Brecht and the Single Girl: PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT (1973)

If you're confused about why Italy continually undoes the soundness of the Euro, Elio Petri's PROPERTY IS NO LONGER A THEFT, a nihilistic anti-capitalist Brechtian satire from 1973, can surely clarify for you toute suite. (Short answer: too many Commies --and they got a funny idea 'bout money.)

The "plot" follows neurotic bank teller Total (Flavio Bucci - the blind pianist in Suspiria) as he tries to escape his meager 9-5 barely-make-ends-meet job, which mainly consists of doling out cash to greedy titans of industry who proudly brag about their non-paying of taxes, oblivious to the seething rage welling up in the little guy who counts their capital. Snapping his pea brain after a robbery, Total becomes obsessed with a rich, corrupt butcher (Ugo Tognazzi), stealing all his signifiers: little butcher hat, favorite carving knife, his car, even his mistress (Daria Nicolodi!). Launching himself on an absurdist Harpo-cum-Karl Marx-Quixote odyssey, Total wind up lost in the out-of-bound weeds of Anarchy. Burning a lire note in his boss's office ("that's sacrilege!") to signify his resignation, he justifies his identity stealing operation by staying 'pure' i.e. not stealing any actual cash: "I'm a Mandrakian Marxist," he announces. "I only steal what I need." By Mandrake, naturally, he means 'the Magician'. When it comes to films equally indebted to crime, communism and comic strips, no one outdpes Elio Petri (The 10th Victim, Investigation of a Citizen Under Suspicion, A Quiet Place in the Country).

While I'm no fan of what I can't help but read as Petri's ingenuità utopica (given allowances for its time and place), I love his deeply cynical reading of a social structure so deeply ingrained most filmmakers don't even notice it's there. The title is confusing mistake, though, a riff on an old anarchist slogan revived for the 60s, when commie ideology was snuck into movie dialogue by leftist filmmakers like Petri, Fernando di Leo and Giuliu Questi. Italians really love the idea that stealing in time of necessity is justified. Obviously they have a violent reaction one way or another to their Catholic guilt, so keep belaboring it, ever evoking the 'bread riots' of the 1940s - as seen in Rossellini's Rome: Open City. (The kind of thing America was briefly allowed to explore (i.e. between the Crash and the Code) in films like Hero for Sale and The World Changes).  Also, they had an establishment much more corrupted and deadlocked government to actually work, so chaos descended. That's why 60s Italian master thief characters like Diabolik (who would be the villains in American comics like Batman) became the heroes of Italy, encouraging the average Italian to smash and grab what they want, leading to rampant crime in the streets and all the other things anti-capitalist Commie subversives would have loved to see become the norm in the US as well. So thank you, Joseph McCarthy, after all!

Property is No Longer a Theft is a child of that mindset in more ways than one. It's on Blu-ray from Arrow, and looks and sounds great, but--if you don't believe in money but do have a Prime subscription, you can pretend you're stealing it by watching it 'free'. Just don't wonder if Arrow suddenly doesn't have any money for new restorations. It's your fault.

What drew me to the title initially (aside from being enthralled by Petri's earlier masterpiece A Quiet Place in the Country) was a recommendation from horror film historian Tim Lucas on Facebook, who pointed out its proto-giallo greatness. Total may not be a crazed killer in high giallo style, but he does threaten people with a knife. Ennio Morricone delivers one of his most surreal breathy scores; Deep Red cinematographer Luigi Kuveller twists the frame with portentous shadows and expressionist angles (lots of doors within doors), star Bucci played the pianist in Suspiria, and longtime Argento collaborator Daria Nicolodi (1) looms tall and ungainly-albeit-sexy as Anita, the butcher's mistress. When she lets loose a deep throaty laugh during one of her Brechtian fourth wall-breaking monologues, you might get an instant chill as you recognize her voice's deep masculine depths from so many Argento classics (it's the same laugh from Phenomena, when daring Jennifer Connelly to call her insects, or the mocking, snarling demoness at the Suspiria climax). Since Bucci looks more than a little like Dario Argento himself (with a Dog-eared dash of a young Pacino around the eyes) it would be easy to see Property as a kind of deranged reflection of the Argento-Nicolodi collaborative canon (1), with the Butcher representing typical 'red telephone' Italian filmmaking at the time, and Total the Argento who steers Daria free. But to what end? 

Keeping the giallo framework in mind might help today's 60s-70s-era Italian genre cinema fan keep its odd mix of police corruption and insurance scam satire (we follow the flow of $$ from robbery to insurance claim, to inventory-exaggerating, cop bribing, policy collecting, to thief selling stolen goods back to insurance company, like some giant financial food chain) from getting too mired in either didactic dissertation (In standard Brechtian practice, characters break the narrative flow perhaps too regularly) or Polanski-style young hungry male vs. olde rich male for sexually ravenous younger woman - power triangulating.

Meanwhile, weird characters pop up to keep you guessing: there's the droop-eyed chief of detective (Orazio Orlando) who seems like he's either fishing for a bribe or trying to trap the butcher into a confession with a sense of conspiratorial camaraderie ("If you're not afraid of having it stolen," he notes, during the insurance tally, "you can't enjoy your wealth"); a cross-dressing master thief named Albertone (Mario Scaccia) who teaches Total the trade (and Total in exchange, does nothing but taxes his mentor's weak, albeit big-as-all-outdoors queer heart with his irrational Ledger Joker-x-Harpo Marxist nonsense), and  Cecillia Pollizi as a dyke fence who evokes Lotte Lenya's madame in Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone albiet in a  resonant post-glam fashion. There's even Diabolik in a blink-and-miss cameo (below):

Diabolik dies in a posion gas-filled car at a security expo in Property is No Longer a Theft

It's not all surreal Brechtian digressions though. A real unhappy, even if trenchant, thread in the film is the Butcher's and Total's treatment of Anita, and her realization that neither being a sexual object or 'powerful' will generate even a flicker of human compassion from them. It's a rather sad in a reflection of the same objectifying dread animosity towards the opposite sex we see in a lot of neorealist and nouvelle vague works of the time wherein a dash of meta-awareness tries to offset the leering (i.e. make sure her legs are crossed and breasts are heaving while she tallies the day's profits in the window a butcher shop display, sigh. The Symbolism!! Is it not deep?). Naming her various succulent sweet meat body parts while addressing the camera, Petri might be referencing the first part of Godard's Contempt (the part Joe Levine wanted added to include some seat-filling Bardot nudity), or --the theme that clouded the mind of Franco Nero's artist in Petri's A Quiet Place in the Country --one of the classic devil's bargains of European film in the 50s-70s-- the relationship of the sex-hungry producer to the idealistic auteur.

By 1973, though, this was all just a bit didactic. On the the other hand, it's nice she can enjoy sex enough to get her rocks off without losing face in her struggle for gender equality. Petri does leave space for Nicolodi to--as he did for Redgrave did for Quiet Place in the Country--to quietly fill up her character's margins with traits that divulge themselves--Farber termite-style--subtly, on repeat viewing. Watching her face, for example, after the butcher instructs her to cry over the 'stolen' items from Total's first robbery. (claiming h stole way more than he really did, hiding non-stolen jewels in a suitcase in the basement to get more insurance $$). Facing close to the camera in close-up we see her crying increase and decrease based on Pirelli's proximity. When it starts to grate on the butcher's nerves, she stops abruptly and cuts into a vague smile, barely able to reign in her delight at the thought of 'earning' more expensive and useless stuff.

Neither happy nor totally miserable in the life of basically a contracted--albeit relatively well-treated--sex-worker, at least Nicolodi doesn't have to play second fiddle to some harridan wife. She and the butcher live together without any tinge of Catholic guilt. She has a nice job as the cashier at the butcher shop; he trusts her, and he buys her expensive things like nice, presumably real, pearls. She can put up with his macho abuse, aware that--in her own words to the audience--if she wasn't here, she'd still be somewhere else. She doesn't consider any of us--there in some imagined air-conditioned little Italian cinema of her mind--to be any less trapped. At least she's free to enjoy her cage as best she can, rather than just banging her head against the bars in an inevitably-doomed attempt to impress some far-away future feminist studies professor.

The chameleonic sexual personae of Daria: with long black hair as armed mistress (PROPERTY 1973); as can-do, sexually assertive reporter (DEEP RED 1975)

Bearing the meta-textuality still further, we find the butcher and Anita going to the adult movie show where he threatens to "send her back to work at the bar" if she doesn't obediently go down on him. He also hits her when frustrated, which doesn't seem to foster any resentment on her part, beyond a fleeting feeling of shock. On the other hand, he also goes down on her --which we know from pop culture is a sad rarity with Italian men, who consider it demeaning to them. In a way, his slapping her around, and her whining to the camera almost seem like they were thrown in last minute efforts to taint what is essentially the film's only full-formed human relationship. Everyone else treats each other the way they might treat vending machines or food products, Total--for all his commie bellyaching--is the worst of all. In the world of backwards men like Total, his rationalizing father (who enjoys the fruits of his son's thievery but doesn't want to hear where it came from), the crazy cop, the drag queen gang of fur thieves, etc., the butcher is, at the very least, reliable and loyal (he doesn't have a wandering eye). Together he and Anita work to keep a legit business in the black, and after hours they share a certain post-coital simpatico that captures the benefits of long-term casual sexual relationships that are very rarely shown in movies which usually deal only in extremes of rapture or loathing. I love the scene when she abruptly stops him from going down on her in the office while she's counting the days tallies,  by announcing she's hungry and wants a steak. He agrees and gets up and there's a moment they share of simpatico alignment, a relationship without the need for little bambinos and sacred mother-in-law's nagging everyone to go to mass. We can, if we care to, admire the way the trappings of love and family are avoided in favor of a long term simpatico entrainment, the languid way two lovers disengage and prepare to go get something to eat, not really looking at each other but totally aligned; since pleasure, wealth and convenience are the focus, and not God or family or some other phony idolatry, they are fulfilled.

When you see these names in the credits, pounce! 

That may not add up to much in the end, but what really puts it all over into classic status, is the presence of an Ennio Morricone score. Why more composers don't endeavor to follow his lead--the use of antithetical counterpoint and surreal minimalism--is one of cinema's great tragic mysteries. Most composers try to show off all the stuff they learned in music school with a lot of mickey mousing orchestral pomp, dictating our every emotion. Ennio shows how the twang of a jaw harp and a lady whispering urgently but incoherently over discordant guitar stings would work so much better than a 100 piece orchestra. Has Ennio ever done a bad score? (and in the 60s-70s he did like ten or more a year). Certainly this is one of his weirdest and most memorable (and it's on Spotify!) especially during the strange opening credits, which play over overlapped densely colored pencils sketches of all the principle players on paper that resembles marble (but with lire notes for veins) while heavy breathing repetitions of "I.... have" ("avere! av-ere!") pulse over whooshing timpani undercurrents.  Elsewhere little ominous electric bass lines, stabby little mountain king strings, and little cycling piano riffs foreshadow similar pulsing passages in his recent Oscar-winning Hateful Eight score (Hey, we all steal from ourselves - and it suits the subject matter)

Ultimately, the main problem with Theft is a not uncommon one for anti-establishment movies of the period: it gest so busy critiquing the current system, and rebelling against it, it runs out of room to find an alternative. Do communist intellectuals seriously think they'll ever weed the Stalin reality out of their Trotskyist idealism by attacking capitalism's status quo? NEVER!

Sellers takes aim at bourgeois values - The Magic Christian (1969)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL PRINTED-GREEN PAPER

An example of this same problem can be found in 1969's The Magic Christian (above)--a satire of consumer culture not unlike Property-- which finds bored millionaire Peter Sellers and his nephew Ringo learning about the world through staging of some very elaborate (and presumably overpriced) 'freak outs' to blow the minds of standard bowler-and-brolly London-suburb train commuters. You can all but trace the thought lines of these little gags back to a time when access to a flood of freely available, semi-legal high-quality LSD woke artists up to the handrails and structure of modern society. The sudden awareness of the absurdity of money and other social mores --as aesthetic things in and of themselves--are made--while tripping--instantly absurd. The cash in hand is no longer 'invisible' as a symbol for goods and services but a pocketful of green portraits of old men in weird wigs; their strange knotty faces seem to be smiling and winking to your dilating pupils. They seem to be struggling to move; en verso, the eye in the pyramid follows you around the room, blinks, and blazes light, pulling you in towards it like a tractor beam. The fact that 'normal' people don't notice these things is even funnier. "Living is easy with eyes closed." With newly opened eyes, one naturally wants to open the eyes of the sleeping straights around him, even if only for a few flash moments, like one of Jerry Garcia's onstage backflips tripping deadheads often see in concert. Pranksters like Ken Kesey and his magic bus pull over on some random small town main street to run amok for five minutes, then disappear - leaving the sleepy town to wonder if it was all just something they ate. This is art. Important. Maybe pointless. And can get you jailed.

Noble in original intent, it spun out of control too fast - too many idiots taking too much of stuff that was too strong, too often, then clogging up the ER en masse the minute they think they're dying (i.e. the 'only fools rush in' preliminary bad trip bardos); the logistics of the endless stream of runaway kids turning Golden Gate Park into a giant toilet. It was a revolution with nowhere to go.

Take that!

But in Europe, there was a movement of intellectuals ready to absorb the psychedelic culture shocks with deadpan bemusement: Antonioni, whose earlier work like Red Desert explored, in a much more abstract, intellectual way, the collapse of structuralism (even sober, he and Monica were hip to the aesthetic absurdity of bank notes) connected with the turned-on generation in such a way as to help form it (via Blow-up), leading to the idea that by keeping your behavior totally random, and embracing a kind of abstract chaos magic approach to life, you can shimmy down from the symbolic ledge and run 'free' without having to run naked, screaming, down 5th Ave with question marks written all over your body in Day-Glo paint.

Even so, some symbols - like 'Stop' signs are better left heeded for their symbolic message rather than regarded purely as red octagons. Failure to comply could lead to your death by car. Similarly, give your money away like it's a disease and you can drift so far off the grid you can't get back on, which might be important if you want to eat regularly. Screw with your own life at your own risk, and you better take that risk seriously. Vanessa Redgrave isn't playing around.

(see also: Through a Dark Symbol).

Pull the string!

That's the core of what's missing in Petri's Theft - which shows the all-importance of having a good star at the center of a work like this: the closest thing we have to a person to root for is Albertone, the beloved cross-dressing leader of a queer gang of jewel robbers who-- their identity as maligned subculture perhaps leading them towards a group loyalty--are truly grieved by his passing. (though he only shows up in the last third). This being a time when queerness was portrayed in giallos as one more signifier of freaky transgression, drag was a common enough drag sight, a symbol of the split self (and Norman Bates), in Petri's reserving of the bulk of our sympathy for Albertone show that beneath its cynical Brechtian satire, Petri's film has a genuine heart and respect for humanity and artistic perception.

If you can admit your confusion, you earn a pass.

But the price of true post-structuralist realization--of stepping free of the bullshit-- is complete paralysis. Hemmings with the ghost tennis ball in his hand, frozen in contemplation. Without real money, and real balls, the void stretches past even new life and new civilizations - it boldly goes where no man has gone before... but leaves you standing there, just a focal point for the endless nada.

One happy little family, pre-Total

You know where I'm going with this: America got around this anti-money issue with a show called Star Trek where private property no longer existed. Maybe one day we'd grow into it, but only if we didn't rush things. America couldn't afford to be nihilistic about money, not at right then, having used up all our nihilism cards on our all-consuming hobby, Vietnam. But, at least the Cold War helped externalize the Red Menace well enough that we didn't have to fight it in the mirror, unlike some people - ahemItalycoguh. 

But hey - in 1973, crime in New York City was as bad as it was Rome, albeit with less motor-scooter purse snatching (ciao, Scippatori!) and more subway knife-point mugging.

Funny, but hardly surprising, that we took the opposite approach of Italy, whose pop culture tended to idolize the crooks, encouraging readers to fantasize they were like Diabolik, robbing the country blind while bemoaning its collective impoverishment, never getting how the two were linked. Here in the USA it was the reverse, we decided to invoke our second amendment rights and make a stand. Here, we wouldn't cheer these masked crooks at all... we'd... well...let's just say, we gotta guy comin' in, and he knows just how to deal with punks like you. See you soon, pally!

(Charles Bronson Death Wish - 1974)

FURTHER READING:

1. See 'Woman is the Father of Horror' - which I argue that a lot of the success of the great horror auteurs comes from their female writing/producing partners - i.e. Debra Hill, Daria Nicolodi, Gale Ann Hurd.

Happy Birthday Cheryl Ladd!

Today, it's Cheryl Ladd's birthday. Happy birthday to an underrated actress, sparkling beauty, sultry singer, and first-class Angel!


It's unfortunate that in between the Farrah-mania that erupted in the first season of Charlie's Angels--and led to her leaving to do movies, namely the ultra-bomb Saturn 3--and the later seasons with derided Kate Jackson replacement Shelly Hack and the decidedly awesome method-acting goddess Tanya Roberts in the still not-on-DVD season five, people forget that there was solid work regularly turned in by the steady presences on the show Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd.

Ladd worked long and hard, from seasons two through five, and never wavered. Though Tanya Roberts' gorgeous eyes stole the show in season 5, Ladd did all the heavy lifting - her face sporting some mature woman lines that somehow made her even more gorgeous, Ladd merged into a full formed actor, taking advantage of the 'no one still watching' freedom to do some of her most fully realized work.

Cast as Jill's sister Kris Munroe, Cheryl Ladd was an ideal replacement for Farrah in Season 2, of whom people tend to forget brought sparkling athleticism and sweetness to her iconic Jill Munroe, not just hair and teeth. As her little sister Kris, Ladd tapered the same qualities to a little sister point and wowed in a brown bikini, swimming up and around to jack a gangster's yacht to rescue the kidnapped Charlie in a wow of a Hawaii season two opener. She had a pop album out early in season 3, modeled in the style of the mega-successful Olivia Newton John. She got to do some synergy singing/ plugging on the show. I remember taping it with my my audio cassette player and even though she only sang a few bars of her song "Take a chance on me / love will never be / for chance" I still know it by heart, 30-odd years later.

Another peak Cheryl role came a few decades later, in a film that saw Drew Barrymore being super sexy and seducing TV op-ed newsman and bender enthusiast Tom Skeritt (his sneaky morning vodka pull is straight out of my own life at the time). Cheryl Ladd is the rich, pampered wife upstairs, terminally ill but still achingly gorgeous, a kind of still-breathing REBECCA. Ladd is great in her few scenes, conveying huge amounts of woe and regret at having spent her life in front of a vanity mirror instead of learning a skill or developing a literary passion. In the process she turns what could have been just a marginally above-average Skinemax-ish potboiler into something truly marvelous, digging up surprising gravitas. Once again, however, she's not the first thing people think of on  that show--ever a team player, it's Drew on a tire swing we all recall. I have a burnt-in memory of seeing it on my friend's couch, where I was crashing having left my wife for a girl very much like Drew Barrymore's character. We had just come back from a Monster Convention in PA where I didn't win the Rondo. We drove straight to Saint Mark's and I got a tattoo, and we were breaking up. It was a once-in-a-lifetime midlife crisis kind of day, and POISON IVY turned it into poetry...  

Here she is with Waylon Jennings. Just look into her naturally loving and open eyes as she looks up at this sexy, noble beast of a man. It's enough to make you go country on the spot.

People love to pigeonhole and over the years the original Charlie's Angels has been maligned with accusations of it being mindless T&A, but if you watch these shows now, as an antidote to the super flashy crap of today, these angels are extraordinarily intelligent and skilled. Over their careers they pose as everything from professional ice skaters, race car drivers, circus folk (above), rich illegal baby adopters, poor bumpkins looking to buy bootleg motorcycle parts, and helicopter traffic ladies... of course they've also gone to the less athletic side, posing as masseuses, prostitutes, fashion models, strippers, belly-dancers, and Playboy-ish bunnies (cats instead), but through it all they're always sweet and kind to the nice guys. Figuring out which alleged playboys are all talk by coming onto them and watching them shrink away, they flirt with kindly old men and talk nice to troubled girls; they show you can be capable, badass, wear awesome flare slacks with turtlenecks, and still be warm.

I'm grateful to the show for being on DVD and on cable. I'm grateful to Ladd, for having lived up to the possibilities Kris Munroe embodied, and beyond. So happy birthday, Cheryl! You have helped make this world brighter for we who dwell in darkness. You have seen our slimy, slothful troglodyte hearts, and instead of wincing smiled and forgave our obscene mental trespasses, refused to see anything but the heart of a knight under our monstrous criminal hides. And all the while, your smile has lighted the world, in illumination, and in load.

Capsule Reviews: CALIBER 9, CATFISH, LAST SUMMER, MACHETE; SOLITUDE OF BLOOD; RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION

CALIBER 9 

(1972) Dir Fernando Di Leo
***

"We need to remember that property is theft!"

From the awesome new Fernando De Leo boxed 'crime' set comes this tough little picture, first in a crime trilogy from the robust director. Barbara Bouchet sizzles as the go-go dancing femme fatale girlfriend of pug-ugly Ugo. Fresh out of the slammer and the only one who might know where the loot is buried, Ugo's instantly a target for his former crime pals, including Lionel Stander (CUL-DE-SAC) as 'The Americano" - a mob head who rehires Ugo into the crew, hoping he'll slip and reveal where the stash is (all the other suspects in the theft are wiped out before the credits in a punchily-edited montage). We don't even know if Ugo took it until later, making his many beatings and denials fraught with strange tough guy ambiguity.

There's lots of De Leo's patented pro-commie dialogue (see above quote) folded into the police procedural scenes, something American character actor Stander (a European exile on account of the blacklist)  no doubt approved of. Money is the root of all evil and in every close-up shot of large amounts of it being handed back and forth we're always afraid it might explode ( BOOM! eh, Ugo? The big a-fireworks, eh? HAhahha! BOOM! hahaha!). A pathetic 'party' is the setting for the big climactic gundown: a handful of lawn chairs on parched grass around an empty pool: classic De Leo. Of course it wont take canny Acidemic fans long to figure out who stole what and where, but they'll be too busy rocking out to Luis Enriqiez Bacalov's funky Ennio Morricone-wannabe score (talk about property as theft!) to give much of a good goddamn especially when the flute and crunchy electric guitars get started.

MACHETE 

(2010) Dir Robert Rodriguez)
***

Could this actually be Roberto Rodriguez's best film? It actually uses everything from that GRINDHOUSE trailer - including Cheech Marin as a shotgun-toting priest saying in a magnificently flat affect: "God has mercy. I don't!" Mind-boggling. Danny Trejo shows--after centuries of playing Mexican bad guys and even being one for 11 years as a child--that he has the depth of presence to handle a lead role, no sweat. And the ladies? My notions of feminine empowerment are completely in sync with Rodriguez's, and I dig the large quotient of strong, ass-kicking hermanas.

CATFISH 

(2010) ***

An eerie downer with some stray grace, CATFISH is the Blair Witch of internet romances, to the point where a violent freaky unseen ghost (with a beautiful profile pic borrowed from someone else) is as a modern ecstasy compared to the soul-snuffing truth at the end of the Facebook rainbow. The story involves a handsome slacker falling love, as we all have, with a phantom from the internet; things get weird when her kid sister does paintings of his dance photos.... and then things get really weirder when he and his buddies drive down to see her, for a surprise visit.

As someone who in the wild west days of the AOL chat rooms (mid-90's) went on many dates with sexy-voiced, able-writing sirens who turned out to be deceiving kraken-gorgon hybrids, CATFISH's documentary sense of excitement and possibility struck deep in the core of my bruised soul; all those post-date Silkwood showers and whiskey shots to wash the wan desperation from my feelers afterwards, and to no avail. Haven't we all been there? Now you can go again! Terrifying, hilarious and deeply sad, no shower is scalding enough to sear the Catfish stains off your soul.

SOLITUDE OF BLOOD 

(aka STEREOBLOOD, aka ODINOCHESTO KOVI)

(2002) Dir. Roman Prygunov
**

11This Russian would-be giallo-esque nevermindbender uses amnesiac tactics to make us ever unsure what's going on in its heroine's head, the result being an underpopulated Russian pharmacological BLACK SWAN minus the dancing, with an intense green, white, and deep commie red set design, as if THE ROOM married SUSPIRIA and none of their friends showed up to the ceremony.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite (!) plays a top flight pharmaceutical researcher named Maria who's recently created a miracle drug for overcoming female infertility. Some really uninspired murders and needless crosscutting make half the events onscreen seem like a dream, but which half? One hopes our heroine is suffering from possible amnesia ala THE HEADLESS WOMAN (see my Amnesiacs in Cinema entry, here) but it's doubtful.

Still, this film helped me realize a few things about how to make movies cheaply by wasting running time dragging out meaningless shots and scenes that require no extra time or $$. So here is my

GUIDE TO CHEAP HORROR FILM PADDING:

1. A phone rings, but no one is on the other end! Or else just deep breathing or whatever:
--All you need is one actress and a phone! If you don't have a phone, she can hold a banana or shoe or even just air, in a phone hand; you can add the phone later in editing.
2. Ben Nye stage blood - $40 a quart! 
You can pour it all over your actress as she wanders around white hotel bathrooms for long pointless dream sequences.
3. The old J-Horror 'coughing weird things up' dream sequences.
Same bathroom, she just does the old magician trick to apparently vomit scorpions or scalpels into the sink (with Ben Nye abounding!)
4. Taking strange pills
A no-frills way to ensure you can let the editor run rampant with weird non-associative editing tricks.

The film has only a few stalk and kill (i.e. 'giallo') scenes and they're all pointlessly intercut with scenes of Maria at lunch or otherwise bored or agitated, making us think she might either be involved or next on the list. She's clearly meant to be a suspect or a victim but we're never really scared for her, as we should be. And then it ends. Could be worse. At least she's hot... and there's a theremin!

LAST SUMMER 

(1969) Dir Frank Perry
****

There's ever so often I catch a fellow critic giving away that he's not seen the movie he's capsulizing (always a temptation for overworked second stringers), as in the Time Out Britannia Film Guide entry on LAST SUMMER, which calls it "winsome," and notes 'typical lessons are learned'?  

There's nothing "winsome" about LAST SUMMER, unless LORD OF THE FLIES or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER are to be filed amongst GIDGET and BEACH BLANKET BINGO. There's a rape (by the protagonists!), pot smoking, race baiting, group hair washing, nonstop groping, evil-confessing, seagull torture,  riveting monologues, and other typical--but far from typical for coming-of-age beach summer movies.

My friend Max turned me onto this movie during one of our wasted-as-we-wanna-be summers hanging around his parent's Long Beach Island beach house. We never found a Barbara Hershey for ourselves (we were too hungover to actually go to the beach... at least during the day) but the meta-ness of it all was not lost on us in our bourbon or gin (in a strict either/or regimen) fog. It was the perfect thing to watch on a rainy Sunday over hash oil pills and190 proof Devil's Springs vodka strained through a flannel shirt. Add some girls and lessen the whiskey load and we might have been looking into an evil mirror.

The casting is awesome, too. I was never into The Waltons (as you might imagine) but when John Boy raises his sadistic demonic eyebrow, or pangs of empathy shoot across his Satanic features during his psychic threeways with Barbara Hersey and smirky Peter Norton, hell, that right there is enough to change my mind.

Coming in for the last half as a frumpy fourth wheel virgin-type they meet on the beach, Cathy Burns steals the show with a single take monologue recounting the last hours of seeing her mom alive at a cocktail party that had been raging at their house for days. By the time she's done you can smell the tang of gin and ocean salt emanating off skin, the heavy mix of cigarettes and lust tempered by drunken dissolution. It's enough to get her just far enough into the Hershey clique that her later glum buzzkillery all but spurns the evil trio into their final vile action.

Criminally not on DVD, this shows up on TCM from time to time and must not be missed.

 RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION 

(2010) Dir Paul W.S. Anderson
**1/2

When it comes to directing action, Paul W.S. Anderson is a great one for color contrast, slow motion rain drops, cavernous all-white spaces, bullets, bullets, bullets and that's all. His action movies are like an expensive video game you're watching someone else play. There's such a shortness of believability or grit or guts in his uber-sterile mise-en-scene that you wonder how in the hell this hack has done so well for himself. With huge budgets and a marriage to the super sexy lead siren Milla Jovovich you know he must have some big connections. On the other hand, no way I could duplicate even a single moment, or even play the game without dropping the joystick with shaky hands... do they still even use joysticks?

And then again, RES EVIL the series was not meant to be great, just meant to be watchable for an international audience, over and over, to play on Syfy in subsequent decades, etc., so any earmarks of a particular culture or time or moment are shorn away, replaced with obvious references to other movies -- DAWN OF THE DEAD meets THE MATRIX in this case--painful cliche and obvious now but in 20 years might seem like its own wild style. It's all the head villain can do to not use that Hugo Weaving "Mr. Andersssson" voice as he dodges slow mo air-rippling bullets in his black trenchcoat and shades but hey---Syfy probably has the movie in the slot too. Milla, meanwhile, appears hung over and tired and "rocks" some weak mom bangs. The rest of the cast try their best but the most interesting character turns out to be a big lug with a black cloth over his head and a ridiculously huge ax! Go get 'em, brother! Machete don't text!

(POST SCRIPT - 2/9/15 - true to expectations, this has been on Syfy a lot, and I've come to love it - see my Milla Jovovich: God's own Avatar post from 2/24/14)

The Return of the Great 70s Dad: Nicolas Cage in KICK-ASS

I thought the age of great 70s dads was done, but that was before I saw KICK-ASS (2010), in which a truly cool father (Cage) manages to slide past the doting widower daddy ("mommy's in heaven!") morons of Hollywood to finally do what Batman should have been doing all along: using firearms, gutting mobsters with exotic weaponry, and teaching his 11 year-old daughter to be a pint-sized killing machine.

This is the kind of film where you see something genuinely subversive -- kids as instruments of lethal vengeance-- and know instantly that a dividing line will form between film critics that are cool (i.e. they get intentional subversion of the treacly overprotective cinema status quo) and the dull self-appointed moral guardians (i.e. status quo dogma-eating suckaz) as easy to demarcate as a scroll down the rotten tomato meter. My old editor at Popmatters, Cynthia Fuch's discusses for example the one-note presence of Marcus, Nic Cage's old cop buddy who raised Hit Girl while Nic was in the slammer, framed for his wife's murder :

Marcus serves one purpose here, to deliver the film’s not-so-earnest injunction against Big Daddy’s monomaniacal exploitation of his daughter: “You owe that kid a childhood!” With that done, the movie can proceed apace, exploiting her in every way it can think of. Serving as Kick-Ass’ mentor, savior, and inspiration, she’s abused and abusive, horrified and horrific, tearfully vulnerable and ingeniously cruel. (4/16/10)

Hahah! Well, frankly, if there wasn't some uptight backlash against all this "exploitation" the character wouldn't have nearly enough subversive zing, so I'm glad at least some critics felt the need to jump on this, like they have to make sure we know it's wrong WRONG WRONG to train our daughters to be assassins. "You owe that kid a childhood?" Really? What's a better childhood than not having to go to school and spending all your time hanging out with your cool superhero gun nut father? What is she missing? Facebook chats? Sexual subjugation and elementary school belittlement? Tedium in front of the TV? Wasted hours playing with dolls and engaging in clique-y slumber party backstabbing?



Even more inflammatory is a review by someone named Prarie Miller:

... let's just say that it's reached the point in movies where pedophiles could conceivably launch a movement protesting that double standard filmmakers get away with all sorts of exploitative behavior with children in movies that would land predators in the real world in handcuffs. It would seem that we're talking a line here between reality and fantasy, with the emphasis on a different kind of graphic at work, and a line that has been seriously crossed (Newsblaze)

 Yeah, Prarie, let's just say that... wait, what? Are you seriously using the phrase "in movies" redundantly in a sentence? Do you even know where the line between reality and fantasy is? It's not in a comic book movie, anywhere! Ever!  Don't you see that this girl assassin is a direct and intentional affront to your hypocritical projecting? More than anything, we love Hit Girl for the very reason that we know she will get you all up in arms; we know that some serious standing-up to nervous industry suits must have gone on to prevent their meddling with the script and turning her bullets into, say, tranq darts. Hit Girl is a triumph for the very reason that she kills her victims without qualms! She's an emblem for child empowerment rather than for child victimization mentality, which the Praries of the world prefer, and misread as saintliness.

Of course, as I say, without the whack-job moral guardian fringe ringing their alarm bells, you wouldn't wake up to realize that finally something genuinely ballsy is happening in a superhero movie -- a gleeful finger in the eye of the still-lingering remnants of the Hollywood moral production code and the whole "Won't someone think of the children" hysteria of films like Cage's "worst dad" film, KNOWING. Actually, Hit Girl's the first 'free' kid I've seen since 1979 and OVER THE EDGE, or the other cool kids I wrote about last week in my slam against Michael Cera (since amended), like Tanner from THE BAD NEWS BEARS!

I'm also reminded of one of the story threads in D.W. Griffith's INTOLERANCE (1919), wherein a moral crusader matron is out to rescue the exploited children of the slums, so she can drag them away from their loving mothers and throw them into a giant orphanage where they can be safely ignored in long rows of cribs by uncaring city employees. I think any girl who had the choice to be raised by Nicolas Cage and trained full time in the art of killing vs. being forced to go to some dumb public school and then come to a distracted babysitter while a single righteous mom works double shifts would choose the former. Watch fucking BLUE CAR and see how bad it could be.

Hit Girl is lucky she gets to spend all her time with a cool, loving father and when you consider (as I've written about in SALT) the usual back story of female assassins--their cruel schooling and tough surrogate parents--Nic's kindly Tod Browning-ish scheme of vengeance is a breath of fresh cool air.  He even takes his daughter to get ice cream after shooting slugs into her bullet proof vest and gives her cool butterfly knives in a big swanky box. This was the first film I've seen since about a single father-daughter pair bond that didn't make me want to wretch, and even makes me want to be a father if I could ensure I had a daughter into knives and not a dorky son into superhero comics.

For an example of the latter, let's examine another case of superhero childhood with (in this case surrogate) dad and no mom, HELLBOY.

Now, I liked the first HELLBOY which involved the origin of an adopted demon child by a squad of rough and tough American GIs in WW2. The child demon grew up a cigar-smoking badass, as if he'd been raised by Sam Fuller. But then in the insipid sequel we get this treacly homespun flashback of Hellboy as a goofy nerd, watching Howdy Doody with his glasses and buckteeth and wearing his jammies and getting tucked in by a loving and responsible... zzzz, I turned it off right at that moment. What the hell happened, "Hell" boy? Prarie got to you, didn't she?

Then there's the drably hypocritical "clean" conscience of heroes like Batman--on whom Cage's Hit Man is cheekily based--who would never, say, shoot a real gun at the Joker or something, because "killing is wrong," -- no guns, Alfred! So he has to invent all these bizarre non-lethal weapons so he can wipe out whole blocks with collateral damage (chasing the Joker around Gotham, he totals dozens of cars and I'm sure incurs a lot of fatalities), but as I've written before, he's as "innocent" as our precision bombers over Baghdad - though to their credit at least the military's not squeamish about shooting a bad guy up close.

Anyway... as Hit Girl, Chloe Grace Moretz is a revelation. Fresh air finally becomes breathable once you see an 11-year old girl eviscerate a room full of thugs and do so with a convincing air of detached cool and scary intellect we haven't seen since Anna Paquin in THE PIANO. QT had to do it in anime with the Lucy Liu backstory in KILL BILL, but that was all dark to be begin with. The juxtaposition of the day-glo highschool coming of age shenanigins in the dorky comic book guy side of things and the colorful costumes make the bloody merciless killing of KICK-ASS's pint-sized avenger all the more striking. We're just not used to it, it's original! Hollywood has this unofficial policy that good girls don't shoot guys - that's why Jamie Lee Curtis has to drop her Uzi before it's allowed to shoot everyone in TRUE LIES.

It's so liberating. One wants to go back in time and rescue Patty McCormack from her mom in THE BAD SEED and teach her to fight crime-- an army of bloodthirsty children stalking the streets! Pedophiles dying right and left. If Nic Cage's Hit Man could become a role model for all the dads of tomorrow, what a blood-stained, crime-free world we would have.

Moretz is next scheduled to appear as the vampire kid in the remake of LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (above). I can't wait to read the uptight film critics' anxiety that seeing blood-sucking children onscreen sends the wrong message to parents everywhere: "Children are meant to be locked in their rooms with bibles and homework, not allowed to kill adults willy nilly!" Yeah, you wish, downpressa!