The Kid from Not-So-Big (1978)

          A harmless but unimpressive attempt at mimicking Disney’s family-friendly formula, The Kid from Not-So-Big is somewhat akin to Disney’s silly Apple Dumpling Gang movies—like those pictures, Not-So-Big is a gentle Western comedy involving frontier swindlers, goofy gunslingers, and saintly children. Deepening the Disney alignment, there’s even a tangential connection to theme parks. Six Flags briefly partnered in a production company that generated only two 1978 projects—Barnaby and Me, a koala-themed comedy that was broadcast on Australian television, and Not-So-Big, which probably reached its broadest audience through a Warner Bros. video release in the ‘80s. Given its close adherence to Disney’s style, Not-So-Big would have benefitted from some Mouse House overkill: name actors, posh production values, a zippy mixture of broad farce with cornpone plotting. Although Not-So-Big looks great thanks to the efforts of future A-list cinematographer Dean Cundey, the picture suffers from bland leading performances and script that goes slack in the middle.

          In the whimsically named town of Not-So-Big, precocious preteen Jenny (Jennifer McAllister) does most of the heavy lifting for a tiny newspaper owned by her grandfather, Hank (Don Keefer). When con man Sylvester Quick (Robert Viharo) blows into Not-So-Big with hype about making everyone rich by selling property to big-city investors, Jenny calls BS. First Sylvester torches the newspaper’s office, resulting in Hank’s death. Then Sylvester hires gunman Slowhand (Paul Tulley) to kill Jenny. Per the norm of such stories, Slowhand’s conscience gets in the way, as does his affection for Not-So-Big’s newly installed schoolteacher, Corinne (Veronica Cartwright). If you’ve ever seen a children’s movie, you can figure out how things go from there.

          The first stretch of the movie is fine, setting up a by-the-numbers plot and stock characters in an innocuous manner, and the final act has the requisite mixture of dopey physical comedy and sappy emotional payoffs. Alas, the second act is quite dull and repetitive because the script by Desmond Nakano (who later found a groove writing heavy dramas) grinds through uninteresting subplots. Exacerbating the vanilla storytelling are performances that range from adequate to less so. It’s a kick to see Cartwright playing a girl-next-door type, but McAllister is likeable without actually being charismatic and Viharo is overbearing without actually being menacing. It’s never a good sign when scowling trash-cinema stalwart George “Buck” Flower, playing one of his patented rural schemers, is the liveliest performer onscreen. 
 
The Kid from Not-So-Big: FUNKY

Inserts (1974)

          The first hurdle to get over when approaching writer-director John Byrum’s strange little movie Inserts is trying to understand how the thing got made. Setting aside the presence of leading man Richard Dreyfuss, who was on the rise in the early ’70s thanks to American Graffiti (1973), everything about Inserts screams “uncommercial.” The piece unfolds like a play, with real-time interaction between a small set of characters sprawling across a single location for 117 minutes; the dense dialogue occasionally tips over into pretention; and the film is filled with sex on every level, so even though the depiction of physical encounters is not explicit, Inserts borders on porn just for the sheer amount of sexual content. (The MPAA slapped the picture with an X rating during its original release.) Put succinctly, Inserts is a North American movie that feels like a European art-house picture, and on top of everything else, it’s dark as hell. Therefore, asking how the movie came into being is futile. It was the ’70s, man.

          Byrum takes viewers on a unique journey, although chances are many viewers give up before the trip reaches its destination—the weirdness factor is undoubtedly a turn-off for some. That said, Inserts is full of intellectual and visceral rewards for those who lock into Byrum’s bizarre frequency. Inserts is a movie about movies, but it’s also about ambition, artistic hubris, emotional paralysis, manipulation, and power—all of which are viewed through the prism of carnal knowledge.

          Set in the 1930s, Inserts takes place in the mansion of Boy Wonder (Dreyfuss), a movie director whose career peaked in the silent era. Boy Wonder drove himself out of the film business with diva behavior, so now he makes his living by shooting stag reels in his own home—a nice arrangement, seeing as how Boy Wonder has become a virtual recluse. Then as now, the porn business attracts damaged souls, so Boy Wonder’s cast members for the shoot depicted in Inserts are Harlene (Veronica Cartwright), a heroin-addicted former mainstream movie actress, and “Rex, the Wonder Dog” (Stephen Davies), a dimwit stud with violent tendencies. Underwriting the whole affair is Big Mac (Bob Hoskins), a crude gangster who hits the scene accompanied by Cathy (Jessica Harper), an intense striver determined to break into movies no matter what it takes. As the story progresses, Boy Wonder plays mind games on his actors to get work out of them. Later, when tragedy strikes, Boy Wonder himself becomes the victim of mind games.

          Even though Inserts is in many ways a film of ideas, giving away too much of the plot would be a disservice to the piece, because the layers of character that get revealed with every plot twist add to the richness of Byrum’s deranged tapestry. Every character is a lost soul of some kind, so watching them grasp for solid ground makes for fascinating sport. Not everything in Inserts works, and the perverse nature of the material ensures that cynical viewers will find the piece more credible than optimistic ones. Still, this is singular work fueled by passionate acting.

          Carwright nails a poignant mixture of naïveté and world-weariness, while Harper presents a character who seems like a skin-trade riff on All About Eve’s Eve Harrington—the hungry young thing without a conscience. Hoskins is effectively boarish and frightening, while Davies personifies the confusion of a man unable to grasp the full dimensions of his own circumstances. As for Dreyfuss, he’s incandescent, the complicated and precise nuances of his performance mitigated only by the actor’s overpowering self-satisfaction. (Few stars seem to relish their own skills as obviously as Dreyfuss does, though a strong argument could be made that arrogance was the perfect choice of emotional though-line for Boy Wonder.) Overall, Inserts is a deeply odd movie, given the juxtaposition of its lofty literary style and its sleazy subject matter. Grim and insightful and macabre and stylish and surprising, it’s a high-wire act performed in a sewer.

Inserts: FREAKY

Alien (1979)

          Writer Dan O’Bannon was a film-school pal of John Carpenter’s, but his career foundered after the duo expanded Carpenter’s thesis film into the commercial feature Dark Star (1974). While Carpenter was making the low-budget shockers that launched his career, O’Bannon was mired in stillborn projects like an unproduced version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune, and at he ended up living on his friend Ron Shusett’s couch. Luckily, Shusett was an aspiring writer-producer intrigued by O’Bannon’s idea for a claustrophobic sci-fi/horror flick about an outer-space critter that preys upon a spaceship’s crew. (The concept borrows liberally from myriad sources, with the 1958 B-movie It! The Terror from Beyond Space often cited as a direct influence.) O’Bannon and Shusett fleshed out the story, which at one point was titled Star Beast, then sold the package to producers Gordon Carroll, David Giler, and Walter Hil, whose new company Brandywine Productions had access to Twentieth Century-Fox. Giler and Hill, both screenwriters, did more narrative tinkering, but Fox didn’t get excited until the studio’s Star Wars (1977) exploded at the box office. Alien was the next outer-space picture on deck at Fox, so the project finally got momentum—and as more people joined the party, the level of artistic ambition continued rising.
          Ridley Scott, then a veteran of countless TV commercials but only one little-seen feature, was hired because of his keen visual sense. Just as importantly, Swiss artist H.R. Giger, who worked on the same stillborn version of Dune as O’Bannon, was recruited for creature and set designs; his creepy “biomechanics” style infused the resulting film’s alien scenes with perverse grandeur. Representing a rare case of the development process doing what it’s supposed to do, Alien kept evolving, rather like the creature in the story, until finally, on May 25, 1979, audiences got their first look at a perfect marriage of exploitation-flick elements and art-film craftsmanship. Scott fills every frame of the picture with meticulous details, building excruciating tension by keeping the titular beastie almost completely offscreen until the film’s finale. He also created one of scare cinema’s greatest jolts with the unforgettable “chest-burster” scene.
          So despite underdeveloped characters and an occasionally murky storyline, nearly everything in Alien works on some level, from the sleek title sequence by R/Greenberg Associates to the terrifying climax featuring Sigourney Weaver wearing the smallest panties in the known universe. The production design’s mix of utility and grime is utterly credible; the score by Jerry Goldsmith is eerily majestic; and the interplay between actors Veronica Cartwright, Ian Holm, John Hurt, Yaphet Kotto, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, and Weaver nails under-pressure group dynamics. The movie that O’Bannon and Shusett once pitched as “Jaws in space” sits comfortably alongside Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster as one of the most cinematically important horror shows ever made.

Alien: OUTTA SIGHT