I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 17
Sample dialogue, from a pool hall:
“What are you doing here?”
“We heard you were doing True West.”
“Well, you heard wrong. We’re doing American Buffalo.”
[Shoots him]
Not a single one of the characters is even slightly convincing as anything other than an artificial theatrical construction. Is that the point? I haven’t a clue. Much of their dialogue is lifted intact from other movies, sometimes inappropriately Lisa Marie plays a buxom sex bomb who recites Harry Lime’s speech about cuckoo clocks from The Third Man. Other speeches come from Night and the City, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll, The Hustler, The Apartment, Repo Man, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and several more. (The film ends by crediting the screenplays, just as most films end with a scroll of the songs on the sound track.)
“Today they write dialogue about cheeseburgers and big special effects,” one of the characters says, contrasting the quoted classics with Pulp Fiction. Yes, but Tarantino’s cheeseburger dialogue is wonderful comic writing, with an evil undercurrent as the hit men talk while approaching a dangerous meeting; no dialogue in this movie tries anything a fraction as ambitious, or risks anything.
Seeing the cast of familiar actors (not only Hershey and Robertson but Harry Hamlin, Ian Hart, Debi Mazar, John Leguizamo, and Ron Perlman), I was reminded of Mad Dog Time (1996), another movie in which well known actors engaged in laughable dialogue while shooting one another. Of that one, I wrote: “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.” Now comes Frogs for Snakes, the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of Mad Dog Time.
Frozen Assets
(Directed by George Miller; starring Shelley Long, Corbin Bernsen, Dody Goodman; 1992)
I didn’t feel like a viewer during Frozen Assets. I felt like an eyewitness at a disaster. If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next couple of weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is being shown, and leading the audience to safety. And if I’d been an actor in the film, I would wonder why all of the characters in Frozen Assets seem dumber than the average roadkill.
This is a comedy (not the right word) about a business executive (Corbin Bernsen) whose corporation sends him to a small town to run the bank. Only when he gets there does he discover it’s a sperm bank. Ho, ho. In the lobby, he meets a customer (Paul Sand) and their conversation goes like this:
Sand: “I’ve been making two deposits a week for the last seven years. I keep a lot on hand in case of an emergency.”
Bernsen: “That’s a smart move for the small depositor.”
“Well, it’s not that small.”
“A jumbo, huh? My door is open if you need a hand.”
Ho, ho, ho. Bernsen quickly (well, not that quickly) discovers his error, after meeting Shelley Long, who plays the nurse at the sperm bank. Among other local denizens is a strange young man named Newton (Larry Miller), who seems seriously troubled, and lives at home (in the local castle) with his mother (Dody Goodman). He invites Bernsen over to dinner and Bernsen ends up bunking with him, in the twin bed in Newton’s bedroom.
Meanwhile, the sperm count rises. The town’s population includes a large number of hookers and the usual assortment of salt-of-the-earth types, who rise, in various ways, to the challenge when the sperm bank gets an emergency order for 10,000 donations. How to inspire the laggard population to such an effort? Bernsen dreams up a big lottery with a $100,000 prize, and the local males line up to take their chances, while we get lots of condom jokes.
And so on. This movie is seriously bad, but what puzzles me is its tone. This is essentially a children’s movie with a dirty mind. No adult could possibly enjoy a single frame of the film—it’s pitched at the level of a knock-knock joke—and yet what child could enjoy, or understand, all the double entendres about sperm, and what goes into its production? This movie, as nearly as I can tell, was not made with any possible audience in mind.
Movies like Frozen Assets are small miracles. You look at them and wonder how, at any stage of the production, anyone could have thought there was a watchable movie here. Did the director find it funny? Did the actors know they were doomed? Here is a movie to watch in appalled silence.
Gator
Directed by Burt Reynolds; starring Burt Reynolds, Jack Weston, Lauren Hutton; 1976)
Gator is yet another Good Ol’ Movie, and not, I fear, the summer’s last. It stars that archetypal Good Ol’ Boy himself, Burt Reynolds, along with Lauren Hutton, who is a plenty good enough Good Ol’ Girl for me, and Jack Weston, who plays a Good Ol’ New York cop. If only it had a Good Ol’ Plot worth a damn, it might have even been a halfway tolerable ol’ movie.
But it never quite connects, even though a summary of its key scenes is like a laundry list of action-’n’-romance clichés. It contains (a) a chase through the mango swamps featuring boats and a helicopter; (b) several chases through town in which the hapless cops once again get their own squad car stolen from them; (c) our ol’ friend the Semi-Obligatory Lyrical Interlude, in which Lauren Hutton and Burt Reynolds snuggle up real close and then run on the beach; (d) one tearful parting and one tearful reunion, and (e) a colorful villain with a weirdo sidekick.
The villain is Jerry Reed, the country-and-western singer, who runs a protection racket and has the whole county in his back pocket. He looks mean enough to chew up Waylon Jennings and spit him out, and that ain’t nothing compared to his sidekick.
The sidekick is named Bones and is played by a man named William Engesser, who looks as if all his width went into height. He’s so tall that he has to drive a car with a sunroof, so he can roll back the sunroof and sit with his head sticking through the top of the car. At chase speeds, he no doubt gets a lot of bugs in his teeth, and he has to watch the clearance in parking garages. “Tell ’em why they call you Bones, Bones,” says Jerry Reed. “Cause I tell ’em to,” Bones explains.
Reynolds plays a two-time loser who joins forces with the law so that his Pappy won’t have to go on welfare and his darlin’ little nine-year-old daughter won’t be shipped to a foster home. He’s teamed up with Weston, the New York cop, who is supposed to be undercover but sticks out, as Reynolds observes, like a bagel in a bowl of grits. Not too many Good Ol’ Boys have ever heard of bagels, but Reynolds has spent a lot of time on talk shows and has picked up cross-cultural references.
Anyway, Reynolds and Weston go after Jerry Reed and Bones, and there is a lot of scheming, especially after Reed signs up Reynolds as his bagman. Along the way, Reynolds falls for Lauren Hutton, a local TV reporter. (They fall in love in a cinematic tribute to the biggest 1940s romantic cliché: Their eyes meet and lock, they exchange tremulous close-ups, the background dialogue fades away, music plays.)
After a number of scenes in which violence is alternated in baffling fashion with in-jokes, love, down-home wit, pathos, slapstick, chases, desperation, arson, relief, murder, intrigue, and tears, retribution is achieved and the remaining relationships brought to bittersweet conclusions while Bobby Goldsboro sings “For a Little While.” This is a movie, you might say, that was intended to have something for everyone. I’m sometimes accused of giving away the endings; I’m afraid that’s the only way they’ll get rid of the one in Gator.
The Ghost and the Darkness
(Directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Val Kilmer, Michael Douglas; 1996)
The Ghost and the Darkness is an African adventure that makes the Tarzan movies look subtle and realistic. It lacks even the usual charm of being so bad it’s funny. It’s just bad. Not funny. No, wait . . . there is one funny moment. A bridge builder takes leave of his pregnant wife to go to Africa to build a bridge, and she solemnly observes, “You must go where the rivers are.”
The bridge man, named Patterson, is played by Val Kilmer in a trim modern haircut that never grows an inch during his weeks in the bush. He is soon joined by a great white hunter named Remington (Michael Douglas), whose appearance is that of a homeless man who has somehow got his hands on a rifle. If this were a comic strip, there would be flies buzzing around his head.
The men meet up in Uganda, where a big push is on to complete a railroad faster than the Germans or the French. The owner of the rail company is a gruff tycoon who boasts, “I’m a monster. My only pleasure is tormenting those people who work for me.” He is too modest. He also torments those who watch this movie.
Work on the railroad bridge is interrupted by a lion attack. Patterson spends the night in a tree and kills the lion. There is much rejoicing. Then another lion attacks. Eventually it becomes clear that two lions are on the prowl. They are devilishly clever, dragging men from their cots and even invading a hospital to chew on malaria patients. “Maneaters are always old, and alone, but not these two,” Remington intones solemnly.
The rest of the movie consists of Patterson and Remington sitting up all night trying to shoot the lions, while the lions continue their attacks. At the end we learn that these two lions killed 135 victims in nine months. The movie only makes it seem like there were more, over a longer period.
Many scenes are so inept as to beggar description. Some of the lion attacks seem to have been staged by telling the actors to scream while a lion rug was waved in front of the camera. Patterson eventually builds a flimsy platform in a clearing, tethers a babboon at its base, and waits for the lions. Balanced on a wooden beam, he looks this way. Then that. Then this. Then that. A competent editor would have known that all this shifting back and forth was becoming distracting. Then a big bird flies at him and knocks him off the beam, and right into a lion’s path. Lesson number one in lion hunting: Don’t let a big bird knock you into the path of a lion.
A narrator at the beginning of the film has informed us, “This is a story of death and mystery.” The mystery is why these particular lions behaved as they did. I don’t see why it’s a mystery. They had reasons anyone can identify with. They found something they were good at, and grew to enjoy it. The only mystery is why the screenwriter, William Goldmen, has them kill off the two most interesting characters so quickly. (They are Angus, the chatty man on the spot, and an African with a magnificently chiseled and stern face.)
In the old days this movie would have starred Stewart Granger and Trevor Howard, and they would have known it was bad but they would have seemed at home in it, cleaning their rifles and chugging their gin like seasoned bwanas. Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas never for a second look like anything other than thoroughly unhappy movie stars stuck in a humid climate and a doomed production. I hope someone made a documentary about the making of this film. Now that would be a movie worth seeing.
God Told Me To
(Directed by Larry Cohen; starring Tony LoBianco, Sandy Dennis, Sylvia Stanley; 1976)
I wasn’t going to see God Told Me To—God, indeed, seemed to be telling me not to—but then I read the press release and knew immediately this was a movie I had to see. It had been too long, I decided, since I’d seen a film in which the leading character was, and I quote, “the only man alive who can make the choice to help or destroy a mysterious force which has begun to unleash its dread power upon the earth.” Not since Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster had a press release promised so much.
The movie, alas, doesn’t quite live up to the billing. It never even quite identifies the Dread Power, although from the brief glimpses I got of it, it seemed to be a hippie who glowed yellow. But the movie does achieve greatness in another way: This is the most confused feature-length film I’ve ever seen.
There were times when I thought the projectionist was showing the reels in random order, as a quiet joke on the hapless audience. But, no, apparently the movie was supposed to be put together this way, as a sort of fifty-two-card pickup of cinema. The story’s so random, indeed, that by the time Sandy Dennis made her second appearance, I’d forgotten she was in the film.
The plot concerns a New York detective (Tony LoBianco) who investigates a series of murders in which the killers claimed God told them to kill. It turns out they’re under the hypnotic sway of the child of visitors from outer space. LoBianco’s assignment, if he chooses to accept it: Help or destroy this mysterious force that has begun to unleash its dread power, etc.
As I left the theater, dazed, I saw a crowd across the street. A young man in a straitjacket (try not to get ahead of the story, please) was preparing to be suspended in midair hundreds of inches above the ground, and to escape, Houdini style. At the moment he was still standing on the sidewalk—but, believe me, it was still a better show.
Godzilla
Directed by Roland Emmerich; starring Matthew Broderick, Hank Azaria; 1998)
Cannes, France—Going to see Godzilla at the Palais of the Cannes Film Festival is like attending a satanic ritual in St. Peter’s basilica. It’s a rebuke to the faith that the building represents. Cannes touchingly adheres to a belief that film can be intelligent, moving, and grand. Godzilla is a big, ugly, ungainly device to give teenagers the impression they are seeing a movie. It was the festival’s closing film, coming at the end like the horses in a parade, perhaps for the same reason.
It rains all through Godzilla, and it’s usually night. Well, of course it is: That makes the special effects easier to obscure. If you never get a clear look at the monster, you can’t see how shoddy it is. Steven Spielberg opened Jurassic Park by giving us a good, long look at the dinosaurs in full sunlight, and our imaginations leapt up. Godzilla hops out of sight like a camera-shy kangaroo.
The makers of the film, director Roland Emmerich and writer Dean Devlin, follow the timeless outlines of many other movies about Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, Gamera, and their radioactive kin. There are ominous attacks on ships at sea, alarming blips on radar screens, and a scientist who speculates that nuclear tests may have spawned a mutant creature. A cast of stereotyped stock characters is introduced and made to say lines like, “I don’t understand—how could something so big just disappear?” Or, “Many people have had their lives changed forever!” And then there are the big special-effects sequences, as Godzilla terrorizes New York.
One must carefully repress intelligent thought while watching such a film. The movie makes no sense at all except as a careless pastiche of its betters (and, yes, the Japanese Godzilla movies are, in their way, better—if only because they embrace dreck instead of condescending to it). You have to absorb such a film, not consider it. But my brain rebelled, and insisted on applying logic where it was not welcome.
How, for example, does a 300-foot-tall creature fit inside a subway tunnel? How come it’s sometimes only as tall as the tunnel, and at other times taller than high-rise office buildings? How big is it, anyway? Why can it breathe fire but hardly ever makes use of this ability? Why, when the heroes hide inside the Park Avenue tunnel, is this tunnel too small for Godzilla to enter, even though it is larger than a subway tunnel? And why doesn’t Godzilla just snort some flames down there and broil them?
Most monster movies have at least one bleeding-heart environmentalist to argue the case of the monstrous beast, but here we get only Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick), an expert on the mutant earthworms of Chernobyl, who seems less like a scientist than like a placeholder waiting for a rewrite (“insert more interesting character here”). It is he who intuits that Godzilla is a female. (You would think that if a 300-foot monster were male, that would be hard to miss, but never mind.) The military in all movies about monsters and aliens from outer space always automatically attempts to kill them, and here they fire lots of wimpy missiles and torpedoes at Godzilla, which have so little effect we wonder how our tax dollars are being spent. (Just once, I’d like a movie where they train Godzilla to do useful tasks, like pulling a coaxial cable across the ocean floor, or pushing stuck trains out of tunnels.)
In addition to the trigger-happy Americans there is a French force, too, led by Jean Reno, a good actor who plays this role as if he got on the plane shouting “I’m going to Disneyland!” All humans in monster movies have simpleminded little character traits, and Reno’s obsession is with getting a decent cup of coffee. Other characters include a TV newswoman (Maria Pitillo) who used to be the worm man’s girlfriend, a determined cameraman (Hank Azaria), a grim-jawed military leader (Kevin Dunn), and a simpering anchorman (Harry Shearer). None of these characters emerges as anything more than a source of obligatory dialogue.
Oh, and then there are New York’s Mayor Ebert (gamely played by Michael Lerner) and his adviser, Gene (Lorry Goldman). The mayor of course makes every possible wrong decision (he is against evacuating Manhattan, etc.), and the adviser eventually gives thumbs-down to his reelection campaign. These characters are a reaction by Emmerich and Devlin to negative Siskel and Ebert reviews of their earlier movies (Stargate, Independence Day), but they let us off lightly; I fully expected to be squished like a bug by Godzilla. Now that I’ve inspired a character in a Godzilla movie, all I really still desire is for several Ingmar Bergman characters to sit in a circle and read my reviews to one another in hushed tones.
There is a way to make material like Godzilla work. It can be campy fun, like the recent Gamera, Guardian of the Universe. Or hallucinatory, like Infra-Man. Or awesome, like Jurassic Park. Or it can tap a certain elemental dread, like the original King Kong. But all of those approaches demand a certain sympathy with the material, a zest that rises to the occasion.
In Howard Hawks’s The Thing, there is a great scene where scientists in the Arctic spread out to trace the outlines of something mysterious that is buried in the ice, and the camera slowly pulls back to reveal that it is circular—a saucer. In Godzilla, the worm expert is standing in a deep depression, and the camera pulls back to reveal that he is standing in a footprint—which he would obviously have already known. There might be a way to reveal the astonishing footprint to the character and the audience at the same time, but that would involve a sense of style and timing, and some thought about the function of the scene.
