I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, page 6
All of this time the film has been performing a subtle striptease involving Shandurai, who has been seen in various stages of partial or suggested nudity. Now, at the end, we see her breasts as she lies alone in bed. I mention this because it is so transparently a payoff; Godard said the history of cinema is the history of boys photographing girls, and Bertolucci’s recent films (like Stealing Beauty) underline that insight.
I am human. I am pleased to see Thandie Newton nude. In a film of no pretension, nudity would not even require any justification; beauty is beauty, as Keats did not quite say. But in Besieged we have troublesome buried issues. This woman is married to a brave freedom fighter. She says she loves and admires him. Now, because Mr. Kinsky has sold his piano to free her husband, she gets drunk and writes several drafts of a note before settling on one (“Mr. Kinsky, I love you”). She caresses herself and then steals upstairs and slips into his bed. In the morning, her freed husband stands outside the door of the flat, ringing the bell again and again—ignored.
If a moral scale is at work here, who has done the better thing: A man who went to prison to protest an evil government, or a man who freed him by selling his piano? How can a woman betray the husband she loves and admires, and choose a man with whom she has had no meaningful communication?
To be fair, some feel the ending is open. I felt the husband’s ring has gone unanswered. Some believe the ending leaves him in uncertain limbo. If this story had been by a writer with greater irony or insight, I can imagine a more shattering ending, in which Mr. Kinsky makes all of his sacrifices, and Shandurai leaves exactly the same note on his pillow—but is not there in the morning.
The film’s need to have Shandurai choose Mr. Kinsky over her husband, which is what I think she does, is rotten at its heart. It turns the African man into a plot pawn, it robs him of his weight in the mind of his wife, and then leaves him standing in the street. Besieged is about an attractive young black woman choosing a white oddball over the brave husband she says she loves. What can her motive possibly be? I suggest the character is motivated primarily by the fact that the filmmakers are white.
The Beyond
(Directed by Lucio Fulci; starring Catriona MacColl, Giovanni De Nava; 1981)
The Beyond not only used to have another title, but its director used to have another name. First released in 1981 as Seven Doors of Death, directed by Louis Fuller, it now returns in an “uncut original version” as The Beyond, directed by Lucio Fulci.
Fulci, who died in 1996, was sort of an Italian Hershell Gordon Lewis. Neither name may mean much to you, but both are pronounced reverently wherever fans of zero-budget schlock horror films gather. Lewis was the Chicago-based director of such titles as Two Thousand Maniacs, She-Devils on Wheels, and The Gore-Gore Girls. Fulci made Zombie and Don’t Torture the Duckling. Maybe that was a temporary title, too.
The Beyond opens in “Louisiana 1927,” and has certain shots obviously filmed in New Orleans, but other locations are possibly Italian, as was (probably) the sign painter who created the big DO NOT ENTRY sign for a hospital scene. It’s the kind of movie that alternates stupefyingly lame dialogue with special-effects scenes in which quicklime dissolves corpses and tarantulas eat lips and eyeballs.
The plot involves . . . excuse me for a moment, while I laugh uncontrollably at having written the words “the plot involves.” I’m back. The plot involves a mysterious painter in an upstairs room of a gloomy, Gothic Louisiana hotel. One night carloads and boatloads of torch-bearing vigilantes converge on the hotel and kill the painter while shouting, “You ungodly warlock!” Then they pour lots of quicklime on him, and we see a badly made model of his body dissolving.
Time passes. A woman named Liza (played by Catriona MacColl, who was named “Catherine” when the director was named “Louis”), inherits the hotel, which needs a lot of work. Little does she suspect it is built over one of the Seven Doors of Evil that lead to hell. She hires a painter, who falls from a high scaffold and shouts “The eyes! The eyes!” Liza’s friend screams, “This man needs to get to a hospital!” Then there are ominous questions, like “How can you fall from a four-foot-wide scaffold?” Of course, one might reply, one can fall from anywhere, but why did he have a four-foot-wide scaffold?
Next Liza calls up Joe the Plumber (Giovanni de Nava), who plunges into the flooded basement, wades into the gloom, pounds away at a wall, and is grabbed by a horrible thing in the wall, which I believe is the quicklimed painter, although after fifty years it is hard to make a firm ID.
Let’s see. Then there is a blind woman in the middle of a highway with a seeing-eye dog, which later attacks her (I believe this is the same woman who was in the hotel in 1927), and a scene in a morgue, where the wife of one of the victims (the house painter, I think, or maybe Joe) sobbingly dresses the corpse (in evening dress) before being attacked by acid from a self-spilling jar on a shelf.
But my favorite scene involves the quicklimed decomposed corpse, which is now seen in a hospital next to an oscilloscope that flatlines, indicating death. Yes, the rotting cadaver is indeed dead—but why attach it, at this late date, to an oscilloscope? Could it be because we’ll get a shot in which the scope screen suddenly indicates signs of life? I cannot lie to you. I live for moments like that.
Fulci was known for his gory special effects (the Boston critic Gerald Peary, who has seen several of his films, cites one in which a woman vomits up her intestines), and The Beyond does not disappoint. I have already mentioned the scene where the tarantulas eat eyeballs and lips. As the tarantulas tear away each morsel, we can clearly see the strands of latex and glue holding it to the model of a corpse’s head. Strictly speaking, it is a scene of tarantulas eating makeup.
In a film filled with bad dialogue, it is hard to choose the most quotable line, but I think it may occur in Liza’s conversations with Martin, the architect hired to renovate the hotel. “You have carte blanche,” she tells him, “but not a blank check!”
The movie is being revived around the country for midnight cult shows. Midnight is not late enough.
Beyond and Back
(Directed by James L. Conway; starring Brad Crandall; 1978)
The makers of Beyond and Back were also responsible, if memory serves, for another film called In Search of Noah’s Ark. It figures. At the end of that one they were still searching for Noah’s Ark—they never found it. At the end of Beyond and Back we’re back, all right—but were we beyond?
The movie’s another one of those pseudo-scientific laundry lists of half-baked psychic theories. There may be something to the theories, all right, but there’s never anything to the movies. They’re booked into half the theaters in town and promoted with a hard-sell TV campaign, on the theory that enough suckers will be parted from their money before the word gets out that it’s a turkey.
Beyond and Back gives turkeys a bad name. It exists on about the same cinematic level as an army training film or one of those junior high chemistry movies in which the experiments never quite worked. To be sure, the narrator is presented as a genuine authentic intellectual; we can tell because he’s got a beard and glasses and stands in front of bookshelves and learnedly caresses bound volumes of the Journal of the American Psychical Society. But what does he tell us, really?
Well, he tells us for one thing that there is strong scientific evidence that human beings have souls, but that dogs do not. We see a nineteenth-century scientist making this discovery. He measures people and dogs at the time of their deaths to see if their bodies lose weight at the moment their souls depart. The people lose weight but the dogs do not. (The scientist had “delicate scales” attached to the deathbeds—scales so delicate, the narrator intones, they could measure to within two-tenths of an ounce! That is not a very small weight, as anyone who has observed the gradual shrinkage over the years of Hershey bars will have noticed.)
But never mind: The scientist discovered that his patients did lose weight when they died, and deduced that the human soul weighs “between half and three-quarters of an ounce.” Given the factor for error in the experiment, which was a fifth of an ounce, you will see that this was not exactly the most precise experiment since Franklin flew his kite. (I cannot resist recalling that in Catholic school, we were told about a similar experiment; the only difference was that the experiment revealed no difference in weight—because the soul, of course, is not physical, and so scientists were stupid to even try to weigh it.)
There are other tiny flaws in the picture, as in the episode depicting the death of an army private during World War II. He was dead, all right: The doctor and the nurse agreed. But he still had consciousness, and his astral body, he tells us, rose from his physical body and walked around the room, saw strange bright glows coming from the sky, witnessed a display of lights, walked down a strange street in a strange city, talked to God, and was back in bed. All in nine minutes.
The flaw here is that although the man’s spiritual body could not touch anything (his hands passed right through telephone poles with a whoosh), he is clearly seen opening the closet door in his hospital room. Fair’s fair: They can’t have it both ways.
But perhaps I’m being too hard to please. This is a film, after all, which permits certain inconsistencies, as when we share with Louisa May Alcott the experience of seeing her sister’s soul rise from the body, looking like a small puff of steam from a teakettle and obviously weighing nothing like half an ounce—give or take a fifth of an ounce, of course.
Beyond the Door
(Directed by Oliver Hellman; starring Juliet Mills, Richard Johnson; 1975)
“Where’s Jessica?” asks her worried husband, when she disappears during a birthday party for the children. He finds her in the bathroom, regurgitating pints, maybe gallons, of blood. “Honey, are you all right?” he asks, in the understatement, or underquestion, of the year. She allows that she feels a little weak. They agree she ought to get more rest. The whole movie is this way: maddeningly inappropriate in the face of its horrors.
And yet Beyond the Door is one of the top-grossing movies in the country right now. Why? Maybe because at some dumb, fundamental level, it really does live it up to, or down to, its promise. It’s not well acted, its “Possessound” audio sounds routed through the ventilation system, and the print looks like it was left too long in demonic possession.
But it’s got one hell of an ad campaign. The TV spots and the trailer on the viewer in front of the theater show all sorts of delightful horrors, a menacing voice dares you to see it and, inside the theater, there’s a party atmosphere. Parts of the movie play almost as comedy. I’m usually disturbed when people laugh at violence, but in a movie like Beyond the Door, the laughs seem almost appropriate.
That’s during the earlier parts of the movie, when mysterious hands reach out to touch shoulders in darkened rooms, and it turns out it’s just the husband patting his wife. In the later stages, though, when Jessica (Juliet Mills—yes, Juliet Mills) begins to turn green and talk like the Big Bopper, the movie’s just conventionally disgusting. We get green vomit, brown vomit, blood, levitations, and other manifestations of the devil.
He is, by the way, in Jessica’s womb. She has this short-order pregnancy that proceeds so rapidly she’s three months’ pregnant within a week (if that’s the way to describe it). The mysterious stranger seems to have the answer, and after saving her husband from being run over by a truck, he offers several enigmatic epigrams such as, “Some people attract . . . misfortune.”
Beyond the Poseidon Adventure
(Directed by Irwin Allen; starring Michael Caine, Sally Field, Karl Malden, Shirley Jones; 1979)
The original Poseidon Adventure began, of course, with the giant ocean liner Poseidon being flip-flopped by a massive tidal wave. What happened then has become legend. In the midst of a New Year’s Eve celebration, the movie’s cast was trapped in the upside-down ballroom, which is what New Year’s Eve feels like anyway, and, in one of the greatest coincidences in the history of casting, all of the stars were saved and all of the extras were drowned.
The stars then had to struggle up the down staircase to the bottom of the boat, which, if you are following me closely, was by then above the water. And, to save their lives, they had to attempt to cut through the thick steel bottom and thus to daylight and so on. So far so good. But what do you do for a sequel?
I posed this question to Irwin Allen, creator of the Poseidon movies and The Swarm and The Towering Inferno, during one sunny afternoon in southern California when disasters were the last thing on his mind. He said he had an idea. It was, in all candor, he said, a great idea. The survivors of the Poseidon would be rescued and taken to land in Italy and be placed on a train which would go through a tunnel in the Alps, and the tunnel would collapse and everyone would be trapped under the mountain.
Irwin Allen cleared his throat modestly. What, he asked, did I think about his idea? It was, I said, a great idea, terrific if not actually stupendous. But I had a better idea. Allen didn’t seem too enthralled, but I told it to him anyway. (There is, by the way, nothing quite so glazed as the eyes of a movie producer who has just seen his interviewer put his Pentel Rolling Marker away and start to speak, but I persisted.)
Here’s what happens, I said. After everybody fights his or her way to the top and/or bottom of the boat, surviving fires and floods and explosions, another big tidal wave comes along and turns the great ship over again! And so the hapless survivors have to retrace their steps!
It makes no sense, said Allen, because (a) he probably wouldn’t be able to reassemble the original cast, and (b) lots of the original cast members, like Shelley Winters and Gene Hackman, were killed in the original movie—so who you gonna top-line?
Hackman’s gone for sure, I conceded. He lost his grip and fell into the flaming oil. But in the case of Winters—well, she says in the movie that she won the underwater swimming competition at the Young Womens’ Hebrew Association, and so maybe at the beginning of the sequel she comes up gasping, and you go on from there. Irwin Allen mulled over that for a fraction of a second, and then, almost inevitably, our interview was over.
Therefore it was with a great deal of curiosity that I went to see Beyond the Poseidon Adventure in order to see how he’d finally worked out the sequel, without my help. And I know you think at this point that I’m going to give away the ending, but don’t stop reading now. I wouldn’t dream of giving away the ending. What I will give away is the beginning.
On the morning after the Poseidon’s disastrous night, tugboat captain Michael Caine and sidekick Sally Field get back on board the Poseidon and find leftover survivors who were not drowned during the original movie, and then bad guy Telly Savalas puts them all in jeopardy, and then . . .
But what did we really, sincerely, expect anyway, from a movie in which Slim Pickens plays a character named “Tex”? If you can think of a single line of dialogue that Slim Pickens, as “Tex,” wouldn’t say in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, please do not miss this movie, which will be filled with amazements and startling revelations.
Bigfoot
(Directed by Robert F. Slatzer; starring John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Lindsay Crosby; 1971)
Why, you are asking, did I decide to see Bigfoot? Why am I taking your time—time you could spend trimming your toenails and talking to your plants, telling them what nice plants they are—to review Bigfoot? What strange light in the sky, what weird whistling in my ear, what blood-soaked note tied to a rock and thrown through my window, sent me to see Bigfoot?
These are good questions. The cast alone convinced me. Let me put it as simply as I can. If you have ever wanted to see a movie starring John Carradine, Joi Lansing, Lindsay Crosby, Chris Mitchum, and Ken Maynard, then Bigfoot is almost certainly going to be your only chance. Not since Joan Crawford starred in Trog has there been such an opportunity.
Joi Lansing began her career as a model for men’s magazines. She is still startling, especially with a jumpsuit. She parachutes wearing the garment, which conceals a minidress slit to the waist, and a top that is slashed to the belt, and she runs away from Bigfoot for about five minutes in this costume, bouncing through the woods but not (for some reason) from her blouse.
No matter. There is always John Carradine. He plays a backwoods trader with a line of goods packed into the rear of his 1958 Ford station wagon. He stops at a general store run by Ken Maynard (yes, Ken Maynard) and Ken makes a phone call while standing in front of a poster from one of his old movies (Texas Gunfighter, if I remember correctly) wearing the same ten-gallon hat that’s on the poster.
“There have been a lot of strange things going on up in those hills,” he informs the sheriff, after Chris Mitchum’s girlfriend has been carried away by a half-human, half-animal creature with big feet. But the sheriff refuses to go up on the mountain after dark, and so Chris enlists his buddies in a motorcycle gang led by Lindsay Crosby (yes, Lindsay Crosby).
This is no ordinary motorcycle gang. All of its members ride identical brand-new medium-size Yamahas, which are credited in the titles to a Hollywood Yamaha agency. The gang members also wear bright-colored nylon windbreakers with pull-strings at the bottom, and they wear new knit shirts and dress loafers. The girls wear bikinis. The gang’s hairstyle is set by Lindsay Crosby’s receding ducktail.
Meanwhile, Lansing and another girl are tied to trees (saplings would be a better word) by the creatures, and then Lansing is carried off and given to Bigfoot. Bigfoot is usually shot from a camera angle between his toes, making him loom over the camera like King Kong, but when we see him straight-on he looks about five feet ten inches or eleven inches tall. He wears a shaggy costume stitched together out of old, dirty brown shag rugs.
There is an exciting chase through the woods, which is only slowed down a little by the fact that the movie has nine unidentified extras who have to file past the camera. Then Bigfoot runs into a cave. This has us hoping that Joan Crawford will appear and explain that the creature has been misunderstood (in Trog, she went into the cave with a twenty-nine-cent bunch of carrots, calling “Here, Trog?”).
