'CANDY - (1968)......WHY NOBODY MENTIONED THIS IN BUCK HENRY'S OBITUARY.......

Candy (1968)    We thought of posting on this one as BQ's perfect way to recollect the brilliant work of supreme comedian-satirist-screenwriter Buck Henry, who passed a few days ago at age 89.........

                   Everyone recalled his superb scripts for "The Graduate", "Catch 22", "Heaven Can Wait" and his many now classic appearances on the early seasons of 'Saturday Night Live'.........

                    But few of these obits mentioned his magnum opus of the late 60's, the screenplay for this mad, mad, mad, mad adaptation of Terry Southern's pornography satire (itself a riff on Voltaire's "Candide")..........

                     Cause this movie is a prime example of BQ's favorite films to unearth........a bloated, gloriously insane international co-production, populated by the oddest collection of stars.......the kind of film that could only have been made in the one of the world's most turbulent decades........and during the world's most topsy-turvy era of filmmaking.......

                     It's batshit crazy right out of the gate, starting off with some bizarre '2001'-like visual effects that announce the arrival of our title character, Candy.......an impossibly sweet beautiful blonde teen (Ewa Aulin), floating down to earth like a Star Child already outfitted for high school.......

                    So much for the spacey stuff......once back at school, Candy, whose dubbed voice sounds like a lousy Marilyn Monroe impersonator on open-mike night, dodges her unsavory dad (John Astin, as if he never left "The Addams Family"), who also happens to be her civics teacher.......(you see where this movie's going, right?)

                     Astin's character represents a long list of institutions and authority figures that Buck Henry mercilessly lampoons..........educators, literary icons, military blowhards, ego-fueled medicos an  and phony religion hucksters.... all them get put on the grill for Henry's skewering

                      Not to mention, everyone's secret obsession with humping a hot babe.........

                      The loony plot (which we lack the stamina to describe) sends Aulin's Candy on a long, long odyssey through all the above mentioned targets.........who not only display themselves as self-serving idiots and fakers, but as horny assholes whose real goal in life is to rip Candy's clothes off and have their way with her........

                       Which they do.........frequently.

                       This includes Richard Burton as a gasbag poet equipped with his own dramatic wind that blows through his hair alone......Ringo Starr enjoying his stumble into fame, as a Mexican gardener.......Walter Matthau as a psycho Army paratroop commando who sounds left over from 'Dr. Strangelove'.......James Coburn as a gore-drenched  celebrity surgeon who performs to a packed operating theater like a matador.......and finally, in  what amounts the movie's showstopper, Marlon Brando as a babbling Indian Guru who travels in his own cross-country 18 wheeler.......

                       We'll now create a whole new genre to properly describe "Candy".......unlike 'Barbarella' or the '67 'Casino Royale', which fall under 'Movies Fun To Think About But Unwatchable'.......this one fall under 'Movies Fun To Think About And Just As Much Fun To Watch At Least Once......(if only to see it to disbelieve your eyes)

                       Adding to the overall craziness.......as we mentioned, the film's one of those misbegotten French-Italian co-productions, filmed mostly in Rome and directed by some French non-entity who clearly couldn't direct his own way to the bathroom.........

                         But if you pay attention and listen carefully, you can hear, in Buck Henry's rapid fire, gag-filled dialogue for his gallery of lunatics, a master satirist at work.......roasting all the people who've made the world a chaotic place to exist in......

                         Rest in peace, Buck Henry......... no other year but the riotous 1968 could have given you the chance to craft such a odd, odd film........and the epitome of your comedic art.  At the end of the film, Candy appears to return to outer space......but she lives in our hearts forever fondly....
3 stars (***)
                   

'YOU - SEASON 2'..........ONCE AGAIN, A PSYCHO IN LOVE......

You - Season 2 (2019)........is once again a darkly funny exaggerated example of what fledgling actors learn in their first theater classes..........

             ..........that even the most vile, reprehensible villain believes he's the hero of his own story.

              So once again we follow the calamitous exploits of bookstore clerk Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), an earnest young psychopath who's just lookin' for love.........and generally unaware that he's a murderous loon..........he can't help it he ends up killing various people who come between him and whichever unlucky girl has become the adored object of his obsession........

               For Season 2, Joe switches networks (from Lifetime to Netflix) and locations. (Pursued with a vengeance by an ex girlfriend/victim whom he unsuccessfully buried alive, Joe flees New York for Los Angeles. A literary lover of high art, Joe thinks La La Land is the last place anyone would look for him.....)

               Fat chance. Immersing himself in the richly phony L.A. lifestyle, Joe ends up clerking in a heath food supermarket chain run by the wealthy scions of the enterprise, Love and her brother Forty.(Victoria Pedretti, James Scully).......(yes, feel free to laugh at the tennis reference..)

               Love, of course, becomes Joe's new obsession,  which sucks him into all of the manic Forty's screenwriting and filmmaking delusions.........further complicating his life -  his hot tempered apartment manager (Carmela Zumbado) and her wise-beyond-her-years teen sister Ellie (Jenny Ortega), both them victims of a popular actor-comedian who drugs and rapes young women......

                Of course, the revenge-fueled, surviving girlfriend Candice (Ambyr Childers) tracks Joe down........and at this point the series amps up the crazy factor to hilarious extremes......forcing Joe to endure a dizzying amount of reversals of fortune......(both you the viewer and Joe will be muttering "What the f**k!', pretty much at the same time......)

                Way beyond ridiculous, but you won't want to miss a single episode.......only Indiana Jones overcomes more outrageous bad luck than Joe Goldberg. And as a bonus, the series delivers some  withering satiric takedowns of L.A. culture, cults of celebrity and hustling, would-be filmmakers.

                Amidst the bloody chaos, the show springs one major Big Twist to upend Joe's mentally ill life......which leads to a more-than-expected, inevitable final twist at the fadeout........(you'll have to wonder though,  where they could possibly go with this in a 3rd season.........by now, we all get it......Joe's bonkers, what else is new?)

              But for pure guilty pleasure fun, you can't beat watching the ups and downs of a psycho in love. 3 stars (***)

'RIO CONCHOS'.........TOUGHING IT OUT, WAY OUT WEST.......

Rio Conchos (1964)    Take special notice of the release year on this one.......it's one of BQ's favorite westerns.....one of those movies that if we stumble upon it while channel surfing, we'll invariably end up watching it to the end.......

                   The rage, brutality and violence that permeates this film puts it way ahead of its time......in many ways, it anticipated the coming avalanche of ultra-nasty Italian westerns that would land on American shores with "A Fistful Of Dollars" in 1967.......

                   But unlike the jokey, casual nihilism of  the spaghetti oaters, "Rio Conchos" stays rooted in the strong, solid dramatic structure of American westerns. The characters are consumed with their agendas, their anger, their goals.  They have a lot at stake.......including their own lives.

                    Even before Jerry Goldsmith's superb score kicks in for the main titles, the film kicks you in the teeth with its prelude...... an enraged ex-Confederate soldier (Richard Boone) guns down an entire Indian burial party.to satisfy his unquenchable thirst for revenge on Indians who slaughtered his wife and child.

                    Boone's promptly arrested by an equally seething cavalry officer (Stuart Whitman) who's aided by his black sergeant  (Jim Brown,mostly silent and powerful in his first screen role)........Whitman's boiling mad at Boone, but not so much over the murdered Indians......

                    What stirs Whitman's ire:  the rifle Boone wields came from  a shipment of guns hijacked by an insane ex-Confederate general (Edmond 'O Brian) who's set up his own lunatic, South-Will-Rise-Again kingdom in the middle of the Southwest desert........complete with an already partially constructed Southern mansion.....

                    Under the threat of imprisonment, Boone agrees to join Whitman and Brown on a mission to track down and thwart O' Brian, who's arming  bloodthirsty Apaches with the stolen rifles. Boone insists on taking along a fellow prisoner, a wily, duplicitous and extremely lethal Mexican bandido (Anthony Franciosa, joyously hamming for all he's worth).

                    And off this odd bunch goes on their bloodsoaked, action-packed quest. Boone and Whitman snap, snarl and distrust each other as they fend off  attacks from rampaging Indians, vicious bandits and O'Brian's shifty minions......joined along the way by their captured Indian girl (the gorgeous Wende Wagner, the closest thing this movie has to sex appeal.)

                    It's tough, violent stuff all the way through, directed by the criminally under-appreciated Gordon Douglas ("Them!") with his usual professional, cut-to-the-chase eye for action.

                    By the time our battered heroes get to launch their final attack on O'Brian's faux-'Tara' lair, you can sense it will cost them dearly, that this is no feel-good John Wayne saga, designed to make you stand up and cheer at the climax......

                   We don't care.....BQ still stands up and cheers for "Rio Conchos", one of the most colorful,uncompromisingly tough,  well acted and directed westerns to come out of 1960's . Hollywood. And that makes it a genuine BQ 5 star (*****), FIND OF FINDS. Seek it out soon.
                     .

'COOGAN'S BLUFF'........EASTWOOD & SIEGEL WARM UP FOR "DIRTY hARRY"......

Coogan's Bluff (1968)   In this first collaboration between Clint Eastwood and veteran director Don Siegel, you can spot all the tropes they'd pour into their groundbreaking action-cop thriller "Dirty Harry".......

                   Eastwood's modern-day Arizona sheriff Coogan is a soft-spoken thug with with a fully functioning sex drive and no sympathy for criminals he tracks down and cracks down on, much like an Old West bounty hunter....

                    In the brilliantly handled opening sequence, you see both sides his personality in play......after capturing a Native american murder suspect, Coogan leaves the poor sucker chained to the front porch of a house he's stopped by.......in order to dally with a married hot blonde who's currently home alone......

                      This....uh.....break in law enforcement protocol does not endear Coogan to his enraged boss, who promptly ships our hero off to New York City, where he's to extradite an escaped  murder suspect (Don Stroud).

                     And we're off to the Big Apple, where Eastwood encounters the expected barrage of fish-out-of-water jokes.........and the implacable bureaucracy of the New York police, as exemplified by the perpetually angry Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb).

                     Ignoring Cobb and  all those big city petty legalities, Eastwood manages to spirit his quarry out of a prison hospital......but then he's bopped unconscious by Stroud and his his wild hippy girlfriend (Tisha Sterling). Undiscouraged by the fuming Cobb, Eastwood goes on the hunt, taking on a crowd of pool hall hoods in a brutal, well staged knock-em-down........and then it's on to Central Park, where he finally nails Stroud after a  brief but furious motorcycle chase.

                     Don Siegel directs this pulp with the same spare, stripped down efficiency he'd later bring to 'Dirty Harry'.......though he's visually hobbled here by the cheap TV-style look of so many Universal studio movies in the 1960's.......(though there's some filming in New York, most of the movie reeks of Universal backlot sets in L.A......)

                     But it's fast and fun, especially featuring its ludicrous visit to Universal Studio's idea of a hippie nightclub. ('The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel', we kid you not........in which, Oh My God.....you can spot same sex couples KISSING......while the club's multi-media wall shows 1955's 'Tarantula', the monster later napalmed......by a young Clint Eastwood)

                     A few years later, 'Coogan's Bluff' ended up re-cycled and homogenized by the studio into into the TV show 'McCloud' with Dennis Weaver taking over as a Southwest lawman plopped down in New York.........but as far as we know, unlike Eastwood's Coogan, Weaver never  jumps in a bathtub with a married babe or pounds a guy into jelly while on top of a pool table.....

                    For that kind of  rough-stuff, prime Don Seigel goodness......only Clint will do.
3 stars (***)>

THE GLOBES.........OUR FAVORITE TRAINWRECK....

The Golden Globe Awards (2020)

                    The Hollywood crowd never had a more deserving host than Ricky Gervais....

                     Especially as they kicked off their tortuous 'awards season', where they subject the entire world to a several months long orgy of self-congratulation.........kissing their own pampered asses while lecturing us paycheck-to-paycheck proles to 'not be afraid to follow your dreams....'

                      And so the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, premier ass-kissers themselves, either from perversity or show-biz savvy, inflicted the acerbic Gervais on the star-studded assemblage.........

                      The result: the expected rancorous spectacle of Gervais hurling jokes brimming with withering contempt at the wincing, uncomfortable crowd of Hollywood-ites......

                        In the BQ's mission statement, this definitely came under the heading....'cool stuff to watch....'

                        Other highlights:  Joaquin Phoenix giving a brilliant wonderful performance.......playing an unhinged, manic depressive actor named Joaquin Phoenix. He nailed it....
And astounding moment when the show poked Disney in the eye by skipping over "Frozen 2" and "Toy Story 4" for "The Missing Link", one of those animated films that come and go in one weekend,  faster than the life cycle of a mayfly.

                        We're begging you, H.F.P. A..........throw enough money at Gervais to get  him to come back next year.......We don't know what the awards season would be without him........

                   

'A LOVELY WAY TO DIE'.........SURVIVED ONLY BY KIRK.......

A Lovely Way To Die (1968)    It's safe to say, that at 103 years old, Kirk Douglas has probably outlived almost everybody in the cast and crew of this movie..........

               And that may be Kirk's best revenge........but for the BQ, once again we've struck GOLD unearthing this movie........another oddest of the oddball messes that periodically crawled out of 1960's Hollywood.......when studios had no idea who they were making movies for....or why.....

              Cranked out from the Universal assembly line, the film's impossible to categorize.......or make any rational attempt to figure out what filmmakers had in mind......

                A private eye noirish thing?  A tough cop shoot-em-up?  A twisty whodunnit?  A cheery opposites-attract romcom?

                At one point or another, this movie tries out all of these genres as it speeds along to its incomprehensible conclusion. But what a fun ride.......

                 A Dirty Harry-ish, free-with-his-fists cop (Douglas) quits the force after he beats up four gangsters in a Chinese restaurant. But he's not unemployed for long, thanks his wily, folksy cornpone lawyer pal, Tennessee Fredericks (Eli Wallach, hamming it up as he's a Tennessee Williams character.....)

                  Our anti-hero's new gig: overseeing a sex-bombshell widow (Ultimate Euro-Babe Sylva Koscina) in the midst her trial for murdering her wealthy hubby, with the help of her young Brit boytoy (Kenneth Haigh)

                   Naturally, sparks fly between Koscina and Douglas.....(who's already been presented in the film as.an insatiable hounddog with women).........but who're the bad guys taking potshots at Kirk?   And what the hell's going on in the neighboring mansion, stuffed with more frozen corpses than the L.A. morgue?

                   If you're expecting the movie to answer any of these questions coherently..........don't hold your breath. Just sit back and revel (as does Douglas) in the ripe beauty and perfect superstructure of Sylva Koscina........be still our heart.......

                   What's especially wonderful here:  the supporting cast, comprised of a veritable army of instantly recognizable character actors.......Sharon Farrell, Ruth White, Dolph Sweet, Philip Bosco, Ralph Waite, Dana Elcar, Richard Castellano,Conrad Bain, Doris Roberts, John Ryan.......and even, for a few seconds at the start, a young Ali McGraw.

                     What's especially horrible here:  The incredibly ruinous music score by Kenyon Hopkins. Hopkins overscores the movie to the point of madness.......the cartoon-ish, annoying music never shuts up and none of it remotely connects to anything shown on he screen. It sound as if Hopkins composed the score while tripping on LSD, hallucinating that he was writing music for a 2 hour Warner Brothers Loony Tune. His work here stands as one of the most rotten scores ever inflicted on a studio film.

                    So how do we rate a movie like this.......with so much good, bad and ugly stuff crammed into it?  Well, there's not enough mercy and kindness in the world these days, so we're going hand out 2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)......which is mainly for Kirk Douglas (at his Kirk-iest) the beyond luscious Sylva Koscina and that massive, wonderful collection of supporting actors........making it still plenty 'o fun to sit through......

                   

             

                     

'DANGER: DIABOLIK'.........THE POP ART SUPERTHIEF........

Danger: Diabolik (1968)    It only just occurred to us that we should have included this film as a double feature on our "Barbarella" post........the two films were produced back-to-back by the Italian mega-mogul Dino De Laurentis.........

               .........with both films designed as flashy, trashy, pop art adaptations of hugely popular European comic strip characters......

                 But holy superhero, what a difference between them. 'Barbarella', as we've pointed out, falls under our category of 'Fun-To-Remember-But-Sucks-To-Actually-Watch'.......directed by that horny hack Roger Vadim, whose primary talent was filming the hot babes he married.......(Jane Fonda, Brigitte Bardot, etc).......

                 Beyond undressing Fonda at every opportunity, Vadim's gasping attempt at sci-fi spoofery is so languid and static, it plays like a bizarre, slow motion fashion show. A painful, dumb slog.

                 'Danger: Diabolik', however,......that's a whole other story.......directed at the very height of his visual powers by that underappreciated master of fantasy and horror, Mario Bava......

                 It's a wild, take-no-prisoners hoot from start to breathless finish...... probably the all-time best replica of a dark, weird 1960's pop art comic book ever put on film.....

                  Fresh from his role as 'Barbarella's winged Adonis comes John Phillip Law as super-dooper thief Diabolik. Fully equipped with blazing eyes, demonic laugh and black leather outfits welded to his skin,  Diabolik stages outrageously ridiculous heists with the help of Eva (Marisa Mell), his blazing hot mini-skirted gal pal.

                  And he's pissed off everyone.......the government and cops (represented by a babbling Terry-Thomas and a cool Michel Piccoli).....and even worse, the mob, headed by who else but 'Thunderball' Bond villain Adolfo Celi......

                  They're all out to get Diabolik and Eva, but our powerhouse Super Duo outwit them at every turn........at one point, they literally leave 'em laughing after dosing a police press conference with 'Exhilaration Gas'.......

                 Bava splashes all of this nonsense across the screen with his unerring eye for dazzling visuals and some startling set pieces......such as Law and Mell sexing it up on a giant circular bed strewn with the cash they've stolen........(the director even slows down a bit for some hubba-hubba
tours of Mell's spectacular, barely dressed body)

                  And the dessert topping's best of all......a nervous, appropriately offbeat score by Ennio Morricone, filled with his signature outbursts of squawking trumpets and rousing chorals

                   For this film, BQ came up with a specialized  category.....file 'Danger: Diabolik' under  Films-You've-Forgotten-About-Or-Never-Heard-Of-But-Are-Loads-Of-Fun-To-Watch.......

                    and not to miss, we should add. 4 stars (****)......we wouldn't watch 'Barbarella' again if you paid us, but we'll always come back to our good buddy Diabolik.