All posts by Louis Fowler

Western

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

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When you’re jawing about the Old West and its history, the first thing that should be dealt with is all the horrid victimization of the Indigenous people assaulted and murdered by “good” white people, something that still happens to this very day.

 So, sorry, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner.

That being realized, the second thing most people remember about the Western frontier is the brat-ish fiction and scrubbed nonfiction of the outlaw of outlaws, Billy the Kid. Popularized by mass-media pop culture from the 1930s in movies like The Outlaw to modern-day fare like Young Guns, he has stayed on the hay-baling radar for well over a century.

But leave it to hard-drinking, pill-popping and well-regarded director Sam Peckinpah to have his say about the rough-and-tumble legend-crasher with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Although less bloody and violent than Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, this caustically serene 1973 film has a brutally lackadaisical form that makes it his most misunderstood — and endlessly watchable — picture. Hot damn.

Aided by Bob Dylan’s soul-stirring, beautifully written soundtrack, we meet uneasy friends Pat Garrett (tough son of a bitch James Coburn) and William Bonney aka Billy the Kid (baby-faced son of a bitch Kris Kristofferson), as lawman Pat gives Billy six days to leave the country or he’ll take him in, by hook or crook.

After the initial shootout, Billy is jailed. But, being a total badass, he escapes and guns down the law, making a break for some Mexican freedom, only to find Pat and his peacemakers wanting retribution and reprisals.

Knockin’ on heaven’s door, so the song goes …

And really, that’s the whole story: a barren world of post-apocalyptic lawmen who carry phony badges and the demonic crooks who will, in theory, blow the outhouse hinges off the whole place, while everything just peters out with both sides taking the loss. It’s hell on earth — or just plain hell.

Making a case for the well-meaning travelogue on a consistent tour of the underworld, both Coburn and Kristofferson are well-timed to the hellfire rolls of Garrett and the Kid. The Sweetwater flies surrounding Peckinpah’s production include R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards and Harry Dean Stanton — a real murderers’ row of outlaws, banditos and horse thieves.

But what truly makes this sauntering joyride all more the incomparable is Dylan’s casting as the enigmatic Alias, a no-name seer who has no joy and no pain in the Western setting, singing mournful hymns as the dust settles in the blazing distance. Though his theatrical roles have always been very hit (Masked and Anonymous) and very miss (Hearts of Fire), he always plays the soulful conductor of a soulless orchestra, which always makes him so interesting, and that all fictionally started here. His tunefully rustic soundtrack ruefully ranks up there with his other aural masterpieces.

In the end, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the meaty type of transcendent Western that is criminally thoughtful, beautifully violent and, like most of Peckinpah’s films, tragically raw to the bone. It’s all there in the bleeding marrow, taking it all out of cinematic purgatory and into pure filmic heaven. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

Who’s That Girl (1987)

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Said many times by many people, I am a rapturous apologist for many movies that most people consider “bad,” “unwatchable” or “sheer slights against God.”

After all, one person’s trash can be another person’s treasure and, many times, I can find a sliver of gold among the absolute dreck, especially that irregular drumbeat plaguing rock-music films like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Who’s Tommy or Can’t Stop the Music.

That being said, Who’s That Girl is complete shit by all accounts and, sadly, I totally agree. Although not her film debut, it became the absolute model of motion pictures to be associated with Madonna and, after 92 minutes, I can see why.

With her constantly braying, ample whines and a high-pitched squeaky-voice that screams “Ain’t I a bad gurl?” to the masses, this modicum of lame humor ingrates from the very beginning. The cartoon opening credits set up Madonna’s whimsical character, who will take stuffed-shirt Griffin Dunne into will-they-or-won’t-they pieces for the movie’s duration, all of them forced and vapid.

Dunne is assigned to get Madonna, a newly released jailbird, on a bus to get some evidence to exonerate her character. On the way, though, she participates in shoplifting and other criminal activities, including buying weapons on the black market and taking charge of an endangered wildcat that, I believe, she doesn’t once feed.

All the while, she speaks in a stupid inflection that’s like nails on a chalkboard.

Now, to be honest, I truly liked Susan Seidelman’s Desperately Seeking Susan when it premiered on HBO, and I also was somewhat enamored with Madonna’s rotating videos on classic MTV … but following it up with the one-two cinematic punch of Shanghai Surprise and Who’s That Girl was too much, even for me.

As a director, James Foley has had a few hits like the Madonna-soundtracked At Close Range and Glengarry Glen Ross, but also misses like Marky Mark’s Fear or Chow Yun-Fat and Marky Mark’s The Corruptor. Turns out, screwball comedy is not in his wheelhouse; hopefully, he burned that wheelhouse down to the ground.

Madonna had her recording career to fall back on, but she’s only part of the problem. Lead actor Dunne (After Hours) is just as blameworthy, because he should had known better. Unacceptable!

While the soundtrack has a few toe-tappers — especially “Causing a Commotion” and the title track — the movie really is one of the worst in the world. Even I can’t come up with a case for it! Playing like a screwball comedy without the screws or the balls, this is not a Girl I want to find. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

Peeping Tom (1960)

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Most men — and, honestly, some women — are Peeping Toms. Abasement in all its glory!

The criminal, sexual act of illicit self-pleasure while a person is unknowing, unwilling and nonconsensual is quite damning and will, at the very least, label you as a pervert among family, friends and neighbors.

So remember, kids: Keep an eye out for Mom … unless, of course, you’re peeping on your mom, which will lead to other problems I’m not able to discuss without the care of a professional — a doctor or a hooker.

In the fickle world of pop culture, the stereotypical Peeping Tom is most often a trope of the teen sex comedy, rubbing one out in the girls’ locker room while getting his crank stuck in a vice-like device. But in 1960, filmmaker Micheal Powell decided to cast a unsexy shadow on the world’s most lonely act in the film Peeping Tom.

When the film premiered, people were outraged, and Powell’s name was dragged through the mud, ultimately killing his career. (Sadly, the billions of gallons of sperm while watching the movie waiting for the tame sex scenes were never accounted for …)

It starts with a shadowy man hiding a film camera under his coat as he seeks a prostitute. In her most Cockney accent, she takes to him a flophouse and, unexpectedly, he murders her with an extended leg of his camera’s tripod. As the tape runs out, I imagine he climaxes.

This man is Mark (Carl Boehm). He makes films of the crimes and watches them ad nauseam, as one will wantonly do. He works for a bookshop as a cover for taking snapshots of nudie cuties, but his dream job is to be a film director. (If only he waited about five years for the porn industry to boom!) Mark’s also a sad loner and very quiet, snapping pictures of disfigured woman to masturbate to.

Eventually, he’s befriended by his tenant who views his works, especially the films his father made of him being sexually frightened, as stunting his emotional growth and causing him to deal with the trauma though voyeurism.

Long story short, Mark is punished for his crimes in the worst way possible in the early ’60s.

A true testament to both swingin’ London and swingin’ ballsacks, Powell’s non-illicit camera gets the dirtiest grime in the gear game. Boehm’s Mark is still relevant today — just sub the cheesecake shots with live camgirls who’ll act out your fantasy for an OnlyFans subscription.

Much in the same vein as Joe Spinell’s work on William Lustig’s Maniac, but with a Piccadilly Circus façade, Peeping Tom is a true classic of perverted outré cinema that needs to be reevaluated in these much more maligned times.

Until then, keep it in your pants, Junior! —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Thriller

The Fanatic (2019)

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The Fanatic is a 2019 film directed by Limp Biscuit (I refuse to spell it like that) frontman Fred Durst. Working behind the camera and off the stage, Durst embodies the roving spirit of changing career lanes, turning him into the thinking man’s Rob Zombie.

That being said, he is a terrible director and his movie, The Fanatic, is worse.

Sadly not based on The Fan, the Wesley Snipes/Robert De Niro baseball fandom-film from 1996, the movie is all about the crazed fandom (femidom?) of movie nerds, comic-book geeks and very stinky horror fans in general.

It depicts L.A. as a land of celluloid dreams caustic shithole that drearily gleams in the broken spotlight. John Travolta, on his third or fourth comeback, is Moose, a street performer with Hollywood’s version of autism. In his bad haircut, he is a “celebrity” impersonator as a London “bobby” policeman.

But, in reality, he’s the No. 1 fan of genre actor Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa). He is fanatical about him, if you will.

Moose meets Dunbar at a Hollywood memorabilia store for an autograph that, in Moose’s mind, is a meet-cute moment. Wiping the fantasies away, he is a truly pushy fan — but Dunbar is just as worse as a B-grade celebrity.

They have words, which end with Dunbar saying he will autograph a dejected Moose “with his fists.” Ow. Wanting a do-over, Moose starts stalking him, using a star map to find his house.

Eventually, after attempting to strangle a dirty magician, he accidentally kills Dunbar’s maid. Though sad about it, Moose — or, perhaps, Travolta — runs around with fake antlers, takes a dump, uses Dunbar’s toothbrush and takes a selfie while kissing Dunbar’s sleeping head, which I guess is kind of sweet.

Realizing that Moose has been in his house, Dunbar pumps the Limp Biscuit (once again, I refuse to spell it like that) in his car. Much like one of Durst’s unlistenable songs, the finale is well-done trash, but in the end, it’s still trash.

This film was made with the association of Redbox. Not wanting to spend the $1.99 for a rental, I saw this on Amazon Prime for free and, well, it was interesting to revisit Travolta’s career … Durst’s, not so much.

Either way, someone owes me $1.99.

While most of the actors are grocery-store brand, Travolta is a big name brand, but one on the clearance shelf. His unwanted performance is a hilarious to both the clinically sane and mentally ill people, feeling like one long joke that no one gets.

But as a director, Durst is dangerously terrible to all people. The movie plays like it were Durst’s vapid handshake to the “meaningful” world of prestige pictures, yet everything about it takes it to broken levels of comic derision because, well, it’s Fred fucking Durst.

In other words, this Fanatic needs to go back to his mom’s basement and shut the door, playing “Break Stuff” while ferociously masturbating. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Comedy

To Die For (1995)

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Director Gus Van Sant was on the top of the film world in the 1990s, with the semi-wistful Good Will Hunting heralding a true rags-to-riches story. Then, the 1998 shot-for-shot/pretension-to-pretension remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho barreled its way though the floppish door, with its brain-numbing thunderclouds, bleating sheep and other l’artiste touches.

So, yeah, I didn’t like the lousy remake.

But I was pretty much in love with Van Sant’s early work, especially To Die For. I saw it opening night in 1995, mostly because I was hoping to score some time with a private school girl I was very smitten with. Of course, she stood me up — I was a 15-year-old jerk who invited girls to Van Sant movies because I liked My Own Private Idaho and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. (To be fair, I think my Film Threat subscription had more to do with my fandom.)

Even sitting alone in the movie theater, I recall really liking the movie. Why wouldn’t I? Not only was it Van Sant’s new flick, but I also liked the Buck Henry script and, even more, I was entranced with the style of tabloid journalism that started with O.J. Simpson, Tonya Harding and Lorena Bobbitt. (Boy, no wonder I was often alone at the movies. *tear*)

In the black comedy, we meet the über-perky Suzanne Stone (the únter-perky Nicole Kidman). She is obsessed with being a “famous” television journalist. Told in flashback form, her life plays out like a John Waters movie with an L.A. snarky edge.

Suzanne believes the self-empowerment mantras about how television is the one great provider — one that doesn’t mesh with her new husband, Larry (Matt Dillon). Over the year, she becomes consumed with making it big, sans Larry. Soon, she finds a trio of white-trash true believers (including a young Joaquin Phoenix) in her cause, and she creates a teen cult of prepubescent murderers.

Being the near-spiritual dry run to Alexander Payne’s Election, To Die For is revelatory for the sleazy ticks and upselling tricks that now seem commonplace with reality TV becoming the status quo. Although things were different on 1995, To Die For is still a prescient movie. That being said, the one actor who holds it together is Phoenix, with Kidman and Dillion being too cartoonishly evil and dumb, respectively. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.