Showing posts with label grindhouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grindhouse. Show all posts
Sunday, July 8, 2012
MANIAC
Stacie Ponder has kickstarted back up the Final Girl Film Club, and asked us all to offer some words on Maniac, the notorious and much-maligned 1980s grindhouse opus. Made for about half a million dollars, which must have felt like a fortune to filmmaker William Lustig, the film concerns the life and lusts of Frank Zito (co-scenarist Joe Spinell), a lonely man tormented by visions of his abusive mother into kidnapping and scalping young women.
Though New York in the late 1970s was a petri dish for many forms of American culture, a certain patina of danger remained. Abandoned at one time by federal authorities, the city battled hard for survival even as lawlessness threatened to overtake it. This sense of violence informs MANIAC, including one of its most notorious scenes in which a man (makeup/FX artist Tom Savini) is decapitated by a shotgun blast (which had to have been inspired by the Son of Sam slayings that rocked the city in the 70s). But perhaps the most perverse aspect of the film, considering its influences and pedigree, is its humanity. Spinell brings a palpable vulnerability to Frank - there is a profound sense of the damage he has suffered, and a very strong sense that this is simply a man who can not stop himself. Spinell captures this aspect of Frank's character as vividly as his violence, placing him firmly along other vulnerable film psychos as Norman Bates and Mark Lewis.
Also juicing the humanity of the film is a startlingly warm performance by Caroline Munro as Anna, a fashion photographer who finds herself drawn to Frank. Frank and Anna are an odd couple, to be sure, but Munro's warmth and acceptance is so beautifully established that we just buy it. She brings his humanity out more clearly than any other character in the film - she could be the break that Frank has needed all his life, and their scenes together win us over. Munro's on-screen grace carried off-stage, as we can see in this wonderful interview where she evenly, even warmly fields some truly damn-fool questions and comments from East Coast newsfolk who've already made up their little minds about the film.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
REVENGE OF THE CHEERLEADERS
A Tarantino favorite, this film chronicles the efforts of a cheerleading squad to thwart the plot of a real estate combine to tear down their high school. Sounds innocent enough, but this thing's the sequel to The Cheerleaders, itself a remarkable T+A sojourn by experimental filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Richard Lerner. And Dorsky and Lerner pack the thing with plotless, out-of-nowhere moments that go beyond abstraction and realize the whole thing with a wildly contagious enthusiasm.
There are a number of professional actors in the thing (though only one of them went on to bigger things), but they're given little direction in terms of building credible characters. But credibility is the last thing Dorsky and Lerner are going for: none of the kids have parents, Aloha High School is a veritable Xanadu of joyous sex and debauchery, and a golf course's sand trap leads directly to the main office of the villainous developers' lair (the labyrinthine final reel shares Kubrick's sense of architecture).
The thing feels...well, like a horny high schooler's sex fantasy, moreso than any movie I think I've ever seen. A teenage daydream, with abundant free association: ineffectual authority figures are easily subverted (including one old lady from the school board who wipes out gorgeously on a textbook left in the hall); a food fight that turns directly into a soap-bubble orgy in the gym showers; students breaking out repeatedly in barely choreographed but exuberant dance numbers brimming with real joy. The amateur but ready for anything cast includes a young David Hasselhoff, whose performance as Boner perfectly exemplifies the dim-witted horniness and antic joy of the movie as a whole (and who appeared in this film to get his SAG card). But everyone in the cast is a little more charming than they need to be, and are all of a piece with the tone of the film.
It would be too easy to view this through a veil of irony and dismiss its apparent shortcomings. Engaging this thing on its own terms yields insane rewards, and a real joy that "better" movies are too programmed, too safe, too unspontaneous to capture. I wish all dumb teen movies were half this smart.
(An archival review from three years ago. Fresh content imminent.)
Monday, April 12, 2010
DC SHOWCASE: THE SPECTRE
An 11-minute extra to the in-itself robust and sublime animated adventure JUSTICE LEAGUE: CRISIS ON TWO EARTHS, THE SPECTRE is a short feature lovingly presented as a lurid, 70s-grindhouse superhero miniature. Gary Cole is just dandy in the voice of Jim Corrigan, a hard-boiled detective with a keen sense of justice and a dangerously otherworldly alter ego. Adapting screenwriter Steve Niles finds plenty of space for his horror film obsessions, and yet his story is faithful to the comic book stories that made the character famous (indeed, notorious), preserving Corrigan's haunted mystique and the Spectre's vicious-yet-cartoonish sense of justice. And director Joaquim dos Santos serves it all up with the meticulously distressed look of a 35mm film print that's rolled more than once in Times Square, or some lost fragment of the Earth-2 HEAVY METAL.
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