Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Goldengirl (1979)

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goldengirlGoldengirl is about how fast a girl named Goldine can run into a mattress on the wall. At least at the beginning of this oddball sports/sci-fi vehicle for tall, blonde Susan Anton, then a model turned actress, singer and Dudley Moore sperm receptacle — not necessarily in that order.

Goldine knows her adopted father, neo-Nazi Dr. Serafin (Curt Jurgens, The Spy Who Loved Me), has been grooming her to be an Olympic champion; what she doesn’t know is that he’s screwed with sinister eugenics and cooked-up injections to get her there.

goldengirl1Dr. Serafin’s pie-in-the-sky goal is to have her win gold medals in all three women’s sprint events in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, so that they’ll be able to pocket a rather arbitrary $10 million in endorsement deals and the like. To help plan for that payday, merchandising expert Jack Dryden (James Coburn, Looker) is brought in. Inevitably, Dryden and the much, much younger Goldine soon step up to the podium — the sexual podium.

Sporting a Bill Conti theme crooned by Anton herself, the run-on-titled “Slow Down I’ll Find You,” Goldengirl holds no luster beyond the beauty of its statuesque starlet. Joseph Sargent (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) directs with a pedestrian nature reflected in Coburn’s just-show-up performance. The results are as deadly dull as Anton is crazy-hot, landing the speculative tale on the side of “agony of defeat,” with “thrill of victory” far out of reach. —Rod Lott

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Horror

The Uninvited (1944)  

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Given its reputation as a superior Gothic shocker, The Uninvited struck me as disappointing. In fact, the spookiest thing about it is that the plot hinges on a brother and sister buying a house together. Asexual the Fitzgeralds may be, the act still smacks of incestuous undertones. Ick! Er, I mean, aaaaiiiiieeeee!

The residence in question is the seaside Windward House, a glorious mansion atop a cliff from which a previous owner fatally fell. The adult siblings are Rick (Ray Milland, Dial M for Murder), a music critic and would-be composer, and Pamela (Ruth Hussey, Another Thin Man), who doesn’t work because a woman’s place is in the home — a haunted home.
 
Soon after moving in, the Fitzgeralds experience strange phenomena, including but not limited to sobs at night, wilting roses, fluctuating temps, slamming doors, flickering candles and the overpowering smell of mimosa. A séance helps brings buried secrets to light, because the aghast neighbors sure don’t like to.

While competently staged by first-timer Lewis Allen (who later helmed Suddenly, a small gem of an assassination thriller starring Frank Sinatra), the parts of The Uninvited fail to merge in a way that brings about goose bumps. Switching tones from serious to silly aggravates the problem, and silly wins out; the film’s last line is a mother-in-law joke, which may as well say all. —Rod Lott

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Reading Material

The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film

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mostdangerouscinemaThat Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” has spawned so many adaptations and knock-offs is hardly surprising; the premise is simple and easy to, um, execute. What is more notable is how a wide a berth those resulting films cast, in terms of genres. Straight-ahead action/adventure takes aside, they include sexploitation, science fiction and even pratfall-fueled comedy.

Whatever form — official to plagiarising, well-known to obscure, excellent to awful — the movies are all rounded up in The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film, Bryan Senn’s book-length journey into the meaty, man-vs.-man subgenre.

For the core of the McFarland & Company paperback, 14 theatrical efforts are examined at length, including the classic 1932 adaptation; John Woo’s Jean-Claude Van Dame vehicle, Hard Target; and Cannon Films’ awesomely named Avenging Force, with stops at everything from quasi-porn (The Suckers) to Z-level director Ted V. Mikels (War Cat) along the way. In these chapters, Senn not only encapsulates each film, but reviews it, delves into its production and, of course, details its similarities to and differences from the source material, whether or not Connell’s name shows up in the credits (which it hardly does).

But, wait, cries the pitchman, there’s more! No less enjoyable chapters take in dozens and dozens more titles that fall into the categories of flicks that went direct-to-video, that draw a little inspiration without being outright adaptations, that substitute aliens for humans, that televise these sick games and that aren’t flicks at all, but episodes of TV series. Throughout these sections, you’ll find everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s blockbuster The Running Man to two episodes of the long-running Fantasy Island and an equal number of Jess Franco pics, one of which is somehow decidedly more pervy than the other.

The sheer amount of viewing hours is undeniable, and somehow Senn’s work never grows repetitive, despite essentially trodding the same story over and over. The Most Dangerous Cinema is the year’s entertainment title I didn’t know I wanted, and I feel that the more adventurous film buffs will agree.

So go get it. I’ll even give you a head start. —Rod Lott

Read our reviews of Most Dangerous Cinema movies:
• Countess Perverse (1974)
• The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
• The Suckers (1972)
• Surviving the Game (1994)

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Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Mission to Mars (2000)

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missiontomarsBrian De Palma shelved the Hitchcock homages just long enough to ape another esteemed cinematic master — Stanley Kubrick — for a foray into big-budget sci-fi, Mission to Mars. The epic space odyssey aims very much to be another 2001 — the mystery is well in place; the pacing is deliberately slow; the feeling of reality is there.

And then he blows it at the end with a wholly unnecessary visit to Mars’ built-in planetarium and spook show, complete with crying aliens. It’s the same problem that plagued the endings of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact and James Cameron’s The Abyss. For God’s sake, when will Hollywood learn? Don’t show the mystic aliens!

missiontomars1But before all that, Luke Graham (Don Cheadle, Iron Man 3) heads an exploratory mission to the red planet that ends tragically, and only Graham survives. A rescue mission is deployed to save him, consisting of astropals played by Gary Sinise (sporting Maybelline MoistureLash), Tim Robbins, Jerry O’Connell and the delicious Connie Nielsen. Despite several obstacles — resulting, as expected, in the usual incredible De Palma set pieces — and even further tragedy, the team makes it to Mars. The scene in which Sinise stumbles upon a mentally unstable Cheadle in a makeshift greenhouse plays like something out of De Palma’s over-the-top Raising Cain, or some nonexistent film where the white man busts in on Bob Marley’s weed farm.

And soon this leads to the aforementioned Twin Peaks-esque trip to the “Golly Gee-Whiz” exhibit at the Mars State Fair, where all credibility is checked at the door for a laughs-aplenty sequence that clearly just should’ve been axed. But up until then, Mission is pretty damn good. It’s intelligent, well-made and looks fantastic. Too bad there’s That Goofy Ending, likely the culprit for the film’s punching-bag rep. —Rod Lott

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Action

Mission: Killfast (1991)

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missionkillfastMission: Killfast seems like Ted V. Mikels’ answer to the Andy Sidaris series of spies, lies and exposed thighs (and then some), yet the result is so bad, Sidaris looks like a Cahiers du Cinéma-lauded auteur in comparison. That’s bound to happen when your sections of principal photography are separated by nine years.

The plot, as it is, revolves around missing detonators, which pass through the hands of the characters as if water. Should said detonators fall into the mitts of someone who also possesses “the components,” kablooey: nuclear bomb. Called in to prevent this global catastrophe from occurring is martial-arts master Tiger Yang (Game of Death II), playing himself and fresh off “a world tour.” His first order of business once in town? Appearing in the local parade as its “grand marshall” [sic]; certainly there are better ways to keep a low profile when on a life-or-death mission, but how could Mikels justify so many minutes of parade footage otherwise?

missionkillfast1The director/writer/producer uses it in the same way Mission: Killfast‘s villains do their “skin mag” empire: as a front to keep people distracted. The would-be Playboy Mansion, largely a pool adjacent to a neighborhood golf course, allows for some skanky ladies with rockin’ bods to cavort about in swimwear apparently swiped from Star Search‘s spokesmodel wardrobe. For whatever reason, the woman Mikels’ camera chooses to focus on has a shaved head, as if she stopped by after chemo.

Elsewhere, there’s ’80s B-movie starlet Jewel Shepard (Hollywood Hot Tubs), eschewing thread. Appearing in a see-through mesh shirt to accentuate the bare nipples, Mikels himself. Later, he appears with novelty eyebrows, which is something to see, even if the movie is not. Coming out between his War Cat and the drama (allegedly) Female Slaves’ Revenge, it’s an incomprehensible mess of polka dots and mullets, of Canon fax machines and Casio scores. —Rod Lott

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