Comedy

Welcome to the Jungle (2013)

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welcomejungleSome would argue that Jean-Claude Van Damme has been doing comedy his entire career — he just didn’t realize it. Whichever side of the argument you fall, there’s no denying Welcome to the Jungle is Van Damme’s first intentional comedy — not a bad step toward a redemption/comeback that started with 2008’s self-aware JCVD and enlisting in 2012’s The Expendables 2.

So what if his role is really just an extended cameo? In being open to poking fun at himself, he’s genuinely enjoyable as Storm Rothschild, a past attendee of web-design classes at DeVry University and current he-man leader of team-building corporate retreats. Storm’s latest clients are the dysfunctional denizens of an advertising agency where young pup Chris (Adam Brody, Scream 4) is constantly bullied — not to mention having his good ideas stolen — by douche-tastic senior VP Phil (Rob Huebel, Hell Baby).

welcomejungle1Storm flies the gang via rickety aircraft to a jungle island, where they are stranded when the old coot of a pilot croaks. Phil is so power-mad that he practically wills a Lord of the Flies scenario into existence, while Chris tries to overcome his wimpy rep and keep the peace among his co-workers, particularly his über-luminous office crush (Megan Boone, TV’s The Blacklist).

A mix of tribal trouble and the more relatable office politics, Welcome to the Jungle never quite finds a stride with which director Rob Meltzer is comfortable. Laughs are present, albeit all front-loaded and operating only as internal chuckles. I suspect few were in freshman Jeff Kauffmann’s script, since so many land by Huebel’s sheer force of delivery alone. (If you dislike his Human Giant style of comedy, don’t even bother.) The large cast, which underuses Kristen Schaal (TV’s Flight of the Conchords), is nonetheless incredibly game and genial, making the mild disappointment at least pleasingly painless. Plus, there’s a tiger. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

Sexplosion: From Andy Warhol to A Clockwork Orange — How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos

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sexplosionOnly in a book like Robert Hofler’s Sexplosion could a line like “Blowjobs continued to present sizable problems for filmmakers” not be played for laughs.

Having last chronicled the flamboyant flame-out of producer Allan Carr in 2010’s Party Animals, New York City-based journalist Hofler continues in a libidinous vein with Sexplosion, the first great book of 2014. The subtitle says it all — in part, How a Generation of Pop Rebels Broke All the Taboos.

Concentrating on the half-decade between 1968 and 1973, Hofler crafts a remarkably cohesive narrative of change and controversy, despite such disparate creative elements at work. Then again, it was not one piece of popular culture that changed the morality grip — no matter how many of them were connected to Andy Warhol and his Factory hangers-on — but the cumulative effect of all of them.

Sexplosion delves into the major players, finding most of its pages spent at the movies, from Myra Breckinridge to Straw Dogs, but also looking long and hard at theater (like Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band) and literature (such as John Updike’s Couples). Merely touched upon is the boob tube; the most conservative medium of them all nonetheless made waves and headlines with shows both factual An American Family and fictional All in the Family.

Along the way, readers get not only accounts of their making — often made against all odds — but wonderful stories most authors might find too crude to include. This book, however, is Sexplosion, which is way we learn how some of Hair‘s initial female cast members were so comfortable appearing nude onstage, they didn’t mind their tampon strings flopping around in the audience’s line of sight, or how concerned Marlon Brando was about his penis size while shooting the sex scenes of Last Tango in Paris.

On the lighter side, you’ll learn that studio execs were so vexed by Midnight Cowboy that they wanted to turn it into a musical for Elvis Presley, and that the Rolling Stones sought to star as A Clockwork Orange‘s gang of Droogs.

No matter the spice level of the words on the page, Hofler’s Sexplosion is that most rare of histories: as fun as it is fascinating. —Rod Lott

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Action

Firefox (1982)

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firefoxIn Firefox, Clint Eastwood, in a bold change of pace, plays a renegade computer programmer who invents a new web browser that quickly becomes popular, making him rich.

Sound dull? Unfathomably, the real Firefox, in which Eastwood (also directing) plays a burned-out pilot tasked with stealing “the most sophisticated warplane on the face of this earth,” is rarely more interesting. Well, at least it gives us another entertainingly eccentric performance from Freddie Jones (The Elephant Man) on which to chew.

There’s more than a whiff of the lackluster from the start, when Eastwood suffers what appears to be flashbacks to a stock-footage festival he attended while fighting in Vietnam. This debilitating dread, played up as a great demon he must constantly battle, manifests itself mainly through Eastwood sweating and dramatically pausing when he shouldn’t as he goes undercover in Russia. Fully two-thirds of a movie ostensibly about one kick-ass piece of weaponry is bequeathed to a lethargic spy thriller rife with bad accents, dull dialogue and rather unpleasant jingoism.

firefox1All this could be forgiven, perhaps, if the main attraction were at all interesting, but even here, despite some really neat effects work by John Dykstra (Star Wars), the plane is ultimately a letdown. For a film built around the concept of “the greatest warplane ever built … a Mach Five aircraft with thought-controlled weapons systems,” the filmmakers do precious little to make it seem unique.

It looks cool, sure, but after a wearing hour and a half of setup, finally arriving at the “Let’s see what this baby can do!” point, I expect a tad more from an action thriller than a half-hour of cruising altitude and refueling while Soviet generals argue with each other over where the plane might be. And when there is finally some bloody action in a long-promised dogfight the likes of which we presumably have never seen … we’ve seen it before, and better, and longer.

In film, there’s Eastwood classic (Unforgiven) and Eastwood junk (Pink Cadillac). Firefox, all buildup and no payoff, is Eastwood meh. —Corey Redekop

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Horror

Curse of the Stone Hand (1964)

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cursestonehandWith Curse of the Stone Hand, enterprising producer Jerry Warren (The Wild World of Batwoman) whipped up something special for moviegoers: a big, steaming bowl of Chile. That is, he butchered a couple of existing Chilean films from the 1940s and ’50s to create a patchwork horror anthology barely over an hour. Because mere spit won’t bind reels of celluloid, he hired John Carradine for the wraparound footage, but was too lazy to give the veteran actor a name for his character. Why bother when “The Old Drunk” will do?

So The Old Drunk (we’ll call him TOD for short) comes across a man painting a picture of an old, sober mansion before them. TOD tells the artist he used to live there and gives him the grand tour, taking care to point out the eerie sculptures of an open-palmed hand, placed in every room by previous tenants. TOD believes intent behind the statuettes was to bring about a curse, because that’s just what well-to-do families wish to do: purposely fuck up their lives.

cursestonehand1Robert Braun sure did. In the first story, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” stories of 1878, the insolvent man played by Carlos Cores faces eviction if he can’t scrounge up a hunk of dough, pronto, so he takes what little cash his wife has and puts all his hopes in gambling. To paraphrase a flying squirrel, that trick never works, and you can guess how dire the stakes are merely from the source material’s title.

As for the second story, it’s about … well, hell if I know. A brother and a sister is about all I can be certain of; it’s that muddled. Somehow, the tale involves marriage, Batwoman star Katherine Victor, a water well, an off-limits cellar, a series of portraits, a science-class skeleton and much confusion on my part. —Rod Lott

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Battle of the Damned (2013)

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battledamnedDolph Lundgren fights zombies and robots! Repeat: Dolph Lundgren fights zombies and robots! And that’s all the information needed in deciding whether Battle of the Damned speaks to you.

The Expendables veteran plays Gatling — as in “gun,” get it? — a former Delta Force soldier dispatched to a city in Southeast Asia quarantined on account on the viral outbreak that has turned much of the populace into zombies. Because of that unfortunate incident, a military blockade is thought to be impenetrable, so how else will a rich white guy extract his daughter but to hire a he-man? (And the actual He-Man at that?)

battledamned1I cannot tell a lie: There’s a palpable novelty to watching Lundgren — my favorite of the ’80s action heroes — mow down members of the undead; the addition of dealing with Battlestar Galactica-esque ‘bots is icing on that junk-food snack cake. I cannot tell a lie: And it is a novelty, meaning the gimmick carries a shelf life, which unfortunately falls mere minutes into all the rapid fire. Before Battle stops to catch a breath, its initial sparks of enthusiasm have settled into charred embers, all but extinguished.

Writer/director/producer Christopher Hatton, whose previous movie tread similar geekgasm territory as Robotropolis, gets a good-looking pic out of ugly Malaysian settings, but Lundgren deserves a better vehicle than anything that pairs him with a spunky young girl (feature-debuting Melanie Zanetti, here cast as a poor man’s Ellen Page) with raccoon makeup around her eyes. I’m not saying the sci-fi/action hybrid is a waste of one’s time, but hey, Damned if you do. —Rod Lott

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