for a noirish Labor Day: The Breaking Point (1950)

                                                                         header photo: Patricia Neal, John Garfield and Juano Hernandez

“if you believe I’m not workin’ hard all day,

Just step in my shoes and take my place …”         

“Just Got Paid,” ZZ Topp

Film noir is subversive in showing American war heroes returning home, only to be denied the rights and opportunities they’d supposedly been fighting for on far shores.  Meanwhile, they're tantalized by flush criminals and malign office-holders, often allied, one hand washing the other.    

In The Breaking Point (1950), John Garfield is Harry Morgan, hardworking captain of a rental boat, who descends to dealing with gangsters just to keep his business viable amid regulations and a sputtering local economy.  The moral compromises alienate his wife, played by Phyllis Thaxter, who tells him supporting his family is “the real war.”  Harry drifts back to his wartime identity, a man good with a gun, but ultimately must pick a side.   (Both this film and 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the first Bogart-Bacall teaming, are loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's The Breaking Point.)

Most criticism on the Red Scare dutifully avoids specific films, except the few explicitly mentioned in primary sources surrounding the Blacklist, but this is mere legalism.  Chronically divided, we’ve become obsessed with sticking to “proven facts,” as if all Americans work in a courtroom before retiring to home laboratories (or vice versa). 

The truth extends beyond proof, and any discussion that ignores this is timid and incomplete.  In my opinion, the Hollywood Blacklist was provoked specifically by film noir, an inherently, insistently socialist genre.  The alternative is to assume the U.S. Establishment could not tolerate the occasional advocacy film about farming (The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, et al.)  

John Garfield had already made enemies with the leftist, classic noirs Body and Soul (1947) and Force of Evil (1948), about corruption in professional boxing and urban rackets, respectively (we could footnote the privation and adultery driving The Postman Always Rings Twice, Humoresque and Daisy Kenyon).  The former pair were produced by Garfield’s own Enterprise Pictures; for the studios, at least, acting as his own producer was salt-in-the-wound.  

Garfield’s collaborators were later blacklisted: Robert Rossen (Body and Soul) and Abraham Polonsky (both films).  Polonsky fled to Europe, but Rossen tried to save himself by naming names, only to die embittered in 1966, age 57.

As the winds changed, Garfield, a premier star of the 1940s, was subjected to withering pressure but refused to buckle.  When he died of a heart attack at 39, in 1952, friends blamed the anti-communist witchhunters.  As lawyers say, however, correlation is not causation: Garfield had a bout with rheumatic fever as a youth, which left heart damage. 

Younger viewers, especially, might be interested to note that Garfield, whose politics would be very liberal even today, felt no need to “play perfect.”  (Compare Ethan Hawke’s character in Brooklyn’s Finest, who punches out a fellow cop, as I recall, for making a racist comment — at a late-night poker game — in his filthy basement.) Garfield’s Harry is indecisive and morose, snaps at his wife and daughters, and ultimately, breaks his word (like virtually everyone in this film). 

And he disrespects other ethnicities, as when, after an abortive smuggling run, he implies Chinese immigrants smell bad.  (Garfield himself reportedly called Patricia Neal “whore” on-set, as character traits spilled over into real life.) 

I enjoyed looting the Criterion of The Breaking Point for the above details (and don't mean to ignore director Michael Curtiz, who so embodied the "well-made film" he seems anonymous), watching most of the elegant film twice to understand Harry’s too-simple motivation: he’s broke.  I’ve lived a middle-class existence, taking the financial safety-net for granted.  

Harry has a safety-net, too: friends and loved ones who’ll stand by him.  His way out is to realize he's not alone (an acquaintance of mine says, “If you don’t need help, you’re not trying hard enough.”).  There's no shame if his wife takes in piece-work, or if he can’t give his friend (Juano Hernandez) steady employment.  He’s a decorated veteran, dammit. 

Everyone has his battles (like the chronic fatigue that kept me from this blog for almost a year).  Not everyone enjoys loyal friends.  It may even be that war persists, in part, to give young men a bonding experience that stays with them for life, stiffening the spine.  

At other times, mutual sacrifice takes a (more) peaceful form, as in a labor union.  Even in a solitary era that claims a "gig economy," union membership can be as profound a bond as that between soldiers in war, or forged during years of marriage. 

In the case of an employee union, the consummation is spelled S-T-R-I-K-E. 

 

 

underseen for Halloween: Body Bags (1993)

If we presently feel an inward relief, give thanks to the season, the sole one to grant a certain license: we relinquish the pretense of opposition to a "culture of death."  

Light and life arrange and justify themselves; it is our vain struggle against dying that needs framing by phrase and fable.

Though immersed in an ambitious essay, which I hope to publish while Sol still burns and gravediggers dig soft earth, I pause for my yearly charge, and post for the dreadful day.  

Body Bags is an intriguing title, if only from the mystique of movies made-for-TV, so often elusive after the initial window.  This was a bid for an anthology series for John Carpenter, who'd hammered his way to horror’s 2nd-tier, thanks to the (still underseen) TV slasher Someone’s Watching Me!, cult faves like The Fog, and the franchise-furthering Halloween and The Thing. As Carpenter acolytes, we appreciated his horror populism -- forgiving an excess of published interviews -- and the way he came back swinging after creative failures (Village of the Damned, any Halloween with a number appended).

the pride of Kentucky, John Carpenter

As written by the horror duo Billy Brown and Dan Angel (they'd go to series with Night Visions, and with R.L. Stine-based Goosebumps and The Haunting Hour) Body Bags is “worth a look,” successful in the modest goal of a fun, E.C. Comics gross-out. Still, every subgenre demands a certain amount of sweat: production values and pacing are good, but the stories have structural flaws that should’ve been addressed. 

Anne digs in

The opening is the most cinematic, set at night at a modern gas station (picture a sprawling version of that in the opening of 1953's Crime Wave). The point-of-view belongs to the improbably attractive young woman in the plexiglass shelter ringing up customers. Director Carpenter provides high style, as new-hire Anne (Alex Datcher) fences with late-night customers, from the disarming (David Naughton of An American Werewolf in London) to repulsive (Wes Craven in a cameo as a drunk creeper). 

Datcher is black, Naughton's white, and “The Gas Station” raises hackles with interracial flirting, but the later violence may be unrelated: the bad-guy seems to kill based on opportunity no motive needed (the twenty-years-past trauma is a cliche, but it works).  Still, the villain's real-life lineage touches the origins of horror cinema, and he meets a satisfying end: even at this full-service shop, he'll be beyond repair.

From here, Body Bags turns to body parts, first “Hair,” with Stacy Keach.  Richard seems to have it all -- nice apartment, young girlfriend -- but thinks only of his thinning hair.  His solution provides the excuse for memorably grotesque special effects.

The real problem is the girlfriend, hot-Scot Sheena Easton (initially a singer, Easton was not-bad as an actor but couldn't hide the burrrrr).  Like George Costanza, Richard needs a pre-emptive breakup.  Instead he consults an expert, as the script weakly spoofs "the Hair Club for Men,” then a stand-up comedy staple.  After a blissful interlude (think Jack Nicholson in Wolf or Wendell Pierce in "Something With Bite"), experimental plugs are revealed as mere (scalp) cover, leading to a CGI freakshow, a pocket Starship Troopers. 

The hairmonger is David Warner as “Dr. Locke,” nudge. The filmmakers even revive the Cronenbergian casting-for-name (ever notice? it's Samantha Eggar having The Brood, Stephen Lack as the prodigal weirdo in Scanners).  Locke’s assistant, naturally, is Debbie Harry (the Blondie singer).  Body Bags' ender "Eye" is a chronicle of baseball decline; the presence of Britain’s erstwhile supermodel “Twiggy” may be another elbow-to-the-ribs. 

The connecting theme here is the decline of white-American men (if that’s not too much gravity for a TV-movie with a male Medusa). Descent continues with the ballplayer, played by Mark Hamill (better known as Luke Skywalker), another bright-horizons space-hero scapegoated into spoof and satire: there’s William Shatner, of course, but also Adam West, from Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Outer Limits "The Invisible Enemy" to Batman; Martin Landau, from Space:1999 to Ed Wood; and the Naked Gun franchise's Leslie Nielsen (Forbidden Planet), Tim O'Connor (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), Fred Ward (The Right Stuff) and (speaking of horror) O.J. Simpson (Capricorn One). 

have your doctor take a look 

Note the fantastic genres are rarely kind to baseball, a past relic in The Twilight Zone ("Extra Innings") and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; in The X-Files "The Unnatural," the midcentury game has been infiltrated by aliens.  Closer to Body Bags is the infamous E.C. story where human parts provide the diamond essentials (bases, etc.). 

This "Hands of Orlac" update gives Hamill's character the "Eye" of a dead serial killer, with flashbacks to the killer's abusive childhood.  Directed by Tobe Hooper, "Eye" may be the most "rounded" of the three stories, with a decent setup and payoff.  

The horror-anthology feature film became rare in the 1990s, perhaps because horror was more common on television.  In retrospect, the inception of horror series with continuing characters (Werewolf, Twin Peaks, Millennium) was a sign of our (ongoing) apocalypse.  Sustainable ratings remained elusive, so genre anthologies migrated to the thunderdome of cable-TV.  

A fantastic anthology is the most subversive TV format. In its hit-and-run episodes, anything can happen, to the destruction of the human race (a frequent indulgence of the 1990s Outer Limits).  It's a tempting crystal ball for creatives: George Romero produced Tales from the Darkside and Monsters; restoration would reveal the best as art-TV (my next post: rec's for Darkside).  Wes Craven served on the 1980s Twilight Zone, and stabbed at a semi-anthology with Nightmare Cafe; David Cronenberg directed an episode of another semi-anthology, Canada's millenarian Friday the 13th: The Series. 

Body Bags seems relatively unambitious, as if Carpenter's best hope for a series was to feint toward parodic crap, promising a Showtime equivalent to Tales from the Crypt.  Such a disguise may permit brilliant tragedy or social satire, and his proposed title may allude to the Nightmare on Elm Street/Twin Peaks motif "wrapped in plastic."  Like most attempts, though, Body Bags was discarded, to fill a single morgue-drawer of evidence.  

Island City (TV movie pilot, 1994) score: 2 of 4

In this post to Pop Matters, I reviewed Gene Roddenberry's Pax TV movies, in which a post-apocalyptic Earth is ministered to by Pax, a sort of post-U.N.  The viewer surrogate is Dylan Hunt who, like Buck Rogers, wakes up after centuries of suspension.  In a classic of network passive-aggression, three of these supposed pilots were commissioned, aired and rejected, 1973-5.  (Dylan Hunt's story did go to series, sort of: that's the name of the revived hero of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda, one of two posthumous series developed from Great Bird outlines.)

In the first PAX movie, 1973's Genesis II, Hunt is played by Alex Cord, with his usual pornstache. 

Dylan Hunt before his long sleep

More substantively, I wrote, the suspense is undercut by the name of an otherwise mysterious civilization, the "Tyranians."  Their subsequent villainy seems as inevitable as that of the Decepticons.  

Flash-forward to 2021: midway into a history doc, my ears reddened, when I learned of the Tyrrhenians, legendary precursors to the Etruscans (and the Mediterranean between mainland Italy and Sicily/Sardinia is known as the Tyrrhenian Sea).  d'ho.

At the risk of self-justification, I still think it doesn't work for Genesis II, in putting the average viewer ahead of the script, if only by an accident of phonetics (the movie never spells the word).  Granted, it's Roddenberryesque to veer to controversial theories of Etruscan origins: his was a restless intellect (he named Star Trek: TNG characters after Benjamin Whorf and Texas Guinan).  Still, the intriguing backstory would've been better developed for the pilot or saved for Season 1.   

back to the forbidden zone 

All of which came to mind because 1994's Island City is undone by a similar mistake. It's another TV-movie pilot, with another valiant, post-apocalyptic team sworn to restore civilization. The inventive twist: the catastrophe was neither martial nor ecologic, but side effect of an anti-aging serum, which makes millions into "Recessives," i.e. latter-day cavemen prone to violence. Why not test the wonder-drug more thoroughly? As Sherman Fraser charges in Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan, "even for TV sf, the science is awfully sloppy."

The utopian goal of greatly increased longevity is attained, but only for an elite, their lives complicated by a large, hostile underclass.  The dynamic varies Planet of the Apes, or The Twilight Zone "Eye of the  Beholder," with aging instead of looks.  

As a series, Island City would've focused on the "normals" who defend their eponymous outpost.  The pilot movie spreads itself thin, with action, soap, humor and the figurative commentary for which TV sci-fi is known.  It's unwieldy, but the humor is essential: as in the Geico commercials (and short-lived sitcom), modern-day cavemen = funny.

Even before getting to plotting, flaws: the fx are rather primitive for the '90s,  including the backlot-armored vehicles, which recall the Pax movies, or the disposable, Saturday a.m. likes of Ark II.  The patrol scenes resort to a disused quarry (or similar), like Blake's 7 and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  One character has a teen son hooked on VR (a '90s buzz-concept), while staying within family-show rails. 

curate's egg

Like the Genesis II name-drop, Island City's bigotry parallel is intriguing in itself.  The team soon adds a sympathetic half-Recessive who, like Spock and Worf, struggles with identity.  All of which had become fairly standard (see also the soulful Diggers of Seaquest, the defensive androids of Tekwar), but there's further provocation, in that most of the elite still use the youth drug, necessitating mating-restrictions (compare the art-house Code 46).  

Unfortunately, the pilot merely sideswipes this moral tangle, dropping hints of terrorism, as some norms abstain from the drug on political grounds.  Granted, the filmmakers run out of time as they introduce the premise and a half-dozen regular characters.  Still, it's all set-up without payoff.  It didn't work in 1973, it wasn't going to work in the busy syndication market of 1994.  

before their big breaks

Island City's talented cast features an amusing Hollywood synchrony: Brenda Strong and Veanne Cox play long-lost sisters (tough officer and man-hungry refugee, respectively).  Each would soon make an impression on Seinfeld, Strong as "braless wonder" Sue Ellen Mischke, and Cox as Toby, the excitable editor.  Sitcom viewers will also recognize Gregg 23 (better than clones #1-22, but clumsy) as Eric McCormack of Will and Grace, and trooper Seall is Constance Marie, Angie on George Lopez.  One team member persevered in service: Kevin Conroy voiced the animated Batman.  

Cloned (1997 TV movie) score: 2.5 (of 4 stars)

** this review contains spoilers **

We all have the vices of our virtues, and medical doctors tend to objectify human beings.  Slowly, they may be making the world a de facto unpaid study. 

Skye Weston (Elizabeth Perkins) backtracks in the watchable 1997 TV-movie Cloned (dvd out-of-print but available).  She and husband Rick (Bradley Whitford) lost their son a year ago.  As they debate trying again, she glimpses her boy in a shopping district.  (The moment of uncanny echoes Duplicates, a 1992 TV-movie with Gregory Harrison and Kim Greist).  A smart professional, Skye sleuths, finding evidence of multiple women with identical sons.  She posts to the (primitive) Internet for help, and when she finds a slew of responses, it remains chilling, despite dial-up graphics.

Cloned was an NBC film but could pass for Lifetime.  As Cascades Gothic, its plot is less involved than a typical X-Files, which may alienate fans.  Still, the movie's frank with the horror of a woman betrayed when most vulnerable, as well as the difficulty in preventing (the return of) human commodification.  Cloned was made by veterans of TV-movies, not speculative fiction; perhaps they confused sci-fi with comic book storytelling.  If so, their muckraker lacks the scope and visual interest of the latter.  

Still, it's grounded by an impressive Perkins, a star of the era (Big, The Flintstones).  Her Skye is stuck in “Anger” stage, though she's not just a scorned mother: the rage issues, we feel, go back.  She snaps to See-the-manager mode, her comments more offensive than necessary, as Rick contains the damage.  She's actually refreshing, and the film's passive community doesn’t deserve better.  Cloned wasn't a pilot (going by Fraser Sherman's Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan), but this Skye may've supported another transit.

Not all's dire: Enrico Colantoni (Just Shoot Me, Veronica Mars) is amusing as security guard Rinker, the cheerfully-evil hired-muscle.  (Note the production felt compelled to also cast a good bald man, a federal agent.)  Roger Cross, following Ernie Hudson and Joe Morton as “black sci-fi guy," is another security guard, Tina Lifford a white-coated tech, and Scott Paulin the bottom-line shark.  

Cloned followed buzz about Dolly the cloned sheep, named for Dolly Parton, as modern priests appropriated celebrity to sell vexatious fertility.  Similarly, the villains in Cloned aren’t mad scientists but aggressive capitalists.  In a scene evoking the same year's Alien: Resurrection, it’s revealed cloning is practice for the real business, growing replacement organs (the alarm-cycle broadens to The Island of Dr. Moreau/1996, Dirty Pretty Things/2002, and Repo Men/2010).  When the sellout fertility expert, Dr. Kozak (Alan Rosenberg), claims ends justify means, Skye fires back his own words: “First, do no harm.” 

underseen for Halloween, 2020 (from behind the mask)

This year's encomiums include a pair of television-plays of 1973, but with no regard to proceedings lately before the eldership in America.    

As ever, the plays are mere hoarfrost amusements, or if the reader prefers, admonishments before "red hour," the tricks or treats.    

Dying Room Only (1973)

The late Richard Matheson was one of television's most reliable: he wrote for Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, created the underrated Circle of Fear, and supplied teleplays for various Dan Curtis productions, including both "Kolchak" features.  Like the Matheson-Spielberg Duel (1971), Dying Room Only is a desert-gothic and a precursor to The Hitcher, The Vanishing and Breakdown.  More modestly scaled, Dying Room Only has, in addition to Matheson's craft, striking desert photography, and a cast including two Oscar winners.

An “ordinary” couple is returning from a road-trip vacation.  Wife Cloris Leachman wants to drive 100 miles out-of-the-way to get photos of a native "wikiup" for a school project (the kid's back home).  Husband Dabney Coleman resists; their quarrel is horror's trigger-sin. 

In a culture dependent on racial identity, it’s not unusual for an American film to be about race even when all characters are white.  This spousal conflict, referencing Indians, evokes national anxiety.  Later, Cloris pokes into a dark storeroom, as if in the national unconscious.   

Handled correctly, such notes create an edge, especially for white viewers: for the conservative, the characters are endangered by their soft-minded disloyalty and condescension.  And regardless, they've been identified with genocide. 

When Coleman disappears, Leachman runs up against clannish locals Ned Beatty (just off the implicitly racial Deliverance) and Ross Martin.  Malignity is gradually exposed, in unnerving fashion.  The narrative is so hard on the female lead, some may object.  Early in 2nd-wave feminism, equality was dead serious -- she's on her own.

Frankenstein: The True Story (1973) 

This film is charged mislabeled, because not faithful to Mary Shelley’s novel.  Without researching the makers' intent, it's frustrating: if faithfulness were the claim, they could’ve billed it “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (available, in 1973). 

Perhaps the subtitle is more in reference to metaphor cheek-by-jowl with reality.  Frankenstein: The True Story, originally a prestige miniseries, is very much costume horror.  Amid the shocks and trading for parts, we see 17^th century industry draw motley laborers from all points, to form new, roiling communities.  Historically, the communities became Frankenstein cultures, often appalling, disowned and self-loathing.  A cultured appreciation for history helps this version be a worthy cousin to Hammer's Frankenstein, then completing its impressive run.

The cast includes Michael Sarrazin as the Creature and David McCallum as Clerval; Jane Seymour is memorably erotic as Prima.  Top billing goes to James Mason, who'd already been 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and on a Journey to the Center of the Earth, and would groom The Boys from Brazil (these credits bely Charlton Heston as first science-fiction star).  

Mason plays Polidori, a new character (by teleplay writer Christopher Isherwood) named after a real friend of the Shelleys.  Although this senior scientist is more consequential than those in most Frankenstein films, Polidori does nothing to discourage Victor’s recklessness.  Perhaps the name was too good to waste: a professed love of all implies an actual love of no one.  This Polidori is an omnivore, waiting for one like Victor to dare the jealousy of God.

With these provocative threads, and the miniseries form still largely untested, a touch of self-sabotage should not surprise.  The first minutes shatter the fourth wall, as Mason hosts clips that give away too much of the plot (skip to 5:44 to avoid spoilers).  

Well, it’s not as if we're unfamiliar with the major beats.  Since at least James Whale in 1931, Shelley's novel has likely been on-the-boards somewhere on any given day.  Frankenstein is a modernist liturgy, a ritual of egomaniacal science transgressing and punished.  The universal refusal to marry Shelley has kept her narrative electric and viral.  And we need the catharsis, when the creature so rarely completes circuit back to his creator ... this side of the mirror.  

Extraordinary Tales (2013)

This is an impressive animated anthology of Edgar Allan Poe, evidently for all ages.  As such,  the Tales are among the most familiar, and will elicit varied responses.  The animation style is more like book illustrations than anything "cartoony," and reminded me of the classics The Selfish Giant and The Woods.  Voices heard include those of Bela Lugosi (reading "The Tell-Tale Heart") and Christopher Lee.  

Caveats: some screens are busy with CGI; the pace is too fast in the first two stories.  It's understandable to schedule for parents, with content more challenging as we go (kids-to-bed before "The Masque of the Red Death"), but the opener, "The Fall of the House of Usher," plays like "Rod Usher's Greatest Hits."  It's especially regrettable in that the medium seems ideal for multiple versions of a film.    

Still, it's an impressive set, especially the wry horror of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and the quietly terrifying "The Pit and the Pendulum."  These are reason to see Extraordinary Tales.  "Valdemar" may be the best English-language version; certainly, it's flights above George Romero's misbegotten Two Evil Eyes (1990).  While worthy Corman-Poe, Tales of Terror (1962) commercializes "Valdemar" with a romance.  (Reviews discourage consideration for The Mesmerist, a 2005 black comedy with Neil Patrick Harris.)

Extraordinary Tales is wrapped in an original frame: a Continental-accented Lady Death tries to seduce Poe (as a raven) from his attachment to life.  If their dialogue is "therapy-speak," it is, at least, perceptive: 

Lady Death: You have devoted so many pages to my name ...  All veiled love letters, addressed to me. You fear me.  And yet you are insatiably attracted. Come with me … it's time.

Poe: No -- it cannot be. I don't want to be forgotten. I was buried in a common grave. My writings were forgotten for years.

Lady Death: ... Come now, Poe. You love me! You've been a corpse walking amongst the living for a long time, Edgar. It must have been quite a strain ...  Look at your final acts: they all succumb to my prowess.  The poor, the weak, the rich, the powerful.  Everybody bows before me. 

There's nothing unusual in Poe being temporarily forgotten, it was the same with H.P. Lovecraft.  That which is most challenging to the culture triggers a quarter-century denial (where needed, the period is indefinite).  Similarly, the films we revisit from any era are almost never the hits.

If Edgar Allan Poe triumphed over death, it was from insight.  He knew the optimistic, utopian, forward-thinking society protests too much, its national poet should write "horror stories for boys" (critic Leslie Fiedler's phrase).  And so the obscurity pitched into a pauper's grave has 392 credits on the IMDb.  

Deep Red (1994 TV movie) score: 2 of 4

Haun as the first human to benefit from "Reds"

not that Deep Red

In a prologue that evokes Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Thing (1982), an alien ship disintegrates in Earth's atmosphere.  As tiny shards spray a park, one pierces a girl's face (as an adult, Lindsey Haun would have a recurring role on True Blood).  She not only recovers, her club foot is healed.

Duly impressed, scientist Newmeyer (John de Lancie) seizes the alien nanotech, dubbed "Reds," as a lucrative panacea/fountain of youth.  ("Deep Reds" are the upgrade, or something.)  He's opposed by the girl's mother (Lisa Collins), herself revivified, but also reeling from the murder of her husband (Newmeyer's erstwhile colleague), played by future-Jigsaw Tobin Bell.

the goodies: Collins, Pacula & Biehn

All of which might be too much premise for a mock-serious neo-noir with a dangling subplot about killer milkmen.  It might've worked as a self-spoof, but even the humor could've used Deep Reds (and milk).

As noted on Moria, Deep Red is confusing: we expect the aliens to show up (again) -- they never do -- while the indulgent character-morphing might force a rewind.  Script fixes would've been rather simple, raising questions of what happened, and, perhaps, the prospect of a redemptive remake.

Michael Biehn is well-cast as Joe Keyes, a dissolute P.I. hired by Collins.  Keyes has been down, ever since a colleague's wife was killed on his watch, which sounds like backstory for a series.  The cast also includes conspiracy vet Joanna Pacula, Steven Williams as a sketchy police contact, and John Kapelos, in basically his Forever Knight role.  Further "pilot" evidence: the nanotech isn't discredited by the end, as the new (very healthy) family drives to sundown.

Amusingly, as Deep Red begins, it seems everyone in this Dark City has a shingle, outside dirty office with desk and chair, like a comic variant of "Demon with a Glass Hand."  There are such glimmers, but like the pieces of the alien craft, they disperse. 

bats left (no, right), throws right (no, left)

My work is rarely to-the-minute, and I rarely consider when a piece will be read.  I started this post long before Covid-19 and the consequent postponing of the baseball season.  If it doesn't elevate, nor replace peanuts and Cracker Jack, it is, I hope, of interest.         

Over the winter, news of an actual MLB game to be played at the location for 1989's Field of Dreams (left) summoned one of the all-time film flubs: Shoeless Joe Jackson hitting right-handed.  Ray Liotta, playing Jackson, failed badly to hit left-handed despite pro coaches on set (per this New York Post interview).  Finally, Liotta was given permission to switch sides.  It doesn't explain why the filmmakers didn't prioritize accuracy from the start.

The 1919 White Sox added disgrace to poverty when they threw the World Series.  70 years on, the "Black Sox" were in the zeitgeist: 1988's Eight Men Out had D.B. Sweeney as Jackson.  According to MLB Radio's Ryan Spilborghs (in a special devoted to Bull Durham), the athletic motions in Eight Men Out are "terrible."  Even so, that Joe Jackson hit lefty, at least.  Filmmaking is tough, but faking a base hit is still easier than the real skill (hitting a round ball with a round bat).  Faking is Hollywood's job.

Shoeless Joe Jackson

It's not that Ray Liotta was perfect casting otherwise: he doesn't look or sound like Jackson, who was from South Carolina.  (Actually, Jackson looked more like top-billed Kevin Costner.)  The production makes matters worse in the field: Jackson threw right-handed, but Liotta's Jackson throws left-handed (again, the actor's preference).  Effectively, the switch draws the attention of anyone still oblivious.  (Field of Dreams also flips Moonlight Graham left to right as a batter, as the redemption-mad narrative grants a sympathetic washout his first big-league at-bat.)

Liotta as Jackson

Thus, we've had non-answers regarding Field of Dreams and its Bizarro World Joe Jackson.  As with Marco Rubio's awkward lunge (addressed here), the baseball flick's "epic fail" may be rooted in polarization trauma.

If so, the filmmakers added their own reason for anxiety.  Their message is memorably spoken by James Earl Jones (as author Terence Mann):

The one constant through all the years ... has been baseball.  America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.  It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.  But baseball -- has marked the time.  This field, this game ... (is) a reminder of all that's good, and could be again.  

Fans can only forgive the script's worst sabotage: the school-auditorium meeting.  All the parents arguing for exclusion of Mann's indecorous book (from the school library) fit the Hollywood-and-Left stereotype: they're ignorant, resentful, repressed.  As Annie Kinsella, Amy Madigan warns them not to be like "the Nazis."  Just as young Ray (Costner) insulted his father (who died before Ray could apologize), the film picks a side from which to decry division.

Even with this regrettable scene, Field of Dreams delivered a plea for unity.  It went unheeded, but we should have self-mercy.  Polarization, I've come to believe, is part of the normal operation of the United States.  The owner of a high performance car should expect road noise and greater maintenance; a nation based in diversity, democracy and ambition is comparable.  (Reading on 3/27, this is ~trite.  But who makes it so?)

If we get twitchy around moves left and right, we need the distraction.  The existential unknown may be displaced to a Jack Nicholson movie: "what if this is as good as it gets?"  How would we ever react, to the honest conviction all our American plans are good for a laugh.

This blog doesn't feature comments, but I very much appreciate your reading.  

checkdown: Brooklyn's Finest (2009) score: 1.5 (of 4)

"Checkdown" is overheard lingo from American football: a play called at the line-of-scrimmage.  Thus, a checkdown review is relatively quick and rough, an attempted end-around perfectionism.  

Cheadle and Snipes posture in Brooklyn's Finest

A tragedy of Hollywood is that the established filmmaker may be subjected to more pressure than the first-time director.  It can ruin an otherwise well-made film, like this one by Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Olympus Has Fallen).  That it fools some (6.7 IMDb) doesn't make it less ridiculous.

Brooklyn's Finest is about men, as portrayed by stars, those being Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere, even Will Patton.  Over the course of the film, the characters plan, allude to and are accused of transgressions,  but we hardly see them do bad.  Repeatedly, the movie stops short: Hollywood stars are notorious for demanding likable, admirable characters.

And so Snipes is a compelling drug kingpin, for whom an undercover Cheadle nobly bleeds, while Hawke's up-against-it cop can't quite grab the loot once he has the chance, and consequently winds up shot.  Hawke's edgy NYC detective also won't allow ethnic jokes at his poker game.  As for Richard Gere's character, he seems well-preserved and virile, for a disgraced alcoholic.  He remains a cop for the pension, but redeems himself saving abused women.

Apparently, writer Michael C. Martin and Fuqua couldn't fit a scene with a cat up a tree.    

Legion (1998 TV-movie) score: 2 (of 4)

** minor spoilers only **

Legion gets a nod in Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan by Fraser A. Sherman, so I braved a stuttery stream.  A modest Sci-Fi Channel production (not yet "Syfy" in 1998), the tale of future war is like a facetious episode of the contemporary Outer Limits.  It doesn't quite work, but with points of interest.

Terry Farrell in more familiar guise

Moonlighting from Deep Space 9, Terry Farrell is Major Agatha Doyle, who's tasked with leading a dirty-dozen military offenders against an enemy "fuel processing plant" in a civil war for the solar system.  Her platoon of "scum" all have the requisite vital specialties and tragic backstories, e.g., Parker Stevenson's an officer cashiered for desertion.  There are multiple psychopaths (one a needle addict), a saboteur fragger, and a colorful distaff column: a nympho traitor, a rape-revenge case, and a religious fanatic.

Farrell doesn't convince as a hard-bitten officer, but it's partly the script: Doyle is so one-note tough, I suspected she was an android.  An interesting cast also includes Rick Springfield and Trevor Goddard.  Corey Feldman may be cast to type, but he gives a lazy, selfish performance as a (brainy) con.

The team starts 10-strong, and as they split up for patrol, the viewer may conflate.  Most turn out to have been falsely accused and/or acting in self-defense, suggesting the script/movie might've started as a pilot.

These heart-of-gold badasses don't know just what they're fighting, except that it's big and bad and leaves piles of uniformed corpses behind.  Once revealed, the foe makes an impression (less so, for those who've glimpsed the box art), but Legion takes too long getting there.  Worse, there's little progressive learning, though the viewer may triangulate from the premise, title, and Troy Donahue's character.

In a mystery-thriller, half the fun is matching wits with the protagonists as they strategize.  Without intell, Farrell in particular is left hanging, as Doyle incongruously agonizes over her fitness to command.  The all-at-once ending seemed confusing -- or maybe I checked out.   

These flaws could have been fixed, rather easily; it may've been (self-) sabotage.  While the film superficially resembles Space: Above and Beyond,  the relatively gung ho Fox series, these Legion-aires are entirely victims of their own command.  This cheeseburger of a TV-movie dares portray an American military on imperial business (pointedly, the flag is unseen until a likely suicide errand).  Even when tongue-in-cheek, subversive content draws flak.

War Machine (2017) rating: 3 of 4

War Machine is a dramatization of Michael Hastings' book about the Afghanistan war, The Operators (which expanded the 2010 Rolling Stone piece, "The Runaway General").  This film is welcome evidence Hollywood is still capable of satire (after Southland Tales, American Dreamz, The Joneses, Salvation Boulevard and Butter).

Brad Pitt as"MacMahon"

General Glen McMahon -- Brad Pitt, playing a cartoonish version of Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- seems more concerned with projecting affirmative masculinity than strictly military objectives.
It's a funny turn: ready with a buzzword, McMahon has a hilarious, stiff gait even when jogging.  Brow perpetually furrowed, his hands claw for odd emphasis.  But he rarely loses his temper, leaving it to a sycophantic posse.

As commander of allied forces in Afghanistan, his job isn't so much waging war as lobbying governments.  As said by a German official (Tilda Swinton in a lucid cameo), careerism renders  McMahon oblivious to whether American goals in the region make any sense.  When a U.S. soldier vents about the surreal conflict where medals are given for "courageous restraint," the general tells him "get un-confused."

The overall tone is sadly wry.  Though well-acted, some of the supporting characters smack of manipulation: the visiting wife (Meg Tilly) would be equally lonely during a necessary war; Ben Kingsley appears as the corrupt puppet-ruler of Afghanistan, but we don't see Hamid Karzai before the dubious office.

The pivotal scene is an airplane encounter between McMahon and Pat Mackinnon (Alan Ruck as a fictionalization of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry).  After one-or-more drinks, Mackinnon breaks down the general's task:

You're not here to win, you're here to clean up the mess ... (to) show everyone ... a nicer set of graphs.  Either that, or get yourself fired.  

These lines, along with McMahon's lack of "face time" with the president, illuminate the casual disrespect, reported by Hastings, of those up the chain of command.  Of course, President Obama soon fired McChrystal.

When a person or group consistently fails to achieve stated goals, we should question the desire to succeed.  Despite its wit and value as history, War Machine is ultimately disingenuous, in assuming American shortfalls in Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East are problematic ... for anyone other than soldiers and the host nations (the word "insanity" is prominent). The opposite may be true, in the context of U.S. global dominance and, especially, the Pentagon's yearly allowance of over $500 billion.

underseen for Halloween 2019, Part 3: The Doctor and the Devils (1985)

(spoilers throughout)

           Roger Ebert called The Doctor and the Devils “unredeemed, dreary, boring, gloomy dreck.”  It is gloomy.  It's also mournfully distinctive, for this writer, and beautifully produced, both painterly and disgusting.  The last helps earn the horror tag, though it’s as much a period dramatization.  It's a based-on-truth Frankenstein movie.     

 from Shout! Factory

Despite the billing, the focus is the working class.  In early-19th century Britain, outdated mores forced a black market in fresh cadavers (for medical research), when the enterprising Fallon (Jonathan Pryce) and Broom (Stephen Rea) take up shovels.  Before it's done, at least one is a serial-killer avant la lettre.  Their patron is Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton), a progressive surgeon secure in his own virtue.  Rounding the eclectic cast are Julian Sands (who’d become a minor horror star) as a naif who falls for a bleak-minded whore (played by ‘60s model Twiggy), with Patrick Stewart as Rock’s fuming rival.

The milieu may evoke Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and Michael Radford’s), though the Orwellian hell is government surveillance, which could've helped here.  Also, we may recall Dickens, Dostoyevsky, and true-crime biopics like In Cold Blood.  As were the The Body-Snatcher (1945) and The Flesh and the Fiends (1960), The Doctor and the Devils was inspired by the real Burke and Hare, suppliers to one Dr. Knox.  (Fiction can’t improve on the names.)  

Mostly, this film gets mixed reviews.  On Slant, Chuck Bowen ends a mostly positive review thus:

The Doctor and the Devils shares Rock’s problem: decrying the state of humanity while displaying precious little of its own.   

the Fox release

DVD Savant Glenn Erickson charges Freddie Francis with indifference:

there's no indication of a director doing anything more than illustrating a script. … this picture just plays out in a flat line. It's handsome and intelligent, but it doesn't grab us.

Well, it’s a hothouse flower.  Still, degrees of success shouldn’t prevent wonder at what's attempted: it's a rare film that disclaims Manichaeism, portraying modernity as an exploitation matrix.  (It seems hard to deny; I've written of our moral entanglement, as in this essay on The Sopranos.)  

The film's pedigree is impressive, and instructive.  Poet Dylan Thomas's screenplay was a pre-Black List item, unproduced for 30 years.  Producer Mel Brooks reportedly wanted major changes, but director Francis lobbied for a faithful adaptation, leading to revisions by Ronald Harwood.  

Harwood, best known for The Dresser, also wrote a series of plays and films about 20^th century celebrities in relation to Nazi Germany, including The Pianist.  The Doctor and the Devils contains intimations of genocide, as do The Elephant Man and The Fly, other Mel Brooks productions.  (Of course, Mr. Brooks is Jewish.  He served in the U.S. military during World War II, later daring to make The Producers.)
             As Jim Knipfel describes on den of geek, several narrative films stay reasonably close to Burke and Hare.  Accuracy aside, and even with a tacked-on reprieve for the Twiggy character, The Doctor and the Devils is the least pandering version.  The others carefully delineate characters from viewers, as in casting the doctor: in The Flesh and the Fiends it's Peter Cushing, already known as Dr. Frankenstein, and it's uber-unnerving Henry Daniell in The Body-Snatcher (in an insipid subplot, Daniell initially refuses a disabled girl a needed operation).  Thriller "The Innocent Bystanders" (1962) is disgraceful, as it exaggerates a story that's terrible to begin with.  In each of these, one of the killers is made a (literal) moron, and a prominent victim, a beautiful woman.   

The Doctor and the Devils skips the doctor's noble, half-false confession (another trope), leaving him haunted by memories and conscience.  And if Dr. Rock was willfully ignorant of the origins of same-day deliveries, are we so different?  
             

The three films reviewed in these Halloween 2019 posts are prophetic works, and have been knocked about: It’s Alive was dumped by Warner Brothers, but Larry Cohen persevered, and it became a hit three years after initial release.  Both Vampire Circus and The Doctor and the Devils suffered late cuts.  The critics hedge, e.g., Danny Peary condemns It’s Alive for a “shameful premise.”  According to Peter Nichols, “Vampire Circus isn’t so much a good film as a good bad film” (whatever that means). 

However different in style — having the aspect of Fellini-gazing horror, grindhouse sick-joke, and PBS adaptation — the films share a moral perspective.  They lack villains, excepting the vampires (who only do-what-vampires-do), and heroes, vessels for the innocence of viewers.  If they overreach — if The Doctor and the Devils is self-serious, Vampire Circus, a bit overfed, and if Larry Cohen made a motion picture about an action figure — prophets also self-sabotage.  He wants to protect his culture, almost as much as he wants to damn it.

underseen for Halloween 2019, Part 2: the It's Alive trilogy (1973-86)

ballyhoo: "one thing wrong ... It's Alive"

(Spoilers throughout.)

               20^th century history seemed to destabilize, with new technologies, mass migrations, and a range of time-limited phenomena from rock n’ roll to genocide.  Industrialization, effectively, made us test subjects.  The fluctuations called for nervous parody. 

Larry Cohen, the late exploitation auteur, typically used high-concept as a stalking horse, building a provocative film around some scary-funny threat (e.g., revived Aztec god Q, addictive dessert The Stuff).  Recalling the shock of a baby’s tantrum, Cohen invented a movie-monster for the cocooning, post-Vietnam U.S.: homicidal infants.  Cradled in a Bernard Herrmann score, the blunt-headed metaphor remains morbidly funny (for some of us) half-a-century later.

The first and best of a trilogy, It’s Alive (1973) is the singular fertility narrative of Frank and Lorene Davis (the first-names evoke horror history).  Suburban and white, they’re habituated to television, prescription pills and cow’s milk — a motif, as when the Carnation man becomes prey — and live in California, where trends start.  Americans believe in “progress," and the new parents seem fairly indifferent to causes.  The smartly satiric horror film ends dropping-the-mic: “Another one’s been born in Seattle.” 

toughest job in the world ...

While acknowledging the comic angle, It’s Alive centers on John P. Ryan’s titanic performance as Frank Davis, as he's betrayed by friends and fate.  Still, he can’t erase his issue.  His Job-like travails deliver twin themes for the franchise: Americans have become fatalistic; the parent-child bond is nearly unbreakable.  The themes mutually reinforce, e.g., repeated speculation the mutants have superior resistance to pollution, similar to the children in These Are the Damned.

The series is less interested in the babies than in society’s reactions.  As in Night of the Living Dead, most characters are comically quick-to-adjust.  As writer-director of the trilogy, Cohen favors canted-angle shots of figures darting here and there: the “normal” characters are as flighty and reflexive as the babies.  If the sequels are less nimble than the original, and repetitive, that might also be the point. 

It Lives Again (1978) posits a hidden colony, for humane study.  Despite help from new dad Frederic Forrest, the rogue pediatricians are themselves too geriatric to manage their charges.  Meantime, the genetic shuffling seems to multiply, e.g., a birthday party where tykes crawl under low branches, and the birthday-girl looks like a  boy.  The location is a memorably cinematic hillside, symbol of the scramble for supremacy.

           The babies are unnerving (models designed by Rick Baker), but the filmmakers never solved movement.  Granted, the babies do more in the third film, but in the commentaries, Cohen cites Val Lewton, in saying both sequels showed too much.  Tone was a challenge, too: the premise is inherently funny, but Cohen wanted monster movies, first, so each suspenseful scene has to be (a little) funny, and vice versa.  He masters tone for the first two, but the third unravels, perhaps from anxiety over the series' misanthropic overtones.   

In the larkish It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1986), a new regime gives the babies an island to themselves.  Of course, these are babies, and the reparation is folly (compare A Clockwork Orange).  This time, the tragic dad is Steven Jarvis (Michael Moriarty, pre-Law and Order), a struggling actor with an antic sense of humor.  He takes to grandly introducing himself as “father of the monster.” 

Disillusioned with community — the movie begins in church, courtroom and '80s comedy club — Jarvis signs on for an expedition to the baby-island (Hawaii locations).  It’s Alive III becomes a stoner comedy, as Jarvis loses any interest in the social contract: imagine Apocalypse Now if Willard (Martin Sheen) and the photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) were one person. 

It’s Alive III isn’t the inspired lunacy of Cohen and Moriarty’s Q, but has its charms, as the latter sings sea shanties, threatens to defect, and muses on the babies’ telepathic potential.  The story defaults to an ending from midcentury space-invasions: an everyday element as deus ex machina.  Still, the viewer is free to imagine a next generation with stronger resistance.
           Nature gave "Larry's kids" a biting chance, whether or not in response to our behavior.  Pollution, abortion, and medication usage are only a few of the troubling associations.  Easier to miss: clawed and fanged babies are kin to Wolverine, Freddy Krueger, Ninja Turtles foe Shredder, and now, "baby sharks."  Like superheroes as a class, such forearmed characters may allude to narcissism, which seems increasingly common, even adaptive.  (If Americans dislike narcissists, why elect them president?)
            Larry Cohen died in March, aged 82.  In assembling an impressive (if spotty) body of work, he had the disarming knack for seeming less subversive than he was.  He's been deceptively influential, witness the Cohenesque likes of Gremlins, They Live, The Addiction, even Velvet Buzzsaw.  He also pioneered movie franchising, in devising Return of the Magnificent Seven, Hell Up in Harlem (sequel to his Black Caesar), and the Maniac Cop series.
            Like those films, the It's Alive trilogy helped validate small-budget, self-referential sequels, like the “dead” series of George Romero and Sam Raimi.  In having scientists study the mutants, the sequels are comparable to Children of the Damned, Day of the Dead and Terminator Salvation.  Finally, as in various franchises, notably the contemporaneous Planet of the Apes cycle, we're shown key engagements in what may be a global revolution. 

underseen for Halloween, 2019: Vampire Circus (1972)

These Halloween posts accumulate more hits than the others combined (my thanks to all who've read).  It seems to have provided inspiration, resulting in enough text for (a planned) three posts, the last for All Soul's.    

  

On usage: "underseen" can be contested, of course, but these titles merit attention amid a wealth of choices.  

Spoilers throughout.

Vampire Circus (1972)

he may know a way out ...

While more of an art film, and closer to didactic than Hammer’s usual line, Vampire Circus is typically sumptuous in evoking an indeterminate past.  It has a liquid quality, like stepping into a river.  It seduces the viewer, as Count Mitterhaus seduces Anna, and Emil, Rosa.

 “a hundred delights!  the Circus of Nights!” 

Vampire Circus caps the horrific-circus/carnival trend of midcentury: Shadow of a Doubt, Nightmare Alley, Circus of Horrors.  In being seasonal, on the edge of town, the Dark Carnival stands for a liminal threat, possibly genocide.  Of its title ruin, dialogue in Carnival of Souls says, "The law has placed it off-limits."  This pavilion is contrasted with what is "safe," "reasonable" and "seemly."  Shtettel (the spelling varies), the town in Vampire Circus, is Yiddish for “town.” 

Another trope, with similar meaning, has survivors crossing paths with perpetrators, as in The Seventh Victim, Seven Men from Now, The Last House on the Left and Eden Lake.  Here, both terms apply to both groups, humans and vampires. 

Vampire Circus is tough on Anglo-Americans, its trigger-sin crouched in our blind spot.  The townsfolk can be deceitful and waspish, but their damning trait is division.  They’ve had time: after the execution of bloodsucker Mitterhaus, 15 years pass before vengeance -- modernity descends -- as half the town decides vampires don’t exist. 

“We make our own luck.”

Early rationalists, Dr. Kersh and schoolteacher Mueller scoff at the notion of vampires.  The teacher is an intellectual feather: after losing his family and killing Mitterhaus, he reverts to scientism, but still can say of the circus folk, “they are death.”  Later, he redeems himself, by believing in what he can’t understand. 

Divisions between men tend to leave a divided population.  Inevitably, an opposing residence becomes hostile territory, as couples and families assume entitlement to (toxic) privacy.  Parents become unaccountable, then suspect.  Thus, the revolutionary insight of Vampire Circus: estrangement from traditional religion as a cause of sexual frustration.

The town’s young adults also assume a type of rabies to be the only plague.  (Indeed, rabies may be the origin of vampire lore: science and folklore interrelate, despite attempts at segregation.)  Only as the skeptics recover faith (intellectual humility) can the town defend itself.  The humility should be in the context of a supernatural: it's too easy to own ignorance if never actually wrong.  

“it’s not life, just distortions …”

the protean Serena

Filmed narratives about demonic encroachment don't necessarily specify demons, e.g., Circle of Fear "Earth, Air, Fire and Water," Twin Peaks.  The horror films of John Carpenter assume a force of pure evil, malignant to humanity.  In both Prince of Darkness and Vampires, the Catholic Church is uneasy ally of the protagonists.  Carpenter is an atheist, but his movies at least flirt with the idea of the Church as hedge against something even worse.  

Like Twin Peaks, Shtettel seems to have no church, and everyone’s lying to someone.  After her son is snatched from danger, the mayor’s wife kisses the rescuer, humiliating her husband.  A splinter group negotiates passage from the barricaded town, and is killed.  Dora, Mueller’s surviving daughter, is safely “in the city,” but journeys home unannounced and unescorted.  Rosa’s mother keeps her daughter’s secret, the affair with Emil.  

Two boys sneak to the circus after hours, joining those snared by the hall of mirrors.  (If funhouse reflections are a door to evil, it questions my daily, four-hour gaze.)  These vampires are magicians and shapechangers, with an (unremarked) immunity to sunlight, and implied psychic powers (the film gets choppy late, reportedly from budget cuts).   

Kersh slips the barricade but, unlike Ivy in The Village, gets revelation.  Now, unanimous belief in vampires gives the townsmen a fighting chance: "Without a vision [no plurality] the people perish."  Shtettel has the advantage of a common heritage, including a recent (cultural) memory of faith.  Still, those attempting “a new kind of nation” should gird for failure.  

“If your wife’s in there, maybe she wanted to go.”  

The film's beginning is both mythic and horrifying: Anna Mueller's fall isn’t frightening, but we know the horrible has happened.  Though soon interrupted, her debauch leaves no doubt why she'd bring her daughter for slaughter.  Here, evil is thrilling and erotic; this isn’t soft-serve Schindler’s List or 12 Years a Slave.

The ending, which is too busy, reveals the circus-leader to be a disguised Anna, even as she saves Dora.  Despite this partial redemption, Anna made the town a target, by placing personal desire above commitments to (original) family and tribe.   

Some films are social-critically present to the point of (evidently) crippling the careers of filmmakers, including Freaks, Sweet Smell of Success, Peeping Tom, Dirty Little Billy, Ganja and Hess and The Sopranos.  The pattern may help to explain the obscurity of the Vampire Circus duo, director Robert Young and screenwriter Judson Kinberg.  Their film attempts to collapse the walls between art and entertainment, sensation and narrative, the erotic and the dramatic.