Teleport City’s latest entry in the FALLING STARS round table pays tribute to one of our Drinking Heroes, a man who made Richard Burton look tame by comparison. Witness Oliver Reed faking a Russian accent in the infamous Disney flop…

CONDORMAN

It puzzles me, given the churning sea of utter garbage that I so easily accepted as a kid, that I should have had such a vigorously negative reaction to — bordering on outright hatred of — Condorman when I saw it as a kid. hat was it about this movie that so anrgied up my blood? What did it do to me that I would continue to stoke those embers of rage well into adulthood, so much so that I made every effort possible to defame the film every chance I got. And you know I live the sort of life where the chance to defame Condorman in casual conversation comes up almost as often as discussion on the proper way to tie a cravat or how to remove an exquisite Czech woman’s cocktail dress with one hand while flawlessly pouring three glasses of champagne with the other (because her friend will be joining us forthwith).

Something is wrong on with…

Saturn 3 (1980)

… and whatever it is, it may have a little less to do with the romantic pairing of a young Farrah Fawcett and the 66-year-old Kirk Douglas than you’d think. Though Douglas’s insistence on doing his own nude scenes is the main reason I’m adding this entry to the Roundtable.

It’s not that it’s such a terrible movie. It’s a little like the design of its killer robot: the pieces don’t quite fit together properly; and for all the brains it took to bring it to life, it doesn’t have a very good head on its shoulders…

THE UNCANNY (1977)

In which author Wilbur Gray (played by BAFTA-winning actor Peter Cushing) tries to convince publisher Frank Richards (played by Academy Award-winning actor Ray Milland) of the Terrible Secret about the world that his research has uncovered—that far from being harmless domestic pets, cats are a force for evil, capable of controlling and manipulating the human race.

To paraphrase Basil Fawlty—

Name – Wilbur Gray of Montreal. Special subject – The Bleeding Obvious.

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In 1996, Cuba Gooding Jr. appeared in the hit movie Jerry Maguire, which won him an Oscar several months later. It would be understandable if anyone thought at that point that even bigger things were on the way for him, but something happened along the way. That something being his major studio star status slowly transforming into being an actor in direct-to-video productions. The Devil’s Tomb is typical of the bulk of direct-to-video movies Gooding has appeared in during recent years. It’s not only bad, it provokes its audiences into asking: Just what happened, Cuba?

ROAD HOUSE

Patrick Swayze is a bouncer/philosopher who teachers the bouncers of the Double Deuce the ancient art of bouncing, saves the town from a corrupt businessman, and falls in love with a female doctor who does a lot more than kiss on the second date.

Review Snippet:
The Double Deuce is a bar well past its prime. It might even have died and come back as a reanimated corpse, instead of the regular cycle of death, reincarnation, and rebirth. A normal night is filled with fights and illegal drug sales, and it ends with the bouncers all nursing black eyes and bloody knuckles. It’s more of a brawl than a party. Turning a place like the Double Deuce around should require either mounted riot police or flamethrowers, but all it takes is Dalton. He spends just one evening observing before firing the troublemakers and changing all the rules.

To simplify things, let’s just say that Dalton teaches the bouncers the ancient art of bouncing.

Lesson Learned:
Presbyterians believe that the 11th Commandment is “Thou shalt not rent thine loft to the Hottentots.”

Yeah, so real life apparently decided it didn’t want me to watch any movies during the final quarter of 2011.  I’m back now, though, with a moderately-sized update to whet your appetites for the double-gimongous B-Fest Review Roundup that will probably guarantee that I’ll be late for February’s  roundtable, too…

The Art of Love (1983), in which– surprise, surprise– there’s a whole lot o’ screwin’ going on in first-century Rome…

The Car (1977), or, “Hermanos!  The Devil has built a hotrod!”

The Craft (1996), in which shooting up the school is for suckers.  Why bring a gun to class when you can lay curses on the popular kids instead?

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972), in which we can count on Jesus Franco to remember that “Frankenstein” is the doctor’s name, even if we can’t count on him to make a movie that sane people would consider watchable…

Orca (1977), in which Captain Ahab is the whale…

and…

Repo Man (1984), in which unemployment can lead one to the damnedest places.

Dean Jagger’s name is not usually associated with stinkingly bad movies. It’s true, he was in the disappointing Revolt of the Zombies in 1936… but those were early days, both for Jagger’s career and for zombies on film.

Jagger went on to win acclaim for his roles in Brigham Young and Twelve O’Clock High (for which he won the 1950 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor). As for his genre performances, he’s fondly remembered for playing a Quatermass surrogate in X: the Unknown, in which he teamed up with Leo McKern to fight a radioactive blob from the Earth’s core.

That’s why it’s so surprising to find a movie like Evil Town (1973/74/87) near the end of his distinguished career. It’s not just that Dean Jagger’s in a movie this bad — Evil Town took 14 years, three versions and at least five titles before it finally got released, so you can imagine what a nightmare the finished product turned into. No: the real surprise is that of all the terrible things in this terrible movie, Jagger’s performance is pretty close to the bottom.

Okay, enough is enough! Yeah, I know you have been coming to b-masters.com on a regular basis to laugh and chuckle over reviews of various B-movies, but it’s time you were exposed to something different. It’s time you experienced some ART. So here’s a review of the first filmed version of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning off-Broadway play That Championship Season. Before you protest and shield your eyes, I compromised in my choosing of an art movie to educate you. While it may be an art movie, it was produced by schlockmeisters Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon Films. Feel better now?

This may be a bit of a variation on the Falling Stars theme, as it’s not a film per se. But it is a very cinematic project, combining prog rock opera, symphonic bombast, HG Wells, and a near-the-end-of-his-career Richard Burton.

The Musical Version of War of the Worlds

“This was no disciplined march; it was a stampede–a stampede gigantic and terrible–without order and without a goal, six million people unarmed and unprovisioned, driving headlong. It was the beginning of the rout of civilisation, of the massacre of mankind.”
– HG Wells, The War of the Worlds

My parents were always willing to indulge my state as kind of a weird kid. One year for Christmas, they got me an LP with which I would become obsessed as a kid, and one that continues to find it’s way into my playlist. It was a bizarre amalgamation of rock opera and old time radio play, featuring the voice talent of none less than Richard Burton: Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds.

The Skeptic (2009)

The tag line for The Skeptic is “A tormented man’s reluctant search for greater meaning in his life.” Uh, no: that’s the synopsis for last week’s “Dr. Phil”. Actually, The Skeptic is a ghost story. But it’s a ghost story that spends about half its time crowing about how stunted and miserable people become if they question the Great Beyond.

Sure, I’ve seen much more aggressive and less technically-proficient attacks on rationality, but still: even when expressed so mildly, this sort of thing sets my teeth on edge. In fact, I found some of the implications so irritating that I had to comment on them, however briefly.

Fortunately, about halfway through, the movie forgets it has an axe to grind and remembers how to tell a story. But, oh, that first half…

W IS WAR

This movie features an army of well-armed, leather clad Filipinas with shaved heads. If you know me, you know that alone qualifies this as one of the greatest movies of this or any generation. Everyone is all crowing about Citizen Kane all the time, but to those people I ask 1) have you ever even seen Citizen Kane; and 2) did it feature even a single well-armed, leather clad Filipina with a shaved head? It didn’t, did it? So stop calling it the greatest film of all time. And since W is War is Filipino trash cinema, it’s not satisfied with just cute women with shaved heads, even though that was enough for me. W is War is the sort of movie that just keeps giving and giving. Cartoonish villains in capes, dune buggies, motorcycles shaped like sharks, massive shootouts, dudes in leather pants, exploding huts, sloppy kungfu fights, scenes shot from between the legs of hairy men wearing yellow Speedos — truly W is War is the movie that has something for everyone, and plenty of it.

ALIEN 2: ON EARTH

In this unauthorized Italian sequel to “Alien” a group of spelunking bowlers (Or are they bowling spelunkers?) discover that their favorite cave and favorite bowling alley are infested with alien monsters that hatch from rocks.

Review Snippet:
Now we are subjected to another ten minutes of watching the group perform a spelunking rescue in every detail. Once Jill’s inert body is hauled back up, the only person at the top is Rod. He starts the process of rigging the ropes so the others can ascend. Unbeknownst to Rod, the camera is slowly panning back through the cave and up Jill’s body to her face. This takes an additional four minutes. So, for the last twenty-four minutes the only thing keeping my attention has been complaining about the complete lack of anything to keep my attention.

Lesson Learned:
Spelunking is an important branch of physics.

So of all the things I could have used to try and kickstart things again, why this? Because I was watching it again the other night after an interval of years, and man—I’d almost forgotten how craptacular it is. And because as I was watching, I started captioning things in my head, which is usually a good sign.

THE HAUNTING (1999)

In which Jan de Bont and David Self teach us all new appreciation for Robert Wise’s 1960 adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s seminal horror novel by botching every one of its set-pieces. In which a subtle tale of psychological horror becomes the $80 million equivalent of trying to frighten someone by blowing up a paper bag and bursting it behind them.

In which we learn that 19th century architects never argued with their clients, that decapitations don’t bleed, that a dead child in your bed is nothing to get worked up about, and that the best way to rid your house of an evil spirit is by yelling at it.

Oh – and that scientists are unethical. Big surprise.

What do you think when you come across the word “scientist”, besides good ol’ Liz? Well, you probably don’t think of the kind of scientist found in the movie Choke Canyon, who comes across as a kind of modern day Indiana Jones. But these particular filmmakers seem clueless as to how to pull off this unusual scientist character successfully, among other things, and end up with a movie that’s both illogical and boring.

INTREPIDOS PUNKS
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, Teleport City was created for one reason and one reason only: to eventually review Intrepidos Punks. In fact, it wouldn’t be entirely beyond the pale to say that my entire life has been leading up to the moment I first heard of, then tracked down and watched this overwhelmingly fantastic slice of punk rock exploitation from, of all places, Mexico. At its heart,Intrepidos Punks is really nothing more than a by-the-numbers biker film updated for the loser censorship morals of the 1970s. But the frosting it layers onto the biker film cake make it into something utterly sublime. Everything I’ve ever been interested in — exploitation films, sleaze, punk rock, luchadores, scantily clad new wave girls, dune buggies — it all comes together in this perfect storm of day-glo mohawks and ten foot tall teased-hair brilliance.

With some people saying that 2012 will be the final year of mankind because of what the Mayan calendar says, what could be better than to encourage building panic by starting off the year with a movie about the end of the world? In This Is Not A Test, several strangers gathered together in the desert find out their country is about to be struck by a nuclear attack. What should they do? What would you do?

Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale / A tale of a cinematic slip…

The movie The Wackiest Wagon Train In The West is about a wagon train headed by a seasoned older gentleman who has a bumbling and dim-witted sidekick played by Bob Denver. The other people in the wagon train consist of a rich couple of good breeding, two sexy young women, and a young man who knows the latest in the field of science. Sounds familiar?

Naked, naked Mathilda May

LIFEFORCE Lifeforce is another one of those horror movies that wrapped itself in science fiction marketing. It’s also another one of those movies that lots of people seem to loathe but I predictably love — and not just because of Mathilda May, though there’s no arguing that she doesn’t hurt. It’s referred to by some as a rip-off of Hammer’s Five Million Years to Earth, akaQuatermass and the Pit (one of my all-time favorites, by the way), with a little bit of Night of the Living Dead thrown in, plus probably some Planet of the Vampires. And pretty much every movie that could was ripping off Alien at that point as well, so we might as well through that one onto the pile too. It mixes everything up into a completely loopy sci-fi horror tale featuring a perpetually nude female lead and an exploding Patrick Stewart.

Catching up on posting updates…

Legend of the Tsunami Warrior I don’t think looking for any historical background to the movie is necessary, because it’s quickly obvious that this movie has less to do with Thai history and folklore and a lot more to do with the fact that someone wanted to make a Thai version of the Pirates of the Caribbean series. In look, scope, and setting it is very similar to the Pirates franchise — lead actor Ananva Everingham even gives off a sort of Orlando Bloom vibe, with all the good and bad that entails.
Rambu: The Intruder Rambu is a gold mine of low budget action entertainment, and what it lacks in polish it certainly makes up for with enthusiasm. Indonesian trash cinema seems occupied first and foremost with giving audiences their money’s worth, and Rambu never once lets you down. From the opening showdown to the frequent fights, then on to the scene where Rambu faces down a gang of thugs by whistling to summon an army of tuk-tuk driving bad-asses who we had no idea existed at his disposal until that very minute (and who never appear again), Rambu‘s only concern is making sure there’s something entertaining on screen.
The Stabilizer Compared to the appellations given to the protagonists of other 1980s action films — the Exterminator, the Punisher, the Executioner — the Stabilizer sounds pretty benign. You’d almost think that he was given that name only because all of those others had already been taken. But then you learn that what the Stabilizer is in charge of stabilizing is the very balance between good and evil itself. And that, it turns out, is a job that involves an awful lot of exterminating, punishing, and executing.
The Vampire Lovers As latter-day Hammer films go, The Vampire Lovers is an entertaining, sexy romp. It relies less on the hammy scare tactics of the later Dracula series and more on the audience’s assumptions. To us it’s obvious that Carmilla is a vampire, but it isn’t explicitly stated with shots of Pitt in fangs until late on in the film. Instead the movie shows the good guys trying to figure things out while Carmilla manages to keep one step ahead each time. The movie’s biggest asset is Pitt, who looks an absolute knockout, her husky Polish accent adding a welcome dash of the exotic. There are a few amusing nods to her vampiric nature, such as a preference for red wine, and refusing breakfast because she isn’t hungry having spent the night feasting on Emma’s blood.
Wolfhound Anyone who knows the tropes of the sword and sorcery genre will be on familiar ground with this movie, but the fact that Wolfhound lacks originality doesn’t mean it lacks for entertainment value. It’s fantasy formula well done, with some decent performances, gorgeous location work, and a lack of the smirking irony that befouls most of the fantasy fare on SyFy. The official story is that it’s based on a novel from 1995 by Mariya Semyonova, but I think it’s pretty obvious where the true influences lie. While this film obviously got made as a Russian answer to Lord of the Rings, it has a lot more in common with Conan the Barbarian, including an opening scene and motivation for the main character that is basically plucked wholesale from the John Milius barbarian classic.
Intrusion: Cambodia Here’s how to test whether or not you are a true resident of Teleport City: if I tell you there’s a movie starring Richard Harrison, Anthony Alonzo, and Tetchie Agbayani, do you look at me quizzically and shrug, or do you start to shake with giddy anticipation? If it’s the former, then let us soothe the wound by agreeing that you have much yet to learn, and the path before you is rich with astounding discoveries. If it’s the latter, then we are all together as one, like a rag-tag band of misfits soldiers fighting our way across ‘Nam on some mission whose objective is entirely unclear but never the less must be undertaken.

And if you are interested in asides, feel free to pick through Teleport City’s Eating and Drinking Adventure in San Diego

After a steady diet of Edgar Wallace novels (preparing for the recent Roundtable), I found myself feeling unsatisfied. I decided to go back and re-acquaint myself with an author whose mysteries are much more rigorous and disciplined that Wallace’s: namely, John Dickson Carr.

Carr, an American by birth, lived and worked for much of his life in England. He became known as one of the most brilliant authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He was so prolific that his publishers made him use pseudonyms (the most famous being “Carter Dickson”) to keep his name from growing stale.

Yet in spite of his talent and his reputation, as far as I know only three of Carr’s stories have ever been turned into feature films. I never stopped to ask myself why this might be the case… until I noticed the contrast with Edgar Wallace. Why was it that the better writer of the two had been so completely neglected by the movie industry? Here, then, are my thoughts on two of the very few movies adapted from Carr’s work:

Dangerous Crossing (1953): Based on Carr’s 1943 radio play “Cabin B-13″. A woman and her husband embark on their honeymoon cruise, but before the ship has even got underway the husband disappears. To make matters worse, the woman finds herself unable to prove that her husband ever even existed. In fact, she’s stumbled into a diabolical plot; but she may not be able to stay sane long enough to find out what really happened to her husband.

That Woman Opposite (1958): Based on the novel “The Emperor’s Snuff-Box”. Eve’s abusive ex-husband shows up just as she’s about to get re-married. The situation is bad enough when he breaks into her bedroom at night… but it soon gets worse. There is a brutal murder, and Eve finds herself the only suspect. And that’s just the beginning of Eve’s troubles…