Only now does it occur to me... SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL (1997)

Only now does it occur to me... that they should've named this picture after a phrase which appears on screen about an hour and twenty minutes in:

"SPEED 2: SPEED MALFUNCTION."

Yes, despite Jan de Bont's workmanlike direction (you likely know him best as Paul Verhoeven's and John McTiernan's cinematographer), a denouement involving a $25 million setpiece with a cruise ship crashing into Saint Martin ("the most expensive stunt ever filmed"),

 

 and Willem Dafoe's finest crazyface (throughout),

this thing is the mess that everyone says it is. Witness my disdain by enjoying these screen captures taken from a VHS, which I photographed off of my television set. 

Anyway, SPEED 2 follows two of my ironclad 1990s rules: one of which is It Takes Place on a Boat, and the other being "if it's a SPEED movie, it must star a David Lynch villain as the Big Bad." In this instance, obviously, it's WILD AT HEART's Willem Dafoe gobbling the scenery. He plays a computer hacking leech enthusiast

with a caddy bag full of golf club bombs

and a nefarious plan to throw Bo Svenson overboard, steal some jewels (?), and ram a cruise ship into an oil tanker. When you first lay eyes on the shopping mall aboard this cruise ship, you find yourself rooting for Dafoe.

Anyway, Keanu Reeves has been replaced by Jason Patric (THE LOST BOYS, SOLARBABIES), 

and if Sandra Bullock wasn't in it (seen here wielding a chainsaw in her only moment of agency), you would have no reason to believe this was a SPEED film. The supporting cast is of a shockingly high pedigree: Temuera Morrison (ONCE WERE WARRIORS, THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT)

Please, sir, I beg you, watch ONCE WERE WARRIORS instead

the aforementioned Bo Svenson (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, KILL BILL VOL. 2),  Colleen Camp (CLUE, WAYNE'S WORLD, POLICE ACADEMY 2), Joe Morton (THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, "Miles Dyson" in TERMINATOR 2), Glenn Plummer (SHOWGIRLS, MENACE II SOCIETY), and Kimmy Robertson (Lucy from TWIN PEAKS, LEPRECHAUN 2) as "Liza the Cruise Director."

Which is probably a bizarre enough note to end this on. Anyway. SPEED 2.

Only now does it occur to me... SPEED (1994)

Only now does it occur to me... that the SPEED franchise shares peculiar connections with the David Lynch universe. Now: to merely cite that it contains Dennis Hopper doing a poor man's Frank Booth from BLUE VELVET
 
is obviously not enough, because most post-1986 Hopper villains are some variation on "poor man's Frank Booth."


We could go the philosophical route and examine how Hopper's retired cop character is a corrupted, insane, dark-side-of-the-mirror version of Keanu Reeves' young, clean-cut, and aggressively Boy Scout-ish cop––in a similar way to how Hopper's and Kyle MacLachlan's characters mirror each other in BLUE VELVET... or we could point out Hopper's penchant in both instances for calling himself "Daddy":

...or the gruesome particulars of how each of these Hopper villains makes their exit:

"He lost his head."  –Keanu Reeves

Or we could consider the fact that SPEED 1 takes its villain from BLUE VELVET and that SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL casts Willem Dafoe as its baddie (who was the villain of Lynch's WILD AT HEART). Does this mean that if there ever were a third film, let's say, SPEED 3: FAST AND LOOSE, that the villain would have to be Robert Blake, portraying his character from LOST HIGHWAY?

Only now does it occur to me... BUSINESS IS BUSINESS (1971)

Only now does it occur to me... that Paul Verhoeven invented a "SUSPIRIA fetish" six years before SUSPIRIA came out!  

Allow me to explain that barely coherent idea in further detail: BUSINESS IS BUSINESS is Verhoeven's 1971 feature-length debut, a film about the life and times of an Amsterdam prostitute.  Like most of his Dutch output, it's well made, thematically daring, and features crisp cinematography by Jan de Bont (who went on to direct SPEED, SPEED 2, and TWISTER).  It's very "slice of life" in its construction, and we follow our heroine as she encounters a number of bizarre fetishists, from "cluck like a chicken man" to "loves to do housework in a baby bonnet guy," and so on.  However, the fetishist who is the subject of this post prefers to cower beneath the bedcovers while bathed in green and red light 

 

as our heroine, dressed in a rubber witch mask, menaces him accordingly.

Between the lighting and content, the whole thing easily looks like it could be an outtake from SUSPIRIA (or its sequel, INFERNO, which actually uses rubber masks of this caliber).  Therefore, I think I'm within my rights to call it "a preemptive SUSPIRIA fetish."

Being as SUSPIRIA had not yet been released, however, it's more likely Verhoeven's inspirations were either the films of Mario Bava or the color sequences from Eisenstein's IVAN THE TERRIBLE.