The Screengrab : Mena Suvari

Screengrab's Ultimate Exploitation Films!!!!!!! (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SPUN (2002)

If not for the evidence of the YouTube clip above, I’d be willing to believe I simply hallucinated this sleazy little movie during a hot, sleepless night in the San Fernando Valley. For example, all during the recent Awards Season, I kept hearing about Mickey Rourke’s years in the wilderness when he couldn’t find work as an actor...and yet, there he is in 2002, playing crystal meth guru The Cook alongside slumming Young Hollywood types like Jason Schwartzman and Mena Suvari (as well as Debbie Harry and Eric Roberts, who apparently did something really terrible fifteen years ago). Not that this icky, hyper-pixilated film (which, according to my pal Wikipedia, holds the Guiness Record for most edits in a full-length motion picture) would have served as much of a heartwarming comeback vehicle for anyone involved. Every character is vile, from Schwartzman’s strung-out tweaker who keeps a naked stripper (played by a very brave or very masochistic actress named Chloe Hunter, who also played the naked stomach on the American Beauty poster...thanks again, Wikipedia!) chained spread-eagle on his bed for most of the movie...to Suvari, who method acts explosive diarrhea...to Patrick Fugit, sporting really, really gross acne...to an even more spastic than usual John Leguizamo, who seems to be jerking off vigorously into a sock in the aforementioned YouTube clip (though, thankfully, I don’t really have any vivid memories of that particular plot development). Which is not to say Spun is a bad movie, exactly...at least not in the sense of being poorly made. It's just bad.

SHOWGIRLS (1995)

It’s a testament to the eternal power of this truly bewildering big-budget sexploitation potboiler that even today, a lot of critics simply can’t figure out what to make of it. Oh, it’s not good – in fact, it’s insanely, jaw-droppingly bad. But how much of that badness is by design? After all, the director, Paul Verhoeven, is a talented filmmaker who has certainly suckered us in the past, delivering sly satire on American culture disguised as blockbuster entertainment in movies like Robocop and Starship Troopers. Then again, the writer is Joe Eszterhas, who has penned a lot of shitty movies like this with no apparent irony. The story of a cheap tramp who comes to Las Vegas in a quest to determine exactly how cheap and trampy she is willing to become, Showgirls features scenes that are so horrible that they can’t possibly be serious, but which are played so seriously that there’s no way they’re a joke. What to make of the scene where Nomi (played by Elizabeth Berkley, who goes the entire movie without ever exhibiting a single recognizably human behavior) angrily eats French fries and vomits in a parking lot out of sheer rage? What to make of the scene where she has sex with a floppy-haired, floppy-souled MacLachlan as if she’s trying to banish him to another dimension? What to make of the scene where she and Gina Gershon, who has clearly sized the whole movie up as a no-win situation, debate the merits of brown rice and vegetables? If Showgirls was made by a bunch of nobodies on a shoestring budget, it would at least be comprehensible, but the fact that it was made by Hollywood heavy hitters for a king’s ransom can only leave you wondering if it’s some kind of insanely good parody of a terrible movie, or something so mind-peelingly bad that it goes, like Nietzsche, beyond good and evil.

SHAOLIN MASTER KILLER (1978)

Also known as Shao Lin San Shi Liu Fang, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, The Master Killer, and about a half-dozen other titles, this is the movie that made a huge star out of Hong Kong kung fu actor Gordon Liu, and led indirectly to the founding of the Wu-Tang Clan. (If you can, pick up the DVD version released by the Weinstein’s Dragon Dynasty company, with astonishingly geeky audio commentary by the RZA!) Before anyone started taking wushu movies seriously, they were generally meant to be exploitative grindhouse fare for urban audiences, as evidenced by their former moniker, “chop-socky flicks”. But Shaolin Master Killer was one of the first wave of post-Bruce Lee wushu epics that started to tip off critics that maybe there was something genuinely worthwhile happening in these punch-‘em-ups. The plot couldn’t be simpler: during the oppressive Manchu dynasty, a young man enters the Shaolin temple to learn kung fu, and, after passing the grueling training exercises required of a monk, uses his martial arts expertise to pursue the secular goal of freeing his people from tyranny. But even with the thin plot, there’s some great acting going on (Shaolin Master Killer features appearances by some of the greatest Hong Kong character actors of the day), and, of course, lots of the most exciting fight scenes ever put on film. You can tell what you’re in for before the movie even starts: its opening credits feature one of the most thrilling sequences in the history of wushu cinema, with the charismatic and emotional Liu performing exciting moves as the soundtrack blares, of all things, a bit of incidental music from the score to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

GOD TOLD ME TO (1976)

For some four decades, the writer-producer-director Larry Cohen has been a never-ending Roman candle of feverish activity, spitting out one punchy, high-concept idea for horror, sci-fi, and action movies and TV series after another and dressing them up with political conceits and crackpot notions that might have been filched from pamphlets found in a Greyhound men's room. His efforts are consistently undermined by low budgets, sloppy execution, and his own sledgehammer touch, but at least he's given us a filmography that can make you wonder what it might look like if its maker had been blessed with resources and talent. This bizarre take on the end-of-the-world religious-horror theme that the big studios were mining with big-budget junk like The Omen is perhaps his most tantalizing project, which means that it's the one that is most plaintively calling out to be remade by somebody who could really do justice to its sick, sick heart. People without past histories of violent criminal behavior are suddenly flipping out all over New York City, committing murders and signing off with the explanation, "God told me to." (One of the killers is a cop played by Andy Kaufman, in his film debut.) The paranoid set-up is juicy and disturbing enough to give you the willies even without Cohen's climactic twist, which basically suggests that Jesus was the product of rape by an extraterrestrial.

IF FOOTMEN TIRE YOU, WHAT WILL HORSES DO? (1971)

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was a subterranean wave of so-called “Christploitation” movies coming out of the American south – cheaply made, often gory and tawdry tales of sensationalist sin, usually with more than a bit of Apocalyptic flavor. A number of these made their way to the Southern Baptist church of my youth, and by far the most demented of these was If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?. Directed by Christploitation superstar Ron Ormond and based on a sermon by the wonderfully named Rev. Estus W. Pirkle, a Tim Kazurinsky lookalike who appears in the film reading in his hysterical hillbilly squeak, the movie posits itself as a dire warning. If America does not undergo a massive church revival in the next few years, Pirkle bleats, it will surely signal the beginning of an invasion by Communist forces that will spell the end of Christianity as we know it. That’s only the beginning: as a fallen churchwoman overacts madly in the pews, Pirkle and Ormond paint a woozy picture of the nightmarish future America under Soviet rule. People are forced to stomp all over a glossy portrait of Jesus! Those who do not renounce their faith are beheaded, machinegunned, or forced to have bamboo rods jammed into their ears until they vomit! Schoolchildren will be compelled to pray to Fidel Castro for free candy! Featuring a no-star cast of locals from Pirkle’s church portraying badly dressed commisars, and a Communist invasion force so ill-equipped that they drive their victims around in a beat-up old pickup truck, If Footmen Tire You is really something to behold. To 11-year-old me, it was terrifying; to anyone grown up enough to see it for what it is, it’s utterly laughable.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four & Six...and don't say we didn't warn you!!!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

Half Measures: Paul Clark's Favorites of the First Half of '08

Paul Clark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Last week, Screengrab’s Andrew Osborne shared with you his favorite movies from the second quarter of 2008, so I figured that I might as well get in on the act as well. Unlike Andrew, I’ll be writing about my favorite releases dating back to the beginning of the year, mostly because I didn’t write one of these back in April. But I’d like to concur with Andrew’s statement that the moviegoing year, like so many others, started slowly but quickly improved in quality as it continued, with both big-budget blockbusters and limited-release arthouse fare making strong showings thusfar.

My top five:

1. The Duchess of Langeais- had Jacques Rivette not made a film called L’Amour Fou forty years ago, he very well might have given his most recent film that title. Based on a novel by Balzac, Duchess often plays like a mirror image of The Age of Innocence- only this time, the knowledge (and flouting) of propriety only serves to drive an emotional wedge between the two lovers. The Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her officer (Guillaume Depardieu) must play games with each other in lieu of an actual relationship, and almost imperceptibly their innocent courtship spirals out of their control. All the while, Rivette’s formal boldness remains intact, resulting in his best film in over a decade- no mean feat for a master of Rivette’s standing.

2. WALL*E- speaking of masters, was anyone really surprised that Pixar’s latest turned out as wonderful as it did? In perhaps their most experimental gambit to date, much of WALL *E is practically dialogue-free, as director Andrew Stanton and his team make most of their points visually. And what visuals! So beautifully-rendered is the dusty Earth future of the film’s first half that the more traditionally eye-popping second half (with its interstellar mega-mall) looks almost chintzy by comparison, like all the life and heart was drained from it. Which is of course the point, as WALL*E’s message isn’t so much anti-corporate as anti-complacency, celebrating the industriousness and determination of its robotic protagonist while despairing of those who would content themselves with having their decisions made and lives lived for them.

3. Stuck- like The Duchess of Langeais, Stuart Gordon’s latest film tells the story of a man and a woman locked in a tragic, fateful duet. The difference is that this one is about a guy who gets stuck in a windshield. There’s nothing pretty about Stuck, from Gordon’s grimy visuals and grayish color palette to the behavior his film portrays, as the film’s anti-heroine (played by Mena Suvari) hides the accident victim (Stephen Rea) in her garage rather than risk jeopardizing the insignificant promotion she supposedly has coming to her. Stuck is a film born of its working-class setting, in which the poor fight over the scraps the rich give them, with little regard for the lives of those who get in their way. It’s ugly, harrowing stuff, but it’s also thrilling like the best exploitation films are, and Stuck is one of the best movies of this kind to come along in ages.

4. Paranoid Park- for years, Gus Van Sant has specialized in films about outsiders, but this is the closest he’s come thusfar to seeing the world through an outsider’s eyes. Much of the credit goes to the subjectivity inherent in Van Sant’s favored style, which he perfects with this film, as he follows a marginalized teenager (newcomer Gabe Nevins) who views his world- his parents, his peers, his girlfriend- from a distance, even before the killing he may or may not have been responsible for causes him to sever emotional ties from them altogether. He would sooner escape into his own mind as find a place for himself in this world, a point Van Sant makes most vivid in the scene where the protagonist takes a shower as the soundtrack becomes overrun with rainforest sounds. Simultaneously nightmarish and poetic, Paranoid Park is a major work by a filmmaker who remains as experimental as ever.

5. Speed Racer- yes, really. I sort of wonder if the overwhelming critical drubbing that was afforded the Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the animated series was due to the directors’ key inspirations- comic books, video games, Saturday morning cartoons- not being part of the critics’ pasts. Granted, I too was skeptical about the film going in, but it didn’t take long for it to win me over. I’ll be damned if I can find a subtext, but with its dazzling array of eye-popping colors, deliberately unrealistic effects, and snazzy edits (Ang Lee could take a lesson in the latter from the Wachowskis), that scarcely matters. The racetrack scenes alone gave me that rush that all big summer movies promise but which few deliver, playing like the Day-glo daydream of a Pixie Stick-fueled kid racing and smashing up Matchbox cars. Plus there are ninjas, and as any young boy can tell you, ninjas make every movie better.

The Jailbait Sweet 16 (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:30:00 GMT

AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999)

This modern day take on Lolita, reviled by some, adored and Academy-Awarded by others, tells the story of Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey), a miserable hen-pecked middle-aged loser reinvigorated by a surge of life-altering lust for the sexually aggressive friend (Mena Suvari) of his mopey teenage daughter (Thora Birch). To attract Suvari’s character, Angela, Burnham starts working out, pumping up his body while channeling happy memories of his irresponsible, pot-smoking youth. Eventually, Burnham gets his wish to have sex with Angela...but, upon learning that the allegedly promiscuous girl is actually a virgin, he pulls back from the brink at the last moment, suddenly remembering that he is, in fact, an adult. And then he gets shot in the head...a nice, throwback moment to the old Hays Code days when moral transgression always led to a grisly end, cautioning the rest of us against stepping over the line. Yet transgression is part of the film’s DNA, and while I can appreciate the reasons why certain people hate this movie (the artifice, the middle-aged lust thing, the Spacey Smarm Quotient), I nevertheless enjoy the message of the smart Alan Ball script that we are not defined by our age, our possessions, or the way we’re perceived, and lying to ourselves about who we’d rather be instead of accepting who we really are leads to heartache, rage, bad relationships and, occasionally, bullets in the head. Like many dirty old men before him, Lester Burnham thinks he wants sex with a much younger woman, but what he really wants is to simply be much younger, with all of life’s possibilities ahead rather than fading away in the rearview mirror.

AMERICAN PIE (1999)

And speaking of fin de siècle movies with “American” in the title co-starring Mena Suvari...this raunchy-sweet comedy was a throwback to 1980s teen sex comedies like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Risky Business, Porky’s, Screwballs, Losin’ It, The Last American Virgin, Zapped! and etc., etc. etc. Yet somehow, despite scenes of adolescent pie-fucking, discussions of inappropriate relations with a flute at teenage band camp, tons of high school sex and the deflowering of a pubescent boy by a predatory Mary Kay Letourneau-esque older woman, American Pie barely raised a flicker of controversy upon its release, possibly because it was simply too funny and ridiculous to get all het up about...but also perhaps because of the genuine affection writer/directors Chris and Paul Weitz had for their characters, male and female, as opposed to presenting them as figures of scorn and/or inflatable sex dolls (or just so much bloody meat, like the unfortunate young victims in any number of slasher flicks from Halloween to Hostel, where sex literally equals death). As the esteemed Mr. Pierce’s notes in an earlier post on Lolita, Nabokov’s book, for all the controversy surrounding it, was actually funny...and American Pie, a kind of classic in its own right, proves once again that sometimes the best way to deal with the scary issue of sex is simply to laugh.

FREEWAY (1996)

And then there’s the less funny side of sex: molestation, prostitution and violence against women, all of which is faced and overcome by a modern day So-Cal Red Riding Hood in this astonishing exploitation film by jailbait auteur Matthew Bright, whose fetish for pigtails and ponytails drove him to personally style the hair of his actresses...which must make him a creep, right? And yet, despite Bright's seemingly shady fascination with underage sexuality, this is one of the most empowering, ass-kicking girl power movies I’ve ever seen. Reese Witherspoon leaves this one off her resume, and yet her portrayal of the indomitable white trash warrior Vanessa Lutz is, hands-down, the single best performance of her career, promising a future of nitro-fueled intensity that (Tracy Flick aside) pretty much fizzled into perky romantic comedy fluff. Remember how cool Emilio Estevez was in Repo Man before he became...y’know, Emilio Estevez? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. The story pits Witherspoon’s illiterate, underage Lutz against a crack whore mother (Amanda Plummer), an abusive stepfather, the L.A.P.D. and, most notably, Kiefer Sutherland as the story’s Big Bad Wolf, Bob Wolverton (get it?), a leering bogeyman of a sexual predator. The escalating verbal and physical warfare between Lutz and Wolverton taps into something downright primal and possibly Freudian, as if Bright is investing all his forbidden love for the raw sexuality and electric vitality of youth into Lutz and all the self-loathing shame surrounding his secret, twisted obsessions into Wolverton, then letting the two duke it out in a steel-cage match. The result is the greatest B-movie John Waters never made, a loud, raucous, thriller with jaw-dropping stretches of pitch-black comedy and a truly startling cameo by the queen of Jailbait Cinema, the one and only Brooke Shields, who shows up (along with Mr. Bright’s even more peculiar sequel to Freeway) in part three of this list.

KIDS (1995)

In Kids, the first feature directed by the legendary photographer Larry Clark, a bunch of teenagers spend a day and a night wandering around New York City in the summer. They have sex, shoplift, beat the crap out of somebody, take drugs, and have an orgiastic party. There's no plot to speak of, but there is a suspense hook: Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) has just learned that she's contracted AIDS from the mushmouthed, seventeen-year-old lothario Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), a serial deflowerer of girls who imagines that his sexual partners will always remember him if he's their first but who loses any interest in them after that, and she sets out to try to find him before he can rack up his next intended victim, Ruby (Rosario Dawson). (She is unsuccessful in this.) The whole movie is sunk so deep inside its obsessions with selfish teenage kicks that it gives the feeling that the screen could use a bath. When it first appeared, Kids was THE controversial indie film of its season, and it was defended by some moralists who argued that Clark and his twenty-two-year-old screenwriting partner Harmony Korine were obviously showing us these youngsters acting like animals--which is the closest thing they have to an interesting quality--as a "wake-up call" to parents. Please. Clark's subsequent films (Bully, Wassup Rockers), and for that matter the photo collections with which he'd made his name (Tulsa, Teenage Lust) have only served to confirm that Clark likes to film teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking because he likes to watch teenagers babbling incoherently, acting out nastily and fucking; pointing a camera at it gives him an excuse to indulge in his hobby, which he is of course entitled to share with others who have similar interests. Those of us who used to get bored with such things after about three minutes even when we were teenagers need to look elsewhere.

HARD CANDY (2005)

At 21, Ellen Page sure is a hard-working gal. Juno may have made her a star when it opened late last year, but in recent months we've seen the arrival of three other movies in which she stars or has prominent roles (Smart People, The Tracey Fragments, and An American Crime, which played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival but recently premiered on Showtime cable). In fact, the success of Juno was the explosion coming at the end of a long fuse set by the cult home video success of Hard Candy, a two-character drama that uses the then-teenaged actress's mixture of seductiveness and spikiness for all it's worth. She plays a 14-year-old who has struck up an Internet correspondence with an adult photographer (Patrick Wilson); when she meets him for the first time, she invites herself back to his place with the promise of hearing a Goldfrapp mp3 he boasts of having. Once they get back to his place, it turns out that she's springing a trap; taking him prisoner, she informs him that she knows that he's a pedophile who's involved in the murder of a girl, and she proceeds to torture him, threaten him with exposure and castration, and cajole him to do the right thing and commit suicide. It's to Page's considerable credit that, by turns enticing, alarming, and outright scary, she remains fascinating throughout, even though she can't make her character believable; she has a degree of infallible self-assurance that would be hard to buy in a SWAT team leader, let alone a 14-year-old girl playing cat and mouse with a psycho on his home turf. Her choicest moment of degradation for her prey may be when, having gotten him where she wants him, she casually reveals that she actually thinks Goldfrapp is pretty lame. Other movies (such as The Professional) know that the viewer's inner pedophile will be flattered by seeing a young girl insist that she wants the older man even if he has the nobility (and the box-office savvy) to not follow through; Hard Candy knows that, while castration threats are pretty bad, the best way to make the older man shrivel up is to let him know that, when he thought he was being cool and up to date, he was actually sounding like an old fart.

For more jailbait: Part One, Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent