Film Review: TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE- THE MOVIE (1990, John Harrison)

Stars: 4.2 of 5.
Running Time: 93 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Debbie Harry (VIDEODROME, "Blondie"), Matthew Lawrence (BOY MEETS WORLD, MRS. DOUBTFIRE), Christian Slater (HEATHERS, GLEAMING THE CUBE), Steve Buscemi (MYSTERY TRAIN, RESERVOIR DOGS), Julianne Moore (SAFE, PSYCHO '00), William Hickey (ONE CRAZY SUMMER, PRIZZI'S HONOR), David Johansen ("The New York Dolls," SCROOGED, 200 CIGARETTES), James Remar (THE WARRIORS, RENT-A-COP), Rae Dawn Chong (COMMANDO, CHAINDANCE), Mark Margolis (THE WRESTLER, THE COTTON CLUB). Cinematography by Robert Draper (HALLOWEEN 5, DR. GIGGLES). Screenplay amalgamated from work by George A. Romero, Stephen King, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Michael McDowell (BEETLEJUICE, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS). Special makeup effects by Howard Berger, Greg Nicotero, and Robert Kurtzman. Visual effects supervised by Ernest D. Farino (THE THING, THE ABYSS, THE TERMINATOR).
Tag-line: "Brace yourself for some KILLER stories."
Best one-liner: "I've never blown a hit yet, kitty cat."

Well, my anthology horror series has given me an excuse to take this lofty tome off the shelf, dust it off, and flip through its brittle, musty pages once more.

Considered by many, including Tom Savini, to be the real CREEPSHOW 3, it features stories from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen King, and ancient Japanese folklore adapted by the likes of Michael McDowell and George A. Romero. Its director, John Harrison, did the electrifyingly spooky score for the first CREEPSHOW, and the crew features many series regulars. Additionally, many of the cast (i.e., Christian Slater and Debbie Harry) were alumni from the TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE TV show.

Divided into three segments, each part has a thoroughly distinctive feel. "Lot 249," a tale of mummies and revenge, has the visual consistency of an old Republic serial with post-RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK production value. "The Cat from Hell" sees a hitman going after a cursed black cat, has a very Vittorio Storaro-esque texture, and becomes very theatrical, not unlike the "Father's Day" segment from CREEPSHOW:

"Lover's Vow," which sees a struggling artist make a pact with a monster to avoid evisceration, feels most like it's embracing a contemporary style, and it features a thick, 'desolate yet metropolitan' atmosphere. The wraparound story is basically "Hansel & Gretel" meets "Scheherazade" in suburbia. With Debbie Harry.

So, while giving away as little as possible, I shall thumb through the veritable reams of these darkened pages- TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE features immeasurable insights into a number of scholarly disciplines. Prepare to have some thoughts provoked:

The Wrap-around Segment:

PHILOSOPHY: Is Debbie Harry a good actress? I don't know. Can we say for sure? ...Should we say for sure?

How about this: if a radio is playing "Rapture" in the woods and no one's around to hear it, does it still have that schweet rap part?

No wait– I'm sorry I said that, Blondie. Er, I mean, Debbie Harry. Yes, I know Blondie is the name of the band, not you. Sorry.


Lot 249:

ZOOLOGY: TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE affords us an outstanding glimpse of the Slater Factor in its natural habitat. Not until KUFFS in '92 would we see it quite this unrestrained. Look at the following images. Rarely has the Slater Factor been captured with such gleeful, manic precision. And rarely has it been captured holding such a wicked electric knife.





SOCIOLOGY: How is it possible that I'm always rooting for the proletariat... unless the ruling class is Slater?

Look at that sweater. We should hate him. But the eyebrow has won us over. An important lesson. Conversely, Robert Sedgwick and Julianne Moore, in their respective squash court and aerobics attire, garner no such sympathy.

Smart-alecky-ness vs. pomposity. An age-old struggle, and one which is always won by the smart-alecks.

ARCHAEOLOGY: Julianne Moore handles an actual Zuni fetish doll, in an in-joke directed at TRILOGY OF TERROR's (historically inaccurate) bundle of teeth.

Though I must admit, a small, polished stone carving of an animal is infinitely less fun than a 'YAAAAAH YAH YAH NUMMM NUM' yammering little fellow with a predilection for edged weapons.

PHYSICS: Can three heads occupy the space intended for two heads?

This case study shows that it is, in fact, possible.

LINGUISTICS: Why does uttering the ancient hieroglyphic curse in English cause the mummy to awaken?... More importantly, who cares!

Young Buscemi utters the malediction.

The Cat From Hell:

GERIATRICS: Is it possible for a human being to have never been young? I swear that William Hickey was like eighty years old for a span of about forty years.

"Bring me its tail, so I can throw it in the fire and watch it burn!"

And it's always the greatest actors, like Harry Dean Stanton, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan ...I could go on. Unless somebody can provide me with evidence to the contrary, I'll have to assume that Hickey sprung forth from the womb as an oldster–

I stand corrected. Though he kinda looks the same, even then (the 1960's).

MUSIC THEORY: Who'd have thought that one day we'd see New York Doll member-turned-Buster Poindexter songster David Johansen stalking a cat with a laser-sighted gun in a suspenseful horror anthology? Not I.


And who'd have thought that he would have such a subtle, classy Dirk Bogardish quality to his acting? Or that he could pull off the whole 'internal monologue externalized' thing like a true professional?

According to Harrison and Romero, Johansen and Hickey drained a great deal of gin in their down-time and held the cast and crew rapt with their constant banter and ridiculous anecdotes. Ah, to have been a fly on the wall on the set of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE...

Lover's Vow:

ART HISTORY: Balsa wood artists are an angst-driven bunch. Theirs is a fleeting art, one that can be easily smashed in fits of impassioned fury.

To be fair, we see him work with different media, but our first glimpse of him is as he's smashing a balsa construction that looks culled from an 'Odyssey of the Mind' competition.

This is easily the most dramatic segment, as nearly every omnibus requires a straight-up tragedy. And James Remar, one of my faves, has been cast against (villainous) type as a sensitive artiste. I like it. Hell, I'm always rooting for him anyway. [See also: The Slater Factor.]

HISTORY HISTORY: Speaking of factors, the RDC factor is pretty high, too, and it's occasionally wearing a fringe hippie jacket. For the uninitiated, that's the Rae Dawn Chong factor. She was comin' into the home stretch of a pretty mindblowing run of films from '81 to '91. We're talkin' QUEST FOR FIRE, BEAT STREET, Ferrara's FEAR CITY, CHOOSE ME, AMERICAN FLYERS, COMMANDO, THE COLOR PURPLE, SOUL MAN, THE SQUEEZE, THE PRINCIPAL, and Ironside's CHAINDANCE.

This was one of her great last hurrahs, and I can't decide if seeing her romantically paired with James Remar makes me happy or uncomfortable.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY: The monster is great. A detailed latex n' rubber construction, you can only shudder to think of how they'd handle it today, maybe with a CGI creature that resembles DRAGONHEART or something. At best.


ALTERNATE UNIVERSE-OLOGY: A glimpse of James Remar in an eyepatch reveals what it would have been like had Walter Hill directed ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.


In the end, one of the stronger horror anthology films. Not as good as the original CREEPSHOW, but it's leaps and bounds above CREEPSHOW 2. There's not a weak segment or a groan-inducing moment in the bunch, and that's the highest of compliments for an omnibus film. A little over four stars.

Film Review: HIGHBALL (1997, Noah Baumbach)

Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 74 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Chris Reed (RUDY, MR. JEALOUSY), Lauren Katz (RUDY, MR. JEALOUSY), Noah Baumbach, John Lehr (MR. JEALOUSY, host of I'M A CELEBRITY, GET ME OUT OF HERE), Chris Eigeman (KICKING AND SCREAMING, METROPOLITAN), Peter Bogdanovich (director of THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, WHAT'S UP DOC?), Eric Stoltz (MASK, THE FLY II), Ally Sheedy (THE BREAKFAST CLUB, SHORT CIRCUIT), Rae Dawn Chong (COMMANDO, CHAINDANCE), Annabella Sciorra (MR. JEALOUSY, THE FUNERAL), Carlos Jacott (KICKING AND SCREAMING, BIG LOVE), Justine Bateman (FAMILY TIES, SATISFACTION), Dean Cameron (MEN AT WORK, ROCKULA). Written by Baumbach, Jacott, and Chris Reed. Produced by Joel Castleberg (KICKING AND SCREAMING, SLEEP WITH ME, MR. JEALOUSY).
Tag-line: "One year. Three parties. Twelve fools."
Best one-liner: "Di-annne! This kid vomited! And he reeks of liquor!"

Written and directed beneath the disguise of pseudonyms ("Ernie Fusco" and "Jesse Carter") and shot across six days on leftover money and film stock from MR. JEALOUSY, Noah Baumbach's HIGHBALL is, I dare say, a low-budge comic masterpiece which was marketed as a straight-to-video SWINGERS clone. You can hardly blame them, though- it's not like the 'overeducated, disaffected, metropolitan youth' subgenre had been packing 'em in since the heyday of late 70's Woody Allen. And while many have drawn parallels between these films and Allen's, I almost see 90's Noah Baumbach (KICKING AND SCREAMING, MR. JEALOUSY, HIGHBALL) and Whit Stillman (METROPOLITAN, BARCELONA, LAST DAYS OF DISCO) as a mini-genre unto themselves, especially separate from what came after: say, the stylistically bold, storybook forays of Wes Anderson; the meaner, more acerbic, post-2004 Baumbach; and the either too-hollow or too-mawkish latter-day fumblings of the so-called Mumblecore.

Shot inside someone's apartment with cheap, stark lighting and tinny sound, many will be put off by the low production value, but you A/V snobs will be ignoring one of the wittiest and best-acted comedy films in the last twenty years. I've watched HIGHBALL probably a dozen times (or more), and I'm left giddy with each viewing, always discovering a new background gag or some genius bit of throwaway dialogue. It's a cult film, and although the cult may be practically microscopic, my household is frequently home to "Everrrybody Fee-lix...it's Felix's birth-day," "Say hello to the other loooooosers," "I hope you like your beer tastin' good," "Little King Joachim," and other such obscure references that would surely baffle the non-HIGHBALL-initiated.

Though the cover art would have you believe that this film is about a Vegas lounge owned by the laid-back Eric Stoltz and run by his flashy cocktail waitress Annabella Sciorra, no element of the DVD cover has anything whatsoever to do with the film, not even Stoltz's and Sciorra's costumes or hairdos. (They do appear in the film, but as supporting characters.) Instead, we have Travis (Chris Reed) and Diane (Lauren Katz), a married Brooklyn couple whose (respective) desires to find an audience for closet-brewed beer and to recreate the French salons of the 18th Century provide the impetus for the film's triptych of parties: Birthday, Halloween, and New Year's.


Because attempting to describe the film's best gags and one-liners would merely be an exercise in watering them down, I'll instead give a rundown of the cast, many of whom will be easily recognizable to fans of semi-sophisticated 90's independent cinema.

Carlos Jacott, also a co-writer, nearly steals the movie as Felix, a character described as a man without a personality, and "if he did have one, deep down, it'd probably be some kind of an asshole." He expresses near-constant disdain, feeds six-year-olds booze, and presides over a host of spectacularly uncomfortable moments.

Jacott (left) exchanges words with Noah Baumbach.

Then we got Chris Eigeman, who's a personal hero of mine.

Sure, he usually just plays 'himself,' but when your self is as effortlessly deadpan and likably droll as Eigeman, you should be allowed to do whatever the hell you want.

There's John Lehr as the obnoxious, long-haired record store employee, er, I mean, record company employee.

Lehr, center, introduces his date (Justine Bateman) to his host (Chris Reed).

Playing an over-the-top goofus is a difficult feat to pull off without drawing the audience's ire, but Lehr is more than up to the task. Why he doesn't get more work (when mainstream comedy is teeming with untalented people playing goofuses) is beyond me.

Then we got Rae Dawn Chong and Ally Sheedy as themselves.


"Ally- was it...SHEEDY?"

And they're just famous enough for the gag to work perfectly. I.e., "Are you gonna go out there and tell Ally Sheedy to put out her cigarette?"

There's Peter Bogdanovich, who probably worked for free under the guarantee that he could pack in as many celebrity impersonations as was humanly possible for the duration.

And he does.

Eric Stoltz is the sensitive "star person" who "happens to know a lot of well-known people" delivers an excellent low-key performance in a film full of flashy ones (as he did in KICKING AND SCREAMING),

Baumbach himself plays a nebbish of sorts and reveals an acting talent that certainly deserves more exposure outside the occasional walk-on,

"How could you not know you look like Hitler?"

Dean Cameron shows up in a bit part as a recovering alcoholic magician whose final show does not disappoint,

'THE MAGIC MAN'

Noah's real-life dad Jonathan shows up as a creepy old man, Justine Bateman appears as a sad-sack hippie space cadet turned pleather-dress-wearing bon vivant, and Annabella Sciorra pops up as an elitist bitch and sometime wingwoman of Jacott's character. There's Stephen Foster references, dueling lizard costumes, and the choice between home brew and Malibu. There's amusingly unexpected character transformations, misuse of candy corn, and the marvelous collision of goofiness and sophistication. I'll say that this is the ultimate party movie for people who generally dislike 'party movies.' Not bad for six days.

Five stars.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: COMMANDO (1985, Mark L. Lester)

Stars: 4.5 of 5.
Running Time: 92 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong (TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE, CHAINDANCE), Alyssa Milano (DOUBLE DRAGON, POISON IVY 2), Vernon Wells (WEIRD SCIENCE, KING OF THE ANTS), David Patrick Kelly (WILD AT HEART, THE WARRIORS), Bill Duke (ACTION JACKSON, PREDATOR, THE LIMEY), Dan Hedaya (BLOOD SIMPLE, THE HUNGER, MULHOLLAND DR.), James Olson (AMITYVILLE II, RAGTIME), and a very special appearance by Bill Paxton. Music by James Horner (48 HRS., TITANIC). Cast by Jackie Burch, clearly one of the best casting directors of all time (THE BREAKFAST CLUB, SIXTEEN CANDLES, D.C. CAB, PREDATOR, DIE HARD, THE RUNNING MAN). Cinematography by Matthew F. Leonetti (EXTREME PREJUDICE, FAST FORWARD, POLTERGEIST).
Tag-lines: "Let's party!"
Best one-liner: See review.

Now this is a difficult task I have before me: what can one write about COMMANDO which has not already been writ in the annals of cinema history? I believe that COMMANDO has universal appeal. There's truly something for everyone in COMMANDO. Yet not everyone is willing to sit down and check themselves out some COMMANDO. Thusly, there are many people- the sorts of people who wouldn't immediately recognize DPK as the universal abbreviation for David Patrick Kelly- that aren't giving COMMANDO a fair shake. So I shall put forth the solution to a perennial problem: how to vault COMMANDO from its position as a beer n' nachos slugfest to something that even the Cabernet Sauvignon crowd could enjoy? Well here ya go: a list of 7 low-brow and 8 high-brow happenings in COMMANDO- the best of both worlds. Hopefully, I can win over some hearts and minds. I'll begin with the low-brow because that's exactly the sort of no-class pandering you'd expect of this site:

LOW-BROW HIGHLIGHTS OF COMMANDO:

1. RDC. Or, for the uninitiated, Rae Dawn Chong.

I like Rae Dawn Chong. I like Rae Dawn Chong a lot. When Ironside needed a go-to lady in CHAINDANCE, who did he pick? Rae Dawn Chong. When C. Thomas Howell was pretending to be black in SOUL MAN, whom did he romance? Rae Dawn Chong. When James Remar needed some luvin' after getting freaked out by gargoyles in TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE, who did he shack up with? Rae Dawn Chong. All these great minds can't be wrong about Chong. Anyway, she's pretty horrible in this movie. She's kind of the Kate Capshaw/Willie Scott of COMMANDO. I don't know why I started with this one. Hell, I don't know why I'm telling you this, period.

Anyway, somebody must've liked it, or else they wouldn't have told her to be really annoying for the duration. Which only proves my point: this theoretical person who likes screechingly vocal, nettlesome female leads is dissimilar to me in almost every regard. And yet the both of us can find common ground in COMMANDO!

2.

I really miss these kinds of mall elevators. They used to be in every movie. Well, they at least used to be in RUNNING SCARED.

3. The emphasis on sweaty Arnie pec-shaking as legions of men wearing mustaches constructed from felt purchased at Jo-Ann Fabrics are gunned down in a wanton display of gratuitous violence.



4. Occasionally in an action movie, they'll show the same explosion twice, from different angles, for dramatic effect. Sometimes they'll show it three times, perhaps alternating shutter speeds or frame rates to give it that DAYUM SHIT IS BLOWIN' UP sparkle. Once in a blue moon, they'll even show an explosion four times, cause they just couldn't resist.

Well, in COMMANDO, the same explosion is shown nine times. Don't take my word for it, either:


5. One-liners, one-liners, one-liners. I know you've heard them all before, from "Don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" to "BULLLLLLLL-SHIT!!!" My personal favorite is probably the head-scratchingly homoerotic, "John, I'm not going to shoot you between the eyes. I'm going to shoot you between the balls!" Regardless, I don't think that I can quite emphasize enough how many one-liners are used in COMMANDO. Look at this graph which compares the number of successful one-liners used in COMMANDO to the number of successful one-liners used in everyday life.

The numbers are staggering. I also appreciate that three thousand years of dramatic writing from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Eugene O'Neill found culmination in 1985 with the following exchange:

FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE! *click*


Fuck YOU, asshole!

6. Arnold flinging a phone booth containing a frightened David Patrick Kelly!


7. An axe-low-blow!?


Alright, before I get off track and we lose too many brain cells:

HIGH-BROW HIGHLIGHTS OF COMMANDO:

1. So many random windows in COMMANDO have artsy, Vittorio Storaro/Dario Argento/Bernard Bertolucci-style colorful backlighting. Didn't expect that in COMMANDO, did you? Well, COMMANDO is full of surprises.



2. I've been working, on and off, on this sort of existential science-fiction film called BLACK HOLE ADVENTURE. It attempts to merge the youthful whimsy and 80's-tastical-ness of those old CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN-ADVENTURE novels with the crushing pessimism and random tragedies of adulthood, and it's all wrapped in a package that's half ROBOT MONSTER and half SPACE ACADEMY. I only mention this, because I discovered that David Patrick Kelly is somehow wearing BLACK HOLE ADVENTURE.


That out-of-this-world suit! The scratchy, woolen needlework! All tied together with a pair of Spicoli's checkered surf shoes from FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH! A-plus, DPK. An A-plus.

3. Hedaya's ponderous jowls. Hedaya's shaggy, caterpillar-esque eyebrows. Hedaya's deeply cleft chin. Hedaya's sunken, terrifying eyes. Hedaya's five o'clock shadow. Hedaya's unnervingly fleecy chest hair, always threatening to crawl out of his shirt and onto YOU. All of these disparate elements converge to form Dan Hedaya.


4. BOOM- out of nowhere- Paxton. He only gets like three lines in a throwaway role as an air-traffic controller, but I still say even just ten seconds of Paxton is ten seconds of class.


5. The COMMANDO font.

Busy, but not too busy. Colorful, but not too colorful. Kinda sporty, but kinda militaristic. Framed elegantly by parallel horizontal lines. I could go on.

6. The opening montage of Schwarzenegger and daughter Alyssa Milano which seems to borrow equally from Leni Riefenstahl propaganda, contemporary political advertisements, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and THE SOUND OF MUSIC.




7. The void in Bill Duke's eyes. Even for the film fan who has seen it all, there's something sincerely uncanny about Bill Duke's deadpan stare. Most of filmdom's great psychos- from Lon Chaney to Dwight Frye to Anthony Perkins to Crispin Glover- have an active glint in their eye, a quivering eyebrow, a narrowed eyelid. Not Bill Duke. Bill Duke looks into your soul, confident that neither he nor you even have one. Then he says that he likes the price of your Cadillac and runs you down with it.


8. James Horner's score. Ever since I got my hands on a copy, I've had nothing but steel drums and discordant wailin' sax stuck in my craw. Now, it may be a total rip-off of Horner's previous score for 48 HRS., but at least this time the tropical locale provides a bona fide excuse for the steel drum action. This is a throbbing, pulsating, hard-driving score that never lets up, never quits, never stops with its firm jams and unyielding grooves.

In all, COMMANDO is the tale of a man who so loves his daughter, Chenny, that he blasts, low-balls, and blows away a ton of dudes so that he can get to a fictitious Latin-American country, change into a Speedo,

row to shore, change back into commando clothes, blow away some more dudes, take off his shirt, and finally face off in a steam room with the leather-pantsed, chainmail-sweater-wearing bastard who has wronged him.











Four and a half stars. Make sure, uh, nobody gets poked in the eye or whatever.

-Sean Gill