Madcap Screencaps #19
Can you guess what movie or TV show we’re watching? We’ve turned on subtitles (when available) not to give you a clue, but to enhance that WTF effect! Leave your best guess in the comments to prove your true Flick Attackosity!
Gold (1972)
Watching, absorbing and trying to stay awake during Gold, you not only realize why Kent State happened, but why it was also fully justified. As a matter of fact, I was so charged up after viewing this musty, shot-in-1968 relic that I went down to my local college campus and shot three kids playing Hacky Sack.
Okay, not really, but I did kick their sack into the sewer just to spite them, and to spite this movie. Like many lost-film obsessives, when word hit that Gold was going to get a proper DVD release, I was excited, picturing an Alejandro Jodorowsky-lite countercultural epic, possibly a pre-indie, all-hippie take on the well-documented American Dream of the ’60s, complete with multicolored acid trips, psych-rock freak-outs and plenty of flower-power pubic hair. At least that’s what I was promised, dammit.
Instead, I got a fifth-rate group of stoned community theater rejects/draft-dodgers — led by “comedian” Del Close — dressed as famed mass-murderer Che Guevara, rolling around in the mud while espousing anti-war sentiments and aimlessly driving sputtering jalopies. Improvised elections are held on a train, The MC5 blares on the soundtrack, and everyone remains happily unemployable. If this is what the young people were doing while our boys were dying face-down in the Vietnam jungles, sign me up to the Ohio National Guard and hand me a bayonet!
With no rhyme, reason or proper editing techniques, it’s as if the school from Billy Jack made a movie and decided to write the screenplay after the thing was already in theaters. Never clever, funny nor enlightening, Gold is a total, unwatchable mess. It’s the Altamont of free-love flicks with every frame a pool cue to Meredith Hunter’s skull. And this Del Close guy: In every book about comedy, every tastemaker to come out of Second City or The Groundlings raves on and on about this so-called “father of improvisational comedy” as “the funniest man you’ve never heard of.” If Gold is any inclination of his talents, there’s a reason for that.
Gold: You blew it, man. —Louis Fowler
Game of Death II (1981)
I’ve never seen anything quite like Game of Death II, in which the late Bruce Lee unwittingly reprises his role as Billy Lo from the misbegotten Game of Death. Like that 1978 turd, this is a Bruceploitation film, utilizing as much Bruce stock footage as they can get away with, and creating an illusion that he’s the star by shooting a double from the back, from the side or obscured by household items. But whereas that film was a chore to sit through, this hack job is a hoot.
If there’s a story to it, I sure didn’t catch it, but Billy fights his way through several colorful opponents before tragically dying at the film’s midpoint when he falls from a helicopter. For the second half, his brother, Bobby (Tong Lung), enters and becomes the main character, seeking revenge for Billy’s death.
That’s when things get crazy. Like my favorite scene, when Billy is sucking face with a fully naked skank. She tries to kill him, the lights go out, and a lion (obviously a guy in a suit) bursts through the wall and chases them around the room. Read that sentence again and let it sink in. I also dug the finale, which takes place in the underground “tower of death,” a high-tech, booby-trapped, spy-type lair that suggests the film is a cut-rate Enter the Dragon impostor. There Bobby takes on several henchmen and a guy in a Tarzan suit, just because.
Although the film itself is pretty funny (not on purpose), the martial arts on display in Game of Death II are pretty serious stuff, courtesy of fight choreographer Yuen Woo Ping, of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Matrix; Kill Bill and just about everything else that rules. —Rod Lott
Posed for Murder (1989)
If you’re anything like me, then the first page of Playboy you always turn to is the centerfold’s fact sheet. “Who is she as a person?” you ask yourself as you enjoy her witty insights regarding her likes, dislikes, ambitions and turns both on and off. It’s only then — with some reluctance — that you take a look at the photographs that represent the rest of her appearance in the magazine and appreciate them in your own special way for a few brief, energetic minutes.
Thankfully, for those of us movie buffs who truly care about who our masturbation fantasies are as people, there’s Posed for Murder, a somewhat-forgotten, late-’80s thriller dedicated to the travails of a glamour model trying to make her way in a world full of asshole publishers, sleazy agents, sleazier movie directors, sick moms, convict ex-boyfriends and psychotic, body-building stalkers-cum-serial killers.
Charlotte Helmkamp (Miss December 1982) is clearly cast against type as Laura, a hot brunette with a bangin’ body whose photos in the low-rent Thrill have paid the bills, but who longs for the kind of respect that’s synonymous with being a terrible actress in low-budget horror films. While she pursues her dream in-between workouts and photo shoots, she barely has the time to notice that all of the people around her are turning up kinda dead.
Posed for Murder is one of those movies that does nothing right, yet still manages to be a fun time. Just sleazy enough to leave you tumescent, but not so much to make you feel guilty afterward, it’s a so-bad-it’s-good fiasco that deserves to be much better known among aficionados of this sort of thing. —Allan Mott