1980 Week: Simon

          Following impressive runs as Johnny Carson’s head writer from 1969 to 1970 and as Woody Allen’s writing partner for Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), and Manhattan (1979), Marshall Brickman launched a brief and only moderately successful directorial career with the sci-fi satire Simon. Starring Alan Arkin in a role well-suited to the actor’s unique gifts, the movie bears obvious traces of Allen’s cinematic style, although Brickman is unable to match his former collaborator on the levels of hilarity, insight, and substance. Simon is mostly sorta-funny and sorta-smart, so the film is only sorta-memorable. Seen today, the movie loses even more potency because so many of the jokes are directed at the extremes of hippy-dippy ’70s scientists—for instance, the picture’s main villain evokes turtleneck-loving ’70s science star Carl Sagan, who deserves better than to be used as the visual reference for a nefarious character.

          Borrowing a gimmick that Allen used many times, the movie opens like a documentary, introducing viewers to the great minds at the Institute for Advanced Concepts, a think tank funded with seemingly unlimited government money. Under the supervision of Dr. Carl Becker (Austin Pendleton), the eggheads at the institute contrive experiments for amusement rather than for higher purposes, for instance skewing Nielson ratings to help the variety show Donnie & Marie become a hit. One day, the scientists decide it would be fun to convince the American public than an alien lives among them. After running data, they identify college professor Simon Mendelssohn (Arkin) as the individual most susceptible to the suggestion that he’s from another planet. Mendelssohn is a low-rent theorist whose desire to make an important social contribution far exceeds his talents, so he’s flattered when he’s invited to join the think tank—and he’s thrilled when Becker and his cronies reveal their “discovery” of Mendelssohn’s true origins. Later, once the eggheads present Mendelssohn to the world, Simon goes rogue, using pirate-broadcasting technology to share his supposedly extraterrestrial wisdom with the people of the world.

          Brickman, who cowrote the film’s original story with Thomas Baum, can’t figure out where to take the outlandish concept, and he can’t sustain a consistent tone. Although the movie never slides into full-on stupidity, various broad jokes diminish the clever gags by association. It’s also distracting that cinematographer Adam Holender so obviously mimics the shadow-drenched shooting style of master DP Gordon Willis, who shot Annie Hall and Manhattan. Arkin scores a few wonderfully silly moments, Pendleton’s performance is quite sly, and leading lady Judy Graubart, as Mendelssohn’s rightfully skeptical girlfriend, is charming in a neurotic sort of way. (The great Madeline Kahn is wasted in a too-small supporting role.) Yet the real problem with the picture is that it’s hard to care what happens to the main character, who toggles between obnoxious and pathetic.

Simon: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Baltimore Bullet

          Drab, sexist, and unfocused, this would-be comedy about pool hustlers features James Coburn in his familiar charming-rogue groove, complete with the glorious salt-and-pepper perm that he sported for many years. (In fact, two separate scenes showcase Coburn's hair-care regimen, because he works a flat iron in one vignette and tucks his precious coiffure beneath a shower cap in another.) The storyline is a colorless mixture of gambling-flick clichés, and the characterizations are as one-dimensional as the narrative. Nonetheless, Coburn does what he can to infuse the movie with energy, and the plot skips along from one situation to the next at a fairly rapid pace. So while it would be a stretch to call The Baltimore Bullet interesting, the picture is basically watchable, and pool fans will enjoy cameos by real-life professional players as well as scenes featuring wild trick shots, some of which Coburn performs on-camera. There’s also a bizarre supporting performance by onetime blaxploitation luminary Calvin Lockhart, who sports a giant white Afro and a ladies’ dressing robe to play a crook named “Snow White.”

          When the story begins, veteran hustler Nick Casey (Coburn), whose nickname is “The Baltimore Bullet,” ekes out a living alongside his young partner, Billie Joe Robbins (Bruce Boxleitner), a headstrong stud with a bad habit of losing all his money in poker games. The men are thoroughly sleazy, using an old clipping of their sole appearance in Sports Illustrated to score with bimbos. (Typically misogynistic moment: Billie Joe loses a bet by groping a waitress’ massive breasts and confirming they’re real instead of silicone.) Eventually, word reaches Nick that an old nemesis, The Deacon (Omar Sharif), has been released from prison, so Nick and Billie Joe head to New Orleans, where they plan to enter a pool contest in order to win enough money for a high-stakes rematch with The Deacon. Along the way to New Orleans, the hustlers befriend singer-songwriter Carolina Red (Ronnee Blakeley, a long way from Robert Altman’s Nashville) and get into a hassle with the aforementioned Snow White, occasioning a chase scene through an amusement-park funhouse.

          Lighthearted but witless, the script by John Brascia and Robert Vincent O'Neill strives for madcap excitement but instead delivers disassociated moments that lack both sparkle and substance. It's impossible to care what happens to the self-serving characters, and the movie ventures off track so many times that one can't even ride the momentum of the central plot all the way to the finish. Worse, incoherence rears its head with considerable frequency, adding muddiness to the lengthy list of the movie's shortcomings.

The Baltimore Bullet: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Octagon

          Unlike his friend Bruce Lee, American martial artist-turned-movie star Chuck Norris rarely used his films to explore the spiritual aspects of Asian fighting techniques. Quite to the contrary, Norris made meat-and-potatoes action pictures during his heyday, eventually complementing his signature roundhouse kicks with giant pistols and massive machine guns. Examining Norris’ most ambitious martial-arts flick, The Octagon, reveals why the strategies that worked for Lee didn’t work for Norris. Among other reasons, Norris is, was, and always will be a genuinely terrible actor, though he was able to slide through on charm and stoicism in a few projects.

          Throughout The Octagon, director Eric Karson features scenes of Norris’ character deep in thought while echo-laden recordings of Norris’ voice reverberate on the soundtrack, conveying the character’s thoughts. Thanks to the actor’s blank facial expressions and lame surfer-dude line readings, the effect is alternately dull and laughable. At his best, Lee was able to convey depth, intensity, and soulfulness. All three qualities are required to put across the concept of a philosophical warrior, and all three qualities are beyond Norris’ dramatic reach. In the star’s defense, the script for The Octagon is so episodic and turgid that even the best actor would have encountered difficulty creating a dynamic through line. So while the film is redeemed somewhat by a few cool action scenes, including the moderately stylish climax, The Octagon is a slog of a movie that only devoted fans of martial-arts cinema are likely to enjoy.

          The mechanics of the story are silly and twisty, but the main thrust is that modern-day ninja assassins have begun operating in the U.S. Professional martial artist Scott James (Norris) suspects the ninja were trained by his estranged half-brother, Sekura (Tadashi Yamashita). Convoluted intrigue ensues. Scott becomes involved with a beautiful woman, Justine (Karen Carlson), who has connections to the assassinations. Also pulled into the situation are Scott’s best friend (Art Hindle) and a mercenary (Lee Van Cleef) with whom Scott shares history. Eventually, Scott learns that Sekura has built a training camp for international killers, so he and his allies mount an assault, leading to a showdown between the half-brothers. Although the dialogue and the storytelling are as poor as Norris’ acting, cinematographer Michel Hugo gives The Octagon a polished look, and every so often, something onscreen has an adrenalized kick—the shots of the ninja scaling a hotel wall at night are creepy, and the staging of the final showdown is suitably grandiose.

The Octagon: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Competition

          An old saying holds that directing is 90 percent casting. The trick, however, is casting the right actor in the right role at the right time. Consider The Competition, a glossy romantic drama about two pianists who fall in love while participating in a contest that will grant the winner instant access to a career performing classical music at top venues. Richard Dreyfuss plays the leading role of Paul Dietrich, a young man who has outgrown his child-prodigy years and yet not fully realized his promise as an adult. With his arsenal of off-putting sneers and uptight tics, Dreyfuss is completely the right performer for this role. Unfortunately, because he was in his early 30s when he made the picture, it’s an impossible accept him as a character who is presumably in his early 20s, especially since Dreyfuss had already played several roles with gray hair and a paunch. Director Joel Oliansnky and his collaborators try every trick they can to put across the desired illusion—Dreyfuss wears distracting makeup beneath his eyes, and other characters comment upon his “premature” receding hairline—but these feeble efforts only make the issue more noticeable. And so it goes, alas, for the rest of the picture, which boats intelligence and wit but feels artificial and contrived in nearly every possible way.

          The story, which Oliansky cowrote with producer William Sackheim, is simple. Paul decides to enter one last competition before giving up his dreams of musical glory for a day job. Upon arriving in San Francisco for auditions, he encounters pretty Heidi Joan Schoonover (Amy Irving), and they strike romantic sparks. Despite his determination to remain focused, Paul falls for Heidi. She, in turn, finds his earthiness refreshing since she comes from an insular, privileged background. Oliansky interweaves the love story of these two characters with subplots about other competitors, plus another subplot about Greta Vandemann (Lee Remick), Heidi’s piano teacher, herself a former competitor.

          Inexplicably, Oliansky lets The Competition sprawl across a bloated running time of more than two hours, even though the material is paper-thin. Much of the excess happens during performance scenes, since Oliansky seems determined to show off the way his actors learned to mimic complex fingering. There’s also a general languidness to the pacing, especially when actors stand in perfect three-point lighting to deliver monologues that, one presumes, were envisioned as Oscar clips. For a movie with a decent sense of humor, The Competition takes itself awfully seriously. Still, the film is not without its emotional peaks, even if Oliansky’s tendency toward overwritten schmaltz undercuts every sincere thing that his actors try to accomplish. Oh, and fair warning: If you’re among those who find Dreyfuss impossibly precious and smug, watching The Competition will not change your opinion.

The Competition: FUNKY

1980 Week: HealtH

          A tiresome ensemble piece blending conspiracies, politics, romance, and satire through the mechanism of interconnected storylines and a kaleidescopic soundtrack, Robert Altman’s HealtH comes across as Nashville Lite. At best, HealtH is a goofy comedy using the intrigue at a health-food convention as a means of spoofing the corruption of modern American politics. At worst, HealtH is a pretentious trifle from an overrated director repeating old tricks. It’s interesting that HealtH was released in 1980, because the film’s artistic and commercial failure neatly bookends the chapter in Altman’s career that began with the success of M*A*S*H exactly one decade earlier. Over the course of the ’70s, Altman made a number of fine films and just as many bad ones, cementing his reputation as an iconoclast who put together wonderful casts by offering the promise of loose work environments and unconventional material. Yet by the time Altman derailed with the twin 1980 misfires of HealtH and Popeye, his first run as a commercial director was over. It wouldn’t be until 1992’s The Player that Altman was able to assemble a cast as impressive as the one he gathered for HealtH.

          Set at a hotel in Florida, HealtH observes a convention at which the officers of a massive health-food organization gather to elect their new president. The leading candidates are Esther Brill  (Lauren Bacall), a pontificating 83-year-old virgin with narcolepsy; Isabelle Garnell (Glenda Jackson), an insufferable progressive who recites old Adlai Stevenson speeches whether or not anyone’s listening; Gloria Burbank (Carol Burnett), a neurotic political operative with White House connections; and Dr. Gil Gainey (Paul Dooley), a vitamin salesman using his “campaign” as a publicity stunt to hype his products. Also involved in the election are Gloria’s ex-husband, Harry Wolff (James Garner); dirty-tricks specialist Bobby Hammer (Henry Gibson); crazed cowboy Colonel Cody (Donald Moffatt); and real-life talk-show host Dick Cavett, who plays himself.

          The mosaic structure of the picture showcases bizarre behavior in a casual style. One gets the sense of Altman and his collaborators indulging their shared sense of humor, so the resulting film feels like a compendium of in-jokes. The actors are all so skilled that some of the gags almost connect, but the overall vibe is quite tiresome. Altman adds virtually nothing to the statements about democratic elections that he made in Nashville, and he seems disinterested in health-food culture beyond making a few judgmental digs. Not surprisingly, HealtH never found a major audience. Altman made the film as part of a multipicture deal with Fox, delivering his third dud in a row after A Perfect Couple and Quintet (both 1979), so Fox initially balked at releasing HealtH. Altman snuck the film into a few theaters during 1980, and the studio released the picture properly in 1982, when it tanked.

HealtH: FUNKY

1980 Week: Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!)

The last theatrical feature made during the original heyday of animated projects based upon Charles M. Shulz’s beloved Peanuts franchise, Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!) finds the franchise’s key creative team at low ebb. Schulz, who wrote and produced the picture, fails to deliver either a memorable narrative or strong jokes, and codirector Bill Melendez (a Peanuts veteran who shared helming chores on this project with Phil Roman) fails to provide the imaginative visual flourishes that make the deliberately crude artistic style of early Peanuts cartoons so charming. In perhaps the most telling sign of creative fatigue, the storytellers feature adult characters onscreen, complete with dialogue, breaking the Peanuts spell of a universe created by and for children. Even Snoopy makes a poor showing here. While the forever-unlucky title character endures an eventful trip through Europe, his brilliant dog, Snoopy, acts like a menace, causing traffic accidents and dodging guard duty so he can slip off to a roadside bar for stiff drinks. (Snoopy favors root beer, but the effect is the same.) Whereas previous Peanuts movies have solid stories with bittersweet emotional payoffs, Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown feels trivial. Charlie Brown, Linus, Marcy, and Peppermint Patty venture to Europe as exchange students, taking Snoopy and his avian sidekick, Woodstock, along for the ride. In France, Charlie Brown visits a remote estate because he received a cryptic invitation, only to uncover a mystery with connections to his family. Neither the investigation nor the revelation it triggers is especially interesting. The movie also suffers for the inclusion of a lot more slapstick violence than usual; while the gags are gentle by normal standards, they seem harsh within the Peanuts sphere. After this disappointing film was released, Charlie Brown and the gang returned to their comfort zone of periodic TV specials until the release of a new, CGI-rendered feature, The Peanuts Movie, in 2015.

Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown (and Don’t Come Back!!): LAME

1980 Week: Private Benjamin

          After years of sharing top billing with male costars, Goldie Hawn finally scored a major box-office hit of her own thanks to Private Benjamin, the military-themed comedy that she also helped produce. Hiding a multilayered feminist message beneath a silly farce about a Jewish American Princess becoming a soldier, the picture has just enough substance to make up for the paucity of laugh-out-loud jokes. And while supporting players including Armand Assante and Eileen Brennan excel in juicy roles, Hawn‘s goofy appeal anchors the picture. Private Benjamin is all about the ridiculous spectacle of a tiny blonde with doe eyes running around obstacle courses in fatigues, complaining about damage to her fingernails and the unsatisfactory accommodations in her barracks. If there’s a major flaw in Private Benjamin, it’s that the movie lacks a big mission that tests the title character’s mettle—essentially, the sort of third act that was contrived for the following year’s military-themed comedy, Stripes (1981). However, Private Benjamin is only nominally about the Armed Forces, because soldiering is just a phase the title character passes through on the way to self-actualization.

          The movie begins with a lively wedding sequence, during which spoiled Judy Benjamin (Hawn) suffers a surprising loss: Her brand-new husband, Yale (Albert Brooks), dies of a heart attack during wedding-night sex. Devastated and lost, Judy meets a friendly stranger named Jim (Harry Dean Stanton), who offers a new life filled with adventure and luxury. By the time Judy realizes Jim is a military recruiter, she’s fallen for his vision of Army service as an extended vacation. Basic training sets her straight, especially when Judy clashes with stern Captain Lewis (Eileen Brennan), but Judy soon realizes she needs to see this thing through because she’s never accomplished anything. Her journey is complicated when she meets dashing Frenchman Henri (Assante), so a dramatic question takes shape: Will Judy discard her newfound sense of pride by settling back into the narcotizing cycle of domesticity and wealth?

          The script for Private Benjamin is shallow, and the writers tend to portray men as one-dimensional ogres. (Cowriter Nancy Meyers, later to become a rom-com titan, received her first credit—and her first Oscar nomination—for Private Benjamin.) Yet Private Benjamin works. The movie presents a steady stream of lighteheated moments, some of which contain a measure of sociopolitical resonance. Oscar-nominated Brennan makes a strong impression as a woman succeeding in a man’s world through pure toughness, while Assante explodes with energy and machismo, playing a special kind of dreamy jerk. Hawn floats through it all, coming across as bubbly even when her character is despondent, and setting the mood with her seemingly effortless comic skill and a touch of solid dramatic acting. She was rewarded with such impressive box-office success that a Private Benjamin TV show soon followed. Running from 1981 to 1983, the show replaced Hawn with Lorna Patterson, although Brennan reprised her supporting role.

Private Benjamin: GROOVY

The Morning After (1974)

          An unflinching made-for-TV story about alcoholism energized by the casting of  likeable Dick Van Dyke in the leading role, The Morning After tracks a man’s descent from managing a drinking problem to something much worse. Adapted from Jack B. Weiner’s novel by the great Richard Matheson, in one of his rare ventures outside the realm of genre fiction, the film moves at a remarkable pace, zooming from one incisive episode to the next. Van Dyke, who was open about his real-life alcoholism, attacks his role with tremendous commitment, so while he can’t quite reach the depths that, say, Jack Lemmon or Ray Milland did in their celebrated performances as men addicted to alcohol, Van Dyke erases any trace of his usual light-comedy style. Aiding Van Dyke considerably is costar Lynn Carlin, who plays the protagonist’s wife. Rather than simply delivering a rote version of the familiar “long-suffering spouse” role, she plays each scene specifically and vividly, illustrating the torment of a woman trying to reconcile the need for self-preservation with the desire to help a loved one. Other supporting players, including Don Porter (as the protagonist’s boss), render fine work as well, but the filmmakers—under the sure hand of journeyman director Richard T. Heffron—wisely keep the focus on Van Dyke’s character.

          Charlie Lester (Van Dyke) works as a speechwriter for an oil company in Los Angeles. Outwardly, he lives the American Dream, with a lovely wife, Fran (Carlin), and two children. Yet what coworkers and friends are mostly too polite to mention is that Charlie drinks to excess whenever he’s near alcohol. After one too many nights when Charlie doesn’t make it home after blacking out, Fran starts to snap, kicking the film’s drama into motion. She pushes her husband to stop drinking, which only compels him to drink more, and that, in turn, causes him to show up hung over at work, infuriating his straight-arrow boss. Charlie’s episodes become more and more unruly, and on several occasions he gets physical with Fran. Every time he sobers up, Charlie gets apologetic and weepy, and he eventually agrees to try therapy. Yet even the revelation that Charlie’s self-loathing stems from withholding parents who favored his golden-boy younger brother fails to suppress Charlie’s unquenchable thirst.

          The Morning After is exceedingly simple in its construction, and that’s why it’s so effective despite running just 75 minutes. Over the course of that short running time, we watch Charlie shift from a façade of normalcy to a pathetic vision of unchecked illness. The movie offers explanations and it also offers solutions, but the filmmakers let everything hinge on Charlie’s willingness to get better. Most stories about alcoholism end up feeling like PSAs for treatment options, but The Morning After doesn’t follow that path. Instead, this fine telefilm heads unrelentingly into the heart of darkness. And if you’re wondering why The Morning After isn’t in wide circulation, music is probably the reason; cover versions of the Beatles’ “Yesterday” are woven into the storytelling, and one imagines that licensing the song’s continued use is prohibitively expensive.

The Morning After: GROOVY

Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973)

          The ignominious final chapter of Adolf Hitler’s life has inspired several pieces of grim drama, including the extraordinary German film Downfall (2004), the TV movie The Bunker (1981), and this British/Italian coproduction starring the venerable English actor Alec Guinness. Downfall exudes authenticity not least because its German characters actually speak German, and The Bunker features Anthony Hopkins as Der Führer. Yet Hitler: The Last Ten Days is not to be dismissed. Beyond the virtues of Guinness’ performance (more on that later), the film benefits from a rigid aesthetic. The camera never leaves the bunker in which Hitler spent his final days, so whenever director Ennio de Concini references the bigger canvas of the war happening outside the bunker, he cuts to grainy black-and-white newsreels. This cleverly underscores the idea that Hitler was living in a parallel reality of his own twisted imagining, even as those closest to him embraced the truth of the Third Reich’s imminent defeat.

          Set in April 1945, the film begins with the appearance at the bunker’s front gate of one Captain Hoffman (Simon Ward). Though incidental to the main narrative, he provides the audience’s viewpoint. Hoffman discovers a Hitler inexplicably confident that victory is still possible, conspiring and ranting before an audience comprising his lover, Eva Braun (Doris Kuntsmann), and a revolving cast of aides and generals. In some sequences, Der Führer calmly orders military deployments, and in others, he issues maniacal decrees such as commanding that the Hitler Youth engage in suicide missions. The most vivid scenes accentuate the grandiosity of Hitler’s self-image. “The gods give their love to those who demand the impossible,” he rails at one point. “Everything I do and everything I say is history!” Dismissive of the horrific loss of life he has caused, Hitler obsesses about his place in history, for instance demanding accurate portraiture so his likeness isn’t subject to interpretation, like that of Jesus Christ. At his most deranged, Hitler decommissions generals for refusing to execute his (insane) orders, barking to one insolent subordinate: “I will drown you in your own blood!” Everything moves, inexorably, toward the grim ritual of Der Führer leading his closest partisans toward mass suicide.

          Presented as a dark chamber piece within a handful of shadowy rooms, the picture employs music sparingly, with a well-chosen Wagner excerpt providing mournful atmosphere during a few key moments. The acting is as respectable, and occasionally as mannered, as the dialogue, but everything is merely background to Guinness’ performance. Despite never achieving true frothing-at-the-mouth abandon, Guinness works up a good head of steam during unhinged monologues, and he spews final-solution venom with unnerving conviction. The sum effect avoids the easy traps of exaggerating Hitler’s tics or recklessly softening him in the name of humanizing a character. Rather, Hitler: The Last Ten Days presents a sober depiction of a hateful demagogue whose grip on reality is inexorably tethered to his grip on power. As one weakens, so does the other, forcing those in his orbit to choose between loyalty and salvation.

Hitler: The Last Ten Days: GROOVY

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (1973)

          Despite running just 75 minutes, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood—the sole directorial endeavor of a filmmaker named Christopher Speeth—packs in a whole lot of weirdness. The title suggests a schlocky gorefest in the Herschell Gordon Lewis style, and, sure enough, there’s a fair measure of a plasma-spilling violence on display. Yet there’s also a demented kind of artistry at work here. Much of the action takes place in a surreal underground community where flesh-eating zombies hang out in spaces that look as if they were decorated by interior designers tripping on LSD. What’s more, the zombies have peculiar pastimes in addition to chewing on people. In several scenes, groups of zombies mash about on the equivalent of a dancefloor while watching silent horror movies, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1925), projected onto a wall. Eerie electronic music provides the scoring for these scenes, so this movie’s version of zombie culture comes across like the world’s worst round-the-clock rave.

          As for those aforementioned design elements, one standout is a VW Beetle hung upside down from a ceiling, with the front doors removed and the interior lined with what appears to be candy-apple-red bubble wrap, transforming the car into some kind of psychedelic hammock; to complete the effect, the front hood hangs open, with the hood and the exposed cargo space painted to resemble a giant mouth. Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is full of such bizarre visual excess.

          Inasmuch as it’s possible to follow the story—or, most of it, anyway—the general idea is that a vampire named Mr. Blood (Jerome Dempsey) and his insidious overlord, Malatesta (Daniel Dietrich), run a carnival aboveground as a tool for luring victims into their subterranean slaughterhouse. Various members of a family get jobs at the carnival so they can look for a missing relative, whom they believe was last seen at the carnival, so one by one the villains attack the family members. However, Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is such an amorphous, druggy film that the plot is inconsequential. Things just sort of happen, with the only real throughline being the viewer’s journey, Dante’s Inferno-style, through the assorted chambers of the underground lair.

          It’s a safe bet some extreme-cinema fans adore this picture, because Speeth either intentionally or unintentionally breaks rules of cinematic storytelling even as he challenges boundaries of good taste. The curious should be warned that event though Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood is photographed relatively well, it is in most other regards the work of a primitive artistic mind, all indulgence and whim rather than discipline and purpose. The patronizing way to absorb a picture like this is to laugh at its incompetent aspects, and the “serious” way is to parse meaning from its crude textures. With those being the available options, a third alternative—avoiding the picture entirely—might be the wisest of all.

Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood: FREAKY

The Headless Eyes (1971)

First off, never mind this picture’s amazing poster, which promises a sci-fi shocker about disembodied eyeballs preying on victims. The Headless Eyes is a cheaply made horror flick about a deranged artist attacking people in New York City. In the opening scene, Arthur (Bo Brundin) breaks into a woman’s apartment to steal from her, and the only weapon she can find for self-defense is a spoon, so she stabs him in the face and knocks his left eye out of its socket. Some time later, eyepatch-sporting Arthur has become obsessed with eyes, murdering people so he can remove their eyes and feature the orbs in his avant-garde artwork. Predictable subplots ensue, with police trying to learn the identity of the serial killer stalking their city’s streets, and a young female artist approaching Arthur about an apprenticeship. Even though writer-director Kent Bateman makes some ham-fisted attempts at delving into his protagonist’s psychology, listing the shortcomings of The Headless Eyes reveals why it doesn’t merit close inspection. The filmmaking is atrocious, with many shots out of focus and poorly lit. The performances are just as bad, though Brundin struggles to put emotion into melodramatic declarations: “I am twisted!” “I’m trying to forget you and your phony sincerity!” “I am twisted!” (He says he’s twisted a lot.) Many scenes are simply pointless, shots of Brundin wandering the streets while twitchy music plays on the soundtrack. And then there’s the whole gore factor, which earned the movie an X-rating during its original release. Even though the special-FX makeup isn’t especially convincing, the way Bateman lingers on shots of Brundin driving instruments into people’s faces and then plucking eyes from sockets is so repugnant as to render the film’s artistic aspirations meaningless.

The Headless Eyes: LAME

Lady Snowblood (1973)

          Yet another ultraviolent saga that made a deep impression on Quentin Tarantino, who borrowed heavily from this film for his epic Kill Bill project (originally released as two parts in 2003 and 2004), Lady Snowblood is among the most pictorially beautiful action films ever made. Not least among its visual wonderments is leading lady Meiko Kaji, who plays an immaculately dressed assassin with a sword blade hidden inside the handle of her ever-present umbrella. Adapted from a Japanese comic strip, Lady Snowblood tells a patently ridiculous story about a vengeance mission handed down from one generation to the next, and the way director Toshiya Fujita fills the screen with artfully staged dismemberments, geysers of blood, and impalements is not for the faint of heart. (Released unrated in the U.S., the picture almost certainly would have received an X-rating for gore.) Incredibly, Fujita manages to tell a fairly compelling story without benefit of realism and restraint, getting by on sheer intensity and style.

          Although events are presented in a jangled mosaic, a linear narrative emerges. In late 19th-century Japan, the government orders a military draft, and a band of criminals roams the countryside, pulling a vicious scam on gullible villagers. The criminals claim they can sell draft exceptions for cash. Occasionally, to create the illusion of governmental authority, the criminals attack and execute persons for “illegally dodging” the draft. One such innocent victim is a schoolteacher with a wife and a young child. The criminals kill the teacher and his son. His widow, Sayo (Miyoko Akaza), declares revenge, hunting down and killing one of the criminals. Captured and imprisoned for the murder, she has sex with every man in prison until she’s impregnated, then declares her daughter, Yuki, an “asura demon” with only one purpose in life—killing the remaining criminals. Sayo dies in prison, and her child finds a new home with a priest who teaches her subterfuge and swordplay. Upon reaching adulthood, Yuki (Kaji) begins her vengeance mission, but complications ensue.

          The film is structured into chapters with florid titles (e.g., “Bamboo Wives and Tears of Death”), and because Yuki befriends an illustrator who agrees to tell her story in book form, the screen occasionally fills with the panels from the comic that inspired the movie. It’s all very meta, sometimes absurdly so. Yet somehow Fujita pulls the disparate elements together, creating a crazy-quilt pattern of varied storytelling modes. Momentum sags during Act Two, but Fujita rights the ship for the outrageously violent climax.
          Nearly everything that makes Lady Snowblood interesting is visual, so it’s a uniquely immersive cinematic experience. Many battle scenes and even some important emotional moments are presented without dialogue, putting the emphasis on composition, editing, and sound design. All of Fujita’s collaborators bolster this approach with exemplary contributions; the costuming, production design, and special effects are gorgeous. In particular, a scene of Yuki attacking a victim in an alleyway while snow falls transforms savagery into a kind of horrific choreography. (Kill Bill features an homage to this scene.)

          As for how leading lady Kaji fits into the mix, she provides more than just her beauty, though her looks are an important aspect of the film’s visual splendor. Whether she’s summoning intensity for a fight or thrilling with adrenaline after vanquishing a foe, Kaji imbues the notion of a character bred only to kill with something resembling credibility. She returned for Lady Snowblood 2: Song of Vengeance (1974), again directed by Fujita; in that one, the title character goes to prison for her crimes in the first picture, then gets an offer of clemency in exchange for working as a government agent.

Lady Snowblood: GROOVY

Mardi Gras Massacre (1978)

All the worst aspects of grindhouse sludge appear in Mardi Gras Massacre, a sexed-up horror picture with so much nasty gore that it received an X-rating during its original release. We’re talking closeups of women’s torsos getting sliced open so their hearts can be yanked out. Telling the story of a psychopath luring New Orleans prostitutes back to his lair so he can sacrifice them in weird rituals—maybe it’s Satanism or maybe it’s voodoo, but the end result is the same—Mardi Gras Massacre offers crappy filmmaking, exploitive nude scenes, and rotten acting. Worse, it drags on for nearly 100 minutes thanks to slow pacing and the presence of two long interludes: a documentary-style sequence featuring on-the-street footage of Carnival celebrations, and a dance number. More specifically, a disco dance number. Because, you see, instead of proper local flavor for a picture set and shot in New Orleans, Mardi Gras Massacre is driven by a soundtrack of thumping, upbeat disco numbers, and at one point the picture stops dead so leading lady Gwen Arment can swirl and twist her way through several minutes of generic gyrations. As can be said of so many other bad movies made for the grindhouse circuit, Mardi Grass Massacre has nowhere to go and isn’t in any hurry to get there. The plot, such as it is, concerns a detective (Curt Dawson) and his hooker girlfriend (Arment) getting mired in the search for a dude preying on the Big Easy’s working girls. From start to finish, this is a reprehensibly bad film, so it’s only of interest for the most masochistic viewers. That said, scuzz-cinema freaks may dig some weird elements, including the opening scene, during which the killer solicits his first victim by searching for the “most evil” prostitute in New Orleans. Also worth mentioning is the occasionally disquieting score, a bizarre mixture of bouncy dance tunes and creepy electronic noises.

Mardi Gras Massacre: LAME

How to Seduce a Woman (1974)

          A sex comedy that’s almost prudish when it comes to putting sex or even nudity onscreen, How to Seduce a Woman is a peculiar sort of picture, especially considering the anything-goes era during which it was released. Methodically constructed, painstaking in its detail, and running a bloated 110 minutes, the film represents a limp attempt at mimicking Billy Wilder’s style of masterfully structured bedroom farce. Yet writer-director Charles Martin is no Wilder, and smarmy leading man Angus Dunan is an amateur compared to the comic pros Wilder put in his movies (e.g., Jack Lemmon, etc.). Worse, nearly every joke in How to Seduce a Woman underwhelms. But here’s the thing. The jokes don’t actually flop, in the sense of making the viewer groan or wince. Rather, the jokes merely exist. They feel, look, and sound like actual humor, but none of the material is genuinely funny. It’s as if the script was filled with placeholders awaiting a punch-up pass that never happened. Here’s an example. At one point, the protagonist brings a guest to his apartment building, and the valet outside is a stout little fellow in a Nazi uniform with a square moustache who salutes by clicking his heels and raising his right arm. The protagonist says this guy “just came in from Argentina.” A throwaway Hitler joke? In a lightweight sex comedy? Huh? But you get the idea—in another context, perhaps some zany Mel Brooks romp, the joke might have worked. Here, it’s just a head-scratcher.

          In any event, How to Seduce a Woman offers an episodic recounting of erotic adventures featuring Luther Lucas (Duncan). The framing device involves several former Lucas employees telling stories about him to Hollywood gossip columnist James Bacon (who plays himself). These veterans of Lucas’ “Seduction Squad” explain the roles they played during elaborate schemes Lucas used to bed beautiful women. He ran a racetrack scheme by pretending to be a gambling savant. He posed as an artist to woo a gallery owner. He pretended to be gay so an ice queen would attempt “converting” him. And so on. Each vignette has solid logic, but the acting misses the mark just as widely as the script does. Some players are too broad, and some—including top-billed seduction target Angel Tompkins—can’t muster the light touch needed for this sort of thing. As for Duncan, he’s off-puttingly mannered and smug. One suspects this was Martin’s design, as seen by the way Duncan turns to the camera after each conquest, but the sum effect of the characterization is not charming.

How to Seduce a Woman: FUNKY

Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973)

          Broadcast on television over consecutive nights as a two-part movie, Divorce His, Divorce Hers represents the last of 11 cinematic collaborations between the most famous on-again/off-again couple in Hollywood history, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The irony that the actors divorced in real life a year after the picture was broadcast, only to remarry in 1975 and divorce again in 1976, is but one of many parallels that makes the project interesting. For while the underlying material is respectable, exploring the dissipation of a marriage first from the husband’s perspective and then from the wife’s, the script is a bit long-winded and superficial, so it’s probable the film would have faded from memory had it not been for the participation of a notorious couple. As is, Divorce His, Divorce His failed to make much noise at the time of its original broadcast (not a single Emmy nomination, for instance), and none would make the argument that it’s essential viewing. Still, those curious to explore whether Liz and Dick still had any of the fire that made Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) so powerful could do worse than tracking this one down. As in most of their latter-day projects, the leading actors rely too heavily on old tricks—his sullen scowling, her breathy overplaying—but every so often, something connects.

          Divorce His, the first part, lays out the particulars. International businessman Martin Reynolds (Burton) navigates life after his divorce from Jane (Taylor), his wife of 18 years and the mother of their three children. Present-day action takes place in Rome, where Jane lives with the kids, and the story begins with Martin returning from Africa, where he lives and works, for a visit. Seeing his estranged loved ones triggers flashbacks. From Martin’s perspective, he was in many ways the culprit for the separation, a cold and distant man who forced Jane to demand affection and to provide emotional support for their children. The more he devoted himself to business, the needier she became. In the harshest Divorce His scene, Martin strikes Jane, only to immediately regret the action, and she suffers the blow willingly: “Beat me black and blue,” she moans, “but please don’t leave me.” The implication is that he finds her complicated psychology erotic and maddening in equal measure—which isn’t far from the read most historians provide about the real Burton/Taylor relationship—but of course this dynamic is supercharged with all sorts of troubling connotations related to gender roles. At its best, Divorce His allows Taylor to convey unaffected vulnerability, something sorely lacking from most of her work in the late ’60s and beyond, while allowing Burton to channel the elegant cruelty that eventually became his cinematic signature.

          Things get messy with Divorce Hers, which portrays the end of the marriage far less clinically. Divorce Hers plays out like an emotional horror movie, with Jane pulled in myriad directions at once. The best thing Divorce Hers conveys is the way Jane handles the everyday work of managing her children’s reactions to the breakup. A young daughter asks if the divorce is her fault, and an adult son dismisses his father as a soulless cash machine. As Jane says to Martin in Divorce Hers, “Where are you when things go wrong?” Alas, things go wrong with the storytelling in Divorce Hers, because the filmmakers get mired in melodrama about the ex-spouses’ new lovers and then get totally lost in pointless scenes about Martin’s latest business deal. It should also be noted that Divorce Hers is less watchable simply because Taylor lacks Burton’s precision as an actor. Considering its cumbersome total length of three hours, Divorce His, Divorce Hers rewards the viewer’s time more often than not, especially if the viewer plays along with the game of looking for clues about the real Burton/Taylor relationship. Surely that was the filmmakers’ intention when casting the leading roles as they did.

Divorce His, Divorce Hers: FUNKY

Bad, Black & Beautiful (1975)

If nothing else, this inept blaxploitation flick has an accurate title: Leading lady Gwynn Barbee is black and beautiful, while the movie around her is bad. The basic premise is fine, because Barbee plays a hotshot attorney who uses her seemingly endless set of skills to help clear a man’s name when he’s accused of murder. Myriad Pam Grier films were made from narrative fabric of this sort. Yet Gwynn Barbee, for all her loveliness, is no Grier, and Bad, Black & Beautiful writer-director Bobby Davis is no Jack Hill, the dude behind Coffy (1973) and Foxy Brown (1974). Davis’ shortcomings manifest in a discombobulated script and sloppy direction, problems exacerbated by a meager budget. For instance, when Eva (Barbee) hears a description of the accused man’s experiences in Vietnam, Davis cuts to grainy stock footage of generic soldiers in Southeast Asia, rather than a properly filmed narrative flashback. Sometimes the film’s flaws result in accidental humor. At one point, a thug working for the movie’s main villain approaches a drunk whom the villain wants dead, shakes the drunk’s shoulders, and walks away, after which the drunk has a seizure of some sort and dies. Say what? Although Bad, Black & Beautiful has the production values of a first-year student film, Davis unwisely tried to emulate the big-canvas style of better-financed blaxploitation flicks. Eva displays her skill as a pilot, a racecar driver, a singer, and, of course, a trial attorney, but each of these sequences looks cheaper than the preceding. Additionally, Davis’ seeming aversion to creating transitions means that the movie regularly cuts to random characters and events, with viewers left scratching their heads as to what X scene has to do with Y scene. Good luck figuring out why Davis spends so much time following a white reporter whose bedazzled denim ensemble makes him look like he should be Stevie Nicks’ Rumours-era coke dealer instead of an ink-stained wretch.

Bad, Black & Beautiful: SQUARE