For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.
Carrey’s star debut, Once Bitten posits a world where he’s Los Angeles’ last virgin, which poses a problem for vampire Hutton, who needs his untainted blood to retain her beauty. Bizarrely Carrey plays the straight man, making the ungodly hot 42 year-old supermodel the only reason to check this out.
When Hubie, a local asshole, steals and wrecks her brother Binx’s beloved scooter, trailer park beauty Billie Jean Davy goes to his family’s store for the $618.00 required to get it fixed. Pyatt, Hubie’s father, tells her that he’ll give her the money, but only in $50 installments for which he expects “something” in return. She refuses and Pyatt catches Binx with the gun he keeps inside his cash register. Binx accidentally shoots Pyatt, which forces him, Billie Jean and their friends Putter and Ophelia to go on the lam. Billie Jean’s beauty turns the news story into a statewide sensation, causing them to be recognized wherever they go. She tries to turn herself in, in exchange for the money owed to repair the scooter, but Hubie and his friends try and grab her before the cops can. Out of cash, they break into an empty looking house, only to find Lloyd, the lonely teenage son of the district attorney. Inspired by a clip from Otto Preminger’s Joan of Ark, Billie Jean cuts her hair and has Lloyd film a video of her giving her side of the story. After the video hits the news, girls all across Texas cut their hair in solidarity with their new heroine. Lloyd agrees to serve as the group’s pretend hostage, which brings them into the literal crosshairs of local sharpshooters at the request of his powerful father. With the promise of a repaired scooter, the three of them return to the scene of the crime, only to have Binx shot while Billie Jean is disguised in the crowd. As he’s taken to the hospital, she confronts Pyatt in front of his shop, which she sees is now devoted to selling memorabilia depicting her slogans and image. He tells her he wants to end this and gives her a handful of money, but she throws it back at him and knees him in the groin, causing a lamp to ignite. A crowd gathers and watches as his store burns to the ground and—realizing their complicity in the madness—take off their Billie Jean hats and t-shirts and throw them into the fire.
Not too long ago I read Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant’s excellent book, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit, which explains how to really make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. In it they tell you that you don’t have to bother taking Robert McKee’s famous screenwriting course in order to figure out the perfect way to structure a screenplay. They advise that you instead watch Die Hard and do that—every single time, no matter what genre.
It’s great advice, only I would suggest that another film could easily take Die Hard’s place as the perfect example of narrative structure done right. And, as you have already guessed, that film is the subject of today’s post. Truthfully, I understand objectively that The Legend of Billie Jean is far from being a perfect movie, but subjectively I can think of few films whose journey from beginning to middle to end makes me so goddamn happy.
I say this not because I am blind to the dozen little absurdities that define the film’s best scenes, but because the film so effectively sails past them that I have no choice but to pay them no mind. I know they’re there, but I simply don’t care.
Take for example, the fact that every single thing that happens in this film happens because a kid’s scooter got messed up and requires $618.00 to be repaired. Intellectually I understand that this is laughable, but then again I remember that at least two classic films were entirely based on the theft of bicycles (shame on you if you don’t immediately know what the two of them are), neither of which had motors or looked as cool as Binx’s sweet ride.
Or how about the scene where a group of kids ask the now legendary Billie Jean to come and save their friend Kenny from his abusive father? I know in real life her heroism would end with her dead from a shotgun wound, but fuck you if that scene doesn’t make me tear up every single time—no matter how ridiculous it might be.
Sure, taken part by part the film is almost unimaginably stupid, but as a whole it’s brilliant. And do you know how I know this?
Because I’ve seen Thelma & Louise.
Callie Khouri won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for that film, but everyone who’s seen The Legend of Billie Jean knows it wasn’t as original as it seemed.
Whether she knew it or not, Khouri was clearly inspired by the earlier work. Both films find their main characters becoming fugitives after they shoot the assholes who try to rape the two hot blondes with terrible southern accents. Both films feature sympathetic male cops who understand that the fugitives aren’t really to blame for what happened. Both films show how the protagonists newfound outlaw status allows them to do things they never would have done before. The main difference is that Thelma & Louise has to be all bleak and depressing to get its point across, while The Legend of Billie Jean just has to be fucking awesome to do the same thing!
(Of course, not everyone feels the same way. I’ve long praised Pat Benatar’s theme song as one of the main reason for the film's awesomeness, but apparently she’s not what you would call a fan of the production. Apparently in concert she introduces the song as being from the worst movie of all time, and it was apparently her refusal to sign off the DVD rights to the song that kept it off store shelves all this time. My guess is that her distaste probably has more to do with the producers of the film, Jon Peters and Peter Gruber, who were kinda like Simpson and Bruckheimer but without the scruples, taste or talent. Chances are they found a way to piss her off so severely she found it impossible to say a kind word about the film and felt justified in keeping it hidden away from the world. Either that or she was just being a major cunt. In the end, it doesn’t matter. She’s Pat Benatar and she’s allowed to do whatever the fuck she pleases.)
Obviously the majority of the film’s enormous appeal comes from its leading lady, who had just finished playing Supergirl when cast in the role. As Billie Jean, Helen Slater looks amazing. Sure she occasionally sounds really dumb and not every line is delivered as successfully as one might hope, but I guarantee that every time one of the characters calls her “a pretty girl” (and they do it a lot) you’ll find yourself nodding your head vigourously in agreement.
The film also features endearing performances by 20 year-old Yeardley Smith as the 13 year-old Putter, and future Mother Night director Keith Gordon as Lloyd, as well as a great turn by Peter Coyote as the film’s sympathetic lawman. Unfortunately, it also features Christian Slater as Binx, who begins and ends the film as an utter douche.
If it doesn’t seem as though I’m getting in as deep as I usually do in these entries, it's probably because I love the film too much to perform the evisceration necessary for a proper autopsy. It’s one of the projects that simply is what it is and what that is is perfect.
Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
Ruby
(1977)
According to my trusty Leonard Maltin iPhone app director Curtis Harrington was so disappointed with one version of his 1977 film, Ruby, he insisted on it being given the infamous Alan Smithee credit once used by filmmakers who felt their artistic vision had been so catastrophically usurped they could not allow to have their name attached to a project, lest it negatively affect their career and reputation.
But having just sat through the unmolested director’s cut for which he took full credit, I’m having difficulty imagining how much worse that other version could have been for Harrington to not want to be associated with it. I say this because the film I watched is so relentlessly mediocre, it’s hard to figure out how it could ever be edited into an outright Smithee-worthy disaster. As is, Ruby simply doesn’t take enough risks to ever be that bad.
Pointlessly set in 1951 (a fact easily forgotten given how little effort is made to convincingly convey the period), Ruby is a supernatural gangster revenge thriller with a mute teenage girl thrown into the mix just so the producers could throw Exorcist and Omen references into the trailer. A post-Carrie Piper Laurie looks fabulous as the title character—a washed up singer/moll who runs a drive-in 16 years after the father of her daughter was gunned down by the other members of his gang—but overplays the part to the precipice of campy embarrassment.
Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of Laurie’s performance to turn the film into a so-bad-it’s-good classic a laMommie Dearest. Instead, Ruby is the least satisfying kind of bad film there is—a dull, unimaginative one.
Which is something even Alan Smithee would be ashamed of.
For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.
Howard plays a nerdy student at a military school who’s bullied by 28 year-old That 70s Show dad, Stark. Using a home computer, Howard joins forces with the spirit of Bull from Night Court and gets his revenge. The moral of the story is: Never mess with a geek’s puppy.
Late at night a carnie named Kogen arrives at the home of famous herpetologist Dr. Carl Stoner to pick up a mysterious package that appears to contain some large, unseen animal. The next day Stoner visits Dr. Daniels, the chairman of the university’s zoological department. He’s come to request an extension on his research grant and to find someone to replace Tim, his student assistant who appears to have taken off without notice. Daniels can’t guarantee the grant, but he does recommend David Blake for the assistant position. David eagerly accepts and drives with Stoner to his isolated house and its basement laboratory. There he meets Kristina, Stoner’s attractive daughter, who’s surprised to learn of Tim’s unexplained disappearance. After showing David his impressive collection of snakes, including a black mamba and king cobra, Stoner gives him an injection he says is meant to protect him from venomous bites. Over the following weeks, David and Kristina start falling in love—a development her father strong disapproves of. David starts showing strange physical changes that the doctor insists are normal reactions to the injections, but the truth of what’s happening to him can be found at the freak show of a local carnival, where the half-man, half-snake is far more realistic than nature would ever allow. The depth of Stoner’s madness is proven when he sneaks into the room of a local football hero and slips the black mamba into the jock’s shower in order to get revenge for the death of his beloved pet python. On the final day of David’s transformation, Stoner sends Kristina away on a wild goose chase so he can attend to the creation of the first snake with a human mind. Doing this also requires that he feed Dr. Daniels to a large snake in his storm cellar. Unlike Tim, David’s metamorphosis proves successful and Stoner chooses to celebrate by gloating about his achievement to his king cobra, which ends with him being repeatedly bitten. Kristina finds her father dead in their backyard, and—having learned about what happened to Tim—realizes that the new king cobra in their lab is her boyfriend who—as the movie ends—is threatened by both an attacking mongoose and the gun of the local sheriff.
Sssssss was the first movie made by the famous producing team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown. The two of them first worked together as executives at 20th Century Fox, the studio founded by Zanuck’s legendary father, Darryl. As far as cult film fans are concerned their most important achievements during this period were Planet of the Apes, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and the infamous WWTTM (What Were They Thinking? Movie) disaster, Myra Breckenridge. As independent producers they wouldn’t hit the big time until two years after Sssssss, when they helped changed cinema forever with another scary animal movie—Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
Watching Sssssss (which earns my personal nomination for worst movie title of all time) it’s hard to see just why they chose to set their shingle on this particular property, which suffers from the same conceptual flaw most animal related horror films cannot overcome. The logic behind these films is that by exploiting people’s natural phobias of frightening animals, you have to expend little effort in crafting an effective horror movie. Since many people are terrified by the mere sight of snakes, making a movie that features a lot of them is guaranteed to thrill. Right?
But this all falls apart when you realize that the kind of person who suffers from the sort of antipathy that makes it difficult for them to even look at a snake or spider or rat, is most probably not going to pay to do so in a movie theater. Tickets will instead be bought by folks who have no problem with such animals and who feel no tension when they appear safely on a movie screen (as opposed to directly in front of them).
I’m not afraid of snakes. Would I object if a rattlesnake showed up in the middle of my bed? Of course, but if you told me I could approach a large python or an adorable chimpanzee, I’d pick the snake every single time. Once you’ve done the right reading, you know that most snakes would rather just ignore you, while a primate will straight out fuck you up. Just ask that woman Oprah interviewed who had her face bit off.
Because of this, for me the horror of Sssssss (I mean, really! Can you think of a worse title?) depends entirely on the element of the mad scientist and his victim and in that direction the film veers away from terror and instead into pathos. Much of this can be blamed on what is actually the film’s most successful element—Strother Martin’s performance as Dr. Stoner.
In playing the insane snake doctor, Martin chose to avoid all of the usual clichés. Instead of being a cackling, insane, egomaniac, he’s instead a quiet, humble, idealist who genuinely believes his crackpot experiment will change the world for the better. Not only do we like him, we sympathize with him. Even when he kills the football player, the script so clearly stacks the deck in his moral favour (the jock killed his pet snake in self defense while he was trying to break into Kristina’s room to rape her) that it’s almost impossible to fault him for it. It’s only at the very end where he becomes the outright villain most other films would have shown from the very beginning.
And as interesting as this is, it upsets the balance of David and Kristina’s story. Played by Dirk Benedict and Heather Menzies, they’re a very appealing couple, but the horror of his eventual transformation is affected by our inability to fault her father until the very end. Rather than a horrific act that defies nature, David’s fate instead seems sadly melodramatic—no different than if he had cancer or some other fatal disease. Instead of thinking “Holy shit, he’s totally turning into a snake!” we spend the movie worrying about how hard it’s going to be on Kristina, “She really seems to like him.”
So you can chalk Sssssss as another movie that fails for many of the reasons it succeeds. If we didn’t care about the characters, chances are the horror elements might have stuck out more. As it is the quality of the main performances do more to highlight the film’s problems than disguise them. This includes the odd decision to obscure nudity by literally painting vegetation onto the frame (which—according to the IMDb—appears only in the home video version for unexplained reasons), the ridiculous death of Dr. Daniels (who appears to have been completely devoured by the snake in a matter of hours, which even I know wouldn’t be possible), the hilarious final transformation scene, and the whole football player subplot, which seems to have been added just to give Dr. Stoner something evil to do before the climax.
I’d actually be okay with all of this if the film didn’t completely fuck up its ending. Clearly the film originally ended with snake-David being killed, but that's the kind of thing that never survives audience testing. So, instead the film ends with Kristina screaming while her snake-boyfriend’s fate is in limbo (for about three seconds at least). My problem is that I actually think the film would have been far creepier if it allowed David to live and we watched as Kristina was left to decide what to do with a boyfriend who is now a venomous king cobra. More than anything I like this because it would have allowed for a sequel in which the situation has driven her mad and she uses her deadly reptile lover to kill all of the folks who refused to recognize her father’s brilliance.
Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
The Adventures of Hercules
(1985)
There are two reasons to love The Adventure of Hercules, the second of two films made about the famous demi-god by director Luigi Cozzi and star Lou Ferrigno. The first is its refreshing dependence on a largely female cast (and that’s before a bunch of Amazons show up), which seems to have less to do with the narrative demands of the plot as much as the director’s desire to make a movie with a lot of really hot Italian chicks in it. As a reviewer who enjoys movies with a lot of really hot Italian chicks in them, this is a definite plus.
The second reason to love the movie is that it’s as insane as we’ve come to expect from the man who gave us Starcrash (in which Caroline Munro, in just one instance, is endangered by a giant lesbian robot) and the first Hercules (in which the hero is shown creating the constellations by throwing stuff into the sky). In this case, the insanity comes from Hercules search for Zeus’ seven stolen thunderbolts, which the god requires to quell the rebellion started by his (really hot) wife Hera. Said bolts are hidden inside a variety of foes, including a hairy monster, a busty Gorgon, Hades, a busty spider lady and a fire monster.
You just have to watch the final fight in which the battle between science and religion (Cozzi’s for the latter) is waged between an animated T-Rex and gorilla to understand the peculiar genius of this neglected auteur’s demented imagination.
For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.
The notorious Troma Entertainment's most mainstream film, Stuck On You! is probably still too vulgar and raunchy for most casual viewers. A broad comic deconstruction of romance through the ages, the film has the best joke to laugh ratio of Kaufman and Herz’s pre-Toxic Avenger oeuvre. Which isn’t saying much.
American karate champ/instructor Susanne Carter has come to the Philippines to find her missing sister, Bonnie. Her investigation leads her to a drug ring run by Erik, who also holds secret martial art matches where local fighters battle to the death. His champion and lackey is a blond American named Chuck. Chuck’s immediately intrigued by the other hot blond in his midst, and learns she has the black belt goods. Erik tries to convince Susanne to take part in his deadly fights, but she tells him she doesn’t think she could kill a man. Bonnie’s body is dragged from a local river, and a distraught Susanne runs straight to Chuck’s penis. Their romance proves short-lived, though, when an undercover detective tells Susanne that Chuck was the one who killed her sister. Susanne finds Bonnie’s bracelet in Chuck’s apartment and knows what she has to do. She calls Erik and tells him she’s ready to fight in his ring, so long as she can do so under her terms. He agrees, not realizing that her terms mean she will only fight her sister’s murderer. Chuck is shocked to learn that his new fuck-buddy is determined to fight him to the death. In the ring he deliberately goes easy on her and at one-point stops short when he has the chance to kill her. Susanne is not so merciful; when her chance arises, she drives two sticks into her former lover’s eyes, avenging Bonnie’s death.
If you haven’t gotten around to seeing the wonderful new documentary Machete Maidens, I will forgive you if you stop reading this and do so immediately. From the same filmmakers who gave us the equally awesome Not Quite Hollywood (about Australia’s 70s/80s exploitation film boom), Maidens is devoted to the low budget exploitation films made in the Philippines during that same period. Watching it will delight anyone who cares even a little about low budget genre filmmaking, although I would advise that you avoid my mistake of doing so in an airport while waiting for a flight, since virtually every film clip shown in the film seems to have at least one naked woman in it.
Among these many, many naked women was an attractive blond lass named Jillian Kesner, whose appearance was justified thanks to her starring role in a Roger Corman production directed by Filipino filmmaking legend, Cirio H. Santiago. In the clip that appeared in the film, Jillian was shown exercising her karate skills while clad in only a pair of white panties. Needless to say, this made me want to see Firecracker very much. Fortunately for me, the good folks at Shout Company (whose recent spate of Corman releases represent the best thing happening in home video at the moment) allowed the film to make its DVD debut this month in a set that also included the butt-kicking babe flicks T.N.T. Jackson and Too Hot To Handle.
And having just watched the film, I can happily report that it didn’t let me down. But then, that’s because I wasn’t expecting anything close to resembling a good film. That’s because Santiago is much like a Filipino Jesus Franco—his legend has everything to do with his productivity and ubiquity and nothing to do with the actual quality of his films. Even at their best, his films kinda suck. At their worst, even Roger Corman worried they might be unreleasable—although that didn’t seem to stop him.
(According to the commentary on Maidens, Joe Dante--the director of Gremlins--insisted that Santiago’s Cover Girl Models was the worst film he saw during his tenure as Corman’s trailer editor.)
The best that can be said for Firecracker is that it’s pretty coherent and always in-focus (claims that can’t be made for every Santiago effort). In fact, there are actually three very entertaining scenes in the film. The problem is that two of those scenes actually fuck up what negligible plot the film manages to have.
I’ve already mentioned the scene where Susanne kicks ass without the benefit of clothing. It comes just after the scene where Eric the drug dealer invites Susanne to fight in one of his secret matches. She tells him she doesn’t think she can, and then the movie cuts to her getting out of a cab—apparently on her way home.
As she walks down the street, she catches the attention of two street thugs, who decide to get their rape-on. Instead of kicking their butts, as you would expect a black belt karate expert who’s just been offered a chance to engage in deadly combat for cash, she instead runs like a pretty blond girl in a completely different movie. As she runs, her skirt becomes snared on a fence, forcing her to abandon it. Thus unclad, she makes it into a factory where she begs a security guard to help her. He does his best, but is soon killed by the thugs. They chase her around the building, where a similar wardrobe snare-up causes her to abandon her top. She manages to fatally dispatch one of her wannabe rapists with a circular saw, while his buddy slices the front half of her bra in two. Now topless, she finally starts to fight the guy the way we kinda expected her to in the very beginning, and eventually takes him down.
All in all, it’s a pretty great exploitation movie moment. The problem is that it was clearly added to the film after the movie had already been shot. The evidence is pretty insurmountable, starting with the fact that it’s the only scene devoid of a single Filipino actor (including the cab driver, who's very clearly a white dude), which suggests to me that it was shot in the States. That and the fact that it seems a bit too competently done for Santiago to have been responsible for it.
This wouldn’t be a problem if the scene didn’t feature Susanne acting completely out of character. Before this we’ve already seen her take on dangerous dudes without breaking a sweat (including one scene where she grabs a deadly snake and flings it at Vic Diaz, the guy who played the gay prison guard in The Big Bird Cage), so it’s impossible to dramatically justify her decision to flee in this instance. That said, it does make sense from a production standpoint, since the only major drawback of filming Kesner without her clothes on is that it becomes impossible for the dude in a blond wig who’s been doubling all of her previous fight scenes to do so here. For that reason her fight choreography had to be kept to a minimum since she had to do all of it herself.
Even worse, though, is how the scene totally screws up the little bit of a character arc Santiago and co-screenwriter Ken Metcalfe (who also plays Eric) managed to come up for her. In the scene just before this one, we see Susanne tell Eric she doesn’t think she can kill someone, a declaration I suspect was supposed to pay off in the final fight with Chuck, where she dramatically proves she can and without remorse.
Unfortunately the added(?) topless fight scene ruins this by showing us Susanne killing someone immediately after she said she couldn’t. Because of this her killing Chuck (played by Malibu Express's Darby Hinton in a very fun and moustachy performance) at the end of the movie doesn’t feel as significant as it should and robs the moment of much of its potential impact.
(Speaking of the scene where Susanne kills Chuck, it does seem weird that Santiago and Metcalfe chose to make him so reluctant to fight her. Based on what we’ve seen of him, his genuine affection for her seems out of character and—oddly—makes him seem more sympathetic in a scene where we should just want to see him straight up murdered. Ignoring his attempts at mercy does make Susanne more of a badass, but it also makes her seem like a dick. It’s definitely a problem we’d never see in a Chuck Norris movie.)
The other questionable scene might have been part of the original production, but that still doesn’t justify it. In it Susanne has just identified her sister’s body at the morgue and runs to Chuck to take comfort in his arms (and cock). What follows is an extremely long and bizarre sex scene where four minutes (in a 77 minute movie) is spent showing the two of them cutting off each other’s clothes in real-time detail.
Truthfully, it’s a fun scene, but it comes far too late in the film. By this point the only possible reason Susanne hasn’t made the connection between her sister’s death and Chuck’s drug dealing shenanigans is because she’s a complete idiot. Had the same scene appeared earlier in the film, this wouldn’t have been an issue, but at that moment in the picture it’s utterly ridiculous.
But as troubling as these scenes are, I know exactly why they’ve been included. It’s because without them, the film would come in at less than 70 minutes long and—much more importantly—would be robbed of all of its nudity.
The result, then, is an already questionable film undone by two of the three scenes that marginally justify its existence. Leaving only one utterly unspoiled moment of perfection. "And what," you ask, "would that be?"
Even though I already posted this week’s edition of Rejected By Rod(?), I’m dipping back into my well of unposted Flick Attack reviews to start off this look at a B-TV classic. The FA part of this review was actually included in the first batch I ever sent to Rod, when I very briefly held myself to a very strict 250-word limit, which explains why it’s so much more pithy and succinct than my typical FA output.
The defining moment of the 1978 TV movie Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park comes when drummer Peter Criss (aka Cat Man) first speaks aloud and the familiar Saturday morning cartoon voice of male Wonder Twin Zan (Michael Bell) comes out of his mouth. It’s then that you realize this film was: A) produced by Hanna-Barbara, B) stars a bunch of people who REALLY didn’t want to be involved in its production and C) is far more wonderful than mere mortals like us probably deserve.
Starring the world’s greatest all-time terrible rock band, the original members of Kiss play themselves—with the fictional license that along with being unapologetic cash whores, they also each possess super powers, which they’ll need in order to stop the titular villain (a slumming Anthony Zerbe) who is turning amusement park customers into robotic slaves. The band is alerted to his evil doings by a pretty young fan named Melissa, (Deborah Ryan) who—in the film’s most fantastic and unrealistic contrivance—Gene Simmons doesn’t try to fuck.
Normally talented genre director Gordon Hessler (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad), couldn’t overcome the film’s non-existent budget and as a result the film has an almost Ed Woodian level of unintentionally amusing shoddiness (ie. Ace Frehley’s stunt double is clearly an overweight black man). Definitely not for the serious minded, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park is one of those nostalgia pieces whose glaring imperfections actually makes it far more loveable than a well-made film.
I based the above review on multiple viewings of a really shitty bootleg copy I downloaded from Napster back when that was totally a thing you could do. As crappy as the quality was, the film itself was the same version I had seen several times play on weekday television when I was kid. So, you can imagine my surprise when I recently downloaded what I thought was merely a superior quality version of the exact same film, only to be stunned by the strange new movie that played before my eyes. Not only did it look 1000x better than my previous version, but right from the start I could tell that the editing was different, the soundtrack was better, and much of the overall suckiness had been removed.
Being the asshole film geek that I am, I didn’t even have to turn to the Internet to figure out what was happening. All I had to do was look through my personal poster collection and find my copy of the one sheet for Kiss en ataque de los fantamas—the Spanish language version of the film, which had actually been released theatrically in Europe. I knew that when the original TV version aired, Kiss had refused to license their songs to play during non-concert/performance scenes in the films, but had changed their mind for the European release. This clued me into what I was watching. I had just been unprepared for how radically different the two films were.
That’s not to say that this version (which is credited as Kiss in Attack of the Phantoms) isn’t as hilariously and rapturously cheesy as the version I had seen dozens of times before—it just manages to leave out all of the parts that made the original look like the Ed Wood spectacle I described in the (thus-far unpublished) FA review I originally wrote over a year ago.
I’ve always said that the best way to teach people how much impact editing can have on a project is to show them the studio and director cuts of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, which are as radically different as two films based on the same raw material can be. The differences between Kiss Meets The Phantom of the Park and Kiss in Attack of the Phantoms aren’t that extreme, but they are significant enough to radically change the viewing experience.
The European theatrical version is close to 10 minutes shorter than the original, but by reordering and re-cutting important scenes, the plot actually feels much more organic and less haphazard—especially regarding Melissa’s search for her roboticized boyfriend. Gone are the shots featuring the overweight black stunt man dressed as Space Ace, and—most importantly—the Kiss tracks on the soundtrack bring a sense of fun and energy to the film that makes it many faults so much easier to digest. Just take a look at the difference between the classic scene where the evil robot version of Gene attacks a bunch of security guards. In the original the sequence is scored by what sounds like archival stock porn music:
While in the European theatrical cut, the same scene is scored to “Radioactive” from Simmons 1978 solo album:
In fact, the group’s (in)famous solo albums are the only sources the new soundtrack draws from—with Simmons getting the most attention. Beyond “Radioactive”, the film also uses his “Man of 1000 Faces” and “Mr. Make Believe”. Paul gets his “Love in Chains” in there, and Criss provides “Hooked on Rock ‘N’ Roll”. But the best moment belongs to Frehley, whose solo album produced the project's only lasting hit—the classic “New York Groove”, which turns the once-awful roller coaster fight sequence (see the clip embedded after the original FA review) into something pretty darn awesome:
Okay, maybe “awesome” is a bit much, but there’s no doubt that this alternative version completely changed my appreciation of this oft-mocked film. I already loved it when its imperfections couldn’t be ignored, but now that I’ve seen them successful hidden and disguised that love isn’t hipster-asshole-ironic, it’s hipster-asshole-genuine. And therein lies a whole heaping world of difference.
Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
Warlock: The Armageddon
(1993)
Watching this sequel to 1991’s Warlock, I started to wonder if maybe a young Michael Bay had seen it before he debuted with Bad Boys in 1995. The third film by second-generation director Anthony Hickox (whose father, Douglas, directed one of my all-time favs, Theatre of Blood), this second entry in the Warlock mythos not only shares a title with one of Bay’s films, but displays all of the same stylistic hallmarks that have made Bay both one of the most hated and successful filmmakers of his generation.
Filled with pointless close-ups shot at strange angles, hilariously dramatic pull-ins and a complete sacrifice of character in favor of constant momentum, Warlock: The Armageddon, like most of Bay’s films, plays less like an actual movie than an abridged version of one with all of the potentially boring bits cut out.
And that is so not a bad thing.
For those of you concerned about the plot, the film features a returning Julian Sands as the titular villain, an antichrist who rises in anticipation of a long-awaited lunar eclipse and who must find a collection of ancient stones in order to help his father, Satan, escape from Hell and take over the living world. Stopping him are Chris Young (TV’s Max Headroom) and Paula Marshall (who you know from a dozen cancelled shows—and my dreams), the youngest descendents of a tribe of California druids, whose deaths and subsequent resurrections make them the only warriors powerful enough to halt Sands in his tracks.
More goofy than scary, the film features a lot of dated effects, but is made highly watchable thanks to the game cast and Hickox’s stubborn refusal to give you enough time to dwell on the film’s many absurdities and enormous plot holes.
Consider it a film for those of you who wish a certain “director” would stop wasting his “talents” on racist toy robot movies and get back to the gloriously stupid basics.
