Only now does it occur to me... WHITE OF THE EYE (1987)

Only now does it occur to me... that WHITE OF THE EYE truly stands alone in the (overflowing) cabinet of '80s horror curiosities. Where else do you get a Tucson, Arizona-set Cannon Film giallo with weird psychedelic fever-dream visuals from Donald Cammell, artistic prodigy and co-director of PERFORMANCE (with Nicolas Roeg)?

 

Taking the "extreme closeup of the murderer's eyeball" ball from TENEBRE and running with it, WHITE OF THE EYE dashes headfirst into a yuppie soap opera

full of mad (and smooth) visuals from legendary Steadicam operator Larry McConkey (CARLITO'S WAY, AFTER HOURS, KILL BILL, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, GOODFELLAS). It genuinely feels like Dario Argento and Richard Rush collaborated on a Cannon Film. (The most Cannon moment: the line of dialogue "Shove it up your sloppy orifice!" which sounds like it came straight from MURPHY'S LAW.)

Strewn with crazed flashbacks, Route 66 Americana, denim, fur coats, waterbeds, and busted diners,

I think the less I tell you about WHITE OF THE EYE, the better. However, I will say that it does feature two great performances by Cathy Moriarty (RAGING BULL, BUT I'M A CHEERLEADER)

 

  and David Keith (AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMEN, FIRESTARTER).

A weird and wild ride, and I'd recommend it as a solid deep cut for when you've exhausted the catalogues of Argento, Rush, and Roeg and are thirsty for more.

Only now does it occur to me... HANSEL AND GRETEL (1987)

Only now does it occur to me... how much narrative padding has to go into HANSEL AND GRETEL to make it feature-length. Let's be honest, the bullet points are these: mom and dad are struggling; Hansel and Gretel go into the woods on an errand (or are abandoned there by their parents, depending on the telling), find the witch's candy house, almost get eaten by the witch, and then they shove her into the oven. There's a reason why the best film version (Tim Burton's) runs about 35 minutes. But this is not early Tim Burton––it's a Cannon MovieTale.

That's right: the children's movie/fairy tale offshoot of Cannon Films (probably only created to get a tax break or something), the same one that brought us Christopher Walken as PUSS IN BOOTS. And, hoo boy, this thing is a mess. As the parents, we have David Warner (TIME BANDITS, TRON, TITANIC, TWIN PEAKS) and Emily Richards (EMPIRE OF THE SUN, ENEMY AT THE DOOR), who clearly deserve better. There's a lot of dignity up for grabs here. Look at Emily Richards, she's so upset she can barely stand up by herself. For starters, she's dressed like an Oktoberfest wench at a knock-off Disneyland.

And poor David Warner. He's trying his best. He's wearing a community theater peasant blouse they stole from a production of THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE. They didn't even launder it first.

They pad this shit with 44 minutes of family drama before we even see the candy house. Lotta Aryan-types moping and puttering around a medieval cabin. It's like the world's worst Ingmar Bergman film. 

Finally, the candy house. You'd have to imagine this would be a holy grail for a production designer––you could really go nuts with it. Instead we get this sad sack shit.
They thought they could jazz it up with some half-assed star bows from the Dollar Store that were lying around in somebody's junk drawer. A child would have done a better job.

You'd think you couldn't get any more depressed. Maybe if they shoehorned in an Oscar-winning actress who deserves a lot better? Somebody like Cloris motherfuckin' Leachman (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, DILLINGER, DAISY MILLER, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN)?

At least she has fun with it. You can tell she wasn't directed at all. None of this movie was. Half of her shots have her leering and extending her fingernails like she was told to "act witchy" and then they forgot to say "Cut!" She gets to go full-HOCUS POCUS soon enough, and in one of the film's two stylistic decisions, they give her some SUSPIRIA-style Argento lighting. 

 

So there's that, at least. She just keeps going, though, cause, like I said, they totally forgot to say "Cut!"

She captures the kiddies and we get a few iconic images.

I recommend singing aloud––to the tune of Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog"––"Now you're messin' with a... Leach-man wiii-iiitch! Now you're messin' with a Leachman witch!"

We even learn that her grounds are populated with the still-living bodies of her victims, children who have been entombed within weeping gingerbread men:

"If you look closely, you can see the tears." Hell, that shoulda been the tag-line to this movie. Speaking of which, throughout, all of this is crosscut with David Warner wandering in the woods, looking for his kids.

It's very post-Beckett, and we return to it a comical number of times. Yep, time to check in on Warner again. No dialogue. Just fruitless searching. And disappointment. It's sweaty out there. If you look closely, you can see the tears.

He's giving us some real "I need to fire my agent" vibes. It's great.

They try to make it a plot point that the witch can't see without her magical, enchanted magnifying glass

but it's totally one of those plastic magnifying glasses that you get as a prize from a cereal box. It doesn't even have glass as a lens, only thickened plastic. Tough to sell it as a magic totem, is what I'm saying. Anyway, the kids lower her into a subterranean oven with a rope (which is much less satisfying than shoving her into a more conventional stove)

 

but then comes the coup de grâce, and the second creative stylistic decision the filmmakers made. That's right, the house explodes in a SHINING-style ejaculation of foamy Leachman blood: 

And it just

keeps

gushing!

The other kiddies break out of their gingerbread prisons

and, mercifully, it's over. This has been a Cannon MovieTale.

R.I.P., Billy Drago

I was very sorry to hear that Billy Drago died today––prolific character actor, cheekbone wonder, menacing Kansan, and portrayer of exquisite madmen. He was one of my favorite eccentric performers in an A-and B-movie canon (and Cannon) full of them... I've written before that his brilliant volatility ought to have resulted in warning labels on VHS tapes that said "HERE THERE BE DRAGOS."

Some classic roles included when he enforced Al Capone's reign of terror in De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES, engaged in complex cartel homoeroticism with Chuck Norris in DELTA FORCE 2: THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION, preached and handled snakes in GUNCRAZY, led a punk gang against vampire Grace Jones in VAMP, ran an insane asylum in THE HERO AND THE TERROR, slithered through INVASION U.S.A. while testing all the coke, and was a frighteningly pathos-filled john in MYSTERIOUS SKIN, among many, many others. His body of work runs the gamut from arthouse films to workaday TV shows to Cannon actioners to music videos to the only episode of MASTERS OF HORROR deemed too extreme to air (directed by Takashi Miike). In each performance, he imbued his characters with a real, lived-in quality; an authenticity that was sometimes startling, sometimes nightmarish, and always profound. Here's to you, Billy: R.I.P.

Only now does it occur to me... THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982)

Only now does it occur to me... that this seems like something of an appropriate week to reckon with a film like THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982), an early Cannon Film attempt at teenage relevance and an '80s update of director Boaz Davidson's own 1950s-set Israeli coming-of-age film, LEMON POPSICLE (1978).

Half of the film feels predictably culled from the brainless sex-comedy genre, films like PORKY'S, REVENGE OF THE NERDS, or JOYSTICKS––



Needless to say, the '80s rule of pools is in effect––which is to say that if there is a pool present, a character will be pushed into it, flailing, in a zany comic moment

––whereas the second half feels like it could be at home in an artistic coming-of-age picture by the likes of Catherine Breillat, Lasse Hallström, or Maurice Pialat.

The suburbo-angst is tangible

Like FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (which was released in August 1982, two weeks after this film's July premiere), it presents a toxic, often alienating, and generally bewildering teenage wasteland; a minefield of harsh, unavoidable truths about the human condition; a labyrinth of pain and nascent sexuality fired willy-nilly in all directions, like a tommy gun.

Of course, a Cannon sex comedy can't be on the right side of history all the time, so there are several cringe-inducing scenarios, like PORKY'S-style locker room peeping, a dick-measuring contest set to Devo's "Whip It," or a bizarre sequence of group sex with a Latina housewife that plays on the surface as "weird and sort of racist," or very generously, perhaps, as a satire on the absurdity of teen sex comedies of the era? (Probably not.) At least the scene where our horndog protagonists visit a prostitute plays out in a manner that's bleak, melancholy, and broken, like a tableau out of Tennessee Williams or Flannery O'Connor.

Conversely, this could be a scene from BARFLY

As with any '80s film whose major focus is its protagonists attempting to "get laid," there's going to be a poisonous strain of male entitlement running throughout,

And a lot of popped collars

but THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN actually makes an attempt to grapple earnestly with the consequences. It's partly owed to Tel Aviv's own Boaz Davidson (SALSA, GOING BANANAS), who lends the film a peculiar sort of Eurotrash/Euro-arthouse-quality where there can be wild tonal shifts, often within the same scene, of silly Hollywood artifice giving way to Neo-realistic emotion and moral ambiguity.


While FAST TIMES tackles similarly weighty subjects, this is the only '80s film I can think of who dedicates the stretch ordinarily reserved for a makeover or training montage to a sequence where a young woman undergoes an abortion while another boy (who did not impregnate her) scrambles to pawn his belongings to pay for it.



Especially remarkable is that the woman's point-of-view is not only considered in this sequence, but that it's central––the viewer has a real sense of the emotional and physical drain the dark and ethically ambiguous shadows of the adult world have cast on her life and the lives of those around her.


Of course, this happens in a film where a group of guys get pubic lice and the subsequent, incessant scratching is played for yucks. Well, that's Cannon Films for you––for better or worse. Nonetheless, it feels morally superior to a few of the options at an American multiplex in July of 1982. While you could indeed catch BLADE RUNNER or John Carpenter's THE THING, it's perhaps more likely that a boneheaded teenager would go see ZAPPED!, a film where Scott Baio uses telekinesis to rip the clothing off of his female classmates.




[Side note: Probably the first thing the viewer will notice about THE LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN is the soundtrack, which would cost more than the entire film's budget today. It's shocking how much 1982 radio they manage to cram in here, with hit songs by Journey, The Police, Tommy Tutone, Blondie, U2, Devo, Oingo Boingo, The Cars, The Human League, Blondie, The Waitresses, REO Speedwagon, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Quincy Jones, to name a few.

It's also worth mentioning that TWIN PEAKS' Kimmy Robertson also turns in a delightful comic supporting performance:

She's always been underutilized (do we blame SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL?––technically she played the title character, as "Liza, Cruise Control/Cruise Director"), and hopefully the revived TWIN PEAKS will get her some more work.]

Only now does it occur to me... LINK (1986)

Only now does it occur to me... okay, a few things. LINK is a "killer ape" movie (it was pitched as "JAWS with apes") in the vein of MONKEY SHINES and Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue." It is also a Cannon Film––however, they only distributed it: i.e., Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus are not listed in the credits. The director is the accomplished Richard Franklin (PSYCHO II, CLOAK & DAGGER, PATRICK, ROAD GAMES), a suspense-driven Australian auteur who probably ranks second only to Brian De Palma among Hitchcock disciples. The stars are Terence Stamp––who plays a wild-eyed anthropology professor with an eccentric fashion sense and Rod Stewart's hair––

and Elisabeth Shue, who plays his student/housekeeper/ape nanny.

And that's all there is to it. The end.

...

Okay, that's a lie. I didn't tell you the entire truth: LINK is a strange little chamber piece and a "killer ape butler" movie. The Germans had the good sense to call this thing LINK: DER BUTLER, cause that ape butler thing isn't something you want to keep under wraps.

It's kind of like EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE meets THE REMAINS OF THE DAY. Except it's a horror movie.

I say, after you, old chap


About a chain-smoking orangutan butler who first made his name as "The Master of Fire" in an infamous carnival show.

So allow me to amend that: LINK is a movie about a "pyromaniac killer-ape butler."

There are also some killer dogs thrown in for good measure, but that's not very important.

As to the film itself, it's fair. It starts strong, but loses steam quickly. It's packed with interesting ideas and camera angles and setpieces, but it never quite delivers on its premise. Franklin does acquit himself admirably: there are inventive edits, theatrical sets,

and tour de force sequences of diegetic and non-diegetic sound (the first diegetic sound we hear is The Kinks' "Ape Man" coming from a car radio, soon it bleeds into "Hot Voodoo"––Dietrich's ape musical number from BLONDE VENUS––coming from a television as an ape stalks its feline prey).

There's inspired wide-angle cinematography by Mike Molloy (DP on THE HIT and SHOCK TREATMENT; camera operator on BARRY LYNDON and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE),

 
and overall, Franklin possesses a pure filmmaking joie de vivre that you don't often see outside of Richard Rush, Sam Raimi, or Ken Russell. There's also so much ape POV that at times I thought I was watching a Lucio Fulci film.

This angle does not bode well for the cat

It's extremely atmospheric and makes excellent use of the Scottish countryside, occasionally to great 'melancholy horror' effect, though I would not categorize the entire film as such.

In any event, this movie is about a pyromaniac killer-ape butler, not the Scottish countryside. As it progresses, our friend Link the Butler begins to lose his mind after falling in love (?) with Elizabeth Shue. The most chilling moments in the movie are when he's creepin' on her in the bath and elsewhere.


Look at that face. This pervy performance by "Locke the Orangutan" might be the best in the entire film. In fact, you'd better look outside your own door, right now, just to make sure some indifferent orangutan isn't out there, staring you down. To quote Werner Herzog, "the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder." Damn.

Also, I must make a special note about the soundtrack, by the legendary Jerry Goldsmith (ALIEN, GREMLINS, PLANET OF THE APES, PATTON, FIRST BLOOD, TOTAL RECALL), which is an insane carnival of circus-y madness, a reverb-heavy '80s nutball score that must be heard to be believed. Seriously, listen to the first minute and a half of this amazing nonsense. It's like if Paganini did the soundtrack to GHOULIES II. Or maybe if Kurt Weill did the score to Bertolt Brecht's CONGO. I don't know, man. But I also think I secretly like it?