Tag Archives: Beware

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015)

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Beware

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DIRECTED BY: Derek Savage

FEATURING: Derek Savage, Erik Estrada, , several innocent children who don’t deserve to have their good names sullied by mentioning them here

PLOT: Cool Cat, a human-sized bipedal feline who loves you and himself in equal measure, spends his days learning important life lessons, watching Daddy Derek engage in various self-improvement pastimes, and creating rock songs about love, friendship, and the general awesomeness of being Cool Cat. 

COMMENTS: This is potentially the most perilous review I’ve ever written. After all, when the video blog “I Hate Everything” decided to share its assessment of Cool Cat Saves the Kids, the helpful feline’s caretaker, Derek Savage, launched an all-out assault on them, allegedly impersonating a lawyer to issue threats and soliciting a DMCA takedown order from YouTube. (Another YouTuber with whom Savage sparred, YMS, produced a follow-up video to explain copyright law and the Fair Use doctrine.) So while I’m hopeful that the passage of a decade will have softened Savage’s feelings toward critical opinions, one can never be sure.

So let’s tread carefully, because we rarely venture into the genre of children’s safety videos. As anyone who has had a child anytime in the past two decades knows, there is a massive market for peppy, carefully-worded productions that use some sort of animated or costumed character to import crucial lessons about staying alive in a dangerous world, covering topics from traffic safety to home safety to stranger danger. They are often amateurish, frequently unbearable to the adult mind, and sometimes very effective with their young audience. So if we’re being charitable, we could say that Savage spotted an opportunity to use his skills as a Hollywood extra and Playgirl model to advocate on behalf of the kids. If we’re less than charitable, we might say that he saw a marketing opportunity.

What gets Savage mentioned in the same sentence with legends like Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau are his deeply lo-fi moviemaking skills. Beginning with the goofy Comic Sans opening credits (which include a credit for Cool Cat himself as, of all things, associate producer), the whole production has big Vegas-suburb energy, with plenty of scenes located in someone’s guest bedroom that has been decorated with pictures of Cool Cat and signs reading “Cool Cat Loves You,” desperate improvisation that take the form of characters describing every action they take, some wonderfully melodramatic child acting, and a hero whose primary action is to holler “Yay!” at every opportunity. Cool Cat is happy about absolutely everything, and every dicey situation is resolved with Cool Cat’s commitment to just, you know, not do the bad thing and then launch into a green-screened musical interlude about being cool. So repetitive and unengaging is the film (which is actually a mashup of three separate Cool Cat shorts) that it Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL CAT SAVES THE KIDS (2015) →

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971)

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Reader Recommendation from James Auburn

AKA BJ Presents; B.J. Lang Presents 

Beware

“…a motion picture so haunted… it will never be shown!” – B.J. Lang Presents trailer

DIRECTED BY: Yabo Yablonsky

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: The film takes place almost entirely on a dusty soundstage. B.J. Lang (Rooney) has kidnapped a woman he refers to as Carlotta (Luana Anders of “Easy Rider”) and has tied her to a wheelchair. Lang spends nearly 90 minutes tormenting Carlotta, screaming at her, forcing her to recite lines to an imaginary movie, and spooning baby food into her mouth, among other indignities. 

Still from the manipulator (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This acid-damaged wannabe-arthouse film has stupefied even jaded psychotronic film freaks. Every “hip” avant-garde editing gimmick in the psychedelic-era toolbox is utilized: strobe lights, fish-eye lens, solarization, freeze-frames, quick-cut frames of random images, flashbacks/flash-forwards, slow-motion/fast-motion, etc. The viewing experience feels like a 90-minute long, 104-degree-fever hallucination that makes you question your own sanity. The uncomfortably cathartic performances from its two leads seem like a blend of acting-workshop exercises and heavy existential therapy put on film. Through extended monologues, the central character explores his own inner turmoil and waxes philosophical about life and show business, and as he wallows in his own insanity, the movie itself follows suit.

 

COMMENTS: Yes, one of the most demented movies you’ve ever seen starred Mickey Rooney—and he gives a psychotic tour-de-force performance that must be seen to be disbelieved.

In the opening scene, B.J. Lang enters the soundstage, as if to begin a routine day of work, passing cobwebbed props and backdrops; he sits down, and starts talking excitedly to thin air. Lang establishes himself as either a movie director who has gone insane, or an insane man who fancies himself a movie director; it’s never quite clear which. He runs a take of an imaginary movie scene while barking orders at mannequins and a film crew that exists only in his addled head. This opening segment culminates in a nightmarish two-minute freakout sequence with Lang screaming at two nude white-bodypainted figures (his parents? sure, why not) who cruelly laugh at him, over a screeching electronic racket. Suddenly: silence. Closeup: Lang is drenched in sweat, exhausted, as are our eardrums and sensibilities. What’s your threshold for cinematic insanity? You’ll know in the first ten minutes of The Manipulator.

We then discover Carlotta, tied to the wheelchair. Evidently she’s been there against her will for some time. For a long stretch, her only line is “I’m hungry, Mr. Lang!” She repeats it, again and again, with every different inflection she can muster (Lang spoon-feeds her a few Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971) →

366 Underground

366 UNDERGROUND: THE BUNNY GAME (2011)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Adam Rehmeier

FEATURING: Rodleen Getsic, Jeff F. Renfro

PLOT: A prostitute is abducted by a trucker for five days.

COMMENTS: My goodness, that was something. Where to begin…

Slapping on the “Beware” label is a step in the right direction—The Bunny Game is a real piece of work. The film starts with super-creep: a female victim suffocating under a white plastic bag on her head. The shot is mere seconds long, but shows the filmmaker’s cards. Rehmeier has some nasty things in store for the viewer. The second shot, much longer—too long, certainly, for comfort—shows the card hiding up his sleeve: some John, viewed at the waist, his erect penis thrust into the mouth of the protagonist, forcefully “encouraging” her to fellate him. This shot goes on, it seems, until the act’s completion.

Events like this unfold for the unnamed woman (dubbed “Bunny” in the credits), going from rather bad to unimaginably worse when she proffers a blow job to a trucker who then abducts her and sexually and psychologically tortures her for five days. Heartbeat foley dominates one scene, where the muffled grunts and screams sound like they are coming through a door whilst a steady thump-thump-thump batters like an amphetamine dirge. Squeals of torsion wrench, as one nightmarish sequence blurs into the next, the timeline skipping between Bunny’s ordeal in high resolution, and a previous victim’s in grainier video. The trucker (dubbed “Hog”) mutters, snorts, smokes—coming across as a miserable, furious wreck of inhumanity as he breaks his victim.

Flash cuts, reverse footage, shaky camera, and other stylization tools simultaneously undercut and enhance the visceral malice. The movie weaves a subtle, but pernicious, electronic score throughout. The two leads obviously give us their all. But to what end? The Bunny Game technically qualifies as a narrative, I suppose: there is at least a through-line of events to follow. However, there is no climax, and no conclusion. As once observed: “If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.” Rehmeier makes an experience with this film—a journey through malignant refuse, or a distillation of white hot agony.

In the Blu-ray disc extras, Rehmeier explains, “…we tried to maintain this negative energy throughout the production, and I think we were successful.” (And if pretentiousness through understatement is a thing, the filmmaker nails it.) But if The Bunny Game might be written off as pretentious Art-House-Shock-Shlock, at least it spares the viewer any affectations of deeper meaning: what you see is what you get—and what you see is mightily disturbing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sort of an unholy merger between extreme performance art and experimental horror film, The Bunny Game essentially dares viewers to sit through it without crying uncle.” — Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]

The Bunny Game [Blu-ray]
  • A prostitute is abducted by a deranged trucker who subjects her to five days of torture and madness.
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List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: OH DAD, POOR DAD, MAMMA’S HUNG YOU IN THE CLOSET AND I’M FEELIN’ SO SAD (1967)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Richard Quine, Alexander Mackendrick

FEATURING: Rosalind Russell, , Barbara Harris, ,

PLOT: 25-year-old manchild Jonathan travels to various points exotic under his mother’s watchful eye; in Montego Bay, his mother hopes to nab a new husband, as the first one is stuffed and hung in the closet.

Still from oh dad poor dad mama's hung you in the closet and I'm feeling so sad (1967)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: It is with reluctance that I recommend this for apocryphization, but I cannot disregard the mathematical theorem: Overblown ’60s romp misfire + Rosalind Russell cranked up to 11 + Stage adaptation + Built-in MST3K post-production tacked on by nervous executives = Weird.

COMMENTS: The good contributors at IMDb inform us that director Richard Quine, “…killed himself because he was not able to make the kind of light comedy films he wanted to make.” I open with this bit of whimsical trivia in keeping with the ODPDMHYitCaIFSS experience: macabre, and almost funny. Sort of. Tragic—but kind of dumb? Well-intentioned? Perplexing?

“Perplexing” might be the most complimentary descriptor I can honestly apply to Quine’s film. “Featuring Rosalind Russell” is another honest thing to say, but while her presence is welcome (as a general rule), her performance as Madam Rosepettle suggests that she knows what she’s doing, but is doing it a bit too well. The outfits, wigs, and Russellness are not for the faint of heart. Robert Morse, as the child of this mother, feels like an underbaked under a layer of pale pastiness. Their romp around a Jamaican grand hotel (mostly in it, I suppose) is scored such that the intent must have been for us to be enjoying a bit of good fun.

“Enjoy” isn’t the word, and neither is the word “fun.” Where ODPDMHYitCaIFSS crashes over the cliff and into the waters of Good God, Why? has to do with the addition of Jonathan Winters. The film, as released, opens with this talented comedian talking to us from Heaven. He’s in a rush, as one of his wings is being repaired by a laconic fellow angel. Throughout the subsequent what-have-you, his face appears in one of the corners, accompanied by some quip concerning the action. These asides are sometimes amusing, sometimes miss the mark, and are sometimes really creepy: I am not a father, but the fellow’s enthusiasm encouraging his somewhat simple son during sexual shenanigans struck me as squicky.

There’s the possibility that Quine’s oddity might have garnered a recommendation if the filmmakers been had able to stick to their guns and play it “straight”—still romp, still badly done, still silly, but minus the bet-hedging from Winters’ character. At points the story could have ballooned into being genuinely disturbing, but the wisecracks deflate the unintentional rise into Beau Is Afraid levels of anxiety. It’s almost enough to drive a reviewer to despair.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If done right this film could have, I suppose, gained some sort of cult following. Yet it is so poorly realized and so thoroughly botched that it is impossible to know where one could begin to improve it… When you get past the weird fringes all you have left is a stale, plodding coming-of- age tale.” — Richard Winters, Scopophilia Movie Blog (VHS)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LIVE FREAKY! DIE FREAKY! (2006)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: John Roecker

FEATURING: Voices of Billie Joe Armstrong, Tim Armstrong, Theo Kogan, Kelly Osbourne, Davey Havok, Asia Argento, John Doe, Jane Wiedlin

PLOT: A denizen of a future, post-apocalyptic landscape discovers an account of a narcissistic cult leader and his murderous spree in Hollywood in the latter half of the 20th century. 

Still from Live freaky, die freaky! (2006)

COMMENTS: A line of defense of bad comedians is to complain when they get called on the carpet for telling offensive jokes that punch down. “Don’t be so offended,” they love to say. So it’s not an auspicious start for Live Freaky! Die Freaky! to kick off with a title card that warns us, “Rated X, not for the easily offended.” It’s a litmus test. If you’re in any way put off by what follows, you have no one to blame but your own uncool bleeding heart. Because giving offense is very much the order of the day.

Make no mistake, writer-director Roecker wants so very badly to shock you with his profane irreverence. Live Freaky! is a bouillabaisse of slanderous characterizations, insulting stereotypes, cheeky musical numbers, and puppet gore. It’s a parade of sub-“Davey and Goliath” animations naughtily saying the dirtiest things they can think of, and then winding up covered in blood. Everyone fails every possible variation of the Bechdel test because everyone endlessly boasts about their depraved sex practices (and one character indulges himself even after death). The meet-cute between the film’s lunatic messiah and one of his aspiring acolytes is a lengthy scene of explicit stop-motion doll sex while singing a jaunty music hall tune. It’s the creation of someone who saw Team America and concluded that the way to make that film’s notorious sex scene funnier would be to just do more of it. 

I suppose Live Freaky! is a bold example of not really caring about anything at all. From the moment we see a live-action post-apocalypse vagrant unearth an old copy of Healter Skelter (sic), we’re launched into a looking-glass version of the Charles Manson story where the inexplicably charismatic miscreant may be bad, but at least he’s a man of the people. His victims are portrayed as even worse: drug-addled, sex-obsessed, vulgar and dismissive of anyone who isn’t rich or famous like they are. Oh, wait. I’m sorry. Did I say Charles Manson? Of course I meant Charles Hanson. Absolutely nothing to do with that other fellow. In fact, you can tell that the filmmakers have done their due diligence removing any trace of the Manson family’s rampage,  because while the names may all seem familiar, they’ve cleverly replaced every first initial with an H. Yep, this story is about Sharon Hate and her friends Hay and Habigail. Totally different. You can’t possibly sue them. It’s all 3-D chess with these guys.  

The movie openly embraces a punk aesthetic, which is presumably why the voice cast is comprised of several major figures from the punk rock scene, led by Green Day front man Billie Joe Armstrong essaying Charlie through what feels like a Redd Foxx impression. He’s joined by Tim Armstrong (no relation) from Rancid, John Doe of X, plus friends from Good Charlotte, AFI, Blink-182, Tiger Army, White Zombie, Lunachicks, and the Transplants. (Also Jane Wiedlin of The Go-Go’s, which is just depressing.) And then they hand this collection of punk all-stars a series of lame songs without an ounce of punk in them. And aside from their punk bonafides, the other thing cast all have in common is that none of them can act. Every line is delivered as if it was the only take of a script received five minutes before recording. The closest thing we have to a professional actor, Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter Kelly, plays her grotesquely vain socialite with the same snooty, over-enunciated whine throughout. The best analogy for the cast I can think of is a bunch of friends who come over to help you move. Everyone’s there to lend a hand, but they’re really just there for the pizza.

This kind of thing is tolerable in a show like, say, South Park because the creators are such committed libertarians. Yes, they’re bomb-throwers, but their targets are usually the high and mighty, the terminally humorless, and blinkered illogicians. There’s a brief glimmer of satire in Live Freaky! in a 20-second scene where the prosecuting attorney bemoans the degeneracy of Charlie and his crew, and then celebrates all the money he’s going to make off the book he’s writing about the case. But that’s it. Who is the movie really out to take down? Hollywood, maybe, although not any Hollywood that bears relation to life as lived by actual human beings. The rich? They’re not so much worse than the murderous, dumpster-diving poor. No, there’s no real target here, except the audience. Basically, the filmmakers are just hoping someone will take offense. They want the glory of having ruined someone else’s day. Well, mission accomplished.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This 2003 [sic] film is a weird concept, done in a weird way and done with a weird sensibility.  Nothing about this feels normal… To quote a great man, ‘This movie sucks!'”– Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

(This movie was nominated for review by Sam, who called it “Pretty terrible, but incredibly weird!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Live Freaky Die Freaky

Live Freaky Die Freaky
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