The B-Masters Cabal

Confession may be good for the soul, but it can be bad for the public image. While our loyal readers may think of us as the font of all b-movie knowledge – no, no! don’t bother to pretend! – the fact is that sometimes we’re just…well, winging it. But no more! For our next Roundtable, we B-Masters will be risking our reputations, baring our souls, and publically ‘fessing up to some of the more embarrassing gaps in our resumes.

The titular character in Freaky Farley (2007) is the oddball in a small New England town who likes to peep in windows.
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What, you people want MORE to your movies? Sheesh! How demanding!

[Auto-posted because I’m on vacation. Hello, future!]

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For the latest installment of That Was Then, This Is Now, Chad Denton, Zack Handlen and myself try something a little different, examing how film-makers from three distinct eras in the history of cinema went about the problem of bringing to the screen that most idiosyncratic of writers, Edgar Allan Poe. 

We also discuss Poe’s writing generally, look at how well (or not) our films reflect their sources, and have a chat about cinema’s apparently irrestible urge to turn Poe into one of his own fictions.

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Edgar Allen Poe (1909) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Avenging Conscience (1914) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Raven (1915) at And You Call Yourself A Scientist!

The Premature Burial (1962) at The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Black Cat (2007) at The Duck Speaks

And The Conversation
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GI JOE: THE MOVIE
The movie jumps right into the action, assuming that if you don’t already know who the characters are, you probably aren’t watching anyway. After an opening montage that affords the Joes an opportunity to pose majestically on the top of the Statue of Liberty (and represents the coolest part of the whole movie), the action proper picks up with Cobra Commander (voiced by the legendary Chris Latta, who also lent his trademark shriek to The Transformers‘ Starscream) and a guy named Serpentor screaming at each other. As was established in the comic and the show, Cobra Commander is constantly vying for control of his own organization against a guy named Serpentor, who was engineered from the DNA of history’s greatest conquerors to be the ultimate warrior. Cobra Commander should have known better than to trust the work of a genetic researcher who walks around shirtless and wearing a billowing purple cape, though, because it turns out that the guy (Dr. Mindbender) didn’t take into account how many of history’s greatest conquerors were insane. Thus, Serpentor emerged as something of a mixed bag, and everyone should have been clued in to his instability as soon as he started insisting on wearing an hilarious snake costume 24 hours a day.

You would think that a movie that seems inspired by a classic movie (High Noon) would have studied the classic movie carefully, but the makers of 3:15 don’t seem to have done so. The punishment I’m giving these filmmakers for making a dull and badly-made movie concerning one teenager’s struggle against a gang is to stay after school.

In Tough Assignment (1949), a news reporter and his photographer wife go undercover to get the story on a cattle rustling ring that’s been strong-arming the local butchers to buy their bootleg beef.

No, seriously, that’s the premise.

And in unrelated matters, please see this blog post: What should I do with ZombieMart?

BLACK EAGLE

If you want vintage Sho Kosugi, you are better off watching Revenge of the Ninja. If you want James Bond with a splash of 80s casualness, you are probably better off just watching The Living Daylights. But if you don’t mind somewhat slack and flawed, cheap action films, Black Eagle isn’t completely shabby, though I seem to be a lonely voice in saying this movie wasn’t all that bad (The Soldier was much worse, for example, even though it had Klaus Kinski in it). The Malta location allows it to have an air of the jet set about it, even if it’s not really trotting the globe all that much. It doesn’t look cheap. The plot never quite seems to know what it’s up to, but ultimately, it becomes inconsequential anyway. As Kosugi’s swan song (his next movie was a schizophrenic action-comedy remake of Zatoichi, the Blind Sowrdsman, but Rutger Hauer was the star), it encompasses all the strengths and flaws that defined Kosugi’s career and completes the man’s journey from shadowy ninja assassin to cut-rate James Bond with some throwing stars. Like a lot of other low-budget action stuff from the era, it manages to be just good enough without actually being all that good.

The Black Room (1935), which somehow manages to benefit from leaving not a single gothic cliche unemployed…

Cape Fear (1991), in which Respected Artists do no better at recapitulating greatness than Stephen Somers or Rob Zombie…

Ghoul Sex Squad (1991), in which Chinese hopping vampires need love, too…

Private Lessons (1980), in which young Eric Brown lives the dream…

The Road Warrior (1981), in which more turns out to be better after all…

The Running Man (1987), in which a pseudonymous Stephen King novel awakens one morning from uneasy dreams, and finds itself changed in its bed into a stupid action movie…

Strange Invaders (1983), in which a little piece of the 50’s wanders into the 80’s, and no one quite knows what to make of it…

and…

Thirteen Women (1932), in which a little piece of the 80’s wanders into the 30’s, and no one quite knows what to make of it, either.

I must be an excessively moral person.  I’m trying desperately not to “give it all away” in my description of Paradise Hills (2007), and yet the writer/producer/director gives it all away in the first ten minutes.  Heck, the “twist” is right there in the back-of-the-case copy for the self-distributed DVD.  I must be a nicer guy than even I realized.

KORKOSUZ
The best way I can think to describe the job Serdar the actor does is to liken him to an alien shape shifter who is struggling both to control his new human face and also comprehend how to express human emotion. While buried, Serdar is supposed to be expressing, I assume, the idea that “it is hot,” and later, “it is rainy.” But the thing he does with his face is just… I have no idea. It looks like he’s in the middle of suffering a stroke, and while his face is contorted by the experience, he’s also bored by it. All the while, Ziya keeps coming out to scream at poor Serdar, convinced by standard issue criminal paranoia that Serdar is an enemy. Finally, in order to prove allegiance, Serdar is ordered to deliver yet another rival criminal to Ziya’s compound. Ziya, of course, plans to kill Serdar once the mission is under way, which seems like a complicated way to go about killing a huge dude with a demonstrable skill for survival and handling a giant knife, especially when you previously had him buried to his neck in the mud. In a more complex film, one could attribute this to Ziya’s mounting psychosis, the feeling that everyone is out to get him somehow clouding his sound judgment. But I think, mostly, Inanc just needed a way to get Serdar out of the mud so we could move things on toward the finale, in which Serdar will tear around in a jeep for a while until it’s time to decimate Ziya’s forces by employing a knife, a Turkish commando force, and an RPG that goes “thoop” when fired.