I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 20
Hav Plenty is basically an amateur movie, with some of the good things and many of the bad that go along with first-time efforts. Set in a comfortable milieu of affluent African Americans, it’s ostensibly the autobiographical story of its writer-director, Christopher Scott Cherot, who plays a homeless writer named Lee Plenty. As the movie opens, he’s cat-sitting for a woman named Havilland Savage (Chenoa Maxwell), who has just broken up with a famous musician. She’s with her family in Washington for New Year’s Eve, invites him to come down and join them, and he does. (So much for the cat.) At the end of the movie, there’s a thank-you to “the real Havilland Savage,” and I gather most of the things in the movie actually happened, in one way or another. How else to account for an episode involving the offscreen explosion of a toilet?
Cherot plays Lee Plenty as a smart young man of maddening passivity. The plot essentially consists of scenes in which Havilland’s best friend Caroline throws herself at Plenty, who rebuffs her. Then Havilland’s sister, who has only been married for a month, throws herself at Plenty, but he rebuffs her, too. Then Havilland herself throws herself at Plenty, and he does his best to rebuff her. Although we see the beginning of a sex scene, he eventually eludes her, too. The movie ends with a scene at a film festival, at which Plenty speaks after the premiere of a film that is a great deal like this one.
As a young man I would have been quite capable of writing and starring in a movie in which three beautiful women threw themselves at me. I would have considered this so logical that I would not have bothered, as Cherot does not bother, to write myself any dialogue establishing myself as intelligent, charming, seductive, etc. I would assume that the audience could take one look at me and simply intuit that I had all of those qualities. So I can accept that the homeless Lee Plenty character is irresistible, even to a newlywed and to a beautiful, rich, ex-fiancée of a big star. What I cannot accept is that he fights them all off with vague excuses and evasions. “He’s not gay,” the women assure each other. That I believe. But either he’s asexual or exhibiting the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome.
Hav Plenty is not a film without charm, but, boy, does it need to tighten the screws on its screenplay. The movie’s dialogue is mostly strained, artificial small talk, delivered unevenly by the actors, who at times seem limited to one take (how else to account for fluffed lines?). There are big setups without payoffs, as when Hav’s grandmother insists, “You’re going to marry him!” And nightmare dream sequences without motivation or purpose. And awkward scenes like the one where the newlywed sister tells her husband that something went on between her and Plenty. The husband enters the room, removes his jacket to reveal bulging muscles, and socks poor Plenty in the stomach. This scene illustrates two of my favorite obligatory clichés: (1) The husband is told only enough of the story to draw exactly the wrong conclusion, and (2) all muscular characters in movies always take off outer garments to reveal their muscles before hitting someone.
Hav Plenty is basically a three-actress movie; Cherot, as the male lead, is so vague and passive he barely has a personality (listen to his rambling explanations about why he “doesn’t date”). All three actresses (Chenoa Maxwell as Hav, Tammi Katherine Jones as Hav’s best friend, and Robinne Lee as the married sister) have strong energy and look good on the screen. With better direction and more takes, I suspect they’d seem more accomplished in their performances. But Hav Plenty is more of a first draft than a finished product.
Heartbreak Hotel
(Directed by Chris Columbus; starring David Keith, Tuesday Weld, Charlie Schlatter; 1988)
Here it is, the goofiest movie of the year, a movie so bad in so many different and endearing ways that I’m darned if I don’t feel genuine affection for it. We all know it’s bad manners to talk during a movie, but every once in a while a film comes along that positively requires the audience to shout helpful suggestions and lewd one-liners at the screen. Heartbreak Hotel is such a movie. All it needs to be perfect is a parallel sound track.
The film tells the story of an Ohio high school kid (Charlie Schlatter), back in 1972, who has his own rock and roll band. But the fuddy-duddys on the high school faculty don’t like rock and roll, so they ban the band from the school talent show. Meanwhile, the kid has problems at home. His divorced mother (Tuesday Weld) is an alcoholic who sleeps with a guy who works at the junkyard. She’s also a diehard Elvis Presley fan. Things are not so great at home for Schlatter and his kid sister, who live upstairs over mom’s business, a fleabag motel. And things get worse when Weld is hospitalized after a traffic accident.
What to do? Well, Elvis himself is going to appear in Cleveland on Saturday night, and so Schlatter and the members of his band concoct a desperate plot to kidnap Presley and bring him home, to cheer up mom. How are they going to get him away from his cocoon of security guards? They come up with a brainstorm. Rosie, the local pizza cook, looks exactly like Elvis’s beloved dead mother. So they’ll give her a black wig, adjust her makeup, and convince Elvis that she has returned from the grave for one last visit with her son. Rosie, portrayed by Jacque Lynn Colton in a role the late Divine was born to play, sends Elvis flowers and lures him outside his hotel at three a.m., and then the high school kids chloroform him and whisk him away in a pink Cadillac.
Once Elvis enters the plot, the movie ascends to new heights of silliness. Elvis, played in the film by David Keith (a good actor who doesn’t look one bit like Elvis), is mad at first, of course. But then he begins to listen when this teenage punk tells him he’s lost his sense of danger and is playing it safe for his fans, who are mostly blue-haired old ladies. Elvis also sort of falls for Tuesday Weld, and he takes a special liking in his heart for her little daughter Pam (Angela Goethals), who is afraid to sleep with the lights out. The tender bedside scenes between Elvis and the young girl are hard to watch with a straight face, especially if you’ve read Albert Goldman’s muckraking biography Elvis, with its revelations about the King’s taste in pubescent adolescents.
I don’t know what Chris Columbus, the writer and director of this film, had in mind when he made it. One of my fellow critics, emerging from the screening and wiping tears of incredulous laughter from his eyes, said maybe they were trying to make a Frank Capra film—Mr. Presley Goes to Ohio. Elvis gives Schlatter tips on picking up women and holds lessons in pelvis-grinding, before agreeing to make a guest appearance at the high school talent show. Any resemblence between this behavior and the real Presley exists only in the realm of fantasy.
And yet Elvis fans are a special lot, and will enjoy some of the small touches in the film, such as the name of Weld’s motel (the “Flaming Star”) and the way the movie reproduces the famous juke box dance and fight scene from one of Presley’s aging classics. Some scenes are tongue-in-cheek send-ups of hoary old B-movie clichés, as when Elvis grabs a paintbrush and helps Weld redecorate her motel, or when he says a tearful good-bye at the airport before flying back to reality in his private jet (he reserves an especially fond pat on the head for the young daughter).
I never know how to deal with movies like Heartbreak Hotel. Sure, it’s bad—awesomely bad, contrived, awkward, and filled with unintentional laughs. And yet I was not bored. The movie finds so many different approaches to its badness that it becomes endearing. The organizers of Golden Turkey film festivals have been complaining lately that they don’t make truly great bad movies anymore. Heartbreak Hotel is proof that the genre is not completely dead.
Heaven’s Gate
(Directed by Michael Cimino; starring Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Willem Dafoe; 1980)
We begin with a fundamental question: Why is Heaven’s Gate so painful and unpleasant to look at? I’m not referring to its content, but to its actual visual texture: This is one of the ugliest films I have ever seen. Its director, Michael Cimino, opens his story at Harvard, continues it in Montana, and closes it aboard a ship. And yet a grim industrial pall hangs low over everything. There are clouds and billows of dirty yellow smoke in every shot that can possibly justify it, and when he runs out of smoke he gives us fog and such incredible amounts of dust that there are whole scenes where we can barely see anything. That’s not enough. Cimino also shoots his picture in a maddening soft focus that makes the people and places in this movie sometimes almost impossible to see. And then he goes after the colors. There’s not a single primary color in this movie, only dingy washed-out sepia tones.
I know, I know: He’s trying to demystify the West, and all those other things hotshot directors try to do when they don’t really want to make a Western. But this movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused, and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture.
But Cimino’s in deeper trouble still. Heaven’s Gate has, of course, become a notorious picture, a boondoggle that cost something like $36 million and was yanked out of its New York opening run after the critics ran gagging from the theater. Its running time, at that point, was more than four hours. Perhaps length was the problem? Cimino went back to the editing room, while a United Artists executive complained that the film had been “destroyed” by an unfairly negative review by New York Times critic Vincent Canby. Brother Canby was only doing his job. If the film was formless at four hours, it is insipid at 140 minutes. At either length it is so incompetently photographed and edited that there are times when we are not even sure which character we are looking at. Christopher Walken is in several of the initial Western scenes before he finally gets a close-up and we see who he is. John Hurt wanders through various scenes to no avail. Kris Kristofferson is the star of the movie, and is never allowed to generate enough character for us to miss him, should he disappear.
The opening scenes are set at Harvard (they were actually shot in England, but never mind). They show Kristofferson, Hurt, and other idealistic young men graduating in 1870 and setting off to civilize a nation. Kristofferson decides to go west, to help develop the territory. He explains this decision in a narration, and the movie might have benefited if he’d narrated the whole thing, explaining as he went along. Out west, as a lawman, he learns of a plot by the cattlebreeders’ association to hire a private army and assassinate 125 newly arrived European immigrants who are, it is claimed, anarchists, killers, and thieves. Most of the movie will be about this plot, Kristofferson’s attempts to stop it, Walken’s involvement in it, and the involvement of both Kristofferson and Walken in the private life of a young Montana madam (Isabelle Huppert).
In a movie where nothing is handled well, the immigrants are handled very badly. Cimino sees them as a mob. They march onscreen, babble excitedly in foreign tongues, and rush off wildly in all directions. By the movie’s end, we can identify only one of them for sure. She is the Widow Kovach, whose husband was shot dead near the beginning of the film. That makes her the emblem of the immigrants’ suffering. Every time she steps forward out of the mob, somebody respectfully murmurs “Widow Kovach!” in the subtitles. While the foreigners are hanging on to Widow Kovach’s every insight, the cattlemen are holding meetings in private clubs and offering to pay their mercenaries $5 a day plus expenses and $50 for every other foreigner shot or hung. I am sure of those terms because they are repeated endlessly throughout a movie that cares to make almost nothing else clear.
The ridiculous scenes are endless. Samples: Walken, surrounded by gunmen and trapped in a burning cabin, scribbles a farewell note in which he observes that he is trapped in the burning cabin, and then he signs his full name so that there will be no doubt who the note was from. Kristofferson, discovering Huppert being gang-raped by several men, leaps in with six-guns in both hands and shoots all the men, including those aboard Huppert, without injuring her. In a big battle scene, men make armored wagons out of logs and push them forward into the line of fire, even though anyone could ride around behind and shoot them. There is more. There is much more. It all adds up to a great deal less. This movie is $36 million thrown to the winds. It is the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I’ve seen Paint Your Wagon.
Hell Night
(Directed by Tom DeSimone; starring Linda Blair, Vincent Van Patten; 1981)
It was that legendary Chicago film exhibitor Oscar Brotman who gave me one of my most useful lessons in the art of film watching. “In ninety-nine films out of a hundred,” Brotman told me, “if nothing has happened by the end of the first reel . . . nothing is going to happen.” This rule, he said, had saved him countless hours over the years because he had walked out of movies after the first uneventful reel.
I seem to remember arguing with him. There are some films, I said, in which nothing happens in the first reel because the director is trying to set up a universe of ennui and uneventfulness. Take a movie like Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, for example.
“It closed in a week,” Brotman said.
“But, Oscar, it was voted one of the top ten greatest films of all time!”
“They must have all seen it in the first week.”
I was running this conversation through my memory while watching Hell Night.
I had waited through the first reel, and nothing had happened. Now I was somewhere in the middle of the third reel, and still nothing had happened. By “nothing,” by the way, I mean nothing original, unexpected, well crafted, interestingly acted, or even excitingly violent.
Hell Night is a relentlessly lackluster example of the Dead Teenager Movie. The formula is always the same. A group of kids get together for some kind of adventure or forbidden ritual in a haunted house, summer camp, old school, etc. One of the kids tells a story about the horrible and gruesome murders that happened there years ago. He always ends the same way: “. . . and they say the killer never died and is still lurking here somewhere.” That was the formula of The Burning and the Friday the 13th movies, and it’s the formula again in Hell Night.
This time, the pretext is a fraternity-sorority initiation stunt. The venue is an old mansion. We learn that the hapless Garth family once lived there and had four deformed and handicapped children. The misfortunes of the children are described in great detail, with dialogue in very bad taste. But then, of course, Hell Night is in bad taste. The only child that need concern us is the youngest Garth, who was named Andrew and was born, we are told, a “gork.” None of the dictionaries at my command include the word “gork,” but for the purposes of Hell Night we can define “gork” thus:
Gork (n.) Deformed, violent creature that lurks in horror movies, jumping out of basement shadows and decapitating screaming teenagers.
I have now of course, given away the plot of Hell Night. As the fraternity and sorority kids creep through passageways of the old house, their candle flames fluttering in the wind, Andrew the Gork picks them off, one by one, in scenes of bloody detail. Finally only Linda Blair is left. Why does she survive? Maybe because she’s a battle-hardened veteran, having previously more or less lived through The Exorcist, Exorcist II: The Heretic, and Born Innocent. At least in those movies, something happened in the first reel.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
(Directed by Tony Randel; starring Ashley Laurence, Clare Higgins; 1988)
Generally speaking, there are two kinds of nightmares, the kind that you actually have, and the kind they make into movies. Real nightmares usually involve frustration or public embarrassment. In the frustrating ones, a loved one is trying to tell you something and you can’t understand them, or they’re in danger and you can’t help them. In the embarrassing ones, it’s the day of the final exam and you forgot to attend the classes, or you’re in front of a crowd and can’t think of anything to say, or you wandered into the hotel lobby without any clothes on, and nobody has noticed you yet—but they’re about to.
Those are scary nightmares, all right, and sometimes they turn up in the movies. But Hellbound: Hellraiser II contains the kinds of nightmares that occur only in movies, because our real dreams have low budgets and we can’t afford expensive kinds of special effects. The movie begins a few hours after the original Hellbound ended. A young girl named Kirsty has been placed in a hospital after a night in which she was tortured by the flayed corpses of her parents, who were under the supervision of the demons of hell. What this girl needs is a lot of rest and a set of those positive-thinking cassettes they advertise late at night on cable TV.
But no such luck. The hospital is simply another manifestation of the underworld, hell is all around us, we are powerless in its grip, and before long Kirsty and a newfound friend named Tiffany are hurtling down the corridors of the damned. Give or take a detail or two, that’s the story. Hellbound: Hellraiser II is like some kind of avant-garde film strip in which there is no beginning, no middle, no end, but simply a series of gruesome images that can be watched in any order.
The images have been constructed with a certain amount of care and craftsmanship; the technical credits on this movie run to four single-spaced pages. We see lots of bodies that have been skinned alive, so that the blood still glistens on the exposed muscles. We see creatures who have been burned and mutilated and twisted into grotesque shapes, and condemned for eternity to unspeakable and hopeless tortures. We hear deep, rasping laughter, as the denizens of hell chortle over the plight of the terrified girls. And we hear their desperate voices calling to each other.
“Kirsty!” we hear. And “Tiffany!” And “Kirsty!!!” and “Tiffany!!!” and “Kirstieeeeeee!!!!!” And “Tiffanyyyyyyy!!!!!” I’m afraid this is another one of those movies where they violate the First Rule of Repetition of Names, which states that when the same names are repeated in a movie more than four times a minute for more than three minutes in a row, the audience breaks out into sarcastic laughter, and some of the ruder members are likely to start shouting “Kirsty! and “Tiffany!” at the screen.
