Roadie (1980)

Why did the armadillo cross the road?  So Alan Rudolph could show that his film Roadie begins and ends in the state of Texas.  Here’s the layout.  Young, hyper Travis Redfish (Meatloaf) lives at his father Corpus’ (Art Carney) salvage company and makes deliveries for Shiner Beer.  Catching sight of young Lola (Kaki Hunter), a groupie-in-training, Travis finds himself swept up into the whirlwind lifestyle of a rock ‘n roll roadie.

One might think, at first blush, that this film would concern itself with the idea of the call of the open road.  But this is not the case.  Travis has no desire to go on tour with musicians.  He doesn’t feel the pull of an opportunity to live life.  The only reason he becomes the world’s greatest roadie is because his mindset is antithetical to that of those around him.  This comes from his background with his dad.  Corpus and Travis are able to rig and create all manner of contraptions to make life easier.  They have a phone booth in the house that extends itself outside if someone wants a little privacy.  Travis makes his entrance (at home and in the film) on a makeshift crane/elevator that carries him between floors.  Corpus surrounds himself with a multitude of televisions, all tuned to different stations.  The thing of it is that the Redfishes are pretty much idiot savants (with the exception of sister Alice Poo [Rhonda Bates], who is just an idiot).  To call them simple folk would be understating things.  For example, none of them can pronounce “Pomona,” though Corpus’ enunciation is the one they stick with because he’s the smartest of them (hey, I had a friend who used to pronounce “San Jose” as “San Joes,” so who am I to judge?).  Corpus installed homemade braces on Alice’s teeth.  The best illustration of the Texans’ shitkickerhood, however, is the scene where Corpus, Alice, and BB (Gailard Sartain) are eating ribs and drinking beer.  Their faces are covered in pork and barbecue sauce, and the mere idea of table manners is utterly foreign.  This tableau is a snapshot of Travis.  Roadie is basically Being There with Deliverance’s Hoyt Pollard as the protagonist.  Or maybe just a quasi-Forrest Gump antecedent minus most of the sentimentality.

At the center of the film is the mismatched relationship between Travis and Lola.  These are two extremely flawed people, neither of whose world view is all that appealing.  Travis’ instant love for Lola is amusing.  He declares that, “That’s the first woman I’ve ever known who I’ve cared for as a human being,” after seeing her for a split second.  Lola knows that Travis is into her, and she knows how to manipulate him into getting her way.  Her goal in life is to be a groupie, but first, she has to have sex specifically with Alice Cooper as a sort of deflowering ritual.  Lola delights in her sexuality, but she’s naïve in its meaning and about life in general.  Much like Travis, she wears blinders to allow for her point of view, because nothing else exists or, at the bare minimum, is less than important.  She is thrilled to inform Travis that she’s only sixteen (the grin on her face when she labels herself “jailbait” is a bit bizarre).  She picks up a box of cocaine, thinking it’s Tide laundry detergent, and has it maneuvered off her by a little old lady.  Her usefulness to rock ’n roll lies in her body, not her brains, and she’s okay with that.  At first.  

Travis resents that Lola is eager to give it up to anybody who plays a musical instrument.  He feels protective of her, but he never bothers to tell her this.  It’s easier for him to react to her and lash out as needed; all emotion, no thought.  Lola resents that problem solving comes so easily to Travis, and he is more desired by everyone in the music biz than she is.  She feels that she is meant to be a Muse, but it’s Travis who inspires others.  He powers a concert with manure and solar energy.  He fixes a feedback issue with potatoes.  Their odd couple relationship is essential to the film, but it loses interest due to their steadfastly willful ignorance.  These two are at their best when they both dig in their heels and defy each other, even though I wanted to smack their heads together many, many times.  The film, of course, resolves itself in Hollywood fashion, which not only undercuts the characters but also takes the perspective of one of them as being more “correct” than the other, when both are myopic and rather uninformed.

Any love that a viewer may have for Roadie relies on two things.  First is their desire to spot all the cameos (Roy Orbison, Hank Williams Jr, Peter Frampton, ad infinitum) and listen to some music.  In some ways, it’s a concert film, though it’s hardly Woodstock, being narratively driven as it is.  The performances are staged detours to keep the people who don’t care about the story in their seats.  Even when the characters are not at a concert, any montage on the road is accompanied by a song, using shorthand to portray bonding rather than actual bonding.

Second, and a far higher hurtle to clear, is one’s tolerance for Meatloaf.  While I admire the man’s verve, he is nigh-psychotic throughout the entire film.  Meatloaf is cranked up to a thousand, squirming his body all around, flopping his long, stringy hair thither and yon.  You may have seen Chris Farley’s impression of Meatloaf at some time or another, but let me tell you, Farley captured maybe one-eighth of the actual man’s bounce.  The thing of it is, Meatloaf does show glimmers of talent in front of the camera (and he would go on to prove that he has decent acting chops).  Nevertheless, his bug-eyed performance in Roadie is both grating and a little scary.  Whether this comes from his unfettered enthusiasm, his substance abuse issues, or a combination of both is immaterial.  It’s all there on screen, good, bad, and ugly.  There are several moments when he looks like he legitimately wants to eat whomever it is he is looking at (and I mean that in the cannibal sense, not as some crack against obese people).  The film does muster up some sweetness and charm, but it also does so after screaming in your face for almost its entire length, so it feels more like apologetic backpedaling (right or wrong) than the end game intended from the beginning.

MVT:  There is a wild amount of energy in the film.  To the point of exhaustion, but it’s there.

Make or Break:  The throwdown between Blondie and Snow White (a fictitious[?] band made up of little people) is truly glorious.

Score:  6.25/10

Demonoid (1980)

The first and last time I got stitches was before I hit double digits.  I was bitten by a dog (which wouldn’t be the last time), and had to get four sutures in my right bicep (when you’re that age, it’s not a lot, but it sure as hell feels like it).  Since then, I’ve had injuries to my hands that I probably should have had stitched and didn’t, because that first time was more than enough for me.  While working at a fast food restaurant in my teens, I was hauling a box of shortening up from the basement, and my hand got caught on the hook end of an electrical junction box cover.  While working on a dryer, I split a knuckle open.  While removing a water valve from a washer, I gouged another knuckle on the same hand.  To this day, I maintain that the actual bone was bifurcated, but since no doctor was consulted, I guess we’ll never know.  Needless to say, I’m sure these injuries will come back to haunt me in short order, as I can already feel how arthritis is and will set in on my joints (not good for someone who works with their hands).  If you’ve ever stared at your hands for any length of time (like Felix Unger did in the “Odd Monks” episode of The Odd Couple), you really do discover what a marvel these appendages are.  They are one of the hardest parts of the human body to draw, too.  The things we can do with them are amazing, and, more often than not, we truly do take them for granted (until, of course, we are without their use, partially or in total).  I wonder, then, why, for as “important” a purpose as he has and as much work as he has to accomplish in a given day, Satan would cut off his left hand and send it to Guanajuato, Mexico, as he does in Alfredo Zacarias’ Demonoid (aka La Mano Del Diablo aka Macabra aka Demonoid: Messenger of Death)?  You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. 

Visiting her husband Mark (Roy Cameron Jenson) at their Mexican mine, Jennifer Baines (Samantha Eggar) uncovers a chamber previously used for Satanic rites.  She and her husband remove a tiny “coffin” shaped like a human hand from which escapes the titular Demonoid (no one calls it that in the film; it just sounds neat).  The avaricious anatomical appurtenance proceeds to wend its way through a series of victims, all the while setting its sights on the woman who freed it (this becomes a rather perplexing point, as the entire film could have been about thirty minutes long, realistically).

Aside from telepathic/telekinetic heads/brains-in-tanks, the most filmed disembodied human limb has to be the hand (I know of no film where an evil foot attacks people, and even the penis got its own cinematic sojourn in Doris Wishman’s The Amazing Transplant).  Whether they are grafted onto some hapless sap or scuttling about under their own steam, hands just have a greater visual appeal than any other body part.  Plus, they’re really good for strangling (and crushing skulls from the evidence presented here; I had to resist saying “on hand”).  What the idea of a lone hand causing malfeasance does is brings up a discussion about accountability.  If the hand is attached to a person who then turns to evil (Mad Love, Hands of the Ripper, The Hands of Orlac, etcetera), we, as an audience, have to consider whether the flagitiousness is located in the hand or in the person it wields.  If it’s all in the hand, then the person abrogates their role in any villainy.  They are no more than another victim or a fall guy.  This additionally raises the question of where consciousness resides; in the mind, in the spirit, or in every part of the body (the last two being easily tied together)?  Like the alien in John Carpenter’s The Thing, maybe every microbe has an instinct for survival.  This is fine for straight forward horror/monster movies.  You have the good guys, you have the bad creature.  You don’t need any more.  

However, if we deem that the evil is inside the person and not the part, we have more possibilities to work with, a more nuanced premise.  Now, it’s the person struggling with the evil within them, the transplanted appendage being just an excuse for them to exercise their darkest desires.  We can even postulate that, even if the hand or whatever is, indeed, evil, its influence brings out the worst in its host rather than working strictly toward its own purposes.  In this sense, the chicken and the egg come into existence at the same time.  In Demonoid, we can say that Mark always wanted to blow up his mine with all his workers in it.  We can say that he always wanted to run away from his wife and head out to Vegas.  We can say that Father Cunningham (Stuart Whitman) always wanted to attack a woman.  They simply never had the stones/opportunity to do it.  Even when the Demonoid does things after its host has apparently died or is moribund, we can still say that the person’s psychosis is so deep-seated that they do these things subconsciously in order to keep their mental narrative going.  Bear in mind, I am in no way saying that the hand in this film isn’t its own thing.  We see it do plenty while unattached to anyone, and it clearly has an agenda (though said agenda is unclear; does it want to rule the world?  To just get joined up with Jennifer?  To play Craps until it runs out of money and credit?).  But we can still consider its host’s responsibility in the proceedings, the same as if they were being controlled by the “injecto-pods” in Zontar: The Thing from Venus or somesuch.  Just something to think about, I suppose.

What I find special about this film is not that it’s especially well-written or well-shot or well-acted (though all three jobs are performed competently enough).  Rather, Demonoid is mindful of its mindlessness.  It knows that the premise is silly, but it plays it straight.  It disregards the common theme in films like this of a crisis of faith (sure, Father Cunningham has a few scenes regarding this dilemma, but they never develop into anything all that important, and the idea of the power of God defeating in the power of Satan never plays out except on a surface level).  The filmmakers understand that all they have to do is say that this is Satan’s hand without any other background information and let it ride.  There is a gleefully grimy aura on the film.  It is utterly unafraid to go for the gore, and said gore is usually accompanied by/women with copious amounts of cleavage.  The big “shock” ending is as predictable as that of an EC Comic.  The film stands there in front of the viewer, warts and all (but especially warts), and it couldn’t care less if you believe in it.  It believes in itself.

MVT:  The serious/not serious attitude allows the film to keep going and drag you along with it.

Make or Break:  The vague prologue that kind of sets up the story but is really just a small showcase for some tits and blood.

Score:  7/10      

Island Claws (1980)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m not a humongous fan of seafood.  Outside of the occasional piece of salmon or Chilean sea bass, it’s just not for me.  Having said that, I did used to like going crabbing as a boy.  When my family went to the shore for vacation, my brothers would pack up the crab traps.  We had about three or four of them, and half the battle was getting the strings untangled and hooked up appropriately to close the traps.  For those who don’t know, the basics of amateur crabbing goes a little like this: You put bait in a collapsible trap (there are non-collapsible traps, too, but they cost money).  You chuck the trap into the ocean, and hopefully, it fully opens up when you do this.  You then wait.  And then you wait some more.  Then you haul the trap up, and hopefully, it fully closes when you do this.  If there are crabs in the trap, you’re in business.  If not, and the sneaky little bastards stole your bait, you re-bait the trap, and do it all over.  After a successful day of crabbing, our family would, of course, have crab for dinner.  To no one’s surprise, I never partook (I probably had a salami and cheese sandwich instead, a delicacy for which the addition of crunchy beach sand only accentuates the experience).  Outside of the waiting, I enjoyed the activity of it crabbing.  The waiting, as Tom Petty said, is the hardest part (the reason I could never do things like hunting and fishing on the regular, not that I don’t have patience, but I could sit around my house waiting for something to happen just as easily).  Now that I think about it, maybe I didn’t enjoy the activity (there really isn’t much activity to enjoy).  Maybe I just enjoyed the company.  Either way, it would be tough to catch the sort of crabs featured in Hernan Cardenas’ Island Claws (aka Giant Claws aka Night of the Claw), not only because they’re far ornerier than your bog standard crabs, but also because they’d be too damned big to fit in our piddly little traps.

Somewhere in Florida, Dr. McNeal (Barry Nelson, a long way from The Shining) and his team at the National Marine Biology Institute are researching ways to grow crabs bigger as a way to solve world hunger using hot water.  Enter cub reporter Jan Raines (Jo McDonnell), who spends more time hanging out with research assistant Pete (Steve Hanks) than doing any sort of reporting.  After a safety incident at the local nuclear power plant releases super-heated, irradiated water into the local area, the crabs in the area get uppity and start to act at odds with their normal patterns of behavior.

The thing that stands out to me the most in terms of themes with Island Claws is the idea of the small community at risk from the big threat.  The Institute may be in a bigger city (we’re never privy to the geography of the area), but Pete actually lives in a tiny fishing village on the coast.  Pete’s adoptive father Moody (Robert Lansing, an actor whom I’ve always felt was actually miserable under his miserable exterior, even when he’s smiling) runs the local bar, The Half Shell.  The bar is the daily gathering place for the locals to get plowed, gamble on hermit crab races, and listen to Amos (Mal Jones) strum his banjo to the accompaniment of a player piano.  In many ways, this is a Western frontier town.  There is essentially one road that runs straight through the middle, and it’s made of dirt.  Everyone congregates at the local saloon.  Most importantly, everyone knows one another and their business, almost all of which involves commercial fishing (this film’s version of panning for gold).  This tightknit community is unassuming, workaday, and mostly pleasant (if plagued by rampant alcoholism and some halfhearted prejudices).  The menace of the crabs rises up to threaten the village, but this is not a threat of the villagers’ making.  This is not vengeance from nature on humanity in general.  It is the specific targeting of this tiny town as a result of something that occurred at a place of wealth and corruption.  The power plant is the symbol for money, and one of its big muckety mucks, Frank Raines (Dick Callinan), who is also Jan’s father, is so entrenched in the cover up of the safety incident, he would even lie to his daughter about it (she being in line with the working class/pro-ecological types).  This is the big conflict taking place in the film.  It’s the struggle of the working class men against the apathetic, borderline flagitious, wealthy/corporate class.  It’s not so much that the business suits of the power plant actively want to destroy the small village.  They simply don’t care whether it’s destroyed or not, and it’s their indifference that may prove more destructive than the killer crabs themselves.

Interestingly, and again in the vein of the Western frontier town, the people in the village are not without faults, and the mindset that trickles down from the wealthy power plant structure affects them as well.  This is embodied in the subplot of a group of Haitians who arrive illegally on the shore and hide out, stealing what they need to survive.  The first reaction of the fishermen, most particularly Joe (Tony Rigo), is to protect their stuff from the Haitians, even at gun point.  Turning on this concept, once the crabs start killing and maiming beloved members of the community, the villagers blame the Haitians, and they get so riled up, an angry mob forms to corral the illegal immigrants.  The villagers feel threats coming from those who are above them socio-economically as well as from those who are far below them on that same scale.  And yet, they never storm the power plant for creating the mutant crabs, but they do go after the Haitians, because they are an easier target, even though the assumptions about them are completely wrong.

Island Claws is a Fifties giant insect movie that arrived about twenty-five years too late, but that’s also the majority of its appeal.  Its heroes are common people (even the scientists).  It takes its time building up its menace.  It gives the audience a scattering of melodrama to maintain some interest in between attack scenes and build up sympathy for the victims.  It’s a classic monster movie set up; something I love.  The big problem that arises is that the script never totally coheres all of its elements enough to completely work.  Some examples: Dr. McNeal is hardly in the film at all outside of providing some occasional exposition.  The Haitians are totally undeveloped outside of their wrongly accused refugee status, but their subplot takes up a lot of screen time.  Frank Raines appears in exactly one scene just to show us that he’s Jan’s dad and more than a little shady.  Further, the back story involving Frank and Moody doesn’t carry any emotional weight, because it’s never followed through on or refined outside of being a bomb to drop on a character (which turns out to be a dud, regardless).  Most disappointing for me was the fact that the giant crab’s ultimate defeat is pretty mundane.  I wanted our protagonists to use their heads and improvise something clever.  However, while they do improvise something, the solution isn’t so clever.  With all that in mind, I enjoyed the film as a breezy, imperfect throwback to the likes of Them! and the movies that colored a giant swath of my childhood’s monster love.

MVT:  For being on the cheap, the life-sized giant crab monster is actually impressive.

Make or Break:  The Kingdom-of-the-Spiders-esque attack on a character’s bus-home tickled my fancy, and it is effectively orchestrated.

Score:  6.5/10