Sunday, March 22, 2020

REEL 02: SOCIETY

So let’s clarify something for a minute about Super 8 Club: I will take a look at horror movies here from time to time, but here I get to be a little more inclusive than on the MonsterGrrls blog and talk about some horror movies that aren’t exactly a good fit for it.

Today, let’s talk about Society.

In the Eighties, there was sort of a horror boom with the success of the Friday The 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare On Elm Street movies. Though the first movie in each of these franchises is pretty good (I’m still not onboard with Friday The 13th, and I like the TV series better than the movie), they were still basically slasher flicks, and over the course of the many sequels the stories within them were worn out. But there were other horror movies besides these, although that is sometimes forgotten when people talk about the period’s horror films. Full Moon Studios was still doing a thriving business during that period, with cheap supernatural horror and sci-fi flicks. And I’ve always leaned toward that type of horror rather than the slasher stuff.

But the slasher stuff fostered a certain element of class warfare among high school kids. Some of us in that generation did go home and watch slasher flicks, as a way of bolstering revenge fantasies against those peers who bullied us. Eventually, slasher flicks became a formula: Stupid kids gather. A couple of good kids are among them; these are our heroes. People start dying, usually in very creative ways. The good kids, who are a little smarter and less prone to doing questionable stuff than the others, start trying to Solve The Mystery and Find The Killer. More creative deaths, highjinks, face down and subdue The Killer, end of movie, next sequel. And as these films made more money for the Hollywood nightmare mill, more and more of these films also became excuses to show off the latest in wildly gross and sickening practical gore effects cooked up by special-effects teams.

Combine class warfare, mystery and practical gore effects, and you get Brian Yuzna’s 1989 horror film Society. Yuzna, who had co-produced classic films Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986) and Dolls (1987) for Stuart Gordon, made his directorial debut with this film, scripted by Woody Keith and Rick Fry, and special effects by Joji Tani, a.k.a. the notorious Screaming Mad George, who had previously done effects on two Nightmare On Elm Street films.

Bill Whitney (Billy Warlock) is a kid living with his wealthy parents Jim (Charles Lucia) and Nan (Connie Danese) and sister Jenny (Patrice Jennings) in a mansion in Beverly Hills. He is handsome and popular at school, being both a basketball star and candidate for high school president. He has his own jeep, a cute cheerleader girlfriend named Shauna (Heidi Kozak) and is basically living the high-school dream. But Bill has a problem.

I’ll give you a couple of minutes to stop laughing.

Finished? OK. Bill’s problem is that he is paranoid about his family and doesn’t trust them at all, to the point that he is having nightmares and sleepwalking. He feels that they dislike his best friend Milo (Evan Richards) and treat him differently from Jenny, and points this out to his therapist Dr. Cleveland (Ben Slack). Some of this appears to be true: the film opens on a nightmare/dream sequence in which Bill, disturbed and frightened by noises in the darkened house, gets a knife from the kitchen to protect himself and starts searching, where he is eventually found in a trance-like state at the bottom of the stairs by his mother. The dream continues with a therapy session in which Bill is comforted by Dr. Cleveland, and while biting into an apple, finds it to be full of worms. Then comes our opening credits, which play out over a mass of darkened, indistinct, and slightly gooey writhing, twisting figures. What have we gotten ourselves into here?

Playing basketball with Milo, Bill notices that David Blanchard (Tim Bartell), his sister’s ex-boyfriend, has turned up, and fears the worst. He is right: Blanchard appears to be stalking Jenny by hiding in her closet, and is dragged from her room and ejected from the house by Bill. His parents witness the entire thing but do not seem appreciative of Bill’s efforts to protect his sister (though she is), and turn away from him. We feel a sense of unease and dislike upon seeing Jim and Nan too: Jim appears to have the most punchable face in Christendom while Nan might as well have I BANG LIKE AN OUTHOUSE DOOR tattooed on her forehead. It is also very obvious that they favor Jenny over Bill.

Jenny comforts Bill over the parents’ attitude, and after a bit of conversation asks Bill to zip her up; she is dressed for her coming-out party, which Bill cannot attend because he has a basketball game. Bill does so, but notices that something appears to be moving under her skin.

Cut to Beverly Hills Academy, where Bill is debating for the high school presidency against Martin Petrie (Brian Bremer), who appears to be the local brainbox. Shauna cheers Bill on and rallies the school audience, but he flubs his speech upon noticing Clarissa Carlyn (former Playboy model Devin DeVasquez), who is sitting in the front row and lets him know in no uncertain terms that she is not only interested but that it’s on a plate. Shauna is livid, and Milo warns Bill about Clarissa: she is evidently Town Ho.

Regardless, Bill does well in both debate and game, and says as much to Dr. Cleveland at therapy session. Even with these “recent victories” Bill is still uncomfortable with his parents: “They don’t approve of me, they don’t like my friends, they don’t—they don’t talk to me like they do Jenny. And they don’t even look like me!” (This last is true: the first time I ever saw this movie I wondered if Bill was adopted from the start.) Cleveland reassures Bill (not very convincingly and somewhat creepily) that things are really okay, and that he will make “a wonderful contribution to Society.” And the reason I wrote the last word that way is because whenever these people talk about society, you hear the capital S by default.

Later, Bill hits his sister up for some suntan lotion. Going into Jenny’s bathroom, he walks in on her taking a shower and sees that something is drastically wrong with his sister’s body; her upper torso seems to be turned a complete 180, so that her butt is in front. He opens the shower door and is embarrassed, because Jenny appears normal. And naked.


Apologizing and leaving quickly, Bill runs into his parents and the gardener outside, who appear to be examining a "crop" of garden slugs. On top of that weirdness, there’s that sense of disconnectedness and dismissal again. Then Bill finds that someone has left a Ken doll with a screw in the head in his jeep, which he tosses.

At “The Albacore Club” which is beachside, Bill tries to connect romantically with Shauna, but Shauna seems more interested in finagling an invite to local social heavyweight Ted Ferguson’s party than snogging with Bill. He also runs into Clarissa again, who teases him and spikes up Shauna’s jealousy, has an embarrassing encounter with a rather large and oddly retarded-looking woman (Pamela Matheson—she will become important later), and tries to feel out an invite from the annoying and snobby Ferguson (Ben Meyerson), who is supporting Petrie for the high school presidency. Noting that Shauna has left, Bill starts to leave but encounters Blanchard again, who begs an audience; he has something important for Bill to hear. Meanwhile, Jenny interrupts a meeting between Jim and Judge Carter (David Wiley) to ask Jim for help with her earring; there is something stuck in the clasp. That something turns out to be a tiny microphone.

Back at the Albacore Club, Blanchard reveals to Bill that he bugged Jenny’s earring and also put a voice-activated tape recorder in their car. Bill is livid, but Blanchard persists, and Bill eventually hears that something is very wrong with the Whitneys: “You know the drill. First we dine, then copulation. Someone your own age first, then with your mother and me. Then in comes the host. You’ll be ready.”

Further listening indicates that the other Whitneys are not only participating in deranged sexual activities with Ted Ferguson, but also something that sounds like murder. Bill accuses Blanchard of rigging the tape, but takes the tape anyway. Meanwhile, Jim and Judge Carter are already speculating that Blanchard is up to no good.

Later, Bill (who apparently has listened to the tape a few more times and done some thinking) appears at Dr. Cleveland’s house, begging him to listen to the tape. Cleveland tries to put him off, but Bill insists, and finally leaves the tape with Cleveland. The next day at school, Bill tries to talk to Shauna about what happened, but Shauna has no concerns for Bill’s mental health or welfare; her only concerns are for Ferguson’s party. The following fight leads to Shauna leaving in a huff, and Bill then finds a rubber voodoo head left in his locker.

The session with Dr. Cleveland isn’t so hot either; Bill finds that the tape’s audio has changed to normal coming-out party activities. Bill angrily insists that that is not what is on the tape, but Cleveland gives him a lecture about rules of privacy and starts writing out a prescription for drugs. Bill calls Blanchard from Cleveland’s phone and arranges to get another copy of the tape. Rushing to the meeting place, Bill finds that Blanchard’s van has crashed and sees a covered, blood-streaked body being loaded into an ambulance. Bill tries to salvage another copy of the tape, but is prevented from doing so by a police officer (David Wells), who orders him away from the scene. At home, Bill tries to tell his parents and Jenny about Blanchard’s death, but they are more interested in the fact that Bill has been finally invited to Ferguson’s party, and to Bill’s horror, they shrug off the wreck.

Bill attends the party, where he winds up dancing with Clarissa (after all, Shauna isn’t there and they’re on the outs anyway, and so it goes). Milo shows up, wanting to know about Blanchard, but Bill follows Clarissa into a private tent where Ferguson is, and confronts him about his sister and Blanchard. Ted verifies with mustache-twirling venom that Blanchard’s tape is real: “You know the schedule. First we dined, then I fucked your sister, and then everybody else got so turned on, they fucked her too. And as far as bagel-breath Blanchard goes, I ran that low-rent fool right into a pole. That was a pretty busy week, don’t you think?”

Already angry, Bill struggles with Ted and gets tossed into the pool by Ted and cronies. Clarissa (who manages to be very alluring and darkly weird at the same time) invites Bill back to her house, where he is treated to sex and more strangeness: Clarissa’s body seems to twist in odd and unsettling fashion. Meanwhile, a tearful Shauna and her BFF Sally (Maria Claire), who is egging Shauna’s discomfort and jealousy on in that special way that only BFFs can do, are watching the house. They notice a strange figure going in, and elect to leave.

The strange figure enters the living room, where Bill and Clarissa are preparing for Round Two, and turns out to be Odd Large Retard Woman from the beach, who is clutching a handful of someone’s hair, and is also Clarissa’s mother. (Told you Matheson was important.) Bill (who has good manners regardless of the fact that he’s just been caught in flagrante delicto with her half-naked daughter) tries to introduce himself and is presented with a fresh hairball. Clarissa angrily pushes her mother out, and dismisses all of Bill’s obvious questions: “She does things I don’t like.” Bill leaves, but there are the beginnings of a connection between the two.

The next day, as Bill is leaving for school, he finds that someone has left a cheap blow-up sex doll marked “Clarissa” with another Ken doll jammed in its mouth marked “Bill.” This occurs just as Shauna arrives to confront Bill about his tryst with Clarissa, and seeing the dolls, Shauna officially puts a pin in their relationship. Thinking that maybe his family (which Bill already thinks is weird and perverted by now) has something to do with the dolls, Bill returns to the house and finds Jim, Nan and Jenny together in the parental bedroom suite, all still in pajamas and/or various states of undress. As if that were not disturbing enough, when Bill confronts them about the dolls, Jenny accuses him of being disrespectful and Nan tries to flirt with him. Things go downhill from there, and Bill threatens to move out, then flees.

Just in case you have not been keeping tabs, something is definitely going on.

Bill and Milo attend Blanchard’s funeral and, after commenting on the odd state of the body, discover that it may be fake. Petrie appears and asks to arrange a meeting with Bill about “your parents, about him, about some of the things that have been happening here lately. Society.” Bill agrees and comes to the meeting that night at a local park, but discovers Petrie’s car and also Petrie’s body; his throat has been cut. Milo, who is tailing Bill, notices a different car driving away from the scene. Bill discovers a sweater at the scene upon further investigation, but an unseen figure pushes him down and leaves with the sweater. Bill gives chase, crossing a fence, and sees the car that Milo saw driving away. He also discovers that he has unknowingly arrived at Clarissa’s house, where he calls the police. Returning to the scene with Clarissa and the policemen (one of whom turns out to be the same policeman at Blanchard’s wreck), Bill finds that the car has been switched and Petrie’s body is gone.

The next day, Bill appears at another student body rally and discovers that he has been gaslighted: Petrie appears, alive and well, just after Bill tells the student body that Petrie was murdered, and Ferguson waves the sweater from the audience. Bill leaves in a rage, but Milo comes after him and confesses to putting the dolls in the car, then also confesses to tailing Bill the night before and seeing Petrie and Ferguson leaving the woods together, as well as seeing the other car that Bill found. Bill is worried about drawing Milo into the approaching fray, but Milo resolves to back him up.

Bill arrives home, tailed by Milo, and finds his parents, Jenny, Judge Carter and Dr. Cleveland all waiting for him. Bill confronts them, but is drugged and taken away in an ambulance, with Milo tailing them to the hospital. He tries to get in and see Bill, but is told that Bill is in the morgue. Meanwhile, Bill awakens in a hospital bed and thinks he hears Blanchard crying out, but finds that nothing is there after tearing down the curtain next to his bed. Leaving the hospital, an angry and thoroughly frightened and paranoid Bill finds Milo, ignores his warnings and drives off in his jeep (which was also brought to the hospital) to confront his tormentors.

After confronting Clarissa, who tries to make him stay with her (she has, after all, fallen in love with him, which is how these things go) and warns him not to go home, Bill drives to his parents’ house. Going in, he finds himself in the same situation as his dream at the beginning: darkened house, whispering and sounds he cannot identify. He takes a knife and stalks through the house, but the lights go up and Bill is captured, to confront his worst fears: his family, Judge Carter, Dr. Cleveland, Clarissa, Ted, Shauna, Petrie and everyone in his community (except for Milo) are all part of Society—an elitist, sexually perverse and highly incestuous species of humanoid creature with the ability to deform and reshape itself, meld together into one or more fleshy masses, and suck the nutrients from a person’s body, then consume the rest through a process called “shunting.” And Bill has been raised by his "family" not as a member of Society, but as food. And if you had suspicions about what was really being done with the garden slugs or what really happened to Blanchard, you were right.

This satirically twisted comic-horror film first premiered in London and was a big hit in Europe, but it took three years to get released in the States, and while achieving some critical acclaim was largely panned by critics. It’s a shame, because Society is probably the perfect comment on the class wars and excess of the Eighties, with its nearest companion being John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi/social satire They Live. Watching it now, considering the current divide between classes on both social and political levels, it almost seems revolutionary in its audacity.  It delivers a slow burn in the first three-quarters by building up the paranoia, and then once the nightmare comes true in the last half-hour, it figures it has nothing left to lose and goes for broke. Screaming Mad George’s surreal and Daliesque effects (the final “shunt” mass of Society at the end was actually inspired by a Dali painting), while thoroughly shocking and disgusting, work perfectly within the parameters of this film, but they are not for the faint of heart. There’s not a lot of blood, but there is a lot of slime, goo, fluids, eyeballs, misplaced heads, stretched/twisted/misappropriated skin, limbs and dangly bits. (You will ultimately find yourself thinking it’s a good thing the Whitney home is not extensively carpeted.)
 

The cast, an interesting mix of younger and older actors, is serviceable: no one particularly busts out with white-hot acting talent (they rarely do in cheap horror movies), but you see pretty much every character you expect, and everyone does their job selling this thing. Our three heroes are charming enough, and though Devasquez and Warlock’s relationship starts out as somewhat perverse (after their first tryst she makes him tea and offers him a choice of cream, sugar, or a special flavoring of her own), she mellows when she realizes that Warlock is not willing to buy into her nonsense. As Milo, Richards is a good foil for Warlock, and has a few humorous moments with Matheson when Milo makes the hair-munching Ma Carlyn into his compadre to storm the Whitney house in the denouement. There are even some nice turnarounds with Clarissa deciding to side with Bill and not be controlled and dictated by Society, and Bill also proves that better breeding doesn’t necessarily make you smarter: he outwits Ferguson in their final fight for Clarissa and his freedom by tempting him into shunting and then, while Ferguson is in his pliable state, pulls him inside out. And he gets to punch out the extremely punchable Lucia as his “father” Jim, who, in an earlier segment of the film, becomes a very literal butthead.
 

If you have had longtime suspicions that the rich live extremely differently from you, look down on you with immense dislike and sometimes get up to very, very bad things, Society will not do anything to alleviate your fears, but at least you’ll have a good time with them.

Saturday, March 21, 2020

REEL 01: CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG

So I have a weird relationship with musicals. Over the years I’ve gone from “heartily dislike” to “mildly uncomfortable with.” Most of this has to do with the fact that I lived in a family where several members were dedicated fans of The Lawrence Welk Show, which meant that for awhile I had to deal with hearing shitty and overwrought arrangements of popular songs from musicals. (Welk seemed to love Rodgers and Hammerstein in particular, but they did create a lot of musicals.) I do have a fair number of musicals I like now, but these tend to be outliers in some way or another, either because of plot or because of general strangeness.

And for me personally, the strangest and weirdest of them all is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Because of my reputation among those who know me as a horror/sci-fi/genre freak, people are always surprised when they learn that I like this film. But I do. For me, it is the anti-Mary Poppins (which I was not a good audience for even as a child, and left a bad taste in my mouth), and so I am willing to sit through some of the sappier and more obnoxious musical numbers while watching it.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang came about because Ian Fleming, who created the James Bond novels, had a heart attack in 1961 and was forced to convalesce. During this time, he was accused by his eight-year-old son Caspar of loving his creation more than his son. Fleming responded to this by writing a series of children’s stories called The Magical Car, which was later changed to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and became his one and only children’s novel. Fleming never saw the stories come to print: he died in August of 1964, on his son’s 12th birthday. (The novel did not bode well for young Caspar either: he was deeply affected by his father’s death, and killed himself at age 23.)

Out of this tragedy was born a loosely adapted 1968 musical film, directed by Ken Hughes and starring Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes, with a screenplay by Roald Dahl and Hughes. CCBB was meant to capitalize on the success of Mary Poppins, which also starred Van Dyke doing a Cockney accent that discerning moviegoers still have yet to let him off the hook for. There was also a strong James-Bondian influence: Albert R. Broccoli, who produced many of the Bond films, was producer; Richard Maibaum, who wrote several Bond screenplays, was credited as co-screenwriter; and stuntman Vic Armstrong, who had doubled for 007, doubled for Van Dyke. This extended to the cast as well; noted Bond film actors Gert Frobe, Anna Quayle and Desmond Llewellyn (a.k.a. weapons/gadget master Q) were also in the film as Baron Bomburst, Baroness Bomburst and garage owner Mr. Coggins, respectively. Musical numbers were written by Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, who also wrote songs for Mary Poppins.

At the turn of the century, car Number Three is winning every race in the European Grand Prix without fail from 1907 until 1909, when it swerves to avoid a child that has gotten onto the course and crashes fatally. The wreck of Number Three is retired to Coggins’ Garage in rural England, where it becomes the favorite plaything of Jeremy and Jemima Potts (Adrian Hall and Heather Ripley, who appear here as every stereotype you have ever heard about British children right down to “triffic” and grubby faces). When a crusty scrap dealer offers Coggins money for the car, they implore Coggins (Desmond Llewellyn) not to sell it, but Coggins says he can do nothing unless their father, Caractacus Potts (Van Dyke) buys the car first. Rushing away to tell their father, they are almost run over by the well-named Truly Scrumptious (Howes) in her own motorcar, who finds that the children are truant from school and takes them in hand.

Truly is far from prepared for what she finds at the children’s home: father Potts is an inventor who is almost beyond eccentric (upon first meeting Truly gets to witness the testing of a rudimentary and dangerous firework-powered jetpack that goes mightily awry), has created a number of weird and wacky inventions that are great eye-candy (including a Breakfast Machine that was no doubt an inspiration for the one seen in Tim Burton’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure), and seems indifferent to his children’s education or Truly’s concerns. Pop Potts, however, is not a patch on Grampa Potts (Lionel Jeffries), a former British Army batman who retires each day in full uniform to a small hut on the premises for activities that are not clearly disclosed except for mention of “going to Africa” or similar. (At one point Grampa is seen heading for the hut dressed as an Alaskan explorer with fur coat and ski poles, so we must assume that daily hut time involves encroaching senility, recreational drug use, a rich fantasy life, or all three.) While Truly is somewhat charmed by Potts’ inventions, she is not charmed by his attitude towards what he regards as meddling. Needless to say, they hit it off in that way of hitting it off that starts out as bickering and will blossom into true love by the end of the film.

The children eventually tell Potts about the car during supper, and while he resolves to help do something to save Number Three, he balks at the price, which is detrimental to the family finances. Trying to figure out what to do, Potts finds that the imperfect hole-filled stick candy from his candy machine can be played like a flute. He tries to sell the idea to the local candymaker, Lord Scrumptious (James Robertson Justice), who turns out to be the father of Truly, but senior Scrumptious is not interested. Urged on by Truly, Potts leads the entire factory floor in the number “Toot Sweets” and is almost successful until a pack of dogs, who hear the whistling candy, overrun the factory with disastrous results. Next, Potts notices a carnival coming into town and takes his automatic hair-cutting machine there, where he quickly ruins the hair of his customer Cyril (Arthur Mullard). Potts is chased through the carnival by Cyril and his girlfriend (Barbara Windsor) and ducks into a sideshow, where he winds up performing with the troupe in a Morris-dancing number called “Me Ol’ Bamboo” that showcases Van Dyke’s dancing talents (in his youth this man had some hellacious muscle control). Potts is the hit of the show and shares in the bounty of the troupe, providing him with enough money to rescue Number Three.

As the children and a disapproving Grampa wait over the course of several days, Number Three is reborn into the fabulous Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, so named for the sound of its engine and its accompanying musical number. Celebrating by going on a picnic, they run into (and almost over) Truly, who accompanies them on the picnic. After some seaside cavorting, Potts tinkers with CCBB while the children bond with Truly over her own self-titled musical number and foreshadow the eventual romantic resolution. They return to the car and Potts, who begins telling them a made-up story of the evil Baron Bomburst (Gert Frobe) who is the ruler of a country called Vulgaria, approaching in a ship with his retinue to steal CCBB.

At this point, the film starts getting weird. Because everything that Potts is telling starts happening, in real time.

As the Baron’s ship draws closer, they try to start the car to no avail; the tide has come in. CCBB, however, displays a mind of its own, and starts itself. It then deploys a flotation device and rudder, effectively turning itself into a speedboat. The Baron gives chase and opens fire on CCBB, which maneuvers itself to avoid every shot; the Potts party escapes and the Baron’s ship runs aground. The Baron sends two spies (Alexander Dore and Bernard Spear) with instructions to capture CCBB. Meanwhile, Potts delivers Truly back to her home, where she sings the set-piece “A Lovely, Lonely Man” and delivers more romantic foreshadowing, while kids everywhere sit and squirm through the girly mushy stuff and wait for more action. Then, it’s back to the spies.

After a series of slapstick attempts that are purest Dastardly And Muttley and result in them accidentally capturing Lord Scrumptious (Irwin Kostal’s score is particularly hilarious here, and makes one long for a soundtrack album with both songs and score), the idiots—er, spies—finally hit on the idea of posing as an “English gentleman” and chauffeur, then traveling to Potts’ home and kidnapping him to build a car for the Baron instead of stealing CCBB. Doing so, they run into Grampa, and mistaking him for the younger Potts, watch him enter his hut and then radio the Baron’s airship to take him away, hut and all. Potts, Truly and the children, on an outing in CCBB, see the airship taking off with Grampa and the hut and give chase, accidentally driving the car off a cliff in their haste to rescue Grampa. CCBB saves them again by sprouting wings and propellers, following the airship to Vulgaria. Far from being frightened, Grampa is delighted at the impromptu trip, and sings the music-hall style “Posh.”

Vulgaria turns out to be a mittel-Europe province with a vaguely Germanic setting (as evidenced by the second-unit shot of the Baron’s castle), and the airship deposits Grampa and hut to the Baron’s castle, where Grampa gets his first good look at his captors in the Baron’s court, who seem to be a number of cranky elderly people. The Baron himself turns out to be an exceptionally childish, bratty and pernicious man who first congratulates Grampa on his inventions and then threatens him with beheading when Grampa tries to clear things up. (No, this doesn’t remind us of any current prominent world leaders at all.)

To save his own neck, Grampa has to pose as the younger Potts. He follows the Baron, who rides a giant toy hobby-horse, through the castle and meets the Baroness (Anna Quayle, exuding a sort of off-brand Evil Stepmother vibe), and is finally deposited into a dungeon-like laboratory with a number of other kidnapped scientists, where he is given orders to turn the baronial vehicle into a Vulgarian CCBB on pain of death. Grampa fears for his life, but the scientists encourage him to press on with the number “The Roses Of Success” which results in them destroying the car.

Meanwhile, Potts and crew have arrived in Vulgaria. Fired upon by the Baron and his crew, they land in the village outside the castle, where they hide CCBB under a bridge and investigate. The townspeople are no help, and Truly immediately notices that there are no children anywhere in Vulgaria. A nameless Toymaker (Benny Hill, in a much different role from the usual highjinks conducted on his TV show—man had some range, actually) rescues and hides them from the approaching soldiers, explaining to them that children are outlawed in Vulgaria, and his toymaking business is exclusively for the Baron. The soldiers conduct a search of the village and bring in the black-hatted, long-nosed, net-toting Child-Catcher (Robert Helpmann), who remains for a certain generation the most frightening thing about this movie: a government employee whose job is to abduct children. The Child Catcher himself searches the Toymaker’s shop, but Potts and crew avoid capture. The Toymaker reluctantly helps Potts search for Grampa and scout out the castle while the Child Catcher tricks the kids into coming out of hiding with sweets, in yet another page from The Dastardly And Muttley Playbook.

Truly, who has gone to find some food for the children, witnesses the capture and gives chase to no avail. The children are delivered to the Baron, who has also found and recovered CCBB. The Toymaker takes Potts and Truly to a grotto beneath the castle where they find all the children of Vulgaria, who have lived there in a self-made ghetto for five years and survive by stealing food from above. Touched by the plight of the children, Potts and Truly are galvanized into action, and resolve to save the Potts kids, Grampa, and the children of Vulgaria by hatching a plot with the Toymaker and the Vulgarian kids to revolt.

Regardless of whether you love it or hate it, this film looks good. Hughes and Broccoli spared no expense on talent or production values, and while the film (or at least half of it) is a fantasy, there’s a definite period flavor to the whole thing. Van Dyke (who wisely poses as an American expatriate living in England than an actual Englander) and Howes are both likable, and while some have longed for a re-teaming of Van Dyke and Julie Andrews for this movie (Andrews was approached for the role but turned it down), Howes offers enough contrast to the handsome but somewhat physically goofy Van Dyke to make it work. (Van Dyke’s dancing skills are no joke either; in their plot to rescue the Potts kids, Van Dyke and Howes pose as the Toymaker’s dolls, and Van Dyke pulls off some breathtaking opening moves in his Golliwog rag-doll routine, raising his body vertically out of the toybox he arrives in so that you’re almost convinced he’s on wires.)

Hill brings a weary but kindly melancholy to his Toymaker role, and it would have been interesting to see him take on some more dramatic roles in his career, if he had been given the opportunity. Frobe and Jeffries munch the scenery whenever they're onscreen, and Jeffries in particular is the epitome of the English-eccentric stereotype. Frobe, who is better known to Bond fans as Auric Goldfinger, had already played a role similar to Baron Bomburst in 1965’s Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines; here he just ramps up the childishness and temperament to eleven, and Quayle serves as his foil (she adores the Baron, while he hates her and spends most of their number “Chuchi-Face” trying to bump her off). Both get theirs in the chaotic battle-for-Vulgaria scene along with Helpmann’s spidery and thoroughly evil Child-Catcher; Helpmann was a renowned ballet star who later went on to be in the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company, and his skills serve him well in the creeping, skulking attitude of his character. The machines, created by Punch magazine cartoonist Rowland Emett, are one of the best things about the film, as is CCBB itself.

And let’s not do any pretending here, folks; we all came for the car, which makes the film take off once it rolls out from Potts’ workshop in its reconstituted form and turns out to be his most successful invention (even if he doesn’t quite remember building certain functions of it). And when the subplot with the Baron gets rolling, the weird blurring of reality and fantasy makes the film a very successful fairy-tale; even though some of the aspects are fantastic in nature, there’s enough grounding in reality to make them plausible. Does CCBB have a mind of its own? Hell if I know. But Potts is presented as being notoriously absent-minded, and of course there’s the whole bit at the beginning where the car just kept winning the Grand Prix over and over until it appeared to sacrifice itself to save a child’s life. File it under Things To Argue About With Other Cinemaphiles.

There’s not a whole lot of moral sophistication here. Good wins, evil loses, and past mistakes are forgiven. It’s not a particularly deep film, but it’s good entertainment that’s done well, and there’s nothing wrong with that even if some of it seems a bit sappy in spots (the slower numbers do bog it down, but not for very long). Even in films, most people will enjoy the cinematic equivalent of a burger and fries if it’s done well and maybe has some grilled onions and cheese. So order up.

Friday, March 20, 2020

REEL 00: COMING ATTRACTIONS

So.

I like movies.  Always have.  Not just the whole theater experience of sitting in the dark eating popcorn and Whoppers (my favorite movie candy) and watching flickering images on a big screen, but watching a story unfold before me on film.  I learned to draw cartoons because I read comic strips and comic books, and I watched Saturday morning cartoons because I was fascinated by the idea of using pictures to tell a story.  Which is what a movie basically does.

Hence, if you are reading this, you are now being offered a membership in the Super 8 Club.  Totally free, no money exchanging hands.

It's an idea I've had for awhile now.  I write a series of books called The MonsterGrrls, and at my website one of the things I do is review horror movies (as do the Grrls, of course, but that's another story) to share my love of horror movies and what inspires me to create MonsterGrrls books.  But we do try to keep MonsterGrrls somewhat family-friendly, plus, not all the movies I like are horror movies.

Hence, Super 8 Club.

So if you just came in, don't worry, because the show will start in a few minutes.  You haven't missed anything.  Sit back, relax, and welcome to the Club.


There you go.