The Scoop: Two of Hollywood's classic romantic leads, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, team up for this great suspense thriller, their only cinematic pairing.
Hepburn is Regina Lampert, a widow who discovers that her dead husband had a secret past and a big stash of hidden loot. Pretty soon, all his old cohorts are chasing her through Paris and it's up to Grant to save her -- if she can trust him. Where's the money hidden? Who will the killer strike next? The viewer is kept guessing right up to the end and Hepburn and Grant keep the romantic sparks flying. The supporting cast is filled with familiar faces, including James Coburn, George Kennedy and Walter Matthau.
Produced and directed by Stanley Donen, best known for his musicals, "Charade" is smart, witty and stylish. The script by Peter Stone is great, as is the music by Henry Mancini. Top notch all the way. This is one of the best films Hitchcock never made.
Best Bit: Just pick any bit of banter between Hepburn and Grant. It's all great.
Side Note: At the British Academy Awards, this performance earned Grant a nomination for Best Foreign Actor -- even though he was born and raised in London.
Companion Viewing: "Suspicion" (1941) and "The Usual Suspects" (1995).
The Scoop: Can I cut to the chase here? This movie is a big old freakin' waste of time. As a serious horror/thriller, it's a complete pile of twaddle. As a campy bad movie laughfest, it has a few moments, but mostly fails at that too.
While on spring break in Cancun, a completely douchey womanizing film student cleverly named Adam (Robert Mann) meets a mysterious hottie cleverly named Lilith (Natalie Denise Sperl). When he returns home, she turns up at one of his parties and starts leaving corpses in her wake. Turns out she's a succubus, a female demon who consumes the souls of men. (In case you weren't tipped off to that by the title, it's literally spelled out for you in the movie. Literally. Because nothing says "tense climactic battle" like a little impromptu spelling bee.) Sperl isn't so bad as Lilith, and is even kind of sexy. But everything else about the movie is just plain wrong.
"Succubus: Hell Bent" is completely insulting to women, film students, ambulance drivers and most other intelligent people. Oh, and did I mention that there's a demonic fighter jet dogfight? Betcha weren't expecting that!
Save yourself and get out now!
Best Bit: Gary Busey's cameo as the whacked-out demon hunter. I'm not sure Busey knew he was really shooting a movie. Also look for really horrible cameos by David Keith, Lorenzo Lamas and Kelly Hu.
Side Note: Want a mythology lesson? Here are the real stories behind succubi and Lilith.
Take a Look: The trailer. You've got to love any movie in which the leads are the last two actors credited, and the first four combined have about 10 minutes of screen time, max:
The Scoop: All you really need to know is that this is an update of "Hamlet" set in the L.A. Jewish underworld.
It's a promising concept, but ultimately falls flat. Jack (Jonathan Penner) is depressed about his father's death, especially when his mother (Jacqueline Bisset) marries his uncle (Jamey Sheridan). Thanks to a mysterious informer and a little detective work, Jack discovers that his uncle killed his father, then plots out his revenge. Meanwhile his girlfriend (Mary-Louise Parker) slowly goes insane.
The problem is that nothing seems to hang together. There's very little plot progression and, in fact, if you didn't know the basic story of "Hamlet" you'd probably have not idea what was happening at all. Only the barest outline of the "Hamlet" story remains, replaced with a lot of scenes that go nowhere and with reams of pretentious, pseudo-philosophic, pseudo-gritty dialogue. It's slow and dreary, and even at 89 minutes if feels way too long.
Not content with being a wannabe Shakespeare, director Stacy Title (who also co-wrote with Penner) also tries to be a wannabe Tarantino. And "Let the Devil Wear Black" is nothing more than just another late entry in the wave of Tarantino imitations that flooded indie cinemas in the '90s.
Best Bit: "If brains were cars, you'd have a boat."
Side Note: The title "Let the Devil Wear Black" of course comes from Shakespeare's play -- Hamlet says it to Ophelia in Act III, Scene 2.
Companion Viewing: Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" (1996) for a good treatment of the original play, and Ethan Hawke's "Hamlet" (2000) for another updated version.
The busy minions at Desuko World HQ are taking a well-deserved summer vacation, so in the meantime, enjoy these favorite posts from the past. [Originally published Dec. 14, 2006]
The Scoop: While "Targets" presents the story of a moral crossroads, it also represents a cinematic crossroads -- the end of the brilliant Boris Karloff's career and the start of Peter Bogdanovich's.
In his writing and directing debut, Bogdanovich crafts this cautionary, semi-autobiographical tale of aging horror movie star Byron Orlok (played by Karloff), who decides to leave the business when he realizes his life's work can't compare to the real horrors taking place on America's streets everyday. The clips of Orlok's past work are taken from the classic performances of Karloff, and to complete the real-life parallels, Bogdanovich even casts himself as the young director making Orlok's last film. There is also a parallel plot concerning a troubled young man who goes on a shooting spree that is sadly all too familiar in our post-Columbine world. These two plot strands cross when the young shooter takes refuge in a drive-in theater that turns out to be the site of Orlok's last public appearance before retirement.
This film offers an interesting exploration of the role of the entertainment media in the social upheaval of the late-'60s (it was released in the late spring of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, but before the shooting of Robert Kennedy) that has grown even more prescient today. And Bogdanovich challeges the viewer by filming from the point of view of the shooter, putting the audience in the killer's shoes.
Despite his obviously failing health, Karloff gives the strongest, most human portrayal of a career marked my more depth than most horror actors'. In a perfect world, this swan song performance would've been recognized with an Oscar. Instead, the poverty-stricken Karloff followed his performance here with appearances (confined to a wheelchair) in a quartet of bad Mexican cheapies, filmed over the course of a couple weeks, before dying in 1969. But forget those duds -- this is the true, final summation of one of the truly great acting careers in film.
Best Line: Karloff's summation, "Is that what I was afraid of?"
Best Bit: The staging of the freeway shooting scene.
Side Notes: 1) Bogdanovich originally offered the lead role to Vincent Price, who turned it down. 2) The film showing in the drive-in at the end of the movie is "The Terror" (1963), in which Karloff costarred with a young Jack Nicholson. 3) The victim who dies in the phone booth is none other than Mike Farrell, who went on to a more distinguished career in television, starring in "M*A*S*H" and "Providence."
Companion Viewing: Two of this film's cinematic descendents -- "Taxi Driver" (1976) and "Natural Born Killers" (1994).
The Scoop: Much like he did with "Saboteur" years earlier, Alfred Hitchcock eschewed big box office stars to make this Cold War espionage tale. A pair of spies -- one American (John Forsythe) and one French (Frederick Stafford) -- team up to hunt for Soviet nuclear secrets in Havana during the Cuban Missle Crisis. The film is based on a Leon Uris novel (adapted by Samuel A. Taylor), which in turn was based on a true story.
Thanks to the changing times, Hitch was able to take advantage of Hollywood's looser restriction on sexual content, being more explicit with many of the things he only hinted at in his earlier films. And there are some good sequences detailing the nuts-and-bolts of espionage work. But beyond that "Topaz" cannot quite be considered the highlight of his late (post-"The Birds") period, and it is certainly not on par with his classics. This film is a must only for Hitchcock completists and Cold War spy buffs -- for everyone else, this is strictly optional.
Best Bit: The cinematography during Juanita's death scene.
Side Note: Hitchcock, a notorious perfectionist about his preproduction, continued to fuss with the script and storyboards during shooting. In fact, he shot three different endings, the only time he ever did so.
Companion Viewing: "Saboteur" (1942) and "Torn Curtain" (1966).
The Scoop: This early directorial effort by Dario Argento is the final film of his so-called "animal trilogy" that started with "Cat o' Nine Tails" and "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage." It is also pretty much indistinguishable from his other early films -- same Hitchcockian aspirations, same plot themes, same visual artistry. The man practically invented the "giallo" subgenre of Italian thrillers, but he just seems to be on cruise control here.
The story concerns a rock drummer (played by Michael Brandon) who kills a man in self-defense, only to be blackmailed my someone who witnessed the killing. Anyone who has seen any other Argento murder mystery will already be familiar with the plot's twists and turns, and probably even guess the blackmailer's identity well before the end.
The film is great to look at and the attention to bloody detail is a gorehound's delight, but the uninvolving story, lifeless acting and oddly misplaced bits of humor conspire to make this one of the Italian master's lesser films. Which is probably just as well, since it's very difficult to find anymore, with no current commercial release in the United States. Unless you're a completist, do yourself a favor and stick to his better and more readily available work.
Best Line: "Oh, you heterosexuals!"
Side Note: Brandon, who does a merely marginal job portraying the drumming hero, was far from Argento's first choice for the role. Among those who couldn't do it for one reason or another were Michael York, Terence Stamp, singer/songwriter James Taylor and even two Beatles -- John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
Companion Viewing: "The Bird With the Crystal Plumage" (1970) and "Cat o' Nine Tails" (1971).
The whole film is available on YouTube in installments, but the audio and video quality is pretty poor. But if you want to stick it out, more power to you. It begins here:
The Scoop: This low budget production, set in Britain, manages to wring some good atmosphere out of its limited sets and personnel.
In the small Cornwall village of Morgan's Head, residents live in fear of a headless ghost that stalks the local tin mine. The villagers get suspicious when a doctor (Lester Matthews) on a walking tour of the area turns up at the local inn one evening. Their suspicion turns to paranoia when someone spots a parachutist landing in the moors. Pretty soon the doctor turns up dead, the ghost is running wild and the village is in a tizzy. Along for the ride are the obligatory bland romantic leads (Eleanor Parker and Bruce Lester), the sympathetic village idiot (Matt Willis), the hooded innkeeper (Frank Mayo) and the local squire (John Loder).
Even though this is an American production (made at Warner's), it's full of that stiff-upper-lip British wartime spirit. The moody cinematography by Henry Sharp and taut direction by Ben Stoloff are both top-notch, and at only 57 minutes, the story flies by at a brisk pace. In that sense it fits the B-movie mold perfectly -- a fun, engaging appetizer that still leaves you hungry for the main feature.
Best Line: You've got to love a dramatic climax that begins with, "I see you don't know much about the early history of tin mining in Cornwall."
Side Note: Although she kind of gets short shrift here, in one of her earliest roles, Eleanor Parker went on to have a wonderful (but unjustly overlooked) career in Hollywood. She later costarred with the likes of Charleton Heston in "The Naked Jungle" (1954) Frank Sinatra in "The Man With the Golden Arm" (1955), and Kirk Douglas in "Detective Story" (1951).
Companion Viewing: "The Cat Girl" (1957), "The Undying Monster" (1942) and "The Man From Planet X" (1951).
The Scoop: The main thing to recommend this middling, faux-edgy romantic drama is some generous flashes of nudity from the luscious, though marginally talented, Asia Argento.
She plays the title character in this British production about a sweet and decent grade school teacher/frustrated musician Alan (Jared Harris) who gets involved with a sexy former thief (Argento, in the title role) who can't quite put her past behind her (nor fully mask her thick Italian accent). The robbery sequences provide the only real energy in the movie, which also features a great performance by Rupert Everett in a wasted role as B.'s former partner in crime/bisexual lover.
Watch it just to ogle Asia, or for the odd other little touches, like Alan's nighttime job as a jazz DJ in a hospital (huh?).
Best Line: "Whoever thought I could find happiness in the middle of fucking nowhere?"
Side Note: Asia is the daughter of Italian horror/suspense meister Dario Argento, and she got her start appearing in his films. I guess you could call her an Italian Sofia Coppola, since she has also moved on to directing films that have been generally better received than her acting.
Coming off the successes of "North By Northwest" (1959) and "Vertigo" (1958), Hitchcock was looking for a change of pace and was inspired by the plethora of B-grade exploitation thrillers flooding the drive-ins at the time. Along came the novel by Robert Bloch, very loosely based on the infamous Ed Gein murders in Wisconsin -- which have also served as the basis of other movies, such as "Deranged" (1974) and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991).
Hitchcock acquired the film rights and set about adapting it quickly and cheaply, so it was shot in black and white with a minimum of star power. The lesser-known actors he found give terrific performances, aided by the legendary score by Bernard Hermann (his music for the shower scene is, along with the themes from "Jaws" (1975) and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1967), one of the most instantly-recognizable pieces of film music ever). To build hype for the picture, Hitchcock made theaters not allow anyone in once the film had started. The result was one of his greatest triumphs.
Best Line: "We all go a little mad sometimes."
Side Note: Among this film's shocking "firsts" for the Hollywood establishment, it was the first to show a woman wearing only a bra, the first to use the word "transvestite" and the first to show a toilet flushing on-screen. Some other firsts were dropped because of studio pressure, including brief nudity and an implied shot of Norman masturbating.
Companion Viewing: "Psycho" (1998) and "Homicidal" (1961).
Take a Look: The trailer, featuring Hitch at his droll best:
The shower scene:
Psycho (1998).
The Scoop: It's director Gus Van Sant's great experiment -- remaking the Alfred Hitchcock classic, nearly (but not quite) shot-for-shot. And yet, for all it's verisimilitude, this doesn't have the same impact as the original. Some of this may be due to the ways the audience's tastes had changed during the interval of nearly 40 years, but more of it boils down to one basic choice -- the casting of Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates. What made Anthony Perkins so effective in that role was his innocent, harmless quality. He seemed like more of a sweet geek than a psycho, which made the ending all that more shocking. He made both Janet Leigh's character and the audience comfortable. Vaughn, on the other hand, is sinister from beginning to end -- sinister enough to make you wonder why Anne Heche's character didn't run from the motel screaming the first time she saw him.
Van Sant may have recreated the visuals of the original, but there is no way anyone can recreate the experience of the 1960 movie-going public seeing it for the first time. Once a bomb has gone off, there's no way to make it unexplode.
(And one other thing that has puzzled me -- why did Anne Heche get the retro wardrobe, while Julianne Moore was dressed like an extra from "90210"?)
Best Line: "We all go a little mad sometimes." (C'mon... They were both working from the same script. You were expecting a different selection?)
Side Note: The use of the knife in the shower scene is credited to director John Woo.
Take a Look: The big basement "reveal" scene, always good for a laugh:
And finally, the two versions of the shower scene, played side-by-side (notice the subtle changes Van Sant introduced, most notably the extra doses of naked Heche):
The Scoop: This lovely little confection is inept enough to be laughable, if only it didn't wind up being so distasteful.
Desmond Harrington plays Kenneth, a repressed schlub who is also a superstar tech writer who is rising fast in his company, a publisher that provides how-to manuals for everything from computer software to carpentry and first aid (don't ask). After his oversexed coworkers introduce him to a company that sells lifelike sex dolls online, Kenneth becomes infatuated with new assistant Lisa (Melissa Sagemiller). So, naturally, he tries to make the doll over in Lisa's image, only to become horribly obssessed. From there, things slide downhill quickly.
What's wrong with this movie? What isn't?
Writer/director Robert Parigi is clearly overmatched by the whole moviemaking endeavor. The acting is horrible (Sagemiller is the only actor to register a pulse). Rip Torn and Udo Kier phone in their ridiculously overbilled bit parts. The dialogue is woodenly implausible. The plot is based on a series of improbabilities and non sequiturs. The art direction looks like it came from the dollar store. And then there's the ending, which is misogynistic at best, and utterly nihilistic at worst.
What starts out looking like humorously cheesy sex farce turns on a dime into an "American Psycho"/"Vertigo" knockoff. It's not a fun combination, and enough to lose its audience along the way -- especially since it isn't a good enough production to carry any of those other films' jockstraps.
Best Bit: The argument with the doll's tech support line: "Just tell me how to turn it off!"
Side Note: Harrington and Sagemiller did almost all their own stunts, and it definitely shows in the tepid action onscreen. Sagemiller even sustained a couple injuries.
Companion Viewing: "Vertigo" (1958), "American Psycho" (2000), "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" (1986).
Take a Look: The German-language trailer, which makes it look a lot more competent than it actually is:
The only clip available on YouTube is this, which comes from a user's collection of film clips in which women get hit on the head and knocked unconscious. Classy. And, somehow, entirely appropriate for this movie:
The Scoop: Those who don't know Anthony Perkins as anything but Norman Bates in "Psycho" owe it to themselves to hunt down this hard-to-find film.
In this low-key black comedy, Perkins is a pathologically lying arsonist, newly paroled from the mental hospital, who convinces a naive teenage girl (Tuesday Weld) that he's really a secret agent. The trouble is, she may just be crazier than he is, and things quickly get out of his control.
Noel Black's direction and Lorenzo Semple Jr.'s script (based on the Stephen Geller novel) are incisive and full of dry wit. Weld gets a chance to tear it up, playing against her squeaky-clean Disney image. And, in many ways, Perkins plays a fun variation on the character he created in "Psycho." In fact, the dumping-the-body sequence in "Pretty Poison" is a pretty sly tweak on the similar sequence in the earlier film.
An obscure gem. Unfortunately, it was horribly difficult to find for decades -- only a meager theatrical run, few TV or revival house showings, and absolutely no video release. (In fact, the copy I first saw of this years ago was a VHS dub of a late night showing from the early, early days of AMC, which found its way into my hands through a really complicated set of circumstances.) Thankfully, 20th Century Fox has finally seen fit to give it a full DVD release, so there's no longer any excuse not to pick this up at your local entertainment peddler's establishment.
Best Line: "I used to practice unlicensed tree surgery. It seems I once performed an unnecessary abortion on a peach tree."
Side Note: The film being shown in the movie theater scene is the Roger Corman quickie "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" (1967).
Companion Viewing: "Heathers" (1988) and "Natural Born Killers" (1995).
The Scoop: While "Targets" presents the story of a moral crossroads, it also represents a cinematic crossroads -- the end of the brilliant Boris Karloff's career and the start of Peter Bogdanovich's.
In this writing and directing debut, Bogdanovich crafts this cautionary, semi-autobiographical tale of aging horror movie star Byron Orlok (played by Karloff), who decides to leave the business when he realizes his life's work can't compare to the real horrors taking place on America's streets everyday. The clips of Orlok's past work are taken from the classic performances of Karloff, and to complete the real-life parallels, Bogdanovich even casts himself as the young director making Orlok's last film. There is also a parallel plot concerning a troubled young man who goes on a shooting spree that is sadly all too familiar in our post-Columbine world. These two plot strands cross when the young shooter takes refuge in a drive-in theater that turns out to be the site of Orlok's last public appearance before retirement.
This film offers an interesting exploration of the role of the entertainment media in the social upheaval of the late-'60s (it was released in the late spring of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, but before the shooting of Robert Kennedy) that has grown even more prescient today. And Bogdanovich challeges the viewer by filming from the point of view of the shooter, putting the audience in the killer's shoes.
Despite his obviously failing health, Karloff gives the strongest, most human portrayal of a career marked my more depth than most horror actors'. In a perfect world, this swan song performance would've been recognized with an Oscar. Instead, the poverty-stricken Karloff followed his performance here with appearances (confined to a wheelchair) in a quartet of bad Mexican cheapies, filmed over the course of a couple weeks, before dying in 1969. But forget those duds -- this is the true, final summation of one of the truly great acting careers in film.
Best Line: Karloff's summation, "Is that what I was afraid of?"
Best Bit: The staging of the freeway shooting scene.
Side Notes: 1) Bogdanovich originally offered the lead role to Vincent Price, who turned it down. 2) The film showing in the drive-in at the end of the movie is "The Terror" (1963), in which Karloff costarred with a young Jack Nicholson. 3) The victim who dies in the phone booth is none other than Mike Farrell, who went on to a more distinguished career in television, starring in "M*A*S*H" and "Providence."
Companion Viewing: Two of this film's cinematic descendents -- "Taxi Driver" (1976) and "Natural Born Killers" (1994).
The Scoop:
