CREEMEDIA

CREEMEDIA

DEPARTMENTS

TEENAGE WASTELAND

THE OUTSIDERS (Warner Bros.)

BAD BOYS (Universal)

by

Toby Goldstein

Back in the days when casting directors automatically hired Italians and Greeks to play the roles of Latins, Hollywood brought us a stylized filmic version of what had been a stylized Broadway play—West Side Story. Choreographed as precisely as a revue by the June Taylor Dancers, in this movie two rival New York teenage street gangs called the Jets (the white guys) and the Sharks (the pseudoPuerto Ricans) inflicted instantly regretted mayhem upon one another. Their illicit love affairs and death agonies took place to the sounds of a traditional score by none less than classicist Leonard Bernstein.

Whether it’s because the film was acted quite splendidly by a cast including Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Rita Moreno (a real Hispanic) and George Chakiris, or due to the fact that it was first released in that comparatively innocent year of 1962, West Side Story worked. Although it wasn’t believable in real terms, it was nonetheless extremely moving. 1 loved that film first-run as a kid, and I’m a sucker for it in re-runs now. Thanks to West Side Story, the fervent strains of “there’s a place for us, somewhere” belong to the ages.

Which is not to suggest that The Outsiders has any business re-cycling that line, or the war between the gangs—complete with innocent victims—and passing it off as something new. When Ralph Macchio’s character of Johnny whispers to his friend, Ponyboy (Thomas Howell), how there’s got to be a place somewhere, without Greasers or Socs, not only did I immediately figure out that the kid was doomed, but in fact that he’d been condemned in his role over 20 years ago!

Possibly as a result of his wellknown successes with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, director Francis Ford Coppola might have assumed he could get away with an equally grandiose treatment of youth in turmoil. Sorry, Frank, but gang war just ain’t on the scale of the Mafia or Vietnam. When you treat teenage passions as if they have monumental, eternal importance, instead of recognizing them as constantly changing white-hot bolts of fury, the result is not only unrealistic; it’s absurd.

Set in the backwaters of Oklahoma, The Outsiders pits the preppy-type, middle-class “Socs” (pronounced Soashes) against the leather-jacketed, working-class Greasers. When a trio of Greasers, led by the oh-soscreamable (at least in my neighborhood theater) Matt Dillon, make the mistake of hitting on a female Soc (played without substance by Diane Lane), trouble is bound to follow. Sure enough, a fight ensues, a Soc is killed, ^ind the greasers are on the run. In true morality play fashion, the greasers-with-heartsof-gold redeem themselves through a heroic death, and one survivor is left to write his memoirs. With great deliberateness, as the sun turns the sky into gold, this young lad tells his harrowing sad-but-wiser tale, diary-like. And if the above line seems particularly sugarcoated, such is the ultimate aftertaste of The Outsiders. Even worse, an extra layer of sugar is thematically imposed by Stevie Wonder at his gushing worst.

Authentically steamy moments in The Outsiders from either cast or script are few. The down-atthe-heels surliness of Tom Waits is wasted in a three line cameo throwaway. Now, that’s one guy who conveys a perfect understanding of the dead-end life simply by existing. Only when Martin Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez, has his few minutes as a rowdy greaser does The Outsiders give off any real electricity.

Estevez Jr. is graced with his father’s sinister intensity, as well as that dramatic face which projects so well on the screen.

Meanwhile, back at a reformatory straight out of the urban jungle, Halloween II director Rick Rosenthal has cast his unsparing eyes on a variously ferocious, smartass-crazy, and all around loser bunch of Bad Boys. ' In his role as the theiving, accidental hit-and-run killer Mick O’Brien (how’s that for ethnicity!), Sean Penn typifies the teenager whose chance at redemption hangs by a single slender thread. With his hooded eyes and long, stringy hair, Penn comes across as the next-door-neighbor of any raunchy heavy metal fan—right down to the Billy Squier albums he blasts in his room.

Similarly, as Mick’s girlfriend JC, Ally Sheedy isn’t out to resemble some teen dream queen. Sure, she fantasizes about a better life alone in her room, but what happens to JC in her daily life doesn’t exactly add up to virginal purity, if you get my drift. Without wanting to sound as if teenagers can only be defined by their nastiness, the sheer aggression expressed in Bad Boys, Quadrophenia, The Warridrs, ad infinitum, all the way back to West Side Story, Bad Boys deals with rivals—in O’Brien’s case a Hispanic named Paco (played with scowling vigor by Esai Morales). When the antagonists battle with words or weapons, their fights are unyielding and reckless—as only personal vendettas would believably spur. Although some critics have accused Bad Boys of racial stereotyping, as in the case of Eric Gurry’s portrayal of whacked-out Jewish whiz-kid Horowitz, 1 can only reply by thinking back to at least a halfdozen similar cases I knew back in Bronx Science. That shoe definitely fits, and Gurry’s performance is amongst the most sparkling in a movie that shocks like a sequence of short-circuits.

Individual, tense, super-charged events in the lives of kids in groups, feeling out of control— that’s what Bad Boys brings to Mr. and Mrs. America. I thing it’s a pretty fair assessment of those wildly chanqinq times.

Gimme Sleaze, Please!

by

Annene O’Kaye

Lately, 42nd Street’s been drier than yer grandad’s bone as far as unforgettably trashy movies are carrt-sarned...unless you want to go see Texas Chainsaw Mess for the 45th time. Luckily, Bill Landis came along to salvage my goremongering soul (a feat comparable to draining the Pacific with a Dixie Smurf cup) and my sanity (Avon calling, nobody home) by programming the wonderful Sleaze Festival at NYC’s 8th Street Playhouse.

Mr. Landis, publisher/author of the indispensable Sleazoid Express sure knows his stuff. The Fest, sub-titled “Films Not Shown Outside Of Drive-Ins In The Deep South” featured two weeks of daily doubles including a 5 splattering of all the sub-genius categories Exploitation offers. It was skip a day, miss a classic, and I missed some primos...fer inst: I Spit On Your Grave, Camille 2000, Africa Addio, Mondo Cane, Love Camp 7, lisa — She Wolf Of The S.S , The Drive-In Massacre, and most regrettably, I Dismember Mama, a movie I’ve wanted to see since spying the title in Creemedia at the not-so-tender age of 15. Geez, where’s The Dauph when you need him?

The first baddie I caught was Night Of The Bloody Apes. According to the tip sheet/program, this horror’s imported, though from where I know not; some fascist dictatorship in South America, no doubt. An atrociously edited, badly dubbed tale of a surgeon/scientist who “saves” his terminal son by transplanting an ape’s blood and pumper into the little croaker. Juan Jr. shows his gratitude by mutating into the missing link and tearing several muchachas y muchachos asunder. The former scientist, now non wheels (the kind hampsters run around in), eventually confronts his son on the roof of la hospital, wherefrom the impudent apester hoists a small, sickly, female child and convinces Jr. to hand over the kid to the local Kommissar so someone can shoot him and put him out of our collective misery.

The most remarkable aspects of this remarkable film include the sub-plot concerning a romance between the aforementioned copper and a lady wrestler (an ample excuse for wrestling scenes and bare tits in the locker room if nothing else); the exceptionally awkward extras who either mooed about waiting to be told what to do or overacted to Rip Taylorian proportions; and the actual footage of open heart surgery some smart geezer got ahold of and decided to build a feature-length film around.

Next up was Russ Meyer’s Common Law Cabin. Now, Meyer doesn’t need excuses for tits galore and therefore doesn’t even attempt to support this flimsy number. The setting is an outback resort/clip joint run by an overweight, overwrought guy with incestuous inclinations toward his well endowed, major-dumbo daughter who’s the picture of her dead mum, or some such rot; and his weller-endowed bottle blonde girlfriend, who sports a truly authentic interpretation of what a French accent shouldn’t be and a face that can only be described as advanced Dead Piggy. A gnarley-Charley steers the boat down the river (the only way to civilized turf naturally), bringing the suckers to this fabulous hole so they can get dicked out of their hard earned pesos and not in the way you’re thinking. Into this set-up putt-putts a Doctor with heart trouble (“Go see JuanlF’ yelled a filmviewer), his wife (a whoreslut bitch with bowling balls in her blouse who is most likely responsible for hubby’s faulty ticker), plus this seedy guy I wouldn’t trust with a used toothpick, who turns out to be the villian.

Breasts are bared, women are beaten and raped, a teenage heir turns up in a boat and begins to make time with the daughter, Charley gets shot, and everything goes out of control until the nasty protagonist is mauled in the water by faithful dead Charley in his vengeful boat. Hell, maybe this was the inspiration for all those ridiculous car movies.

The Ghastly Ones features genremaster Andy Milligan as goremeister. The location is Staten Island. The budget is $23.50 with change left over. The medium is 16mm and the camera work is pure cinema vertigo as the lens-smith swings about wildly in search of the cow-jumpingover-the-moon, occasionally landing on the subjects of this Victorian period-piece howler. All male actors appear to be homosexuals, accounting for their wives conduct (alternating between glazed stupidity and early hysterical ninny), but not their wardrobes—dresses constructed from quilted satin bedspread remnants swapped between cast members when a change of clothes is called for. Inconsistency abounds, daylight streams through windows when it’s supposed to be 11 p.m. etc., etc. A hooded killer runs rampant as a family of sisters and their husbands do the obligatory three-day-wait-in-oldhouse-to-collect-inheritance song and dance. The bloodletting is plenty (some of you more sensitive louts may not want to see if after your usual breakfast of warm beer and potater chips) but laughably crude. This was my personal fave, simply because most of it is beyond description.

In The Headless Eyes, a touchy artist-type encounters a resourceful female during a pilfering expedition into her room. She grabs the nearest weapon, which happens to be a spoon, and gouges out the poor chap’s -eye. He in turn feels obliged to run around town gpuging out various women’s eyes. The egglike organs are cleaned and implanted in plastic, which in the mid-’70s could very well have passed for art. Classic line is delivered by a girl who blunders into his grosso grande shop and .wants him to be her plastic professor—“Alright, so I’m just some art student with dumb glasses who happens to think * you’re good!”

One of the participants in this filmatic roller rink decided this should be the first arty gore movie, so it’s kind of hard to tell what’s going on as the main subject delves into every boring aspect of his one-dimensional pathos. Someone should send him a subscription to Psychology Today. In the end, all his indulgences go down the tubes as he freezes to death in a meat locker with his last victim, who deserved to die for her dress alone.

Black Shampoo, the final entry, choked me but good. There comes a time when every good authorette must stand aside for a defiriative statement made by somebody else: “This deranged Blaxpoitation flick opens with a black Warren Beatty look-alike and closes with two men battling with chainsaws.”—Bill Landis.

Oh where, oh where were Satan’s Cheerleaders, The Slime People, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, The Last Days Of Planet Earth, and I Sailed To Tahiti With An All Girl Crew? There’s always next year, until then pass the sick bag and don’t take any wooden spoons.

There Goes The Neighborhood

by

Richard C. Walls

This month’s column is being written on the mend, Dr. Prime Time having spent the just passed Easter weekend moving^ fleeing from a ravaged Detroit war zone to the relative calm of a nearsuburb. Reaching forward to secure a pen, the stabbing pains in my back and arms serve to remind me of the appropriately religious experience of pushing an 800 pound washing machine up an endless and rickety cellar stairway—while in the here and now there’s no hot water, the furnace sounds like there’s someone bowling inside it, the smoke alarm goes off when you light a match, the dog shits on the new living room rug with th^t offensive, nonchalant air that the lower species often adopt during a crisis, and my mercilessly throbbing sprained ankle soaks in . a repulsive mixture of tepid water and Epsom Salts, presented to me by my girlfriend in order, she said with cheery impudence, that I may salt my Epsom. No matter, this month’s effort will still be filled with the usual amounts of cheer and goodwill. And, if I can find my typewriter somewhere in these boxes of old Ballentine SF paperbacks and Down Beats going back to 1964, it may even see the light of day. Lucky you.

PBS has been quietly rerunning the British 13-episode series I, Claudius, to my mind the best of the British/PBS series, and one with a bit more vitality and humor than you might expect—far from being a bunch of toga clad stiffs making mockcharacters speak in modern British colloquialisms and the story is spiced with enough sex and violence to get it either a soft R or a hard PG were it to be shown in American movie theatres. When the series was originally run on Masterpiece Theatre each episode was introduced by that old smoothie Alistair Cooke, whose informative comments and plot summaries were a welcome touch. Unfortunately, for the rerun Cooke has been replaced by Anne Bancroft, who, apparently over-awed at being allowed on the culturally prestigious PBS network delivers her introductions in an annoying whisper, leadirtg one to conclude that she hasn’t actually seen the series since it’s anything but polite. What it is, this story of the succession of Caesars from Augustus to Claudius, is raunchy and intelligent and far more entertaining than anything being shown on commercial TV nowadays—in fact, it’s far more entertaining than much of what is shown 6n PBS nowadays (faint praise: just how entertaining can Yoga With Priscilla Patrick be?). The series’ audacity peaks with John Hurt’s brilliant depiction of the mad emperor Caligula, a role he seems born to play. Hurt’s effete and hang-dog look and querulous voice have always suggested some unspecified depravity and as Caligula, who marries and then murders his sister, fancies himself an incarnated god (his sister calls him “Zeusy”), appoints a horse to the senate, and randomly slaughters both friend and foe, his haggard fruitiness is perfect. Equally fine is Derek Jacobi as Claudius, the lame and stuttering observer of the passing parade, content to play the fool in order to stay out of harm’s way until he accidentally becomes emperor after Caligula’s assassination...bbt such plot descriptions only sound dull, which the series most definitely is not.

Actually, one of the series’ more memorable moments was something of a lucky accident itself and occurred during the local PBS pledge week. No doubt you’re familiar with the pledge ritual, an irritating but necessary evil of public TV and radio stations. Naturally, during this period the various pledgemongers come on like cheerleaders, brazenly bragging about their station’s uniqueness—the most oft-heard line is “and here’s something else you won’t see anywhere but on public TV.” So it was with interest that I watched, during pledge week, the /, Claudius episode which ended with Caligula desemboweling his pregnant sister and eating the fetus. Though not horribly graphic, the scene was still grisly, what with all the wretched screaming and Caligula emerging from his chambers with the blood still streaming from his lips...it represented the cutting edge of TV permissiveness and PBS is to be congratulated for not being so squeamish or puritanical as to censor it. But 1 was curious to see how they were going to handle it when they switched immediately from that harrowing climax back to pledge central—was this the night they were going to have the right-to-lifers in the studio to man the phones? Unfortunately, no— still the usual vapid rah rah rah would be wildly inappropriate. Maybe they’d make a little inoffensive tension-relieving joke (an inoffensive dead baby joke?). Anyway, good ol’ Dennis Wholey, host of PBS Latenight was the one stuck with the chpre and he looked suitably stunned, glum and distracted as though trying to figure out what could possibly be the appropriate thing to say. For connoisseurs of live TV awkwardness, it was a • priceless moment. Finally he said “Yes...that’s good too,” thought about it for another moment, nodded his head and repeated “That’s all right...that’s good too.” Meaning, I guess, that Caligulas’s strange feast, as mind-boggling as it was, was still just another of the good things brought to you by the good folks at PBS. And he was right.

Spring saw the passing of Detroit pay station ON-TV, and I’m sure you’re very sad. I know I am, I watched 197 movies on that sucker, over a 10 month period (which is not quite as ? craven as it might first soundconsidering that the average movie is about'95 minutes long, it adds up to only a little more time than the General Hospital addicts spend on their disgusting and va'stly more unrewarding habit).

ON will be missed, and since there’s no cable in Detroit or even (yet)’in this, near-suburb, I guess I’ll have to get my epiphanies somewhere else—still, I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity to have seen some truly apalling movies and for cheap, too. When I sit a prisoner in my dotage, many months from now, I can enhance my dwindling days by re-running thru my enfeebled mind some of the more lifeaffirming moments that ON has allowed me to witness.

F’rinstance: the, you should excuse the expression, climax of If You Don’t Stop It...You’ll Go Blind, a big production number with veteran song and dance man Keefe “Skirts Ahoy” Brasselle warbling an incredible ditty entitled “Don’t Fuck Around With Love”; Laurence Olivier’s deeply weird impersonation of Rudolph Hess on a crying jag in The Jazz Singer—the title character being impersonated by Neil Diamond, who has the screen presence of a box of Borax; Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris beating each other to a bloody pulp in the Roman Coliseum at the end of the chopsocky meller Return Of The Dragon—and why not?; this bit of dialogue from Tarzan, The Ape Man: Richard Harris (as the great white hunter, flat on his back with a 20 foot elephant tusk sticking out of his gut): “And I thought I’d live forever.” Bo Derek (as his ever-optimistic daughter Jane): “I don’t like to hear that kind of talk.”; Elke Sommer, barfing brown sludge and livp toads and asking priest Robert Alda to munch her muffin in the incoherent House Of Exorcism, also starring Telly Savalas, lollipop and all. There’s much more, but as usual space is running out.

Next time, more jollity, assuming I’m not done in by near-suburban ennui and an oversalted Epsom.