Prime Time

Prime Time

Face-Sucking Bloat Worms

Richard G. Walls

Briefly, then, the long suffering columnist has finally acquired the necessary subscription television facilities (there's still no cable in Detroit—what with so much money at stake it takes a while to work out the intricate details of the various payoffs, kickbacks, etc., just kidding), which means that he'll never feel compelled to watch commercial prime time TV again, ever, period. Meanwhile, he does feel compelled to write about something and so, 12 quick reviews, a sampling of the movies currently playing the cable/subsubscription circuit. The rating system is the standard one thru four, the assessments, the usual neurotic gobbledygook (D. designates director, where known—it's not like I sat in front of the TV taking notes, y'know).

BLOW OUT ('81)-D. Brian DePalma. John Travolta, Nancy Allen. People stayed away from this movie in droves, not because of the facile Hitchcock and Antonioni borrowings, which is the kind of thing that only bugs film buffs (and not all of them) and probably not because, like the other Travolta bomb Moment By Moment, it didn't yield a hit soundtrack album. More likely, the reason it stiffed was because it was one of the few "horror" movies in recent memory to exploit, explicitly, left-wing rather than right-wing paranoia—and both the gore goons and the Travolta sweeties are too apathetic to respond to that. Too bad, because, for all its directional glibness it's a substantial movie, well-acted, thoughtful, moving. (☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2).

THE DEMON (76) D. ? Cameron Mitchell, Craig Gardner. There's no mention of this movie anywhere in my voluminous reference library and I sometimes wonder if I actually saw it. Apparently two movies awkwardly joined together a la They Saved Hitler's Brain, the first one has something to do with Mitchell as a psychic trying to solve a murder while the second is a standard mad slasher piece. The two stories never come together, there's long meaningless sequences of Mitchell making faces as he stares out to sea, the end is total cypher—someone hip the Medved Bros, to this one! (☆ 3A).

DR. HECKYLL AND MR. HYPE ('80)-D. Charles B.

Griffin. Oliver Reed, Mel Welles. Director/screenwriter Griffin scripted some of Roger Corman's zanier flicks including Bucket Of , Blood and Little Shop Of Horrors (and Welles was featured in Shop as the unforgettable Gravis Mushnik) so one goes into this hoping for a little of the old outrageousness and that's exactly what you get—a little. Reed makes a wonderfully sympathetic Dr. Heckyll but the problem with this one as with so many spoofs is that the jokes are so mechanical. Make that stupid. (☆ 1/2).

FAME ('80)-D. Alan Parker. Irene Cara, Eddie Barth, Anne Mera, etc., etc. Story about a school in New York where you can learn disco dancing and how to compose and sing Carole Bayer Sager I've-got-a-lump-in-mythroat-but-I'm-gonnamake-it songs. Dreadfully corny, both musically and wih its little messages about striving and succeeding and dancing your way to inner fulfillment, this one almost gets by on editing alone—before you can adequately shudder at one hoary homily another bit of business is worming its way into your face. Might as well give in to it. (☆ ☆ V2). THE FIRST DEADLY SIN ('80) —D. Brian Hutton. Frank Sinatra, Faye Dunaway, Brenda Vaccaro, James Whitmore, E.G. Marshall. Ultra depressing movie about a killer who hammers people's skulls in while detective Sinatra, soon to retire from the force, tries to track him down. Meanwhile wife Dunaway is dying a slow painful death in the hospital. This isn't gritty realism, this is unrelieved defeatism, alienated and tired. (☆). GALAXY OF TERROR ('81) -D. Bruce D. Clarke. Edward Albert, Erin Moran, Ray Walston. A sinister planet in the farthest reaches of space, where your worst fear becomes a reality—especially if your worst fear is having your flesh ripped off by giant glob monsters. Tiresome Alien rip-off (foggy planet, changeable menace, organic landscapes) produced by Roger Corman (which may account for the giant maggot that eats one starlet's clothes before finishing her off) with more gross scenes than usual. (☆ ☆ for when Erin Happy Days Moran's little head goes "pop!").

NEW YEAR'S EVIL ('80)-D. Emmett Alston. Roz Kelly, Kip Niven. Kelly plays a castrating bitch who drives poor husband Niven to commit a series of senseless slashings of innocent women, or so we are told in this piece of hysterical-backlash-to-women's-lib garbage. Twisted bid for sympathy at the end where demented Pop tells battered Mom that after he snuffs her he's gonna take wimpy Jr. to the Rose Bowl where, presumably, they will be bonded forever in subliminal homosexual bliss. But all that is fairly standard slash fodder—the really weird thing in this flick is a punk band that sounds, variously, like CS&N, REO Speedwagon, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Chilling. (☆*)

THE NIGHT PORTER ('74)D. Liliana Cavani. Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling. Love blooms anew when an ex-Nazi concentration camp officer meets a former love slave in romantic old Vienna. The expected sex turns out to be more overwrought than sensational—the real perversion here is the way the movie's Nazi chic ambience attempts to trivialize the holocaust. It's not the evil that's banal, it's the imaginations of people who use it for set decoration. (☆).

PAYDAY ('72)—D. Daryl Duke. Rip Tom, Elayne Heilveil. Tom is C&W ringer Maury Dahnn in this little mood piece, a cut-rate Johnny Cash who uses people and then casts them aside like so many guitar picks. Full of believable characters and strong performances, this isn't really any kind of expose of the C&W scene but rather reworks the old story of the star as charismatic, pathological, doomed. (☆ ☆ ☆Vs).

RAGING BULL ('80)-D. Martin Scorsese. Robert DeNiro, Cathy Moriarty, Joe Pesci. With a protagonist so doggedly anti-heroic and a narrative whose structure is so determinedly anti-cliche, with set pieces dominated by spacey method/improvisational rhythms, all presented with a dazzling visual style, this is a movie that pulls you in at the same time it pushes you out. Less an anti-boxing tract than an anti-social act, the pleasure of watching DeNiro and Scorsese at the peak of their powers generally overwhelms the movie's basic nastiness. (☆ ☆ ☆ V2).

S.O.B. ('81)—D. Blake Edwards. Richard Mulligan, Julie Andrews, Robert Preston, William Holden. The main problem with this movie is that it isn't very funny—many of the gags are based on taboos that (in movies, anyway) don't exist anymore or at least possess a shock value of diminished potency. Even the premise that the film industry is run by demented lunatics is something less than a bold, new idea. Still, the performances are good (except for Mulligan, who's a manic bore), there's a few chuckles, and an intriguing centerpiece wherein we are asked to contemplate Julie Andrews' unspectacular but culturally significant tits. (☆ ☆ V2).

STARDUST MEMORIES ('80)-D. Woody Allen. Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling, Jessica Harper, Marie-Christine Barrault. The critics creamed this one about a troubled filmmaker and his slavering public, accusing Allen of turning on his many admirers while borrowing much too indiscriminately from Fellini's 81/2. Allen in return has denied that the film is so strictly autobiographical, that he would never deliberately alienate his fans in such a way. The movie is more acerbic than usual for Allen, but not unreasonably so, it's not a straight comedy (Rampling has a harrowing scene in an asylum that lingers long after several amusing bits are forgotten) and if any critics think that a scene where two misguided cineastes discuss a film ("what did you think the Rolls Royce symbolized?" "I think it symbolized his car") is more snipish than funny, then fuck 'em. (☆ ☆ ☆ )