The Screengrab : plan 9 from outer space

Unwatchable #66: “Jail Bait”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:00:00 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.

At last, it’s Ed Wood! For months I’ve been dutifully trudging my way up this list of the 100 worst movies of all time, and somehow made it a third of the way through without encountering a single work by the man celebrated far and wide as the worst filmmaker ever. I suppose that makes sense, in that the most notorious Wood works – the likes of Plan 9 from Outer Space and Glen or Glenda – must be lurking near the top of the chart. It so happens that I’d never seen Wood’s second feature, Jail Bait, so this promised to be quite a treat. We’re huge jailbait fans here at the Screengrab…er, in the cinematic sense, that is.

Wood’s work is tough to rank on the Unwatchable scale, just because he’s usually at his most watchable when he’s at his worst. That is, his bizarre mix of enthusiasm and incompetence only soars when he goes completely off the deep end, as in Plan 9 or Bela Lugosi’s infamous “Home? I have no home” monologue from Bride of the Monster. Jail Bait is as shoddily constructed as you’d expect, but the goofy juice doesn’t really get flowing until the last ten minutes or so.

The story concerns handsome young doofus Don Gregor, son of the famed plastic surgeon Dr. Boris Gregor. Instead of lounging around the house and spending his dad’s money, Don has taken to hanging out with low-rent mobster Vic Brady. One night the cops pick Don up for carrying a concealed weapon and his sister Marilyn has to bail him out. (Marilyn is played by Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, who no doubt worked for free and gives a performance worth every penny.) Marilyn lectures Don that she won’t do so again: “That gun is jail bait!” Wait – the gun is jail bait? Oh, Edward D. Wood, Jr.! I see what you did there! You got me again.

Don doesn’t heed his sister’s warnings – instead, he goes ahead with Vic on a planned robbery and ends up killing a security guard in the process. Vic shoots a witness who survives and can identify both men. The cops (including a pre-Hercules Steve Reeves) go to Dr. Gregor and urge him to convince his son to turn himself in. Before Don can do so, Vic kills him. But how can Vic evade arrest himself? Simple! He’ll blackmail Dr. Gregor into performing plastic surgery on him, promising to return Don alive if the doc gives him a new, unrecognizable face.

Dr. Gregor is prepared to go along with the plan, until he pokes around Vic’s kitchen and finds his son’s corpse standing upright in the pantry. He gives Vic a new face, alright – spoiler alert! – but it’s the face of Don Gregor! The cops arrive on the scene to arrest him for murder, but Vic-with-Don’s-face flees and is gunned down, flopping face-first into the pool.

To be sure, many of the classic Wood virtues are on display here: the cardboard sets, the absurd mix of catatonic and scenery-devouring acting styles, the Sarah Palin dialogue (“I hope I’m happy to know ya.” “South America! The foreign countries! Where we’ll live like kings!”), the 71-minute running time padded out with 26 minutes worth of footage of cars pulling in and out of driveways. There’s even an utterly gratuitous shot of Steve Reeves putting on his shirt, and I haven’t even mentioned the inanely insistent zither score that will probably follow me to the gates of hell. I know it all sounds good, but it mostly plays like a dull episode of a ‘50s cop show. Only the big twist ending, with the unveiling of Vic’s new face (a scene that surely influenced Ed Wood director Tim Burton’s revelation of the Joker’s face in the 1989 Batman) reaches the heights of top-shelf Wood (or the lows of bottom-drawer Wood, depending on how you look at it).

Previously on Unwatchable:
67. Nine Lives
68. Kazaam
69. The Perfect Holiday (pending)
70. Epic Movie
71. Gigli

Ignominious Exits: The Top Ten Worst Final Films (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Bela Lugosi, PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959)

Depending who you ask (specifically if one of the people you ask is Bela Lugosi’s son and the other is Tim Burton), Ed Wood, Jr. was either a talentless, exploitive vulture or a scrappy independent filmmaker who befriended Lugosi late in life and (inadvertently) made him relevant to a whole new audience of younger fans through cult classics like Glen or Glenda? and Bride of the Monster, climaxing with Martin Landau’s Oscar-winning portrayal of the actor in 1994’s Ed Wood. Either way, though, Plan 9 From Outer Space was hardly the most dignified send-off for a Hungarian film and theater legend and one of the best known international movie stars of the 1930s. For one thing, Lugosi only appears onscreen for a few minutes of the so-called “worst movie of all time” (a designation Screengrab’s own Scott Von Doviak would undoubtedly challenge), but the posthumous “performance” (culled from stock footage) isn’t even listed as an official film performance on the actor’s Internet Movie Database page, possibly because it was completed by a chiropractor.

Errol Flynn in CUBAN REBEL GIRLS (1959)

In his prime, Errol Flynn was the last word in swashbuckling action on screen and the most legendary stud in America in real life. (Reports of his bedroom escapades during the war years inspired the optimistic G.I. catch phrase "in like Flynn.") By 1959, though, Flynn was a has-been and a tax deadbeat with a nearly defunct liver. Lacking the energy to do much that might pass for active, never mind acting, he wrote and narrated this low-budget film, in which he appears as a reporter telling us about the "wonderful" rebel girls who are doing their part for the Cuban revolution. Flynn had actually met Fidel Castro, who gave the project his blessing, and the film returns the favor, though it probably had its origins not in political fervor but a mixture of contractual obligation -- Flynn owed somebody a movie -- and cherchez la femme. Cuban Rebel Girls was actually shaped as a vehicle for Beverly Aadland, a talentless would-be actress who was Flynn's steady companion during the last couple years of his life. (She was about fourteen when they met.) The movie was Flynn's last and her only real credit, though the first-time director, Barry Mahon, followed it up with a stream of films, which tend to have such titles as International Smorgas-Broad and Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico. (Another of his flicks, the Cold War paranoia-fest Rocket Attack, U.S.A., made it to the summit of trash that is Mystery Science Theater 3000.) In every compartment of his life -- co-star/girlfriends, directors, revolutionaries -- Errol sure did know how to pick 'em.

Henry Fonda in ON GOLDEN POND (1981)

Henry Fonda had a very long and honorable career, but his last really notable movie role was probably in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, made when he was in his early sixties. The role of the ruthless but naive professional killer Frank -- the dark side of capitalistism wearing the face of old Hollywood's favorite spokesman for liberal idealism -- gave him a chance to turn his iconic image on its head while doing things he'd never done before as an actor, and that wouldn't have been a bad way to hang it up. But instead he kept at it through the 1970s, plugging away in disposable roles in ever tackier movies (Ash Wednesday, Tentacles, The Swarm, Meteor, etc.). In one way, his final feature film role in On Golden Pond qualified as a comeback: it was, at least, a respectable part in a high-profile prestige release. But it was also an exploitative piece of casting that put the frail-looking, visibly ailing Fonda on screen as a sick, possibly dying old man, and even tapped into gossip about his relationship with his children by casting his real-life rebellious daughter Jane as a character who's constantly lectured about getting over the past and getting on with her life. (How much of a coincidence was it that, at the time, Jane Fonda was in the process of packing up her sixties image as a political firebrand and remaking herself as the yuppie queen of the workout tape?) For audiences, the emotions that the sentimental movie meant to arouse became inseparable from the guilty feelings one might have had about having come to regard the older Fonda as a has-been. The media took the bait and latched onto the movie in a strange way: it basically double-dog-dared the Motion Picture Academy to not give Fonda an Oscar for his performance, knowing that he'd never gotten one before and that he very likely wouldn't have another chance to earn one. The campaign paid off, but at a loss of some dignity for the man at its center.

Click here for Part One & Part Two

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Your Stupid Minds! Stupid! Stupid!

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Greetings, my friend! We are are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown...the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here. But what if were were to tell you that someone plans to remake the worst movie of all time? Would that be a future worth living in?

Yes, folks, someone is remaking Plan 9 from Outer Space. It's come to this: apparently having exhausted the entire supply of old sit-coms, action movies, and low-budget horror flicks, some group of misguided maniacs has decided to remake the Ed Wood flick that is famous for being the most incompetent, incomprehensible, and poorly acted in motion picture history. Worse still, they seem to be intent on taking out the only good things in the movie and replacing them with things aren't there in the first place: according to the website, the makers of the retitled Plan 9 intend for their movie to be "serious-minded", without "camp or parody", and will focus on the sci-fi aspects of the Wood original but will be "character-driven". It's not clear what character will be driving it -- Tor Johnson's? -- but we'll take their word for it.

The remake is set to debut in 2009, the fiftieth anniversary of the original. All we can say is, if they don't get Albert Pyun, or at least Uwe Boll, involved in this project, we ain't seein' it.

Splat! Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Returns

Phil Nugent — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The news that Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, best known as the "Ask a Ninja" guys, are working on a remake of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, is confounding on many levels. It's not that the guys in question are overreaching, God knows. They have proven their ability to be amusing for thirty-second bursts, which is more than can be said for the makers of their source material. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, which came out as drive-in fodder (made on a budget of less than $100,000) back in 1978, has already spawned three sequels (the first of which, the 1988 Return of the Killer Tomatoes, is semi-infamous for featuring a young, deeply humiliated George Clooney), an animated TV show, and a video game based on the cartoon series. Why does this unfortunate creation refuse to die? A clue can be found in this remark about the original by Nichols (who is co-writing the script of the remake with Sarine, who is set to direct): "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is the masterwork of a generation. We can only aspire to recapture that magic." Since it is not possible for a sentient being to think that Tomatoes is in some way good, he must be making a nudge-nudge, wink-wink allusion to how bad it is, the idea being that it's so bad it's good. This is really at the core of the cult reputation that Tomatoes has built up over the years: many people are under the impression that it's one of those rare examples of a serious movie so freakishly bad that it's surreal and hilarious.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Tomatoes is a comedy; it's supposed to be funny. The fact that it is incompetently made to an embarrassing degree, and that it is in fact not funny, does not qualify it for consideration as a bad movie on the same magical level as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Robot Monster, Blood Freak, They Saved Hitler's Brain, or even Battlefield Earth. The fact that the movie has had any life at all since 1978 is based on its having often been unfairly bracketed with these anti-classics, which is to say that it's all based on a terrible misunderstanding. The movie is a cult classic in the minds of people who break up over the title because they assume that the filmmakers meant it to be taken seriously. But whereas the work of Ed Wood and Phil Tucker has the authentic fascination of a vision reflecting, as Tim Burton once put it, "someone's strange mind", Tomatoes is reflective of what wouldn't pass muster during the last ten minutes of Saturday Night Live. Place it alongside the real thing and the difference is obvious: I once attended a daylong "World's Worst Movies" festival where Tomatoes was included on the schedule and it cleared the room of an audience that had gleefully sat through The Beast of Yucca Flats and Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. If you can't maintain integrity in the field of really bad movies, where can you maintain it?

Say Good Night to the Bad Girl: Vampira, R.I.P.

Phil Nugent — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Maila Nurmi has died, at the age of 86. A Finnish-born model — she worked for Man Ray and the pin-up artist Alberto Vargas — and sometime actress, Nurmi was best-known as her alter ago, Vampira, the "beatnik ghoul-girl" with the long black tresses and long talon-like fingernails who began hosting movies on late night television in 1954. The Vampira character, whose look was reportedly inspired by the cartoon drawing that would eventually be christened Morticia Addams, first appeared on Los Angeles's KABC-TV. The station discontinued the show a year later, but Nurmi held onto the rights to the character and was able to revive Vampira on a different channel. Kinescopes of her TV work are now rare, much-valued ephemera on the collectors' market, but Vampira will remain undead forever in Nurmi's best-known movie role, in Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space, where she appeared made up as the character and was billed under the character's name.

Nurmi's other movie credits include The Beat Generation, Sex Kittens Go to College, and The Magic Sword. Her last film appearance was in the oddball cult project I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, made in 1998 from an unproduced script credited to Ed Wood; she herself was portrayed by Lisa Marie in Tim Burton's 1994 Ed Wood biopic. She was also a footnote Hollywood celebrity of the 1950s, fabled for her friendships with the likes of James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Orson Welles. (In her later years, she ran an antiques store, Vampira's Attic, on Melrose Avenue.) But her real place in pop culture history is as the first of the TV "horror hosts"; her success as Vampira led to a wave of wisecracking, ghoulish hustlers doing wraparound segments for TV showings of scary movies, most of whom never attained anything like her degree of national recognizability. Probably the best known of the latter day hosts, Cassandra Peterson's Elvira, was in fact the product of a failed attempt, by KHJ-TV, to revive the Vampira character with Nurmi's blessing. (Nurmi withdrew her consent for the use of the Vampira name and makeup after the station rejected her choice, Lola Falana.) She died peacefully in her sleep on January 10.