WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP......SPECIAL "I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT...." EDITION....

                 Baby Orange claims, "I know nothing about Wikileaks"    Translation: "Everyone go back to sleep.....that moment you saw me scream 'Wikileaks! Wikileaks! I love Wikileaks!".....only a bad dream.......rock-a-bye baby....on the tree top...."

                  Baby Orange's Minion-General claims Baby Orange was 'spied upon'.......Minion-General has no evidence of this, but promises a thorough investigation of Oval Office closets that might serve as hiding spots for midget spies......

                   Baby Orange threatens to flood sanctuary cities with illegal immigrants......and also threatens to equip the ones sent to San Francisco with Ford Mustangs so they can duplicate the "Bullitt" car chase......

                    Baby Orange threatens to get tougher on the border.......by seriously considering advisor Stephen Miller's plan to save money by moving immigrant children out of cages and into used Amazon shipping boxes.......for quick and easy return to their country of origin........

SOFTCORE COPPOLA..........BQ EXHUMES F.F.C.'S "THE BELLBOY AND THE PLAYGIRLS"

The Bellboy And The Playgirls (1962)   Having graduated from a radio-TV-Film university and known more than a few fledgling filmmakers, BQ well knows how brutally impossible it is to break into professional filmmaking........

               It takes powerful, hungry ambition, talent, grinding hard work.........and tough as this is to say.......mostly pure luck. Or luck you make yourself.........

                Francis Ford Coppola, like many of today's film giants, eventually jammed his foot in the door by way of Roger Corman's mentorship, as in  "Kid,  here's a couple of thousand and some raw film stock, go make me a movie in 10 days...."

                But even before that, young Coppola found a way, much to the disgust of his film school classmates, to achieve his first official writing and directing credit........

                And what a weird way to do it.

                 Armed with a bevy of Playboy Playmates and their accompanying bare boobs, Coppola fashioned enough footage to graft his own embarrassingly lame nudie comedy into an already abysmal German movie.

                  The German movie, in black-and-white, is a load of stillborn, English-dubbed gibberish about a virginal actress given droning, pageant-like displays of the history of sex, in order to loosen her up......(the only thing here that caught my eye - the naive cutie's played by a young Karin Dor, soon to become a Eurotrash Scream Queen and Bond vixen.....)

                   Edited into the German mess comes Coppola's own dismal farce, shot in washed out color and featuring a babbling, pathetic Jerry Lewis clone and the lingerie-clad Playmates, regularly parading their bare chests........

                      Watching this bizarre goulash unfold for over 90 dreary minutes, you have to wonder why they even bothered with the German movie at all........it's about as compelling and sexy as a Volkswagon owner's manual.......

                     Not that Coppola's breast festival is any better.........there's no hint of his yet-to-be-revealed style and talent here........his footage looks and sounds like it came from a horny 12 year old boy sneaking a peek at his dad's old Playboy issues........

                    But hey........he got his foot in the door. Mission accomplished.  And for that, and all his subsequent films, we should all be thankful.........

                   So don't bother with this unwatchable, Zero Star (0) abortion.........you'll see no trace of Coppola anywhere in it........strictly for film historians now........its original target audience, old men in raincoats stroking their erections to the sight of boobies, have long since passed away........

GIALLO 'N GOODBYE!.......BQ SEARCHES FOR LIFE IN "THE DEAD ARE ALIVE"

The Dead Are Alive (1972)     Been a while since BQ dove in to one of my favorite genres........the creepy, gory, sexy "Giallo" murder mysteries.........Italian films where a black-hatted, black-gloved, black trenchcoated killer goes about his (or her) business........using a switchblade to slice 'n dice up naked women into bright crimson ribbons........

                This one, however, takes liberties with the usual carved-in-granite formula.........no black-outfitted perp here........this psycho prefers to pound on hot-to-trot young couples with a blunt instrument, mashin' 'em up to a pulp and sticking costume high heels on the dead babes........

                But the other conventions of the genre are duly observed........in that all the characters, including the leads (Alex Cord, Samantha Eggar) are a self-centered, obnoxious bunch of alcoholics, egomaniacs, nymphos and psychotics.........

                So it really doesn't matter whom the Designated Mad Killer chooses to massage with a metallic pipe.........as Clint Eastwood so ably put it in "Unforgiven"......"we all got it comin', kid....."

                This movie dotes on Archaeology, briefly toying with the idea that the killer's a revived Etruscan demon, fresh out of the tomb that Cord is unearthing.........but we know better, don't we?

                Cord's got the full-boil hots for Eggar, who's married to a raging, loudmouth symphony conductor played by that specialist in raging loudmouths, John Marley.  In true Giallo fashion, Cord tries to pull a full Harvey Weinstein grope-a-thon on Eggar, while Marley engages in enough apoplectic fits to deserve waking up with another 'Godfather' horse's head on his pillow....

                 The film's last third sweats and strains to point the finger at Cord as the killer (after all, he is a drunk, angry bastard)....... but once again, we know better, don't we?

                Not bad, as Giallos go, and the cast sure works hard to keep it lively........but I'm a traditionalist when it comes to these things........and much prefer that comforting, swtichblade wielding black hat character.........sorry, but I don't care for having the Psycho-Du-Jour run around swinging some big-ass club.....like a demented refugee from 'One Million Years B.C.'.........

                 2 stars (**).......and we promise to deal with more promising Giallos than this in the weeks ahead..........with plenty of black leather trenchcoats, hats and gloves.......

               

             

THE HELL, YOU SAY..........CHILLIN' WITH 'CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA'........

Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, Part 2  (2019)    Once again, at the heartfelt request of BD (Beloved Daughter), BQ endured yet another engorged load of barely-lit,angst-ridden demonic teen noir.........

               I will give the makers of this series due credit........they've made barely-lit, angst-ridden, demonic teen noir a new genre all by itself. For better or worse, they own it.

                The 'worse' part?  You can almost hear the producers and directors of this show high-fiving each other at what they consider their genius idea.........making the episodes look like they've been illuminated by a 5-watt nursery-room night light........

                 BQ memo to the showrunners..........the art of cinematography, something unknown to you clueless dickwads, consists of selectively applying both light and shadow for maximum dramatic effect......check out classic horror films for examples.....
 
                 What cinematography does NOT involve, you imbeciles, is cloaking an entire show in pitch darkness, rendering it barely visible to its audience.  That's not creativity, it's just stubborn idiocy.......

                Let's move on to the better stuff........

                Doubling down on the crazy..........more wack-a-doodle melodrama with the Satan himself poppin' up regularly to mix things up.......yeah, baby, liked it a lot. Go for it.......

                The MVP of this show, (in BQ's humble opinion).......Lucy Davis as Sabrina's Aunt Hilda......hysterical, mumbling and muttering her dialogue, she steals every scene she's in.......she's like a throwback to the British "Carry On" movies.......a gem, funny as....uh.....hell.

                 Speaking of hell...........never seen a witch show that so fully embraces satanic worship with such rip-roarin' fervor.  Granted, sometimes they're having fun with it ("What the Heaven!" the cast frequently cries out in anger).........but mostly the show's as steeped deeply in Da Debbil as the evangelicals'  sold-their-souls devotion to Donald Trump.......

                 Let's put it this way, unlike "Hocus Pocus", none of the witches in "Sabrina" are ever going to mistake a guy in a cheap Halloween Shop costume as their Lord and Master.......not when the real thing stops in to say hello every other day......

                Special shout-outs to couple of individual episodes........one of them's an entire tribute to the 1965 Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee "Dr. Terror's House Of Horrors", a movie that this show's demographic most certainly never saw or even heard of.......

                And let's hear it for the "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers"  homage, complete with duplicate plant-people and a creepy plant copy of Sabrina doing that 'Hey, stop, you're killin' us!' shriek from the 1978 Body Snatchers remake.........

                 By the time all theses nutso dramatics grind to a halt, the show promises a Season 3 where they all go to Hell.......for real........

                 Good move.......we heard Satan keeps the fires burning high down there........which means the lighting of Season 3 should be way brighter........who knows, they might even make the actors......uh......visible.

                  I sure in Heaven hope so........2 stars (**)

BEAUTY DREW THE BEASTS........THE AMAZING STORY OF "THE LADY FROM THE BLACK LAGOON"

The Lady From The Black Lagoon by Mallory 'O Meara (2019)    What a wondrous, fascinating and ultimately sad true story..........

                 Mallory 'O Meara, a young producer-writer of horror films, unearthed, through dogged research and detective work, the life of Millicent Patrick.........a stunning, glamorous beauty who moved through 40's and 50's Hollywood as an actress, an animator, an artist-illustrator...........

                  .......in that last capacity, she forever became a part of film history........as the woman who created and designed the most iconic movie monster of the 50's.......The Creature From The Black Lagoon..........

                   Always the lover of fashion and glamour, Millicent never went anywhere unless dressed to the nines........the quintessential photo of her shows her working in the Universal Studios art department, sketching the Creature while dressed in pearls, an evening dress and high heels......

                    No wonder the studio sent her out in public on a "Beauty who lives with the Beasts" tour to coincide with the release of "The Creature From the Black Lagoon"..........which tragically incurred the jealous wrath of her boss, the studio's make-up chief Bud Westmore.

                   Westmore, a vile scumbucket, engineered the destruction of Millicent's Hollywood designing career, getting her fired and taking all the credit for her work, which also included creating the monsters of "It Came From Outer Space" and "This Island Earth"........

                    Author 'O Meara, possessed of a wicked wit, cleverly compares the ups and downs of Millicent Patrick's career with 'O Meara's own struggles to establish herself in the rocky, rough world of filmmaking..........where the discrimination and harassment of women has barely improved, even with the onset of the MeToo movement.......

                   Not only a great read.........but a long overdue account that re-discovers the lost legacy of an ill-used cinema artist..........make space for it on your night table and dive into this story ASAP.      4 stars (****)

BRONTE=SAURUS REX!..........THE BEST "JANE EYRE" EVER.........

Jane Eyre (1943)      BQ doesn't care that this is probably the least faithful version of "Jane Eyre" ever produced...........

                  You want faithful?  Read the book.

                   Want the best (in my humble opinion) film version?

                   Got it for you right here.

                   As it flows through its swift 96 minutes, it's a damn near perfect Grand Gothic Romantic Noir....... featuring stunningly composed, stylized black-and-white camerwork and production design........a gorgeous symphonic score by.....who else.....the young Bernard Herrmann........and the all-time best of all tortured, brooding, castle-dwelling aristocrats in Orson Welles' Rochester.

                    I don't know if I've ever seen a more achingly romantic screen pairing than Joan Fontaine as the painfully shy governess Jane Eyre, capturing the abrasive guarded heart of Welles.......an embittered soul keeping his worst kept secret locked up in a tower like a dark fairy tale.....(which, come to think of it, is exactly what the movie is......)_

                    It wouldn't hurt some of today's filmmakers to sit down and study the brilliance of the sheer brevity of this movie..........and what is accomplishes in the power of its imagery and performances.

                   And what performances....... such as.the ever-vile Henry Daniell as Jane's cruel orphan-school  tormentor throughout her childhood, a religiously righteous hypocrite so evil, he causes the death of Jane's only friend (played by.....yes, your eyes don't deceive you,  11 year old Elzabeth Taylor!)

                    Sadly, the stunning directorial work here by the quiet, unobtrusive jouneyman Robert Stevenson didn't earn him the top projects he deserved.........until after a decade of TV series work, he signed up with Walt Disney.......becoming Uncle Walt's primary go-to director for every major Disney film through the mid-1970's.....("Mary Poppins", "Bedknobs and Broomticks, ", "Old Yeller", "Darby O Gill", etc, etc.....)

                   I could go on and on about "Jane Eyre", but let's leave it at this.........as a prime example of Hollywood studio filmmaking at its 1940's peak of craft and creativity.......it has few equals. A gold-plated, genuine BQ 5 stars (*****), a FIND OF FINDS.

SHLOCK AND AWE!..........BQ SLICES "PIECES" INTO.......WELL, YOU KNOW......

Pieces (1982)    Oh, those fun, fun Jurassic-Era days......when BQ, toiling away in the fledgling video movie biz, poured over  R.O.I.'s.....(the Return On Investment for every videotape.......the good, the bad......and something like "Pieces", which deserved a category all its own........)

                As if I needed any more proof that at the dawn of homevideo, people would shove anything into their big new expensive bulky VCRs..........

                   Cause back in those ancient times, if you wanted to watch young naked girls chainsawed into hamburger, you'd either have to cough it up for HBO.........

                   ...........or rent it from me...........

                   And who could resist unrepentant, rock-bottom sludge like"Pieces"........incomprehensible from beginning to end, filled with embarrassed, embarrassing actors in the nadir of their careers.......and in certain, wonderful moments, certifiably insane........

                   What more could you ask for.........a shadowy, chainsaw-wielding figure sub-dividing screaming college girls like Thanksgiving turkeys.......

                   You want more?  This movie's got it..........completely unrelated to the bloodbath, there's a rollerskating babe who goes sailing into a huge mirror (whoopee!) and a Kung Fu guy who pops up out of nowhere to kick 'n chop at our undercover cop heroine (Lynda Day).....and then apologizes for his lunacy, blaming it on 'bad chop suey'.......(he must have shared the same meal with the film's writers and director)

                  As you'd expect, the movie fields a perfect cast.......a carload of European non-entities in the supporting roles......working along side the poor Americans scraping bottom.......the ludicrously vacant Lynda Day George and her vulpine hubby Christopher George as the investigating detective.

                  Chris, with a cigarillo constantly stuck in his mouth, escapes this mess with his dignity intact while the unlucky Lynda gets forced into a putting on a laughable, hysterical screaming fit........looking like one of those sorry, first-round auditonees for "American Idol"......

                  Also lurking about as the college Dean.......none other than one-time Hollywood slab 'o beefcake Edmond Purdom, who after his big starring role in "The Egyptian", spent the rest of his career toiling in Euro-junk..........

                Poor Eddie........due to popular demand, they paved over his handprints at Graumann's Chinese Theater and replaced them with Yul Brynner's.........(cause after all, Ed only had few movies under his belt.....)  After "Pieces" I think they should have let Purdom make a triumphant return to the theater and at least let 'im press his ass-cheeks into the concrete..........

                 Let us also not forget the massive Paul L. Smith, "Popeye"s Bluto and the sadistic guard from "Midnight Express"...….here playing the most obvious red herring imaginable.  Could he be the killer because he likes tossing cops around like rag dolls???? Uh...….no.

                  But nobody watches this movie for the actors..........you gobble that popcorn at the sight of Chainsaw Guy making literal mincemeat of nubile starlets........In this regard, "Pieces" does not disappoint........never has a film's title exhibited such truth-in-advertising.......

                 Wait! Sitting at the pinnacle of this prime shitcake is the Cherry On Top..........a final 10 seconds that sends it into the Stratosphere of Shlock Vallhalla...........senseless, idiotic, essentially a huge 'F*** You!' from the filmmakers to anyone foolish enough to watch their film..........

                 Ooops........I watched it.  (Like all politicians, I'll deny ever having written this post. I'm not even here right now.......)

                 Once again, I'll use two levels of ratings for this........for intelligent, rational, reasonable devotees of finely artistic cinema......Zero stars (0).......on the other hand, for FANBOYS AND FANGIRLS WHO CAN'T GET ENOUGH OF FINDING A ROARING DUMPSTER FIRE OF A MOVIE......a long lost 4 star (****) treasure for you. Enjoy.