Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Slipstream (1989)

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SlipstreamFrom Tron director Steven Lisberger slips Slipstream, which boasts an “all-star cast” of Mark Hamill, F. Murray Abraham, Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton. It tries fairly hard, but can’t make the “science fiction spectacular” a movie that sits comfortably in one’s head.

Its story takes place in a post-something future in which cyborgs, bounty hunters and lowlifes symbiotically abide. There’s a “slipstream” or something, that somehow is supposed to indicate that the world and nature are out of sorts. A lot of scenes are thrown in that appear to be there to enhance characters, provoke emotion and induce laughs, yet none of them succeed.

slipstream1Plus, there’s dialogue intended to make Paxton (Twister) the folksy, down-to-earth, Han Solo-type with whom we can all identify. After one of many awkward exchanges between his character and one of the female bounty hunters, he sarcastically quips, “The hospitality of women never ceases to amaze me.” What does that mean? That women are never hospitable? Has the gesture of hospitality always eluded Paxton in his dealings with women, thereby warranting such a response? No one knows!

Additional scenes and snippets make no sense, including a dancing (that’s right, dancing!) scene in which the male cyborg learns to love life, as well as some anonymous female character. It’s supposed to make our hearts swell and eyes tear. I think I held up my middle finger until the scene was over.

With nothing to work with but a beard, Star Wars vet Hamill actually acts fairly unshittily, but Slipstream is quite a mess. I surprised myself by sitting through it until the end. —Richard York

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Reading Material

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made

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disasterartistI wish I could say I’ve been eagerly waiting the release of Greg Sestero’s The Disaster Artist since he mentioned it on a 2011 episode of the How Did This Get Made? podcast, but really, I’ve been eagerly waiting it longer than that — in fact, mere minutes after I saw 2003’s The Room, this millennium’s arguably strongest candidate for Best Worst Movie.

Someone, I reasoned, just had to write a book to answer all my questions surrounding such a misbegotten production, not the least of which was simply, “What the hell?”

Sestero does not disappoint. As one point of The Room‘s wretched love triangle and inadvertent line producer, the actor had a front-row seat not just to the chaos of shooting of the $6 million vanity project, but the chaos that was (is?) the life of Tommy Wiseau, “mastermind” of the movie. Years before The Room said, “Oh, hi” to an unsuspecting world, Sestero was a friend and roommate of Wiseau.

The author’s recollections (undoubtedly goosed by Disaster co-writer Tom Bissell) are hysterical from the start. On page 2, I was already laughing out loud at Sestero’s descriptions of the … how you say, “unique” look of Wiseau: “Gene Simmons after three months in the Gobi Desert? The Hunchback of Notre Dame following corrective surgery? An escaped Muppet? The drummer from Ratt?”

A terrific sense of humor is the book’s greatest asset. Unlike The Room, the laughs are intentional. Laughter was something every poor soul who had the unfortunate experience of working on the picture struggled to stifle — everyone, of course, except Wiseau, who failed to see his acting/screenwriting/directing/producing debut as anything but life-altering brilliance.

So delusional is Wiseau that he paid for The Room to play a theatrical run (to empty houses, no less) for two whole weeks, because that time frame is required to qualify for Academy Awards consideration. That’s merely one baffling decision of a thousand that Wiseau makes over the course of The Disaster Artist’s pages. God bless Sestero for taking mental notes the whole time.

So harsh is he on Wiseau at times (“The only casting directors who’d be willing to call Tommy in on the basis of this headshot were the ones curious about what it was like to be murdered”) that I wonder if their friendship experienced a fatal falling-out after the film’s premiere. If so, it goes unaddressed, but that’s about the only thing readers will be left wanting to know. Sestero even sheds light on the enigmatic Wiseau’s past, to disturbing detail.

All of this might come off as an exercise in petty cruelty, if not for two things:
1. Sestero is quick to point out his own shortcomings, e.g., “It’s pretty obvious that I mailed in my performance throughout the entire production, but during this scene I didn’t even bother to lick the envelope.”
2. The Room deserves it. Anyone who’s seen it, knows it, and anyone who’s seen it needs to read this book on its making. Apologies to the word “making.” —Rod Lott

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Action

The Doll Squad (1973)

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dollsquadAfter an American rocket is blown to smithereens shortly after launch, an IBM computer so big that it fills a room suggests the “most capable” persons to call upon in this time of government crisis would be … The Doll Squad!

Leading that bevy of big-haired, big-breasted beauties is redhead dynamo Sabrina Kincaid (Francine York, The Centerfold Girls). The president of the United States gives the sexy six exactly two weeks to track down the man behind the deadly sabotage: Eamon O’Reilly (Michael Ansara, It’s Alive), an impotent madman who lords over an island compound. With the help of many rats and agents with skull-implanted silver disks, he’s plotting to take over the world via bubonic plague.

dollsquad1Because Sabrina and her fellow Dolls (including Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!‘s Tura Satana, The Thirsty Dead‘s Judy McConnell and The Corpse Grinders‘ Sherri Vernon) do the snoop-and-shake thing, writer/director/producer/editor Ted V. Mikels long has claimed that his Doll Squad was ripped off by ABC’s Charlie’s Angels. I fail to see concrete evidence of theft, but The Doll Squad already feels like a TV series of its own, given the presentation of its credit sequences, the bargain-bin effects and dialogue that calls back to previous (nonexistent) episodes, i.e. “Sabrina! I haven’t seen you since the blasted U-2 affair!” Then there’s Nicholas Carras’ brassy, blaring theme song that paints the illusion of more action than actually exists.

Mikels wrings production value out of two major elements: blood and boobs. The former carries the color and consistency of Campbell’s tomato soup; the latter is accentuated by having Sabrina appear in a different outfit every couple of minutes, most of which are cleavage-driven. This changes for the island siege, for which the Dolls don matching green jumpsuits (the uniform idea fits since only Sabrina was given a personality); victory is celebrated with bikinis, as it should be.

Keep in mind we’re talking Mikels here, but those things combine to make the flick his most accessible. It certainly goes down easier than his other stab at portraying the adventures of a girl group, 1982’s 10 Violent Women. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975)

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brothercharlesWTFI have seen a lot of crazy shit in my life, but nothing prepared me for the utter insanity of Penitentiary director Jamaa Fanaka’s debut feature. Welcome Home Brother Charles (also known as Soul Vengeance) opens with a bizarre R&B/industrial theme while the camera scrolls over an African penis statue. Cut to local drug dealer Charlie (Marlo Monte) getting busted by a cop who just caught his wife with a black man, so instead of just booking Charlie, the cop tries to castrate him.

Charlie is sent to prison for three years where he has a frightening nightmare (told through black-and-white stills). After he’s released, the film becomes a “make the ghetto a better place” film, where Charlie does good in the neighborhood, getting a girlfriend out of prostitution and talking to his young brother about the dangers of gangs. But then, Charlie goes psycho and starts killing the honkies who put him in prison … with his magic penis.

brothercharles1I don’t know how and I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, Charlie’s member has the power to make white women go into a hypnotic trance and do his bidding. Once he has his enemy cornered, he simply takes off his pants and his dick grows bigger and bigger until it wraps itself around the judge’s neck, strangling him.

So, in other words, Welcome Home Brother Charles is one of the greatest films of all time. —Louis Fowler

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Action

Ticker (2001)

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tickerTom Sizemore and Steven Seagal: together at last! In Ticker, a straight-to-video action movie resembling at least five action movies that did play in theaters, Sizemore (Heat) is Ray Nettles, an unshaven San Francisco detective on the hunt for a mad bomber, while Seagal (in his first multiplex-skipping starrer, sandwiched between his theatrical swan songs of Exit Wounds and Half Past Dead) is Frank Glass, a member of the bomb squad adept at snipping wires.

It should come as no surprise that Dennis Hopper essays the role of mad bomber, but don’t think for a second that he’s merely repeating what he did in 1994’s Speed! Heavens, no! This is completely different because he:
a) has a beard,
b) sometimes speaks in an Irish accent, and
c) is always singing AT&T’s old “Reach out and touch someone” jingle. Hopper’s character keeps blowing up buildings and killing innocent people because the cops won’t release his girlfriend (Jaime Pressly, Torque), because, you know, she’s kinda cute to have around to look at.

ticker1Sizemore isn’t too bad, because he plays his character like he had everything else up to then. A meatloaf-cheeked Seagal does the same, yet that makes him bad. I prayed for him to make a quick exit as he did in Executive Decision, but no dice, Chicago. Ticker comes courtesy of director Albert Pyun (1990’s Captain America), while gangsta rapper Nas plays a guy named Fuzzy, which couldn’t have been good for his street cred. —Rod Lott

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