SHARK ATTACK (1999)
D: Bob Misiorowski.  Casper Van Dien, Ernie Hudson, Jennifer McShane, Bentley Mitchum, Tony Caprari, Chris Olley. (Trimark)

Something amazing happens about halfway through Shark Attack.  The film, which up until this point has been a less-than-average killer shark pic, suddenly turns around and becomes a less-than-average action/conspiracy pic.  This is the sole contribution Shark Attack makes to the history of film.
Good-Looking Hero (Van Dien) comes to a remote locale after the death of his friend, Scientist Killed in the Opening Scene.  Scientist has sent Hero some incomplete information about a Local Man-Made Menace (in this case, sharks) and Hero teams up with the Scientist’s Spunky, Attractive Sister (McShane) and Ethnic Comic Relief Sidekick (Caprari) in an effort to solve the mystery.  Ernie Hudson plays the Money-Crazed Villain and Bentley Mitchum is the Morally Ambiguous Scientist who ends up on the right team just a little bit too late.
And that’s pretty much all you need to know.  If you’ve ever seen this kind of movie before (Lake Placid and Bats being two other recent examples, both of which are just as bad) you can pretty much figure out the rest.  The actual shark attack scenes are, oddly enough, well shot and tension-filled, but it’s a shame there’s not more of them.  Instead, the movie pretty much ignores the sharks completely in the second half, choosing to concentrate on Hudson’s cliché goons chasing the Heroes all over the place.  The killer water beasts only appear again at the very end in order to give the villain an “ironic” send-off.
While nowhere near as jaw-droppingly poor as Bats, Shark Attack doesn’t even have the charm of being an entertainingly bad movie.  Instead, it’s simply content to be there, perfectly willing to get picked from video shelves by customers too unwilling to wait for the release of Deep Blue Sea (which is just as badly-written as Bats, but looks a lot better).  Nobody was expecting greatness from Shark Attack, but this doesn’t do anything for anyone, unless you count the opportunity for Hudson to lose what little credibility he has left.  Bland, bland crap.

The cover box promises a “fresh, honest, free-spirited look at life on the cutting edge,” and while this may have been slightly true three years ago when the film was made, Slaves to the Underground has aged so poorly so quickly that it’s a wonder why anyone bothered to release it at all.  It’s a film so immersed in early-‘90s Seattle culture that it’s amazing they even bothered filming it in 1996, much less dumping it unceremoniously to video today.
Molly Gross plays a weak, indecisive woman in a riot grrrl band who must choose between two suitors; her girlfriend, the lead singer of the band, and her ex-boyfriend, a socialist zine writer.  Her decision would matter, of course, if the characters were the least bit interesting, but writer Bill Cody and director Kristine (Critters 3) Peterson have thankfully gone out of their way to prevent that from happening.
Each character is allowed a monologue to the camera that’s supposed to explain their identity.  The ex-boyfriend rambles on about media hype, claiming that the mainstream tries to pigeon-hole everyone into small groups.  The band kidnaps a right-wing radio talk show host.  The politics of the film are pooped out in front of the set and the filmmakers are determined to rub your face in them every step of the way.
Our whiny, irritating heroine’s turmoil is made worse by the arrival of one of her ex-boyfriend’s friends, who apparently raped her one night.  The controversial subject would have made for an interesting approach (see Desolation Angels), but, like every other point in the movie, the message is drilled so far into your skull that you just want the blasted movie to shut up and start being entertaining.
Average acting can’t overcome this Z-grade Singles’ total lack of subtlety.  In the end, when the lead becomes a successful one-woman act (despite the fact that Gross, who does her own singing, couldn’t hold a tune to save her life), you wish all of these people would either get jobs and grow up or get a good heroin addiction and die.

Okay, okay, so we nobody really asked for another hustlers-on-the-strip movie.  The whole hustler scenario may have been adequately explored in My Own Private Idaho and Hustler White (and beaten to death, pounded into the ground and run over with a steam roller with johns), but Speedway Junky proves that, while the plot is the same as usual, there may be some life in the old scenario yet.  The Hustler Movie has simply become the Boy-Meets-Girl plot for gay films.
Not that Speedway Junky is specifically a gay film.  No, like johns (a name I will try to bring up as little as possible due to violent flashbacks that surge through my brain whenever its name is mentioned), the lead character is straight.  Unlike, um, the ‘j’ movie, the lead character isn’t annoying.  Played well by Jesse Bradford, he’s an Army brat whose hopes of running away to North Carolina to become a race car driver have stalled in Las Vegas, causing him to fall in with a group of folk in various less-than-savory professions.
Among these is Eric, a gay hustler played in Oscar-worthy form by Jordan Brower.  Eric immediately falls for Johnny and takes him in.  Johnny’s intent on making money without hustling men, and at one point his female trick turns out to be a hooker (Patsy Kensit).  Daryl Hannah plays Eric’s surrogate mother figure, and Hannah does a surprisingly good job as a worn-down ex-dancer with an abusive boyfriend.  Jonathan Taylor Thomas is the only real weak link in the cast, hopelessly miscast as a bad boy hustler who can’t quite sound convincing with his baby face and TV-bound history.
So it’s, um, johns (nngh) then, basically, but it’s done right this time.  There’s no pretense of making some serious point, minimal over-the-top creepy tricks and only a couple spots where the whole thing seems as derivative as it actually is.  In fact, the first hour and a half are compelling enough with simply watching the characters go about their daily business that I almost regret the decision to put in a plot.
Unfortunately, the plot takes over in the final 15 minutes.  The climax is, while set up to some minimal degree earlier in the film, so contrived and pointless that it doesn’t fit the mood of the rest of the film at all.  An epilogue following is just as much of a Hollywood-tinged let-down.
A shame, then, because Speedway Junky is a moderately decent film up until the final reel.  Oh well.  It’s still better than johns.

 
Thank God for Mike Vraney.  His company, Something Weird Video, is responsible for making available several hundred obscure b-titles that would otherwise have been lost to time on home video for a new generation to stare slack-jawed at.  This amazing little timepiece, for example, a long-lost piece of queer cinema that Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot dildo.
Released in 1970, the same year as The Boys in the Band, Sticks and Stones is a precursor to later, much more bloated, self-important works in queer cinema like the dull Boyfriends and the godawful Love! Valour! Compassion!  Like those two, Sticks and Stones is about a group of gay friends who take a vacation together.  Sticks and Stones, however, comes from an era where queer films were more concerned with simply being visible, and less interested in making any sort of point.
The film opens with young boys playing on a beach, building a sand castle.  After they chase a girl away, we cut to (presumably) one of the boys’ grown-up selves, a young man in a troubled relationship with a playwright.  We slowly get introduced to the rest of the clan, including a leather queen (who talks about his leather sheets), a guru-type with lots of rambling dialogue obviously improvised by a very stoned actor (“When God is someone other than man, it is something else.. this is it, we are it…”) and an extremely flamboyant bitch of a fellow who gets all the best lines (“You’ll never live to be as old as you look!”) but really fags out when forced to change a tire.
As the bunch meets up (at Fire Island, natch), the plot lines that seem to be getting drawn quickly vanish. Any coherant narrative is lost in a flood of random party dialogue, a couple fairly explicit sex scenes (even a hetero one), and the varied character’s attention focused on a young man new to the scene, who resembles a teenage Michael Szarazin.  Eventually, not even the couple that seems to be the focus of the film gets much of a resolution.
Instead, we get lots of goofy 60’s-era clothes and lots of queens bitching at each other without a political agenda in sight.  The theme song of the film (“Let it Always be Summer”) is sung in full no less than three times, and there’s not a trace of pretention.  Unless you count the guru, of course, who mostly comes off as a total freak.
Sure, it’s rambling and pointless, and the last twenty minutes (featuring a really long conversation between the disgruntled half of the couple and the bitchy queen) are painfully dull, but it’s great to have this thing see the light of day once more.  In today’s lifeless state of queer cinema, a film that says “We’re here, we’re queer, if you don’t like it, fuck off,” is a real refreshment.

If you’ve ever wondered where your tax dollars went during the ‘80s, you need only check out this U.S. Department of Education-funded classroom scare film featuring TV drama regular Chad Allen.  A puffy-haired Allen plays a normal middle school kid hanging around a parking garage(?) when he stumbles across four schoolmates (white guy, black guy, Asian girl, fat kid) drinking beer and smoking pot.  After being shunned by his peers for not giving into their pressure, he meets a white-robed Louis Gossett, Jr. (can you say “community service?”) as “Cosmo,” who bursts into a horrifically lame song-and-dance number while taking Allen for a ride on his “Fate Elevator” complete with “Dr. Who”-level special effects.  Cosmo then lends him a glowing headband of knowledge and letting him off an an Escher-inspired dungeon-like floor of cardboard sets where he comes across the personifaction of booze.  Booze, a stumbling hobo with slurred speech who later appears as a clown, attacks him with a chainsaw and tries to steal the headband with the help of Pot, a crazy-eyed Carol Kane wanna-be who resembles a plastered Statue of Liberty with joints in her hair.  The pair cause Allen to be left hanging over a pit of snakes, but after a brief musical duet, he’s saved by the headband, whose knowledge allows him to escape them and trap them with Cocaine (a frantic, white-haired woman who resembles a giant poodle) and Heroin (a tall, skinny pale punker with double mohawks who only has one line).  (Tragically, hallucinogenics don’t even manage a cameo) Two similar episodes follow, as Cosmo instructs Allen to spread the word, but can’t convince his peers to stop drinking in the middle of a video store.  All the “bad” kids (including Scott Nemes, of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show”) get sick and cough (“Your breath smells like an elephant’s armpit”) but Allen manages to save one of ‘em, anyway.  Add in some laughable animation sequences, more awful musical numbers (“Reservation for One” in particular makes any given Voyage of the Rock Aliens number sound like prime Bowie) random “facts” (“Only five out of every hundred kids experiment with drugs,” “Mixing drugs with success in life is a major advertising trick”), magical glasses that allow you to see things soberly, ever-lengthening recaps of previous segments and more reprises of Gossett’s “Take the Elevator Up” song than you’d ever want to expose humanity to, and you’ve got the sort of horrifying waste of taxpayer funds that could have only been produced during the Reagan administration.  I picked this up for 99 cents at a Blockbuster, where it’s a free rental in their “Community Service” section.