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Saturday, May 12, 2007

Vietnam veteran Cage Diamate is in trouble. He’s indebted to the mob, required to fight in illegal kickboxing matches. He is also tormented by a pretty severe case of post-traumatic overacting stress syndrome. Every time he’s about to score a KO, he sees images of that Asian Hell and he slumps over like a ragdoll sans stuffing. His gangster boss is incredibly pissed by his losing streak, and gets even angrier when Cage skips town to “find his way”. Apparently, said destination was a VA hospital, where he befriends a freaked out hop head named Legs who suffers from agoraphobia. Eventually released by his doctor even though he is not quite cured, Cage heads over to the local nightclub where his old job as a dishwasher is waiting for him. So is his ex-gal pal, a little flaxen-haired honey who worships the ground he walks on.

As he gets back to his pruny fingered/soiled serving platter life, Cage also reconnects with his rural bayou roots. He begins writing songs in secret, hoping to restart a previous path toward musical superstardom. When his girlfriend hears his tunes, she tries to convince him to join her on stage. When he won’t, she goes on and wows the crowd with his claptrap anyway. In the meanwhile, our unhappy hoodlums want Cage back, and plan one final death match for the marked man. In addition, the club where Cage and his sweetie work is about to go under, and they decide to stage a benefit to save it. Naturally, it’s scheduled for the night of the big fight. When he refuses to brawl, his crooning companion is kidnapped! It will take a miracle for this Ragin’ Cajun to win the day.

Like a stand-up comic recognizing that he is just a few fatal moments away from completely bombing, Ragin’ Cajun is shameless. This movie tosses in everything but the My Lai massacre in order to avoid some manner of formulaic flop sweat. It’s an action adventure drama carved completely out of clichés. However the way in which actor David Heavener and his main muse, writer/director William Byron Hillman combine the standard cinematic archetypes becomes a sheer jaundiced joy to behold. They don’t care if it’s all been done before. This crazy combo just wants to entertain, to tell a standard tale of vengeance and redemption that hits all the right beats. So what if every section is beaten with a sledgehammer full of hokum - they’re still striking, aren’t they? As a result, Ragin’ Cajun is an impossible film to dismiss, no matter how hard it tries to circumvent your expectations with inane, worn-out hogwash.

Heavener has to be one of the bravest performers in all of the business called show. He is not beyond looking bare-chested and broken (that’s how he ends up most of the time, even when he’s NOT fighting), weepy-eyed and wimpy (dude cries A LOT in this movie) and sexually celibate to the point of near sainthood (he and main squeeze Charlene “Dallas” Tilton share a single, stunted kiss). Add to that his inner rock star (Heavener wrote and performed almost all the music for this film) and the typical psychosomatic licks that come from being a flashback prone ‘Nam casualty, and you’ve got the most completely complex character an actor could ever want. That Heavener attempts to portray EVERY SINGLE facet of this persona in each line reading causes him to resemble a tone-deaf Sybil. If there were an Oscar for most bald-faced bellyaching by an actor, Heavener would have no immediate equal.

And then there is the music. That’s right, Ragin’ Cajun is a kind a musical, in the way that Triumph of the Will is a song and dance extravaganza. Every time an emotion needs to be over-emphasized, whenever the action is getting a little too energetic - Heck, whenever the Hell Heavener feels like it - someone breaks out in semi-melodious mawkishness. Supposedly selling himself in the country and/or western genre, Diamond Dave is all over the map with his harmonious hooey. There are a couple of power ballads, some inspirational singalongs, and lyrics of such lunatic fringe fearlessness that you have to wonder why Heavener’s not a constant on The Doctor Demento Show. Titles like “I Slipped on My Best Friend (and Fell in Love)”, or the classic “I L.U.V.Y.O.U.” just resonate with cornball creativity, and as delivered by Heavener you can’t help but smile with saccharine satisfaction. Perhaps the best bits are when Dave tunes up and sings solo. The minute his fingers hit the guitar, entire orchestras and bands blare behind him in a whacked out wall of sound.

All of this adds up to a movie that can do nothing but amuse. There are barrelfuls of badness here, umpteen ugly moments that make no sense within the standard cinematic showcase. But Heavener and Hillman don’t care - they just keep shoveling the substance, hoping no one notices how impractical and illogical it is. In a sense, Ragin’ Cajun is like a compendium of old Hollywood storytelling. It’s not enough to have the suffering hero with a bad brain and criminal ties. We need the gentle girlfriend, the floundering nightclub, and the owner desperate to bring in some bucks. In addition, there has to be a well meaning mental patient, a mobster with his back to the wall, a couple of hired goons, and a selection of set-pieces - both musical and muscle based - to give us the necessary emotional uplift. Add in minor nods to religion, gun violence, the American policy in Southeast Asia, and a single sequence of narrative invention that’s so surreal it sticks out like a strange sore thumb, and you’ve got a cult classic just waiting to be embraced. Ragin’ Cajun has nothing new to offer at the core of its creation. But how it shamelessly puts those moldy old ideas together is the stuff of B-movie magnificence.

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Saturday, Apr 28, 2007

For Ken Jorgenson (Richard Egan), the trip back to Pine Island is bittersweet. He’s married to Helen (Constance Ford), a woman he can’t stand, and raising a daughter, Molly (Sandra Dee), confused about the difference between his permissiveness and his wife’s frigid primness. Moreover, the residential resort holds a lot of mixed memories for Ken. He was a lifeguard there in his youth, working for the Hunter family and wooing local lass Sylvia (Dorothy McGuire). Desperate to make something of himself, Ken left his love, and she wound up marrying the bumbling son of the owners. As an adult, Bart Hunter (Arthur Kennedy) has squandered the family fortune and spends his days in a half-drunken stupor. Luckily, the couple has a conscientious son named Johnny (Troy Donahue), who wants to help as much as he can.

The reunion between the parties is problematic, especially with Helen acting extremely suspicious and the young people discovering a burning desire for each other almost instantaneously. Things come to a loggerhead when Ken and Sylvia begin an affair, a series of secret encounters that leads to the break-up of their respective families. Naturally, the teens are devastated, hoping to keep their love alive. But with the infighting and legal wrangling, feelings get deeply hurt. Even a new marriage can’t mend the damage. As they struggle to stay together, Molly and Johnny long for A Summer Place, somewhere they can go and be happy—and alone.

A Summer Place is a movie about sex. And hate. Actually, it’s a film about the unbridled passions of ardent lovers separated, either by distance or design, and how they will stoop to all manner of anger-based schmaltz to realize their throbbing biological urges. Based on the scandalous novel by Sloan Wilson (also famous for The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit), this overheated sudser, loaded with more histrionics and innuendo than a tent full of Cub Scouts with a National Geographic, does almost anything to draw us in. It provides one of the most heinous, hissable villains of all time—a woman who has basically boiled life down to a series of prejudices, predilections, and presumptions. This porkpie shrew, expertly essayed by Constance Ford, is the kind of cow who makes you want to reach out into the screen itself and choke that smug smirk off her obviously overfed face. She delivers such devastating attacks on everyone in the film—her fragile daughter, her dour husband, the innkeepers of the vacation spot—that you wait in desperation for her well-earned comeuppance. In fact, you beg the movie for the moment where all the cards she’s carefully stacked against the rest of her brood come falling back on top of her. Unfortunately, A Summer Place doesn’t provide that kind of denouement. Instead, it has other things on its mind, issues involving carnality and its expression, both physically and emotionally.

If you weren’t aware that it wasn’t invented until the mid ‘90s, you’d swear the entire cast of this film was strung out on maximum-strength Viagra. Wild cats with biologically modified animalistic urges aren’t in this much heat. Our primary horndog is Richard Egan, playing the husband of the horrid housefrau mentioned before. His position as a lowly teen lifeguard was especially helpful in wooing the ladies, and as he’s aged into a man of wealth, he’s got lovin’ on his brain morning, noon, and night. Having never gotten over his affair with Pine Island local Sylvia, he despises his wife for withholding her prudish favors and preaches a kind of corporeal clemency to his hormonally hopped-up daughter. In fact, it’s safe to say that if he didn’t invent the hedonistic philosophy, Egan’s Ken Jorgenson was a staunch advocate of the “if it feels good, do it” mantra. As a result, his offspring, essayed with a syrupy strangeness by ‘50s cinematic chastity belt Sandra Dee, is simultaneously stunted and sizzling, ready to rock and roll once the right guy comes along, only to feel tremendous guilt afterwards. In essence, she’s organized religion without the burden of the “Big V.” Lucky for her then that Troy Donahue is in residence. The minute she meets him, it’s major lip lock time, with just a few cautionary words about “being good” before proceeding through the rest of the adolescent “bases.”

Naturally, all of this makes Donahue’s parents all the more unhappy. In fact, the filmmakers felt so bad for mother Hunter, played by Dorothy McGuire, that they had to put a glaucoma-level of soft focus on her just to keep the lust issues in check. In a scene guaranteed to give the casual viewer a compositional headache, Egan and his former love have an attic assignation where, half the time, you can barely make out the features on McGuire’s face. Granted, she was five years older than her costar, but the more unbelievable element was the film’s apocryphal timeline. Sylvia and her swim stud were teens when they made their “mistake.” He hasn’t been back to the island in nearly 20 years. He has a daughter whose 16, while she has a 17-year-old. Math majors out there will see that the McGuire, pushing 44, is trying to pass for mid-30s. Even worse, Egan, who looks like a bulldog beaten about the face and head with a case of bourbon and Old Spice, is also in his post-20s prime. Call it an old-fashioned casting conceit, but these two make youthful indiscretion seem positively prehistoric. And then there’s Arthur Kennedy. As McGuire’s husband Bart, this constantly inebriated loser is like old money gone to super seed. Aperitif glass permanently glued to his hand, conversational skills both enhanced and exaggerated by his constant snorts of booze, he’s supposed to be the unredeemable harlequin of this menagerie. His bon mots are aimed at making him seem witty despite his permanently pickled nature. He simply turns out as pathetic as a human can possibly be without resorting to stories of childhood molestation.

In the end, it’s all in service of cheese so ripe and sensationally stinky that we anticipate every amazingly aromatic moment of it. Writer/director Delmer Daves, whose pen was responsible for the whacked-out weeper An Affair to Remember and whose eye delivered Dark Passage and the baby-on-fire masterpiece Susan Slade, is an expert at making this kind of potboiler pulp percolate with sentimentality and spice. Not one for subtlety, he keeps his characters cranked over to “11” and never once stops to examine the authenticity of his moments. Instead, he takes the standard soap opera material and makes an elephantine opera out of the smallest situations. Preempting John Waters in the Christmas tree defilement department, and letting each face slap—and threat of medical virginity checking—sink in like an interpersonal war crime, he’s not just making a regressive romance picture. No, Daves is delving into the heart of human darkness, illustrating the actual ways in which people decipher and destroy each other. Rendering every conversation an experiment in socio-anthropology and reducing the slow sensual burn into an aberrant art form, the end result is an unapologetic campfest fashioned onto a cleaned-up copy of The Kinsey Report. You’ll hate yourself for loving every insinuation-laced minute, and the aftershock is akin to a hangover from too many bottles of Boone’s Farm strawberry wine. But you’ll be as happy as a casino-ed clam once it’s all over.

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Saturday, Mar 24, 2007

An elderly couple’s car has broken down along a lonely country road. With their tire flat, the man struggles to change it with little success. Suddenly, a motorcycle gang shows up, a bunch of leather-wearing weirdoes with their sleazy old ladies along for the ride. But instead of harming the aged pair, they proceed to repair their car and send them on their way. While still out for a sometimes illegal good time, this Harley-riding horde is also considerate and concerned for their fellow man. Recognizing that the freedom they seek must be provided to others as well, they only use their bad-ass image to undermine the Establishment.

When the girlfriend of a dead buddy’s brother is assaulted, the police naturally pin the crime on the Club. Turns out, it was a rogue officer that was responsible for the frame-up. With the help of the gal’s frantic father and a local weapons lover who masquerades as a nature-loving sportsman, the town hopes a little vigilante justice will drive the bikers away once and for all. Resolved to clear their name, the clan prepares for a showdown. A funeral for a fallen member provides the perfect backdrop for a standoff, and with everyone loaded for bear, it’s not long before the Northville Cemetery Massacre is in full, fatal swing.

Let’s just call this two-wheeled wonder Uneasy Rider and get it over with, shall we? Like Robert Altman directing a Roger Corman biker epic, Northville Cemetery Massacre defies description as precisely as it plays with certain cinematic classifications. Some sort of counterculture experiment by first-time filmmakers Thomas L. Dyke (his only credit) and William Dear (who would go on to helm Harry and the Hendersons and Angels in the Outfield), this combination of cinema vérité, born to be wildness, and standard cautionary storytelling is one bizarre bit of motorcycle mayhem.

Both embracing and examining the outlaw nature of the chopper champion, Dyke and Dear originally called their movie Freedom: R.I.P. , with good reason. This movie was meant to symbolize the inner corruption among so-called law-abiding citizens, including the police themselves, while striving to show the leather-wearing biker as a righteous dude with an undeserved rowdy reputation. Oh sure, there’s some bar-based fisticuffs, and the movie ends in one of the biggest bloodbaths captured on independent film, but at its heart, Northville Cemetery Massacre wants to draw a distinction between brutality based in the support of brotherhood, and cruelty as a sense of civic duty.

Buried inside all the “us vs. them” underpinnings are class-crossed lovers who just want to get high and roll in the hay. With a voice dubbed by a very young Nick Nolte, our slightly fey hero is an ex-Vietnam vet whose decision to drop out has a lot to do with the treatment of his dearly departed brother at the hands of authorities. His potential old lady is a typical small-town twinkie who’s lost in her own inner world of frilly drapes, romantic phone calls, and sexual assault at the hands of a psychotic sheriff’s deputy. Together, the duo makes an uneasy core for the average audience member. He feels like an afterthought to the whole narrative construct, a drive-in denizen who presents passion pitters with a like-minded weed head they can identify with.

As for the gal, she emanates about as much sex appeal as a socket wrench, and her moments of tasteful toplessness do very little to stir male viewing interest. It would be interesting to see a version of this film sans the lovebird life lessons, one that uses the real-life Detroit Scorpions Motorcycle Club as a foundation for a pragmatic look at how ‘70s society viewed such “gangs.” Instead, we get the gratuitous rape, the sportsman/serial killer who can’t wait to hunt that most dangerous of games, and an ending that’s both perfunctory and profound, questioning all that’s come before while offering little in the way of easy solutions.

For many a seasoned grindhouse fan, this sounds like solid sleazoid stuff, right? Well, the truth is trickier than that. While obviously aimed at an exploitation-appreciating throng, there is a strange, audience adverse approach to Dyke and Dear’s designs. Obviously unable to “direct” the real-life bikers, we get a clashing confrontation of styles and substance, amateur acting accented by professional performers trying to add to the authenticity. Many of the scenes are fascinating free-for-alls, dialogue constantly overlapping and conversations collapsing in on each other. We never really get to know the riders, and their women are pure props, positioned on the back of their Harleys for maximum hot mama effect. But this was probably not Dyke and Dear’s point. With that original title of Freedom: R.I.P. , they were clearly responding to the idea that America was becoming a nation divided along generational lines.

To the conservative clans who held the power, a group like the Scorpions represented lawlessness and defiance. That many of them were actually decent people drawn together by a sense of family that was sadly lacking in a post-‘60s society never really mattered much to those in charge. Bikers were an easy breed to pick on (the Hell’s Angels not helping matters much). By turning them into amiable anti-heroes here, the directors manage the mirror reflection on the culture that so many movies of this kind miss. For those who long for the days of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper puffing their way across a dying America, Northville Cemetery Massacre will be a big, bad, bloody mess. But for those looking for more depth than defiance in their motorcycle storyline, this movie makes a very strong, if rather surreal, point.

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Saturday, Mar 17, 2007

During a standard shift at the local funny farm, Dr. Widesworth consults with Dr. Godwin about a girl, named Julie. She’s been diagnosed as a “cutter”, a self-mutilator. Convinced she can add some insight, Widesworth wants Godwin’s help. Meeting with the decidedly sane psychotic, the docs become privy to Julie’s bizarre, unreal story. Seems she once did the old University thang with a group of her best friends. One day, a new girl from Hawaii showed up. Her name was Amy and she was introverted and inhibited. Naturally, Julie’s catty clique instantly classified her as a ‘loser’. When it becomes obvious that the withdrawn islander had eyes for drama teacher Mark Bernardi, the crew determines to play a joke on the Pacific princess. Unfortunately, it resulted in Amy going comatose. When Julie’s Aunt Maylea arrived to care for her, she brought along an ancient Polynesia cure. She then used an enchanted Tiki doll to avenge Amy. She believed that, only through the systematic killing of everyone involved, could her niece’s soul be saved - apparently. And thus the massacre began…

Lord Almighty, but you have to adore Tiki! Oh sure, it’s a schlock revisit to the Charles Band school of scares, with just a splash of Dan Curtis’s Trilogy of Terror thrown in for gory good measure. Writer/director Ron Ford obviously suckled on the Zuni Fetish Doll’s Movie of the Week teat for several years, resulting in this Polynesian prank that’s more marvelously tacky than a blistering bowl of rotten poi. All the characters are jerks, barely able to provoke our curiosity, and the plot is so staggeringly mechanical that we keep waiting for the creepy old guy to turn up and tell the rest of the prospective victim’s pool that they are, indeed, “all doomed!” But thanks to a perfectly satisfactory puppet assassin, as well as the unrestrained bliss of seeing said plaything track and take out a cluster of clods, this incontrovertibly non-scary homage to horror’s blatant b-movie ideals is spectacularly silly. You’ll cackle at all the logic leaps and piss-poor intrigues, while at the same time championing a little island icon with a voracious craving for bad actor body parts.

It goes without saying that our star, an ersatz actress named Jolene Smith, is extremely unappealing. Even when she’s gussied as Eliza Doolittle in preparation for her part in Pygmalion (emphasis on the first syllable, please), those shrieks you hear aren’t paranormal beings yelping at the moon. It’s viewers around the world wondering how this attractiveness-addled performer ever got a callback. While it may appear unjust to highlight such an observable visual aspect of the film, it definitely supports the homespun spirit that helps make Tiki what it is. In the hands of some veteran specialists and teeming with onscreen CGI-sores, we’d be groaning at all the dumb dialogue, retard line readings and obvious continuity errors. But by hook or by crook, our title terror makes it all tolerable. Perhaps it’s the retro recollection of Karen Black taking on that vicious little blade wielder with a yap full of fangs, or the current island-oriented model who darts across the screen, little wooden feet tapping away in full sonic mode. Whatever the reason, Ford has found a way to make the monster movie fun again. And he does it by concentrating almost exclusively on the villian.

Indeed, without our new shock symbol, Tiki would flop quicker than a family-oriented Robin Williams comedy. The little wooden wonder is the gratuitous glue that holds this otherwise middling fright flick together. The nudity is nauseating (especially a Disgusting Girls Gone Wild style lesbian sequence – ew!) and the bloodletting is awesome, but limited to just a few memorable moments. Some of the set-ups are completely uproarious (one corpulent boytoy and his equally balloonish-babe make bile-producing whoopee in a hayloft before Tiki performs his serial public service = GO! TIKI! GO!) and the climax lays the groundwork for a possible sequel, which means more of our featured fright figurine. While one lone element doesn’t usually rescue a failing genre effort, the title treat in Tiki has enough cinematic charisma to save several subpar scare films. Ron Ford deserves plenty of fright fan Frenchings for delivering on what could have been a major macabre calamity. If you want a wonderful reminder to the diabolical doll era of terror, this talented little island idol will definitely deliver the terrific Trader Vic’s goodness.

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Saturday, Mar 3, 2007








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