I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 16
Consumer note: Nobody walks on fire in this movie.
Food of the Gods
(Directed by Bert I. Gordon; starring Marjoe Gortner, Ida Lupino; 1976)
“Most guys who play pro ball, they get racked up every once in a while,” observes the hero’s buddy in Food of the Gods. “But not old Joe. Seven years in the major leagues and he never got carried off the field even once. And then this had to happen to him. It really makes you think.” It sure does. Old Joe has just gone and gotten himself stung to death by a giant killer wasp.
Joe’s friends load him into a Jeep, drive the body back to the mainland, and then return to the island where the attack took place. “There’s something strange going on out there,” one observes sagely. “I don’t know if I should go back,” says the other. “I gotta be in Chicago on Tuesday. . . .” Meanwhile, poor Mr. Skinner has stopped to change a tire and has been eaten alive by gigantic mutant rats. In a way, that was simple justice; it was Mr. Skinner’s doing that got the whole plague of giant rats started. He found some of this funny stuff oozing up out of the ground on the back forty, you see. Creamy-like, and about the color of skimmed milk. For some fool reason he mixed it with the chicken feed and fed it to the chickens. It made the baby chicks grow taller than a man. It also had an effect on the adult chickens: Their babies ate them.
This is obviously a case for Marjoe Gortner, playing a pro football teammate of poor old Joe. He loads up some shotguns and drives back to the island in his Jeep, and not a moment too soon, because Mrs. Skinner has just had her arm chewed up by gigantic mutant worms and a young couple has busted the back axle on their Winnebago camper just as the girl has started labor pains. Meanwhile, the wasps have built hives twenty feet high, the rats are reproducing like crazy, and the venal businessman, Bensington, has gone out to the island determined to get the patents on the stuff oozing out of ground: “In five years, no one will be hungry—and we’ll be rich!”
What happens next is a cross between Night of the Living Dead, The Birds, and a disaster movie, if you follow me. The little band of people are marooned in the Skinner cabin. Rats sniff around outside. Marjoe and the others fire at them with shotguns and throw Molotov cocktails into their midst. Pamela Franklin falls down into a rat hole and Marjoe falls in trying to help her. They get lost and almost eaten before they find a tunnel to safety. Killer wasps attack again and are driven back. Marjoe electrifies the fence that cuts the island in two, but the rats sabotage the electrical generator. The pregnant girl (did I forget to mention her?) says her labor pains are becoming more closely spaced.
“I’ll bet those rats can’t swim,” Marjoe speculates. “When you’re a rat and suddenly you weigh 150 pounds, you got to learn all over again how to swim.” He dashes to his Jeep, races over to the dam, blows it up with two well-placed charges, and drives so quickly that he gets back to the house before (a) the floodwaters, and (b) before we ask ourselves what a dam could be holding back on a small island with no apparent heights.
Anyway, the floodwaters surround the house, and Marjoe leads the survivors upstairs and out onto a small second-floor balcony that did not exist in any of the earlier shots of the house and will have disappeared in all of the later shots but is mighty handy just at the moment. The rats drown. The baby is delivered. It’s a boy. Everybody agrees that Mr. Skinner sure shouldn’t have fed that oozy stuff to the chickens.
Fools
(Directed by Tom Gries; starring Jason Robards, Katharine Ross; 1971)
How can I possibly describe how awful Fools is, and in how many different ways? The task approaches impossibility. The only way to fully understand how transcendently bad this movie is would be to see it for yourself—an extreme measure I hope, for your sake, you’ll avoid. Let me just sort of hint at the depth of my feeling by saying Fools is the worst movie in 1971, a statement that springs forth with serene confidence even though here it is only February. Happy Valentine’s Day, by the way.
The movie is about love. Now the one thing we all know about love is that it’s more important than money, position, respectability, age, anything. When people fall in love, they’re supposed to abandon all caution, embrace the moment, be true to Life, run through the park, sing songs, cluck at swans, blow dandelion pods, and in general flout convention. Fools is a movie like that.
Jason Robards once again plays the fiftyish Free Spirit with a feather in his hat and spring in his step. He falls in love with Katharine Ross, who has been repressed by her rich, constipated husband, the most successful young lawyer in San Francisco despite the fact that he is a paranoid closet queen with a nasty homicidal streak and a Napoleonic fixation, and likes to play with guns. He’s the kind of lawyer that ambulances chase.
Okay, so Jason and Katharine fall in love. They are then set upon by cops, the FBI, the San Francisco pornography epidemic, neon signs, smog, hate, bigotry, exhibitionists, fierce dogs, and freeways. That’s what the middle part of the film is about: how people can’t be in love because of our materialistic, capitalist, fascist society, which invades privacy and is not, ever, tender. Then at the movie’s end Katharine runs into a church during a baptism and is shot dead by her husband, who drives off in his Rolls-Royce.
By now you should be getting the idea that Fools is the most cynically “idealistic” exploitation movie in some time. It is for life and love, against fascism and firearms in private hands. It also has countless songs trying to out-banal each other during at least seven Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interludes. Fools sets a new Semi-OLI ground speed record. When in doubt, throw in a song and a sunset. Right?
On top of all this, we get dialogue so inept that I will provide a free ticket to The Vengeance of She (the next time it plays town) to the first person who can convince me that any two English-speaking human beings ever talked remotely like these characters at any time during the present century. I commend the dialogue, however, to local comedy groups getting up satires on love, if the satires don’t have to be too good.
The only mystery about Fools is how Tom Gries could have directed it. He is the tasteful director of Will Penny, where the situation and dialogue rang absolutely true, and he demonstrated a genuine narrative gift in The Hawaiians. Now we get Fools. How?
Henri Bollinger, the film’s coproducer, was in town last week for interviews. I declined the opportunity, to save embarrassment all around, but he telephoned me to explain that the film had been made with “absolute sincerity” and the “best intentions.” Could be. Nobody sets out deliberately to make a bad film. When I gently suggested to Bollinger that his film was the worst of the year, he gently suggested back that since I was obviously “violently prejudiced” against it, the Sun-Times should provide “the other side.” I demurred. I said my judgment was sober, impartial, and fair: Fools stinks.
Forces of Nature
(Directed by Bronwen Hughes; starring Sandra Bullock, Ben Affleck; 1999)
So I’m sitting there, looking in disbelief at the ending of Forces of Nature, and asking myself—if this is how the movie ends, then what was it about? We spend two endless hours slogging through a series of natural and man-made disasters with Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck, and then . . . that’s it?
Bronwen Hughes’s Forces of Nature is a romantic shaggy dog story, a movie that leads us down the garden path of romance, only to abandon us by the compost heap of uplifting endings. And it’s not even clever enough to give us the right happy ending. It gives us the wrong happy ending.
By then, of course, any ending is good news. The movie is a dead zone of boring conversations, contrived emergencies, unbelievable characters, and lame storytelling. Even then it might have worked at times if it had generated the slightest chemistry between Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock, but it doesn’t. She remains winsome and fetching, but he acts like he’s chaperoning his best friend’s sister, as a favor.
The movie combines at least five formulas, and probably more: The Meet Cute, the Road Movie, the Odd Couple, Opposites Attract, and Getting to Know Yourself. It also cuts back and forth between a journey and the preparations for a marriage, and it tries to keep two sets of parents in play. With so much happening it’s surprising that the movie finds a way to be boring, but it does, by cross-cutting between one leaden scene and another.
Affleck stars as an ad man who is flying from New York to Savannah, Georgia, for his wedding. On the plane, he’s strapped in next to Bullock, who has held a lot of jobs in her time: flight attendant, wedding photographer, exotic dancer, auto show hostess. The flight crashes on takeoff, and they end up driving to Georgia together, amid weather reports of an approaching hurricane.
Of course circumstances conspire to make him pretend to be a doctor, and them to pretend they’re married, and a motel to put them in the same room, and his best man to see him with this strange woman even though he tries to hide by holding his breath in a swimming pool, and so on. Rarely does the artificial contrivance of a bad screenplay reveal itself so starkly on the screen. And when the contrivances stop the revelations begin, and we learn sad things about Bullock’s past that feel exactly as if Marc Lawrence, the writer, supplied them at random.
They have a lot of adventures. Arrests, crashes, trees falling on their car, hospitalizations. They take a train for a while (standing on top of one of the cars in a shamelessly pandering shot). And they take a bus (with condo-shopping oldsters). And a Spinning Sombrero ride. At one point they both find themselves performing onstage in a strip club—not quite the kind of club you have in mind. This scene would seem to be foolproof comedy, but the timing is off and it sinks.
Despite my opening comments, I have not actually revealed the ending of the movie, and I won’t, although I will express outrage about it. This movie hasn’t paid enough dues to get away with such a smarmy payoff. I will say, however, that if the weatherman has been warning for three days that a hurricane is headed thisaway, and the skies are black and the wind is high and it’s raining, few people in formal dress for a wedding would stand out in the yard while umbrellas, tables, and trees are flying past. And if they did, their hair would blow around a little, don’t you think?
Friday the 13th, Part 2
(Directed by Steve Miner; starring Betsy Palmer, Amy Steel, John Furey; 1981)
I saw Friday the 13th, Part 2 at the Virginia Theater, a former vaudeville house in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. The late show was half-filled with high school and college students, and as the lights went down I experienced a brief wave of nostalgia. In this very theater, on countless Friday nights, I’d gone with a date to the movies. My nostalgia lasted for the first two minutes of the movie.
The pretitle sequence showed one of the heroines of the original Friday the 13th, alone at home. She has nightmares, wakes up, undresses, is stalked by the camera, hears a noise in the kitchen. She tiptoes into the kitchen. Through the open window, a cat springs into the room. The audience screamed loudly and happily: It’s fun to be scared. Then an unidentified man sunk an ice pick into the girl’s brain, and, for me, the fun stopped.
The audience, however, carried on. It is a tradition to be loud during these movies, I guess. After a batch of young counselors turns up for training at a summer camp, a girl goes out walking alone at night. Everybody in the audience imitated hoot-owls and hyenas. Another girl went to her room and started to undress. Five guys sitting together started a chant: “We want boobs!”
The plot: In the original movie, a summer camp staff was wiped out by a demented woman whose son had been allowed to drown by incompetent camp counselors. At the end of that film, the mother was decapitated by the young woman who is killed with an ice pick at the beginning of Part 2. The legend grows that the son, Jason, did not really drown, but survived, and lurks in the woods waiting to take his vengeance against the killer of his mother . . . and against camp counselors in general, I guess.
That sets up the film. The counselors are introduced, very briefly, and then some of them go into town for a beer and the rest stay at the camp to have sex with each other. A mystery assailant prowls around the main cabin. We see only his shadow and his shoes. One by one, he picks off the kids. He sinks a machete into the brain of a kid in a wheelchair. He surprises a boy and a girl making love, and nails them to a bunk with a spear through both their bodies. When the other kids return to the camp, it’s their turn. After almost everyone has been killed in a disgusting and violent way, one girl chews up the assailant with a chain saw, after which we discover the mummies in his cabin in the woods, after which he jumps through a window at the girl, etc.
This movie is a cross between the Mad Slasher and Dead Teenager genres; about two dozen movies a year feature a mad killer going berserk, and they’re all about as bad as this one. Some have a little more plot, some have a little less. It doesn’t matter.
Sinking into my seat in this movie theater from my childhood, I remembered the movie fantasies when I was a kid. They involved teenagers who fell in love, made out with each other, customized their cars, listened to rock and roll, and were rebels without causes. Neither the kids in those movies nor the kids watching them would have understood a worldview in which the primary function of teenagers is to be hacked to death.
Friends & Lovers
(Directed by George Haas; starring Stephen Baldwin, Claudia Schiffer, Robert Downey, Jr.; 1999)
I don’t want to review Friends & Lovers, I want to flunk it. This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from tenth graders that are better made than this.
Last week I hosted the first Overlooked Film Festival at the University of Illinois, for films that have been unfairly overlooked. If I ever do a festival of films that deserve to be overlooked, here is my opening-night selection. The only possible explanation for the film being released is that there are stars in the cast (Stephen Baldwin, Claudia Schiffer, Alison Eastwood, Robert Downey, Jr.). They should speak sternly with their agents.
The story involves a group of friends spending the holidays in a Park City ski chalet. They’re involved in what an adolescent might think were adult relationships. Much time is spent in meaningless small talk. We also get the ultimate sign of writer desperation: characters introducing themselves to each other.
If I were marking this as a paper, I would note:
Director George Haas often lines up actors so they awkwardly face the camera, and have to talk sideways to one another.
Much of the dialogue is handled by cutting to each character as he speaks. This is jarring because it reveals that the movie knows when each character will speak. Professional movies overlap sound and image, so that dialogue begins offscreen, before a cut to the speaker.
The characters frequently propose toasts, as if the movie is a social occasion.
Pregnant girl looks like she has a pillow stuffed down her dress. Self-consciously holds her belly with both hands in many scenes.
Dad puts tin can in microwave. Can explodes, and whole chalet is plunged into darkness. I am not surprised that a character in this movie would be stupid enough to microwave an unopened can, but why would the explosion blow every fuse?
Characters gossip that one character has a big penis. Everyone strips for the Jacuzzi. Movie supplies close-up of penis. Since this is the first nudity of any kind in the movie, audience is jolted. In a light comedy, a close-up of a penis strikes a jarring note. An amazed reaction shot might help, but represents a level of sophistication beyond the reach of this film.
The general preoccupation with sex and size reminds me of conversations I had when I was eleven. One guy says a female character has two-inch nipples. No one questions this theory. I say two-inch nipples are extremely rare among bipeds.
Dad says, “My generation thought that working was the best way to support a family.” Dad doesn’t even know what generation he belongs to. Dad is in his fifties, so is a member of the sixties generation. He is thinking of his parents’ generation.
All dialogue on ski slopes involves ludicrous echoing effects. Yes, a yodel will echo in the Alps. No, conversational levels will not echo in Utah.
David seems to be a virgin. Friend asks: “You have never done the dirty deed?” David asks, “How exactly would you define that?” Friend makes circle with thumb and finger, sticks another finger through it. Most twenty-something movie characters have advanced beyond this stage.
Automobile scenes are inept. One “crash” is obviously faked to avoid damaging either vehicle. In a scene that cuts between girl walking by road while a guy drives beside her and talks through open window, the girl is walking at a slower rate of speed than car.
I have often asked myself, “What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?” Now I know.
Frogs for Snakes
(Directed by Amos Poe; starring Barbara Hershey, Harry Hamlin; 1999)
Amos Poe’s Frogs for Snakes is not a film so much as a filmed idea. That could be interesting, but alas, it is a very bad idea. The film is about a group of Manhattan actors who support themselves between roles by working as gangsters and hit men, and as the film opens they turn their guns on one another. This is a movie that gives new meaning to the notion of being willing to kill for a role.
Barbara Hershey stars, as a waitress and debt collector who used to be married to crime kingpin Al (Robbie Coltrane), who doubles as a theater producer and is preparing a production of Mamet’s American Buffalo. She and several other characters spend much of their time hanging out in a diner and talking about absent friends. So much time is spent in the diner, indeed, that Frogs for Snakes begins to resemble a one-set play, until there are excursions to pool halls, apartments and even a theater.
