Reading Material

Reading Material: Short Ends 11/21/15

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artofhorrorWithout question, the ideal gift book for genre film enthusiasts this holiday season is The Art of Horror: An Illustrated History, a beautiful book depicting ugly things. Edited by Stephen Jones, the full-color hardback from Applause Theatre & Cinema Books presents thousands of images from several centuries past to about a year or so ago, all neatly organized among 10 themed chapters (Halloween, aliens, ghosts, etc.) with accompanying text by an expert in that field. (For example, David J. Skal tackles vampires; S.T. Joshi handles H.P. Lovecraft.) It will surprise that no one that film posters and pulp magazines figure heavily in the mix of monsters and madmen, as do comics and original art, but Jones curates deeper to showcase 3-D sculptures, rare collectibles and even stained glass! Within the chapters, spreads are devoted to more specific studies, from spiders, Cthulhu and Jack the Ripper to Italian zombie movies, various book covers for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Halloween postcards of John O. Winsch circa 1910. Opulent in its scope and sporting a fright-friendly foreword by Neil Gaiman, The Art of Horror is that rare kind of coffee-table book: the kind its target readers actually want to read. You’ll get lost in it for hours, and love every minute, making it a more-than-worthy investment.

top100sitcomsLike art, what is funny is all in the eye of the beholder. I get that. But with The Top 100 American Situation Comedies, Mitchell E. Shapiro and Tom Jicha set themselves up for a good ribbing, even by subtitling their book An Objective Ranking, because at the bottom of their list stands Family Matters. I mean, if only 101 sitcoms existed, I might see Urkel earning the grade, but as is, it makes the cut, while the likes of Parks and Recreation, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and, heck, even The Brady Bunch do not. Arrested Development is on the list, yet considered inferior to Coach, Night Court and — gag — Full House. All over the Internet as blog posts, these kinds of lists — wholly subjective, yet presented as definitive — are silly, and even sillier expanded to nearly 300 pages. Devoting a full essay to each of their selections, however, Shapiro and Jicha prove themselves fine writers who make their arguments concisely and credibly — just not always convincingly. Prepare to be further enraged by the appendix, which presents rankings all the way to No. 377.

canadianhorrorBooks on American horror movies are dime-a-dozen. Not so with our friends to our north, so I welcome any book on Canada’s counterpart. Enter the University of Toronto Press’ The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, edited by Gina Freitag and André Loiselle. As Andrea Subissati puts it in her piece on 2008’s Pontypool, “There are uniquely Canadian stories to tell, and … they are stories worth telling.” With 14 essays from almost as many authors, the collection touches on topics of gender, belonging, national anxiety and the environment, while also discussing and dissecting films both little-known (Death Weekend, Rituals) and higher-profile (Orca: The Killer Whale, Ginger Snaps). You may learn more about the Great White North’s tax-shelter system and the history of animation house Nelvana than you ever dreamt possible (if at all), but that’s the point in a text leaning heavily academic. While the book does a terrific job of proving that the country’s contributions to cinematic terror don’t begin and end with David Cronenberg, the pieces on his work from William Beard and James Burrell prove the strongest. —Rod Lott

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Documentary

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon (2015)

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drunkstonedWhen I spied a copy of National Lampoon at my Uncle Bill’s house one evening in 1979, the bored, Mad magazine-loving, 8-year-old me snatched it up and started flipping through it. I’ll never forget the shock of seeing real women’s breasts staring back at me from the “Foto Funnies” page. I’ll never forget the comic strip of two boys making shadow puppets using not their hands, but their prepubescent genitals. I’ll certainly never forget, when I laughed aloud and bravely shared that strip’s crasser-than-crass “Abraham Leakin’” punch line, how fast my mom traversed the kitchen to confiscate the issue from my hands and far-too-young eyes.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was my introduction to the Lampoon. The story has a happy ending, because a mere four years later, in 1983, Mom took me to see my first R-rated movie in theaters: National Lampoon’s Vacation. For fellow children of the ’70s and ’80s, I suspect exposure to the Lampoon brand arrived far more through its films than the actual publication. I’ve never read a complete issue, yet am fully aware of its enormous and ever-continuing influence on modern comedy — dangerous, politically incorrect and sacred cow-punching — perhaps most notably with the birth of Saturday Night Live. Regardless, Douglas Tirola’s feature-length documentary, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon, is not to be missed.

drunkstoned1In its opening minutes alone, the documentary does what Ellin Stein’s 2013 book on the topic could not achieve in 464 pages: Capture the anarchic energy and unrestrained creativity of the mag at its mid-’70s’ peak. Its success was not immediate, and that it was successful at all is something of a right-place/right-time fluke. Outside of the magazine eventually sucking from the mid-’80s to its 1998 death, Tirola and his talking heads (Chevy Chase, Matty Simmons, Kevin Bacon, P.J. O’Rourke, John Landis and Tim Matheson among them) skip over the Lampoon’s many misfires beyond the stapled pages; Class Reunion and Movie Madness are completely MIA, while Disco Beaver from Outer Space gets a cursory mention without even explaining what it was (an HBO special). I would call this the only fault to be found in Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, but instead I choose to flip it into a positive and say I wish the doc had kept going to share even more.

Not all of the humor has aged well — far from it (especially the live Woodstock parody Lemmings, the appeal of which escapes me based upon the footage shown here) — yet that doesn’t make this retrospective any less fascinating, particularly with so many caustic, drug-fueled egos at play, more than one of whom met tragic ends. Even with those secondary routes into weightier matters, the movie zips by us with immeasurable verve, often so fast that my thumb happily leapt between the rewind and pause buttons so much to get a closer look at the art. In doing so, I inadvertently added nearly 45 minutes to the running time. (The last time I did that, I seem to recall Christie Brinkley stripping for a motel-pool skinny dip, just to bring this review full-circle.) —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Stung (2015)

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stungMaybe the marketers behind Stung didn’t even consider that using the tagline “The Ultimate Buzzkill” could come back to sting them in the ass — as in, “Stung is a real buzzkill.” Because it is.

A throwback to the big-bug invasion flicks of the 1950s, the first movie from director Benni Diez pits wasps against WASPs. A garden party to honor a deceased, well-to-do patriarch represents a do-or-die opportunity for the catering company owned by Julie (appealing newcomer Jessica Cook), having taken it over on the occasion of her own father’s death. On hand to help her is her one employee, the smart-mouthed Paul (Matt O’Leary, Sorority Row), who obviously carries a torch for her with more devotion than he carries buffet trays.

stung1What should be a routine gig is ruined when a swarm of giant, mutated wasps zooms in and crashes the party. The insects have the wings; the humans haven’t got a prayer. And what should be a fun hour and a half just isn’t, falling as flat as a soufflé removed from the oven too early.

Everything seems to be stuck at the halfway mark for optimal conditions: its energy level, the jokes, characters for whom to root, creatures frightening enough to fear. (Committing to the practical route vs. relying on CGI to create critters would have taken care of the last point.) When you cast Aliens’ Lance Henriksen, yet his big moment consists of him ordering the wasps to “kiss my ass!,” an opportunity clearly has been wasted. As is, the film is watchable, barely. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Murder Can Hurt You! (1980)

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murdercanhurtCop shows ruled the prime-time lineup in the late 1970s, and the Aaron Spelling-produced Murder Can Hurt You! poked fun at seven of them. Like a massive Mad magazine parody come to made-for-TV life, its sights were set on Ironside, Baretta, Starsky & Hutch, Kojak, McCloud, Police Woman and — oh, yeah, one more thing — Columbo.

The telepic boasts a cast that appears to have been drawn, lottery-style, from a complete series roster of The Love Boat (with which this movie shares director Roger Duchowny), because not only do we have Gavin MacLeod, but Victor Buono, Jimmie Walker, Tony Danza, Jamie Farr, John Byner, Buck Owens, Connie Stevens and Burt Young. These Los Angeles “defectives — I mean, detectives” (per the narrator, Get Smart star Don Adams) match their collective wits (which ain’t much) against the one-person crime wave known only as the Man in White (Mitch Kreindel, Modern Problems), so named because … hell, you figure it out. One by one, the cops are thwarted by such cartoon-ready devices as giant balloons, wet cement and magnetic beds.

murdercanhurt1The level of humor in this thing is every bit as low-aiming as you would expect from an ABC Wednesday-night movie. A recurring bit has flames shoot high every time Palumbo (Young, Paulie of the Rocky franchise) flicks his Bic to light a smoke. The climactic slapstick set piece atop — and hanging from — a ladder connecting two buildings is like the finale of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as if adapted by sixth graders.

What once was a laugh riot upon its broadcast premiere — hey, I was 9 — is largely an embarrassment now. One thing that hasn’t changed: how unbelievably sexy Connie Stevens is in this. Spoofing Angie Dickinson’s Sgt. Pepper Anderson, the bubble-voiced Grease 2 faculty member plays Sgt. Salty Sanderson by squeezing herself into one homina-homina-homina getup after another, from blue hot pants and, um, purple hot pants to a gold nightie. So what if the bra we glimpse as she plays Strip Go Fish is rather plain in its whiteness? It’s what I remembered most. —Rod Lott

Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Beowulf (2007)

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beowulf07Here’s how little I understood Beowulf when I had to read it in English class in junior high and again in high school: I thought the title referred to the monster, and that the monster was a wolf. Laugh all you want, but Anglo-Saxon epic poems of the 8th century are not the easiest things to decipher.

Luckily, Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf is different, and I don’t just mean because it’s animated. The film marks his “no-bullshit” version of the classic text, as he promises on the making-of documentary featured on the DVD: “This has nothing to do with the Beowulf you were forced to read in junior high school. It’s all about eating, drinking, killing and fornicating.”

Actually, as scripted by novelist Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, the movie doesn’t stray all that far from the story of its source. It’s just that it ditches much of the boring elements and amps up the saucy ones, leaving an action-oriented, sometimes ribald and unapologetically over-the-top experience. Should Beowulf really be shown punching his way out of sea monster by going through the eye? Sure, why the hell not?

beowulf071Getting a CGI slimdown in the process, The Departed heavy Ray Winstone assumes the lead role of Beowulf, a hero — here, made flawed, in direct opposition to the poem — who arrives at the castle of King Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins, Thor) to slay the monster Grendel (Crispin Glover, apparently having put his Back to the Future beef with Zemeckis behind him), a giant deformed beast from a nearby village who doesn’t like all the noise their merriment makes.

Beowulf agrees, Grendel attacks and — while stark naked and opting to use no sword — our hero slays the creature. That doesn’t sit well with his serpentine mother, who takes the form of Angelina Jolie (Maleficent), whose breastastic reveal sent the tongues of internet bloggers a-wagging when the scene was leaked just prior to its theatrical release. She offers Beowulf a truce: He can say he killed her if he promises to leave her be. Because she looks like a nude Jolie, he agrees.

Women are known to change their minds, however, which results in Beowulf having to engage in the fight of his life with an enormous, fire-breathing dragon. Like much of the movie, this sequence is a thrill to watch. Even when the narrative lags — and at nearly two hours, it does here and there — the visuals are something to behold. While I’ve never been a fan of motion-capture animation, Beowulf represents a huge leap for the medium; it’s difficult to imagine even a whiz-kid director like Zemeckis being able to make it work in the traditional format of live-action. Laden as his film is with violence, gore and nudity, it makes the ages-old story more exciting and accessible (Seamus Heaney or no Seamus Heaney) than it ever has been, or could ever hope to be. —Rod Lott

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