AL ADAMSON AUGUST

 

I just got this mega boxset from the good people at Severin Films.  It contains the complete works of maverick filmmaker Al Adamson, containing thirty-two movies spread out over fourteen Blu-Rays.  Rarely can you hold a man’s entire work in your hands, but Severin has given us this rare privilege. 

Now, are most of Adamson’s films “good”?  Hell no.  In fact, I can probably count the good movies Adamson made on one hand.  Despite that, I never turn down an opportunity to watch one of his pictures.  There is a true auteur feel to his work.  No matter what the quality may be, each one has those distinct Adamson touches that only he could’ve applied. 

Since it’s August, and I’m a sucker for alliteration, I’m making it Al Adamson August around here.  I’m going to try to work my way through the massive set this month.  Many of the films I’ve already reviewed on my other site, but I may repost some here and make an addendum or two with new thoughts if and when it’s applicable.  Also, I’ll be watching the movies in chronological order as opposed to the way they are featured in the box set, not because OCD prevents me from doing otherwise, but because I’m curious to see if and how Adamson’s vision, technique, and craft matures (or not) over time.

I sincerely doubt I’ll be able to cover all the films featured in the box set this month, but be sure, I will tackle them all eventually in due time.  First up will be a review of Adamson’s debut feature, the 1960 western he co-directed with his father, Victor:  Half Way to Hell.

TRESPASS AGAINST US (2016) ** ½

 

I’m kind of a connoisseur of gypsy cinema.  I come from a long line of gypsies, and although I am far removed from that world in real life, I always enjoy seeing my heritage dramatized on the screen.  Whether it be The King of the Gypsies, Traveller, or Snatch, I never miss an opportunity to check out what Gypsy Cinema has in store.

Michael Fassbender stars as a gypsy who lives in a close-knit trailer community with his criminal family out in the woods.  To protest his brother’s incarceration, the family often pulls stunts like driving a yellow car around town to lure the local cops into a chase they have no chance of winning.  Unlike those around him, Fassbender is uneasy with the hardscrabble lifestyle and is looking for a way out, much to the chagrin of his domineering father (Brendan Gleeson). 

Trespass Against Us is a little disappointing when compared to the previous works of Gypsy Cinema I previously mentioned.  Unlike the characters in those films, Fassbender and company don’t go around conning, scamming, and grifting people out of their hard-earned dollars.  The saying goes, “A dollar grifted is better than a hundred dollars earned”.  This family never heard that saying as they prefer to earn their keep from thieving, break-ins, and other forms of criminal mischief. 

I’m not saying that alone makes the film lesser in my eyes.  It’s just that the dramatic meat of the story is somewhat lacking.  Despite strong performances by Fassbender and Gleeson, the tension between them is nominal.  Their push-me-pull-you family dynamics are firmly set to simmer, with neither one ever really getting to the point of boiling over.  Their final scenes of reconciliation are fairly predictable too.  Gleeson does get a good monologue where he adamantly professes why he believes the earth is flat.  He is so good in this scene that he may be able to convince a few people to get on board with his flat-earth rhetoric. 

Ultimately, this is more of a family drama set in the gypsy caravan world than a movie about gypsy life itself.  Still, it’s the slice of life touches that keeps Trespass Against Us’ head above water.  I especially loved all the gypsy slang and lingo, so be sure to watch the film with the subtitles on to get the full impact of the idiosyncratic dialogue.  It’s ironic that their language, which is designed to keep outsiders from understanding what they’re saying is the most endearing thing about them.  At least for me anyway.

THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE (2019) ***

 

Who would wait 42 years to make a sequel to The Car?  Why, G.J. Echternkamp, the guy who waited 42 years to make a sequel to Death Race 2000, that’s who!  While it’s vastly uneven and maybe at times downright stupid, The Car:  Road to Revenge is without a doubt the best 42 Years After the Fact Sequel to a Killer Car Movie ever made.

Remember the original?  You know, the one where James Brolin was menaced by a killer car?  Although the car in this one is eventually retrofitted to resemble the car in the first movie, the overall approach couldn’t be more different.  In the first film, there was never an explanation as to why the car killed people.  It was just a killer car on four wheels hellbent to run over a lot of folks.  In this one, we get about twenty whole minutes devoted to laboriously setting up why and how the car came to life. 

You see, an arrogant District Attorney (Jamie Bamber) is desperately trying to bring a demented street gang of bioengineered punks to justice.  One night, the gang breaks into his office and throws him out the window.  Naturally, he lands on his beloved car, The “Lazarus One” (and no, I’m not kidding, that’s the name of the car) and dies instantly.  Possessed by its owner’s spirit, the car wastes no time tracking down the punks that killed him and turning the gang members into human roadkill.

Oh, and did I mention it takes place… IN THE FUTURE?  I mean, I guess that would be okay if the movie was an original piece, but it’s especially odd when you’re trying to connect it to the 1977 original (which took place in 1977).  I never thought I would see a cyberpunk sequel to a James Brolin movie, let alone a cyberpunk sequel to The Car, but here we are.

The gang members are comprised of assorted oddballs that look like extras from The Warriors, Escape from New York, The Crow, and (I’m not kidding) Amadeus.  I mean bizarre doesn’t even begin to cover it.   One guy has a drill bit that extends from his middle finger that he uses to burrow holes through people’s skulls.  The other futuristic tech is also eye-opening.  Take for instance the courtroom scene when a gang member is sentenced to death.  After the verdict is issued, a plastic tube drops down from the ceiling and traps him inside.  The tube then depressurizes, promptly making him explode.  

I guess in the future, there’s no chance for parole.

The car attack scenes are similar to Christine.  The car slowly stalks its prey, before flashing its high beams at them, and running them down.  Sometimes, the car terrorizes them a bit first, making them say stuff like, “What the fuck are you?” before they are ran over, squashed, or pushed over a cliff.

I also thought it was funny that the guy who possesses the car is an asshole.  I guess maybe funny isn’t the right word.  Maybe “refreshing” is the word I was looking for.  I guess he had to be a dick to make the third act work, because it’s here where he finds out his girlfriend (Kathleen Munroe) has moved on and is boning the cop (Grant Bowler) who’s trying to solve his murder.  He doesn’t like that too much and tries to flatten them both like a pancake. 

The killer car scenes are gory as Hell too.  We get a lot of exploding bodies and crushed skulls that turn the pavement red.  Echternkamp also delivers a gnarly little home invasion sequence that kicks all kinds of ass too and announces that our heroine is not a cookie cutter damsel in distress, but an ass-kicking, karate-chopping, machine-gun-toting badass.

Just so you know, there IS some connective tissue with the original film.  The co-star of part one, Ronny Cox also has a cameo here, albeit playing an entirely different character.  This time out, he’s the mechanic who fits the car with the same grill as the one from the first movie.  He doesn’t stick around very long, but if Cox is still alive in 42 years, I sure as hope there’s a place for him in part 3.

Like the Death Race sequels, this was a DTV flick from Universal’s home video branch, 1440 Entertainment.  I don’t know how much IP you have to go through before you make a sequel to The Car, but they’ve obviously reached that point  Not only did Universal save some cash by shooting this baby in Bulgaria, but I think they snuck some B-roll footage from a Fast and the Furious movie in there and passed it off as a chase scene, which I’m sure saved them even more scratch.

Look, The Car:  Road to Revenge is not a perfect film.  It spins its (ahem) wheels in places and the finale is rushed.  However, if you are looking for 88 minutes of gory, brain dead, badass fun, this should fit the bill.  Even if you can’t fully divorce yourself from the original movie, I think you’ll find enough nuttiness here to keep you happy.  I mean there’s a scene in which the villain’s sexy henchwoman crashes the underground cyberpunk bar brandishing a forearm-mounted flamethrower that is just a thing of demented beauty.  I don’t know if anyone will be so bold to call this great cinema, but it is certainly great fun.

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.