Indecent Exposure (Gary Graver [as Robert McCallum], 1981)

Sort of a hardcore Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Indecent Exposure presents a typical porn conundrum. One path to legitimacy for adult cinema is to emulate mainstream movies. But if a porno attains the level of something solid yet hardly masterful as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, then what's the point? I gravitate towards porn that ventures into alternate worlds far away from the solid and the "well-made" because I can't get that at the multiplex (apart from the occasional Southland Tales). So while I grant that the performances of all four principals (Veronica Hart, Jesie St. James, Robert Kerman, and Eric Edwards) in this bed-hopping dramedy are top-notch and Graver's cinematography is typically lovely (especially in Vinegar Syndrome's restoration on Blu-ray) and the incredible Georgina Spelvin is on board in a smaller, but crucial, role, there's not much more to latch onto. I recommend Indecent Exposure. But check out Little Sisters or Graver's 3 A.M. for something truly distinctive. 

Grade: B+

The Unholy Child (Jim Turner, 1975)

There's a thin line in pornography between winningly godforsaken and cynically lazy and, sadly, The Unholy Child tips over into the latter mode. It's already escaping my memory. So I'll record here everything I want to remember. A car blows up and the owner underreacts. The murderer's motive is unclear if not unknown. And the murderer appears in bad male drag. Not actively awful. Just forgettable which may be the greater sin. A dud. But a 57-minute one. So if you're perversely interested, you'll lose little time.

Grade: C+

3 A.M. (Gary Graver [as Robert McCallum], 1975)

According to They'll Love Me When I'm Dead (Morgan Neville, 2018), the documentary about the making of Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind, Welles helped Gary Graver edit the scene in 3 A.M. where Georgina Spelvin (Kate) and Judith Hamilton (an unnamed hippie chick) have shower sex so that Graver could return to his work as cinematographer on Welles' film. History has not recorded Welles' exact contributions. But it's worth noting that it's easily the steamiest sex scene in the film. It's also worth noting that the scene in which Kate makes dinner for her nephew Ronnie (Charles Hooper, adorbs) mirrors a similar moment in The Magnificent Ambersons when Aunt Fanny (Agnes Moorehead) serves strawberry shortcake to George Minafer (Tim Holt).

I mention the Welles connection not to rope classical Hollywood dorks into watching a porno but to proclaim that 3 A.M. is every bit the match of The Other Side of the Wind in terms of commitment and formal pizazz and hence would make a dynamite double feature. A tale of murder, incest, and privileged ennui, 3 A.M. benefits from fantastic performances, especially Spelvin as a faux spinster, and Graver's painterly eye. This is truly a cinematographer's film which means subsequent viewings will have to determine the structural role played by the deft dollies, unmotivated fish-eye lenses, and Ozu-like pillow shots. For now, they're absolutely gorgeous to behold/ponder.

3 A.M. is also a sonic marvel. As befits the upper-middle-class milieu, the drama here results from the ways in which sound invades well-cultivated privacy. The first sex scene is tape recorded. So is a climactic murder confession. Family members are heard crying and fucking through the walls. Ronnie self-actualizes through his love of classical music. One delicate sequence has him taking steps towards losing his virginity by bringing over records to sexy neighbor Vicki's (Sharon Thorpe) house. ("Do you like good music?" Yeah, I like good music." "I mean, really good music.") The last sex scene is scored to Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier's electro-psych-rock frug "Too Fortiche." And the very last sound we hear, as the final credits come to a close, is three grandfather-clock chimes, an elegant time stamp acknowledging the precise moment the narrative kicks into gear.

Astonishing from the git, 3 A.M. is one of the finest adult films I've ever seen. The Graver obsession starts here.

Grade: A

Check out Robbie's nifty tennis sweater

Robbie likes classical but Vicki prefers Buffalo Springfield

Foxy Rob Rose as Morgan

Honey Pie (Mel White and Howard Ziehm, 1976)

Porn and the musical are my favorite film genres because I have limited use for those well-proportioned wholes that uphold tired canons and itchy concepts (which I abuse, I admit!) like "genius" and "masterpiece." In oscillating between narrative and number, both genres traffic in a hybridity that weakens (and hence devalues) a firm sense of gestalt. Still, I discover deeper pleasures in one coordinate of the oscillation depending on the genre, e.g., I tend to privilege the number in the musical whereas the narratives of feature-length pornography fire me up more. 

With Honey Pie, however, the sex scenes give off plenty of sssteam heat while the narrative stalls with a forced jokiness. Arlana Blue stars at Lois, a writer at the fictional Screw-like magazine Metro, the editor of which is played by Screw editor Al Goldstein. She's looking for something especially naughty to include in Metro and reads several letters to the magazine, each occasioning a dramatization in what amounts to an illustrated Penthouse Letters. The dramatizations run through a typically polymorphous array of options - intergenerational sex, lesbianism, DP, S&M, etc. In between, the ever-horny Lois camps it up with fellow journalist Dick (Bobby Astyr) at the Metro offices and eventually they get it on. These scenes are cute enough. But the real prize in Honey Pie is the hardcore activity which generates a quiet intensity that contrasts with the framing narrative. In short, yet another hybrid that is pornography's gift to humankind.

Also on board is Annie Sprinkle (billed here as Ann Sprinkle) in a cameo at the end. And check out Mel White's platforms before the S&M sequence!

Grade: B+

Coming West (J.S. Scott, 1971)

Coming West feels like a softcore film that's reluctant to showcase hardcore sex although the director, Steve Scott (working under a different name here), would go on to direct straight and gay hardcore porn. The lovemaking is pretty chaste overall so that the relatively brief meat and money shots startle. In short, it's very much a film of 1971, one year before Deep Throat.  

Three contemporary gals drive a convertible to vacation in Laramie. One gal, Kate (Maria Arnold), daydreams of the Old West where the trio are prostitutes. She wanders off and runs into former lover Matt (sexy George Peters) which triggers a reminiscence of their past together. So this scene is a flashback within a dream sequence! A hunky Native American approaches the other two and moments later, he is lying motionless on the ground. We are left to deduce that Matt, who has returned with Kate, has rendered him unconscious to protect the ladies. An orgy ensues and the somehow-reanimated Native American joins in (?). Kate awakes from her dream and as she tells the other two about it, we see two Matt and the Native American hitchhiking together.

At 53 minutes, Coming Together goes down easy especially with the help of a dippy folk song that sounds like a duet between a bargain-basement Leonard Cohen and Buffy Sainte-Marie. But it does feel rather inconsequential. As with a lot of pornography, this would be best caught on the sly, peripherally experiencing it at the local adult theatre of your mind rather than taking it all in at once.

Grade: B

Opus (Matt Helmet, 1970)

Opus is nine minutes of avant-porn in which a heterosexual couple have sex with Toshi Ichyanagi's "Extended Voices (for Voices with Moog Synthesizer and Buchla Associates Electronic Modular System)" on the soundtrack (although it seems to be spliced in with another piece). A curio at best, it still ends conventionally with a money shot. According to the Erotica Films blog, the performers are Natalie Nell and John Joseph and the festival mentioned in the opening credits is The Second Wet Dream Film Festival (1971). 

Grade: B-minus

The Bride's Initiation (aka Demon's Brew) (Duncan Stewart, 1973)

SPOILERS (if anyone could possibly care)

The Bride's Initiation features a Dracula (Marc Brock) in terrible face paint (do we want any other kind?) who subsists on sperm rather than blood. He has his chauffeur (Jack Birch, father of Thora Birch!) kidnap a newlywed couple and his assistant, a cackling witch in better makeup, collects the groom's elixir. The bride's parents (two of the oiliest individuals ever to appear in a porno) hire a detective to find the newlyweds but the detective gets kidnapped too. Dracula sees a beautiful blonde (Carol Connors) at an intersection (during the day - this Dracula is uneffected by the sun) and immediately becomes infatuated. He kidnaps her too. But the hardy-har-har ending reveals that the sperm has turned Dracula gay and he lusts after the detective who himself is gay (which we learn only at that moment). Also included: some light S&M, several $1.98 sets, and sweaty faces (you can tell this was shot in Florida).

The Bride's Initiation is a tad too linear for my taste. But it's more fun than the cranky (and bizarre - this is a melodrama??) IMDb reviews would lead you to believe. In fact, it's more linear than the reviews themselves, reminding me yet again how difficult it is to tell sustain an argument (or story). As user Hollwoodshack avers, "It's interesting that a lot of the goofy plot resembles some events in the real life marriage of Jack Birch and Carol Connors. For example, his daughter was fired from a production of Dracula because he objected to Thora getting a back rub from a cast member. The main character here in parody is Dracula, also. A change in sex preference caused by a magic formula appears here, too. Thora was given her name because the couple expected a boy." In comparison to this review, The Bride's Initiation is as tight as The Usual Suspects.

Grade: B+

Funny Farm (George Roy Hill, 1988)

I officially apologize to Leonard Maltin because I thought he gave Funny Farm ***1/2 in his movie guide. In fact, it received only **1/2 and good, because I couldn't imagine anyone giving this thing even that many stars. Lawd, this was a slooooog. I didn't laugh once but a few cat naps were taken. And there's a venal anti-city bent running throughout, particularly irksome in 2020 when so many rich folks are abandoning New York City for the "safety" of the greener climes of Connecticut and Vermont. Y'all don't come back now, ya hear?

Grade: D

The Rites of Uranus (no director credited, 1975)

An hour-long, bottom-of-the-barrel wonder, The Rites of Uranus follows Sarah (Vivian Parks) into an anally focused cult whose members chant "Hail to Your Anus, Your anus takes my thrust and the penetrating force of my grey hot venom shall shatter the sanctity of the mind" over and over, although some of the more inebriated cast members mangle the pronunciation. And at 18:37 in my copy, a disembodied voice intones, "I'm going to enter your body through your anus," but the last two words are uttered in mock-Cookie-Monster style. 

Much sex occurs in the first twenty minutes before Sarah accidentally kills the high priest by sitting on his face. Sporting purple, sparkly knee-high socks, Sarah is thrown in a jail cell and seems distraught over her crime. But it's difficult to be certain since her dialogue sounds like those "I had a stroke" memes: "I didn't kill him. I killed him. But he was...he committed his own suicide" or "I want keys and a hard-on."

The narrative then abandons Sarah for a while and we're treated to a vaginal examination on a waterbed in a wood-paneled room. Cult members (Uransites, as they're referred to) in hooded robes perform various duties such as handing out fliers for the cult ("Lost? Find Yourself in Uranus.") and attaining hard-ons for ever more sexual activity. They manage to entice one hapless gal but not much happens with her beyond signing her life away to the cult (on a poster-size contract). 

Sarah has ever more sex with disrobed male cult members, one of whom is anally penetrated with a thin sword-dildo while mounting her in the missionary position. The climax reveals that the high priest did not, in fact, die. He returns in a tuxedo t-shirt and matter-of-factly sends her home for a hilariously deflating dénouement. 

The soundtrack is comprised of several Santana and Tomita songs including the latter's Firebird and, I think, his outer-spaced version of Holst's The Planets. There are also plane and car sounds even though the sets seems to be interiors. And check out the final screen shot for a glimpse of an early videotape machine.

Yet again, I'm supposed downgrade this kind of burned-out nonsense that is pornography's gift to humankind? Neauxp!

Grade: A-minus

Available on the Vinegar Syndrome collection Storefront Theatre: All Night at the Bizarre Art. 

Edit: This was directed by Richard Mailer according to Vinegar Syndrome's Joe Rubin.

His House (Remi Weekes, 2020)

Bilge Ebiri's Vulture review of His House had me expecting the Sundance favorite to be "terrifying at just about every level." I'm chagrined to report that this tale of a Sudanese refugee couple settling into a haunted slum in London doesn't work as a horror film; it's largely a series of patience-draining jump scares. As a portrait of migrant PTSD, however, it's got plenty of bite. Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) must navigate an indifferent, when not outright hostile, England while attempting to live with a scarred past and their attendant struggle invokes a panoply of demanding spectres. No spoilers but anyone who can easily assign guilt to the couple's decisions while fleeing a war-ravaged country is no doubt judging from a quite comfortable position in their own house.

Grade: B+

Fire in the Sky (Robert Lieberman, 1993)

Fire in the Sky scared all the crap out of me on VHS in the 1990s. But seeing it again last weekend reminded me that only Travis Walton's abduction flashback terrifies and it takes up ten minutes of screen time. And it truly is terrifying, a perfect balance between sci-fi and horror. Up until that point, though, it's 90 minutes or so of windup. And not helping it go down is Mark Isham's score which aerates all manner of triumphalist pablum. 

Grade: B

Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood, 2019)

In a terrific capsule review of Richard Jewell for the Chicago Reader, Kathleen Sachs claims that "Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now. Not the greatest, mind you, just the most." By this, I take it Sachs means that Eastwood's films don't sway decisively in one ideological direction. In Richard Jewell, he seems to have a readymade story to propagate right-wing ideologies. Jewell was the security guard who discovered the bomb at Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. The FBI quickly targeted Jewell as a prime suspect and the media proceeded to investigate his potential culpability. Jewell was exonerated while the real bomber would evade capture for seven years. Some critics have thus read Richard Jewell as a right-wing primer on fake news and how government institutions fail the individual.

The first quarter of Richard Jewell, however, paints the protagonist as a George Zimmerman type who constantly oversteps his bounds as a security guard at Piedmont College. An ineffectual bully who hungers for more power than his rent-a-cop status affords, Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser, jaw-dropping) comes off more as a dangerous crank than any kind of hero. So however heroic his actions were at Centennial Olympic Park, they are already filtered through this most unheroic portrait. Had Eastwood intended to uphold Richard Jewell as a martyr, he failed. 

This is why I don't have as much of a problem as other critics do with the more cartoonish portrayals. Most damningly, Eastwood commits the same error as the media did with Jewell by falsely fashioning Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) into a vixen eager to exchange sexual favors for information from the purely evil FBI composite character Agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm, oily). And few critics have mentioned how Eastwood transforms Piedmont College Raymond Cleere (Charles Green) into a symbol for an effete higher-education system that cares more for its boozing privileged students than its hard-working staff (not faculty). But none of these performances render Jewell any more a hero.

Because, of course, Eastwood never intended to conceive of him so unambiguously in the first place. As the most American director working right now, he's asking audiences if this type of person deserves due process. Is he innocent before proven guilty? Does this person who consistently makes stupid decisions (Richard Jewell is frequently an uneasy comedy) earn our compassion? Framing these questions is a masterful mise-en-scène that always reminds us about exactly the kind of person we're contemplating here. Richard Jewell explodes with props that lend savor to the frame (Sirk would be proud): underwear, Tupperware, TV sets, guns and more guns, etc. A poster in Watson Bryant's (Sam Rockwell), Jewell's attorney, office reads: "I fear government more than I fear terrorism." Confederate flags stand witness to Bobi's (Kathy Bates, almost as jaw-dropping as Hauser), Jewell's mother, plea to the media to exonerate her son. 

Allow me to quote Sachs' line in full. "For better or worse—some will say better, many more will say worse—Clint Eastwood is the most American director working right now." What Eastwood is asking us to do in Richard Jewell is to imagine ourselves in a position opposite to our own or perhaps others heretofore unforeseen. How will a black viewer receive Bobi's tearful plea? How will a NRA member take those early scenes at Piedmont College? I cried at the final title informing us that Bobi watches Bryant's children every weekend just like I cried at Eastwood's song at the end of Gran Torino. But I'm crying again right now because these are the people who probably voted for Trump last night. On November 4, 2020, I can't think of anything more American than that, for better or worse.

Grade: A

April Fool's Day (Fred Walton, 1986)/My Favorite Slasher Films!

MASSIVE SPOILERS!

 

I hate slasher films so much (their dread of difference, their hypocritical puritanism that punishes sexual activity but courts unfettered violence, their implicit Boomer ideology in calling for the annihilation of 1980s youth, etc.) that I applaud a terrible film like April Fool's Day. For a good 75 minutes or so of its 89-minute running time, it's a numbing experience with inscrutable character behavior and Mad Lib dialogue ("Boy, when she said 'well,' she really meant 'well.' Who dug this thing - Pocahontas?" Huh??). But then SPOILERS, it was all a prank! No one dies in this slasher film, not even in the cheat ending! In fact, it becomes a straight-up comedy in its penultimate scene. The hero's continued screaming when confronted with a no-longer-dead character is genuinely hilarious (albeit mean). No murders, no punishments, a good time had by all? That's progressive enough for me!

Grade: B+

Fun facts:

I saw this film in its first run at either Mann's Chinese Theatre or The Egyptian Theatre in Los Angeles. Can't recall which but either was Mecca for a young movie geek.

There was a novelization by Jeff Rovin, the author (I assume) of my beloved The Signet Book of Movie Lists. 

And here's a list of my favorite slasher films which should demonstrate how much I loathe the genre since most are either too early or too arty to be slasher films. 

April Fool's Day
Badlands
The Boston Strangler
Un couteau dans le coeur (Knife + Heart)
The Driller Killer
Follow Me Quietly
Frenzy
Gideon of Scotland Yard
I Spit On Your Grave (original)
M (Fritz Lang, 1931)
Peeping Tom
Psycho
Psychos in Love
Se7en
Stranger by the Lake
10 Rillington Place
While the City Sleeps 

Black Sabbath Findings For You!

1. There's not a single Black Sabbath album that's great from start to finish, mostly due to the proggy or jazzy or ballady cuts.

2. Someone on ILM made a mix of nothing but those proggy, jazzy, ballady cuts. It was awful. 

3. Technical Ecstasy is one of the worst albums I've ever heard. Here's bassist Geezer Butler looking back on the album in 2004: "Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive then and we felt that our time had come and gone." Ok so then holy funk y'all should have kept up and sold your souls to punk!

4.  Qua album, Never Say Die! may be their very best. I prefer it to Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. It makes up in loopy, try-anything desperation what it lacks in archetypal rockers. And the title track can stand with any of their archetypal rockers. Don't believe me? Check out John Darnielle's Last Plane to Jakarta flowchart proving the album's greatness. 

5. Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules, and Born Again are NOT good albums or even all that heavy. If you're going to go for one of these, try Born Again. It's the campiest.

6. I couldn't care less about anything after Born Again.