Blackenstein

During the blaxploitation craze of the 1970s there was a sub-genre of blaxploitation horror films.  Blacula kicked it off and was soon followed by Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, Voodoo Black Exorcist, Abby, Scream Blacula Scream, and Blackenstein.  I remember hearing rumors they were making Black Creature from the White Lagoon, but apparently that was just a rumor.  Unfortunately the same cannot be said about Blackenstein.

Blackenstein concerns a black man who has returned from Viet Nam after losing both arms and both legs.  His girlfriend (Ivory Stone) studied under Dr. Stein (John Hart), who has done some remarkable work with limb replacement using a secret DNA formula.  She asks the doctor to help her boyfriend, Eddie (Joe De Sue) and he agrees.  Eddie begins receiving treatments and has new limbs attached.  Everything appears to be going fine until the doctor’s servant Malcomb (Roosevelt Jackson) confesses his feelings for the girl and is spurned for Eddie.  He switches the DNA serum and Eddie begins to change.  He develops a high forehead and soon is reduced to grunting like the Frankenstein monster.  His mind and head may have changed for the worse, but the new arms and legs work out nicely, allowing him to begin a killing spree that leaves three people and a dog murdered on the first night.  Unlike Universal’s Frankenstein, Eddie doesn’t just stop with strangling his victims.  He rips them open and plays with their intestines for some reason.  As the body count rises, the doctor and the girlfriend remain clueless as to Eddie’s other activities.  As the film gets closer to the end, the filmmakers decide to up the score by having the female victims get their blouses torn open to expose their bare breasts before Eddie kills them.  Eventually the police track him down and attack him with Dobermans that tear him open, leaving him laying with his intestines hanging out and one of his new limbs ripped off.

This is not the film to watch if you want good acting (or even competent acting).  This is not the film to watch if you want any sort of editing skill displayed or a semblance of intelligence in the script.  This is the film that you pop in when your friends are over, they’re all half drunk (or further), and you want a good laugh.  If Ed Wood had made this film, even he might have been ashamed of it.  It is that bad. 

As a movie, I give Blackenstein 1 1/2 stars.  As trash cinema at its finest, this would rate a 9 1/2 on the Night Flight scale.

The Plot To Kill Nixon

Last month I took my daughter to get her hair cut, and while we were down in Charleston, we ran by Taylor Books.  As I was looking at the books and magazines, my eye was caught by a row of DVDs.  Most of them were History Channel DVDs and one of those stood out.  It was called The Plot to Kill Nixon.  I knew a lot of people didn’t care for Nixon, but I had never heard of any plot to kill him.  I seemed to remember a Sean Penn film called The Assassination of Richard Nixon, but I just assumed that was a work of complete fiction.  As it turns out the Sean Penn film was based loosely on the events which are covered in this film.  In 1974 a man named Sam Byck actually put into motion a plan to kill Richard Nixon by flying a commercial jet into the White House.

This documentary/dramatization was made for the History Channel and it covers the plot from the start with Byck blaming Nixon for his financial problems and the rejection of his SBA loan application.  Byck saw his plan as a way to make himself famous and he reasoned that with the crimes of Watergate and the situation in Viet Nam, he would be considered a heroic patriot for taking out Nixon.  He began to record an audio diary of his thoughts and preparations.  Several times during the months leading up to his attempt, Byck would come under the eye of the secret service, but he never did anything to cause them to see him as more than a disgruntled citizen and an annoyance.

Byck’s plot began to unravel when he finally got to the airport.  In order to sneak his gun and homemade bomb on the plane, he decided he would have to shoot the cop at the metal detector.  After he shot this man, he rushed into the plane and confronted the pilot and co-pilot.  When the co-pilot explained that they couldn’t leave without clearance, Byck shot him and asked the pilot if he needed to wait for clearance as well.  The pilot pretended to cooperate and then grabbed for the gun.  In the struggle, Byck shot the pilot as well.  Eventually another officer on the scene managed to get a shot and took out Byck allowing the passengers and crew to escape.  It’s an amazing story, and one I am surprised that I was not familiar with in any way.

The biggest problem I had with the movie was the fact that since it was made for a cable television network to air, it had to be structured to keep you there during the commercials and also bring any new viewers up to speed if they didn’t tune in until after the commercials.  When you’re sitting through a large block of commercials you don’t notice it, but when you are watching straight through the effect is very annoying.  They might show you a shot of Byck hiding his gun and walking through the airport terminal while the narrator explains what Byck is doing and why.  There will be a place that you can tell they broke for commercials and then there’s the same basic shot of Byck in the terminal and the narrator once again tells you what he is doing and why.  The further into the show it got, the more annoying this became.  If I have sat through an hour of a DVD called The Plot to Kill Nixon and there is a guy that has spent the last hour talking about how he was going to force his way onto an airplane with a gun and a bomb and kill Nixon, I don’t really need the narrator telling me that he is on his way to the plane to go and kill Nixon.  I really don’t then need for the same narrator to relay this same information to me again 15 seconds after stating it the last time. 

Another problem I had was that since we obviously know that he failed to kill Nixon or crash the plane into the White House, the best action scene we should expect is perhaps a shoot-out at the airport or on the airplane.  The filmmakers decided to add a scene of Byck getting the pilot to take off with the plane and then crashing it into the White House in a ball of flames.  This scene is revealed to be a fantasy playing out in the mind of a dying Byck, but it just seemed like a bad idea to me.  It obviously didn’t happen, so it looks cheesy.  The film would have been much better off without it in my opinion.

The Plot to Kill Richard Nixon is an interesting story, but the DVD doesn’t really do it justice.  Perhaps if I had watched it on The History Channel as it was originally shown, the repetition and fantasy sequence wouldn’t bother me so badly.  As it stands, I don’t know that I will ever return to the DVD for a second viewing, but I will keep my eyes open for the Sean Penn film now.  I give The Plot to Kill Nixon 2 stars, but I am glad I found out about this nearly forgotten piece of history.  The news downplayed or ignored the whole assassination plot part of Byck’s story when it happened for fear of inspiring copycats and emboldening other enemies of the President.  Even in the presentation here, the filmmakers stress that Byck’s plot was doomed to failure because of the secure structure of the White House and the fact that the President would have been swept off into a secure location.  They stress that Byck’s plot actually caused the airports to increase their security and to move the metal detectors further away from the loading gates.  As badly as Nixon split the country, things have gotten a lot worse, and the filmmakers want to be sure they don’t give any nutcase with a death wish any ideas.

Smokey And The Bandit

I have a confession to make.  Any time I am down in the dumps, depressed, distressed or otherwise disturbed, this is the movie I pop in to cheer me up.  This movie is just plain fun.  I first saw Smokey and the Bandit at the old State Theater with Jamie Anderson and her parents.  My mom wouldn’t drive that far into Charleston at night, and the State didn’t have matinees, so I always had to hope for an invite from one of my friends when a film played the State that I wanted to see.  Either that or I had to wait and hope that some other theater picked it up after the State’s run ended.

Smokey and the Bandit is not high art by any stretch.  It’s a 90 minute car chase movie with some great music by Jerry Reed and a cast that seems to be having a blast.  The story is that the first script Hal Needham wrote was terrible, but that his buddy, Burt Reynolds, agreed to do the film and they just re-wrote and improvised as they went.  Jackie Gleason was signed on to play Sheriff Buford T. Justice and based much of his character on a lawman that Burt’s dad once knew.  One of the bits that Gleason brought to the role by way of Burt’s dad’s buddy was the use of the term “sumbitch”.  After Smokey premiered, the term became official Southern slang.

Smokey and the Bandit is set back in the days when Coors beer was illegal east of Texas.  The plot centers on a bet made by Big and Little Enos Burdette (Pat McCormick and Paul Williams) with Burt Reynold’s Bandit.  Bandit has to bring them a truck load of Coors beer in 28 hours.  Bandit brings in his old buddy Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed) and his dog Fred to haul the beer while Bandit runs blocking with a now iconic black Trans-Am.  On the way back with the beer, Bandit picks up a hitchhiking bride played by Sally Field.  Unfortunately the bride’s jilted groom’s daddy is a Texas sheriff named Buford T. Justice and played impeccably by Jackie Gleason.

There were a lot of very grim and very serious issues going on in the 70s with Viet Nam and Watergate.  The movies tackled a lot of the heavy issues and the 70s is viewed by many as a second golden age for movies with classics like Taxi Driver, Network, MASH, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, The Conversation, A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist just to name a few.  But the seventies was also one of the goofier, fun decades with things like disco, CB radios, pet rocks, mood rings, roller disco, macrame, streaking, bell bottoms, and the like.  The fun aspects of the seventies also have their classic movies as well with Star Wars, Jaws, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Airplane, Up In Smoke, and Smokey and the Bandit.  I would also throw in one of my personal favorites from the era, Kenny and Co. as a perfect time capsule for what it was like to be a kid in these times.  I also think Dino DeLaurentis’ King Kong has to be mentioned, not because it is a classic, but because it was an event when it came out. 

I think this is one of the reasons why Smokey and the Bandit always brings a smile to my face.  It reminds me of a time when I didn’t have a care in the world.  Oh sure, I had to go to school and pass my classes and deal with bullies, but that was only 9 months out of the year and there was a Christmas break and an Easter break thrown in there as well.  I didn’t have any bills, comics were 25 cents each, movies were 75 cents each and my mom paid for those for me.  Smokey and the Bandit always takes me back to those times.  As I said, it ain’t high art, but it will always by 4 stars in my book.  Smokey is also one of those movies that I have multiple copies of on DVD.  I currently have 3 different editions.  I have the original bare bones edition with the original trailer as the sole bonus feature, the “Pursuit Pack” franchise edition with all 3 Smokey movies and the Smokey and the Bandit Special Edition with a featurette on the making of the movie and a featurette on the CB language used in the movie.  The CB featurette isn’t anything groundbreaking for anyone that grew up during the CB craze, but the making of featurette is well worth watching.

Greetings

When I think of Robert DeNiro, I tend to think Martin Scorcese.  When I think of Brian De Palma, I think of his Hitchcock period and suspense films.  I don’t normally think of DeNiro and De Palma together, but early in their careers the two men made two offbeat comedies together; Greetings and Hi, Mom.  The fact that the films had similar casts, had titles that were both forms of greetings, and had DVD covers that featured nearly identical art (a head shot of a young DeNiro) caused me to get the two films confused.  It also made it difficult to remember which one I had on DVD and which one I needed.  Last fall I picked up a DVD on the 50 worst movies ever made and was surprised to find Greetings included in the list.  I was also surprised to find that the film was the first film to ever receive an X rating.  I checked my collection and found that the movie I owned was Hi, Mom.  I did not have Greetings. 

Friday I was looking through the DVDs at KV Fine Jewelry and Loan in St. Albans and I found a copy of Greetings.  I quickly added it to my collection and once I got it home, popped it in the DVD player and began to watch.  As it turns out Greetings had been re-rated and was now an R.  I’m not sure how much was cut (if anything) to get the lesser rating.  Back in the late 1960s several mainstream films got the X rating before it became synonymous with pornography.  Greetings is fairly tame in most respects although there is some non pc language, some cursing and some  nudity.

Greetings concerns three young men trying to avoid the draft.  They each have their own plans for how to accomplish that.  They also each have their own obsessions. Paul (Johnathan Warden) is into computer dating.  Jon (Robert DeNiro) is a peeping tom.  Lloyd (Gerrit Graham) is a zealot about the Kennedy assassination.  In one scene Paul goes on a computer date with a woman who has dressed up for a fancy night out while he is looking for a less costly evening.  When he asks if her apartment has any other rooms, she tells him that the room they are in is the only room.  When he then asks where she sleeps, the woman tears into him about how all he is interested in is getting her into bed.  She goes through the list and cost of the various items she is wearing and how he is completely oblivious to them because he wants to get her naked and have sex.  She then storms off and into her bedroom (guess she lied about there only being one room).  Paul sits silently for a few moments and then stands and peeks through the door only to see her lying naked on the bed.  He leaves and calls Lloyd, telling him that she’s not ready for Paul and he’s not ready for her, but maybe Lloyd would be ready for her instead.  The next scene shows Lloyd in bed with the naked woman.  A magazine on the Kennedy assassination covers her crotch and as Lloyd consults various texts he has brought along, he uses a black sharpie to map out and trace the bullet’s trajectory on her naked body in an effort to disprove the Warren commission.

Greetings is not a great film by any stretch, but it is a fascinating film from a different time.  The underground feel of the film is real as they had no permits for any of the shots they filmed.  The anti-draft feel is real also as this was filmed while the Viet Nam war was raging.

It’s odd to think of De Palma directing a comedy, but this is where he got his feet wet in filmmaking.  It is also his first film with Gerrit Graham who would play Beef in De Palma’s cult favorite Phantom of the Paradise.  I’m glad I got to see the film and now I have to watch Hi, Mom as it is a sequel of sorts with DeNiro’s Jon Rubin returning home from Viet Nam.  (Oops, spoiler alert, Jon’s plan to avoid the draft fails.)

Greetings gets 2 1/2 stars, but it is a piece of cinema history that should be experienced.

Tropic Thunder

I had thought Tropic Thunder looked interesting when it was in theaters, but I never got around to going to see it.  When the DVD came out, they did the now common practice of releasing a single disc and a two disc version.  Target went so far as to include an exclusive Tropic Thunder patch with their two disc version.  I wanted to see the movie, but I wanted to get the 2 disc version, and it wasn’t on sale.  I didn’t want the movie bad enough to pay full price, and if I was going to pay full price, then it was going to be the Target exclusive with the patch because I would at least get something extra for my money even if it wasn’t something I had any real particular interest in having.  Can you follow the twisted logic in that?  I came very close to picking it up one time while on vacation, but I ended up buying something else (the Target exclusive version of the 2 disc Star Wars Clone Wars movie, I believe).

When Tropic Thunder hit pay cable, I managed to catch a little of it.  It was the scene where Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) is trying to convince agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey) that they can make more money by just letting the Asian drug lords that have captured Tug Speedman (Ben Stiller) kill him and collect the insurance than by saving him and finishing the over budget film they were making.  Watching Cruise in his Grossman makeup dance around to Flo Rida’s song Low while offering McConaughey a G4 airplane if he’ll just play ball was pretty funny and actually made me want to see the film even more.  Last week I finally found a used copy of the two disc version with the cardboard slipcover at KV Fine Jewelry & Loan in St. Albans.  I grabbed it up in a heartbeat.

The DVD features the Unrated Director’s Cut of the film which runs slightly over two hours.  Normally on Tuesday, I try to find a short film because I’m trying to get done early enough to catch Lost.  This week I managed to start my movie early enough that I would be done before Lost came on, even with the longer running time.  The movie starts with an ad for Booty Juice, a fictional product one of the stars of Tropic Thunder is pitching.  This is followed by trailers for Scorcher VI (a post apocalyptic action hero franchise that has seen better days), The Fatties Fart 2 (a comedy about a family of overweight goofballs all played by the same actor constantly farting), and one whose title escapes me (Satan’s Alley perhaps) about a forbidden love between two holy men at a monastery (or maybe an abbey).  From there we are taken right into the heart of the Viet Nam war.  Men are being shot, helicopters are spraying bullets and dropping bombs, and, as we quickly learn, it’s all fake.  A group of actors are filming a Viet Nam war film based on a book by one of the only surviving veterans of that particular skirmish, Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte).  Tayback convinces the directer (Steve Coogan) to take the lead actors out to this spot he knows, drop them off and then make them learn to work as a team as they complete their “mission”.  Unfortunately, Tayback is a liar that created his hero story and was never in Nam.  The spot he has chosen is in the heart of a drug lord’s heroin operation, and it also still has active mines, one of which the director steps on as he briefs his actors on their mission.  When the director explodes, the actors assume that it’s a gag designed to heighten their sense of reality, so they start the mission the director assigned them, still thinking everything around them is all part of the movie.

The acting in Tropic Thunder is spot on.  Robert Downey Jr. plays an Australian method actor playing a black man.  Jack Black is the comic star of the Fatties movies making a serious film and trying to deal with his massive drug problem.  And Stiller, Nolte, McConaughey and especially Cruise, nail their characters perfectly.  The rest of the cast is great as well from Danny McBride as pyro effects man Cody to Brandon T. Jackson as Booty Sweat hawking rapper/actor Alpa Chino. 

Tropic Thunder is also a very well written film.  It is a satire with some very funny scenes and insightful gags.  Stiller’s character’s desire to adopt a child from overseas which backfires on him with hilarious results.  The concept of a white man undergoing surgery and makeup to play a black man and then trying so hard to live his life the way he thinks a black man would to get in character.  And then there’s the Simple Jack subplot.  Simple Jack was a role that Stiller’s character played in a fictional movie about a mentally challenged young man.  It is a role he obviously took with the hope of winning an Oscar, which he didn’t.  The conversation between Stiller and Downey’s characters over how Stiller screwed up by going “full-blown retard” is extremely funny and very sharp.  The problem with something like this is that some people don’t see the satire, they only hear the words, and they get their panties in a bunch.  Naturally that happened to Tropic Thunder and so the DVD also contains a public service spot extolling the fact that mentally challenged people are just like everyone else and should be called friend, co-worker, inspiration, but never retard.  Okay Dreamworks, where was the PSA telling people not to call overweight people fatties?  Oh that’s right, it’s okay to poke fun at the fat people.  We’re all jolly, happy folk.  Or maybe you understood that we’re smart enough to understand comedy.

The DVD is loaded with bonus features.  There are some great featurettes on the making of the film, an alternate ending is included, and there is commentary available.  This is a very well done DVD.  The movie is also very well done, and gets 3 1/4 stars.