Hardly Working (1980)

 

Director: Jerry Lewis

Screenplay: Jerry Lewis and Michael Janover

Cast: Jerry Lewis as Bo Hooper; Susan Oliver as Claire Trent; Roger C. Carmel as Robert Trent; Deanna Lund as Millie; Harold J. Stone as Frank Loucazi; Steve Franken as Steve Torres; Buddy Lester as Claude Reed; Leonard Stone as Ted Mitchell

Ephemeral Waves

 

Don't call me a clown. I'm not a clown. Not anymore.

For full context, this film was first seen with very little knowledge of Jerry Lewis. Lewis, an American comic who first began in popularity as a duo with actor/singer Dean Martin, developed a career as a filmmaker as well as onscreen in his own films, eventually developing the clichéd reputation that the French were the ones who liked his films. That is not that exaggerated, as even Jean-Luc Godard (and the legendary French film magazine Cahier du Cinema he wrote for) liked his films and took inspiration. Lewis was also an actual innovator in that, to be able to look at his own work to direct, he helped pioneer the video assist technology.  The context for the following film, excluding seeing The Nutty Professor (1963), could be lost for me, but a lot can be immediately gathered however if you know the historical context.

Namely - Hardly Working is the first film Lewis directed after a seven year absence from behind the film camera. The last film he helmed beforehand is the one, ironically, which has become one of his most well known alongside The Nutty Professor (likely due to the 1996 remake) and The King of Comedy (1982) (a Martin Scorsese film he has a prominent role in), being The Day The Clown Cried (1972). Clown was never released, which adds a perverse irony to it being one of his most well known films as said movie is one few have ever seen. It became a source of speculation of a drama-comedy about a clown sent to a Nazi concentration camp, where his attempt to tackle the Holocaust would have been a challenge, alongside additional issues like the funding disappearing and forcing him to use his own money. It was never seen, and has had up to June 2024 (7 years after Lewis' passing in 2017) a rule stating that the film could never been seen in public form in whatever form actually exists, even in mind to that only being accessible through the Library of Congress¹. With only second hand testimony from comedian/actor Harry Shearer who saw the film as what most think of the film, namely a complete and utterly tasteless disaster², it has become an albatross that many of us (myself also a guilty member) are morbidly curious of even if we were all to go over to the Library of Congress to see. I admit to at least wanting to learn of Jerry Lewis as more than that film, as a filmmaker and actor, even his stint with Dean Martin or his reputation in humanitarian work, as a result of seeing something like Hardly Working. Many however will probably think of him only for The Day The Clown Cried if not The King of Comedy, someone else's work after the clown film.

Whatever the truth behind this infamous crypto-cinematic entity, whose existence and mystery have likely subsumed Lewis' long career in many eyes rather than his own successes, Hardly Working is Jerry Lewis trying to pick himself up after that incident to make a new comedy. It is also a film of a man entirely alien to the new world around him, even if Hardly Working was more financially successful than Charlie Chaplin's A Countess from Hong Kong (1967), another film of an acclaimed older comedian lost out of time back the late sixties. Fraught with its own financial issues, Hardly Working's aspirations to even have a sequel called Hardly Working Attacks Star Wars announced in 1979 were kicked in the teeth by budget problems and a protracted completion³, only to get a release in Europe in 1980 and only in Lewis' homeland in 1981 through 20th Century Fox³. This was neither the last Lewis made, but taking a year or two to be gestating, it feels like an alien entity despite Lewis having done so well as an auteur to direct a string of films through the sixties beforehand. It feels funereal, or at least to throw back to his own past as a real man behind the character, with an opening montage of hits and gags from older films as set up for this new story of Lewis himself as the icon and his new character. It then introduces Lewis faintly veiled as said new character, as Bo Hooper, a professional clown whose circus has had to shut down leaving him jobless.

Bo is cursed to be a comedy character, a natural klutz in a world where everything will fall off a shelf, petrol pump cables are too short and mailboxes will fall over to spite him. He himself is a miscreant, given the chance to live with his sister (much to her disapproving husband) until he can get on his feet again. The film, in truth, is not quite funny enough to be good but is strangely compelling to the point it is still a good film in spite of itself. This is a rare case of a film that I come to pity, and said pity comes (with moments of a great craftsman's skill) to appreciate as with virtue. The first act, where he blunders through a series of jobs, is a mixed bag entirely. On one hand, you see the complete skill of a man who will even with a low budget here use it for perfection, unlike comedies I grew with during the 2000s and 2010s where the visual form was rudimentary as a concern in Hollywood films. One gag about Bo's ill fated work at a glass factory does not even show the disaster of these two meeting, only the aftermath, the noise and him being told to leave with the smash cut in editing to the joke perfect. As someone who also struggled through countless job interviews in my twenties, let alone actual jobs, this segment does ring true in its bitter sense of humour.

This however also has Lewis, taking a job in a Japanese restaurant, do yellowface, which even in the late seventies is a tasteless thing to have, worse as this is returned to in the end credits and the original American poster. Yet it is telling, if indefensible even in this context, Bo's character having decided to act like this in his new work, with fake buck teeth and even producing a fan for Asiatic mist effects, ends up offending his white clientele so much they proceed to beat the shit out of him off camera. Again, the scene should not be here, a nadir, yet apt for Hardly Working's curious and disquieting themes, even the film itself is self critical of a joke from a decade or so before, when Mickey Rooney could get away from a Japanese stereotype in Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), and punishes the lead for playing this as a joke as part of the final punch line for the sequence.

Even once you get to the core of the narrative, Bo's attempts to succeed in the postal service, the film is funny at points but undercuts itself. Part of it is obvious, a film with the tone of humour in this era wilting, but as much of it is that it is far more compelling as a melancholic tale of a man who simply cannot adjust to the world around him than if it was a comedy gem. Not only is Bo struggles to be someone within this world, but for all the moments of colour, the world's starkness (by accident of a low budget and the production being shot in Florida) alienates even Jerry Lewis, the man behind the character of his past now as a middle aged man, further. Even if the issue of Hardly Working being difficult to see has posed a barrier, likely to be seen by many through a VHS rip haze, the world of palm trees and stark suburbia makes Bo even more of a miscreant. The narrative trajectory, a mild pleasant one about him trying to win over his post office boss, to keep the job, and having accidentally developed a romance with said boss' daughter, which is felt the same from her side, is subdued and antiquated, feeling of a sixties film but now trapped in a time period and production aesthetic a long way from that idealised past.

Adding to this is that, in this world, strange and surreal things happen for punch lines which gain power from the starkness, a world which is utterly at odds with Lewis' act let alone his character, like giant menus being handed out in a restaurant or that answering machine voices can not only talk back but can be strangled if you twirl the phone cord at your end. Even when he predates Adam Sandler by acting as a female character interacting with himself, a heavy set caricature with a curious European accent, it is disquieting rather than a cheap joke, an abrupt tangent that disquiets. Even Lewis' own physical comedy, such as a famous trick of sticking a glass of water between his lips and suspending it in his mouth, feels not childish but a goonish innocence at odds to the subdued world the film is set in and made in real life within.

Truthfully, not in terms of a wider Lewis canon but by itself, Hardly Working's title is tragically apt for itself, but it also as a result becomes a fascinating piece to stab at as most comedies do not suddenly force one to feel melancholia this way. Most comedy for me, especially in the "modern day" (i.e. not from 1980, when I was not even born), was never interest personally as a genre, whilst a film like this many would not like if far more compelling. Made originally in the late seventies, having Bo imagine himself as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977), shimming on a dance floor, was a topical joke back when that film was a success and disco was still alive. In context, when the illusion of Bo as the white suited lothario and centre of attention is deflated, and the reality is a middle aged putz shimmying by himself, told to quietly leave, the joke has a greater sense of sad sack humour.

So much is this tone there, radiating the picture of someone out of step for all the moments which are legitimately funny, that it means that I do not feel it requires a spoiler warning to tell how the film ends. Eventually, in a quiet presentation rather than a climatic happy conclusion built up to, Bo becomes good at his job. Barring annoying his boss by being obsessed with his Dunkin Doughnuts, and the tension of dating his divorced daughter, Bo succeeds but it was almost abrupt for myself, baffled by the creative decision by Lewis, when Bo decides to burn his bridges and reject his success by becoming the clown again, mass of rabbits coming out of the post van to a confused helicopter reporter and police. In hindsight, the point is obvious, above spoiler warnings, that suddenly the clown realises after gaining normalcy and acceptance it means not being himself, rejecting it, and driving off into the sunset a better man. Hardly Working is an awkward film, difficult at times of dated jokes, one really offensive one that was never funny, and at times too much uncomfortably real melancholia, where Bo's comments like “There is no place for clowns in this world[...]” really feel too close to Lewis himself being an odd man out in a time. Post New Hollywood and into the blockbuster era of the eighties, even if this film did well in the day it feels a relic from an alternative era of that time, a resulting mess that is still a compelling result, far worthier to exist than a generic slapstick comedy in the flawed humanity that exists within it.

 

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1) As talked of HERE.

2) The original Spy magazine article which deals with the film and includes his testimony can be found HERE.

3) As referred to in the film's history HERE.

Redoubt (2018)

 

Director: Matthew Barney

Screenplay: Matthew Barney

Cast: Matthew Barney as the Engraver; Eleanor Bauer as the Calling Virgin; K.J. Holmes as the Electroplater; Laura Stokes as the Tracking Virgin; Anette Wachter as Diana; Sandra Lamouche Yellowhorn as the Hoop Dancer

An Abstract List Candidate

 

We begin this review with the fact that I can even cover the following. The legend of Matthew Barney, artist/filmmaker, comes with the caveat that unless seen in a grey market form or through special screenings, his cinematic work since he started as an artist have been difficult to see. Famous for the Cremaster Cycle, five pieces filmed out of order from 1994 to 2003, the series was only possible to see in theatrical screenings. Cremaster 3 (2003), the magnum opus, had a segment within it released commercially on DVD, but the series was only possible to legally own through limited edition DVDs in specially created cases¹.

My university, in the City of Lincoln, had the commercially released DVD, released by Palm Pictures, and its content has been etched in my mind. Set at the Guggenheim Museum, the segment released on DVD was entitled "The Order", following Barney's own character of "the Entered Apprentice" scaling the inside and overcoming a series of obstacles. From rival mosh pits of duelling hardcore bands - Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law - to Paralympics athlete Aimee Mullins as a half-cheetah/half woman, that one sequence by itself shows the very unconventional and extravagant nature of Barney's work. If you even see images of Barney's work, whether he is under significant amounts of prosthetics or deliberately forcing obstacles on himself in craft work, part of his "Drawing Restraint" pieces, where athleticism and physical barriers were put on himself during creation, the work from the Cremaster era are very unconventional and aesthetically extravagant even compared to installation artists, completely touching upon the surreal even.

Again, these films are not easily available - including Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) which he collaborated with his then-wife Bjork, the legendary Icelandic musician, and the five plus hour Norman Mailer adaptation/opus Rivers of Fundament (2014)² - but Redoubt, his 2018, had been made available through theatrical screenings through Grasshopper Films, and in a rare moment in Spring 2021 even available to stream on MUBI³, a rare case of his work actually being available to see beyond a gallery setting. This however is a more restrained piece - not of sights like a death metal drumming playing whilst being entirely covered in real bees head-to-toe - and notably, Barney is now an older artist dressing down in his character of an artist who crafts electroplated copper etchings in the middle of the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, stepping back in his own work as one of a small ensemble. The long prologue even for this review is necessary before you even have to try to unpack what Redoubt means and signifies, as it has so much to unpack.

Even the title is distinct as, playing to a mythological tone, "Redoubt" is likely a reference to "American Redoubt", a political migration movement first proposed in 2011 by survivalist novelist and blogger James Wesley Rawles which designates certain areas in the north-western United States (including Idaho) as a safe haven for conservative, libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews⁴. Boise, Idaho was also where Californian born Barney was raised, making the location in Sawtooth Mountains a step into his own life, contrasted with political subtexts and history being touched upon in the content symbolically. That being, effectively, a retelling of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Actaeon is a young hunter who accidentally stumbles upon the goddess of the hunt in the midst of bathing, promptly turned into a deer by her as a consequence and eventually ripped to shreds by his own hounds as a result. 

Wolves, found in the film, evoke a huge political issue that came in the 1980s in Idaho of introducing them back into the wild which divided conservationists against vocal figures like hunters and ranchers, something the director-writer has explicitly evoked⁵. Set within this, and a more modern political subject of the American Redoubt, you have Actaeon as depicted as Barney, an older man who living in a camper with a figure (dance artist/singer/poet/actor K.J. Holmes) who helps create between them finished electroplated etchings, a fascinatingly (and for me, weirdly archaic and almost alchemical) process of metal plating by way of chemical baths where Barney's copper etched work done in the snow covered landscapes are dropped into and the electrocuted for a final finish. Playing Diana, following by two Virgins called the Calling Virgin and the Tracking Virgin, the "30 Cal Girl" Anette Wachter, an NRA advocate and international long-range shooting champion would have been able to complete all the rifle shots in this film entirely with her own skills. Her two follows are played by Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes, the former Bauer a dance choreographer who worked on the dance sequences in the film too⁵.

Questions can be raised, entirely due the more intense climate that the world was in during the later 2010s with more tightly drawn and antagonistic political lines, about a film like this which is not engaging with a moral message or a political opinion, but interpretation through an dialogue-less modern myth, set entirely in the Sawtooth Mountains over multiple "hunts", chapters divided between each other, as Barney's "Engraver" and Wachter's Diana will eventually pass crosshairs. In truth, this is entirely for each individual viewer to consider - likely a cop-out in opinion, but it is very clear that the film is a symbolic work as much about the art within itself, sketched within its precise and simple narrative, than tackling the politics. It is better Redoubt never becomes overtly political and is instead a dreamscape of his history with Idaho and tensions within it clashing. Matthew Barney can be political or least reference the real world when he can, such as collaborating with others on a "Remains Board", on the exterior of his studio building in Long Island City, a large seven-segment digital clock counting down the days and hours remaining in the U.S. president Donald Trump's first (and only) term⁶.

How the film decides to present itself works. Redoubt, benefitting from a sense of narrative and a clear narrative, is distinct. The atmosphere of the film, entirely dialogueless, is striking, in which slowly burning to their conflict, the natural landscape of Sawtooth Mountains is lived in, with the natural wildlife brought in, even to the point (as a disclaimer states in the end credits) the production worked around simulating scenes of animals being shot and targeted with rifles without harming them for vividness. The art within this is as much of the film too, where the key collaborators onscreen bring their own craft fully through. Wachter with her real skill in rifle shooting contrasted by Bauer and Stokes as her assistants, between them figures almost more of the landscape in their contrasting dancing movements against the preciseness of Wachter's hunter Diana.  

The resulting emphasis is hypnotic, one which requires a great deal to digest. The film is also aware too, before anyone asks, this is a history of white Americana it is evoking, as one of the only other actors within the film is Sandra Lamouche Yellowhorn. A dancer who is crossed paths with in a town hall practicing an elaborate and beautiful dance with hoops by herself, she is the one non-Caucasian figure whose existence is more than this, enticed by her dances in her own space listening to music in headphones, but a poignant reminder (as with the title) Barney is evoking a specific part of his culture which is not the same as everyone else's. It is poignant, as well, he is the only male within the cast, still a prominent figure who works in his private world, etching the landscape and even a cougar up in a tree, even killing one of the virgins during their first crossings. Yet, with Diana and her assistances effectively immortal, he is merely one figure, and even shooting one of the hunter's assistants does not mean she will stay dead.

The pair of Eleanor Bauer and Laura Stokes in particular have the most striking screen presence, first introduced high in two trees paralleling each other on a hammock they have to ascend down from in spins on rope, their interactions with each other whether in a spring pool or casually as two opposites who dance or cavort around each other in the background whilst Diana the huntress is collected, precise and silent. K.J. Holmes as the figure with Barney's Engraver is restrained in contrast, the figure who completes the electroplating with the elaborate system she has set up. When the film leads to a chaotic end, actual wolves descending on the inside of the camper and tear everything to shreds, she is calm, dancing outside at night whilst what can be only described as an unnatural solar eclipse captured for the film, one transpiring that sinks the moment into twilight related frenzy.

All of this is built naturally too, and honestly, with a lot greater power than most traditional storytelling and without any dialogue. Redoubt is effectively "avant-garde", but its construct and form is easy to understand and compelling as a tale, the myth it is telling told simply within itself, and only the presentation and its tangents emphasising additional pieces. Redoubt undeniably is part of its own larger project, as the film exists as much with Barney's own craft and sculptures which toured with Redoubt itself, but again, it is a tragedy that his work exists as a rare phoenix in terms of being able to experience. More so when with this, a subdued and less maximalist extravagance of his earlier work I have seen snippets of, is  a film of a greater artistic power and clearness than if you attempted to make this film as a drama with dialogue and "making sense" of.

Progress in film making technology has helped him, as he does indeed with his cinematographer Peter Strietmann embrace the drone camera, but the landscape of Sawtooth Mountains and its natural occupants are utterly striking themselves, as vivid as his artificially created worlds used beforehand. Some will be difficult content for some viewers, evoking the hunting and shooting of animals with the potential distress involved, but is also has the striking images of a cougar calmly in a tree among others, the beauty of the world in this snow covered wilderness as much embraced. To my own surprise, feeling close to them as an animal, I realise magpies are carnivores in terms of being at least scavengers as, whilst the film does explicitly state its carefulness with the animals used, dead carcasses are used or were located a filmed, and there is a scene where Barney himself is clearly skinning a dead animal, part of the final conclusion of his character.

Certainly, in contrast to what I have seen, including his previous fixations of petroleum jelly and very human made industrial materials, Redoubt is a striking contrast, a film which is entirely set in the wilderness.  If anything is artificial, it is an entirely different aesthetic for him, where one very distinct form of craft is even contrasted in itself when bullets are shot at the copper plates and leave their permanent marks of impact on the easy-to-scar surfaces. If politics has to play a part in interpretation, it would frustrate some that Barney is staying from neither side, but he is as if chronicling the sense of tensions of this landscape, one in Sawtooth Mountains isolated from humanity yet in this is a place where tensions mount. As its own work, constructed, it is a thing to bask in and find so much in apparently very simple material, something exceptional as a result.

Abstract Spectrum: Atmospheric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None); Low

 

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1) Such as the following example shown HERE.

2) The one exception that was commercially available was his collaboration to Destricted (2006), a British-American anthology of conceptual artists and filmmakers tackling pornography, which was divisive when it first came out and has been forgotten about. (Alongside the fact that the British and American releases are very different, with segments unique to either for DVD). Barney's - which is in both versions alongside artist Marina Abramović, filmmaker Larry Clark and Demolition Man director Marco Brambilla - is the meeting of the body with industrial machinery. What it is turns out to be, with Barney in full costume, effectively masturbating with the help of an industrial machine he is inside, as bizarre (and with a variety of liquids involved) as you could hope. 

3) I saw the first for the first time, on MUBI, on the 13th May 2021 just to time stamp this. An early birthday gift, as I am born in that month, in fact and the pleasure a few days before said birthday to see a Matthew Barney film was appreciated.

4) To read of in more detail, follow the link HERE.

5) Taken from an Art News article on the film HERE:

"“One of the stronger memories I have of Idaho was the debate that carried on throughout the ’80s about reintroducing wolves into the wild,” Barney said. “On one side you had the voices of people who used the land—hunters, ranchers—and on the other you had voices of conservation. Arguments were fierce. When I was a teenager you would hear about fights breaking out in town hall meetings and people being dragged out of rooms. The wolf subject couldn’t be mentioned in a bar.”"

6) Which can talked about HERE.

The Happening (2008)

 

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Screenplay: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Mark Wahlberg as Elliot Moore; Zooey Deschanel as Alma Moore; John Leguizamo as Julian; Ashlyn Sanchez as Jess; Betty Buckley as Mrs. Jones; Spencer Breslin as Josh; Robert Bailey Jr. As Jared

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #223

 

We're packing hot dogs for the road. You know, hot dogs get a bad rep. They gotta cool shape, they got protein.

Spoilers Throughout

As time has passed, his career has been a rollercoaster of other films in his career that have both harmed his reputation and have raised him back in praise to cinema patrons, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening is still in hindsight the film where he had shot himself in the foot. Films before were divisive - with the huge buzz from The Sixth Sense (1999), Shyamalan was pigeonholed for all his films having plot twists, whilst Lady in the Water (2006) was not well received. The Happening however was a film which became notorious, though the irony is that its premise, where plants decide to get their revenge on humanity, is a disturbing one rife in potential. As set up, suddenly waves of people in natural areas like parks are affected by an unknown force. Stopping, becoming disorientated, and leading to mass self-inflicted suicide. The scene, as Shyamalan restrains from showing a great deal barring an occasional shock, where construction workers are suddenly walking off the edge of a tall building they are working on, like how lemmings (fictionally) were meant to, is a legitimately creepy one that in itself sets up a compelling work.

Then, however, Mark Wahlberg is introduced as a science teacher, talking about the bees disappearing and being very heavy handed about environmental issues to his class, and the issue with The Happening and why it became infamous is entirely for me revealed to be the presentation. Yes, some will immediately get annoyed when his character talks about the unknowable science of nature, which would piss material rationalists off, but weaving the supernatural and religion into his work like Signs (2002), Shyamalan was always going to take on the wide eyed mysteries of the world. The issue with the film is that it clearly wanted to juggle a lot, including a knowing sense of humour as Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, the later playing his estranged wife, are meant to the wide eyed ordinary Americans trying to rationalise this grim scenario where mass death happens in the most abrupt of places. The tone misfires, with choices made, that lead the film to its infamy.

The premise itself stretches credibility, even as someone liberal in logic for his storytelling, in that once it is revealed plants are using a pheromone which blocks the human brain function of self preservation, an issue arises where it requires some very elaborate ways for people to kill themselves. It leads to another moment, one of the few perfect ones, of a cop's handgun being passed along in a street between people affected by the happening, but it does stretch into the absurd how abruptly people act, into actual comedy when the elaborate nature of the pheromones' effect include a man starting a drivable lawnmower, laying down and waiting for it to run him over. The story could have just been changed in one way, that the plants admittedly a hallucinogenic that caused chaos, and the premise would be helped. Imagining nature itself attacking humanity is a common theme, and whilst a plant might seem absurd on the surface beyond The Day of the Triffids as a threat, the notion of an entity which covers large amounts of the Earth, and can eventually grow over even manmade structures, is a striking one. Environmental issues are still sadly with us; a film like this, in the era of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), would be perceived as heavy handed, but the concerns this plays with are relevant with the idea of Mother Nature wiping the human species away one we return to in storytelling.

The infamy of the film is that, with the tone a mess, you also have so many misfires. It does want to juggle humour and being serious, which is perfectly possible, but The Happening is a step behind in the pace it needs to succeed in this, where a man having his arms eaten off by lions (as seen in a web video a character watches) is nasty but in position comes off as ridiculous. The dialogue is one of the biggest kneecappings for the film. The speech about the underrated nature of hot dogs, abruptly appearing, is ridiculous. The subplot that, with their marriage in a crucial point, Deschanel's character is hiding the fact she went for dessert with a co-worker, is closer to the awkward humour of a mumblecore comedy, with the rebuttal by Wahlberg about buying cough syrup just to talk to a female stranger being probably the most misfiring, illogical piece of the film. These moments of dialogue are worse knowing it is meant to be humorous and, in cases like the cough syrup, they are meant to build characters teasing each other and moments of levity.

Having characters running away from the wind, which pushes the pheromone, is also inevitably going to look silly, as even the scene of Wahlberg talking to a plastic plant is meant to be playful on purpose, in another rewarding scene of a model house for a building estate full of plastic goods. Confused looking actors running around in a field is inevitably going to look absurd. The worst aspect of this is that, upon reflection, aspects within The Happening itself have aged with some scary resonance, lost within the awash of its misguided aspects. With the attacks only place in one region of the United States, references to conspiracy theories come up in dialogue including the disbelief for some that it was anything else but the government responsible for this. More unfortunately relevant is that, for a sight joke of two older women in ye old gas masks, you also have people arming themselves with guns which leads to probably the most shocking moment (two young children being shot) that really has grown darker over time.

That the film, instead, has visibly slipped trying to juggle so many variables instead maims the film, which eventually does deviate into a pointless conclusion with a strange older woman with huge psychological issues, closer to a prelude to The Visit (2015) by the director. The abruptness of the conclusion, where the events end, fits in the sense of a profoundness of it merely ending, and that it can transpire in another country with ease, but by that point you have a film which is memorable yet for many bad reasons. It is compelling, truthfully, to revisit and a fascinating title which has good and the bad, but I am not surprised that this really did not help its creator with hindsight at all.

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)

 

Director: Jim Hosking

Screenplay: Jim Hosking and David Wike

Cast: Aubrey Plaza as Lulu Danger; Emile Hirsch as Shane Danger; Jemaine Clement as Colin Keith Threadener; Matt Berry as Rodney von Donkensteiger; Craig Robinson as Beverly Luff Linn; Zachary Cherry as Tyrone Paris; Sky Elobar as Carl Ronk; Jacob Wysocki as Lawrence Doggi; Sam Dissanayake as Adjay Willis

An Abstract List Candidate

It was a pleasure to bring you tampons.

Following on from The Greasy Strangler (2016), director-writer Jim Hosking's transgressive horror-comedy with grotesque humour and large quantities of grease, how do you follow up an idiosyncratic debut feature? This is where the "second album syndrome" issue arises, a concept found in music (hence my choice in term) and other art in how, after your first work catches public attention, having to follow it up and with far less time for the project to digest can lead to disappointment from the audience. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn is as strange and idiosyncratic, but there is no male penises, no gore or very explicit sex (baring one scene), and especially no grease. What it is instead is a perverse take on a romantic comedy starring recognisable actors. Something which fits and already paints a unique world Hoskins has created for himself, assisted by co-writer David Wike, but of a different mood.

Lulu (Aubrey Plaza) is the tired wife of Shane Danger (Emile Hirsch), manager of a coffee shop who fires her when upper management demands he cuts a staff member. Left, as a result, by herself watching television at home, she witnesses an advertisement for "a magical night" with Beverly Luff Linn (Craig Robinson), a figure from her past with clear endearment for. Taking advantage of Shane's decision to rob her brother Adjay Willis (Sam Dissanayake), at his vegan food store, of a large sum of money, she takes the money and the man Colin (Jemaine Clement) meant to retrive it back, taking them both to the hotel where Beverly Luff Linn's show will be at. Luff Lin is as weird as The Greasy Strangler, but much more reliant on the dialogue and tone, becoming stranger in a more subdued way. Jim Hoskins' style is fully unique, a minimalistic tone of awkward long takes and crassness which is yet precise.

Not as many people here wander around in just Speedos or nude, though Clement does get to exhibit his manly hair covered form for compensation. However most of what came before in the previous film is here, a contrast between the modernity of real life and it being twisted into a curious form, a lush if gauche aesthetic dominating a film almost entirely set in timeless middle urban America, mostly set at the hotel where the narrative is a boiling pot of emotions and eccentric characters bashing into each other or throwing out insults. Among such figures is Beverly Luff Linn, who is possibly dead or at least in a strange limbo form where his manager and potential lover Rodney von Donkensteiger (Matt Berry) has to least lace his Earl Grey tea with a drug and delay the magical evening's performance due to health issues. That Lulu's presence is affecting Beverly is adding greater tensions for von Donkensteiger which will lead to conflict, especially as her husband with his employees, in wigs, will be looming around the hotel when they know where the money and she went.

A lot of the humour is exaggerating the oddness of human behaviour, with some grossness though toned down from the previous film also with the same tone adding sympathetic light hearted in the midst of this. The only mean thing about Beverly Luff Linn, for all its swearing, is the cast constantly calling each other fat, which might be held as body shaming were it not for Hosking being a director with a much more open minded and thoughtful habit of casting actors of all shapes and sizes, everyone distinct even if as much part of the joke in their absurdness, the result of which causing the use of being fat as an insult taking on the strangeness as childish school ground insults from adults. Hosking's logic as a result can make a joke of Lulu asking Colin to go for tampons for a "heavy flow" come off not as a cheap gross joke but something odder in the punch line, and it says a great deal that the film could jettison the grease and transgression of the previous film, and retain its strangeness.

It is a film that will be more difficult for many to appreciate, truly the difficult second project as it does not have the instant saleability, paradoxically enough, of being so shocking you have to see it. It instead has a different form of weirdness in how the little details are meant to be jokes even if a curious ha-ha form, like the coffee shop selling a mid-winter blend. As well, the fact the director Hoskins is British, using American iconography, also means that a lot of the film and the previous is likely drawing from a very quaint absurdity part of our humour. That and, for a film set in the middle of middle America, the punch line being the magical night involving Scottish songs lamenting becoming a football referee becomes funnier in its co-production context, stranger in hindsight the longer I think of the film, weirder than its post-relevant disco music or the main receptionist at the hotel having a long hair that gets him mocked as looking like a dog. The cast including recognisable figures also does emphases the genesis of this film's humour - case in point, if you recognise Matt Berry's voice, think of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace (2004) and how people who use subtext are cowards - whilst emphasising that, for all its droll and oddly paced humour, the film's melodrama is never merely ironic, but actually sincere in its perverse way. As a result, whilst The Greasy Strangler was a compelling piece, the sophomore production is the one that won me over to Jim Hosking entirely.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Vulgar/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

A Day in the Country (1936)

 

a.k.a. Partie De Campagne

Director: Jean Renoir

Screenplay: Jean Renoir

Based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant

Cast: Sylvia Bataille as Henriette; Georges D'Arnoux as Henri; Jane Marken as Madame Dufour; André Gabriello as Monsieur Dufour; Jacques B. Brunius as Rodolphe; Paul Temps as Anatole; Gabrielle Fontan as the Grandmother; Jean Renoir as Uncle Poulain; Marguerite Renoir as Waitress

Canon Fodder

 

A family of a Parisian shop-owner - including wife, daughter, mother-in-law and the daughter's fiancée - go for a day in the country. The daughter Henriette (Sylvia Bataille) falls in love with a man, one of two at the inn they go to, and thus begins one of the many pieces of the career of Jean Renoir, a legendary French auteur but also someone who may come off as unexpected to be covered by myself. My taste in idiosyncratic cinema could be stereotypically paint brushed for more stranger fare, but his however is a distinct worldview I admire, a great humane figure in his love for humanity.  His idiosyncrasies are also visible, including the result of his real life, a figure who had to leave in exile from his homeland of France after the Nazi occupation of the country in World War II, eventually returning to there in cinema in 1955 and in-between having gone through the likes of Hollywood and even filming in India for The River (1951).

Before that history, however, came his attempted adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's short story. It was never completed initial during its shooting in 1936, but in 1946, the remaining footage was completed into this short piece. For myself, any work is that is considered "unfinished" is paradoxically that but also not unfinished, simply in mind to the fact that, if released into public access in any form, what is unfinished is only the gaps and holes in the crafted art rather than the finished product you have to adapt to. A Day in the Country itself also feels fully formed, a miraculous fact it had enough footage from its production to tell a succinct story to stand on its own two feet too.

The final result including that, per one of his greatest trademarks, Renoir fully humanised his stories. The narrative for a modern audience does have a plot aspect which may discomfort - two young men wish to go "fishing", to woo the daughter and mother of the Parisian family for a one-off romance, the one who comes off the most lecherous, even if he keeps a finely trimmed moustache he has to mould using a special mask, especially an off-putting figure in the current day. Thankfully, he is reduced to clowning around with the mother, turning into a Pan-like satyr, whilst a romance that will never become complete between Henri (Georges D'Arnoux with his deep brooding eyes) and Henriette will be kindled in the countryside. Said tale, aptly a short story in cinematic form, is told fully and feels its weight. Even in mind to content which may be problematic - where the moment passion strikes, in the middle of the woodland canopies, invokes the action of Henriette resisting Henri at first only to succumb to his passions - you have a the story in itself feels a fully formed and complex. One of a love connecting unexpectedly from a playful seduction, that sequence (or actually, gesture in acting) only an issue because such iconography has been used in cinema in a way that is inherently problematic, whilst everything else in how it begins and where it ends is a real bitter sweet romance. Where the entire scene and the story of Henriette with Henri turns into one of two adults falling in love by accident, with the weight of it Renoir provides more powerful than merely a choice in depiction which has aged.

Everything else is striking, even in mind that a lot of the film is very light in tone, as much to its virtue as well for emotional impact. Renoir's greatest favour is how everything is relaxed and even playfully humorous in his work, in contrast to when he has to be serious and makes those films and scenes powerful. Even an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (his TV movie project The Testament of Doctor Cordelier (1959)) is light in tone but still takes the material serious in its drama, an obscure title in his career showing his skills in both sides of the emotional coin. A Day in the Country has a perfect title which describes its atmosphere, one in mind to the source material Renoir fleshed out to be sympathetic to his entire cast of characters. Even the father and the husband-to-be, a portly man and a thin fishing obsessed guy who legitimately look to Stan Laurel and Laurel Hardy, are likeably oafs accidentally fishing up boots from the river, with the sense of Renoir caring for them even if playing to a comedy of the pair of goofs. Everyone even if they can be broad is a character to care for in such little time, where eventually the sadness, in the epilogue, means more when Henriette is going to be stuck with the younger man as her husband when Henri and she suddenly have a spark of love that is real.

Contrasting this is how vibrant the film is. Even if Renoir, once he transitioned to it, would embrace colour in all its passionate energy, the use of the natural environment the story is set in is exceptional. It opens up fully, in a brilliant use of deep composition of a scene with fore and background content, when a window is open and we see the countryside in its fullest the first time seeing Henriette and her mother on swings. Nature in the film, the wildlife and the landscape, becomes a magical place which is yet real and accessible, adding to the narrative that, by pure accident, a game of lust between the two male suitors, to trick the men away for them to go boating with the women and seduce them, is stripped away to a real romance between Henriette and Henri as much because the woodland they get to by boat is a place of pure aesthetic beauty. Even if the landscape was as much a cause of the film's production problems, where it rained continuously during shooting¹, it is in itself a character as well as would be the case in later films. It actually evokes Picnic on the Grass (1959), a very odd little film later in his career, a comedy with a satirical edge of a scientist and political figure pushing forth artificial insemination who instead finds love, and emotion, when he meets a peasant girl. It is a film with quirks that you have to adapt to, from a time period dealing with modernity to tradition, but in colour Renoir again dealing with the natural landscape having an incredible power and God-like form which can heighten emotions like love. (Even, in mind to one character playing up as a satyr in A Day in the Country, this is escalated in the later film in having a subplot of an old pagan landmass and unnatural winks which cause stuck up rationalist people to suddenly become freer and loose, all for the better in a sudden mass Dionysian possession).

The success of A Day in the Country, in mind to the inherently fascination with "unfinished" work, is both the luck of having enough substance to be a fully formed narrative, the rain which plagued the original production becoming the change where, cutting forwards in time, the romance briefly found once before cannot be gained back but will be remembered forever. The other aspect is Renoir himself whose talents made sure said story was complete and worthy even if it never properly concludes.

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1) Referred to HERE.

Interstate 60: Episodes of the Road (2002)

 

Director: Bob Gale

Screenplay: Bob Gale

Cast: James Marsden as Neal Oliver; Gary Oldman as O.W. Grant; Amy Smart as Lynn Linden; Christopher Lloyd as Ray; Chris Cooper as Bob Cody; Kurt Russell as Captain Ives; Michael J. Fox as Mr. Baker; Ann-Margret as Mrs. James; Amy Jo Johnson as Laura

An Abstract Film Candidate

Are you saying Phil will be cleaning toilets...and have no sex drive...?

Digging into the corners and crevices of cinema, you find yourself discovering the likes of this. A film from the co-writer of Back to the Future (1985) in his directorial debut, Bob Gale, a whimsical magical realist road movie which on the surface is a family friendly romp, in which a young man named Neal (James Marsden) after his twenty second birthday wishes to find answers, only for Gary Oldman as a magical wish fulfiller, the son of a leprechaun emigrating to the Americas from Ireland and a Cheyenne Indian, to push him onwards to a road journey across an interstate not on the map. It is, on paper, as much an Alice in Wonderland scenario as well as a surreal journey, between a museum of art forgeries to the town of lawyers, which is full of litigation as you can imagine, among the sights witnessed. It proves, despite its sheen and whimsy, to be odder than that.

It is also written for adults only, which is one detail among many which cause Interstate 60 to become a cultural oddity in cinema, in between cursing in the script to the fact that Oldman's immortal prankster O.W. Grant laments at one point having had his penis was cut off in a weird accident at nine. Oddly un-commercial Hollywood films are rare, especially rarer from the 2000s onward, so there is something compelling about this one even if it is an acquired taste you groan at as much as find merit in. Marsden's Neal is at the centre, the son of a lawyer of a well off family, wishing to become an artist, at a crossroads in his life and being railroaded by his father into law school and his life, even buying him for his birthday the red car he himself would want. To the viewer, a character like Neal, a stereotypical white middle class young guy, is going to be off-putting because such figures are gauche as protagonists, especially as his journey, when kicked off by Christopher Lloyd assigning him to deliver a package across Interstate 60, is a cliché. One with the added cliché of the chance of meeting the woman of his dreams, played by Amy Smart, a figure mostly seen on billboards only Neal can see, guiding him in their messages.

The result is, blatantly, a metaphor for Neal's personal grown, with his father's preferred red convertible (not his own choice) transporting him on this odyssey, Gale uses it to have characters Neal meets spin conservative, homespun advice on life, not attempting remotely to hide his design to spin meanings in his whimsical journey. The journey, as someone obsessed with surreal Wonderland/journey narratives in art, was always going to be compelling for me as, even here, they are idiosyncratic. It is for the most quite creative and even funny - particularly as the lawyer town, where everyone who is not a local gets slapped with a lawsuit for running over the mayor's dog which does not exist, and that lawyers sulk the streets on mass asking for clients - and whilst heavy handed, many of the eccentrics Neal encounters and the places he find are interesting.

Right from a stop sign, on his way to "Danver", Neal is already encountering a man who wished to be able to eat all the time, eventually stuck in a monkey's paw scenario of having a gut like a black hole, to a town called Banton (with Kurt Russell as the police chief) where drugs are legalised, creating one named Euphoria legal only in its region for anyone over thirteen, warned of in its addictive properties constantly but left for anyone who wishes to get high to take, the addicts cheap labour to pay for their now permanently addiction. Even if the film is heavy handed, even heavy handed surreal and metaphorical worlds are interesting for me, particularly as this film decides to go for a scenario of directions Neal could take in his life and see how ill advised they are for him. The only one of the encounters which is not well thought out, or just one of the times the more adult humour is in poor taste can be, is the personification of lust, a female hitchhiker played by Power Rangers alumni Amy Jo Johnson, looking surprisingly like Natalie Portman, playing a young woman searching for the Perfect 10 in bed, a scene which could be read as sexist depending on your mood and does not work as well as it could have.

Gale as a director is not as idiosyncratic as his script, at least in the sense that his visual and directorial ambitions are solid but they are propped up by the imagination onscreen. The film is given the advantage that it is a well made film with large production value, adding to the weirdness of this film's entire existence. Plotted as a road movie, but also an absurd journey, it is helped every scenario is heightened. It is a world of Americana - diners, giant bill boards - and runs with them to good effect, such as the idea, based on bizarre roadside attractions, of the museum of Art Forgeries, which is revealed to actually have real works of art with copies sent to real art galleries. The film is peculiar, as all of this film is felt with a whimsy apt for the co-writer of Back to the Future, but all these odd and subject to being tonally off too at moments, such as the tangent (never brought back again) of the main wish giving character having no penis, or the ouroboros weirdness surrounding a killer on the loose which leads to doppelgangers, almost something David Lynch if the tone has fully committed to a darker work. The film belies being a vehicle for James Marsden, who would stand out in this period playing Cyclops in the X-Men (2000), the first major superhero film of the Millennium, as the happy-go-lucky lead with a magic 8-ball guiding him going on this journey for self discovery.

It is also odd seeing Gary Oldman, a serious actor, having a lark with dyed red hair, but around this time was also Tiptoes (2003), a film in the career of screenwriter/director Matthew Bright where Oldman played Matthew McConaughey's brother born with dwarfism, which in a film which cast actors with dwarfism you had Oldman on his knees off-camera with co-stars, something to remind myself that Oldman also has a penchant for weirdness. Christopher Lloyd is not necessarily stretching himself, among this strangeness, but he has always been a charismatic actor, and in a film from the screenwriter of Back to the Future, it is not a surprise he is here, as is a brief cameo by Michael J. Fox as a businessman only to be run over by a trunk in a monkey's paw scenario. Also worthy of mention is Chris Cooper, playing a former advertising creator with terminal lung cancer who, alongside demanding truth in everything, has also strapped a belt of explosives around his waist set to a timer. Whether that joke can still be funny nowadays, it is nonetheless Cooper as an interesting character actor shining in his scenes, a straight man in this peculiar production. The only person in the cast who feels left out of place is tragically Amy Smart, as the sole woman of great plot important in what is frankly a white male Americana tale, not an insult to Interstate 60 but blatantly obvious in its DNA. Even if they make a comment of her not being the romanticised ideal of a woman, through a curiously used fart gag, Smart is still stuck with a bland figure, mostly seen as billboards that can change and guide Neal around, but never standing out.

Interstate 60 is definitely a curiosity, and in truth these forgotten obscurities for myself are far more compelling to experience over masterpieces at times, especially as this feels like a more honest snapshot just to peek in Bob Gale's brain. Parts of Interstate 60 are cringe worthy. Some of the jokes have not aged well, such as Smart suddenly talking in a way that would make, as Neal states, Mike Tyson seem eloquent just for a joke (and even referencing that in this sentence feels uncomfortable to have done readers). Some of it is clichéd yearnings of what life should mean, all of which feel like Bob Gale is lecturing his viewers. Yet it is all aptly personal, also aptly part of the Americana the film is touching at, the absurdities and men with cartoon dynamite strapped around their waists as part of their culture as the diners and the red convertibles are, even the magic 8-ball and a man eating beyond his weight in food in a bet and the strange museums part of this mass of culture.

It is a film that was never going to be a success because it is unmistakably weird. I have to admire its idiosyncratic take on the type of American comedy however, even in mind to what does not work, where this goes on a road journey to find humility even if absurd. It even still finds some apt and surprisingly salient aspects along the way, in spite of being antiquated, such as Cooper's character evoking historian Frederick Turner, expressing the idea that the frontier was a place for the malcontent to escape to and that, far from a gateway, the internet would not help replace it when there was no more physical frontier. Definitely in terms of unconventional American films of any budget, I would find virtue in the likes of this, even in mind to its failures, always more fascinating than many of the more successful productions due to their idiosyncrasies to genres and tropes. Even if the film, for all its early 2000s sheen and soundtrack, feels like a film from an older man out of touch to the world, it fascinates as much as causes one to roll your eyes at.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Tammy and the T-Rex (1994)

 

Director: Stewart Raffill

Screenplay: Stewart Raffill and Gary Brockette

Cast: Denise Richards as Tammy; Theo Forsett as Byron Black; George Pilgrim as Billy; Paul Walker as Michael Brock; Ellen Dubin as Helga; Terry Kiser as Dr. Gunther Wachenstein; Buck Flower as Norville; Ken Carpenter as Neville; Sean Whalen as Weasel; J. Jay Saunders as Sheriff Black; John Edmondson as Karl; John Franklin as Bobby

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

 

There is something naturally, perfectly, fitting that this film, from the director of Mac and Me (1988) and Standing Ovation (2010), originates when a man approached director Stewart Raffill with the fact that he had a large scale animatronic T-Rex and wished to make a film with it¹. Knowing as well the fuller context, including Raffill having to write the script in a week and improvising whatever he felt could get a reaction, suddenly I find myself with the British born filmmaker, infamous for a E.T. rip-off by McDonalds, more sympathetic for a man who went from working as an animal trainer for films to a strange career of movies hesitantly put together and in this case, gunning for the weirdness for the sake of weirdness genre but not making something contrived.

What you get was a film lost in time which is strange. As in, already this comes from the baking pot of hastily putting together a film post-Jurassic Park (1993) where Paul Walker, long before his career in the Fast and the Furious films, is romancing a young Denise Richards only to accidentally get the wrong side of her domineering ex. Said ex dumps Walker's Michael in the middle of a big cat park at night, where he is mauled by a lion, and becomes an experiment for Dr. Gunther Wachenstein (Terry Kiser), who transplants his brain into a robot full sized T-Rex. Admittedly, this is not the first strange idea of putting a brain into something else - Boris Karloff was obsessed with transplanting brains between man and dog in House of Frankenstein (1944), and likewise Tammy... was made as a comedy. The narrative gets weirder, in real life as much as the movie's own, when the original film was meant as an R-rated movie. And when I write R-rated, that means that it was originally released cut of its content for a more family friendly form by in its premiere, and that when it was resurrected in the later 2010s by Joe Rubin, co founder of the distributor Vinegar Syndrome, with its fully uncut form, it was revelled to have a jaw dropping level of gore to go along with its bizarre tone.

Yes, Tammy... is a silly film but it does catch one off-guard with ease. It is made in the nineties, yet we open with Denise Richards in the middle of an aerobics scene with other women set to a glam metal score about walking around like a dinosaur. In complete honesty, the film with its cheese and winking tone, alongside some of its adult humour really being tactless, would have in any other context had put me off. I realise that, with a lot of cult eighties horror films especially, their cheesy tones really do not work for me. Here however you have a film where, when it comes to Paul Walker having his brain transplanted into a robot dinosaur, you have in the fully uncut version a full blown splatter moment Herschell Gordon Lewis would have been proud of, with the brain being exposed and eventually being removed. Gore is not something nowadays I take with interest as well, but there is something incredibly jarring and striking in this film, with its early nineties colours and comedic tone, where a tyrannosaurus rex foot crushes a man and it has blood split, or heads being bit off. Whilst it is not a definition of greatness in a film, there is something striking when genre and tone catch one off guard.

This is definitely the case for a film, in truth, which is goofy. In mind to its circumstances, including that the director filmed most of the film not far from his own house¹, there is a charm to the film but it cannot be denied either that it is ridiculous to consider. It is helped considerably by its cast. There is an unfortunate and bittersweet nature to Paul Walker, who tragically died too young when he developed a popular status in the Fast and the Furious franchise, a series about cars and action which moved away from its origins, of the boom in interest for street racing, into a long lasting series that gained more fans unlike other franchises after five films onwards. He is charismatic in the scenes he gets on screen, bearing in mind he is literally replaced with an animatronic dinosaur, thankfully one which does have enough as a great piece of mechanical creation that, even if they have to awkwardly animate scenes in with him afar moving, is an interesting co-star to work with as a machine. Denise Richards is the same here, a charismatic figure who thankfully went on to have a prolific career in television. Whether one film or not can be argued for why her cinema career never went as far, when there was a period in the late nineties when she would be very visible in films like Wild Things (1998), it was probably not helped by the notoriety of casting her as a nuclear physicist named Christmas Jones in a James Bond film, The World is Not Enough (1999), probably the biggest profile film from that time and an albatross around her neck for how her role was not highly looked upon.

A shame as, actually the figure that has to carry the film, she is sincere in this utterly silly film having to act against an animatronic dinosaur. With Theo Forsett, playing her friend Byron Black, having to play the leads in this absurd premise, there is a lot to have to work around in its adult humour and absurdities, such as an entire scene in a morgue, trying to find a new body for her boyfriend, which alongside a T-Rex outside giving thumbs up and downs in response outside in a truck, also has the consideration of whether to have a woman's body instead which some temptation from the dino to go in that direction. If anything, the film willingly going to the edge in terms of stretching itself is where Tammy... gains worth, a movie that knows how ridiculous it is to have an animatronic dinosaur have a scene using a payphone. It does stumble in its willingness to go for an unexpected - some of the jokes have not aged well, and Forsett's broad stereotype of a gay character will cause some to roll their eyes, but it is really the couple of jokes at his expense that are more an issue, whilst by accident character is given to him as the son to the town sheriff whose relationship is awkward as father and son.

Other times however this attitude proved a virtue to the film, where even the gore is a strange and unexpected exclamation which keeps the film, where a young woman's love for her boyfriend even overcomes him sudden brain transfer in a dinosaur, interesting. That it will have, for the scene of Michael being mauled, an actual stunt man or animal trainer play acting being attacked by an actual lion is something which stands out, as is the fact that for all the jokes, the gore and even attempted grave robbing just after a funeral, it is still sincere as a love story is credit for the film in terms of positives. Definitely the experience has softened me to Stewart Raffill as a figure, least who in his career as a filmmaker and then later an author is as eccentric as his output. Unlike a future film like Standing Ovation, a film always meant for kids which did get predictable, this in contrast was not surprisingly a film to screen when it was rediscovered and made available for midnight movie crowds in its original cut. It is, again, ridiculous, but I have to admire the film being weird too.

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1) Which can be read about, along the director's career, HERE.