All posts by Louis Fowler

Comedy

Gold (1972)

Leave a comment

Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during Gold, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty, shot-in-1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing Hacky Sack.

Okay, not really, but I did kick their sack into the sewer just to spite them, and to spite this movie. Like many lost-film obsessives, when word hit that Gold was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing an Alejandro Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie, all-hippie take on the well-documented American Dream of the ’60s, complete with multicolored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic hair. At least that’s what I was promised, dammit.

Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft-dodgers — led by “comedian” Del Close — dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara, rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies. Improvised elections are held on a train, The MC5 blares on the soundtrack, and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our boys were dying face-down in the Vietnam jungles, sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!

With no rhyme, reason or proper editing techniques, it’s as if the school from Billy Jack made a movie and decided to write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, funny nor enlightening, Gold is a total, unwatchable mess. It’s the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull. And this Del Close guy: In every book about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or The Groundlings raves on and on about this so-called “father of improvisational comedy” as “the funniest man you’ve never heard of.” If Gold is any inclination of his talents, there’s a reason for that.

Gold: You blew it, man. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

Sex

Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana (1971)

Leave a comment

Is marijuana an aphrodisiac? While I know some women who would easily fellate you for a dime-sack of high-quality, hydroponic sticky-icky with no hesitation, I have a feeling that has more to do with low self-esteem and the lack of a positive male role model than it does any type of magically seductive ingredient laced within those tenderly pungent pot buds.

Sadly, I personally have never been privy to such THC-leazy doings — although it hasn’t been for a lack of trying — nor have I ever been to a swanky cocktail party wherein a joint is casually passed around and eventual inhalation of the demon weed leads to a spontaneously nude encounter group session wherein pock-faced, fully-bushed cuties are told to stare at your bathing-suit area and gently caress your mons pubis, as I am repeatedly promised in this 1971 sexploitation relic.

Sorry, Aphrodisiac!: The Sexual Secret of Marijuana, but while you dubiously proclaim that cannabis is an ancient sexual enticer that will lead even the most frigid broad to drop trou and let you plow, in my experience, it’s typically just two or three dudes chafing it up on a Goodwill couch, barely watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force and, almost ritualistically, going to sleep, alone, with a belly full of Salsa Verde Doritos, depressed they can’t even maintain the most pathetic of erections for some tearful self-stimulation before passing out to side one of Jefferson Starship’s Red Octopus.

Your visual dissertation just doesn’t hold (bong) water, Aphrodisiac! It does, however, hold other, thicker fluids. While I’m sure in their heart-of-hearts, the filmmakers thought they were presenting a strong case for the use of marijuana as a sexual aid, all that hard work and scientific research is pretty much lost entirely the first moment onscreen penetration occurs between two of the saddest, most unphotogenic, low-rent porn actors the Bowery-based modeling agency could rustle up.

And, you know, I kinda liked that, actually. The idea of a director trotting out to the nearest homeless shelter, paying a belligerent morphine addict $10 to mime the most reptilian of sexual encounters with an equally uninterested, possibly dead hooker, using every diseased thrust as an opportunity to feel something other than the lifetime of mind-numbing regret and stomach-growling hunger … well, that’s some sexy shit. It makes me feel like a shadowy Italian businessman who just paid $5,000 to sit in a hotel room with other equally shadowy businessman — mostly Japanese — to watch a Bolivian snuff flick. I’m sure we can all relate. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

Action

S.W.A.T.: Firefight (2011)

1 Comment

When I heard a straight-to-video sequel to the 2003 actioner S.W.A.T. was right around the corner, the special weapons and tactics unit in my pants became visibly mobilized. That being said, S.W.A.T.: Firefight has absolutely nothing to do with the first one. Sure, there is a S.W.A.T. team present, but it’s a whole new cast, led by Gabriel Macht (The Spirit) as Cutler, a by-the-book S.W.A.T. superstar in L.A. who, through a student-exchange program sponsored by Homeland Security, is sent to Detroit to train a ragtag group of misfits to adapt to the fast paced-world of post-9/11 S.W.A.T. procedures and practices. (Personally, I would’ve just built a RoboCop. But I think outside the box.)

The first hour and 10 minutes is the best damn training video you’ve ever seen, something you’d watch on your first day on the force. It’d be called So You Think You Got What It Takes to Be in S.W.A.T.? From hand-to-hand combat to target practice, it’s all here and occasionally filmed first-person video-game shooter-style, which is fun for us, but might cause impressionable youths to shoot their classmates.

While all this is going on, Robert Patrick minimally toys with the crew, in a bid for poorly plotted revenge: He’s an ex-CIA spook who is pissed they kinda-sorta-but-not-really killed the woman (Kristanna Loken, for about one minute) he’s been stalking. We’ve all been there, right?

Next Day Air director Benny Boom does a good job here, especially with the material he’s given. If anything, Firefight feels like an above-average TV pilot for a new S.W.A.T. television incarnation, which I’m sure would air on CBS after JAG: The Next Generation and NCIS: Surf Patrol ’11. Oh, and that iconic Barry De Vorzon theme? A few bars of it show up dutifully over the opening credits, and proceed to disappear, never to be heard again. However, they had plenty of room for rapper Tony Yayo’s “S.W.A.T. 2,” which manages to prove everything un-hip white people have said about hip-hop absolutely true in only three minutes. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Monsters (2010)

4 Comments

Have we become such a navel-gazing, irritatingly self-introspective, youth-fellating culture that we can’t even make a decent giant monster movie anymore? It started with Cloverfield, where, instead of a gargantuan beast destroying New York, we got a group of slick hipster jerks dodging debris, searching for a superficial “love” interest while talking about how much they loved Fraggle Rock while a gargantuan beast destroyed New York. Maybe. It’s kinda hard to tell because the thing was filmed on the modern-day equivalent of a handheld Fisher-Price PixelVision camera. It’s like a Nick Zedd movie with self-esteem.

Monsters director Gareth Edwards, luckily, invested in a tripod so we can at least see what is going on. Too bad what is going on are two insipid spring breakers stuck in Central America, trying to get home to Regular America, while gargantuan monsters are destroying the lush Mexican countryside. Maybe.

This is a great idea — the chance for an Americanized District 9 — but every time leads Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able open their mouths, it’s like listening to every single drunken conversation you’ve ever overheard around closing time at Señor Frog’s. Mumblecore for the frat crowd, finally! And the monsters? They’re barely seen extraterrestrials who crash-landed in Mexico a few years back — oversized, Old Gods-esque creatures that crush and destroy whole villages and, best of all, inspire heavy-handed allegories about illegal immigration.

It’s commendable that Edwards made Monsters for $800,000 and, because of it, he’s got the upcoming Godzilla remake gig, which is awesome. If there’s one way to top the 1998 Roland Emmerich atrocity, it’s making an ultra-talky redux of a legendary kaiju film. Were the Duplass brothers all booked up? Either way, I look forward to the inevitable Taco Bell tie-ins. I won at least 10 free bean burritos last time! —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.

Action

Fire on the Amazon (1993)

1 Comment

No one makes low-budget genre fare better than producer Roger Corman. Be it sea creatures in rubber suits or slimy alien rapist worms, Corman can (and usually does) deliver the goods. But what happens when he tries to, you know, get serious? What happens when he tries to make an “issue” movie? If Fire on the Amazon is any indication, I’d love to see his version of An Inconvenient Truth.

Yep, Fire on the Amazon is a movie about the devastation of the rainforests and one man’s fight to stop it. Of course, when that man happens to be the ridiculously coiffed Craig Sheffer, looking like he came straight from a grunge-era Playgirl photo shoot, the results will be nothing more than ineffectually comedic. He’s a nosy “photojournalist,” but I’d like to see his press credentials and, no, your blog doesn’t count, Craig.

If following this clown around Bolivia weren’t enough — and believe me, it is — Amazon also happens to be one of the earliest films to star Sandra Bullock, and, true to Corman form, she has a sex scene. While this may be a cream-dream come true for her fans, director Luis Llosa brings the same clinically erotic eye to lovemaking that he did with Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone and a bathroom floor in The Specialist. (I’m actually worried that Llosa has never been with a woman. We should all pitch in and get him a hooker!)

Does the rainforest get saved? No, of course not. But Bullock does get many long-winded speeches about displaced native peoples that actually made me almost want to do something. Almost. So I guess it was successful in that respect. —Louis Fowler

Buy it at Amazon.