December 4, 2002
by Matt Singer
If you enjoy my column, you might want to pop over every once in a while to Slush Factory, where I’ve started reviewing current movies. Head over now and you can check out my reviews of PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE and DIE ANOTHER DAY. There’s no regular schedule, I just write reviews as I see movies.
Here, the reviews still come every other Wednesday. This time, all the movies are either science-fiction, garbage, or both.
THE GOOD
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981)
Starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef
Directed by John Carpenter
Rated R, 99 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
Clearly, writer and director John Carpenter and Kurt Russell need to work together more often. Together they’ve made ELVIS, THE THING, and the underrated BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA. Working separately, they’ve been involved in such clunkers as GHOSTS OF MARS, SOLDIER, and VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED . They need to make more films together, ones like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, a sci-fi suspense film as gritty and exciting today as it was upon its initial release.
The film placed its unthinkable future in 1997, in a world in which crime in the United States has gotten so bad that New York City has been turned into one giant maximum security prison. Every entrance to the island is guarded by the police; once you’re on the island, there is no way off. This poses a significant problem when the President’s plane is hijacked by revolutionaries and flown onto the island. The President (Donald Pleasance) is needed to give a speech to a very importance conference that will be over in 24 hours; if he’s not retrieved in that time, the world could be plunged into a war of the most vague kind (It really doesn’t matter why there’s a deadline, only that one exists in the first place). Who you gonna call?
No, not Ghostbusters.
You call Snake Plissken, played by Kurt Russell, who somehow manages to make his character’s lack of a personality a personality unto itself. Speaking in a whispered growl, with 5 o’clock shadow, eye patch and a fetching pair of camouflage tights, Snake is man who everyone thinks is dead, and has wound up in the hands of the police at just the wrong moment. He’s been trained in special forces and managed to escape a famously impossibly situation while serving in the military, so the chief of police (Lee Van Cleef) offers Snake his freedom if he can manage to get in and out of New York in 24 hours. In order to make the uncaring Snake bend to his demands, he injects him with a concoction that will kill him in that same time limit.
It’s a load of bunk (A British President? Er, all right), but it’s well-made bunk all the same. Carpenter isn’t a particularly versatile director - supernatural suspense is really his one strength - but ESCAPE is right in his wheelhouse. A great sci-fi premise mixed with fine action scenes and a genuinely badass cast (Isaac Hayes and Ernest Borgnine in the same movie automatically makes it a must-see) qualify this movie for some all-time lists.
Generally, movies that put a year on their apocalyptic futures wind up dating themselves. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK’s future passed five years ago, but, aside from some weak matte shots, the film still looks good. Even the presence of the World Trade Center amidst a highly stylized New York skyline fits, giving the opening moments a ghostly, spooky edge. A lot of credit should go to Russell for playing it so dead serious that we get behind Snake’s quest as quickly as we do, and for performing most, if not all, of his own stunts. He does have a few snappy lines, like when he’s accused of being a cop and he responds, “I’m an asshole.”
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK has a lot of great moments; a particular standout features Isaac Hayes taking target practice at the President while he forces him to shout, “You are the Duke of New York! You are ‘A’ Number One!” The film has a following as a cult movie, but deserves more. There are plenty of good sci-fi films, lots of good escape pictures, and even more good suspense pictures, but how many do a good job with all three? All the more reason Carpenter and Russell should stick together. Not more sequels like ESCAPE FROM L.A. mind you, let’s see some original works, with more innovative premises and characters. If they refuse, may I suggest we inject them with that 24-hour killer juice stuff. It worked for Snake, I’m sure it’d work for these guys as well.
IF YOU LIKED ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, CHECK OUT: HALLOWEEN (1978); a lot of people have seen this movie, but I don’t think people realize who directed it. Nor do they know that he also did that great piano score.
THE BAD
ISHTAR (1987)
Starring Warren Beatty, Dustin Hoffman
Directed by Elaine May
Rated PG-13, 107 minutes
Available on VHS
I consider it a personal triumph that I watched ISHTAR in its entirety. One cannot over-emphasize how truly awful this movie is. The first night I had the tape, I watched about thirty unbearable minutes before I passed out, waking up the next morning with my head in the toilet and my nose bloody. So I tried again, and this time it only took ten more minutes of this debacle to knock me out. The only way I could stay conscious while watching ISHTAR was to pop the tape in immediately after I woke up in the morning - at one point I thought smelling salts might be necessary. Under these conditions, I finished the final forty-five minutes of ISHTAR, and immediately entered into a blood oath never to watch it again.
If you care (and you obviously shouldn’t), Ishtar is a place near Morroco. In ISHTAR, two aspiring songwriters, Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman), are so desperate to perform their atrocious songs in public that they’ll take a gig in Ishtar earning peanuts doing standards for morons. Then again, everyone in this movie is dumb, and I suppose I am too for actually watching it.
Rogers and Clarke as absolutely terrible, so the movie forces us to watch them perform over and over. Clearly these scenes are played for laughs; the whole movie, in fact, is actually a comedy disguised as the unfunniest thing you have ever seen. Simply, ISHTAR is flawed from top to bottom, starting with the casting. Warren Beatty is an okay actor, but he is a movie star first, and as a movie star, we cannot accept him as a loser songwriter who can’t sing and is hopeless around women. Adding a slight accent to the Warren Beatty persona does not make him a loser. Isabelle Adjani plays a female that everyone mistakes for a man, but the gag doesn’t work because she looks like a curvy, attractive female. It’s a gag that not only doesn’t work, it aggravates you.
Adjani’s character gets Rogers and Clarke mixed up in a revolution in Ishtar that involves a map, some camels, and Charles Grodin. If ISHTAR was boring and unfunny while they were just songwriters, you can only imagine what happens when they become CIA agents with the fate of the Middle East on their shoulders. In my wildest dreams, I would not have imagined the movie could be this bad. If you’re unfamiliar with ISHTAR, it was briefly famous for being one of the most expensive flops in history. Of course, a box office failure isn’t automatically a creative one. Here, the American public actually did the right thing in burying this film.
I love it when a bad movie unintentionally describes the experience of watching it. In ISHTAR, audiences watching Rogers and Clarke are shown looking bored and confused, two emotions that are at the heart of any ISHTAR viewing experience. When the picture returns to bad singing after an hour of bad spy intrigue the on-screen audience now looks obligated to applaud - there’s even a voice that shouts “Applaud!” after one of the songs. One audience member turns to another and goes, “Unbelievable!” My favorite moment is when Dustin Hoffman, dehydrated and exhausted in the middle of an endless desert gets down on his knees, begins to cry and sobs, “What have I done?” Too late for forgiveness, Dustin.
After one highly fragmented viewing, ISHTAR has plummeted into my Bottom Five Films of all time, right along such giants of garbage cinema as AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM. If you learn anything, ANYTHING, from reading my column, learn this: Never watch ISHTAR. I could not be made to watch it again for anything less than a lottery-size dollar amount. If Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman were Hollywood neophytes in 1987, they would have never made another movie again. But since they were established stars, they’ve been allowed to make lots more films in the 15 years since then, including BULWORTH, MAD CITY, and SPHERE. Keep up the good work, guys.
INSTEAD OF ISHTAR, CHECK OUT: WAG THE DOG (1997), a movie with political satire and Dustin Hoffman that is actually funny. Imagine that!
THE UGLY
GODZILLA VS. MONSTER ZERO (1965)
Starring Nick Adams, Akira Takarada
Directed by Ishiro Honda
Rated G, 93 minutes
Available on VHS & DVD
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Video game fans who are looking to satisfy their Godzilla jones after playing the new Destroy All Monsters! game would find their appetite for cheese and huge monster puppets sated by the absurd GODZILLA VS. MONSTER ZERO -- the video game’s plot and aliens are inspired by the film. I’ve said before that a golden rule of bad movies is, “A movie’s ugliness increases with each alternate title it was screened under.” Here, according to the IMDb, is the full list of (English) titles that this film has been screened under: Monster Zero, War of the Monsters, The Great Monster War, Battle of the Astros, Invasion of the Astros, Invasion of the Astro-Monster, Invasion of the Astro-Monsters, Invasion of Planet X. According to my fingers, that’s eight alternate titles. If I had known this demented little monster movie had eight titles, I would have seen this movie years ago.
You no doubt are familiar with Godzilla, but this film also features Rodan (giant pterodactyl) and King Ghidorah (three-headed dragon with wings); the later is actually the Monster Zero of the title. Our heroes, American astronaut Glenn (Nick Adams) and Japanese astronaut Fuji (Akira Takarada) are sent on a mission to make contact with newly discovered Planet X (The naughty planet has been hiding behind Jupiter). They arrive to find the Planet Xians, who wear Geordi La Forge visors and dress like Japanese leather fetishists, terrorized by Monster Zero, their fancy numerical name for King Ghidorah. Xians refuse to use names, they choose to identify things by numbers, hence King Ghidorah becomes Monster Zero. That Monster Zero is causing all sorts of trouble for Planet X, so The Controller of Planet X beseeches Glenn and Fuji to bring Godzilla and Rodan to Planet X to defeat Monster Zero.
It’s on this bizarre Planet X that the movie really takes off into ugly territory. Glenn and Fuji explore the surface of Planet X and note that the gravity is only two-thirds of that of earth. Of course this does not stop Glenn and Fuji from walking around like the gravity is that of a cheap planet set on a soundstage in Japan. When our intrepid explorers meet the restrictively clothed Xians, they are instructed to bring Godzilla and Rodan, referred to as “Monster Zero One” and “Monster Zero Two.” Now, call me crazy, but wouldn’t Monster One and Monster Two just have been a whole lot easier? Or, at the very least, more logical? Not a single character questions Monster Zero One and Monster Zero Two. Ah, the marvels of cheap dialogue dubbing.
The unsuspecting humans bring the monsters back to Planet X, and to the surprise of no one in the audience, they are double-crossed by the fiendish perverts from Planet X, who are so evil they are capable of laughing without moving their lips. While the astronauts and the rest of Earth is busy going about their lives, the Planet Xers infiltrate our society, even getting an alien to pose as a love interest for Glenn. When the chips are down, this alien, who is also a computer, (The less said about this subplot the better) sacrifices herself to help Glenn and Earth, because she regrets her spying and has found redemption in, as she puts it in a letter to Glenn, “a love beyond all computation.” It almost brings a tear to my keyboard’s colon and open parenthesis buttons.
Finally, the plot reaches a point where the monsters can battle, as Planet X invades Earth using all three monster in the assault. Eventually the aliens are repelled by an noisemaking invention by an associate of Fuji (Later reused by Tim Burton in his MARS ATTACKS!), but before all that mishegas can pan out, there’s a good fifteen minutes of wanton model city destruction. With three monsters and the military all blasting the holy hell out of each other, a lot of stuff gets smashed up good - you won’t see this much funny looking smoke anywhere else outside of a Phish concert. And, sure, the monsters look ridiculous now (In hindsight, a dancing Godzilla might have done more harm than good to his reputation as a fearsome creature), but the Toho team do conjure up some visceral visuals, like the tiles flaking off the roof of a crumbling house. On a side note, doesn’t it seem odd that a country that is hounded by giant fire-breathing monsters on an almost yearly basis would refuse to find a more sturdy building material for their houses than paper? I think at some point tradition has to be sacrificed for not getting squished.
MONSTER ZERO is pretty crummy, but it does have a certain innocent charm. I can see why Godzilla movies remain so popular with children, their plots are easy to follow and the sides clearly drawn, and there’s plenty of action and excitement, but never anything so convincing as to frighten. For those of us who are physically, if not mentally, mature, it’ll will entertain and draw plenty of unintentional laughs. Just please, whatever you do, try resist the urge to head to a crowded area, look up at the sky shout “GODZILLAAA! WE MUST FLEE!” and then push your way to the closest exit. These things always end in lawsuits. And I should know.
IF YOU LIKED GODZILLA VS. MONSTER ZERO, CHECK OUT: GODZILLA 2000 (1999), a more recent, but no less cheesy, Japanese Godzilla flick. Contains the immortal line “Perhaps there’s a little Godzilla in all of us.”
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