The Screengrab : gina gershon

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

Unwatchable #73: “Fascination”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

It’s time for another Unwatchable substitution. As regular readers of this column may recall, occasionally there is an entry on the IMDb Bottom 100 that I am unable to lay my eyes on. Usually it’s a foreign film despised in its own country but unknown and unavailable in mine. That’s the case with number 73 on the list – that is, the list I’m working from, which I downloaded back in April – the 2004 German film Daniel - Der Zauberer. I do wish I could have found this one, the plot of which is described thusly on IMDb: “Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols.” Alas, my efforts fell short, but we can at least enjoy the trailer together:

Anyway, in the event a film from my version of the list is unavailable, I go to the current version of the Bottom 100 list and select the first available entry that does not appear on my version. In this case it’s the erotic thriller Fascination, which many of you may have missed, given its $9,018 opening weekend in January 2005. No decimal points are missing there – the movie took in a little over nine grand on its way to a robust final tally of $16,066. It’s become a hacky staple of film criticism to note that most erotic thrillers are neither erotic nor thrilling, but hackery is definitely called for in this case. Fascination plays like something Joe Eszterhas would come up with if he was writing for Skinemax instead of Jesus Christ.

Wealthy Patrick Doherty (David Naughton) lives with wife Maureen (Jacqueline Bisset) on an exotic island paradise. It’s an idyllic existence until the day he goes for a swim and gashes his head open on a reef. Son Scott (played by a plank of driftwood called Adam Garcia) returns for Patrick’s funeral, and learns he and his mother have inherited the estate. Only a few weeks later, Maureen returns from a cruise engaged to the Euro-sleazy Oliver Vance (Stuart Wilson). Scott isn’t thrilled with this development, but he is happy to meet Vance’s daughter Kelly (Alice Evans), a British Gina Gershon with whom he is soon having acrobatic sex.

Oh, the sex. Your Screengrab pals recently participated in the Nerve/IFC 50 Worst Sex Scenes in Cinema list, and if only one of us had seen Fascination at the time, it would have qualified twice over. The first liaison between Scott and Kelly takes place on a slanted corrugated tin roof in a photogenic rainstorm that comes out of nowhere. Just when you’re thinking, “Gee, looks like fun, but also a good way to fall to your death,” Scott and Kelly slip and nearly fall to their deaths. Their next session takes a place alongside Showgirls and The Color of Night in the pantheon of laughable pool sex, as Kelly nearly drowns Scott between her legs while entertaining visions of an underwater car accident. Hey kids, how about taking that action somewhere safer, like a bedroom or the deck of an aircraft carrier? There’s also some icky father-daughter stuff between Vance and Kelly, but most of that is mercifully left to our imagination.

Well, so much for the eroticism – onto the thrills. It turns out that Scott’s saintly pop Patrick had a Chappaquiddick in his past, and as becomes clear long before it is tortuously revealed onscreen, the secretary who drowned in his car was Kelly’s mother. It also happens that Patrick’s death was no accident, as a toxicology report confirms he had Maureen’s sleep medication in his system. So who is behind Patrick’s death? Maureen? Vance? Kelly? All three?

To find out the truth, you have to get through the scene where Vance tries to blow up Maureen in a cabin and gets himself trapped inside. Then the scene where Kelly goes to his hospital bed and kills him by disconnecting his breathing tube. Then the scene where Scott goes to his hospital room to find out the truth about Kelly, and the nurse shows up just in time to catch him with the disconnected tube in his hands, and the cops arrest him for murder. Then the scene where Kelly confesses that she’s not really Vance’s daughter and Scott is, for some reason, released from custody. I did make it through all these scenes, and was rewarded with Kelly and Scott enjoying one more sweaty fuck, this one immediately following a car crash she causes. Honestly, this dumbass deserves her.

Previously on Unwatchable:
74. You Got Served
75. The Last Sign
76. Kickboxer 3: The Art of War
77. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance
78. The Quick and the Undead

The Gay Pride Top Twenty (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:45:00 GMT

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975)

By the time I first encountered the film version of Richard O’Brien’s bizarre musical paean to ‘50s horror movies and polymorphous perversity, it was already a well-established cult classic, regularly attended by freaks and frat boys, geeks and fad-of-the-week trendies. But underneath the audience-participation spectacle was a gleefully subversive last gasp celebration of gender-blind free love (before pop culture sexuality became more repressive yet somehow simultaneously more commodified, fetishized and pervasive in the neo-con '80s and '90s). The invocation of Tim Curry’s infamous sweet transvestite Dr. Frank-n-Furter to “Give yourself over to absolute pleasure” became highly questionable advice in the AIDS era; even in the no-holes-barred world of the film's Transsexual Transylvanians, Frank’s lifestyle’s too extreme (and the character, like many overreaching sensualists before him, meets a tragic demise). Yet, the Rocky cult continues to flourish, years after its early ‘80s heyday, with screenings often serving as safe havens for GLBT (and straight!) misfits seeking community, acceptance and glamour in the midst of a “Science Fiction Double Feature” lost in time, lost in space and meaning. (Mee-eeaaaaa-nnniiinnnggg!!!!)

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (2005)

According to the official Oscar narrative, 2005 was the Year of Gay Cinema, and Brokeback Mountain, which won three Academy Awards that year, was its purest expression. And that’s true, to a point; in a year that seemed to feature more mainstream movies than usual with gay themes, Brokeback Mountain, with its gorgeous scenic cinematography, its elegiac tone, and its powerhouse lead performances by the late Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as doomed, love-struck cowboys, stood out. But more than a simple movie, Brokeback Mountain was that rare thing, a cultural phenomenon: a work of art that transcends its nature as merely a good or bad, popular or unpopular, example of its type and becomes something that permeates the culture and becomes a sort of intellectual shorthand for something greater than itself. Not only did the movie provide us with a genuine catchphrase in “I wish I knew how to quit you”, but it became such a phenomenon that pundits on the left and the right used its box office numbers to defend or denigrate the mainstreaming of homosexuality. One’s very reaction to it seemed to become a referendum on gay rights. And while there’s no denying that a lot of the attention it got was of the negative sort, tinged with a base and hysterical juvenile homophobia, from the first internet wag who dubbed it Bareback Mountin’ to the last sports radio talk-show guest who used its title as a cheap butt-fuck joke, it saturated the very cultural discourse of its time. And in that way, it advanced the cause of gay cinema – and maybe of gay rights in general – more than its makers could have ever dreamed.

BOUND (1996)

Because its action unfolds mostly in a couple of apartments on what appears to be the planet Earth, it's tempting to think that Bound is the only Wachowski Brothers movie to take place in the real world, when actually it's as much a fantasy as The Matrix or Speed Racer. Gina Gershon's Corky may hang out in the sort of bars where the women are built like Brian Dennehy…but she's still built like Gina Gershon. When she hooks up with breathy femme fatale Violet (Jennifer Tilly), it's the sort of lesbian romance that two dudes from Chicago would dream up. (That is, they were two dudes at the time, Larry Wachowski's later gender bending adventures notwithstanding.) Still, their love affair isn't just Skin-emax-style titillation; it's actually handled rather matter-of-factly in what might otherwise be a pretty standard neo-noir flick. Joe Pantoliano's greasy hood Caesar may disapprove, but who cares what he thinks? Violet and Corky aren't just partners in crime, plotting to swipe two million dollars out from under the noses of Caesar and his gangster pals. They have genuine love and respect for each other, a rarity in a genre where everyone is usually out to screw everybody else.

THE COCKETTES (2002)

This tremendously entertaining documentary, directed by Billy Weber and David Weissman, records through vintage footage and new interviews the rise and fall of San Francisco's pre-eminent drug-addled co-ed transvestite hippie song and dance trip. Led by the charismatic Hibiscus, footage of whom provides grounds for a convincing argument that the Second Coming occurred sometime in the late sixties and that Jesus had to leave again but wants everyone to know that he really enjoyed the acid, the Cockettes went from improvisational dancing to the accompaniment of old records before the midnight movie at the Palace Theater to elaborate, high-camp stage musicals. Their story doubles as a parable of the bust-up of the counterculture; the troupe eventually split up over the question of whether they were in it to make money or for love of performance with quasi-religious ambitions. Hibiscus and his devotees broke apart to form the Angels of Light, while the other Cockettes stormed New York for a disastrous run on Broadway before sneering crowds of jaded, black-hearted sophisticates. They crawled back home and had a few more local triumphs (including the sci-fi extravagaza Journey to the Center of Uranus, starring special guest Divine), but time and medical bills began to tear them apart. Some of the survivors interviewed in the movie look as if they're still trying to catch their breath since having stormed the Bastille, but between their stories and the clips of the troupe in action, few movies have made a misspent youth look like such a noble and enviable calling.

LAW OF DESIRE (1987)

In 1987, American audiences shell-shocked from AIDS and the sexual revolution made a blockbuster out of Fatal Attraction, the movie that created the modern stereotype of the spurned one-night-stand turned stalker as the ultimate embodiment of the fear of the loss of control that can come with romantic obsession and sexual freedom. That same year, Pedro Almodovar, a Spaniard liberated by the death twelve years earlier of the dictator Franco, served up Antonio Banderas as a young, straight stud who experiences one night of bliss with the celebrity director Pablo (Eusebio Poncela) and is so determined to make just one more trip to the well that lays siege to his reluctant love object's life, killing the boy-man of Pablo's dreams (who's such a dullard that the audience couldn't care less) and holding his sister (Carmen Maura), who used to be his brother, hostage until his steamy demands are met. With Banderas in the role and with Almodovar nudging him on, it is very hard to watch this without thinking, "Sure wish somebody loved me enough to put a gun on my family and pitch my significant other off the nearest cliff." Some sniff at early Almodovar as a frivolous artist, but for all his camp humor and extravangance, he was deadly serious in his insistence that respect be paid to those willing to go all the way for love.

Click here for Part One, Part Two and Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: "This World, Then the Fireworks" (1997)

Phil Nugent — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 23:00:00 GMT

This past week marked the thirty-first anniversary of the death of Jim Thompson, the cult-object writer who worked on the scripts of Stanley Kubrick's The Killing and Paths of Glory, but whose real gift to film history was a shelf's worth of pulp novels (The Killer Inside Me, The Getaway, The Grifters) so intense and obsessive in their seaminess that they amount to a double-dog-dare to the movies: You think you're the repository of forbidden daydreams? Put this on the big screen! Two versions of The Getaway, including one with Sam Peckinpah's name in the credits, softened the relationship between the husband and wife bank robbers on the lam (the star of the Peckipah version, Steve McQueen, having objected to the less cheerful elements of a screenplay treatment turned in by Thompson himself); Coup de Torchon, directed by Bertrand Tavernier and based on Pop. 1280, is in motherfucking French! Even the best of all Thompson adaptations, Stephen Frears's The Grifters, is handsomely mounted and has a good vicious streak but keeps it distance from the vortex of Thompson's deeply felt hatefulness; it maps the dragon's lair down to the last molted scale but resists the urge to fling you in there by your feet and nail the door shut behind you.

To see what Thompson's special, sweaty brand of nihilistic dementia looks like uncensored, flashy but not polished, your best bet might be the 1997 This World, Then the Fireworks, based on a posthumously published Thompson fever dream. Directed by a music-video veteran named Michael Oblowitz, the movie lets you know right from its opening moments that it's not going to play coy and try to impress you with its subtle touch. The antihero and narrator, Marty, has a twin sister, Carol, and the movie opens with a little backstory interlude set on their fifth birthday. Entertainment at the party includes a shootout between their father and the wife of a woman dad's been screwing. "The man on the floor didn't have any head, hardly any head at all," Marty says, by way of explaining why he and sis got such a kick out of the festivities. Oblowitz shoots this bloody-trauma sequence in over-the-top funhouse mode, breaking out the fish-eye lenses and dousing the screen with surreally bright colors and contorted faces leaning into the camera. He doesn't pull back much when the action shifts to the "present"--which is supposed to be 1956 but looks more like some perpetual Noirville, U.S.A.--and Marty and his sister, who's become his fuck buddy, are played by Billy Zane and Gina Gershon, both looking as if they'd immigrated to our world from the covers of old paperback thrillers.

It might be a stretch to call This World a good movie, but it's true to its overheated vision in a way that's amazing to watch, partly because it makes you aware of how watered-down down pulp movies really are. Zane and Gershon thrive in this atmosphere. She's never been as eerily adorable as when she describes having suckered a couple of thugs who thought they could threaten her into staying out of their territory ("I do believe they'd never heard of chloral nitrate!"), and he looks unusually at home whether he's resigning from his job as a newspaper reporter by physically assaulting his editor (because the man has said nice things about his work, which bothers him because it makes him worry that the man might have the capacity to understand him) or romancing a masochistic woman cop (Sheryl Lee) by asking, "Are you blonde all over, or just where it shows?" If there's any real art mixed in with the cheap thrills and dazzling hype of This World, it comes from Sheryl Lee; as in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, she demonstrates a rare, brave talent for acting her character's sexual degradation that sensitizes you to the pain inside the pulp fantasy. She conveys the unhealthy attractions of Jim Thompson's cruel fantasy life even as she transcends the mindset that it grew out of.