The Screengrab : larry cohen

Taxing Time: A Screengrab Salute To Beat The Clock Cinema (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 21:00:00 GMT

CELLULAR (2004)

Despite flying under many moviegoers’ radars in 2004, David R. Ellis’ Cellular is a crackerjack thriller that overcomes its somewhat preposterous central conceit via unflagging breakneck energy. Co-written by B-movie master Larry Cohen, the story hinges on a kidnapped woman (Kim Basinger) using a smashed telephone to make a random call to the cell phone of a stranger (Chris Evans). Basinger successfully convinces Evans to help her escape her predicament, though complications arise at every turn, from dying cell phone batteries, to the cops’ unwillingness to lend a hand, to a bit of signal-crossing that forces Evans to steal someone else’s cell phone and car. Bolstered by a strong cast that also includes Jessica Biel as Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Jason Statham as Basinger’s kidnapper, and William H. Macy as a police officer, and enlivened by director Ellis’ no-nonsense, pulse-pounding orchestration of his various high-wire set pieces, Cellular remains the type of efficient, no-frills genre flick that Hollywood has – save for the rare exception – mostly given up on in favor of high-concept, big-budget spectaculars. (NS)

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)

Jonathan Demme’s 1991 serial-killer fantasia has been so celebrated (after winning a shocking number of Oscars and turning Dr. Hannibal Lecter into a household name) and its performances so justifiably celebrated that it’s easy to forget: at its heart beats a good old-fashioned thriller, cleverly conceived and exquisitely realized. A huge amount of the tension in a movie crammed full of it derives from the fact that Anthony Hopkins’ Dr. Lecter knows exactly what the murderous Buffalo Bill is up to, but he doesn’t care. As he notes, he has all the time in the world, but as for Bill’s latest victim – “Tick tock”, he says with casual menace. Even after it’s become clear that Lecter is doling out information as part of an overarching plan to free himself, the movie never stops screwing with the bloody deadline it’s set; when Buffalo Bill’s house is finally raided, it’s a masterful fake-out that only increases the tension. Demme and his screenwriter, Ted Tally, deserve tons of credit for adding psychological depth and character to what is, at heart, a terrifically paced old-school murder mystery. (LP)

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES (1971)

This camp horror classic stars Vincent Price as a brilliant madman outfitted with a voice box, a Moe Howard haircut, and the red-rimmed eyes of a lifetime High Times subscriber. Peeved at the medical team he blames for the death of his beloved wife -- and if you looked like this and managed to find a beautiful woman who wanted to marry you, you'd take the loss of her hard, too -- Price sets about dispatching them by means of a series of murder plots inspired by the plagues that God, under Charlton Heston's supervision, once inflicted on Egypt. The climactic zinger is a terrifically tense draining-hourglass sequence that is Price's version of the curse that claimed the country's first born sons. Instead of killing the chief surgeon (Joseph Cotten), he kidnaps and drugs the man's son, implants a key inside the boy's chest near his heart, and leaves him lying on a surgical table beneath an acid-filled container. Doc Cotten has six minutes to perform the delicate surgery necessary to retrieve the key so he can free the boy and move him out of the way before the acid eats its way through and destroys his face. In the end, Cotten pulls it off, and the acid falls on Price's mysterious woman assistant, who thus forfeited the chance to appear in the sequel. (PN)

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958)

This little-seen but influential 81-minute noir, directed by Irving Lerner on a low budget, stars Vince Edwards as a businesslike hit man who hits Los Angeles and hooks up with a couple of mooks who are to support him in his efforts to kill a government witness who is being kept under heavy guard while waiting to give testimony against Mr. Big. Despite its brief running time, the movie is to most race-against-time films what O. J. Simpson's televised 2004 tour of California was to Vanishing Point. To his assistants' consternation, the brainy Vince chooses to while away his first few days in the city before turning to his work, only to explode when he discovers that the target is a woman -- not because he has any philosophical or sentimental objections to killing a woman, but because he regards women as more "unpredictable" than men, which makes them more likely to veer from the routines on which he bases his elaborate murder plans. After a re-negotiation of his fee, Vince sets to work, but damned if there doesn't seem to be something to his gender-based theory. After bombing out a couple of times. and with the clock ticking down, Vince breaks character and makes a last, desperate, hands-on stab at dispatching his target, finally coming to grief in the end. It's an unusually zen thriller. (PN)

Cut the red wire, the green wire...or Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!!!!

Contributors: Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

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

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

POULTRYGEIST: NIGHT OF THE CHICKEN DEAD (2006)

A while back, I started blogging about the summer I spent working for Troma Films as a production assistant (and eventual second assistant director, co-screenwriter and co-star) of the company’s terrible, terrible superhero spoof, Sgt. Kabumikman, NYPD. One of these days, I’ll eventually continue that tale, but in a nutshell, Troma (which allegedly stands for Tits R Our Main Attraction) was founded in 1974 by Yale grads Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz to produce and distribute softcore sex romps and, eventually, their own unique brand of gross-out message movies, chock full of gratuitous monsters, violence, nudity and critiques of corporate malfeasance. The fact that Troma’s stayed in business for so many years as one of the only truly independent production companies in America would probably be more inspiring if their exploitation films weren’t so consistently godawful (despite the cult popularity of “hits” like The Toxic Avenger, Tales From The Crapper, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.). Having watched (and even helped to create) hours and hours of the company’s poorly acted, juvenile and just plain ugly swill, I must say I was pleasantly shocked by the uncharacteristically high quality of the poopy jokes in Poultrygeist, the company’s most recent major release. Not only is the cast star-studded (well...there’s a cameo by Ron Jeremy and a hall-of-fame gross-out performance by Troma regular Joe Fleishaker), but the romantic leads (Jason Yachanin and especially the radiant Kate Graham) seem like honest-to-god actors...y'know, with actual careers ahead of them. The script and direction are noticeably smarter and tighter than most past efforts, and best of all: it’s a musical, with song and dance numbers at least ten times better than Baz Luhrmann’s recent Oscar monstrosity. And why not? After all, there’s no rule that says exploitation movies have to be terrible...just as long as they’re shocking, bloody and gloriously naked.

MANIAC COP (1988)

It has an awesomely blunt, cheesy title. It was directed by Maniac’s William Lustig. And it was written by It’s Alive’s Larry Cohen. Toss in Bruce Campbell, and what you have is potential B-movie heaven. Unfortunately, Maniac Cop didn’t turn out to be the ne plus ultra of slasher flicks, but it is the type of rough-around-the-edges horror film that delivers splatter imbued with some mildly potent undercurrents. Offering up a classic return-of-the-repressed scenario, Lustig’s story concerns a detective’s (genre legend Tom Atkins) search for a homicidal cop, whose crimes have been pinned on an innocent officer (Campbell). The real culprit is a resurrected boy-in-blue who’s hell-bent on exacting revenge against the bureaucrats responsible for his death, a group of government cretins whom Cohen’s script gleefully skewers before sending to grisly deaths. Politically charged as it is, however, Maniac Cop’s critique of the powers-that-be never interferes with its low-budget thrills and kills, including a great one involving a man’s face and some wet cement.

GATOR BAIT (1974)

As the internationally renowned author of Hick Flicks: The Rise and Fall of Redneck Cinema, it would hardly be appropriate for me to participate in an exploitation movie roundup without including a little something from the wild world of hixploitation. Since the poster for Gator Bait happens to be hanging on my living room wall mere inches from where I now sit – hick chick supreme Claudia Jennings giving me a come-hither look (or maybe that’s an I’ll-rip-your-tongue-out look) as I blog in my boxer shorts – it seems like as good a choice as any. In this “redneck romper-stomper” from Louisiana mom-and-pop team Ferd and Beverly Sebastian, Jennings and her form-fitting Daisy Dukes star as Desiree Thibodeau, a bayou woman turned Death Wish-style vigilante after her little sister is murdered by depraved hillbillies. Desiree uses her sexual wiles and her swampy know-how, employing such tried-and-true tactics as the ol’ sack of snakes trick to pick off her toothless, inbred foes one by one. The sleaze-meter runs into the red zone early and often (Desiree’s little sister avoids being gang-raped only because the nutless hillbilly freaks out and blasts her between the legs with a shotgun), and Jennings’ Cajun accent is shaky at best, but her confident embodiment of the sexy action hero is indisputable.

B. J. LANG PRESENTS (1971)

One function of low-budget movies is to give employment to new actors on the rise or veteran performers who are down on their luck. When a good actor is practically the only thing a filmmaker has in his arsenal, you may get to see just what he can do when forced to single-handedly keep a movie on life support. But it's hard to think of another one-man show quite like this one. Also known under the title The Manipulator, it is the only film directed by one Yabo Yablinsky, and stars Mickey Rooney as a theatrical lunatic who has kidnapped a woman (Luana Anders) and spirited her to his backstage lair. Anders has practically nothing to do but whimper and stare at Rooney in disbelief, and the only other real member of the cast is Keenan Wynn, who turns up out of nowhere for no particular reason at the very end, leading the viewer to speculate that Yablinsky must have found an extra fifty dollars under the couch cushions on the last day of shooting. There's a story that Klaus Kinski was once working on a movie on which filming was stalled while the director grappled with a problem in the script, and Kinski announced, "There is no problem. I have the solution: Put the camera on me!" B. J. Lang Presents is Mickey Rooney's Klaus Kinski close-up. For an hour and a half you get to watch him race about the set, throw props around, babble endlessly to himself, babble endlessly to mannequins, talk to himself in funny voices that he thinks are the voices of the mannequins talking back, laugh maniacally, just stand there maniacally, dance and twirl a broomstick in comically speeded-up motion, dress up as Cyrano de Bergerac, and give a suspiciously convincing impersonation of a man who didn't know until this very scene that Keenan Wynn was also in this movie. At times you may wonder if Yablinsky paid Rooney for his work in this film or if Rooney paid him, but I confess to finding his go-for-broke turn fascinating, even mesmerizing, recalling in equal parts Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in The Entertainer and Jerry Lewis at the point around 4 A.M. Sunday during the Labor Day telethon when his latest infusion of caffeine kicks in just as his meds are wearing off. Every actor worth his salt ought to have one of these on his IMDB page. They'd probably sleep better for it.

DANCE HALL RACKET (1953)

This sixty-minute ball of sleaze is notable for being the closest that Lenny Bruce ever got to his lifelong dream of breaking into movies. The big studios thought the controversial comic was too hot to handle, and though he himself initiated this project and wrote the script, he apparently didn't see it as an opportunity to allay their fears by showing his warm and fuzzy side. Directed by Phil Tucker -- it was his first film, made the same year that he threw a diving helmet on a guy in a gorilla suit and called the result Robot Monster -- it's almost entirely set in and around the titular establishment, where dime-a-dance girls (one of whom is played by Lenny's stripper wife, Honey Harlowe) tend to the customers up front while all kinds of shady doings are going on in the back. (The plot involves a smuggler who's brought precious jewels into the country sewn into the ear of a puppy.) Lenny plays Vinnie, the cretinous, switchblade-flipping assistant to Timothy Farrell, a dead-faced actor with a mustache who looks like Wayne Newton gone horribly, horribly wrong. (Farrell appeared in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda? and Jail Bait and the Wood-scripted The Sinister Urge, and it would be an understatement to say that he always played the same kind of character; in fact, Dance Hall Racket was the third picture, after The Devil's Sleep and Racket Girls, in which his character was named "Umberto Scalli." Maybe he had trouble remembering that the other actors in a scene were addressing him unless they called him by a name that he had gotten used to.) In the end, Lenny is killed while the audience is still trying to digest the energetic cameo appearance by his mother, Sally Marr, and the reporter who is being told the story of the Dance Hall Racket case in the framing sequence closes his notebook with an impressed whistle. Bruce died in 1966, five years before he finally got to be associated with a good movie, when director John Magnuson used one of his greatest standup routines as the soundtrack and basis for the 1971 animated short Thank You Mask Man.

Beware Of Part One, Two, Four, Five & Six!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

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

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:30:00 GMT

GLEN OR GLENDA? (1953)

By high school, I’d seen plenty of artsy foreign films and indies (not to mention a decade's worth of Saturday morning creature double features on UHF), but I’m pretty sure Glen or Glenda? was the first real exploitation flick I ever saw (at least on the big screen), followed by a half dozen more during a day-long marathon at the late-lamented Off The Wall Cinema in Central Square, Cambridge. Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s impassioned fauxcumentary -- about a man (Wood himself) who can work better, think better, even play better, and be more of a credit to his community and his government, in satin undies, a dress and a sweater of finest angora -- was unlike anything I’d ever seen, less a work of art than a Rorschach snapshot of a fringe perspective far beyond mainstream standards of taste, commerciality and talent (in...uh...the traditional sense). Before long, I knew everything about Ed Wood, Jr. and his merry band of misfits, but few cinematic experiences in my life, before or since, have been so bizarrely disorienting as my baffled first encounter with the spectacle of stampeding buffalo superimposed over Bela Lugosi’s impassioned command to “PULL THE STRING!” Wood may have only been exploiting himself (and, I suppose, Lugosi), but respectable Hollywood movies are rarely this fascinating, sincere or unique.

THE TRIP (1967)

Roger Corman was never slow to jump on a trend, so it’s no surprise that he was first out of the gate when the LSD craze hit in the 1960s. Ever the consummate professional, Corman sampled the drug while camping at Big Sur and by his own account, had a mighty fine time doing so. Nevertheless, in the course of his diligent research he had come across some mentions of what the hippies termed “bad trips,” and felt compelled to present a more balanced picture of the hallucinogen’s effects than his own experience had provided. Peter Fonda stars as TV commercial director Paul Groves, a straight-arrow type who decides to take an acid trip as a means of dealing with his pending divorce. Even for a novice like Groves, certain ground rules should be self-evident, the primary one being: when tripping for the first time, you do not want Bruce Dern to be your guide. The man is not possessed of a soothing bedside manner, to say the least. All seems to be going well for Groves at first; he stares at his hands and entertains deep thoughts about the significance of the phrase “living room,” and experiences vivid hallucinations in which he runs around the sets from Corman’s old Poe movies. (Even while experimenting, it seems, Corman never took his eye off the bottom line.) Groves’ trip takes a turn for the worse when he convinces himself he’s killed his creepy guide and, panicked, races out into the Hollywood night. He proves to be an even worse judge of character than we’d previously suspected when, at the height of his freaked-out paranoia, he turns to Dennis Hopper for solace. He also has a proto-Robert Downey Jr. moment when he wanders into a Hollywood Hills mansion and watches TV with a little girl until he is chased away. None of this strikes me as a ringing endorsement of the drug, but apparently it was still too ambiguous for distributor AIP, which added a “shattered mirror” effect to the film’s final shot of Fonda, against Corman’s wishes.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972)

Wes Craven’s later successes made him a genre icon, but it’s the director’s early, bare-bones efforts that delivered his canon’s most inspired chills. That’s certainly true of his skuzzy, deranged calling card The Last House on the Left, which commingled camp, dirt-under-fingernails brutality and one stunner of a twist. Spitting in the face of the peace-and-love generation’s idealism about humanity’s goodness (and rife with hoary urban panic), Craven’s debut mimics Bergman’s The Virgin Spring save for that film’s happy ending, its initially goofy amateurishness – full of ham-fisted cross-cutting, silly songs, and a group of fiends who seem better fit for a sitcom – soon giving way to stark, vicious brutality. After two girls are slaughtered for trying to procure some pot, their murderers coincidentally show up at the house of one of the victims’ parents, who quickly deduce who the strangers are and what they’ve done, and decide to do something very, very violent about it. Cheap, graceless and often shocking, Craven’s film is in many ways quite inept, but it’s the memorable carnage that’s truly, intentionally awful.

IT'S ALIVE (1974)

Ever want to have a baby? If so, make sure to avoid Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, which trumps Rosemary’s Baby as the ‘70s horror gem most likely to turn couples permanently sour on the notion of procreation. Though the director’s first mainstream success, few scary movies have been as underrated as Cohen’s masterpiece, an undeserved fate one can only assume has something to do with the corniness of its creature’s rubbery appearance and two sequels that did little to enhance its reputation. With a no-frills, slightly surrealistic approach that heightens his tale’s emotional immediacy, Cohen blisteringly exploits the myriad anxieties that accompany the impending birth of a child, which in this case proves to be a mutant monster begat by a middle class couple. A physical expression of its parents' neuroses (as well as ecological ruin), the creature’s rampage is stoked for typical genre scares, but Cohen doggedly keeps the focus first and foremost on the inner conflict of the creature’s father (John P. Ryan), torn between an instinct to care for, and a burning desire to kill, his unholy progeny.

MS. 45 (1981)

Few exploitation cinema auteurs are as skilled as Abel Ferrara, and few exploitation films are as grimly proficient as Ms. 45, the director’s nasty, nimble tale of a female avenger taking her fury out on NYC’s chauvinistic male population. Ferrara’s down-and-dirty aesthetic lends some high-voltage seediness to his story about a mute seamstress (Zoë Lund) who’s raped by two different men in one afternoon and responds by going Charles Bronson on any guy unfortunate enough to cross her path. Her feminist fury unleashed, Thana becomes a simultaneously sexy and scary angel of death, singlehandedly embarking on a campaign of terror that ultimately leads to a mesmerizing finale in which she carries out her bloody work in a nun’s costume. Far from merely an exploitation hack, Ferrara arranges his frame with a master’s eye, conveying his story’s central gender conflict in a raft of expertly orchestrated compositions, all while addressing his own Catholic hang-ups and – as implied by his cameo as her maiden, masked attacker – taking a decidedly ambiguous stance towards his anti-heroine’s rampage.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six...insurance policies are available in the lobby!

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager

The Rep Report: August 21--27

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: It's that time of year--the humidity-soaked dead space between the last of the real summer movies and the first of the autumn "serious" pictures--where unexpected flurries of stray weirdness count for a lot even in repertory programming. Starting August 21 and running for a week, Anthology Film Archives digs deep into the seamier recesses of the nostalgia glands for a celebration of New York vigilante movies from the 1970s and 1980s. including the official kick-start to the genre: Michael Winner's Death Wish, with Charles Bronson in his most archetypal role, and a movie that Jeff Goldblum (who made his screen debut with a five-second appearance as one of the caterwauling thugs who fuck up Chuck's wife and daughter) has been apologizing for ever since. The schedule also includes Abel Ferrara's moody, arty-looking bloodbath Ms. 45, which is notable for its wordless star performance by the beautiful and doomed Zoe Lund, who would later write Ferrera's Bad Lieutenant under the name Zoe Tamerlis. (She also appeared in that film as one of Harvey Keitel's drug connections. Zoe Tamerlis Lund died in 1999, of a heart attack brought on by cocaine use, at the age of 37.) The schedule also amounts to the closest thing you're ever likely to see to a William Lustig Festival. Lustig, the subject of a new interview in the New York Press, directed the 1988 Maniac Cop (which was written by Larry Cohen and boasts one of the all-time classic B-list casts of its era: Tom Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Sheree North, Richard Roundtree, William "Big Bill" Smith, and the cruelly-underappreciated-by=everyone-except-Larry-Cohen Laurene Landon) and its sequel Maniac Cop 2 as well as the 1983 Vigilante. (Say what you like about Lustig, nobody can accuse him of going in for opaque, misleading titles.) Vigilante, which stars Fred Williamson and my man Robert Forster, has an impressive back-up choir itself in Richard Bright, Joe Spinell, Woody Strode, Joseph Carberry, Rutanya Alda, and Steve James, a talented performer who died young after practically taking out a patent on the category "Action Hero's Sidekick, Black Male." There are people who actually watch the Times Square scenes in Taxi Driver and tear up from thinking about the "good old days." They'll be squeezing them into the theater with a crowbar.

The dog days are also a great time for rummaging in the career of actors who had such long and busy careers that they can to be part of the landscape and rediscovering what they were like when they were walking cult items. The Brooklun Academy of Music is having a three-day Richard Widmark festival from August 25 through the 27th, and the inclusion of the London-set Night and the City makes it an event. This febrile yet moving noir was directed by Jules Dassin, who as it happens died this past March, as did Widmark himself, when both men were in their nineties. Neither ever did better work than they did here.