Ex-Rent Hell

Euro-Trip!

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 01:13:00 +0000

The ERH International Affairs Desk grabs it's forged passport, hitches up it's skirt and sticks out a mysteriously callused thumb for a whistle-stop tour of Eighties movie poster art from across the Continent. Some of it is good, most of it demented, all will leave you shivering in a puddle of your own bafflement. So let's clamber board the VHS Express to the Roadhouse - calling at Wall Street, Paradise Alley and - as ever - the friscalating plains of Krull.

The ERH Euro-Trip!

We've all seen those weirdo, crepuscular, somewhat scary Polish film posters in which Rosemary's Baby is represented by a green snowdrop dripping blood on an old-timey telephone, or the broiling psychosexual maelstrom of Chinatown is symbolised by a chicken eating a tractor. They stand as something of an alternate film history, hinting at a Philip K. Dick-ian netherworld in which the Axis Powers won the War and big-budget cinema went on to take three or four hard Left turns into an Eastern European formalism filtered through unchecked Bohemian bacchanalia.

'The Deer Hunter', apparently

But it wasn't just mindless blockbusters and staid heritage pictures that washed up in the garretty design studios of Europe and beyond: the Eighties VHS boom saw an unprecedented explosion of cinematic and video output, and although most of it was incalculable shite, the continental artists and designers who set themselves to the task of adapting Hollywood posters and video covers for local consumption were often to grant no more - or less - drawing-board deliberation to the low-rent shinola of Surf Nazis Must Die than they might the latent megabucks porn of Point Break; for whom Arnie's Red Heat may just as well have been Warren Beatty's Reds.

'Rain Man: Bongo Redux'

The ERH International Affairs Desk has rounded up 25 of the more notable offspring of this gloriously mismatched shotgun marriage. Some of them are wonderful - and sometimes vast improvements on the Tinseltown templates of the originals; some are hopelessly abysmal; some are bum-nosed runts that cater to their markets to such an extent that they are become strange perversions of the filmmakers' supposed intent. But most of all, they are - almost without exception - balls-out odd.

So put on your best all-purpose foreign-style accent, fix your eyes on the distant, hazily delineated prize and and let's hit the high road for the low, low countries.

Set the compass for strange...

'Roadhaus'

We're not sure whether it's supposed to be reverential hick folk art or simply exists as the twisted brainwrong of a man mental, but this German spin on 1988's crackpot redneck throwback Roadhouse carries - for those of a certain vintage - many vestiges of its age: Le Swayze looks like a Commodore 64 rendering of himself; Sam Elliot comes across like an overzealous weekend dad with a few too many Rolling Rocks in him; and whoever that chick is elicits an effortless sense of maternal longing, projected shame and Valley Girl ennui. The Eighties are thus writ large in a Teutonic howl that is part Hollywood mash note, part tear-stained sophomore symphonietta, part Germanic reclamation of the filmic expertise that it had bestowed upon the New World. "Es ist mein weg, oder die autobahn!" Indeed.

Rhinestone

It is hardly within ERH's looseleaf remit to imply that the average Turk is anything other than an enlightened cosmopolitan aesthete whose views on sexual politics are never less than forward-thinking and dynamic, but whoever put together this poster must have been having a bad, bad day at the office. It would seem that the idea of Sly Stallone getting roundly cuckolded by Backwoods Barbie Dolly Parton's peroxided blend of down-home cocksurety and Brill Building schtick was too much for our Anatolian design-monkey to bear, and so they duly offered up this wearying slab of institutionalised benchpress erotica. You're jockeying for EU entry, lads - let's clean this shit up a bit, eh?!?

Short Circuit

Number Five is not only alive but has evidently passed into hideous electro-jaundiced Cronenbergian necroticism in this Polish take on the Bank Holiday family filler which witnesses Steve Guttenberg cockblocked by a cutesey military attack droid. Always second choice, eh, Steve? Always second choice...

The Empire Strikes Back

The ERH Licensing and Merchandise Arm always understood that Weird Uncle George kept an iron grip on any and all Star Wars advertising material, but he must have been sleeping one off in the Skywalker Ranch stables when the fax came through from Warsaw with the mock-up of this Eastern European Empire effort that makes the Force's finest foray look like the back cover of Computer Studies textbook.

Carbon Copy

Erm... what???

Beverly Hills Cop

Is that the one with Joss Ackland and Patsy Kensit? No, that's Lethal Weapon II. The one where they go to Tokyo? You're thinking of Black Rain. It's the one when he whales on Charles Grodin - I like that one. That's Midnight Run... Wait, wait - is it the one where he's styled up as Lionel Richie and carrying a tiny 'spurty cock' gun on a bed of graph paper..? Bingo.

O.C. and Stiggs

If one were to swap these poster images for Robert Altman's bizzaro spiteful-teen class-war monster-truck road-trip comedy-caper (with a chipper World Music soundtrack from King Sunny Ade, no less!) then we'd probably be guffawing at the Italians' gauche reductivism, so maybe we should let this one slide.

Krull

According to the ERH Ambassador to Germany, this tawdry ad for Krull should come with a spoiler alert... 'Caught in a massive spiderweb lives the hexed woman her life. She knows the secret of the Black Fortress. With the exposure changes her being.' Yep, that pretty much spells it out - thanks, Fritz!

Wall Street

The Exercise Book stylings and heavy-gauge phallic symbolism of this amateurish Spanish outing really hammer home the priapic macho preening of Oliver Stone's stock market shakedown, but it's still horrid to look at.

City Heat

The Italian plea (?) on the poster - 'In order to appeal to not to save more the life to me' - makes about as much sense as anything else in Clint and Burt's seedless Kansas City jazz, but this wacky artwork otherwise flatters to deceive.

Trading Places

Iguana? Masonic pyramid? Bleak, post-Apocalyptic fiscal wilderland? Must be Trading Places! Quite why the Polish designer of this left-field effort chose to render 1983's funniest fillip of festive financial frippery via the sort of image you'd normally expect to find adorning the back cover of a solo album by the bass player of a fading early-70's heavy rock combo is anyone's guess.

Dead Heat

The French manage to suck all the fun out of 1988's corpsed copper caper and instead serve up a grossly off-putting Photoshop nightmare that almost defies people to want to see the film.

The King of Comedy

There's either some elephantine irony at work in this Italian take on Scorsese's meditation on the price of fame and the ends of ambition or they've missed the point to a heroic degree here!

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai

Buckaroo Banzai - neurosurgeon, particle physicist, rock musician and geek-chic godhead - is given a something of a makeover in a French poster that tests the limits of the Trade Descriptions Act and - ultimately - the patience and reserve of Gallic cinemagoers...

Paradise Alley

Not for the first time, we're left wishing we'd seen the film advertised in the overseas poster than the one we actually sat through. This German offering makes Stallone's humdrum Thirties wrestling parable look less like a drab Meatball Opera set on the Paramount backlot than a Brechtian carnivale of dreams, desire and destitution. Oh, well - maybe in the next life...

The One and Only

We nip cheekily back to the Seventies for another wrestling fable in the form of Carl Reiner's scattershot romantic comedy that sees two of TV's towering titans take to the top turnbuckle. Alas, the fine work that both the The Fonz and Tatoo from 'Fantasy Island' put into the film will have been missed by Italian film fans who were surely put off by a poster that blands everything out into beige corduroy nothingness.

Malone

Serviceably awful Burt Reynolds vehicle Malone gets the Criterion treatment in a Polish poster that would have viewers expecting to see something pitched between Bonnie&Clyde and Le Conformist rather than a dreary, underfunded, box-ticking hicksploitation dud.

Used Cars

Those bloody French!

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Wolves in Sheep's clothing? Mix up at the message centre? Simple vandalism? Your guess is as good as ours on this one...

Vampire's Kiss

While far more elegant than it's American forebear, this Italian aposteratta offers even less clue to the perilously unglued nature of a purported comedy that goes heavy on insoluble psychosis, rape and cockroach-gobbling.

Caveman

Our fruity Gallic cousins are at it again with an entirely misleading - if rather delightful - take on Ringo Starr's gormless 1981 dino no-no, Caveman.

Hanky Panky

We made this one up, but we're pretty sure that by now you're willing to accept anything. Tee-hee, eh, readers!

Action Jackson

Quite why the Italian designers of this poster for 'Black Bond', Action Jackson, chose to concentrate on this particular scene in order to entice their brothers into the cinema is a question perhaps best left to their consciences...

Bullseye!

German literalism knows no bounds in this excruciating poster for Michael Winner's ghastly 1990 embarrassment starring a past-it Roger Moore and a pre-resurgence Michael Caine. Darts. Yes, we get it.

Black Moon Rising

The original poster for Tommy Lee Jones Supercar! vehicle is pretty awful - looking as it does like the cover of the kind of ZX Spectrum that came free with budget Eighties computer mags - but at least it gets behind the mule. This Belgian misfire, however, really plumbs the depths with a pair of competing images in which there is no clear winner.

What a long, strange trip it's been...

+DJ

Code: Inappropriate - Weirdo Computer Game Tie-Ins

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Tue, 01 Mar 2016 01:54:00 +0000

We count down our pick of the ten odder examples of movie titles that - for reasons of taste, applicability or simple horse sense - had no business whatsoever in making the journey from the silver screen to your bedroom portable.

Code: Inappropriate - Weirdo Computer Game Tie-Ins

In the multi-platform, cross-pollinating, symbiotically engorged futurescape we now all call home, video game adaptations of box-office behemoths fit their cinematic forebears with such wit and gleaming precision that they are considered less artistically bankrupt cash-ins than they are extensions of the director's original artistically bankrupt vision. 'Avatar: The Game', for instance was designed in conjunction with James Cameron's tub-thumping blue eye-melt in order to allow the player greater insight to the world of Pandora. But wasn't always thuswise.

Back in the Eighties, silicone and celluloid weren't such intimate bedfellows. Early game tie-ins were often off-the-peg platformers featuring hastily re-christened characters or badly executed cockamamie that frequently baffled to deceive. Then there were those titles that - for reasons of taste, applicability or simple horse sense - had no business whatsoever in making the journey from the silver screen to your bedroom portable.

We count down our pick of the ten odder examples. You don't even have to press fire to start...

Number Ten: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Just who in the name of hell's horses imagined that the cider-wazzed students, Camp Freddies and Lambrini-loosened typing pools that make up the core audience for Richard O'Brien's enduring fishnet opera were the same crowd who'd enjoy sitting through a tortuous fifteen minutes of excruciating ZX Spectrum loading howl in order to corpse through a humdrum - if properly strange - amulet-collecting button-jabber is lost to the ages. On the other hand, the minimal amount of higgledy-piggledy he/she carnal chaos that survives the original will hopefully have messed with the sexual gyroscopes of the few misguided Pointdexters who happened across it. They're probably all Tory MPs now.

Number Nine: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

The shrieks! The shock! The looks on their innocent little faces! Yes, many a freckly little sprog must have lost their mess on Christmas morning 1983 when they tore the wrapping paper off this little nugget. Fast-forward a couple of hours, a few tantrums and a whole lot of headscratching later and little Johnny's ditched Leatherface and his feeble collection of wheelchairs and is channeling his disappointment by performing experimental surgery on Mary Lou's Cabbage Patch doll with the electric carving knife whilst hopped up on brandysnaps.

Number Eight: The Untouchables

Not an unreasonable tie-in per se. A text adventure where you have to track Capone, deploy your forces across Chicago and crack his codebooks could have made for a fittingly dour spin-off game. Or perhaps a top-down strategy version of the same. Or even a first person shooter - like this decent SNES effort - where you Tommy gun your way through a slew of Chi-Town gunsels before taking on the fearsome Frank Nitti and then Scarface Al. What The Untouchables doesn't lend itself most naturally to, however, is a ultra-generic ZX Spectrum platformer that's backed with an impossibly chipper faux-ragtime score and in which Eliot Ness bounds about as if he's just stood on an upturned plug while wearing what looks a lot like a deerstalker.

Number Seven: Hudson Hawk

The video game spin on everybody's least favourite bizzaro clockpunk conspiracy caper-com shares much of the jarring surrealism of its progenitor. Rhino stampedes through the Vatican; rapacious kangaroos; a fleet of daschunds who will attempt to throw the Hawk of the roof of an auction house: Yes, the gang's all here. One footnote to this animalistic effrontery is that Bruce Willis doesn't show up on any of the packaging, and in the game the Hawk is presented as having a massive slick of bouffant hair. Legal wranglings, or did the marketing bods decide that the kids might not get behind an over-indulged baldyman going through his Return of Bruno phase..?

Number Six: Nosferatu The Vampyre

Murnau's silent horror classic rendered as a crunky, puce-coloured isometric puzzler scored to Sinclair's trademark 'frying fat' sound effects? Where do we sign?!?

Number Five: Death Wish 3

"Where's little Johnny?"
"He's upstairs playing Death Wish 3 on his computer."
We can't find any evidence that the first two installments of Charles Bronson's vigilantisploitation cycle were gifted a computer game run out, which makes us wonder what was so special about the third that it entered the post-school slaughter schedule of any right-thinking Amstrad owner. Whatever the case, the game is a forerunner of the Swiftian excesses of Grand Theft Auto that allows you to wallow in the filth and moral degradation of pre-Giuliani New York from the comfort of your bunk-bed.

Number Four: 2010 - The Graphic Adventure Game

Somehow managing to be even more dull and stodgy than Peter Hyams' talky, narratively undernourished potboiler, this older brother of a game is aimed at all those little boys who - rather than dreaming of zero-G spacewalks off the shoulder of Orion - dreamed of working as a circuitboard repairman in a remote, fusty lab deep within the beige bowels of some faceless NASA contractor based out of a retail park in Shitwheel, Wyoming.

Number Three: Moonwalker

Join Michael on his quest to 'rescue' kidnapped children from the clutches of some perceived 'Mr. Big'. The King of Pop's messiah complex is indulged via magic powers and occasional heavenly intervention as he battles zombies, buff, shirtless Thirties stevedores, remote-controlled armored dobermans, a grasp on the corporeal that was only ever tenuous to begin with, and, finally, a massive clockwork lunar spider. Oh, and just to scramble our minds that little bit more, every time Michael stumbles across the truant Bubbles, he powers-up into a killer robot who shoots lasers from out of his eyes. Chuck in some elective surgery and a few placebo weddings and the whole thing would be all but indistinguishable from MJ himself.

Number Two: Platoon

It's only to keep up some semblance of thematic coherence that the ERH Mixed Message Desk plumped for Ocean's entirely staggering home computer adaptation of Ollie Stone's lachrymose Vietnam War lament over Atari's troubling arcade shoot-'em-up take on Robert Altman's flip Korea-set campus-com M*A*S*H*. Here, the geo-political complexities and front-line exigencies of the SE Asian conflict are boiled down to a simple 48K broth and served up with noodles of confusion as a lone grunt runs around a version of Vietnam that resembles an especially well manicured golf course blithely slotting anyone who gets between him and the nearest hash pipe.

Number One: Porky's

Yes, folks - Porky's. For the cinematically benighted amongst you who've not had the pleasure, Porky's moral pitch rests somewhere between American Pie, a genial Mexican snuff movie and a virulent dose of the clap. Directed with the sort of elan you might expect from the man who gave us The Karate Dog and Baby Geniuses, it follows a group of Horny Teens on a mission to lose their cherries at a dilapidated cathouse mouldering in a stretch of militarized Florida swampland. The game is as baffling and counter-instinctual as adolescence itself, as a priapic knee-high soda-jerk careens up and down sundry ladders in a fruitless attempt to blow the titular knocking shop to sexy smithereens whilst being chased by an irate Southern whoremaster armed with an endless supply of tuning forks.

PS If anyone can provide video evidence of the computer game adaptation of Paul McCartney's obnoxiously irrelevant Give My Regards to Broad Street movie, there's an ERH t-shirt in it for them.

The ERH Advent Calendar: Day Seventeen

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 09:23:00 +0000

Low-rent espionage hallmarks Day Seventeen of our festive rundown with a sublime seasonal still from a film that was memorably described by Alexander Walker in London's Evening Standard as having "more holes than a June bride"...

The ERH Advent Calendar: Day Seventeen

If the bitter Cold war enemies of Frederick Forsythe's Fourth Protocol can put aside their political differences long enough to pose for this hideously forced snapshot, maybe there's hope for all of us...

Diary of a Game of Thrones addict

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 15:47:00 +0000

Diary of a Game of Thrones addict

Game of Thrones is back! Again! After all the hullabaloo surrounding the Red Wedding, Joffrey’s death and Tyrion’s escape, fan fever is at an all time high for a series that simply refuses to disappoint. But how devoted are you? Are you merely a casual viewer or does it go deeper than that? Are there any House Stark coffee mugs in your kitchen cupboard? Are you regularly locked in fierce online debate as to John Snow’s true parentage til dawn? Ever contemplated a tattoo? It is a world that is all too easy to get lost in. How far gone are you? Follow Time Out’s seven-step guide to Game of Thrones fandom and find out…

The Time Before Reckoning

You never thought it would happen to someone as worldly-wise (read: lazy and sarky) as you. It might, as Huey Lewis always assured us, be hip to be square these days, but isn’t Game of Thrones the preserve of block-quoting nerdlingers in egg-stained Red Dwarf t-shirts and earnest girls who’ve had too many packed lunches and henna tattoos. We’re none of us strangers to the box-set/Netflix-dump/dodgy download, but whereas The Sopranos was cask-aged in gushing claret and ‘family’ values and The Wire made us feel Legit and Word and Street, this is surely just an excuse for B-list English thesps to mess around in the Lord of the Rings dressing-up box. And yet. And yet… You’ve heard rumours that there’s the occasional flash of skin and that someone is graphically deprived of a limb/head/loved one/codpiece every ten minutes. So it is that you find yourself happening across a random episode whilst flicking around during the ad breaks in Family Guy. Maybe just give it five minutes. Can’t hurt, can it?

A Song of Vice and Ire

It’s three weeks later. You‘ve steadily caught up on all those precious episode you missed. You’ve dabbled online. You’ve casually sounded out which people at work are safe to approach on the subject. You find yourself in increasingly animated debate over Friday-night drinks with colleagues you’ve never really bothered with before. The depth of knowledge exhibited by your fellow Throneheads (your term) makes you realise how little of the Seven Kingdoms you have explored. There’s nothing for it. You need to learn more. This means reading the big, thick source novels. This means reading. Crikey. Yet this is the path you have chosen. George Martin’s original books may be staggering in both imagination and scope, but they are also stodgier than mammoth pie in places. Long chapters filled with aimless trudging or dream sequences. Dream sequences, for fuck’s sake! Yet you plough through them. Then, one day, you find yourself pricing up a full-size replica of Sean Bean’s sword (by now you know the sword is named ‘Ice’, but you’re still forcing yourself to call in ‘Sean Bean’s sword’) on the Forbidden Planet website. If anyone were to walk in on you right now you’d prefer to lie and tell them that you were surfing mammy-ramming porn than what you’re actually looking at. It’s a fad, that’s all. A craze. It’ll soon be out of your system.

A Cat of a Different Coat

While it passes, you might be well served by picking out a House with which to ally yourself. In real life you are most likely a blurry whirl of showbiz gossip, sweaty ‘pits and wanky little coffees, but the high tables of Westeros offer a chance to better yourself. A bit. Do you perhaps fancy yourself a Stark or a Lannister; a grimly-heroic, flinty-eyed martyr or a golden-haired, glory-shitting warmonger? You settle on House Targaryen and now everything from your hand towels to your Oyster Card wallet has a dragon on it. And it is here that we meet the pointy end of fandom: to tattoo or to not to do a tattoo. Maybe just a little one, yeah? On that same shoulder blade where you got the dolphin or that Chinese symbol for… something… back in the ‘90s. While you’re deciding, you immerse yourself in oddball fan fiction on websites with names like MuthahofDragons.com and Starknado. You’re skipping engagements, letting your friends down and neglecting work. You’re in trouble friend, and going back doesn’t seem to be an option.

Beards, Barrels and Bellies

You eventually go for a little tattoo of the Targaryen crest on your ankle, but what does the rest of your general lifestyle say about your devotion to the cause? If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then it’s time to hoist the nutty flag and hang some bunting from your mental buttresses. You look into the legal ramifications of re-naming your house Winterfell. You grow a beard (ladies, you’re just going to have to do your best here), burn all your Ikea crap on a pyre on the front lawn, fill your home with animal hides, church candles, barrels and hang billowing muslin drapes in your uPVC conservatory. You now eat only pies, which you call ‘pie’. You also call beer ‘ale’ and have your own pewter tankard behind the bar of your local. The local children have a song about you and former drinking partners fall into a respectful hush every time you enter the pub. Such is the price of majesty.

Sex & Violence

It isn’t just your appetite for pie, ale and sheepskin apparel that has increased. You’ve stopped going to badminton club, cancelled your membership at the gym and enrolled in a six-week fencing class at the local leisure centre. It’s hardly broadswords at dawn, but it’s a start. You’re the oldest person there by some margin and one of your classmates’ mum’s has already given you a telling off for calling her daughter a ‘vile strumpet’ during the heat of battle. By the end of the course you’re the only one there. Even the instructor fails to turn up. You are reduced to whacking at the pommel horse until someone turns the lights off. And it’s not just your bloodlust that’s up! Sex used to be a furtive, lights-off experience after Match of the Day was over. Now it s a wine-drenched bacchanal! You roister and bellow and gorge amid flickering torchlight beneath an old-timey parchment map of Dorne. If only there was someone there with you.

This time, it’s war! Sort of.

You now have friends all over the globe. A bloke you’ve been Skyping with in Germany has invited you over to hunt wild boar with him. You both know you’ll never go, but it’s nice to chat about it. A woman in South Africa keeps sending you erotic poems in which Jaime Lannister’s severed hand features prominently. It’s all very safe and remote and cosy, but deep down you yearn for the gore-streaked camaraderie of war. Of friendships borne out of iron and blood. Of marching shoulder-to-shoulder with men and women who would walk through dragonfire for you. So it is that you find yourself recreating the Battle of Blackwater in a car-park in Woking. You’re screaming foulmouthed death-or-glory allegiance to Stannis Barratheon into the face of a portly traffic warden from Balham and it’s not even lunchtime. Yes, you’re using broom-handles for swords and all the arrows have suckers on the ends, but the Westeros Reenactment Society is as close as any fan can get to pageantry and fury of battle. You have risen through the ranks to Master of Coin (i.e. making sure that the hot-dog van has enough loose change), but it is real power you crave. Bide your time.

You’ve bought a what?

You’ve finally gone the whole hog and bought a actual wolf. A mangy looking thing purchased at auction in a Latvian zoo foreclosure, it patrols your semi-detached house with barely disguised malice. The police have been round a few times, it’s eating you out of house and home and the downstairs bathroom is a complete right-off, but you have now ascended to the very pinnacle of GoT fandom. All the tattoos and tankards in the world cannot compare to this. Leave the masses to their box-sets and pub quizzes, for your devotion to Game of Thrones cannot now be surpassed. Unless… You don’t happen to have a brother or sister, do you..?

Are You Seeing This?

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 15:44:00 +0000

Are You Seeing This?

On January 31st 2007 the city of Boston, Massachusetts was brought to a virtual standstill when a homemade battery-powered LED device was spotted attached to a freeway flyover. Immediately concerned that the item was an improvised explosive a patrolman put in a call. The emergency services were mobilised, the bomb squad called in and highways and bridges were closed. TV helicopters were soon buzzing overhead and the news of the panic was swiftly spread across the net.

But this was no terrorist attack, rather a piece of guerrilla marketing for the movie version of Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force - think SpongeBob SquarePants aimed even more directly at stoners - that had gone most spectacularly wrong.

Or had it? No doubt the idea was wrong-headed and clearly distressing to many, but it was clearly effective. Everyone from Fox News to The Colbert Report subsequently featured coverage of the event and though the studio behind the film had to pay some millions of dollars in damages, the placement of a small few plasticky gizmos around Boston had garnered national exposure. Was this, then, simply an ill-advised/deranged stunt, or an extreme example of a movie marketing campaign ‘going viral’?

“The problem with the term ‘viral marketing’,” says Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment, the agency behind the viral campaigns for The Dark Knight, Tron: Legacy and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, “is that there is no clear consensus on what it means. For some it means viral videos, for others it means guerrilla outdoor activities, and for others it means everything combined.”

And while more and more of them are being produced to announce new movies, what is agreed on is that viral campaigns are born out in the wild woods, not concocted in the lab, “Campaigns can only become viral if an audience responds to them after they are created and launched,” says Steve Wax, Partner at creative consultancy Ladies & Gentleman. “What increases the chances they will go ‘viral’ is not marketing's version of Viagra – Facebook - but instead a careful concentration on the fans of a brand, where they like to hang out, and what they're are interested in and entertained by.”

Movies and viral marketing would appear to be a perfect match. Viral campaigns are free to take advantage of many of the aspects unique to movie production – from borrowing actors for splinter projects that expand on characters’ backstories and flesh out the fictional world to making use of footage that didn't end up in the finished picture. So what makes for a successful viral movie marketing campaign? Why do some movies forgo them? Do they ever run the risk of over-exposing a film? Are they merely preaching to the converted and, ultimately, do they even work at all?

A campaign that has certainly caught public attention and made the leap from movie websites to the broadsheets is that for Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, the belated prequel to his 1979 sci-fi horror Alien. Whilst undeniably benefitting from the boon of existing audience knowledge of Alien movie mythology, there is no denying the quality and consistency of the viral clips and trailers that have teased us up to the release of the film, nor the innovation with which they have been presented over various media.

Whether it be Guy Pearce as grandstanding Steve Jobs-meets-Kerry Packer techno-mogul Peter Weyland speaking at the 2023 TED Conference or the chilling ads hawking the Weyland Corporation’s new emotionally aware android David 8, played with sycophantic naivety by Michael Fassbender, the campaign has made us want to know more, to tell our friends and – the holy grail of viral marketing! - to get involved.

Both of these campaign films were devised by Scott and co-writer Damon Lindelof, and directed by Luke Scott. The filmmakers worked with Substance, the London-based company charged with the online publicity, marketing and social media strategy for Prometheus. “We design and build digital projects such as video, websites, apps and games. This gives us the capability to offer a holistic digital strategy for releasing a film,” says Sam Corry, Senior Digital Publicist at Substance. “If we take a look at the most recent trailer launch for Prometheus, which aired on Channel 4 during an episode of Homeland, viewers were invited to interact with this exclusive reveal by sharing their thoughts via Twitter using the hashtag #areyouseeingthis. During the second ad break these responses were aired live on screen for all Homeland viewers to see. This is a great example of how offline advertising can create a much bigger impact and pull in a wider audience by incorporating a digital element.”

It’s tempting to already view this elegant, restrained campaign as a copper-bottomed success, yet Billy Donnelly of aintitcoolnews.com isn’t wholly certain as to the true potency of the Prometheus virals. “I don't think it's caught the public imagination so much as it's caught the geek imagination. I'm still not convinced the general public knows exactly what Prometheus is yet, nor do they have any ideas about its connection to Alien. Remember, if it isn’t referencing something made in the last 10 years or so, this younger generation seems to be in the dark about it!”

“We don't know if the Prometheus campaign has been successful or not yet,” adds Matt Bochenski, editor of film magazine Little White Lies. “It's been noisy, sure, but has your mum or dad heard of it? I'm excited for Prometheus but I actually think the viral campaign has been annoying as fuck - it's a self-anointed Movie Event, and I kind of resent that.”

We’ll have to wait and see as to Prometheus’s eventual success, but one campaign over which there can be no debate was also the first to make digital media central to its marketing strategy – that for 1999’s Blair Witch Project.

Dan Myrick, one of the film’s co-writer-directors says that the filmmakers had little clue how persuasive the ‘found footage’ viral videos that preceded the film would be. “I don't think we would have made such a splash at Sundance had it not been for so much pre-awareness generated by our web campaign. We felt we had a compelling premise and an interesting way of conveying it, but we had no real way of knowing how big it would become. Beyond a certain point, the film took on a life of its own and we were just along for the ride.”

In 2008, The Dark Knight was promulgated by a breakout campaign that greatly expanded the mythos of the Batman movies with a vast alternate reality game (ARG) that incorporated real world scavenger hunts. Susan Bonds of 42 Entertainment outlines the campaign’s appeal. “Participants got to be a citizen of Gotham City and all the complexity that entailed - being part of the Joker’s growing army or working in support of Batman. We created over 35 weeks of interactive fiction that played out the story and world between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Almost 11 million people in over 75 countries actively engaged for several hours on average. Key film assets were released through the viral campaign on the strength of community collaboration and the passion of fans. It’s that give and take between the studio/filmmakers and the audience that fuels the growth of participation exponentially.”

Perhaps even more impressive was the viral campaign for 2009 South African sci-fi sleeper hit District 9, which couldn’t call upon the Caped Crusader’s brand recognition, but instead utilised a wide range of viral sites, real-world guerrilla marketing tactics and ARGs to propel the film’s profile from backwater curiosity into blockbuster territory. Somewhat ironically, however, the filmmakers have denied approval for the creative agency behind the campaign permission to speak to CR relating to any and all ‘marketing activity’. The same kind of static surrounded inquiries into Watchmen, the campaign for which forms a textbook case study of an excellent viral shot being let down by a mediocre film. Viral publicity is not, it seems, a two-way street…

Nor is not one long roll call of triumphs. As well as Aqua Teen Bomb Terror there was the ill-conceived apocalyptic scaremongery of the campaign for Roland Emmerich’s 2009 end-of-the-world rollercoaster 2012, which caused so much confusion and alarm amongst the public that NASA set up an Armageddon FAQ page on its website to assuage people’s fears. The campaign for Samuel Jackson’s irony free winkfest Snakes on a Plane (2006), meanwhile, created such a hurricane of early viral activity that interest in the film had blown itself out long before its eventual released.

But even disregarding the clunkers, there is some considered scepticism toward the worth and efficacy of viral movie marketing. Some feel it’s a case of singing to the choir. “Some movies are so highly anticipated that it doesn't even matter,” reckons Dan Koelsch, Executive Editor of movieviral.com. “I'm surprised The Dark Knight even had a viral campaign. They obviously spent a good amount of money on something for people who were already going to see the film.”

Marc Berry Reid, Regional Director of digital communications agency Way To Blue, concurs. “The big question for me is how can viral campaigns break out of just appealing to the core audience. They are typically adopted by the 'fan boy' audience who, it could be argued, are going to see the film anyway. Avengers Assemble is a good example of a movie that, even though it screamed for one, had no elaborate viral campaign. Did the lack of one impact the movie? The box office so far doesn't seem to suggest so.”

Robert Marich, contributor to Variety and author of the book Marketing to Moviegoers has harder evidence. “It's absolutely shown by interviewing American moviegoers that the most impactful marketing is the in-theater screening of trailers and TV commercials. Online comes after. That's unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.”

So is it ultimately simply a case of throwing it all against the wall and seeing what sticks? The immaculate, award winning campaign for Tron: Legacy failed to put bums on seats, while James Cameron’s Avatar had no viral campaign to speak of.

But with the success of Prometheus already looking assured and the viral campaign for box-office sure-thing The Dark Knight Rises steadily ramping up, you can be sure that a good viral campaign will be deemed central to successful movie marketing for some time to come.

Hollywood loves a winner.

Better than the film?

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 15:25:00 +0000

Better then the film?

There’s a sidelong query trotted out – in the memory at least - by every other sub-Seinfeld late-Eighties stand-up ever to grace open-mic night as to why they don’t build the aeroplanes out of the same stuff they use to make the black-box flight recorders. It’s a fairly flatulent line of reasoning, but some refined stylistic variant of this disingenuous horse-sense flits through many people’s minds every time they plonk themselves into a cinema seat.

Movies today are more market-conscious and committee-led than ever, with your average blockbuster pandering to every demographic and regularly pleasing none. But one area of filmmaking that has maintained and steadily developed a level of artistic integrity and audience appreciation is that of the opening title sequence.

The title sequences for many – if not most – movies are not tackled by the feature director, but farmed out to design houses and graphic artists who are charged with setting the mood for the subsequent film or filling in something of the movie’s backstory. While ‘show-stopping’ and ‘scene-stealing’ are not compliments that credit sequence directors are keen to hear about their work, so many feature films these days are so contemptuous of their audience and so staggeringly inept in their execution that the economy and craft of many opening sequences usurp the films they precede. So why, to flog the flight recorder analogy, do they not let the title designers loose on the entire film..?

Eye-popping opening montages are, of course, nothing new. The dazzling name-in-lights credits of lavish MGM musical ‘The Great Ziegfeld’ (1936) and Saul Bass’s many collaborations with both Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock offered sumptuous entrees to some wonderful films. Later, Maurice Binder’s wildly iconic work on the first James Bond outing ‘Dr. No’ (1962) not only introduced 007’s trademark gun barrel intro, but the ultra-modern electro-gimcrackery that accompanied the credits proper announced to audiences that had – in Britain at least – endured the grim fortitude of the post-War Fifties that the future had most definitely arrived. Animated title sequences also had their day, with Bass’s lightly unhinged opening for ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ (1963) proving a perfect prelude to cinema’s finest madcap ensemble treasure hunt, while the insouciant feline anti-hero of the titles for 1964’s ‘The Pink Panther’ was such a hit that he even snagged his own freaky-deaky Saturday morning cartoon series.

Pablo Ferro, title designer for groovy Steve McQueen vehicles ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’ and ‘Bullitt’ (both 1968) - and hailed as a genius by no less than Stanley Kubrick – explains some of the basic ground rules of the discipline. “Everything has to be part of the movie. No matter how eye catching it is, if it doesn’t fit the movie you have to throw it out and start over.” The success of this approach is evidenced in Ferro’s seamless work on Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ (1964). “The B-52 refueling in mid-air looks like it was done when the movie was shot. Actually it was found at the last minute. Also, the long, thin lettering allowed you to see the screen and the lettering at the same time. It all fits perfectly.”

Films, of course, mirror their times and the close of the Sixties saw the likes of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967), which recalled a nation torn by the Great Depression of the Thirties as badly as it was by the turbulence of the Sixties. It also featured a stark, documentarian title sequence featuring bedraggled and oppressed country folk that mirrored the photojournalism coming back from Vietnam. Later, Charlton Heston-in-a-safari-suit sci-fi chiller ‘Soylent Green’ (1973) served up the last word in dehumanisation, and was preceded by an excellent sequence tasked with nothing less than charting the entire evolution of human technology.

The Eighties threw up very little in way of truly memorable title sequences, but the smash-and-grab ninety-minute blockbusters of the time were straightforward and direct affairs, and the back-alley conception of most VHS fodder left little time or money for notable production design. It would be the Nineties that ushered in something of a renaissance for the art of the title, with two wildly disparate sequences that reveled in squalor and glamour respectively; Kyle Cooper’s grungy, crepuscular and – watching it again – all too brief credit sequence for David Fincher’s ‘Se7en’ (1995) and Saul Bass’s glitzy, fatalistic opening for Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino’ (also 1995).

‘Se7en’ was a real landmark in movie title design, and the attention to detail that makes it work so well is almost tangible. “That’s where the fun is,” notes Kyle Cooper, “looking at something over and over again, finding ways to improve it, finding new solutions to the problem; tweaking the aesthetic, the timing, looking at a piece frame by frame and making it beautiful. That is how the best work gets made, and that is the work I would always choose to be measured against.”

Garson Yu, whose contribution to 2003’s ‘Hulk’ was a clammy microscopic maelstrom that prepared us for Bruce Banner’s cellular meltdown, has nothing but praise for Cooper’s work. “When ‘Se7en’ came out, it brought a new approach and look to feature films. Film is conservative compared to commercials and music videos in terms of a visual look. ‘Se7en’ at that time was edgy and it was new to the movie-going public.”

Not quite as edgy, but equally eye-catching, was Bass’s wondrous credit montage – his last before his death – for ‘Casino’, in which Robert De Niro, blown sky-high by a misfiring car-bomb, tumbles through a gaudy inferno of Vegas neon. Yu seems to be in a reverie when recalling what is already a distant, bygone age. “They were not done digitally but were all in-camera optical double exposures,” he says of Bass’s kaleidoscopic overlaps. “Beautiful colour montages. The look is different. We are all looking for a groundbreaking technique and look in title design. When that came out, it was mesmerizing.”

David Fincher is just one big-name feature director who appreciates the values of a well-drawn opening sequence. As well as ‘Se7en’ and the circuitous delirium that fronted up ‘Fight Club’ (1999), Fincher opened his claustrophobic yuppie-flight polemic ‘Panic Room’ (2002) with a stately aerial tour of a Manhattan hung with ominous, floating credits that foreshadow the emotional distance of the film. William Lebeda, proud recipient of both the ID Forty’s 2003 Best Title Designer award for ‘Panic Room’ and their year’s worst equivalent for M. Night Shyamalan’ ‘Signs’ (2002), details the process. “Fincher had a rough idea of placing type around the buildings,” he says, “but no one knew how to arrange it or what it was going to be when it was all done. We met with him and thoroughly discussed the potential and then went back and brought it to life for him. In many ways it is a visual effect sequence more than titles. Visual effects with words, really.”

As might be imagined, the realm of title design is a small one, but not, it appears, in any way vicious. My initial request for an interview with Mr. Lebeda was incautiously cut‘n’pasted to him bearing the name of a direct competitor, but he was more than willing to look past it. Similarly, I was invited to get in touch with Kyle Cooper by his putative rival Danny Yount. It is heartening to know these things go on under the Hollywood sign, no?

Yount, the design muscle that brought you the stripped-down vector assault of the ‘Iron Man’ credit sequence as well as one of the few good things about Guy Ritchie’s ‘RocknRolla’ (both 2008), is winningly self-deprecating when he describes his role in the Tinseltown process. “A title sequence is as important to a movie as a good cover is to a novel. Creating the first moving visual statement of a film is huge and delicate responsibility - I am invited by the director to set the tone of the film in the most expressive manner possible.”

If the director does not have a clear vision as to how he opens the film, he will, like any other area of design world, take pitches for ideas. This can take place at any point in the film’s development and can mean that prospective designers often have very little to go on. Pamela B. Green of PIC Agency, producer of many arresting montages such as that for Peter Berg’s overlooked Saudi actioner ‘The Kingdom’ (2007) elaborates. “Every film is different. When we worked on ‘The Kingdom’ all we had was the script, the same on ‘Van Helsing’ [2004]. With ‘Twilight’ [2008] we saw the whole film, but on ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ [2007] we only saw third. And sometimes we get nothing.”

Such last-minute breathlessness, however, can provide cover for some under-the-radar excellence. As Kyle Cooper says, “the title sequence becomes a side project for the director, almost like another little film, with a whole different set of concerns. So if we're lucky, we can stay fairly independent - and can usually get away with doing something good.” Naturally, modifications are often necessary, but Laurent Brett, designer of the titles for joyous French spy spoof ‘OSS 117: Cairo Nest of Spies’ (2006) and middling Bruce Willis payday ‘Hostage’ (2005) embraces the challenge. “I would say it is less case of revision, but rather a logical progression.”

The best sequences tend to stem from true collaboration between director and titles designer, and Gareth Smith of Shadowplay Studio worked especially closely with the director of precocious fertility fable ‘Juno’ (2007). “We generally prefer to work with people who specifically ask us to make a proposal or who have seen our work. The ‘Juno’ title sequence was just such a collaboration with director Jason Reitman. He was interested in the idea of a sequence that was somehow animated and featured the main character” What emerges is a savvy, winsome sequence that puts the inexplicably popular indie-flavoured dramedy that follows it to shame.

So why, to yank everything back to the initial analogy, do the powers that be not hand over the blueprints to the entire moviemaking behemoth to the designers of these wonderful sequences? “Huh,” snorts Garson Yu. “If they made planes out of the black box material, they wouldn’t fly. Maybe the same is true for films.” It’s a fair point – after all, the demands of modern filmmaking mean that having a nose for a good story and an eye for detail are nought compared to possessing the hide of a rhino and a stomach for battle. William Lebeda expresses it a little more eloquently. “I think it’s a bit like asking a poet to write a novel. The tools are the same, but the style is so profoundly different. And as title designers, we gravitate toward poetry.”

Red Dawn (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 16:21:00 +0000

With top doc 'Milius' in cinemas, ERH looks back at the at the film that makes Rambo look like Rimbaud...

Click For Trailer

Red Dawn (1984, John Milius)

Starring: Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Jennifer Grey, Ben Johnson, Harry Dean Stanton, Powers Boothe.

Box notables: Bomb-shelter mint. ‘Born in the USA’ iconic.

Tagline: ‘8:44 A.M. A full scale military invasion by foreign troops begins. Total surprise. Almost total success. A gang of high school kids become the last line of defense.’

Trailers: Raging Bull, Tin Can Alley, BIG Mistake!

Cherrypick: “Give me a grenade – I don’t wanna get cold!”

Whereas most Ex-Rent Hell material comes seeping up through the floorboards of expectation like the gut-clenching flash-flood backwash of latrine stew that eventually coagulated into the unflushable turds you see smeared across these pages, this beautifully shot and smartly directed big-budget whoop’n’holler drivel from exultant apocalyptic harbinger ‘Iron’ John Milius paratroops in through the suspended ceiling of our quality control by dint of sheer reprehensibility and a staggering balls–to-the-wall dementia that makes Rambo look like Rimbaud.

Abetted by slavering Cuban running dogs and some wigged out-of-the-box ‘What if?’ military daring on the part of Milius, a sneak Russian invasion of God Bless America begins with an entire division of battle-frenzy Commie helldivers parachuting onto the High School playing fields of Cripple’s Landing, Colorado. Quite how or why these baby-eating Bolsheviks flew such a massive complement of men and artillery through two thousand miles of US airspace to a totally indefensible spot in the very centre of a country whose security forces are surely poised on Defcon Zilch is swiftly rendered moot as the granite-hearted drones of the Evil Empire proceed to aerate everything that moves, starting with the film’s only black character.


Red Squares

Temporarily bamboozled by some sweet tactical manoeuvres resourcefully adapted from Coach Carter’s Junior High Pudknocker Playbook by skull-brained school quarterback Charlie Sheen, the vodka swilling heathens - no doubt caught up in the bloodlust of their cloven-hooved carnage – let the young Charles and a few of his better looking WASP friends slip through their borscht stained clutches. Pausing only long enough to see their school shelled back to the Stone Age (“School’s out, guy. Like, forever.”), the kids hook up with Sheen’s older brother (Patrick Swayze - who else?), loot the town bare and head up into the mountains where they learn that the whole nation is squirming beneath the iron-gloved paw of the Great Bear.

Trading their letterman jackets for snowtrooper uniforms, these Tet-Offensive teens are soon swooping down from the wintering hills and hazing the Crazy Ivans with guerrilla ambushes, psych-ops and the odd panty raid – and all this before their stones have dropped! It is on one such gusset run that they rescue feral waifs Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey, who in time bring a touch of cornfed mall-trash femininity to the boys’ barrack-room living conditions which have become, for want of a better term, fucking shocking. Not that these girls are anything less than emancipated: A few years after Red D Grey would reteam with Le Swayze for the inexplicably popular feelgood abortion drama Dirty Dancing, but here, after being mortally wounded during a miscarried sabotage mission, she resolutely demands that Patrick leave her with a solitary grenade to take an approaching column of Russkie APCs down with her – as early as 1984, it seems, Grey wanted it known that nobody, but nobody, puts Baby in the Red corner.

Do the Russians stand even a chance against such pluck? Clue: No.

Armed to the teets

With the golden hour palette of Days of Heaven, the clamorous tone of Days of Thunder and the moral weight of A Day at the Races, Red Dawn’s berserker inversion of what America had been doing to the denizens and regimes of its chosen enemy’s various strategic outposts for a good twenty years looks good, rides well, but tastes bad. While it is hardly within the remit of ERH to get overly stentorian and wade through it’s own A-hole into political waters that are far above it’s head, it is surely reasonable to say that this pointlessly splenetic contraposition of the Marshall Plan’s inevitable legacy, added to a total lack of rectitude in promulgating the virtual placebo of a conventional land war to the teen fall-out fodder of a world on the brink of nuclear showdown can’t do no right for doing wrong.

Bright spots include an invaluable snapshot of Swayze’s ineluctable rise to the Grand High Viziership of hick guru-dom that began in the boonies of Grandview USA, was consolidated on the Kentucky bluegrass of Next of Kin and would reach Zen perfection amid the fatal swells of Point Break; C. Thomas Howell going so Deer Hunter-Walken critical that his own team have to frag him; and Charlie Sheen’s lachrymose “Child torn between two fathers” Platoon rehearsal, but though these boys win their respective battles, Iron John botches the war.

Of course it may well be that Red Dawn, by hiding in such plain sight, was intended as a brash satire of American foreign policy; that Milius had baked a liberal hot potato and merely served it in a full metal jacket; that the Big Kahuna was tiring of his constant warmongery and using the tropes of blitzkrieg to send a message of brotherhood to all the victims of totalitarian colonialism… Sure - and he duetted ‘Islands in the Stream’ with Fidel Castro at the wrap party.

Get real, candy-ass!

Originally published in Little White Lies #26

Doin’ Time (1985)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 14:42:00 +0000

The most unbalanced, incautious bit of business committed to magnetic strip since Tricky Dick’s Lee Harvey Oswald impression turned up at the end of the Nixon Tapes...

Click for Trailer

Doin’ Time (1985, George Mendeluk)

Starring: Jeff Altman, Dey Young, Richard Mulligan, Big Yank, John Vernon, Simmy Bow, Barstow Eves, Muhammad Ali.

Tagline: ‘The most outrageous, hilarious, bizarre prison movie ever to escape.’

Trailers: Parker, She’ll Be Wearing Pink Pyjamas, La Historia Oficial

Cherrypick: “I think I found his weakness. Every time you punch him in the balls - he goes down!”

The Big House; the Cooler; Statesville; Old Chokey; Greystone College; the County Hotel: like schooldays, active service and a career in ‘waste management’, prison life is a duck-press in which the most colourful argot is forged. As intimate, lifelong friendships are cast, enemies shared and disappointments conjoined, the cryptic and endlessly evolving word-jazz that rat-a-tats through those calaboose bars carries within it a sense of community most law-abiding citizens will never truly know. It is a hard-luck language sired by circumstance and nursed by the knowing self-pity of the chain-gang lament; basted in irony and seasoned with time.

Yellow credits - always a bad sign

Little wonder, then, that with all this purple patois floating around that Hollywood scriptwriters should continue to dig around for prison yarns through which to parade their repertoires of purloined prose. But although it has proven endlessly tempting to all manner of writers and directors down the years, filmmakers looking to transcend prison movie diktats have almost to a man found themselves stymied by the burden of ministering to the genre’s compulsory cast of new fish, kindly old lags, bent screws and wicked wardens, its necessarily grim settings and the limited set of achievable goals for which their protagonists can reasonably aim.

Of course none of this barely researched claptrap would have mattered to the Braniacs up at ERHQ; to them prison was just another backdrop to crud up with their bush league spoofery. And so, from what the credits insist is an original story by Franelle Silver and Ron Zwang comes the most unbalanced, incautious bit of business committed to magnetic strip since Tricky Dick’s Lee Harvey Oswald impression turned up at the end of the Nixon Tapes; the aforementioned Doin’ Time.

Mulligan: Lust for Lunacy

Sentenced to twenty to ten in the pen for porking the Governor’s wife, diminutive door-to-door cryogenics salesman (no, really) Duke Jarrett (Altman) is looking at some serious limbo time. Quite which law he is adjudged to have actually broken is never made entirely clear, but five minutes in his glib, oleaginous company was more than enough to convince us that whatever the inequities surrounding the terms of his incarceration, the bastinado is most definitely the correct place for the little turd. Add to his constant toadying a loud mouth, a lofty demeanour and a line in sarcasm that’s about as subtle as a burning cathedral, and it’s safe to say that Duke’s spell in the bastille is going to be short, gruelling and more than eventful.

Things initially look up when he arrives at the prison to find the convicts merrily cooking burgers on the electric chair, performing skits on their own in–house TV channel and enjoying regular Friday night mixers with the women's prison across the street, but after running foul of the prison’s Mr. Big (Vernon) in a hallucinatory episode involving a hedge trimmer, a croissant and some ordinary household bleach, Duke finds himself challenged to a knock-down-drag-out boxing match with Vernon’s henchman – a white, middle-aged Mr. T manqué known simply as ‘Animal’. Such madcap mobocracy promises to be firmly stamped out when ludicrous popinjay Richard Mulligan (moose-faced fruit-loop Burt Campbell from TV’s Soap) takes over as warden, but when he in fact turns out to be stone-hatchet mad the prison spirals yet further out of control and the remainder of the movie veers off into a boxing picture rudely pasted together using cutaways from other films.

Say it ain't so, Mo!

Attaining a level of humour nudging pre-school and with the production values of a Central American snuff movie, DT’s shortcomings give one abundant leave to idly marvel at the unyielding power of the VHS juggernaut to so marmelise the careers of the likes of Mulligan and Vernon under its rancid wheels. Mulligan at least throws himself into proceedings with the vim and brio he applied to his every role. He does, admittedly, display frequent signs of having heavily self-medicated to reach such a state, but at least he gets behind the mule. Point Blank and Josey Wales veteran Vernon on the other hand seems so utterly mortified by the grievous sliproad onto which the ERH 18-Wheeler has muscled him that his despair seeps from every frame and oozes down the screen…

When not even a brief appearance by Muhammad Ali and his trainer/colour man/prank monkey Bundini Brown can enliven things, you know you’re up shit creek.

A Filmcorp production.

Taffin (1988)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Thu, 05 Sep 2013 15:19:00 +0000

"Ah, feck it!"

Taffin (1988)

Director: Francis Megahy

Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Alison Doody, Dermot Morgan, Patrick Bergin, Padraig O’Loinsigh

Trailers: Snorri and the Sagas, The Locarno Pact, Labrador vs. Jaguar, Okavango Delta

Cherrypick: “When you turn against me, as you surely will, remember - I am only your weapon.”

Ex-Rent Hell usually prefers to do it’s own bandy legwork when hunting down the lame turkeys plucked for this column, but after being alerted to the dribbling gonorrhoeal horror of ‘Taffin’ by a bootleg recording of Joe ‘Hollywood’ Cornish and Adam ‘Norfolk’ Buxton’s ‘Adam&Joe’ BBC6 show that was recently re-transmitted on ERH’s station of choice - Radio Free Dungeness - we realised that a golden gift-horse had laid a lemon in our laps. Soon finding ourselves £0.01 (inc. P&P) the poorer, but richer in every other way, a dinged-up VHS tape (and apologetic note) was winging it’s way from ‘Artie’s Artiefacts’, Kalamazoo Ave, Grand Rapids, MI.

Your loss, Arthur, is ERH’s cherished boon.

Kalamazoo Avenue, yesterday

Pierce Brosnan is Mark Taffin (brief and immediate note to budding screenwriters - no tough-guy/hero has ever been called Mark. Mark is a name for a third-division footballer, a pension advisor or a child). Taffin is a lovable, drunken rogue/two-fisted debt collector in a small seaside town in County Wicklow. His rebellious outsider credentials are swiftly established by the posters of Johnny Cash and hard-drinking Irish snooker ledge Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins he has Blu-Tacked to the walls of his tumbledown (read: insanitary) farmhouse (read: cowshed). He is Robin Hood, Jesus and Shane all put together – and looks better in Ray-Bans than any of them.

Yes, whether it’s solving a piffling financial matter for the head of the local Rotary Club or helping a gang of larking teens get one over on a comedy car salesman, Taffin is up to the task. It’s a rather genial line of business in which money rarely changes hands – he’s a bit like a one-man A-Team in that regard – and everything is usually cleared up by the time the pubs open. Taffin is a big-haired fish in a small, boggy pond, happy to tool around the countryside in a salmon-pink Fiat cabriolet bearing a bumper sticker that reads, ‘My Other Ride Is Your Sister!’ He’s part George Michael, part Bart Simpson, part shouty headcase, and all is well.

Welcome to my world...

But when a group of Dublin businessmen - led by ‘Harry the Bastard’ - turn up with sketchily outlined plans of locating a chemical plant on the local lacrosse pitch/totally reinvigorating the local economy, Taffin must become part Shaft, part Henry Kissinger and part shouty headcase in order to singlehandedly stop their fiendish plans to regenerate the community. All of which makes ‘Taffin’ sound like a bizarrely motivated but competently staged inversion of ‘Local Hero’, when it is in fact a somnambulant home-movie of some big lads in blousons running around the in woods, necking Guinness and wading through Wicklow’s many (and vast) Sunday lunchtime strip-clubs.

The LWLies lawyers would never allow us to ever imply that excessive alcohol consumption was part of any film’s shooting schedule, but Brosnan’s… ahem ‘wandering attention’ and transient accent (really, even after all these years are we sure he’s Irish at all?), the fact that he habitually sports thick sunglasses during any scenes shot before lunch and a wavering performance that mixes Richard Burton surliness with Nic Cage mania all add to ‘Taffin’s ‘Ah, feck it!’ style of filmmaking. It all comes to a head in the film's justifiably infamous line-reading/internet meme/‘Adam&Joe’ fave “Then maybe you shouldn’t be living heeeeeeeeeere!!!” Do seek it out.

Indeed, the film’s swollen Guinness budget might well be the reason that the business end of the big junkyard finale takes place entirely off-screen, with the resultant matte-painting explosion witnessed only by an old man walking his dog. It’s a sublime piece of comedy editing that, along with a late stand-up turn by ‘Father Ted’ star Dermot Morgan as obnoxious ‘Blue Book’ comedian Mickey Botswana and the closing theme music by Chas&Dave means that ‘Taffin’ – the big bollix! - may have had the last laugh after all…

Obituary: Rampton Caine (1933-2013)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Fri, 30 Aug 2013 11:38:00 +0000

Legend of stage and screen Rampton Caine quietly passed away in a Sierra Leone field hospital this morning. The Ex-Rent Hell National Affairs Desk looks back over his turbulent life and extraordinary career...

Rampton Caine (1933-2013)

To sum up the life of any man is no simple thing, but when it comes to a man as complex and private as actor Rampton Caine then the threads of truth, legend and vicious innuendo become harder to disentangle than a blind fisherman’s tackle-box. Often described as a self-hating racist, devious and manipulative, a liar, braggart and - according to director and friend Roger Ipswich – “the sort of man who would call out his own name during sex”, Caine has always remained an enigma, the key to whom his many biographies have consistently failed to conjure.

Born the son of a Bolshevik sous-chef in 1933, Caine’s early life was spent in almost comical poverty above a fishmonger’s on the Goldhawk Road in West London. His only escape from a home-life of tedious left-wing rhetoric and fishy updraft was visiting his uncle Barty who worked as a clapper loader at nearby Ealing Studios. It was here that he took his first steps toward acting, pestering producers into indulging him with parts in such post-war boosters as The Wooden Walls of England (‘47), and the incomparably mawkish East End wrestling fable The Kid Who Couldn’t (‘48), helmed by future business partner Grafton Wilde.

Guns by Suppertime

By 1950 he was beating out other fresh-faced hopefuls Dirk Parsons and Nicholas Bogard for junior romantic leads in such winsome comedies as jam-based cleric-com Saints Preserve Us! (‘50) and the self-explanatory Pardon My Pigeons! (‘52). But it was the one-two of doomed bomber-pilot ‘Wonky’ Wilkins in lavish WWII folly Operation: Cummerbund (‘56) and the lead in pointlessly grim kitchen-sink drama The Lonesome Ballad of Newton Heath (‘57) which brought him back to the attentions of Grafton Wilde, then prepping his seminal Canadian Western Guns By Suppertime (‘58).

Caine’s Atlantic crossing began a love affair with Canada, a place to which he would frequently return - often of his own volition – and somewhere he credited with gifting him “a renewed sense of wonder, many lifelong friends and a much needed dual passport”. Ironically, the role of grizzled trapper Chip Manners had originally been offered to old rival Dirk Parsons, but after he was killed in a brutal - and apparently motiveless - street attack, the part came to Caine. It was an opportunity he took with both hands, pricking the ears of Hollywood and ultimately marrying co-star Verna Palermo.

Twelve Minutes to Zurich!

The relationship would not last. Her fiery temperament and many infidelities dismayed Caine less than “her bloody cooking” and they were divorced months later. By this time he was in Hollywood starring in TV series ‘The Magpie’. As suave English sleuth Simon Magwitch, whose catchphrase “I’ve got the negatives!” would soon enter the national lexicon, Caine’s mediocre thespian chops were abetted by a series of co-stars ranging from old pros like Bettina Kermode to such rising talent as Hunter Boyd. These were the salad days, with Caine slipping in the co-financed spy-caper hit Twelve Minutes to Zurich! (‘61) and ensemble disaster behemoth Timeclock! (‘63) between palling it up with the Rat Pack and campaigning for presidential hopeful Richard Nixon. It was also around this time that he began his own long, bitter and wholly unsuccessful lobbying for the role of James Bond. It would later become an obsession.

The remainder of the Sixties saw him split between the UK and US for a variety of TV shows, films and hotly disputed tax-related issues. Few will now recall the nasty period colonial carry-on of A Town Called Hitler (‘66) or swinging zombie flick Chelsea Babylon (‘68), but his fondly remembered ATV series ‘Mine’s a Large One!’ and sweaty, vaguely existential Tex-Mex double-crosser The Eye of the Duck – which grazed the top ten earners of 1969 - kept him near - if not at - the top. However, some injudicious remarks about Sean Connery, an open letter to the Washington Post claiming the moon landings were filmed in a seed barn in Vancouver and divorce from his second wife - Peruvian art dealer Llama Paz - meant that the close of the decade couldn’t come quickly enough. Although he had scored a few notable hits, he spoke in his frankly unpublishable diaries of being “consumed by doubt and riddled with syphilis. What now for Rampers..?”

A Town Called Hitler

The answer was to come from the most unexpected source. While Caine was paying the bills with fluff like The Styrofoam Incident (‘70) and Sino-Italian costume picture The Contessa and the Cobbler (‘73) a young Californian filmmaker was casting his merchandise-friendly sci-fi saga Battle Beyond Space (‘77). Its massive success would introduce Caine to a whole new audience and open many doors. Unfortunately, just as he was enjoying this new-found position, his friend - and co-chair of their Ginger Palomino production company - Grafton Wilde was killed when a the brake cables of his vintage glider failed. A stoic Caine, who learned the news on the first day of filming on Euro car chase picture TR-7: The Movie (‘79), said that he was “stirred” by the tragic accident. By day’s end he had sold the company to Thorn-EMI for a sum infamously reported by the Financial Times to have been “well naughty”.

Security, however, was not without its price. Wilde had always advised his partner on career choices, but without his guidance Caine embarked on bizarre series of projects. With the distasteful mercenary romp The Carrion Crows (‘80) already in the can, he went on to make sleazy drug-peddling thriller The Union Square Shuffle (‘81), bawdy modern-day pirate guff The Treasure Chest (‘83) and an ongoing series of threatening phonecalls to Roger Moore before withdrawing from the limelight.

The Treasure Chest

It was around this time that myths started to circulate pertaining to both his state of mind and whereabouts… Had he holed up in a dojo in the foothills of Mount Fuji, or become a mountain man in the wilds of his beloved Canada? Had he undergone experimental reconstructive surgery in Panama or lost his mind on bad acid in a tee-pee in Wiltshire? Rumours also abounded that he had in fact appeared under numerous guises and aliases in art-house navel gazer The Oceanographer’s Niece (‘86), DTV schlocker Deathbarge! (‘87) and as the Reagan-masked killer in Something About the Way You… Die! (‘88). Upon his shock return to the public eye in 1990 he refused to confirm or deny any of these stories, but looked every inch the elder statesman in an eye-catching cameo role as a retired astronaut in Loudon A. Schmelling’s Oscar-baiting autumnal romance The Ineffable Wind (‘92).

A return to TV in primetime PI applesauce ‘The Sayonara Boys’ opposite old mate Nicholas Bogard kept him busy through much of the Nineties, though he did find time to camp it up in student comedy Bakersfield Rocks! (‘96) and serial killer hokum Johnny Serious (‘99). But a mixture of what, in an interview with the Radio Times in 2001, he called “swathes of Shakespearean guilt and debilitating jealousy” caused him to turn his back on the film world and retreat to his first love of crossbreeding waterfowl on his tumbledown Norfolk estate.

Johnny Serious

He surfaced now and again in the odd BBC adaptation – most memorably as the Duke of Croydon in 2005’s ‘A Catered Affair’ – and in dictionary corner on Channel Four’s teatime workhorse ‘Countdown’, but his most well-known and lucrative later appearance was as the Green Arrow’s sagacious valet in Colin Sawyer’s comic book adaptation Arrow Arrow (‘07). He took the role, he said, mainly to please his grandchildren, to whom, at the time, he owed a great deal of money, but it also served to remind millions of cinemagoers of his precise comic timing, considerable physical presence and freakishly high-pitched voice.

In an untransmitted television interview with Tony Milton in 1974, Caine was asked how he would describe himself, “Oh, balls to all that! I’ll leave it to the obituary writers if I may, old stick.” It is the reply of a man who never looked back, who esteemed his brittle muse above all else and who point-blank refused to answer a simple bloody question. So, with your permission, Mr Caine, might we say that there’s a new star in celluloid heaven tonight, and everything it touches… is its kingdom.

Rampton Caine, 1933-2013

A Catered Affair

Do please feel free to sign the remembrance book below.

Selected Filmography

The Kid Who Couldn’t (1948)

Director: Skip Wepner

Starring: Jack Carpenter, Rampton Caine, Kym Kipling, Otto Strang

Hideous confection of sentimentality, boneheadedness and flat-out tedium, this East End wrestling rigmarole takes in homeless orphans, cockney pluck and a curious turn from German weightlifter Otto Strang as a one-armed circus strongman. Avoid.

Saints Preserve Us! (1950)

Director: Clive Potterton

Starring: Hugh Massingbird-Massingbird, Jenny Pipkin, Reuben McKenzie, Rampton Caine.

Saucy Ealing effort about a family-owned Northern pickle factory threatened with closure by rapacious property developers. Little do the prospective new owners know that the factory stands on the site of an ancient battleground and is haunted by the family’s fearsome forebears. It tiffs along jauntily enough but is ultimately little more than Ealing’s own I’m All Right Jack recast as a ghostly lark – to little effect.

Pardon My Pigeons! (1952)

Director: Jack Steadman

Starring: Ian Middleman, Chance Hapley, Henderson Lime, Rampton Caine, Lorna Clitheroe

Standard clerical comedy in which the newly appointed vicar of a small rural parish must mediate between two rival factions vying for control of the village fete. When a band of crooks, led with effortless charm by the oily Henderson Lime, use the confusion as cover for a ludicrous jewelry heist, the lightness of touch with which director Steadman has imbued the first half of the film simply vanishes.

Operation: Cummerbund (1956)

Director: Gibson McKniff

Starring: Lawrence Kelp, Frank Wattle, Rampton Caine, Walter Kincade, Joan Threadnought

Spectacularly dull and stagebound WWII tale which seems to suggest that the entire war was fought in Westminster boardrooms by a moustachioed network of chipper Etonians. The operation they are all endlessly blathering about details a mission to target the clothing factories of Germany to sap enemy morale. We see little of it other than some patently obvious stock footage and some Whitehall martinets patting themselves on the back.

The Lonesome Ballad of Newton Heath (1957)

Director: Clem Waterhouse

Starring: Rampton Caine, Cyril Fanshaw, Cecily Duckworth, Philo Beehan

Yet another glum Northern kitchen-sinker that puts its protagonist through the ringer with merciless glee. Caine plays the titular Heath, a cinema usher and full-time dreamer diagnosed with an incurable – and very sketchily outlined – disease. His one remaining desire is to have his ashes scattered over the pitch of Old Trafford football ground, but fate, heartbreak and rigidly observed zoning laws stand in his way...

Guns by Suppertime (1958)

Director: Grafton Wilde

Starring: Rampton Caine, Verna Palermo, Wendell Wayne, ‘Arapaho’ Joe Thunderhead

Offbeat range Western filmed and set in Canada with Rampton Caine looking surprisingly lean and capable as a trapper framed for the murder of a local sheriff. Shot with no little brio by journeyman director-producer Wilde, this effective and well-crafted gem is well worth a look.

Twelve Minutes to Zurich! (1961)

Director: Kasper Menschmeier

Starring: Rampton Caine, Dolores Clayshoot, Tinto Agnelli, Sergio Aragones

Set in Switzerland, filmed in Colorado, dubbed in a hurry and released without a care, this co-production has tax-loss written all over it. Rampton Caine heads up a flabby cast of Euro jet-trash has-beens in a purported thriller about the assassination of a top soccer player. Political overtones are hammered home and the overall feel is one of confusion and carelessness.

Timeclock! (1963)

Director: George P. Hazzard

Starring: Cal Bracewell, Thelma Kellog, Rampton Caine, F. Campbell Muirhead

Very much the least of the top-heavy disaster potboilers that came in the wake of 1963’s Cuban Missile Crisis, Hazzard’s wordy nuclear parable stars the great, the good and Rampton Caine. When the fictional island of Santa Dominguez declares its atomic capabilities the race is on to prepare the US for imminent attack. But when a device is set off that disables all mainland chronometers, the military has to rely on more old-fashioned methods of timekeeping to coordinate its defences…

A Town Called Hitler (1966)

Director Roger Ipswich

Starring: Rampton Caine, Denholm Platt, Concordia Valentine, Jack Swann

A truly unpleasant colonial drama that centres on the battle for supremacy on the fictional island of Gran Bastado in the weeks and months following WWII. Delighting in scenes of graphic torture and merciless cruelty, Ipswich’s film is hard to take in one sitting.

Chelsea Babylon (1968)

Director: Lindsay Harcourt

Starring: Carrie-Ann Hampshire, Louise Spruce, Cresswell Hewitt, Rampton Caine, Peter Osgood

Zombies; the Swinging Sixties; dolly birds; the West London art-rock scene – fill in the blanks yourself. Features The Animals as house band.

The Eye of the Duck (1969)

Director: Denis Manley

Starring: L.Q. McKidney, Sally Pfister, Rampton Cain, Tonto Rodriguez

Very much in the vein of Peckinpah and prefiguring the druggy motorcycle emptiness of the early Seventies catwalk hippie scene, Manley’s film centres on a groovy motorbike gang running afoul of a local drug-lord on the Tex-Mex border. Veering between the supercharged and the dippily reflective, this was one of the first signs that the cinematic times were a-changin’.

The Styrofoam Incident (1970)

Director: Dr. Phillp Lavender

Starring: Rampton Caine, Lenny Crampton-Pugh, Marigold Pennycock, Tony Rudder

Caine applies his patented brand of world-weary misogyny to the role of Archie Croft, a washed up Fleet Street hack who gets wind of a once-in-a-lifetime story brewing in the backwaters of Haiti. Trading his jumbo expense account for a chartered Hercules to Port-au-Prince, he is soon embroiled in some ecological derring-do, plentiful bouts of world-class racism and a short-sleeved safari suit that would overwhelm a lesser man. When he discovers that a rapacious American company is dumping industrial by-product into the island’s rivers, Croft has his exclusive, but will he live long enough to file it…

The Contessa and the Cobbler (1973)

Director: Tezuka Yoshimura

Starring: Ramton Caine, Gina Villalobos, Omar Khalif, Dinsdale O’Rourke

Doing for costume epics what the Welsh did for cooking, this ludicrous mish-mash of histrionics, continuity howlers and overbearing music has little to recommend it. Rampton Caine as the cobbler’s Gepetto-like grandfather is the worst of the bunch and at one point can clearly be seen sporting a wristwatch throughout an entire scene.

Battle Beyond Space (1976)

Director: Bruce Hooper

Starring: Steve Stamper, Hope Thursby, Thoro'good Moore, Rampton Caine, Tiny Hamlets

Full-bodied space-opera with lashings of bold symbolism, flashy effects and a fine cast of unknowns aided by wily space general Rampton Caine. A wonderful fantasy adventure from the young director of Bad Zip-Code and American Car.

The Carrion Crows (1980)

Director: Roger Ipswich

Starring: Robert Stockton, Rampton Caine, Denby Spiggot, Carole Weymouth, Gunter Hartmann

Director Ipswich outdoes himself with this grubby and despicable tale of a group of heartless mercenaries rigging the election of the fictional West African country of Sierra Gabon. That Caine and co. so obviously appear to be enjoying themselves renders the whole enterprise even more unseemly.

The Union Square Shuffle (1981)

Director: Swede Larsson

Starring: Jim Madsen, Herman Blessed, Rampton Caine, René van Der Kirkoff

Seedy gem set in and around Manhattan’s Union Square, where we are introduced to the dopers, no-hopers, grifters, drifters and cops that make up the grim fandango of pre-Giuliani New York. Rampton Caine turns in a bonkers performance as a crossdressing street preacher while director Larsson insists on closing each scene with one of his trademark ‘up-skirt’ shots.

No Comment...

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 15:51:00 +0000

Hearts of Fire (1987)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:59:00 +0000

This is not Cinema, this is somebody else’s fugged holiday snaps spooled off at 24fps. And a grim excursion it proves...

Hearts of Fire (1987)

Directed by: Richard Marquand

Starring: Bob Dylan, ‘Fiona’, Rupert Everett, Julian Glover, Ian Dury

Trailers: The Lords of Quacktown, S*P*U*D*S*, Afternoon Moonlight

Cherrypick: 404: File Not Found

If one minus one equals zero, then, so theoretical mathematics posits, by peeling zero apart we get both one and minus one. From literally nothing we have created two distinct – if opposing – somethings. 17^th Century metaphysical philosopher Johnny Spinoza promoted related ideas concerning the formation of the universe – that it needed no creator, but was, rather, causa sui : a self-causing mechanism. Modern quantum theory now offers hypothetical proof that from absolutely nothing every atom in the cosmos simply spunked itself into existence - with no hint of intelligent design anywhere in sight.

All of which brings us to Hearts of Fire, a celluloid sandwich so devoid of flavour, filling, crust, texture, impetus, wit, energy, conflict, colourful packaging or any other conceivable reason for being that we must assume that the entire production just willed itself into actuality. There can be no other explanation for a film that nobody seemingly wanted to make, certainly no-one wanted to see, and many people now view as an existential prank.

Farts for Hire

This example of a self-creating film is not unique. Quizzed about 1976’s King Kong remake, baffled producer Dino De Laurentiis happily exclaimed “Is just ‘appen!” A similar kind of professional accommodation - tempered by incomprehension - was writ large on Angelina Jolie’s massive face at the premiere of self-sustaining spy shenanigan Salt. Ditto for Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s bemused grimace on the red carpet for Premium Rush.

In an exclusive 1988 interview with rock mag Burnt Suede, star Bob Dylan himself hinted at the veiled cosmic happenchance that underpinned the making of Hearts of Fire. “It was like a hailstorm in your jacket pocket, man,” he mumbled obliquely; “like being brought up Jewish on a hog farm.” Later in the same interview, director Richard Marquand – previously George Lucas’s directorial avatar/push-around guy on Return of the Jedi – muttered darkly about Druidic rituals, perpetual motion and ‘sentient production schedules’…

Indeed the film they were referring to could only have sprung into existence of its own volition. Imagine Spinal Tap’s home movies, or outtakes from seminal Metallica doc Some Kind of Monster in which the thrash titans take a break from dark metal alchemy, psychotherapy and despising each other in order to ponce around Welsh clifftops in loose-fitting satin jockey-pants. Now imagine fading rock scarecrow Bob Dylan decked out in apatchwork leather harlequin blouson fighting Rupert Everett’s electro-pop princeling for the musical soul of gormless ginger American hayseed ‘Fiona’ while the viewer’s hopes suffocate amid empty verses of narrative nothingness and endless choruses of sublime vacuity. This is not Cinema, this is somebody else’s fugged holiday snaps spooled off at 24fps. And a grim excursion it proves.

A sheepie and a perm = the '80s

Dylan is former rawk! idol Billy Parker. He’s American. He plays grundy sub-Tom Petty toe-tappers. He owns a chicken farm. He’s ‘real’. Everett’s Zak Cyan is nauseatingly English. His music sounds like the Art of Noise being played through a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He owns a helicopter. He is ‘a nob’. The Hayseed is a guitar-slingin’ blow-dried toll-booth operative with more hair than sense and more sense than talent. She will be their denim battleground.

But there will be no victory. No heart of fire.

This universe does not explode in a supernova of rock ecstasy, but folds into cold, lonely isolation as Bob heads back to Chickentown, Illinois, Rupe gets his head blown off by a jealous fan and the Hayseed gets to play her joyless proto-yacht rock beneath the grim Friday-night lights of her rickety hometown stadium. The film winks out of existence. It has fulfilled its unknowable life cycle and must now die.

'Eagles of Sanctuary', apparently

In King Lear, Shakespeare suggests that ‘nothing will come of nothing’. But he was wrong. Nothingness has gouged forth the very boiling heavens and all their illimitable glories: C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate; galaxies that existed impossibly long ago and tantalisingly far, far away.

Ninety minutes of undercooked, overripe, solid-gone music industry horseshit is a walk in the fucking park.

Heartbeeps (1981)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 20 May 2013 10:41:00 +0000

'Combines the easygoing child-abandonment larks of Spielberg’s A.I. with the sleek, hard-sci rigour of Spaceballs...'

Heartbeeps (1981)

Director: Allan Arkush

Starring: Andy Kaufman, Bernadette Peters, Randy Quaid, Barry Manilow

Trailers: Wright, Wong or Eddie, The Ottawa Papers, Silent Susan, The Dalesman

Cherrypick: “Check out the floppy discs on her!”

When the history of the long-predicted, oft-postponed, but ultimately inevitable robot apocalypse is finally written, the chapters on late 20^th and early 21^st Century speculative fictions dealing with how mankind has portrayed androids, artificial intelligences and assorted sex-bots, love removal machines and orgazmatrons should make for interesting reading.

Will the Terminator, for instance, be eventually viewed as the pitiless kill-crazy hassle-bastard we know and begrudgingly love, or seen as a timegliding Metal Christ sacrificing himself upon the pudgy anvil of human weakness? Will history record that C-3PO was an invaluable lightning rod for the converging affairs of man and machine, or a copper-kettle Quisling, blindly indifferent to the fate of his own kind?

And what, indeed, will tomorrow’s historians see through the grimy sprocket-holes of 1981’s near-future robo-love-in Heartbeeps, a film that combines the easygoing child-abandonment larks of Spielberg’s A.I. with the sleek, hard-sci rigour of Spaceballs to produce a cinematic experience akin to getting your wedding tackle caught in a sentient – and for some reason vengeful – film projector.

Yep.

Struggling under prosthetics that make them look like survivors of a darkroom fire in a toytown S&M club, Andy Kaufman and Bernadette Peters feature as two recalled mechanoids shunted into storage to run down their remaining (battery-)lives. Said storage facility is not, as might be expected, in the dank, padlocked basements of a bankrupt Des Moines retail park, but - because the script will soon require that the golden pastures of Arcadian romance blossom for our faulty Adam and his spent Eve - an airy, architect-designed atrium overlooking the Rocky Mountains. Despite both looking like they’ve been assembled from Airfix kits comprised entirely of inexpertlylacquered gammon, the sweet mountain air, piped-in Laurel Canyon muzak and the rhythmic throb of a nearby generator soon have their hearts a-beeping…

Deciding that a powered-up, temperature controlled love-nest affording breathtaking views of outstanding natural beauty is not a fit setting against which to play out their budding romance, they hook up with a wisecracking Borscht Belt comedian-bot named ‘Catskill’ – think an automated Rodney Dangerfield suspended in marmalade-hued Carbonite – and trade the stifling confines of their gilded cage for an unforgiving hardscrabble life stumbling across deserted Colorado mountainsides.

It surely goes without saying that genial repairman Randy Quaid is in mildly-hot pursuit.

'Take my wife...'

The rest of the films hypnotically dull 79 minutes alternate between the wretchedly predictable and spine-bendingly bizarre. Sub-Jim Kirk ‘What is this human emotion you call love?’ script-filler shores up such scenes as the one in which Peters is set upon and violated by a rogue Frogger machine. Quasi-religioso vignettes of our sexless cyborgs constructing a child from spare parts culled from each other’s nether regions is set against a major set-piece that witnesses them decimate a frou-frou drinks party in upscale Aspen, leaving the dead or dying bodies of sundry vacationing Hollywood types and log-cabin liberals – plus, curiously, Barry Manilow – in their beatific wake.

And speaking of musicians, special mention must at some point be made to the score by – and you’ll like this – John Williams. One can’t quite picture the great man – nor his frequent collaborator Steven Spielberg – being much for the booze, but his work here sounds exactly like the unexpurgated lo-fi demos he and the Beard might have laid down after rocking up to Williams’ home studio after a night on the tiles discussing ideas for Close Encounters. At least they didn’t go to waste.

Eh?

Perhaps the only true distinction one can allot Heartbeeps is that it’s blank reception and dismal performance totally derailed Kaufman’s plans to develop a movie vehicle for his spectacularly unloved and certifiably noxious creation, Tony Clifton. A foul, powder-blue lounge singer/Dadaist performance artist, Clifton’s toxic schtick was pitched somewhere between Andrew Dice Clay, a Weimar Miss Piggy and a tire fire on a garbage barge, and predicated on the idea that everyone but him was a slathering, uncouth imbecile. Happily the project eventually saw the light of day, serving as the basis for Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix’s 2010 fuck you-mentary I’m Still Here.

But that’s another story.

Rewind: Rhinestone (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:08:00 +0000

Looks like we're not in Max's Kansas City any more, Toto!

Rhinestone (1984, Bob Clark)

Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Dolly Parton, Ron Leibman, Richard Farnsworth, Tim Thomerson

Trailers: The Jewel of the Nile, Unfaithfully Yours, Phar Lap, Bachelor Party

Cherrypick: "I'm tighter than a gnat's nose stretched over a rainbow!"

'I've been walking these streets so long,

Singin' the same old song,

I know every crack on these dirty sidewalks of Broadway…'

Rhinestone Cowboy (Words and Music Larry Weiss)

The unholy congregation of major motion pictures based on popular music hits is a bizarre but neighborly one in which Country music is - as Ex-Rent Hell has so consistently, fervently and vainly maintained – quite definitely king. You won't find too many studio releases based on Delta Blues murder ballads (dark and difficult) or Rock standards (too dumb and full of cum) or Disco anthems (frothy and city-fied), but the amiable universality of anecdotal heartbreak and boozy reminiscence that flows through Country music like the conjoined river of life that rolls through Anytown USA is just right.

Country & Western music is as timeless and sweet the view from America's back porch. It might not be a wholly New World invention like Jazz, the Western or drive-by bodybaggings, but it has nevertheless been distilled down into the very essence of heartland values.

Either that or it's a twangy shorthand for the shackles of conformity, poverty, institutionalised ignorance and alcoholic self-negation that are the true qualifiers of the human condition - the ones that Hollywood so repeatedly and enthusiastically loves to ram down our pie-holes. And if they're slathered in jaunty tunes, shitkicking moonshinery and the odd car chase, then so much the better!

Yee, and indeed, Har!

Despite this, most C&W movies are rather forgettable affairs. The 1978 film adaptation of Tom T. Hall's #1 single Harper Valley PTA didn't trouble too many years’ best lists, while Arthur Penn's 1969 reworking of Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant has not dated at all well. And although Sam Peckinpah's mighty, lunatic tilt at CW McCall's 1976 novelty hit Convoy remains a dubious thrill to this day, it is, if we're splitting hairs - and this being Ex-Rent Hell we most assuredly are - more of a trucker anthem or rebel yell rather than true C&W.

Not so 1984's Rhinestone, based on the majestic happy-sad 1975 chart-topper by Country royalty Glen Campbell, and transmuted into a kooky inversion of The Wizard of Oz that sees Stallone's lunkheaded New York-Italian cabbie whisked from the Emerald City by blowsy Country chanteuse Dolly Parton and dumped in a Tennessee hog farm to be deprogrammed by the down home gumption of her extended family of gunning sideshow hayseeds so she can win a bet that she can turn anyone into a C&W star in just two weeks*.

Looks like we're not in Max's Kansas City any more, Toto!

"Be gentle - I may be a little rusty..."

Adapted by the erstwhile Rocky Balboa alongside future Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson, and with the Backwoods Barbie dishing out the folksy wisdom-bombs/weirdo barnyard aphorisms in between the sassy bar-room stompers, it's hard to imagine a more perfect storm of pure-blood rags-to-riches Americana. And yet the film failed to find an audience, lost a pile of cash, was nominated for raft of unwanted awards and is seen now, when it is seen - it's almost impossible to get hold of a copy - as a bad joke.

True, Stallone staggers distractedly through the film as if he's trying not to spill a glass of water he's carrying in the pocket of his nut-smuggling royal blue denims, while Dolly – herself dealing with balance issues on a much grander scale and in a region of far greater gravitational instability - seems unsure whether she's in a rambunctious comedy or a disease-of-the-week tearjerker, but they make for charming enough company. And the dialogue might flit around the dial from crass sex-puns to schoolboy innuendo but very occasionally tunes into a crackling bandwidth of amiable wit. A shame then that, cinematically, the film is one big missed opportunity, with none of the cracked glitz of post-Disco comedown New York or the pastoral balm of the Tennessee boonies getting much of a look in.

Hay!

Back in 1969 Easy Rider claimed to be the story a man who went looking for America, but couldn't find it anywhere, while, in his song America, Paul Simon was stranded - empty and aching and not knowing why - on the New Jersey turnpike, watching the cars making similar pilgrimages into the dying light of that very same year.

In 1984 Rhinestone found America. But nobody wanted to know.

*Oddly, this - apart from the line-dancing - is also the basic plot outline for Sly's ‘95 sci-fi actioner Judge Dredd.

Previously published in Little White Lies #40

Jaws Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:13:00 +0000

Little White Lies intercepts a private message concerning an exciting new 'Untitled Shark Pic'. Click through to read secret studio notes on cast, score, director, title and more...

Man In Black 3 Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:31:00 +0000

'If ITV had made 'Dr Who', it would look something like this...'

Erratic Tex-Mex man-love for Josh Brolin notwithstanding, ERH proceeds to get unnecessarily hot under the starched collar over the out of date, out of ideas and thoroughly out if time threequel to the sheer perfection that was the original Men in Black for Little White Lies...

The Avengers Review

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:21:00 +0000

'Like being kicked repeatedly in the throat by a metal dog...'

They don't come much bigger and they don't get all that very much better than Joss Whedon's bright, shiny, unapologetically fun superhero smackdown, The Avengers/Avengers Assemble. Click through for our lengthy, somewhat smitten review of Marvel's sprightly leviathan for Little White Lies...

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:18:00 +0000

Connery and Moore appear as Richard Nixon's Spitting Image puppet and Pat Butcher/a rotting orange respectively in Time Out's 1983 homage to Radio Times cover art.

Just imagine what they'd have done with Daniel Craig's mug - a visage ERH has always thought looked like a cross between a fleshy upturned plug and a dented coal scuttle.

Animation: The Eagleman Stag

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:10:00 +0000

An assured, delicately monochromatic creation in folded card and plasterboard, Mikey Please's The Eagleman Stag is a grudgingly humanistic mix of memory, aging and mutant beetle DNA, and will likely be one of the greatest things you’ll see on any screen this year...

Rewind: Joysticks (1983)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Sun, 13 May 2012 16:11:00 +0000

The kids are funning it up and City Hall wants to drop the curtain on their good times. We’ve heared this song before, but Joysticks is a lament, not a hymn...

Joysticks (1983, Greydon Clark)

Starring: Joe Don Baker, Leif Green, Jim Greenleaf, Scott McGinnis, John Diehl

Tagline: More Fun Than Games! (?)

Trailers: Chump Change, Ivory Powers, The Oceanographer’s Niece

Cherrypick: “He’s got Pac-Man Arthritis and Blinky Syndrome?!?”

It would be remiss to steam into any review of a film as far-reaching as 1983’s mammary-minded button-jabber Joysticks without first checking the grubby fingerprints of the unregistered clown school rejects that somehow scavenged together the fears and obsessions of the video generation into a fully-formatted pixilated zeitgeist that gifted the era their Altamont; a dark and kaleidoscopic prism through which the videovisual Eighties could rewind a splintered decade.

Nostalgia: not what it used to be...

Produced and distributed by the dubiously monickered Jensen Farley, purveyor of superannuated bongo flicks and third-tier schlock horrors - as well as Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, which for ERH’s money is the greatest film title since Children’s Toilet (1897) – Joysticks would appear to have skin and shock credentials to burn, but little feel for the beat of the street. Enter director Greydon Clark, a cinematic ambulance chaser who had already proved that he didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing with such à la mode polemics as Satan’s Cheerleaders, Black Shampoo (literally an all-black version of Warren Beatty’s Shampoo) and Skinheads. Together they would come to do for the neon Valhalla of the video arcade what Harpo Marx did for the telephone.

Essentially a itchy-trigger showdown between the nerds, jocks, Pasadena punks and bleach blonde Valley girls that make up the console community of some jerkwater Californian burg and local busybody/mob bagman/boiling-point puritan Joe Don Baker’s attempts to shut down their gilded palace of sin, this is the underdog story writ large: Footloose for four-eyed Freddies; Amistad for Amstraders; Rocky for ‘tards. The kids are funning it up and City Hall wants to drop the curtain on their good times. We’ve heard this song before, but Joysticks is a lament, not a hymn.

Believe it or not, but this crew is actually a highlight!

But we get ahead of ourselves, for every Kong needs his Mario, and our guide through the neon-edged netherworld of arcade fire is one Eugene Groebe – an entry-level Pointdexter complete with bow tie, three-pleat chinos and brutal horn-rims. Drafted into the food counter of his neighborhood video parlour – a facility whose W.I.C. (Wiener Into Cleveage) count stands alone in modern cinema – Eugene is our pratfalling Passepartout around the world of cabinet chaos, breasty bi-play and internecine intrigue that all threaten to take the unwary viewer’s eye off the ball. We would, however, do well to remember that this was the American Eighties, where nothing was as it first seemed…

Not only was the Cold War raging, but American heavy industry was buckling under the yoke of the Rising Sun as Japanese corporations employed inscrutable long-game business plans in order to break the back of US manufacturing. And where better for the Asian appeasers to psychically feed and water the armies of disinherited American worker drones while they flooded the market with cheap electronic gee-gaws and efficient automobiles than the inescapable 8-bit Matrix of their own fiendish video ‘entertainments’. The battle for American industry would not be fought in the boardroom or on the picket-line but on the breaking grounds of Galaxian and Pac-Man. The irony, of course, is that the vanquished foe would be paying a quarter a time for the privilege.

'Satan's Hollow'

Thus Baker is ultimately revealed as the hero of the piece. The big-boned barbarian at the gates is become an unheeded saviour; the herald of economic collapse and societal malaise destined to be forever shunned and ridiculed by the silicone sybarites raining outsize barrels down upon him from atop the city walls.

Never mind that Joysticks is episodic, crass, prurient, boneheaded, rudderless, baffling and groans under the production values of a Central American snuff movie - it is also binary wake-up call to a goggle-eyed nation blasting away at the wrong kind of space invader. This is Cinema as Smuggler: subversive, slippery and - to paraphrase Hunter S Thompson – stupid enough to be totally confident.

Film File: The Deer Hunter (1978)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Just. How. Cool. Is. This? Michelangelo goes Cimino in this brilliant, bonkers Deer Hunter Time Out cover from Feb, 1979.

Click through for a precise dissection of the film.

Film File: The Deer Hunter (1978)

Plus...

Time Out, you rule(d)!

Satin Crew Jacket Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:43:00 +0000

The ERH Fashion Desk is a much maligned section of our vast sprawling organ, but even a blind squirrel finds the odd nut, and they've stumbled across a real blinder in the net's premier resource for Vintage TV and Film Crew Jackets.

Standouts are an unglued drug-busting cartoon on this silver 'Miami Vice' number, a ghoulish burgundy 'Night Court' jacket and this cooler-than-school 'Baretta' windbreak. But ERH's favourite has to be this slick, hi-tech, midnight black street-tough jacket knocked out to accompany warm, fuzzy MASH spin-off 'Trapper John M.D.'

ERH is now heading over to ebay with the housekeeping money and the sad, pitiful illusion that our ungainly bucket-gut and curiously misshapen frames could ever actually pull one of these babies off. See you there!

Rewind: Eat The Rich (1987)

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:58:00 +0000

The nobs are snubbing the snobs and the peasants are truly revolting in The Comic Strip's 1987 jollity pogrom!

Eat The Rich (1987, Peter Richardson)

Starring: Lanah Pellay, Nosher Powell, Lemmy, Ronald Allen, Robbie Coltrane, Koo Stark, Roland Rivron, Paul McCartney.

Tagline: ‘You are what you eat!’

Trailers: The Pick-up Artist, The Boy Who Could Fly, Nightflyers, Revenge Of The Nerds II, Maximum Overdrive, The Squeeze

Cherrypick: “Die, minge-eaters!”

"We must admit that history is enjoyable to a large extent because it enables us to pass judgment on the past" homilised Whippy-haired former Home Secretary Douglas Hurd a couple of years ago. Whilst many assumed Lord Westwell to be eloquently promoting the need for a newly galvanized Europe, he was of course referring - albeit obliquely - to the Ex Rent-Hell National Archives and, in doing so, specifically attempting to distance his Cabinet term from the semi-fictionalized events of Channel Four comedy troupe The Comic Strip’s 1987 big-screen jollity pogrom, Eat The Rich.

Arrow Arrow!

Loosely based on Alan Moore’s graphic novel ‘V for Vendetta’, Richardson’s piebald splattire follows Alex (Pellay), a sexless Chalk Farm rugger nun fired from upscale Yuppie eatery, ‘Bastards’, for being too common, too gay and too black, and summarily thrown to the mercy of the shark-infested jackboot factory of Thatcher’s Britain.

After an attempt to claim some dole money degenerates/escalates into fatal gunplay our nascent Revlon revolutionary is soon on the run - fomenting dissent across the breadth of Maggie’s Farm (read: riding a shire horse idly around Wiltshire with Big Ron from ‘East Enders’) and pricking the left ears of filthy/fruity fifth columnists Lemmy and truant ‘Crossroads’ Casanova Ronald Allen

'Going down to the Crossroads...'

Meanwhile, in another film entirely, beer swilling, signet ringing, royalty boinking Home Sec. Nosher Powell is busy dealing with Shane MaCgowan’s sea shantying IRA wastrel and Rik Mayall’s fingerpoppin’ trade unionist with all the subtlety of a bull in a Chinese shop. A couple of rabbit punches in the diplomatic ‘nads later and Nosh has his politically expedient sights set on crushing Alex’s rabble-rousing Robyn Hoodery/pony trekking weekend. The board is set; the nobs are snubbing the snobs and the peasants are truly revolting.

Achieving something akin to a proto photo-tableaux vivant by cross-processed Hogarth/class traitor Martin Parr and as similarly welcome as a red-headed step-child, Eat the Rich produces the visual equivalent of listening to long wave radio with an ice-cream headache and boasts a soundtrack muddier than a Somalian dockyard.

Nosher's got a red-top!

Inspirations are clearly Gilliam’s Brazil, Norman Tebbit's ‘On yer bike!’ speech and mushrooms from off of the municipal golf course, but denuded of the Thatch baiting, tin-pot Trotskyism of ‘Young Ones’ scribe Ben Elton - who, repugnant though he remains, knew at least one way to skin a cat - the filmmakers’ putative political potpourri falls flatter and faster than Del Boy in that wine bar.

The Strip had pissed in their silver screen chips. The following year’s TV series would, ironically, produce their best work with such febrile Brechtian lunacy as Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door, The Yob’s cosmic pithiness and, in The Strike, their one indisputable classic, but it was to be four years before they finally received cinematic probation, only to immediately re-offend with ‘91s deity-defeatingly execrable The Pop Must Die(t).

Nurse – the codeine!

Jerry Seinfeld's Video Shelf: Revealed!

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:50:00 +0000

Ever wondered what movies made up the motley collection of video tapes in the corner of Jerry Seinfeld's apartment? Well, now, after much educated guesswork, plenty of wild hypotheses and a many a crazed conjecture, ERH has the evidence that will finally lay the matter to rest once and for all. Our archivists have been granted unprecedented access to a recent find made in the Columbia Studios vault that puts an end to years of speculation, violent disagreement and bitter schisms within the fan community. The truth is here at last...

Jerry Seinfeld's Video Shelf: Revealed!

Many ‘Seinfeld’ fans have long obsessed over the contents of the video tapes nestled on the ratty shelving system that rests in the corner of Jerry Seinfeld’s on-screen apartment. For almost the entire run of the smash-hit show they were to remain tantalisingly out of reach of those desperate to know what it was that Jerry fired into the VCR in those few, precious moments when he had the apartment to himself. Was it sports? Was it porno? Was it – as many have suspected – endless repeat plays of his own stage-shows watched with a mixture of solipsistic glee, preening narcissism and egomaniacal self-preoccupation?

Well it’s now time to find out!

The arguing's over, Jerry. Over!

Recently rediscovered in the musty vaults of the Columbia Studios Props Archive while ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ production designers were busy preparing the sets for Larry David’s ‘Seinfeld’ ‘reunion’ show, the movies on the tapes in question – long considered lost, and since bequeathed to the Chevy Chase Wing of the Smithsonian Museum - will have a familiar ring to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the show. And not only do we – and future generations - now have the actual tapes themselves, but ERH has also managed to track down contemporaneous reviews for ten of these lost classics.

So let’s rewind to the Nineties, when VHS still ruled and one young girl’s strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk was captivating the hearts of viewers worldwide…

Rochelle, Rochelle (1987, Roger Ipswich)

Starring: Beatrice Dalle, Jeremy Irons, Rampton Caine, Billy Mumphry
Trailers: Private Tiddles, The Irate Pallbearer, Medoc or Bust!

A stultifying US-produced Euro-pudding that labours under an indeterminate ‘old-timey’ vintage and a grasp of Old World geography that is fairly boggling even by American standards, Ipswich’s would-be epic bodice-ripper is in fact an endless roundelay of Vaseline-lensed drawing room blather and cruelly protracted seductions that make The English Patient look like Red-Hot Dutch. Rumoured to exist purely as a tax loss into which portly Jock-rockers Simple Minds siphoned off the cream of their ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ jackpot, this slipshod tale of ‘international intrigue and high-stakes diplomacy’ is in fact little more than an a mercilessly overextended Ferrero Rocher ad in which Dalle’s increasingly bored pout threatens to ingest her entire face as she trudges from the palazzos of Milan to the ghettos of Minsk in search of her long lost twin.

Pierre Nourmand, Irish Vogue

Deathblow! (1990, Slip Digby)

Starring: Tom Selleck, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Joe Pantoliano, Charles Durning
Trailers: Rome, Open City II, Honeymoon in Hiroshima, Chump Change

A risible slab of tub-thumping Japanoia based around technologically advanced fire balloons being released into the jet stream by the Japanese military-industrial complex for detonation across the Western seaboard of the US. The only thing between mainland America and this mild incendiary peril is Tom Selleck, foreman of an experimental inflatable oil refinery off the coast of California. The 'deathblows' come thick, fast and ludicrous, while Tom has his hands full juggling peril from above with the arrival of his ball-busting wife/boss/senator (Tripplehorn) and his half-Japanese foreman (a heavily Nipped-up Pantoliano) who’s scheming away in the hydrogen filtration plant deep in the bowels of the flyaway oil platform...

Ben Okwonga, Quebec Star-Herald

Cold Fusion (1989, Grafton Wilde)
Starring: Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Wings Hauser
Trailers: Muleskinner Maude, Banker's Draft, Q-Factor

The ultimately profitless reteaming of Terminator stars Biehn and Hamilton is the only notable aspect of an underfunded post-Apocalyptic dud that’s light on action, low on ideas and heavily indebted to Mad Max Beyond Refrigidome. Essentially a McCabe & Mrs. Miller for the SNES set, it revolves around Hamilton (spunky, wooden) and her low-rent Alaskan brothel being given the glad eye by local robber-baron Hauser (wing-faced, wooden) and his overdressed banshee horde. The only thing standing in the way is itinerant lamplighter Biehn (smelly, wooden) and his arsenal of judderingly unlikely pyrotechnic gee-gaws that make poundshop indoor fireworks look like the Great Fire of Chicago.

Moss Partridge, TV Times

Prognosis Negative (1988, Iain St. John Sinclair)
Starring: Mark Harmon, Holly Hunter, Timothy Hutton, Ernest Borgnine
Trailers: Wagga Wagga, Flash Drive, The Oceanographer's Niece

A brooding courtroom melodrama told via a dizzying array of multiple flashbacks, Sinclair’s overwrought potboiler relates a horribly botched surgical procedure as seen through the eyes – and lives and loves! – of a group of freewheeling, sports-jacketed medical professionals. Perennial second-stringer Harmon plays against type as the self-serving - probably Jewish, but definitely European - surgeon who falls for the prim Iowa farm girl (Hunter) he blinded during a routine tonsillectomy; but it's when Hospital Administrator Borgnine takes the stand to deliver some sweaty, wild-eyed revelations that expose a complex – and frankly, rather absurd - web of medical, legal, political and anatomical corruption that leads all the way to the Vatican that this reviewer’s prognosis switched from negative to positively antagonistic.

Jack Morales, The Greenwich Village Gardener

“Blame It On The Rain” (1992, Dawn Silver)
Starring: Laura San Giacomo, Elizabeth Perkins, Eric Roberts, Rubén Blades
Trailers: Objective: Toronto, Jack in the Box, Extreme Genocide

Agreeably featherweight/offensively irrelevant South American-set rom-com in which San Giacomo and Perkins play rival botanists who both fall for the same man (Roberts), unaware that he is the mineral-stripping industrialist jackal behind the massive swathes of deforestation that threatens extinction for the Amazonian Sperm Beetle they have come to study. Although a notable early entry into the ‘Bespectacled Clipboard Dolly’ cycle, “Blame It On The Rain”’s musings on the changing face of women in the workplace are overshadowed by a grandstanding turn of lunatic macho posturing by Roberts, who displays a knack for comedy that touches the cloth of genius. Blades is similarly revelatory as freelance Nazi sidekick, D'arblay ffytche.

Doc O’Shea, Hepcat! Magazine

Firestorm (1997, Harry J. Uckhauser)
Starring: Harrison Ford, Barry Newman, Piper Perabo, Jay Leno, Ice Cube
Trailers: Ivory Powers, The Kids From Cabbagetown, Quadruplex

Sickly but full-bodied environmentalist fable that would seem to be the bastard child of Laurel Canyon crystal gazing mumbo-jumbo and the kind of balls-out disaster movie that went South around the same time as Barry Newman’s mojo. Just 48 hours from retirement, hangdog LAPD Chief of Predictive Science Jack Nostradamus (Ford) discovers a genre-neutral doomsday prophecy written on the stick of his morning corndog that warns of fiery destruction for the LA metropolitan area unless carbon emissions are cut by at least a third by suppertime. Teaming up with maverick eco-warrior Newman, Nostradamus embarks on a calculated orgy of destruction to wreck the city’s infrastructure in order to save it from an only-slightly-more terrible fate - while still attempting to make it to his estranged step-daughter’s wedding on time!

Anamaria Ardilles, Tijuana Examiner

Check Mate (1998, Elia Kamalev)
Starring: Brian Dennehy, Oskar Wiesner, Elizabeth Shue, Frank Whaley
Trailers: Sandwedge Susie, The Corked Aristocrat, Track Meet

Action-packed adaptation of Ferenc Jaspar’s classic meditation on power and corruption, My Mother Is My Kamera, that smartly updates the narrative to post-Cold War Europe. Whereas Jaspar’s original turned on a 19th Century Hungarian peasant’s attempt to regain his farmstead by challenging the Tsar to a game of chess, Kamenev substitutes said farm for a missing nuclear warhead, stolen by ‘The Tsar’ - a disfigured mathematical genius turned insane supervillain. And so it is that retired USO black ops wet-jobber Jack Keane is sent in to butcher his way through post-Wall Eastern Europe and take on the megalomaniacal mastermind at the treacherously tedious game of ‘Death Checkers’. Shot during a less bureaucratic, more enterprise-minded era, the stunning gold-plated Maserati chase through Moscow’s Hermitage Museum is famous for being entirely free of CGI, and holds the current Hollywood record for damage caused to a World Heritage Site.

Dandridge White, Waco Proclaimer

Blimp: The Hindenburg Story (1988, P.P. Wagstaff)
Starring: Joe Piscopo, Andrew McCarthy, Rob Lowe, Linnea Quigley
Trailers: The Crying of Lot 48, Spotted Dick, Infinite Displeasure

Wagstaff’s shoddy follow-up to his similarly misbegotten all-toddler production of Charles Bukowski’s ‘Ham on Rye’ takes the greatest disaster of aviation history and uses it as a lamentable excuse for Piscopo to run around shouting “Ach, nein!” in his inimitable Brooklyn drawl. It was initially presumed that Wagstaff’s decision to frame his cast in extreme close-up was an attempt to emphasise how his tightly his characters’ fates were intertwined, but he has since hinted that it was simply due to the fact that the budget dictated he shoot most of the film in the gazebo of a recently deceased business associate. For the most part, the cast all look like they are either drunk or thinking about getting drunk, while the decision to use a slide whistle over actual stock footage of the disaster at the climax of the film was ill-advised to say the least. “Oh the Humanity!” indeed.

JB Pepperton, East Yonkers Seed Bulletin

Chunnel: 32 Miles of Hell (1994, T. Barry Armstrong)
Starring: Jonathan Pryce, Marha Plimpton, C. Thomas Howell
Trailers: Take the High Road, Lenny, The Lynching of Lollipop Johnny

This slickly retooled version of the 1960 Richard Harris vehicle Annoyance at 4000 Leagues sees a diplomatic furore erupt when a coach-load of test patients for new weapons-grade anti-depressant hijack a train half way through the newly-built Channel Tunnel. Pryce takes on the famous Sgt. Wilkins character, but whereas Harris played him as a louche, skirt-chasing bounder (resulting in well-documented off-set court proceedings), Pryce opts for a bizarre, fidgety, near-catatonic incarnation of the angry lone soldier who must decide whether to join or quash this subterranean siege. Plimpton, as the ex-Vegas pole dancer en route to her new vocation as a church restorer in Lille, is the moral nucleus of the piece, and the scene where she distracts the patients with some ping-pong balls and a carefully placed rosary chain proves something of a crypto-Christian hoot! Attempts at forging a supplementary metaphorical stratum regarding deep-set class divisions in the New Europe, however, are less successful, relying, as they do, all-too-heavily on extraneous shots of Howell as a narcissistic corporate shitbag doing donuts in his speedboat while bellowing NASDAQ figures into an outsize mobile phone.

Kim Clutch, Seattle Breeze

Sack Lunch (1997, Crichton Sawyer)
Starring: Dustin Diamond, Pam Grier, Bert Kwouk, Dabney Coleman
Trailers: Careless Tentacle, Rank and File, Fever Dream Genie

The question of how an entire family actually got in to a brown paper bag is somewhat superseded by the question of how a family constituting of an African-American mother (Grier) and Chinese father (Kwouk) were able to spawn pale-faced ass-clown, Dustin Diamond. Allegedly made for $5000, with all performers and crew accepting questionably sourced hi-fi equipment in place of their per diems, Sack Lunch is your run-of-the-mill cheapjack comedy, in that it’s all concept and no execution. Its verbose, single-location structure and melancholy undertow had some wags calling a ‘Waiting for Godot’ for the cafeteria crowd, but not even Beckett at his most indulgent would risk testing the dedication and patience of his audience to this degree. And is an eleventh hour Foucauldian polemic on the dehumanising effects of prisons really the best use of a Dabney Coleman cameo?

Alan Mack, Cropduster’s Quarterly

+DJ+PF

DO NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH...

noreply@blogger.com (Ald) — Mon, 07 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

It’s a celluloid jungle out there. We’ve all of us at one point got our wires crossed and settled down for a night in front of the box with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s peerless spy caper Notorious only to be confronted with workaday Biggie Smalls biopic… Notorious. Even the most diligent film fan can often find it tricky to differentiate between the deluge of similarly titled claptrap out there, but here are a few that you most definitely don’t want to mix and match…

DO NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH...

The Proposition - The Proposal

True story: ERH was on a plane recently, coming home from its holidays (read: a grim and barren sex-tour of the Benelux Countries). Everything was proceeding with its usual despicable monotony, until, from deep within the swirling cocktail of gin-shivers, flop sweat and past-its-best testosterone that was coursing through our body, we mistook the scheduled in-flight movie to be John Hillcoat’s grisly Ocker revenge Western, The Proposition*. We were not in the mood. Luckily, icky Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds rom-com The Proposal - despite making Failure to Launch look like Brecht on toast – made it all better. ERH doesn't know much about Reynolds, but the looks of disorientation, acute discomfort and near-tearful resignation that played across his face throughout the entire film made us feel that we weren’t alone. Not… so terribly… alone…

*Do Not To Be Also Confused With...

Hillcoat’s Ghosts of the Civil Dead and Bill Cosby’s Ghost Dad

Shoah – Showgirls

Too Soon? Yes..? No..? Have the scars still not healed? ERH was given to understand it had become a cult classic that’s all the rage within the ‘camp’ community, who regularly clan together for theme evenings that include dressing up as their favourite characters and joyously singing along with the catchy tunes. The other, of course, is an unremittingly bleak and emotionally exhausting Paul Verhoeven atrocity that many still find too harrowing to sit through.

Knight and Day – Day For Night

A film within a film about the making of James Mangold’s Cameron/Cruise howler might have made for a revealing insight as to how the modern blockbuster is shunted together out of a flyblown clusterfuck of bargain-bucket ideas, shameless product placement, green-screen effrontery and sheer bloody mindedness. As it is we have to content ourselves with Truffaut’s romantic hymn to the production process, which - to be honest - would have benefited greatly from a few 4X4s flipping over lengthwise and a couple of exploding taco stands.

Feds – Reds

Sometimes the tiniest grain of sand can trip you up: in Terry Gilliam’s sparkling clockpunk bureaucratopia Brazil, a miniscule typographic error sets off a chain reaction that explodes into mayhem, madness and state-sponsored murder. In the real world, one wrong keystroke into your Lovefilm account and your Friday night no longer consists of a five-hour lecture on blow-dried Bolshevism, but a slapdash eighty-minute cackfest starring TV-Movie parolee Rebecca DeMornay. Enjoy.

Cinema Paradiso – Guest House Paradiso

Oh, the magic! Oh, the emotion! Oh, the pure joy of cinema! The laughter, the tears, the misty-eyed nostalgia for a wholly imagined pastoral Arcadia! Oh, the Vesuvian vomit! Oh, the pan-fighting! Oh, the red rubber mankinis! If one, both or neither the Italian mini-masterpiece nor Rik and Ade’s hopeless fistic folly reduces you to a puddle of salty tears, then you’re not plumbed in right.

Tootsie – Tsotsi

Don’t eff this one up, as a Sunday afternoon under the duvet with a box of Maltesers, a Skol Superstrength spritzer and some mild – but not completely unwelcome - sexual disorientation watching a frocked-up Dustin Hoffman teetering through the pastel thrum of Eighties Broadway is a very different prospect than one spent quivering and cowering amid the diesel fumes, gang violence and squalor of Soweto slumland. Come to think of it, both are pretty high on the Yikes!-o-meter…

The Thin Red Line – The Thin Blue Line

Pretty gloomy either way, but at least Errol Morris’s groundbreaking crime doc doesn’t entirely consist of sweaty pretty-boys with $100 buzzcuts staring at ferns. Your call on this one.

Babe – Babel

One is a critical smash and box-office behemoth that suggested that we’re not all that different under the skin; that our hopes, fears, dreams are all crystalline droplets from the same communal wellspring of shared experience that will all eventually flow together to join the great river of life. The other - that’s right we’re pulling the same shit twice – is about Brad Pitt’s abortive Moroccan gap-year. We know which one we’re watching!

Holiday Inn – Hostel

We all love to fly by the seat of our pants now and again, but sometimes it really pays to check the guide books - although, for some, being tortured with a power-drill is infinitely preferable to witnessing Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby mercilessly ba-ba-ba boom their way through an entire calendar of public holiday-infested showtunes with the likes of ‘White Christmas’, adenoidal valentine ‘Be Careful, It’s My Heart’ and the frankly staggering blackface turn ‘Abraham’ they put on to celebrate – and you’ll like this! – Lincoln’s birthday.

Monster’s Ball – Monsters Inc.

Want to keep the anklebiters quiet while you sleep off one of your special ‘Saturday Morning Headaches’? Well, plonk them in front of either of these little beauties and it’s unlikely you’ll hear a peep put of them until ‘Football Focus’ starts…

Do Not To Be Also Confused Also With…

84 Charing Cross Road - 10 Rillington Place

Runaway – The Runaways

The Aviator – The Navigator

Lenny – Kenny

The Road - The Road (to Morocco)

Any more for any more...?