In my ongoing efforts to keep myself writing all the time I have a file called Blurbs that I use to write down any random thoughts that a film might inspire in me. Sometimes they really are blurbs and sometimes they shape up to be pretty well-rounded mini-reviews. The point is that aside from those that get posted at the Horror-Wood webzine, most of these go unread by anybody but me, a couple of family members and a few friends. So, not content with the level of self-aggrandizement this afforded me, I have decided to inflict some of these on you good people. Enjoy.

Alice (Czechoslovakia, 1988, min.) Starring Kristyna Kohoutova. Scripted, designed and directed by Jan Svankmajer. Czech animator Svankmajer takes liberties in his adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, including adding scenes, such as one where Alice encounters a room full of sock-worms, and downscaling or even leaving out characters (the Cheshire Cat, of all creatures, is completely absent). But then again Disney took their share of liberties and didn't come even remotely as close to the darker dream-state tones of the original book as Svankmajer does. His success with the material he does utilize makes me wish he had given it a go and tried to fit in that which he didn't. His interpretations of the inside of the Duchess' house, which he skirts around, or the scene with the Griffin and the Mock Turtle, which he completely omits, could have been very interesting. Still worthwhile for what he did choose to include. My only beef is that throughout about two thirds of the dialogue the camera constantly cuts away to a close-up of a girl's mouth, playing narrator, except it's only, "…said the White Rabbit," or "…demanded the Queen of Hearts," a device that does get a bit tiresome at times. But it's a minor point, detracting little from the inventive visual motifs, wicked combinations of the playful, macabre and pseudo-psychotic elements that made the book so great in the first place.

A Certain Sacrifice (1985, 60 min.) Starring Madonna (as Madonna Louise Cicciona), Jeremy Patnosh, Charles Kurtz. Directed by Stephen Jon Lewicki. Notorious embarrassment for the Material Girl has her as a free-wheelin' NYC chick though the central character, if this film can actually be said to have one, is her rebel-without-a-clue boyfriend (Patnosh). Nothing really happens until near the end when she gets raped in the bathroom of a tiny coffee shop (the patrons of which must be completely deaf) by an alienated, racist freak from upstate (Kurtz). Her friends then abduct him and punish him live on stage in some kind of avant-garde art ritual. While released in 1985, this was actually filmed in 1979. Trapped between the Warhol Factory sensibilities of the early '70's and the insurgent MTV mentality of the '80's (and bearing the worst pretensions of both), it's no wonder Ms. Ciccione tried to stop this amateurish, ludicrous exercise in pseudo-artistic venting from being released. Having said that, I must admit that those with the proper bad-movie temperament will find unintentional things to appreciate about it, not the least of which is the way the credits zoom by at the end as if willed to by people ashamed to have their name seen on this dreck.

The Chilling (1989, 95 min.) Starring Linda Blair, Dan Haggerty, Troy Donahue. Directed by Deland Nuse and Jack A. Sunseri. A serious SNAFU at a cryogenics lab releases a bunch of defrosted corpses who terrorize Grizzly Adams and Regan MacNeil (Haggerty and Blair, for the uneducated). Has all the trappings of a bad Italian zombie movie, except for the one thing that makes those films watchable: stomach-churning gore. While some of the zombie make-up is actually fairly good, the grue scenes are few, far between and pretty lame.

The Gangster (1947, 84 min.) Starring Barry Sullivan, Belita, Joan Lorring, Akim Tamiroff, Harry Morgan, John Ireland, Sheldon Leonard, Fifi D'Orsay, Elisha Cook, Jr., Shelley Winters. Directed by Gordon Wiles. Odd little noir about a tough guy who finds it more than a little difficult to trust people, though of course as the saying goes, just because he's paranoid don't mean they're not after him. It was never quite clear to me exactly what his racket was supposed to be, but whatever it is he runs it out of the ice cream parlor of a local businessman (Tamiroff), who is also his partner and who also seems to love saying "Shubunka," Sullivans' character's name, over and over again in his thick Georgian (as in Eastern Europe, not Southern America) accent. Apparently it's a lucrative racket as well because it isn't too long before fellow roughneck and future Dick Van Dyke Show producer Leonard decides he's taking over. As if that weren't enough on his plate, Sullivan is also trying hard to woo Belita's nightclub chanteuse despite the fact that tenderness is not his strong suit and he's convinced that she's screwing around behind his back anyway. Intertwined with all this brouhaha is Ireland's gambling addict who's trying to get anyone to lend him some dough and a pre-Dragnet Morgan providing comic relief with his romantic escapades of a sort. The whole thing has a kind of random feeling to it, but somehow it works anyway, partially because it all ties together well towards the end and partially because Sullivan manages to drum up a fair amount of sympathy for a character who, it's pretty clear even if you're not an aficionado of this type of movie, is doomed from the start.

The Straight Story (1999, 112 min.) Starring Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Everett McGill, Harry Dean Stanton. Directed by David Lynch. I know this has already been said umpteen times, but here we go again: after Lost Highway, one of his most obtuse, violent and perverse films to date, it's doubtful that anyone expected Lynch to announce that he was making a G-rated film for Disney. (And given it's albeit mild profanity, prevalent smoking and some dark subject matter, I'm kind of surprised it got a G in this knee-jerk society. To quote Helen Lovejoy, "Oh won't somebody please think of the children!"). And yet, of course, that's exactly what he did. What interests me more though is what number of people actually believed that he could pull it off, let alone pull it off as beautifully as he did. The late Farnsworth, in an Oscar-nominated performance (though it took the Independent Spirit Awards to actually give him a prize) plays Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old man who rides his lawnmower across two states to see his estranged brother, who has just had a stroke. Lynch's films have never been for all tastes, and this is no exception, though in a different way. It reminded me quite a bit of Wim Wenders' early '70's road movies, especially Kings of the Road: not really much plot (in the case of Kings practically none), but a lot of evocative imagery and scenes of people just being people. I'm not surprised that some people just find it boring: admittedly not a lot happens in the course of the film. The film either speaks to you or it doesn't, much like poetry, which feels strange for me to say as I hate most poetry. But on those rare occasions when it's gotten right, it can touch a part of your soul that you weren't even aware was there.

Thursday (1999, 85 min.) Starring Thomas Jane, Aaron Eckhart, Paulina Porizkova, James LeGros, Glenn Plummer, Michael Jeter, Mickey Rourke, Paula Marshall, Luck Hari. Written and directed by Skip Woods. The opening scene of the film tells me two things right off the bat. Number one: that it's set in a convenience store filled with simmering violence tells me that we are in familiar territory here, territory that would most likely be classified as "Tarentino-esque," a term that is sounding less and less like a compliment these days. (And as a friend of mine and I have agreed, it's kind of ironic to invoke the name of a filmmaker who is so incredibly familiar with those who have gone before him to describe newcomers who are solely familiar with the filmmaker being named, if you follow me. (And in my opinion it was Alex Cox who definitively defined the convenience store as the single most dangerous place to work. So there!)) Number two, and this is a kicker: when I first get a good look at Porizkova, as I have never seen her before, dressed as a sort of cheerleader from #### (see-through miniskirt, high heeled sneakers, letter jacket with the word "C*NT" on the back), I realize that regardless of what comes next, this film will stick in my mind for this image alone. What does come next is a tale of a former drug dealer (Jane) gone straight, except that his past comes back to haunt him in the form of his irresponsible ex-partner (Eckhart), the partner's trash-talking, gum-snapping, multi-orgasmic sidekick (Porizkova) and the expected assortment of hip references and shock tactics. I have to say that I felt the formula worked a bit better here than I've seen in other instances, though my judgment may be clouded by the one true lesson I learned from watching this film: that Ric Ocasek is one goddamn lucky son-of-a-bitch.

Young Doctors in Love (1982, 95 min.) Starring Michael McKean, Sean Young, Dabney Coleman, Harry Dean Stanton, Hector Elizondo, Patrick Macnee, Pamela Reed, Taylor Negron, Saul Rubinek, Michael Richards, Titos Vandis, Ted McGinley, Crystal Bernard. Directed by Garry Marshall. TV schtickmeister Marshall (The Dick Van Dyke Show, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley) made his feature directing debut with this Airplane-style spoof of soap operas, and General Hospital in particular. A great cast can only do so much with the generally silly material, though inspiration does shine through occasionally. Special mention must be made of Elizondo, who steals the show with his hilarious performance as a foul-mouthed goombah who gets into the hospital to visit his ailing gangster father by dressing up as his foul-mouthed daughter. Many soap stars of the era make cameos (including Janine Turner, Demi Moore and Susan Lucci) and I'm told that the film is more fun for sudsters trying to spot them all.

Well, that's all for now, kids. Until next time...

Ciao,

Marxo Grouch - King of All He Surveys, Which Right Now Would Be a Tiny Little Office in a Video Store

(Edited by Marxo Grouch at 8:26 pm on Nov. 2, 2001)


(Edited by Marxo Grouch at 7:32 pm on Nov. 3, 2001)