TELLING LIES IN AMERICA (1997) ***

Brad Renfro stars as an immigrant kid who looks up to his local rock n’ roll DJ, Kevin Bacon.  Bullied at school, and looking for a way out, he fudges the results of a contest and lies his way into getting a job being Bacon’s right-hand man.  Bacon knows he’s full of shit, but he likes the kid’s moxie and uses Renfro as a go-between to collect payola from the record companies.  

The screenplay was written by Joe Eszterhas, who shows a surprisingly tender side, considering he wrote the sleazy screenplays for movies like Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Jade around the same time.  It’s a nice blend of coming of age drama and a nostalgic look at the rock n’ roll era.  It’s consistently watchable, all around enjoyable, stopping just short of pulling at your heartstrings.  At least Eszterhas doesn’t try to make the kid learn some big life lesson at the end.  Having said that, the final scenes do feel a bit too pat.  

Still, the music is great, and the performances are excellent.  The two stars are keenly matched with Bacon’s seedy charisma being a good foil for Renfro’s calculated toughness.  The role of the crooked DJ fits Bacon like a glove and Renfro once again shows he had so much promise.  It’s a shame he died so young.

Maximillian Schell is measured and reserved as Renfro’s Hungarian immigrant father.  Calista Flockhart has a number of good scenes with Renfro too (like when he tries to give her some Spanish Fly) as his prospective girlfriend, and Luke Wilson is amusing as his harried boss.  Paul Dooley, who’s always a welcome presence in anything he’s in, is equally fun as Renfro’s consistently shocked and appalled priest.

Bacon gets the best line when he tells Renfro, “I think you’re slicker than two snakes screwing in snot!”

AKA:  Seventeen.

MITCH APPEARS ON THE DIRECT TO VIDEO CONNOISSEUR PODCAST!

It was my privilege to appear on the Direct to Video Connoisseur this week.  Host Matt Poirier and I had a lengthy discussion about comic book movies past and present, from the direct to video adaptations of the ‘80s and ‘90s to the blockbusters of today.  Matt was also kind enough to give me a platform to once again sing the praises of my favorite holiday horror movie, Elves!  We were only supposed to talk an hour and we wound up doing double that, mostly because the subject was so far-reaching, but also because we were both having a lot of fun.  Hope you enjoy!

The Podcast can be found here: https://www.talkshoe.com/episode/7915569?fbclid=IwAR2Ss3MK6fs260IzXy-Ge9eqbvR5epk9nY1s3Co7XUw9PrDGpc2mnSHf0jA

GRAVE ROBBERS (1966) ***

A mad doctor is going around robbing graves and performing experiments on dead bodies.  He wants to bring them back to life, but soon determines they are far too weak to resurrect.  He reasons he needs a resilient and strong specimen if his experiment is to be a success.  Naturally, he sets his sights on El Santo for his next experiment.  When the attempt on El Santo’s life fails, the mad doctor sets a trap for him by kidnapping his friends.  

The scarred doctor doesn’t work alone.  He has team of informants who keep him up to date with El Santo sightings.  (One even pretends to be a flamboyant hairdresser!)  He also has the power to turn ordinary everyday objects into death traps.  Of the film’s three musical numbers, two are interrupted by the villain’s creations.  One hip-shaking dance number ends abruptly when the strings of a violin attack its musician, flies out of his hands, and spontaneously combusts!  Gina Romand’s big number is also cut short when her wig comes to life and tries to kill her!  The sight of a flopping killer wig running around like a mini Cousin It is one I won’t soon forget, and its demise is equally memorable.  (El Santo stomps on it and blood gushes out.)    

On the wrestling side of things, we get two matches.  The first one contains a surprising show of sportsmanship as El Santo’s opponent embraces him after being defeated.  This is a nice change of pace as his opponents are usually trying to kill him.  Which is exactly what happens during the second wrestling match.  The doctor’s hunchbacked assistant Igor injects El Santo’s opponent with a serum that drives him crazy in the ring.  He soon leaps into the audience, causing panic, before dying in the dressing room.

The centerpiece sequence is when the villain sends El Santo a lamp through the mail.  Thinking it’s an anonymous gift, he plugs it in, and it emits a piercing sound that nearly kills him.  This scene is highlighted by some great camerawork that helps to punctuate the suspense (and absurdity).  

Outside the ring, El Santo gets into a good fight in a graveyard with the mad doctor’s henchman.  The brawl ends when they knock El Santo out cold and bury him alive.  This is very similar to the scene in The Ghost of the Strangler (which came out the same year) in which the same exact thing happened to El Santo.  It really doesn’t matter if the circumstances are overly familiar, especially when it culminates in a great moment when El Santo rises from his grave.

Grave Robbers should please even the most die-hard lucha libre fan.  There’s plenty of nutty moments, genuine atmosphere, and lots of body slams to keep most everyone happy.  Sure, it may borrow (or rob) from some of El Santo’s other adventures, but I say any movie featuring killer violins, evil wigs, and homicidal lamps is a helluva lot of fun.

WINTER BREAK (2003) * ½

Milo (Rocky Balboa) Ventimiglia stars as a college grad with a big-time job waiting for him.  When the company gets sold, he finds himself unceremoniously unemployed.  Low on options, he gets shanghaied by his friends who whisk him off to a ski resort in Aspen.  There, he falls head over heels with Maggie Lawson, who naturally has a boyfriend.  They start up a friendship that quickly turns awkward because the two are obviously attracted to one another.

The cover makes Winter Break look like it’s going to be a teenage sex comedy.  The original title was Snow Job, which certainly sounds like it was going to be a throwback to the sex comedies of the ‘80s.  Unfortunately, it’s more of a coming of age story than a sex comedy, which is disappointing, especially considering there’s no sex or nudity anywhere to be found.  If anything could’ve broken up the monotony of Ventimiglia’s relationship woes, Eddie Kaye (American Pie) Thomas’ unfunny mugging, and the gratuitous slow-motion skiing montages, it’s a little gratuitous T & A.

The back and forth between Ventimiglia and Lawson gets boring pretty quickly.  There’s no drama in the will-they-or-won’t-they, because it’s already a foregone conclusion that they’ll end up together.  It doesn’t help that the performers have very little chemistry with one another.  

Ventimiglia makes for a bland lead.  Anna Faris has an extended cameo as his ex-girlfriend.  One can only imagine how much better the movie would’ve been if she stuck around.  The best part of the movie is seeing George Lazenby as the distinguished old skier who dispenses life lessons and love advice to the characters.  Still, if you have to watch George Lazenby ski, you can always watch On Her Majesty’s Secret Service instead of this crap.

AKA:  Snow Job.

MANHUNT (2018) ** ½

John Woo returns to his action roots with the occasionally exhilarating, but mostly uneven Manhunt.  Some Woo fans will bemoan the fact that it’s more of a thriller than his action fests of the past.  (It definitely hews closer to The Fugitive than The Killer.)  Still, there are enough shootouts, chase scenes (one involving a jet ski), slow motion, freeze frames, and random shots of doves flying about to keep his die-hard fans satisfied.

Du Qiu (Hanyu Zhang) is a lawyer for a big-time pharmaceutical company.  When he is framed for murder, he is forced to go on the run.  Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is the hot shot detective who believes he’s innocent, but is still obliged to bring him in.  Things get complicated when a pair of lady assassins (Stephy Qi and Ji-won Ha) join the fray. 

The opening is a lot of fun and involves a wonderful bit of misdirection that leads up to an impressive shootout.  I also liked the fact that being a cinephile is enough to not only bond two complete strangers but also prevent them from killing one another later in the film.  However, after the exciting set-up, the bright spots become fewer and fewer.

Most of this is overly familiar, but Woo is able to make it work most of the time.  His penchant for macho tough guy bromances helps propel the movie along even though the plot is spinning its wheels.  It’s only in the third act when it completely goes off the rails when it takes a detour into sci-fi territory.  Even though none of this comes close to matching the films from his heyday, Manhunt remains a solid exercise in action filmmaking from one of the old masters.

WARCRAFT (2016) * ½

I had pretty much gotten out of gaming by the time the whole World of Warcraft craze hit.  I think it even stopped being a phenomenon by the time this film adaptation came out.  Having never played the game, I really have nothing to compare it to.  To me, it plays like a third-rate version of Lord of the Rings.  Or perhaps a second-rate Dungeons and Dragons.  Either way, it doesn’t really work.  Die-hard WOW fans’ mileage will vary.

The special effects are the big stumbling block.  I mean, the scope of Duncan (Moon) Jones’ film is quite ambitious.  I’m sure it takes thousands of technicians sitting around computers to make such a sprawling, CGI-heavy epic like this.  It’s just that it’s maybe a bit too ambitious for its own good.  The various orc designs only occasionally look near-photo realistic.  Most of the time though, they look so cartoony that it just feels like you’re watching a video game.  Imagine if the Hulk dressed up in D & D cosplay and that might give you an idea of what these orcs look like.

On the human side of things, there’s no one to really root for, mostly because they’re your basic underdeveloped kings, knights, and magicians you’d see in this sort of thing.  The typically intense Ben Foster is hilariously miscast as a Merlin-type wizard, which doesn’t help.  The fact that he’s played by Foster kind of tips off that he’ll eventually turn into your more typical Foster character late in the game.  The only one who comes close to leaving an impression is Paula Patton as the half-orc slave who betrays her people to help the humans.  

Warcraft is watchable for the first half-hour or so.  Then it just gets bogged down with a lot of boring backstabbing and double-crossing subplots between the various species.  The big Braveheart-style battles in the finale don’t do much to pique your interest either.  I will admit, the cheesy-looking Golem that pops up near the end is kind of cool, if only because it resembles an old school stop-motion monster.  Maybe that’s what’s missing from the film; a bit of that old school moviemaking magic.  With all the state-of-the-art effects at Jones’ disposal, all we get is a film that’s about as much fun as watching somebody else playing a video game.

AKA:  Warcraft:  The Beginning.

LET MY PUPPETS COME (1976) ****

Let My Puppets Come is the world’s first puppet musical comedy porno movie.  Leave it to Gerard Damiano, the director of The Devil in Miss Jones to come up with something like this.  Sure, the idea of puppets singing, cursing, and fucking seems crude and obvious, but the surprising thing is, it manages to get a lot of laughs.  Although I can’t quite say I was aroused by all this, I have to admit the sight of puppets going at it works better than you’d probably expect.  

A trio of brothers are up to their necks in debt.  “Mr. Big” is giving them 24 hours to pay up, so they have to think up a get-rich-quick scheme, and fast.  They decide to pool their resources and, naturally, make a porno.  

Previously only available in a shortened forty-three-minute version, Vinegar Syndrome has released Let My Puppets Come it in its original uncut form.  Now we can see it in all its puppet-fucking glory.  Even at seventy-five minutes, it feels like half that because it whizzes by at such a dizzying clip.  

The scenes of puppets sucking and fucking are warped, weird, and/or just plain fun.  One involves a dog fucking its owner.  Another has the “head nurse” blowing her terminally ill patient.  (This is the only scene that contains an actual onscreen “orgasm”.)  Pinocchio, predictably, bangs girls with his nose.  

This was probably the inspiration for Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles.  It’s not as consistently funny or crazy as that film, but man, is it something to see.  If there is a complaint, its that the human cast is kind of sparse, so there’s only a handful of nude scenes involving flesh and blood women.  Even then, these scenes manage to get some big laughs.  

Besides, pornos with human casts are a dime a dozen.  Pornos with puppets are precious and few.  Thank God Vinegar Syndrome is there to preserve this one for all time.