'SHANKS'.....MARCEAU AND CINEMA'S SHLOCKMEISTER RAISE THE DEAD......

 Shanks (1974)    BQ visitors well know of my perpetual, eternal, never ending search for the strangest, most obscure, most bizarre movies I can unearth from the abyss of total obscurity.

             Pay dirt!  A gold strike!  The mother lode of strange.  Featuring the oddest creative pairing to ever work together on a movie. 

             Don't even ask me how such a project could exist......the feature film, leading role debut of internationally celebrated mime artist Marcel Marceau. And directed by......

              William Castle?   The carnival barker producer-director of Hollywood's cheesiest, silliest, most ludicrous gimmick-laded horror movies? 

               Seriously?  Marcel Marceau teaming up with  the impresario of "House On Haunted Hill", "13 Ghosts", "The Tingler", "Straight Jacket" and "Homicidal" ??

               With a host of powerhouse talent behind the camera?  Composer Alex North? Production designer Boris Levin?  

               Let the weirdness begin.......

               Correctly announcing itself as "A Grim Fairy Tale", the film hoped to blend Marceau's astonishing physical creativity as a mime with Castle's peculiar, patented brand of horror - in other words, horror so over-the-top it bordered on comedic. 

               Structured and staged like a pathos-filled silent film, it presents Marceau as simple soul Malcolm Shanks, a gentle deaf mute abused by his cruel, obnoxious in-laws, the Bartons. (played by Marceau's fellow mime artists Phillipe Clay and Tsilla Chelton). 

                Shanks entertains a small town's children with his own hand made marionettes and mime routines, until he's given a job as assistant to an elderly, reclusive scientist Dr. Walker (also Marceau). 

                 Teetering near death himself,  the ancient Walker's devised a way of re-animating the dead......via remote controlled electrode pins stuck in a corpse's arms, legs and neck. After discovering the old man's passed away, Shanks manages to engineer the deaths of his tormentors,  the hated Bartons. 

                 Then with the implanted electrodes, Shanks turns their corpses into twitching, strutting life sized  puppets, much to the horror and then fascination of Celia (Cindy Eilbacher) a young girl he's befriended. 

                Shanks throws a birthday banquet for Celia, comically served by the dead but ambulatory Bartons, until they're interrupted by an invading gang of Hell's Angels bikers. And all of the expected tragedy, death and re-animated corpses duly unfold. 

                Though I'd love nothing more than to report that all this macabre lunacy is as much fun to watch as it is to describe, that never happened.  Even a gifted, visual stylist film director would have found this project a daunting challenge to bring off.  Marceau wanted Roman Polanski, but settled for Castle, the producer of Polanski's huge hit 'Rosemary's Baby'.......

                But William Castle a born huckster who excelled in outrageous pranks to push his low budget cheeseball horrors, was never anything more than a barely competent journeyman as a director. He sure as hell was no Roman Polanski.  "Shanks", with its goulash of silent-movie sentimentality and perverse Halloween-ish sick jokes, was infinitely beyond this shlockmeister's  filmmaking abilities. 

                While Marceau, and his two fellow mimes put on deft displays of body dexterity, all the walking dead scenes are interminably slow, stillborn and staged with zero imagination. It makes for long, long dull experience.......literally dead on arrival. 

               Which is exactly how "Shanks" arrived in the few theaters it played in......to no audiences and derision from critics. Castle never directed a film again and Marceau went to only a few brief cameo appearances, including his funny little bit in Mel Brooks' "Silent Movie". 

               I'd only recommend this to the most dedicated of film buffs and seekers of the most off-the-wall, forgotten films in the dustiest of cinema archives.  For casual views, 1 star (*) at best.....

                

               

'CRIMES OF THE FUTURE'......CRONENBERG'S ORGAN GRINDERS......

Crimes Of The Future (2022)    Even if David Cronenberg didn't put his name in the credits as this film's writer-director, is there any hardcore movie buff alive who couldn't figure out who made it?

            Body horror taken to all new revolting extremes.

             Warped, mutated flesh on display everywhere.

             And deep squishy dives into ooey-gooey human organs.......autopsies on people still wide awake.

            Woooo hooooo.  Cronenberg at his most Cronenberg-iest.......finally making the movie he's been heading toward his entire career.

             As the title promises, it's the future. A future so overloaded with technology and synthetic substances, that humans have taken to speeding up their evolution.

             This....uh....evolution revolution, so to speak, involves people growing all new unheard of internal organs, or altering their guts so they can exist solely on a diet of toxic plastics......(so no need for the recycling bin anymore....you are your own bin.)

            Some part of the ruling class dislikes this turn of events, so there's sort of a police force dedicated to stopping all these organs-gone-wild shenannigans. They've even got an office where an official tattooist (Kristen Stewart) can brand numbers on renegade organs.

           Speaking of organs gone wild, there's performance artists Saul Tensor and his partner Caprice (Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux). Saul's afflicted with chronic growth of all new, undocumented organs which Caprice extracts from him in front of a packed house of paying customers. 

           They accomplish this hellish America's Got Talent routine on an ornate antique autopsy machine that looks like a leftover prop from a Guillermo De. Toro movie.

            Need I go on any further?   

             You're either salivating at the very thought of watching this film or you probably stopped reading this review after the first few sentences........

             For true-blue Cronenbergians, it's a gold mine, as personal a film as he's ever created, in that it deals with people who've raised the corruption and altering of human flesh into an art form, a statement of the human condition........much like Cronenberg himself. 

           For the faithful who've followed the director through projects like "Shivers",  "Scanners", "Rabid", "The Brood", "Crash", "The Fly", here's your 4 star (****) Holy Grail. 

            Everyone else.......don't come near this without a barf bag or a small wastepaper basket......

              

              

'THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU'.....SELLERS' FAREWELL, DAME HELEN AS YOU'VE NEVER SEEN HER.....

The Fiendish Plot Of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980)    I'll not dwell too much on the details of this terrible, unfunny and generally pathetic movie......... the last film appearance of cinema comedy icon Peter Sellers, who finally (and fatally) succumbed to a lifetime of heart disease not long after its release. 

            Sellers, who spends most the film heavily made up as the famous pulp villain Fu Manchu, already looks and sounds exhausted and ill. His legendary mercurial and toxic temperament led him to fire the director of this lame, desperate farce and direct it himself.

            He did himself no favors and the script did him no favors, a worn out collection of tired gags strung together to service a dumb storyline. It's like a bad Saturday Night Live 3 minute sketch stretched out over 100 very very long minutes.

           (And in our current day and age, it's hard to watch it without wincing, since the foul racist slur for Chinese people gets freely thrown in, making the film even more embarrassingly awful...)

            Fu's elixir that fuels his eternal life gets accidentally dropped by a clumsy minion....played, in a surprise meta gag, by Burt Kwouk, renowned for his role as Sellers kung fu butler Kato in the "Pink Panther" movies. 

           So the evil genius has no choice but to engineer thefts of precious diamonds in Washington and London, since he needs to grind up the gems as the secret ingredients for a new batch of elixir. 

           Hot on Fu's trail comes Scotland Yard inspector Avery (David Tomlinson of "Mary Poppins").The 'Yard also recruits Fu's longtime nemesis, Sir Dennis Nayland Smith (also Sellers) and FBI agent Joe Capone (Sid Caesar outfitted like he's playing a gangster in one of his old TV show skits.)

            This sad train wreck of movie came close to putting me to sleep until it sprung another member of the crime fighting team, young police constable Alice Rage (Helen Mirren, still decades away from her 'Damehood). Signed up as decoy to entrap Fu Manchu, Alice first auditions for the job, warbling "On The Good Ship Lollipop" while dressed in a thy skirt. 

          Really.

           And she plays a mean saxophone. No kidding. Not making this up. 

           Should you ever come across the film (not that we'd ever advise anyone to actively seek it out), stick around at least for Dame Helen's song and dance numbers. Sequences you're likely to never forget.

          And the rest of "Fu Manchu"?  Change the channel. Quick. It's a 1 star (*) ordeal to sit through. 

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAP-UP....SPECIAL 'LINDSEY GRAHAM CRACKERS' EDITION......

 Lindsey Graham promises 'riots in the streets' if Trump is prosecuted......in related, breaking news from Hollywood, Warner Brothers announced they've offered Graham play one of the sand worms in the "Dune" sequel. "It's ready made for him, " producers explained, "given that he's both mindless and spineless all at the same time."

Trump lawyers claim classified documents found at Mar-A-Lago are like 'library books'.......they also promised the court that Trump would not go through with his original plan for the papers.....to have them laminated and used for placemats at Mar-A-Lago dinner events.......

Trump's thinking of pardoning the January 6th insurrection rioters if he's re-elected.......and also promised supporters he'd invite Vladimir Putin and the Russian army to invade and occupy California, put Rudy Giuliani and the Pillow Guy in charge of voting machine maintenance and have raped, pregnant pre-teen girls caged until they deliver their babies. 

GOP candidates in upcoming mid-term elections suddenly downplaying or erasing their position on abortion......."Abortion?  What is that....something to do with babies, right?  Never heard of it, never said a word about it....."

Jared Kushner, promoting his book, says Trump holding on to secret documents sounds like a "paperwork issue" and that he himself had little to do with such things........meanwhile, the publisher of Kushner's book pulled the first printing out of bookstores, since they mistakenly used Kushner's original dedication page from his first draft..."For the cash.....forever and always...."

MAGA Trumpanzees send out death threats to the National Archives, Federal judges, election workers and scream about defunding the FBI.....and receive a congratulatory video from the remaining, surviving leaders of ISIS...("MAGA fighters, we LOVE you American guys! You're our kind of people.....keep up the good work!"

'THE THIEF WHO CAME TO DINNER'.....A PRETTY BOY PLAYS 'TO CATCH A THIEF'.....AND CHESS.

 The Thief Who Came To Dinner (1973)    Pundits like to refer to the 1970's as the "Me" decade.....supposedly (we think) because we'd lost all interest in reforming the ills of the world ( that's so 60's) and preferred to concentrate on ourselves......and our own personal self -gratification. 

             Ah. Well that would explains movies like this......where morality takes a hike and it's all about enjoying  ill-gotten money and sex.......and looking really pretty while you're scoopin' up the cash and boffin' your brains out. 

             Speaking of pretty, that brings me to Ryan O' Neal, then in the prime of his stardom, youth and, let's face it, made-for-Hollywood handsomeness. 

             At least twice in this movie he's actually referred to as 'pretty', the very equal to his co-star Jacqueline Bisset, also at the height of her stardom, youth and gorgeousness. 

              Prior to prettyhood, O' Neal plays Webster, a mundane, divorced computer programmer (those huge gunky ones with the spinning tape reels and spit-out punch cards). Tired of his boring life and boring self (the reason his wife dumped him), Webster ditches his job and transforms himself into a dashing, witty and yes....pretty jewel thief.  And he's pretty good at it.

              Plundering the safe of a shady bigwig, Webster comes across incriminating paperwork and blackmails the bigwig into introducing him into high society.......so he get to hobnob with a whole slew of uppercrusts whose mansions he can break into and rob.

               Along his merry way, (leaving chess pieces and their  moves at his crime scenes) he also acquires Bisset, playing a bankrupt socialite and functioning, as Bisset always did, as the eye candy "girl" of the film. 

               But hot on Webster's trail is the dogged relentless insurance company investigator Dave Reilly (a rare un-showy role for the veteran scene-stealing character actor Warren Oates.)  Dave's sure he's hunting the right guy and Webster, ever the cool cat, proceeds to play cat-and-mouse with the exasperated gumshoe, daring Dave to catch him in the act.  

              In fact, Webster's now such a charismatic, witty rogue, that his ex-wife (Jill Clayburgh, soon to enjoy her own brief stardom)  stops in for a visit, intrigued enough to try making a move on him. 

               A movie like this cried out for a sense of high style and a sharper sense of humor (like Hitchcock's "To Catch A Thief")......but none of that is ever provided by director Bud Yorkin, who mostly labored on TV sitcoms.  The gloss, wit and suspense required here are simply way out of Yorkin's skill set. 

              So ultimately "The Thief Who Came To Dinner" becomes nothing more than an expensive-looking made-for-TV movie populated with then current movie stars. 

              I did like the final scene though, which featured the expected final confrontation between smooth criminal Webster and Dave, as single-minded as 'Les Miserables' Inspector Javert.  Explains Webster, "Jail does not suit my lifestyle".

             Thereby making the pretty, larcenous Webster a true hero of the Me decade. 2  & 1/2 stars. (**!/2).

'DUNE'......WORMS OF ENDEARMENT.....

 Dune (2021)   Once again, I pride myself on being the very last person on planet Earth to see a huge, talked about movie and becoming the very last person on planet Earth to post a review of it.....

            The advantage of waiting this long.......wasting little or no time scribbling out plot details, since you've probably already absorbed 5000 reviews and/or pieces of internet news about  'Dune'.

             I'm aware this movie owes its existence to the fact that everybody agreed, including David Lynch, that Lynch's 1984 version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic sucked to high heaven.........for reasons too countless and boring to bother describing here. 

             Writer-director Denis Villaneuve solved one major problem right away......not trying to cram all of the Herbert book into one movie and only filming the first two thirds of it. 

             So for Act III of this story, we all have to wait for Dune 2......whoopa-dee-doo.

             And Villaneuve doesn't worry too much about setting up 'Dune's storyline and its cast of characters. First above storytelling, he's all about the world-building, which this film does with a vengeance. 

            You want world building?  Endless, lengthy CGI infused landscapes of the desert planet Arrakis?  And with images pumped up by Hans Zimmer's expansive Middle-East wailing 'n bagpiping score? You got it. 

             Oh right, there is stuff going on here. Two big galactic royal clans vying for control of the planet, which features city-sized worms who produce some sparkly stuff called 'spice',  which everyone in the Dune' universe uses as an energy source or a drug, or for all we know, cooking oil.  

             Good guys - the Atreides bunch, a handsome, stalwart group. Yay.  Bad guys - Harkonnens, big fat and bald evil bastards. Booooooooo..........

              Bad guys, who used to manage the planet before the good guys moved in, plan a comeback. This doesn't bode well for the good guys except their young heir Paul (Timothee Chalamet) and his mysterious mom (Rebecca Ferguson). Mom's part of a weird quasi-religious female cult who can sort of Jedi mind trick people by shouting at them extra loud. 

               Paul and mom, cast out into the desert during all the chaos, have to dodge those worms, who pop up like vacuum cleaner nozzles the size of aircraft carriers. Lucky they fall into the hands of the planet's hardy indigenous natives, the Fremen.....even luckier for Paul, that gang  also includes Chani (Zendaya), the fierce warrior babe he's been psychically dreaming about. 

             And that's as far as the film's 155 minutes takes you.......we'll all just have to wait a couple years to watch Paul and Chani galvanize the Fremen and go out and kick some fat, bald Harkonnen asses.  Woopadee-doo. 

             While I deeply admire Denis Villaneuve's dedication and artistry to meticulously evoke the Dune universe, the problem is we've seen all this before in various forms.  That's because other filmmakers like George Lucas, James Cameron  and a host of lesser talents used chunks of the "Dune" books as inspiration for their own assorted sci-fi.fantasy visions.  

              By the time David Lynch rolled out his blighted, star-crossed film version of 'Dune', it just resembled stale leftovers of tropes, characters and good-vs-evil struggles we'd already watched in the first three 'Star Wars' episodes. (and their many imitators)

             But for all sci-fi-ers, the stunning visuals, matched by the equally powerful Zimmer score make  'Dune'  essential viewing. (We've hardly mentioned the cast, fine actors all......but you know from the start that this is no movie to allow actors to impress, except maybe for Jason Momoa, who enjoys a bit of swashbuckling swagger in his battle scenes.)

              I was leaning toward a 2 & 1/2 star rating, but any movie featuring a worm that looks like it could inhale Manhattan and still have room to suck in Staten Island for dessert is an automatic 3 stars (***).  May the worms be with you.

              

 

            

             

            

'THE GRASSHOPPER'......WHEN COMEDY GUYS ATTEMPTED DRAMA.....

 The Grasshopper (1970)     While it never hangs together as a coherent effort, movies like this exemplify why cinema buffs still celebrate the 1970's as a golden era for groundbreaking, memorable films......

             Because when you scroll through the 70's films, it looks like anybody would take shot at making any film.....not matter how unlikely, odd, ridiculous, or just plain nuts.......

             So here's a film that aspired to be an Americanized version of  'new cinema' European movies that served up unflinching, cold-eyed views of less than sympathetic characters.....and unafraid to hand out abrupt, downbeat endings for them. 

             In true 1970's upside-down-ness, "The Grasshopper" came from a three writer-directors who spent a lifetime crafting comedies.......Jerry Paris (the film's director) and its writers Gary Marshall (yes, that Gary Marshall) and Jerry Belson. 

               In this story of a restless young girl who quests for a happily-ever-after in all the wrong places  and with all the wrong men, Paris, Marshall and Belson couldn't resist peppering their movie with one line gags and funny bits they couldn't fit into their various other sitcoms and movies. 

              And yet they still want us to pay serious attention to the never ending plights of  Christine Adams (Jacqueline Bisset) who leaves her Canadian small town to hopefully marry her boyhood boytoy, a Los Angeles bank teller who's struggling to climb up the corporate ladder. 

              Our enterprising comedy triumvirate no doubt scored a casting coup in securing Bisset, enjoying her reign as Hollywood's "It" Girl after starring as Steve McQueen's girlfriend in the 1968 blockbuster "Bullitt".

               Oh yes, Bisset was drop dead gorgeous and your eyes went nowhere else whenever she appeared on film. 

                And that's basically all she brought to the party.......as an actress, she had little or no range.....other than to stand there and be drop dead gorgeous.  Which nobody minded all that much.

                Marshall and Belson's script asks us to believe that Christine possesses an anarchic penchant for sudden goofy pranks, but there's nothing in Bisset's unexceptional, monotone delivery that make these bursts of mischief plausible.  (This role desperately required an actress with some devilment in her eyes and soul....and some real acting chops as well....Tuesday Weld would've been perfect)

                Since the bank teller/boytoy dream falls apart, Christine lands in Las Vegas and a job as a showgirl. And in Vegas she navigates her way through a host of crude, cruel men, dripping with insincerity as they salivate over her at the same time.  

                Christine's brief doomed love affair and marriage with gentle hearted ex NFL star Tommy Marcott (Jim Brown) provides the heart of the story..  And here's where film stays a little ahead of its time......in its telling depiction of the couple's suffering through bigotry and objectification. In Vegas, a town fueled by money and flesh, Christine and Tommy find themselves either sneered at by racists or pawed over and prized like pieces of meat, Things don't go well.......

                From there, the plot bounces through Christine's fling as a potential trophy wife for an aging CEO (a wasted Joseph Cotton) and a rock-bottom turn as a hooker for her failed rock musician boyfriend turned pimp.

              Paris, Marshall and Belson obviously still wanted some big yoks and what they'd consider a striking, up-to-the-minute ironic, not to mention cinematic fade-out They serve up a final, pointless, anarchic act of defiance for Christine......her vivid declaration of "who cares".......and a perfect example of how many 1970's movies frequently closed out this way.....after an arresting, pretentious, unresolved climax, came the inevitable freeze frame. 

               The comedy boys went back to what they do best....Bisset went to more roles displaying her stunning beauty.  And 20 years later in 1990, Gary Marshall in the midst of a long successful directing career, made "Pretty Woman", in which he found Julia Roberts, the kind of live wire, talented actress who could energize a comedy-drama and make both those genres work simultaneously.

              To put it bluntly, the kind of actress that "The Grasshopper" so desperately needed but didn't get, making it at best, a moderately interesting piece of 70's nostalgia. 2 stars (**)