Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

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I don't think either one is movie-ruining bad. The one in Rope is probably "better" in that it's more organic to the proceedings, but I found it a bit clumsy compared to the dialogue in the rest of the movie. I'm also never been too bothered by the one in Psycho, as Hitchcock follows it up with a great closing shot. Maybe that's the key to selling clunky speeches?
Maybe, but I remember the closing shot in Dressed To Kill being pretty good, and the equivalent exposition speech about the killer in that one was still much more excruciating to sit through (but then again, pretty much everything about it was worse than Psycho).



I haven't seen the movie in probably 20 years, but I can hear Stewart saying "You're gonna die, Brandon" clear as a bell. (Um, hopefully that's something he actually says in the speech . . .)

Yeah, he says something to that effect during the speech.

WARNING: spoilers below
"It's not what I'm going to do, Brandon. It's what society is going to do. I don't know what that will be, but I can guess, and I can help. You're going to die, Brandon. Both of you. You are going to die."



Victim of The Night
Angel (O'Neil, 1984)




Given the sleazy subject matter, I was surprised by the amount of warmth in Angel. This is a movie about a child prostitute whose friends are murdered by a serial killer, yet in delivering these salacious elements, the movie achieves an impressive level of dramatic weight. There's a surprising amount of attention devoted to the social dynamic on the street, between the prostitutes and the other performers, including a Charlie Chaplin impersonator and a kindly old cowboy played by Rory Calhoun. These characters are likable individuals with real personalities who form something of a family with the heroine played by Donna Wilkes. Even more surprisingly, the movie does a respectable job with its LGBT characters, including an old trans prostitute played by Dick Shawn and a lesbian landlady played by Susan Tyrell. Are they broadly drawn? Yes, but the movie shows a welcome amount of compassion toward them - they're a source of some humour but not the butt of the joke. You get the sense that Hollywood Boulevard isn't just a hive of scum and villainy like the premise would suggest, but a living, breathing community. A good amount of credit goes to the cinematography by Andrew Davis, who is no great visual stylist but brings some of the same feel for location that would distinguish Code of Silence, which he directed the following year. His work is particularly gripping in the climactic chase, where his reliance on handheld gives the action an almost vérité quality.

Movies like this tend to be a bit conservative in that the police are shown to be a stabilizing force, sometimes painting over the antagonistic relationship they've had with sex workers in real life, but again the movie deserves some credit for making its sympathetic cop character kind of an *******. Yes, he cares, but he's not someone the heroine can readily go to for help. Perhaps unintentionally, it shows the limitations of sympathetic outsiders to this world, in showing a brief yet completely unhelpful visit from a concerned teacher, whose attitude towards the heroine's LGBT friends comes off as entitled and condescending. After Savage Streets, this is the second movie I watched in a row that tries to link the ugly realities of the street with the comfortable domestic existence enjoyed by its assumed target audience, and specifically its impact on children (in the words of Helen Lovejoy... *wrings hands*).

Like that movie this is clumsy in making the connection, although the attempts to pass the cast off as teenagers are less egregious here. Wilkes looks with pigtails a little bit like what Steve Buscemi looks like with a baseball cap turned backwards, and her level of agency feels a bit implausible given her character's age, but she sells this about as well as it can be and turns in a pretty likable performance on the whole. There's also a kid who looks like Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds and a couple of douchebags, one of whom wears a blazer despite the school not having a uniform, who antagonize the heroine. (The heroine wears a blazer as well, complete with gold buttons. Blazers seem to have been more popular among high schoolers in the '80s than the 2000s when I was of that age. Also beads. Between this and Savage Streets I've seen enough ****ing beads for a lifetime.) I did appreciate in delivering the skin quotient, it at least didn't excessively sexualize the heroine (it gets in a few superfluous shower scenes for that purpose), and has a welcome twist on the perfunctory rape scene you think it's setting up.

And of course, the movie wouldn't be very much fun if it didn't have a good villain, and the one here is a real sick ****. The movie lets you know what a sick **** he is almost right away. We see him stab a raw egg and drink the yolk while staring at a picture of his mother. He even eats the eggshells. What kind of a sick **** would do that? His own mother? And then we see him scrubbing himself with a sponge while his junk is facing an uncovered window? What if somebody sees? This ****ing sicko probably doesn't even care. And later we see him shaving his own head with a switchblade. Does he even own a razor? Probably, that's how ****ed up he is. The picture of the mother is likely the movie's attempt to draw a parallel between him and the heroine's own domestic situation, but given that he's mostly a blank slate (aside from the murders and ****ed up personal habits), it doesn't really land. But that's ultimately to the movie's benefit, as the movie's reframing of the slasher movie template keeps us firmly on the heroine's side as the bodies pile up. Not great by any means, but I was pleasantly surprised by how invested I was in this.

First of all, sorry, somehow I missed this whole thread and I declare that there's gold in them thar hills.

Angel is a favorite of mine. Really a lot in this movie to like.



I threw that on when I was pregaming for October and was surprised by how compassionate it was. Not the sleaze-fest I was expecting, in a good way.



Victim of The Night
Movie Review | Silverado (Kasdan, 1985)



After a certain point, probably sometime in the '70s, westerns had become so scarce that a new one, by virtue of being made, functioned as a kind of statement. Certainly movies like Unforgiven and The Proposition are designed as reflections on the genre rather than mere exercises in the form (and this reflective quality extends to movies that traffic in western aesthetics, like No Country for Old Men). But even movies eager to bask in the simple, unpretentious pleasures of the genre come off like statements through omission, by virtue of being so rare. Silverado is one such film, and a pretty good one at that. This is a movie about good guys being good, bad guys being bad, spinning pistols and being crack shots, hopping on horses and riding into the sunset. If any of those things sound good to you, you're likely to have a good time with this anyway, but some astute casting goes a long way in making this work.

The heroes are played by Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner, who are roughly given equal weighting, although Glenn is perhaps the most alpha. Glenn is perfect for westerns, with a face so leathery it might as well match his boots and so craggy it blends into the harsh landscape. (I've heard him described as weird looking, which is a bit unfair. Rugged is a better term, and if you squint, he's maybe even a little handsome.) He has a certain low key presence that suggests confidence without overplaying it, and is instantly credible as a man who's averse to violence but awful good at it if the need arises. He's also the coolest looking of the bunch, with a hairdo and wardrobe that look stylish and modern without compromising the period. (Black Friday is coming up and I can't promise I won't order some western wear as a result of this movie, although I suspect the short jacket he wears for much of the movie would not look flattering on me.) This was during the period when Glenn was being pushed as an action hero, and his work here fits nicely with The Challenge, a pleasingly excessive swordplay movie with a well used Toshiro Mifune, Man on Fire, a thriller whose artfulness better matches the samurai-inspired quality of its source novel than the more jagged Tony Scott adaptation, and Wild Geese II, the sober followup to the cheerful mercenary shoot 'em up. Glenn had also donned a cowboy hat in Urban Cowboy, where he stole the movie from John Travolta, and it's nice to him put on a hat and play a good guy this time around.

Glover is someone I always think of as very old, likely because his best known role includes a famous line of dialogue commenting on his age. This is the role I've seen him where he comes off the least geriatric, and like Glenn, he brings an unforced heroic quality (and his character is a better shot too). His introduction can remind viewers of the extremely lame ways modern movies will try to pander to righteous sensibilities by having a character face racial injustice (or some other kind) in an awkwardly written scene, but the one here works because of two indisputable facts: One, Glover is kind of cool in this, and two, watching him beat up racists is objectively enjoyable. Compared to him and Glenn, Kline comes off as relatively genteel, but in a way that creates tension between his desire for respectability, his violent past, and his need to pick up a gun again for the sake of justice. His might be considered the Henry Fonda role, and he has some nice, maybe romantic chemistry, with a saloon operator played by Linda Hunt. And in contrast to all of them, Costner is the most excitable, bringing some of the spontaneity and anarchic energy of a young Tom Hanks. I've usually seen him cast as an everyman, which can help ground a movie (like in the frantic, paranoid JFK), but it's nice to see him in a completely different mode. (In contrast to Glenn's costuming, Costner's is a little more flamboyant and goofy, in keeping with his character's youthful indiscretion.) If you like these actors, you'll get a lot out of the way the movie savours their distinct presences.

The strong casting carries over to the rest of the film as well, including the aforementioned Hunt, Brian Dennehy as the heavy, a purposefully incongruous Jeff Goldblum, and the list goes on. To borrow a phrase from the We Hate Movies podcast, this was made in an era when studio movies had deep casts (good, recognizable actors all the way down). This is directed by Lawrence Kasdan, and like Raiders of the Lost Ark, for which he wrote the screenplay, this is deeply nostalgic for the films of yore, although the innate significance of a western made in this era probably forces it to be more sprawling and quite a bit less terse than the B-westerns that would have inspired it. It's not as good as that movie, as Kasdan lacks Spielberg's immaculate action direction. (Consider a scene where Costner guns down two foes, one on each side. Kasdan chooses to cut when holding the shot would have made the punchline land better.) But at the same time, the baseline of craft in studio pictures at the time was a lot better than it is today, and on the whole this is quite enjoyable, especially if you like hanging out with the stars and spending time in this setting. I know I did.

I know I'm way behind but this is another of my pet all-time favorites.
I agree with everything you say here, though I think the Glover "I had enough of what ain't right" scene is also elevated by the John Cleese presence that concludes it. Today my jurisdiction ends here.
I really liked Glover's dad (in the movie).
Glenn is perfect for his role.
I liked the confusing bit with Rosanna Arquette (meaning I liked that it was kept vague). Though, honestly, I just like seeing Rosanna Arquette and I'm glad she inspired that great song.
Linda Hunt is just great.
Brian Dennehy is surprisingly menacing. Now you're gonna get a fair trial. Followed by a first-class hagnin'.
Kline kinda stole this movie for me though, I just really liked this character of a really nice, good man who'd rode with some bad people and, despite his actual gentle nature, was probably the most dangerous of all of them.
Ya know, I even liked Jeff Fahey in this and he's really not a very good actor.
One thing I will particularly say, this is actually the kind of Costner role I prefer, like the Fandango Costner.
And you are so damn right about the two-gun draw scene. Should have been epic but he edited it wrong so it's merely cool.
What a fun movie.



Victim of The Night
Have you seen A Color Purple? It was the first thing I ever saw Glover in and because of it I tend to think of him as anything but harmless.
I can't watch The Color Purple without sobbing uncontrollably during Shug's walk to the church.
I don't know why I shared that but there it is.



Victim of The Night
I threw that on when I was pregaming for October and was surprised by how compassionate it was. Not the sleaze-fest I was expecting, in a good way.
Yeah, it's interesting how it treats its misfit characters like real people.



I can't watch The Color Purple without sobbing uncontrollably during Shug's walk to the church.
I don't know why I shared that but there it is.
I've never seen the movie in its entirety. I've seen a lot of bits and pieces on TV as a kid, but it was always just so sad.

At this point I'd really like to read the novel and then watch the film.



Added this to the watchlist. I'm a big fan of The Beast of War from the same director.



Victim of The Night
I've never seen the movie in its entirety. I've seen a lot of bits and pieces on TV as a kid, but it was always just so sad.

At this point I'd really like to read the novel and then watch the film.
I also read the novel. But one should watch the movie all the way through. There is some real payoff including the scene that makes me cry every time.



Victim of The Night
Added this to the watchlist. I'm a big fan of The Beast of War from the same director.
Oh, Fandango is a wonderful little thing, fun and charming and magical.
We just had a showing last summer on an outdoor screen in a friend's backyard for a crowd that was about 30% lovers of the film and 70% people who'd never heard of it.
Everybody at least really liked it.



The Farmer's Daughters (Colt, 1976)




Maybe I'm getting desensitized, but for a movie that has a reputation for being extremely sleazy, I found myself mostly bored by this. (Sometimes I wonder if my Phil Prince marathon last year broke my brain, but I did find myself rather disturbed by my recent viewing of Through the Looking Glass, so I suppose I still haven't gone off the deep end.) This falls into the hardcore "roughie" genre, which represents an intersection of exploitation and pornography, presenting a kind of grimy conceptual apex (or trough, more accurately), where sexual assault and acts of cruelty are presented basically for titillation. As porn, most of what goes down in these movies is not my jam, but sometimes you want to wallow in the filth and bad vibes, and these movies theoretically deliver on both. I think the genre can make for compelling cinema, like the surprisingly gripping Apocalypse Now porn-riff China De Sade, or the supremely repellent yet aesthetically consistent work of Phil Prince, but what those movies offer is a certain forcefulness in delivering the goods. Such forcefulness is absent here.

The plot, what's there of it, consists of the titular farmer's daughters watching their parents ****, getting worked up and having their way with the farmhand, only for all of them to be taken hostage by a trio of escaped convicts who have their way with the family. Some recognizable faces show up in the cast, like Zebedy Colt (who also directs), Gloria Leonard, Marlene Willoughby and Spalding Gray (yes, that Spalding Gray), but there's pretty much nothing in terms of characterization (aside from some exaggerated country accents) for them to chew on. Willoughby at least wears cutoffs, has very animated facial expressions and paddles the farmhand's ass with a flyswatter, so I guess she was my favourite, although it's worth noting that Leonard's hair gets less grey as the movie progresses, through some miracle of de-aging (and nonexistent makeup continuity), and that Gray has really weird speech patterns that seem to change with each line. (I do not remember him sounding like this in The Killing Fields.) The bargain basement production values do lend it a sense of grime, but mostly in a bad way, as the performers all seem really uncomfortable. Leonard cites this in her Rialto Report interview as her least favourite movie she worked on due to the cold, while Gray alleges he and another performer struggled to keep it up, and that energy level can be seen on screen.

Also, for a movie that's supposed to be scuzzy, there's an awful lot of banjo music, although that's preferable to the loud as hell bedspring noises that have you fearing for the performers' safety. If one must say nice things about this movie, they can observe that the climax features some interesting editing, and that the blanket on the ground must have made the climax a bit more tolerable to shoot, and that I was not entirely unmoved by the presence of Willoughby. And if one really wants to stretch, they could acknowledge that the movie briefly features overlapping timelines and that Leonard's ungreying hair could be conceptually justified as a result, but one would be completely talking out of their rear end at that point. Rather, one can savour some of the handful of amusing dialogue sprinkled throughout.

"Sex is like bacon. It all depends on how well you grease the pan."
"Yeah!" (This is only funny because of how Gray delivers the line.)
"Hey, that's the guy they pissed on."
"This is funny only to me!"
"You're a lousy **********, Kate, but I forgive you."
That last line is a rare moment of compassion in an otherwise pitiless film. (Okay, it isn't really.)




Gray alleges he and another performer struggled to keep it up
Am I to understand that Gray took part in the naughty scenes? This is something that I did not know about Spalding Gray. Not that I knew a lot to begin with.
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Am I to understand that Gray took part in the naughty scenes? This is something that I did not know about Spalding Gray. Not that I knew a lot to begin with.
Yup, he appeared in a number of 70s porn productions. If I recall correctly, Maraschino Cherry opens with a shot of his dick moving around like a shark in a nature documentary. That movie is a lot more enjoyable than this one.



Yup, he appeared in a number of 70s porn productions. If I recall correctly, Maraschino Cherry opens with a shot of his dick moving around like a shark in a nature documentary. That movie is a lot more enjoyable than this one.
Upon checking his imdb page, it looks like he was just in those two. Wouldn't be surprised if he did loops as well, but I don't care to dig further.



Yup, he appeared in a number of 70s porn productions. If I recall correctly, Maraschino Cherry opens with a shot of his dick moving around like a shark in a nature documentary. That movie is a lot more enjoyable than this one.
Clearly!