Vampirella

I was a huge fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine when I was a kid, and as such I was exposed to Uncle Creepy, Cousin Eerie, and Vampirella as well.  Eerie and Creepy were Warren’s horror magazines and said Uncle and Cousin were the hosts.  Vampirella was different.  She did introduce some stories, I believe, but she also was featured in her own strip in the magazine.  I recall picking up a few of the early issues at one point in the back issue boxes at Saint Albans News and selling them to Tom Cremeans at the Comic Book and Paperback Kingdom in South Charleston.  I really never read any of the Vampirella stories until Harris Comics picked up the rights and started publishing a color comic in the early to mid 90s.  I enjoyed the book, but eventually dropped it around the time they decided to change her iconic outfit to some sort of spacesuit design if memory serves.

Another reason I was familiar with Vampirella was the classic Aurora model from the Monster Scenes kits.  Aurora made a slew of great model kits and Monster Scenes was just one of their great lines.  Unfortunately there were parental complaints and the Monster Scenes kits soon disappeared from the store shelves only to be replaced by the more parent friendly Prehistoric Scenes.   I had all of the Monster Scene kits with the exception of the Giant Insect which was never released in America until Moebius models decided to rerelease the Monster Scenes kits last year.  They rereleased all but three of the kits and those three, which includes Vampirella, are to go on sale this year.  I already have my order placed with Comic World for these last three kits.

In addition to the model, Vampirella is also coming back in a new comic from Dynamite Publishing as well as a series of hardcover archive editions reprinting the old Warren magazines and trade paperbacks reprinting the various comic book series.  Back in 1996 when Harris was still publishing Vampirella, Roger Corman’s New Concorde filmed a Vampirella movie.  The movie was released on DVD and I was fortunate enough to stumble across a copy in the used DVD section at FYE before they started mixing the used DVDs in with the new ones.  I never got around to watching the movie, but I decided to pop it in recently.

I was expecting the worst, so I was pleasantly surprised.  The cheese factor is incredibly high in the film which features Talisa Soto as Vampirella.  The film covers her quest to track down the killer of her father (played by Phantasm’s own Tall Man, Angus Scrimm).  The killer, who just happens to be named Vlad, is played by an over the top Roger Daltrey.  He and his gang fled the planet Drakulon and set up shop on Earth.  Vampirella trails them by stowing away on a shuttle piloted by John Landis.

The film uses a variant on the iconic costume that seems a lot more realistic and slightly less likely to suffer from a “nip slip”.  It’s still a very sexy look, unlike the new outfit that Harris tried.  One of Vampirella’s creators, Forrest J. Ackerman, gets not only a cameo, but a character named after him in the film.

Vampirella isn’t a bad film, for what it is, and it’s a fun diversion on the way to Halloween.  I give it 2 1/4 stars.

The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard

I love the movie Used Cars.  It is one of the funniest movies from start to finish that I have ever seen.  Once I realized that The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard was also about used car salesmen, I knew it had a huge measuring stick to go up against.  The Goods focuses on one particular type of used car salesman; the ones that car lots bring in when they really need to make a lot of sales.  John Landis did a fantastic documentary on one of these used car warriors called Slasher.  It was a very entertaining film and it showed some of the tricks of the trade.  The Goods didn’t use all the tricks that Slasher used like the $50 car that is for the most part a piece of junk the dealer should be paying to have hauled away, but they created some that were funny and yet plausible like the salesman that buys the customer’s car as a trade-in and then sells it back to him at a mark-up 40 minutes later.

One of the reasons I felt The Goods worked so well was its top-notch cast.  Jeremy Piven, Ving Rhames, David Koechner, and Kathryn Hahn are the sales crew brought in to bring up the sales.  The local crew they are brought in to assist includes Tony Hale, Ken Jeong, and Charles Napier.  We also meet the family that owns the lot led by patriarch Ben Selleck, played by James Brolin.  The rest of the family includes Wendie Malick, Rob Riggle, and Jordana Spiro.  Spiro plays daughter Ivy Selleck who is engaged to Paxton Harding (Ed Helms) the son of a competing used car dealer played by Alan Thicke.  Helping to further raise the comedy talent quotient is Craig Robinson as DJ Request (a DJ that refuses to take requests) and an unbilled Will Ferrell as McDermott, the sales team’s former DJ who dies in a horrible sky diving accident that had me laughing out loud sitting by myself in the living room.

The plot is pretty simple.  The mercenary sales force comes in and motivates the local crew.  They buy lots of TV and radio spots to promote the event and bring in a minor celebrity to help sell the event.  The rival dealer makes a play for the lot and they end up making a wager that they will sell every car on the lot by the end of the weekend.  It is the whacked out characters and their interactions that make the film.  Helms for example is also part of a boy band, or as he calls it, a man band since all the members are grown men.  Brolin has a crush on one of Piven’s sales crew but it isn’t the busty red-head, it’s Koechner.  Piven has his eyes on Spiro’s Ivy despite her engagement to Helms.  And Hahn has the hots for Brolin’s son Peter (Riggle) who although he is in a huge man size body is actually only 10 years old and suffers from a glandular disorder that makes him large.

The Goods is not as laugh packed as Used Cars, but it is still pure good old raunchy fun done extremely well.  I didn’t see the film when it was in theaters, and it appears that I was not alone in that.  The trailer and the marketing didn’t do a good enough job of telling the potential audience what they were in for.  That is terrible for audience attendance, but it makes the film that much more enjoyable when you can walk in and no practically nothing about the film.

I give The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard 4 stars.  Any flaws it has I can overlook by the virtue of two incredibly funny scenes that had me laughing.  I mentioned that one was the skydiving scene.  The other one also involves Ferrell, but this time with a pair of singing black angels with dirty mouths.  Definitely check this movie out, and if you see Used Cars available, make it a double feature.

Videodrome

I saw Videodrome when it was first released and it blew me away.  I didn’t completely understand it, but I still loved it.  The effects were revolutionary for the time and the idea that a person could be turned into a human video player that could be controlled by what was on a tape inserted into their body was mind-boggling.  I did some trading and managed to get the one sheet for this film and it hung over my bed for years.  Several years later I recall finding out that the film was available as an unrated DVD.  I began searching for it, but kept running into the R rated version.  Finally I found a used copy at FYE.  I was ecstatic.  Then I found out Criterion had released a two disc edition packed with all sorts of goodies.  I stumbled across that at FYE as well and added it to my collection.  It had been several years since my last viewing of Videodrome, and I had never checked out either of the DVDs I had purchased, so today I popped the original unrated Universal DVD into my player.

I was surprised at how much of the film I had forgotten.  There were scenes I just did not recall.  And these weren’t the scenes that had been added to the uncut DVD.  I also couldn’t help but marvel at the pronouncement of one of the characters, Professor Brian O’Blivion.  He states that O’Blivion is not his birth name, that it is his television name.  He then states that soon everyone will have television names.  Well, he was half right.  Most people these days have a screen name, but it is for the computer, albeit often for video blogs which is similar to television.

Videodrome stars James Woods as Max Renn, a sleazy cable channel operator that is looking for something edgier than the soft core porn he has been airing.  He stumbles across Videodrome, a television program with no plot except sexual torture.  He is hooked and his new partner, Deborah Harry, becomes intrigued as well.  She is into pain as a form of pleasure showing Max scars where other boyfriends had cut her at her request.  She offers to show Max a few things and soon he is sticking needles into her ear lobes.  Max has one other major change in his life.  He has started having headaches coupled with hallucinations.

David Cronenberg has often been described as a “body horror” filmmaker, and Videodrome takes this to new levels.  Max develops a giant slit in his abdomen where a gun can be hidden, or a living video tape inserted.  It’s hard to tell where Max’s dreams begin and reality ends.  One scene has him grabbing his secretary and slapping her only to watch her turn into Debbie Harry and then back with another slap.  He apologizes for his reaction and then for hitting her, but she informs him he never did hit her.

The Universal DVD is light on extras.  There are a couple of the slide show production notes and cast bios as well as one of the theatrical trailers.  The Criterion edition is much more giving in the extras department.  There are two commentary tracks as well as the short film Camers on the main disc.  The second disc contains a couple of featurettes created by Mick Garris as promotional tools for Universal when the film was first released.  One of them contains a roundtable interview with Cronenberg as well as John Landis and John Carpenter (who was currently finalizing The Thing).  The interview was very entertaining although it was not truly Videodrome specific.  Mick’s second featurette was on the making of the film.  While this feature was more Videodrome specific, I didn’t find it nearly as interesting.  Part of this may have been because much of the footage in this featurette had also been featured in a featurette about the special effects and make up crew’s challenges on the film.  That featurette was created for Criterion and looks at Videodrome from the perspective of 2004.  The people they interviewed including Rick Baker no longer had to worry about spoiling key plot points or revealing trade secrets of the time, so it was much more informative,

The Criterion edition also includes three trailers and a slide show of  various marketing materials.  The French lobby card set looked really nice.  If you needed any further reason to pick up the Criterion edition, there is also a nearly 40 page booklet as well as a truly cool looking DVD case decked out to look like a video tape.

Videodrome is still an amazing movie, although it may not be what one would call escapist entertainment.  It challenges the mind and creates images that will remain in your mind long after the movie is over.  By all means, if you are a fan of the film, grab the Criterion edition which also contains the 89 minutes uncut version.  Videodrome gets 3 1/2 stars.