All posts by Louis Fowler

Sex

Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair (1979)

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In Confessions from the David Galaxy Affair, the third film to star sexy British siren Mary Millington — but just barely — we enter immediately into the ultimately sleazy conquests of decidedly non-sexy psychic David Galaxy (Alan Lake) as he hosts a beauty pageant filled with mostly topless women. Apparently, if you’re into sexually harassing women, late-1970s Britain was the place to be!

Part James Bond (the worst part) investigative police are hot on his tail, apparently for a 1930s robbery a few years back that really makes no sense. Still, Galaxy goes from the bare bosoms of women with low self-esteem to the creamy thighs of women with even lower self-esteem, for reasons that are unknown to me, extreme horniness aside.

One of the said buxom broads includes the famed Millington as a society debutante, complete with a Cockney accent. While there is very little backstory to her with exception of “she’s rich,” their highly horny encounter has a bar full of lecherous perverts listening via ham radio as she duly shags his brains out, not that he really had any.

Maybe I’m expecting far too much from late ’70s British softcore pornography — let’s call a spade a spade, right? — but Galaxy is such a smirking dullard that you actively cheer on the cops, hoping they bust him then take him to a back alley and beat his brains in with a truncheon, paying for his crimes against women with life in prison and a permanent limp.

And, I assume, for the dated robbery as well. —Louis Fowler

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

12 Monkeys (1995)

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I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Terry Gilliam has always been a true visionary who has never received the full credit he truly deserves, and I’m not talking about Monty Python.

While he has done some truly great movies like Time Bandits, Brazil and The Fisher King, I feel that he reached his absolute mainstream height with 1995’s 12 Monkeys, a truly original take on time travel inspired by the absorbing French short film La Jetée, told mostly in photographs.

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a prisoner chosen for a dangerous experiment to travel from 2035 to 1996 to stop a deadly disease that was supposedly started by a group known as the 12 Monkeys. However, during his first attempt, he ends up in 1990 in a mental institution, with Jeffery Goines (Brad Pitt) as a bunkmate, giving him — who happens to be the leader of the 12 Monkeys, natch — the idea for starting the simian insurrection.

Mistake (somewhat) fixed, Cole is sent to 1996, for real, kidnapping one of his former doctors from the asylum, Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe). He attempts to stop the 12 Monkeys — and the virus in general — but through a series of continually turning and twisting spheres, we soon learn that Cole can’t change the future, no matter how hard he tries. But he doesn’t know that.

Filmed with Gilliam’s masterful hand, 12 Monkeys presents a claustrophobic underground future, yet somehow makes the then-present feel even grimmer and grimier. That’s one of his specialties, with everything he’s ever done coming together, almost knowing that the end of the world — and the end of his career due to money-hungry studio heads — was coming. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Switchblade Sisters (1975)

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I had the ultimate pleasure to meet director Jack Hill in the early 2000s, when he was a at a local college campus showing a double feature that included Switchblade Sisters, a film that gained new prominence once Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures reissued it to theaters.

One of my favorite films since a rental in the early ’90s from a now long-gone video store in Oklahoma City, it was thrilling to see it on the (somewhat) big screen and even more thrilling to meet the soft-spoken man who made it, a film that he described as a modern (as modern as the ’70s can be, I suppose) take on Othello.

Switchblade Sisters tells the story of blonde Maggie (Joanne Nail, in short shorts and high-heeled boots), a streetwise teenager who, after a scuffle in a local burger bar, ends up in a girl gang called the Dagger Debs, led by Lace (Robbie Lee, who has always reminded me of a Depression-era youth). When her boyfriend, the leader of the Silver Daggers, dies, they become the Jezebels, the meanest bunch of teen troublemakers in town.

However, when high school sleaze Crabs (Chase Newhart, channeling his evil Eaglebauer) tries to take full control, the Jezebels team up with a Black militant squad led by Muff (Marlene Clark, who really should have had a spin-off flick) and take the dirty motherfucker and his boys down, by any means necessary, which, thankfully, includes plenty of machine guns.

A box-office dud upon release, Switchblade Sisters effectively killed Hill’s career, but, even watching it now, the amount of guts on display here proves that he was far ahead of his time, delivering a movie that would probably make at least good money at Redbox, capitalizing on all the things that have made movies in general great over the years: rowdy girl gangs, dark violence, black humor, Black nationalism and, I guess, Shakespeare.

Well, at least all the things I love in a movie. —Louis Fowler

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Martial Arts

The Paper Tigers (2020)

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The older I get, the more I realize that I’m doomed to watch these dumb young kids get all the good dumb action movie roles; it’s like babysitting a kid who knows how to punch and kick — a job I really don’t want or need. So maybe that’s why I absolutely loved The Paper Tigers so much.

Capturing three 40-something men who are stuck in the dire pit of utter mundanity and near hopelessness, they claw their way back above ground with the help of remembering their martial arts upbringing and the man that taught them. That’s an idea and execution I can fully get behind and support.

Danny (Alain Uy) is a failing insurance salesman who has long put his kung-fu training behind him. When his old ramshackle teacher is murdered by a pupil, he hooks back up with his long-lost friends — a disabled Hing (Ron Yuen) and MMA instructor Jim (Mykel Shannon Jenkins) — to track down the killer, who happens to be working as an assassin using a secret method that was never taught to the now-aged men.

And while the fight scenes are definitely enjoyable to watch, the film never backs away from the realities of getting old, from the slower stamina to the years of absolute regret that can build up. As the trio face these realized difficulties, they take on a trio of young upstarts, a rival school’s comedic underling and other martial arts tropes that drive the point home, especially in its railing against the mental blocks that stop most people dead in their tracks.

The Paper Tigers has such a good heart — not to mention moments of total action and relatable comedy that only people our age could possibly understand — it feels as though writer and director Quoc Bao Tran has been put through his own paces as well, with the cast charmingly fulfilling it with humor and pathos, something that’s typically missing from many martial arts flicks, especially these days. —Louis Fowler

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Kitchen Sink

Stardust (2020)

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WTFMany critics have slammed the “fictional” David Bowie biopic Stardust for different reasons, ranging from the lack of any true Bowie music to the fact that lead Johnny Flynn’s accent goes strangely in and out. I understand all that, but working within the confines of the chameleon world of Bowie, it does quite an admirable job of shuffling in and out of reality, the way we believe the fictional alien would have.

It’s a year or so before Bowie will release The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. He’s still in his enchanted folkie period, coming to America for the first time to promote the failing record The Man Who Sold the World, shocking homophobic people with his gender-bending ways while personally dealing with the institutionalization of his brother.

He meets Mercury publicist Rob Oberman (an outstanding Marc Maron), who is eager to work with him, but Bowie is such a bona drag — especially to music reporters — even Oberman grows weary of him. I wonder if, because the film depicts Bowie in a usually unsavory way, that’s one of the reasons that it was so disliked; I am a huge follower of Bowie, but even I recognize that he was something of a jerk much of the time, especially to the media.

Following the duo on a cross-country tour of America — one where he can’t even perform — Bowie manages to piss off everyone, from a local newspaper writer to a supposed bigwig at Rolling Stone. Perfectly capturing the enigmatic brilliance of the games Bowie put these people through, as the film goes on, you feel this is quite fitting for what the man’s public persona was — or at least who we perceived him to be.

What I’ve mostly read though was the sheer displeasure at the absence Bowie songs, instead relying on things like Anthony Newley tunes. Being unauthorized by the family — probably because they want to make their own movie, of course — the film works, while being somewhat off-putting, because besides the actual fans of his music, how many people truly know about Bowie before Ziggy, the defining music and the supposed alien? —Louis Fowler

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