Recent Viewings, Part 2

[wadee]

I recently watched Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and wow, it was really cool    loved the references to Polanski, Sharon Tate, and the whole Manson story and as always his style makes even characters doing nothing look cool

[Rev. Powell]

I hate THE DOOM GENERATION too. 

[M.10rda]

That's okay, Rev, you can always watch A HARD DAY'S NIGHT again instead of watching THE DOOM GENERATION.   

Gregg Araki is an acquired taste, very similar to what Bret Easton Ellis (also an acquired taste) is to literature, though I'd presume Araki is a normal nice person IRL and not a lunatic like Ellis. Both of them like to slice it thick in their respective mediums, though.

[M.10rda]

I recently watched Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and wow, it was really cool    loved the references to Polanski, Sharon Tate, and the whole Manson story and as always his style makes even characters doing nothing look cool

Welcome, Wadee!
I happened to watch a (horribly edited) trailer for THE GETAWAY earlier in the week... which btw is my least favorite Sam Peckinpah movie... but it did remind me that Damian Lewis was perfectly cast as McQueen in OUATIH! I love the scene where he ruefully explains the Tate/Polanski/Sebring triangle and wishes he was a tiny cute man.

[Rev. Powell]

Gregg Araki is an acquired taste...

I absolutely love MYSTERIOUS SKIN, though Araki didn't write it, only direct it.

[M.10rda]

MYSTERIOUS SKIN is sliced pretty thin as Araki goes.    It's less in your face, though the subject matter, of course, is still pretty tough.

[M.10rda]

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970):
Ubiquitous western bit players LQ Jones and Strother Martin leave poor Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) in the middle of the desert with no water and he wanders around dying of thirst and trying to strike a deal with God through the opening credits. At the last possible second he steps in a small damp sinkhole, discovers a freshwater spring, saves his own life, and begins a new career as a roadside entrepreneur. He also promptly forgets the desperate promises he made to the Lord, and instantly the viewer begins expecting the Lord to call in his marker. Eventually He does, though not in the way one might expect and only following some pretty interesting narrative perambulations.

BALLAD... was the penultimate western by Sam Peckinpah and, having blown the genre to smithereens with THE WILD BUNCH, Sam was clearly losing interest in the old stale tropes. Only two men and one lizard get shot in this film. Peckinpah is far more absorbed in the process of creating order out of Old West chaos, which puts BALLAD in the same company with films like ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and McCABE & MRS. MILLER. With its focus on the business of water supply, you could also easily connect BALLAD to CHINATOWN, and for that matter I'd guess that P.T. Anderson is a fan of this movie and was thinking about it when he made THERE WILL BE BLOOD.

Stella Stevens plays Cable Hogue's love interest, the obligatory HWAHOG, who gets treated w/ a lot more dignity and delicacy - both from Cable and from Peckinpah & the screenwriters - than that stock character usually receives. I think this is the earliest film I've seen Stevens in, well before she turned into something of a parody of herself (or just couldn't find good roles anymore). Stevens is not remotely my type but she delivers a real performance, besides just looking admittedly pretty darn hot. Supporting cast includes Slim Pickens as a friendly stagecoach driver, R.G. Armstrong (another name routinely listed in the credits of these kinds of movies alongside Strother Martin and L.Q. Jones) as an unfriendly railroad man, and David Warner as a pervy preacher who alternately assists and frustrates Hogue. (Warner would later play the same kind of character  in STRAW DOGS - a guy who just can't keep his hands to himself.)

Then there's Robards, who (between this and OUATIT WEST) makes you think he was incapable of giving a dishonest or superficial performance. His dialogue is sometimes pretty good, other times just good enough, but he could be reciting his grocery list and it wouldn't matter. His face and posture communicate volumes upon volumes. BALLAD might be the closest thing Peckinpah ever made to a comedy - some parts are pretty broad, and he even resorts to sped-up footage now and then to create ye olde "zany" effect. But when he captures Robards in close-up, or tracks one of the characters lonesomely wandering the streets or the plains in wide shot, THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE becomes almost unbearably sad. I was a little bit sad at the end, too, and a little bit disappointed in Hogue. But overall I felt kind of grateful to have gotten to know him a little for a couple of hours.

4/5
Robards won two back-to-back Oscars in the late 70s, yet wasn't even nominated for this film. The fact that Lee Marvin won a Best Actor Oscar for CAT BALLOU and Jason Robards wasn't even nominated for CABLE HOGUE really makes you want to ignore the Oscars in perpetuity.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Dressing Up Halloween: The Story of Ben Cooper Inc." (2024)
If you were a kid in the '60s, '70s, or '80s, you probably wore one of Ben Cooper Inc.'s famed cheap plastic-and-vinyl costumes for Halloween at least once. The Brooklyn based company was the Big Kahuna of the Halloween season for decades, with a knack for capturing all the top licenses every year (Disney, Looney Tunes, Star Wars, Strawberry Shortcake, etc.).  This documentary gives viewers a trip down memory lane as some former employees re-visit the now-defunct factory and share their recollections of what it was like to work there. It's interesting for a while but runs a bit longer than it needs to. 

[lester1/2jr]

^ that sounds interesting. There was a woman named Lisa Frank who licensed all sorts of stuff in the 80's and me and my sister bought tons of her stickers for our collections. like Betty Boop riding a unicorn or something

Half a Sinner (1940) - future blacklist victim Dalton Trumbo wrote this charming rom com that is charming but, unfortunately, still a rom com. A teacher in her mid twenties wants to let loose and discover her wild side, so she goes out on the town expecting something to happen...which it does! The dialogue is a little clever for random people in a small town somewhere, but no one seeing this is expecting realism. (except me, I found them all kind of irritating)

The lead actress was one of the people on the raft in Hitchcock's "Lifeboat". It's okay, it's just all smiles and not the slightest bit of genuine drama or danger. Pre code it would have been funnier and crazier.

3.75 /5 

[FatFreddysCat]

"Raw Force" (aka "Kung Fu Cannibals," 1982)
Martial arts students on a South Seas cruise get tangled up with a ring of jade smugglers and human traffickers, and end up on a "forbidden" island where a cult of monks raise kung-fu fighters from the dead for a final battle.
...I swear I am not making this plot up.
Everybody's kung-fu fighting in this ultra-bizarre, U.S./Filipino co-production that doesn't makes a lick of sense, but it's got loads of action, bare boobs, sleaze, and cheap gore, therefore I was entertained.

[zombie no.one]

think I made a thread about RAW FORCE when I saw it a couple of years back. bonkers film... had never heard of it before then

[wadee]

I recently watched Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and wow, it was really cool    loved the references to Polanski, Sharon Tate, and the whole Manson story and as always his style makes even characters doing nothing look cool

I recently watched Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and wow, it was really cool    loved the references to Polanski, Sharon Tate, and the whole Manson story and as always his style makes even characters doing nothing look cool

Welcome, Wadee!
I happened to watch a (horribly edited) trailer for THE GETAWAY earlier in the week... which btw is my least favorite Sam Peckinpah movie... but it did remind me that Damian Lewis was perfectly cast as McQueen in OUATIH! I love the scene where he ruefully explains the Tate/Polanski/Sebring triangle and wishes he was a tiny cute man.

omg I didn't know it was Mcqeen Really! I have a reason to watch it again  thanks for let me know

[M.10rda]

ARNOLD (1973):
Talk about a "cold open"...! Eponymous creepy rich guy Arnold marries his sweetheart (Stella Stevens, again) in the film's first scene, in spite of two catches: first, Arnold's already married to another foxy-looking, much-younger dame, and second... Arnold's dead! Yeah, Stevens marries an embalmed corpse in an open casket in front of a small party of friends and loved ones, including her new sister-in-law, Elsa Lanchester (!!!). Arnold's first wife is none-too-pleased, but Arnold's attorneys reason that their marriage was dissolved when Arnold died - thus Stevens is at liberty to marry his remains!

Okay, this is a weird flick that is often classified as "horror" but mostly plays as a black (yet rather goofy) comedy. Automatically one can reasonably assume that either Stevens is marrying "Arnold" to get his money and/or "Arnold" has faked his own death in order to remarry and keep his cash from Wife #1. Rather than efficiently address those expectations, ARNOLD shifts into an Agatha Christie/OLD DARK HOUSE-style potboiler with a colorful ensemble of suspects-slash-victims. Among them is an underutilized Roddy McDowell as Elsa and Arnold's younger brother; Farley Granger as one of his lawyers; Jamie Farr (?!) in an eyepatch, turban, and brownface    as a sinister silent manservant; and Victor Buono, popping in for a paycheck as the puzzled priest presiding over the early nuptials but wisely buggering off before people begin being bumped off. Much of the murder is mild and milquetoast, but there are a couple bits of mayhem that are more macabre, including a suit that constricts and explodes - not implodes, explodes - its victim....... which if of course preposterous. 

No real SPOILERS, though I might as well tell you there's less to ARNOLD than meets the eye, and his chief accomplice is exactly who you expect it is after 20 or so minutes. The film transcends its lack of any mystery by more or less laughing the the face of formulaic whodunnits, via the profoundly incompetent police inspector (Bernard Fox) who performs one outrageous hand-wave after another following each death and probably belongs in the running for Dumbest Cop In Cinema History. The screenwriters, who are negligent elsewhere, put a lot of effort and clever humor into this character and his scenes. That's a blessing, as the dumb cop is the only good reason to watch ARNOLD, besides Stella, Elsa, and Elsa's awesome cat.

I may be turning a corner on Stella Stevens, who has nothing to work with here but a red-tinted dye-job, but never flags in her tireless eye-popping and faux-vacuous seductive grinning. She actually manages to evoke the extremely daffy (yet also extremely hot) Elsa Lanchester of the 1930s, which is a nice touch opposite 71 year old Lanchester in 1973. This is one of Elsa's biggest roles in her late career and she knocks it out of the park, which is fortunate as I only watched ARNOLD for her!

3/5
ARNOLD is a quirky curio but it does suffer from the stink of made-for-TV movie about it. Granted the 70s were a golden age for MFTVMs but ARNOLD is a little cheap and a little flat and there's not enough onscreen violence. Unsurprisingly, director Georg Fenady worked in TV (and MFTVMs) most of his career, though ARNOLD was one of his few theatrical releases. He finished his career directing "Baywatch", which seems about right!

[Rev. Powell]

KUSO (2017): Surreal horror vignettes loosely premised on the survivors of a LA earthquake. The small amount of intriguing imagery here from musician-turned-filmmaker Flying Lotus is drenched in gallons of off-putting pus and other bodily fluids; there are no real characters or meaningful structures, and despite the constant invention everything becomes bland because it's all in the same depressing/scatological tonal register. I love Lotus' music and I like the weird impulse, but this is a total misfire. 1.5/5.

[lester1/2jr]

I know there are a few Bigfoot fans here and just fyi Wild Man of Navidad (2008) is now on tubi

Here's a link to my old review ( it got a 5/5)   https://www.badmovies.org/forum/index.php?topic=115439.msg559623#msg559623