BLACKkKLANSMAN (US - 2018) Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee. Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins, Robert John Burke, Michael Buscemi, Frederick Weller, Ken Garito, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin, Ryan Eggold, Jasper Paakkonen, Paul Walter Hauser, Ashlie Atkinson, Nicholas Turturro, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Danny Hoch, Arthur Nascarella, Brian Tarantina, Ryan Preimesberger. (R, 135 mins) As difficult as it may be to believe, Spike Lee's BLACKkKLANSMAN is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer hired by the Colorado Springs P.D. back in the 1970s, and the man who was instrumental in busting up a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. As a rookie hired mainly for show, Stallworth (BALLERS' John David Washington, son of frequent Lee star and close friend Denzel Washington) is immediately sent to the records department and generally dismissed and disrespected by his fellow officers. Looking for some meaningful police work, he jumps at the chance to go undercover at a rally hosted by Colorado College's black student union, welcoming civil rights leader Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), formerly known as the Black Panthers' Stokely Carmichael. Backed up by detectives Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) and Jimmy Creek (Michael Buscemi, Steve's look/soundalike younger brother), Ron doesn't see much more than rhetoric in Ture's call to arms, but he does make the acquaintance of Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), the "pig"-hating president of the black student union, though he keeps his job a secret.
Shortly after, spotting an ad for the local chapter of the KKK in the newspaper on a slow day in the squad room, Ron calls the number and pretends to be a white racist, inquiring for information about joining and, in a bad rookie mistake, giving his real name. Police chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) and Sgt. Trapp (Ken Garito) assign Ron to lead an undercover infiltration of the KKK, with Jewish Flip posing as "Ron Stallworth" while the real Ron coaches him and backs him up from a nearby location. As "Ron," Flip gathers intel by ingratiating himself with local chapter president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold) and his two chief underlings, hot-headed Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Paakkonen) and mouth-breathing moron Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser, who seems to be cornering the market on such characters between this and his role as the hapless Shawn Eckhardt in I, TONYA). The ruse can't last forever, especially with Felix's overwhelming suspicion that "Ron"/Flip looks "too Jewish" and when he looks up "Ron Stallworth" in the phone book and sees that a black man lives at the address. Ron and Flip always manage to cover themselves and explain away inconsistencies, whether it's Flip avoiding a Felix-administered lie detector test or the real Ron getting in the good graces of KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) over the phone. Tension soon escalates with Duke planning a visit to Colorado Springs for "Ron"'s initiation and Felix, Ivanhoe, and Felix's wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), who's desperate to be accepted as one of the guys, planning to bomb a civil rights demonstration organized by Patrice.
Co-produced by the GET OUT team of Blumhouse and Jordan Peele, BLACKkKLANSMAN is Lee's best narrative film in at least a decade, maybe since 2006's INSIDE MAN. Alternately edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, funny (the great Isiah Whitlock Jr. stops by long enough to drop his signature catchphrase), satirical, and biliously enraged, the film balances its moods perfectly and satisfies on all fronts, serving as a 1970s-set police procedural and as a bitter polemic about the current state of Donald Trump's America. It's no coincidence that the film was released on the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville tragedy, and Trump is invoked both in archival news footage and in the platitudes of Grace's sinister yet folksy ("You're darn tootin'!") David Duke, both in his political aspirations and his use of "America first" and the KKK"s background chatter of "making America great again." Lee even opens the film with a faux-editorial by fictional white supremacy advocate Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), whose disturbingly prophetic inflammatory hate speech sounds exactly like the Laura Ingraham diatribe that aired on Fox News just a couple of nights before the film's release. The riveting, kinetic third act balances the thwarting of an act of domestic terrorism along with a cross-cutting of "Ron"'s induction into the Klan and a celebratory viewing of D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION and Patrice and her fellow black students listening to a lecture by elderly activist Mr. Turner (Harry Belafonte) as he recounts the horrifying 1916 lynching, mutilation, and burning of Jesse Washington, itself inspired by the renewed interest in the Klan following the box-office success of Griffith's film, which was praised by none other then President Woodrow Wilson.
Lee's output has been wildly inconsistent in recent years. Small, crowdfunded indies like 2012's RED HOOK SUMMER and his 2015 horror film DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, a remake of the 1973 cult film GANJA AND HESS, were intermittently interesting curios at best, while his ill-advised 2013 remake of OLDBOY was a disaster that he disowned after the producers took it away from him in post-production (I haven't seen 2015's CHI-RAQ, which many praised as a return to form, or his barely-released, 2018 filmed play PASS OVER). But BLACKkKLANSMAN finds the 61-year-old auteur at a full fury on a level we haven't seen since DO THE RIGHT THING (or possibly BAMBOOZLED), a perfect mix of his commercial capabilities and his sociopolitical concerns. The cast is outstanding across the board, and over the course of its 135 minutes, a star is born with Washington, who turned to acting after his pro football career failed to pan out. His transformation into a leading man occurs with his character's growth over the film, and by the end, you'll absolutely see his dad in his performance. Dazzling from start to finish, and funny and frightening in equal measures, and with an utterly devastating final montage, BLACKkKLANSMAN immediately establishes itself as one of Lee's essential works and one of the best films of the year.
NIGHTMARE WEEKEND (US/UK/France - 1986) Directed by H. Sala (Henri Sala). Written by Georges Faget-Benard and Robert Seidman. Cast: Debbie Laster, Dale Midkiff, Debra Hunter, Robert Burke, Lori Lewis, Preston Maybank, Wellington Meffert, Kim Dossin, Andrea Thompson, Kimberley Stahl, Bruce Morton, Karen Mayo, Nick James, Dean Gates, Marc Gottlieb. (Unrated, 86 mins) PIECES. TROLL 2. MIAMI CONNECTION. THE ROOM. GETEVEN. There are bad movies and then there are bad movies that take the art of bad movies to another level of cinematic nirvana. Films made with sincerity but so misguided and thoroughly bizarre that they simply must be seen to be disbelieved. You can add 1986's NIGHTMARE WEEKEND to that by-no-means comprehensive list. Just out on Blu-ray (Blu-ray!) from the folks at Vinegar Syndrome, the insane NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is poised to break out as the next great Bad Movie sensation. A US-British-French co-production starring American actors and shot in Ocala, FL in 1984 by a French crew headed by a director who didn't speak English, couldn't communicate with his cast, and was primarily known for his work in French hardcore porn (helming such classics as S COMME SPERME and CLUB PORNO POUR CHATTES ENRAGEES), NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is so deliriously bonkers that it feels like a lost Jess Franco film, only somehow less coherent.
In the '80s, many European exploitation directors (Lucio Fulci with THE NEW YORK RIPPER, Enzo G. Castellari with 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS, Umberto Lenzi with EATEN ALIVE and CANNIBAL FEROX, and Romano Scavolini with NIGHTMARE all come to mind) would shoot in America, particularly NYC and usually without permits, and would deftly capture its mood and aura in an almost verite way, in ways that sanitized and secured Hollywood productions couldn't. Not so with Henri Sala, barely hiding behind the name "H. Sala." Whether it's his living in a porn bubble or his lack of fluency in English, his "America" of NIGHTMARE WEEKEND seems to work from a list of vague caricatures of 1980s America: Big hair? Check. Computers? Check. Sony Walkman? Check. Aerobics? Check. It demonstrates the kind of cultural tone deafness that runs rampant throughout PIECES (Kung-fu professor? Retired tennis pro-turned-cop going undercover as a tennis pro? Lead detective letting Cosby-sweater-wearing, Horshack-looking campus babe magnet take over the murder investigation?) and it's almost as funny. The communication breakdown between all involved parties is apparent in nearly every frame. NIGHTMARE WEEKEND seems like the pieces of at least three movies stitched together at random. Though it was shot with live sound, the audio was tossed for some reason, leading to the American actors--including three young up-and-comers and one Brit who would go onto varying levels of success in years to come--all being dubbed over by other voice actors, giving it a distinctly foreign vibe that only adds to its ludicrous charms. According to cast member and American co-producer Marc Gottlieb, who gave up acting after this movie and became a Wall Street lawyer, the French script by Georges Faget-Benard was rewritten multiple times, both by a credited Robert Seidman (a co-writer on 1984's ALPHABET CITY) and by an uncredited Gottlieb. No one had any idea what was going on, and it's obvious when you see the finished product. When the action cuts three times between one set of characters and two others in a sex scene, and the two actors in the sex scene go from 1) naked and fucking to 2) clothed and talking to 3) naked and fucking again, it's almost offensive that someone in the closing credits is actually credited with "continuity." You had one job, Christine Rondwasser.
The plot--and I use the term loosely--focuses on three college girls on a weekend getaway at a mansion where they're the unwitting subjects of a scientific experiment. A behavior-based computer program called "APACHE" has been developed by the respected Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert) but has been hijacked for nefarious purposes by his bitch-on-wheels assistant Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster). Clingstone has sad-sack hunk Ken (Dale Midkiff, a few years away from the NBC miniseries ELVIS & ME and the blockbuster hit PET SEMATARY)--who's still grieving over the death of his best buddy Bob (Preston Maybank) in another botched Clingstone experiment--under her thumb but she also has to contend with his attraction to Brake's daughter Jessica (Debra Hunter). Jessica spends a lot of time messing around with the APACHE program on a computer she calls "George" (played by a Coleco Adam), which has a sentient hand-puppet attachment that keeps demanding "More data please!" Meanwhile, there's constant cutaways to a local bar/arcade called Stag, where badass stud Dave (future ROBOCOP and DUST DEVIL Robert John Burke, currently guest starring on a network or cable TV show near you) has sex with a woman (Karen Mayo) on a pinball machine, an idiot named Tony (Bruce Morton) dances around to the music on his Walkman, and the alcoholic Brake limo driver is given "special sandwiches" by the bartender, a stealth way to disguise his drinking by putting a mini-bar bottle in between two slices of bread. Eventually, all of these parties end up at the Brake estate, where various hook-ups take place (even the Walkman guy gets laid!) and Clingstone unleashes the full power of APACHE, which materializes in the form of small silver balls that force themselves down the mouth of their victim and turn them into zombies.
"More data, please!"
A hodgepodge of nonsensical plot (watch Jessica and "George" control Clingstone's car via computer, and Clingstone's utterly blase non-reaction to her car driving itself!), endless filler (why is Sala so concerned with what's going on that bar? Why is the limo driver hiding tiny bottles of liquor between two slices of bread?), terrible dubbing, and even worse puppetry, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is a film so fucked-up that cocaine should've gotten at least a co-producer credit. Sala made one more porno in France before calling it a career and hasn't been heard from since. Dead? Alive? Who knows? With the exception of four people, everyone else in the cast vanished into bad movie witness protection: Midkiff and Burke went on to busy careers; Mayo became better known as Karen Mayo-Chandler when she appeared in a few scattered B-movies like STRIPPED TO KILL II: LIVE GIRLS and 976-EVIL II and was a girlfriend of Jack Nicholson's in the late '80s (she died from breast cancer in 2006 at just 48); and one of the three college girls is played by Andrea Thompson, who would go on to stints on FALCON CREST, BABYLON 5, JAG, 24, and HEROES, but is best known for her role as Det. Jill Kirkendall for five seasons midway through NYPD BLUE's run. How could guys named "Wellington Meffert" and "Preston Maybank" not make it? It's safe to say that aside from the Ocala party scene and cast members hooking up after hours (Gottlieb even says the best thing to result for him from the film is that his daughter was conceived during the making of it), none of them have fond memories of NIGHTMARE WEEKEND as a movie--none take part in the Blu-ray special features, though Gottlieb does mention Midkiff having an on-set meltdown upon realizing he might not be finished with the film in time to move on to a more promising project that he had lined up immediately following (considering the time frame, it was probably the Roger Corman-released STREETWALKIN'). Watching the film, one can hardly blame Midkiff's hysterical reaction to such news. Yes, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is...well, words can hardly do it justice. It's much more than the overwrought theme song's declaration of "You are a nightmare, a nightmare fantasy!" Simply put, if you haven't seen it, you must. And like me, you'll wonder where it's been all your life.
