Sorry, folks, with the Holidays fast approaching this'll only be a mini-batch of rehashed reviews. And though the selection be small, there's still plenty of tasty treats to choose from. We've got a couple Albert Zugsmith oddities, one where the Cold War turns Red hot, the other an opium-fueled fever dream. Or, if you dare, you can sample a couple of treats concerning the disciples of the Great Cloven One. Chose wisely, my friends. Your soul and Captain Kirk's are riding on your decision!
Incubus :: It's the Shatner versus the devil in the form of a coven of female succubus. But by the end, we're not sure who is really seducing who with the power of Esperanto. Click on over and check out the Captain's *ahem* log.
I Drink Your Blood :: David Durston's PSA on the horrors of Hippies for Satan and Hydrophobia is about [this] close to being an all time gonzoidal cult classic. How close? This close.
The small town rivalry between a garrison of State Troopers and the local police comes to a head when State budget woes says one of them has to go. And to try and one up each other, these warring factions compete to solve a murder and bust up a drug smuggling ring to prove who's more worthy.
I'm ashamed to admit but when I first saw the trailer for Super Troopers back in 2001 I thought it looked irredeemably stupid. However, upon my second viewing of the Super Troopers trailer, several things cracked a big smile on my face -- especially that bit with the stainless steel nut cup. Then, after a third viewing, I finally went and rented the damn thing, and while watching it, I proceeded to laugh. A lot. And, more often than not, laughed really hard.
Jay Chandrasekhar, Steve Lemme, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske first teamed up at Colgate College in 1989, and honed their sketch comedy skills in a student film, The Tinfoil Monkey Agenda, and that cemented their course in feature film making. Taking the name Broken Lizard, the group's first effort, Puddle Cruiser, focused its comedic eye on college life, and proved such a big hit on their college tour more investors came forward to help finance their next feature, Super Troopers.
The overall storyline is basically irrelevant as the film is more of a throwback to the comedies of my youth, like Caddyshack and Strange Brew, where the plot exists solely to string together several comedic sketches, vignettes and scenes that showcases the cast, who all perform beautifully. The Troopers, Thorny (Chandrasekhar), Mac (Lemme) and Foster (Soter), are more concerned with personal antics like tormenting speeders, hazing their rookie, Rabbit (Stolhanske), and playing pranks on the surly dope, Farva (Heffernan), then solving any real crimes. At the eye of this comedic storm, and the rock that holds the film together, is Brian Cox's Captain O'Hagen, who tries but mostly fails to keep them in line. His men's antics are lewd, crude and [nearing the borderline of] socially unacceptable, but the characters lack the mean-spiritedness that permeates most frat-boy-fueled comedies these days. I don't know. All the humor in comedy lately seems to be grounded in bodily fluids, demeaning others, and a general meanness that spawned a new genre that someone else so rightfully dubbed [-- but I wished I had, dammit]: When bad things happen to Ben Stiller's privates. It's a cheap laugh, but a laugh nonetheless. These films are funny, sure; they just aren't that funny in my book.
When Super Troopers premiered to rave reviews at The Sundance Film Festival, it was quickly snatched up by Fox Searchlight Pictures for general release. It had a modest box office return but would go on to be a sleeper hit on home video, where it soon exploded into one of the most quotable comedies of the Aughts. And the studio was so impressed they signed Broken Lizard to a multi-picture deal, leading to the release of Club Dread, which, when I saw it on the day it opened, made me wonder if these bunch of comedians realized they were making the most effective giallo in years? Alas, Club Dread fizzled at the box office, and I'll admit that Beefest was disappointing at first encounter but seems to be improving with age -- and is worth the price of a rental for the frog gag alone. Which brings us to the recently released Slammin' Salmon, whose trailer, frankly, made me retreat to the nearest corner with my Super Troopers DVD tightly clasped to my chest to weep silently for awhile.
But then again, Super Troopers took me by surprise because I wasn't expecting that much from it, either so I'll still hold out some hope. In all of the Broken Lizard's films, the humor is far from sophisticated but the troupe proves adept at the right balance between absurd, witty, sublime, and clever, and yes, rolling around in the gutter. And like those other famous comedies of my youth, I can watch this film, again and again; laugh at the same bits, again and again, forever; and not get tired of it one bit; epitomized by one of my favorite lines that needs to go down as the greatest piece of dialogue in the history of cinema:
"Uh ... Excuse me. Bear ... Bear-fucker? Do You need assistance?"
Super Troopers (2001) Broken Lizard Industries :: Cataland Films :: Jersey Shore :: Árpád Productions :: Fox Searchlight Pictures / EP: Peter E. Lengyel / P: Richard Perello / AP: Robert Barocci, Amy Minda Cohen, Adam Mazer, William Rotko, Kevin Weiss / D: Jay Chandrasekhar / W: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Erik Stolhanske, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter / C: Joaquín Baca-Asay / E: Jay Chandrasekhar, Jacob Craycroft, Kevin Heffernan / M: 38. Special / S: Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Erik Stolhanske, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Marisa Coughlan, Daniel von Bargen, Brian Cox
"This is the voice of Colossus. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die." xxxxxx
Based on a novel by D.F. Jones, Colossus: The Forbin Project is a satirical/cautionary tale about man's good-intentions-intended folly of surrendering those really hard decisions over to a super-computer, thinking this would logically make all emotions and the resulting hesitations over them obsolete. Unfortunately, the creators did their job a little too well, and, as in all Sci-Fi parables, things quickly go from bad to worse when the machine turns sentient and decides that his creators are so inferior it must remold them in his image of strict ones and zeroes. And since this was made in the 1970's, I'll just let you guess who wins in the end.
"End of line."
Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) Universal Pictures / P: Stanley Chase / D: Joseph Sargent / W: James Bridges, D.F. Jones (novel) / C: Gene Polito / E: Folmar Blangsted / M: Michel Colombier / S: Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, William Schallert, Leonid Rostoff, Georg Stanford Brown
"Ezekiel saw the wheel. This is the wheel he said he saw. These are unidentified flying objects that people say they are seeing now. Are they proof that we are being visited by civilizations from other stars? Or just what are they? The United States Air Force began an investigation of this high strangeness in a search for the truth. What you are about to see is part of that 20-year search..."
Though I had always remembered it under its alternate title, Project Bluebook, one of Jack Webb's last Mark VII Ltd. productions, Project U.F.O., has finally resurfaced on YouTube! Kind of a mash-up of Dragnet's sardonic dryness with the truth/untruth of The X-Files, the series followed two Air Force investigators as they hopped around the country looking to either corroborate or debunk any sightings or strange phenomenon. And like his police procedurals, Webb based each episode on actual cases from the Air Force's files on unidentified flying objects, better known at the time as Project Bluebook.
When I revisited the first few episodes after some thirty years I was struck by how well the F/X, though grounded in the time of its production, held up. But what really struck me was how the show was structured to let the audience see what the witnesses were seeing, meaning actual bona fide flying saucers, only to then tell us that that's not what we saw at all and the witness was either crazy or mistaken. That's a bit of a cheat, and though I don't think that's what Webb had intended, unless the aliens were Communists, this approach gives the whole investigative angle a bit of an insidious, conspiratorial twinge to hide the truth that we are not alone.
The show lasted for two seasons and 26 episodes. And hopefully, we'll see a legitimate DVD release of the whole shebang someday. Until then, here's a link to get you started to the first episode, The Washington DC Incident, that appears to be loosely based on the controversial 1948 case of Captain Thomas. F. Mantell, who was allegedly shot down by a UFO near Godman Army Air Field at Fort Knox, Kentucky.
Meanwhile, our reclamation project continues with another batch of rehashed reviews. Now, you maybe wondering what that odious smell is. Well, all I can say is check out these soiled short-film showcases for any tell-tale racing stripes or skidmarks ... We've got hygiene horrors, both mental and physical, a Driver's Ed atrocity film, a How-to guide on how to get high, then everyone gets naked, followed by a couple of curdled Cold-War leftovers in dire need of some re-heating.
Signal 30 :: Feh. You can keep your August Undergrounds and Faces of Death! I survived Driver's Ed.
Red Nightmare :: See how those lying, dirty, shrewd, godless, murderous, determined, and internationally conspiring Communists really live -- before it's too late!
Brad Grinter: Nudist :: Old school titillating porn is a world of visible boom mikes, lost delivery boys, skanky soundtracks, and lots-n-lots of earth tones. They were populated by tan-lines, fish-white beer guts, and drooping *ahem* equipment. And I miss them dearly as one of the few who actually likes a little plot in their porn -- and the wonkier the plot the better, like, say, trying to save your marriage by taking your nudie-phobic wife to a nudist colony.
A Day of Thanksgiving :: It's that time of year, folks, when families get together, gorge on some chemical enhanced turkey, thirteen different kinds of pie, and then settle in for some football until, inevitably, something triggers that same family argument you had last year. But before things turn too ugly, grandma makes a temporary peace by gonging everyone on the head with a gravy ladle. And after the dust settles, you realize you have approximately one month to cool off and start speaking to each other -- because you get to do it all over again at Christmas. Turns out things weren't all that different back in the 1950's...
