AD ASTRA (2019) **

 

James Gray’s Ad Astra is a ponderous and slow-moving film.  It’s also strangely beautiful.  The combination of cool visuals, droning music, and soothing even-toned voices is downright hypnotic.  I’ve seen plenty of movies that have put me to sleep.  This one put me in a trance.  Once I eventually snapped out of it, I was surprised to learn that it was half over.  I just chalked that up to me being overly tired and watching it at a late hour.  I decided I’d come back to it the next day and give it another shot.  I’ll be damned if it didn’t make me zone out again. 

Unfortunately, the hypnotic visuals are at odds with the derivative narrative.  It’s basically Apocalypse Now meets 2001:  A Space Odyssey, but there also some nods to other films along the way.  There’s a scene in which some astronauts attempt to hold up a moon buggy that is framed like a stagecoach robbery in an old western, which of course, makes you immediately think of the space-age western-style hijinks of Moon Zero Two.  We also get a completely random monkey attack that feels like a Zero-G version of Link.  It’s an uneven mix of stuff to be sure.  (There are moments that will make you think of Gravity and Blade Runner too.)

Brad Pitt stars as an astronaut whose father (Tommy Lee Jones) disappeared around the rings of Neptune.  After years of not knowing what happened to his father, he gets word that his dear old dad just might be alive after all.  Unfortunately, there’s a high probability he’s plotting a mutiny that could possibly destroy all life on Earth.

Pitt is good.  He dials himself way down for this one.  His character is cool as a cucumber, as his heart rate never rises about 80 BPM, even during the most perilous calamity.  His laid-back demeanor is a good fit with the calming, picturesque space vistas.

While Ad Astra is always a visual feast, the meat of the story is paper thin at best.  It also doesn’t help that Gray treats all this with such grave seriousness that it leaves little room for a sense of wonder or adventure.  This approach could’ve worked if the film as a whole was meditative in nature.  However, those hokey bits (like the aforementioned rabid monkey attack) promptly undo any sort of hoity-toity aspirations Gray might’ve had for the picture.  Then again, if it wasn’t for the screeching of the killer monkey, I might not have ever snapped out of my trance.

Ad Astra might’ve skated by with a ** ½ rating on visuals alone, but the final act is so heavy handed that it almost feels like a parody.  The final scenes between father and son are painfully obvious and more than a little maudlin.  I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a male version of a Lifetime Movie set in space, but if there is, this is about as close to one as we’re likely ever to get.

FIREBIRD 2015 A.D. (1981) * ½

In the future (you know, five years ago), all cars are outlawed.  The Department of Vehicular Control (DVC) stands guard waiting to blow up any “Burner” (driver) that might venture into the wild for a joyride.  Red (Darren McGavin) is a wily old Burner who reconnects with his estranged son Cam (Robert Charles Wisden) over the love of his car, a souped-up Firebird.  The father and son bond while taking the Firebird out for a spin across the barren desert, which puts them on the radar of the DVC.  When the DVC kidnaps Cam’s girlfriend (Mary Beth Reubens from Prom Night), he and his old man set out to get her back. 

Firebird 2015 A.D. has a cool premise, but the execution is sorry and sloppy.  Despite having a kernel of a good idea, it never quite pops thanks to the sluggish pacing and the far-too-many subplots that gum up the works.  The lovey-dovey shit with Cam and his tomboy dune-buggy-riding girlfriend should’ve been excised right from the get-go (although it does inject the movie with some short-lived T & A).  Trust me, if anything makes a sappy romantic interlude less effective, it’s a dune buggy.  You also have to deal with scenes of a deranged DVC agent going native (literally) as he dresses up in warpaint and begins shooting at and blowing up cars indiscriminately.  The stuff with Doug McClure as the ineffectual head of the DVC falls flat too, mostly because it’s hard to buy McClure as a villain. 

Unfortunately, this is more The Last Chase than Mad Max.  In fact, the future doesn’t look all that bad.  It just sort of looks like Canada.  To make matters worse, there are hardly any races or chases on pavement.  Instead, we get a lot of scenes of cars driving over fields, deserts, and plains, which just doesn’t have the same feeling.  It also doesn’t help that the chase scenes are sorely lacking energy or excitement. 

The scenes that revolve around humans are even weaker.  I did like the part where Reubens tried to seduce Wisden by teaching him to drive a stick though.  The father/son sequences work up to a point, but only if you imagine McGavin is still playing the same dad he played in A Christmas Story.  I mean as far as leading men of dystopian futuristic car chase movies go, McGavin feels like a strange choice.  Ultimately, even his finely tuned performance is unable to save this Firebird from the junkyard. 

GODZILLA (1977) **

In 1954, Toho Studios released Godzilla and the world was never the same.  In 1956, some American producers re-edited the film, inserted Raymond Burr into the narrative, and created a new version tailored specifically for American audiences.  In 1977, 21 years after the Americanized version of Godzilla was released, Italian schlock filmmaker Luigi (Hercules) Cozzi made his own Italianized version of the Americanized version of the original Japanese version.  (Got all that?)  

Since two full decades had passed since the last time audiences saw this footage, Cozzi knew he had to spice it up a bit.  First off, he knew the then-modern audience wouldn’t sit still for an old black and white film, so he colorized it to make it look new.  Since this is a cheapskate Italian director we’re talking about here, he used what’s probably the most rinky-dink colorization process imaginable.  Seriously, it looks worse than some tinted moldy oldie silent films I’ve seen.  Most of the time, the screen is only tinted with one or two colors, so Godzilla often appears blue, red, or even purple (a precursor to Barney, perhaps?), but rarely his traditional green.  Most of the time, it all looks like a pop art student film or something.  There are a few instances however in which it looks as if Cozzi spent a little more time or money on the process and the footage looks surprisingly cool (especially the scene where Godzilla uses his fire breath for the first time).  By the end though, there are just a bunch of scenes that look black and white, as if they shot their wad on the color budget by the time the final reel came around.

If Cozzi had just tinkered with the color, I don’t think this would even warrant mentioning in the pantheon of Godzilla movies.  What makes this version reprehensible is that he uses real war atrocity footage of the Hiroshima bombing to substitute as stock footage of Godzilla’s wrath.  I can see using the aerial shots of the damage to buildings and the landscape and such, but did we really need up close and personal shots of horribly mangled, hideously burned women and children?  Not cool, Luigi.  Not cool.  That said, the new soundtrack by Magnetic System is THUMPING.  I mean, it will never replace the iconic Godzilla theme by Akira Ifukube, but I’ll be damned if that track wouldn’t get the dancefloor jumping.

So that’s about it.  Do you really want to see an Italian version of a beloved classic needlessly colorized (Cozzi was ahead of the Ted Turner curve, you have to give him that) with disturbing war footage callously inserted?  If you’re a dumbass like me, you probably already know the answer to that one.

AKA:  Cozzilla.  AKA:  Codzilla.  AKA:  Godzilla:  The Euro-Trash Version.

LAS VEGAS HILLBILLYS (1966) ***

Ferlin Husky stars as Woody, a Tennessee hayseed whose uncle dies and leaves him a Las Vegas casino.  He heads out to the desert with his best friend Jeepers (Don Bowman) only to discover he’s now up to his eyeballs in debt.  An unscrupulous businessman wants to take the place out from under him, but Woody gets a hand from a mess of his Nashville singing star pals to help turn the club around.  Naturally, it all ends in a half-assed pie fight. 

If you can’t already tell, Las Vegas Hillbillys is sort of a riff on The Beverly Hillbillies, and as a fish out of water comedy, it’s predictable and corny.  In fact, there’s not a laugh to be had from any of the one-liners and comic shenanigans.  Mostly though, it’s an excuse to string together some damned fine country numbers from some of the top names of their day.  (At one point, when the plot threatens to get too thick, Husky falls asleep and dreams an entire hootenanny that eats up a lot of screen time.)  Bill Anderson does a great rendition of “Bright Lights and Country Music”, Connie Smith belts out “Nobody but a Fool”, Del Reeves sings the great “Women Do Funny Things to Me”, and Husky kicks off the movie with the catchy “White Lightning Express”.   

Las Vegas Hillbillys is also historically noteworthy for being only film that contains both mega babe bombshells Mamie Van Doren and Jayne Mansfield.  No matter how lame the comedy gets, any movie that has Mamie and Jayne in it is worth watching.  The highlight comes during the unintentionally hilarious scene where Jayne breathlessly belts out “That Makes It”, while on the phone.  (It’s basically a woman’s rewrite of “Chantilly Lace”.)  Mamie is fun to watch too, but the funniest part is when she finally “shares” the screen with Jayne.  The filmmakers had to resort to using doubles because according to Hollywood legend, the pair despised each other and refused to appear on screen at the same time!  All this and Richard Kiel as the villain’s towering henchman!

Husky and Bowman returned the following year for the sequel, Hillbillys in a Haunted House (which is even better because it’s a pseudo-horror movie) with the buxom Joi Lansing stepping into Mamie’s role.  

AKA:  Country Music.  AKA:  Country Music, U.S.A. 

HOLLYWOOD HIGH PART 2 (1981) *

I never saw Hollywood High Part 1, but something tells me there weren’t enough dangling plot threads from that film to warrant a sequel.  Even though the original remains unviewed by my eyes, it’s pretty safe to assume Part 2 is completely unrelated to that flick.  Heck, there were even times when I doubted it was related to itself.

The plot, and I use that term loosely, has three sets of horny teenagers necking, going to the beach, necking, throwing pool parties, and necking.  Occasionally they go to school when time permits.  Sometimes, a cop (played by ‘70s sexploitation vet Con Covert, who usually, but not this time, dresses in drag) hassles them, but the teens get payback on him when they take pictures of him smooching with his mistress.  He eventually gets the upper hand when he catches the teenage boys making time with their sex-starved teachers, which gets them in hot water with their respective girlfriends.  

Much of Hollywood High Part 2 relies on long, sluggish scenes of the teens hanging out.  These scenes are unimaginatively filmed too, and usually done in one long master shot.  Eventually, someone will say something like, “Hey, let’s all go into the jacuzzi!” or “Fuck it, let’s get stoned!” and some semblance of action occurs.  Most of the time though, it’s just nothing more than a lot of boring scenes of the teens ambling along the beach, cruising down the Strip in their car, or splashing around in the pool.

These inane teenage shenanigans might’ve been bearable if the T & A quotient was higher.  As it is, we get a few OK nude scenes, but for the most part, it’s a lot of skinny-dipping and topless sunbathing sequences.  Cinematographer Gary Graver has certainly done better work than this, although I’m sure the grainy print I saw isn’t the best example of his talents.

DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY (2018) *

1975’s Death Race 2000 is one of my favorite productions from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.  Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2008 remake was a top shelf Jason Statham vehicle that was better than it had any right being.  Its sequel was less than stellar, but the recent sequel to Corman’s original film, Death Race 2050 was breezy dumb fun.  Somehow, I didn’t see Death Race 3, but that didn’t stop me from seeing this fourth entry in the remake cycle. 

In the near future, the Death Race has expanded to a massive prison known as “The Sprawl”.  Frankenstein (Velislov Pavlov) now rules over the racers with an iron fist.  A new inmate named Connor (Zach McGowan) teams up with a grizzled prisoner named Baltimore Bob (Danny Glover) to beat Frankenstein at his own game and take over his throne. 

Beyond Anarchy is closer to Mad Max in inspiration than the original Death Race, with a little Escape from New York thrown in there, just because.  I wouldn’t have minded the blatant homages so much if the execution was borderline competent.  However, this one is pretty much a chore to get through thanks to the rampant ADD editing.  Many sequences feel like leftover footage from a Korn video, and the editing is especially incoherent during the racing and action scenes.  Beyond anarchy is right. 

It’s also weird that they make Frankenstein the villain this time out.  Imagine if Mad Max was the villain in Fury Road, and that’s kind of what it’s like.  Now, I didn’t see Part 3, so I don’t know if there was some incident in that film that changed his character and turned him into a half-assed Colonel Kurtz, but I highly doubt it.

There are a few not-terrible parts.  The nudity is rather plentiful, bordering on completely random.  We also get an OK game of motorcycle chicken.  It’s just that at 111 minutes… yes… 111 minutes, it goes on forever.  There are way too many subplots, irritating supporting characters, and superfluous action beats that make this race a marathon rather than a sprint.  Add to that the fact that it is sorely lacking the zany spirit of the original (or at the very least the brain-dead fun of the remake) and you have yourself a helluva slog on your hands. 

The original Death Race 2000 was a lean and mean 79 minutes.  Part of its success was that it didn’t wear out its welcome.  This one has too many preliminary races (including an actual Death Foot Race) and undercooked subplots that could’ve easily been cut out without anyone missing them.  In fact, the Death Race in this one starts at the 79-minute mark; right when the original film would’ve been over! 

Strangely, the race scenes in the third act feel rushed and are frantically over-edited.  It’s particularly strange when you consider how slow moving and dragged-out the first eighty minutes were.  Plus, it seems like the drivers spend a lot of time getting out of their cars to engage in fights and shootouts with one another, which kind of goes against the whole aspect of racing.  

McGowan has no screen presence whatsoever, so it’s hard to root for him.  The character of Frankenstein is even worse.  He’s devolved over the years from an iconic drive-in hero to just some biker dude in a mask, which is equal parts frustrating and heartbreaking.  Glover is basically there to earn a paycheck as he merely goes through the motions as the obligatory mentor figure, and Danny Trejo is given fuck-all to do as the bookie taking bets on the race. 

If there was more of an emphasis on the race itself, and the racing scenes were clearly photographed and edited properly, this might’ve been a passable sequel.  Heck, even if the action sequences still sucked and it clocked in at 79 minutes, I could’ve been more generous.  As it stands, this Death Race feels more like a Bataan Death March.

AKA:  Death Race 4:  Anarchy.  AKA:  Death Race:  Anarchy.

THE WONDERFUL LAND OF OZ (1969) *

A boy named Tip (Channy Mahon, son of the director, Barry Mahon) creates a walking talking pumpkin man using his evil stepmother’s magic. When she discovers what he’s done, Tip and his new pal escape to Oz where they learn that Emerald City has been taken over by an all-girl army of babes in ‘60s stewardess outfits.  With the help of Scarecrow, the Tin Man and a bug-eyed guy, the friends set out to restore the throne. 

Mahon also directed Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny, so that might give you an idea of what you’re in for.  I’m something of a Mahon apologist, but I much prefer his skin flicks to his matinee kiddie pictures.  As far as these things go, The Wonderful Land of Oz is even duller than his other storybook sagas, if you can believe it.  The actors are terrible as they mill around mumbling their lines with the barest amount of energy possible.  The sets are depressing and look like something made for a drama production by students from a high school suffering from a series of crippling budget cuts.  As for the songs... well... let’s just say they’re no “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. 

The Wonderful Land of Oz is quite painful for much of its seventy-one-minute running time (which feels much longer).  I do have to give credit where credit is due.  The ending is positively bonkers.  I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it for you.  Just know the eleventh-hour plot twist is just nutty enough to keep it from getting a ½ * rating.  Also, the make-up on the Wogglebug guy is the stuff nightmares are made of.  No matter how cheap the rest of the production is, I have to commend the make-up department for some truly disturbing work.

AKA:  The Land of Oz.