Action

Point Break (2015)

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pointbreak15Look, just because something is old does not make it great. And yet, as the Point Break remake surfed into theaters on Christmas Day 2015, I do not recall running across a single article or review that failed to refer to the 1991 original, which paired Patrick Swayze with Keanu Reeves, as “classic” — noun or adjective. “Classic” is a charged word — one that should be earned rightfully vs. bestowed automatically.

Perhaps Swayze’s too-young passing in 2009 is responsible for the revisionist love, because Kathryn Bigelow’s crime flick was neither well-reviewed nor a hit in its July ’91 bow. In fact, its $8 million opening placed it in fourth that weekend, behind James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day, John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood and a reissue of a then-30-year-old cartoon, Disney’s 101 Dalmatians.

So, old? Definitely. Classic? Hardly.

With that out of that way, back to the “new” Point Break …

pointbreak151… and wow, does it suck. Seven years after witnessing (if not encouraging) the death of his dumbass bike-riding buddy (Max Thieriot, House at the End of the Street), extreme-sports athlete Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey, The November Man) has reinvented himself as an FBI agent. When a group of rogue extreme-sports enthusiasts use their extreme-sports skills to pull off a series of extreme heists, Utah is the only one who convincingly can go deep, deep, deep, deep undercover. After all, he’s got the extreme-sports know-how, the sleeve tats and, of utmost importance, the looks of what would result from The Fast and the Furious’ Paul Walker impregnating Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam.

With the bureau’s blessing and armed with gun and surfboard, Utah takes off to infiltrate the gang, crack the case and bring ’em to justice … extreme justice. (Fun fact: According to one of the film’s posters, justice has no limit. Crime doesn’t, either, according to another. #themoreyouknow) Led by the Zen-ful Bodhi (Deliver Us from Evil’s Edgar Ramírez, too good an actor to endure haircuts as super-silly as he does here), the group operates under a Robin Hood agenda of wealth redistribution: Steal from the rich, make it rain on Third World countries. Bodhi’s crew members have names like Roach, Chowder, Grommet and Samsara, and welcome Utah into their bro-dude family with irony-free lines like, “What’s a motocross rider like you doing on a wave like that?” and “The only law that matters is gravity.”

Yes, Point Break is exactly that point-blank simpleminded, and its stupidity exhausts the viewer. Clearly cribbing more from the likes of Furious 7 than Bigelow’s big Break, it boasts some absolutely amazing stunt sequences that impart if not an adrenaline rush, then a solid contact high. Yet not even the best is worth suffering two hours plus of boneheaded dialogue and an unintentionally hilarious bumped-uglies subplot between Utah and eco-friendly earth child Samsara (Warm Bodies’ Teresa Palmer, suffering the further indignity of having her breasts pushed up to her neck). Invincible director Ericson Core (chosen for his extreme name?) is no Bigelow; while he can shoot leaping, jumping, running, falling and other action verbs all day, the man is forever crippled when it comes to mere walking and talking. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Here’s to My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies and Pop Culture, 1966-1980

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heresweetsatanOne of my favorite books from last year, Spectacular Optical’s Satanic Panic, did a thorough job of looking at one 1980s trend as peculiar today as Jams and parachute pants: the widespread hysteria among preachers, teachers and suburban creatures that Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal and the like were corrupting our children. It is an excellent read that comes at its subject from a multitude of angles.

But that feverous movement is just one portion of a far larger story; full-blown, coast-to-coast delirium doesn’t just happen overnight. After all, tales of devilish temptation are as old as the Book of Genesis, so how did these media items become public enemies? George Case looks at the sordid, start-to-finish tale in Here’s to My Sweet Satan: How the Occult Haunted Music, Movies and Pop Culture, 1966-1980. Don’t let the serial killer-looking cover scare you away.

Why jump in at 1966? Because that’s when, on its April 8 cover, Time magazine famously inquired, “Is God Dead?” As Case notes in his introduction, “After World Wars I and II, fascism and the Final Solution, and the atomic bomb, the presence of a benign God watching over humanity became less plausible to the average mind than ever.”

time-isgoddeadAs restrictions on media slowly laxed, especially with regard to the MPAA, creatives increasingly pushed the envelope in turn, resulting in such zeitgeist magnets and game changers as Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen; the early novels of Stephen King; a host of rock records, from The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album to Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.”

With each piece of media earning its own “making of” story, all of these and more paved the way to “redirect the middle of the road to the occult,” eventually leading to PMRC LP bonfires and hysteric vilification of mazes and monsters — the aforementioned “satanic panic,” to which Case devotes the seventh and final chapter. Structurally simple but effective, the chapters before that segregate the subsets of motion pictures, music and literature from one another. Even greasy kids’ stuff à la Ouija boards, horror comics and Count Chocula cereal earns a section of its own.

No matter the chapter and from the very beginning, the author approaches his main topic for what it really is: one big business. (We could gauge just how big if only we were privy to the tax returns of Alice Cooper, Gary Gygax and Bill Blatty.) He writes, “While Black Masses, evil spirits, and poltergeists continued to bring customers to the Warlock Shop and the Metaphysical Center, they were also ringing up sales at pharmacies, airports, malls, and department stores.”

By now, I assumed that everything there was to be told about, say, The Exorcist, had been told long before. I was wrong. With Case’s examination of that 1973 Oscar-winning blockbuster and other artistic works that leveraged Christian America’s fear of the unholy into big bucks, there’s real heft to Here’s to My Sweet Satan: factually, culturally, intellectually. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Cracking Up (1977)

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crackingupFrom 1983, the Jerry Lewis comedy Cracking Up is not to be confused with this other comedy titled Cracking Up. Whereas Lewis’ picture centers on a man with a plan to commit suicide, this 1977 sketch movie merely places all suicidal thoughts in the viewer.

Distributed by AIP, the Rowby Goren/Chuck Staley joint finds Channel 8 news reporters Walter Concrete and Barbara Halters (Firesign Theatre co-founders Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, respectively) reporting live from the scene of what’s left after the world’s worst quake, measuring 9.7 on the Richter scale, levels California. They interview the people they encounter on the decimated city streets, allowing the movie to segue into unrelated sketches transferred from videotape and having nothing to do with the disaster. Starring in these ugly bits are members of such improv troupes as The Credibility Gap and The Ace Trucking Company, whose rosters included such now-familiar, then-unknown faces as Fred Willard, Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and David L. Lander.

crackingup1Judging solely by the skits, each measuring 0.0 on the laughter scale, no one would predict actual showbiz careers were in store for any of the performers. Although for years, McKean and Lander made for a popular duo as Lenny and Squiggy on TV’s Laverne & Shirley, they stun the viewer into silence with a humorless Polish talk-show parody. Lander and Shearer attempt to update Abbott and Costello’s legendary “Who’s on First?” routine with discussion of a concert lineup featuring The Who, The Guess Who and Yes. One can see Willard trying in vain to liven up shit scripts (if scripts existed) on an overenthusiastic diner staff and an office full of execs with exaggerated tics, but to no avail.

Same goes for The Tubes singer Fee Waybill, utterly grating as a scientist; future Cheers barfly Paul Wilson, coaching guys on the care and hygiene of the penis; and especially Edie McClurg (eventual school secretary of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), unmemorable both as a televangelist and a rootin’-tootin’ cowgirl who, for a dime, showers men with positive comments about their genitalia as they urinate. (Don’t get me started on the fake — but truly racist — commercial for “N****r Boppers.”) Everything about the material, the delivery, the presentation and so on suggests that lines of cocaine were the whole of craft services’ offerings.

Like Tunnel Vision, The Groove Tube, Loose Shoes and other counterculture-minded sketch films of the era, the contents are as such that if something doesn’t gel, you can wait a few moments in hopes that the next segment will. However, in the case of Cracking Up, none does. The project is so aggressively unfunny, it accidentally becomes an enemy of comedy. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

Earthquake (1974)

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earthquakeWhat Mark Robson built in 1967’s Valley of the Dolls — a quintessential L.A. — he tore down less than a decade later with Earthquake, his penultimate picture as director. Released at the height of Hollywood’s disaster craze, the movie beat The Towering Inferno into theaters by one month, but lost to Irwin Allen’s flame-broiled spectacle in three categories at the Academy Awards. Often wrongly assumed to be an Allen production, Earthquake has the next best thing: Jennings Lang, the man behind the Airport franchise.

Co-scripted by The Godfather author Mario Puzo, Earthquake’s main plot concerns ace construction engineer Graff (Charlton Heston, who headlined Airport 1975 just one month prior) and his sham of a marriage to a miserable, pill-popping harridan (Ava Gardner, 1977’s The Sentinel) who happens to be the daughter of his boss (Lorne Greene, Battlestar Galactica). Graff nonagressively puts the make on a co-worker’s widow (Genevieve Bujold, Dead Ringers) on the day that “the big one” hits the Golden State. (With a split-nearing couple also at its epicenter, 2015’s San Andreas practically qualifies as a remake.)

earthquake1Intermittently intersecting subplots involve an idealistic cop (George Kennedy, also fresh from Airport 1975) suspended for damaging Zsa Zsa Gabor’s hedges in a car chase, a would-be Evel Knievel (Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree) perfecting a stunt on a rickety wooden ramp, and a shopkeeper-turned-soldier (former evangelist Marjoe Gortner, Starcrash) who gets all handsy and rapey with a busty customer (Victoria Principal, TV’s Dallas) for stealing a donut in the aftermath. The only thing more perverse than Gortner’s mentally unhinged character is Principal’s comically large Afro.

She’s not the only chalk-white cast member sporting a ’fro; in a pseudonymous credit, Walter Matthau appears as a drunk decked out in pimp duds. Occasionally, he awakens from his shot-glass stupor to mutter a now-dated famous name without comment, e.g. Bobby Riggs. To borrow a popular Internet phrase I cannot stand, yet is wholly appropriate, I can’t even.

While Earthquake is generally remembered today for its much-hyped, low-frequency Sensurround process that enabled audiences to “feel” the tremors, its visual effects remain impressive — well, most of them. When the earth initially starts a-rockin’, Robson warps the frame, which looks as phony as the illustrated blood spatter that later closes an ill-fated elevator ride. Luckily, those cheats are the exception to the epic rumble of rubble that retains the power to jolt. So does a rather pessimistic ending. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

The Wave (2015)

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waveYou know the hoary cinematic chestnut of the retiring cop whose last day proves quite the pickle? The reality-rooted The Wave ups that finality ante with a frickin’ tsunami! Not for nothing did this taut thriller become the year’s biggest deal in its home country of Norway, where the scenario depicted is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future — all a matter of when, not if.

Reluctantly, family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, The Revenant) is leaving the quaint town of Geiranger behind — and his post as a shaggy geologist watching the mountains from command central at the Early Warning Center — for a move to a buttoned-up, better-paying career in the oil industry. He’s having a hard time letting go — a grip that becomes even tighter when an anomaly in groundwater levels raises an instinctual concern that just won’t settle down.

wave1This is why: Because if the mountain were to expand enough to cause a rockslide, a 279-foot wave would result in turn and head straight for the good people of Geiranger, who would receive advance notice of 10 minutes, tops. And that is exactly what happens, smack-dab in the middle of tourist season, with Kristian’s wife (Ane Dahl Torp, Dead Snow) and kids as sitting targets, holed up at a hotel precariously not far enough above sea level.

The Wave is a disaster film of seismic proportions, but a damned fine one. Although it delivers the (damaged) goods in visual spades, it is cast neither in the all-star Irwin Allen cheese of the 1970s, nor the blockbuster-slick style of the subgenre’s 1990s resurgence (as seen in Twister, Volcano, Daylight, et al.). Plausibility trumps panache; science is practically a member of the supporting cast; subplots are kept to a bare minimum; celebrity cameos are nonexistent; and, like 2012’s true-life tsunami tale, The Impossible, the story is free of sentiment until the final scene. Nothing in director Roar Uthaug’s previous hit, the 2006 frozen-over ski-lodge slasher Cold Prey, suggests the sure hand that guides The Wave to such great heights. —Rod Lott

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