Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

I haven't seen anything from Bay other than his Transformers films, but I also haven't been able to muster up the encouragement to check anything else of his out. I'll keep an eye out for Ambulance though to see how I respond to it.

__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd

The Rock and Ambulance are the ones that feel like his work while keeping his more off putting tendencies relatively in check. Pain & Gain has those off putting tendencies on full display but deploy them more purposefully. 13 Hours has some of his best filmmaking but doesn't feel like what most people think of as a Bay film.

I might check them out as well then.

The Rock is no great masterwork, but it is a lot of fun. And Bay's style is perfectly suitable for this kind of movie. The bad wrap he gets is frequently a little much. I know people have serious complaints about the Transformer films (and from clips I've seen, they seem to have a point) but a movie like The Rock is in completely capable hands with Bay. And he deserves some credit for developing a very specific style that has been copied a thousand times over by now. You can recognize a Bay film at a glance. And that doesn't happen by accident. He's not a hack, even if he has produced a tonne of shit in his career.

I think Bay is an easy target as he's a director with a recognizable style who frequently lacks good taste and doesn't seem concerned with making holistically enjoyable movies. I think some of his work can be criticized even with those caveats (I think his visual style at its best has a thrilling sense of movement, but at its worst is totally incoherent), but that's probably why he gets more shit than plenty of blander directors.


With The Rock, I suspect there's quite a bit of Bruckheimer in the finished product as well, reining in some of Bay's more annoying tendencies and providing a level of quality control. Its virtues are readily apparent (great cast, funny dialogue) and can likely be attributed to a supportive producer, but I do think Bay imbues it with a certain irreverence and energy that's his own. It may look like Top Gun, but it certainly doesn't feel like it.

Rankings:

Love:
The Rock
Ambulance

Like:
13 Hours
Pain & Gain
Dark of the Moon
Bad Boys
6 Underground
Bad Boys II

Dislike, but have their moments:
Age of Extinction
Pearl Harbor

Feces:
Transformers
Armageddon
The Last Knight

Haven't seen:
The Island
Revenge of the Fallen

In the films of Lau Kar-Leung, kung fu is not just a means of violence but a path to spiritual enlightenment. In a movie like The 36th Chamber of Shaolin and The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter, you can see how the hero doesn't just become superior fighters as they train in kung fu, but grows as a human being. The training sequences challenge his mind as well as his body, and you can see what lessons he is learning at each step of the way. Lau was a believer in the philosophy of kung fu, which is not something that was shared across the genre, even in movies that deploy many of the same tropes. In Hitman in the Hand of Buddha, the hero undergoes training at a Buddhist monastery, but rather than teaching him any actual lessons, the monks use this as an excuse to bully him relentlessly, with one monk in particular subjecting him to all sorts of inane, pointless exercises. I am not a Buddhist and not well versed in Buddhist philosophy, but I would wager that this is not a devout interpretation of Buddhist values.

Eventually the hero overhears that the monks were trying to build the strength of his kicks, although we see in the opening scene that he's not lacking in that department. He has a showdown with the abbott, who complains that he hasn't been doing his reading (something we see none of the other monks do at any point in the movie), and proves to everybody that he's a better fighter than all of them. Then he graciously thanks them all, even the one ******** monk who was giving him a hard time, and returns to the overarching plot. Earlier, he had been pushing back against some thugs who had been antagonizing the local populace, and it turns out in his absence they raped his sister (who then killed herself) and killed his stepbrother. So within five minutes he forgets whatever lessons he was supposed to have learned (not hard when he received such dogshit intruction) and enacts violent revenge.

The movie's handling of the monk training tropes perhaps unintentionally emphasizes their hollowness, as the monks don't seem all that better as people and don't seem terribly interested in teaching spiritual matters. But really this is an excuse to string together a series of creative, high energy fight scenes, and at a runtime of under an hour and a half, this is a pretty breezy watch. (I believe a ninety-minute is available, but the cut I watched ran seventy-five minutes. The dialogue switched to German at a few points mid-scene, but it wasn't too hard to follow on the whole.) Hwang Jang-Lee co-directs and stars as the hero, and his kick-heavy fighting style is made the most of. There are moments when he seems to almost levitate, kicking his enemies repeatedly to bounce off them while in mid-air, like a hacky sack (if the hacky sack did the kicking). Now, hacky sacks don't have terribly cool associations, and I for one have them tied irreparably in my brain to the slam poetry scene in She's All That, where the hero Freddie Prinze Jr. used them as a metaphor for his fraught relationship with his father Tim Matheson. Hwang does no such thing here, but I'm sticking my the metaphor.

Now if I can quibble with one thing, the hero at one point tortures one of the villains by dunking his head in a bucket of water, using a punching bag or something of the sort as a counterweight. Eventually, he pokes a whole in the bag to let it slowly drain out, leaving the villain to drown. Now, from the staging of the scene, you can see that the villain could easily get out of this predicament by curling or swinging away, but this occurs to neither the hero nor the villain at any point. Now, this is nowhere near movie-ruining bad, but for a scene that's supposed to depict some ice cold shit, it's a bit distracting.

__________________

Wow. After looking at this list, and I've seen a lot of them, it looks like the only Michael Bay movie I actually like is The Rock.

(Disclaimer: I have not seen Ambulance)

Apparently there's a cut of this that replaces all the sex and violence with footage from Ghoulies. I have not seen that version.

Anna Obsessed opens with a pair of images it returns to repeatedly over the course of its runtime: Annette Haven, writhing around in bed as if she were having a nightmare, and a nude woman ascending a set of shadowy stairs. Then we get a car driving in the rain, as moody saxophone music plays over the soundtrack and the opening credits flash on the screen. The car stops outside a house, and the driver, dressed in black, gets out and peeks in through the window. Inside the house, the camera pans from the window to Constance Money and John Leslie, who are doing what people in porno movies tend to do. But as we learn at the end of this scene and the following morning, all is not well in the Money-Leslie household, as Money has been finding Leslie increasingly inattentive as a lover and a husband.

Enter Annette Haven, who seems to hit it off immediately with Money, running into her at the most convenient times and eventually the two of them start an affair. Yet perhaps Leslie has an affair of his own with his secretary, and more troublingly, there seems to be a killer rapist on the loose, who's already claimed four victims, and may have set their sights on Money, and we see them repeatedly obsessing over a polaroid. And we return to those same opening images, of Haven tossing and turning in bed and a nude woman ascending the stairs.

Those recurring images are key to the distinct spell cast by Anna Obsessed, which plays like a dream we're not sure we've awoken from. The sex scenes are shot with intimate, floating camera moves, so that while they provide the usual jollies offered by these movies, also feel like images straight out of the subconscious. Even when we slip into a daydream by another character, the effect is less a break in perspective than an overarching somnambulist atmosphere, where we're not sure whose dreams we're slipping in and out of. The movie's ugliest scene (a brutal rape involving a pistol) seems to rupture this feeling, as if the movie's very reality is in flux. And in that sense, Annette Haven's casting is a masterstroke. More than any other golden age actress, Haven has the aura of a classical movie star, and here her presence plays like she's stepped out of the TV after you dozed off during a noir late at night. It makes sense that Money would fall so easily under her spell: Haven represents a fantasy Money didn't know she had. (The effect is somewhat undone when Haven double dips a breadstick during the climactic scene, where she and Money feed an assortment of snacks to a shirtless Leslie. I believe in Italy they call this la dolce vita.)

This had a heftier script, more preparation time and a bigger budget than usual for an adult film in this era (although some of that is through deferring salary for the crew), and was shot with video assist (a technique pioneered by Jerry Lewis) so the filmmakers wouldn't have to wait to review the dailies. The result is a movie with a distinct, deliberate visual style and a heavy sense of mood. There is arguably a certain incoherence in the finished film, which was the result of the competing visions of the filmmakers, as well as deliberate choices like having screenwriter Piastro Cruiso play the killer, similar to how Dario Argento would step in during the murder scenes in his giallos. (Cruiso gets a scene where Money energetically straddles his face, which I'm sure he enjoyed.) And it's undeniably a bit goofy that the impetus of this psychological horror noir is that the husband is lame in the sack. Yet this incoherence works in the film's favour, as dreams don't always make sense when you try to pick them apart. In an interview with the Rialto Report, Cruiso also recounts that Money had difficulty remembering her lines, so the filmmakers placed them around the set and obscured them with props. I mean, if Marlon Brando did it during The Godfather, I don't see why Constance Money shouldn't, and while she's not as good as Brando, I found her performance empathetic and engaging.

Isn't this getting a 4K from Vinegar Syndrome?

Yup. They had a DVD release earlier, but I think that's out of print now.


The movie is fun if not especially "good". Most of the novelty comes from seeing the biggest stars in '70s porn in a relatively lavish production (by '70s porn standards). How much enjoyment you get out of it will likely be determined by your affection for the Dracula story.


Personally, I prefer the "followup" Dracula Exotica with the same lead actor. It's a less conventional take on the material, but feels a lot more dynamic. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have a nice-looking release available.



I have a review somewhere in this thread of both if you're interested.

I'm about 90% sure your reviews of them are the only reason I took notice of VS releasing them. You getting the 4K?

Nah. I don't have a 4K TV, and don't know how likely I am to rewatch this.

Gotta step your tech game up. I've gone 4K and I'm never coming back. Next best thing to having your own 35mm prints.

The problem is that if I start spending more money on fancy 4k blu-rays, I'll have less money to spend on clothes I don't need.

When we first meet him, the miner played by Harry Belafonte seems to be having a bad day at work. You see, the mine's just caved in, and he can hardly get in touch with anybody topside. Realizing that nobody's going to come down and save him, he manages to dig himself out. At this point, he finds himself bewildered by the total absence of people anywhere he goes, although as he goes looking, the picture becomes clearer, with newspaper headlines and old radio broadcasts confirming that he missed the apocalypse as he was trapped underground. Eventually he makes his way to New York City, and these initial scenes provide the movie's most haunting passage, juxtaposing him with a sea of unattended cars on a bridge and other landmarks. The most poignant of these images has him framed against skyscrapers, suggesting that as a working class black man, he could only attain such heights once society has totally collapsed.

At this point it starts to come into focus that this is not merely a cautionary tale about nuclear weapons (the same year saw the release of the talkier but no less involving On The Beach, and the following decade produced one of my favourites in the genre, The War Game, the sometimes bitterly funny and mostly terrifying pseudocumentary that hits like a sledgehammer). Belafonte eventually starts accepting his new reality, finding ways to amuse himself like befriending two mannequins, one male, one female (he does not however give the female a fake mustache and the male lipstick, nor does he make them kiss; his intentions are more dignified). He even regales them with a song, perhaps as a commercial concession and acknowledgement of Belafonte's other talents. Boy, this nuclear apocalypse sure is grim, here's a tune from the "Banana Boat Song" guy to cheer us up.

He eventually tires of the male and tosses him out the window, which leads to the reveal that he's not alone. In fact, a young woman played by Inger Stevens has been stalking him the whole time. They become friends, but up to a point, as Belafonte is unable to accept her affection, and the movie slowly reveals how their internalized racism colours their relationship, no matter how much they desire to bridge the gap. Further complications are posed by the arrival of a sailor played by Mel Ferrer, who announces that he's not a racist but is beholden to patriarchal notions, feeling the need to compete for Stevens' heart, neither man paying much heed to what she actually wants. Eventually he forces an ultimatum, triggering a showdown between both men that has them hunting each other across the city.

There is arguably something quaint about a movie that chooses to tackle racism and misogyny without explicitly addressing structural issues, but I found the movie quite moving in how it depicts the depth to which the characters have had such ideas ingrained in them by society that they're unable to shed them even said society has collapsed. It helps that it provides three very engaging lead performances. It helps even more that the delivery is so cinematic, with striking B&W scope compositions lending the proceedings an austere beauty and heightening the tension of the climax. And if the movie's resolution, which has the characters walking off like I assume Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke and Lee Marvin do in Paint Your Wagon (which I haven't seen but am happy to make wild assumptions about), is a little hokey, I guess that's okay too. If Inger Stevens held our hands and looked deep into our eyes, I suspect many of us would be powerless to resist too.

Yes, yes, I watch good movies too. I'll go back to watching garbage soon, I promise.