I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 4
Students of grade-Z exploitation films may want to take notes about the employment of nudity in this film. Although the bimbos do not remove their clothes in the go-go joint, there is a later scene where they change clothes on the roadside, and we see their bare breasts. However, we never see the faces and breasts of the same women at the same time; the film is carefully edited to show nudity only from the neck down. That leads to the suspicion that body doubles were used to supply the nudity, and that the actresses actually starring in the film never took off anything.
Was this because (a) they refused to, or (b) they were assured there would be no nudity in the film, and then matching nude shots were spliced in later? Good questions, both of them, and I expect we can look forward to the answers in the sequel to this film, which is advertised during the closing titles and will be called Bimbo Barbeque.
At the Earth’s Core
(Directed by Kevin Connor; starring Peter Cushing, Doug McClure; 1976)
Peter Cushing has never said the name “David!” so often before in his life. You remember Peter Cushing. He’s the one in all those British horror films, standing between Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. His dialogue usually runs along the lines of, “But good heavens, man! The person you saw has been dead for more than two centuries!” This time all he says is “David!”
David is played by Doug McClure. You remember Doug McClure. Good. I don’t. McClure plays a rich young American inventor who has financed the Iron Mole, which is a gigantic steam-powered screw, designed to penetrate to Earth’s core. The Mole has been designed by Cushing, an eccentric British inventor, as who would not be after such an invention?
McClure and Cushing settle into their seats and push the appropriate levers and the Mole goes berserk. It forgets all about the hill and screws itself right into the very mantle of the planet itself, emerging in Pellucidar, that mysterious land within Earth. Pellucidar is inhabited by the kinds of characters whose names make me chuckle aloud even as I type them down. There’s Dia, the beautiful slave girl with the heaving bodice, and Ra, her boyfriend, and the evil Ghak, not to mention the impenetrable Hooja. All of these people speak English, you understand, except when it comes to the matter of proper names.
Well, anyway, Doug and the professor step out into this sinister underworld, which is filled with telepathic giant parrots, and the next thing you know they’re on the chain gang. The chain gang spends all day breaking up rocks. You wouldn’t think there would be a rock shortage at Earth’s core, but there you are.
About here, we begin to notice the Captain Video effect. You remember Captain Video. He was a science-fiction hero on the old DuPont TV network. He and his trusty sidekick (Bucky? Rocky?) were forever landing on strange planets and sneaking around rocks. After three weeks, you realized that the rocks were always the same.
Same here. Doug and the Professor sneak around one strange man-eating vegetable, and there’s another one—which is the original vegetable, photographed from a new angle. Meanwhile, the telepathic parrots wander by, opening and closing their beaks by spring action. It’s along about here we begin to really zero in on Dia’s bodice. Let somebody else break up the rocks and clean up after the parrots.
The Awakening
(Directed by Robert Solo; starring Charlton Heston, Susannah York; 1980)
The Awakening is bad in so many ways that I’ll just have space to name a few. It is, for example, completely implausible in its approach to the science of archaeology—so hilariously inaccurate, indeed, that I can recommend this movie to archaeologists without any reservations whatsoever. They’ll bust a gut.
Example. Charlton Heston, a British archaeologist, is searching for the long-lost tomb of the Egyptian queen Kara. He finds it. Well, no wonder: It’s “hidden” behind a gigantic stone door in a mountainside, with big, bold hieroglyphic written all over it. It’s about as hard to find as Men’s Clothing at Marshall Field’s. Anyway, having found this priceless and undisturbed tomb, Heston immediately begins pounding away at the door with a sledgehammer.
Now, even if your knowledge of archaeology is limited to leafing through back issues of National Geographic at the dentist’s, you know that when they make a major find, they’re supposed to spend years dusting off everything with little brushes and making a fetish of not disturbing anything. Not Heston. He even has a team of laborers with pickaxes standing by as backup.
Well, wouldn’t you know, every time Heston hammers at the tomb, his pregnant wife back at the camp doubles up in pain. That’s because, as the movie makes abundantly clear, the spirit of Kara is being reborn in Heston’s baby daughter. There’s also some nonsense about how Heston ignores his wife-to-be with his comely young assistant (Susannah York), and then the movie flashes forward eighteen years, and we veteran Omen watchers prepare for the scenes in which the child becomes aware that she is possessed by a spirit, and that Her Time Has Come.
Great! And none too soon, we’re all thinking. But the movie’s climax is so filled with impossibilities that we’re too busy with the mental rewrite to get scared. For example: Do you believe a priceless tomb would be left open, eighteen years later, so that people could walk right into it? That the operation of a secret door could elude generations of grave robbers, but be solved twice in a matter of minutes? That Heston could walk into a modern museum, move a sarcophagus around on a freight elevator, light candles, lift a two-ton lid with his bare hands, and conduct arcane rituals without attracting the inquiry of a security guard?
If you can believe all those things, then, at the end, when the reborn priestess Kara turns and snarls at the audience, you’ll believe that The Awakening is set for a sequel. Call me an optimist, but I believe this movie is so bad it’ll never be reborn.
*Okay, there’s some nonsense about air jets to push them down—but what happens when they bend over?
The Babe
(Directed by Arthur Hiller; starring John Goodman, Trini Alvarado; 1992)
Say it ain’t so, Babe.
Say you weren’t a sad, tortured person who just happened to be able to slam homers out of the park better than anyone else.
Say this movie is all a lie, and that you were indeed a glorious American hero, the grandest of all the boys of summer, and that it was great fun, at least sometimes, to be the most famous baseball hero of all time.
Let us believe. We need our heroes.
But The Babe doesn’t give us one. Apart from being a bad film in the first place, aside from being superficially written, aside from being shot with little sense of time or place, the movie portrays Babe Ruth as a man almost completely lacking in the ability to have, or to provide, happiness.
Spending these 115 minutes with the Babe is a little like being jammed into the window seat on a long-distance bus, next to a big guy with beer and cigars on his breath and nothing to talk about but his next meal and his last broad. Babe Ruth comes across as a pathetic orphan lacking in all social graces, who grew up into a self-destructive bore and hit a lot of home runs in the process. And then, in the end, when time caught up with him, he never got the message, and almost destroyed the myth that had grown up around him.
No matter how many homers he hit, Ruth would have never become a Great American Hero in the television age. On the radio and in the newspapers, maybe he came across as quite a guy. But to see and hear him—at least as he is portrayed in this movie—is to cringe. After the magical innocence of baseball as painted in Field of Dreams, after the life-affirming Bull Durham, here is a baseball trading card that looks like it was found in the gutter.
The fault is not John Goodman’s. He plays the Babe as written. You can see, watching this movie, that he could have played a lot of other sides of Babe Ruth and made them work. But John Fusco’s screenplay doesn’t seem to like Babe very much. It shows him as an overgrown, recalcitrant kid who had one skill. He could hit the ball. And then it shows him growing up into a human pig who wenched and cheated on those who loved him, who was drunk during many of his games, who was small-minded and jealous, who wasn’t much of a team player, who lost his temper and screamed at the fans, and whose little trot around the bases looked like the outing of a constipated alderman.
Much has been made of the movie’s use of Wrigley Field and a ball park in Danville, Illinois. They’re supposed to re-create the look of the diamonds of Ruth’s day. But the movie seems to keep showing us the same two parks, while giving us subtitles trying to convince us we’re in Baltimore, or Boston. There don’t seem to be many fans in the stands. There is no sense here of baseball. No smell of peanuts and roar of the crowd.
Babe’s first wife, played by Trini Alvarado, is a nice girl who finally can’t stand the reports of Babe’s raids on the brothels and his demands for three girls at a time. The second wife, a Ziegfeld Follies girl played by Kelly McGillis, has been around the block a few times and is less easily shocked. She stays with the Babe, but more out of loyalty and stubbornness, we sense, than because of love.
Her loyalty is more than organized baseball can muster. Ruth is paid well and tolerated by the Yankees as long as he’s hitting, but when his legs and eye start to go, there’s no love lost between them, and no sense of loyalty. He ends up in Boston, where his final days are portrayed as a mixture of shame, anticlimax, and betrayal.
The famous moments are here. The dying kid in the hospital, who Ruth promises he’ll hit two home runs in the next game. The “called shot” in the World Series. The home run record that has never been beaten, except by an asterisk. But at the end of the movie, when we’re thoroughly depressed anyway, do we really need that maudlin scene where a young man follows Ruth off the field after his final game, introduces himself as the kid whose life was saved by those two homers, and gives back the ball that Babe autographed beside the hospital bed? Talk about shameless.
Baby Geniuses
(Directed by Bob Clark; starring Kathleen Turner, Christopher Lloyd; 1999)
Bad films are easy to make, but a film as unpleasant as Baby Geniuses achieves a kind of grandeur. And it proves something I’ve long suspected: Babies are cute only when they’re being babies. When they’re presented as miniature adults (on greeting cards, in TV commercials, or especially in this movie) there is something so fundamentally wrong that our human instincts cry out in protest.
Oh, you can have fun with a baby as a movie character. Look Who’s Talking (1989) was an entertaining movie in which we heard what the baby was thinking. Baby’s Day Out (1994), with its fearless baby setting Joe Mantegna’s pants on fire, had its defenders. But those at least were allegedly real babies. Baby Geniuses is about toddlers who speak, plot, scheme, disco dance, and beat up adults with karate kicks. This is not right.
The plot: Kathleen Turner plays a woman with a theory that babies can talk to each other. She funds a secret underground lab run by Christopher Lloyd to crack the code. Her theory is based on the Tibetan belief that children have Universal Knowledge until they begin to speak—when their memories fade away.
This is an old idea, beautifully expressed by Wordsworth, who said that “heaven lies about us in our infancy.” If I could quote the whole poem instead of completing this review, believe me, we’d all we happier. But I press on. The movie involves a genius baby named Sly, who escapes from the lab and tries to organize fellow babies in revolt. The nauseous sight of little Sly on a disco floor, dressed in the white suit from Saturday Night Fever and dancing to “Stayin’ Alive,” had me pawing under my seat for the bag my Subway Gardenburger came in, in case I felt the sudden need to recycle it.
Every time the babies talk to one another, something weird happens to make it look like their lips are in synch (think of talking frogs in TV commercials). And when the babies do things that babies don’t do (hurl adults into the air, for example), we lose all track of the story while trying to spot the visual trick.
There’s only one way the movie might have worked: If the babies had been really, really smart. After all, according to the theory, they come into this world “trailing clouds of glory” (Wordsworth again: The man can write). They possess Universal Knowledge. Wouldn’t you expect them to sound a little like Jesus, or Aristotle? Or at least Wayne Dwyer? But no. They arrive on this mortal coil (Shakespeare) from that level “higher than the sphery chime” (Milton), and we expect their speech to flow in “heavenly eloquence” (Dryden). But when they open their little mouths, what do they say? “Diaper gravy”—a term used four times in the movie, according to a friend who counted (Cleland).
Yes, they talk like little wise guys, using insipid potty-mouth dialogue based on insult humor. This is still more evidence for my theory that the greatest single influence on modern American culture has been Don Rickles.
B.A.P.S.
(Directed by Robert Townsend; starring Halle Berry, Martin Landau; 1997)
B.A.P.S. is jaw-droppingly bad, a movie so misconceived I wonder why anyone involved wanted to make it. As a vehicle for the talents of director Robert Townsend and actors Halle Berry and Martin Landau, it represents a grave miscalculation; I hope they quickly put it behind them.
The title stands for “Black American Princesses.” Its two heroines are more like tacky Cinderellas. Berry and Natalie Desselle play vulgar and garish homegirls from Decatur, Georgia, whose artificial nails are eight inches long, whose gold teeth sparkle, and whose hairpieces are piled so high on their heads that the concept passes beyond satire and into cruelty.
There is a thin line between satire and offensiveness, and this crosses it. Its portraits of these two working-class black women have been painted with snobbery and scorn. The actresses don’t inhabit the caricatures with conviction. The result is a hurtful stereotype, because the comedy doesn’t work to redeem it. We should sense some affection for them from the filmmakers, but we don’t—not until they receive a magic Hollywood makeover in the later scenes of the movie, and miraculously lose their gold teeth. The movie invites us to laugh at them, not with them, but that’s a moot point since the audience I joined did not laugh at all, except incredulously.
The plot: Berry plays Nisi, a waitress, who hears on MTV about a contest to choose a dancer for a music video and national tour by Heavy D. She shares this news with her friend Mickey (Desselle), a hairdresser, and it fits right into their plans for marrying a rich guy and living on easy street. So they say good-bye to their shiftless boyfriends and fly to L.A. wearing hairstyles so extreme no one behind them on the airplane can see the movie. Funny? No. It could have been funny, but not when the reaction shots are of annoyed white businessmen asking to change their seats.
In L.A. they’re spotted at the audition by a mysterious figure who makes them an attractive offer: Room and board in a Bel Air mansion, and $10,000. What’s the deal? He represents Mr. Blakemore (Landau), a dying millionaire, who has only experienced true love once in his life, many years ago—with Lily, his family’s black maid. Nisi will pose as Lily’s granddaughter and cheer the old guy in his final days on Earth.
There’s more to it than that, of course; it’s all a scam. But Mr. Blakemore inexplicably takes to the women from the moment he sees them. (Nisi, dressed in pink latex and high heels, looks like a hooker, and Mickey looks like her coach.) The plot later reveals details that make it highly unlikely Mr. Blakemore would even for a second have been deceived by the story, but never mind; the movie’s attention span isn’t long enough for it to remember its own setup.
Even though the movie fails as a comedy, someone should have told Landau it was intended to be one. He plays Mr. Blakemore with gracious charm and great dignity, which is all wrong; his deathbed scene is done with such clunky sincerity that one fears Landau actually expected audiences to be moved by it. Not in this movie. The cause of his ill health is left a little obscure, and no wonder, because shortly before his dreadful deathbed scene he’s well enough to join the women in a wild night of disco dancing. You have not lived until you’ve seen Martin Landau discoing. Well, perhaps you have. He is both miscast and misdirected, and seems to labor under the misapprehension that his role should be taken seriously.
Another key character is Manley (Ian Richardson), Blakemore’s butler, who turns up his nose at the first sight of the women, but inevitably comes to like them. The message of the movie, I guess, is that two homegirls can find wealth and happiness if only they wear blonde wigs, get rid of those gold teeth and country vocabularies, and are nice to rich old white men. It gets even better: At one point, the boyfriends from Georgia are flown out to L.A. to share the good luck, and they vow to get their acts together and Plan for Their Futures in a scene that comes way too late in the film for us to believe or care.
The movie was written by the actress Troy Beyer, who has a small role as a lawyer. What was she thinking of? I don’t have a clue. The movie doesn’t work, but was there any way this material could ever have worked? My guess is that African Americans will be offended by the movie, and whites will be embarrassed. The movie will bring us all together, I imagine, in paralyzing boredom.
Battle of the Amazons
(Directed by Al Bradley; starring Lincoln Tate, Lucretia Love; 1973)
Dear Mr. Ebert: I would like to object to consumer fraud in the ads for Battle of the Amazons. They taught us in Greek mythology class that the real Amazons had only one breast so they might better shoot their bows and arrows. So I went running down to the Michael Todd with the intent of seeing an eighty-inch boob and instead I got conned with a pair of forties.
