to make sense of everything that permeates North American filmgoing culture. Denzel is terrific here, letting the intensity and introspective obsessiveness his detective no doubt once had simmer on a dim low burn that comes with years of searching for answers to no avail. Malek does his wife eyed nosferatu shtick again, I’ve never been able to really connect with him as an actor but there’s no denying that he has presence, the exact essence and intention of which still eludes me. Leto is undoubtedly spooky as all hell but perhaps falls victim a tad to mannerism and histrionic flexing, yet still does a fine job in a difficult role to pull off. Director Hancock uses some absolutely sensational camera movements to create tension and atmosphere, as we see a lone girl jogging down an unlit side street, an ominous black car slinking in after her and then a slow time-lapse panning shot up over the LA horizon as the sun rises, just purely inspired creativity there. Thomas Newman does excellent music work as always, his score here is a melodic, fretful jangle of electronic rhythms and nocturnal passages that feels like the highway, the sky just before dawn, unanswered questions and decades of dark rumination wrapped up in one transfixing musical chorus. This film won’t be for everyone but I hope it at least imparts the harsh reality that not all stories are neatly wrapped packages of comforting resolution and beat-by-beat bullet points of what you can always expect to find in a serial killer thriller, because how boring would that be, to always and forever be able to predict narrative patterns and never once be surprised, scared or left in the dark? This story isn’t afraid to go to those dark intangible places, and more importantly, isn’t afraid to not return from them. Great film.

-Nate Hill

THE ROBERT ALTMAN FILES: POPEYE (1980)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

As the seventies came to a close and a new day was dawning on Hollywood, filmmakers and studios began to shift their work and business models to better prepare for the type of film they needed to make. Sure, the point of any movie studio at any time in the history of motion pictures had always been to make a profit. But after watching truckloads of cash show up at their doorstep after the release of films such as Jaws and Star Wars, it was no longer enough to just turn a profit. Movies began to come together in board rooms and designed to be less as entertainment vehicles that would make money and more unstoppable machines that would print money. So this is why it made a certain amount of sense for Paramount Pictures and the Walt Disney Company to join forces for a slate of films that would be geared towards the entire family but would be just a smidge more sophisticated than what could be expected from a live-action “Disney movie” which, by the 1980’s, had a certain kind of downmarket reputation and wasn’t exactly raking in the cash.

This partnership produced exactly two movies, Robert Altman’s Popeye in 1980 and Matthew Robbins’s impressive Dragonslayer, released the following year. That it produced anything is a small miracle as Popeye, first on the slate, was an absolutely cursed production from top to bottom and any sane assessment of the film reveals that fact many times over. From on-set fighting to the cocaine bust of producer Robert Evans, the production of Popeye kind of had it all. It wasn’t quite a Heaven’s Gate but it was definitely the last thing director Robert Altman needed at that point in his career. After owning the first half of the 1970’s, Altman’s work was continually met with diminishing returns which culminated in HealtH, his previously completed picture, getting completely buried and unreleased by 20th Century Fox. He needed a hit in the worst way and Popeye was a tee-up for him.

But the fact of the matter was that there was no real certainty Popeye would be a hit. All that was there was a vague notion that the monster Broadway success of Annie meant that there was sure to be a motion picture adaptation and, therefore, something had to be crafted to catch that similar wave of upscale family fare. Paramount owned King Features and, therefore, the universe of the Popeye comic strip so why not hire Harry Nilsson, the genius but inveterate alcoholic pop star on the downslope, to write the tunes and Robert Altman, an independent, bullheaded filmmaker whose last huge hit had been a whole decade earlier, to direct? I mean, it looked good on paper to somebody and I can’t help but think that somebody was Robert Evans whose career, like Altman’s, was also in jeopardy after a string of poor decisions teetered his reputation for rescuing Paramount Pictures in the late sixties from impatient creditors who were ready to engage the studio in a complete fire sale.

Another thing not considered is that by 1980, there was a giant delta that separated audience’s understandings of the Popeye from his origins in the Thimble Theatre comic strip created by Elzie Crisler Segar in 1919. In that iteration, Popeye (introduced in 1929) was but a supporting player in the larger world of Sweethaven, a cockeyed seaport town crawling with strange, yet lovable denizens. After becoming the star of the strip, Max Fleischer’s studios popularized Popeye and the majority of the Thimble Theatre characters in a series of cartoon shorts which usually put Popeye and company in contemporary and urban settings. By the time Paramount’s Famous Studios began producing the cartoons, Popeye and Olive Oyl were fully suburbanized and Popeye would frequently appear in shorts in which he would be battling his nemesis Bluto over trivial things like front lawn maintenance and seats at a baseball game. When Altman and screenwriter Jules Feiffer took the story back to its roots, it looked a lot like a world unfamiliar to many of the people who had become accustomed to Popeye as the confident, spinach-swilling, language-murdering hero who always had Olive Oyl by his side and Bluto at his feet.

But, oh, Lordy Moses, did people bitch when Popeye hit the theaters. Save the Wolf Kroeger production design and the incredible sets constructed in a Maltese cove (that are still standing and function as a tourist attraction, by the way), there was virtually nothing in the film that didn’t prove distasteful to at least one person in some shape or form. It did decent business but, unfortunately, was made at a time when it wasn’t enough to do good business if the business wasn’t good enough. Because of this attitude, Popeye has since been remembered as a magnificent disaster and a flop of a film, neither of which are remotely true. It’s a wild film in Altman’s canon and looking at it from the highest peak of Mt. Objectivity reveals an absolute mess of a final product but it’s also not out of line to rule Popeye a film where the sum of the parts are definitely better than the whole. As if it were built as if it were a number of cartoon shorts strung into one whole movie, Popeye is a movie without much drive but with a whopping ton of energy which can be joyous and fun but, at 114 minutes, feels like a juggernaut that could even wear down the last, most energetic person on the Studio 54 dance floor.

To the uninitiated, Popeye is about the titular character (Robin Williams in his film debut) arriving in the seaside town of Sweethaven in the search for his father, Poopdeck Pappy (Ray Walston). During his hunt, he becomes entangled with and falls for the dizzy Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall in her final bow for Altman), takes charge of abandoned infant, Swee’ Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt, Altman’s impossibly cute ham of a grandson), and runs afoul of Bluto (Paul Smith), the burly and hirsute heavy who begins the film as Olive’s betrothed.

Thematically, this is McCabe & Mrs. Miller territory (replete with a direct blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visual nod in the floating casino sequence as a zonked-out prostitute examines a ceramic pot as she reclines in her bunk); ultimately a story about how an iconoclast can enter a town and rearrange the structure. The problem with Popeye is that the story never allows the viewer to understand how anything in the town works in the first place. Some of it feels like a parody of shallow American nationalism but the town of Sweethaven is such a sketch, the details the audience has a right to know are either not there or buried. Taxes are being constantly collected but for what purpose and they’re routed where, exactly? The town has a Mayor but the Commodore holds more stroke why? The Commodore is a recluse that nobody has seen for what reason? Is this an isolated island burg in a post-Quintet future that’s surrounded by the melted ice and where the people are only just learning how to be a functioning society again? Because they sure act like it.

But, putting narrative and story aside (which we shouldn’t do but will anyway) is there another movie outside of Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy that looks like it was Silly Putty’d right off a newspaper than Popeye? As a retrospective criticism, the film’s bloated budget would be a legitimate concern if every single dollar wasn’t up on the screen and everything didn’t look absolutely gorgeous. The beautiful widescreen compositions by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno capture the sideways-pitched structures against an immensely beautiful green sea where foregrounded primary colors absolutely pop off the screen. The costumes by Scott Bushnell, longtime Altman producer, are magnificently elaborate and detailed and everyone in the cast looks 100% perfect.

Altman’s on-screen choreography with his performers, always a staple in making his movies breathe, might just be at its highest level here as the frame is constantly swishing back and forth, always revealing some new information in the background. In fact, so busy is its canvass that, after forty years of watching the film, I have just recently spotted the caveman that randomly pops up in the far back of the background throughout the movie. Where most Altman films demand a second viewing due to the multi-tracked, overlapping dialogue, Popeye joins ranks with works such as Brewster McCloud and HealtH as needing multiple views due to everything that’s going on everywhere but the center of the screen. Just one instance of this is Robert Fortier’s Bill Barnacle. Sloshing around as the town drunk (ya know, the same character he played in McCabe & Mrs. Miller for those of you keeping score), it’s worth missing everything else that’s happening on the screen each time he appears as his physical performance is likely funnier and more interesting than what’s happening front and center.

And despite his giving up on the project to return to Flash Harry, his penultimate album before his untimely death in 1997, the Harry Nilsson tunes (and their wonderful Van Dyke Parks orchestrations) still soar. “Sweethaven,” “I Yam What I Yam,” “I’m Mean,” “Kids,” and, especially, “He Needs Me” all have a loopy charm and sly humor while “He’s Large,” a song dedicated to Bluto’s… ahem… girth, sung by Shelley Duvall and backed up by the Steinettes, the Greenwich Village doo-wop outfit who served as the Greek chorus in HealtH, is absolutely inappropriate for a family film but, on second thought, perhaps this film deserved such a shot of raunch if to only diffuse the treacle in “Sailin’” and “Swee’ Pea’s Lullabye,” two slabs of straight sentimentality that feel a bit out of place in a bizarre place such as this.

1980 wasn’t terribly kind to Popeye and time has done little to repair its image. Folks that loved it then, love it now. Folks that hated it then are always quick to point out they’ve never revisited it. Contemporary audiences don’t know quite what to make of it. Robert Altman didn’t end up in director’s jail but he would be cast out onto the stormy seas of the 1980’s with almost zero studio support, fully requested by the powers that be that he learn to fend for himself. In the end, Popeye turned out to become a fondly-remembered cocaine film for children and, regardless of the film’s box office returns, we probably needed more of them as the dawn of Reagan loomed large.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

The Punisher (1989)

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

There was a long period of time where I didn’t even know there was a Punisher flick from the late 80’s starring Dolph Lundgren, and I blissfully lived under the assumption that the character never entered cinema until 2004 when Thomas Jane tried it on for size, and although that’s still my favourite take on Frank Castle to date, in terms of both performance and film overall, the Dolph one is a pretty badass slice of retro action pulp that I greatly enjoyed. It’s not an origin story and doesn’t have much use for exposition, time spent on tragic backstory (beyond a few haunting flashbacks) or dark rumination, it’s strictly a blast of violence, chases and genre thrills built around the visual aesthetic of the Punisher. He’s already been doing this for quite a while here, and Lundgren, strikingly brunette here, imbues Frank Castle with a sort of tired and unimpressed yet still viciously violent edge as he teams up with an equally sardonic cop (Louis Gossett Jr) to take on pretty much every criminal faction in the city including a tribe of psychotic matriarchal Yakuzas and one pissed off drug Baron (Jeroen Krabbe) who initially hired Frank to find his kidnapped son and then inevitably can’t be trusted not to be a backstabbing lunatic. There’s an absolute ton of exciting, well staged action set pieces here including an extended bus chase all over the city, endless thundering shootouts and Frank roaring around on a huge black motorbike that he uses to descend into the subterranean tunnels below the city in a decidedly Batman-esque flair. This version is stripped of much of the mythology behind The Punisher and is more just a straightforward, bloody, pulpy action extravaganza, and had the film not been called Punisher and Dolph not been credited as Frank Castle it would just be another day at the Lundgren races. However, they chose to make it a Punisher film and it’s better for that, Dolph fits the role like a glove, and although my only complaint is that he didn’t get to wear that classic skull logo on his chest that we know so well, he inhabits the gritty, browbeaten, heavy artillery sporting viciousness of Frank very well, whether he’s beating hordes of goons mercilessly or literally mowing down more of them with a fucking Gatling gun he found somewhere. It’s brutal, urban, feels just ‘comic book’ enough to fit the aesthetic and has a ballsy, very dark final stroke to the script in the last act that is a borderline taboo shocker but let’s you know this Punisher isn’t fucking around. Good stuff.

-Nate Hill

Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl is one of the bleakest, most depressing and soul dampening films I’ve seen recently, so much so that it seems to take a bit of you with it after the experience. It’s also quite an important film though, serving to illuminate and highlight the downward trajectories that human lives take after being abused and mistreated as children, and the ripple effect these lives have on others as the years pass on. It’s an ensemble film full of amazing talent that falls into the groove of vignette, and while each episodic chapter isn’t quite as immediate or powerful as others, the ones the work are something profound. In the opening segment a socially stunted woman (Toni Collette) finds the decomposing corpse of a teenage girl in the desert, and struggles to deal with her horribly abusive, bedridden gasbag of a mother (Piper Laurie in curdled Carrie mode), while going on a hopelessly awkward date with a weird grocery store clerk (Giovanni Ribisi). This chapter didn’t really resonate with me whatsoever beyond her finding the dead girl (the connective tissue between all of the episodes) so that’s all I’ll say about it. The second sees college med student Rose Byrne and her parents (Mary Steenburgen and Bruce Davison) dealing with the aftereffects of her sister going missing years before and the new knowledge that the dead girl in the desert could possibly be her. The next segment, starring Nick Searcy and an infuriating Mary Beth Hurt, is one best left not talked about because it’s spoiler territory, it’s well done but maddening. The last two are where the film really shines and finds its broken beating heart, as the mother (Marcia Gay Harden, brilliant) of the dead girl visits the ramshackle motel she was living in with another prostitute (Kerry Washington) who knew her well. Both actresses give a master class in pain, anguish and the brittle regret of lives gone wrong and paths taken from which there is no return, they’re two characters from very different walks of life who find solace as they mourn the daughter, sister and companion they once had. Kerry Washington in particular is so heartbreaking, so absolutely present in her flawlessly pitched performance of outwardly guarded toughness barely hiding the wounded, abandoned soul frying out for help beneath and her work here knocked me just flat. Finally in the last sequence we meet the dead girl in question, played hauntingly and painfully by the late Brittany Murphy in one of her blessedly candid, frenzied performances that shirks mannerisms for uncanny realism and emotion that comes across not as orchestrated by an actress onscreen but organically bubbles and wells up from a living, breathing human being, she was that good. Others make fleeting appearances to round out the ensemble including James Franco, Chris Allen Nelson and a degenerate, crack piping Josh Brolin. The film doesn’t let anyone off the hook, doesn’t hand out happy endings to the ensemble like goody bags and hasn’t a care in the world for conventional catharsis, neatly resolved narratives or crowd pleasing, it’s a film whose outcomes and arcs will leave you cold, hurt, confused, angry and completely disillusioned in humanity overall. So why watch it? Well, aside from being a beautifully acted, directed, scored and edited film it’s important as a mosaic narrative, especially in the final two chapters, because we see how the actions, abuse and effects of one life can scintillate out into others, and how this dead girl, an abuse and trauma victim from a broken home, despite being in a life situation some may regard as utterly hopeless she is still desperately clinging onto one glimmer of light in her life, a plot thread I won’t spoil but one that she so fervently keeps in her mind and thoughts that even after a life of tragedy ends in unconscionable untimely death, her intentions, pure heart and undimmed desire to be there for someone ripple out after she has passed away and affect those she left behind, in the film’s only life affirming aspect. I think that’s incredibly important to observe, and while the film’s first three chapters are important parts of this tapestry, it’s the final two that radiate forth as the most integral, and the showcase acting work from Murphy and Washington that is so good and so essential I felt like life was unfolding for real. Brilliant film.

-Nate Hill

Damian McCarthy’s Caveat

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Trust Ireland to give us what for me now stands as the scariest film I’ve seen since Ari Aster’s Hereditary. I realize that is the boldest of claims and before anyone chimes in with the obligatory “welL HEridiTARy didntT scAre me And wasNT evEn thAT GOoD”, just keep in mind there are many of us who were scared piss-less by it and keep your edginess to yourself. Damian McCarthy’s Caveat is a brand new addition from Shudder, an Irish mood piece with some unique ideas, atmosphere so thick you could choke on it and some of the most skin crawling, sleep with the lights on moments of sheer terror I’ve seen in many a moon. I didn’t say it was a perfect film and the plot, such as it is, is kind of a murky one in areas but best I could surmise it is: a shady English dude (Ben Caplan) hires an also somewhat shady Irish dude (Jonathan French) with amnesia to babysit his adult niece on an isolated island cabin. The girl has some form of schizophrenia of schizo-affective disorder and is out of it most of the time, but one of the conditions of this well paid for agreement is that Irish dude must wear a leather harness attached to a chain that prevents him from entering certain areas of the house, to make the disturbed girl feel safer… I guess? It’s a premise with so many loaded questions attached that you just kind of have to surrender to the atmosphere and experience, and it’s here that the film not only shines but unearths something almost profoundly spooky. There are ghosts in the film, and they are so scary you’ll wish I’d never recommended this to you. You know that special feeling after you’ve watched a film that genuinely, tangibly provoked real fear in you and you have immediate, dread soaked regret that you ever watched it? Yeah I got that from this one, which is rare for me these days and it may not hit for everyone like that but for me it was effective in that elemental, hair raising way. There is an actual plot to the film and although I wasn’t entirely clear on all the ins, outs and beats it did feel like it was trying to impart a discernible narrative while still being a decidedly arthouse mood-board experience. There’s also a creepy little toy rabbit, as you can see by the poster, and he serves as both a mascot of sorts and also a proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’ device, as he seems to beat his little drums with relative sentience whenever it feels like malevolent forces are near. The eerie score, suffocating abandoned house atmosphere and deliberately spatial camera movements all place you right in the front seat of terror and apprehension as you wander the mildewed halls and decrepit rooms of this broken down house and encounter things you really could have done without seeing at 2am when you’re alone in your own house and the cat is making noise somewhere. It’s a staggeringly well made film for a first time director and I can’t wait to see what he does next. Terrifying, immersive, hypnotically unsettling, a fully realized horror experience that will fuel the darkest of nightmares. Streaming now on Shudder.

-Nate Hill

Highlander III: The Sorcerer

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

After the absolute trip to WTF-ville that was Highlander 2 I kind of felt the franchise had scraped rock bottom and I didn’t think anything could ever be as bad as that. I’m happy to report that Highlander 3: The Sorcerer is not only an improvement (obviously) but an incredible sequel that captures the magic of what made the first such a special film for me and, in my eyes, is on par with it. I know the second film has this big huge production history and that’s why it’s so weird, bad and off topic from the mythology, but for this one they have stripped away all that bullshit and distilled the story back down into what made the first Highlander so great. Christopher Lambert’s immortal Connor McLeod tells us of a new chapter in his ongoing life, wherein a Japanese mystic (Mako) trains him further in the ways of battle so that he can fight another remaining member of his race of beings, the evil Hun-like Kane (Mario Van Peebles). Their battle begins in 500ad or so and rages across time until Connor finds himself in 1990’s New Jersey where Kane follows him. Connor falls for a beautiful archeologist (the lovely Deborah Kara Unger) who is the reincarnation of a girl he knew during the French Revolution and circles a final battle with Kane which, naturally, is staged inside one of those classic ‘smoke and flame’ sheet metal factories that are utilized for showdowns in everything from T2 to Batman 89 and Roger Ebert loved to make fun of so much but try and tell me that in New Jersey there isn’t a large chance that a final fight would realistically end up in one of those buildings, I mean the place is only made of them. Mario Van Peebles is great as Kane, ditching his usual persona for a growling, leering, barbarian type of performance that pays dues to Clancy Brown’s Kurgan without outright aping him. He’s got magic illusion powers, snazzy tattoos, great taste in metal music and is so culturally hopeless in the 90’s that when a hooker gives him a condom he puts it in his mouth in puzzlement, immediately spits it out in distaste and just proceeds to raw-dog her. I’ve talked this film up and you gotta realize that it’s a ramshackle threequel to a cheesy 80’s cult classic that does its best to clean up after a totally irresponsible, ridiculously off the wall sequel and while I was sometimes utterly confused about the timelines or how this chronologically connects to the first, I though it did a pretty damn good job of salvaging tone, style and aesthetics and steering this canon in a serviceable direction. Lambert and Unger are adorable together and have not only a smouldering sex scene that might be among the hottest the 90’s has to offer but actual romantic chemistry to back it up. There is the obligatory helicopter shot of Lambert running and training amidst the gorgeous Scottish scenery that somehow manages to be silly as hell and deeply rousing in the same stroke, here set to a gorgeous Celtic song called Bonny Portmore by Loreena McKennitt. The finale battle between Connor and Kane is like a thunderous fireworks show of lovingly creaky 90’s FX and music that reaches a biblical crescendo and serves to reinforce that even when a franchise has seemingly reached its doldrums, a crowd pleaser like this can come along and shake out the cobwebs. If you go into it cynical over the fact that it’s a Highlander sequel and keep your nose upturned on principle, well you’re only robbing yourself of a fun time, because to me this had everything I wanted from one of these flicks and was a hell of a lot of fun, capped off by a genuinely sweet ending that gives you the option to stop here and have this as the final note of Connor’s story, or continue on in the series for more adventures.

-Nate Hill

THE MICHAEL MANN FILES: MANHUNTER (1986)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Once waist-deep in the world of Miami Vice, executive producer Michael Mann became obsessed with the dichotomy between both the law and lawlessness and good and evil. In that series, these themes were explored through the lens of the undercover cop who has to blend both the personal and professional into one, often creating moral quandaries and existential crises of the soul. In Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, Mann found perhaps the starkest example of these themes as it blended the law enforcement official with a serial killer. Moving beyond dope peddlers and cat burglars, this was a story that would really put the protagonist through the paces.

Due to the financial drubbing felt by producer Dino De Laurentiis’s Year of the Dragon, released in 1985, Red Dragon was retitled Manhunter to avoid the same fate. It didn’t much work as Manhunter, a title that almost nobody on the planet liked, barely made a blip at the box office, grossing less than nine million dollars and having to settle on slowly finding a cult audience on HBO and home video. By the time Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs was released to almost universal acclaim in 1991, Manhunter and its pioneering cinematic representation of serial killer Hannibal Lecter (spelled Lecktor in Mann’s film) had been mostly forgotten, leaving cinephiles who dared to articulate a preference for Mann’s highly stylized thriller over Demme’s film castigated and hectored as snobbish contrarians. But legion was and is the gang of folks who find Manhunter’s moody, yet cool and uncluttered visual palate and detail-oriented procedural a more sensory intoxicating cocktail than Demme’s admittedly brilliant hair-raiser.

In terms of a broad plot outline, the differences between Manhunter and Lambs are negligible; FBI Agent Jack Crawford recruits a brilliant investigator to track down a serial killer which causes the investigator to enlist the help of incarcerated serial killer Hannibal Lecter to assist in stopping him before he kills again! The major difference between Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs is in its protagonist. I can’t imagine greenhorn cadet Clarice Starling being as compelling a figure in the world of Michael Mann as haunted FBI profiler Will Graham (William Petersen), the man who earned a Pyrrhic victory by capturing brilliant serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox) but only after absorbing a punishing amount of psychological damage in the process. With this character, Mann gets to have it both ways as Graham continually walks a fine line not just between cop and criminal but literally between saint and monster. As is the case with Clarice Starling’s monologue about the doomed livestock in Lambs, Manhunter underlines Graham’s humanity with a turtle hatchery he’s constructing at the beginning of the film with his son, Kevin (David Seaman). Will Graham is doing his best to save what he can from the awful, predatory forces of nature. Meanwhile, Jack Crawford (a terrific Dennis Farina) and Molly Graham (an even more terrific Kim Greist) sit on the balcony of the Graham’s beachfront home where she grouses to him about the dangers of bringing the retired and broken Graham into the investigation, all the while being framed against one of Mann’s painterly vistas that drive home the perpetual theme of emotional distance that affects almost all of his characters like a virus. Unlike Lambs, however, the investigative prowess of the protagonist is, in fact, part of his actual deviancy as telegraphed early in the film as Graham’s investigation of a crime scene utilizes the same point of view footage from the pre-credit sequence which chronicles the home invasion by the horrifying Francis Dollarhyde (dubbed “The Tooth Fairy”; Tom Noonan, giving the performance of his career) as he prepares to slaughter the family inside.

As the embodiment of the mythic Mann hero who is conflicted the second he breathes air outside the womb, William Petersen gives a performance that has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first of its kind. Coming off of a highly energetic turn in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. the previous year, Petersen commits to a performance where he makes a series of choices that have been criticized over the years as being flat or unconvincing. It’s a performance that is not exactly either one of those things but it is unconventional and has to be viewed from a very specific angle to be fully admired. Sometimes his emotive bursts are a few degrees too hot for the scenes in which they occur but there are a number of very tricky and difficult things Petersen successfully pulls off that are more important to the character as a whole than a couple of awkward line readings. There is a severe fragility eating at the center of Petersen’s Graham that occurs in scenes with his family where he chillingly employs a mid-distance stare and a lukewarm delivery that never seems like it’s coming from a real person. But, holy god, watch him in an early scene in the hotel room where he dutifully checks in with his sleeping wife on the phone only to have his eyes light up like a Christmas tree when he hangs up and moves over to the portable TV and VCR unit where he can indulge himself in watching the victims’ home movies in order to recapture the mindset of a murderer. Looking like a seventeen year old who is now watching his parents’ porn after assessing that the coast is clear, Will Graham fits in with the many Mann protagonists who treat their lovers and significant others as mothers from whom they need permission to go outside and play and only come alive when totally plugged into their work.

Unlike any other of Mann’s works, sex is treated less as a pleasurable action between two adults but as a brief respite from ongoing pain in the lives of its principal characters. Graham’s character spends his last night with wife at their home making love with her but he’s already on another track that will lead to rack and ruin; something she knows, recognizes, but is also cognizant to the fact that she is powerless to stop it. Dollarhyde, by comparison, eventually makes a genuine physical connection with a blind co-worker (a fabulous Joan Allen) but instead of bringing him any peace, their night together only brings more pathology. And in further tying the two together, the film’s structure is very purposeful as, right around the film’s halfway mark, Manhunter becomes less about Graham and more about Dollarhyde. This specific kind of duality is further driven home by visually framing Lecktor and Graham in such a way that both characters are functionally looking at themselves in a mirror, predating Detective Vincent Hannah’s coffee date with Neil McCauley in Heat by a number of years.

Manhunter was also Mann’s one theatrical film that looks MOST like a traditional Mann production of the time. Thief might be the masterpiece that subtly influenced short-subject filmmaking but Manhunter was the most modernist Mann film. Dante Spinotti’s cinematography is bold and the compositions strong with the exact same kind of anti-earth tone mission that was employed in the first couple seasons of Miami Vice. Additionally, thanks to the production design by Mel Bourne and art direction by Jack Blackman, almost nobody lives in a house that looks like it was built by a sane architect nor decorated by a legitimately bonded interior designer. Mixing the post-modern structures of Miami Vice and the geometrical furnishings and tchotchke from Crime Story, Mann creates a world that is both of its time and retrograde; where glass block is as prevalent as brick and almost every FBI office is spotless and looks like its been cleaned by someone on a coke binge.

Though current home video releases of Thief have been graced with an additional scene not seen in its theatrical release, Manhunter was Mann’s first film to go back to the editing room on multiple occasions and there are no less than three different cuts of it floating around out there and one might say that Mann has used home video as an excuse to tinker with 90% of his work. While Mann gets it right the first time on the majority of his films, a case could be made for the director’s cut of Manhunter (available on Scream Factory’s Blu ray which also includes the theatrical cut). While we lose the elevator shot in Graham’s hotel which feels like taking a knife to my mother’s throat, and the running of the opening credits over the initial Crawford/Graham conversation makes it feel like you’re about to watch a television movie, the director’s cut leans more heavily on the concern for Graham’s mental well-being and also makes the focus on the family much starker. If one thinks of the film’s happy ending as a detriment (as I do), it’s a crying shame that Mann didn’t shoot something a little more dour and closer to his heart as an alternate, even if the odds of getting it past the producers was likely going to be a no-go. For the penultimate scene in the director’s cut would work even more beautifully if, instead of an awkward reunification of the Graham family as is the case no matter what cut you go with, Will was left with nothing but his memories and an empty beach. Graham’s unnecessary and creepy presence at the home of what would have been Dollarhyde’s next victims would hint at a happy ending but, really, Graham could have only really gotten to know their identities if he were as disturbed and calculating as Francis Dollarhyde, casting the film’s finale as something that more closely resembled William Friedkin’s Cruising.

But even if it wasn’t a capitulation to the studio, Mann’s disallowance of Graham to be alone on the beach at the end, especially with the terrible Red 7 “Heartbeat” song draped over it, feels like a false note. In the true universe of Michael Mann, Graham would wander in the white sands amid a bunch of turtles he’d saved but only at the expense of losing everything and everyone else in his life, including himself. And, like Graham, Mann had found a way to get the darkest examination of his obsessions onto the big screen but with no small amount of budgetary difficulty and with little to show for it in return.

With Manhunter behind him, Mann would slink back into the world of television where he would hone and woodshop new visual and thematic ideas in episodes of Crime Story and, portentously, 1989’s made-for-TV L.A. Takedown. Despite his enormous contribution to popular culture, the first phase of Mann’s career was ending on an inauspicious note; a big filmmaker retreating back into a small medium where he was likely to get trapped for the remainder of his career. But the 1990’s were on the horizon and a sea change was forming. Michael Mann was about to get his day.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain

Steven Kostanski’s Psycho Goreman

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Psycho Goreman is a hell of a title for a film and anyone one that dares use must ensure their art lives up to it, and this one sure as hell does. It’s one of those deft, near miraculous efforts that dances an impossible yet flawless ballet between genres of horror, SciFi and comedy and almost fuses them all together for something entirely new. The titular Psycho Goreman is a hulking alien warlord with a penchant for violence, torture and all sorts of melodramatic menace, who arrives on earth only to be outwitted by a incredibly feisty ten year old girl (Nita Josee-Hanna) who snags the magic gemstone that controls him and now calls the shots. There is an entire galactic Narmada of silly funny weird creatures who are trying to track and destroy him though and they eventually follow him to earth for all out warfare. The terrific thing about this film is how deftly it balanced extremely graphic, hard-R gore with a genuine childlike sensibility and the kind of dark, deadpan humour that is so funny and so pointed that I just can’t even describe it in a review, you have to see the thing to get it. It’s sweet yet still has a jaggedly nihilistic tonal edge, hilarious yet feels truly gnarly and almost… ‘Troma’ in its levels of schlock and splatter and just the perfect mix of everything fun. Director Steven Kostanski also made the brilliant 2017 cosmic horror The Void, which is in my top ever made in the genre and I always wondered what he’d follow it up with. A true winner that blazes new trails and shows his devotion, invocation and passion for practical effects based horror. The costumes, makeup and gore effects are pure bliss here, with every extraterrestrial creature owning their own distinct, hilarious and lovingly campy anatomical design, the gore is unapologetically ruthless, bathed in buckets of blood n’ body parts and the the script laced with indescribably hysterical wit, comedic inspiration and overall horror nirvana. Wonderful film.

-Nate Hill

THE RUSS MEYER FILES: EVE AND THE HANDYMAN (1960)

by Patrick Crain, posted in Film Review

Russ Meyer had to take incremental steps to get to become the storied and respected filmmaker that he eventually did. His first step was being a gifted photographer who was as adept at his skill as mortars and debris rained down around him in the heat of battle as he was while studying the contours of his models’ bodies as they were lying at the base of an oak tree while bathed in dappled sunlight. His second step was punching through the wall of morality and releasing The Immoral Mr. Teas, his groundbreaking film that introduced actual nudity in a motion picture to those who would pay for the privilege to see it.

I would bet that Meyer’s most important step in the evolution of his success was hooking up with and marrying the former Eve Turner in 1952. No doubt that Meyer had talent to burn and that his personality caused him to be a little shrewd but Eve took his game to a whole other level. At once both his business partner and muse, Eve Meyer pumped life into his output in which she was the subject by being both impossibly built and having a uniquely strong relationship with the camera. In terms of what they did for each other and each other’s work, you’d probably have to look to Jess Franco and Lina Romay for something comparable.

So it’s something of a shame that, as far as his motion pictures went, Eve Meyer was only ever in front of the camera in Eve and the Handyman, Russ’s follow-up to the previous year’s Teas. But her presence in it is both sly and smart; Eve Meyer is the primary woman on display in this film and it ends up being ten times as effective as Teas without having to resort to any nudity on her behalf.

Like Teas before it, Eve and the Handyman is little more than a sketch-pad for Meyer’s visual ideas and micro-budgeted creativity. A jack-of-all-trades handyman (Anthony-James Ryan) is stalked by a mysterious, trench-coated blonde whose constant, double entendre-stacked voice-over narration positions the film as a bawdy, Dragnet-style procedural in which every move of the handyman is noted and remarked upon by his voyeuristic pursuer. Gone is the gimmick in which naked girls pop up to awkwardly pose in the daydreams and hallucinations of our protagonist only to be replaced by our bumbling hero staying 100% focused on his day-to-day tasks, never to be distracted by the many buxom women he encounters along the way (mostly all played by Eve Meyer in various get-ups).

Where Teas reflected women contented to be placed like statues and given little to do, Eve wants women to be the driver of the engine. Teas wants to be a moving centerfold and Eve wants to be the whole damn magazine. The jokes are livelier, the mood is more jovial, and, more importantly, Eve Meyer flips the script by giving the audience an instance in which the woman is on top and the man is the dope. Sexually oblivious, Bill Ryan’s Handyman gets saddled with Eve Meyer almost exclusively because her mission is to, ostensibly, wise him up. So she becomes every woman in his path while remaining the detective that wants to sell him toilet supplies in the end.

Eve Meyer’s presence in this film couldn’t help but inform Meyer as to what exactly he wanted in the future. For Eve Meyer is the first “Russ Meyer Woman.” Eve Meyer showed Russ Meyer how to present a woman who looked like she wanted to be wanted. More importantly, she wanted the audience to know she knew they knew that she wanted to be wanted. Untangle all that and you’re are the heart of what makes Russ Meyer’s films stand so far apart from other films of their ilk that the massive delta between them renders it unfair to mention them in the same breath. Show me a Russ Meyer film that’s blessed with a narrative structure and I’lll show you a heroine that sprung forth from Eve Meyer’s roots which are so firmly planted in this film.

Once past the nudie cuties, the cinema of Russ Meyer is as equally hilarious and exhilarating as it is titillating. And even if the nudie cuties are tame pieces of antiquity, they aren’t bereft of a good laugh or two. The jokes in Eve take a while to unfold and your mileage with them may vary; they might or might not be worth it, depending on your perspective. But this film is the first to have this specific blend of broad, sight-gag humor and sex which was mostly missing from Teas, a film that feels like it can barely breathe lest it get caught doing what it wants to be doing. Additionally, in employing a panoply of visual ideas representative of intercourse and orgasm (the constant churning of oil wells, the coupling of trains, etc.), Meyer gives the thrust of the train into the tunnel at the end of Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, itself released a scant one year earlier, nowhere to hide.

As stated before (and likely will be stated at least one more time in this series), there’s just not a lot of there there in the subgenre of the nudie cuties. They are what they are and the trick is to try and enjoy them with a sense of historical context because there just aren’t many of them that are going to stop the conversation at a dinner party and become the thing everyone will have to have seen before the next get-together. Depending on the director and the talent involved, they mostly all run the gamut between unwatchable and pleasant enough. With Eve and the Handyman, Russ and Eve Meyer joined forces to give the audience something a little more more memorable; electric burlesque compliments of Eve’s stong, palpable sexuality reminiscent of one of Howard Hawks’s joyously randy heroines and Myer’s clean compositions, edited together like a breathless Gatling gun shooting off eye candy.

“The biggest catch in life, my friends, is a happy ending,” so says our heroine in the final line of the film. As much as that phrase meant something even in the creaky days of 1960, the film earns its right to use it as Eve and the Handyman, while not the best or bawdiest of Russ Meyer’s output, is truly his first effective mix of the sex and the sublime.

(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain