Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
Up the Academy
(1980)
After the unprecedented success of National Lampoon’s Animal House it seemed only natural that the nation’s other most influential comedy magazine of the period would get into the movie game as well. Unfortunately for the usual gang of idiots at Mad, the result wasn’t nearly as financially rewarding.
In fact, the Mad men were so disappointed with the way Up the Academy turned out, they eventually took the Mad Magazine Presents out of the title and disavowed any association with the film—instantly turning Alfred E. Neuman’s cameo into a strange non sequitur.
In retrospect, though, you do have to wonder how they ever thought hiring the iconoclastic filmmaker Robert Downey could have ever resulted in a successful mainstream comedy. Best known (aside from siring the future star of Iron Man) for his cult masterpiece, Putney Swope, Downey was an auteur whose gifts pretty obviously didn’t extend to the creation of a sophomoric teen comedy (or at least one that could actually be appreciated by its intended audience).
Sloppy, deliberately offensive (the film’s casual jokes about race and teen pregnancy seem especially shocking today) and almost angrily broad, the film plays less like an actual movie than a feature length version of one of Swope’s infamous commercial satires. But then at the same time it also feels strangely restrained for a film supposedly inspired by the anarchic spirit of Mad (a spirit much better exemplified onscreen that same year in Airplane!).
For this reason Up the Academy is one of those films I personally find interesting even though it clearly fails on all of the levels by which it should be judged. An experiment gone hopelessly awry, it’s one of those strange projects that should be viewed if only because it somehow manages to exist even though it probably shouldn’t.
For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.
Its plot perfectly summed up by the title, this second entry in the Ilsa canon is just as vile, sordid, and misogynistic as the first, adding racism into the mix. Kidnapped females are tortured in every conceivable fashion. Needless to say it’s a must watch for every serious B-Movie fan.
“But what the holy heck did I do to get sent to Hell, Duke? I lived a mostly good life. I went to church. I tolerated my mother. Sure I was tangentially connected to a dozen or so “accidental” deaths, but no charges were ever made.”
“Everyone’s innocent down here, pardner.”
“But I don’t want to go to Hell! There must be something I can do to stay away from here if that ambulance makes it to the hospital in time.”
“There is, Drake. You’d have to give up being a stuntman.”
I have no way of knowing if I was the only 15 year-old who spent a weekend afternoon sitting alone in an empty theater watching Blake Edwards' remake of the Vincente Minnelli's 1964 Goodbye Charlie, but I'm pretty sure that if I was, I was probably the only one who knew who Edwards or Minnelli even were. That said, the real reason I decided to bike on over to the Londonderry Mall theater and plunk down my $6 had everything to do with the blond on the poster. I had seen Sea of Love and The Adventures of Buckeroo Banzai and was all over anything with Ellen Barkin in it.
Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
Sorority House Massacre
(1986)
For eagle-eyed horror fans the cleverest moment in Sorority House Massacre comes when two of its characters are watching television. Showing on the set is a scene from an earlier Roger Corman produced classic, Slumber Party Massacre, in which a character is—you guessed it—watching a horror movie on television. It’s the cinematic equivalent of one those drawings of a cartoon character holding a drawing of them holding a drawing on into infinity.
Beyond this one moment, though, there’s not a lot to say about the film. While it does feature a memorably creepy dream sequence, the plot itself is lifted straight from the first two Halloweens, featuring as it does a killer who escapes from the loony bin in order to return to the house where he killed all but the youngest member of his family, who’s now an attractive brunette college student plagued by nightmares featuring him and the massacre she doesn’t remember surviving.
To writer/director Carol Frank’s credit, she avoids the mistake of making her characters deliberately hateful, and merely settles for bland and uninteresting. To her discredit, she chose not to fire her apparently blind costume designer and allowed them to dress her cast in the most hideous clothes the 80s ever foisted upon the planet. That is if a movie this low budget even had a costume designer. If it didn’t, then her biggest crime was casting actors who couldn’t supply decent clothes out of their own closets.
Ultimately, Sorority House Massacre is an especially unexceptional movie and the only reason I’m reviewing it now is because I took the time to watch it before experiencing Sorority House Massacre II, which is an exceptional movie, but not for the reasons you might think.
For some the capsule review comes easy, but for me it’s an exercise in pure frustration. As a means of self-discipline I have decided to confront that which tortures me through this continuing feature—B-Movie Bullsh*t in 50 Words or Less.
Honey, O’Hara, Teri and Sam are the H.O.T.S., four girls with axes to grind against their college’s snootiest sorority. By recruiting other busty “rejects” they connive to get their revenge. This mostly unfunny comedy ends with a strip football game you will likely remember for the rest of your life.
At his business school graduation party, Alan Finston learns he’s inherited a 51% interest in his late Aunt Ida’s beachside swimwear store. He leaves his spoiled fiancé, Jane, behind to prepare the store for sale, only to discover that his ne’er-do-well brother, Todd, is the owner of the other 49%. Todd wants to keep the store, but can’t stop Alan from selling it to the leader of a local religious cult. When Alan learns that the cult leader plans to close the store and open a recruitment center in its place, he has a change of heart and asks to buy it back, pissing off a visiting Jane in the process. The cult leader agrees, but demands an additional $6,000 in cash within two weeks. Determined to raise the money, Alan, Todd and the shop’s three female staff members hand-sew 50 army-inspired bikinis designed by Ronnie, the beautiful brunette who’s had a crush on Alan since they first met. With just a few hours to go before the money has to be paid, they do everything they can to sell their new bikinis, while the angrily scorned Jane and her father try their best to make sure they don’t succeed.
The Malibu Bikini Shop is as purely a product of the 1980s as Culture Club, Ray-Bans, and Dynasty. Whereas the fun, lightweight bikini movies of the 1960s (most famously the ones starring Frankie & Annette) were all frivolous fantasy pictures featuring the complications created by glamorous Italian heiresses (Muscle Beach Party), rich English pop stars (Bikini Beach), and mermaids (Beach Blanket Bingo), this 80s incarnation of the genre eschews whimsy in favor of depicting the battle between uptight capitalism and unapologetic hedonism. What makes the film especially evocative of its decade is that the battle ends in a tie, with both sides coming to a better understanding of the other and embracing the idea that one shouldn’t be afraid to party, so long as you’re making money at the same time.
Written and directed by David Wechter (who remains best known as the co-writer/co-director of the cult 1980 Disney film Midnight Madness), TMBS is strongly reminiscent of Paul Brickman’s much, much, much better Risky Business, which also featured an ambitious young wannabe-yuppie as its supposedly sympathetic protagonist. The clear difference is that Brickman had Tom Cruise, who actually did manage to imbue some likeability into the role of Joel Goodsen, while Wechter cast Michael David Wright, whose acting career justifiably ended almost as soon as it began and who went on to make a living as a network executive. It’s all the difference in the world.
Oh, and Paul Brickman had vision and talent.
It doesn’t help that TMBS ups the ante by giving us an 80s archetype even more tiresome than the ambitious young Republican—the slobberific party animal. Unlike the part of Alan, the role of his brother Todd is actually played by a very talented actor—Canada’s own Bruce Greenwood—but he’s miscast here and incapable of convincing us that we wouldn’t want to beat Todd to death with a tire iron within minutes of meeting him.
The result is cliché battling cliché, leaving the viewer to impatiently wait for the plot to stop and allow for the film’s true raison d’etre to show itself.
There’s a certain promise inherent in any 80s movie with the word “bikini” in its title, that its 60s predecessors were not also allowed to make—that at some point, hopefully more than once, twice, or thrice, those bikinis would come off and we would get to see what was barely being hidden from us. TMBS attempts to make good on this promise, but its prurience lacks conviction.
The film’s most famous nude scene serves as proof of the film’s ambivalence about the only reason anyone has ever watched it. In it, a stacked blond customer (Bobbi Pavis, credited as “Stunning Girl”) enters one of the store’s changing rooms, unaware that Todd has equipped them with two-way mirrors in order to commit a crime that could now result in jail time, but in 1986 was considered hilarious. He marvels at the sight of her removing her top, while conservative, no-fun-asshole Alan looks away. But when Todd leaves, Alan allows his mask of decorum to fall away and is punished by the sight of an overweight woman trying to get into a bikini that clearly doesn’t fit her.
This sudden juxtaposition of the attractive and repellent is meant to be funny (although you can tell the movie was made in the 80s because the overweight woman is shown attempting to put on the bikini over her very large underwear—today that same scene would be shot with her completely naked), but there’s a tangible hostility inherent in the moment that makes it clear Wechter wants to punish us for enjoying the sight of Pavis’ copious breasts in the same way Alan is punished for giving into his own urge to peek.
Interestingly, though, the one person who gets away without harm in this moment is the man who instigated it. Although Alan is obviously the film’s protagonist and has the largest character arc, Todd is clearly meant to serve as the film’s moral center, which is odd since he’s very clearly a selfish, lazy manchild who’s only interested in his own immediate happiness.
As different as they appear, both Alan and Todd have embraced the Reagen-era belief in the virtue of self-interest. Alan insists on using his 1% controlling interest in the store to override Todd’s desire to keep it, while Todd ignores anyone who might impede his ability to have a good time. While Alan succeeds in removing the stick from his butt by the end of the picture, Todd—who the film has portrayed as right more often than wrong—remains unchanged. When Alan discovers that the surgical thread they used to sew the bikinis is designed to dissolve in water he runs to tell Todd, who responds by saying he knew that all along and watches enthusiastically as a group of attractive women dressed in the swimsuits are quickly robbed of their dignity.
The moral then seems to be that selfish, extremely questionable behaviour is entirely acceptable if it’s in service of a good time. Since watching TMBS isn’t a good time, though, it’s hard to justify its similar impropriety.
That said, there is at least two good things about the film. Former Miss Texas, Barbara Horan (now Amanda Horan Kennedy, owner of a successful bra company) is very appealing as Ronnie, the gorgeous brunette who likes Alan for reasons that are explained, but still don’t seem the slightest bit plausible. Not necessarily a strong actress, she still manages to leave a good impression and earns far more sympathy than your typical fantasy dream girl character.
But if I had to pick TMBS’sone redeeming moment, it would have to be the extremely gratuitous, nonsensical dance sequence that occurs when Ronnie unveils her new swimsuit designs for the first time. In terms of style and content it bears no relation to any other sequence from the movie, which is probably why it was easily my favourite part of the whole movie.
To no one’s surprise, The Malibu Bikini Shop is a bad movie, but the problem isn’t inherent in its premise or genre, but rather one of execution and confused philosophy. The truth is that the film is undone by David Wechter’s clear ambition to make a film that was more than an excuse to bare some T & A. Had he stayed true to just that noble ambition the film probably would have still sucked, if only because he isn’t a talented filmmaker, but it at least would have spared us several moments of agony in the process.
I was 12. Plus I was a major anti-Reagan mini-liberal who despaired the way Russians were always portrayed as villains throughout 80s cinema, and I felt honour bound to support a film that set out to break that mold. Did I mention I was 12? Blame my Uncle Doug--he paid for the tickets.
Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:
Rejected By Rod(?)
The Convent
(2000)
The Convent is one of those horror movies that was made with such obvious affection by its filmmakers I’m able to forgive the fact that it literally plunges a knife into the heart of its least hateful character 30 minutes into its running time and then makes us wait another 20 before Adrienne Barbeau shows up to kick some serious demon nun ass.
The movie begins memorably with a hot young brunette in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform walking into a church and batting away at the assembled sisters (and father) with a Louisville slugger before setting them ablaze and blasting them with a shotgun, all to the sweet sound of Lesley Gore’s classic “You Don’t Know Me”.
It then cuts to 40 years later, where the location of this massacre is the destination of choice for a trio of truly obnoxious fraternity assholes, their virgin pledge, two girlfriends and the super cute, sarcastic goth girl who’s just like the woman I imagined I’d end up marrying back when I was 14 (which obviously didn’t happen).
The trouble starts when super cute goth girl is sacrificed by a quartet of pathetic Satanists, which causes the demons that necessitated the previous massacre to rise up from wherever they went the last time this all went down. In the end, the only person who can stop the demons from raising the antichrist is the hot 50-something version of the hot schoolgirl who took care of the problem the first time.
Needless to say, Adrienne Barbeau is truly awesome as the foul-mouthed, liquored up, tight jeans wearing demon slayer and is—along with the film’s sly sense of humor—the main reason to ignore the its obvious deficits and give it a chance.
Clearly inspired by Night of the Demons and Evil Dead II, The Convent is better than the former and nowhere close to the latter, which is exactly how it should be in a fair and just world such as our own.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 6:00AM 
