The Tall Man glaring at Reggie, who insists on wearing a pre-tied bow.
Phantasm (1977) begins bootaciously, with bared bobbing boobs and grunting, gasping graveyard gropes.
Then the demonic dame stabs the prone putz, for no apparent reason, and we cut abruptly to somebody’s funeral, where Jody, who has authentic late 70s helmet hair, is talking with Reggie, who doesn’t.
Usually I like a film that makes no sense, but this turkey acts like it does, and this is confusing. Even CACA has rules.
So the upshot is this: The Tall Man (played by the immortal Angus Scrimm) runs a funeral home which is a front for a supernatural outfit that is taking the recently deceased, turning them into little malevolent dwarves in capes, and shipping them through a portal to be slaves in a world with eternal cold and crushing gravity.
Yes, the doomed are heading off into the America of President Barack Obama.
We have: Car chases; six breasts; yellow blood; flying orb thing that drills through some guy’s head; absolutely no story to interfere with the plot; terrific hair continuity problems; relentlessly horrible theme music that is the same as “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist except the phrase goes up, not down.
This gets a “Ffffffft” from Fast-Forward Freddy, and a lone coil from me.
The Cinema - Where Have You Gone, Kevin Cronin?
April 30th, 2008
“You can never give/The finger to the blind…” Yeah, but you can annoy them with endless stupid questions.
Circle of Iron is the film that answers the question “Whatever happened to the REO Speedwagon haircut, as practiced by insipid lead singer Kevin Cronin?”
Answer: It bulked up, bought a loincloth and set off into the wilderness to seek the Book of Knowledge.
Cord (Jeff Cooper) is a wandering weirdo. At the opening of the film he is participating in a fighting contest supervised by Roddy McDowell. You could repeat this scenario today and call it Ultimate Wizard Fighting.
Anyhoo, Cord cheats, sort of, and Roddy gets to utter the immortal words: “Morthond wins.” He says this with all the enthusiasm of a fat guy on a diet reaching for another rice cake. So Morthond, who looks like he should be in a low rider in Albuquerque, not roaming the barrens with a sword, sets off to find Zetan, a sort of Scientologist who guards the Book of Knowledge.
And Cord, like the big ol’ lovable puppy dog he is, just follows along after him, so when Morthond runs into the Monkey Man and is mortally wounded Cord’s available to help him commit hari-kiri.
That’s what friends are for.
Moving in and out of all this stunning mise en scene is The Blind Man (David Carradine) who can kung fu an entire gang of thugs without a whole lot of trouble. He also plays the flute. Cord decides Blind Guy shall be his teacher, and he annoys Blind Guy with his constant yakking.
So Cord has to go through all these trials - the Monkey Man, Chang-Sha and what the credits list as “Death” but what really looks like David Carradine dressed as a cat. He has sex with Chang-Sha’s ninth wife, who gets crucified for her trouble, and comes across Eli Wallach, submerged in a big vat of oil in the desert. (The exchange between Cord and the Man in the Oil is worth the NetFlix fee.)
Eli Wallach demonstrates the latest in operant conditioning
Finally Cord gets to the island, meets Zetan (Christopher Lee) and the gang, and finds the Book of Knowledge, which is not what he expected.
Summary: Automatic one coil deduction for no nudity. David Carradine, made up as a monkey, in a loincloth. Roddy McDowell, dressed in a bathrobe and a pointy white hat, saying “Morthond wins.” Extras from “Planet of the Apes” to make Roddy feel at home. Kabuki belly dancers and the world’s worst rhythm section, courtesy of Chang-Sha, desert chieftan (also played by Carradine). Crucifixion of pretty wife. Unpleasant thought about what the fellows on the Island of Peace do for fun, besides tend the roses. Eli Wallach indulging in the world’s most extreme Temptation Removal Procedure (TRP). Gratuitous wooden flute music that doesn’t match the soundtrack.
Circle of Iron, with its ponderous pseudo-Zen platitudes and mock-heroic structure should be just another lame sword ‘n’ sorcery epic, designed for the eighth grade market. It’s just good enough to escape that fate and earn three-coil status in the CACA pantheon.
At 102 minutes it’s also short, which helps.
Will Dems De-Kook?
April 27th, 2008
I’m a Democrat because:
1. It’s always been that way
2. My late grandmother Margaret Collin would haunt me if I changed parties. As it is I feel an icy chill if I vote for a Libertarian or a Green.
3. It’s always been that way
and
4. It’s always been that way
Over the years I have become steadily disenchanted with my party. My party seems to appeal primarily to people who write formulaic, indignant letters to the papers:
To the editor -
As a (fill in this spot with your aggrieved group) I am outraged at the yah yah yah yah yah yah yah yah yah…
(signed)
C.L. Snodgrass
Third yurt from the left
Organic Wallow, Ore.
Also featuring prominently in my party are folks who regard 1968 as the high-water mark of American life, with protests, riots, assassinations and all kinds of groovy stuff.
These nitwits are organized - of course - into a group, Recreate68, which plans to do something at the Democratic convention in Denver.
Do their re-enactment plans call for authentic thumping of hippies by cops? I certainly hope so.
The party leadership isn’t doing a very good job. In fact, I think it safe to call them utterly delusional.
Why? Last time around, they had as a target an unpopular blue-blood President, a Yalie Skull & Bones knucklehead with lousy rhetorical skills and a record of stunning mediocrity.
Who’d they choose? Their own blue-blooded Yalie Skull & Bones knucklehead with even worse rhetorical skills, a record of stunning mediocrity and a rich wife with a big mouth.
And now, as the result of forty years of identity politics, Democrats find themselves in a rather hilarious situation: Half of the delegates are afraid to go against Sen. Barack Obama lest they be called racists; the other half are worried that, if they go against Sen. Hillary Clinton, they will be vilified as sexists.
Which -ist is worsest?
Meanwhile a few pockets of intelligent life remain in the party so dominated by symbolic victories, shameless pandering and the usual patronage and pork. Bill Bradley’s The New American Story is a sober look at America’s current state that actually offers solutions - ideas that might not be to everybody’s liking but certainly provide a place to start.
So after either Obama or Clinton gets whomped in the fall, will the Dems finally learn their lesson and start concentrating on results? Will the party get some guts and tell MoveOn.org to live up to its name?
What’s it going to be: Hoopster or Hippie?
Bill Bradley, demonstrating his broad appeal, nails down the Eddie Van Halen lookalike vote, after helping remove the plastic cover from the sofa for the picture.
The Shouters
April 25th, 2008
Years ago my father, a lobbyist, would sit down on Sundays to watch “The McLaughlin Group,” which he referred to as “The Shouters.”
Pop, an advocate of the soft sell school persuasion, got a kick out of listening to the panelists, well, shout at each other.
He also told me of a commentator from the old Metromedia Channel 5 in New York, a Dr. Marty Abend, who represented the right wing on shows, usually paired against someone like Ted Sorensen.
When discussing the latest friction in the Mideast in, say, 1973, the lefty would say all the usual things - “We can’t interfere with the rights of blah blah blah.”
Abend’s rejoinder: “Nonsense! Seize them! These are not countries, they are sheikdoms! Seize them!”
“Seize them!” is a standard line in my family, along with other classics such as “What do you think this is? A club?” and “Used to be a bowling alley.” (I will explain these another time.)
For whatever reason, I have been watching the new breed of shouters quite a bit lately. And not really digging them, either. Here are my impressions of the current Shouters:
Alan Colmes is a ferret-faced weasel. (Or weasel-faced ferret, if you prefer.) His favorite rhetorical device is to ask, “Well, what about George W. Bush?”
His dorky pal Sean Hannity is dreadfully earnest. I don’t trust the earnest. They make me nervous. He reminds me of those Mormon kids doing their two years of missionary work, right down to the short-sleeve shirt and tie he would undoubtedly be wearing if someone from Fox’s wardrobe department hadn’t intervened.
Hannity is polite, though, which counts for something.
Bill O’Reilly is an appalling, smarmy character and a lousy interviewer to boot. He doesn’t try to change the subject a la Colmes, he just blathers straight through any dissonance.
And Greta Van Whoosiewhatsis? How does she talk without moving her mouth? (Mary Matalin does this too.)
Keith Olbermann wears those stupid little rectangle glasses, his suits are too big and too padded, and he thinks he’s funny. He is mistaken.
And Chris Matthews is a slobbering ninny. Is it too much to ask that he actually pronounce the words “Social Security” ?
(He says, and I can only approximate because there is no way to spell the sound of drooling, “Sohsh Secur.”)
Never mind their politics, their ratings gimmicks, the brainlessness of the whole cable news shtick.
These people are just not entertaining, except as neo-circus freaks.
I can’t imagine any of them having the wit and panache to simply say “Seize them!” and be done with it.
Jack Webb, Style Icon
April 23rd, 2008
I recently picked up a four-disc DVD set from the bargain bin at the Super Duper Stop & Shop in Canaan, Conn. - the same unlikely setting has provided me with the original King Kong (remastered) and Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy.
This set, Best of TV Detectives, has a couple of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and some other moderately interesting stuff - a couple of Glen Howard Fu Manchus, half a dozen Dick Tracys.
And 13 episodes of Dragnet from 1953-54. Dragnet was really the original cop show, and it’s astonishing how contemporary they are. The crimes include murder, grand theft in the form of swindling families of recently deceased servicemen, and child molestation. Sounds like a typical night of Law & Order reruns to me.
But the biggest revelation to me was Jack Webb’s Joe Friday, Sartorial Stud.
Sgt. Friday invariably wears a shirt with a buttondown collar that has a serious roll to it. And with his slim cut sports jackets (often featuring a ticket pocket) and snap-brim fedora, he looks like (gasp) a jazz musician or something.
In one episode, he bends over to scoop up a dog that’s in the way, revealing what appear to be black loafers and argyle socks. Argyle socks!? From the “Just the facts, ma’am” guy?
And Friday is always showing just a bit of shirt cuff, in elegant and sharp contradistinction to his fat partner, whose jacket buttons always appear to be on the verge of flying off, with the swallows, to Capistrano.
Postscript: Here is a Time magazine cover story about Webb. The author’s son, who provided the link, informs me that Mr. Webb wasn’t too pleased with some aspects of the piece.