Karate Rock (1990)

During the opening credits of Larry Ludman’s (aka Fabrizio De Angelis) Karate Rock (aka Il Ragazzo delle Mani D’Acciaio aka The Kid with Iron Hands), a car passes by a Burger King, and the first thing that popped into my head was how appropriate that is.  When I was a boy, fast food was something you got once in a blue moon.  It was a “treat,” not the go-to for every meal of the day.  Fast food was considered trash food.  I suppose it still is, but it’s much more readily accepted as a meal option now.  The same holds true for trash cinema.  It’s probably not “good for you” (yes, I know that sounds snotty), but damn it all, it sure does taste good.  The acceptance of trash cinema has certainly grown over the years from a rather small cult following into a veritable legion or people who devote the entirety of their moviegoing lives to it.  I have no grudge against trash cinema nor against the people who live and breathe it (I would consider myself at least partially in this category).  But I do find myself, from time to time, trying to figure out the “why?” of it’s appeal.  This is something which can be especially confounding when you’re a devotee as well as an observer.  

I’m sure the answer is likely far more complex than any of the films which fall under the trash purview (and definitely more in-depth than I have room for here), but I keep coming back to fast food as the appropriate analogy.  Trash films, even when they drag, when the camerawork is horrible, when the action is less than thrilling, almost always give you at least one moment you won’t see in any other film (or, lacking a specific moment, an attitude).  Just like you can’t get a Burger King burger at McDonald’s and vice versa, you can’t confuse something like 1990: Bronx Warriors with 2019: After the Fall of New York, no matter how hard you try.  In fact, the individual flaws may be the things that make them stand out.  These are films totally concerned with trying to be entertaining.  They don’t care about expanding the vocabulary of filmmaking.  They don’t care about making any cogent statements about the human condition (though, I would argue, they sometimes do despite their best efforts).  They don’t want to suggest anything.  They want to be as plain as the nose on your face (and 99.999% of the time, they are).  Like Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, et al, they all want to sell you a hamburger, fast and cheap, and, most importantly, from one of their franchises.  So, Karate Rock is perhaps the most bonkers ripoff of The Karate Kid ever made, yet it still partly works in spite of itself, but not because of any inherent virtues.  That said, the distinct lack of Elisabeth Shue is truly, truly tragic.

Kevin Foster (Antonio Sabato, Jr) is moved from his Savannah, Georgia home to the small town of Bend because he got into too much trouble for his policeman father John (David Warbeck) to take.  Rooming with the happy-go-lucky Billy (Robert Chan), Kevin runs afoul of local jerkoff Jeff Hunter (Andrew J Parker) and his gang of thugs.  From there on out, it’s nothing but dancing at the local slushie bar and karate-ing (-ish).

As previously stated, the clear and obvious “inspiration” for Karate Rock is 1984’s The Karate Kid.  There is the new kid transplanted to a town where he is all alone and outcast for his background.  There is the young love angle.  There is the karate angle, replete with the old, retired (and retiring) Asian mentor.  There is the gang of young toughs who dominate the protagonist’s life and make it infinitely more difficult.  The thing of it is, Karate Rock has none of the heart of the John G Avildsen film, and it completely misses the whole point of its progenitor.  For the first part, there are still all the setups we expect from this story, and they all turn out exactly as one can predict.  Nonetheless, there is no connective tissue to get us there.  There is no development of the characters, from the top down, to make us care about anything that happens to any of them.  Kevin is practically a doorstop who keeps getting in Jeff’s face just to make himself feel bigger and salve his own pride.  Billy offers no wisdom or insight into how Kevin can better himself until he decides to train him (he does get a half-assed back story, however).  Conny (Dorian D Field), the girl next door, never shares a heartfelt moment with Kevin, and she pathetically keeps trying to change herself to match Jeff’s hotty girlfriend Kim (Natalie J Hendrix) rather than showing Kevin (and the audience) anything unique she has to offer.  John behaves more like Kevin’s parole officer than his father, and there is no depth to their relationship for a reconciliation to mean anything.  These are warm bodies occupying spaces until it’s time for them to do something.

For the second part, this film has nothing to do with self-discovery or conquering one’s fears.  This is because it is entirely shot through a thick, oily filter of pure Italian machismo.  Kevin wants Kim because she’s beautiful, and, according to various moments between her and Jeff, she puts out.  Conny flings herself at Kevin because he’s hot, not because he is in any way distinctive.  And Kevin frankly couldn’t give a shit about Conny until he needs her, anyway.  The impetus for Kevin’s martial arts training has nothing to do with improving himself.  He’s doing it just to get revenge on Jeff for publicly kicking his ass multiple times (and never mind that Kevin names Kim as the prize for the winner of their climactic showdown, something she protests not in the least).  Billy’s decision to teach Kevin has nothing to do with anything other than that he’s an old Asian guy who knows karate (and the training montage is not only substandard in its techniques [read: no “wax on, wax off” stuff] but also mindboggling in its intercutting with shots of Jeff dancing at the slushie bar), and there is no thought given to the ideals and philosophy of martial arts.  It’s strictly used here to beat the shit out of people.  Finally, just to keep the viewer even more off-balance, the whole inner turmoil that Kevin has completely not been struggling with for the entire movie is his desire to be accepted by his old man, which he does by beating up a couple of kids (wasn’t that part of the reason he was taken away from his home in the first place?).  The whole film is like getting Chinese noodles and putting pesto sauce on them.  Yes, it’s still noodles and sauce, and it tastes fine, but it is not in any way what you expect.  And that’s without even getting into all of the disco dancing that takes place to music I could have whipped up at twelve-years-old on my Casio SK-1.

MVT:  The pure wrongheadedness of De Angelis’ approach and the bizarre view that the Italian filmmakers had of American life.

Make or Break:  The “rock dance” competition.  It’s one for the ages in so many ways.

Score:  6.75/10             

Shredder Orpheus (1990)

Skateboarding and punk rock and mythological tales should go together like spaghetti and meatballs.  Skating personifies the idea of the journey (even though there may be no destination; the path itself and what the skateboarder does during it [read: tricks] are enough), something to which every Greek myth adheres.  Punk (or even music in general) celebrates freedom of expression and (ideally) individuality, another trait shared by some myths.  While myths tend to rely on a certain rigid framework of parables to get their point across, skating and music, on their surfaces, go in the opposite direction.  They follow in the belief that there are no limits, anything goes.  Yet, there are basics that have to be followed in order for either enterprise to succeed.  Music, even and especially punk, uses verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure in most cases.  For skating, one must know the rudiments of the functionality of the board; how to set your feet, push, transfer weight, and so forth.  In both, however, it’s the style of the performer that counts most.  Musicians know the basic chords.  It’s the attitude and coarseness that distinguishes, say, The Ramones from The Germs.  Likewise, a skateboarder like Rodney Mullen does totally different things on his deck than does someone like Tony Hawk, but the rudiments remain the same.  To combine music and skateboarding and myths is an intriguing aspect, but there has to be a line drawn between servicing the fans of the former two with honoring the narrative of the latter.  Otherwise, you get something like Robert McGinley’s Shredder Orpheus, which gives us all three but doesn’t know how to combine its component into a coherent whole.

After the Big War, the poor have been shuffled into the Grey Zone, a housing project consisting of shipping containers.  There, Orpheus (McGinley) and his band, The Shredders, are the most popular act (I’m guessing because they’re the only one).  Hades (Gian-Carlo Scandiuzzi), the owner of the villainous Euthanasia Broadcast Network, wants Orpheus’ stage dancer/girlfriend/wife Eurydice (Megan Murphy) for his show, so he has her killed and absconds with her soul.  Orpheus decides to go after his love, armed with a lyre-guitar prototype, supposedly designed by Jimi Hendrix.

The EBN starts off as a sinister device that pulls the souls from people.  On air, Hades and Persephone (Vera McCaughan) drone on about praising the Cathode Ray.  The idea is that this thing is killing people slowly, without their knowledge, from the inside out.  Immediately, this brings to mind memories of Videodrome and Halloween 3 (and even They Live).  In those movies, television is bad (ain’t it always?).  It draws its victims to it, like junkies to a dealer, then it takes them over and/or kills them.  What you see is not what you get.  The complacent act of watching, of being narcotized by the banality on the boob tube, is like the lame gazelle at the watering hole.  The New Flesh of Videodrome is a cancer that causes hallucinations and likely warps reality.  The signal sent by Silver Shamrock to the wearers of their masks draws forth a supernaturally apocalyptic scenario in Halloween 3.  But the power of television to enthrall and enslave is the primary point.  In Shredder Orpheus, the programming on the EBN is as soulless as it can be.  For example, Hades does a muzak version of “Up a Lazy River.”  Eurydice dances for the network, but she’s a shadow of her former self.  On stage with Orpheus, the music unlocked her inner spirit, and she gave herself over to it, because that’s who she is at her core.  Hades and Persephone stare blankly out at the viewer, hypnotizing the audience with the siren call of the television screen.  Television becomes God.  Outside of this basic premise associated with the EBN and its application as a modern device for worship, it doesn’t mean much of anything in the overall narrative of this film.  It’s simply a way to show the corporatization of pantheon figures and provide the bad guys with a lair.  Its signal doesn’t present a threat throughout the film, because we only see one example of its deleterious effect.  It never comes up again.

In visual media, specifically film and video, skateboarding falls into one of two categories (you can argue the same about any sport, from volleyball to broom ball to chess).  Either it’s a gimmick (think: Gleaming the Cube or Thrashin’) or it’s a spectacle (think: Public Domain or any of the scads of skateboarding promo videos from the Eighties on).  Its focus is meant to draw in viewers inherently predisposed to skateboarding and those who find it appealing enough as a curiosity but still want what they expect from any other movie.  To integrate it into a film is difficult, because it’s not a sport with sides that an audience can root for (though it almost works in this regard with the jousting and racing scenes in Thrashin’).  Any scene in which it is featured prominently is bound to be a showcase, stopping the pacing dead, like the superfluous race sequence in The Phantom Menace.  McGinley attempts to make skateboarding relevant here.  Everyone in The Grey Zone is a skater, so everywhere they go, they can do a couple of simple moves along the way.  Orpheus and his pals “shred” the EBN parking garage, a structure which terminates in an elevator to Hell.  Thus, we get an extensive sequence of the skaters rolling down the entirety of the spiral ramp.  The story halts.  A smoking skateboard shows up to valet Orpheus back to EBN/Hell.  I don’t know how a filmmaker could make something like this and not have the skateboarding hook feel like a contrivance.  I do know that McGinley fails at this intermingling, though not as egregiously as Gleaming the Cube does.

Shredder Orpheus is a valiant effort, but it’s also proof that you can’t simply “adapt” a story.  It gets the large picture mostly right, and it supplies enough details to be recognizable as the legend of Orpheus.  But it also tries to serve two masters, and it doesn’t devote enough attention to either for their fusion to be satisfactory.  Further, and perhaps worst of all, McGinley managed to rob this myth of any momentum and/or urgency.  It relies on angst over tension (the dream scenes with McGinley in a loincloth are just…c’mon), yet even this doesn’t solve the main problem of doing something like this in the first place.  Myths are traditionally told in general, sweeping motions.  We know who the heroes and villains are, because they are the heroes and villains.  Films need to flesh out the characters, to breathe some life into their interpretations, and to give these people something to do when they’re not out Questing.  McGinley doesn’t outside of skating, which tells us nothing about these guys other than that they skate.  His characters meander around, or play music, or talk a lot while saying nothing.  There is no invigoration or development of the archetypes.  Like skateboarding, Shredder Orpheus’ characters are on screen only for show.

MVT:  The underlying idea behind the project is noteworthy.

Make or Break:  Orpheus’ first story-cancelling song is enough to let you know that the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with what they had but still had to get it to feature length.

Score:  5/10

The Suckling (1990)

**SPOILERS**

An opening crawl informs us that, on April 1, 1973 (y’know, April Fool’s Day), a bunch of prostitutes and other sundry folks were killed at a rundown brothel/abortion clinic.  The lone survivor, an unidentified woman (in both the film and its credits, though she’s played by Lisa Petruno, and for the purposes of this review I’ll refer to her as The Mother), is kept at an asylum, where two doctors somnambulistically discuss her case.  Flashback to: the fateful day, where an abortion goes very, VERY wrong.

Francis Teri’s The Suckling (aka Sewage Baby) is a simultaneously tasteless and fascinating film.  Obviously, any movie using abortion as a springboard for gore effects is going to be tacky to some degree or another, yet there are things going on under the surface here that intrigue as well as exploit.  So, let’s look at the more serious side here to start.  Roe v. Wade was passed in January of 1973, making abortion legal under the Constitution of the United States of America.  Since the film takes place in April of that same year, it follows that Phil (the father) and The Mother didn’t have to go to a back alley abortion clinic from a legal standpoint (she states that “this place is illegal”; it wasn’t by this point, but for the sake of argument let’s agree that maybe she didn’t know about the Supreme Court’s decision).  Nonetheless, the very idea of abortion still had a stigma to it (and still does to a certain extent even today), as did pregnancies outside of wedlock (damned if you do, damned if you don’t).  The Mother doesn’t want the abortion.  She wants to put the baby up for adoption as soon as it’s born.  Phil, surely thinking only of his reputation, insists that she go just to talk it over with Big Mama (Janet Sovey), the madam and abortionist at the whorehouse.  The Mother is drugged, and the fetus is forcibly aborted, an encroachment of The Mother’s rights and an assault on her body that is, frankly, heinous.  By violating The Mother so personally, the characters in the brothel (and anyone associated with them) damn themselves.  Because she didn’t want the abortion in the first place, The Mother and the Suckling still share a symbiotic connection, symbolized by the deadly umbilicus that the fetus grows (helped greatly by some convenient toxic waste that drips down onto it) after being flushed down the toilet and landing in one of the smokiest sewers ever put to film.  The Mother is devastated by the loss of her baby against her will, and the Suckling responds to this.

This bond between The Mother and the Suckling manifests itself in the brothel.  After beginning its assault, the Suckling envelops the house in a placenta that the characters cannot break through, and even if they did, it would dissolve them.  First, this traps the characters in one location for easy pickings.  Second, it re-encases the Suckling in the womb from which both it and its mom didn’t want it to be removed.  The Suckling reacts, I tend to believe, to The Mother’s conscious and unconscious desires and protects her while also taking revenge against the people who hurt her.  The longing to return to the womb exhibits itself later on when the Suckling literally shrinks to its birth size and reinserts itself into The Mother.  She is already on the edge by this point in the film, and it really makes you wonder whether this wish fulfillment pushed her over the precipice, because something monstrous happened to her when the fetus was removed from her (with a wire hanger on which Big Mama hangs her coat, by the by) and something monstrous happened to her again when this malevolent creature thrust itself back inside her (which is also a bit Oedipal in my opinion, especially considering what happens to Phil).  In a way, The Mother’s body ownership is taken away from her completely by both the abortionists and by her own child, and in the end, she has shut down, a piece of meat that can no longer choose for herself what to do with her body.  The Suckling protects her from harm while it also possesses her body for itself, the symbiosis between mother and child turned toxic and permanent.

The Suckling is also unafraid to go extremely broad in its humor, a decision I’m unsure about to the extent of whether it helps or harms the film (though I do tend to lean towards the latter, because it’s frankly not clever or subtle enough to be successful as black comedy, and in the context of this film, I think that’s key).  For example, a nerdy guy in a loud plaid suit and bowtie and a kid with the word “fuck” written on his tee shirt gawp as a man liquefies in front of them (a blunt, one-note “joke,” to be sure).  The clearest exemplar, however, is the rich john who visits the brothel while the abortion is taking place.  He enjoys getting pegged with a large dildo while wearing a propeller-topped beanie.  Said propeller, naturally, responds to what happens to this guy’s body, spinning and even popping off at one point (to the accompaniment of goofy sound effects).  The prostitute he’s with rolls her eyes and leaves in the middle of their session.  Later, he’ll be made to bark like a dog in a different context.  But he’s wealthy and entitled, and for as much as he sees himself as above the prostitutes in the brothel, his bizarre proclivities, his dirty little secrets, make him lower than them.  The prostitutes work for their money, and this is just a job for them, an act they put on in private.  The john, by contrast, puts his act on in public.  In private, his true self comes out, and it’s the hypocrisy of respectability that is lampooned (successfully or not) in the scenes with him.

The Suckling itself is a decent monster makeup, even for how odd it is.  It has spikes everywhere on its body and hook hands (and I have never completely understood beasts with hooks for hands like Gigan, the Hook Horror from Dungeons & Dragons, et cetera; they’re totally impractical outside of the one obvious function, but whatever), and its teeth are about the length of a man’s forearm and protrude from its maw, resembling a pink, slimy Venus flytrap (or the monster from The Terror Within on crack, and The Suckling bears some resemblance to that film in the monster child department, as well; coincidence?).  As a concept, it makes no sense, but as something cool for makeup effects lovers, it works well enough in its uniqueness.

And yet, the film itself is lifeless outside of the gore/effects scenes.  The acting is wooden across the board.  The characters are either irritating or distasteful or both.  There is zero sympathy built up for any of them, including and especially The Mother, who spends the entire movie as a passive, crying lump.  The cinematography is flat and static with the brief exception of the few scenes shot in the sewer which actually looked visually interesting.  There is no plot once the killings start, no tension either between the characters (despite the attempt to do so with the shitheaded thug/contagonist character Axel [Frank Rivera]) or as anticipation for where and when the Suckling will strike next.  So, the best advice I can give to anyone interested enough in watching this movie is to be sure you keep your finger floating over the fast forward button.

MVT:  The effects are about the only thing that worked for me in this.  Maybe that was the point/intent, so credit where it’s due.

Make or Break:  The Break for me was the “funny” scene between the rich john and the hooker.  Humor that low grade takes a certain talent to pull off, and sadly, that talent is lacking here.

Score:  5/10