Category Archives: Imaginary US Cinema

Action/Adventure, Crime, Imaginary US Cinema

#206 – Anvil Strikes!

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(1976, US, 104 mins) Dir Jack Blackstaff. Cast Ernest Borgnine, Ursula Andress, Bernie Mayes.

Death Wish wannabe from opportunistic Irish director Blackstaff misguidedly attempting to reposition Ernest Borgnine as an action man – not that he was entirely unsuccessful as sequels Anvil Strikes Again and Anvil in Africa will attest. It’s the usual guff as expertly parodied by the likes of Mr Kill Man – Borgnine is Dr James Anvil, wealthy surgeon, whose wife (Andress) and daughter are raped and killed (in that order) by a group of merciless street toughs when they take a wrong turn on their way home from the ballet and in whose name he vows vengeance. It would be refreshing – if you’ll excuse the tangent – to witness a film in which the lead’s conversion to vigilantism was perhaps triggered by his sense of social injustice rather than by sexualised violence being meted out to the women in his life. The reproduction of this unfortunate trope, along with the equation of class and colour with relative goodness or lack thereof, taints what would otherwise be a well executed, kinetic bloodbath albeit one that would still be plagued by characters so insubstantial that Anvil’s .45 seems unneccessary in dispatching them – he could have blown them away with nothing more than a hairdryer and an especially long extension cord should he have wished.

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Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#204 – No Pain, No Gain

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(1987, US, 97 min) Dir Calvin Hardwick. Cast Melvin Brewer, Harley Brewer, Jimmy Mix.

Day-Glo vampire flick set among Californian exercise nuts. Identical twin brothers Max and Hal (real life weightlifting duo the Brewer Brothers) are new in town, moving to California to ‘live the life’. They sign up to the expensive glass and steel gym around the corner from their apartment which seems perfect, filled with super buff workout buddies and tons of hot chicks. But soon enough they find out that of course it’s just too perfect as Hal starts spending all his time there, looking more and more wan and weak no matter how much working out he does. Max, of course, has to do something about this and starts investigating the surprisingly shady history of Jimmy’s Gym. Produced by Jack Pryce of Pryce Professionals as a feature length advertisement it was turned into a vampire film on the insistence of the hired director, Calvin Hardwick, a director of gay pornography turned low budget horror peddler. When it was released it was met with derision by horror aficionados – as any film that ignores one of the central tenets of vampire mythology like their aversion to sunlight without explanation will – it still found itself a cult following, especially among fans of eighties cheese and muscle-bound men.

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Black and White, Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#200 – Fabulous Two Hundred, The

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(1935, US, 98 min, b/w) Dir Gerard Handley. Cast Clark Gable, Myrna Loy, Stacy Burch.

Showbiz comedy and the one and only Hollywood picture from British director Handley. Gable plays smooth manager John Jackson who is put in charge of the popular dance troupe of the title when their previous manager leaps from his hotel room window rather than continue managing them. Immediately he spots the source of the problem – strong willed lead dancer Natasha Rudolph (Loy). Jackson figures that if he can cow her he’ll have the group on hand but this proves easier said than done. A fine, breezy film whose production didn’t run as smoothly. Life imitated art when Handley butted heads with Gable on set, becoming so enraged in the course of one argument that, according to witnesses, he pulled the hat from his head and tore a strip from it with his teeth. In a further turn of grim irony Handley would later fall to his death one night from his hotel window under mysterious circumstances while in the midst of filming 1962’s Christmas in February. His body was discovered in the bushes below the next morning when no one was able to satisfactorily explain why he was dressed as Henry VIII.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema, Musical

#197 – Beat Bourguignon

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(1962, US, 118 min) Dir William Lett. Cast Russ Tamblyn, Rosalyn Bier, Lou Jacobi.

Fleeing an enraged landlord after an all night bongo party ends in an unacceptable amount of property damage, even for the dive he’s renting, Russ Tamblyn’s beat wannabe Chico Wow hitches a transatlantic crossing to France, ending up on the streets of Paris where he is mistaken for bona fide hepcat poet Jimmy Coinsberg. Within no time at all he’s holed up in a garret of his own and in love with Rosalyn Bier’s romantic prostitute Candy. Oh, and it’s a musical with some exceptional dance numbers in the streets of a Paris that’s imagined with fantastic colourful sets in the vein of An American in Paris or Irma le Douce – their torn posters and exposed brick walls are worth the price of admission alone. By the end of the film the streets are stuffed with Parisian wannabe hepcats, swinging to Chico Wow’s imported beat. A huge flop at the time and almost devoid of tension, Lett’s film is nonetheless a perfect time capsule from the era.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#188 – Current Affairs

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(1986, US, 114 min) Dir Andy Farmer. Cast Dan Aykroyd, Christopher Plummer, Daryl Hannah, Bebe Neuwirth, Dudley Moore

High-pitched farce set in a TV newsroom. The poster, featuring a shrugging Dan Aykroyd with his trousers around his ankles, says everything you need to know about Current Affairs – the satirical potential of the rolling news story of the American intervention into a proxy war in an unnamed Middle Eastern country is lost amidst the film’s focus on the comedic potential of who’s boinking who, where they’re doing it and who’s nearly caught them at it. A roll call will suffice in place of a plot: Aykroyd at his most jabber-mouthed is Sal Danners, the coked-up show runner; Christopher Plummer is Peter Christmas, venerable anchor and voice of steadfast morality; unbeknownst to all he and his co-anchor Felicity Day (Neuwirth) have just ended a clandestine relationship, the rancour of their split simmering on air; Daryl Hannah is Mimsy Butler, the intern that everyone is chasing; Christopher Lloyd is Hal, the narcoleptic cameraman and Dudley Moore is Reginald Blueford, their British correspondent in the Middle East getting into hotter and hotter water as the film goes on. Directed in a slapdash manner by the King of Falling Upwards Andy Farmer, who either throws one hell of a party or has a detailed map of where the bodies are.

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Documentary, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary US Cinema

#184 – Empty Forest, The

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(2015, US/GB/Fr, 102 min) Dir John Henry.

Campaigning doc about illegal wildlife trade. In the last couple of decades the amount of animals in the wild has declined massively and confrontational director John Henry wants to find out why – this is no disingenuous starting point question either, he wants to actually ask people why they are taking the animals out of their habitats and why the people who are buying them are doing so, even if it means being on the receiving end of some very angry men. The answer is depressing – the animals in question are either being kept domestically in cages thousands of miles from their natural habitat or else eaten for the status their meat conveys and the unfounded belief in it’s medicinal properties. An angry film that forces the viewer to bear witness to the animal markets of South East Asia, the piles of confiscated ivory in Africa and the animals caged outside restaurants in China or, as more recently exposed, in the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone in Laos. A barrage of statistics makes it plain that it’s not just elephants and tigers that are suffering – the loris, bears, pangolin, snakes, salamanders and many, many more now hover on the brink of extinction. That there is no solution or hope of a happy ending offered by the film makes it that much bleaker.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#180 – #DESTROY!!

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(2013, US, 93 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Daryl Sabara, Linda Hamilton, Jason Hampton, Kevin Smith.

Comedy techno-horror. Gifted young hacker Jimmy Staedtler (Sabara) spends most of his time in his bedroom with the curtains drawn, desperately trying to think of a scheme that will put him on the map and avoiding his nerdly neighbour Hal (Hampton) when he notices that his Twitter account has been updating itself with sinister messages. This is when he discovers, along with the rest of the world, the worst news possible – so much information has been pumped into Twitter that it has achieved sentience and it is now reaching out across the web to take control of anything it can. Staedtler gathers a loose confederation of fellow hackers on 4chan but will they be able to achieve what the authorities haven’t and defeat the ultimate web-spanning intelligence while the world burns outside their windows? White’s foray into technological amusements is more fantastical than Los Data but it’s an inventive if super low budgeted comedy. It’s not above a little stunt casting either – Hamilton, as Staedtler’s mother, knows a thing or two about rogue computer intelligence from the Terminator series and noted blogger and sometime director Kevin Smith gamely cameos as himself before, perhaps inevitably, being murdered by his own Twitter feed.

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Comedy, Imaginary US Cinema

#179 – Mr Kill Man

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(2011, US, 106 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Michael Keaton, Justin Long, Elizabeth Shue.

A pre-Birdman rejuvenation Keaton starred in this, Mr Kill Man, in another role that riffs on his vigilante past. Mild mannered office drone Hamilton Brody is knocked on the head during what he believes to be an attempted robbery (but was, in fact, an attempt to save him from a worse fate from a falling brick) and when he wakes up in hospital he finds himself reborn as a Death Wish style vigilante, the self-styled Mr Kill Man. So, once he’s tricked the hospital staff into believing that he’s fine, he begins patrolling the night, looking for crimes to stop and wrongs to right. The only problem with this is that he doesn’t have a gun like he thinks he does – no, he’s actually facing down hardened criminals armed with nothing more than a scowl, a trench coat and a banana held like a revolver. It’s up to Brody’s wife and son (Shue and Long) following in the family car to stop him from getting hurt and protect him from the attentions of the law. A fun little film with a great central trio all perfectly shot in a sea of drenched neons, Dutch tilts and darkened alleys.

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Imaginary US Cinema, Thriller

#178 – Great Storm, The

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(2011, US, 109 min) Dir Jack Burch. Cast Michael Shannon, Paul Dano, Jena Malone, Benicio del Toro.

Michael Shannon is the explosives expert in a cell of eco-terrorists who is known only as Banger and when a planned raid on a dam is foiled by the police he suddenly becomes their leader. The media attention surrounding the arrest divides the group and drives them underground but somehow, where the police can’t find Banger, Benicio del Toro’s mysterious unnamed South American does. He is representing a Brazillian rubber company, he says, the name of which Banger wouldn’t know if he was told it. Del Toro has a proposition – the vast rubber plantations in South East Asia have caused untold ecological damage and will cause much more without the diseases that kept the plant in check in it’s native South America. Perhaps Banger and his crew would smuggle in some of the offending Microcyclus ulei and aid the decimation of this environmental disaster? “Why would we help you?” asks Banger. “I think you’d do a deal with the devil to get what you want,” is the reply. And he’s right – Banger contacts Alvin and Sasha, the only other members of the cell remaining, who now have to get to Laos and begin their new mission, never realising the dangers that lie ahead. A tense yet low key thriller.

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Drama, Imaginary US Cinema

#176 – Hurtin’

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(1990, US, 80 min) Dir Bryce Tasco. Cast Jeff Bridges, Dennis Quaid, Paul Haltmann.

Directed by Bryce Tasco from his own play, the little-seen Hurtin’ follows the last days of an Elvis-alike superstar as he roams his mansion, clearly at the end of his mental and physical tether. He’s visited by his drug dealer Amos (Quaid) and his hot-shot manager Phil (Haltmann) who has taken over from his recently deceased long-term one but, for the majority of the film, is alone and talking either to the pictures on the walls or to the TV or to phantoms that we can’t see. Apparently starring Bridges and Quaid as favours to Tasco – a friend to both – and filmed in the Beverly Hills mansion of a third unnamed friend (rumoured to be none other than Jack Nicolson), Hurtin’ has been virtually unseen by any kind of audience since it was made as while the main character is never named as Elvis Presley, his estate evidently felt the likeness to be sufficiently close for litigation and the producers agreed. It’s a slight film either way though it’s attempt to bring depth to a death that has been mostly regarded as little more than a joke is laudable.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms