BRITANNIA HOSPITAL (UK - 1982; US release 1983) Directed by Lindsay Anderson. Written by David Sherwin. Cast: Leonard Rossiter, Graham Crowden, Malcolm McDowell, Joan Plowright, Jill Bennett, Marsha Hunt, Robin Askwith, John Bett, Frank Grimes, Mark Hamill, Peter Jeffrey, Fulton Mackay, John Moffatt, Dandy Nichols, Brian Pettifer, Vivian Pickles, Marcus Powell, Arthur Lowe, Alan Bates, Catherine Wilmer, Dave Atkins, Peter Machin, Gladys Crosbie, Rufus Collins, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Haygarth, Richard Griffiths, Dave Hill, Roland Culver, Val Pringle, Liz Smith, Gordon John Sinclair, T.P. McKenna. (R, 116 mins) An anarchic, absurdist black comedy that's a scathing satire of England under then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1982's BRITANNIA HOSPITAL was the final chapter of the very loosely-connected "Mick Travis" trilogy from director Lindsay Anderson and writer David Sherwin. Following 1968's IF... and 1973's O LUCKY MAN!, BRITANNIA HOSPITAL brings back Anderson protagonist Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), now a muckraking documentary filmmaker who relocated to Arkansas but is back in his native London to cover various goings-on at the beleaguered Britannia Hospital. They've got a lot on their plate, starting with a highly-publicized visit from the Queen Mother (Gladys Crosbie), with a laundry list of distractions putting the whole operation in jeopardy: striking nursing staff has led to a marked decline in patient care, including dead people left on gurneys at admitting; the socialist kitchen staff are refusing to prepare the elaborate meals demanded by the wealthy VIP patients; one of those patients is African dictator President Ngami (Val Pringle), a ruthless, Idi Amin-like despot who slaughters children in his country and is reputed to be a cannibal; Ngami's presence at the hospital has sparked intense protests by increasingly large crowds just outside the entrance gate; and quack mad doctor Professor Millar (Graham Crowden, reprising an O LUCKY MAN! character) is about to kick off the grand opening of the Japanese-financed Millar Center for Advanced Surgical Studies, a mysterious new wing of Britannia Hospital where he and his staff are conducting top secret experiments with unwitting patients, all of this under the watchful eye of an all-knowing AI supercomputer known as "Genesis."
A cable fixture in the mid '80s that's just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), BRITANNIA HOSPITAL is, in a word, a lot. It's freewheeling to the point where it's easy to write it off as an unwieldy, chaotic mess and maybe it is, but there's a certain audaciousness to it that makes it impossible to just dismiss. The two storylines finally intersect at the end, but for much of its duration, the film feels like two wildly different Anderson projects that the director just threw together. The satirical bits involving the striking workers and the Queen Mother visit have a cynical, Paddy Chayefsky thing going on, while the sections with Travis investigating Millar take the film in a truly jarring direction that had to throw off highbrow critics who adored Anderson's previous work. The director was no stranger to disregarding cinematic convention, but a crazed Millar chopping off Travis' head and putting it onto a badly-stitched body in a grotesque FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN riff is something no Anderson fan in 1982 would've seen coming.
Each of the two disparate plot threads work in fits and starts--the splattery result of Millar's Travis experiment is hilariously over-the-top and outrageously gross in a way that prefigures the likes of Peter Jackson's DEAD ALIVE--but it also prevents BRITANNIA HOSPITAL from finding any kind of rhythm or momentum. Top-billed Leonard Rossiter, a veteran character actor (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, THE PINK PANTHER STRIKES AGAIN) who, by this point in his career, carved a niche for himself playing uptight, bureaucratic toadies, is perfectly cast as harried hospital administrator Vincent Potter, trying and failing to keep it together as things keep escalating beyond any semblance of control. Rossiter died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1984 at just 57, and was such a workhorse to the end that he was still popping up on British TV and in movies as late as 1986's WATER, where he played yet another bureaucratic asshole, this time in the form of a pompous politician.
The ensemble cast is almost too packed to keep track of without taking notes, with appearances by Joan Plowright as a hospital union official; Robin Askwith as the head cook leading the kitchen revolt; Peter Jeffrey as a supercilious surgical chief; Mark Hamill--in between EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI--as Travis' sound engineer who spends most of the film in the production van watching TV and getting stoned on Nicaraguan weed, oblivious to his boss' cries for help when he's being decapitated by Millar; Marsha Hunt (a Mick Jagger ex long assumed to be the subject of "Brown Sugar") as a Millar nurse secretly getting info for Travis; John Bett in drag as a Buckingham Palace official named Lady Felicity; Richard Griffiths as hospital radio DJ Cheerful Bernie; Robbie Coltrane as a protester; and "guest patient" Alan Bates as a corpse, murdered by Millar after not dying quickly enough ("I'm afraid he's lingering"), for the purpose of his reanimation experiment only to have his head turn "pulpy" when it's kept at the wrong temperature, prompting Millar's need for Travis' head as an impromptu replacement. Not everything in BRITANNIA HOSPITAL works, but it's legitimately unpredictable and frequently batshit insane, though some things still resonate on a serious level, whether it's patient care and insurance concerns, or one unexpectedly topical scene where a peaceful female protester offers a flower to a cop only to get violently punched in the face, instantly sparking a massive riot that ultimately spills into the halls of the hospital.
CLOCKWISE (UK - 1986) Directed by Christopher Morahan. Written by Michael Frayn. Cast: John Cleese, Penelope Wilton, Alison Steadman, Stephen Moore, Sharon Maiden, Michael Aldridge, Joan Hickson, Benjamin Whitrow, Geoffrey Palmer, Pat Keen, Geoffrey Hutchings, Constance Chapman, Ann Way, John Bardon, Angus Mackay, Chip Sweeney, Sheila Keith, Tony Haygarth, Nicholas le Prevost, Nick Stringer, Peter Cellier, Peter Jonfield. (PG, 96 mins) Given a spotty release on the US arthouse circuit by Universal in the fall of 1986 and into 1987, the British import CLOCKWISE was written by playwright Michael Frayn with Monty Python vet John Cleese in mind to star. Best known for his play Noises Off!, made into a film by Peter Bogdanovich in 1992 and required by law to be performed by every high school theater department in America, Frayn stages CLOCKWISE as a door-slamming farce reworked as a slapstick road movie of the pre-smartphone era, with Cleese channeling his loud, harumphing FAWLTY TOWERS persona as Brian Stimpson, the uptight, micro-managing headmaster of the Thomas Timpion Comprehensive School. Obsessed with punctuality, down-to-the-second time-management, and keeping his students in line by calling them out on the playground from his office perch with a PA system when he spots misbehavior, Stimpson has turned the school around and as such, is being rewarded with a new post as the chairman of an elite headmaster's association, the first such chairman to come from a common, public institution. He's set to depart on a 10:25 am train trip to Norwich, allowing him plenty of time for his 3:00 pm speech. But after his nurse wife Gwenda (Alison Steadman) drops him off, he realizes he's on the wrong train--due to his boorish habit of declaring "Right!" and being a general pain in the ass with the ticket taker and getting confused when he's told the Norwich train is on the left. He gets off the wrong train but isn't able to get onboard the Norwich in time, watching in horror as it departs without him, then realizing he left his speech on the other train at the exact moment it takes off in the opposite direction. Running out to the parking lot to see Gwenda driving away, Stimpson is stranded with no way to get to Norwich and no speech to give even if he could.
While trying and failing to hail a cab, he literally runs into a car driven by Laura (Sharon Maiden), a truant student who lives in his neighborhood. He talks her into driving him to Norwich--approximately three hours by car--but they run into one ridiculous mishap after another, starting with Laura borrowing her mom's car without permission after breaking off an illicit relationship with Mr. Jolly (Stephen Moore), Timpion's music teacher and recurring Stimpson foil due to his lack of concern for punctuality. While filling up at a petrol station and forgetting to pay, Stimpson is spotted by Gwenda, who's out on a day trip with three senile nursing home patients and now thinks he lied about going to Norwich and is having an affair with Laura. He's critical of Laura's driving and takes the wheel, only to immediately plow into the back of a cop car. Malfunctioning pay phones with too-small coin slots prevent him from notifying the headmaster's association that he's running late, and a stop-off in a small village leads to an unwanted reunion with his clingy college girlfriend Pat (Penelope Wilton, best known these days as Shaun's mom in SHAUN OF THE DEAD and as Isobel Crowley on DOWNTON ABBEY), who never really got over him.
That Stimpson was written for Cleese is obvious, but he's always had more success in comedic parts he's crafted for himself. There's a definite Peter Sellers/Terry-Thomas vibe to some of the absurd situations in which Stimpson finds himself, and to that end, some of the set pieces in CLOCKWISE are crying out for the kind of inventive, intricate comedic choreography of a director like, say, Blake Edwards instead of the workmanlike job done by Christopher Morahan, a journeyman British TV vet who had a long and busy but generally undistinguished career. With one misunderstanding after another, there's also a definite Larry David quality to some of Stimpson's predicaments, but CLOCKWISE never quite settles on what kind of comedy it wants to be, whether it's slapstick or the right/left confusion feeling like an Abbott & Costello bit, cops showing up in Norwich looking for Stimpson and one headmaster concluding that he's a pedophile who likes little boys, or the generally laissez-faire attitude it takes with Jolly sleeping with a student, something that definitely wouldn't fly in a comedy today but still managed to keep CLOCKWISE at a PG back in 1986. The film was a bigger hit in the UK than in the US--though its found a small cult following stateside--and while Cleese was happy with how it turned out, he was disappointed that some of the more British humor didn't go over as well as he'd hoped with American audiences, and he specifically cited that concern when he was doing press for 1988's A FISH CALLED WANDA, which he wrote himself and enjoyed significantly more acclaim and commercial success. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), CLOCKWISE is a slight but enjoyable showcase for the tight-assed pomposity in which Cleese has always excelled, and it's a rare example of him being given a lead in a project he didn't originate, but it still feels like more could've been done with the material if Cleese was more involved behind-the-scenes.
BREEZY (US - 1973) Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Jo Heims. Cast: William Holden, Kay Lenz, Roger C. Carmel, Marj Dusay, Joan Hotchkis, Jamie Smith Jackson, Norman Bertold, Lynn Borden, Shelley Morrison, Dennis Olivieri, Eugene Peterson, Lew Brown, Richard Bull, Johnnie Collins III, Don Diamond, Scott Holden, Sandy Kenyon, Buck Young. (R, 106 mins) It remains a popular notion that Clint Eastwood wasn't taken seriously as an actor or a director until 1992's UNFORGIVEN established him as a genuine auteur and put him back on top after a string of box-office disappointments that found him in a major slump for the first time in his career. But anyone who'd been paying attention over the years already knew that Eastwood was doing more substantive and creative work that was commonly believed, whether it was 1971's influential proto-FATAL ATTRACTION psycho-thriller PLAY MISTY FOR ME, the same year's Southern gothic period piece THE BEGUILED, 1973's disturbing supernatural revenge western HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, or 1974's offbeat heist/buddy/road movie THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT. Eastwood was never afraid to tackle unusual projects outside of his comfort zone, and he was proving that in the years leading up to UNFORGIVEN, when he was forced to compromise and do junk like THE DEAD POOL, PINK CADILLAC, and THE ROOKIE in order to get a green light for personal passion projects like BIRD and WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART. The first real surprise of Eastwood's career after he became a superstar (unless you count PAINT YOUR WAGON), 1973's BREEZY was an odd outlier in his filmography, at least back then in the pre-BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY days when we weren't privy to his softer side. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), BREEZY was his third film as a director, and the first where he was just the director (unless you count a fleeting Hitchcockian cameo where he can be glimpsed standing on a pier), and it's a low-key, sometimes overly sentimental May-December romance that plays like a conservative guy's idea of the era's counterculture scene.
Eastwood was 43 when he directed BREEZY, and it's surprising he didn't sit on it for another decade so he could play the lead role himself. Instead, he got the legendary William Holden to star as Frank Harmon, a successful Laurel Canyon real estate agent in his mid-50s who's divorced, aloof, and enjoys no-strings-attached evenings with blind dates and hookups he has no intention of ever calling back. He's introduced getting a cab in the morning for his latest one-nighter, and can barely hide his eye-rolling disinterest when she gives him her phone number, which he immediately tosses in the trash the moment she gets in the cab. He's leaving for work when he sees a young woman hanging out at the end of his driveway. She's Edith Alice Breezerman, aka "Breezy" (Kay Lenz), a 19-year-old drifter from Pittsburgh who's been hitchhiking and free-loving her way out to California and going wherever the day takes her. Frank has neither the time nor the patience for this chatty hippie whose only possession is an acoustic guitar, but she cracks his hard-shell exterior and the "black cloud" around him gradually dissipates. They form an unlikely bond and eventually fall in love, and Frank feels happy and alive for the first time since his divorce from the bitter, sloshed Helen (Joan Hotchkis), though he's still second-guessing his decision to give the cold shoulder to Betty (Marj Dusay), a friend-with-benefits that he pushed away when she wanted to get serious, only to have her marry the guy she began seeing when Frank started giving her the brush-off.
Though he didn't write BREEZY (it was scripted his PLAY MISTY FOR ME scribe Jo Heims), it's not hard to imagine a well-documented serial womanizer like Eastwood seeing much of his current and future self in Holden's character. To that extent, he understands Frank and lets Holden really explore the psychology of a solitary man who wants things uncomplicated, wants to be untethered, and shuts people out to avoid the risk of getting attached. He's at first appalled by Breezy's carefree nature and cruelly accuses her of seeing him as a financially secure meal ticket, then very slowly falls for her once he gets to know her. That is, until he runs into his disillusioned, lives-vicariously-through-him, midlife-crisis buddy Bob (Roger C. Carmel) and his wife and some mutual acquaintances when he and Breezy go see a movie (HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, of all things) and he's visibly embarrassed about their discovery of his secret 19-year-old girlfriend. Bob's later remarks about how he'd feel like a child molester sleeping with a girl that young prod Frank into doing what he always does when he starts feeling close to someone: he pushes Breezy away by acting like a total prick. Holden is at his jaded, cynical, late-career best here (Bob: "I ran into your ex-wife the other day." Frank: "I hope you were in your car doing 80"), and Lenz is fine with what she's asked to do, which is essentially be a too-good-to-be-true Hollywood version of a hippie drifter. She's more of an early incarnation of the Nathan Rabin-coined "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" than anything resembling then-contemporary youth. She's perpetually cheerful, teaches curmudgeonly Frank some heartfelt life lessons, hangs out with other homeless hippies but is the only one who doesn't do drugs, and when Frank takes her to a swanky restaurant, she orders a Shirley Temple. It's almost like Eastwood was already an old soul looking to argue with a chair when he made this, because the only real emotional honesty comes in the film's depiction of Frank's side of the relationship and his mindset as his world is turned upside down by his infatuation with Breezy.
Clint Eastwood on set with
William Holden and Kay Lenz
Released by Universal in November 1973, BREEZY remains a relative deep cut in the Eastwood catalog that came near the end of a busy year for him, having HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER in theaters in April and MAGNUM FORCE out in December. But BREEZY fell through the cracks in a rare instance of a studio lacking confidence in him. A skittish Universal pulled the film from release after its limited NYC engagement bombed with critics and audiences. They shelved it for several months before doing some re-editing, eventually relaunching it in the summer of 1974, starting in Utah of all places, another sign that they still weren't seeing much commercial potential for it. It moved slowly around the country throughout the rest of 1974, eventually barely turning a profit, but Eastwood felt Universal never really gave it a shot and was offended by their treatment of it after he delivered huge hits as a star and director with PLAY MISTY FOR ME and HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER. Eastwood was dividing his time between Universal and Warner Bros. during this period, and their handling of BREEZY was but one instance of his escalating disgruntlement with Universal that led to him working, with rare exceptions, almost exclusively with Warner Bros. after 1975's THE EIGER SANCTION.
SPLIT SECOND (UK - 1992) Directed by Tony Maylam and Ian Sharp. Written by Gary Scott Thompson. Cast: Rutger Hauer, Kim Cattrall, Neil Duncan, Michael J. Pollard, Alun Armstrong, Pete Postlethwaite, Ian Dury, Tony Steedman, Steven Hartley, Sarah Stockbridge, Ken Bones, Dave Duffy, Stewart Harvey-Wilson, Paul Grayson, Chris Chappel, John Bennett. (R, 91 mins) "We need to get bigger guns! Big fucking guns!" Few films scream "early '90s at the video store" like SPLIT SECOND. After making a quick exit from American theaters in May 1992, the British import went on to be discovered by a more appreciative audience on home video, where it got a second wind and became a legitimate word-of-mouth cult hit. It's also an essential for fans of Rutger Hauer, by then a fixture in B-movies, with SPLIT SECOND being one of his best. He stars as Harley Stone, a renegade, plays-by-his-own rules cop in a near-future hellscape of 2008 London, with the city feeling the effects of global warming and largely submerged in perpetual flooding after 40 days and nights of torrential rain. It's a dark, dreary, smoggy, neon-lit, waterlogged hellhole with a production design that's typical of dystopian British cinema of the time, whether it's Richard Stanley's HARDWARE (1990), Bob Keen's PROTEUS (1995), and Stephen Norrington's DEATH MACHINE (1995) to name a few. Norrington would go on to direct big-budget Hollywood productions like BLADE (1998) and THE LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2003), but before that, he worked on the effects and design crew of both HARDWARE and SPLIT SECOND, making him a key figure in this period of British genre fare. SPLIT SECOND had a long and troubled journey to the screen, with the script by Gary Scott Thompson (who would later go on to co-write THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and subsequently cash in on that "Based on characters created by" action) initially making the rounds in 1988 as an L.A.-set Satanic serial killer thriller titled PENTAGRAM and written with Harrison Ford in mind. That never happened, as it ended up being put in turnaround after the similar Lou Diamond Phillips chiller THE FIRST POWER hit theaters in 1990.
After some rewrites and some additional tweaks and several title changes, the script made its way to Hauer and he liked it. Production began in June 1991 with director Tony Maylam (best known for 1981's post-FRIDAY THE 13th slasher THE BURNING) at the helm. Rewrites continued throughout the shoot and after several weeks, Maylam exited the production over "creative differences" and Ian Sharp (THE FINAL OPTION) was brought in to finish the film, with an "additional sequences directed by" credit at the end. SPLIT SECOND is pretty incoherent at times, and the end result barely hangs together, but it's got enough style, action, and Rutger Hauer being fucking awesome that it succeeds in spite of everything wrong with it. Like any cop who plays by his own rules, Hauer's Stone is constantly on suspension, and often so out of control that it's not unusual for him to be detained and placed under psychiatric observation. He "lives on anxiety, coffee, and chocolate" in a hoarders' nightmare shithole of an apartment that would take several deep cleanings to reach condemned status. He hasn't been the same since the murder of his partner in the line of duty, and not even a brief fling with the partner's widow Michelle (Kim Cattrall) made things any better. That was three years ago, and now the same Satanic serial killer who killed his partner is back (we know this because "I'm back!" is tauntingly written in blood at a murder scene), offing victims, ripping out their hearts, and sometimes eating them. Stone ("I work alone!") is teamed with dweeby, brainy new partner Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan) in a classic "...if they don't kill each other first!" mismatch, but they gradually bond amidst constant ballbusting and quotable dialogue. The body count continues to rise, there's something about the murders taking place at the start of the new moon when the tide is highest, and the killer is some kind of ten-foot-tall supernatural creature that's able to absorb the DNA of its victims both dead and surviving, which explains why Stone has developed a psychic connection to it, having been scratched and left scarred in a confrontation years earlier.
SPLIT SECOND's wild plot developments have a pretty obvious "making it up as they go along" aura, but Hauer and Duncan are such a great team that you can't help but roll with whatever bullshit the filmmakers throw at you (there's a scene where they're jawing at each other as Duncan breaks and Hauer starts grinning but keeps it together, and they just left it in, and you know what? It's perfect). They bust each other's chops, they get chewed out by their blustering boss Thrasher (Alun Armstrong as Bob Hoskins as Frank McRae), and Stone has a perfect foil in asshole, desk jockey precinct adversary Paulsen (a pre-mainstream success Pete Postlethwaite), which generates some amazing shouting throughout, particularly during one epic rant from Armstrong. Duncan's manic, Roy Scheider-like freakout after a near-fatal encounter with the creature ("We need bigger guns!") got a lot of laughs in the theater, as did any number of zingers like "Zip up, Dick," Stone's coffee-stirring staredown with Paulsen, and his incredulous reactions to Durkin's repeated boasting about how much he gets laid and how he manages to work it into the conversation ("You read these?" Stone asks, seeing books on demonology and astrology in Durkin's car, with Durkin deadpanning "Yeah, last night. After sex"). In a perfect world, SPLIT SECOND would've been a huge hit and Hauer and Duncan would've teamed up as Stone and Durkin for at least two sequels in the future London dystopia version of the LETHAL WEAPON franchise.
It all leads to a showdown in the ruins of the London Underground, where Stone and Durkin are taken by the reluctant Rat Catcher (Michael J. Pollard, cast once again as "Michael J. Pollard"). Pollard shows up 75 minutes into the 91-minute film, and everything from his first appearance through the gory climactic showdown in the abandoned subway station was directed by Sharp after Maylam left. SPLIT SECOND was one of only a handful of titles released by the short-lived InterStar Releasing, a company whose fate was pretty much sealed when they kicked things off with 1991's universally-loathed HIGHLANDER 2: THE QUICKENING. SPLIT SECOND was InterStar's fourth and final release, the other two in between being Keith Gordon's acclaimed A MIDNIGHT CLEAR and the Christopher Lambert/Diane Lane chess thriller KNIGHT MOVES (why isn't that on Blu-ray?). A quality edition of SPLIT SECOND has been hard to come by, but that situation's been remedied with the new Blu-ray from MVD (because physical media is dead), which includes a ton of interviews with Duncan (who now goes by Alastair Duncan) and several crew members, some vintage behind-the-scenes footage and, as an additional bonus, a standard-def transfer of the 96-minute Japanese release which restores Roberta Eaton's performance as Durkin's oft-mentioned girlfriend, which was cut from the film everywhere else in the world even though her name is still in every version, even with an "introducing" credit!
SOLDIER BLUE (US - 1970) Directed by Ralph Nelson. Written by John Gay. Cast: Candice Bergen, Peter Strauss, Donald Pleasence, John Anderson, Jorge Rivero, Dana Elcar, James Hampton, Mort Mills, Bob Carraway, Martin West, Jorge Russek, Aurora Clavell. (R, 115 mins) A revisionist western inspired by the 1864 Sand Creek massacre in the Colorado Territory that also tries to be a then-topical Vietnam allegory, Ralph Nelson's SOLDIER BLUE was a controversial misfire in the summer of 1970 (though its theme song by Indigenous Canadian singer/songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie became a big hit in the UK) and despite some positive critical reassessment and an inevitable cult following over the ensuing 50 years, it hasn't really improved with age. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), SOLDIER BLUE generated some buzz at the time of its release for its sickeningly violent climax, with a cavalry attack on a Cheyenne tribe so gory and over-the-top it that out-splatters THE WILD BUNCH and goes several steps beyond, with heads blown apart, limbs hacked off, children being decapitated, trampled, and/or impaled, a Cheyenne woman gang-raped and getting her left breast sliced off, and a laundry list of other unmentionables in a seemingly endless barrage of atrocities that remains shocking today and seems more in line with an Italian jungle exploitation grinder. That the perpetrators are American soldiers attacking "savages" is a salient point that directly invokes both Sand Creek and the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. The finale of SOLDIER BLUE needed to be as difficult to watch as it is, certainly one of the most disturbing depictions of historical carnage ever seen in a mainstream American film, but it's such a tedious buildup in a generally standard western that the abrupt shift in tone seems like a tacked-on afterthought. Imagine if you can a pre-WILD BUNCH Hollywood western that feels like it was started by Henry Hathaway and finished by Ruggero Deodato.
A cavalry escorting military fiancee Cresta Marybelle Lee (Candice Bergen) across the Colorado Territory to her husband-to-be is attacked by the Cheyenne warriors of the feared Spotted Wolf (Jorge Rivero). The only survivors are Cresta and Private Honus Gant (Peter Strauss), who must make their way across the harsh terrain to the safety of her fiance Lt. Johnny McNair's (Bob Carraway) unit at Fort Battalion. Along the way, they brave the elements, deal with a shortage of food and water, have a run-in with Kiowa tribesmen, and encounter a duplicitous trader named Isaac Q. Cumber (Donald Pleasence), who's been getting rich by selling military weapons to various tribes. Complicating matters is that the headstrong, independent Cresta sympathizes with the "savages" and spent two years married to Spotted Wolf. Of course, she and Gant will develop feelings for one another, but there's a lot of bickering and arguing along the way, with the brash, vulgar, uninhibited Cresta and the fussy, whiny, uptight Gant turning into the stars of a mismatched "...if they don't kill each other first!" buddy movie as he expresses continued dismay at her behavior while she derisively refers to him as "Soldier Blue" for his naive, puritanical ways.
The opening attack on Gant's cavalry unit is well-choreographed and features some attention-getting Peckinpah-esque bloodletting, with a memorable shot of a bullet ripping through the cheek of Gant's clownish best friend Private Menzies (James Hampton). But the opening and closing sequences are tonally at odds with everything in the sluggish middle. Bergen and Strauss (in just his second film after his 1969 debut as Michael Douglas' younger brother in HAIL, HERO) both deliver seriously grating performances, with Bergen's especially feeling much too 1970 counterculture to work in an 1864 period setting (when John Anderson's psychopathic colonel sees Cresta and harumphs "When I see young people today behaving like that, I just can't help but wonder what this goddamn country's coming to," the point is a little too on-the-nose). Strauss' Gant is one of the least-appealing western genre heroes you'll ever see, and it's little wonder that SOLDIER BLUE began and effectively ended his career as a big-screen leading man. He next did Sergio Grieco's obscure 1971 Italian desert adventure MAN OF LEGEND before embarking on a successful TV career, vying with Richard Chamberlain for the "King of the Miniseries" title with must-see blockbusters like 1976's RICH MAN, POOR MAN and its 1978 sequel, and 1981's MASADA, along with an Emmy-winning turn in the 1979 TV-movie THE JERICHO MILE, the directing debut of Michael Mann. Strauss only made occasional appearances in feature films for the next two decades (1976's THE LAST TYCOON, 1983's SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE) before aging into the character actor phase of his career in the late '90s and into the '00s. Now 73, Strauss remains busy, and was most recently spotted in multiplexes in a supporting role in 2018's OPERATION FINALE and he guest-starred on a February 2020 episode of GREY'S ANATOMY.
Perhaps SOLDIER BLUE needed a more risk-taking director than Nelson, a high-end journeyman who directed Sidney Poitier and Cliff Robertson to Best Actor Oscars in 1963's LILIES OF THE FIELD and 1968's CHARLY, respectively. Nelson was a top television director in the 1950s and generally took whatever big-screen assignment came his way, whether it was the 1964 Cary Grant comedy FATHER GOOSE, the 1966 Poitier/James Garner western DUEL AT DIABLO, or the 1976 Rock Hudson sci-fi/horror outing EMBRYO. SOLDIER BLUE has some valid points to make and the comparison between Sand Creek and My Lai is a legitimate one, but it needed someone with vision to properly pull it off. Nelson was a go-to "get it in the can" director, but at a time when American cinema was at a crossroads with the New Hollywood era being ushered in by the auteurist likes of BONNIE AND CLYDE and EASY RIDER, SOLDIER BLUE struggles to find its identity. It seems to have one foot in the formulaic, old-fashioned John Wayne westerns of the past and one in the post-WILD BUNCH "Bloody Sam"-style of the present and future. As a result, it never reconciles those discrepancies and ends up working at cross purposes. It's a western with a score by Roy Budd that invokes the grandiose majesty of a composer like Dimitri Tiomkin (HIGH NOON, GIANT), but it doesn't gel with off-the-charts levels of graphic violence and gory atrocities so extreme that it's legitimately surprising that the film somehow managed to avoid an X rating. Nowhere is that inability to settle on a tone more apparent than in Pleasence's unthreatening, almost comic-relief secondary bad guy, complete with his silly name and a set of ludicrous fake teeth to make him even more buffoonish. No politically-charged Vietnam-era allegory that features gang rape, breast mutilation, realistic scalpings, copious amounts of horse-tripping, and children being decapitated, impaled, and trampled as buckets of blood splash across the screen in one stomach-turning shot after another should include a total goofball character named "Isaac Q. Cumber."
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR (US - 1987) Directed by Terry J. Leonard. Written by John Gatliff and Lawrence Kubik. Cast: Fred Dryer, Brian Keith, Joanna Pacula, Paul Winfield, Mohamad Bakri, Kasey Walker, Joey Gian, Peter Parros, Sasha Mitchell, Rockne Tarkington, Tuvia Tavi, Yossi Ashdot, Jullianno Merr, Dan Chodos, Haim Geraffi. (R, 95 mins) "Go home, Sergeant. Bury your dead and go home. This isn't your war."
"It is now."
Released in the spring of 1987, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was New World's attempt to get a piece of the Reagan Era's "America! Fuck yeah!" flag-waving counterterrorism action so jingoistic that it made THE DELTA FORCE look like a Costa-Gavras film. One of the most Cannon-esque '80s actioners that Cannon somehow didn't make, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was the lone big screen starring vehicle for former New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams defensive end Fred Dryer, then in the midst of a successful run as the title character on the NBC cop show HUNTER. A 13-season NFL vet who remains the only player to score two safeties in one game, Dryer was 34 when he retired from football in 1981 and, like many of his contemporaries inspired by the likes of Jim Brown and Fred Williamson some years earlier (Joe Namath, O.J. Simpson, Alex Karras, Dick Butkus, Bubba Smith, etc), parlayed that gridiron success into an acting career. He nabbed some supporting role in a few TV-movies and in 1982, was almost cast as Sam Malone on CHEERS before Ted Danson ultimately won the role (Dryer did appear in several episodes as one of Sam's buddies from his baseball days). But it was HUNTER that proved to be his breakout acting gig, with Dryer perfectly cast as a tough, plays-by-his-own-rules cop with the obligatory DIRTY HARRY-inspired catchphrase ("Works for me!"). DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR was developed specifically for Dryer by his HUNTER producer Lawrence Kubik, but despite the show's popularity during this period, the audience didn't follow Dryer to the multiplex. The film opened in seventh place and was out of the top ten its second week.
Just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR proved a durable video store and cable favorite in the late '80s, but amidst the RAMBO and Chuck Norris movies that came out around the same time, it's more or less fallen through the cracks over time. Dryer relies a lot on his HUNTER persona as Gunnery Sgt. Jack Burns, a hardass Marine who's tough with those under his command but also doesn't shy away from occasional camaraderie and goofing off. He's all business when base commander--and his dad's Korean War buddy--Col. Halloran (Brian Keith) is dispatched as a defense attache to the fictional Middle Eastern country of Jemal (the film was shot in Israel), which the US government has been arming in their fight against terrorist insurgents. Burns and some of his men are sent along as Halloran's security detail, and Burns immediately ruffles some feathers and almost causes an international incident when he intervenes in a weapons hijacking by Arab insurgents led by the nefarious and not-very-subtly-named Jihad (Rockne Tarkington) and his associates Gavril (Mohamad Bakri) and Maude Winter (Kasey Walker, Kubik's wife at the time), a pair of international terrorists-for-hire. Burns blows up one of their getaway Jeeps with a rocket launcher, killing several Jihad followers, prompting spineless US Ambassador to Jemal Virgil Morgan (Paul Winfield) to order him to stand down. Of course, Jihad wants revenge for his murdered men, so he orchestrates the kidnapping of Halloran and his driver Sgt. Ramirez (Joey Gian) hostage, demanding the release of his imprisoned comrades in exchange.
Needless to say, Burns has neither the time nor the patience for Morgan's dithering brand of diplomacy--especially after the US embassy in Jemal is destroyed in a suicide bombing--and he becomes a virtual one-man Delta Force in his pursuit of Jihad, Gavril, and Maude. Caught in the middle is Elli Bauman (Joanna Pacula), an embedded Israeli photojournalist who's caused some controversy for her stance as a Jihad sympathizer, but has information that Burns needs. The lone directing effort to date for veteran stuntman and stunt coordinator Terry J. Leonard (still active in the industry today at 79, and whose plethora of credits date back to the 1963 John Wayne western MCLINTOCK!), DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR doesn't disappoint in the action and explosion department, and even more so than most similar Cannon titles of the time, the violence is pretty over-the-top, whether it's a shot of splattered chunks of brain sliding down a wall, or Jihad's men taking a large power drill to Halloran's left hand. The politics are such that Dryer makes Chuck Norris look like Bernie Sanders, and the casting of blaxploitation actor Tarkington (BLACK SAMSON) as an Arab terrorist and TV character actor Dan Chodos (who played a few different bit characters on HUNTER) in brownface as a would-be despot named "Amin" are decisions that have "canceled" written all over them. But DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR is a product of another time, and taken on its own terms as a brain-dead, flag-draped '80s action movie, it's entertaining enough that it's a surprise Dryer didn't at least have a career as a lead in the world of straight-to-video.
HUNTER ended up running several more seasons before its cancellation in 1991. In 1995, Dryer starred as a cop-turned-private eye in the one-season syndicated series LAND'S END before concentrating on TV guest spots, TV movies, and an occasional supporting role in a DTV outing, like 1999's Roger Corman-produced actioner STRAY BULLET or 2000's Playboy-produced erotic thriller WARM TEXAS RAIN. HUNTER remained popular in syndication and NBC ended up doing a pair of reunion movies with Dryer and co-star Stepfanie Kramer in 2002 and 2003. That led to a 2003 revival of HUNTER--a good decade before the "TV series reboot" became a trendy thing--but lightning didn't strike twice and it was a ratings disaster, prompting NBC to pull the plug after just three episodes. Now 74, Dryer is a frequent guest on sports talk radio, particularly in the L.A. area where he remains an NFL legend, and as an outspoken conservative, he made the rounds on Fox News during the Colin Kaepernick controversy. He's still an occasional presence on TV, with guest spots on shows like AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D. and NCIS, and was most recently seen on the big screen in a supporting role in the 2018 TRANSFORMERS spinoff BUMBLEBEE.
DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR opening in Toledo, OH on 3/13/1987
THE CALLER (US - 1989) Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman. Written by Michael Sloan. Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Madolyn Smith. (R, 97 mins)
An Empire Pictures production that really only turns into something recognizably "Empire Pictures" in its last ten minutes, THE CALLER is a bizarre oddity that connoisseurs of '80s cult movies have pretty much kept to themselves. A dialogue-heavy two-hander mostly confined to a single set except for a couple of exteriors and one brief drive down a mountain road, THE CALLER was written by Michael Sloan, best known as the creator of the acclaimed 1980s CBS series THE EQUALIZER. In its style and structure, it plays a lot like a TV-movie, not surprising given that journeyman director Arthur Allan Seidelman has spent most of his long career as a small-screen hired gun (though he did helm Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1970 debut HERCULES IN NEW YORK). Shot in Rome at Empire's Italian studio, THE CALLER opens with an exterior supermarket parking lot set so blatantly phony that you might be inclined to think it's some Italian production design team's idea of a "normal American parking lot." Whether that's a happy accident that's taking advantage of an existing set is up for debate, but the artifice in these early scenes of THE CALLER is so pronounced that it creates such a sense of disconnect from reality that, eventually, it's quite clear that it's by design. That also extends to the staginess of the entire project, set almost entirely in a remote cabin that seems designed more for a Country Living photo spread than a place where one might actually live. An unnamed woman (Madolyn Smith) returns home from shopping after finding an abandoned car in the forest around her home. She appears to live alone, but there are framed photos all over the house indicating that she has (or had) a husband and a daughter who are presently nowhere to be found.
After a bizarre phone conversation with her daughter ("It's gonna be really fine...this time. You'll see. You're gonna be proud of Mommy...what Mommy's going to do!"), there's a knock on the door. The caller is a stranger (Malcolm McDowell) who's been following her since she was out shopping. He says his car broke down and he needs to call for a tow. The tone of their subsequent conversation indicates that they may or may not already know each other or at least he knows about her. They feel one another out in ways that are alternately friendly, flirtatious, interrogating, accusatory, and cruel. He wants to know where her husband and daughter are. He suspects she may have killed at least the husband. She accuses him of acting like characters in cliched TV cop shows. Whenever she gets the upper-hand in a line of questioning, he says "A point for you." They're playing head games with one another, but that doesn't explain what appears to be blood seeping from the bottom of a cake box from her shopping trip, or the discovery of a doll hanging from a noose in a locked closet, with each accusing the other of putting it there.
Mind you, this synopsis makes just as much sense watching it play out as it does reading it. The artifice of the production design, along with the jarring tonal shifts, and the stilted acting, particularly by Smith, combine for a frequently off-putting effect but rest assured, it's all intentional. Things don't become any clearer after a fade to black around the midpoint, followed by the two of them crossing paths once again the next morning in the supermarket parking lot, with McDowell suddenly dressed like he just blew through a gift card from Bass Pro Shops. And there's never anyone else around (she stops at a gas station in the beginning of the film and leaves money on the pump when she can't find an attendant). Given Sloan's roots in television (he also created the short-lived Lee Van Cleef NBC ninja series THE MASTER), THE CALLER feels an awful lot like it should've been an episode of the '80s TWILIGHT ZONE revival, especially with what transpires in the absolutely bonkers climax. There's a good idea here, but it's a 30-to-45-minute TV episode idea that just becomes repetitive and tiresome as a feature-length film. That is, until it goes completely berserk in the last ten minutes. Given how it pans out, THE CALLER, just out on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome (because physical media is dead), might be a rare example of a twist-ending film that plays better on a second viewing, when you know how it ends and can watch for all the hints along the way. Smith's mannered, erratic performance certainly makes a lot more sense once you know the big reveal. The film itself still may not make much sense by the end, and its an extremely laborious set-up getting there, but you can't help but admire its go-for-broke audacity and its off-the-charts WTF? factor. THE CALLER was shot in late 1986, but aside from a 1987 Cannes screening and another festival in Italy that summer, its release was stalled by Empire's financial troubles and eventual bankruptcy prior to its 1989 rebirth as Full Moon Entertainment. They sold a number of titles to various other distributors, and THE CALLER ended up with Trans World Entertainment, who gave it a belated straight-to-video at the tail end of 1989.
ALPHABET CITY (US - 1984) Directed by Amos Poe. Written by Gregory K. Heller, Amos Poe and Robert Seidman. Cast: Vincent Spano, Michael Winslow, Kate Vernon, Jami Gertz, Zohra Lampert, Ray Serra, Kenny Marino, Daniel Jordano, Tom Mardirosian, Tom Wright, Clifton Powell, Martine Malle, Harry Madsen, Alex Stevens, Christina Marie Denihan. (R, 85 mins) One of the more mainstream offerings in the short-lived "No Wave Cinema" movement that began in the Lower East Side and the East Village in the late '70s, ALPHABET CITY didn't really make a dent outside of NYC when Atlantic released it in theaters over the spring and summer of 1984, but its location shooting in parts of the city that no longer exist make it a vital snapshot of a bygone era. That's the primary reason for its current rebirth as a cult movie, and its standing as the inaugural Blu-ray release of the new Vinegar Syndrome offshoot Fun City Editions, because physical media is dead. Having first received attention in the scene with the 1976 punk chronicle THE BLANK GENERATION, ALPHABET CITY director/co-writer Amos Poe was one of the key figures in No Wave, along with Beth B (VORTEX), Susan Seidelman (SMITHEREENS), Lizzie Borden (BORN IN FLAMES), Eric Mitchell (UNDERGROUND U.S.A.), and Kathryn Bigelow (THE LOVELESS). Seidelman and Bigelow went on to successful mainstream careers, while filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo and actors such as Willem Dafoe, Viggo Mortensen, Steve Buscemi, and Vincent Gallo also had connections to No Wave in their early days.
The most famous film associated with the No Wave Cinema is arguably Slava Tsukerman's 1983 cult classic LIQUID SKY, but by the time ALPHABET CITY came out, the movement was winding down and its major players were either gravitating toward art and music or, in the case of Seidelman with DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, opting to play the Hollywood game. With ALPHABET CITY, Poe has one foot in the mainstream and the other in the East Village, and the end result has the gritty immediacy of early Abel Ferrara while perhaps somewhat lacking when it comes to a momentum-driven narrative, which is at odds with the urgency of its antihero's predicament. On the cusp of becoming a Next Big Thing after RUMBLE FISH and BABY, IT'S YOU, Vincent Spano stars as Johnny, a successful young drug dealer given control of his Alphabet City neighborhood by powerful crime boss Gino (Ray Serra). Only just out of his teens but wielding much respect and power, Johnny has it made, driving a flashy Firebird (personalized license plate: "CHUNGA"), and living in a spacious loft with his artist fiancee Angie (Kate Vernon) and their infant daughter. But he's secretly been plotting a way out, and that time comes when Gino orders him to torch a dilapidated tenement to clear the way for some lucrative real-estate deals. It happens to be the tenement where he grew up and where his mother (Zohra Lampert) and would-be high-class call girl sister Sophia (Jami Gertz) still live. He can't talk them into leaving, so he spends the night cruising around the neighborhood tying up all loose business ends before taking his cash, his car, and Angie and the baby and disappearing. But Gino has eyes and ears all over the East Village and making a clean getaway won't be easy.
Essentially a "survive the night" scenario, ALPHABET CITY is curiously meandering once the plot is set in motion. Poe doesn't really establish much in the way of suspense, but where the film excels in the way it nails the sights and sounds of the East Village in 1984. It's a highly-stylized look with an unmistakable music video aesthetic--one almost has to think that the GOOD TIME and UNCUT GEMS directing team of the Safdie Brothers are fans--with rain-slicked streets, neon, garish lighting and colorgasms out of a Mario Bava film, shadows, tunnels, and Dutch angles inspired by THE THIRD MAN, and much of the action taking place in some dangerously seedy parts of Alphabet City. One standout is a long sequence in a vacant, bombed-out tenement that's been turned into a drug den overseen by Johnny and his right-hand man Lippy (POLICE ACADEMY's Michael Winslow) who, unlike the all-business Johnny, has spent too much time getting high on their own supply. Poe shot the film with a small crew over 24 nights (Spano is interviewed on the Blu-ray, and mentions lunch was at 2:00 am), and it vividly captures the time and the place, whether it's the fashions, the soundtrack by Nile Rodgers, some guys breakdancing outside of a nightclub, or even a Menudo bumper sticker plastered on a wall (Paul Morrissey's 1985 film MIXED BLOOD, another crime thriller set and shot in and around Alphabet City, would prominently feature a bloody shootout in Menuditis, the official Menudo store).
Poe also captures the mood of the period in real time, showing how the writing was already on the wall with gentrification, or the way that AIDS--not mentioned by name--was wreaking havoc, with Johnny admonishing Sophia to find another line of work because "too many girls are getting sick." Never mind that his own shooting gallery is filled with hopeless addicts and shared needles, with one well-dressed guy forced to show his track marks at the entrance to prove he isn't a narc. To that end, ALPHABET CITY, for all its narrative wishy-washiness and genre cliches (of course, his embittered mother knows what he does for a living and refuses any of his "dirty money"), remains a fascinating time capsule. Poe went on to a brief career directing music videos, most notably Animotion's "Obsession," Run-D.M.C.'s "You Talk Too Much," and Anthrax's "Madhouse." An odd outlier in his filmography came when he scripted the 1988 family drama ROCKET GIBRALTAR, starring Burt Lancaster in one of his last films and Macaulay Culkin in his first. Poe also gave Philip Seymour Hoffman his first movie role in his 1992 indie TRIPLE BOGEY ON A PAR FIVE HOLE. Other mainstream efforts include the 1995 Showtime sci-fi thriller DEAD WEEKEND and 1998's FROGS FOR SNAKES, but the now-71-year-old Poe's post-No Wave work has largely concentrated on documentaries and short films.
ALPHABET CITY opening in Toledo, OH on a busy 6/22/1984
BLUE MONKEY (Canada - 1987) Directed by William Fruet. Written by George Goldsmith. Cast: Steve Railsback, Gwynyth Walsh, John Vernon, Susan Anspach, Joe Flaherty, Robin Duke, Don Lake, Helen Hughes, Sandy Webster, Joy Coghill, Stuart Stone, Sarah Polley, Peter Van Wart, Cynthia Belliveau, Philip Akin, Dan Lett, Michael J. Reynolds, Ivan E. Roth. (R, 96 mins) A cult classic due almost entirely to its ridiculous title, 1987's BLUE MONKEY is a low-budget Canadian monster movie that's a blatant response to the previous year's box-office smash ALIENS and, to a lesser extent, David Cronenberg's remake of THE FLY. A staple of any self-respecting video store back in the day, BLUE MONKEY has been MIA in the modern era but has just resurfaced on Blu-ray from Code Red offshoot Dark Force (the print used has the alternate title INSECT), because physical media is dead. It's moderately entertaining trash if approached with realistic expectations, with plenty of slime, ooze, and general grossness to go along with some generally well-done practical creature FX. It's got an eclectic mix of American and Canadian faces and an energetic score by Patrick Coleman and Paul Novotny that would be right at home in something from Empire Pictures. And it boasts a fine cult B-movie pedigree with a script by FORCE: FIVE and CHILDREN OF THE CORN screenwriter George Goldsmith and reliable Canuxploitation director William Fruet (THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE, FUNERAL HOME, SPASMS, BEDROOM EYES) at the helm, guided by executive producer Sandy Howard, a noted purveyor of '80s exploitation who bankrolled hits like VICE SQUAD and ANGEL.
Released in the fall of 1987 by the short-lived Spectrafilm, BLUE MONKEY opens with elderly handyman Fred (Sandy Webster) flirting with sweet old Marwella (Helen Hughes) before being bitten by an insect hiding in one of her plants. He's rushed to the local hospital where he loses consciousness just as a worm-like parasite slithers out of his mouth. At the same time, intense, on-the-edge cop Bishop (intense, on-the-edge Steve Railsback) arrives with his partner (Peter Van Wart), who's just been shot during a stakeout. Soon, the paramedics who brought in Fred fall ill and the parasite is moved to a lab while the ER's Dr. Carson (Gwynyth Walsh) and Dr. Glass (Susan Anspach) wait for the arrival of renowned entomologist Dr. Jacobs (Don Lake). When horny nurse Alice (Cynthia Belliveau) is left in charge of watching the secured parasite but sneaks off with douchebag orderly Ted (Dan Lett), a quartet of adorable ragamuffins from the pediatric ward (including an eight-year-old Sarah Polley in one of her earliest credits) sneak into the lab and pour a chemical on the parasite that causes it to grow and mutate, escaping from the lab and hiding in the basement boiler room. With the parasitic virus infecting the hospital, the health department orders the entire building closed and the people in it quarantined, much to the chagrin of bloviating hospital director Levering (John Vernon, cast radically against type as "John Vernon"). This also makes for a long night, as the growing and rapidly spawning, hermaphrodite creature (played by Ivan E. Roth) periodically pops up to snatch victims to use as incubators for its asexually-produced eggs, with Jacobs predicting there could be an untold number of these creatures in the hospital by morning.
Originally set to be released as GREEN MONKEY, as if that makes a difference, BLUE MONKEY has an OK set-up and third act, but the midsection is filled with an awful lot of ass-dragging, with people endlessly wandering around dark corridors or heading to the boiler room to watch the creature lay its eggs. The kids run around the hospital and cause trouble, and unfunny comic relief is provided by usually reliable SCTV stars Joe Flaherty and Robin Duke (also an SNL vet) as the Bakers, dorky expectant parents who show up to deliver the baby even though she isn't in labor yet, but obnoxious Mr. Baker's scientific calculations have determined that today is the day. Anspach's promising early '70s career (FIVE EASY PIECES, BLUME IN LOVE) had pretty much flamed out by the time she was turning up in stuff like BLUE MONKEY, and neither she nor Vernon have very much to do as both vanish for long stretches, perhaps pleading with their respective agents to get them some more reputable gigs.
Railsback is typically Railsbackian, a quirky actor who was briefly the Nicolas Cage of his day after his mesmerizing performance as Charles Manson in the hugely popular 1976 CBS miniseries HELTER SKELTER. That led to the title role opposite Peter O'Toole in 1980's highly-acclaimed, Oscar-nominated THE STUNT MAN, but beyond that, 1980s Hollywood never really could figure out what to do with him. Railsback was a promising actor who just came off as too twitchy and weird to make it as an A-list leading man, like a Christopher Walken or a Jeff Goldblum minus the eccentric sense of humor and the winking self-awareness. Even when he's playing the hero in BLUE MONKEY, he manages to look like a creep in physical pain when he's goofing off with the kids. Railsback had a long run in cult movies throughout the '80s--Brian Trenchard-Smith's ESCAPE 2000 and Tobe Hooper's LIFEFORCE being the standouts--and he did manage one more critically-acclaimed performance in the 1985 cocaine addiction drama TORCHLIGHT, but by 1987, BLUE MONKEY was typical of the kind of B-movie and straight-to-video gigs he was getting. In the '90s, he would occasionally land supporting roles in major releases like IN THE LINE OF FIRE, BARB WIRE, and DISTURBING BEHAVIOR, and managed to channel some of that Manson insanity when he landed the title role in the barely-released 2001 indie ED GEIN. Now 74, Railsback works much less frequently these days, most recently appearing in an apparently unreleased 2019 horror movie called IT WANTS BLOOD! with such convention luminaries as Eric Roberts, Felissa Rose, Ola Ray, Tuesday Knight, and Brinke Stevens.
AENIGMA (Italy/Yugoslavia - 1987) Directed by Lucio Fulci. Written by Giorgio Mariuzzo and Lucio Fulci. Cast: Jared Martin, Lara Naszinski, Ulli Reinthaler, Kathi Wise, Riccardo Acerbi, Sophie D'Aulan, Jennifer Naud, Mijlijana Zirojevic, Dragan Ejelogrlic, Lijlijana Blagojevic, Franciska Spahic, Dusica Zagaric, Lucio Fulci. (Unrated, 89 mins) Having exhausted everything there is to say about Lucio Fulci's early '70s gialli and his trailblazing 1979-1982 gore galore glory days, cult film scholars have reached the point in Fulciology studies where it's time to begin re-examining his much-maligned late-period of 1986-1991. Peak Fulci came to a close after his falling out with producer Fabrizio De Angelis during the making of 1982's underappreciated MANHATTAN BABY, but he did some decent journeyman work on 1983's CONQUEST and the 1984 films THE NEW GLADIATORS and the FLASHDANCE-inspired slasher MURDER ROCK. Health issues kept Fulci sidelined through the rest of 1984 and all of 1985, and 1986's erotic thriller THE DEVIL'S HONEY was the start of what's considered "latter-day Fulci." Aside from gory throwbacks like 1988's ZOMBI 3 (which he left midway through production, citing health concerns, and the film was finished by an uncredited Bruno Mattei) and TOUCH OF DEATH and 1990's meta, self-referential CAT IN THE BRAIN, this period was almost completely dismissed by all but the most devout Fulciphiles. Other than THE DEVIL'S HONEY turning up in US video stores in 1991 as DANGEROUS OBSESSION, none of these later Fulcis made it to America until the post-2000 Eurocult DVD explosion after years of only able to be seen stateside via bootlegs and gray market means. But as the '00s kicked off, all of the late-period Fulci titles began appearing on DVD, courtesy of labels like Shriek Show, Image Entertainment, and Severin. And for the most part, they were as bad as we'd heard during that previous decade where they were difficult to see. None of these films are essential Fulci, but some indeed have their charms and deliver the gory goods, even if they lack the polish and financial backing that he was getting during his heyday. A pair of these later Fulci titles--1987's AENIGMA and 1990's DEMONIA--have just been given 4K restorations and are out on Blu-ray from Severin (because physical media is dead), and while neither are where any Fulci newbie should begin their exploration, they're both worth second looks for the die-hards.
Playing like a bizarre mash-up of CARRIE, JENNIFER, PATRICK, and Dario Argento's PHENOMENA, AENIGMA opens at the fictional St. Mary's College in Boston--though at no point does this Beantown look like anything other than Sarajevo, where this Italian/Yugoslavian co-production was shot--with a group of students, along with lecherous gym instructor Fred (Riccardo Acerbi) plotting a cruel prank on shy, awkward Kathy (Mijlijana Zirojevic). This results in Kathy being run over by a car and left brain-dead on life support at a local hospital, where she's looked after by neurologist Dr. Anderson (requisite American export value Jared Martin, best known for his recurring role as J.R. Ewing nemesis Dusty Farlow on DALLAS). Meanwhile, new transfer student Eva (A BLADE IN THE DARK's Lara Naszinski, niece of Klaus Kinski) gets settled into St. Mary's as she recovers from a nervous breakdown, though she soon becomes a sort-of psychic conduit of Kathy who, with the help of her occasionally glowing-red-eyed mother and school maid "Crazy Mary" (Dusika Zagaric), uses Eva to enact vengeance upon her tormentors.
When you think of Lucio Fulci set pieces, you probably go to the shark vs. zombie clash or the eye-splinter scene in ZOMBIE or maybe the intestine-barfing or drill-through-the-head scenes in THE GATES OF HELL or the razor blade-through-the-nipple bit in THE NEW YORK RIPPER. AENIGMA offers its own memorable sequence with the awesomely gross "death by snails" suffered by Virginia (Kathi Wise), who's eventually covered head-to-toe by snails and slugs in her bed. Fred is attacked by a double that materializes out of a mirror where he's admiring himself and his death is written off as a heart attack, while others are killed by a statue come to life or decapitated, or thrown from a window. Eva--enacting the desires of the comatose Kathy--seduces Dr. Anderson, and their constant fooling around makes Eva's roommate Jenny (Ulli Reinthaler) a third wheel. That is, at least until Eva has another breakdown and gets committed, after which Dr. Anderson starts sleeping with Jenny. Almost all of the characters in AENIGMA are varying degrees of shitty, with horrible teacher Drop Dead Fred and lecherous would-be sugar daddy Dr. Anderson really lowering the bar on male authority figures one should be able to look up to.
AENIGMA isn't top-shelf Fulci by any means, but after many years away from it, it has its entertainment value, even if some if it comes in the form of unintentional laughs, be they the Yugoslavian prop team's attempt at Massachusetts license plates, a shot of a miniature cityscape that could pass as a Lego "Antonio Margheriti Action Playset," the theme song "Head Over Heels" being listed as "Head Over Meels" in the opening credits, or a poster of Yoda on Jenny's wall demonstrating that Fulci really had his finger on the pulse of dorm life for late '80s American college girls. There's also the clarity of HD revealing oopsies like the timing of a red-filtered light during an overhead shot of an oil-slicked Martin/Naszinski sex scene offering a view of Naszinski that's perhaps a bit more proctological than anyone intended. But as it stands, AENIGMA is a not-bad second-tier offering from the waning days of Italian horror. It was produced by corner-cutting Ettore Spagnuolo, who spent most of the second half of the '80s trying to turn Harrison Muller into an action star in films like THE VIOLENT BREED and GETTING EVEN. Spagnuolo managed to get known names at cheap prices, like Henry Silva for THE VIOLENT BREED and Richard Roundtree for GETTING EVEN, but despite his visibility on DALLAS and other American TV shows going back to the late '60s (with requisite stops on FANTASY ISLAND and THE LOVE BOAT), Martin, who didn't even stick around to dub himself, wasn't enough to secure any kind of US distribution deal for AENIGMA, which didn't legitimately appear in America until it was released on DVD by Image Entertainment in the summer of 2001.
DEMONIA (Italy - 1990) Directed by Lucio Fulci. Written by Piero Regnoli and Lucio Fulci. Cast: Brett Halsey, Meg Register, Carla Cassola, Lino Salemme, Christina Engelhardt, Pascal Druant, Grady Thomas Clarkson, Ettore Comi, Michael J. Aronin, Al Cliver, Isabella Corradini, Paola Cozzo, Bruna Rossi, Paola Calati, Antonio Melillo, Francesco Cusimano, Lucio Fulci. (Unrated, 89 mins) Like AENIGMA and most other latter-day Fulci, DEMONIA was a staple of the bootleg VHS circuit in the '90s, finally getting a legit US release when Shriek Show released it on DVD in 2001. It was lumped in with the generally dismissed stretch of product that Fulci was cranking out, like THE HOUSE OF CLOCKS, THE SWEET HOUSE OF HORRORS, and what most consider his worst horror film, SODOMA'S GHOST. And like AENIGMA, time has been kind to DEMONIA while still being unquestionably lesser Fulci. Much of that is due to the presentation on Severin's Blu-ray, which really makes both of these films look better than they ever have. Both have that sort-of "gauzy" look that was common with a lot of Italian horror of that time, particularly the product coming off of Joe D'Amato's Filmirage assembly line, but DEMONIA's outdoor scenes--the film was shot on location at Sicily's Capo Bianco and at the San Pellegrino monastery in nearby Caltabellotta--really benefit from the 4K restoration and help at least those portions of the film look a lot better than most of the stuff that was being bankrolled by budget-conscious producer Ettore Spagnuolo.
A frequently nonsensical mix of Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH, Marcello Avallone's SPECTERS, with a little of John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS, with some bonus nunsploitation thrown in for good measure, DEMONIA deals with a team of Canadian archaeology students led by Prof. Evans (veteran American actor Brett Halsey, a late-period Fulci regular at this point after THE DEVIL'S HONEY and TOUCH OF DEATH) on a dig in Sicily. The locals, led by pissed-off butcher Turi (Lino Salemme from the DEMONS movies), don't want them there, but they proceed with their work anyway. The dig has a profound effect on student Liza (Meg Register), who takes part in seances (a shout-out to Catriona MacColl's character in THE GATES OF HELL) and believes in all manner of psychic hooey despite Evans reminding her that she's a scientist. Liza explores the dig on her own and finds a walled-off crypt with the skeletal remains of five crucified nuns. Lilla (Carla Cassola), the local medium--doesn't every superstitious village have one?--fulfills her Basil Exposition duty by informing Liza that in 1486, the five nuns were accused of holding orgies and committing deviant sexual acts in the nunnery after making a pact with Satan, prompting the villagers to crucify and execute them. The spirits of the five nuns now seek vengeance on the town and have established a psychic connection with Liza, which somewhat thematically ties it to the Kathy/Eva situation in AENIGMA. Various gory deaths ensue, including an Evans rival (Fulci stalwart Al Cliver of ZOMBIE, appearing here long enough to get spear-gunned by a topless apparition) whose decapitated head prompts an investigation by the local cops, represented by Lt. Andi (Michael J. Aronin) and his boss Inspector Carter, played by none other than Fulci himself in a prominent supporting role (dubbed by Robert Spafford) that gives him more screen time than his usual cameo.
DEMONIA has a lot of atmosphere in the foreboding catacombs and Fulci even breaks out a Steadicam for a show-offy tracking shot at one point. He also doesn't skimp on the gore--highlights a woman's eyes being clawed out by possessed cats and a graphic wishboning of one of Evans' team--though the shoddy effects are pulled off by the aptly-named Elio Terribili. Co-written by Fulci, Piero Regnoli (BURIAL GROUND), and an uncredited Antonio Tentori (CAT IN THE BRAIN), DEMONIA drags a bit in the middle before all hell breaks loose, and even taking the dubbing into account (no one voices themselves, not even Halsey, who's dubbed by Ted Rusoff), the performances seem stilted and awkward. That's not helped by scenes that drag on without going anywhere--there's a lot of padding to get DEMONIA to feature length, especially the time-killing way Aronin's Andi hems and haws in his prolonged and ultimately pointless confrontation with Halsey's Evans, then Fulci just cuts away and never wraps it up--and Salemme's character is underdeveloped, as Fulci kills him off before the villagers raid the excavation site with torches like an angry mob from an old Universal FRANKENSTEIN movie.
Halsey, who was groomed as a leading man back in the '50s but went to Europe in the '60s after it never panned out, remained a busy character actor who found himself back in Italy in the late '80s, appearing in three Fulci films (four if you count recycled footage in CAT IN THE BRAIN), along with others by the likes of Jess Franco, Antonio Margheriti, Luigi Cozzi, and Bruno Mattei, and the same year he starred in DEMONIA, he landed a supporting role as the second husband of Diane Keaton's Kay Corleone in THE GODFATHER PART III. Despite his long career in Hollywood and abroad, Halsey's name, like Jared Martin's with AENIGMA, wasn't enough to secure any interest in DEMONIA from US home video distributors, nor was Fulci's by that point. Though he looked better here than in his haggard appearance around the time of AENIGMA, Fulci's health would soon take another downturn. He only made two more films--VOICES FROM BEYOND and DOOR TO SILENCE, both in 1991--before being sidelined by diabetes and other related medical issues. He attempted a comeback when it was announced that he would write and direct THE WAX MASK, a HOUSE OF WAX redux produced by Dario Argento, but he died at the age of 68 shortly before production began in 1996. Argento handed THE WAX MASK off to Italian FX master Sergio Stivaletti, with a dedication to Fulci in the opening credits.
