Sorceress (1982)

The Corsican Brothers is a story by Alexandre Dumas which first saw print in 1844.  In it, the brothers de Franchi, Louis and Lucien, are former conjoined twins who still share a bond that allows (you could argue suffers) them to feel each other’s pain.  If this sounds familiar, it should.  The idea has been adapted to numerous ends over the years.  Of course, there is the eponymous 1941 film starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr (and it should be stated, cinematic adaptations of the novella go back as far as 1898 according to my research), as well as the comedic reworking from Cheech & Chong (of these two, this is the one I’ve watched, for better or worse).  Then there are the maleficent twins Tomax and Xamot from the G.I. Joe cartoons, comics, et cetera.  Even the classic children’s educational show The Electric Company got into the act, though the brothers were renamed Miguel and Ramon and taught us how to form words using sounds like “ow.”  Outside of the obvious comic appeal of the concept, the conceit is intriguing.  It shows us, quite dramatically, that the bonds of family, of blood, are stronger than anything else, and this connection can never be severed, despite our possible desire to do so.  Jack Hill’s (aka Brian Stuart, a pseudonym used after a falling out between the director and Roger Corman, the film’s producer; if memory serves, it’s the name of Corman’s nephew, but don’t quote me on that) Sorceress also deals with the core of The Corsican Brothers, though one would be hard-pressed to say that it handles it even half as carefully or intelligently as Messrs. Chong and Marin.

On a sultry, fog-shrouded night, Traigon (Roberto Ballesteros) and his cronies hunt down Traigon’s wife, who has fled with their newborn twin daughters.  Unable to tell which of the two is the first born (this is crucial for Traigon’s sacrificial plans, though not nearly as crucial as you’d think, as we will learn later), the nefarious sorcerer is thwarted by aged magician and martial artist Krona (Martin LaSalle), who spirits the girls away, gives them some ill-defined superpowers, and spouts some prophetic gunk about them being “the two who are one.”  Fast forward to Mara and Mira’s (Lynette and Leigh Harris, respectively) voluptuous young adulthood, where they inevitably find themselves on the path to slay Traigon and stop his plan along with a small group of disparate allies (Baldar, a Viking [Bruno Rey], Pando, a satyr [David Millbern], and Erlick, a barbarian [Roberto Nelson]).

I know I made a big deal about the Corsican Brothers angle, but aside from the constant reference to “the two who are one” (a phrase which characters spout as if it had been drilled into their heads from birth but without any other context than that it’s important; it’s not), there is only one allusion to the psychic/sensual bond that the sisters share.  Of course, it takes place when one of the twins is having sex, and it gives the filmmakers the impetus to have the other sibling writhe on the ground in orgasmic ecstasy (it should be stated that screenwriter Jim Wynorski’s fingerprints are all over this film, this being one of the larger marks left on it).  So, why make the girls be cosmically/mystically conjoined?  Outside of the standard prophecy angle of the Sword and Sorcery genre, the answer is novelty.  More precisely, it’s the novelty of having two beautiful twins who aren’t afraid to doff their clothes in this milieu.  There is nothing going on in this story that in any way expands on this idea of bonding (at least not that I could see).  Fair play, since the film was a financial hit for Corman and New World Pictures, so the absolute minimum you can say is that one, it is distinguished from other efforts in this genre in this regard, and two, the producers certainly knew their target demographic.

To no one’s surprise, I’m about to labor a point, so bear with me.  There is a heavy religious angle at work in Sorceress, and it all starts at the opening.  The twins are being spirited away from religious zealots who would kill them, shades of the story of Moses (no floating them off down a river, however).  Krona is a Judeo-Christian God parallel with his long beard and mane of hair, his simple attire, and his invulnerability to things like fire.  Krona gives the twins to a couple of lowly goat herders to raise, and these two form a correlation to Joseph and Mary, the lowly carpenter and his wife who reared Jesus to adulthood at the request of God.  Naturally, this being a Sword and Sorcery film, Traigon’s religion is considered evil, calling as it does for the sacrifice of a human being in order to attain some nefarious end.  This also circles back around to more Christian references (are you tired of them yet?).  The face of Kalghara (Germaine Simiens), Traigon’s bad deity, is half serpentine, a Satan reference.  The good deity, Vital (Vitara?  I couldn’t tell completely), is a winged, lion-esque creature.  In combination with the sacrificial element of the film, he and the twins symbolize the duology of Jesus, who was referred to at one point as both the “conquering Lion” and “the Lamb who was slain.”  These are not exactly straight lines I’m drawing between this picture and its biblical references (and I would be shocked as all hell if they were overtly intended, but I believe this is likely one of those times when themes and motifs appear unconsciously in a piece of work for any number of reasons).  After all, the film has to satisfy its generic requirements.  But they seemed pretty obvious to me (and I haven’t opened a Bible in decades).  Nevertheless, I don’t recall horny satyrs or horny ape creatures in the Bible, so I could be wrong about all of it.    

Sorceress has enough interesting things going on, at least from a visual angle to make it worth seeing.  Unfortunately, it’s also pretty slapdash in a lot of ways, and there are dollops of broad humor that make a pie in the face look like a Lenny Bruce monologue (an ape gets shot in the ass with an arrow, a troop of zombies molest a gaggle of vestal virgins to a “what can you do?” aside from Baldar).  This is the type of film wherein every character will believe absolutely anything they’re told.  Mara and Mira believe they are boys, despite the obvious physical differences (even if they had never seen a man in their entire lives, did they never notice or question the differences between their parents?), and don’t know quite what to make of Pando’s engorged penis (okay, that was actually kind of funny).  Worse, the other characters believe the twins are boys up until they disrobe in front of them.  No one is that naïve.  No one.  Traigon’s whole scheme calls for the virginal sacrifice of the first born of the twins but after she’s been impregnated (huh?!).  One of Traigon’s soldiers commands the girls be taken alive and then commands their deaths not even a minute later.  

Still and all, there are things to enjoy, as well (one could argue that the things I just mentioned are some of them).  You get a medieval set of nunchucks.  You get a decent amount of female nudity (and even some male butt).  But more than that, you get a movie that feels like a rollicking, carefree adventure, not so much because you’re glued to your seat following its progression in peaks and valleys, but because you can enjoy the gleefully madcap, thrown-in-a-blender nuttiness that occurs constantly throughout it.  Yes, Sorceress is a mud puddle of a film, but it’s a mud puddle that’s kind of fun to slop around in from time to time.

MVT:  John Carl Buechler’s creature and makeup effects are imaginative and skillfully done.

Make or Break:  Honestly, for this film I have to go with the skinnydipping scene.  It has a little nudity, a little creature effects work, and a little juvenile humor that just about works.  Something for everyone.

Score: 6/10

Screwballs (1983)

The one thing that becomes readily apparent when one enters high school is that everyone is in a clique of some sort or another.  And as broad and dismissive as it may be to say it, they really are as we’ve come to expect from pop culture.  You have your nerds, your jocks, your loads, your punks (Goths, whatever), and so on.  Most people, however, are not defined solely by the company they keep nor by the seemingly self-defined, self-limiting rules ascribed by their social status, so they can, will, and should associate with those outside their clique, at least on some level.  What’s interesting is that once one gets out of high school, one discovers that cliques carry on through college, into the work place, and they even run the world (shocking, I know).  It’s all a part of man’s tribal nature.  We gravitate to those who either share our personal belief systems or seem to have the most to offer us (or a combination of both).  Of course, this isn’t meant as a blanket statement.  There are exceptions to every rule.  But I think that even a person engaging with the broadest spectrum of societal cliques recognizes that these do exist, and that they, in fact, belong to them, even if they belong to a lot of them.  Thus do we come to the main characters of Rafal Zielinski’s Screwballs.  I don’t think anything else needs be said (but I’m going to say it, anyway).

Five high school horndogs, jock Rick (Peter Keleghan), rich boy Brent (Kent Deuters), nerd Howie (Alan Deveau), slob Melvin (Jason Warren), and new kid Tim (Jim Coburn), all find themselves in detention because of the cruel manipulations of the snotty, virginal Purity Busch (Linda Speciale).  The five disparate youths vow to get a glimpse of Purity’s boobies before the Homecoming dance and set about making it happen.  Hilarity is supposed to ensue.

The Teen Sex Comedy has a long tradition, and following in the popular trend in youth-oriented media of the time (think Happy Days, Porky’s, The Wanderers, etcetera), Screwballs is a period piece.  Outside of the window dressing (and scant though that dressing is due to budgetary constraints), the film doesn’t feel of the Fifties.  This is really neither here nor there, since it’s so focused on its grabassery, you would never notice the disparities.  Despite the film’s more graphic sexual references (throbbing erections [yes, really], blunt character monikers, female nudity), it is little more than a collection of misadventures along the lines of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon or a silent comedy of the Twenties.  We don’t need more development of the characters or the plot than what we’re given, because none of it matters.  This is the broadest of broad comedies in the vein of a turd in a punch bowl.  Characters have names like Jerkovski, Howie Bates (get it?), and Sara Bellum (before The Powerpuff Girls).  The librarian silences people who use sign language in her library.  The school is referred to as T&A High (named after Presidents William Taft and John Adams, natch).  The film lacks any of the sophistication of its aforementioned ancestors.  In a way, this makes Screwballs almost critique-proof.  You can’t truly complain about its prurient interest or its unsubtleties, because the only reason it exists is to give fourteen-year-old boys hard-ons  (witness the fascination with and multiple closeups on women’s lips, tongues, and breasts) and make them giggle at humor that would likely still make fourteen-year-old boys groan.  Yet, there are some things at play underneath because of its base, primal makeup.

Comedy and Horror share a lot of common traits, perhaps the most prevalent being the attention given to obvious set-up and payoff scenarios.  So, in Comedies like this we have things like Howie setting up an elaborate series of mirrors just to see up the skirts of the school’s girls.  Similarly, in Horror films, we have lone characters walking through excessively dark spaces.  Both build tensions on simple expectations and then pay them off by fulfilling or subverting those expectations (and if you’ve seen enough of either, those subversions can be rare).  Nonetheless, Screwballs very intentionally uses Horror-type images to play as humor.  Bootsie (co-writer Linda Shayne) finds herself (and more importantly her breasts) pushed against the rear window of a van as she screams and struggles in vain.  Melvin rises out of the beach like a member of the living dead.  A girls’ gym class feign being hypnotized and march, arms out, like zombies.  Most telling on a subtextual level is the scene where Purity cuts into and eats a sausage, while the lads wince in sympathy pain.  

Along those same lines, the plot of the film is a Revenge tale.  Purity is the antagonist, and she delights in tormenting everyone around her by getting them into trouble for following their natural instincts.  The other characters are all fascinated by her, because she’s a virgin, and in a way, this is the sin she commits (combined with her attitude of superiority) that garners the indignation of her peers (and something which would signify her as a Final Girl in a Slasher movie of this era).  For being slighted, the boys seek revenge, and the route they choose to achieve it is through Purity’s humiliation.  This seems sort of lopsided, since none of the boys seem in any way humiliated themselves in how they came to be in detention.  If anything, they are proud of how they got there.  In fact, it seems like a regular occurrence in their scholastic careers.  What they are miffed about is that they got caught at all.  

For all her haughtiness, Purity is little different from everyone else, and she has the same urges they do.  She simply represses them, making her shenanigans something of a werewolf motif (work with me on this).  This is illustrated in the scene where, while deep in dreamland, she hits on and dry humps her oversized teddy bear.  It serves to knock her down a peg and almost even humanizes her in the eyes of the audience, but it doesn’t absolve her misbehavior.  So, like Larry Talbot, she has to be proverbially clubbed with a silver-headed cane.  Purity may be a human in private, but she is a monster in public.  The cost is her chaste public image.  Even though she doesn’t lose her virginity, her exposure comes close, because now everyone has seen what she has held back.  It somehow feels anticlimactic, since there are so many naked boobs throughout the film, another pair really doesn’t seem all that special.  I’ll leave it to you to compare and contrast, if you like.

MVT:  There is pulchritude in excess herein, and if your life has been short of this, then Screwballs is the perfect remedy.

Make Or Break:  The opening scene is the Make.  Bootsie and Rhonda (Terrea Smith) are hanging a sign outside the local diner.  Meanwhile, a giant inflatable sausage flops thither and yon between them, poking both lasses in the nethers.  Really says it all, doesn’t it?

Score:  6/10     

Episode #44: Let Naked Corpses Lie

Welcome back for another episode of lush, cinematic goodness....we hope.
This week we cover LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE (1974) from Jorge Grau and HARD TO DIE (1990) from Jim Wynorski. It's a fun-filled show with Sammy losing his mind, it seems, through out....very tired was the Samurai. Large William was the anchor that kept this ship from drifting away....but the cinematic talk was as bountiful as usual.

Direct download: Let_Naked_Corpses_Die.mp3