Corazine

My favorite things about CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (in no particular order):

• The cheezy bug-eyed monster
• The low rent Humphrey Bogart guy
• The stupefyingly bad hard-boiled voiceover narration
• The stupefyingly bad humor
• The underwater sequences
• Legend Films’ colorization

Now, let’s talk about these things shall we? Blurting the same lively jazz tunage as his “Little Shop of Horrors” (also available from Legend Films), Roger Corman’s CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA is a dingbat creature feature comedy that mixes monsters with mobsters. Well, sort of. They’re American criminals on the lam from Cuba with some Cuban ex-soldiers on board the boat. I just liked the alliteration of monsters … *clears throat*    Moving on.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini’s THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW arrived when the ostentatious Bible epic had been popular for the last decade or so. But Pasolini’s film is surprisingly reverent coming from the man who would go on to direct the controversial “Salo: 120 Days of Sodom.” He is to be praised for his recognition of different kinds of beauty, which enabled him to see the transcendence in both the work of the notorious Marquis de Sade and in the first (table-of-contents wise) canonical gospel.

But Pasolini’s cinematic gospel is the anti-epic. Shot with stark simplicity in bare-bones style, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW is exactly what its title suggests. This movie is the closest thing I’ve seen to a literally faithful adaptation of a biblical book. It’s barely even an adaptation. As I say, it’s essentially that gospel in film form. This shouldn’t suggest I come from the literal-rendition-is-best school of thought. I’m not. Any shift in medium generally requires adjustments. Even here in Pasonlini’s remarkably literal rendering of the Gospel of Matthew, there are slight shifts. It’s unavoidable. When moving from simple, non-descriptive prose like that of the gospel, the director must decide how things appear. What does Joseph look like (here, utterly every-day and nothing like the standard conception)? How does Yahweh’s messenger appearl to deliver messages – such as when to get moving to avoid slaughter? In this case, in the form of an androgynous youth.

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Well then. Um, you know how a movie, say, can be about stupid, but intelligently so? Or how it can use silly smartly? I hope you know what I mean because that will help you understand why I think FORBIDDEN ZONE is so brilliant. It’s one of the damned silliest things I’ve ever seen, but it’s wildly, enthusiastically, over the top demented as shit. It’s absurd as hell, and that word is key. But back to that in a moment. FORBIDDEN ZONE catapult copious amounts of zaniness, wackiness, madness, craziness, bizarreness, randomfuckness, all hyper-goofy random fuckness. It is low-browness, vulgarity, crudity and insane elevated to minimalist-expressionist subversive arthouse majesty. It’s beyond explaining. I’ll just throw some snippets from the box at you for a taste: “Frenchy”, “cosmic intestines”, “horny midget King Fausto” (the little dude from “Fantasy Island” – “dee plane, dee plane!”), “Chicken-boy”, “the Devil himself – played by Danny Elfman and the original Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.” I don’t usually quote this extensively from the package synopsis, but in this case, I think you understand why I do. And, yes, Elfman contributes musically. This is Richard Elfman’s movie and I’m assuming that’s a brother or some such. There are also old, classic jazz tracks set to deliberately horrendous lip synching. Fuck, man, there’s a lot of stuff. It’s unchecked absurdism splattered onto the screen. Yes, absurdism. Albert Camus? Look it up. Oh, and watch this movie. [Note: It's worth mentioning this DVD is the film's first appearance in color - and the first time I've ever seen a director's quote PRAISING the colorization. Takes someone with an appreciation for absurdism, I guess. *evil grin*]

Paramount Pictures 1986 crime thriller BLUE CITY is quite a bit more than the Judd Nelson/Ally Sheedy vehicle of vapidity you might suspect from the cover. “Blue City … It’s below Miami and above the law.” Judd Nelson is a surly smartass in this, so he’s reprising part of what he did in “The Breakfast Club” but where there he was a bit whiny under the ruggedness (don’t lecture me; I know it was his vulnerability; I love that movie), in BLUE CITY he puts the trademark Judd Nelson personality to use in tougher fashion. Ally Sheedy makes a perfect romantic foil and partner in crime. Their chemistry is fantastic. And by crime I mean not technically legal detective work to discover who killed Nelson’s dad, formerly the mayor of BLUE CITY. Until he was murdered. But Nelson’s been out of town and doesn’t know this. Out of town for five years, as a matter of fact. Now he’s back and on his first night … well, I’ll let the movie do the storytelling. A supporting cast that includes David Caruso, Paul Winfield, Tiny Lister, etc., makes for a strong phalanx of actors to carry off this engaging and suspenseful film that manages to be both an R-rated crime actioner and fun mystery romp.

LONG WEEKEND doesn’t do anything you’d expect a horror movie to do. Well, it doesn’t go about things the way you’d expect, anyway. And the truth of the matter is that this film tends to be more than a genre pic – it transcends its genre as I’m so fond of saying (whenever I come across a film that does so). And LONG WEEKEND is almost a blend of the old horror and the new. It’s quiet and doesn’t depend gore or excess violence. It’s not loaded down with psychological abuse – not what you’d expect, anyway – or torture. But tonally, the film IS of the new horror. And it tackles edgy subjects and isn’t about monsters. Really, it isn’t even exactly about WHEN NATURE ATTACKS!!!, though, of course, it is about that. But it’s about more. LONG WEEKEND works because of its two main characters – the ONLY people you’ll spend any time with for 99 percent of the film’s running time – a married couple with obvious problems. What they are I leave to the film to reveal for you because I wouldn’t dream of giving away such a major story development. The nature retaliation is largely carried off with subtlety. Like I said, LONG WEEKEND isn’t about shock and awe – at least not until the end, and even then no intelligence is lost and no real excess is introduced. And, in the end, it is the callous humans – with a little help from their animal antagonists – who bring havoc on their own heads. Which is likely part of the film’s message. Speaking of which, this isn’t a generic environmentalist propaganda horror film either. (Yes, that’s damn near a small subgenre; consider “Prophecy”.) Though obviously respect for our world is a component of the film’s subtext. This is more about people who can’t see beyond their own egos long enough to see the world around them and how they’re impacting it – and that includes how one impacts the people around one. Really, LONG WEEKEND uses a horror subgenre trope, strips it of its tropeness, and uses it as a foil and parallel for a discursion into the real horror – the human ego.

For fans of both campy 50s exploitation films and vintage propaganda schlock, INVASION U.S.A. represents the intersection of your pleasures. Think of this film as “Stock Footage, with Appearances by Actors.” When INVASION U.S.A. isn’t busy browbeating the viewer with military stock footage and accompanying faux newscasts to provide story context for all the stock footage, it’s lambasting you from high on its filibustery soap box with a McCarthyist spankfest. It’s at these moments we spend time with the characters, which INVASION U.S.A. kindly returns to occasionally to remind us we are watching, in fact, a movie and not a newsreel collection. INVASION U.S.A. has a lot of lots of things: bad dialogue, bad acting, bad use of stock footage, bad romantic subplotting – though I guess something original, by which I mean not ripped off WHOLESALE from elsewhere (like *cough* stock footage). One of the payoffs in this storyless drone of a film is the destruction of Hoover Dam, which goes right past unconvincing to laughable and I’m thinking it’s not just because the film hasn’t aged well. This is not just bad cinema, it’s double bad. Double dog bad, even. This is for seasoned B-movie philes only. It takes a strong person to endure such a “classic.” Are you such a viewer? Go ahead. Find out. I dare you. Double dog dare you …….