FUCK THE OSCARS

A feminist masterpiece, utterly snubbed the the so-called "Academy."

My skipping of this year's Oscars show is in bitter memory of the shameful fact that Jack Hill's epochal SWITCHBLADE SISTERS wasn't even considered for the Best Picture award in 1975, which only serves to further point out just how meaningless the Oscars are.

McBAIN (1991)

When the star looks like he wishes he were in a Golan-Globus movie instead.

Last night's lull-me-to-sleep movie was McBAIN (1991), featuring a zombified Christopher Walken as a Viet Nam vet who gets called in to honor a debt that requires him to lead ragtag revolutionaries in taking down a stereotypical Columbian dictator/drug trafficker. It was so by-the-numbers and stupid that I ended up watching the whole thing, marveling at a movie of its wannabe Golan-Globus ilk being released as late as 1991. It comes off exactly like a bunch of little boys (and the neighborhood's girl who got in on this sort of thing) playing soldier with toy weapons and a few pets thrown into the mix, only enacted by grownups, and the effect is unintentionally (?) hilarious.

The film opens in Viet Nam in 1973 on the day when the conflict is officially declared over, where we see our hero as a P.O.W. forced to fight to the death against a hulking enemy bruiser who's armed with a big-ass knife and low-budget martial arts skills. By comparison, Walken looks like a dried-up scarecrow and basically gets his ass mercilessly kicked. That is, until a bunch of hardcore U.S. soldiers show up in a Huey, blow the living shit out of the P.O.W. camp and liberate the prisoners, which is when McBain — whose first name is Bobby, so we get an action hero named Bobby — meets Santos, the Columbian-born U.S. soldier to whom he now owes a life debt. Eighteen years later,  Santos is killed during a botched coup attempt, so his sister (Maria Conchita Alonso — remember her?) rides out of her shot-in-the-Phillipines Columbian village on a donkey and somehow tracks McBain to NYC, where he works on the Brooklyn Bridge as an arc welder. McBain witnessed Santos' death on the news, so he's on board to help the man's sister but first he rounds up a group of U.S. vets to form an even cheesier variant on the A-Team and then we're off to endless firefights and shots of Columbian peasants screaming "Libertad!" while waving rifles in the air. 

Bobby McBain (Christopher Walken). Not since Sean Connery's 007 has a protagonist exuded such palpable alpha wolf energy.

Bear in mind that there was no prior setup whatsoever to lead us to believe McBain — excuse me..."Bobby" — was in any way a highly-skilled commando with the respect and unquestioning loyalty of equally-skilled former soldiers, one of whom (Michael Ironside) is now a multi-gazillionaire whose cash and apparent deep ties to the U.S. government are totally at Bobby's disposal, which is convenient since Bobby and his faux A-Team require a budget of $10 million for weapons and a light aircraft, plus air support from a U.S. fighter pilot acting as a military supply plane's escort in Columbia. (The guy basically ditches his own assignment because McBain mentions he knew the guy's father's division during 'Nam, and brings his fully-loaded fighter jet with him.) The relative ease with which this crew accomplishes the takeover is childlike in its narrative simplicity and grasp of the concept of "unsanctioned international incident" and it's a fucking hoot.

Much like the rest of the movie, the film's tag line of "It takes a killer to stop the killing" makes no sense whatsoever. When we meet him, Bobby's getting his ass handed to him by some Viet Cong thug and he requires the army to save his scrawny ass. Skip ahead by eighteen years and with no explanation whatsoever he's suddenly effortlessly badassed and connected. WAHAAAA??? Ludicrous, but very entertaining.

Oh, and according to the IMDB, the release of this movie led the writers of THE SIMPSONS to refer to their McBain character only as Rainier Wolfcastle for some time in order to avoid confusion with this film. When what they felt was enough time had passed, the name "McBain" returned.

Packaging image from the VHS release.

SHOGUN ASSASSIN (1980) at the Alamo Drafthouse, Brooklyn

Saw the screening of SHOGUN ASSASSIN at the Alamo and, as I had been afraid might be the case, it was the same mangled veteran-of-grindhouses print that I saw over a decade ago during a Subway Cinema classic martial arts film festival. The print was scratched-up and random seconds were missing here and there, which haphazardly cut off parts of the dialogue and caused some of the important exposition to be lost. The hero's brief underwater battle with the female ninja was entirely missing and — most unforgivable of all — the legendary gout of blood that geysers from the slashed neck of the leader of the Masters of Death immediately after he delivers his poetic/hilarious dying speech about "how the sound of wailing winter winds" is heard when such a magnificent cut is administered? Completely missing due to it having been excised from the print during its long years of service in sleazy 24-hour theaters that once dominated areas like the Deuce.

When I saw the film at that Subway Cinema screening a decade back, the showrunners were aware of the print's horrendous quality, as it was allegedly the only extant 35mm print that could be found, so the show's host told the audience up front what they were in for. (The disappointed hew and cry of the packed-to-capacity audience when the aforementioned neck geyser was missing was one of the greatest displays of simultaneous audience sadness and ire that I have ever witnessed.) The showrunners for tonight's screening were apparently unaware of just how dilapidated this evening's print was, so I'm not going to hold their not informing the audience ahead of time against them.

The damaged print is introduced to an unsuspecting audience.

BOTTOM LINE: SHOGUN ASSASSIN is one of my all-time favorites and it's a hell of a lot of fun, but it's very much a visual piece that needs to be see in pristine condition in order to be properly experienced. Thus I suggest that you avoid 35mm screenings of it, should you see it listed, if there truly is only this one damaged print still available for projection. Criterion has issued it in a gorgeous edition on DVD and BluRay, so go with that instead. Or, better yet, just watch the unedited, full-length, subtitled Japanese originals that Criterion issued as a boxed set (which includes SHOGUN ASSASSIN while simultaneously rendering it superfluous).

TRUCKER'S WOMAN (1975)

Poster from the theatrical release.

Released roughly a year before the '70's trucker craze really kicked off with the release of #1 Top 40 hit "Convoy," this no-budgeter follows the adventures of a man who drops out of college after his truck-driving father meets his fate in a suspicious accident, and replaces his old man as a trucker. More refined than the average long-haul driver, thanks to him being a college boy (played by Michael Hawkins, an actor who was at least 15 years too old for the role), our hero charms his way into the pants of a mysterious blonde (Mary Cannon, also too old for her role) who is later revealed to be the daughter of the mobster who ordered his father's brakes cut. The action is lackluster, the hero is in no way believable, his "humorous/endearing" behavior toward the titular character would these days be considered stalkerish and rapey, women find him sexually irresistible despite the aforementioned creepy aspects, the soundtrack consists exclusively of generic mid-'70's truckin' music, and there are agonizingly long shots of 18-wheelers pulling into and out of truck stops and motel parking lots. Oh, and Doodles Weaver's in a featured part and is clearly drunk whenever on camera.

What we have here was likely a staple of southern drive-ins that drunk patrons would ignore while engaging in sweaty groping in their station wagons, and in many ways looks and feels like a more competently-made all-white answer to THE GUY FROM HARLEM (1977), which has rightly been described as "the PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE of blaxploitation films." Utter trash, but an interesting time capsule of a trucker movie as seen before the short-lived genre's tropes were fully codified. It was entertaining enough to hold my interest, but virtually every second of it was a textbook example of a movie whose story particulars you will predict well before they happen. 

Wow. Just...WOW.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 31: DOG SOLDIERS (2002)

Yeah, that's you, well and truly fucked.

A group of British soldiers are dropped into the Scottish Highlands for exercises against a squad of elite SAS operatives, only to find that the SAS unit has been savagely torn apart, apparently by vicious animals. The unit's lone survivor, Captain Ryan (Liam Cunnigham), is seriously wounded but apparently knows what wiped out his men, though he remains kind of cagey about that information. Taking the captain with them, the soldiers realize they are being pursued by...something. They encounter a zoologist Megan (Emma Cleasby), who takes them to a house whose dwellers are nowhere to be found, and that timely bit of shelter proves their only defense as the place is surrounded by the returning family, who just so happen to be a pack of ravening werewolves. As the soldiers fight to survive against insurmountable odds, details of the how and why of the soldiers being dropped into this particular remote area are revealed, and it's only a matter of time until the inevitable...

I wanted to close this year's round of 31 DAYS OF HORROR with something strong, and DOG SOLDIERS qualifies in no uncertain terms. I discovered it with a friend during Thanksgiving in 2003, when we had nothing better to do in Connecticut, so we drove around to several of the county's mom-and-pop video rental joints in search of entertainment. We ended up snagging both DOG SOLDIERS and DAGON in what turned out the be the best randomly-selected double-feature of our lives up to that point. Both films went on to become personal favorites and I immediately purchased DVD copies for my own collection.

Taking the tried and true "base under siege" setup carved in stone by the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD  DOG SOLDIERS proves to be a savage, visceral treat for horror-lovers in general and werewolf fans in particular. The list of genuinely great werewolf movies is a rather short one — I cite THE WOLF MAN (original version), THE HOWLING, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON,  WOLF, and LATE PHASES — and DOG SOLDIERS can proudly be counted among the best of the best. It's got a story that is best approached with a minimum of plot foreknowledge (hence my not going into too much detail), but it can be said that the werewolf effects are superb, it's gory as a motherfucker (to most sensibilities), features a solid script and performances, and the set pieces are all memorable and engrossing.

 When you know you're gonna die horribly anyway, why not go out like a man and fist fight a fucking werewolf?

As previously noted, it's pretty much a re-staging of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD's no-way-out scenario, only ramped-up on a fistful of Study City animal stimulants. Trust me on this one. You absolutely will not be disappointed.

And with that I wish you a safe and Happy Halloween 2019!!! And remember: "Evil" spelled backwards is "live."

Poster from the original release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 30: I AM LEGEND (2007)

 The desolation of post-apocalypse New York, the city that never sleeps...

It's been said that the third time’s the charm, and when applied to this third cinematic adaptation of Richard Matheson’s 1954 science fiction/horror novel I AM LEGEND that assessment is only partially accurate.

Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) is a military scientist attempting to cure a pandemic that has wiped out nearly all of the world’s population, leaving him, as far as he knows, the last uninfected man on Earth. You see, the plague was an unexpected by-product of a successful cancer cure that mutated into a virus that killed about 90% of mankind, transforming the remaining survivors into mindless, animalistic “darksiders” who combust when exposed to UV radiation and roam the streets at night in search of food. Neville proves immune to the plague and when not working on the cure he cruises around a desolate Manhattan hunting deer for fresh meat and working his way alphabetically through the DVDs at a deserted video store (he’s up to G), his only companion being a German Shepherd named Samantha (“Sam” for short).

Neville operates from his sumptuous brownstone near Washington Square, a home fortified with all manner of military security and an assortment of no-nonsense ordnance, to say nothing of a fully equipped laboratory, but while he has plenty to occupy his time he’s quite lonely. He broadcasts an endless loop radio message alerting any survivors to his existence and names a contact point where he can be found every day at a certain time, but after three years no one has responded to his message. And as he periodically hunts the infected for anti-virus test subjects Neville notices their behavior becoming more savage and aggressive, even copying the traps he sets for them.

That setup is all you need for a compelling story, and I AM LEGEND is a very, very good film that allows Will Smith a showcase for his acting abilities since he has only a dog to share the screen with and his performance is punctuated by the film having virtually no music throughout its running time. I used to think that Smith was just another pretty-boy who headlined churned-out blockbusters and frivolous flicks, but here he proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he can act his ass off, imbuing Neville with quiet intelligence, sensitivity, and a loneliness that’s simply heartbreaking.

But the film does have its flaws. The infected antagonists are all rendered in iffy CGI, giving them the aspect of video game characters and causing them to clash wildly against the obviously live Neville and Sam. It almost looks like we’re along for the ride as Neville finds himself in some sort of “shooter” virtual reality simulation. But that quibble is minor when stacked against the real issue: the film actually goes out of its way to not be your standard Hollywood blockbuster/mindless action movie, and as such it’s simply terrific, so why did the filmmakers throw that all away during the last reel? I won’t say what happens — because I still recommend the film nonetheless — but the film totally douches out during the final twenty-five minutes and effectively sinks what could easily have become a classic of the genre. All the striving not to insult the viewer’s intelligence is traded in for cheap sentimentality and an ending straight out of a bad DIE HARD sequel, throwing in bits of business that utterly defy the well-constructed logic that came before. Seriously, once the film nose-dived I was greatly disappointed, especially when I considered just how engrossing it was up to that point.

I don’t know what it is about Matheson’s novel, but for some reason it has never been made into a fully satisfying feature film. THE LAST MAN ON EARTH (1964), with my boy Vincent Price, kept the novel’s straight-up horror edge with the plague victims mutating into vampires, but was hampered by a weak script and a budget that wouldn’t have bought a decent box lunch (although some of the admittedly creepy visuals did inspire George Romero’s landmark NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, so it wasn’t a total loss). THE OMEGA MAN (1971) was basically a backyard G.I. Joe scenario enacted on celluloid, filled with shoot-‘em-up action, car chases, and Charlton Heston in the lead, totally unbelievable as any kind of scientist and coming off as a slightly over-the-top fusion of his earlier turns as Moses, Judah Ben-Hur, and Taylor. And now the 2007 I AM LEGEND comes along and almost delivers a perfect, contemporary treatment of Matheson’s bleak narrative, but it still manages to scuttle all of its virtues by adhering to an unfortunate status quo at the last minute.

Bottom Line, I AM LEGEND is definitely worth checking out for the good stuff, but be prepared for the cop-out when it happens. You have been warned.

Advance poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2019-Day 29: GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE (1972)

 A considerate caveat.

A young couple’s choice of venue for lover’s lane action proves disastrous when they park in a graveyard and a hungry vampire, one Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki), rises from the earth in search of sustenance. 

Freshly risen and ravenous...

...for more than just blood.

Croft kills and drains the boyfriend while the horrified girl screams in terror, but her day gets considerably worse when the undead murderer drags her into the open grave and rapes her (thankfully off-camera, allowing our imaginations to conjure up something far worse than what could have been presented directly). She survives the ordeal, considerably less sane for her trouble, and gives birth to a pale baby boy who won’t breastfeed. When mum accidentally cuts her finger with a knife and her blood falls onto the babe’s lips, he laps up the red stuff with gusto and his mother immediately begins lacerating her breasts to feed her little one. 

A mother's love writ jet black.

As the years go by mom perishes from blood loss, and the half-nosferatu child grows up into a hulking specimen (biker film mainstay William Smith) who sets out to take vengeance against his father, provided he can track him down. In a novel twist, Croft is now a professor of legends and mythology at a university’s night school, and as he begins preying upon the student body his son signs up for a night course.

Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki): rapist vampire. In short, not a nice guy.

What follows is a game of cat and mouse that erupts into a knock-down, drag-out ass-whuppin’ of a showdown from which only one can walk away, and while I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, there is no happy ending…

This whole film’s pretty good, if a tad dated, but the thing that sets this one squarely in the exploitation/grindhouse firmament is the still-shocking setup. I mean, really. Raped by a goddamned vampire as he crawled from the grave after years of sleep? Now, that's original (if incredibly sleazy and tasteless)! Proof of what can be achieved with a low budget and a solid script, GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE is very much recommended, and it's one of the handful of old school grindhouse perennials that I would love to see get a modern, gorier remake.

Poster for the theatrical release.