Repost - My Bloody Valentine

The indexing continues with a look at the only movie to ever combine the celebration of Valentine's Day with the gritty world of mining.

 

Awhile back a friend from my old job mentioned to me that she had recently rented the 1981 holiday slasher flick My Bloody Valentine and remarked that she had been surprised to find out that it was Canadian.  Being the obnoxious geek that I am, I explained to her that it must have been one of the infamous "Tax-Shelter Films" from that period.

In the 70s and 80s, in an attempt to boost the Canadian film industry, the federal government decided that anyone who invested a certain amount of money into the production of a feature film could write off the amount from their taxes.  This did in fact result in the bankrolling of many Canadian movies, but the problem was that rather than put their money into serious and important films, these tax-shelter investors preferred to produce movies that actually had a chance of turning a profit and allow them to make some money out of their tax dodge.  As a result of this a majority of the Tax-Shelter Films ended up being low-budget genre films just like the one currently up for discussion.  

But unlike most of the films from this strange period in Canadian cinema, My Bloody Valentine stands out because rather than deny its Northern origins, it embraces them almost to the point of unintended self-parody.  Fearful of alienating American audiences, the majority of films shot in Canada (even to this day) are either set in specific American locales or in nameless, unidentified places where all hints of Canadiana are carefully kept away from the camera.  This is definitely not the case with this film, though, as it could very well be THE MOST EXPLICITLY CANADIAN MOVIE EVER MADE.  Seriously, the only way the movie could be more Canadian would be if the killer turned out to be a beaver in a hockey mask who killed his victims by stuffing Timbits down their throats.  And in case any movie producers are reading this, THAT is a movie I would very much like to see.

 

From the general hoser behaviour of its characters, the maple syrup thick Canadian accents (I swear I actually heard several examples of the fabled "a-boot"), the constant references to Moosehead Beer and a cast filled with familar Canadian actors (including Don "The Voice of Mok" Francks and Cynthia "Not Quite As Hot As Her Sister Jennifer" Dale) My Bloody Valentine isn't afraid to wear its country of origin on its sleeve, even though it does avoid mentioning it specifically.  In fact this aspect of the movie is so strong, it's difficult for me to judge it in terms of a general audience.  Frequently I found myself so enthralled by the blatent Canuckness of it all, that it never occurred to me whether or not a non-Canadian might find it as amusing as I did.  I admit that to the eyes of a foreigner, My Bloody Valentine could be just another lame slasher movie with some odd accents and a cast of smalltown characters who strangely never talk about football.  I, however, loved every minute of it.

Though I have in the past admitted that I love many of the more obvious slasher movie cliches, I also enjoy it when a movie attempts to subvert them, even if just a little.  To that end, the movie changes things up a bit by featuring a cast of 20-something actors who are actually playing 20-something characters, rather than the usual overaged teenagers.  And rather than taking place at a college/private school/summer camp the film is set in a small mining town, which gives the picture a distinctly blue collar tone not normally seen in the genre.  In fact the film's setting is so unusual, that one cannot help but assume that it was chosen only to credibly provide an excuse for its maniac killer to don his effectively unsettling miner costume of dark overalls, gasmask, flashlight helmet and pick-ax.  That said, the killer's obsession with a particular date--in this case February 14^th aka Valentine's Day--is straight out of the slasher handbook, so all is not completely out of whack.

 

As the film's requisite Creepy Old Man tells the skeptical young miners who hang out in his bar, there's a reason why the town hasn't held a Valentine's Day dance in 20 years.  It all began when two foreman--eager to leave work so they could get cleaned up and go to the dance--left six miners alone in the mine, all of whom were trapped when a methane leak caused an explosion.  It took six weeks to clean up the rubble and only one of the six miners was found alive.  Harry Warden, having lost his mind during the ordeal, resorted to cannibalism to survive and was more than a little pissed at the two foreman who left him and his friends alone in the mine that Valentine's Day.  Wearing his workclothes, he killed the two men with a pick-ax befor being caught and sent to the nearby mental hospital.  Since then all of the town's Valentine's festivities had been canceled, out of fear Harry might escape and return to mete out further vengeance against the town.  But after two decades the story of the killer miner has become the stuff of boogeyman legend and everyone assumes it is safe to start celebrating the holiday of love once again.  It goes without saying that they are mistaken.

 Given the nature of the holiday the movie is centered around, it's only natural that a part of its plot is devoted to a love triangle.  T.J., the film's nominal hero (if only because he manages to survive all the way to the end) is the mayor's son who has returned to the town after failing to make it on his own "out west."  During his absence he left behind Sarah (who also survives, but can't accurately be described as a proper Final Girl) who--never knowing if or when T.J. was going to return--started dating Axel.  Sarah is clearly torn between the man who left her and now wants her back and the man who's been with her ever since T.J. went away, while the audience has trouble figuring out why she's attracted to either of them.  I suspect many folks will find these more dramatic sequences difficult to sit through, but I found myself much taken by the low-rent CBC-ness of it all.  It doesn't hurt that in the final scenes T.J. wears an open shirt, neck-bandana ensemble that is hilariously mesmerizing to behold.

 

Beyond that the film features the standard authority figures trying to keep the return of the murdering maniac a secret, the young adults defying the authority figures and throwing the party anyway and the shocking discovery that the killer isn't who everyone thinks it is.  The gore is kept to a minimum and the filmmakers show an unfortunate restraint in their presentation of sex and nudity.  Unlike most slasher movie victims, who at least get to enjoy penetration and/or a climax before they are killed, all of the amorous folks in this movie get whacked before they can even get past second base.  And those folks who actually expect a movie like this to be frightening (which I've never really understood, but anyway...) will likely be disappointed as director George Milhalka keeps the action as predictable and suspense-free as possible.  Despite this, anyone interested in seeing a completely straight-faced version of Strange Brew should definitely make every attempt to check out My Bloody Valentine.Now before I tally up the official Slasher Statistics, I thought I'd give you a chance to enjoy the song that plays over the closing credits.  I could probably read the credits and find out what it's actually called, but I prefer to just call it "The Ballad of My Bloody Valentine".  Whatever it's called, it's pretty awesome:

 

Slasher Statistics

Body Count: 17 (Onscreen: 5 women and 6 men/Offscreen: 6 miners)

Shower Scenes: 2 (but neither count since the first features a bunch of dudes and in the other the female is fully clothed)

Instances of Nakedity:0 (Booooooo!!!!  Hisssssssss!!!!!)

Obligatory Has Beens: Anyone who calls Don Francks a has been is looking for a mess of fists in their face!

Instruments of Death: Pick-Ax, Explosion, Boiling Weenie Water, Shower Nozzle, Large Drill Bit, Nail Gun, Rope

Moments of Inexplicable Female Jealousy: o

Creepy (and therefore suspicious ) Old Guys: 1 (but he dies too early to probably count)

References to Moosehead: Too many to humanly count.

Amount of Time Required to Correctly Identify Killer: The film fails to provide a crucial clue until the moment of revelation, so you might actually be surprised.  I guessed correctly about an hour in.

Exploding Heads: o

Cheesy References to Other Horror Movies: 1 (Since Valentine's Day in the movie falls on a Saturday, then that means all of the events on the day proceeding it take place on Friday the 13^th)

Utterly Pointless Trivia: The movie's ending was deliberately left open for a sequel and director George Milhalka did actually try to convince Paramount to produce a second film in 2001.  They decided to pursue different projects.

Final Girl Rating: 6 out of 10

Repost - The Prowler

I've mentioned before in previous posts that I've been going through a real horror movie dvd collecting phase--to the point that I have a stockpile of dozens (maybe even as much as a hundred) of movies I've yet to actually sit down and watch.  To do something about this, and make it so I don't have to wonder what I'll post about on Sunday's, I've decided to do an online index of my collection, in which I'll write a post about one of these movies each week.  To keep things easy for me, I've broken them up into different sub-genres, which I will focus on individually until I run out of movies and have to move on to the next one.  I am going to start off with the Slasher genre, which will probably take me all the way to September or October to complete.

And for the premiere edition of this regular feature (and I mean it this time, damn it!) I've decided to take a short look at an occasionally-entertaining and frequently gory movie that was made in 1981 during the peak of the sub-genre's popularity.

 

Also released as Rosemary's Killer in Europe, The Prowler is best remembered today for featuring some of Tom Savini's more memorable slasher movie make-up effects and for being the film that got director Joseph Zito the job of putting together the fourth (and some believe best) film in the immortal Friday the 13^th franchise.

Shot for $1,000,000 in New Jersey (which comes as a surprise, since it so clearly resembles many of the Canadian-made tax shelter films from that same period) The Prowler, like many other early slashers, attempts to be as much a mystery as a straight-ahead body count picture.  To this end the film begins with stock news reel footage of soldiers returning home from WWII, during which a narrator informs us that:

 

For some--the psychological victims of war--it will be a long road back.  These men will need time to rebuild the lives they set aside when Uncle Sam called.  For others--the G.I.s of the "Dear John" letters--it means starting over, replacing what they have lost.  They faced one challange and won!  They can win this one too!

At this the movie then begins to pan down one of these "Dear John" letters as we hear the voice of a young woman, Rosemary, read it aloud, explaining to her overseas beau that she can no longer wait for him and needs to move on with her life.  It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the recipient of this letter is probably going to prove to be a little less than understanding.

With this set up, we are taken to a town called Avalon Bay and informed that it is June 28^th 1945, 'The Night of the Graduation Dance."  Given the movie's low budget, The Prowler deserves some credit for bringing some authenticity to this period sequence.  Though Zito admits in his commentary that the costumes were all eight years out of date, having been found in a warehouse with tags labeled "1953" still sewn inside them, these scenes manage to avoid being as overtly anachronistic as others found in similar movies from the height of the slasher era.  It helps that it's a short sequence that ends when the unnamed soldier her letter was addressed to arrives to impale Rosemary and her new boyfriend with a pitchfork, indicating that he didn't take the rejection as well as she had hoped.
 
We then jump ahead exactly 35 years later and are introduced to our heroes and future victims, learning in the process that they are about to hold the first Graduation Dance since the two kids were murdered all those years ago.  It soon becomes clear that our two main protagonists are an amazingly bland blonde named Pam (Vicky Dawson) and Mark, the deputy sheriff with the embarassing 70s haircut she's been known to flirt with on occasion (Christopher Goutman, who later forged a career as a director of afternoon soap operas).  Turns out that the dance coincides with the Sheriff's (Strangers on a Train's Farley Granger) annual fishing trip, which means that Mark will be on his own if any trouble occurs. 

In an attempt to keep the mystery going, the filmmakers fill the town with as many creepy old men as their budget could afford, hoping to keep the audience from guessing the true identity of the killer.  Personally it took me 20 minutes to figure it out, but I can be a bit slow about these things.

 

For reasons that are left to the audience's imaginations rather than actually explained, the never-caught psycho ex-soldier responsible for the murders that night 35 years earlier decides to suit up once again and arm himself with a bayonet, a sawed-off shotgun and his trusty pitchfork.  He then proceeds to make his way to the almost-vacant dorm rooms and finds a young couple who are just about to get squishy with it.  The young man gets a bayonet in the head and his naked girlfriend gets pitchforked in the shower. 

 

Thanks to the efforts of noted make-up guru Tom Savini, The Prowler is probably one of the gorier examples of the sub-genre.  Not only are we allowed to see the murderer's weapons fully penetrate the bodies of his victims, but the camera is left to linger as they cut and stab their way through the foam and latex flesh.  Despite their reputation for bloody excess, the majority of slasher films (if only for reasons of budget) left much of this violence to the viewer's imagination, but The Prowler is completely content to show us everything it can. 

 

Returning to the dorm to change out of her punch-splattered dress, Pam manages to avoid discovering the bodies of her murdered friends, but does suffer a run in with the man who killed them.  She manages to escape from him (largely because, like most slasher villains, he seems unwilling to catch his victims if it means running after them) and finds Deputy Mark, who is just shitty enough at his job to not only not find the killer, but also completely miss out on finding his first two victims as well.

 

From that point on the movie does what its supposed to do and intercuts scenes of The Prowler killing folks with Pam and Mark trying to figure out what is going on.  The script does try to be a bit different by ignoring some of the more blatent cliches.  For example one couple (who ultimately serve absolutely no purpose to the film's narrative) are allowed to have sex without dying and the male protagonist is allowed to remain alive.  But even here the picture is a bit clumsy, since we are lead to believe The Prowler has killed Mark, but he is shown to be alive and unharmed after Pam finally manages to kill the murderer in typical Final Girl fashion.  This could have been cleared up with a single line of dialogue, but the filmmakers seem too eager to get to the film's last shocking surprise (which ends up being neither shocking or surprising) to bother tying up such an obvious loose end.
 
On the whole The Prowler is a film that slasher enthusiasts can easily enjoy, but whose appeal will be lost on more casual genre fans.  While it does not transcend its limitations, it manages to make for an entertainingly gory 90 minutes and is easy to sit through since its characters are more bland than outright hateful.

Slasher Statistics

Body Count: 8 (4 men and 4 women)

Shower Scenes: 1

Instances of Nakedity: 1

Obligatory Has Beens: Farley Granger, Lawrence Tierney

Instruments of Death: Bayonet,Pitchfork, Sawed-Off Shotgun, Regular Shotgun

Moments of Inexplicable Female Jealousy: 1

Creepy (and therefore suspicious ) Old Guys: 4 

References to Pot: 1 ("Do you have any rolling papers?")

Amount of Time Required to Correctly Identify Killer: 20 minutes

Exploding Heads: 1

Cheesy References to Other Horror Movies: 0

Utterly Pointless Trivia: The movie was co-written by Neil F. Barbera, son of the recently-deceased c0-creator of The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo and Tom & Jerry, Joseph Barbera.

Final Girl Rating: 5 out of 10

Repost - Slumber Party Massacre II

There is a theory in Hollywood that the last 10 minutes of a movie are by far the most important for its overall success.  The argument goes that a mediocre film can be saved by a memorable conclusion, while a disappointing ending can easily derail an audience’s appreciation of an otherwise great film.  The reason for this is simple—many people are linear thinkers who base their judgments solely on their most recent experiential data.  Ask them what they thought of a film and they’ll base that judgment on how they felt when they walked out at the end.  Even if they sat bored for the first 80 or so minutes, it’s the rush of excitement they remember from the last 10 that will cause them to praise the picture and—vice versa—cause them to denounce a film with an unsatisfactory climax that they otherwise enjoyed.

It is for this reason that any filmmaker who employs the infamous “It was only a dream!” device, no matter how cleverly or innovatively they do so, ultimately dooms their work to popular failure.  Over the years audiences have come to think of this ending as a hackneyed rip off and as a result are inclined to revolt against it and any film it appears in—no matter what the context or how it is employed.

 

The best example of this is the vehement reaction Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky engendered during its 2001/2002 holiday release.  As documented by Chuck Klosterman in his essay “The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise’s Shattered, Troll-like Face” (from his book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs), audience members walked out of the movie visibly hostile in a way that bore no relation to the quality of the film they just sat through.  “…[I]n the parking lot outside the theater, I overheard one guy tell his girlfriend he was going to beat her for making him watch this picture,” he writes in stunned amazement.  A well-made film filled with excellent performances (I personally have never found Penelope Cruz more enchanting) that features at least one truly amazing sequence (Cruise’s desperate jog through a deserted Times Square), the reaction the film received ultimately had everything to do with its final few minutes, in which we learn that everything we have seen has been the computer-programmed dream of a man in cryogenic stasis in preparation for his rebirth in an unknown future.  Having primed viewers to expect a more complex explanation for its events, the film’s creative variation of “It was only a dream”—alongside its refusal to show the future world it alluded to—alienated viewers to an extreme degree.  I strongly suspect that if the Brothers Medved had conducted a poll that year, the movie would have easily made the list of the worst films of all time, even though it wasn’t even the worst film released that particular weekend.

I mention this as a way to explain why the utterly harmless and fitfully amusing sequel to the subject of my previous DVD Horror Movie Index was only until very recently ranked as one of the IMDb’s Bottom 100 rated movies.  Rather than enjoy it as an entertaining—if also occasionally cheesy—comedy nightmare, most people upon seeing it choose to dismiss it as nothing more than a weird/stupid slasher movie with the lamest of all possible endings.

I am, of course, talking about:

 

Roger Corman is not the kind of dude to fuck up a good thing.  Having made enough of a profit from video and cable revenues to produce a sequel to 1982's The Slumber Party Massacre, it must have occurred to him that the fact that the film had been made by women might have had a hand in its success, so when it came time to assign the sequel to the sort of starving and desperately ambitious film school graduate upon which he built his low-budget movie empire, it only made sense that in this case this person would also be a female-woman type.  After what I'm sure was an exhaustive search, he settled on UCLA grad Deborah Brock, who had been making no-budget 8mm films since she was a teenager, but had yet to helm an actual feature at that point.  But although she shared the same chromosomal makeup and genitalia as Amy Holden Jones and Rita Mae Brown, she came to the project with a different attitude than her predecessors.  Her intention in making the film wasn't to--as Brown wanted--to mock the genre or--as Jones successfully did--simply create a highly-effective representation of it, but rather to instead do what they could not and create the first slasher film that effectively represented an entirely female point of view. 

 

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To that end she wrote a screenplay that attempted to include all of the necessary slasher movie cliches, but that also explained them away as the nightmarish imaginings of a severely traumatized mind--in this case, Courtney, the 17 year-old version of the 12 year-old girl who survived the events of the first film.  Right from the very first shot of our sleeping main character it is clear that what we are going to be seeing isn't a literal representation of a horrific event, but rather the extended dream of a disturbed young woman whose traumatic experiences have left her incapable of willingly making the transition into female adulthood.

 

In Courtney's dream she imagines herself as an attractive woman (future Wings star Crystal Bernard) who is at least 8 years visibly older than her actual age.  The same is true for all of her friends (one of whom looks just like 1982's January Playmate of the Month) and the handsome boy she has a crush on, who looks far more like a 30-something teacher than one of her peers.  She and her friends are in a band and though their songs really, really suck, it is clear that music means something important to her--something deep and intimate that is innately connected to her own nascent sexuality.

 

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We know this because whenever her dream turns nightmarish she is tormented by glimpses of a leather clad psychopath, whose look, cadence and demeanor is that of a 50s era rockabilly performer.  And though the identity of this dark, evil Elvis Presley manque is forged by Courtney's love of music,  he actually represents her inner sexual conflict.  Now a young woman dealing with natural carnal desire, she cannot help but associate the loss of her virginity with the massacre she survived five years earlier, due to the overtly phallic nature of the murderer's weapon of choice.  That is why she imagines Val, her now-insane older sister (who also became a lot less attractive in the intervening half-a-decade), urging her from underneath her mental hospital bed to "Don't...go...all...the...way...."

 

But despite these strong inner fears, Courtney's attraction to the handsome Matt is too powerful to be denied, which is why she invites him to join her at the slumber party being held at her friend Sheila's father's condo. 

 

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Now, If there is any validity to the idea that every person you dream of doesn't represent that actual person, but rather an element of yourself that they best exemplify, then Courtney's three friends (and bandmates) can be viewed like this: Sally (Heidi Kozak) is the self-loathing Courtney feels for not being able to overcome her minor imperfections (ie. the shallow bimbo), Amy (Kimberly McArthur) is the voluptuous symbol of the impossible physical ideal that plagues many women's psyches (ie. the busty centerfold), Sheila (Juliette Cummins) is the overt expression of Courtney's sexual desire (ie. the exhibitionist slut), while she imagines herself as a near-perfect symbol of purity and innocence, struggling to retain her virtue in a dangerous world (ie. the final girl).  Beyond her love of music, she imagines herself and her friends as a band because it allows her to better appreciate them as the cohesive aspects of her own identity and the music they create together allows her to more creatively ponder such ideas as her own personal dissatisfaction and desire for new experiences, which she addresses in a song that asks "Why do you want more?":    

  

It's only a matter of time, though, before Courtney is unable to keep the two separate halves of her dream--the one based in a normal reality and the overt nightmare--from colliding together.   

 

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First she dreams of a dead chicken coming back to life in her hands--an incident whose symbolic relevance is lost to me, but could be dismissed as merely one of the random elements that naturally pop up in these unconscious inner narratives.  Next she images her bathtub filling up with blood--an obvious allusion to menstruation and the inevitable loss of her girlhood.  Most disturbingly she imagines Sally's face transforming into a pus-spewing monstrosity--an image that works to confirm her terror that at the end of the journey through adolescence (Sally spends much of the movie fretting about the kind of nearly invisible facial blemishes that is the bane of many teenagers life experience) there is only disease, ugliness and death.

 

When the Sally aspect of her identity disappears following the projectile-pus incident, Courtney dreams that she and the others contact the local police (one of whom she--in a nod to her narrative's subconscious state--names Officer Krueger after the famous villain of the similarly dream-inspired Nightmare on Elm Street series).  Rather than take her concerns seriously, they question her sanity and berate her for wasting their time--especially when Sally eventually reappears unharmed and without a care in the world.  It's clear that there's no help or comfort to be found from the adult world.

 

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It would seem that her only comfort from the terror of her nightmare comes in the arms of Matt (Patrick Lowe), the symbol of romantic perfection, but as the two of them finally attempt to "Go all the way"--Valerie's dire warning proves entirely wise.  With a weapon that grafts a guitar with the electric drill of her previous tormentor, The "Driller Killer" (Atanas Ilich) penetrates Matt before Matt can do the same to Courtney.  The rockabilly killer then proceeds to lay waste to the rest of Courtney's subconscious identities, with superficial Sally being the first to go.  Throughout the ordeal it is clear that the killer--and therefore also the young woman responsible for manifesting him--takes a special joy in seeing these less-ideal aspects of her personality die at his hands.  This is most obvious when he turns the death of Sheila into a musical number:   

 

 

Soon only Amy (arguably the least objectionable of her three female aspects) and Courtney remain.

 

 

The police express only indifference to Courtney's pleas on the phone for help, so she and Amy have no choice but to escape from the condo and attempt to outrun the mysterious guitar-drill wielding psychopath.  Unfortunately, he easily catches up to them and quickly dispatches Amy, leaving Courtney only with the most idealized version of herself to battle against her own fear of personal corruption.  For a time it seems as though she is victorious, when she is able to set the Driller Killer ablaze with a blow torch, but her victory is short-lived.  No matter how much she wants them to be gone, her aspects cannot be so easily disposed of.

 

Witness the resurrection of Amy:   

 

(Move pointer over image for full nightmare effect)

 

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Of course this also means the resurrection of Matt, but her fear of sex is too strong to allow him to remain for long and she quickly replaces him with the killer.

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The film then ends with the implication that Courtney, not Valerie, was the person driven insane by the experience of the first film, as we see her screaming and tormented on a hospital cot in a dingy unfurnished room, but even this is called into question as it becomes clear that her nightmare hasn't ended as the credits being to roll.  This is no "It was all a dream" happy ending, but rather the discomfiting suggestion of a torment without end--a perpetual state of insanity from which its victim, whoever it may be, cannot ever escape.

 

Viewed this way, Brock's Slumber Party Massacre II is a much more interesting film than it's low IMDb rating and negligible reputation would suggest.  The problem, no doubt, is that most viewers come to it expecting another straight-ahead slasher tale in the same mold as its predecessor--thus they are alienated by deliberate choices Brock made that make no sense in that context, but that fit in perfectly with the nightmare narrative  she instead chose to pursue.  That's not to say the film isn't without its faults (bad acting, low production values, truly terrible music and the utterly inexcusable failure to get Kimberly McArthur naked, considering that her famously copious breasts remained explicitly visible throughout the entirety of her previous three screen credits), but when viewed as a whole and with the right mindset, many of these faults actually work to the film's advantage--making it seem that much more like the dream of young woman (if that is indeed the person who is doing the dreaming) who is familiar with the genre only through its most obvious weaknesses and cliches.  It's precisely the kind of narrative tomfoolery that has made David Lynch a cult icon, but without the self-congratulatory pretentiousness that I personally find so alienating in much of his work.  For that reason I was surprised and impressed by the film, although I suspect that my admiration for it is definitely going to remain the minority position.

 

Slasher Movie Statistics

 

Body Count: 6 (three men and three women) 

Instances of Nakedity: 1 (Sadly, not from the playmate)

Instruments of Death: Guitar drill

References to Pot: o (Courtney apparently isn't a subconscious toker)

Amusingly Dated References to 1980s Culture:  At their band rehearsal, Sally requests a can of Slice, while Sheila gets pretentious with some Perrier.

Cinematic Girl Band Comparison: Not as good as: The Carrie Nations or Josie and the Pussycats/Better than: Mystery (from  Satisfaction)

Cheesy References to Other Horror Movies: I already mentioned Officer Krueger, but I didn't mention that his partner is Officer Voorhies.

Utterly Pointless Trivia: Bernard and McArthur both had roles in Garry Marshall's feature film directing debut Young Doctors in Love.  As mentioned above, nearly all of McArthur's screen time is spent without a top. 

Final Girl Rating: 7 (out of 10)

Repost - Slumber Party Massacre

One of the nice things about this internet of ours is how quickly and easily it can solve those little mysteries you’ve always wondered about, but were never before able to answer with any real satisfaction.

Case in point, the subject of today’s Sunday Thursday Horror Movie DVD Index—a film whose significance comes largely from its lack of significance.  One of the few original early 80s slasher movies to have been written and directed by women, the film begs knowledgeable viewers to engage it as a work of feminist comment, but stymies such commentary by presenting the genre’s clichés without any significant irony or insight.

I always wondered why the film’s screenwriter, Rita Mae Brown, and its director, Amy Holden Jones, decided to take no advantage of their unique-for-the-genre perspective and instead chose to make a by-the-numbers reproduction of the slasher template.  What I did not know and only learned as I started to do a little bit of research for this post, was that though Brown received sole credit for the film’s screenplay, the draft she wrote was completely different in tone from the script that was eventually filmed.  Brown originally wrote the film as a satire of slasher movies, but as the script was revised by a handful of uncredited writers the satire was (mostly) lost and the film ceased to be an ironic commentary on the genre and instead became a typical representation of it.

To which I say:

 

WHEW!
 

Thank Yahweh we dodged that bullet, because if there’s anything worse than a bad slasher movie, it’s a bad slasher movie parody and—based on the few satiric elements that managed to survive the various rewrites—I suspect that’s exactly what the film would have been if Brown’s draft had been made.  As directed by Jones the film is a taut, well made slasher classic that is smart enough to realize that sympathetic characters equals effective tension and benefits greatly as a result.

I am, of course, talking about:

 

 

In truth it is a bit disingenuous of me to claim that there are no examples of potential feminist commentary in the film, but those moments that do make it into the movie bear little distinction from similar scenes in other films made by (if the popular feminist critique of the genre is to be believed) supposedly misogynistic male filmmakers.  A good example of this is the brief sequence that opens the film in which Trish (Michele Michaels), the first of the film's two potential Final Girls, goes through her room and disposes of the items that represent her childhood, including a Barbie doll, a slinky and various other toys.  Having become what she considers to be a woman, she no longer wishes to cling to these reminders of the girl she once was.  But her conviction is not an absolute one, as she does decide to hold onto at least one stuffed animal she cannot bear to include with the other items destined for the garbage can.  Watching this brief scene one gets the sense it's supposed to be at least a little bit important, but--apart from being a nice character moment--it ultimately adds nothing to the picture and is not further developed into any kind of notable theme.

 

Actually I lied, the scene does add something to the film, since it is as Trish is gathering up her old toys that we hear a newscaster on the radio announce that police are on the lookout for an escaped killer named Russ Thorn.  Apparently Russ is eager to reclaim his old ways, as he appears in the next scene, where he pulls an unusually shapely phone company employee into her van and kills her with a very large (and very unsubtle) electric drill.  In this way TSPM represents the purest kind of slasher movie, in that it makes no attempt to disguise itself as a mystery and is only too happy to identify its killer right from the very beginning of the movie.  Following the linewoman's shocking demise, the movie cuts to a girl's basketball sequence that can only be described as--WAIT!--why should I bother wasting valuable brain cells attempting to describe it, when I can just let you watch the scene yourself?  (God bless you internet--truly you are the greatest boon we lazy-ass writers could ever hope to have been given!)

 

 

One Word:

Jiggletastic!

  

Now in a normal slasher movie, this basketball sequence and the lengthy group shower scene that immediately follows it, wouldn't seem the slightest bit odd or out of the ordinary, but when viewed with the knowledge that they were directed by a female filmmaker, they seem just a tad off-kilter.  The tightness of the uniforms takes on the air of almost-satirical exaggeration, while the slow-panning of the camera as it moves across the sloping curves of the actresses' naked, soapy buttocks gives the impression that Jones is attempting to supply her own withering deconstruction of the Predatory Male Gaze of the Camera's Eye.  The problem with this analysis, however, is that it is impossible to tell how much (or if any) of this is intended and how much comes from our desire as an enlightened viewer to assume that a female director would not be so crass as to fill her film with the requisite T&A without at least trying to meet her obligation with some form of deliberate spin. 

 

 

In terms of the actual plot, the sequence does a good job of setting up the dynamics of its main female characters.  Trish, who we met earlier, is the kind, sympathetic girl who is planning on throwing a slumber party that night.  Valerie (Robin Stille --an extremely attractive actress of admittedly limited talent whose 1996 suicide serves as further proof of my thesis that the IMDb is the most depressing website on the planet) is the beautiful new girl, whose perfection has alienated her from her new classmates, especially Diane (Gina Simka), the snob with the perpetually turned up nose who is far too self-centered to be alive at the end of the movie.  And joining Diane on the doomed list is Kim (Debra Deliso), the vaguely tomboyish blond, Jackie (Andree Honore), the black girl and Linda (Brinke Stevens) the skinny brunette whose butt gets the most attention in the shower scene, but who doesn't even make it out of the school--much less to the slumber party. 

 

 

After Linda's drill-induced decision to shuffle off this mortal coil, the movie spends the next few minutes introducing the rest of the victims/characters, before it gets to the sweet slumber party action that one assumes is its raison d'etre.  Most important of these is Val's 12 year-old sister Courtney (Jennifer Myers), who spends most of her screen time ogling a copy of Playgirl, providing far too many false-scares to keep track of and inspiring the future writer/director of the film's 1987 sequel to place her at the center of that movie's memorably wacky dreamscape.

 

Naturally, once the party gets underway (during which beer is imbibed, cannabis is inhaled and nighties are slipped into) Russ decides to join the fun and quickly (literally given the movie's abbreviated 75 min running time) drills his way through the relevant cast members.  With the exception of the scenes where a hungry Jackie lifts and eats a piece pizza off of the back of the murdered delivery boy and the one where Val's first attempt at an offensive attack is stymied by the shortness of her extension cord, the film resists any signs of obvious comedy or satire.  Considering how short the film is, Jones actually does a commendable job establishing a sense of suspense and tension, largely because she has managed to make us like some of these characters and thus makes their situation horrifying and tragic, rather than karmically just.  That said, she is unable to resist the temptation to provide the kind of obvious symbolic imagery the murderer's weapon of choice (perhaps too) easily provides:

 

 

Despite playing mostly by all of the rules, TSPM does deviate slightly from the formula in that it presents two of its characters as possible Final Girls and waits until the film's final moments both deciding who is going to earn this important honorific.  Though both characters survive the night, Trish remains more a victim, while Val clearly establishes herself as the capable heroine who gets the job done.

 

 

In the final analysis, I believe one could argue that the reason Jones elected to not make her debut movie a work of overt feminism is because she was smart enough to understand that despite its unjust reputation for misogyny the slasher formula is one that openly embraces the concepts of female empowerment.  One need only look at the most important of the genre's archetypes and appreciate that there is a very good reason that it is virtually never referred to as the "Final Boy".

 

Slasher Movie Statistics

 

Body Count: 11 (six women and five men, which--interestingly--makes it one of the rare slasher movies in which female victims outnumber the males)

Shower Scenes: 1 (and it's a long one)

Instances of Nakedity: 8 (7 and 1/2 if I wanted to get all pissy and deduct half a point for use of an obvious body double) 

Obligatory Has Beens: N/A

Instruments of Death: Electric Drill, Butcher Knife and Machete.

Creepy (and therefore suspicious ) Old Guys: 0

References to Pot:  It's a slumber party in a movie from the 80s!  You expect me to keep count?

Amount of Time Required to Correctly Identify Killer: N/A

Cheesy References to Other Horror Movies: Val spends some time watching a horror movie I couldn't identify on TV.

Number of Seriously Awesome All-Girl Basketball Scenes That the Folks Who Run the WNBA Would Be Wise to Watch: 1

Utterly Pointless Trivia: Amy Holden Jones is married to the guy who shot Raging Bull and also--more importantly--directed Clan of the Cave Bear.  

Final Girl Rating: 7 (out of 10)

Repost: The Strange Tale of the Cute Girl With the Robot Brain

It has been a long while since I last saw a film so insane I felt immediately compelled to document its madness in excruciating detail here at the H of G, but a few nights ago I decided on a whim to pop in a disk I’d been sitting on since I picked it up in a boxed set last December and…well…here we are.

I hope you’re comfortable, because I don’t think this is going to be brief.

I got about halfway through the movie before I started debating with myself over whether what I was watching was a What Were They Thinking Movie (WWTTM) or a Bad Film I Love Anyway (BFILA).  At first I was convinced it was the former, given the film’s wildly disparate tone and combination of seemingly mutually exclusive elements, but as I continued watching it occurred to me that with a better script, the story being told could have made for an admittedly bizarre, but still genuinely good movie, which put it firmly in the latter category.  

More than any other era in filmmaking, the 1980s provided us with the greatest number of what I like to call Conference Room Classics.  These are films that are so overtly contrived to appeal to as many viewers as possible that you can actually hear in your head the boardroom discussion between a group of coked up movie executives that brought them into existence as you watch them.  Today’s subject is an archetypal example of this lamentable and unheralded genre and here is just a small snippet of the conversation I imagined as I watched the movie:

Studio Executive #1: So, Douchebag, I hear you picked up the rights to an interesting new novel.  Tell us about it.

Studio Executive #2: Thanks, Asshole!  It’s a great idea with plenty of potential.  It’s about this kid who’s a super-genius.

Studio Executive #3: I love it!Studio Executive #2: Hold on, Shit-for-brains!  I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.  So the kid is such a super-genius, his best friend is an adorable artificially intelligent robot he built himself.

Studio Executive #1: Wow.  I think I just came in my pants!  That sounds just like that Steve Guttenberg movie TriStar is making.  They say it’s going to be a big hit!

Studio Executive #4: This sounds great!  We need a good family comedy on our slate.

Studio Executive #2: You didn’t let me finish Dickface!  This isn’t a family comedy!  It’s a horror movie!

Studio Executive #1, 3 & 4: SAY WHAT?

Studio Executive #2: Y’see the super-genius kid is new in town because he’s such a super-genius he’s already enrolled at the local college, and he falls in love with the cute blond girl who lives next door.

Studio Executive #4: I like cute blond girls.  Cute blond girls are good,

Studio Executive #2: So they become really good friends and everything seems like it’s all going to be happy and stuff, but then the robot gets destroyed by the crazy woman who lives across the street and the girl gets killed by her abusive alcoholic father.

Studio Executive #3: That’s sad.

Studio Executive #2: But the kid is such a super-genius he figures out that he can bring his friend back to life by implanting the same microchip that powered his robot into her brain.

Studio Executive #1: That makes sense!

Studio Executive #2: The problem is that when the girl comes back to life, she’s like a robot and doesn’t have a…whatayacallit…y’know that thing that makes people feel bad about the stuff they do….

Studio Executive #1. 3 & 4: (Long silence)

Lowly Assistant: A conscience?

Studio Executive #2: That’s it, Lowly Assistant!  You’re fired!  Now, she doesn’t have a conscience, so she goes around killing the people who did her and the robot wrong.

Studio Executive #3: That’s so scary!

Studio Executive #1: I just came and shit in my pants at the same time!  Really!  I’ll show you if you’d like!

Studio Executive #4: It’s got everything!  The kids will like the cute robot, the teenagers will like the gore and the adults will like the emphasis on higher education.

Studio Executive #2: So I take it you guys want to make it into a movie?

Studio Executive #1, 3 & 4: FUCK YEAH!

Studio Executive #2: Great.  I think we can get the guy who made Nightmare on Elm Street to direct it.

And they did.

Today’s film not only earns the title of the Second Worst Wes Craven Movie of All Time (with it being just narrowly beaten out by The Hills Have Eyes Part II), but it also earns the award for the Second Worst Horror Movie Script Ever Written By A Future Oscar Winner (with Brian Helgeland’s 976-EVIL taking the top spot in this case).It is, as the above dialogue would suggest, an odd hybrid of a horror movie without a moment of tension or suspense and a fanciful children’s adventure that contains far too much violence and bad language to be in any way appropriate for a younger audience.  

The popular term in Hollywood for this kind of failed combination is a Feathered Fish—named so because the poor creature can neither swim nor fly and merely lies there on the ground, satisfying neither of the potential diners for whose palates it has been bred.  For most folks these poor creatures are best avoided at all costs, but to us gourmands of misbegotten cinema, they are tastier than the finest high-priced Russian caviar and by that standard, today’s subject is easily worth $1000 an ounce.

I am, of course, talking about:

 

Now before I spank Craven too hard for his second biggest filmic fiasco, I should acknowledge some of the background history that mitigates his failure, even if just a little.  By the time he got around to making this, his eighth official feature film (he had also directed four TV movies by then), he had truly been put through the show business wringer.

His first (credited) film The Last House On the Left was an enormously profitable hit, but it was so controversial and alienating that it took him five years before he got his next gig directing The Hills Have Eyes.  It too was a hit, but his follow-ups Deadly Blessing and Swamp Thing (a comic book adaptation seriously marred by budget difficulties) failed to make a mark at the box office.  As a result he was unemployed for two years before he finally got the chance to direct his original screenplay A Nightmare On Elm Street.  The result was one of the most important horror films of the 80s, but his deal with New Line Cinema kept him from financially capitalizing on its success.  To add insult to injury, not only was he denied a piece of the enormous franchise he created, but was left to fend for himself when another screenwriter accused him of plagiarizing Nightmare and took him to court.

Broke and in desperate need of a job, he agreed to make The Hills Have Eyes Part II, but wasn’t given a big enough budget to produce a complete film—a problem he solved by having nearly half the film consist of flashbacks to the original.  With the case against him finally dismissed, he remained in dire financial straits and eagerly accepted the next job that was offered him.  In this case it was his first feature film for a major studio (his previous efforts having all been made by smaller independent companies), which meant that for the first time in his career he had an adequate budget to work with, but also meant that he now had to deal with a level of creative interference he had never experienced before.  Unused to dealing with the petty demands of egotistical, coked-out executives, Craven lost control of the project and did his best to give the suits the movie they all seemed to so desperately want.

And that’s the film for which I am about to rip him a new one.

As for the film’s soon-to-be-heralded screenwriter, I can’t provide a similar defense since I’m not as well versed in the background of Bruce Joel Rubin.  I do know that this was the first produced screenplay for which he got sole attribution (he received a story credit for Natalie Wood’s last film Brainstorm), but I cannot tell you if its incompetence on virtual every technical and creative level was the result of his being a relative neophyte, a lazy hack or his craven desperation to please the clearly misguided folks signing his paychecks.  Whatever the case, his second produced screenplay, Ghost, won him an Oscar, while his third, Jacob’s Ladder, resulted in a genuine cinematic classic, so—if anything—what you are about to see does prove that in Hollywood it’s always possible to bounce back from anything, no matter how dire it may seem at the time. And believe you me, after this movie was released things must have seemed pretty damn dire.

Now let us get on with the petty sarcasm!

 

Staying true to what we are about to watch for the next 90 minutes, Craven and Rubin manage to present us with a logical blunder in the film's very first scene, even before the credits have been allowed to roll.  The film starts with a thief breaking into a car parked in front of grocery store, so he can help himself to the cash found inside the wallet left conveniently on the driver side seat.  But before he can make his getaway, he's stopped by a mechanical hand that appears from the back seat and grabs him firmly by the throat.  When we're given a glimpse of this unseen vigilante's POV, it becomes clear that we are dealing with some sort of mechanical automaton and not a one-armed man with the coolest 80s era prosthetic limb of all time.  The thief escapes from the vehicle without the money, just as our protagonist and his mother--the car's owner--walk out of the store, carrying their purchases.

What, you ask, is so illogical about this?  Lemme answer you by asking a question of my own....

How did Mom pay for the groceries if her wallet was in the car?

Now I suppose a creative person could come up with a dozen answers to this question, but my experience as a hack writer knows that the only one that matters is: Who cares!  We need the wallet to be in the car, so the thief has something to steal!  Now, one could respond to this by asking why the thief couldn't just try and steal the car itself, but once again the hack writer in me already knows the response: The robot we built would never have been able to grab the actor's throat if he was sitting in the front seat, so we had to have him steal something he could pick up in a much more technically convenient position.

One of the misconceptions among non-creative folks is the idea that logical errors happen in movies because no one involved in the production was smart enough to point them out at the time.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I would say that about 90% of the time, the author of a work can successfully name every single logical inconsistency that appears in their finished work--to the point that they are able to point out examples no one else would ever catch.

Why then don't they correct these mistakes?

Mostly it's pure laziness (you have to remember that most folks become writers to avoid ever having to do real work), but in a lot of cases it's a matter of resigned pragmatism.  Often correcting a mistake causes more problems than it actually fixes and it's better to just ignore the blunder and hope no one makes too big a deal out of it.  Unfortunately, we now live in a world filled with millions of assholes like me who take a twisted sort of delight in making exactly that sort of deal out of them. Hell, I've just spent two paragraphs discussing the movie's most minor error in logic!

What am I going to do when the shit really hits the fan?

Back to the movie, after our hero and his mom return to their car, we see them interacting together as they drive to their new home.  It's immediately apparent that Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux) is a smart kid who has a loving, close relationship with his foxy mother, Jeannie (Anne Twomey).  When they finally arrive at their destination we get to see just how smart he is when we see the mysterious backseat passenger exit from the vehicle.

A genuine prodigy, Paul has built his best friend, BB, all by himself--an achievement made all the more amazing by the robot's sophisticated artificial intelligence, which stands lightyears away from anything that exists even today, 22 years later.

Hey!  This raises an interesting question!

Where the Hell did Paul get the money to build BB?

By 1986 the home computer movement was in full swing, but the market was still decades away from creating affordable hardware with the processing power needed to create a genuine artificial intelligence.  When you consider that a remote-controlled puppet designed to merely create the illusion of such an achievement would have cost the production at least $100,000 (and probably closer to double that), it wouldn't be unreasonable to suggest that in 1986 dollars, BB would have been a $10,000,000 investment (including both hardware and labour).

Now, I know you're thinking I'm going to far.  "It's called the willful suspension of disbelief, buttmunch!" I hear you mutter to yourselves as the glow from your computer screen slowly gives you a strange new cancer that hasn't been identified yet, but let me defend my nitpickiness by arguing that this is a film that takes all notions of credibility and shoots them in the back of the head so it can go back to their house and sodomize their crippled grandmother.

And it is for that reason that I feel no guilt as I focus on every little nit that I find to pick. More than anything else, the depiction of BB is what is responsible for the film's odd contradictory tone.  All of the scenes featuring the robot attempt to recreate the moments of patronizing faux-hilarity that are familiar to anyone who grew-up watching films like Unidentified Flying Oddball on The Magical World of Walt Disney and they bear no relationship to the nightmarish imagery that follow them.

Witness this typical example:

 

 

 

Now even if the purpose of the first twenty pages of a screenplay is to introduce all of the elements that will be important in the final 70, one does have to assume that there are less obvious ways to go about it than the way Rubin presents here.  I say this because of his decision to introduce the "good" and "bad" characters in what can only be called an assembly-line order.

Let's start with the "good guys"!

The first character we meet is the neighborhood paperboy, Tom "Slime" Toomey (Michael Sharett), who is plum amazed to discover a technical marvel as amazing as BB the yellow robot.  I'm assuming that his odd nickname is a holdover from the novel, since it's an utter non sequitur in the movie. Next up is Dr. Johanson (Russ Marin), the neurosurgeon/professor who helped Paul get his scholarship to the university.  You could be forgiven for assuming that Paul's creation of BB would make him a perfect engineering or computing student (in an age that predated robotics as a field of academic pursuit), but apparently his ability to program BB's A.I. comes from his nearly superhuman understanding of the human brain and not from his mad hacker skillz. And, finally, we have Samantha "Sam" Pringle (Kristy Swanson).  The cute blond girl who lives next door, who has a painful secret (and, as Slimey so eloquently observes when Paul asks him about her, "great tits").

 

 

Now let's look at the "bad guys" (aka the assholes who have to die)!

 

Just seconds after we're introduced to Sam, we get our first glimpse of her father, Harry (Richard Marcus), who even just standing at a distance in his doorway clearly looks like the possessive, abusive alcoholic he quickly proves himself to be.

Equally detestable is Elvira Parker (Anne "Honest To Goodness Oscar Nominee" Ramsey), the crazy old woman whose yard is protected by a six-foot chain link fence that is kept shut via a combination lock and who greets any potential intruders with her trusty shotgun.

And just to up the asshole body count to a more satisfactory number than 2 we have Carl (Andrew Roperto), a neighborhood ruffian whose crotch learns the hard way what happens to folks who mess with BB's creator.

Now that we've been properly introduced to all of the film's principal characters, the plot can start in earnest.  Rubin sets it in motion by having Sam appear in Paul's doorway with a gift of snack cakes.  Despite appearing to be eager to make a new friend, she is visibly anxious the whole time she's there, which makes sense when her psychotic father comes to pick her up.  Of all the stereotypical characters in the film (and they're all stereotypical characters) Sam's dad is easily the most absurdly hackneyed.  Hell, BB is given more shading and complexity than he is.  One wonders if Craven felt he was showing restraint by not having drool dabbed around Marcus' lips before each shot, since he was more than willing to do everything else he could to sell the idea that Harry Pringle is a bad, bad man.

 

 

Speaking of which, that brings us to the first of the film's three dream sequences.  Now, I realize most people who've seen Deadly Friend will insist that there are only two nightmares in the film, but I also count the film's ending as a dream sequence, because that's the only possible way it makes a lick of sense.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After having been drug away from the Conway's back to her own horrible home, Sam goes to bed and dreams of something we assume has happened more than once in real life--a nocturnal assault courtesy of her father.  But this time in her dream she defends herself by grabbing a flower vase and smashing it against her nightstand and stabbing the glass shard into his chest.  Rather than kill him, it merely makes him laugh as a stream of blood spurts (comically) from the shattered vase and soaks Sam and her blankets.

 

This sequence is significant for two reasons, the first of which I didn't discover until I found the film's wikipedia entry.  It was there that I learned that the version of the movie I own is not the one originally released to theaters or on videotape, but rather the original unrated edition that was held back when the MPAA threatened to give it an X rating.  This surprised me since a) the packaging makes absolutely no mention of this and b) the fact that it almost got an X rating makes the overt-childishness of the BB sequences even that much more absurd. According to the entry, this scene is significantly shorter and less graphic in the R-rated version, which is funny since the unintended effect of the abundant gore in the sequence is hilarity rather than discomfiting terror.

 

The second reason it's significant is because it--as well as the second nightmare sequence--is obviously only in the film because someone was worried there wasn't enough horror in their horror film.  Once again speaking from experience as a genre hack, the only reasons a writer ever includes a dream sequence in their work is either because a) it's the only way to great some crazy shit into an otherwise boring story or b) they need to fill space.  I used to consider dream sequences my word count killer when I was writing the ghost books, since I could usually count on taking another 250-500 words off my total by throwing one into a story whenever I got stuck on what to write next.  I admit there is a chance that sequences likes this do appear in Henstell's novel, but even if that is the case, here in the film they serve no narrative purpose save to add a few more (non-)scares into an otherwise sedate horror tale.

 

 

Having at least tried to scare us, Rubin and Craven now take the time to show us the blissfully happy period that has to occur in order for the following misery to have any emotional effect.  We see Paul share his unique theories on robotics and neurology with his older classmates and "the gang" goof around shooting hoops in his backyard.  Their basketball shenanigans end, however, when they give BB the ball and he shoots it all the way into the yard of crazy Mrs. Parker, who takes the ball from her porch and throws it into her house.  This is not a trivial detail, as this act of petty cruelty will have serious consequences later on in the film.  As "the gang" turns away from the paranoid woman's fence and walks dejectedly back home, BB turns and stops to analyze the situation--his circuitry clearly coming to the conclusion that the bitch gots something coming her way. 

 

 

We next see Paul at work in a lab at school, where he and Dr. Johanson do some experiments on a cadaver.  To his professor's amazement, Paul is able to make the corpse move its limbs by stimulating it's dead brain tissue with electricity.  Craven follows up this close-up look of the inside of a person's head with a shot of Paul's mom scooping out the insides of a jack o'lantern, which he probably thought was really clever at the time.  Jeannie's scooping is interrupted by Sam who comes into their kitchen with a bleeding nose.  She insists that she gets them all the time, but Jeannie isn't fooled and tells the girl that someone should report her father to the authorities, but Sam is reluctant.  Sure, he may be a psychotic, alcoholic abusive bastard, but he's still her dad. 

 

 

As evidenced by the carved pumpkin, it's Halloween and "the gang" run around the neighborhood causing the usual teenage mischief.  After spraying whipped cream on a neighbor's car, Slime decides it would be hilarious if they made it past crazy Mrs. Parker's combination locked fence and rang her doorbell.  Now, since she has a tendency to respond to violations of her privacy with a shotgun, one could question the potential amusement inherent in such an enterprise, but Sam thinks it's a great idea and Paul reluctantly agrees. 

Paul's reluctance is due to the fact that BB is the only member of "the gang" capable of opening the lock and he doesn't want to expose his robotic best friend to any potential harm.  But peer pressure is a bitch and he allows BB to give the lock a go. Paul warns his friends that it could take hours for BB to find the proper combination, but the robot gets the job done in less than two minutes.  With their path no longer impeded, Sam proves to be the only one brave enough to approach the crazy woman's doorway.  What she doesn't expect is that the porch is protected by a security system that activates a loud alarm as soon as she steps on it.  Terrified, she runs from the porch and into the yard's bushes.

Strangely, rather than urge her to run out of the yard and to the safety of their homes, Paul and Slime run into the yard and join her behind the shrubbery.  Fearing that BB might follow them, Paul makes sure to turn him off via his remote control, but the robot has figured out a water to counteract its programming and turn itself back on.  Assuming that "the gang" is in danger, the robot enters the yard and approaches the shotgun wielding proprietoress and is blasted to smithereens for its effort.

 

Paul, naturally, is somewhat devastated by this.

 

(Note: See my earlier discussion of the attempted wallet theft for the best possible explanation regarding "the gang's" inexplicable decisions in this sequence.  Even though it seems obvious that the best reaction to their predicament was to simply get the fuck out of dodge, the three of them had to stay there because BB had to be destroyed by Mrs. Parker because a) Paul will need the robot's brain chip later on in the movie and b) even in this movie stealing a basketball isn't a serious enough crime for the old bag to merit the death penalty.)  

 

 

But life goes on and later that year Sam joins the Conway's for Thanksgiving dinner, while her father nurses his addiction on their couch back home.  When she leaves, Paul bravely kisses her goodbye and it seems clear that young love is about to take flight.

 

Sadly, though, that flight is canceled when Sam's dad goes into full psycho mode and shoves her down the stairs.

 

 

Things don't look good for poor Sam.  In fact, one could say they look pretty damn bad, since her brain is toast and machines are the only thing keeping her alive.  Informed by Dr. Johanson that his almost-girlfriend is going to have her plug-pulled at 10:00 o'clock the next day (which kinda seems random, but then I don't really know how hospitals work) Paul doesn't take the news well. 

 

 

Back at home, Paul sheds copious tears before stumbling on a photograph of himself with his two bestest dead friends in the whole wide world.  Purely by chance the photograph is being held up by the box that contains BB's brain chip--the one responsible for his unique A.I.  Holding the box in his hand, Paul has the kind of idea that could only come from a horny, 15 year-old supergenius.

 

Needing help, he immediately runs to Slime's house in order to enlist his aid.  Slime has a poster of Pat Benatar on his wall, which makes me love him far more than I normally ever would.  Not surprisingly, Paul isn't above committing emotional blackmail to get his friend on his side: 

 

 

Tom's response at the very end of this scene is probably the best genuine moment in the whole movie, but it also exemplifies the film's biggest miscalculation.  These days a lot of fanboys get upset at the idea of PG-13 horror movies, arguing that the resulting lack of violence, nudity and/or vulgarity invariable wrecks these films.  I personally don't see a well-made film like The Ring (the American remake) would have been any better with a R-rating, but I can appreciate the sentiment.  In the case of a film like this, on the other hand, I think the filmmakers would have been wise to attempt to get a PG rating rather than the R they settled for after nearly getting an X.  The inclusion of  gore, as well as the profanity featured at the end of the above scene do not make the film more edgy or violent, only more absurd--like a fifth grader attempting to be as cool as the kids from the high school down the street.

 

That said, I'm glad they didn't make the sensible decision, because if they had the result would have been merely forgettable rather than worthy of an enterprise as ridiculous as this post.

 

 

With Tom now in on his plan, Paul decides the best way to keep his mother from getting in the way is to drug her coffee, which he does in a sequence whose humour has the post-modern quality of being funny only insofar as it represents a failed attempt at comedy.

 

 

Before the drugs take their full affect, Paul's mom informs the kids that Sam's plug-pulling has been moved up to 9:00 PM, giving them only a half an hour to get to the hospital and rescue her.  Luckily, she succumbs to the mickey just in time and the two of them make haste.  By a fortunate coincidence, Tom's dad happens to work at the hospital, so they have no problem getting in through a back entrance.  Paul tells Tom to shut off the building's power at 9:01 to create the necessary amount of confusion in the hallways to allow him to slip away unnoticed with a cute dead blond girl, comforting him with the knowledge that backup generators will ensure that no one dies as a result of their actions. 

 

 

In Sam's hospital room, Dr. Johanson waits for his wristwatch to indicate it's time, but--adding impatient asshole to his list of deserved epithets--her dad tells him to get on with it and the decision is made to turn off the girl's life support before the scheduled time (which makes you wonder why they bother making a schedule at all, but oh well....).

 

 

After a brief moment of elevator suspense, Paul makes it to Sam's room, only to find her alone and deceased.  Though he would have preferred for her to be alive, he refuses to give up and stuffs her body into a laundry basket and takes her back down to the van waiting below.  Tom's a bit upset about the whole dead girl thing, but Paul passionately convinces him that they can still save her if they try.  

 

 

Back at the lab we saw him in earlier, Paul inserts BB's chip into Sam's brain.  Using BB's remote control he activates it and is successfully able to get Sam's body to move, although it remains very far from being animated.

 

 

The two boys take Sam's body back to Paul's house and place it in his garage.  When they walk back into the house, they find his mother lying in the same position they left her in that previous night.  Tom worries that Paul drugged her too heavily and caused her to have a fatal overdose.  Paul's reaction to the possibility that he killed his mother is oddly less extreme than the ones he had following the destruction of BB and the imminent death of Sam, but he does manage to panic a little, which is enough to wake Jeannie from her stupor.

 

 

Later on in the garage, Sam starts showing signs of life, although based on her movements, it appears as though BB's personality is the one in control of her body.  After successfully teaching her how to move again, Paul returns to the garage to find her staring at her father through a window.  Even though BB controls her body, she clearly has access to all of her old, painful memories. 

 

 

And as a direct result of those memories she returns to her old house, baits her dad with a bottle of bourbon and then snaps his neck and shoves him into the basement's coal furnace.  

 

 

Paul searches for her and is horrified to discover what she has done, but is too overcome with love to inform the authorities and decides instead to hide Mr. Pringle's charred remains.

 

 

Unable to keep her hidden in his garage, he takes her up to her old room and tells her to stay there while he attempts to figure out what to do next.  As she waits, she's spotted across the street by crazy Mrs. Parker, who immediately panics and calls the police.

 

The cops, however, are used to her frequent calls and feel no need to rush over, which sucks for her, since Sam decides to ignore Paul's orders and leaves her room in order to pay the mean old woman a visit.

 

Now remember the scene with the basketball?

 

This is where it gets its callback:

 

 

This death by basketball scene is easily the movie's most famous moment, as it ranked amongst the 3-D eyeball flying towards the camera in Friday the 13^th 3-D and Jeff Goldblum's ear coming off in The Fly as the most discussed horror movie gross-outs amongst my elementary school classmates.  And that was just the original cut version of the scene, which is much less extreme than the one shown above.  One does have to give it credit, even though it is marred by weak special effects, it is pretty damn hard to forget once you've seen it.  

 

 

After killing Mrs. Parker, Sam returns to Paul, who takes her to the attic above his room and orders her to stay there while he attempts to get some sleep. His slumber presents Craven and Rubin with their second chance for a completely unnecessary dream sequence.  This one involving Mr. Pringle emerging Freddy Krueger-like from the middle of Paul's bed. 

 

 

Awakened by his nightmare, Paul hears the sound of a commotion happening outside.  Joined by his mother and Tom, he finds out that the police have discovered both of Sam's victims (presumably the police found Mr. Pringle's body while searching his house following Mrs. Parker's report that she saw Sam there just before she herself died).  Tom, knowing who is behind this madness, panics and rushes back home as he looks back at his friend with fear and concern.

 

When I took a look at the movie Evil Toons a long time back, I noted that a major sign of a filmmaker's indifference to the project they're working on is an unreasonable fidelity to the script even when it is directly contradicted by what we can see for ourselves onscreen.  In the case of that film it was the use of the word "basement" to describe a structure that was clearly an above-ground garage rather than an underground cellar.  A good example of this same phenomenon is evident in this scene when the bathrobe clad neighbor who tells the Conway's and Slime what's going on, refers to the male victim as Old Man Pringle, which is problematic when you consider that the person calling him that is at least 25 years older than the man he's referring to.  Chances are that at some point in the process, the line as written did make sense and people either got so used to it that they didn't question it when it was eventually filmed or--much more likely--they were so innurred by the film's hundred other implausibilites that they simply shrugged when they heard it and moved on.

 

 

The next day, Sam breaks out from the attic and discovers the photograph that inspired Paul to resurrect her in the first place.  Looking at it, it is clear that she is confused.  Is she Sam or is she BB?  Not even looking into the mirror can help her decide.

 

I suppose now would be a good time to discuss Ms. Swanson's performance.

 

It's really hard not to feel sorry for her.  Clearly an appealing young actress, the poor girl is made to look ridiculous thanks to the decision (be it Craven's, Rubin's or the producers') to mimic the movements of the remote-controlled puppet we watched at the beginning of the film.  Despite the hard work of her credited "Mime Coach", Swanson never comes across as a robot stuck in a girl's body, but rather as a girl forced to joylessly practice the same stupid dance move everywhere she goes (my guess is that it would be called The Claw).

To make matters worse, the only attempt made to acknowledge her status as a reanimated corpse is a bit of dark mascara around her eyes, which definitely works against the credibility of her performance.  But then these kind of bad breaks pretty much tend to define her whole career.  Besides being best know as the girl who played Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the movie that sucked rather than the TV show that rocked, her greatest career achievement remains winning the top prize on Celebrities On Ice, but even this accolade was sullied when it was revealed she stole her partner, Lloyd Eisler, away from his wife and was later arrested for assaulting the woman during a domestic dispute (the charges were eventually dropped).         

 

 

And perhaps with thoughts of her tabloid future running in her head, Swanson gets to emote in the scene that follows, as Paul attempts to comfort her in her moment of painful realization.  Could those be real tears in that last image?  I'll be nice and assume they are. 

 

 

Meanwhile, Tom informs Paul that he cannot remain silent about Sam's killing spree any longer.  Paul tries to change his mind by introducing him to their now fully-animated friend, but Tom is more frightened than moved by the reunion.  When he begins to run away from her, Paul chases after him and physically blocks his attempts to leave--going so far as to punch him in the face.

 

 

Interrupted by Paul's mother--who knows that her son hasn't been going to his classes--Tom manages to get out of the Conway house, only to have his escape foiled by Sam, who leaps out at him through the attic window.

 

 

As Sam attacks her former friend, Jeannie comes to his aid, only to get knocked down to the ground.  Finally awakened by the sight of his mother being injured, Paul goes after Sam, who responds by wrapping her hands around his neck, only to stop and run away once she recognizes who she is about to kill.

 

At this point I should mention the most potentially disturbing aspect of the movie that everyone involved does their absolute best to ignore--it's a necrophiliac love story.  Personally I think the film could have been much more successful had the filmmakers focused, rather than denied this part of the story.  Perhaps this says far too much about my own cynicism than the failure of the filmmakers to properly exploit their subject, but it seems obvious to me that the primary motivation behind Paul's actions is just as much sexual desire as it is the bond of friendship.  The last thing he shared with Sam before her accident was a kiss and it only makes sense that he would want to continue their relationship in a natural progression towards complete intimacy.

At its core this is a movie about the extraordinary lengths a teenage boy will go to get laid, so--considering how far the filmmakers were willing to go in terms of violence--it seems like the ultimate cop-out that this theme is never explored in a way that could have added a nude scene to a work that already had an R-rating.  I mean, why else have Slime point out the tremendous quality of Sam's bosom, if you have no intention of showing it?

 

 

Anyhoo, it's been awhile since anyone has died and there is one asshole from the beginning of the movie who has yet to show up so he can get killed in an entertaining fashion.  Hey!  Whaddaya know!  Here's Carl now!  If you watched the clip I posted earlier as a preview to this essay, then you already know what happens to him, but in case you didn't:

 

 

As you can see, Sam at this point has ceased her silent ways and is now speaking with BB's voice (provided by Charles Fleischer, the future voice of Roger Rabbit), which adds a whole new level of hilarity to the movie.

 

 

As a means of illustrating Sam's inner struggle between her human and robot selves, her POV flickers between normal and robot vision, which brings up what is probably the film's largest and most obvious logical hiccup.  At no point in the film do the filmmakers--even with some patently bullshit excuse--attempt to explain how inserting the chip into Sam's head causes her to take on BB's physical characteristics.  Though they play some lip service towards how the chip was able to bring her back to life, they never explain how it also a) causes her to see in robo-vision, b) speak with BB's mechanical voice or c) gives her superhuman strength.

 

I bring this up not so much to criticize this plot development, but rather Rubin and Craven's laziness when it came to justifying it.  Dipping once more into my experience as a genre hack, there are few if any implausible story choices that can't be explained away with a few lines of gibberish here and there.  What's insulting about the decision to never explain Sam's physical metamorphosis isn't that it's impossible, but rather that no one could be bothered to even try. 

 

 

Of course, Sam can only go around killing assholes for so long before the police catch on.  Eventually they corner her in the driveway of Paul's home, just as Sam starts to gain the edge in her battle over the control of her mind.  As you might guess, things do not end well:

 

 

I have no proof to back this up, but I'm 99.9999999% positive that this clip ends on what was the original ending of the film.  That final crane shot is clearly designed to fade to the end credits, but my guess is that a test screening put the kibosh on this tragic conclusion when the producers found out that the audience a) thought Paul was a selfish prick who deserved to die and b) the film needed at least one more major scare.

 

 

Which brings us to the film's actual ending.  In it, Paul goes to the morgue where Sam's body is being held--presumably to once again attempt to resurrect her--only to discover that she has physically transformed into a robot from the inside out when her new razor-toothed BB head bursts out of her skin.  "Paul, come with me...." we hear her whisper as the head moves towards the camera.  We then cut to outside the room where we hear Paul's neck snap, which is then followed--hilarilously--by his murderer saying "BB" in Sam's voice.

 

As I suggested earlier, I am convinced that this ending was originally conceived as a dream sequence, since it only makes sense in that context.  Although one could suggest that this would be the logical conclusion of the metamorphosis I described above, the fact that the cause of this transformation is never even remotely broached suggests only two options.  Either this ending was edited in a way that altered its original intention or Craven and Rubin truly thought they were making a movie for nose-picking idiots.

 

I prefer to assume the former, but some folks have suggested

that I am something of a naive optimist.

 

Okay, so that was my way-too-long look at Deadly Friend, a truly terrible movie I love anyway.  I hope you enjoyed it and forgive the fact that I'm currently too tired and lazy to proofread this sucker or finish throwing in the links to the other movies I discussed along the way.

Repost: The Life After

In a past post I described (at length) the reasons behind my firmly held belief that the IMDb is the most depressing website to be found on the internet, in so far as it serves as a cold and disheartening record of thousands of broken dreams.  But despite this harsh fact, I often find myself lost in its virtual pages, inevitably enjoying some new and exciting discovery in each filmography I come across, no matter how obscure their subject may be.  The sensation is identical to the feeling I had as a kid reading those thick Leonard Maltin Movie Guides from cover to cover as if they were the most absorbing novels ever written.  With each new name and title I find another opportunity to increase my appreciation of the art, which I am grateful for after 20+ years of cinematic study.  Thanks to the IMDb I have unearthed many treasures that might have remained buried had I not first found out about them within its online pages.

But this alone is not the only reason why I cannot stay away from the site for more than a few days (or hours) at a time.  The other reason, though, is directly tied into the aspect of the site that accounts for its melancholy aftertaste.  The more pages you read, the more often you find yourself confronted by the title at the top of each of its subjects’ resumes.  Depending on who that subject is this first title could merely be the most recent of their projects and will soon find itself buried under future endeavors, but more often than not this first entry serves as a monument to the end of a person’s film and television career.  Beside that title is a date and with that date you can measure the length of time that passed since its subject ceased to be an actor/director/writer/producer/whatever and went on to live as a real, ordinary, average, not-at-all-special human being.

It’s this undocumented period of time that fascinates me more than I can describe.  What has this person done in the 20 years that passed since the two-line bit part on Night Court that ended their career?  Have they accomplished anything?  Are they happy?  Filled with regret?  Does anyone in their current lives know or appreciate who they once were?  Do they want them to?

These last two questions are especially intriguing when you look over the pages of people who were involved in the less respectable areas of the industry.  One has to wonder, for example, if anyone involved with The Last Slumber Party is apt to mention their participation in that monstrosity at every available opportunity or if they (much more wisely) live in constant fear that someone they know might stumble upon the film and discover their deep, dark, terrible secret.  In the past, keeping such a skeleton hidden in your closet might not have been difficult, but in the age of Google all of our skeletons are becoming a lot harder to hide.

I write this because I just spent a somewhat ambivalent 90 minutes watching a long-forgotten mid-70s curiosity entitled Chesty Anderson USN.  For fans of such cinema, its significant only as the second—and last—film of beloved Russ Meyer discovery, Shari Eubank, whose dual role in SuperVixens instantly earned her a kind of b-movie immortality that can be considered either a blessing or a curse depending on the feelings of the individual it’s imposed upon.

While Meyer’s best film remains Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (despite what some fans of Faster Pussycat!  Kill!  Kill! may foolishly claim),  a lot of the credit for its success can be given to his screenwriter Roger Ebert (yes, that Roger Ebert) and especially—in my opinion—the film’s composer Stu Phillips (whose songs are likely to remain with you longer than the any of film’s colourful images).  SuperVixens, on the other hand, is pure unfiltered Meyer (its final opening credit reads “Written, Photographed, Edited, Produced and Directed by RUSS MEYER”) and for that reason has always struck me as his most important film—the one for which his reputation as a genuine softcore auteur became wholly deserved.

Driven by a cartoonish energy perfectly matched by the comic book bodies of its heroines, SuperVixens flirts with self-parody but manages to remain true to itself, unlike his subsequent efforts Up!, Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens and the released-even-though-it-was-obviously-never-finished-and-wouldn’t-have-made-sense-even-if-it-had-been Pandora Peaks (a project whose failure can be excused by the Alzheimer’s that was slowly wrecking Meyer's mind as he very-slowly worked on it) all of which seem desperate and uninspired in comparison.

That said, there’s another reason SuperVixens satisfies more than most of Meyer’s other films.  According to Jimmy McDonough’s biography of the director Meyer was introduced to a 28 year-old dancer named Shari Eubank by his friend and occasional star Haji, who had worked with her at a club called The Classic Cat and later said, “She was a damn good actress and she didn’t even know it.”  Meyer was instantly smitten and for good reason.  Not only did she have the kind of figure that had made his films famous, but unlike his previous and future discoveries such as Tura Satana, Erica Gavin, Raven De La Croix and Kitten Natividad, Eubank exuded a classic wholesomeness almost completely absent from his oeuvre.  For this reason it seems strange that Meyer originally hired her to play the part of SuperAngel—the film’s representation of female power at its worst—and gave the part of Angel’s virtuous opposite, SuperVixen, to his then-wife Edy Williams--quite possibly the least wholesome actress of the era.

But then Williams decided she wanted to be recognized as a serious actress and would no longer appear naked on film (a career choice she would reverse a few years later when it became abundantly evident no one would hire her for any other reason).  Unable to find a suitable replacement, he decided Eubank could play both roles—a choice made out of desperation that accidentally gave the film a bit of unintended thematic depth and which also made the character infinitely more sympathetic.
For a neophyte actress, Eubank proved remarkably adept in both roles.  If her SuperAngel sometimes seems a bit over-the-top, it’s always to the film’s benefit and perfectly in keeping with Meyer’s manic style.  As a character, SuperAngel is a broadly drawn representation of the worst kind of woman—supremely narcissistic, lazy, unsupportive, selfish and jealous—yet Eubank is able to show how she gets away with it with a single innocent look (it doesn’t hurt that the look just happens to be perched on top of that body).

In a weird way, casting Eubank as SuperAngel works against the film in that when she finally pushes a man too far, her violent comeuppance lacks the sense of justice Meyer pretty obviously wanted to convey.  Many commentators have expressed offense over the scene where policeman Harry Sledge (Meyer regular and well-known character actor Charles Napier) is driven to kill her after she cruelly mocks his inability to get an erection in her presence (“Not ready?  With my beautiful body?  You got a lot of nerve buster telling me you’re not ready!”), and while the scene is wildly over the top and does border on the wrong side of misogynistic, I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that even though SuperAngel the character isn’t sympathetic, Shari Eubank the actress is, and it’s painful to see her suffer in such a violent way.  Such is her presence in the film, the thought of her no longer being in it feels like a violation and it was only through happenstance that this potential mistake managed to be corrected.  Had Edy Williams been willing to take her clothes off for her husband, SuperVixens would have ended being a very different (and most likely unsatisfying) film.

Unlike SuperAngel, the role of SuperVixen didn’t require as much effort from the actress.  “Vix” (“As [her] friends call [her]”) is a sweet, hard-working young widow whose gas station/diner is literally an Oasis for Curt Ramsey, the film’s hapless and harried male protagonist.  Though their onscreen courtship isn’t given much screen time and basically consists of the two of them cavorting nakedly in the wild, their relationship is easily the sweetest and most romantic in all of Meyer’s films—a fact due as much to the performers as any effort from the director.

It’s unfair, however, to suggest that Eubank’s success in the film is based entirely on her own charisma.  Meyer’s contribution to her iconic performance is made evident by even a single viewing of the only other film she appeared in, the above-mentioned Chesty Anderson USN, in which she flounders under the weight of a poorly-written role in a badly-directed movie. For those of you who look to titles as a way to judge whether or not a film is right for you let the example of Chesty Anderson USN serve as fair warning of your folly. 

Let’s start with that Chesty part. 

“Now,” you must be thinking, “any movie that goes to the trouble of advertising it’s heroine’s pulchritude in the title must surely be a sexy romp filled to the brim with enticing female nudity.”

WRONG!

Despite its featuring a cast Meyer himself would be proud of [joining Eubank are such shapely actresses as Rosanne Katon, Dorrie Thompson, Dyanne “Ilsa” Thorne, Joyce Gibson (aka Joyce Mandel) and—in a wordless cameo as a gangster moll—fellow SuperVixens alum, Uschi Digard], the amount of actual nudity seen in the film clocks in at around 30 seconds.  The effect is not dissimilar to casting Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Steven Segal, Jean Claude Van Damme, Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan, Vin Diesel, Jet Li, Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery in a remake of 12 Angry Men.  As cool as it may seem for the first ten minutes, at a certain point you realize that they’re really just going to talk for the whole movie and a certain galling disappointment quickly begins to set in.

And I suppose you’re now thinking, “Okay, so there ain’t much sex.  At least the USN tells us we’re about to see a fun service comedy in the vein of Buck Privates, Stripes or In the Army Now.”

WRONG!

Though the film’s heroines are portrayed as being WAVES, their service in the military has as much impact on the plot as a butterfly flapping its wings in China does on the overall future of mankind.  Had the filmmakers instead found cheap and easy access to an abandoned hospital and a trunk full of old nurse costumes, the film could have been turned into Chesty Anderson RN with literally ten minutes worth of script revision.

But then if Chesty Anderson USN isn’t a sexy military romp, what the hell is it?

I’m not sure I should answer that question, since doing so would require me to spend more time thinking about its plot than the filmmakers ever did.  Beyond the criminal lack of nudity, the most frustrating aspect of the film is its shocking lack of urgency.  Near the beginning of the film Chesty’s younger sister is kidnapped and killed by the mob to stop her from ruining the career of her old boss, a corrupt, cross-dressing senator, and the subsequent investigation into her disappearance that then dominates the rest of film is given all of the gravitas of a search for a Jackson Five album needed for a sorority party scavenger hunt.

The blame for this rests on the shoulders of director Ed Forsyth who was not only incapable of handling the script’s bizarrely disparate tones, but was also clueless when it came time to direct his cast.  As memorable as Eubank was in her first film, here she comes off as lifeless and flat (emotionally if not physically).  She never seems that worried about what happened to her sister and shows absolutely no signs of anger or grief when she finally uncovers the truth. 

Her male co-stars fare little better.  Recognizable character actor Stanley Brock’s performance (seen here with Dyanne Thorne) as the lecherous doctor who orders the WAVES to strip to their waist (which in this case means taking of their shirts, but not their bras) no matter what their complaint would have been embarrassing on a vaudeville stage in 1926, much less in a movie made half a century later.

Scatman Crothers (billed here as Scat-Man) is a long way away from The Shining, but he only appears in one--unnecessary--scene, while the usually brilliant Fred Willard is saddled with the lame heroic boyfriend role and is given zero opportunity to showcase his tremendous comic talents.

 

And Timothy Carey as the mob hitman seems desperate to reinforce his off-screen reputation as an unstable freak (he’s the guy who was blacklisted for years after he infamously ended what he considered to be a humiliating audition at Columbia Studios by pulling out a gun and firing blanks at Harry Cohn and the executives in attendance).  Some folks may find themselves amused by his shameless overacting, but it struck me more as humiliating and sad.

The only performers who come off well are Katon (who in 1978 would become Playboy’s Miss September and in that capacity would go on to appear in the third episode of a certain variety show), who manages to take on the sassy black mama role without making her character seem like a tired stereotype, and Marcie Barken , whose turn as the trampy, flat-chested redhead earns the film its only real laughs.

Still, as bad as the film may be it is only a footnote in the brief career of its star.  Unlike 99% of the folks whose careers are documented on the IMDb, Shari Eubank earned true cinematic immortality and lives on in the memories of all those who’ve seen her first film.

Which is what makes her ultimate fate so fascinating.

After Chesty Anderson USN was released in 1976, the 30 year-old actress (who others described as sensitive and naïve), gave up on show business and eventually returned to her hometown of Farmer City, Illinois, where she had once been a cheerleader and the homecoming queen.  In the intervening decades it was rumored she’d gotten a degree in Education and taught Drama and English in her hometown’s small school system.  Now, thanks to Google and the increasing necessity for all institutions to be online, rumor has become fact.  All those fans who want to know what SuperAngel/SuperVixen looks like today, merely have to visit the staff section of the webpage devoted to Farmer City’s Blue Ridge Junior High.

And some may be happy to leave it at that, but I suspect many will be driven to distraction by the questions this raises.  Farmer City is a small community, so it’s unlikely her acting career has ever been a secret, but there would have been a period before home video where her appearance in a Russ Meyer film would have only been an unprovable legend among her students: 

“Hey, did you hear Ms. Eubank was in a porn movie?!?!”
“No way!”
“It’s true!  My dad says he saw it.  She was naked and everything!”
“Your dad’s a liar.”
“Is not!  Billy’s dad says he saw it too.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh!”
“What’s it called?”
“I dunno.  Something like Wonder Boobs, I think….”

Fast forward a decade later:

“You’ve got to come over to Billy’s place!”
“Why?”
“He just got back from a trip to his cousin’s in Chicago and he brought something back!”
“What?”
“It’s a copy of that porno Ms. Eubank was in!”
“No way!”
“Yeah, his cousin has all of these movies and Billy recognized the title.”
“Has he watched it?”
“Only like a dozen times!”
“She’s really naked in it?”
“Really, really naked!”

Fast forward to today:

“Let’s Google Ms. Eubank.”
“Okay.  What’s her first name, again?”
“I think it’s Shari.”
“Okay, here we go.”
“Holy shit!  Are those her boobs?”
“I love the internet.”

In all seriousness, it is virtually impossible for anyone with a single wit’s worth of imagination to not wonder how they would have reacted to the knowledge that their junior high school language arts teacher was once the buxom star of one of the best softcore movies ever made.  And those of us blessed with even more imagination than that cannot help but go on to ponder what it must have been like to be that junior high school language arts teacher whose interesting former career is inevitably discovered each year by a new crop of hormone-addled students.

And with this being just one untold story hinted at in the IMDb, you can understand why it’s difficult for me to stay away from its depressing online pages for any length of time.  The sadness  they sometimes make me feel being nothing compared to the wonderful curiosity they inspire.

Day of the Woman

Of all the films I have elected to discuss here at The House of Glib, today’s is BY FAR the most controversial.  Few films in the brief history of the art form have managed the nearly impossible trick of being praised by some as a low-budget masterpiece of feminist cinema, while also being denounced by others as the worst example of misogynistic exploitation trash ever to be devised by a truly sick and twisted mind.  While serving as a perfect case of how much a film’s title and marketing can influence an audience’s reaction, today’s film is important for also forcing the viewer to ask themselves how far is too far when it comes to getting a desired point across.  At what point does a filmmaker cross the line from exposing society’s evils to exploiting them?  And should they be blamed if certain segments of the audience respond to the material in the exact opposite way that they intended?

For those reasons today’s subject is the rare example of a film whose content makes it almost impossible to recommend to others, while also being one that no serious student of the filmmaking arts can justifiably avoid—it’s a film that should be shown in every introductory film class, but never will be because of the protests its inclusion would inevitably engender.

I am, of course, talking about:

Originally released as Day of the Women in 1978, Polish sound editor Meir Zarchi’s directorial debut was inspired by a real life incident in which he and a friend discovered a badly beaten and nude woman who had been raped in a park near his home.  Not only had he been horrified by the barbarity of the woman’s attackers (they had broken her jaw and only allowed her to live after she insisted that there was no way she could identify them since they had smashed her glasses and she could not see their faces), but also by the terrible bureaucratic indifference of the police officer who took her report and seemed far more concerned with getting it finished than calling the ambulance she so obviously needed.  To Zarchi’s eyes the casual cruelty of the apathetic officer was little different than the animal savagery of the rapists and in the years that followed the incident he began to imagine a film in which a woman survives a terrible rape, but instead of going to the police for justice, decides to take the matter into her own hands and forces her attackers to understand how terrifying it is to be a victim of another person’s remorseless brutality.  He wrote the screenplay during the 40-minute subway commutes to and from his New York office and was able to raise enough money (and defer enough payments) to make the film with a cast of unknowns and a crew largely composed of enthusiastic amateurs.

The film begins in New York, but only stays there for the briefest of scenes.  Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton), a successful young short story writer has decided to leave her apartment in the city in order to enjoy the peace and tranquility of a lake house located in rural Connecticut, where she plans to write her first novel.  On her way there she stops for gas at the town’s antiquated station, where the attendant, Johnny (Eron Tabor) takes notice of her sophisticated beauty, while his two dimwitted friends, Andy (Gunter Kleeman) and Stanley (Anthony Nichols) play a game that involves throwing a switchblade into the grass at their feet.

Upon reaching the lake house, Jennifer is so excited by the quiet, natural beauty of her surroundings that she runs towards the water and takes off her dress and enjoys a naked swim in the water—visibly thrilled to have escaped the noise and squalor of the city.  

We next see her as she unpacks her clothes and discovers a gun left behind by a former tenant in one of the drawers, but before she can do anything more than look at it, she is interrupted by the sound of someone knocking on her door.  It turns out to be Matthew (Richard Pace), the Lenny-esque manchild who works as the delivery boy for the local grocery store.  When he learns that she’s from New York City, he tells her that she “…comes from an evil place!”  She humours his small-town innocence by giving him “…a tip from an evil New Yorker,” which he excitedly tells her is the largest he’s ever received (a whole dollar).   He’s also becomes excited when he learns she’s a real writer and is famous (even though he’s never actually heard of her) and—as he chomps on an apple she gives him—he asks her if she has a boyfriend. 

 

“I have many boyfriends,” she tells him. 

 

“Could I be your friend?” he asks her sweetly. 

 

“Sure,” she smiles at him.  

Thrilled by his encounter with the glamorous woman from the big city, Matthew leaves and finds his friends—the same three men Jennifer encountered at the gas station.  Trying to impress them he tells them that he “…saw her tits!” (referring to the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra underneath her shirt).  It’s obvious that they aren’t a good influence on him, but they’re also the only people around who treat him like an equal—largely because they’re not that much smarter than he is.  Having exhausted all of the other diversionary activities their small town offers, the four of them decide to go fishing.  There they discuss whether or not beautiful women have to defecate (they decide that they do, since all woman “…are full of shit”) and how they have to get Matthew “…a broad…” to rid him of his virginity.  Stanley takes a shot at Matthew’s sexuality by claiming that, “…broads don’t turn him on!” to which Matthew responds by insisting, “Yes they do, but not all broads, only the special ones.”  Johnny humours him by asking, “What’s a special broad, Matthew?”

“Miss Hill,” answers Matthew.  “Miss Hill is special.”

Unaware of the impact she is having amongst the locals, Jennifer continues to commune with nature by going on canoe rides and sitting outside as she writes out chapters of her novel in long hand on a yellow legal pad.  Her peace does not last, however, when Andy and Stanley drive by on their motorboat.  Intent on getting her attention, they obnoxiously loop around the water until finally she has no choice but to go inside in order to escape them.

Later that night, while she is alone in bed, she is disturbed by the sound of clearly manmade animal noises coming from outside the house.  She goes outside to see where they are coming from, but sees only the darkness of the night and decides to go back inside, where she reassures herself with the knowledge that she has the gun she found in the drawer, if she needs it.  It turns out that she soon will, but at a time and place where no one would think to bring it.

During the middle of a hot summer day, Jennifer basks in the rays of the sun as she lies out in her canoe as it floats across the water.  Her calm does not last long, though, as Stanley and Andy return in their motorboat.  This time, however, they intend on doing more than simply show off.  They begin by driving around her canoe, causing it to shake in the waves, and then they grab its rope and begin pulling it behind them.  They take it to the shore, where Jennifer tries to fight them off with her paddle, but they quickly get it away from her and begin chasing her through the woods.

Jennifer soon discovers that this attack was planned when she reaches a clearing and is knocked down by Johnny, who has been waiting for his two friends to deliver her to him.  With Andy and Stanley’s help he tears off her bikini, holds her down and urges Matthew to come out from his hiding spot and take what they had gotten for him.  Matthew, torn between his loyalty to his friends and his affection for Miss Hill, refuses to rape her, but agrees to hold one of her legs as Johnny decides to do what he won’t.  Johnny strips out of his clothes and roughly penetrates Jennifer.

When he finishes, his three friends let her go and they all watch as she crawls away into the woods.  Johnny sends Matthew out to get her back, but he just helps her up and watches as she limps away.  The others taunt him for not taking advantage of the situation, with Johnny telling him, “…You’re gonna die a virgin.”

Naked and barefoot, Jennifer is forced to walk through not only the forest, but also small streams and swamp water in order to get back home.  Sadly, though, her attackers know the area far better than she does and are able to find her again.  This time Stanley rapes her—sodomizing her as Andy and Matthew hold her down on a large rock.  He climaxes as quickly as Johnny did and the four of them leave her stretched out on the rock and return to their boat.  Making their escape they abandon her canoe in the middle of the lake and Johnny throws her bikini into the water.  

Bruised, bloodied and covered in mud, a nearly catatonic Jennifer is finally able to get back to the lake house.  Upon reaching it, she collapses and has to crawl in order to get to a shirt to cover her naked body and to then get to the phone to call the police.  

But her attackers are not done with her.  Just as she finishes dialing, the phone is kicked away from her and Johnny appears at the top of her stairway.  As the others cheer him on, a now-drunk Matthew overcomes his shyness and strips naked and jumps on top of their victim, but isn’t able to finish like the others.  As he dejectedly puts his clothes back on, Andy finds some pages from Jennifer’s unfinished novel and reads them aloud for everyone’s amusement before he tears them up and throws the ripped up pieces on top of her.  

The other three having had their turns, Stanley is the last of the four to take advantage of their captive.  Jennifer—knowing that she can’t stop him and has been badly hurt by the other’s rough penetrations—begs him to allow her to fellate him instead.  “Total submission, that’s what I like in a woman,” he sneers just before he sadistically shoves a bottle into her vagina and orders her to perform oral sex with the command “Suck it, bitch!”  Unhappy with her lack of effort, he gets up and starts kicking her, which—despite their previous barbarity—is too much for even his friends to take.  They pull him outside and start to leave, but then Johnny decides that they can’t leave her alive after what they did to her.  He hands Matthew a switchblade and tells him to go back inside and kill her.  Matthew naturally refuses at first, but Johnny is finally able to convince him to do it.  With the knife in his hand he returns inside the house, where Jennifer is laying unconscious on the floor.  He puts the blade to her chest, but he can’t go through with it, so he instead wipes it across her cheek, covering it in blood, which he shows to his friends in order to prove that he did it.  Assuming that they now have nothing to worry about, the four of them escape away from the house down the water in their motorboat.

Knowing that there is nothing the law can do to get her the justice she deserves for what the four men have done to her, Jennifer does not call the police.  Instead she slowly nurses herself back to health and picks up the pieces of her now-shattered life.  One day she spots her canoe floating in the water outside of her house and is able to retrieve it.  The next she spends patiently taping up the pages from her novel that Stanley tore up in front of her and soon she starts writing new pages to go along with them.  The days pass by and her visible wounds fade, leaving only the ones left on the inside—the ones she’ll have to eventually leave the lake house to cure.

As their victim convalesces, the four rapists grow concerned that she might still be alive since they had not heard any news about her body being discovered by the police.  Johnny attempts to convince Matthew to go to the house to check, but he refuses and it’s left up to Andy and Stanley to find out for sure.  They drive past the house on their motorboat and see their victim sitting at a tree reading a book.  Knowing now that Matthew lied to them, the three others beat him up and make it clear that their friendship is over.  

As the quartet self-destructs, Jennifer is finally ready to open the drawer that holds the gun she found her first day there.  Dressed in black, she drives to the local church and asks God to forgive her for what she is about to do.  She then drives to the gas station where Johnny works, but stops herself from carrying out her plan when she sees him with his wife and children.  She then spots Matthew as he rides past her on his bicycle and decides to begin with him.

She returns home and places an order to the grocery store where he works.  Upon being told of the address of his next delivery, Matthew gets scared and steals a knife from the meat counter to protect himself.  When he arrives at the lake house, he finds Jennifer waiting for him outside, dressed in a white robe that makes her look like an angel.  He follows her into the woods, holding up the knife he brought with him—ready to use it if he has to.  

With the knife in his hand, he finds her standing beside a tree next to the water.  

“I hate you!  I hate you!” he cries at her angrily.  

“What have I done to you Matthew?” she asks with an eerie calmness that almost borders on kindness.  

“I have no friends now because of you!” he tells her.  

“Why, Matthew?” she asks as she begins to untie her robe.  “Why because of me?”

“Because I was chosen to kill you and I didn’t!”

“You will this time Matthew,” she says encouragingly.  “You will.  Just relax.”

“I’m sorry I have to do this,” he apologizes.  “I’m also sorry for what I did to you with them.  It wasn’t my idea.  I have no friends in town.”

“I thought we were friends.  Remember?  You asked me.”

“You’re only here for the summer!  What am I to do the rest of the year?”

“I could have given you a summer to remember—for the rest of your life,” she tells him as she pulls apart the robe and exposes one of her breasts.  

With the knife still raised above his head, she shows him the rest of her naked body and pulls him in for a kiss.  She then kneels down and takes off his pants and pulls him on top of her.  As he has sex with her (doing now what he earlier could not), she reaches behind to a noose hidden in the leaves of the tree and slips it around his neck.  She then starts pulling on the rope the noose is attached to and lifts Matthew up into the air, his body jerking spastically as he slowly suffocates.  She waits until she is sure that he is dead before dumping his body and bicycle into the river.  She then returns to the house and calls the grocery store to inform them that her delivery never arrived.

Having taken care of Matthew, she decides it’s time to return to Johnny.  She finds him by himself at the gas station and is able to wordlessly convince him to get into her car—using nothing more a flirtatious look and a nod of her head.  She drives him to a clearing, where she pulls out her gun on him and orders him to strip.  Johnny does as he’s told, but rather than beg for his life he explains how what happened was really all her fault—insisting that she provoked them with her sexy clothes.  Jennifer allows him to believe that she is swayed by his reasoning and hands her gun over to him and invites him back to her house.  He agrees—not realizing that she is only doing so in order to make him suffer much, much more than he would have if she had just shot him.

Back at her house, she joins Johnny in her bathtub for a bubble bath as he complains about his wife and friends.  He tells her that Matthew is missing, but that he’ll probably turn up sooner or later.  

“He’ll never come back,” Jennifer tells him as she massages and caresses his chest.  

“Why, do you think he committed suicide or something?” asks Johnny.  

“No,” she answers matter-of-factly.  “I killed him.”

Despite her protestations to the contrary, Johnny refuses to accept that she isn’t joking and doesn’t see it coming when Jennifer reaches for a knife she has hidden underneath a towel and uses it to castrate him.  Her rapist is so relaxed in the water he doesn’t even realize it has happened until he sees the water turn red.  Jennifer calmly gets out of the tub, puts on her robe and locks Johnny inside the bathroom as his cursing turns to begging for help and mercy.  She drowns out his cries by playing an aria from Puccini's Manon Lescaut.

This just leaves Andy and Stanley, who—knowing that both Matthew and Johnny are missing—suspect that their own lives are in danger.  Stanley approaches the house on his boat, while Andy comes by land—armed with an ax.  Jennifer, swinging in her hammock in a green bikini, hears Stanley coming and surprises him by swimming to his boat and climbing in.

“Where’s your friend?” she asks him.

“He stayed back in town,” he lies to her.

“I’m glad,” she lies right back to him.  “It’s you I wanted.”

As clueless as Matthew and Johnny, Stanley leans in for the implied kiss, which gives Jennifer the opportunity she needs to push him out of the boat.  As he splashes in the water, she starts the motor and starts terrorizing him with the boat just like he and Andy did to her before.  Andy reveals himself from where he was hiding on the shore and screams at her to leave his friend alone as he climbs into the water.  Using the boat, she manages to steal away his ax and watches as Andy swims towards Stanley in a foolish attempt to rescue him.  The two of them attempt to make it to shore, but Jennifer is able to split them up and kills Andy with his own ax.  

She then stops the boat just a few feet away from Stanley, who swims to her and attempts to lift himself out of the water via the motor.  He begs her not to kill him, insisting that he’s sorry and that it was never his idea in the first place.  Jennifer answers his pleas by repeating his own words back to him—“Suck it, bitch,” she says just before she turns the motor back on and tears him apart with its underwater propeller.

As his body begins to sink into the water, Jennifer drives away.  For the briefest of possible seconds a smile begins to appear on her face, but she does not allow it to grow and replaces it with a cold, blank stare.

 

The credits begin to roll.

I’m sure it’s pretty obvious by now where I stand in the whole misunderstood masterpiece/worst movie ever debate that has helped keep Day of the Woman relevant to this very day, but I should admit right now that I have a more personal reason to side with its creator than natural contrariness.  Like Meir Zachri, I know what it’s like to make a sincere effort to create a work that both honors the strength and fortitude of women and criticizes the clueless brutality of men, only to be accused of misogyny for having created it.  It actually happened to me twice, both cases involving poems I had written for two creative writing classes I had taken during my brief tenure at the University of Alberta.

The first time involved a poem I had written from the point of view of a rapist who rants at his victim for not giving him the experienced he wanted.  Clearly a weak and pathetic figure who committed his crime in a sick attempt to control someone else, his effort fails when his victim refuses to break down into tears and simply stares back at him with hateful contempt.  Despite having been written with the rapist’s voice, it was obvious whose side I was on and that I had intended for the creep to damn himself with his words, rather than present them as an actual defense of what he did.

It proved to be the most controversial poem the class discussed that year (literally, as nearly a 1/4 of that week’s 3 hour class ended up being devoted to it) and it was simultaneously praised by some as my best work to date and trashed by others as a work of terrible misogyny that illustrated a viewpoint that had no right to exist in the printed word.  And lest you think that I’m being a bit overdramatic describing the sentiments of my detractors, I will never forget that at the end of the debate the poem inspired, our professor summed up his feelings by saying “I think this proves that some point of views should not be expressed.”  

To this day it saddens and shocks me that someone who had devoted their entire life to being a writer and a poet would actually say those words out loud.

The most vocal of my detractors was the class’ most fiercely dogmatic feminist, who ignored the poem’s obvious theme of how even when victimized, women are inevitably stronger than men, and instead insisted that by giving a voice to a rapist, I became one.  Never mind that the poem was a work of fiction and no crime actually occurred, as far as she was concerned my having written about a rape from the male perspective made me a (literary) rapist.

You would think that after being accused of such an offense, I would cease from that point on to write about the subject and protect myself from being labeled a disgusting misogynist for the rest of my academic life, but I was just 19 and not ready to be so easily cowed into dogmatic submission.

The next year nearly all of the same students were enrolled in the higher-level class with a different professor and—without even thinking about what had happened the year before—the first poem I submitted was a long and angry screed that took issue with the way woman had been treated by religion (in this case Christianity) over the years.  It told the tale of Christ returning just before The Rapture specifically to rape an underage stripper on Christmas Eve (not a subtle concept to be sure, but I was only 19 when I wrote it).  My professor, when he introduced it, described it as, “The most explicitly feminist poem I’ve ever read,” which—considering the kind of work he must have been exposed to over the years—struck me as a being a very bold statement, but the same woman who had accused me of being a symbolic rapist a year earlier strongly disagreed.  

In this case her outrage came from the fact that I had depicted the rape in the body of the poem and—even though my narrator this time was unambiguously sympathetic to the victim and hostile to her attacker—this again was an act of misogyny on my part.  As she argued her case it become quite obvious that—as far as she was concerned—rape, as a subject, was entirely off limits to any writer with a penis.  The violation of undesired penetration being a subject she believed male writers could never appreciate or even remotely understand.  Naturally this argument can be undone with a single viewing of any one episode of Oz or Deliverance, but I have discovered throughout the years that pointing this out seldom, if ever, inspires those who make it to reconsider their position.

In defense of my accuser, she did eventually praise me for a later poem I wrote about women who are afraid to express themselves out loud that was inspired by our talented, but very shy fellow classmate, whom every male in the class had a serious crush on, which she included in a ‘zine she put together with her roommate.  

And while this explains my natural impulse to defend Zarchi’s film against accusations of the big, nasty m-word, I would gladly stifle it if I for one second believed that he actually hated women and had created the film to titillate his fellow misogynists, but having repeatedly watched the film and listened to his thoughts on the DVD commentary track I can say with 100% certainty that his intentions were pure—unfortunately the marketing plan of the film’s distributor was not.

In 1978 Zarchi had successfully sold Day of the Woman across the world, but had been unable to find a distributor willing to take on the film in North America.  After a very brief and unsuccessful attempt to distribute it himself, it appeared as though his film was destined to be lost to obscurity, until two years later when exploitation film distributor Jerry Gross (Blood Beach, Miss Nude America and The Boogeyman among others) agreed to release it.  Against Zarchi’s wishes Gross changed the title to I Spit On Your Grave and marketed the film with a lurid poster featuring a bruised and bloodied woman’s shapely backside and the (admittedly wonderful) tagline:

 

This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition...
But no jury in America would ever convict her!

Despite the tagline’s three major inaccuracies (Jennifer only kills four men, doesn’t burn any of them and would most likely still get convicted in Texas), it did the trick and got the film in theaters around the country, including—most significantly—Chicago where a single review branded the film with its infamous reputation and sparked the debate that surrounds it to this day.

Since he saw it in 1980, Roger Ebert has never hesitated in naming I Spit On Your Grave as the worst film he has ever reviewed.  Such was his antipathy for the film, he actually appointed himself the role of public censor and urged people to boycott and protest the theaters that were showing it and on several occasions stood outside those theaters with his fellow famous TV reviewing partner Gene Siskel in order to try and convince people not to see it.  For the moment, he proved successful, as the film quickly disappeared out of theaters, but in the long run his efforts were undone when—thanks largely to its now-infamous reputation—the film became a huge hit following its release into the then-nascent home video market.

The irony being one that every potential crusader should note—in all likelihood your protests will give the subject of your ire more attention than it ever would have received if you had simply allowed it to come and go without comment.

And while Ebert certainly was well within his rights to loathe the film and do everything he could to spare others what he believed was the most horrible of cinematic experiences, his reaction to the film was troubling for several reasons, the first of which was utter hypocrisy.

 

In the decade preceding his review of I Spit on Your Grave, Ebert had occasionally moonlighted as a screenwriter for the infamously breast-obsessed director Russ Meyer (both pictured) and collaborated on the scripts that would eventually become Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Up! and Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens.  And while the three films vary greatly in quality (Beyond is brilliant, Up! is extremely uneven but has its moments and Beneath is a self-indulgent mess) each of them contains moments as discomfiting as any found in Zarchi’s film.  In particular, the deaths of Casey and Roxanne in Beyond (who essentially die for no other reason than their lesbian relationship), the extended and brutal rape of Margo in Up! and the numerous sexual assaults played for laughs in Beneath, all call into question the validity of Ebert’s moral crusade against the film.

Equally distressing is the fact that eight years earlier Ebert (to his credit) had been one of the few critics to defend Wes Craven’s disturbing breakout film, The Last House on the Left--a film one could easily argue is as “…sick, reprehensible and contemptible…” as I Spit on Your Grave, if not more so.  But it is clear when you read his review of I Spit on Your Grave, what has offended him is not so much the film’s content, but rather how the audience he watched it with reacted to it.

Reading his description of the vocal reactions of his fellow audience members cheering on the rapists as they assaulted their victim, it is easy to understand why he left the screening feeling so disturbed, but it is much harder to sympathize with his conclusion that this was the precisely the reaction the filmmakers had intended.  

I remember when Schindler’s List came out there were reports of laughter from callous teenagers on school field trips, who reacted to the senseless deaths of Jewish holocaust victims the exact same way they would later react to the senseless deaths of the underworld characters in Pulp Fiction.  Had Ebert seen Spielberg’s movie in a theater filled with these idiots, would he have concluded that the director was an amoral anti-semite playing the Shoah for laughs?  Of course not, but Spielberg’s film had the benefit of being marketed as the serious work that it was—while Zarchi’s film had had its title changed and was now being sold as a pure exploitation picture.  The question then is if Ebert’s review would have stayed the same if he had seen Day of the Woman instead of I Spit on Your Grave.  My guess is that under its original title, the film wouldn’t have attracted the rough, unenlightened crowd that responded so enthusiastically to the ads for I Spit on Your Grave and Ebert would have simply dismissed the film rather than be inspired to declare the jihad that helped make it so famous.

In retrospect the most troubling part of Ebert’s review is his insistence that, “This is a film without a shred of artistic distinction. It lacks even simple craftsmanship,” since watching the film today clearly proves this not to be the case, but in the critic’s defense it is certainly likely that the film he saw and heard at a local theater in 1980 bears little resemblance to the film now available on DVD in 2007.  In the past few years we have seen a rise in once-dismissed or even actively abhorred films receive the benefit of a critical re-evaluation thanks largely to remastered DVD releases that present them in a new and entirely different light.  It is entirely possible that the film Ebert saw appeared to be poorly made, but the film available right now proves that initial appearances can be deceiving.

There is a reason I took the time and effort to format this post so that its screencaps could be enlarged with a mouse click and that is because many of them possess a deceptively simple beauty that I felt was ill served by presenting them at only 350x190 resolution.  The film possesses a unique look that at once seems dreamlike and verite-esque (is so a word)—as if Zarchi has made a fly-on-the-wall 70s documentary of a horrible nightmare.  Zarchi and his cinematographer Yuri Haviv (who also shot the genuinely artless Doris Wishman curiosity Double Agent 73) take full advantage of the natural settings of Kent, Connecticut, to create an arresting juxtaposition of savage inhumanity and lush green floral beauty.

But even if this were not the case, I believe Ebert is completely mistaken when he argues that, “Because [the film] is made artlessly, it flaunts its motives: There is no reason to see this movie except to be entertained by the sight of sadism and suffering.”  In fact, I would argue that the exact opposite is true—it is the perceived lack of artistry that actually proves that Zarchi’s motives were to invoke horror and empathy for his victim and not to titillate the sadists whose laughter and jokes caused Ebert to so passionately lash out.

The attack on Jennifer (starting from Andy and Stanley abducting her canoe and ending with the four rapists escaping from the lake house via their motor boat) lasts just a bit over 32 minutes, which is almost less than half as long as the “…hour of rape scenes…” Ebert describes, but still long enough to make it one of the most significantly extended rape sequences in film history.  For many it is this extended length that the film’s detractors point to as the clearest sign of Day of the Woman’s perceived misogyny—arguing that the film could have simply suggested the attack if it intentions were to enlighten rather than to arouse—but in reality the opposite is once again true.

 

Strangely, those offended by the sequence’s “artlessness” and extended length complain that it is ugly, unbearably sadistic and nearly impossible for a decent person to sit through, which is an extremely odd criticism when you consider that they are talking about—and please forgive me as I use a profanity to express myself—A FUCKING RAPE SCENE!  By its very definition rape is an ugly, sadistic crime that no decent person would be comfortably able to watch happen in front of them.  The rape scenes in Day of the Woman are disgusting because they were meant to be disgusting.  Zarchi’s intentions are clear, he wants you to feel sick as you watch what happens to Jennifer and if you don’t than that is a damning failure of your own soul, not his as a filmmaker.

Beyond its length, there are several other factors that make the sequence unique amongst its ilk.  The first is the unusual use of male nudity.  In most films involving rape, it is almost always only the victim who is seen naked, but in Day of the Woman, all but one of Jennifer’s four attackers strip down to nothing but their socks.  There is a reason male nudity is still extremely rare in movies, especially when compared to its female counterpart, and that’s because many people—both male and female—are repulsed by it.  In the majority of cinematic rape scenes, the filmmakers only show us genitalia we are hardwired to find arousing, thus making their sequences more potentially titillating than they would want to admit.  Zarchi avoids this trap by showing just as much of Johnny, Andy and Matthew’s bodies as he does as Jennifer’s.  This contributes significantly to the sense of disgust decent audiences feel when they watch the film.

But the aspect of the sequence that most significantly makes it stand out is its use of music—there is none.  With the exception of the scene where Jennifer puts on an opera record to drown out Johnny’s cries for help, there is no music in Day of the Woman.  More than anything else, this lack of a traditional score contributes to the film’s documentary-like feel—the absence of the expected emotional cues tricks us into thinking that what we are seeing is really happening and not a work of imagination.  This more than anything else is why I believe Ebert became convinced that Zarchi’s film was an “…expression of the most diseased and perverted darker human natures.”  Without a musical score to tell him what Zarchi wanted him to feel at that moment, it was easy for him to conclude that the filmmaker was in league with the sick fucks he was unfortunate enough to be sitting with in the theater.

To my eyes, Zarchi did everything he could to make the sequence as hard to watch as possible, with the sole exception of casting an unattractive woman as the victim (but even his decision to cast the beautiful Keaton--pictured here from a horror convention appearance she made at the age of 55--in the role is one that makes sense on both a thematic and narrative level).  And while I believe he did this out of a genuine desire to document the true horrors of sexual assault, the sequence’s brutality also serves the vital purpose of justifying Jennifer’s own remorseless brutality in the last half of the film.

In her brilliant defense of the film in her landmark book Men, Women and Chainsaws (perhaps the most often cited text in the history of this blog), Carol J. Clover points out that Roger Ebert never mentions how the twisted souls who laughed at Jennifer’s suffering reacted when she turned against her attackers in the most violent ways possible.  Did they laugh when she cut off Johnny’s penis or hung the pathetic Matthew?  They might have, but my guess is that they didn’t.

More than anything else, the reason my gut reaction to Day of the Woman is to call it a work of overt feminist propaganda is the fact that the only sequences where I feel Zarchi does take some sadistic delight are the ones where Jennifer kills hers attackers.  Unlike the rape sequence, which he made as ugly as possible, the three sequences where she gets her revenge are far more aesthetically pleasing and—at times—oddly and disturbingly beautiful.

The major criticism of these sequences has always been that Jennifer uses her sexuality in order to commit her murders, suggesting that as a woman she has no other weapons in her arsenal.  My argument against this is that Jennifer is presented as being a smart, worldly young woman and she is canny enough to realize that seducing her victims before killing them allows her to get closer to them and make them suffer that much more than if she merely attacked them from a distance.   And in the case of Matthew, her seduction not only allows her to disarm him and put him in a position where she can slip her waiting noose around his neck, but also justify her unwillingness to spare him despite his unfortunate condition and personal predicament.  By allowing him to do to her what he originally couldn’t, she turns him into a man, which makes him no longer an object of pity, but rather one of deserved scorn. 

 

In other words, she has to fuck him so she can kill him.

In the sequence with Johnny, Jennifer proves her status as the most powerful of the two by first wordlessly convincing him to get into her car and then pretending to be swayed by his ridiculously chauvinistic defense of his crime against her, so she can put him in position to be robbed of the one thing he cares about most.  Without even really trying she is able to expertly exploit his delusional narcissism and get him into that bathtub where a very sharp knife is waiting for her beneath a nearby towel.

Interestingly, in these two sequences Zarchi uses female nudity in the exact opposite way he did male nudity during the rape sequence.  Unlike the scenes featuring her assault, Zarchi wants us to enjoy watching Matthew and Johnny suffer, so he uses Camille Keaton’s body to provide the titillation he previously worked so hard to avoid.  Her beauty distracts us from the ugliness of her actions, which might otherwise cause us to cease to empathize with her.  Thus his apparent exploitation actually serves as an example of his feminist intent.  By emphasizing her beauty in these moments he proves his allegiance to her and makes it obvious that he considers her actions just.

At this point I still have a lot more I could say about Day of the Woman (I haven’t even touched on the secondary theme of the conflict between urban and rural culture or the strange fact that in criticizing the film some feminist academic reviewers express sentiments nearly identical to that of the uber-chauvinist, Johnny) but this entry is now awfully close to being 7000 words long and I think it’s time for me to stop and get this sucker posted.  That I, or anyone else for that matter, could be inspired to write at such length about this film goes a long way to negating the sentiments of those who would dismiss it as just another example of low-budget exploitation filmmaking that happened to become infamous because of one vitriolic review from a nationally-recognized film critic.  In my introduction I suggested that Day of the Woman/I Spit on Your Grave was a film that is impossible to recommend, but having reached the end of this post, I feel duty bound to contradict myself—see this movie.  The most-recent DVD release of the film, which not only contains the best visual and audible example of the film to date, also contains two extremely interesting audio commentary tracks by Meir Zarchi (who gave no interviews about the film for over 20 years following its release) and by genre critic and historian John Bloom (aka Joe Bob Briggs) and is one of those rare special editions that is truly special and is a must have in the collection of any serious cineaste—genre or otherwise.