End of the Month Mini-Reviews

I've been sick this past week with a yucky summer cold. I usually like to write blogs late at night so my high doses of Robitussin has kept me from being conscious during my peak writing hours. Not to mention the general crappiness I've felt. So I'm tardy on a few reviews I've been wanting to do. Rather than devote whole blogs on some of the great movies I've watched recently, I think I'm just going to summarize the highlights of the June.


I'm sure if you live near a Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video you know that (not so) sadly they're going out of business. I have mixed feelings about this. I was partially disappointed because in this area they are literally the last rental places around. Our Mom and Pop shops have almost completely disappeared so if I ever wanted to see something I didn't want to buy (or wait for an available slot on my Netflix que) I'd just pop into Movie Gallery on my way to the grocery store. On the other hand I often bitched about Movie Gallery. They were insanely over priced and had mostly terrible new movies that didn't interest me. Renting three movies costs somewhere around $20. I always felt ripped off and annoyed at the smug employees. Yet I still went about once a month. I guess I just felt sentimental about going to a store, browsing at all of my options and inevitably compromising my standards to rent something almost at cost. Netflix has been a life saver with it's endless options but the aesthetics of a shop full of movies can't be replaced by that jovial red envelope. But on the other hand, places like Movie Gallery couldn't evolve with the advancing technology so they were doomed to fail. Being an opportunist and also having a nasty addiction for buying movies, I've been taking advantage of their going out of business sale. I THOUGHT they had mostly shitty movies but with prices between $2-$6 you start to notice things you might not have before.

I finally saw the classic Jack Hill Blaxploitation movie, Foxy Brown. I only recently have made a special effort to get into the genre, this one really stands out as one of the best. It's so over the top and she's incredibly sexy! Everything about this movie is a perfect example of what it SHOULD be. I also saw Shaft for the first time. File both under "should have seen before now". I liked it a lot but not much could measure up to Foxy Brown and her infinite coolness. I also saw the Jamaican masterpiece The Harder They Come, which I guess also counts as blaxploitation though it plays out to me more like a foreign film. I always love seeing foreign cities in the 60's and 70's. Though I'm sure I've seen movies set in Jamaica, I'd never really seen a Jamaican movie as far as I know. The locations were interesting and the story was exciting and gritty. I always found out that it's almost single handedly responsible for bringing Ska, Rocksteady and Reggae to America. I thought the clips from Django and Jimmy Cliff's finale being an homage to those scenes was a really nice touch. I saw the 1977 version of the Sentinel which I quite enjoyed. It reminded me of Rosemary's Baby though I read that it was supposedly inspired by the Exorcist. I love anything with Burgess Meredith. I especially love the roles he played in the 70's. Old and absent minded, as apposed to his earlier roles where he's young and absent minded. Even more so than the Sentinel, I was enamoured by Don't Look Now. An emotional thriller written by Daphne Du Maurier. A brilliantly paced movie with a truly horrific ending. Beware though: LOTS of naked Donald Sutherland. I saw another underrated horror masterpiece called Of Unknown Origin directed by George P. Cosmatos. Peter Weller vs. a giant-fucking-rat! One of the coolest rat movies I've ever seen, and I'm pretty fond of the genre. Usually I find myself sympathizing with the rats since I used to own some rodent cuties. This rat however was anti-cute! Very slimey and creepy. One of the best creature feature of the month was the Howling 3: the Marsupials. Still trying to find any ozploitation available to me, I came across a cheap copy used at FYE and knew it must be mine. I'm not sure what was my favorite, the clip from "It Came from Uranus" or the creepy birth of the kangaroo were-baby.

I've never seen the second or any of the other Howling films, but I liked it much more than the first. In all it's cheesy glory!




So I finally saw Showgirls. I had seen it edited for TBS with half the movie cut out and animated bras overlayed on their bodies. I thought it was absurd and pretty entertaining. Like I said, $2 movies make you do strange things. I had the sudden urge to OWN Showgirls. As soon as the thought entered my head I couldn't NOT buy it. I thought it might not be as funny with an NC-17 rating. I was wrong. Oh how I was wrong. Seeing Jessie Spano flopping around like a dead fish mid-coitus was one of the greater moments of my life. It really is an epic disasterpiece of embarrassing proportions. It's Golden Raspberry award was well deserved!

The best movie I saw this month was Sammo Hung's Encounter of the Spooky Kind.
 

I love the way the Hong Kongers make black magic movies! This one combines horror, comedy and kung-fu flawlessly! King of Shaw Brothers-esque. Apparently he re-invented the vampire/kung-fu genre which had been done in the past but really gained popularity in the 80's. His comical fight choreography is unparalleled. I ended up watching this movie twice. It's just the kind of outrageous spookfest I love to see and NEED to see more of!

Ok, that's all for now! It's late and I still haven't fully recovered. Time for sleeps!

Blue Sunshine & Patrick

I've always had a penchant for baldness. That would explain my crush on Terry O'quinn circa ALWAYS. I seem to gravitate toward bald characters in movies. I especially love baldness in women! I'm still pining over the hard to find trashterpiece, Bald Headed Betty. Today's feature's initial attraction was the incredible ominous cover featuring a beautiful bald woman soaked in somber blue rays. I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Blue Sunshine. Sometimes I do endless research before watching a movie, other times I like to go into it blind.

A ten year delayed reaction to a bad batch of acid leads a group of well adjusted citizens to have the suckiest kind of flashback. The kind that leads to murder, mayhem and baldness. When one of these post-hippies flips out at a party and kills everyone (in turn, getting hit by a truck and being killed himself), the one survivor (cult actor Zalman King who bears a striking resemblance to Sean Penn!) is framed for the murders. He starts to realize that his predicament is related so some other murders and begins putting the pieces together to prove his innocence.

This being 1976, LSD had pretty much gone out of style. Most of our free love youngsters were now well into adulthood having hung up their peace pipes for polyester suits. It was the dawn of the disco era and closing in on the 80's was going to mean the end of drugsploitation movies of this nature. It had been years since a decent acid movie had been made. In this respect Blue Sunshine really is an under appreciated gem. Not only is it unique to it's decade but it's exploits the "dangers" of psychedelics better than pretty much any movie I've ever seen. It's a scary concept! The feel of this movie immediately reminded me of David Cronenberg, particularly the Brood and They Came from Within. It was directed by Jeff Lieberman who also made Squirm (1976), Just Before Dawn (1981), Remote Control (1988) and more recently Satan's Little Helper (2004).

The final outburst by a giant patchy bodyguard Frankenstein guy in the middle of a disco makes me smile. Did I mention there was baldness?

I ended up watching the marvelous new documentary on Ozploitation (Aussieploitation) Not Quite Hollywood. I was pretty much blown away and completely humbled by this whole world of bad assery I basically didn't even know existed. There was only a hand full of movies I had even heard of let alone scene. After the movie ended I'd immediately ran to the computer and started typing in memorable titles only to realize WHY I hadn't heard of them. A shitload have not made it to dvd in the US! Talk about a bummer! I decided to check out FYE today and see if I could dig anything up. I wasn't unsuccessful, I found several of the more well known Aussie flicks. I decided to start with the one I'd been putting off for years. Everyone's favorite telekinetic coma victim, Patrick.

I can see why this is considered a classic. It's well made and has moments of sheer brilliance (IE: when the doctor is eating the frog) but I'd be lying if I said it didn't leave something to be desired. I thought the pacing was a bit slow with long scenes of dryness. We don't really watch genre films to sit idly for gaps of time. I was most impressed by Robert Thompson who plays Patrick. Being the title character it would make sense that he steals the show but then again he still has no speaking parts. His look is incredibly intense and it was his intensity that carries the whole film. It was directed by Richard Franklin who's a genre film house name having made Fantasm (1976), Road Games (1981), Psycho II (1983) and Cloak and Dagger (1984).

This was obviously an influential movie. Now that I've seen it I can tell that it must have been a big inspiration for Lucio Fulci's Aenigma (1987). Which I happen to love but always read bad things about, mainly that it's a rip-off of Carrie (1976), but If it's a rip-off of anything my vote is on Patrick. This wouldn't have been the only time the Italians ripped off Patrick. On Not Quite Hollywood they show clips from an unofficial sequel called Patrick Viva Ancora aka Patrick Still Lives (1980). It supposed to be terrible but I thought it looked fantastic! As a general rule I find that poorly and cheaply made sequels are often times more fun than the originals. I can't wait to track down a copy of that.

Maybe after all of the excitement of discovering a genre that is new to me and having been curious about this movie for six or seven years I wasn't mentally prepared for what the film actually would be. It has it's moment of trashy goodness but overall it's a very serious psychological thriller. It really is a good movie, perhaps not one of my favorites, but I'm glad I've finally seen it.