Lemonade Joe

1964 Czech Western musical parody

Rating: 16/20

Plot: The titular sharpshooter tries to rid a sinful town called Stetson City of whisky in the 1880s.

The good guys wear white and refuse libations while the bad guys wear black and are actually named Badman. With 1920's color tinting and slapstick, way too many songs, ridiculous fight scenes that are speeded-up, and stock characters, this both pokes fun and pays homage to Western musical comedies. It also nails capitalism as Joe seems to exist only to shill lemonade that has a name suspiciously close to Coca-Cola. Kolaloka? That's close, right? There's plenty of silliness here--a trumpeter in black face who engages in a shoot-out with the good guy in what might be the best shoot-out I ever see, a trickster bad guy named Hogofogo who probably gets the best song, a guy who eats violins, and lines like "The night is cold; I'll need to put on my woolens" preceding a climactic trip to a place called Dead Man's Valley. The hijinks make this really entertaining even though it seems to go on a little too long, and although all the parts of this remind you of things you've seen before, it all comes together uniquely and isn't really like anything you've seen before. This is the best Czech Western I've seen and much better than Blazing Saddles despite the lack of Gene Wilder. Fun stuff!

Meet the Feebles

1989 puppet movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular Muppet-esque creatures desperately try to get their variety show ready on schedule, but a variety of issues threaten to derail the whole thing.

This is one of those movies that I want to like more than I actually like. It starts out well enough with a bit glossy impressive theme song. The puppets look great, like creations Jim Henson's people just barely decided to discard. There's a ton of color and personality on the screen as we see the characters on stage for the first time. Then, the whole thing stumbles for about an hour and a half. There's way too many subplots, Peter Jackson (yes, this is what he did before he got Hobbititis) trying to juggle way too many ideas in a movie that is far too weak on main plot. For certain types of people, it'll be a hoot seeing these puppets, like bizarro Muppets, engaging in really bad behavior. The first clue that this thing isn't for children is the first sex scene featuring a little walrus-on-cat action. They're interrupted, and the walrus exclaims, "I was just about to pop my cookies!" It's ridiculously filthy, but it does force you to imagine interesting animal pairings. How would an elephant and a chicken do the deed, for example? For the rest of the movie, the creatures show off their waxy nips, puke, fornicate, smoke, die, shoot up, eat each other, curse, gorge themselves, drool while peeping a rabbit ménage a trois, engage in S&M acts, sniff panties, bleed, perform opera, eat fecal matter, have Vietnam flashbacks, make pornography (nasal pornography), contract sexually-transmitted diseases, projectile vomit, attempt suicide, and perform songs about sodomy. Again, I want to remind you that these are not puppets that you should watch with your children. I can't recall a Muppet ever dying. Lots of the Feebles die, and they die in grotesque meaty ways that only Peter Jackson at this stage in his career can dream up. If a director who seemed to be trying to see just what kinds of lewdness he could get away with doesn't completely scare you away, this might be worth you time. You'll probably never look at puppets the same, however.

Reflections of Evil

2002 movie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A bulbous guy named Bob unsuccessfully sells watches on the street and frequently engages in shouting matches with fellow pedestrians. He wanders a sort of purgatory. Meanwhile, his sister Julie, a girl who died from a drug overdose a long time ago, searches for him in an attempt to save him from a sugar addiction.

Damon Packard wrote, directed, and starred in this stunningly original piece that I'd like to label "outsider art" if it wasn't so aware. If I understand the story correctly, Packard spent an inheritance to make this movie which I think is about Hollywood, Hollywood's affect on our psyches, human beings' inabilities to get along with each other, human beings' inabilities to get along with themselves, overindulgence, paranoia, the role that media plays in our lives, and probably countless other things; made about 25,000 dvd copies; and sent them to celebrities. It reminds me of what the Residents did with their "Santa Dog" single although if Packard sent one of these to Richard Nixon, he was probably too late.  Their reactions were collected on his website which doesn't seem to exist anymore. Unfortunately, I can't find any of those. The movie is a real treat for oddballs like me with the right sensibilities. It's a collision of nightmarish, horrifying imagery and hilarity that you don't see much outside of David Lynch's stuff. Things start with low-budget shots of a wandering spirit in a ghostly-white nightgown, shots ultra-eerie or mysterious because they are low-budget ones. The after-school special music gives this a weird 70's vibe. Then, the onslaught begins. Off sound-effects, voices obvious and comically dubbed with actors who had no idea that they were actors in a movie, an extended vomiting scene that is probably about six times longer than it actually needs to be, warping effects, characters shouting like they have Tourette's, sound effects from other worlds, drug-dazed horrors. The style's unique, and the results are very funny while managing to seep into your skin a little and reach parts of the soul that you're not usually aware of when watching a movie. There's a redundancy to the proceedings and a cheap experimental flavor that will turn off most people who like "real" movies. I want to make it clear that this is not a movie for everybody, but more adventurous cinephiles will discover a lot of beauty in all this ugliness. I know nothing about Damon Packard, and this is the only movie of his that I've seen. I suspect he's a very cynical individual, but he finds some humor in all these aspects of society that he doesn't like very much. A lot of the voices put to some of these "characters" made me laugh, and I loved one of his sister's lines: [Spoiler Alert!] "You died on the E.T. Adventure in 1984 from a sugar overdose." The hilarious behind-the-scenes reenactment of what seems to be a Steven Spielberg shoot also made me laugh, almost uncontrollably. Best of all? Amidst a lot of chaos filmed (illegally) at Universal Studios: A Klaus Kinski ride. Just let those three words sink in a little bit. Klaus Kinski ride. Just thinking about it makes me want to throw a monkey across the room.

Shane Watches a Bad Movie on Facebook with Friends: Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

2006 horror comedy musical

Rating: 15/20 (Libby: 18/20; Fred: 17/20; Carrie: 19/20; Josh: didn't rate)

Plot: A fast-food chicken franchise builds on a Native American burial ground. Amidst protesters, those Indian souls take possession of the foodstuffs and eventually the workers and customers. Poultrygeist!

What a terrible punny title. The intention with our little bad movie club, obviously, is to watch a bad movie and make fun of it. Troma doesn't make unintentionally bad movies exactly. They understand their capabilities and the filmmakers are proud of what the disgusting and sometimes downright tasteless stuff they put on screen. And sometimes, as is the case here, they sneak in a movie that could actually be described as good. This accomplishes everything Lloyd Kaufman and his writers set out to do. Josh put it best: "Fun for the whole family: racism, sexism, fat people, geeks, lesbians, h[censored], [censored], handicaps [almost censored that one, too], white trash, rape, shit, vomit, and boobs." And, of course, a whole lot of cock. It's trashy, often looks stupid, and could possibly offend hippies, animal rights activists, Native Americans, liberals, black people, people with good diets, Middle Eastern peoples, women, and really anybody else. This pulls no punches, unapologetically and gloriously. And yes, there is the "choke the chicken" that you could have predicted before the movie even started. At the same time, there's some shrewd satire about our appetites as a society, both our literal appetites and our entertainment appetites, as well as some expected and bitter swipes at the (admittedly, fish-in-a-barrel-y) fast-food industry. The jokes are stuffed into this thing, and while a lot of them are terrible--some funny because they are terrible--a lot of this made me laugh the kinds of laughs that you almost hate yourself for. And did I mention that Poultrygeist is a musical? Because it is! With some standard musical choreography! The songs are good enough to sound like something from Rocky Horror and the lyrics are funny enough. The real fun begins when the mayhem does, and there are a few lengthy sequences where Kaufman and company are very obviously just seeing how many different ways they can think of for a zombie chicken to kill a human being. The violence is nearly orgasmic. Unfortunately for a lot of viewers, they'll miss out on the berserk zombie chicken mayhem because they'll turn the movie off during an extended scene where a bulbous man with gastrointestinal issues makes a mess of a bathroom. That's if they got past the creatively juvenile use of a Native American zombie finger in an opening scene featuring a guy with something other than an ax in his other hand. No, you don't want to know. This is a movie that surprises from its beginning to its end, and you might have as much fun watching it as it looks like the people who made it must have had. It's a real blast but definitely not for everybody. I wouldn't recommend it to my mother-in-law, for example.

Shaye and Kiki: Fun Bubble

2004 compilation

Rating: 15/20

Plot: Shaye Saint John and her charred doll Kiki have a series of mundane and repetitive adventures.

This is a compilation of about thirty short films featuring the titular characters. Here's the character's background: Shaye was a model who was involved in a car accident that disfigured her, so she had to replace a lot of her parts with mannequin parts. Or something like that. Shaye is the creation of performance artist Eric Fournier, now sadly deceased. These shorts definitely fall in the not-for-everybody camp and are alternately hilarious and horrifying. It's a maddening hyperkinetic dada art assault on at least two of your senses. The repetition alone is enough to drive some people batty, but the cheap computer effects, daffy minutia, and often terrifying imagery are what would make things unbearable. In fact, if I ever get the opportunity to prop somebody's eyes open and forcefeed their brain things like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, this is now on the list. I'm not sure if this stuff was created to say anything about society or not. Shaye is shallow enough to match a lot of cultural phenomena in our reality-show culture though, so there might be some lunatic fringe satire going on here. I laughed and probably had a nightmare or two that I don't remember, so I'm considering this thing a success. I mean, there's a scene where Shaye is in a washroom and the creepy doll keeps banging on the window. It's the stuff of nightmares, a scene easily more horrifying than I've seen in any horror movie. And then you get a repetitive scene where Shaye is trying to get a present indoors in the hilarious "Bake, Shake, Explode" which makes me laugh just thinking about it. And Shirley Temple 2000! made me laugh out loud. If you like gams, ever wished that the movie Mannequin was created under the influence of LSD, and like to feel really really uncomfortable when watching movies, this might be for you. Hypnotizing weirdness! One gripe: Grammar problems! Missing apostrophes annoyed me.

O.C. and Stiggs

1985 teen comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: The titular high school friends terrorize the Schwab family and the suburban middle class in general.

I know, I know. Giving this much-maligned Robert Altman inexplicable teen comedy that may or may not be a parody of other teen comedies a 15/20 is going to get me called an Altman fanboy or something, but I really dig this movie. Like a lot of Altman movies, this is light on plot. It's breezy, a series of non sequiturs and oddball moments and half-heard lines, a hodgepodge of the bizarre. It's ornery Altman, one that might laugh at the same fart joke he's already heard three times. But you know what? This movie is downright entertaining and very funny. There's an absurdist slant to the whole thing that makes it, although still very much an Altman bastard of a movie, very different from other movies. You almost have to appreciate a movie that isn't going to appeal to anybody who might be the intended audience--not the people who like raunchy teen comedies like Porky's or the people who liked Altman's movies in the 70s. The rapport of the leads--Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry, neither who went on to do all that much--is great. There's a natural connection that helps hold this whole mess together. Ray Walston gets a great part as gramps, and Dennis Hopper is in there playing a crazed Vietnam vet like only Dennis Hopper can. It's also got one of the coolest movie cars you'll ever see, a car the characters buy specifically because it will be really loud and disrupt the lives of ordinary people. And that's kind of how this movie is--it's disruptive jab in the eye. In a good way! Nearly brilliant and undeniably stupid, this baffling little film would be almost impossible for me to recommend to anybody but myself and fans of King Sunny Ade.

LolliLove

2004 mockumentary

Rating: 13/20

Plot: A prospective Hollywood power couple decides to help the homeless by giving them lollipops with the husband's paintings and inspirational slogans on the wrappers.

I'm not sure there was enough of an idea here to comfortably stretch this into a twenty-minute short film. And that's a problem since it was stretched into a feature-length film. Director Jenna Fischer co-wrote and starred in this with her then-husband James Gunn, a guy who reminds me of David Arquette which caused me to spend the majority of the movie wondering why she married somebody who reminds me of David Arquette. Their rapport on the screen wasn't too bad, at least not as bad as it must have been in their real lives. There are a handful of funny moments, but so much of this was a little too obvious. They're shallow, and they're kind of stupid. The audience figures that out pretty quickly, and then the movie just keeps going on and on and reminding us of those two things. Judy "Kitty" Greer is in this, and there are enough humorous ideas--more than a few improvised, I reckon--to keep this entertaining enough for the duration.

Released by Troma, a company that James Gunn worked for.

This is only the second time I've mentioned David Arquette on this blog.

Emperor Tomato Ketchup

1971 blockbuster

Rating: no rating

Plot: In a land governed by children, kids run around abusing adults and drawing X's over things.

The only thing I really knew about this movie is that the band Stereolab grabbed its title for one of their album titles. I'm not sure what it's about. It's a frenzy of worn black 'n' white shock images, a lot involving children doing things they're not supposed to be doing. I'm sure director Shuji Terayama is saying something here, but it's going to be next to impossible for most viewers to see it through some really shocking visuals. The imagery invited Holocaust comparisons and thoughts about censorship and totalitarian governments, but none of it was cohesive enough to make a point that a dumb guy like me could fully grasp. No, I'm the type of viewer who's content in being entertained by a scene of a little person emerging from a hole while wearing an army helmet and what appears to be a diaper, running to another hole where he extracts a chicken that he takes an ax to, an act accompanied by a too-loud screech and some scattered applause. There's no real dialogue, but there's some words thrown in (found sound or stock sounds, I assume), none of it that I could understand because I don't speak whatever language it's in. There are also some words that appeared in white on the screen that I wouldn't be able to read even if I could read German. The music is nice if not all over the place. Like many foreign avant-garde productions, I'm missing way too much context to fully appreciate this or even understand it. This might have loads of interesting ideas but it's distracted by its own imagery.

Note: There's a 70-something minute version of this and a much shorter 20-something minute version that I'm guessing only shows the highlights. Like a Michael Bay movie with just the explosions maybe.

The Onion Movie

 

2008 satirical news movie

 

Rating: 10/20

 

Plot: America's finest news source with anchorman Norm Archer gives us the news. But Archer becomes increasingly frustrated with their corporate sponsor and its cartoon penguin. Meanwhile, terrorists.

 

I love The Onion, but this came across as a slightly-more-intelligent Not Another Teen Movie which I don't mean as praise. On the one hand, you've got some biting satire (my personal favorite kind of satire), some no-holds-barred envelope pushing that is clever enough to make me want to use all kinds of cliches. And then you've got Steven Seagal punching cocks. Sure, "Taffy? Fucking blacks!" is something that I'm likely to repeat and the most inappropriate time imaginable, and a blue teddy bear nearly converted me into a plushsexual after years of sketchy heterosexuality. And then there's Rodney Dangerfield rolled out to say exactly what you think he'd say. There's clever stuff in here, and I'll always be more willing than most people to support a movie that features scenes with people having sexual relations with a library book return slot, but the whole thing is so poorly paced and clumsily strung together that it's not a surprise at all to find out that this had no theatrical release and was shelved for a few years. Bits went on for far too long, and the attempt to tie it all together with the Archer vs. cartoon penguin subplot never really worked. A wild ending synthesized the chaos a bit, but there was just far too much stupid involved to make it work. And Rodney Dangerfield. 

Pumpkin

2002 parody

Rating: 14/20

Rating: Sorority girl Carolyn is forced to train the titular special needs athlete for the upcoming Olympics. She annoys her sisters, her boyfriend, and her family by falling for him.

This was recommended by somebody based on my love for Harold and Maude, and it really does seem like my type of movie. It took me a while to figure out what this even was--the soap opera acting, the terrible music, dialogue that couldn't be this bad unless somebody worked hard to make it this bad.

Pumpkin: Carolyn, why does the moon change?
Carolyn: I really don't know, Pumpkin. I'll try to find out for you, OK?

But wait just a second! That's it! Somebody wrote this like an after-school special written by a team of mentally-challenged people intentionally, and once you
figure that out, the satire does deliver. And I did laugh a few times. A bite out of a McDonald's cheeseburger made me laugh because of how it ruined a tender moment so greasily, and I loved a discovery that some really cheesy music was non-incidental. I also enjoyed the "John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt" singalong, a reaction during a party crashing, a car crashing, the collapse of a poetry teacher, a Long Beach Tech meal, and an opening ceremony featuring sombreros and cowboy hats. Oh, and there's a Belle and Sebastian montage, something else that gives away that these people are in no way serious. Parts of this do seem to drag a little bit, and I imagine the film's style would be off-putting for most people. And it just doesn't feel completely complete, like something's missing. Or maybe it's that the movie goes too far without going far enough. I think you'd know what I mean here if you've seen this. Anyway, an interesting concluding bit of dialogue and final shot are good. This movie isn't nearly as good as Harold and Maude, but it's not going to be a complete waste of your time if you like that sort of movie.

Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story

2010 comedy

Rating: 6/20

Plot: During the 1994 baseball strike, professional wiffleball legend Ted Whitfield attempts to break the home run single single record of 122. Controversy surrounds him as cheating accusations arise.

This half-assed mockumentary, one that doesn't really follow its own rules and ends up being a half-mockumentary/half-straight-fiction, has a handful of interesting ideas mixed in with all the poop and penis jokes and cheap drug references. I thought having this coincide with the '94 strike and a lot of subtle references to McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds was kind of clever. The blue dinos, a performance-enhancing vitamin, and the diming the bat episode were almost funny. And it was fun hearing a pretty good Harry Caray impersonator. Unfortunately, this wears thin very quickly. It really should have been a nine-minute short on Youtube instead of a feature-length movie. Oh, well. At least I got to use my bestiality tag again. A movie about wiffleball does seem like a promising idea. And this one, though nowhere near a good movie, did inspire me to start up an adult wiffleball league once I recover from my foot injury surgery. Two-man teams, standard rules. So far, I've recruited one other guy, and I know my brother and brother-in-law will play. So I guess you could say that Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story was an inspiration.

Tere Bin Laden

2010 movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Ali Hassan is a young Pakistani man with aspirations of making it in America as a news reporter. Unfortunately, his visa application is refused over and over again because of an incident where he kept using a couple no-no words on a flight to the United States. Things are looking bad until he runs into a Bin Laden look-a-like while covering a cock opera. That's right--a cock opera. Let's see if that word combination gets me some Google search hits! Anyway, Hassan decides to use the faux-Laden to record one of those wacky videos the real-Laden used, and the entire plan, as you'd expect, backfires.

Cock opera? Is that just as punnish in Urdu or whatever they speak in Pakistan? The cock opera sequence and all of the scenes with the Bin Laden doppelganger were funny. Mostly, however, this has a liveliness to it that is infectious without being all that funny. It's colorful and most of the action zips by so briskly that you can't get bored. The film's star, the Indian Zach Braff (Ali Zafar, but he should just change his name to "Indian Zach Braff" actually) sure is likable and full of energy. I'll tell you one thing though. I've not watched a lot of movies from India compared to other countries, but it seems that Bollywood sure likes its montages. And loud soundtracks. There's some very light and playful satire (love that the American military action is called Operation Kickass) that more than likely isn't going to offend anybody from anywhere who stumbles upon the movie. Things are lighthearted. Still, I appreciate the ballsiness.

Seriously, check that guy out. He's the Indian Zach Braff. They should get him to star in an Indian Scrubs, but it probably wouldn't make much sense since they don't have hospitals in India.

They Live

1988 science fiction movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: An unemployed former wrestler exchanges his kilt for jeans and looks for a construction job. While crashing at an urban campground for the homeless, he stumbles onto a sort of rebellion centered in a small church. The government comes with powerful bulldozers, and the former wrestler finds a nifty pair of sunglasses that enable him to see the truth. He runs out of bubblegum.

The famous "I'm all out of bubblegum," "You know, you look like your head fell on the cheese dip back in 1957" (I rewound to hear this one three times to make sure I caught it correctly), "Mama don't like tattletales," and "And who are you, little fellow" are all lines that show what happens when you let Roddy Roddy Piper write his own dialogue. And no, I do not mean that as a criticism! It's taking the whole 1980's action movie one-liner thing, something I've always blamed on Arnold Schwarzennegar, to its logical crux. I just love what John Carpenter does with a limited budget here. The glasses effects are eerily fantastic, the switch to black and white and those expressionless alien faces combined with the subliminal messages make for some classic sci-fi horror with, more than likely, some heavy-handed satire. Personally, I don't mind heavy-handed satire. What does annoy me are action movie cliches, and this has more than a few of them as well as what is probably the longest and most absurd scene of extended fisticuffs in science fiction movie history. I think the fight between Piper and the black guy was probably longer than most of Roddy Roddy's wrestling matches though not, if I'm remembering correctly from back when I watched WWF wrestling (its golden age, in my opinion), nearly as long as some of his speeches. Piper, to be honest, makes the transition from ring to movie role much more smoothly than I expected. He plays Average Joe just fine and his action hero chops are as good as any other 80's superstar they would have thrown in there. Pretty cool sci-fi flick with several great scenes and a few that need to be reconsidered or completely removed before they do a remake of this in a few years, probably with Vin Diesel.

Parents

1989 horror movie or possibly black comedy

Rating: 15/20

Plot: In antiseptic 1950s suburbia, young Michael begins to suspect that there's something not quite right with his parents. He's got enough trouble trying to adapt to a new school in a new hometown without having to worry about whether or not the dietary habits of his parents are socially acceptable.

Bob Balaban is a guy with a name I like to say and a guy I always like seeing in movies or television shows. He's directed barely a handful of movies and a bunch of television shows, but Parents is the only thing I've seen that he's directed unless I watched something accidentally. I really liked how he visually told the story. He frames this typical suburban middle-class home in a way that somehow transforms the setting into a perfect location for a horror film, and some playful and surprising camera angles keep this whole thing interesting even when the story he's working with isn't. I'm not totally convinced this is a straight horror film. There's a consistent creepy vibe, even when what is happening on the screen isn't anything threatening, but there's also a healthy dose of dark comedy that give this a different kind of fun than the type of fun your average horror movie is going to give you. Some dream sequences and possible hallucinations give this a surreal flavor and also make the last third of the story a little indeterminate. That, or I'm just slower than the average Randy Quaid fan. Speaking of him (I think it's Randy; I still get them confused), this might be my favorite Randy Quaid role. He manages to maneuver realistically between 1950's sitcom wholesome and unnerving, often in the same scene. I also want to mention Bryan Madorsky, the kid who played the kid. He's really got a kid-from-the-Shining in him, and although they don't really succeed in making him seem like a real kid, he still does a really nice job. This was Madorsky's only movie though. Parents isn't exactly a classic of whatever genre it belongs in, but it's got a feel that makes it seem fresh 20+ years after it came out.

(Untitled)

2009 comedy

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Avant-garde composer Adrian doesn't have a lot of fans while his brother, a painter named Josh, makes a pretty good living selling pleasant art--the painting equivalent to elevator music?--to hotels. Madeline owns an art gallery, making money off of Josh's work while showcasing the work of less-commercial artists. Josh brings Madeline to one of his brother's shows, and she becomes interested in him as both an artist and as a sleepover buddy. This creates all kinds of problems.

"Harmony was a capitalist plot to sell pianos!" Love that line. My favorite bit of comedy was when Goldberg's character was giving instructions on how to properly "play" a bucket to one of his "musicians," a scene that reminds me of the one in Scott Walker: 30 Century Man in which the documentary subject gives instructions on how to play meat percussively. The stupidly-titled (Untitled) gets avant-fart exactly right, and Adam Goldberg does pretension and frustration very well. It seems like he's an actor I see all the time, but looking through his filmography, I don't see a lot of titles that would make that true. Regardless, I never really like his characters. I'm not sure you're supposed to like his character here. He's a guy who needs to make compromises but refuses, neurotically. This takes some fun jabs at modern art(ists), both the visual artist and the sound artists like Goldberg's character. Thing is, while I think I was supposed to laugh at rather than scowl with the surly Adrian, I actually thought the music sounded pretty cool. I'm a sucker for kicked buckets though, and Goldberg apparently is classically trained in bucket playing, a real bucket virtuoso. I also liked the art pieces of character Ray Barko, a modern artist who uses taxidermy. Again, I'm pretty sure I was supposed to laugh at those works, but my favorite works of art are the ones that I can laugh at. The work of another artist, a character named Monroe, crossed the line from satirical to the unbelievably absurd. Like the only other Jonathan Parker (director) movie I've seen--Bartleby, with Crispin Glover--this seemed a little incomplete. I'm not sure it says what Parker wants it to say as completely or as coherently as it needs to. It's not a bad little film, but it should have been better. I did really like the last scene and the perfect look on Goldberg's face.

Galaxy 500 and Luna frontman Dean Wareham has a small role in this, by the way.

A Nous la Liberte

1931 French satire

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Emile and Louis are tired of wasting away in a prison cell. They long for freedom, so much that they feel the need to sing about it even. They attempt an escape, and while Emile makes it to the other side of a pair of walls, Louis is captured again. Or maybe it's the other way around. Anyway, the guy who breaks out winds up becoming a rich and successful owner of a factory that makes phonographs, a device that apparently played MP3's back in the 1930s. Eventually, Louis also, regardless of his actual intention, succeeds in breaking out of jail and meets up with his buddy when he gets a job at the factory.

It's just a guess, but I'm thinking Rene Clair wasn't totally ready to embrace the new technology that would allow the characters of his films to speak, just like his buddy Charlie Chaplin. So much of A Nous la Liberte reminds me of silent comedy, and Clair tells the story of these two guys visually a lot of the time. And visually, this movie's really impressive. I'm not sure there's anything I'd describe as fancy with the camera work or its movements, but the cinematography definitely has more of a modern feel than almost all the other comedies I've seen from the 1930s. So although we do get to hear the characters communicate, I'm not sure we really need to because the visuals do a good enough job telling the story. We definitely don't need to hear them sing. The songs aren't very good anyway, and if you call this a musical, you have to call it a half-assed one. Satirically, it seems pretty subversive, actually exploring similar ideas as Chaplin's Modern Times. Maybe that's why the studio sued Chaplin for cinematic plagiarism, but really, I don't see that much that these movies have in common. I'm a sucker for great visuals, it's one of those whimsical French dealies, and this is just the kind of comedy that hits my sweet spot. Yes, that's a reference to my taint.

A very cool Cory recommendation. I think the movie poster probably first attracted him.

Battle Royale

2000 cult classic

Rating: 15/20 (Mark: 18/20)

Plot: Forty-two students are transported to an island, given a random weapon (firearms, paper fans, nunchucks, tasers, etc.), and instructed to kill each other off. Their old teacher, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano, is there, too. I think there's something like this in the "No Child Left Behind" act.

My favorite thing about this movie: I busied my brain trying to guess how a pair of binoculars and/or a pan lid were going to come into play, and then nothing ever materialized. Battle Royale gets some points for effort. People who don't like it will tag it with a violence porn label. People who do like it will talk about it as a satire of the Japanese educational system and how society demands that children compete against their peers. And maybe I'm just desensitized to this sort of thing, but I didn't think it was all that violent. And I didn't think the satire--muddled and missing a few pieces--added up to much. There are a ton of characters in this, but the ratio of interesting characters to uninteresting ones is a problem. I liked the teacher (and Kitano [Zatoichi in the 2004 version of the blind swordsman movie]is always pretty awesome) and the crazy girl (Chiaki Kuriyama--Gogo in Kill Bill Volume One) and maybe the mean kid who doesn't get any lines. The others, including the rest of the forty-two children, aren't really memorable. I'm not sure I'm willing to sacrifice the quantity and variety of violent acts by limiting the amount of characters, but there sure were a lot of characters to keep track of in this. And, as you can probably guess, they all looked almost exactly the same, which made any subplots or connections between the characters kind of confusing. I did like that this movie wasn't afraid to show not only all those scenes of Japanese pop idols dying tragic deaths but also showing it all with a healthy dose of black humor. The action's paced well, and I liked how this explored the varying psychologies of children put in traumatic situations. This definitely lost a point because of the sickeningly melodramatic score. I have no problems watching a kid with an ax sticking out of his head stumble around on a television screen. However, I have no tolerance for bad film music.

The Toxic Avenger

1984 superhero movie

Rating: 9/20

Plot: 90-pound weakling Melvin works as a janitor at a health club, and he's endlessly teased and terrorized by the beefier and more attractive clientele. One day, they pull the ultimate practical joke--throwing Melvin in a barrel of toxic waste. It's hilarious. When he emerges, he's transformed into the titular superhero and starts mopping up crime all over town.

When I was a kid, Anonymous and I ate these kind of movies up on USA's Up All Night program with hosts Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Shear. And that other woman who was there before Rhonda Shear. Actually, very late at night is the only time this kind of movie would be appropriate. It's only late at night (very very late) when this kind of trash is funny. And this is the lowest form of trash, from the (intentionally?) awful acting to the gross-out effects to the cringeworthy attempts to be humorous. Anonymous and I missed out on some of the more gruesome effects since the USA Network apparently doesn't think there's a time late enough to show watermelons with wigs on them being run over by a car. I liked the low-budget effects; it's a good mix of bizarre and just plain icky. Nobody will accuse The Toxic Avenger or its makers of being intelligent, but there are times when you've watched too many dark and slow Hungarian movies or Czech Holocaust comedies and need something that's just the right amount of stupid. And The Toxic Avenger has that.

The Happiness of the Katakuris

2001 black comic musical (with claymation!)

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular family lives in the middle of nowhere, operating a bed-and-breakfast that nobody visits because the dad heard that a new road was going to be constructed that would be great for business. The family's far from happy. The son's got a criminal background, and the daughter is recently divorced. But their luck changes when they actually get a customer. Then their luck changes again when the customer commits suicide. They decide to cover it up. Soon, more customers arrive and wind up dead. Apparently, that's a problem. They sing about it!

This one starts with a woman in a restaurant eating soup. She finds a demon thing in the soup ("Waiter, there's a demon in my soup!") and the whole scene morphs into claymation. The demon steals her uvula and flies off. Eventually, a bird gets involved and the grandfather of the family throws some firewood at it from an absurd distance and hits it. Then, we get to meet the Katakuris. I've got no idea what the demon or the woman's uvula had to do with anything. This is the second Takashi Miike movie I've seen in the last couple weeks. He's the type of director who needs to calm down, have somebody gift him a funnel, or hire an assistant to throw cold water in his face every twenty-three minutes or so. This is a wild ride, not really letting up after the scene with the uvula-thieving demon, and the mashing together of genres (the Sound of Music meets Dawn of the Dead description on the poster is appropriate) is almost unnerving. But in a delightful way! You can go into this movie expecting the unexpected, but Miike will be a step ahead of you. It's like he's discovered the 3-D equivalent to "unexpected," and uses it to attack the viewer as he also assaults with tacky color, gross imagery, gross sound effects, and tacky musical numbers. You know how you sometimes come across a video clip of footage from a Japanese game show and you watch it and think, "Everybody in Japan must be nuts!"? This is the movie equivalent to that. Nothing's right about The Happiness of the Katakuris. It's unapologetically dopey and covered in a few thick and raunchy layers of cheese. The music really is terrible, dated Japanese pop with embarrassingly terrible lyrics. You really have to sort of endure the musically numbers. The onslaught of that with the gross-out imagery and the seemingly random metamorphosis into claymation is enough to make you dizzy. But again, it's in a delightful way! The humor's black, absurdly black, and if you can't laugh at death, this probably isn't the movie for you. As unhinged as this is, it all manages to keep things together for an (expected?) feel-good ending. This definitely isn't for everybody. In fact, it's probably not for very many people at all, but if you think you might be the type of person who would like a movie where one of the first five words in the script is "uvula," you might want to give it a shot.

Britannia Hospital

1982 Lindsay Anderson movie

Rating: 11/20

Plot: Mick Travis, the guy in If... and O Lucky Man!, suddenly finds himself in a movie that isn't nearly as good. In this one, he's a documentarian surreptitiously making a film to expose a hospital's questionable procedures. Meanwhile, the Queen is set to visit, and a doctor is working on a crazy experiment known as the Genesis Project which he claims will perfect mankind. And also meanwhile, a bunch of protesters threaten to ruin everybody's plans.

This didn't work for me as a comedy or as social satire, the latter maybe because I'm missing a bunch of context. All I know is that where Mick Travis ends up is completely unexpected but unfortunately not in such a good way. There are lots of unexpected goings-on in Britannia Hospital, like in the other two movies of this trilogy, but instead of the unexpected being used to season the proceedings, this thing is sauced in the unexpected. It's like the Monty Python boys decided to smoke Keith Richards' dad's ashes, lost interest in trying to be funny, and made a loosely-connected series of sketches anyway. It's more bizarre than funny, and this is coming from a person who likes his humor dry. Immensely disappointing stuff, but worth checking out if you've ever wanted to see a stoned Luke Skywalker laughing hysterically at a documentary about chickens.