Showing posts with label stephen macht. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stephen macht. Show all posts

Friday, July 28, 2017

1980 Week: Galaxina



Given the cost of creating outer-space special effects, only a handful of low-budget movies were able to draft off the success of Star Wars (1977), which meant that each of these ripoff projects received enough hype to capture the imagination of young moviegoers still high on their trip to a galaxy far, far away. Otherwise, how can one explain cult followings for such genuinely terrible movies as Galaxina? Although primarily marketed as a starring vehicle for Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, who wears sexy outfits but does not appear nude, Galaxina is not erotica. Nor is it an exciting space adventure, though it contains dopey laser fights. Galaxina is primarily a broad comedy, with scenes spoofing (or merely copying) tropes from Alien, Star Trek, and Star Wars. C-list actors Stephen Macht and Avery Schrieber play crewmen aboard an intergalactic patrol vehicle responsible for monitoring space traffic, and Stratten plays the ship’s quasi-sentient robot. Zingers never rise pass the level of schoolyard insults (“If a jackass had both your brains, he’d be a very dumb jackass!”), and sight gags are just as dumb, right down to a schlocky riff on the famous Star Wars cantina scene. As for the story, it’s pointless idiocy about the patrol vehicle encountering outer-space intrigue. Circumstances force Galaxina to leave the vessel and confront villains on a planet resembling the Wild West, only with aliens. There’s also a romance involving Macht’s character, who has the hots for Galaxina. Weirdly, the whole thing has a nocturnal vibe because cinematographer Dean Cundey shrouds images in the same widescreen shadows he brought to several John Carpenter films in the ’70s and ’80s. The movie’s sole redeeming value is Stratten’s sex appeal, but given the ineptitude of her acting, one can only admire her curves for so long.

Galaxina: LAME

Saturday, December 3, 2016

The Tenth Level (1976)



          Based on controversial experiments conducted by psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale in the early ‘60s, The Tenth Level explores the troubling question of why otherwise good and rational people follow orders they know to be morally wrong, simply because the inclination to comply with directions from authority figures is so ingrained into human behavior. Specifically, Milgram created an elaborate scenario involving three participants. Two volunteers flipped coins, with one becoming the teacher and the other becoming the learner. The learner sat in a separate room, out of sight, with electrodes wired to his or her body. The teacher communicated by microphone, reciting a series of phrases and quizzing the learner about the phrases. Each time the learner got an answer wrong, the teacher hit a switch on a control board. The first switch triggered a tiny electric shock. Progressing through 25 levels, each switch zapped the learner with more electricity than the last. All the while, a scientist functioned as the experimenter, sternly urging the teacher to follow the experiment to its conclusion even as the teacher inevitably balked at inflicting pain on the learner.
          The ethics of Milgram’s work were widely debated, even though his findings, which suggested that blind obedience is a common trait, sparked disturbed reactions from a populace still trying to understand, like Milgram, why so many Germans during World War II participated in genocide.
          Shot on video and broadcast on Playhouse 90, The Tenth Level stars William Shatner as Stephen Turner, a stand-in for Milgram. In addition to navigating trite melodramas during scenes outside the laboratory, he struggles to keep his work secret from college officials, lest they shut down him down. Later, he defends himself once a school committee responds to accusations that Turner manipulated test subjects. Predictably, the best scenes involve re-creations and/or re-imaginings of experiment sessions. (The real Milgram consulted on the project.) Fine actors including Mike Kellin and Viveca Lindfors imbue their runs through Turner’s moral obstacle course with palpable anguish. Somewhat less effective is the picture’s second lead, Stephen Macht, who plays an important test subject. (Explaining his relevance would reveal too much of the plot.) Handsome and sincere, Macht gives the sort of one-dimensional performance one might encounter in a soap opera, an effect that’s exaggerated by the movie’s clunky video imagery. Unfortunately, Macht shoulders most of the film’s emotional weight, with Shatner largely relegated to speechifying until the final scene. Also working against the film’s efficacy is the way excellent supporting players including Roscoe Lee Browne and Lindsay Crouse are underused. In sum, The Tenth Level is intense and thought-provoking, but it’s also preachy and wooden.
          FYI, the real-life science explored in this movie has appeared elsewhere in popular culture. Peter Gabriel’s 1986 album So features a song called “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” and the 2015 film Experimenter stars Peter Sarsgaard as Milgram.

The Tenth Level: FUNKY

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Nightwing (1979)


Despite its atmospheric poster and fantastic title, Nightwing is one of the worst big-studio horror movies of the late ’70s. Tedious gobbledygook about a Native American cop and a white scientist investigating the killer bats laying siege to an Indian reservation in New Mexico, the movie pathetically tries to mesh comin’-at-ya scares with then-fashionable Native mysticism, and the picture is so laughably inauthentic that the two principal Native American characters are played by an Italian-American (Nick Mancuso) and a Jewish Philadelphian (Stephen Macht). Both try not to embarrass themselves, though the idiotic storyline makes that challenging; they mostly end up bulging their eyes to simulate intensity. This misfire also features sexy leading lady Kathryn Harrold in one of her few starring roles. For several years in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Harrold eemed like she was one movie away from a big career, but Nightwing was among several embarrasing flops that impeded her momentum. Inexplicably, this turkey was directed by Arthur Hiller, whose filmography is dominated by sensitive dramas like Love Story (1970) and glossy comedies like Silver Streak (1976). There’s a reason he didn’t make any other horror movies, and that’s because Nightwing relies on cheap and derivative gimmicks like a scene that mimics the underwater-cage sequence in Jaws (1975)—suffice it to say that fake-looking bats swarming around a metal box that’s attached to a pickup truck in the middle of the desert doesn’t have the same oomph as a submerged Richard Dreyfuss steering clear of an enormous shark’s pearly whites. The end of Nightwing almost achieves a fever pitch of bad-movie kitsch, when Mancuso goes into some sort of drug-induced trance while summoning up the ancient spirits who’ve been driving the bats batty, but reaching that brief moment of amusing awfulness requires sludging through an hour and a half of unredeemable guano. (Available through Columbia Screen Classics via WarnerArchive.com)

Nightwing: SQUARE