White Elephant Blogathon 2011: Unmasking the Idol

Unmasking the Idol is the first movie ever made where the director knew more people who owned airplanes and owed him favors than people with tripod experience willing to work for free. Never has an obviously cheap film looked so expensive.

Here's the pitch:

Our hero is James Bond except now James Bond has a stupid name (Duncan Jax), periodically forgets he has an English accent, and dresses up like a knight because he wants to be a ninja but has never seen what one looks like. James Bond, the least adorable animal companion in cinematic history, and an army of indistinguishable characters with unidentifiable brogues, battle other ninjas and the Oakridge Boys in various levels from Super Nintendo's Pilotwings. We present the audience with 37 different MacGuffins so that it has no idea why anyone is doing anything. Then we add equal parts explosions and exposition. The exposition will not only be boring, it will also be unhelpful.

But you came here for a movie review not a synopsis. This is the part where I review stuff from the movie.

The writing: Bad. It's possible that if I watch the movie three or four more times I might catch a line of dialog that explains something I didn't think was explained. I admit that, but an understanding of what's happening in a movie should not be dependent on a throw-away line. This is the worst kind of movie to review because I feel slightly negligent for not knowing, for instance, who our hero works for or the names of any of the characters.

And in fairness, the motivations for the things that happen on screen are sometimes elaborately detailed, it's just that there are so many justifications that they cease to make sense in any way. Why does Duncan have to travel to the island of North Carolina to steal all the gold from an evil red ninja? Because the evil red ninja will use the gold to build nuclear bombs. But really it's because the evil red ninja killed Duncan's parents. But really it's because the evil red ninja has another treasure that's better than gold. But really it's because Duncan wants to get in his ninja/knight hybrid mask and go hot air ballooning with his friends (this is a thing that happens).

At least director Worth Keeter makes an effort to change up the scenery while his characters talk about stuff. Sometimes they're in a hot tub. Sometimes they're at a dinner table. Sometimes they're in the same barren white room with no walls or doors that Neo got his guns from in The Matrix except now there are exam desks instead. Whether or not anything useful was said in these scenes is unclear. I would have to watch the movie again to let you know. I had to take an hour break at the halfway point to get through it the first time, so a second viewing is unlikely.

I do know that 75 minutes into a 90 minute movie, we discover the reason the movie is called Unmasking the Idol and that reason is that there is an idol that has nothing to do with the plot of the movie up to that point.

Early on in the film, a title card informs us that "The mission begins." It's the only time we get a title card and it's the last time I had any idea what was going on. Some might call this amateurish, but I'd argue Keeter should have employed the technique throughout the film. Simple things like, "Now they are going to punch some bad guys in the face" or "This scene will not impact the plot in any way" would have helped keep me in the loop.

The acting: Bad. Ian Hunter's performance (Duncan Jax) consists of opening his eyes wide and then rapidly contracting them again to indicate that what he has just said is immensely interesting because otherwise there's no way to tell. I guess he deserves some credit for this.

The camera-work: Bad. You know when you tighten all the knobs on a tripod and then decide that tilting and panning might make your shot more interesting but you're lazy so instead of loosening any of the knobs you try to coax the camera to move with a gentle push but that doesn't work so you push a little harder and then suddenly you're herky-jerking your way across the scenery like an animatronic puppet at Chuck E. Cheese's? Yeah. That's most of this movie.

The fight choreography: Bad. It's roughly on par with Power Rangers. Which IMDb tells me Keeter directed many episodes of. Oh.

The monkey: Evil. This movie has a monkey. Most of the time throwing a trained animal into a movie is a surefire way to gain some goodwill from the audience. Here it backfires horribly. "Boon" the Baboon is ugly. It looks kind of like a giant rat with a dog snout and an afro. Duncan spends a lot of time making kissy faces at it. There is nothing redeemable about Boon.

I'm going to stop here for now even though I haven't hit on half the points I wanted to make because I have something important to tell you. Sometimes people like to watch bad movies ironically because deep down, most film nerds think they could have written for Mystery Science Theater 3000. That's fine. But trust me when I say this movie is not a good time. I know who you are. You're an ironic film hipster. You're looking for the buzz phrases "so bad it's good" and "unintentionally funny." I guess it has some of that. But mostly it has boring. Lots and lots of boring.

Until the end that is, when everyone gets their own helicopter or airplane. I admit it picks up a little at that point.

Next week I'll go a little more in depth and I'll even have screen caps. No, I don't know why I'm doing this either.

KC Remembers Movies He Saw a Long Time Ago: Jeff Bridges Edition

I've seen many, many movies. A small selection I recall in great detail. Most of them I remember as a jumble of half-realized scenes between a famous actor and a faceless character he is acting at. Usually my brain unravels the details of these movies without my permission.

But I want to fondly remember these films like I fondly remember memorable films -- without having to watch them again. Because I don't really want to watch them again.

That's why I'm doing this. It's a public service of sorts... preserving our culture without anyone having to do the heavy lifting of examining it first hand.

I'm starting with the films of Jeff Bridges. In 2011, Jeff Bridges will retire from acting and turn over all of his acting commitments to the younger, more physically fit JeffBridges.mov. I thought we should take the time to get to know Jeff's wonderful films before he's taken from us forever, so I jotted down some notes in a Notepad document that I unintentionally saved as "jeff daniels." It's been, at a minimum, five or six years since I've seen any of these movies, but here's what I remember...

Arlington Road (1998?)

Jeff Bridges in Arlington Road?

-Jeff Bridges is a professor of things at a university.
-Jeff Bridges' neighbors turn out to be terrorists but no one believes him.
-Jeff Bridges spends a long time looking at microfiche.
-Jeff Bridges conclusively proves that the terrorists are terrorists.
-At some point Jeff Bridges gets punched in the face.
-Perhaps Jeff Bridges family thinks he's crazy.
-Jeff Bridges drives to DC to go see the government.
-Jeff Bridges parks his car in the government parking lot.
-Jeff Bridges discovers his car is packed with explosives.
-Jeff Bridges blows up.


Tron (1985?)

Jeff Bridges in Tron?

-Jeff Bridges is a computer programmer.
-Jeff Bridges gets sucked into his computer.
-Jeff Bridges discovers a race of computer people who wear cyber camoflage.
-Jeff Bridges makes friends with a computer person.
-Jeff Bridges is forced to drive a motorcycle that shoots laser walls.
-Jeff Bridges makes his motorcycle opponent run into one of his laser walls.
-Jeff Bridges is forced to play combat discus.
-Jeff Bridges wins combat discus by cutting someone's head off.
-Jeff Bridges meets a big computer object that looks like the symbol for Pi and rides around on it like the kid on the flying dog in Never Ending Story.
-Jeff Bridges escapes from the computer. With his girlfriend. Who was also there the whole time probably.


Seabiscuit (2004?)

Jeff Bridges in Seabiscuit?

-Elijah Woods is a jockey.
-Elijah Woods breaks his leg racing in Mexico or suffers from rickets or something.
-A kindly rich family of horse racers takes Elijah Woods in and nurses him back to health.
-Elijah Woods falls in love with a horse named Seabisbuit who is similarly broken.
-Against all odds, Elijah Woods and Seabiscuit win some races but not without something bad happening in one of the early races that motivates Elijah Woods to succeed.
-Elijah Woods convinces everyone including a fat rich man in an office that Seabiscuit should race Secretariat but actually come to think of it it was probably War Admiral.
-Seabiscuit wins.
-Seabiscuit dies and everyone is sad or else the movie ends happily and we don't see that happen.
-Apparently Jeff Bridges does something at some point before the end or at least appears in the background of one scene.
-Also, Elijah Woods is played by Tobey Maguire.

White Elephant Blogathon: Olga's Girls

Olga's Girls was followed up by the film Olga's House of Shame (which incidentally served as the inspiration for the title of the hit TV show Tyler Perry's House of Payne)

This article is ostensibly a review of the 1964 exploitation film Olga's Girls directed and (arguably) written by Joseph P. Mawra, but more importantly, it's the first rousing defense of the Hays Code from this side of the Christian right since well before the turn of the new millennium.

The Hays Code doesn't get a lot of love these days. It's remembered as an overbearing censorship tool that stunted Hollywood's creativity and resulted in movies where couples slept on opposite sides of the room lest they touch legs and accidentally conceive right there on screen. By the early 1960s, the Hays Code was already more or less irrelevant and on its way to eventual extinction. Before you knew it, Sex and the City: The Movie began pre-production.

Here my memory of film history begins to get a little bit fuzzy.

I think what happened was that for a time, everyone was pleased. In the 1950s and 60s, more and more quality movies came out as people discovered that sex and bad guys were kinda swell. Then disaster struck. Olga's Girls was released on an unsuspecting public, single-handedly engineering the argument for the reinforcement of the Hays Code and forcing the cast of Sex and the City 2 to flee to Morocco.

Never has one film done so much to convince me that censorship is right and in fact required to prevent directors from making movies wherein the prevailing emotional tone of each scene is "boobs."

Olga's Girls is the story of one small business woman's struggle to gain respect in the world of white slavery and drugs. We witness the often tortuous daily work routine of one Olga Q. Nolastname (Audrey Campbell) as it's explained to us by narrator Joel Holt (a man who went on to narrate many other films including the delightfully titled The 'Imp'probable Mr. Wee Gee). The narrator is there to fill us in on the back-stories of characters we will forget ever existed in the very next scene and also to elucidate the emotional tumult no doubt being felt by the various mute, dispassionate actors as they writhe around on the couch, in the shower and in handcuffs.

While Mr. Holt doesn't get any screen time, you might argue he's the film's true star as he lectures us on the Soviet origins of marijuana and the ins and outs of making drug slang sound goofy until we forget we aren't watching a poorly-sourced documentary with b-roll accidentally spliced in from Cinemax. He's the only memorable individual besides the boobular titular Olga.

Olga is not a well-liked lady. At first it may seem like this is due to her insistence on merrily ripping open everyone's shirts and beating them until they're made to bleed magic marker. But really it's because everyone is pissed off that she's the only one who gets to have a voice in the movie besides the narrator (who in turn is presumably pissed off because he doesn't get to show off his boobs). Olga also has this really neat trick where her mouth doesn't move when she speaks which makes it hard to tell if she's telepathically communicating her displeasure with everyone else in the room or dictating to the Livejournal in her head.

The plot bounces around both literally and figuratively, but settles on the journey to discover who the rat in Olga's whorehouse is and finishes with the defection and eventual reunification of Olga's Girls. Mr. Mawra tries to spice the proceedings up by sprinkling in sexy dance scenes with levels of sexiness ranging from "not very sexy" to "the uncomfortable feeling mom might have danced like that once."

Of course the real reason this movie was made was to satiate softcore S&M fans with Olga's "Dungeon of Persuasion," a dungeon where Olga I guess takes girls so she can persuade them torture really isn't so bad when it's being performed by someone who doesn't know how whilst wearing a leather smock ("The Cape of Persuasion"). These are some of the least distressing torture scenes ever committed to film. One girl is tied to a chair while wires are hooked up to her legs. Olga throws the power and much to our shock and horror, the poor girl's thighs are forced to jiggle playfully as the electricity courses through her veins. Also, it goes without saying that her boobs pop out. I believe it is during this same scene that we are treated to the following line: "Olga was sure that Judy wasn't the informant. She had been faithful to her for too long a time... but she just couldn't be sure."

Despite all this, I'm forced to admit that the non-torture portions of the film reminded me of Jean-Luc Goddard's 1962 classic Vivre sa vie, a movie about a prostitute filled with interesting cinematography and similarly bereft of a plot anyone cares about.

Worried that maybe I'd missed some hidden, deeper meaning lurking below the see-through negligee of the film, I turned on the commentary track helpfully included on the DVD. Within minutes, Audrey Campbell explained that they "never had a script of any sort... We just would kind of wing-it."

So I turned off the TV and concluded that Olga's Girls is a cry for help. I submit to you that it's an example of why we should never be trusted to make whatever we want because there is too great a risk that what we will come up with will be stupid. The director could not have made his intent clearer if he'd shouted at the top of his lungs, "Look! Look at the massively stupid shit we came up with when we weren't properly supervised!"

Personally, I don't find it hard to imagine that with a simple change of script, Olga's Girls could have been the next great screwball comedy. Instead we got this.

White Elephant Blogathon: The Gate (1987)

[This review is part of the White Elephant Blogathon, run by Paul Clark of Silly Hats Only.]

The Gate may not rank among the most widely remembered films of the ‘80s, nor will you find it on any but the most obscure awards lists, but let it stand proud as the film with the highest ratio of horror-movie tropes to minutes the world has ever seen. Clocking in at a bedtime-friendly 85 minutes, The Gate unleashes blood-red titles, dissonant stringed instruments, ominous mood lighting, a television set with bad reception (“They’re he-re!”), malfunctioning electrical equipment, a healthy abundance of slow zooms, close-ups, and jump-cuts, and a creepy doll. All this and mind you, we’ve barely moved passed the opening credits.

So now that we know where director Tibor Takács spent his modest budget (‘cause it wun’t on the acting), how much bang for his buck, fright for his franc, screams for his sickle did he manage to eek out? (Snap!) Well, that depends—are you the kind of person who is frightened by slow zooms and creepy dolls? A premature childhood viewing of Poltergeist renders that answer “yes” for me, but then again, I have been known to be frightened by my stuffed animals and people sneezing loudly in my vicinity.

Viewers made of sterner stuff might have trouble getting their fear on with this story of real estate development gone terribly awry. In The Gate, a typical suburban family finds, as so many typical suburban families of the ‘80s did, that they have unwittingly purchased a home with a compound interest rate of Evil. Young son Glen (Stephen Dorff, most noted for later providing the enthusiastic “ugh!” in the Lenny Kravitz cover of “American Woman”*) is left alone by his parents** in the care of flaky sister Alexandra (Christa Denton, mistakenly thought by the producers to be someone I should know by now). While Al devotes herself to catching the attention of that cute guy with the mullet who’s in all these films, Glen and his friend Terry (Louis Tripp) accidentally open a gateway to Hell in the backyard, unleashing a pint-sized demon horde, some powerful wind machines, and a serious case of the willies. What’s a kid with no last name to do?

Well, for starters, not much more than skulk around his house and jump at small noises. About 45 minutes into the movie I realized that, despite my rapidly developing ulcer, nothing scarier than an overwrought string sonata had actually happened. In the great Chekhovian tradition, Takács devotes most of that time to foreshadowing. There’s the introduction of the model rockets, the family shotgun, the of-course-there’s-no-workman-buried-in-our-walls speech to get through, so that all these things can be used in the second act without any ruinous sense of surprise. And indeed, if someone stubs their toe on it in act one, it will get used in act two, with the exception of the creepy doll, whose presence serves no other apparent purpose than to propel me into the lap of my viewing partner.

Evil, of course, will eventually be let loose through a very specific yet totally unavoidable series of events. These include runic recitation, animal sacrifice, and the levitation of a small child. (And who among us cannot say that we’ve accidentally done those things during a celestial alignment?) When the demons finally do take action, why Takács is so reluctant to do the reveal becomes immediately clear: much to the misfortune of my viewing partner, the creature effects of 1987 burst into full and glorious bloom. Glen and company are terrorized by a horde of ankle-biting mutant voles on whom no amount of zooming in quickly will make scary. Having worked so hard to build such feverous anticipation out of nothing at all, with the appearance of the zombie Lilliputian army, The Gate retains all the dramatic tension of An Evening with Julie Andrews. Don’t even get me started on Godzilla’s runty step-brother, who comes in at the finale to try and finish our heroes off.

Yet in all its hokiness, The Gate retains an endearing charm with its likely completely unwitting defiance of the sluts-die-first, black-people-second commandments of typical horror. Well, yeah, okay, it’s an easy trap to avoid when you’ve forgotten to cast black people in your movie, but when the irresistibly be-mulleted jerk who sends the family dog down the hellmouth receives no further comeuppance than a polite request to go home, it’s actually kind of hard to predict who will be off-ed and who spared.

Perhaps my praise of writer Michael Nankin's gentle touch is misplaced, however, since any subvention of the horror genre in the macro sense is more than vented in the scene-to-scene. When faced with a choice between pursuing logical action to stop the advancing horror and being dumb, characters inevitably go for the latter. Thus, finding that their house is possessed, Glen and Posse decide to escape through the back yard—where the demons came from. At another point, when confronted with an unexpected zombie, is Terry's first instinct a) run screaming; b) get the shotgun so artfully foreshadowed; or c) approach the zombie with open-minded curiosity? Hint: this scene does not end well for Terry.

This, too, has its brand of appeal, in the same way of wooden acting and feathered bangs, both also prominently featured. Ultimately, most of what does entertain in The Gate seems thoroughly unintentional and very likely done in the service of a PG-13 rating. Is the film's ideal audience probably barely pubescent? Yes and, if at all possible, sheltered from the last two decades of developments in special effects. But if you stand with us who are easily manipulated by off-key violin music and know that the stuffed animal revolution is coming, set pride aside and grab a friend with a comfortable lap. You’ll never read Gulliver’s Travels the same way again.


*The reviewer would like to thank IMDB for its excellence in the service of making it look like she knows what she’s talking about.

**Glen’s father, incidentally, is played by Donny Osmond of the Mirror Universe, the one who retired to South Jersey and didn’t win Dancing with the Stars.