Thanks to some bewildering log-in trouble, I wasn’t able to announce my previous update on the blog. Here’s everything I posted on my site while I was incommunicado.
First, the 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting Ultimate Hobo-Hunting Championship:
Deadly Prey (1987), which does the “Hounds of Zaroff” thing by way of Rambo…
Hard Target (1993), which is John Woo’s take on the subject…
and…
The Perverse Countess (1973), which is the first of Jesus Franco’s.
Then for the Carradine roundtable:
The House of Seven Corpses (1973), in which Carradine hams it up as a glorified red herring while a B-movie crew raise the dead…
and…
Voodoo Man (1944), in which he plays third or possibly even fourth fiddle to Bela Lugosi, who’s using black magic to repair his incapacitated wife this time around.
And finally, a bunch of stuff I just felt like watching:
Deadly Sanctuary (1968), in which Jesus Franco first tries his hand at the Marquis de Sade…
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), in which a depressed Iranian city is stalked by a depressed Iranian vampire…
Hitch-Hike (1977), in which an ill-advised vacation is made even worse by the garden variety David Hess psycho…
It Follows (2014), in which premarital sex is even more dangerous than you already realized…
Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985), in which two unfinished scripts enter, and one Frankensteinian abomination leaves…
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), in which some schmuck who you’ll never convince me is Max Rockatansky does sod-all, while an overachieving Enzo G. Castellari movie smashes a terrific feminist action flick to bloody bits…
Showgirls (1995), which remains the worst movie I’ve ever paid full price to see in first run, even after 20 years…
Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which W. Lee Wilder’s smarter brother beats Robert Aldrich to the punch by twelve years…
Toxic Zombies (1980), in which the War on Drugs inadvertently becomes a war on the undead…
and…
Traffic in Souls (1913), which set the pattern for the first 40 years’ worth of American sexploitation movies.
#1 by lyzard on June 14, 2015 - 11:54 pm
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“A bunch of stuff I just felt like watching”…what kind of system is THAT!?
#2 by lyzard on June 15, 2015 - 1:16 am
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…if you seriously haven’t seen any other Billy Wilder I would recommend to your notice Ace In The Hole aka The Big Carnival, his follow-up to Sunset Boulevard and one of the nastiest non-horror films you’ll ever see. (Or rather, it’s horror the same way that SB is horror.)
#3 by RogerBW on June 15, 2015 - 9:08 am
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Presumably a stupid local cop is more acceptable under the Code than a corrupt one.
I got the impression at the time that Beyond Thunderdome was the first series entry. Mad Max to me was a sideways take on crime-is-out-of-control films like Dirty Harry; The Road Warrior made it blatantly post-apocalyptic, and triggered all those Italian imitators; but Beyond Thunderdome felt as though it was just another imitator: The Road Warrior again but brighter and noisier. Interesting about the dual film origin; that makes a lot of sense of that change of tone.
Ah, so we can blame Showgirls for PG-13 horror? (If NC-17 doesn’t get shown, R is the hardest stuff, so R doesn’t get carried in Wal-Mart, and…)
Your comment on Verhoeven trying to send up a trashy script, but subtly, inevitably makes me think of Starship Troopers where he wasn’t even a little bit subtle about it.
#4 by Prankster on June 15, 2015 - 9:57 am
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Huh. Man. I thought making Max a peripheral character was absolutely of a piece with the whole series since Road Warrior–Max is just the dude who wanders into other people’s stories, more a viewpoint character than a protagonist. Further, the continuity in these movies has always been very loose if not actively contradictory, so making Max’s child a girl (if that’s what she was, his child?) doesn’t seem too farfetched.
I’m also surprised to hear you saying the movie confirms the nuclear apocalypse–I thought it did the exact opposite, walking it back. The opening soundbites mention some kind of nuclear destruction, yes, but they seem to link it specifically to terrorism rather than a full-scale nuclear exchange, and I’m pretty sure they mentioned resource depletion as well. Honestly, it seemed like more or less a re-do of The Road Warrior’s vague opening exposition (which also showcases a nuclear bomb going off).
#5 by ronald on June 17, 2015 - 11:22 am
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As uber-creepy a thought as it is, “spend[ing] pretty much their entire lives pregnant” at least guarantees that the harem women will be kept alive and reasonably healthy until they’re past their childbearing years (into their mid-40s or so); that’s a longer lifespan than most post-apocalyptic women AND men have any reason to expect. Sure, whether or not a long and **relatively** comfortable life as a slave is better than a short painful life as a freeperson is kind of subjective, but…well, it all boils down to just how dedicated one is to remaining alive.
#6 by Jen S 1.0 on June 16, 2015 - 7:20 pm
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A Girl… was definitely released in the US. We saw it in Seattle. Both of us loved it.
Here’s a drawing my husband did of The Girl.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bufu1SzDxM0/VXjiUfSD18I/AAAAAAAAWo0/FMj1RBkqohM/s1600/A%2BGirl%2BIs%2BWatching%2BYou.png
#7 by The Rev. on June 16, 2015 - 7:58 pm
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The House of Seven Corpses actually caught me off-guard with the zombie. I really hadn’t expected that. That, plus Carradine, probably leave me more fond of it than it deserves. It’s not something I’ll rewatch any time soon, but it was entertaining enough.
I’d been considering catching the new Mad Max movie. However, if it suffers from the same bipolar scripting that plagued Thunderdome, my thought process has gone from “Might be fun,” to “No. Just no.”
#8 by ronald on June 17, 2015 - 1:02 am
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But if Furiosa had been the star, without the drawing power of the name “Mad Max,” how many people would’ve gone to the movie? Somehow, I don’t think “The World of Mad Max Presents: Fury Road” would have caught on as well. 😉
>>>in the end, they come up with nothing that couldn’t just as well have been done by some other character [than Mad Max]
Well, when you think about it (“So don’t think about it.”), aren’t a lot of action heroes only heroes because they’re victims of soicumstances? That’s part of what it means to be an Everyman(or woman). The hero wanders into the plot, often without any intention of being a hero at all, but anyone else wandering into the identical situation could, as likely as not, be just as effective. It didn’t HAVE to be Flash Gordon who ended up on the planet Mongo as a result of Dr. Zarkov’s actions, it could just as easily have been some other guy. It didn’t HAVE to be Han Solo who got hired by Ben Kenobi, it could just as easily have been some other guy. And so on.
#9 by RogerBW on June 17, 2015 - 3:28 am
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If Furiosa had been the star, and the film been anything other than a towering success, it would have been considered more evidence that people don’t want to see female action stars.
As it is: “a generation of girls just found their Ripley.” Could be a lot worse.
#10 by Jen S 1.0 on June 17, 2015 - 1:21 am
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I see Max as a pawn of the gods, dropped on his post-psychotic break ass into story after story, to serve as a trigger for a certain series of events that couldn’t have happened in just the way they happened without his presence.
Max is a contrast to everybody else in these films in that his one wish is to stop feeling, stop remembering, and that wish is not granted. Instead, he unwillingly becomes a pivot for the crazy turning world of these movies–where people are the opposite of numb or suicidal. They care, with a savage desperation, about whatever goal they have in mind, but without Mad Max being thrust upon them things wouldn’t have lined up the way they did for them to achieve their aims.
#11 by El Santo on June 17, 2015 - 10:21 am
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Yeah, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I don’t mean “some other character” out of all the characters who could potentially exist in a given fictional universe; I mean “some other character” out of the ones who are actually in the movie. This isn’t a very high level of necessity I’m asking for. In The Road Warrior, it has to be Max playing that catalytic function because he’s the one who knows where the truck is, and because he’s the one who met the gyro-captain. In Beyond Thunderdome, Max is catalytic in Bartertown because he’s the guy who whipped Ironbar’s ass (suggesting that he might be able to take on Blaster), and in the valley for three reasons: 1. he’s the one whom the Cargo Cult Kids mistake for the second coming of Airline Jesus; 2. he’s the one who’s been to Bartertown before; and 3. he’s the one who knows where to find an extremely unhappy dwarf with the knowledge to recreate vanished technologies.
In Fury Road, though, the only time Max really affects the course of events at all is when he suggests that Furiosa gather up the War Grannies, sneak back to the Citadel, and conquer it while Immortan Joe and his army are busy trying to force a new pass through the blocked canyon. Literally everyone present (except maybe the brides, and I wouldn’t be so quick to put it past them, either) has the knowledge and experience necessary to think of that, so the only reason to put the suggestion in Max’s mouth specifically is because he’s had occasion to do nothing so far but to demonstrate his ability to take a punch, even though his name is in the freaking title.
#12 by ronald on June 17, 2015 - 11:40 am
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Re: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
“show us one shot of this one riding her skateboard around the deserted streets of Bad Shahre in the dead of night, her chador stretched out behind her on the wind like Count Dracula’s opera cape, and the loneliness comes across at full force”
Why is “skateboarding vampires” not a sub-genre in itself? 😉
“in the real world, or in any fictional world that much resembles it, serial murder is generally considered a dick move”
Which reminds me, I frequently read about how it’s a sign of the current collapse of western civilization (in contrast to the one ten years ago and the one ten years in our future) that serial killers are being presented as “heroic.” Yet aside from “Dexter,” who is basically just a continuation of the killer vigilante trope that dates back at least as far as the pulp magazines, I haven’t come across any forms of fiction that posit being a serial killer as a “good” thing. Of course, that wouldn’t be the first time that a supposed symptom of societal collapse was conspicuous in its absence…
Chador Girl kind of qualifies as a vigilante inasmuch as Saeed was abusive and killing “low-life[s] whom nobody will miss” apparently, in her eyes, qualifies as chaotic-neutral (and Arash’s non-reaction seems to indicate that Chador Girl was *right* about that). I’m sure there have been other films that present vampires as vigilantes, which is really only a step away from presenting serial killers as vigilantes, but none are occurring to me at the moment.
#13 by ronald on June 17, 2015 - 2:41 pm
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Re: Deadly Sanctuary (1968)
I have no compelling desire to actually *read* DeSade’s work and, oddly enough, neither Cliffs Notes, Masterplots, nor annotated versions of his work (where one could read the annotations while skimming over the actual content) seem to exist. Yet I’m curious (as the fact that I took the trouble to look for such things may imply): By modern standards, just how “bad” is he? Thanks.
#14 by Braineater on June 19, 2015 - 5:26 pm
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“Justine” (the original non-explicit version, on which this movie is based) isn’t bad at all, in part because Justine is pretty much his only female character that even remotely resembles a real woman. All sorts of terrible things happen to Justine as part of Sade’s moral that virtue is its own punishment, but Justine is surprisingly feisty in the face of all the horrors, and manages to present the case for the opposition rather well.
“The Crimes of Love” is a set of 3 non-pornographic novellas that you can also read without too much cringing… the third story, “Eugenie de Franval”, has been filmed a number of times.
#15 by Jen S 1.0 on June 18, 2015 - 1:43 pm
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Absolutely awful, and tiring, and boring. DeSade is creatively bankrupt.
#16 by ronald on June 20, 2015 - 1:25 pm
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Well, yes, but also “relevant.” On some level.
Also, I have no clear concept on what is considered “too far” by even today’s standards, and at least some of de Sade’s work is supposedly that. Just morbid curiosity, really, but as I’m sure many here know, the harder it is to find something, the more determined (if only subconsciously) one becomes to find it. It goes from “hm, I wonder” to “IT WILL BE *MINE*!” 😉
#17 by twm on June 26, 2015 - 11:08 pm
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POSSIBLE SPOILERS:
One thing I liked about Fury Road is that Max is far more credibly mad in this film. I also think it’s possible to square this film with the continuity of the earlier films if you assume that the reason he keeps seeing a girl who is annoyed that he didn’t save him is because his madness has resulted in his mixing-up guilt over the death of his son with guilt over having failed the kids from Beyond Thunderdome in some unspecified way. I also disagree that Max is a merely a peripheral character. He’s insane at the start, causes a number of serious problems for Furiosa and company, spends most of the film working to correct those mistakes, eliminates the heads of the Bullet Farm and Gas Town, has a turning-point when he chases the women down and suggests they head back and reclaim the Citadel, and is instrumental in the final battle. It’s just that in this film he is actually invested in the people he meets, and working to regain control of himself, rather than being a shifty outsider who is only involved because he is cutting a deal that will allow him to continue wandering around the Outback howling at the moon.
It also makes more sense to have him contribute through co-operation given that this is a feminist film, and largely about the role that men have to play in the advancement of a feminist agenda.
#18 by maggiesmith on January 12, 2022 - 5:03 pm
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In The Road Warrior, the audience assumes Max is the hero, because his name is in the title, and he’s handsome and well, the usual hero type. In the end, though, we realize that the real hero is gyrocopter pilot . He’s the one who becomes the leader on the people’s trek to the promised land; he’s even the one who gets the pretty girl with the loyal nature. Max was just a pawn used to distract the villains while the good guys sneaked out the back door. The only one who is going to miss Max is The Feral Kid.