Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

Listen, you show me an '80s Jackie Chan movie, I guarantee you it's a good time or your money back. (In this hypothetical, I'm charging you money to pat you on the back for your movie selections. A surprisingly lucrative grift, in this hypothetical, that is.) You add Sammo Hung, I call that leveling up, my friend. And throw Yuen Biao into the mix, well, now we have a party. Now, if in that hypothetical, you picked Fearless Hyena 2 (where Jackie left the production and his departure was hidden with a stand-in and lots of stock footage from the first Fearless Hyena) and Heart of Dragon (where Sammo plays Jackie's developmentally disabled brother with all the tact of the Simple Jack gag from Tropic Thunder) for the first two picks, well, those are still a good time, there's just more compartmentalizing required to enjoy them. Luckily, for the third pick, there are fewer options so it's harder to go wrong, and if you settled on this movie, there's not much you have to excuse here. (Of course, if you gave this a shot based on this poster that uses an image from Twinkle Twinkle Lucky Stars, you might be very confused as Andy Lau is nowhere to be seen here.)

The plot here concerns Jackie playing a lawyer defending a gangster whose factory is polluting the water and killing the livestock of a fishery owner. In his scheme to win the case, he enlists the help of Sammo, a dirty tricks operator first seen in an arms deal gone awry (a number of the posters feature Sammo brandishing assault weapons, which literally only happens in this scene and is not at all reflective of the film's overall tone) and Yuen Biao, a philosophically confused cat burglar alienated by both capitalism and communism (he subjects his pet birds to the former and his pet fish to the latter). Much of this is fodder for comedic hijinks, with Sammo and Yuen Biao getting into it as neither is initially aware of the other's relationship to Jackie. Sammo spies on the fishery owner with an elaborate satellite headset and then foils what he thinks is a robbery by Yuen Biao, who was attempting to place a bug in the fishery owner's apartment, and later the two of them get into a fight that Jackie clumsily tries to hide while having the fishery owner's sexy cousin (Miss Hong Kong 1987 Pauline Yeung) over for dinner. And along the way, love blossoms, with sentimental Cantopop tunes playing while Jackie romances the cousin and Sammo romances the fishery owner. This stuff is corny as hell, but I ate it all up. (Also, if you must ask, Jackie and Sammo are in that tier of movie stars who have first name status, like Eddie and Clint. Yuen Biao is in the second tier of stars who we refer to by their whole name, like John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe. Sorry, I don't make the rules.)

Of course, because they are all essentially good hearted, they decide to do what's right and help the fishery owner, and go to the gangster's factory to find evidence of wrongdoing and beat the shit out of all his goons, with Jackie having a climactic showdown with Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, in a reprise of sorts of the famous confrontation from the earlier Dragons team-up Wheels on Meals. I don't think this movie is quite as enjoyable as that one, but it's better to savour the differences. Sammo Hung spoke of the relative freedom he was allowed when shooting Wheels on Meals in Spain compared to the restrictions he faced making movies in Hong Kong, and Dragons Forever does feel comparatively claustrophobic, a quality which colours the action. (You'll notice how much of the climax consists of the heroes swinging over or contorting around railings and other obstacles, and there's plenty of the classic prop-heavy Jackie combat we know and love.) I've seen other Letterboxd reviews make comparisons to the Three Stooges, and there's certainly a resemblance in the scenes of the three stars slapping each other in succession, like ricocheting across paddles in a pinball machine.

And while much of the story is a clothesline to hang these sequences on, I do think there's some resonance in the heroes' dilemma. Because Hong Kong has such a specific political history and such a specific cinema, it can be easy to read the former into the latter, but Yuen Biao's political and spiritual confusion foregrounds this dynamic. And I think it also works as a commentary on the stars' talents. Jackie spent his early years having his tremendous abilities exploited by a sleazy producer who was friendly with the mob (Fearless Hyena 2 has a shot of him stuffing snakes down his pants in the first few minutes) only for him to eventually break away and make more fulfilling films. The gangster here could be Lo Wei and the tactics Jackie employs initially could be as slimy as the snakes he stuffed down his pants in that other movie, if you think about it.

Now, if one must quibble with this movie, it's that Jackie and Sammo both end up with girlfriends while Yuen Biao ends up alone (he decries the "gals before pals" mentality of the others at the very end). Meanwhile, Jackie spends the entire movie ignoring his bespectacled colleague who's obviously into him. All I'm saying is, he could hook a brother up.

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For whatever reason, the early to mid '80s saw a number of movies pop up about journalists covering precarious political situations and foreign conflicts. Why the trend? Well, I'm sure somebody somewhere has already offered analysis that's intelligent and thoughtful, but let me provide some dumbassed speculation of my own. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that some combination of post-Watergate political disillusionment, a reaction to a right wing presidency (all roads lead to Reagan) and increasing awareness of the role America was playing in these conflicts thanks to coverage of civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador played a part. Of these movies, my two favourites would have to be Circle of Deceit, the West German film shot dangerously near actual conflict zones in Beirut and where Bruno Ganz thirsts for Hanna Schygulla in between bartering for massacre photos, and Under Fire, where Gene Hackman puts in a wonderfully textured and pained performance as the third wheel in a romance between Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy while the three of them cover the Sandinista uprising.

What both those movies have in greater supply than this one is a willingness to interrogate the eagerness with with their journalist heroes cover real life horrors, milking bloodshed to sell papers or get ratings. There's a scene in Under Fire where a group of journalists watches a bombing campaign from atop a hotel that succinctly conveys this queasy dynamic of war as a spectator sport. There's an element of this in The Year of Living Dangerously, where the hero gets so eager to pursue the story he thinks he's caught onto, about an attempted Communist uprising, that he completely misses the actual military coup and subsequent massacre that takes place. The final stretch of the film shows the hero and his Communist-affiliated assistant racing to the airport as the killings begin. These scenes are tense, and at least for a PG-rated film, quite bracing in their impact, but the final shots, where the hero is reunited with his love, hit a completely solipsistic note, entirely inappropriate for the material.

When discussing this movie, the elephant in the room has to be Linda Hunt's character. It's not just that she's playing an Asian character, which is bad enough on its own, but that the characterization seems to play so readily into unmasculine stereotypes about Asian men that are unfortunately so prevalent even today. This was Hunt's breakout film role, and credit to her, she's very good, managing to wring nuance and poignancy out of this extremely loaded characterization. But at the same time, seeing her in this makeup is about as distracting as Sean Connery's Japanese disguise in You Only Live Twice, without the camp elements of that other movie to make it easier to laugh off.

All that being said, this is a very gripping movie on the whole. As Ebert points out in his review, this does a great job of capturing the tense yet perhaps a little thrilling ambience such a political situation would evoke for its journalist hero, the humid atmosphere, and the callous group dynamic in the foreign journalist community. (It was nice, after having first seen it on a muddy DVD copy, to revisit this in a crisp HD transfer, which really let the technical aspects shine.) There's a great, slimy performance by Michael Murphy as a journalist who seems to enjoy his job a little too much, in contrast to the naive idealism of Mel Gibson's hero. At the risk of sounding glib, I think a lot of Gibson's performances are coloured by the darkness of his real life, but this is the furthest I've seen him get away from those qualities. And there's also Bembol Roco as Gibson's assistant, turning in work too subtle for Gibson's myopic character to pick up on. And of course Sigourney Weaver, who I don't need to tell you is great as she always is.

Always been a big fan of this one. Saw it when I was too young back in the early 80s because my parents just had no idea how cable TV worked.

I've always heard that early '80s cable was like the wild west?


There were interesting specialty channels when I was growing up (which seemed awfully generous with their free previews; maybe that's why they didn't survive?), but at least in Canada, they basically made you pay for packages full of lots of channels you didn't want, making the whole thing not terribly cost-effective if you only wanted a few of them.

After being unmoved by Zebedy Colt's The Farmer's Daughters, I was surprised by how much more I enjoyed The Devil Inside Her. It's probably not much more forcefully directed on the whole, and contains some of the same unpleasant content as the other movie, but couches it in subject matter much more conducive to this style. The movie takes place in New England, 1826. Terri Hall, a farmer's daughter, longs for a handsome farmhand, played by Dean Tait. Their strict father, played by Colt himself, doesn't take too kindly to this relationship, and tries to put an end to it by flogging her. His other daughter, Jody Maxwell, in a fit of jealousy, prays to the devil, played by Rod Dumont (first seen in KISS makeup and working his genitals like he's making hand pulled noodles), who then descends upon the family and tries to bring them under his influence. Because this is a '70s porno, this happens through a number of sex scenes with varying degrees of consent, with the devil having his way with different members of the family while disguised as their loved ones, usually with cat eye makeup to clue the audience in.

Now, if this sounds just a little bit like a certain witchy movie from a few years ago, I will suggest that this would make a pretty good double feature with Robert Eggers' The Witch, as both families depict a puritanical family under attack by hostile supernatural forces they're completely unequipped to deal with. (While the onscreen content in this film is obviously more unsavoury, the conclusion it reaches might be a bit gentler. "Love of God cannot be so oppressive that one forgets pure love and honest desire.") While this movie is not up the technical standards of that other movie, its low budget does give it certain advantages, with its forest environment providing a certain immediacy and sense of isolation a more polished production might not be able to conjure. (This also makes it easier to excuse that the movie isn't a terribly convincing depiction of the period, with characters wearing bellbottom jeans or dressed like the raided L.L. Bean. Inconsistent costuming is beside the point when you feel like you're really alone in the forest.) The filmmaking, while not particularly sophisticated, does apply its lo-fi stylization where it counts, peaking with a climactic satanic orgy that hits us with a barrage of red filters, canted angles, gimp masks, an upside down lady, glam rock makeup, capes, afro wigs, slow motion, and Annie Sprinkle throwing herself into the action with abandon.

This is not a lot more polished than The Farmer's Daughters, but with its slightly longer runtime, you can see it build some kind of arc, both narratively and stylistically, instead of the two act structure and handful of editing tricks during the climax of the other movie. Colt also seems to have a better handle on the light but ominous folk horror atmosphere here than on the roughie sleaze of the earlier movie. (As for the farm theme, I understand Colt owned a farmhouse and shot his movies nearby, which likely explains things. Of course, he plays off this theme with a scene of Maxwell spending quality time with an unshucked cob of corn. All I could think of during this scene was Gerald Ford's lesson from the campaign trail in the year prior to when this movie was made: "Always shuck your tamales.") And I think the casting goes a long way in making this work, with the more clean cut looking Maxwell playing the "bad" sister and the more unusual looking Hall playing the "good" sister. Hall, with her narrow face, raccoon eyes and wispy presence, looks like she'd be entirely at home in a giallo or ghost story and as such is a pretty effective lead for this movie's folk horror stylings. Is there a movie where she walks down corridors in flowy white robes while curtains flutter in the wind? This merits further investigation.

I knew going into Armour of God that Jackie Chan nearly died during production after a routine stunt went seriously wrong. In that sense, it makes sense that this movie doesn't go quite as hard as some of his other movies from the era, as it would be entirely justified for Jackie to make the action scenes a bit less bruising so he could properly recover from his injuries. (The first scene was mostly shot prior to the accident, but the majority of the movie was shot several months later. You will notice a different haircut in that opening scene, but the rest of the movie has him with his usual mop.) But I think the bigger problem is that he doesn't seem to have much of a feel for the globetrotting adventure genre. I get the sense that this might have been designed to play better internationally, and the result is that it tones down the clothesline-plot quality of his better movies (that allowed him to maximize the killer-to-filler ratio) for fear of alienating viewers with the usual tonal dissonance. Instead, it commits to a plot that by itself isn't terribly interesting, and fails to liven it up in between the set pieces. Unlike his directorial efforts from the era, this is shot in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio (chosen by original director Eric Tsang, who started shooting the opening scene but didn't return after the hiatus in production) instead of 2.35:1, and as a result looks grittier and less lavish than I'd like from this genre.

I think the other big problem is that Jackie is paired with weaker than usual co-stars. You can watch his Police Story movies or the ones he did with Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao and see how him and his co-stars have complementary presences that play off each other nicely. Here, he's paired with Alan Tam, who I presume was cast because of his talents as a singer (in an undercooked backstory about both characters being in a band that's never paid off), but Tam is neither charismatic nor agile enough to give Jackie much to play off of. (I suspect Tam's involvement was also the result of a conscious MTV influence, visible in a massacre montage and the makeup of Jackie's foes in the climax. The massacre is bloodier than usual for Jackie, likely because it was shot by Tsang.) The only co-star Jackie has any chemistry with here is Miss Spain 1979 Lola Forner, reuniting with him after Wheels on Meals, who plays every scene with her hair seemingly caught in a slight breeze. That being said, there is some classic shtick here, like the scene where Jackie distracts Forner while Tam tries to sneak out of her room, or the scene where Forner waits in the car while the two friends take a leak at the side of the road while a Cantopop ballad sung by Tam blares on the soundtrack.

All that being said, Jackie Chan is still a master physical performer and action director, so a movie where he's operating at less than 100% is still pretty enjoyable and has enough of his usual slapstick-tinged fight scenes to sate viewers. The opening feels the most aggressive in terms of stuntwork (probably because it began shooting before his accident), but the climactic fights have him surrounded by his foes who strikes him from all corners of the frame, business as usual. There's even a certain balletic grace in how his foes stumble out of the way to dodge the fiery wooden log he swings across the room. But the best action scene comes around a third of the way in, with a car chase that tries to approximate the claustrophobia of Hong Kong in a European location (the movie was shot mostly in the former Yugoslavia), with endless extras jumping out of the way as Jackie tries to evade a motorcycle gang in his silver Mitsubishi. (I suspect Golden Harvest had a product placement deal with the manufacturer. I also noticed a scene where Jackie conspicuously uses a can of Kirin beer to distract a group of hostile tribesmen.) This is a great scene, although if I must be perfectly honest, I didn't find it quite as fun as a similar chase in Heart of Dragon which I watched a few weeks ago, likely because the ugly car here (which for some reason has a "Twin Turbo" feature to make it go extra fast) doesn't have the same visual impact as the loud yellow one in the other movie.

Watching Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher and Las Vegas Serial Killer, two late works by Ray Dennis Steckler. Both directors started their careers in the '60s and now found themselves trying to keep up with current trends, but finding themselves unable to adjust due to their outmoded filmmaking methods, they settled back into reflex. A Night to Dismember especially feels like a transmission from another timeline, where filmmaking had become less technically sophisticated over those couple of decades, and instead dissolved into a kind of primordial soup. The production and release circumstances add to this "moment out of time" quality, with Wishman having to salvage the film with reshoots and brazen editing after losing most of the footage after it was sent for processing, and the finished film not getting released until several years later. (Wishman's original cut apparently surfaced on YouTube a few years ago,, but I did not watch it yet.)

The natural state of this movie is VHS tape as it's wearing out, or a film reel as it's disintegrating. Shots connect with each other at jagged angles, jammed together like puzzle pieces that obviously shouldn't connect, yet Wishman takes her scissors to the edges and puts them together anyway, with ungainly dissolves and superimpositions further melting them together, while the dubbed audio creates a further sense of detachment. I don't think this quite holds together with any kind of dream logic, and I didn't find this as fun as some other nightmare-tinged horrors, perhaps because none of the individual images really grabbed me. That being said, I probably am a bit kinder to it than most would be, as having watched a number of Wishman's films over the past few weeks, I do find it recognizably her work. There's a certain dissonance that can be detected in some of her other films that I've seen, with the rampant objectification of the heroine and interrogation of said objectification in Indecent Desires, the visual poetry contrasting with the ugly subject matter in Bad Girls Go to Hell, and the alternately sympathetic and sensationalized portrayal of trans people in Let Me Die a Woman. While this movie doesn't present such clean contrasts, I did find its jumbling of slasher tropes and the way the violence (at times laughably crude, at other times startlingly gnarly) collapses upon itself to be engaging in a strange way. And there are moments when the soundtrack proves effective, usually when it settles on synth fuzz, which resembles a coating of grime over the proceedings. However, the soundtrack is usually hilariously ill-fitting, populated mostly by some kind of stock chase music from '70s thrillers.

To the extent that there's a recognizable human element in the movie, it's represented by Golden Age porn star Samantha Fox. Fox has turned in some pretty moving performances in her porn work (one can look to Her Name Was Lisa and Dracula Exotica as evidence of her genuine acting talents). This is not a good showcase for her as an actress (which makes the claim that she paid Wishman to star in this pretty baffling), but I did enjoy her exaggerated facial expressions during the dinner scene or the deranged grooving she does when she sees a character spying on her through a window. I found myself to her character in any case, as she represented an element of the familiar in the alien dimension portrayed by this movie, like a party where you know almost nobody and spend the entire time attached to the one friend you stumble across.

Did I enjoy this? I suppose I did, even if I felt my brain leaking out of my ears in the process.

Never seen it, but I love that title.

I saw A Night to Dismember a week or two back. I'm still not sure if I over or underscored the film, but while I gave it a 4/10, I saw potential for the supposed lost footage fixing some of the narrative issues with the film, so I appreciated it as a what-could've-been type of film to a degree.

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IMDb
Letterboxd

4/10 is a perfectly sensible rating for this movie. At 6/10 your brain starts to melt. When you reach the fabled 10/10, I'm pretty sure your head explodes.

I doubt the lost footage would do anything to improve it. The 'proper cut' of the film is almost completely unrecognizable from the salvaged cut. I don't know if I was even able to finish it, I found it so dreary. It's definitely more coherent, but how any of it could possibly plug up the narrative holes of what you saw, um, that's probably asking alot. You could probably be just as successful fixing it up by randomly inserting clips from old Toys R Us commercials. Or scenes from my masterpiece Rambling Man. A Night to Dismember is well beyond redemption.


Which is of course why it appeals to me. It is an anti-movie. It plays more like random footage spliced together than narrative. And the fact that it was intentionally assembled this way, as Rock says, melts brains. From one shot to the next, shots don't link up technically, narratively or even tonally. I find that the more you watch movies, the more you can almost internalize how they are put together. When you are watching a normally composed film, you can vaguely guess what shot will follow the next. There is a flow. This can allow us to follow what is happening on screen better, but in the hands of most tepid directors, it also can become extremely boring.



But Wishman's film disrupts all of this, and essentially can never be predicted from shot to shot, musical cue to musical cue. The entire experience keeps you off balance. And being that I"m someone who doesn't like to think of film as only a bit of narrative flashing up on screen, or an artform that has 'important things to tell us', and thinks it is good to be reminded how film is a physical medium that has been manipulated and cut up and fed through a projector, Dismember is pure artifact. It can't possibly be understood in any way beyond how it has been completely warmped and turned alien by the process of being made. It is an aberration. A birth defect.


By now I've seen the movie probably five times (surer proof of mental illness I don't think exists). It's of course not the most enjoyable of watches, especially if we are trying to find any standard value in it. But I always find when I watch it, I'm kept on edge as with every cut of the film. Where is Wishman going to bring me next? Where else can this possibly go? It keeps you off balance to ALWAYS be wrong in your predicting. And, as a result, I have lots of emotional reactions while watching it, from delighted confusion, to frustration, to laughter, to a kind of horror that nothing is adding up and I don't know what I'm doing with my life watching this shit.

Is any of this Wishman's intent? Probably not, as I think she mostly just wanted to get a long enough running time to play in theaters. So her cramming it full of so many random asides and nonsensical junk was mostly utilitarian on her part. But by doing this, she created for me a movie viewing experience like almost no other I've ever had....Jonas Mekas' As I Was Moving Ahead is probably the only other similar one. But where Mekas was going for a very deliberate effect with his randomness, Wishman is the complete inverse of this, in that what she created is an empty hellscape of celluloid. A place where you can really become lost in the creative process of making a movie. You can watch all the nuts and bolts become unscrewed and fall out in real time. And I find it riveting.....even if it is probably unbearable for 99 percent of audiences.



So, for you, a 4/10 is probably quite a reasonable overrate. If you want to fix A Night to Dismember, you don't love it for what it really is. One of the most awful cinematic monstrosities ever made.


4.5/5

Just bump up your rating half a popcorn and...blammo!

For the record, I don't think Wishman is a total incompetent, just someone who cut their teeth making movies at an absurdly low budget level (I.e. can't afford to record during the shoot, only dub it later). But it leads her to make choices to salvage a project that someone making more expensive and polished movies wouldn't even consider. Such is the strange beauty of A Night to Dismember.

I think I've only seen 2, maybe 2 1/2 of her other films. And they are nothing like this one. They are definitely more sound in structure, editing etc than someone like HG Lewis. Dismember though is just next level. Back at Corrie, or RT days, I'm pretty sure it was the film out of all the garbage I was watching, that I thought might in some weird way be deserving of the Criterion treatment.


And now, all these years later, Criterion has a retrospective of her work...and Dismember is one of the few notable films not even included. Shows what I know.

I'm actually surprised a boutique label hasn't jumped on it yet. Seems like it would be a pretty good candidate for someone like VS or AGFA/Something Weird, who restored the ones currently on the channel. Wonder if it's a rights or elements issue. (My guess is the latter.)

Of the ones on the channel, I still need to see Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73. If you haven't seen it, I think Bad Girls Go to Hell is genuinely good for what it is, and shows how her low budget style can accumulate to a kind of gutter poetry. Indecent Desires is similarly worthwhile, although it lacks the same narrative momentum. And Nude on the Moon is bad but genial. (I can't stay mad at the moon people.)


Let Me Die a Woman is a pretty interesting artifact, and I think the interview segments make it a pretty worthwhile viewing. Unfortunately, there is also graphic footage from a sex change operation and lots of really uncomfortable scenes where a "doctor" prods the bodies of actual trans people and explains what their deal is in a way that comes off as really demeaning. Also, for some reason, '70s pornstars Harry Reems, Vanessa Del Rio and Michael Gaunt are in it.

Looks like I have a lot to learn about appreciating B movies. Maybe watching enough schlock will help in that regard.

Yes, keep eating garbage, and one day you will find that mystical eclair.

Is Nightbeast your mystical eclair?