Despite the fact that I grew up at the right time, I couldn’t really care less about most of Sid & Marty Krofft’s output.  I do have a special place in my heart, however, for “ElectraWoman and DynaGirl,” a distaff  “Batman” rip-off starring future soap mainstay Diedre Hall and Judy Strangis and lacking any of the Adam West series’ high budget or quiet subtlety.  Of special interest was this episode, not only because the villian is based on the glam-rock trend of the time, but also because it features Michael “Lance Rock” Blodgett!  The Glitter Rock of the title is a clownish, green-afroed world domination-type who talks like Roddy McDowall and has glasses like Bootsy Collins.  ElectraWoman, in her secret identity, has invited the Prince of Tarenbourg (Blodgett) to stay with her because he’s attending their class reunion.  The Prince holds the Key of Tarenbourg, the powers of which seem questionable, but according to the Prince, “Whoever possesses it, rules.”  Natch, Glitter Rock and his assistant Sideman (a Gabe Kaplan-type who says “Far out” and “heavy” a lot, just to show how out-of-it the Kroffts were when they tried to be hip) plot to steal the key, and after the Prince is hypnotized by Glitter Rock’s “evil concert” (and, no doubt, the jaw-dropping psuedo-psychedelic editing that mostly involves Glitter Rock’s head rotating around the screen), it’s up to our heroes to get the key back.  After DynaGirl explains things to the Prince (“Let’s just say Glitter Rock wasn’t playing your song,” followed by the sort of mugging grin that only child actors of the ‘70s seemed to know how to do), the three of them become trapped in a typical walls-closing-in trap.  More bland sets, lame dialogue (“Electra-smart!”) and laughable special effect ensue.  Blodgett sleepwalks through his part, and the scenes where his eyes get glazed over with hypnosis don’t really seem different from his normal self.  In terms of idiotic 70’s kids TV lunacy, you can’t beat this, but making it through more than one episode at a time may cause your brain to melt.
 
 

Yes, “Super Dave” Osborne fans, your answer to Viva Knievel! is finally here.  Over ten years after a movie like this should have been made, filled with every ego project cliché you’ve always dreamed of and helmed by Peter MacDonald, whose career has been peppered with projects dumped to video because their theatrical time had passed (Legionnaire, Neverending Story III), The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave is a piece of work that ranks as the first truly unbelievable film of the new millennium.
Bob Einstein (the brother of Albert Brooks) plays the gravel-voiced “Super Dave,” who introduces the film with a message to kids “not to try these stunts at home.”  The movie itself begins as young Dave at his grandfather’s funeral (being eulogized by Billy Barty!) gets advice from his dead relative’s ghost in the form of a locket.  After a pratfall into the grave, we cut to the present day, where Dave is being driven to his millennium charity stunt by Ray Charles.  After a crash through the bus window, Dave arrives, has his foot accidentally tied to a midget, is harassed by evil promoter Dan Hedaya and prepares for his big stunt, which amounts to bouncing up and down between two trampolines 2,000 times on (free) TV.  The Pope, the Dalai Lama and President Clinton are in the audience.
Well, the stunt goes wrong and Dave decides to retire.  He quickly loses all his money and people start abandoning his stunt carnival in droves.  He meets his love interest, an accident-prone single mother who with a kid in need of an operation (!) after she nearly runs him over by driving her truck through a hall of mirrors.  When the evil promoter turns Dave’s star protégé (Van Wormer) into an evil stunt man who gives kids the wrong message, it’s up to one last, half-mile jump in a souped-up car to save the day and Little Timmy’s life.
I really don’t know where to begin with this.  I could talk about the profanity, which is edited out and poorly over-dubbed for a PG-rating to the point where certain scenes make little sense.  I could talk about how seeing the same dummy get crushed under a car just isn’t funny the third time.  I could talk about the hopelessness of having Dave rescue a dog from a burning building.  I could talk about how useless the running gag of Dave mixing up everyone’s name was.  I could talk about the bulging eyeball computer effects, the outrageous Japanese assistant named Fuji, or the possible motivations of having Dave’s going-through-puberty-with-a-cold voice coming out of the mouth of the kid playing him as a child, though only some of the time.
Instead, I think I’ll talk about the mimes.
For some reason, Dave’s stunt carnival has lots of mimes corralled like animals.  His assistant Donald (veteran character actor Don Lake) brings him a new mime on a leash, but it protests (verbally) when forced to wear white face paint.  Dave is occasionally nostalgic for one mime that he lost, a long time ago.  Later in the film, he finds his lost mime, and then falls down a hill.
Say what you will, The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave is exactly what it’s supposed to be.  It’s an incredibly silly, mind-numbingly dumb ego project.  While the making of it doesn’t make any sense at all, the fact that this movie cost $15 million to make and got backing by a major studio like MGM for video instead of being quietly sold as a mid-summer TV-movie for the Warner Brothers Network defies every rule of the film industry I’ve ever known.  I’m glad I live in a time and place where a movie like this, despite all evidence of “logic” and “common sense,” can still get made.
Also available on DVD.  Thank God.

THE FAT BLACK PUSSYCAT (1964)
D: Harold Lee. Frank Jamus, Janet Damon, Hector Elizondo, Geoffrey Lewis.  (Something Weird)

Any movie that opens with a nude woman stumbling down a dark alley to her death is certainly on the right track, and this beatniksploitation murder mystery certainly has a lot going for it in terms of timepiece value.  Frank James stars as a detective investigating the opening demise by checking out the young woman’s frequent hangout, the title hipster establishment run by a guy who looks more like Vic Tayback.  He can tell the poets from the bums because the poets have “soulful eyes.”  He runs into trouble, however, because he can’t speak hip and needs every other sentence translated into English despite the fact that, as he says, “some of my best friends are existentialists.”  The hipsters spout poetry, have goatees and don’t care about the investigation (“I heard she got attacked by a sex fiend.   Ain’t that a laugh?”)  and the detective’s job is made infinitely difficult.  He shouldn’t worry too much, however, because the killer turns out to be someone who isn’t even in the film until the end!  We also get our hero at a dinner party (featuring Hector Elizondo) where a psychologist tries to convince him he doesn’t like steak, only the idea of steak, and priceless bits of beatnik dialogue (“That’s Albert.  Boy, is that Albert.”  “Envy, man... strictly nowheresville.”).  Blink and you’ll miss a young Geoffrey Lewis attacking the detective in the park.  The music is by the Don Bader group, whom I’ve never heard of, but whose bongo-laden tracks provide the perfect accompaniment for such a sampling of pretentious exploitation at its best.  Like most movies of this sort, the fast-talking characters and too-cool-for-its-own-good dialogue get old fast, and it lacks sleaze after the opening credits, but it’s still an entertaining timepiece perfect for a coffee-sipping, beret-wearing, finger-snapping double feature with A Bucket of Blood.

I’m a sucker for a good It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World rip-off, but unfortunately, there aren’t any.  Instead, I’ll have to be satisfied with imprsessively lame crap like Flush, a 1976 entry that actually purports to be “popularly known as IT’S A MAD MAD WORLD PART TWO” on the box notes.  By who, exactly?  The same people that got suckered into The Gates of Hell II?
You know you’re in trouble when the word “zany” is used in the introduction credits.  The “zany” antics that follow all revolve around a series of boxes placed across the country, the first of which is uncovered when a women’s room toilet explodes, causing the entire ceiling of a gas station to be blown.  The grouchy station owner demands that he owns the box, but our, um, “hero,” a plumbing repair truck driver, is constantly trying to get the boxes himself, all in the hopes of getting the big prize of millions of dollars.
So across the country they go, and they’re joined by a truck driver (who turns out to be gay), the female owner/go-go girl of a gay night club (eh?) and an assortment of zany archetypes, like the sleazy spanish guy, the swearing priest, the cross-eyed drunkard and the corrupt sheriff.  All of this is punctuated by really odd sound effects that crop up at silly moments, including whenever a characters wears.  “Shit” makes a bong sound, and with the title and the fact that the whole thing revolves around a cesspool repair truck, you hear that bonging a lot.
The whole thing is so gleefully, energetically awful that it takes on a certain charm.  The humor is the most dumb-witted, lame-brained crap (there’s even a rubber chicken) and the characters are so stupid you almost expect Jim Varney to show up.  When the trail leads through a funeral home and our hero causes a body to rise from the grave in the middle of a service(!), you can’t help but wonder what the hell these folks were thinking.  One character threatens a telephone operator by saying he'll fill a phone booth with gas--and it works!  Sally Kirkland has a small role and future “Diff’rent Strokes” maid Mary Jo Catlett has a bit part as a bartender.
Okay, so it’s terrible and offensive (the gay bar scene alone must have caused any well-adjusted homosexual of the time to run screaming for the closet) and dumb as nails.  It’s a product of it’s age, and it sure is zany.

I just can’t figure out what the hell the market for this sort of thing is supposed to be.  This looks like the sort of thing that was a lot of fun to make, but just turns into something excruciating on-screen.  (See also The Silence of the Hams.)  Does anyone out there really WANT to see another lame horror-comedy-musical?  And I even have a soft spot in my heart for Transylvania Twist, but it seems like every year someone brings out an unbearable exercise in genre-bending.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show rip-off plot (minus the sexual perversions) involves a young couple (Ian Bohen and “Full House”’s Candice Cameron... nnngh) whose car breaks down and they’re forced to seek refuge in an old castle.  The castle is run by Doctor Frankenstein, played by Bobby “Boris” Pickett (who lip-synchs his hit and is occasionally entertainingly bad) and includes a couple of vampires (Sarah Douglas and Anthony Crivello), a hunchback (John Kassir), a werewolf and his mom (Mink Stole!) and, for no apparent reason, Jimmie Walker and Elvis’ mummified remains.  Awful energy-free musical numbers featuring lyrics that could have been thought up by a bored fifth grader, poor jokes and lots of mugging ensue.  See terribly stale jokes coming from minutes away and be completely powerless to stop them.  Stole, Kassir and Douglas deserve better than this.  Hell, Jimmie Walker deserves better than this.  Unless you want to see a watered-down, completely useless version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show with no sense of pacing or wit, stay far, far away.  It’s based on a play co-written by Pickett, so you know where to put the blame. Frankenstein does not sing.

You’ve got to love direct-to-video horror franchises.  The first film in a series is usually watchable, but not actually good enough to add more, or even equal, money into a sequel. The second usually comes off as a safe retread of the first.  The third, however, is the killer.  The third is when either new ideas are born, usually ideas so out-of-whack they’re fun to watch even if they don’t work (Leprechaun, Children of the Corn, Howling), or they stick to the formula, which has now been watered down to the point of total pointlessness (Candyman, Warlock, Critters).  The fourth, inevitably, takes place in space.  (The exception to this rule is Witchcraft, which started at barely tolerable and worked its way to the bottom by the second film, stopping at No. 9 before cranking out something you could actually sit through.)
From Dusk til Dawn 3 marks at least a vague improvement over the lame first sequel to a film that wasn’t all that well-liked in the first place (for my money, an energetic, if slightly clumsy, mixture of vampire flick and southwestern road movie).  For one, it’s a historical piece, centering around the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce, who vanished in order to join Pancho Villa’s army.  The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge-inspired opening has Birece (well played by “Then Came Bronson” vet Parks) watching a condemned prisoner’s  (Like Water for Chocolate hunk Leonardi) hanging get interrupted by his escape and kidnapping of Ezmerelda, the title babe.  The Hangman (Once Were Warriors’ intense Morrison) swears revenge and takes after him.  Bierce takes his leave on a stagecoach run by a man with no eyes and another with no tongue (perhaps a wink to El Topo) with two bible-thumpers (Loftin and Gayheart) who chide him for his athiesm.
The fugitive and daughter quickly fall for each other in faux Hollywood rebel fashion.  Ana Celi looks blankly at Leonardi, quickly going between two emotions, vacant and vaguely worried.  Nods to other flicks, from Taxi Driver to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, show up just to keep the nice, moody atmosphere away.  Eventually, natch, all the characters end up at a certain strip bar in the desert, and, natch, vampires emerge.
 Figuring out which characters in a particular horror film are going to live is usually one of the easiest tasks a viewer has.  The two romantic leads are typically so obvious that you quickly lose any hope that the supporting cast will make it.  Smarter, well-written flicks get around this problem by making the rest of the characters interesting to watch so their deaths have some emotional impact.  The makers of From Dusk til Dawn 3, on the other hand, chose to fill their film with irritating, unsympathetic characters that end up fighting amongst themselves so much that you don’t give a crap who lives or dies.  Leornardi’s character should have been a proper Django/Man With No Name tough-guy, but he’s too sadistic to folks that don’t really deserve it to come off as a likable anti-hero.  Ezmerelda is a blank slate, Morrison is an obvious villain, and Gayheart and Loftin look like they’d rather be at the nearest coffee shop.  Only Bierce, who goes out of way to be unlikeable, comes off as someone you’d want to see live.
The final slaughter sequences, which take up the last third of the film, are relatively energetic and worth watching.  After a character is stabbed through the mouth (a great moment), hell begins to break loose and you don’t mind the lack of logic as much.  Those hoping for some sort of reasoning behind the origin of the place will be disappointed, in fact, the movie just brings up more questions, with a decapitated vampire sprouting a snake head(!) and an off tango number in the middle of it all.  Danny Trejo gets a few moments to shine as the bartender again as well.
Still, why the hell don’t these characters make any sense?  When Leonardi’s character catches an obvious vampire gnawing on his horse’s neck, why is his response no more excited then if he caught a kid touching the tail?  Why does Ezmerelda freak out when a vampire knows her name even after the same vamp has told her part of her history?  Why can’t we hear the band playing (like the first movie) during the slaughter even though we see them?
It’s pretty dumb stuff if you think about it, so the best idea is to not bother thinking.  On that level, FDtD3 is a fairly frenetic mix of Django and the first film, though not as good as either.  I look forward to seeing the next in the series, in which a bunch of stripper vampires face off against alien miners.

Since Reservoir Dogs, nobody can deny the number of Quentin Tarantino copycat flicks, but what’s astonishing is how few of them actually do it correctly.  What made Dogs and Pulp Fiction work wasn’t just the over-the-top hipster dialogue and clever camerawork, but the inventive time and perspective shifting in both films that managed to confuse some audiences as much as it attracted them.  Few filmmakers have followed the route with any inventiveness, instead choosing to focus on comically-named characters and endless gunfire and sadistic humor in their efforts.
Heaven is not a QT rip-off.  In fact, in terms of tone, it shares much more in common with John Cassavetes’ crime work like Gloria and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.  But Heaven does something unique in its narrative structure, throwing out bits and pieces of a scene at a time, occasionally showing the aftermath before actually letting you find out what happened.  It’s a dizzying, alluring and only slightly distracting effect, and one that allows a standard plot to rise above the norm.
Martin Donovan (always a pleasure to see him cast in a non-Hartley film) plays a broke gambling addict whose ex-wife (Going) is attempting to take full custody of their son.  Through a gambling buddy (character vet Schiff), he becomes involved with a transsexual stripper (Edwards) whose flashing psychic visions help him win a poker game and warn him of his wife’s involvement with his psychiatrist.  His gambling buddy is busy with other matters, busily trying to pay off two local hoodlums to burn down the strip club he owns for the insurance.
What would be average direct-to-video fodder in the wrong hands (and, in fact, slightly similar to Donovan’s role in Hollow Reed) is helped by Reynolds’ realistic dialogue, clever editing and a nice, tense filming style.  Donovan’s admittedly limited emotional range is used well here, allowing him to portray a man threatening to explode at any given moment if the opportunity came up.   A tension-filled poker game is a highlight, and the gory climax where Donovan runs through the strip club is one of the best-shot pieces of film I’ve seen in a while.
Scott Reynolds, who gave new light to the serial killer plot in The Ugly, is a talent to be watched.  Sure, the villains are a bit on the cookie-cutter side, the psychic angle’s been done before, and we don’t really need another dramatic scene with Filter’s “Hey Man, Nice Shot” in the background, but Heaven is an engaging thriller, and a welcome relief to the over-stylized and underwritten dreck that’s been getting churned out lately.

While his wife, Alison Anders (Gas, Food, Lodging, Mi Vida Loca, Grace of My Heart) gets more press, Kurt Voss has been a more prolific filmmaker, averaging a couple direct-to-video titles a year.  I’ll always be a fan on the basis of Horseplayer, an underrated thriller-drama that provided Brad Dourif with one of his few starring roles.  Though his other thrillers (Amnesia, Genuine Risk, Poison Ivy: The New Seduction) have been less successful, his films have a certain sense of style and care that place them above the typical Cinemax fodder.
Highway Hitcher is typical of Voss’ style.  Essentially a reworking of The Hitcher (The Halloween of the psycho hitchhiker genre), the film stars William Forsythe as a comic strip syndicate executive whose wife (Allen, giving the film’s weakest performance) has just left him.  Persuaded by his friend (McKean) to take a vacation over Christmas, he ends up picking up stranded existentialist Hunter (LeGros).  While Hunter starts out as a garden-variety weirdo, his behavior soon grows more violent.
The second half of the film takes place in a small town, where Forsythe meets up with bartender Elizabeth Pena, who at first comes off as a typical noir-ish love interest, but whose aloof dialogue is later justified by the fact that she’s a junkie!  Jamie Kennedy pops up as an oddly disinterested sheriff, and a few plot twists turn up, some expected, and others nicely surprising.  A rather silly, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” epiliogue almost deflates the grin-worthy climax.
Writer/director Voss sticks in a little bit of thought to the characters, especially Forsythe’s and LeGros’, to keep things interesting.  Forsythe begins the film as such a weak-willed sucker that it’s a pleasant surprise to see him finally go into action in the final act, and LeGros’ existentialism lends him a bit more credibility than the average screen serial killer.  It’s in sharp contrast to Rutger Hauer’s psycho in The Hitcher, an almost supernatural maniac whose origins are never explained.
With the exception of the decliningly-talented Allen (whose performances in this and Children of the Corn 666 make you wonder how she became a name star in the first place), the cast is fine.  Forsythe makes a suitable lead, if a bit too assertive-looking for the meek character he begisn the film portraying, and LeGros, a fine actor who has, unfortunately, never seemed to get out of playing character parts, is a memorable villain.  Pena, essentially the Jennifer Jason Leigh part in The Hitcher, mumbles a bit too much but turns in an otherwise fine pathos-ridden performance.
While other films of this type dabble in homoeroticism (The Hitcher and Road Kill USA to some extent, Victor Salva's Nature of the Beast more so), Highway Hitcher deflates such matters.  The only questionable aspects of the relationship between the two leads come entirely from Forsythe’s character.  Why does he let such an odd, creepy hippie-looking guy like Hunter (who tells Forsythe’s wife that “he often regrets getting married to her”) get away with so much?  And why does he buy a condom at a gas station in the middle of nowhere after getting a flashback to his wife?  Who’s he going to use it with?  LeGros?
As usual, Voss turns a typical direct-to-video plot into a perfectly watchable piece of drive-in cinema with the help of a fine cast and a decent sense of style.  Tension-filled scenes and edited together nicely, and complimented by an appropriately active score.  While continuity problems emerge (It’s pouring when Forsythe enters the hotel, yet there’s no sign of any moisture when he exits minutes later)and the characters don’t make a hell of a lot of sense (The condom thing), it’s got enough going for it to make a passable rental.  The Hitcher and Red Rock West are still the ultimate words in desert noir, but the blandly-titled Highway Hitcher (good cover art, though.) is worth a worthy time waster.

It’s a shame that there’s not much of a market for short films.  So many ideas that would make for perfectly agreeable 15-to-30 minute films are filmed and then ignored simply because there’s no place to put something of an awkward length like that.  Despite the efforts of the Independent Film Channel and Bravo, short films have remained something of an enigma, a little appetizer before the feature at film festivals, or a curiosity from someone who’d go on to bigger projects.
Hoods would have made a great 25-minute film.  It’s got a nifty concept, good actors, and about enough clever ideas and dialogue to fill a half-hour time slot.  Unfortunately, Hoods runs an hour and a half.
Mantegna and Pollak play mob buddies who are quickly getting sick of the game, especially after a coffee shop owner calmly asks that they knock off his competition across the street because it’s cheaper than getting air conditioning to compete.  Mantegna’s mob boss father (an unbilled Cassell) has another assignment for them, however; the hit of someone Mantegna’s never heard of.  After some very fluid and funny interplay between Mantegna and Pollak, the two hire an emotionally disturbed hitman (Pantoliano, who is great in a subtle part) to perform the hit.  Unfortunately, it turns out to be a 9-year-old boy.
The film maintains a feel of low-key zaniness throughout, especially with the interplay between the three mobsters and the kid.  Mantegna’s character occasionally flashes back to childhood memories of his father teaching him how to fire a gun, and wonders constantly how he got into this situation, the first sign of a severe tonal shift.  Toward the end of the film, after one of the leads is killed, the tone shifts completely, reducing the affair into a melancholy, slow-moving self-pity fest for the last half-hour.
Parts of the film are fun to watch.  Mantegna, Pollak, and Pantoliano make a great team, and Jennifer Tilly is fun to watch in a relatively useless role as Mantegna’s now-married ex-girlfriend.  Much of the film, however, is dull and repetitive, detouring into areas that a light-hearted gangster romp that this promises to be are best not going.  It’s like two fairly enjoyable short films stuck together into an overlong, uncomfortably package, and Hoods is never really engaging enough to allow a flow like that to work.

Rene Daalder will always be an appreciated filmmaker of mine, if solely for Massacre at Central High, his 1976 exploitation classic that treads on much the same turf Heathers would 12 years later.  Tragically, only one his later films (1995’s Habitat) have been released in the States.  Given the work of his I’ve seen, he comes off as a Canadian equivalent to Larry Cohen, a clever writer with some good ideas that don’t always work out in the execution.
The film opens with a psychiatrist escaping from an informally-run psychiatric facility headed by crazed genius Patrick McGoohan.  After the loose shrink gets into a car accident because of the voices in his head chanting “All for one and one for all” possess his arm, the action switches to his peer (Shakespearean thesp Michael Maloney) who’s trying to find a place for the schizophrenic Veronica (Emmanuelle Vaugier), to stay after the free clinic he works in shuts down.  Convinced McGoohan’s clinic is the only refuge, the pair take it on the lam, but it’s really just a set-up for the clinic’s new owner to investigate the place and rescure his son from what he considers to be a cult.  Lost yet?  Don’t worry, you will be.
After a brief picnic lunch that causes Veronica to see ants on her body, rip off her clothes, run into a lake and almost stab Maloney in the eye with a corkscrew, they arrive at the home where the rest of the movie takes place.  McGoohan welcomes them with open arms, quickly establishing himself as a psychiatric Charlie Chan with dialogue like “Delusions should be cultivated like mushrooms—shed too much light on them, and they crawl back into the woodwork.”  He tells Maloney about his theory of mainting a universal consiousness and soon performs surgery on Veronica, allowing her to share in the thoughts of the rest of the group.  The group includes the clinic owner’s son (who’s there of his own free will, after his parents sent him there because he stutters!), a butch Tourette’s Syndrome victim who speaks in rhyme, a pianist with two separate minds living in each of his arms, and, best of all, Amanda Plummer as a wheelchair-bound dance enthusiast who turns a group session into a bizarre interpretive dance number that wouldn’t look out of place in Dr. Caligari.
The meandering, all-over-the-place plot (the frequently-topless Veronica only enters the plot occasionally after this point) and stagy dialogue are typical of Daalder’s other work, but like Massacre and Habitat, there’s a definite sense of oddball perversity at work here.  Blending bits of Freaks, One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest and Disturbed, the film’s weirdness climaxes (literally) with a montage of virtually everyone at the asylum having sex (straight, gay, solo and chained to a table in leather garb) as Plummer dances around gleefully in her wheelchair.  McGoohan turns in such a fine performance and makes a great creepy-yet-oddly-likable mad doc that it’s not surprising that Maloney’s hero is pretty bland.  It doesn’t matter, though, because there’s enough curiosity value in Hysteria without an enaging lead to make it worth a look.  Tragically, it's only available in Canada.

I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER (1998)
D:. Jennifer Love Hewitt, Brandy, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jeffrey Combs, Bill Cobbs. (Columbia)

Let’s say that Scream is to this horror film era what Halloween was to the boom in the early 80’s that became so atrocious everyone had to forget about horror movies for a decade.  That would make I Know What You Did Last Summer, an inexplicably successful film that rips off a much better film, but removes its suspense, irony, and ingenuity, the Friday the 13th.  I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, whose complete lack of originality even descends to its’ title, for God’s sake, would be the Friday the 13th, Part 2.
The best thing that can be said about I Still Know... is that Ryan Phillippe does not return, even in a cameo, as he was apparently too busy vomiting dialogue elsewhere.  Jennifer Love Hewitt, unfortunately, is back, and this time she’s joined by TV’s “Moesha” Brandy as the two girls and their respective boyfriends win a trip to the Bahamas.  Once they get there, the island is sealed up and a mysterious stranger starting bumping off the residents.  Freddie Prinze, Jr., also returns, though he spends most of the film trying to get to the island, a la Scatman Cruthers in The Shining.  Jeffrey Combs lends the lone speck of interest as the unpleasant owner of the resort hotel they stay at.
While the plot is strictly the same old thing, you’d expect the writers to come up with something, anything that makes this different from every other slasher film ever made.  There’s nothing there, though--the plot “twists” are few and far between, and you’ll see them well in advance anyway, the characters are poorly-written and unmotivated, the supporting cast is wasted, the killer is pretty much the same unmemorable fisherman from the original, and most unforgivably, the death sequences show a complete lack of creativity.
The one thing that would have made I Still Know... worth a rental would have been to see Brandy’s pretty little throat slit, her head dangling off her neck, a pickaxe through her gut.  Tragically, even this faint hope is dashed--the character survives, no doubt, for another sequel.  To avoid encouraging this sort of thing, please do not see I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.
 

Don’t let the cryptic title fool you into thinking this is some new Harminy Korine-level weirdness.  It’s merely a standard indie pic, the feature debut of Matthew Modine, who stars and wrote the script with an uncredited Todd Field.
Modine plays Johnny, who gets out of jail and gets a job as a mechanic working for Bruce Dern (excellent in an understated role).  He’s not all that thrilled about seeing his father (Hurt) who abandoned him at a bank job several years ago, though he quickly hooks up with his brother James (O’Connor), whose life has just led to more small crimes and a cloying, stupid girlfriend (Marie).  After James knocks out Johnny’s parole agent/friend from High School (Keith), the two are forced to make a run to Tijuana.  To get back, of course, they’ll have to pull one last job: the robbing of a bullfight arena.
Modine’s direction is bland, vaguely likable, and completely unmemorable.  He seems to be trying to get a mid-70’s drive-in road movie feel to the thing, a la Macon County Line, and casting Dern, Keith, Hurt, and (in a bit part) Julie Newmar is a good start.  Unfortunately, the script doesn’t have realistic enough to pull off a more hard-boiled tone.  Johnny himself is a pretty dull character, and his brother (O’Connor gets a hefty chunk of the screen time) is so irritating that you just can’t want until the inevitable climax to watch him get blown away.  The interplay between Modine and Hurt is quite good, but we never really get into Johnny’s head, nor do we ever understand why he doesn’t just leave all of these negative people behind.
What was already a sub-par flick is made infinitely worse by the role of Lisa Marie.  It’s not her fault that the role is poorly-written; she never comes off as anything more than a dumb teenager who ruins everything by doing stupid things for no reason.  However, she adds no defense against the common argument that she shouldn’t act in anything but Tim Burton films by her grating line readings that make you wonder if she actually speaks English, and her emoting, which amounts to shouting, smiling, posing and staring.  It’s hard to feel sympathy when she finally gets kidnapped towards the end, in fact, I was gleefully looking forward to watching this bothersome bitch get some much-needed electro-shock therapy.
Modine is a talented actor, but it’s obvious he’s not all that accustomed to handling their actions.  The blocking is terribly stiff, and when combined with the mostly-static camera movements, the first two-thirds of the film end up being paced like a wet slug.  While the action does pick up in the final third, it’s not enough to make the first part worth sitting though.
The title, incidentally, refers to a story Johnny’s brother told him as a kid as a rationale for theft.  The film contains neither dogs nor rabbits.
 

LOST HORIZON (1973)
D: Charles Jarrott.  Peter Finch, Liv Ullman, Michael York, Sally Kellerman, Olivia Hussey, Bobby Van, George Kennedy, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer.

Since its original release over 25 years ago, Ross Hunter’s epic Lost Horizon remake has been the subject of much rampant critical attacks, but, like the same era’s At Long Last Love, has been virtually unseen by today’s new generation of bad movie fans.  Fortunately, buried in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, American Movie Classics was courteous enough to give millions of viewers a chance to look at one of the most unbelievably bad musicals of all time, and I’m pleased to say, it lives up to the hype.  The AMC version is worth seeing alone for Bob Dorian’s embarrassed introduction, as if to shrug and say, “Well, it’s really not THAT bad,” when deep in his head, he knows the truth.
Lost Horizon is incredible.
It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.  Get a bunch of A-List actors, throw them in a remake of a classic fantasy film, add in some musical numbers by Burt Bacharach.  Box-office gold.
Too bad the first half doesn’t seem to be a musical at all.  In fact, the first musical number isn’t until over a half-hour into the film.  It’s a shame that the music kicks in, because the first bits aren’t that bad—the crew of a plane (Finch, York, Kennedy, an irritating Van and a hopelessly miscast Kellerman) are hijacked and taken to Shangri-La, a place of paradise.  But then comes the music.
Now, I like Burt Bacharach.  Most of his songs are catchy and hummable, even though they all seem to be formed with one idea.  The songs in Lost Horizon, however, are horrifically lame and not even well-paced, a matter made worse by some of the blandest, disinterested choreography ever committed to film.  The highlight of the pic is a godawful duet between the sultry-voiced Kellerman and Hussey about the pros and cons of utopian life, sung at two different paces.
It doesn’t help that the cast is way too good to be embarrassing themselves like this.  York is basically his standard Logan’s Run self (turtleneck and all), but Boyer looks pathetic and the mere presence of Liv Ullman, introduced to the film by dancing around a bunch of school children and singing about how the world is a circle, is enough to cause any real movie fan severe nausea.  Kellerman is lost, a sultry vamp in a role meant for an Ali McGraw type, and George Kennedy… well, George Kennedy is George Kennedy.  Thankfully, he doesn’t sing.
Lost Horizon even features a script by Larry Kramer (who stuck to books after this crap), but despite this, it remains one of Hollywood’s most uneven, horrifically jaw-dropping spectacles, ranking beside The Story of Mankind in its display of sheer rediculousness.  I only hope the actors were on as many drugs as the filmmakers so they don’t even recall making this piece of tripe now.