Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEODORE REX (1995)

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DIRECTED BY: Jonathan Betuel

FEATURING: Whoopi Goldberg, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Juliet Landau, Bud Cort, Stephen McHattie, voice of George Newbern

PLOT: A cybernetically enhanced cop and a genetically restored dinosaur are paired up to solve a murder, but their investigation uncovers a larger plot to destroy humankind and bring about a new ice age.

Still from Theordore Rex (1995)

COMMENTS: Once upon a time, the high concept of a cop paired with another, weirder cop had been efficiently reduced to its purest form by including the signifier “Heat” in the title. There was a run of movies with titles like Red Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is from the Soviet Union), Dead Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is deceased), and very nearly Outer Heat (cop is paired with another cop who is an alien) until some studio executive realized that “Heat” wasn’t moving any tickets and switched the name to Alien Nation. That one word did all the work of summing up the premise while warning savvy filmgoers to avoid it at all cost. What I’m saying is, the producers of Theodore Rex had Jurassic Heat sitting there, ready to go, and they passed. Cowards. It wouldn’t have helped the movie, mind you. It just would have saved us all a lot of time.

A mostly forgotten bomb today, if Theodore Rex has any reputation at all, it’s either as the most expensive film of its time to be released direct-to-video or as the movie that Whoopi Goldberg only agreed to appear in after the producers sued her for trying to bail on the project. This is unfair, because Theodore Rex ought to be remembered as terrible on its own merits. It’s always a delight to find a diamond in the rough, a gem that the masses were too closed-minded to appreciate, but sometimes the masses are right, and a bad movie gets the public raspberry it deserves. 

The premise is so aggressively high concept that its overall illogic barely qualifies as an afterthought. You have to take a lot on faith from the outset: dinosaurs have been resurrected via hand-wavey DNA science as human-sized, English-speaking, long-armed, ghettoized cartoonish weirdos. (They are all animatronic caricatures, bumpkin cousins to the stars of the sitcom “Dinosaurs.”) The city is a Dick Tracy-style candy-colored series of backlot alleys. Whoopi Goldberg wears a skintight Lycra catsuit. If you can accept all of these ideas into your heart, then you’ve achieved the bare minimum of scrutability to get you into the plot. 

About that plot. It’s already a shopworn premise — initial crime leads to bigger conspiracy — that is drained of all suspense by the inexplicable decision to reveal the identity of the villain and his elaborate scheme in the opening narration. Aside from killing the little bit of mystery the film might have, it forces the story to become a character study of two completely empty shells: Goldberg’s cop, who is so devoid of personality that she plays both by-the-book and screw-the-rules without any seeming contradiction, and Teddy the dinosaur, who combines an endless display of neuroses with the vibe Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THEODORE REX (1995) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: STRANGERS IN PARADISE (1984)

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DIRECTED BY: Ulli Lommel

FEATURING: Ulli Lommel, Ken Letner, Thom Jones, Geoffrey Barker, Ann Price, Galyn Görg

PLOT: A mentalist has himself cryogenically frozen to escape the Nazi regime, only to be thawed out amidst another fascist regime: suburban America in 1984, where hyper-conservative parents hope to use his talents to undo the rock-and-roll perversions of their children.

Still from strangers in paradise (1984)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A deeply earnest musical that isn’t afraid to look silly—and does, quite often. Strangers in Paradise wants to speak to the young while addressing hot-button issues, a formula that is catnip for us because there are so many ways for it to go wrong, none of which come anywhere close to “normal.” In that respect, Strangers in Paradise really can’t miss, with its direct comparisons of Nazis to Reagan Republicans. But there’s also real talent here: a surprisingly strong set of songs, excellent choreography, and enough good ideas to give the bad ideas competition.

COMMENTS: If you read any biographical information about Ulli Lommel, you might be fooled into thinking that you’ve gleaned a little insight into how he might have developed his highly unusual career. Born in the waning months of World War II in part of Germany now located inside Poland, his parents purportedly smuggled baby Ulli out of the city wrapped up in a rug. As a teenager, it’s said that he played music with during the King’s tenure in the Army. His early acting career included a role in a Russ Meyer adaptation of Fanny Hill. He appeared in Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s debut feature and became a regular in that director’s company, with roles in Whitty and World on a Wire. When one of his own directorial efforts attracted the attention of Andy Warhol, Lommel came to America, where he became particularly attracted to films with music, such as Jack Palance’s rock western Cocaine Cowboys, and punk pioneer Richard Hell’s Blank Generation. So there you have it: a historical fear of Nazis, a strong relationship with the avant-garde, and an affinity for a rockin’ beat.

I provide you with all of this background to tell you that none of it adequately explains the path that might lead a person to make Strangers in Paradise. The end product is such a wild tonal mishmash, such a startling blend of amateur and professional skills, such an earnest and serious-minded piece of cheese, that it’s remarkable to think that it all spawns from the mind of one man. Instead of developing a singular voice, it simultaneously adopts multiples.

Strangers in Paradise lets you know just what kind of intestinal fortitude it has right from the beginning, when we meet our hero, the renowned mentalist Jonathan Sage (played by Lommel himself), telling Adolf Hitler (also Lommel) that he won’t work for him. To his face! You can’t get much more principled than that! While Sage can make a dedicated German soldier forsake the cause, he can’t do the Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: STRANGERS IN PARADISE (1984) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE DEVIL’S CHAIR (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Mason

FEATURING: Andrew Howard, , Louise Griffiths, Elize du Toit,

PLOT: Having witnessed his girlfriend’s brutalization and disappearance by an evil chair, Nick returns four years later with a group of psychology students to recreate the experience.

COMMENTS: The Devil’s Chair could have been a pretty neat movie: a ’70s / ’80s throwback, telling a tale about evil science intersecting with dark occultism: about a sinister device crafted by a mad psychologist to separate the body from the soul in a manner most horrible. Alternatively, it could have been a decent exploration of criminal insanity, from a skewed perspective maintained up through until the very end, leaving us uncertain about the grisly narrative we’ve endured. Instead, it was a third thing, facetiously tossing aside and spitting on the better possibilities.

Despite this decision, The Devil’s Chair has glimmers of promise and possibility. Nick is hitting well out of his league with Sammy, a gorgeous young woman whom he takes on a date to an abandoned mental institution; the pair drops acid and things go pear-shaped. He convinces himself (and us) that the sinister device bloodily violates her before poofing her out of existence. The psychology department at Cambridge is intrigued both by his condition (it must have been a psychotic vision) and the occult possibilities (Dr. Willard knows more than he initially lets on). They take Nick to the scene of the awful for psycho-supernatural tests and observations.

What the movie does right is mostly in the title. The furniture piece in question is one prop I’d be happy to own. A combination of electric chair and sacrificial restraining device, it springs into action when a hidden needle pierces the skin of any finger foolish enough to rest within a cunningly-placed aperture. The doctor behind this machine is one of those classic “brilliant scientists gone wacky,” and the parallel world (with its requisite flickering lights, endless corridors, and gooey-boney demon thing) is derivative, but delightfully imagined. Matt Berry’s presence as an academic toff—at one point clad in a radiogram-skeleton shirt, long underwear, and cowboy boots—adds a chuckle.

But alas, the whole thing feels as if director Adam Mason watched too many movies. He constantly sabotages the experience through snarky asides and observations, rendering his protagonist not only unsympathetic, but also irritating. (This is only worsened by a tendency to freeze the frame as Nick spits out his dumb little witticisms.) There’s also an odd little tirade arriving at what should have been a stirring demonic climax, admonishing the viewer for watching this kind of thing in the first place. Still, The Devil’s Chair had enough momentum to carry me through the “Ahahah, gotcha!” bloody finale, and makes me hopeful that another filmmaker out there might swipe some of its better elements. Bring unto me the horror throwback about an evil chair and the dark arts behind its manifestations.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…The Devil’s Chair, alas, is dumb sensationalism that trusts blood-buckets dumped on thesps are enough to raise a fright, then undercuts even that via laddish, winking audience asides… The eventual twist only makes the scenario seem more crassly lacking in motivational logic.” — Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HANZO THE RAZOR: SWORD OF JUSTICE (1972)

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Goyôkiba

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DIRECTED BY: Kenji Mishumi

FEATURING: Shintarō Katsu, Yukiji Asaoka, Mari Atsumi, Ko Nishimura

PLOT: In Tokugawa-era Japan, a cop is willing to step outside the law to take down some of the most nefarious criminals in the realm, using his unique brand of interrogation and enforcement to get at the truth.

Still from hanzo the Razor: Sword of Justice (1972)

COMMENTS: “Dirty Harry” Callahan. John Shaft. “Popeye” Doyle. They all hit screens within months of each other during the year of the loose-cannon cop, a new archetype in law enforcement that arose out of the ashes of both the peace-and-love 60s and the Hays Production Code. It would be entirely appropriate to welcome Hanzo “the Razor” into these ranks. He’s a lawman who doesn’t play by the rules. He’s the one honest man in a corrupt world, and he doesn’t care who he pisses off, even his own bosses. Women love him, men fear him. And most importantly, as he walks the streets of Edo, he’s accompanied by a kickin’ funk soundtrack. (Kunihiko Murai’s score would be perfectly at home on the streets of Harlem.) Sure, his adventures might be taking place 200-300 years in the past, but a lawman who doesn’t let the law get in his way is timeless.

It’s entertaining to watch how closely the film applies the conventions of the 70s rogue cop to this hard-bitten samurai. He talks back to his superiors, who repeatedly remind him how close he is to getting himself kicked off the force. He has a group of ex-cons he employs to help him gather information and plot against his opponents. He even has a solitary lifestyle, with a small home bereft of creature comforts, and a series of elaborate booby traps to foil would-be assassins. In a world of venal authorities who cling to their power and advantage, Hanzo seems like the faultless icon of righteousness we all need.

Of course, such a perfect hero does suck some of the suspense out of his adventures. Hanzo is presented as the epitome of manly rectitude. Is he strong? Of course, as evidenced by the trail of bodies he leaves behind after being confronted by small militias. Is he honest? As honest as they come, such as when he refuses to sign the basic oath of allegiance to the police force because he won’t engage in the hypocrisy of his peers. And most important of all: Does he have an enormous penis? I’m surprised you even feel the need to ask.

Not only is that last one not a joke, but it’s the ridiculous-yet-troubling foundation of his entire strategy of policing. Hanzo’s manhood is so sizeable, he has a specially carved platform to hold it, which he needs because he performs a daily regimen to toughen it up that includes beating it with a stick and plunging it into a bag of uncooked rice. He does this because it’s actually the most productive weapon in his arsenal, which he uses to persuade recalcitrant women to give up crucial information on the whereabouts and connections of lawbreaking men. And how does he accomplish this? He kidnaps them and rapes them, impaling them upon his great endowment until – without exception – they are so overcome with pleasure that they will gladly share anything he might care to know. He even has a tried-and-true method of stripping the women down, cinching them up in a fishing net, lowering them onto his linden Johnson, and setting them in motion like a spinning top to reach unthinkable levels of ecstasy while he looks on impassively. His mighty truncheon does the job every time, as big and reliable as Harry Callahan’s .44 Magnum. “Sword of Justice” turns out to be a pun.

Two elements define Hanzo the Razor. On the one hand, casting a historic Japanese warrior as a badass cop delivers a terrific charge. It’s gratifying to see smug, weaselly white-collar crooks get their comeuppance in any era, and Hanzo is a virile, if somewhat tubby, man of the people, like a Japanese Joe Don Baker. When he goes strutting down a dusty road accompanied by a blaring saxophone, tootling organ, and pulsing bassline, it’s genuinely thrilling. At the film’s end, when Hanzo looks out over a map of the entire country and surveys a land filled with crime and corruption that only he can tame, it’s visually spectacular.

But then there’s that other element, Hanzo’s key crime-fighting tool. If any film can be said to be a product of its time, it’s this one; its prehistoric notion that there’s nothing wrong with women that a good rogering won’t solve is almost impressively ugly. The idea that it’s all okay because it helps him get the bad guys, and the women get supreme sexual satisfaction is, to be blunt, gross. It says something about the film that, if you have any reservations about the way The Razor conducts himself, it seeks to cleanse his spirit in your minds in the final minutes by showing the softer side of Hanzo—he kindly assists a dying man by delivering the instantaneous death that the law forbids. Yes, we’re supposed to balance out the rape with assisted suicide. Grand.

There were diminishing returns to those loose-cannon cops. Once you’d seen them do their thing, any future adventures had little to promise but more of the same. That seems to be true for Hanzo, as well. Katsu played Hanzo in two sequels (still a far cry from his two dozen appearances as blind swordsman Zatoichi), with rape-as-investigative-technique a central part of his toolkit throughout. There’s no denying that the well-endowed detective makes a splash in his first outing. But given how he conducts himself, it’s probably best that he turn in his badge.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hanzo the Razor:  Sword of Justice contains some jaw-dropping stuff early on.  However, the fun sort of dries up in the third act as the plot begins to meander and the weirdness starts to subside.” – Mitch Lovell, The Video Vacuum

(This movie was nominated for review by Cabra. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Hanzo The Razor Sword of Justice

Hanzo The Razor Sword of Justice
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: DEAD MOUNTAINEER’S HOTEL (1979)

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“Hukkunud Alpinisti” Hotell

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This review includes spoilers.

DIRECTED BY: Grigori Kromanov

FEATURING: Uldis Pūcītis, Jüri Järvet, Lembit Peterson, Mikk Mikiver, Tiit Härm, Nijole Ozelyte

PLOT: Called to an Alpine inn and trapped by an avalanche, a police inspector uncovers a bizarre mix of murder, organized crime, paid assassination, and an unexpected twist that leaves the him in way over his head. 

Still from Dead Mountaineer's Hotel (1979)

COMMENTS: Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction are a handy guide to playing fair with the reader. They are not always scrupulously followed, and shouldn’t be considered  inviolable; some of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels make mincemeat of the rules. But they’re valuable as a guide to what might happen when coloring outside the lines. We turn to this list today because Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel takes a weed whacker to Commandment #2: “All supernatural or prenatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” The result is a mystery that only the most wildly lucky viewer could possibly solve, so reliant is it upon a massive genre swerve. And it’s all exactly as the creators intended.

Brothers Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky (who also wrote the source material for Stalker) adapted their own book, a formal experiment in pulling a switcheroo on the reader. They envisioned a classic locked-room mystery, one in which a smart detective has to choose between a number of suspects at an isolated location, all of whom arouse suspicion in their own way. Think Murder on the Orient Express. Now imagine that the culprit in that classic whodunit was an invisible octopod who entered the train through a transdimensional rift, and you’ll start to get a sense of the sharpness of the left turn in Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Because that’s our solution here. It’s aliens. It’s a thoroughly unexpected twist that makes it a failure as a mystery—and a success as something else entirely.

Long before the truth behind the strange goings-on at this remote mountain inn are revealed, there are the strange goings-on themselves. The hotel is decorated in striking 70s modern décor courtesy of set designer Tõnu Virve, with post-space age lines and lots of mirrored surfaces. (The setting is perfectly matched by Sven Grünberg’s groovy synth-based score.) The source of the lodge’s name is peculiarly mundane: a guest disappeared while out climbing and that was that. The unfortunate sportsman left behind his dog, who now works delivering guests’ luggage when he’s not sitting watch beneath a giant portrait of his lost master. And then there are the guests, a motley crew with odd backgrounds and uncertain futures, including a scientist who climbs the walls of the hotel, a beautiful Lothario who seems incapable of making a bad shot on the billiard table, and an older man who curls up on the snow-covered balcony to escape his many allergies.

In every possible respect, our hero does not fit in with these people or in these surroundings. Glebsky, the by-the-book detective, is utterly incapable of drawing outside the lines, and when it appears that there has been a murder, his unswerving dedication to finding a culprit and meting out justice is unshakable. The movie repeatedly tests him: he is asked questions about fanciful theories of the origins of human intelligence, which he sidesteps because they are outside of a cop’s purview. He cannot change his approach to games to meet an unexpectedly strong foe or adjust his dance style to accommodate a freewheeling partner on the floor. When a newcomer arrives at the lodge, Glebsky’s only concern is how this person is connected to the murder. And most crucially, when the plot makes its ultimate transition from mystery to science fiction, and not only are we introduced to aliens but the murder itself is undone, Glebsky is unable to shift his mindset in any way. (Tellingly, actor Pūcītis was a Latvian in a cast of Estonians; he did not speak the same language, and thus was perpetually isolated amidst the production.) He remains utterly committed to his certainty that he’s in a police procedural, and any facts that don’t fit must not be facts at all.

A film made amidst the Cold War in a republic under Soviet domination will inevitably have a political element, and Glebsky is a serviceable stand-in for a state that was so committed to a point of view that stifled dissent in all its forms, even in the shape of contradictory facts. (Thank goodness that’s behind us.) But the extra layer of commentary is not necessary to deliver the tragedy of Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel. Nearly every character demonstrates the ability to perceive new circumstances and adapt to them, even the late alpinist’s dog. But not our hero. He remains shackled to his orders, enables a tragedy because he knows no other way, and ends the film trying to convince himself of the righteousness of his actions. If only he’d been able to roll with the changes when the mystery dropped out from under him.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This is another of those movies that’s not really within just one genre as there are elements of mystery / suspense, crime, science fiction, surrealism and horror all weaved in plus lots of flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations and oddball characters and even some bizarrely-placed b/w newsreel footage showing real people falling to their deaths trying to escape from a burning high rise apartment building. While it’s well-made, handsomely-shot and keeps you guessing, it’s at its best as a visual piece…” – Justin McKinney, The Bloody Pit of Horror

(This movie was nominated for review by MrEvilGuy. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)