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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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) →

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CAPSULE: SPIDER BABY (2024)

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AKA Spider Baby, or the Maddest Story Ever Told

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DIRECTED BY: Dustin Ferguson

FEATURING: Noel Jason Scott, Skylar Fast, Emma Keifer, Jennifer Moriarity, Peter Stickles, Cody J. Briscoe

PLOT: A family of three young adults suffer from “Merrye syndrome,” which causes them to slowly regress to a childlike (but homicidal) state; their kindly caretaker tries to protect them from scheming relatives seeking to seize their ancestral homestead.

Still from spider baby (2024)

COMMENTS: Despite what laypeople might assume, it is rarely a fun exercise to review a bad movie. There are, of course, exceptions. Movies that are bad, but unintentionally entertaining, can be eviscerated and celebrated in the same breath. It can be cathartic to unload on Hollywood product cynically dumped into theaters just to make a few bucks off unwitting dupes by people who should care more about their craft —these provide excellent excuses to flex your mordant prose muscles. And there are a small number of movies for which calling out their antisocial elements—be they misogynist, sadistic, exploitative, ignorant, or bigoted—feels like a public service. But most bad movies, unfortunately, were made with love by decent people doing the best with what they had to work with; these flicks inspire disappointment, not indignation. And disappointment rarely results in prose that’s a delight for either reader or writer.

But the issuance of a remake of a weird movie classic  like Spider Baby is newsworthy. And although the project feels wholly unnecessary, people are likely to be at least a little curious. Seeing the name of original director on the marquee as executive producer is encouraging; surely he would not leave his baby in the hands of ne’er-do-well filmmakers? Unfortunately, the new Baby goes wrong in just about every way imaginable; so much so that any analysis reads less like a meaningful critique and more like a particularly grisly cinematic autopsy report.

Ferguson has added entirely new scenes, and yet the new version somehow runs almost ten minutes shorter than the original. The film is padded with little home-movie style clips (a tribute to House of 1,000 Corpses, a movie this actually resembles more than its source) and many more senseless murders—as if a greater quantity of perfunctory killings could make up for the carefully orchestrated, individualizes fates that befell the original’s scant three victims. The four top credited actors are Beverly Washburn (Elizabeth in the original), Ron (great-grandson of Lon) Chaney, Robert Mukes, and . Each of them spent at most an afternoon on the project, filming meaningless death, flashback, or wraparound scenes. Stevens doesn’t even speak. The actual principals are no match for the originals. Nor is the camerawork, the setting (sunny Cali mansion instead of old dark country house), the continuity, the humor, or, really, anything. A few of the performances aren’t completely embarrassing (Moriarity is best), the credit sequence is well done, and the score is good (if used far to liberally, in an attempt to manufacture a spooky atmosphere not happening onscreen). But it’s like a community theater enactment a beloved classic, with no real individual take to offer. Great scenes are omitted, inconsequential ones are substituted. All that you really need to do is to compare the two renditions of the famous “playing spider with Uncle Peter” scenes. The original is a masterpiece of suspense worthy of , playful and subtle, conveying themes of bondage, incest, and sadism through the context of a villainess with the unknowable, morally ambiguous mind of a child. Even though some of the dialogue is lifted verbatim for the remake, this re-enactment is more like watching candid security footage from the VIP room of a B&D-themed strip club. Ferguson establishes no relationship (much less chemistry) between the characters, starts the scene in medias res, and ends it in sleaziest res.

Of course, there will be some generous and charitable folks who think that this younger sibling is not such a bad egg, and good for them, I guess. But my recommendation is to avoid; the fact that, despite the cult tie-in, this movie has almost no distribution, marketing, or reviews from sources besides us bolsters that warning. It would be all terribly depressing, but the bright side is that this microbudget remake helps us to appreciate the miraculous accomplishment of Hill’s original so much more. Hill may have been working in schlock, but he was a master schlock craftsman, able to wring memorable performances out of mediocre talent and genuine suspense out of thin, musty air.

On Pod 366, we incorrectly speculated that the advertised “BONUS black and white feature” was a copy of the original film. It is, in fact, merely a monochrome rendering of the remake. There are a lot of interviews and behind-the-scenes footage on the disc, however.

Spider Baby (2024) [Blu-ray]

Spider Baby (2024) [Blu-ray]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: COOL WORLD (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Ralph Bakshi

FEATURING: Kim Basinger, Gabriel Byrne, Brad Pitt, voices of Charlie Adler, , Candi Milo

PLOT: Cartoonist Jack Deebs finds himself magically transported to the universe he thinks he has created, the Cool World, where sexpot doodle Holli Would is scheming to transform herself into a humanoid.

Still from Cool World (1992)

COMMENTS: The notion that Ralph Bakshi was ever going to make a four-quadrant, people-pleasing mainstream Hollywood smash seems utterly ludicrous. But damned if people weren’t thinking he would back in 1992. By all accounts, animation’s enfant terrible rode the Who Framed Roger Rabbit wave, selling on the spot his pitch for a horror film in which the half-toon offspring of an absent-father cartoonist seeks revenge. Then, a phalanx of studio executives, producers, and screenwriters set about methodically dismantling that initial pitch, to the point where Bakshi was handed an entirely new script just prior to the start of shooting. Perhaps he can be forgiven for losing some of his enthusiasm for the project.

The result is two different kinds of hybrids: a mix of live-action and animation, and an unholy mashup of a Ralph Bakshi film and the kind of movie that everyone else in Hollywood was looking for. (Supposedly, halfway through filming, Basinger told the director that she wanted to make a movie that could be shown to sick kids in hospitals, betraying a total lack of familiarity with his c.v.) In either case, the mix never really takes. The visual combination is surprisingly terrible, resembling Pete’s Dragon rather than the more recent achievements of Roger Rabbit. The interaction is sloppy, the eyelines are all over the place, and the physical sets are rendered two-dimensionally but without any sense of cartoonishness. As for the tone, it’s as schizophrenic as you might imagine. This may be one of the worst-edited films I’ve ever seen, with scenes covering different plotlines and delivering dramatically contrary emotions intercut and slammed together almost randomly, as though assembled by a hyperactive chihuahua. At any moment that you think you’re watching one storyline, you’ll need to brace yourself for an awkward and illogical transition, with the likelihood that you’ll soon be zipped back to the previous thread without warning. The best thing that can be said for this approach is that it neatly conceals the fact that Cool World is equally as incomprehensible as a linear story.

Part of the challenge is to figure out exactly whose movie it is. Are we watching the tale of an artist who is suddenly confronted by his work? (Practically no time at all is spent on Byrne’s backstory as the ostensible creator of this cartoon universe or on reactions to his predicament, so no.) Or perhaps it’s the artist confronting the unaddressed trauma from the incident that landed him in jail. (The revelation that Byrne was accused of murdering his wife for cheating on him is casually thrown away, left unproven either way, and never addressed again. Probably not that, then.) Okay, forget the artist. Could it really about the poor World War II veteran suffering from both PTSD and the tragic loss of his mother and now finds himself in a world beyond all understanding? (All that is jettisoned approximately two minutes after Pitt is transported to the Cool World, so no again.) Then surely it’s about the Machivellian efforts Holli Would expends in pursuit of her quest to become human. (Honestly, we don’t really know why Holli does anything she does, except that it involves a lot of rotoscoped dancing, so… maybe?) The story is so confused that late in the third act, someone entirely new tries to sneak in, a neighbor about whom we know exactly nothing but who is positioned as a possible love interest and as a foil for Holli, but is then almost comically ignored in the conclusion. Cool World is in the remarkable position of having only irrelevant characters.

The cast flounders amidst this mess. Basinger never seems to know which emotion she’s supposed to play (not entirely her fault), so her sex-kitten allure fails to jibe with her madness for power, a dynamic most evident in the inexplicable scene in which Holli sings a duet with Frank Sinatra, Jr. in which she barely seems to acknowledge the man’s existence. Pitt seems thoroughly embarrassed in every scene he’s in. At least he has an extended introduction to try and make something of himself; Byrne has no character at all, and the film knows it, since he’s barely onscreen for 30 seconds before yanking him into the animated universe, and then isn’t even remotely like himself once he is transformed into his cartoon avatar. Even the voice actors struggle, such as Adler’s choice to play Pitt’s dimwit partner with a voice that suggests Ed Wynn by way of Dom DeLuise.

I honestly can’t say enough bad things about Cool World, but for the purposes of this forum, I must offer this final condemnation: it’s not anywhere near as weird as it wants to be. At its best, Bakshi has littered his animated landscape with an unending supply of throwaway gags and random images, sometimes even overlaying them atop the main action, as if the spirit of Max Fleischer was perpetually trying to break out of the film. These adjunct characters capture Bakshi at his wildest, but those treats are fleeting. The core story is little more than warmed-over rabbit, garnished with sex jokes that don’t even have the guts to be proper smut. Holli Would? You’d best not.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… the animation here is really impressive and while a tighter plot and better storytelling definitely would have helped, Cool World winds up being weird enough in its own right to make it worth seeking out for fans of cult cinema or Bakshi’s unique visual style.” – Ian Jane, Rock! Shock! Pop!

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

Cool World - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]

Cool World - Collector's Edition [Blu-ray]
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Video Review

WEIRD VIEW CREW: ROCK N’ ROLL FRANKENSTEIN (1999)

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Beware

This review isn’t too NSFW (we’d rate it PG-13 for penile synonyms), but the movie sure is. Kids shouldn’t watch Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein. Other people who shouldn’t watch Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein: people who care about movies or about being entertained.

(This movie was nominated for review by Brian O’Hara, director of Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Rock & Roll Frankenstein

Rock & Roll Frankenstein
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BOXING HELENA (1993)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: (credited as Jennifer Chambers Lynch)

FEATURING: Julian Sands, , Bill Paxton, Kurtwood Smith, , Betsy Clark

PLOT: Unable to cope with his recent breakup with the temperamental Helena, surgeon Nick Cavanaugh finds himself caring for her at his house after a car accident.

Still from Boxing Helena (1993)

COMMENTS: I honestly don’t recall which was the bigger source of discussion when Boxing Helena hit theaters. Was it David Lynch’s daughter helming her first feature? Or was it the prospect of so much sexiness revolving around “Twin Peaks” bad girl Fenn? Some of it was probably the titillatingly taboo premise of a man so infatuated with a woman that he hacks off all her limbs and puts her in a box. (Spoiler: there is exactly one box in this movie, and it does not contain Helena.) But the bulk of the attention circled around the fact that Kim Basinger had to pony up nearly $4 million as recompense for breaking her contract to appear in the title role (and that was after Madonna had rejected it outright). Many of the negative contemporary reviews congratulated Basinger on getting the better end of the deal—and with 30 years distance, watching the film with clearer eyes, we discover that those critics were absolutely right.

We learn at the outset that Nick has been emotionally scarred from his youth, with a slutty mom who rejected him and left him hungry for love. So maybe it’s easy to understand what he sees in Helena: the apathy, the dismissiveness, the belittling condescension… who could turn that down? What’s not at all clear is what she ever saw in him. Within two minutes of arriving at Nick’s party, she’s stripped down to her negligee and cavorting in the fountain. It’s hard to argue that she leaves anything on the table.

One of our most iconic weird actors, Julian Sands, is either terribly miscast or horribly directed. This beautiful, suave man flounces about like an emasculated mockery of masculinity, whining and pining for a lost love that it’s not clear he ever had. But as pathetic as he makes Nick, Lynch goes to great pains to make him more so, with mournful closeups as he jogs and his puppy-dog fawning over her. Later, when Helena mocks his poor bedroom skills, his defensive retort is, “If you were a real woman, you’d lie to me about our sex.” It’s hard to know if Sands is in on the joke or just fully committed to Nick’s painful lack of self-awareness, but his despairing cry of “she’s leaving?” actually left me in hysterical laughter.

Fenn, meanwhile, has almost nothing to do. She begins the film peevish; the loss of her legs makes her angry, the loss of her arms moreso. Her shift to a needier, more empathetic character is motivated not by any change in her but rather as a means of bringing about a change in Nick, an especially odd choice given that a massive plot twist essentially undoes all of the “learning” we’ve witnessed. So this movie about handicapping and torturing a beautiful woman in order to satisfy a broken male ego can’t even commit to its own questionable choices.

Once you establish that the whole thing is an elaborate melodrama with no real point, you can start to embrace it as unintentional comedy, with ridiculous situations, thudding dialogue, and overheated acting. This is best exemplified by the amazingly entertaining Bill Paxton, who shows up as Helena’s occasional boytoy in a Nigel Tufnel hairdo, mesh T-shirt, and leather pants, as cocksure as a 12-year-old trying to buy liquor. The movie may believe in him (when he busts out a Benjamin in payment for information, it cracks on the soundtrack with a snap), but there’s no reason we should. Bragging about his manhood one moment, hiding in the bushes like a Peeping Tom the next, he’s always absurd. The moment late in the third act when he sees what has become of Helena is a masterful double-take, a magnificent piece of comic idiocy.

Boxing Helena could have used a lot more of that, because it is resolutely dumb but lacks the wisdom to recognize it. Young Ms. Lynch seems to think she’s created something bold and erotic and profound. That is an impulse that should be cut off.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“I am probably prevented by some unwritten law from divulging the end of Boxing Helena. I can only say that, instead of adding an extra twist to this bizarre tale, it deprives it of what little point it had.”–Quentin Crisp, Christopher Street (contemporaneous)

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