I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 34
Next comes the Real Crisis. Patch is threatened with expulsion from medical school. I rubbed my eyes with incredulity: There is a courtroom scene! Courtrooms are expected in legal movies. But in medical tearjerkers, they’re the treatment of last resort. Any screenwriter who uses a courtroom scene in a nonlegal movie is not only desperate for a third act, but didn’t have a second act that led anywhere.
What a courtroom. It’s like a John Grisham wet dream. This could be the set for Inherit the Wind. The main floor and balcony are jammed with Patch’s supporters, with a few seats up front for the villains. There’s no legalistic mumbo-jumbo; these people function simply as an audience for Patch’s narcissistic grandstanding. (Spoiler warning No. 2.) After his big speech, the courtroom doors open up, and who walks in? All those bald little chemotherapy kids that Patch cheered up earlier. And yes, dear reader, each and every one is wearing a red rubber nose. Should these kids be out of bed? Their immune systems are shot to hell. If one catches cold and dies, there won’t be any laughing during the malpractice suit.
I have nothing against sentiment, but it must be earned. Cynics scoffed at Robin Williams’s previous film, What Dreams May Come, in which he went to heaven and then descended into hell to save the woman he loved. Corny? You bet—but with the courage of its convictions. It made no apologies and exploited no formulas. It was the real thing. Patch Adams is quackery.
Phantasm II
(Directed by Don Coscarelli; starring Michael Baldwin; 1988)
The silver sphere is about twice the size of a billiard ball. It has a couple of very sharp hooks built into it. It flies through the air, attaches itself to your forehead, and digs in. Then a drill comes out and pierces your skull right above the bridge of the nose, while blood spurts out the other end. I hate it when that happens.
The sphere is the property of the Tall Man. He is an evil mortician who lurks in the ghost town of Paragore, where all of the houses seem empty, and most of the graves seem robbed. “When you die,” he tells one of his luckless victims, “you don’t go to heaven. You come to us.”
Who is us? Or, to phrase the question more elegantly, what’s going on here? After having paid close attention to Phantasm II, I am not sure I can answer that question. “This time, I’m going to get him,” Mike vows early in the film. But unless you have seen Phantasm, a low-budget horror film released nine years ago, the reference is likely to be lost. I did see the original Phantasm, but the details do not leap into my mind with crystal clarity.
There is a sense in which Mike’s history is not so important to this film—a sense in which the plot itself is expendable. Phantasm II is like an extended dream, in which characters appear and disappear according to no logical timetable, and a wide-angle lens makes everything look distended and nightmarish.
The images are of corpses and graveyards, spurting blood and severed skulls, rotting flesh and faces filled with terror. Sitting through a film like this, which contains so little of genuine interest, I find myself meditating on such images, wondering who they would appear to, and why.
The target audience for Phantasm II is obviously teenagers, especially those with abbreviated attention spans, who require a thrill a minute. No character development, logic, or subtlety is necessary, just a sensation every now and again to provide the impression that something is happening on the screen.
But why would images of death and decay seem entertaining to them? For the same reason, I imagine, that the horror genre has always been attractive to adolescents. They feel immortal, immune to the processes of aging and death, and so to them these scenes of coffins and corpses represent a psychological weapon against adults. Kids will never die. Only adults will die. Kids, of course, eventually become adults, but there is always a new generation of kids, and there perhaps we have our answer to the question of why anyone would want to make a sequel to Phantasm.
Phantoms
(Directed by Joe Cahppelle; starring Rose McGowan, Joanna Going; 1998)
Did you know that if a certain kind of worm learns how to solve a maze, and then you grind it up and feed it to other worms, the other worms will then be able to negotiate the maze on their first try? That’s one of the scientific nuggets supplied in Phantoms, a movie that seems to have been made by grinding up other films and feeding them to this one.
As the movie opens, two sisters arrive by Jeep in a quaint mountain town that seems suspiciously quiet, and no wonder: Everybody in town appears to be dead. Some of them have died rather suddenly. The baker’s wife, for example. Her hands still grip the rolling pin. Just her hands. The rest of her is elsewhere.
The sisters (Rose McGowan and Joanna Going) find more ominous signs. A dead deputy sheriff, for example. And phones that don’t work—but then one does. The older sister picks it up. “Who are you? What do you want?” she asks. It is a test of great acting to be able to say those ancient lines as if you mean them. A test like many others that this movie fails.
The sheriff turns up. He is played by Ben Affleck, wearing an absurd cowboy hat that looks like the kind of unsold stock they unload on city slickers at the end of the season. He is accompanied by another deputy (Nicky Katt) who wears an identical hat. Don’t they know it’s a rule in the movies: Hero wears cool hat, sidekick wears funny hat?
Joining the two young women, they search the town, and find a desperate message written in lipstick on a mirror, which (I’m jumping ahead now) leads them to Dr. Timothy Flyte (Peter O’Toole), an editor of the kind of supermarket rag that features babies with nine-pound ears. Dr. Flyte and U.S. Army troops soon arrive in the small town, dressed like ghostbusters, to get to the bottom of the mystery. “What kind of threat are we dealing with here—biological, chemical, or other?” he’s asked. “I’m leaning toward ‘other,’” he replies, with all the poignancy of a man who once played Lawrence of Arabia and is now playing Dr. Timothy Flyte.
The movie quickly degenerates into another one of those Gotcha! thillers in which loathsome slimy creatures leap out of drain pipes and sewers and ingest supporting actors, while the stars pump bullets into it. There are a few neat touches. In front of an altar at the local church, the heroes discover a curious pile of stuff: Watches, glasses, ballpoints, pacemakers. At first they think it’s an offering to the Virgin Mary. But no: “That’s not an offering. Those are undigested remains.”
How common are these films getting to be? Two out of the three films I saw today used the formula. With a deep bow (almost a salaam) to Tremors, they locate their creatures beneath the surface of the land or sea, so that most of the time, although not enough of the time, you can’t see them.
Peter O’Toole is a professional and plays his character well. It takes years of training and practice to be able to utter lines like, “It comes from the deep and secret realms of our earth” without giggling. It is O’Toole who gets to float the educated tapeworm theory. When these creatures eat a human, they learn everything it knows—and even everything it thinks it knows, so that since many humans think they are being eaten by the devil, the creatures think they are the devil, too. If only we could learn to think more kindly of those who digest us, this movie could have ended happily.
Pink Flamingos
(Directed by John Waters; starring Divine; 1972, re-reviewed in 1997)
John Waters’s Pink Flamingos has been restored for its twenty-fifth anniversary revival, and with any luck at all that means I won’t have to see it again for another twenty-five years. If I haven’t retired by then, I will.
How do you review a movie like this? I am reminded of an interview I once did with a man who ran a carnival sideshow. His star was a geek, who bit off the heads of live chickens and drank their blood.
“He’s the best geek in the business,” this man assured me.
“What is the difference between a good geek and a bad geek?” I asked.
“You wanna examine the chickens?”
Pink Flamingos was filmed with genuine geeks, and that is the appeal of the film, to those who find it appealing: What seems to happen in the movie really does happen. That is its redeeming quality, you might say. If the events in this film were only simulated, it would merely be depraved and disgusting. But since they are actually performed by real people, the film gains a weird kind of documentary stature. There is a temptation to praise the film, however grudgingly, just to show you have a strong enough stomach to take it. It is a temptation I can resist.
The plot involves a rivalry between two competing factions for the title of Filthiest People Alive. In one corner: a transvestite named Divine (who dresses like a combination of a showgirl, a dominatrix, and Bozo); her mentally ill mother (sits in a crib eating eggs and making messes); her son (likes to involve chickens in his sex life with strange women); and her lover (likes to watch son with strange women and chickens). In the other corner: Mr. and Mrs. Marble, who kidnap hippies, chain them in a dungeon, and force their butler to impregnate them so that after they die in childbirth their babies can be sold to lesbian couples.
All of the details of these events are shown in the film—oh, and more, including the notorious scene in which Divine actually ingests that least appetizing residue of the canine. And not only do we see genitalia in this movie—they do exercises.
Pink Flamingos appeals to that part of our psyches in which we are horny teenagers at the county fair with fresh dollar bills in our pockets, and a desire to see the geek show with a bunch of buddies, so that we can brag about it at school on Monday. (And also because of an intriguing rumor that the Bearded Lady proves she is bearded all over.)
After the restored version of the film has played, director John Waters hosts and narrates a series of outtakes, which (not surprisingly) are not as disgusting as what stayed in the film. We see long-lost scenes in which Divine cooks the chicken that starred in an earlier scene; Divine receives the ears of Cookie, the character who costarred in the scene with her son and the chicken; and Divine, Cookie, and her son sing “We Are the Filthiest People Alive” in Pig Latin.
John Waters is a charming man, whose later films (like Polyester and Hairspray) take advantage of his bemused take on pop culture. His early films, made on infinitesimal budgets and starring his friends, used shock as a way to attract audiences, and that is understandable. He jump-started his career, and in the movie business, you do what you gotta do. Waters’s talent has grown; in this film, which he photographed, the visual style resembles a home movie, right down to the overuse of the zoom lens. (Amusingly, his zooms reveal he knows how long the characters will speak; he zooms in, stays, and then starts zooming out before speech ends, so he can pan to another character and zoom in again.)
After the outtakes, Waters shows the original trailer for the film, in which, not amazingly, not a single scene from the movie is shown. Instead, the trailer features interviews with people who have just seen Pink Flamingos, and are a little dazed by the experience. The trailer cleverly positions the film as an event: Hey, you may like the movie or hate it, but at least you’ll be able to say you saw it! Then blurbs flash on the screen, including one comparing Pink Flamingos to Luis Buñuel’s and Salvador Dali’s Un Chein Andalou (1928), in which a pig’s eyeball was sliced. Yes, but the pig was dead, while the audience for this movie is still alive.
Note: I am not giving a star rating to Pink Flamingos, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object.
Piranha
(Directed by Joe Dante; starring Kevin McCarthy, Bradford Dillman; 1978)
I walked into Piranha wondering why the U.S. government would consider the piranha to be a potential secret weapon. After all, I reasoned, you can lead the enemy to water but you can’t make him wade. I was, it turns out, naive. Piranha is filled with people who suffer from the odd compulsion to jump into the water the very moment they discover it is infested by piranhas.
Consider, for example, the case of Kevin McCarthy. He plays a government scientist who has developed superpiranhas, which can live in salt or fresh water, reproduce with amazing speed, and are smarter than your average fish. If anybody knows how dangerous these piranhas are, Kevin McCarthy does. And yet when a little kid’s father falls into the river and is gobbled up, and then the kid is clinging to the top of an overturned canoe, and Kevin McCarthy sees him, what does Kevin McCarthy do? Why, jumps in the water, of course, and swims toward the kid, and is eaten.
He is the first of many victims. By the time this movie is over, half a kids’ summer camp and three-quarters of a crowd of potential homesite buyers have been eaten alive. That often happens to potential homesite buyers, but for the kids it’s rotten luck.
There they are, the little tykes, splashing about in their inner tubes when the deadly piranhas attack. The kids bleed a lot, and people in the audience cheer a lot, and finally there is this to be said: It is in the nature of a piranha to eat flesh, so the piranha can be forgiven. But why is it in the nature of a movie audience to cheer?
This movie has really bad special effects. We kinda expect that, though, since it’s hard to actually show thousands of tiny fish ripping peoples’ legs apart. It’s a good thing that it’s hard, too—because if it were easy the producers would have shown it. Because it’s so hard, what we get instead is a weird noise on the sound track, like a window fan being fed Styrofoam. And what we see are dozens of piranhas that share a curious trait: They all swim at exactly the same speed and without moving anything. That’s probably because they’re phony little models being pulled through the water.
The movie’s plot is mostly an excuse for showing people thrashing about in bloody water. When it gets more specific, though, it turns out to be a rip-off of the first two Jaws movies. In both of them, you will recall, the danger of shark attacks was concealed by venal real estate speculators who didn’t want to scare the buyers away. That’s the case this time, too: The Realtor throws a party for prospective homesite buyers and denies that there are piranhas in the lake until most of his would-be customers have been digested. Implausible, you say? Try telling that to the piranhas. Next I am anticipating a movie called Realtor.
Pirates
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Walter Matthau; 1986)
There hasn’t been a pirate movie in a long time, and after Roman Polanski’s Pirates, there may not be another one for a very long time. This movie represents some kind of low point for the genre that gave us Captain Blood. It also gives us a new pirate image to ponder. After Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power—Walter Matthau? Matthau is only partially visible behind his makeup and his costumes, but the part we can see appears to be totally at a loss to answer this question: What is Walter Matthau doing on the bounding main, wearing a peg leg?
The movie stars Matthau as Captain Red, a vile old swashbuckler who eats fishhooks for breakfast. Cast adrift in the open sea, he is picked up by a passing Spanish galleon and soon learns that the ship’s cargo is a priceless golden throne. He sets about trying to steal the booty, but not before the movie bogs down in a hopeless quagmire of too much talk, too many characters, and ineptly staged confrontations in which everyone stands around wondering what to do next.
Pirates proves, if nothing else, that Matthau is not an action star and that Polanski is not an action director. We kind of knew that already. Matthau is, however, a very capable comedy actor, and there are times when Polanski seems to be trying for comedy, although search me if you can find a laugh in this movie. One of Polanski’s worst films was The Fearless Vampire Killers, and again this time, he is totally adrift trying for laughs with an expensive takeoff of a B-movie genre.
The real star of the movie is the Neptune, the full-size, functional galleon that was constructed as a set for most of the scenes. It’s one of the finest sailing ships I’ve ever seen in a movie, but I couldn’t see much of it, because Polanski steadfastly refuses to give us blood-stirring shots of the Neptune plowing through the waves. He begins with a real ship, then treats it like a studio set.
The real tragedy of Pirates may be that the movie was more of a deal than an inspiration. Polanski wrote the script twelve years ago, shortly after finishing Chinatown, and it languished on his agent’s desk until Tarak Ben Ammar, a wealthy Tunisian, finally signed on as producer. Polanski had gone eight years without a movie (his last film was Tess), and no doubt he was happy to have the work. But Pirates should never have been made, at least not by a director with no instinctive sympathy for the material, and not by an actor whose chief inspiration seems to be the desire to be a good sport.
A Place for Lovers
(Directed by Vittorio De Sica; starring Faye Dunaway, Marcello Mastroianni; 1969)
A Place for Lovers is the most godawful piece of pseudo-romantic slop I’ve ever seen. I did see it. Yes. I sat there in the dark, stunned by disbelief. Could Vittorio de Sica possibly have directed it? De Sica? Who made Bicycle Thief? Even a director who had made no movies would have a hard time making one as bad as this.
It is about a beautiful woman (Faye Dunaway) who has an incurable disease and takes up with an engineer (Marcello Mastroianni) who designs big plastic bags of water that are supposed to bring an end to racetrack accidents. They go up to a ski lodge and ponder at each other. Ponder, ponder, ponder. When Faye gets all pondered out, she takes the Jeep and drives into town to enigmatically threaten suicide. But she never kills herself, alas.
Instead, she lingers on during some of the most incredibly static scenes ever put on film. There’s a byplay involving a stray dog that she rescues from the dogcatcher and then (apparently) abandons. Either she abandons the dog or the script does. The screenplay was written by no less than five writers, who were possibly locked into separate rooms and forbidden to communicate.
