One of the benefits of owning a toddler is their usefulness as guinea pigs in experiments. It is widely known that a toddler has no cinematic taste (controlled experiments prove this) so they are about as blank a slate as you are likely to get. It is interesting to observe their little minds being shaped and warped by whatever you put in front of them.

In this case, it was Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons—about 100 hours from each studio. I painstakingly gathered data and registered their effects on the little guy. I wanted to find out which cartoons were funnier, which ones were scarier or more disturbing.

We watched only the shorts, and to even things out I disqualified all of Disney's Silly Symphonies—that vast treasure trove of fables and lullabies that tended to induce in the child a desire to snuggle. We kept the focus on Mouse vs. Bunny, brash verbal sass vs. something more silent and Chaplinesque, Warner's witty limericks vs. Disney's humorous ballads, Duck vs. Duck. Equipped with only a clipboard, safety goggles, and a sippy-cup, I got to work.

At first blush, one would think that the hyper-violence in Warner Bros. would be more troubling, and indeed, my son did take to Disney slightly sooner. After all, in a Warner Bros. short, it is not uncommon to see a duck getting his bill blown off with a shotgun at point-blank range.

But over time I found that Disney's universe disturbed them much more. This has to do with their respective environments: the universal laws at play; the powers that be.

In Warner Bros., the environment is backdrop, an inanimate background waiting to be controlled and manipulated at the character's whim. A Warner Bros. protagonist (often protagonist and antagonist simultaneously) might paint a tunnel road onto the side of a rock, opening up a new dimension to facilitate his escape. It is no problem for Tweety to be in two places at once. Dynamite rigged to blow up Bugs Bunny waits until precisely the right moment to explode in Yosemite Sam's face. Even the hapless Coyote with his ever-backfiring A.C.M.E. contraptions doesn't start falling until he realizes that he is no longer on firm ground. If you are Bugs Bunny, you don't fall at all because it's the law of gravity, and you never studied law.

But in the world of Disney the background has a will of its own. Things swell and breathe with animated life. Objects almost consciously thwart the characters' intentions. No matter how many times Mickey Mouse empties a pale of water, the water doesn't want to be thrown out and returns to the bucket. After his umpteenth try, the water flies around and splashes Mickey in the face. Or witness Donald Duck and a deck-chair, or Goofy with damn near anything. Disney's universe is often dark, malevolent, and out to get you.

One could argue that the famous cartoon "Duck Amuck" has a Disney-like maleovelence, but that feeling ends once we discover that it is Bugs who is thwarting Daffy, quite literally manipulating the tortured duck's backdrop. In this sense then, all Disney cartoons are Ducks Amuck, except that we never discover the source of the characters' suffering, or learn about the demiurge that is driving everything.

Another contrast in qualities is best described in this quote from film historian William K. Everson, via Leonard Maltin's book The Disney Films:

"Disney used height—skyscrapers, mountains, etc.—far more than other cartoon-makers, and with more concern for perspective and the convincing illusion of dizzy depths. Height gags in Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons were always just that—rapid gags that paid off quickly in a laugh, and without buildup. Disney, on the other hand, used height much as Harold Lloyd did, to counterpoint comedy with a genuine thrill."

I think this holds more widely as a general rule, with Disney tending to build extended comic sequences and Warner Bros. performing a breakneck succession of stop-gags. Here some exceptions might include "What's Opera, Doc?" or the series of "How to..." shorts demonstrating various sports, starring "The Goof."

When it comes to their character rosters, Warner Bros. beats Disney hands down, with more funny stars than you have fingers to count. Who wasn't touched by that poster commemorating the passing of the great Mel Blanc, with all those familiar characters bowing their heads in respect behind a silent microphone? In comparison, few characters in Disney are really funny. You can count them on one hand and still have left over fingers, but I would argue that no single character from either studio is funnier than Donald Duck. To quote Noel Coward, "Thank heaven for Donald Duck! ...for all his dreadful energy and his blind frustrated rages."

The characters' social spheres are vastly different, too. Disney was squarely planted in the mid-American psyche, deeper and more in tune with the stuff of dreams and nightmares. His characters started as vulgar barnyard creatures. Next there was a rough period during the Great Depression (exactly why was Mickey on that chain gang in "The Chain Gang" anyway?). Then they spent most of the 40's as working proles before finally reaching middle class suburbia in the 50's. Warner Bros. speaks more to the perennial outsider, always making wisecracks. Their trajectory is that of a comic slumming it on the vaudeville circuit and then suddenly being catapulted to instant Hollywood superstardom.

The moods at each workplace must have been far different as well. I think of the Disney Studios as some sort of top secret Manhattan Project, with the animators testing their multi-plane camera in "The Old Mill," gearing up for the big one: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Uncle Walt was a tough, hands-on boss who would give you whatever he thought you needed. He would send you to art school. Just don't start any unions. We know that Walt Disney smoked, drank, and fornicated, but when it came to the Disney family image he was something of a prude. It may or may not be true, but one story goes that a couple of animators thought it would be funny one night to screen a pornographic Mickey and Minnie cartoon they had drawn at a party. When Walt walked in he wasn't amused, and promptly fired them both.

It is hard to imagine an equivalent story at Warner Bros. Those guys were hardcore, exploding-cigar-in-the-face funny. There's a great photograph of a bunch of the Boys from Termite Terrace in a long line, each man bending down to give the man in front of him the "hot foot." When is the last time you saw someone get the "hot foot"? And is there anything in Disney to match Warner's propensity to do drag? Most of the Disney characters had girlfriends. The closest they come to cross-dressing is a few amazingly life-like girl puppets and maybe that time that Donald and Goofy impersonated a blonde-wigged moose floozy in "The Moose Hunters."

In the realm of music, the contest is almost too close to call. The Disney orchestra could play fast and stop on a dime, whereas Carl Stalling's gang could play even faster, stop on a dime and probably give you back the dime.

The biggest difference between the two studios' approaches is the difference between Wit and Humor, with the enjoyment of Wit relating to a general sadism in the viewer, just as the enjoyment of Humor relates to a general masochism.

We take pleasure in watching Bugs Bunny outwitting his opponents and giving them hell, and in those rare instances when Bugs is an outmaneuvered victim it doesn't sit well. Elmer Fudd doesn't deserve all he gets, no hard feelings, but we want to see him get it anyway. "What a maroon!" The Coyote is a rare Warner Bros. example of Humor. We don't identify with the Road Runner, and like the little boys watching the big TV, we'd like to see the Coyote catch him just once. Humor, on the other hand, rules at Disney. Our sympathies are with Donald's impeded will and explosive tantrums - and not that obstinate deck-chair. We look on Goofy's clumsy misteps with an aghast recognition. The pleasure is mixed with pain. The Wit in Disney is mostly confined to wry narration.

What can we conclude from this experiment in science? I am still interpreting the raw data. The little tyke seems to love both Warner Bros. and Disney shorts; like father, like son. I will attribute his willingness to sneak up and pop a cap in his Pop's ass with his toy pistol to the Warner Bros. influence. When I see the wheels in his imagination make that extra turn I think Disney, and I definitely blame Warner Bros. for that insubordinate gleam he gets while munching an invisible carrot, asking "What's up, Doc?"

As far as life lessons go—things that are downloaded into his operating system—I will let the reader decide which studio's output will stand him in better stead. He still watches the cartoons, but he has also moved on to things that would have frightened me out of my wits at thrice his age. Any day now I expect to see Freddy vs. Jason on his little shelf of DVDs. The kid is already addicted to Deadwood, and although I can't make out every word he says, I'd swear that he's cursing like Al Swearengen. It is easy to overestimate or misjudge his sophistication on these matters. Sometimes it is three steps forward and two steps back.

Yesterday, I heard a loud clank coming from the other room. The source of the noise was my toddler banging his head against the television screen. He was trying to get inside the cartoon.

When I ran in to discover the source of his tears, he had already backed up ten feet and was getting ready to run at the TV again.

"You can't go inside the television, son. It's just pictures," I said.

He rubbed the whelp on his head and confusedly looked around the TV set, then asked, "Where's the door?"

That's all, folks.

By Matt Zoller Seitz
Bryan Singer's "Superman Returns, which opened yesterday, is getting wildly mixed reviews (including pans from Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis). Three House contributors wrote about the movie for their respective publications this week; excerpts and links follow.

I adored the movie—despite a first act slog that leaves a lot to forgive—because of its mythic spectacle. The movie is visionary bubblegum, unabashedly in love with its source material.

"In scene after scene," I wrote in NYPress, "Superman Returns implicitly asks what it might feel like to be Superman and to live in a world that has the Man of Steel in it...Where most comic book movies are paradoxically inclined to make their points verbally—bulldozing heaps of raw data in our faces, a la the Matrix movies, Batman Begins and Singer's own X-Men films—Superman Returns is conceived as a visionary spectacle, a series of mythic tableaus that brazenly liken Superman to Mercury, Jesus, Atlas and Prometheus. It's a sensory—at times sensuous—experience, modeled not just on great comic book art, but on the crème-de-la-crème of machine-age spectacles: 2001:A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

In Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns is only slightly less enthused. "Nitpicks aside, Superman Returns carries you along with the force of a great many iconic, often poetic images, all backed up by Singer's bold commitment to the forthright emotions of the piece... Despite all the earth-shaking action sequences, this is a surprisingly tender and gentle film—one that feels like it came from somewhere very personal and deeply felt. Lois might have said the world doesn't need Superman, but it sure feels good to have him back."

Meanwhile, over in Slant Magazine, Keith Uhlich is not impressed. His two-star review calls the movie "...a pleasant enough piece of hackwork, anonymous in all the right ways so that it neither offends nor thrills...Aside from a reverse-motion shot of Superman inhaling the inverted and impossible breath of a Busby Berkeley extra while lifting a sunken ship out of the ocean, the themes and characters in Superman Returns remain frustratingly conceptual."

By Kenji Fujishima

A kaleidoscope of alienation and longing, Wong Kar-Wai's 1995 film Fallen Angels remains one of Wong's least discussed and least appreciated films. Of course, compared to the sheer beauty and maturity of his latest work--his intimate In the Mood for Love (2000); his majestic 2046 (2004); even "The Hand" (2004), his relatively brief yet masterful contribution to the omnibus film Eros—-earlier films like this one and Chungking Express (1994) come off as energetic though show-offy stylistic exercises.

But Fallen Angels is no mere exercise. In some ways, it is almost as important a film in Wong's oeuvre as Happy Together (1997). If Happy Together represented a stepping stone, an emotional deepening of Wong's usual themes of love, loss and desire, Fallen Angels represents both a look back and a look forward for one of cinema's most important current directors.

Wong's first feature film was a gangster flick titled As Tears Go By (1988), a Mean Streets ripoff that seemed to take its emotional cues from the popular Hong Kong action films of the time (such as John Woo's 1986 gangster melodrama A Better Tomorrow). Tears may have been derivative and at times even dated and cheesy (on hearing the film's Cantopop rendition of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," a friend said, "And I thought the original was bad enough!"), but it had an operatic power, and more importantly, it laid out some of Wong's stylistic signatures, including exaggerated neon-tinted lighting, the use of pop music to underscore moods, and pixillated slow-motion action scenes.

Fallen Angels is the only other film of his that could be considered a "gangster film," although certainly it's quite different from As Tears Go By. What Fallen Angels adds to what he was already doing visually in his first film is his experimentation with voiceover narration, allowing the characters to express their thoughts and feelings to us in ways that they are unable to articulate to each other. Also, in contrast to the linear plot of As Tears Go By, Fallen Angels pretty much disregards rules of classical storytelling. Instead of focusing on one linear plotline, it tells two interlocking stories filled with digressions and jumps in time.

In Fallen Angels, Wong takes all of those stylistic signatures to extremes. He pours on the slo-mo, the pixillated action scenes, the neon lighting and the pop music (one Canto pop song even becomes the source of a message from a killer to his assistant). In addition, the voiceovers become a dominant creative force: there's barely any dialogue, and nearly all the characters' thoughts and emotions are expressed through narration.

For all its youthful stylistic brashness and crisscrossing plots, though, one of the major themes of Fallen Angels is the idea of moving on, or at least trying to do so: moving on from an unfulfilling job, in the case of Leon Lai's assassin-for-hire; moving on from a broken heart, in the case of Michelle Reis' personal assistant; and especially, moving on from a slacker's existence, in the case of Takeshi Kaneshiro's mute He Zhiwu.

Surprisingly enough, that last instance of moving on—-part of the film's barely-related subplot rather than its main plot—-may be the key to explaining Fallen Angels' significance in the context of Wong's body of work.

Early in the movie, He, who has escaped from prison, is seen breaking into shops every night and running them after hours. In his voiceover, he reasons that because the rent has already been paid, someone should still maintain these stores after hours. In some of the film's funniest moments, He essentially hassles people into giving him money; a young man who professes to have mob connections is one of his accidental frequent "customers." Eventually, though, he finds himself falling in love with a nutcase named Charlie (Charlie Yeung). When he discovers that his love is unrequited, he responds by trying to settle down from his older, wilder ways and reestablish a familial emotional connection, inspired by a Japanese restaurant owner who used to be a filmmaker: he decides to make a video of his widowed father, owner of the Chungking Express Mansions (one random Chungking reference among many in this film), as he goes about his everyday business.

I'd like to think that this plot turn holds at least a whisper of personal confession for Wong: his way of taking stock of the kinds of films he made before while expressing a desire to move on to something different and arguably more mature. Consider some of his previous film characters: the heartless ladies' man played by Leslie Cheung in Days of Being Wild (1991), for example, or Faye Wong's free spirit in Chungking Express. Both characters express one of Wong's major cinematic preoccupations: a yearning for some kind of freedom within societal boundaries. Fallen Angels throws a wrench into his obsession by presenting a group of characters who, in their own ways, yearn for the opposite: a semblance of stability, in the case of killer; or an emotional connection to one closest to him, in He Zhiwu's case.

As it turns out (spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen the film) the killer ends up getting killed as he tries to do one last job for the assistant, and He returns to his aimless ways after his father dies. The personal assistant, meanwhile, having decided never again become personally involved with her partners, becomes a disheveled mess after the killer's death (an event she may have helped orchestrate, although the film only suggests it obliquely). One could understandably see these developments as regressions for these characters-—real fallen angels. But I prefer to see them as Wong taking one last pained, wistful glance at his old preoccupations with free spirits and forbidden love before finally deciding to go in a different direction.

Thus, it is fitting that the film's final image is a pixillated slo-mo of the assistant riding He's motorcycle: He has possibly made the human connection he'd sought, while the assistant has at last found some genuine "warmth." As is typical of Wong, he leaves the ending unresolved—-the two characters' futures hang in the balance—-but emotionally and thematically it is complete and satisfying.

Of all of his early films, Fallen Angels, for all of its high style, is arguably his most outwardly deceptive. I saw it soon after Days of Being Wild, probably the earliest Wong Kar-Wai film that could be said to be a spiritual precursor to In the Mood for Love and 2046. Compared to that relatively relaxed feature, Fallen Angels at first seemed a mere exercise: effectively moody, yes, but seemingly less interested in defining the characters and deeply involving us in their thoughts and emotions than in looking "cool," playing with certain romantic notions, and revelling in changing film stocks, pixillated action sequences, and glamorous neon lighting (by Wong's regular collaborator Chris Doyle, his cinematographer on every feature after As Tears Go By,). The result at first struck me as superficially impressive but rather detached and empty; one could be easily dazzled by its MTV veneer, but was there really anything beneath the pretty surface?

These days, though, as a young film enthusiast still working out my views on cinema in general, I've become less interested in placing emphases on "well-told stories" or "three-dimensional characterizations" all the time, as many filmgoers are wont to do. Perhaps that's why, a few months after getting my first full glimpse of this film, I couldn't get its powerfully alienated feel out of my head.

And so, while I would concede that the characters in Fallen Angels are rather thinly defined, and the style at times a little too flashy—-although more subtly expressive of characters' emotions than I realized on first viewing—-the film is more important to Wong's body of work than it first seems. In pushing his visual approach and his feel for hopeless romantics to extremes, he carries his modern style to its zenith. In emphasizing the changes his characters experience, I think Wong is implicitly looking ahead in his own career: wanting to enjoy the same free-spiritedness as his characters—-a freedom reflected not only in those characters, but also in Wong's rampant technique throughout the film—-but realizing, with a wince, that even in a big city like Hong Kong, there's a price to be paid for living such a lifestyle. That Wong continued to explore similar themes of love and alienation in an equally gorgeous yet more mature and intelligent style is further proof that he is one of the most exciting and fascinating filmmakers working today.
________________________________________________

Kenji Fujishima is a Rutgers University journalism student and the publisher of the blog My Life, at 24 Frames Per Second.

by Odienator

Under Wagstaff's Watching Movies entry, kenjfuj stated that he enjoys repeat viewings of certain movies "simply because I was mad entertained by them the first time I saw them." This breaks the cardinal rule of film criticism: analysis trumps enjoyment.

As a critic, you can, without shame, admit to liking a movie because it's

a) non-linear
b) not from Hollywood
c) full of symbolism, or
d) a three-and-a-half hour flick about a sock puppet with a hole in it weeping in German about how it can still taste the foot that once inhabited it.

But god forbid you admit to liking a movie simply because it entertained you. And if you do commit that sin, you must hastily repent by calling it a "guilty pleasure." (I.e., this isn't really my taste! Honest to God, they made me like it at GUNPOINT!)

Every film critic--nay, everybody--has at least two skeletons: the one that's holding them up, and a cinematic one in their closet. It's that movie that might embarrass you if people found out you actually liked it. It is a shameful movie from your past.

I have a cemetery in my cinematic closet, and I chose to wake the dead by holding the first annual Shameful Movies of Odie's Past film festival, or SMOOP. These are movies I should be ashamed of myself for liking...but am not. After all, Shame is a stranger I have yet to know. I only called it "Shameful Movies of Odie's Past" because no respectable newspaper would run an ad for the "You Actually Liked That Shit?!" Film Festival.

The rules of my festival were:

1. Each presentation was a double feature.
2. Each film had to be on DVD, and limited to theatrical films only.
3. No Porn. This was a film festival, not a bachelor party. And Vincent Gallo might have shown up, which was the last thing I needed.

My "festival brochure" follows, but before it does I ask: what movies would you run at your own personal SMOOP, and why? Don't be shy. If I have to be ruined, I'm taking all of you with me.

SMOOP's Opening Night Feature: "Thank God Puberty Only Happens Once"
Shameful Movies: Rock and Roll High School and Porky's

Someone once wrote that you knew you were getting older when Joey Ramone started to look ugly; that person must have been born blind. Joey and his other Ramones join P.J. Soles (as Riff Randell, the greatest music fan to ever grace a screen) in the Roger Corman gem Rock and Roll High School (1979), director Allan Arkush's antidote to Robert Zemeckis' too-cutesy I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978). The alliterative team of Randell and the repetitive rhythms of the Ramones brought Sheila the Punk Rocker to the ghetto theater of my youth. The film's climax grants one of two wishes common to every high school student, even if it's the fakest explosion since Felton Perry blew up in Magnum Force.

The literal climax of Porky's (1982) satisfies the other wish of most high schoolers—at least the guys. Before Ralphie, director Bob Clark gave us horny teenager Peewee (27-year old Dan Monahan), who "can't wait to get laid!" Though it lacks a comparable Why-I-believe-there-is-a-God moment (Phoebe Cates "releasing the twins" in Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Porky's earns its shameful place with raunch, slapstick and two unnecessary sequels. It is also, with its full frontal nude men hugging and snuggling each other, the most homoerotic teenage sex comedy ever made. Added note of shame: My cousins and I convinced my mother that Porky's was rated R for profanity, so she was willing to buy our tickets for us when she dropped us off. As a result, I've spent the last 25 years preventing her from seeing this movie at home.

"Paul Bunyan: Exterminator"
Shameful Movies: Them! and Food of the Gods

Director Bert I. Gordon's initials were B.I.G., and so were the creatures in his movies. Food of the Gods (1976), which is supposedly based on H.G. Wells, features giant chickens, giant bees, giant rats, giant maggots...and a normal sized Ida Lupino. Actually, everything is normal sized; Mr. B.I.G.'s less than impressive camerawork supersizes the aforementioned animals through the magic of American International Pictures' cheapo F/X department. Joining Lupino, one of Hollywood's first female directors, is evangelist Marjoe Gortner, who apparently didn't heed the commandment "Thou Shalt Not Kill Big-Ass Chickens." Easily the worst movie in the festival, it's certainly not Citizen Kane. But then again, Welles' classic isn't going to satisfy your hankering for huge rats. There's only one huge rat in Kane.

In 70s horror movies, toxic waste was the catalyst for animal elephantiasis. The 50's, however, used the timely fear of "nuke-u-lur" testing to justify giant ants in Them! (1954). It's amazing that, 22 years earlier, the folks at Warners were able to create more convincing giant creatures than anything in Gods; they aren't very scary, but the noise they made became permanently etched in my brain as a kid. Them! plays its story completely straight, and is shockingly effective for it. Bonus pre-feature short: A re-enactment (by yours truly) of the infamous Muhammad Ali D-Con Roach Spray/Rat Poison commercial from the early 70's. "Roaches," said the Greatest. "I hate 'em! Knock 'em out with D-Con Four Gone!"

"Neo-Noirs of TV Stars"
Shameful Movies: The Late Show and The Hot Spot

Like her brother, Michael, Virginia Madsen brings cinematic death wherever she goes. See Altman's latest, A Prairie Home Companion, for her most recent example. If you want to be entertained, however, check out the one good movie in director Dennis Hopper's oeuvre, The Hot Spot (1990). In addition to Jennifer Connelly, who justifies my belief in God, you'll see Madsen bring the kind of death most men would be proud to endure. Hopper's film is full of steamy sex between Crockett from Miami Vice and the actress who saved HBO in the 80's, but the guiltiest pleasure occurs when Madsen's Dolly Harshaw murders her husband. During the act, Madsen, wearing a rickety Southern accent and a Victoria's Secret get-up, announces "I'm fuckin' ya ta death, George!" The rest of this neo-noir about a used car salesman in Hicksville is as overheated as that line.

Far quirkier, though equally strange, is Robert Benton's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink The Late Show (1977). Art Carney, aka Ed Norton, plays a seen-it-all gumshoe whose age is catching up with him. He has a hearing aid, he won't run after suspects for fear of a coronary, and he has little patience for his latest client, Lily Tomlin, whose seemingly easy assignment to find a missing cat turns into a surprisingly violent case of murder and deception. The Late Show is like sitting on your remote control; it flips through genres and tones with reckless abandon. Yet somehow it works, broken-down gumshoe and all. And Tomlin's refrigerator scene is a morbid classic.

The Cinterpiece: What Mildred Pierce Did
Shameful Movies: Mommie Dearest and Strait-Jacket

In Mommie Dearest (1981), Faye Dunaway as Joan yells out "BRING ME THE AXE!!" In Strait-Jacket (1964), Joan brings the axe herself. After catching her husband, played by the Six Million Dollar Man himself, Lee Majors, in bed with another woman, Joan goes all Lizzie Borden on them. Twenty years later, somebody is chopping the heads off wax dummies masquerading as actors like George Kennedy. Is it the newly-freed asylum inmate Ms. Crawford, and if so, is this her response to Bette Davis and her axe murder movie, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte? William Castle, the master of gimmick-filled cinema (immortalized by John Goodman in Joe Dante's 1993 must-see Matinee) handed out cardboard axes at showings of Strait-Jacket. Adding a touch best appreciated by lovers of Faye's Crawfordesque freak-out, Castle decapitates the Columbia Pictures lady as well. Crawford was married to the head of Pepsi, Columbia was once owned by Coke...hmmm. Maybe Joan is guilty of that beheading.

Satan Wears a Seatbelt
Shameful Movies: The Car and The Hitcher

You could run a cable channel on all the shameful movies of Universal's Past. Despite having the blockbuster Jaws in its orbit, Universal was committed to churning out schlock like the Airport sequels, the Sensurround classic Earthquake, and The Car, which stars the titular object, a big black car with black windshields and orange side windows, a truck horn, and a perpetual state of road rage. Said road rage may have something to do with the fact that the car's driver is Rosemary's Baby Daddy; it hits people with sadistic glee, from hippies to trumpet players to bike riders.

Sounds like a great amusement park attraction, right? The folks at Universal Studios theme park in Hollywood thought so. Gas prices may make you feel like your car has the devil in it too, so be careful what you say at the pump. This movie shows you precisely why calling Satan a "chickenshit son of a bitch" is a bad, bad, bad idea.

The Hitcher (1986) also has Satan in a car, in the guise of hitchhiker Rutger Hauer. Kicking common sense to the curb, C. Thomas Howell picks up Hauer, who proceeds to make his life unpleasant indeed. The Hitcher is so sadistic that it made Roger Ebert short-circuit, but it is too unbelievable to be taken as anything but a parable. Jennifer Jason Leigh shows up to do what she does best: be a victim. In my essay "Homosexuality and the Horror Film," I theorize that Hauer is the manifestation of the Howell character's fear of his own homosexuality. I said the same thing about Freddy Krueger in the execrable Nightmare on Elm Street 2. And Sensurround feels good on your balls.

A Little of the Old 80's Ultraviolence
Shameful Movies: Marked for Death and Commando

Commando (1985) is my favorite of the non-Terminator Ah-nold movies. Before she was as tasty as a Pepperidge Farm Milano, Alyssa Milano played Ah-nold's kidnapped daughter. Ah-nold kidnaps Tommy Chong's daughter, Rae Dawn Chong, then proceeds to kill half the state of Kah-lee-forn-ya to ensure Alyssa's future on Who's The Boss. Things to look out for: the scene where Ah-nold circumcises a guy with an ax (Joan would be proud) and the "Ut-oh! Better Get Maaco" Porsche gaffe where the Porsche Ah-nold previously flipped over is miraculously cured of all its damage.

This is the perfect companion piece to Steven Seagal's gory Marked for Death (1990) which gives us the king of the three-word titled movies (Out for Justice, Hard to Kill, Above the Law) before he got so fat that the film editor had to do his aikido moves for him. Marked is The Believers meets Hong Kong Phooey, a cartoonish horror film that's so over the top one can't help but enjoy cringing at the racial stereotypes and Live and Let Die-style voodoo mumbo-jumbo.

Closing Night: So You Think You Can Dance?
Shameful Movies: Flashdance and Hairspray

Joe Eszterhas and Adrian Lyne have each made ONE good movie. That movie is Flashdance (1983). (Yes, I know Lyne directed Fatal Attraction, but did you see the piece of shit ending to that movie?) I had no desire to see Flashdance as a teenager until one of my friends said it had "women running around with money stuck to their butts!" Flashdance's plot is the stuff of B-movie legend: Welder by day, Mawby's bar stripper by night, Jennifer Beals tries to make it as a legit dancer. She bangs a guy, asks de Lawd for forgiveness, does some freaky disrobing gymnastics with her titty coverings, and has her ass allegedly doubled by a man during the dance sequences. It all adds up to Oscar nominations for cinematography and editing, and a win for Best Song, "What A Feeling," which could have been the theme for Sensurround.

I love John Waters, which is why I saved the most shameful movie of my past for last. Hairspray is PG-rated, which by itself should be a sin for Waters fans. Yet, looking closer, it has everything you could expect from Baltimore's Bad Boy. There's puke, pimples, ridiculous hairstyles (one of which holds a bomb), inspired casting (Sonny Bono, Ruth Brown and Deborah Harry), crazy character names (Amber Van Tussle, Penny Pingleton, Tracy Turnblad), Divine, a love of the underdog, and terrible fashion (Ricki Lake makes the greatest entrance ever, dressed in an outfit covered with big, embroidered roaches).

It all centers around the Corny Collins dance show and its refusal to allow Black people on it save for one day a year. Lake and her buddies want to change that, and go about it using the power of every gimmicky 60's dance there is. Only John Waters could propose electroshock treatment as a cure for jungle fever, have Jerry Stiller married to Divine, and have a guy unzipping his zipper during a dance number on national TV. Sure, it became a big, Tony-winning musical, but not even that can match the candy-colored lunacy of seeing future talk show host Lake ironing her hair and dancing "The Roach." It's everything a shameful movie of one's past can be.