The Return of Torgo and Wooley's September Excite-o-rama!

A few months ago I watched a documentary called Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons, about the artists that illustrated the books/boxes etc. As a doc it's not great, but it gave me some new names to look up. Those of you who actually play D&D might already know these guys, but they were new to me. Yes a lot of it is cheesy, but sometimes I like cheese.
The doc is streaming on 4-5 different apps for anyone interested.

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I have seen this doc, and recommended it to all of my old D&D friends (from back in the 80s).
As you say, it is not a great documentary by any means but if you care about this topic, it is worth it.

Land Of Doom

This is yet another low-budget, post-apocalyptic, post-Mad Max, evil-raiders taking everybody’s ass kinda thing. There is no plot, really, just a survivor-type woman comes across the rapey-ass raiders and tries to avoid them, somehow ends up traveling with a guy they're chasing (whose crime was suggesting that maybe they shouldn't just go around raping everybody) and... well, that's basically the whole movie.
While the acting is adequate and they make full use of the desert, literally almost nothing happens and to some degree they seem to be making the script up as they go along. Like there was a sale on studded black leather so they decided to make a movie and then started filming while they figured out what the people in studded black leather should actually, ya know, do. Other than look really, really silly. More like a parody of The Road Warrior than an actual attempt at it.


What is on that guy's head?!!!


Love your bikes!


That said, the movie is pretty rapey, though with no nudity which feels like it tones down the exploitative nature of rape on film, this is more just a bunch of savage dudes just rape everybody they meet. They even stab each other so they can rape the person someone else is already raping.
The villain, like the whole movie, is terribly silly in that way that they were in 80s low-budget films where, because The Lord Humungus had his mask, every knock-off villain has to have one or some other facial flair (like an eye-patch or a cyborg eye or something). But this one is just some skinny, charisma-less blonde dude with his hair blown out sporting a really ridiculous leather mask. What the criteria for casting him was I can’t imagine.


I mean, that whole image is even sillier than the previous ones and yet the villain, Slater, takes the cake. Just look at him! What the hell is on his face?! And why?! Silly.
Also, this movie has Jawas in it. Full on Jawas. For no real reason. Seems like that was not totally uncommon in the 80s. How they didn’t all get sued I have no idea. Maybe because they, inexplicably, didn't put the Jawas on the poster.
I also have to say that I enjoyed how the guns, which were just old shotguns and machine guns and stuff left over from civilization, that fired regular bullets, would occasionally make a pew-pew noise just to further invoke Star Wars. At some point you just embrace the silliness so you can finish the film and that touch made me smile.

One interesting feature of the movie is whatever is going on with Harmony. Nothing she actually does, as I mentioned nothing really happens in this movie. But, she’s an attractive woman in an 80s genre movie and yet dresses fully covered from head to toe. I found it amusing that on the poster she's in skimpy studded black leather but in the film, you don’t even see her elbows or ankles in this film and I feel like that means something.


That is literally her skimpiest outfit in this film. Passing on the opportunity to unnecessarily (except for the box-office) show her bathing or dressed up in a skimpy leather outfit when she's captured by the villains or something seems almost virtuous in a film of this era and it does kinda underscore how gratuitous skin really is in a lot of genre films. There's no real reason for her to ever be in a leather bikini, or out of one for that matter, in this film, so she's not. What a crazy idea.
All that said, her character is the closest thing to a character in this film and whatever her deal is, it's the most interesting thing in the film. She travels alone, trusts no one, is a pretty damn good survivor, and she doesn’t let anyone touch her. You do not want to try and touch her, she will kill you first. It is never expressly said why she feels this way but, based on the raiders' behavior and the fact that she is alone, you can maybe guess. The fact that the movie doesn't come out and just say it is actually slightly artistic. That’s really the only interesting aspect of this film.

There are much better, albeit more exploitative movies just like this. I'm not sure it matters which ones you watch, although I can tell you that this movie lacks whatever style the Italians put into their post-apocalyptic Road Warrior knockoffs and is nowhere near as good as something like Spacehunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. Still, I finished it, so it must not have been that bad.

The actor himself already had a cyborg arm. When the producers saw that, his casting was a lock!

Is it maybe the only motivating, inciting incident that male writers can imagine for a female character?

I'm no mechanic, but some of those bike accessories look... impractical.

Ha! on the cyborg arm joke.

And I think that's why I like that they never say it. She never tells some story about what happens to her or anything else, she just doesn't like to be touched and you see what the raiders are like and you think what you wanna think. Considering the reality of the situation (did I just say that?) I thought it was actually a nice way to handle a female character in a post-apocalyptic world.

Self-expression isn't about being practical, you philistine!

Visibility is overrated!

Exactly.

It's not about what you can see. It's about how others see you.

And they need to see you as a man wearing microwave guts on your face, framed by an art piece called "Jaws of Death"/

This guy gets it.

The Maskmaker couldn't finish the right cheek because he spent too much time on the nostrils and he was past deadline.

"So I told 'em, I said, f*ck your symmetry man. No one tells Oya Vest how to make a mask!"

Jabberwocky

Here we have Terry Gilliam’s solo directorial debut, a story about a young man (Michael Palin) living in the Dark Ages setting out to find life in the Big City. But all the land lives under the shadow of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, a monster so fierce it reduces its victims to bloody, pulp-covered skeletons. Eek!
The movie is fairly slow and not nearly as funny as any Python film or sketch I can think of, with a startling amount of the humor being scatological. Early in the film you would swear that all of the jokes are going to be about someone pissing or shitting or being pissed on. But this isn't so. There's even more hygiene-based humor. And really just a lot of humor about how shitty things really were in the Dark Ages and how crappy it must have been to be alive then. Although very little if any of the humor will make you laugh, more just kind of grin or smirk.
But I don't say that as a bad thing. I actually liked the movie.
For one thing, it has better acting than every film I’ve watched this month. Easily. Every performance is credible and bought-in and I felt like actors gave even very small roles a lived-in feel.
Also, the opening scene is basically the The Evil Dead four years earlier, technique-wise. Like Sam Raimi was watching this and then wanted to make a Horror movie later and couldn’t get it out of his head.


Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film a one-star negative review, calling it "a film suitable for those who like unfunny comedies" and added that "to link it to Lewis Carroll or to his poem is to insult both." He further commented:
"Jabberwocky is being billed as made by the Monty Python comedy crew, with artwork that suggests it's a sequel to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. That's misleading on both counts. Only a couple of the Python gang (seen regularly on contributed to the script, and the result is a crude and totally unfunny picture. When in doubt, the script resorts to jokes about urination, defecation, or dismemberment.”
But I beg to differ with Gene on this. I found the film enjoyable if slow. I suspect he got hung up on expectations from the obviously much funnier Monty Python And The Holy Grail. And, as I've said, there aren't a lot of funny jokes or bits. But the movie has something that I like. The feel maybe. I do love how grimy and ugly Gilliam made the Dark Ages look. I mean, this is the king!


Everything is just covered in grime and you can tell no one has bathed in ages and probably everybody has boils all over underneath and you really feel that in just about every frame. You see this in HG and Time Bandits too but he really lays it on here.
Also, as has been remarked on in a number of reviews, the jousting scene is just aces. I mean it feels like the real thing. And when even the king and princess are covered in blood just from watching, I got a real kick out of it. And a lot of people praised the Jaberrwocky itself and I think when you see it and the way it moves and the way Gilliam films it, you'll instantly be reminded of the cow-skull demons from Time Bandits. Yes, you can really see Gilliam's style in this film.
So, really, for a $500,000 first-effort from a director I think most of us like, I was reasonably happy with Jabberwocky and would give it at least a pat on the head.

Just what I need to give that movie a chance. Pretty much all of Gilliam's movies get mixed reactions, and what's made me avoid that one is that its reaction is the most mixed of all of them. Your writeup and that image of Terry Jones (R.I.P) sold me.

My next entry will be all locked up real soon (is that something people say? Probably not).

Jabberwocky is the most prominent Gilliam that I've yet to see. I need to get on that.

Yes! I win!

Here's what I would say about Jabberwocky. There is nothing bad about it. Absolutely nothing. At least nothing I remember. I would say it gets a bad rap for not being as good as people hope and I'll be honest, I assumed it would be better than it is, at least funnier and weirder, based on Holy Grail and Time Bandits and such. But that doesn't mean it's bad and really, I can't think of anything negative to say about it and in it's own odd little way, even though I didn't necessarily feel excited about it at the end, I still felt kinda rewarded for having watched it.

I'm very hit and miss with Gilliam (and more miss). Time Bandits and Fischer King are great. 12 Monkeys is pretty great. And, it took a long time, but I eventually realized Brazil is also great.



Everything else I either sort of dislike or I only like patches of. Even though I respect him as a unique voice, I generally find his aesthetic too superficially showy. Not terribly poetic. Garish in the worst sense. I think he simply has too many ideas in his head, and they are always pushing eachother out of the way. Nothing settles long enough for me to appreciate it. Or, I feel, long enough for even him to really actualize how to make it its best version of itself.



Jabberwocky though, while certainly no favorite, is probably one of his most confident feeling movies. Which seems weird, because its probably the smallest scale film he's done. And probably one of the least adventurous. But it knows what it wants to be, settles itself down into the grime of that concept, and mostly succeeds with his small aim. At no point does it feel desperate to please those watching. As said above, the film can't even bother bathing for its audience. And I can appreciate such stubbornesses.

Fortress -

When it comes to Stuart Gordon, I take Bob Slydell’s approach to Michael Bolton: I celebrate the man's entire catalog. When he wasn't breathing new life into Lovecraft or Poe stories, he was sticking it to corporations like he did in Robot Jox and this movie. It's set in a dystopian 2010's - well, more so - in which there's a one-child policy that, if violated, results in a long sentence in the titular prison, which is operated by the evil Men-Tel corporation. While attempting to sneak into Canada, military man John (Christopher Lambert) and pregnant wife and fellow officer Karen (Loryn Locklin) learn this the hard way. In prison, he bonds with his cellmates, which include D-Day, one of Jeffrey Combs' many oddballs, and a young Clifton Collins, Jr. He also earns the ire of prison director Poe (Kurtwood Smith), who much to John's chagrin takes a liking to Karen.

Besides for-profit prisons, Gordon exploits our fears about corporations intruding into our lives in ways both scary and interesting. The most worrying of these is the prison AI that scans the inmates’ minds while they dream and punishes them for having good ones in a way that would make Freddy Kruger blush. In other words, this is likely David Cronenberg's favorite prison movie. It has a relatively low budget, but you wouldn't be able to tell based on how well-realized the fortress is. The laser bars on the cell walls are a bonus, as is the director's office, which is lined with so many video screens, Poe might as well be the Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. Kurtwood Smith makes him into one of his many enjoyably hateable and sleazy villains, and he somehow manages to become even more loathsome when he reveals his origins and that one-child policy's purpose. As for Lambert, he's no expert at line delivery, but he makes up for it with his presence and physicality, and I enjoyed Locklin's performance for how good she makes Karen keep secrets from Poe. This is primarily an action movie, but fans of Gordon's horror work will be satisfied, especially in the stomach-churning (literally) ways the prison punishes inmates for violating the rules.

The predictions this movie makes about the dangers of corporations becoming too big and powerful are more on the nose than its creators probably would have liked. In spite of these predictions and everything I like about the movie, it doesn't do that much you haven't already seen in the typical prison flick. In fact, I could make a decent list of its similarities with The Shawshank Redemption, the Hong Kong movie The Prisoner from a couple years prior, etc. It still proves that Stuart Gordon could do no wrong, and considering how much more fun and smarter it is than similar movies from this era that have bigger budgets, it should have been more of a hit (it did very well overseas and on video, at least).

My rating: 3 intestinators out of 5

My guy (or gal): D-Day. Sure, he's a little crazy, but his selflessness and special skills are all that you could ask for in a cellmate. Plus, it's Jeffrey Combs.