Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

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I don't believe most people think of Martin Scorsese as an action director, but one can find plenty of examples that suggest his talents in that area. There's the Rube Goldberg machine of violent comeuppance that closes The Departed, the splatterific climax of Taxi Driver, the bruising boxing matches of Raging Bull, the thunderous final moments of Boxcar Bertha. These aren't exactly intended to deliver the thrills we associate with action movies (except maybe Bertha), but they display a sure sense of how to stage and cut action to generate precise effects. In that sense, The Color of Money offers ample more evidence of such abilities in its numerous pool matches. The best thing about these scenes is the way Scorsese captures their sense of geometry, moving his camera in kinetic bursts along angles that evoke the ricocheting of the balls off each other and the edges of the table. The climax of the movie is a tournament match between Paul Newman and his protege Tom Cruise, the camera snapping along, the editing whipping us back and forth, masterfully capturing the energy of not just the match but the sense of personal conflict between the two characters. Scorsese has delivered us so many great sequences that I wouldn't dare rank this near the top, but in that long, long list, I think we can carve out a well deserved spot for this.

The movie is not regarded as one of his best and I understand it was seen as something of a sellout assignment. Now, I have two perhaps contradictory responses to this. One is: so what? Perhaps I've grown weary of our modern studio environment where big money generally gets thrown only at increasingly bland projects and where actual star power seems harder and harder to come by, but going back a few decades and seeing a mass-marketed commercial movie made with this standard of craft and this level of personality and confident execution of tropes, it's easy to find things to enjoy here. The fact is, Scorsese is a master director, and even a more overtly commercial project by him is going to be extremely well made. I happen to think Cape Fear and the aforementioned Boxcar Bertha are both pretty good too. As far as selling out goes, one could do a lot worse.

My other response is that I don't think he's really selling out here. Yes, there are formulas, but Scorsese finds ways to either subvert them or colour them with additional human interest. The fallout from the big match isn't what we expect, and the resonance of these scenes come from how specifically these characters have been developed. The movie is a long gap sequel to Robert Rossen's The Hustler, and while it initially seems to lack the same psychological claustrophobia as the earlier movie, developments later in the movie wring a sense of trauma from our memories of our earlier movie. One of the best scenes in the movie show astutely how deeply shaken Newman's character is after being conned by a pool hall hustler (an electric Forest Whitaker, threatening to run away with the movie). The tension in his voice is palpable when he asks repeatedly, "Are you a hustler, Amos?"

And Scorsese has a deep appreciation for his actors' star qualities, particularly Newman, who combines his classic Hollywood charm with a sense of fallibility and fraught psychological realism. Probably the greatest thing about Newman's performance is its sense of texture, effortlessly evoking a sense of being at this for too long, and having picked up a certain amount of wisdom but maybe not enough. It's a quality that extends to his wardrobe: Newman is one of the most stylish people to ever grace this planet, and in this movie wears one of the greatest collection of sunglasses I've seen in a movie. (In contrast, Cruise gets an amusingly high pompadour that feels like a joke Scorsese played on him, although it works for the character. Just because he's got a story to tell doesn't mean he can't have some fun.) And it's extends even to his voice, simultaneously smooth and gravelly, aged like the whiskey he's been hawking, and Scorsese complements it with the sense of texture he brings to his direction. This doesn't have the intense B&W look of the original, but from the opening shots, a pan across the bar where you can practically feel the wood underneath your hands, smell the cigarettes in the air, taste the booze in those half-empty glasses, it's quite evocative in its own way. This movie is coloured by a deep love of these milieus and the characters who make their way through them.

Had it at 4, then said **** it and bumped it up half a star. This movie rules.

Watched that last year for the first time and I was surprised by how good it was. Everything I read about was always so negative, but it’s a nice sequel to The Hustler.
Is it better than the Hustler? Nope. But it doesn’t need to be to stand on its own.

There's a joy of discovery that colours much of Arthur J. Bressan's Passing Strangers. The movie is about a courtship between an older gay man and a younger man who meet over a classified ad. (The title refers to a passage from a Walt Whitman poem which the older man used for his ad.) The younger man, who still lives with his parents, has only recently begun to enter the gay world, so to speak, and the first half, which is structured around their correspondences over mail, sees him, among other things, visit a porn shop and catch a movie at a porno theatre. In other movies, both mainstream and pornographic, these locations might be depicted with a certain tawdriness, but here, the movie evokes the thrill and self-actualization this character feels as he enters these places, emphasizing not just what he's watching, but his reactions as he processes them. (I did chuckle as he walked by the racks in the porn shop and one of them was titled "incest". Also, the porno theatre advertised a double feature of Nymphettes and **** Me, **** Me. I did not look up whether they were real movies, but laughed when it advertised itself as "San Francisco's oldest art cinema.) I'm perhaps making this sound a bit clinical, but the experience is anything but.

Much of the power of this movie comes from how these characters navigate their environments, first separately, in the B&W first half, and then together, in the vivid colours of the second half. The movie takes a certain poetic approach, trying to abstract the central courtship into pure feeling, but this element gives it a certain tactility. There's one especially thrilling scene early on when the older man explains his cruising routine, and we see him on the street, engaging in a complex interplay of connecting glances and subtle gestures, and the movie climaxes with the characters visiting a gay pride parade, which provides not just documentary interest but the emotional peak of the movie. I admit that by the end I was quite moved.

Now, this is a gay porno, and as a straight man there's probably a cap on how much I can enjoy the movie in that sense, but I did appreciate the way Bressan's camera captures the beauty of the characters' bodies. (I will note that I found a key sex scene ran a tad long, but it was also central to the emotional crux of the movie, so maybe I should suck it up.) This does fall in the great pornographic tradition of amazing soundtracks, with one early synth funk track that especially caught my ear. And I should note that one of the characters wears a Canadian tuxedo, proving once again that it's a good look in the right hands.

The movie is a sort of mirror image to Forbidden Letters, which I would suggest chasing this with. (Both films were recently restored and released together on Blu-ray, and can be rented likewise on Vimeo. The transfers look gorgeous.) That movie also has both B&W and colour sequences, and is also structured around a series of letters, but is undercut by a certain melancholy. If Passing Strangers is about evoking the feeling of falling in love, this is about evoking trepidation and dread that your relationship might never really be repaired. It's about two gay lovers reuniting after one of them did a stint in jail, and even the happier moments are coloured by the psychological toll from being in prison and having to hide that he's gay to protect himself. It also draws much of its effect from how the characters navigate their spaces, but the result is instead dehumanizing. The most potent image in the movie is a shot of both characters masturbating but in separate cells, the incarceration of one of them making the other struggle to even conceive of them truly being together even in his fantasy. I am not sure I can describe just how powerful I found that image, but the composition with the wall between the cells running down the middle of the frame and the gritty B&W wide angle cinematography made quite an impact on me. This is a pretty downbeat film (the one moment of levity comes from the frank advice given to one of the heroes by their female sex worker friend), and perhaps I found it a touch ponderous at times, but I still found the overall result pretty moving.

YESSS!!!
My second-favorite Scorsese. And it's actually kinda close. For all the good reasons you mention here.

Updating this list with Top Gun: Maverick. More uneven than those two, but you can't argue with those IMAX flight sequences.


In Tom We Trust.

Careful, your occasionally excellent taste is showing again.

This is the thing. I think it stands on its own. I know both movies pretty well. I do not feel like anyone needs to have seen The Hustler to get everything that is there to be had in The Color Of Money. If you have, it's more like icing, maybe some little Easter Eggs but even those I think are honestly very subtle and few. This movie is about these two characters, and to a lesser but still legit degree, about Mastroantonio and even Shaver, the point being it's about people and how they act and react and how they adjust to the forces in their lives. It's about a real thing.

Paul Newman and Charlotte Rampling have two of the most beautiful pairs of eyes in the movies, and in The Verdict, they spend much of the runtime pointing them at objects of significance, at the camera, and at each other. In one of the emotional high points of the movie, we're treated to a shot-reverse shot sequence where the characters make eye contact and approach each other, their expressions subtly shifting as emotions come to a boil, one character processing the their betrayal by the other as they converge. It's a deceptively simple yet undeniably powerful piece of direction, and I'm not sure it would have resonated as much had the actors less striking pairs of eyes. In an alternate reality both Newman and Rampling would have had their stars fade and flown over to Italy and ended up in a Lucio Fulci movie, where the famously ommetaphobic director would have hit us with a barrage of extreme eye close-ups and then...Splow! In case the power of onamotopoeia fails me, the sound I'm making is the one that's meant to evoke the results of the spiked-bat-on-testicle torture from the intro to "M.E.T.H.O.D. Man".

I watched this to chase The Color of Money, which I'd put on to pre-game for Top Gun: Maverick (the original was not on any of my streaming services) but only made me hungry for more Newman. And I think the two movies pair well together (this and The Color of Money, although that one pairs better than you'd expect with Top Gun: Maverick) as there are similarities in Newman's performances and character arcs. Both characters are old and faded and not as sharp as they used to be, but where Scorsese conceded Newman's underlying coolness and complemented the hints of classic Newman magic with an appropriately flashy style, Lumet opens with him in a completely dismal state, having him scan the obituary section and sneak into funerals as the movie opens. (Rampling later sizes him up succinctly: "You want to be a failure? Then, do it some place else! I can't invest in failure, Frank, anymore. I can't.") Both movies show the characters navigating bars with some frequency, and evokes the settings with the , but here there's no real joy, just desperation.

The movie is a masterclass in small moments and gestures, and you can see Newman get a glimmer of a certain hope when a potential expert witness concludes an exchange in the simplest words.

I'm not sure this moment would work nearly as well if Lumet didn't trust his actors completely and if anyone without the carefully calibrated magnetism of Newman were providing the reaction. Similar to Scorsese's movie, there's a deep appreciation of Newman as a movie star, and the movie generates a certain tension between Newman's immense charisma and the state of his character. We want him to succeed because he's Paul Newman, dammit.

I'd actually watched most of this years ago, but had missed the ending, which as you can guess is pretty important for a courtroom drama. Now for years I'd processed my failure to catch those last few minutes by rationalizing that it doesn't matter what the outcome is to the case, but you know, it kind of does here, at least in terms of the emotional fallout for the main characters. (As a result I'm considering it a first time; also I'd forgotten large chunks of the movie.) I am no legal eagle (and have yet to even be called for jury duty) so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the courtroom scenes, but Lumet's direction is so good as to be invisible, knowing just where to point the camera and when to cut, so that the proceedings themselves provide the tension. There's a key moment when Newman concludes his case, and as he's speaking, Lumet slowly moves in his camera. The move is pretty straightfoward, but the effect is tremendously moving, granting this character a certain dignity he'd been fighting to reclaim for the entire movie. Sometimes simpler is better.

Alright, I think we've had enough good movies for now. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I sought out The Night of Submission for two reasons. One, it represents an intersection of two genres I’m interested in, horror and pornography. As much as I’d like to say that these are two great flavours that taste great together, the fact is that most hybrids are unfortunately heavy on sexual assault, which this movie thankfully isn’t. The other reason is that this is an early production from Avon Films, a mob-affiliated porno theatre chain that got asses in seats by churning out the roughest, meanest pornos to play 42nd Street. My introduction to Avon Films was through the work of Phil Prince, whose Taming of Rebecca is one of the most vile movies I’ve ever seen but also kinda, sorta, pretty effective as a work of horror, and with a great maniacal performance by George Payne. It’s a movie that’s kinda, sorta, maybe worth seeing at some point if you have sufficient interest in the darker corners of cinema, but also comes with a great big “Watch at your own risk” disclaimer. But let’s just say that when you start with something that unpleasant, the rest is gravy, and I did find myself warming up to Prince’s less caustic efforts, if only by virtue of a consistent aesthetic.

The Night of Submission is directed not by Prince but by Joe Davian, an earlier house director for Avon who like Prince was not a trained filmmaker, and actually came from a background of athletic coaching. (You can learn more about both directors through some great deep dive articles on the Rialto Report’s website.) The plot of the movie concerns a secret voodoo BDSM cult who use their secret voodoo BDSM powers to host a bunch of secret voodoo BDSM orgies. I mentioned earlier that this is thankfully not chock full of sexual assault, and in fact the activities of the secret voodoo BDSM cult, while not vanilla, seem entirely consensual. The cult is secret but not particularly sinister. Of course, this attracts the attention of a magazine publisher played by Carter Stevens, who dispatches his seemingly only reporter C.J. Laing to investigate, who reacts incredulously as she excitedly snaps photos of the proceedings. "My God, they're beating her to blood! This will be the biggest...the boldest...the best story of my life, I don't believe it!"

Unfortunately, the camera roll turns out to be entirely blank thanks to the cult’s secret voodoo powers, leading Stevens to fire Laing and take over the investigation himself by going undercover. What really happened is that Laing left the production after shooting her one scene, and Davian brought in Stevens in an effort to patch up the movie, and the audience is significantly worse off as a result. Instead of Laing, who is easy on the eyes and happened to specialize in the kind of scenes featured in the finished product, we’re stuck looking at Stevens, who resembles a long lost bearded Belushi brother and executes his scenes without a great deal of energy. The climax of the movie involves the characters participating in an overlong, shapeless orgy, after which Stevens types up his account of the events while his girlfriend Annie Sprinkle beams with pride. But wait, could there be one last secret voodoo surprise? Forgive me for spoiling the movie, the answer is yes.

Davian is obviously an inexperienced filmmaker, and while he has some sense of how to deploy music effectively to raise the movie’s pulse, most of this is formless and unexciting. There are moments when it approaches a horror movie atmosphere (the film’s most intriguing visual involves a fire being lit in front of a woman tied to a cross; I’m not an expert on fire safety but the distance between them looked safe enough), the cult’s lack of malicious intentions and the fact that a lot of this was obviously shot in somebody’s apartment, meaning the scariest thing is the decor. Was it too much to ask to set this in a dungeon? And I’ll admit I find orgy scenes pretty boring to watch in general as I never know what I’m supposed to be focusing on, I do think the movie’s reliance on them undermines its effectiveness. While these scenes arguably give the audience more bang for their buck, they’re overlong, uninterestingly filmed, and lack any of the kind of context regarding power dynamics or even basic characterizations that might give some tension to the proceedings. Prince’s films might be a lot more noxious, but that noxiousness lends it a certain charge that’s missing here. But really the movie’s biggest crime is that it casts both Annie Sprinkle and Vanessa Del Rio and manages to squander them both.

Domination Blue ups the production values by featuring an actual set. The movie is a hardcore take on the women in prison genre, which actually makes for pretty good bedfellows with pornography given that it’s largely motivated by titillation and doesn’t demand expensive production values. I’d previously seen the enjoyably campy Desperate Women, which features the adorable Taija Rae as well as Sharon Mitchell doing a terrible Latino accent. This movie also features Mitchell, but its tone is a lot meaner, leaning into its roughie dimensions by making its sex either nonconsensual or as demeaning as possible, interspersing abuse in the prison with the troubled case histories of the inmates. Most of the proceedings are unpleasant by design, and I admit that one scene involving a character having to eat brown, viscous slop made me gag a little. The only moment of levity comes when the prison warden gets dominated by his female assistant, who expresses some insecurity when he shows a preference for his blowup doll. "You love her more than me. She's just a plastic thing, she has no feelings, she can't beat you, she can't do anything, just be there.”

Joe Davian’s direction here is more assured than in The Night of Submission, as the stark lighting and heavy use of shadows (likely to hide the limitations of the set; you can spot a radiator in a few scenes if you squint) gives the movie a nicely sinister atmosphere. That being said, it seems that there might have been only one microphone used in the production, as it’s pretty much impossible to hear most of the actors clearly in any scene involving more than two characters. As far as the cast goes, Vanessa Del Rio gets one great line ("You bastard, why don't you go sit on a dildo?"), and the presence of Mitchell means we get to see some actual acting here. That being said, there’s one scene where she shoots up in a dirty bathroom that I found upsetting even by the grimy standards of the material, especially given her real-life struggles with substance abuse. And I do think the movie miscalculates when it shows her reminiscing about her boyfriend, as it shoots what should be a tender scene in the same dark, sinister lighting scheme as the rest of the movie.

House of De Sade feels like a redo of The Night of Submission, but more assured in its execution. The plot here involves the characters being invited a seance where they end up summoning the Marquis de Sade, who is touted as being “one of the most notorious sex fiends and villains ever known to man”. Now the fact is, the characters seem pretty well versed in his teachings already, so one wonders what they hoped to gain by summoning him (perhaps some recognition for their execution of his theories), but the movie does manage to conjure some lo-fi atmosphere. The haunted house the seance is set in is clearly just somebody’s house, but anytime you turn down the lights and have the characters walking through creepy corridors, I’m having a good time, and the movie does more or less deliver on that front. (Unfortunately, the characters foolishly split up to explore the house, violating one of the most important rules explained by Randy in Scream.) The movie does betray its budget as a lot of it is obviously dubbed, and it would have been funnier if Joe Davian went full Doris Wishman and avoided showing the characters’ mouths during dialogue scenes.

This stars Vanessa Del Rio, who apparently was quite sympatico with Davian‘s vision, and you can see the results here, as her scenes are substantially more energetic than anything else in the movie. (The highlight, I suppose, involves the creative use of a cucumber. While food play is not at all my thing, I must thank the movie for at least not opting for a tossed salad joke, which I’m pretty sure would have made me throw up. If I’ve caused you to lose your lunch, my apologies. And if I’ve piqued your interest, hey, more power to you.) Like in The Night of Submission, Davian cuts multiple scenes of sexual activity together likely to give the audience better value, but the juxtaposition only emphasizes that Del Rio was operating on a whole other level than the rest of the performers, and that the movie would have been better off just sticking to her. And of course, there are some spooky highlights, including a hunchback in a mirror, a painting with moving eyes, nunchuks (alas, nobody demonstrates their nunchaku technique), and Del Rio getting ejaculated on by a possible ghost and then calming her nerves by indulging in a threesome. We’ve all been there.

I like that the poster makes it look like Lisa De Leeuw and a Jackson brother are in the movie. Nobody in the movie looks anything like the people on the poster.

Rock, I'm not going to figure out how to use the site search to find out if you've reviewed it here, but have you seen The Coming of Sin?


I couldn't help but think of your appreciation of some actress (I've forgotten who) as the movie focused on the eyes of all the young, attractive characters in this movie. Or, actors/actresses, I can't tell how old the characters are supposed to be.

I have not but I've enjoyed the few from Larraz I've seen. And it looks to be well regarded by my Letterboxd circle, which is doubly encouraging.


That being said, there's a horse on the cover and... I hope this doesn't go full Emmanuelle in America, does it?

I was going to say, "no. Though it gets implied in one of the character's dreams." But I did get my copy off of iTunes which didn't have the version of Bad Lieutenant with Keitel's dick in it either. So let me check IMDb.
*cross checks The Beast to make sure this type of stuff shows up*


Looks like you're good if you wanted it to remain implied.