Family Business (1989) vs. Misconduct (2016)
All posts by Rod Lott
Gamera: Super Monster (1980)
If you see only one Gamera adventure from the Daiei studio’s initial run (not to mention outside of all those Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes), might as well make it Gamera: Super Monster. Playing like Gamera’s Greatest Hits, the Saturday-matinee movie largely comes cobbled together from the giant flying turtle’s previous adventures. This eighth flick inadvertently sent the Godzilla knockoff to the franchise cemetery, where it stayed buried for a full 15 years.
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa (as with the other seven), the film opens on a pirate spaceship in battle. Don’t get your hopes up for an epic star war, however; Super Monster is so cheap that the skirmish is depicted only via stationary illustrations. Nonetheless, the ship sends a female alien to attack Earth, yet Earth is protected by the Spacewomen, a superhero trio. When not in their matching costumes, the three ladies individually work at a pet store, a school and a Mazda dealership. The Spacewomen occasionally shrink to fit inside a dog carrier; ride in the pet shop’s van, which takes flight as a glowing orange oval; and have a loyal friend in the genre’s required little boy in short pants. Not to stereotype, but like all good Japanese students, he plays a mean rendition of “Camptown Races” on a Yamaha keyboard.
If there’s one thing the kid likes to do more than smile, roam the metropolitan area freely and hang out with older women, it’s watching Gamera defend the world. The Spacewomen don’t do a whole helluva lot beyond some kung-fu sparring with the alien; a good two-thirds of Super Monster is given over to the fight scenes culled from the aforementioned other movies (the American versions of which often have vs. in the title). Gamera pulls out all his tricks — breathing fire, spinning like a goddamn pinwheel, doing gymnastics on industrial constructions — as he goes head-to-turd-resembling-head with the creatures Gaos, Zigra, Viras, Jiger, Guiron and Barugon — or, in respective scientific terms, a bat-dragon, a shark thingie, a squid with an extra chromosome, a dentally challenged dinosaur, a knife-headed reptile with built-in ninja stars, and I don’t even know what.
Early on, a kooky cop dismisses a Gamera manga as “just funny old fairy tales” — as good a review as any for this and any other Gamera outing. They have their place. —Rod Lott
Puppetmaster (1989)
Turns out Tourist Trap was a test run of sorts for director David Schmoeller in the Shit That Should Not Move horror subgenre. Having made that low-budget chiller and its mannequins so effective in 1979 for producer Charles Band, Schmoeller earned himself the gig of helming Full Moon’s flagship, Puppetmaster, which has served as Band’s bread and butter ever since, for better and often worse.
Set at the Bodega Bay Inn, this inaugural entry in the Puppet Master series (two words beginning with the first sequel) isn’t so bad. In a 1939 prologue, puppet creator Andre Toulon (William Hickey, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) already has discovered an ancient Egyptian method of giving life to the inanimate. As the Nazis come charging in his room to swipe his secret, Toulon bites a bullet, ensuring it stays out of the Führer’s hands. Fifty years later, a select few people gifted with extrasensory powers are summoned to the inn at the behest of colleague Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs, 1988’s Ghost Town) who has unlocked Toulon’s secret … and since committed suicide.
Gallagher’s cohorts stick around to collectively figure out, y’know, what the hap. They include an anthropology professor (Paul Le Mat, Strange Invaders) with midtransformed-wolfman hair and dreams of things to come; a fortune teller (Irene Miracle, Dario Argento’s Inferno) who carries a stuffed dog; and, most hilariously, a scalding-hot psychic (Kathryn O’Reilly, Jack’s Back) who experiences the past of her surroundings. Seriously, she steps in the elevator and senses a rape; she plops onto her hotel room’s bed and feels the oohing and ahhing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s mattress activity of decades prior. (Apparently, the Bodega Bay Inn doesn’t retire mattresses.)
Oh! And there are killer puppets. No one in Gallagher’s party possesses peripheral vision, because Toulon’s puppets roam about the halls rather freely and without causing alarm … until they decide it’s time to commit murder. Although they have no names in the movie, Band’s Full Moon catalogue of action figures, comics and other merch will not let you forget their cute monikers. Each is labeled for his or her defining trait, e.g., Jester, Pinhead and Tunneler. Leech Woman pukes up the slimy, bloodsucking worms onto the chests of her prey (an act that look like she’s defecating from the wrong end), while the skeletal-faced Blade (a dead ringer for Invasion U.S.A. villain Richard Lynch) stabs his victims. In arguably Puppetmaster’s most overt point of humor, Blade’s pupils pop out as bolts when he peeks through the keyhole as the sexy psychic in undress.
With more of a mystery vibe at play, not to mention legitimate storytelling in general, Puppetmaster bears little resemblance to the double-digit sequels Band continues churning out, now with crowdfunding assistance. While the puppets are the draw, they are not the focus. When they are onscreen, however, it’s for the benefit of Schomeller’s picture because David Allen’s stop-motion animation is quite good, particularly on a Band budget. Then again, on projects big (Young Sherlock Holmes, for which Allen was Oscar-nommed) and small (this) and really small (Equinox), Allen delivered. —Rod Lott
The Concorde … Airport ’79 (1979)
With The Concorde … Airport ’79 being the fourth and final flight in the Airport series, I am legitimately saddened I have no further sequels to consume. As creaky as this franchise is by today’s standards, I find it more entertaining than most. After all, its living, breathing, connective tissue is George Kennedy’s continuing role as Joe Patroni, here promoted to pilot and squeezing into the cockpit with a shit-eating grin and an update on his life: “My boy’s starting college!” he beams with pride. “My wife’s been dead a year!”
And thus, the secret seeds are planted to score Patroni a prostitute during layover. Ladies and gentlemen, we are cleared for takeoff!
Capt. Patroni and his co-pilot, Capt. Paul Metrand (French superstar Alain Delon, Le Cercle Rouge), are tasked with taking the airline’s newfangled Concorde from D.C. to Paris, and then Paris to Moscow, partly as a PR stunt for the Russia-hosted Olympic Games. (Two flights compressed into two hours feels like two episodes of an Airport television series, which is what Airport ’79 may as well be.)
The trips fall under the category of “easier said than done,” what with Patroni busting out some incredible aerial acrobatic maneuvers — including more than one hysterical 360˚ — to avoid having the supersonic jet blown to smithereens by the drone missiles chasing it. The missiles are “accidentally” deployed by a slimy aeronautics CEO (Robert Wagner, Curse of the Pink Panther), because just before boarding the plane, his journalist girlfriend (Susan Blakely, Over the Top) uncovered evidence of his involvement in illegal arms sales. If he can down the plane, he’ll get away with greed!
On the downside, he’ll also be killing many in the process; the potential collateral damage includes the airline prez (Eddie Albert, TV’s Green Acres), his trophy wife (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat), one sexy stew Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle, of course), a Russian gymnastics coach (Avery Schreiber, those Doritos commercials) and his deaf moppet daughter, a news reporter/set of teeth (John Davidson, TV’s Hollywood Squares), the Russian figure skater he’s boinking (Andrea Marcovicci, The Hand) and a really worried parent (Cicely Tyson, Bustin’ Loose), whose carry-on is a human heart awaiting transplant into her dying child.
And those are just the subplots that make sense! So many baffling creative decisions reroute The Concorde into self-parody without director David Lowell Rich (1973’s Satan’s School for Girls) or screenwriter Eric Roth (future Oscar winner for Forrest Gump) knowing it. I speak of comedian Jimmie Walker, then coming off his “dyn-o-mite” run on TV’s Good Times, playing a jazz saxophonist who keeps sneaking off to the bathroom to get high. I speak of Martha Raye, in her final film (roughly 37,000 feet from her days sharing the screen with Charlie Chaplin), as a fraidy-cat passenger who keeps sneaking off to the bathroom because of nervous diarrhea. I speak especially of game-show staple Charo, who has one scene that exists only to feature Charo and her cuchi-cuchi shtick. Was she really that much of a “get”?
Don’t answer that. Do see ’79, the master of the disaster film — disastrous in all the right ways. —Rod Lott
Trailer Trauma (2016)
Packaging for Garagehouse Pictures’ Trailer Trauma makes the dubious claim that while it’s far from the only coming-attractions compilation on the market, “only [it] contains the ultra-rare titles that you absolutely will not find anywhere else.” And dammit, with the likes of Ironmaster, Dr. Frankenstein on Campus and Smokey and the Hotwire Gang — to name only three — the Garagehouse gang actually makes good on that promise!
Elsewhere on the back cover, the consumer is warned that the 137-minute collection “is going to hurt.” This, too, turns out to be true; in the immortal words of John Mellencamp, it hurts so good. For lovers and mistresses of B-movie advertising, this disc is essential.
Speaking of dubious claims and immortal words, the program overflows with gems of taglines and selling points. In this category fall The Incredible Torture Show (aka Bloodsucking Freaks) as “the show that will make anyone retch”; Grave of the Vampire’s dire warning that “if the sight of an infant child nursing on human blood will make you sick, do not see this gruesomely explicit horror film”; and, best of all, the announcer for Nine Deaths of the Ninja proclaims, “A cat has nine lives … Sho Kosugi has nine deaths!”
Not all of that ballyhoo works as intended, which is half the fun of revisiting trailers of the grindhouse era. For example, Sunn Classics’ Beyond and Back, a 1978 “documentary” about death and the afterlife, presents itself “an exciting experience for the whole family.” Little kids love mortality, right? Meanwhile, Stoner promises “the most dynamic kung fu team ever!” And yet the 1974 actioner pairs that Deadly China Doll Angela Mao with one-time 007 George Lazenby — one of these things is not like the other.
Found among the 65 trailers are early roles for Mr. T (Penitentiary II) and Jean-Claude Van Damme (No Retreat, No Surrender), as well as cinema’s only teaming of Brigitte Bardot and Claudia Cardinale and the onscreen comic-book sound effects of TV’s Batman (The Legend of Frenchie King).
Where else can the discriminating viewer find a tribeswoman breast-feeding puppies, Dabney Coleman as a blaxploitation heavy and an ad for Oliver Stone’s Seizure dubbed into French (because, hell, why not), all in a single source? Nowhere, of course! But speaking hypothetically, even if there were, I’d still bet Trailer Trauma bares a higher BPM (breasts per minute). In this realm, that counts for everything. —Rod Lott