Arena

Arena

United States - 1989

Director - Peter Manoogian

RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1991, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 37 minutes

The list of mostly forgettable science-fiction popcorn films produced by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures in the ‘80’s is for the most part an unchallenging intellectual vacuum. In many cases that is what makes them so mindlessly entertaining. With a naïve innocence that can only come from sincerity and a (relatively) low budget, Arena is a shining example. It doesn’t require any mental acrobatics or ask any hard moral questions, but it was a little better made than most of the Empire Pictures catalog. Arena is at some six years distance, clearly riding on the coat-tails of Star Wars. It is not surprising then that in addition to its Empire pedigree, Arena should suffer from many of the same philosophical shortcomings as its source material.

With nowhere else to go after losing his job on a space-station somewhere in the universe, Steve Armstrong (Paul Satterfield) bunks with his former coworker Shorty in the slums. Here he meets a destitute bum, the last human champion of the Arena, an intergalactic boxing competition that has been dominated by aliens for the last five decades. He anoints Steve as the next human champion of the Arena making him quite literally the Great White Hope in space.

The man in the Sloth suit is future director Steve Wang

There are two categories of aliens that populate Arena and highlight Steve’s messianic status. Both are visibly differentiated from the protagonists. The first are helpers, house-aliens who are silly and or dumb but totally harmless. To remove any ambiguity, the second group, Steve’s rivals, are not only visibly different but especially hideous, making them even more clearly unsympathetic and evil, and giving the good aliens excuse to support the collective restoration of a properly ordered hierarchy  without appearing overtly Uncle Tomish. Steve’s final opponent, the present champion Horn is also a cyborg. As such he is not only a direct threat to and reaffirmation of human physical purity, but a confirmation of the physical corruption and immorality of the non-human which has to “cheat” in order to win. And in fact, that’s precisely what Horn’s manager Rogor does when it becomes clear that Steve is going to beat his fighter.

Jade (Sharri Shattuck) a sultry nightclub performer (Shattuck actually performs several of Richard Band's songs) and Rogor’s lapdog is sent to seduce and poison Steve before the championship fight. Yet despite a romp through the futuristic spacy mylar sheets in Jade’s cat-box, her eroticism does not bode well for the normative settled family relationship. Instead, there is Quinn (Claudia Christian,) a reserved, practical woman carrying on her father’s legacy as a boxing manager. It is with her faithful encouragement and training that Steve will restore hetero normative values to the universe. Can there be any doubt that our ubermensch will succeed in setting all of this straight when the distinction between right and wrong is so clear-cut?

The ultimate Buck?

Despite all of this 50’s era conservative paranoia, Arena is still enjoyable for a number of reasons. The practical special effects provided by Screaming Mad George are better done than most of Band’s films. Arena is also distinctly more working-class than its big budget franchise predecessor. Boxing, which is really all the Arena fights are, has always been viewed as a proletarian sport. Related to this is my final assertion that Arena’s settings capture perfectly the appeal of the mundane. From the diner of the opening sequence, to the slums where Steve is verbally identified as the hero (it’s always been visually obvious), to the contest itself where order is restored, Arena is fiction made tangible. Without throwaway details like burned eggs and garbage, it would be just another space movie. Narrative details that speak to perceived experience are what make good fiction. Unfortunately that’s why audiences rarely question such obviously reactionary symbolism when couched in throwaway sci-fi fluff.

This beautiful VHS insert comes from Japanese VHS Hell, go visit 'em!

Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction

Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction
US – 1994
Director – Jim Wynorski
New Horizons Home Video, 1994, DVD
Run time - 1 hour 30 min.

When I rewatched Naked Cage several months ago to write about it, I took a shine to Shari Shattuck. I tracked down a couple of her other films including Tainted and this, only to discover that she never went beyond B-list TV and exploitation with a few saucy photos thrown in.

Forster's gettin' ready for another night in the ring.

This films thin plot-like gruel in which the tits will swim begins in a fancy hotel or brothel. A drunken Robert Forster beats-up two hookers and his buddy Alan is called in to diffuse the situation. The hooker abuse is quickly forgotten because Forster is under a lot of pressure man, and that's what dudes do. And hey, business calls, Alan has a hot lead on a great TV movie that he wants to pitch to Forster. Speaking of calling, Shari Shattuck is Claire, a TV sex-psychologist with a live video-call-in show. Her recently deceased lovers are the subject of Alan’s script

Alan’s source is an old buddy and alcoholic radio personality cum-script writer. He claims that his story is great but the idea has to be okayed by Claire herself, and that just might take some doing. After getting an eyeful of Claire, Alan is prepared to do some doing, but she is appalled by the idea of a TV bio-pic, unless she has total control over the whole process. To this end she later calls on Alan in his hotel room where she proposes a special deal in which he provides, the “doing” and she will let him make the movie, with the aforementioned stipulations.

What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of my wife's makeup.

Things get stupidly complicated as Alan’s actress wife, Morgan Fairchild -basically playing herself- gets the notion that she should play Claire in the movie. The writer meanwhile does some investigation and finds out that Claire’s priors include extreme S&M that caused her lovers deaths. The mystery here is apparently supposed to be who Claire’s lovers were and why. Ostensibly she had some ulterior motive for fucking them to death, but this seems pointless to the overall plot and added after the fact to add screen time between Shari’s disrobings. To keep the writer from revealing her motives to Alan, she repeatedly uses her vaginal mind control device to reduce Alan to a speechless idiot with a stiffy. Despite this, each time he’s being “coerced” by Claire (or his wife), he wears a look of uncomfortable revulsion on his taut and pallid visage.

Whatever. The overarching theme is that Claire is downright predatory which seems pointless because she doesn’t have to be, she is an attractive and successful doctor, author and TV personality after all. Rather, the real point is that sexually aggressive/confident women are so intimidating that there has to be some evil intent working behind the scenes, right? Men aren’t just so stupid that they’ll do anything for poontang are they? Absolutely not, from the evidence presented it’s clear, any woman who likes sex is obviously trying to bring about the downfall of modern civilization.

Tainted

Tainted

1988 – United States

Director – Orestes Matacena

Southgate Entertainment, 1989, VHS

Run time – 1 hour, 30 min.

In this one Shari Shattuck (of Naked Cage) plays a grade school teacher with a perm. A terrible teacher with a terrible perm. I was too young to remember well, but I cannot fathom what the fuck people were thinking when the crispy tinsel look was considered attractive. It is beyond my ability to understand. This entire setting is bizarre, a sort of vortex of affluent whitetrashy conservatism where the storefronts all look hokey frontier style and the female teachers alternately sport yee-ha mullets and victorian beehives (see below) amongst a hive of palatial mansions.

Shari yuks it up at a fancy party with a bunch of rich assholes (aren’t they all) then later attends a do-see-do school dance event at her school. At the latter her husband becomes jealous of her flirtatious behavior towards another young teacher and complains about it later that night. The next day the school principal also warns her, but this potentially interesting plot thread is quickly forgotten in favor of personal hygene. Taking a bath to ease the stress of accusatory scrutiny, Shari exposes a bit more than intended, but the bum at the window doesn’t mind. In fact he considers it encouragement and walks right in to the unlocked house. He finds Shari in a special toweling off position that he also finds encouraging for some reason, god only knows, so he tries to rape her.

During the subsequent struggle her husband gets home and joins in the scuffle. After stabbing the bum to death with his own switchblade, already jealous husband accuses Shari of soliciting the bum, and then has a heart attack. Wracked with guilt for having done absolutely nothing wrong up to this point she decides not to call the police but dispose of the bodies herself; the husband in a car to be “discovered” by the police and the bum, in the front yard.

Here the film suddenly switches gears from an erotic thriller into a disconnected series of horror-comedy snafu’s. Pretty much a downshift from Single White Confederate Female to Slasher Weekend at Bernie's, only without the slasher, yet.


Telephones ring with condolence calls driving poor Shari insane. But are they real calls or is she really insane, and just practicing her “bereaved” act for the inevitable interrogation? Moments after selling her house in a barely-alluded-to prior tangent, and while she is clearly still living there, the people who bought it decide to dig a pool in the front yard threatening to unearth the decaying bum.

Worst Enemy (Park Overall) left, and Cathy (Shari Shattuck) discussing the finer points of grave robbery.

To prevent the corpse from being disinterred, Shari conspires with her worst enemy to dig it up, but on the way to the family mortuary/crematorium they suddenly find themselves in an inner-city slum and out of gas. They frighten off a band of street punks with the dead body, and re-emerge from the ghetto-wormhole back in Dixieland and at the funeral home.

Remember that guy at the beginning of the movie who was doing it with Shari’s enemy in that one brief scene? Yeah well he’s also the mortuaries loony embalming guy who suddenly plays the key role as a last-minute calculating psychopathic murderer. Whatever, in any case he gives Shari the opportunity she should have taken at the beginning of this madness, namely to duck out of this haphazard film.

The Naked Cage

Naked Cage

United States - 1986

Director – Paul Nicholas

Media Home Entertainment, 1987, VHS

You might think the movie hasn’t started yet and you’re watching a trailer for a Disney picture about animal husbandry when you spot the first scene coming over the horizon like a gilded unicorn. Buxom blonde Michelle (Shari Shattuck of Arena and later, director Jim Wynorski's Body Chemistry 3) lives the life of a perfect adorable princess well into her twenties, all soft focus, Slisbury Steak dinners, cooing mothers and underthings that smell like sunlight and Jesus. This is the kindof girl that prays every night for god to bless her horsies, c’mon, she actually enjoys her job as a bank teller. Like director Nicholas’ earlier women-in-prison film, Chained Heat, Naked Cage also centers around an innocent baby-fatted princess thrown into the grinder of prison only to come out all tits and gristle on the other side.

Alright!
That’s the first exclamation of enthusiasm coming from the jutting rugged jaw of Willy (John Terlesky of the title role in Deathstalker 2 also directed by Jim Wynorski). Willy picks up a fashion-punk chick named Rita from the side of a lonely desert highway. Over lunch at a roadside diner, a cop takes an interest in Willy’s stolen Corvette, and Rita exposes her inner ex-con by airing out the cop’s brain. Later, after Willy snorts some victory cocaine off her titties, Rita convinces him to rob a bank, but he makes one last drug addled reconciliation plea to with his wife (? This is never clarified) the angelic untainted Michelle. Rebuffed, (and probably a few grams later) it turns out that they’re robbing the same bank that doe-eyed Michelle works at. (big surprise) Michelle tries to intervene in the whole blundering operation, to make Willy stop, to turn him back into the sunshine, but when she jumps in the getaway car to staunch the flow when he is shot, she is taken as an accomplice and is prison bound for all the usual visual vice and expected sin.

Inside she is forced to wear a demeaning little rag of a miniskirt and befriends the stringy-haired waifish drug addict inmate Amy who she counsels in positivity with sparkly sigh-heavy bragging about her pony. The Warden, with a rat’s nest of blond curls piled and sprayed to a rigid finish, gives Michelle the lesbian warden speech. Please me, and your life here will be easy etc. Hmmm, in case you were wondering just what that means, or maybe just wanted the warden to be a little more specific, hold on a sec…

In the Warden’s boudoir, bedecked with every tacky 80’s aesthetic convention short of a Lamborghini poster, she spanks and is spanked by a pillowy chested inmate in low-grade bondage gear and competing spray-hardened rats nest. If you aren’t too distracted, you’ll notice that the inmate is pocketing, er, pantying something, go back to being distracted it never gets explained. But do pay attention to the pug-nosed creep in the closet, he’ll be back in just a … WAIT There he is, raping one of the black inmates before hanging her.
Brought to task by the leader of the black prisoners, Brenda, the Warden upbraids “Smiley” the rapist, but as we know, in detail, she has her own prisonerette vice and there is an uneasy a live and let live, racist-rapist-homicide policy.

Suddenly Rita shows up in the mess hall and you know she’s pure poison because she’s already sporting a custom modified punk prison issue miniskirt and single dangling feather earring. That’s concentrated anarchy waiting to happen.
Good timing too, I was just starting to think Michelle wasn’t going to have a shower scene. But as if to punish me for being such a shallow slob, Rita emerges from the roiling steam to slash Michelle up with a knife, waking her up from her nightmare. This is where things start to get a little bit complicated and overly serious, blame it on director Nicholas who’s Chained Heat (1983) was equally brimming with bloodletting and boobs. He’d rather bite the tongue off than stick it in the cheek.

Here Michelle incurs the wrath of the Warden and her pal Smiley by refusing to rat on the other inmates, and by sticking up for Amy when her pimp comes around. Sent to solitary so Smiley can have his perverse revenge, Michelle shows him how quick a country girl can learn that testicles are sensitive to kicking.
Also like Heat, Cage follows an uplifting arc of revenge and renewal with the inmates rebelling and Michelle chucking Rita onto a giant open fusebox festooned with dangling wires where she fries ever so believably in a shower of sparks like a horsefly on a bug zapper. I don’t think anybody has died like that since 1988.
Having kicked down the rotting house from the inside, Michelle can return to innocence and her 70’s ranch-house all American lifestyle to make out with her stupid pony.