'THE H-MAN'.........HE'LL MELT YOUR HEART.......AND EVERYTHING ELSE.......

The H-Man (1958)   Forget defrosted dinosaurs.....forget giant ants.......forget invading aliens.........

           Nothing, but nothing could strike fear in our hearts like rampaging ooze.....once it slid under the doors or through the heating ducts, its one and only task was to glop 'n slop itself all over you, absorbing and dissolving you into nothingness........

            This kind of monster generated the most primal fear in audiences.......cause what were these things except metaphors for cancer........for some form of illness that could eat us alive while we helplessly watched......a much more likely fate than being stepped on by Godzilla.

             Filmmakers from various countries did their own variations on this ooey-gooey sort of creature.......in America, "The Blob" went oozing after rebels-without-a-cause teenagers led by Steve McQueen.......in Britain, the first two Quatermass films pitted alien slime against government and scientific bureaucracies....(followed up by "X The Unknown" a generous hunk 'o homegrown radioactive sludge from the Earth's core)......and Italy served up "Caltiki, the Immortal Monster", literally a huge pile of ambulatory, carnivorous tripe.......

             Japan, of course, had its own unique agenda.......still reeling from being the only country on earth that endured and survived nuclear warfare.....

              So it's no surprise that sci-fi/monster-meister Ishiro Honda took his inspiration for "The H-Man" from the unlucky fate of the 'Lucky Dragon', the infamous fishing boat that sailed into a cloud of radiation from an American H-bomb test......

            In Honda's film, the radiation melts six crew members of a "Lucky Dragon" type boat, turning them into liquid creatures who immediately melt and consume their fellow crew members......turning the whole boat into a sci-fi haunted house, since the things frequently re-form themselves into their once human shapes......

            The rest of movie never quite equals this eerie sequence, done as a flashback about halfway into the story.  Since the creepy, sentient, ever-hungry liquid still retains the intelligence of its absorbed victims.......it heads for familiar hangouts........like a cheesy cabaret nightclub frequented by loads of sleazy gangsters......whom you know are bound to end up as H-food........

             Silly?  Oh, you bet. Big time. But enormous fun to watch.

             Director Honda and his hard-working special effects crew go for a "whatever works" in their scenes of the H-Man attacking and melting humans.......everything from Looney Tunes cartooning to letting the air out of inflatable dummies........but their best (and most unnerving) effect by far shows the gelatinous creature sliding across walls, floors and over windowsills.

             You can't help falling in love with a Japanese movie that features a nightclub singer warbling insane, non-sequitur English lyrics obviously written by someone who was looking up each word individually in a dictionary.

            And for a movie with such a ghastly, horrific premise, it's scored with a wildly inappropriate main title theme......a rousing, blasting, blaring march.........(you could almost picture this being used for Donald Trump's upcoming military parade, the "salute to the Draft-Dodger-In-Chief")

           Fortunately for humanity, the cops and military set fire to every sewer and waterway in Tokyo to wipe out the H-Man........(since H-Guy is made of water, we wondered about that climax.......we always thought water trumped fire, but.....hey, what do we know?)

           A few lines of offscreen dialogue warn us that in the nuclear age, H-Man could make a comeback and inherit the earth......how true.....how true.

           For the BQ........H-Man, The Blob, X the Unknown and Caltiki will live forever in our hearts, minds and bad dreams.....oozing through our restless thoughts.....with  melting us, the only mission on their single-celled little brains......3 stars (***)......keep your eyes on that windowsill........

'YEAR OF THE DRAGON'.......THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF MICHAEL CIMINO........

Year Of The Dragon (1985)   As we pointed out in yesterday's post on "Heaven's Gate", if there's one thing we loved about controversial writer-director Michael Cimino, it was his whole-hearted embrace of larger-than-life visual excess........

           In that regard, he crafted his films with the same Grand Opera exaggerations as Sergio Leone......(if you saw crowd scenes in a Cimino film, you knew they'd look bigger, noisier and more chaotic than crowd scenes in anyone else's movies....)

             And with Oliver Stone as a co-screenwriter, Cimino found an over-the-top kindred spirit.....a fellow lover of overdone, overblown mayhem, bombast and hyperbole......

             What a perfect pair to make a movie about a volcanic-tempered New York cop (Mickey Roarke), a Vietnam veteran who wages war on an ambitiously ultra-violent young Chinatown gangster (John Lone).

              Even better, under the auspices of mogul Dino DeLaurentis, Cimino got to re-create his very own little Chinatown on a sound stage in Wilmington, North Carolina.....

              Teeming, busy and colorful, Cimino's rogue Chinatown looks like an ethic village in Disney World..........except for the fact that in a Disney village, you don't normally thrill to the sight of the wild-eyed Roarke engaging in blood-splattered gun battles with Lone's army of punk assassins.

             The bullets fly, the bodies fall........and there's no relief for anyone even in the dialogue sequences. Roarke's defiantly obnoxious character carries on an adversarial relationship with everyone he comes across.......including his equally intemperate wife (Caroline Kava) and his sort of new girlfriend, a TV reporter who's always on the spot for all the carnage... (played by Ariane, a fashion model who shouts her lines like she's reading them from cue cards held too far away from her....)

               Guilty pleasures don't come any guiltier than this........and unlike "Heaven's Gate" which, granted,  takes an iron will and limitless patience to sit through, Cimino makes this one a virtual rollercoaster ride.....it periodically explodes,without a moment's notice, into gloriously gory set pieces........(most of them occurring in a huge Chinatown restaurant, a marvel of production design with multiple floors and stairways....)

               As we once again enjoyed Mickey Roarke (still looking human before his strange boxing career) and John Lone exact grim vengeance on one another, we couldn't help wishing Cimino had been more prolific.  Alas, his problematic personality and enormous ego undid his career in filmmaking.......studios showed little tolerance for a Grand Opera director who behaved like a Grand Opera diva-soprano.

              We know there's no rational artistic defense of "Year Of The Dragon"........it's ridiculous and hyper-ventilating from start to finish.......

              But ya know what?  We got biggest kick out of the goddamn thing.........Cimino never had to slavishly imitate video-store sludge like Tarantino.......he brought his very own internal crazy to his films, with a showman's eye for spectacle.......(and by that, we mean the real stuff, not something concocted by 300 people sitting at computer terminals....)

              So we don't care about any aesthetically-correct consensus of Cimino's work, whatever that might be these days.......for us, "Year Of The Dragon" remains a visually splendid hoot.....4 stars (****).....we would have given it 5 if someone just held the cue cards a little closer to Ariane's face.....

'HEAVEN'S GATE'.......DISASTERPIECE OR MASTERPIECE?......BQ WEIGHS IN.......

Heaven's Gate (1980)    For the hell of it, we thought we'd dive into the Grand Canyon-sized abyss that separates the 1980's film critics, (who roasted this movie like a barbecued pig on a spit) with the new millennium judgement that it's a maligned classic..........

            We wade into this debate having finally decided to eat up our rapidly aging life with the 3 hours and 38 minutes required to view writer-director Michael Cimino's Director's Cut.......

            Our take?   Just as in real life, you find the truth of the matter tends to fall somewhere in between the two extremes........

             Even before the film's 1980 release date, critics and pundits had already feasted on a steady stream of bad press about the troubled production history..........by the time they actually got to see the movie, they were more pumped to deal out a lethal thumbs-down than the worst bloodthirsty Coliseum mobs of Ancient Rome........

             And what a ton of red meat they chomped on.......the hubis and directorial dementia of Cimino, his ego inflated to Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloon proportions by his "'Deer Hunter" Oscars.......the film's out-of-control shooting schedule and runaway budget, which ultimately destroyed United Artists, the studio that took pride in allowing its directors their artistic freedom......(as long they adhered to their initial budgets)........

              Studios took note of all this toxic chaos and "Heaven's Gate" served as the final nail in the coffin of the 70's era in which young directors were indulged without any studio control or oversight. The era of the corporate-controlled, crowd-pleasing blockbusters would soon dawn upon us.......

              Decades later, the film was rediscovered and celebrated as a long lost, misunderstood cinematic jewel......

              Jewel?  Hmmm........tarnished in so many ways, but yes, we found much to admire.....

              Deep, deep inside the 219 minute running time of "Heaven's Gate", we detected a sweeping, epic,compelling film, struggling to work its way out of the piles of unnecessary, excess footage.....

              We always likened Michael Cimino to a sort of American-ized Sergio Leone........not much of a storyteller, but oh what a Grand Opera visualist.  Like Leone, Cimino favored everything in his films done larger than life.......settings, scenery, scenes extended into elaborately choreographed set pieces, for no other reason than pure cinematic splendor.

              Unlike Leone, who varied his wide vistas with extreme closeups of his characters, Cimino had no such interest in the topography of his actors' faces.  Mostly, they remained distant figures in his stunning landscapes.......giving "Heaven's Gate" a remote quality, even in the midst of its grand emotions and perpetual violence.....

                Watching this movie in 2018, we couldn't help raising ironic eyebrows to its eerie relevance to America in the Dark Age Of Trump.......

               Cimino, in his blatant fictionalizing of the Johnson County, Wyoming battles between cattlemen and settlers, simplifies the Great Divide for us. It's basically rich, powerful entitled white men pitted against poor, struggling immigrants, most of whom don't speak English.  As the white guys' hired thugs beat up the "others", they're heard to scream out, "Why don't you go back where you came from!"

                 Ah, where have we heard that before?

                True, almost every scene in the film runs two to three minutes longer than it has to.  If ever a movie needed a brilliant, creative film editor ( a Dede Allen, for example).......a whole team of editors worked on this, but it's clear they gave in to Cimino's self-indulgent impulse to hang and frame every shot like an oil painting fit for the Louvre....

                 And we did grow weary of cameraman Vilmos Zsigmond swinging back and forth from that washed out burnt-orange (so beloved by cinematographers after the "Godfather I and II") to the genuine brilliance of the Montana scenery, doubling for Wyoming.

                Even having itemized those faults, we still found ourselves immersed and seduced by this expansive, cruel universe created by Cimino.  If you have the time and patience, the overwhelming imagery and tragic spectacle of the film inevitably draws you in......

                And isn't that what good filmmaking's about?

               No masterpiece by any means, but we don't regret a single minute of the time we spent with the uncut "Heaven's Gate"........a fractured, flawed epic indeed........but in its vaulting ambition and artistry, we'd rather sit through this than any of the latest CGI superhero slugfests. 3 stars (***)

'DUCK SOUP' & SYRIA......TO WAR, TO WAR......WITH A HEY NONNY NONNY AND A HOT CHA CHA.......

Duck Soup (1933)   One thing we've learned........if you live long enough, you get to see everything....

               More than once.......

               And maybe wish you hadn't............

               We now rejoice.......we punched Assad in the nose. That'll teach 'im.  Uh, won't it?

               For at least a half an hour, we experienced the same temporary thrill we got watching Chuck Norris kick some guy in face during any random episode of "Walker, Texas Ranger"........

               You'll please forgive the BQ if we stop to ruminate a bit........

                So we (America), along with France and Great Britain, delivered a brief Chuck Norris face-kick to Syria.......for killing about 40 people with poison gas.

                Assad crossed the famous Red Line In The Sand doing this. Meanwhile, he's already killed half a million of his people with bullets and bombs.

               Maybe we're going out on a limb here, but we're guessing that a good portion of those 500,00 men, women and children, their bodies shredded and torn apart, died with the equivalent amount of agony and suffering as the 40 people who were gassed.

                Nothing to be done about that, we guess. Hey, it's war........that's what happens when a country comes under the control of an inhuman monster.....

               But let's be clear......don't misunderstand us. By no means do we advocate marching in hundreds of thousands of young American soldiers for use as cannon fodder in another never-ending Middle East bloodbath.

               We are not John Bolton, who's essentially a spoiled fully grown toddler who wants to play toy soldiers with real soldiers......after all, as long it's not his blood that's being spilled.....

                And besides, we supposedly have no such aims for Syria anyway........a week ago, Baby Orange couldn't control his ever flapping mouth and said he expected to pull out of Syria......

                But when the Special Counsel and the FBI are relentlessly closing in on you.......there's nothing like sending missiles and planes to blow shit up to take everyone's mind off things......

                So once again, we'll ask you understand why we're casting a jaundiced eye at virtually every aspect and every side of the World At Large and the Powers That Be......

               It's just that we've lived through all this crap before........and it never gets any better.....for anybody.

             If there's anyone among you who thinks that Assad's been taught a lesson he'll never forget, then no doubt you've eagerly answered those e-mails that scream YOU CAN MAKE $1,000 DOLLARS WORKING FROM HOME! JUST SEND US YOUR CREDIT CARD NUMBER!!

               So to hell with them all......to hell with Putin, a KGB assassin masquerading as a world leader, to hell with Assad, a malignant cancer in a business suit......and to hell with Baby Orange, a hollow shell of human who got to put on a "Walker, Texas Ranger" episode as a convenient smokescreen to cover his own criminality......

               Oh, right......this post was supposed to be about a movie, wasn't it?  That's cause every time we punch a dictator in the nose, it reminds of us Groucho's rousing song "To War.."......in which he exhorts the mythical kingdom of Freedonia to head into battle........for the sheer patriotic fun of it.....

             4 stars for "Duck Soup" (****)....and its glorious song.  We only wish that in the process of bombing Assad's chemical weapons facilities, we'd also dropped leaflets with Groucho's lyrics.......Hi-De-Hi-De-Hi-De-Ho.....With a Hey Nonny Nonny And A Hot Cha Cha....

LEAST FAVORITE THINGS........SPECIAL PEE-PEE EDITION.......

               Had a movie post all planned.......but nothing beats current events for outrageous comedy, compelling drama.......and if you stop to contemplate at all......blood-freezing horror.

               Comey outdoes Stormy.......even without having to slap Baby Orange's ample ass with a rolled up magazine.......

                Baby Orange's lawyer takes the Fifth.......we suppose that means he's cancelled the 'round the world cruise he planned to take on cash collected from Stormy........

                 The Baby Orange Love Child??  If Baby Orange fathered a blonde attractive female, she should go deep, deep into hiding.......chances are, he might take the phrase "love child" too literally....

                 Baby Orange asks Comey to investigate the "Pee-Pee" tape......Truly, we don't understand why Baby Orange obsesses over this........if the Trumpanzees who voted him in don't mind him grabbing vaginas, why would the sight of him pissing on Russian whores bother them?  We can already hear the Evangelical sermons in preparation ......."praise the Lord, when you gotta go, you gotta go...."

                  "At attack on America", says Baby Orange about the FBI raiding his lawyer's offices  Memo to Baby Orange........The FBI didn't raid America.....the FBI protects America, the complete opposite of what you do......The FBI isn't after America......it's after two psychotic lying sociopaths who've smeared feces all over America and are headed for criminal indictment.......you and your lawyer.

                   Baby Orange claims he'll never reveal his military strategy......and then tweets about the missiles he plans to lob over to Syria........(and he no doubt thinks the check from Mexico to pay for his Great Wall is in the mail.....)

                    and before we close the lid on this Trumpster fire.......

                   Scott Pruitt    Remember "Drain The Swamp?" (especially you MAGA redhats.....that's your tax dollars he flies first class on).......when it comes to swamps, this guy is the entire Everglades........

                     Paul Ryan    What a profile in courage......dividing his time between making war on the elderly and sick people......and cowering and quivering in the shadow of Baby Orange.  A genuine pleasure to watch this oozing worm slither out of Congress......

                    Devin Nunes  This scuttling cockroach who crawled fully grown out of Baby Orange's  anus hasn't the mental capacity to figure out how history will judge him.........he thinks only one minute ahead at a time.  Truth and karma may finally hit him after the stench of Baby Orange is gone and he's swept into the dustbin with the rest of the spineless enablers........  

'EAT MY DUST'........RON HOWARD ENROLLS IN CORMAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE.......

Eat My Dust (1976)    First.....a vital BQ statement......

               It is positively evil, toxic and malicious that the Academy Awards shuffles off the lifetime achievement Oscar winners to some un-televised, unseen ceremony before the big awards show.......

               So we never, ever get to see cinema icons duly honored....

               We do, on the other hand, get to see Jimmy Kimmel shlep celebrities over to some movie theater to surprise people in the middle of a showing of "A Wrinkle In Time"........(but the sight of Donald Sutherland awarded for his lifetime of memorable roles is for Academy attendees eyes only.....)

               Among other filmmakers condemned to this secret unheralded  'by-invitation-only' ghetto was Roger Corman, not only the undisputed Lord and Master of quickie shlock movies, but the mentor and one man Kickstarter for a host of A-Listers......Francis Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Jonathon Demme, Jack Nicholson, James Cameron, Bill Paxton......and Ron Howard.

               Howard was already firmly established as America's 'Happy Days' boy-next-door when he signed on for "Eat My Dust", a typically slapdash Corman car-crash crapfest............written and directed by one of Corman's most legendary, prolific alter-egos, Charles B. Griffith. ("Little Shop Of Horrors", "A Bucket Of Blood", "Not Of This Earth", "Death Race 2000", etc, etc......)

               The 1970's became the Golden Age Of Automobile Destruction for grindhouse filmmakers and the one and only purpose of something like "Eat My Dust" was providing the spectacle of rebellious teens crashing cars into buildings, gas stations, stores......and each other.

               Ron Howard had more on his mind than merely toplining one of Roger Corman's many disposable drive-in movies.........he recognized a chance to enter the unofficial Corman College for Fledgling Directors.....

               Corman offered his young and hungry 'students' a sink-or-swim course of study......giving them enough raw film stock to make an 80 minute movie and about 2 weeks time to shoot it.

               Usually, this resulted in a win-win for everybody.......Corman got his fast 'n cheap little movie......and the film's director got a crash course in filmmaking that served him well after graduating to bigger and better movies for major studios.

               You could consider "Eat My Dust" as Ron Howard's Freshman year at Corman College prior to Corman letting him take the directorial reigns over the almost identical follow-up, "Grand Theft Auto"......

              The movie?  Easily described.......Ron sees a race car, Ron sees a cute blonde......Ron steals the race car and Cute Blonde hops in for the ride. Many cop cars, led by Ron's father, the Sheriff, chase after him.......many cars crash......and crash some more......and keep crashing.

              That about covers it.

              Sure, it's the most raggedy, slapped together piece of nonsense you could ever hope to watch, but Corman knew his audience and knew how to assemble and market his product like no other producer.......

              And no other producer so astutely took advantage of the energy, enthusiasm and creativity of the  neophytes who worked under him........if you consider all the films made by the directors who jump-started their careers at Corman's Krazy Kollege.......then stuff like "Eat My Dust" would turn into a win-win for audiences as well......

              For Ron Howard, the movie served its purpose as a Freshman Orientation.......and we promise to cover "Grand Theft Auto", his Corman senior year Directing Final Exam in a future post.
For "Eat My Dust", we'll pop the clutch and rev up 2 & 1/2 quickie stars (**1/2).......it's entirely possible we spent more time writing this post than the movie's shooting schedule........

             

'I CONFESS'........HITCH DOES THE FULL MONTY.......

I Confess  (1953)  There may be have  been no actor more unsuitable to work with Alfred Hitchcock than Montgomery Clift.......

              High strung, mercurial, an ultra nervous practitioner of deeply internalized Method acting, Clift couldn't ever fit in with Hitchcock's 'pure cinema' technique, in which he moved the actors around like chess pieces in a meticulous pre-planned strategy......

              Actors learned to work their way through the strict discipline of Hitchcock's pinpoint camerawork and editing. They'd manage to fit in their performances within the rigid structure of a film that Hitchcock had essentially made already.......in his head and on paper.

              So one could only imagine the oil-and-water mix that went on between ultimate craftsman Hitchcock and the Method-trained Clift, who needed to mentally feel his way through every nuance of his character..........a Canadian priest who hears an admission of murder in the confession booth.

              But here's the thing......why we regularly return to this movie......one of the forgotten, rarely examined movies in the Hitchcock canon.....

              We positively love Montgomery Clift in this.........even when the film itself goes wobbly and unbelievable in its plot structure, Clift's conflicted, morally tortured Father Logan holds us riveted.....

               Looking always like he's on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown, Clift's haunted expressions and deer-in-the-headlights eyes can literally magnetize you to the screen.

               Using an actor who lives on the tip of his nerve endings may have been a terrible choice for Hitchcock's personal style........but by the time "The End" appears in the final frames, you realize Clift's work here is what truly makes the film worth watching.

               Watching Clift as he lugs the weight of the world around on his slim shoulders, we barely notice the idiotic, soap opera-ish plot twist.......the film's murderer,for reasons of his own,  in a far-fetched variation on the guilt-transference trope of  "Strangers On A Train", conveniently bumps off the guy who's been blackmailing Clift and his long-ago, pre-priesthood girlfriend. (Anne Baxter)........threatening to expose the one-night-stand they once had after taking a rainy day refuge in the blackmailer's gazebo.

             In this movie, what happens in the gazebo, doesn't stay in the gazebo......

              Like we said, you don't examine this hard-to-swallow storyline too closely.......not while you're busy watching Clift give you the full Monty of agonized neurotic guilt.......

             And there are a few other pleasures here........Karl Malden's sturdy performance as the dogged detective out to unravel the crime.... O.E. Hasse's unsettling work as the simpering, creepy murderer, whose profound evil finally comes roaring out at the climax.......and a surprising lack of sound-stage artifice from Hitchcock, shooting many of the key scenes in actual locations.

              Film critics, cinema historians and even Hitchcock fans tend to give this one a pass......but the BQ still counts it among our treasured favorites.......4 stars (****)......the only Hitchcock we could categorize as a Clift-Hanger.....(sorry, we couldn't resist.....)