Only now does it occur to me... MOTHER'S BOYS (1993)

Only now does it occur to me... that MOTHER'S BOYS (1993) deserves its place in the pantheon of scary-campy "diva gone mad" thrillers, a proud tradition stretching at least from 1964's STRAIT-JACKET to 2019's MA.

Picture it: KRAMER VS. KRAMER, THE STEPFATHER, and SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, mashed together and directed in the fashion of "a John Waters Hitchcock thriller"... and starring Jamie Lee Curtis!

It must be noted that Jamie Lee, in a rare villainous turn, is decked out as if her style icons are Angelica Huston and Annette Bening in THE GRIFTERS: cool sunglasses, dyed blonde hair in a "sea anemone" cut, and the most wicked blazers this side of a Joan Crawford movie. I mean, look at how Queen JLC elevates the pedestrian act of grocery shopping:

JLC plays "Jude," a mother of three who abruptly left her husband (Peter Gallagher) and kids for reasons the screenplay judges as "um, I dunno... unknowable crazy-woman motivations maybe involving a traumatic childhood?" She didn't leave a note, at any rate.

In the three years since, Gallagher's "Robert"––a primo soap opera archetype, the stiff-upper-lip architect dad who's trying to repair his broken heart––has moved on and is dating Joanne Whalley (WILLOW, NAVY SEALS). She is styled like Jeanne Tripplehorn in the thrillers of this era and in no way deserves the inspired madness which is deposited on her doorstep.

You see, Jamie Lee Curtis shows up out of nowhere––and she wants her family back, her Gallagher back, and Joanne Whalley... dead!

She is willing to use raw sexual/elaborately violent schemes to get what she wants, and I must say that this movie truly has a Joe Eszterhas-ian (BASIC INSTINCT, SHOWGIRLS) understanding of human sensuality. 

There are so many ludicrous happenings in this movie that Dame Vanessa Redgrave (!)

is pushed down a flight of stairs by a her grandson

 ––we're talkin' two, full-body flips––

and it's only, like, the fifth most insane thing to happen in this movie.

What are some others, you might ask? I couldn't dream of giving them all away, but I will say that Jamie Lee gets a bathtub masturbation scene as campy as anything in THE PAPERBOY or the Angela Lansbury workout video.

A personal favorite is when she buys a bunch of sugary cereals for her estranged family (on that grocery trip where she looked so fabulous) and, before she can gift them to her children, she sees them out enjoying a nice dinner with Joanne Whalley (the horror!). She does what any sensible hag-horror-heroine would do and drives into the sunset, sob-steering while she flings entire bags of groceries onto the highway.

To me, this is as iconic as the bunny boiling in FATAL ATTRACTION, Bette Davis' outbursts in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE, and the car burning in WAITING TO EXHALE.

There's melodrama for days, and Jamie Lee does a tremendous job, really giving it 110%––

"I'M STILL THEIR FUCKING MOMMA!"

––even when the three screenwriters let it be known that they have the combined psychological maturity of an adolescent boy who caught a double feature of THE CRUSH and POISON IVY on late nite TV after his parents went to sleep. This all works in the movie's favor, I believe.

Oh man, there's a scene where Jamie Lee tries to show her son her c-section scar in a (seductive?) attempt to manipulate him into becoming THE BAD SEED/THE GOOD SON, so... MOTHER'S BOYS is not without its groaners, I suppose.

Ooh, and there's a very proto-FIGHT CLUB bit where Jamie Lee gets into a fight with herself in Joanne Whalley's office

to make it look like Joanne is the crazy one who attacked her. Nice!

The grand finale involves a beautifully absurd scenario wherein Joanne is tied up and put on trial by "Mother's Boys"

and Jamie Lee orchestrates a murder plot which involves cutting the brakes on someone's car and sending out the family dog to make them swerve to their doom

and it's all camp, beyond camp, and it brought many a smile to my lips.

There's a glossy "taking this seriously" workmanship to the direction by Yves Simoneau (BLIND TRUST, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE) and a solid supporting cast which includes the aforementioned Vanessa Redgrave as Jamie Lee's mom, John C. McGinley (THE ROCK, SCRUBS, SURVIVING THE GAME, OFFICE SPACE) as a hapless biology teacher

and Joss Ackland (THE APPLE, LETHAL WEAPON 2) as a slimy divorce lawyer.

But, as you would assume, the entire project rides on the commitment and charisma of one Jamie Lee Curtis

Check out those fish earrings, a WANDA reference?

who I've now decided is the hero of this picture and will be awarded full custody. MOTHER'S BOYS, ladies and gentlemen.

Only now does it occur to me... PHANTASM III: LORD OF THE DEAD (1994)

Only now does it occur to me... that PHANTASM III is one of the wildest collection of happenings and imagery and disparate tones to ever inhabit a motion picture... and that, somehow, against all odds, it works.

This is the handiwork of a filmmaker who was certain this would be the last film in the series and, damn the torpedoes, intended to go down with the ship. Therefore, Don Coscarelli has assembled a true Frankenstein's monster of his favorite things: it's Buñuel's UN CHIEN ANDALOU, Cocteau's ORPHEUS, Malick's BADLANDS, Lynch's TWIN PEAKS, Golan & Globus' NINJA trilogy, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, Waters' PINK FLAMINGOS, and a Lloyd Kaufman Troma flick, all shaken and stirred into the PHANTASM universe, where truth is a hallucination, and the only logic is dream logic.

The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) broods in his lair, contemplating his orb like Saruman.

A. Michael Baldwin––the original "Mike" from PHANTASM and famously replaced by James LeGros in PHANTASM II––reappears fifteen years later, having aged into "if young David Patrick Kelly were a New Wave musician."

In its David Lynch-inflected surrealist mayhem, it feels both post-TWIN PEAKS and pre-LOST HIGHWAY. The original PHANTASM's Jody (Bill Thornbury) reappears as one of the iconic spheres

in a twist (?) that presages Lynch's use of tulpa-spheres in TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN, or David Bowie's steam-kettle reincarnation in that same series. 

There's something very visceral and elemental here in Coscarelli's use of electricity, contorted reflections, fabricated/unnatural objects, and liminal spaces.

 

 

I think it's because Lynch and Coscarelli have both dipped deeply into the shared imagery pool of 20th Century surrealists like Dali, Escher, Magritte, Ernst, and Miró (and Cocteau and Buñuel, of course).

But Coscarelli is not merely content to make a surrealist, arthouse-horror picture like the original. He quickly introduces a gang of criminals (Brooks Gardner, Cindy Ambuehl, and John Davis Chandler) who clearly escaped from an early John Waters flick and appear to represent the tackiest/greediest elements of late stage capitalism.

You see, Coscarelli is also endeavoring to build an apocalyptic universe where America's Main Streets have fallen victim to a combination of Reaganomics and the Tall Man, all of which feels a little tonally similar to, say, Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER or THE STAND.

These campy criminals attempt to ply their trade by robbing the house from HOUSE (1985),

and only succeed in being dismantled by Tim (Kevin Connors), a survivalist child armed with a razor frisbee.

 

Of all the things that any viewer of the series might have anticipated from PHANTASM III, I believe its brief transformation into an R-rated HOME ALONE qualifies as the most surprising.

Draped in only the best denims that 1994 has to offer, Tim teams up with Reggie the Ice Cream Man (slow-jammin' Reggie Bannister, of PHANTASMs 1 and 2, and the answer to the question, "What if Clint Howard were the last action hero?")

and though he is "too old for this shit,"

the quest to dismantle the Tall Man's Earth-altering influence must continue. 

They are aided in this pursuit by another new addition to the cast: funk-rock singer Gloria Lynn Henry, playing an ankh-earring-wearing, Grace-Jones-flattopped, and nunchaku-wielding army vet named "Rocky."

If you guessed that are were multiple sequences of Rocky facing off against PHANTASM spheres with nunchucks, then you are beginning to attune yourself to the PHANTASM III wavelength.

That her acting repertoire includes a lot of flat line readings and a singular look of disgust/a withering glare

is only another addition to the Plus Column. To me, this is A+ avant-garde theater. It's especially welcome in a gross scene where the Ice Cream Man attempts to mack on the out-of-his-league Rocky

and is righteously shut down (at least outside of his orb-influenced hallucinations). 

Generally speaking, Gloria Lynn Henry plays it like she dropped into the film from someone else's dream and regards her current surroundings with disbelief and disdain. This is appropriate.

She also undergoes more costume changes per capita than any other character in the film, probably ten outfits or more. Whether this is a continuity error or an illustration of PHANTASM's ever-shifting dream boundaries is up for the viewer to decide.

I have a theory that each PHANTASM film represents the same dream being slowly remembered and interpreted and misinterpreted over time, sort of like the Mark Twain quote about "History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme," and this is simply the version which happens to place a nunchaku badass in a central role. 

[In a sense, it resembles Robert Rodriguez's EL MARIACHI series, conceived by Rodriguez as a quotidian crime story (EL MARIACHI) retold as a tall tale (DESPERADO) and finally as mythology (ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO), with the storytelling itself approximating a whispered game of Telephone.]

With each variation, however, there are recurring motifs. At this point, we can decidedly say that exploding cars have, somehow, become an essential ingredient of the PHANTASM experience. 

As have STAR WARS references.

(The delivery and essence of this scene seems to rhyme with Darth Vader's "the circle is now complete" speech in the STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE.)

And the idea of ice cream eventually morphing into cryogenics perfectly encapsulates
this cycling of PHANTASM's dream logic.

 

And let it be said that Coscarelli does not take himself too seriously––a plunger plays an outsized role in the finale.

I do think the best way to conclude a review of PHANTASM III is to watch the footage of Rocky and Reggie's farewell:

A stilted goodbye of true comic perfection, open to a variety of interpretations and intentions, and perfectly unique to the world of PHANTASM III. 

"Enough of that!"

 

 

To be continued...