Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 5/23/18

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Even if they don’t come along that often, I love a good horror movie set among the stars. I love some bad ones, too. (But not all.) That sent Horror in Space: Critical Essays on a Film Subgenre rocketing toward the top of my reading pile. Edited by Michele Brittany, the McFarland & Company paperback sends 15 think-pieces into orbit, including yet another anatomical reading of Alien. Luckily, other contributors boldly go elsewhere, such as Jason Davis’ rollicking, reverse-order tour through “Aliensploitation” films. Continuing in that vein is Kevin Chabot’s look at slasher sequels that send their killer characters into space, notably Leprechaun 4 and cover boy Jason X. Elsewhere, look for love for John Carpenter, H.P. Lovecraft and the increasingly appreciated Event Horizon.

In Biology Run Amok! The Life Science Lessons of Science Fiction Cinema, cancer immunologist and Scary Monsters magazine scribe Mark C. Glassy (an appropriate surname for beaker-laden B-pic fare) examines and reviews the science portrayed in the films, rather than the films themselves. For example, this summation of The Bride of Frankenstein: “The supporting glassware and overall layout of the lab are quite fitting for the work at hand, namely making different reagents, philters, and solutions for the creation of his homunculi.” If that’s your thing, then this experiment may yield positive results for you, with chapters on radiation, re-animation, brain surgery, extreme hair growth, etc. Glassy’s admirable goal here is to teach science through a massively popular art form, which he does with obvious intelligence. While similar to his 2001 book, The Biology of Science Fiction Cinema, also from McFarland & Company, Amok is not the same thing. Consider it a companion — or lab partner, as the case may be.

Harris M. Lentz III’s Obituaries in the Performing Arts, 2017 is kind of like having the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” segment in book form, but without the varying bursts of applause to let you know that, even in death, it’s all a popularity contest. As if there were any question, the 447-page paperback pays tribute to those actors, actresses, authors, musicians and other artists who left this earth in the last calendar year, from A (Adair, Perry Sheehan) to Z (Zumbrunnen, Eric) — almost 1,300 in all, even including animal stars (orca whale Tilikum) and porn stars (Shyla Stylez). It seems macabre, but such things should be preserved for future generations. That’s what no-frills reference books are for. The nice thing is that, in Lentz’s world, death is an equalizer. By that, I mean that the dearly departed get more or less the same treatment here: a bio and write-up no matter how successful (or un) he or she was. Clifton James, Doris Carey and Frank “The Tank” Miller are as important as Chuck Berry, Mary Tyler Moore and Harry Dean Stanton. Photos are used as often as possible, which is to say for almost every entry. —Rod Lott

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Horror

Herschell Gordon Lewis’ BloodMania (2017)

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When “the Godfather of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis, passed away in 2016, his final movie was 2009’s The Uh-Oh! Show. That footnote since has been supplanted by Herschell Gordon Lewis’ BloodMania, a four-part anthology that’s at least four times worse than the previous worst thing he had done, which is really saying something — and I’m a fan! Seriously, The Uh-Oh! Show — highly flawed, yet highly fun — is Call Me by Your Name compared to this.

Following interminable opening credits that treat its no-name actors as if they constitute an all-star cast à la It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Lewis addresses the video camera as himself, an ersatz Cryptkeeper to introduce each deplorable tale, half of which he directed, including the first.

Of that one, “Gory Story,” he declares, “You’re about to get your money’s worth” — a promise unfulfilled, even if you watch the film for free. Brewster Bricabrac (Roger LeBlanc, Painkillers) possesses a possessed hook hand, which continues to injure him — a single joke dragged out 20 minutes too long. While an improvement, “The Night Hag,” also from our host and about a hairy she-creature haunting a suburban family’s home, fails to engage past an initial, quickly discarded sitcom spoof.

Freshman filmmaker Melanie Reinboldt directs “Attack of Conscience,” featuring a comatose woman (Sonia Deleo) who dreams of dying over and over at the hands of her abusive lover (Donovan Cerminara, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days). This short is not only confusing, but tonally askew from the rest of the picture. Finally, tyro helmer Kevin Littlelight offers “GOREgeous,” in which former rock star Gordo (Stuart Bentley), suffering from erectile dysfunction, slices and dices his “deaf retard” wife and continues a murderous rampage from there. It’s the kind of piece in which a girl complains, “These high heels are killing me!” while a high heel juts from her bloodied, stabbed back.

Groan. I’d dub BloodMania unwatchable, if not for the fact that I watched the damn thing. It took me three days to get through it. Avoid at all costs; your allegiance for Lewis should go only so far. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Dig! (2004)

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• Number of albums by The Dandy Warhols I have owned: 3
• Number of albums by The Brian Jonestown Massacre I have owned: 0

And in part, the reason can be found in the scrappy rockumentary Dig!, a funny, sad, warts-and-all, good-cop/bad-cop portrait of two bands on the rise — and one’s fall — over seven years’ time and captured by the camera of Ondi Timoner (We Live in Public).

In the mid-’90s, our nation had not heard of The Dandy Warhols or The Brian Jonestown Massacre, no matter how hard those puns tried. But that was soon to change. What begins as a friendly rivalry between the bands’ respective leaders (Courtney Taylor and Anton Newcombe) devolves into outright jealousy on the Massacre’s part when the Warhols taste some major-label success — and, to their credit, apparently with relative levelheadedness.

Newcombe, meanwhile — due to either mental illness, drug addiction or just plain stupidity — sabotages each and every chance of his band achieving the same. By the film’s midpoint, he seems to expend more energy trying to badmouth or crash the Warhols than he does working on his own music. And perhaps that’s because he keeps beating them — and the occasional audience member — up during shows, some of which become riots.

Personally, The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s music never has done anything to perk my ears, while several of The Dandy Warhols’ power-pop cuts stuck in my brain like spilled soda — and this was before knowing the backstory of either. But as one watches Dig!, which is entertaining even when your heart aches for Newcombe’s ravaged soul, it becomes clear that Newcombe has talent. It’s just buried under a lifetime of painful memories, self-destructive behavior and a general unwillingness to do something about it, making this tale all the more tragic. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Ready Player One (2018)

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Ready Player One is the $175 million embodiment of the adage about wishing to possess cake and consume it. Like a cruel parent with bipolar issues, the film spends two hours sparing no expense to tout its virtual-reality construct as something BuzzFeed might headline “You Guys! This Game Gives Me So Many Feels, I Can’t Even,” only to turn around and abruptly scold its audience for snapping at the cheese, let alone even sniffing it.

And that’s if you buy into the showroom model Ready Player One presents. If you don’t, which is my case, the experience is even worse: an empty vessel of sensory overload.

In the vast wasteland that is America 2045 (just you wait!), the populace has become what Pixar’s WALL-E prophesied in 2008: lazy asses. Instead of participating in real-world activities, people strap on goggles and hide behind chosen avatars to spend their days and nights roaming around in OASIS, an immersive, anything-goes environment of VR fantasyland games and high jinks. Drive the Batmobile or the Back to the Future DeLorean! Wage war against Freddy Krueger and the Iron Giant! It’s like Second Life with a thumbed nose at copyright law and intellectual property.

When OASIS’ dippy-hippie founder, Halliday (Bridge of Spies’ Mark Rylance, Oscar-winning porn star), passes away, he does not go gently into that good night. Rather, he makes his death and legacy a game, proactively bequeathing ownership of OASIS to one lucky player, Willy Wonka-style. Whomever can obtain the three keys hidden throughout his pixel-perfect world, wins.

Poverty-stricken teen orphan Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) vies to grab that bounty. His most formidable challenger: the ruthless, bullying corporate CEO/control freak Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn, Knowing). The innocence of youth and plucky know-how vs. unchecked power and vast resources: We all know how this one will end — fictionally, of course.

The first key goes to the victor of an improbably speedy road race. Coming essentially right out of the movie’s gate, it kick-starts Ready Player One on a propulsive, well-boding note. Then the movie downshifts into narrative banality until the set piece for the second key — without question, the film’s most enjoyable sequence, as Wade and friends (including a love interest played by Ouija’s Olivia Cooke) enter The Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Jack Nicholson not included).

From that point on, with roughly half an elongated running time still to come, Ready Player One is a punishing sit. The quest for the third and final key occupies all of Act 3, culminating in an all-out CGI war among indiscernible sides and blink-and-gone pop-culture cameos (Robocop! Chucky! And, um, that guy!) Maybe this Trivial Pursuit: The 1980’s style works on the page — I have not read Ernest Cline’s 2011 best-seller on which this blockbuster is based — but given how the battle is entirely artificial, the effect is pummeling to a point of numbness. Your mileage may vary, dependent on how much you enjoy watching others play video games.

Ironically, the USP of Ready Player One becomes utterly meaningless well before the picture’s end: the four-word phrase “directed by Steven Spielberg.” America’s longest-reigning household-name filmmaker helped define the decade to which this film pays homage, if not worships. In the 1980s, a movie stamped with Spielberg’s name felt like a Spielberg movie, from the ones he directed (E.T., the first two Indiana Jones adventures, one-fourth of Twilight Zone: The Movie) to the ones he did not (Gremlins, The Goonies, Poltergeist,* Young Sherlock Holmes); whatever his capacity, each production bore That Spielberg Touch.

No more. If Ready Player One has a heart, it does not beat. Arguably half-animated, the film could have been directed by anyone, since it sparks no wonder, appears to confuse nostalgia with drama, and wastes the gifts of its actors. It is a chunk of digital plastic — tomorrow’s ColecoVision, today! —Rod Lott

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Horror

Poor White Trash Part II (1974)

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Not even three minutes of Poor White Trash Part II tick by before an unseen ax murderer kills one of our two presumed main characters — newlyweds on a log-cabin honeymoon, no less! With her new hubby freshly dead, insta-widow Helen (Norman Moore, Problem Child) runs for her life into the woods — and all to the tune of an inappropriately upbeat score, complete with rubber-band instruments.

Helen soon finds safety — relatively speaking — when she bumps into possum-hunting redneck Odis Pickett (Gene Ross, The Legend of Boggy Creek), who lives nearby with his son (Charlie Dell, 1986’s Invaders from Mars), daughter (Camilla Carr, A Bullet for Pretty Boy) and pregnant wife (Ann Stafford, Keep My Grave Open). “Lookie here what I done brung home for supper,” Odis tells them, and he doesn’t mean possum.

If you read Odis’ quote as a leering threat of nonconsensual sexual congress, pat yourself on the back. When it comes to Helen, who shore is purty, every overstrained syllable that manages to escape the uneducated man’s mouth crackles with electricity. Unfortunately for her, it’s like the kind of electricity generated by the exposed ends of frayed cords used for misogynist methods of torture as depicted on the covers of pulp detective mags: unwanted.

Or, as his daughter says best, “I know what kind of privates you got in mind: same ones you been pokin’ in me since I’s goin’ on 12!”

Welcome to Deliverance as a family sitcom. Yessiree, this here Trash comes scooped and dumped by the Arkansas-born/Texas-dead director of the public-domain fright favorite Don’t Look in the Basement, S.F. Brownrigg.

Poor White Trash Part II has jack-squat to do with the original-recipe Poor White Trash, except the nekkid pursuit of a quick-and-easy buck. Seeing how the plain ol’ Poor White Trash was a shrewd and profitable retitling of 1957’s Bayou for the drive-in market, why not see if White lightning could strike twice? Trash Part II first entered the world with the none-too-subtle title of Scum of the Earth … but should not be confused with the 1963 Scum of the Earth, a sexploitation serving dished out by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

However, you are forgiven for any confuzzlement, because Brownrigg’s picture owes quite the debt to Lewis’ pioneering gore films (as well as his hicks-in-the-sticks flicks, e.g., Moonshine Mountain). With its shock scenes — tame by today’s standards, natch — of killbilly kapers, it also prefigures the slasher subgenre that would propagate like inbred offspring across drive-in screens by decade’s end.

Call it what you wish. Brownrigg’s blood-strewn streak of soap-opera camp makes Poor White Trash Part II tough to take seriously, but easy to take in. —Rod Lott

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