I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 42
Exploitation films could be a lot of fun. The director of Switchblade Sisters, Jack Hill, directed sixteen of them, including two of my favorites, the Pam Grier films Coffy and Foxy Brown. His other titles included Swinging Cheerleaders, The Big Bird Cage, Snake People, Blood Bath, and Spider Baby. Often they were released more than once, under various titles; Spider Baby became The Liver Eaters, and Switchblade Sisters was also known as The Jezebels and The Playgirl Gang.
What made the Pam Grier pictures stand out from the others was Grier’s own charisma; she was an authentic movie star, and even Hill’s sleazy production values and slapdash photography and editing couldn’t conceal her talent. The problem with Switchblade Sisters is that no one on screen is any better than the talent behind the camera. The movie is badly acted, written, and directed, and while I was watching it I realized that in some unexplained but happy way, the basic level of cinematic talent has improved in the past two decades.
Few new directors today could make a film this bad. Low budgets have nothing to do with it. Consider Robert Rodriguez (whose El Mariachi cost $8,000), Matty Rich (Straight Out of Brooklyn, $24,000), and Edward Burns (The Brothers McMullen, $28,000). Despite their budgets, they are born filmmakers who know where to put a camera, how to write a script, how to cast and direct actors, and how to move things along. By contrast, Switchblade Sisters is a series of tableaux in which stiff actors are grouped in awkwardly composed shots to say things like “Freeze, greaseball!”
The greaseball, by the way, is a sadistic bill collector trying to collect $40 in back payments on a TV set owned by a tearful welfare mother in a building that is otherwise apparently occupied only by Switchblade Sisters. As he takes the elevator to the street, another Sister gets on at every floor (are they psychic, or did they phone ahead and plan the elevator ride?). When they reach the ground floor, the greaseball gets his tie cut off. Heavy.
The plot involves a girl gang named the Jezebels, which hangs out at a burger stand. Maggie (Joanne Nail), a new girl in the neighborhood, refuses to give her seat to Lace (Robbie Lee), the Jezebels’ leader, and that leads to a fight but also to mutual respect. Soon Dominic (Asher Brauner), the leader of the Silver Blades, rapes Maggie—and since he is Lace’s boyfriend, this leads to a certain tension.
One thing leads to another, as the script hurries from cliché to cliché. The Jezebels are thrown into jail, where they are mistreated by a lesbian warden before getting their revenge. Later there’s a hilarious rumble in a roller rink—it’s a shoot-out on skates with automatic weapons—that seems to leave dozens dead, although all but one of the key characters survives.
The movie is wallpapered with the slogans of the era. The cops are “pigs,” the Black Power girl gang is the repository of revolutionary wisdom, there is solidarity between the girl gangs, and at some point we are astonished to be given the information that all of these characters are still in high school, and as juveniles cannot be tried for what seems like a citywide crime wave.
The only real reason for seeing Switchblade Sisters would be to condescend to it, to snicker at its badness. But there are degrees of bad, and this movie falls far below Pauline Kael’s notion of “great trash.” There is also some amusement to be had from the costumes: The mile-wide shirt collars, leather vests, and plaid pants on the men, and the hot pants and thigh boots on the women. But such pleasures are small. Should you actually pay money to see this movie at a time when Welcome to the Dollhouse, The Rock, Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I Shot Andy Warhol are playing? I don’t think so.
Tai-Pan
(Directed by Daryl Duke; starring Bryan Brown, Kyra Sedgwick; 1986)
Tai-Pan is the embodiment of those old movie posters where the title is hewn from solid rock and tiny figures scale it with cannons strapped to their backs, while the bosoms of their women heave in the foreground. It tells the saga of men who were larger than life, except for their brains, and of the women who loved them, lost them, left them, returned to them, double-crossed them, bore their children, oppressed their servants, and still found time to rend their hearts and their underwear.
The China Coast, 1842. The Chinese object, not unreasonably, to the British practice of buying opium from the Chinese and then selling it back to them for their silver. British warships are sent to pound the Chinese mainland, and then a treaty is signed giving England the right to operate Hong Kong as a free port.
But who will control Hong Kong? Will it be Dirk Struan, the lusty buccaneer, or Tyler Brock, the sniveling cheat? Both are extraordinary men. For one thing, they do not age visibly during the several decades of their rivalry. The movie is a little cagey about its exact time span, but try to figure this out: Struan has two grown sons near the beginning of the story, and so he must be at least forty or even forty-five when the auction is held to sell the land on which Hong Kong will be built. And yet he is still fit enough to fight a duel in the midst of a raging hurricane after principal construction has been finished on the original city. The women also hold up remarkably well—better than the buildings, which fall down around everybody’s ears in the stirring climax.
Struan (Bryan Brown) is the kind of man who never apologizes and never explains. He has a British wife who came out to Hong Kong, took one look around, and went back home forever, sending him a son as a memento. He has a Chinese mistress and a Chinese son (by an earlier mistress). Brock (John Stanton) has a son, too—a vicious torturer and killer. Both fathers hope their boys will grow up to inherit Hong Kong, and soon we are on the edge of our seats with suspense over who will prevail: Will it be the two noble heirs to a hero’s blood, or the snot nose sadist?
Life in early Hong Kong seems to have centered on protracted boudoir scenes, interrupted by beauty contests, formal balls, sword fights, and stormy weather, with the occasional odd bit of perfunctory diplomacy. By my estimate, twice as much time is spent on the fancy-dress contest as on the negotiations over the opium trade.
Of the women of Tai-Pan, it can be said that Joan Collins could have played each and every one of them at some point in her career. My favorite is Mary Sinclair (Katy Behean), who comes out to Hong Kong as a simple English lass and, through pluck and dedication, becomes a successful prostitute, inspiring the immortal line, “You’re not the Mary Sinclair I knew.” Then there is May-May (Joan Chen), Brown’s Chinese mistress, who will-will. Their most tender moment comes when she loses face with him and wants to commit suicide, and he helps her regain face by whipping her but not really hitting her very hard. You gotta love this guy.
The conflict in the movie centers on who will be the Tai-Pan, or British ruler, of Hong Kong. Brock buys up a lot of Struan’s promissory notes to force him into bankruptcy, but Struan is able to raise the money in the nick of time through a loan from the industrious Sinclair, who is the kind of girl Marlene Dietrich had in mind when she observed that you don’t get to be known as Shanghai Lil in one night.
Brock remains bitter over the years and vows that he will have his revenge, and that leads to the big sword fight during the hurricane. Then all is calm, and Struan observes that we are in the “eye of the hurricane.” This must be some hurricane, because the eye alone lasts longer than some of the movie’s whole decades, providing Struan with time to return home for the ending, which is romantic, glorious, tempest-tossed, tragic, and way overdue.
Teaching Mrs. Tingle
(Directed by Kevin Williamson; starring Helen Mirren, Marisa Coughlan; 1999)
Helen Mirren is a very good actress. All too good for Teaching Mrs. Tingle, where she creates a character so hateful and venomous that the same energy, more usefully directed, could have generated a great Lady Macbeth. She is correct to believe that comic characters are best when played straight. They depend on the situation to make them funny. There is nothing funny about the situation in Teaching Mrs. Tingle.
The movie resembles Election in its attempt to deal with the dog-eat-dog world of ambitious high-school students, where grade points can make an enormous difference. But it lacks that movie’s sly observations about human nature, and bludgeons the audience with broad, crude, creepy developments. Here is a movie that leaves us without anyone to like very much, and no one to care about. It was written and directed by Kevin Williamson, whose screenplays for the Scream pictures depend on comic slasher situations for their appeal; here, required to create more believable characters, he finds the wrong ones for this kind of story.
Katie Holmes stars as Leigh Ann Watson, an honor student only a few percentage points shy of becoming class valedictorian. Much depends on the grade she gets in history, a class that Mrs. Tingle (Mirren) rules with an iron fist and cruel sarcasm. She seems to take an almost erotic delight in humiliating her students in public, and singles out Leigh Ann for special ridicule, maybe just because she’s smart and pretty.
Also in the picture: Jo Lynn Jordan (Marisa Coughlan), Leigh Ann’s best friend; their classmate and friend, Luke Churner (Barry Watson), who combines the better qualities of slobs and oafs; and Trudie Tucker (Liz Stauber), who is Leigh Ann’s bitter rival for valedictorian. Oh, and there’s Michael McKean as the high school principal; Mrs. Tingle knows he’s in AA and threatens to blackmail him for secret drinking. And Coach Wenchell (Jeffrey Tambor), whose relationship with Mrs. Tingle is reflected in his nickname, Spanky (in this case it is best spelled Spankee).
Leigh Ann turns in a history project in the form of a journal that might have been kept by a Pilgrim woman; it’s leather-bound, with meticulous calligraphy and decorations, and would make the judges of the History Book Club weep with gratitude. Mrs. Tingle scornfully mocks it after only glancing at the front page. Later, she pounces on the three friends in the gym. Luke has stolen a copy of Mrs. Tingle’s final exam, and stuffs it into Leigh Ann’s backpack, where Mrs. Tingle finds it. Now Leigh Ann faces expulsion.
All of this serves as setup to the heart of the movie, which is spent with Mrs. Tingle tied to her bed while the three students desperately try to figure out what to do next. If this were a serious hostage or kidnapping movie, some of the resulting material might seem appropriate. Mirren approaches Mrs. Tingle like a prisoner of war in a serious film, playing mind games with her captors. There are scenes that are intended as farce (unexpected arrivals and phone calls), but they’re flat and lifeless. We have no sympathy for Mrs. Tingle, but at least she has life, while the three students are simply constructions—walking, talking containers for the plot.
Is it possible that some high school students hate their teachers so much that they’ll play along with Teaching Mrs. Tingle? I doubt it, because Mrs. Tingle isn’t hateful in an entertaining way. She belongs in one of those anguished South American movies about political prisoners and their captors facing ethical dilemmas. And the kids belong in Scream 3.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
(Directed by Michael Pressman; starring Paige Turco; 1991)
I bent over backward to be fair to the first movie about the Teenage Mutant Turtles. It was, I wrote, “probably the best possible Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie.” Now we have the sequel, subtitled The Secret of the Ooze. I may not get what I want, but I get what I deserve.
Once again, here are the four superhero turtles, their friends Keno and April, their enemy the Shredder, his buddies the Foot Gang, and the maddening Turtle theme music, which sounds like an berserk merry-go-round. There is also a mad scientist, necessary to explain additional details about how the turtles got that way.
Kids like the turtles. A recent national survey reported that 95 percent of grade-school teachers could trace aggressive, antisocial classroom behavior to the Ninja Turtles—high praise. As someone who was raised on Superman, Batman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman, I think the kids are getting the short end of the stick. What kind of a superhero is an amphibian who lives in sewers, is led by a rat, eats cold pizza, and is the product of radioactive waste? Is this some kind of a cosmic joke on the kids, robbing them of their birthright, a sense of wonder? Or is it simply an emblem of our drab and dreary times?
One disturbing thing about the turtles is that they look essentially the same. All that differentiates them, in the Nintendo game that gave them birth, is their weapons. It’s as if the whole sum of a character’s personality is expressed by the way he does violence. The turtles are an example of the hazards of individuality. They hang out together, act together, fight together, and have a dim collective IQ that expresses itself in phrases like “Cowabunga, dude.”
This is the way insecure teenage boys sometimes talk in a group, as a way of creating solidarity, masking fears of inadequacy, and forming a collective personality that is stupider than any individual member of it. The way you attain status in the group is by using violence to defend it against outsiders. People raised on these principles run a risk of starring in videotapes of police brutality.
I liked the older superheroes better. The ones that stood out from a crowd, had their own opinions, were not afraid of ridicule, and symbolized a future of truth and justice. Superman represented democratic values. Today’s kids are learning from the Turtles that the world is a sinkhole of radioactive waste, that it’s more reassuring to huddle together in sewers than take your chances competing at street level, and that individuality is dangerous. Cowabunga.
The Tenant
(Directed by Roman Polanski; starring Roman Polanski, Shelley Winters, Melvyn Douglas; 1976)
Roman Polanski’s The Tenant was the official French entry at Cannes last May, and in the riot to get into the press screening one man was thrown through a glass door and two more found themselves in the potted palms. It’s a wonder nobody was killed in the rush to get out. The Tenant is not merely bad, it’s an embarrassment. If it didn’t have the Polanski trademark, we’d probably have to drive miles and miles and sit in a damp basement to see it.
Like Last Tango in Paris, it involves the apartment shortage in Paris. An earnest and shy young man (Polanski, very earnest and shy) applies for the apartment of a young woman who attempted suicide and is in the hospital. The woman dies and Polanski gets the apartment. It’s in a tall, gloomy building inhabited by hateful, spiteful people who are always spying on each other. And it has a haunted bathroom; every time Polanski looks in through the bathroom window (which he does quite frequently), there’s someone standing there motionless, looking straight back at him.
Polanski throws a modest little housewarming party, and all hell breaks loose. Every other tenant in the building complains about the noise. Indeed, every time Polanski moves a chair, shifts a cabinet, plays the radio, or even coughs, the people upstairs and downstairs start banging on the walls for quiet (it’s here that the movie most closely approaches a horror story).
Polanski eventually decides that the building itself is malevolent, and the people in it are out to get him. He is wrong; actually, all they want is a little quiet. But Polanski is paranoid, and that’s the movie’s basic problem. If he thought he were paranoid but the people really were after him, then there’d be some nice fun in the tradition of no more than perhaps six dozen movies already this year. But because he really is paranoid, and we know he is, the movie’s just a study of his downward spiral.
And what a spiral. He becomes convinced that the other tenants are trying to turn him into the woman who committed suicide. He puts on her clothes and makeup, and buys shoes and a wig. He convinces himself, at times, that he is the dead woman. In an ending that must rank among the most ridiculous ever fashioned for an allegedly reputable movie, he dresses in drag, hurls himself from the same window the former tenant used, fails to kill himself, climbs back upstairs, and throws himself out again.
There is then an ironic ending that will come as a complete surprise to anyone who has missed every episode of Night Gallery or the CBS Mystery Theater. It turns out that—but never mind, never mind. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard an audience talk back to the ending of a horror film. The Tenant might have made a decent little twenty-minute sketch for one of those British horror anthology films in which Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Vincent Price pick up a little loose change. As a film by Polanski, it’s unspeakably disappointing.
The Thing with Two Heads
(Directed by Lee Frost; starring Ray Milland, Roosevelt Grier; 1972)
What a heck of a thing to happen to a guy. He’s a black man, convicted of murder and unable to persuade anyone of his innocence. He’s sentenced to the electric chair (apparently because the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction doesn’t include American International Pictures). He’s willing to do anything to get another chance at life, so he volunteers for a weird medical experiment. The next thing he knows, he has Ray Milland’s head parked alongside his left ear. This leads us to a philosophical point: Is it better to be alive with Ray Milland’s head plugged into your neck, or to be dead?
Most of us would probably take Ray Milland, I guess. It’s not often you get to meet a real movie star. But Roosevelt Grier, who plays the escaped convict, doesn’t have such an easy choice.
The problem is that Ray Milland is an evil scientist who dreamed up the head transplant in order to ditch his old body because he was having a lot of trouble with arthritis. His sinister plan is to wait until his head grows on—and then cut Roosevelt Grier’s head off! Not only that, but Milland is a racist with a line of lousy cracks about watermelon for dessert.
Some days you just can’t win. It’s bad enough to try to work with a veteran actor breathing down your back—but in your ear?
