Reviews

For no apparent reason, TV stations in Southern California run the crud films during the Christmas season. KTLA made it a tradition of running "S.C. Conquers..." sometime in the 1970s - or before - and Tom Patten (bit player of a thousand films, including the original "Miracle on 34th Street" and "Spies Like Us") once dragged Pia Zadora into the studio to discuss her role as a Martian tot in "S.C." I think he was better off introducing old "Popeye" cartoons on Saturday mornings in that goofy fake wood-panelled den, running that blinding projector into the camera...

But on to "Attack of the the Eye Creatures!" It was during the holiday season that a friend loaned me his MST3K copy of Buchanan's opus. What can I say? The mangled Air Force captain (resembling Walt Disney) who shows a film clip of "Chipwich"-like UFO buzzing a surveillance satellite which looks nothing like the UFO featured in the rest of the film...the already-overmentioned sleazy USAF sergeants watching "smoochers" on an oscilloscope [!]...the "silent language of balding men" scene...the flashbulb deaths of the monsters...the leading lady's hair...the old man who has an insatiable urge to shoot "smoochers" at all costs...Buchanan knew what he was doing, unlike Hal Warren. He wanted to make a drive-in film, and make one fast. He knew that most people would be making out, not eyeing the screen for such defects as monsters in black tights, etc. It was a great holiday film because it didn't harp on the cheer we are supposed to display around the Winter Solstace; it created this cheer through the bungled nature of the film and the endless wisecracks of a human and his robot-puppet friends.

What got me about the "rampaging boob" segment of the film is that it seems to be both a satire of the monster movies John Carradine made (especially "The Unearthly") and Dr. Wilhelm Reich's "Organon" research facility in upstate New York, or a combo of both. In both cases, we have men who are shunned by the scientific community for their interesting theories (Reich believed in "bions", subatomic particles that increased a person's health, esp. through sex, and created devices to collect and utilize these particles), build institutes far from cities ("Organon" is in the countryside), and are destroyed by their work (Reich died in prison for selling his devices; Bernardo is crushed by his monstrous mammary gland.)

Or maybe I saw "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" too many times...

Having seen way, WAY too many examples of the B movie (thanks, MST3K!) I have developed a crude scale of trash film directors based on the quality of their product. Ed Wood (before his 1960s monster porno flicks), Roger Corman, and William Castle are at the high end, Hal P. Warren (of "Manos" fame) is at the rock bottom. Somewhere in the middle of this Dante's inferno lies the Red Zone of Colman Francis. Like Orson Welles' "Othello" (without the genius) "Night Train..." appears to have been shot over a number of years, perhaps during the making of the other two Francis films. I get the feeling that the story line changed during shooting, that budgets ran low, that Francis should have abandoned the project, or turned it into a right-wing collage. No greater bit of retrograde John Birch Society-style patriotism (hardened cons conned by the CIA [?] into killing Castro, then gunned down by their own government) has ever hit the screen. Like "Monster A-Go-Go", the picture never works out, so it may really be a mirror of Colman's own disappointed self-image...

At least there are no lines like "Flag on the moon...how did it get there?" or "It will be dark soon, the Master will not approve, it will be dark soon."

...the problems with "Startup.com" are rather simple. No narration, no charts or graphs, and no discussion of the other founders besides Tom and Kaliel (who are only slightly interesting because the former is a gay single parent, the latter a sexually overactive multiethnic who I took for an Arab or Semite of some sort. Lack of real backgrounds for these men is another failing of the film.) A narrator could have told us what was really going on when their Asian co-founder walked away with $700,000; what experience the men had working with venture capitalists (none); how the business was really going to work. Was it all for the stock market? Was it a M. McLaren style swindle, a la his concept of the "Sex Pistols?" We don't know. The charts and graphs could have told a visual picture of how the company was really going, how ready their website was, how theirs compared with their competitors. And then the $700,000 man walks into the film, walks off, and literally telephones his role in as he gets his pile of smackers.

I think what the film-makers wanted to make a mythic picture in the style of Leni Riefenstahl's "Olympia." We see the screen subjects doing their respective things, yet their inner motivations are vague and the goal becomes small and abstract compared to their struggle. Tom and Kaliel are symbols of the vacuity of the proto-dot.commers; they think that just because they are young and ecstatic about the IT "revolution" (even mouthing the Mao-like slogans of the period) they can outrun their competetiors, who probably hail from mainstream "Fortune 500" companies. In retrospect, it was like watching the rise and fall of the Wehrmacht "blitzkrieg"; the early stumbles and breath-taking victories, then the first big failure, the enemy closing in, then the collapse. Thus the present govWorks site is West Germany in the `50's.

It's always nice to see Sikhs in IT jobs (they could have done mini-bios of the staff instead of leaving them a mass of Starbucks-guzzling background while T and K fight it out.)

What's with the orange flag symbol of govWorks.com? Are they supporters of the House of Orange? Are they for Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands? Or were they too weak to use the RED flag of revolution (used by communists, Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists since 1848)? All the world wonders.

K's womenfriends: what happened to the Peruvian he was dating? What about the next chick? And the last white one, seen throwing a frisbee at K's dog? Is there a party always going on in his pants?

Tom's daughter: Is she adopted? Did Tom once think he was straight, have a child with a black woman, and get custody? And what about his hippy-ish parents who ran that summer camp? What are their stories? Or Kaliel's mother?....

NUMBER 2: We want information, information information...

NUMBER 6: I AM A FREE MAN!!

NUMBER 2: HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

...at one point Mostel asks "where did we go right?" How could he have missed the whole camp phenomenon of the `60- `70's? Here he is "King of Broadway", yet no understanding of the tastes of the time. Bialystock and Bloom are 1955 men stuck in a 1968 world. Unless Chris Hewett couldn't pull off drama, and told Shawn to ham it up, or Shawn ad-libbed the whole thing, which would have ticked off Hewett. Mostel wasn't minding the store, in other words. Ken Mars' Nazi was a hoot (no pun), a broader character then his Inspector Klemp in "Young Frankenstein." Like all Brooks' movies, either you like it, or you don't. Mel is more subtile than the ZAZ team, or the Farreley brothers (who took notes from ZAZ), John Hughes, Ivan Reitman, or the other comic directors of today. Like Ken Russell, Brooks is totally in thral with the Nazis, and took cracks at them whenever he could. Like the "Monty Python" team after "Monty Python" there are hits and misses, and more misses as Brooks career went along, esp. in the Reagan years.

One element of this pleasant piece of film or video wallpaper that everybody (even the Russian!) has missed in the comments is that there is a definite anti-communist undercurrent to the film. How so? you may ask. It's simple [ACHTUNG!! SPOILERS AHEAD]. In the rolling pan shot early on where Nicolai gets Hanks' package, one sees workmen taking down a marble plaque of V.I. Lenin (the Soviet state's founder) of the building Nicky has run into. The wheel boot the Moscow militsiya (police) put on the important FedEx truck is red with a yellow hammer-and-sickle (emblem of the USSR) painted on it. The Russian workers Hanks lectures to through interpreter are sullen. What does all of this mean? Literally it means that the cash strapped Russian Fed. is too poor to get new wheel boots or paint them the Russian tricolor, and it is too slowly "de-Sovietising" the country (the film is set in 1995). Symbolicly it says that the idea of communism has fallen to the new ideology of FedEx, or more broadly, the world's multinational corporations. The workers, sullen in their aging warehouse are the product of a failed system that could not compete with capitalism. The translator is their spokesman, bring up the fact that Hanks' character once stole a child's bike to make a delivery. Like Thomas J. Watson of IBM, Hanks' ruthless character is the company, it's best architype. Now to the island. Here we see the castaway story as one of individual initiative to survive. Chuck only has his brains, his courage, etc. to live on the island and then get off. And Chuck, the manager, survives, while the plane crew (workers) perish. The island story is similar to the James Bond novels and films, where the individualist fights the collectivisers (in "Cast Away" the island ecology itself) in the name of his bourgeoise government. Then, when he gets back, he goes about doing his job, delivering those packages (substitutions, of course) as best he can. He is his job. The rest of the film is about his relationship with another managerial type, which is the "human element." What I have brought up is the ideological, economic aspects of Zemeckis' picture.

I'M NOT A MARXIST, I SWEAR IT!!!!!!!!!!

What the director has done with this picture is make the history of the DDR (Deutche Demokratishe Republik - The German Democratic Republic)with the protagonist a stand-in for the state. Certainly she is the little orphan Annie of Marxism-Leninism, and we see the DDR though her eyes (which may explain why the sets are so clean.) In a possible defence of her radicalism, may I say that the Bundesrepublik Deutchland(West Germany)was very much a conservative, yet apolitical state for the first 20 years of it's existence. The WW II generation was silent, the (initally) radical labor unions of 1946 were tamped down with help from the CIA and the AFL-CIO. German youth was ambivalent towards America and the West because of the occupation troops and the cheasy bar culture they brought with them. You can't live in the `50's forever, and when the 1960's wafted in, people like Rita were silently raging for change. Unfortunately for her, Mao's dictum of "political power grows from the barrel of a gun" was more appealing than other forms of protest or makig a counterculture. The rest is the plot.

The Stasi paper-shredding scene near the end actually happened; the BDR is still sorting the fragments. And yes, Trabants were that cheap.