Duel

Duel

United States - 1971

Director - Steven Spielberg

The VHS box insert above came from Vestron Dan
There are lots of posters for Duel out there, these are just some of the better ones.

 This poster came from Denver Westword

This one came from Moviegoods

This Swedish one came from About.com

The Burning

It's always been my policy to avoid posting horror movies during October since everyone else already has that genre pretty well beaten to death. But since I had to do this one more or less on assignment, I'll throw it out there, on Halloween day no less, just to contradict myself.

The Burning

United States - 1981

Director - Tony Maylam

Mostly forgotten until it’s re-release on DVD in 2007, The Burning has earned a minor reputation among horror enthusiasts. It is true that the slasher genre, begun definitively with 1978’s Halloween but presaged in the stalker thriller movies of the foregoing decade, has a limited appeal. But after thirty years and numerous remakes, it’s much easier to look at the originals as ‘classics.’

So why is it that despite being one of the earliest entries in the genre, The Burning was until recently a relic? Despite a relatively large budget, it suffered from the typical maladies; bad acting and a predictable story. In fact, The Burning is a near copy of its predecessor, 1980’s Friday the 13th. Instead of being murdered by a protective mother, this passel of summer campers are killed by a vengeful groundskeeper hideously burned in a pre-credit prank. 1981 was probably too early for there to be a slasher formula per se, but not for lack of The Burning trying.

That’s what is appealing about this film however. It doesn’t try to out-think itself, it puts on no pretensions or fancy twists to keep things surprising because there was not yet a need to do so. It’s important to remember that just a week before this film, Friday the 13th Part 2 was released followed by Holloween 2 in October of that year. By the end of the decade the three major slasher franchises would have spawned a total of fifteen sequels and countless knockoffs. In retrospect I see The Burning as one of the most honest of its cohort for it has nothing to hide and goes straight for the guts.

This rad poster comes from Phantom City Creative

Tightrope

Tightrope

United States – 1984

Director – Richard Tuggle

Following a decade of race-riots, hippies and touchy-feely progressive politics, 1971's Dirty Harry, was the reactionary tale of a white cop incensed at a justice system that cared more for so called “rights” and “due process” than it did for the “law.” The film was a huge hit spawning several sequels and its own genre of reactionary angry-white-male films. (Reasserting masculinity after the ‘emasculating’ loss in Vietnam.) Poor guys.

At the same time the Feminist movement and yes, rape revenge films are forcing the previously taboo subject of sexual violence into the public discourse in low-budget films like Ms. 45 and I Spit on Your Grave. In 1983 just a few years after I Spit on Your Grave, the fourth installment of Dirty Harry, Sudden Impact is released. The main character is also named Jennifer and also a rape victim out for revenge. But instead of encouraging us to sympathize with her, this Jennifer is painted as a criminal for operating outside the confines of legality. She is after all a she and thus not allowed to engage in the same extralegal punitive justice as our hero Harry.

Thus, facing criticism for yet another reactionary plot in which a rugged man of action saves everyone else in the service of the status quo, Eastwood decides to get behind a clone script engineered to explicitly address the issue of his stone-age out-of-touchness.

Enter 1984’s Tightrope in which Eastwood plays (Dirty Harry playing) Wes Block, a callous and sarcastic New Orleans cop on the case of a serial rapist/murderer. Great and crude effort is made to give Harry, err…Wes, a veneer of empathy. A single father of two young daughters (one Eastwood’s own,) Wes also becomes romantically involved with Beryl (Genevieve Bujold), a womens’ self-defense teacher and rape-counselor who doesn’t wear a bra. Although he never acts it, the mere proximity of females (something Harry generally lacked) is meant to give Wes a mild guilt-by-association "sensitivity."

But Tightrope's message is more than simple retrenchment, it is an attempt to work out the dimensions of the "New Man" predicated by feminism's demands and successes. The film intentionally draws a parallel between Wes and the killer by confusing their psychology, by making them sides of the same coin.

The clearest indicator to my mind is the use of handcuffs as a motif of power and submission. Used for domination in both sex games and the law, their repeated appearance in the film (and promotional materials) highlights the way that public and private power are often intertwined and mutually justifying. Struggling with these conflicting notions of morality, Wes suffers from nightmares in which he is the killer misogynist strangling the "liberated" Beryl. “I’m gonna get you motherfucker!” Wes yells after the killer violates his home. Sure, he’s yelling at the absent killer (an ex-cop no less), but Wes is looking at himself in the mirror, implying that his hypothetical good side is determined to catch and contain his bad side.

Although it makes a strong case for the possibility of shared power, that is, over none-but-ones-self, Tightrope is bound by the conventions of genre and its star's image. The struggle is a private one, and on the surface Wes must play the same old Harry. When he visits Beryl's self-defense class and she knees a practice dummy in the balls, it mechanically groans and sticks its tongue out while Wes grins bemusedly. And as if to demonstrate the one-sidedness of this whole paradigm shift,  Beryl is attacked but fails to employ any of her own training, instead feebly stabbing the killer with a pair of sewing scissors before Wes comes to her aid. Woman it would seem, is still bound by the traditional rules of conduct even if man isn't.

Reform School Girls

Reform School Girls

United States - 1986

Director - Tom DeSimone

New World Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 34 minutes

You'll have to get you ass over to Paracinema if you wanna read my review of this puzzlingly popular 80's cult-favorite. If you're too lazy to read, I'm not sure what you're doing here, but I'll give you some posters as a consolation prize.

These posters are on loan from the fantastic Wrong Side of the Art

Reform School Girl

Reform School Girl

United States - 1957

Director - Edward Bernds

This snappy little poster does a wonderful job of making an otherwise tame film appear incredibly exciting. They sure don't make 'em like this anymore. With over fifty years of retrospect it's easy to call this movie tame; by today's standards nothing in Reform School Girl is shocking in fact, much of its tension seems downright silly, its claims simply naive, but in 1957 well, things were a little different than they are now. But, while the shocking moments might plausibly have mellowed with the social changes of the last half century, the overall scope of the film, that is good girls gone bad, seems not to have lost it's appeal. What remains interesting are the circumstances of the protagonist(a)s fall from grace and, her subsequent redemption.

Thanks to Lewis Wayne Gallery for the lobby cards.

And her redemption is essential to films of this era (and still to a lesser extent) because in the end, the starlet must be made appealing to the audience once again. I would venture that there are not too many movies before the 70's that started to feature irredeemable protagonistas. It's always titilating to see how low she can go, but ideologically we prefer the pure girl after all. In Reform School Girl, Donna (New Mexico native Gloria Castillo) is the product of a broken home where her harpy aunt and lecherous uncle each abuse her in their own way. Seeking escape she goes out with some kindof-friends only to be harangued and abused again by her rotten 'date.' When he runs a man over and the two are caught, Donna is sent to a rural Reform School where she soon finds herself fighting for survival with the other girls. Finally, a local farm boy sneaks onto the school grounds and slow dances the warmth back into Donna's heart. The End (more or less.)

So, while the love of a good man proves once again to be the saving grace of the lost woman, Reform School Girl still offers some interesting tributaries into the river of tradition. The fact that Donna's home life, and the rotten boy who gets her into trouble are clearly centered in the city suggests that the new (in '57) urban way of life is responsible for the erosion of traditional family structures. Note that Donna is saved by a rural boy whose greatest transgression (by his admission) was the borrowing of a tractor without asking. Compound this with the fact that her uncle, clad in dungarees and an undershirt ('wifebeater') idles at home ogling Donna while aunt Rita comes home and goes out again wearing a handkerchief on her head, hinting that she is the one earning a living. The working class way of life and the eroding of traditional gender roles are, if not equally at fault, at least complicit in the urban industrial decay of ideal feminine purity.

If Reform School Girl's conservative solution is less than surprising, it does at least highlight the abusive nature of objectification. In the opening scenes, shots of Donna's uncle watching in the mirror as she puts her clothes on are cross-cut with shots of the rotten boy dressing in front of a mirror surrounded by pin-up-girl posters and Donna spends a good deal of the movie voicing her subsequent distrust of men. And for a movie, and a genre marketed to a predominantly male audience that sort of critique -however obtuse- can't be a bad thing.

 The two posters come thanks to MovieGoods.

Thanks to Psychotronic 16 for making this movie available for us to watch. It's worth the hour and ten minutes it takes up and boy does the time fly!

Week of Back Talk!

One of the disappointing things about being a small time writer (at least to me) is that one yearns for feedback and dialogue from others, yet rarely gets it. This is particularly the case online where so much content is available for free and in the meantime one is frequently too self-interested.

I myself am often guilty of merely noting, but not reading the posts of my cohorts. In an modest effort to address this situation I'm pledging to leave at least two comments a day for the next week on my various comrade's blogs. Sound easy enough, but the catch is I have to actually read the post and be insightful in my response!

Since I was duped into the Twitter-hole, I'll Tweet (@SethGoodkind) a link to the site in question each time I comment on a fellow's article or review, that way there's accountability. (you can also see my Tweets on this blog just above Linda Blair.)

What's more, I challenge readers of this blog to follow suit, it's not that hard, read someone's post and say something! You can get started by looking at my comrade's recent entries in the sidebar to the right. There's lot's of content everyday, so there is plenty to think about and respond to!

Join me, dialogue is AMAZING!

Commence Week of BACK TALK!

Talk About a Stranger

United States - 1952

Director - David Bradley

Jesus de Nazareth

Jesus de Nazareth

Mexico - 1942

Director - Jose Diaz Morales

El Martir del Calvario

El Martir del Calvario

Mexico - 1952

Director - Miguel Morayta

Switchblade Sisters

Switchblade Sisters

United States - 1974

Director - Jack Hill
Poster art by - John Solie

After over ten years since my last watch I revisited Switchblade Sisters over the weekend. I think I'm able to appreciate it more this time around. My personal favorite is the opening title starting with the switchblade snapping action of the main title itself. The first time I watched it I think I was expecting more. It had been talked up so much I thought it was going to be epic and my tastes, tempered as they were by the relative extremes of 80's and 90's cinema, couldn't process what seemed like bland 70's flavor.

One of the things that I still find a little bit disappointing is what seems to me as a lost opportunity for some explicit feminism. There are a few moments which in a certain light might appear to reject the standard film portrayals of 'tough girls' (that is, still within gender norms) but I suppose one can't expect too much in an exploitation flick from 1975. In particular though I think it's interesting that the white girl gang are just directionless hooligans and subordinate to their boyfriends (until the end) while the Black gang are thoroughly militant and led by a woman. Those roles would be largely reversed by the '80's thanks to the advent of the "War on Drugs." But don't get me wrong, it is fundamentally just a movie about a bunch of white girls doing things that white girls aren't supposed to which is apparently 'shocking.'

The artificiality of the sets (especially the street battle sequence at the end) and the shallow scripting which harken back to the delinquency films of the 50's, definitely strikes me as more of a parody than anything else. Fortunately, director Hill seems to have intended it that way. Which, as it turns out, is not a bad thing. With a little perspective, I can understand why Switchblade Sisters is regarded as a classic.

Borderline

Borderline

United States – 1980

Director – Jerrold Freedman

Avid Home Entertainment, 1995, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour, 44 minutes

In the early 1980’s a whole little cluster of border films came out within a few short years. It seemed that suddenly, illegal immigration was contentious again. In Border Cop (1980) Telly Savalas, and The Border (’82) Jack Nicholson each played a jaded Border Patrol agent who threw up his hands in cynical and frustrated sympathy. He may have felt deeply for the plight of the illegals, may have even been good friends with some of them (or even fallen in love), but he still had a job to do. Borderline, which came out just a few months after the Savalas picture was a gap in my Bronson collection that I had long needed to fill, but I was worried that it might be a difficult experience.

You see, I get totally confused when we white people make movies about non-white people. I start to feel like my emotions are being intentionally manipulated, especially when white actors play sympathetic non-white characters. Steven Segal, Burt Reynolds, Marlon Brando, Telly Savalas; the list goes on and on. Even my creasy Polish-American hero Charles Bronson played Mexicans and Native Americans on occasion. Bronson’s may have been the most believable brownface portrayal, but it still felt somehow disingenuous. These characters are repeatedly robbed, abused and even killed with much handwringing, but my feelings of empathy were all too often haunted by an inkling of insincerity which I couldn’t quite place. I don’t like having to think too deeply about what’s going on on-screen, it really ruins my suspension of disbelief.

It turns out I needn’t have been so concerned. Bronson, though he may have been typecast, or facecast as it were, always manages to deliver yet another compelling performance. In Borderline he plays Jeb, a Border Patrol agent much like his cinematic contemporaries; physically and emotionally overwhelmed with the contradictions of the very system which cuts his paychecks. It is such a difficult and thankless job being the responsible, caring zookeeper. But after watching as crowds of immigrants were herded about like frightened cattle in a prison yard for the first few minutes of Borderline, I was once again feeling the early stages of nagging guilt. But moments later, when Jeb’s best friend and fellow agent Scooter (Wilford Brimley) was brutally murdered, I suddenly had a revelation.

Scooter’s killer is Hotchkiss, “The Marine” (Ed Harris), a cold-blooded, uzi-weilding Nam Vet working for a local California businessman in a grand conspiracy to rake in the cash by drowning the U.S. labor market in a sea of malleable brown servants. Now even though the complications and tensions of illegal immigration policy are central to the rivalry between the Jeb and Hotchkiss, Borderline is not about illegal immigration at all. In fact it’s never even discussed. That’s because everything troublesome about immigration is embodied in one unscrupulous and evil individual, Hotchkiss whose elimination “solves” everything. Jeb’s clear-cut moral victory relieved me of any responsibility for the active contemplation of systemic social issues that often makes watching dramatic movies so unpleasant. Pitting these two men against each-other was brilliant. Not only do they play their roles with gusto, but it utterly mystifies one of the most contentious issues in modern U.S. politics. I must say though, if I have to cheer on the retrenchment of the status quo, Bronson’s the guy who’ll get me to do it every time. It’s so much easier when complex moral issues are boiled down into charismatic and easy to digest character tropes. If it had been anyone but him I would probably still be feeling guilty.

Wait, who's the headliner here, the Subject or the Objects?

French, Italian and United States' posters from Movie Poster Shop.
The French one is my absolute favorite, maybe one of the best posters of all time. It perfectly exemplifies the misguided self-deluding quality of white-people making movies about brown-people.

German poster-thing from Movie Poster Database
Why does (almost) every poster have a giant United States' flag on it?

Once Upon a Time in the West

Once Upon A Time in the West

Italy - 1969

Director - Sergio Leone

I do so love Charles Bronson that I am almost willing to say that this is my favorite of Leone's classic westerns. Woody Strode doesn't hurt of course, even though he's only in the film for the opening scene. I recently read a nice long article in Cinema Retro which proposed that Leone's film was a response to 1962's romantic fantasy How the West Was Won. Something of a darker, more cynical vision, though I would argue no less fantastical or romantic.

This poster by artist Rudolfo Gasparri

Red Sun

Red Sun

France 1971

Director - Terence Young

I so badly wanted to like this movie and I waited with much anticipation for it to arrive in the mail. I mean, Toshiro Mifuna and Bronson! I suppose it's one of those films that I should give another chance since it's been a few years. Good posters anyway. Polish poster above comes from At The Movies, the rest from Moviegoods.

Saturn 3

Saturn 3

United Kingdom – 1980

Director – Stanley Donen

CBS/FOX Home Video, 1987, VHS

Run Time – 1 hour 28 minutes 

Until my friend laid this old tape in my hands I had never heard of Saturn 3. That isn’t saying much I suppose, but he hadn’t either, and we are both big fans of robot oriented space-fiction so it was a pleasant surprise. Before watching the film I did a little research and discovered some interesting stuff. Despite not initially wanting to write extensively about what is a fairly mainstream film, after watching I was inspired to say something about it its relationship to space-fi in general.

When it was released, Saturn 3 appears to have received generally negative reviews, and remarkably, continues to do so . Not surprisingly these predominantly appear to stem from unfavorable comparison to Star Wars, which was released just a few years before. Although not mentioned in anything I read, I think it also owes a large debt to Kubrick’s 2001 in both overall plot, and Elmer Bernstein's score. But even if it’s not exceedingly original, Saturn 3 does a damned good job of wearing it’s pedigree on its sleeve.

The important thing to remember about Star Wars, especially because it has compounded its cultural significance in the last decade, is that it wasn’t very creative. As I’ve said before, it’s an entertaining movie, but the plot as we know is a generic and predictable white hero myth. Saturn 3 is not as epic or inspiring than its predecessor, but neither is it any less creative. What was so remarkable about Star Wars (and this is what I think most people find so endearing about it) was the visual design. Saturn 3 interestingly enough, was written and (initially) directed by John Barry, the same man responsible for the look of Star Wars.

The story itself centers around Adam (Kirk Douglas) and Alex (Farah Fawcet) on one of Saturn’s moons where they operate a hydroponic farm but mostly shag. When another astronaut, Benson (Harvey Keitel) arrives at their secluded love nest, they soon discover that he and his robot are not on a mission of peace. Compelling? Perhaps not, but visually everything in this movie, from the spacesuits to the ships clicks. The thing that really sells it for me is the robot, “Hector”, an eight foot tall machine powered by a giant tube of vat-grown human-fetus brains. The concept is pretty twisted if you think about it, and the way in which Hector takes on the sociopathic personality of its programmer Benson is particularly well conceived.

I’ve always cushioned my disappointment with the termination of sci-fi cinema’s great sagas with a simple philosophy; If the human geography of space has been expanded as much as my favorite films claim, then it is quite possible that each space-fiction film (of a nominally similar quality) merely represents another local facet in the same broad story. In that sense, there is no “end” to what I call the “Space-Fi Narrative Continuum”*. Garnished with moments of genuine intelligence and clothed in awesome visuals, Saturn 3 definitely makes the cut.

*In the future I'll refer to qualifying films under this label. Previously reviewed films which qualify have been back referenced.

 This Japanese poster is from Movie Outlaw

Striptease Murder Case

Striptease Murder Case

United States - 1950

Director - Hugh Prince
 

Nature's Sweethearts

Nature's Sweethearts

United States - 1963

Director - Larry Wolk

What exploitation enthusiast can forget those laughably innocent days of the nudist camp film?!

Black Mama, White Mama

Black Mama, White Mama

Philippines/US - 1972

Direstor - Eddie Romero

Orion Home Video, 1996, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 26 minutes

This is a personal favorite of mine because it is one of the first Corman/Philippine exploitation movies I saw. It's a favorite of many people apparently, across many genres. Oftentimes it is classified among the Blaxploitation and Women In Prison genres. I can see elements of both, (more of the latter) but I would call it more of a Caper movie. It doesn't really matter though because it is awesome, and written by Jonathan Demme!

Ministry of Fear

Ministry of Fear

United States - 1944

Director - Fritz Lang

Yog Monster From Space

Yog Monster From Space

Japan - 1970

Director - Ishiro Honda

Movie Favorites (Trans-Atlantic Video Inc.), 1987, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 24 minutes

A few months back I shared an awesome poster for this Kaiju movie. I really wanted to see the film, but the version available on DVD has the original title Space Amoeba, and features a totally different photo cover. I really like the poster art! As it happens this VHS tape showed up shortly thereafter but something seemed a bit strange about it. It looks to me like someone did a quick copy of the poster. It's a pretty close reproduction as far as composition goes, but the quality of detail is much less on this box. But hey, it matches the quality of the film print!

Ahhhhh, public domain VHS.

Anayway here a few more posters I found.

This nice lobby card comes thanks to Black Hole Reviews

This poster thanks to Super Punch

This one from Toho Island