PRE-HISTAURUS!........ ...THAWING OUT "DINOSAURUS!"

Dinosaurus! (1960)    Nobody hold their breath waiting for BQ to gang up on this cute little movie......

                   It's near and dear to my heart, coming from director-writer Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. and his hardy little band of Chester Springs, Pennsylvania filmmakers.......(working out of a converted barn in a leafy meadow.....)

                    This plucky bunch previously toiled on 16mm religious shorts for Sunday Schools until producer Jack H. Harris tapped them to produce 1958's immortal "The Blob" with Steve McQueen.....

                     One year later in '59 Harris and Yeaworth went on to make the equally iconic "4-D Man", with Robert Lansing walking through walls and terrorizing, as did the Blob, the little suburban town of Downingtown, Pa......not far from where BQ lived for many years.

                   And now we come to what you'd call the 3rd film in Jack H. Harris and Irvin Yeaworth's mighty sci-fi trilogy........for which they trooped down to the Virgin Islands.......

                  Here's what I love about Yeaworth........though supposedly shot in a tropical paradise, he makes 98 per cent of his movie look like it was made on the same tiny indoor sets as "The Blob" and "4-D Man".....(even the lush jungle exteriors are obviously done indoors).....

                 Ah well....you can take the boy out of Downingtown, but you can't take Downingtown out of the boy......

                Even laboring under poverty budgets, Yeaworth maintained his own primal visuals.......with the help of veteran cinematographer Stanley Cortez ("The Magnificent Ambersons", "The Night Of The Hunter") the director gives "Dinosaurus!"  the same ripe comic-book style of his two previous sci-fiers........not so much Color By DeLuxe..... more like Color By Crayola......

                So it's off we go to to the Caribbean, where a construction crew unearths two frozen dinos, who get quickly defrosted by lightning.......and off they rumble around, with the T-Rex's perpetual roars sounding like someone's jump-starting a pickup truck with a weak battery......

                No, you won't hear me rail and moan about the film's famously terrible dinosaur effects......(hastily constructed models, barely animated.......in some scenes,  they're just randomly shaken and pushed back and forth, much in the same way toddlers play with their own plastic dinosaur toys...)

                 The bottom-the-barrel effects end up adding to the film's innocent charm......with a skimpy story constructed like a kids' bedtime fable........complete with a little boy who flees a T-Rex, rides a brontosaurus and befriends the dinos' fellow defrostee, a caveman confounded by mirrors and waxed fruit......

                Speaking of the comedy-relief Cave-Guy, a tip of the hat to actor Greg Martell, who milks all the laughs you'd expect out of the role........he's at least as funny as they guys who use to push Geico insurance.....

                 How 'bout a thrilling climax to wind things up?  "Dinosaurus!" more than delivers......one of our stalwart heroes goes mano e mano with the T-Rex using a construction shovel........it plays like a Jurassic era pre-cursor to the "Aliens" smackdown between Sigourney Weaver and the Alien queen.......(and done with about 20 million less in special effects....)

                No mockery here. I've flat out loved Irvin Yeaworth's toy monsters ever since watching them when I was........uh....well never mind how old. 3 & 1/2 stars (*** 1/2)......Yeaworth went back to making Sunday School stuff, but BQ's memory forever remembers his oozing Blob, his dimension-bending 4-D man and his adorable Dinos......still proudly roaring like my dad's '58 Chevy that needed jumper cables to start.......

             

SHIRLEY YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS.......NEITHER IS "JOHN GOLDFARB, PLEASE COME HOME"

John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (1965)   Paydirt hit!  The Mother Lode!

                  The very oddest of all 1960's oddities!

                   Five years before 20th Century Fox tried to push the offensiveness envelope with "Myra Breckinridge" and "Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls", they let this one escape........

                   .......and for sheer repulsive lunacy, misbegotten filmmaking and humiliated actors, it leaves "Myra" and "Beyond" in the dust.......

                      Before William Peter Blatty's mega-success as "The Exorcist"s novelist and screenwriter, he toiled as a 'comedy' scripter.    Let's put it this way:   "The Exorcist" was ten times funnier than any attempted 'comedy' Blatty ever committed to paper.......

                      Blatty's goal here (I can only guess).......a frenzied satire of global foibles falling somewhere between "Dr. Strangelove" and a Keystone Kops silent slapstick wingding........

                      As Shirley MacLaine frequently mutters throughout the film.......Oy Vey.....

                     Blasting out of the gate comes the title song, composed by 'Johnny' Williams and literally shrieked out loud by MacLaine........an ominous warning about MacLaine's performance, which will be equally shrill and grotesque........(and no symphony orchestra will add this song to their John Williams repertoire......)

                     Shirley's a take-no-prisoners reporter who arranges her own trafficking (by Telly Savalas!) into the madhouse Middle East harem of King Fawz (Peter Ustinov) of Fawzia......

                      Fawzia, as conceived by Blatty, is kind of a 1950's Mad Magazine version of an Arab kingdom,,,,,,,a matte-painted 'Thief Of Bagdad' city surrounded by sudden cascades of gushing oil.....(you wonder how King Fawz accrues his wealth, since no effort's made to cap the gushers and install oil wells....)

                       Ustinov's Fawz rides around in jet propelled golf carts and babbles non-stop gibberish sprinkled with an English word or two.......and furious that his son, the Prince just got kicked off the Notre Dame football team.......more about that later.....

                       Meanwhile in Washington D.C. a entire clown car of State Department and CIA imbeciles (Harry Morgan, Jim Backus, Fred Clark, Richard Deacon, etc) plan to spy on Russia using the world's worst U-2 pilot, John 'Wrong Way' Goldfarb (Richard Crenna)......(but you gotta love Blatty's names for this bunch, including 'Heinous Overreach' and 'Miles Whitepaper')

                       True to his nickname, 'Wrong Way' and his plane miss Russia entirely and crash in Fawzia........where Fawz threatens to turn him over to the Kremlin unless he coaches the Prince and a woebegone Fawzian football team......in a game against Notre Dame........

                      Is that more than enough madness for one movie?

                       After watching this, you may think you've hallucinated the entire film.......MacClaine almost never dials it down below screeching level......especially after she's terrified to discover, contrary to rumor, that King Fawz enjoys a robust sex life with the harem......(the scene where she costumes herself as a Halloween shop gargoyle to cool Fawz's lust is way beyond description....)

                       You can practically predict every frantic gag thrown into the climactic Fawzia Vs. Notre Dame gridiron clash......rampaging camels, harem girl cheerleaders and MacLaine herself tossed skyward by another erupting oil spurt on the field.........

                      It would probably take 25 more posts to total up all the now politically incorrect moments......but you get the idea.......

                     Even in 1965, audiences (what little showed up) found all this desperate, exhausting and not even slightly funny........(particularly Notre Dame, who, without success, sued Fox to suppress the film. They needn't have bothered......the film easily suppressed itself into oblivion......

                     For William Peter Blatty, however, it wasn't a total loss.......using Shirley MacLaine and director J. Lee Thompson as models for characters in "The Exorcist"......

                    As for BQ........can't really refer to 'John Goldfarb' as a Guilty Pleasure......'pleasure' is too strong an adjective to use here.  But for all us lovers of ultra-strange, bizarre cinema.....it's at least a 2 star (**) 'see-it-at-least-once-before-you-die-preferably-with-a-pitcher-of-beer-nearby'........

                    And don't worry, Shirley's rendition of the title song will stick in nobody's head........

BE KIND, DON'T REWIND.........FLUNKING OUT "FINAL EXAM"

Final Exam (1981)    BQ returns to misbegotten little nuggets like this every so often..........

           ..........can't help it. Sometimes it's fun to reminisce - not about the movie itself (an unwatchable waste of time), but the long gone era that spawned it........

               A tiny scrap of refuse like "Final Exam" could only flourish due to two major upheavals in the pop culture landscape........the rise of teen slasher movies after the surprise success of John Carpenter's original "Halloween" and the subsequent rise of the VCR and all the Mom 'N Pop video rental stores that came with it......... 

               For anyone not around in this era (or if you were around and forgot about it)........critical standards at the video store were lower than Donald Trump's I.Q........we were all still besotted with the idea of taking home an actual movie to watch......uncut, commercial free.

               So it didn't matter if we got our hands on an Academy Award winner....or......"Final Exam", for example.....

               Today's makers of horror films could never get away with something like 'Final Exam'.....an amateur night, slipshod, bargain basement effort populated entirely with community theater
non-actors embarrassing themselves every time they spoke.......

               But viewing it in context of its time, there's sort of a sweet innocence to this motley crew, thinking they could get away with making a slasher movie that wastes 90% of its time on its worthless cardboard characters.........a slasher movie with little blood and a killer who's nothing but a generic, hulking guy with a knife.........(by the film's finale, they give up keeping him in shadows, realizing.....what's the point?)

                In this mercifully quick trip down memory lane, BQ will award 1/2 a star for one single startling sequence that "Final Exam"s writer-director Jimmy Huston couldn't possibly know foretold future horrific events.........a scene in which the pranking, odious frat boys stage a fake terrorist attack on campus, complete with machine guns and make-believe student victims.........

               Maybe that's why today's horror movies can hardly keep up with real life.......

               

               

              

I SQUID YOU NOT.......FOR SUMMER FUN, GO "BELOW".....

Below by Ryan Lockwood (2013)    No summer's complete without a book like this........

                 For everyone who needs a "Jaws" romp  to wile away the rest of these balmy days, this'll do just fine.........

                 Yes, it's from that wonderful genre where horrible things in the ocean want grab you and eat you......(and that's all you really need to know.......any book that kicks off with lines like....."they needed to feed" or whatever.....you know a good time's comin'......except for the characters in the book, of course....)

                This one features a voracious mass ( or 'shoal' to use the correct term) of Humboldt squid who've been driven into a rabid frenzy by parasitic worms inside their squishy innards......

                 Oh my, this does not bode well for any humans who encounter them......they promptly get seized by spiky tentacles and dragged down into the deep to be eaten alive.  The stuff of aquatic nightmares......

                  Naturally, there's a few people you're supposed to care about here.......a beautiful marine biologist and a cranky charter boat captain who's an alcoholic, still grieving widower.

                So guess which two people end up dunked in the drink with the squid armada?  (But not before bunches of other folks die horribly at the hands...er...tentacles of the ever ravenous monsters....)

                The prose is moderately okay.....(come on, nobody cracks open a book like this for the sparkling writing)......and gory summer fun is guaranteed.  3 bubbling stars (***)...... don't let summer slip by without fighting off a ghastly horde of  parasite-crazed, super hungry squid.....from the comfort of a lounge chair, preferably.......

OK CONNERY!.......A.K.A. "OPERATION KID BROTHER"

Operation Kid Brother (1967)   I've no excuse for waiting so long to get around to this one........the Mount Rushmore of 1960's lunacy.........

                 There's all sorts of visual evidence of the James Bond mania that swept the entire world in the mid 1960's........photos of long, long lines of people waiting to get into theaters showing "Goldfinger" and "Thunderball"..........endless ads for James Bond toys, games, even men's cologne....

                 But nothing can give you a more telling snapshot of this craziness than "Operation Kid Brother", the cheapjack Italian knockoff to end all cheapjack Italian knockoffs.......

                 Any rational description of this movie will sound like I'm kidding around.......no, really, it's Sean Connery's younger brother Neil playing Dr. Neil Connery (!!), a combo plastic surgeon, hypnotist, lip reader, and archery champion..........and brother of....uh.....you-know-who......

                 Joining the madness:  an entire roster of  Bond movie veterans, both allies and villains.....Bernard Lee, Lois Maxwell, Adolfo Celi, Anthony Dawson, Daniela Bianchi......and some Italian actress playing "Lotte", meant to resemble "From Russia With Love"s Lotte Lenya.....

                 Where to I even start?

                 Ennio Morricone's rambunctious score kicks off with a woman shrieking 'OK Connery!'....the film's alternate title.  As Austin Powers would put it....yeah, baby.

                  Neil Connery other than bearing a striking resemblance to big brother, maintains a steady gaze, like he's posing for a James Bond Cologne ad.  Everybody's badly dubbed, but at least Lee, Maxwell and Dawson hung around long enough to re-record their own lines........

                  The plot? Beats me.......something about Celi and Dawson's evil outfit 'Thanatos' grabbing an atomic something-or-other. To do this, they employ babes who dress up as can-can dancers and pussycats to beat up security guards......(to the sound of Morricone music peppered with 'Meow Meow'.....)   The villains also hoodwink blind beggars to unknowingly irradiate themselves while toiling in a nuclear sweatshop........

                  Once again, I remind you I'm not making any of this up........(including Celi parading around in what looks like a solid gold camping tent)

                 This one-of-a-kind trainwreck forever stands as a glorious footnote and testament to the Bondmania frenzy that seized the world for at least a few years.........(and probably one more contributing factor in Sean Connery's decision to quit the series, fed up with the ongoing insanity that would lead to a film like this......)

                  But for all Bond fanatics......a guilty, guilty pleasure like no other in movie history.  And for the brass balls it required to make "Operation Kid Brother".....3 stars (***)......(Oh, did I forget to mention the remote control car that features the actual driver hiding underneath the steering wheel?)

                   Yeah, baby.

               

           

SMELLS LIKE TEEN CYBORG............"ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL"......

Alita: Battle Angel (2017)   Astonishing admission........I can't even believe I'm writing it.......

             I kinda liked this........

              Nobody's more surprised than me.........having sat through one too many overlong, overpraised, overproduced CGI-bloated Marvel/D.C. superhero bashes........

               So how come I fell for this one?

               First, it's in the hands of two natural born storytellers, James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez.......(Cameron long had this on his agenda before deciding to devote the rest of his life to 'Avatar' sequels.....he wisely turned it over to Rodriguez, who miraculously streamlined Cameron's epic-length script into a lightning paced 2 hour movie....)

               Second, under Rodriguez's command, it's ruthless, straight-ahead filmmaking, devoid of the meta snark and convoluted backstory you have to wade through in today's comic book hoo-hahs........the setup is simple and you don't need a flow chart to keep up with the logjam of superheroes, their powers and whatever the hell it is they want to achieve or destroy..........
.
               Third, precision in the action - unlike the Marvel and D.C. directors, whose only watchword is overkill, pounding you over the head with endless bash-o-ramas, Rodriguez keeps his action sequences swift, to the point, and intricately staged.  His fight scenes never wear out their welcome.........or you, the viewer as you enjoy the hell out of 'em.

                Fourth....(and most important)....as the song in "Damn Yankees" goes,....you gotta have heart,,,,,,for all of its dystopian world-building  and spectacular effects, "Alita" remains a simple primal tale of a teen girl's awkward attempts to figure out who she is.........(it's basically every teenager's story, only wildly enlarged into a sci-fi fantasy epic....)

               With actress Rosa Salazar digitally animated into this strangely affecting character, the film seduces you into rooting for her.........even as she ferociously battles her fellow metallic cyborgs, she remains a sweet, conflicted kid......(and best of all, unlike Spider-Man, for example, she's free of that inexhaustible supply of Marvel quippy one-liner sound bites)

               This may be the first super-girl I've seen who wears her heart on her sleeve......literally.

               BQ visitors know I'd rather hurl myself off a cliff than to launch into a point-by-point examination of a film's plot.........(for that, there's 300 million other sites or folks you could sample on IMDB or MRQE,,,,,)

                 I can only go with my gut reaction,,,,,,,,,what can I say, other than I had a real good time with this one. Unlike, the Marvel movies, "Alita: Battle Angel" opened, closed and fell off the radar pretty damn fast for a movie that cost in excess of 200 million.

                 Don't care........any single minute of it is more effective than the entire running time of "Captain Marvel"......3 stars (***).

MIDWEEK SADNESS UPDATE........SPECIAL "END OF MUELLER-TIME" EDITION.....

               For almost 2 years, more than half the U.S. looked to Robert Mueller as the still shining light at the end of the tunnel.........

                ........as the savior who would rescue the country from the new Dark Age it had fallen into.

               Tweeters joyfully chirped 'Now comes Mueller-time!'.....quoting the beer commercial in advance of his report.

                When Mueller and his report finally arrived, the light in the tunnel blinked out. He didn't come to rescue us after all........he only meticulously laid out what we had to rescue ourselves from....

                Beyond that, he had no further interest.

                And neither did ADD-afflicted Americans, who could barely stay focused on the latest "Bachelorette" episode, let alone read a 450 page report.....

                ........a dream come true for Trump and his mob lawyer posing as the Attorney General.

               Democrats foolishly thought they could coerce Mueller into making his report vivid and real for a near-illiterate populace, like having a celebrity read "Green Eggs And Ham" to an audience of rapt toddlers......

                But Mueller, aging, forgetful, halting in speech and thought, made good on his promise that his testimony would be nothing more than his report.......and left frustrated, confounded politicians from both parties with a barrage of "I can't speak to that", "I can't answer that"......endlessly.

                  Trump brayed in triumph, vomiting out his usual river of lies.......

                  So here's where we stand now.....(or as BQ sees it.....)

                   Nancy Pelosi's right. Impeachment's a waste of time. Never gonna happen. Besides, the GOP no longer consists of real Senators and Congressmen......they're nothing but minions, slaves to Trump, the guys in the red jumpsuits from the older James Bond movies........so the votes aren't there.

                  The Trumpanzees who adore him will never stomach Impeachment anyway.........they'd consider their votes stolen........anger and resentment would fester for generations.

                   The Ballet Box will be the only to save American democracy.......by definitively cutting out the spreading cancer of Trump.......and putting an end to his demented dreams of becoming President-For-Life of his very own banana republic.

                     Mueller-Time's over. Voter-Time comes next.

                 

SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE IMPULSE.............."ANATOMY OF A MURDER"

Anatomy Of A Murder (1959)........officially kicked off director Otto Preminger's successful run of turning doorstop bestselling books into expansive all-star dramas.......(like many aging directors who lost touch with the times, Preminger's movie Book Club finally crashed and burned with his 1967 Deep South disaster  "Hurry Sundown".....a crappy book made even worse)

                   "Anatomy" still stands as the best of Otto's Read-The-Novel-See-The-Movie blockbusters.......bursting with controversy (for 1959) and a featuring a busload of actors at the very top of their game........

                     James Stewart took his patented persona to all new heights.......the stuttering "Aw Shucks" country bumpkin who's actually a wily, steely operator who confounds anyone who mistakenly underestimates him.......

                      As a near broke former district attorney, Stewart takes on the defense of a blatantly guilty client..... a volcanic-tempered Army officer Frederick Manion (Ben Gazzara) who murdered a man who may or may not have raped Manion's brazen, slutty hot-to-trot wife (Lee Remick).......

                    The trial that ensues is a spectacular three ring courtroom circus, filled with multiple twists and turns.......all these theatrics sorely testing the patience of the weary judge(..... played by lawyer turned actor Joseph N Welch, famous for publicly scolding the notorious commie-hunter Sen. Joseph McCarthy.... )

                      Stewart's 'Hail Mary' defense of Gazarra involves using a temporary-insanity longshot known as 'irresistible impulse'........an attempt to convince the jury that his client only went bonkers in the few seconds it took him to pump five slugs into his wife's supposed rapist.

                      And there's no end of fun watching Stewart put on a wild smoke 'n mirrors legal sideshow that leaves the prosecution apoplectic, Director Preminger, ever the envelope-pusher, throws in jaw-dropping testimony about Remick's soiled panties and the search for any left over sperm from the murder victim......

                      There's so much to enjoy here....the vast array of familiar character actors who appear as trial witnesses.....the pulsating jazz score by no less than Duke Ellington.......George C Scott as the slick big city D.A. who more than meets his match in Stewart's deceptive cornpone demeanor......and by far, the supporting role MVP Lee Remick, commanding the screen as the sexually restless bombshell (whom Stewart wisely re-costumes as a prim schoolmarm for the benefit of the jury.....)

                        And to top it off, an appropriate sardonic windup.....in which 'Irresistible Impulse' comes full circle.......

                         It's been a while since BQ handed out the highest rating, but I'm happy to do it......
a genuine 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS. For the best in disorder in the court, look no further.....

                     

                 

'THE NEW CHICK'??..........A LOW DIVE INTO "LOVE IN A GOLDFISH BOWL"

Love In A Goldfish Bowl (1961)    Nothing floats BQ's boat more than unearthing bizarre relics of the 1960's like this one.........

              Trust me, in all his wild adventures, Indiana Jones never dug up a stranger piece of bric-a-brac than this one........

                How can you not adore it......a teen romantic triangle involving not one, but two talent-free sides of 1960's prime beef, Fabian and Tommy Sands.......

                The object of their affliction?  A platinum cupcake named Toby Michaels........or, as she's proudly billed in the opening credits, 'The New Chick' (!!)

                The weirdness starts early. Since Sands and Michaels supposedly enjoy a strictly platonic brother-sister relationship, Sands' hair is platinum-ized to match Michaels..........they look like a college-age version of the kids from "Village Of The Damned".....that is, if the kids from "Village" had been born babbling idiots.........

                A fragile pair indeed, these two. Early on, a random bully knocks both of them down like they were 3rd graders. Undeterred, off they go for a platonic spring break at the beach house owned by Sands' jet-setting mother. (Jan Sterling). Meanwhile, Michaels' dad (the forever sputtering Edward Andrews) fumes about her unknown whereabouts........

                 Into the mix comes a smooth, suave Coast Guard sailor (Fabian) who promptly starts romancing Michaels, much to Sands' perpetual annoyance.  And 'perpetual annoyance' is a fairly accurate description of Sands' character, made doubly obnoxious by the actor's monotone overplaying.

                 Watching Sands becomes the visual equivalent of listening to 90 minutes of fingernails dragged across a blackboard.........it takes him the entire running time to figure out he wants to be a little more than a big brother to Michaels......

                 Naturally, taking place in 1961, sex will never rear its forbidden head (or any other appendage)......how could it, when Sands bedtime attire consists of underwear underneath his pajamas......he's twice as virginal as Doris Day......

                  At the windup, poor Fabian's moved on and Sands and Michaels are back in the same position they started. Sitting in a car's backseat, their feet propped up on the front seats, plotting their next move......

                   They may have found love, but they're still blindingly dumb blondes........

                    If you're a 60's film archeologist like BQ, you'll need to see this rare museum piece at least once. Not quite the Ark Of The Covenant, but loads of unintentional fun.  For everyone else, a
1 star (*) bit of vanilla fluff...........like whatever ungodly crap they used on Tommy Sands' hair......

HE BLOWED UP AMERICA REAL GOOD..........GROUND ZERO AT "ZABRISKIE POINT"

Zabriskie Point (1970)   If you examine this movie with 49 years hindsight, there's no rational reason for its existence.......

                  How the hell did this even happen?   The ever-struggling MGM financing and producing an expansive 'Up Yours, America' from the Italian master of impenetrable alienation, Michaelangelo Antonioni??  Seriously?

                  Maybe not so crazy.........

                  By 1970, Hollywood finally premiered its responses to the chaos, deep division and domestic carnage that convulsed the U.S. still in the endless churn of the Vietnam War......

                   These included campus riot movies ("Getting Straight", "The Strawberry Statement", revisionist westerns ("Soldier Blue"), madness-of-war satires ("MASH", "Catch-22") even a dark, way-ahead-of-its-time harbinger of right-wing media stoking up Nixon's 'silent majority' ("WUSA").......

                   Even films with no overt political storylines were infected by the depressive dread of the era......the subtext: the Bad Guys run the country, they're getting away with murder and we're all screwed.......

                   In other words, nothing like controversy to goose the box-office tally.....

                  But none of these films quite generated the revulsion, anger and ridicule that swirled around "Zabriskie Point". After all, where did this pretentious auteur Antonioni get his nerve, using MGM cash to take a huge steaming dump on America?

                  So how's the film stand up, almost 50 years later?   Still a dopey mess, barely watchable.

                 For all his heralded talents, Antonioni's no different than a lot of 1970's Hollywood directors....... randomly pointing his camera at highway billboards and police cars to make his point....(look at all the rampant consumerism and government repression!!)

                  Never much of a storyteller, the director tracks the intersection of two young people (blank-faced, inexpressive non-actors Mark Frechette and Daria Halpin)  Frechette swipes a Piper Cub plane and flies off to the Southwest desert, since he may or may not have shot a cop during a campus protest........

                     Halpin's tooling around the same desert in an old 50's Buick, alienated from her....uh....ardent admirer,(Rod Taylor) a high-powered real estate tycoon planning to desecrate the landscape with golf course communities.......(he's never far from his coterie of aging, business-suited bigwigs...)

                     And there you have it. Halpin and Frechette hump away in the desert, along with other young couples who appear like magic. Frechette repaints his stolen plane into a colorful, hippie-dippy 'F*** You' to the Establishment.......the cops shoot him dead, but it's debatable for which crime - stealing the plane, killing a cop, or the plane's new counter-culture paint job.......(probably the latter, given the function of police in films like this....)

                     Then at at last Antonioni arrives at his signature set-piece......what appears as the only reason he went to the trouble of making the film in the first place......

                      After arriving at Rod Taylor's sumptuous, sprawling, ultra-modern house, carved into the Arizona desert, Halpin imagines the place blown to kingdom come......multiple times....from multiple angles. Antonioni treats us to a slow-motion ballet of American debris floating in the sky........(oh my God, a loaf of Wonder Bread blown to hell 'n gone...Oh, the humanity!)

                      Thus ended Antonioni's raised middle finger to America. And the makers of "Getting Straight", "WUSA" and such must have drooled with envy.......since "Zabriskie Point" sucked up all the outrage and hate  that they themselves could only dream of......

                     You'll have to decide if this 2 star (**) oddity is worth sitting through.......but by all means, do NOT miss a clip of the near-comatose Frechette and Halpin appearing on the Dick Cavett show to promote the film.......sitting along side Mel Brooks.  The disinterested 'actors' confound Cavett with monosyllable responses, while Brooks hilariously takes up the challenge of waking them up from whatever trance they're in. Priceless. 4 star (****) comedy.

                     If only Antonioni had cast Brooks in Rod Taylor's role.........

                   

SEE THAT SOME HARM COMES TO HIM.......HAPPY 40TH TO "MOONRAKER"

Moonraker (1979)   Millions and millions of Bond fanatics (BQ included) blow hot and cold on this one......

              So now that it just hit 40 years, I might as well weigh in with everybody else......broken down by all the beloved Bondian tropes.........

               Pre-credit wham-bam:  All the parachute-wrangling's terrific.....until they get to Jaws trying to fly like Dumbo without his magic feather.

                John Barry's score:   He's well into his slow, lush period, where even his action scoring never goes faster than 20 miles per hour........it somehow fits well with sheer heft of the movie itself and features one last bout of Olympian warbling by Dame Shirley Bassey.....

                The Bond Girl:  Dull, dull, dull. Lois Chiles' NASA toughie seems modeled after Barbara Bach's Soviet secret agent in "The Spy Who Loved Me"......neither of them had a shred of acting talent, but Bach displayed a sweet vulnerability and genuine sex appeal. Chiles behaves like a
dead-eyed, bored-out-her-skull fashion model, napping during a photo shoot.......easily the worst Bond girl.

                 The Villain:  Couldn't help thinking.......this guy's probably like that stiff who briefly played Blofeld in "You Only Live Twice" before they fired his ass and  replaced him with Donald Pleasence.  Michael Lonsdale barely registers a pulse through the whole movie, reciting his lines like he learned them phonetically.  A crying shame, since the script gave him some of the all time best Bond Villain lines in the entire series.....("You arrive with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.....")  When he's pitched into the void of outer space, he doesn't look any different than when he was alive and well.......

                 Jaws  and the Venetian pigeon:  Believe it or not, I don't have that big a problem with Jaws finding love with his tiny little girlfriend......(since it naturally sets them up as misfits in Lonsdale's dreams of deep space utopia).......but the double-take pigeon, achieved by reversing the film, looks left over from an old Jerry Lewis movie......beneath contempt.

                 Best use of Jaws:  Watching him shamble down an alley, engulfed in a jumbo, grotesque Rio Carnival costume. Creeeeepy............

                 The space battle:  This is the ultimate continuation of the trope first established in "Goldfinger" - a ferocious pitched firefight between a force of good guys and the villain's minions making their last stand......with heavy casualties on both sides.  You can rant and rail all you want about putting Bond in outer space, but this sequence remains stunning -   spectacular in its high-tech violence and in a few shots, strangely haunting......(the dead, fallen astronauts floating off into the stars, the universe serving as their graveyard...)

                  Farewell, M......before his passing, the wonderful Bernard Lee performs his final
tough-love oversight of 007......

                  Farewell,  Lairs by Ken Adam.....the legendary production designer's last Bond assignment....and the last time we'd see Bond villains cavort in his enormous, wondrous stainless steel hideouts......

                  And summing up....."Moonraker" may stand as the last Bond that advertised itself as a
technological special effects spectacle......(the franchise came back to earth with a vengeance in "For Your Eyes Only")........it's slow and clumsy in spots......but producer Albert R.Broccoli always got maximum bang for his bucks.......and 40 years later, it's still a good time. 4 stars (****).