Belated Shortenings

It's going to be a busy bee month here around these parts, so allow me to busy bee yourselves with a few external suggestions:

Good friend of the Doll's House Elwood Jones invited me on his podcast, the MBDS Showcase, to discuss two very different, very memorable classics of vertically challenged cinema. Take a listen to his episode 36, where we discuss one of my personal favorites, Stuart Gordon's Dolls, along with the very special, very odd For Your Height Only. Just in case you didn't recognize the title, FYHO is indeed a James Bond, um, adaptation of sorts, starring 2'9 action star Weng Weng as the world's deadliest and least secretive secret agent. Check it out here!

Meanwhile, down south of the equator, good pal Chris Hewson has tackled a few family-friendly Shortening cookies over at Not This Time, Nayland Smith. Travel back to the grand ol' '90s for his review of the 18-episode Betty Davis-starring sitcom Maybe This Time.  

While you're there, take a look at his review of 1995's long-awaited cinematic Annie sequel (I know, who knew it was a thing?) Annie: A Royal Adventure.  

Joan Collins is in it, and she wears a fabulous hat. What more do you need?

That's fair. The world can never have enough Zelda Rubinstein wearing a great hat. Hence, I leave you with one more little bonus, courtesy of my podcast, The Feminine Critique. On our most recent episode, Christine and I tackle 1989's pop masterpiece Teen Witch, along with the recently released and confusing to pronounce The VVitch. Download* via iTunes or hear it here!

*Just in case it's unclear, download the podcast, not the movie. Pony up a few singles and pay to see the movie so that studios keep buying and releasing movies like The VVitch. We'll all be better off, and otherwise, I'm selling your soul to that nice lady in the woods and I won't feel a goat's eye bad about it. 

My Fellow Shorteners

The little people need to stick together. It's much easier to climb out of trouble when you can hop on someone else's shoulders. Particularly when said someone's shoulders are low enough to the ground for you to actually be able to hop on.

My point, of course, is that The Shortening is a team effort, and a glorious one when two of my favorite fellow bloggers tackle two of my favorite films. Deep down From the Depths of DVD Hell, Elwood Jones digs in to Stuart Gordon's 1987 classic Dolls. Head here for his thoughts, and stay tuned for next month's Mad, Bad, & Downright Strange Showcase podcast when I join in to say even more about Judy's adventures in doll-ville.

Further down south, the fabulous Chris Hewson of Not This Time, Nayland Smith attempts to TOP THAT with coverage of 1989's musical extravaganza Teen Witch. Set your broomstick GPS here to read his take on this piece of glory, co-starring Golden Lifts champion Zelda Rubinstein herself. 

Don't forget that if you have a Shortening post of your own, feel free to share it here in the comments section or email me at deadlydollshouse at gmail dot com (but you know, the right way). 

The Craftettes

As a female who was 14 in 1996, I consider virtually every day of the year the right time to watch The Craft. Imagine my glee then to discover that way back when Fairuza Balk was pulling her hair and Robin Tunney was rocking a strawberry blond wig, a small studio financed a quickie Catholic schoolgirls-turn-to-Satan movie starring Clea DuVall and Jennifer Rubin as a nun in a fanny pack.

A NUN IN A FANNY PACK!

Quick Plot: After a black mass-y prologue, we’re sent to the present (or really 1990s version of it) where a girls' Catholic school is about to relax for Easter break. A gaggle of students stay behind due to the typically Harry Potter-esque reasons of being orphans, having rich parents that don’t want them around, or trying to avoid abusive dads that have birthed a very dangerous habit of masturbating during confessional.

Said girl with the habit of touching herself during Lord's Prayers is Jamie, played with full panache by an often naked Sheeri Rappaport. As you might guess, it’s Jamie, the girl who performs a topless striptease in front of her window to an audience of uniformly attractive construction workers who ends up falling hardest for Lucifer’s charms. If you’d like, we can henceforth refer to this character as Fairuza Two.

Rooming with Fairuza Two is a goody two-shoes Stanford hopeful named Faith (or Robin Tunney Two Point Oh, if you’d prefer) who has the handy skill of reading fluent Latin and the inconvenient drawback of being a fairly terrible actress, at least during the apparent two-week shoot time of Little Witches. Like me, actress Mimi Rose speaks too loudly, which, as you might expect, IS QUITE ANNOYING (now I know how everyone I converse with feels; sorry guys). She’s also taxed with the dullest role and paired with a hunky (at first) virginal (see?) love interest whose delivery of dialogue rivals Siri on Valium. 

Once Fairuza Two and the remaining students discover a book of spells in a hidden lair, the girls spend some montages preparing to summon Satan or gain knowledge or do something that involves naughtiness. The details are fuzzy, but you can count on a few naked teenagers, some deep demon voiceovers, and a not-that-epic-at-all showdown between the screechy Faith and funtime Jamie.

Directed by Jane Simpson, Little Witches is not a particularly good movie, but if IMDB's 2-week product claim is correct, then it certainly could have been worse. There’s plenty of muted sleaze to keep things somewhat interesting, plus bonus supporting turns by a few genre gems. It doesn’t have a toilet bowl full of snakes on the OTHER witchy thriller of 1996, but it’s nice to know there’s another one.

High Points

Rappaport really does do her damnest to keep her scenes alive. When she’s paired with capable costars (including an always welcome Clea DuVall), Little Witches can appear to be a decent movie. When she’s paired with, well, Mimi Rose, at least she keeps things interesting

Low Points

The presence of the late, great Zelda Rubinstein is always welcome. The waste of her time is not.

Lessons Learned

The trick to fishing is to say three Hail Marys before throwing the line in the water

The trick to not being killed by a demon is to enact stricter supervision over troubled teenagers

The trick to surviving a Good Friday black mass is to shove a Eucharist down the chanters’ throats with all the fervor of Kristy Swanson at the finale of Flowers In the Attic

Rent/Bury/Buy

Hey, for a 90 minute instant watch, Little Witches offers some goofy 90s charm. It doesn’t quite have the nerve to revel in its sleaziness, but there’s still enough to go around, especially if you put it next to the far less fun 5ive Girls. Those who enjoy this decade’s horror output will chuckle at some of the nostalgia, although looking at Little Witches now, it’s hard not to think of it as a pre-Asylum adaptation of the funner, more expensive The Craft. Then again, a cheap quickie version of The Craft costarring Clea DuVall and, in case I haven’t mentioned it, Jennifer Rubin as a nun with a fanny pack is kind of something special, wouldn’t you say?

And the Golden Lifts Go To:

 Zelda Rubinstein

1933-2010

It's hard not to love this woman. Standing at just 4'3, the late actress is best known--to horror fans and the general public--as Tangina, the ethereal medium who helped save Carol Anne from not one, not two, but three Poltergeists between 1982 and 1988. Before her passing in 2010, Ms. Rubinstein had amassed a bevy of key roles on the big and small screen, with credits that were mainstream (Picket Fences,  Sixteen Candles), indie (Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, Anguish) and belovedly cult (Teen Witch).

With a voice that somehow called to mind strawberry marshmallow fluff, Zelda Rubinstein was one of a kind when it came to performing. Like many genre fans who saw a sleepover party turn to screams once the PG-Rated Poltergeist showed up, I personally always had a soft spot for her unique presence whether it was on an episode of Tales From the Crypt or as the well-known voice that cooed "Taste the Rainbow" for Skittles ads. As I sat back to wonder which supporter of the vertically challenged qualified for a pair of Golden Lifts (the now yearly award bestowed upon someone awesome with a connection to shortness), Ms. Rubinstein seemed a natural Cinderella fit.

Upon poking a little more into the other side known as the Internet, I was thrilled to discover that not only was Ms. Rubinstein a wonderful actress, but more importantly, a truly wonderful person.



Having left a successful position as a lab technician to pursue the Hollywood dream (which found her late into her 40s) Ms. Rubinstein wasted little time in pairing her successful acting career with admirable work for better causes. Her first film role in the Razzie Award winner Under the Rainbow made her question how little people were seen by the film industry, leading her to establish the Michael Dunn Memorial Repertory Theater Company. Named after an Oscar nominated little person, the (now defunct) theater was composed of 16 fellow little people with the glorious mission statement "Become an actor and your world will get much bigger."

After stealing her scenes in Poltergeist, things certainly did for Zelda. She worked steadily from that point on and bravely used her growing fame to help bring awareness about the life-or-death importance of safe sex during the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Playing a kindly mother encouraging her gay son to use protection, Rubinstein appeared in print and television ads for L.A. Cares at the risk of putting her career in jeopardy. Looking at this from a 2012 perspective, it's hard to believe that just 30 years ago, actors could be unofficially blacklisted for speaking about the kind of issue that can now be recognized through simple red ribbons, but in 1984, becoming a spokesperson for such a then-controversial (and sadly still so, in different ignorant ways) issue could have been a career killer.

 

Zelda Rubinstein knew that. And it didn't matter. This woman who had faced the odds since birth with what some would've called a handicap was willing to risk her newly prominent reputation to illuminate an issue that she cared deeply about, and one that the whole world should've addressed sooner.

Despite what our cultural atmosphere wants us to believe, movie stars are not superheroes. They (sometimes) have a specific skill set paired with great luck and with those tools, they can give great performances or mumble through a script and sometimes, take everything that comes with it to make a difference. Zelda Rubinstein didn’t necessarily change the world, but she piped up in a time when others didn’t while also establishing herself as a formidable screen presence. These posthumous Golden Lifts won’t do much, but personally, I for one am glad to have learned a little more about a woman who was far more special than I ever realized.

 Also, that dame could ROCK a sassy hat!