BUCKY’S ‘70S TRIPLE XXX MOVIE HOUSE TRAILERS VOL. 3 (1995) ***

This was my first brush with Something Weird’s compilation series of ‘70s porn trailers.  I can honestly say they give you your money’s worth.  I’ve never even heard of most of the movies featured, so it’s fun to watch just to see the many obscure titles.  Some of the prints are terrible.  Many of them look ragged, and constantly skip, pop, and jump, but who cares?  Especially when it adds to the scummy atmosphere of the overall experience.  

The trailers include:  Woman in Love (featuring Ron Jeremy sucking himself off), Nasty Lady, China Girl (starring James Hong!), The Joy of Letting Go, A Little More Than Love, Baby Face 2, Oriental Baby Sitter, Kate and the Indians, Hot Pursuit (featuring Annette Haven), Summer Session, Angel on Fire, Sounds of Sex, Oh Fanny, Tapestry of Passion (a John Holmes Johnny Wadd picture), Bangkok Connection, Pandora’s Mirror, Sensational Janine, Coming Together, A Portrait of Seduction, L’Amour (starring Ginger Lynn), Little Girls Lost…,  M*A*S*H’D, Never Enough, Beyond Fulfillment, Perverse, Alice in Wonderland (probably the most famous film featured here), Sex World, Lollipop Palace, Champagne for Breakfast, French Finishing School, Scheherazade:  One Thousand and One Erotic Nights, Inside Marilyn, Bad Company, Scandalous Simone, The Psychiatrist, Josephine, and Prison Babies.

It would’ve been nice if the trailers had been curated in some way.  Perhaps grouped by star, theme, or studio.  (Many of them were Essex productions.)  Also, some of them are clearly from the ‘80s, which I’m only pointing out because I’m a stickler for such things.  Even with those qualms in mind, Bucky’s ‘70s Triple XXX Movie House Trailers Vol. 3 gives you nearly two non-stop hours of vintage smut, so I can’t complain too much.  If you’re a fan of vintage porn and trailer compilations (like me), this collection will pretty much be review-proof as it is.    

THE LEGEND OF TARZAN (2016) * ½

The Legend of Tarzan takes an inordinate amount of time getting going.  We start off with a laborious scene setting up Christoph Waltz’s villainy, turgid sequences of Samuel L. Jackson trying to convince Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgard) to return to Africa, and Tarzan’s flashbacks to his childhood growing up in the jungle.  By the time the adult Tarzan finally returns home with his wife Jane (Margot Robbie) in tow, I was already nodding off.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t improve much from there.

Part of the problem is Skarsgard makes for a dull Tarzan.  While he certainly looks the part with his scraggily hair and chiseled physique, he acts much too civilized to really sell the character.  Even when he starts swinging from vines and shit, you never once believe it. 

 Robbie, who you would think is ideally cast as Jane, is shrill.  Like Skarsgard, she looks great in the role, but comes up way short.  Waltz is stuck playing his umpteenth twist on his stock villain role and Djmon Honsou is, of course, around to play yet another villain.  Jackson is the only spark of life, although he just seems shoehorned in there to give Tarzan a sidekick that modern-day audiences can relate to.  

Another problem is that the filmmakers try to make Tarzan a reluctant hero.  They spend a lot of time having Tarzan hemming and hawing about coming back to Africa.  It would’ve worked better had Tarzan been more assertive.  As it is, it takes him a good hour or so before he starts doing his thing, which is far too long if you ask me.

Another issue is that director David Yates (the director of the last 47 Harry Wizard movies) should’ve just assumed everyone knows the story of Tarzan and Jane.  The flashback scenes are incongruous to the action and are totally superfluous.  The scene of Tarzan and Jane’s first meeting (complete with bad de-aging CGI) falls flat.  At one point, Waltz forgoes getting into a big speech and simply says, “He’s Tarzan, you’re Jane.  He’ll come for you.”  The rest of the movie should’ve taken its cue from this bit of dialogue and just trusted the audience to know who the fuck Tarzan and Jane are.

Also, the ape CGI is pretty bad.  They don’t look terrible when they’re standing still, but once they get moving, it looks quite phony.  The big scene where Tarzan swings from his trusty vine suffers from terrible FX too.  I mean they can make Spider-Man swinging through the air look great with no problem.  How come when Tarzan does it, it looks so shitty?  It’s bad enough we have to wait nearly an hour before he swings on the vine to begin with, and even then, the CGI is so shitty it looks like something out of Pitfall.  

Like the main character, the movie spends too much time being civilized.  Once it finally loosens up a little, all we get is a few generic fight scenes that use way too much slow motion.  The humor (like when Skarsgard and Jackson joke about licking monkey nuts) feels out of place, but at least it’s memorable, unlike everything else in this bland, boring mess.

Remember as a kid when all those old Johnny Weissmuller movies used to be on TV non-stop and you could kill a lazy afternoon watching them?  I can’t imagine anyone doing that with this version.  Heck, even the Disney version is head and shoulders better than this tripe.  

AKA:  Tarzan.  AKA:  Tarzan:  Reborn.  

ROLLS ROYCE BABY (1975) ****

Any movie that starts with Lina Romay shaving her pussy immediately gets my attention.  Having her practically orgasm by merely applying the shaving lather is a plus.  Never mind the fact that she was clearly shaved before filming.  That in no way detracts from the intensity of the scene, especially when she’s given narration like:  “My body will be smooth and hairless as an infant!”, “Men will desire me as they would a virgin!”, and “They will all lust after my virgin territory!”

This naturally leads to a scene where Lina fingers her freshly shorn fun button until she humps herself into nirvana.    

We eventually find out her character, Lisa is a nude model/actress.  She doesn’t pose for her photographer for five minutes before he’s banging her under the hot lights.  Later, she watches a guy doing Kung Fu and imagines him karate-chopping naked before giving him a demonstration of nude yoga.  She tells him about her past when she was picked up hitchhiking by a trucker.  She strips down in the passenger seat and the trucker and his buddy bang her in the back of the cab.  (“I’ll teach you how to fuck in a truck!”)

Then, something of a plot emerges.  She gets her Kung Fu friend to dress up as a chauffeur and drive her around in her Rolls Royce.  They then pick up random hitchhikers who are more than happy to get it on with her in the backseat.  If it takes them a while to find someone, she’s content to mess around with herself (again) until a prospective stud shows up.  She even mistakes one woman (Ursula Shaefer) for a man, but luckily, she’s more than willing to do the backseat boogie with Lisa.  

Rolls Royce Baby is one of the best Lina Romay vehicles ever made (no pun intended).  It’s not quite as good as Jess Franco’s Female Vampire, but it certainly comes close, just in terms of pure skin alone. Director Erwin C. (Frauleins in Uniform) Dietrich gives us lots of lingering close-ups of Romay’s… shall we say, femininity.  There’s hardly any part of Lina that goes unexplored.  Dietrich also gives us a hint of hardcore footage (which is tastefully done).

Lina gives a terrific performance.  She’s surprisingly tender in the scene where she sits alone in the car using a tissue to wipe herself clean after an anonymous fuck.  She looks absolutely lonely and miserable.  It’s a great moment that shows her ultimately empty existence.  Little touches like these highlight the fact that Dietrich and Romay wanted to make something more than just a simple skin flick (but not too much).  

Take for example the ending.  At first, you think a relationship is going to form with Lisa and the woman she picks up as she is the only hitchhiker who is invited back to the house and goes for multiple rounds in the sack with her.  Eventually, she moves on, leaving Lisa and her chauffeur alone once again.  The film ends with them getting into the car and going on the prowl for more sex.  Nothing is learned.  No message is hammered home.  Nothing is gained.  Nothing is lost.  We’re left with the impression her sexual appetites probably will never be sated, and she will go on repeating her behavior again and again.  There is no judgment here.  No slut shaming.  Although there is no celebrating her sexual liberation either.  Dietrich is merely presenting the desperate act of a lonely woman with the means of living out her fantasies and fetishes.  Because of that, Rolls Royce Baby is a premium import.

DEFENDOR (2010) **

Defendor, like Super, is about a man who takes it upon himself to become a vigilante superhero.  While somewhat humorous, it is much more serious about its subject matter and whether or no the hero’s delusions of grandeur are a product of mental illness.  I think there’s room for a good movie here, but writer/director Peter Stebbings never quite finds it.  

Arthur (Woody Harrelson) dons a black outfit, helmet, and painted-on mask to fight his archnemesis, Captain Industry.  He also does battle with a crooked cop (Elias Koteas) who has a thing for a junkie hooker (Kat Dennings).  She then uses Arthur to get more drugs by claiming to know all about his fictional villain’s operation.  

There was a good idea here.  The early scenes set a nice tone that the rest of the movie struggles to recapture.  Super and Kick-Ass did a good job portraying its characters as off-kilter, but still incompetent and believable as a makeshift superhero.  Here, it never seems like Harrelson’s in any real danger, not because he’s adept at kicking butt, but because the screenplay seems much too convenient.  At all times, it feels like a first draft of a script as the predicaments arise and are resolved without much consequence or emotional impact.  (Even the tragic ending falls flat.)  The action is flatly filmed too, what little of it there is, anyway.  

Harrelson almost singlehandedly holds the picture together.  He does a fine job as the vigilante crimefighter and as his possibly unstable alter ego.  Dennings, one of the more winsome and enchanting actresses around, is stuck playing a thoroughly repellent junkie who grates on the nerves more than tugs at your heart.  Koteas is well-cast as the slimy cop, but the script lets him down.  Sandra Oh is also around as Defendor’s therapist, although her intrusions on the narrative (most of it is told in flashback from her office) become annoying quickly.

PET SEMATARY (2019) **

Guys, it’s my fault.  A few days ago, my VCR ate my copy of Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary.  I was heartbroken at the loss.  So, blinded by grief, I buried the tape in the rocky soil of the old Indian burial ground in my backyard.  I waited.  Eventually, it came back.  To theaters this time.  It looked like my old Pet Sematary.  It sounded like my Pet Sematary, but it wasn’t the same.  It was… bad.

In the beginning, this Pet Sematary gets you thinking everything is going to be just fine.  It lulls you into a false sense of security.  Then, from out of nowhere… WHAM!  It attacks you.  Why would my Pet Sematary do this to me?  How could it be so cruel and heartless?  

That’s because… IT’S NOT MY PET SEMATARY ANY MORE!!!

This Pet Sematary just tries too damn hard to be scary.  Take for example the funeral procession of kids in creepy animal masks.  Why are they there?  Ominous harbinger of doom?  Or just something the directors (Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, the team behind Starry Eyes) thought would look cool?  It just doesn’t work.  

They also go overboard with the Zelda and Victor Pascow scenes.  I get why they’re in the book as they offer us a glimpse into the psyche of Louis and Rachel (who in this version are played by Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz).  In this incarnation, both Zelda and Victor are gratuitous and only exist as over the top portents.  (Did we really need the scene at the clinic where Pascow’s brain pulsates out of his skull, and the nurse screams, “OH MY GOD!  I CAN SEE HIS BRAIN!”?)

As unnecessary as all this is, the first half of the movie is… okay.  It’s when the film deviates from the original (not to mention the book) in such a dramatic way that the wheels just don’t fall off, they spontaneously combust.  I know this isn’t the first remake to change something from the original.  Nor is it the first adaptation of a novel to stray from the source material.  It’s just that the changes (especially in the last ten minutes) are needless and clumsily executed.  

The big change, which won’t be much of a spoiler if you saw the trailers, is that it’s the Creeds’ eldest daughter Ellie (Jete Laurence) who gets hit by a truck and not the toddler Gage (Hugo and Lucas Lavole).  I get the reasoning behind this.  A two-year-old zombie isn’t as emotionally complex as a nine-year-old.  (Besides, let’s face it, Ellie was the most annoying and extraneous character in the original.)  If handled just so, the change could’ve packed a real wallop, but like the zombie Ellie, it’s just plain no good.

I won’t lie.  There was a part of me that had a bit of a reaction to the big scene.  My daughter is the same age as Ellie.  We live by a heavily trafficked road that are full of speeding semis.  I imagine I would’ve done the same thing Louis does.  It’s a storytelling low blow to be sure, but the novel was like that too.  Like Gage says in the original, “No fair”.  

Jason Clarke does a fine job as Louis, the grieving father in the scenes leading up to and immediately after he digs up Ellie.  He has an appropriate emptiness in his eyes, like lights are on, but no one’s home.  There are two quiet scenes that work.  One, where he gives his freshly risen daughter a bath.  The other, when he tucks her into bed at night.  These little moments work remarkably well.  If the filmmakers explored this gray area further, it may have been brutally efficient, even scary.  

Instead, the next scene has Ellie dancing wildly around, growling, and smashing shit.  Before long, she’s donning one of those creepy masks and dispatching people with a scalpel while making lame wisecracks.  It’s pathetic.  

The final scenes will just leave fans of the book and the original film furious.  Those unfamiliar with the changes may be able to accept them at face value.  However, the final moments land in such a clunky manner that I severely doubt it.  

I was ecstatic about the casting of the great John Lithgow as the Creeds’ neighbor Jud, who was memorably played by Fred Gwynne in the original.  As a fan of Lithgow’s I couldn’t wait to see what he would do with the role.  As it turns out, John Lithgow is no Fred Gwynne.  Who’d thought?

Honestly, there’s no reason for this thing to even exist.  There are so many great Stephen King novels and short stories that haven’t been turned into movies yet.  Why dig up old ones and remake them?  Other than to get some of that It money. 

Sometimes, the original is better.

SECURITY (2017) ***

Antonio Banderas stars as a soldier who comes home from war to be confronted by an unreceptive job market.  Desperate for work, he takes a job as a mall security guard.  His first night on patrol, it immediately becomes apparent that his co-workers are woefully ill-equipped for the job, but that’s okay, because nothing ever happens at the mall, right?

Of course, a little girl comes banging on the door looking for help.  You see, Ben Kingsley wants her dead and…

Yes, folks, THAT Ben Kingsley.  

Anyway, Antonio protects the girl and refuses to give her up.  Since Ben is the head of an elite assassination team whose assignment is to silence the kid so she can’t testify for his client, a standoff ensues.  Once his men infiltrate the building, it’s up to Antonio to rally the troops in order to survive the night.  

Wouldn’t you know it?  The security team isn’t allowed to carry guns, so the only weapons they have are pepper spray and tasers.  That might work against your average shoplifter, but what’s it going to do to a trigger-happy hit squad?  That means Antonio and his crew have to salvage what they can from the various stores to create their own makeshift weapons to protect the little girl until the police arrive on the scene.  

Look, Security isn’t going to win any awards.  Casual viewers are likely to skip right over it.  It probably won’t even get a look from Banderas fans thanks to the generic poster.  That’s a shame too because even if it isn’t a Grade A thriller or anything, it’s a lean, mean, efficient little picture that moves along at a crackling pace.    

Banderas takes his PTSD-addled character seriously, but the movie itself is anything but.  It’s ridiculous, a tad cheesy, and a lot of fun.  The scenes of Banderas taking control of his team of unarmed Paul Blarts, whipping them into shape, and prepping the mall with Home Alone-style traps is a hoot.  Kingsley is clearly having fun and turns what could’ve been a standard issue villain into something offbeat and memorable.  

Some of the action scenes are kind of dark, but at least the camerawork isn’t shaky.  Other than that, Security is a pleasant and diverting old school action flick.  Action fans looking for a night of undemanding fun are pretty much guaranteed to have a blast with it. 

SHAZAM! (2019) ***

Shazam! is the second-best movie starring a Captain Marvel released in the last four weeks.  It’s easily one of the weaker recent DC superhero movies too.  What keeps it afloat is the plucky, jubilant, and endearing performance by star Zachary Levi.

Foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is not happy in his new home.  While dodging some bullies, he hops on a subway and finds himself transported to the mystical lair of a wizard (Djmon Hounsou, who was also in Captain Marvel, coincidentally) who imbues him with superpowers.  Since his foster brother Freddy (Jack Dylan Glazer) knows all about superhero shit (he has a shrine in his room to Superman and Batman), he enlists his help to test out his superpowers.  Trouble brews when the evil Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), empowered with no less than the Seven Deadly Sins, comes lurking around seeking to drain Billy of his power.

Like the main character, Shazam! seems to be going through an awkward phase.  Long stretches are dark, brooding, and gloomy.  It even threatens to turn into a balls-out horror movie at certain points (which is fitting I guess since it was directed by Annabelle:  Creation’s David F. Sandberg).  Other sequences play like a superhero version of Big (there’s even a direct homage to that film) where a boy trapped in a man’s body takes advantage of being a grown-up (buying beer, going to a strip club, etc.).  These scenes score big laughs, mostly due to the hilarious turn by Levi.  

The superhero scenes are clearly the better, breezier sections.  While the Seven Deadly Sins look better than most generic CGI monsters found in these things (they sort of resemble a stop-motion Harryhausen creation), the scenes where they are unleashed are surprisingly gruesome and a tad unnecessary in what is essentially a kid’s movie.  The tone is out of whack, more so than in Justice League, which tends to keep Shazam! from flying high.

There’s a good message here.  Family is where you find it, and all that.  It’s nothing we haven’t seen before though.  However, the family scenes are held together by the dynamite ensemble cast that help the film over its cliched passages.  

Jarring tonal shifts aside, Sandberg delivers on the superhero mashing.  The scenes of Shazam testing out his powers are quite funny, and the Found Footage shots of Freddy filming Shazam doing superhero shit are kept to a minimum.  The superhero brawls are well done and the finale (which I will not spoil) leaves me hopeful for more Shazams in the near future.

Strong makes for a solid villain.  He’s all business, and Levi makes an excellent foil for his no-nonsense demeanor.  I also enjoyed his scenes with the legendary John Glover who plays Strong’s father.  

The movie really belongs to Levi.  He’s so charming and funny that you kind of forgive the movie for its lapses.  It’s probably not the ideal vehicle for the character as it often uses the premise as an excuse to spoof the genre, but the bottom line is that Shazam! is just plain fun.   

DC Extended Universe Scorecard: 

Batman v Superman:  Dawn of Justice: ****
Man of Steel: ****
Aquaman: *** ½
Wonder Woman: *** ½
Justice League: *** ½
Shazam!:  ***
Suicide Squad: ***

2019 Comic Book Movie Scorecard:

Alita:  Battle Angel:  ***
Captain Marvel:  ***
Shazam!: ***