The Screengrab : damien: omen ii

Summer of ’78: “The Bad News Bears Go to Japan”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan

Release Date: June 30, 1978

Cast: Tony Curtis, Jackie Earle Haley, Tomisaburo Wakayama, Dick Button, Regis Philbin

The Buzz: Bad News Bears! Japan! Whaddaya need, a roadmap?

Keywords: Baseball, Sequel, Japan

The Plot: The Bad News Bears go to Japan. That’s about it, but I’ll try to be a little more specific. The Bears little league team – or at least the members of the team that returned for the concluding film of this essential trilogy – see a news report indicating that the United States will not be sending a team to Tokyo to compete with the Japanese little league champions. The Bears decide they’re the team for the job, and go on TV to tell Regis why they should represent our national pastime in the Land of the Rising Sun. Degenerate gambler Tony Curtis sees the program and decides the Bears are his meal ticket; he’ll take them to Japan in exchange for the lion’s share of the profits from a potential network telecast. Once the team reaches Tokyo, the Bears disappear for large chunks of the movie, which is heavily padded with travelogue material: a karate exhibition, a wrestling match, a game show talent competition. Curtis’s gambling partners fly in three ringers for the big game in order to ensure a U.S. victory, and a brawl breaks out shortly after the match-up at the Tokyo Dome gets underway. The network broadcast falls apart, but the two teams later meet up in an old-fashioned sandlot showdown.

The Test of Time: As I proceed with this series, it’s becoming clear that I spent the summer of ’78 reading a lot of novelizations. I’ve already mentioned Damien: Omen II and Jaws 2, but I also had the Fotonovel of Heaven Can Wait and I definitely had all three Bad News Bears novelizations. Although the original Bears was one of the seminal movies of my childhood, I don’t think I ever saw the sequels on the big screen. I’m sure I wanted to see the first sequel at least, but I had limited options at that age. If it wasn’t playing at the Navy base or in the tiny two-screen theater at the mall in Ellsworth, Maine, I didn’t have much choice. In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t see The Bad News Bears Go to Japan at the time, because I had better things to do in 1978, and now I apparently don’t. The one thing I’ll say on the movie’s behalf is that it didn’t dip nearly as deeply into the waters of cultural insensitivity as I was expecting. That’s not to say it’s a nuanced look at Japan circa the late ’70s, but it’s not as offensive as it could have been. It is, however, horrible. It’s so bad that most of the original cast declined to participate. I’m not just talking about Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neal here – I mean like the kids who played Tanner and Lupus. Can you imagine how badly Tony Curtis’s career must have been going if he agreed to star in a movie that the kid who played Lupus turned down? The few Bears who do return have pretty much outgrown their cuteness, particularly pudgy catcher Englebert, now roughly the size of Haystacks Calhoun. The Bears aren’t given much to do aside from Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley), the onetime bad boy who has now been Fonzied into a sensitive punk and who gets a perfunctory romance with a Japanese girl. I’m glad Haley had that little comeback a couple years ago, because it would be sad if this was the last thing he’d ever done.

Fashion Highlights: Kelly Leak still has the look with his shiny disco shirts and bell-bottom jeans, but Curtis is tragic in a wide-collared leisure suit with gold chains. Let us not even speak of his flared baseball uniform pants.

2008 Equivalent: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, just because it’s an unrequested and unnecessary threequel that will undoubtedly suck.

Previously on Summer of '78: Heaven Can Wait

Summer of ’78: “Jaws 2”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Jaws 2

Release Date: June 16, 1978

Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Joseph Mascolo, Jeffrey Kramer

The Buzz: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

Keywords: Shark Attack, Waterskiing, Beached Whale, Lighthouse, Ribbon Cutting

The Plot: It’s been a few years since that pesky shark attack ruined the summer for the residents and tourists of the quaint New England island town of Amity. Brody (Roy Scheider) is still the chief of police, and inexplicably enough, sleazebag Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) is still the mayor. (“Re-elect Mayor Vaughn! He didn’t let all of you get eaten!”) Mrs. Brody is now working for a slick real estate developer, and eldest son Mike is a horny teenager with a sailboat. Everything seems normal, until a series of freak accidents awaken a fishy fear in Brody. Two divers disappear after stumbling upon the sunken ruins of the Orca, Quint’s boat from the first movie. A waterskiing boat blows up. A killer whale washes up on the beach with huge chunks bitten out of it. Brody’s shark fever gets out of control when he shoots up the surf in front of a huge crowd of beachgoers, only to find he’s been targeting a harmless school of bluefish. Worried that Brody will scare off all the developers, the mayor and city council give him his walking papers. But the joke’s on them, as Mike Brody and his gaggle of teen buddies learn when they go sailboat racing the next day and Amity’s new shark starts using them as its own personal concession stand.

The Test of Time: I can’t think of many movies I ever anticipated more rabidly than Jaws 2. When everyone else my age decided Star Wars was their favorite movie, I still stood by Jaws – I even remember being bummed out when Lucas’s clunky space opera overtook my beloved shark movie as the all-time box office champ. So when I heard a sequel was on the way, I was all over it. By the time the movie opened, I had already consumed the making-of book, the novelization (a cut above the usual hack job, written by Hank Searls as a follow-up to Peter Benchley’s novel, complete with a continuation of the Mafia subplot that never made it to the movies), and the Marvel comics adaptation (based on the early footage shot by original Jaws 2 director John Hancock, who was fired a few weeks into production). I think the future movie critic in me made his first appearance that day in 1978 when I walked out of the matinee show. I’m not sure I was disappointed, exactly, but I knew something wasn’t quite right. It may have been my first realization that the director was more than just the guy who called “Action!” and “Cut!” They might have both gotten their starts on Night Gallery, but there was a big difference between Steven Spielberg and Jeannot Szwarc, even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

Thirty years later, it’s a little easier to figure out. (In case you’ve lost track of Szwarc’s career, he went on to direct Supergirl and Santa Claus: The Movie, and currently helms episodes of Cold Case and Without a Trace.) With Robert Shaw’s character dead and Richard Dreyfuss deciding he had better things to do, only Scheider remained from the original Orca crew, and he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he was basically doing the sequel at gunpoint. To fill in the gap, Universal essentially fused their shark movie with a teen sex comedy, with the result that we spend much of the running time waiting for some really unappealing young actors to get eaten. Even the most effective moments in Jaws 2 are pale echoes of scenes from the first movie, as when Brody wades out into the surf, overturns a piece of driftwood, and a burnt corpse pops up. The one kernel of a new idea is Brody’s shark paranoia threatening to ruin his career and marriage; it’s possible Jaws 2 would have been more interesting if it turned out there wasn’t a shark at all, but of course, that’s a movie that would have never been made. The shark sequences are sorely lacking Spielberg’s sure-handed touch, and naturally, the bigger and better mechanical fish looks much faker than the original. Obviously, Jaws 2 wasn’t the first such follow-up – we just saw Damien: Omen II last week, after all – but it was really the birth of the blockbuster sequel, the “tentpole” movies that would come to dominate the summer season, which is reason enough to look back on it with very little fondness at all.

Quotable Quote: “Open wide!”

2008 Equivalent: A redundant sequel/remake about a powerful, dangerous beastie? The Incredible Hulk, of course.

Previously on Summer of '78: Damien: Omen II

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: May 31-June 6, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:00:00 GMT

School may be out of the summer, but we’ve still done plenty of learning this week at the Screengrab, on a variety of subjects:

Gender Studies: Heterosexual Males Survive “Sex and the City”

Current Events: When Movies Are Too Timely

Political Science: Harvey Milk and Great Black Presidents

English Literature: No Shit, Sherlock

Seventies Studies: Summer of Sam, The Way We Were and Damien: Omen II

Music Appreciation: OST “Drowning by Numbers”

Statistical Analysis: Screengrab Underestimates Ladies

Social Studies: Taverns on the Screen: Top 10 Barroom Scenes

Comparative Research: Coffy vs. Foxy Brown and Herzog vs. Ferrara

Summer of ’78: “Damien: Omen II”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

Damien: Omen II

Release Date: June 9, 1978

Cast: William Holden, Lee Grant, Jonathan Scott-Taylor, Robert Foxworth, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen

The Buzz: The son of Satan is back to raise more hell!

Keywords: Devil Child, Satanism, Ice Hockey, Attacked By Bird, Torso Cut In Half

The Plot: I'd never seen any of the Omen movies, but I do vaguely recall reading the novelizations. You know how it is; too young to see R-rated movies in the theater, but not too young to buy the book versions of same down at Mr. Paperback. (They were probably just happy I was interested in reading at all.) So I can’t tell you much about the first Omen movie, but let’s all agree to assume that Damien Thorn was born with the mark of the beast, and that those who figured out he was the Antichrist met with an untimely demise.

One of those people was Damien’s father Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck), who apparently did not have the chance to change his will before attempting to kill his own offspring with sacred daggers, because as the sequel begins, the now teenage Damien is in the custody of Robert’s brother Richard (William Holden) and his wife Ann (Lee Grant). Now a military school cadet, Damien is still unaware of his destiny as the prince of darkness, until his sergeant (played by a young-yet-craggy Lance Henriksen) tells him to check out the Book of Revelation. “For you it is just that – a book of revelation, for you, about you.” Hey, who couldn’t use one of those?

Damien learns that being the Antichrist comes with certain advantages. For example, it turns out that he’s very good at remembering historically significant dates. And, you know, he can give heart attacks to old ladies and make people plummet down elevator shafts. It takes him long enough, but eventually Richard Thorn figures out that his brother has willed him a dud, and tries to get his hands on those fancy daggers. Sadly, even William Holden is no match for Satan’s boy.

The Test of Time: I have no idea if Omen fans were satisfied with this follow-up, but if so, they must have been easily impressed. The stakes never seem particularly high in this sequel; those who grow suspicious of Damien are pretty quickly hit by trucks or fall through thin ice on the lake. And there doesn’t seem to be any urgency to get rid of him, since his destiny involves taking over a big corporation with questionable ethical policies. Heck, if he doesn’t do it, someone else will! Damien was released a few months before John Carpenter’s Halloween would usher in the era of the slasher film, so its big scares must have looked dated almost immediately. (Perhaps not quite as dated as Robert Foxworth’s frightening Luke Spencer perm, but still.) Still, it was successful enough to spawn Omen III: The Final Conflict, and now that the first Omen has been remade, who knows? Maybe Damien will be back for another round as well.

Quotable Quote: “You’re not my brother! The Beast has no brother! You were born of a jackal!”

2008 Equivalent: It’s a sequel about the son of a demon, so I’m going with Hellboy II: The Golden Army.

Previously on Summer of '78: Capricorn One