Entry 72: Malibu High (1978)

Malibu High (1978)

Dir: Irvin Berwick

"Every teacher in school wanted to FLUNK HER...But novody dared!"

 

I've got a special treat for you tonight, folks; if you want to experience grade-A, triple-prime, B.o.S.-approved sleaze, register for classes at Malibu High!

When we first meet high school senior Kim (Jill Lansing, who never acted again and seems to have vanished off the face of the earth after this movie), she's going full-frontal in front of a mirror while getting ready for school.  You see, Kim's had a chip on her shoulder since her father hung himself two years prior; she's a bitch to her mom (Phyllis Bentley), she's failing all her classes, and her fuck-it-all attitude has resulted in her being dumped by sensitive boyfriend Kevin (Stuart Taylor).  After a booze and weed produced epiphany with her best friend (Katie Johnson, TVs Tracey Takes On...), Kim decides to turn her life around "in the easiest way possible."  After donning a miniskirt, high heels and some new eye shadow, Kim begins seducing and fucking her male teachers, turning those "Fs" into "As" overnight!  Not satisfied with furthering her scholastic career, Kim begins turning tricks for local drug dealer/pimp Tony (Alex Mann, I Drink Your Blood, Microwave Massacre, who here has a fantastic mustache and drives a sweet, carpeted 70s van), and soon has the local working Joes lining up around the block.  As talk of her talent spreads, Kim finds herself recruited by big-time, mob-backed "agent" Lance (Garth Howard, who shows off some truly gnarly back hair in his love scenes with Kim).  After turning tricks for a couple of wealthy "dirty old men," Kim finds herself confronted with a "Looney" who wants to shackle her to the bed for some BDSM action.  Handily dispatching her assailant with an ice pick, Kim admits that murder "turns her on" and is recruited by Lance as a hitwoman.  After dispatching the problematic Tony and a jeweler who was embezzling from Lance's mafia overseers, Kim maintains her GPA by seducing her suspicious, elderly principal and flushing his heart medication down the toilet when he gets all hot and bothered.  I can't deny that the lady is efficient!  When Kim assassinates local bigshot Harry Ingersoll (musician Bob Gordon), it just so happens that he's the father of Kevin's new girlfriend, Annette (Tammy Taylor, Don't go Near the Park, Meatballs, Part II).  Caught in the act by her peers, Kim is gunned down by police snipers.

HOLY GODDAMN SHIT!  The title (and poster/video sleeve art) for this film really don't prepare you for the insanity that's about to unfold.  I LOVED this movie!  Lansing is pretty goddamn great as Kim, a character who goes through actions that might seem debasing, but, through her own anger and piss-and-vinegar determination, are always a conscious means-to-an-end.  The rest of the cast is, at best, serviceable, but who gives a shit?  This is Lansing's show all the way.  Kudos to director Berwick (sadly, this was his last film); he doesn't seem to know where to point his camera during love scenes (they often dwell on close-up shots of feet and, during one particular moment of insanity, the eyes of a bearskin rug), but he handles the dramatic tone-shift between high school melodrama and crime thriller with aplomb.  This HAS to have been seen by both David Lynch (the high school principal with a hearing problem who constantly, comically mishears Kim is strongly reminiscent of the Gordon Cole character on Twin Peaks) and Quentin Tarantino (the general tone of the film predicts much of his pre-Inglorious Basterds work).  HIGHEST possible recommendation!  Oh, and Jeremy?  There's a good bush shot.

Entry 71: Barbarian Queen (1985)

Barbarian Queen (1985)

Dir: Hector Olivera

"No man can touch her naked steel."

 

I will have you all know that I'm near the end of a pretty goddamn book right now, but, as my goal is to get to entry 100 by the end of the year, I'm foregoing finishing it in order to spend a little time down here in the basement.  Now, since I'm in a fantasy mood, journey back with me to an age of savage warriors, undreamed of treasures and bountiful organ-spilling!  Journey with me into the realm of...the Barbarian Queen!

After opening with a rape scene ("Nothing like a virgin to brighten a man's day!") featuring copious breast-fondling (the woman's screams lead to the film's most inappropriately-quotable line, as one of the assailants chuckles and exclaims "Karax never COULD rape a woman quietly!"), we're introduced to a medieval village that looks for all the world like a South American forest.  The victim of the aforementioned rape is Taramis (Dawn Dunlap, Night Shift), younger sister of Princess Amethea (Lana Clarkson, Deathstalker), who is about to be wed.  Turns out the attack on Taramis is just a preamble to an entire raiding party that interrupts the nuptials by laying waste to Amethea's village.  Amethea proves to be no slouch with a sword after she kills a dude by stabbing him in the ass hard enough for the blade to emerge through his dick, and, after her people are either killed or enslaved, she swears vengeance upon the armored horde responsible!  She is joined in her quest by fellow female warriors Estrild (Kat Shea, who went on to direct the Stripped to Kill movies) and Tiniara (Argentinian actress Susana Traverso).   After rescuing Taramis, Amethea gets to make a profound statement about the cruel nature of the world they live in ("There are no 'little girls' any more.") and our small army of amazonian ass-kickers sets off on a series of adventures in the name of vengeance!  They pose as damsels, meet up with a preteen-girl scout, infiltrate a harem, suffer setbacks brought on by the PTSD-suffering Taramis and rescue Amethea's betrothed from a gladiator pit.  Tiniara is killed and Amethea is tortured on a rack by a dude wearing anachronistic glasses and what appears to be a yellow yarmulke, whom she kills by crushing between her thighs and tossing into a vat of acid.  In the end, Amethea and Taramis kill the evil warlord and establish their own kingdom.     

I'm not embarrassed to admit that I enjoyed the hell out of this 72-minute time-waster.  I'm a sucker for movies about ladies who kick ass and, while this features far too much gratuitous nudity to be considered a lost feminist classic, Shea, Traverso and, especially, the 6-foot tall Clarkson acquit themselves well and more than deliver in the ass-kicking department.  It's refreshing to see, considering it's age and genre, a film that takes a completely dim view of men (they're all horrible rapist assholes or incompetents in need of rescuing) and puts the women firmly in charge.  The swordplay is brutal and well-choreographed and there's a surprising amount of gore.  Roger Corman backed this Argentinian feature as an attempt to cash in on the hype surrounding the same year's big-budget Schwarzenegger vehicle Red Sonja.  A (terrible) DTV sequel (also starring Clarkson) followed in 1990.  For fun, sing this movie's title to the tune of Billy Ocean's "Caribbean Queen..." 

Entry 70: The Pom-Pom Girls (1976)

The Pom-Pom Girls (1976)

Dir: Joseph Ruben

"It was their senior year...the last chance to raise hell!"

 

Tonight, the Basement of Sleaze travels back in time to the fall of '76 to raise a little goddamn hell on the first day of school with the Pom-Pom Girls!

It's the first day of school, 1976, and the seniors at Rosedale High are already beginning to chaff under authority.  Despite it's title, this breezy, mostly plotless comedy centers around football players Jesse (Michael Mullins, a frequent 70s TV guest-star in his only major role) and Johnnie (Robert Carradine, desperately trying to ward off his future as a major nerd icon thanks to Revenge of the Nerds).  Jesse's a smooth operator who fucks anything with tits, but finds himself falling for prudish cheerleader Laurie (Jennifer Ashley, Phantom of the Paradise).  Johnnie, meanwhile, has a thing for outgoing head cheerleader/class president Sally (Lisa Reeves, Ski Lift to Death), who's already dating hotheaded drag racer Duane (Bill Adler, no relation to Steven).  After Johnnie gets caught pissing out a window and is sentenced to latrine duty, Jesse makes it his mission to get his buddy to loosen up and get laid ('cause pissing out the fucking window on your first day of school isn't loose enough).  We're then treated to a smorgasbord of teen comedy hijinks: food fights, beach frolicking, stealing a fire truck, dirt biking, messing with the JD drag racer kid, etc.  Stand up guy that he is, Jesse goes off and fucks another girl every time Laurie refuses to cut class to goof off with him, while Duane is threatening to kill Johnnie for messing with his girl...Can these two guys get their shit together, win the girls AND pull off a victory in the big game against Hardin High?  Given that this is a Crown-International release, you're goddamn right they can; Johnnie even makes a last-minute escape from a seemingly fatal drag race crash!

If you can dial your brain down for 90 minutes, this movie is relatively fun; it's filled with great 70s music, cars and fashions and features better-than-expected performances and lively direction.  On the downside, there's less nudity than expected (much of it is centered around Jesse's skeletal conquest Sue Ann, who needs to eat a goddamn sandwich) and central character Jesse is a REALLY unlikeable tossface.  Late, great exploitation movie legend Cheryl "Rainbeaux" Smith (one of the original members of The Runaways and star of Laserblast and Lemura) appears in a small role as cheerleader Roxanne.  Director Ruben foreshadows his career as a horror director (Dreamscape, The Stepfather) with the eerie opening shot of a football player dummy burning in effigy.  They don't make whimsically politically-incorrect films like this anymore, folks; if you're at all interested, watch it before somebody in our increasingly-sensitive society decides you can't.  

Entry 69: Cafe Flesh (1982)

Cafe Flesh (1982)

Dir: Rinse Dream (Stephen Sayadian)

"The creators of Nightdreams present a film so hot, it has no place in a world with a future."

Well folks, we've arrived at entry 69...I'm sure you're expecting me to highlight some sort of gonad-pumping, sweat-licking, multiple-orgasm receiving fuck flick, and...Well, you're half right.  Journey with me now into the post-apocalyptic future, where we'll get a front-row seat at Cafe Flesh.  

In post-nuke America, 99% of human society have become "sex negatives," poor souls who are reduced to violent retching when attempting physical contact.  The remaining 1% are "sex positives," forced to copulate on-stage in clubs to feed the desires of the leering negatives.  The most popular and exclusive of these clubs is Cafe Flesh, where wiseass M.C. Max Melodramatic (Andy Nichols from Nightdreams, who reminds me a little of David Johansen and is GREAT here) holds sway over the crowd, taunting their radiation-born sexual disability while presenting a series of bizarre, cabaret-style fuck tableaus.  After a performance in which a housewife is 69ed and fucked by a milkman dressed like a rat while three grown, bearded men (one of whom is in blackface) dressed as babies in high chairs look on while pretending to cry, we are introduced to Cafe Flesh regulars Nick and Lana (Pia Snow, who gave up on adult films a few years after this and became "scream queen" Michelle Bauer), a "negative" couple.  Angsty, pissed-off Nicks complains bitterly about his lot and fantasizes about the days when he and Lana were able to make the beast with two backs, while Lana accepts things as they are and enjoys the milieu of Cafe Flesh.  The two are introduced to Angel (porno actress Marie Sharp), a sexy negative from Wyoming on her first trip to the big city.  Lana gets all hot and bothered when she hears that legendary positive Johnny Rico (Kevin James, the porn star, not the blithering idiot from the Paul Blart movies, here playing a character with a name stolen from Heinlein's Starship Troopers) is coming to perform at Cafe Flesh, but Nick just sees it as another frustration.  After Max (dressed in drag as Little Bo Peep) taunts Angel from the stage ("Here's something to make Uncle Foamy stand up and tap dance!  What's your name, sugar puss?"), we're treated to a boardroom-inspired scene in which a guy in a suit with a giant pencil for a head fucks the shit out of a secretary on a desk while a naked, spectacled clerk with enormous breasts drones "Do you want me to type a memo?" over and over again.  Nick gets jealous when club owner Moms (Tantala Ray, from the John Holmes flick Suburban Satanist) offers Lana a job coordinating the stage routines and working with the positives.  Feeling guilty, Lana attempts to have sex with him, but he gets violently ill.  During a government raid, virginal Angel is revealed to be a positive and dragged off to perform, and bored, gallant Nick decides to rescue her.  The next day...HOLY GODDAMN SHIT!  TVs Richard Belzer (every fucking Law & Order series ever) shows up as a fucking jive-talking ("I'm not his agent, bitch; goddamn!  My eyeballs is scorched!") club patron...I wonder if he still keeps this on his resume?  I'm pretty sure Ice-T's seen this movie; I wonder if they ever talk about it?  Anyway, Nick's rescue attempt fails, and Angel shows up again at Cafe Flesh as a performer, slid back and forth on a table as if in a cheese slicer between two guys dressed in black and white with black nail polish, while disembodied hands snap in time with the music.  Angel brags to Nick and the immensely turned-on Lana about her new lifestyle, and Lana goes into "the back room" to talk to Moms.  At this point, Johnny Rico shows up (looking A LOT like Ric Ocasek in a bright blue suit).  After Johnny does some on-stage pussy eating and salad tossing, Lana, egged on by Max, reveals herself to be a positive and joins Johnny onstage.  She has a bed-shaking girl-on-girl encounter with Angel, then Angel is removed from the stage and Johnny has his way with her.  As Johnny cums on Lana's ass, Nick looks on in despair while Max laughs...

Cafe Flesh is the ultimate anti-porn porno movie.  After the success of Nightdreams (which, despite it's often bizarre imagery, still set out to titillate), director Sayadian and writer Jerry Stahl (Twin Peaks, Bad Boys 2, here credited as Herbert W. Day), crafted a film that intentionally called out and alienated it's dolphin-flogging porno-theatre target audience.  The sex scenes are uncharacteristically short and ugly for a porno flick, and they're often intercut with jarring shots of the leering, emaciated faces of the negatives (they look like extras from a Cure video, and their often-blank expressions would make this a great double-bill with Gimme Shelter), a thinly-veiled surrogate for the XXX cinema audience.  Obviously, inner-reflectivity wasn't what the dolphin-floggers were looking for, and this quickly tanked in adult theatres, but was resurrected as a midnight hit in arthouse theatres and found an even wider audience when it was edited down to an "R" and sold to HBO during it's early days.  The soundtrack by Mitchell Froom (who would go on to write the fucking fantastic Crowded House song "Something So Strong" with Neil Finn) is goddamn fantastic, as well.  A classic not only of porn, but of post-nuke cinema, as well; worth seeking out!   

Entry 68: Harbinger Down (2015)

Harbinger Down (2015)

Dir: Alec Gillis

"Terror is just beneath the surface."

 

In 2011, legendary effects house ADI (Alien3, Starship Troopers) was contracted to provide the visual effects for the prequel to The Thing.  After months of hard work, the studio decided at the eleventh hour to replace all of their in-camera effects with "more consistent" CGI effects.  Undaunted, they turned to Kickstarter and raised enough money to create their own film, directed by ADI co-founder Gillis, which would utilize the work that had already gone into The Thing.  The result was Harbinger Down.

Grizzled sea captain Graff (Lance Henriksen, Aliens, Hard Target) allows his marine biology grad student granddaughter, Sadie (Camille Balsamo, TV's Treme) and her professor Stephen (Matt Winston, Fight Club, Zodiac) to tag along on his crab fishing trawler in order to study whale migrations.  A frozen block hauled up in a net turns out to be the body of a Soviet cosmonaut, frozen since the early 80s, whose body is covered in slimy tumors.  Because this is a movie, piece of shit Stephen wants to steal credit for the find from Sadie, but winds up getting royally fucked when the body comes to life and absorbs him.  It seems that the cosmonaut was a participant in a Soviet genetic experiment to make the human body more adaptable to space travel, but shit went south and they lost control of the experiment.  When one of the crew reveals herself to be a Russian sleeper agent, on board to ensure that the specimen never reaches the mainland, our intrepid crew must contend with both a traitor in the midst, a slimy monster bellow decks, and a major approaching storm...Who will make it out alive?!

I'd been following this film's development on-and-off since it's announcement and, in a great year for genre cinema that's included the fantastic It Follows and Mad Max: Fury Road, my hopes were high that we might be able to add another classic to the list.  Unfortunately, Harbinger Down just really isn't very good.  There's a great monster-with-a-woman's face at the end, but other than that, the much-ballyhooed practical effects (the entire film's raison d'etre) look fairly cheap and rubbery.  Rob Bottin's similar effects in the '82 The Thing all had form that suggested a terrible purpose; here, everything just look messy and shapeless.  ADI has done MUCH better work in the Alien films, and the lack of any real effort is disappointing and not up to their usual standards.  Director Gillis is (usually) one helluva an effects man, but as a director, he resorts to overused shakeycam and MUCH too dark cinematography (it's often difficult to make out just what exactly is going on).  Henriksen is GREAT, as always, but at this point in his career he plays roles like this in his sleep.  Newcomer Milla Bjorn is kind of fun as the hard-ass Russian spy, but the rest of the cast ranges from merely serviceable to REALLY FUCKING AWFUL, especially Winston, who plays his dickhead scientist character so broadly that it comes off as parody, and Balsamo...HOLY FUCKING SHIT, she's BAD.  with her model looks and stilted delivery, she's the worst big screen lady scientist since Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough.  Meanwhile, the muddled script never provides any real explanation for why the creature is doing what it's doing (does it it eat people?  Absorb them?  Try to imitate them?  Is it even sentient?)  and provides a few genuine "what the fuck" laps-of-logic moments (Bjorn has a weird foreplay session with one of the crewmen the devolves into a fistfight/choking, a sub-plot involving the recent death of Henriksen's wife is introduced WAY to late in the film and adds NOTHING to the story).  While this was clearly meant as an homage to The Thing, it actually reminds me more of the semi-obscure 1998 Jaimie Lee Curtis/Donald Sutherland vehicle Virus (shape-changing creature loose on an industrial ship crewed by both fishermen and scientists), with the creature from Leviathan (Soviet experiment that takes on aspects of it's victims) thrown in.  I suppose this is worth at least a look for serious genre fans; it certainly beats another found-footage flick or slick, PG-13 CGI-fest but, considering the immense talent involved, it stands as a disappointment.    

Entry 67: They Live (1988)

They Live (1988)

Dir: John Carpenter

"You see them on the street.  You watch them on TV.  You might even vote for one this fall.  You think they're people just like you.  You're wrong.  Dead wrong."

 

I'm writing this entry in honor of "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, who passed away much too early last week.  I'm not a wrestling fan, but, as a very young man in the golden days of the mid-1980s, when Hulkamania surely reigned supreme, I watched the occasional Saturday afternoon match with my dad, and smirking, kilted Piper was always the guy you loved to hate.  I also have some vague memories of him being the primary villain on the amazingly shitty Hulk Hogan's Rockin' Wrestling cartoon show.  But for me, the most important and lasting introduction to Piper was in his role as the nameless, ass-kicking, bubblegum-chewing hero of John Carpenter's underrated 1988 sci-fi/action movie They Live.

Piper stars as a homeless drifter (never named in the film, but referred to as "Nada" in the credits) who comes into possession of a pair of sunglasses that allow him to "see" reality: whenever he dons them, the upper class (bankers, stock brokers, corporate executives, bored housewives, TV celebrities) appear as black and white aliens (they look like skinned human beings), while the lower classes (homeless, day laborers, servants, retail employees, etc) appear normal.  Advertising billboards are revealed to contain subliminal messages like "OBEY" and "MONEY IS YOUR GOD."  After using some sweet goddamn wrestling moves to take out a couple of cops, Piper shotguns the fuck out of an entire bank filled with aliens, then takes a TV producer named Holly (Meg Foster, Masters of the Universe, Leviathan) hostage.  After Holly knocks him out a window, Piper tries to convince his friend, construction worker Frank (Keith fucking David, The Thing, Requiem for a Dream), to put on the glasses and see reality.  This leads to THE SCENE in the movie; a glorious, SIX FUCKING MINUTE street brawl between Piper and David ("You dirty motherfucker!")!  Eventually, David puts the glasses on ("Brother, life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."), and our heroes are able to infiltrate Holly's TV station, from which the alien's signal is broadcast, with a little coerced help from another, traitorous homeless man played by the great character actor George "Buck" Flower (whose career ranged from hardcore porn to mainstream hits like Back to the Future).  When double-agent Holly kills Frank, Piper sacrifices himself to destroy the TV signal ("Fuck it.") and awakens America to the true nature of it's overlords.        

first saw this movie as channel 29's "Movie of the Week" up in my parents' bedroom on their old antenna television; I enjoyed it then, and I enjoy it now. Like the previous year's RoboCop, They Live uses the milieu of science fiction to frame a particular, anti-Reagan narrative (in RoboCop, it was the trappings of traditional superhero stories; in They Live, it's cold-war era alien paranoia).  Interestingly, Piper's character starts out as a complacent man amongst a sea of angry, but impotent, outsiders.  Only once the glasses allow him to "see reality" does he become a progressive leader.  This is why the streetfight sequence is so important-David's character is angry, but he refuses to put the glasses on; it's easy to complain, but it's far more difficult to take action.  Carpenter keeps things gritty; his low-prowling camera is filled with shanty towns, welfare lines, soup kitchens and shitty news vendors.  I'm not sure if this was the ex-hippy in Carpenter coming out to "stick it to the man," or if it was the director railing against an increasingly-corporatized Hollywood system that had failed him (by the time of They Live, a string of poorly-marketed, expensive flops had left Carpenter with increasingly-low budgets and limited studio support).  Either way, he crafts an effective us-vs-them narrative with some GREAT fucking lines and action sequences!  This certainly isn't the best of Carpenter's films; it lacks the slow-burn tension of Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween or The Thing and the madcap insanity of Escape from New York or Big Trouble in Little China, but it's genuine and "earthy" in a way those films often aren't, and is perhaps the least-cynical, most "human" film of Carpenter's classic oeuvre.

Oh, I bet you thought I'd forgotten...prior to the bank massacre, Piper announces his presence with the line "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...And I'm all out of bubblegum."  This wasn't scripted; it was a line Piper was planning to use for a WWF entrance that he decided to ad-lib here as a joke.  Not being an idiot, Carpenter decided to use it in the final cut.  100 years from now, when Piper's wrestling career is all but forgotten, people will still be quoting and paraphrasing that line...That's a goddamn legacy.  Rest in peace, sir.