In short: The Day Time Ended (1979)

Richard Williams (Christopher Mitchum) has built a nice, ultra-modern desert home that looks rather 50s futurist to my eyes, so that he and his family and his grandparents (Jim Davis and Dorothy Malone) can live together. While Richard’s away – expect many a shot of Chris Mitchum driving around and looking confused later on – the rest of the family is hit by a variety of strange occurrences, starting with electrical problems, time slips, the appearance of strange aliens, and finally attacks by various monsters. It’s apparently all on account of a triple supernova 200 lightyears or so away. Eventually, the family will be transported to what may or may not be another planet, until the plot, such as it is, just stops.

And there really isn’t much “plot” The Day Time Ended, as directed by John “Bud” Cardos. Instead this Charles Band (in his Charles Band Productions phase) production is all about the weirdness and the effects work, particularly the weird effects work, so that the film often feels more like a show reel that demonstrates the good and the bad of state of the art (of the day) effects techniques when used on a low budget. Consequently, some of the effects shots look pretty shoddy and awkward, but for every bad back projection, there are half a dozen fun and pleasantly grotesque stop motion monsters, swirly laser stuff and inexplicable nonsense I don’t have the vocabulary to describe but certainly the capacity to enjoy quite a bit.

Also very much speaking to me is the film’s insistence on making not a lick of sense but getting by on just throwing strange visual stuff at its audience, hoping that some of it might stick to our brains enough we can at least pretend the talk about “time space rifts” (and so on) makes an sense whatsoever. If that plan works out, we might even take being transported to a strange new planet with no way home but only a not at all mind-control like feeling that things are gonna be okay in the next alien domed city as well in stride as the protagonists do at the non-sequitur ending of the film. “#lifegoals”, as the youth of today with their Internets and their weird beards would say.

Big Jake (1971)

1909. In what’s still not quite a civilized West of the USA, the outlaw gang of John Fain (Richard Boone) attacks the prosperous McCandles ranch, nearly killing one of the family’s sons, while murdering quite a few people and last but not least kidnapping the McCandles’ grandson, Little Jake (Ethan Wayne), for a ransom. Apart from getting together the humungous ransom money of a million dollars, family matriarch Martha (Maureen O’Hara) calls in her estranged husband Jacob aka Big Jake (John Wayne), deeming him the proper kind of brute to deal with brutes.

Jake hasn’t seen (or written to) his sons for over a decade, apparently roaming the West increasing his already huge reputation as a frightening badass, so the family reunion is even more strained than the situation would suggest. But needs must, so Jake has to team up with his sons, the slick-ish James (actual Wayne son Patrick) and the younger Michael (Christopher Mitchum, of course the son of Robert). Everyone will learn a valuable lesson: the best way to solve family troubles is to punch each other in the face a lot, apparently. The bad guys clearly don’t stand a chance.

This final big screen outing directed by George Sherman (he still shot some TV episodes afterwards) is certainly one of the better John Wayne vehicles of its era. It is neither trying to crib from the Spaghetti Western book nor make gestures towards the revisionist Western, which were seldom directions that worked well with Wayne in the lead, instead making much of the more traditional (though not squeaky clean) Western.

There are obviously elements that will not have aged well for every viewer today. It’s not difficult to imagine a reading of the film as celebrating toxic masculinity or some such for all of the scenes in which the male McCandles solve their interpersonal problems by hitting each other in the face (with Wayne inevitably knocking his – grown – sons out). I found this business mostly funny, the film simply realizing that having these larger than life cowboys right at the end of the line for their idea of the West solving their interpersonal problems with a civilized heart to heart (or a stupid shouting match) like you or I would simply doesn’t feel believable in the world of the film, while their solving their problems with companionable violence seems rather fitting to them and their lives, and also funnier.

And this is a film that likes having its little chuckles: apart from the joys of family violence, there’s a lot of comedic business about the contrast between the Old West and all the new ideas and objects that come in from the less rough East, mostly exemplified through Jake’s exasperated reaction to all the new-fangled stuff his sons are into, from automatic guns to motorcycles. Big Jake does of course use this opportunity to put a motorcycle stunt into its Western business, too, for why wouldn’t it? There’s some not completely uninteresting subtext hidden away here too, James and Michael representing young men caught right in the middle between the old and radically new ways, not quite belonging to the former side like Jake, his old buddy Sam Sharpnose (Bruce Cabot) and the villains of the piece do, but also being rather too far away from the places where the new is really happening to be completely part of that, particularly when they go on an old school bandit hunt with their dad.

There’s a lot of cool, classic Western business happening in said bandit hunt too. Sherman seems to go out of his way to include every single type of traditional Western set piece in the movie, all of them realized with great gusto, timing, but also a sense for mood building that’s not always been common in the genre. A particular favourite here is obvious the long showdown between Jake and co and the gang of villains, a showdown that includes a sharpshooter duel, various sub-shootouts, some machete action, and starts with a fantastic staring contest between Wayne and Boone (that also includes some very clever dialogue), both of whom give a hell of a performance against each other. The way Wayne twists Boone’s own threats against him before the shooting really starts is utterly brilliant, hitting home that Wayne may have been an actor with a limited scope but also one who could work wonders inside of it.

Big Jake does very well with its villains, too, providing every one of them with enough (nasty) character to make them memorable threats. On the hero side, things aren’t quite as interesting, but then, part of the point of the whole affair is how larger than life Jake is compared to his surroundings, so him being the centre of non-villainous affairs is not (just) Wayne being vain, but the film following its own argument. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing of interest happening around him – son Patrick and Chris Mitchum are a lot more expressive here than later in their careers (the latter is in fact repeatedly showing off a range of facial expressions he seems to lose over the next decade). It’s a bit of a shame that Maureen O’Hara’s role isn’t larger than it is, for she quite believably plays the only person in the movie willing and able to call Jake on his shit, and also able to win without punching. But then, Big Jake really isn’t a movie about calling macho heroes on their shit (though the film at least does not approve of Jake just ignoring his family for years) but celebrating them going for one last wild ride before the wild rides stop existing.

Hairy Beasts: Bigfoot (1969? 1970?)

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may turn living matter to stone) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, Feroz Khan's chest and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

But there's time for that later. Now, follow me into the wooded mountains of Nowhere, USA, where a trio of bigfoots - bigfeet as we call them in Europe - is kidnapping women, stripping them down to their underwear (or indescribable-wear), and tying them to trees.

First, the hairy gang kidnaps pilot and exposition fairy Joi Landis (Joi Lansing), then they steal Chris (Judy Jordan), "the girl" of kinda-sorta hippie biker Rick (Christopher Mitchum, still young enough to try and move his face). After getting short thrift by the local sheriff, Rick decides to mount his own rescue expedition, getting unexpected help by "comedic" Southern traveling salesmen Jasper B. Hawks (John Carradine in his embarrassing phase) and Elmer Briggs (look, it's Robert Mitchum's little brother John, sporting the sort of facial hair that would nominate this filmlet for the Hairy Beasts project even without the bigfeet!). Now, Jasper may plan on catching himself a bigfoot and get rich through it, but a guy with a gun is a guy with a gun, right?

Turns out hunting bigfeet is more difficult than Rick thought, and it'll need all of his kinda-sorta hippie biker friends, some dy-no-mite, and a lot of walking through the woods to rescue the girls.

Not all that unexpectedly, the month of hairy beasts began a bit painful down here when I thought to myself: "would-be interspecies rapist bigfoot, two Mitchums, bikers, and the living corpse of John Carradine, whatever could go wrong?", and then proceeded to watch Bigfoot, or, as I'd rather call it, Various Groups Of People Walk, Ride, Drive, Or Run Through The Woods Forever.

Now, as even irregular readers of my musings will realize, frequent exposure to films like (the glorious) Don't Go In The Woods…Alone has helped me build up quite a high tolerance for the - oftentimes frightening - sub-genre of the walking-through-the-woods low low budget horror movie, so I feel pretty secure in surviving anything such a film can throw at me without falling asleep. However, Bigfoot is a movie clearly out to show people like me where our limits lie, featuring fifteen (warning: numbers may not be quite exact) boring scene of people moving through the woods for every two boring, static scenes of old coots in front of cheap sets (hello, former western star Ken Maynard in a role that could have been cut like just about everybody else's) mumbling irrelevant nonsense at each other. It's all a bit much, or rather, a bit much of nothing even for my hardened tastes.

It does not help the film's watchability that parts of it seem to be meant as comedic - though I dare not venture a guess which parts specifically beyond the painfully unfunny scenes between Carradine and the elder Mitchum - but as a matter of fact only work as a laxative. Nor are things improved by an acid rock soundtrack that generally has less to do with what happens on screen than the soundtrack of a Los Campeones Justicieros film. Bigfoot is even missing the obligatory soft rock theme song all bigfoot movies are supposed to include (see every other bigfoot movie made in the 60s and 70s).

And even when "director" and "writer" Robert F. Slatzer decides to throw a cult movie fan a bone by including a scene of one of his ratty bigfeet wrestling a bear (I think that's what's happening there, at least - the VHS sourced print I watched wasn't exactly a beacon of clarity), or of Joi Lansing calmly expositing SCIENCE! about the bigfoot as the missing link while tied to a tree and poked by a human/bigfoot hybrid, or the appearance of the big boss bigfoot ("the eighth wonder of the world", Carradine enthuses), he's filming these scenes with such an utter sense of apathy, it's exceedingly difficult to keep oneself awake.

Fortunately, Joi Lansing screeches so much and so loudly during the film's grand finale I woke up again in time. Hooray.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,robert f. slatzer,john carradine,joi lansing,christopher mitchum,horror,the pain,reviews,hairy beasts

Three Films Make A Post: That's not the victim screaming - it's you!

The Fountain (2006): Take one part pretty good melodrama, one part utter, brain-curdling weirdness and one part horrible 70s airbrush poster art, and you pretty much have The Fountain. It's a film where earnest artistic ambition dances with kitsch so closely that nobody involved - surely not director/writer Darren Aronofsky and certainly not this writer - seems to be able to tell where one begins and the other ends anymore. It's certainly a film worth experiencing, but it's also a film to which the often misused description of "pretentious" fits perfectly, in that it just isn't as clever and profound as it pretends to be.

Can you really watch naked, bald, lotus-seated Hugh Jackman float through golden-ish space in a bubble and not giggle?

 

Death Journey (1976): I'd be glad if there were much of anything to giggle about in this Fred Williamson-directed part of the Jesse Crowder series of films (it might be the first one or the second - the Internet is divided, and I'm not going to watch the additional material about the production, because this thing has already stolen enough of my life), starring Williamson, and nobody else of consequence. A private eye carting a mafia bookkeeper willing to sing from LA to Chicago while the man's former bosses are doing their best to kill them may sound like the perfect set-up for a low budget action movie, especially with a guy like Williamson who always seems to have fun when doing anything physical in the lead role. Williamson the director, however, has no idea how to stage an action sequence interestingly or even just effectively, leading to a film so bland it would probably still be boring if half of it didn't consist of filler and scenes that go on much longer than they should. Even the soundtrack gives the impression of being a collection of outtakes from a a handful of other blaxploitation soundtracks.

On the positive side, there's only a sex scene realized so hilariously wrong-headed that Williamson and his partner seem to possess two or three heads each.

 

Ricco The Mean Machine (1973): Christopher Mitchum takes his dear time to take vengeance on the mafia boss who murdered his mafia boss father while Barbara Bouchet undresses or under-dresses to distract the parts of the audience receptive to her charms from the utter vacuum that is Chris. The sleaze for a good Italian crime movie is certainly there, sometimes in hilarious and embarrassing ways (turns out the best way to steal mafia money in a film that isn't supposed to be a comedy is to let Barbara Bouchet dance naked in front and on top of a car). From time to time, Tulio Demicheli's film breaks into fits of pretty nasty violence, but even then, Mitchum's complete lack of personality in his role as Hamlet's more boring brother undermines much of the emotional punch of those scenes. Not to speak of the scenes where the script wants him to act.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,sf,melodrama,action,blaxploitation,eurocrime,darren aronofsky,hugh jackman,rachel weisz,fred williamson,christopher mitchum,barbara bouchet,in short