Hello, Detroit!

This isn’t an entry into the heavy metal horror comedy fest - Detroit Rock City (1999) is missing the horror. Other than that it works pretty well.

The movie starts with four high school kids covering a KISS tune (badly) in a basement. They are

• James Bello, a long haired stoner (Jason Mewes type)
• Edward Furlong, tough kid (ala Michael J. Fox)
• Sam Huntington, the cute kid (like a blonde David Cassidy?)
• Giuseppe Andrews, a nice kid (sorry, I couldn’t identify his type)

It is 1978, and they are totally psyched to be going to see KISS in Detroit in two days. But Huntington’s mom (Lin Shane, Elise from Insidious!) finds and confiscates the tickets, because satanic. Then Bello manages to win tickets in a radio contest, and they are off to Detroit in a borrowed Volvo.

On the way, they pass some Guidos and Stellas (Italian-American disco fans) and get into an altercation. The Guidos bully them a little, then the kids turn on them and leave them by the side of the road. But Andrews gives one of the girls (Natasha Lyonne) a ride to Detroit (she’s going to Disco Inferno). Then the Volvo gets stolen.

Ok, so they get to the radio station and discover that stoner Bello hung up before he told the DJ his name, so there are no tickets. Now they need to take desperate measures. They split up and attempt to come up with tickets or money for a scalper.

To summarize:

• Furlong enters a ladies night amateur strip competition, MC’ed by Ron Jeremy. He has a lot to drink first and pukes before performing, but does an interesting, Jim Morrison style routine. He loses, of course, but cougar Shannon Tweed picks him up, rocks his world, and slips him a few hundred.
• Bello figures he’ll just mug a kid for a ticket, but the kid he picks has a huge big brother. He winds up owing the kid, and has to rob the convenience store. Instead, he foils someone else who’s trying to rob the convenience store, gets a reward and a kiss from the cute checkout girl.
• Andrews sneaks backstage, but gets thrown out the back. There, he finds the Volvo and Lyonne, being held for nefarious purposes. He saves her, and gets his reward.
• Huntington gets caught by his mom, who is part of a religious protest against KISS. She drags him to confession with father Joe Flaherty. But a girl from his class (Melanie Lynskey) sneaks into the confessional, and confesses she loves him, but is moving out of town. They get it on.

So our heroes all get some romance and some kind of reward. But do they make it to the concert? I don’t think you need a spoiler.

We are by no stretch of the imagination KISS fans, but this is a great movie. It’s full of the type of music you’d expect (KISS, Cheap Trick, Thin Lizzy, The Runaways). It’s full of funny scenes, and the kids are great. One thing I liked is that they are fundamentally OK. They never really think of skipping school or rebelling against authority - except Bello, he’s kind of a dick. When they meet the Guidos, it’s kind of obnoxious. But the disco guys bully them a lot before they even think of fighting back. And Lyonne gets to stand up for herself and the proposition that good music is good music, disco, metal or polka.

This was written and directed by Adam Rifkin, who has an odd resume, including writing Underdog and Mousehunt, but also Small Soldiers for Joe Dante. Recently, he wrote and directed The Last Movie Star, which may turn out to be Burt Reynolds final movie. An odd duck indeed.

Triple Black

I’ve heard a lot about Trilogy of Terror (1975) over the years, and now I’ve seen it. This made-for-TV movie is cited by a lot of the podcasters I listen to as one of the movies they loved to watch from behind the couch when they were kids. The last of the trilogy is most people’s favorite, but they are all pretty cool.

They all star Karen Black and are based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one has college student Chad (Robert Burton) decide to “seduce” frumpy professor Black. He convinces her to go to the drive-in with him, then drugs her drink. He takes some sexy pictures of her and blackmails her into sexual slavery. Want the spoiler? Here it comes - it was all her idea. She likes playing sex games, but she’s tired of this one, so she drugs his drink. But her drug is poison!

The next features Black as a somewhat prissy rich woman, calling her doctor about her slutty twin sister. When you notice that you never see them together, you probably figure out the ending. The prissy sister kills the slut (also Black) but it’s a suicide, since they are one woman with split personality.

The final part is a tour de force, a one-woman play. Black comes home to her apartment, with a present for her boyfriend, an anthropologist. It’s a doll (called a Zuni fetish, but it doesn’t look very Native American) with fierce teeth and a spear. She has a talk with her overbearing mother who doesn’t want her to see her boyfriend, even though it’s his birthday. Then the doll comes to life and starts hunting her. The scene where the doll is hiding under the sofa made me understand why kids watched this from behind theirs.

I won’t spoil the end of this. It’s actually a pretty corny story, but Black does it all herself, with barely any special effects to animate the doll. That’s cool.

This was directed by Dan Curtis of Dark Shadows. I think my favorite was the first one, with the roofies and the me-too and the revenge turn-around. The gimmick of the twins in the second was a little too obvious. They tried to hide that it was a split personality in one scene, but barely. There’s also a voodoo subplot that doesn’t work. And the Zuni doll story is silly but let’s face it - it’s a classic now. Glad we got to this and kudos to Karen Black. She had done a some serious work before this, but afterwards found herself typecast. That’s suffering for art.

Tiger in the Tank

Railroad Tigers (2016) is your basic late Jackie Chan: a big cast to share the stunt duties and a little more wire work and editing around Jackie scenes. Still, a lot of fun.

It starts with a little boy looking at an old steam train, and he sees a cartoon tiger face chalked on the boiler. This triggers a flashback. We meet Jackie and crew robbing a train. This is during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, so they are more or less freedom fighters. By day, they are railroad workers, and hang out at auntie Xu Fan’s pancake shop. As the Japanese train security mounts, they run into a wounded Chinese soldier. They hide him from the Japanese and he tells them of his mission - to destroy a certain bridge at a certain time. So the Tigers, much against their better judgement, agree to help.

The lead up is long and convoluted, with lots of new character enter, including Andy Lau. Each new character gets an old-fashiony title card, which helps keep them straight, but not by much. Many of them get a fighting style, like the engineer who uses a hammer on a rope. There are goofy fights and stunts - like when they make a human pyramid to scale a wall and then notice there was a ladder a little ways over. Most of this film is an action comedy.

Then comes the final fight to destroy the bridge. No one expects to come back alive, and pretty much no one does. This tonal shift might be jarring, but is actually pretty common in Chan’s movies. I feel like he wants to emphasize that violence is not all fun and games. But in the end, we come out of the flashback to see the little kid’s father, who was one of the Tigers. So either someone made it out alive, or it was all a story he was telling.

All in all, a little long and complicated, but some great set pieces.

In Good Standing

Last Man Standing (1996) was Walter Hill’s version of Yojimbo, which was also remade as A Fistful of Dollars. Since this version is a 1930s gangster movie, I was hoping it would be more of a remake of Dashiell Hammett’s original story, Red Harvest. But it’s really more of a Bruce Willis thing.

It starts with Willis driving his Model A into a small Texas town, on his way to Mexico. He sees some men hustling a beautiful woman, Karina Lombard, across the street. The men see him looking at her and take offense, trashing his car and warning him that she is Doyle’s property. So it looks like he’ll be staying in town a while.

Sheriff Bruce Dern refuses to do a thing, being afraid of Doyle’s gang - and of the other gang in town. So Willis goes to ask Doyle to pay for repairs. The guy who trashed his car takes offense and draws a gun, so Willis shoots him. So now we know Willis is a bad man.

The other gang, run by an Italian named Strozzi, hires Willis as a soldier in the coming war between the gangs. One of his first gigs is to help hijack a shipment of liquor from Doyle. At this point, Willis goes to Doyle and defects for more money. And you get the idea.

I had mixed feelings about this film. Willis’ opening monologue is so over-the-top hardboiled poetry that I thought it was going to be silly. And it kind of was - this is Walter Hill we’re talking about, with Bruce Willis doing the talking. But, maybe since it is Hill and Willis, it was also kind of fun, in a bloody, amoral kind of way. The women don’t get treated very well, but not as bad as all that. One of the big bad guys is played by Christopher Walken, and that’s fun. And Ry Cooder did the music, mostly as subtle, bluesy guitar.

Still, someday I’d like to see a version of Hammett’s story about a town they call Poisonville.

Scandal of 1960

A Breath of Scandal (1960) looks pretty good on paper - a Michael Curtiz sex farce starring Sophia Loren, with some Angela Lansbury and Maurice Chevalier thrown in. I can’t say it lived up to this, but it does still have Sophia Loren.

She plays an Austrian princess, exiled to a remote castle by the Emperor for having affairs. She is headstrong and self-centered. She loves to shoot a rifle at the mailman, and gallop her horse through the countryside. On one of these rides, American John Gavin in his new-fangled automobile scares her horse, throwing her. When she sees him, she has to have him, and sets out to seduce him. Since he is a Puritanical American, this is harder than it sounds, but she succeeds.

But her father, Chevalier, tells her that the Emperor has rescinded her exile and wants her to marry the Prince of Prussia. Of course, she is thrilled - that is what princesses do, she explains to Gavin, marry princes. She expects him to understand (he doesn’t). She also expects that no breath of scandal will be exposed, or the marriage cannot take place.

There isn’t much humor in this comedy (sex farce is a bit too far). Gavin is famously wooden - this makes him well cast, but not very interesting. Curtiz was probably past it. However, Loren looks amazing, with what appears to be a 19-inch waist. Her decadent aristocrat without a touch of feeling for the common people is charming, or at least bracing. She is so much better than the material.

Ain’t Misbehaving

Misbehaving Husbands (1940) is a late Harry Langdon, but not really. He’s in it, but there doesn’t seem to be a trace of his silent film persona. In the silents and some early talkies, he was a sort of round-headed man baby. He is more of the absent-minded husband, with more than a touch of Wally Cox.

He plays the manager (owner?) of a department store, into which he puts all his attention. He even forgets about the party his wife, Betty Blythe, is throwing for him. He stays late at the store moving a blonde mannequin around in the display window, and one of his guests sees him on the way to the party. Worse, he injures her face and someone sees him loading her up into his car to take her to the wax works for repairs. The police pick him up later, thinking he was disposing of a body and hold him for questioning. Meanwhile, the story of him romancing a blonde starts going around among the guests at the party that he is missing, and his wife overhears.

This leads another guest, an unscrupulous divorce lawyer, to encourage his Blythe to divorce Langdon, and soak him for anything she can. And so on.

There’s a certain amount of humor in Langdon’s absentmindedness and some physical comedy with the mannequin. Also, there’s a drunk scene that isn’t bad. But most of this is very much standard fare - including the romantic subplot between two young people brought in to observe the couple’s separation. It’s mildly interesting to see Langdon all grown up. His wife, Betty Blythe, is another silent era star. Look for stills of her playing the Queen of Sheba - she was hot stuff. Several other cast members had similar backgrounds. Whether that makes it worthwhile is your call.

Kiwigasm

Deathgasm (2015) is another entry into our metal horror comedy festival. This entry comes from New Zealand, and is pretty crazy.

It stars Milo Cawthorne as Brodie, a high school metalhead who gets sent to a small town to live with his Christian aunt and uncle while his mother is in the hospital (meth problem). They are not very tolerant of his lifestyle, and his cousin is a jock bully. He tries to rescue a nerd from his cousin and crew, and gets introduced to another nerd and the concept of Dungeons and Dragons - which he doesn’t care for. Then he meets Zakk (James Blake) in the local record store.

Zakk is another metalhead, and a real bad boy - he drinks, smokes pot, and plays outrageous pranks. Along with the two nerds, they form a band that Zakk insists must be called Deathgasm. Also, it looks like the cutest girl in school (and his jock cousin’s girl), Medina (Kimberly Crossman), is interested in him. So now he’s starting to have fun.

One of Zakk’s pranks is to sneak into a “deserted” house where he thinks a famous musician is hiding out. They find him, but so does a strange cult. So the musician gives them a record and they run, before the cult gets them. The record turns out to be Rick Astley (Rick rolled!), but there is also some paper with an ancient musical melody written on it. When they play it, it has a weird effect on them - and the neighborhood. Could it be - the Devil’s Music? (SPOILER - yes.)

Soon Brodie is pissed off enough at everybody that he is willing to play this Satanic Hymn to gain great power. He doesn’t, though. He just makes everyone else possessed by demons.

There’s a lot to love about this movie. It has great low-budget gross-out special effects, including a long fight between Brodie’s demonic aunt and uncle, and Brodie and Zakk, armed with a collection of dildos and vibrators. Then there’s the teen character study, with Zakk as the fun friend who turns out to be a totally selfish jerk who will try to steal your girl and lie to your face about it. Then there’s the metal sound track, which is pretty righteous. And it’s all done in a devil-may-care (heh) indie style with notebook doodle title cards, crazy editing and fourth wall breaking.

Also, the Brodie/Medina/Zakk triangle made me notice that Jennifer’s Body is a rock-horror-comedy, because of a similar scene. Cool.