Performance (1970)

WTF

When I moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, years ago, somehow I fell into a commune-like situation, with plenty of wheatgrass juices, patchouli incense and Kundalini yoga — woven, parachute-like pants sadly not included.

With all the flatmates, bunk buddies and transitional couch surfers really into the crunchy granola lifestyle as they professed, I slowly noticed they didn’t bring their free love and other wanton charges around me. To be sure, it’s because I was so darn square and far too fat.

Such is life, right?

Viewing the movie Performance, my counterculture dreams became my transient nightmares, as well as a revelatory cream dream of the demeaning sod I would’ve become around the arousing ’60s temptations and erectile ’70s eruptions.

The musings and teachings of Mick Jagger and his Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request have been accurately depicted here, even if the album’s drug-swaggered, free-loving altera-utopia was never to be seen in real life (mostly due to the release of Running Out of Luck in 1985, but that’s a whole other story).

In the rogue hands of director Nicolas Roeg, Performance’s prince/pauper fable might have been overlooked, if not for its dispassionate narrative and drab surroundings making it one of Roeg’s definitive defective works.

East London gang member Chas (James Fox) goes about muscling the wrong people — beating, extorting, shaving a man’s head bald. It’s sitar raga in basic 4/4 time, man, as the scared Chas goes on the run and finds himself in the slovenly boudoir of strung-out rock star Turner (Jagger).

In addition to a drug habit, Turner has quite the sexual addiction. He leads Chas into drab games of master and servant, with bisexual Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michèle Breton) feeding him LSD and handling loaded weapons in a slim bathtub while smoking cigarettes and, probably, scissoring.

As Turner performs the movie’s lone single, “Memo from Turner,” he and Chas physically and metaphysically transform into one another, resulting in not only the type of spiritually devolved finale Roeg was wont to do later (in Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell to Earth), but also one of his most troubling films, all in a syncopated tabla-beat way.

With all the pomp and circumstance a man can muster, Jagger’s performance is very invasively tight, but Fox is no slouch, giving an enthusiastic, bleak portrait like he did in films such as The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Together, they’re a satanic pair of spilled wine decanters filled with all the vice in the world, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off them.

But, in the end, Roeg’s masterfully hypnotic direction, aided by artist Donald Cammell, is the burning, the consumption and the dying of the fading rock star and his homunculus’ wet ashes, mystically and masochistically buried along with their names.

I never found my hellish opening to that detached, debauched, hedonist rock-star lifestyle I so secretly craved, but Jagger — and, really, Roeg — were kind enough to show me their vacation photos. That’s good enough for me. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Right Hand of the Devil (1963)

Meet Pepe Lusara, criminal mastermind and master of disguise. He’s recruiting a few good men for an assignment on a need-to-know basis.

Despite a resemblance to Squiggy, Pepe (Aram Katcher, Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens) is also a ladies’ man, wooing the blonde Elizabeth (Lisa McDonald), despite her Phyllis Diller voice. Certainly Pepe isn’t interested in Elizabeth for her proximity to cash working in an arena box office, is he? Yes, actually, that’s completely it, not even taking into account her choice of nightstand reading: The Modern Sex Manual

Now it’s time for you to know Pepe’s plan: Rob the armored car when it rolls up to the arena to collect the kitty from the world heavyweight fight. Hope you don’t expect to see the heist or the fight; Right Hand of the Devil hasn’t the budget or permits or perhaps even the know-how to depict action. (But it does have a few precious seconds of basketball-breasted burlesque dancer doing her thang. That’s Georgia Holden, whose curvy caboose commands the poster.)

The only film Katcher ever wrote, directed, produced or edited — not to mention handled hair and makeup for — Right Hand is so clumsily made, it doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Even at an hour and some change, the black-and-white non-wonder is virtually incomprehensible. And completely unmemorable, except for the scene where Pepe’s old girlfriend hurls her artificial leg his way: “Remember you always said my legs were pretty? Here!”  —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977)

Version 1.0.0

In 1977, John Waters released the filthy Desperate Living, one of his most underrated features and, to be sure, one of his best. On the other hand, famed pop artist Andy Warhol’s film editor Jed Johnson directed his own filthy ditty, Andy Warhol’s Bad, and, true to its name, it really wasn’t very good.

In fact, it’s Bad.

Sure, Bad had the Waters vibe of the Baltimore suburban dystopia, all played for full belly snorts and unrushed chortles, but Waters’ own artistry and persona made all his films so unique. At times, his amateurish bravado made his films better.

Bad has none of that. Sure, Johnson had the low-class substrata, the skid-marked panties and a brutally nasty tone, but unlike Waters’ work, Johnson’s film doesn’t have the well-oiled crotch or the well-timed heart. Just a bunch of people acting like assholes.

Starting with the boozy theme song courtesy of blues musician Mike Bloomfield, the movie starts with an overflowing public toilet and, sadly, doesn’t get better. Drifter L.T. (a pre-Riptide Perry King) gets in the murder-for-hire business for downbeat electrolysis pimp Hazel (Carroll Baker, 1978’s Cyclone). L.T.’s a sleazy dude who struts around waiting for the phone while stealing from his landlord as she puts broken glass on the floor for him to step on.

Waiting for the call, he encounters all the women in Hazel’s service, including an oversexed Italian ice queen; Hazel’s undersexed, long-suffering welfare daughter (Susan Tyrrell, Avenging Angel); and a pair of sisters who are psycho-sexual arsonists and stab a dog in the street.

It all culminates when not only does L.T. strikes an autistic child many times on his job, but when a woman throws a screaming child out the window that, of course, causes it to splat on the street, all for comedy … right?

I am all for the blackest comedy around — seriously! — but you need to have even slight tittering somewhere in there, even for the most uncomfortable jokes. Instead, Warhol and company thought they were woefully posturing around the New York art scene, yet they were the only audience for it. It’s sad this could have been something but when a bad joke isn’t a joke at all, it becomes a tarnished insult.

The direction is bad, the script is bad, the performances are bad and, worst, the comedy is bad. At least Paul Morrissey could set up a camera and a joke. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

The Invisible Raptor (2023)

What kills so many monster movies today is cheap CGI. The further down a film sits from that line item on a Steven Spielberg production, the less convincing the creature. In the low-budget world, the effects can be so bad, you wonder why anyone bothered, from the makers to the viewers.

The Invisible Raptor gets around this by, well, making its titular dinosaur unseen. For a good chunk of the pic, the prehistoric beast is represented by a Mylar helium balloon tugged by its string. Because Mike Hermosa’s movie is an out-and-out comedy, that trick works — like the proverbial charm, actually.

Escaping from the lab that created it, the indiscernible apex predator embarks a killing spree. Only downtrodden paleontologist Dr. Grant Walker (Bachelor Party Massacre’s Mike Capes) recognizes the carnage as the works of a raptor. He also recognizes a chance at redemption from his humiliating daily job: teaching kids about fossilized feces at a dino theme park. And, in the process, if he can win back the heart of his former girlfriend (Caitlin McHugh Stamos, Random Tropical Paradise), newly divorced, that’s a bonus.

I was fully prepared to abhor this based on title alone. Yet I wasn’t at all prepared for something so more-than-intermittently clever, it’s kind of ingenious. (Had Capes and co-writer Johnny Wickham stuck to one “butthole” joke, I doubt “kind of” would remain part of the previous sentence.)

Although not a true spoof, The Invisible Raptor is engineered as a gentle Jurassic Park parody steeped in reverence for other Spielberg milestones (Jaws, E.T., Gremlins) and popcorn actioners of the 1980s (Rambo, Predator, The Terminator, et al.). Thus, it’s no accident they recruited Goonies leader Sean Astin for an extended cameo and top billing.

You’ll quickly forget he’s in it because Raptor roars to life on the combined comedic strength of Capes, Stamos and David Shackleford (Vacancy 2: The First Cut) as the park’s redneck security guard. Oh, and some really dark, really funny gags at the expense of kids’ feelings and dead people. —Rod Lott

Get it on Amazon.

Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross (2024)

Caveat emptor time, kids. The sports documentary Pay Dirt: The Story of Supercross should be subtitled Some Stories of Supercross in No Particular Order. After priming the pump with an adrenaline-edited prologue of defied gravity and severed spinal cords, Paul Taublieb’s feature goes into scattered mode, leaping from subject to subject like a dog who’s just had a dozen squeak toys thrown its way.

Want to know how the dirtbike arena competition started? Well, first, we watch a profile of Jimmy Button, a champion who bounced back from paralysis — inspiring, but wholly out of place; given its emotional weight, it arguably would work best at the other end. The whole movie is like that. With each title card rebooting the narrative starting line, the experience is like watching the full contents of a YouTube channel’s playlist.

In quick succession, Pay Dirt’s segments (really documentary shorts) surface-level examine a rivalry among two riders, the amateur kids’ competition at the Loretta Lynn Dude Ranch, another rivalry among two other riders, the dirt on the track, the sport’s version of stage parents, riders without factory sponsors and, buttering its own bread on both sides, Monster Energy’s current sponsorship of Supercross.

As an occasional casual viewer of the X Games and any Olympic event that irks old people, I’m open to this sort of thing. But an ESPN 30 for 30, this is not.

And not for lack of opportunity, as Pay Dirt absolutely chokes when it comes to the single most interesting story: Supercross creator Mike Goodwin being convicted for murdering former business partner Mickey Thompson and the man’s wife. From a prison phone, Goodwin recalls that he “was flabbergasted” and hoped he wouldn’t be blamed. What he doesn’t provide is a reason to believe him. In fact, Taublieb is so unconcerned with the crime, he gives it a minute.

I mean that literally: one minute. To a double homicide. Committed by the guy who started the sport you’re telling the “story” of. Adding insult to fatal injury, the narrator even botches the dead woman’s name as “Judy” instead of “Trudy.”

That narrator? Just one Josh Brolin, whose participation in a project far beneath his Oscar-nominated talents suggests either a big favor or a bet make-good. —Rod Lott

Opening Friday, Jan. 24.

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